Chris Hedges's Blog, page 201

Trump Blocks Clinics From Making Abortion Referrals

Federally funded family planning clinics can no longer provide referrals for abortions, according to the Trump administration’s “Protect Life Rule,” which went into effect Monday. Clinics that continue to do so will lose their funding.

The rule, which could affect many clinics that serve low-income Americans, is considered a particular attack on Planned Parenthood, which stands to lose approximately $60 million in federal funding.

The American Medical Association (AMA) and 21 states have filed lawsuits against the policy. According to the AMA, it “could affect low-income women’s access to basic medical care, including birth control, cancer screenings and testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases,” CBS News reports.

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The rule applies to clinics that receive funding through Title X, a federal program that benefits 4 million women and provides approximately $260 million in grant funding. Many of those clinics are operated by Planned Parenthood affiliates.

The rule, which will be enforced by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), holds that clinics that receive Title X funding cannot share space with facilities that provide abortions.

The move “will undoubtedly force the clinics to transfer to new locations or undergo costly remodeling,” Marie Lodi writes in New York Magazine’s The Cut.

Title X, passed by Richard Nixon, has never funded abortions; the decision to withhold funding from clinics that simply refer patients for them is new.

“The administration’s actions show its intent is to further an ideological agenda,” Clare Coleman, president of the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association, told CBS.

In June, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Trump administration could to go forward with the policy, pending the decisions of judges in California, Oregon and Washington. HHS contends it has the right to enforce the rule even as additional litigation proceeds.

“Title X is a limited grant program focused on providing pre-pregnancy family planning services—it does not fund medical care for pregnant women,” the Ninth Circuit ruled. “The [final rule] can reasonably be viewed as a choice to subsidize certain medical services and not others.”

Opponents of abortion cheered the Ninth Circuit’s decision. “Ending the connection between abortion and family planning is a victory for common-sense health care,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, said in a statement.

Kelly Laco, spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, told the Los Angeles Times that the DOJ’s position “is supported by longstanding Supreme Court precedent and we are confident we will ultimately prevail on appeal.”

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Leana Wen, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, called the decision “devastating for the millions of people who rely on Title X health centers for cancer screenings, HIV tests, affordable birth control and other critical primary and preventive care.”

Planned Parenthood announced Tuesday that it plans to defy Trump’s rule. Jacqueline Ayers, the organization’s head lobbyist, told The Associated Press, “We are not going to comply with a regulation that would require health care providers to not give full information to their patients.”

HHS has not yet responded to Planned Parenthood’s decision.

 

Democrats Have Facilitated Trump’s Racist Attacks

What follows is a conversation between Gerald Horne, Kimberly Moffitt and Marc Steiner of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists. They hate Israel, they hate our own country, they’re calling the guards along our border— the Border Patrol agents— concentration camp guards, they accuse people who support Israel of doing it for the Benjamins, they’re anti-Semitic, they’re anti-America. Don’t get down, aim higher. We don’t need to know anything about them, personally. Talk about their policy.

MARC STEINER: Welcome everybody. It’s The Real News Network. I’m Marc Steiner. Senator Lindsey Graham speaks for Trump. They are like a tag team match. When Trump tweets telling people to go back to their own countries, and then tweets all of what Graham had said on Fox News to the 62 million people who follow him on Twitter, calling four new congressional representatives who are all women of color “communists,” what does this really hold for us? What does it portend for us and the policies to come? The political struggle that lies ahead of our country, how will it define it? How has this intensified what lays ahead of us?

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I Know What It’s Like to Be Told to ‘Go Back’ to My Own Country



by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

We’re joined today by Dr. Kimberly Moffitt, Professor and Chairman of Language, Literacy & Culture at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. She’s a media critic who often writes on politics and pop culture. She is co-editor of The Obama Effect in 2010 and the forthcoming volume, The FLOTUS Effect: Reflections on the Platform, Presence, and Agency of Michelle Obama. And once again, here on The Real News, Dr. Gerald Horne, the John J. And Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. He’s author of numerous books. Most recently, Storming the Heavens and The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism. And folks, welcome. Good to have you with us.

Gerald, let me start with you, if I might. What we’ve seen over the last few days, we’ve seen— and I’ll talk a bit about later— episodes of this from presidents and presidential candidates over the years, kind of, really throwing out racist tropes. But this is taking it up a notch in terms of telling people to go back to their country, and more. So talk a bit about your analysis of what we’re seeing here now. And then we’ll hear what both of you think this, kind of, portends for what’s politically coming up next.

DR. GERALD HORNE: I think that undercurrents in the United States and of US history are bubbling to the surface. Perhaps, because of the crisis the United States faces externally with this ongoing trade war and new Cold War with China, and this ratcheting up attentions with Iran. What I mean is, is that if you look at US history, you will quickly note that before The US Civil War, there were basically three factions. There was a pro-slavery faction in Dixie. There was a white man’s country faction that said that black people should not be part of the United States of America and the only people who should be part of the United States of America are those defined as white. If you look at the history of Oregon, for example, which comes into the Union right before the Civil War, they basically barred the admission of black people in particular well into the 20th century, which is one of the reasons why Portland even today has one of the smallest black populations in the United States of America. Now, the historians mostly focus on the third faction, the abolitionist faction— John Brown, Frederick Douglass of Baltimore, William Garrison of New England, etc. But that’s a misreading of history and I think what’s happening now is that Mr. Trump is bringing to the surface this white man’s country faction, which encompasses— I’m afraid to say— a goodly number of his 63 million-strong base that voted for him in 2016, and are probably going to vote for him again in November 2020.

MARC STEINER: Kimberly, what’s your take? I mean, building on what Gerald Horne has just said, given that when you look at all these polls we have in America— it’s really interesting the findings in these polls, I was reading earlier this morning— that really kind of show how maybe 60% of Democrats think that we have a struggled to overcome racism, but only 15% of Republicans, which says to me that there’s if not a majority, then a significant portion of white Americans are saying they can go along with Trump. You can even say that it fills what their juices are about, what they’re seeing and hearing. How do you see this playing out?

DR. KIMBERLY MOFFITT: Yeah. And I also think it’s even a denial about the role of race in our society as a whole. That we don’t even believe this is something that we should be focused on because of what Trump is contributing to us, and what many believe is a very strong economy, and a willingness to say the things that haven’t been said by previous administrations regarding our borders, and our trade deals, all that many had felt like had been a bad deal for America. I also see this very much as about a browning of America that really frightens a lot of that 63 million that support President Trump. A lot of folks are struggling with the idea that these very vocal voices, the progressives of our House, currently happen to be women, but they are also brown women. And that becomes offensive to a white male that says there is a place for all of us, and they aren’t maintaining the place that they’re supposed to in our society.

MARC STEINER: And then you have on top of that, you have Senator Graham, what he said this morning on Fox where he called the four representatives literally “communists.” And going back to the tropes of the early 50s and the 60s again, when anybody who opposed the Vietnam War, anybody who was fighting for black liberation, what happened in the 50s in HUAC, are attacked as communists, Gerald. And I think that this is—I mean, we’re setting up a political battle here. Let me put it this way: I think we’re setting up a political battle, but I’m not so sure the Democrats are prepared to win given how this is being fought. What do you think?

DR. GERALD HORNE: I’m glad you brought up the Democratic Party because in some ways the Democratic Party, at least some elements within the leadership, paved the way for the rise of one Donald J. Trump. I take it that your audience has been paying attention to The New York Times for the past few days, which has been running major-length articles about the anti-busing record of one Senator Joe Biden, a former vice president under Barack Obama. As a Senator from Delaware, he led a one-man crusade against busing. And as Reverend Jesse Jackson said at the time, the issue wasn’t the bus; the issue was us. That is to say, the issue was the fact that black kids were going to be sharing classroom space with kids defined as white.

And then, if you look at the origins of this controversy that has brought us to your cameras today, in many ways it starts with an interview that Speaker Nancy Pelosi did with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd when she sharply rebuked, reprimanded and criticized Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez in particular, a congresswoman who has been receiving a steady rain of death threats. And that opened up Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to be receiving even more death threats. She, of course, clapped back. Speaker Pelosi, rather than taking the high road, then upped the ante and opened the door for Donald J. Trump to enter into this debate. And so once again, you see leading Democrats paving the way for the rise of Donald J. Trump’s racism.

DR. KIMBERLY MOFFITT: Yeah.

MARC STEINER: So, Kimberly, picking up on what Gerald just said, I mean, you know—What Trump did here, on the one hand is he saw a divide happening inside the Democrats and was trying to drive a truck through that divide and really split it wider and deeper. He was also making a very calculated move to throw red meat to the people who would vote for him, who voted for him, and are worried about and hate immigrants coming in. We’ve seen all the latest studies showing that race plays a huge factor in the reasons that they vote for Trump. And so, I mean, this is to me a very critical and dangerous moment.

DR. KIMBERLY MOFFITT: Indeed, it is. And what I would say is that Trump knows how to capitalize off of those very moments, and has been successful in doing so. I mean, here’s the reality. You know, the comments that Trump made via his tweets yesterday clearly are saying to us that we don’t have a right to critique what happens with our government nor the president. But the reality is, we in fact do, and we should be able to criticize our government and the individual who is running the government. That’s the beauty of being an American, is having that latitude in which to do so. The problem is that criticism does not equate to hate for our country, but Trump’s tweets do equate to hate. That’s where it’s been, that’s where the line has been crossed, where he has assumed that it’s acceptable for him to call out women who are born and bred in this country— at least three of the four— and don’t have a right to speak back to what they see as problematic in the country. And the other reality is, just as Trump decided he felt like he needed to be the leader of this nation because he didn’t like the direction of the country, so too did those four women. They didn’t like the direction of the country and decided to do something about it. and that’s what we are supposed to do.

MARC STEINER: When Trump writes in his tweets, “….and viciously telling the people”— talking about these women— “telling the people of the United States, the greatest most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how.” Which is almost going back to his being one of the leaders of the birther movement against Obama. I mean, it’s this really feverish hatred of immigrants that is coming to play here. And I think that, you know, that it—Well, moving ahead with this, let me show you this, and let’s talk about this one tweet in response. It was Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley and what she had to say. Let’s take a look at this tweet: “THIS is what racism looks like. WE are what democracy looks like. And we’re not going anywhere. Except back to DC to fight for the families you marginalize and vilify everyday.”

And so, the fight is coming back, but the question is, and I’m really curious—Well, let’s take a look at one other piece. I really want to put this back-to-back because I think it’s important. Rashida Tlaib also tweeted in response, and I found her tweet very interesting as well. “I am fighting corruption in OUR country. I do it everyday when I hold your admin accountable as a U.S. Congresswoman. Detroit taught me how to fight for the communities you continue to degrade & attack. Keep talking, you’ll be out of the WH soon. #TickTock.” Well, let’s talk about the “TickTock” for a moment. I mean, so can the Democrats overcome this divide internally to ensure that the white nationalists who have, kind of, seized the executive branch since the last election are not in power, and what that would mean? There’s a big argument of how that should happen. We don’t have to do that today, but I’m just curious how you think that plays out. Gerald?

DR. GERALD HORNE: Well, I’m afraid to say that it’s unclear at this point. As you probably know, certain polls suggest that Mr. Trump is ahead in terms of prevailing in November 2020. Other polls suggest that he is not with regard to running against Vice President Biden, or Senator Sanders, or Senator Kamala Harris, or Senator Elizabeth Warren. But we know that as of 8:30 p.m. on the first Tuesday in November 2016, The New York Times had Hillary Clinton ahead. And then minutes later, ruled that she had lost. So it’s difficult to say what’s going to happen, but with regard to your earlier point, it’s quite curious— is it not— that Mr. Trump during his inauguration speech in January 2017 railed against the real and imagined flaws of the United States of America. It was carnage, he suggested. And yet, these four Congresswomen are not allowed to make criticisms of the United States. He’s saying implicitly what he has said explicitly. That is to say, they should not count as US citizens, and only those who look like him should count as US citizens.

DR. KIMBERLY MOFFITT: I would concur with what my colleague has already said, but I would also suggest that where we currently are, the Democratic Party is really struggling to overcome this divide. And I think Trump, based on what Pelosi put out recently in response to the four Congresswomen, showed that there was a divide and it left a wide space open for him to enter and continue to broaden that particular bridge that exists right now, or the bridge that doesn’t exist right now. And I don’t see on the immediate horizon that the Democratic Party is doing what it needs to do to be able to bridge that, and be successful in overcoming Trump in the next election.

MARC STEINER: Let’s look at another clip here from Senator Graham again from the same Fox interview, and what he had to say. It’s important to talk about this, I think.

SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: They wanted to impeach Trump on day one. They are socialist, they’re anti-Semitic, they stand for all the things that most Americans disagree with. Make them the face of the future of the Democratic Party. You will destroy the Democratic Party.

MARC STEINER: You can see from these clips, in terms of what the strategies are going to be here, and what they’re going to attempt to do, and this brush that they’re painting people with, and the clear terror in their hearts. I think in many ways because of these women of color who are standing up. And if you add to that, I found a really interesting quote I thought in The New York Times from Douglas Blackmon who wrote Slavery by Another Name, the great Pulitzer Prize-winning book. He said, “In many ways, this is the most insidious kind of racial demagoguery.” He writes that the president has moved beyond invoking serious slanders like neighborhoods and gone back to the rhetoric of the early 1900s of white supremacy. Again, given the state of America, I mean, watching this happen, it really gives me a moment of pause and gives me some chills about where we could be headed. I’ve done other programs here—And Gerald just talking about 1877, what 1877 means for us now in 2019. As does 1932, what it means for us now. So, I mean, this is not something to be taken lightly, I think.

DR. GERALD HORNE: Well, I think you’re right. And the only friendly amendment that I would make to what Douglas Blackmon said is that it soars far beyond the early 1900s in the era of white supremacy. It actually soars back to the antebellum period, the pre-1861 period, when a dominant, predominant faction amongst certain so-called white Americans was that this was a country for whites only. And recall that Abraham Lincoln himself early on in his administration was in favor of emancipation, then expulsion. Even in the last stages of his administration before he was assassinated, he was negotiating with various countries to dispatch and expel the black American population to their shores. So only those who have a romanticized gauzy view of settler colonialism in United States of America should be shocked and surprised that in 2019, these ideas, these noxious ideas of Donald J. Trump, bubble to the surface once again.

MARC STEINER: And so, Kimberly, as we kind of close this out, one of the things here as I was thinking about what Gerald just said and the place we find ourselves in, another thing from that same period of the Antebellum South when Abraham Lincoln won as President of the United States. In part, he won in this four-way race that he had, in part won because abolitionists and others allied with people who we would consider a moderate and didn’t necessarily want to fight slavery that way, to put him over the top even in that election. So I mean, there are a lot of lessons about history about what this says about the 21st century, and what people need to learn about what could happen if people do not, kind of, politically figure out what direction to go in.

DR. KIMBERLY MOFFITT: Indeed. And as someone who studies more contemporary media starting of course in the 50s, you know, so much of the rhetoric of Republicans seems to tie us right back to the 50s, right? In terms of what they feel like was the golden years in which the country was thriving for at least some, but certainly those that didn’t look like me, and it worked for them. And that becomes a particular decade that gets referenced and looked upon time and time again when we’re having conversations around “making America great.” And so, Trump is certainly implicitly taking us back to those moments to say this is where we were successful, and this is where we should be to continue being that great nation that we’ve always seen ourselves in. But again, all we see happening at the same time, instead of focusing on those policies and that legislation and those acts that would make a country successful, we see him stoking the flames of fear by talking continuously about issues of race and those individuals who are bringing harm, or at least raising questions about us being successful as a nation, and taking something away from the rest of us who are the legitimate Americans.

MARC STEINER: So I think that, as we close this out, this is the time when we all have to, kind of, hope and work for coalitions that actually confront this and allow a new America to be built and not to send us backwards.

DR. KIMBERLY MOFFITT: Indeed.

MARC STEINER: And so, I’m going to try to remain optimistic and push ahead. [laughs] Gerald Horne, it’s always great to have you with us. Kimberly Moffitt, thank you both so much for being here with us today. I look forward to continuing this discussion in greater depth. It’s always great to talk to the two of you. Thank you.

DR. GERALD HORNE: Bye-bye.

MARC STEINER: And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. I want to thank you all for joining us. We’ll continue these conversations, obviously. Take care.

Senate Panel Casts Skeptical Eye on Facebook’s Digital Currency Plan

WASHINGTON—Under withering criticism from senators, a Facebook executive on Tuesday defended the social network giant’s ambitious plan to create a digital currency and pledged to work with regulators to achieve a system that protects the privacy of users’ data.

“We know we need to take the time to get this right,” David Marcus, the Facebook executive leading the project, told the Senate Banking Committee at a hearing examining the plan. Anger over Facebook’s series of scandals, notably the opening of personal data of millions of users to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, boiled over as senators of both parties demanded to know why the company wielding massive market power should be trusted in this far-reaching project. The litany of criticism came as Congress began two days of hearings on the currency planned by Facebook, to be called Libra. Also Tuesday, a House Judiciary subcommittee was extending its bipartisan investigation of the market power of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple.

“Facebook is dangerous,” asserted Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the committee’s senior Democrat. Like a toddler playing with matches, “Facebook has burned down the house over and over,” he told Marcus. “Do you really think people should trust you with their bank accounts and their money?”

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by Ellen Brown

Republican Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona said “the core issue here is trust.” Users won’t be able to opt out of providing their personal data when joining the new digital wallet for Libra, McSally noted. “Arizonans will be more likely to be scammed using Libra,” she said.

On the defensive from bursts of aggressive questioning, Marcus indicated the currency plan is a work in progress. “We will take the time” to ensure the network won’t be open to use by criminals and illicit activity like money laundering and financial fraud. “We hope that we’ll avoid conflicts of interest. We have a lot of work to do,” Marcus testified.

The grilling followed a series of negative comments and warnings about the Libra plan in recent days from President Donald Trump, his treasury secretary and the head of the Federal Reserve.

Some senators emphasized the potential positive benefits of Facebook’s plan, meant to bring money transacting at low cost to millions around the globe who don’t have bank accounts. Facebook had its strong defenders of the project, too, on the panel.

“To strangle this baby in the crib is wildly premature,” said Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa.

In that vein, Marcus said Libra “is about developing a safe, secure and low-cost way for people to move money efficiently around the world. We believe that Libra can make real progress toward building a more inclusive financial infrastructure.”

The planned digital currency is to be a blend of multiple currencies, so that its value will fluctuate in any given local currency. Because Libra will be backed by a reserve, and because the group of companies managing it will encourage a competitive system of exchanges, the project leaders say, “anyone with Libra has a high degree of assurance they can sell it for local (sovereign) currency based on an exchange rate.”

Promising low fees, the new currency system could open online commerce to millions of people around the world who lack access to bank accounts and make it cheaper to send money across borders. But it also raises concerns over the privacy of users’ data and the potential for criminals to use it for money laundering and fraud.

To address privacy concerns, Facebook created a nonprofit oversight association, with dozens of partners including PayPal, Uber, Spotify, Visa and MasterCard, to govern Libra. As one among many in the association, Facebook says it won’t have any special rights or privileges. It also created a “digital wallet” subsidiary, Calibra, to work on the technology, separately from its main social media business. While Facebook owns and controls Calibra, it won’t see financial data from it, the company says.

Senators demanded to know exactly how that separation will be done.

“Facebook isn’t a company; it’s a country,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. Kennedy and other conservative senators took the occasion to air long-standing grievances against Facebook, Twitter and Google for a perceived bias against conservative views.

Federal privacy regulators are close to levying a $5 billion fine on Facebook for not meeting terms of an earlier agreement; it would be the largest by far for any tech company.

Trump tweeted last week that the new currency, Libra, “will have little standing or dependability.” Both Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Fed Chair Jerome Powell have expressed serious concerns recently that Libra could be used for illicit activity.

The Treasury Department has “very serious concerns that Libra could be misused by money launderers and terrorist financers,” Mnuchin told reporters at the White House on Monday. “This is indeed a national security issue.”

Facebook has “a lot of work to do before we get to the point where we’re comfortable with it,” Mnuchin said.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., head of the House Financial Services Committee, has asked Facebook to suspend the plan until lawmakers and regulators have a chance to review it. She has said that Facebook, with some 2 billion users around the world, “is continuing its unchecked expansion and extending its reach into the lives of its users.” She called Libra “a new Swiss-based financial system” that potentially is too big to fail and could require a taxpayer bailout.

Mnuchin’s comments came a few days after Trump tweeted: “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”

If they want to get into the financial business, Facebook and its dozens of partner companies in the venture will have to accept the kind of tight regulation that banks are under, Trump said.

Powell, a powerful financial regulator who is independent of the Trump administration, told Congress last week that Facebook’s plan “raises a lot of serious concerns, and those would include around privacy, money laundering, consumer protection, financial stability. Those are going to need to be thoroughly and publicly assessed and evaluated before this proceeds.”

‘Somewhere People Just Accepted What’s Going On as Normal’

The Border Patrol agent, a veteran with 13 years on the job, had been assigned to the agency’s detention center in McAllen, Texas, for close to a month when the team of court-appointed lawyers and doctors showed up one day at the end of June.

Taking in the squalor, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the poor health and vacant eyes of the hundreds of children held there, the group members appeared stunned.

Then, their outrage rolled through the facility like a thunderstorm. One lawyer emerged from a conference room clutching her cellphone to her ear, her voice trembling with urgency and frustration. “There’s a crisis down here,” the agent recalled her shouting.

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Leaked Memo Reveals Government Plan to 'Traumatize' Migrant Children



by

At that moment, the agent, a father of a 2-year-old, realized that something in him had shifted during his weeks in the McAllen center. “I don’t know why she’s shouting,” he remembered thinking. “No one on the other end of the line cares. If they did, this wouldn’t be happening.”

As he turned away to return to his duties, the agent recalled feeling sorry for the lawyer. “I wanted to tell her the rest of us have given up.”

It’s rare to hear from Border Patrol agents, especially since the Trump administration has put them at the front lines of its sweeping immigration crackdown. Public access to them is typically controlled and choreographed. When approached off duty, agents say they risk their jobs if they speak about their work without permission. As a result, much about the country’s largest federal law enforcement agency — with some 20,000 agents policing the borders and ports — remains shrouded in secrecy, even from congressional oversight, making it nearly impossible to hold it accountable.

Disturbing glimpses of some agents have recently begun to fill the void, including some that were published recently after ProPublica obtained screenshots from a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents that showed several agents and at least one supervisor had posted crude, racist and misogynistic comments about immigrants and Democratic members of Congress. The posts raised questions about whether the deplorable detention conditions on the border were out of the control of Customs and Border Protection, as the agency had asserted, or a reflection of its culture.

Other reports followed, including one from CNN that described agents attempting to humiliate a Honduran immigrant by trying to force him to be photographed holding a sign that read in Spanish, “I like men.” The Intercept published more degrading posts from the secret Facebook group, and it reported that it appeared that Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost had once been a member. Provost has not commented.

But there was some nuance. An account of life inside a Border Patrol detention facility outside El Paso, Texas, by The New York Times and The El Paso Times, revealed that two agents there had expressed concerns about the conditions to their supervisors.

The agent who spent June in McAllen doesn’t see his reality in any of those depictions. He’s in his late 30s and is a husband and father who served overseas in the military before joining the Border Patrol. He asked not to be identified because he worried that his candor could cost him his job and thrust him and his family into the middle of the angry public debate over the Trump administration’s border policies.

His comments come at a particularly fraught moment, as politicians on the left compare the Border Patrol’s detention facilities to “concentration camps” and senior Trump administration officials, including most recently Vice President Mike Pence, dismiss descriptions of the inhumane conditions as “unsubstantiated.”

When asked about Pence’s comments, the agent said the damning descriptions of the facilities are “more substantiated than not.” And, while he didn’t embrace the term concentration camp, he didn’t dispute it either. He searched out loud for a term that might be more accurate. Gulag felt too strong. Jail didn’t feel strong enough.

He came around to this: “It’s kind of like torture in the army. It starts out with just sleep deprivation, then the next guys come in and sleep deprivation is normal, so they ramp it up. Then the next guys ramp it up some more, and then the next guys, until you have full blown torture going on. That becomes the new normal.”

Referring back to the grim conditions inside the Border Patrol holding centers, he said: “Somewhere down the line people just accepted what’s going on as normal. That includes the people responsible for fixing the problems.”

He spoke at length in several interviews, making clear that the views and motivations he articulated were his alone. He said he’s not on Facebook, much less a member of any secret Border Patrol social media groups. He also said he did not witness any egregious behavior by his colleagues during his time in McAllen. But he said the agents who were permanently posted there had the shortest fuses, and he’d heard them launch into condescending harangues at the young migrants, blaming them for crossing the border illegally and denying their requests for extra food, water or information about when they’d be released.

Most of his colleagues, he said, fall into one of two camps. There are the “law-and-order types” who see the immigrants in their custody, as, first and foremost, criminals. Then, he said, there are those who are “just tired of all the chaos” of a broken immigration system and “see no end in sight.”

“The only possible end to this that I see is if there’s some change after the next election,” he said, referring to what might finally end the stalemate in Washington over how to reform the system. “Either this president will win again, and Congress will be forced to work with him. Or a new president will get elected and do things a different way.”

In addition to the interviews, the agent shared a journal entry about his time in McAllen, which he wrote in a tentative attempt to sort through what he described as the “roughest” experience of his career; a month that he said revealed a disturbing capacity for detachment.

“What happened to me in Texas is that I realized I had walled off my emotions so I could do my job without getting hurt,” he said. “I’d see kids crying because they want to see their dads, and I couldn’t console them because I had 500 to 600 other kids to watch over and make sure they’re not getting in trouble. All I could do was make sure they’re physically OK. I couldn’t let them see their fathers because that was against the rules.

“I might not like the rules,” he added. “I might think that what we’re doing wasn’t the correct way to hold children. But what was I going to do? Walk away? What difference would that make to anyone’s life but mine?”

When asked whether he simply stopped caring, he said: “Exactly, to a point that’s kind of dangerous. But once you do, you feel better.”

Part of that feeling, the agent said, comes from experience. He’s served Republican and Democratic administrations, each one with its own border crisis and wildly unpopular responses. Other people might find it hard to view his agency outside the context of their political leanings, but he said that he didn’t join because he feels strongly one way or the other. He has a criminal justice degree and was looking for a federal law enforcement job that would provide him financial security, without requiring him to go overseas.

What keeps him in now, even as his job has morphed into one he and his wife are uncomfortable talking about in public, is that he earns about $100,000 a year, including overtime and holiday pay. He has a top-of-the-line health insurance plan that, among other things, covered nearly the entire cost of his child’s birth. In a little more than a decade, when he turns 51, he’ll be eligible to retire with a full pension that probably won’t cover the cost of a house on the beach, he said, but will give him the freedom to “do just about anything else I want, and not have to worry.”

The agent, tall and fit with dirty blond hair, said he thinks of his time left in the Border Patrol like the home stretch of a marathon. He does his work with blinders on to everything but his family and the finish line. “I’m already starting to attend retirement seminars,” he said. “All I’m trying to do is get through the next decade.”

That was his mindset, he said, when he landed in McAllen. It was his first time on the border since he was a rookie. He’d spent most of his career posted in the eastern part of the United States, investigating smuggling organizations rather than intercepting undocumented immigrants. But as huge numbers of Central American migrants came to the Rio Grande Valley, he and hundreds of agents across the country were summoned to help.

In his journal entry, the agent described what he saw when he arrived at the Border Patrol detention center as a “scene from a zombie apocalypse movie.”

His colleagues, he said, wore surgical masks and rubber gloves because there was “sickness and filth everywhere.” And he said the facility “looked like a walled-off compound where the government had the last safe zone and was taking in refugees fleeing the deadly zombie virus.”

The scene that struck the agent the hardest that first day was the sight of dozens of children being held in cages — an image publicized this year to widespread condemnation. The children seemed about the same age as his 2-year-old son, but that’s where the similarities ended. “My kid would have been running laps around that entire building, nonstop,” the agent said. “But the boys my kid’s age, they were just there. They weren’t running or playing, even though they had been pent up all day.”

The agent said he suspected that the kids were lethargic because they hadn’t been given enough to eat. He said he wondered, “Why are things like this?” He said he didn’t look for answers because he didn’t expect he’d find any. “I decided not to dwell on it, and just do my job.”

He went on that way for weeks, seeing things without dwelling on them. His interactions with individual immigrants, he said, are a blur. He vaguely recalled a government staffer combing lice out of a little girl’s hair; 7- and 8-year-olds pacing in circles and sobbing inconsolably because they’d been separated from their parents; a teenage mother who’d swaddled her baby in a filthy sweatshirt that she’d borrowed from another detainee because she’d been forced to throw away the clothes she brought.

Only a few of those encounters are mentioned in the agent’s written account of his experiences in McAllen. Most of it reads like a chronicle of a mundane work trip. He got Memorial Day off. He bought groceries and stopped drinking soda. A colleague who was staying at the Residence Inn shared enough free gym passes to last the entire trip, and his waist size went from 33 inches to 32. He started listening to music again: “Not a specific style, language or rhythm rather music that expressed passion.” And he tried meditation.

The visit by the team of lawyers to the facility near the end of June seemed to shake up the agent. The team, led by a California attorney named Hope Frye, had arrived to interview children being detained in McAllen. The agent’s duties placed him close enough to them to observe their work.

Frye said that typically during such visits, the agents tend to blend into the background; silent and straight-faced, in their badges and drab green uniforms. They didn’t engage much with her because they were instructed not to. She said years of hearing immigrant children tell her how badly they’d been treated in detention had long made her worry about the agents’ humanity. “I’ll look at them and wonder sometimes, ‘What kind of a parent are you when you spend your entire day filled with hate and victimizing other people?’”

But to get her work done, Frye said, she tries to keep such thoughts to herself. At some point in McAllen, however, she let a comment slip to the agent about a young child who had been separated from his family. The agent, she said, blurted out that he knew of another woman who was separated from her family and raising a 2-year-old on her own.

Frye, 68, said she asked the agent if he was referring to his own family. Her question started a series of exchanges that didn’t diminish her suspicions about the Border Patrol, Frye said, but did change her thinking a bit about the agent.

“If what happened was a film, you’d see an older woman with many years of experience, her eyes lined from seeing these poor children, and a young man, with a young family, seeing this nightmare for the first time,” Frye said, recalling her encounter with the agent. “What I thought to myself was, ‘How sad is it that this young man who probably wants to be of service to his country is stuck doing this.’”

Referring to the agent’s initial outburst, she said, “I think he was trying to tell me, ‘Hey, I’m human too.’”

Katherine Hagan, a Spanish interpreter who worked alongside Frye, also interacted briefly with the agent, and, although he didn’t say it in so many words, she felt he was struggling to reckon with his role at the facility, as if, she said, “he had become so accustomed to seeing children behind wire cages that he had assimilated it as normal and necessary.”

At one moment, she said, she recalled him scrambling to find clothes for the baby girl wrapped in the sweatshirt. The baby was so dirty that Frye wiped away rings of black dirt from around her neck. But at another point the agent lectured Hagan about indulging the immigrant children, warning her not to let “the aliens” use the officers’ bathrooms.

“I’m trying to find the right words to describe his demeanor,” Hagan, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, said of the agent. “I could tell he felt embarrassed and potentially kind of exposed. I don’t know whether he was having some kind of epiphany. But it was clear he knew that I saw him — really saw him — in the middle of this horrible situation.”

When asked about the interactions, the agent said he was trying to communicate to the lawyers that the detainees were not the only ones at the facility who felt trapped. Walking away, at least in his mind, was not an option. Trying to change things on “a macro level,” the agent said, was for fools.

“The most I felt I could do was make sure toilet paper was stocked. Or if someone wanted an extra juice, I’d give them an extra juice. Or maybe do something to make someone’s day a little nicer; maybe smile and treat them with respect. That’s all I felt I had the power to do,” the agent said. “The ones that try to save the world, they’re the ones who either get burned out or put on a leash.”

The agent compared himself to the cynical donkey in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” who survives by never sticking his neck out.

“I’ve decided that I’m not interested in advancement,” he said. “I’d rather be a full-time father than a full-time Border Patrol agent.”

But now that he’s home, he feels the experience has somehow followed him.

“I go to the playground with my kid, and I say to myself, ‘Why am I not enjoying this?’”

Kamala Harris Blasts, and Takes Money From, Epstein’s Law Firm

WASHINGTON (AP) — Kamala Harris bemoaned the influence of the powerful and connected elite last Tuesday when she called on top Justice Department officials to recuse themselves from any matter related to Jeffrey Epstein. She said their former law firm’s work on behalf of the financier accused of sexual abuse “calls into question the integrity of our legal system.”

Yet the same day, Harris’ husband headlined a Chicago fundraiser for her presidential campaign that was hosted by six partners of that firm — Kirkland and Ellis, according to an invitation obtained by The Associated Press.

Harris, a California senator and Democratic presidential candidate, was one of several White House hopefuls to blast the handling of Epstein’s case in Florida a decade ago, when his lawyers negotiated a deal with federal prosecutors that allowed him to avoid the possibility of years in prison. But her decision to move ahead with the fundraiser hosted by Kirkland and Ellis partners while criticizing the firm underscores the tension that can arise when a politician’s rhetoric collides with his or her need to raise money to sustain a presidential campaign.

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“If any connection with Kirkland and Ellis is a stain on (senior Justice Department officials), why isn’t a connection with the law firm for the receipt of campaign contributions a stain on her own campaign?” said Paul S. Ryan, an attorney for the good-government group Common Cause.

Ian Sams, a Harris spokesman, said there wasn’t a problem with accepting the campaign contributions because the firm is big and the partners who hosted the fundraiser didn’t work on Epstein’s plea agreement.

“The people involved in that case have not supported her campaign, and she wouldn’t want that support anyway,” Sams said.

The firm and the six partners named on the event invitation did not respond to requests for comment.

The Epstein case has roiled Washington this month after federal prosecutors announced fresh charges against the financier, who is accused of paying underage girls for massages and then molesting them at his homes in Palm Beach, Florida, and New York during the 2000s. President Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Alex Acosta, resigned on Friday over his handling of the case. As a U.S. attorney in Miami, Acosta met with Kirkland and Ellis lawyers and agreed to a deal that allowed Epstein to avoid federal trial by pleading guilty to state charges and serving 13 months in jail.

The new attention being paid to the case has also drawn scrutiny on Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who both worked for Kirkland and Ellis. Harris, who is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it’s necessary that they recuse themselves from involvement in the matter to avoid even the “appearance of impropriety.”

“In our democracy, no one — no matter how powerful or well-connected — is above the law. Yet Epstein’s deal, secured by his lawyers at Kirkland and Ellis, calls into question the integrity of our legal system and undermines the public’s confidence that justice will be served,” Harris said in a statement released hours after the Chicago fundraiser.

Barr is recused from any review of a 2008 plea deal, but has said that he doesn’t need to do so with the current case.

Before her election to the Senate, Harris was the attorney general of California and was elected to two terms as San Francisco’s district attorney. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, is also a high powered attorney who works in corporate law. So it is perhaps little surprise that law firms have been one of the top industries that have donated to her presidential bid, with Kirkland and Ellis being no exception.

Her campaign declined to say how much was raised at last week’s event, and the sum won’t have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission until October. Records show that a handful of employees and partners of the firm donated about $6,000 to Harris during the first quarter of the year — a drop when compared to the $12 million she raised during that time.

“It’s an international law firm with thousands of employees, many of whom probably support Kamala Harris because she’s a tough prosecutor who actually knows how to put away predators, unlike the Trump lackeys who protect them,” Sams said.

___

Follow Slodysko on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianSlodysko

The Sanders Campaign Is Fighting Back Against Biased Media Coverage

Sen. Bernie Sanders is doing well in the polls, but as his presidential campaign staff explains to Politico, you’d never know that from his media coverage and comments from reporters. Yet in a July 12 New York Times analysis of multiple public opinion polls asking likely voters whom they would choose for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders ranks second, behind Joe Biden.

“There are a healthy number [of reporters] who just find Bernie annoying, discount his seriousness, and wish his supporters and movement would just go away,” Sanders’s campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, told Politico.

Sanders’s campaign staff members are not unique in calling out what they see as excessively negative media coverage. During the 2016 campaign, and even through today, former Hillary Clinton staffers blame the media as at least partially responsible for her loss.

“The media always covered her as the person who would be president and therefore tried to eviscerate her before the election, but covered Trump who was someone who was entertaining and sort of gave him a pass,” John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, said on a private conference call with supporters, The Hill reported in 2016.

In 2016, Sanders supporters accused the media of a “Bernie blackout.” In a statement from December 2015, as The Los Angeles Times reported, then-campaign manager Jeff Weaver said, “corporately-owned media may not like Bernie’s anti-establishment views,” but that didn’t prevent them from “[allowing] for a fair debate in this presidential campaign.”

While his staffers say Sanders is getting more coverage than he did in 2016, their current complaints center on the type of coverage, which, as Politico writer Michael Calderone explains, they see as “excessively negative.” The campaign is also using its own platforms to make their concerns heard. As Calderone writes:

On Sanders’ livestreaming show “The 99,” three campaign staffers spent more than an hour last week discussing what they perceive as media bias, such as the tendency to focus on the shiny and salacious rather than Sanders’ decadeslong advocacy for the poor and working class. ‘Standing up on these issues over 40 years is not new and exciting for people,’ said chief of staff Ari Rabin-Havt.

David Sirota, a former journalist and now speechwriter for Sanders, made his displeasure known in a tweet.

It's weird — in this poll, there's a candidate in a strong second place position, and yet once again, this particular candidate's name is apparently not allowed to even be mentioned by media organizations promoting the poll. https://t.co/eI2wgHt0uY

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) July 9, 2019

Staff members like Shakir were careful to differentiate their complaints from President Trump’s frequent tirades against the media, emphasizing that Sanders “appreciates and understands the role the media plays in a democratic system.”

Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama staffer and current co-host of the podcast “Pod Save America,” cautions that if the Sanders campaign tried to go after the media the way Trump does, they’d lose.

“The right has had unbelievable success working the refs [the press] by calling the mainstream media biased against them,” he explained to Politico, adding, “Unfortunately for the Sanders campaign, the press too often considers complaints from the left as validation of their objectivity and complaints from the right as something worth addressing to prove their objectivity.”

Founder of African American Museum Found Dead in Car Trunk

BATON ROUGE, La. — A 75-year-old Louisiana woman who founded an African American history museum was discovered dead in the trunk of a car, and police said Saturday that investigators were working diligently to find those responsible.

Baton Rouge police Sgt. L’Jean McKneely said investigators were still waiting for a coroner to determine a cause of death for Sadie Roberts-Joseph after her body was found Friday afternoon.

The Advocate reported Roberts-Joseph was the founder and curator of the Baton Rouge African American Museum, which she started in 2001. The museum sits on the campus of New St. Luke Baptist Church, where Roberts-Joseph’s brother is pastor.

“Ms. Sadie was a tireless advocate of peace,” the Baton Rouge Police Department posted on its Facebook page, adding: “Our detectives are working diligently to bring the person or persons responsible for this heinous act to justice.”

Roberts-Joseph also organized an annual Juneteenth festival at the museum, marking the date June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers delivered belated news to Texas that President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all Southern slaves free. The document had been finalized more than two years earlier.

The museum features African art, exhibits on growing cotton and black inventors as well as a 1953 bus from the period of civil rights boycotts in Baton Rouge. It also has prominent exhibits on President Barack Obama, whose presidency Roberts-Joseph cited as an inspiration to children.

“We have to be educated about our history and other people’s history,” Roberts-Joseph told the newspaper in 2016. “Across racial lines, the community can help to build a better Baton Rouge, a better state and a better nation.”

Beatrice Johnson, one of Roberts-Joseph’s 11 siblings, lives two doors down from her sister’s home on a quiet street in Baton Rouge. She said Roberts-Joseph would come by every day. Johnson said her sister came over Friday because “she had mixed some cornbread, but her oven went out, and she brought it here to put in the oven.”

Gesturing toward her kitchen, Johnson said: “The bread is still there. She never came back to get it.”

I Know What It’s Like to Be Told to ‘Go Back’ to My Own Country

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” asked Donald Trump this weekend, all but certainly targeting Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. The president’s latest tweets came in response to an ongoing public feud between the four progressive women of color—often known as the “Squad”—and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The episode merely confirmed what The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi had pointed out prior to his racist screed:

America is becoming an increasingly hostile place for women and for people of color. Pelosi’s constant public attacks against the four newly elected women of color aren’t just disrespectful, they’re dangerous. Whether she means to or not, her repeated insinuations that the Squad are rabble-rousing upstarts who are undermining the Democratic party helps bolster the right’s vitriolic narratives about the congresswomen. As America grows increasingly brazen in its bigotry, Pelosi should be aggressively standing up for her freshman colleagues, not trying to tear them down.

Since being smeared by the president with characteristically white nationalist rhetoric, each of the congresswomen has issued a powerful response on social media.

You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us. You rely on a frightened America for your plunder.

You won’t accept a nation that sees healthcare as a right or education as a #1 priority, especially where we’re the ones fighting for it.

Yet here we are.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 14, 2019

You are stoking white nationalism bc you are angry that people like us are serving in Congress and fighting against your hate-filled agenda.

“America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.” -RFK

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) July 14, 2019

Want a response to a lawless & complete failure of a President?

He is the crisis.
His dangerous ideology is the crisis.
He needs to be impeached.

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) July 14, 2019

Let’s set aside that Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley were born in the U.S., if only for a moment. Regardless of where you were born, if you’re a person of color in America, it’s likely that you or someone you love has been told a variation of “Go back to where you came from.” I’ve lost track of how many stories I’ve heard, but a personal experience immediately springs to mind watching the most powerful man in the country attack four women of color.

Just after the 2016 election, I was home in the U.S. for an extended period to work and visit my family. My partner, brothers and I were driving through rural Illinois, where I was born, to Chicago, after a wedding in Wisconsin when we stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts. There, a group of young white men started making loud comments about how we should “immigrate here legally, and then you could vote for Trump” as, I assume, they just had. It’s hard to know if it was my partner’s British accent, or the color of my brothers’ and my skin that made them assume we were not from the country, let alone that very state, but it struck straight to the core of my frustrations that the U.S. had just elected an unabashed nativist as president.

“I was born here. Not voting for Trump makes me no less of a U.S. citizen than you,” I replied through gritted teeth. The kids backed off immediately, and ultimately, they didn’t seem intent on attacking us. While I tell myself it could’ve been worse, and I have indeed heard much worse, their remarks have stayed with me. While I was no stranger to American racism, this was the first time my citizenship status had been openly questioned by a stranger who wasn’t a U.S. border patrol officer. (It should be noted that these officials have had no trouble asking me, repeatedly, why I was re-entering the U.S., unwilling to accept my answer that I was born here.)

What became clear to me at that Illinois Dunkin’ Donuts, its surrounding roads littered with red Trump/Pence signs, was just how emboldened the most racist and xenophobic elements in the country have come to feel under Trump. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that counties that have hosted Trump rallies have been seen a 226% rise in hate crimes.

My mother, like several other members of my family on both my Mexican and Iranian sides, was undocumented. I was taught from a young age how “lucky” I was to be born north of the Río Grande, how much my parents and grandparents had given up for my generation to have more than they could dream of. It’s a common narrative among immigrant families, which doesn’t mean to say it isn’t true. Every day that migrant men, women and children are kept in abhorrent conditions, I’m reminded that had I been born just a few miles south, I, too, might be in a migrant camp right now. With each ICE raid, I have come to fear that a member of my family could be detained, even though we’ve all been naturalized.

I am not alone in my anxiety. A recent study of Latinx teenagers in California born in the U.S. found that this administration’s xenophobic immigration policies are having a very real impact on their mental health:

In this cohort study of 397 US-born adolescents in California, fear and worry about the personal consequences of current US immigration policy were associated with higher anxiety levels, sleep problems, and blood pressure changes. Reported anxiety statistically significantly increased after the 2016 presidential election, particularly among young people in the most vulnerable families.

The study reminded me of my mom, who often tells me about how her mental health suffered for over a decade while her immigration status remained unresolved, fearing at any moment she would be forced to the leave the country she’s now lived in longer than her native Mexico.

A powerful epistolary poetry exchange between Latinx writers Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz also captures the pain and fear so many are feeling right now in the U.S. Here is an excerpt from a poem in the series by Limón.

Manuel is in Chicago today, and we’ve both admitted

that we’re travelling with our passports now.

Reports of ICE raids and both of our bloods

are requiring new medication.

Below is part of Diaz’s poetic response:

I have my passport with me these days, too, like you and Manuel.

Not because of ICE raids, but because I know

what it’s like to want to leave my country. My country—

to say it is half begging, half joke.

Lately, I settle for an hour instead of a country.

What joy might be in this hour? I ask myself.

And there is much—

Ours is a country that decided at its inception what a U.S. citizen must look like, and it’s easy to see now that the founding fathers never had Ocasio-Cortez or Tlaib or Omar or Pressley or me and my family and countless others in mind. This president and his enablers are not the exception in our long, shameful history of systemic racism—they simply have no interest in hiding theirs behind platitudes.

If anything, Trump has exposed “legal citizenship” and “residency” for the constructs they’ve been all along. A passport, a birth certificate, a green card, a visa—each of these documents can be revoked. One’s status is ultimately as fragile as the paper the words are printed on. Just look at Trump’s threats to nullify birthright citizenship or his adviser Stephen Miller’s plot to deny green cards to immigrants who have received benefits, including Obamacare or food stamps. On several occasions, full U.S. citizens have been detained and deported by immigration officials.

I have a U.S. birth certificate and a passport, yet my own president believes I do not have a right to these documents. He also seems to maintain that there are actions, words, events that could make me “un-American,” with all of its McCarthyist implications.

In the end, what do those pieces of paper even really mean? Do they give me more human rights than the 4-month-old child detained somewhere in our purportedly exceptional country? That I even have to ask that is a sign of how clearly our institutions were designed by white hegemonic powers to make us question everyone’s humanity, to dehumanize anyone who didn’t look or sound or act or think like them.

I leave the U.S. often, ironically, and I have been fortunate to live and study and work abroad in countries from Mexico to Portugal and the U.K.—experiences that have thrown the good and the bad the U.S. has to offer into high relief. On the days when I read the news, I can’t imagine how I can love the country I still, sometimes reluctantly, call home, but I try to remember what the great James Baldwin said in an interview with the Paris Review:

I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else. At least not in a single lifetime, or, if you do, you’ll be aware of precisely what it means, knowing that your real roots are always elsewhere. If you try to pretend you don’t see the immediate reality that formed you I think you’ll go blind.

I’m trying not to go blind, even though the tears that come more and more often these days make it harder than ever to see the nation for which my parents gave up so much to call their own.

The U.S. Is Quietly Opening Detention Camps for Small Children

The federal government is quietly expanding its use of shelters to house infants, toddlers and other young asylum-seekers. One Phoenix facility housed 12 children ages 5 and under, Reveal has learned, some as young as 3 months old, all without their mothers.

As part of this expansion, the government has designated three facilities to house newborns and unaccompanied teen mothers. Records obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting indicate a dozen children arrived at Child Crisis Arizona starting in mid-June, after it garnered a $2.4 million contract to house unaccompanied children through January 2022.

The kids, some of whom entered the facility as recently as Thursday and hail from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Ecuador and Brazil, are each living in Child Crisis without a parent.

It’s unclear where the children’s parents are located. Child Crisis didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. The Office of Refugee Resettlement told Reveal on Friday that it’s working on a response to our questions about the whereabouts of the children’s parents.

The revelations come as the government draws widespread and growing protest over the treatment of infants, children and adults in its care. As advocates and attorneys monitor overcrowding and inhumane conditions at existing locations, new government-financed facilities, run by three agencies within two federal departments, continue to pop up around the country.

Children in at least one of these shelters, which holds a newborn, have not been provided legal services. Meanwhile, hundreds of children at the Carrizo Springs emergency shelter just outside San Antonio are not receiving legal services stipulated under federal law, Reveal has learned.

In addition, Crisis Care Arizona, a nonprofit, was recently cited by state officials for deficiencies before the arrival of unaccompanied infants and toddlers. Inspectors from the Arizona Department of Health Services found hazardous conditions in one location in February, including a “tall floor lamp (that) was unstable and tipped forward easily when light pressure was applied,” as well as unsanitary toys and chipped paint in both the restrooms and outdoor play area.

In January, state monitors found several records for children in Child Crisis’ care lacked information about a parent or health care provider. State standards indicate that water in the sink next to the diaper-changing station should run between 86 degrees and 110 degrees to ensure that employees’ hands are properly disinfected. The sink at Child Crisis in January measured just 70 degrees.

Inspections at three Child Crisis locations in Phoenix and Mesa over the past three years revealed 37 violations, including a lack of drinking water for children in classrooms, a missing lid on a vessel containing soiled diapers, an incomplete first-aid kit, and “dried yellow-orange liquid splatters on the base of one toilet.”

Phoenix City Council member Carlos García said he’s concerned about the welfare of the children at the facility. “Because of the recent deaths and rampant abuse, sexual or otherwise, at the hands of this administration, we need to make sure these kids’ lives are a priority,” he said, adding that reunification with a parent or other family member should happen as soon as possible.

“For those who don’t have that option, we need community response to make sure these children are taken care of,” he said.

In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, Bethany Children’s Home is housing 11 children, including an unknown number of infants, on its campus in Womelsdorf, Reveal has learned. Bethany Children’s Home was awarded a $3.5 million grant in late April to house unaccompanied children through early 2022.

The organization’s website says that its unaccompanied child population includes trafficking victims “ages infant through eighteen years of age (who) are in desperate need of a safe and appropriate shelter while seeking reunification with their family members.” The goal, according to the website, is to facilitate 65 new unaccompanied children.

Just weeks before Bethany Children’s Home was awarded its federal grant, a Philadelphia jury awarded the father of a 16-year-old $2.9 million after she took her own life while living at the facility – the result of a 12-day trial. And in January, a Bethany Children’s Home employee pleaded guilty to charges related to setting up a teen to be beaten by two others while on a school bus.

Inspection records issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services in the last two years indicate a vast array of violations of state standards at the various homes that make up the Bethany Children’s Home campus. These include an allegation of sexual abuse by a staffer that wasn’t immediately reported to the state, problems with children’s medication logs and improper use of restraints – after a staffer placed a child into a restraint when the child was verbally aggressive and kicked a radiator.

Bethany Children’s Home requested that questions be submitted in writing but did not respond in time for publication.

Bethany Christian Services (not connected to the Pennsylvania facility), a Michigan-based provider that already contracts with the federal government to hold unaccompanied children, reopened a Modesto, California, facility last month that was once used as a home for women with unplanned pregnancies.

The state of California has licensed the group home to hold 12 children, and it’s currently holding four minors: two teenage parents and two babies. One of the infants is just 2 weeks old and was born in the United States, making the child a U.S. citizen in the custody of the federal refugee agency.

***

As the government expands its use of facilities to shelter children, it has not apparently kept up with federally mandated obligations to provide legal services to these asylum-seekers.

Under the federal law known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, the refugee agency must provide vulnerable children in its custody access to legal services. On its website, the agency states that these mandated services include visits with the client and advocating in the child’s best interest.

Bethany Christian Services says the first unaccompanied child arrived at its home in Modesto last month, on June 29. A few days later, on July 4, the refugee agency provided the children with a know-your-rights presentation, produced as either a video or slide presentation, along with a written packet that’s required for unaccompanied children in shelter.

It wasn’t until this week, on July 8, that Bethany says it was in touch with a legal service provider that could furnish the children in Modesto with federally mandated legal services. It’s unknown whether these children have been directly connected with individualized legal services yet. Any delay in legal services could harm a child’s ability to get immigration relief.

In the Carrizo Springs emergency shelter just outside San Antonio, where hundreds of children are being kept, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, better known as RAICES, said the Office of Refugee Resettlement hasn’t yet given it clearance to provide legal services for children.

Jonathan Ryan, RAICES CEO, said the law is designed to protect children who have been placed in proceedings to be deported.

“That’s the case for kids in Carrizo,” he said. “There’s already been cases scheduled for court.”

The shelter has been open for two weeks, but the refugee agency hasn’t authorized a contract for legal services there, Ryan said.

The agency said it’s working on a response to our inquiry about the lack of legal services provided at various facilities in its contracted shelter network.

The news comes as the Trump administration last month ordered the refugee agency to stop funding certain education, recreational and legal aid for children in the agency’s care.

Ryan said RAICES plans to go to the shelter on Tuesday with a team, with or without a contract.

“These kids need lawyers,” he said.

This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and Matt Thompson and copy edited by Stephanie Rice.

Aura Bogado can be reached  abogado@revealnews.org . Follow her on Twitter:  @aurabogado .

A Solar-Powered Future Is Finally Upon Us

The world’s solar future continues to brighten, further and faster than seemed possible only a few years ago.

As the price of all types of solar technology goes on falling, it is becoming possible for large parts of the world to replace fossil fuels with cleaner and cheaper solar alternatives. A UN-backed report says much of Asia could meet all its electricity needs and ditch coal completely, by adopting solar power on a large scale.

After an initial drop of 2% in installations of solar equipment in the United States when President Donald Trump put a 30% tariff on overseas-manufactured solar panels, the market has picked up again and there are forecasts of a rapid growth rate this year.

The US Solar Energy Industries Association expects installations to rise by 25% in 2019 to a capacity of 13.3 gigawatts, about the output of 15 large coal-fired plants. This is more electricity than many smaller countries in Africa and Europe need to keep their lights on.

The boom in American solar power is due mainly to the continuous fall in the price of photo-voltaic panels, because of an over-supply in China. This has cancelled out the negative effect of Trump tariffs. States in the southern US, particularly Florida, are expecting to install large-scale solar farms this year that will produce electricity more cheaply than coal.

New technology

In China itself the solar boom continues. It has been strengthened by an innovation, a molten solar power plant in Dunhuang (in the north-western Gansu province, on the edge of the Gobi desert), costing three billion yuan (£345m/ $440m).

This uses 12,000 mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays onto a tower containing molten salt which heats to a far greater temperature than water and creates steam to drive turbines and generate electricity.

The advantage of this concentrated solar power method over solar panels is that the heat can be stored in the salt and electricity produced in the evening when demand rises.

The 100 megawatt plant, enough to power a medium-sized city, can store energy for up to 15 hours, so it can work continuously and can re-charge itself when the sun comes up the following day. The Chinese engineers say the plant has already exceeded its design specifications.

The same technology is being used in Dubai, where an ambitious project, Noor Energy 1, will cover 44 square kilometres of desert. Costing $4.4 billion, it is the largest renewable energy project in the world, apart from hydropower, and combines both concentrated solar power and photo-voltaic technologies.

“The 1.5°C limit means a greatly reduced risk of drought and water stress in south and south-east Asia”

This combination is expected to produce 950 megawatts of power: it uses 550,000 tons of salt to store the heat. Again, the power output after sunset is expected to last for 15 hours. Dubai aims to generate 25% of its energy from solar power by 2030.

Although concentrated solar power plants take longer to construct and have a larger capital cost, the energy storage they provide makes them particularly attractive to desert states where the input from the sun is so reliable.

But the future for solar is bright over the whole of south and east Asia, according to a new report by Climate Analytics, which is supported by the United Nations. The study has seven country studies for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Climate Analytics researchers estimate that covering just 1.5% of the territory in each south and east Asian country with solar installations could satisfy their combined electricity consumption 13 times over.

Costs for renewables and energy storage technologies continue to fall: the average cost of renewables was often already in the same range as fossil fuels in 2016, even without accounting for external costs like health and the environmental impacts of fossil fuels. It has now fallen further.

Key contribution

However, for the world to limit warming to 1.5°C, these  countries need to decarbonise their energy systems by 2050, and the power sector has a critical role to play.

According to the study, the share of zero carbon electricity generation needs to reach at least 50% in 2030 and 100% by 2050. Coal would need to be phased out of electricity generation by 2040.

“By decarbonising their energy systems, south and south-east Asian countries can make a fundamental difference in global efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C, in line with the Paris Agreement, and will reap large economic and sustainable development benefits by doing so,” said the report’s author, Bill Hare, Climate Analytics’ CEO.

Dr Fahad Saeed, climate scientist at Climate Analytics, said: “The 1.5°C limit means a greatly reduced risk of drought and water stress in south and south-east Asia, which would contribute to achieving zero hunger, good health and wellbeing, and clean water and sanitation.”

“It would also reduce the risk of flooding for large numbers of people living in coastal regions, as well as extreme heat that can otherwise reach intolerable levels for human health and labour productivity, particularly in densely populated cities in south Asia.”