17 February 23
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Pennsylvania’s governor said Norfolk Southern’s response to the disaster has put first-responders and residents ‘at significant risk’
The derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, has left residents uncertain and fearful about their town and the toxic mess that raises questions about the area’s water and soil.
The Environmental Protection Agency has said the air is safe to breathe and Norfolk Southern, the rail company, has pledged to clean up. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said Tuesday he was “not seeing” the need for further federal assistance, though President Biden had offered it. Without the full extent of contamination known, however, environmental advocates have questioned the response, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has said Norfolk Southern mismanaged its response to the disaster.
“The reassurances that these front-line communities are being given that ‘We didn’t find anything terribly serious’ is just misleading,” Joe Minott, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council, told The Washington Post over the weekend.
As effects continue to emerge, here’s what to know.
What happened when the train derailed?
Part of the Norfolk Southern train derailed on Feb. 3 around 9 p.m. in East Palestine, Ohio, causing a massive fire. Fifty cars were involved in the crash and fire, the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday.
Eleven of the cars that derailed were carrying hazardous materials, the NTSB said, some of which escaped during the crash and burned during the fire. Because of the risk of contamination and explosion posed by the chemicals, firefighters couldn’t put the blaze out for days. About 1,500 residents of the village, which is on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania, were told to evacuate.
On Feb. 5, a drastic temperature change in one of the rail cars created a high probability that it would explode in a “catastrophic” blast, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said at a Tuesday news briefing. Evacuations were ordered, and officials decided to allow the controlled release of vinyl chloride from the train car to avoid an explosion. It sent a plume of toxic fumes into the air.
Three days later, evacuated residents were allowed to return to their homes. The Environmental Protection Agency said its air monitoring had not picked up any hazardous levels of chemicals, though some experts have said the monitoring should have been more robust.
What caused the accident?
The derailment appeared to have been caused by a mechanical problem on one rail car, NTSB board member Michael Graham said at a Feb. 5 briefing in East Palestine. The agency has already identified which rail car caused the accident, saying a wheel bearing on that car appeared to have overheated.
The information released so far is preliminary as federal investigators continue piecing together what happened. The NTSB, which routinely investigates plane and train crashes, will release a preliminary report in early-to-mid March.
Surveillance videos have shown that the train was on fire as it passed through Leetonia, Ohio, before it derailed, according to the fire company in Leetonia, which is about 13 miles from East Palestine. The NTSB said that the train’s crew members received an alarm indicating a mechanical issue before an emergency brake went on. No injuries were reported.
Misinformation about the derailment, including claims without evidence that it was intentional, has circulated on social media. Federal investigators have found nothing to indicate that the train was purposely derailed.
What was the train carrying?
Vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate were the primary chemicals released in the crash, Ohio EPA spokesman James Lee told The Washington Post. When vinyl chloride burns, it releases hydrogen chloride and phosgene. In addition, ethyl hexyl acrylate and ethylene glycol monobutyl ether also leaked from the train cars, according to a Norfolk Southern document posted by the EPA.
All of those six chemicals can be harmful to humans, experts say, depending on the amount and length of exposure. Neither Norfolk Southern nor authorities have quantified exactly how much was released into the air and spilled on the ground. Environmental experts have told The Post that it’s possible the fire also created other highly toxic substances, such as dioxins.
Exposure to the chemicals can cause various symptoms, such as ear, eye and throat irritation or dizziness, nausea and headache. Vinyl chloride is a carcinogen; phosgene is a highly toxic gas; butyl acrylate produces poisonous gases when burned; ethyl hexyl acrylate and ethylene glycol monobutyl ether are irritants.
“I wouldn’t want to be exposed to any of them in significant amounts,” Erik D. Olson said in an email. Olson is a senior strategic director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. “They all pose hazards if inhaled.”
Though the fire and chemical release initially created air pollution, EPA and state investigators now must determine how much contamination got into the ground and whether it will leach into drinking water, contaminate soil and have other dangerous effects over time.
“It is unclear how much of this volatile chemical escaped into the air or burned before entering surface waters and soil, but vinyl chloride is highly mobile in soils and water and can persist for years in groundwater," said Cornell University soil and crop scientist Murray McBride, recommending that farmers test wells and surface soils in the months to come.
How are residents affected?
About 1,500 residents were told to evacuate, but others outside the one-mile evacuation zone, including some over the border in Pennsylvania, also left their homes. Some have told The Washington Post that they’re worried about staying in East Palestine and don’t feel like they have enough information. For many, the debacle has meant missing work, spending money on temporary lodging and dealing with other issues.
A strong chemical odor remained in East Palestine this week, and residents reported symptoms such as headaches and nausea, which state and EPA officials said can happen even when chemicals are present at levels not considered harmful.
On Tuesday, state officials recommended residents on the East Palestine municipal water system use bottled water until test results are back for public water. On Wednesday, however, DeWine tweeted that new water testing results revealed no detection of contaminants in East Palestine’s municipal water system. “With these test results, @OhioEPA is confident that the municipal water is safe to drink,” the governor stated.
Until their wells are tested, residents with private wells need to use bottled water, Ohio health director Bruce Vanderhoff said Tuesday. Residents can obtain well testing and bottled water by calling a local hotline.
The environmental advocacy group Earthjustice said Wednesday that DeWine should declare a state of emergency to unlock more federal aid. Some residents have filed class-action lawsuits against Norfolk Southern, seeking monetary compensation and medical monitoring for all affected.
How are wildlife and the environment affected?
About 3,500 fish in four local waterways were killed after contaminants spilled into one waterway as a result of the crash and spread, Ohio Department of Natural Resources Director Mary Mertz said at the Tuesday news briefing. Twelve species of fish were affected, none of which are endangered.
The creeks affected flow into Little Beaver Creek, which is designated as a state scenic river. Wildlife officials will be monitoring the hellbender, an endangered giant salamander, Mertz said, to find out whether any were affected. So far, they haven’t found any dead hellbenders.
Despite anecdotal reports of animal sickness, state officials said they had not collected any evidence of species other than fish suffering from the chemical spill. Ohio Department of Agriculture Director Brian Baldrige said his department has been in contact with veterinarians and others. “To this date, there is nothing that we’ve seen in the livestock community that causes any concerns,” he said Tuesday.
What about drinking water?
The initial spill and fire created a large plume of toxics that flowed into the Ohio River and has been moving down the river for several days, Tiffani Kavalec, head of surface water for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, said at the briefing. Water officials are tracking the plume in real time, but it is not expected to affect drinking water sources downriver, Kavalec said.
As the chemicals pass by, intakes for public water supplies along the Ohio River are being closed or the water is being treated. The contaminants have been measured at “very, very low levels” that can be treated, she said. Because the river is large, the chemicals have been diluted and will continue spreading as they move, Kavalec said.
On Tuesday, the plume was near Huntington, W.Va., Kavalec said.
What is Norfolk Southern’s response?
The EPA has notified Norfolk Southern of its liability for potential costs of the contamination, EPA regional administrator Debra Shore said in Tuesday statement. DeWine said he had spoken to Norfolk Southern’s CEO, Alan Shaw, and said Shaw had committed to paying “for everything.” He said the state would hold the rail company accountable for the disaster.
Norfolk Southern set up a $1 million fund this week and said it planned future charitable donations in East Palestine. Working out of a “family assistance center," the company has reimbursed evacuated residents for expenses, saying more than $1.5 million has gone to more than 1,000 families and some businesses. It is also providing bottled water to residents and reimbursed the local fire department for compressed-air packs.
Residents have to sign up for the home air testing, must pick up bottled water at the assistance center, and must live within a certain Zip code to get reimbursements, although the rail company offered aid to the entire Zip code Wednesday after previously only offering it to those in the evacuation zone. Residents also need a photo ID, proof of residency and a Social Security card to use the assistance center, some told The Post.
The tracks were quickly cleared so that trains could keep running through, with the wreckage placed to the side. State officials said that cleanup crews, including those excavating butyl acrylate that puddled on the tracks, are pausing when a train comes through.
In addition to cleanup and testing already underway, which included installing a dam and pumping water from a stream for treatment, the rail company has also said it will install wells to monitor groundwater.
“We are committed to East Palestine today and in the future,” Shaw said in a statement. “We will be judged by our actions. We are cleaning up the site in an environmentally responsible way, reimbursing residents affected by the derailment, and working with members of the community to identify what is needed to help East Palestine recover and thrive.”
Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, criticized Norfolk Southern’s response in a Wednesday letter to Shaw, saying that mismanagement by the company had put first-responders and residents “at significant risk.” He said the rail company’s personnel made decisions without talking to state and local agencies, caused first-responders to have a lack of awareness, gave state officials inaccurate information about the impact of the controlled release of vinyl chloride and “failed to explore” alternatives to the controlled release that might have been safer.
“Norfolk Southern has repeatedly assured us of the safety of their rail cars — in fact, leading Norfolk Southern personnel described them to me as ‘the Cadillac of rail cars’ — yet despite these assertions, these were the same cars that Norfolk Southern personnel rushed to vent and burn without gathering input from state and local leaders,” Shapiro wrote.
What happens now?
The EPA is monitoring air quality and helping state officials with water testing. The EPA stopped monitoring for phosgene and hydrogen chloride on Tuesday, the agency said, because vinyl chloride, which produces them when on fire, is no longer burning. The EPA is also helping Norfolk Southern conduct in-home air testing, which residents can request.
DeWine said Tuesday that President Biden had offered other federal assistance if it becomes necessary but said the state had not needed it.
Workers are cleaning up the accident site, removing massive amounts of soil and water. The state will then work on long-term plans for ensuring the water and soil are safe, said Ohio EPA on-scene coordinator Kurt Kollar on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the NTSB will determine the cause of the derailment.
DeWine said Tuesday his administration would begin providing daily updates about the situation.
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Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, checked in to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Wednesday to receive treatment for clinical depression. (photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times)
A spokesman for the first-term senator from Pennsylvania, who had a near-fatal stroke last year, said his depression had grown severe in recent weeks, as he has worked to adjust to life in the Senate.
The decision to seek psychiatric help underscored the profound challenges, both physical and emotional, that Mr. Fetterman has been dealing with since entering the Senate last month after a life-threatening stroke last year, a transition that has been made vastly more difficult by the strains of his recovery.
“While John has experienced depression off and on throughout his life, it only became severe in recent weeks,” Adam Jentleson, his chief of staff, said in a statement. He said that Dr. Brian P. Monahan, the attending physician of Congress, had evaluated Mr. Fetterman on Monday and recommended he be admitted to Walter Reed for treatment for clinical depression.
“John agreed, and he is receiving treatment on a voluntary basis,” Mr. Jentleson said.
His decision to do so could place Mr. Fetterman — who was dogged by questions about his health and fitness to serve in the Senate throughout his campaign — at the center of a national conversation about mental health struggles that has become more public and urgent since the pandemic began.
That is not a role he naturally would have sought.
“After what he’s been through in the past year, there’s probably no one who wanted to talk about his own health less than John,” his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, said in an email to supporters. “It’s not easy for anyone to be open about mental health challenges. But I am so proud of him for asking for help and taking steps to get the care he needs.”
Ms. Fetterman wrote that “our family is in for some difficult days ahead, and we ask for your compassion on the path to recovery,” and added that she was “sad, and worried, as any wife and mother would be.”
For now, aides said, the primary focus is on his recovery. It is not yet clear how long Mr. Fetterman, 53, will stay at Walter Reed, though aides anticipate it will be longer than a few days.
Since January, Mr. Fetterman has been trying to dig into his new job, attending caucus meetings and committee hearings, meeting with constituent groups and attending high-profile events like President Biden’s State of the Union address this month. He has been living alone in Washington during the week, while his wife and three children remain in Braddock, Pa.
The Senate and his colleagues in Washington have been trying to adjust with him: The sergeant-at-arms has arranged for live audio-to-text transcription for Mr. Fetterman’s committees and installed a monitor at his desk so he can follow proceedings with closed captioning. His Democratic colleagues in the Senate have been growing accustomed to communicating with him through a tablet that transcribes their words, technology he needs because he suffers from auditory processing issues associated with his stroke.
But Mr. Fetterman has also been quietly struggling on a psychological level that is less obvious and harder for his colleagues to accommodate.
Mr. Fetterman was admitted to George Washington University Hospital last week after feeling unwell during a daylong Senate Democratic retreat. He spent two days in the stroke unit, where he underwent an M.R.I. and other tests that ruled out another stroke and remained free of any seizures, a spokesman said. But the episode convinced Mr. Fetterman and his closest aides that he needed a better plan to take care of himself physically and emotionally.
After the life-changing stroke, days before the Democratic primary last year, Mr. Fetterman briefly pared down his schedule to recover. But he continued his campaign in one of the most competitive and closely watched Senate races in the nation.
Now, the possibility that he may have missed out on a crucial recovery period has become a source of pain and frustration for Mr. Fetterman and people close to him, who fear that he may suffer long-term and potentially permanent repercussions. His schedule as a freshman senator has meant that he has continued to push himself in ways that people close to him worry are detrimental.
Dr. Eric Lenze, the head of the psychiatry department at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, described post-stroke depression as “very common, often very serious and, maybe most importantly, actually really treatable.” He said depression affects one in three people recovering from a stroke but added that controlled clinical trials have found that “it’s a very treatable condition, not just on the symptoms of depression but on one’s functioning.”
On Thursday, Mr. Fetterman’s colleagues rallied around him.
Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said he was confident Mr. Fetterman would be able to serve his full term despite the challenges.
“This is an unimaginable challenge that he has faced in life,” Mr. Durbin said. “He deserves the very best in professional care, and I am sure he will get it.”
He added that the country was evolving in its understanding of mental health, in part because of veterans who served in Iraq and other combat zones who have experienced profound psychological problems upon returning.
“Mental illness was considered a curse, not a medical problem — thank God that has changed,” Mr. Durbin said. “There isn’t a single family that isn’t touched by it. And those who are touched by it and succeed really are very honest about it. I’m glad John has done that.”
That kind of support would have been unthinkable a few decades ago.
Thomas F. Eagleton was forced to drop off the Democratic presidential ticket in 1972 after revelations that he had been treated for mental illness. Mr. Eagleton, who was then a Democratic senator, had been chosen as Senator George McGovern’s running mate that year, but he did not share with his team while being vetted that he had been hospitalized for depression and that his treatment involved electroshock therapy.
In an interview in 2006, Mr. McGovern said he regretted the decision to remove Mr. Eagleton from the ticket, saying, “I didn’t know anything about mental illness — nobody did.”
During the Senate race last year in Pennsylvania, his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, seized on the issue of Mr. Fetterman’s health in an attempt to revive his struggling candidacy. He was not the only one; Republicans and conservative talk show hosts relentlessly attacked Mr. Fetterman and questioned whether he was fit to serve.
At the time, Mr. Fetterman said he was recovering quickly and living a normal life. His campaign aides insisted he was healthier than a vast majority of the aging Senate.
“I’m running a perfectly normal campaign,” Mr. Fetterman said in an interview with The New York Times in September. At another point he added, “I keep getting better and better, and I’m living a perfectly normal life.”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis speaks at a press conference in Daytona Beach Shores, Florida, January 18, 2023. (photo: Paul Hennessy/Getty)
With each law restricting what people can say, read, and study, they become more Free.
Below, you'll find a list of things whose banning the Florida governor championed or carried out directly. As you reach a new subject, remember that you've taken another stride towards true freedom.
Books
PEN America compiled a list of 176 books that were removed from classrooms in Duval County, Florida, last year because they fell afoul of new laws passed by the Florida legislature and signed by DeSantis. ABC News reports that upwards of 1 million books are now under review in that jurisdiction, home to Jacksonville: "There are approximately 1.6 million titles in our classroom and media center libraries that need to be reviewed by a certified media specialist," said Tracy Pierce of Duval County Public Schools. These "media specialists" are incentivized to err on the side of banning a book because of vague criteria—more on that below—and fear of stiff punishments if they fail to ban all the right books. There are widespread reports of teachers removing or covering up their classroom book collections.
Titles that have been caught up in these reviews include books on Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, "Queen of Salsa" Celia Cruz, and baseball legends Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente. (County officials have said the latter two are back on shelves.) When asked about the Clemente book, DeSantis said, "Roberto Clemente? I mean, seriously. That's politics," which is accurate in a way. These books require investigation because they supposedly run afoul of three fresh laws: The "Stop W.O.K.E." Act, the Parental Rights in Education law, and House Bill 1467, which focuses on books alleged to contain "pornographic" or otherwise "inappropriate" content.
Teaching About How Gay People Exist
The laws above have also had an impact on what teachers believe they can say in the classroom. A key provision of the Parental Rights in Education statute, which critics have called "Don't Say Gay," is the following: "Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards." You probably won't find many people fighting the K-3 provision, but who decides what's "appropriate" or "in accordance with standards" everywhere else? It seems almost intentionally vague, tailored to once again have people on the ground err on the side of not talking about this stuff at all.
Meanwhile, the bill's sponsors in the legislature were less clever than DeSantis and made it clear that the "sexual orientation or gender identity" language was about keeping talk of how "Sally has two moms or Johnny has two dads" out of the classroom.
AP African American Studies—No, All AP Courses?
DeSantis has sought to ban AP African American Studies, claiming that the course lacked "educational value" because among the curriculum's 100-plus units, a few focused on queer theory or the prison abolition movement. (State officials have also claimed the course is historically inaccurate and violates a state law on how race issues are taught in schools.) This prompted the College Board to change the curriculum, though they've denied it was in response to political pressure, and DeSantis is now floating a general ban on AP courses. He's also pushing the study of Western Civilization, as if that's in short supply in American schools and universities.
Teaching About Privilege and Oppression
The Stop W.O.K.E. Act focuses on the notion that teachers are teaching white kids that they're inherently evil racists and Black students that they're morally superior to their white counterparts. It outlaws this supposedly widespread behavior, but also includes a ban on teaching that "a person’s moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex." This is a very strange formulation: that some people have faced oppression or enjoyed privilege in America is not a matter of their moral character, it's a social dynamic. But again, the sweeping language and harsh penalties will likely work to push discussions of race—a real and persistent social force in American life—out of the classroom. According to PEN America, the fact that this statute applies to public colleges and universities likely renders it unconstitutional.
DEI Training
The Stop W.O.K.E. Act also applies to public and private employers who want to train their employees in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Again, your mileage may vary on the effectiveness of these programs, but the government stepping in to ban private firms from training their employees in a certain way—particularly when it could inform how they interact with customers—would be blasted as insane government overreach if the idea came from Democrats. A federal judge has blocked this provision on free speech grounds.
ESG Investing
"ESG" stands for environmental, social, and governance—essentially, investment strategies that take into account social and environmental impact. DeSantis no like this:
ESG: Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) defends new legislation to ban "woke" ESG banking in the state of Florida, and calls ESG investing "kind of a house of cards, it's going to come crashing down." pic.twitter.com/b8OLKNnKxI
— Forbes (@Forbes) February 14, 2023
This is part of an extended campaign: "No investment decisions at the state or local government with ESG," he said, "no use of ESG in procurement and contracting, and no use of ESG when issuing local or state bonds." DeSantis is painting this as a retired cop getting ripped off by Woke Hedge Funds on the basis that an ESG investment vehicle might yield slightly lower returns because it considers, say, the future habitability of our planet. Maybe it should be refreshing to hear a Republican consider the plight of everyday people who can be caught up in schemes from powerful financial interests, though in this case DeSantis translates it to a pure distillation of Reaganomic corporate governance: nothing matters except money. You may well consider many firms' ESG programs to be bullshit—plenty of environmentalists do!—but it's worth considering that DeSantis can't actually say Florida cops are getting ripped off because Bloomberg found Florida's public money wasn't really in ESG in the first place.
Granted, all this is best understood as secondary to the aim of punishing companies who do politics that Ronald DeSantis does not like. This hit a high point with his war on Disney after one of Florida's largest employers pushed back on the "Don't Say Gay" bill.
Tenure
DeSantis would be quick to insist he has not pushed to get rid of tenure at public colleges and universities, only for tenured professors to come under "review" every five years. He's since pushed for more frequent reviews, to be carried out by institutional boards appointed by...Ronald DeSantis. If you stand a chance of getting fired every five years, or maybe more often, that ain't tenure. The point of tenure is to shield teachers from retribution, particularly from politicians who can affect public institutions, when they study controversial topics. This is going to affect what teachers teach and research, which is, of course, the point.
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Tony Mitchell is carried by prison guards. (photo: Family Attorney)
Tony Mitchell's family says video contradicts official accounts of his time in custody in Alabama before he died with a body temperature 26 degrees cooler than average.
Tony Mitchell was a pretrial detainee at the Walker County Jail from Jan. 12 until his death Jan. 26, according to a federal complaint filed Monday in U.S District Court for Northern Alabama.
Mitchell's mother sued after a corrections employee showed her surveillance video of her son's time in custody that contradicted what she had been told by officials, the suit says.
"Although the medical examiner has not yet released the autopsy report, it is clear that Tony’s death was wrongful, the result of horrific, malicious abuse and mountains of deliberate indifference," the suit says.
The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency is investigating Mitchell’s death. The Walker County Sheriff's Office declined to comment Wednesday.
The suit accuses jail staff members of looking on and chatting by Mitchell's open cell door, "entertained" as he "languished naked and dying of hypothermia."
Mitchell was taken into custody after a family member asked officials to perform a wellness check, noting he might be a danger to himself or others, the Walker County Sheriff's Office said on Facebook at the time.
Mitchell fired a gun while deputies were on the scene and was charged with attempted murder, the sheriff's office said.
According to the lawsuit, Mitchell's cousin, Steve, had gone to the man's home and noticed that he appeared emaciated and unwell. Mitchell, who had recently lost his father and had a history of drug addiction, told his cousin that he believed his stillborn baby brother was in the attic and that there were portals to the afterlife in the home, the suit says.
"Steve realized immediately that his cousin, having lost around a hundred pounds from his healthy weight, having lived evidently in complete isolation during recent months, and spouting delusions about portals to heaven and portals to hell, was in serious need of psychiatric help," the suit says.
Walker County Sheriff Nick Smith and TJ Armstrong, a public information officer, were present when Mitchell was taken into custody, the lawsuit says. It alleges Armstrong told Mitchell's cousin and his mother that he would receive medical treatment and evaluation in custody.
The suit alleges that three days into custody, Mitchell was stunned with a stun gun, causing his false teeth to fall out of his mouth, and that officials placed them in a dated bag, the suit states, citing video a corrections officer provided to the family. Mitchell appeared to never get his teeth back, making it unlikely he was able to eat solid foods, the family alleges.
Mitchell was in a concrete cell, with only a drain in the floor, the suit says.
"Tony had no cloth uniform, possibly as a result of the jail’s 'suicide watch' protocol," the lawsuit said. "In every video clip on which he appears during his incarceration, until deputies at last dress him in a jail uniform just prior to transporting him to the hospital on January 26, Tony appears completely naked."
Screenshots of video given to Mitchell's family are included in the lawsuit. An image from about 4 a.m. the day he died shows Mitchell naked on the floor and his cell door open. Corrections employees are outside the door and appear to be speaking to one another. It is unknown what was said.
Video from later that morning, which was provided to NBC News by the attorney representing Mitchell's mother and the jail employee who leaked it, show corrections officers carrying a clothed Mitchell to a sheriff's office SUV.
It's unclear whether Mitchell is conscious in the video as officers stand on either side and carry him into the car.
Mitchell's family says in the suit that Armstrong told them Mitchell was alert and conscious before he left the jail and that he was speaking when he arrived at the hospital at 9:23 a.m. Jan. 26.
The lawsuit says county officials told Mitchell’s family that staff members found that his temperature began to drop during a routine exam that morning.
Mitchell's body temperature when he arrived at the hospital was 72 degrees Fahrenheit, according to medical notes included in the suit. The average body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and hypothermia begins once the body falls below 95, according to the Mayo Clinic.
The emergency room doctor described being unaware of the underlying cause of Mitchell’s hypothermia but believed it “was the ultimate cause of his death,” the document says.
The lawsuit casts doubt on officials' claims that Mitchell's temperature began dropping only that morning. It notes that the family did not have access to video of Mitchell's location overnight.
"The only way for Tony’s body temperature to have 'started dropping' to 72 degrees in such a short period of time was for him to have been placed in a restraint chair in the jail kitchen’s walk-in freezer or similar frigid environment and left there for hours," the suit says.
Karen Kelly, the jail supervisor who leaked the videos of Mitchell, has filed a wrongful termination suit against the sheriff's office. She alleges that Smith fired her as retaliation.
The county administrator said that the defendants in the Mitchell wrongful death suit had not yet been served and that issues of representation would be determined afterward.
The county administrator did not reply to a request for comment about Kelly's suit.
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Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego speaks during a news conference with newly elected Hispanic House members at the DCCC headquarters in Washington, D.C. (photo: Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP)
The Arizona congressman, who just launched a campaign to take Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate seat, discusses political pragmatism, the lessons of the war on terror, and what’s really happening in Latino communities.
If this election marks a turning point in Sinema’s political career, then it is also critical for Gallego, an outspoken, partisan figure who represents a different generational tendency, in which the dynamic force in the Party is the young members of the establishment, hardened by the Trump experience, growing more combative in their politics and expansive in their demands. Raised in Chicago with three sisters by an immigrant single mother (his estranged father was at one point imprisoned for drug trafficking), Gallego made it to Harvard, where his work-study job entailed cleaning his classmates’ bathrooms. After his grades faltered, and what he called an “enforced ‘pause’ ” on his studies, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and later served as an infantryman in Iraq, where he saw extensive combat as part of a company that went on to suffer some of the highest casualties of any Marine company during the conflict. Returning Stateside, he eventually moved to Arizona with his Harvard girlfriend, Kate Widland, who is now his ex-wife and the mayor of Phoenix. Gallego’s 2021 memoir of his war experience, “They Called Us Lucky,” is an emotional and at times angry book that emphasizes the tenacity of combat trauma in his own life and in the lives of his fellow-soldiers. Gallego is not idealistic about the business of politics, nor about the people within it. After a short interview by phone, Gallego and I met for dinner in Rockefeller Center, on Monday evening, when the media world was consumed by the news that the U.S. military had shot down several unidentified flying objects over North America. We spoke about the Senate race, the impact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have had on politics, and—most of all—about the generational change under way in the Democratic Party.
Do you have any insight about whether we’re under attack by aliens? I feel like I would be derelict if I didn’t ask—do you know anything we don’t know?
I definitely know stuff you don’t know, because I’m the former chairman of the Intelligence and Special Operations committee. So, yes, yes, I do. I don’t think what’s happening now is aliens—that I deduced recently.
Are these just balloons?
Could be anything. But if we’re using F-22s to shoot it down it’s probably not aliens. Just a hunch.
You gave a quote to Vox a year and a half ago that really stuck with me, because it seemed to give some insight into how you view politics. You said, “Politics is dark and hard. It’s not a bunch of people trying to do their best. It’s who can shank each other in a smarter way.”
Well, I try to be subtle.
Aha.
Many times, politicians focus on this idea of how politics should be but not necessarily on the outcome. That ends up hurting people that need help. Sometimes you have to maybe not work hand in hand with your loyal opposition. Maybe you should focus on making people’s lives better. A lot of people grew up watching “The West Wing” and thinking that politics can be decided by two people who agree. Well, sometimes you should just care about the outcome. People are hurting right now. They need help, and politicians should focus on how to get that done first.
I had thought this had something to do with the 2020 Democratic primaries, and the very idealistic politics that were ascendent then.
No. I’ve always kind of felt this way. I’ve seen the disappointments of my generation. I was born in 1979. I’ve seen two recessions, the towers fall, us getting thrown into an illegal war—and all this time I think there’s been a certain disappointment with the outcomes. I think it’s because politicians aren’t very realistic.
When you say disappointed with the outcomes—
You have generations right now that find themselves in poverty that their parents were never in. You have the lowest amount of homeownership, especially below the age of thirty. You have the highest amount of debt. All these things that our parents grew up with, that we kind of were expecting, are no longer there. But there really hasn’t been any kind of policy decisions to try to help. Until recently.
If this is your perspective on politicians, do you think that the press is not cynical enough?
I don’t think it’s that the press isn’t cynical enough. It’s just that the viewpoints coming from the press, and from policymakers, are very much a product of groupthink. Everyone went to the same colleges. Everyone grew up in the same areas, and I think they all kind of ended up thinking the same way.
I’ll give you a good example. I won’t name this person, but someone I went to college with was shocked after the 2016 election that Donald Trump had won. We went out to dinner, and he was lamenting that he didn’t understand how it went so bad—G.D.P. growth was happening every year. When you have the same amount of money coming into your checking account but you can’t afford to buy anything new, G.D.P. growth doesn’t matter. And he was shocked. He was, like, “Oh, so we should have been worried about people’s personal income growth the whole time?” Like, yes, yes. I don’t think you have to be more cynical. I just think that people have to look outside their bubble to see what’s actually happening.
I think we should be more cynical.
I also do think reporters should be cynical. That should be your standard.
But you did not grow up in that bubble. You grew up in a different environment.
Yeah, I grew up in a different environment, absolutely.
Tell me about that.
I definitely was an interloper in polite society. I was born and raised in Chicago, but lived for a while in Mexico, the son of immigrants. We lived in Mexico, part time, in a city called Chihuahua, and also in the country, where there was a farm that we were working. When we moved back to the states, we moved into working-class Latino and Black neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. You know, in some ways, it’s probably the last generation where I got to ride my bike until the lights were on, all that kind of stuff. But there was also gang violence, things of that nature.
This was the late eighties.
Late eighties, early nineties, yeah. I had a cousin who was shot—everyone knew it was my uncle who did it. It was still a pretty decent experience growing up, but it was working class—my father was a construction worker, and I’d go to construction sites with them and work construction. Things eventually, unfortunately, went bad. My father’s company went under. He started selling drugs. Eventually, my father left the picture. He’d pop in every once in a while, but he was no longer a father. And he was an asshole. You don’t think about it at that age, but, when you think about it later, you’re better off, right?
Not a good dude.
No, not a good dude. My mom is hardworking. She was a secretary. She had four kids to raise. She moved into a small apartment just outside Chicago, a community called Evergreen Park. It was a very working-class area, largely Irish and Italians—a lot of people who work in the trade unions and stuff like that. We had a two-bedroom apartment for five people. I was the only male, so I slept on the floor. I went to college. You know, it was a weird situation—we were poor, but we were working. We weren’t spiteful. I don’t think we thought of ourselves as poor. Now we understand that it was not great. I worked throughout high school. I was a janitor. I worked in a meatpacking factory. I was a line-order cook and then went to school, studied, helped raise my sisters. And I had a lot of help from my teachers, my family.
You’ve said that, when Trump ran, you were very worried early on because you’d grown up among his voters, in Evergreen Park, and you were pretty sure he’d have traction.
When I was starting high school, the effects of NAFTA were starting to get felt, and Rush Limbaugh was actually coming through. I was one of the few Latinos in that high school. And definitely a mouthy Latino. I was not going to back off of anybody. I got shit for it. I was called a spic, beaner, everything else you can think of. People would try to start fights with me, and with my sisters, too. A lot of what I was hearing was definitely things that their parents were saying, right? And where were the parents getting it? It doesn’t excuse the kids for being little shithead racists. It is what it is. But you can tell that there was frustration at that point—it was a Democratic area—about people losing their jobs.
And you don’t think this was just about elemental racism? You think it was specifically about NAFTA?
Oh, there’s elemental racism in everything. But there’s degrees to it. And I think the stress of this shit that was happening in these households was probably on top of that. When Trump came along, years later, I was worried right away. I think a lot of people were saying, “No, no, no, he couldn’t win.” I’m, like, “There’s a big segment of the population who’ve been waiting for someone to say this to them and make them feel good about these thoughts that they’ve been having.” And unfortunately I was right.
You left Evergreen Park to go to Harvard.
You know, I got into this great school, but to this day I’m not really a Harvardian. Like, I went to school there, but I never really fit in.
I think you were there at the same time as Pete Buttigieg and Elise Stefanik.
Yeah, I knew both of them because—this is a weird situation—they were in this group called the I.O.P., the Institute of Politics. I used to go bartend at their events. They have a speaker series and stuff like that. We’d get paid to go bartend or serve food. But, yeah, I knew of them. They were campus celebrities already.
Did it feel as though you were in a whole different world from them?
I never thought about it. I mean, I was just happy I was getting nine bucks an hour. And whenever there was some old dude who came by and said, “Oh, chap,” or something like that, I was, like, This dude’s going to tip me well at the end of the night. I was in this thing called Dorm Crew, where you clean the student bathrooms. It wasn’t until later on that I realized it was actually kind of fucked up—clean the kid’s bathroom, and then see him the next day. When you’re in it, it’s just a work-study job.
You went to Iraq as a marine, in 2005. You’d been working in politics a bit.
Yeah, right. I had just gotten off the 2004 election.
Did you have a political career in mind at that point?
No, I always wanted to work for the C.I.A. or the State Department. I thought it was really cool. I used to love that shit. And I even did an internship at the State Department, just after 9/11, so, probably the summer of 2002. Colin Powell was in charge. I was in the Western Hemisphere department. I loved everything about it. Even took the Foreign Service exam that summer and went pretty far in it. I passed the orals and then didn’t pass the next level. But, yeah, that was a goal. I wanted to be a diplomat. The military—being in the Marines is mostly something that I wanted to do for me. I should have been smarter, in retrospect. But I thought it would be very helpful for going into the F.B.I., the C.I.A., or the State Department.
Before you went to Iraq, in the aftermath of 9/11, did you feel that the U.S. was in an emergency?
Prior to the Iraq War, I actually thought it was a war of emergency. I really thought, at some level—and in retrospect I was wrong—that we were at an existential point in this country. I was already in the military [as a reservist]. I didn’t join because of 9/11, but I hoped that they were going to activate me to go to Afghanistan. Partly I wanted to serve, partly I wanted revenge. People died. In a weird way, for a lot of us younger Latino men, it was our generational fight—kind of a way to be part of the grander American story. And, unfortunately, we ended up in Iraq, and it’s a whole different story. I still feel that Latinos aren’t part of the story of the last twenty years of war, even though a lot of us were in that war.
What do you mean by “aren’t part of the story”?
When you see any movies about the Iraq War, you don’t see, you know, Javier Ramos running around, right? There were a lot of us over there. I mean, we had so many Latinos that we’d speak Spanish to each other on patrol.
You’ve written a whole book about what happened in Iraq and its aftermath, so we don’t need to get into a ton of detail—
I can’t afford more therapy.
But, toward the end of this book, you have a scene where you duck out of an event where Dick Cheney is going to speak because you’re furious about the whole situation.
Yeah. I mean, we were getting fucking killed because these guys didn’t get us enough armor, didn’t get us enough manpower, and just basically left us out there to die.
Knowing what you now know about politics, why did they?
The more I’ve been in this, the more I’ve realized that it was a combination of things: acceptance that people are just going to die; laziness, that they just didn’t want to break through bureaucracy to get us the weapons that we needed; ego, because some of these officers wanted their ribbons and their medals, and we were the fodder; and a lot of wish-casting about what was happening in Iraq.
A lot of us were very heroic at the time, in an awful situation. We were put in an unjust war by our leadership—by our bosses, by our politicians. And, when we returned, people still didn’t want to deal with the fallout of what happened, and kind of wanted to just ignore it for years. One of the things I really wanted to do with my book is not sugarcoat it, because war is dirty, and the aftermath carries on, you know, forever. I’m going to have P.T.S.D. for the rest of my life. A lot of my friends have other diseases, and one too many have killed themselves.
Will there be any effect on policy—fewer wars, for example—if these experiences are properly digested?
You know, I wasn’t born yet, but I think the same thing was said after the Vietnam War, that we wouldn’t find ourselves in foreign engagements. And of course that wasn’t true. I hope people will learn the lessons of the endless war, about military power and what it can do, but I’m afraid that won’t be the case. Until people really feel what happens in war, it’s always going to be easy to ship those kids off to war. It’s the same families and communities that are committing their kids to the military. It’s not really the full society.
Early in the 2016 primaries, I saw Jeb Bush do a veterans’ event in New Hampshire, where he was trying to make a play for the veteran vote, as the brother of the former Commander-in-Chief. There were all these guys at the back of the room, some of them in wheelchairs, many with a kind of broken-seeming look, who were veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and were just not having any part of it. That always stuck with me, and I’ve wondered how much that experience of war had to do with the rise of Trump and populism.
The connection between veterans and Trump is more about his populist appeal. I mean, a lot of them were also very pro-Bernie, right? You sometimes hear from people that Trump is the antiwar guy, but he has nearly gone to war with North Korea a couple of times. He gave the Saudis weapons that are killing innocent children in Yemen.
One thing that was appealing to veterans was that they felt Trump spoke with no bullshit, and they were just sick of the same politicians over and over again. That same group may have cost him the election [in 2020] because they felt that he was a danger to the country and they didn’t vote for him as much as they did in 2016.
Are we still in the Trump emergency, or do you feel like we’re out of it?
You have Trump and you have Trump copycats. Until we actually fully defeat election denialism, I don’t think we can just let it go. There are offshoots of it—dangerous people, such as Michael Flynn, who have this ethno-nationalist religious movement that’s very scary, and that’s not even being paid attention to right now.
Let’s talk a little bit about that. After returning from Iraq, you eventually moved to Arizona, started working in politics, and, by 2011, you were the vice-chair of the Arizona Democratic Party. The next year, you were in the state legislature. The major figures in the Arizona G.O.P. were still John McCain and Jeff Flake, but there were all these other Republicans around who are now part of the national conversation. A big one is Kari Lake, who was then a newscaster, and who eventually became an election denier and was one of the Trumpiest figures in the country in this last cycle, when she narrowly lost a race for governor of Arizona. What did you see of the Republican Party in Arizona then, and how was it transitioning?
I was seeing two things happening at the same time. You had a Republican Party that was trying to be the McCain wing of the Party. And then you had the one being led by people like Russell Pearce and Sheriff Joe Arpaio. That was building, but you felt it all the time. There were people in my American Legion who were in shopping malls where people would come up to them and say, “Go back to your fucking country”—to people who have lived here for generations. As a Latino, I would get it all the time: “Go back to your country. You’re a traitor. You’re a spic.”And that was coming as the Republican Party was getting crazier and crazier. The Republican Party wouldn’t use words like “spic” or anything like that, but they would certainly amp up some of the illegal-immigration rhetoric that was kind of throwing a blanket across all of us.
And that was the time of S.B. 1070. [The law originally required police to determine the immigration status of anyone they stopped whom they suspected of being in the country illegally.]
Yeah. S.B. 1070 really was a wake-up call to Arizona and to Latinos in Arizona, because it’s one time when everyone felt targeted. It’s one time that everyone thought, like, Oh, it doesn’t matter if you are well-to-do—you’re brown, you’re going to be targeted. That’s the one thing that unified a lot of the community to finally get together and start pushing back.
How much responsibility do Republicans such as Flake and McCain bear for this?
It’s not that they’re weak. What the Republicans don’t want to tell you is that people with these views were always there, because they needed them. And, instead of trying to say, “No, that’s not the kind of party we are,” they try to keep them as the base. They ran commercials that are somewhat inflammatory. Maybe they did their best, but there was nobody in the Republican Party who was entirely denouncing the really xenophobic, right-wing tilt that was taking over at that point. They were always trying to figure out how to calm it, how to tame it, but it was always part of the base of the Party that they needed to have.
This is maybe an example of a theme of yours: that politics is about sticking the shank in.
It was a failure of collective action. A lot of Republican leadership wanted this not to happen. But they just wanted someone else to do it for them. Much like Trump in 2016—nobody wanted Trump to happen, but nobody wanted to do anything about it. Even now. In some sense, they’re, like, Well, someone will do it, and I’ll just keep reaping the benefits. In reality, they could have done it, but it would have required all of them to take a leap together. And I think a lot of them were afraid to do it because a lot of them started going down, started losing elections and primaries. And then a lot of them kind of rationalized that they got to live to fight another day.
One of the big themes coming out of the 2020 election was that Democrats were going to have a problem with Latino voters in the future, concentrated especially among Latino men without college degrees. How do you read the evidence of the 2022 election both in Arizona and nationally? How worried do you think the Democratic Party should be about the Latino vote?
In 2022, we stabilized, except in Florida. And, as I tell my friends, Florida is always going to Florida us—and that’s across the board, right? We stabilized because Democrats actually spoke to Latinos early and often. And we spoke to them about things that matter to them. For me, talking about the American Dream matters to Latinos. They want to have steady jobs; they want to have a bright future for the kids. They want to believe that if they work hard, play well, and study hard, they’re going to have that American Dream. In 2022, we were having that conversation more often, about how the Democratic Party is that party. That’s why we were able to recover a lot of that.
The other thing that really matters, and people don’t talk about it, is that January 6th and election denialism drove a lot of conservative male Latino voters back to the Democrats. Latino males, and especially older Latino males, are very patriotic. They love this country. They love the Constitution, and enjoy everything that comes with it.
How did January 6th change the Democratic Party?
I think there’s just a lot more understanding of the danger of letting certain elements of fascism go unchecked. A lot of people thought, you know, maybe it’s just Trump, and other people keep him in check. We were wrong. But it wasn’t just Trump that got us to January 6th. It was all these lawyers with Ivy League degrees and people who have been in government forever, who let this kind of build to the point that we could have had a real disaster on our hands. It has made us more attentive and aggressive. It also gave us the opportunity to reframe what patriotism is. I think patriotism in the past has had a lot to do with honoring the military. A lot of people now understand that patriotism has to do with honoring the Constitution, protecting our institutional democracy.
When I was running for office all those years before January 6th, rarely did people ever talk about the institution of democracy. I think this is a newfound passion. It’s a newfound passion for me. I still can’t believe how close I came to getting killed by an insurrection. It makes me more aggressive. If someone like Kari Lake is my opponent, I’m going to take her down. Not because I don’t think she’s a good person. I think she’s a real threat to democracy. I think she will do anything she can to overthrow elections for her own political game. I think there are a lot of people who would gladly join her, and I think that is a reason why we have to have people running, not just for policy goals but for pure protection of democracy.
There was a big fuss a year or two ago when you said that your office would not be using the term “Latinx” in its official communications. You went on a little Twitter rant about it. And I remember at the time kind of rolling my eyes and thinking, Here goes Gallego grandstanding a bit here, and now he’s going to go on Bill Maher—
Got me on that one!
—and it feels like he’s trying to build a kind of anti-woke brand. Because you could have simply used the words “Hispanic” and “Latino” in your office’s communications and not made such a big deal about it. Why did you make a big deal about it?
I felt that we needed to communicate to the people who were iffy on this that it’s O.K. to not use a term like that. As the chair of the Committee for Hispanic Causes PAC, we see data. We see what’s really happening in the Latino community. There was this very weird feedback loop that was happening where people were afraid to say it, to say, “Hey, ‘Latinx’ is not the most appropriate term to use all the time.” It was important to just start the conversation, because it wasn’t going to be done by, honestly, a white consultant. It wasn’t going to be done by another activist group that was feeling the same way. And so I had a position from which it was safe to say it. I was not going to get voted out for saying it. A lot of us Latinos in Congress have a certain amount of authority to do this that a lot of other people just don’t.
The thing you’re signalling here is to not let the academic, activist language govern how you try to communicate with ordinary people?
Absolutely, yeah. And we did see some campaigns that sent out literature to Latino or Hispanic voters that referred to Latinx voters. That’s a very risky move, considering how few people identify with that word.
Arizona only recently became a state that elects Democrats to statewide office. But the Democrats it elects are, in many cases, people without deep roots there. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema came to Arizona from other places. You moved to Arizona as an adult.
There wasn’t that barrier. There are more people in Arizona who moved to Arizona after 1990 than who lived in Arizona before 1990. That tells you something about the movement of people in Arizona. And because the Arizona Democratic Party was very bare-bones, there wasn’t a hierarchy we had to fight.
One of the people who didn’t have to fight that hierarchy is Senator Sinema, who you are now running against. I’m sure you watched her campaign in 2018 closely.
I volunteered. I donated, I knocked on doors for her. . . . We had met early on, when I worked on a campaign that she was the chairwoman of.
You were both operatives.
Yeah. And we were in the State House together. She was an effective legislator who I think at that point was in it for the right reasons. She ran for Congress, and a lot of us were happy that she won and were rooting for her. But you could sense that there were some things that were kind of off during the campaign. There was a group that got together to recall Russell Pearce, who was the head of the S.B. 1070 movement [and the president of the State Senate]. They called us and asked us to support the recall, and I said of course I would do it, I would raise money for the recall. I got some calls from some very big donors who were, like, “How can you do this? Russell’s the president. He’s not that bad.” Like, he is bad. Sorry. He literally tried to take away birthright citizenship in Arizona. You don’t get any worse than that. When Kyrsten was asked if she was going to support the recall, she absolutely said no. She said, “I have to work with this guy.” That was in 2012. In 2016, she refused to endorse Hillary—didn’t campaign for her, didn’t show up at anything. That was troubling for me.
What’s your theory about what happened with Sinema?
She didn’t learn. When you grow up poor, every day is a grind. For me, the walk to school was the biggest thing in my life. It was cold. It was rainy. And then I had to figure out how to get back, and how to do the work, and all this kind of shit, right? And now you multiply that by three hundred and sixty-five days, and by however many years. The whole time you’re just, like, How the fuck am I gonna get out of this? That’s all you’re really obsessing about. What are my little lights that I can focus on?
A lot of it is about who’s helping you out. My computer wasn’t up to snuff for my college applications, so the Kobelt family, a really nice family in Evergreen Park, would let me use their computer. You need that kind of stuff. I had a librarian, Linda, who would let me stay after school and practice exams. And so it’s weird to see somebody who I think went through the same thing just be, like, I’m not going to worry about these people anymore. I’m going to worry about these people who are already doing well, and already have power. It’s as if she literally forgot the lessons of being poor.
You’ve said that you considered challenging Mark Kelly when he ran for Senate, in 2020.
If I ran against Kelly it would have been a losing campaign. We did our polling, and, honestly, we were ten points down before we started, which is . . . manageable. But it was going to be a two-year race for a two-year term, and then you’d have to run again. It was going to have to be running to his left and going negative where you can—I was going to spend so much time away from my baby son attacking someone else, who I think at his core is a good man who would end up doing the right things. It didn’t make sense. It was hard because he didn’t have any positions at that point. He was an astronaut. It’s great to have a great American story, but try running against a fucking astronaut. I mean, that’s hard.
Sinema’s got an eighty-two-per-cent rating from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. And I think she’s someone most progressives would trust on social issues—she’s been a leader on reproductive and L.G.B.T. rights. The place where they might have the most doubt is on economic issues. But, even there, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. says she goes four-fifths of the way toward where they’d like her to go. That’s not terrible. Why is it so important to run against this person, when you might risk splitting the vote and throwing it to Republicans?
When push came to shove, was she going to make the right decisions? She didn’t. I was on the floor on January 6th. It was not a great situation. The country was under threat. We need to have some legal way to stop these courtroom insurrections that are going to happen, and she’s there upholding the filibuster of the John Lewis voting-rights act, of a person who she claimed was her friend and mentor. When she was needed, when we needed courage from her, she did not show courage. This is a tough job. You’re spending all this time away from family, all this kind of stuff. Why do all this if, at the end of the day, you’re not really moving the ball forward? Not really making people better? That’s what she represented to me.
At an earlier point, I asked you if we were still in the Trump emergency, and you said, basically, yes.
Right.
That sounds to me like part of what you are saying here.
I don’t really think you need to be a lockdown Democratic voter. I don’t think the problem is that she didn’t stay with the Party. It’s that she didn’t stay true to Arizona. Nobody sent her over there to negotiate for pharmaceutical companies. She did that. No one sent her to negotiate for hedge-fund managers and private equity. She did that on her own. Where was this pressure coming from? And then she didn’t even bother to tell us why she did it. She doesn’t have town halls. Well before me, people were mad about it. Because, at some level, she had broken the social contract she had created with these voters.
When I talk to folks about this race, what I hear, generally, is that “Gallego is trying to get her out of the race, because, if she stays in, and you have two people elected as Democrats and one as a Republican, you’d bet on the Republican.”
People need to make their own estimations about whether it’s worth it. If we run a really, really good race, she and other people are going to have to make calculations. If she stays in, she’s not going to be a senator. And I’m going to. If she leaves, I’m going to be a senator.
The Democrats have been outwardly very cordial about Sinema leaving the Party. They’ve allowed her to keep her committee posts; they’ve said accommodating things about her. Do you think that suggests that they’re going to avoid intervening in this race?
Look, elected officials are just passive-aggressive by nature. They’re not going to confront somebody they don’t have to, and so they put off making hard decisions. Right now, it’s so early in the race that they don’t have to make a decision. [The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] is not going to do anything in this race for a while. Why put yourself in a weird situation with someone you’re going to need to sit next to for the next two years when you can just put off the decision, right? I wish it were deeper than that. But there is no Machiavellian move. It’s just a passive-aggressive standoff.
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Miners work at a site in Tena, a city in the Amazon rainforest and capital of Ecuador's Napo province. (photo: Courtesy Napo Resiste)
Government’s failure to regulate mining has damaged the environment and human health, community members say.
In the Ecuadorian village of Napo, traditions form a large part of family and spiritual life. At around 3am each morning, before heading to their chakras, many families take part in a traditional tea ceremony. Once freed from his farming duties at around midday, Cerda recalled running to the river to swim and fish with friends. Fish would later be grilled on an open fire and eaten with large amounts of fruit.
“As a kid, I got to enjoy nature,” Cerda told Al Jazeera.
These days, however, the 34-year-old spends his days chasing gold miners from his community and campaigning against those who threaten to destroy his ancestral lands. He can no longer swim or fish in the rivers, he says, because they are contaminated.
“Within three years, everything changed,” Cerda said. “The land has been poisoned. There are no more fish, except ones that are contaminated. People eat them, and they get sicker and sicker.”
A recent study carried out in mining areas of the northeastern Andean foothills of the Ecuadorian Amazon, close to where Cerda lives, revealed high concentrations of toxic metals. They are up to 352 times above permissible limits established by environmental guidelines. For communities along the Anzu, Jatunyacu and Napo rivers, their cancer risk is up to three times greater than the acceptable threshold.
Mariana Capparelli, a researcher who contributed to the study, told Al Jazeera it was “very sad to see the conditions these communities are exposed to as well as the total degradation of an ecosystem that is so important for the entire planet”.
“The effects on human health are devastating,” she said.
Toxic waste
Due to what critics say is an absence of sufficient government regulation, mining in Ecuador has led to environmental pollution and adverse effects on the health of Indigenous communities. In recent months, authorities have carried out several raids against illegal miners.
But with widespread state corruption and tip-offs given to miners, machinery is sometimes withdrawn immediately before police operations take place, activists say, highlighting the need for additional protections.
Ecuador has a national system of protected areas that aims to safeguard biodiversity and local ecosystems in national parks, wildlife refuges, marine reserves and other designated areas throughout the country. Although the government has taken some steps to protect local water systems, rivers have traditionally not been included in this system.
A Canadian researcher who has studied mining in Ecuador said toxic waste is “easily assimilated by the human body and stored in the brain and breast milk”. Speaking to Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, the researcher added: “It passes readily to babies and young children who are still breastfeeding and interferes with their brain development. It also passes through the placenta and enters into developing fetuses and can affect their brain development as well.”
Al Jazeera tried to reach several government officials in Ecuador’s environment and energy ministries for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
According to Andres Tapia, a spokesperson for the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, illegal mining has become “uncontrollable” in parts of the country. Many areas of Napo have been “invaded and taken over by illegal mining mafias”, Tapia told Al Jazeera.
Figures released by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project show that areas dedicated to mining in Napo province increased from 2.6 hectares (6.4 acres) in 1996 to 556.8 hectares (1,375.9 acres) in 2020. Across three key locations – the Anzu River, Arosemena Tola and the Huambuno River – 490 hectares (1,211 acres) of land were affected from 2017 to 2022, the equivalent of 687 professional football fields.
“I thought I would always be able to drink from this river,” Eli Virkina, a member of an Indigenous Kichwa community in Napo, told Al Jazeera. “Now I’m at this point where maybe I shouldn’t even swim in the water. That is really heartbreaking for me.”
In the past few years, Virkina says she has witnessed an increasing number of large machines, black smoke and noise pollution along the river. Recently, she discovered lumps around her breasts and changes to her skin. “I haven’t felt okay for the past two years – mentally, because of what’s happening, but also physically.”
Community resistance
Across Napo, Indigenous communities and organisations have been monitoring, mobilising and resisting mining activities. To defend their land, they have formed alliances and connections across riverine communities, including the Amazon’s first women-led Indigenous guard.
In February 2022, a landmark Constitutional Court ruling recognised the rights of Indigenous communities to have a final say over extractive projects that affect their territories. The ruling “offers one of the strongest legal precedents in the world, which upholds the rights of Indigenous peoples to decide on the futures of their ancestral territories”, according to the Amazon Frontlines advocacy group.
But in December, the ruling was disregarded when the government approved a mining project in Las Naves in Bolivar province without gaining the consent of affected communities.
In the meantime, Napo has installed four alarm systems around the village to signal when miners are close by.
“In our territory, spears were not used anymore, but now we have one in at least every house because it’s part of the way we have to defend ourselves,” said Majo Andrade, a member of the female-led Indigenous guard Yuturi Warmi.
Cerda said he believes the national government must do more to protect its citizens: “It’s not able to protect resources, our lands and territories.”
At the same time, Virkina says Indigenous resistance is vital to the region’s future.
“Once [Indigenous people] disappear, it is way easier for miners and people to come in and access the river,” she said. “When we have stronger Indigenous communities, we have stronger forests and a stronger river.”
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A flock of wood storks mingles with egrets as they stand in a retention pond along a road in Atlantic Beach, Florida, Aug. 12, 2015. (photo: Bob Mack/AP)
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a news release that restoration of the wood stork's habitat, especially in the Florida Everglades and adjacent Big Cypress National Preserve, led to a sharp increase in breeding pairs. Those numbers had shrunk to just 5,000 pairs in 1984, whereas there are more than 10,000 pairs today.
"This iconic species has rebounded because dedicated partners in the southeast have worked tirelessly to restore ecosystems, such as the Everglades, that support it," said Shannon Estenoz, assistant Interior secretary for fish, wildlife and parks.
In addition, the wood stork has increased its range in coastal areas of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, officials said. The birds have adapted to new nesting areas in those states, tripling the number of colonies across their range from 29 to 99 in recent years.
Credit goes mainly to the wildlife protections provided by the Endangered Species Act, which marks its 50th anniversary this year, said Stephanie Kurose, a senior policy specialist at environmental group the Center for Biological Diversity. The act can impose restrictions on a variety of activities in areas where such species are located, such as development, mining and oil drilling.
"The act saved the wood stork and it helped preserve and rebuild vital habitats throughout the southeast, which has improved water quality and benefited countless other species who call the area home," Kurose said by email.
Wood storks have a distinctive scaly, featherless gray head and a bright white feathered body with long skinny legs. They are fairly large, standing up to four feet (1.2 meters) tall and with a wingspan of up to 5 feet (1.5 meters). The nesting pairs lay three to five eggs per year, although the eggs are frequently targeted by predators such as raccoons and other birds.
Their bald heads give wood storks an almost prehistoric appearance, leading to nicknames such as "stonehead" and "flinthead." Wood storks feed in shallow waters on fish, insects, frogs and crabs depending on whether it's wet or dry season. They are the only stork native to North America.
In Florida, federal and state governments are spending tens of billions of dollars for ongoing projects to restore natural water flows in the Everglades and Big Cypress and reduce harmful nutrients from fertilizer runoff and other sources that promote unhealthy plant growth.
The Endangered Species Act has saved 99% of the species that have been on the list since 1973, with 100 types of plants and animals delisted because they have recovered or are at least stable, according to the Interior Department.
"The proposed delisting of the wood stork is a significant milestone and a testament to the hard work by federal agencies, state and local governments, tribes, conservation organizations, and private citizens in protecting and restoring our most at-risk species," Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service will take comments on the proposal through April 17 from other government agencies, scientists, environmental groups and anyone else interested in the welfare of the wood stork. After that, the service will publish a final decision on whether to remove the bird from the endangered species list.
If the wood stork is delisted, officials said it would remain protected by other laws including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Clean Water Act. A monitoring plan would be put in place for at least five years to ensure the stork population remains stable.
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