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When the first rockets struck outside Vasyl Bilous’s apartment building, in Kharkiv, he was already at the front.
Vasyl is not mean, or greedy. He tears up easily. He and his wife, who is also a lawyer, are strivers. They saved to buy an apartment in a new nine-story building on the western edge of Kharkiv, overlooking a forest. Vasyl liked to get up at the crack of dawn and do a twenty-five-kilometre bike loop in the woods. So he was already awake, in the kitchen, on February 24, 2022, when he heard explosions. He looked out the window—they had a great panoramic view—and saw the skies turning red near Piatykhatky, at the northeastern edge of the city. He woke up his wife by saying, “It seems the war has started.”
A few weeks later, a Russian Grad rocket hit the ground near their building. Half the windows in the apartment shattered. Fortunately, Vasyl’s wife was at work when that missile hit. Vasyl was already at the front, where, for the past year, he has served as a member of an aerial-intelligence unit.
Vasyl is a gadget guy. Before the war, he liked to take bird’s-eye—or, as he calls them, angel’s-eye—photographs of the city, particularly the Law University, with aerial drones. His drones are now used to locate targets. He flies them behind enemy lines, looking at what the camera on his drone can see on the screen of his cell phone. When he spots, say, a tank, he taps the screen to get the coördinates of the object and transmits these to an artillery unit. As the Ukrainians open fire, the drone camera continues working, and Vasyl keeps transmitting information back to base: “Fifty metres north,” “Twenty metres south,” and—finally, when the missiles are hitting within ten metres of the object—“Repeat!” until the target is destroyed.
In the first weeks of the war, two of Vasyl’s drones were shot down. An émigré entrepreneur whom he knew donated a replacement. When Vasyl unpacked the parcel, he cried because he saw the care that his friend had put into it: he included the best available battery, the most capacious memory card, and backups of essential accessories. Sometimes, when Vasyl is flying a drone, the Russians manage to jam his radio signal. The drone then starts swerving haphazardly, cutting figure eights and zigzags in the air. Vasyl has a way of landing the drone—but then he has to make his way to it, to salvage the gadget and the information it has recorded. This can involve crawling through a snowy minefield, holding a metal detector in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Vasyl has heard that, for every year of war, demining operations will take ten. That would mean that Ukraine is already in for ten years of demining.
Sometimes Vasyl goes so deep into enemy territory that, on the way back, the dispatcher might say to him, “Welcome back to Ukraine!” “It’s an odd war,” Vasyl sometimes says: after he returns to Ukraine, he is back in his own city within an hour, and sometimes he even stops by his office at the university, in a lush nineteenth-century building with gilded bannisters. Sometimes, when he is out in the field, he himself becomes a target. He has to fall to the ground to avoid bullets. It’s good to wear knee and elbow guards. These are donated by people who raise funds to support the Ukrainian military.
When Vasyl first signed up, he was issued a well-worn bulletproof vest and a helmet in which the protective foam inside was cracked from age. It stank, too. But Vasyl was grateful for this equipment. He served for eleven months before he got notice to report to the supply center, where he was issued a new vest and helmet. He has carried a Ukrainian flag with him since the start of the war, folded under his bulletproof vest. He chokes up when he talks about how sweaty and tattered the flag is, from all the times that he has been terrified while on duty. He has found that fear makes him sweat.
He lives in an administrative building that has been retrofitted to serve as both barracks and offices. He bought an orthopedic office chair and a memory-foam mattress to use there. Some of his fellow-soldiers laughed at him, but he has a bad back, and he often needs to spend hours at a computer, deciphering drone data.
About thirty men sleep in the same space as Vasyl. For the first few months, he slept on military-issue sheets that were rough and gray from wear. When stores in Kharkiv reopened in the summer, he bought two sets of sheets, a blue-gray one and a pink one. This was a little embarrassing, but there wasn’t much light in the store, so he couldn’t see what he was buying. Once a week, he drops off a backpack of dirty laundry with his wife at their apartment and picks up a backpack of clean things. Early on, he didn’t have this luxury—he washed what he could when he could, in the barracks, and used radiators as dryers. Now even his underthings are ironed, and his sheets carry the odor of fabric softener. It smells like home.
The last time he got a haircut was a few days before the war. In the barracks, he used his mustache trimmer to shave the sides and much of the top of his head, to create a traditional Cossack hairdo. He also stopped trimming the ends of his mustache, to complete the Cossack look. It sends a message, he thinks, like the Mohawk haircut: it shows that he means business and won’t back down. It’s the wartime equivalent of claiming to be mean, if not greedy.
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Former President Donald Trump. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Trump’s legal threats are moving faster than the political calendar.
Welcome to the prosecution primary, where Trump’s legal threats are moving faster than the political calendar.
The biggest action of the next few months won’t take place on the campaign trail, but in the hushed conference rooms of District Attorneys and the Department of Justice, where prosecutors will decide whether to indict the former president. Three separate groups of prosecutors are preparing to make charging determinations within the next few months, ahead of next year’s GOP primaries. Many independent legal experts now think Trump’s indictment looks like a matter of time—including some who were once highly skeptical Trump would ever be charged.
That means law enforcement officials in Washington D.C., Atlanta, and Manhattan are primed to have an outsized, early influence in the race.
If Trump is indicted in the first half of 2023, a criminal trial could start before the end of this year, or in the first half of 2024. The resulting possible scenarios seem outlandish to even consider: Will we see a Trump mug shot this summer? If Trump is released on bond, will he do presidential debates wearing an ankle monitor? If he is charged, and refuses to abandon his campaign, will he finally succeed in splitting the GOP?
And, perhaps most importantly: Would criminal charges actually hurt Trump’s chances at winning the GOP nomination, or will his ride-or-die supporters stick with him?
In the prosecution primary, it’s Trump vs the law, with no historical precedent for what follows.
The Next Stage
Prosecutors eyeing Trump show every sign of making decisions soon, legal experts say.
In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in late January that charging decisions are “imminent” in her long-running probe of Trump and his allies’ attempts to flip his 2020 defeat into a victory. A special purpose grand jury has already delivered a report to Willis recommending charges against over a dozen people, including famous names and “potentially” Trump, according to the foreperson of the jury, Emily Kohrs.
In Washington D.C., Special Counsel Jack Smith reportedly aims to wrap up his investigations of Trump by this summer, according to sources who spoke to the New York Times. Smith has already subpoenaed high-profile targets like former Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s family-members-and-ex-White-House-advisors, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Filing subpoenas for those big names suggests both that Smith is close to the end of his probe and also that he’s serious about bringing a criminal case, according to former prosecutors and legal experts.
Smith is investigating Trump’s attempts to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election, and whether Trump broke the law by stashing sensitive government documents at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
In Manhattan, District Attorney Alvin Bragg has re-upped a years-old probe into payments related to Trump’s alleged sexual affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels. Those payouts were intended to stop Daniels from telling the press she had an affair with Trump before the 2016 election, a claim that Trump has repeatedly labeled a fabrication.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing, and calls all the probes into his conduct part of a “witch hunt.”
But any of these probes could soon erupt into the first prosecution of a former president in U.S. history. Or, in a bizarre, legal cataclysm, he could become ensnared in all three, at the same time—in the middle of running for president.
Crime Vote
There was a time when being charged with a felony would have blocked any candidate’s path to the White House, but Trump’s proven ability to survive endless scandals debunked the idea that a criminal indictment would derail his campaign.
There’s no legal reason why Trump would have to step aside after receiving an indictment, or even if he’s later convicted at trial and sentenced to prison. The Constitution gives only three criteria for winning the presidency—you must be at least 35 years old, a natural-born citizen, and a resident in the U.S. for 14 years. Technically, Trump could even win the presidency from inside prison.
In 2016, Trump proclaimed during the 2016 GOP primaries that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.” Though he didn’t go that far, Republican primary voters shrugged off his litany of lies and legal liabilities during the 2016 primaries, from a lengthy list of sexual assault allegations to the $25 million settlement of a fraud lawsuit over Trump University. Every time he got in trouble during the general election, the response was a collective “but her emails” about Hillary Clinton’s own scandal. Republican voters—and enough independents—simply didn’t care about Trump’s immense legal baggage.
That only got more true during his presidency.
“When he’s held accountable, it can be a motivator for his base,” Norm Eisen, who served as co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment and trial of President Donald Trump in 2020, told VICE News.
Only about 10% of Republicans supported Trump’s first impeachment, for threatening to withhold defensive weapons from Ukraine unless its leaders dug up dirt on President Joe Biden. After the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, there was a brief dip in GOP support for Trump—but they rallied against his second impeachment in early 2021 and bear-hugged his claims the election had been stolen from him afterwards.
“We actually saw his popularity rise with his core supporters at certain points during the impeachment,” Eisen told VICE News.
During the midterms in 2022, Republican voters overwhelmingly backed Trump’s election-denying nominees for office—while booting out almost every GOP member of Congress who backed Trump’s second impeachment.
And the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid last summer actually boosted Trump’s support among Republican voters, according to polls.
He’s shown that he can effectively rally his base against law enforcement officials by casting their probes as pure politics.
The former president has already spent months painting the prosecutors who are now poised to indict him as bogeymen to his rightwing base. Willis—a Black woman, Democrat, and daughter of a Black Panther—hails from liberal Atlanta, a city Trump and Republicans love to hate.
And Republicans’ contempt for Atlanta is nothing like their loathing for New York City, where Bragg, who is also Black, already secured a conviction for criminal tax fraud against Trump’s company last year.
Trump spent his entire presidency convincing his supporters that the FBI is part of the “deep state” that’s out to get him, priming them to see any prosecution as a politically motivated witch hunt. And he’s started to do the same with his current foes.
“These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They're racists and they're very sick, they're mentally sick,” Trump told a rally last year, before adding: “In reality, they're not after me. They're after you.”
“His base is conditioned to believe that any legal action against him is from the nefarious ‘Deep State,’” said Rick Wilson, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who cofounded the Lincoln Project.
“They’re going to say ‘they’re just doing this to get Trump,’” Wilson told VICE News. “The base will look at it as a badge of honor. They will not respond the way ordinary voters would have responded at any point in our prior history.”
But while a large number of Republicans seem fine with Trump breaking rules, they don’t like to lose—which could point to Trump’s actual weakness if he gets charged. The biggest polling dip in Trump’s support in years came right after his slate of candidates got walloped in the 2022 midterms.
And that points to a different kind of vulnerability: Trump’s legal troubles can and have actually hurt him and his party with swing voters, costing them general elections. And Republican primary voters do care about electability.
Past events prove that criminal behavior isn’t a dealbreaker for Republican voters. But if Trump’s legal troubles get bad enough in 2024, his primary opponents may have an opening to argue he’s a loser who blew it in 2020, hurt them in 2018 and 2022, and whose baggage could sink them in 2024, too.
That might be an actual drag on his chances at the GOP nomination—and his chances of returning to the White House.
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A swing set at Mormon Island State Recreation Area at Grand Island, Neb., on Feb. 25. The fallout from the Packers Sanitation Services case in Grand Island illustrates the painful complexity of enforcing U.S. child labor laws. (photo: Madeline Cass/WP)
One of 27 minors hired to clean a Nebraska slaughterhouse, the middle-schooler and her family now fear deportation and more.
Since the U.S. Department of Labor raided the plant in October, Packers Sanitation Services, a contractor hired to clean the facility, has been fined for violating child labor laws. The girl, meanwhile, has watched her whole life unravel.
First, she lost the job that burned and blistered her skin but paid her $19 an hour. Then a county judge sent her stepfather to jail for driving her to work each night, a violation of state child labor laws. Her mother also faces jail time for securing the fake papers that got the child the job in the first place. And her parents are terrified of being sent back to Guatemala, the country they left several years ago in search of a better life.
“I have no words,” the mother said last month, sobbing in the doorway of their pale-peach house hours after police had led her husband away in handcuffs. The girl, now 14, hugged her mother and struggled to describe how she felt.
“Bad,” she said, finally.
A sweeping investigation of Packers found 102 teens, ages 13 to 17, scouring slaughterhouses in eight states, part of a growing wave of child workers illegally hired to fill jobs in some of the nation’s most dangerous industries. Driven in part by persistent labor shortages and record numbers of unaccompanied migrant minors arriving from Central America, child labor violations have nearly quadrupled since 2015, according to Labor Department data, spiking in hazardous jobs that American citizens typically shun.
Homeland Security Investigations has opened a criminal investigation into possible human trafficking related to the Department of Labor’s civil probe, a spokesperson said, and the Biden administration this week pledged a broader crackdown. But the fallout in Grand Island illustrates the painful complexity of enforcing the nation’s child labor laws.
Packers has faced no criminal charges, despite evidence that it failed to take basic steps to verify the age of its young employees. Last month, it quickly resolved the case by paying a $1.5 million civil fine. The families of the teen workers, by contrast, have been exposed to child-abuse charges and potential deportation. None have applied for work permits and the protection against deportation that is available to the child workers, fearing retaliation in a company town where almost everyone’s job is somehow tied to the meatpacking industry.
Since the October raid, some of the children are nowhere to be found — dismissed from their jobs and no longer in school, according to two school employees. Migrant advocates said Labor Department officials raided the Grand Island plant with no plan for making sure all the children were safe and then declined to provide the children’s names to organizations that could have helped them.
“It’s maddening,” said Audrey Lutz, a former director of the nonprofit Multicultural Coalition, which provides services to immigrants. “We have no idea where they are.”
The Grand Island teens had been hired to scour blood and beef fat from the slippery “kill floor,” using high-pressure hoses, scalding water and industrial foams and acids, according to the Labor Department in federal court records. They sanitized electric knives, fat skinners and 190-pound saws used to split cow carcasses, according to court records. Some students suffered chemical burns and were so sleep-deprived after working their night shifts that they dozed off in classes, according to a local prosecutor and court records.
Packers officials said they have dismissed all the minor workers and fired two managers in Grand Island. They accused “rogue individuals” of using counterfeit documents to prove that the children were of legal age and emphasized that the 102 workers made up a tiny share of the company’s 17,000-member workforce. The full statement from Packers is available here.
“As parents and citizens, we don’t want a single person under 18 working for [Packers], period,” spokeswoman Gina Swenson said in an email.
“Our company has a strong corporate commitment to our zero-tolerance policy against employing anyone under the age of 18,” Swenson added. “As soon as we became aware of the [Labor Department’s] allegations, we conducted multiple additional audits of our employee base, and hired a third-party law firm to review and help further strengthen our policies in this area — among numerous other steps.”
Packers is owned by Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private-equity firms, which is valued in the market at more than $100 billion. A Blackstone official said that company, too, opposes child labor and is “pleased that PSSI has resolved this matter with the Department of Labor.”
The Grand Island meatpacking plant is owned by Brazil-based JBS, one of the world’s biggest beef producers, which owns two other plants where children worked. In 2016, the Brazilian government fined JBS for illegally employing children, and, in 2021, a Brazilian anti-slavery group accused the company of buying cattle from ranches that used slave labor.
None of the children in the Packers case were hired directly by the beef company. They all worked for Packers, a third-party contractor, said JBS spokeswoman Nikki Richardson. She said JBS has severed contracts with Packers in Grand Island and Worthington, Minn. JBS has faced no penalties in the case.
“JBS USA has zero tolerance for child labor,” Richardson said. “We expect and contractually require our vendors to adhere to the same high standards that we apply to the screening and eligibility of our own workforce.”
Since 1938, U.S. federal law has prohibited employers to hire people under age 18 to work in certain hazardous occupations. It also prohibits children under 16 from working long hours or late at night.
The growth in violations comes at a moment of extraordinary scarcity in the labor market. The national unemployment rate fell to 3.4 percent in January, the lowest since 1969, and it’s even lower in places such as Nebraska. In covid-ravaged industries such as meatpacking, employers have struggled to fill vacancies, prompting lawmakers in Iowa and Minnesota recently to propose lowering the legal age at which teens may work in some dangerous jobs.
“We have never in my memory found the types of violations that are being found in hazardous occupations,” said David Weil, a professor of social policy and management at Brandeis University who was a top labor official in the Obama administration. “It’s outrageous.”
The Labor Department does not track how many child workers are immigrants, saying that is not relevant to its investigations. But advocates and industry watchdogs say immigration is a key factor in the increase.
The girl in Grand Island — who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation in the community — is among a record number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the southern border, nearly half from Guatemala, since the Biden administration exempted them from a pandemic policy that expels migrants who cross illegally.
Critics say the exemption is encouraging young people to head north, with many settling in rural areas in desperate need of workers. Grand Island, a town of 52,000 on the Nebraska plains, has received roughly 260 unaccompanied minors since 2019, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for placing unaccompanied minors with parents or guardians in the United States.
The girl arrived in 2021 from Joyabaj, a poverty-stricken municipality in the Guatemalan highlands. The girl and her older sister had been living with grandparents since 2016, when their mother left for Grand Island, where she works 3 p.m. to midnight as a JBS meat cutter. After five years, she paid smugglers to bring her daughters north.
The mother, who has seven children, said she wanted the girl to focus on school. But the girl said she grew bored in Grand Island and last summer applied online for the job at Packers so she could buy nice clothes and an iPhone 13.
“I like money,” the girl said with a shy smile during a recent interview in the family’s sparsely furnished living room, which is dominated by a large shrine to Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe. “I like to buy things.”
She said she worked at the plant for barely three months, from June 1 to Aug. 22, 2022, emptying trash and cleaning sinks. The job came to an abrupt end after a nurse at Walnut Middle School found chemical burns, blisters and open wounds on her hands and one knee, according to county prosecutors. At the time, the girl said the wounds had been caused by cleaning chemicals that soaked through her gloves and clothes. Packers officials said internal records show no report of such injuries.
The school alerted local authorities, who had received previous reports of children working at the plant. In 2016, Grand Island police were called to Walnut Middle School to investigate a 14-year-old student with injured hands, police records show. Local prosecutor Sarah Hinrichs said she reviewed a March 2022 report about another 14-year-old girl who fell asleep in class after working the night shift cleaning the JBS facility.
In the 2022 case, the girl told authorities she was abused and forced to work for Packers to repay an $8,000 bill for smuggling her north from Guatemala. Her uncle pleaded no contest to felony child abuse and is awaiting sentencing; and the aunt has yet to enter a plea. In an interview, she denied mistreating the girl.
Packers said the company was not alerted to either incident. Grand Island police said they forwarded the 2016 report to the Labor Department, but federal investigators say they have no record of that. The Labor Department staged the October raid after receiving a tip in August and interviewing some of the child workers at home and at school.
In an interview, Shannon Rebolledo said she and other investigators had no trouble spotting underage workers when they searched the Grand Island plant. Many were suited up in green rubber overalls, steel-toed boots, gloves, hard hats and goggles — a clear sign that the job was hazardous.
Some of the teens worked more than 40 hours a week in close contact with a multitude of adult employees, the Labor Department said in court records: Supervisors trained them for weeks. Security guards greeted them each night at the door. Co-workers did calisthenics with them before each shift and ate meals with them in the cafeteria.
“You’ve got people within the community seeing them coming and going late at night and arriving to school,” Rebolledo said. “All I keep thinking is: ‘How did this happen? How did no one say anything?’”
One former Packers worker who witnessed the raid told The Post that his young colleagues sometimes joked about their fake identities. He recalled one particularly childlike worker who claimed to be 37. The former worker spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harming his prospects for future employment.
Swenson, the Packers spokesperson, said company policy requires workers to report suspicions of identity fraud so the company can investigate and terminate minor workers. She said the company was tricked into hiring the children, calling identity fraud the “only way” to circumvent Packers’ rigorous process of checking all new hires through the government’s E-Verify system.
Fake papers are a common hazard for employers. In January, a federal judge sentenced a Grand Island man from Guatemala to 15 months in federal prison for selling counterfeit driver’s licenses and Social Security cards. It is unclear whether the man, who will be deported after serving his sentence, had any link to the Packers case.
Indeed, the provenance of the fake documents remains a mystery. The girl from Joyabaj and her mother offered conflicting explanations of how the middle-schooler obtained papers saying she was 22. The mother told The Post a woman gave her daughter the documents; the girl said she got them at work. Local prosecutors have accused the mother of supplying the papers and confiscating the girl’s earnings.
Labor Department investigators said E-Verify is no shield against hiring child workers. The internet-based system allows employers to check an applicant’s eligibility to work but does not verify age. Managers who are hiring workers are responsible for scrutinizing applicants’ IDs, officials said, to make sure their faces match the photos and other identifying information.
Packers also uses software that asks applicants to confirm that they are over 18. Several applicants declined to answer that question, Labor officials said, causing the software to issue warnings that Packers disregarded.
“They’re doing a lot of blaming of documents. But they’ve demonstrated that they would not have been looking regardless,” said Michael Lazzeri, Chicago regional administrator of the Labor Department wage-and-hour division, which led the investigation.
The Packers spokesperson said that the federal government promotes E-Verify as the best way to check identities, but it is just “one among a comprehensive set of tools we use to enforce our absolute prohibition against employing anyone under the age of 18,” Swenson said.
In response to the allegations, Swenson pointed to a sworn statement from Paul DeCamp, a former Labor Department official who oversaw child labor investigations during the George W. Bush administration. DeCamp, who has been retained by Packers as an expert witness, wrote that the department had investigated Packers at least a dozen times since 2010 without finding any child labor violations, a sign that the company generally complies with federal law and that “there is in no sense a broad practice at the company of hiring minors.”
Packers officials said Labor had given them the names of only 23 of the 102 minors. “The remaining 79 were not disclosed to us, because they were allegedly former employees,” Swenson said. “Our audits and DOL’s investigation confirmed that none of the individuals DOL cited as under the age of 18 work for the company today, and many had separated from employment with PSSI multiple years ago.”
Labor officials said they declined to give Packers all 102 names for fear of retaliation against the children or their relatives. Instead, Lazzeri said investigators instructed the company to find them. “It’s really up to them to figure that out,” he said.
Lazzeri said investigators observed numerous Packers workers who appeared to be underage at the plants — far more than the 102 identified. Based on surveillance photos and investigator observations, he said, the actual number of teen workers could be “five times as many.”
Investigators did not try to track down those additional children, he said, adding: “We can only confirm so much.”
Though Rebolledo, the investigator, called Packers “the worst case that I’ve seen,” the allegations of child labor have barely rippled the civic fabric of Grand Island.
The matter has not come up at school board or city council meetings, minutes show. School officials and most school board members declined to comment, while most city councilors did not respond to phone calls from The Post. Mayor Roger Steele, a Republican, declined to be interviewed.
Vaughn Minton, a former city councilor who left office in December, said reaction was muted because JBS immediately fired Packers. “The meatpacking plant did all the changes they were required to make,” he said.
Grand Island City Councilor Jack Sheard offered another reason for the silence.
“It’s embarrassing for any community to be attached to something like this,” Sheard said. “I’ve tried to help make our community better about being more tolerant and open to immigrants, immigrant families, people who don’t look just like me. … A lot of us are embarrassed it happened here.”
Grand Island is predominantly White. Immigrants make up about 16 percent of the local population. In interviews with more than two dozen residents, business owners, church leaders and lawyers, many said rumors of child labor at the meatpacking plant had circulated for years — long before JBS bought the plant in 2007 after an immigration raid upended the city.
Former school board member Carlos Barcenas Jr. said he remembers a small number of classmates cleaning the plant at night when he was in high school in 1998. Another Grand Island resident, a migrant from Honduras who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being deported, said he cleaned the meatpacking plant at night in 2002 when he was 17.
“I wasn’t the only one who worked there. There were many minors,” said the man, who recalled blasting carcasses on the plant floor with chemicals for $14 an hour and napping between classes in the high school cafeteria. He said he quit after six months.
“I don’t understand how these children today … could have done something like this, because it’s really rough,” he said. “Working all night in a difficult place and then going to school.”
JBS has since donated millions for a city preschool, a high school medical program, food banks and a new bike path that leads to the plant. The company is widely viewed as a civic leader.
While none of the 27 children identified by Labor investigators still work at the plant, it is unclear what happened to most of them.
Only about a dozen were enrolled in school, according to community advocates and school staffers. Immediately after the raid, some skipped school for days to avoid talking to investigators. At least four have since dropped out, according to a school employee with direct knowledge of the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.
Two of those students have fled town, the employee said, adding: “When the authorities came, the kids thought they would be taken away or deported.”
Labor officials said they tried to help the child workers by referring them to the schools and to other federal agencies such as HHS. They also asked the Department of Homeland Security to consider work permits and protection from deportation for current and former Packers employees. (A DHS official said the department welcomes applications, but that, so far, none have been received.)
However, caring for the minors is not part of the Labor Department’s mission, Labor officials said.
“I hope that they’re safe. I hope that, if they’re working, that they’re working under safe conditions,” Rebolledo said. “But I don’t know.”
The lack of follow-up has frustrated immigrant advocates. The Immigrant Legal Center of Nebraska asked the Department of Labor to identify the child workers so the center could provide legal assistance and help them to apply for federal aid. Labor declined, citing the children’s privacy rights, said the center’s executive director, Erik Omar.
“We are here to help. But we can’t help if we don’t know who the kids are,” Omar said.
A Labor official said the agency refers minors only “in accordance with privacy laws,” adding that the White House has announced a task force to foster better collaboration with other agencies in such cases.
As potential victims of human trafficking, the underage workers also may be entitled to federal assistance buying groceries and paying rent, said HHS spokeswoman Alyssa Jones. The mother of the girl from Joyabaj said her daughter received a letter offering such aid. But the mother, who said she cannot read or write in any language, said she was afraid the government would take her children away if the family accepted the money.
Already, the mother faces charges of child abuse for allowing the girl to work at Packers. She has pleaded guilty and faces up to one year in jail. Her $24-an-hour job at JBS — with paid holidays and benefits she had hoped to keep forever — is at stake.
One blustery day last month, the girl’s stepfather, Manuel De la Cruz, arrived at the county courthouse in downtown Grand Island for sentencing in his own misdemeanor case. He had pleaded guilty to violating child labor laws by driving the middle-schooler to a dangerous job, a charge that carries a maximum penalty of six months in jail. His lawyer asked the judge to impose a fine.
The judge, Arthur Wetzel, called the case “extremely difficult.” He accused Packers of “forcing young children to work on a kill floor.” He blamed the girl’s mother for obtaining the fake papers and collecting her pay. And he blamed “the elephant in the room, JBS,” for “hiring a cleaning company such as this.”
“However, Mr. De la Cruz, you also are at fault,” the judge said. “To have a 14-year-old daughter employed eight hours before she’s expected to attend school under dangerous circumstances simply could not be condoned by this court.”
The judge sentenced De la Cruz to 30 days in jail. After serving his time, court records show, he could be deported. Through his lawyer, he declined to comment.
An officer’s handcuffs clicked open. At the back of the courtroom, De la Cruz’s 19-year-old stepdaughter sobbed. Outside, his wife and young children watched as he was led away.
The 14-year-old girl did not attend the hearing. For the moment, at least, she was still in school.
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Fox News. (photo: Richard Drew/AP)
The amount and weight of evidence is perhaps without equal among other major, recent defamation cases.
"How often do you get 'smoking gun' emails that show, first, that persons responsible for the editorial content knew that the accusation was false, and also convincing emails that show the reason Fox reported this was for its own mercenary interests?" says Rutgers University law professor Ronald Chen, an authority on constitutional and media law.
Fox News has endured one humiliation after another from the rolling revelations in the case brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Private communications made public in legal filings demonstrate the network's producers, stars and executives — even controlling owner Rupert Murdoch — knew the claims they were broadcasting were false, and at times unhinged. A trial in the case is slated for next month.
Fox attorney: "We don't suppress the speech that we don't think is right"
Fox's legal team is grounding much of its defense in a claim that it was merely reporting allegations by the most newsworthy public official of all, then-President Donald Trump.
"We err on the side of speech because the more and more speech you have, the better chance of having people actually getting the opportunity to point out what's right and what's wrong," attorney Erin Murphy, one of the senior figures on Fox's defense team, tells NPR in an interview. "And that's why we don't suppress the speech that we don't think is right."
A loss for Fox would make it harder for all journalists to serve the public, she says.
"At the end of the day, it's going to hinder the ultimate objective of the First Amendment, of getting to the truth," Murphy argues.
The case may serve as a test for the elasticity of that argument.
Dominion alleges great reputational harm from false accusations
Fox News was the first major television outlet to project that then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden would win Arizona on election night 2020, which all but put victory out of Trump's reach. Dominion has alleged that Fox embraced the conspiracy theories about election fraud to try to make up for angering millions of pro-Trump viewers with the Arizona call. Many peeled away to other right-wing outlets.
In the ensuing weeks, Fox repeatedly invited Trump ally and attorney Sidney Powell on its programs to allege Dominion's voting systems had switched votes from Trump to Biden. Yet Fox hosts and executives privately dismissed her as unreliable and unhinged. Powell had shared with hosts Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo a memo to justify her allegations. Even the memo's author called the claims "pretty wackadoodle."
Top executives, including Murdoch and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, told one another they could not bluntly confront their viewers with the facts because that could alienate them further.
Dominion says the baseless claims of fraud have destroyed its reputation for electoral integrity with much of the voting public.
"To simply say Fox is a bunch of liars ... is a slippery slope"
Even with that record, set out with voluminous documentation, some media lawyers say Fox's attorneys may be right in predicting that a loss would constrict the media's freedoms.
"No matter how much I might personally deplore what Fox is alleged to have done, I worry a lot more about the longer term-ramifications," says University of Minnesota media law professor Jane Kirtley, a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
"To simply say Fox is a bunch of liars — that they shouldn't be allowed to get away with this and their wild speculations should not be reported and should not be protected — I just think that that is a slippery slope," says Kirtley.
Were Fox to lose, "there would be a scramble by other news organizations to distance themselves from Fox's techniques and Fox's editorial decisions," Kirtley says. "But the problem is that by lifting the veil on the editorial decision-making process, we are now going to see all news organizations called into question going forward." She says she believes such a verdict finding Fox liable for defamation would encourage more such cases.
Dominion's legal team shared a statement stating that the voting tech company believes in the First Amendment and its protections, but that Fox crossed a line after the 2020 election: "As long-settled law makes clear, the First Amendment does not shield broadcasters that knowingly or recklessly spread lies."
It's hard for plaintiffs to win defamation suits but that could change
Media outlets rarely lose defamation cases in court. Under a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the New York Times, plaintiffs have to prove the claims made about them were false and damaging to their reputation. Additionally, they have to prove that those making the statements in question either knew the assertions were untrue or had good reason to know they were untrue, and willfully ignored that information. That's known as "actual malice," under the late Justice William Brennan's decision.
Brennan also argued Americans should have latitude to get some things wrong in talking about public officials and politics, in order to ensure free and robust debate.
Two current Supreme Court justices, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, have indicated they would be open to making it easier for plaintiffs to prevail in defamation suits. A third, Elena Kagan, published her own musings years before she joined the court that the protections for the press might be too strong.
The idea of "actual malice," Murphy says, requires Dominion to prove specific people directly involved with the broadcasts knew the statements they aired were wrong. For instance, Murdoch's sworn statements that he had dismissed the claims of election fraud as bogus, and affirmed under oath that some of his star hosts had nonetheless endorsed them publicly, carries no legal weight, she says.
"Anybody would have to acknowledge that what the president and his lawyers were doing was newsworthy in and of itself, regardless of whether the allegations were ultimately going to be anything they could prove," Murphy says. She invoked what journalists consider the safe ground of "neutral reporting" — just telling their audiences what others are saying.
Law professor: The financial motives to present lies "probably destroy" Fox's defense
In its legal briefs, Fox leans heavily on the idea that news organizations must be allowed to convey allegations by major public figures to their audiences — even wild allegations. Rutgers' Chen says that doesn't hold up if Fox was motivated by profit instead of the newsworthiness of the claims being presented in its programs.
"The fact that there was arguably a motive by Fox to publish these accusations against Dominion based on its own economic interests in retaining Trump viewers would, if believed by the jury, probably destroy that argument," Chen says.
He's not the only legal scholar skeptical of Fox's argument that a loss would ripple through journalism.
"Even if Dominion makes their case and convinces a jury to shovel truckloads of Fox's money to [the election tech company], nothing in this case presents a meaningful threat to the First Amendment," says Charles Glasser, who was global media counsel for Bloomberg News for 14 years and now teaches journalism and media law at New York University. "It really comes down to the facts about how the story was crafted and disseminated."
In his sworn responses to questioning from Dominion attorney Justin Nelson, Fox Corp. boss Murdoch acknowledged that four of his star hosts — Dobbs, Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity — had endorsed the baseless claims of election fraud, at least "a bit" in the case of Hannity. He referred to them as commentators. Opinions have even more latitude under case law than straight-ahead reporting. (Dobbs left his post at Fox Business Network a day after a second election tech company, Smartmatic, filed its own $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox. That case is not as far along as Dominion's.)
Yet Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum also were deeply concerned about the loss of viewers and deliberated about how to win them back, evidence uncovered by Dominion's attorneys and separate reporting by the New York Times' Peter Baker show.
Legendary media lawyer sees Fox News case as "bizarre" exception to the norm
When news outlets do lose defamation cases, they often result in retractions or apologies and settlements while they're still on appeal. The two most prominent defamation cases of recent years resulted in divergent outcomes.
In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine settled separate cases filed by a University of Virginia dean and a campus fraternity after a collapse of standards in reporting on what turned out to be a source's fabricated account of campus rape.
A year ago, the New York Times prevailed against former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin after an editorial wrongly linked her advertisements from her political action committee to a mass shooting months later.
"Generally speaking, it is not a good idea to permit a wholesale inquiry into newsroom decisions as a whole, and also I include ownership as part of that inquiry," James Goodale, the legendary New York Times general counsel who advised the paper to publish the Pentagon Papers, tells NPR in an email. "Newsroom decisions, including ownership decisions as to news judgment, should be protected by the First Amendment."
Libel and defamation cases override such protections, he notes.
"The Dominion case is such a strange case it provides an exception to the general rule," Goodale says. "Let us hope we don't see such a bizarre case as this one again."
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Elon Musk in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023. (photo: Marlena Sloss/Bloomberg)
“I was really happy, I loved my team, I loved contributing,” Ali said. “I was also pregnant, so [leaving] didn’t even make sense on any level” because that maternity leave might not be guaranteed as a new hire at a different company, she said.
But in November, shortly after Musk completed his acquisition and weeks before she was set to start her five-month maternity leave, Ali was laid off as part of the first round of mass job cuts under the new owner.
January 4 marked Ali’s official separation date from Twitter, leaving her without health insurance, which her job had provided for her family. Her baby was born a week after. Two months later, she has yet to begin looking for a new job, as she is instead spending time with her newborn.
“But I’m not being financially supported like I had planned,” she said. “We have to make some way of staying afloat.”
Ali is one of thousands of current and former Twitter employees whose lives have been upended since Musk began buying up shares of the social media company early last year. Twitter employees endured a corporate circus unlike any other, complete with Musk’s threats to bail on the deal, his public clashes with Twitter executives, the potential for a high-profile trial between Twitter and the Tesla CEO, and finally the deal’s completion immediately followed by rumors of imminent mass layoffs.
After buying Twitter, Musk cut more than half of its staff then proceeded to lay off and push out even more employees while repeatedly warning that Twitter could go bankrupt. Twitter now reportedly has fewer than 2,000 employees following more cuts late last month, down from around 7,500 before Musk took over.
Former workers who spoke with CNN said the past year has felt like whiplash: they went from working for a company whose culture they loved with a corporate mission they believed in, to hunting for a new job and worrying about the platform’s future under Musk’s leadership as he restored incendiary accounts and alienated advertisers. One former employee told CNN following December layoffs that they felt like they were grieving what had been their “dream job.”
Many workers are now reeling from more generous severance packages they claim they were promised but never materialized. While some have quickly found jobs, others have struggled with a tech job market that’s at its bleakest point in recent memory. And, in some cases, workers are balancing the uncertainty of unemployment with disability or illness, as well as pregnancies, parental leave or other family obligations, according to former employees who have spoken to CNN and legal claims filed against the company.
“I wasn’t a software engineer or an executive,” said Michele Armstrong, a former senior audio video engineer, who was laid off seven months after joining the company. “I made a decent wage in San Francisco, but if I don’t find another job, I will have to move out of my apartment because I was paid just enough to live in San Francisco … but I wasn’t one of the people that could sock away a bunch of money.”
Armstrong says she’s now searching for work in the challenging tech job market and dipping into her retirement savings to help pay her rent.
Armstrong and Ali are among the more than 1,500 former employees who have now taken legal action. Ex-Twitter employees have filed arbitration demands and four class action lawsuits against Twitter in pursuit of additional severance they allege they were promised by the company prior to Musk’s takeover. Some former workers have also alleged sex and disability discrimination and other issues, which the company has argued in court are without merit.
“One person can impact our way of living, and unfortunately, we’re seeing the negative impacts of that from how Twitter is being run,” Ali said.
Twitter has moved to dismiss the four class action lawsuits, saying its layoffs were lawful and that employees should pursue their claims in arbitration. A judge ruled last month in the company’s favor that at least some workers could not pursue their claims through a class action suit and must instead proceed through arbitration.
Twitter has not commented publicly on the arbitration demands, but Shannon Liss-Riordan, the lawyer representing hundreds of former Twitter employees, last month made a court filing accusing the company of failing to cooperate with the arbitration process. Twitter, which laid off much of its media relations team last year, did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
‘Nothing to worry about’
Armstrong was in onboarding sessions for a new job at Twitter, which she called her “unicorn company,” the day news broke that Musk had agreed to buy the company. “It was very welcoming,” Armstrong said of the company. “I was respected, and I hadn’t had that anywhere else working in tech.”
But in the months after Musk’s April offer to buy Twitter, employees witnessed near-daily news coverage of their employer and a wide range of questions about the takeover, from uncertainty over the billionaire’s financing to concerns about his “free speech” vision for the platform.
“We were on the Twitter-coaster, the Elon Musk chapter, for seven months,” Ali said. “And during that time, he was in, he was out, it was happening, it wasn’t happening, we could’ve been purchased by some other rogue faction, there were so many rumors, so many opinions.”
Of the many rumors that swirled about Musk’s plans for Twitter, former employees say the biggest question internally was whether Musk would conduct layoffs following his takeover.
But former employees say they got some reassurance after a June meeting in which Musk responded to a question about layoffs by telling Twitter workers that “anyone who’s obviously a significant contributor should have nothing to worry about.”
“I thought, well then, I don’t have anything to worry about because I’m a significant contributor,” Armstrong said, who added that she had previously considered starting to look for another job but “then he said that and it kind of changed my mind.”
Like Ali, some employees said that even if they’d wanted to leave, it simply didn’t feel like an option for personal reasons. Other workers were open to the idea of working for Musk, one of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs, despite his reputation as a controversial figure on Twitter and the uncertainty around his plans for the platform.
“Twitter has definitely never been a perfect company … and so I kind of welcome that not necessarily contrarian, but definitely different, approach,” said Justine de Caires, a former senior software engineer who was the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit filed against Twitter shortly after the November mass layoffs and who is now pursuing arbitration claims against the company. “I think we definitely could have had something to learn from Elon.”
Instead, Twitter employees say they heard very little from their new leader in the days immediately after his takeover. De Caires spent the first week under Musk working on Twitter Blue, the subscription service that Musk wanted revamped as part of his urgent effort to bolster revenue. At one point, de Caires said they pulled an all-nighter to help with the effort. Armstrong said she was called in to the office at 8 p.m. one night that first week to help set up audio-video equipment in a conference room in an office building that the company had been in the process of shutting down because the new leadership wanted to have meetings there.
A week after his takeover, Musk laid off around half of Twitter’s staff by email, leaving employees without work — and at least some confused about whether they could seek out new jobs without risking their severance pay — just before the holidays. In the following weeks, Musk continued to push out additional employees, including by asking remaining workers to commit to working “extremely hardcore” or resign.
Musk had denied reports from prior to his takeover that he planned to cut 75% of jobs at Twitter in order to reduce costs, but he has effectively ended up doing something close to that with various rounds of staff reductions over the past four months.
Disappointing severance
In lawsuits and arbitration claims, numerous former Twitter employees have alleged that the company had promised if layoffs did occur following Musk’s takeover, the severance benefits provided would be at least equivalent to what had been offered prior to his acquisition, including two-months base pay, three months accelerated equity vesting, annual bonuses and some continued health insurance coverage.
Instead, Musk’s Twitter offered laid off employees just one month’s severance following layoffs, beyond pay during the notice period that’s required by state and federal laws. That’s far less than rival companies like Meta, which laid off thousands of workers around the same time as the first cuts under Musk and guaranteed them 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for each year they worked at the company. And for at least some former employees, the severance offer landed in their email spam folder, according to public tweets and former employees who spoke with CNN.
“I had lots of Twitter employees reaching out to me and saying they relied on” the company’s earlier severance promise, Liss-Riordan told CNN. “They were nervous during all that uncertain time last year when it wasn’t clear what was going to happen with the company, and leadership at Twitter didn’t want to lose their workforce in the meantime, so to keep people there, they made these promises.”
Some former employees say the company’s severance promises had encouraged them to stay at the company last summer amid the uncertainty around Musk’s acquisition, only to regret that as the tech industry entered its most severe downturn in recent memory later in the year.
“It would have been really good to have spent the time in the substantially better tech market while it still existed,” de Caires said. “The market is hot garbage right now. I was sitting down earlier this week after a wave of rejections and I was kind of like, maybe I should go be a firefighter or something… because the tech jobs are just not happening.”
De Caires said that about half of their compensation had been comprised of equity vesting, so losing that portion of the severance package meant missing out on a large chunk of additional money. They and other workers are now hoping to recoup those alleged losses through their arbitration claims.
“A lot of us put in a lot of effort because we love the company and we love to excel,” Ali told CNN. “I think there were a lot of excellent workers at Twitter … we were part of a global movement to tell everyone what’s happening, how it’s affecting you locally, how it’s affecting you nationwide, how it’s affecting you globally. And I think that we all should be compensated fairly for what we’ve done.”
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Suspected gang members arrive at the new prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on February 25, 2023. (photo: Press Secretary of the Presidency Of El Salvador/Anadolu Agency)
President Nayib Bukele promised to end gang violence. It may come at the expense of human and civil rights.
El Salvador has long struggled to contain the brutal gang violence that has dominated daily life for many of its people for decades; extortion, kidnapping, murder, smuggling, and other brutalities have persisted, to some degree, since the late 1990s due to the social, economic, and political instability left by the civil war, which ended in 1992. Successive presidential administrations have taken different approaches — many have adopted the mano dura, or “iron hand” tack, instituting harsh crackdowns to mitigate the violence. But Bukele is on an entirely different level; his administration has imprisoned tens of thousands, many arbitrarily, repeatedly extended a state of emergency severely curtailing the rights of ordinary citizens, and attacked and even detained his critics in the press.
Bukele showed off the prison with a slickly produced, if dystopian, video on his Twitter feed. Each cell is to hold 100 prisoners, with only two sinks and two toilets for the group — due to the militarized police force and remote location of the prison, it’s a situation that could become combustible when the facility reaches its capacity of 40,000 inmates.
What’s more, Bukele’s tough tactics appear to be popular with Salvadorans overwhelmed by years of living under the brutal rule of gang violence. Using underhanded media tactics, Bukele manipulates the fear of the populace and the violence it’s endured to consolidate his grip on power, while all but eliminating transparency surrounding his security strategy and alleged cooperation with gang members.
Bukele offers security after decades of conflict and violence
Bukele is not the first Salvadoran president to institute hard-line anti-violence policies, but he is perhaps the most aggressive. Under Bukele’s rule around 65,000 people have been incarcerated for gang activity, Noah Bullock, the executive director of Cristosal, a human rights organization focused on Latin America, told Vox in an interview. Those arrests have come during a state of emergency, or state of exception, that Bukele declared last March after MS-13 and two different factions of Barrio 18 murdered 87 people in the span of 72 hours.
“During the last 20 years, in different moments, El Salvador has been the most violent country in the world,” Bullock told Vox in an interview. “The presence of organized criminal groups in communities has impacted people’s lives almost totally, absolutely, and created conditions of violence, levels of violence, that compare to armed conflict.”
The gang violence follows a brutal civil war, which lasted from 1979 to 1992 and killed around 75,000 people, as well as decades of military dictatorship. The civil war forced between 20 and 25 percent of the Salvadoran population to flee — many to the US, where MS-13 was born in the 1980s. Some members of MS-13 and Barrio 18, which like MS-13 began in the Los Angeles area, were deported back to El Salvador, where they could operate with relative impunity, even from prison. And with weapons left over from the war, gang members on the street could engage in extortion, kidnapping, and murder, as well as make money through the illicit drug and human trafficking trades.
“People never experienced the freedoms promised by liberal democracy,” Bullock said. “They never experienced what rule of law meant.”
It’s now widely understood that the Bukele government has been negotiating with gangs — which in itself isn’t a bad thing, as José Miguel Cruz, an expert on Latin American gangs at Florida International University, told the United States Institute for Peace’s Mary Speck in October.
According to Cruz, the problem with Bukele’s negotiations is that they don’t actually work to dismantle the gangs and incorporate the members into society — they just put low-level actors in prison where they can reorganize. “They also did it clandestinely, so you don’t know what arrangements were made,” he said, speaking to the lack of transparency around Bukele’s entire security strategy, called the Territorial Control Plan.
While the mass incarceration has coincided with a significant drop in violent crime and homicides, there’s evidence, particularly through the reporting of El Faro, an investigative digital outlet, that the spikes and drops in violence are the results of negotiations with the gangs, rather than the success of Bukele’s Territorial Control Plan, which has never been made public in full. “Nobody’s ever been able to look at it, we can’t monitor its implementation, we can’t verify its results,” Bullock said.
Human rights and democracy get in the way of security
Over the past year under the state of exception — which has been extended many times and suspends basic rights like the freedom to assemble and makes it easier to arrest people — the prison population has doubled, hence the need for the massive new prison. On Bukele’s watch, El Salvador has claimed the highest rate of incarceration in the world — around 2 percent of its adult population, according to a report by the International Crisis Group.
El Salvador’s prisons are already notoriously violent and under-resourced; previous crackdowns and mass arrests have given gang members the chance to reorganize and recruit new members. Before the crackdown, prisons were already operating at 120 percent of their capacity, according to the Associated Press.
“In the prisons themselves during the Sánchez Cerén administration they began to declare states of emergency, in which prisoners were locked down 24 hours a day, denied access to lawyers, healthcare, weren’t able to participate in the trials against them — basically spent four or five years in lockdown in prison cells,” Bullock told Vox. “And that becomes a new norm, that is aggravated by the numbers of people incarcerated, the overcrowding in prisons which in El Salvador has been one of the most overcrowded in the world.”
Bukele has bragged that detainees in the new prison will live at the facility for decades and will be isolated from the outside world. But prisoners in El Salvador rely on their families for support, even for basic items like food and underwear, as Jonathan Blitzer explained in the New Yorker last year.
The new prison will be a harsh, punitive structure, with little opportunity for growth or reform, as Rev. Andreu Oliva, rector of the Central American University in San Salvador, told the Associated Press.
“It shook me to see punishment cells where the people are going to be in total darkness, total isolation, sleeping on a concrete slab,” he said.
“In the state of exception that was put into place last year, there’s been a series of new norms that have been generated,” Bullock told Vox. “Effectively, the state of exception has transformed the criminal justice system entirely,” essentially negating the possibility of fair trials.
For one thing, there simply aren’t enough public defenders assigned to the thousands of people in pretrial detention, Bullock said. But the bigger problem, according to Bertha María Deleón, an attorney from El Salvador, is the justice system itself.
“Bukele also controls the Attorney General’s Office, the institution in charge of public criminal defense,” she told Vox. “What’s more, the attorney general says that there are no cases of arbitrary detentions. The human rights attorney does not do her job either.”
According to Deleón, prisoners must wait in detention, “in overcrowded and subhuman conditions” as their criminal trial plays out, for as long as three years. “Many have died,” she told Vox, “and they do not allow an autopsy.”
There is muted opposition to the crackdown, mostly from the families — particularly mothers — of people arbitrarily swept up in the mass arrests, Bullock said. “In some cases, those groups have begun to organize,” presenting over 4,000 habeas corpus claims to El Salvador’s Supreme Court over the past year.
Under Bukele’s rule, people might not have to worry that much about gang violence and extortion, but that doesn’t mean they live without fear. Bullock recounted a conversation with a Salvadoran friend, a taxi driver in the outskirts of the capital, about life under the state of exception.
“He said, ‘It’s great, I don’t have to pay extortion, I don’t worry about the gangs.’ I said to him, ‘Do you worry about getting detained?’ He said, ‘Every day.’”
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Clean-up continues in the aftermath of the Norfolk Southern train derailment on 18 February. (photo: Tannen Maury/EPA)
People living near the chemical disaster are wary of contamination, and even across the state line Pennsylvanians are worried
The 30-year-old bartender lives and works just a few miles from East Palestine, Ohio, where the Norfolk Southern’s 1.7-mile-long freight train carrying a hotchpotch of dangerous chemicals partly derailed and caught fire on 3 February.
Three days later a billowing smoke plume and the stench of burning plastic blew east into Pennsylvania after crews conducted a controlled burn of the vinyl chloride onboard the derailed train to nullify the risk of a potentially deadly explosion.
The toxic cloud engulfed Darlington Township, a small rural community with 1,800 residents, coating lawns, crops and cars in black soot.
“We wanted to get away even though we live outside the evacuation radius, but had nowhere to go. Over this way we’ve not been told anything about the implications – it’s very concerning,” said Dittman.
Regulators overseeing the cleanup in East Palestine have pledged to make the multibillion-dollar railroad company foot the bill, but neighbouring communities feel forgotten.
Dittman forked out $300 on private lab tests to check for volatile organic compounds including vinyl chloride and benzene, carcinogenic chemicals leaked from the train, in his garden soil and well water.
He was relieved when those came back clear, but is now awaiting results from significantly more expensive tests amid growing fears about the chemical byproducts of vinyl chloride such as dioxins, which environmental health experts warn are very toxic and long-lasting, and can accumulate in soil and water ingested by grazing animals and crops.
“I have a seven-month-old daughter so I’m doing everything I can to make sure she is safe. No one is coming to save us so we have to stick up for ourselves,” said Dittman.
Norfolk Southern, which reported $3bn in profits last year, has committed $11.8m to East Palestine and said it will review individual requests from those outside the town’s zip code.
“No one really cares about this side of the state line. We’re not as affected as East Palestine, but we are affected,” said Max Knechtel, 26, a patron at the Greersburgh Tavern watching news coverage of the political fallout from the train disaster which brought Donald Trump and the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, to East Palestine last week.
“My house is 50ft from the rail tracks, my kids play outside, my dog has gotten sick. If we don’t get tests now, down the line when we start getting health problems, the company will try to blame it on everything else but the train,” added Knechtel.
A rural community waits for answers
Darlington is a small rural community where hunting deer, fishing and planting vegetable gardens are common activities for residents, who rely on private water wells which they, not regulators, must monitor for quality.
Like East Palestine, people here are furious and want Norfolk Southern to be held accountable, but first and foremost they want clear information and guidance on how best to protect themselves and their families from long-term health complications.
“I was doing my job, and hope that I don’t end up in my grave quicker because of this,” said a Darlington police officer who was among dozens of first responders from Pennsylvania sent to the scene.
The 149-car train was classified as a general merchandise train, not a high-hazard flammable train, and therefore local officials did not immediately know what toxins the first responders and residents were exposed to when 50 cars derailed or caught fire.
The officer, who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to discuss the matter, lives 20 miles east of East Palestine, where the black toxic cloud also swamped his community. “Fishing and deer hunting is a huge part of our life, and there’s lots of cows and horses, so we’re all worried about our soil and water. I’ve had a constant headache but we’ve been fully forgotten on this side of the state line.”
Federal and state officials insist that Norfolk Southern, which has spent tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions and lobbying Washington to oppose tighter regulations, will be held accountable for the environmental and health costs resulting from the disaster which was “100% preventable”.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took control of the cleanup operation amid mounting criticism about poor leadership, mixed messaging and inadequate testing.
There has been a growing chorus of calls to expand its testing to include dioxins and PFAS, the forever chemicals contained in firefighting foam, that accumulate in water, soil, plants and animals, and which environmental health experts warn represent the greatest risks to human health.
On Thursday the agency ordered Norfolk Southern to test the disaster site for dioxins – a family of carcinogenic compounds probably spread by the plume that could end up in distant surface water (rivers, streams, creeks) and groundwater sources and in the soil ingested by grazing cows, horses and deer, and they could be absorbed by vegetables and other crops eaten by humans. PFAS contamination should be limited to the firefighting foam area, but it can also linger for decades once it is absorbed into the soil and water.
Residents are frustrated. “I’m not very worried right now because the toxins haven’t settled yet, but we will need our well water tested and no one has come here to talk to us about what we should do,” Carli Borato, 48, said as her goddaughter and German shepherds played in the muddy yard five miles from the derailment.
“In the immediate aftermath, regulators were absolutely right to be most concerned about the acute toxicity of contaminated air and water sources. But now they must turn their attention to areas potentially contaminated by the plume and test for dioxins to protect people with grazing animals, crops and vegetable gardens,” said Betsy Southerland, former director of science and technology at the EPA’s office of water. “They must also clearly communicate to private well owners which contaminants they need to monitor and when. People need clear answers – their concerns should not be blown off.”
Contaminated surface soil should be replaced by clean earth before planting season, but it could take months for dioxins to end up in water wells, added Southerland.
The Guardian spoke to several residents in East Palestine and Darlington who have spent hundreds of dollars on lab tests without a clear understanding of what they should be testing for and when.
The information gap is fueling fear and misinformation.
Sherry Anderson, 57, who lives just 2.6 miles from the disaster site, drives to East Palestine to pick up cases of bottled water donated by local businesses. They are stacked on pallets in the parking lot of the Chevrolet dealer as freight trains carrying toxic and flammable materials chug past.
“I own a 60-acre farm and don’t know if we can plant a garden this year. I don’t know if my ground is safe. I don’t feel safe drinking the well water,” said Anderson, who grows tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, broccoli, lettuce and peppers for her family, while her father-in-law commercially farms beans, wheat and hay.
Amid mounting concern from Pennsylvanians, the Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, opened a resource centre in Darlington Township on Wednesday where residents can sign up for water testing and get advice on health matters and food and animal safety through 10 March.
It’s an important step, but concerns about the long-term impacts are spreading across the sprawling Ohio valley, where many communities are already polluted by heavy industries.
“We’re already dealing with so much pollution, and the Black community is often the last to know about health risks,” said Justice Slappy, who runs an urban garden in Steubenville, a small city south of East Palestine where a different Norfolk Southern train, this one carrying garbage, derailed in November.
Experts say Steubenville, which draws its water from the Ohio River, is too far away to be directly affected by the chemical burn, but the decision to send some of the toxic waste to an industrial incinerator located between the city and East Palestine in East Liverpool has done little to calm fears.
Slappy said: “Everyone deserves clean water, soil and air. The community garden is the only place some people can get fresh produce – is East Palestine going to destroy what we’re doing here?”
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