Chris Hedges's Blog, page 237

Lawsuit Over Ferguson’s ‘Debtors Prison’ Drags On

In January 2014, Tonya DeBerry was driving through an unincorporated area of St. Louis County, Missouri, when a police officer pulled her over for having expired license plates.

After discovering that DeBerry, 51, had several outstanding traffic tickets from three jurisdictions, the officer handcuffed her and took her to jail.

To be released, she was told, she would have to pay hundreds of dollars in fines she owed the county, according to her account in a federal lawsuit. But after her family came up with the money, DeBerry wasn’t released from custody. Instead, she was handed over to the municipalities of Ferguson and Jennings, and in each city, she was told she would be released only after she paid a portion of the fines she owed them, according to the lawsuit.

It was as if she were being held for “ransom,” her lawyer would later say.

The Supreme Court ruled almost 50 years ago that a person can’t be jailed for not being able to pay a fine. But like so many people in Missouri, DeBerry had ended up cycling through a succession of jails for that very reason, caught up in what critics have called modern-day “debtors prisons,” used by towns to keep fines flowing into municipal coffers.

“It’s a cat-and-mouse game,” said her daughter, Allison Nelson, who has also spent time in jail for not being able to pay traffic fines.

If DeBerry and her family were exasperated by the heavy-handed collection efforts, they would learn how hard it would be to hold the authorities accountable, especially in Ferguson, even after the killing of Michael Brown later that year drew national attention to the city’s troubled criminal justice system.

The city slowly stopped jailing people for not being able to pay fines as the news media showed the victims were primarily black and the Justice Department made clear that what Ferguson had been doing was wrong. But four years after a federal class-action suit was filed against the city on behalf of thousands of people who claimed they were jailed for their inability to pay fines, the plaintiffs are still waiting for redress.

The city has sought to have the lawsuit dismissed, filing a succession of motions, arguing among other reasons that instead of suing the city, the plaintiffs should be suing the municipal division of the state court. All three of the motions have been denied by the judge, Audrey G. Fleissig, of the U.S. District Court in St. Louis, though one of the rulings was appealed and that took about a year to resolve.

One issue has proved to be particularly frustrating to the plaintiffs: whether the city of Ferguson is even insured for a class action.

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In March 2016, the lawyer representing Ferguson sent an email to a representative of the city’s insurer, saying that the scope of the lawsuit had expanded, and that concern about the case “grew” after a similar suit was settled for what was believed to be a “substantial amount of money.”

The five-sentence email concluded with the lawyer, Peter Dunne, of the St. Louis firm Pitzer Snodgrass, saying that legal action may be necessary to resolve the question of whether the city was covered for a class action.

“We believe a DJ [declaratory judgment] suit to determine coverage may be necessary,” Dunne wrote.

Three months later, the insurance trust filed a declaratory judgement suit against Ferguson in St. Louis County Circuit Court, asking a judge to find that the city did not have insurance coverage for class actions.

Dunne’s role was not publicly known until September, when St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger reported Ferguson’s allegation that Dunne had violated his duty to the city. The email documenting Dunne’s discussion of a lawsuit with the insurer was first obtained by ProPublica. Dunne, one of the firm’s principals, did not respond to requests for comment. The other principals did not respond to emails or to a call to the firm’s office.

Suggesting legal action involving his own client was a breach of legal ethics, some experts said, and the revelation has only deepened the sense among the plaintiffs and their supporters that the deck is stacked.

“No matter where the citizens of Ferguson go in the legal system, justice is really hard for them to obtain,” said Vincent Southerland, executive director of New York University School of Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law. “It’s another example that we have a legal system that was not built to protect and vindicate the rights of the most vulnerable among us.”

The killing of Brown by a police officer in August 2014 and the unrest that followed thrust Ferguson into the middle of a growing national debate over race and law enforcement. But for black people in Ferguson and the surrounding North County region, racial discrimination had long defined their relationship with the local police and courts.

Even as the rest of the country moved on from Ferguson, the people seeking a judgment against the city found themselves mired in the machinations of an insular legal system and an overburdened insurance carrier.

Ferguson, a city of about 21,000 people, was insured through a cooperative of 25 municipalities called the St. Louis Area Insurance Trust, commonly referred to as SLAIT.

The trust has operated largely out of the public eye. It took the persistence of Messenger, who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for his columns on “debtors prisons” in rural Missouri, to make the trust comply with open government laws.

Messenger said the rural courts ensnared whites, while in Ferguson and elsewhere in North County, it was blacks who were victimized. “But it’s the same concept,” he said. “It’s policing on the poor, it’s jurisdictions that don’t have a tax base anymore looking to the judicial system as a fundraising tool and judges allowing themselves to be tax collectors rather than purveyors of justice.”

The trust hired Dunne to provide Ferguson’s defense of the class-action lawsuit. But his firm, Pitzer Snodgrass, was also providing the trust with legal advice on insurance coverage issues, according to a court filing by Ferguson. That set up what Ferguson said in the filing was a conflict that the city had not been made aware of.

Even if city officials wanted to settle the case, the trust claims in court filings there isn’t coverage and it won’t pay out. The insurance trust’s lawsuit will determine whether there is coverage.

Michael Downey, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on legal ethics, said that unless Dunne had Ferguson’s permission, Dunne should not have talked to the insurer about the possibility of a lawsuit over coverage.

“A breach of the duty of confidentiality basically to encourage a party to take action against your client is a pretty serious violation of the rules,” Downey said.

Even if Dunne thought he was conveying something that the insurer already knew, the exchange was still concerning, Downey said.

The trust, through its lawyer, declined to comment.

Michael Frisch, Georgetown University Law Center’s ethics counsel, said that, were the bar to pursue an investigation, any punishment would not be severe. A reprimand — at most, he said.

“It’s the kind of a thing that would not draw that much of a response from the bar,” Frisch said. “Lawyers tend not to get suspended for things like this.”

New York University law professor Stephen Gillers, who specializes in legal ethics, said that regardless of any punishment, Dunn’s actions are significant.

“It’s a big deal, because clients are entitled to loyalty,” he said. “If you can’t be equally loyal to both clients, then you have a conflict and you have to withdraw entirely or from one or the other client.”

For lawyers hired by insurance companies to represent policyholders, the question of who is the client was for many years unsettled ethical terrain, experts say.

Lawyers can feel a sense of obligation to the insurance companies that hire them — and that can provide a steady stream of business — said William Barker, co-author of “Professional Responsibilities of Insurance Defense Counsel.”

Barker, a Chicago lawyer with the firm Dentons, said that until the 1970s, lawyers hired by insurance companies to represent a policyholder typically thought of the company as their chief client. But a series of court decisions since then established that the lawyer owes undivided loyalty to the policyholder, and that is why the lawyer’s actions in the Ferguson case appear to be troubling, Barker said. “That’s something that the defense lawyer ought not to be doing,” he said. “The lawyer who is handling the defense ought not to be involved, certainly in advising the insurance company on coverage issues.”

Michael-John Voss, a lawyer for the ArchCity Defenders, the civil rights group that brought the lawsuit against Ferguson, expects to case to drag into 2020.

“The relief and the remedy has been a long time coming, and there’s no clear end in sight,” he said. “And it reemphasized to me the way that these larger structures are put in place to avoid accountability and to perpetuate a system of social control.”

ProPublica asked the insurance trust if it had instructed Dunne to act as he did, but the trust’s lawyer said the organization would not answer any of ProPublica’s questions because of the ongoing lawsuits.

The insurance cooperative was created in the 1980s to help small St. Louis-area municipalities share the cost of liability insurance and health care. The arrangement worked for the occasional slip-and-fall claim and other routine municipal litigation. But it has not held up well in the face of payouts to cops injured on duty and for actions by the police and the courts.

Most notably, the trust paid $1.5 million to Brown’s family in 2017 to settle a wrongful death claim against Ferguson. But that was hardly the only big hit in recent years. In 2016, a jury awarded $3 million to the family of Jason Moore, an unarmed 31-year-old man, who died after a Ferguson police officer delivered several shots from a Taser.

A state audit released in February showed the organization’s fund balance dropped to $3.8 million in 2018 from $12.2 million in 2016. Like many insurers, the trust also has its own coverage, known as reinsurance, and it turned to those carriers to help with the Moore verdict. But the companies have told the trust that they won’t cover the judgment in the Moore case because the companies allege the trust improperly notified them of the claim. The trust is suing the companies.

Dunne and his firm are no longer working on the Ferguson case. The firm was disqualified by the judge after it hired a lawyer from the ArchCity Defenders who represented one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs in court.

De’carlon Seewood, who stepped down in March after three and a half years as Ferguson’s city manager, said resolving the lawsuit will help the community move beyond the abuses and the notoriety that came with them.

“It is important to kind of move forward and show that new face, that better face,” Seewood said this year, before he left Ferguson to become the city manager in Fairburn, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. Jeffrey Blume, Ferguson’s interim city manager, directed questions to the city’s attorney, who declined to answer.

Seewood said the city had hoped the insurance trust would take care of the settlement the way the insurer for the city of Jennings had. But Jennings was in a very different position. Its insurer was Travelers, the country’s sixth-largest property and casualty insurer. By contrast, the insurance trust is a small cooperative with dwindling funds.

“The insurance [trust] looked at the enormity of what’s being asked and they said that’s it’s outside their [coverage] of the city, and so the city finds itself fighting with its insurance company about [coverage],” Seewood said.

According to a memo written by the trust’s claims administrator, the plaintiffs originally asked for $27.5 million but during mediation in April 2016 reduced the demand to $9.5 million. That amount is what the plaintiffs believe, based on the policies, is the total coverage limit of Ferguson’s insurance.

Alexandra Lahav, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law and an expert in civil litigation, said a case like this typically would be resolved in about two years and said the insurance dispute was slowing the process.

“This really shouldn’t be a very complicated class action,” Lahav said.

Lisa Soronen, executive director for the State and Local Legal Center, a Washington organization that supports states and local governments in legal disputes that rise to the U.S. Supreme Court, said the dispute between the trust and Ferguson didn’t leave the city with many sound options other than fighting the case mightily.

“As a practical matter, Ferguson’s a really small city that has no money,” she said. “If there’s no insurance coverage and there’s a huge judgement, I don’t know how it would pay.”

John Rappaport, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who has studied the impact insurance can have on police practices and policies, said insurance trusts have a reputation for being less likely than commercial insurers to settle case involving police officers.

“The risk pools or the trusts, they see themselves as extensions of the cities themselves,” he said. “Their reluctance to settle litigation against the police would seem [to be] a kind of loyalty to their members — their cities.”

Rappaport said commercial insurers often see the issues as purely a matter of dollars and cents.

“Whereas if the city either is in a risk pool or the city represents itself, they see it as more of like a moral issue, like we have to stand up for our officers,” he said.

Even after the Ferguson suit is resolved, litigation in Missouri over “debtors prison” practices won’t be. ArchCity Defenders has lawsuits pending in six other cities, with more in the pipeline stretching beyond North County.

DeBerry, the Ferguson woman who was a named plaintiff in the Ferguson class action, was also a plaintiff in the lawsuit against neighboring Jennings, which settled for $4.8 million less than a year and a half after the suit was filed.

But the suit in Ferguson has dragged on longer than DeBerry could wait.

She died in April 2018.

“And now she will never even get a piece of this justice because she’s no longer here,” said Nelson, her daughter. “That’s sad, that’s really sad. It’s actually pathetic because it should have never come to that. It hurts.”

Ex-Governor’s Phone Seized in Flint Water Probe

LANSING, Mich. — Authorities investigating Flint’s water crisis have used search warrants to seize from storage the state-owned mobile devices of former Gov. Rick Snyder and 65 other current or former officials, The Associated Press has learned.

The warrants were sought two weeks ago by the attorney general’s office and signed by a Flint judge, according to documents the AP obtained through public records requests.

Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who is helping with the probe, confirmed they executed a series of search warrants related to the criminal investigation of Flint’s lead-contaminated water in 2014-15 and a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.

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The water crisis in Flint was one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in U.S. history. Untreated water leached lead from pipes and into Flint’s homes and businesses while cost-cutting financial managers — appointed by Snyder — were running the city.

The investigation has led to charges against 15 current or former government officials, including two who served in the Cabinet of Snyder, a Republican who left office in December. But no one is behind bars, and some Flint residents believe key players who could have prevented the lead debacle are getting off easy.

“As stated in recent motions, the prosecution is aware of substantial potential evidence that was not provided to the original prosecution team from the onset of the investigation,” Hammoud said in a statement Monday following the AP’s reporting. “The team is currently in the process of obtaining this evidence through a variety of means, including search warrants. The team is also conducting a thorough review of existing and newly received evidence pertaining to the Flint water crisis.”

One warrant, signed May 19, lists all content from Snyder’s state-issued cellphone, iPad and computer hard drive. Similar information was sought from the devices of 33 employees who worked in his office, 11 in the Department of Environmental Quality and 22 in the Department of Health and Human Services.

The evidence was apparently initially obtained by former special prosecutor Todd Flood with investigative subpoenas. Because it has been kept in a division of the attorney general’s office, Hammoud took the unusual step of securing a warrant to search another part of the office. She has been managing the probe since January.

“We’re doing everything we can to comply,” said Dan Olsen, a spokesman for Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is not involved in the criminal investigation and is instead handling lawsuits against the state by Flint residents. After succeeding former Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette this year, she appointed Hammoud to lead the probe.

A similar warrant was also issued to the Department of Technology, Management and Budget.

“The department is complying with the warrant. We cannot discuss the details further because it is part of pending litigation,” spokesman Caleb Buhs said. A spokesman for the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy — formerly the Department of Environmental Quality — confirmed it was served a warrant last week.

The warrants seek data from the devices of individuals who have been charged in the probe but also uncharged officials such as Snyder, former Environmental Quality director Dan Wyant and various people who worked in Snyder’s office including former Lt. Gov. Brian Calley, top aide Richard Baird and chief of staff Dick Posthumus.

Snyder attorney Brian Lennon declined to comment on the warrants Monday, saying they are part of ongoing litigation.

The warrants came after Hammoud this year reported that boxes of records were discovered in the basement of a state building, including phone extractions and a “trove” of other materials stored on hard drives that allegedly had not been turned over in response to the subpoenas. She sought long breaks in the criminal cases to look at the boxes and any other evidence, but judges declined to suspend the cases for six months.

Flood was ousted as special prosecutor in April after leading the three-year investigation. Nobody in Snyder’s office has been charged.

Hammoud accused Flood of mishandling the production of records and other evidence collected from state agencies. He has defended his work, saying he acted professionally.

Separately, another lawyer from the attorney general’s office appeared in court to speak up for attorneys in the department who had assisted Flood in collecting and cataloging mounds of records. Christina Grossi said there was no wrongdoing by staff.

Under Michigan law, the affidavit that Hammoud submitted to get the warrants signed by Judge Nathaniel Perry III will not become public for 56 days, though prosecutors can seek to suppress it longer.

The AP filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the attorney general’s office and the budget department to see the warrants they received.

Is the Government Finally Going After Google and Amazon?

The U.S. Department of Justice is facing what Politico calls a “major test” of its antitrust abilities as it takes steps toward an initial investigation of Google, as The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The Washington Post also reported Friday that the Federal Trade Commission is considering an investigation of Amazon. While these reports don’t mean official investigations have been opened, even small steps, as Politico writer Nancy Scola says, is “a clear signal that two years of a bipartisan anti-Silicon Valley backlash in Washington may be yielding concrete action.”

Both moves, as the Post reported, are “the result of the FTC and the Department of Justice, the U.S. government’s leading antitrust enforcement agencies, quietly divvying up competition oversight of two of the country’s top tech companies.”

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal also reported that the FTC will lead an antitrust investigation into Facebook, and the House Judiciary Committee will begin its own investigation into the technology industry, examining competition in digital markets. The process, the Journal reports, “will include multiple hearings, along with requests for information to the major businesses.”

According to the Post, the new oversight is a sign that both agencies are attempting to improve their supervision of tech companies. Earlier this year, as the Post points out, “The FTC established a special task force it said would monitor tech and competition, including ‘investigating any potential anti-competitive conduct in those markets, and taking enforcement actions when warranted.’ ”

As Scola explains:

A move against Google would be in keeping with the agenda of DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim, a Trump nominee who has been talking up the idea of subjecting internet firms to closer examination. In a speech last year, he said that “If there is clear evidence of harm to competition in digital platforms, enforcers must take vigorous action and seek remedies that protect American consumers.”

President Trump too, has accused tech companies like Google of being unfairly prejudiced against him. At a March news conference with Brazilian President Jair Bolsanaro, Trump said, “Something is happening with those groups of folks that are running Facebook and Google and Twitter, and I do think we have to get to the bottom of it.”

If undertaken, a DOJ investigation of a potential Google monopoly would focus on the company’s advertising and search businesses, according to the Times’s sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. According to those sources, the impetus for even considering an investigation came, at least partly, from competitor complaints. If an investigation does come to pass, it’s not clear what penalties Google would face, or if the DOJ would attempt to break up the company.

It’s also not clear what actions or penalties the FTC might pursue against Amazon. The company, as The New York Times explains, “has been criticized for using its vast online sales site to edge out competitors and harm third-party sellers that use the platform to sell goods.”

As had Google, Amazon declined to comment to both Politico and the Times.

Microsoft’s experience, however, may offer an example of potential consequences, or at least a cautionary tale. As the Times explains, “A prospect that should really worry Google and Amazon, is a replay of the government’s case against Microsoft in the 1990s. Microsoft did not have to break itself into two, which was the government’s goal. But the company was distracted for at least a decade, which allowed space for start-ups like Google. Microsoft’s reputation took a dive.”

Microsoft aside, it’s been nearly 35 years since the last time the U.S. government split up a corporate behemoth, when it broke AT&T into eight companies. The FTC previously investigated Google’s search ranking practices for its competitors in 2011, but the investigation ended after two years with only minor voluntary commitments from Google to change its practices.

The Supreme Court’s Harrowing New Lurch Right

If you are looking for confirmation that the Supreme Court is moving ever further to the right, you don’t have to wait for its decisions in a pair of pivotal cases concerning partisan gerrymandering and the census.

Those cases—which deal, respectively, with the constitutionality of carving up voting districts to advantage the party in power and the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census to give even greater political clout to red states—are the most closely watched of the current session. When they are resolved this month, they will clarify a great deal about the long-term future of the court’s five-member conservative majority that now includes Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

In the meantime, two under-the-radar decisions that the court has already handed down—Bucklew v. Precthye on the death penalty, and Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt on the esoteric doctrine of “sovereign immunity”—signal where the court is likely headed.

Decided on April 1 along party lines, the 5-4 majority opinion in Bucklew was written by Gorsuch, who constructs his argument along the principle of “originalism”—a legal theory that threatens to reverse decades of liberal court rulings in areas well beyond capital punishment.

Originalism posits that the Constitution should be read according to its meaning for the Founding Fathers rather than be interpreted as a “living document” that can accommodate contemporary values and evolving traditions. Originalists contend that their approach minimizes the personal views of judges—what the late Antonin Scalia called “judicial subjectivism”—and is ideologically neutral. Critics counter that far from being neutral, originalism is a result-oriented methodology aimed at disguising and validating right-wing outcomes.

Before he was arrested in Missouri for murder in 1996, Russell Bucklew had likely never considered the merits of originalism. Bucklew was subsequently tried, convicted and sentenced to death. He appealed his conviction and sentence in both the state and federal court systems, but without success.

After Bucklew was scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection on March 20 of this year, his lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court for a stay of execution. They also asked the court to examine Bucklew’s claim that because he suffers from a rare medical condition, lethal injection by means of the drug pentobarbital would cause him to experience excessive pain in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments.

Bucklew suffers from a disease called cavernous hemangioma, which causes clumps of blood vessels known as vascular tumors to grow in his head, neck and throat. He contends the disease will prevent pentobarbital from properly circulating in his body. Instead of sedating him, as designed, the drug will cause his tumors to rupture, resulting in an agonizing death by suffocation.

The relief Bucklew sought from the high tribunal was actually quite modest. Instead of asking the Supreme Court to vacate his death sentence and let him live the rest of his life in prison, he requested that state of Missouri execute him by means of nitrogen gas, which, he argued, would be more bearable than pentobarbital.

The court’s conservative majority rejected his plea, holding that all executions are painful, and finding that Bucklew had not demonstrated he would suffer disproportionately.

“As originally understood,” Gorsuch explained, “the Eighth Amendment tolerated methods of execution, like hanging, that involved a significant risk of pain, while forbidding as cruel only those methods that intensified the death sentence by ‘superadding’ terror, pain, or disgrace.” The key question in determining whether a particular method of execution runs afoul of this standard, he continued, is whether the method is “intended” to inflict those additional elements. Missouri, he concluded, had no such intent.

In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer offered a “living Constitution” counter-interpretation, arguing that “the Eighth Amendment is not a static prohibition that proscribes the same things that it proscribed in the 18th century. Rather, it forbids punishments that would be considered cruel and unusual today.” Breyer’s analysis failed to carry the day.

If Bucklew’s personal fate were all that mattered, few people besides dedicated death-penalty abolitionists would care. But the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bucklew bodes ill for the protection of other constitutional rights, especially the right to abortion that is now under attack throughout red-state America.

This is where the Hyatt case comes in.

Gilbert Hyatt, a former California resident who holds a lucrative microprocessor technology patent, sued the Golden State’s Franchise Tax Board (FTB) in Nevada, seeking compensation for the FTB’s 30-year effort to tax him for the royalties he had received under the patent. Hyatt accused the FTB of harassment. A Nevada jury subsequently returned a $490 million verdict in his favor.

At the time of the trial, a 1979 Supreme Court case, Nevada v. Hall, permitted interstate litigation of the sort Hyatt had initiated as a private individual. On appeal to the Supreme Court, the FTB urged that Hall be overturned.

In another 5-4 party-line decision released on May 13, this one authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court obliged, holding that as separate sovereigns, states must be immune from private lawsuits brought in the courts of other states.

What makes Thomas’ opinion significant isn’t so much the reversal of Hall but the activist reasoning behind it. Of particular concern is what Thomas writes with regard to the age-old principle of stare decisis, which requires the Supreme Court to exercise caution before overruling its prior decisions. “Stare decisis,” Thomas declared, “is not an inexorable command.”

The court’s liberals understood full well the implications of Thomas’ opinion. Writing again in dissent, Breyer charged:

“It is one thing to overrule a case when it ‘def[ies] practical workability,’ when ‘related principles of law have so far developed as to have left the old rule no more than a remnant of abandoned doctrine,’ or when ‘facts have so changed, or come to be seen so differently, as to have robbed the old rule of significant application or justification.’ It is far more dangerous to overrule a decision only because five Members of a later Court come to agree with earlier dissenters on a difficult legal question. … Today’s decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next.”

The reversal of Roe v. Wade is perhaps the number one concern of liberals and progressives. But Roe is by no means the only time-honored precedent in jeopardy.

As I have noted in this column before, Thomas is on record questioning the validity of such landmarks as Gideon v. Wainwright, which established the right to court-appointed counsel for criminal defendants, and New York Times v. Sullivan, which established crucial protections for reporters in defamation suits brought by public figures and government officials.

Just how far the court’s hardline originalists are willing to go to take the country back to the 1950s, or an even earlier era, remains to be seen. Resisting their designs is part of the larger battle for the soul and future of the nation.

Congress Finally to Send $19B Disaster Aid Bill to Trump

WASHINGTON — Congress is finally shipping President Donald Trump a $19.1 billion disaster aid bill, a measure stalled for months by infighting, misjudgment and a presidential feud with Democrats.

The House is approving the measure in its first significant action as it returns from a 10-day recess. It is slated for a Monday evening vote in which Republicans whose home districts have been hit by hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and fires are set to join with majority Democrats to deliver a big vote for the measure.

Conservative Republicans had held up the bill during the recess, objecting on three occasions to efforts by Democratic leaders to pass the bill by a voice vote requiring unanimity. They say the legislation — which reflects an increasingly permissive attitude in Washington on spending to address disasters that sooner or later hit every region of the country — shouldn’t be rushed through without a recorded vote.

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Along the way, House and Senate old-timers have seemed to outmaneuver the White House, though Trump personally prevailed upon Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., to drop a bid to free up billions of dollars for dredging and other harbor projects. The Senate passed the bill by a sweeping 85-8 vote on its way out of Washington May 23, a margin that reflected a consensus that the bill is long overdue.

The measure was initially held up over a fight between Trump and Democrats over aid to Puerto Rico that seems long settled.

“Some in our government refused to assist our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico who are still recovering from a 2017 hurricane. I’m pleased we’ve moved past that,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y. “Because when disaster strikes, we shouldn’t let a ZIP code dictate our response.”

The measure also faced delays amid failed talks on Trump’s $4 billion-plus request to care for thousands of mostly Central American migrants being held at the southern border. The sides narrowed their differences but couldn’t reach agreement in the rush to go on recess but everyone agrees that another bill will be needed almost immediately to refill nearly empty agency accounts to care for migrants.

The measure is largely the same as a version that passed the House last month that Republicans opposed for leaving out the border funding.

“We must work together quickly to pass a bill that addresses the surge of unaccompanied children crossing the border and provides law enforcement agencies with the funding they need,” said top Appropriations Committee Republican Kay Granger of Texas. “The stakes are high. There are serious — life or death — repercussions if the Congress does not act.”

Among the reasons was a demand by House liberals to block the Homeland Security Department from getting information from federal social welfare authorities to help track immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally who take migrant refugee children into their homes.

As the measure languished, disasters kept coming — with failed levees in Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri and tornadoes across Ohio just the most recent examples. The measure is supported by the bipartisan party leadership in both House and Senate.

The legislation is also being driven by Florida and Georgia lawmakers steaming with frustration over delays in delivering help to farmers, towns, and military bases slammed by hurricanes last fall. Flooding in Iowa and Nebraska this spring added to the coalition behind the measure, which delivers much of its help to regions where Trump supporters dominate.

The bill started out as a modest $7.8 billion measure passed in the last days of House GOP control. A $14 billion version advanced in the Pelosi-led chamber in January and ballooned to $19.1 billion by the time it emerged from the floor last month, fed by new funding for community rehabilitation projects, Army Corps of Engineers water and flood protection projects, and rebuilding funds for several military bases, including Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

Many Republicans opposed funding to mitigate future disasters as part of rebuilding projects when Superstorm Sandy funding passed in 2013 only to embrace it now that areas such as suburban Houston need it. Democrats, for their part, held firm for what ended up as roughly $1.4 billion for Puerto Rico, letting Trump feud with the U.S. territory’s Democratic officials for weeks and deflecting political blame for stalling the bill.

Lawyers Deem European Union Migrant Policy a Crime Against Humanity

PARIS — More than 40,000 people have been intercepted in the Mediterranean and taken to detention camps and torture houses under a European migration policy that is responsible for crimes against humanity, according to a legal document asking the International Criminal Court to take the case Monday.

The request filed with the ICC alleges that European Union officials are knowingly responsible for deaths of migrants at land and sea, and their widespread rape and torture at the hands of a Libyan coast guard funded and trained at the expense of European taxpayers. It names no EU official but cites an ongoing ICC investigation into the fate of migrants in Libya.

Officials with the European Commission, Germany and Spain defended EU policy and efforts to help migrants in Libya. France dismissed the accusations as “senseless” and lacking “any legal foundations.”

The legal document cites public EU documents, statements from the French president, the German chancellor and other top officials from the bloc.

“We leave it to the prosecutor, if he dares, if she dares, to go into the structures of power and to investigate at the heart of Brussels, of Paris, of Berlin and Rome and to see by searching in the archives of the meetings of the negotiations who was really behind the scenes trying to push for these policies that triggered the death of more than 14,000 people,” said Juan Branco, a lawyer who co-wrote the report and shared it with The Associated Press.

The ICC is a court of last resort that handles cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide when other countries are unwilling or unable to prosecute. It is up to the prosecutor, who receives many such requests, to decide whether to investigate and ultimately bring a case.

The EU spokeswoman in charge of migration, Natasha Bertaud, declined to comment directly on the court filing, but she and Germany’s government spokesman, Steffen Seibert, each placed blame for deaths at sea firmly on smugglers.

“The EU’s track record on saving lives in the Mediterranean speaks for itself, saving lives has been our top priority and we have been working relentlessly to this end,” Bertaud said.

The first crime, according to the document, was the decision to end the Mare Nostrum rescue operation near the end of 2014. In one year, the operation rescued 150,810 migrants in the Mediterranean as hundreds of thousands crossed the sea. The operation cost more than 9 million euros a month, nearly all paid for by Italy. It was replaced by an operation named Triton, financed by all 28 EU nations at a fraction of the cost. But unlike the earlier operation, Triton ships didn’t patrol directly off the Libyan coast, the origin of most of the flimsy smuggling boats that were taking off for Europe.

Deaths in the Mediterranean then soared. In 2014, around 3,200 migrants died in the sea. The following year, it rose to over 4,000, and in 2016 peaked at over 5,100 deaths and disappearances, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration.

“The objective of this new policy was to sacrifice the lives of many in order to impact the behavior of more,” according to the complaint. “It also failed. Crossings did not decrease as predicted, because the risk had little deterrent effect on those who have little to lose to begin with.”

Bertaud said the EU quickly realized its mistake in ending the Mare Nostrum operation and tripled its rescue capacity in 2015, helping save the lives of 730,000 since that year.

But EU countries leaned heavily on the Libyan coast guard to do so, sending money and boats and a degree of training to units of the loosely organized force linked to various factions of Libya’s militias. For Alpha Kaba, a Guinean detained in slave-like conditions in Libya before ultimately making the crossing in 2016, that decision is a travesty.

Kaba was rescued by a ship operated by humanitarian organizations. Those are all but gone now from the Mediterranean, after Italy, Malta and other countries repeatedly refused to allow them to dock with migrants on board.

And in the past two years migration has dropped considerably to Europe. The total for the first four months of 2019 was around 24,200 for irregular migration, 27% lower than a year ago, according to Frontex, the EU’s border agency.

“Yes, there’s no more migration, but where are all those young people that they picked up? They’re in the prisons. They’re in Libya and in prisons, and they’re being tortured over there. If they aren’t allowed in Europe, then let them go back to their countries quickly and under good conditions,” said Kaba, who has received asylum in France. “There are no more entrances or exits.”

Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said Libya’s migrant holding cells “cannot be referred to as torture detention centers.” Borrell, who is maneuvering to become the EU’s next foreign policy chief, told reporters in Morocco, “We are trying all means to help Libya provide migrants with the best possible conditions.”

Libya’s role in the migrant crisis is already on the radar of the court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda. In a statement to the Security Council in May 2017, she said that her investigators were studying the issue, adding: “I am deeply alarmed by reports that thousands of vulnerable migrants, including women and children, are being held in detention centers across Libya in often inhumane conditions. Crimes, including killings, rapes and torture, are alleged to be commonplace.”

The court receives many similar requests every year for formal investigations into war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“The more detailed the communication, the more likely the prosecutor will take it seriously,” said Dov Jacobs, a defense lawyer at the ICC who is not connected to the 243-page request.

Branco said he believed the details in the report, co-written with lawyer Omer Shatz, would leave the court little choice.

“(European officials) pretended that this was a tragedy that nothing could be done against it that they had no role in it,” he said. “And we demonstrate very carefully that, on the contrary, they triggered this so-called tragedy.”

___

Associated Press writers Masha Macpherson in Paris, Mike Corder in The Hague, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Sylvain Plazy in Brussels; and Amira El-Masaiti in Rabat, Morocco contributed to this report.

Bernie Sanders’ Rallying Cry for the Democratic Party

Inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s speech at the California Democratic Convention in California—in which the 2020 contender took a thinly veiled shot at fellow White House hopeful Joe Biden’s centrist policy approach—progressives made the Twitter hashtag #NoMiddleGround go viral on Sunday in an effort to make clear that there can be no compromises when it comes to confronting the global climate crisis, providing healthcare to all as a right, and battling inequality.

“We have got to make it clear that when the future of the planet is at stake, there is no ‘middle ground,'” Sanders said, in a clear reference to Biden’s reported middle-of-the-road climate agenda. “We will take on the fossil fuel industry and transform our energy system.”

“When it comes to healthcare, there is no middle ground,” Sanders continued. “When it comes to abortion, there is no middle ground. When it comes to mass shootings and the fact that 40,000 people were killed last year with guns, no middle ground.”

There is no “middle ground” compromise with Donald Trump and the GOP. pic.twitter.com/EKu13ktjyc

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 2, 2019

Stopping a war with Iran #NoMiddleGround

— Josh Orton (@joshorton) June 2, 2019

Abortion is health care.

Health care is a human right. #NoMiddleGround https://t.co/uMA2WFBKxh

— Briana Blueitt (@briana_blue) June 2, 2019

There is #NoMiddleGround with the environment and climate action. Either we save 1,000,000 species from destruction and avoid $160 trillion in environmental costs or we don’t.

— Youth For Environmental Change (@youth4ec) June 2, 2019

Middle Ground on Climate Change = Uninhabitable Planet

Middle Ground on Healthcare = 30K+ Die Each Year

Middle Ground on Wall Street = Multi-Trillion Bailouts

Middle Ground on Social Security = Work Until You Drop Dead

Middle Ground on Housing = 553K homeless#NoMiddleGround

— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) June 3, 2019

The Vermont senator’s remarks inspired a flood of tweets from his supporters and other progressives, who expressed enthusiastic agreement with Sanders’s call for an uncompromising approach to the most pressing crises facing the United States and the planet.

Middle ground on fracking: water still poisoned.

Middle ground on health care: people still dying.

Middle ground on climate: planet still becomes uninhabitable.

Dems, for all these things (and more) there’s #NoMiddleGround. Thankfully though, there’s #Bernie. #FeelTheBern pic.twitter.com/j5SKSyvdm7

— Josh Fox (@joshfoxfilm) June 3, 2019

The tweets from Sanders backers and others quickly made #NoMiddleGround a trending Twitter topic in the U.S.

Sanders’s remarks demanding an unabashedly bold progressive agenda were also applauded at the California Democratic Party Convention in San Francisco, where the Vermont senator received a standing ovation while calls for moderation by Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and former Rep. John Delaney were panned by many in the crowd.

Biden, who is currently the Democratic frontrunner according to most national polls, did not attend the California convention.

“In my view, we will not defeat Donald Trump unless we bring excitement and energy into the campaign, and unless we give millions of working people and young people a reason to vote, and a reason to believe that politics is relevant to their lives,” Sanders told the San Francisco audience. “We cannot go back to the old ways, we have got to go forward with a new and progressive agenda.”

Joe Biden Can Run, But He Can’t Hide Forever

Joe Biden’s glaring absence from the California Democratic Party convention has thrown a national spotlight on his eagerness to detour around the party’s progressive base. While dodging an overt clash for now, Biden is on a collision course with grassroots Democrats across the country who are learning more about his actual record and don’t like it.

Inside the statewide convention in San Francisco over the weekend, I spoke with hundreds of delegates about Biden while leafletting with information on his record. I was struck by the frequent intensity of distrust and even animosity; within seconds, after glancing at his name and photo at the top of the flyer, many delegates launched into some form of denunciation.

I often heard delegates bring up shameful milestones in Biden’s political history — especially his opposition to busing for school desegregation, treatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas hearings, leading role in passage of the 1994 crime bill, career-long services to corporate elites, and powerful support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

It may have been a dumb tactical move for Biden to stay away from the convention. Its 3,400 delegates included core Democratic activists and leaders from around the state. Even some of the pro-Biden delegates said they were miffed that he wasn’t showing up — in contrast to the 14 presidential candidates who accepted invitations to address the convention. (Biden chose to be in Ohio instead, speaking at a Human Rights Campaign gala in support of LGBTQ rights.)

Nationwide, Biden generated headlines like this one in USA Today: “Biden Faces Stiff Criticism from Democrats for Skipping California Convention.” Interviewed for that news story, I said: “He was not going to be very popular at this convention, but his refusal to show up only reinforces the idea that he’s an elitist and he is more interested in collecting big checks in California than being in genuine touch with grassroots activists and people who care about the Democratic Party’s future.”

Yet if Biden had shown up, it’s quite likely he would have been met with a storm of protest on the convention floor. That’s because so many of the state’s Democratic delegates are vocally opposed to the root causes and effects of institutionalized racism, war, systemic assaults on the environment and overall corporate power.

Looking ahead, Biden will strive to avoid, as much as possible, any uncontrolled situation that could disrupt his pose as an advocate for the middle class and the poor. He least needs wide circulation of accurate information about his political record.

I worked with a few other delegates to blanket the convention with a RootsAction flyer that included some revealing quotes from Biden and facts about his record. We got some pushback from people who didn’t like seeing distribution of such critical material. But many more said that they appreciated it.

Polls show that Biden has little support among young people. Many share the basic outlook of a 19-year-old Sanders supporter at the convention, Yvette Flores, who told Bloomberg News: “Everything he stands for is against the interests of the working class and young Democrats.”

While a dozen of the presidential contenders who spoke were unimpressive or worse, two were far and away the progressive standouts.

Bernie Sanders (whom I actively support) delivered a cogent and fiery speech on Sunday. “There is a debate among presidential candidates who have spoken to you here in this room — and those who have chosen for whatever reason not to be in this room — about the best way forward,” he said. “In my view, we will not defeat Donald Trump unless we bring excitement and energy into the campaign, and unless we give millions of working people and young people a reason to vote and a reason to believe that politics is relevant to their lives.” And: “We have got to make it clear that when the future of the planet is at stake there is no middle ground.”

The other great speech came from Elizabeth Warren, who also deftly skewered Biden along the way. “Big problems call for big solutions,” she said. “And some Democrats in Washington believe the only changes we can get are tweaks and nudges. If they dream, they dream small. Some say if we all just calm down, the Republicans will come to their senses.” Warren added: “Here’s the thing. When a candidate tells you about all the things that aren’t possible, about how political calculations come first . . . they’re telling you something very important — they are telling you that they will not fight for you.”

Her reference to the distant Joe Biden was crystal clear.

The Banking Model That’s Bankrupting Americans

This article is excerpted from Ellen Brown’s new book Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age , available in paperback. 

The U.S. federal debt has more than doubled since the 2008 financial crisis, shooting up from $9.4 trillion in mid-2008 to over $22 trillion in April 2019. The debt is never paid off. The government just keeps paying the interest on it, and interest rates are rising.

[image error] “Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age from Democracy Collaborative”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

In 2018, the Fed announced plans to raise rates by 2020 to “normal” levels — a fed funds target of 3.375 percent — and to sell about $1.5 trillion in federal securities at the rate of $50 billion monthly, further growing the mountain of federal debt on the market. When the Fed holds government securities, it returns the interest to the government after deducting its costs; but the private buyers of these securities will be pocketing the interest, adding to the taxpayers’ bill.

In fact it is the interest, not the debt itself, that is the problem with a burgeoning federal debt. The principal just gets rolled over from year to year. But the interest must be paid to private bondholders annually by the taxpayers and constitutes one of the biggest items in the federal budget. Currently the Fed’s plans for “quantitative tightening” are on hold; but assuming it follows through with them, projections are that by 2027 U.S. taxpayers will owe $1 trillion annually just in interest on the federal debt. That is enough to fund President Donald Trump’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan every year, and it is a direct transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy investors holding most of the bonds.

Where will this money come from? Crippling taxes, wholesale privatization of public assets, and elimination of social services will not be sufficient to cover the bill.

Bondholder Debt Is Unnecessary

The irony is that the United States does not need to carry a debt to bondholders at all. It has been financially sovereign ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the dollar off the gold standard domestically in 1933. This was recognized by Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in a 1945 presentation before the American Bar Association titled “Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete.”

“The necessity for government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments,” he said, “but it is not true for a national government.” The government was now at liberty to spend as needed to meet its budget, drawing on credit issued by its own central bank. It could do this until price inflation indicated a weakened purchasing power of the currency.

Then, and only then, would the government need to levy taxes — not to fund the budget but to counteract inflation by contracting the money supply. The principal purpose of taxes, said Ruml, was “the maintenance of a dollar which has stable purchasing power over the years. Sometimes this purpose is stated as ‘the avoidance of inflation.’”

The government could be funded without taxes by drawing on credit from its own central bank; and since there was no longer a need for gold to cover the loan, the central bank would not have to borrow. It could just create the money on its books. This insight is a basic tenet of Modern Monetary Theory: the government does not need to borrow or tax, at least until prices are driven up. It can just create the money it needs. The government could create money by issuing it directly; or by borrowing it directly from the central bank, which would create the money on its books; or by taking a perpetual overdraft on the Treasury’s account at the central bank, which would have the same effect.

The “Power Revolution” — Transferring the “Money Power” to the Banks

The Treasury could do that in theory, but some laws would need to be changed. Currently the federal government is not allowed to borrow directly from the Fed and is required to have the money in its account before spending it. After the dollar went off the gold standard in 1933, Congress could have had the Fed just print money and lend it to the government, cutting the banks out. But Wall Street lobbied for an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, forbidding the Fed to buy bonds directly from the Treasury as it had done in the past.

The Treasury can borrow from itself by transferring money from “intragovernmental accounts” — Social Security and other trust funds that are under the auspices of the Treasury and have a surplus – but these funds do not include the Federal Reserve, which can lend to the government only by buying federal securities from bond dealers. The Fed is considered independent of the government. Its website states, “The Federal Reserve’s holdings of Treasury securities are categorized as ‘held by the public,’ because they are not in government accounts.”

According to Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, the prohibition against allowing the government to borrow directly from its own central bank was written into the Banking Act of 1935 at the behest of those bond dealers that have an exclusive right to purchase directly from the Fed. A historical review on the website of the New York Federal Reserve quotes Eccles as stating, “I think the real reasons for writing the prohibition into the [Banking Act] … can be traced to certain Government bond dealers who quite naturally had their eyes on business that might be lost to them if direct purchasing were permitted.”

The government was required to sell bonds through Wall Street middlemen, which the Fed could buy only through “open market operations” – purchases on the private bond market. Open market operations are conducted by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which meets behind closed doors and is dominated by private banker interests. The FOMC has no obligation to buy the government’s debt and generally does so only when it serves the purposes of the Fed and the banks.

Rep. Wright Patman, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency from 1963 to 1975, called the official sanctioning of the Federal Open Market Committee in the banking laws of 1933 and 1935 “the power revolution” — the transfer of the “money power” to the banks. Patman said, “The ‘open market’ is in reality a tightly closed market.” Only a selected few bond dealers were entitled to bid on the bonds the Treasury made available for auction each week. The practical effect, he said, was to take money from the taxpayer and give it to these dealers.

Feeding Off the Real Economy

That massive Wall Street subsidy was the subject of testimony by Eccles to the House Committee on Banking and Currency on March 3-5, 1947. Patman asked Eccles, “Now, since 1935, in order for the Federal Reserve banks to buy Government bonds, they had to go through a middleman, is that correct?” Eccles replied in the affirmative. Patman then launched into a prophetic warning, stating, “I am opposed to the United States Government, which possesses the sovereign and exclusive privilege of creating money, paying private bankers for the use of its own money. … I insist it is absolutely wrong for this committee to permit this condition to continue and saddle the taxpayers of this Nation with a burden of debt that they will not be able to liquidate in a hundred years or two hundred years.”

The truth of that statement is painfully evident today, when we have a $22 trillion debt that cannot possibly be repaid. The government just keeps rolling it over and paying the interest to banks and bondholders, feeding the “financialized” economy in which money makes money without producing new goods and services. The financialized economy has become a parasite feeding off the real economy, driving producers and workers further and further into debt.

In the 1960s, Patman attempted to have the Fed nationalized. The effort failed, but his committee did succeed in forcing the central bank to return its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs. The prohibition against direct lending by the central bank to the government, however, remains in force. The money power is still with the FOMC and the banks.

A Model We Can No Longer Afford

Today, the debt-growth model has reached its limits, as even the Bank for International Settlements, the “central bankers’ bank” in Switzerland, acknowledges. In its June 2016 annual report, the BIS said that debt levels were too high, productivity growth was too low, and the room for policy maneuver was too narrow. “The global economy cannot afford to rely any longer on the debt-fueled growth model that has brought it to the current juncture,” the BIS warned.

But the solutions it proposed would continue the austerity policies long imposed on countries that cannot pay their debts. It prescribed “prudential, fiscal and, above all, structural policies” — “structural readjustment.” That means privatizing public assets, slashing services, and raising taxes, choking off the very productivity needed to pay the nations’ debts. That approach has repeatedly been tried and has failed, as witnessed for example in the devastated economy of Greece.

Meanwhile, according to Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari, financial regulation since 2008 has reduced the chances of another government bailout only modestly, from 84 percent to 67 percent. That means there is still a 67 percent chance of another major systemwide crisis, and this one could be worse than the last. The biggest banks are bigger, local banks are fewer, and global debt levels are higher. The economy has farther to fall. The regulators’ models are obsolete, aimed at a form of “old-fashioned banking” that has long since been abandoned.

We need a new model, one designed to serve the needs of the public and the economy rather than to maximize shareholder profits at public expense.

_____________________

An earlier version of this article was published in Truthout.org. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. Her latest book is Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age, published by the Democracy Collaborative. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

U.S. Begins Vastly Expanded Visa Screening

WASHINGTON—The State Department is now requiring nearly all applicants for U.S. visas to submit their social media usernames, previous email addresses and phone numbers. It’s a vast expansion of the Trump administration’s enhanced screening of potential immigrants and visitors.

In a move that’s just taken effect after approval of the revised application forms, the department says it has updated its immigrant and nonimmigrant visa forms to request the additional information, including “social media identifiers,” from almost all U.S. applicants.

The change, which was proposed in March 2018, is expected to affect about 15 million foreigners who apply for visas to enter the United States each year.

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“National security is our top priority when adjudicating visa applications, and every prospective traveler and immigrant to the United States undergoes extensive security screening,” the department said. “We are constantly working to find mechanisms to improve our screening processes to protect U.S. citizens, while supporting legitimate travel to the United States.”

Social media, email and phone number histories had only been sought in the past from applicants who were identified for extra scrutiny, such as people who’d traveled to areas controlled by terrorist organizations. An estimated 65,000 applicants per year had fallen into that category.

The department says collecting the additional information from more applicants “will strengthen our process for vetting these applicants and confirming their identity.”

The new rules apply to virtually all applicants for immigrant and nonimmigrant visas. When it filed its initial notice to make the change, the department estimated it would affect 710,000 immigrant visa applicants and 14 million nonimmigrant visa applicants, including those who want to come to the U.S. for business or education.

The new visa application forms list a number of social media platforms and require the applicant to provide any account names they may have had on them over the previous five years. They also give applicants the option to volunteer information about social media accounts on platforms not listed on the form.

In addition to their social media histories, visa applicants are now asked for five years of previously used telephone numbers, email addresses, international travel and deportation status, as well as whether any family members have been involved in terrorist activities.

Only applicants for certain diplomatic and official visa types are exempted from the requirements.