03 December 20
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Bess Levin | Stephen Miller Races to F--K Over Immigrants on His Way Out the Door
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "When he wasn't making the case, via Twitter, that he should be put under conservatorship, or speaking to Fox and Friends for hours on end, Donald Trump spent much of the last four years enacting despicable policies, many of which concerned immigration."
The new father and architect of Donald Trump’s family-separation policy is hard at work.
hen he wasn’t making the case, via Twitter, that he should be put under conservatorship, or speaking to Fox & Friends for hours on end, Donald Trump spent much of the last four years enacting despicable policies, many of which concerned immigration. The top hits obviously include the travel ban, family separation, and spending billions of dollars in taxpayer money on his ridiculous border wall, but also using ICE to terrorize undocumented immigrants, attempting to allow the deportation of 700,000 people who came to the U.S. as children, cutting the refugee cap to the lowest level in history, and generally demonizing anyone who wasn’t born here and making their lives as miserable as possible. Behind these policies was World’s Biggest Bastard nominee for four years running Stephen Miller, the 35-year-old adviser who cut his teeth working for Jeff Sessions and defied his upbringing in Santa Monica to become a white supremacist. And if you thought he was going to ease up the immigrant-bashing policies on his way out the door, you sadly underestimated the depths to which Miller clearly hates himself, a self-loathing that he takes out on anyone with less power than him or who doesn’t have to spray on their hair.
Instead, Miller is reportedly doing everything he can to limit immigration, legal and otherwise, on his way out the door. Per Politico:
Since Election Day, the president’s staffers have pushed through changes that make it easier to deny visas to immigrants, lengthened the citizenship test, and appointed new members to an immigration policy board.... The focus is on putting a bind on President-elect Joe Biden, making it harder for him to reverse these politically fraught issues, according to half a dozen people familiar with the changes.... The administration’s push on immigration is attributed to Stephen Miller, the senior aide who has largely guided the president’s policies on the issue for four years, according to people on both sides of the debate.
On November 13, the administration announced that starting next month, the citizenship test would include more questions about American history and politics. The revised questionnaire, which received some criticism, will increase from 100 to 128 questions. Four days later the administration said it would also give federal officials more discretion in approving an immigration application through updates to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Policy Manual. The changes will provide officers with an expanded list of positive and negative factors they can use to either accept or reject applicants. Administration officials said the new language would make the decisions more consistent and fair, but immigrant advocates said new factors, such as the strength of family ties, history of employment, and community standing, will lead to longer processing times and additional denials.
That same day the administration published a proposed rule that would limit work permits for immigrants awaiting deportation but not in custody.
Additionally, despite the administration’s claims that it’s only illegal immigration it has a problem with, it’s trying to make it harder for people to obtain H-1B visas, which go to highly skilled workers. The move would not only shrink the types of jobs foreign workers can apply for, but also require companies to pay foreign workers more, changes the administration itself says would decrease the number of H-1B applicants by one third. It is also trying to scrap the long-running lottery process for such visas and prioritize authorization for those with the highest-paid jobs. And:
Outside groups are pushing the administration to go even further in its final days. Chris Chmielenski, deputy director at NumbersUSA, which supports immigration restrictions, said he hopes the administration will also limit a program that provides work permits for international students. The administration previously considered the step, but never acted.
“What they’re doing through the transition is working their way down their list of items to minimize immigration to the U.S.,” Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, told Politico. “The Trump administration has been widely effective in terms of grinding our immigration system to a halt.” In a statement, White House spokesman Judd Deere said, “Since taking office, President Trump has never shied away from using his lawful executive authority to advance bold policies and fulfill the promises he made to the American people.”
In a sign of just how far some people want the administration to go in its last few weeks in power, aides reportedly “urged” the president to sign an executive order that would end birthright citizenship, which, as Politico notes, “is enshrined in the Constitution.” The idea was said to be recently dismissed, presumably much to the chagrin of Miller, a uniquely evil nonhuman who, as my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported in 2018, enjoyed “seeing...pictures at the border” of families being separated.
In other Miller news, the Trump adviser is a new father:
And apropos of nothing, here’s an NBC News report from August on the administration’s family-separation policy, which Miller was the architect of:
Miller saw the separation of families not as an unfortunate byproduct but as a tool to deter more immigration. According to three former officials, he had devised plans that would have separated even more children. Miller, with the support of Sessions, advocated for separating all immigrant families, even those going through civil court proceedings, the former officials said.
While zero tolerance ultimately separated nearly 3,000 children from their parents, what Miller proposed would have separated 25,000 more, including those who legally presented themselves at ports of entry seeking asylum, according to Customs and Border Protection data from May and June 2018.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham arrives for a hearing on Capitol Hill on Nov. 18. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Former US Attorney Asks Georgia to Investigate Lindsey Graham for Potential Election Crimes
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
Stern writes: "A former U.S. attorney has asked Georgia to open an investigation into Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham's potentially criminal interference in the state's election."
former U.S. attorney has asked Georgia to open an investigation into Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s potentially criminal interference in the state’s election.Michael J. Moore, who served as U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia from 2010 to 2015, sent his request to the Georgia State Board of Elections on Thursday. Moore cited multiple public interviews given by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, in which Raffensperger said that Graham pressured him to throw out valid mail ballots. According to the secretary of state, Graham asked whether he could toss all mail ballots from any county with a high rate of “signature mismatch”—signatures that don’t match those on a voter’s registration form. (Under a federal court order, Georgia is required to let voters cure a mismatched signature.) Signature mismatch disproportionately affects racial minorities, who lean Democratic overall. Graham requested that even ballots with matching signatures be rejected in precincts with large populations of Black voters. It thus appears that Graham wanted Raffensberger to throw enough Democratic ballots to swing the state toward Donald Trump.
In his letter, Moore noted that Graham’s alleged conduct might constitute a criminal offense under Georgia law. The state prohibits solicitation to commit election fraud, which occurs when an individual “solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause” another person to commit an election-related offense. Disqualifying valid ballots would constitute such an offense and constitute a crime in itself. State law also forbids interference with the performance of the secretary of state’s official election duties—by, for instance, asking him to falsify records. An individual is culpable even if they failed to induce fraud.
If Raffensberger’s account is true, Graham seems to have committed both of these crimes. Solicitation to commit election fraud is a felony punishable by up to three years in prison. Attempting to interfere with the performance of election duties is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year’s imprisonment. Cathy Cox, the dean of Mercer University’s School of Law who previously served as Georgia’s secretary of state, told Slate in November that Graham’s alleged conduct likely violated both these laws.
Georgia law empowers the State Elections Board to conduct an investigation into Graham’s alleged malfeasance. (While Raffensberger is the chairman of the board, he would have to recuse because he is a witness to the alleged crime.) The board has a legal duty to investigate frauds and irregularities in primaries and elections. It must report possible violations of election law to Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, or to a state district attorney, for further investigation and possible charges.
Moore asked the board to commence an investigation quickly given the Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. “Time is of the essence for this investigation,” Moore wrote, “as Senator Graham has also indicated that the purpose of his call to Secretary Raffensperger was to ask questions about the upcoming Senate runoff election.”
In a conversation on Thursday, Moore—who is now in private practice—told me he hopes Georgia’s political leadership will probe this matter “to protect the sanctity of the vote.”
“According to public accounts, Graham asked a state constitutional officer to do away with a number of legal ballots,” Moore said. “Our electoral system is under attack. Officials in Georgia must stand up to say that the votes people cast here are sacred.”
Carr, the state attorney general, has not yet provided any public comment on Graham’s alleged interference. (His office did not respond to a request from Slate.) The attorney general’s wife, Joan Carr, currently serves as chief of staff for Sen. Kelly Loeffler, one of the Republican incumbents in the upcoming runoffs. Given that Graham reportedly sought to interfere in Loeffler’s election, a criminal probe is plainly not in the senator’s political interest. Indeed, Graham is scheduled to appear at a fundraiser for Loeffler on Thursday afternoon; donations begin at $2,800 per person, and dinner for one couple requires a $25,000 donation. Carr has not said whether he would recuse from an investigation that involves a candidate for whom his wife works.
Moore, a Democrat, told me his concern transcends politics. “You’ve seen some people who are unabashed Republicans come forward to defend the integrity of this election,” Moore said. “I hope we see the attorney general, or a district attorney, look into this episode. What’s important is that we have an investigation and uncover whether individuals intended to do harm to our electoral system. An investigation is a good thing whether it leads to sanctions or not.”
President-elect Joe Biden. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)
Joe Biden Is Taking Office Amid a Poverty Crisis
Dylan Matthews, Vox
Matthews writes: "Poverty actually fell in early to mid-2020, as the pandemic took hold, due to an unprecedented expansion of government safety net programs."
Columbia researchers project that 5 million to 12 million more people will be in poverty in January than a year before.
overty actually fell in early to mid-2020, as the pandemic took hold, due to an unprecedented expansion of government safety net programs. But it has since grown and surpassed its early 2020 level, and is poised to increase more if the economic situation remains dire.
Those are the major findings from projections made by researchers at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy (CPSP) at Columbia University, who have been developing methods for monthly estimates of poverty during the Covid-19 pandemic. The researchers — Zach Parolin, Chris Wimer, Jane Waldfogel, Jordan Matsudaira, and Megan Curran — use a metric known as the “supplemental poverty measure,” designed as a more consistent and reliable measure of hardship than the official poverty measure used by US government programs. Their metric is hardly perfect — critics argue it “defines poverty down” by setting too low an income threshold — but it’s useful for tracking variations like those experienced during the Covid-19 crisis.
According to their data, 15.5 percent of Americans, or 50.3 million people, were living in poverty in January 2020, before the coronavirus crisis began in earnest. In April, after relief measures began, the rate was down to 13.9 percent.
The crisis continued, but many relief measures did not. The $1,200 “economic impact payments” (a.k.a. stimulus checks) were a one-off. The $600-per-week boost to unemployment insurance expired at the end of July. And poverty began creeping back up again, reaching 17.3 percent in August, and 16.7 percent, or about 54.2 million people, in September.
In other words, about 4 million more people were in poverty by September than were at the beginning of 2020. That’s a quite large degradation in living standards.
Looking ahead to January 2021 requires making some assumptions about unemployment. The rate as of October was 6.9 percent, a swift improvement from the peak of 14.7 percent in April. But it’s still nearly double what it was in February before the crisis.
The Columbia researchers’ findings confirm that the January 2021 poverty situation will depend heavily on unemployment. They find that even if unemployment falls to 5 percent, which would be a big improvement, poverty will rise modestly from 16.7 percent in September to 17 percent in January, putting another 1 million or so people in poverty for a total of 55.2 million.
If, on the other hand, unemployment remains elevated, the situation gets substantially worse. If it ticks up to 7.5 percent, then poverty will reach 18.1 percent, or 58.8 million people. If the situation deteriorates substantially and unemployment rises to 10 percent again, then poverty will rise to 19.1 percent of Americans — 62.1 million.
The upshot is this: Depending on the scale of the broader economic recovery, between 4.9 million and 11.8 million more people will be living in poverty in January 2021 than were in January 2020.
This is a large increase even compared to the Great Recession. The same Columbia research group estimates that from 2007 to 2011, poverty measured the same way rose from 14.4 percent to 16.1 percent of the population, a 1.7-point increase. The best-case scenario of 5 percent unemployment in January 2021, by comparison, registers as a 1.5-point increase in poverty, similar in scale to the Great Recession. If we don’t get down to 5 percent unemployment, the effects could be worse than the Great Recession.
Signs of a large decline in living standards for low-income Americans
The Columbia team is not the only group of researchers attempting to track living standards for Americans in poverty on a monthly basis during this crisis. Jeehoon Han of Zhejiang University, Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago, and James X. Sullivan at the University of Notre Dame have their own set of real-time measures, and while they do not calculate projections for January 2021, they tell the same story as the Columbia researchers about what happened from January to October 2020.
The poverty rate, as they measure it, fell from 10.9 percent in January/February to 9.4 percent in April/May/June (they average months in an attempt to minimize error). But it then ticked up dramatically, from 9.4 percent to 11.3 percent in September and October. “Nearly 7 million have been added to the ranks of the poor since May,” the researchers write in their most recent release. “Poverty appears to have risen in October even though the unemployment rate fell by more than a percentage point.”
That disconnect is partially a temporary result of the expiration of aid programs — but if it holds, then poverty could rise even more with falling unemployment than the Columbia numbers suggest.
One thing to keep in mind when interpreting these two sets of numbers is that the Columbia team defines people and households as “in poverty” if they fall below a certain income threshold (adjusted for cost of living in their area and a few other factors) during a particular month. That has advantages, particularly during a rapidly evolving crisis like this one, but also disadvantages: It only counts tax credits, for instance, as income for the month when a person’s tax refund is delivered. So if a low-income worker got a large earned income tax credit (EITC) in March, that counts as a several-thousand-dollar windfall for just that month — which helps explain why the Columbia measure sees poverty falling in March, even before Covid-19 relief measures were implemented.
The Zhejiang/Chicago/Notre Dame team, by contrast, uses an annual reference period: It is trying to estimate how many people fell below a certain income level in the past 12 months. That gets around problems like the EITC but might make income fluctuations look smaller than they feel: If you lost all your pay in April, that would only show up as an 8 percent fall in your annual income, measured from the previous April. On a monthly basis, though, your income fell 100 percent.
Another indication of an increase in that kind of short-run need is the nationwide surge in demand for supplies from food banks. A report from Hunger Free America found that in New York City, food pantries and soup kitchens fed 65.1 percent more people in 2020 than in 2019; that’s compared to a 10 percent increase in people served the year before. The Greater Boston Food Bank told the Boston Globe that it went from distributing 1 million pounds of food per week to 415,000 people pre-pandemic to 2.5 million pounds per week to over 660,000 people.
The St. Louis Area Foodbank in Missouri reports that it went from distributing 3.1 million meals a month pre-pandemic to 5 million meals a month now. In Grand Rapids, the South Michigan Food Bank reported distributing more food in October than it had in any prior month in its 38-year history, covering both the early 1980s recession and the Great Recession. Underlying these trends is an increase in food insecurity, which is closely linked to income poverty.
The next stimulus needs to address the increase in poverty
One of the first tasks the Biden administration will face in January is crafting a stimulus package that will pick up where the package that expired at the end of July left off. The expiration of the $600-a-week bonus unemployment benefit appears to have substantially increased need and poverty at the low end, and reviving a bonus benefit and providing other income support policies will be critical for avoiding further increases in poverty and returning the poverty rate to where it was in January 2020, if not lower.
President-elect Biden has outlined what his preferred stimulus package would look like in considerable detail. It includes extending the $600-per-week unemployment insurance bonus; extensive aid to state, local, and tribal governments; and a $250-per-child monthly allowance for families, boosted to $300 per month per child for kids under 6.
But congressional Democrats have struggled to get a deal matching these parameters through the Republican-controlled Senate, or even a more limited one with, say, $400 per week in bonus UI payments. Republican leader Mitch McConnell has insisted on a lower-cost package that includes civil immunity for businesses that put people at risk of Covid-19 infection. McConnell is likely to hold that line if he controls the Senate under Biden; control of the Senate will be determined in two Georgia runoff elections on January 5.
The main challenge for policymakers interested in poverty alleviation, then, will be convincing McConnell and his allies to support stimulus and income support at the level that’s needed to reverse the increase in poverty.
Former mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel. (photo: Joshua Lott/Getty)
Rep. Jamaal Bowman | We Can't Restore the Soul of the Nation With Rahm Emanuel in Public Office
Jamaal Bowman, The Appeal
Bowman writes: "If Laquan McDonald could have three wishes, he wanted to turn back the clock on his life, have enough money to live with dignity, and see his grandmother again. This is what he said to a clinical worker during their meeting, weeks before he was shot sixteen times by Officer Jason Van Dyke."
It doesn’t matter whether it’s Transportation Secretary or Assistant to the Transportation Secretary, Rahm doesn’t belong in any of D.C.’s halls of power.
f Laquan McDonald could have three wishes, he wanted to turn back the clock on his life, have enough money to live with dignity, and see his grandmother again. This is what he said to a clinical worker during their meeting, weeks before he was shot sixteen times by Officer Jason Van Dyke.
Laquan may have faced more hurt and hardship in his seventeen years than many of us experience in our lifetimes, but he was still a kid. A kid who missed his grandmother and dreamed of making a better life for himself.
While Laquan’s family were privately grieving their loss, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was figuring out how to keep the video footage of Laquan’s shooting from seeing the light of day.
So when I got word that President-elect Biden was considering Emanuel for a Cabinet position, I was hurt. It wasn’t because Rahm and I have differing views on policy (although we do), but because Rahm saw the murder of Laquan McDonald as a political obstacle, a threat to his reelection bid. Instead of seeking justice for Laquan and the people of Chicago, he took the coward’s way out by trying to bury the story. To me, that speaks volumes about his character.
As a father, as an educator, as a Black man in America, I can’t sit quietly by or let this pass. Millions of Americans have marched in the streets, rallied together, registered to vote, in the name of racial justice and an end to police brutality. To respond to this historic moment by appointing Emanuel to any position of influence is an affront to the memories of all those who have been murdered by police.
Even after the footage went public and demonstrations started, Emanuel opposed a federal civil rights investigation into the Chicago police and failed to deliver on civilian oversight of the department. In fact, Emanuel said that police were getting “fetal” in the age of bystander video. Apparently “tough-on-crime” isn’t tough enough for Rahm.
We can’t restore the soul of the nation with Rahm Emanuel in public office. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Transportation Secretary or Assistant to the Transportation Secretary, Rahm doesn’t belong in any of D.C.’s halls of power.
Losing sight of the people closest to the pain is how we got here. High-priced political consultants can tell you how to bag a billionaire donor, but they don’t know what it’s like to grow up on the West Side of Chicago or in public housing in East Harlem, where I grew up with my grandmother. I’ve known plenty of kids like Laquan, who were failed by a system that couldn’t see past their haircut. We’ve decided that their lives don’t factor into our political calculus. But that needs to change.
If we want our talk about racial equity to be more than just that–talk–then we can’t return to the same well of political operatives and insiders, folks who have benefited from the status quo. Voters turned out in record numbers because they want change. The competing crises of COVID-19, unemployment, and police violence have left us feeling more vulnerable than ever before. But building back better demands better builders: new people with bold new ideas.
I wholeheartedly believe that a Biden administration can deliver for our families and move us closer toward a vision of racial equity. And that means Rahm Emanuel should stay home.
Mail-in ballots. (photo: Spotlight PA)
Democrats Took a Risk to Push Mail-In Voting. It Paid Off
Sam Levine and Alvin Chang, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "When America began shutting down this spring because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it transformed the already high-stakes 2020 race into a precarious high-wire balancing act."
Analysis: the 2020, conducted during a pandemic, led to a change in voting habits that could have ended in disaster, but didn’t
hen America began shutting down this spring because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it transformed the already high-stakes 2020 race into a precarious high-wire balancing act.
Election officials across the country, many of whom were already underfunded and under-resourced, began scrambling to find places where they could safely offer in-person voting, and poll workers, who tend to skew older, began to drop out. Disastrous primaries in Wisconsin and Georgia offered alarming signals that America was barrelling towards a chaotic general election.
Amid this mayhem, states where few people typically vote by mail were suddenly forced to scale up and run elections in which most people were expected to vote that way, hoping to avoid long lines and human contact amid the pandemic. As the year wore on, a sharp partisan divide emerged. Donald Trump railed against voting by mail, while Democrats aggressively encouraged supporters to do so.
For Democrats, it was a risk. In many states, vote by mail had not been used before – including key battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. For voters used to casting their ballots in person, voting by mail offered a new set of rules and procedures to follow and a voter could have their ballot rejected for even a small mistake.
While Democrats waged an aggressive legal battle to loosen mail-in voting restrictions many Republican officials refused to do so. Congress allocated a fraction of the estimated $4bn needed to run elections with significantly scaled-up mail-in voting. Despite severe mail delays this summer, Republican officials in Texas and Ohio limited opportunities for voters to return their ballots in person. Texas Republicans fought to block people from being able to register to vote online and sought to reject 127,000 ballots cast using drive-thru voting. Republicans in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina strongly objected to efforts to give voters more time to return their ballots and election officials to count them. In Alabama, the state’s top election official successfully went all the way to the US supreme court to block counties from offering curbside voting. In Oklahoma, after the state supreme court struck down a law requiring voters to get their ballots notarized, Republicans moved quickly to reinstate a revised version of the measure.
Now, nearly a month after the election, the risk appears to have paid off for Democrats. The nightmare scenarios largely didn’t occur – there weren’t widespread mail delays leading to millions of Americans being disenfranchised, as many feared this summer. Instead, states with little vote-by-mail experience were able to match more experienced states in running a successful election. More than 100 million people voted early, either in person or by mail – a record number.
“I’m fairly convinced at this point that the Democratic strategy and the Democratic advantage in vote by mail was just crucially and critically important to Biden’s win,” said Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm that tracks voter data. “There’s absolutely no way we would have hit these record levels of voter turnout, nationally, without this massive adoption of mail voting.”
‘We worked our ass off’: more Democrats voted by mail
The partisan fights around voting in recent years have been shaped by a belief that, generally, more people voting benefits Democrats. But research earlier this year showed that, on the whole, vote by mail does not generally benefit one political party over the other. As Trump continued to attack vote by mail throughout the year, some Republicans worried he was sabotaging his own voters, dissuading them from a method of voting that might be more convenient and easy than going to the polls.
While the switch to mail-in voting alone cannot explain election results, Democrats did in fact do well in places where many people chose to vote by mail, according to data collected by the Guardian and ProPublica. Counties where people voted by mail at high rates were more likely to swing Democratic compared with four years ago.
As far as raw votes go, many of them came from large suburban counties which swung heavily toward Democrats compared with 2016.
Some of the counties that had high ballot return rates were ones that Trump carried in 2016 and 2020, but where Biden was able to cut into his margins. In Pike county in north-east Pennsylvania, for example, voters returned at least 93% of the mail-in ballots they requested. Trump carried the county in 2016 by about 26 percentage points. In 2020, Trump carried the county by just 19 points.
Jay Tucker, the chair of the Pike county Democratic committee, said there was “no question” mail-in balloting helped improve Democrats’ performance this year. He said he and other organizers were able to closely track who had requested a ballot and regularly followed up with those who hadn’t returned a ballot.
“We worked our ass off on that,” Tucker said. “One of the biggest mistakes that Trump made in this election was not backing mail-in voting. Because I think a lot more people came out.”
In Michigan, one of the places that swung hardest towards Democrats was Kent county, home to Grand Rapids. Trump won the county by four points in 2016, but Biden carried it by six points this year. Eighty per cent of the people who requested mail-in ballots returned them, something that contributed to Democrats doing well there, said Gary Stark, the chairman of the county Democratic party.
“I think that the absentee voting was a factor in the higher turnout. I think a number of new voters did use absentee ballots or mail-in ballots this time. No way to prove that, but that would be my gut assumption,” he said.
‘Don’t trust the mailbox’: varying views on mail-in ballots
America saw the highest turnout in a presidential election since the turn of the 20th century. Nearly 160 million people – about 67% of those eligible – cast a ballot this year. And Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who closely tracks voter turnout, said there were signs that states that expanded vote by mail contributed more to the higher turnout than those that did not, though he cautioned he was still analyzing voter data.
But the repeated Republican attacks on the process appears to have shaken some voters’ faith in the process.
Deadlines for returning absentee ballots flipped back and forth as lawsuits made their way through the courts. There were hundreds of election-related cases brought in state and federal courts this year. The US supreme court declined to lift restrictions on mail-in voting in the handful of them that reached it. It took a federal lawsuit to get the United States Postal Service to be transparent and make detailed commitments about how it would guarantee the timely delivery of ballots.
“My mom was like, no, don’t put anything in the mail. Don’t trust the mailbox. Walk it inside and drop it in,” said Sonni King, who requested a mail-in ballot and returned it in person at a satellite voting location in Philadelphia days ahead of the election.
“I’ve been hearing a lot about the whole mail issues and the breaching and all of that so I felt like this was a safer route,” said Brittany Davis, who voted in person on election day in Philadelphia.
“You just hear so much in the news, in the media, I don’t know how much is true and how much is false, just [about] the mail-in ballots being messed with, people not doing it the right way. So I just know if I was able to come in, even if I had to wait, just to make sure my vote was 100% counted, I was gonna do it,” said Shofolahan Da-silva, who also voted in person in Philadelphia.
There’s also the fact that some communities had a more difficult time voting by mail. As the election neared, Black voters in North Carolina overwhelmingly had their ballots flagged for potential rejection.
Native Americans also faced severe hurdles to voting by mail – postal service on reservations can be unreliable and the nearest post office might be hours away.
‘Habit-forming’: expanded access could be here to stay
The success of mail-in voting this year could mean that more people will vote by mail in the future, Bonier said. That could mean more election infrastructure that supports the sending and counting of these ballots – a process that caused some of the biggest legal fights of the election.
“Historically, generally when people vote by mail once, they do it again. It is habit-forming,” he said. “What we’ll see in terms of the trend line is this election represented a massive spike in interest in mail voting, and some of that will recede, but we’ll settle at a point where far more people in this country will vote by mail in future elections than did prior to 2020.”
In Georgia, for example, people who voted by mail in the 2018 midterm election were far more likely to vote by mail again in 2020, according to a Guardian analysis of data from the Georgia secretary of state. Of those who voted in both elections, about 78% of people who cast mail ballots in 2018 did so again in 2020. Just 34% of in-person voters in 2018 voted by mail in 2020.
Still, if states will continue to embrace the dramatic expansion of mail-in voting after a record turnout election. Republicans in Georgia, as well as Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, have already suggested revisiting the rules around mail-in voting. Such an approach would fit in with a well-documented Republican strategy of trying to make it harder to vote to preserve the party’s power.
“I think we could see some rolling back. It would be hard to justify that given how high turnout was, and the goal should be higher participation,” Bonier said. “But just given the polarization we’ve seen specifically on this issue of mail voting, it’s unreasonable to assume there won’t be at least some efforts to restrict mail voting in future elections.”
A collection of .50-caliber rifles seized from criminals or handed over by Mexican citizens for destruction, in Mexico City, in August 2017. (photo: Bernardo Montoya/Getty)
The Sniper Rifles Flowing to Mexican Cartels Show a Decade of US Failure
Kevin Sieff and Nick Miroff, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "North of the border, the .50-caliber sniper rifle is the stuff of YouTube celebrity, shown blasting through engine blocks and concrete walls. Deployed with U.S. troops to foreign wars, it is among the most destructive weapons legally available in the United States."
orth of the border, the .50-caliber sniper rifle is the stuff of YouTube celebrity, shown blasting through engine blocks and concrete walls. Deployed with U.S. troops to foreign wars, it is among the most destructive weapons legally available in the United States.But every week, those rifles are trafficked across the border to Mexico, where increasingly militarized drug cartels now command arsenals that rival the weaponry of the country’s security forces. In many cases, criminals outgun police.
After years of failed U.S. and Mexican efforts to curb arms trafficking, groups such as the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels are showcasing the military-grade weapons in slick propaganda videos and using them to defeat security forces in battle.
In a country with just a single legal gun shop, on a military base in the capital, roughly 2.5 million illicit American guns have poured across the border in the past decade, according to a new Mexican government study. That flood has been a key accelerant in the security crisis now confronting the country. The cartels are using trafficked weapons to kill record numbers of police officers — 464 in the first nine months of 2020 alone — and smaller armed groups are fueling historically high homicide rates.
Mexican officials, in rare public criticism, are now venting their frustration at what they say is the U.S. failure to stop the flow of .50-caliber rifles. At a time when the United States is pushing Mexico to target cartels more aggressively, U.S. laws that make .50-calibers and other destructive weapons easy to buy, along with a lack of enforcement at the border, are enabling those groups to expand their influence and activities in the country.
“It’s irresponsible that in the United States this type of weapon is sold to anyone with minimum requirements and without any follow-up after the purchase,” said Fabián Medina, chief of staff to Mexico’s foreign minister. “What we know in Mexico is that it reaches the hands of criminal organizations, and that with these powerful weapons, they’ve shot down marine helicopters and deprived many people of their lives.”
The weapon has both tactical and strategic power, as a symbol of the growing strength and reach of the cartels. One of Mexico’s most popular bands has adopted the name “Calibre 50.” Among its recent hits: “El Niño Sicario,” or “The Child Hitman.”
The number of .50-calibers and assault rifles in Mexico has more than doubled in the past decade, officials here say. The annual homicide rate has risen 67 percent in that time.
The United States and Mexico this year formed a high-level working group on arms trafficking. U.S. officials say they’re now doing more than ever to halt the flow of arms and ammunition.
“Over the last eight months, there’s been a real sea change in terms of the effort being made on this,” said a State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “It takes a while to get indictments, get arrests, put people in jail, but in terms of a much more coordinated U.S. government effort and better coordination with Mexico, there’s been a lot of progress.”
But frustration on the Mexican side has grown. A decade after “Operation Fast and Furious,” in which U.S. agents allowed thousands of firearms to flow south in a botched attempt to track them, and despite $3 billion in U.S. aid to Mexico to fight narco-traffickers, the two countries have not curbed the flow of weapons.
At one high-level meeting this year, Mexican Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval, grew visibly irritated with U.S. officials.
“What if we did as little to stop drugs as you’re doing to stop guns?” he asked, according to a senior Mexican official who was present.
Around 70 percent of guns found at crime scenes in Mexico are traceable to the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The .50-calibers were used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to strike targets from nearly two miles away. In the United States, they’re a fixture of gun shows. Enthusiasts make online videos showing people using them to obliterate game and take down trees.
But in Mexico, the weapon has come to symbolize a dangerous misalignment in the broader drug-war partnership between the two nations: Sold casually in the United States, it is increasingly being used to target and terrorize Mexicans.
In a conference room next to the border crossing between Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Mexico, local Mexican customs chief Juan Gim Nogales was giving a presentation on the rise of arms trafficking. Ammunition is one sign of the problem.
“The amount of ammunition we’re seizing has surged in the last few months,” he said. In August alone, agents at the port of entry seized more than four times the ammunition confiscated in all of 2019.
“We can’t tell what they’re getting ready for, but they’re arming up,” Gim said.
Then word came through: A man had just been stopped by agents with boxes of ammo in his back seat. Several customs officials drove to the scene in an armored car.
The trafficker was a large man, leaning against a pillar, talking casually on his cellphone while soldiers inspected his red Ford Explorer. He had left the ammunition sitting on the back seat, unconcealed.
It happens multiple times a day: Even with only random, periodic inspections, Mexican authorities get a glimpse into the scale of the trafficking problem.
Increasingly, they’re finding military-grade weapons and ammunition, often brand-new, purchased days before at Arizona gun shops and shows. When weapons are detected at the border, it’s often because the traffickers are hapless or distressed, very different from the sophisticated transnational criminals who use the contraband.
A young American woman tried to speed through the border crossing this year and hit a wall; Mexican authorities said she was high on drugs. There was a .50-caliber rifle in the back seat.
“It was sticking out of a suitcase,” Mexican authorities noted in a report. Next to it, they found 8,018 rounds of ammunition for the heavy weapon.
Last year, it was a 14-year-old boy who slammed into a wall. He, too, was found with a .50-caliber. Mexico has confiscated more than 600 rifles in the past 11 years, officials say. Many more have reached the cartels.
“It’s what we don’t find that we worry about,” said Ricardo Santana Velázquez, Mexico’s consul in Nogales, Ariz. “Because those are the guns that show up later at murders and massacres.”
Mexico accuses the United States of insufficient effort against arms trafficking, but Mexican law enforcement is also weak. U.S. citizens caught in Mexico trafficking guns face a maximum sentence of two years — and often serve only a few months.
In one recent propaganda video, gunmen from the Jalisco New Generation cartel showed off .50-caliber rifles, some mounted on armored trucks.
“They give a psychological edge to the cartels and create fear among the security forces,” said Ioan Grillo, author of the forthcoming “Blood Gun Money,” about cross-border gun trafficking to Mexico. “Imagine being in a police truck and .50-cal bullets rip through the armor.”
The day after the man was found with the boxes of ammunition in Nogales, Santana went to inspect the U.S. side of the border.
At one crossing, there were no U.S. agents conducting searches. At another, agents conducted quick, superficial inspections of 1 in 20 cars. Signs warned against crossing the border with guns: “Illegal to carry firearms/ammunition into Mexico.”
In the foothills on the Mexican side, cartel scouts watched with binoculars.
“They choose their moments,” Santana said. “They know when to cross."
“You can see how little stands in the way of someone trying to move an arsenal into Mexico,” he added.
The weapons come from throughout the United States. The two biggest sources, ATF officials say, are Arizona and Texas.
Traffickers bring the guns southward along the same routes they use to move drugs north. The groups that dominate smuggling along the Pacific Coast, including the Sinaloa cartel, shop for guns in Arizona. Texas is the primary market for the ascendant Jalisco cartel. The .50-caliber weapons are widely available in both states, where they retail for about $10,000 to $12,000 each.
The Houston area, home to 5,000 licensed gun stores and dealers and a sprawling, unregulated informal market, where private sales are facilitated by online listings, is “ground zero” for trafficked weapons, according to Fred Milanowski, who runs the ATF office there. More weapons recovered in Mexico are traced to Houston and surrounding Harris County than anywhere else in the United States.
Trafficking cells are typically led by an organizer who offers recruits $500 or more per gun to purchase .50-calibers. In many cases, these straw buyers are people with substance-abuse problems who are indebted to their dealers. Last year, a couple was caught trafficking .50-calibers on behalf of their Tucson heroin dealer. In another case, teenagers agreed to buy weapons for a cartel in exchange for Justin Bieber concert tickets.
The organizer seeks out buyers who don’t have felony convictions; buyers typically have little or no idea for whom they’re working or where the guns are going. Unless they make the kind of large bulk purchases that would raise red flags, there’s nothing to stop them from buying up powerful rifles, particularly on the informal, or secondary, market.
“We’ve had trafficking cells who only make purchases on the secondary market,” Milanowski said.
Some organizers work exclusively for one criminal group. Others have little idea whom they’re supplying. Weapons are smuggled south the same way narcotics are moved north: hidden in secret vehicle compartments and sometimes broken into parts for reassembly on arrival.
Mexican officials and analysts are studying the American gun culture, as U.S. officials have tried to make sense of the Mexican narco-trafficking culture. David Pérez Esparza, now a top official in the country’s Public Security Ministry, became a member of the National Rifle Association to better understand the organization while writing his dissertation on arms trafficking. He wrote of the shock of attending a gun show in Texas, watching children play around assault rifles: “Wow, a normal Sunday with the family.”
Mexican officials have tried to pitch the United States on deploying X-ray scanners on both sides of the border. They’ve asked for more intelligence-sharing and permission to send Mexican agents to work on the U.S. side of the border. They’ve requested changes to U.S. gun laws that allow weapons to be sold at gun shows without background checks, and they’ve asked for more information about the “Fast and Furious” scandal that stung ATF.
U.S. officials say efforts to install such technology have been hampered by red tape in the Mexican customs department. The U.S. diplomats working on arms trafficking have reminded their Mexican counterparts that they cannot change U.S. laws.
Milanowski said the lack of tough U.S. penalties for firearms trafficking leaves ATF without leverage to turn offenders into informants. U.S. lawmakers have introduced multiple anti-trafficking bills in Congress, but none of them has passed, largely because of the strength of the gun lobby.
“We have to charge them with what is basically a paperwork violation,” he said. “We don’t really have a big charge to hang over them.”
The NRA did not respond to a request for comment. The organization has defended the sale of .50-caliber weapons in the United States, arguing that criminals don’t use them because they’re too expensive and unwieldy, but noting that they’re popular with competitive sharpshooters and sportsmen.
Homicides in Mexico reached historic highs in 2018 and 2019; 2020 is on pace to set a record.
Cartels that once focused on securing drug routes to the United States are increasingly fighting for control of territory, waging gun battles that can leave a dozen or more people dead. The availability of high-powered weapons has transformed that fight.
In telephone recordings from the October 2019 ambush in Aguililla, Michoacán, officers can be heard shouting “I’m dying” and pleading for backup as gunfire continues. Mexican officials say at least one .50-caliber rifle and several AK-47s and AR-15s from the United States were used.
“It’s a telling example of what happens when the cartels are better armed than the police,” said one Mexican security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.
Twenty-three people, including four police officers, were killed the next month when gunmen descended on Villa Unión, 70 minutes from Eagle Pass, Tex. Investigators recovered six .50-caliber rifles; ATF traced one to a gun shop in suburban Houston. Five people have been charged in an alleged scheme to traffic weapons from Texas.
U.S. officials say they have responded to Mexico’s requests to improve coordination on the issue. Border authorities seized more than 350 Mexico-bound rifles and handguns at checkpoints during fiscal 2020, the most in at least a decade. That’s just over 0.1 percent of the estimated guns trafficked each year, roughly 250,000.
The ATF says it has increased its presence in Mexico by 20 percent in the past year, with a focus on tracing recovered weapons. Still, officials say they have limited ability to make arrests unless there is evidence of a trafficking operation.
“There are a range of factors that agents and prosecutors can look at, such as firearms concealed in a hidden space of a vehicle, but there is nothing inherently illegal about driving near the border with firearms in your car,” said Thomas Chittum, ATF’s assistant director of field operations.
Mexicans see a deeper disconnect between the U.S. focus on the drug war and a lack of action to help stem the flow of powerful weapons.
“Imagine if criminals were regularly shooting at American police with .50-cals,” Grillo said. “That would surely cause an uproar and people would look at how people are often able to buy these weapons as easily as if they are buying a pistol.”
Caribou from the Porcupine Caribou Herd migrate onto the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska. The refuge has long been eyed for oil exploration. (photo: AP)
Trump Rushes to Lock in Oil Drilling In Arctic Wildlife Refuge Before Biden's Term
Tegan Hanlon, NPR
Hanlon writes: "In a last-minute push, the Trump administration announced Thursday that it will auction off drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in just over a month, setting up a final showdown with opponents before President-elect Joe Biden takes office."
The announcement of a lease sale comes sooner than some expected: The Bureau of Land Management did not wait for the comment and nominations period to officially end before scheduling a sale date.
The sale, which is now set for Jan. 6, could cap a bitter, decades-long battle over whether to drill in the coastal plain, and it seals the administration's efforts to open the land to development. But the Trump administration's plan for the sale may also draw legal challenges from drilling opponents, who could target the aggressive timeline in court.
Environmental groups have vowed to continue to fight to keep drill rigs out of the coastal plain and have filed lawsuits challenging the Trump administration's environmental reviews.
Biden has also said he opposes drilling in the refuge. But if leases are finalized before he takes office Jan. 20, they could be difficult to revoke.
The coastal plain covers about 1.6 million acres, an area roughly the size of Delaware, and makes up about 8% of the vast refuge. It's home to polar bears, caribou and other wildlife. It's also thought to hold billions of barrels of oil.
The Trump administration started the formal process of selling oil rights in the coastal plain on Nov. 17, when it launched the "call for nominations," a 30-day window for oil companies to confidentiality tell the government which pieces of land they would like included in a lease sale. That comment period ends Dec. 17.
To the west, in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the government has waited until the comment period closes before providing notice of a lease sale. It must provide at least 30 days notice before holding a sale.
It remains unclear who might show up to a coastal plain lease sale. Oil and gas companies aren't talking publicly about whether they plan to bid.
