18 April 23
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
A forensic investigation found the police used dangerous amounts of tear gas in an attempt to put down Black Lives Matter protests
The international investigation is yet another black eye for a Portland Police Bureau that has become synonymous with brutality — in particularly against “dirty hippies” — and which has been subject to federal supervision for more than a decade.
The investigative findings released Monday by Forensic Architecture are stark:
- On the night of June 2, 2020 — infamous to locals as “Tear Gas Tuesday” — Portland Police fired nearly 150 “tear gas” munitions across a tight area of downtown.
- The CS gas deployed resulted in protesters being exposed to concentrations far higher than those deemed “immediately dangerous to life and health” by a federal agency. In some instances, that safety threshold may have been exceeded by 2,200 times.
- Clouds of chemical compounds spread half a mile, hanging in the air between downtown buildings for hours that night. With settling and runoff, more than four pounds of the caustic compounds polluted the nearby Willamette River, threatening wildlife.
Based at the University of London, Forensic Architecture is renowned for high-tech investigation techniques that combine open-source video evidence and computer modeling to reconstruct front-line horrors in places like Syria and Mariupol, Ukraine. This rare investigation of abuses in the United States builds on a previous FA investigation of tear gas deployment against protesters in Chile. (The new FA study was first reported by The Guardian.)
Chemical agents like CS or “tear” gas are banned in warfare by the Geneva Conventions. But they’re still permitted — and frequently deployed — as crowd-control agents in American policing.
Forensic Architecture trained its focus on Portland after the Oregon city gained infamy as an epicenter of police violence directed at anti-police-violence demonstrators, as well as against journalists covering those protests. Protests roiled Portland for more than 100 consecutive days in the summer of 2020, exacerbated by the Trump administration’s July incursion of irregular federal forces, itself marked by copious use of tear gas.
As detailed in the FA investigation, the Portland Police did not maintain records of “what or how many” munitions it fired that June night. To reconstruct events, FA gathered open-source intelligence, including videos posted to social media and private footage from activists and other witnesses. It then scoured the videos for distinctive visual signatures of chemical munitions known to exist in the PPB arsenal.
FA collected technical data about the quantities of chemicals in these munitions. It then created a 3D computer model of downtown Portland. After geolocating and time-synching the video footage, FA could then simulate the point-source emissions of tear gas, and how the fluid dynamics of the airflow downtown that night carried the gasses. Using this elaborate model and days of computing power, FA then measured concentrations of the caustic chemicals faced by protesters and that leached into local waterways.
The methodology is complex. But the FA visualization of its investigation, embedded below, conveys what is at heart a simple story about law-enforcement excess and the indiscriminate use of health-threatening chemical agents during a respiratory pandemic:
Robert Trafford, an assistant director of FA, emphasized to Rolling Stone that the group’s findings likely understate the risk faced by protesters. “We’re building models of reality; there are variables that can’t be captured,” he says, including munitions that were not captured on video. “We consider every input with scientific patience and care, and draw careful limits around what we don’t know,” he says, “to make sure that we are low-balling our figures [and] not falling prey to exaggeration.”
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration has found that a CS gas concentration of 2 milligrams-per-meter-cubed is “immediately dangerous to life and health.” PPB records reportedly recognize this standard. The FA model cannot recreate exact air-quality measurements, but can reproduce the intensities of exposures protesters likely faced. In the worst “sample” studied, FA found demonstrators could have confronted CS concentrations of more than 2,000 times the OSHA limit. Even if that datapoint is discounted as an outlier, every other location sampled in FA the investigation also exceed the OSHA limit.
“This is a very painstaking and complicated way to say something that was intimately understood by everybody who was at the protest,” Trafford says. “That this was reckless and dangerous policing. This is a testament to the total bankruptcy of the use of tear gas as as a protest management tool.”
FA’s findings add to those of a federal judge. PPB’s use of tear gas inspired a federal class action lawsuit as well as changes to state law. In mid-June 2020, judge Robert Hernandez placed a temporary restraining order on PPB, citing evidence that “tear gas was used indiscriminately”; that “officers fired cannisters of tear gas at protestors without warning or provocation”; that “crowds were surrounded by tear gas without available avenues of escape”; and that “protesters were confronted with tear gas while trying to follow police orders and leave the demonstrations.” The plaintiffs were ultimately awarded $250,000 as part of a settlement that requires PPB to strictly adhere to new state law and bureau policies on tear gas.
On the day after “Tear Gas Tuesday,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, who also serves as the police commissioner, publicly praised his cops for “doing everything they can within their power to respect and protect peaceful demonstrators.” A few days later he directed cops to only use tear gas only when confronting a “serious and immediate threat to life safety.” Not long after getting tear gassed himself during the federal incursion into Portland, Wheeler issued a broader, September 2020 directive to police to block use of CS gas for crowd control.
Presented with the FA findings, Portland Police Bureau said in a statement: “We can’t provide comments due to pending litigation.” A spokesperson for Wheeler said, “We have not yet seen the report but look forward to reviewing it.” He highlighted the mayor’s CS directives, and added: “These unprecedented events characterize one of the most difficult chapters in our city’s history, and I believe we have taken what we learned to move Portland forward in many positive ways.”
The newly documented excesses by Portland police underscore longstanding problems across America. “U.S. policing has, time and again, demonstrated itself to be operating along militaristic lines that are unproductive any of society’s stated goals for its police forces,” Tratford says. He also insists that the FA investigation brings into sharp relief a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do attitude in America’s stance toward repression of protest. “This is the kind of sustained, repeated inflicting of harm on a civilian population that the U.S. federal government has castigated countries around the world for — happily and frequently,” he says.
While hopeful that FA’s model will be useful for those seeking accountability for the harms of a diffuse weapon like tear gas, Trafford is pessimistic about the prospect for a change in police practice. “What this consistent use of tear gas demonstrated in the case of the protests in 2020 — and what we are sure it will demonstrate the next time that there is such a major uprising — is that U.S. police have very little idea how to safely and responsibly manage Amercians’ right to protest,” he says. “We’ve seen routinely that they will invest in making situations more dangerous, and more harmful, than almost any other response would have done.”
READ MORE 
Residents call for the resignation of several McCurtain County officials Monday in Idabel, Oklahoma, after tapes with racist comments surfaced. (photo: Christopher Bryan/AP)
“I am both appalled and disheartened to hear of the horrid comments made by officials in McCurtain County,” Gov. Kevin Stitt said.
Gov. Kevin Stitt called for McCurtain County Sheriff Kevin Clardy, county Commissioner Mark Jennings, sheriff's investigator Alicia Manning, and Jail Administrator Larry Hendrix to step down after the McCurtain County Gazette-News published an article over the weekend about what was captured on the recording.
“I am both appalled and disheartened to hear of the horrid comments made by officials in McCurtain County,” Stitt said in a statement released Sunday. “There is simply no place for such hateful rhetoric in the state of Oklahoma, especially by those that serve to represent the community through their respective office.”
Stitt, a Republican, said he has ordered the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation to “initiate an investigation to determine whether any illegal conduct has occurred.”
Bruce Willingham, who works for his family-owned newspaper, has turned the full audio over to the FBI and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office, his lawyers said.
Meanwhile, dozens of county residents angered by the officials' comments picketed Monday outside the headquarters of the McCurtain County Commissioners in the town of Idabel, which is about 200 miles southeast of Oklahoma City, NBC affiliate KFOR of Oklahoma City reported.
None of the four officials named by Stitt could be reached for comment, but late Monday the McCurtain County Sheriff's Office said in a statement that the recording was "illegally obtained," appears to have been altered, and may have been produced in violation of state law prohibiting secret recordings by third parties.
The office, which said it has received threats of violence and death over the saga, said it was investigating how the recording was obtained and whether it violated the secret recording law.
Investigative findings, the sheriff's office said, will be "forwarded to the appropriate authorities for felony charges to be filed on those involved."
The Willinghams also did not respond to inquiries from NBC News. But Kilpatrick Townsend, the law firm representing the Willingham family, said they appreciated the expressions of support.
"For nearly a year, they have suffered intimidation, ridicule and harassment based solely on their efforts to report the news for McCurtain County," the statement said.
The latest furor erupted after Willingham, acting on a tip that the commissioners were illegally engaging in county business after the public meetings were over, left a recording device on March 6 in the commissioners' chamber, the newspaper reported.
Earlier that day, Willingham's son, Christopher Lee Willingham, who is also a reporter at the newspaper, had filed a lawsuit against Clardy, Manning and the commissioners in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma seeking unspecified damages. He claimed they were punishing him for his hard-hitting reporting by spreading "slander" about him.
When Willingham retrieved the device, he discovered that the conversation began with a grisly conversation about a fire victim being compared to "barbecue" before the group turned to talking about his son.
"My papaw would have whipped his ass, would have wiped him and used him for toilet paper," Manning said of the younger Willingham, according to the newspaper. "If my daddy hadn't been run over by a vehicle, he would have been down there."
Jennings then piped in, saying "I know where two big, deep holes are here if you ever need them."
"I've got an excavator," Clardy chimed in, according to the newspaper.
Jennings, according to the newspaper, then said he knew "two or three hit men" who belong to the Louisiana mafia.
"They're very quiet guys and would cut no f---ing mercy," he reportedly said.
Manning, according to the newspaper, discussed "who would get the blame if anything was done" to Christopher Lee Willingham's wife, Angie.
There was also "caustic" criticism of local District Attorney Mark Matloff, the newspaper reported in the first batch of recordings it released.
Matloff is not commenting on the report, a member of his staff said at the McCurtain County Courthouse.
"Some of the discussion included not only harsh criticism of judges, but also the possibility of assaults on judges here," the newspaper reported.
When the talk turned to who might run for sheriff against Clardy, Jenning recalled how a former sheriff "would take a damned Black guy and whoop their ass and throw them in the cell."
"Yeah," Clardy replied, according to the newspaper. "It's not like that no more."
"I know," said Jennings. "Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damned rope. But you can't do that anymore. They've got more rights than we've got."
Two more batches of recordings made by Willingham are to be released soon, his lawyers said.
The Willingham family has lived in the county for 120 years and has operated The McCurtain County Gazette-News for 40 years. Founded in 1905, it is a print-only publication, a rarity in the rapidly diminishing world of newspapers. And this is not the first time it has made national news.
In the wake of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Willingham hired a freelancer named J.D. Cash who produced a number of scoops about the investigation into the deadly terror attack and who was later derided as a "conspiracy theorist" by some of the newspaper's competitors. Cash died in 2007.
READ MORE 
Two Russian men who claim to be former Wagner Group commanders have told a human rights activist that they killed children and civilians during their time in Ukraine. (photo: AFP)
The claims were made in video interviews with Gulagu.net, a human rights organization targeting corruption and torture in Russia.
In the video interviews posted online, former Russian convicts Azamat Uldarov and Alexey Savichev – who were both pardoned by Russian presidential decrees last year, according to Gulagu.net – describe their actions in Ukraine, during Russia’s invasion.
CNN cannot independently verify their claims or identities in the videos but has obtained Russian penal documents showing they were released on presidential pardon in September and August of 2022.
Uldarov, who appears to have been drinking, details how he shot and killed a five- or six-year-old girl.
“(It was) a management decision. I wasn’t allowed to let anyone out alive, because my command was to kill anything in my way,” he said.
According to Gulagu.net, the testimonies were given to founder and Russian dissident Vladimir Osechkin over the span of a week. It said Uldarov and Savichev were in Russia when they spoke.
“I want Russia and other nations to know the truth. I don’t want war and bloodshed. You see I’m holding a cigarette in this hand. I followed orders with this hand and killed children,” Uldarov said, describing his motivation for the interview.
The Wagner Group is a Russian private mercenary organization fighting in Ukraine, headed by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin.
It has recruited tens of thousands of fighters from Russian jails, offering freedom and cash after a six-month tour. It’s estimated by Western intelligence officials and prison advocacy groups that between 40,000 and 50,000 men were recruited.
Uldarov said in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Soledar and Bakhmut – which have seen some of the fiercest fighting – Wagner mercenaries “were given the command to annihilate everyone.”
“There is a superior over all the commanders – it’s Prigozhin, who told us not to let anyone get out of there and annihilate everyone,” he added. CNN has previously reported on former Wagner fighters making similar claims.
At one point in the interview, Savichev described how they “got the order to execute any men who were 15 years or older.”
He also talked about getting orders to ‘sweep’ a house. “It doesn’t matter whether there is a civilian there or not. The house needs to be swept. I didn’t give a f**k who was inside,” he said.
“Whether a hut or a house, the point was to make sure that there wasn’t a single living person left inside,” he said. “You can condemn me for this. I will not object. It’s your right. But I wanted to live, too.”
Savichev said Wagner fighters who did not follow orders were killed.
Wagner Group chief Prigozhin confirmed on his Telegram channel that he had watched parts of the video, and threatened retribution against the two former Wagner fighters. “As for what (Osechkin) filmed, I looked at the pieces of video I managed to see,” he said. “I can say the following: if at least one of these accusations against me is confirmed, I am ready to be held accountable according to any laws.”
But Prigozhin said that “if none is confirmed, I will send a list of 30-40 people who are spitting at me like Osechkin (there is a whole list of them, including the scum that fled Russia) that the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine is obligated to hand over to me for a ‘fair trial,’ so to speak.”
“They will not be “civilians” for us, and especially not children, whom we have never touched and do not touch. This is a flagrant lie. These people (spreading the lies) are our enemies, and we will deal with them in a special way.”
Earlier, Prigozhin said on Telegram: “Regarding the execution of children, of course, no one ever shoots civilians or children, absolutely no one needs this. We came there to save them from the regime they were under.”
Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian president’s office, said in a tweet Monday that the group must be held accountable.
“Russian terrorists confessed to numerous murders of Ukrainian children in Bakhmut and Soledar. Confession is not enough. There must be a punishment. Tough and fair. And it will definitely be. How many more crimes like these have been committed?” he said.
In February, CNN spoke to two former Wagner fighters who described how recruited Wagner convicts are pushed to the front lines in a human wave, reminiscent of World War I charges. Deserters, or those who refuse orders are killed and there was no evacuation of the wounded, they said.
In January, US Treasury Department designated Wagner Group as a significant transnational criminal organization, and imposed a slew of fresh sanctions on a transnational network that supports it.
The US Department of State concurrently announced a number of sanctions meant to “target a range of Wagner’s key infrastructure – including an aviation firm used by Wagner, a Wagner propaganda organization, and Wagner front companies,” according to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
READ MORE 
New documents detail hundreds of investigations by ICE into alleged database misuse that includes harassment, stalking, and more. (photo: AP)
Documents obtained by WIRED detail hundreds of investigations by the US agency into alleged database misuse that includes harassment, stalking, and more.
ICE says these databases are vital tools for enforcing the law. However, agency records of internal misconduct investigations reveal that they can also be used to subvert it. They show for the first time how ICE employees allegedly exploited their access to these databases to unlawfully search or disclose sensitive information, including medical, biometric, and location data. And they detail how access to these databases can be misused to carry out personal schemes and vendettas.
According to an agency disciplinary database that WIRED obtained through a public records request, ICE investigators found that the organization’s agents likely queried sensitive databases on behalf of their friends and neighbors. They have been investigated for looking up information about ex-lovers and coworkers and have shared their login credentials with family members. In some cases, ICE found its agents leveraging confidential information to commit fraud or pass privileged information to criminals for money.
In total, ICE employees or contractors have been investigated for misusing agency data or computers at least 414 times since 2016. In nearly half of those incidents, the misconduct triggered investigations by the Office of Professional Relations (OPR), a division responsible for investigating allegations of serious misconduct, both criminal and noncriminal.
Of these serious misconduct cases, 109 were “substantiated” or “referred to management” after an internal investigation by OPR fact finders. Those include a Vermont-based enforcement and removals officer accused of “online solicitation of an intellectually disabled adult”; a special agent who received gifts from a Colombian drug trafficker in exchange for information; a Virginia deportation officer who altered electronic records to assist a family member; and an ICE attorney who stole immigrants’ identities in an attempt to defraud credit card companies.
ICE categorizes allegations as “substantiated” or “referred to management” if the evidence shows that the alleged misconduct is more likely to have occurred than not—a lower standard of proof than in criminal investigations.
The records do not include what disciplinary measures, if any, were imposed on ICE employees or contractors whose allegations of misconduct were substantiated by investigators.
While many of the records lack enough detail to discern the full nature of the allegations, two dozen investigations were categorized as criminal. And in at least 14 incidents, the records explicitly say that agents were investigated for allegedly using agency databases or computers to harass someone or make threats.
In March of 2021, for instance, a special agent in McAllen, Texas, allegedly used information from a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database called TECS to threaten a coworker. And in July 2020, employees at the Port Isabel Detention Center were investigated for illegally accessing a detainee’s medical records and sharing videos of detainees.
ICE did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
An ICE official familiar with the way internal investigations are conducted at the agency reviewed the records WIRED obtained. The official, who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak to the media, says that because ICE agents collectively query confidential law enforcement databases “many millions of times a year,” the presence of a few “bad apples” is inevitable and not particularly surprising.
But legal experts and privacy advocates who reviewed the data resoundingly disagree with the ICE official’s characterization of the issue as likely isolated to a handful of problematic officers.
“This isn’t about a few bad apples, it’s about a tree that’s rotten to the core,” says Albert Fox Cahn, the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP). “There’s no version of mass surveillance that’s compatible with civil rights.”
Erik Garcia, an organizer and program manager with the Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition, a Southern California-based migrant advocacy organization, says ICE agents’ abuse of confidential databases “very much is the culture of abuse and unchecked power at ICE. It’s part of the culture of policing generally, which makes me question whether they should be collecting this data in the first place.”
ICE is already under increased scrutiny for how agents are misusing the law enforcement tools at their disposal. In February, for example, the DHS inspector general released a report detailing how agents at ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division conducted illegal surveillance of cell phones using a controversial tool called a cell-site simulator.
Earlier this month, a WIRED investigation revealed how ICE used customs summonses to demand data from elementary schools, news organizations, and abortion clinics in ways that experts say could be illegal. “Calling ICE a rogue agency doesn’t even quite get at how bad the problem is with them,” said Emily Tucker, the executive director at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, in response to those findings. “They are always pushing to the limits of what they are allowed to do and fudging around the edges without oversight.”
Law enforcement abuse of databases is far from unique to ICE agents. In the past decade, local police around the US have repeatedly abused their access to confidential databases. In 2016, an Associated Press investigation found that police officers across the country misused confidential law enforcement databases to get information on romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, and journalists.
The misconduct records that WIRED obtained detail similar allegations. However, due to ICE’s sprawling access to data sets from federal, state, local, and private entities, experts are particularly concerned about how an agency with a prolific history of misconduct could abuse these tools.
Last May, Tucker and three colleagues coauthored a report called “American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century.” Their report, based on a review of ICE spending transactions, found that the agency has amassed an enormous trove of databases containing billions of data points that enable the agency “to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time.”
“The databases ICE employees can access contain almost everything you might want to find about someone: who they are, where they live, where they drive, and who their family is,” says Nina Wang, a policy associate at the Center on Privacy & Technology and one of the “American Dragnet” coauthors. “All of that access to bulk data leaves the door wide open for misconduct.”
ICE is one of 22 agencies housed under DHS. In 2021, the American Immigration Council used DHS privacy and compliance documents to compile a list of databases and information systems that DHS uses in relation to immigration law enforcement. The list captures the breadth of databases that ICE officials can access, some of which are referenced in the misconduct records.
Among the databases that ICE agents allegedly misused were those containing medical records, license plate reader data, and biometric data. One of the most widely misused databases in the records is the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system, software developed by the data-mining firm Palantir that serves as the primary database for information collected by ICE during criminal and civil investigations.
According to documents obtained by the Intercept, ICM allows ICE agents to access a kaleidoscope of data that reportedly includes information about “a subject’s schooling, family relationships, employment information, phone records, immigration history, foreign exchange program status, personal connections, biometric traits, criminal records, and home and work addresses.”
Representatives from Palantir declined to be interviewed for this story. But in an email, Courtney Bowman, the company’s director of Privacy and Civil Liberties, pointed WIRED to public documents detailing ICM’s oversight mechanisms, including its ability to log and record every query an individual makes.
Much of the ICM misconduct that internal investigators flagged involves employees looking up information about themselves—so-called self-queries. While this kind of misconduct might seem harmless, Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, asserts that it speaks to a culture of impunity at the ICE. “When you have officers taking a database intended for a specific purpose and subverting for self-gain, it exposes a lawless and dangerous mindset,” Schwartz says.
To Fox Cahn of STOP, the presence of so many self-queries in the data might say more about how ICE monitors its databases for abuse than about the volume of underlying misconduct. Fox Cahn suggests that the likely reason so many self-queries appear in the records is that it’s easy for agencies to spot this kind of behavior. “They should really be going query by query to make sure that someone has a legitimate reason to do a search,” he says.
Because ICE did not answer specific questions about how it monitors misconduct, it’s unclear how the agency spots abuse of its databases.
Every expert we spoke to, including the current ICE official, says that because the vast majority of misconduct probably goes undetected, the records the agency released likely only detail a small fraction of the total abuse.
“If you’ve got hundreds of abuses, you have a systemic problem that needs a systemic solution,” says Schwartz. “This is a flood of misconduct,” he adds. “It raises serious questions about whether this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
READ MORE 
A thriving North Carolina tobacco field is pictured here in August 2011. Child labor laws in agriculture are more lenient than those in other industries - and that means 12-year-olds can work in tobacco fields. (photo: Carol M. Highsmith/NPR)
José Velásquez Castellano started working in agriculture when he was 13 years old. Ten-hour days, five or six days a week, in North Carolina's summer heat. It was sometimes blueberries, sometimes cucumbers — but mostly, it was tobacco.
He'd go home dehydrated and exhausted and then wake up at 4 a.m. the next day and do it again.
For children 12 and older in the United States, difficult, low-paying and dangerous work in tobacco fields for unlimited hours is legal, as long as it's outside school hours. Child labor laws are more lenient in agriculture than in other industries, and efforts to change that have repeatedly failed, leaving growers and companies to decide whether to set the bar higher than what's legally required of them. In the meantime, kids work, often trying to help their families make ends meet.
Today, Castellano is a sophomore at Tufts University. But when he worked, he felt "this sense that working in those fields was going to be the rest of my life, that I had nothing else going for me."
His mother immigrated to the U.S. with Castellano when she was herself a teenager. Agriculture was one of the few jobs accessible to her, Castellano says. In the summer, it was Castellano's job too.
He sometimes had trouble getting the money he was owed for his labor. At the start of his days, he says, he'd write his name and the hours he'd worked in a notebook and "hope that notebook wouldn't get lost" — which would mean he wouldn't get paid.
He worked alongside other kids with one of North Carolina's most valuable crops. Some of them worked in the summer and went to school the rest of the year, like him. Some didn't go to school at all.
All the while, nicotine — a substance he's barely old enough to legally purchase now — seeped into his skin. For all tobacco workers, but especially kids, that can cause nicotine poisoning, or green tobacco sickness, whose symptoms include nausea, vomiting, headaches and dizziness.
Seventh-graders can't buy cigarettes, and they can't work at grocery stores or fast-food chains. But they can work in tobacco.
Why is this allowed?
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, kids 12 and up can work unlimited hours outside school hours in agriculture, and the rules are even more lenient for kids who work on their families' farms. Outside that industry, workers have to be 16 to work unlimited hours. Sixteen-year-olds and 17-year-olds working in agriculture can do tasks listed by the Labor Department as hazardous, versus 18 in other industries. Agriculture's hazardous occupation orders haven't been updated in 50 years, and they don't include tobacco, despite the known risks for workers of all ages.
"If a labor inspector goes to a tobacco farm and finds a 12-year-old kid working, there's no labor violation to report," Margaret Wurth, a senior children's rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, told NPR. She has co-authored reports on child labor in tobacco farming that included interviews with more than 100 child tobacco workers.
Advocates have asked the Labor Department to update agriculture's hazardous occupation orders, which Wurth says need to reflect "what's causing kids to get sick, be injured or die on farms in 2023, as opposed to 1970." More broadly, advocates want Congress to give kids in agriculture the same age limits and protections they have in other industries.
But efforts to tighten agricultural child labor laws have repeatedly failed because of opposition from Republicans in Congress and farm lobbying groups. They argue that such changes would hurt family farms and make it harder to teach kids about farming.
An Obama-era rule change proposed by the Labor Department would have updated the hazardous occupation orders to include work with tobacco, among other protections. It withdrew the proposed changes in 2012 after intense pushback from critics, including nearly 200 lawmakers in both chambers of Congress, during a public comment period.
Agencies within the department such as the Wage and Hour Division, which enforces child labor laws, declined to be interviewed for this story. In a statement, the department said it has "long been concerned" with child labor in the U.S., including in tobacco, and is focused on combating illegal child labor. The department pointed out that large tobacco companies publicly pledged to end child labor in their supply chains in 2014.
Because of the uptick in labor violations in recent years, the department launched a child labor task force and "called on Congress to give the department better tools to hold companies accountable for putting children in danger," according to the department's statement.
What about the companies?
Some major tobacco companies and growers announced policies in 2014 prohibiting their contract growers from hiring kids under age 16 and prohibiting workers under 18 from doing hazardous work — standards that exceed federal child labor laws.
Workers on commercial tobacco farms are often brought in by contractors, meaning the growers might not interact with kids hired to work on their farms, according to Wurth and Castellano.
Wurth says Human Rights Watch was concerned that growers may be telling the companies they sell tobacco to that "'we don't have any kids in our fields,' but they might not even actually know."
"We don't have reason to think a whole lot has changed," Wurth says, but because there are no reliable counts of kids working in the fields and because companies are responsible for policing themselves, "we don't know, concretely."
Reynolds and Altria, two of the largest tobacco companies in the U.S., were among the companies that voluntarily adopted child labor policies exceeding federal law. To monitor compliance, both companies told NPR in statements, they require contracted growers to be certified and audited by the industry group GAP Connections.
That certification process prohibits growers from hiring children under 16 unless they're excused from attending school or involved in accredited learning programs, and it prohibits minors from doing tasks defined by the Labor Department as hazardous.
Reynolds told NPR in a statement that if GAP Connections found a minor under 16 working on a contracted farm, the worker would immediately be removed from the farm and "the contract could be terminated immediately, not renewed, or the grower could receive a probationary contract which would result in immediate termination if found not in 100% compliance with any GAP Connections Certification standard or Reynolds contract requirement."
Altria said in a statement to NPR that all its contracts "meet and often exceed the law" with regard to child labor and that 97.6% of its contracted growers achieved certification. When asked what the consequences would be for growers if children under 16 were found working, Altria directed NPR to the GAP Connections compliance guide and said that "we evaluate why the grower was not certified and take appropriate actions, up to and including terminating our contract with the grower."
Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine found that children under 16 were still working in tobacco more than a year after major industry players announced they would prohibit hiring workers younger than that age.
Castellano says that on days his supervisors knew the farm's owners were coming, they "would tell me to hide my face, to not be noticeable, because they knew it was wrong."
Why do kids work?
Factors that push kids into working — from the rise in unaccompanied migrant kids to the economic hardships imposed by inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic — are in full force in the U.S. economy today, Wurth says.
"Wherever families are struggling to make ends meet, kids are going to find themselves in the workplace," legally or not, Wurth says.
That was Castellano's situation.
"I really worked mainly because money was tight," he says. "I needed to help my mother pay the bills," and his goal was to make sure that his younger siblings wouldn't have to do the same. It also "felt nice sometimes to be able to buy my own things."
Yesenia Cuello is a former child farmworker who, like Castellano, worked in tobacco fields in the summers to help her mother make ends meet from the time she was 14. Her sisters did too — the youngest was 12 when she started.
Now, Cuello is the executive director of NC Field, a grassroots nonprofit organization that works to serve marginalized populations in rural eastern North Carolina.
The number of children working in the fields has probably increased since the start of the pandemic, Cuello told NPR. Part of the reason is that kids weren't going to school, but another factor was that people without legal immigration status couldn't access many of the pandemic relief resources available to U.S. citizens.
"The reality is that if you're not working, you're not making money," Cuello says. "And if you're not making money, are you eating?"
Because many families rely on extra income from kids to pay bills and put food on the table, meaningfully addressing this problem isn't as simple as pulling kids out of the field, Cuello points out.
She says fixing the nation's immigration system, paying farmworkers better wages and providing summer programs for young people will keep parents from even having to consider bringing their children to work.
"People should understand that the food they're eating on a daily basis is harvested by oppressed people," Cuello says. The food and other agricultural products that everyone consumes are "touched by millions of people who sometimes have no choice but to send their children to work."
READ MORE 
General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo heads the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan. (photo: Samir Bol/Reuters)
The people of Sudan should reject choosing the lesser of two evils and should seek a third option.
For decades, countries in the Middle East have suffered from military coups carried out in the name of national salvation, pride and prosperity that have consistently culminated in disaster.
Many of the coups in the 1950s and 1960s – from Syria to Sudan, through Egypt, Iraq, Yemen and Libya – were led by young officers with lofty visions and high hopes for replacing a dreadful status quo with a better, more prosperous future, free of humiliation and defeat.
But the more recent coups, like that in Algeria in 1992, Egypt in 2013 and Sudan in 2021, lacked vision and ambition beyond merely blocking political change and restoring the appalling status quo ante that favoured military power and privilege.
All these coups have generally ended in disaster regardless of their original goals, and yet the farce continues as generals today stubbornly repeat their predecessors’ follies to no end, alas.
If coups were of any benefit to the state, Sudan would be the most prosperous country in the region. It has had more than a dozen coups and coup attempts since it gained independence in 1958.
But it is not. All its coups – attempted, realised and failed – have had a devastating effect on the country, unleashing repression onto its struggling population and destabilising the state.
Despite this tragic history, those who have never won on the battlefield are still eager to attack civilians and civilian institutions and violently suppress political parties as if they were the enemies of the state, all to preserve their power.
Among the few serious studies of the Arab armies is a paper by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies that notes a pattern of behaviour common to most coups, including the latest in Sudan.
It argues that once they take hold of political power, coup leaders do not give it up voluntarily. In other words, they do not seize power for others to rule over them. And once they depose the head of state, coup leaders begin to suspect one another and tend to turn on each other.
Moreover, military leaders-cum-political leaders tend to militarise politics and politicise the military to the detriment of state institutions and the people. Unable or incapable of providing socioeconomic solutions to their nations’ problems, they resort to religious populism, sectarianism or the only language they master – force. They perpetuate instability in the name of stability and fear in the name of security.
So it is no surprise that Sudan’s coup leaders, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the army chief, and General Mohamad Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, the head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), have pursued the same deceitful ways and means to monopolise power after the 2019 ouster of President Omar al-Bashir.
It was no shock that the mischievous generals squeezed out the civilian prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, in 2022, about 14 months after reaching an accommodation with the Forces for Freedom and Change, which led the civilian movement challenging al-Bashir’s regime.
When national and international pressure mounted, they struck a new deal, a transitional Framework Agreement, through which they sought to preserve their power.
As their influence grew, so did their suspicion of one another. When attempts at power sharing failed, it was only a matter of time before their distrust and discord escalated into an open, bloody confrontation.
With the battles intensifying in the streets of Khartoum and other major cities and the chances for reconciliation dissipating with each passing day, it is hard to say when the fighting may end or who is more likely to come out on top.
What is clear thus far is that the less powerful but more mobile and battle-tested RSF has pursued asymmetrical strategies, deploying rapidly to sensitive power centres to achieve quick wins against the less mobile military. It is also trying to capture or kill al-Burhan and thus deliver a decisive psychological blow to the armed forces.
If the RSF does not achieve a quick victory and the fighting persists unabated, the bigger, more powerful national army, which has the advantage of more sophisticated weapons like fighter jets, could eventually prevail, albeit at a terrible cost to Sudan and the Sudanese people.
To be sure, al-Burhan and Hemedti, who were powerful enablers of al-Bashir’s dictatorship before turning on him, have had a long, bloody history from Darfur to Yemen. They have conspired against the 2019 popular uprising against al-Bashir and undermined the political transformation towards civilian rule. And today, both have de facto forfeited any right to lead the country, having cynically dragged it down the path of bloodshed and destruction.
Having said that, the two strongmen have very different pedigrees and head two very different military forces. While al-Burhan is a professional soldier who climbed the ranks of an army with clear structures and operating systems, Hemedti was a rogue camel smuggler turned hired gun turned leader of a vicious militia that conducts illicit trade and functions according to his whims and fancies.
Al-Burhan’s transgressions are outrageous, considering his position as army chief. But that is precisely why Sudan deserves a national army whose leaders are professional, legitimate and accountable to its government.
Every state requires or deserves a truly national army, but no state needs a shadowy militia that functions above the law. It is a recipe for perpetual disaster.
That is not to say that the Sudanese people must now take sides as the strongmen fight it out at the expense of the country’s security and stability. Regardless of its outcome, once this reckless, bloody fight is over, hopefully soon, Sudan must overhaul its military and rid itself of all militias.
As they are pushed to choose the lesser of two evils, the Sudanese should opt for a third choice: a civilian-led, democratically elected government that oversees the return of the army to its barracks.
READ MORE
Now, scientists are linking that to deeper shifts in the ocean, brought on by climate change. (photo: Ryan Kellman/NPR)
Now, scientists are linking that to deeper shifts in the ocean, brought on by climate change. The connection may reach all the way to the world's second-largest ice sheet, melting increasingly fast on Greenland.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/18/1170547217/greenlands-melting-ice-could-be-changing-our-oceans-just-ask-the-whales
READ MORE
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.