George Packer's Blog, page 94

After an Immigration Raid, a City’s Students Vanish

David Morales teaches social studies at Mayfield High School, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a city of a hundred thousand people, located fifty miles north of the Mexican border. Some of his students are the children of undocumented immigrants, and a few of them might even be undocumented themselves. He doesn’t know which ones, exactly, and he doesn’t care. “When they’re in my classroom, I’m there to teach them,” he told me recently. “I make a point of not knowing, unless the student wants me to.” His classes are small, with around twenty students each, and when any kid is out, “it’s obvious,” he said. “But last month it was painfully obvious.”

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A Death in a Florida Prison Goes Unpunished

In 2013, a Florida inmate named Mark Joiner sent a letter to the Forgotten Majority, a prisoners’-rights organization based in Jacksonville. In the letter, Joiner explained that he had recently been transferred to the Columbia Correctional Institution, in Lake City, from Dade, a state prison forty miles south of Miami, where, he wrote, “I witnessed starvation and other forms of torture being used to control or discipline mentally ill patients.” One method employed was “to place inmates under scalding hot water,” Joiner alleged, a punishment that, on June 23, 2012, “killed inmate Darren Rainey,” who suffered from schizophrenia and died after guards locked him inside a scorching shower for nearly two hours. Joiner indicated that, since his transfer, he had tried to contact Florida law-enforcement agencies, to no avail. “If I’m interviewed I’ll prove to law enforcement that this was intentional,” he went on, adding that guards had ordered him to remove from the shower pieces of skin that had peeled off Rainey’s body.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Terror and Dismay in London

This afternoon in London, a man drove a car across Westminster Bridge, heading from the south bank of the Thames to the north. It appears that he deliberately drove into pedestrians and policemen who were using the bridge at the time. The car then approached the Palace of Westminster, where the Houses of Parliament are located, and crashed into the railings that border it. The driver got out of the car, and, wielding a knife, stabbed one of the many police officers who guard the Palace. As the attacker went toward the entrance, he was challenged by officers carrying firearms, who then shot him.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Neil Gorsuch Makes the Case for His Own Independence

The Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Judge Neil Gorsuch has been an endurance event. On Tuesday, Charles Grassley, the eighty-three-year-old chair of the Judiciary Committee, planned out a ten-hour hearing and then sat through it, measuring out precise ten-minute breaks. (“That means we’ll reconvene at 3:31,” he said at one point.) Gorsuch, who is forty-nine, with trim white hair, wore a blue shirt and a purple tie, and followed custom by declining to comment on any topic that might theoretically appear before the Court. But, during the day, hints of Gorsuch’s personality appeared. He is a familiar figure grown mysterious: the establishment Republican.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Has Paul Ryan Suckered Donald Trump Into Making Health Care His Top Priority?

If there was any doubt that Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are now fully conjoined, Trump’s visit to Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning resolved it. After the President tried to cajole and bully the Republican congressmen into voting for their leaders’ controversial plan to replace Obamacare, Ryan praised Trump lavishly, saying he “came here and knocked the ball out of the park . . . in explaining to our members how it’s important to unify, how it’s important to work together, how we are advancing our principles and we are doing what we told the American people we would do.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Saga of Tom Brady’s Jersey

On Monday morning, moments before James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., confirmed the existence of one of his agency’s investigations—the one into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia—news broke about the results of another one. The F.B.I. had helped track down the jersey worn by New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady during last month’s Super Bowl, in Houston, which had gone missing in the moments following the game and was valued at about half a million dollars. According to a statement from the N.F.L., the jersey had “been found in the possession of a credentialed member of the international media.” Houston’s police chief, Art Acevedo, whose department had worked with the F.B.I. and other law-enforcement agencies on the case, announced that the jersey had been located in Mexico, and the credentialed media member in question was soon identified as Mauricio Ortega, who, until last week, had been the head of the Mexican newspaper La Prensa. He had been caught on video leaving the Patriots’ locker room with what appeared to be Brady’s jersey hidden beneath his shirt. In a further twist, Ortega, when confronted by authorities, reportedly turned over a number of items in addition to the jersey, including a helmet likely worn by the Broncos linebacker Von Miller in last year’s Super Bowl, and the jersey that Brady wore in the Super Bowl before that.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Playing in Pain in the N.F.L.

During the National Football Conference championship game this January, during the Atlanta Falcons’ victory over the Green Bay Packers, Alex Mack, the Falcons’ center, broke his fibula for the second time. When he broke it for the first time, in 2014, doctors put a plate in his leg. The second break landed just above the plate. There was some concern that he would be unable to play in the Super Bowl two weeks later, since a player normally misses six to eight weeks with that type of injury. But on the day of the Super Bowl ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that Mack would be given a painkiller shot. He started the game. It was the Super Bowl, after all, and football players are celebrated for playing through pain. (The Falcons did not respond to a request for comment.) “I just know his toughness and strength is so great,” the Falcons head coach, Dan Quinn, told reporters.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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How the First Amendment Applies to Trump’s Presidency

One of the strangest sentences in American law comes from Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. “Under the First Amendment,” he wrote, in 1974, “there is no such thing as a false idea.” That is not a decree that the world brims with truth. He meant that we rely on the marketplace of ideas, rather than on judges and juries, to sort out truth from falsehood—and to continually check our understanding of the truth. The Justice was restating the central tenet embraced in New York Times v. Sullivan, in 1964, the Supreme Court’s most important decision about freedom of speech and of the press. The Court extended the scope of the First Amendment to libel law and held that, even if a citizen stated or a newspaper published criticism about a public official that was incorrect, that mistake could be punished as libel only if the critic knew or suspected that the criticism was false. In 1967, the Court applied this rule to public figures as well.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Rex Tillerson’s Deferential Visit to China

Rex Tillerson’s Deferential Visit to China

On March 19th, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Chinese President Xi Jinping, two men in dark suits, white shirts, and red neckties, sat in matching armchairs in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. Both of their bellies bulged slightly, and their neckties curved over their well-fed contentment. Their interaction, as described by Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, was equally amiable. Xi called on the United States and China to “expand coöperative areas and achieve win-win results.” Tillerson, who was on his first visit to Asia since taking over at the State Department, and was travelling without the press gaggle that usually chronicles the movements of America’s top diplomat, agreed that “the U.S. side is ready to develop relations with China based on the principle of no conflict, no confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win coöperation.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Saga of Tom Brady’s Jersey
How the First Amendment Applies to Trump’s Presidency
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The Problem with Steve Bannon’s Story About His Father

Steve Bannon is the keeper of the secret formula—that peculiar and potent mix of aggressive bluster and selective empathy—that enabled Donald Trump to be elected. It’s worth remembering how unlikely the success of the formula seemed even a year ago. Before Trump got to Hillary Clinton, and when Bannon was an informal adviser, the candidate mowed down a long list of Republican opponents, without being the biggest spender or having the best organization. That was because the formula worked. It isn’t conventionally liberal or conservative, and it doesn’t have much in common with the standard views of either political party. Essentially, all of Trump’s Republican opponents were more pro-market, more pro-trade, and more anti-government than he was. And Clinton, by virtue of unexpected pressure from Bernie Sanders, had moved slightly in the direction of the Trump formula before she was nominated.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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