Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 73

Alex Will Take in Syria's Refugees

If Texas won’t take them, 6-year-old Alex will. Or at least he has offered to take in one Syrian, the child captured in a photograph last month while he sat in the back of an ambulance, his head dusty and bloodied after a bomb hit his family’s home.

“Remember the boy who was picked up by the ambulance in Syria?” Alex wrote to U.S. President Obama. “Can you please go get him and bring him to my home?”

Obama read the note earlier this week at the UN Leaders’ Summit on Refugees held in New York, and the White House posted it online Wednesday.

Obama, in his speech, chided world leaders for not doing enough to help refugees. He called the global refugee crisis “one of the most urgent tests of our time.” About 65 million people are displaced from their homes and most of these people come from countries of great poverty, or as in Syria’s case, have experienced prolonged war. Obama commended Germany and Canada as exemplary nations for providing these people support, and announced the U.S. would increase the number of refugees it accepts in 2017 by nearly 60 percent. (The U.S. accepted 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016 and it accepted 40,000 from around the world this year.)

The issue has political implications. In the U.S., some politicians and states have complained that taking in refugees, especially from Syria, might imperil national safety. They argue federal authorities can’t properly screen these people, some of whom could be terrorists.

This how Alex’s letter came into the conversation.

“The humanity that a young child can display, who hasn’t learned to be cynical, or suspicious, or fearful of other people because of where they’re from, or how they look, or how they pray, and who just understands the notion of treating somebody that is like him with compassion, with kindness,” Obama said Tuesday, “we can all learn from Alex.

Here’s a transcript of Alex’s letter:

Dear President Obama,

Remember the boy who was picked up by the ambulance in Syria? Can you please go get him and bring him to [my home]? Park in the driveway or on the street and we will be waiting for you guys with flags, flowers, and balloons. We will give him a family and he will be our brother. Catherine, my little sister, will be collecting butterflies and fireflies for him. In my school, I have a friend from Syria, Omar, and I will introduce him to Omar. We can all play together. We can invite him to birthday parties and he will teach us another language. We can teach him English too, just like my friend Aoto from Japan.

Please tell him that his brother will be Alex who is a very kind boy, just like him. Since he won't bring toys and doesn't have toys Catherine will share her big blue stripy white bunny. And I will share my bike and I will teach him how to ride it. I will teach him additions and subtractions in math. And he [can] smell Catherine's lip gloss penguin which is green. She doesn't let anyone touch it.

Thank you very much! I can't wait for you to come!

Alex

6 years old

And here’s a picture of the letter in Alex’s handwriting:

The White House

The Syrian boy Alex referenced is 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh, who was filmed dazed and bloodied after being pulled from the rubble of his family’s home in Aleppo last month. The picture of Daqneesh came to represent the terrifying toll Syria’s five-year-long civil war is still exacting on its people.

A day after Obama’s speech, Texas Governor Greg Abbot sent a letter to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement notifying it of his intent to withdraw from the resettlement program— unless, the governor said, the federal government could “unconditionally approve” the state’s updated plan that would “require national-security officials to ensure that refugees do not pose a security threat to Texas.”

As my colleague Matt Ford noted, Texas’s withdrawal from the program doesn’t mean the state would entirely stop accepting refugees, because the federal government could directly fund nonprofit resettlement agencies.

Here’s a video of Alex reading his letter:

Storks Is a Kids' Movie That Is Not for Kids

What is a kids’ movie, these days? Animated, often. Full of PG-appropriate potty humor, sometimes. Sharing a message about the goodness of family, or the warmth of belonging, or the power of individualism, usually. Wacky, inventive, a Delightful Romp … almost always.

There is one thing, though, that will be uniformly true of a true kids’ movie: It will involve, implicitly, a paradox. It will glorify the experience of being young in a world made by, and for, grown-ups—that’s what will, ultimately, make it a kids’ movie—and yet it, too, will be made for grown-ups. The jokes will be layered, so that adults can appreciate them. The storylines will be, too. The themes will address nostalgia for childhood as much as they address childhood itself. And of course they will: Adults are the ones who buy the tickets. They’re the ones who buy the DVDs. They’re the ones who decide what a kids’ movie should be, in the end, because movies may be about creativity, but they are also about capitalism.

Storks is a kids’ movie that is really, in the end, about parenthood.

With Storks, written and co-directed by Nicholas Stoller, the creator behind the decidedly non-kids’ movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, that paradox might have hit its peak. This is a movie, after all, that is premised entirely on a joke that only an adult will find funny: the parent’s age-old insistence that “where do babies come from?” can be answered, definitively, by a reference to long-beaked birds. Storks is also a movie, though, that fulfills its thematic obligations—the goodness of family, or the warmth of belonging, the power of individualism—by way of one overriding theme: It is about all the crazy things people, adult people, will do in the name of their kids. It is a kids’ movie that is really, in the end, about parenthood.

Things start on the factory floor of Cornerstore.com, an Amazon-esque corporation that used to deliver babies (deliver! get it?), but has since pivoted toward deliveries of a more consumerist kind. The company’s fleet of storks are now working as, essentially, living, breathing drones; the NASA-circa-the-Apollo-program metal capsules once used to deliver babies have been repurposed to deliver smartphones. That’s all fine, until Junior (Andy Samberg), a white-collar middle manager, finds himself up for a promotion. Cornerstore’s CEO, the booming-voiced Hunter (Kelsey Grammar), insists that to prove himself worthy of the new job, Junior must first fire one of Cornerstore’s longest-serving employees: the orphan, Tulip, who has been living with the storks as the result of a botched delivery—and who has just reached the fireable age of 18.

Meanwhile, in human-land, there’s Nate, an imaginative young kid who, after being mostly left to his own devices by his well-meaning but workaholic parents (Jennifer Aniston and Ty Burrell), requests a baby brother. (One, ideally, with “ninja skills.”) Nate makes the request by sending a letter to the baby-makers up on Stork Mountain; Tulip, charming but accident-prone—and left unfired by Junior, who is too kind for corporate coldness—intercepts it. And then manages to feed it to the company’s retired-but-still-functioning baby-making apparatus (baby-making, here, seems to involve some combination of industrialized cold fusion and a Rube Goldberg machine).

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Thus: a baby! Who—cue the film’s narrative driver—now must be delivered. By Tulip, who feels responsible for the infant’s well-being, and by Junior, who feels responsible for Tulip. Adventure ensues.

And it ensues weirdly, but mostly well! Storks is charming, if often nonsensical in its plot line and frenetic in its pacing. It features the voice talents of, in addition to Samberg et al, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Danny Trejo, Stephen Kramer Glickman, and, as Tulip, the veteran voice actor Katie Crown. It is generally well-written. (It’s also uncommonly derivative: Its parable of corporatism is borrowed from The Lego Movie. Its frenemies-on-a-quest narrative is borrowed from Shrek. Its parents resemble the ones from Inside Out’s, its kid resembles Toy Story’s, its avians resemble Angry Birds’s, its adoption narrative resembles The Jungle Book’s, its joke about a girlfriend who lives in Canada resembles the one made in the smash Broadway musical Avenue Q. Etc.) Overall, though, Storks is a decidedly Delightful Romp. It features a sub-plot involving wolves. It checks all the Pixar-sized boxes you’d expect such a movie to check.

But is it a kids’ movie? Not really. Not fully. Storks’s visual gags—the wolves at one point assemble themselves into a bridge, and an airplane, and a submarine—may be kid-friendly; Nate may cajole his parents, finally, into transforming their suburban home into a fun house straight out of kid fantasy. But Storks is, ultimately, the anti-Frozen: Here, adults are the audience, rather than the add-ons. Nate, trying to guilt his harried parents into spending time with him, utters lines like, “You blink, and I’ll be in college” and “Dad, you’ll be my idol for like two more years.” He yells, at one point, “I’m not a jerky teen yet! Fleeting moments, precious memories!”

As every parent knows: Whatever you do, do not wake the baby.  

There may be something for a kid in all that; these are lines, though, aimed squarely at the “Cats in the Cradle” crowd. So, too, are the movie’s many jokes about the drudgery of corporate culture, and the emptiness of internet-enabled consumerism, and the challenges of work-life balance, and the weirdness of drones.

And so, too, are the movie’s many, many jokes about the trials of new parenthood. Storks features an extended riff in which Tulip and Junior—acting as the temporary parents of the baby they are determined to deliver together—bicker about who will get some sleep while the other stays up with the infant. (Roughly: “No, you sleep!” “But I’d feel guilty sleeping while you’re staying up!” “No, it’s okay, just get some sleep!” “Okay.” “Wait, you’re going to bed?” Etc.) Junior, at one point, as he’s trying to get the baby to shut her eyes, expresses his regret that eye glue is not a thing. And at a climactic moment in the movie’s adventure narrative, Tulip, Junior, and the wolves fight each other, physically, for custody of the baby—but once they realize that the infant has finally fallen asleep, they conduct their assorted violences silently. As every parent knows: Whatever you do, do not wake the baby.  

It’s another great gag—subtle, wry, an animated admission of the way babies and their insistently inconvenient needs can take over adults’ lives—but, to get it, you kind of have to be … well, a new parent. Or at least someone who understands the nuances of being a new parent. That’s true, as well, for one of the subtler jokes in a movie that is, after all, about parents requesting, rather than simply making, their babies. When Tulip, Junior, and their human charge first encounter the wolves, the two alphas, charmed by the infant’s coos, announce their intention to raise her as their own—as, yep, a wolf. There’s a canine uproar in response to this, during which one of the wolves shouts, quickly and barely audibly: “You’re keeping it?”

It’s a joke, if it’s a joke that all, that only an adult could understand.

China's 12-Year Sentence for Ai Weiwei's Lawyer

NEWS BRIEF Xia Lin, a human-rights lawyer whose clients include Ai Weiwei, the famed Chinese dissident, was sentenced to 12 years in prison by a Beijing court Thursday on fraud charges, the BBC reports.

The 46-year-old, known for defending human-rights activists, was first detained in November 2014 as he was preparing to represent Guo Yushan, a civil-rights activist who supported the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Though Xia was found guilty of fraudulently obtaining 4.8 million yuan ($700,000), his friends said they loaned him the money willingly.

Ding Xikui, Xia’s lawyer, told The Guardian his client believes the charges are government retribution for his human rights work.

“He thinks they are taking revenge on him for getting involved once in the Hong Kong [case] … and some other human rights cases,” Ding said.

Xia’s supporters condemned the sentence as a move designed to intimidate China’s human-rights community. Guo, in a Chinese news and commentary blog, said Tuesday: “The September 22 sentence might be, say, 11 years imprisonment, or it might be 2 years, but however many years it is, it will have had nothing to do with the law. This is our fate. We have no choice but to accept it.”

The Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a coalition of Chinese and international human rights groups, called the sentence a “severe retaliation.”

Andy Wong / AP

Xia’s sentence follows a yearlong crackdown on human rights lawyers and activists by the Chinese government, which has accused those detained of subverting state power. According to a July report by Amnesty International, nearly 250 people have been arrested.

A WNBA Team's Protest Against Police Violence

NEWS BRIEF An entire WNBA team knelt and locked arms during the national anthem Wednesday night, protesting recent police shootings.

Every player on the Indiana Fever and two players from the Phoenix Mercury decided to take a knee before their playoff game to protest police violence and racial inequality. A protest that began with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has spread across the sporting world.

After “The Star Spangled Banner” played, Fever coach Stephanie White told her team:

I’m proud of y’all for doing that together. That’s big. It’s bigger than basketball.

WNBA players have been leaders in recent protests by professional athletes. In July, four players on the Minnesota Lynx wore black warmup shirts to honor victims of fatal shootings by police, and others have joined them in speaking out.

Since Kaepernick started his protest several weeks ago, dozens of other football players have joined him in one way or another. But beyond just kneeling, locking arms, or putting fists in the air, football players are starting to use their position as professional athletes to explain their position in more detail.

Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman refused to take questions from reporters Wednesday, instead explained that he’s making a statement during the national anthem—in his case, locking arms with his teammates—because of police shootings like the ones from this week. He added:

The reason these guys are kneeling, the reason we’re locking arms is to bring people together to make people aware that this is not right. It’s not right for people to get killed in the street…

And so when a guy takes a knee, you can ignore it. You can say he’s not being patriotic, he’s not honoring the flag. I’m doing none of those things. I’m saying, straight up, this is wrong and we need to do something.

Former NFL star Marshawn Lynch and Carolina Panther quarterback Cam Newton also came out Wednesday in support of Kaepernick’s continuing protest.

A Shooting at the Charlotte Police Protest

Updated at 10:54 p.m.

NEWS BRIEF A man was shot at a protest in Charlotte on Wednesday night, and is in critical condition. Earlier, the city’s police chief erroneously said the man had died.

Hundreds of people demonstrated throughout the evening, one day after an officer fatally shot a black man police said was armed.

During Wednesday’s protest, a man was shot by a fellow civilian. City officials say police were not responsible for this shooting.

On Tuesday, Keith Lamont Scott was shot and killed by a police officer. Kerr Putney, the chief of police, said Scott had a gun in his hand when he was shot. Police had been at the apartment where the shooting occurred looking for a different man who had an outstanding warrant.

Police fired tear gas into the crowd Wednesday night after protesters lit off firecrackers in front of a line of riot police. One local NBC reporter was at the scene:

Police driving protestors back with tear gas. @WXII #Charlotte pic.twitter.com/cJwYALKag8

— Samina Engel (@SaminaEngelNews) September 22, 2016

Protesters also tried to flood a downtown Omni Hotel lobby. Police used tear gas to clear the area, blocking the entrance. Paul Boyd, a local ABC reporter, said on air:

It was so peaceful the start of the night. Unfortunately this night has taken a turn for the worse and it is young.

Beginning around 5 p.m., demonstrators marched through the streets, stopping at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police headquarters.

Before the protests began on Wednesday, Rakeyia Scott, the wife of Tuesday’s shooting victim, said in a statement:

As a family, we respect the rights of those who wish to protest, but we ask that people protest peacefully.  Please do not hurt people or members of law enforcement, damage property or take things that do not belong to you in the name of protesting.

This is the second night of protests in Charlotte. Police had to use tear gas Tuesday night as well, after several hundred people demonstrated near the scene of the shooting.

The Deal to Share the North American Fish and Chips Supply

NEWS BRIEF There’s a looming fish and chips crisis in the United States.

The number cod, the fish most used in the popular pub dish, is in decline in the waters off New England, and it seems overfishing and warming ocean temperatures as a result of climate change are to blame.

The U.S. and Canada have come to a deal on how to divide what remains of the North American cod supply in parts of the Atlantic Ocean. The Associated Press has the breakdown:

The countries have agreed to set the total allowable catch at 730 metric tons next year. The U.S. will be allowed to take 146 metric tons and Canada will get the rest…

The agreement with Canada represents an 8 metric ton increase for the U.S. and a 96 metric ton increase for Canada, leaving some in the U.S. fishing industry irked.

American fisherman can still get cod in other parts of the Atlantic Ocean, most notably in the Gulf of Maine. But their supply has been limited in recent years.

But before people start rushing to their local pub to get what fried cod remains, two other countries may be able to help fill American fish and chips needs. Norway and Iceland still have a booming cod industry.

Stop-and-Frisk: Trump's Bad Idea for Fighting Crime

At a town-hall-style forum hosted by Sean Hannity and airing Wednesday night, Donald Trump was asked what he’d do about black-on-black crime. His answer, reported by NBC’s Alexandra Jaffe, is worth reading in full:

Right, well, one of the things I’d do, Ricardo, is I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to. We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive, you know, you really help people sort of change their mind automatically, you understand, you have to, in my opinion, I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk. In New York City it was so incredible, the way it worked. Now, we had a very good mayor, but New York City was incredible, the way that worked, so I think that could be one step you could do.

Trump’s answer comes in the context of his latest series of events aimed at black voters, and nearly every sentence here offers something to think about.

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First, stop-and-frisk is already in place in Chicago and other cities, making this idea in keeping with Trump’s habit of suggesting policies, such as “extreme vetting” of refugees, that closely resemble practices that are already in place. (Stop-and-frisk is not federal policy, but it is practiced by police departments across the country.) Second, the best studies suggest that stop-and-frisk does not effectively reduce crime where it is used. Third, court decisions and settlements have acknowledged that the methods used in both New York and Chicago were unconstitutionally discriminatory, setting aside their efficacy. Fourth, one of the two New York mayors who oversaw the implementation of stop-and-frisk, Michael Bloomberg, has blasted Trump, saying, “I'm a New Yorker, and New Yorkers know a con when we see one.”

Moreover, it’s hard to take the proposal seriously as outreach to the black community. National polling on stop-and-frisk is tough to come by, but both anecdotal and statistical data from New York suggest that black citizens view the practice as discriminatory and dehumanizing. In a 2012 Quinnipiac poll, seven in 10 black New Yorkers opposed stop-and-frisk. In 2013, Marist found an even higher proportion, 75 percent, wanted an overhaul.

Trump’s supposed black outreach has taken place to a great degree in white communities, before white audiences, while his appearances in African American communities have not always gone so well. His advocacy for stop-and-frisk offers more evidence for the view that Trump’s goal is not so much to court black voters but to convince white ones who are rattled about crime to back him.

This is one of the many contradictions of Trump’s recent moves. Even as he campaigns on the basis of “law and order,” he appeared at events in Ohio Wednesday with Don King, the boxing promoter who shot and killed a man (the death was excused as justifiable homicide) and served time for manslaughter after stomping a man to death in 1966. King’s speech in Cleveland was a strange, sporadically coherent stream of consciousness, in which he said, “I want you to understand, every white women should cast their vote for Donald Trump, not for Donald Trump the man but to knock out the system.”

One important question is what the Republican presidential nominee means by “stop-and-frisk.” As Donald Braman wrote in The Atlantic in 2014, “No one thinks a police officer with a reasonable suspicion that a suspect has a gun should be barred from frisking the suspect, but that is not what stop-and-frisk has come to mean,” i.e., stopping vast numbers of people for vaguely “suspicious behavior,” then searching them. Since Trump cited New York City, it seems reasonable to assume that’s what he meant.

Stop-and-frisk is not inherently unconstitutional, but the recent record shows that it’s hard to execute without racial discrimination. In New York, a federal judge deemed the city’s approach unconstitutional. Of city officials, Judge Shira Scheindlin wrote, “In their zeal to defend a policy that they believe to be effective, they have willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the policy of targeting ‘the right people’ is racially discriminatory and therefore violates the United States Constitution.”

Something similar happened in Chicago, where the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois documented a pattern of racially disparate enforcement. The report came in March 2015. Among its findings: Blacks made up three-quarters of stops but less than a third of the city's population. Chicago’s police department decided to reach an agreement with the ACLU to install closer oversight.

Proponents of stop-and-frisk argue that disproportionate stops are a regrettable but forgivable and necessary side effect of the practice. Poor black communities are often plagued by high crime rates, they say, and so it stands to reason that police would be making the most stops in the places where crime is highest. This may or may not be true. A Columbia study found that racial disparities existed even when controlling for location.

But in any case, what happened in New York undercuts the theory that stop-and-frisk is a necessary tool for reducing crime. New York officials credited a huge drop in crime to aggressive use of stop-and-frisk, though hard data told a different story. In 2013, prior to New York effectively ending stop-and-frisk, David Greenberg of New York University found “no evidence that misdemeanor arrests reduced levels of homicide, robbery, or aggravated assaults.” Since the end of stop-and-frisk, crime has remained at historically low rates or even dropped further. In 2015, murder rebounded slightly from its all-time low in 2013, though the first quarter of 2016 was the lowest on record.

Chicago, of course, has not seen such a pacific stretch. The violent crime rate in the Windy City remains extremely high. But there’s little indication that stop-and-frisk plays much role in that. Murder rates were already high before the August 2015 agreement on stop-and-frisk, which produced a sharp drop in stops. There was no clear resulting uptick in crime, which perhaps should be no surprise: WBEZ found that data from the stop-and-frisk era “show negative trends as officers reported more stops: Gun seizures dropped, detectives solved fewer murders, and a decade-long decline in gun violence ended.”

But crime in Chicago did spike after the city released (under duress) video of an officer shooting and killing Laquan McDonald. One reason for that is that arrests declined, as police retrenched. Another logical reason is that the sight of a police officer brutally killing a man—McDonald was not approaching officers, was not threatening Officer Jason Van Dyke, and was shot several times as he lay on the pavement—undermines trust in the legitimacy of rule of law, as did the realization that many police officers had relayed misleading reports of McDonald’s shooting, validating Van Dyke’s version of the encounter.

A January 2014 paper by professors at Yale Law School, Columbia Law School, and Columbia University concluded that stop-and-frisk undermined young black men’s faith in the legitimacy of the police, too:

Whether the police were viewed as exercising their authority fairly and lawfully shaped the impact of stops on respondent’s general judgments about police legitimacy. Fairness and lawfulness judgments, in turn, were influenced by the number of stops and the degree of police intrusion during those stops. Similarly, judgments of justice and lawfulness shaped the estimated influence of judgments of the general character of police behavior in the community on general perceptions of police legitimacy.

There’s some grim irony to be found here. African Americans, as well as many white ones, are currently outraged, horrified, and despairing over the deaths of Terence Crutcher and Keith Lamont Scott, the types of shootings that provoke widespread fear and distrust of the police around the country. It is almost unbelievable that against such a backdrop, and under the guise of outreach to black Americans, Trump would propose the expansion of a policy that also undermines black trust in the police. Unless he isn’t reaching out to them at all.

Texas's Refusal of Refugees

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has threatened to withdraw his state from the federal refugee-resettlement program, escalating the clash between Republican-led states and the Obama administration over the relocation of refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war.

State officials on Wednesday formally notified the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement of its intent to withdraw unless the agency agrees to “unconditionally approve” its annual state plan before the September 30 deadline. The state’s updated plan would “require national-security officials to ensure that refugees do not pose a security threat to Texas,” Abbott’s office said in a statement.

Abbott repeatedly cited security fears about possible refugees and said the resettlement program was “riddled with serious problems that pose a threat to our nation.”

“The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Director of National Intelligence have repeatedly declared their inability to fully screen refugees from terrorist-based nations,” he added, repeating a common conservative criticism of the program.

The current process for refugees to enter the United States is arduous and time-consuming. Federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies perform extensive background checks and screenings on resettlement applicants, often lasting as long as two years before the refugee sets foot on American soil. As my colleague Russell Berman reported last November, applicants receive the most extensive security checks of any travelers to the U.S.

The move comes a day after President Obama pledged to accept roughly 110,000 refugees from around the world in 2017, a 60 percent increase over this year’s total. Obama, speaking at a United Nations summit in New York, framed the Syrian refugee crisis as a “test of our common humanity” and criticized opponents of resettlement.

“To slam the door in the face of these families would betray our deepest values,” he said. “It would deny our own heritage as nations, including the United States of America, that have been built by immigrants and refugees.”

Abbott cited Obama’s pledged increase as justification for his threat to withdraw from the program. “Even with the inability to properly vet refugees from Syria and countries known to be supporters or propagators of terrorism, President Obama is now ineptly proposing a dramatic increase in the number of refugees to be resettled in the U.S.,” he said.

Texas’s withdrawal from the federal program wouldn’t block refugees from entering or resettling there, the Texas Tribune noted, since federal agencies could directly fund nonprofit resettlement agencies instead. But it would be a major break from Texas’s long history as the leading state for refugee relocation. A large Vietnamese community resettled in Texas in the 1970s after the collapse of South Vietnam, followed by tens of thousands of refugees from other countries in subsequent decades. “If Houston were a country, it would rank fourth in the world for refugee resettlement,” the Houston Chronicle said last year.

Abbott has staked out a leading role in state-level resistance to the Obama administration’s Syrian refugee program. In the initial aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks last November, Abbott directed state agencies to not cooperate with federal refugee-assistance agencies, citing news reports a refugee’s passport had been found on one of the attackers’ bodies.

The following month, Texas sued the federal government to block a Syrian family from being resettled in the state. A federal judge dismissed the case on procedural grounds in June, which Texas has appealed.

Legal efforts by other states to block Syrian refugees have also largely floundered in the federal courts. An ongoing lawsuit between Indiana and a private refugee-resettlement organization underscores the legal hurdles they face. In that case, Exodus Refugee International is challenging a directive by Indiana Governor Mike Pence that forbade state agencies from granting federal funds to resettlement organizations that help Syrian refugees. A federal district court sided with Exodus on equal-protection and civil-rights grounds; Indiana appealed the ruling.

During a heated oral argument session in Chicago for the case last week, two federal judges from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals criticized Indiana’s legal interpretations and motivations. A series of questions by Judge Frank Easterbrook during those arguments also foreshadowed Abbott’s withdrawal threat. At one point, he asked Fisher if any provisions in the federal Refugee Act of 1980, through which Congress funds state resettlement efforts, allowed states to only partially participate in those efforts.

Could Indiana lawfully help some refugees but not others? Easterbrook framed the question by comparing resettlement programs to Medicaid, in which states must be either all-in or all-out. Fisher at first pointed to phrasings in some federal regulations but, when pressed by Easterbrook, admitted he couldn’t cite anything in the statute itself that allowed partial participation. Implicitly, that meant Indiana had to be either all-in or all-out too.

One week later and one thousand miles to the southwest, Abbott threatened to opt out.

The Perils of Delivering Aid in Syria

NEWS BRIEF The United Nations will resume deliveries of humanitarian aid to tens of thousands of civilians in Syria days after an attack on one of its convoys killed at least 20 people.

UN spokesman Jens Laerke said Wednesday that “several” convoys are expected to reach their destinations as early as Thursday, but he did not name the locations, the Associated Press reported. Laerke said the convoys will not go to Aleppo, the epicenter of Syria’s civil war, which is in its sixth year, and the humanitarian crisis it created.  

Deliveries came to a halt after an air strike hit a convoy of Syrian Arab Red Crescent trucks in northwestern Syria Monday night. The bombing engulfed 18 of the 31 trucks in flames and killed 20 civilians, including Omar Barakat, the organization’s local director. The trucks were carrying UN-supplied food, medicine, and other aid to the 78,000 people of Urm al-Kubra, a rebel-held town near Aleppo. The attack occurred hours after Syrian forces called off a weeklong, nationwide cease-fire brokered by Russia and the U.S., who are on opposing sides of the civil war between Bashar al-Assad’s government and Syrian opposition groups.

Responsibility for the attack is disputed, and U.S. and Russian officials have spent the days since trading blame. White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said U.S. intelligence suggests the convoy was hit by an air strike, and pointed to the fact that Syrian rebel groups don’t have an air force. He did not say whether the strike came from Russian or Syrian aircraft, but said the U.S. holds Russia responsible because, under the terms of the failed cease-fire, Moscow was supposed to keep Syrian forces in check.

The Kremlin says Russian and Syrian forces are not at fault, and on Wednesday the Russian Defense Ministry claimed a U.S. drone was flying near the area just minutes before the convoy was bombed.

The failed cease-fire brokered earlier this month had allowed aid workers unrestricted access to Aleppo and nearby besieged neighborhoods.

Terence Crutcher's Family Calls for 'Immediate Justice'

NEWS BRIEF The family of Terence Crutcher, the man fatally shot by Tulsa police last week, called Wednesday for charges to be brought against all the officers involved.

“Our servants, our police officers who are supposed to protect and serve, they shot him,” Tiffany Crutcher, Terence’s twin sister, said at a news conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Wednesday. “We’re asking, we’re pleading, and we’re demanding that justice be served.”

As we previously reported, dashboard camera footage released Monday by the Tulsa police department showed Crutcher was unarmed and had his hands in the air when he was shot and killed by officers responding to a report of a stalled car. The Tulsa police department identified the officer who shot and killed Crutcher as Betty Shelby, who has since been placed on paid administrative leave in line with department policy. Both Oklahoma state authorities and the U.S. Department of Justice have launched investigations to determine if Crutcher’s civil rights were violated and if criminal charges should be brought against the officers responsible.

Crutcher’s family also called for the immediate implementation of body cameras and bias training for the officers. Presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both reacted to the shooting.

Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, called the shooting “intolerable.”

Another unarmed Black man was shot in a police incident. This should be intolerable. We have so much work to do. #TerenceCrutcher -H

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 20, 2016

Trump, the Republican nominee, said he was “very troubled” by the shooting.

“Did [Shelby] get scared? Was she choking? ... But maybe people like that, people that choke, they can’t be doing what they’re doing,” Trump said. “We all respect our police greatly, and they will have to get better and better and better.”

Crutcher’s death is one of several recent high-profile shootings of black men by police. Demonstrations broke out Tuesday night in Charlotte, North Carolina, where 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by police officers. Though police say Scott was armed with a gun, his family says he was reading a book inside his car when he was killed. The officer who shot Scott, Brentley Vinson, has been placed on administrative leave, per police protocol.