Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
A federal court has ruled that a law barring domestic-violence offenders from owning firearms is unconstitutional.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals demonstrated as much when it relied on originalism in United States v. Rahimi, a case about a law restricting the gun rights of domestic-violence offenders, last week. The central legal issue in Rahimi was not whether protecting women and children from gun violence is good; the court conceded that it is. Rather, the question before the court was whether protecting women and children from gun violence is constitutional. And the court concluded that it is not.
A three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the Second Amendment was violated by a federal statute that made possessing a gun unlawful for a person who is subject to a restraining order in protection of an intimate partner or child. Its explanation for this dangerous ruling was a straightforward application of originalism. The Founders mentioned a right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution. They did not, however, mention women, who are disproportionately victimized by domestic violence. And although today’s lawmakers may care about women’s rights, they cannot deviate from the Founders’ wishes without a formal constitutional amendment. This will almost assuredly have very real, potentially fatal consequences for women in America: The presence of a gun in a domestic-violence situation increases the risk of femicide by more than 1,000 percent. Originalism is going to get women killed.
United States v. Rahimi is the latest example of the intolerable hazard originalism poses to women’s lives and our democratic society. Originalist ideology glorifies an era of blatant oppression along racial, gender, and class lines, transforming that era’s lowest shortcomings into our highest standards. The country and the Constitution do not belong to the nation’s white and wealthy forefathers alone. But the consequence of chaining constitutional interpretation to a time when much of the country was much worse off and only a rarefied few held power is as foreseeable as it is deadly: Huge swaths of the population will be worse off once again. Originalism is fundamentally incompatible with a legal system interested in protecting the rights of all the nation’s people.
The law at issue in Rahimi survived multiple constitutional challenges in the Fifth Circuit prior to originalism’s intervention. The same circuit court most recently reaffirmed its legality in 2020 in United States v. McGinnis, holding that the statute was reasonably adapted to the compelling government interest of reducing domestic gun abuse. This would have directly foreclosed the argument made in Rahimi if not for the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In Bruen, the Court announced a strict new originalist standard for evaluating the constitutionality of laws regulating guns. A gun law is now valid only if it is “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” And even then, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, “not all history is created equal.” (This is how the Bruen court justified striking down a law that had been on the books for more than a century.) The elected branches must prove to the judiciary that a sufficiently analogous regulation existed roughly 230 years ago, when the Second Amendment was adopted, or potentially 155 years ago, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted.
There’s a certain level of absurdity to this exercise. The Supreme Court essentially disallowed the country’s lawmakers from developing new solutions to the national gun crisis and instead sent the people’s representatives on archival scavenger hunts. “When a challenged regulation addresses a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century,” Thomas wrote in Bruen, “the lack of a distinctly similar historical regulation addressing that problem is relevant evidence that the challenged regulation is inconsistent with the Second Amendment.” Instead of counseling “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” originalism instructs “If it’s still broken, you still can’t fix it”—a prescription for permanent crises in America, unsolvable in the present because they were not solved in the past.
The government jumped through the required hoops and proffered various historical analogues for the statute at issue in Rahimi. All were rejected. The Fifth Circuit’s rationale for doing so was sometimes disturbing. The government pointed to laws in several colonies and states that disarmed classes of persons considered dangerous—namely, enslaved people and Indigenous people. The Fifth Circuit said that the domestic abusers’ restriction was insufficiently similar, because it disarms people after individualized findings of credible threats to other identified persons, whereas the historical laws disarmed classes of people deemed a threat to the political and social order. Put plainly, the law was held unconstitutional because it disarmed citizens for reasons other than the brazen enforcement of white supremacy.
That it would be challenging to identify colonial laws that took violence against women seriously is not a surprise. Indeed, not until 1920 was wife-beating made unlawful in every state. Finding no historical tradition of disarming people who abuse women, the Fifth Circuit is allowing them to keep their guns. The court concluded that the statute’s ban on domestic-violence offenders possessing guns is an “outlier that our ancestors would have never accepted.” Whose ancestors is unclear. The court does not say whether it includes the ancestors of the 4.5 million women alive today in the United States who have been threatened with a gun by an intimate partner. Or the hundreds of victims of gunmen who first committed acts of violence against the women in their life—a reliable bellwether for mass shootings. Originalism limits who gets to be a part of “our” and who is entitled to the Constitution’s rights and protections.
The country is ill-served by a judiciary that uplifts an alleged original understanding of the Constitution over the public interest and makes false claims of objectivity to obscure oppression. The first drafters of the document articulated important, inclusive democratic ideals but did not yet know how to live up to them. The courts must stop rejecting everything we’ve learned over hundreds of years and calling doing so wisdom. Lives quite literally depend on it.
READ MORE 
A Russian soldier patrols an area at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Station on May 20, 2022, in a photograph taken during a trip organized by the Russian Ministry of Defense. The blue gantry cranes, which control locks along the dam, can be seen in the background. (photo: AP)
Since early November 2022, water has been gushing out of the Kakhovka Reservoir, in Southern Ukraine, through sluice gates at a critical hydroelectric power plant controlled by Russian forces. As a result, satellite data shows that the water level at the reservoir has plummeted to its lowest point in three decades. Separate images provided by the commercial companies Planet and Maxar show water pouring through the gates, and shoreline along the giant reservoir emerging as a result of the rapidly falling water levels.
At stake is drinking water for hundreds of thousands of residents, irrigation for nearly half-a-million acres of farmland, and the cooling system at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Late last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it was aware of the potential risk posed by dropping water levels at the reservoir.
"Even though the decreased water level does not pose an immediate threat to nuclear safety and security, it may become a source of concern if it is allowed to continue," the IAEA's director General Rafael M. Grossi said in a statement.
A major water source
The Kakhovka Reservoir is a massive, man-made lake roughly the size of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. It is the final body of water in a network of reservoirs along Ukraine's Dnipro River. Since the 1950s, it has been used to provide drinking and irrigation water to parts of Ukraine's southern districts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. A lengthy canal leading from the reservoir also supplies Russian-occupied Crimea.
The reservoir is essential to supplying water to otherwise arid farmland in the southern part of the country, according to Brian Kuns, a geographer at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who has studied farming in southern Ukraine. A network of canals leading from the reservoir irrigates roughly 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of farmland that is used to grow sunflowers, grain and vegetables. "It's very important locally," Kuns says.
The reservoir was also a critical source of water for the Crimean Peninsula, which is supplied via a 403-kilometer (250 mile) canal. After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Ukraine diverted water from the canal, leaving the peninsula parched. Following Russia's larger invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, one of the goals was to restore Crimea's water supply, and Russia did so that summer by diverting water out of the reservoir.
Russia appeared to have spent several months using the Kakhovka Reservoir to refill a network of reservoirs in Crimea, according to David Helms, a retired meteorologist with decades of experience working for the U.S. federal government, most recently at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. "There's 23 reservoirs; they're topped off," he says.
Opening the floodgates
Then on Nov. 11, 2022, as Ukrainian forces advanced, Russian troops blew up a road over the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Dam, which controls the water level on the reservoir.
Initially some feared that the explosion would damage the dam and spill water from the reservoir, but Helms says it seems to have destroyed the road, while leaving the dam's sluice gates mostly intact.
However immediately after the detonation, it appears that Russian forces deliberately used two gantry cranes on the Russian-controlled side of the dam to open additional sluice gates, allowing water to rush out of the reservoir.
The result has been startling. Radar altimetry data shows the current level of the reservoir at 14 meters, approximately 2 meters below its normal height. Since December, the reservoir's water level has plummeted to its lowest level in 30 years of satellite observation.
A Feb. 7 statement on Telegram from the local government said that if the level fell below 13.2 meters, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant's cooling system, which relies on water from the reservoir, would be in peril. The statement said that Ukrhydroenergo, Ukraine's hydro electric company, believes the discharge is being done deliberately by the Russians.
The statement from the Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Administration also warned that several cities that rely on the reservoir, including Enerhodar, Melitopol and Berdyansk may face water shortages, though it noted that all three are currently under Russian occupation, so little is known about their water supply.
Unclear motivations
Helms believes the deliberate discharge is another way for Russia to hurt Ukraine. Now that Crimea's reservoirs are full, he says, this could be a way for Russia to hamper Ukraine's economy, which depends heavily on agricultural exports.
"It's as good as knocking out the power grid," he says.
But Kuns is less certain of Russia's intent. He points out that most of the affected agricultural areas are in Russian-held parts of Ukraine. "It just seems strange that they'd be doing a scorched-earth on territory that they claim publicly that they want to keep," he says.
In its statement, the Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Administration suggested that the purpose of draining the reservoir may be in part to flood the area south of the dam, in an effort to keep Ukrainian Forces from crossing the Dnipro River. Officials stated that Ukrhydroenergo believed Russian occupiers "opened the station's locks fearing an advance of Ukrainian soldiers."
For now, there's little to be done except watch the water as it drains away. "I don't know what the purpose of it is," says Kuns. "But it is very worrying."
READ MORE 
Greta Thunberg. (photo: Getty Images)
Impressively, in The Climate Book, Thunberg and team — which includes well-known names like Margaret Atwood, George Monbiot, Bill McKibben and Robin Wall Kimmerer -- explain and offer action items in 84 compelling, bite-size chapters.
Most critically, they — and Thunberg herself in numerous brief essays of her own — explain what steps need to be taken without delay if the world is to have a reasonable chance of limiting global temperature rise as stated in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The document aims to keep the temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius (and better yet below 1.5 degrees Celsius).
The essays also explain why climate justice must be at the center of these efforts.
Reading The Climate Book at a deliberate pace over some weeks (it's a lot to absorb), the cumulative impact on my understanding of the crisis through its data, cross-cultural reflections, and paths for step-by-step change became mesmerizing.
If you think the rich nations of the world are making real progress towards achieving limits on global warming, think again. In one essay, Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the Universities of Manchester, Uppsala and Bergen, puts it this way: "Wealthy nations must eliminate their use of fossils fuels by around 2030 for a likely chance of 1.5C, extending only around 2035 to 2040 for 2C... We are where we are precisely because for thirty years we've favoured make-believe over real mitigation."
What does Anderson mean by "make-believe"? In her own chapter, journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto describes her investigation into Swedish climate policy, specifically its net zero target for 2045. She discovered a discrepancy between the official number of greenhouse gases emitted each year — 50 million tons — and the real figure, 150 million tons. That lower, official figure leaves out "emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass," which means the target is way off, she writes. If all countries were off by that much, the world would be heading straight for a catastrophic increase of 2.5 to 3C.
What does that mean, emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass? John Barrett, professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Leeds, and Alice Garvey, sustainability researcher at the same university, explain that "emissions from consumption" means emissions are allocated to the country of the consumer, not the producer. Because industrial production is often outsourced to developing economies, in a world where climate justice were front and center, the consumer country (in this example, Sweden) would take the burden of lessening the emissions from consumption.
As for biomass, that refers to burning wood for energy, and sometimes other materials like kelp. Burning wood for energy causes more emissions per unit of energy than fossil fuels, explain Karl-Heinz Erb and Simone Gingrich, both social ecology professors at Vienna's University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences.
Alice Larkin, professor of climate science and energy policy at the University of Manchester, adds "a highly significant complication" to this disturbing picture: international aviation and shipping aren't typically accounted for in national emission targets, policies, and carbon budgets, either.
This under-reporting situation, I would wager, isn't known even by many climate-literate citizens. It certainly wasn't to me.
One urgent goal, then, is transparency in climate-emission figures. Beyond that, Thunberg says, distribution of climate budgets fairly across countries of the world must be a priority. Without climate justice, policies are unlikely to succeed. An especially effective subsection of the book, "We are not all in the same boat," brings this point to life.
Saleemul Huq, director of a Bangladeshi international center for climate change, puts the point squarely: The communities most devastated by climate change "are overwhelmingly poor people of colour." But Bangladeshi citizens shouldn't be thought of as passive victims, Huq emphasizes. Communities work together to prepare for the effects of climate disasters in ways not often seen in the global north. For example, "An elderly widow living alone will have two children from the high school assigned to go and pick her up" in case of hurricane or other emergency.
Globally, then, what to do? First, we can hold industrial and corporate interests accountable and push back on their messages placing the burden solely on the individual, a tactic that allows the worst of the status quo carbon-emissions activities to continue.
Beyond this, it's not enough "to become vegetarian for one day a week, offset our holiday trips to Thailand or switch our diesel SUV for an electric car," as Thunberg puts it. Participating in recycling may lead to feel-good moments, but in fact, in the words of Greenpeace activist Nina Schrank, it's "perhaps the greatest example of greenwashing on the planet today." Even the 9% of plastic that does get recycled ends up (after one or two cycles) dumped or burned.
Thunberg herself has given up flying. In the book she writes, "Frequent flying is by far the most climate-destructive individual activity you can engage in." Though she writes that lowering her personal carbon footprint isn't her specific goal in sailing (instead of flying) across the Atlantic — she hopes to convey the need for urgent, collective behavioral change. "If we do not see anyone else behaving as if we are in a crisis, then very few will understand that we actually are in a crisis," she writes.
We can join Thunberg in giving up- or at least reducing- a flying habit if we have one. Three further steps, out of many offered in the book, are these: Switch to plant-based diets. Support natural climate solutions, by protecting forests, salt marshes, mangroves, the oceans, and all the animal and plant life in these habitats. Pressure the media to go beyond the latest story on a heat wave or collapsing glacier to focus on root causes, time urgency, and solutions. Thunberg writes that "No entity other than the media has the opportunity to create the necessary transformation of our global society."
Social norms can and do change, Thunberg emphasizes. That's our greatest source of hope — but only if we keep climate justice front and center at every step.
READ MORE 
"The push is part of a new effort called Fund Our Future." (photo: Shutterstock)
With a wealth tax stalled at the national level and Republicans in control of the U.S. House, a coalition of progressives at the state level are fighting for tax justice.
Now, a coalition of state lawmakers from California, New York, Washington, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and Hawai’i have announced a coordinated effort to increase taxes on their wealthiest residents.
The push is part of a new effort called Fund Our Future and is supported by the State Revenue Alliance — a group that coordinates political campaigns around tax justice — and SiX Action, a wing of the nonprofit State Innovation Exchange, which provides support to state legislators working to pass progressive policies.
On a press call in late January with the state lawmakers behind the bills, Washington State Sen. Noel Frame told reporters “We are here to put billionaires and ultramillionaires on notice that it is time that they pay what they owe, and that state legislators are the ones to make them do it.”
Also on the call was Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who is co-sponsoring federal wealth tax legislation this session with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, (D-Mass.). “As we well know, Democrats don’t control the U.S. House in this session and so it’s more important than ever that we use our state legislatures to showcase the incredible opportunity to really skew the scales towards working people, not against them,” Jayapal said.
“We’ve seen over and over again how leading cities and states across the country can help make the case for and build the movement for federal policy from a 15-dollar minimum wage, to paid sick days, now to a wealth tax,” she added.
While the proposals all involve taxing the top .01% of earners, the bills vary from state to state. In Washington and California, State Sen. Frame and State Rep. Alex Lee, respectively, have introduced direct taxes on assessed net worth: the Washington bill would levy a 1% yearly tax on individuals with more than $250 million in financial assets, such as stocks, bonds, and futures contracts, while the California bill would levy a 1% tax on residents with more than $50 million in assets and a 1.5% tax on those with more than $1 billion.
In New York, progressive state legislators introduced three pieces of legislation that aim to increase taxes on the wealthy. One, a so-called “mark-to-market” tax, would require that taxpayers who have more than $1 billion in assets pay the equivalent of an income tax on yearly increases in their net worth. Another bill would increase the estate tax, levied on inheritance income, and a third would increase New York’s already-existing capital gains tax on long-term investment income.
Those three states — California, Washington and New York — account for 40% of U.S. billionaire wealth. And while Democrats hold full control of state government in all three states, in New York and California the bills look unlikely to pass because of opposition from Govs. Kathy Hochul and Gavin Newsom, who are both Democrats.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, meanwhile, a Democrat who signed a tax on capital gains last year currently being argued in front of the state Supreme Court, said he was open to the proposal in his state.
On the press call, Professor Emmanuel Saez, a French-American economist at the University of California, Berkeley who helped state legislators devise their proposals, noted that “states have historically been the laboratory of new progressive policies, such as progressive income taxes before 1913 when progressive taxation began at the federal level.”
Far from being un-American, Saez said, “the United States is the country that invented steeply progressive taxation in the first half of the 20th century to bring an end to the Gilded Age. It may well be the country that invents effective taxation of billionaires in the 21st century, the remedy we need for our second Gilded Age.”
Over the last 20 years, Saez, along with famed French economist Thomas Piketty, have published numerous pioneering studies and books outlining their findings that, across the Western world, income inequality has increased dramatically since the 1970s. Both advocate a redistributive tax on wealth to help even the playing field.
Those measures are broadly popular — 57% of Americans polled by YouGov last year said that billionaires are taxed too little and 61% said that they would support requiring households earning more than $100 million to pay at least a fifth of their income in taxes. State-level polling commissioned by Fund Our Future and shared with In These Times shows overwhelming support for taxing the ultra-rich: at least 67% of respondents in the five states the group polled said they favored “increasing taxes on the wealthiest individuals in [their] state.”
Today, wealth taxes are uncommon. While in the mid-1980s there were 11 European nations that had a wealth tax — including Germany, France and Spain — only three do now: Norway, Switzerland and Spain. In most cases, according to a paper published last year by Saez and a colleague, these taxes, which had largely been established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were inefficient, hard to enforce and frequently circumvented by the wealthy who could travel with ease to avoid such local taxation. The legislation that U.S. progressives have proposed at the federal and state levels are designed with this history in mind, and carry with them strategies designed to mitigate the unique challenges of taxing the ultrawealthy.
The payoff is potentially huge: State Revenue Alliance executive director Kristen Crowell estimated that the state taxes, were they all to pass, would “conservatively” raise at least $50 billion across all eight states.
The legislators have proposed a variety of ways to spend those gains.
Illinois State Rep. Will Guzzardi said that “in Illinois, we’re proposing to deposit that new revenue into a new working families fund, which will specifically be spent on ending homelessness, fully funding public education, and expanding childcare for every family in our state.”
“A world without homelessness is possible. A world with great public schools for every kid no matter their zip code and universal childcare for every family, that world is possible,” he added.
Frame, the Washington state senator, said that his state would use the increased revenues — an estimated $3 billion per year — to fund education, housing, disability services and tax credits for working families.
A ProPublica report based on IRS filings from the richest Americans found that the ultrawealthy regularly paid far less of their income in taxes than average taxpayers did. Several, including Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and investor Carl Icahn, had years where they paid no income tax at all. An analysis from the Office of Management and Budget and the Council of Economic Advisers confirmed the substance of ProPublica’s report, finding that the richest 400 American households paid just 8.2% of their income in taxes — less than the lowest income tax bracket.
“SRA and SiX brought together advocates and legislative officials who understood the critical importance of investing in our communities and ensuring that corporations and the ultra-wealthy pay what they owe,” Crowell, the State Revenue Alliance’s executive director, told In These Times. “We connected them with strategic support and best-in-class campaign resources in order to maximize the impact of their work happening on the ground — movement-building work that will continue to build throughout the legislative session and beyond.”
Like many progressive legislative pushes, Jessie Ulibarri, co-executive director of SiX Action and a former Colorado state senator, told In These Times that a strong grassroots campaign is fueling the drive to raise taxes on the super-rich.
“Fund our Future is unique in that we have state legislators from eight states moving these proposals in a coordinated way, and they’re doing that side by side with grassroots partners, with advocates, with people who are directly impacted by the kinds of issues that have required this kind of legislative intervention,” Ulibarri said. “It’s not just the legislators introducing bills — they’re working in coalition.”
“For us, that’s the sweet spot of social change,” he added.
Many of the legislators involved in the campaign come from an organizing background, including Frame and New York State Sen. Gustavo Rivera.
The utility of that background was on display on the afternoon of January 19, when, amid a rainstorm, Rivera and other New York state legislators rallied alongside activists in front of an Upper East Side high-rise home to a number of the city’s billionaires and millionaires. Organized by a group called Invest in Our New York Coalition, the group — including New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and State Sens. Jessica Ramos and Jabari Brisport — called on the state to pass the slate of wealth tax legislation that progressives have introduced as part of the national campaign.
“A little rain is not going to stop us,” Brisport said, “and neither are decades of trickle-down economics.”
READ MORE 
Immigrants in an ICE detention center. (photo: Jose Cabezas/AFP/Getty Images)
GEO Group guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center took the measure after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorized “non-lethal use of force” in response to a confrontation during a housing unit inspection that discovered contraband razor blades, an ICE spokesperson said.
The unit’s detainees barricaded their door before the chemical agents were used, according to GEO and a witness, and multiple reports say a hunger strike is taking place at the facility, though that’s contested by GEO.
Maru Mora Villalpando, of the group La Resistencia, which closely follows conditions at the detention center, said Wednesday’s confrontation marked the first time she’s heard of chemical agents being used at the facility, though there have been reports of tear gas used at other immigrant detention centers.
She also said one detainee tried to kill himself after the incident — a claim GEO and ICE deny. A detainee at the facility died by suicide in 2018.
The confrontation taps into a battle between state officials who want to ban privately run detention operations and the corporate and government entities that seek to keep them running. It also highlights the opaque way the Tacoma facility runs, with confusing messages about who’s ultimately responsible for an institution operated by a private company under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“These latest reports are alarming,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a statement. “Unfortunately, they are consistent with the concerns my office has long had regarding the unlawful and unsafe conditions at the Northwest ICE Processing Center.”
GEO fired back in a statement, strongly refuting “baseless allegations” the Florida-based company claimed “are part of a long-standing radical campaign to attack ICE contractors, abolish ICE, and end federal immigration detention by proxy” in Washington.
David Yost, the ICE spokesperson, wrote in an email that the agency “is committed to ensuring that all those in its custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments.” He added, “like all ICE detention facilities, the Northwest ICE Processing Center (NWIPC) adheres to ICE detention standards to meet these needs.”
He also included a photo of a razor blade attached to a comb that was confiscated during Wednesday’s inspection.
In a previous phone call, Yost indicated ICE had limited control over what happens in the facility that bears its name. “I don’t have direct oversight over GEO,” he said, referring questions to that company.
Yet, Christopher Ferreira, a GEO corporate relations manager, said by phone the company would only comment by email because all statements must be approved by ICE. The government agency sends immigrants to the facility that it charges with being in the country unlawfully.
According to the statement Ferreira later sent, the Wednesday incident involved “a small group of high-security detainees” who were being disruptive, barricading themselves inside their housing unit and blocking security cameras.
“Staff were able to diffuse the initial disruption, with more than half of the detainees complying,” Ferreira said. “However, the remaining detainees continued to be unresponsive to staff orders and, as a matter of protocol, this resulted in the use of chemical agents.”
The statement added: “We take the use of chemical agents with the utmost seriousness and our staff follow strict federal standards as it relates to their use.”
Christian Dueñas, who’s being held in a unit directly across from the one where the confrontation occurred, said he could see and hear much of what happened. The confrontation began, he said, when guards inspected the unit, which Dueñas estimates holds roughly 30 people. The guards confiscated empty soda bottles detainees were using as water bottles, a use guards said was prohibited, said Dueñas, who didn’t mention razor blades.
When detainees got upset, the guards told them to go to their beds. The detainees refused, according to Dueñas, saying: “You can’t treat us like it’s a prison.” Detainees are subject to civil, not criminal, deportation proceedings.
The situation escalated from there. Guards began removing items from the unit: an Xbox video game console, tablets, even chairs, Dueñas said. When most of the guards left, detainees told the lone remaining officer to leave. “She left because she [saw] it was escalating out off control.” Detainees then barricaded the door, he said.
Dueñas said guards dressed in helmets and body armor arrived and unsuccessfully tried to talk with the detainees, then threw what he described as three grenades — one that gave off smoke and two that emitted something like tear gas. (GEO did not respond to a question about what kind of chemical agents were used.)
“You could smell it from across the hallway,” Dueñas said. Guards then led detainees, “coughing and choking,” out of the unit in handcuffs.
Tim Warden-Hertz, directing attorney in the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project’s Tacoma office, said one of the organization’s lawyers talked to a client from the affected unit Thursday. That client echoed Dueñas’ account in several ways, including by describing detainees as upset, officers responding by taking items out of the unit, and detainees shutting the door and getting hit with “gas bombs.”
Warden-Hertz said the use of gas in a confined space is “incredibly troubling.”
The account relayed by Warden-Hertz did not mention an inspection or confiscated soda bottles setting off the confrontation. Rather, the client said detainees in the unit were on a hunger strike and demanding to talk to ICE.
Dueñas said he and other detainees in his unit are also on a hunger strike, in protest of miserable conditions that include food that is undercooked, inadequately portioned and erratically delivered. He said one day this week, guards served dinner at 8:30 p.m., seven hours after lunch.
Mora Villalpando, of La Resistencia, said at least 100 detainees are on a hunger strike as of Friday. The organization and detainees have reported wave after wave of hunger strikes for years, often refuted by GEO and ICE.
While detainees have long complained about conditions, the situation seems to have worsened of late. In January, Ferguson sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general calling for an investigation into “unsanitary living conditions” and how GEO actions in Tacoma have “put detainee health, safety, and welfare at risk.”
Ferguson accused GEO of retaliating over a lawsuit he brought against the company in 2017, saying its $1-a-day voluntary work program violated minimum wage law. Ferguson won the case in 2021, and it’s now under appeal.
In the meantime, GEO suspended the program instead of paying detainee workers more. And according to Ferguson, the company has failed to make up for the lost labor, resulting in filthy surroundings, poor food quality and inadequate laundry services. Even though GEO eventually hired a cleaning company, detainees report cleaners come as little as once a week and work “quickly and superficially,” the attorney general wrote.
GEO denies the allegations, saying: “We have taken all necessary action to ensure that facility sanitation levels and food service operations and quality are maintained at the facility in accordance with all applicable federal sanitation and food service standards.”
Washington lawmakers passed a bill in 2021 banning most privately run detention centers. GEO sued, and the litigation is ongoing. The 1,575-bed facility, whose population plummeted to about 200 as ICE scaled back operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, currently holds about 600 detainees, according to the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.
READ MORE 
A 26-year-old pregnant woman named Talibe Gezginci cleans her tent in a makeshift camp for displaced people in Gaziantep. (photo: Erin O'Brien/NPR)
ALSO SEE: Doctors Warned This Turkish Hospital Was Unsafe.
Then the Earthquakes Hit.
"There's nothing for us here to eat," says a soldier in his mid-20s named Faris, who fled from the hard-hit city of Antakya. "There's no gas, no heating system, no electricity. We don't have money or any of our cards."
He asks to be identified only by his first name because he is still an active member of the Turkish military and risks punishment if he criticizes the government.
The regions affected by Monday's earthquake are home to an estimated 13.5 million people, including as many as 2 million refugees, primarily from Syria. The earthquake has killed more than 25,000 in Turkey and Syria, according to The Associated Press, and tens of thousands have been injured.
Tens of thousands of buildings have been destroyed. Many residents of the hardest-hit areas, including Antakya and the satellite villages around Gaziantep, have fled to areas like Gaziantep's city center that remain comparatively unscathed.
Five days after the earthquake, Turkey's government under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been widely criticized for a scrambled and ineffective response. While an estimated 200,000 people remain trapped under rubble, many of those who have survived are struggling to meet their basic needs.
Many hundreds of people in these camps are from villages surrounding the cities of Gaziantep and Hatay. In villages such as Nurdagi, Islahiye and Pazarcik, small satellite districts, entire streets and neighborhoods have collapsed into rubble.
Late Thursday night in Nurdagi, a rescue worker named Ozgur says his team no longer expects to find anyone alive under the rubble. He works in construction for a large holding company and asks to only be identified by his first name for fear of reprisal for providing assistance without direct government approval.
"There are 30 to 40 people under there," he says, pointing to a collapsed six-story building in front of him. "But none of them are going to come out alive."
In the camps, people are facing a different sort of danger.
Crowded into white tents set up by Turkey's disaster and emergency relief arm, known by the acronym AFAD, families of eight or more are sleeping on foam mattresses on the ground. Wrapped in the clothes they were wearing at the time of the quake, and in donated, colorful blankets, mothers, daughters, brothers and fathers huddle to keep warm.
Faris, who has been in the camp since Wednesday, says he hasn't eaten since then.
"We wait in line all morning and by lunch there is no food left," he says.
AFAD has said it has deployed dozens of food trucks and hundreds of thousands of meals, but opposition politicians and members of the public have widely condemned the organization's response.
Faris says his family can barely even access the bathrooms for the lines, because there are not enough facilities in the municipal stadium for the hundreds of people temporarily staying there.
He and his mother, three sisters, brother and brother-in-law all have deep purple circles under their eyes and are covered in wounds from falling rubble. Their hands are covered in deep gashes from where they dug each other out from their collapsed home, their feet cut from when they finally made it out and had to find their way through the rubble in the cold without shoes.
They stopped counting how many people had died.
They traded off shifts sleeping in a car and on the street in Antakya for three days before driving to the Gaziantep camp, some 100 miles away.
They were told by police in Antakya that they had to evacuate, and that they could find shelter and food in Gaziantep. Now, Faris says he regrets the decision to come.
In Gaziantep, he explains, they have no food, no money, no credit cards, no form of identification and no way of making a plan. He says the day before he walked to the gas station next to the camp with a plastic cup to see if they would give him something to eat or drink. He came back with an empty cup.
"We don't know why we're here. We have nothing. We don't know what we came here for," he says.
In a makeshift camp set up in a sports field outside the Gaziantep stadium, the situation is also dire.
There, several Kurdish migrant families have set up the tents they usually use during the planting season. Genco Demir, who organized his community's move to this field, says he and other farmers have been abandoned by the government. In their impoverished neighborhood of Sekiz Subat, less than 2 miles away, they say no one has come to inspect or repair their homes, damaged by the earthquake.
"We don't have coal, we don't have food, we don't have anything," he says. "We have to feed the children. Help us."
Hayat Gezer, a 45-year-old woman with a traditional Kurdish tattoo on her chin and a black headscarf, says the group is grappling with the additional stress of legal problems. Many members of their community, she says, have been imprisoned for crimes ranging from theft to aiding and abetting terrorism.
Southeastern Turkey is a heavily Kurdish region, and the Turkish government has been involved in a four-decade-long conflict there with the armed separatist group, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). This has led to persecution of many Kurds for alleged links to the group.
Gezer's daughter was imprisoned in Islahiye, an area heavily damaged in the quake. Gezer doesn't know if she is alive.
The desperation in this camp is clear. At one point, a young man tries to take bread from his neighbor's tent; a violent fight ensues. Demir has to hold the young man back.
Hunger and cold have helped make those in the AFAD camp highly critical of the Turkish government. Faris says he voted previously for Erdogan, who is up for reelection this year, but the soldier vows he never will again.
When camp officials try to pull back another older man, the man shouts, "Let them hear what we're going through."
"I'm yelling at the president," he says. "Shame on the president. No one is helping us."
READ MORE 
A resident walks her dog in Oxnard, California. (photo: Paul Harris/Getty Images)
Among more than 2.5 million pregnant people studied in California, researchers found that each additional day of smoke exposure increased the risk of preterm birth.
The findings were presented Saturday at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine’s annual meeting and are currently undergoing peer review. They're set to be published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
The researchers collected data from hospital records of pregnant people from 2007 to 2012, then analyzed daily estimates of wildfire smoke in the participants' ZIP codes during their pregnancies, based on satellite images.
The results suggested that just one day of smoke exposure slightly raised the risk of spontaneous preterm birth — defined as before the 37th week of pregnancy. But the odds of preterm birth increased by 0.3% with each additional day of smoke exposure.
"Most pregnant persons are having well over one day of exposure, and the chronicity of this exposure, which continues to increase, is really the worrisome relationship with wildfire smoke," said Dr. Anne Waldrop, the study’s lead author and a maternal-fetal medicine fellow at Stanford University.
Waldrop's team estimated that 86% of the pregnant people studied in California had been exposed to fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke during their first or second trimesters, or during the four weeks leading up to conception. On average, the study participants were exposed to more than seven days of smoke during that time.
Exposure was only associated with preterm birth within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, however, not before conception.
The term fine particulate matter refers to tiny particles in the air that are less than 4% of the diameter of a human hair. Once inhaled, the particles can penetrate into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. They can increase a person's risk of asthma, lung cancer and other chronic lung diseases, particularly among vulnerable groups like older people, infants and children, and those who are pregnant.
"Not all smoke exposures are these dramatic smog- and smoke-filled days," Waldrop said. "Most likely a lot of these [people] didn't recognize the days that they were being exposed."
Since smoke from fires in the West can travel thousands of miles, she added, "it’s not an isolated issue with the Western United States anymore."
Dr. Leonardo Trasande, a pediatrics professor at New York University who researches children’s environmental health, said the risk of preterm birth could worsen over time as wildfires become more frequent and intense.
"Insofar as wildfires are a byproduct of climate change, it’s common sense to put two and two together and ultimately relate preterm births to climate change," he said.
Trasande's own research has focused on the link between air pollution and preterm births. He previously estimated that nearly 16,000 preterm births in the U.S. in 2010 alone were attributable to exposure to air pollution.
On a global scale, another analysis found that air pollution likely contributed to nearly 6 million premature births in 2019. Rakesh Ghosh, the author of that analysis and an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said that exposure to wildfire smoke during the first trimester can cause the amniotic sac to rupture early due to inflammation.
"Any abnormality at that stage, in the early stage of the development of the placenta, can cause a very long-term condition," he said.
Premature birth is a risk factor for death in the first 28 days to one year of an infant's life. Research also suggests that preterm birth can be associated with developmental delays in childhood.
Trasande said it's difficult to compare the risk of wildfire smoke to other forms of air pollution, say from cigarettes or vehicles.
"What distinguishes certain types of smoke is what’s being burned," he said. "We know, for example, that, increasingly, plastic is a component of fires, period. And wildfires lead to damaged homes, which lead to emissions of what’s burned in those homes."
Waldrop said emerging evidence suggests wildfire smoke might be particularly harmful because it contains many different pollutants, including carbon monoxide.
"There's actually now data that suggests that wildfire smoke pollutants can be more biologically active and worse for human health than other forms of pollutants," she said.
Aside from leaving an area where there's wildfire smoke or staying indoors with an air filter running, it's difficult to avoid exposure, health experts said. N95 masks may help prevent high levels of exposure, Ghosh said, though experts disagree as to how effective masks can be in smoky air.
Waldrop said it's also hard to determine the precise line beyond which smoke becomes a serious health threat to an individual.
"What are the thresholds for smoke exposure that are safe? That’s really not clearly defined," she said.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.