Chris Hedges's Blog, page 571

Spain’s Conservative Government Poised to Fall

MADRID—Spain’s conservative government on Thursday appeared doomed to lose a no-confidence vote in parliament, with the center-left Socialist party poised to take power.

A Basque nationalist party’s decisive announcement that it would vote in favor of the motion spelled the almost certain end of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s mandate and foretold the stunning collapse of his minority government in a parliamentary vote Friday, when it will be short of support to survive.

The impending downfall of Rajoy’s government after ruling for nearly eight years came just days after his Popular Party’s reputation was badly damaged by a court verdict that identified it as a beneficiary of a large kickbacks-for-contracts scheme.

The unexpected development injected a new element of tension into European Union politics and global financial markets, already unsettled by Italy’s struggles to install a government since a March 4 election.

Under a Spanish law that prevents a power vacuum, Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez — who tabled the no-confidence motion — would immediately become the new leader of the 19-country eurozone’s No. 4 economy and a prominent EU leader at a time when the bloc faces numerous challenges.

Unlike Italy’s potential new leaders, Sanchez hasn’t expressed skepticism about the EU nor the continent’s single currency, both of which are broadly popular in Spain.

In the no-confidence debate, Sanchez, 46, called on Rajoy to step down over the kickbacks scandal.

“Are you ready to step down here and now? Resign and everything will end,” Sanchez told the prime minister, who listened from his seat with an impassive face. “Mr. Rajoy, your time is up.”

Rajoy was having none of it, accusing Sanchez of a power grab.

“Everybody knows that Pedro Sanchez is never going to win the elections and this is the reason for his motion, his urgency,” Rajoy told lawmakers, reminding them that the Socialists lost two general elections under Sanchez’s leadership and warning that a Socialist government would endanger the country’s financial stability.

Sanchez promised to abide by a national budget that was recently negotiated by Rajoy. It includes substantial benefits for the Basque nationalists whose promised votes in the no-confidence debate opened the door for Sanchez to oust Rajoy.

Sanchez also vowed to open talks with separatists in the Catalan regional government over their demands for independence. That issue has dogged Spain for the past eight months.

Rajoy has been in power since December 2011, successfully steering Spain out of its worst economic crisis in decades during the eurozone debt crisis and achieving some of the strongest economic growth in Europe. Last year, gross domestic product growth reached 3.1 percent.

Rajoy, cultivating a stern image, faced down opponents who complained that the recovery came at the expense of austerity measures, just as he has faced down Catalan secessionists.

But the strong economy wasn’t enough to keep Rajoy in La Moncloa palace, the seat of government in Madrid, and he was undone by the corruption scandal that brought verdicts last week. National Court judges delivered hefty prison sentences to 29 business people and Popular Party members, including some elected officials, for fraud, money laundering and tax evasion, among other crimes.

The PP was fined 245,000 euros ($287,000) for benefiting from “an authentic and efficient system of institutional corruption.” More damagingly for Rajoy, the judges questioned the prime minister’s credibility when he said in court that the false accounting was unknown to him.

Sanchez appeared to have the absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies — 176 of 350 seats — required to unseat Rajoy.

But the coming months could be difficult for Sanchez to navigate, with a minority Socialist government needing to please Basque regionalists, Catalan separatists and anti-austerity parties in order to pass legislation in parliament. Rajoy had labeled that prospect as a “Frankenstein government.”

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‘You’re All Going to Die’: Parkland Suspect’s Chilling Videos

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. —In chilling cellphone videos released Wednesday, the suspect in a February massacre at a Florida high school announced his intention to become the next school shooter, aiming to kill at least 20 people and saying “you’re all going to die.”

The three videos released by prosecutors were found on the cellphone of suspect Nikolas Cruz after the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 people and injured 17 others.

Cruz, wearing a ball cap, introduces himself in the first video and says he is “going to be the next school shooter of 2018.” He goes on to say that he wants to use an AR-15 to kill at least 20 people and specifies the high school in Parkland. The videos are undated, but on one he says, “Today is the day. Today it all begins. The day of my massacre shall begin.”

“When you see me on the news, you’ll all know who I am,” he says in another and then laughs. “You’re all going to die. … Can’t wait.”

In a second video, Cruz briefly discusses logistics, including that he will take Uber to campus about 2:40. He then says he’ll walk onto campus, go up some stairs, open his bag to take out his weapon and start firing. School surveillance video shows that was almost exactly what he did —the only difference being that he arrived at the school at 2:19 p.m.

In the third video, the camera apparently pointed at pavement, he talks about his loneliness, anger and hatred, and announces that the “day of my massacre shall begin.”

“I live a lone life. I live in seclusion and solitude. I hate everyone and everything. But the power of my AR you will all know who I am. I had enough of being told what to do and when to do,” he says. “I had enough of being told what to do and when to do. I had enough of being told that I’m an idiot and a dumbass. You’re all stupid and brainwashed by the political and government programs.”

He also referenced a former girlfriend, saying “I hope to see you in the afterlife.”

Cruz is charged with 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder in the attack. His lawyers have repeatedly said Cruz would plead guilty if guaranteed a sentence of life without parole, but prosecutors refuse to waive the death penalty. Cruz, 19, is a former Stoneman Douglas student.

The Broward State Attorney’s Office released the video because under Florida law, with few exceptions, evidence becomes a public record when it is turned over to the defendant’s attorneys as part of the pretrial discovery process. Cruz’s attorneys say they did not request evidence such as video from inside the building where the massacre happened and autopsy reports so they would not become public and “further hurt and inflame the victims’ families and the community.”

“This is an awful case and today is more of that awfulness and further shows how severely broken a human being the defendant is,” Broward County Public Defender Howard Finklestein, whose office is representing Cruz, said in a statement.

Cruz spent several years at a school for children with emotional disabilities before being allowed to transfer to Stoneman Douglas. He spent several months there before being kicked out. His late mother also called 911 on him almost 20 times over the years and he had a history of killing animals then posting images on the internet and taking body parts as souvenirs.

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Racism Keeps Rearing Its Ugly Head

TV star Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett and ABC’s subsequent cancellation of her eponymous show constitute just the latest and most high-profile episode highlighting the ways in which people of color are routinely dehumanized. Barr insulted Jarrett, an African-American woman, by using both an anti-black comparison to apes and an Islamophobic accusation of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood. To their credit, ABC executives canceled “Roseanne” within hours.

But the network should have known better than to revive the self-avowed ardent Donald Trump supporter’s show in the first place. Much like serial Twitter abuser Trump, this wasn’t the first time Barr had spewed racist garbage on Twitter. In rebooting “Roseanne,” ABC legitimized a high-profile racist supporter of a racist president.

Barr’s words are a symbol of just how overtly the racist dehumanization of people of color continues to play out in Trump’s America. On the same day as that controversy, news broke of a far higher death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year than was previously reported. A Harvard University study published in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that more than 4,600 Puerto Rican deaths were attributable to the hurricane—a number several orders of magnitude greater than the official U.S. estimate of 64. Because the study extrapolated numbers from a small sample size, the actual death toll could be as low as 800 or as high as 8,000.

In comparison, the 2005 devastation from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was linked to about 1,800 deaths. In that instance, people across the United States and even the world watched scenes of devastation in horror, and they rightly blamed George W. Bush’s administration for inaction and a botched response to the calamity that mostly affected African-Americans. In the case of Puerto Rico, a Spanish-speaking U.S. territory, President Trump has not been held nearly as accountable in the court of public opinion for the government’s poor response to the hurricane disaster, in part because of the undercount of deaths.

The message that the lives of people of color are worth less is also felt around the world—such as in countries where the U.S. wages wars, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, or where the U.S. supports wars like Saudi Arabia’s assault on Yemen and Israel’s violence against Palestinians in Gaza. The people of color who inhabit these lands are considered expendable, their lives subject to the whims of “collateral damage.”

Those people of color who flee our wars are also met with contempt abroad. In France, Malian refugee Mamoudou Gassama, who risked his life crossing the Mediterranean, was offered French citizenship after carrying out a bold rescue of a child dangling from a fourth-floor balcony in Paris. As political commentator Wajahat Ali noted wryly on Twitter, “In order to be seen as a human, a migrant has to literally leap, climb tall buildings and save lives.” The rest of the refugee population in France and Europe at large struggles daily to be seen as human.

Here in the United States, even acts of incredible heroism by people of color don’t guarantee attention from our current head of state. Three weeks after a black man named James Shaw risked his life to tackle a shooter at a Waffle House in Tennessee, Trump reached out to him in a phone call that Shaw described as “lackluster.” Meanwhile the president was victorious in his push to silence black people from speaking out about racism when the NFL decided recently to fine football players who refuse to stand for the national anthem. Trump had conflated peaceful anti-racist protests by players with disrespect for the U.S. military and the flag, and the NFL appears to have capitulated.

Black communities in the U.S. know intimately what the project of dehumanization feels like. When two men were arrested on April 12 at a Philadelphia Starbucks, it was business as usual in America. This week as Starbucks closed shop en masse for a high-profile afternoon racial sensitivity training session for its staff in light of the incident, the corporation hoped to fix the problem in one fell swoop while restoring its liberal reputation. Despite the fact that the training will likely fall far short of what is needed, and is probably a major publicity stunt, it is a start. But there were two sets of perpetrators during the arrest: the white manager who called the cops on the black men, and the officers who believed the manager and hauled the men away in handcuffs without determining properly if they deserved to be arrested. When will police be required to receive anti-racist training? It is precisely this sort of racist mistreatment by police that NFL players like Colin Kaepernick were protesting and that the NFL and Trump have decided to ignore.

We see over and over the dehumanization of people of color in our country and our world. As I concluded in my recent documentary “Making America Racist Again,” racism was not invented by Trump, the Republicans or conservatives. It is built into the fabric of this country right from the start, through the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the exploitation of immigrant labor and more. The systems that dehumanize people of color have remained largely bipartisan even in recent years, as detrimental policies aimed at people of color were being quietly pursued by Democrats and President Obama when they held political power (e.g., unchecked police brutality, disproportionate incarceration of people of color, mass detention of undocumented mothers and children). Now Trump and the GOP are able to point out Democratic hypocrisy and have ratcheted up those horrors. Trump has even repeatedly used the term “animals” to refer to his favored anti-immigrant symbol, the MS-13 gang.

A case in point is a set of photos of undocumented immigrant children being held in metal cages that a news outlet recently posted alongside an article about Trump’s policy of separating children from undocumented parents. Except that those photos, which were widely shared on social media, were from 2014, when Obama’s approach also resulted in immigrant suffering (though the children pictured were actually unaccompanied minors, not separated from their parents by U.S. authorities). Now Trump and his defenders are scoring political points because the Democrats simply did not do enough to distinguish themselves from Republicans on immigration.

Just as a border patrol agent recently shot a young undocumented Guatemalan woman named Claudia Patricia Gómez González, under Obama another border patrol agent fatally shot an immigrant youth through the U.S. border fence with Mexico. That agent was just acquitted of all charges in the killing of 16-year old José Antonio Elena Rodríguez. Of course, Trump is worse than Obama, but not by as much as you’d probably assume. The Democratic Party ought be as clearly distinct from its rivals as possible on the issues of immigration and race—not interchangeable, as the embarrassing photos of immigrant children being held in metal cages suggest.

If Starbucks, ABC, the NFL, the Democratic Party or even the U.S. government truly wanted to fix the problems of racism, real inequalities that diminish the rights of people of color and in turn dehumanize them need to be addressed. After all, our very democracy is in jeopardy as racism drives a faction in the country toward fascism. A recent study found a correlation between those white Americans who voted for Trump and those who favor fascism, or as NBC’s Noah Berlatsky wrote, “When intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy.” The stakes are high.

There are deep, systemic approaches to addressing racism that go well beyond a four-hour training session or the cancellation of a racist’s TV show. Some of those solutions are as old as the civil rights movement, when figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began linking racism to poverty and war. Today the Movement for Black Lives is centered on a similar set of concrete systemic solutions focusing on economic justice, and even more recently there has been a modern-day revival of the Poor People’s Campaign. There are strong movements to end wars and curtail our support for warring regimes. There are calls for better government support for the vulnerable victims of climate change such as those in Puerto Rico. There are networks of immigrant rights organizations advocating for justice for the undocumented.

These and others are the appropriate places to begin the long and necessary work of restoring the humanity and dignity of people of color.

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Avenatti Says ‘Trump Tapes’ Exist

Michael Avenatti, the outspoken lawyer who represents adult film actress Stormy Daniels in her suit against President Trump, says there are audio recordings of Trump’s conversations with his embattled personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Comparing the recordings to the infamous “Nixon tapes” that sealed President Richard Nixon’s political fate, Avenatti charges that the recordings might show a conspiracy “to commit one or more potential crimes.”

Avenatti made his assertion Wednesday on the left-leaning cable channel MSNBC. He represents Daniels in a case concerning the actress’ alleged 2006 affair with Trump and hush money that Cohen allegedly paid to silence her shortly before the 2016 election.

Avenatti has proved to be a virtual match for the president in hogging the media limelight. Earlier in the day, he withdrew a request to enter the criminal case against Cohen, in which he had sought a role in order to protect Daniels’ interests. He retracted the request after a federal judge warned him to end the “publicity tour” that has made him a recent fixture on cable TV news.

It previously has been reported that Cohen was in the habit of recording his phone conversations.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump gives the background to this story and offers a skeptical assessment of Avenatti’s latest bombshell. But keep an open mind: Avenatti has been out ahead of the mainstream media for some time now in correctly predicting important developments in the Trump-Daniels case.

NFL Confirms Critics’ Worst Suspicions About Anti-Kneeling Policy

Last week, the National Football League unveiled a punitive policy that fines teams whose players take a knee during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Critics have lambasted the new guidelines for their rank nationalism and racial pandering, but it wasn’t just white fans the league was hoping to appease. As a new Wall Street Journal report reveals, President Trump personally lobbied team owners and Commissioner Roger Goodell to take action—and coerced them into doing so.

“This is a very winning issue, strong issue for me,” Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones claims the president told him over the phone. “Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”

Jones delivered his statement as part of a deposition in the collusion lawsuit against the league by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. In a gesture that touched off the current debate, Kaepernick first knelt during the national anthem in 2015 as a protest against police brutality and systemic racism. He has been unemployed since 2016 despite multiple NFL executives reportedly viewing him as a starter in the league as recently as last year.

Jones was not the only NFL owner to address Trump’s maneuverings. In a separate deposition, Stephen Ross of the Miami Dolphins admitted the president “changed the dialogue” surrounding the anthem protests. “I was totally supportive of [the players] until Trump made his statement,” he said. (During a campaign rally for Luther Strange, a Senate hopeful running in Alabama, Trump called any player who chose to take a knee a “son of a bitch.”)

Several owners, including Ross, Jones and the Houston Texans’ Bob McNair, testified that national anthem protests have impacted their teams financially, but as Deadspin’s Dom Cosentino observes, it’s unclear “how much of that can be attributed to fans avoiding the NFL because of protests, versus those staying away out of solidarity [with] Kaepernick.” Both McNair and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft expressed grave misgivings about Trump’s anthem stance but were unwilling to defy the president.

Ultimately, the Journal’s latest revelations merely confirm what was already readily apparent: President Trump is willing to employ strong-arm tactics to achieve his political ends, and the NFL’s owners will do anything to protect their bottom lines.

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Harvey Weinstein Indicted in Sex Case

NEW YORK — Harvey Weinstein was indicted Wednesday on rape and criminal sex act charges, furthering the first criminal case to arise from a slate of sexual misconduct allegations against the former movie mogul.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said the indictment brings Weinstein “another step closer to accountability” for alleged attacks on two women in New York.

Weinstein’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said he would “vigorously defend” against the indictment and ask a court to dismiss it. He called the allegations “unsupported” and reiterated that Weinstein strongly denies them.

The indictment came hours after Weinstein’s lawyer said the film producer would decline to testify before the grand jury because there wasn’t enough time to prepare him and “political pressure” made an indictment unavoidable.

“Regardless of how compelling Mr. Weinstein’s personal testimony might be, an indictment was inevitable due to the unfair political pressure being placed on Cy Vance to secure a conviction of Mr. Weinstein,” the statement said.

Weinstein, 66, learned of the specific charges and the accusers’ identities only after turning himself in Friday, according to his lawyers. Brafman said that with a deadline set for Wednesday afternoon for Weinstein to testify or not, prosecutors denied his request for more time.

Vance said the Weinstein camp’s “recent assault on the integrity of the survivors and the legal process is predictable.”

“We are confident that when the jury hears the evidence, it will reject these attacks out of hand,” Vance said in a statement.

Weinstein was charged Friday with raping one woman and committing a criminal sex act by compelling oral sex from another. A grand jury continued hearing evidence in the case, as it had been doing for weeks.

Defendants have the right to testify in a grand jury’s secret proceedings but often don’t, for various reasons.

Freed on $1 million bail and electronic monitoring, he is due back in court July 30, though that date may now be moved up in light of the indictment.

Beyond the two women involved in the case, dozens more women have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct ranging from harassment to assault in various locales.

He has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex, and Brafman said Tuesday that Weinstein was “confident he’s going to clear his name” in the New York prosecution.

Brafman called the rape allegation “absurd,” saying that the accuser and Weinstein had a decade-long, consensual sexual relationship that began before and continued after the alleged 2013 attack.

The woman, who hasn’t been identified publicly, told investigators that Weinstein confined her in a hotel room and raped her.

The other accuser in the case, former actress Lucia Evans, has gone public with her account of Weinstein forcing her to perform oral sex at his office in 2004. The Associated Press does not identify alleged victims of sexual assaults unless they come forward publicly.

Vance, a Democrat, came under public pressure from women’s groups to prosecute Weinstein after declining to do so in 2015, when an Italian model went to police to say Weinstein had groped her during a meeting.

Police set up a sting in which the woman recorded herself confronting Weinstein and him apologizing for his conduct. But Vance decided there wasn’t enough evidence to bring charges.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, also a Democrat, ordered the state attorney general to investigate how Vance handled that matter.

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Journalism Watchdog Blasts DNC Lawsuit Against WikiLeaks

As President Donald Trump continues to wage war on journalism with “violent anti-press rhetoric,” the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) published a scathing analysis on Tuesday arguing that the Democratic National Committee’s recent lawsuit against WikiLeaks could set the stage for even more alarming attacks on press freedom by empowering the U.S. government to penalize media outlets that publish leaked information.

Citing the concerns expressed by numerous First Amendment experts and journalists, CPJ’s Avi Asher-Schapiro contends that the DNC’s suit—which accuses WikiLeaks of conspiring with Russia and the Trump campaign to tilt the 2016 election by publishing a trove of hacked DNC emails—“goes against press freedom precedents going back to the Pentagon Papers and contains arguments that could make it more difficult for reporters to do their jobs.”

“What the language in this suit is calling ‘conspiracy’ is the same thing journalists do all the time—report on leaked or stolen documents. Imagine if Trump had the power to go after ‘leakers’ for ‘conspiracy,'” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote in a series of tweets highlighting CPJ’s “blistering” report on Tuesday. “This case has potentially enormous consequences for the press as a whole.”

“This precedent threatens all journalists,” added Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept.

The people pretending to be so concerned about press freedoms are actively threatening it, while journalists who express indignation toward Trump’s insulting tweets about Chuck Todd & Wolf Blitzer ignore it because the target is unpopular. This precedent threatens all journalists https://t.co/BPw4nXEc6W

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 30, 2018

George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, echoed Taibbi and Greenwald in an interview with CPJ, arguing that the DNC clearly “paid zero attention to the First Amendment ramifications of their suit.”

“I’m unhappy that there’s even an allegation that you could be held liable for publishing leaked information that you didn’t have anything to do with obtaining,” Freeman added.

James Goodale, a First Amendment lawyer who represented the New York Times in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, said the idea that outlets like WikiLeaks should be punished for receiving and publishing stolen documents—an idea that forms the foundation of the DNC suit—is the “greatest threat to press freedom today.”

As Common Dreams at the time, free speech advocates raised alarm about the DNC’s suit when it was filed last month, arguing that it is both riddled with legal holes and full of dangerous implications.

“I think that this civil suit goes well beyond what the First Amendment permits,” Barry Pollack, former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who represents WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in criminal cases. “We have seen in DOJs under both parties, a willingness to at least bump right up against the line of pursuing journalists criminally. And that’s dangerous.”

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ACLU Campaign Seeks to End Immigration Policy ‘Child Abuse’

Fighting back against the Trump administration’s “vile” new policy of separating young migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, the ACLU is launching “Families Belong Together” rallies at immigration enforcement offices nationwide on Friday in an urgent effort to “end this practice for good.”

“The Trump administration is sending the clear message that immigrants aren’t welcome here—and they don’t mind sacrificing constitutional rights and basic human decency just to get that across,” the ACLU wrote, urging supporters to sign a petition opposing the administration’s policy. “They want to scare people away from coming to this country to seek a better life and aren’t afraid to admit it. We have the power to change this cruel policy—if enough of us raise our voices.”

In addition to publishing an action plan that includes details on how to spread information about Friday’s rallies on social media, the ACLU also provided an updated map of events taking place across the country.

We don’t want to live in a country that brutally separates young children from their parents. If the Trump administration’s cruelty doesn’t speak for you, show the world this Friday. #KeepFamiliesTogether https://t.co/zUpjLHjPpZ

— ACLU (@ACLU) May 30, 2018

FRIDAY: Join the National Day of Action to oppose Trump’s policy of tearing immigrant families apart.

Join an event in your community and remind the president that #FamiliesBelongTogether: https://t.co/kLdWXvl3dU pic.twitter.com/Rrmt23ZmKI

— People Power (@peoplepower) May 29, 2018

According to the Trump administration’s own figures, over 700 children were reportedly separated from their parents between October 2017 and April 2018—before the Department of Homeland Security’s new policy officially took effect earlier this month.

“The federal government has not released figures from May, but those who work on immigration cases have observed a large increase in the number of children affected” by the new policy, as  NBC News reported last week.

“It doesn’t matter how young the child, how terrible their situation, or how unnecessary their separation,” the ACLU noted. “They have one goal in mind: to warn immigrants not to come here, or else they might lose their children.”

As Common Dreams reported, ACLU documents published last week detailed the appalling treatment of detained migrant children during the Obama administration and clearly demonstrated that “pervasive abuse” of immigrants didn’t begin with President Donald Trump.

But Trump appears deadset on doing everything he can to make an already cruel system even more inhumane, and advocacy groups are hoping Friday’s rallies will help call attention to these often overlooked policies and build a grassroots movement strong enough to bring them down for good.

On Friday, we are rallying across the country to demand that @DHSgov end its cruel practice of separating children from their parents.

Join an event near you and help #KeepFamiliesTogether:https://t.co/kLdWXvl3dU

— People Power (@peoplepower) May 30, 2018

“Make no mistake: This new policy is vicious, brutal and is nothing less than Trump administration-endorsed, U.S. government-sanctioned child abuse,” concluded political strategist and commentator Maria Cardona in an op-ed for The Hill on Tuesday.

Asylum Seeker’s Death in ICE Custody Exposes Systemic Neglect, Brutality

Immigrant rights groups are blaming ICE for the death of a transgender woman who died last Friday after seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border and being held in the agency’s custody for two weeks. The woman’s death calls attention to the brutal treatment faced by immigrants held in ICE facilities, advocates say—cruelty that existed under the Obama administration and has worsened under President Donald Trump.

Thirty-three year old Roxsana Hernandez had arrived in the U.S. on May 9 with the migrant caravan of hundreds of people who had traveled through Mexico from Central America earlier this spring.

Hernandez was HIV-positive, and according to the group Pueblo Sin Frontera, which had organized the caravan, she died after having been held for several days in a cold cell known as an “ice box” at the San Ysidro port of entry.

Diversidad Sin Fronteras and Al Otro Lado joined the group in asserting that ICE was to blame for Hernandez’s death, saying that she was given inadequate food and medical care and was held in a cell where the lights were on 24 hours a day.

“Roxy died due to medical negligence by U.S. immigration authorities,” the groups said in a statement. “Why incarcerate and torture her like this? She had a home waiting for her in the United States. They could have let her go there. If they had, she would still be with us.”

Hernandez had been taken to Cibola County Correctional Facility, which contracts with ICE, on May 16, then airlifted to the intensive care unit at a hospital in Albuquerque where she remained until she died on May 25 of cardiac arrest. She had also been found to suffer from pneumonia and dehydration.

According to Sarah Sherman-Stokes of Boston University’s Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Program, Hernandez was the sixth immigrant to die in ICE custody since October 2017, the beginning of this fiscal year.

Roxana Hernández’s death is a symptom of a bigger problem. deaths in immigration detention are way up. in fact, 2017 saw the highest number of deaths in detention since 2009. here’s why. 2/

— Sarah Sherman-Stokes (@sshermanstokes) May 30, 2018

for one, the dramatic increase in the number of people detained by ICE daily. in 1995, there were 6,785 immigrants detained nationwide. Over the next 2 decades, that # grew to more than 34,000 as of 2013. Trump recently requested money for more than 50,000 ICE beds. 3/

— Sarah Sherman-Stokes (@sshermanstokes) May 30, 2018

here’s another reason: the standards that govern conditions in immigration detention are toothless. there is no enforcement mechanism and no incentive to comply with even low level standards around conditions of confinement, medical care, or access to clean food and water. 4/

— Sarah Sherman-Stokes (@sshermanstokes) May 30, 2018

Last year, Human Rights Watch highlighted the “dangerous and substandard” medical care offered to detainees in facilities run by ICE.

Immigrants’ requests for care routinely go ignored, according to the group’s report, entitled “Systemic Indifference,” and facilities were found to disregard appropriate HIV screening guidelines and care for HIV-positive patients.

Significant lapses in medical care in immigration detention facilities “are not new problems,” read the report, but HRW expressed concern that treating immigrants properly was being prioritized less and less under the Trump administration.

“ICE has been receiving reports of such substandard medical care for years but has failed to take meaningful action,” wrote the group. “The Obama administration implemented several new programs meant to improve oversight, but these monitoring procedures remain inadequate, and the Trump administration has already announced plans to reverse many of these reforms.”

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‘I’m Alive’: Russian Reporter, Ukraine Police Faked Killing

KIEV — A Russian journalist who was reportedly gunned down in Ukraine’s capital strolled into a news conference that authorities called Wednesday to discuss the investigation of his death, revealing that the slaying had been staged to foil an alleged Kremlin hit plot.

“I’m still alive,” Arkady Babchenko, 41, told startled fellow reporters at the news conference held less than a day after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building.

Ukrainian police said Tuesday that Babchenko, a strong critic of the Kremlin, was shot multiple times in the back Tuesday, found bleeding there by his wife and died on the way to the hospital. Kiev’s police chief said he suspected the journalist was killed because of his work.

Details of the sting operation were not clear, including why authorities decided to go to such lengths to make it look as if Babchenko was dead. The head of the Ukrainian Security Service said the suspected organizer of the alleged hit plot was detained Wednesday, suggesting the bogus killing was aimed at flushing him out.

Babchenko apologized to his wife, who he said was not briefed on the scheme in advance, “for the hell she had to go through in the past two days. There was no choice there, either.”

The astonishing turn of events brought harsh criticism from Russia and the international media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.

The journalist group’s director, Christophe Deloire, expressed on Twitter his “deepest indignation at the discovery of the manipulation of the Ukrainian secret services. It is always deeply dangerous for states to play with the facts.”

Konstantin Kosachev, head of the international affairs committee of the upper house of the Russian parliament, compared Ukraine’s allegations to Britain’s claims that Moscow was behind the nerve gas poisonings of a Russian former spy and his daughter in England. Russia vehemently denies poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal.

“The logic is the same — to defame Russia,” Kosachev told the state news agency Tass.

Neither Babchenko nor Ukrainian Security Service chief Vasyl Gritsak provided details of how they staged Babchenko’s injuries or made his wife believe he was dead.

The movie-like twist came as Gritsak convened the news conference to announce the security agency and the police had solved Babchenko’s reported slaying. He then confused everyone there by inviting the supposed slaying victim into the room.

To applause and gasps, Babchenko took the floor and apologized to the friends and family who mourned for him and were unaware of the plan.

“I’m still alive,” he said. “I know that sickening feeling when you bury a colleague. I’m sorry you had to go through this but there was no other way.”

Before ushering Babchenko into the room for the big reveal, Gritsak said investigators had identified a Ukrainian citizen who allegedly was paid $40,000 by the Russian security service to organize and carry out the hit. The unidentified Ukrainian man in turn allegedly hired an acquaintance to be the gunman, Gritsak said.

The man allegedly paid to organize Banchenko’s killing was detained Wednesday, he said, showing a video of the arrest.

Gritsak said killing Babchenko was part of a larger alleged plot by Russian security services. The Ukrainian man also was supposed to procure large quantities of weapons and explosives, including 300 AK-47 rifles and “hundreds of kilos of explosives,” to perpetrate acts of terror in Ukraine, he said.

Babchenko said he was not allowed to go into the details of his false death. He said Ukrainian law enforcement had been aware of a contract on his head for two months. He said he was approached by the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU, a month ago.

“The important thing is my life has been saved and other, bigger terrorist attacks have been thwarted,” he said.

Babchenko, one of Russia’s best-known war reporters, fled the country in February 2017. He spoke and wrote about needed to leave Russia because of threats against him and his family. He said his home address was published online and the threats he received were made by phone, email and social media.

Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and support for separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine were topics on which the journalist was scathingly critical of the Kremlin. His flight from Russia came several months after he wrote in a Facebook post that he wasn’t sorry members of a military band and state television journalists died in a plane crash on their way to Russia’s military base in Syria.

Several Russian lawmakers said at the time that Babchenko should be stripped of his citizenship over the comment, and Russian state media called him a traitor.

Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian lawmaker who also moved to Ukraine, said Babchenko continued being threatened after he settled last fall in Kiev, where he worked as a host for the Crimean Tatar TV station.

Babchenko did not take the intimidation too seriously, Ponomarev said Wednesday before the fact that the slaying was staged came out.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko lashed out Wednesday at Ukrainian politicians and civil groups who accused the government following Babchenko’s faked assassination of allowing contract killings to happen.

Hours before pretending to have been fatally shot, Babchenko wrote on Facebook that he narrowly escaped death exactly four years ago when the Ukrainian military refused to take him on a helicopter heading to the front line in eastern Ukraine. The aircraft was shot down minutes later.

“I was lucky, it was my second birthday,” he wrote Tuesday.

Gritsak, the security service chief, ended his remarks Wednesday congratulating Babchenko on his “third birthday.”

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Vasilyeva reported from Moscow. Jim Heintz in Moscow, Ayse Wieting in Istanbul and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.

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