19 May 23
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After claiming for months he wouldn’t negotiate budget cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, Joe Biden is doing just that. In caving to the GOP’s threats, Biden is empowering them to demand even more.
Given the opaque and abstract nature of the debt ceiling, and the fact that there has been so much talk and no action for so long, it would be easy to miss the significance of this remark. But the White House has said for months — and as recently as Friday — that it would not negotiate with Republicans over lifting the debt ceiling. Given the potentially catastrophic results of defaulting, Biden argued, Republicans should not be allowed to extract concessions in exchange for completing one of Congress’s most routine and perfunctory tasks.
But it seems that all this stance resulted in was a lot of wasted time.
While the White House maintained a hard rhetorical line, it apparently did not seriously pursue any plan to give it leverage against the House GOP’s demands. Alternatives like minting more money to pay the debt or citing the 14th Amendment to simply keep paying it absent congressional action were apparently never seriously considered. Both ideas are novel and controversial, but each has the backing of numerous mainstream economists and constitutional scholars.
Having tried no alternatives, Biden had little choice but to start negotiating. Waiting until the last minute likely strengthened Republicans’ hand, as the day the government will default draws closer.
The specifics of the negotiations are still up in the air, but reporting suggests the question is less give-and-take between the two parties, and more about how much Biden will give away. (For example, after months of claiming they wouldn’t negotiate, the new Democratic Party line seems to be that they’re willing to make it more difficult to access food stamps but not Medicaid.) This is hardly surprising, given Biden’s lack of leverage.
Despite Biden’s claims that “this negotiation is about the outlines of the budget, not about whether or not we’re going to (pay our debts),” for all intents and purposes, it is about precisely that. Negotiation on the budget can’t begin in earnest until the government has funded its current debt.
By extracting concessions now in exchange for not tanking the global economy, Republicans have given themselves two chances to make cuts to the budget. The same dynamic between Biden and the House will start all over again when budget negotiations themselves start, but at that point, a significant number of Republican demands will already be baked in as the new starting point.
Of course, this entire conversation assumes that McCarthy can get House Republicans to accept as sufficient whatever concessions Biden gives. Given the far-right Freedom Caucus’s penchant for personally humiliating McCarthy and the draconian rules they established for his speakership, that is far from certain. The GOP’s right wing could easily demand more, or force a government default just to make a point. Why would they stop now that they’ve seen it works?
While Republicans’ tactics are more brazen this year than in many years past, by now the entire fake drama those watching the debt ceiling discussion have seen follows a well-established script: Republicans seize the political initiative and demand cuts to both taxes on the rich and virtually all social spending; most Democrats say that would be wrong but do little of consequence to stop it and the resulting negotiations are over how much of Republicans’ agenda to implement. When it’s over, everyone pats themselves on the back for finding a “bipartisan compromise.” Biden himself has a recurring role in this decades-long serial drama.
The resulting slow grind of austerity — and, with it, the sense that things keep getting worse without a clear explanation why — was one factor in the rise of Donald Trump, and of the far right in general. When it is in one party’s political interest to degrade even the basic functions of government, the way to fight back is to refuse to play the game. That’s exactly what Biden said he was going to do the past six months. But in the end, it was the rest of us who got played.
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Family members and neighbors of the Ahmadi family around the wreckage from a U.S. drone strike that killed 10 civilians inside a residential compound in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021. (photo: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)
Some survivors of the 2021 drone strike are struggling in California as they wait for the U.S. to make good on a promised condolence payment.
Weeks after the attack, which targeted an aid worker whom intelligence officials had mistaken for someone else, the U.S. made a public commitment to condolence payments and pledged to help survivors relocate. With the help of U.S. officials, some of those survivors made it to California last year, including two of the aid worker’s brothers, Emal and Romal Ahmadi, and their families.
As they struggle to adapt to life in a new country, however, they feel abandoned by the U.S. government, according to volunteers and community groups that have assisted them. One volunteer recently started a fundraiser to help cover some family members’ living costs while they wait for the U.S. government to deliver on its promise.
“They are living day to day in a very stressful environment of bills, and making sure they have their rent, and do they have enough food, and why did the utility bill go up this month?” Melissa Walton, who regularly visits members of the family, told The Intercept. “It’s stressful, and they didn’t ask for any of this, to have to leave their country and come to a different country and start over.”
The Pentagon declined to comment, citing the family’s privacy. John Gurley, Sylvia Costelloe, and Joanna Naples-Mitchell, attorneys representing the Ahmadi brothers, said they are having ongoing discussions with the U.S. government but declined to further discuss the case.
“Now that Emal and Romal Ahmadi’s families have been resettled in the United States, we look forward to productive discussions with the Department of Defense regarding the compensation promised to them,” the lawyers wrote in a statement. “Our clients arrived in the United States penniless, after suffering unimaginable losses. For that reason, a community volunteer has launched a fundraiser to help them meet their basic needs while our confidential discussions with the U.S. government continue.”
Zuhal Bahaduri, executive director of the 5ive Pillars Organization, an Afghan American-led group that was established following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to support the thousands of refugees resettling in the U.S., said the Ahmadi family’s trauma compounds the many challenges facing the 76,000 Afghans who have arrived in the U.S. over the last two years.
“There’s a lot of hurt and a lot of anger and a lot of frustration. The country that is responsible for the death of their children has helped them out by getting them here, but they do not feel fully supported,” Bahaduri told The Intercept.
“I don’t understand why it’s taking this long,” she added, referring to the condolence payments “Do they think that all they had to do was relocate the family and that’s it? That that’s where their responsibility ends?”
A “Horrible Mistake”
When she offered to drive Romal and his wife Arezo to pick up donated clothes and household items for their temporary, unfurnished apartment, Walton was warned not to gush too much over their newborn baby boy.
Hadis, now 8 months old, was not the couple’s first child, Walton was told: Their three older children, 7-year-old Arwin, 6-year-old Benyamin, and 2-year-old Aayat, were all killed in the Kabul drone strike.
The strike was the U.S. government’s final act before withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan after losing its two-decade war there. The announced withdrawal precipitated the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government and the Taliban’s takeover of the capital, which led to days of chaos as tens of thousands of Afghans rushed to flee the country. Three days before the drone strike, the Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, had carried out a suicide bombing that killed more than 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops outside the Kabul airport.
Zemari Ahmadi, an electrical engineer working for a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization and the primary breadwinner for his extended family, had been driving colleagues to work and unloading water canisters from his white Toyota Corolla all day, on August 29, 2021, as U.S. intelligence officials, believing that a second attack near the airport was imminent, tracked his movements for hours. The officials flagged his “erratic route” and concluded that the car contained explosives, according to an internal review obtained by the New York Times earlier this year. An American MQ-9 Reaper drone shot a Hellfire missile at his car just as Zemari arrived home and as a group of children from his family rushed outside to greet him. The California-based Nutrition … Education International, Zemari’s employer, did not respond to a request for comment.
Within hours of the drone strike, U.S. officials announced that they had successfully thwarted an attack but made no mention of civilian casualties, even as it later emerged that intelligence analysts had observed children on the scene moments beforehand. In the following days, as family members, journalists, and Zemari’s employer shared evidence that the drone strike had targeted the wrong person, U.S. officials defended the action, which a Pentagon official called “a righteous strike.”
The Defense Department did not admit to its mistake until more than two weeks later, after video reconstruction of the strike raised serious questions about its version of events. In a rare acknowledgment of responsibility, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin conceded that Zemari had no connection to ISIS-K and that he and his family were all innocent victims of a “horrible mistake.” Later, then-commander of U.S. Central Command, Marine Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, took personal responsibility for the error. “As the combatant commander, I am fully responsible for this strike and its tragic outcome,” he said.
By October, the Pentagon promised to compensate the survivors — but only after family members told reporters that they had not been contacted by U.S. officials yet.
Romal and Arezo were the first to arrive in the U.S. last summer, followed a few months later by another brother, Emal, his wife, Royeena, and their 8-year old daughter Ada. (Emal and Royeena’s other daughter, 3-year-old Malika, was killed in the strike.) Other relatives have since joined them in California, although some remain in Afghanistan or in refugee camps in Kosovo and Qatar.
But life in the country responsible for their family’s tragedy has been difficult for the Ahmadis. “They have put a lot of trust in America and the U.S. government,” said Walton. “They had a lot of faith that once they got to the U.S. they would be safe and secure and stable. And that’s not where they are at.”
U.S. officials have not publicly committed to a specific timeline or amount to compensate the Ahmadis, but in the past, condolence payments for families of Afghan victims ranged between $131 and $35,000, with most around a few thousand dollars. Walton noted that the family left Afghanistan in part because the public announcement of the condolence payments put their safety at risk in a country that was plunged into a deep economic crisis after the Taliban takeover — even as the payments had not materialized.
Like tens of thousands of Afghans who have resettled in the U.S. since 2021, the Ahmadis found that the 90 days of refugee support services they received upon arrival fell short of addressing many of their immediate needs, let alone helping them land on their feet. A federal refugee cash assistance program covers $325 per adult and $200 per child monthly for eight months, hardly making a dent in the exorbitant Bay Area rents and cost of living they are now facing.
Most of the Ahmadis don’t speak English. Walton, who communicates with them with the help of an interpreter, described their experiences to The Intercept. One of them was robbed in broad daylight outside his Oakland apartment and lost all his documents. There was no space for Ada, the 8-year-old, in the school closest to the family, so she walks to a school further away, as her family has no car. A host of resources — including counseling and mental health support services — exists in theory but is largely inaccessible in practice because of overwhelmed agencies, an intricate bureaucracy made even more intractable by language barriers, and because it’s difficult for family members to get around on their own.
Meanwhile, the trauma from the drone strike lingers. Romal’s barebones apartment is decorated only with a photo of the 10 relatives killed in the strike — a reminder of the tragedy that forced his family to leave home.
“He keeps saying, ‘I lost all my kids,’” said Bahaduri, of the 5ive Pillars Organization. “He hasn’t had a chance to deal with that, but on top of that, he has to find a way to make ends meet now, so it’s trauma after trauma, one crisis after another crisis.”
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The civil liberties organizations are praising the supreme court decision saying protecting Section 230 is essential to enabling free speech on the internet. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP)
Justices avoid weighing in on law which shields internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by their users
The cases had been closely watched for their impact on a federal law known as section 230, which protects internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by their users, a law that – if successfully challenged – could have upended the rules of the internet.
The justices delivered a victory to Twitter in the first case, reversing a lower court’s ruling to revive a lawsuit that attempted to hold the platform liable under an anti-terrorism law. American relatives of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian man killed in a 2017 attack during New Year’s celebration in an Istanbul nightclub claimed by the Islamic State militant group, alleged Twitter failed to stop the militant organization from using the platform.
In the second case, the justices returned to a lower court lawsuit against Google, the owner of YouTube, brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American college student who was killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris in 2015. The lower court had thrown out the lawsuit. The family wanted to sue Google for YouTube videos they said helped attract IS recruits and radicalize them.
Civil liberties organizations are praising the supreme court decision saying protecting section 230 is essential to enabling free speech on the internet.
“We are pleased that the court did not address or weaken section 230, which remains an essential part of the architecture of the modern internet and will continue to enable user access to online platforms,” said David Greene, director at Electronic Frontier Foundation Civil Liberties.
However, some say the supreme court avoided answering important questions when delivering their opinions. “Questions about the scope of platforms’ immunity under section 230 are consequential and will certainly come up soon in other cases,” said Anna Diakun, staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
Google said the court’s decision would reassure the “companies, scholars, content creators and civil society organizations who joined with us in this case”.
“We’ll continue our work to safeguard free expression online, combat harmful content and support businesses and creators who benefit from the internet,” said Halimah DeLaine Prado, the Google general counsel.
The outcome is, at least for now, a victory for the tech industry, which predicted havoc on the internet if Google or Twitter lost. But the high court remains free to take up the issue in a later case.
In the lawsuit against Twitter, the relatives of Alassaf, who was killed in the Istanbul massacre on 1 January 2017, along with 38 others, accused the company of aiding and abetting the IS by failing to police the platform for the group’s accounts or posts.
The case hinged on whether the family’s claims sufficiently alleged that the company knowingly provided “substantial assistance” to an “act of international terrorism” that would allow the relatives to maintain their suit and seek damages under the anti-terrorism law. After a judge dismissed the lawsuit, a San Francisco appeal court in 2021 allowed it to proceed, concluding that Twitter had refused to take “meaningful steps” to prevent IS’s use of the platform.
The conservative justice Clarence Thomas, who authored the ruling, said the allegations made by the plaintiffs were insufficient because they “point to no act of encouraging, soliciting or advising the commission” of the attack.
In an amicus brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, EFF, the Knight Foundation and others, the civil liberties organizations argued that holding Twitter liable under the Anti-Terrorism Act would chill free speech by making platforms more “risk-averse and more susceptible to overly cautious moderation”.
“Given the vast amounts of speech that online intermediaries handle every day … intermediaries would be likely to use necessarily blunt content moderation tools to over-restrict speech or to impose blanket bans on certain topics, speakers, or specific types of content,” the brief read.
Chris Marchese, an attorney with NetChoice, a technology industry group that counts Twitter, Meta and Google as members, said that imposing liability on services such as Twitter for harmful content that falls through the crack “would have disincentivized them from hosting any user-generated content”.
“Even with the best moderation systems available, a service like Twitter alone cannot screen every single piece of user-generated content with 100% accuracy,” said Marchese.
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John Boyd Rivers may have unknowingly committed voter fraud after being told by a county representative that he could register to vote. (photo: Octavio Jones/ProPublica)
John Boyd Rivers says he was misled by an election official who urged him to vote for the first time in 2020. Now he’s been found guilty of voter fraud
Judge James Colaw read the verdict on the first charge: not guilty. Then he read the verdict on the second: guilty. Rivers stood quietly as he listened, a small hole visible in the red long-sleeve shirt he wore to court over khaki pants and work boots.
It was a result that was unimaginable to Rivers, 45, who voted for the first time in his life in 2020.
Rivers became interested in doing so in February of that year when he was being held in the county jail on a different charge. One day, TJ Pyche, the outreach director at the local elections office, came to his unit with voter registration forms. An eager employee just a few weeks shy of his 25th birthday, Pyche told the inmates that Florida had recently changed its voting laws, making it easier for those with felony convictions to cast a ballot.
Rivers remembers asking Pyche if he could vote while in jail on a violation of his probation. As Rivers remembers it, Pyche said that he could as long as his prior convictions weren’t for murder or sex offenses – crimes that result in the permanent loss of voting rights in Florida. Rivers hadn’t been convicted of those crimes, so he filled out a voter registration application, registering as a Republican, and gave it to Pyche.
When Rivers eventually received a voter registration card in the mail, he believed he was eligible to vote. And he was thrilled, as it made him feel as if he was a part of something.
That fall, he cast his first ballot in the presidential election.
Nearly two years later, Rivers was indicted for voter fraud along with nine other people who registered with Pyche.
In dozens of cases in Florida, prosecutors have filed charges against people with felony convictions who believed they were eligible to vote, received voter registration cards in the mail and then later turned out to be ineligible because of their criminal history.
Many of those cases are being handled by a new statewide unit focused on voter fraud created by Governor Ron DeSantis. But no local prosecutor has brought more charges than Brian Kramer, the elected state attorney in Alachua county, who is prosecuting 10 people, including Rivers.
Voting advocates have decried the prosecutions across Florida as intimidating, designed to dissuade people who are uncertain about their eligibility from voting. And they are particularly alarmed at those prosecutions enabled by Pyche, an official elections office employee.
“They set up about a dozen people, essentially, set them up, sent them a voter registration card, encouraged them to register, sent them a voter registration card, and then when they registered, the supervisor of elections office – nobody’s charged from [that office],” said Andrew Darling, Rivers’ lawyer. “It sends a message that we don’t want you voting.”
“American states have a long, ugly history of using law enforcement to intimidate and suppress voters,” said Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who specializes in restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions. “This is clearly what is happening in Florida. We should be paying attention because other states may follow suit.”
Kramer, a Republican elected in 2020, dismissed those concerns. He noted his office has started a program to help those with felonies figure out their voting eligibility, though he acknowledged few people had utilized it.
“My job is simply to enforce the law as it’s written by the legislature and if it has a deterrent effect, that’s fine,” he said in an interview in his office in downtown Gainesville.
“All prosecutions are intimidating.”
Rivers’ case was just the second of the voter fraud cases in Florida to make it to trial. A central issue in the case was whether he knew he had to repay all of his outstanding debts related to prior criminal cases before he could vote. For the last few years, that repayment requirement has been the subject of intense scrutiny in Florida.
In 2018, voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment allowing people with felonies to vote once they completed their sentence. But in 2019, Republicans in the legislature imposed the new requirement that fines and fees would have to be paid off in order to vote.
Voting rights groups sued, saying the measure was essentially a poll tax. Florida did not have a centralized way to check voters’ eligibility, so it would be extremely difficult for anyone to figure out what they owe. A federal judge struck down the law in 2019, but that ruling was later overturned by a federal appellate court, upholding the law. When the US supreme court allowed the law to go into effect for the 2020 election, Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying Florida had created a “pay-to-vote scheme” that would block people from voting because they were poor.
“The voting cases happening in Alachua county and across the state put a human face on our broken election system,” said Neil Volz, the deputy director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the main group that pushed a 2018 constitutional amendment expanding voting rights for people with felonies. “The people of Florida deserve better.”
When Rivers registered, he owed thousands of dollars in debts related to prior criminal cases.
Pyche testified that when he visited the jail, he repeatedly said that anyone who wanted to vote had to have completed their sentence and paid off all fines, fees and restitution. A jail employee who accompanied him on his visits corroborated what he said.
But Rivers says he never heard anything about fines and fees. An informational flyer that Pyche carried was also confusing – it said someone could vote when they completed all terms of their sentence, but didn’t specify repaying outstanding debts. Pyche testified that he could not recall meeting Rivers or what specifically he said on the day Rivers registered.
“He didn’t follow the rules,” David Margulies, the prosecutor who handled the case, said during the trial. “Voting requires effort. Citizenship requires effort. John Rivers did not display effort.”
Rivers faced two criminal charges. One for illegally signing up to vote and a second for illegally voting. Both were punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
Rivers’ attorneys argued that he couldn’t be held liable for illegally registering because he hadn’t known about the requirement that he had to repay fines and fees in order to vote. Once he received his voter registration card in the mail, no one had told him he was ineligible.
The local elections office only reviewed his application to make sure that it was completely filled out before issuing him a voter registration card. Under Florida law, the secretary of state’s office is supposed to review all new applications to determine someone’s eligibility. In Rivers’ case, it didn’t raise any issues.
There was much confusion over the law at the time, Kim Barton, the county supervisor of elections, testified during the trial. The secretary of state’s office was backlogged in reviewing applications.
To complicate matters further, in April 2020, after Rivers received his voter registration card in the mail, he pleaded guilty to a new felony and was placed on probation, once again losing his voting rights. But he still didn’t receive any notice from the state telling him that and voted in November.
It wasn’t until October 2021, nearly a year later, that the state notified the Alachua county elections office that Rivers was ineligible and removed him from the rolls.
Prosecutors maintained that Pyche had informed Rivers about the outstanding debt obligations and that it was Rivers’ responsibility to know his eligibility. “They gave a voter registration card to everyone. That doesn’t mean their rights have been restored,” Margulies, the prosecutor, said.
Had he understood that he needed to repay outstanding debts, Rivers says he wouldn’t have cast a ballot. He can’t afford to repay the thousands of dollars he owes – he is out of work and has eight children. His driver’s license is suspended and he had to rely on his lawyer to get to and from court on Tuesday.
“I can’t give what I don’t have,” he said.
At the end of the trial on Tuesday, the seven-member jury – three white women and four white men – deliberated for around an hour and a half. It had little trouble reaching consensus, said Janet Heern, a 64-year-old retiree who served as the jury foreperson.
When it came to registering, they believed Rivers was genuinely confused. The language on the voter registration form wasn’t clear and they took Rivers at his word when he said that he believed it to be an application that would be rejected if he was ineligible. She also said Rivers should have been able to rely on guidance from Pyche, who was in a position of authority.
But when it came to actual voting, the jurors were less forgiving. After he pleaded guilty to the April felony, Rivers was on house arrest. It wasn’t plausible to Heern and the other jurors that he would continue to think he could vote.
“I vote all the time and I take it seriously. It’s a right but you have to have some responsibility too,” Heern said. She added that she didn’t think Rivers should have been prosecuted in the first place. If prosecutors were going to go after Rivers, she said, they should also bring charges against the supervisor of elections.
After the verdict, Colaw turned to figuring out a sentence. On the one hand, he was concerned that Rivers had been acting at the request of the office of the supervisor of elections. On the other hand, Rivers had a lengthy criminal history and had repeatedly violated his probation.
Earlier in the trial, Margulies dismissed the suggestion that Pyche and Barton bore responsibility for registering Rivers. “Poor TJ,” he said. “He was trying to do a good thing for the community.”
Barton said she still thought her office did a good job running the program, even though 10 people had been charged with voter fraud. When she was asked whether her office would continue the jail outreach program, she took a short pause before saying softly: “I think I will.”
“My office met its obligations per Florida statute and cooperated with the state of attorney’s office and provided all information requested,” Barton said in a statement. “Upon making a determination about Mr Rivers’ potential ineligibility, we followed the procedures for removal … My office remains committed to providing information to and working with any citizens who wants to exercise their right to vote.”
Ultimately, Colaw sentenced Rivers to two years of supervised probation, requiring him to check in with a probation officer every month, as well as 50 hours of community service.
Rivers, who had been stoic for nearly all of the trial, quietly wiped away tears as Colaw read the sentence. It wasn’t the worst possible punishment. But in the lead-up to the trial, prosecutors had offered him an even better deal – one year of unsupervised probation – if he pleaded guilty to one of the charges. Rivers refused.
“I wasn’t going to get rolled over this time,” he said.
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Opponents of a bill that critics say would harm transgender youth protest outside the New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord. (photo: Holly Ramer/AP)
Laws restricting transgender rights have piled up in recent months, underscoring likely 2024 election battle lines.
The issue is sure to factor heavily into the 2024 elections as Republicans seek to portray Democrats as out of touch with the values of large swathes of the country and to fend off challenges from further-right candidates within their own party.
Most recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to announce his bid to be the Republican presidential nominee, signed bills that ban gender-affirming care for minors, restrict chosen pronoun use in schools and force people to use the bathroom corresponding with their sex assigned at birth.
In a statement following the signing, Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said the measures are “denying transgender children and adults access to life-saving, best-practice medical care [and] contradicting guidelines recommended by every major medical association – representing over 1.3 million doctors in the United States”.
Every major US medical group, including the American Medical Association, has opposed the bans and supported the medical care for youth when administered appropriately. Advocates have long warned the restrictions further marginalise transgender youth and threaten their health.
Recent legislation has gone even farther than that signed by DeSantis. A law signed by Oklahoma’s governor at the beginning of the month made it a felony to provide gender-affirming medical care to minors.
All told, 17 states have recently passed restrictions on such care – which includes things like puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender youths. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, South Dakota and West Virginia.
Only three states had passed such restrictions prior to 2023.
It’s part of a wider trend, according to the Human Rights Campaign. It said there have been more than 500 bills introduced by Republicans affecting LGBTQ people in 2023. At least 48 have passed.
Those numbers are up from 315 bills introduced and 29 passed in 2022.
Like the laws signed by DeSantis, many of these bills target every aspect of a transgender person’s life. Indiana has enacted a law requiring teachers to tell parents when students ask to be called by a new name or different pronoun. North Dakota has approved a law that lets public-school teachers and state employees ignore using a transgender person’s preferred pronouns.
Others seek to ban transgender girls from participating in girls sports, require transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender assigned at birth or prevent transgender people from changing their sex on identity documents.
More restrictions are expected soon with bills banning gender-affirming care for minors recently reaching the desk of Republican governors in Missouri and Texas and the Nebraska legislature expected to pass a bill on Friday.
Rights groups have responded with a raft of lawsuits. On Thursday, Oklahoma’s governor agreed to not enforce his state’s ban while opponents of the law seek a preliminary injunction against it in federal court. Federal judges have also blocked enforcement of laws in Alabama and Arkansas.
President Joe Biden’s administration has also weighed in. Last month, the Department of Justice sued Tennessee to challenge its Republican-backed ban on gender-affirming care for minors, one of several states where it has filed a complaint or supported lawsuits.
A group of Florida parents has sued in federal court to try to stop rules put in place by the state’s Boards of Medicine and Osteopathic Medicine that have largely prohibited providing gender-affirming care to minors.
They added the latest law signed by DeSantis to their challenge, writing in an emergency appeal that the restriction deprives parents of the “fundamental right to make medical decisions for their children” while causing transgender youth to “suffer a cascade of mental and physical injuries”.
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Migrants wait to be processed by U.S. Border Patrol after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in Yuma, Arizona, July 2022. (photo: Allison Dinner/AFP)
If the Biden administration wants to stop the mass displacement that is leading enormous numbers of Cuban and Venezuelan migrants to the US-Mexico border, it should end the sanctions that have made life in those countries all but impossible for average people.
The pandemic recession had a devastating impact on Latin American economies. But certain countries have seen their recovery stymied by unilateral US financial and trade restrictions. In 2022, 42 percent of US asylum requests came from Cuba and Venezuela alone — countries that are the target of brutal US sanctions.
If the Biden administration were serious about tackling the roots of today’s mass displacement, it would start by ending the sanctions that have made life in those countries all but impossible for working people.
Biden’s Betrayal
Despite campaign promises to the contrary, the Biden administration has continued Donald Trump’s war against migrants and refugees. The current White House’s repressive turn includes deploying 1,500 troops to the southern border and implementing a sweeping asylum ban that promises to put hundreds of thousands of people in harm’s way. In April, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also launched a two-month joint “surge campaign” with Panama and Colombia to block the movement of migrants from South America and beyond through the perilous Darién Gap between the two countries.
Biden extracted commitments from Mexico to accept thirty thousand Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan deportees from the United States each month while allowing the same number to enter the United States via a new humanitarian parole program for qualifying migrants with financial sponsors. Absent Title 42, undocumented migrants entering the United States are now “presumed ineligible” for asylum and likely to be expelled under Title 8, which leaves them subject to a five-year reentry ban and potential criminal prosecution.
“We are conducting dozens of removal flights each week, and we continue to increase them,” DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the press on May 11. “Just yesterday, we worked with the Mexican government to expel nearly one thousand Venezuelans who did not take advantage of our available lawful pathways to enter the United States.”
These measures point to the changing face of irregular migration at the US-Mexico border. So far in the current fiscal year, South American and Caribbean nationals have surpassed both Central Americans and Mexicans combined in Customs and Border Protection’s euphemistically termed “enforcement encounters.” Chief among them are migrants from Cuba and Venezuela escaping unprecedented economic crises that are the deliberate creation of US policy.
Cuba’s Burden
In addition to sustaining Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, Biden has preserved most of his predecessor’s “maximum pressure” strategy of economic warfare against perceived US enemies. These sanctions have not succeeded in toppling targeted regimes, but they have forced millions of people from their homes.
US sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela are part of a failed bipartisan project of regime change. In the Cuban case, this project dates all the way back to the country’s 1959 revolution. The US record of interventions in Cuba is notorious, including the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 and innumerable assassination attempts against the late Fidel Castro over the decades.
The centerpiece of US policy, however, is the enduring blockade that has hamstrung Cuba’s economic development for more than sixty years. According to UN calculations, the blockade had cost the country over $130 billion by 2018.
After a short-lived easing under Barack Obama, Trump redoubled the restrictions. Starting in 2017, the new strategy included 243 new measures that eliminated Cubans’ access to legal forms of US travel and immigration as well as to critical sources of foreign income for Cuban families and the state.
The Trump sanctions included the withdrawal of US consular services in Cuba, which removed visa and family reunification programs. The measures also prohibited US remittances from Cuban immigrants to their family members on the island. Those transfers fell by nearly $1.8 billion between 2019 and 2021, cutting off a critical income supplement as tourism and other industries ground to a halt during the pandemic. The redesignation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” furthermore, blocked the country from international financial relief.
Today those stifling sanctions, combined with the impacts of the pandemic, have created a crisis not seen on the island since the fall of the Soviet Union. As a result, Cubans have been displaced in record numbers. Border Patrol registered over 220,000 “encounters” with Cubans at the US Southern Border in 2022. That year, nearly 46,000 Cubans applied for US asylum, up from 2,800 in 2021.
Biden loosened some of the consular and remittance restrictions last year, but international financial restrictions remain. “Until the United States alleviates the punishing blockade that is suffocating the Cuban people,” writes Helen Yaffe in CounterPunch, “economic hardship will continue to drive Cuban emigration.”
Venezuela’s Crisis
US sanctions against Venezuela date to the years following the 1998 election of leftist president Hugo Chávez, beginning with a 2006 arms embargo after an unsuccessful 2002 US-backed coup d’état under the George W. Bush administration.
Under Trump, sanctions were broadened to restrict oil exports and freeze Venezuelan state assets abroad, some of which were transferred to the Venezuelan opposition. Oil production plunged as a result, depriving the country of billions in foreign exchange needed for essential imports. According to a May 2023 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), export reductions have cost the country between $13 and $21 billion in revenue per year.
“The resulting decline in oil exports severely circumscribed the ability of a traditionally import-dependent economy to buy imports of food as well as intermediate and capital goods for its agricultural sector, driving the economy into a major humanitarian crisis,” the CEPR paper found. “By contributing to lowering the country’s oil production, sanctions also contributed to lowering per capita income and living standards, and are a key driver of the country’s health crisis, including its increase in child and adult mortality.”
A 2019 study by Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs linked US sanctions to forty thousand excess deaths in Venezuela in 2017–18. “These sanctions would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions,” the authors concluded.
The crisis has fomented a staggering exodus from the country. Since 2015, over seven million Venezuelans have abandoned their homes. Since the onset of the pandemic, more and more have traveled toward the United States. Venezuelan applications for US asylum increased from 9,200 to 35,000 between 2021 and 2022, with Border Patrol documenting over 187,000 “encounters” with Venezuelans at the US-Mexico border last year.
The US Treasury Department modified some of the oil restrictions late last year to allow Chevron to resume operations in Venezuela as a gesture toward reopening negotiations between the government of Nicolás Maduro and the opposition. But Trump’s punishing “maximum pressure” strategy remains otherwise intact. In April, even the opposition’s new US envoy, Fernando Blasi, called on Biden to lift the sanctions or be responsible for “an extremely sad destiny” for his country.
Enough Is Enough
On May 10, twenty-one Democrats in Congress published a letter to Biden calling for the lifting of sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela: “We urge you to act swiftly to lift the failed and indiscriminate economic sanctions that were imposed by the prior administration, and engage in a broader review of preexisting sanctions policies that your administration inherited, which exacerbate hardship for innocent civilians and serve as additional push-factors for migration.”
“Rather than re-imposing Trump-era deterrence policies, we must demonstrate a sharp contrast with these approaches by showing compassion towards migrants and upholding our asylum obligations, while simultaneously seeking to curb the broad-based sanctions that contribute to widespread suffering and spur increased migration,” the representatives wrote.
The factors driving mass migration are complex, and they vary across intersecting individual, social, and national contexts. Decisions to flee economic hardship are often compounded by motives that might include family reunification, ecological crisis, gender violence, or political persecution.
In the case of Cuba and Venezuela, however, there is a clear US policy path to alleviating the suffering of millions. By lifting US sanctions, Biden could begin to repair the historic US debt to these nations and help create the conditions for their citizens to make their lives where they wish. After all, migration is a right. It should not be an obligation.
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Black-footed cats, the smallest and also one of the rarest wildcat species in Africa, have been assessed for The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species in 2016. (photo: Alex Sliwa)
However, their most notable characteristic may have contributed to their decline. They are tiny, so receive little notice from conservationists. Full grown, they tip the scale at just 1-2 kilograms (2.2-4.4 pounds). As Africa’s smallest feline, they’re too tiny to even trigger a conventional camera trap. While the species was first described by science in 1824 (but only from skins, not a live specimen), it went largely unstudied for more than 150 years.
“Black-footed cats fly below the radar,” says zoologist Beryl Wilson, project manager for the Black-footed Cat Working Group, an NGO. Shy, secretive and very hard to find, F. nigripes remained one of the continent’s least-studied nocturnal mammals until the 1990s.
And without detailed data, determining a species’ conservation status and, more importantly, understanding how best to protect them, is near impossible. And that’s the fate that befell the black-footed cat until a sole researcher came to its rescue.
It took a die-hard researcher to study a species this small, enigmatic and mistakenly thought to be insignificant, Wilson says. You need someone, she adds, who can stick to it with “German tenacity.” For F. nigripes, that scientist is Alex Sliwa, a curator at Cologne Zoo in western Germany.
“My research on black-footed cats has guided my life for 31 years,” he says. That passion has led to the uncovering of much of what we know about the species today.
A lifetime of dedication
Sliwa’s interest in black-footed cats started young. On a trip to Berlin Zoo at age 11, he peeked into an enclosure at a small cat. It looked cartoon-like: cute, with a broad head and short legs, tiny nose and large, rounded ears. The stocky body was covered with bold, black spots and stripes — good camouflage in the dappled nocturnal shadows the species roams.
Young Sliwa was intrigued and motivated to learn more, but remembers not finding much reading material on the cats beyond a basic description like the one he could gain himself from just observing that single caged animal.
Years later, in January 1991, Sliwa — now training as an ecologist — headed to a little-known nature reserve called Benfontein, just outside Kimberley in South Africa’s Northern Cape province. He headed there to do his Ph.D. fieldwork on aardwolves (Proteles cristatus), a species of hyena. But Benfontein was also rumored to be an enclave for the elusive black-footed cat.
Sliwa’s nocturnal fieldwork placed him ideally to spot the tiny felids, and over the roughly 600 nights he spent there, he caught erratic glimpses of Africa’s smallest cat. The young researcher tried to habituate the animals to his vehicle until eventually they allowed him to follow them to their dens — mostly disused springhare burrows or hollowed-out termite mounds. These dens had earned the cats the descriptive Afrikaans nickname miershooptier — “the anthill tiger.” In 1992, he managed to take his first F. nigripes photo.
Bolstered and fascinated, Sliwa returned to Berlin to secure funding for a formal research project from cat-loving donors connected with the zoo community. Almost no research had been done on the species, and even basic facts such as its home range, territory, habitat and reproductive habits were unknown.
He knew he had to start with the very basics, he remembers, and his first big question was what did this diminutive cat eat?
‘Driving … from sunset to sunrise through a ditch’
Sliwa got his funding and went back to South Africa in 1993. He planned to fit two cats at Benfontein with radio collars. But to gather the first radio telemetry data ever on the species, he needed help, so got in touch with Wilson, then a knowledgeable zoologist at McGregor Museum in Kimberley, not far from Benfontein.
At the time, neither of them knew what such a task would entail, and it turned out to be a real baptism by fire. Following a black-footed cat in the field with a pickup truck is “like driving in first and second gear from sunset to sunrise through a ditch,” Wilson says.
The small cats can travel between 8 and 30 kilometers (5 and 19 miles) a night, zigzagging fast ahead of a research vehicle. Reputed to be harder than tracking a tiger in dense rainforest, black-footed cat fieldwork is “very intense,” Sliwa explains. You have to be focused, know what you’re doing, wear gloves and long sleeves, and expect to be bitten and scratched.
Undaunted, he did the job. In 1994, he published a paper on the diet and feeding behaviors of the black-footed cat and its extraordinary nocturnal hunting activities. He had observed the felid killing a vertebrate every 50 minutes, mostly rodents and small birds. They could devour a lark in minutes, leaving only feathers and legs behind.
The cats, the researcher learned, were able to spot birds in total darkness, and jump up to 2 meters (6 feet) to catch and kill their prey mid-air with their powerful jaws. Their sharp night vision is perfectly adapted — enhanced by a mirror-like layer behind the retina (the tapetum lucidum) that makes double use of minimal available light, a trait common to all cat species. “In relation to their body size, the black-footed cat must have one of the largest-sized eyes of all cats,” Sliwa says.
The researcher also observed the cats hunting, and repeatedly failing to catch, springbok calves (Antidorcas marsupialis). They failed every time when the calves stood up, suddenly becoming taller than the tiny cat stalking them. “It has a hell of an ego,” Sliwa says in admiration of the species’ tenacity.
Achieving conservation status
Sliwa continued publishing often and widely about F. nigripes, tremendously growing the literature and building on awareness and interest among his peers, while securing funding.
His attempts at convincing people of the work’s importance paid off. In 1995, he was approached by the Cat Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, to become the organization’s reference person for the species.
Thanks to the growing body of data (Sliwa himself is lead author on nearly 50 studies surveying the species), the black-footed cat went from being listed as a species of least concern (since there was no scientific backing for any other assessment result) to vulnerable on the IUCN Red List — based on its rarity and relatively restricted and patchy distribution at low densities across Southern Africa. Today, the IUCN Red List puts its estimated population at fewer than 10,000 adult individuals.
Sliwa continued traveling to South Africa and gathering data until, in 1999, now a husband and father, he decided to focus on life back in Germany. There he became the curator at Wuppertal Zoo, taking over the international studbook for black-footed cats and the European breeding program in the process.
“For a couple of years, I essentially stopped working with black-footed cats in the wild,” he says.
The captive cats presented different, unique challenges. They’re notoriously hard to breed and prone to AA amyloidosis, a disorder that leads to catastrophic kidney failure. Healthy black-footed cats don’t drink water, Wilson explains. Their kidneys are highly effective at recycling fluid in semiarid climes, but the moment even something minor goes wrong with that specialized organ, health problems cascade, she says.
In 2004, two researchers on the lookout for a solution to the captivity problem contacted Sliwa for help collecting health and epidemiological data and sperm samples from wild cats, to find out if they were disease free, and if their genes could be introduced to captive cats.
The next year, he was back in Benfontein and fitting radio collars with Wilson as part of the team. The collaboration led to the formal establishment of the Black-footed Cat Working Group in 2008. The BFCWG’s aim is to conserve the rare species by furthering awareness and conducting multidisciplinary research on its biology.
Taking the work forward
With the establishment of the BFCWG “we could keep the work going,” says project leader Sliwa. Aside from the ongoing, long-term research at Benfontein, annual captures were also conducted at two additional locations in the Upper Karoo region of Northern Cape province from 2009 to 2018, and on farmland in Grünau, Namibia (a location thought to be at the lower rainfall range of where the small cat can survive). Taken altogether, the team’s research on the black-footed cat is now the longest-running small cat project in the world — quite a distinction for an animal once almost unknown to researchers.
But today, Sliwa says he would still be more surprised to hear someone had seen a black-footed cat, rather than they hadn’t, even though the veil over their secretive lives has been largely lifted; today, an informative YouTube video details the cat’s once obscure life cycle.
Now, scientists know that the black-footed cat roams more widely than most other small cats, possibly due to the low availability of prey in their semiarid home range, combined with the large amounts they need to eat to stay warm at night. They’re solitary, only keeping company to mate or to mother kittens. These behaviors may also explain why they do badly, paired and in small enclosures, at zoos, says BFCWG program manager Wilson.
In the wild, birthing coincides with the rainy season when prey is abundant. Mothers can have two litters annually, with one to four kittens, each weighing just 60 to 88 grams (between 2 and 3 ounces) at birth.
Adult animals hunt about 70% of the night — like a cat on steroids, Wilson says. Males kill larger prey, while the smaller, more agile females are more successful in catching small birds. Overall, they mostly eat large-eared mice. In turn, they are mostly killed by predators such as black-backed jackals (Lupulella mesomelas) and caracals (Caracal caracal) or, even in the wild, die due to AA amyloidosis.
The species still keeps some secrets: Sliwa notes that the population total of 10,000 mature individuals displayed on the IUCN website is nothing more than a modeled estimate: The numbers “probably fluctuate between a couple of thousand and more,” as populations rise and fall with rainfall patterns and human impacts, he says.
A lack of connective wildlife corridors linking isolated patches of habitat can result in pockets of black-footed cats dying out after torrential rain or extreme drought. The failure of those cutoff pockets to exchange genetic material is also a serious problem, Wilson adds.
Attempts to impregnate a captive cat with “wild” sperm remain unsuccessful, but researchers are building up a collection of frozen sperm samples to protect against loss of the species’ genetic diversity.
“Contrary to the situation for most small cat species, mortalities of [wild] black-footed cats in our study areas were mostly attributed to natural causes rather than human-related causes,” Sliwa says. They mostly die because they are killed by predators or complications due to AA amyloidosis. But conserving the species in the wild is integral, he says, because creating a long-term sustainable population in captivity has so far not been possible. Zoos are frustrated with black-footed cats, Sliwa says, because they have no handle on the disease issue. A pair might breed once or twice, then die with their offspring due to it.
It is impossible to provide a prognosis for the species’ survival: “Nobody knows,” Sliwa says. Global warming, new diseases or more intensive use or other impacts on their rangelands are only some of the factors that can cause the species to “slip quietly into extinction.” Despite more media attention, including a feature by the BBC, people are still not very aware of the small cat, he says, and funding to continue the research is a constant battle — as is the case with most small wildcat species.
Would it make a difference if black-footed cats disappeared overnight? Economically and even ecologically, probably not, Wilson says. “Except, their presence indicates a healthy environment, for which we as humans are the custodians.”
For zoo curator Sliwa — sitting amid photos of lemurs and lions, and surrounded by towering piles of paperwork awaiting attention — there’s much more to do: Data, he says, are needed on the survival of black-footed cat kittens, on subadults and their dispersal, on scent marking, and there are also theses projects to supervise.
For him, the black-footed cat is a lifelong commitment. “I will continue,” he says, “until I can’t do it any longer.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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