Chris Hedges's Blog, page 544

Five Reported Dead at a Maryland Newspaper

ANNAPOLIS, Md.  — The Latest on shootings at The Capital Gazette newspaper in Maryland (all times local):

8:10 p.m.

Police say the shooting at a Maryland newspaper was a “targeted attack on The Capital Gazette.”

Bill Krampf is the acting police chief for Anne Arundel County. In a news conference Thursday, he said a white male in his late 30s has been arrested in connection with the shooting.

Krampf says the shooter used canisters of smoke grenades when he entered.

He says five people were killed and two injured in the attack. He described the two injuries as superficial.

___

7:30 p.m.

A U.S. official says the suspect in the shooting at a Maryland newspaper was identified using facial recognition technology.

The official said the man was identified with the technology after he had damaged his fingerprints in what investigators believe was an attempt to prevent them from quickly identifying him.

The official was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Police say five people died in Thursday’s shooting at the building housing The Capital Gazette.

—Michael Balsamo in Los Angeles.

___

6:50 p.m.

A law enforcement official says the suspect in the Annapolis, Maryland, newspaper shooting mutilated his fingers in what investigators think was an effort to prevent him from being easily identified.

The official was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official says investigators believe the suspect was attempting to prevent them from getting a fingerprint match.

The official says that investigators have nonetheless been able to identify the man, though it was not immediately clear how.

–Eric Tucker in Washington.

___

6:30 p.m.

The Chicago-based publishing company for The Capital Gazette says it is “deeply saddened” by the attack on its Maryland newspaper.

Justin Dearborn, chairman and CEO of Tronc, Inc., says in a statement, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.” Dearborn says the company is focused on providing its newspaper employees and their families with support during what it called a “tragic time.”

Police say five people are confirmed dead in Thursday’s shooting at the paper’s location in Annapolis, Maryland.

Tronc Inc. publishes the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers and digital news sites in various markets.

___

6:10 p.m.

A leading government official for the Maryland county where the deadly shooting occurred says investigators still don’t have any information about a possible motive.

Police have said the suspect in Thursday’s shooting at a Maryland newspaper is a white male now in custody who was armed with a long gun. Authorities say five people are confirmed dead and investigators are questioning the suspect.

Anne Arundel County executive Steve Schuh says the suspect “has not been very forthcoming” with information. Schuh adds: “To my knowledge, there was no verbal aspect to the incident where he declared his motives or anything else, so at this point we just don’t know.

___

5:50 p.m.

Police have confirmed that the suspect in a deadly shooting at a Maryland newspaper is a white male who was armed with a long gun.

Anne Arundel County Police Lt. Ryan Frashure also told a news conference that police recovered what they believe to be an explosive device from the building housing The Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis.

He said the device “was taken care of,” but didn’t elaborate. He says authorities don’t believe there are any other explosives at the site.

Frashure says police have no information yet on a motive for Thursday’s shooting, which left five people dead and others seriously wounded.

___

5:30 p.m.

President Donald Trump says his “thoughts and prayers” are with the victims of the shooting at a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, and their families.

Trump says in a tweet that he was briefed on the shooting at The Capital Gazette before departing Wisconsin.

He says, “My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families” and thanks “all of the First Responders who are currently on the scene.”

A shooter killed five people and wounded others at the newspaper Thursday. Police say a suspect is in custody.

___

5:30 p.m.

Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos says he was joking when he told two reporters that he couldn’t wait “for the vigilante squads to start gunning down journalists on sight.”

He said Thursday that he texted that comment to reporters at the New York Observer and The Daily Beast essentially as a way to get them off his back, and that they were responsible for taking his comments seriously and spreading it.

In a Facebook post, he expressed no sympathy to journalists involved in Thursday’s shooting. Rather, he described journalists who spread his comment about vigilante squads as “vermin.”

___

5:20 p.m.

A U.S. official briefed on the investigation has identified the suspect in a shooting at a Maryland newspaper as a white male who is believed to have carried a shotgun.

The official told The Associated Press on Thursday that the suspect is not cooperating with investigators.

The official wasn’t authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

(Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo in Los Angeles contributed to this report)

___

5:30 p.m.

The New York Police Department has deployed counterterrorism teams to news media organizations in response to the shooting at a newspaper in Annapolis, Md.

Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism and Intelligence John Miller says the deployments are not based on any specific threat information, but out of an abundance of caution. He says the NYPD is monitoring the shooting.

Police presence was seen outside The New York Times, ABC News and Fox News early Thursday evening.

Police say five people have been killed and several others were “gravely injured” in the shooting at a building housing the Capital Gazette newspaper Thursday afternoon. Authorities say one suspect is in custody.

___

4:50 p.m.

Police say five people have been killed and several others were “gravely injured” in a shooting at a building housing a Maryland newspaper.

Anne Arundel County Acting Police Chief William Krampf confirmed the deaths Thursday at a news conference.

Gov. Larry Hogan has previously said that there were “several fatalities and several people in the hospital.”

Lt Ryan Frashure of Anne Arundel County Police says the building is now secure and a suspect had been taken into custody.

____

4:25 p.m.

A spokeswoman for the city of Annapolis, Maryland, says one suspect is in custody after a shooting at the building housing the Capital Gazette newspaper.

Susan O’Brien shared the information with The Associated Press in an email Thursday afternoon.

A spokeswoman for a hospital near the newspaper said two patients had arrived there but she did not know their conditions.

Anne Arundel Medical Center spokeswoman Arminta Plater said she couldn’t immediately provide any further details.

___

4:15 p.m.

Police have confirmed an active shooter in the building housing a Maryland newspaper.

Lt Ryan Frashure of Anne Arundel County Police said Thursday that “we did have” an active shooter in the building where The Capital Gazette is located, and there are injuries.

He would not say whether a suspect was in custody, or give details about the extent of the victims’ injuries. He says police are first trying to make sure everyone in the building gets out safely and that there are no bombs inside.

Frashure added that we “don’t anticipate this being a mass major casualty.”

___

3:55 p.m.

A reporter at the newspaper where there are reports of an active shooter say a gunman shot multiple people.

Phil Davis is a reporter at The Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis.

He tweeted Thursday that a gunman shot through the office’s glass door.

In his tweet he remarked, “There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload.”

___

3:20 p.m.

Multiple people have been shot at a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland.

The Baltimore Sun, which owns The Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis says a reporter told them of the shooting Thursday afternoon.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said it was responding to reports of the shooting.

Anne Arundel County Police Department spokesman Marc Limansky said officers are searching the building where the shooting was reported. He said the situation is “active and ongoing.”

On TV reports, people could be seen leaving the building with their hands up, as police officers urged them to depart through a parking lot and officers converged on the building.

Lt. Ryan Frashure, another spokesman for Anne Arundel County police, said on WJLA that officers are “doing everything to get people out safe.” He said they must look for other dangers, such as bombs and other shooters.

(this item has been edited to correct the newspaper’s name, to The Capital Gazette)

What Joe Crowley’s Defeat Has to Do With Democratic Party ‘Superdelegates’

Conventional wisdom said that powerful Congressman Joseph Crowley couldn’t be beat. But his 20-year career in the House of Representatives will end in early January, with the socialist organizer who beat him in the Democratic primary in the deep-blue district poised to become Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The defeat of Crowley shows how grass-roots movements can prevail against the corporate establishment and its vast quantities of cash. The Crowley campaign spent upward of $3 million in the Democratic Party primary. The Ocasio-Cortez campaign spent one-tenth as much. He wielded money power. She inspired people power.

As the 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez was quick to say after her victory Tuesday night, the triumph belongs to everyone who wants social, economic and racial justice. She ran on a platform in harmony with her activism as a member of Democratic Socialists of America and an organizer for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

In a simple and symbolic twist of fate, the stunning defeat of Crowley came a day before the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party voted on what to do about “superdelegates.”

Conventional wisdom said superdelegates—who exerted undemocratic power over the selection of the party’s presidential nominee in 2016—couldn’t be stopped from putting the establishment’s thumbs on the scale again.

But on Wednesday afternoon, the party committee approved a proposal to prevent superdelegates from voting on the presidential nominee during the first ballot at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. (The last time the party’s convention went to a second ballot was back in 1952.)

As NPR reported, “A Democratic National Committee panel has voted to drastically curtail the role ‘superdelegates’ play in the party’s presidential nominating process. The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee voted 27 to 1 to block officeholders, DNC members and other party dignitaries from casting decisive votes on the first ballot of presidential nominating conventions.”

Make no mistake: Those in the top echelons of the Democratic Party aren’t moving in this direction out of the goodness of their hearts. Grass-roots pressure to democratize the party—mounting since 2016—is starting to pay off.

But that pressure needs to increase. Corporate power brokers of the national party are in the midst of a tactical retreat, which should not be confused with surrender.

During the latest Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting, former DNC Chairs Donald Fowler and Donna Brazile voiced strong—and in Fowler’s case, bitter—opposition to changing the superdelegates status quo. They may have been foreshadowing an escalation of insider pushback before the full DNC decides on rules in late August.

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by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

In recent weeks, some of Crowley’s kindred corporate Democratic colleagues in the House—angry at the prospect of losing their privilege to vote on the nominee at the next national convention—have been railing against the superdelegates reform proposal. Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia said that “it disenfranchises the elected leadership of the party” and, if adopted, “is going to do terrible damage to party harmony.”

A New Jersey congressman, Bill Pascrell, said: “I think this is absolutely an insult to us. We’re no better than anybody else, but we stand for election. That has to mean something, that has to stand for something. That’s a lot of baloney.”

DNC Chairman Tom Perez has become an advocate for blocking superdelegate votes on the first ballot. That has put him in the line of fire from Capitol Hill, as Politico reported in early June: “Rep. David Price (D-N.C.), executive director of the early-1980s Hunt Commission, which created superdelegates, said lawmakers were ‘infuriated’ by Perez’s stance, although he’s not sure there’s anything that can be done. ‘I think there was a good deal of incredulity and some pretty severe criticism,’ Price said.”

Very few entrenched Democratic officials were willing to criticize the setup when most of the 712 superdelegates made Hillary Clinton the far-ahead “front-runner” by announcing their support for her before a single ballot was cast in a primary or caucus to choose the 2016 nominee.

Now, the huge defeat of quintessential hack Crowley by Ocasio-Cortez underscores the importance and the possibilities of what Bernie Sanders urged during a recent video interview: “Open the doors of the Democratic Party. Welcome working people. Welcome young people in. Welcome idealism in.”

Of course, “idealism” is hardly a word that comes to mind when listening to Democratic congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Crowley. No wonder young people’s support for the party has been eroding.

“It may take liberals by surprise to hear that a recent Reuters/Ipsos mega poll of 16,000 respondents found that the Democrats are losing ground with millennials” even while “their support for Republicans has remained roughly stable,” Guardian columnist Cas Mudde wrote days ago. “While millennials still prefer the Democratic Party over the Republicans, that support is tanking. In just two years, it dropped sharply from 55 percent to 46 percent.”

Reviving the Democratic Party will require making the party democratic in the process of winning genuine progressive victories. Ocasio-Cortez is helping to show the way.

Former Death Row Inmate Gary Tyler Carries On RFK’s ‘Ripple of Hope’ Ideal

Imagine you are charged with a crime you didn’t commit, then wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder. Now, imagine you get sentenced to death by electric chair, sent to one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, and assigned an execution date.

That’s what happened to Gary Tyler. In 1974, Tyler was arrested for disturbing the peace as a 16-year-old sophomore at Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish, La., after a racial altercation involving 200 white students and a school bus filled with black students (including Tyler). A 13-year-old white student was shot and later died. Tyler was named as the shooting suspect, even though he claimed his innocence and evidence suggested he was framed.

“They kept asking me questions about what happened on the bus,” Tyler told the Pasadena Weekly about being in police custody. “When I said I didn’t know anything, six or seven police officers brutally beat me for two to three hours in the booking room at the substation.”

An all-white jury found Tyler guilty of murder. He entered the Louisiana State Penitentiary, or Angola, at 17, the youngest person on death row.

“Angola was the bloodiest, most infamous prison in the nation,” Tyler said. “It was a place of turmoil where prisoners were killing each other and committing suicide. I saw horrible things in Angola—inmates being set on fire or stabbed with homemade spears. I saw inmates who were doused with acid by other inmates. Some prisoners even got beaten to death by guards.”

A group of inmates protected Tyler.

“They saw a little kid who was all alone,” Tyler explained. “Many of them were uncles and fathers—and they stepped up as responsible men to make sure that nothing happened to me.”

Tyler’s execution date was May 1, 1976. Before that day arrived, his sentence was commuted to life without parole (until after 20 years) after the Supreme Court ruled in Roberts v. Louisiana that the state’s death penalty was unconstitutional.

Tyler made the best of his injustice, getting a GED, studying graphic arts and printing, attending paralegal school, mentoring other inmates and volunteering in the prison’s hospice care facility for 17 years.

During his time in prison, Tyler helped transform the culture of violence at Angola. As the president of the drama club, he directed a passion play, “The Life of Jesus Christ,” featuring other inmates as cast members. This project became the basis of the documentary “Cast the First Stone.”

Tyler recalled the experience during an interview with Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer:

Of course, I was able to recruit people from all walks of life in the prison. Also, that we’re talking about some people that had disciplinary problems and I knew these guys. I knew that giving them a chance, an opportunity, I could help transform them. I like that I had opportunity to interview and audition, you understand, these guys, because I opened it up to the prison population and I was getting, if you consider the worst of the worst, and to hear these guys say, “Give me chance. Let me prove myself.” It’s like people asking society, “Give me a second chance.” So, I heard their cries and I gave them that chance. I found them to be the most committed and dedicated actors that I had in the production.

Tyler’s legal case became known worldwide as lawyers and human rights activists fought for his release from prison. In 2016, the St. Charles Parish district attorney’s office in Louisiana agreed to overturn Tyler’s murder conviction if he entered a guilty plea for manslaughter. He did and received the maximum sentence of 21 years. Since he already had served almost 42 years, Tyler was released from Angola on April 29, 2016, at the age of 57.

He now lives in Pasadena, Calif., and has become a community leader.

Tyler has spoken out in support of Proposition 62 to end the death penalty in California. He has spoken at events with actor and activist Mike Farrell, former Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti and musician Jackson Browne.

Tyler also has lectured at many places: Cal State Northridge, with the Rev. James Lawson; Cal State Long Beach, with actor Danny Trejo and film producer and Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC) founder Scott Budnick; USC (five times), Loyola Marymount; Venice Art Garden; UCLA’s Department of African-American Studies; Loyola Law School, Hastings Law School, All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Los Angeles; Scott United Methodist Church in Pasadena; University Methodist Church in Irvine; actor Tim Robbins’ experimental theater, The Actors’ Gang (two times); and the Catholic Biblical Federation (two times).

He is scheduled to go to Wisconsin in September to speak at Viterbo University and the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

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Gary Tyler on Maintaining Hope and Compassion in the U.S. Prison System



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Still, re-entry after four decades of incarceration has its challenges. Tyler came out of prison with zero dollars and turns 60 on July 10. Although Tyler now works as an outreach and engagement support worker at Safe Place for Youth in Venice, Calif.—helping homeless youth—Social Security requires 40 quarters or 10 years to get the minimum benefits. That means Tyler will be at least 69 years old before he can qualify and collect.

Longtime Los Angeles peace activist Bob Zaugh, who has known and advocated for Tyler since 1989, arranges Tyler’s speaking engagements and has set up a re-entry fund for him.

“Gary had to start from scratch upon leaving Angola prison,” Zaugh wrote in an email. “He had no paid work history, no driver’s license, no savings, had never had an apartment. Even going to Ralphs to shop was an eye-opening experience. He was starting from ground zero, but Gary immediately became a community force.”

Tyler continues to be a positive force. At the beginning of 2018, he spoke at Caltech in Pasadena. The woman who organized the event, Marionne Epalle, an administrator in the engineering and applied science department, is his neighbor. After the talk, they went to the Caltech private dining room for lunch. Mwi Epalle, Marionne’s 15-year-old daughter, joined them, and said she wanted to do a class project with Tyler at the International School of Los Angeles. The project was a video, “My Neighbor, Gary.” When the video was completed, she submitted it to a Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights video contest in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers and Tribeca Film Institute. The competition had more than 800 entries. Her entry won first place.

Tyler has chosen the power of compassion over the power of destruction. Despite spending two-thirds of his life behind bars in a terrible miscarriage of justice, Tyler holds no anger or resentment. In fact, he carries on RFK’s message of hope:

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Like the America of Robert F. Kennedy’s day before his death in 1968, America today faces some difficult tests. As we question what nation we are and what direction we want to go, we can look to Tyler for some guidance and inspiration in the struggle for justice.

“The life I lived, the life that others lived, what they went through, it exemplifies how an individual can overcome these adversities and these challenges and how they can make a difference in their community.”

If you want to provide financial support as Gary Tyler develops his life and work as an important community leader, give to his Liberty Hill re-entry fund or his GoFundMe birthday page.

A Harrowing Firsthand Account of Border Detention Centers

Sunday morning, I flew to McAllen, Texas to find out what’s really happening to immigrant families ripped apart by the Trump administration.

There’s one thing that’s very clear: The crisis at our border isn’t over.

I went straight from the airport to the McAllen Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processing center that is the epicenter of Donald Trump’s so-called “zero-tolerance” policy. This is where border patrol brings undocumented migrants for intake before they are either released, deported, turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or, in the case of unaccompanied or separated children, placed in the custody of Health and Human Services.

From the outside, the CBP processing center looks like any other warehouse on a commercial street lined with warehouses. There’s no clue about the horrors inside.

Before we could get in, CBP insisted we had to watch a government propaganda video. There’s no other way to describe it – it’s like a movie trailer. It was full of dramatic narration about the “illegals” crossing our border, complete with gory pictures about the threats that these immigrants bring to the United States, from gangs to skin rashes. The star of the show is CBP, which, according to the video, has done a great job driving down the numbers.

Then an employee described what we were about to see. “They have separate pods. I’ll call them pods. I don’t really know how they name them.” Clearly they had gotten the memo not to call them what they are: cages. Every question I asked them had a complicated answer that led to two more questions – even the simple question about how long people were held there. “Nobody is here longer than 24 hours.” “Well, maybe 24-48 hours.” “72 hours max.” And “no children are separated out.” “Well, except older children.”

The warehouse is enormous, with a solid concrete floor and a high roof. It is filled with cages. Cages for men. Cages for women. Cages for mamas with babies. Cages for girls. Cages for boys.

The stench – body odor and fear – hits the second the door is opened. The first cages are full of men. The chain link is about 12-15 feet high, and the men are tightly packed. I don’t think they could all lie down at the same time. There’s a toilet at the back of the cage behind a half-wall, but no place to shower or wash up. One man kept shouting, “A shower, please. Just a shower.”

I asked the men held in cage after cage where they were from. Nearly all of them were from El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras.

Then I asked them how long they had been there – and the answers were all over the map, from a few days to nearly two weeks (72 hours max?). The CBP agents rushed to correct the detained men, claiming that their answers couldn’t be right. My immigration specialist on the trip who speaks fluent Spanish made sure the men understood that the question was, “How long have you been in the building?” Their answers didn’t change.

Cage after cage. Same questions, same answers.

Next we came into the area where the children were held. These cages were bigger with far more people. In the center of the cage, there’s a freestanding guard tower probably a story or story-and-a-half taller to look down over the children. The girls are held separately in their own large cage. The children told us that they had come to the United States with family and didn’t know where they had been taken. Eleven years old. Twelve. Locked in a cage with strangers. Many hadn’t talked to their mothers or fathers. They didn’t know where they were or what would happen to them next.

The children were quiet. Early afternoon, and they just sat. Some were on thin mats with foil blankets pulled over their heads. They had nothing – no books, no toys, no games. They looked shell shocked.

And then there were the large cages with women and small children. Women breast-feeding their young children.

When we went over to the mamas with babies, I asked them about why they had left their home countries. One young mother had a 4-year-old child. She said she had been threatened by the gangs in El Salvador. She had given a drink of water to a police officer, and the gang decided she must be in with the police. The longer she spoke, the more agitated she got – that she would never do that, that she understood the risk with the gangs, but that the gangs believed she did it. She sold everything she had and fled with her son to the United States.

One thing you won’t see much of in the CBP processing center? Fathers caged with their children. After pressing the CBP agents, they explained that men traveling with children are automatically released from the facility. They just don’t have the cages there to hold them. Women with small children, on the other hand, could be detained indefinitely. I pressed them on this again and again. The only answer: they claimed to be protecting “the safety of the mother and children.”

CBP said that fathers with children, pregnant women, mothers of children with special needs, and other “lucky ones” who are released from the processing center are sent over to Catholic Charities’ Humanitarian Respite Center for help. That was my next stop in McAllen. Sister Norma, her staff, and volunteers are truly doing God’s work. Catholic Charities provides food, a shower, clean clothes, and medicine to those who need it. The center tries to explain the complicated process to the people, and the volunteers help them get on a bus to a family member in the United States.

Sister Norma introduced me to a father and his teenage son from Honduras. The father said that a gang had been after his son, determined that the boy would join the gang. The only way for the boy to escape was to run. The man left his wife and four daughters in Honduras to bring his son to the United States. His only plan is to find work here to send money home to his family. His cousin lives in New Jersey, so CBP sent their paperwork to the local ICE center in New Jersey, and they would soon begin the long bus ride there.

Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley provides a lifesaving service to people of all faiths and backgrounds, but with a humanitarian crisis in their backyard, they’re clearly stretched as thin as it gets. With more money and volunteers, they would gladly help more people.

I asked Sister Norma about the women and babies who were in indefinite detention. She said her group would open their arms and take care of them, get them cleaned up and fed and on a bus to a family member – if only ICE would release them.

“This is a moral issue. We are all part of this human family,” they say.

Next, I met with some of the legal experts on the frontlines of this crisis – lawyers from the Texas Civil Rights Project, the Border Rights Center of the Texas ACLU, and the federal public defenders.

I gave them a rundown of everything I’d seen so far in McAllen, particularly when it comes to reuniting parents and children, and they raised some of my worst fears:

The Trump administration may be “reunifying” families, but their definition of a family is only a parent and a child. If, for example, a 9-year-old crosses with an 18-year-old sister – or an aunt or uncle, or a grandparent, or anyone who isn’t the child’s documented legal guardian – they are not counted as a family and they will be separated.

Mothers and children may be considered “together” if they’re held in the same gigantic facility, even if they’re locked in separate cages with no access to one another. (In the world of CBP and ICE, that’s how the 10-year-old girls locked in a giant cage are “not separated” from their mothers who are in cages elsewhere in the facility.)

In the process of “reunifying” families, the government may possibly count a family as reunited by sending the child to a distant relative they’ve never met – not their parents. Some relatives may be unwilling to claim these children because it would be inviting ICE to investigate their own families.

Parents are so desperate to be reunited with their children that they may be trading in their legal right to asylum.

The system for tracking separated families is virtually unknown, if one exists at all. One expert worries that for some families, just a simple photo may be all the documentation that the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services have to reunite them. (I sincerely hope that’s not true.)

The longer the day went on, the more questions I had about how the Trump administration plans to fix the crisis they’ve created at the border. So my last stop of the day was at the Port Isabel Detention Center, about an hour east of McAllen. It’s one of the largest detention facilities in Texas.

The Department of Homeland Security had released some details on its plan to reunify families. The release noted that Port Isabel will be the “primary family reunification and removal center for adults in their custody.”

Let’s be clear: Port Isabel isn’t a reunification center. It’s a detention center. A prison.

There’s no ambiguity on this point. I met with the head of the facility. He said several times that they had no space for children, no way to care for them, and no plans to bring any children to his locked-down complex. When I pressed on what was the plan for reunification of children with their parents, he speculated that HHS (the Department of Health and Human Services) would take the children somewhere, but it certainly wasn’t going to be to his facility. When I asked how long HHS would take, he speculated that it would be weeks, but he said that was up to them. He had his job to do: He would hold these mothers and fathers until he received orders to send them somewhere else. Period.

So let me say it again. This is a prison – not a reunification center.

We toured the center. It is huge – multiple buildings isolated on a sun-baked expanse of land far from any town. We didn’t go to the men’s area, but the women are held in a large bunk-bed facility with a concrete outdoor exercise area. It’s locked, double-locked, and triple locked. Tall fences topped with razor wire are everywhere, each backed up by a second row of fences also topped with razor wire.

An ICE official brought in a group of nine detained mothers who had volunteered to speak to us. I don’t believe that ICE cherry-picked these women for the meeting, because everything they told me was horrifying.

Each mother told us her own story about crossing the border, being taken to a processing center, and the point that they were separated from their child or children. In every case, the government had lied to them about where their children were being taken. In every case, save one, no mother had spoken to her child in the days since the separation. And in every case, no mother knew where her child was.

At the time of separation, most of the mothers were told their children would be back. One woman had been held at “the icebox,” a center that has earned its nickname for being extremely cold. When the agent came to take her child, she was told that it was just too cold for the child in the center, and that they were just going to keep the child warm until she was transferred. That was mid-June. She hasn’t seen her child since.

One mother had been detained with her child. They were sleeping together on the floor of one of the cages, when, at 3:00am, the guards took her away. She last saw her 7-year-old son sleeping on the floor. She cried over and over, “I never got to say goodbye. I never got to say goodbye.” That was early-June, and she hasn’t seen him since.

Even though the CBP officials at the processing center told me that mothers with children that have special needs would be released, one of the mothers I spoke with had been separated from her special needs child. She talked about her child who doesn’t have properly formed legs and feet and walks with great difficulty. One of the mothers spoke of another mother in the facility who is very worried because her separated child is deaf and doesn’t speak at all.

The women I met were traumatized, weeping, and begging for help. They don’t understand what is happening to them – and they’re begging to be reunited with their kids.

Detainees can pay to make phone calls, but all of their possessions are taken from them at the processing center. The only way they can get money for a call is for someone to put money on their accounts. I asked if people or charities could donate money so that they’d be able to make phone calls to their family or lawyers, but they said no – a donor would need the individual ID number for every person detained at the center, and ICE obviously isn’t going to release that information.

Three young lawyers were at Port Isabel at the same time we were. The lawyers told us that their clients – the people they’ve spoken to in the detention center – have strong and credible cases for asylum. But the entire process for being granted asylum depends on one phone call with an immigration official where they make the case for why they should be allowed to stay. One of the first questions a mother will be asked is, “Have you been separated from a child?” For some of the women, just asking that question makes them fall apart and weep.

The lawyers are worried that these women are in such a fragile and fractured state, they’re in no shape to make the kind of detailed, credible case needed for themselves or their children. They had no chance in our system because they’ve lost their children and desperately want them back.

We stayed inside at Port Isabel for more than two hours – much longer than the 45 minutes we had been promised. When I finally went to bed that night, I thought about something the mothers had told me – something that will likely haunt me for a long time.

The mothers say that they can hear babies cry at night.

This isn’t about politics. This isn’t about Democrats or Republicans. This is about human beings. Children held in cages today. Babies scattered all over this country. And mamas who, in the dark of night, hear them cry.

I’m still working through everything I saw, but I wanted you to know the full story. The fight for these children and families isn’t over – not by a long shot.

How America’s Wars Fund Inequality at Home

In the name of the fight against terrorism, the United States is currently waging “credit-card wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. Never before has this country relied so heavily on deficit spending to pay for its conflicts. The consequences are expected to be ruinous for the long-term fiscal health of the U.S., but they go far beyond the economic. Massive levels of war-related debt will have lasting repercussions of all sorts. One potentially devastating effect, a new study finds, will be more societal inequality.

In other words, the staggering costs of the longest war in American history—almost 17 years running, since the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001—are being deferred to the future. In the process, the government is contributing to this country’s skyrocketing income inequality.

Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent $5.6 trillion on its war on terror, according to the Costs of War Project, which I co-direct, at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. This is a far higher number than the Pentagon’s $1.5-trillion estimate, which only counts expenses for what are known as “overseas contingency operations,” or OCO—that is, a pot of supplemental money, outside the regular annual budget, dedicated to funding wartime operations. The $5.6-trillion figure, on the other hand, includes not just what the U.S. has spent on overseas military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria, but also portions of Homeland Security spending related to counterterrorism on American soil, and future obligations to care for wounded or traumatized post-9/11 military veterans. The financial burden of the post-9/11 wars across the Greater Middle East—and still spreading, through Africa and other regions—is far larger than most Americans recognize.

During prior wars, the U.S. adjusted its budget accordingly by, among other options, raising taxes to pay for its conflicts. Not so since 2001, when President George W. Bush launched the “Global War on Terror.” Instead, the country has accumulated a staggering amount of debt.  Even if Washington stopped spending on its wars tomorrow, it will still, thanks to those conflicts, owe more than $8 trillion in interest alone by the 2050s.

Putting the Gilded Age to Shame

It’s hard to fathom what that enormous level of debt will do to our economy and society. A new Costs of War study by political scientist and historian Rosella Capella Zielinski offers initial clues about its impact here. She takes a look at how the U.S. has paid for its conflicts from the War of 1812 through the two World Wars and Vietnam to the present war on terror. While taxes, bond sales and other mechanisms were used to raise funds to fight such conflicts, no financial strategy has relied so exclusively on borrowing—until this century. Her study also explores how each type of war financing has affected inequality levels in this country in the aftermath of those conflicts.

The implications for today are almost painfully straightforward: the current combination of deficit spending and tax cuts spells disaster for any hopes of shrinking America’s striking inequality gap. Instead, credit-card war spending is already fueling the dramatic levels of wealth inequality that have led some observers to suggest that we are living in a new Gilded Age, reminiscent of the enormous divide between the opulent lifestyles of the elite and the grinding poverty of the majority of Americans in the late 19th century.

Capella Zielinski carefully breaks down what effects the methods used to pay for various wars have had on subsequent levels of social inequality. During the Civil War, for example, the government relied primarily on loans from private donors. After that war was over, the American people had to pay those loans back with interest, which proved a bonanza for financial elites, primarily in the North. Those wealthy lenders became wealthier still and everyone else, whose taxes reimbursed them, poorer.

In contrast, during World War I, the government launched a war-bond campaign that targeted low-income people. War savings stamps were offered for as little as 25 cents and war savings certificates in denominations starting at $25. Anyone who could make a small down payment could buy a war bond for $50 and cover the rest of what was owed in installments. In this way, the war effort promoted savings and, in its wake, a striking number of low-income Americans were repaid with interest, decreasing the inequality levels of that era.

Taxation strategies have varied quite significantly in various war periods as well. During World War II, for instance, the government raised tax rates five times between 1940 and 1944, levying progressively steeper ones on higher income brackets (up to 65 percent on incomes over $1 million). As a result, though government debt was substantial in the aftermath of a global struggle fought on many fronts, the impact on low-income Americans could have been far worse. In contrast, the Vietnam War era began with a tax cut and, in the aftermath of that disastrous conflict, the U.S. had to deal with unprecedented levels of inflation. Low-income households bore the brunt of those higher costs, leading to greater inequality.

Today’s wars are paid for almost entirely through loans — 60% from wealthy individuals and governmental agencies like the Federal Reserve, 40% from foreign lenders. Meanwhile, in October 2001, when Washington launched the war on terror, the government also initiated a set of tax cuts, a trend that has only continued. The war-financing strategies that President George W. Bush began have flowed on without significant alteration under Presidents Obama and Trump. (Obama did raise a few taxes but didn’t fundamentally alter the swing toward tax cuts.) President Trump’s extreme tax “reform” package, which passed Congress in December 2017—a gift-wrapped dream for the 1 percent—only enlarged those cuts.

In other words, in this century, Washington has combined the domestic borrowing patterns of the Civil War with the tax cuts of the Vietnam era.  That means one predictable thing: a rise in inequality in a country in which the income inequality gap is already heading for record territory.

Just to add to the future burden of it all, this is the first time government wartime borrowing has relied so heavily on foreign debt. Though there is no way of knowing how this will affect inequality here in the long run, one thing is already obvious: it will transfer wealth outside the country.

Economist Linda Bilmes has argued that there’s another new factor involved in Washington’s budgeting of today’s wars. In every other major American conflict, after an initial period, war expenditures were incorporated into the regular defense budget. Since 2001, however, the war on terror has been funded mainly by supplemental appropriations (those Overseas Contingency Operations funds), subject to very little oversight. Think of the OCO as a slush fund that ensures one thing: the true impact of this era’s war funding won’t hit until far later since such appropriations are exempt from spending caps and don’t have to be offset elsewhere in the budget.

According to Bilmes, “This process is less transparent, less accountable, and has rendered the cost of the wars far less visible.” As a measure of the invisible impact of war funding in Washington and elsewhere, she calculates that, while the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense discussed war financing in 79% of its hearings during the Vietnam era, since 9/11, there have been similar mentions at only 17% of such hearings. For its part, the Senate Finance Committee has discussed war-funding strategy in a thoroughgoing way only once in almost 17 years.

Hidden Tradeoffs and Deferred Costs

The effect of this century’s unprecedented budgetary measures is that, for the most part, the American people don’t feel the financial weight of the wars their government is waging — or rather, they feel it, but don’t recognize it for what it is. This corresponds remarkably well with the wars themselves, fought by a non-draft military in distant lands and largely ignored in this country (at least since the vast public demonstrations against the coming invasion of Iraq ended in the spring of 2003). The blowback from those wars, the way they are coming home, has also been ignored, financially and otherwise.

However little the public may realize it, Americans are already feeling the costs of their post-9/11 wars.  Those have, after all, massively increased the Pentagon’s base budget and the money that go into the expanding national security budget, while reducing the amount of money left over for so much else from infrastructure investment to science. In the decade following September 11, 2001, military spending increased by 50 percent, while spending on every other government program increased only 13.5 percent.

How exactly does this trade-off work? The National Priorities Project explains it well. Every year the federal government negotiates levels of discretionary spending (as distinct from mandatory spending, which largely consists of Social Security and Medicare). In 2001, there were fewer discretionary funds allocated to defense than to non-defense programs, but the ensuing war on terror dramatically inflated military spending relative to other parts of the budget. In 2017, military and national security spending accounted for 53 percent of discretionary spending. The 2018 congressionally approved omnibus spending package allocates $700 billion for the military and $591 billion for non-military purposes, leaving that proportion about the same. (Keep in mind, that those totals don’t even include all the money flowing into that Overseas Contingency Operations fund). President Trump’s proposals for future spending, if accepted by Congress, would ensure that, by 2023, the proportion of military spending would soar to 65 percent.

In other words, the rise in war-related military expenditures entails losses for other areas of federal funding. Pick your issue: crumbling bridges, racial justice, housing, healthcare, education, climate change—and it’s all being affected by how much this country spends on war.

Nonetheless, thanks to its credit-card version of war financing, the government has effectively deferred most of the financial costs of its unending conflicts to the future. This, in turn, contributes to how detached most Americans tend to feel from the very fact that their country is now eternally at war. Political scientist and policy analyst Sarah Kreps argues that Americans become invested in how a war is being conducted only when they’re asked to pay for it. In her examination of the history of the financing of American wars, she writes, “The visibility and intrusiveness of taxes are exactly what make individuals scrutinize the service for which the resources are being used.” If there were war taxes today, their unpopularity would undoubtedly lead Americans to question the costs and consequences of their country’s wars in ways now missing from today’s public conversation.

Pressing for a real war budget, though, is not only a mechanism to alert Americans to the effects (on them) of the wars their government is fighting.  It is also a potential lever through which citizens could affect the country’s foreign policy and pressure elected officials to bring those wars to an end. Some civic groups and activists from across the political spectrum have indeed been pushing to reduce the Pentagon budget, bloated by war, corruption and fear-mongering. They are, however, up against both the power of an ascendant military-industrial complex and wars that have been organized, in their funding and in so many other ways, not to be noticed.

Those who care about this country’s economic future would be remiss not to include today’s war financing strategy among the country’s most urgent fiscal challenges. Anyone interested in improving American democracy and the well-being of its people should begin by connecting the budgetary dots.  The more money this country spends on military activities, the more public coffers will be depleted by war-related interest payments and the less public funding there will be for anything else. In short, it’s time for Americans worried about living in a country whose inequality gap could soon surpass that of the Gilded Age to begin paying real attention to our “credit-card wars.”

The Supreme Court, the Muslim Ban and Trump’s Ugly Abyss of Racism

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a tsunami of decisions this week, most of which left no doubt about its fiercely right-wing orientation. By a narrow 5-4 majority, the court upheld Republican gerrymandering in Texas, overturned pro-choice legislation in California, dealt a significant blow to public sector unions and upheld President Donald Trump’s latest Muslim ban. Each decision sets back decades of organizing and progressive legislative achievements, struggles for which people fought, protested, went to jail and, in some cases, died. Each decision will be heralded as a signal achievement of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who engineered the current makeup of the court by denying President Barack Obama a confirmation hearing for his nomination to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. But of all these decisions, the most odious, the most reprehensible, was the case of Trump v. Hawaii, upholding the Muslim ban, endorsing and empowering Donald Trump’s vile, naked racism.

This case involves the three successive attempts by Donald Trump to deliver one of his many notorious campaign promises, to implement, as he said at one rally, “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Trump issued the first Muslim ban on Jan. 27, 2017, provoking massive protests at airports from coast to coast. After legal challenges blocked that ban, Trump issued “Muslim Ban 2.0” in March. That one was also blocked by the courts, with one federal appeals court concluding Trump’s executive order “drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination.” Finally, in September, the White House issued a proclamation, “Muslim Ban 3.0,” with narrowly tailored legal language restricting, to varying degrees, entry to the United States for people from Chad, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. The Supreme Court allowed it to go into effect while the legal challenges progressed. This week, it gave Trump the green light to make his racist ban permanent.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a blistering dissent that performed a vital public service, by collecting all of Donald Trump’s blatant anti-Muslim and Islamophobic statements, tweets and press releases in one place, permanently inscribed in the public record for future generations to behold. In addition to the formal campaign statement that he wanted to ban all Muslims, Sotomayor summarized, “Trump told an apocryphal story about United States General John J. Pershing killing a large group of Muslim insurgents in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood in the early 1900’s.” He later said—again, from Sotomayor’s dissent—“[w]e’re having problems with the Muslims, and we’re having problems with Muslims coming into the country.” The list of blatant statements is long and, as she wrote, “harrowing.” Of Muslim Ban 3.0, she concludes, “this repackaging does little to cleanse … the appearance of discrimination that the president’s words have created.”

Trump’s Muslim Ban is now the law of the land. Sotomayor’s dissent continued: “Trump justified his proposal during a television interview by noting that President Franklin D. Roosevelt ‘did the same thing’ with respect to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.”

She was referencing the 1944 case, Korematsu v. United States. Fred Korematsu was a California-born U.S. citizen of Japanese heritage, who was ordered to report to one of the internment camps where 110,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned after Pearl Harbor. He resisted the order, and took the government to court. The Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment camps by a 6-3 majority. Justice Frank Murphy, in his dissent, said the policy “falls into the ugly abyss of racism.”

In 1983, research revealed that the government suppressed evidence that Japanese Americans posed no threat during WWII, and Korematsu’s conviction for avoiding internment was vacated. But the legal precedent set by the Supreme Court remained on the books — until this week. As if anticipating how reviled their decision would be held, the majority specifically stated that the Korematsu decision was in no way relevant to the matter before them, but, nevertheless, they formally overturned the Korematsu decision. Fred Korematsu died in 2005, but his daughter, Karen, responded in a statement: “The Muslim travel ban is unjust and singles out individuals due to the religion they practice, similar to Executive Order 9066 that unconstitutionally imprisoned my father due to his Japanese ancestry. Although the Court overruled my father’s case today, it only substituted one injustice for another.”

Despite the wave of negative decisions, there are signs of hope. “We are not waiting. We are resisting,” Linda Sarsour, director of MPower Change, the first Muslim online organizing platform, and co-chair of the Women’s March, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “I will be joining hundreds of women engaging in the largest mass civil disobedience by women that this country has ever seen.” While the Supreme Court adjourns for the summer, networks of grassroots social justice organizations are just getting started.

Supreme Court Wraps Term With Anthony Kennedy’s Retirement and a Rash of Right-Wing Rulings

The U.S. Supreme Court concluded its term this week not with a whimper but a rightwing bang, handing down major decisions on racial gerrymandering, abortion, the Trump travel ban, and public employee unions. Each case was decided 5-4 along ideological lines, with Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, who replaced Antonin Scalia on the bench last year, voting with the conservative majority.

In another late-breaking development, Anthony Kennedy, the court’s perennial swing voter, announced his retirement on Wednesday.

Here’s your recap of the jurisprudential carnage:

Public Employee Unions:  Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31

On Wednesday, in a decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court dealt public sector unions a crippling blow. The ruling overturned the “fair-share” system the unions had relied on for more than forty years to collect fees from non-union government employees. The outcome was expected, given the animus toward unions expressed by the Roberts’ court in recent years.

Under current law, no one can be forced to join a union, even one that has been elected by a majority of workers in a bargaining unit to negotiate on their behalf. In non-right-to-work states, however, unions nonetheless can collect “fair-share fees” from workers who don’t join, to help pay for the costs of bargaining. Fair-share fees cannot be used to pay for contributions to political campaigns or most lobbying.

Conservatives nonetheless argue that requiring non-union public employees to pay fees to a union they don’t want to join, even on issues of pay and benefits, amounts to compelled speech in violation of the First Amendment.

In a 1977 decision dealing with government unions, one handed down during a more labor-friendly era in the court’s history—Abood v. Detroit Board of Education—the Justices upheld the constitutionality of fair-share fee systems.

But the Roberts court, operating in a new era of hostile anti-worker judicial activism, has steadily chipped away at the Abood rule. Starting with its 2012 opinion in Knox v. SEIU and continuing with its 2014 decision in , the court has emphasized that the payment of union dues by public employees is a form of political speech subject to the constraints of the First Amendment.

In 2016, after Scalia died, the court deadlocked 4-4 in another case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, involving a fair-share appeal. That issue now has been resolved.

“It is hard to estimate how many billions of dollars have been taken from nonmembers and transferred to public-sector unions in violation of the First Amendment,” Alito rued in his ruling. “Those unconstitutional exactions cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.”

There are currently twenty-two non-right-to-work states across the nation, which permit fair-share fees to be deducted from employee paychecks. They include both New York and California, the states with the highest number of unionized public employees. Nationwide, the public sector boasts a unionization rate of 34.4 percent, while the private sector rate has dwindled to 6.5 percent.

The Janus decision will effectively turn the country’s entire public sector into a right-to-work jurisdiction. Many labor activists fear it will drain union coffers and ultimately eviscerate public employee unions—the last bastion of organized labor in America.

Racial Gerrymandering:  Abbott v. Texas

In its landmark 1962 ruling in Baker v. Carr on reapportionment and redistricting, the Supreme Court established the doctrine of “one person, one vote”—the equal protection principle that electoral districts must be roughly the same in population.

In subsequent cases, the court went further, proscribing “racial gerrymandering”—the practice of purposely designing electoral districts to dilute the voting power of minorities. Whether a given legislative map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, however, depends on the specific facts and circumstances of each case, and, sadly, the political orientation of the justices of the Supreme Court.

On Monday, with Alito writing for the majority, the court’s five Republicans reversed a lower-court finding of intentional discrimination against Hispanic and black voters. Alito’s opinion validated Texas’ voting maps with the exception of a single state legislative district, which he conceded was a racial gerrymander.

According to the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice, the decision will have broad ramifications for the entire country, making it harder to challenge “not only redistricting plans but a whole host of other discriminatory voting laws, ranging from voter ID laws to cutbacks in polling place hours.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court also declined to hear a political gerrymandering appeal from North Carolina on the merits, after taking similar action earlier in cases from Wisconsin and Maryland. To date, the court has never invalidated a state legislative map as an illegal political, or partisan, gerrymander.

Abortion:  National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra

In 2015, California passed the Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency Act, or “FACT Act,” requiring anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers” to make certain disclosures to their patients seeking pregnancy-related services and advice. It says centers with medical licenses and doctors and nurses on staff must inform patients that the state provides free or low-cost contraception, prenatal care, and abortion services. Unlicensed facilities must disclose that they have no medical personnel in house.

According to the state, the FACT Act is designed to guarantee informed consent on the part of patients faced with critical reproductive decisions. It takes aim at what defenders of the act claim is deceptive advertising that undermines and confuses women about their treatment options.

Two centers, one licensed and the other unlicensed, sought a preliminary injunction against the act, along with the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, a nonprofit corporation from Fredericksburg, Virginia, that operates some 1,400 anti-abortion facilities nationwide. Together, they argued that the act abridges the First Amendment by compelling the centers to convey a pro-abortion message on behalf of the state.

In 2016, the 9th Circuit of Appeals rejected those arguments. But on Tuesday the Supreme Court, in a majority opinion drafted by Justice Clarence Thomas, reversed this, saying the FACT Act “imposes a government-scripted disclosure requirement” that violates the First Amendment.

In a tweet, NARAL Pro-Choice America condemned Thomas’s handiwork for “saying it’s more important that fake women’s health centers be allowed to lie than to provide women w/medically accurate info.”

The Travel Ban:  Trump v. Hawaii

On Tuesday, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, the court upheld the third version of Trump’s travel ban, rejecting Hawaii’s contentions that the ban violated provisions of the Immigration & Nationality Act. In Roberts’ view, the ban was a legitimate exercise of the President’s national security powers.

The ban, unveiled last September, restricts entrants from six predominantly Muslim countries, along with North Korea and government personnel from Venezuela. Although clearly directed against Muslim immigration, it is less restrictive than the ban’s earlier iterations.

The original ban, issued in January 2017, stopped citizens from seven Muslim nations from entering the United States for 90 days, indefinitely barred refugees from Syria, and put a 120-day hold on all others, except for some members of religious minorities (i.e., Christians). The second ban dropped Iraq from the list of targeted nations and removed the exception for religious minorities.

Writing in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted Roberts’s opinion for leaving “undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ because the policy now masquerades behind a façade of national-security concerns.” She also compared the majority opinion to the court’s infamous 1944 ruling, Korematsu v. United States, upholding the wartime internment of Japanese Americans.

As bad as the last week was, it may only be a taste of more to come next term and beyond as Gorsuch settles into his role as a conservative ideological stalwart. And now that Kennedy has retired, President Trump will get to nominate his replacement. For progressives, it can’t get much worse.

The Devastating Implications of the High Court’s ‘Right to Work’ Ruling

It was a decision that was all but guaranteed with the Senate confirmation of Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch. On Wednesday, hours before Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement ahead of November’s midterm elections, the court voted 5-4 along party lines in Janus v. AFSCME to make “right to work” the law of the land.

The ruling is nothing short of disastrous for an already beleaguered American labor movement. By barring unions from charging public employees “agency fees,” the high court has ensured these organizations will be underfunded and underrepresented, as workers will be entitled to the same benefits whether they become full members or not. For Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the GOP’s wealthy donors, the Janus decision is a triumph, and the culmination of a decades-long conservative lobbying effort.

More than 40 years ago, D. Louis Abood sued Detroit’s Board of Education on the grounds that he shouldn’t be forced to join or make payments to a union whose political ideals he claimed to reject. His case reached the Supreme Court, where its justices ruled unanimously in 1977 that his financial contributions did not violate his First Amendment rights. In Janus, the high court has reversed a legal precedent that has been in place for more than 40 years.

“Janus is a rare Supreme Court decision (though the second in this term) that overrules a previous judgment of the Court,” writes Vox’s Dylan Matthews. “The Supremes generally abide by a principle known as stare decisis, Latin for ‘to stand by things decided.’ That means that even if justices believe a past decision is wrongly decided, they generally accept it as precedent and rule in accordance with it going forward.”

Groups like the Liberty Justice Center, which represented the plaintiff, Mark Janus, had other ideas. As the New York Times reports, the organization is backed by Illinois industrialist Richard Uihlein, who has donated millions to the campaigns of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tx., and Republican Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Bruce Rauner of Illinois, as well as to the right-wing Federalist Society—the same organization that guided the president in his nomination of Gorsuch. The objective? To radically reshape the American judiciary.

“It’s a mistake to look at the Janus case and earlier litigation as isolated episodes,” Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a political scientist at Columbia University, told the Times in February. “It’s part of a multipronged, multitiered strategy.”

Their gambit is already paying dividends. While the Janus ruling pertains to public employees, it is likely to encourage the private sector to become open shop as well. Observes Jacobin’s Chris Maisano, “it seems only a matter of time … either through congressional legislation or another Supreme Court case.”

Janus could prove especially devastating to teachers’ unions, which have earned a string of victories following wildcat strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. The New York Times estimates they could shed as many as one-third of their members, and with them the kind of funding that made this year’s demonstrations possible. If they manage to preserve their membership rolls, a dubious proposition even before Janus, they’ll still lose the fees of nonmembers used to help cover the costs of collective bargaining.

“Members and money are power in politics,” Stanford political scientist Terry Moe tells the Times. “This will weaken teachers’ unions nationwide as a political force.”

Maisano contends the labor movement is faced with one of two choices: watch as its numbers continue to dwindle or embrace the kind of collective action that made the teachers’ strikes this spring so effective.

“The kinds of local leaders and unofficial rank-and-file networks that initiated these struggles and highlighted their broader political ramifications have shown themselves to be labor’s best hope,” he concludes. “As they consider the post-Janus world before them, the rising generation of young radicals should do everything they can to join and support them.”

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to Retire

WASHINGTON—Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy said Wednesday he is retiring, giving President Donald Trump the chance to cement conservative control of the high court.

The 81-year-old Kennedy said he is stepping down after more than 30 years on the court. A Republican appointee, he has held the key vote on such high-profile issues as abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, guns, campaign finance and voting rights.

Without him, the court will be split between four liberal justices who were appointed by Democratic presidents and four conservatives who were named by Republicans. Trump’s nominee is likely to give the conservatives a solid majority and will face a Senate process in which Republicans hold the slimmest majority, but Democrats can’t delay confirmation.

Trump’s first high court nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, was confirmed in April 2017.

Judge Orders Reunification for Separated Families

MCALLEN, Texas—A judge in California on Tuesday ordered U.S. border authorities to reunite separated families within 30 days, setting a hard deadline in a process that has so far yielded uncertainty about when children might again see their parents.

If children are younger than 5, they must be reunified within 14 days of the order issued Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego. Sabraw, an appointee of President George W. Bush, also issued a nationwide injunction on future family separations, unless the parent is deemed unfit or doesn’t want to be with the child. He also requires the government provide phone contact between parents and their children within 10 days.

More than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in recent weeks and placed in government-contracted shelters — hundreds of miles away, in some cases — under a now-abandoned policy toward families caught illegally entering the U.S.

Amid an international outcry, Trump last week issued an executive order to stop the separation of families and said parents and children will instead be detained together. A Department of Homeland Security statement over the weekend on reuniting families only seemed to sow more confusion.

“The facts set forth before the Court portray reactive governance responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the Government’s own making,” Sabraw wrote. “They belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution.”

The ruling was a win for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit in March involving a 7-year-old girl who was separated from her Congolese mother and a 14-year-old boy who was separated from his Brazilian mother.

“Tears will be flowing in detention centers across the country when the families learn they will be reunited,” said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt.

The Justice and Homeland Security Departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Tuesday.

It’s not clear how border authorities will meet the deadline. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told Congress on Tuesday that his department still has custody of 2,047 immigrant children separated from their parents at the border. That is only six fewer children than the number in HHS custody as of last Wednesday. Democratic senators said that wasn’t nearly enough progress.

Under questioning, Azar refused to be pinned down on how long it will take to reunite families. He said his department does extensive vetting of parents to make sure they are not traffickers masquerading as parents.

Also challenging will be the requirement the judge set on phone contact.

At a Texas detention facility, immigrant advocates complained that parents have gotten busy signals or no answers from a 1-800 number provided by federal authorities to get information about their children.

Attorneys have spoken to about 200 immigrants at the Port Isabel detention facility near Los Fresnos, Texas, since last week, and only a few knew where their children were being held, said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg of the Legal Aid Justice Center in Virginia.

“The U.S. government never had any plan to reunite these families that were separated,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said, and now it is “scrambling to undo this terrible thing that they have done.”

A message left for HHS, which runs the hotline, was not immediately returned.

Many children in shelters in southern Texas have not had contact with their parents, though some have reported being allowed to speak with them in recent days, said Meghan Johnson Perez, director of the Children’s Project for the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, which provides free legal services to minors.

“Things might be changing now. The agencies are trying to coordinate better,” she said. “But the kids we have been seeing have not been in contact with the parents. They don’t know where the parent is. They’re just distraught. Their urgent need is just trying to figure out, ‘Where is my parent?'”

The decision comes as 17 states, including New York and California, sued the Trump administration Tuesday to force it to reunite children and parents. The states, all led by Democratic attorneys general, joined Washington, D.C., in filing the lawsuit in federal court in Seattle, arguing that they are being forced to shoulder increased child welfare, education and social services costs. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the multistate lawsuit.

“The administration’s practice of separating families is cruel, plain and simple,” New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in a statement. “Every day, it seems like the administration is issuing new, contradictory policies and relying on new, contradictory justifications. But we can’t forget: The lives of real people hang in the balance.”

In a speech before the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Los Angeles, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administration for taking a hardline stand on illegal immigration and said the voters elected President Donald Trump to do just that.

“This is the Trump era,” he said. “We are enforcing our laws again. We know whose side we are on — so does this group — and we’re on the side of police, and we’re on the side of the public safety of the American people.”

After expressing reluctance in May to get too deeply involved in immigration enforcement decisions, the judge who issued Tuesday’s ruling was clearly influenced by Trump’s reversal last week and the Homeland Security Department’s statement on its family reunification plan Saturday night, which, he said, left many questions unanswered.

“This situation has reached a crisis level. The news media is saturated with stories of immigrant families being separated at the border. People are protesting. Elected officials are weighing in. Congress is threatening action,” he wrote.

Outraged by the family separations, immigrant supporters have led protests in recent days in states such as Florida and Texas. In Los Angeles, police arrested 25 demonstrators at rally Tuesday ahead of Sessions’ address.

Outside the U.S. attorney’s office, protesters carried signs reading, “Free the children!” and “Stop caging families.” Clergy members blocked the street by forming a human chain. Police handcuffed them and led them away.

Later, protesters gathered outside the hotel where Sessions gave his speech. As the attorney general’s motorcade arrived, the crowd chanted, “Nazi, go home.”

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Weissert reported from Harlingen, Texas. Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington; Gene Johnson in Seattle; Robin McDowell in Austin, Texas; Amy Taxin in Santa Ana, California; and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this report.