Native leaders and activists, calling themselves water protectors, wanted to show the newly elected President Donald Trump that they would continue to fight for their treaty rights to lands including the pipeline route. The march would be called “Native Nations Rise.”

Law enforcement was getting ready too — and discussing plans with Energy Transfer, the parent company of the Dakota Access pipeline. Throughout much of the uprising against the pipeline, the National Sheriffs’ Association talked routinely with TigerSwan, Energy Transfer’s lead security firm on the project, working hand in hand to craft pro-pipeline messaging. A top official with the sheriffs’ PR contractor, Off the Record Strategies, floated a plan to TigerSwan’s lead propagandist, a man named Robert Rice.

“Thoughts on a crew or a news reporter — or someone pretending to be — with a camera and microphone to report from the main rally on the Friday, ask questions about pipeline and slice together [sic]?” Off the Record CEO Mark Pfeifle suggested over email.

A security firm led by a former member of the U.S. military’s shadowy Special Forces, TigerSwan was no stranger to such deception. The company had, in fact, used fake reporters before — including Rice himself — to spread its message and to spy on pipeline opponents. The National Sheriffs’ Association’s involvement in advocating for a similar disinformation campaign against the anti-pipeline movement has not been previously reported.

The email from the National Sheriffs’ Association PR shop was among the more than 55,000 internal TigerSwan documents obtained by The Intercept and Grist through a public records request. The documents, released by the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board, reveal how TigerSwan and the sheriffs’ group worked together to twist the story in the media so that it aligned with the oil company’s interests, seeking to pollute the public’s perception of the water protectors.

The documents also outline details of previously unreported collaborations on the ground between TigerSwan and police forces. During the uprising at Standing Rock, TigerSwan provided law enforcement support with helicopter flights, medics, and security guards. The private security firm pushed for the purchase, by Energy Transfer, of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of radios for the cops. TigerSwan also placed an order for a catalog of so-called less-lethal weapons for police use, including tear gas. The security contractor even planned to facilitate an exchange where Energy Transfer and police could share purported evidence of illegal activity.

Meanwhile, communications firms working for Energy Transfer and the National Sheriffs’ Association worked together to write newsletters, plant pro-pipeline articles in the media, and circulate “wanted”-style posters of particular protesters, the documents show. And the heads of both the National Sheriffs’ Association and TigerSwan engaged in discussions on strategy to counter the anti-pipeline movement, with propaganda becoming a priority for both the police and private security.

“It is extremely dangerous to have private interests dictating and coloring the flow of administrative justice,” said Chase Iron Eyes, director of the media organization Last Real Indians and a member of the Oceti Sakowin people. Iron Eyes was active at Standing Rock and mentioned in TigerSwan’s files. “We learned at Standing Rock, law and order serves capital and property.”

Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, whose jurisdiction in Morton County, North Dakota, abuts the Standing Rock reservation, said collaboration with pipeline security was limited. “We had a cooperation with them in reference to the pipeline workers’ safety while conducting their business,” he said in an email. “TigerSwan was not to be involved in any law enforcement detail.” (TigerSwan, Energy Transfer, and the National Sheriffs’ Association did not respond to requests for comment.)

Rice, the TigerSwan propagandist, had posed as a news anchor for anti-protester segments posted on a Facebook page he created to sway the local community against the Standing Rock protests. But when Pfeifle, the sheriff group’s PR man, suggested pretending to be a reporter at the Native Nations Rise protest, Rice was unavailable. (Off the Record did not respond to a request for comment.) Pfeifle found another way to tell the pipeline and police’s story: a far-right news website founded by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Pfeifle wrote to Rice: “We did get Daily Caller to cover event yesterday.”

Law Enforcement Collaboration

The idea of working with police was baked into Energy Transfer’s arrangement with TigerSwan. The firm’s contract for the Dakota Access pipeline specifically assigned TigerSwan to “take the lead with various law enforcement agencies per state, county, state National Guard and the federal interagency if required.”

Cooperation between Energy Transfer’s security operation and law enforcement agencies, however, began even before TigerSwan arrived on the scene. A PowerPoint presentation from Silverton, another contractor hired by Energy Transfer, described its relationship with law enforcement as a “public private partnership.” The September 2016 presentation said that a private intelligence cell was “coordinating with LE” — law enforcement — “and helping develop Person of Interest packets specifically designed to aid in LE prosecution.”

Multiple documents make clear that part of the purpose of Energy Transfer’s intelligence collection was to support law enforcement prosecutions. A September 2016 document describing TigerSwan’s early priorities said, “Continue to collect information of an evidentiary level in order to further the DAPL Security effort and assist Law Enforcement with information to aid in prosecution.” 

The collaboration extended to materiel. TigerSwan operatives realized soon after they arrived that local law enforcement officials lacked encrypted radios and could not communicate with state or municipal law enforcement agencies — or with Dakota Access pipeline security, according to emails. Energy Transfer purchased 100 radios, for $391,347, with plans to lease a number of them to law enforcement officers.

”We want them to go to LEO as a gift which represents DAPL’s concern for public safety,” wrote Tom Siguaw, a senior director at Energy Transfer, in an email.

During large protest events, TigerSwan and police worked together to keep water protectors from interfering with construction. On one day in late October 2016, the day of the protests’ largest mass arrest, Energy Transfer’s security personnel “held law enforcement’s east flank” and supported sheriffs’ deputies and National Guard members with seven medical personnel and two helicopters, named Valkyrie and Saber.

After the incident, TigerSwan planned to set up a shared drive, where law enforcement officials could upload crime reports and charging documents, and TigerSwan could share photographs and pipeline opponents’ social media. Documents show other instances in which TigerSwan set up online exchanges with law enforcement. In a February 2017 PowerPoint presentation, TigerSwan described plans to use another shared drive to post security personnel’s videos and photographs, taken both aerially and on the ground during a different mass arrest.

A Dakota Access Pipeline helicopter also supported law enforcement officials during one of the most notorious nights of the crackdown, in November 2016, when police unleashed water hoses on water protectors in below-freezing temperatures. By morning, police were in danger of running out of less-lethal weapons — which can still be deadly but are designed to incapacitate their targets. TigerSwan and Energy Transfer again stepped in.

TigerSwan founder James Reese, a former commander in the elite Army Special Operations unit Delta Force, reached out to a contact at the North Carolina State Highway Patrol. North Carolina had recently used TigerSwan’s GuardianAngel mapping tool to respond to uprisings in Charlotte, in the aftermath of the 2016 police killing of Keith Scott. (A spokesperson from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety said the agency does not currently have a relationship with TigerSwan.)

Reese sent a list of weaponry sought by North Dakota law enforcement to an officer from the Highway Patrol. The list included tear gas, pepper spray, bean bag rounds, and foam rounds. The official referred Reese to a contact at Safariland, which manufactures the gear.

“We will purchase the items, and gift them to LE,” Reese told the Safariland representative. “We need a nation wide push if you can help?”

Meanwhile, another TigerSwan team member sent the Minnesota-based police supply store Streicher’s an even longer list of less-lethal weapons and ammunition. “Please confirm availability of the following price and ship immediately with overnight delivery,” TigerSwan’s Phil Rehak wrote. 

“I would be given an order by either somebody from TigerSwan or maybe even law enforcement, being like, ‘Hey, can you find these supplies?’”

Rehak told The Intercept and Grist that his job was to procure equipment — including for law enforcement. “I would be given an order by either somebody from TigerSwan or maybe even law enforcement, being like, ‘Hey, can you find these supplies?’” He said he doesn’t know if the less-lethal weaponry was ultimately delivered to the sheriffs.

“I am not aware of any radios for Morton County or any less lethal weapons from Tiger Swan,” Kirchmeier, the Morton County sheriff, told The Intercept and Grist in an email. “I dealt with ND DES for resources.” (Two other sheriffs involved with the multiagency law enforcement response did not answer requests for comment. Eric Jensen, a spokesperson for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, said the agency had no arrangement with TigerSwan or Energy Transfer to provide less-lethal weapons, and that they wouldn’t have knowledge of any arrangements between law enforcement and the companies.)

The “partnership” went both ways, with TigerSwan sometimes viewing law enforcement weapons as potential assets. In mid-October 2016, as senior Energy Transfer personnel prepared to join state officials for a government archeological survey to examine the pipeline route, three law enforcement “snipers” agreed to be on standby with an air team, according to a memo by another security company, RGT, that was working under TigerSwan’s management. A Predator drone was listed among “friendly assets” in the memo.

TigerSwan routinely shared what it learned about the protest movement with local police, but most of what the documents describe in the way of reciprocal sharing — from law enforcement to TigerSwan — came from the National Sheriffs’ Association.

In March 2017, the sheriffs’ group helped the South Dakota Legislature pass a law to prevent future Standing Rock-style pipeline uprisings, the documents say. To support the effort, the Morton County Sheriff’s Office sent along a “law enforcement sensitive” state operational update from the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center. National Sheriffs’ Association head Jonathan Thompson forwarded the document to TigerSwan executive Shawn Sweeney. Thompson recommended Sweeney look at the last page, which included a list of anti-pipeline camps across the U.S.

TigerSwan also recruited at least one law enforcement officer with whom it worked on the ground. In November 2016, Reese requested a phone call with Maj. Chad McGinty of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, who had acted as commander of a team from Ohio sent to assist police in North Dakota. By February 1, McGinty, who declined to comment for this story, was working for TigerSwan as a law enforcement liaison, earning more than $440 a day.

Spreading Stories

TigerSwan’s contract also mandated that the firm help Energy Transfer with telling its story. The firm was expected “to help turn the page on the story that we are being overwhelmed with over the past few weeks,” according to a document from mid-September 2016.

Energy Transfer’s image was in trouble early on. Critical media coverage of Standing Rock grew dramatically in early September after private security guards hired by the company unleashed guard dogs on protesters. A flood of reporters arrived on the ground to cover the protests. Social media posts routinely went viral. The narrative that took hold portrayed the pipeline company as instigating violence against peaceful protesters.

Energy Transfer recruited third parties to spread its messaging and counter the unfavorable storyline. At least two additional contractors — DCI and MarketLeverage — joined TigerSwan in trying to burnish Energy Transfer’s image. TigerSwan recruited retired Maj. Gen. James “Spider” Marks, who led intelligence efforts for the Army during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and served on TigerSwan’s advisory board, to write favorable op-eds and deliver commentary. (Marks did not respond to a request for comment.) With its veneer of law enforcement authority, the National Sheriffs’ Association would become Energy Transfer’s most powerful third-party voice.

Together, TigerSwan, the National Sheriffs’ Association, and the public relations contractors formed a powerful public relations machine, monitoring social media closely, convincing outside groups to promote pro-pipeline messaging, and planting stories.

Off the Record Strategies, the public relations firm working for the National Sheriffs’ Association, coordinated with the opposition research firm Delve to track activists’ social media pages, arrest records, and funding sources. The companies sought to paint the protesters as violent, professional, billionaire-funded, out-of-state agitators whose camps represented the true ecological disaster, as well as to identify movement infighting that might be exploited. Both companies were led by Bush administration alumni. (Delve did not respond to a request for comment.)

Framing water protectors as criminals was a key National Sheriffs’ Association strategy. ”Let’s start drumbeat of the worst of the worst this week?” Pfeifle, Off the Record’s CEO, suggested to the head of the sheriffs’ group in one email. “One or two a day? Move them out through social media…The out of state wife beaters, child abusers and thieves first… Mugshot, ND arrest date, rap sheet and other data wrapped in and easy to share?”

The result was “wanted”-style posters — called “Professional Protestors with Dangerous Criminal Histories” — featuring pipeline opponents’ photos and criminal records, which Pfeifle’s team circulated online and routinely shared with TigerSwan. The National Sheriffs’ Association repeatedly asked TigerSwan to help “move” its criminal record research on social media, and TigerSwan repurposed the sheriffs’ group arrest research for its own propaganda products.

Pfeifle also made summary statistics of protesters’ arrest records and a map of where they were from. The color-coded map came with a running tally of the number of protesters. The details collected by Pfeifle then began showing up in blogs and remarks by police to reporters. One piece by KXMB-TV, a television station in Bismarck, North Dakota, repeated almost verbatim statistics summarizing the number of protesters arrested and their criminal histories, noting that “just 8 percent are from North Dakota.”

“They make it harder for people to engage in peaceful protest. People are arrested and they say, ‘See, those people are criminals.’”

Naomi Oreskes, a science historian who has researched the fossil fuel industry’s communications strategies, said the attempt to frame environmental defenders as criminals was consistent with the long trend of attempts to discredit activists. However, it was also “particularly noxious,” she said, because the energy industry has pushed for stronger penalties against trespass and other anti-protest laws. “They make it harder for people to engage in peaceful protest,” said Oreskes. “People are arrested and they say, ‘See, those people are criminals.’”

DCI, which got its start “doing the dirty work of the tobacco industry” and helped found the tea party movement, was also a key player influencing media coverage, placing and distributing op-eds. In one exchange between DCI partner Megan Bloomgren, who would later become a top Trump administration official, and Reese, Bloomgren sent a list of 14 articles “we’ve placed that we’ve been pushing over social media.” The articles ranged from opinion pieces in support of the pipeline in local newspapers to posts on right-wing blogs.

Oreskes said using opinion articles in this way is a common strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry, among others. “You push that out into social media to make it seem as if there’s broad grassroots support for the pipeline,” said Oreskes. ”The reader doesn’t know that this is part of a coordinated strategy by the industry.”

MarketLeverage, another Energy Transfer contractor, also spent a considerable amount of its resources tracking social media and boosting pro-pipeline messages. In the weeks following the dog attacks, for instance, Shane Hackett, a top official with MarketLeverage, suggested highlighting a Facebook post by Archie Fool Bear, a Standing Rock tribal member who was critical of the NoDAPL movement. “We need to exploit that shit immediately while we have a chance,” a TigerSwan operative wrote in response to an email from their colleague Rice, the chief propagandist. (Neither DCI nor Market Leverage responded to requests for comment.)

Hackett suggested creating a graphic out of the tribal member’s post and having “other accounts share his post with the same hashtags.” Rice provided the social media text and hashtags, including, “Respected Tribe Members Call Attention to Standing Rock Leadership Lies and Failures #TribeLiesMatter #NoDAPL #SiouxTruth.” Obscure social media accounts then repeated the exact language.

“These people who are trained to use whatever publicity they can for their advantage, they’re going to do what they want anyway,” Fool Bear told The Intercept and Grist. “They don’t live in my shoes, and they don’t believe in what my beliefs are. If they’re going to take what I say and manipulate it, I can’t stop them.”

Sheriffs vs. Indigenous and Environmental Justice

Off the Record Strategies and the National Sheriffs’ Association didn’t just focus on issues of law-breaking. The association parroted some of the same messages that TigerSwan — as well as climate change deniers in Congress — were trafficking. Notable among them was a right-wing conspiracy theory that the environmental movement was “directed and controlled” by a club of billionaires.

The National Sheriffs’ Association also tried to undermine the credibility of well-known advocates Bill McKibben and Jane Kleeb, who founded the environmental organizations 350.org and Bold Alliance, respectively. Pfeifle circulated memos on the two movement leaders. “McKibben is a radical liberal determined to ‘bankrupt’ energy producers,” said one, adding, “McKibben will join any protest because he enjoys the fanfare.” Another memo said, “Kleeb admitted her pipeline opposition was about political organization and opportunity, not the environment.”

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Kleeb and McKibben expressed bemusement at TigerSwan and the sheriffs’ association’s fixation on their work. “It’s all pretty creepy,” McKibben, a former Grist board member, said in an email. “I live in a county with a sheriff, and it seems okay if he tracks the speed of my car down Rte 116, but tracking every word I write seems like… not his job.”

The sheriffs’ group also listed the nonprofit organizations Center for Biological Diversity, Rainforest Action Network, and Food & Water Watch as “Extremist Environmental Groups” — a pejorative used by some authoritarian government officials, including from the Trump administration.

“Campaigning against corporations driving our climate crisis and human rights violations is not extremist,” said Rainforest Action Network Executive Director Ginger Cassady. Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the association’s flyer contained “categorically false” information about the organization — a sentiment repeated by others mentioned throughout TigerSwan’s other records.

“We would urge the Sheriffs’ Association to focus on its own responsibilities instead of attempting to undermine well-meaning organizations like ours,” added Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch’s executive director.

Both the National Sheriffs’ Association and TigerSwan took pride in meddling in tribal affairs. Reese enthusiastically encouraged his personnel to spread a story that the Prairie Knights Casino, run by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, was discharging sewage into the Missouri River watershed. Meanwhile, the sheriffs’ association worked with TigerSwan to push a story about a drop in revenue at the casino. In an email to TigerSwan’s Rice, Pfeifle noted that the issue had been raised at a recent Standing Rock tribal council meeting.

“We moved this story on front page of Sunday Bismarck Tribune and in SAB blog Friday, playing perfectly into the ‘get-out’ narrative going into next week,” Pfeifle wrote to Rice a few days later, referring to the conservative Say Anything Blog. “Please help echo and amplify, if possible.”

Using newsletters and news-like web sites to discredit pipeline opponents’ concerns as “fake news” was a top tactic for both TigerSwan and the National Sheriffs’ Association. The irony of the strategy was not lost on its protagonists.

Over WhatsApp, in June 2017, Rice, the propagandist, chatted with Wesley Fricks, TigerSwan’s director of external affairs, about a possible response to a Facebook video in which an unnamed reporter described recently published news reports on TigerSwan’s tactics. They would post it on one of the astroturf sites Rice created and describe it as “fake news.”

“That will cause a few people’s brains to explode,” Rice wrote in a WhatsApp message. “fake news calling fake news fake which is calling other news fake?”

Frick replied, “One big circle.”

The post Pipeline Company Spent Big on Police Gear to Use Against Standing Rock Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.

By October, TigerSwan — founded by James Reese, a retired commander of the elite special operations Army unit Delta Force — had established a military-style pipeline security strategy.

There was one nagging problem that threatened to unravel it all: Reese hadn’t acquired a security license from the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board. Although Reese claimed TigerSwan wasn’t conducting security services at all, the state regulator insisted that its operations were unlawful without a license.

TigerSwan turned to Jonathan Thompson, the head of the National Sheriffs’ Association, a trade group representing sheriffs, for help. The security board “has a problem understanding and staying within their charter,” Shawn Sweeney, TigerSwan’s senior vice president, wrote to Thompson. If he could “discuss possible political measures to apply pressure it will assist in the entire project success [sic],” the employee appealed.

Thompson was enthused to work with TigerSwan. “We are keen to be a strong partner where we can help keep the message narrative supportive [sic],” he wrote back. “[C]all if ever need anything.”

Despite Thompson’s offer of assistance, TigerSwan continued to operate in North Dakota with no license for months. The company managed dozens of on-the-ground security guards, surveilled and infiltrated protesters, and passed along profiles of so-called persons of interest to one of the largest midstream energy companies in North America.

A discovery request filed as part of the case forced thousands of new internal TigerSwan documents into the public record. Energy Transfer’s lawyers fought for nearly two years to keep the documents secret, until North Dakota’s Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that the material falls under the state’s open records statute. Because an arrangement between North Dakota and Energy Transfer allows the fossil fuel company to weigh in on which documents should be redacted, the state has yet to release over 9,000 disputed pages containing material that Energy Transfer is, for now at least, fighting to keep out of the public eye.

The released documents provide startling new details about how TigerSwan used social media monitoring, aerial surveillance, radio eavesdropping, undercover personnel, and subscription-based records databases to build watchlists and dossiers on Indigenous activists and environmental organizations.

At times, the pipeline security company shared this information with law enforcement officials. In other cases, WhatsApp chats and emails confirm TigerSwan used what it gathered to follow pipeline opponents in their cars and develop propaganda campaigns online. The documents contain records of TigerSwan attempting to help Energy Transfer build a legal case against pipeline opponents, known as water protectors, using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, a law that was passed to prosecute the mob.

The Intercept and Grist contacted TigerSwan, Energy Transfer, the National Sheriffs’ Association, as well as Thompson, the group’s executive director. None of them responded to requests for comment.

To TigerSwan, the emergence of Indigenous-led social movements to keep oil and gas in the ground represented a business opportunity. Reese anticipated new demand from the fossil fuel industry for strategies to undermine the network of activists his company had so carefully gathered information on. In the records, TigerSwan expressed its ambitions to repurpose these detailed records to position themselves as experts in managing pipeline protests. The company created marketing materials pitching work to at least two other energy companies building controversial oil and gas infrastructure, the records show. TigerSwan, which was staffed heavily with former members of military special operations units, branded its tactics as a “counterinsurgency approach,” drawing directly from its leaders’ experiences fighting the so-called war on terror abroad.

TigerSwan did not just work in North Dakota. Energy Transfer hired the company to provide security to its Rover pipeline, in Ohio and West Virginia, the documents confirm. By spring 2017, TigerSwan was also assembling intelligence reports on opponents of Energy Transfer and Sunoco’s Mariner East 2 pipeline in Pennsylvania.

The documents from the North Dakota security board paint a detailed picture of counterinsurgency-style strategies for defeating opponents of oil and gas development, a war-on-terror security firm’s aspirations to replicate its deceptive tactics far beyond the Northern Great Plains, and the cozy relationship between businesses linked to the fossil fuel industry and one of the largest law enforcement trade associations in the U.S. The impetus for spying was not simply to keep people safe but to drum up profits from energy clients and to allow fossil fuels to continue flowing, at the expense of the communities fighting for clean water and a healthy climate.

“For them, it was an opportunity to help create a narrative against our tribe and our supporters.”

“For them, it was an opportunity to help create a narrative against our tribe and our supporters,” said Wasté Win Young, a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and one of the plaintiffs in a class-action civil rights lawsuit against TigerSwan and local law enforcement. Young’s social media posts repeatedly showed up in the documents. “We weren’t motivated by money or payoffs or anything like that. We just wanted to protect our homelands.”

The Intercept published the first detailed descriptions of TigerSwan’s tactics in 2017, based on internal documents leaked by a TigerSwan contractor. Nearly six years later, there have been no public indications that the security company obtained major new fossil fuel company contracts. Meanwhile, corporate lobbyists spurred the passage of so-called critical infrastructure laws widely understood to stifle fossil fuel protests in 19 states across the U.S. Collaborations between corporations and law enforcement against environmental defenders have proliferated, from Minnesota’s lake country to the urban forests of Atlanta.

No significant regulatory reforms have been enacted to prevent firms from repeating counterinsurgency-style tactics. And TigerSwan is far from the only firm to use invasive surveillance strategies. The North Dakota documents show that at least one other private security firm at Standing Rock appears to have utilized similar schemes against pipeline opponents.

“We need to always be very clear that the industry knows what a risk the climate movement is,” said May Boeve, the executive director of 350.org, a climate nonprofit that was repeatedly mentioned in TigerSwan’s marketing and surveillance material. “They’re going to keep using these kinds of strategies, but they’ll think of other things as well.”

TigerSwan’s Surveillance Gospel

“Gentlemen, as you are aware there has been a shift in environmentalist and ‘First Nations’ groups regarding the tactics being used to prevent, deter, or interrupt the oil and gas industry,” said a February 2017 email drafted by TigerSwan employees to a regional official at ConocoPhillips, a major oil and gas producer — and a potential TigerSwan client.

“Recently in our area the situation has become extremely tense with ‘protestors’ using terrorist style tactics which are well beyond simple civil disobedience,” the email continued. “If steps have not already been taken to prevent and plans to mitigate [sic] an event or events like these to Conoco I may be able to suggest some solutions.”

TigerSwan’s marketing materials read like a playbook for undermining grassroots resistance. ConocoPhillips was just one of the companies the private security firm had in its sights.

In another case, a PowerPoint presentation drafted for Dominion, which was building the Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline through three mid-Atlantic states, offered detailed profiles of local anti-pipeline groups and individuals identified as “threat actors.” (The planned pipeline was canceled in 2020.) TigerSwan laid out the types of services it could provide, including a “Law Enforcement Liaison” and access to GuardianAngel, its GPS and mapping tool. (Neither ConocoPhillips nor Dominion responded to questions about whether they hired the security firm.)

In January 2017, a TigerSwan deputy program manager emailed a presentation titled “Pipeline Opposition Model” to Reese and others, explaining that it was meant to serve as a business development tool and a “working concept to discuss the problem.” The presentation claimed external forces had helped drive the Standing Rock movement and pointed to outside tribes, climate nonprofits like 350.org, and even billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who had a “vested interest in DAPL failure” because of their investments in the rail industry.

Water protectors used an elaborate set of social movement theories to advance their cause, another slide hypothesized, including “Lone Wolf terror tactics.” Specifically, TigerSwan speculated that pipeline opponents could be using the “hero cycle” narrative, a storytelling archetype, to recruit new movement members on social media and energize them to take action — a strategy, the presentation said, also used by ISIS recruiters.

Anyone whose work had touched the Standing Rock movement could become a villain in TigerSwan’s sales pitches. One PowerPoint presentation included biographical details about Zahra Hirji, a journalist who worked at the time for Inside Climate News. Another included a photo of a water protector’s former professor and her course list.

As a remedy, the company offered up a suite of “TigerSwan Solutions.” To the security firm, keeping the fossil fuel industry safe didn’t just mean drones, social media monitoring, HUMINT (short for human intelligence, such as from undercover personnel), and liaising with law enforcement officials and agencies — all included on its list — it also meant local community engagement, counter-protesters, building a “pipeline narrative,” and partnering with university oil and gas programs.

“Win the populace, and you win the fight,” the presentation stated, repeating a key principle of counterinsurgency strategy.

Reese approved: “I’d like to have these cleaned up and branded so I can use,” he wrote back.

Reese used similar material to shore up his relationship with existing clients. In December 2016, he requested a copy of a presentation titled “Strategic Overview,” which he hoped to send to Energy Transfer supervisors working on building the Rover natural gas pipeline. The presentation, a version of which The Intercept previously published, draws heavily from a 2014 report by the Republican minority staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, claiming that a “club” of billionaires control the environmental movement.

In a memo called “The Standing Rock Effect,” TigerSwan lays out a set of seven criteria the company had developed for identifying anti-pipeline camps sprouting up across the country. “TigerSwan’s full suite of security offerings offsets the risk these camps pose to a company’s bottom line,” the company concluded.

TigerSwan utilized its promotional materials to target both energy companies and states with oil and gas resources. In April 2017, the security firm and the National Sheriffs’ Association planned to brief more than 50 state employees in Nebraska, including staffers in the governor’s office, the state Emergency Management Agency, and the State Patrol, on the “lessons learned” from the Dakota Access pipeline protests. A contractor for the National Sheriffs’ Association wrote that the briefing was in part “to prepare the state of Nebraska for the Keystone Pipeline issues coming in months ahead.”

Target: Water Protectors

TigerSwan’s obsessive tracking of environmental activists is laid out in detail in the North Dakota documents. Assisted at times by National Sheriffs’ Association personnel, the company targeted little-known water protectors, national nonprofits, and even legal workers.

The first page of a template for intelligence sharing encouraged TigerSwan employees to enter information about any “New Person of Interest.” TigerSwan personnel routinely referred to its targets as “EREs,” short for environmental rights extremists, apparently a version of the Department of Homeland Security’s classification of “Animal Rights/Environmental Violent Extremist” as one of five domestic terrorism threat categories.

A document labeled “Background Investigation: 350.org” helps explain why the company kept tabs on a national environmental organization with little visible presence on the ground at Standing Rock. Using an “Influence Rating Matrix,” TigerSwan ranked 350.org’s “formal position in organization/movement” and its “criminal history” as 0 — but gave its highest rating of 5 to the group’s size, funding, online presence, and history with similar movements.

TigerSwan also attempted to dig up dirt on legal workers with the Water Protector Legal Collective, which represented pipeline opponents. The security company used the CLEAR database, which is only available to select entities like law enforcement and licensed private security companies, to dig up information on attorney Chad Nodland. The company concluded that Nodland was also representing a regional electric cooperative that generates some of its power through wind — apparently considered a rival energy source to the oil the Dakota Access pipeline would carry. (Nodland told The Intercept and Grist he never worked for the cooperative.) TigerSwan also put together a whole PowerPoint presentation on Joseph Haythorn, who also worked for the legal collective and submitted bail money for clients to be released.

At the same time, the National Sheriffs’ Association was building its own profiles and sharing them with TigerSwan. In one instance, a contractor for the sheriffs’ group passed along a six-page backgrounder on LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a prominent Dakota Access pipeline opponent and historian, to TigerSwan. The document included statements Allard made to the press, her public appearances, social media posts, and details about tax liens filed against her and her husband.

Targeting individual pipeline opponents like Allard seems to have been part of TigerSwan’s strategy particularly when it needed to have something to show its client, Energy Transfer Partners. In one exchange with employees, Reese suggested digging up more intelligence on a pipeline opponent who goes by the mononym Tawasi.

“We need to start going after Tawasi as fast as we can over the next couple weeks so we can show some more stuff to ETP.”

“We need to start going after Tawasi as fast as we can over the next couple weeks so we can show some more stuff to ETP,” Reese wrote, using an abbreviation for the company’s old name, Energy Transfer Partners. The documents show that TigerSwan kept close tabs on Tawasi, reporting his movements in daily situation reports, monitoring his social media, and at one point noting that he had gotten a haircut.

Tawasi, who had a large social media following but was not a prominent leader of the anti-pipeline movement, was bewildered that he had been so closely monitored. “They didn’t have anything at all,” he told The Intercept and Grist. “And they picked me as somebody that they thought they could make something out of.”

“It makes me feel unsafe,” he said, “because the same contractors could be working for a different company, still following me around under a different contract from the next oil company down the line.”

Prairie McLaughlin, Allard’s daughter, said records of TigerSwan’s activities remain important, even six years later. “It matters because it gives somebody a handbook on what could happen — what might happen.”

Not a “Mercenary Organization”

After The Intercept published its first set of leaked TigerSwan documents in 2017, the company attempted to downplay the impact of the revelations. In a memo, TigerSwan shrugged off the story’s importance. “The near-term impact of the article is positive for the company,” TigerSwan claimed. The revelations had caused water protectors to limit their social media activity, rendering them “incapable of effectively recruiting members, raising operational funding, or proselytizing,” TigerSwan wrote.

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Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies”

The company intended to use “information operations” to maintain the paranoia: “This looking over-their-shoulder behavior will continue for several months because of internal suspicions and targeted information operations.”

Internally, the company scrambled to mount a public relations response, calling on help from Chris LaCivita, a Republican political consultant now reportedly being considered for a senior role in Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. A memo emailed to LaCivita by TigerSwan’s external affairs director said that, as a defensive strategy, the company would assert on background that “TigerSwan is not a ‘mercenary organization.’” It was a point that must never be made on the record, the document says, because it “would be like saying ‘no I don’t beat my wife.’” (LaCivita did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

TigerSwan’s offensive strategy primarily consisted of trying to marshal evidence showing that water protectors were violent lawbreakers, professional protesters, un-American, and not even very Indigenous. The document author advised TigerSwan to locate “Any visuals, video of demonstrators waving flags or using insignia of an enemy of the United States.” Another suggested talking point said, “Upon our arrival, we quickly learned that a vast majority of the protestors were not indigenous not [sic] part of the peaceful water movement.”

In a final act of law enforcement collaboration, the memo advised TigerSwan to identify one local and one federal law enforcement source who could defend them — but only off the record.

Outside the public relations strategy, TigerSwan didn’t dramatically shift its tactics in response to the story, the documents suggest. In an email dated June 20, 2017, nearly a month after The Intercept’s first exposé, an intelligence analyst distributed a list of anti-pipeline camps across South Dakota, where the Keystone XL pipeline was supposed to be built.

“Maybe your folks can take a look at the list, check the social media for the sites, and figure out if A) you can get in and B) if there’s value to being inside and C) do you have the creds you need to get in. If you figure out that you need to attend some more events to build cred and access we can do that,” he said. “That should feed the beast until the next shiny thing.”

The post After Spying on Standing Rock, TigerSwan Shopped Anti-Protest “Counterinsurgency” to Other Oil Companies appeared first on The Intercept.

More than 20 years earlier, another climate catastrophe had upended Argueta Anariba’s life. In November 1998, he had fled Honduras in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch. Now he found himself confronting new climate nightmares in Louisiana, with no possibility of escape.

The privately run facility where Argueta Anariba was held was one of several new U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Louisiana. The implications of caging thousands of people in a state that’s notorious for extreme weather crystallized with the intensifying wind.

In the days that followed the storm’s landfall, detainees throughout the state would endure appalling conditions caused in no small part by ICE’s lack of preparedness for climate disasters. An Intercept investigation found that more than half of ICE’s detention facilities, including Catahoula, are already facing significant climate risks.

“Climate change has already exacerbated extreme weather conditions, and we are seeing a direct impact on incarcerated people warehoused in immigration detention facilities across the country,” said Karla Ostolaza, managing director of the immigration practice at the Bronx Defenders, a public defense group that is representing Argueta Anariba. “We are very concerned that more extreme weather events caused by climate change will lead to further exploitation and disregard for detained immigrants at ICE facilities.”

On August 26, with Hurricane Laura lashing the Catahoula facility, the lights went out and the water stopped running, according to a court affidavit by Argueta Anariba. The services were down for five days. Several inches of water pooled on the ground. With the air conditioning down, the dorm felt like it was over 100 degrees. In the first days, facility employees brought in a few gallons to drink, twice a day, for more than 50 people.

“The toilets would not flush during this time, and some people were forced to defecate on the trays that they gave us for meals and then throw those in the trash,” Argueta Anariba said, adding that with staff avoiding the dorms, garbage piled up. The stench made Argueta Anariba feel sick and aggravated his asthma. “The smell was excruciating.”

People held by ICE in other parts of the state were experiencing similar problems, with protests arising among the detained.

2020 would soon set the record for the number of hurricanes that crashed into the continental U.S. Within weeks of Laura, wind and rain from another storm hit the Catahoula facility.

Evacuees from other facilities were bused to the detention center. Tensions were high in the overcrowded prison; Argueta Anariba said a pepper spray-like substance was frequently used as a means of crowd control. “I could not breathe and vomited several times,” he said. “My face felt like it was burning.”

When a third storm hit, electricity went out again, but with the heat less severe, the situation was more tolerable.

“In the three hurricanes that passed,” said Argueta Anariba, who is undocumented, “I lived the worst part of my life.”

The Next Disaster

The past decade has given rise to the notion of the “climate migrant,” a term that describes people like Argueta Anariba who are forced to leave their nation because of a climate-related disaster. The climate crisis means that migration to the U.S. is likely to increase in the years ahead. Around 680,000 climate migrants are expected to cross the U.S.-Mexico border between now and 2050, according to an analysis by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine.

“I traveled with many people who came from Honduras, escaping from the destruction that was the country,” Argueta Anariba told The Intercept in Spanish. “They’re still in this country, continuing forward, working to get ahead.”

For some climate migrants, the journey ends when they are ensnared in the U.S. immigration enforcement system. Many will find themselves in detention centers that are, an Intercept investigation found, especially vulnerable to climate risks.

To determine how the climate crisis impacts incarcerated people, The Intercept mapped more than 6,500 jails, prisons, and detention centers against heat, wildfire, and flood risk. ICE detainees were held in some 128 facilities as of 2020, according to research by the Carceral Ecologies team at UCLA. Catahoula Correctional Center is one of 72 immigration detention centers The Intercept identified as facing significant climate-related risks — risks that are poised to get more severe as the climate crisis deepens. (ICE did not provide answers to The Intercept’s questions for this article.)

The U.S. refugee system generally does not recognize climate disaster as a reason to grant asylum. In cases of environmental catastrophes, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has the power to designate a country for temporary protected status, a program that allows some of its citizens to temporarily live and work in the U.S. without fear of deportation.

The designation, though, is rarely applied. The program, for instance, was not opened up to those fleeing Honduras when hurricanes Eta and Iota devastated the country in 2020. When TPS is applied, onerous conditions can thwart those seeking its protections. After Hurricane Mitch, Hondurans were afforded TPS status, but Argueta Anariba didn’t qualify in part because of a criminal conviction, his lawyer said.

If restrictive U.S. immigration policies go unchanged, more climate migrants will end up in detention facilities. Without either new investments in infrastructure or a rethinking of U.S. immigration policies, detained migrants will be facing worsening climate risks — this time without the chance to flee.

Prisons at Risk

No states have more ICE detention centers than sweltering, storm-prone Texas and Louisiana. All 10 immigration detention facilities in Louisiana and 19 in Texas are in counties that have historically experienced more than 100 days annually with a heat index over 90 degrees. Those temperatures are hot enough to cause health problems in places where medical care is lacking and air conditioning often breaks down, if it exists at all.

ICE’s detention standards include only vague references to maintaining comfortable temperatures and offering climate-appropriate clothing, and advocates say there’s minimal enforcement. Even in the much-cooler Northeast, extreme heat is already creating dangerous conditions. “ICE frequently exposes people in their custody to extreme heat conditions without air conditioning in the summer and freezing temperatures without adequate heat in the winter — leading to increased health risks among the people we represent,” said Ostolaza, of the Bronx Defenders.

It’s going to get worse, according to county-by-county heat projections from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Historically, no ICE detention centers were in counties where heat spiked above 105 degrees for more than a month annually — a level of heat the National Weather Service designates as dangerous. By 2100, the county where Catahoula is located is likely to see nearly two months annually over 105 degrees. Across the nation, every ICE detention facility will see longer periods of high heat.

Shoddy infrastructure is already failing to keep up with snowballing climate-related problems. Catahoula has low flood risk, according to data from the First Street Foundation, and the water coming in during Hurricane Laura likely had more to do with structural problems than with flood vulnerability. ICE detention centers’ climate control systems are known for breaking down; summer after summer, public defenders have demanded that ICE address air-conditioning failures in a detention center in northern New Jersey.

For many immigrant advocates, the climate emergency lends new urgency for systemic changes that go beyond fixing buildings. “If we can foresee that these facilities are going to need infrastructure reworking, it’s a good sign that we need to end detention centers as a whole,” said Dagoberto Bailón, a coordinator for Trans Queer Pueblo, an Arizona-based organization that works with LGBTQ+ migrants.

In the cases of some risk-prone facilities, ICE is looking to scale up detention. In Georgia, the Folkston ICE Processing Center faces severe wildfire risk yet is in line for an expansion that would make it one of the largest ICE detention facilities in the nation, increasing its number of beds from 780 to 3,018.

Organizers have, however, scored victories. In New Jersey, the Hudson County Correctional Facility faces extreme flood risk and flooded during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. As of this past November, under pressure, the facility no longer houses ICE detainees.

ICE and the Climate Crisis

ICE, for its part, is already preparing for the future. The Department of Homeland Security is evaluating detention facilities for climate risk and gearing up for the new migrant influx.

“Catastrophic events, such as floods, wildfires, and extreme drought, may prompt mass migration which has the capacity to overrun DHS facilities and infrastructure supporting the Nation’s immigration system,” the agency wrote in its Climate Action Plan, released in October 2021. “Climate change is likely to increase population movements from Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean and impact neighboring countries.”

DHS lists increased migration among its top five climate vulnerabilities, but its climate action plan is light on details about what the agency will do about it. Department officials are working on creating a plan to predict and plan for future waves of mass migration, according to the climate report, hinting at more arrests and detention. “Increases in human migration may require more resources and operational capacity at the U.S. border to facilitate the application of immigration law, including the law governing claims for humanitarian protection,” DHS wrote.

And DHS is aware that many of its facilities could be at climate risk: “This risk could require relocating or even abandoning current infrastructure in certain circumstances,” the report says, calling for incorporating climate resiliency when expanding the detention infrastructure.

Until now, a main factor that ICE had used to choose where to locate detention centers was local communities’ demands for prisons to bolster their economies. In the case of Louisiana, criminal justice reforms led to fewer people being held in jails and prisons, creating economic gaps that were filled by new ICE contracts.

To Trans Queer Pueblo’s Bailón, it’s all part of a pattern that needs to be broken. “The U.S. is really good at solving problems by trying to put people away,” he said. “Investing in people looks like investing in other countries, investing in migration and having the means to have a smooth migration process, rather than having these detention centers where abuses happen.”

No Asylum

As a kid in Honduras, Argueta Anariba would spend four hours a day at school and eight hours planting and harvesting crops. He loved his classes, especially math, but he also appreciated learning at his father’s side in the fields. He knew from an early age that a bad harvest meant going to bed hungry. Today, climate-driven drought has pushed many Honduran farmers over the edge. In Argueta Anariba’s case, it was a storm.

Hurricane Mitch roared through Argueta Anariba’s community when he was 20. “We lost everything: property and land, jobs, crops,” he remembered. By then, he had two little children. “The government didn’t have capacity to help all the people that were affected. Due to the situation, I traveled to the United States to try to support my family.”

After passing through Guatemala and Mexico, Argueta Anariba made his way to Washington, D.C., where he joined a tight-knit community of Hondurans from his region.

His problems with ICE began after he demanded payment for one of his jobs. Argueta Anariba’s employer responded by threatening him, he said. In the weeks that followed, the conflict escalated until, according to Argueta Anariba, one of his former boss’s friends — who had gang ties — pulled a knife. Argueta Anariba stabbed him in self-defense, he says, and spent the next seven years in prison before being put in ICE custody.

An immigration judge ruled that Argueta Anariba cannot be released while he waits for the government to decide his asylum claim. By now, he has been in ICE detention — which is not supposed to be punitive — for seven years, a period equal to his prison term.

Last winter, he endured yet another climate change-related disaster, when a sudden cold snap struck Louisiana, leaving him shivering in a detention center with inadequate heat.

Despite it all, going to Honduras isn’t an option. Although a climate disaster drove Argueta Anariba to migrate, his asylum plea isn’t about a storm. While he was in prison, masked men broke into his mother’s home and beat her, demanding to know when Argueta Anariba would return to Honduras. Unable to rely on protection from a Honduran government with a reputation for corruption, Argueta Anariba is convinced that he will be murdered by associates of his Washington attacker if he returns.

In the coming weeks, Argueta Anariba may get the chance to leave confinement for the first time in more than 14 years. At a new bond hearing, a judge will reconsider whether Argueta Anariba should be released until his immigration case is decided.

More than anything, Argueta Anariba wants to be there for his kids again, the youngest of whom are U.S. citizens. “To be my own boss is my dream, and also I wish to help the community, to serve on some public projects. I would like to be part of pro-migrant organizations,” he said. “Maybe it’s for that reason that I’ve had to suffer and overcome some obstacles, if in the future I have the chance to get out and to show the public that we deserve one more opportunity.”

The post Migrants Fleeing Hurricanes and Drought Face New Climate Disasters in ICE Detention appeared first on The Intercept.

Over the past 20 years, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality repeatedly issued compliance orders and documented environmental violations at the Cottonport Monofill tire processor and landfill, located next to the prison. The company never cleaned up its mess and declared bankruptcy seven years ago. On January 16, towering piles of tires and tire scraps caught fire, and they wouldn’t stop burning for 11 days.

As the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections tells it, favorable winds kept smoke safely away from the prison in the early days of the fire. Those inside, however, say they experienced respiratory problems and headaches for days before being evacuated.

People inside the prison attempted to cover vents with cardboard to keep the smoke out, but it wasn’t enough. Moore, who is 37, said that one of the men in his unit began coughing up blood. Several people interviewed by The Advocate also described smoke entering the facility soon after the fire began, followed quickly by health issues. The prison was already in the midst of a Covid-19 outbreak, with 307 people testing positive.

Finally, four days after the fire began, officials evacuated the prison. However, even as state environmental monitors collected evidence of elevated levels of volatile organic compounds and particulate matter in the air — both of which can cause health problems — the evacuees were not allowed to see medical staff until well after their return to Laborde on January 27, according to three people interviewed.

When they arrived at a previously shuttered part of Allen Correctional Center, “Everyone was trying to see the nurse,” recalled 29-year-old Rondell Delaney. “They said it’s too many people.” Watts said a nurse took the names of people with health impacts, but there was no follow-up.

Upon returning, “I told them I’m having chest pain and a hard time talking,” Delaney recalled. Prison staffers told him the nurses were backlogged and he should sign up for sick call, which costs $3 or $6 for emergencies. He estimated another two weeks passed before he was allowed to see a medical professional. Even then, “All they did was check our temperature and see if we had Covid.” A month after the fire began, Delaney’s voice was still hoarse. Delaney, Moore, and Watts were all still dealing with migraine headaches — something Moore said he’d never experienced before.

Although Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Chuck Carr Brown declared the tire fire and subsequent cleanup an emergency on February 8, people incarcerated at the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center say it didn’t translate into robust health checks for the 1,500 people who were locked inside next to the tire fire.

Ken Pastorick, communications director for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, denied that medical attention was inadequate. “A handful of prisoners who claimed health issues with the smoke were examined and cleared by the prison’s medical staff,” he said. “Employees effectively and efficiently executed the evacuation and return of prisoners without incident.”

To environmental experts, the burning tires represent a collision of failures by two state agencies that are supposed to protect the health of Louisiana’s most vulnerable people: the Department of Environmental Quality and the Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

Wilma Subra, an environmental scientist who has long worked with Louisiana communities coping with the health impacts of industrial disasters and pollution, said incarceration made a bad situation even worse. She surmised, “The evacuation would have happened earlier had it not been a prison.”

Pastorick replied, “Evacuating an entire prison is very rare, not something to take lightly, and must be fully warranted.”

Air Monitoring Dysfunction

Soon after the tires went up in flames, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality parked its Mobile Air Monitoring Laboratory, a big white van full of environmental sensors, on the northeast corner of the prison, between the fire and Laborde. The state scientists were looking especially for types of particulate matter so small they can lodge in people’s lungs and bloodstream, known as PM10 and PM2.5.

On January 17, the first day that the mobile laboratory delivered results, PM2.5 levels spiked to 97.5 micrograms per cubic meter, a level Kimberly Terrell, staff scientist and director of community engagement at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic in New Orleans said was concerning and likely representative of pollution levels for those downwind. “Very high levels of PM2.5 like this are definitely known to trigger asthma events and cause difficulty breathing. They have acute, immediate impacts,” she said. For the next two days, the lab’s readings were lower.

On the fifth day, “The wind direction shifted and significant quantities of smoke generated by the fire inundated the Correctional Center,” LDEQ’s declaration of emergency says. “The smoke generated by the fire was so significant that visibility was greatly impaired near the vicinity of the Site.”

Guards lined up Laborde’s prisoners outside in the bad air to wait for evacuation, according to two of the incarcerated people interviewed. People who had tested positive for Covid-19 were loaded onto buses alongside everyone else.

“Very high levels of PM2.5 like this are definitely known to trigger asthma events and cause difficulty breathing.”

Yet despite the dire conditions, the state’s lab equipment again recorded relatively low levels of pollution. It wasn’t because the air was clear. “The MAML was likely outside the edge of the smoke plume,” Langley said. Complicating matters further, the day before the evacuation, the Mobile Air Monitoring Laboratory’s power generator broke down, and LDEQ had to bring in a new van, which it placed in the same spot.

Issues like this are typical, Subra said. “Frequently they can’t put the MAML in the best place to monitor,” she said. Plus, “It’s had a history of breaking down.”

It’s also unclear what MAML readings would have triggered a response. Langley told The Intercept that readings above 15 parts per million for an extended period of time would be “concerning,” and a single reading of 100 would be cause for action. “If any receptors were within an area with readings that high, a shelter in place might be ordered,” he said.

Of course, the standard measurement for PM2.5 pollution data — and the measurement that LDEQ used for the MAML data it posted online — is micrograms per cubic meters, not parts per million.

Terrell said this kind of problem, too, is typical of LDEQ. “Yes, there was monitoring, but we are missing very basic information.”

The full spectrum of health impacts is difficult to determine without learning which chemicals were in the smoke. The LDEQ used canisters as well as handheld monitors to determine levels of volatile organic compounds, some of which are linked to cancers. Although LDEQ’s emergency declaration stated that they detected elevated levels of VOCs, Langley said he could not say which compounds his agency detected. He pointed to a laboratory backlog.

Years of Violations

Although the state fire marshal has not determined the fire’s cause, Langley said that environmental violations, documented by LDEQ for years, likely made things worse. “If a fire starts at a tire facility, the configuration of the tire stacks and presence of debris can contribute to the severity of the fire,” he said. “The tires were piled as high as 50 feet in areas and the piles were up to 100 yards wide. The area that burned did not have the proper spacing to provide fire breaks.”

Beginning in 2010, LDEQ filed three separate compliance orders against Cottonport Monofill, including a 2013 order describing tires piled too high and too close together, with fire lanes that were too narrow. The problems went unresolved as the years ticked by.

“DEQ is good at going out and inspecting sites, especially when someone complains,” said Subra. “They write up compliance orders, and they never get enforced.”

Cottonport Monofill filed for bankruptcy in 2015, a month after it applied to LDEQ for a new permit to operate. Despite the fact that the company was in bankruptcy court and still had an outstanding compliance order from 2013, LDEQ granted the new permit.

In 2019, the environmental agency issued another compliance order stating that the company failed to properly clean up the site, a process that would have involved shredding all the tires into chips and capping the landfill with clay. Instead, 100,000 tires remained, piled several times higher than the 10 feet allowed. Hydraulic fluid was spilled on the ground. The order demanded the facility’s owners take action within 30 days, stating that penalties of $32,500 per day were on the line. However, the situation was unchanged when inspectors returned that December.

Bankruptcy wasn’t enough for LDEQ to deny Cottonport Monofill’s permit, but it was enough for the agency to decide that no penalty should apply. “Due to the bankruptcy and inoperable status of the Respondent, the Department has not issued penalties to Cottonport Monofill LLC,” said Langley, over email. “Gross Revenues of the Respondent is one of the Factors the Department has to consider.”

Hunting for Accountability

It’s unclear who LDEQ expects to pay for the fire damage and the remaining tire debris. Langley said he couldn’t comment on liability. The agency’s inspection reports say First Guaranty Bank possessed the property after the bankruptcy. Yet bank Vice President Evan Singer denied to The Intercept that the bank is the owner or that it has responsibility for cleaning up the tire landfill.

Avoyelles Parish also has a stake in the property. Land records from the parish assessor’s office say the parish bought the property in a 2020 tax sale. However, Joey Frank, director of the parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said that the rules around tax sales mean the parish isn’t liable for the cleanup either.

According to the bank, the site is still owned by Ward Enterprises LLC. Listed in the permit as the facility’s owner is Lloyd D. Ward, a former Maytag CEO who was forced to resign as CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee in 2003 amid allegations of ethics violations. Ward did not respond to requests for comment.

LDEQ’s failure to assure Cottonport Monofill resolved its environmental violations before it disappeared tracks with Louisiana’s recent history. Under former Gov. Bobby Jindal, funding for LDEQ was dramatically slashed, leaving the agency with a skeleton staff and weakened environmental enforcement. “DEQ does not issue enforcement actions in a timely manner,” stated a January 2021 report from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor, focusing on air quality violations.

For now, the state is on the hook for the fire’s expenses. “The declaration of emergency allowed LDEQ to direct state resources to address the fire and control the pollution resulting from the fire,” including 800 barrels of a type of oil produced when tires burn, said Langley.

Dancing With the Devil in Louisiana Prison

The tire fire wasn’t the only environmental problem Moore has experienced at the Laborde Correctional Center. According to The Intercept’s Climate and Punishment investigation, the prison is located in a county that has historically seen 110 days annually with a heat index over 90 degrees and 10 days over 105 degrees. By 2100, as the climate crisis deepens, the county will likely see as many as two months annually over 105, a level the National Weather Service considers dangerous.

Moore has witnessed people pass out from the heat. “In the summer you’re dancing with the devil. In the winter, there’s no heat,” he said.

The prison was also the subject of an Environmental Protection Agency Clean Water Act enforcement action in 2017 for wastewater treatment problems, something the federal agency rarely issues against a prison, according to an analysis by Nick Shapiro, director of the Carceral Ecologies lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Exacerbating all of it is poor health care. In a recent ruling, a judge described “overwhelming deficiencies” in another Louisiana prison’s medical system, violating the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

“The medical system in the prison altogether is like you’re the bottom of the barrel. You’re going to get treated like crap every time,” Moore said. The tire fire was no exception.

The post Burning Tires Left Louisiana Prisoners With Migraines, Breathing Problems, and Minimal Medical Care appeared first on The Intercept.

At the Cross City Correctional Institution, the prison administration repeatedly canceled visitation hours throughout July. As August progressed, the yard between buildings filled with water. Classes and religious services were scrapped.

On the main unit, fetid water started coming up through the drains, said DaRon Jones, who is incarcerated at Cross City. Guards told all the prisoners to pack what they could into a pillowcase and prepare to evacuate, but Jones spent hours locked in his cell with the filth. “The water was close to ankle-deep, with human waste floating by as we were fed in our cells,” he said. “The smell was unlike anything I have ever encountered.”

When they were finally led outside, Jones waded through knee-deep water. “There were snakes and bugs swimming in the water as we made our way to the bus,” he recalled.

The rising waters were predictable, according to an Intercept analysis that cross-referenced flood risk data from the First Street Foundation with the locations of more than 6,500 carceral facilities across the U.S. Cross City was at a severe risk of flooding. (Florida Department of Corrections press secretary Paul Walker, who did not initially respond to a detailed inquiry about Jones’s case, sent a statement after publication disputing the account. “The rising flood waters did not enter the housing areas until after the evacuation was completed and at no time was food delivered during this evacuation,” Walker said.)

Fiercer hurricanes, rising seas, profuse rainfalls: The climate crisis is causing more flooding across the nation. And while federal and state institutions are generally lagging when it comes to climate resilience, the carceral system is in particular peril. Many jails and prisons were built as the war on drugs ramped up and have since been all but neglected. Worsening disasters will test the deteriorating buildings.

“Most of the infrastructure we have now was built in 1980s and 1990s,” said Molly Gill, vice president of policy for FAMM, an organization focused on sentencing reform. “We built all these prisons when we passed mandatory sentencing laws and had our prison booms and embarked on mass incarceration,” she said. “All those chickens are coming home to roost.”

“We built all these prisons when we passed mandatory sentencing laws and had our prison booms and embarked on mass incarceration. All those chickens are coming home to roost.”

Florida is in especially bad shape. Cross City is one of 52 jails, prisons, and detention centers in the state that face major to extreme flood risks over the next 30 years, according to The Intercept’s analysis. Half of those facilities, including Cross City, are run by the state of Florida, under the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis. The state is responsible for more carceral institutions with elevated chances of flooding than any other government authority, local or national.

The DeSantis administration seems ill-prepared for the next rounds of flooding. There is a huge maintenance backlog, little evidence of robust disaster planning, and resistance to policy changes that would leave fewer people in prison. For state leaders, staffing woes overshadow all those issues: Some 5,500 low-paying prison guard positions are currently unfilled, out of a workforce of 18,000.

Authorities with the DeSantis administration said the prison system is addressing problems like flooding. “Planning and preparing for natural disasters such as flooding is an integral part of our operations. We will continue to work with local emergency management officials in an effort to identify aggravators associated with the rise in flood waters,” Molly Best, deputy communications director for the Florida Department of Corrections, said in an email. She defended the department’s response to the Dixie County flooding: “Inmates at Cross City CI did not wait weeks for evacuation. Cross City CI was evacuated immediately at the onset of the flooding incident.”

Prisoners, as wards of the state, can’t make decisions about leaving flood zones. For the most part, they must rely on their custodians — policymakers and politicians — to protect them. DeSantis has persistently refused to pursue reforms that would meaningfully improve conditions, and in the state government, there is little will to hold him to account. Incarcerated populations tend to be low priorities in the halls of power.

“Most legislators would much rather focus on jobs and education in Florida than they would trying to fix the most difficult public policy area in the state, which is a collapsing prison system, because there’s no credit to be gotten from that,” said Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes. “We are on a completely unsustainable trajectory.”

The flood risk data was drawn from the First Street Foundation’s flood model, which was developed as an alternative to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s outdated and incomplete flood zone maps. First Street’s property-specific flood risk assessments, or “Flood Factors,” take into account flooding due to rivers, tides, precipitation, and storm surges. The Flood Factors also incorporate the impacts of the next 30 years of the climate crisis. Though First Street’s model has limitations for assessing risk to prison campuses, it can also illuminate which facilities deserve scrutiny.

According to The Intercept’s analysis, 621 facilities across the U.S. have major to extreme flood risk. Not all of the high-risk facilities are in places where one might expect to find them, like the Gulf Coast; many are located instead in landlocked states like Tennessee, Ohio, and West Virginia.

Several of the most imperiled locations identified in The Intercept’s analysis have already experienced flooding. When a surge from Superstorm Sandy hit the tidal waterways around New York City, nurses at the Hudson County Correctional Facility were forced to wade through hallways of knee-deep water to attend to panicking prisoners. The Franklin County Corrections Center II in Columbus, Ohio, has been forced repeatedly over the past decade to ferry staff to work in boats.

Police watch over prisoners from Orleans Parish Prison who were evacuated due to high water in New Orleans, Louisiana, on September 1, 2005.

Hurricane Katrina was America’s introduction to the horrors wrought by the climate crisis behind bars. As the storm approached New Orleans, mandatory evacuation orders went out for the city, but more than 6,000 people held at the Orleans Parish Prison were left behind.

A promised emergency plan, insofar as one was put in action, fell short. When the facility’s generators failed, lights, ventilation, and toilets stopped working. Days went by with little to no food or medication. In some areas, the waters reached chest level. Violence broke out. Five hundred-seventeen people on the prison roster were never accounted for.

The Orleans Parish Prison, though, doesn’t carry an extreme flood risk. The contradiction points to the unpredictable nature of flooding in a climate-impacted world. It also shows how other factors — in New Orleans, the hurricane-strength wind, infrastructure failures, and gaps in political will — exacerbate catastrophes. The failing levees weren’t a natural disaster, but rather one born out of manmade neglect.

“A lot of prison flooding issues have more to do with sewage and old water pipes than they do with storms.”

Where floods will occur depends on far more than topography or location. A detention facility’s position on a hill, for instance, won’t protect it in heavy rains if the windows are broken and the roof leaks. Conditions affecting nearby roads and power supplies can sow chaos even at prisons that appear to be low risk.

Plumbing and sewage systems that aren’t properly maintained can also create flooding hazards. A prison in South Carolina and a jail in Pennsylvania with minimal flood risks, according to The Intercept’s analysis, have both experienced sewage floods owing to infrastructure failures.

“A lot of prison flooding issues have more to do with sewage and old water pipes than they do with storms,” said FAMM’s Gill. “Every hurricane season, our families get very frightened for their loved ones who are in facilities in places like Louisiana and Alabama and coastal Florida. They worry not just about the flooding, but they also worry about the integrity of the building.”

When Hurricane Harvey struck in 2017, more than 2,000 people at the U.S. Penitentiary at Beaumont, one of four federal prisons situated around a traffic circle in Beaumont, Texas, were never evacuated. The city frequently lies in the paths of hurricanes — making the prison there one of the most notorious in the U.S. for its history of flooding.

The stories from Beaumont — which is located in an area with some of the highest flood risks in the country — are indicative of the outsize role the federal government plays in flood-prone detention. The Intercept’s analysis identified 25 facilities under federal authority that are in areas with major to extreme flood risk.

After Harvey landed, people incarcerated at Beaumont Penitentiary recounted dire conditions: no air conditioning; toilets shutting down; problems accessing food, water, and medications; and restricted access to phones and email. Complaints, the detainees said, were met with retaliation.

The parcel of land where Beaumont sits faces significant flooding in rare 500-year flood events. By 2050, those odds will shift dramatically.

One prisoner, Sergio Alberto Rosales, described the situation as “low water rations and living in our own defication [sic] which would ferment from the extreme heat.” In a message sent to the Prisoners Legal Advocacy Network, he said, “i felt i was going to die because the water was not enough to sustain a 6’2 235lb body . when i passed out the first time my celly called the officer to ask for help and we were met with aggression and ‘your just faking be a man and suck it up.’”

The Prisoners Legal Advocacy Network sent Rosales’s and other prisoners’ distressing testimony to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Prisons, which runs the facility, describing the conditions as “persistently unconstitutional.”

The federal government was aware of the potential dangers. In 2014, FEMA had identified the area as being prone to flooding. And it had happened before: When Hurricane Rita hit in 2005, people left behind at Beaumont described conditions similar to Harvey: days without food and weeks of stifling heat punctuated by overflowing toilets.

The flooding is only expected to get worse. According to the First Street Foundation’s flood model, under today’s climate conditions, the parcel of land where Beaumont sits faces significant flooding in rare 500-year flood events. By 2050, those odds will shift dramatically, with the area likely to be inundated even in the type of flood that occurs every five years.

Since 2017, little action has been taken by the Bureau of Prisons to plan for the sort of flooding at federal facilities that will only become more common as the warming climate fuels more extreme storms.

Before Harvey hit, there were hints of progress. President Barack Obama issued executive orders that required federal agencies to make climate adaptation plans.

The Justice Department’s initial plan in 2014 pointed to flooding and severe weather as the most serious threats to its infrastructure, including prisons. The report called for action to identify high-risk facilities and plan for climate impacts. (The Bureau of Prisons did not respond to The Intercept’s request that the agency provide its evaluations, share a list of facilities facing dangers, or send the criteria used to make such determinations.)

Obama’s effort, however, was scuttled by Donald Trump when he became president. Now, through a pair of new executive orders, President Joe Biden is picking up where Obama left off. An updated Justice Department climate adaptation report, dated July 2021, says the department is beginning to reevaluate facilities for climate dangers and will prioritize environmental justice in its climate adaptation plans.

“The entire country should develop local, state and federal climate resiliency plans which includes close attention to our most vulnerable populations.”

It’s not clear whether the health and safety of incarcerated populations will again fall to the wayside: The report’s plan to identify “disadvantaged” communities includes an Environmental Protection Agency tool that provides little information about incarcerated populations. A second system that will be used to make assessments for the project is still in the planning stages.

What is clear is that governments are falling short on providing protections for incarcerated people, said LaTricea Adams, the head of Black Millennials for Flint and a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, who declined to comment specifically on the new assessment tool. “The Department of Justice and EPA, just to name a few have turned a blind eye to the racially motivated actions (and inactions) that take place in prisons that house majority Black and Latinx people,” she said in an email. “The entire country should develop local, state and federal climate resiliency plans which includes close attention to our most vulnerable populations including (but certainly not limited to) our individuals who are incarcerated.”

Members of Congress are also pushing for better accounting of how the Bureau of Prisons manages disasters. For two years running, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., has introduced a bill that would require the bureau to submit detailed annual damage reports describing how federal prisons and the people inside fared during major disasters. The bill, which stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee, would have encouraged corrections officials to consider home confinement or early release to manage disasters in carceral facilities.

The provision speaks to the scope of the challenge. Mass incarceration means hundreds of thousands of people are stuck behind bars as climate disasters unfold. Reducing prison populations would mean many fewer people stuck in the way of climate harms, yet the prospects for large-scale reforms of the criminal legal system seem remote.

In 2014, the National Institute of Corrections recommended that prisons move toward a “green corrections” system, which would include rooftop gardens, solar energy, and wastewater recycling. For advocates, such reforms would hardly do enough to keep incarcerated people safe.

“Decades of research has demonstrated how bad these systems are at doing what they’re designed to do, especially in terms of rehabilitation,” said Nick Shapiro, who leads the Carceral Ecologies team at UCLA. “You’re pulling the most vulnerable people and putting them in the most vulnerable situation, and that’s a recipe for disaster.”

Experts are increasingly arguing for prison abolition as the most effective climate disaster mitigation strategy. Few federal leaders have embraced the approach, but in state capitols a debate is underway.

In Florida, a growing contingent of Republicans are calling for a combination of infrastructure investment and sentencing reforms. Brandes, the state senator, joined state Rep. Dianne Hart, a Democrat, in calling for bringing back parole, which the state effectively abolished in 1983, to get more people out from behind bars. Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson, while focusing less on systemic reform, has vocally advocated for closing old prisons and building bigger, air-conditioned, and disaster-ready facilities. As a start, the state Senate’s proposed budget this year includes $1.3 billion for two new prisons.

About 100 miles away from the senators’ offices, in Cross City, officials are toying with both approaches. In the wake of the floods, they entertained the idea of closing Cross City permanently. Community members opposed the move, saying they rely on the facility economically. Following the objections, DeSantis recently announced hundreds of thousands of dollars in flood control projects for Dixie County’s prison.

Update: February 16, 2022
This story has been updated to include a statement by the Florida Department of Corrections about DaRon Jones’s case that was sent after publication.

Correction: May 11, 2022
This story has been updated to reflect that a government tool mentioned in the Justice Department’s climate adaptation plan includes limited information on incarcerated populations.

The post With Floodwaters Rising, Prisoners Wait for Help in Floating Feces appeared first on The Intercept.

No power meant no cooking, no televisions to furnish a distraction. Time in the communal day room was scrapped. Prisoners could only rarely call their loved ones. Toilets stopped working for hours at a time, and the ventilation systems would go down as smoke wafted into the facility, according to two people incarcerated there at the time. (A California prisons official said the facility was “running full-power operations.”)

Now, with the Dixie Fire approaching, incarcerated people in the C-Yard were locked in their dark, smoky cells. Cell doors, normally electronically powered, were in some cases padlocked by guards, according to a man incarcerated at the C-Yard, who asked for anonymity to avoid reprisals. He said the guards dismissed prisoners’ concerns about how to open the locks if the flames came into the prison complex: “The COs would laugh at us and tell us, ‘You effers are going to stay in your cell.’”

No one in the C-Yard, five buildings constructed to house hundreds of people, had any idea if, when, or how they would get out if the flames encroached on the prison campus. “We never had any evacuation drills,” said Joseph Vejar, a prisoner at California Correctional Center who served as chair of the inmate advisory council; he says he discussed the fire and the generator failure with prison officials. Vejar said he was never shown the details of the prison’s emergency protocols: “I never heard of them having a plan for evacuation.”

Absent any details about evacuation plans, prisoners and their advocates across California are skeptical that meaningful arrangements exist.

In Susanville, a fire event was foreseeable. Using U.S. Forest Service data, The Intercept mapped wildfire risk against the locations of more than 6,500 prisons, jails, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers listed in a 2020 Department of Homeland Security register. The analysis showed that the California Correctional Center falls in the 90th percentile for wildfire danger in the nation.

With its vast expanse, enormous population, and hot, dry climate, California is the state with the most detention facilities at the highest risk levels: About a fifth of the state’s institutions are above the 95th percentile, according to The Intercept’s analysis. (The count includes a couple dozen small fire camps, where incarcerated firefighters are trained and work, that are by design in the most fire-prone areas.)

Left/Top: A burn probability map visualizes historical data from 2000. Right/Bottom: A map of projected risk for 2030 shows that wildfire danger is growing fast. Credit: Pyrologix

Meanwhile, wildfires in California have been getting worse — larger and more destructive, with each fire season coming earlier than the last. Warming temperatures and drought exacerbated by the climate crisis are creating an ever more parched landscape, leaving swaths of land ready to ignite.

“The California prison system should figure out the most high-risk prisons,” said Joe Scott, a wildfire researcher, “and make a plan.”

In an email, Terry Thornton, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which operates under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, said the agency regularly reviews and updates emergency protocols, including evacuation plans, for each prison. “Due to the construction features of many of our prisons and camps, landscape fuel management modifications, dedicated fire brigades, and planning, many of our state prisons are well prepared for any wildfire risks, regardless of the area they are located,” she said. Thornton declined to share any specific details “for safety and security reasons.”

Asked if the prison system analyzed wildfire risk for institutions, Thornton said the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services “develops and maintains planning, preparedness, prevention, response and recovery strategies.” Brian Ferguson, a spokesperson for the office, said the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was responsible for identifying risks to prisons. “Our general take,” he said, “is every place in California is wildfire country in 2022.”

Scott has been researching and modeling wildfire behavior since the 1980s, when the work was “an esoteric backwater of forestry that nobody cared about.” In 2004, Scott founded Pyrologix, a research firm based in Missoula, Montana, that assesses wildfire threats. After the deadliest and most destructive wildfire seasons on record in 2017 and 2018, Congress passed legislation calling for a nationwide assessment of the dangers posed by wildfires; the U.S. Forest Service hired Scott’s firm.

Scott and his team set out to develop a dataset that could be used as a tool for prioritizing the management of fuel before a blaze breaks out and the response after it does. To determine the most high-risk areas, they looked at both the probability that an area will burn in any given year and the potential for intense fires. They also sorted the data by housing density to identify areas where concentrated numbers of people might face fires.

“I do not see anywhere in the country where risk is going down. It’s either flat or going up very, very fast.”

As they combed through the data, Scott and his team noticed something: patches of very high-density housing in remote areas that were prone to burning. At first he suspected some kind of error in the model. As he went through each location, he was surprised instead to find carceral facilities. “Every time I look,” Scott said, “it’s a prison camp, a juvenile detention facility, a jail.”

The Forest Service fire data, which The Intercept used for its detention facility risk analysis, does not fully account for how fires are changing. Its assessments are based on historical records that cover 1992 to 2015 — not including, for instance, the Northern California blazes of October 2017 or the fires that have torn through the Pacific Northwest in recent years. The 2017 fires forced researchers like Scott to rethink changing wildfire behaviors. It soon became clear that the number of “fire weather days” — characterized by a combination of heat, strong winds, and low humidity — are proliferating from Oregon to Texas to Oklahoma.

“I do not see anywhere in the country where risk is going down,” Scott said. “It’s either flat or going up very, very fast.”

Sixteen of the nation’s 54 high-risk, high-capacity facilities are in the Golden State, including the Otay Mesa Detention Center, a privately run ICE detention center. Three of the prisons with large populations and extreme risk are in Oklahoma and eight are in Texas.

“I think we can assume that fires are going to continue regularly now and are now going to be chronic.”

The Intercept’s analysis found that many of the most fire-prone facilities are concentrated in the American West. In both Idaho and Nevada, more than a quarter of detention facilities are at the highest level of peril.

Then there are unexpected areas of danger. Florida has more state-run facilities facing extreme wildfire risk than California and is home to the highest-risk facility in the nation with a capacity of over 1,000 people: the Everglades Correctional Institution. It’s not a matter of dryness — the state prison sits next to a tropical wetland — but rather nearby vegetation is so flammable that fires can move on top of the water. The facility was evacuated in 2008 because of wildfires; flames came dangerously close in 2017 and again last spring.

“I think we can assume that fires are going to continue regularly now and are now going to be chronic,” said Woods Ervin, who works with the coalition Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a statewide grassroots group that is pushing California to close prisons. “All signs point to that prisons don’t work, and so we need to figure something else out, because it’s just untenable.”

In the end, neither prison was evacuated during the Vacaville fire. Thornton, the state corrections agency spokesperson, told The Intercept there were no evacuation orders for the prisons themselves. As in Susanville, the agency refused to provide any details about what plans and procedures the detention facilities had in place for wildfires, let alone why they were not evacuated.

“The present state of ‘mass incarceration’ in the U.S. has resulted in a full-blown logistics nightmare in terms of emergency actions.”

The sheer number of prisoners in California’s often overcrowded facilities creates a powerful disincentive for the state government to act. “The present state of ‘mass incarceration’ in the U.S. has resulted in a full-blown logistics nightmare in terms of emergency actions, making the decision to evacuate seem impossible,” Carlee Purdum, an expert on the impact of disasters on incarcerated people at Texas A&M University, wrote in a recent book.

Prison evacuations frequently go poorly. When Oregon evacuated prisons being approached by wildfires in 2020, incarcerated people reported being left without sufficient food, water, bathrooms, and Covid-19 protections. Some were unable to access medications they needed. Others reported being placed in facilities alongside — and facing retaliation from — members of their former gangs.

With the pace at which wildfires are getting dramatically larger and more severe, Newsom’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has taken flak from advocates for being unprepared for the deepening climate crisis in the state’s prisons, jails, and detention centers.

The Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project, an advocacy group known as TGI Justice Project, is demanding that California create guidelines for what should happen when prisons do evacuate. Newsom has yet to respond.

A recent report by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, a state body that provides lawmakers with policy advice, said that it would take nearly $20 billion to resolve the full list of infrastructure problems prison officials have identified — a total that doesn’t even fully account for climate adaptation costs. (The agency’s report doesn’t mention wildfires, except to reference incarcerated people serving as firefighters.)

With prison populations declining, the Legislative Analyst’s Office also had another suggestion: Close some prisons. Organizers with Californians United for a Responsible Budget want more. The climate crisis has made the scope of infrastructure needs so unwieldy, they say, that repairs should be halted altogether. Instead, the organizers are pushing for California to close 10 prisons and release 50,000 people.

Two closures are already penciled in. In April 2021, the Newsom administration announced that it would close the California Correctional Center by June 2022. The town, whose economy depends on the facility, sued and won an injunction, freezing the process for now.

Vejar, the former head of the C-Yard’s inmate advisory council, who was released in November, said prison officials told him the backup generator that failed had needed repairs for more than 20 years. Closing the California Correctional Center, he said, was also overdue: “I think they’re doing what they should have been doing a long time ago and closing it down.”

The post As Wildfires Threaten More Prisons, the Incarcerated Ask Who Will Save Their Lives appeared first on The Intercept.

In the past decade, dangerous weather events have become more frequent and extreme. Public and elected officials are finally beginning to take this crisis seriously. But there’s one population in the U.S. facing some of the worst climate threats whom almost no one is talking about: incarcerated people.

In this video, we travel to some of the highest-risk facilities identified by The Intercept as part of our Climate and Punishment investigation to hear from incarcerated people and their families about living with the threat of climate disaster while behind bars.

A California mother worries as wildfires approach the prison where her young asthmatic son is incarcerated. A formerly incarcerated man with a rare kidney condition talks about how his health deteriorated in a sweltering Texas facility. While he was in prison, his wife became an advocate for installing air conditioning in Texas prisons, but so far lawmakers have done little to mitigate this crisis.

The post Video: Climate and Punishment appeared first on The Intercept.

“Someone diagnosed with pauci-immune glomerulonephritis” — Phillips’s diagnosis — “could get in trouble in a hurry if they’re exposed to heat, regardless of medications,” said Aaron Bernstein, an expert on climate and health at Harvard University’s School of Public Health.

With treatment, patients with the condition are expected to have a 75 percent five-year survival rate. By the time he left prison last year, Phillips had end-stage renal failure, and doctors told him the likelihood of surviving five years was 40 percent.

“I feel like they gave me a possible death sentence,” said Phillips, who is now 42, of the Texas prison system. “I don’t think they care.”

The Coffield Unit is among the hottest places in the nation for incarcerated people, according to an Intercept analysis of extreme heat in more than 6,500 jails, prisons, and detention centers across the U.S. — and it’s getting worse. As of 2020, Coffield was one of 21 Texas state prisons with no air conditioning, according to public records obtained by the Texas Prisons Air-Conditioning Advocates, an organization Phillips’s wife, Casey, founded.

That he was transferred out of his sweltering cell at all, Justin said, was only due to Casey’s relentless advocacy. After months of calls, emails, and formal complaints, Justin was transferred to an air-conditioned unit. Four days before he was moved, the heat index outside the Coffield Unit was recorded at 127 degrees.

Desperation spurred Casey Phillips to turn her work on her husband’s case into statewide activism. As an advocate, Casey reserves much of her ire for one man: “Honestly, it’s Greg Abbott that doesn’t care. It’s him,” she said, referring to Texas’s Republican governor.

For more than a decade, Abbott has been a key figure stymying the fight for air conditioning in Texas carceral facilities. When he was the state attorney general, Abbott defended the Texas Department of Criminal Justice from heat lawsuits. Today he sets the agenda for legislative sessions — where heat-relief bills, like the ones pushed by advocates like Casey Phillips, go to die. Casey was blunt about Abbott’s role in the stalled legislation: “He’s the problem.”

The state prison system has spotty air-conditioning coverage at best. When the information was last made public in 2020, parts or the whole of around 70 Texas prisons, with a combined capacity of 122,000 potential inmates, had no air conditioning.

“If any other Texan doesn’t have AC, they can be in a shaded situation. They can drink more water. They can take a shower,” said Ariel Dulitzky, a human rights lawyer at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and the co-author of a report on heat in prisons. “Persons deprived of their liberty are under the absolute control of the state. They cannot do anything.”

“Incarcerated people will always be at the bottom rung in terms of targeting of resources.”

The push for air conditioning in Texas prisons is among the first fights like it in the nation, but it’s unlikely to be the last: With the climate crisis raising temperatures across the nation, the battle being waged in Texas will spread. According to the data reviewed by The Intercept, by the end of the century thousands of prisons across the U.S. — from New Jersey to Minnesota — will experience the kind of heat Texas sees today. Nobody seems to be ready. And, as in Texas, easing prisoners’ conditions is unlikely to be at the top of the political agenda.

“Prisons using AC to keep people safe will draw a lot of resources,” said Carlee Purdum, a specialist on disasters affecting prison populations at Texas A&M University. “And incarcerated people will always be at the bottom rung in terms of targeting of resources.”

To assess the dangers of the climate crisis for people behind bars, The Intercept cross-referenced the locations of more than 6,500 detention centers across the U.S. against both historic county-by-county heat data collected by the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists and the group’s projections for how hot weather will increase. The group used the heat index, which incorporates humidity, for its data, because an outdoor temperature reading on a thermometer doesn’t capture how the body struggles in humid conditions with high temperatures.

For each county, the group calculated the historical average number of days each year surpassing heat index readings of both 90 and 105 degrees. According to the National Weather Service, a heat index over 90 degrees merits “extreme caution”; the agency says that over 105 is dangerous. A prison that lacks air conditioning can be even hotter inside than the outdoor heat index might suggest.

Hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people are being subjected to prolonged periods of high heat every year, according to The Intercept’s analysis, which relied on a 2020 Department of Homeland Security register to map jails, prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding facilities, and juvenile detention centers. More than a third of the detention facilities in the U.S. have historically had more than 50 days a year, on average, with a heat index above 90 degrees, the data suggests. That includes nearly every detention facility in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Oklahoma. There are no federal laws mandating climate control in carceral facilities, and none of those states’ corrections departments require universal air conditioning in state prisons. Nearly 100 facilities in Texas are located in counties with more than 10 days annually over 105.

Long spells of high heat, though, aren’t the only concern. Acute health issues can arise from brief temperature spikes in places where people and infrastructure aren’t prepared to deal with it. A short but sudden heat wave in the Northeast, for instance, could be more deadly than a prolonged period at the same temperature in Arizona. Research by Julie Skarha, a graduate affiliate at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, shows that a heat index above 90 degrees in a prison in the Northeast can increase mortality by as much as 18 percent.

Heat index measurements will also mean different things for different people. People taking certain medications — including a class of drugs known as psychotropics that treat a range of mental illnesses, which are common among the incarcerated — are particularly sensitive to heat.

Jennifer Vanos, an expert on extreme heat at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, said, “The people who tend to be most impacted by heat are those who are sick, on medication, or have preexisting conditions that put them at a higher risk of heat death.”

Left/Top: Historical county-by-county heat index records show that the heat in U.S. carceral institutions is already high. Right/Bottom: Projections from the Union of Concerned Scientists show that the heat will soon get much worse. Maps: Union of Concerned Scientists

How much future prisoners suffer in the heat — and how many die — will depend on what policymakers do, both to stop runaway global warming and to improve conditions inside carceral facilities.

No amount of greenhouse gas emission cuts will change the fact that existing carceral facilities are about to get hotter. What’s unclear is how much worse things will get. That depends on governments’ success in transitioning economies from fossil fuels to energy sources that do not produce greenhouse gases, such as solar or wind energy.

By the end of the century, if massive steps aren’t taken to combat the climate crisis, it’s likely that nearly three-quarters of U.S. carceral institutions will experience more than 50 days a year with a heat index over 90 degrees, levels today associated with hotter regions of the country. Historically, only 224 facilities in seven states were in places with more than 10 days over 105 degrees. By 2100, more than half of the prisons, jails, and detention centers in the U.S. — 3,544 facilities in 32 states — will reach that level.

The impact will be dramatic in both historically hot and cool places. Facilities in the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Pacific Northwest that are unaccustomed to high heat will begin to see dangerous days over 105 degrees every year. Other parts of the country will see unprecedented stretches of heat. No carceral institution today is located in a county with more than 50 days a year at 105 degrees; by 2100, almost 700 will be, mostly in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana.

By the end of the century, thousands of U.S. detention facilities will see sustained dangerous temperatures — sometimes running more than 50 days a year. The only way to protect incarcerated people will be for city, county, state, and federal policymakers to act, investing significant resources in installing functioning climate control systems or reducing the number of people in the carceral system.

The fight over air conditioning in Texas prisons, though, shows what it takes to force incremental action on heat in prisons — and the lack of political interest that makes progress so difficult.

In July and August 2011, at least 10 people died of heat-related causes in Texas prisons. Several of the victims’ families sued Texas in federal district court. Other suits followed, including one filed by people incarcerated at an unair-conditioned medical and geriatric prison known as the Wallace Pack Unit.

The attorney for the Pack Unit prisoners argued that they were being subjected to Eighth Amendment violations — cruel and unusual punishment — because the state knew about the conditions and did nothing about it. The plaintiffs also pointed to the Americans with Disabilities Act and argued that reasonable accommodations had not been provided to people with heat-sensitive disabilities. As attorney general at the time, Abbott represented the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in federal court.

Texas was forced to sign a settlement in 2018 in which the state agreed to air-condition the prison. Soon after, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice announced that by the end of 2021 it would make air-conditioned beds available to prisoners with the highest risk of heat-related illnesses. It also introduced new measures prisons must take when the heat index rises above 90 degrees, such as providing additional water and giving fans to incarcerated people. Tens of thousands of people, though, would still be left behind bars in severe heat.

A year later, under pressure from the organization, the first bill to provide funding for air conditioning in all Texas prisons was introduced in the state Legislature. And in 2021, another version of the air-conditioning legislation sailed through with bipartisan support in the Texas House of Representatives, only to die in committee in the Senate.

Things have since stalled. When a special legislative session was called last fall, with Abbott setting the agenda, advocates could not convince him or statehouse leaders to put an air-conditioning bill on the table. With Texas’s infrequent legislative sessions, prisoners won’t get another chance at relief until 2023.

“It means more deaths. It means more medical issues,” said Amite Dominick, who now leads Texas Prisons Community Advocates. “It means family members worrying when their loved ones on the inside tell them, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’”

“If we can’t get anyone to help us, how are these other families that don’t have experience advocating for loved ones going to get justice?”

In a statement to The Intercept, Robert Hurst, a spokesperson for the Texas prisons authority, said, “Core to this department’s mission is protecting the public, our employees, and the inmates in our custody. It is a responsibility that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice takes seriously.” He said the agency gives incarcerated people access to ice, water, fans, and, when needed, air-conditioned respite areas.

An automated heat sensitivity score identifies people with health-related illnesses who should be prioritized for air-conditioned beds, Hurst added. He declined to explain how the score is calculated or whether the agency has fully implemented the program.

A list of health problems that would qualify priority placement does not include kidney disease.

To his family’s great relief, Justin Phillips came home in the spring of 2021. He’s hoping to eventually get on a kidney transplant list, but for now he goes to dialysis three times a week. Meanwhile, years of fighting for other people left Casey Phillips behind in caring for her own health. She stepped down as president of the organization she started to take care of herself, her husband, and their kids.

The Phillipses want to take the prison and state to court to hold them accountable for Justin’s worsening illness. So far they have been unable to find an attorney to take their case. “If we can’t get anyone to help us,” Casey asked, “how are these other families that don’t have experience advocating for loved ones going to get justice?”

The post In Sweltering Texas, Prisons Without Air Conditioning Are About to Get a Lot Hotter appeared first on The Intercept.

Internal documents reviewed by The Intercept describe how Enbridge launched an initiative known as Opposition Driven Operational Threats, or ODOT, to focus the company’s attention on Indigenous opposition to Line 3 and Line 5, two controversial pipelines that transport carbon-intensive tar sands oil between Canada and the United States.

The documents provide a rare window into how fossil fuel companies counteract political opposition. In Enbridge’s case, its ODOT initiative goes so far as to track community gatherings of pipeline opponents and label tribal lands as areas where the company faces threats.

“To the rest of us, ‘threat’ means actual threats to life and liberty, but to them this is all about how much money they can extract while carrying out an operation that is environmentally devastating,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation and an attorney representing opponents of Line 3. “You begin to have this perversion of concepts of what actually are true threats.”

“To the rest of us, ‘threat’ means actual threats to life and liberty, but to them this is all about how much money they can extract.”

Information about how the internal system works is limited, but Verheyden-Hilliard said that there could be civil rights implications depending on whether any state or local agencies are involved in the collection of data for ODOT and how Enbridge uses the information the initiative produces. The existence of the tracking system, she said, was especially troubling considering Enbridge’s payments to law enforcement agencies for policing pipeline opposition. Gatherings of pipeline opponents are protected by the First Amendment. In communities in which tribal governments have invoked their treaty rights to challenge pipeline paths, the tool could potentially be used to develop divisive campaigns aimed at pressuring tribes to back down.

“As part of Enbridge’s risk assessment process, we work to better understand the communities in which we operate, views about energy infrastructure and various perspectives regarding our projects and operations,” Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner said in a statement to The Intercept. “Doing so enables us to actively address issues through engagement and dialogue. We take seriously our role in delivering the energy people count on every day and ensuring safe, uninterrupted and reliable operations.”

Enbridge designed ODOT as a sweeping system to identify emerging outside threats to the company’s business. The program has been managed by a team of Enbridge employees, representing various areas of expertise across the company, who planned to coordinate with various departments within the liquids pipeline division.

Enbridge’s definition of a threat includes virtually anything that could negatively impact the company. ODOT was meant to protect against not only property damage but also reputational harm to the company. A list describing categories of threats included activities that involved trespassing or disruptive protests as well as “awareness events,” which appeared to reference gatherings for pipeline opponents to get their message out. A tribe considering rejecting an Enbridge easement, often by invoking its treaty rights, could also qualify as a threat.

The ODOT initiative includes a system that assigns a risk score to geographical areas. One of the factors used to tally the score is “Indigenous Opposition.” Enbridge has used the scores to generate color-coded maps that often identify areas covered by treaty rights as places where the company faces a threat.

On the maps, lands of the Red Lake Nation, the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, and the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa — all Upper Midwest tribes that have opposed Enbridge pipelines in court — have been marked in red to indicate a threat area.

“Enbridge does not and has never viewed Indigenous communities or Tribal Nations as threats,” said Kellner, who did not directly address the maps. “We listen to and engage with tribes and communities to advance matters of mutual interest.”

Through ODOT, the company also tracks individual pipeline opposition groups. To facilitate the monitoring, Enbridge has used a system to count the number and types of “threats” to Enbridge projects carried out by particular “threat actors” over time. In 2021, the counts focused particularly on Line 3 and Line 5, tracking more than a dozen threat actors, including Indigenous-led pipeline resistance groups such as Camp Migizi and the Giniw Collective.

A source who had access to information about the ODOT system, who asked for anonymity, said they shared the material with The Intercept out of concern that Ojibwe pipeline opponent Winona LaDuke had been named as a threat, alongside the nonprofit she founded, Honor the Earth.

The documents about ODOT reviewed by The Intercept don’t show how the system was used, but groups named in the documents, like LaDuke’s, often had run-ins with the company during the fight over Line 3.

Enbridge, for example, bought land near the headquarters of an Honor the Earth project — miles away from the company’s pipeline. After the purchase, Honor the Earth employees repeatedly spotted drones around the property, which LaDuke suspected were for keeping an eye on the group. “The drones were significant, the surveillance was very significant on our staff,” said LaDuke. After Line 3 was completed this past fall, LaDuke said Enbridge agreed to sell her the land. “The amount of trauma they have caused in our communities is significant,” she said.

How the company gathered intelligence to make its risk assessments is unclear. Public records obtained by The Intercept show that law enforcement shared intelligence on anti-pipeline organizing with Enbridge security, though no link has been established between the police intelligence and ODOT.

Enbridge did not respond to questions about the land purchase, use of drones, or use of law enforcement intelligence. “While we always respect the rights of people to peacefully protest, some actions taken by protestors have put people, communities, and the environment at risk,” said Kellner, the Enbridge spokesperson. “It’s our obligation to protect our workers as well as the communities we operate in and the environment, which means understanding and managing those risks in a manner consistent with our values, and state and federal law.”

To Alexander Dunlap, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, ODOT is a tool of what he and other academics have called corporate counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgencies, often associated with the military, involve convincing communities to take on a key role in quelling resistance, and corporate counterinsurgencies frequently seek to stymie opposition to megaprojects such as Line 3 and Line 5.

The Minnesota permit that granted permission for the Line 3 pipeline barred Enbridge from utilizing “counterinsurgency tactics.” The Intercept previously reported on criticisms that Enbridge was conducting a corporate counterinsurgency in Minnesota.

Dunlap said the documents provide additional evidence that such tactics were used. He said, “It’s most certainly counterinsurgency.”

The post Pipeline Giant Enbridge Uses Scoring System to Track Indigenous Opposition appeared first on The Intercept.

Defense attorneys for the water protectors, as the members of the Indigenous-led anti-pipeline movement are known, said many of the charges are overly aggressive and should be dismissed. Defense attorneys pointed to examples like felony theft charges for protesters who chained themselves to equipment and felony aiding attempted suicide for those who crawled into sections of nonfunctional pipe.

“These felony theft charges started coming out during the summer and it’s very clearly an abuse of the prosecutorial charging function.”

“These felony theft charges started coming out during the summer and it’s very clearly an abuse of the prosecutorial charging function,” said Joshua Preston, a lawyer for the water protectors. “It’s meant to send a message saying, ‘If you come to this property and chain yourself to something, we’re going to throw the book at you.’”

One of the county attorneys pursuing felony theft charges said the indictments were appropriate. “Criminal felony theft meets the elements of the offense,” Hubbard County, Minnesota, Attorney Jonathan Frieden told the Intercept.

The criminal trials are the coda to a yearslong fight over the pipeline in Minnesota between water protectors, on the one hand, and the pipeline company and police on the other. Tensions flared, with Minnesota community members pitted against each other — partly owing to what pipeline opponents said was a “corporate counterinsurgency” against their movement, a set of military-style tactics barred by the oil company’s permit.

In addition to the aggressive legal tactics, new questions are being raised this week about the relationship between prosecutors in Minnesota, where the opposition was concentrated, and the pipeline company. Documents published this week by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation, which is representing pipeline opponents, show that Frieden sought reimbursement from an Enbridge-funded state escrow account to pursue charges against the corporation’s opponents. The requests were denied.

According to the documents, Frieden attempted to bill $12,207.14 to a special account set up by the state of Minnesota to allow Enbridge to pay for law enforcement and public safety expenses affiliated with pipeline construction. Frieden was asking Enbridge to pay for the labor of Assistant County Attorney Anna Emmerling and three support staff for processing approximately 400 cases associated with construction of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline.

“Hours are due to multiple arrests/citations/complaints and prosecution for public safety related costs for maintaining the peace in and around the construction site,” the county attorney stated in his invoice.

He also asked the Minnesota state official hired to approve or deny Enbridge account invoices if he would extend the period of time covered by the account. “I would like to speak with you over the phone regarding the 180 day time limit following completion of the project,” Frieden wrote in an email that the Center for Protest Law and Litigation obtained through a public records request. “I’m wondering if that might be changed in the future given the significant amount of resources my office will be expending over the next 6 months in the prosecution of criminal acts associated with Line 3.”

Rick Hart, the account manager for the Enbridge-funded escrow account, wrote back, “Prosecution expenses are not an allowable reimbursable expense for the Line 3 Public Safety Escrow Account.”

Frieden appeared to respond with frustration. “I look forward to hearing why the multiple late nights and overtime hours by my staff to charge the individuals endangering the public don’t qualify under public safety. I assume the cost to arrest them is covered, just not to prosecute them? How does that make sense under the language you provided below?”

Despite the denial, the requests for reimbursement themselves suggest that a county attorney in charge of prosecuting hundreds of protest-related cases assumed Enbridge would be covering its costs — a fact that defense attorneys said could have legal significance.

“The fact that the prosecutor brought these charges believing the prosecutions were going to be funded by the Enbridge corporation and oil money raises real issues as to the due process rights of defendants,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Center for Protest Law and Litigation and an attorney representing opponents of the pipeline.

Frieden denied any bias against pipeline opponents. “The idea that we as a prosecution or a county prosecuted criminal law because we thought we would just not ever have to pay money is not accurate. We attempted to return some taxpayer money,” he said. When the request was denied, the county moved forward with the felony theft cases, he added: “We are still prosecuting all the cases so any idea that we were prosecuting based on getting paid by Enbridge is not true.”

An Enbridge spokesperson said the company leaves policing and prosecutions up to local officials. “Community police and sheriff deputies are responsible for public safety. Officers decide when protestors are breaking the law — or putting themselves and others in danger,” said Juli Kellner. “We support efforts to hold protesters accountable for their actions.”

The dates covered by the invoice coincide with a period of aggressive law enforcement responses to protests against the pipeline. On June 7, more than 100 people were arrested in Hubbard County while attempting to halt pipeline construction through civil disobedience. During the protest, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter kicked up a cloud of debris as it swooped low in an apparent attempt to disperse protesters. Among the indictments brought by prosecutors was trespass on a critical public service facility, a charge defense attorneys said should not apply since the pipeline was not operating.

Preston, the lawyer for the water protectors, called Hubbard County “ground zero” for arrests and prosecutions — with more than 300 cases still pending. Preston said the prosecutorial strategy was to send a message: “You get a few people who get felony theft charges and they have five to ten years hanging over their head potentially, that’s going to deter other people.”

Later in June, Hubbard County sheriffs blocked access to a small strip of county land between a public road and the driveway leading to land owned and occupied by pipeline opponents, claiming it was county property. Prosecutors filed dozens of misdemeanor charges against people who entered the driveway for driving on what they labeled a trail.

And on July 2, three women were charged with felony theft after locking themselves to the gate at a pipeline site in Hubbard County.

The Hubbard County attorney ultimately dropped the driveway cases, while some of the felony theft charges have been dismissed. “In Hubbard County, at least, there have already been two instances where the judge has dismissed, for lack of probable cause, two felony theft cases,” said Preston. “The rationale being it’s effectively a misapplication of the statute, it doesn’t constitute a ‘taking.’”

Activists have been petitioning Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison to drop all the charges. Ellison signaled a reluctance to intervene in these cases. “My office has not brought any charges against Line 3 protesters,” he tweeted. “Only the county or city attorneys who have brought criminal charges have the power to drop them.” Anti-pipeline organizers argue that Ellison could file an amicus brief in favor of lesser charges or outright dismissal without intervening directly. The petition now has over 78,000 signatures.

Defense lawyers are eager to see some kind of intervention. As Preston put it, “If the state can get away with this overcharging without repercussions, they’re going to do it elsewhere.”

Tara Houska, an Ojibwe water protector, is among those facing charges in Hubbard County. “I’m facing multiple gross misdemeanor trespass charges, which as an Ojibwe person in Ojibwe territory is appalling,” she said. “We are protecting the drinking water of millions of people. We are not criminals.”

The post Prosecutors Hit Anti-Pipeline Protesters With Felony Charges to Send a Message, Defense Says appeared first on The Intercept.

“This is the first opinion that I’ve been aware of that’s made it clear that when you give records to a public entity like this private investigation board, they become public records,” said Jack McDonald, attorney for the North Dakota Newspaper Association. “What relationship there was between Energy Transfer and TigerSwan — that doesn’t affect the records.”

The North Dakota case revolves around 16,000 documents that an administrative law judge forced TigerSwan to hand over to the state’s Private Investigation and Security Board in the summer of 2020 as part of discovery in a lawsuit accusing the company of operating without a security license. TigerSwan was hired by Energy Transfer in September 2016 to lead its security response to the Indigenous-led movement to stop construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, or DAPL, at the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

A portion of the discovery documents were already made public in court filings. The documents provided unprecedented detail about the security firm’s activities against members of the anti-pipeline movement, known as water protectors, and raised questions about whether public officials’ responses to Energy Transfer’s activities were appropriate.

In October 2020, I made a public records request under the aegis of The Intercept for the full set of documents that gave rise to the court case. This week, Energy Transfer attorneys said they plan to appeal the latest ruling and requested a stay to prevent the North Dakota security board from releasing the material.

Led by a former commander of the elite Army unit Delta Force, TigerSwan approached the water protectors as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component,” according to internal documents leaked to The Intercept. Company tactics — including aerial surveillance, communications monitoring, infiltration of activist circles, and coordination with law enforcement agencies — were revealed by The Intercept in an investigative series. In one of the discovery documents that has already been released, TigerSwan bluntly said that its “counterinsurgency approach to the problem set is to identify and break down the activist network.”

Energy Transfer is pouring money into fighting more documents disclosures. The pipeline company hired Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, a law firm founded by Marc Kasowitz, one of former President Donald Trump’s longtime attorneys. Critics say the firm’s aggressive lawsuits against environmentalists are designed to strain its opponents’ resources and chill public debate.

Kasowitz Benson Torres represented Energy Transfer in a federal suit accusing Greenpeace and others of launching the Standing Rock movement through a misinformation campaign and of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which was designed to take down the mob. The suit against Greenpeace was dismissed by a federal judge, who said that its RICO interpretation was “dangerously broad.” (Energy Transfer and Kasowitz Benson Torres declined to comment for this story.)

“The dehumanization, demonization, and lawfare tactics used against water protectors … are bankrolled by private fossil fuel corporations with endlessly deep pockets.”

“The dehumanization, demonization, and lawfare tactics used against water protectors from Standing Rock and Line 3” — another contested pipeline — “to front lines across the world are bankrolled by private fossil fuel corporations with endlessly deep pockets,” said Natali Segovia, legal director of the Water Protector Legal Collective, which represents opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline and other polluting projects. “These documents are crucial to understanding just how far those tactics run and the extent of the harm they have already caused to those that were at Standing Rock.”

Shortly after TigerSwan handed over its documents to the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board, Energy Transfer began fighting to get them back, including by suing the board itself. The fight continued after TigerSwan and the board agreed to a settlement in the licensing dispute, in which TigerSwan affirmed that it would not operate in the state and would pay $175,000 but admitted no fault.

Meanwhile, the board denied The Intercept’s public records request for the documents, in part by citing pending litigation. When The Intercept sued for the documents, the two cases were combined.

Energy Transfer argued that the documents don’t count as public records because, it claimed, TigerSwan had inadvertently supplied material that went beyond the discovery request, violating its contract with Energy Transfer. TigerSwan agreed in court filings that the material should be returned and kept from release.

Feland, the judge, dismissed the claim and others, affirming that Energy Transfer’s contract with TigerSwan does not override North Dakota’s open records laws.

Although the ruling only directly applies to a handful of North Dakota counties, it could have consequences beyond the region. “State law rulings can really spread,” said Victoria Noble, a First Amendment fellow at The Intercept and one of the lawyers representing the news outlet in court. “If Energy Transfer had prevailed here, that would have given a blueprint both for Energy Transfer and for other companies to make the same arguments in other states, in other cases.”

“If Energy Transfer had prevailed here, that would have given a blueprint both for Energy Transfer and for other companies to make the same arguments in other states, in other cases.”

The ruling does not mean that the North Dakota board will immediately hand over the documents, in part because the judge did not rule on whether a public records law exemption asserted by the security board applies. Energy Transfer’s appeal and request for a stay are likely to halt any potential release for the time being.

Separately, the company is still fighting in North Dakota’s Supreme Court to intervene in the security board’s now-settled administrative case against TigerSwan, aiming to get the administrative law judge to issue a protective order forcing the board to withhold the documents.

In an amicus brief, news organizations characterized Energy Transfer and Kasowitz Benson Torres’s arguments to the Supreme Court as “abusive litigation tactics.” The signatories — the North Dakota Newspaper Association; HPR LLC, which publishes Fargo’s High Plains Reader; and First Look Institute, The Intercept’s parent company — said that allowing Energy Transfer to make arguments similar to those already presented in district court again to an administrative law judge would be “duplicative litigation” and would “seriously impair the rights of the press and public under the Open Records Act” because of the high expense of fighting the Fortune 500 company in multiple venues.

The aggressive approach is nothing new for Energy Transfer. In 2019, when Energy Transfer’s RICO suit against Greenpeace was dismissed, its Kasowitz Benson Torres attorneys filed a new version of the suit in a North Dakota state court within a week; that case is ongoing. Last spring, the attorneys filed wide-ranging subpoenas against individuals and groups associated with the Standing Rock movement — including press. Among the subpoenas was one demanding that the nonprofit news organization Unicorn Riot turn over audio, communications, and article drafts related to Standing Rock reporting.

The post Judge Rules Against Pipeline Company Trying to Keep “Counterinsurgency” Records Secret appeared first on The Intercept.

 Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the Mexican general who colonized California’s Sonoma County, remains an admired figure to this day. A local authority erected a monument to the general as recently as 2017. The darker side of this history is typically overlooked.

In 1838, according to records, Vallejo executed 35 of his Indigenous workers as suspected cattle thieves. When a smallpox epidemic struck the area, he inoculated his own family but left around 2,000 Native workers, likely Wappo, Southern Pomo, and Coast Miwok people, to die unvaccinated.

Today, with its fame as one of the world’s most important wine-producing regions, Sonoma County supports a tourism industry centered on grape growers’ connections to the rolling land — a landscape that, over the last few years, has been increasingly consumed by wildfires. After a particularly brutal fire season last year, lifestyle magazines and national newspapers alike expressed concerns about the local industry and the impact of wildfire smoke on the wine.

Once again, Indigenous workers were often left out of the story. Largely from regions of Mexico, the workers toiled in smoky evacuation zones, struggled to access health care, and went without government support when the fires made work impossible.

On a cool autumn day last month, farmworkers inserted themselves into the narrative. Tourists were streaming into Simi Winery to immerse themselves in the storied winery’s Harvest Celebration — at $145 for a ticket, a meal, and, of course, wine pairings. As the well-heeled attendees arrived, a group of farmworkers, their families, and supporters picketed, chanting and playing drums.

The price tag for the meal, according to North Bay Jobs With Justice, which helped organize the protest, roughly matches what a farmworker gets paid for collecting 1 ton of grapes.

The protest organizers, led by workers, had been trying to meet with Simi Winery’s owners since September, but the winemakers never replied. No mom and pop shop, Simi Winery is owned by one of the largest alcohol companies in the world, Constellation Brands, a Fortune 500 firm valued at $44 billion that includes Modelo Especial and Corona beers in its U.S. portfolio, as well as other popular brands.

The farmworkers had sought to invite Simi — as well as more than 30 other local wine-related businesses — to commit to meeting five demands tailored to the needs of fire-stricken workers.

The workers are fighting for disaster insurance to cover wage losses when it’s too dangerous to work, as well as hazard pay for high-risk shifts — such as when wineries are granted waivers to allow workers to labor in evacuation zones. The workers also want community safety observers to be allowed into the evacuation zones to assure that safety standards are upheld and for safety information to be distributed in Indigenous languages. Finally, they want clean bathrooms and clean water available even when the fires are burning nearby.

In response to The Intercept’s questions about the workers’ demands, Alex Wagner, vice president of communications for Constellation Brands said in a statement that the company has a “long history of providing competitive pay and benefits, a safe and sanitary workplace, and a culture where team members feel welcome, valued and respected.”

Unable to get an audience with some of Sonoma’s largest winemakers, the farmworkers resorted to their picket at Simi Winery — hoping that putting their story in front of winery patrons might put pressure on their employers to come to the table.

Today, the idyllic Sonoma County experience that visitors flock to is made possible by workers inhaling toxic smoke as fires burn nearby.

Maria Salinas, a Chatino farmworker from the Oaxaca region of Mexico, described what harvest season is like now. “You’re working and you’re smelling the toxic smoke,” she said. “And you don’t want to protect yourself with the masks, because it’s too hot, so you’re breathing all of this. After work, you feel like sneezing and spitting. The saliva is black. If this is just what you’re spitting, how must it be inside? What about your lungs?”

Salinas, who is involved with wildfire organizing as a leader with the Indigenous workers’ group Movimiento Cultural de la Unión Indígena, has asthma that has worsened with the smoke: “I have to use my inhaler constantly.”

Last spring, organizers among the farmworkers conducted a survey of about 100 colleagues to identify demands. The results showed that, even without the wildfires, 61 percent of respondents earned less than $2,500 a month and 45 percent said they were underpaid for the work they did. Four out of five respondents said the pay was not enough to support their families, and fewer than a quarter had employer-provided health insurance.

The survey elucidated the specifics behind a common dynamic among the farmworkers: They can’t afford not to work, even when conditions become unsafe.

North Bay Jobs With Justice pointed out that in 2020 the federal government provided $63 million in fire-related insurance payouts to Sonoma County wineries, yet provided no comparable support to the people who work the land. Many of the workers are undocumented and ineligible for most income replacement programs.

“We don’t have protection,” said Salinas. ”We can’t count on anyone to come tell us, ‘If you don’t have a job, take this for the rent.’”

The struggles of farmworkers weren’t the only stories the survey told. Many people commented on their connection to the land.

“It is a privilege to work the land and experience every part of nature. It is giving life to the world we live in,” said one worker. Another said, “My father taught me to work and harvest from the land. It is very sacred.”

Many of the farmworkers hail from rural parts of Mexico and speak Indigenous languages, such as Triqui, Chatino, Mixteco, or Maya. Nine out of 10 respondents said they had been discriminated against for speaking their Native language.

The workers’ demand for safety information to be available in Indigenous languages speaks to something deeper than physical security. In 2000, the Mexican government classified some dialects of Salinas’s first language, Chatino, as endangered.

“As an Indigenous woman speaking my own language, I do feel proud of speaking it. I feel that it is the most valuable thing I have,” Salinas said in Spanish, her second language. Her dream is that her people’s language will be passed on to Chatino children.

As the harvest season closes, no Sonoma County winery, grape grower, farm labor contractor, or vineyard management company has agreed to the campaign’s demands, though a few businesses have been meeting with organizers.

“On the whole, we’ve not been received with open arms with these demands,” said Davin Cardenas, the organizing director at North Bay Jobs With Justice.

Meanwhile, Simi has been doing its own Sonoma County storytelling with a big-budget brand campaign centered on its place in the area’s history. Videos filmed by an Oscar-nominated cinematographer tell of how Isabelle Simi took over the winery in 1904 at age 18, after her father and uncle, who migrated from Italy to establish the winery, both died.

The video depicts Simi dusting herself off and harvesting the grapes alone, through grit and determination — no workers in sight. She heroically keeps the winery afloat through Prohibition years and, in 1934, opens Sonoma County’s first tasting room — a space where all the members of the community can gather, according to the video.

As part of the campaign, Simi has partnered with actor Reese Witherspoon’s book club. “Together, these female-led brands will spotlight diverse narratives and deepen connections within the community by offering readers and drinkers more ways to engage with these stories and each other,” the executive vice president of Constellation Brands said in a statement.

The workers are now inviting the Simi community to spotlight a different narrative. As Salinas put it, “The people who make this dream possible are the workers; we work so hard. And us — when are we going to enjoy this?”

The post Grape Pickers Crash Lavish Sonoma Winery Banquet Demanding Better Wildfire Protections appeared first on The Intercept.

Manchin, whose vote is key to any possibility of passing the already diminished $3.5 trillion reconciliation package into law, said he will not support its most meaningful climate provision. The Clean Electricity Performance Program would have sped up the transition to renewable energy from coal and natural gas by offering power utilities money to make the switch and charging them fines if they failed to do so.

With the cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s climate policy all but dead, Democrats are pushing to get Manchin on board for a suite of tax credits that would incentivize renewables. Manchin has signaled that he’ll only sign on to wind and solar credits if Democrats chip away yet another key provision of Biden’s agenda: the elimination of fossil fuel industry subsidies.

“The climate provisions of this package keep on shrinking.”

Manchin’s proposed policies would effectively mean that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions won through incentivized renewable production could be canceled out by continued government-incentivized fossil fuel production. The fossil fuel industry subsidies on the table for elimination total $121 billion over the next decade.

“The climate provisions of this package keep on shrinking,” said Lukas Ross, a program manager focused on the federal budget at the environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth. “If subsidy repeal is no longer part of the discussion, a lot of progressives won’t feel compelled to help carry this over the finish line.”

Progressive Democrats have signaled that the subsidy eliminations remain key. “Repealing these subsidies would finally establish a level playing field for renewable energy and go a long way towards tackling the climate crisis,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told The Intercept. “It’s a top priority.”

Despite Manchin’s cost-conscious approach — he has demanded a reduced $1.5 trillion price tag for the bill — he has fought to preserve domestic fossil fuel industry subsidies. On the potential repeal of international oil and gas subsidies put into place during the Trump administration, Manchin has been silent.

Manchin, who did not respond to a request for comment, has significant personal investments in the coal industry and is also one of the biggest congressional recipients of fossil fuel industry donations, taking in $400,000 between July and October alone, mostly from the oil and gas sectors, according to E&E News.

The subsidies sometimes go to companies that have supported Manchin, like ExxonMobil. Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy told an undercover reporter for Greenpeace’s Unearthed that the international tax benefits at stake add up to $1 billion for the corporation.

“Joe Manchin,” McCoy responded when asked about crucial members of Congress. “I talk to his office every week. He is a kingmaker on this because he’s a Democrat from West Virginia, which is a very conservative state. He’s not shy about sort of staking his claim early and completely changing the debate.”

It will be up to progressive Democrats’ political calculus to decide whether the fossil fuel industry subsidies survive negotiations. “Clearly everything is at risk,” said Ross. He added, “Clearly progressives have some leverage.”

Building Blocks of a Crisis

The subsidies, which are recorded in law as impenetrable jargon, form the building blocks of a taxpayer-funded system that propels the climate crisis. Analysts have counted well over a dozen fossil fuel industry subsidies, totaling at least $20 billion annually, propping up the U.S. industry.

In his budget proposal, Biden targeted 13 domestic fossil fuel industry subsidies to be slashed, and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have fought especially hard for the repeal of four of them.

Among them is a subsidy called the deduction for “intangible drilling costs.” Manchin singled out his desire to preserve the subsidy in a memo to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, which was leaked to Politico.

The subsidy essentially works by allowing oil and gas companies to write off the costs of drilling from their tax bill right away, even before they have produced any oil or gas. If oil prices are high, over the coming decade that subsidy is poised to boost the profitability of new oil and gas fields by 32 and 33 percent, respectively — a bigger impact by far than any of the 15 other major domestic fossil fuel industry subsidies analyzed in a recent study by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Earth Track. If oil prices are low, the subsidy significantly incentivizes new oil and gas drilling that may not happen otherwise.

The subsidy also keeps potential tax money in oil and gas companies’ pockets that could be used to manage the climate crisis. The Biden administration, which supports killing the subsidy, estimated that its repeal would raise $10.4 billion over the next decade.

Another subsidy is known as “percentage depletion” for oil and gas wells. It allows 15 percent of many oil and gas producers’ income to go tax-free. The deduction is meant to account for the cost of developing the well, but the set percentage in many cases exceeds the actual costs.

The deduction is set to boost profitability of new wells by about 3 or 4 percent over the next decade, according to the Stockholm Environment Institute and Earth Track study. If repealed, the Biden administration estimated that it could instead raise $9.1 billion in revenue over that period.

The two subsidies alone, enacted about a century ago, added billions of dollars in value to new oil and gas projects every year, with some years totaling more than $20 billion in added value, according to another study by the Stockholm Environment Institute.

The two other subsidies on the Democrats’ hit list include “last in, first out,” a bookkeeping trick that allows fossil fuel companies to lower their taxable profits, and a loophole that exempts importers and refiners of tar sands oil from paying into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund used to fund oil spill cleanups. Over the next decade, those subsidies will be worth an estimated $15 billion and $352 million, respectively.

Manchin isn’t the only Democrat who has stood in the way of eliminating fossil fuel industry subsidies. Seven moderate House Democrats signed a letter in September asking that the domestic subsidies be preserved. They appeared to get their way: When the latest version of House Democrats’ reconciliation plan was released in September, the domestic subsidy repeals had disappeared. Progressives are imploring party leadership to help get the repeals put back in the bill.

Trump’s Oil Industry Subsidies

A second set of subsidies that progressives hope to put on the chopping block was born out of President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Republicans addressed American corporations avoiding U.S. taxes on their overseas operations with a new tax, which critics point out allows lower rates for overseas corporate earnings. Fossil fuel firms got an even better deal: The bill’s Republican authors made it so that U.S. oil and gas companies owe no taxes on income from extraction abroad.

The carveout appears to benefit only about a dozen companies, according to a Friends of the Earth analysis, since not many companies drill abroad. The beneficiaries include ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil, Occidental Petroleum, Murphy Oil, EOG Resources, Hess, APA, Kosmos Energy, Talos Energy, and Ovintiv.

Many of the same companies caught a separate tax break on money their foreign subsidiaries earn on transporting, refining, and selling oil and gas. The companies were able to shift those earnings from one tax category to another, significantly slashing the tax rate.

“It just doesn’t make sense at a time when we need to rapidly decarbonize to still be supporting and entrenching the fossil fuel industry.”

In its 2022 budget proposal, the Biden administration estimated that getting rid of those fossil fuel carveouts could bring in $84.7 billion in revenue over the next decade. The White House estimates that another $1.4 billion could be collected by closing a loophole that allows fossil fuel corporations to claim that royalties and other nontax payments to foreign governments are actually foreign taxes and deduct them from their U.S. tax bill.

The oil and gas industry has fought hard against all the potential changes. ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Occidental all noted the 2017 tax cuts in lobbying disclosures for the first half of 2021.

They have allies among Democrats. House members wrote to Democratic leadership twice this fall asking that reforms to international taxes be removed from the reconciliation bill, arguing in part that any changes should be halted while international negotiations over tax policies are underway.

Among the signatories to both letters was Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, who has been called “Big Oil’s Favorite Democrat” and has received more than $1 million in oil and gas industry campaign donations over his career. Cuellar also signed on to the letter asking that domestic subsidies remain intact.

Ross, of Friends of the Earth, said, “Democrats are advocating to press pause on what could be the only opportunity to do this.”

The stakes are high: “We’re rapidly running out of time to limit long-term warming to 1.5 degrees,” said Ploy Achakulwisut, co-author of the Stockholm Environment Institute reports, referring to the goal agreed upon in the global Paris climate accord. “It just doesn’t make sense at a time when we need to rapidly decarbonize to still be supporting and entrenching the fossil fuel industry.”

The post Sen. Joe Manchin Has Been Fighting to Keep Billions in Subsidies for Fossil Fuel Industry appeared first on The Intercept.

“It’s like being in a walk-in closet in one of the hottest days of the year with another person for maybe 16 to 18 hours a day,” said Tracy Williams, who was released from prison last December after 25 years and now works for the Texas Inmate Families Association. “Sometimes you have to rinse yourself and lay on the floor to try to catch a breeze.”

The hot weather has been to blame for the deaths of numerous incarcerated people over the years, leaving thousands of others in conditions described as torturous. In response, a movement of family members of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people have repeatedly pushed bills in the state legislature requiring climate control in detention centers. In the wake of a cold snap last winter that showed the temperature extremes can go both ways, last spring’s version sailed through the Texas House before being left to die unattended in a Senate committee.

Now, with a special 30-day legislative session launched this week, advocates see a rare opportunity to use federal funding from the Covid-19 stimulus package to pay for prison climate-control infrastructure Texas has long deemed too expensive. House Bill 88 would mandate that state prisons maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees and install new air conditioning with air purification technology designed to reduce the spread of viruses. A separate appropriations bill would tee up the American Rescue Plan money to pay for it. In Texas prisons, 265 incarcerated people have died of Covid-19, along with 63 staff members.

Even as advocates are reaching for temperature controls to help people incarcerated by the state endure climate disaster, another bill would create a special carveout that allows counties to leave immigrant detainees in dangerous heat and cold.

“It seems the trajectory of the governor is to imprison everyone he can in the worst conditions.”

Since the Texas legislature only meets every two years, the stakes for the 30-day session are high. Whether incarcerated people in Texas will begin to see more survivable climate conditions over the next two years — or worse conditions than ever — could be determined in the next few weeks.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appears to be opposed to creating better conditions for detainees, advocates said. “It seems the trajectory of the governor is to imprison everyone he can in the worst conditions,” said Amite Dominick, president of Texas Prison Community Advocates, which is mounting a campaign to push legislators to finally pass the air conditioning bill.

Children play on the splash pad at Discovery Green during a heat wave in Houston on June 17, 2021.

The bill that could leave immigrants in the heat and cold can be traced back to Abbott’s anti-immigrant Operation Lone Star. During the summer, as a growing climate disaster gripped much of the country, the governor instead declared a disaster in Texas due to migration along the Texas border. Widely seen as a political move to push Abbott’s presidential hopes, the state made nearly $2 billion available for “border security efforts,” including to help sheriff’s offices arrest immigrants on misdemeanor rather than immigration charges.

Typically, such charges would land a person in a county jail, where they would await trial or post bail. Unlike state prisons, those jails have standards that include a requirement for temperatures to fall between 65 and 85 degrees. To accommodate the influx in immigrants arrested by border county law enforcement authorities, the state is repurposing state prison units, where there are no climate standards. In short: If an undocumented immigrant broke the law in certain counties, rather than going to a county jail they would go to a separate facility with worse conditions.

Placing immigrants in state prisons already creates worse conditions than they would face in county jails, said Alicia Torres, a member of Grassroots Leadership’s ICE Out of Austin group, which aides detained immigrants. The new bill would make the conditions even worse — including by allowing state prisons acting on behalf of county governments to forgo the climate control requirement. According to Grassroots Leadership’s policy and research manager Bethany Carson, the bill “could be used to justify the lack of almost any basic needs that would make establishing these facilities more expensive.”

“The standards are protecting the health and safety of people who are incarcerated. To say some people are deserving of that and other people are not — it’s at best morally repugnant.”

Michele Deitch, an expert in prison and jail conditions at the University of Texas at Austin, said the jail standards were created primarily to protect the counties from lawsuits. “These are not high standards,” she said. “I think the counties ought to be really worried. This could open them up to liability in lots of different ways.” (Texas already foots a hefty annual bill fighting lawsuits filed by people outside of the immigration system who have been impacted by extreme heat conditions in state prisons.)

Beyond avoiding lawsuits, Deitch said, “The standards are protecting the health and safety of people who are incarcerated. To say some people are deserving of that and other people are not — it’s at best morally repugnant.”

In a best-case scenario for incarcerated people, the bill waiving jail standards for immigrants would fail, while the climate control bill for state prisoners would succeed.

The availability of federal funds helps address detractors’ repeated — and exaggerated — excuse that climate control is too expensive. There’s even precedent in New Hampshire for federal Covid-19 relief funds to be used to install ventilation systems in state prisons.

“People inside are still human,” said Williams, the formerly incarcerated person now working with people reentering society post-prison. “Yes, a lot of us made bad decisions. We messed up. But would you put your dog or an animal in a hot car? You wouldn’t do that.”

The post One Bill in Texas Legislature Would Ease Extreme Heat in Texas Prisons. Another Makes It Worse. appeared first on The Intercept.

The letter, sent by the Promise of Justice Initiative and co-signed by nine other organizations, follows up on a September 3 missive and comes after a summer of climate-driven disasters, including wildfires, extreme heat, and floods. It’s a signal that state, county, and federal officials responsible for thousands of incarcerated people across the U.S. are not prepared for effects of the climate crisis that scientists say will deepen over the coming decades.

“It is imperative that the state have plans in place for the safe, humane, transparent, and efficient evacuation of our incarcerated community members during these dangerous times.”

“As noted in our previous letter, hurricanes and other devastating weather events in this region are not unexpected,” the letter says. “It is imperative that the state have plans in place for the safe, humane, transparent, and efficient evacuation of our incarcerated community members during these dangerous times.”

Ken Pastorick, communications director for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, denied the reports laid out in the letter. “The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPS&C) is proud of the professional support it provided the local sheriff’s jails and facilities leading up to, during, and after Hurricane Ida,” he said in an email. “The allegations being made are filled with many falsehoods. During their time at Louisiana State Penitentiary, the prison received no complaints from Orleans Parish inmates and staff.”

Because incarcerated people are often confined in aging facilities and are unable to make decisions about how to respond to climate disasters, they are among the most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis. States and counties often struggle to safely and humanely evacuate large populations of incarcerated people, who are viewed as security threats. The Covid-19 pandemic has only made things worse, with evacuations entailing the movement of a large number of people to new congregate settings.

When disasters strike prisons, another common issue is a lack of transparency. The September 3 letter, a series of questions sent to the governor, asked why some facilities in mandatory evacuations zones didn’t evacuate; what systems were in place for family members to locate and communicate with their incarcerated loved ones; and how hurricane-hit facilities would be evaluated for safety prior to return.

The advocates say that they have not received an official response yet, besides piecemeal reassurances from the state that Covid-19 protocols have been followed and incarcerated people at state facilities would have access to phones, and from St. Charles Parish officials that conditions at an un-evacuated jail remained normal. The letter says the reassurances from officials don’t line up with what advocates have heard from at least 12 incarcerated people, whose experiences the advocates described.

Poor Conditions at Angola

When Hurricane Ida hit, many southern Louisiana communities enacted mandatory evacuations in the face of forecasts not seen since Hurricane Katrina, exactly 16 years ago. The decision to evacuate parish jails and prisons — or not — fell to the parishes, the term used for counties in Louisiana. Some parishes in the path of the storm, including Lafourche and St. Charles, left a total of nearly 1,000 incarcerated people in place as they mandated that community members leave. For the 2,700 or so incarcerated people who were evacuated from various facilities, many landed at other local jails, while approximately 800 from Orleans Parish were evacuated to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, and housed in facilities separate from the general population.

There, the letter states, Covid-19 protocols were not followed. “People report having to sleep on mattresses on the floor of a gym, with no social distancing and no masks. Hundreds of people were crammed into the gym head-to-toe so that ‘if you rolled over, you’d roll onto someone else’s mattress,’” the advocates wrote, referring to the account of an incarcerated person.

The letter continues, “There were birds living in the gym, and the floor was covered in bird feces, spiders, insects, standing water, and trash. By the end of the evacuation, the evacuees’ sheets were filthy.” Several people interviewed by the letter’s authors said they were unable to shower for several days and, for many, 10 days passed before they could change their clothes.

“In one place, there were only two toilets and one urinal available for use—and no toilet paper—for at least 150 individuals.”

In some areas, conditions were particularly unsanitary: “In one place, there were only two toilets and one urinal available for use—and no toilet paper—for at least 150 individuals.”

Louisiana’s heat compounded the impact of the storm. Fans blew over the incarcerated people, but there was no air conditioning, driving some people to heat exhaustion, the letter said. Sufficient drinks were not provided to detainees. Some were unable to access medication, including a man who “was without his psychological medication for a couple days and did not have his blood pressure medication for the first six days.”

The conditions led to fights and harsh responses from guards. The letter described at least four reports of pepper spray being used on the evacuees, “including one man who has asthma and who was positive for COVID-19.” Disciplinary action meant corrections officers sending some inmates to Camp J, an area that has also been used for Covid-19 quarantine. A lack of access to phones, for calling loved ones and attorneys, was pervasive.

Pastorick, the spokesperson, denied the letter’s description of poor conditions. He said that housing areas were cleaned, Covid-19 precautions were taken, and detainees from Orleans Parish who tested positive were housed in a Camp J facility designated for medical isolation. He confirmed that people were also sent to Camp J for disciplinary purposes but said they were placed in designated nonmedical areas and the parish provided security. Pastorick also said coolers of ice and water were provided, there were plenty of showers and toilets, and the state prison provided jumpsuits and a laundry service, so that people would have clean clothing.

He said medication was administered according to orders from the Orleans Parish medical staff on hand to support the evacuees. Louisiana State Penitentiary’s pharmacy provided any medication Orleans Parish personnel lacked. “LSP medical staff was available to provide all emergent care that may be needed during the evacuation period,” he said.

Phone lines, Pastorick said, were set up by the second day of evacuation, though service was sporadic due to the impacts of the hurricane across Louisiana. He said, “This had a direct impact on the ability to communicate with relatives.”

The Un-Evacuated

Days passed before many family members heard anything about where their loved one ended up or whether they were safe. The situation conjured memories of Hurricane Katrina, when adults and youth incarcerated at the Orleans Parish Prison faced chest-high water after the sheriff decided not to evacuate.

Among those lacking information about the whereabouts of their loved ones were parents of incarcerated youths. The state had notified many parents that their kids had been evacuated but didn’t tell them where. Only after the storm did they learn that 36 youth were evacuated from the New Orleans Juvenile Justice Intervention Center to an adult facility, the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center. Although the youth were kept in a building separate from the adults, advocates have questioned whether the evacuation violates a Louisiana law that states, “No child subject to the jurisdiction of the juvenile court shall be held in adult jail or lockup.”

Pastorick told The Intercept that the juvenile detention center and the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections have had an emergency evacuation agreement in place since 2018 and that the juvenile detention center exhausted other housing possibilities before requesting support from the state. “Staff were in constant communication with the families and attorneys prior to the transport to the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center on Aug. 27, during their stay, and upon return on Sept. 1.” He added, “The location was initially undisclosed as a matter of safety protocols.”

“He said call his lawyer because conditions are really bad.”

For family members of adults who did not evacuate, the lack of access to communication deepened anxiety about the conditions inside hurricane-struck facilities. When Ida hit, Alesiá Richards’s husband was awaiting trial as a federal inmate at the Nelson Coleman Correctional Center in St. Charles Parish. Typically, Richards is able to communicate with her husband over the phone throughout the day. However, after the storm, 11 days passed before she heard any news of her husband. Finally, on September 9, she got what she estimates to be a two-minute call from him. “He said call his lawyer because conditions are really bad,” she recalled.

Since then, Richards said she’s heard from her husband, from his attorney, and from the attorney of a family member who is also incarcerated there that the facility was operating on generator power and lacked air conditioning, the roof appeared to be leaking, and no more than one hot meal was distributed per day. When she got another two-minute call from her husband on September 17, he told her that the lights were back on, but they weren’t expecting phones to be working until the end of the month. Sadadra Davis, whose partner is at the same facility, said she’d also heard from him that the ceiling was leaking, the air conditioning was minimal, and they were not getting enough food to feel full.

St. Charles Parish Sheriff Greg Champagne told The Intercept that the claims laid out in the letter, which echo some of Richards’s and Davis’s concerns, were “mostly false,” adding that the jail was built in 2003 to withstand a Category 5 storm. “The facility was never at any time without power after the storm passed,” he said, adding that they were never without air conditioning and lights. “We had some spots mostly at the skylights where small leaks developed which were quickly mopped up.”

He continued, “It is my belief that certain inmates are attempting to manipulate the situation by also spreading false and greatly exaggerated information.” Champagne said the only service that was cut was landline phone service and that officials were providing cellphones to incarcerated people for short calls home.

By now, incarcerated evacuees across Louisiana have largely been sent back to their original facilities. Only the Terrebonne Parish Jail has been deemed still too damaged for return, said Pastorick. For family members of people who were never evacuated, though, communications problems and uncertainty persist.

Richards believes her husband should have been moved when the mandatory evacuation was put in place for the surrounding community. On top of her worry over the conditions, the loss of contact has heightened anxiety throughout her own evacuation and return to a damaged home. “It took something from me,” she said. “I deal with anxiety myself, and he’s my way of being calm.”

The post Hurricane Ida Prison Evacuations in Louisiana Left People Without Medication in Bird-Infested Shelter appeared first on The Intercept.

Now, at Enbridge, Troy Kirby oversees efforts to combat a protest movement aimed at stopping construction of the company’s Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. Enbridge’s security operation has drawn criticism for its efforts to influence the police response to the Indigenous-led movement, whose members are known as water protectors.

“These are the people that specialize in the dark arts. Maybe it’s a bit more banal than we might imagine, but these are the spooks.”

Enbridge’s response to the water protectors is part of a pattern of megacorporations working to quell resistance to their environmentally harmful activities. Enbridge’s close cooperation with police, including payments and intelligence sharing, has been deemed by academics and water protector critics as emblematic of corporate counterinsurgency — a suite of tactics, ranging from public relations campaigns to surveillance and support for armed force, designed to win over communities to controversial profit-making projects.

“You have companies that have entire departments dedicated to making sure you stay in your place, that you don’t resist, that you don’t talk about it, and you most certainly don’t act on it,” said Alexander Dunlap, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, who has written extensively about how corporations utilize counterinsurgency tactics to quell movements against environmental degradation. “These are the people that specialize in the dark arts. Maybe it’s a bit more banal than we might imagine, but these are the spooks.”

An Enbridge spokesperson said the company supports the rights of individuals to protest lawfully and peacefully. “Security teams use a ‘people first’ concept to ensure public safety — their mission is to observe, respond, and report safety issues,” said Juli Kellner, a communications specialist for the company. Kellner did not make Kirby available for an interview.

As this story was being reported, Kirby’s Amazon job description was deleted from his LinkedIn page.

As sophisticated corporate security efforts have burgeoned, lucrative positions lure specialists from company to company, linking together the practices of megacorporations. Kirby, for his part, started at Enbridge in 2019 after a three-year stint as Amazon’s head of corporate security throughout the Americas, according to LinkedIn. Part of his role included overseeing the online giant’s Global Security Operations Center. Internal Amazon documents dated to the year Kirby left, obtained by Vice, provide clues. According to the report, security personnel with the center used Facebook and Instagram to monitor environmental groups as well as union organizers.

In Poland, operatives working for the private security company Pinkerton were sent to an Amazon warehouse to investigate reports of employee misconduct, Vice reported. Pinkerton got its start in the late 19th century, using undercover operatives and agents provocateurs to bust unions. The firm is now a subsidiary of the private security giant Securitas — one of the companies providing security for Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota.

Before Amazon, Kirby spent 16 years doing security work for Exxon Mobil. For at least four years, he worked for Exxon in Nigeria — where there is a history of energy company complicity in human rights abuses. During his time in Nigeria, Kirby was an adviser on “strategic security countermeasures,” which involved managing so-called crises, including pirate attacks and kidnapping, as well as “community protests,” according to a section of his LinkedIn page that has since been deleted.

As in Minnesota, the work in Nigeria included collaborating closely with public agencies. Kirby’s LinkedIn page said he “Established a Nigerian based security network with private and public sector security leaders” and was involved in “Oversight of host government security forces.”

The Exxon Mobil security operation was heavily militarized and focused in part on Exxon’s offshore oil operations. Kirby described designing a “Security Maritime Operations center including a fleet of 17 military-grade security vessels.”

For critics of corporate counterinsurgency, Kirby stands as just one example of corporate officials steeped in highly militarized security efforts abroad bringing those practices back home.

“To corporate entities like Energy Transfer and Enbridge, water protectors and land defenders are perceived as ‘security threats’ endangering shareholders’ profits.”

“It’s telling, but not at all surprising, that the head of security for Enbridge has trained in the so-called Third World to deal with high-stakes security issues impacting corporations in Africa and the Americas,” said Natali Segovia, an attorney and the legal director for the Water Protector Legal Collective. The collective is representing opponents of Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access pipeline, who argue that aggressive law enforcement tactics used near the Standing Rock reservation were influenced by the contract security firm TigerSwan, run by special operations military veterans. “To corporate entities like Energy Transfer and Enbridge, water protectors and land defenders are perceived as ‘security threats’ endangering shareholders’ profits,” Segovia said.

Kirby appears to have put some of the lessons he learned with Exxon Mobil in Nigeria into practice on Enbridge‘s project in Minnesota. Under Kirby’s watch, Enbridge pays law enforcement for pipeline-related police activity. The company’s security team members have set up trainings for local law enforcement and have been invited to attend public safety officials’ intelligence sharing meetings, where information on individual pipeline opponents has been discussed.

In advance of Line 3 pipeline construction, Kirby planned meetings with local law enforcement officers to discuss Enbridge’s approach to responding to opposition. When a local sheriff expressed concern over whether law enforcement agencies would be reimbursed for pipeline-related expenses, Kirby reassured him that the security head had influence over the appointment of the public official who would approve reimbursement requests, according to the sheriff. As the sheriff recalled in an email, Kirby told him “he would be involved to ensure we are taken care of, one way or another.”

It’s Kirby’s colleague Brian Aldrich, Enbridge’s Line 3 security lead, who has worked more routinely on the ground in Minnesota. Aldrich, according to an email sent to state officials, served with the Marines before working for large security firms including Control Risks and Gavin DeBecker and Associates. He also has an Amazon connection — providing personal security for the corporate giant’s founder and executive chair, Jeff Bezos himself.

The post Oil Company Official Overseeing Crackdown on Pipeline Resistance Cut Teeth at Amazon and Exxon appeared first on The Intercept.

By the time construction on Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline, began last December, a working relationship had been established between Enbridge and police officers. A public safety official even invited the company’s Line 3 security chief to regular intelligence sharing meetings. In one case, the official passed along intelligence to Enbridge’s security chief for Line 3: a list of people who attended an anti-pipeline organizing meeting.

Line 3 opponents have long raised concerns about payments made to law enforcement by Enbridge to cover pipeline-related policing. A special account set up by the state of Minnesota has distributed $2.3 million in Enbridge funds to public safety agencies so far. The records shed new light on the level of close coordination between law enforcement agencies and the Canadian oil company to police the Indigenous-led movement to stop Line 3.

“Local law enforcement has become the brutal arm of a Canadian corporation.”

“Local law enforcement has become the brutal arm of a Canadian corporation,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation and an attorney representing opponents of the pipeline. “It’s highly inappropriate for law enforcement to target people based on First Amendment activity, collect identity information and then deliver that information to their political opponents.”

The effort to halt the Line 3 pipeline is the latest flashpoint in the movement to end development of new fossil fuel infrastructure amid a growing climate crisis. In Minnesota, members of the Indigenous-led resistance, known as water protectors, have turned to tactics that directly disrupt construction, sometimes trespassing on private property, blocking roads, or locking down to pipeline company equipment.

“Community police and sheriff deputies are responsible for public safety,” Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner told The Intercept. “Our security call the police when a disturbance occurs. Officers decide when an individual is breaking the law — or putting themselves or others in danger.”

How law enforcement responds to the protest movement is a matter of training and discretion. The documents obtained by The Intercept suggest that Enbridge has stepped in to influence officers’ choices.

Water protectors point to the close working relationship between Enbridge and law enforcement to explain escalating police tactics, with rubber bullets and other “less-lethal” weapons deployed in recent weeks.

Plans to Coordinate

Emails between Enbridge and members of the Northern Lights Task Force — a group consisting of sheriffs and public safety officials coordinating plans for expected protests against Line 3 — describe several joint training exercises and other coordination meetings set up by the energy firm. The largest of the trainings was in Bemidji, Minnesota.

In October 2020, according to emails, Enbridge organized an all-day training at the company’s Bemidji Emergency Operations Center. According to an email sent a day before the event, dozens of Enbridge employees, public safety officials, including local sheriffs along the pipeline route, and an FBI agent were invited to attend. A primary goal for the event: “Coordination between Line 3 project team and L.P.” — an acronym that typically refers to “local police.”

The email sent out ahead of the training included a series of “Incident Briefing Maps” laying out scenarios where Enbridge and law enforcement might need to coordinate a response. The various scenarios had something in common: They all involved protests.

The list of scenarios — which were drawn up by the Response Group, a controversial crisis management firm that works for the energy industry — laid out four possible events: demonstrators blocking traffic, the breach of a construction site, “swarming” of a pipeline hub while streaming on social media, and project opponents locking themselves to the gate of an Enbridge office.

Training participants would be asked to come up with a plan to respond to each of the scenarios, as well as to develop an “Information and Communication Strategy” to keep government agencies, the public, and the media informed of what was happening, according to a list of exercise objectives. Enbridge planned to discuss providing local law enforcement with a project radio, according to an email describing the exercise.

It wasn’t the first conversation of its kind. In advance of a smaller version of the exercise, back in April, members of the Northern Lights Task Force filled out a questionnaire for Enbridge. The public safety officials noted that it was a “priority” for law enforcement to obtain access to Enbridge security camera feeds. It also referenced the possibility of placing an Enbridge liaison inside the two law enforcement emergency operations centers, as well as a law enforcement liaison in Enbridge’s emergency operations center.

The Northern Lights Task Force’s communications team did not answer a detailed list of questions. Aitkin County Sheriff Dan Guida, a member of the task force, said his office never received a project radio nor saw other agencies with one. Guida said that the scenarios served to show law enforcement how Enbridge runs its emergency operations center. “It was for Enbridge to learn. We didn’t get trained by Enbridge,” he said, adding that law enforcement might carry out a similar exercise with a bank. “We assisted them and told them this is how we do it, you do your own thing.”

It’s not clear how many officers attended the trainings offered by Enbridge. Clearwater County Sheriff Darin Halverson was copied on the invite and RSVP’d that he would attend an additional Enbridge security exercise as well as a “sensitive security information” meeting. He told The Intercept that he did not attend any of the gatherings.

Sharing Intelligence

By the time construction on Line 3 began, a comfortable working relationship appeared to have been established between Enbridge and some of the public safety agencies invited to the company’s meetings. Public officials repeatedly expressed interest in exchanging information on pipeline opposition with Enbridge.

In December 2020, a St. Louis County sheriff’s deputy distributed language to be used by officers issuing dispersal orders during protests against Line 3 and also sent a list of potential charges that could be applied to pipeline protesters. Another officer responded, noting that it would be legal to arrest water protectors even if they trespassed without a law enforcement officer present. “Hopefully Enbridge security would be videotaping when able,” the officer said. Other documents affirmed that Enbridge security would be wearing body cameras.

The Northern Lights Task Force, the group of public safety officials, occasionally suggested that Enbridge should be excluded from planning, the documents show. In November 2020, Guida, the Aitkin County sheriff, copied Enbridge public information officers on an email about the task force’s public messaging strategy. Another sheriff advised that the corporate representatives did not belong in the group: “It is not a good idea to have Enbridge employees in our group, but they would certainly be good contacts to have to know what info is being put out,” wrote Carlton County Sheriff Kelly Lake. (Guida told The Intercept he copied Enbridge on the email so that law enforcement and the company could avoid mixed or duplicate messages.)

In other cases, public safety officials actively sought out Enbridge security to assist with law enforcement officers’ efforts, inviting an Enbridge representative to share space and attend meetings. St. Louis County Emergency Management Coordinator Duane Johnson copied Enbridge’s security lead for the Line 3 project on an email inviting first responders to work out of the law enforcement emergency operations center as they monitored intelligence on a potential direct action the next day. “There is considerable intel on something brewing tomorrow. Let me know if you’d like to come over and work out of the EOC tomorrow just in case something pops,” the official wrote, referring to the emergency operations center.

In another email, Johnson requested that Enbridge’s Line 3 security lead attend regular intelligence meetings. “We have missed you on our 0900 intel meetings. Is there another time that would work better for you?” asked the emergency management coordinator in a January 2021 email. “It would be nice to have someone from your company on.”

The Enbridge security officer was kept in the loop. The next day, Johnson copied him on another email, forwarding a list of names of water protectors who had attended a “Line 3 Organizing Meeting” the night before.

“It was all I really got from last night,” Bruce Blacketter, emergency management director for the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, wrote to Johnson in the forwarded email. “Well, this and a slight ‘back of the head’ headache from the musical performances and guided breathing/stretching exercises.”

St. Louis County did not respond to a request for comment, and the Fond du Lac Band declined to comment.

The post Minnesota Law Enforcement Shared Intelligence on Protest Organizers With Pipeline Company appeared first on The Intercept.

The internal reckoning around race, gender, and sexual as well as other abuse allegations coincided with a more public confrontation with the legacy of the Sierra Club’s once-revered founder John Muir, who expressed racist sentiments and traveled in circles that included eugenicists. Following the racial justice uprisings during the summer of 2020, the Sierra Club disavowed Muir. At the same time, discontent was brewing inside the organization over less symbolic issues, leading to the internal report.

The report, prepared for the Sierra Club by the consulting firm Ramona Strategies, describes a series of recommendations developed as part of a “restorative accountability process,” based on dozens of interviews and hundreds of pages of documentation. The sharply worded executive summary describes how the organization of nearly 900 staff members fostered a culture lacking accountability for abuse and misconduct, especially when it came from the Club’s 4,000 volunteers, some of whom act as managers for the organization’s employees. The report, which was commissioned after a volunteer leader was publicly accused of rape, underlined that employees and volunteers from historically marginalized groups were most vulnerable to abusive behavior.

“We began that restorative accountability process to understand and examine where we failed our people so we can do better as an organization, as an employer, as an advocacy group and progressive partner,” said Ramón Cruz, the Sierra Club board president, in an interview. “We have made a commitment to follow through on these changes.”

The report’s authors noted that they are unaware of any other organization that has delegated management authority to volunteers in the way the Sierra Club has. They advised that the structure be revised.

“Being a ‘volunteer-led’ organization cannot stand for volunteers having carte blanche to ignore legal requirements or organizational values around equity and inclusivity — or basic human decency,” the report stated. “All employees should be managed by and subject to the oversight of individuals also under the organization’s clear control and direction as employees. There is no other way we can see.”

Internal Reckoning

Interviews with more than a dozen former and current Sierra Club staff members, as well as several volunteers, echoed the problems the report describes. Most of those interviewed were people of color, and nearly all had a story about racism or sexism from a volunteer or manager. Those who voiced concerns said they saw little action, and some saw the subjects of their complaints receive praise or even promotions. Some of the complainants said they experienced retaliation — allegations echoed in the report findings. Several ultimately quit.

In the Sierra Club’s statement announcing his resignation, Brune made references to the themes of the internal report and the concerns raised by staff members. “The traditional systems of power that have made the Sierra Club one of the most powerful environmental groups in the country are barriers to the transformational change we need in our society,” Brune said in the statement. “Within the Sierra Club, many members of our community, especially Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color staff and volunteers, have called for significant changes in the organization, often at great personal risk.”

Brune added an apology: “Along with our Board of Directors, I bear the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that our staff and volunteers feel safe, supported and valued, and I sincerely apologize for any instance in which this was not the case.” (Cruz, the Sierra board president, said the accountability report had not played a role in Brune’s resignation, adding that Brune had helped shepherd all the changes underway.)

“We recognize the impacts of our organization’s history and harm, and we are deeply dedicated to fundamental transformation.”

“We recognize the impacts of our organization’s history and harm, and we are deeply dedicated to fundamental transformation,” Cruz said in a separate statement. “We are making substantial changes to our policies and committing substantial resources to much needed capacity, and we know that the trajectory for transformation will be a long one.”

The Sierra Club is far from the only environmental organization undergoing an internal reckoning over race, gender, and abusive cultures. However, as one of the oldest and largest green groups in the U.S., with assets of over $100 million, the Club’s success or failure in addressing structural racism and sexism carries significant weight. Its work confronting environmental injustice, which tends to fall along racial lines, could help define how American society responds to the growing climate crisis.

“There’s a lot of people doing good work in that organization and effective work, all around the country, so that makes me unable to throw away the Sierra Club,” said Olka Forster, a former employee who is Black and quit the Sierra Club last year in part because of frustrations related to what she said was institutional racism. “The work that the Sierra Club does — I have to have hope that it works because it means our survival.”

Sexual Misconduct and Abuse

The most serious consequences of the Sierra Club’s lack of strong accountability systems were cases of assault, according to the report summary and recommendations. “In more than one situation, we heard accounts that verified bad behavior — at least at lower levels — was widely known about individuals who perpetrated much more serious harm than was widely discussed,” the authors wrote. “In two of these situations, the more serious harm included multiple instances of assault.”

The process that gave rise to the internal report began after a former Sierra Club employee, in July 2020, posted an account on social media of being raped by a volunteer leader, shared just as the Sierra Club was grappling with the racial justice movement sweeping the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer. The organization removed the individual from his Sierra Club position and launched an investigation into his tenure, ultimately determining that he would never be allowed to work or volunteer with the group again, said Cruz.

The account of rape was not the only incidence of reported sexual misconduct to roil the Sierra Club. An earlier incident in Iowa had led to fallout. After Heather Pearson was hired to work for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign in Iowa in 2018, she reported to a manager that a well-known local environmental organizer, Ed Fallon, who at times worked with the Club, used his position to make an inappropriate sexual advance toward her before she joined the Club. Fallon has repeatedly denied Pearson’s account, calling it a “slander” in online posts and sending a cease-and-desist letter to Pearson. He repeated his denial in response to an Intercept inquiry.

Ultimately, the Sierra Club severed ties with Fallon and posted a public statement. Fallon’s attorney sent another cease-and-desist letter, this time to to the Sierra Club, demanding that it remove references to Fallon. The Sierra Club declined to do so.

Several members of the Iowa chapter’s volunteer executive committee pushed back on the Sierra Club’s decision to cut ties. At least two committee members resigned in protest because they thought Fallon’s denials had been insufficiently considered and that the Sierra Club had failed to communicate with the committee effectively.

The toll the process took on Pearson’s mental health led her to leave her position at the Sierra Club in the spring of 2020. She told The Intercept, “It’s incredibly important for organizations to do everything in their power to make spaces safe for the volunteers and the employees.”

Cruz said that the organization’s response to Pearson’s complaint would have been improved by reforms now being enacted. As for the volunteer committee members that left in the wake of the dustup, Cruz said generally that dissent against some moves was inevitable. “We know we will lose some people who feel threatened by reforms within the organization,” he said. “We are not making these changes in order to drive people away, but we fully recognize it may happen as a consequence of Sierra Club standing firm in our values and committing to build a safer, more fulfilling organization for our staff and volunteers.”

New Tensions in an Old System

The Sierra Club’s volunteer leadership system, with its roots in Muir’s era, helped to create rifts that divided the organization internally along racial, gender, and generational lines.

In the organization’s structure, each state has one or more chapters, whose staff is overseen by a powerful, agenda-setting all-volunteer executive committee elected by dues-paying members. Because the committee roles are unpaid and a person must be a dues-paying member to fill them, the executive committees are most welcoming to people with money and time to spare, including, according to staff and volunteers interviewed, a disproportionate number of white retirees. At times, the older, white volunteers’ environmental commitments differ from a movement that is shifting toward a focus on environmental justice.

Disagreements over issues like mission orientation and diversity in the Sierra Clubs arose in various chapters in recent years. In one instance, a Colorado chapter was riven by disagreements over the disparity of power along gender lines, and recriminations followed. Following a lengthy investigation, several volunteers were suspended. The moves did not come quickly enough to prevent those who had raised the issues from resigning in frustration. Cruz touted the Club’s accountability moves but acknowledged that the process had taken too long. He said policies were being put in place to speed up such inquiries.

Other tensions have emerged inside the organization over racial and ethnic dynamics. The Sierra Club has disproportionately lost staffers of color. A retention study put out by the group in 2017, following pressure from staff, showed that on average 19 percent of people of color employed by the Sierra Club each year between 2011 and 2015 left the organization that same year, compared to a turnover rate of 15 percent for white staff. The difference was even starker for Black employees, who had an average turnover rate of 23 percent. The number of Indigenous people employed by the organization was so small that the turnover rate meant little at all. The Sierra Club has not shared updated data with employees.

“Every single thing, in my view, that Sierra Club has done in service of their Black and brown employees was hard fought by the union.”

In interviews with The Intercept, former employees of color said that Sierra Club policies failed to sufficiently address tensions. Instead, staffers turned to the Club’s employee union. “Every single thing, in my view, that Sierra Club has done in service of their Black and brown employees was hard fought by the union,” said Forster. The union, which had officially been called the John Muir Local 100, jettisoned the founder’s name three years before the wider Sierra Club.

Larry Williams, who is Black and the former union president, said the union intervened when bias complaints were ineffectively handled. The executive summary of the Ramona Strategies report noted the pattern: “Feedback indicated that even well-known misdeeds of certain individuals have both historically and currently been overlooked, minimized, or tolerated because of their contributions to the organization or the movement.” The report authors also noted that in some cases “bad actors actively took steps to punish those who complained or otherwise assisted in bringing concerns about their conduct to the fore.”

Williams, who left the Sierra Club three months ago feeling that he had no room for advancement, told The Intercept that he faced such consequences. “I and others have been demonized and suffered a lot of blowback for speaking up about things,” he said. “Because of that, my career was railroaded at the Sierra Club.”

Cruz acknowledged a lack of trust between management and the union and said policies were being put in place to improve the situation. He said retaliation would not be tolerated. “We have a strong policy that does not allow retaliation for participation in the union,” Cruz said. “If people feel they are being retaliated against for participating in the union, we need to know about it immediately in order to address it.”

Cruz said that among other changes, the Sierra Club is already making moves to significantly increase its human resources staff and develop a new conflict resolution team. Volunteer leaders will no longer manage any staff, he said, pledging that the organization will communicate better with staff. “Sierra Club leadership has been and will continue to be committed to doing the hard work to acknowledge and address systemic injustice inside and outside of our organization,” he said. “That transformation is also reflected in our work internally to build a more inclusive workplace and organization.”

Brune, the outgoing executive director, said he was proud of the work he had done at the Sierra Club, but acknowledged that more was needed to improve the company’s culture — something he said the incoming leadership would address. “The Sierra Club is a nearly 130-year old, white legacy organization that is in the middle of a transformation to become more equitable and just,” he said in a statement to The Intercept. “The progress that we’ve made has been both significant and insufficient — there’s so much more to do.”

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“This is billions upon billions of dollars in additional fossil fuel industry subsidies in addition to the $15 billion that we already hand out to this industry to support and fund this industry,” said Jim Walsh, Food and Water Watch’s senior policy analyst. Scientists say that to meet the goals of the international Paris climate accord, the U.S would need to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 — and be well on the way there by 2030. With subsidies that keep fossil fuel industries going, Walsh said, “We will never be able to meet the Paris agreement if we fund these kind of programs.”

“This deal envisions a world where we will use fossil fuels into perpetuity.”

Just as concerning is the new economy the subsidies could entrench, said Walsh, through the creation of new fossil fuel infrastructure. “This would support the development of four petrochemical hubs that would create profit incentives for greenhouse gas emission production and would be focused on finding new ways of integrating fossil fuels into our economy for transportation, energy, petrochemical development, and plastics.”

In short, he added, “This deal envisions a world where we will use fossil fuels into perpetuity.”

Industry-Backed “Climate” Projects

The subsidies would go toward technologies sold as dream fixes for ending the nightmare of the climate crisis without the colossal political hurdle of dislodging the fossil fuel industry from the U.S. economy. Such technologies include carbon capture and decarbonized hydrogen fuel. Both purported solutions in practice help fossil fuel companies mask the continued release of climate-warming gases. Neither of the technologies are currently commercially viable at a large scale, so the energy industry requires government help to carry out what critics see as a public relations scheme.

The bill includes billions of dollars for carbon capture, utilization, and storage; hydrogen fuel made from natural gas; and “low emissions buses” that could run on fuels including hydrogen and natural gas. It also encourages subsidies that go unquantified in the legislation, for example urging states to waive property taxes for pipelines to transport captured carbon.

The devil is in the details. The vast majority of clean-sounding hydrogen is made from natural gas and produces the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide as a waste product. The process itself requires energy, typically supplied by burning more natural gas, which also produces greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, carbon capture and storage are promoted primarily as a means to clean up continued emissions from fossil fuel processing facilities. Carbon capture would do nothing to resolve the array of severe environmental problems caused upstream by drilling, fracking, and mining — let alone the downstream burning of the fuels for energy.

The survival of the fossil fuel industry depends on its ability to convince the public that corporations are taking steps to address the climate crisis. Hydrogen and carbon capture, utilization, and storage have been two of the industry’s key strategies for achieving that goal. Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Chevron, just to name a few, have touted their investments in hydrogen and carbon capture.

While long-shot, industry-supported “climate” projects depend on government subsidies, so does the rapid scale-up of renewable energy sources already proven to meaningfully slow down the spiraling climate crisis. Put simply, wind and solar work as climate fixes right now, while carbon capture and “decarbonized” hydrogen do not.

Yet the Democrats and Republicans pushing the infrastructure compromise are choosing to give the fossil fuel industry a lifeline instead of providing funding for proven renewable energy technology. Even bill provisions that facilitate renewable energy development contain language that could allow funds to go instead to fossil fuel industry “solutions.”

“By far, the best thing to do with the subsidy money for this is to purchase wind, solar, and storage to eliminate fossil fuels.”

“Any legislation funding carbon capture and storage or use or direct air capture is legalizing the funding of scam technologies that merely increase air pollution death and illness, mining and its damage, and fossil-fuel infrastructure, and they have no provable carbon benefit,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. “By far, the best thing to do with the subsidy money for this is to purchase wind, solar, and storage to eliminate fossil fuels.”

Little-Understood Technologies

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., hopes to finalize the latest $550 billion bipartisan iteration of the infrastructure bill by the end of the week. The legislation will also have to make it through the House and will ultimately be complemented by hundreds of billions in additional provisions to be hammered out though a separate process called reconciliation, which requires no Republican support.

President Joe Biden kicked off the process with his own blueprint, the $2.5 trillion American Jobs Plan. Republicans, however, didn’t come up with the carbon capture and hydrogen spending: Many of the industry-friendly proposals were part of Biden’s plan from the start. “It’s truly bipartisan, which makes me cringe,” said Walsh.

The bill is moving fast, and the billions in funding are set to become law at a time when policymakers and the public still lack a firm grasp on how the technologies work.

Hydrogen has become the latest darling of the fossil fuel industry. So-called clean or “blue” hydrogen would use carbon capture and storage to neutralize the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the process. Another type of the fuel, called “green” hydrogen, uses electricity drawn from renewables.

Neither “blue” nor “green” means of hydrogen production, however, are widely used. For instance, only two facilities in the world have tried to commercially produce decarbonized “blue” hydrogen. As a result, 96 percent of hydrogen fuel globally comes from carbon-intensive means of production, according to a 2019 report. Research out of Stanford and Cornell Universities indicates hydrogen produces more climate-warming gases than simply using natural gas directly.

The infrastructure bill calls for a national strategy to put “clean hydrogen” into action, including four regional hydrogen hubs. The provision explicitly ties one hub to fossil fuels and calls for two others to be near natural gas resources.

Likewise, the carbon capture measure in the bill ties government investment to areas “with high levels of coal, oil, or natural gas resources.”

Existing carbon capture projects have repeatedly run into problems, including a heavily subsidized Chevron facility dubbed the largest carbon capture project in the world, which was attached to a liquid natural gas export facility in Australia and recently deemed a technological failure. Exacerbating the problem is that there is no real market for captured carbon — except to use captured gases to produce even more oil from old wells. While the legislation puts money toward creating new uses for the trapped gases, large-scale markets are a far-off prospect.

While the legislation puts money toward creating new uses for the trapped gases, large-scale markets are a far-off prospect.

Some proponents argue that carbon capture and hydrogen fuels could ultimately be beneficial for the climate if used for narrow purposes, like capturing carbon from steel production. But there is nothing in the bill preventing the fossil fuel industry from using the purportedly climate-friendly technologies to shore up its image while continuing to release emissions — a tactic known as “greenwashing.”

Environmental justice groups are clear about where they stand. Biden’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council issued a report in May that included carbon capture and storage among a list of technologies that will not benefit communities. Separately, a group of hundreds of organizations, ranging from Ben & Jerry’s to 350.org, sent a letter to Democratic leaders on July 19 urging them to resist energy strategies reliant on carbon capture, utilization, and storage.

The letter reads, “Investing in carbon capture delays the needed transition away from fossil fuels and other combustible energy sources, and poses significant new environmental, health, and safety risks, particularly to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities already overburdened by industrial pollution, dispossession, and the impacts of climate change.”

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“Those who died lacked access to financial capital, social networks, and had aging or injured bodies,” Vivek Shandas, director of the Sustaining Urban Places Research Lab at Portland State University, told the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. To Shandas, the tragic result was not unforeseen.

“We knew who was going to die,” the scientist said. “I wrote a report stating as much in 2009, and yet local agencies had little capacity for taking swift action.”

Shandas is part of a league of scientists that could be called the Cassandra generation, named for the Greek myth about unheeded prophecies. For decades, scientists have predicted a moment like the one we’re living now: climate-driven crises destroying lives and beloved places once assumed safe from catastrophes like extreme heat waves. Scientists like Shandas saw it coming, yet little action was taken.

At the hearing, titled “Silent Killer: The Rising Problem of Extreme Heat in the U.S.,” researchers urged action to protect the most vulnerable from the deepening heat, now that we can all see the severity of the crisis.

The heat event would have been “virtually impossible” without human-driven climate change, a study by the World Weather Attribution group found.

Shandas told Congress, “We can now say that those who died during the ‘heat dome’ event were arguably the first climate-related deaths in Oregon and Washington.”

Shandas’s 2009 paper urged public agencies in Portland to take action to identify the highest-risk neighborhoods.

“Adaptation is already needed on a massive scale. While hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods are dramatic and often make the front page, a far more insidious and silent result of climate change is urban heat,” he said. The paper included maps of urban heat islands throughout the city and pointed to research that said lower-income people and those living alone were in the most danger.

In the years that followed, Shandas was part of a team that linked pockets of extreme heat to discriminatory housing policies. Across the U.S., redlined areas were 2.6 degrees Celsius hotter than non-redlined areas on average, according to the study. Portland, along with Minneapolis and Denver, was among the cities with the largest heat difference between redlined and non-redlined communities.

Despite the warnings, insufficient action was taken, and the Pacific Northwest was unprepared for the heat wave. When the heat dome hit at the end of June, sending temperatures soaring above 100 degrees in a typically cool, wet part of the country, Shandas and his team went block by block measuring air temperatures and showing that they varied by as much as 25 degrees between wealthy and lower-income areas.

According to a Washington Post analysis of early mortality data in the county where Portland is located, 61 percent of deaths were in zip codes with higher-than-average poverty rates.

The preliminary numbers of heat deaths reported in Oregon and Washington, 115 and 117, respectively, are likely undercounts. Heat-related deaths and injuries are not always recorded as such. Using a different measurement, the Canadian province of British Columbia has estimated about 600 “excess deaths.” The heat wave was declared the deadliest weather event in Washington history.

The witnesses at the congressional hearing urged policymakers across the U.S. to prepare the most vulnerable communities for what is to come.

As multiple attendees pointed out, heat waves kill more people than any natural disaster, yet get less recognition as such.

Shandas told lawmakers that local governments should collect data block by block to make sure that the hottest, most vulnerable communities have access to relief.

“It’s very clear that the single best thing we can do to address all of the above is to prevent greenhouse gas emissions in the first place.”

Since extreme heat is going to hit areas like Oregon that are not used to it, engaging community members in the data collection could help build the social infrastructure that will assure communities understand how to recognize risk and respond.

He urged more coordination between regions so they can learn from each other and stressed the need for federal support for local heat mitigation endeavors. Other witnesses emphasized the need for urban greening — tree cover, which can correlate with neighborhood income and provide lifesaving degrees of relief from heat — and a closer examination of how heat impacts people’s ability to work or pay their electric bills.

Although all of the attendees emphasized the urgency of adaptation in the face of irreversibly rising temperatures, witness Aaron Bernstein, interim director of Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, pointed out the other urgent lifesaving avenue.

“It’s very clear,” he said, “that the single best thing we can do to address all of the above is to prevent greenhouse gas emissions in the first place.”

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