11 May 23
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They’ve gone on for years and they raise serious questions about accountability at the Supreme Court.
But we are learning that such payments actually have been “ordinary business” on the Court. In fact, as I reported last year, similar but even larger undisclosed payments were made to Ginni Thomas in 2017 and 2018. During those two years, a conservative nonprofit group, headed by Frank Gaffney, a defense hawk known for promulgating anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, paid a firm she runs, Liberty Consulting, upward of two hundred thousand dollars for unspecified work, at a time when Gaffney had business before the Court. Those payments are visible in tax documents that were filed by Gaffney’s group, the Center for Security Policy. But they are not evident in the financial disclosures for those years submitted by Justice Thomas. Nor was any note made of the financial relationship when Gaffney joined six other advocates in filing an amicus brief to the Court, in August, 2017, in support of Donald Trump’s travel ban, which restricted the entry of people from seven countries, most of them majority-Muslim. Gaffney’s brief argued that “the challenge of Islam must be confronted.”
Throughout the 2017 and 2018 Court terms, as the Justices considered various challenges to the travel restrictions, Justice Thomas consistently took a pro-Trump line. In June, 2018, he and four other Justices narrowly upheld the final version of the travel ban.
Almost as troubling as the details of these ethical lapses is the fact that neither of these payments to Ginni Thomas would be known today except for random happenstance brought to light by investigative reporters. Judges are required to publicly report outside income in their annual financial disclosures, including approximate amounts earned by their spouses. But there is no requirement that a spouse who owns a firm must reveal the identities of their clients, which could reveal potential conflicts of interest. As a result, there is no way for the public to know if a spouse’s business venture is serving as a backdoor for payments from an interested party to a Supreme Court Justice.
As numerous critics have now noted, only the Supreme Court exempts itself from the judicial code of ethics that binds federal judges. Chief Justice John Roberts has said that the Court takes its “guidance” from the judicial code set out by the U.S. Judicial Conference, the policymaking body of the federal court system. But, at the Supreme Court level, the financial-disclosure process, and decisions about whether to recuse from hearing a case, are left up to the Justices, under an honor system. They fill out annual reports, but there is no independent oversight or enforcement of them. Over the years, Justice Thomas has repeatedly failed to meet these minimal disclosure requirements, amending his statements only after watchdog groups and investigative reporters have exposed lapses. In his disclosures in 2017 and 2018, for instance, despite the six-figure payments from Gaffney’s group to his wife, he gave a curiously low value for her firm, claiming in both years that it was worth only between fifteen thousand and fifty thousand dollars.
When payments are made to a Justice’s spouse by a nonprofit group, as in the Gaffney group’s case, the original source of the funds is especially screened, because such groups aren’t required to disclose their funders. It remains unclear, for instance, where Gaffney’s nonprofit got the funds to hire Thomas’s firm. (Neither the Thomases nor Gaffney responded to interview requests from The New Yorker.) But according to the Center for Media and Democracy, which monitors nonprofit political spending, one of the largest donors to Gaffney’s organization in 2017 was a pro-Trump political group, Making America Great, which was chaired by the heiress Rebekah Mercer, who is one of Trump’s biggest backers. As a result of this financial daisy chain, it is likely that hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed undetected from Trump backers through Gaffney and on to the Thomases, as the Court was agreeing to hear legal challenges to one of Trump’s signature policies.
Given Justice Thomas’s conservative judicial record, it’s likely that he would have supported the Trump Administration’s travel restrictions, anyway. The same may be said of the case that the Post highlighted. In that instance—the landmark decision in Shelby County v. Holder, in 2012—Thomas joined a 5–4 conservative majority in rolling back voting-rights protections. The vote was consistent with Thomas’s past rulings, but a concurring decision he wrote was also in line with an amicus brief filed in the case by the Judicial Education Project, the group that had paid Ginni Thomas earlier that year. The funds, according to the Post, were funnelled through another company, the Polling Company, which at the time was run by the conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway.
Leonard Leo, a leader of the powerful conservative legal group the Federalist Society, and a longtime friend of the Thomases’, was at the time advising the Judicial Education Project. According to the Post, Leo explicitly directed Conway to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25k,” and he emphasized that the paperwork should have “no mention of Ginni, of course.” Conway’s company sent Ginni Thomas the funds, and documents obtained by the Post described the purpose of the payment as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting.”
The Thomases declined requests for comment from the Post. But Leo, who is arguably the foremost legal activist on the right, overseeing a large and growing network of conservative nonprofits aimed at influencing the courts, defended the payments to Ginni Thomas, as well as the secrecy. In a statement to the Post, he said that her work for the nonprofit “did not involve anything connected with the Court’s business” and that it had been necessary to conceal the payments because they would have provoked negative publicity. “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious, and gossipy people can be,” he said, “I have always tried to respect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”
Respect for judicial privacy is understandable, even commendable. But when it conflicts with the public’s interest in knowing whether dark money is tainting the justice system, the intent of the law is clear. The 1978 Ethics in Government Act—which was passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal—was designed to fight corruption. Gaming whether the fine print of the Act permitted Justice Thomas to conceal over the years hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of free vacations, travel on private jets and yachts, private-school tuition for family members, and free rent for his mother, all paid for by the Dallas real-estate billionaire Harlan Crow, as ProPublica disclosed, and to hide payments made to a spouse may be technically defensible, but it clearly defeats the law’s purpose. And whether it is technically defensible remains to be seen.
Justice Thomas has already acknowledged that he needs to amend the disclosures concerning his private jet travel—an admission made after the judicial conference updated the wording of the rules to explicitly spell out what virtually everyone else already understood. And he will also have to amend his disclosures to reveal the real-estate transaction concerning his mother’s house. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are investigating whether Crow, who extended much of the most lavish “personal hospitality”—as Thomas described it—personally owned the jet, the yacht, and the resorts that Thomas stayed at, or whether these were owned by his corporation, which would strain the claim. The Democrats may investigate whether Crow complied with gift-tax regulations. A lawyer representing Crow, however, declined on Monday to comply with a request from Ron Wyden, the chair of the Senate’s Finance Committee, to provide a full accounting of Crow’s gifts to Thomas.
Gabe Roth, of the nonpartisan watchdog group Fix the Court, told me last year that, at the very least, Justice Thomas should be asked to amend his financial statements. Thomas already did so in 2011, after it became public that he hadn’t disclosed six hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars that his wife had earned while working at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, between 2003 and 2007. Beyond that, Roth said, “the Justices should, as a rule, disqualify themselves from cases in which a family member or the family member’s employer has filed an amicus brief.”
The emerging role of Leonard Leo in connection with these undisclosed gifts and payments sets off additional alarms. As a 2017 New Yorker profile put it, Leo, a central figure in the conservative legal movement, has yielded “extraordinary influence” over the makeup of the Supreme Court. Leo has been particularly close to Clarence and Ginni Thomas—they have been friends since at least 1991. In 2009, Leo became a director of a Tea Party political-advocacy group run by Ginni Thomas and funded in part by Crow. But it became so controversial, because of the conflicts it posed with Justice Thomas’s work, that Ginni Thomas left the organization, in late 2010, citing “distractions.” Leo’s previously unknown involvement in directing and concealing payments from the Judicial Education Project to her soon after raises a new round of questions.
In 2012, for instance, as these payments were being made, Leo was closely allied with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a small Catholic-led nonprofit legal group that has litigated a number of landmark religious-liberty cases before the Supreme Court. (He became a director of the group in 2014, and serves on its board of directors.) In 2012, he was an “honorary vice chair” of the group’s annual fund-raiser. That year, the Becket Fund brought the momentous Hobby Lobby case, in which it successfully argued that corporations are entitled to religious freedom and therefore can exempt themselves from national laws that they deem violations of their beliefs. At issue was the mandate in the Affordable Care Act that required employers to provide their workers with insurance coverage for contraception.
It’s hard to assess whether Leo’s overlapping ties to this case and to the Thomases constituted improper influence, or its appearance. But his unusual access to multiple people who would decide its fate was evident in a surprise dinner that he hosted in Washington, D.C., in 2013, as the case was wending its way from Oklahoma, where the Hobby Lobby company is based, to the Supreme Court, which decided it the following year. Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general at the time, who filed a brief in support of Hobby Lobby, later described the dinner in a speech at Hillsdale College.
As Pruitt recalled, Leo had urged him to come to Washington to attend the Federalist Society’s annual gathering at the Mayflower Hotel. The two men had struck up a close political partnership. Pruitt was the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association, and another nonprofit group in Leo’s network, the Judicial Crisis Network, had just begun donating money to Pruitt’s group; the total sum would rise to $2.4 million over the next two years, according to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.
Pruitt was impressed by Leo’s connections when he got to Washington. As he described it, Leo had suggested he stay in town an extra night to attend a dinner, but didn’t mention who the other guests might be. “Any time that Leonard asks you to go to dinner, you stay, because he feeds you well,” Pruitt said. But, as the Times reported, it wasn’t just the cuisine that dazzled Pruitt. When he reached his table, he found Justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia seated there. “We spent three hours talking about the Constitution and things that we were involved in,” Mr. Pruitt recalled. “It was a fabulous time.”
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Tamara Smoliarchuk mourning at the graves of her mother and sister, in Kherson on Tuesday. (photo: Finbarr O'Reilly/The New York Times)
No city in Ukraine has suffered the reversal of fortunes that Kherson has. Liberated in the fall, it was a symbol of hope. Now it is a kill zone.
Entering town from the west, you pass the ATB supermarket, one of the mainstays of the city’s shopping. A rocket ripped into it a few days ago, shrapnel slicing into shoppers, killing four.
After that lie more crushed buildings, disassembled by Russian artillery shells.
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Rockets are fired from Gaza into Israel after Tel Aviv launched a series of air attacks that have killed at least 24 Palestinians (photo: Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
The hostilities amount to the heaviest fighting between the two sides in months.
Gaza’s health ministry said seven people were killed on Wednesday, a day after Israeli strikes on the Palestinian territory left 15 dead.
Four of those killed on Wednesday were fighters with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the group said.
Three more deaths were reported following an air attack in the early hours of Thursday morning in Khan Younis in the southern part of Gaza.
A 10-year-old Palestinian girl named Layan Madoukh was also killed in a blast at her home in Gaza City in unclear circumstances.
“There is a very high sense of worrying,” Al Jazeera’s Youmna El Sayed, reporting from Gaza City, said.
“Everything is closed; schools, private and public facilities have shut down, and people have limited going out of their homes.”
Rana Shubair, a Gaza-based writer, said that the Israeli attacks took them “by surprise completely”.
“Everybody was asleep; we suddenly work up to huge explosions,” she told Al Jazeera.
“Barrages of rockets are being launched from the Gaza Strip towards southern Israeli towns,” Sayed added. “We also saw the Iron Dome trying to intercept these rockets.”
The hostilities amount to the heaviest fighting between the sides in months.
Israeli officials said more than 400 rockets had been fired as of Wednesday evening. Most, they said, were intercepted or fell in open areas, but Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said about one-quarter had misfired and fallen inside Gaza.
Journalist Issam Adwan, reporting for Al Jazeera from Gaza City, said that after a “cautious silence” that had lasted around two hours late on Wednesday and into the early hours of Thursday morning, Israel renewed its air attacks with two strikes on Gaza’s Khan Younis, one of which hit a residential apartment building.
The Ministry of Health confirmed three deaths and dozens of people injured, Adwan said.
“So after this cautious silence, now it’s broken with another round of violence from the Israeli air strikes,” he said.
“It is very difficult to cope in these circumstances for [Palestinians in Gaza],” he added.
“The city is basically crippled and citizens are expecting the worst.”
The Israeli military said later that it had hit members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movements, killing the commander of the group’s ‘rocket launching unit’.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned civilian deaths in Gaza as “unacceptable” and appealed for them to “stop immediately” and for all parties to exercise maximum restraint, deputy UN spokesperson Farhan Haq said on Wednesday.
“Israel must abide by its obligations under international humanitarian law, including the proportional use of force and taking all feasible precautions to spare civilians and civilian objects in the conduct of military operations,” Haq said.
Renewal of hostilities
The initial Israeli air attacks on Tuesday that set off the exchange of fire killed three senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters and at least 10 civilians, most of them women and children.
Israel has come under international criticism for the high civilian toll from those air attacks, which included wives of two of the hardliner commanders, some of their children, and a dentist who lived in one of the targeted buildings along with his wife and son.
The Israeli military has said its attacks were focused on Islamic Jihad infrastructure in the coastal enclave.
A state-run Egyptian TV station announced that Egypt, a frequent mediator between the sides, had brokered a ceasefire on Wednesday. Israeli officials confirmed that Egypt was trying to facilitate a ceasefire.
But truce efforts appeared to falter as fighting intensified late in the day, with neither side showing any sign of backing down.
In a prime-time TV address, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Israel dealt a harsh blow to the fighters.
“This round is not over,” he said. “We say to the terrorists and those who send them: ‘We see you everywhere. You can’t hide, and we choose the place and time to strike you.'”
Palestinian Islamic Jihad said it would continue firing rockets. Muhammad al-Hindi, an official with the group, said a sticking point in the talks was that the Palestinians wanted an Israeli commitment to stop targeted killing operations, such as the ones that killed three top Islamic Jihad commanders early Tuesday.
In a statement, an umbrella organisation of Palestinian factions in Gaza, including Hamas, said the campaign against Israel – which it dubbed “Avenging the Free” – involved firing hundreds of rockets in response to Israel’s killing of the three Islamic Jihad commanders as well as several civilians.
“The resistance is ready for all options,” the factions said. “If [Israel] persists in its aggression and arrogance, dark days await it.”
Hamas involvement
It remained unclear whether Hamas had joined the fray.
Mosheer al-Masri, a senior member of Hamas, told Al Jazeera that the Palestinian response to Israeli air raids on Gaza was “a reflection of the resistance’s covenant with its people and martyrs.
“Its hand [the resistance’s] is unified,” he said, adding that “the door of reckoning with the Israeli occupation was still wide open”.
Hamas is among the factions of the Joint Operations Room, which includes other Gaza-based armed groups, but they have not announced their individual participation in the rocket fire.
As rockets streaked through the sky, Israeli TV stations showed air-defence systems intercepting rockets above the skies of Tel Aviv. In the nearby suburb of Ramat Gan, people lay face-down on the ground as they took cover.
The Israeli military said that for the first time, an air-defence system known as David’s Sling intercepted a rocket.
The system, developed with the United States, is meant to intercept medium-range threats and is part of a multilayered air defence that also includes the better-known Iron Dome anti-rocket system. Israeli media said a previous attempt to use the system several years ago had failed.
Israel and Hamas have fought four wars since the group took control of Gaza in 2007.
In past conflicts, rights groups have accused Israel of committing war crimes due to the high number of civilian deaths. Israel has said it does its utmost to avoid civilian casualties and holds hardliner groups responsible because they operate in heavily populated residential areas.
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Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., left, and Malcolm X at the U.S. Capitol on March 26, 1964 (photo: Henry Griffin/AP)
“I think its historic reverberations are huge,” Eig told The Washington Post. “We’ve been teaching people for decades, for generations, that King had this harsh criticism of Malcolm X, and it’s just not true.”
The quote came from a January 1965 Playboy interview with author Alex Haley, a then-43-year-old Black journalist, and was the longest published interview King ever did. Because of the severity of King’s criticism, it has been repeated countless times, cast as a dividing line between King and Malcolm X. The new revelation “shows that King was much more open-minded about Malcolm than we’ve tended to portray him,” Eig said.
Haley’s legacy has been tarnished by accusations of plagiarism and historical inaccuracy in his most famous book, “Roots,” but this latest finding could open up more of his work to criticism, especially “The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley” — released nine months after Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965.
Malcolm X, a member of the Nation of Islam, had frequently attacked King and his commitment to nonviolence, going so far as to call King a “modern Uncle Tom.” But his criticism often had “strategic purposes,” Eig said.
In acting as “a foil” to King, his message had more value to the media. “King saw value in being a foil to Malcolm sometimes, too. But I think at their core they had a lot in common. They certainly shared a lot of the same goals,” Eig said.
Eig, who previously wrote acclaimed biographies of Muhammad Ali and Lou Gehrig, said he found the fabrication in the course of his standard book research for “King: A Life,” due out May 16. When a subject has given a long interview, he’ll look through the archives of the journalist who conducted it, hoping to find notes or tapes with previously unpublished anecdotes.
He did not find a recording of Haley’s interview with King in the Haley archives at Duke, but he did find what appears to be an unedited transcript of the full interview, likely typed by a secretary straight from a recording, Eig said. Eig provided The Post with a copy of the transcript.
On page 60 of the 84-page document, Haley asks, “Dr. King, would you care to comment upon the articulate former Black Muslim, Malcolm X?”
King responds: “I have met Malcolm X, but circumstances didn’t enable me to talk with him for more than a minute. I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views, as I understand them. He is very articulate, as you say. I don’t want to seem to sound as if I feel so self-righteous, or absolutist, that I think I have the only truth, the only way. Maybe he does have some of the answer. But I know that I have so often felt that I wished that he would talk less of violence, because I don’t think that violence can solve our problem. And in his litany of expressing the despair of the Negro, without offering a positive, creative approach, I think that he falls into a rut sometimes.”
That is not how King’s response appeared in the published interview. While the top part is nearly identical with the transcript, it ended in Playboy like this: “And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice. Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.”
Some of the phrases added to King’s answer appear to be taken significantly out of context, while others appear to be fabricated:
- “ … I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice.” King does not say this or anything similar anywhere in the 84-page interview transcript.
- “Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence …” King says this phrase much earlier in the transcript, on page 12, and in answer to the question: “Dr. King, what is your opinion of Negro extremists who advocate armed violence and sabotage?” King gives a lengthy response that begins: “Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettoes urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence can achieve nothing but negative results.”
- “ … as he has done …” King does not name Malcolm X as an example of “fiery, demagogic oratory” anywhere in the transcript.
- “ … can reap nothing but grief.” This phrase does not appear in the transcript.
It is a standard practice in journalism when publishing Q…A-style interviews to make minor changes, such as removing excessive “ums” or truncating long answers where the subject repeats their point over and over again or wanders from the topic at hand. But journalists typically take great pains to ensure any changes do not alter the intended meaning of an interviewee’s response. In addition, outlets commonly will include an editor’s note informing the reader of such changes.
What Haley appears to have done amounts to “journalistic malpractice,” Eig said.
“We should remember that King was always more radical than we like to imagine or talk about,” Eig continued. “He was a Christian radical, and his radicalism came from a different place than Malcolm’s did, but they always had a lot in common. They always believed that you had to take radical steps to change America, to end racism, to create a country that lived up to the words of its promises.”
Indeed, in another part of the transcript, Haley asks King about critics labeling him an “extremist,” to which King responded: “At first, it disturbed me. Then I began to consider that, yes, I would like to think myself an extremist — in the light of Christ-like spirit which made Jesus an extremist for love.”
King never commented on the interview, and it is not known whether he was even aware of the changed quotes, Eig said. “He was extremely busy, he had a lot of other problems going on, and in general, he never complained about any media coverage,” Eig said. “He had bigger fish to fry.”
Eig has shared his discovery with a number of King scholars, and the changes “jumped out” to them as “a real fraud,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been teaching that to my students for years,’ and now they have to rethink it,” Eig said.
One of these scholars is Peniel E. Joseph, director of the Center for Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of a number of books about the civil rights and Black power movements. He told The Post he would change how he teaches now that Eig’s “terrific” research was “setting the historical record straight.”
Given Haley’s other scandals, “this is not really surprising or shocking, but it’s bad,” Joseph said.
“We know on other occasions King is talking about Malcolm X without mentioning him at all,” Joseph said. “In this specific case, we have more clarification about how certain media wanted to pit them against each other and use Dr. King as a cudgel against Malcolm.”
King and Malcolm X met only once, and briefly, outside a Senate hearing at the U.S. Capitol on March 26, 1964. Weeks before, Malcolm X had announced his break with the Nation of Islam and its leader, Elijah Muhammad, and his willingness to work with other civil rights leaders.
When the men met, he told King, “I’m throwing myself into the heart of the civil rights struggle.”
Haley, who spent much of his life struggling to pay the bills, may have decided to emphasize or exaggerate King’s and Malcolm X’s differences to increase his public profile, Joseph suggested.
In this same period, between 1963 and 1965, Haley was also conducting a series of interviews that would become Malcolm X’s autobiography, as Malcolm X allegedly told it to him. “I believe that what we know about this incident, and others that we know about Alex Haley, should prompt us to scrutinize everything he’s written, including the autobiography,” Eig said.
Joseph is more cautious, saying that even if Haley “took license with it,” all autobiographies should be understood as “a literary creation” and not an exact historical record. Still, educators using the autobiography in their classes teach students to “think critically” about it, he said.
In the end, King “was not afraid to criticize Malcolm, but he was also willing to listen to him, and he was not ruling him out as a crackpot, as a violent wild card. He was thinking about Malcolm and where he belonged on the team of people fighting for justice,” Eig said.
Whatever thoughts King may have had about working with Malcolm X in the future, no such partnership would come to pass. Malcolm X was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965, a month after the King interview published.
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Edward Bronstein (R) with one of his daughters. (photo: Courtesy Bronstein family)
Edward Bronstein, 38, shouted ‘I can’t breathe’ as officers restrained him after a traffic stop in March 2020
Seven California highway patrol (CHP) officers and a nurse were charged with involuntary manslaughter earlier this year in connection with the 2020 death of Edward Bronstein, 38.
Annee Della Donna and Eric Dubin, attorneys for Bronstein’s young children, said it was the largest civil rights settlement of its kind by the state of California, and the second largest nationally since the city of Minneapolis paid $27m in the George Floyd case.
The settlement comes amid renewed scrutiny of potentially fatal restraints following last week’s killing of a New York City subway rider, Jordan Neely, who was placed in a chokehold by a US marine veteran. Bronstein’s death also echoes that of Eric Garner, a New Yorker put in a chokehold by police in 2014 and whose dying words “I can’t breathe” became a chant in protests against racial injustice. Both Garner and Neely were Black.
The Los Angeles county coroner said Bronstein’s death was caused by “acute methamphetamine intoxication during restraint by law enforcement”. The report lists Bronstein’s race as white.
Bronstein was taken into custody following a traffic stop on suspicion of driving under the influence on 31 March 2020. He died at a highway patrol station in Altadena, north of downtown Los Angeles, less than two months before Floyd was killed by police in Minnesota as he, too, repeatedly told officers, “I can’t breathe.”
George Gascón, the LA county district attorney, said while announcing the criminal charges in March that the highway patrol officers failed Bronstein, “and their failure was criminally negligent, causing his death”.
A nearly 18-minute video showing the officers’ treatment of Bronstein was released last year after a judge’s order in the family’s federal lawsuit alleging excessive force and a violation of civil rights.
Family members have said Bronstein was terrified of needles and they believe that’s why he was reluctant to comply with the CHP officers initially as they tried to take a blood sample.
The video, filmed by the sergeant, shows several officers forcing a handcuffed Bronstein to a mat on the floor as he shouts, “I’ll do it willingly! I’ll do it willingly, I promise!”
He continues screaming as six officers hold him face-down – the lawsuit alleged they put their knees on his back – and pleads for help.
“It’s too late,” one officer replies. “Stop yelling!” another shouts.
“I can’t breathe!” and “I can’t!” Bronstein cries, and an officer responds, “Just relax and stop resisting!”
But Bronstein’s voice gets softer and he then falls silent. While he is unresponsive, the nurse continues to draw blood and the officers keep pinning him down.
After they realize he may not have a pulse and does not appear to be breathing, they slap his face and say, “Edward, wake up.” More than 11 minutes after his last screams, they begin CPR.
Bronstein never regained consciousness and was later pronounced dead.
Sean Duryee, the CHP commissioner, offered condolences to the family in a statement and said he would respect the judicial process. His office didn’t immediately respond on Tuesday to a request for comment on the settlement.
The officers, who were put on administrative leave in March, face one count each of involuntary manslaughter and one felony count of assault under the color of authority. If convicted, they could receive up to four years in prison. The registered nurse was also charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Bronstein’s death prompted the CHP to change its policies to prevent officers “from using techniques or transport methods that involve a substantial risk of positional asphyxia”, the agency said. Additional training was also ordered for uniformed officers.
Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, signed a law in September 2021 barring police from using certain face-down holds that have led to multiple unintended deaths. The bill was aimed at expanding on the state’s ban on chokeholds in the wake of Floyd’s murder.
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Kinney County Sheriff’s Deputy Rolando Escobar, left, arrives as the only Spanish speaker on scene as officers with Operation Lone Star arrest a driver accused of smuggling migrants, who are detained until Border Patrol arrives. (photo: Washington Post)
Inside one border county where Operation Lone Star has brought charges, chases and fear
Kinney County Sheriff’s Deputy Rolando Escobar followed at a distance, waiting for details from dispatch on the vehicle’s license plates. Then it took off.
“Be careful of that driver,” Escobar radioed to the other deputies joining the pursuit. “Looks like he is reaching down for something.”
Minutes later, the suspected smuggler’s vehicle came to a sudden stop — Escobar’s cruiser nearly crashing into it from behind. The doors swung open and the driver leaped over a four-foot fence. Several passengers darted off into the moonless night. A pepper ball exploded. Deputies tackled two men and quickly arrested three others.
Smuggling in this rural stretch of Texas picks up at twilight, when Escobar’s shift begins. Over the next 24 hours, he’d join two other high-speed chases, respond to one crash, and arrest more than 10 migrants and two suspected smugglers.
Young women crammed into trunks. A Mexican couple fleeing violence. Men who tried to run but gave up rather than get lost in vast ranch lands without water.
As Texas leaders prepare for the end of the Title 42 border policy — the pandemic-era public health rule that resulted in automatic expulsions for most migrants — Kinney County offers a lens into the more aggressive tactics some border sheriffs have adopted even before the expected surge in the weeks ahead. The Biden administration plans to lift the order Thursday, and already, growing numbers of migrants are arriving at the Southwest border.
“We can’t stop it,” said Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber, who oversees a border community adjacent to Kinney County. “We really aren’t prepared for what’s coming.”
Kinney County officials were the first to declare a local “border crisis” emergency two years ago, allowing authorities to act with the same executive powers they often utilize after a major storm. Here, deputies act as a de facto U.S. Border Patrol extension, spending much of their time capturing migrants. Sheriff’s deputies have arrested nearly twice as many migrants in the past two years as there are residents in the remote ranching community.
The county has become the showpiece of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s controversial border initiative, Operation Lone Star, which directs troopers to arrest migrant men and charge them with state crimes. Proponents say the $4 billion program is needed in the absence of a stronger federal response. In recent weeks, at least one other county sheriff’s office has joined the operation, bringing the total to nearly 50, roughly a fifth of all Texas counties. Some border sheriffs are preparing to devote more officers to detaining suspected smugglers and border crossers.
Migrant advocates and some community members say Kinney County’s leaders have gone too far. Residents in the county of 3,200 people routinely stumble across deputies chasing smugglers like NASCAR drivers. Boulders line the front of local schools to prevent vehicles from smashing into classrooms. The town has one ambulance crew frequently tied up with the aftermath of pursuits.
Civil rights groups have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Operation Lone Star for allegations of racial profiling and discrimination. They contend Texas is usurping the federal government’s immigration enforcement responsibility by creating its own unilateral system that weaponizes state law and puts migrants in danger.
“It has become the media star of the anti-immigrant movement,” Bob Libal, a civil rights consultant for Human Rights Watch, said of Kinney County. “They have achieved the goal of heightening the rhetoric and bringing us to a place in Texas that 10 years ago would have been unimaginable.”
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, for his part, believes capturing migrants is the best way to protect both his residents and those trying to enter the United States.
“For every one that we stop, every group that we catch that’s being smuggled, I feel like we’re saving somebody a life of grief,” Coe said. “You get wrapped up in the sex trade, is it a better life?”
At the scene of the Dodge Durango chase, officers found an older Mexican woman and her husband in tears hiding inside the sport-utility vehicle. The woman rested her head against her husband’s shoulder while they sat on the ground between patrol vehicles flashing red and blue lights.
“We’re here because they killed our whole family,” the woman’s husband said. The couple began to sob, saying they were from Guerrero, a lawless southern Mexican state where warring criminal organizations have pushed the homicide rate to one of the highest in the country. They were quickly escorted away before sharing their names with a reporter.
As he stepped into a Border Patrol van, the man said, “We’re the only ones left.”
A web of lonely roads winds from the Rio Grande to Brackettville. The two-streetlight town sits on U.S. Highway 90 between official border crossings in Del Rio to the west, Eagle Pass to the southeast and a checkpoint heading northeast to Uvalde. That makes Kinney County a choke point attractive to migrants and smugglers trying to evade authorities.
Coe spent 30 years working for Border Patrol and had hoped for a quiet second act busting small-time drug dealers and reading books to schoolchildren when he signed up for the job. The community is known mostly for an old frontier garrison. Residents also proudly note it was the backdrop for John Wayne’s 1960 film “The Alamo.”
But when President Biden assumed office, Coe said his community came “under siege.” Federal authorities made 1.7 million and 2.4 million arrests respectively in 2021 and 2022 at the Southwest border — and the Del Rio sector, where Kinney County is located, became one of the busiest in that time.
It took little time for Coe’s resource-strapped force to be overwhelmed.
“I have to fight tooth and toenail to protect my ranchers and hunters,” Coe said from his office, where stacks of reports are piled next to a large-lettered study Bible and Donald Trump bumper stickers. He is worried that frustrations with migration will push the county’s tax base out.
“If we lose them,” he said, “I lose the county.”
Coe started airing his frustrations in Facebook videos in which he had imaginary conversations with a cardboard cutout of Vice President Harris. In one 2021 video, he asked “Kardbord Kamala,” as he called the effigy, what her plans were for thousands of Haitian migrants camping out under a border bridge in Del Rio.
“Why are we on our own?” he asked.
The camera panned right to the cutout as a recording of Harris laughing played. Soon Fox News was calling to interview him on border security. Then came meetings with former Trump officials, conspiracy theorists, vigilante groups and, ultimately, Abbott.
“I had every militia group in the world call me wanting to help,” Coe said.
For many county leaders, the issue hit close to home. County Judge John Paul Schuster said his family has had several unsettling experiences with men walking through their property in recent years. They got a dog and don’t leave the house before daybreak.
“We shouldn’t have to live like this,” Schuster said, holding back tears. “I don’t want my home to become a gateway that wrecks the country.”
The county declared a border disaster in April 2021. At a news conference a few months later, Coe warned of an invasion of “thousands of illegal aliens.” State and federal money came swiftly. The sheriff bought five vehicles, and the county hired more than two dozen support staff to help process the sudden rise in arrests. The county has also raised about $22,000 in donations through a Christian crowdfunding site.
“The only thing standing between our residents and an open border is Operation Lone Star,” said Brent Smith, the county attorney. “It’s the only thing that stands between them and chaos.”
Kinney’s prominence grew, but it came at a price.
THE MIGRANTS
‘Treated as less than a delinquent’
As deputies wrapped up interrogating the Mexican couple found in the Dodge Durango, news of another smuggling attempt crackled across the dispatch radio.
Kinney County Deputy Sheriff Liz Aguirre stopped a blue Mitsubishi with expired tags. She spotted two people slouched in a back seat. A 21-year-old San Antonio woman driving the car said the female passengers were her aunts. According to an arrest report, she told the deputy that both were lying down because they were taking a nap.
Aguirre didn’t buy it. She detained the driver. Inside the vehicle, deputies found two more suspected migrants crouched in the trunk. In all, four young women trying to cross the border were taken into custody. One pulled her long obsidian hair across her face to obscure it as officers turned her over to Border Patrol.
Most migrants caught in Kinney County are turned over to Border Patrol and deported. But the sheriff’s office is also on pace to make more than 900 human smuggling arrests on state charges this year. That figure would eclipse the total number of similar arrests in the past two years combined — a stunning increase in a county that previously had only a handful of jury trials.
While Coe and county leaders hold up those numbers as a sign of success, others point to concerning stories behind the arrests.
The American Civil Liberties Union in Texas obtained documents describing a June incident in which the sheriff removed four men suspected of being smuggled from the country by driving them from a crash scene to a port of entry. County sheriffs do not have the authority to deport.
When asked about the incident, Coe said the men had refused medical treatment but Border Patrol wasn’t willing to take them into custody without it. He didn’t have time to wait, so he said he took the migrants to the border himself.
Arrest records reviewed by The Washington Post show instances in which Kinney County property owners have detained migrants at rifle-point, in a sign of how tense the situation has grown. Rights advocates also point to sheriff’s deputies citing dubious legal reasons for traffic stops. One state trooper stopped a vehicle on a county road in June, suspicious of its tinted windows. He determined the tint was legal but said a smell prompted him to investigate further.
“I identified the smell as an odor that is associated with human smuggling,” Cpl. Orlando Rivera wrote. “Undocumented aliens emit a distinct odor due to sweat and being exposed to the environment.”
The trooper found two Mexican migrants in the trunk and arrested the driver for felony smuggling.
Abbott’s office has defended the state’s approach, noting in a recent press release that thousands of pounds of fentanyl and weapons have been seized and more than 360,000 migrants detained as part of Operation Lone Star.
“Every individual who is apprehended or arrested and every ounce of drugs seized would have otherwise made their way into communities across Texas and the nation due to President Joe Biden’s open border policies,” the governor said.
Civil rights leaders say the approach hasn’t proved effective in curbing migration, but lawmakers are doubling down. Bills creating a Texas border protection unit with the power to detain and deport migrants are advancing swiftly through the state legislature. Some of the text mirrors Kinney County’s disaster declaration.
“We are seeing some of the most dangerous legislation on the border being proposed in Austin,” Roberto Lopez, an organizer with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said. “It’s built on the invasion rhetoric Kinney advocates.”
Roberto Mejía, 32, was arrested and charged with trespassing in Kinney County in October 2021. The child psychologist from Honduras said he tried to enter legally at the Del Rio crossing but was told he could not apply for asylum because the Title 42 policy remained in effect. Desperate, he jumped into the Rio Grande, despite not knowing how to swim.
Mejía said members of the Texas National Guard found his group soon afterward and instructed them to walk onto the nearby train tracks — private property. They were all immediately apprehended.
Mejía said he spent months inside a special Texas prison unit for migrants enduring emotional torture and physical abuse. He said officers hit him and told him he had less right to be in the country than an animal. Weeks went by with no word on the status of his case.
“My will to live was crumbling,” he said.
Mejía was eventually released with the help of an attorney and has petitioned for political asylum.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said they investigated the complaints and they were “unfounded.” Both prison units are undergoing unannounced inspections and comply with standards, according to a spokesperson.
“I was treated as less than a delinquent for trying to seek out a better life,” Mejía said.
THE COMMUNITY
‘It’s getting worse and worse’
Cole Hill’s security cameras go off incessantly. The ranch manager has scores of snapshots of backpack-carrying men and women, some wearing camouflage. His cattle get loose on the highway after smugglers slice his fences open. He is scared for his young children, whom he has forbidden from wandering through their big backyard.
“I’m neither left nor right; I just want everybody else to know that it’s ridiculous what we are dealing with,” he said. “It’s getting worse and worse for us down here.”
Hill supports local and state law enforcement efforts, but he also wants to see immigration reform at the federal level.
“We need to make immigration laws much easier and more accessible for the people who generally want to be here for good reasons,” Hill said. “But we also need to deter anyone coming here for anything less than that.”
Gage Brown, a working artist whose ranching family has been in the county for five generations, said the intense focus on border enforcement is taking away from other pressing needs. Brackettville is experiencing a teacher shortage, and drought has left local waterways dry. Domestic violence and drug abuse are persistent ills.
For all of Kinney County’s official bluster, many border residents here say they favor opening more legal pathways for people to enter the United States. But they also don’t want migrants coming through their lands without permission.
“Deterrence doesn’t work,” Brown said. “So why haven’t we begun to create something that does?”
Brown has testified against Operation Lone Star at the legislature in Austin, where civil rights groups have been tracking the program’s alleged abuses. Texas judges have dismissed cases over rights violations and ruled the operation unconstitutional because it targets only men for arrest.
Some frustrated residents have taken matters into their own hands. Moses Lozano wears a body camera everywhere he goes to record police.
“There’s no sheriff here; they’re an extension of the Border Patrol,” he said. “The siege is not from any aliens. It’s from law enforcement.”
THE BORDER
‘It’s already started’
Nearly 24 hours after the Dodge Durango chase, Escobar was gunning the engine again behind another suspected smuggling vehicle. The gold-colored truck veered off the main road and crashed into a wire fence. Those inside quickly fled.
The deputy and a handful of other officers scanned the brush and eventually caught two men. How many others escaped was unclear.
As the Title 42 policy comes to an end, deputies here and elsewhere are bracing for more chases, more detentions and more smuggling. The Biden administration will send 1,500 additional troops to augment security at the southern border. The United States also recently reached a deal with the Mexican government to allow U.S. authorities to deport non-Mexican migrants who entered illegally back across the border.
But sheriffs anticipate that much of the day-to-day policing will fall on them.
In Kinney County, an uptick in migration has begun. Deputies found nearly 100 people crowded into a sweltering rail car days before Title 42’s end. Investigators believe just as many escaped before authorities could take them into custody.
“It’s already started,” Coe said. “We don’t know what we are going to get, if we get them all at once, or if they come in waves. All I know is that they’re coming.”
READ MORE 
Sunrise El Paso members gather on July 25, 2022 outside El Paso City Hall after delivering 39,000 signatures to the city clerk in support of adding the climate charter to the ballot. (photo: Martha Pskowski)
Sunrise El Paso’s grassroots campaign was not enough to overcome the influence of a monopoly utility and fossil fuel companies at the ballot box.
Sunrise El Paso, the local climate justice organization behind the proposition, bet on a grassroots, people-powered campaign to achieve ambitious climate action in Texas’ hostile political climate. But opponents spent more than $1 million to defeat Proposition K, including $500,000 from Consumer Energy Alliance, which represents fossil fuel and energy companies. The opposition campaign also included the El Paso Chamber of Commerce, El Paso Electric and Marathon Petroleum
At the ballot box, 81 percent of voters rejected the proposition. Prop K’s defeat shows that even in local elections, progressive climate campaigns face an uphill battle against fossil fuel interests.
But the urgency of local climate action in Texas remains. While the debate over Proposition K raged in El Paso, lawmakers in Austin advanced legislation that would create new incentives to build natural gas power plants and stifle renewable energy projects.
“We were up against the full force of the fossil fuel industry,” said Sunrise El Paso’s Dominic Chacon. “As well as the power that they have through their donations over elected officials.”
Sunrise El Paso partnered with the statewide advocacy group Ground Game Texas on the campaign. Ground Game Texas also backed Proposition A in San Antonio, which would have decriminalized abortion and marijuana. It, too, was defeated on Saturday.
Opponents of Proposition K said that it was pushed by outside interest groups and the vote indicates the will of El Pasoans.
“I am hopeful last night’s crushing defeat in two major Texas cities sent a message to Ground Game Texas that our communities are not as easily swindled as they had hoped,” Andrea Hutchins, CEO of the El Paso Chamber of Commerce, said on Sunday.
Opposition Campaign Attracts Over $1 Million
Sunrise El Paso drafted the Climate Charter, a 16-section document that would have established a goal of 80 percent clean, renewable energy in El Paso by 2030 and 100 percent by 2045. The charter would also have banned water sales for fossil fuel industry activities outside city limits and required the city to “employ all available efforts” to convert El Paso Electric to municipal ownership.
El Paso, a city of 700,000 people in the northern Chihuahuan Desert, is threatened by extreme heat and water scarcity as the climate continues to change. The city currently has no climate action plan but has recently employed consultants to that end.
After collecting 39,000 signatures during the spring of 2022, Sunrise El Paso submitted the proposition to the City of El Paso and it was added to the ballot in early 2023. Then the opposition campaign began in earnest.
The Chamber of Commerce commissioned a study by Points Consulting of Moscow, Idaho, that found the charter would cost El Paso billions of dollars and kill nearly half the city’s jobs. Energy economists from the University of Texas, Austin debunked these claims, which they said overlooked the benefits of a transition to renewables and were based on faulty assumptions.
That didn’t stop Political Action Committees opposed to Proposition K from repeating the study’s claims in mailers, billboards and television ads that blanketed El Paso in the weeks leading up to the vote. The Chamber of Commerce backed the El Pasoans for Prosperity PAC, which reported $200,000 in donations from El Paso Electric and another $150,000 from Marathon Petroleum, an Ohio-based company that owns an oil refinery in El Paso.
The Consumer Energy Alliance formed an eponymous PAC and contributed $548,250. CEA, the public-facing side of HBW Resources, a Houston-based lobbying firm, includes Shell USA and Occidental Petroleum Corp. among its members. According to an interview with a local business journal, CEA’s Southwest director, Matthew Gonzales, lived for a month in a downtown El Paso hotel while leading the organization’s campaign against Proposition K.
Americans for Prosperity/The Libre Initiative formed a third PAC. Americans for Prosperity is a libertarian conservative political advocacy group funded by the Koch brothers. All told, these PACs reported more than $1 million in contributions to fight Prop K.
Ground Game Texas also formed a PAC to support the proposition. To date, the organization has reported $41,000 in contributions. The national Sunrise Movement also contributed unspecified amounts to the Sunrise El Paso climate charter campaign. According to El Paso Matters, Ground Game Texas received an additional $3,100 for the campaign in small donations from 78 residents of El Paso.
Chacon said the reach of the opposition campaign made it difficult for the climate charter’s message to break through to voters. “We would door knock, and the first thing people would say is, ‘You want to take my gas stove,’” he said. (Some opponents of the climate charter falsely stated the measure would ban gas stoves in El Paso.) “We would really have to break it down,” he said.
“It was an eye-opening experience for the group to see just how easily that misinformation can taint everything,” he said.
Petition Signers Didn’t Turn Out to Vote
Proposition K garnered several endorsements late in the campaign that proponents hoped would motivate voters. Beto O’Rourke, a former Democratic congressman, gubernatorial candidate and El Paso resident, endorsed the proposition in an op-ed on April 29.
El Paso has had consistently low voter turnout—32 percent in November 2022—but Sunrise El Paso was counting on turning out young voters, who are more likely to support action on climate change and had signed the charter petition at high rates. With no city or state-wide races on the ballot, the charter propositions were the biggest draw for the May 6 election.
Demographics reported during early voting, from April 24 to May 2, spelled trouble for Prop K, with older voters turning out in much higher numbers than younger El Pasoans. When the results came in on Saturday night, there was no nail biting: Only 11 percent of eligible voters turned out and Prop K lost by a wide margin.
Out of 49,800 voters, only 9,190 had voted in favor of Proposition K. The final results showed more than 81 percent of voters rejected the measure.
El Paso Electric CEO Kelly Tomblin was among those celebrating the results. “We want to thank the voters who cast their ballot in this election that was so important to the people of El Paso,” she said in a statement.
“The results show that a vast majority of El Pasoans believe Proposition K was the wrong path to move the city towards a clean energy future,” said CEA’s Gonzales.
The results beg the question of why so few of the 39,000 people who signed the petition in support of the climate charter turned out to vote for it. Chacon said that many of the young people who signed the petition may not be identified in databases of likely voters that the group relied on for door knocking and other get-out-the-vote strategies. Chacon said younger voters are also more likely to rent instead of own their homes, so it was more difficult to reach them at a permanent address.
Ground Game Texas’s other high profile campaign this election cycle, the San Antonio Justice Charter, was opposed by 74 percent of voters. The grassroots petition-based model that Ground Game Texas relies on has had some success in smaller Texas cities, but well-funded opposition campaigns in El Paso and San Antonio defeated both progressive ballot measures.
“While today’s result in El Paso is disappointing, the campaign to pass the El Paso Climate Charter was an unprecedented success story,” said Mike Siegel, political director of Ground Game Texas, in a statement.
Proposition K was voted down as the Texas Legislature moves to limit the ability of municipalities to craft their own policies. House Bill 2127, which has been voted out of committee, would prohibit cities and counties from passing regulations that exceed state laws in areas including labor, agriculture and natural resources. Meanwhile, a bill restricting future climate charters, House Bill 4930 and its senate counterpart, have both passed out of committee. The bills would require municipalities to receive approval of a climate charter from “the appropriate state agency with proper jurisdiction to propose a climate charter for a municipality.” Because Texas does not have any state agency charged with climate action, it is unclear how the law would be implemented if passed.
But Chacon remained optimistic that Proposition K was the beginning of a change in El Paso. He said the campaign pushed conversations of climate change that had been stagnant in the border city. “When will we transition to solar? What is the better plan, if not this one?” he asked. “We’re really proud of provoking that conversation and sparking it.”
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