18 March 23
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International Criminal Court accuses Russian president of responsibility for war crime of illegal deportation of children from Ukraine.
In its first warrant involving Ukraine, the ICC on Friday called for Putin’s arrest on suspicion of unlawful deportation of children and unlawful transfer of people from the territory of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.
The ICC, which has no powers to enforce its own warrants, also issued an arrest warrant for Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the Russian commissioner for children’s rights.
Russia, which is not a party to the court, said the move was meaningless. Moscow has repeatedly denied accusations that its forces have committed atrocities since it launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February last year.
Here is everything you need to know about the case:
What is the ICC?
The ICC was established in 2002 to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression when member states are unwilling or unable to do so themselves.
The tribunal is based in The Hague, Netherlands, and leads high-profile investigations into prominent suspects.
It can prosecute crimes committed by nationals of member states or on the territory of member states by other actors. It has 123 member countries. Its budget for 2023 is about 170 million euros ($180m).
What crime is Putin accused of?
Both Putin and Lvova-Belova are accused of being responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of people, in particular children, and their unlawful transfer from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.
The ICC said it sees reasonable grounds to believe that Putin bears individual responsibility for the crimes either by committing them directly, jointly with others and/or through others.
It also said he failed to exercise proper control over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts or allowed for their commission and who were under his effective authority and control.
The arrest warrant obliges member states to arrest Putin or Lvova-Belova if they were to travel to their country. The ICC, however, has no police force of its own or other ways to enforce arrests.
How is Russia reacting?
Russia, which denies committing atrocities since it invaded Ukraine, rejected the ICC’s move as “null and void”.
“The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view,” Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on her Telegram channel.
“Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and bears no obligations under it,” she wrote.
What does Ukraine say?
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin hailed the announcement by the ICC.
“The world received a signal that the Russian regime is criminal and its leadership and henchmen will be held accountable,” he said. “This is a historic decision for Ukraine and the entire system of international law.”
Does the ICC have jurisdiction in Ukraine?
ICC President Piotr Hofmanski told Al Jazeera that it is “completely irrelevant” that Russia had not ratified the Rome Statute.
“According to the ICC statute, which has 123 state parties, two-thirds of the whole international community, the court has jurisdiction over crimes committed in the territory of a state party or a state which has accepted its jurisdiction,” he said. “Ukraine has accepted the ICC twice – in 2014 and then in 2015.”
Hofmanski said 43 states had referred “the situation in Ukraine to the court, which means they have formally triggered our jurisdiction”.
“The court has jurisdiction over crimes committed on anyone on the territory of Ukraine from November 2013 onwards regardless of nationality of the alleged perpetrators,” Hofmanski said.
How likely is it that Putin will end up at the ICC?
The arrest warrants theoretically mark the first step towards an eventual trial – although under current conditions, the capture and arraignment of Russia’s president is almost inconceivable.
Even if that did happen, previous ICC cases have shown it is hard to convict the most senior officials. In more than 20 years, the court has only issued five convictions for core crimes, and none was for a top official.
But the ICC investigations into international figures are not the only option. War crimes can also be prosecuted in Ukraine’s own courts, and a growing number of countries are conducting their own investigations.
There are also plans to create a new tribunal to prosecute the Russian invasion as a crime of aggression. The ICC cannot bring such a charge due to legal constraints.
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Donald Trump. (photo: AP)
In a social media post, Trump, referring to himself, said the “leading Republican candidate and former president of the United States will be arrested on Tuesday of next week.”
“Protest, take our nation back,” he wrote.
CNN’s John Miller reported that meetings have been going on throughout the week among city, state and federal law enforcement agencies in New York City about how to prepare for a possible indictment of Trump in connection with a yearslong investigation into a hush money scheme involving adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
Any indictment of the former president, who is running for reelection in 2024, would mark a historic first and quickly change the political conversation around an already divisive figure. While Trump has an extensive history of civil litigation both before and after taking office, a criminal charge would represent a dramatic escalation of his legal woes as he works to recapture the White House.
Trump did not say why he expects to be arrested. The former president has been agitating for his team to get his base riled up and believes that an indictment would help him politically, multiple people briefed on the matter told CNN.
Another witness is expected to testify Monday before the grand jury investigating the hush money payments, according to a source familiar with the investigation. It is not clear whether this would be the final witness before it votes on a possible indictment.
His legal team has been anticipating that an indictment will happen soon and has been preparing behind the scenes for the next steps.
A spokesperson for Trump said Saturday that the former president has not received a notification from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office regarding any potential indictment, but was “rightfully highlighting his innocence” in his post.
Previewing a potential line of defense from Republicans on Capitol Hill, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, tweeted Saturday that any potential indictment of the former president would represent “an outrageous abuse of power” from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on Saturday.
Protest call reminiscent of January 6 comments
Trump has complained privately that he believes he is going to being indicted only because he thinks Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “hates him,” according to a source familiar with what Trump has said.
His call for a protest in response to a potential arrest echoes his final days in office, when he repeatedly urged his supporters to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the deadly January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Some of Trump’s advisers had urged him privately not to call for protests, concerned about the optics of a mass protest in the streets of Manhattan growing out of control or resembling the 2021 insurrection.
Another witness scheduled to testify on Monday
Trump’s defense team is expected to be notified following any possible indictment and then they would engage in negotiations for surrender and an initial appearance.
Another witness is expected to testify Monday before the grand jury investigating the hush money payments, according to a source familiar with the investigation. It is not clear whether this would be the final witness before it votes on a possible indictment.
Trump’s team has said repeatedly that he will not accept an invitation to testify before the grand jury. But multiple sources familiar with his legal team’s thinking says that if there is an indictment, he would negotiate an agreed upon surrender date with the district attorney’s office.
Trump’s team has been huddled all week planning for various scenarios, including Trump traveling to New York as well as having a remote hearing where he stays at Mar-a-Lago, according to sources familiar with the meetings.
Some members of his legal team are advising Trump to ask for a remote appearance for security reasons should an indictment occur but it is unclear if he would agree to that as he has also discussed with his team wanting to give a statement at the courthouse, sources said.
Trump is also considering hiring a new TV-friendly lawyer who can handle the outside media, sources said. The former president is known for hiring lawyers and advisers based on their TV presence and ability to defend him in the media.
Two lawyers currently involved in the Justice Department’s investigations around the former president, Jim Trusty and Christina Bobb, were brought into Trump’s fold after he saw them on television.
The campaign is also adding staff to focus on messaging around the potential indictment, a detail first reported by The New York Times.
Law enforcement talks continue
Law enforcement discussions have been about how to navigate the potential indictment for a criminal charge by a New York county grand jury and the choreography around the possibility of an unprecedented arrest of a former president. The New York Police Department did not immediately respond to CNN’s inquiry following Trump’s posts on Saturday.
Trump’s US Secret Service detail would deliver him to the Manhattan district attorney’s Office for fingerprinting and then taking mugshots in offices of the district attorney’s detective squad. As is customary in cases where a defendant is allowed to voluntarily surrender, after arrest processing, the former president would be brought directly to an arraignment before a judge where he would likely be released on his own recognizance.
Law enforcement officials who are privy to the discussions said several concerns have been discussed in the planning process, including courthouse security and the potential for demonstrations or rallies outside of the courthouse by Trump supporters or counter demonstrations by anti-Trump protesters, with the risk of the two groups clashing.
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The Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. (photo: CNN)
Mansoor Adayfi says the brutal force-feeding methods employed on Guantanamo prisoners like him amounted to torture. He tells Richard Hall that Ron DeSantis watched it happen
Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni citizen who was held for 14 years on the US Naval base in Cuba, told The Independent in an extraordinary interview that he was brutally force-fed by camp staff during a hunger strike in 2006, and that Mr DeSantis was present for at least one of those sessions.
The United Nations has characterised the force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay as torture. The US government has denied that the practice amounts to torture, and it has been used against prisoners over successive administrations during hunger strikes.
Mr DeSantis was stationed on the base between March 2006 and January 2007, according to his military records.
An investigation by The Independent details the following claims:
- Two prisoners held at the camp at the time Mr DeSantis was stationed there claim he witnessed the forced-feeding of hunger-striking prisoners.
- Mr Adayfi claims that Mr DeSantis had initially told him he was there for the detainees’ welfare.
- Mr DeSantis was stationed at Guantanamo during a year marked by riots, hunger strikes and death.
- Part of his role was to field concerns and complaints from prisoners.
- Mr DeSantis emerged from his time at Guantanamo as an advocate for its continued use, and against the release of detainees.
Mr DeSantis has not responded to several requests from The Independent for comment on the allegations and for clarity about his role in the notorious prison camp.
As an assumed candidate for the 2024 election, Mr DeSantis is likely to face questions about this time in his career and what impact – if any – witnessing the treatment of Guantanamo detainees has had on his politics.
Until now, he has not spoken in detail about this part of his career. In public, he has advocated for the continued use of Guantanamo Bay to hold detainees suspected of involvement of terrorism, but he has not spoken in detail about his time spent at the camp.
‘Bleeding, vomiting and screaming’
Mansoor Adayfi describes it as one of the worst stretches of his 14-year imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay. In 2006, he was in the midst of a hunger strike with a number of his fellow detainees in protest over the conditions inside the notorious prison. A new team had been brought in to break the strike with a more aggressive form of force-feeding. One day, he recounts with emotion in his voice, he was strapped to a chair in the yard by his head, hands, waist and feet, and a feeding tube was forced into his nose. He was bleeding and vomiting and screaming while an assortment of uniformed military personnel watched from the side.
Years later, now released from the camp without charge and trying to rebuild his life in Serbia, Adayfi came across a photograph online of someone he says he recognised from that day. Until then, he says he knew the man as a young Navy lawyer stationed at the prison, but now he had a name: Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida.
Adayfi says that the same man had watched the terrible episode unfold from behind a chain link fence.
“He was watching, and I was really screaming, crying,” Mr Adayfi, a Yemeni, tells The Independent in a lengthy video interview from his home in Belgrade. “I was bleeding and throwing up. We were in the block yard, so they were close to the fence.”
Mr DeSantis has spoken sparingly of his time at Guantanamo Bay, where he served between March 2006 and January 2007 with the US Navy, at 27-years-old, as a judge advocate general (JAG), a job which entailed providing legal representation to military personnel and ensuring the US military complied with the law. There is little mention of it in his new book and he has offered few details of what he did on the campaign trail.
But since serving at the controversial military prison, Mr DeSantis has consistently argued for it to remain open, and spoken against the release of prisoners, even though most are held for years without charge.
At a time when Mr DeSantis appears to be preparing to run for president, the accusations from the former prisoner may shed new light on the potential candidate’s military career. They allege that he witnessed treatment of detainees that the United Nations condemned as torture, and went on to become a champion of the facility that practised it.
In 2006, the year Mr DeSantis arrived at Guantanamo, the camp was rocked by hunger strikes, violent riots and protests from prisoners over their conditions. Camp officials began to take a more aggressive tack to bring the hunger strikes to an end in the early part of the year.
In February of that year, camp authorities began to implement a more aggressive regime of dealing with hunger strikers, according to a New York Times report from the time.
That method, according to the Times, involved “strapping some of the detainees into ‘restraint chairs’ to force-feed them and isolate them from one another after finding that some were deliberately vomiting or siphoning out the liquid they had been fed.”
Mr Adayfi says his first interaction with the young navy lawyer was memorable. When they first met, he didn’t know his name – camp staff do not use their real names around prisoners for security reasons – but the man he would later come to learn was Mr DeSantis told Mr Adayfi that he was there to help him.
“I don’t remember exactly when DeSantis came because we had no watch, no calendar, nothing,” he says. “He came to talk to us along [with] others – medical staff and interpreters. And we explained to him why we were on hunger strike. And he told us, ‘I’m here to ensure that you get treated humanely and properly.’ We were talking about our problems with the brothers, the torture, the abuses, the no healthcare.”
“This was something strange, because nobody told us that before,” Mr Adayfi adds.
Mr DeSantis was memorable for his appearance, too.
“He was handsome with beautiful eyes,” he says.
Mr Adayfi recalls that he initially believed Mr DeSantis when he told him he was there to help, but he says that quickly changed after he claims he was present for his force-feeding. On the day in question, Mr Adayfi says Mr DeSantis was standing behind a fence in the yard behind the November and Oscar blocks of Camp Delta, watching him being strapped to the chair and force-fed.
“He was there with medical staff, there was other officers, there was some interpreters. There was like a group of them there,” he says.
In his memoir, Don’t Forget Us Here, Lost and Found at Guantánamo, Mr Adayfi describes one incident of force-feeding in detail.
“Guards pushed me into the chair. They tightened the chest harness so that I couldn’t move, then strapped my wrists and legs to the chair. Every point of my body was tightly restrained – I couldn’t move at all. One of the male nurses stood in front of me holding a long, thick rubber tube with a metal tip. Another nurse grabbed my head and held it tightly while the male nurse forces that huge tube into my nose. No numbing spray. No lubricant. Raw rubber and metal sliced the inside of my nose and throat. Pain shot through my sinuses and I thought my head would explode. I screamed and tried to fight but I couldn’t move. My nose bled and bled, but the nurse wouldn’t stop.
“When they were done feeding me, the nurse pulled hard on the tube and ripped it out of my body. It felt like a knife coming through my nose and it bled badly. Blood ran everywhere. I couldn’t breathe and my stomach was so full I thought I would explode.”
Throughout lengthy questioning from The Independent about the finer details of his interactions, Mr Adayfi was insistent that the man he knew as a lawyer at Guantanamo was Mr DeSantis. Mr Adayfi’s description of his initial interaction with Mr DeSantis, for example, where he claims the young lawyer explained his role at the camp, matches the description given by Mr DeSantis’s superior of his job. The dates of key events in the camp during 2006 – such as the deaths of three prisoners – match publicly available information regarding the timeline of Mr DeSantis’s posting.
‘Amounting to torture’
Mr Adayfi characterises the forced-feeding episodes he suffered as torture. That assessment is supported by numerous United Nations reports, including one in 2006 which said of the practice at Guantanamo: “[t]he excessive violence used in many cases during transportation, in operations by the Initial Reaction Forces and force-feeding of detainees on hunger strike must be assessed as amounting to torture as defined in article 1 of the Convention against Torture.”
The World Medical Association said in 2006 that the force-feeding of hunger strikers “constitutes a form of inhuman and degrading treatment”.
The US government, over several administrations, has defended the practice and consistently denied that it amounts to torture. In a lawsuit brought by four detainees in 2013, government lawyers said of the practice: “It is the policy of the Department of Defense to support the preservation of life and health by appropriate clinical means and standard medical intervention, in a humane manner, and in accordance with all applicable standards.”
Barack Obama, who as a candidate promised to close the prison at Guantanamo, but defended force-feeding there when he was president, replied to a question about it by saying: “I don’t want these individuals to die.”
After Mr Adayfi says he saw Mr DeSantis at one of these force-feeding incidents, he didn’t talk to him again.
“At that time, I don’t want to see his face. But other prisoners, they talked to him. Some of the prisoners splashed him with faeces and urine and spit on him,” he says.
Mr Adayfi was released from the prison camp in 2016 with no charges. He kept in touch with other former detainees spread across the world in various locations and started to try to rebuild his life. Then one day, in 2020, he saw a photograph of Mr DeSantis online.
He says he shared the image with some other released former detainees, who also recognised him. He also shared the image with his book editor at the time, Antonio Aiello. When contacted by The Independent, Aiello confirmed this account and says he had multiple discussions with Mr Adayfi about Mr DeSantis going back roughly two years.
Mr Adayfi first made the claims publicly in November 2022, on the Eye’s Left podcast. That account of Mr DeSantis’s presence during force-feeding matches the one he gave to The Independent.
But Mr Adayfi is not the only former detainee who says that they recognised Mr DeSantis from their time at the prison camp.
Ahmed Abdel Aziz, a former prisoner who was released after 13 years without being charged with a crime and is currently back at home in Mauritania, also claims that Mr DeSantis witnessed the force-feeding at Guantanamo.
Although he did not take part in the hunger strike himself, Mr Aziz tells The Independent that he witnessed “dozens” of force-feeding sessions in 2006 himself, and it was not uncommon for large groups of camp staff to watch them from the side.
“Sometimes a big bunch of people will come, sometimes two or three, sometimes the medical staff would come alone with the guards. Among them was this man,” he says, referring to Mr DeSantis.
“He was not there all the time,” he says. “He was watching. He cannot stop it, he doesn’t have the authority, but he could stand against that or write to his higher-ups, to Washington, to other departments and tell them what’s going on.”
Like Mr Adayfi, Mr Aziz says doesn’t remember exactly when he realised the lawyer he knew from Guantanamo was Mr DeSantis, but he dates it roughly to a few years ago, when one of his friends sent him a picture.
”As soon as I saw his picture I know him very well because he spent a long time there, maybe six months or eight months,” he says. “Most of the people in there, once we see them, we don’t forget them,” he adds.
Mr Adayfi says he believes the American people should know that Mr DeSantis – now a national political figure on the cusp of declaring a run for the White House – was aware of and observed what he endured at Guantanamo.
“I’m not trying to say DeSantis was giving orders to the force-feeding. I didn’t see him giving orders to the guards, and I don’t think he was in a position to give orders to the guards. But he was there watching. He knows about everything – about the hunger strike, the torture, the abuse in the camps. And his job was to ensure that we were treated humanely,” he says.
Mr DeSantis’s military records show that he had duties at Guantanamo Bay Naval base between 1 March 2006 and 31 January 2007. His duties are listed as “Trial Counsel, Command Services Attorney,” as well as JTF-GTMO scheduler/administrative officer.”
Retired Navy captain Patrick McCarthy, who served as staff judge advocate at the detention facility and supervised Mr DeSantis, said in a 2018 interview that his duties required interacting with detainees and hearing their complaints.
“If any complaints were raised, Ron would have been among the folks I sent down to talk to the detainees,” Mr McCarthy told the Miami Herald. He said in the same interview that Mr DeSantis would have made sure the complaints “were addressed in a way that was consistent with the law”.
In his recently released book, The Courage to be Free, Mr DeSantis wrote that part of the reason he enlisted in the military in 2004 was so that he might be able to take part in prosecutions at the camp.
“One recruiter told me that the assumption was that the Iraq campaign would be over relatively quickly, and that there would be a need for military [judge advocate general’s] to lead prosecutions in military commissions of incarcerated terrorists at Guantánamo Bay,” he wrote. He added that it “seemed like a good opportunity to make an impact.”
At the time, allegations of torture and ill-treatment of detainees at the camp were rife. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which had conducted visits to the camp since 2002, wrote to the US government in June 2004 to decry the system of interrogation there as “an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture”. The report, which became public in November of that year, alleged “humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions”, as well as exposure to persistent loud noise and music and “some beatings”.
The use of torture at Guantanamo Bay – euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation” by the Bush administration – was approved by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld for use as early as 2002. Those techniques included “hooding, stress positions, isolation, stripping, deprivation of light, removal of religious items, forced grooming, and use of dogs”, according to a 2005 Human Rights Watch report.
The chaotic situation at the camp continued throughout the year. On 10 June 2006, three prisoners died in one night. The US military determined that Yassar Talal al-Zahrani, Mani Shaman Turki Al Habardi al-Tabi, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed, all died by hanging, but researchers claimed the investigations into their deaths "failed to conform to minimum standards”.
Enemy combatants
As of February 2006, the month before Mr DeSantis arrived, the US government held more than 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as alleged “enemy combatants”. Mr Adayfi was one of them.
Born in a small village in Yemen, he was just 18 when he went to Afghanistan in 2001 to conduct what he says was a research mission into al-Qaeda on behalf of a sheikh at an Islamic institute outside of Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. According to his account, detailed in his book, Mr Adayfi was captured by Afghan warlords and handed over to the CIA at a time the intelligence service was offering rewards. He then says he was taken to a CIA black site, where he was tortured.
According to a Department of Defense file on Mr Adayfi that called for his continued detention in Guantanamo, dated 2008, the US government described Mr Adayfi as “an admitted member of al-Qaeda who possessed prior knowledge of the 11 September 2001 attacks as well as other planned attacks against US interests”, and also claims that he was “identified as a commander of evacuating front line forces assessed to be Usama Bin Laden’s (UBL) 55th Arab Brigade during hostilities against US and Coalition forces”.
Mr Adayfi says he repeatedly denied the interrogator’s accusations that he was a member of al-Qaida, but says he later gave a false confession in anger at his ill-treatment.
“I was angry. I was hurt. I said things that I didn’t mean, but I was in a deep, dark hole,” he recalled in his memoir. “I wanted to teach them that they couldn’t kill and torture us and expect us to love them for it.”
Before his release, the US government also amended its assessment of Mr Adayfi, saying in a declassified report that it was “unclear whether he actually joined” al-Qaeda and was “probably … a low-level fighter”.
Mr Adayfi’s sister and brother died during the 14 years he was held at Guantanamo. He emerged from the prison he entered at 19 years old a different person. He says he still suffers from the impact of the time he spent at Guantanamo, and the force-feeding was just one part of it.
“They totally destroyed our life. The interrogations, sexual assault, the beatings, the long-term confinement, mental, psychological, physical abuse, just name it,” he said of his treatment at the prison camp and in CIA custody before his arrival.
“They broke our lives, and we still struggle to live now,” he adds.
When asked how he feels about Mr DeSantis today, Mr Adayfi says he has no ill will towards him, but does not believe he should be president.
“He’s a bad person, you know. I like America, and such people, when they come to power, they create a lot of problems.
“I have no hate against him. But at the same time, as a lawyer, as someone who is a graduate of law and believes in the law, he should have known better,” he says.
“I would ask him why would he want to keep Guantanamo open. As a lawyer, there should be a presumption of innocence, not guilt. If you love your country, if you love your people, if you believe in American values, you should be the first one who called for the closure of Guantanamo. And if you think we are criminal terrorists, okay, take us and try us before your justice system.”
Following his time at Guantanamo, Mr DeSantis went on to serve as a JAG in Iraq. Later, he became a congressman for Florida’s sixth congressional district, at which time then-president Barack Obama had proposed closing the prison by executive order. Mr DeSantis spoke out numerous times against the idea.
At a congressional hearing chaired by Mr DeSantis in 2016, the then-congressman forcefully argued for Guantanamo to remain open.
“The president’s conclusion that the detention facility should be closed is based in part on his idea that the facility is a recruiting tool for Islamic jihadists, but this represents a misunderstanding of the nature of the terrorist threats we face.,” he said. “These are not the type of people that will abandon their jihad against America and our allies simply because we close Guantanamo Bay,” he told the House of Representatives Subcommittee of National Security, part of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
In the same session, he spoke briefly of his time there.
“When I was in the Navy I was there for a time and it is a very professionally run facility. Anybody in this room would rather spend a night there than in like the Fallujah jail or something like this. I mean, it is just night and day. And the people that are guarding that facility are under an awful lot of pressure because those detainees are very hostile to them, and they know that if they do anything that they are all of a sudden going to be subject to – so it is a very stressful environment for our uniformed personnel who are there,” he said.
In a campaign ad for his successful 2018 run for governor, images of Mr DeSantis in his navy uniform are shown as a narrator described him as a “JAG officer who dealt with terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.”
Mr DeSantis’s office did not respond to several requests for comment.
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A police officer. (photo: Adobe Stock)
Bianca Clayborne and Deonte Williams’ case fits pattern of child welfare services fueling disparities in who gets to remain a family
That moment – about 60 miles outside Nashville – has since upended their lives as Clayborne and Williams try to regain custody of their children after they say state authorities “kidnapped” them on account of a minuscule amount of marijuana in the car, the Tennessee Lookout first reported.
The separation described by Clayborne and Williams fits into a historical pattern of US child welfare services dividing poor, Black and Indigenous families in particular on the grounds of alleged neglect and abuse, fueling disparities in who gets to remain a family and who doesn’t.
“I just have to believe if my clients looked different or had a different background, they would have just been given a citation and told you just keep this stuff away from the kids while you’re in this state and they’d be on their way,” said Jamaal Boykin, one of the family’s attorneys, according to the Tennessee Lookout.
In her damning book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families – and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, University of Pennsylvania law professor Dorothy E Roberts described how the US child welfare system historically punished families – especially Black ones – for living through poverty as they face accusations of neglect or being unable to meet children’s housing, healthcare and other basic needs.
Roberts argues that racist stereotyping influences the way child welfare workers and policymakers approach the investigations of families of color, finding that one in 10 Black children are forcibly removed from their families and put into foster care by the time they are adults. She wrote in an excerpt that more than half of US Black children would face some form of a child welfare investigation by the time they are 18 while fewer than a third of white children would.
In Clayborne and Williams’s case, the trooper stopped their car on 17 February for having dark tinted windows and driving in the left lane without actively passing, according to citations reviewed by the Lookout. The officer searched their car and found five grams of marijuana, a misdemeanor offense. He arrested Williams and took him to a local jail. Clayborne followed, as her kids cried.
While Clayborne waited for Williams’s release on bond, an officer restrained her while state officials took custody of her five children, including her four-month-old baby. Courtney Teasley, an attorney representing the family since late February, said that Clayborne and Williams’s case reflected “how government systems that say they are there to protect have the ability to use those same protections to oppress”.
Saying Tennessee’s children’s services department was “abysmal,” Teasley said her clients’ children now face being removed from Georgia “to some school that they know nothing about”.
“We already know that … [most] children being hurt are the Black children,” Teasley added. “Shining a light on this [shows] what’s being done to Black people in real time. That leads to mass incarceration and everything that comes with it: generational trauma, the school-to-prison pipeline.”
The state’s children’s services department ultimately alleged that Clayborne and Williams’s children were being abused to obtain an emergency order to take them away. The removal went through though court records showed a state case worker brought in after the stop “discovered only the father had been arrested”, the Lookout reported. Still, that same day, the agency received a court order to take the children away from Clayborne and Williams.
Nearly a week later, during their first juvenile court hearing, the couple was asked to take drug tests, which showed mixed results.
Urine drug tests came back positive for Williams but negative for Clayborne. Follow-up, rapid hair follicle tests were then ordered, coming back positive for fentanyl and oxycodone for both. Both deny taking those substances, and a local treatment court administrator told the Lookout that such tests are generally inadmissible as evidence.
Teasley said it is “egregious” for someone’s children to be taken on the basis of an inadmissible test. “How many people have had this happen to them?” she said.
Tennessee Democratic lawmakers called for the return of the couple’s children. State senator London Lamar told reporters on Friday the state’s action was “ridiculous” and an “overuse of power”, describing it “borderline discrimination”.
State senator Raumesh Akbari said on Friday that state officials “exercised extreme and flawed judgment in taking their children and it seems they’ve doubled down on this poor decision”.
In an interview with the Lookout, Clayborne said she couldn’t believe when officers surrounded her for six hours and stopped her from reaching for her nursing baby. She recalled one of them said: “Don’t touch him. He’s getting taken away from you.’”
“I breastfeed – they didn’t give me anything,” Clayborne said. “They just ran off with my kids.”
Teasley says that the couple has driven back and forth from their home in Georgia to see their children in Nashville, where they are with a foster family. Clayborne has struggled with the aftereffects of being unable to nurse her baby and wound up in the hospital as she suffered from panic attacks.
“They are on the road all the time now [to] see the kids and stay with them as long as they can,” Teasley said, adding that the children sob whenever their parents leave. “It’s escalated, because it’s seeming like they’re never going to get their kids back.”
Meanwhile, “the kids … know nothing except ‘I want to go home’,” Teasley said.
A hearing on the case is scheduled for Monday.
Teasley added that she has risked facing reprisals just for speaking to the media about the case. On Friday, she said that the attorney for Tennessee’s children’s services department had filed a motion “for sanctions and referral for prosecution” against her. The motion argues that Teasley violated confidentiality provisions, which she denies.
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Abortion rights protesters chant during a Pro-Choice rally. (photo: Sandy Huffaker)
A list circulated in January by the distributor to Walgreens and CVS underscores the uncertainty surrounding abortion pills in the post-Roe era.
But fear of state prosecution is not the only factor shaping Walgreens’ decision-making. Another previously unreported constraint on the company is that its sole supplier of Mifeprex — the brand-name drug for the abortion pill mifepristone first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000 — circulated a list to its corporate clients in January naming 31 states that it would not supply the abortion medication to. Vox spoke with two sources who had reviewed that list recently.
The sole US distributor for Mifeprex is AmerisourceBergen, one of the largest pharmaceutical distribution companies in the world. (The federal government is currently suing AmerisourceBergen for allegedly distributing opioids while knowing they would later end up on the illegal market. The Pennsylvania-based company has denied this.) Back in January, AmerisourceBergen created its list of 31 states using as a source the website of the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive research organization that tracks state abortion restrictions, according to sources with knowledge of the list’s origin.
The list’s existence underscores the precarious state of abortion rights in the US in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson — the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that struck down Roe v. Wade, effectively leaving abortion rights to each state. Walgreens drew condemnation for saying it would not dispense abortion pills, even in states where it’s currently legal to do so. AmerisourceBergen’s list indicates another reason influencing Walgreens’ stance: a distributor — it’s the only one for this drug — had signaled that it would not supply pharmacies with abortion pills.
Walgreens and Danco Laboratories, the manufacturer of Mifeprex, declined to comment. A source with knowledge of the contractual agreement between Walgreens and AmerisourceBergen told Vox that the parties are legally barred from talking publicly about the supplier, but that advocates have been trying to persuade AmerisourceBergen to adopt a less risk-averse stance on abortion-pill distribution.
Lauren Esposito, a spokesperson for AmerisourceBergen, told Vox over email that the situation “is dynamic and ever evolving. Any information that you’re referring to from January is certainly out of date by now. Additionally, as I’m sure you can appreciate, for contractual purposes we are not able to discuss specific products.” The company later released an additional statement, emphasizing that AmerisourceBergen does not “independently decide what medications should be available to health care professionals as part of their treatment plans” and does “not make clinical decisions or values-based judgements on which FDA approved products it distributes.”
Vox asked Guttmacher about the supplier’s list and its reported use of the institute’s site as a guide for compiling the list. “We would like to understand what data AmerisourceBergen is basing these claims on, as we are not aware of any policies that would prevent the shipping of mifepristone to such a large number of states,” said Elizabeth Nash, a Guttmacher policy analyst. “Private companies should be extremely careful not to limit access to mifepristone in response to threats from anti-abortion groups or politicians.”
Abortion rights advocates and consumers responded with outrage to the Politico report, calling for a boycott of Walgreens until it reverses its stance. At particular issue is the fact that four states on Walgreens’ list — Montana, Kansas, Iowa, and Alaska — have restrictions on pharmacists that are blocked in court. California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he would not renew a multimillion-dollar contract with the pharmacy chain to signal his disapproval.
Walgreens spokesperson Fraser Engerman maintained the company’s position hasn’t changed, and that they still intend to dispense mifepristone “in any jurisdiction where it is legally permissible to do so.”
In January, the Food and Drug Administration announced that brick-and-mortar pharmacies could apply for certification to sell abortion medication at their stores, a move hailed as an important step toward expanding access to the safe and effective drug that has become the most common method for ending pregnancies in the United States.
Representatives from CVS and Rite Aid, which like Walgreens said they would seek certification, have remained conspicuously quiet on the issue for the last two weeks, and did not return requests for comment. (No drugstore has yet been certified, and it is not clear how long the process will take.)
The ongoing debate over what pharmacies like Walgreens can and should do when it comes to dispensing mifepristone reflects the political challenge of navigating the patchwork of conflicting state abortion restrictions in the post-Roe era. With a bevy of new laws and litigation, individuals, abortion providers, and companies are left to make consequential decisions in a highly fraught and confusing legal environment — which, in the case of Walgreens and AmerisourceBergen, means inaction in the face of uncertainty.
Pharmacists are caught in the middle
Caught in the middle of this legal and political tug-of-war are abortion providers. While it’s easy for Democratic governors in states like Illinois and California to tell companies they should dispense medication abortion, it’s harder to insist that they should put their pharmacists at risk.
“Violating the has-to-be-done-by-a-physician requirements in some of these states is punishable by jail,” a Walgreens spokesperson told the New York Times. “In other states, it’s punishable by a civil fine, and in a number of them it’s punishable by licensing sanctions. And so these are restrictions that present real risks to pharmacists.”
The 21 states where Walgreens has said it will not dispense mifepristone fall into a few different categories, explained Nash of Guttmacher. Some have banned abortion entirely, while others have laws requiring physicians to dispense drugs in-person, or require in-person counseling and ultrasounds, making the prospect of dispensing mifepristone through a pharmacy impractical. And still others, like Alaska, should feasibly be able to dispense through a pharmacy, Nash said.
“Overall there’s a lot of confusion in the marketplace as pharmacies and pharmacists try and follow all the laws and regulation and litigation,” said Ilisa Bernstein, the interim CEO of the American Pharmacists Association. “It’s unsettled right now.”
Bernstein told Vox that beyond legal risks, members are grappling with new safety issues: “Pharmacy team staff safety is a concern, whether it’s getting into the pharmacy and going through people who may be demonstrating and picketing outside or in the pharmacy, where team members want to be sure they’re in a safe space when they’re working,” she said. Recently anti-abortion activists protested Walgreens’ annual shareholder meeting, casting drugstores as the new abortion clinic.
Next week the American Pharmacists Association is holding its annual meeting where hundreds of delegates from across the country plan to revisit the group’s policies on mifepristone and reproductive health care.
Regardless of what pharmacists want their group’s policies to be, they will remain bounded by the FDA’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) list, a restrictive designation the federal government places on mifepristone over the objections of groups like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Pharmacists will also be circumscribed by the lawyers of their companies, and other actors involved in the medication abortion supply chain, like drug distributors and lawmakers.
Esposito, the spokesperson for AmerisourceBergen, told Vox, “We continue to make FDA-approved medications, including reproductive health medications, available to health care facilities and providers in all 50 states and territories that meet local, state, and federal requirements to distribute and dispense.”
But whether AmerisourceBergen will let Walgreens and other drugstores sell Mifeprex in all the locations pharmacies would be willing to dispense them from is another question.
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Police officers and soldiers take a man to a detention center in San Salvador, El Salvador. (photo: Jose Cabezas/Reuters)
Measures enjoy widespread support, but rights groups say they have led to arbitrary arrests and prison overcrowding.
The so-called state of exception, renewed for a 12th time late on Wednesday by the Salvadoran Congress, came into effect last year and has led to around 66,000 arrests in the Central American nation.
It allows arrests without warrants, government access to private communications and detentions without the right to a lawyer.
“We ask that this regime be extended for more time,” Police Director Mauricio Arriaza told reporters ahead of this week’s 30-day extension.
“We need to keep fighting criminal groups, we need to give assurance to Salvadoran families, for their lives and their property.”
The text of the legislative decree stated that the “war against gangs conducted by the government has allowed the Salvadoran population to feel a sense of security”.
While the emergency measures enjoy widespread support in El Salvador, human rights groups and United Nations experts have raised serious concerns around violations of due process, arbitrary arrests and mistreatment of detainees.
Last month, rights groups and the Salvadoran police union told Al Jazeera that a rising number of Salvadorans detained under the state of exception have been “re-arrested” upon release after either being granted bail or having their cases dropped.
That raised fresh fears that Bukele’s government plans to ensure that detainees remain behind bars, particularly in advance of 2024 elections.
“From the beginning, we pointed out that it was not so crazy to think that the state of exception could extend until the elections,” Eduardo Escobar, a lawyer and director of Salvadoran NGO Citizen Action (Accion Ciudadana), told Al Jazeera at the time.
Bukele has said around 80 percent of El Salvador is under the control of criminal gangs, with the state of emergency introduced last year after a wave of murders attributed to the violent groups.
According to official figures, the crackdown has already led to 65,795 arrests, and 2,513 firearms have been seized.
In January, Humans Rights Watch denounced “severe prison overcrowding” in El Salvador’s jails as a result of the surge in detentions.
A month later, Bukele unveiled what he called the largest prison in the Americas region, intended to hold 40,000 suspected gang members – more than doubling the country’s current total capacity of 30,000 inmates across 20 prisons.
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Pollution from a factory. (photo: Science Focus)
Trichloroethylene, or TCE, is a colorless liquid that has been used to remove gunk from jet engines, strip paint and remove stains from shirts dropped off at the dry cleaners. Decades of widespread use in the U.S. have left thousands of sites contaminated by the TCE.
In a paper published Tuesday in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, authors hypothesize that this pollution may be contributing to the global spread of Parkinson’s, a neurological disorder characterized by uncontrollable tremors and slow movement. Although authors were unable to prove a direct connection, they cited a number of other studies that suggest TCE may play a role in the degenerative brain disorder, and urged further research on the matter.
“When Dr. [James] Parkinson described the condition in 1817 in London, he reported six individuals with the disease,” said Dr. Ray Dorsey, a neurology professor at the University of Rochester and lead author. “Two hundred years later, the global burden of disease is estimated that over 6 million people have the disease worldwide. So how do you go from six to 6 million? The rates are growing far faster than aging could explain alone. It has to be environmental factors. I think TCE and air pollution are important contributors.”
Although prolonged or repeated exposure to TCE is known to cause kidney cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute, the paper’s authors argue that a connection to Parkinson’s disease would greatly increase its risk, particularly for contaminated sites that have been converted into housing developments.
“When a patient tells me about possible exposure, I Google their location and I almost always find a contaminated site,” Dorsey said.
The paper draws from more than two dozen research papers documenting apparent neurological effects associated with TCE exposure and highlights a number of Parkinson’s cases. In citing the ubiquitous nature of the chemical, the paper references a plume of contamination underlying a portion of Newport Beach, which is considered one of California’s largest residential communities affected by chemical vapors from legacy contamination.
TCE was first linked to Parkinson’s disease symptoms in 1969 in a 59-year-old man who worked with the chemical for more than 30 years, according to the paper. It was largely connected with workplace exposure, including a woman who worked with the chemical while cleaning houses and factory workers who degreased and cleaned metal parts. A 2012 study of twins found that occupational or hobby exposure was associated with a roughly 500% increased likelihood of developing Parkinson’s disease.
TCE production in the U.S. peaked in the 1970s, surpassing 600 million pounds per year. It was commonly used at military bases and industrial sites and disposed of at hazardous waste facilities.
Today, up to one-third of the drinking water supplies in the U.S. may contain TCE, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But the chemical also threatens indoor air quality, as it can seep from the soil into homes through gaps in the foundation, where it is then inhaled as vapor.
In Southern California, a region facing a shortage of housing, redevelopment of lands contaminated by TCE and a host of other chemicals has raised alarms among community groups.
The Santa Susana Field Laboratory site, where rocket engines were tested in the Simi Hills of Ventura County, was once remote. Today, 700,000 people live within 10 miles of the dormant site, where soil and groundwater are contaminated with more than 300 pollutants, including TCE.
Similarly, in Riverside County’s Jurupa Valley, development has crept closer to the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a closed hazardous waste site that handled TCE.
“The studies have always focused on cancer. And we’ve always said that there are other ancillary diseases and illnesses that show up with this that they’re not picking up on,” said Penny Newman, a Jurupa Valley resident and founder of the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice.
"The site itself was isolated in a box canyon above the community, and there hadn't been much development up there," Newman said. "But as the city grew with the freeways, then they start looking for any piece of property that's available. And it's just in the last few years, people have started looking to how they can develop up around the side" of the site.
In Newport Beach, the chemicals in shallow groundwater were left by a former testing ground for missile systems. From 1957 to 1993, Ford Motor Co. operated a 98-acre aeronautics campus where it developed tactical missile systems. After the facility was demolished, the site underwent some environmental remediation and was subsequently redeveloped into residential properties, including multimillion-dollar homes. However, some chemical contamination remained and migrated with groundwater into surrounding areas.
Groundwater within Newport Beach isn’t used for drinking, and TCE vapor levels weren’t considered a threat to public health risk at the time. However, in 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 issued a memo about the dangers of breathing TCE vapors. Soon after, California revised its health thresholds for TCE exposure.
Since 2018, consultants hired by Ford, under the supervision of the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board, have conducted soil vapor monitoring in the area surrounding the former site.
“Ford believes that access to a healthy and clean environment is a basic human right, including for the residents of Newport Beach,” the company said in a statement. “Since 1996, Ford has been working proactively with the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board to address volatile organic compounds in soil and groundwater. We have regularly provided updates to the community and will continue to do so.”
So far, more than 350 residential properties and three commercial properties have had their indoor air sampled. Vapor from TCE and a related solvent — tetrachloroethylene, or PCE — have been detected above screening levels in 129 homes. Air purifiers have been offered to about 30 households where data suggested vapor intrusion was occurring.
Outside homes, a network of 424 underground monitors collect measurements of vapors at depth. In some cases, these probes have measured TCE concentrations more than 100 times the state residential limit.
In Bayridge Park and Belcourt Terrace, two of the communities with the greatest concentrations, Ford is working to install systems of underground pipes designed to treat underground vapors for roughly a year, which is expected to lower indoor TCE levels to state standards, according to Jessica Law, an engineering geologist with the water board.
“This is one of the wealthiest parts of the entire United States,” said Dorsey, who grew up in Newport Beach. “If this is happening in a resource-rich area, think about what’s happening in a resource-poor area.”
Environmental advocates say exposure to TCE is avoidable. New York and Minnesota have banned its use, and earlier this year, the federal EPA determined that TCE presents “an unreasonable risk of injury to human health,” a designation that paves the way for potential regulation.
In Jurupa Valley, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control continues to grapple with TCE contamination that spilled out of a long-shuttered hazardous waste site. From 1956 to 1972, about 34 million gallons of liquid industrial waste were discharged into evaporation pools in the Stringfellow Acid Pits in a canyon in the Jurupa Mountains. The pollution escaped when floodwaters carried contaminants off site and into a community below.
The state spent millions of dollars installing a network of wells to extract and treat a plume of contaminated water. Despite substantial progress, monitoring in 2018 revealed TCE vapors continued to exceed state health standards.
But after years of drought, which allowed for more contaminated water to be treated and removed, locals now worry contamination might spread with rain and snowmelt.
"It's all in that soil," said Jurupa Valley's Newman. "So if you activate that again and it becomes mobile through the groundwater, you're gonna have it start coming down [into the community] again."
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