But there is one distinguishing characteristic that could help identify the man who first opened fire: the patches on the back of his vest. One is the state flag of Texas. Another appears to read “U.S. Border Patrol.”

Insignia like these have become a common sight as federal agents swarm U.S. cities to carry out the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies. When Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis this month, his tactical vest was adorned with “Police” and “Federal Agent” patches. When a mob of officers created a civil disturbance in Arizona, in which Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva was pepper-sprayed, many were wearing a distinctive red shoulder insignia, some with vest patches reading “HSI.”

Patches like these are often the only means to identify a federal officer’s agency or a particular unit within it. But amid mounting scrutiny of the Trump administration’s brutal tactics, government agencies are attempting to keep information about their personnel, operations, and even their uniforms under wraps — right down to the patches that officers wear.

So The Intercept built a guide of the official shoulder patches that Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses for unit identification, as well as known insignias worn by U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel and unofficial patches conveying personal or political messages that federal agents have been spotted wearing. It’s a step toward transparency that immigration authorities refuses to provide to the American people on its own.

The most common patches are the least helpful. Many ICE agents affix to their vests or plate carriers vague patches reading “Police,” “Federal Agent,” or “Federal Officer.” CBP’s Border Patrol agents often wear “Police” patches as well. Some common patches are also strictly fashion choices, such as earth-tone U.S. flags designed to blend into military camouflage.

But federal agents’ outfits are sometimes adorned with lesser-known acronyms that offer additional information. “ERO” is short for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, a unit tasked with the standard immigration enforcement process: identifying, arresting, and deporting immigrants. “HSI” stands for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, which formerly focused on transnational crimes, ranging from narcotics smuggling to cybercrime, but has been pressed into service as an anti-immigrant force.

Border Patrol agents generally wear “U.S. Border Patrol” patches on their vests. Others sport “U.S. Border Patrol” or “U.S. Customs and Border Protection” patches on their sleeves. Specialized components of agencies, like CBP’s Air and Marine Operations unit, wear unique official patches. Others may wear unofficial morale patches designed to foster esprit de corps.

Last year, Cary López Alvarado, a U.S. citizen who was nine months pregnant, was harassed by a Border Patrol agent wearing a patch with the image of the Punisher war skull over a thin-green-line Border Patrol variant of the American flag. The iconic logo of the brutal Marvel Comics vigilante anti-hero from the 1970s, the Punisher, was inspired, in part, by the “totenkopf,” a skull-and-bones logo worn by the Nazi SS during World War II. The Punisher’s symbol has been embraced by members of the U.S. military and law enforcement personnel in the 21st century. CBP did not immediately return a request for comment about the patch.

Agents with the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, which specializes in high-risk operations like counterterrorism missions, often wear vests or shoulder patches that read BORTAC. Some BORTAC agents have been spotted with a special patch on their plate carriers that features wings and a stylized starburst or compass over an American flag. (DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told NBC that the agents who killed Pretti included members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit.)

Inside ICE, there are even lower-profile and less-documented, although official, insignia. Both ERO and HSI have Special Response Teams, tactical units devoted to higher-risk operations, like dealing with individuals with a history of violence or resisting arrest. There are 30 such HSI offices across the country, including Miami which also has a HSI Caribbean attaché office.

Emily Covington, until recently an assistant director in ICE’s Office of Public Affairs, sent The Intercept images of 21 patches. “I gave you all the patches,” she said.

This wasn’t true, as a nameless ICE official later acknowledged. “[W]e are not going to spend time providing you with each and every patch,” he emailed from an official “ICE media” account. Covington said that ICE officials feared that The Intercept would use the patches to “dox people,” though she also dared The Intercept to pursue the story. “We hope that you go ahead and report,” she said. “Go for it.” 

The Intercept compiled this set of images released by the Department of Homeland Security and open-source photographs.

ICE and DHS failed to respond to numerous follow-up questions dealing with insignia and patches submitted scores of times over a period of months, as well as a request to speak with an expert on ICE uniforms and adornments. CBP acknowledged receipt of The Intercept’s questions but did not respond to them prior to publication.

The Department of Homeland Security provided The Intercept with images of 21 HSI special activities unit patches. The designs and aesthetics vary. HSI Arizona features a malevolent-looking rattlesnake coiled around an assault rifle. HSI Los Angeles includes a California condor clutching an automatic weapon in its talons. And HSI San Juan Puerto Rico’s image of SWAT officers appears to have been cribbed from sketches by the late artist Dick Kramer, the “father” of modern tactical artwork.

One notable absence from the patch collection provided by Covington is a shoulder patch worn by personnel from the St. Paul Field Office, where Ross works. (Ross is reportedly an ERO team leader and an SRT member.) The St. Paul office’s Special Response Team patch was spotted on the camouflage uniform of a masked ICE officer during a raid of a Minneapolis Mexican restaurant last year. The circular patch depicts a bearded Viking skull over an eight-prong wayfinder or magical stave — a Nordic image called a “Vegvisir.” The symbol has sometimes been co-opted by far-right extremists. ICE and DHS failed to respond to repeated requests for comment about the St. Paul patch.

Another patch missing from the images supplied by ICE is the Phoenix Special Response Team patch that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was seen wearing on a tactical vest last year. The HSI Rapid Response Team patch was also missing from the official list.

The Intercept also inquired about various other patches found in online photos, including those posted on social media by the ERO Newark field office covering New Jersey; the ICE Washington, D.C., and Virginia field offices; and blurred-out patches published by the ICE ERO Harlingen Field Office in South Texas. Neither ICE nor DHS responded to repeated questions from The Intercept about these patches.

In addition to official insignia, some federal agents have been spotted wearing seemingly unofficial patches to express personal or political predilections that DHS will not explain.

An ICE officer in Minnesota was spotted, for example, wearing a patch reading “DEPLORABLE,” a term some devotees of then-candidate Donald Trump adopted in 2016 after Hillary Clinton said half of his supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” since they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, [and] Islamophobic.”

In November, after local reporting drew attention to the deplorable patch, Tanya Roman, the acting ICE communications director, said she would “look into” it. After The Intercept repeatedly asked for details, Roman replied: “Please contact DHS.” The Department of Homeland Security did not answer The Intercept’s questions about the DEPLORABLE patch.

Over the summer, masked CBP and possibly ICE officers in Lower Manhattan were seen wearing Superman patches on their uniforms after actor Dean Cain, who portrayed the comic book character on television decades ago, announced his intention to join ICE. “We stand with Dean Cain,” one agent told amNY. Another said: “It’s just a patch.”

ICE, DHS, and CBP did not return requests for comment on the patch or Cain’s status with ICE.

For further information on insignia, Covington directed The Intercept to a memo outlining ICE’s “approved HSI SRT uniform and authorized identifiers.” It notes that the “above-described patches which are not listed as optional shall be worn on all operations,” but the sections dealing with those patches are redacted. Covington did not reply to questions about the redacted information. The guidelines also state: “The use of military tabs/‘rockers’ or any other type of patch not listed herein, is prohibited,” referencing specialized, mostly curved, patches common to both the military and motorcycle clubs.

In 2024, The Intercept shed light on a racist “Houthi Hunting Club” patch — photos of which were posted to and then disappeared from a Pentagon website — worn by members of the military.

Immigration authorities routinely cloak their secrecy in fears about the “dangerous doxxing” of their personnel and fight accountability and transparency at every turn. Over the summer, for example, Noem said that she was in communication with Attorney General Pam Bondi about prosecuting CNN for reporting on ICEBlock, a crowdsourced application that tracks ICE sightings. 

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Three women who put the home address of an ICE officer online were, for example, indicted in September in Los Angeles on conspiracy charges. “We will prosecute those who dox ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.” said Noem. “We won’t allow it in America.”

Covington lobbed similar accusations at The Intercept. “Quite frankly, people here think you’re just doing it to dox people,” said Covington when The Intercept complained about ICE’s monthslong foot-dragging on supplying promised images of patches.

While revealing the names of federal employees such as ICE officials is not doxing, it’s unclear how this reporting would accomplish that. When asked how publishing a picture of a patch could be used to reveal someone’s identity — much less their phone number, address, Social Security number, names of their family members, or similar information — Covington failed to offer a coherent explanation. “I didn’t think it was possible for what has happened to our officers to happen, but it has,” she replied. “People are following our people home every single day.” Covington also did not explain how publishing the image of a patch would facilitate people following ICE officers to their homes.

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ICE’s concerns about the public disclosure of patches are especially odd in light of all the unblurred photos and video footage of maskless officers available from an online database of agents and officials; publicly released mugshots of ICE personnel accused of crimes; images of agents from commercial photo agencies; and the many photographs of unmasked officers posted by the War Department, DHS, and ICE or photos of agents with conspicuous and unique tattoos found on ICE’s own social media accounts.

On Sunday, before Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino was ordered out of Minneapolis by the Trump administration, a reporter asked if the agents who gunned down Pretti were on administrative leave.

“All agents that were involved in that scene are working, not in Minneapolis, but in other locations,” Bovino said. “That’s for their safety. There’s this thing called doxing. And the safety of our employees is very important to us, so we’re gonna keep those employees safe.”

The post These Patches Are Clues to Identifying Immigration Agents appeared first on The Intercept.

When family members arrived on the scene in Eagle County, Colorado, their loved ones had already been disappeared by federal agents. But what they found inside the vehicles was disturbing: a customized ace of spades playing card — popularly known as a “death card” — that read “ICE Denver Field Office.”

“We are disgusted by ICE’s actions in Eagle County,” Alex Sánchez, president and CEO of that immigrant rights group, Voces Unidas, told The Intercept. “Leaving a racist death card behind after targeting Latino workers is an act of intimidation. This is not about public safety. It is about fear and control. It’s rooted in a very long history of racial violence.”

During the Vietnam War, U.S. troops regularly adorned Vietnamese corpses with “death cards” — either an ace of spades or a custom-printed business card claiming credit for their kills. A 1966 entry in the Congressional Record noted that due to supposed Vietnamese superstitions regarding the ace of spades, “the U.S. Playing Card Co. had been furnishing thousands of these cards free to U.S. servicemen in Vietnam who requested them.”

Official U.S. military film footage, for example, shows ace of spades “death cards” being placed in the mouths of dead Vietnamese people in South Vietnam’s Quảng Ngãi province by members of the 25th Infantry Division. Similarly, Company A, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade left their victims with a customized ace of spades sporting the unit’s nickname “Gunfighters,” a skull and crossbones, and the phrase “dealers of death.” Helicopter pilots also occasionally dropped custom calling cards from their gunships. One particular card read: “Congratulations. You have been killed through courtesy of the 361st. Yours truly, Pink Panther.” The other side proclaimed, “The Lord giveth and the 20mm [cannon] taketh away. Killing is our business and business is good.”

The cards found in Eagle County harken back to this brutal heritage. The black and white 4×6-inch cards look like an ace of spades with an “A” over a spade in the top left and bottom right corners. A larger ornate black and white spade dominates the center of the card. Above it reads “ICE Denver Field Office.” Below it is the address and phone number of the ICE detention facility in nearby Aurora. 

Sánchez said his organization took possession of identical cards found in two separate vehicles by two different families. “These were not from a doctored deck of cards. These were designed with this legacy in mind. They were printed on some sort of stock paper and cut in the dimensions of a card,” he explained. Basic templates for ace of spaces playing cards are readily available as clip art for purchase online.

A DHS spokesperson told local NBC affiliate 9News that ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility will “conduct a thorough investigation and will take appropriate and swift action.” ICE’s Denver Field Office did not respond to questions posed by The Intercept about the office’s use of the cards, the meaning behind them, and its agents’ tactics.

“You realize — of course — that in Spades, the ace of spades is the trump card,” said a federal official of the Bridge-like card game, alluding to the possibility that the death card is also an homage to President Donald Trump. That official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak to the press continued: “These guys are not too subtle, to be honest.”

Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., recently took to the Senate floor to denounce the use of the malicious ICE calling cards. “They found ‘death cards’ [left in] the cars of their family members who were taken away by ICE agents,” he said. “These cards … have a history of being used by white supremacist groups to intimidate people of color. ‘Death cards’ is what they call them.”

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Sánchez expressed worry that similar acts of intimidation are happening elsewhere but may not be reported, noting that while Voces Unidas became aware of the death cards in the course of their work, investigating such incidents is not a core focus of his organization, which provides legal assistance to immigrants.

“When people call us, they call us to get an attorney out to them at a detention center,” Sánchez explained. “In the process, we sometimes hear about these details. But it isn’t a priority. Our job is not to investigate cards. Our job is to provide legal aid.” He noted that the community served by Voces Unidas in the western slope of rural Colorado does not trust local law enforcement officers, elected officials, or mainstream human rights groups. “They’re calling organizations that they trust. And unless those trusted organizations are doing civil rights reporting or are going in-depth in providing emergency assistance, it’s very difficult to find out the details of such incidents,” he explained. “So I would be surprised if we’re the only community where this has happened. We just might not know it.”

Neither ICE nor its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, returned a request for comment about the use of the death cards in Colorado or elsewhere in the U.S.

This isn’t the first time that immigration agents have used similar imagery during the Trump administration’s ongoing deportation campaign. This summer, for example, a Border Patrol agent taking part in immigration raids in Chicago wore the image of a skull with a spade on its forehead affixed to his helmet below another unidentified but apparently unofficial patch. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment.

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Recently, The Intercept published a guide to official and unofficial patches worn by immigration agents. These included a shoulder patch worn by personnel from the St. Paul, Minnesota Field Office, where Jonathan Ross — the ICE agent who shot Renee Good — works. The St. Paul office’s Special Response Team patch was spotted on the camouflage uniform of a masked ICE officer during a raid of a Minneapolis Mexican restaurant last year. The circular patch depicts a bearded Viking skull over an eight-prong wayfinder or magical stave — a Nordic image called a “Vegvisir.” The symbol has sometimes been co-opted by far-right extremists.

Another ICE officer in Minnesota was spotted wearing a patch reading “DEPLORABLE,” a term some devotees of then-candidate Donald Trump adopted in 2016 after Hillary Clinton said half of his supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” since they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, [and] Islamophobic.”

ICE and DHS failed to respond to repeated requests for comment about these patches.

The ace card has a long and macabre history. A British tax on playing cards, which specifically required purchasing aces of spades from the stamp office, resulted in the hanging of a serial forger of the “death card” in 1805. Legend has it that “Wild Bill” Hickok held the Dead Man’s Hand — aces and eights, including the ace of spades — when he was gunned down in Deadwood in Dakota Territory in 1876. In 1931, murdered Mafia boss Giuseppe Masseria was photographed with the ace of spades clutched in his hand. By that time, it was firmly entrenched in culture as the “death card.”

The U.S. use of death cards in Vietnam was immortalized in the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now” in a scene in which Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, places unit-branded playing cards, reading “DEATH FROM ABOVE,” on the bodies of dead Vietnamese people. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency developed a set of playing cards to help troops identify the most-wanted members of the Iraqi government. President Saddam Hussein, who was eventually captured and executed, was the ace of spades.

Last year, the official Instagram account of Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector used the 1980 Motörhead song “The Ace of Spades” as the soundtrack of a video of its canines practicing attacks on people. “Our Patrol-K9s are trained to take down violent threats,” reads the accompanying caption.

The post Federal Agents Left Behind “Death Cards” After Capturing Immigrants appeared first on The Intercept.

On the day before Thanksgiving, he was released without warning or explanation. He walked out to a jail parking lot relishing the fresh air — and watching over his shoulder.

During the week that followed, Sanchez Estrada savored his time with family members and worried that his release might have been an accident. Apparently, he was right.

On Thursday, Sanchez Estrada turned himself in to await a trial that could be months away.

It was another swerve in the case of a man who has been demonized by the federal government for actions he took after a protest against Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Civil liberties advocates have decried the case against him as “guilt by literature.” (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas declined to comment and the Federal Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request.)

In a Wednesday night interview during his final hours of freedom, Sanchez Estrada said the decision to voluntarily surrender himself was gut-wrenching.

“As scary as it is, I’m innocent,” he said. “I just have to go through this process. It’s necessary to show that I’m not the person they say I am. I’m not fleeing. I’m not hiding. Because I’m innocent. I haven’t done anything.”

Sanchez Estrada spoke to The Intercept outside an ice cream shop in an upscale shopping mall in Fort Worth, Texas. He was set to turn himself back into jail 16 hours after the interview — but before that, he was treating his 12-year-old stepdaughter to sweets during his first meeting with her as a free man since his arrest in July.

Prairieland Protest

Prosecutors allege that Sanchez Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, attended a chaotic protest outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Center on July 4 that ended with a police officer wounded by gunfire. A separate defendant is the sole person accused of firing a gun at the officer.

The gathering outside the Alvarado, Texas, detention center happened in the context of huge rise in the number of immigrants detained under Trump, from 39,000 in January to 65,000 in November, which has been accompanied by reports of dire conditions inside.

Supporters of the Prairieland defendants say the protesters hoped to cause a ruckus with fireworks in a show of solidarity. The government has accused members of what it dubs the “North Texas antifa cell” of rioting and attempted murder.

No one claims that Sanchez Estrada was present at the protest. Instead, he is accused of moving anarchist zines from his parents’ house to another residence near Dallas on July 6 after Rueda called him from jail. Sanchez Estrada was arrested when the move was spotted by an FBI surveillance team, according to the government.

Prosecutors said the zines contained “anti-law enforcement, anti-government and anti-Trump sentiments.” In a statement made outside of his interview, Sanchez Estrada said that possession of such items is clearly protected by the First Amendment.

“My charge is allegedly having a box containing magazine ‘zines,’ books, and artwork,” Sanchez Estrada said. “Items that should be protected under the First Amendment ‘freedom of speech.’ If this is happening to me now, it’s only a matter of time before it happens to you.”

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Civil liberties groups such as the Freedom of the Press Foundation have denounced his case as “guilt by literature.” They warn that his could be the first of many such prosecutions in the wake of a presidential memo from Trump targeting “antifa” and other forms of “anti-Americanism.”

The purported “North Texas antifa cell” has been cited by FBI Director Kash Patel and others as a prime example of a supposed surge in the number of attacks on ICE officers — although a recent Los Angeles Times analysis found that unlike the incident in Texas, most of those alleged attacks resulted in no injury.

Sanchez Estrada faces up to 20 years on counts of corruptly concealing a document or record and conspiracy to conceal documents. The stakes are higher for him than other defendants because he is a green card holder, which ICE spotlighted in a social media post that included his picture and immigration history.

“I Did Not Participate”

Sanchez Estrada also worries about the fate of his wife, who faces life imprisonment if convicted. She pleaded not guilty in an arraignment Wednesday. The case is currently set for trial on January 20.

“I want to be very clear. I did not participate. I was not aware nor did I have any knowledge about the events that transpired on July 4 outside the Prairieland Detention Center,” Sanchez Estrada said in his statement. “My feeling is that I was only arrested because I’m married to Mari Rueda, who is being accused of being at the noise demo showing support to migrants who are facing deportation under deplorable conditions.”

Sanchez Estrada said that he spent his months in jail anguishing over how his stepdaughter would be affected and how his parents, for whom he is the primary supporter, would make ends meet.

A nature lover who peppers his speech with references to “the creator,” for Sanchez Estrada one of the toughest things about being in jail was not being able to breathe fresh air or watch the sun set.

He said he was immediately suspicious when jail officers told him that he was being released.

“You normally would assume the worst when you’re in there. I just did not believe them. I thought they would be waiting in the parking lot to arrest me,” he said.

Soon, however, Sanchez Estrada was eating vegan tacos and spending time with friends and family.

“It is something just beautiful to see — everyone rooting for you,” he said.

He fears what could happen when he returns to custody. Still, he will have a reminder of his brief return to life on the outside: freshly inked tattoos of a raccoon and an opossum.

“They’ve been here even before people,” he said. “They’re wild animals, and they’re beautiful.”

Update: December 4, 2025, 12:58 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to reflect that, after publication, the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas declined to comment.

The post “I’m Not Fleeing” — Alleged Antifa Cell Member Says He Was Accidentally Released From Jail appeared first on The Intercept.

It worked. “Fuck you,” Fuentes wrote back. 

This was Rectenwald’s shot. He apologized, calling Fuentes “a brilliant guy.” He reposted an uncannily gorgeous, computer-generated woman in a cross necklace and blazer encouraging the two men to “drop the beef.” She sat in front of an American flag and six light-up letters spelling “AZAPAC,” the acronym for Rectenwald’s new group. If Fuentes would just endorse it, Rectenwald promised, he’d “take it all back.”

Rectenwald launched the Anti-Zionist America Political Action Committee in August, vowing to fight to end U.S. financial and military aid to Israel and root out pro-Israel influence in Congress. AZAPAC aims to raise money to unseat pro-Israel legislators in the coming midterm elections, targeting some of the main recipients of cash from influential groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Democratic Majority for Israel.

It’s a goal that might sound appealing for the electoral left, whose members have long struggled to make meaningful progress on Palestinian rights in Washington, D.C., largely because of the strong grip the pro-Israel lobby holds on U.S. politicians. And as Israel’s genocide in Gaza stretches into a third year, AZAPAC’s policy goals may tap into a political energy currently unaddressed by either major party: growing anti-Israel sentiment on the right.

Though the Republican party loudly backs Israel and its war effort, far-right online spaces are growing increasingly critical of Israel. While accusations of antisemitism from the pro-Israel mainstream often dog Israel’s critics on the left, they appear as little cause for concern to far-right figures and their followers. As the nonpartisan AZAPAC works to sway the 2026 midterms, Rectenwald’s group will test whether candidates across the political spectrum will be similarly pressed on the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

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The AZAPAC founder has attempted to connect with openly antisemitic figures like Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who famously praised Hitler. Rectenwald is a regular on The Stew Peters Show, which streams on the Peter Thiel and JD Vance-funded YouTube alternative Rumble, where the host has used slurs to describe Jewish and Black people — to no objection from Rectenwald. He’s courted support from popular manosphere influencer Dan Bilzerian, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who has falsely claimed Jewish people are behind DEI policies, transgender identity, and “open borders.” AZAPAC is helping fund at least one candidate who is a Hitler apologist and another who has participated in white nationalist demonstrations.    

In a conversation with The Intercept, Rectenwald made clear he’s aware such affiliations could be detrimental to his cause. He said he is no longer seeking the support of Fuentes, though he remains interested in his fan base — they’re “more sincere than him on some things” — and that he was unaware of “the depth of” Bilzerian’s antisemitic views, which are well–documented online.   

Asked about Peters’s language, Rectenwald told The Intercept he would no longer appear on his show, then reversed and said he didn’t want to “throw him under the bus.” Peters, Rectenwald added, has “helped us quite a bit.”

Affiliating with such figures perpetuates harmful and often violent rhetoric toward Jewish people, antisemitism and hate speech experts told The Intercept, and in the most extreme cases, conspiracy theories can motivate violence, as occurred when a white nationalist shooter massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.  

These antisemitic allyships also risk undermining legitimate criticism of the state of Israel — a heightened liability at a time when the federal government and its pro-Israel allies have launched largely spurious claims of antisemitism against advocates on the left who support Palestine and oppose Israel’s genocide. 

“If we give any quarter to antisemitism anywhere near our movements, we are opening ourselves up to the charges from Israel’s defenders,” said Ben Lorber, an author and researcher of antisemitism and white Christian nationalism. “It stands to really harm the movement.”

Rectenwald appears to understand what he’s risking. After The Intercept reached out to AZAPAC-endorsed candidates for this story, two rejected the group’s backing and were scrubbed from the site, and a third threatened to do the same. Rectenwald accused The Intercept of trying to sink his PAC.

Rectenwald himself has used language commonly associated with antisemitic conspiracy theories of global Jewish control, and he argues that other Israel critics embrace similar language. Online, he regularly refers to “the Jewish mafia” and “Jewish elites,” and last April, he self-published a novel called “The Cabal Question.” He originally wanted to call it “The Jewish Question,” as he said on a podcast, but Amazon barred him from using the title. 

“We don’t use the same language and talk about the same things with the same terms,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, referring to Peters. And yet, he said, “I do believe he’s doing pretty good work in terms of exposing the Zionist network and what it’s up to.” He said a significant portion of AZAPAC’s early donations arrived after his appearances on Peters’s show, which also runs commercials for the group.

During a September episode while introducing Rectenwald, Peters referred to Jewish people using a common antisemitic slur. A month earlier, he used an anti-Black slur to describe Department of Justice attorney Leo Terrell in another episode with Rectenwald. In that episode, Peters said the U.S. is “occupied” by “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American Jews who are not just working on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of a more broad, satanic, Talmudic agenda that’s taken shape over thousands of years.” 

Rectenwald promised Peters in his August appearance that AZAPAC does not have “infiltrators,” “dual allegiances,” or “sneaky Jews coming in and running the show.” He closed out the episode by offering Peters an invite — which he told The Intercept has since been rescinded — to be a member of AZAPAC’s board.

The 2026 Slate

An AZAPAC ad launched in November and produced by the far-right company Dissident Media shows Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands, Palestinian children killed by Israel, re-enactments of the American Revolution — and the red, clawed hands of a puppet master manipulating strings overlaying a mashup of the American and Israeli flags. 

Rectenwald told The Intercept that he was not aware “puppet master” was a well-known antisemitic trope and that the strings represented the pro-Israeli donor class’s influence on the Trump administration. Plus, the trailer was a success: Donations poured in as it drew attention online, Rectenwald said.  

AZAPAC had raised $111,556 by the end of December, according to recent FEC filings.  

Of AZAPAC’s 10 publicly endorsed candidates, six are running as Republicans with three Democrats and a Libertarian on its slate. The group is more focused on Republicans, Rectenwald said, because he aims to put a dent in the GOP’s pro-Israel base. AZAPAC is backing Aaron Baker, for example, an America First conservative who is running to unseat Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., a vocal supporter of Israel and Netanyahu.

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At least one AZAPAC candidate drew national headlines five years ago. Tyler Dykes, a Republican candidate running for Rep. Nancy Mace’s congressional seat in South Carolina, was famously accused of performing a Nazi salute, which he denies, while storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and later pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers with a stolen riot shield. (Trump pardoned Dykes on his first day in office.) Dykes also received a felony conviction for his participation in the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where organizers protested the removal of a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and yelled, “Jews will not replace us.”

Reached by The Intercept, Dykes said in an emailed statement he denounces “violence and extremism in all its forms.” He added that “Robert E. Lee was a hero, and deserves to be honored as such.”

Rectenwald told The Intercept that AZAPAC’s board had vetted Dykes and other candidates. He said he was willing to tolerate certain disagreements with the candidates and their views. The endorsements, Rectenwald said, are “a pragmatism of sorts.” 

“We don’t agree with all of these candidates,” Rectenwald said. “We’re trying to put together a coalition of sometimes very unlikely bedfellows, if you will.”

AZAPAC’s endorsement process is primarily based on a 19-part questionnaire, which Rectenwald shared with The Intercept. It asks things like whether a candidate would pledge not to receive campaign donations from prominent pro-Israel groups or “any other foreign lobby/PAC”; what they think of laws restricting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement or imposing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism; and whether they would vote to end military aid to Israel.

The group’s contradictions are perhaps best captured by two brief recent endorsements: two former American soldiers, Anthony Aguilar and Greg Stoker, running for Congress as progressive Green Party candidates. As a contractor working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Aguilar, who is running in North Carolina, became a whistleblower alleging that GHF employees were firing into crowds of starving civilians at aid sites. Stoker, running in Texas, took part in last year’s Global Sumud Flotilla, a humanitarian mission meant to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Their AZAPAC endorsements were short-lived. 

After receiving questions from The Intercept about Rectenwald’s language and AZAPAC’s associations with far-right figures, both Aguilar and Stoker rejected the group’s backing. Mentions of them had been erased from AZAPAC’s online presence by Tuesday.

In explaining his withdrawal, Aguilar’s campaign acknowledged that anti-genocide and anti-Zionist activists “are falsely accused on antisemitism on a regular basis” to discredit their work. “For that reason, we want to avoid being associated with any group whose statements or actions raise credible concerns of actual antisemitism,” Aguilar’s campaign manager said in a statement.

Stoker told The Intercept that “I have always used my platform to fight against racial superiority,” adding that AZAPAC’s narrow focus on “old conspiracy theories” and eradicating the pro-Zionist lobby “is not going to fix any of the larger systemic issues facing working class Americans.”

Christine Reyna, a professor at De Paul University who studies the psychology of extremism, questioned why AZAPAC would endorse candidates like Dykes and Casey Putsch, a racecar driver and AZAPAC-backed Republican candidate for Ohio governor. In August, Putsch posted a video asking Grok to list “all the good things Adolf Hitler did or was responsible for creating in his life” and railed against the Jewish right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, whom he called “an annoying little rodent.” While there’s a growing number of other candidates who oppose sending military aid to Israel or have sworn off AIPAC donations, backing candidates like Putsch and Dykes could serve as a dog whistle, Reyna said, to some of the most extreme corners of the far right.

“When you package these really frightening and terrible and dangerous ideologies and you hide them behind this front-facing organization that gives them legitimacy,” Reyna said, “That can be extremely dangerous.”

Aligning with such America First nationalists, who tend to ignore the issue of America’s own ambitions of control and profit, can harm other communities, antisemitism researcher Lorber warned, because of their anti-Blackness, xenophobia, or anti-LGBTQ views. In the case of Israel, these far-right alliances can also injure the movement for Palestinian liberation, he said.

“If we get distracted chasing fantasies of Jewish cabals, it harms our analysis, it makes our work less informed and less effective,” Lorber said, “and it also divides our movements.”

Palestinian-American advocate and analyst Tariq Kenney-Shawa, whose family is from Gaza, is acutely aware of the ways pro-Israel institutions have attacked anti-Zionist work for being antisemitic. He said those bad-faith attacks were why he was concerned about AZAPAC’s affiliations with the far right, which has long rooted its criticism of Israel in “actually racist and antisemitic” beliefs. 

“There is a big umbrella for a movement against unconditional support for Israel,” Kenney-Shawa said. “But neo Nazis and far-right antisemites will never be welcome in that.”  

The day after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Putsch, who did not respond to outreach from The Intercept, doubled down on his support for ICE’s mass deportation campaign. On social media, Putsch, who is Christian, often attacks his opponent Vivek Ramaswamy’s Hindu faith and Indian ancestry. On his campaign site, his platform includes anti-immigrant calls to “accelerate deportations” and limit the number of H-1B visas offered to immigrant workers.

His platform makes no mention of Israel or foreign policy.

The Founder’s Journey

“Maybe one time I failed to say Zionist,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, acknowledging that on occasion, he has used the words “Jew” or “Jewish” instead. A search of his X account turned up at least 43 references to the “Jewish mafia,” and he’s repeatedly invoked the “Jewish elite” on his Substack. He claimed to have borrowed the latter term from Norm Finkelstein, a pro-Palestinian author and activist who, unlike Rectenwald, is Jewish himself. 

“It’s not just an ‘israeli lobby.’ LOL. It’s a Talmudic Jewish mafia that runs the U.S. and the world,” Rectenwald wrote in one post in March. The same day, he claimed that “the Jewish mafia did 9/11.”

When The Intercept asked about Rectenwald’s use of the term “Zionist Occupation Government,” which has a history of popularity among white supremacists, he brought up AZAPAC-backed candidates like Bernard Taylor, a firefighter and Democrat hoping to unseat Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast, a former IDF volunteer. Rectenwald cited Taylor, who is Black, as proof that “we are not like bigots,” adding that AZAPAC planned to endorse other people of color.

Taylor, who accepted an endorsement from AZAPAC in December, said he also was not aware of Rectenwald’s rhetoric until approached by The Intercept for this story.

“I’m not gonna sit here and say it’s not concerning to me,” Taylor told The Intercept in a phone call, referring to Rectenwald’s language. In an emailed statement, he said his campaign rejects antisemitism, racism, and white supremacy, but would keep the AZAPAC endorsement based on policy. Taylor said that if he feels AZAPAC is “crossing the line” into overt antisemitism, he will reject its endorsement and refund donations from the group.

“If I made, you know, some slips here and there, it isn’t intentional — I’m not trying to dog whistle to anybody,” Rectenwald said. “I’m just trying to be precise, and sometimes, you know, precision is difficult.” 

In “The Cabal Question,” Rectenwald’s self-published novel, a former professor finds his worldview transformed when a friend “thrusts him into the JQ,” or Jewish question, as the book’s Amazon summary puts it, working with “a steadfast ex-occultist turned Christian nationalist to trace the strands of the cabal’s reach.” The story mirrors his own evolution of getting “J-pilled,” or “Jew-pilled,” Rectenwald has said, though he insists the novel is not about promoting antisemitism but rather “a Christian redemption story.”

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Rectenwald once identified as a leftist. He taught liberal studies as a Marxist at New York University — until a fallout that began in 2016, when it was revealed that he was behind the since-deleted Twitter account @AntiPCNYUProf with the screen name “Deplorable NYU Professor.” Rectenwald used the account to act “in the guise of an alt-righter,” as a way to argue against politically correct use of pronouns, trigger warnings, and safe spaces.  

He took a paid leave from NYU and claimed he was a victim of liberal censorship in a splashy op-ed and a sit-down on Fox & Friends. When he came back, Rectenwald invited far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos to speak to his class and later sued NYU for defamation. Court records indicate the case was dropped with prejudice, and Rectenwald said he settled out of court for a cash payment in exchange for his departure from the school in 2019.

NYU did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

The experience prompted Rectenwald to denounce the left and his several decades of Marxist scholarship, and in 2024, he launched a failed bid for president as a Libertarian, representing the conservative Mises Caucus.

It’s unclear when his fixation on Israel and antisemitic conspiracy theories took hold. But on the right-wing podcast The Backlash in May, Rectenwald used the protagonist of “The Cabal Question” to describe how his views developed. 

In the book, Rectenwald said, the main character flees persecution and surveillance from the government controlled by “the Jewish mafia.” The character ends up finding refuge with “radical right wingers,” who help him escape the country. The more closely he affiliates with the right-wing network, however, the more he risks damaging his own reputation. 

“Art imitates life, right?” said the host. Rectenwald agreed.

The post A New PAC Wants to Counter Israel’s Influence. It Also Welcomes Hitler Apologists. appeared first on The Intercept.

The first phase of the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal began to move forward this week as Israeli and Palestinian hostages have been released and aid trickles in. 

“The crossings were partially reopened, so some aid is coming in — food, water, and medicine — but only a small amount compared to the huge need,” says Intercept contributor Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi. “People are surviving, but every day it is still a struggle.”

“There is a pause in the bombing, and I say ‘a pause’ because there are still people being killed,” says James Zogby, the president and co-founder of the Arab American Institute.

This week on the Intercept Briefing, we hear from poet and writer Al-Wawi about what it’s been like in Gaza over the first few days of the ceasefire. Then reporter and host Jonah Valdez speaks to Zogby who, along with a delegation of Palestinian Americans, are meeting with members of Congress to ensure the current ceasefire holds and to push for an arms embargo on Israel.

“We were challenging members of Congress, not just on ending the weapons supplies to Israel because they’ve so abused them — in violation of U.S. and international law — but also to consider what are the needs of those who remain behind, the millions of Palestinians still in Gaza,” says Zogby. 

Valdez and Zogby dig into the details — or lack thereof — in Trump’s plan, how Israel is already breaking the ceasefire agreement, takeaways from past efforts to broker peace through the decades, and how the American public can continue pushing lawmakers to achieve lasting peace, healing, and reconstruction that benefits Palestinians. 

“Nothing’s going to happen on the Israeli side in terms of concessions, unless there’s a threat of punishment coming from the U.S. or the international community,” says Zogby. “That’s what happened during Oslo [Accords]: The U.S. let Israel get away with murder, and they just kept doing it. If Donald Trump lets them do the same thing — and I fully expect that he probably will — then I don’t expect this to move toward completion.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript 

Jonah Valdez: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jonah Valdez. 

The U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal began to move forward this week with Hamas releasing the remaining 20 living Israeli hostages, and Israel freeing nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom were themselves hostages, abducted from Gaza and held with no charges. While Israel has pulled back troops from Gaza, they still control more than 50 percent of the territory.

Donald Trump: As you know, the hostages have been returned and further work goes on having to do with the, sadly to say, bodies. Together, we’ve achieved what everybody said was impossible. At long last, we have peace in the Middle East. 

JV: Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza never guaranteed peace. And sure enough, the ceasefire remains fragile. In the last few days, Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinians trying to return to their homes in northern Gaza and in the south, a direct violation of the ceasefire agreement. And Israel at this point is still only allowing 300 aid trucks per day into Gaza. That’s a fraction of what was agreed upon and needed, and a violation of not just the ceasefire, but also international humanitarian law. 

To break down the ceasefire plan and where things stand, we’ll speak to Dr. James Zogby, the president and co-founder of the Arab American Institute.

But first, to understand how Palestinians are responding to the ceasefire so far, we turn to Intercept contributor Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi, a Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza.

Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi: My name is Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi. I’m 19 years old and I’m from Gaza, Palestine. I’m a writer, poet, and editor, and I’m studying English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. 

Writing and education have always been my tools, my weapons in a way, to resist and survive through learning and words. I try to make sense of what’s happening around me. 

In Gaza, education is not just a school. It is a way to survive, to keep our minds alive and to resist in the face of destruction. Before the genocide, I wrote about my life privately, everything that happened to me, but I never shared or published it. When the genocide began, I realized that telling our stories is no longer optional, it is a duty. 

The feelings I experience here are indescribable and the situations we endure are incomprehensible and unbelievable. 

The crossings were partially reopened, so some aid is coming in — food, water, and medicine — but only a small amount compared to the huge need. People are surviving, but every day it is still a struggle. So yes, life is a little better after the ceasefire, but it is still hard and challenging and people continue to fight every day to survive. 

The biggest fear we have is that Israel will not respect the ceasefire as it has always done before. We hear about agreements. But then Israel breaks them.

It happened just a few months ago. We started to believe, to feel some safety, and then everything collapsed again. This is what worries me the most, that this so-called ceasefire, it’s only temporary that at any moment the genocide can start again. 

People here are deeply afraid to trust because the trust has cost us everything before — our homes, our families, our lives.

If this agreement fails, Gaza will face something worse than what we have already endured. 

I hope this time things will be different. I hope this time the world will not turn away. If this ceasefire is to last, Israel can’t continue the way of the past. 

Everyone here is tired of a promise that are not kept. People need to feel that the ceasefire is real and that their safety is protected. That means no more attacks, no more shelling. Aid must continue to enter Gaza without interruption. 

My hope for the next chapter of Gaza is a chapter of safety, life, and freedom. I hope that people can feel safe in their homes, that children can live freely without fear, and the families can rebuild what was destroyed during the genocide.

I hope the streets and neighborhood will be full of life again. I hope there’s real justice and protection, that our rights are respected. 

I also hope the world stops staying silent and really supports Gaza with aid, reconstruction, and helping it get back to what it once was. Gaza needs action, not just words.

JV: That’s Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi, a Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza and Intercept contributor. 

Next, we dig into the details of the ceasefire and Trump’s 20-Point Plan, and what it means for the future of Gaza, with Dr. James Zogby. 

But first, a short break. 

Break

JV: To unpack the terms of the Gaza ceasefire deal and what remains for the future of Palestinians in Gaza, we turn to Dr. James Zogby. He is the president and co-founder of the Arab American Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community. 

His advocacy for Palestinian rights, namely Palestinian statehood, stretches back decades and he has remained an active voice throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

On Wednesday, October 15, he joined a delegation of Palestinian Americans who survived the genocide to Capitol Hill. They met with members of Congress to ensure the current ceasefire holds and to push for an arms embargo on Israel.

We’re speaking to him on Wednesday as they begin those conversations on the Hill.

Welcome to the Intercept Briefing, Dr. Zogby. 

Dr. James Zogby: Thank you so much, Jonah. 

JV: Yeah. To start, I’m wondering if you could tell us about your meeting with members of Congress. 

JZ: Let me first tell you about why we did it.

It’s because throughout this entire conflict and now especially at the end of the Trump plan and the ceasefire and the returns of hostages and prisoners, Palestinians have been invisible or objectified in a way that the personal was lost. We saw the Israeli families hugging their returned ones. There were interviews with them. They even got to speak at the Democratic convention. Palestinians didn’t get to tell their story. 

Today, one of the newspapers had a half page with profiles of the Israeli hostages who had died. And yet there’s no personal profile of the Palestinians who were returned. And let me tell you, the Palestinians who were returned weren’t prisoners — they were hostages. They were people picked up in the early part of this war, held with no charges, no trial — no sense even, in many cases, to why they were being picked up.

JV: Right. 

JZ: They were young men, and they were just held in administrative detention, which Israel does, for two years, treated abominably — lost so much weight. People died. There were 70 of these prisoners who died. Their bodies have not been returned by Israel, and yet there’s no fuss in the American press about it. No discussion in Congress. Members of Congress are saying, “Well, it’s over. Now there’s a peace settlement.” There is no peace settlement because as I’ve said, for years now, there is no day after in Gaza.

There’s a generation of kids who have lost everything. And I wanted to get together Palestinians in America who had family in Gaza to be able to tell their story, just as the Israeli family of hostages got to tell their story. And we brought together a group that had very compelling stories to tell to members of Congress. And they’re making visits to members now and into the next week or so to be able to tell who they are, who their loved ones are. Pictures of the cousins and kids who’ve died. The father who died, the house that they’d built that was now rubble. To put a human face on it.

We were challenging members of Congress, not just on ending the weapons supplies to Israel because they’ve so abused them — in violation of U.S. and international law — but also to consider what are the needs of those who remain behind the millions of Palestinians still in Gaza. Not just the food and the medical supplies, but the understanding of the trauma and the need to help this entire society move forward. Compassion cannot just be toward Israel, it has to be toward Palestinians. They’ve suffered enormously from this and they need help. 

JV: So the last time I spoke with you was in August 2024. I’m not sure if you remember since it was a very brief phone call because you were in the middle of the DNC in Chicago, and you mentioned this, but pushing for a Palestinian speaker on the convention’s main stage — as we know, that effort fell short. 

And at that time, the very idea of even getting a lot of your fellow Democrats to call for a ceasefire in Gaza was an uphill battle. Now here we are more than a year later and two ceasefire agreements later. Of course, there was the deal in January led by the Biden administration that Trump closed and took credit for. That ceasefire fell apart.

Israel is already violating terms of this current deal. It feels like over the past year, a lot has changed and a lot hasn’t. I’m really curious to know how you’re making sense of this moment with a new ceasefire plan in place, and thinking back to what it took to get to this point. 

JZ: Well, what it took to get to this point were two things.

One, it took a president who wanted a Nobel Peace Prize and was willing to say or do anything to get there. So yeah, he put pressure on the Israelis, but he has also — very characteristic for this president — so exaggerated what has happened. And the media has so far bought it. You know, “the greatest day in human history,” that Trump, the president, said.

JV: Mm-hmm. 

JZ: That’s a bit of an overstatement, but it’s almost like “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” you know, Hans Christian Andersen’s story for children. No one wants to call his bluff. Because actually, very little has happened. Yes, there is a pause in the bombing, and I say “a pause” because there are still people being killed.

Part one or two of the 20 points are beginning to be implemented. Some aid is getting through, and people are moving back in Gaza to the north, again, hoping to be able to enjoy this moment. But actually if you look at the rest of the 20 points, they are so ill-defined. There is no enforcement mechanism.

And there’s no sense really of how each point will have to be negotiated to be fulfilled. For example, just on the Israeli withdrawals, there are lines, but those lines mean nothing unless there’s a mechanism to get Israel to those lines. And even with the lines that are there, if you look, it’s two miles in to Gaza on all sides, except in the south where it goes almost to four or five miles, that Israel will retain control, and retain control over the seas so that Gaza basically becomes as strangled as it was before October 7, 2023. And even to some degree, it’s worse, because then the hold on Gaza was external. Now it’s internal. So they lose more land to Israeli occupation forces than they had before. How’s that going to be negotiated? How’s that going to be accomplished? What is an independent Palestinian technocratic, non-whatever? I mean, who defines that? Will the Palestinians have a role to play in shaping their form of governance?

Will there be a connection between Gaza and the West Bank, or is this the final Bantustan-ization of Gaza? If Israel controls all entry and exit points, then who’s to say there won’t be another stranglehold over Gaza? How will the Israelis be held accountable for their violations?

Look at the ceasefire in Lebanon. Israel is the enforcer of the ceasefire in Lebanon, so there’s no ceasefire. They bomb at will, as they have been doing in the last couple of days. And so I, frankly, am not optimistic about this because the president has been very ecstatic, and he’s being fed and reinforced in his ecstasy by foreign leaders, by media, by people in elective office here in the states. But it’s not that nothing happened, but far less happened than he is pretending and they are all reinforcing that, “Oh, yes sir, you’ve done a great job.” But actually, so little has happened, and we don’t know the way forward to get the rest of it. Will he be able to sustain this? Will Netanyahu be interested in sustaining it? I frankly have my doubts. 

JV: Right, right. And so we’re clear, we’re referring to Trump’s 20-point plan that he put out with his administration that was heavily edited by the Israelis. And you mentioned a lot of the doubts surrounding it. Experts I’ve talked with have described it and criticized it for being incredibly vague.

And you mentioned this kind of security perimeter that would be allowed for Israel around Gaza. They say that basically returns things to pre-October 7 status quo of an open-air prison, if not worse. 

You know, you’re referring to what’s happening in Lebanon, resuming attacks, yeah—

JZ: I worked with Vice President [Al] Gore on a project he wanted to start that he asked me and a former congressman, Mel Levine, from California to co-chair to promote economic development in the West Bank and Gaza. This was in the “good years,” and right after Oslo. 

To see what the checkpoint getting into Gaza was like then, with Palestinians in cattle chutes holding their ID above their head with Israeli soldiers straddling the cattle chutes above them, guns pointed down, saying, “Don’t look at me. Don’t look at me. Keep your head down.” There was a master-slave dialectic going on. And it was sickening to see, but these were the day laborers that Israel was bringing into Israel to work in construction jobs or service jobs. It was absolutely deplorable.

So we brought American companies over to invest in Gaza, and many were interested. They thought it might be an interesting way to bring a factory from North Carolina to Gaza to ship products to Europe. Furniture construction factory, a number of places. Guess what? The Israelis would not allow this during the good times.

JV: Hmm. 

JZ: They would not allow Palestinians or American partners to import or export without Israeli controls. And in some cases, they insisted there be an Israeli middleman, which [would] chew up the profit margin so that the American companies dropped off. So this stranglehold over the West Bank and Gaza — because the West Bank had the same problem, they weren’t allowed to import or export freely either — has been Israel’s hold over the occupation. They have not been willing to let it go.

Even in the investment program that’s outlined — not outlined — but is mentioned in the 20-point Trump plan, says there’ll be investment in Gaza. Investment to whom? Investment for what? Is it going to be a real estate deal, as he talked about? And will Gazans actually benefit? Will they create the businesses? Get the jobs? None of that is defined. It sounds like they’re looking at Gaza as an empty lot where they’re going to be able to build and do things to benefit themselves, but not to benefit the people of that land.

JV: Right. Yeah. I have questions specifically on that economic part of the plan, but you mentioned Oslo. It appears that so much of the plan’s success hinges on U.S. involvement or how much Trump will be willing to keep pressure on Netanyahu, as you said, to keep within the plan and be a sort of good faith, equal negotiating partner to Palestinians.

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And for this, I want to dig back. You mentioned the Oslo Accords, which for listeners, is a deal in 1993 that attempted to chart a path toward a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. Dr. Zogby, you were there on the White House lawn when then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with [then] Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat. 

And of course, during the Clinton years, you pushed hard for the plan’s success. You wrote in 2023, during the 30th anniversary of Oslo, that a big reason it failed is the U.S. failed to embrace its role as the guarantor of the deal. 

JZ: Mm-hmm. 

JV: Fast forward to the ceasefire deal today. The Trump administration obviously is quite different from the Clinton White House of the ’90s, but what role would you like to see from the U.S., and how would you want to see the U.S. act during this current attempt at peace?

JZ: Well, the Clinton administration would not act as an enforcer. And they had advisers, i.e., Dennis Ross and others, who when the Israelis were violating something, which they often did, their argument was, “Don’t criticize them.” That just makes them angry and they stiffen up. That the way to get them to do things is to hug them close and do things for them. So increase this, increase that, show them love, and yes, then maybe they’ll do it. Well, the result was that Israel got a sense of impunity. They — like a spoiled child — knew that if they acted up and did bad things, they’d actually get good things. And so why end up doing good stuff? Because you don’t have to. No one’s going to punish you for whatever you do. 

The same mindset exists today. Some think that Donald Trump had some quiet words of threat to Benjamin Netanyahu, like, “Don’t screw with me, buddy. I want this done,” and Netanyahu gave in. If that’s the case, and then what we have to see is that for the next three years Donald Trump gives more threats. Because Israel’s not going to move because we’re giving them extra goodies. They’re only going to move when they feel that there will be some repercussions. I don’t think that Donald Trump is interested in that. I think that he got the photo ops that he wanted. He got the Nobel Prize bragging rights that he wants.

I don’t think actually you get the Nobel Prize for just saying you’re going to do something. You actually gotta do it. Although previous recipients might argue against my case here. They’ve had some pretty poor judgment in Nobel Peace Prizes in the past.

But look, nothing’s going to happen on the Israeli side in terms of concessions, unless there’s a threat of punishment coming from the U.S. or the international community. If the Europeans decide to sanction Israel, that could get them to move. If the Arab states decided to punish Israel in concert with Europe, that would get them to move. I don’t expect that to happen, and I don’t expect the U.S. to take a strong stand either.

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So that’s where I think the difficulty is. That’s what happened during Oslo. The U.S. let Israel get away with murder, and they just kept doing it. If Donald Trump lets them do the same thing, and I fully expect that he probably will, then I don’t expect this to move toward completion. 

JV: Right. I mean, if we’re seeing any pressure, it’s really Trump putting, continuing to put public pressure on Hamas only. On Tuesday at the White House, Trump told reporters when talking about disarmament of Hamas, he said, “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them and it will happen quickly and perhaps violently.”

I’m wondering if you wanted to respond to that comment of this idea that perhaps violence can resume — an occupation, military occupation of Gaza can resume, which is something that I feel like a lot of Israeli leadership is almost previewing at this point.

JZ: Let me start first with the Trump threat. It’s hollow at best. U.S. troops are not going to enter Gaza, and the U.S. public would not allow it. I mean, there’s been a sea change of public opinion here in the states. There would be an uprising across the U.S. if we actually send troops into Gaza to do Israel’s bidding.

Number two, there’s no way to disarm Hamas, and let’s be clear about this. This is a popular movement among Palestinians in the West Bank right now. Less popular in Gaza because people are fed up with Hamas. There’s no question about it, but there are still people in Gaza who say, “We’ve suffered, and we’re going to take vengeance.” Do I think it’s a clever or smart political strategy? I don’t. I simply think you kick the hornet’s nest once, and you get bit, you don’t kick it again. But there are people in Gaza who are not going to just surrender because they don’t have the confidence that if they surrender, it’s going to get any better either. They have no confidence in the Israelis and certainly no confidence in the U.S.

So there has to be a way to finesse this disarmament issue, and one of the ways to finesse it is to incorporate Hamas, as in our polling, we find people in Gaza, they do not want Hamas to govern, but they want a unified governance of all the Palestinians, including the [Palestinian Authority].

They want it actually under the supervision of the PA, but everybody else included. They have enough of factionalization, enough internal conflict, and they know enough to know you don’t simply ignore Hamas or any other faction. You have to somehow find a way to incorporate. That would be the sophisticated way of doing it.

I don’t think the U.S. is sophisticated enough to get that. So, we’re not going to disarm them. The Israelis aren’t going to disarm them. The only way you can do it is to incorporate them into a broader coalition effort that includes technocrats, includes the PA, and includes international support. That would work, but I just don’t have confidence that Trump will do it, and I certainly don’t believe that the Israelis will allow it. They’re looking for a reason not to accept moving forward in this agreement. And that’s what they’ll latch onto: is that Hamas wouldn’t disarm. And so we’re not going to continue any further with this program. 

JV: And Hamas has said publicly that they would be willing to disarm if it was with a guaranteed Palestinian state and a Palestinian-led governance structure.

But I do want to talk more about the fragility of the plan. As I wrote in my new piece out now at The Intercept, Israel is already violating the ceasefire. It continues to kill Palestinians in Gaza, as we noted. It’s withholding some humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, accusing Hamas of delaying the transfer of bodies despite their previously agreed upon mechanisms.

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This is kind of inevitable for the deal, right? I mean, the plan’s vagueness and its assurances to Israeli security primarily, it seems to allow a lot of latitude for Israel to resume its attacks. You wrote on your website last week, “You cease, while we continue to fire,” is basically how they’re interpreting it. Yeah, please say more. 

JZ: And they’re looking for excuses. And the excuse right now is, “You didn’t return all the bodies,” but they’re holding onto a couple hundred bodies of Palestinians who’ve died in their captivity, and they have not released them. And the Palestinians made the point in the international community, the United Nations, Red Cross have made the point that because Palestinians have been forced to move — in some cases, 15 times over the last two years — it’s not as if they were all held in one place, and we just get their bodies and send them to you.

They’ve got to find them. In some cases, the Palestinians cannot find the bodies because they’re under rubble, because Israel exploded the buildings on top of where they were being kept. And their bodies are buried with Palestinians in that rubble. In other cases, the Palestinians have left areas that Israel is now in control of. They still retain control of 53 percent of Gaza, and they can’t get to those areas to dig up the bodies.

And so, both the Red Cross and the United Nations have said to the Israelis, “You have to have patience here. They’re looking. It’s not like you, where you kept them all in one place. They have been forced to move 15 or so times during this two-year period, and they’re not sure where things are.” But the Israelis have looked for excuses to not honor this agreement. Netanyahu has promised his coalition partners, “We will not get to Phase Two.”

He promised them they would not get to phase two. To keep his government together, he’s looking for every reason he can to not get to phase two. This is the latest one. 

JV: This phrase “self-determination” is thrown around a lot by politicians. I’m wondering what you think that actually looks like for Palestinians, and the viability of that within this plan.

It very briefly mentions it, and like point 17 of 20, on sort of the maintaining the right of self-determination for Palestinians. But I’m wondering if we could dive back into the political leadership structure that does exist already. You mentioned some polling that you’ve done, feel free to mention some of that. And of course, you have the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank mentioned in the plan, but they aren’t the most politically popular in Gaza, as I understand it. So what does the pathway to statehood look like? 

JZ: Let me make an observation about self-determination first.

During the earlier part of the 20th century, there was a push toward an independent Black nation in the south [U.S.], the Black Belt from Georgia across to Alabama. Ninety-five percent of the population in that Black Belt was African American. There was a push among some: “We deserve our own homeland. We deserve a separate state.”

World War II and the mass migration of Blacks from the south to the north to work in factories and live in cities in the north changed the dynamic. So by the time you got to the ’50 and ’60s, the push was for civil rights. The argument was made: Self-determination can either mean you separate from and govern yourself, or you get full, guaranteed democratic rights in the state in which you are currently living.

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All the Times Israel Has Rejected Peace With Palestinians

Palestinians have that option. They either want a separate Palestinian state, or they have wanted, and they argued from the beginning, their earliest demand, was equal democratic rights within a single state. It’s the Israelis who reject that because they do not want to see Palestinians equal in number or maybe even greater in number in that state.

They want a Jewish state. So that’s the argument, the Palestinian self-determination issue. It can be one or the other, but the Israelis have chosen instead for apartheid and for subjugation, which is the antithesis of either of those two self-determination cases. In the situation in which we currently find ourselves, there’s a problem.

I mean, Israel has erased the possibility of an independent state because in the West Bank, they have so discredited the concept by checkpoints, 500+, and they move from place to place, settlement construction, infrastructure construction, which has severed the West Bank into little pieces so that Palestinians can’t go from the north to the south. They can’t go from one village, in some cases, to the next. They’ve lost access to their ancestral lands and homes.

The PA, which was, according to the Oslo Accords, as we move forward, the Wye [River Memorandum] agreement, they were to be in governance of the areas that were Palestinian, dedicated Palestinian. Areas A, and they were to cooperate with the Israelis in Area B, and Area C remained under military control.

The Israelis, clearly in Area C, they want that land now. Area B, the PA has been pretty much pushed out. And in Areas A, which are these main city concentrations, the little Bantustan dots in the West Bank, because the PA has been told by the Israelis, “You’d better enforce what we ask you to enforce. Arrest these people, stop these demonstrations, stop this civil disobedience, this protest against the occupation, et cetera, or else, we’ll take away your right to govern in these areas.” 

As a result of that, the PA’s been discredited in the West Bank. In the polling that we do, we find Hamas at about 4 percent popularity in Gaza, with the PA having about a 30 percent popularity. In the West Bank, the numbers get reversed, with Hamas having higher numbers, the PA, not as low as Hamas in Gaza, but the PA having lower numbers than Hamas because they look at the PA as an agent of the occupation, and they see Hamas, on the other hand, as fighting for Palestinian rights. So that the issue of how you move forward has to be a newly constituted Palestinian national body like the old [Palestine Liberation Organization].

Many Palestinians are calling for it. The PA doesn’t want to give up what it’s got. And yet, that’s the only way forward. And I think that if you don’t get there, then you’re going to have a continued divided Palestinian polity, which is not a good thing for the Palestinian community or for the prospects of any peace. There has to be a unified Palestinian voice. That doesn’t exist right now.

JV: And could you say a bit about what the Trump plan actually spells out for what those next phases look like for a governance structure? It talks about a “board of peace,” I think is what it’s referred to, that would be overseen by Trump, and previously, I don’t know if this is still on the table, but former U..K Prime Minister Tony Blair. It seems like this idea of having Palestinians be in charge of their own self-determination seems very far off from what is actually spelled out in the plan.

JZ: They had no role to play in this 20-point plan at all. The Israelis got it, edited it, made it closer to what they wanted. The Palestinians never saw it at all. So as I say, there’s the spoiled child syndrome, and then there’s the abused child syndrome. The Palestinians are told, “You take it or else,” the Israelis are told, “Do you like this? And if you don’t, tell us what we need to do to make you like it.” 

So there is no plan, in the plan, to move forward. They say an independent, non-political, technocratic Palestinian group. Who defines that? What the hell is a non-political Palestinian? Somebody incidentally Palestinian? What is technocratic and independent?

Independent of what, and of whom? If they’re independent, as I think the U.S. envisions it, they have no base, they have no support. You’re imposing people who are incidentally Palestinian, on the Palestinian people, and saying, well, “There’s your people.” 

That’s not going to work. If they don’t have legitimacy, if people will not accept being governed by people they don’t know, don’t care about and didn’t put [in power], that’s not going to meet the needs of this moment. So that’s why I say there needs to be Palestinian unity, and there needs to be Arabs standing up and speaking out and saying, “This isn’t going to work unless Palestinians have a say in who governs them.”

JV: Right. Back on the topic of the economic portion of the plan and sort of self-interest, we’ve been reporting on Trump’s personal business interests in the region. His family’s business ventures, of course, in the Gulf States. His earlier vision for a Gaza Riviera, as he called it. Is this so-called peace plan nothing more than a plan to pave the way for Trump, his family, and his inner circle to benefit from the destruction of Gaza with future development projects? What’s your read on that? 

JZ: I think they were smart enough to leave that out, and I can’t imagine that it’s not someplace in the back of their mind that when these vague plans about investment and this international peace board, that that’s not something that they’re thinking about.

But rest assured, it’ll never happen. That will never happen. You are not going to build this paradise on the ruins, the bones, the bodies of tens of thousands, probably a couple hundred thousand people who’ve perished in Gaza. And the Palestinians won’t allow it. So it’s a pipe dream. And a sick pipe dream, as well.

And there is no plan, incidentally. There is no economic [plan], there’s a line about investment, but investment in what? The things that need to happen in Gaza right now are, number one, people need to know that their property rights will be respected because people are going north, or people are moving south, but they’re going to uncharted territory.

Everyone in Gaza, because there was a Palestinian Land Authority, they had a deed. And they had property and they have property rights. When you live in an apartment building and it’s completely destroyed and you owned that apartment, what happens? You’re basically destroying one of the fundamental concepts of civil society, which is, you own, you live, this is yours, and you can pass it on.

That doesn’t exist right now, so there has to be a reconstruction of that. 

Another basic is psychological support. We have a generation of young people who have been traumatized, repeatedly traumatized. I tell people, think about this: That a 12-year-old kid in Gaza forced to move, in our polling, we find 10, 15 times in two years. He goes back, it’s not just the house is gone, but it’s all rubble. The trauma that that’s going to effect in the kids’ lives has to be addressed. There’s going to be a massive need for PTSD and psychological counseling for these kids and as part of the education process. Otherwise, we’re going to have a generation of Palestinians that are, you know, Lord knows what becomes of them.

We talk about resilience, but that’s cruel. To just assume, “Oh, they’ll get over it.” They won’t. And we have to have sympathy and sensitivity to that. I’ve found with the visits that we’ve had of the Palestinian Americans telling the stories, members of Congress were moved. When they heard these stories, America has to be moved.

It’s not just Israelis who suffer. Palestinians are real people who suffer, who have pain, who lost family, who have faces, have stories to tell. They have to be respected. Otherwise, there will be no peace in the future. 

It’s not a real estate project. These are human lives. Two million of them have been devastated, whether they’re dead or whether they’ve been forced to move, like I said, 10, 15 times, and have lost dozens of family members. That has to be the priority. How do we put these people back, and able to live in dignity?

JV: Right. You bring back the work being done at the Hill again, and I know you have to go, but to close, I wanted to direct things back to your party.

You’re a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee. You ran for the DNC vice chair earlier this year. What are Democrats likely to do to protect Palestinian rights as the rebuilding efforts start, if the ceasefire holds? And where does the party go from here? 

JZ: Well, number one, most of the meetings that I’ve seen, all with Democrats, and largely with progressive Democrats. Met today, this morning, which is Wednesday morning, with Rep. Delia Ramirez, who’s the sponsor of the bill to stop the bombs. 

And the change within the Democratic Party is real. Members of Congress, many of them don’t get it. I mean, look, there’s not ignorance, there’s a kind of willed ignorance that this is, “I just don’t wanna know about it.” But they’re being forced to know about it because they’ve gone home to town meetings and they’ve been yelled at.

The public polling on this, on the Democratic side, is real. There’s a shift. It’s become a litmus test for honesty. And it crosses race, ethnicity, and religion. People, in particular, Democrats, are pushing for change. 

Now, the party, I think there’s a confusion. The Democratic Party doesn’t make policy. The Democratic Party, the national committee, builds capacity to win elections. And so, it’s not a legislative body that passes — We do a platform, but it’s the platform done by candidates. So the role that Democrats have to play is what they are playing, which is impact elected officials. Go to town meetings, elect candidates who support justice, throw the old bums out, and bring in the new guys who actually want to fight for change, and support those who have, for example, Cori Bush is running for reelection. She has to get reelected. If we can defend people and not lose elections, because AIPAC gangs up on them, then we make real change here. And I think that’s where the dynamic is going. Now, Trump is doing everything he can to keep Republicans in power. We have to do everything we can to get more progressive Democrats elected to change the dynamic in Washington.

And guess what? Republicans are starting to hear from their constituents too. I know that there are some saying, “Oh, well, it’s over now, there’s peace.” There’s not, and the pressure has to stay on and we have to find a way to create a political power base, not just on the Democratic side, but on the Republican side, that fights for justice in the Middle East, in particular for Palestinians. 

JV: Are you seeing unity within the DNC around that issue of pushing for those types of candidates? 

JZ: I’m seeing it, that kind of unity in the public, of those who self-identify as Democrat. Yeah. Numbers are 2 to 1 or more, sometimes 70 points higher, those who want to cut aid to Israel, military assistance to Israel, versus those who don’t. Those who say this is a genocide versus those who don’t. Those who say we’re less likely to support a candidate if they get money from AIPAC than those who would be more likely. 

There’s a real unity in the public, but among elected officials, it moves a little more slowly. They’re like the big ship in the ocean. You want to turn direction, takes a long time to get around. And within the DNC, most people in the DNC don’t have politics on these issues. They’re there because it’s the organization that they joined to help win local elections, state elections, and they’re not equipped to have this policy debate.

I think we’re going to do a task force in the party. We pushed for it at the last meeting. How do we talk about this issue as Democrats? How do we move the issue as Democrats? Chairman Ken Martin supports this, and we’re in the process of determining the composition of that right now, but they don’t have policy positions on most anything.

Like I said, the policies are shaped by the electeds. And right now, among the electeds in Congress, the dynamic is with the progressives. More than half of the elected Democratic senators supported Bernie [Sanders]. Delia Ramirez’s bill is now gaining real momentum in the House. So yeah, I think we’re winning the fight within that, but not in the institution of the DNC, but among Democrats and among Democratic elected officials. Because the grassroots base of this movement is so powerful that it can’t be ignored anymore. 

JV: Right, right. We’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much, Dr. Zogby, for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

JZ: Thank you. 

JV: And that does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. 

We want to hear from you. Share your story with us at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278. You can also email us at podcasts@theintercept.com. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave. 

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And tell all of your friends about us, and better yet, leave us a rating or a review to help other listeners find us.

Until next time, I’m Jonah Valdez. 

Thanks for listening. 

The post Trump’s Gaza Ceasefire Deal Is Already Failing Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

The victims of violence represented 17 nationalities, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Africa and the Middle East, and described cases of assault, kidnapping, and rape in northern Mexico border towns in recent months. Black asylum-seekers, in particular, stood out as targets, with more than 60 percent of Haitian asylum-seekers in Baja reporting that they were the victims of crimes. Out of a sample of more than 150 asylum-seekers interviewed between March and April, the researchers found that none were given an opportunity to apply for asylum before being summarily expelled from the U.S.

“Despite his frequent pledges to reverse President Trump’s cruelty at the border, President Biden is continuing a policy that is wreaking havoc: it endangers children, drives family separations, and illegally returns asylum seekers to danger,” said advocates with Human Rights First, Al Otro Lado, and Haitian Bridge Alliance. While acknowledging that the administration inherited an asylum system that was decimated by Donald Trump, the report argued that those challenges do not excuse the deplorable and deteriorating conditions asylum-seekers continue to face: “Sacrificing adherence to U.S. refugee law and adopting a Trump-administration policy that treats human lives as dispensable are not the answer.”

Pressed by Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller over the objections of public health professionals, Title 42 — an obscure Centers for Disease Control and Prevention law from the 1940s — went into effect last spring with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. According to the administrations of both Trump and Biden, the law allows Border Patrol agents to swiftly expel individuals and families encountered on U.S. soil without a hearing, regardless of whether they are attempting to exercise their right to seek asylum, while also broadly barring asylum access for most people at ports of entry.

Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, has carried out more than 630,000 expulsions in the past year. As The Intercept detailed in an investigation published last weekend, Border Patrol agents have used Title 42 as a basis to drop asylum-seekers in Mexican border towns in the middle of the night — a practice that’s been largely prohibited for years under agreements between the U.S. and Mexico. The agents have also relied on Title 42 to expel individuals and families through remote ports that were previously not used for removals, into communities dominated by organized crime and without transportation services. The law is under challenge in the courts, with critics arguing that what’s been presented as a public health measure is in fact being used as a means to deny people their rights under domestic and international law. Hundreds of thousands of travelers continue to pass through the nation’s ports every day; it’s asylum-seekers — and virtually asylum-seekers alone — who are rebuffed at those locations.

“Our staff and our volunteers have increasingly received reports from asylum-seekers whose family members or themselves have been kidnapped by organized crime and held for ransom.”

“In Tijuana, under Title 42, our staff and our volunteers have increasingly received reports from asylum-seekers whose family members or themselves have been kidnapped by organized crime and held for ransom,” Nicole Ramos, director of Al Otro Lado’s Border Rights Project, told reporters in a press call Tuesday. “Our staff receives videos of asylum-seekers with guns pointed at their head, children held over the mouths of barking dogs, all being threatened that if their families do not pay the $5,000, the $10,000, they will be killed and the parts of their bodies scattered, never to be recuperated or identified.”

Ramos added that while the U.S. reportedly stopped the practice of expelling unaccompanied children in November — after the Trump administration carried out at least 13,000 such expulsions — that halt has not applied to unaccompanied Mexican children. “They’re still turning back the Mexican minors in much the same way that we’ve seen previously,” she said. Nicole Phillips, legal director at Haitian Bridge Alliance, said on the call: “It feels like Stephen Miller is still here.” In addition to expulsions into Mexico, Title 42 has been used to send 27 flights to Haiti since February, the report noted, unloading more than 1,400 adults, children and asylum-seekers into violently unstable conditions in which Department of Homeland Security officials have privately acknowledged they “may face harm.”

“This particularly cruel right now because of the state Haiti is in,” Phillips said. “There’s a political instability like Haiti has not seen since the 1980s under the Duvalier regime.”

Muhamed, an asylum-seeker from East Africa who arrived in Tijuana with his family one month before Title 42 began and was just granted entry into the U.S. this month, described what it is like to be a Black asylum-seeker in a foreign city where violent and extortionist targeting of migrants is entrenched. “Apart from the racism of the society, the police extortion was also a very huge challenge to us,” he said, adding that he was extorted by police on three separate occasions. Earlier this year, Muhamed began volunteering at a camp for asylum-seekers hoping for an opportunity to make their case in the U.S. “These people are not criminals,” he said. “They are migrants. They are human beings who are sleeping on the streets under the sun and rain, just to fulfill their dream of seeking asylum in the United States of America.”

The implementation of Title 42 is creating a new vocabulary of immigration enforcement. Alexandra Miller, managing attorney of the Border Action Team at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, told reporters of the emergence of what advocates are calling “delayed Title 42”: cases where Title 42 is used to expel individuals in ICE detention in the interior of the U.S., not at the border. “Over the past five months, on any given day, there’s been around 100 individuals in ICE custody, who will not have access to due process, who will have limited access to counsel, and who will ultimately be removed to their country of origin, despite asserting fear claims,” Miller said. Marisa Limón Garza, deputy director of the Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Texas, described the challenge of responding to “lateral flights”: operations in which individuals and families are flown to El Paso and booted across the bridge into Ciudad Juárez, a city that has earned an infamous reputation for violence and targeting of migrants.

Limón said that while advocates in the region have contended with Title 42 for more than a year, conditions have worsened in the past two months, with nearly 5,000 men, women, and children flown to the border cities and expelled. Typically, flights arrive carrying 135 passengers, she explained, U.S. officials choose 35 individuals to stay, and the rest are sent to Juárez. Embedded in the process is what advocates are calling “the borderlands betrayal,” wherein families are told they are being flown to another U.S. city, only to be expelled into Mexico.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have the benefit of waiting. Every day is another 100 people. Every day is another family.”

“We have hundreds of empty beds right now ready to welcome people. We know that our partners in South Texas also have beds ready to receive people,”Limón said. “And yet the United States government continues to apply the use of Title 42 incorrectly, inappropriately at all of our collective expense.” Limón added that she and her colleagues have called on the administration to end its use of Title 42 and that the response they continually receive is to wait. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the benefit of waiting,” she said. “Every day is another 100 people. Every day is another family. Every day is another person that is attempting to cross between ports of entry because we have cut off asylum at our southern border.”

A truck displaying messages protesting the continuation of mass deportations of Black immigrants drives past the office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement prior to a rally against Title 42 in Washington, D.C., on February 15, 2021.

The human rights report comes just one day after a binational coalition of 92 Mexican and U.S academics who study the border issued a series of recommendations to the governments of their respective countries in order to “avoid a humanitarian crisis.” At the top of the researchers’ list was the phaseout of Title 42 and the beginning of processing for families seeking asylum. The signatories, which included many of the region’s top experts, noted a pattern that’s emerged in recent weeks of families choosing to separate themselves upon learning that the U.S. is still accepting unaccompanied children. Allowing families to seek asylum together “will decrease the need for facilities dedicated to unaccompanied minors, as families are able to travel to their final destinations upon release and require less immediate support” following their initial interview in the asylum process, they argued.

The border and immigration scholars advocated for expanded use of so-called filter locations, such as hotels, as a measure to prevent the spread of Covid-19. “The creation of ‘filters’ and the ‘filter hotel’ have proven to be efficient venues for the control of the pandemic prior to transferring migrants to other spaces such as shelters where they receive support,” they noted. “However, it is important to increase capacity, both in terms of the number of spaces and in the application of PCR tests,” they wrote, referring to testing for Covid-19. The researchers added that filter locations could be used to administer one-shot vaccines and said that “more dignified holding conditions should be built for unaccompanied children, adolescents, and families on the US side while they are processed and transferred to their final destination.”

Responsible and coronavirus-conscious admission of asylum-seekers is not without precedent, the experts said, pointing to the recent admission of individuals who were enrolled in the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program as an “orderly, efficient and safe” model of success. The Trump-era program forced more than 71,000 asylum-seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico, triggering an explosion in violence and human rights abuses against those populations. Biden ended the notorious program on his first day in office, and his administration has moved forward with the phased entry of individuals formerly enrolled in the system.

One thing the governments of the U.S. and Mexico should stop doing, the border and immigration researchers argued, is relying on Mexican security forces, with their long and well-established record of human rights abuses and corruption, to interdict asylum-seekers making their way north. Just two days after Biden’s inauguration, a U.S.-trained Mexican special operations team massacred 19 migrants in northern Mexico; last month, a Mexican soldier shot and killed an unarmed Guatemalan migrant in southern Mexico. Less than two weeks later, the Biden administration announced that it had secured agreements with the governments of Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala to deploy thousands of troops to their respective borders.

“There is a strong correlation between violence against migrants in the form of kidnapping, extortion and even massacres with increased immigration enforcement in Mexico,” the researchers said. “Mass detention will drive people to hide in dangerous and risky conditions, which will cause greater humanitarian costs.”

The post New Report Documents Nearly 500 Cases of Violence Against Asylum-Seekers Expelled by Biden appeared first on The Intercept.

Four years ago, Republicans and Democrats linked arms with residents from both sides of the border to form a human chain across the bridge in a show of “unity,” yet in recent weeks Del Rio has become a theater for a dramatic show of violence and force, as mounted Border Patrol agents charged at Haitian migrants while twirling their reins like whips. Some 2,300 law enforcement officers, said Mayor Bruno Lozano, had been dispatched to Val Verde County, home to roughly 49,000 residents.

“I don’t feel it’s in anybody’s best interest to come in mass movement like that,” he said, adding that it creates security vulnerabilities elsewhere. “If this is going to continue to be our response, it’s not a good precedent.”

Outside a shelter operated by the Val Verde Humanitarian Border Coalition, a local man carrying a holstered firearm said he was providing security to protect Haitians from hostile residents and outsiders. When Rev. Al Sharpton attempted to hold a media event near the border wall in solidarity with the Haitian migrants, he was shouted down by men who accused him of spreading racism. Volunteers in Del Rio collected donations and set out refreshments and snacks — for state troopers.

“Overwhelmed” was the word repeatedly used by federal, state, and local officials to describe Border Patrol agents, who officials said were caught by surprise and unable to address the influx of Haitian migrants.

But the arrival of Haitians was anticipated, and much of the chaos that ensued seemed preventable with basic planning and logistics. But in the scramble to contain the media crisis, the U.S. employed tactics that set off a cascade of repression and violence on both sides of the border. By allowing the situation to reach critical levels, federal officials created conditions that made a militarized crackdown seem inevitable, making criminals out of people asserting their right to seek asylum.

Almost 30,000 migrants, mostly Haitians, “were encountered” in Del Rio after September 9, said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a briefing, and more than 12,000 will have their cases heard by an immigration judge. But more than 5,000 of those asylum-seekers have been deported to Haiti, just weeks after the U.S. extended and expanded temporary protected status to the country. As Mayorkas stated in May, “Haiti is currently experiencing serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“The arrival of vulnerable asylum-seekers is not a crisis,” said Wade McMullen, an attorney at RFK Human Rights who traveled to Del Rio. “The militarized response and lack of preparation — that’s the crisis.”

Days after Border Patrol agents on horseback charged at Haitian migrants, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made four requests of the mayor to authorize state troopers to enter the city property to arrest the Haitians for criminal trespassing, Lozano told me. “It would have caused mass chaos,” he said during an extensive interview. A spokesperson for Abbott did not answer questions about the governor’s request to conduct arrests. Lozano said he stalled, telling the governor he was staking his faith on the immigration system to process the asylum-seekers.

After a massive deployment involving the Coast Guard, Texas National Guard, state troopers including air and marine support, and Customs and Border Protection, on September 24 officials announced that Haitians were no longer under the bridge. After weeks of a growing encampment and worsening conditions, everyone had been cleared out in mere days.

The aggressive response in Del Rio underscores an immigration system that prioritizes the spectacle of force over an investment in the construction of systems needed to process asylum-seekers.

The aggressive response in Del Rio underscores an immigration system that prioritizes the spectacle of force over an investment in the construction of systems needed to process asylum-seekers to conform to obligations dictated by international and U.S. law. Officials left little doubt that the aggressive deployment was designed to send a message of deterrence to others who might also seek aslyum.

“What we start doing to Haitians tends to spill over to everyone else,” said Yael Schacher, an immigration historian and senior advocate with Refugees International. In the 1980s, after the U.S. had experimented with imposing detention on Haitians, the policy was expanded to Central Americans fleeing U.S.-backed wars.

County Judge Lewis Owens, the top administrator of Val Verde County, described the state and federal law enforcement deployment as “amazing.” “We want to lean on law enforcement to stop flow,” he said, adding, “that said, there has to be a process to ask for asylum.”

Warning Signs

Despite claims that border officials were caught off guard, signs of the impending arrival of a large number of asylum-seekers were not hard to find. In the Del Rio area, the number of encounters with migrants had increased in 2021 over the prior year, with the numbers spiking over 1,000 percent by May, according to Customs and Border Protection data.

In May, Lozano, a Democrat, met with congressional Republicans and appeared on Fox News, complaining about “illegals” in town and criticizing the Biden administration for a lack of response at the border. “Unfortunately, at the time it was only right-wing media groups like Fox that were telling the story,” he told me, adding that “the policy needs to be reformed so ports of entry have to take them in legally and not be criminally charged.”

Two months later, Border Patrol agents detained hundreds of people from various countries under the bridge in Del Rio. Meanwhile, a video that captured Mexican immigration officials brutalizing Haitian migrants who were headed north circulated online. The Spanish newspaper El País reported that Haitian claims for asylum in Mexico had reached a record high. By September, Mexico had received 19,000 petitions for asylum, higher than any other nationality, following a trend of Haitians transiting through Mexico that began two years ago. Even so, U.S. officials repeatedly claimed that the arrival of Haitians on the border was a surprise.

Given that the Biden administration has continued the Trump administration policy of closing the traditional route of asking for asylum at ports of entry, asylum-seekers took to the river, setting the stage for compelling video footage of large groups of immigrants turning themselves in at the border fence in Del Rio, exciting viewers of Fox and Newsmax. In early August, Jorge Ventura, a contributor to the right-wing Daily Caller interviewed Del Rio residents about the “crisis.”

Around this time, said Owens, the judge, county authorities were informed that “caravans” of some 25,000 people were expected to arrive on the border.

The longer the Haitians were under the bridge, the more currency was extracted from their presence.

Weeks later, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recorded a video at the bridge in Del Rio, using Haitians suffering miserable conditions as a prop to talk about border chaos. Gesturing toward a crowd of what he said was 10,503 people, Cruz claimed the number had increased tenfold in one week after the Biden administration announced a pause to deportation flights following a devastating earthquake in Haiti. According to Cruz’s version of events, the hundreds of Haitians who had been camped in Del Rio sent word to friends and family in South America who arrived in one week.

Texas state police later posted images of troopers and their vehicles positioned with Haitians in the background, a show of force meant to deter other migrants. By that time, 700 troopers had been deployed to the county, a number that ultimately grew to 1,000.

The longer the Haitians were under the bridge, the more currency was extracted from their presence. An editorial in the newspaper Zocalo stated, “Someone has made a business from the issue of the migration crisis in the border state of Coahuila.”

Left/Top: Haitian migrants cross the Rio Grande at dawn from Del Rio, Texas, to Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, on Sept. 21, 2021. Right/Bottom: An exhausted Haitian father cradles his son in Ciudad Acuña, across from Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 19, 2021. Credit:Photos: Left/Top: Paul Ratje/AFP via Getty Images; Right/Bottom: John Moore/Getty Images

About 1,000 Haitians arrived in Del Rio in early September. When Lozano visited the camp on September 13, the number had doubled to more than 2,000. The local CBP port director called Lozano and said, “’Mayor, this is it, it’s happening now. There’s 30 buses coming this way.”

The worsening situation was apparent even to diners of La Cabañita, a taqueria along Acuña’s main tourist drag, where the television is permanently tuned to a live feed from the international bridge. A restaurant manager said he first noticed the growing crowd two weeks before state and federal agents flooded the region.

On September 15, with nearly 4,000 people under the bridge, Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz informed the mayor that construction of necessary infrastructure to process people would take 10-14 more days. “And I said, in a more colorful tone, ‘You don’t have 10 to 14 days,’” Lozano told me. “You had plenty of frickin’ time to fix this out.” Two days later, the number of people had increased to 14,000. Ortiz told a reporter he expected to clear the camp within a week.

“It’s not a lack of resources but a lack of priorities of screening asylum-seekers.”

“I don’t believe these capacity arguments anymore. It’s not a lack of resources but a lack of priorities of screening asylum-seekers,” said Schacher. “What I wish, is that people would be honest and say, ‘We are deliberately not devoting resources to asylum-seekers to send a deterrent message.’”

With the equivalent of a third of the population of Del Rio living under the bridge, Lozano posted a video stating that the local processing center was at capacity and asked: What was the Border Patrol supposed to do with the 20,000 who were projected to arrive?

The answer to Lozano’s question soon became clear. After the deplorable conditions made national headlines, immigration officials removed thousands of people from the camp within days. Deportation flights to Haiti began almost immediately. During one night, nearly 3,000 people were bused out. U.S. officials shut down the border and mobilized air support, the Coast Guard, state troopers, and the deployment of an additional 600 CBP agents and officers to the area.

Shortly before the camp was cleared, Owens posted a video describing the situation as “bat-shit crazy” and blaming the Biden administration for the arrival of the migrants, saying, “I’m going to go ahead and throw rocks at [Biden] because it’s his fault.”

When I asked about the lack of preparation or readiness, Owens said that county officials knew 45 days earlier that the projected caravans would arrive on the Acuña-Del Rio border. “What I’ve been told is that nobody expected it,” said Owens. Why there was no response or preparation? “I don’t have an answer,” he said, “I’m not going to throw rocks at Border Patrol.”

U.S. Border Patrol referred requests for comment to Customs and Border Protection, which referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security. Those questions went unanswered.

For his part, the massive government response within 48 hours left Lozano speechless. “Makes you wonder,” he said. “I don’t know how they explain it.”

For McMullen, the attorney at RFK Human Rights, the situation represents “a lack of transparency.” “They said they are overwhelmed,” he said. “Either that’s a lie or they don’t know how to treat migrants. It’s either gross incompetence or blatant lies.”

Fleeing From Texas

As word of the U.S. deportations spread through the camp, thousands of Haitians who had waited under the international bridge for processing fled back across the river to Mexico and took refuge in Parque Braulio Fernández Aguirre, a large park along the riverbank. U.S. authorities had closed the port of entry, and with the bridge closed, commerce ground to a halt between the U.S. and Acuña, home to at least 50 factories, many of which ship goods across the river. The U.S. told Mexican authorities that the bridge would be reopened once the Haitians were removed from the park. Meanwhile, the business community in Acuña demanded that Mexican officials do whatever was necessary to appease the Americans and reopen the bridge.

Mexican immigration authorities, backed by local police, rode through the city in caravans waging nightly raids. Agents abducted people from hotels, apartments, and even off the street. Haitians were loaded into buses and sent to Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, and Villahermosa in the Yucatán. The operations were reminiscent of the tactics regularly used by security forces a decade ago under President Felipe Calderón during Mexico’s “drug war,” when agents routinely grabbed people off the street and during traffic stops.

Andrés Ramírez, director of Mexico’s commission for refugees said in an interview with El Diario that Haitians should not be returned to Haiti because the country has been “absolutely devastated” by recent disasters, including an earthquake and presidential assassination. Less than a week later, the Mexican government announced the start of deportation flights to Haiti, which it termed “humanitarian returns.”

Thirty-year-old Jean was among those who joined the exodus from Del Rio. “It feels like a humiliation,” Jean told me. “I came from far for help and they rejected us.” Two of his friends had been deported to Haiti from the U.S.

When I met Jean, he had recently left Aguirre Park and moved to the Fandango, a nightclub with a massive courtyard that had been converted to a shelter. The relocation was not his choice. “They told us that they couldn’t reopen the bridge until we were gone,” he said.

We met at nightfall when hundreds of families and single men were settling into the Fandango. Tents had sprung up inside atop the old dance floor and along an enormous elegant bar. Volunteers unfurled more tents outside where armed soldiers with the Guardia Nacional roamed around. In the middle of the courtyard, children soon found spaces to play, and women rummaged through huge bags of donated clothes.

Left/Top: A member of the Mexican National Guard monitors a shelter for migrants in Acuña, Mexico, on Sept. 24, 2021. Right/Bottom: A child plays on a mattress as migrants stack up water bottle packages at a shelter in Acuña, Mexico, on Sept. 24, 2021. Photos: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Intercept

Jean wore a bright smile on his weathered face and said he had traveled to the U.S. from Chile through Panama’s treacherous Darién Gap, through Guatemala along the Atlantic coast and into Tampico before arriving in Acuña and crossing into Del Rio. Five years ago he had fled Haiti, embarking on long journey that included studying Spanish in the Dominican Republic, where he also learned English. He then migrated to Chile where he worked in the hotel and tourism industry and became a bodybuilder.

Nearby, Rev. Marco Rivera, the pastor of World Harvest Church Mexico, checked in on new arrivals. Rivera had intervened at the park to persuade people to move to the refuge, telling them it had been established for them. But they had reason to be distrustful of Mexican officials and were reluctant to leave.

“They were promised certain things and they broke their promises,” Rivera told me while he toured the Fandango. “For example, that they were safe there at the camp. Then about three days ago, at 3 o’clock in the morning, they came with cars and three buses; they filled them up and sent them away.” The next day Rivera combed the city for Haitians who had gone into hiding, to try and persuade them off the streets into the shelter where they wouldn’t be alone.

The chaotic response by the U.S. resulted in confusion and misinformation that left Gaby and her partner DeYoung feeling deceived. “They said pregnant women could stay,” said Gaby, who is six months pregnant. But with the announcement of deportation flights, such exemptions to rapid expulsion went unstated. Some 44 percent of Haitians deported this week were women and children. “I am not certain of anything,” she said, adding that she has been too stressed to even think about baby names.

Seated next to her, James, a tall man with dreadlocks piled high on his head retorted, “Name the baby Del Rio.” His suggestion stirred withering laughs from others nearby. To describe how he felt, James pulled up a meme of two images: an 1830 engraving of the slave trade depicting a man gripping a whip, next to the photo of Border Patrol agents on horseback chasing people who hail from the first country in the hemisphere that successfully revolted against slavery.

The next day the shelter courtyard looked like a tailgate party. Mexican families from the city to the small farm communities had piled up food and clothes to share with the Haitians. A Mexican toddler queued up to kick a soccer ball while a Haitian boy played defense.

Two sisters, Susana and Leticia Reyes, served dishes of pureed potatoes, salad, and chicken from their van. The meals represented the combined efforts of five family members plus a cousin in San Jose, California, who sent the funds to cover the ingredients. They were also motivated to help after watching the treatment of the Haitians. “We had never seen raids like the ones done to Haitians,” said Susana. “We thought it was a type of persecution.” For two years they had noticed Venezuelans, Cubans, and Haitians living in Acuña, but they had not heard about any raids.

Across the courtyard, Yesenia Castro and her family and friends had traveled to Acuña from a nearby rural community with their van loaded down with meals prepared by seven families. They too were moved by the plight of the Haitians, saying they had all experienced tough times when a meal was nothing more than a tortilla with beans. And they were motivated by indignation over ads warning Mexicans that it was a crime to give the Haitians a ride.

Left/Top: Christela, 28, left, a Haitian migrant, does the hair of volunteer Celia Guerra, 52, as Veloude, 28, right, fixes Celia’s hair at a migrant shelter in Acuña, Mexico, on Sept. 25, 2021. Right/Bottom: A Texas DPS helicopter is seen overhead from Acuña, Mexico, on Sept. 25, 2021. Photos: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Intercept

The fate of the Haitian asylum-seekers remained uncertain, and fear was pervasive. Jean and others were anxious about an impending visit by immigration officials that could result in their removal to the Guatemalan border. Twenty-eight-year-old Christela decided to pass the anxious moments by weaving an intricate and beautiful braid for one of the volunteers who had donated food. She didn’t want to think about the possibility of deportation, and she feared the bandits who were known for violence. The journey to Texas had been marked by fear and trauma; thieves robbed migrants and raped women. But for a few minutes, surrounded by people admiring her handiwork, she experienced an unfamiliar feeling: She felt content.

Two days after the camp was cleared, after thousands of Haitians had been deported to Haiti or bused from Acuña, two Haitians, one in red shorts and a red hat and another wearing a gray polo shirt, waded into the Rio Grande and turned themselves over to the Border Patrol as state troopers looked on, a military utility truck cruised by, and a CBP helicopter hovered closely.

The post U.S. Border Authorities Failed to Prepare for Influx of Haitian Migrants Despite Weeks of Warnings appeared first on The Intercept.

Nelson and his wife, Maura, are from Puerto Cortés, a Caribbean port city in northwestern Honduras. Along with other migrants and asylum-seekers interviewed for this story, they requested that only their first names be used to avoid risks to their security or immigration status. Nelson and Maura owned their modest home in Honduras, but it was near the edge of a large lagoon. When hurricanes Eta and Iota swept through Central America in November, the swollen Chamelecón River fed the lagoon faster than it could empty into the sea, flooding their neighborhood.

“The flooding took everything away,” Nelson told The Intercept. They were able to stay temporarily in a makeshift shelter in a kindergarten but eventually ended up living on the side of a road under a plastic tarp. Between the hurricane devastation and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, there was no work available to alleviate their situation and very little humanitarian aid. “We lived in the encampment in the street until we came here,” said Nelson.

The couple made it to Mexico 12 days after a significant and much publicized deployment of immigration officials and military and National Guard troops to the southern border, but none were in sight. The Suchiate River separating Guatemala and Mexico was low enough that Nelson and Maura could wade across, and it was not until later in Tapachula that they witnessed Mexico’s militarized immigration enforcement.

“The response of the Biden administration is very similar to the response of the Trump administration.”

Militarization and crackdowns on migrants and asylum-seekers extend more than a thousand miles south of the U.S. border. Periodic shows of force at Mexico’s southern border tend to occur when there’s heightened U.S. pressure and attention on Central American migration, particularly in the context of highly visible “migrant caravan” groups. But more often than not, operations are less geographically concentrated and tend to fly under the radar. It’s not just migrants and asylum-seekers transiting the country who are the targets of militarized immigration operations, but also people seeking asylum in southern Mexico. The specifics are often in flux, but the bigger picture remains the same: The militarization of immigration enforcement far south of the U.S. border has been increasing and is U.S.-driven.

“With the new administration in the U.S., many people had expectations for a potential change in focus. We have been more wary from the beginning,” Yuriria Salvador, coordinator for structural change at the Fray Matías de Córdova Human Rights Center, told The Intercept in the courtyard of the organization’s office in Tapachula. “The response of the Biden administration is very similar to the response of the Trump administration.”

A Show of Force

White House spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters on April 12 that the Biden administration had secured commitments from the governments of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras to increase border security. “I think the objective is to make it more difficult to make the journey and make crossing the border more — more difficult,” Psaki said at the briefing.

The Guatemalan government was quick to issue a statement countering the notion that there was any agreement and clarified that the deployment of 1,500 police and military personnel mentioned by Psaki was a temporary response to a caravan. The Honduran government likewise insisted that there was no deal. Following the confusion and contradictions, Ricardo Zúñiga, U.S. special envoy for Central America’s Northern Triangle, revisited the issue and stated that there were ongoing bilateral discussions but not any new agreements.

Mexico’s response was more ambiguous. “Mexico made the decision to maintain 10,000 troops at its southern border, resulting in twice as many daily migrant interdictions,” Psaki said on April 12. The Mexican government clarified that its efforts involved 12,000 people, though not just troops and not just to the southern border. The government did mention an agreement concerning efforts to address the migration of minors but did not provide any details.

Mexico’s National Institute of Immigration, or INM, declined to provide The Intercept with estimates of how many personnel had been deployed to the southern border states of Chiapas and Tabasco, instead highlighting that the inter-institutional actions were intended “to identify and, when applicable, provide care for migrant minors.” National and state-level agencies for the protection of children and teenagers are part of the coordinated Mexican response. But so are the army, the navy, and the National Guard.

“There’s confusion about the agreement. There could at least be clear communication,” said Salvador. “However, regardless of whether it exists on paper or not, there have been meetings and coordination.”

“There’s confusion about the agreement. There could at least be clear communication.”

Mexico’s border restrictions are clearer than whatever commitment it might have made to the U.S. regarding deployment. In March, overland entry at the southern border was restricted to essential travel only. The measure was extended for another month in late April. Restrictions on nonessential travel at Mexico’s northern border only apply to states with high Covid-19 risk, and only one of the six border states is currently high risk. At the southern border, though, restrictions remain in place regardless of Covid-19 risk levels.

Most migrants and asylum-seekers crossing from Guatemala into Mexico are not doing so at official border crossings and were therefore unaffected by the land border restrictions. But shortly after announcing the restrictions, the Mexican government also announced the mass inter-institutional deployments to the southern border. Hundreds of immigration agents, National Guard troops, and other forces assembled in cities in Chiapas and Tabasco.

Fernando watched the troops assemble in Tapachula 10 days after he arrived from western Honduras. “They put on like a show,” he told The Intercept. “I saw it and I just thought, ‘Why are they doing this?’”

Targeting Asylum-Seekers

Threats from gang members were the main reason Fernando fled Honduras, but like many migrants and asylum-seekers, there was not just one factor driving his decision. Fernando also lost his jobs at the outset of the pandemic, when lockdowns brought an end to his work as a bicycle taxi driver and in a coffee processing plant. Then flooding from hurricanes Eta and Iota damaged his family’s home, appliances, and other belongings. He was fleeing violence but also needed to be able to work to support his baby daughter.

Since arriving in Tapachula just over a month ago, Fernando has been living in the street, sleeping on flattened pizza boxes and other pieces of cardboard that he finds around town. He and several other Central Americans pooled some money to buy a kilogram of tortillas, thick cream, and a three-liter bottle of soda to feed themselves and others who had nothing to eat.

They had just finished their collective meal when four cousins who said they were fleeing gang violence in the Honduran capital stopped by to ask about routes to continue north. Like Fernando, they had no problem crossing the Suchiate River into Mexico and easily skirted a militarized immigration checkpoint along the way, but routes north from Tapachula through the state of Chiapas are often riddled with checkpoints and enforcement operations. For the past several years, Mexico has deported or otherwise returned more Hondurans than the United States, and roughly as many Guatemalans.

In the first four months of this year, 31,842 people — roughly half of them from Honduras — requested asylum in Mexico.

Fernando explained that he chose the less risky albeit much longer option of applying for protection and a visa in Tapachula, processes that will likely take three to six months. Asylum applications in Mexico have increased drastically over the past eight years, with the exception of last year, when the pandemic limited mobility. In the first four months of this year, 31,842 people — roughly half of them from Honduras — requested asylum in Mexico, and officials expect that applications could reach 90,000 in 2021, breaking the 2019 record. More than two-thirds applied in Tapachula. Some want to remain in Mexico, while others hope to obtain temporary protection and immigration status that will enable them to travel legally through Mexico to the U.S. border.

Immigration agents, the National Guard, and other security forces do not just carry out identification checks and enforcement operations at the border. They also do so within Tapachula, frequently in the city’s central plaza in the evening and sometimes in neighborhoods with high concentrations of migrant residents. Samuel, a Haitian asylum-seeker who requested that his name be changed, has been subject to documentation checks a few times during his several months waiting for a resolution to his request for protection. “Sometimes they treat us like criminals,” he told The Intercept.

“We are still facing the mentality of ‘the enemy,’” said Salvador, of the Fray Matías de Córdova Human Rights Center. “It creates an atmosphere of much more racism and xenophobia in the city.” Migrants and asylum-seekers are the main targets of anti-migrant discourse and enforcement operations, she said, but sometimes Mexican advocates observing operations or defending migrant rights have also been detained.

Migrant advocates in Tapachula told The Intercept they were deeply concerned about a local report of joint operations by immigration officials and the National Guard right outside the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, or COMAR, late one night at the end of March. So many people request protection that if they aren’t in line well before dawn, they are unlikely to get in on any given day. As a result, most people planning on requesting asylum spend the night outside the office, and nighttime enforcement operations there would inherently target asylum-seekers in line to begin the process.

Mexico’s immigration agency stated that it had no knowledge of any immigration enforcement operations outside the COMAR office. “INM personnel in the municipality of Tapachula in Chiapas have no record of operations carried out in the vicinity of the [COMAR] office nor does it have any record of any complaints to that effect,” INM told The Intercept.

Feliciana listened to the descriptions of the late-night detentions with concern. She had not made it to the COMAR office on a Friday in time to get in and would have to wait until Monday to request asylum. A single mother, she left Guatemala with her children after assailants shot at her house, presumably in retribution for violence carried out by one of her relatives. Feliciana and her kids fled, leaving nearly everything behind, she said. She requested that her real name not be used for security reasons.

“People are leaving because they badly need to.”

“I was so scared the whole way here,” she told The Intercept. “I am still scared.”

Like many Central Americans fleeing violence, Feliciana worries that she might be easy to find right across the border in Tapachula if she sticks around for months in the hopes of obtaining legal status. But she also worries about the risk of getting caught and sent back if she decides to head north. Feliciana also finds it deplorable that Guatemala is following in Mexico’s footsteps and ramping up militarized crackdowns on migrants and asylum-seekers in transit.

“I lived in Honduras, and I know how it is,” she said. “People are leaving because they badly need to.”

The post “Enemy Mentality”: Mexico Cracks Down on Migrants and Asylum-Seekers at Its Southern Border appeared first on The Intercept.

“It’s 30 miles to the next type of town — and that’s 30 miles of open desert,” Mayor Chris Riggs said on Tuesday. “Come July and August, we’re going to be finding bodies.”

The town council of Gila Bend, population 2,000, voted unanimously in favor of the emergency declaration. Riggs told Arizona’s Family, a local TV news outlet, that he and his wife recently used borrowed vans to personally drive 16 people — Chilean and Venezuelan families with young children — some 70 miles northeast to Phoenix.

Gila Bend is not alone. In the unincorporated community of Ajo, 40 miles to the south, the Border Patrol has dropped off dozens of people in the past week. The town has no hospital, no fire department, and no police force. With around 3,700 residents, Ajo is surrounded by a vast expanse of federal lands that include some of the Sonoran Desert’s deadliest and most remote terrain. In 2020, when Arizona broke a 10-year record for the most human remains recovered in a single year, many of those bodies and bones were found in the valleys and washes outside Ajo.

Aaron Cooper, executive director of the International Sonoran Desert Alliance, a community organization that often serves the functions of a local government in Ajo, said the first group of migrants was dropped off last Friday. There were 21 people, Cooper said; a total of 54 people have been dropped off in Ajo since the shift in policy began, and 38 more are expected to arrive today.

“It’s been all family units to date,” Cooper told The Intercept. “No individual females or males and no unaccompanied children. It’s been mostly mothers with young kids — kids from age 2 up to 13.” Many of the families have been from Venezuela, he added, but Cubans and Chileans have arrived as well as well.

“We’ve managed to kind of hustle and pull together something that will work short term until a better solution is devised. But we’re not equipped to do this indefinitely.”

In response to the drop-offs, community members have stitched together a patchwork system to test families for Covid-19 and then transport them more than 130 miles east to Tucson, where the Border Patrol has historically taken the people agents apprehend in the desert. Cooper said Pima County officials have provided support in responding to the new policy — the Pima County Board of Supervisors recently held an emergency meeting to discuss a potential contract for transportation of asylum-seekers — and that the community has also worked closely with Casa Alitas, a Tucson-based shelter that has long provided services for migrants moving through Arizona.

“They did a great job of helping us really kind of stay in our lane and figure out what the most effective response might be, which in this case was to develop kind of a temporary transportation hub to, as quickly as possible, get folks Covid tested, rapid Covid tested, and then get them on transportation to the Casa Alitas Welcome Center,” Cooper said.

The system is holding together for the moment, Cooper said, but “it’s not the sort of thing that is going to be able to have a long life cycle without breaking down.”

“We’ve managed to kind of hustle and pull together something that will work short term until a better solution is devised,” he said. “But we’re not equipped to do this indefinitely.”

In Arizona, the Border Patrol’s shift in policy is the result of several factors, including an increase in unaccompanied migrant children seeking asylum, the interplay between a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rule known as Title 42 and the Mexican government’s response to it, and a court-ordered injunction concerning deplorable conditions in Border Patrol detention cells in the state.

Title 42, which went into effect this time last year, allows Border Patrol agents to rapidly expel unauthorized border crossers without a hearing. Though promulgated by the CDC with the stated purpose of stopping the spread of Covid-19, the invocation of Title 42 was the brainchild of senior Trump administration immigration adviser Stephen Miller, and it went into effect over the objections of public health professionals within the agency. From an arrest in the field to expulsion from the country, the entire process can take less than two hours.

“The unique challenges of the pandemic require additional authorities, such as the CDC order known as Title 42, to allow DHS to effectively protect both the health and safety of migrants and our communities from the spread of COVID-19,” Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, said in a statement to The Intercept. “The border is not open, and the vast majority of people are being returned under Title 42.”

With more than 530,000 expulsions and counting, Title 42 has been the primary way in which the Border Patrol has removed unauthorized border crossers and asylum-seekers over the past year. Though the Trump administration’s unprecedented practice of expelling unaccompanied children by the thousands came to an end late last year, the American Civil Liberties Union’s top immigration litigator has said that President Joe Biden’s continued use of Title 42 as a border enforcement deterrent is “flatly illegal.”

In recent weeks, the White House has gone to great lengths to deliver the message that the border is closed and that asylum-seekers should wait until a more agreeable time to exercise their rights under domestic and international law.

In his first press briefing since taking office, Biden said on Thursday that his administration was doing its best to repel as many immigrants as possible. “We’re sending back the vast majorities of families that are coming,” the president told reporters. The administration’s efforts to expel every migrant who is not an unaccompanied child have been complicated, however, by Mexican laws and policies governing the migrant populations that the country is willing to receive. According to CBP data shared with The Intercept, the Border Patrol expelled roughly 88 percent of the people it deemed eligible for Title 42 in Arizona last month. Biden said his administration is negotiating with Mexico to see to it that the country resumes receiving migrant families with children.

“I think we are going to see that can change,” the president said, adding that asylum-seeking families “should all be going back.”

Republicans, meanwhile, have taken the position that Biden is not doing enough and that a more muscular, militarized response is needed to confront would-be asylum-seekers. On Friday, 19 Republican senators participated in a photo op in South Texas, cruising down the Rio Grande in gun boats with heavily armed state police. Meanwhile, in Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey tweeted that he was ready to partner with the federal government to “resolve the issues at the border,” signaling that he would call up the National Guard.

Historically, migrants apprehended in the Arizona desert have been taken to a nearby Border Patrol station before being transferred to a second location, often Tucson, for the next stage of their journey through the nation’s interlocking criminal and immigration systems. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, most migrants who were not part of a family unit would first be prosecuted criminally at Tucson’s federal court under a program known as “Operation Streamline” before being moved into the immigration system. The process for families could be more complicated and dependent on individual circumstances but still involved transfer from the desert into cities with available resources.

Now the Border Patrol is processing those individuals whom the agency cannot expel as fast as possible, terminating custody at the station level and then dropping them in the nearest possible population center.

In part, the Border Patrol’s shift is the result of an injunction stemming from a lawsuit focused on Border Patrol detention facilities in the agency’s Tucson Sector, a CBP official, speaking on background, told The Intercept. Referred to in Arizona as the “Jane Doe” suit, the lawsuit alleged that “men, women, and children” in Southern Arizona were held “in freezing, overcrowded, and filthy cells for days at a time in violation of the U.S. Constitution.” Following a trial last January, a federal judge ruled that migrants in the Tucson Sector may not be detained in holding cells at Border Patrol facilities for more than 48 hours unless the agency provides for their “basic human needs,” such as a bed with a blanket, healthy food, a medical assessment by a medical professional, and other requirements.

According to the CBP official, Border Patrol agents in Arizona are continuing to use Title 42 to expel migrant families back to Mexico. When that’s not possible — because Mexico won’t receive them or for other reasons — the Border Patrol will look to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the nation’s lead agency on interior immigration enforcement, to see if the family can be placed in what’s known as an “alternative to detention” program. If that’s not possible, then the family is processed and released on its own recognizance. The official said community stakeholders in Southern Arizona were first notified in January that the releases would likely occur.

“We were just saying be ready,” the official said. With a rising number of unaccompanied children entering Border Patrol custody, the official said the moment the Border Patrol was warning about has now come. Combined with the court injunction, he added, “our holding capability here is significantly lower than a lot of the other sectors.”

“There’s no local decision-making involved here. It’s nobody in our local station. It’s no organization in our community.”

Earlier this month, the Arizona Republic published a detailed account of the Border Patrol’s “dramatic shift in policy,” describing how the agency told local officials, churches, and aid organizations to expect hundreds of migrants to be dropped off in their communities, releases that would coincide with the state’s blistering summer months, when migrant deaths in the desert historically skyrocket.

According to the report, the Border Patrol dropped approximately 1,000 migrants off at three small border communities with little to no resources from mid-February through mid-March.

The amount of lead time the Border Patrol station near Ajo has given community leaders before drops are made has varied widely, Cooper said. “We’re pushing for more,” he said. “I think our local station is doing the best they can, but they often don’t have the full picture at the station level, and so they’re also responding on the fly.” It is not uncommon for the Border Patrol’s Ajo station to apprehend groups of migrants numbering into the hundreds. The community’s ad-hoc system cannot transport more than 28 people in a day, a fact that Cooper said he has stressed to local agents.

“We’ve done the best we can to message that this is not a local decision,” Cooper said. “There’s no local decision-making involved here. It’s nobody in our local station. It’s no organization in our community.” Right now, he said, the main goal is to get people where they need to go in a safe and efficient manner: “That’s what we’re all hoping comes out of this eventually.”

The post The Border Patrol Is Dropping Migrant Families in Arizona Desert Towns With Little Capacity to Receive Them appeared first on The Intercept.

Whatever else has happened over the last three months, the joint campaign with Rev. Raphael Warnock has rubbed off on both Democratic Senate candidates. The two have been joined at the hip on the campaign trail, and the results tonight are showing the effect, with Ossoff trailing closely behind Warnock in their respective races. And so far, it seems to have worked. They both needed to win for it to matter, and their campaigns reflected political reality. On Tuesday, there was no Warnock without Ossoff, and vice versa.

The contrast between their very practical, very tactical campaigns and the maddeningly dysfunctional Republican ones couldn’t have been starker. Democrats in Georgia have always presumed that the mechanisms of elections would be turned against them, and planned accordingly. Democrats assembled voter suppression strike teams and had a highly organized system for locating people whose absentee ballots had been rejected due to a signature mismatch, likely saving thousands of lost votes.

The last best example of Democrats trying to team up in Georgia would be Jason Carter running for governor against Nathan Deal and Michelle Nunn running for the Senate against David Perdue in 2014.

Their teams believed that they could pull enough white voters on a center-left platform and the strength of the legacy of their family political dynasties: Jason is the grandson of Jimmy Carter, while Michelle is the daughter of former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn. The political math on the left at the time centered on the belief that a Democratic candidate could only win with at least 30 percent of white voter support. Neither cracked 25, losing by about 7 percentage points overall. I watched Jason Carter speak eloquently and honestly about his faith in front of large Black churches in DeKalb County, where he was serving as a state senator. But notably, communities of color underperformed for the pair relative to turnout for Barack Obama.

It was in the crucible of this loss that then-state representative and minority leader Stacey Abrams began to argue loudly for a reimagining of Democratic politics here. Black voters won’t turn out for candidates with whom they do not identify, and campaigns have to focus on their support to win enough turnout to change the math, she said.

Meanwhile, Republicans have spent much of the runoff jerking from one manufactured crisis to another. Lin Wood and white nationalists calling for a boycott of the election. Photos of Sen. Kelly Loeffler emerged with a white nationalist leader and the campaign manager of a Ku Klux Klan candidate for sheriff in north Georgia. Donald Trump did what Donald Trump does: make a mess others are forced to clean up and apologize for.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who now represents the northwest corner of Georgia in Congress, has been spreading QAnon conspiracy theories about a stolen election since November. She’s also an anti-masker; House leaders threw her off the floor on her first day for refusing to wear a mask. These two moral maladies are connected.

Most people in Georgia voted early, one way or another: either by absentee or early voting. But early voter turnout in the heavily Republican north Georgia counties is running 5 to 10 points behind the state average; it’s why the president held a rally in Dalton. Between skepticism about the fidelity of voting machine tabulation and fear that an absentee ballot might be tampered with, it would be reasonable to conclude that the #stopthesteal rhetoric depressed voter turnout in the heart of conservative Georgia.

And, as the pandemic rages on, many north Georgia counties consolidated their polling locations as a preventative measure. Fewer polling places in counties that already have low population density may have also depressed election day turnout.

Later on the same morning, Ossoff was barnstorming through the Atlanta suburbs, and I found myself surrounded by shofars on a street corner across from the state Capitol. The “Georgia Prayer March” had descended on Atlanta. It’s worth noting that most of the folks I saw weren’t actually from Georgia.

They walked around the Capitol seven times, blowing horns like Jericho. A young man from Brooklyn, dreadlocked and hemp-fibered, explained to me in complete earnestness that America’s government is ordained by God, and if Loeffler and Perdue don’t win on Tuesday, the country will be destroyed in hellfire within a year. In the text he sent to me with his contact information, he misspelled his own name.

Let me say on behalf of all Georgians: We’re a little tired of being the center of the political universe. Go home. All of you. We love you. Get out.

It would be easy to blame the self-immolation of the Republican campaigns in Georgia on the fecklessness of the candidates, but I think what we saw were rational politicians responding to an irrational political marketplace. Loeffler, Perdue, and others seemed to behave as though they’d lose their elections unless they appeared to be out in front of the mob braying for undeserved power, or else be replaced later in a primary by someone who will at least appear nuttier than they are. Many are absolutely correct in this political assessment.

Hillary Clinton described these voters as a “basket of deplorables.” She was castigated for it. But she was absolutely correct. A voting majority of the Republican primary electorate are some combination of conspiracy-swilling white supremacists (or people with enough racial resentment to be indifferent to them), religious fundamentalists who believe the laws of the country are subordinate to their interpretation of biblical law, or kleptocrats defending their estates. That’s somewhat more than half the party.

Just before Trump held a rally Monday night in north Georgia, Loeffler announced that she too would be challenging the results of the Electoral College on the day after the election. She hadn’t been willing to commit to that publicly.

A supposition: Trump made a last-minute demand for Loeffler to challenge the vote in order to get him to appear in Dalton. He introduced uncertainty, and she caved because she is fundamentally risk-averse and doing what powerful people tell her to do has worked so far.

The same impulse made Loeffler memorize what other people told her to say in the debate. She sounded like a robot wearing a skinsuit, but that’s a feature in her world, not a bug.

If you thought that winning this election was enough, you’re not paying enough attention. Senators who said the remedy for presidential misconduct was an election are now attempting to set aside that election. They believe it is necessary to lie and cheat because the Republican base punishes anyone who will not lie or cheat in their name.

In a sane political universe, the president would have been arrested once the phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brian Raffensperger was made public. As it stands, the just-elected district attorney of Fulton County is exploring charges. The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, Byung J. Pak, might have considered a similar investigation — but he resigned suddenly Monday afternoon, citing “unforeseen circumstances.” Pak is a former Republican state legislator and federal prosecutor, and a Trump appointee, whom I have known for many years. I have reason to trust him implicitly, as does most of the political establishment of Georgia, left and right. Pak is widely considered the best chance in Georgia for an Asian American to win statewide office.

Trump derisively referred to him as a “Never Trumper” on the Raffensperger call.

This election will imprint itself on the political psyche of Georgia for a generation. For the first time in a long time, structures will have been built that will endure through an election cycle, given the strength of the Democratic showing. And, normally, I would expect a round of soul-searching among Republicans, an after-action review to adjust. But I doubt it this time.

Mired in conspiracy and lying to itself, the self-corrective mechanisms of politics here are broken on the right. Too few Republican political leaders here — leaders, as in people who have followers — seem prepared to be honest with the right-leaning public about what happened and how to fix it.

Meanwhile, I fear that there is no step the incoming president can take to right the ship that will seem strong enough to be satisfying, not without creating legal issues that complicate governance. The guillotine is incompatible with the rule of law. Perhaps this ending cascade of outrages is meant to make of us what has been made of them, to infect the left with the irrationality plaguing the right.

The post While Republicans Fractured, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff Teamed Up — and It Seems to Have Worked appeared first on The Intercept.

Earlier this week Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware led a congressional delegation to a Texas immigration detention facility housing children who arrived unaccompanied at the border. Also on the trip was Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, who joins Ryan Grim to talk about the present and future of U.S. immigration policy.

[Introduction music.]

Ryan Grim: I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome to Deconstructed.

When Donald Trump’s policy of separating children from their parents at the southern border hit the radar of the national media in 2018, what followed was one of the more embarrassing and revealing press blunders in recent memory. Some national news outlets illustrated their coverage of Trump’s border policy with harrowing photos of children in cages, wallowing in deplorable conditions. The photos sparked outrage around the world, yet before too long people started to point out an inconvenient fact: Some of the images were of children caged during the Obama years, swept up in a wave of border crossings by unaccompanied minors in 2014. Those photos, which had long been public, had produced little in the way of outrage back then.

Now, deliberately separating children from their parents as Trump did, for the explicit purpose of terrorizing them and discouraging further immigration, is a crime under international law. But it is also horrifying that our immigration policy led to children being kept in cages in 2014 and in plenty of other years. And while it’s true that prior to Trump children who wound up detained alone came here unaccompanied — already separated from their parents — in most cases that separation wasn’t exactly voluntary. It was forced on them by economic desperation and the violence sewed by political instability, corruption, and climate collapse.

The media’s photo mishap, and the reaction to it, suggested that Democrats were concerned less with the plight of migrants than with which president was responsible for it.

I feel like I have a bit of credibility on this question. Because in June 2014, along with my HuffPost colleague Jen Bendery, I was the first national reporter to document those kids in cages. I had been chasing the story when a reporter for Breitbart Texas, Brandon Darby, beat us to it and posted those harrowing photos. I reached out and asked if we could republish them on our site. He agreed, we authenticated them, and made it our top story, back when the Huffington Post’s top story would drive the news cycle.

I wasn’t excited about promoting anything from Breitbart — though Breitbart Texas is a bit of a different beast and has done some genuinely decent border coverage. Either way, it was too important to let that get in the way, and it didn’t matter to me as a journalist that Obama was at the helm. It was still a humanitarian catastrophe.

The one upside of all the outrage at Trump, who did indeed take the evil to a new level, is that progressives and Democrats now understand the necessity of dealing with this situation. It’s too shameful to ignore any longer. But to think of it as simply a temporary crisis is wrong. Northward migration from Central America is normal — it’s here to stay — and as the climate continues to collapse, it will only increase. Our immigration policy will have to grapple with that reality.

And that means we have to think completely differently about what our immigration, refugee, and asylum system should look like at the border. We have to think much more expansively about our TPS program, which stands for temporary protected status. TPS gives migrants broader protections if they’re coming from countries where it’s generally too dangerous to return.

We have to ask a very basic question: Why are cops involved in the process of caring for detained children in the first place? What possible justification could there be for that arrangement? So far, Joe Biden has barely scratched the surface of these questions.

Last week, our episode laid out the parallels between the emigration from Ireland during the potato famine in the 1840s and the emigration from Central America now. If you haven’t yet, I’d encourage you to go back and listen to that episode as the background for this one. We had planned on including an interview with Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who represents the border city of El Paso, Texas, but she had to cancel last minute in order to tour a new facility being set up to house unaccompanied minors while they’re being processed.

If you’ve been following the border story at all, you’ve no doubt heard again and again that Joe Biden’s softer tone on immigration is the reason that so many people went across into the U.S. these days. It’s a point we talked about on the show last week with John Washington and José Luis Sanz, and it’s a point that representative Escobar tackled in a press conference in Texas on Monday.

Rep. Veronica Escobar: For four weeks the national media have been focused on: “Did Joe Biden being a nice guy cause this?” Just a week or two ago we had 18 senators parachute into a border community in South Texas. I urged the media to ask them: What have they done to bring forward solutions?

On Tuesday, she was able to join us to talk about the current situation, and what needs to be done.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: Congresswoman Escobar, welcome to Deconstructed.

VE: I’m so happy to be joining.

RG: You toured the central facility this morning. What did you see there compared to what you had seen before?

VE: You know, I’ll tell you. I’ve spent a lot of time inside those facilities throughout 2019 and I’ve started going in pretty frequently as soon as it became safer under Covid regulations, when I got vaccinated, etc.

I think this is a very important thing to remind the American public about: In 2019, we saw conditions that, from my perspective, were human rights abuses. Children who were wearing the same clothes that they traveled thousands of miles in, they were wearing them throughout their stay in our processing centers. They didn’t have access to toothbrushes, didn’t have access to showers, didn’t have access to hot meals. Some of them were being held outdoors in triple-digit temperatures, in the hot Southwest El Paso sun. The same thing happened during the winter months, being held outdoors or in insufficient facilities.

So while it is absolutely never appropriate to hold a child in confined buildings, I think it is important for the context that our supplemental funding did improve conditions somewhat. So kids now have access to hot meals, to more thorough medical screenings, so no longer do you just smell humanity when you walk into those facilities. It really was inhumane. And so the conditions are better. They’re being held in shelters for shorter periods of time.

RG: Mhmm.

VE: The Trump administration put up all sorts of obstacles, trying to prevent families from being reunited. The Biden administration is approaching this in the opposite way, doing everything possible to quickly and safely get families who are here in the U.S. reunited.

When I visited shelters in 2019, I spoke to kids who had been in those shelters for six months, nine months; I even met kids who had been there for a year. Yesterday, as I toured some of the shelters, kids had been there two weeks, the managers of the facility said their average stay before they can get them reunited with their families is about 35 days. So there’s progress. Is it still unacceptable? It is. But there’s progress.

RG: Kids aren’t supposed to be in there for longer than 72 hours. Do the people that run these facilities try to hit that target? And what’s the consequences if they don’t?

VE: Here’s what happens today: A Border Patrol agent picks up a child or a group of children and they take them to what’s called the Central Processing Center. At the Central Processing Center, kids are still under Border Patrol custody. They’re put in what are called pods, in large rooms. They are given fresh clothes, fresh food, shower, toiletries, etc, all those improvements that we talked about.

But that’s where they’re not supposed to be held for more than 72 hours, because those are just not great conditions for children. What is supposed to happen is there supposed to be very quickly processed; in other words, an assessment made about whether they have a criminal history, and whether they have a sponsor in the country. If they don’t have a criminal history, and if they have a sponsor in the country, they’re supposed to very quickly be moved into HHS custody, and they’re supposed to go to a shelter. And a shelter is a much better situation for kids. They have their own bed, their own bathroom, access to mental health care, primary health care caseworkers who are working to quickly reunite kids with their family or their sponsor. But what’s happening now is because the Trump administration essentially ignored the increase in numbers that began in September, and because of Covid, and they were basically telling shelters that they should only operate at 50 percent capacity or in some cases, 25 percent capacity, shelters, the licensed facilities that kids should be in while they wait for their family, folks were laid off, and the bed space was kind of shut down. And instead of finding other shelters in order to ramp up and still follow CDC guidelines, the Trump administration just did nothing. And so month after month after month, as the numbers have been increasing, the shelter space capacity has not grown to meet the need, because there was a four-month lag.

And so the Biden administration is doing everything it can to build what are called influx facilities: those facilities that folks see on their TV when they watch the news, the big white tents that are HHS facilities, so they’re better than CBP facilities, because at least in HHS influx shelters, you have HHS personnel, and caseworkers, mental health care workers, and they’re not being detained by someone with a gun in a badge, who is a law enforcement agent trained for completely different functions.

So they’re doing the Biden administration is doing the best they can with what they inherited from the Trump administration and with the increase in kids. My view is, I don’t think kids should be in CBP custody at all, but that would mean a complete re-envisioning of the system.

RG: What would a reformed system look like? Comprehensively reformed?

VE: I think that first and foremost, we have to acknowledge that there have been complete domestic policy and foreign policy failures on migration issues in our hemisphere. There has not been any sort of strategic, concerted effort to bring together all of the leaders of this hemisphere to think through migration as it’s been happening over the last decade.

We have got to reengage from a very smart foreign policy strategy, engage everyone in the Western Hemisphere, but we also should re-envision the way that we address migration at our front door. I don’t believe that children and families should be in CBP custody. CBP and Border Patrol have the ability to do very quick background checks, even quick fingerprint checks to determine whether or not a child or family members are national security threats. The vast majority of them pose no national security threats.

RG: Right.

VE: And so why are we as a country then apprehending and putting them into custody in criminal-like conditions and warehousing? I believe they should very quickly be moved to HHS custody. And once in HHS custody, I believe that they should very rapidly have access to counsel. And the Migration Policy Institute, under Doris Meissner, had this interesting proposal — I don’t agree with all of it — but the proposal from MPI was: Have asylum hearing officers basically adjudicate those cases. I think that that is actually a smart strategy, but what I would add would be the legal component. Every family, every child, I think, should have access to counsel, as their case, their asylum hearing is adjudicated, and they should have the right to appeal to a judge.

And I think if they decide to appeal, then they should be released on alternatives to detention. And I think this would shrink the number of people in CBP custody. Border Patrol could get back to performing their law enforcement functions, instead of the mission creep, which has happened now, you know, where they are basically holding families and kids, while they are untrained to do that, and don’t have the resources or the facilities for it.

At the same time, Ryan, we have to acknowledge that over decades, as we have limited access to legal migration, we have essentially fuelled illegal immigration, and we have fueled those opportunities for human traffickers. So if we want to limit undocumented immigration, and if we want to lessen the power of the criminal organizations that traffic in these vulnerable souls, then we need to open up legal pathways for people. That means considering TPS, for example, for those families who are fleeing the climate catastrophes in their region. That means opening up refugee status for family reunification. That includes families who have been here without status, but who have been contributing to agriculture, construction, hospitality, etc. You know, we have benefited as a country, from their labor, from their work, from their commitment.

So it is a far more holistic approach, I think. It’s obviously an ambitious approach, but it would completely re-envision the way that we approach the situation, especially at our front door.

RG: Do you think CBP would resist that approach? They claim to not want to be in the business that they’re currently in. But do you think that’s true? Do you think some part of them has come to cherish this role they’re playing?

VE: You know, I will tell you, I think that, yes. [Laughs.] To answer your question, I do think they would resist this, because in touring the Central Processing Center today with some of my House colleagues and with one of our U.S. senators, I mentioned that and I mentioned it in front of a group of Border Patrol agents. And one of them, as I was walking out, approached me and he expressed concern about it,

RG: How so? What was his concern? What was his objection?

VE: His view was: Then how are we going to investigate, basically, fraud cases? And I said, “I think there’s a way to do it.” But I think, right now, what’s happening is the reverse of what should be happening. We are keeping children and families in what feels like criminal custody. And the vast majority of them, their one violation of the law is a civil violation. And if they want to request asylum, or seek asylum, we are really limiting their ability to do it. And so let’s do the reverse. Let’s put them in HHS custody, so that we get them out of your custody, so that you can do your job.

And I told him: “Surely you don’t like the mission creep that’s been happening. I mean, you have had to care for children.” And I will tell you, Ryan, I’ve had agents complain to me for years about that.

RG: What do you think that divide is among the CBP itself, within the agents, and also the difference between the leadership and the agents on this question?

VE: In my experience, so many of these agents are really hard-working, dedicated law enforcement men and women. And they want to be able to do their job, and they believe in their job.

And I know a lot of these folks. I mean, obviously, not every single Border Patrol agent. But with some of the agents of my generation, I went to school with them, or college with them, or high school with them, have gone to church with them. Border Patrol agents, and federal law enforcement, is inherent in border life. Our community sees a lot of these jobs. And I have met many of these agents, especially in my role as a member of Congress over the years. And the vast majority of them, I would tell you, are very good hearted, just want to do their job. And they hang their hat on the fact that they’ve been trained to do a job and they just want to do the job that they were trained to do.

There are, I think, some very corrosive toxic people within the Border Patrol as well.

RG: I mean, has the leadership turned over, in the sense that they recognize that they actually have to be subservient to the new civilian government? Or are you getting the sense that they feel like they’re kind of still out on this border post, and they don’t answer to anybody but themselves?

VE: I’ll tell you that the minority that is, to me, very dangerous — and I couldn’t tell you the breakdown. I think the agents that I’ve talked to, who are good folks, I don’t know what percentage they make up within the agency.

But the really dangerous component in the agency, I have long suspected, collaborate with the border militia, collaborate with people who want to film vulnerable souls who come to our custody. I believe that there is a component that wants to obstruct President Biden’s efforts and Secretary Mayorkas’ efforts, and would love to see a more compassionate approach fail, and completely embraced and celebrated the cruelty of the Trump administration and their approach.

And it’s those sick forces that I am very worried about. I have also heard from people in Washington, who would know this, that there are a number of QAnon followers within Border Patrol, and I find that deeply threatening as well,

RG: How high up have you heard it goes?

VE: You know, I’m still asking questions. So I don’t know how high up it goes. But I think that there needs to be a deep cultural change. There needs to be a rooting out of people who were instrumental in coming up with policies that were intended to be cruel.

And I think we had some of those forces here in El Paso. There have since been leadership changes. But unfortunately, what happens is people get transferred, and they get promoted, and they move on, and there’s no accountability. Ugh, it is very, very difficult to have accountability. And you know, as I’ve told members of the community, that is not good for the good agents, the people who just want to do their job, the people who believe in their work; same with local law enforcement. We should create deep-rooted accountability, because it roots out those who should not have a gun or a badge, and it uplifts those who are doing their best to do good work.

RG: So are you considering legislation that would kind of rewrite the way that this is done? Is there anybody in the House or Senate who is fundamentally thinking about this, beyond slogans?

VE: I have a bill, a very kind of fundamental DHS reform bill. It does not reform the system in the way that I’ve described it to you. That would take buy-in from committee chairs. And I have already reached out to the chairs of the committees that have jurisdiction over this, and have told them that as soon as we get back to D.C., I would like to sit with them and lay this out.

I really do feel that this is a moment of reckoning. And it is a moment of reckoning where we should recognize our colossal failure in the past, but the opportunity in the future.

RG: During the Trump administration, there were a lot of calls from Democrats and from activists saying, “This is not just a failure, but this is something that needs to be prosecuted. There’s so much cruelty and negligence going on.”

So kind of two parts: One, is there still talk about potentially prosecuting people in the past for what was done? And how long would you give the Biden administration or the DHS leadership or the CBP leadership to improve this situation before similar calls were made this time around?

VE: So to the accountability and prosecution question, I think Stephen Miller should be behind bars. I think he committed heinous human rights violations, and I think that those around him who helped plot this out should be held accountable as well. That is going to be very difficult, but it kills me that these people could potentially walk away — and even potentially rebuild their reputations. I mean, I find them to be just among the most reprehensible, abhorrent people that our generation could have ever produced.

To your second question, I am in good, frequent communication with the Biden administration on what’s happening. And as long as I continue to see progress and movement in the right direction, and input from folks on the ground, including advocates and attorneys who shoulder the consequences of horrific policies right alongside their clients, and the migrants who they’re advocating for, as long as the administration is moving in the right direction, I will keep working with them and will keep providing them with other ideas for reform and for forward movement. But, if at any point, I feel like we are sliding backward or there’s not absolutely every resource and effort being put toward a more humane and compassionate system that does justice to our values, I will be among the Biden administration’s loudest critics.

RG: Well, Congresswoman Escobar, thanks so much for joining me.

VE: Thank you.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: That was Congresswoman Veronica Escobar. In that same press conference that we played a clip from at the top of the show, she was asked by a reporter if she’ll be inviting president Biden down to visit the border anytime soon.

Reporter: Will you guys plan to ask the president or the vice president to come to the border themselves now?

VE: I have. I have.

RG: If that happens, I’m sure we’ll be discussing it right here.

[Credits music.]

RG: That’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give — your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

See you next week.

The post A Big New Idea to End the Border Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

But it is quite likely that this fate will only apply to those unfamous citizens who joined the mob, not their ideological masters.

When it comes to holding the most powerful responsible for their role in crimes, particularly those committed while holding high office, the U.S. track record is anemic. While Democrats are rightly intent on proceeding with impeachment and other measures against Trump, the reality is that U.S. history is rife with episodes of political elites ultimately deciding to move on “for the good of the country.” It is why so many shameless Republicans are whining about the need to unify the country so it can heal. They know the game.

Listening to many Democrats and some Republicans speak in holy terms about the “sanctity” of the “temple of democracy” being pillaged and ransacked, it is easy to be seduced into believing that this time will be different, that the perpetrators — from top to bottom — will be held to account. But doing so would buck a long-standing pillar of the bipartisan system: When it comes to the crimes of the powerful, we must always look forward.

No senior military official was prosecuted for the torture at the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq. No CIA officer went to jail, much less lost their job, for operating a global kidnapping and torture program. No one faced an indictment for the U.S. use of banned cluster bomb munitions in President Barack Obama’s first airstrike in Yemen in December 2009 that shredded a few dozen human beings into ground meat. The failure to hold senior U.S. officials responsible for their crimes ensures that the crimes can and will continue. Look no further than the ascent of Gina Haspel, a key player in the CIA’s torture program and the destruction of videotapes of the abuse of detainees, to become the first woman to head the agency. It was a fruit of Obama’s look-forward-not-backward doctrine. There has rightly been outrage at Trump’s pardons for soldiers and mercenaries convicted of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the other side of that coin is the bipartisan refusal to prosecute the masterminds of U.S. imperial crimes in those countries or elsewhere.

The events of January 6 were shocking in only one way: the fact that a violent mob was able to so easily storm and occupy the Capitol. These events were unprecedented in that the most powerful political figure in the United States was the circus master who used incendiary language as he called on the mob to descend on the building. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” Trump declared at a rally moments before the siege began. “You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.” Trump’s disgraced lawyer Rudy Giuliani went a step further, suggesting that the mob needed to create the conditions on Capitol Hill for a “trial by combat.”

Among the most serious questions as yet unresolved are: What role did law enforcement and Republican members of Congress play in facilitating the violent takeover of the Capitol? What did Trump administration officials in control of federal forces and the military know leading up to the siege? And did they facilitate it either directly or through deliberate inaction?

No one should pretend that this moment was not in some form predictable.

No one should pretend that this moment was not in some form predictable. Trump has spent four years using lie-filled bile to empower and embolden violent, dangerous, low-information racists and xenophobes to embrace a worldview where their “real America” had been snatched from them by Black people, immigrants, socialists, “abortionists,” and anarchists. Trump has openly encouraged police and other law enforcement to be more brutal toward protesters (and other people they arrest, for that matter); he has offered to pay legal expenses of supporters who beat dissidents at his rallies; and he issued orders in September for the Proud Boys militia to “stand back and stand by” as he waged his preemptive campaign to declare the election stolen. Trump has also sent a clear message that he will use the power of the presidential pardon to rescue war criminals, including U.S. soldiers and Blackwater mercenaries, who murder people. The rioters at the Capitol may have sincerely believed that Trump would absolve them of any actions they took that day in their pseudo-revolutionary war.

Leading up to January 6, the message from the president and his sizable coterie of allies among the Republican Party in Congress was clear: Joe Biden and the radical left are stealing not just the presidency but America itself. In portraying the “resistance” to the certification of Biden’s election victory as the second coming of the American Revolution — their 1776 2.0 — Trump offered a presidential seal of approval for any means necessary to “stop the theft.”

The fact that very few of the MAGA warriors who stormed Congress on January 6 attempted to conceal their identities is simultaneously a symbol of their idiocy and their belief that they were operating on orders from the commander in chief. It also served as dramatic evidence of the privileges assumed by the president’s supporters. Violence from Black Lives Matter supporters or antifa is regarded as punishable by death, but when performed by MAGA mobs, you might just deserve the Medal of Freedom like Rush Limbaugh.

How we as a society choose to respond to these events is of great consequence to our future. People were killed in this riot, including a police officer who was allegedly beaten to death by a mob whose members spent four years screaming about blue lives mattering. It seems clear that some among the mob spoke of, if not actively contemplated, murdering House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and hanging Vice President Mike Pence as a traitor from a tree on Capitol Hill. Particularly if you watch the videos of the mob attacking police as well as journalists, it would be a grave mistake to dismiss any of this as political disagreement or rhetoric that went too far in the heat of the moment.

It is easy, morally and politically, to join calls for Trump to be prosecuted. He is a cartoonish villain who clearly relishes his crimes. And let there be no doubt, Trump should face prosecution for a wide range of offenses, from his grifts to inciting violent white supremacists, to war crimes. But the most likely scenario, based on history and the current discourse among the elite political class, is that Trump mainly has reason to fear prosecution in New York and possibly other state jurisdictions, largely for financial crimes that predated his presidency. Trump may well be impeached and convicted under a Democratic-controlled Senate. But that is a very big maybe, given the razor-thin margin and the need to convince at least 17 Senate Republicans to vote to convict him. For a variety of reasons, Trump’s most consequential crimes as president will almost certainly go unpunished.

This country made a grave mistake by not prosecuting former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other senior U.S. officials who lied to justify the invasion of Iraq, who trampled on basic international laws and conventions, and whose policies destroyed nations and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and thousands of U.S. military personnel. We can recognize that it was and remains unforgivable to forgive Bush and Cheney while still agitating for justice to be served against Trump. In doing so, a precedent could be set that a U.S. president can be prosecuted for crimes committed in the course of their duties.

But that is almost unfathomable to imagine. While Democratic leaders in Congress are eager to impeach Trump, President-elect Joe Biden has indicated, in the words of one of his advisers, that he “just wants to move on.” Another aide told NBC News that Biden is “going to be more oriented toward fixing the problems and moving forward than prosecuting them.” Political elites in the U.S., particularly Democrats, are guided by fear of political blowback. They overemphasize the possibility of Republicans seeking revenge on them and creating a debilitating spiral where no president can govern without constant investigation and threat of prosecution. But that era is already here. The Republicans spent eight years undermining the legitimacy of Obama and moving mountains in an effort to block him from governing. The Trump administration, with support from its Congressional allies, spent four years investigating Obama and Hillary Clinton. And a significant number of these Republicans have endorsed the fantasy that Biden actually lost the election. This weak-kneed game theorizing from powerful Democrats must end. If we cannot hold the president accountable, the crimes will continue unabated.

The principle and the gravity of the crimes should guide our actions, not the personality or particulars of the accused.

This could be a moment for reflection about the dangers of unchecked executive power and the crimes that stem from it. But it won’t be. Even if the unthinkable happens and Trump is somehow prosecuted for his high crimes, it will almost certainly be treated as an anomaly rather than a precedent. The unstated conclusion will be that the crimes of the Bushes of the world pale in comparison to Trump’s, that his actions were more abominable than those of the men who authorized two nuclear bombings of Japan in 1945, incinerating more than 130,000 people in an instant and many more after. Trump will be painted as the one president — the only one — we cannot allow to get away. This too would be a disservice to justice. The principle and the gravity of the crimes should guide our actions, not the personality or particulars of the accused.

There are ample dangers present in the aftermath of the siege. On the one hand, there may be more mobs, more violence, more attacks. There are indications that Biden’s inauguration and the days preceding it could become the next theater for the MAGA warriors. In his first remarks in front of reporters since the siege, Trump on Tuesday defended his incitement and ominously warned Pelosi and Chuck Schumer that trying to impeach him is “causing tremendous danger to our country, and it’s causing tremendous anger.” Much as the Hosni Mubaraks of the world directed their unofficial gangs of thugs after defeat in elections, Trump has his irregular army, and he seems dedicated to unleashing them again.

But among liberals, there have been disturbing undemocratic trends emanating from the crisis. Some have called for an expansion of the no-fly list; others have questioned why police didn’t gun down the rioters. There are calls for expanding surveillance capabilities and authorities through new domestic anti-terrorism legislation.

Advocating the banning of right-wing figures on social media could lead to a popular mobilization toward a broader limiting of speech in this country.

And there is a real danger that advocating the banning of right-wing figures on social media could lead to a popular mobilization toward a broader limiting of speech in this country. We have to be able to rely on principle rather than passion in determining the path ahead. There are dire consequences to ceding to Silicon Valley the decision-making on who is entitled to core liberties. One can believe that Twitter was right to shut down Trump’s account because of its role in inciting violence while also holding extreme concern over how far such bans will go and how much power we as a society bestow upon the tech monarchies.

Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel — no fan or friend of Trump — criticized Twitter’s banning of Trump, labeling it a violation of the “fundamental right to free speech.” As the Financial Times reported, Merkel believes “that the U.S. government should follow Germany’s lead in adopting laws that restrict online incitement, rather than leaving it up to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to make up their own rules.” The political dynamics and Constitution in the U.S. suggest that European laws, such as the German statute that criminalizes Holocaust denial as an act of incitement, would be widely opposed as violations of free speech. But Merkel’s broader point about who makes the rules in an increasingly monopolistic social media environment is an important one.

History has taught us over and over that in the aftermath of crises, the government uses popular fear and outrage to push through far-reaching policy changes that ultimately serve as howitzers blasting away the liberties of the many. That is what happened after 9/11 with the Patriot Act, which most members of Congress didn’t bother to read, and only one senator, Democrat Russ Feingold, opposed. It was this dynamic that led the country into a state of perpetual war with the veneer of legitimacy offered by a law signed nearly 20 years ago, the Authorization for Use of Military Force. There was just one member of Congress, Rep. Barbara Lee of California, who recognized this danger. With incredible bravery and her voice shaking, she took to the floor of Congress just days after the 9/11 attacks with an urgent warning.

“There must be some of us who say, let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today — let us more fully understand their consequences,” Lee said. “We must not rush to judgment. Far too many innocent people have already died. Our country is in mourning. If we rush to launch a counterattack, we run too great a risk that women, children, and other noncombatants will be caught in the crossfire.” She concluded her remarks by describing how difficult it was knowing she would be the lone voice ringing the alarm bells. “I have agonized over this vote. But I came to grips with it in the very painful yet beautiful memorial service today at the National Cathedral. As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, ‘As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.’”

Lee’s sentiments are an important reference point for the moment we now face. As the country debates the fate of Trump, the legislative response to the Capitol siege, and the role that the Silicon Valley moguls play in deciding what speech is acceptable, it is vital that we view them all through the lens of the precedents that will be set and the consequences that they will enact.

The post The Trump Precedent: No President Should Be Above the Law Again appeared first on The Intercept.

Long before a global pandemic pushed even more households to the brink, data collected in January 2019 showed that as many as half a million people were unsheltered on any given night. Public housing is and has been suffering from a multibillion-dollar deficit, a chronic underfunding that has left millions of people in deplorable living conditions. As the number of renters increased after the 2007–2009 financial crisis, affordability has steadily plummeted. In 2017, almost half of all renters were handing more than 30 percent of their income to the landlord. For extremely low-income households, the rent burden neared 50 percent. Meanwhile, despite the Civil Rights Act of 1968’s recent golden anniversary, segregation and discrimination continue to plague housing.

The guarantee of safe and affordable housing is too important for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to continue being treated as the short straw by incoming White House administrations.

Despite HUD’s great potential in addressing America’s cycle of housing crises, recent administrations have failed to dignify it with leadership experienced enough to hit the ground running. The resumes of the Cabinet picks speak volumes. When they are thin on housing experience, one can often presume a grooming for “higher” office. Andrew Cuomo, HUD secretary under Bill Clinton, for the eventual job of governing New York. His successor Mel Martinez, under George W. Bush, for one of Florida’s Senate seats. Julián Castro, it was rumored, for vice president to former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. For the young and ambitious man, HUD can be a low-stakes stepping stool.

Other resumes tell the story of a White House indebted to its pick, though not so much as to hand them the job they really covet. The latter might explain how Dr. Ben Carson, an accomplished medical surgeon with no background in housing finance, found himself at the helm of HUD under Donald Trump. Two years into the job, Carson was still confusing REOs — short for real estate owned properties — with the chocolate sandwich cookie in a very public congressional hearing. A predictable outcome when an agency’s mission is an afterthought of the administration. In line with this tradition, the Biden-Harris camp announced on December 8 that it was tapping Rep. Marcia Fudge for secretary of HUD.

A cursory glance at the Ohio Democrat’s career makes clear that she has never led a public housing authority or developed an affordable housing complex. She did serve as mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, but she is not a trained urban planner or former advocate for indigent clients. She has neither represented tenants in housing court nor investigated the banks that fueled the foreclosure crisis. Nor has she managed a shelter for the unhoused, administered disaster relief grants, taught the complex scheme that governs federal housing on Native American land, or published research on housing market conditions. She does not appear to have ever filed suit to enforce the civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination in housing, though she did once work for a county prosecutor.

Fudge’s tenure in Congress reveals no interest in the housing universe. Since her first election to the House of Representatives in 2008, the Ohio Democrat has sat on three House committees: Education and Labor, House Administration (which does not work on housing), and, most recently, Agriculture, on which she chairs a subcommittee. Though a subcommittee on housing, community development, and insurance exists, this congresswoman has never served on it.

Fudge’s tenure in Congress reveals no interest in the housing universe.

This does not mean Fudge is incapable of grasping the breadth of HUD’s mission, surrounding herself with knowledgeable advisers, and getting down to work quickly. But it does suggest that she will initially do so without familiarity with the field’s long-standing debates, the stakeholders in any given rule-making, or the experts across the political spectrum, including those who operate off the Democratic Party’s Rolodex.

Beyond her utter lack of connection to the post offered, Fudge has made choices that warrant serious evaluation of her suitability for this particular job. In 2018, Fudge refused to support the Equality Act, which sought to explicitly prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people in a number of areas, such as on public premises and in housing. The congresswoman first argued that she would vote for these same protections if they were in a stand-alone bill, rather than in the format presented to her. Defending her decision on Twitter, Fudge stated, “What I opposed was including the Equality Act in the current Civil Rights Act.” In May 2019, however, she voted with her party to pass the Equality Act. But after four years of a HUD administration openly hostile to LGBTQ people, a period during which Secretary Carson ridiculed transgender people and proposed a rule to permit their exclusion from shelters, Fudge’s initial hesitation toward the Equality Act is discomforting and her explanation unsatisfying. After all, it is not uncommon for the discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity to overlap with categories of discrimination already covered by the existing Civil Rights Act.

And, journalist Jamil Smith reported in Rolling Stone, five years ago, Fudge went out of her way to write to the Cuyahoga County prosecutor in support for Lance Mason, a former legislator and county judge in her state. At the time, Mason was serving a two-year sentence for brutally beating his wife. In 2018, having been released early, Mason stood accused of fatally stabbing her.

In her letter, Fudge had described Mason as a kind man and loyal friend. (Her letter became public as Fudge was being floated as an alternative to Rep. Nancy Pelosi for speaker last Congress.) The representative’s compassion was laudable for its exception; hers was a kindness rarely shown to people convicted of violent crimes. That could matter for recipients of housing assistance. Under the Obama administration, HUD prodded public housing authorities to open units to people with criminal records.

At the same time, by calling the beating a “very bad mistake” while insisting that her friend’s actions were “out of character,” Fudge displayed a naivete about the patterns that often characterize intimate violence. It also obscured the gravity of the assault, which counted severe punching, choking, biting, and head-slamming. Intimate violence is a major driver of housing insecurity. This is part of why HUD housing programs provide important protections and rights to victims of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. It is imperative that any incoming secretary of HUD understand this and take the implications seriously. Their leadership in such matters could be, for many, a question of life and death. Why should the post go to Fudge when so many qualified other advocates can finally give HUD constituents the champion they deserve?

None of this implies that Fudge, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, is not invested in the very vulnerable populations that HUD stands to help most. On the contrary, Fudge has leveraged her position on the Nutrition Subcommittee to advocate for maximizing the Department of Agriculture’s role in combating hunger. Two weeks after winning her seat a sixth time, Fudge was pushing for a 15 percent increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits through the next coronavirus relief bill. And just a year ago, she was fiercely opposing the Department of Agriculture’s proposal to cut billions of dollars from SNAP and drop 700,000 recipients from its benefits rolls. “The truth is the USDA is an agriculture and food agency, not a workforce agency,” Fudge wrote in a Washington Post opinion. “The president has cynically weaponized the USDA as a blunt political instrument, flying in the face of the department’s stated mission to ‘do right and feed everyone.’”

As the odds of a Biden-Harris victory quickly rose after the election, the Congressional Black Caucus and progressive organizations like Feeding America and the NAACP began to call for Fudge’s nomination to the Department of Agriculture. The organizations’ recommendation letters highlighted the historic nature of a Fudge appointment, who would be the first Black woman to lead the agency. But they also cited her politics: a commitment and track record of recognizing the Department of Agriculture’s power to alleviate poverty. Implicit in those endorsements was an assumption that Fudge had the substantive experience to enter the job with a vision for her tenure, rather than waste months, or even years, wrapping her head around the agency’s dominion. Fudge herself became less coy about desiring the job. As she told Politico in November, “I think it’s a natural fit.” Despite this push, the post is going to Tom Vilsack, who held it from 2009 to 2017.

Fudge’s appointment is still being framed as historic and, certainly, it is. The long list of HUD secretaries is overwhelmingly male; the Ohio representative would be the first Black woman to grace the top since Patricia Roberts Harris in 1977. But the progress feels shallow. Black and brown faces are being crudely shifted across a limited number of Cabinet spots to fulfill the primary goal: the ability to boast, as President-elect Joe Biden has begun to, “the most diverse Cabinet anyone in American history has ever announced.”

It is hard to argue against this. There is something seductive about building a government reflective of its population. A leadership made up of fewer wealthy, white, heterosexual men is attractive. But racial, ethnic, and gender diversity for its own sake is a harmful way to govern. It permits the executive to absolve itself of the policy determinations baked into its Cabinet picks. Rather than expand the search to diverse people with the right blend of qualification, passion, and, crucially, politics, Biden’s transition team is limiting itself to a closed pool of party loyalists with the right faces, and will deem the mission accomplished once it has distributed the optimal number of positions among those coming for their seat at the table.

Some see things in a more positive light. Jennifer Stewart, a Democratic lobbyist close to Fudge, disagreed that HUD secretary was a consolation prize for agriculture secretary, adding that it positioned her strongly to do an immense amount of good for marginalized communities. She told The Intercept that Rep. Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip from South Carolina, wanted Fudge to be considered for an appointment. “Marcia didn’t personally lobby for anything,” said Stewart. “Clyburn thinks highly of Marcia and you know he wanted her voice to be part of the conversation. She was just willing to do whatever it was.”

But the indignity of this cynical game isn’t always lost on its participants, and that includes Fudge. Just last month, she was telling Politico, “We’re going to have to stop looking at only certain agencies as those that people like me fit in. You know, it’s always ‘we want to put a Black person in labor or HUD.’” In other words, enough with the tokenism.

Yet this is where we find ourselves once more as an unenthused congresswoman gracefully accepts the consolation prize of being the first Black woman to lead a department whose mission she might have to research before her nomination hearing. A disappointing outcome, to be sure. Then again, is this not what the Biden-Harris camp promised us all along: a return to normal?

Correction: Dec. 10, 2020
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Marcia Fudge would be the first Black woman to serve as HUD secretary. She would be the second, after Patricia Roberts Harris — not Robert Harris, as the story previously stated. It has also been updated to clarify that she is the chair of a subcommittee of Agriculture, not the chair of Agriculture.

The post Why Is Marcia Fudge Being Nominated to HUD, if Not Tokenism? appeared first on The Intercept.

So explained a China-based Oracle engineer at a developer conference at the company’s California headquarters in 2018. Slides from the presentation, hosted on Oracle’s website, begin with a “case outline” listing four Oracle “product[s] used” by Liaoning police to “do criminal analysis and prediction.” One slide shows Oracle software enabling Liaoning police to create network graphs based on hotel registrations and track down anyone who might be linked to a given suspect. Another shows the software being used to build a police dashboard and create “security case heat map[s].” Apparent pictures of the software interface show a blurred face and various Chinese names. The concluding slide states that the software helped police, whose datasets had been “incomprehensible,” more easily “trace the key people/objects/events” and “identify potential suspect[s]” — which in China often means dissidents.

Oracle representatives have marketed the company’s data analytics for use by police and security industry contractors across China, according to dozens of company documents hosted on its website. In at least two cases, the documents imply that provincial departments used the software in their operations. One is the slideshow story about Liaoning province. The other is an Oracle document describing police in Shanxi province as a “client” in need of an intelligence platform. Oracle also boasted that its data security services were used by other Chinese police entities, according to the documents — including police in Xinjiang, the site of a genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic groups.

In marketing materials, Oracle said that its software could help police leverage information from online comments, investigation records, hotel registrations, license plate information, DNA databases, and images for facial recognition. Oracle presentations even suggested that police could use its products to combine social media activity with dedicated Chinese government databases tracking drug users and people in the entertainment industry, a group that includes sex workers. Oracle employees also promoted company technology for China’s “Police Cloud,” a big data platform implemented as part of the emerging surveillance state.

Several Oracle materials imply that the company has gone substantially further than marketing to Chinese police, which operate as part of the country’s Ministry of Public Security: One presentation detailing Oracle’s database and data security products contains a slide titled “Oracle and the national defense industry.” That title is followed by a list of multiple Chinese military entities, including the People’s Liberation Army, China National Nuclear Corporation, and China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. Defense entities are also the apparent target for two additional Oracle Chinese-language presentations, the most recent of which is dated 2015, and for events called the “People’s Armed Police Force–Oracle Cloud Computing Exchange Forum” and the “Oracle Xi’an Aviation and National Defense Industry Informatization Seminar” listed in Chinese on Oracle’s site. It is not known whether Oracle software is in use by any Chinese military entities or if the company has any agreements with them.

All told, the documents paint a disturbing picture of a tech company sacrificing its professed values to push its data analytics products in China, where the most formidable collector of data is the Chinese government.

Oracle’s presentations about China’s security apparatus raise a number of serious issues for the company, which is enmeshed with the U.S. defense establishment. It said last year that its customers include “all 5 branches of the U.S. military,” and it has recent or pending contracts with NASA, the Department of Commerce, and the CIA. Oracle has also worked closely with police departments in the U.S.

Oracle’s government work helped it and Walmart edge out rivals in a bid to control U.S. operations for the Chinese-owned social media company TikTok last year, after the Trump administration ordered TikTok to find a U.S. buyer for its American operations. The proposed deal, under challenge in court, was driven by concerns that TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company might pass on sensitive user data to Chinese authorities. But in a strange twist, the documents show that Oracle has marketed its software’s use by those same authorities in an extreme example of putting profit over human rights.

“Companies should not be selling any kind of surveillance predictive policing system to the Ministry of Public Security,” said Maya Wang, a China senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, who was among a group of experts that reviewed some of the presentations for The Intercept. “They should not have any business with the Ministry of Public Security. This raises questions about the role that the West has played in inspiring and building surveillance systems in China.”

“This raises questions about the role that the West has played in inspiring and building surveillance systems in China.”

In addition to human rights concerns, the documents point to profound national security questions. One of the military-oriented presentations cites Oracle’s U.S. defense work in an apparent effort to win Chinese cloud computing contracts. “The fact that an American technology company is marketing capabilities to increase the combat power of Chinese military is definitely poor judgment, especially given how avidly Oracle continues to pursue opportunities to work for the Defense Department,” said Elsa Kania, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and an expert on Chinese military strategy, after reviewing the relevant documents. “It says something about the pursuit of profits and market share over questions of ethics and due diligence.”

In a statement to The Intercept, Oracle spokesperson Jessica Moore said the materials showed “what our products could do if others built on top of them” and were “aspirational business development ideas” that “do not indicate any targeted or intended sales/support execution.” The company is not selling data analytics software “for any of the end uses implied in the materials,” she said. “Such activities would be considered inconsistent with Oracle’s core Corporate Citizenship Values, including our Human Rights statement.”

She stated further that Oracle does “extensive due diligence” to ensure its exports comply with trade restrictions, including in any dealings with the Chinese military. Asked about Oracle’s apparent marketing to military-linked entities, she wrote, “Any such transactions would have to be in full compliance with U.S. and applicable export control and economic sanctions laws and regulations. Period. And beyond our legal and regulatory obligations, Oracle is VERY conservative and cautious in how we even approach such opportunities.”

Moore described the engineer’s story about the Liaoning police leveraging Oracle software as a “pitch deck” that was “theoretical” and said it “does not depict or demonstrate an actual Oracle implemented solution.” It would “require extensive third-party work to actually develop and implement,” she said.

A former Oracle senior director, Xavier Lopez, told The Intercept that marketing cases like the Liaoning police example are often presented at tech conferences to show developers how they can build custom software for particular industries or government entities on top of generic Oracle platforms. Lopez co-presented a similar Chinese police “use case” at the 2017 Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, a massive annual conference that draws some 60,000 attendees. The presentation indicated that an unnamed “Chinese Police Department” had used Oracle graph analysis software to home in on suspects by ingesting “documents, social media, web content, chat rooms, flight records, hotel stay registries, and publically [sic] available open datasets.”

Lopez confirmed that “the police province in China used the software to develop that,” referring to the data analysis described in the slide. “They just shared with us some generic information on how it was used.” He did not recall which province provided the information.

Moore said, of Lopez’s presentation, that “we have no known implementation with a ‘Chinese Police Department’” and that “the definition of ‘use case’ is very different than an actual, implementable product or service, which Oracle does not have.”

Lopez was clear that his presentation was not a hypothetical, however: “The data didn’t come from us. The data came from the province. The province uses the software, they license the software to use for different things, for different use cases. And this was one example of when they used it for that particular use case.”

Team USA

Oracle got its start in the late 1970s building databases for the CIA and still fosters a reputation for being closely allied with the U.S. government. Co-founder and chair of the board Larry Ellison criticized Google’s 2018 plans for a censored Chinese search engine, telling Fox Business, “We have a serious competition going with China. I’m on Team USA.” The fact that Google “goes into China and facilitates the Chinese government surveilling their people is pretty shocking,” he added.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz, meanwhile, is a commissioner on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a Department of Defense-backed initiative that seeks to maintain U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence. A key interest of the commission has been China’s growing technological prowess, and in her role as a commissioner, Catz has received weekly email updates from the National Security Council’s former China director on the “malign behavior of the Chinese Communist Party.”

“The concern is that Oracle executives are determining U.S. national security policy and yet have simultaneously pitched technology to Chinese police for intelligence purposes,” said Jack Poulson, who resigned from Google in 2018 after The Intercept exposed the company’s search plans in China and is now executive director of the nonprofit Tech Inquiry, which monitors bias, human rights abuses, and financial flows at tech companies. “This is not the first such company, but this might be one of the most egregious examples.”

“The concern is that Oracle executives are determining U.S. national security policy and yet have simultaneously pitched technology to Chinese police for intelligence purposes.”

Oracle was cozy with the Trump administration, a fact that may have aided its TikTok bid. Catz was a member of Donald Trump’s 2016 transition team, and she donated $130,600 to Trump’s reelection campaign last year. But the fate of the TikTok deal may now be in Joe Biden’s hands. TikTok has been fighting Trump’s executive order in court, and the U.S. government’s response to the challenge is due today. It is unclear whether Biden’s Justice Department will defend Trump’s action. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration had indefinitely shelved the TikTok-Oracle-Walmart deal. In the meantime, Oracle is still technically in the running to acquire a significant stake in TikTok’s American operations. Under the proposed terms of the deal, Oracle would host data from U.S. users that flows through the app as a lead investor in an independent company called TikTok Global. It would also be able to review TikTok’s source code.

Oracle’s interest in both TikTok and data-driven policing stems from its sustained push into the burgeoning cloud market and the related expansion of its artificial intelligence offerings. The company’s roots are in database software, but over the past decade it has acquired several online search and data analytics startups. Oracle has also become a major data broker. It claims to sell data on more than 300 million people around the world — what it calls “the world’s largest collection of third-party data.”

Its efforts are part of a global shift toward big tech entering policing, in which more niche companies like Palantir and PredPol are being edged out by large platform companies like Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. Oracle’s data analytics software and applications have been used by the Chicago Police Department and the Illinois State Police, as well as by several local U.S. governments.

Under “Barriers to Overcome,” it lists “privacy protections.”

But Oracle has also marketed police applications of its software in countries with deplorable human rights records, including not just China but also Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, according to company documents and police contracts uncovered by The Intercept, as well as apparent Oracle employee presentations uploaded to Slideshare and other sites. The documents make clear that the software could be used to further surveillance. One Oracle global marketing brochure from its website notes that police “need crime analysis and social media analytics in one source.” Another implies that Oracle’s software can help police filter 700 million messages a day from major social media apps — including WeChat and Weibo — as well as “chat rooms, forum pages, reviews and news media.” Under “Barriers to Overcome,” it lists “privacy protections.”

“We have a lot of evidence of the negative potential of this type of technology for the Black and outskirts population” in favelas and other poor neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, said Pablo Nunes, a researcher at the Rio-based Center of Studies on Security and Citizenship. “It also reinforces the criminalization of certain spaces in the city.”

Related

Millions of Leaked Police Files Detail Suffocating Surveillance of China’s Uyghur Minority

Some Oracle marketing materials claim that its technology can help officers prevent or anticipate crime. That’s a specious claim even in societies with strong civil liberties protections. In China, which lacks a free press and other means for civic accountability, police can use big data to justify basically any decision — most horrifically, the detention of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. “Democratic systems generally have to answer some resistance and pushback from people who are being discriminated against,” said Wang, of Human Rights Watch. “But in China the police don’t have to answer to any pressures. So the very imperfect design of the system can just expand.” Oracle’s imprimatur aids in that growth.

Moore, the Oracle spokesperson, said the company’s global customers and end uses were “authorized” and that the company’s products are not specifically tailored to crime or surveillance. “Third parties or systems integrators could develop products on top of our technology,” she wrote, “and could be configured and implemented for such purposes but would need to involve extensive consulting/development of such systems.”

Integrated Policing

The Oracle documents uncovered by The Intercept span the period between 2010 and 2020. They broadly describe an approach called “social-enabled policing” or “integrated policing,” which entails merging traditional sources of police information with data from social media. The goal, according to one document, is to remove “barriers and stovepipes, facilitating a lifecycle 360-degree view of the victim, witness, suspect and incident” in order to police “both the physical and digital worlds.”

A prominent figure promoting this concept was Hong-Eng Koh, a former Singaporean police officer who worked at Oracle from 2010-2016, at least part of that time from Beijing. Koh is described in Oracle documents, an archived Oracle conference agenda, and his own and former colleagues’ social media posts as Oracle’s “senior director” or “global lead” for justice and public safety during that time. According to the documents, Koh oversaw a team of employees who approached government agencies around the world about police applications of Oracle’s software. Oracle’s Moore claimed that the company never had an “Oracle Justice and Public Safety group” but acknowledged there was a group of employees working with Koh. She added that Koh “was in a Global Industry Solutions role focused on positioning Oracle products with various industries, including Public Sector.”

Koh appears to be an enthusiastic fan of police work. “Which other job gives you a personal gun?” reads a post from what appears to be his LinkedIn account about his early days as an officer in Singapore. “For a few months, I felt so ‘empowered’ that whether on or off duty, I eagerly carried the gun and bullets everywhere I visited.” (Koh did not respond to multiple email and LinkedIn requests to comment for this story.)

At Oracle, he had other powerful tools at his disposal. In the documents, Oracle pitches a suite of analytics and enterprise software called Oracle Business Intelligence for police use, including in China. Such software has broad applications and is widely used by companies for business analysis. Lopez, the former Oracle senior director, said that while Oracle’s engineers generally don’t overhaul software like Business Intelligence for specific industries, Oracle does market it for specific uses. “When you market something, you want to have your marketing illustrate how this generic software can be customized or modified or tuned to solve your industry’s problems,” he said. He added that Oracle’s engineers would also often add features to software based on government or corporate input. A video on Oracle’s site titled “Transforming Justice and Public Safety” suggests close collaboration with police on integrating “siloed data into a single intelligence hub.” “We can help you build your ideal way forward,” it says.

Oracle is the world’s leading supplier of commercial database software, and for police departments already using the company’s databases, one advantage of Oracle’s analytics offerings is that they can more readily layer software on top.

The company documents reviewed by The Intercept note that countries have different laws governing the use of data-driven policing, but they brush over civil liberties concerns. “A law-abiding citizen should not be afraid,” reads the Oracle document on “social-enabled policing,” which lists Koh as a co-author. “If a person does not shy away [from] posting on social networking site publicly, he/she needs to understand that anyone, including marketing companies, government agencies and even criminals, can view such contents without his/her permission.” The document continues, the “Internet never forgets.”

The internet has not forgotten Koh. A Slideshare account in his name contains presentations detailing work with police departments around the world, and the LinkedIn account contains an apparent photo of Koh with the Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary federal law enforcement organization.

Big Data and Repressive Regimes

Koh seems to have found a receptive audience in repressive regimes where authorities were sitting on massive troves of information. Over the past decade, Chinese authorities have strived to use big data to prevent incidents that threaten the Communist Party. Chinese President Xi Jinping has talked of preserving “stability” by guarding against “black swan,” or unforeseen, events. “The logic is that it’s no longer sufficient to react to events, because by then it’s too late,” said Edward Schwarck, a Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford who has written about the origins of predictive policing in China. “You need to preempt events.”

“The logic is that it’s no longer sufficient to react to events, because by then it’s too late.”

Over the past few 20 years, China has rolled out electronic IDs, real-name registration online, automated license plate readers, and checkpoints bolstered by facial recognition and surveillance cameras. “Everyone is using phones, using WeChat, using all these devices that can be tracked and that can generate a lot of data points,” said Daniel Sprick, a China legal scholar at the University of Cologne who studies predictive policing in China. Some data collected under the emerging social credit system feeds into information accessible by police as well, he added. “So police are in a position to have a unique data set of more or less everything they want to know.”

In Brazil, the government has been working tirelessly to merge information and create megadatabases of citizens. The country’s Citizen Base Register, for example, gathers more than 50 types of information about Brazilians, including employment details, health data, and biometric information, such as fingerprints and photos of people’s faces. Under the direction of President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Federal Police are also creating a unified data system that gathers biometric and crime data from all states in the country.

Authorities in the United Arab Emirates have similarly moved to amass data on citizens. In Dubai, police have rolled out a massive surveillance program called Oyoon, which literally means “Eyes.” The program, which involves 5,000 surveillance cameras, purportedly allows police to track people throughout the city by uploading a mugshot into a database.

Koh claims on the LinkedIn account that his team “successfully developed multiple industry solutions” for police in all three countries.

One Oracle-branded Slideshare presentation apparently posted by Koh describes a “big data analytics demo” involving police in the UAE. Technology helped authorities there more easily monitor suspects’ movements and phone calls, build networks of people who are working together, and identify individuals who happen to be near a suspect, it explains. One slide shows what appears to be an Abu Dhabi police mobile interface alongside a server.

Oracle documents support many of the Slideshare claims. In Mexico, one country where Koh claims to have brokered deals, an Oracle slide deck says that the company’s databases and middleware helped authorities conduct “real-time video intelligence” and license plate monitoring in partnership with the company iOmniscient, which does facial recognition, crowd behavior analytics, and “sound and smell analytics.”

In Rio de Janeiro, meanwhile, Oracle sold Business Intelligence, the data analytics software, to the Civil Police, which is known for its ties to drug rings and local mafia. Contracts with Oracle, which began in 2013 and renewed every year since, show that Rio’s police paid $500,000 per year for the software.

One of Koh’s Slideshare presentations includes an apparent photo of Koh with José Roberto Peixoto and Andre Drumond Flores, both senior information technology employees for the Civil Police. Drumond boasted to a researcher in 2017 that the police had an “Iron Man 3 machine.” The Oracle Exadata processor appeared in the photo and in a scene of the Hollywood action blockbuster. Drumond said that the system could help police find patterns of behavior and possible suspects in police data.

But Koh seems to have made the deepest inroads in China. For the last two years of his tenure at Oracle, according to his professional bios and to his presentations, he simultaneously held a visiting researcher position at People’s Public Security University of China, China’s leading police academy. In addition to training officers and police officials, the school has labs that work on digital forensics and image recognition, technologies that help power the surveillance state. Asked about this, Oracle’s Moore wrote, “LinkedIn profiles should not be confused with actual work performed.”

Oracle in China

Oracle’s technology was used in key Chinese government surveillance initiatives before Koh came on board. Company documents boast that in the years before 2010, its technology was used to build the pilot for China’s grid management system, a network of neighborhood-level social monitoring and control, in Beijing’s Dongcheng District. The documents also claim that Oracle’s technology played a role in China’s Golden projects, a collection of early internet surveillance efforts. But after 2010, with Koh involved and Chinese surveillance projects going into overdrive, Oracle appears to have enthusiastically marketed its software for use by government entities, claiming it could be used for “centralized processing and smart analysis of public safety information.”

Some of the Chinese-language presentations on Oracle’s site are labeled “CONFIDENTIAL,” despite being publicly available. It is easy to see why someone might have wanted to keep them hidden. Taken together, they show an extreme willingness to aid in the construction of the surveillance state. One Chinese-language presentation, for example, promotes “Oracle’s recommendation: a more complete platform to meet the needs of public security big data processing.”

It is unknown exactly how many Chinese police departments may have used Oracle software for data analytics or predictive policing work beyond the departments — as implied in the documents — in Liaoning and Shanxi. Most of the Oracle China materials date to after the 2013 leak of documents by whistleblower Edward Snowden revealing that the National Security Agency had obtained access to the systems of U.S. technology companies. The Snowden revelations spooked Chinese government leaders and prompted renewed efforts to develop indigenous technologies, particularly for sensitive work involving police and the military.

But at the very least, the documents suggest that Oracle employees did detailed research on Chinese police and government operations, and crafted pitches based on that knowledge.

One notable Chinese-language presentation from 2014 describes a “Public Security Big Data Model,” depicted as a colorful bubble chart. At the center is a list of basic details that police might start with: a person’s name, national ID number, birth year, phone number, or QQ ID. (QQ is a popular instant messaging and social platform owned by the Chinese tech giant Tencent, which also owns the “super app” WeChat.) From there, the bubble chart links out to other data, including hotel check-ins; web and social media activity; and phone, bank, immigration, and vehicle records. Additional circles on the chart reference databases that Chinese authorities use to track drug users and people in the entertainment industry.

Sprick, the legal scholar, said that the entertainment industry databases are an ostensible public health measure meant to track at-risk people, including workers who engage in sex work, without criminalizing their activities. “If this data is now becoming directly accessibly by the police because some IT giant has a smart database architecture to offer, this public health issue can be hijacked by the public security organs and thereby endanger the aspired outcome of such a health tracking system,” he said. The chart suggests that Oracle pitched the ability to cross-reference basic identifiers with someone’s drug use or, indirectly, their sexual history.

Another pitch depicts a broad array of sensitive citizen data being converted into ones and zeros, including DNA, mental illness records, and other medical information. Still other documents from China boast that Oracle technology can help police trawl internet activity to “analyze potential suspected criminal behavior among hundreds of millions of netizens,” capture license plate data from “tens of thousands of cameras,” and analyze call records to build out criminal networks, then link them to fingerprint and facial recognition images.

Such emphases are consistent with previous findings about police surveillance in China. In 2017 and 2018, for example, Human Rights Watch published detailed reports on Police Cloud, the China-wide cloud computing project, and Integrated Joint Operations Platform, a predictive policing project in Xinjiang province. Both projects emphasize surveillance on specific categories of people named in the Oracle documents, including drug users and those with mental health problems.

The language in Oracle’s defense-focused presentations is also strikingly close to language that the Chinese military uses to characterizes its own agenda, according to Kania, the expert on Chinese defense strategy. One early military marketing presentation, from 2011, ticks off examples of Oracle’s work with the U.S. Defense Department before detailing how Oracle can help China with “military informatization,” a People’s Liberation Army buzzword. It reads, “We look forward to the opportunity to contribute to the transformation of cloud computing technology for the informatization of national defense.”

Selling to Xinjiang

Koh boasted on the LinkedIn account that he did so well at Oracle he was invited to an exclusive company gathering in Maui. But in 2016, he left for Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei, where according to his bios he is the company’s global chief government industry scientist. He now hawks an analytics platform called FusionInsight. At Huawei, his work in Brazil continued. Huawei reportedly supplied João Doria, then mayor of São Paulo, with a gift of hundreds of surveillance cameras, and a news account indicated that Koh attended a meeting in China on the deal with Doria. Koh also was quoted speaking on behalf of Huawei after the company helped supply a controversial facial recognition system in Rio de Janeiro, saying the system could blend “facial recognition, behavior recognition and even objects.” The facial recognition system was used at Rio’s famed Carnival in 2019. In the first weeks of use, an innocent person was arrested.

Oracle’s efforts to work with police around the world continued after Koh’s departure. The Rio de Janeiro police still have active contracts with Oracle. The company also provides data centers and software to dozens of government agencies in Brazil, including universities, health agencies, ministries, and tribunals.

Do you have information about how Oracle products are used in China or in security applications? Have you worked with the company? Contact the author of this story, Mara Hvistendahl, on Signal at +1 651-400-7987 or at marahv@protonmail.com.

In China, meanwhile, an index of marketing seminars on Oracle’s site includes two apparent government-oriented cloud computing events from 2017. And a list of clients published on Oracle’s site last year said that the company provided “data security solutions” to the public security division in Xinjiang, along with five other Chinese provincial and city police departments, as well as the Ministry of Public Security itself. The document also lists telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE as data security customers, both of which have come into the crosshairs of the U.S. government.

Moore, the Oracle spokesperson, said the company has “limited transactions with authorized ZTE and Huawei entities and NO transactions with any restricted ZTE or Huawei entities.” She conceded that Oracle had “limited authorized transactions with Xinjiang Public Security Bureau from 2011-2019,” adding that Oracle has not done business with the police bureau since the U.S. imposed sanctions on it in 2019.

“The entire system is run by the PSB. So if you are aiding them, you are aiding the camps.”

But for at least a year before Oracle says it ended its business with the police bureau, there was widespread global awareness of authorities in Xinjiang rounding up ethnic Uyghurs and other minorities and interning them in inhumane reeducation camps. The data collected by Xinjiang police included DNA samples, biometric information, and family planning histories, and it was shot through with ethnic, religious, and other forms of bias. “The Public Security Bureau is at the end of the chain of command,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist who has written extensively about repression in Xinjiang. “The entire system is run by the PSB. So if you are aiding them, you are aiding the camps.”

Today Oracle continues to push into new markets, offering services that build foreign government demand for other Oracle products. Last October, Oracle launched a cloud hub in Dubai in collaboration with state-owned telecommunications company Etisalat, which helps implement internet censorship in the UAE.

Oracle chair Ellison reportedly told shareholders in the company’s December earnings call that the company’s work outside the United States is strategic and that its data centers and other services can lead to other business: “We’re just seeing demand for our products all over the world.” He added, “Our strategy is, because we have a large existing business, we have a large existing installed base, we believe we just have to get into more countries than someone — than Amazon.”

The post How Oracle Sells Repression in China appeared first on The Intercept.

Earlier this summer, as I walked past the hum of the morgue trucks parked outside our neighborhood hospital, I remembered my frequent pilgrimages to the morgue in Sarajevo as people searched for missing family during the war more than a quarter century ago. I can’t believe it’s that long ago. Watching what’s happening around the country, images from the Bosnian war and from years of my past living amid other people’s civil wars have crept into my daily and sleepless life. What were the precipitating incidents, what were the signs, when did rage and fear turn to violence, how did the fear defeat hope, was there some measure that could be codified? I don’t think we’re there yet. In fact, I can’t believe we’ll ever be there. But neither did they.

George Floyd’s death, the video of his slow suffocation, his pleas for breath, his call for his mama as he lay dying under the knee of police Officer Derek Chauvin ignited a rising-up against an entrenched and far better organized movement of white power, one that stretches back and back through our history. During one of the first Black Lives Matter protests in Brooklyn, I stood in a crowd wearing a mask and listened to a Black Episcopalian preacher give a sermon about peaceful anger. The next day, I was outside Barclays Center just before dusk with a crowd of protesters when another crowd arrived, having marched for miles from Bay Ridge. They stopped and one woman said they were going to pray, the evening Islamic prayer, and anyone could join or listen. They formed rows. A young man sang the call to prayer. The rest of the crowd — Black, white, brown — got down on a knee facing them. You could feel the surprise among the original crowd who had not expected the Bay Ridge Islamic Center’s arrival. How to react? Time passed and the anxiety dissipated as the kneelers watched and listened and some raised a fist. Bay Ridge’s Muslims were saying, Yes we know well how the system wields power, sweeps through neighborhoods, crushes minorities. And we’ve joined forces before.

That night, the protesters stayed out after curfew; the police chased them, many were beaten, locked up. Groups formed to get people out of prison. You know the rest: Allies handing out water bottles, curfews, the chanting of names of Black men and women killed by police, police violence, clashes. And then, on the tails of demands for justice, the extremists flew in. In the streets of Portland, Oregon, the gun-chested, beefy, white power anti-maskers and the Homeland Security dudes in riot gear ratcheted up the crisis, with unmarked vans whisking protesters away, with the Boogaloo Bois, the Boojahadeen, the Proud Boys, and antifa. In early June, helicopters were constantly buzzing overhead in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, and then at night the fireworks began. All over the city. At first, it was exciting, celebratory. I noticed Max, our 6-year-old mutt, who could never get enough of the outdoors night or day, around dusk, his tail would drop, he’d lope to the dining table and duck under. If I tried to take him out after sundown, his feet cemented in place. Max wasn’t alone. There was an epidemic of traumatized dogs. Canines sense an earthquake coming — why not war?

Max’s fear started with the fireworks. And the fireworks set off more fears, conspiracy theories about government plots to drive people mad with sleeplessness, to stir anxiety in Black and brown communities, to send police fireworks squads into neighborhoods searching for “troublemakers” — code for protesters. You could find any and every theory, even that the fireworks were the prelude to war. Isolation, despair, insomnia, job losses, illness, curfews, police violence, looting — they breed conspiracy theories. It’s the traction of those conspiracy theories that needs to be measured.

I lived in Sarajevo during the war above the Catholic church in the old town called Bascarsija — “grand bazaar” in Turkish — with Vera, her husband Drago, and their traumatized dog, Blacky. Every time the phone rang, which wasn’t often since the phones were often down during the war, Blacky flipped out. If you dared to venture forth and pick up the receiver, he’d grip your ankle with his teeth and yank. Everyday around dusk, an archipelago of shell-shocked dogs barked their agony across the city.

Vera, a poet and newspaper editor in her 50s, was convinced that war would never come to Bosnia. Even in 1991, the year before the war began, with the Yugoslav army shelling towns on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, with the Yugoslav army besieging the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar, Sarajevans did not believe that war would come to their beautiful city nestled in the mountains. War in Bosnia? No way, said Vera. It was too mixed up: Muslims, Orthodox, Catholics, Jews, all living together and intermarried. Vera was Croat. Vera’s former husband was half Croat and half Jewish. Drago, a retired economist and bank director, was Serb. Upstairs in Vera’s apartment building lived a Jewish-Croatian Bosnian and his Muslim Bosnian wife and their mixed son. The whole building was like that.

Drago told Vera that she was naive. “The war in Bosnia,” he said, “will be longer and bloodier than anywhere else.” The two rarely agreed on anything.

Vera had been a baby in a bomb shelter in World War II. Drago had joined the partisans to fight the Nazis and their Croatian allies. He ended up in a concentration camp in Austria and nearly died of starvation. His sister happened to see his body thrown on a pile of corpses and saved him.

Drago always expected the worst. And so in early 1992, with war raging just across the border from Bosnia, Drago drove up north to his family farm where he’d once been mayor. Already, the Bosnian Serbs had declared autonomous zones and were preparing for an independent state. Drago heard that Ratko Mladic — the charismatic Bosnian Serb military commander who would become notorious for leading the massacre of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica — was recruiting men for his separatist army. Drago urged the reservists he knew to resist Mladic and stay home, until a friend warned him to be quiet and leave lest he get thrown in prison or killed. On his way home, he saw irregular soldiers with beards and long hair wearing patches with crossed swords, a skull, an eagle. The Chetniks were back, reincarnations of the old nationalist guerrillas who’d formed an alliance with the Nazis in World War II to advance their dream of a Greater Serbia. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, was a great admirer of the Chetniks. In their honor, he vowed that the Muslims of Bosnia would burn in hell if Bosnia declared independence.

Lately, I’ve drifted into Drago’s camp. The images of bulging, bearded men with their ammunition bibs, wielding automatic rifles and a medley of white power symbols — swastikas, Confederate flags, nooses, patches of an arrow through a skull and the words “death” and “victory” — just like a cabal of Chetniks. They mobilize like the wind thanks to their chat-frats. They message, “Any patriots willing to take up arms and defend our city?”— Kenosha, Wisconsin. They threaten to lynch and behead the governor of Michigan. Drago recently died, but I can hear him telling me, “Don’t be a donkey.” That’s what he called me. A lot. Usually for missing signs of trouble, for not being vigilant.

Left/Top: Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander, and his soldiers during the war in Bosnia, on April 16, 1994. Right/Bottom: Serbian trench in the front of Osijek, Croatia, on March 1992. Photo: Vlastimir Nesic/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images; Francoise De Mulder/Roger Viollet/Getty Images

In Sarajevo, whispers swept through schools, the hospital, newsrooms, offices. Serb friends and colleagues were suddenly off to Belgrade to visit family, or going to the countryside, or getting medical treatment, or just disappearing. Still few believed that war would come to Sarajevo. Between February 29 and March 1, 1992, Bosnia held a referendum on independence from Yugoslavia. A nearly unanimous “yes” prevailed. Except that the Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia boycotted the vote. In fact, they’d already declared a separate constitution.

On March 1, a Serb wedding party was heading toward the old Orthodox church in Bascarsija. Gunfire scattered the celebrants. The bridegroom’s father was shot and killed. The Orthodox priest was shot. Sarajevans were disgusted but not surprised when the killer was rumored to be a local thug, nicknamed Celo, or “baldy.”

Immediately Bosnian Serb leaders declared, You see? We were right. Independent Bosnia means death to Serbs.

Up went the barricades manned by Serb paramilitaries. Students removing the barricades were killed. And up went the barricades manned by Celo and other criminals. Fairly quickly, the Bosnian government formed its own underdog army.

In April, Sarajevans still believed peace was possible. Because they wanted peace. Because they felt peace. They couldn’t conceive that anyone would want war. Hundreds began marching in Dobrinja, the suburb created for the 1984 Winter Olympics. Hundreds turned to thousands and tens of thousands shouting, We can live together. They brandished photographs of the late Josip Broz Tito, nostalgic for his autocratic rule when everyone was a Yugoslav. They waved signs for sex, drugs, and rock and roll. This was Sarajevo. Fun town. Comedians. Musicians. Cafe hipsters. War was for those rural hillbillies. The protests carried on into the next day. Some 100,000 Sarajevans calling for peace. Then the shots rang out again. Bullets hit dozens of protesters. Fourteen were killed. The police figured out that Serb snipers were firing on the protesters from the Holiday Inn, the same hotel that would end up housing the international media for three and a half years of siege.

That day, April 6, Bosnia won international recognition of its independence. And the siege began.

The siege of Sarajevo, the longest in modern Europe’s history, was brutal and twisted and yet so intimate. It’s very intimacy made it so unthinkable that friends and neighbors could turn on each other. How could they? How could we? One Bosnian Croat writer and boxer I knew who stayed to defend the city told me that his best friend was on the other side with the Bosnian Serb army. During the day, they shot at each other. At night, they talked on the phone and wept. Ismet Ceric, the head of psychiatry at Sarajevo’s main hospital, was Karadzic’s boss for 20 years. He told me that the very day Karadzic ordered the shelling of Sarajevo from the mountains, he called Ceric’s mother in Sarajevo. “He called to wish her a happy Bajram,” Ceric told me, referring to the Muslim festival following Ramadan. Ceric then asked me, Can you believe that? Yes, sadly I could. Karadzic was so obsessed with Ceric that he followed his old boss around the city for the next three years with mortars and grenades. It was hard to say whether Karadzic wanted to kill him, taunt him, or whether Ceric thought there must be a Karadzic behind every near-miss.

When Karadzic told Serbs to evacuate the city, many refused, because they had nowhere to go, some because they refused to be refugees, and some because they believed in defending the old pre-war Sarajevo even as the Bosnian army turned more and more Muslim. As hard as you tried to hold on to your identity as a mother, a doctor, an actor, a journalist, a policeman, that’s not how others identified you. With a flip of a linguistic switch, you were reduced to Serb, Croat, Muslim, Jew.

What flips civil strife into civil war? A well-planned agenda, charismatic leaders, and fear. And perhaps one last ingredient that pulls together all three: the whittling down of history and all its complexities into a narrative of collective destiny — ours against theirs, us against them.

Left/Top: Bombing of Sarajevo. Right/Bottom: A Bosnian man runs in a Sarajevo street where civilians were hit by sniper fire, in 1992. Photo: Francoise De Mulder/Roger Viollet/Getty Images; David Turnley/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images

This summer some New Yorkers fled the city for the suburbs, the countryside, New England, California. The New York Post egged on the dystopian fears with headlines like “New York City Crime Wave Reaches New Heights.” People have lost their homes, more are living on the streets. Storefronts and restaurants are empty. Overturned chairs and tables fossilized in the windows. My dentist in Manhattan told me that her colleagues want to buy guns. What did you tell them, I asked her. That they should get them, she said. Her husband survived the war in Kosovo, he says they would be foolish not to have guns. A war photographer and friend told me that I should have an escape-survival bag always at the ready. He thinks we city people are idiots not to have guns.

An author and friend in Charlottesville, Virginia, tells me the feeling in low-income communities is that the mob is coming, and no one will protect them but their own guns. She says summer of 2017 in Charlottesville was our Fort Sumter, the first generation of a virus that’s morphing. When a group of Ku Klux Klan showed up to demonstrate, the police had their backs to them. Who were they facing down? The citizens who’d come to protest these avatars of violent white power. They chanted: The cops and Klan go hand in hand. And when the KKK left, the cops tear-gassed the anti-KKK demonstrators as if to say, Yeah, we do. That was two years before George Floyd’s death set off demands to defund the police. After all, who are they defending? The KKK? The Proud Boys? The demonstrators? Onlookers? Their power?

FBI documents released recently give proof to the fact that right-wing extremists are infiltrating and recruiting the police. Daryl Johnson, an agent tasked with investigating domestic terrorism at DHS eleven years ago, was pushed out for his inconvenient findings that right-wing extremist terrorism is far more dangerous to the homeland than Islamic terrorists. Recent history in Las Vegas, El Paso, Gilroy, and Charleston just proves his point, a point he now makes in books, articles, interviews, to anyone who will listen. Hundreds of thousands of well-armed white power extremists are now fully out in the open. Their violent acts are enshrined in social media and heralded by the president. They have new charismatic leaders. They have a clear agenda. They have a narrative of historic grievances and a shared destiny: white power. They have their white supremacists’ bibles. Their conspiracy theories are sticking with acronyms like TEOTWAKI: The End of the World As We Know It. They could all be called the children of the Turner Diaries.

The U.S. doesn’t share a political context or history with Bosnia. But then there’s human nature, how we wield denial to survive, and tribalism when under threat, and how hard it is to turn off the worst of ourselves.

Residents in Erie and Union City, Pennsylvania tell a New York Times reporter that people on both “sides” are ready for violence should the other candidate win. Biden and Trump supporters live side by side. Some in the same family. They all know each other. And they’re all saying, Forget the courts. Trouble is coming to the streets. Because everyone’s armed. Trump supporters say a Biden win would be a Marxist socialist coup — extreme-right rhetoric is now mainstream. Female Biden supporters like Mary Jo Campbell say they’re scared to death. After Trump was elected, she and her friends started a club they called “The Drinking Girls” to meet, drink, plot, talk. During the pandemic, my women friends, and I’m pretty sure thousands of others, took to Zoom-drink sessions for similar reasons.

I keep looking at the portraits of Campbell and the other people of Erie captured by photographer Libby March. The faces — weary, drawn with anxiety, tough. They remind me of the men and women in central Bosnia, where the war hit first, where everyone kept an AK-47 or hunting rifle by the door. It’s impossible to imagine neighbors and friends turning on each other. Until it’s not.

I’m trying not to be a donkey, but being a Cassandra is extremely unrewarding. And annoying. A friend of mine who fled Iran when she was 9 years old balked at my comparisons to Sarajevo. “The minute anyone compares completely different countries that share no history, I switch off. That is never going to happen here.” I agree, in part. The U.S. doesn’t share a political context or history with Bosnia. But then there’s human nature, how we wield denial to survive, and tribalism when under threat, and how hard it is to turn off the worst of ourselves.

The two sides have come to stand for so much more than they can possibly hold and now face each other down like the forces of light and dark over Gondor. Only each side thinks the other is the dark. People who should be united by economic class are divided by skin color. The idea that one side is elitist and the other working class is a fallacy. Look no further than the elitism of the sitting president. Or the myriad working classes who comprise the so-called elitist Democratic Party. Still, when we meet strangers, we know almost instinctively who is a Trump supporter and who is a Biden supporter. Who is other. Who is hateable, deplorable, dispensable. The language of othering slips so easily off the tongue in this fraught moment. We are in the throes of an inexorable rearrangement. History moves not like an arrow but a boomerang, Ralph Ellison wrote. And no one knows which way it will go. What is known is that none of us can escape from history.

I could leave off here. Except I prefer the endings of comedy, not tragedy.

My neighborhood park in Brooklyn has come alive as never before: It’s an outdoor gym, an outdoor dance floor, people bring their exercise mats and a phone for their online high-intensity training or yoga class. People are kickboxing, jump-roping, sweating under the British prison ship martyrs’ monument. I watch one-woman camera crews filming their friends for a TikTok video. Nightlife has also moved to the park: Picnics, small parties, a couple wrapped in a blanket because there’s nowhere else to go. Every shape and color and size mingles in the park. I recently noticed that the hum and menace of a police generator and a police pole with stadium lights are gone. While ostensibly there to offer safety, the hum and glare stalked you, creating the menacing atmosphere of a dystopian film about surveillance, anomie, and the end of the world. Their absence has brought calm, respite, and festivity. And been replaced by nightly drumming sessions.

I loved Jerry Seinfeld for his real-New Yorkers-stick-it-out column, rebutting and lampooning a fellow New Yorker and comedy club owner whining on LinkedIn that the city is dead, his friends have fled, and he’s moving to Miami. Imagine being in a real war with this guy, Seinfeld wrote.

The day after I read it, I was speaking to a friend who wrote one of the definitive books on the wars in Yugoslavia.

“We have to stay,” I said.

“Of course we’re staying,” she said. “Where else are we going to go?”

Then she said, “We’ll be like the Sarajevans.”

Even if Joe Biden wins, the divides ripping apart this country will not go away. But that doesn’t mean we will go the way of the Balkans, find ourselves in Sarajevo’s siege. That’s the nightmare scenario. There are millions of people, most in fact, who want to find a way to bridge the divides and face the seismic shift that history is demanding.

In a recent dream, I walk into a party in Sarajevo. I plan to surprise Vera. We haven’t seen each other in two decades. She’s on the couch. She seems angry. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming, or is this just a coincidence because you wanted to go to a party? No, no, no, I say, stunned by her anger. I don’t even know these people, I tell her. She hugs me so tight. We’re both crying, in front of a roaring fire. The room turns to stone. The ceiling recedes, cathedral high. It’s so dark. I take my daughter by the hand to show her the room where I slept without windows, but she is pulling me away, she wants to go talk to the kids outside. She says something about a new friend, Methody. Outside Vera’s building I see a bent-over old man with long gray hair and a cane. It’s Mr. Methody, the philosopher-father of the crowd. Everyone looks to him, but he keeps manifesting in different places. He whispers to me, The structure of things is difficult. These are not normal times. The atoms and structures. It’s not a time of normal cause and effect. Then he vanishes.

This article was supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Correction: November 1, 2020
This story has been corrected to note that Kenosha is in Wisconsin, not Minnesota.

The post I Watched War Erupt in the Balkans. Here’s What I See in America Today. appeared first on The Intercept.

Palestinian and Israeli activists condemned a map of the proposed annexation presented by Netanyahu at a televised news conference, in which he argued that his close relationship with Trump would make it possible for him to extend Israel’s borders if he wins re-election.

“In recent months, I have led a diplomatic effort in this direction, and the conditions for this have ripened,” Netanyahu said in his pitch to voters.

While the Trump administration’s “Vision for Peace,” devised by Netanyahu’s longtime friend Jared Kushner, is not yet public, Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley would make a viable Palestinian state impossible by fragmenting it into enclaves within Israel.

Ayman Odeh, who leads the Joint List, the third-largest bloc in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, called Netanyahu’s proposed annexation a “vision of apartheid.”

“They aren’t annexing the West Bank into Israel; they are turning Israel into an extension of the West Bank,” Odeh added, according to a translation by the Israeli-American journalist Mairav Zonszein. “A reality where a minority of Jewish citizens control a majority of Palestinian subjects.”

Yousef Munayyer, director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, pointed out that Netanyahu’s map would allow the 20,000 residents of the Palestinian city of Jericho to live under nominal self-rule, but leave them as dependent on Israeli permission to enter or exit their enclave as the besieged residents of Gaza.

Netanyahu's map shows the intention to make Palestinian Jericho a new Gaza, another open air prison Israel can lock down as it pleases. https://t.co/tv2QfPQgBI

— Yousef Munayyer (@YousefMunayyer) September 10, 2019

“Anyone familiar with the conflict, the geography of the region, and the minimum conditions for establishing a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories knows that an independent and viable Palestinian state cannot be established with such a large swath of land along the Jordan River taken away,” the Israeli group Peace Now said in a statement deploring Netanyahu’s plan. “The autonomy and access roads Netanyahu guarantees to the Palestinians in the Valley are alarmingly similar to the Bantustan formula in former Apartheid South Africa.”

A detailed analysis of Netanyahu’s map by Peace Now concluded that he planned to first annex more than 22 percent of the West Bank, sealing its major population centers off from the neighboring Arab state of Jordan and leaving more than 44,000 Jordan Valley Palestinians in isolated communities, effectively living in Israel but without citizenship or voting rights.

Israel’s Peace Now showed what the Israeli-occupied West Bank would look like after the annexation of the Jordan Valley and Northern Dead Sea Region by Israel.

Brian Reeves, a Peace Now spokesperson, observed that confining Palestinians to such enclaves could allow Israel to eventually annex the entire West Bank without giving its non-Jewish residents the right to vote. “If you are wondering how the Israeli right thinks it can annex the West Bank while not having to fully enfranchise millions of Palestinians, this is the formula,” Reeves wrote on Twitter.

The Israeli peace activists also reported that nearly 9,000 Palestinians reside in 48 shepherding communities in the Jordan Valley, which were ignored in Netanyahu’s plan.

Although the Israeli prime minister described his map as a “dramatic” new initiative, in reality it is almost identical to a plan to offer Palestinians limited autonomy in “four self-managing Arab counties” he first outlined in his 1995 book, “A Place Among the Nations.”

During his first term as prime minister, in 1997, Netanyahu presented a version of the same plan to then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, and, as the Washington Post reported at the time, “The Israeli army’s planning branch gave Clinton a detailed presentation on a classified army-drawn map of Israel’s security interests in the West Bank. Clinton, according to a U.S. official who has read a written account of the meeting, responded with a single word, ‘Interesting.'”

Commentators in Israel agreed that the latest version of Netanyahu’s proposal was unveiled this week in order to appeal to far-right voters, but the idea of annexing the Jordan Valley and offering some sort of autonomy to Palestinians in West Bank enclaves was first outlined by Yigal Allon, an Israeli cabinet member from the left-wing Labour party, in 1967, just weeks after Israel seized the territory from Jordan. The following year, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that “cabinet ministers were giving serious thought to the so-called Allon plan,” which “calls for the incorporation into Israel of a 10- to 14-mile-wide strip along the West Bank of the Jordan River and the return to Jordan of the central mountainous region in which such towns as Nablus and Hebron are located. A corridor passing through Jericho would link the two regions.”

Netanyahu’s map is only a slightly revised version of the Allon plan map, with the key difference being that the Palestinians are no longer offered access to the international border with Jordan.

A map of the 1968 Allon Plan for the West Bank.

While Trump has yet to endorse Netanyahu’s proposal — which was condemned by governments around the world, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United Kingdom — the Israeli prime minister seems to be hoping for a pre-election gesture of support.

Just before Israelis went to the polls in April, the American president gave Netanyahu a boost by recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. The following month, Kushner even brought Netanyahu a gift to commemorate that gesture, an updated U.S. map of Israel including the Golan Heights, with the word “Nice” scrawled on it with a presidential Sharpie.

To that end, Netanyahu seems to have been working to draw the White House’s attention to the strategic importance of the Jordan Valley in recent months. In June, Netanyahu brought Trump’s ambassador, David Friedman, and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, on a tour of the area.

Today I visited the Jordan Valley and Jordan River with PM @netanyahu, Israeli NSA Meir Ben-Shabbat, @USAmbIsrael, & @AmbDermer. I saw firsthand the strategic importance that these locations have on Israel's national security. (1 of 3) pic.twitter.com/JcNRnaqOxk

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) June 23, 2019

Netanyahu’s political rivals, the Blue and White party led by retired Gen. Benny Gantz, responded to his proposal by asserting that “the Jordan Valley will be part of Israel forever” and mocking his claim that only he could convince Trump to support Israeli sovereignty over the strategic but sparsely populated territory.

That statement from Netanyahu’s opposition led Matt Duss, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser, to comment: “The Israeli election is between those promising permanent occupation and those promising permanent occupation who are also corrupt.”

The post Netanyahu Hints Trump Peace Plan Will Allow Israel to Annex Key West Bank Territory appeared first on The Intercept.

The decision to bar the Democrats, who have been outspoken in calling for an end to the occupation, was quickly condemned by the two most progressive contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

“Israel doesn’t advance its case as a tolerant democracy or unwavering US ally by barring elected members of Congress from visiting because of their political views,” Warren wrote on Thursday morning, before the ban was confirmed. “This would be a shameful, unprecedented move.”

“Banning Congresswomen Omar and Tlaib from entering Israel and Palestine is a sign of enormous disrespect to these elected leaders, to the United States Congress, and to the principles of democracy,” Sanders wrote 30 minutes later, when the news became official. “The Israeli government should reverse this decision and allow them in.”

Rep. Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat, then added that Trump and Netanyahu were “afraid” of letting Tlaib and Omar “witness first-hand the brutality & dehumanization Israel’s occupation inflicts on the Palestinian people.” McCollum, who introduced legislation in May to ban Israel from using U.S. military aid to detain, interrogate, or torture Palestinian children, added that “This bigoted president is working to extend his Muslim travel ban to Members of Congress.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi waited nearly three hours after Warren’s tweet to add her condemnation. “Israel’s denial of entry to Congresswomen Tlaib and Omar is a sign of weakness, and beneath the dignity of the great State of Israel,” Pelosi said in a statement that focused more on Trump than Netanyahu. “The President’s statements about the Congresswomen are a sign of ignorance and disrespect, and beneath the dignity of the Office of the President,” she added.

“I don’t believe any nation should deny entry to elected Members of Congress, period,” Kamala Harris wrote at about the same time on Thursday afternoon. “It’s an affront to the United States. Open and engaged foreign relations are critical to advancing U.S. interests. Trump is playing politics as he weakens our global leadership.”

Later still on Thursday, after even the American Israel Public Affairs Committee had condemned the decision, Joe Biden, the former vice president who is the leading moderate in Democratic presidential field, finally weighed in. “I have always been a stalwart supporter of Israel — a vital partner that shares our democratic values,” Biden tweeted. “No democracy should deny entry to visitors based on the content of their ideas — even ideas they strongly object to. And no leader of the free world should encourage them to do so.”

As the statements rolled in throughout the morning and afternoon, Daniel Seidemann, the director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, noted that Democrats appeared more willing to criticize Trump than Netanyahu. The words of Democrats and American Jewish groups should be studied carefully to detect “the relative integrity vs. spinelessness” of those offering them, Seidemann suggested.

“Do you mention Netanyahu and Israel by name, or only Trump?” Seidemann asked. “Do you cover ass by emphasizing how much you disagree with Omar and Tlaib? Do you say this is really bad because it tarnishes Israel’s otherwise sterling image? Do you find awkward opportunities to use profusive adjectives for Israel (our great ally)? The tone used to condemn Trump and Netanyahu should not diverge.”

Reports from Israel suggested that the decision was an abrupt reversal, taken only after the U.S. president had pushed the Israeli leader into a corner by writing on Twitter on Thursday morning, “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit.”

Last month, Israel’s American-born ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, a former Netanyahu aide, said that “out of respect for the U.S. Congress and the great alliance between Israel and America, we would not deny entry to any member of Congress into Israel.”

In a statement issued shortly after Pelosi condemned the about-face, Omar called Netanyahu’s decision, made “under pressure from President Trump,” an affront.

It is an affront that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, under pressure from President Trump, would deny entry to representatives of the U.S. government.

My full statement: pic.twitter.com/v00ESmehXT

— Rep. Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan) August 15, 2019

Tlaib tweeted a photograph of her grandmother, who lives in the occupied West Bank, and called the decision “a sign of weakness [because] the truth of what is happening to Palestinians is frightening.”

This woman right here is my sity. She deserves to live in peace & with human dignity. I am who I am because of her. The decision by Israel to bar her granddaughter, a U.S. Congresswoman, is a sign of weakness b/c the truth of what is happening to Palestinians is frightening. pic.twitter.com/GGcFLiH9N3

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) August 15, 2019

The lawmaker also expressed her disappointment that she would not be able to tour the West Bank city of Hebron with Avner Gvaryahu, a former Israeli soldier who leads the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence.

.@AGvaryahu I was looking forward to it & can't thank you enough for being on the right side of history. As an American who grew up embracing justice & equality, I appreciate your courage & hope that one day my Congressional colleagues are given the opportunity to hear you. https://t.co/wbboQEUHge

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) August 15, 2019

Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress, conceived of the trip late last year as an alternative to a junket to Israel sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby group — a decades-old tradition for newly elected members of Congress.

Since then, she and Omar have been regularly slandered as anti-Semites by supporters of Israel in both the Republican and Democratic parties for their criticism of Israel’s far-right government and their support for the Palestinian-led movement to use boycotts, divestment, and sanctions to press Israel to end the occupation and annexation of Palestinian land.

At rallies and in tweets, Trump has been seeking to demonize the two members of Congress, who are outspoken critics of his administration and of the Israeli occupation, both to fuel his nativist campaign against immigration — Omar is a refugee from Somalia and Tlaib is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants — and to deepen divisions between progressive and moderate Democrats over unconditional American support for Israel.

In his first tweet on Thursday, the U.S. president repeated the false slur that the two lawmakers “hate Israel & all Jewish people.”

Two hours later, Trump made the primarily political nature of his attack even more transparent, by tweeting, “Representatives Omar and Tlaib are the face of the Democrat Party, and they HATE Israel!”

Sanders, the only Jewish American among the leading presidential contenders, responded forcefully to Trump’s attempt to smear his colleagues. “It is disgusting that a bigot like Trump is attacking @RashidaTlaib and @IlhanMN in this way,” he tweeted back. “Opposing Netanyahu’s policies is not “hating the Jewish people.” We must stand together against those who promote hatred and racism in Israel, Palestine, the U.S. and everywhere.”

Sanders expanded on that defense in a video message recorded later in the day, in which he rejected attempts by Netanyahu and Trump to accuse critics of Israel’s far-right policies of anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is not some abstract idea to me. It is very personal. It destroyed a good part of my family. I absolutely reject Trump's disgusting efforts to exploit fear of anti-Semitism to attack my colleagues. pic.twitter.com/IwpSmxcnHF

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) August 15, 2019

“Anti-Semitism is not some abstract idea to me. It is very personal. It destroyed a good part of my family,” Sanders said. “I am vigorously opposed to the reactionary, racist and authoritarian policies of Donald Trump. That does not make me anti-American. And I am not anti-Israel because I oppose Netanyahu’s policies.”

If Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s government “doesn’t want members of the United States Congress to visit their country to get a first-hand look at what’s going on,” Bernie Sanders told MSNBC Thursday night, “maybe he can respectfully decline the billions of dollars that we give to Israel.”

WATCH: Bernie Sanders on Israel’s decision to deny entrance to two elected U.S. officials: “If Israel doesn’t want members of the United States Congress to visit their country…maybe they can respectfully decline the billions of dollars that we give to Israel.” #inners pic.twitter.com/m48djEhZjU

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) August 16, 2019

Trump’s public intervention on Thursday morning was reportedly prompted by private frustration that Israeli officials were planning to permit the visit, despite a law barring supporters of the BDS movement from entering Israel or the Israeli-controlled territories.

Barak Ravid of Israel’s Channel 13 reported for Axios that Netanyahu had been looking for a way to “address the pressure from the White House” without totally barring Omar and Tlaib. As Ravid noted after Netanyahu caved to that pressure, the idea that the visit had been blocked at the last moment because the two members of Congress support the boycott movement made little sense, since their positions were well known months ago.

I want to tell you a secret: A month ago when Netanyahu decided to allow Omar and Tlaib into the country they alreadty supported BDS and he knew it back then. There is only one reason for Netanyahu's backtracking today – the pressure from Donald Trump

— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) August 15, 2019

Netanyahu, who is boasting of his close alliance with Trump on billboards ahead of Israeli elections next month, made no mention of the U.S. president in a statement justifying the decision to block two sitting members of Congress from visiting the nation that is the largest recipient of U.S. aid.

“Only a few days ago, we received their itinerary for their visit in Israel, which revealed that they planned a visit whose sole objective is to strengthen the boycott against us and deny Israel’s legitimacy,” Netanyahu wrote. “For instance: they listed the destination of their trip as Palestine and not Israel, and unlike all Democratic and Republican members of Congress who have visited Israel, they did not request to meet any Israeli officials, either from the government or the opposition.”

The two lawmakers had planned to visit the West Bank cities of Hebron, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, as well as the Al Aqsa Mosque in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, on a tour sponsored by Miftah, a Palestinian rights group led by the veteran Palestinian negotiator Hanan Ashrawi.

According to Netanyahu, that itinerary “reveals that the sole purpose of their visit is to harm Israel and increase incitement against it.”

In what looked more like political trolling than a serious offer, Netanyahu finished his statement by suggesting that Tlaib, whose maternal grandmother lives in the occupied West Bank, could be permitted to visit her family there, if she first agrees to surrender her right to free speech while in Israeli-controlled territory. If Tlaib “submits a humanitarian request to visit her relatives,” Netanyahu wrote, “the minister of interior has announced that he will consider her request on the condition that she pledges not to act to promote boycotts against Israel during her visit.”

Israel's "exemption" for @RashidaTlaib doesn't convey generosity, it only highlights a disconcerting reality where an American lawmaker must restrict her free speech in order to be allowed to visit her family in lands unlawfully controlled by Israel. #FreePalestine

— Omar Baddar ??? ????? (@OmarBaddar) August 16, 2019

Late on Thursday, Tlaib did request permission to visit her grandmother in a letter to Israel’s interior minister in which she promised to “respect any restrictions” and pledged not to “promote boycotts against Israel during my visit.” That letter prompted a wave of criticism from Palestinian activists, who argued that she would set back their struggle against the occupation by forfeiting her right to free speech.

What is truly upsetting is that @RashidaTlaib fell in this trap and accepted to demean herself and grovel. Israel is the oppressor and its racist attitude towards Palestinians is established policy. Rashida should have known better. She should have acted with more dignity & pride https://t.co/ahAJ0s9Vg9

— Nour Odeh ?? #NojusticeNopeace (@nour_odeh) August 16, 2019

And @RepRashida should have used her platform to highlight this point instead of writing that humiliating letter asking the occupier to treat her as an exception in exchange for abiding by its “restrictions.” https://t.co/NbkI1TF7AE

— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) August 16, 2019

On Friday, Tlaib reversed herself, rejecting the offer and cancelling her trip.

Silencing me & treating me like a criminal is not what she wants for me. It would kill a piece of me. I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in–fighting against racism, oppression & injustice. https://t.co/z5t5j3qk4H

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) August 16, 2019

On Thursday, Miftah called the decision to block the visit “an affront to the American people and their representatives” and “an assault on the Palestinian people’s right to reach out to decision-makers.” The Palestinian organization also noted that Israel had just welcomed dozens of American lawmakers, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, on a tour organized by AIPAC.

Netanyahu’s decision to side with Trump was deplored by Palestinian-Americans and seen as shortsighted by some supporters of Israel, who noted that nearly three-quarters of Jewish Americans are Democrats and the Democratic Party could soon be back in control of the White House as well as Congress.

“What should not get lost in this story is the degree to which Israel controls Palestinian lives,” the Palestinian-American lawyer Huwaida Arraf observed. “Palestinians cannot travel anywhere without Israel’s permission and no one, not even members of the U.S. Congress, can visit Palestinians without Israel’s permission.”

Last Updated: Friday, Aug. 16, 4:46 p.m. EDT
This article was updated with a new headline, revised chronology and the addition of a video message from Sen. Bernie Sanders, in which he rebutted Donald Trump’s claim that Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are anti-Semites for criticizing Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories it seized in 1967. It was later updated to report Tlaib’s decision to cancel her trip.

The post As Warren and Sanders Swiftly Condemned Israel for Barring Congresswomen, Pelosi and Biden Hesitated appeared first on The Intercept.

On Wednesday, the United Nations released the results of a five-month investigation into the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Utilizing recordings and forensic evidence from inside Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, where Khashoggi was killed, the 100-page report details the grisly final moments of the journalist’s life. The report suggested that Khashoggi first struggled with his killers, after which he “could have been injected with a sedative and then suffocated using a plastic bag.”

The report’s author, Agnes Callamard, the U.N. human rights agency’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, places guilt for the murder squarely on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, emphasizing the “individual liability” of many senior officials. There was “credible evidence,” the report said, of the direct involvement of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Describing Khashoggi’s murder as a “deliberate, premeditated execution” and an “extrajudicial killing for which the state of Saudi Arabia is responsible under international human rights law,” Callamard called on the U.N. secretary general to establish an international criminal investigation.

Callamard also pointed to “Saudi Arabia’s continual denials and scene clean-up” following the killing, excoriating the kingdom’s lack of transparency, cover-up efforts, and hampering of Turkish law enforcement — enough, argued the report, to amount to obstruction of justice. She also deplored Saudi Arabia’s secretive prosecution of 11 Saudis supposedly linked to the crime who have quietly and anonymously been put on trial inside the kingdom. According to the report, these proceedings failed to meet international standards and should be handed over to the international community.

Despite the chilling and highly documented details of the report, Callamard’s articulate arguments are likely to go unheeded.

The findings reinforced public opinion, which already held the Saudi government, and bin Salman personally, accountable for Khashoggi’s death. While increasing the number of confirmed details on the public record, the report also largely echoes the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community, which declared barely a month after the murder that the crown prince likely ordered the killing himself.

Callamard singled out the U.S., calling on the country to recognize its duties to Khashoggi as a legal U.S. resident and its jurisdiction to investigate, and prosecute, possible stateside links to the plot. It also called out the American government for failing to honor multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, filed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Committee to Protect Journalists for documents related to the CIA’s investigation of the crime.

Despite the chilling and highly documented details of the report, Callamard’s articulate arguments are likely to go unheeded. From the beginning of the Khashoggi affair, President Donald Trump set himself firmly in defense of the Saudi government and bin Salman, in particular. Trump has repeatedly and openly dismissed accusations against the crown prince, calling him a “very good ally” and refusing to accept the findings of his own intelligence community. Rather, he’s reassured Riyadh both rhetorically and materially, invoking the veto power to sustain U.S. support of the Saudi-led war in Yemen and using emergency powers to pursue massive arms deals with the kingdom. Trump’s unequivocal, lavish support of the Saudi regime has garnered a rare level of bipartisan opposition, yet so far, the executive branch has largely won out.

Without a strong rebuke from the U.S., any international outcry is unlikely to influence Saudi behavior. Bolstered by a fawning president and strategic alliances with the United Arab Emirates and Israel, Riyadh has proven remarkably immune to anyone else’s critiques.

Such critiques have been mounting. For years, the international community has decried the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, largely a product of Saudi campaigns and U.S.-made weapons. Bin Salman’s imprisonment and possible torture of human rights activists, such as Loujain al-Hathloul and Eman al-Nafjan, have elicited cries of horror from journalists and governments alike. Khashoggi’s murder ignited global outrage. Numerous countries have warned against the rising aggressions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, stoked and supported by U.S. hawks like John Bolton.

Yet each cycle of outcry has been followed by acts of further defiance on the part of the crown prince, who wasted little time after the Khashoggi affair to begin rehabilitating his image. In this effort, the U.S. has served as a loyal ally and often a direct enforcer of bin Salman’s agenda. This was evident in a report, published one day before Callamard’s, that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blocked experts in his own State Department who intended to include Saudi Arabia on a list of regimes utilizing child soldiers. Pompeo’s denial contradicts not only his own specialists, but many other reports of the kingdom’s use of underage Sudanese fighters in Yemen. It was just another sign that the Trump administration is willing to deliberately overlook human rights concerns in favor of its strategic interest in Saudi dominance.

The implications of this pattern are grave — and the consequences are accelerating. With bin Salman’s erratic, violent tendencies unchecked, Saudi Arabia has taken an increasingly aggressive position in a region already beset by conflict. Recent strikes between Houthi fighters and Riyadh promise only escalation in war-battered Yemen, exacerbating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Confrontations in the Persian Gulf stoke an anti-Iran rhetoric in the Persian Gulf and the U.S. alike, now approaching a fever pitch. Meanwhile, Saudi courts are on track for a record number of executions, while scores of human rights activists and other civilians remain in prison. With the stakes continually rising, and Callamard’s carefully argued plea for justice likely to go unheeded, the potential body count of Mohammed bin Salman’s reign is likely to rise much further still.

The post U.N. Concludes That Saudi Arabia Needs to Be Held Accountable for Khashoggi. Here’s Why That Won’t Happen. appeared first on The Intercept.

“The definition of insanity,” Einstein didn’t say, “is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Have the Democrats gone mad? Are they really planning on putting up the same type of candidate against Donald Trump in 2020 that they put up against him in 2016? Is the party bent on nominating Hillary 2.0?

How else to describe Joe Biden, the former vice president and ex-senator from Delaware, who is leading in the polls and has hinted that he’d reveal whether he’s running for president in “a few weeks” and might select a running mate early in the process?

Forget, for a moment, his “blue-collar-uncle-at-the-end-of-the-bar persona.” Ignore also his recent, and ridiculous, claim to have the “most progressive record of anybody” running for president. Consider, instead, the sheer number of similarities he seems to have with the vanquished Democratic presidential candidate of 2016.

Iraq War supporter? Check. Clinton was pilloried by the left and the right alike as a wild-eyed hawk; her vote in favor of the Iraq invasion haunted both her 2008 and 2016 campaigns. In fact, a study by two academics in 2017 found a “significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump” and suggested that if Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin “had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate,” they could have “sent Hillary Clinton to the White House.”

Let’s be clear: If he runs, Biden will be the only candidate — out of up to 20 Democrats running for the nomination — to have voted for the Iraq War. As the influential chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the run-up to the invasion, Biden (falsely) claimed the United States had “no choice but to eliminate the threat” from Saddam Hussein. A former U.N. weapons inspector even accused the then-senator of running a “sham” committee hearing that provided “political cover for a massive military attack on Iraq.”

Friend of Wall Street? Check. Clinton had a Goldman Sachs problem; Biden has an MBNA problem. Headquartered in his home state of Delaware, the credit card giant MBNA was his biggest donor when he served in the Senate. In 2005, Biden threw his weight behind a bankruptcy bill, signed into law by President George W. Bush, that shamefully protected credit card companies at the expense of borrowers.

National Review later dubbed Biden “the senator from MBNA”. The then-senator’s son Hunter even went to work for the company while his father was pushing through the bankruptcy bill. There’s a word for that, right? Trumpian.

As in 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders will be bashing the banks again in the run-up to 2020; as in 2016, his fellow frontrunner will be defending them. “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders,” Biden confirmed in a speech in May 2018. “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

Champion of mass incarceration? Check. Clinton took flak for supporting the 1994 crime bill, which helped push up the U.S. prison population, introduced new federal death penalty crimes, and hugely exacerbated racial disparities in the criminal justice system. And Biden? Well, he wrote the damn thing!

Remember how Clinton’s loathsome defense of the 1994 bill came back to bite her in 2016? “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators.’ … We have to bring them to heel.”

You don’t think Biden’s decadeslong “tough on crime” rhetoric will hurt him too? Especially with minority voters? “One of my objectives, quite frankly, is to lock Willie Horton up in jail,” he declared in 1990, as Senate Judiciary Committee chair.

“I don’t care why someone is a malefactor in society,” Biden said in 1993, as he mocked “wacko Democrats” for trying to understand the causes of crime. “I don’t care why someone is antisocial. I don’t care why they’ve become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society.”

“My greatest accomplishment is the 1994 Crime Bill,” he told the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2007.

Millions of black voters refused to turn out for Clinton in 2016. Why wouldn’t they do the same in response to a Biden candidacy in 2020?

Establishment-friendly? Check. The Clintons arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1993; Clinton then spent eight years in the Senate and four years in Barack Obama’s cabinet. Biden arrived in D.C. in 1973; he spent 36 years in the Senate and eight years in Obama’s cabinet.

When Trump tries to run again as an anti-establishment outsider in 2020, what will Biden’s response be? And will grassroots Democrats rally behind a candidate who befriended and defended notorious segregationist Strom Thurmond, and whose allies brag that he is a “a guy who actually gets along with Mitch McConnell and a number of other Republicans”? This is supposed to be a selling point?

Gaffe-prone? Check. You think the “deplorables” line from Clinton was bad? Did you cringe at “Pokemon Go to the polls”? The former vice president has a long list of excruciating “Bidenisms.” Remember when he asked a state senator in a wheelchair to “stand up … let ’em see ya”? Or when he told a largely African-American audience that Mitt Romney was “going to put y’all back in chains”? Or when he said, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent”? I could go on. And on. And on. (And don’t even get me started on the “Creepy Joe Biden” videos …)

Why nominate a candidate for president who’ll make Trump look … what’s the word … normal?

Loser? Check. Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 2016, at the second attempt, having been defeated by Obama eight years earlier. For Biden, it would have to be third-time lucky. His supporters might not want you to remember this, but he has run for president twice already: In 1987, he quit the Democratic primary race within three months of announcing after being accused of plagiarizing parts of his speech. In 2008, he dropped out after coming fifth in the Iowa caucus, winning less than 1 percent of the vote.

Yet now, it seems, he and his supporters believe this serial loser is the only Democratic candidate able to win back white-working class voters from Trump and triumph in the 2020 presidential election?

Where is the actual evidence for this ludicrous claim? For a start, a recent poll found that “every potential Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential election — announced and unannounced — would beat President Trump in a head-to-head contest.” (As Biden himself conceded to The Intercept in December, “I think anybody can beat him.”)

The bigger issue, however, is that there is no question for the Democrats in 2020 to which Biden is the answer. Have they really learned no lessons from three years ago?

The post Joe Biden Is Hillary Clinton 2.0 — Democrats Would Be Mad to Nominate Him appeared first on The Intercept.

Google “is Trump racist?” and you’ll find that just within the last week, at least three major news outlets have taken on that very question.

At the Chicago Tribune, columnist Clarence Page asked, “Is President Trump a racist — or does he just act like one?” At CNN, Mallory Simon and Sara Sidner offer that “Trump says he’s not a racist,” but “[t]hat’s not how white nationalists see it.” And at New York magazine, the headline doesn’t hide the ball, declaring: “The Republican Denial of Trump’s Racism Is Absurd.”

I tend to agree. Over the past year, a consensus seems to have finally formed — at least among the broad political left — that President Donald Trump is, in fact, racist. Liberals have largely backed away from euphemisms like “racially charged” and “racialized” and just started speaking plainly. “Just Say It,” read a headline last January in the New York Times. “Trump Is a Racist.”

But the question of how politicians should characterize Trump supporters is a different matter altogether. Some Trump voters are certainly racist. But is it worth the strategic risk for politicians to call them out?

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., found himself in hot water last week when, in a clumsy quote to the Daily Beast, he said that voters who rejected black candidates because they are black might not be racist.

Sanders’s full remarks, cut from the Daily Beast article but released later in an audio clip, included a strong condemnation of racism. When asked to comment on the “race-oriented” nature of the gubernatorial campaigns waged by Brian Kemp of Georgia and Ron DeSantis of Florida against African-American candidates Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum, respectively, Sanders corrected the reporter, saying, “Why don’t we use the right word — not use the phrase ‘race-oriented.’ Why don’t we say ‘racist,’ how’s that?” Sanders went on to describe Gillum as having had to take on some of the most “blatant and ugly racism that we have seen in many, many years.”

But when discussing whether voters themselves, rather than the candidates, might have acted out of racism, Sanders seemed to equivocate. “There are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist, who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their life about, you know, whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American,” he said.

Of course, as many have pointed out, Sanders’s comment didn’t make much sense. Declining to vote for a candidate because of their race is, by definition, racist, and Sanders should have known better than to suggest otherwise.

But much of the criticism that followed focused on Sanders’s perceived tendency to “downplay” racism — a claim that isn’t supported by the interview transcript or his subsequent statement, in which he said, “Let me be absolutely clear: Donald Trump, Brian Kemp, and Ron DeSantis ran racist campaigns. … They used racist rhetoric to divide people and advance agendas that would harm the majority of Americans.” On NPR later that day, he explained that “there’s no question that in Georgia and in Florida, racism has reared its ugly head, and you have candidates who ran against Gillum and ran against Stacey Abrams who were racist and were doing everything they could to try to play whites against blacks.” He’s been similarly blunt before, as in an August MSNBC appearance, when he said, “I think we have to do a heck of a lot better getting through to some of those people. I am not going to deny for a second that some of those supporters are racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes. That’s true.” But, he said, “I don’t believe that’s a majority.”

In response, some critics still observed that “in neither statement did Sanders indict voters for backing racists candidates.” To them, it wasn’t enough for Sanders to call out racism or racist politicians. The litmus test seemed to be whether he would call voters racist. And that reopened a debate, familiar from when Hillary Clinton labeled Trump voters “deplorables,” about how politicians ought to address racist voters. Should they call out racists, or should politicians avoid that confrontation in hopes of building a broad coalition that can better attack racist policies and systems?

A politician must be persuasive. She must be many things for many people. She must represent the masses, and appeal to thousands, if not millions.

Consequently, setting aside extreme examples like white supremacists, terrorists, or abusers, politicians often take “the customer is always right” approach when it comes to voters. They might be cajoled, but they’re rarely criticized.

Instances in which politicians publicly contradict average voters are so rare and unexpected that they become iconic, as when late Sen. John McCain clumsily corrected a supporter who claimed that then-Sen. Barack Obama was “an Arab,” and thus couldn’t be trusted; or when Texas congressional candidate Beto O’Rourke voiced support for Colin Kaepernick in response to a constituent who found the football player’s protests “disrespectful.”

It takes courage to contradict a constituent when one’s career depends on votes, and moments of political and personal integrity are rightly celebrated. But even in these instances, O’Rourke and McCain understood that voters needed to be treated, well, politically.

McCain didn’t call the woman who objected to Obama on the (mistaken) basis of his identity a racist — even though choosing to reject a candidate on racial grounds undoubtedly is. And O’Rourke didn’t argue that antipathy for the NFL Black Lives Matter protests is rooted in anti-blackness, though he’d be justified in doing so. Instead, both men responded with strategic grace. Notably, O’Rourke set the stage for productive communication by first offering that “reasonable people can disagree on this issue,” and establishing that it makes people “no less American to come down on a different conclusion on this issue.”

Whether or not you agree that reasonable minds can differ on the issue of police violence, it’s hard to argue that O’Rourke’s soft touch didn’t help his argument. His approach — which some might call “good politics” — acknowledges what Zak Cheney-Rice, writing about Sanders in New York magazine, noted when he said that “calling racist white people ‘racist’ is probably a good way to ensure they do not vote for you.” At 72 percent of the country, white Americans are still a necessary part of any political coalition, and the geographic distribution of ethnic groups combined with our electoral college system means white votes are weighted more heavily than others.

Clinton felt the consequences of labeling voters racist when her “deplorables” gaffe became one of the more notable controversies of her 2016 presidential campaign. And Gillum seemed to appreciate the danger of calling his Republican opponent racist outright, saying instead, “I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist. I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.” (Even that deft sidestep might have hurt Gillum, who lost the election.)

Obama — who negotiated the third rail that is American racial politics more successfully than perhaps any other politician — declined to directly confront racists. During his famous “race speech” in 2008, he went out of his way to emphasize that although his own white grandmother exhibited prejudice, she sacrificed for him and loved him “as much as she loves anything in this world” — a framing choice that seemed to recognize that he would get further by lighting a path for those with bigoted beliefs to join the fold than by shaming them. He didn’t win by calling out racist voters, but by suggesting that they could be “more perfect.”

Like it or not, the opinions of white voters matter, and politicians have to balance the validation that marginalized communities deserve against the anxieties of white voters. As Cheney-Rice noted, it’s frustrating that white voters’ sensitivity about being called racist often becomes a more central part of the national conversation than the actual consequences of experiencing racism.

The consequences of not considering white voters in one’s political messaging strategy are more than just frustrating.

But the consequences of not considering white voters in one’s political messaging strategy are more than just frustrating. To millions of black and brown people, LGBTQ Americans, women, immigrants, and differently abled people, they are existential. In just the last two years, voting protections have been bulldozed, transgender rights stripped, and the deficit exploded on a tax giveaway to the rich — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If Democrats can’t win in 2020, things will only get worse.

Cheney-Rice worries that an “unwillingness to alienate racist voters inevitably leads to coddling racist voters” — an understandable and common concern. But I’d argue that there’s nothing inevitable about it. To the extent that politicians have put the interests of white voters before others, it’s been a choice, and not something intrinsic to multiracial coalition building.

Too often, politicians, including Democrats, have exploited racial bias to gain power in this majority-white but ethnically diverse country. The third-way strategy perfected by Bill Clinton relied on right-wing racism to keep nonwhites in line with the Democratic Party while he pivoted hard to the center — branding himself as a welfare-slashing, tough-on-crime candidate who was so invested in capturing the “law and order” vote that he paused his first presidential campaign to personally oversee the execution of a functionally lobotomized black man.

Unlike many Republicans and some moderate Democrats, many progressive candidates today seek to erect a big tent by offering broad-based, universal policies — not by weaponizing identity politics. Despite rejecting white majoritarianism and relying instead on cross-racial, class-based solidarity, they’re often met with understandable, if undeserved, skepticism. Words like “pandering,” “courting,” and “coddling” — as well as newer slang, like “caping for whites” — are frequently bandied about when the political motives of white voters are interrogated beyond the question of racism.

But not all politicking is pandering, and it’s incumbent on journalists to be observant about the difference: Are racist sentiments or group stereotypes being exploited, or are the interests of various groups being authentically met? If we treat genuine, if messy, efforts at communication and cynical identity politicking the same way, we run the real risk of derailing efforts to deliver maximum benefits to the most vulnerable among us. And the vulnerable simply can’t afford it.

Clinton’s defenders often point out that her “deplorables” speech was accurate: that anyone who would endorse the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia coming out of the Trump administration is deplorable.

Some Trump voters are undoubtedly racist. But racism is a popular and bipartisan endeavor. A much touted Reuters/Ipsos poll from 2016 showed that over 30 percent of Trump voters think blacks are less “intelligent” than whites, while 40 percent think we’re “lazy.” But the fact that 20 percent of Clinton voters agree went underreported. That number is especially troubling when you consider that without the 22 percent of Clinton voters who are black, there might not be much daylight between white voters regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

The prevalence of racism means that most accusations of racism are accurate — if only by broad definitions that include implicit bias, or structural systems in which most Americans are complicit. But as common as it is, few people see themselves as racist, and that fact neuters the efficacy of accusations of racism. The accused often react defensively and become even more resistant to change. “Telling people they’re racist, sexist, and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere,” says Alana Conner, executive director of Stanford University’s Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions Center. “It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.” As I’ve argued before, shaming, though cathartic, just doesn’t work.

This gulf between what racism is and what the average American understands racism to be is at the root of this racial double bind. Whether to call out voters isn’t always a question of political temerity. It can be a matter of political strategy.

Whether to call out voters isn’t always a question of political temerity. It can be a matter of political strategy.

The difference between Sanders and some other Democratic politicians (and liberal voters) is not a reluctance to call out racism. It’s that he’s not willing to write off people who hold bigoted beliefs as beyond political reach — perhaps understanding that racism is a pathology avoided by few. It’s the difference between seeing racism as something mutable and susceptible to the influence of persuasion (e.g., politics), or something intrinsic, static, and essentially corrupting.

I’ve always thought the more problematic part of Clinton’s statement was her deployment of the word “irredeemable.” Irredeemable voters don’t just hold abhorrent views. They’re permanently, essentially toxic. By calling half of Trump voters — millions of Americans — “deplorables,” she transmuted an adjective into a noun, and morphed bad actions and beliefs into untouchable people. One’s personal antipathy for racism shouldn’t preclude understanding that a president, responsible for all who live within her nation’s borders, shouldn’t consider any constituents beyond saving.

On some level, liberals seem to agree that racism is mutable. Despite somewhat deterministic historical accounts which have become popular in recent years, they celebrate the fact that higher education is correlated with liberal political views — as is living in racially mixed urban areas. But although they acknowledge that exposure to diversity is a balm for bigotry, many still scoff at middle-American conservatism as though their politics wouldn’t likely be different if they’d been born in Boise, Idaho.

Sanders takes the more humanistic approach. He has been rebuked repeatedly for believing that some Trump voters could be flipped, and for declining to write off all of them as “irredeemable.” He has been criticized for carving out space for their rehabilitation and reintegration into the Democratic party — even while he’s clear that not all can be convinced. For over two years now he has traveled the country — visiting parts of America long abandoned by the Democratic Party — red states full of black voters and white states that used to go blue — selling America on progressive policies that have consequently become mainstream. But few who criticize him pause to reflect on the relationship between Sanders’s inclusive, nonjudgmental approach and the increasing currency of his ideas.

In his statement following the Daily Beast article, Sanders threaded this needle well. He seemed to draw on a Demos report from earlier this year, which shows that so-called persuadable voters — those that fall in the middle of the political spectrum — are most receptive to political messaging that condemns the 1 percent for exploiting racial division. By appealing to voters’ belief that they aren’t racist, that they are better than divisive rhetoric, those voters are offered an opportunity to position themselves on the side of anti-racism, and against the more powerful enemy: corporate oligarchs. “It’s not just that politicians divide us based on what we look like, but that they do it to rewrite the rules to line their pockets,” was one message that tested well, according to the Demos study. “It’s not just that they generate fear based on race, but that they do it to benefit the wealthy few at our expense,” was another. Or, as Sanders put it in his response last Thursday, “They used racist rhetoric to divide people and advance agendas that would harm the majority of Americans.”

So is the answer ignoring individual racism? Not at all. I only question the utility of calling voters racists — not policies, or politicians, or other public figures. Nor am I suggesting that politicians should stay silent on biased remarks or behaviors — no matter who voices them. But pointing out acts, beliefs, or systems as racist is different, and more effective, than focusing on individuals, who are likely to become defensive and resistant to change. It’s not that politicians should do anything to win, but they shouldn’t tether themselves to a strategy that neither lessens racism nor helps them access the political power necessary to better people’s lives.

If the Democrats want any chance of winning in 2020, they should reconsider whether they want to force their most compelling and progressive politicians into an unwinnable double bind.

The post Calling Out Racist Voters Is Satisfying. But It Comes at a Political Cost. appeared first on The Intercept.