Chris Hedges's Blog, page 505

Spike Lee Returns to Form With the Entertaining and Relevant ‘BlacKkKlansman’

Ever since his early career peak, culminating in a best original screenplay Academy Award nomination for “Do the Right Thing,” has opined on the big screen with the same measure of nuance and subtlety he demonstrates courtside at Knicks games—which is to say, none at all. But when it comes to his latest movie, “BlacKkKlansman,” arriving amid a steady stream of footage of unarmed black men and boys subjugated and murdered by police around the U.S., maybe subtlety is the wrong tack. And, for the many white people who view this same footage not as evidence of police brutality but of black people operating outside the law, maybe Lee’s full-on approach will finally wake them up.

A Grand Jury Prize winner at Cannes, the new movie is based on the memoir “Black Klansman,” by Ron Stallworth. In it, a black cop, played by , and his Jewish partner, Flip Zimmerman (), infiltrate the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s.

As a newly assigned rookie at the start of the film, Stallworth quickly rises to the rank of undercover detective, assigned to a speaking engagement by Kwame Ture (a.k.a. civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael). There, he wears a mike and records a fiery address (Ture is played by in a moving cameo), hitting inspirational points on pride, hope and persistence.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?” he asks, quoting rabbinical sage Hillel the Elder. The sequence stops the film’s narrative and gives Lee a chance to do what he has often shown a penchant for: proselytizing. But what gorgeous proselytizing it is—timeless truths about social justice over ellipsing images of Ture’s audience, eyes uplifted, a dimly lit portrait montage tastefully rendered through cinematographer ’s artful lens. It’s an example of “BlacKkKlansman” at its finest, matched only by the rhapsodic dance sequence that follows at the local bar to the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose’s “It’s Too Late to Turn Back Now.”

Stallworth’s dance partner is the stunning Patrice Dumas (a ravishing Laura Harrier), president of the Black Student Union, which sponsored Ture. Patrice is drawn to Stallworth despite his more moderate politics. But although his tight-ass cop routine smoothly counters her militant hippie groove, their romantic subplot ultimately feels sketched-in.

With Ture moving on to his next speaking engagement, Stallworth is left without an assignment, stalling the screenplay written by and along with and Spike Lee. The movie restarts with Stallworth at his desk, impulsively calling the KKK and reaching Walter Breachway ( in a cartoonish, shifty-eyed performance).

From this point forward, Stallworth maintains the phone persona of the Klan infiltrator, with Zimmerman as his face. Why they don’t simply let Zimmerman lead is anyone’s guess, but soon he is in close quarters with the Klan, bearing the intense scrutiny of bug-eyed racists, particularly Felix (Finnish actor ), who suspects he’s a Jew. As the tension ratchets up, Driver takes over the movie.

In a misstep, Lee portrays Klansmen as spectacularly dumb, personified by borderline imbecile Ivanhoe (, the hilarious henchman in last year’s “I, Tonya”), and Felix’s wife (), who fantasizes in bed about killing black people. By broadening the tone, Lee not only defuses dramatic tension but trivializes the threat posed by today’s emboldened racists.

Complications ensue when Stallworth is chosen as bodyguard to Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, played by in a monochromatic, though subtly hilarious, portrayal. Duke is visiting Colorado Springs to oversee the induction of new members, including Zimmerman—who goes by the name Ron Stallworth (don’t ask). Further complicating things is the fact that the real Stallworth has become phone pals with Duke, without the latter knowing he is talking to a black man.

As “BlacKkKlansman” winds to a close, Lee and his trio of writers show casual interest in plot machinations, using their narrative framework to address pressing issues instead. A  lecture recalling a gruesome lynching is juxtaposed with grotesque Klansman cheering on their forebears portrayed in the 1915 film classic “The Birth of a Nation.” Though Belafonte effectively delivers, it’s not the strongest montage, even if Lee makes his point.

Lest anyone not get it, he hammers the point home with footage of Charlottesville, Va., 2017, where white nationalists clashed with protesters at the “Unite the Right” rally. And yes, we see Trump with his familiar, “very fine people” quote describing racists who attended that event, such as James Alex Fields Jr., the man who struck and killed Heather Heyer.

As Stallworth, Washington, a former professional footballer and costar of the HBO series “Ballers,” ably anchors the movie with an honest performance, free of gimmicks. But while he is convincing, with an easygoing charm one might expect from the son of Denzel Washington, his range of expression is limited.

As Zimmerman, Adam Driver is looser than his by-the-book rookie counterpart. Their easy chemistry is underscored by jazzy compositions by frequent Lee collaborator and composer Terence Blanchard, which are, like the movie itself, evocative of the era, though not of it.

While the Hollywood establishment seems to pride itself on avoiding subjects that actually matter, exceptions can be found in this film’s producers, Jordan Peele and Jason Blum, who teamed on last year’s sleeper hit, “Get Out.” Samuel Goldwyn once said, “If you’ve got a message, send a telegram.” What he didn’t understand is that movies are telegrams, albeit with outlandish trimmings.

“BlacKkKlansman” has everything anyone would want from a cop movie, but its candid treatment of its subject matter and the conversation it might inspire are the telegram that audiences deserve.

New Trump Rule Would Give $2.5 Billion Tax Cut to Big Banks

As Wall Street banks continue to enjoy record profits thanks to President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax scam, Trump’s Treasury Department—headed by former Goldman Sachs executive Steve Mnuchin—quietly moved to hand big banks yet another major gift on Wednesday by hiding a $2.5 billion tax cut in the fine print of an “esoteric” new rule proposal (pdf).

At first glance, the Trump administration’s rule appeared to be little more than a mundane set of regulations aimed at providing owners of so-called pass-through businesses everything they “need to comply with the Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” as Reuters put it.

But Capital & Main journalist David Sirota decided to take the radical step of actually reading the proposal in its entirety, and he found that the White House’s rule also seeks to exclude banking from the “financial services” category—a move that would allow thousands of large banks to take advantage of the controversial tax cut for pass-through income included in Trump’s tax bill.

As they were hashing out the details of their tax bill behind closed doors, Sirota notes, Republican lawmakers included a provision that prohibited businesses in the “financial services” sector from qualifying for the tax cut in an effort to counter “assertions that the bill could enrich big banks.”

But, at the direction of bank lobbyists, the Trump administration’s new rule asserts that “‘financial services’ don’t include banking,” thus allowing “hundreds of banks operating as S corporations—as well as their owners—[to] claim the tax cut,” Sirota writes.

It is appalling that ⁦⁦@stevenmnuchin1⁩ claims that banks are not part of the “financial services” industry & qualify for generous tax cuts. They are betting America’s future on the bankers. I want to bet on America’s workers.⁦@davidsirota⁩ https://t.co/kFeO34xD2n

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) August 9, 2018

In addition to taking the side of bank lobbyists with its new rule, the Trump administration also explicitly “echoed their views” in the fine print of its proposal, Sirota points out.

“Banking industry lobbyists pushed for the interpretation—acknowledging that the bill generally blocked pass-through tax cuts for businesses in financial services, but arguing that ‘financial services are, however, clearly something other than banking,'” Sirota writes. “The Trump Treasury Department not only sided with the lobbyists, but in the fine print of its new rule, which is now subject to a public comment period before it goes into force, echoed their views.”

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin just quietly copied & pasted bank lobbyists’ talking points into an IRS rule, thereby handing bankers a new $2.5 billion tax cut https://t.co/NEgSJJhn2h

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 9, 2018

According Daniel Hemel, a tax law professor at the University of Chicago, the Trump administration’s rule change would reward “roughly 2,000 banks around the country that qualify as S corporations.”

“It’s a safe bet that most of the S corporation shareholders benefited by today’s decision will fall into the upper reaches of the top one percent—not many middle-class folks own a bank,” Hemel told Capital & Main. “If you assume a return on assets of around one percent and S corporation bank assets in the range of $400 billion, then the move reduces the total tax liability of S corporation bank shareholders by $300 million per year for 2018 through 2025. We’re talking about something like $2.5 billion total.”

In response to the Trump White House’s latest attempt to reward the wealthy—which comes as wages for most workers are declining—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote, “It’s never been more clear who the Trump administration is really working for.”

It’s never been more clear who the Trump Administration is really working for.https://t.co/XtRrUsEq8T

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 9, 2018

Court Orders Ban on Harmful Pesticide, Says EPA Violated Law

WASHINGTON—A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration endangered public health by keeping the widely used pesticide chlorpyrifos (clor-PEER-i-fos) on the market despite extensive scientific evidence that even tiny levels of exposure can harm babies’ brains.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to remove chlorpyrifos from sale in the United States within 60 days.

A coalition of farmworkers and environmental groups sued last year after then-EPA chief Scott Pruitt reversed an Obama-era effort to ban chlorpyrifos, which is widely sprayed on citrus fruits, apples and other crops. The attorneys general for several states joined the case against EPA, including California, New York and Massachusetts.

In a split decision, the court said Thursday that Pruitt, a Republican forced to resign earlier this summer amid ethics scandals, violated federal law by ignoring the conclusions of agency scientists that chlorpyrifos is harmful.

“The panel held that there was no justification for the EPA’s decision in its 2017 order to maintain a tolerance for chlorpyrifos in the face of scientific evidence that its residue on food causes neurodevelopmental damage to children,” Appeals Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote in the majority’s opinion.

EPA spokesman Michael Abboud said the agency was reviewing the decision. It could appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.

Environmental groups and public health advocates hailed the court’s action as a major victory.

“Some things are too sacred to play politics with, and our kids top the list,” said Erik Olson, senior director of health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The court has made it clear that children’s health must come before powerful polluters. This is a victory for parents everywhere who want to feed their kids fruits and veggies without fear it’s harming their brains or poisoning communities.”

Chlorpyrifos was created by Dow Chemical Co. in the 1960s. It remains among the most widely used agricultural pesticides in the United States, with the chemical giant selling about 5 million pounds domestically each year through its subsidiary Dow AgroSciences.

Dow did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. In past statements, the company has contended the chemical helps American farmers feed the world “with full respect for human health and the environment.”

Chlorpyrifos belongs to a family of organophosphate pesticides that are chemically similar to a chemical warfare agent developed by Nazi Germany before World War II.

As a result of its wide use as a pesticide over the past four decades, traces of chlorpyrifos are commonly found in sources of drinking water. A 2012 study at the University of California at Berkeley found that 87 percent of umbilical-cord blood samples tested from newborn babies contained detectable levels of the pesticide.

Under pressure from federal regulators, Dow voluntarily withdrew chlorpyrifos for use as a home insecticide in 2000. EPA also placed “no-spray” buffer zones around sensitive sites, such as schools, in 2012.

In October 2015, the Obama administration proposed banning the pesticide’s use on food. Pruitt reversed that effort in March 2017, adopting Dow’s position that the science showing chlorpyrifos is harmful was inconclusive and flawed.

Pence Outlines Plan for New Space Force by 2020

WASHINGTON—Faced with growing competition and threats from Russia and China, the White House on Thursday said it will create the U.S. Space Force as a sixth, separate military service by 2020.

Vice President Mike Pence told a Pentagon audience that the plan fulfills President Donald Trump’s vow to ensure America’s dominance in space — a domain that was once peaceful and uncontested that has now become crowded and adversarial.

“Now the time has come to write the next great chapter in the history of our armed forces, to prepare for the next battlefield where America’s best and bravest will be called to deter and defeat a new generation of threats to our people, to our nation,” said Pence. “The time has come to establish the United States Space Force.”

Trump marked Pence’s announcement with a tweet: “Space Force all the way!”

Trump has called for a “separate but equal” space force, a complicated and expensive move that requires congressional approval. On Thursday, Pence said that the administration will work with Congress on the plan, and will outline a budget next year.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has endorsed steps to reorganize the military’s space warfighting forces and create a new command, but has previously opposed launching a pricey, new service. A new branch of the military would require layers of bureaucracy, military and civilian leaders, uniforms, equipment and an expansive support structure.

The Pentagon proposal delivered to Congress Thursday lays out plans to consolidate the Pentagon’s warfighting space forces and make organizational changes to boost the acquisition and development of leading-edge technologies.

The Pentagon’s role in space has been under scrutiny because of a recognition that the United States is increasingly reliant on satellites that are difficult to protect in space. Satellites provide communications, navigation, intelligence and other services vital to the military and the economy.

The U.S. intelligence agencies reported earlier this year that Russia and China are pursuing “nondestructive and destructive” anti-satellite weapons for use during a future war. And there are growing worries about cyberattacks that could target satellite technology, potentially leaving troops in combat without electronic communications or navigation abilities.

Devin Nunes Admits Desire to Undermine Mueller Probe in Recording

In a newly released recording of Rep. Devin Nunes at a recent GOP fundraiser, the California Republican made explicit what many have long suspected regarding his actions toward special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe: He views his main task not as getting to the truth or fighting for justice but as protecting President Donald Trump.

The audio was first released Wednesday night on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Maddow said it was provided to her by the progressive group Fuse Washington, which bought a ticket to the fundraising event.

Speaking on the topic of the probe, Nunes said in the recording: “If Sessions won’t un-recuse and Mueller won’t clear the president, we’re the only ones — which is really the danger. That’s why I keep — and thank you for saying it, by the way — I mean, we have to keep all these seats.”

In other words, he believes the president will be in real danger if Republicans lose control of Congress next year, which would mean Nunes would lose control of the House Intelligence Committee that he chairs. Without that authority, the GOP would have much less power to hamper the Justice Department’s work, as Nunes has repeatedly tried to do.

It is clear that he intends to undermine the investigation because he lists keeping control of the House as an alternative to Attorney General Jeff Sessions — who is recused from the investigation and all related matters on the advice of ethics experts — taking control of the probe or to Mueller finding the president to be innocent.

It apparently isn’t a consideration among him and his colleagues that their role in Congress is not to protect the president but to be a check on his power.

“The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is supposed to be an impartial investigator who follows the facts wherever they may lead,” said cybersecurity reporter Eric Geller on Twitter in response to the recording.

It’s also worth noting that Mueller and Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who currently oversees the investigation, are both Republicans who were highly respected across the board prior to the start of the investigation. Rosenstein was, in fact, appointed to his position by Trump himself.

Ocasio-Cortez: Why Are Our Pockets Empty for Health Care and Education?

In an interview with CNN‘s Chris Cuomo Wednesday evening, New York congressional candidate and democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioned how Congress can “write unlimited blank checks for war” and pass the GOP’s $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthy, but when it comes to proposals that would help every American—such as Medicare for All—”our pockets are empty.”

“Why is it that our pockets are only empty when it comes to education and healthcare for our kids?” she posed. “Why are pockets only empty when we talk about 100 percent renewable energy that is going to save this planet and allow our children to thrive?”

“We only have empty pockets when it comes to the morally right things to do,” she continued, “but when it comes to tax cuts for billionaires and when it comes to unlimited war, we seem to be able to invent that money very easily.”

“We only have empty pockets when it comes to the morally right things to do, but when it comes to tax cuts for billionaires and when it comes to unlimited war we seem to be able to invent that money very easily,” Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says. https://t.co/cgpyxY7z1g pic.twitter.com/dgVgv8EMRb

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) August 9, 2018

The 28-year-old, who is expected to win New York’s deep blue 14th District in November, has championed a boldly progressive platform, demanding Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, a Green New Deal, and tuition-free public college.

Predictably asked by Cuomo about the “sticker shock” of implementing a system that would guarantee healthcare for all Americans, Ocasio-Cortez said, “People talk about the sticker shock of Medicare for All—they do not talk about the sticker shock of the cost of our existing system.”

She pointed to a recent Koch Brothers-funded study that spectacularly backfired for the right-wing oil barons by demonstrating that such a system would not only cover everyone but also save $2 trillion over a decade.

“At the end of the day, we see that this is not a pipe dream. Every other developed nation in the world does this. Why can’t America?” she said. “That is the question we need to ask.”

Federal Agency Sent Immigrant Kids to Dangerous Youth Facility, Despite Warning Signs

By the time the federal government started sending immigrant children to Shiloh Treatment Center in 2009, the warning flags were waving blood red.

Three children had died after being physically restrained at Shiloh and affiliated facilities in rural Texas run by the same man, Clay Dean Hill. A teenager from California died after running away and getting hit by a truck. Texas officials repeatedly had cited Hill’s residential centers for troubled youths after caretakers were found to have slapped, punched and kicked children.

Yet nine years ago, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sent its first delivery of federal tax dollars to Hill, a onetime longshoreman-turned-millionaire entrepreneur specializing in the care of vulnerable children. The federal government wanted Hill to take immigrant children with mental health problems who were caught crossing the border without parents or papers.

The funding started a couple of months before a male caretaker in his 40s was caught preying on a 15-year-old girl from California, sexually abusing her at one of Hill’s all-girl dormitories, where he was assigned overnight. He’s now a convicted sex offender.

“It shows you how disgraceful the place was,” said the former resident, now 25, who told her story publicly for the first time to Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement continued to send immigrant children to Hill’s care after another teenager was killed during a restraint and the state of Texas shut down one of his facilities, deeming it unsafe for children. And this year, after immigrant children said in court declarations that they were forcibly injected with psychiatric drugs, federal officials claimed there was no problem. In all, the federal government has paid Shiloh more than $33 million for the care of immigrant youths.

It took a federal judge to force the refugee office to take action. U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee ruled July 30 that the Office of Refugee Resettlement must remove children from Shiloh unless a licensed psychiatrist or psychologist determines they pose a risk to themselves or others.

It didn’t have to get to this point. The history of death and abuse at Hill’s rural outpost for troubled children was no secret. Hill, 69, has remained a go-to provider for the Office of Refugee Resettlement even after multiple exposés by Texas newspapers, calls by members of Congress for Shiloh to be shut down and warnings from the local district attorney.

The story of Shiloh shows just how bad it can get at a child care operation the federal government deems worthy of taxpayer dollars and acceptable for immigrant children. Reveal previously found that private companies operating immigrant youth shelters across the nation have racked up citations for serious lapses in care. A ProPublica analysis of police reports found hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse, fights and missing children at these shelters.

Hill and Shiloh employees have not returned multiple calls by Reveal seeking comment.

A July statement on Shiloh’s website says it has been investigated by various government agencies and “all of the widely distributed allegations about Shiloh were found to be without merit. The children have been found to be properly cared for and treated.”

Trump administration officials also maintain that the children are in good hands at Shiloh and other facilities paid to supervise immigrant children. Scott Lloyd, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said in a June press briefing that his agency is “proud of its partnership with our UAC care providers,” using the acronym for unaccompanied alien children.

“I’ve witnessed firsthand the good work they do throughout the U.S. to ensure UACs receive proper care and services,” he said.

The government’s defense of Shiloh also points to a fundamental problem with federal oversight. In court filings this year, government lawyers made it clear that the federal agency responsible for the children puts much of its faith in state officials to monitor immigrant shelters such as Shiloh.

But Reveal has found that Texas licensing officials apparently failed to properly implement their own regulations when they shut down Hill’s Daystar Residential Inc. facility and allowed Shiloh to continue. The law should have stopped Hill from operating any residential child care centers for five years.

It was a far-reaching failure that let Hill salvage his operation. Just as Texas stopped sending its foster children to Hill, the federal government was tossing him a new source of money: immigrant children.

Former employees told Reveal that they loved working with the children but were concerned that Hill has been allowed to stay in business, taking in a vulnerable population after decades of problems. Four said they were disturbed by the abuse that happened there while management looked the other way. They also said they didn’t want to use their names for fear of retaliation.

“Some of these guys, they were just so rough and brutal,” said a former employee who worked for years as a caretaker at both Daystar and Shiloh. “They seemed like they just wanted to always provoke the clients and get them to act out, get them to fight each other. They would abuse them.”

Drugging kids

Clay Hill now faces a court order to stop drugging children without proper consent. Immigrant children, many traumatized by violence in their home countries, told of being threatened that if they didn’t take pills, they would be punished with more time in Shiloh. Some said they were held down and forcibly injected with medication despite their objections.

Parents of the children said they never were asked permission to administer the powerful drugs.

This should not have been a surprise. Medication problems at Hill’s facilities go back many years, Reveal found.

“If they get mad, they’re gonna get a shot,” said a former employee who worked with foster children at Daystar and immigrant children at Shiloh. “If they start talking like, ‘I’m not going to do this,’ they’re gonna get a shot.”

A Texas Education Agency review in 2015 cited Shiloh for requiring parents of special education students to consent “to the use of ‘emergency’ medications as a condition of acceptance.”

“Some parents stated to the district that they did not feel their concerns were being heard by the facility doctors,” the findings state. “It also was reported by some district representatives that they have observed a Shiloh staff member threaten to give students ‘a PRN (emergency medication)’ for misbehavior.”

Ten years earlier, the Texas Department of State Health Services issued a scathing report on medication practices at Daystar. A team of experts found a troubling pattern: “There was no evidence of documented, informed consent for prescribed medications.”

The diagnoses and treatment plans were “canned” and often didn’t correspond to the patient, the report said. Children and their families were not being told why they were being given the drugs. Many children were developing weight problems and some as young as 10 years old had high cholesterol.

“In almost none of these children were the elevated laboratory tests addressed,” the review found.

Daystar’s psychiatrist at the time was Dr. Javier Ruíz-Nazario, a longtime fixture of Hill’s operation and the same man immigrant children at Shiloh said was giving them medication. In fact, all four psychiatrists listed on a 2007 organizational chart for Daystar also are named on Shiloh’s forms for dispensing medication to immigrant youths.

Still, federal officials assured a judge in May that Shiloh didn’t need more oversight.

Jallyn Sualog, deputy director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said in a court declaration: “To my knowledge, Texas state licensing officials have not reported any concerns regarding Shiloh’s compliance with state guidelines concerning the administration of psychotropic medications” to detained immigrant children.

Sualog asserted that “the board certified child and adolescent psychiatrists” at Shiloh use “best practice guidelines.”

Ruíz-Nazario, however, hasn’t had board certification to treat children and adolescents for years, Reveal found. After Reveal’s story, Sualog filed a revised declaration acknowledging that.

Another federal official said in an April letter to attorneys for the children that the Office of Refugee Resettlement has a medical team that monitors treatment and has visited Shiloh. In a footnote, he admitted the agency “does not, however, employ child and adolescent psychiatrists who would have the training to scrutinize the specific medications prescribed by Shiloh experts.”

Overmedicating the children to keep them in line was common practice, said three former employees. Two said caretakers would ask doctors to boost the medications to make the children sleepy and easier to deal with.

Even if federal officials were not paying attention to the findings of Texas agencies, they should have seen the Houston Chronicle’s 2014 investigation of Shiloh, which raised questions about the use of psychotropic medications. The story prompted U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, to call for Shiloh to be shut down.

Jackson Lee told Reveal that she reacted to the recent news of problems at Shiloh with “a combination of disbelief, disappointment and outrage.” She had assumed the government stopped sending immigrant children there after the previous outcry.

“I’m sure there are some nice people there, but the overall record makes it inappropriate to send traumatized children to this facility. So it is very much a great disappointment to me,” she said. “I’m kind of taken aback.”

Who is Clay Hill?

Clay Hill has a special education degree from the University of Houston and a teaching certificate, according to a deposition he gave in 2003. After college, Hill started working with an autistic child and later ran a treatment center in Dallas.

In the 1990s, Hill founded Daystar and Shiloh, building a sprawling campus out of trailers and houses off country roads south of Houston. He created a variety of interrelated corporate entities, but Hill was behind it all.

He took in the most vulnerable children: emotionally disturbed foster kids, nonverbal autistic children and special education students school districts couldn’t handle. Many were from Texas, but some were sent there from California and Guam.

The operation thrived because he would accept children no other facility would, former staff members said. Some were extremely disturbed and volatile, at times attacking caretakers.

Hill set up Daystar as a nonprofit at the suggestion of state officials, to allow for the use of federal tax dollars, according to his deposition. Daystar then leased the land, buildings, furniture and vehicles and contracted services from Hill’s for-profit entities.

In 2010, right before it was shut down, Daystar reported receiving more than $1 million in direct care services from Shiloh, according to financial records provided to the state.

Hill even served as president of the now-defunct Daystar Pharmacy, a for-profit that provided drugs to his programs. Years ago, the pharmacist there got caught using fake prescriptions to steal some 15,000 pills, including more than 7,000 doses of opioids, according to state records.

Daystar and Shiloh sat near each other, sharing some staff and leadership. The children living at Daystar often went to school at Shiloh. At one point, their administrative headquarters were different parts of the same trailer.

At the same time, Hill created a baseball team for elite high school players that claims big-leaguers Josh Beckett and Matt Carpenter as alumni. Hill ran a  called Texas Tournament Baseball  a former banker who went to prison for fraud and later worked at Hill’s treatment facilities. Ex-employees said ballplayers without experience caring for troubled children would sometimes work there, too.

Former employees said Hill seemed to care more about making a profit than improving the lives of children.

Hill took in compensation of $680,000 in  and $720,000 in, the most recent years he reported the amount in public tax filings. That was down from a salary of more than $1 million that he reported in 2001. Meanwhile, children had limited facilities for recreation, former workers said, and lived in buildings sometimes cited by state regulators as grimy and dilapidated.

“It was all about money with him,” said Caroline Laifang, who worked as a special education teacher at Shiloh for several years in the 2000s. “If you’re trying to explain to him this is not in the best interest of the students, he’ll let you know – this is a business.”

Hill, for his part, said he was constantly working for Shiloh and Daystar.

“I think I work 24 hours a day, seven days a week because I’m on call all the time,” he said in his 2003 deposition, “and I respond to every call.”

Dangerous restraints

In October, David, a 13-year-old boy from El Salvador, didn’t feel safe at Shiloh Treatment Center.

Fearful of employees who screamed at him, David packed a bag to escape. When he tried to open a window, he said in a court declaration, a supervisor threw him against the door and pinned him against the wall.

“This made me feel like I was choking and it was hard for me to breathe. I told the supervisor to stop because I couldn’t breathe,” David’s declaration states. “I briefly fainted. As I recovered consciousness a staff person violently threw me on my bed and this caused my head to bang against the wall.”

It was eerily reminiscent of scenes described in medical examiner reports when U.S.-born children died in Clay Hill’s care.

Dawn Renay Perry had been struggling with depression, aggressive behavior and low mental function when she was placed at Hill’s Behavior Training Research facility, in the same area outside the town of Manvel where Shiloh sits now.

In April 1993, the 16-year-old was held face down on the floor by four people, records show.

“After restraint was applied multiple times, the decedent relaxed and rolled up into a ball as she usually did when she quit fighting,” medical examiner records state. Then she vomited, turned blue and stopped moving.

Stephanie Duffield was also 16 when, in 2001, she became upset that a Shiloh staff member didn’t escort her to the bathroom quickly. There was a struggle, and the assistant held her down, face to the carpet, putting her weight on Duffield’s shoulders, according to medical examiner records.

Duffield protested, saying she couldn’t breathe. Then she did stop breathing. The medical examiner called it “sudden cardiac death following hyperactivity and physical exertion during restraint,” ruling it an accident.

Hill said in a 2003 deposition that he didn’t think his staff did anything wrong.

“I thought it was just another horrible, horrible incident,” he told a lawyer representing Duffield’s family. “I happen to be – considered myself a friend of Stephanie’s, had worked with her two days before. She bit my hand and scratched it and all the things that she could do. And we were friends. It – it broke my heart to see the kid die.”

“So, you know, I thought she died of a heart attack,” he said. “I didn’t think the length of the restraint had a lot to do with it.”

He didn’t see a pattern when, a year after Duffield’s death, 15-year-old Latasha Bush also died following a restraint.

The girl, who was diagnosed as bipolar with the emotional age of a 6-year-old, had told her one-on-one caretaker, Tisha White, that she wet the bed at night because she was afraid of her.

White said in a deposition that Bush was restrained by other caretakers after it appeared she was going to throw a flashlight and then threw herself against the wall, cracking it, and repeatedly asked to be left alone. White said the employees put Bush on her side, but a youth in the house said one of them was sitting on Bush and she was screaming that she couldn’t breathe.

The medical examiner called it homicide by asphyxiation. State licensing officials said she suffocated as a result of being restrained with excessive force. The district attorney told The Dallas Morning News in 2003 that she considered prosecuting but lacked hard evidence of criminal intent.

Hill called Bush’s death “a horrible tragedy” but saw no fault in his operation’s methods.

“Based on the information we had, we felt like the restraint was done the way it was supposed to be done,” he told a lawyer for the Duffield and Bush families, who ended up settling their lawsuits.

“I’m not willing to agree that the restraint caused the suffocation,” he said.

Those deaths had been well publicized by the time federal officials awarded Shiloh $480,000 in May 2009 to start sheltering immigrant children.

What they didn’t know was there would be another.

In November 2010, Michael Owens, a 16-year-old battling depression and behavioral problems, gasped for air in a closet smeared with blood. Daystar employees had taken him to the floor, pulling his arms behind him, when he began “huffing and puffing,” medical examiner records show.

He died from asphyxiation, the medical examiner found, also noting “blunt impact trauma of face, torso and upper extremities.” Like Bush’s death, it was ruled a homicide.

His death was one too many for the state of Texas. Officials stripped Daystar of its license, cut off its multimillion-dollar contract and moved out all the children who lived there in 2011.

Texas’ foster care agency wouldn’t send any of its own children to Shiloh, either. In response to concerns from the district attorney, the Department of Family and Protective Services wrote in a 2011 letter that it “has no intention of contracting or placing any CPS children with Shiloh, Inc. and staff has been instructed accordingly.”

But Hill got a big break from the state. Licensing officials kept Shiloh open for business, and that was good enough for the federal government, which was ramping up its delivery of immigrant children and millions of taxpayer dollars.

A month after Owens’ death, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded $1.8 million to Shiloh to take in detained immigrant children. The address on federal funding records is the same as the one on Owens’ autopsy report.

Problems continued. In 2011, state officials found a Shiloh caregiver restrained a child without justification, causing “an injury to a vital body area.” He had lifted up and then dropped the child to the ground, records show, putting his body weight on top. Within two months, the federal government awarded Shiloh $2 million more.

With the influx of immigrants, state investigators started finding a new twist on an old problem: Shiloh didn’t always have employees present who could speak the child’s language.

A Honduran boy was bleeding from his mouth and screaming in Spanish that he was in pain while being held down in 2013, according to witness accounts described in state records. One of the employees restraining him admitted that he did “not speak Spanish and he would not be able to understand if (the boy) was complaining.”

The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, declined an interview and did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Slapping, punching and kicking

In November, an 11-year-old girl said in a signed declaration that she’d rather live on the streets in her native Honduras than stay at Shiloh.

“On at least two occasions staff members have tried to hurt me,” she stated. “One time a staff member put her two thumbs up to my throat and her hands around my neck. It hurt and I was gasping for breath. The staff member said she was just ‘playing’ but I felt scared.”

Such testimony should come as no surprise to government officials.

On several occasions over the years, Texas investigators found that employees at Hill’s facilities slapped, hit and kicked children. In one case, an employee bit a child during a restraint. In two others, employees punched children in the head.

An employee bathing a 16-year-old resident caused severe bruising to the teenager’s buttocks. Another child, a nonverbal 8-year-old boy, was found with multiple marks to his lower back and bottom. Years later, a cellphone video surfaced showing a Shiloh employee slapping a nonverbal autistic child.

At one point, a Daystar supervisor and another employee instructed seven developmentally delayed residents to fight, using snacks as a reward for the winner. The staff “laughed and cheered as the residents fought,” leaving multiple injuries, according to state records.

Former employees said there were some people working there who were doing their best. But they also told of abuse by co-workers that they couldn’t forget: the ones who beat up a foster child, the one who frightened an autistic boy with sexual comments, the one who offered to teach how to choke children to “put them to sleep.”

A former Shiloh caretaker said other employees would antagonize children to get them to act out, prompting a painful restraint.

“It was just like they got a kick out of it,” said the former worker. Some of them were longtime employees, and no one would get in trouble, she said. She ended up quitting because, she said, “I didn’t want to be a part of any of that.”

Even in the early years, getting beat up was a part of life at Hill’s treatment centers, said Brielle Gillis.

“It was to a point where you got beat so much that you felt like you deserved it,” she said.

Gillis arrived in the 1990s as an 11-year-old foster child, removed from an abusive home, she said. Now 35 and transgender, she went by the name Jeremy Keith Gillis at the time. Gillis spent her adolescence at Hill’s facilities until she got out in 2001.

One time, she said, three caretakers ganged up on her.

“They was holding me down, folding me like a pretzel, and they was stomping and kicking me,” she said.

An adult witness to the beating confirmed it to Reveal and said nothing came of it.

Any complaints would get back to the caretakers, who would punish the children, Gillis said. In any case, she said, kids were written off as troubled liars.

Many years later, after a state investigator determined that Shiloh employees used excessive force in restraining a 14-year-old Honduran boy who had been abandoned as a baby, Hill defended his staff.

“Mr. Hill stated the kids can be very manipulative and will make up stories to get staff in trouble,” the investigator wrote in 2013. “He stated he trusts his staff in doing the right thing.”

‘Controlling persons’

Texas has a law to prevent someone such as Clay Hill from running another child care facility when one gets shut down.

The state warned Daystar that its “controlling persons” – those determined to exercise control over the facility – would be barred from running another residential facility for five years.

If there was a person in control at Daystar, it was Hill.

Hill said it himself in his 2003 deposition when the family of Latasha Bush sued Daystar. He said he was the ultimate authority in terms of hiring, giving raises, training staff and accepting patients, though he delegated some decisions to underlings. The executive director of Daystar, Carroll “Cal” Salls, reported to Hill, he said.

State licensing officials should have known as much. A 2007 organizational chart in state files lists Hill at the top of Daystar. And state records list Hill as a “controlling person” at Shiloh.

It was even more clear on the ground, said former employees and residents. From Daystar to Shiloh, Hill ran everything.

“He’s the one who runs the show,” said former employee Caroline Laifang. “No decision is made without Clay Hill knowing about it.”

But somehow, the state didn’t see it that way.

“In conducting its investigation, the state found that Daystar Residential and Shiloh Treatment Center did not share a controlling person,” said John Reynolds, spokesman for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

Still, the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement had plenty of opportunities to pull the plug. The Brazoria County district attorney, Jeri Yenne, wrote a letter to federal officials in 2011 “out of concern for the safety of children.”

“This is due to the fact that there have been a number of deaths over the years of minors placed on the property managed by Shiloh and its affiliate corporation Daystar Treatment Center,” she wrote. “I am requesting increased monitoring of Shiloh Treatment Center and that your agency review the same and consider limiting the number of children placed in Shiloh Treatment Center.”

Relying on state oversight

This year, an attorney representing immigrant minors at Shiloh wrote a letter urging federal officials to stop sending children there. It focused on the drugging problems, but noted Shiloh’s connection to Daystar and the deaths.

An Office of Refugee Resettlement official responded by making a point of distancing Shiloh from Daystar.

“Notably, Shiloh RTC (Residential Treatment Center) is not operated by DayStar Treatment Center (DayStar), which is mentioned in your letter,” wrote senior federal field specialist supervisor James De La Cruz. “Even when it was still in business the licensure of Daystar was completely separate from that of Shiloh.”

The distinction is lost on former employees and residents. And Clay Hill wasn’t the only person who oversaw both institutions during their darkest moments. Kellie Pitts has been in charge of quality control at Shiloh since 1999 and also held that role at Daystar, according to Hill’s deposition. Tisha White, who was briefly suspended but cleared of wrongdoing in the 2002 death of Latasha Bush, appears to work at Shiloh, based on her Facebook profile and accounts of others. Pitts and White could not be reached for comment.

When lawyers representing the children asked a federal judge to intervene this year, government attorneys shot back that there is already plenty of oversight.

Federal officials argued that the court “should not conduct its own evaluation,” but rather “should rely on the State’s own evaluation.”

“Given this extensive level of oversight by the states,” the government’s filing says, “this Court can – and should – reasonably rely on the conclusions of those state licensing authorities.”

Yet state licensing officials, also responsible for the Texas foster care system, have been found to be dangerously ineffectual.

Federal District Judge Janis Graham Jack ruled in December 2015 that Texas was fundamentally failing to protect foster children. Among widespread problems, she found the state licensing agency was “failing its licensing and inspecting duties” and “almost never takes an enforcement action.”

She cited an internal review that found error rates of up to 75 percent in the state’s investigations of abuse allegations.

“This is staggering,” she wrote, “and it means that many abused children – for whom a preponderance of evidence indicated that they were physically abused, sexually abused, or neglected – go untreated and could be left in abusive placements.”

It is the same agency that investigated 30 complaints of abuse or neglect at Shiloh since October 2012 and ruled out every one of them, according to Department of Family and Protective Services records.

Texas, the judge found, “has closed one facility in the past five years, but it is a story of horror rather than optimism regarding enforcement.” She was talking about Daystar.

Texas authorities “allowed this facility – that was responsible for four deaths, numerous allegations of sexual abuse, and unthinkable treatment of developmentally disabled children – to operate for 17 years,” the judge wrote. “The Court does not understand, nor tolerate, the systemic willingness to put children in mortal harm’s way.”

In January 2018, the same judge issued a grim update: “Over two-years later, the system remains broken.”

Jack ordered continued monitoring of the state system by appointed special masters. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, where it is pending.

“The ruling was arrived at by an unelected federal judge who misapplied the law, hijacked control of our state’s foster care system, and ordered an ill-conceived plan by the special masters that is both incomplete and impractical,” Paxton said in an April statement.

Former federal officials said they were doing the best they could.

“There was definitely a sense that the problems at Shiloh were problems that could be fixed,” one ex-official said. Given that Shiloh maintained its state license, “working to address the issues seemed like the right thing to do to keep the capacity on line.”

There weren’t a lot of other options for immigrant children with serious mental health problems, said the former official, who requested anonymity: “It is a specialized facility. We don’t have a ton of those in the system.”

Even one case of child maltreatment is unacceptable, but in a system housing thousands of children, it is also inevitable, said Maria Cancian, who was deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Administration for Children and Families, over the refugee resettlement office, from 2015 to 2016.

“Sometimes things are going to happen that shouldn’t happen,” she said.

The refugee resettlement agency tightened oversight, Cancian said, including increasing unannounced visits to shelters by field representatives.

“Was it enough? Almost certainly not,” she said. “There’s almost never a child service organization in this country that is adequately resourced.”

Cancian said she visited shelters that were “overwhelmingly staffed by people who were trying to do their best, and by and large, they were places that provided high-quality care.”

“The exceptions are absolutely not acceptable,” she added, “and it’s appropriate to shine a light on that.”

The Knife in Iran’s Back

On Tuesday night, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani went on television to talk about the reinstatement of sanctions by the United States against his country. He prepared the country for more privations as a result of the sanctions. Responding to Trump’s offer for a meeting, Rouhani said pointedly, “If you stab someone with a knife and then say you want to talk, the first thing you have to do is to remove the knife.”

It is clear to everyone outside the U.S. government that Iran has honored its side of the 2015 nuclear deal that it made with the governments of five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (the U.S., the UK, France, China and Russia) as well as the European Union. In fact, quite starkly, the European Union’s foreign policy chief—Federica Mogherini—said, “We are encouraging small and medium enterprises in particular to increase business with and in Iran as part of something that for us is a security priority.” In other words, Mogherini is asking companies to resist Trump’s policy direction. What she is saying, and what Rouhani said, is that it is the United States that has violated the nuclear deal and so no one needs to honor the U.S. sanctions that have been reinstated.

Mogherini pointed to “small and medium enterprises” because these would not be the kind of multinational corporations with interests in the United States. But it is more than small and medium enterprises that are going to challenge the U.S. sanctions. China, Russia and Turkey have already indicated that they will not buckle to U.S. pressure.

China: “China’s lawful rights should be protected,” said the Chinese government. China has no incentive to follow the new U.S. position. First, China imports about $15 billion of oil from Iran each year and expects to increase its purchases next year. Chinese state energy firms, such as China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Sinopec, have invested billions of dollars in Iran. CNPC and Sinopec have also got shares in Iran’s major oil fields—CNPC has a 30 percent share in the South Pars gas field and has investments in the North Azadegan oil field, while Sinopec has invested $2 billion in Yadavan oil field. China’s Export Import Bank, meanwhile, has financed many large projects in Iran, including the electrification of the Tehran-Mashhad railway. Other Chinese investment projects include the Tehran metro and the Tehran-Isfahan train. These projects are worth tens of billions of dollars.

Second, China is in the midst of a nasty trade war with the United States. In late August, Trump’s government slapped 25 percent tariffs on $16 billion of Chinese imports into the United States. China responded with its own tariffs, with the Chinese Commerce Ministry saying that the U.S. is “once again putting domestic law over international law,” which is a “very unreasonable practice.” The “once again” is important. China is seized by the unfairness of the reinstatement of sanctions on Iran, not only for its own economic reasons but also because it sees this as a violation of international agreements and a threat to Iranian sovereignty—two principles that China takes very seriously. Sinopec, knee-deep in Iran’s oil sector, has now said that it would delay buying U.S. oil for September. Iran has now been drawn into the U.S. “trade war” (on which, read more here). The Chinese have been quite strong in their position. The Global Times, a Chinese government paper, wrote in an editorial, “China is prepared for protracted war. In the future, the U.S. economy will depend more on the Chinese market than the other way around.” This fortitude is going to spill over into China’s defense of Iran’s economy.

Russia: Russia and Iran do not share the kind of economic linkages that Iran has with China. After the 2015 sanctions deal, Iran did not turn to Russian oil and gas companies for investment. It went to France’s Total—which signed a $5 billion deal. Russia and Iran did sign various massive energy deals ($20 billion in 2014), but these did not seem to go anywhere. Russia’s Gazprom and Lukoil have toyed with entry into Iran. In May, Lukoil directly said that it would be hesitant to enter Iran because of the proposed U.S. reinstatement of sanctions. Lukoil’s hesitancy came alongside that of European firms such as Peugeot, Siemens and even Total, which decided to hold off on expansion or cut ties with Iran. Daimler has now officially halted any work in Iran. It was a surprise earlier this year when the Iranian Dana Energy firm signed a deal with the Russian Zarubezhneft company to develop the Aban and West Paydar oilfields. The contract is for $740 million, which in the oil and gas business is significant but not eye-opening.

In July, Iran’s senior leader Ali Akbar Velayati met Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Moscow. He left the meeting saying, “Russia is ready to invest $50 billion Iran’s oil and gas sectors.” Velayati specifically mentioned Rosneft and Gazprom as potential investors—“up to $10 billion,” he said. When Putin had been in Tehran last November, Russian companies signed preliminary deals worth $30 billion. Whether these deals will go forward is not clear. But, after Trump’s reinstatement of sanctions, Russia’s foreign ministry said that it would “take appropriate measures on a national level to protect trade and economic cooperation with Iran.” In other words, it would see that trade ties are not broken.

Turkey: Both Iran and Turkey face great economic challenges. Neither can afford to break ties. Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has said that his government will only honor international agreements, and that the U.S. reinstatement of sanctions is not part of an international framework. Turkey, therefore, will continue to trade with Iran. Iran’s oil and gas are crucial for Turkey, whose refineries are calibrated to Iran’s oil and would not be able to easily and cheaply adjust to Saudi Arabian imports. Almost half of Turkey’s oil comes from Iran.

Turkish-U.S. relations are at a low. Conflict over the detention of a U.S. pastor—Andrew Brunson—has led to the U.S. sanctioning two Turkish ministers—Minister of Justice Abdulhamit Gul and Minister of Interior Suleyman Soylu. Gul is a leader of the ruling party, AKP, while Soylu came to the party at the personal invitation of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. These are not men to be intimidated by U.S. pressure.

A U.S. mission—led by Marshall Billingslea, assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury—went to Turkey to convince the government to join the U.S. sanctions. Meanwhile, the U.S. has begun to put pressure on Turkey’s Halkbank, one of whose senior officials was found guilty of violation of the U.S. sanctions on Iran by a court in the United States earlier this year. This kind of pressure is not sitting well with the Turkish government.

Inside Iran: Pressure mounts inside Iran. Protests have begun across the country, a reflection of the distress felt by the population as the country’s currency—the rial—slides around and as fears of inflation mount. Last week, the Iranian government fired the head of Iran’s central bank—Valiollah Seif—and replaced him with Abdolnasser Hemati. It reversed the foreign exchange rules, including the failed attempt to fix the value of the rial that was put in place in April. Hemati had been the head of Iran’s state insurance firm and before that of Sina Bank and Bank Melli. He is a highly trusted person by the government, which had already appointed him as ambassador to China before hastily rescinding that offer and moving him to the central bank. Whether Hemati will be able to balance the stress inside the Iranian economy is to be seen. Faith in the currency will need to be strengthened.

As part of that, Iran’s government has cracked down harshly against financial fraud, particularly scandals over foreign exchange. The man who signed the 2015 nuclear deal—Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi—now watches as his nephew—Ahmad Araghchi, the central bank’s vice governor in charge of foreign exchange—is arrested with five other people as part of an inquiry over fraud. The message: no one, not even the Araghchi family, is immune from the long arm of the law.

Trump’s belligerence, the refusal of key countries to abide by Trump’s sanctions (including the European Union, but mainly Russia and China) as well as the internal pressure in Iran could very likely create the conditions for a military clash in the waters around Iran. This is a very dangerous situation. Sober minds need to push against the reinstatement of these sanctions—which the Iranians see as economic warfare—as well as the escalation into military war.

This article was produced by Globetrotter , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Scenes From the Front Lines of America’s Immigration Crisis

The Tucson Greyhound bus station sits in an expansive parking lot in what could generously be called the edge of downtown. It once shared a historic building with the train station but is now in what amounts to a double-wide trailer, propped up five feet off the ground with a sheet-metal skirt. The building shimmers in the heat radiating from the asphalt. This unremarkable trailer played a key role in the reunification and separation of migrant families back in 2013 to 2014—which, in turn, laid some of the groundwork for the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.

In 2013, I came to this bus station three or more times a week. I lived in a volunteer intentional community whose members would load the back seat of our shared car with a dozen homemade care packages: small cloth bags filled with bottles of water, cups of ramen soup, a fistful of granola bars and a mishmash of whichever portable snacks were on the food shelf that week.

In the parking lot of the Greyhound station, an unmarked white passenger van would drive up. The passengers were short, well-dressed Central American mothers with their children in tow, everyone’s shoes still dusty from the trek across the border. They’d get out of the van wearing what looked like new T-shirts and jeans with bedazzled pockets. The jeans sagged because the migrants’ belts had been taken away during Border Patrol (BP) detention. It appeared as if they were trying to balance looking good for their trip to America while also dressing practically in case they had to walk a long way in the desert.

I’d wait for a fellow volunteer, preferably a woman who spoke better Spanish than I, to arrive and help me carry in the bags of food, extra clothes, diapers and stuffed animals. We would approach the migrants, tell them where they were, and let them use our phones to call their families. I would talk to family members on the other end of the line, as the migrants puzzled over how to buy a Greyhound ticket, which was not as easy as you would think. We took money orders so families had cash for the three-day trip from the border to their families living in the vast interior of the U.S.

We knew the Greyhound staffers by name and knew which nights the friendly ones worked. We memorized the routes that were easy to navigate, and which cities were problematic. We explained migrants’ tickets using highlighters to emphasize stations at which they had to change buses. If they got a ticket for that night, we got on the bus with them to help them find a seat close to the driver. If it was a driver we knew, he or she would give a knowing nod.

If it was a new driver, we would explain that these were asylum applicants with a stay of deportation notice that allowed them to travel in the U.S. We would tell the mothers where BP would pull the bus over, and we tipped them off about which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents they needed to show. Often, we would watch the last bus of the night drive into the hot, dry Tucson night—the migrants’ small silhouettes speeding away under a lone streetlight overlooking the backside of the Greyhound station.

Our intentional community consisted of a single-story brick house I shared with four other people. We hosted weekly meals, letter-writing nights and sign-making events, and provided a space for folks transitioning out of the for-profit immigration detention centers to the north of us in Florence, Ariz.

This phase of our work began on Labor Day weekend 2013, when a Greyhound employee called our house because our number was written on a two-year-old note that read, “If someone needs a free place to stay.”

That note was placed there because two years prior, ICE had been dumping recently released migrants from the detention centers in Florence at the Tucson Greyhound station. Volunteers from our community would bring them food and blankets. That work stopped when ICE began unloading migrants at the Phoenix bus station, which is larger and open 24 hours a day.

After Labor Day, we started getting phone calls every night from the bus station. We reached out to friends and neighbors to ask for help assisting the hundreds of Central American asylum seekers who were left stranded at the station. Shifts were delegated, chores were made, and for a little under a year we assisted mothers reuniting with their husbands and other relatives in the U.S. It begs the question how a single-family residence occupied by five part-time volunteers could provide more humane care than ICE, a multibillion-dollar agency with thousands of employees.

On some nights, ICE would drop off the asylum seekers at midnight, an hour before the station closed. Other nights, bus routes were closed due to poor weather or a sick driver. About half the time families had to buy tickets for the following day because the buses leaving that night were full. In those situations, we drove them to our home, a half-mile away from the bus station.

They came in through our side door with babies strapped to their backs, holding the hands of their children. Their serious faces concentrated not on what they had been through but what lay ahead. Our small home suddenly become a way station for Guatemalan families fleeing violence, drug cartels and economic devastation. In our Tucson living room, we saw refugees from the international forces of global capitalism, climate change and failed foreign and border policies. We heard countless stories of small family farms in the mountains where people could no longer make a living selling their corn, so the husband traveled north for work. Over time, it became impossible for the husband to keep returning because the border became harder to cross.

Farms in Guatemala had a hard time sustaining themselves in part due to the shifting climate that alternated between droughts and floods. For years, a husband would send money, until even that was no longer enough. When the cartels moved in and started recruiting the children, families decided to pay those cartels for the trip north. They often put their land up as collateral against a loan with 10 percent interest every month.

The families took a bus north through Mexico, where they were forced to bribe Mexican immigration officers. When they arrived at Nogales, Mexico, the smugglers lifted the mothers with babies swaddled to their backs and dropped them over a 15-foot fence. They risked getting raped, kidnapped or killed by the people they were paying a small fortune to. These stories were frequently glossed over. What they wanted to tell us was how our country treated them when they arrived.

They told us their stories at our dining room table each night, over corn tortillas, rice and black beans. Mothers often bounced a baby on one knee while feeding a 3- or 4-year-old. Although I have never traveled to Guatemala, I now know how to cook for Guatemalans.

The first time I tried to serve cold corn tortillas, the mothers looked at me with confused expressions. One walked me to the stove and showed me how to heat tortillas over an open range. I learned that my black beans were too spicy, and that it was not appropriate to mix them with rice. We learned to put sippy cups next to the coffee mugs. It always surprised me how sophisticated a 4-year-old could look drinking coffee at night, wearing a wool sweater over a collared shirt.

After dinner, mothers would cycle through our one bathroom, taking a shower and bathing their children. The children fell asleep on their mothers’ laps or played quietly, silently dismantling our couch or kicking around a stuffed soccer ball. Often, around midnight, as the dark Tucson night buzzed with cicadas, the women would start to tell us stories about what happened to them in the cells they called hieleras (ice boxes) while they were with la migra (border patrol). Agents took jackets from children and made them sleep on the floor. BP took all belts, shoelaces and bags—including diaper bags.

Many mothers lamented that their children had to wear the same diaper throughout the three-day detention. The food consisted of frozen microwavable burritos, and when water was given, it was filled with ice. Even worse, medical care was not given when needed. One mother told me her child had a cold so severe that he had trouble breathing through the mucus.

When she asked a Border Patrol agent if she could see a doctor, he asked for $80.

“I laughed in his face! We are so poor; how could we pay that?” she said.

At every step of their incarceration, they were goaded and coaxed into signing documents written in English.

“I knew better; I could see that they were voluntary deportation papers,” said a woman who could read English. “I told everyone in my group, ‘Don’t sign any papers.’ ”

We took several terrified pregnant women to the hospital because they feared a miscarriage due to this abuse. We gave children cold and cough medicine every night. It was surprising to see a child without a cold.

Sometimes an older child, around 16 or so, would be separated from the rest of her family. It was never clear why an agent singled her out. She would be sent to a shelter for unaccompanied minors in an old motel at the end of Tucson’s Miracle Mile. We would contact our friends who provided pro bono legal services. Over the course of a week or so, the child would be reunited with her family on our front porch.

Whenever a father traveled with the mother and children, he would be separated from his family in BP detention and sent to Operation Streamline. He would go through a criminal proceeding—with 80 other migrants—that lasted two hours. Afterward, he would spend three months in a for-profit immigration detention center before he was deported with a misdemeanor or felony on his record. He would then be barred from the U.S. for 10 years or longer.

Over the course of a year, our small community helped over 3,000 families, half of which spent the night in our home. We helped them find Greyhound rides to various parts of the U.S., where they waited for their immigration court cases to be processed. To be released by BP, they needed to give ICE an address of the family member they would be staying with. The migrant families would be processed with fingerprints and pictures, given a court date and discarded at the Greyhound station.

At first, we didn’t understand why ICE simply released families. For the first month, we were quiet about it, not telling many friends or asking the families too many questions. We had heard stories of BP agents releasing people they had found in the desert at the Greyhound station. Had the agents been struck by their consciences after spending shifts arresting women and children fleeing cartel violence? Was there a bribe too big to pass up?

After a month, we asked a lawyer for explanations. She examined the papers the families carried with them. A Bush-era law required families from Central America to see an immigration judge before being deported. Since most family detention centers do not stay open long due to human rights abuses, there was no place to imprison them. This had an unintended effect, causing begrudging ICE officers to treat asylum seekers in the same manner most countries did: allowing them to live with their own families while a court took the time to determine if they could receive asylum.

Two days before Memorial Day 2014, the cartels increased the number of buses they sent to the border. When ICE started dropping off 80 families a night—even flying families from Texas BP stations to drop off at our Greyhound station—we caved. We called the newspapers, and a story ran in a Phoenix paper. The Associated Press picked it up.

During this time, two of our roommates were on a road trip in Texas. They saw the same situation in every Greyhound bus station they passed: families not fed and abandoned with no money and no concept of where they were or how to get to where they needed to go. Nicaraguans and Salvadorians were pushed into the Rio Grande by smugglers from a different cartel.

When I asked them what I should say to the TV stations calling our home, my housemate John said, “This is a humanitarian crisis with a military response.” Over the course of weeks, this turned into a “Central American Surge” in national media. The Tucson BP station also received a lot of calls from news stations. And when we took TV crews to the Greyhound station, BP began collaborating with Catholic Charities, whose members took over our work and set up a migrant shelter in Tucson.

All around us, talking heads debated what BP should be doing differently and whether our border policies were “working.” To us, it was clear this was not a system that worked. Families still had to risk crossing the desert, and the cartels made a fortune ferrying vulnerable families and literally tossing them over the fence. Mothers and children left the Greyhound bus station having undergone an expensive, traumatic trip that caused lasting pain. Once a family made it into the interior of the U.S., they put their extended families at risk by giving ICE their phone numbers and addresses. If they didn’t report to their local ICE office, their unexecuted order of deportation would become active. They would become undocumented and risk being flown back to their country of origin.

Even though these families had every reason to fear ICE, 95 percent of people released into this monitoring system returned for their ICE appointments, according to an ICE study from 2014.

But the narrative spun out of control on the national stage—falsely described as a “massive influx,” an “invasion.” People were “caught and released” like fish. We watched in horror as militia groups came back to the border. They came because (they said) BP agents were too busy acting as babysitters. Protesters turned away buses of children at a shelter for minors in California, waving back the buses with American flags. The belief that separating families would act as a deterrence grew out of a soil already primed with racist fears of an ever encroaching “other.”

What differentiated our small community from ICE and BP was our ability to see these families as people. They were humans, not “Illegals.” They deserved to be treated with dignity.

For the last several decades, we have manufactured a constant emergency on our southern border by toppling democratically elected leaders in Central America’s Northern Triangle, strengthening cartels by providing a market for the smuggling of drugs and people, and flooding foreign markets with cheap American corn. Yet we respond with racially charged vocabularies such as “infestation.”

The driving assumption behind a “zero-tolerance” border policy and the “detention first” response is that those coming to our border are criminals—a false, easy label that justifies all kinds of abuses.

I recently heard in news reports the cries of migrant children being separated from their parents, and couldn’t help but think of the children I saw at the Greyhound bus station in Tucson. They smiled as I handed them a stuffed toy, their shy, bright, hazel eyes looking out from under mops of brown hair. They asked if I wanted to play, yearning for a human connection, unaware of the labels meant to divide us.

ICE Brazenly Lies About Crashing Van Carrying Mothers Separated From Their Children

Recent polling from the Pew Research Center indicates a plurality of Americans now hold an unfavorable opinion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A new report published Wednesday helps illuminate why.

According to the Texas Observer, which cites a police report and interviews with four passengers, an ICE contractor crashed a cargo van in San Marcos, Texas, last month. The van was transporting eight Central American mothers who had been separated from their children as part of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. The vehicle was rendered inoperable and multiple women were injured, yet the agency repeatedly denied that the accident took place.

“The crash occurred as the group was leaving a Sunoco gas station just off Interstate 35,” writes the Observer’s Gus Bova. “The van’s driver was an employee of Trailboss Enterprises, an Alaska-based company that provides transportation for ICE in Central and South Texas. The driver failed to come to a stop and T-boned an F-250 [Ford truck] that was entering the gas station, police said. The mothers told the Observer the impact slammed them against the seats in front of them, resulting in headaches, dizziness, nausea and injury to one woman’s leg, which began swelling immediately.”

The mothers’ statements are nothing less than harrowing. Dileia of Honduras, who did not want to give her full name for fear of reprisal from U.S. officials, told the Observer, “The crash was really strong, like maybe we were going to flip.” Another mother, Roxana, added, “We were all trembling with shock from the accident; my whole body hurt.” Each of the women said they had not been instructed to put on their seat belts.

“For nearly three weeks, ICE denied the crash happened and ignored requests for information,” writes Bova. “The Observer was first alerted to the crash the day after it occurred by immigrant rights activists in Austin. The next day, Leticia Zamarripa, an ICE spokesperson, denied the incident twice. ‘Your sources misinformed you,’ Zamarripa wrote on July 20. ‘There was no crash.’ ”

After the magazine obtained an accident report, an ICE spokesperson issued a statement calling the incident a “fender bender.” The report itself notes that the vehicle had to be towed.

Ultimately, the incident is merely the latest in a long string of atrocious developments involving the newly empowered federal law enforcement agency. Just last month, HuffPost revealed that ICE is “effectively partnering” with domestic abusers in order to “keep their victims from seeking help from law enforcement and the judicial system.”