As the world’s attention was occupied with the chaotic implementation of the travel ban and its dramatic domestic and international impacts, the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security have quietly moved forward with elements of the earlier executive orders, according to internal communications obtained by The Intercept.

Trump’s orders on border security and public safety in the interior of the U.S. resurrect some of the most controversial immigration enforcement programs of recent years, seek to deputize state and local law enforcement as immigration officials across the country, and threaten major cuts to federal funding for cities that fail to fall in line with the administration’s vision.

In order to address the massive strain those efforts would place on the nation’s already overburdened immigration system, Trump has called for the construction of new immigrant detention facilities along the U.S. border with Mexico — including through private contracts — as quickly as possible. Trump has also directed DHS to “allocate all legally available resources to immediately assign asylum officers to immigration detention facilities” for the purpose of conducting so-called credible fear hearings for asylum seekers. According to internal DHS communications obtained by The Intercept, this latter step is already underway.

In an email sent to personnel on Monday, Kathy Valerin, chief of staff at the Arlington Asylum Office for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, put out a call for asylum officer volunteers to conduct screening interviews at two for-profit immigrant detention facilities in Arizona as part of an ongoing effort to support the president’s orders beginning this week.

“In response to the recent Executive Orders, asylum offices have been instructed to immediately begin sending employees to conduct in-person CF and RF interviews [at] several detention facilities,” Valerin wrote, referring to “credible fear” and “reasonable fear” interviews, which are legally required in asylum cases, depending on the status of the individual. Specifically, Valerin added, USCIS was looking for volunteers to take up posts at private immigrant detention centers in Eloy and Florence, Arizona, “for two-week minimum increments through mid-March.”

USCIS confirmed to The Intercept that the call for volunteers was a response to Trump’s border security order.

“Prior to the EO, USCIS deployed staff on a continuous basis to a number of detention facilities across the country to conduct its credible and reasonable fear work,” Joanne F. Talbot, a USCIS spokesperson, wrote in an email. “We are currently assessing and planning for additional deployments to further advance the directive contained in the Executive Order. USCIS officers will continue to make all credible and reasonable fear screening determinations in a manner that is consistent and in full compliance with the applicable statute and regulations.”

A senior U.S. immigration official, speaking to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, said the volunteer posting would likely involve five or so trained asylum officers, conducting five interviews each per day, at the Arizona detention centers  — a total of roughly 125 interviews each week. When asked what the purpose of the call-out for volunteers might signify, the official responded, “I can’t think of any other reason than preps for processing a lot of expedited removal cases.”

Immigrant detainees walk through the ICE detention facility in Florence, Ariz., on Feb. 28, 2013.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Immigration attorneys who spoke to The Intercept largely agreed with that assessment, though they were careful to stress that the call for volunteers alone does not necessarily point to a particular outcome.

Expedited removal is the process for deporting people who have come to the country without the proper paperwork. If individuals in expedited removal ask for asylum or say they fear being returned to their country of origin, they have the right, under U.S. law, to describe their situation before a U.S. asylum officer. If the officer finds that an individual’s claim passes a low threshold of credibility, then the case may be heard before an immigration judge. If not, Immigration and Customs Enforcement takes control of the case and deportation proceedings can move forward.

In its domestic immigration enforcement order, the Trump administration said the executive branch will “end the abuse of parole and asylum provisions currently used to prevent the lawful removal of removable aliens,” raising concerns among some immigration attorneys that asylum seekers could be prioritized for deportation. If that’s the case, credible and reasonable fear hearings would need to be held, and detention centers along the border could be one place to start, though it would still be up to individual asylum officers to determine whether detainees pass or fail their screenings.

The administration’s focus on the early stages of the expedited removal process has some attorneys worried that individuals who have already passed their screenings could end up languishing in the system, while deportations of those who have not are prioritized. “I think it’s just going to be long waits for people from this point on,” Greg Siskind, a Tennessee-based immigration attorney, told The intercept.

The Arizona detention facilities where USCIS is currently directing volunteers — Florence and Eloy — are well-known among local immigration attorneys and activists. Both are owned by one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison corporations, CoreCivic, formally known as Corrections Corporation of America. According to the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to immigrants in Arizona’s detention system, more than 3,000 “immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking women and men [are] detained daily in Florence or Eloy.”

Eloy has been called the “deadliest immigration detention center in the nation” ever since an investigation by the Arizona Republic newspaper found 15 detainees had died at the facility since 2003, including three since October.

Beyond the potential implications of an increased number of asylum officers at Eloy and Florence, which at this point remains to be seen, Lauren Dasse, executive director of the Florence Project, said her organization harbored profound fears that Trump’s domestic immigration directives could make longstanding problems in the state even worse.

“The Florence Project is the only organization providing free legal services to detained immigrant children, women, and men in Arizona,” Dasse wrote in an email. “Based on the executive orders, we are deeply concerned about possible increases to detention, prolonged detention of immigrants including asylum seekers, and threats to individuals’ due process rights. We advocate that every person is treated with dignity and respect and understands their options under immigration law.”

In another dramatic sign that officials in Arizona are beginning to move forward with Trump’s domestic enforcement orders, immigration agents in Phoenix arrested Guadalupe García de Rayos on Wednesday. For eight years, the 35-year-old, who has lived in the U.S. since she was a teenager, had regularly checked in with a local ICE office after being arrested in 2008 for using a fake social security card number in order to work. Under the Obama administration, that kind of offense was not prioritized for deportation — that’s no longer the case under President Trump.

“That is precisely what the alarming problem is with Trump’s internal enforcement order,” Cecillia Wang, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the New York Times.

Migrant rights groups participate in a vigil to protest President Donald Trump’s crackdown on “sanctuary cities” outside City Hall in Los Angeles on Jan. 25, 2017.

Photo: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

In interviews with The Intercept, immigration lawyers and advocates echoed those concerns, noting that while Trump’s domestic enforcement orders face congressional hurdles that his travel ban did not, the president’s plans lay the foundations for an aggressive mass deportation apparatus — one that could take the historically high levels of immigrant detention and deportation under Obama to new heights by drastically expanding the range of targeted individuals. Current and former law enforcement and immigration officials, meanwhile, added that the administration’s plans could easily intensify fear in immigrant communities, elevate the risk of racial profiling, and strain the relationship between state and local authorities and the federal government.

Parts of Trump’s domestic immigration enforcement plan, particularly those related to so-called sanctuary cities, have already faced pushback, with mayors of several major cities saying they will fight efforts to withhold federal funding. Last week, San Francisco became the first city to file a lawsuit challenging the order — others are expected to follow. And while Trump has enjoyed support from unions representing the nation’s immigration enforcement agencies, other corners of the law enforcement community are less than enthused about his vision.

Since 2013, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organization made up of dozens of senior law enforcement executives from the nation’s largest cities, has publicly rejected efforts to enlist state and local law enforcement as ad hoc immigration officers and has opposed measures that would punish cities financially if they fail to cooperate with such initiatives.

Darrel Stephens, executive director of the association, said his organization’s concerns with Trump’s directives were multifaceted. First, Stephens said, the administration fails to define what it considers a sanctuary city to be — beyond a city that fails to abide the White House directives. Second, and more broadly, he said, recruiting state and local law enforcement to act as immigration officials instills fear in immigrant communities, which makes solving crimes more difficult and puts more people — regardless of their immigration status — at risk.

“The funding is a big concern of ours,” Stephens told The Intercept. “Lack of clarity on what the definition is is a big concern of ours. Local police being involved in immigration enforcement creates some enormous challenges from a resource perspective. It’s complicated law. It is very difficult to understand and interpret. And as a practical matter, arresting illegal immigrants, the federal government has no capacity to process them. The detention centers are full. The courts have a two-year backlog.”

Art Acevedo, chief of police for the city of Houston, shared Stephens’s concerns, telling The Intercept that implicit in Trump’s messaging were two false notions. The first is that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime — experts have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not, and Acevedo said his decades of law enforcement experience supported those conclusions. And second is the suggestion that local and state law enforcement aren’t already focused on arresting individuals who violate criminal laws.

“We are charged with keeping people safe from predators and from thieves and from violent members of society,” Acevedo explained. “We’re not charged with going out and wasting and spending our very limited resources booking a day laborer or somebody that, but for their immigration status, have done nothing that would harm our society.”

Rather than engaging in “political theater” designed to please its base, Acevedo suggested the administration instead listen to the concerns of local and state law enforcement executives on the ground, who have long rejected seeing their officers used as de facto deportation forces.

“Sadly, if these type of ill-advised, poorly thought out public polices were to go through — where they try to take away my ability to control the workforce, to control the priorities of my workforce — there are going to be unintended consequences and those unintended consequences are going to result in additional crime,” Acevedo said.

“You cannot be the party of law and order and not listen to your police chiefs and your police executives,” he added. “You can’t. Doesn’t add up.”

“This is a nightmare scenario,” Heidi Altman, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center, told The Intercept. Altman pointed to three elements of the administration’s initial orders as key areas of concern. The first is the range of individuals to be targeted by Trump’s immigration enforcement agents, which grows increasingly broad as the order on public safety in the interior unfolds and, according to a recent analysis by the Los Angeles Times, could ensnare as many as 8 million people.

In the view of the administration, any “removable alien” who has broken a law or been suspected of breaking a law is fair game for deportation — regardless of whether that person was convicted or even charged with a crime. The order goes on to say that any person from that category who authorities believe “committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense” can and should be targeted as well. Whether that person is a young student suspected of a traffic violation or a grandmother who’s lived in the country for decades is immaterial; both are on par with a violent criminal in Trump’s America and can expect to face the same consequence: removal from the country.

Second, Altman explained, Trump’s order calls for the revitalization of two deeply controversial immigration enforcement initiatives: the widely reported program known as Secure Communities and a lesser known, though arguably more aggressive program known as 287(g).

Spearheaded by the Bush administration and expanded under Obama, the DHS-administered Secure Communities program partnered ICE with local jails to facilitate the sharing of biometric data between detention facilities and ICE officials. After years of criticism from immigration advocates, who argued that the program routinely went far beyond targeting violent offenders, the Obama administration ended Secure Communities in November 2014, replacing it with a similar initiative known as the Priority Enforcement Program.

The second program slated for expansion under the Trump administration, 287(g), permits partnerships between local jails and ICE agents as well, but also goes a step further, allowing local and state law enforcement officers on the street to be deputized as immigration officials. Investigations by the Department of Justice and the ACLU have repeatedly linked implementation of 287(g) to systemic patterns of racial profiling and constitutional rights violations in Latino communities.

The third element of the Trump domestic enforcement plan Altman pointed to is the administration’s targeting of sanctuary cities — described in the order as “jurisdictions across the United States [that] willfully violate Federal law in an attempt to shield aliens from removal from the United States.” Under the order, cities that refuse to comply with the administration’s enforcement directives will be cut off from federal grants “except as deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes by the Attorney General or the Secretary [of DHS].” According to an analysis by Reuters, implementation of this component of Trump’s order would threaten $2.27 billion in annual funds for the nation’s 10 largest cities, including hundreds of millions of dollars intended for Head Start preschool programs, public housing, and HIV prevention and relief.

Combining the broadened categories of people prioritized for enforcement, the enlistment of local and state authorities to execute that enforcement, and the “coercive threats against sanctuaries or restrictions” makes for a “very toxic” brew, Altman argued.

“When you put the three of them together, you just have the most fertile ground possible for racial profiling and terrorized immigrant communities who are going to be too frightened to cooperate with their local police,” she said.

Altman is not alone in her grim assessment. In a legal breakdown following the signing of the order, immigration attorney David Leopold argued that Trump’s directive is a loaded gun with millions of immigrants in its crosshairs. “Trump’s plan is a blueprint to implement his campaign promises of mass deportation, and it puts in place the Deportation Force to carry out his plan,” Leopold wrote on Medium. “It’s clear that the executive orders were crafted by the most extreme anti-immigrant zealots in Trump’s orbit.”

“I don’t want to say one order is more important than the other one,” Leopold told The Intercept, noting that the dramatic human impact of Trump’s travel ban is self-evident, not to mention the deep legal concerns raised by the order. But, he added, Trump’s order on internal immigration enforcement is “just as important” and has unfortunately slipped beneath the public’s radar.

“I shudder to think about what’s going to happen once that’s implemented, and we’re already seeing signs,” Leopold said. “He has made, or I want to say Steve Bannon has made, every immigrant in this country a priority.”

“That thing is vicious,” Leopold added. “It’s vicious.”

Correction: Feb. 9, 2017

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Donald Trump’s executive actions on border security and immigration as his first executive order.

The post Trump Administration Prepares to Execute “Vicious” Executive Order on Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.

According to an internal memo issued Thursday by Lori Scialabba, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the portion of Trump’s controversial ban pertaining to the issuance of visas and other benefits to immigrants from the targeted countries “does not affect USCIS adjudication of applications and petitions filed for or on behalf of individuals in the United States regardless of their country or nationality.”

The new memo, obtained by The Intercept, stands in direct contradiction to the earlier DHS guidance, which effectively blocked U.S. immigration officials from issuing decisions in any adjustment of status cases for nationals of the banned countries — including applications for permanent residency and naturalization by individuals already in the United States.

Last weekend, as DHS personnel scrambled to figure out what the executive order meant for their work, a directive from Daniel M. Renaud, associate director of field operations for USCIS, informed senior officials that “Effectively [sic] immediately and until additional guidance is received, you may not take final action on any petition or application where the applicant is a citizen or national of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya.”

A number of rank-and-file DHS staffers were horrified to learn of the directive when they returned to work on Monday.

Thursday’s memo essentially walked back the previous memo — a sign of the chaos that continues to dominate the agency and an indication that policies related to the ban remain uncertain, fluid, and subject to public as well as internal pressure.

In the more recent memo, Scialabba noted that the portion of the executive order dealing with visas and immigration benefits for individuals from the listed countries “does not affect applications and petitions by lawful permanent residents outside the United States, or applications and petitions for individuals outside the United States whose approval does not directly confer travel authorization (including any immigrant or nonimmigrant visa petition).”

The acting director added that USCIS “may continue to adjudicate” permanent resident and status change applications for individuals from the countries targeted by Trump’s order and that the office will continue to adjudicate refugee and asylum petitions for individuals from any country who are already in the United States. “USCIS will continue refugee interviews when the person is a religious minority in his or her country of nationality facing religious persecution,” she wrote.

“Additionally, USCIS will continue refugee interviews in jurisdictions where there is a preexisting international agreement related to refugee processing. USCIS will not approve a refugee application for an individual who we determine would pose a risk to the security or welfare of the United States,” Scialabba wrote, adding that her office will also “continue adjudicating all affirmative asylum cases according to existing policies and procedures.”

The new memo was met with some relief — if ongoing confusion — by immigration officials who had essentially seen their jobs transformed overnight by the original directive.

“This memo completely reverses the hold imposed Monday,” a senior U.S. immigration official told The Intercept, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There is now no additional processing requirements for all immigration petitions for nationals of affected countries. It is essentially a return to the status quo.”

“The speed of the volte-face is surprising,” the official added, noting that a reversal of directive in less than a week was “light speed in government.”

As The Intercept reported earlier this week, the inspector general of DHS opened an investigation into the chaotic rollout of the executive order as well as reports of noncompliance with court orders and “allegations of individual misconduct on the part of DHS personnel.” The probe came in response to “congressional request and whistleblower and hotline complaints,” the office said in a statement confirming the investigation.

Both the internal review and rapid changes in the directives issued to DHS staff are a result of an executive order that was drafted without the input of the agency’s career officials.

This haphazard implementation of Trump’s plan to remake America’s immigration system has resulted in widespread fear and confusion. In addition to an indeterminate number of deportations that have occurred since last week, reports have surfaced of individuals being pressured to sign documents forfeiting their green cards and legal U.S. residents being stranded abroad while traveling.

A State Department memo released last week as part of a lawsuit challenging the travel ban authorized the government to “provisionally revoke all valid nonimmigrant and immigrant visas of nationals” of the seven countries affected. A U.S. government lawyer in Virginia on Friday said that more than 100,000 visas have now been revoked, while the State Department itself has claimed that the figure is closer to 60,000. Both figures contradict Trump administration claims that just 109 travelers were adversely impacted by the ban.

Many of the changes triggered by Trump’s ban have affected international students and other legal permanent residents of the United States, leading to fears of a wave of deportations in the future.

The sweeping, abrupt shifts in U.S. immigration policy triggered by Trump’s executive order have generated widespread protests, with activists descending on major U.S. airports to demand the release of travelers held in detention by border officials. Internal pressure also appears to be building, with immigration officials pushing back against some of the most callous aspects of their new mandate.

The directive DHS officials received earlier this week caused shock and confusion within the department itself — but also spread anxiety among those whose status and immigration prospects were suddenly in limbo, and frustration among the lawyers representing them.

“I think they’re walking themselves back,” said Claudia Cubas, an attorney at the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, who works with immigrants at risk of detention and deportation in the D.C. area.

The early memo, Cubas said, was “very broadly worded” — applying not only to adjustment of status cases, but also to more routine applications that have a significant impact on people, like renewing their green card application or renewing their employment authorization. “That meant people would be placed in legal limbo but also in financial limbo,” she said, noting that many immigrants rely on the processing of these applications to continue to work legally.

The new memo suggests the impact would be more limited, she added, but not insignificant. “If there’s still some type of impediment for people to file applications, I think the repercussions will be less than with the previous guidance, but there are still repercussions.”

Most importantly, she noted, the lack of clarity and consistency remains a problem for the thousands of people affected by the executive order. “The importance that government bureaucracies provide, especially such large ones as DHS and USCIS, is consistency in the application of the laws and clear guidance,” Cubas said. “And that has been ultimately the concern since the executive order was issued by the president — that it wasn’t clearly applied, it’s been affecting people very, very differently. And these are not just numbers, these are people’s lives.”

Top photo: Yemeni-led protest outside Brooklyn Borough Hall on Feb. 2, 2017.

The post DHS Walks Back Immigration Directives as Muslim Ban Chaos Continues appeared first on The Intercept.

In an agency-wide directive sent to DHS staff early Wednesday afternoon, the IG’s office wrote, “All agency personnel must preserve any document that contains information that is potentially relevant to OIG’s investigation, or that might reasonably lead to the discovery of relevant information relating to the implementation of this Executive Order. For the duration of this hold, any relevant information that is within your possession or control must be preserved in the exact form as it currently exists.”

The department’s IG office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the investigation.

The launch of the probe, headed by DHS Inspector General John Roth, follows calls from Illinois Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin earlier this week for a “comprehensive investigation” into the “chaotic execution” of the administration’s order, which separated families around the world and led to mass protests at multiple U.S. airports.

In a letter sent to Roth on Sunday, the lawmakers asked the IG’s office to investigate a number of issues related to the rollout of the order, including what guidance DHS and Customs and Border Protection personnel provided to the White House in developing the order and what directions were provided to CBP officers in implementing it.

The lawmakers also asked the IG to investigate whether CBP officers complied with subsequent court orders, and whether DHS and CBP officers kept a list of individuals that they detained at ports of entry.

Despite a Saturday night federal court order blocking all ban-related removals, and a series of subsequent legal challenges in a number of states, including one in Virginia mandating that lawyers be granted access to individuals arriving from affected countries, reports of noncompliance with the orders continued to spread in the following days.

Over the weekend, The Intercept reported on an Iranian citizen at Los Angeles International Airport forced by CBP officials to board a flight to Copenhagen, despite the nationwide stay. In New York, another Iranian woman was forced onto a flight to Ukraine despite the judge’s order. In a phone call with reporters Sunday, Becca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, said “high-level intervention” was required to prevent the woman from being deported.

“They literally turned the plane around while it was taxiing on the tarmac and allowed her to leave,” Heller said.

In the following days, reports have also emerged of immigration officials making people sign forms renouncing their valid immigration status, sometimes through threats and manipulation.

On Sunday, DHS said in a statement that the department would continue to implement the executive order while also complying with court orders.

“We continue to face [CBP]’s noncompliance and chaos frankly at every airport across the country,” Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, told reporters on Sunday. “The last 48 hours have been really full of chaos, the sense of the federal government completely deciding to not comply with the Constitution and on top of that, to not provide guidance to its field with respect to arriving immigrants and refugees.”

“We are grappling with their all-out rejection — on the one hand saying that they started to comply but on the ground seeing something very, very different,” she added. “The truth is that DHS’s messaging since this nationwide order continues to instill fear in communities and arriving immigrants and refugees.”

The ban was implemented inconsistently in airports across the country — with lawyers and Congress members unable to get answers from immigration officers on the ground.

“Every time we talked to [CBP] about one of these instances, they just told us they were awaiting a call from D.C. and finally stopped talking to us altogether and told us to call President Trump,” said Heller.

“It’s really clear that there’s really no method to this madness and that the fate of all these people is sort of up to the whim of how bold is the [CBP] port director for that airport willing to be,” she said. “Or it begs the question, are there directives coming from D.C. to target certain airports but not others?”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Thomas Homan and DHS Secretary John Kelly listen to questions during a press conference related to President Donald Trump’s executive order concerning travel and refugees, Jan. 31, 2017, in Washington.

Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The nation’s top homeland security and immigration officials defended the execution of Trump’s order in a press conference Tuesday, with DHS Secretary John Kelly saying that Trump’s executive order was “not a ban on Muslims,” adding that “religious liberty is one of our most fundamental and treasured values.”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer also denied that the executive order constituted a ban on Muslims in the United States, also describing it yesterday as “a vetting system to keep America safe.”

But high-level advisers to the Trump administration, as well as Trump himself, have periodically characterized the policy as one intended to ban Muslim travelers from entering the United States. Trump initially rolled out his proposal in 2015 as a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Over time Trump’s public position on the issue shifted between “extreme vetting” and an “expansion” of the initial policy.

But former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a senior adviser to Trump, said in an interview on Fox News last week that Trump had asked him for advice on how to legally impose a Muslim ban. “I’ll tell you the whole history of it: When he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban,’” Giuliani told Fox News. “He called me up, he said, ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’”

Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said last Sunday that the executive order could soon expand to include more countries than the seven currently listed.

Rank and file employees at DHS, who for days have described an atmosphere of chaos and frustration at the agency, learned of the probe with some surprise, according to an official who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity. “I think the OIG probe will demonstrate that there was a real sense of confusion over the weekend at DHS,” the official said. “I don’t think it will demonstrate any attempt to circumvent the circuit court rulings. There were, of course, numerous instances of individuals, including legal permanent residents being removed after the stay. But any orders to do this would have been given verbally either in person or over telephone. It is highly unlikely that any record of this would exist in written form.”

The inspector general’s investigation comes amid mounting tensions between the White House and career U.S. officials who oppose the Trump administration’s hard-line, anti-immigrant policies. On Monday, acting Attorney General Sally Yates was promptly removed from her position and accused of betraying the Department of Justice just hours after announcing that she would not defend Trump’s executive order on the grounds that it was illegal. Earlier in the day Spicer also lashed out at State Department officials working on a dissent channel memo registering their concerns over the administration’s order — the memo has since garnered 1,000 signatures.

Whether the increasing hostility will impact Roth’s investigation into Trump’s order remains to be seen. The senior immigration official expressed doubts, saying, “Standby for the sacking of the OIG.”

Top photo: A woman of Iranian descent, right, cries as she waits for a family member at Los Angeles International Airport following the immigration ban imposed by President Donald Trump, Jan. 30, 2017, in Calif.

The post Homeland Security Inspector General Opens Investigation of Muslim Ban, Orders Document Preservation appeared first on The Intercept.

“There are people literally crying in the office here,” said a senior U.S. immigration official who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity.

Interviews and internal communications obtained by The Intercept reveal how American personnel tasked with aiding the planet’s most vulnerable populations and representing the country in the international arena are learning bit by bit, through emails and confounding directives, how the jobs they signed up for are being steadily eroded.

The immigration official said that staffers at one Department of Homeland Security office were devastated when they arrived at work Monday morning to find an email, circulated among DHS leadership over the weekend, informing department personnel that they would no longer be permitted to adjudicate any immigration claims from the seven countries targeted by Trump’s travel ban, including petitions for asylum, permanent residency, or naturalization.

“Effectively [sic] immediately and until additional guidance is received, you may not take final action on any petition or application where the applicant is a citizen or national of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya,” wrote Daniel M. Renaud, associate director of field operations for DHS’s office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Field offices may interview applicants for adjustment of status and other benefits according to current processing guidance and may process petitions and applications for individuals from these countries up to the point where a decision would be made.”

“At that point, cases shall be placed on hold until further notice and will be shelved with specific NFTS codes which will be provided through the Regional Offices,” Renaud went on. “Offices are not permitted [to] make any final decision on affected cases to include approval, denial, withdrawal, or revocation.”

“Please look for additional guidance later this weekend on how to process naturalization applicants from one of the seven countries listed above who are currently scheduled for oath ceremony or whose N-400s have been approved and they are pending scheduling of oath ceremony,” Renaud wrote. “We expect to issue more detailed guidance and procedures as needed in the coming days.”

The email, sent Saturday morning at 11:12 a.m., was among the first explicit instructions given to DHS leadership after Trump signed his travel ban Friday night. Numerous government officials, including some who spoke to The Intercept over the weekend, have said the implementation of the ban has been defined by a total lack of clarity and direction, resulting in chaos at airports across the country.

In practice, the senior immigration official told The Intercept, the directive means that if individuals fleeing wars or persecution in the countries targeted by Trump file for asylum, “We can’t issue a final decision.” Immigration authorities also can’t grant what is called “adjustment of status” to people already in the U.S. With respect to the oath ceremonies referenced in the directive, the official said the language indicates those could be placed on hold. When they would be resolved is unclear.

It was a move many within the government had feared, the official said — a so-called security hold that would essentially paralyze the asylum and immigration process for those fleeing some of the world’s most volatile places. “Permission to work, adjust status to a citizen or a permanent resident, any immigration form they have will stay in limbo,” the official explained. “We know what is coming. These cases will all likely be denied after significant waits.”

The impact of the new administration’s hard-line approach is also being felt in U.S. offices that work abroad, on the ground, with populations impacted by war and political repression.

Dozens of staff members of DHS’s Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations Directorate (RAIO) — which provides immigration and urgent humanitarian services to people fleeing oppression, persecution, or torture — were slated to fly out to posts in the Middle East and North Africa this week, the immigration official told The Intercept, but were told to stand down as early as last week. In an email sent to her staff on Friday, after Trump’s second executive order was signed, RAIO’s acting associate director Joanna Ruppel did her best to explain the new circumstances.

“There is not much I can tell you at this time, as we are working with the Department to get additional direction and guidance on implementation issues,” Ruppel wrote. “As we know more and develop implementation plans in the coming weeks, we will share information with you.”

Ruppel acknowledged that much of her staff had come to RAIO with the understanding that their work would largely involve granting asylum approval to those fleeing hardship around the world, and that Trump’s order appeared to threaten that reality. “Many of you joined RAIO specifically because you care about protection issues — protection of vulnerable populations and protection of our national security,” she wrote. “In implementing these executive orders, we will continue to use our collective knowledge, experience and ingenuity to improve the processes and programs we administer to further our important, integrated protection mission.”

“I cannot emphasize enough how important your work is and will continue to be,” she added.

The sense of upheaval has not been confined to DHS. On Monday morning, the legal blog Lawfare published a draft version of a dissent channel memo compiled by several officers within the State Department, which blasts the Trump administration for endorsing a policy “which closes our doors to over 200 million legitimate travelers” and “runs counter to core American values of nondiscrimination, fair play, and extending a warm welcome to foreign visitors and immigrants.”

“We are better than this ban,” the memo adds.

The Intercept independently reviewed an earlier version of the same memo. A final draft will be formally filed and delivered to the incoming secretary of state, though it was unclear when that would happen. A vote to confirm Trump’s pick for the position — Rex Tillerson — is expected later this week.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer responded harshly to the leaked dissent memo during a press briefing on Monday. “I think that they should either get with the program or they can go,” he told reporters. “This is about the safety of America and there’s a reason a majority of Americans agree with the president.”

“The president has a very clear vision,” he added. “If somebody has a problem with that agenda, then that does call into question whether they should remain in that post or not.”

Spicer’s comments further infuriated State Department officials who in the dissent memo clearly expressed their belief that the president’s ban “will not achieve its stated aim of to [sic] protect the American people from terrorist attacks” but that instead it would “immediately sour relations with these six countries, as well as much of the Muslim world” as well as “increase anti-American sentiment.”

“Multiple people were absolutely livid,” said a State Department official, who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity. The official noted the important role played by the State Department’s internal dissent channel.

The channel was established as a way for State Department officials to raise concerns with government policy during the Vietnam War and requires the secretary of state to formally respond to the complaints raised through it. Last year, a few dozen officials filed a dissent to Secretary of State John Kerry on President Obama’s Syria policy.

“Freedom from reprisal for Dissent Channel users is strictly enforced,” the regulations state. “Officers or employees found to have engaged in retaliation or reprisal against Dissent Channel users … will be subject to disciplinary action.”

But this administration clearly has no interest in expertise or criticism.

“It shows zero understanding of the intent behind the dissent channel,” the official said, in reference to Spicer’s comments. “It’s an enormously grave insult to the institution, which is intentionally built to be deliberative.”

The White House’s response to this effort to raise concerns through official channels did little to reassure career State Department officials, many of whom learned of the executive order last week with a mixture of bafflement and heartbreak.

When asked what the mood was like on the inside, the State Department official responded, “In a word — chaos. And silence.”

“Today has been astonishingly silent. No NSC taskers, no communication. We’re all in suspense and on hold, and obviously fuming. This is a new era of American foreign policy that nobody I know ever really thought we’d usher in.”

It’s not just the “obviously wrong-minded” goals of the new administration, the official said, but also the opaque manner in which decisions about the executive order were being made and implemented.

“Procedurally speaking,” the official said, “it’s unprecedented.”

If you are a federal employee working in immigration you can contact us anonymously via SecureDrop. Instructions here: https://theintercept.com/leak/

Top photo: Iraqi refugees who fled the city of Mosul due to fighting between government forces and the Islamic State look from behind a fence at the U.N.-run al-Hol refugee camp in Syria’s Hasakeh province, on Dec. 5, 2016.

The post Turmoil at DHS and State Department — “There Are People Literally Crying in the Office Here” appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump’s order triggered waves of outrage and condemnation at home and abroad, prompting thousands of protesters to flood several American airports and ultimately culminating in a stay issued by a federal district judge in New York City on the deportation of people who were being detained by immigration officials. Similar stays were issued by judges in Washington state, Massachusetts, and Virginia.

The administration’s assault on civil liberties explicitly targeted the world’s most vulnerable populations — refugees and asylum seekers fleeing devastating wars — as well as young people with student visas pursuing an education in the United States, green card holders with deep roots in the country, and a number of citizens of countries not included in the ban. It also impacted American children traveling with, or waiting to meet, their non-citizen parents.

With an estimated 500,000 people in the crosshairs, Trump’s order was carried out swiftly and sowed confusion among the nation’s immigration and homeland security agencies — which were excluded from the drafting process and were scrambling to understand how to implement it, according to media reports and two government officials who spoke to The Intercept.

“We are violating international law.”

Days before the executive order was signed, reports began to emerge that valid visa holders were suddenly being prevented from re-entering the country after taking trips abroad. A senior U.S. immigration official, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, confirmed to The Intercept that the rash of unusual student visa revocations began roughly a week before the official order was signed.

Many of the stories the official heard about were anecdotal. Others, however, the official was able to review via internal Department of Homeland Security monitoring systems. While visas are revoked every day with little explanation afforded to those affected, the backgrounds of the individuals in these cases raised no red flags, the official said. On the contrary, the impacted individuals whose files the official reviewed included a young mother of a U.S. citizen child and students at some of the nation’s top universities who had been publicly recognized for their outstanding achievement. These students had already undergone rigorous U.S. government vetting before being admitted to the country, and had only traveled abroad briefly over their winter break.

The Intercept has independently verified two of these stories by speaking to those denied entry, who asked that their names not be used because they are attempting to appeal the decisions.

“The visa terminations struck me as unusual given that in the cases that I observed, nearly all of them had significant presence in the United States before the ban,” the official told The Intercept. “More disturbing, in some cases the individuals were allowed to board flights for the United States not knowing their visas had been terminated. They were only informed when they attempted to use their visas to seek admission and were denied. Even though they were ignorant of the termination, they were still charged with violating U.S. immigration law and given a five-year ban to future admission.”

By the time Trump traveled to the Department of Homeland Security to trumpet the signing of his first anti-immigrant executive order Wednesday, the immigration official had personally reviewed four visa revocation cases that seemed to be out of the ordinary. In addition to young people with passports belonging to countries later targeted in Trump’s executive order, at least two were traveling on Jordanian passports. All were denied entry to the United States. In one case, the visa of an Ivy League medical student was revoked by Customs and Border Protection while he was in the air from a European layover to the U.S.

It’s unclear whether the visa revocations last week were related to the subsequent ban. “But the timing of the revocations indicates that CBP supervisors felt sufficiently empowered to use their discretion to deny admission and cancel the visas in these cases,” the immigration official said.

The students repatriated earlier this week were also charged with violating U.S. immigration law — despite their valid visas — much in the same manner as some of those who were denied entry on Saturday, after the ban kicked in.

In another case the immigration official reviewed, a Syrian woman traveling to the U.S. from a third country on Saturday was denied entry and told she had to return to her port of origin. After consulting immigration attorneys volunteering at the airport, the woman — along with several other students, tourists, and business visitors — formally requested “humanitarian parole,” which allows temporary entry in emergency situations. When they were all denied that, she requested asylum, explaining that she did not have residency in the third country she had flown from and feared returning to Syria.

She was told she was not eligible to request asylum and that she had no choice but to return to her airport of origin, and then was walked to her gate. A lawyer she had briefly been able to communicate with told the immigration official that the woman was later made to sign a paper stating that she understood she had violated immigration law.

“A bedrock of refugee and asylum law is the concept of non-refoulement — not returning an individual to a place where they will be harmed,” the immigration official told The Intercept. Under international law, the United States is required to screen applicants to ensure they will not face persecution if returned to their countries, a process known as “credible fear screening.”

“Asylum law requires CBP officers to affirmatively ask if an applicant fears return when placing them into expedited removal,” the immigration official said. “By pressuring them to simply get on a plane without going into formal removal proceedings, they are violating our obligations under the refugee convention.”

“We are violating international law.”

“We really are still learning the impact of the order.”

Questions, fear, and confusion ran deep on Saturday — not only among those directly impacted by the ban but also by those trying to help them. “We are in the same boat as everyone else trying to determine and understand the meaning of the provisions in the executive order,” said Steve Letourneau, CEO of the Catholic Charities Maine Refugee and Immigration Services, the primary provider of refugee resettlement services in the state. “We really are still learning the impact of the order.”

Refugee and immigrant advocates were not the only ones scrambling to cope with the impact of the order — many immigration officials tasked with enforcing it were also at a loss. On Saturday, reports emerged that the Trump administration denied the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice input on the drafting of the order. While the visa revocations described by the immigration official we interviewed suggest that some CBP officials had indications of what was coming, there were also reports that even among career immigration and State Department officials, “nobody has any idea what is going on,” NBC News reported.

A State Department official confirmed this account to The Intercept. “De facto, we were not consulted, not how we’d normally be consulted. We had less than a day to review vague details,” said the official, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. “This normally takes weeks of conversation. This EO took hours, and we never, never saw the final draft.”

“The ban took everyone by surprise,” the official added. “We’ve known things were in the works all week, but have basically been in the dark.”

“We honestly don’t know what is going to happen,” said the immigration official. “The EOs are extremely vague and some of our talk is based upon worst case scenarios. We have heard rumors coming from upper DHS echelons, but nothing concrete.”

The enormity of the executive order — slated to affect hundreds of thousands of people as well as severely impact the United States’ relationships with several countries — seemed to indicate it was written with little appreciation of the workings of the system it sought to undo.

“I think the government hasn’t had a full chance to think about this,” said Judge Ann Donnelly, who issued an emergency stay in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other organizations and ordered the government to provide a list of names of the people affected. That stay — the first win in what will inevitably be many legal battles to come — only applies to people currently in the United States or in transit to the country.

“She has her visa, she has everything. We even paid for her green card to come here.”

While reports multiplied of airport detentions and forced repatriations, so too did stories of panic and heartbreak among families who found themselves suddenly separated and desperate for information on when they’d be able to see their loved ones again.

Anfal Hussain was among the worried and the waiting pacing the terminals at JFK airport in New York City as the implications of Trump’s order became increasingly clear. “It’s my mom,” Hussain told The Intercept, explaining that her mother had flown from Iraq to join her daughters in the U.S. that morning. “She was in the air when Trump was like, ‘No one is allowed to visit the United States,’” Hussain said. “She has her visa, she has everything. We even paid for her green card to come here. And we’re both citizens, me and my sister.”

Hussain said her sister was able to speak to their mother briefly after she landed Saturday morning. She was crying and scared, Hussain said. “She doesn’t really speak English,” she added, and it was her first time traveling to the U.S. Hussain explained that her mother’s husband had passed away recently and she had no one left in Baghdad, a city increasingly riven by violence nearly a decade and a half after the U.S. invasion.

“She wanted to be with us,” Hussain said. “She wanted to be with her daughters.”

As the wide-ranging scope of the executive order became clear, immigration attorneys and advocates, as well as universities, issued warnings to citizens of the banned countries not to leave the United States. CLEAR, a New York-based group that is offering free legal advice to those impacted by the ban, circulated a fact sheet explaining how people in the country on different immigration statuses would be impacted if they left. It also warned green card holders denied entry not to sign any forms at the border abandoning their permanent residency.

But even as protesters in airports across the country broke into jubilation at the news of the stay, some people at those airports continued to be denied entry and, in some cases, were still threatened with forcible removal.

Our video report from Los Angeles International Airport.

Although DHS issued a statement saying it would comply with the court orders, at Los Angeles International Airport, Sara Yarjani, an Iranian citizen, was told by CBP officials she had to board a flight to Copenhagen, despite the nationwide stay and against the protests of lawyers and two U.S. congresswomen who were present. The representatives, Rep. Judy Chu and Rep. Nanette Barragan, asked over the phone to meet with CBP officials, who refused. When asked who they were reporting to, the officials said “Donald J. Trump,” then hung up on them.

The Intercept was not able to confirm whether Yarjani was on the flight when it took off or whether she remained detained at the airport.

While nationals of seven countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — have been targeted for exclusion so far, lawyers say that number could soon increase. Trump’s order calls for a 30-day review period in which the secretary of state and the director of national intelligence will compile “information needed for adjudications and a list of countries that do not provide adequate information.”

“The executive order is drafted in a manner that anticipates the extension of the ban. It’s clear that the White House expects that this is going to affect more people and more countries going forward,” Gadeir Abbas, a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights attorney, told The Intercept. “There is a lot of ambiguity in the language used in the order — and executive power thrives on ambiguity.”

A section of the order also calls for the suspension of visas and “other immigration benefits” to nationals of targeted countries. Abbas said this reference to non-visa immigration benefits indicates a likely intention on the part of the Trump administration to target green card holders already in the United States.

“The changes in this order are not limited to border crossings. The text indicates that restrictions can also apply to immigration benefits such as green card renewal for those who are already inside the country,” Abbas said. “You could be a green card holder for 20 years and be prevented from renewing your documents — this is something that would impact a huge number of people.”

On Saturday, the State Department also confirmed that dual nationals of other countries would be subject to the ban on entry. A number of dual Iranian-Canadian citizens have already been prevented from boarding flights into the United States or were sent back after landing there, The Intercept has learned.

But while there are no official accounts on the number of people impacted who were traveling when the ban took effect, the impact on those temporarily outside the country is likely exponentially larger. The stay does not apply to them, and it’s unclear how many people were stranded outside the country after their visas and green cards were suddenly revoked.

A Texas resident named Stephanie Felten who contacted The Intercept said that her sister-in-law, an Iranian green card holder who has lived in Chicago for over a decade, was stranded in Iran after traveling there last week to visit family. With her in Iran is her 3-year-old daughter, an American citizen, who now has no way to return to the United States with her mother. Iran has promised a reciprocal ban on American citizens traveling there, effectively making it impossible for the child to see her father or the rest of her family.

“Nobody is providing any answers right now,” said Felten. “We’re just trying to confirm what we’re hearing. You can read the executive order and try to make determinations, but then news breaks that even people that are dual citizens are being turned away. Everyone is unsure where to turn.”

“My family have become refugees from my country.”

Have you been affected by President Trump’s travel ban? Do you know someone who has been turned away while attempting to return to the United States? The Intercept wants to hear your story. Please write to our reporters.

Lynn Dombek, Spencer Woodman, and Leighton Woodhouse contributed reporting to this article.

Top photo: A woman greets her mother after she arrived from Dubai on Emirates Flight 203 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York, on Jan. 28, 2017.

The post Trump’s Muslim Ban Triggers Chaos, Heartbreak, and Resistance appeared first on The Intercept.

Though the move is likely to appeal to his core supporters north of the border, one place where Trump’s efforts are not playing well is Mexico, despite the president’s dubious assertion Wednesday afternoon that “our relationship with Mexico is going to get better.”

By Thursday morning, less than 24 hours after his order was signed, Trump’s dubious optimism suffered a public blow when Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced that he would not be attending a meeting in Washington, D.C., scheduled for next Tuesday.

Peña Nieto’s decision followed escalating tensions between his government and the newly empowered Trump administration that appear to have reached a critical point following Wednesday’s signing.

Throughout his campaign, Trump insisted the Mexican government could be forced into paying for the wall, which would likely cost billions of dollars. He has walked that back in recent weeks, asserting instead that Mexico would reimburse the U.S. for the project.

“We’ll be reimbursed at a later date from whatever transaction we make from Mexico,” Tump said in an interview with ABC News Wednesday. “I’m just telling you there will be a payment. It will be in a form, perhaps a complicated form.”

Peña Nieto has repeatedly denied Trump’s assertion. In a televised statement Wednesday night, the Mexican leader fired back at his counterpart in the White House. “I have said it over and over again: Mexico will not pay for any wall,” he said.

Responding to the Mexican president through his preferred medium of public communication, Trump tweeted Wednesday night that the meeting might be cancelled if Mexico refuses to pay for the wall. Peña Nieto beat Trump to the punch, however, saying in a tweet of his own the following morning that the Mexican government had informed the White House that he would not be attending the meeting.

“It is becoming a huge political issue,” Alejandro Hope, a national security expert and former intelligence analyst in Mexico City, told The Intercept.

As news of Trump’s executive orders began to break, “social media exploded” in Mexico, Hope said, with numerous prominent Mexican figures calling on President Peña Nieto to boycott his meeting with Trump.

Gabriella Ramirez speaks to her boyfriend, a construction worker who immigrated to California, through the U.S.-Mexico border fence on May 1, 2016, in Tijuana, Mexico.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Hope argued that even if a wall could be completed, it would do little to achieve its stated objectives, including stemming the flow of drugs north to the U.S. “Let me put it this way, all the heroin consumed in the U.S. in a year would fit into 2,000 pieces of luggage,” he said. “The notion that you stop that with a wall is truly nonsensical.”

The wall also sends a harsh diplomatic message that could have far-reaching impacts: It could push Mexico closer to governments the U.S. considers hostile or prompt Mexican agencies to withdraw from joint drug-war operations. Regardless of its intents, Hope argued, the very idea of the wall is imbued with aggression from the highest office of the U.S. government to the Mexican state.

“It is a hostile act,” he said.

A core feature of Trump’s ascendance to the White House, the wall was first among a collection of hardline, anti-immigrant policies the new administration had long promised and has now begun rolling out. The executive order calling for its construction also empowers state and local law enforcement “across the country to perform the functions of an immigration officer in the interior of the United States to the maximum extent permitted by law” and calls for a build-up of detention facilities along the southern border.

“We’re in the middle of a crisis on our southern border,” Trump told an audience this week at the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group, cheered the president’s order as a step in the right direction, saying in a statement that the wall “will go a long way in making effective border control a reality.” (The federation’s longtime executive director, Julie Kirchner, was this week named chief of staff at U.S. Customs and Border Protection.)

Numerous civil liberties and human rights organizations, meanwhile, blasted Trump’s immigration directives as emblematic of a horrifying descent into discriminatory and racist policy territory.

“This wall would say that those from outside the United States, especially from Latin America, are to be feared and shunned — and that is just wrong,” Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement. “We will fight this dangerous move with everything we’ve got.” Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, added, “President Trump’s fantasy of sealing the border with a wall is driven by racial and ethnic bias that disgraces America’s proud tradition of protecting vulnerable migrants.”

Mexico is seen over the U.S.-Mexico border fence at the Imperial Sand Dunes on Nov. 17, 2016, near Felicity, Calif.

Photo: by John Moore/Getty Images

Border security experts have long pointed out that a wall alone would not solve the problems of immigration and crime that Trump so often describes. Indeed, Trump’s own director of DHS, the retired Gen. John Kelly, said as much in his Senate confirmation hearing.

“Wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on a border wall Mexico will never pay for, and punishing cities that do not want their local police forces forced to serve as President Trump’s deportation dragnet, does nothing to fix our immigration system or keep Americans safe,” said California Rep. Nancy Pelosi. The criticism was not limited to Democrats. Texas Republican Rep. Will Hurd, a former clandestine CIA officer whose district includes some 800 miles of border territory, said the wall would accomplish little. “The facts have not changed,” Hurd said in statement. “Building a wall is the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border.”

“The impact is more symbolic than anything,” Adam Isacson, a senior associate for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America told The Intercept.

Isacson pointed out that Bush administration efforts at erecting some 700 miles of border fencing only managed to meet roughly half of their objective — the areas lacking fencing include remote terrain where such construction is difficult.

“He’s more interested in the display, the spectacle, the impact that it will make, rather than what will practically work,” Isacson said. “And yeah, it will play well in Kansas.”

Top photo: A woman carries her child after crossing from Mexico into the United States on Jan. 5, 2017, near Los Ebanos, Texas.

The post “A Hostile Act”: Mexico Braces for Trump’s Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.

The Republican lawmaker from Kansas donned two hats while trying to convince the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence he deserves to be the next spy chief: the congenial small business owner whose license plate reads “EAT BEEF,” and the tough-talking former soldier, first in his class at West Point, ready to defend the country at any cost.

While he promised to abide by current legislation on surveillance and intelligence collection — even suggesting he didn’t intend to seek any policy changes in those areas — his views on making maximum use of government authorities to collect and analyze sensitive personal data alarmed some members of the committee.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., demanded to know where Pompeo stood on the controversial issue of domestic surveillance, pointing to a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal where the nominee proposed amassing “all metadata” publicly available, including financial information and “lifestyle” details, in order to sniff out possible terrorists and criminals. “Are there any boundaries?” Wyden asked.

While Pompeo reassured Wyden there are in fact “legal boundaries” to prohibit him from creating such a massive dossier of information, particularly on Americans, he argued the intelligence community would be “grossly negligent” if it didn’t take advantage of “publicly available information … to make Americans safe.”

Pompeo gave conflicting answers when Wyden demanded to know if he would outsource intelligence collection to foreign partners; he denied its legality during the hearing, but suggested in written testimony he’d be happy to accept nearly any information other nations offered him, including bulk surveillance. “It is appropriate for the CIA to receive such information from foreign partners without the same requirements that would apply if the CIA itself were to collect the information, or to request that the foreign partner collect the information,” he wrote, except in “limited circumstances.”

Pompeo also promised to do everything he could to defend “the critical nature of the authorities” the intelligence community has to spy, and make sure that his employees didn’t shy away from using those authorities out of fear of political retribution.

In the past, Pompeo has denounced former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, even calling for his execution. He has also proposed legislation that would roll back changes made to NSA’s bulk collection of information about Americans’ phone calls, specifically following the passage of the USA Freedom Act in 2015, which placed that information back in the hands of the telephone and internet companies. Even the executive director of the NSA recently praised the shift as a decision that preserves capability while protecting privacy and civil liberties.

Pompeo admitted that he “had not had a chance to have a complete briefing” on the changes to intelligence collection made since the USA Freedom Act passed, despite his vocal opposition to them, suggesting he would bring forward any recommended policy changes after he’d studied it more closely.

However, despite the amount of attention devoted to Pompeo’s positions on surveillance, decisions about signals intelligence and collection won’t be solely his to make. “He’d be a somewhat secondary player in that decision,” Aki Peritz, former CIA analyst and senior fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, told The Intercept. He suggested Pompeo would have to work with President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Gen. James Mattis, to push those types of policies through.

The bigger question may ultimately be how Pompeo gets along with Dan Coats, the Republican senator from Indiana who is slated to become director of national intelligence, and Michael Flynn, who will serve as national security adviser. What Pompeo and Coats say to the president “will get filtered through Flynn, when the doors close, and they go back to their agencies,” noted Ted Johnson, a national security research manager at Deloitte and a former aide-de-camp to two former NSA directors, in an interview with The Intercept.

One of the larger issues Pompeo will face is the morale of the CIA workforce in the face of derision from the president-elect in recent weeks, particularly over assessments of Russian hacking and influence over the presidential election. “Basically, Pompeo is going to have his work cut out for him reassuring a concerned CIA workforce that things aren’t going to turn very ugly over the next four years,” Peritz, former CIA analyst, said. “He also has to show he is willing to speak truth to power, even if it costs him his job. CIA doesn’t need yes-men.”

Several senators noted the frustration and despair of current CIA employees. James Woolsey, former CIA director, abruptly parted ways with Trump’s transition team in early January, reportedly over concerns for Trump’s cozy connection to Russia. Former CIA spokesperson George Little went as far as predicting that after inauguration “we will be less safe” thanks to Trump’s praise for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and Russian President Vladamir Putin.

While President-elect Trump initially avoided taking a firm stand on the intelligence community’s unanimous conclusion that the Russians digitally infiltrated the Democratic National Committee’s servers, Pompeo was straightforward. “It’s pretty clear what took place here,” he said, later concluding he had no reasons to doubt the report prepared by the intelligence community.

He promised to brief  Trump on the issue as it continues to unfold, whether it’s politically popular or not. “I would expect the president-elect would demand that of me,” he said.

Pompeo also appeared to part ways with Trump on the issue of waterboarding — a technique that Trump said he supports. When asked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein if he would “restart the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques that fall outside of the Army field manual,” Pompeo replied, “absolutely not.”

“It’s significant that Rep. Pompeo publicly committed to abide by the law and reject orders to torture,” Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International, said in a statement following the hearing. “That commitment must remain steadfast if he is confirmed to lead the CIA.”

The post Pompeo Goes Dark in CIA Nomination Hearing appeared first on The Intercept.

A jovem pensava sobre a série tumultuosa de acontecimentos que a levaram a sair do Brasil, o homem que transformou sua vida em um pesadelo e a deportação que ela e sua filha evitaram, por pouco, semanas antes. Foi então que o pavor a consumiu: estremeceu ao considerar a possibilidade de oficiais americanos tentarem, mais uma vez, expulsá-las  do país. Imaginou guardas tirando as duas de suas camas no meio da noite, para então enxotá-las de volta ao outro lado da fronteira, como viu acontecer com tantas outras famílias. Chorando, entrou no banheiro, tirou a lâmina de um apontador de lápis e pressionou-a contra o pulso.

Jayne Alves Vilas Novas e sua filha.

Foto: Facebook

Onze semanas antes, Vilas Novas e sua filha apareceram no serviço de fronteira dos EUA. Em território americano, elas buscavam uma vida mais segura e a parte da família que já vivia por lá. Os dois irmãos de Jayne vivem no Massachusetts com seu tio, que tem cidadania americana, e com a tia, que é residente permanente.

Mal sabiam as duas que, ao cruzar a fronteira, tinham sido engolidas por uma máquina de deportação que nos últimos anos devolveu milhares de famílias aos lugares que elas mais temiam. A experiência da jovem mineira dentro do sistema de imigração americano é de uma crueldade singular e joga luz sobre um dos cantos mais obscuros do legado deixado pelo governo Obama: a formalização de práticas que permitem a detenção indefinida de mães e crianças, práticas estas que em breve serão supervisionadas por um homem que tem como missão de vida deportar milhões.

Jayne chegou à porta de entrada internacional de Brownsville, Texas, no dia 31 de agosto. Carregava a filha de dois anos no colo. Era o ponto culminante de uma viagem que começou no interior de Minas Gerais, passou pela capital do Rio de Janeiro, chegou à Cidade do México de avião para, finalmente, alcançar de ônibus a fronteira americana. No momento em que se apresentou aos agentes da patrulha fronteiriça, em Brownsville, Jayne guardava US$ 271 do empréstimo que a tia havia lhe dado.

Mãe e filha passaram as duas primeiras noites nos Estados Unidos cobertas apenas por uma folha de alumínio, em um quarto frio e abarrotado de outras famílias imigrantes. “Parecia que eles tinham colocado o ar condicionado na potência máxima”, conta Jayne ao The Intercept Brasil em uma videoconferência. O uso das chamadas “caixas de gelo” nos centros de imigração já foi documentado anteriormente. “Não tinha cama para deitarmos, só um colchonete fino jogado no chão que tivemos que dividir com outra família. Deitei minha filha na beirada do colchonete e me deitei do lado, metade do corpo no chão, que nem um cachorro.”

No segundo dia na fronteira, a jovem foi interrogada pela primeira vez. O primeiro passo no processo de imigração para os Estados Unidos é a chamada entrevista de credibilidade, uma fase crucial. Nela, imigrantes marcados para deportação explicam seus casos e tentam provar que não é possível voltar ao país de origem, contando quais tipos de riscos estão envolvidos. Se um oficial de asilo determinar que os argumentos apresentados são confiáveis, então o processo de deportação é interrompido e a pessoa tem a chance de apresentar seu caso completo a um juiz.

Os oficiais determinaram que Jayne e sua filha eram “inadmissíveis para os EUA”. As duas receberam “ordens de remoção expressa” e, 24h depois, foram transferidas para o maior centro de detenção familiar de imigrantes do país, o “centro residencial familiar” do sul do Texas, em Dilley.

Dirigido pela maior empresa privada de gestão de prisões do país, a CoreCivic (ironicamente, em tradução literal, algo como núcleo/coração civil), o centro de Dilley foi aberto pelo Departamento de Segurança Nacional em dezembro de 2014. É um misto de prisão e campo de refugiados, guarda 2.400 camas e, em agosto passado, abrigava mais de 1.300 imigrantes.

Apesar dos anos de críticas por parte da imprensa, das acusações de tirar lucro do sofrimento daquelas que estão entre as populações mais vulneráveis do mundo e das evidências de abuso de autoridade, Dilley presenteou Vilas Novas com uma segunda chance de contar sua história. Desta vez, a esperança era a de obter uma audiência ante um juiz. A segunda entrevista durou pouco mais de uma hora e meia. Ao contrário daquela feita na fronteira, Jayne conseguiu contar pelo menos um pouco sobre como era sua vida no Brasil. Explicou que fugiu do país por medo de cinco homens que apedrejaram ela e seu ex-marido, após um desentendimento em um bar.

“Abrimos um Boletim de Ocorrência na época, mas nada aconteceu”, disse aos oficiais americanos, concluindo: “tivemos que conseguir um advogado, mas não tem justiça no Brasil. E então meu marido me deixou”. Jayne ainda afirmou que, com o desaparecimento do marido e a pouca fé na justiça brasileira, o risco em que ela e sua filha se encontravam aumentou substancialmente.

“Esse cara faz tudo o que quer lá”, disse ao oficial, referindo-se ao homem que liderou o ataque: “Ele briga. Ele ameaça as pessoas. Também usa drogas. E nunca o prenderam por nada”. No Boletim de Ocorrência que registra a agressão, posteriormente apensado ao processo de pedido de asilo, o delegado que cuidou do caso da agressão acrescentou, ainda, que os integrantes da gangue cometeram desacato. Os criminosos não apenas desrespeitaram os policiais que os pegaram em flagrante, como fizeram ameaças. Disseram que iriam “pegá-los” e que iriam “beber seu sangue”.

Questionada se tinha outros motivos para temer um retorno ao Brasil, Jayne então respondeu “não, essa é a única razão”, e complementou: “Se eu voltar, esse homem vai fazer alguma coisa comigo ou com a minha filha”. Ela afirmou que não havia descrito essas ameaças na primeira oportunidade porque “estava com medo de que eles contassem a pessoas no Brasil, assim o homem saberia e poderia tentar fazer algo contra mim ou contra minha filha”.

O oficial, no entanto, determinou que a entrevista não era crível. No mesmo dia, o juiz concordou com o veredito. A jovem relembrou a cena:

“Eu comecei a chorar e ele me disse: ‘eu não duvido que sua história seja verdadeira, mas eu concordo com o oficial. E a resposta é não. Você vai ser deportada”.

Com isso, mãe e filha receberam a notícia de que seriam transferidas para um centro de detenção menor, na Pensilvânia, onde aguardariam pela deportação.

Protestos no Massachusetts contra a detenção de famílias imigrantes no Centro Residencial de Berks, na Pensilvânia, dia 15 de agosto.

Foto: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Olugar onde Jayne se encontra hoje era um asilo até março de 2001, quando foi transformado na Instalação Residencial Municipal de Berks (Pensilvânia). Este ano, Berks estampou jornais americanos de grande circulação quando 22 mulheres confinadas no conjunto de prédios começaram uma greve de fome.

A manifestação foi motivada por uma fala do chefe do departamento de segurança nacional, Jeh Johnson. Ele afirmou que o tempo médio de estadia das famílias nos centros de detenção era de 20 dias. As mães que fizeram greve de fome estavam presas na instituição há aproximadamente um ano.

A defensora pública Carol Anne Donohoe trabalha com  imigração na Pensilvânia e preside o projeto Greater Reading Immigration. Ela defende as mães de Berks e conta que, no primeiro ano de existência do centro, o prolongamento da detenção era usado como argumento de dissuasão.

“Ao manter essas famílias detidas por longos períodos, envia-se uma mensagem para as demais: não venham porque, se vocês vierem, serão deportadas, vocês não conseguirão vencer o caso na justiça.”

O sistema americano de imigração nem sempre foi tão duro e implacável com crianças e suas mães. A estratégia de deportação em larga escala foi estabelecida em 2014, como uma tentativa de deter a enxurrada de refugiados — dezenas de milhares de famílias e crianças desacompanhadas — que chegavam à fronteira sul dos EUA tentando se salvar do aumento nos índices de violência na América Central.

A defensora explica que a ênfase em detenção e deportação atrapalhou o trabalho dos advogados que atuam  em Berks: “Antes, nós não tínhamos que fazer pedidos de segundas entrevistas, por exemplo. O processo de pedido de asilo tornou-se tão proibitivo… Eu olho para as entrevistas feitas fora de Houston [onde fica a central nacional do Serviço de Imigração do governo americano], elas são terríveis. Não são orientadas para aquilo que deveriam ser – uma rede de segurança que garantisse que as pessoas com reivindicações próprias não fossem deportadas”.

Com o enfrentamento entre juristas e agentes de segurança sobre as políticas adotadas nos centros, começou uma batalha entre os poderes Executivo e Judiciário. Juízes federais chegaram a determinar que as práticas violam acordos judiciais sobre direitos humanos. No início do mês, por exemplo, centenas de mulheres e crianças foram libertadas dos centros de detenção com fins lucrativos no Texas depois que um juiz determinou que o licenciamento para as instalações “contraria o Código de Recursos Humanos do Texas e vai contra os objetivos gerais do Código”.

Em janeiro, o Departamento de Serviços Humanos da Pensilvânia anunciou que não renovaria a licença de Berks para operar como uma “instalação residencial para crianças”, porque estava funcionando “para a detenção de famílias de imigrantes, incluindo adultos”, o que era algo além do seu propósito inicial. Enquanto um recurso corre na justiça, o centro pode continuar aberto.

Em setembro, o mesmo departamento divulgou os resultados de uma análise feita durante um ano e meio por uma comissão especificamente focada nos centros de detenção familiares. A primeira recomendação do relatório de 158 páginas, destacada em vermelho, foi a de que a detenção de famílias precisa parar.

Vilas Novas não conseguia se ajustar à nova realidade. Ela nunca estivera em uma prisão antes. Sua filha começou a apresentar sintomas de estresse, mordendo a pele ao redor de suas unhas até sangrar. Jayne podia sentir o vínculo entre elas e sua autoridade de mãe se desgastando a cada xingamento, resposta fria e até mordida que a filha lhe dava.

Em um relatório de agosto de 2015, a organização Human Rights First documentou impactos sobre a saúde mental e o bem-estar das crianças instaladas em Berks. Entre os sintomas listados estão “depressão, ansiedade e aumento da agressividade”. Jayne chegou a pedir para ser transferida de quarto, porque as outras crianças frequentemente batiam em sua filha. Somando-se ao fato de ser a única família que falava em português, enquanto todas as outras eram hispânicas, o problema com as outras crianças só fazia com que a brasileira se sentisse mais indesejada, mesmo entre suas companheiras de quarto.

Durante sua detenção em Berks, por duas vezes agentes fizeram denúncias de maus tratos contra Vilas Novas, as duas derrubadas na justiça. No entanto, mãe e filha entraram em um regime de vigilância 24h. Sempre havia alguma agente de segurança na porta de seu quarto. A segunda acusação foi feita por uma agente que, segundo Jayne, a estava atrapalhando na hora de colocar a menina para dormir: “Eu reclamei com ela, porque ela estava mexendo com a minha filha e eu tentando colocar para dormir. Aí ela foi para o corredor falar com as outras e depois fiquei sabendo que tinham me acusado de maus-tratos”.

Por isso, quando se encontrou com a psicóloga da instituição na manhã seguinte após tentar se cortar, Jayne se sentiu despedaçada ao tentar explicar como se sentia. Temia que as palavras erradas pudessem servir de pretexto para levarem a sua filha embora. Com muito esforço, ela fez o que pôde para transmitir uma simples e dura mensagem. Com o auxílio de um intérprete telefônico – nenhum dos funcionários do centro fala português –, desabou: “Eu não aguento mais”.

Mãe hondurenha carrega seu filho no colo no centro de detenção de imigrantes localizado na fronteira dos Estados Unidos, em 2013, em McAllen, Texas.

Foto: John Moore/Getty Images

Quando Jayne chegou a Berks, em 19 de setembro, a advogada Carol Anne Donohoe rapidamente se apossou do caso. Enquanto isso, sua colega Karen Hoffman — uma ex-jornalista e ativista social que fala português — começou conversar com a jovem mãe sobre a sua vida no Brasil. As conversas foram transformadas em documentos apensados ao processo de deportação.

A equipe jurídica em Berks também anexou ao processo o relatório médico feito quando Jayne e o seu ex-marido foram apedrejados. As fotos impactantes mostram um corte largo no nariz quebrado da jovem e a cabeça de seu ex-marido aberta. Também foi anexado ao processo o Boletim de Ocorrência da agressão, em que o delegado relata o desacato. A única diferença em relação às falas de Jayne em sua entrevista foi que ela errou a data do ocorrido por alguns meses, todo o resto tinha provas mais do que fundamentadas.

Nas conversas com os advogados, Vilas Novas explicou que os homens por trás do ataque eram traficantes de drogas. “Não foi apenas uma briga de bar, foi um traficante”, defende Donohoe: “Trata-se de alguém que o governo não consegue controlar”. Juntos, os documentos e as conversas explicam as medidas desesperadas que Vilas Novas tomou para manter a sua filha segura.

A omissão das autoridades brasileiras é uma constante na vida da jovem. Fernandes Tourinho, a cidade natal de Jayne, é um município mineiro de apenas 3300 habitantes, incrustado numa região conhecida por ser atravessada pela rota do tráfico. Registros da impunidade dos criminosos da região, como seguidas notícias de invasões e roubos a delegacias, ressoam ao que se encontra no boletim de ocorrência oferecido pela jovem.

Desde o motivo de sua saída do país às explicações para o prolongamento de sua estadia no centro de detenção americano, a ausência de suporte do governo brasileiro é uma constante. Questionado por The Intercept Brasil sobre o caso da jovem, a primeira resposta do Ministério de Relações Exteriores, enviada pelo email de sua assessoria de imprensa no dia 22 de novembro, foi:

“Informamos não haver aparentemente registro nos consulados brasileiros nos EUA sobre o caso mencionado.”

Já havia quinze dias que Jayne estava no centro de detenção americano.

Foi necessário que a reportagem de The Intercept Brasil informasse ao Itamaraty sobre o fato de que uma brasileira de 19 anos e sua filha de dois anos estavam presas em centros de imigração americanos, também foi necessário que a reportagem informasse o nome completo de Jayne para que o ministério entrasse em contato com ela — apenas para confirmar a idade de sua filha. Tratando-se de um país que tem uma intensa relação diplomática com o Brasil, é surpreendente que autoridades das duas nações não tenham se comunicado sobre o caso antes.

A diretora do departamento americano de imigração, Sarah Saldana, fala no Comitê de Supervisão e Reforma do Governo, no Congresso americano; ela foi dar explicações sobre as políticas adotadas em relação a apreensão, detenção e liberação de imigrantes ilegais em março de 2015, em Washington.

Foto: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

As conversas com a equipe de advogados e conselheiros também revelaram algo que Vilas Novas não havia contado em suas entrevistas: anos de violência doméstica e perseguição por parte de um ex-namorado. Aos 14 anos, começou um relacionamento com um homem dez anos mais velho. Ela contou para os advogados como, em poucas semanas de namoro, ele começou a agredi-la regularmente, uma vez esfaqueando-a na perna em um surto de ciúmes no meio de uma festa.

Embora Jayne tenha terminado a relação depois de seis meses, ela conta que o ex fez de tudo para permanecer em sua vida. Quando o pai de sua filha a deixou, o ex-namorado começou a espalhar pela pequena cidade que queria voltar com ela e pediu que diferentes pessoas entregassem o recado.

Jayne chegara a um ponto em que não conseguia sair de casa, com medo do ex-parceiro que a seguia. Contudo, quando o oficial de imigração perguntou se ela se sentia perseguida por pertencer a um grupo social específico, ela disse que não. Não perceber a violência doméstica como uma ameaça, segundo a advogada Donohoe, é uma constante entre as mulheres detidas em centros de imigrantes. Ainda de acordo com a advogada, muitas mulheres que sofrem agressões de seus maridos não consideram que são perseguidas por pertencerem a um “grupo social” específico, tal qual Jayne.

O pertencimento a um grupo social perseguido é um dos critérios avaliados nas entrevistas para pedido de asilo. Ao ignorarem o fato de sofrerem por serem mulheres, mais do que demonstrarem não entender que se trata de uma questão de gênero, essas vítimas sem querer advogam contra si mesmas. Já a condução da entrevista, no entanto, não é despropositada. As mães devem responder às perguntas na presença de seus filhos, o que dificulta ainda mais uma conversa. Já é complicado expor detalhes tão sórdidos de suas vidas um completo estranho — que em geral é homem — ainda mais contar sobre os traumas familiares em que, muitas vezes, os algozes são os pais das crianças que estão na sala.

Em sua entrevista, Jayne afirma não ter falado sobre os abusos sofridos pelo ex-namorado por dois motivos. O primeiro: ela foi orientada pelo oficial da imigração a dar “respostas curtas” que se limitassem a responder o que era perguntado. O segundo: ela temia que suas declarações sobre o ex gerassem registros policiais contra ele, que poderia descobrir de alguma forma e ir atrás dela. “Eu não sei o que ele poderia fazer comigo e, principalmente, não sei o que ele poderia fazer com a minha filha, que é de outro homem”, desabafa Jayne.

Pessoas próximas à jovem, em Minas Gerais, deram entrevista ao The Intercept Brasil e confirmaram que o homem segue perguntando por ela. “Depois que ela viajou, ele chegou a espancar o pai dela com um chicote de bater em cavalo enquanto perguntava por ela”, disse um conhecido, que pediu para não ser identificado. Jayne confirma a agressão, que aconteceu porque seu pai não quis dizer para onde ela tinha ido. Com os olhos cheios de lágrimas, ela encontra dificuldade para falar e lembra que a agressão a seu pai foi um dos motivo que a levou a se automutilar: “Esse é o homem que me fez sofrer desde que eu tinha 14 anos. Eu precisei sair de casa, do meu país, por causa dele. Todas essas coisas passam na minha cabeça e foi por isso que eu quis morrer”.

Mães e crianças imigrantes saltam de ônibus em San Antonio, Texas, após serem liberadas dos centros de detenção familiar municipais de Karnes e Dilley, no mesmo estado.

Courtesy of RAICES

Aprova da arbitrariedade dos critérios de credibilidade das entrevistas é que o pedido de asilo do irmão de Jayne foi aceito nos Estados Unidos pouco após do dela. “Contei que tive uma briga com um vizinho que me ameaçou de morte”, afirma Geraldo Vilas Novas: “Outro motivo de eu ter fugido foi por esse problema com o ex-namorado da minha irmã. Ele bateu nela várias vezes, perseguiu ela, depois que ela foi embora, ele espancou meu pai. Eu não ia esperar pela minha vez. Mas não contei isso na entrevista, só falei do vizinho. Eles não me perguntaram nada sobre minha irmã, então eu não falei nada sobre ela”.

No dia 12 de outubro, o grupo de juristas que tomou o caso incluiu no pedido de asilo os motivos “ameaças por organizações de narcotraficantes” e, “mais importante, violência cometida pelo antigo parceiro, que a agrediu brutalmente desde os 14 anos”. Também foram descritos os traumas psicológicos passados no centro de detenção e as barreiras linguísticas. “Este caso tem todas as facetas de violações aos direitos civis encontradas na detenção familiar”, afirma Donohoe no documento. A equipe ainda agendou uma sessão com uma psicóloga voluntária que irá ajudá-la na preparação para a próxima entrevista.

No entanto, até agora a posição do governo americano é de negativa, com o contador marcando menos de duas semanas para que os advogados possam contornar o caso. A única coisa que previne mãe e filha de serem deportadas é a investigação sobre violação direitos civis que o Departamento de Segurança Nacional está realizando. Quando a investigação for concluída, no entanto, o futuro de Jayne se tornará ainda mais tenebroso.

No dia 22 de novembro o Itamaraty retornou mais questionamentos da reportagem com uma curta e inconclusiva resposta:

“De acordo com informações do Consulado Geral do Brasil em Nova York, a Sra. Jayne Alves Vilas Novas estava no Berks County Residential Center acompanhada por sua filha menor. Ainda segundo o Consulado, a deportação das duas deverá ser suspensa pelas autoridades norte-americanas”.

Questionado sobre quando mãe e filha devem ser liberadas, o ministério não se manifestou até o momento desta publicação. Um dia depois do email, no entanto, o segundo pedido de entrevista de Jayne foi negado.

Perguntado sobre o caso específico de Vilas Novas e sobre os traumas que ela passou no centro de detenção, o departamento de imigração americano se limitou a dizer que “se mantém comprometido em providenciar um ambiente seguro e humano para todos os que são abrigados pela agência” e que não há possibilidade de retaliação:

“O ICE não retalia de forma alguma os indivíduos que registram queixas contra as condições de suas instalações ou funcionários. Em consistência com a política da agência, os residentes de Berks têm a oportunidade de expressar de maneira privada as suas preocupações sobre as instalações. Esses documentos passam por muitos níveis de pesquisas minuciosas feitas pela agência para garantir que as preocupações dos moradores sejam rapidamente e adequadamente tratadas”.

Sobre as negações aos pedidos de novas entrevistas, o ICE indicou que a reportagem perguntasse diretamente ao Serviço de Cidadania e Imigração dos EUA (USCIS) e ao Gabinete Executivo para a Revisão de Imigração. Nenhuma das duas pastas respondeu aos questionamentos enviados. A conselheira Hoffman se diz perplexa com as respostas taxativas do governo americano:

“Todos os advogados que trabalharam nesse caso, no Texas e na Pensilvânia, comentam que esse é um caso muito forte e que não conseguem entender por que o pedido segue sendo negado. Temos tantos documentos provando os abusos e as ameaças… O lado positivo é que temos a investigação que a mantém aqui, o que ainda é melhor que voltar para o Brasil, mas sua vida na detenção é miserável”.

Com a eleição de Donald Trump, leva-se ao poder uma plataforma de retórica anti-imigrante. O presidente eleito prometeu deportar no mínimo 3 milhões de imigrantes não documentados e implementar leis de imigração o mais agressivas possível. Trump também prometeu um congelamento de contratações federais que, segundo as previsões dos defensores, levará os já sobrecarregados tribunais a uma parada brusca. Tudo isso, os advogados afirmam, causará o enraizamento dos problemas inerentes ao atual sistema de detenção familiar.

A preocupação se ilustra perfeitamente na fala da defensora Donohoe:

“Durante o ano passado, todo mundo estava dizendo: ‘Oh, Deus, o que Trump faria com os imigrantes? O que Trump faria?’ Se você se preocupa com o que Trump faria com os imigrantes, olha o que Obama está fazendo. Ele está abrindo caminho para tudo o que Trump diz que fará. É o departamento de justiça de Obama que argumentou que as mães não merecem um dia no tribunal. Então, se você tem medo de Donald Trump, diga isso a Obama. Tudo está nas mãos de Obama. Ele pode acabar com isso. Ele pode fechar os centros”.

Nas mãos de Obama e do governo brasileiro, que poderia elaborar uma saída diplomática para o assunto. O ponto mais aterrorizante, segundo Donohoe, é que “se, para o departamento de imigração pode significar apenas uma cama ou um número, para Jayne e sua filha é a diferença entre estarem salvas ou serem aterrorizadas, ou até mesmo mortas”.

The post Brasileiras são abandonadas por autoridades em centro para deportados nos EUA appeared first on The Intercept.

Vilas Novas was thinking about the tumultuous series of events that brought her to the U.S., about the man who turned her life into a waking nightmare, and about the deportation she and her daughter narrowly avoided weeks earlier. She was consumed with dread over the possibility that the American officials might try it again, pulling the two of them out of bed in the middle of the night then shipping them back home. Weeping, Vilas Novas walked into her bathroom, pulled out a razor from a pencil sharpener, and pressed it to her wrist.

Jayne Alves Vilas Novas and her daughter.

Source: Facebook

It had been nearly 10 weeks since Vilas Novas and her daughter showed up at the U.S. border, hoping for a safer life with family in New England. After U.S. officials determined her fears of persecution in Brazil were not credible, Vilas Novas and her daughter were shipped to Pennsylvania, where the young mother’s hopes began to dim.

The pair had been swept into a deportation machine that over the last few years has shuttled thousands of families back to the places they fear most. Vilas Novas had never been in prison before, she later said, and she couldn’t bring herself to adjust to her new reality. Her daughter began acting out, biting at the skin around her fingernails until she bled. Vilas Novas could sense the bond between them fraying under the stress.

When she met with the facility’s contracted psychologist the morning after the cutting, Vilas Novas was torn over how to explain what she was feeling, afraid the wrong words could provide a pretext for taking her daughter away. Struggling through a telephonic interpreter — none of the staff at Berks speaks Portuguese — Vilas Novas did what she could to convey a simple message: “I can’t bear it anymore.”

A week and a half later, Vilas Novas described her ordeal to The Intercept in her native language. Relatives corroborated much of her account in interviews from Brazil and Massachusetts, while the small team of overworked legal advocates fighting on her behalf provided dozens of pages of sworn declarations, legal briefs, and Brazilian police records offered to U.S. officials as proof of the trauma and threats Vilas Novas and her daughter face at home.

Together, the documents and conversations reflect the desperate measures Vilas Novas took to keep her daughter safe, highlighting the complex intersections of mental health and trauma coursing through the nation’s asylum bureaucracies, and offering a window into one of the darkest corners of the Obama administration’s immigration legacy — the formalization of practices allowing for the indefinite detention of mothers and children seeking safe haven, practices that will soon be overseen by a man on a mission to deport millions.

Vilas Novas and her daughter arrived at the Gateway International port of entry in Brownsville, Texas, on August 31 — the culmination of a journey that had taken the pair from rural Brazil to Rio de Janeiro, by plane to Mexico City, then finally by bus to the U.S. border. By the time Vilas Novas presented herself to Border Patrol agents in Brownsville, the loan her aunt had given her had been whittled down to $271.

Given an aluminum sheet to sleep with, Vilas Novas said she and her daughter spent their first two nights in the U.S. in a frigid, kennel-like room crowded with other immigrant families. “It seemed like they put the air conditioning on the coldest setting,” she recalled — Customs and Border Protection’s use of so-called iceboxes in immigrant detention centers has been documented before. “There was no bed for us to lie down on, just a thin cushion thrown on the ground — as if I were a dog.”

The following day, CBP officials questioned Vilas Novas and determined that she and her daughter were “inadmissible to the United States.” The two were issued expedited removal orders and the next day were transferred to the nation’s largest immigrant family detention center, the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.

Run by the country’s largest private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America, now going by the name CoreCivic, the Dilley center was opened by the Department of Homeland Security in December 2014 as part of an Obama administration effort to deter a tide of migrants, many of them families and unaccompanied children, fleeing violence in Central America for the southern border of the U.S. Somewhere between a prison and a refugee camp, Dilley has a 2,400-bed capacity and, as of August 2016, housed more than 1,300 immigrant women and children.

Despite years of bad press, evidence of abuse, and accusations that it profits off the suffering of some of the world’s most vulnerable populations, Dilley nevertheless represented an opportunity for Vilas Novas to tell her story again, this time in hopes of securing an asylum hearing before a judge, something she had indicated that she was not seeking during her original CBP interview.

The first step in the process was a so-called credible fear interview. CFIs are a crucial initial screening phase in which noncitizens slated for an expedited removal can make the case that they have a legitimate fear of being deported back to their home country. If an asylum officer determines that the fear could indeed be credible, then the deportation process is effectively paused and the individual has a chance of making their full asylum case to a judge.

Vilas Novas’s interview lasted just over an hour and a half. Unlike in her CBP interview, she managed to convey at least some of what life was like for her in Brazil. She explained that she had fled the country because she was afraid of five men who had beaten her and her husband with rocks, resulting in serious injuries. “We filed a report and nothing happened,” Vilas Novas said. “We had to get a lawyer, but there is no Brazilian justice, and then [my] husband left me.” With her husband gone, and with little hope in the Brazilian justice system, Vilas Novas said she believed the physical danger she and her daughter were in had increased substantially. “This guy does everything he wants there,” she told the official, referring to the man who led the attack. “He fights. He threatens people. He also uses drugs. They never got him for anything.”

Vilas Novas was asked if she had any other fears of returning to Brazil, other than the man who led the assault on her and her partner. “No, that’s the only reason,” she said. “If I go back, that this guy would do something to me or my daughter.” She told the official that she didn’t describe these fears before because “I was afraid they would contact Brazilian people and the guy would know and he would do something to me and my daughter.”

The asylum official determined Vilas Novas’s fears were not credible. Later that day, the judge reviewing her interview agreed. Vilas Novas described the moment he rendered his decision. “I started to cry and he said: ‘I do not doubt that your story is true, but I agree with the official. And the response is no. You will be deported.’” With that, Vilas Novas and her daughter were advised that they would be transferred to a small family detention facility in Pennsylvania, where they would await deportation back to Brazil.

The Karnes County Residential Center on July 31, 2014, in Karnes City, Texas.

Photo: Drew Anthony Smith/Getty Images

The move was a significant departure from past practices. In years prior, families were rarely slated for expedited removal, nor were they subject to mandatory detention. In court, the government has defended its post-2014 practices — spearheaded by DHS and its immigration enforcement wing, ICE — on national security grounds, while journalists, human rights organizations, and attorneys have roundly criticized them as inhumane and an affront to due process.

ICE currently maintains three family detention centers that as of August held just over 2,000 women and children. In addition to the Dilley facility, Texas is also home to the Karnes County Residential Center, in Karnes City, operated by the GEO Group, a private prison company. The third and oldest family detention center — the only one that existed before the summer of 2014 — is the Berks facility in Leesport, Pennsylvania, where Vilas Novas and her daughter are currently being held.

Converted from a nursing home in March 2001, the county-owned Berks facility is the smallest of the government’s family detention centers, with a 96-bed capacity, and has been the subject of intense criticism. In an August 2015 report, Human Rights First documented impacts on the health and well-being of children housed at the facility — including “depression, anxiety, and increased aggression” — and “obstacles to release such as unaffordable bonds, delays in interview processes, and/or lack of counsel.”

Berks garnered national attention earlier this year when 22 women held there announced they were going on hunger strike. The impetus for the strike were comments from DHS chief Jeh Johnson, who said the average stay in family detention was 20 days — the hunger strikers included mothers with children at the facility who had been held for nearly a year, many of them asylum seekers who said their credible fear interviews had been conducted improperly.

Carol Anne Donohoe, a Pennsylvania immigration attorney and former president of the Greater Reading Immigration Project, was one of the lawyers for the so-called Berks Mothers. Over the last two years, Donohoe and her colleagues Jacquelyn Kline and Bridget Cambria have had an up-close experience of the dramatic changes at Berks and in family detention nationally. Donohoe recalls first visiting Berks as part of a bar association tour in April 2014.

“I had never been in that particular facility,” she said. “I never had to go over to Berks because people were held there for just a very brief span of time while they either finished their paperwork or got a sponsor.” Donohoe recalls about 17 people being held at the center during her initial visit. A little over a year later, multiple detention centers had opened up across the country and the numbers of women and children held in them, often after presenting themselves to immigration authorities in hopes of gaining asylum, were swelling into the thousands — during one recent seventh-month stretch, the number of individuals who passed through the nation’s family detention centers was well over 18,000.

For Donohoe and her team, the influx has been staggering. “For the first year and a half, two years, we were the only ones who really represented anyone at Berks,” she said. What’s more, she said, “There have been constant policy shifts since the summer of 2014.” Each shift, including some stemming from major court decisions rejecting core elements of the government’s family detention practices, has impacted legal work at Berks in its own way.

“For the first year, the reason for the prolonged detention was supposedly deterrence, trying to keep these families — send a message to other families: Don’t come because if you do, you’re going to be deported, you’re not going to win your case,” Donohoe explained. “So that was what we dealt with.”

The next summer, a federal judge in the Central District of California determined that the Obama administration’s family detention practices violated a longstanding court settlement, part of a case known as Flores v. Meese, by ruling that protections long guaranteed to unaccompanied minors also apply to immigrant children accompanied by their parents. As part of the ruling, the government was ordered to release those families held in unlicensed and “secure facilities” — such as the private detention centers in Texas — as quickly as possible.

In late October 2015, new transfers who could no longer be held in the Texas facilities as a result of the decision started showing up at Berks. Donohoe and her colleagues noticed patterns among the new arrivals. “Up until a year ago, we got people right from the border,” she said. “We didn’t get all these people who were being transferred from Texas.” In the past, the Newark Asylum Office would typically conduct incoming asylum seekers’ initial CFI, Donohoe explained.

“The Newark Asylum Office is good,” she said. “They know how to question someone. They know how to actually elicit the responses that might go towards a claim. Not all of them, but for the most part, they try.”

Donohoe pointed out that when an asylum official gives a CFI the green light, it’s not the same as granting the individual asylum — it’s a “threshold determination,” she said, meaning a determination that an individual could have a viable asylum claim and should get the opportunity to appear before a judge. Under the law, an asylum claim can be based on person’s persecution — or well-founded fear of persecution — as a result of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, or their well-founded fears of being tortured if returned home. In the past, Donohoe said, people almost always passed their CFI.

“Until we started getting these transfers, we didn’t have problems with people passing CFIs,” she said. “We didn’t have to do these requests for re-interviews. I think there were maybe one or two where I ever had to say, ‘Hey, can you look at this again?’”

With the shift in policy, and with the Obama administration’s ongoing emphasis on detention and deportation, the situation for the legal advocates at Berks has changed dramatically over the last year, Donohoe explained,

“The process has become so prohibitive,” she said. “I look at the CFIs out of Houston and they’re terrible. It’s not geared towards what it’s supposed to be — being a safety net to make sure people aren’t deported who might have a claim.”

Protestors in Massachusetts rally against the detention of immigrant families at Pennsylvania’s Berks County Residential Center, Aug. 15, 2016.

Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Last summer, Donohoe and her colleagues hired two legal advocates to help them with their tremendous workload, including Karen Hoffmann, a former journalist who had reported from Brazil and spoke Portuguese. When Vilas Novas arrived at Berks on September 19, Donohoe quickly took her case while Hoffmann began having conversations with the young mother about her life in Brazil.

Immigration lawyers in Texas who collaborate with the attorneys in Pennsylvania had already put in a request for Vilas Novas to be re-interviewed. The legal team at Berks picked up where they left off, obtaining a Brazilian police report and medical records that confirmed the violent incident Vilas Novas had described in her initial CBP interview — though it occurred months earlier than Vilas Novas originally recalled.

Photos from the medical records showed Vilas Novas with a wide cut over the bridge of her nose and her partner with a crooked gash stretching up from his forehead to well behind his hairline. The police report, meanwhile, confirmed the couple’s attackers were arrested and released on the same day and added that the men threatened the military police unit that responded to the scene, telling them they were going to “drink their blood.” Vilas Novas explained that the men behind the attack were known drug traffickers who operated with impunity — local press reports indicate that drug traffickers and criminal groups in the area where Vilas Novas lived have at times rivaled law enforcement.

“It wasn’t just a barroom brawl, it was a narcotrafficker,” Donohoe said. “Someone who the government can’t control.”

Conversations with Hoffmann also revealed something Vilas Novas described in conversations with immigration attorneys in Texas but had not discussed in her initial credible fear interview: years of domestic abuse and stalking by a former partner. Vilas Novas explained how, at the age of 14, she met a man who was roughly a decade older who became her boyfriend. Shortly after they started dating, she said, the man began beating her regularly, once stabbing her in the leg in a fit of jealousy. Though she left him after six months, Vilas Novas said the man maintained an ongoing and threatening presence in her life. When the father of her daughter left her, Vilas Novas said her ex made it known around their small town that he wanted her back.

Asylum seekers’ lack of disclosure on domestic violence is something Donohoe and her team come up against often. Many women, advocates point out, including Vilas Novas, arrive in the U.S. without knowing that the persecuted “social group” referenced in their CFIs can include women, and as a result don’t identify as members of that population in screening interviews. What’s more, mothers are sometimes required to have their children present during the interview, making candid disclosures to a stranger about deeply personal domestic trauma all the more difficult.

“Mothers don’t know how to answer,” Donohoe said. “They don’t know how they have to say everything that ever happened to them since birth.”

In what they viewed as a sign of how arbitrary the immigration process can be, Hoffman and the legal team also discovered that Vilas Novas’s brother had successfully entered the U.S. after her.

“One of the reasons I left Brazil was that one neighbor threatened my life,” Geraldo Vilas Novas told The Intercept. “The other was this problem with my sister’s ex-boyfriend. He [had] chased my sister, beaten my father — I wasn’t going to wait for my time. But I didn’t mention this in the immigration office interview, I just spoke about the problem with my neighbor. They didn’t ask me anything about my sister, so I didn’t mention her.”

A Honduran mother holds her toddler son at the U.S. Border Patrol detainee-processing center on April 11, 2013, in McAllen, Texas.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

“I was accused of child abuse two times,” Vilas Novas said. “The first time they accused me because I picked my daughter up by the arm. Ever since she was little, I have always had the habit of picking her up by the arms, but without meaning to, I dislocated her arm and was accused of child abuse.” The second accusation, Vilas Novas said, was entirely fabricated. Her legal advocates say the accusations resulted in Vilas Novas being placed under 24-hour surveillance until she agreed to take a Berks-administrated parenting course — a Pennsylvania Department of Human Services investigation later determined both accusations were unfounded.

On October 12, a week after Vilas Novas filed her complaints, Donohoe and the legal team submitted a formal request for a stay on her and her daughter’s deportation, citing “threats from a narcotrafficking organization” and “more importantly, violence at the hands of [Vilas Novas’s] former partner who brutalized her since the age of 14.” Bridget Cambria, Donohoe’s legal partner, wrote, “We are currently scheduling a volunteer psychologist to come and speak with Jayne in order for us to prepare a comprehensive request for re-interview.”

In her official declaration to DHS, attached to the stay of removal request, Vilas Novas offered a multi-paragraph account of the incident with the alleged drug traffickers and the intimidation that followed. Over the course of several more pages, she gave detailed descriptions of the physical and sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her ex, whom she also named, and laid out the specific reasons why she still fears him. She explained why she hadn’t raised the issue of the domestic abuse in her original credible fear interview — because the asylum officer had advised her to keep her answers short and because she was “afraid that there would be a permanent record in the United States government and that he would find out” — and she asked to be heard again.

“There is nowhere in Brazil where my daughter and I could live safely,” she said.

ICE denied the request the following day.

With the denial in place, ICE moved to deport Vilas Novas and her daughter as quickly as possible. Donohoe’s team countered by fast-tracking a formal complaint to DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties that they had already been drafting. Cambria, Donohoe’s colleague, filed the complaint that afternoon. Outlining what Vilas Novas and her daughter had gone through, including “mental health issues and extremely frustrating language issues,” Donohoe wrote that “this case has every facet of violations of civil rights in family detention” and argued that their ordeal reflected a broader problem with the family detention system.

“For some reason the Asylum Office has begun a pattern of not understanding that domestic violence victims do not immediately disclose interfamilial violence to strangers, and in cases of extreme violence and extreme youth, this is more often than not the case,” she wrote.

In Vilas Novas’s case in particular, Donohoe presented two core issues that she considered troubling. The first stemmed from Vilas Novas spending nearly a month and a half unable to fully communicate with any of the staff detaining her and her daughter. “She filed a language access complaint with Berks and rather than being handled in a professional way, Jayne understood that if she continued to be a ‘problem’ they would remove her or take her daughter, a threat which unfortunately we hear often,” Donohoe wrote. “Now a mere eight days later (coincidentally the normal time it would take ICE to purchase a ticket), she has been taken from Berks.”

The second issue Donohoe identified had to do with ICE’s claim that Vilas Novas’s attorneys had sufficient time to settle her case. “ICE states that we had 41 days for her to be evaluated, the length of detention,” she wrote. “However during that time she has been engaged in a CFI process that absorbs time. Then she endures a transfer from Texas to Berks. Texas where she had pro bono counsel working on her case. Now sent thousands of miles away to Berks where we, as local pro bono counsel, have to scramble.”

Donohoe, whose legal team currently represents around 40 women at Berks, explained that she and her colleagues receive no notification when a new person or family arrives at the facility. “We rely on word of mouth,” she wrote. “Once we learned that Jayne was here we immediately began working on her case, however we have had a little over two weeks time to finish everything, including coordinating everything between TX and PA.”

“It is absolutely a winning case,” Donohoe wrote. “And the terrifying part of this all, is it may be a bed or a # for ICE, but to Jayne and her child, it’s the difference between being safe and being terrorized or killed.”

“I actually physically fear for them,” she added.

Vilas Novas and her daughter were at the airport, their bags already loaded onto a plane bound for Brazil, when their deportation was halted. The last ditch effort worked, with DHS civil liberties officials informing Donohoe’s team that they would look into the case.

Despite the break, Vilas Novas’s outlook grew increasingly dark in the weeks that followed.

As her case was wending its way through the immigration bureaucracy, Vilas Novas learned that her ex had confronted her father back home in Brazil — he had asked about her, and when her father refused to answer, her ex grabbed a horse whip and lashed him in the street. In an interview with The Intercept, a person close to the family, who requested not to be named for fear of retaliation, confirmed that the assault happened. The attack, Vilas Novas said in one of her declarations, was on her mind on the night she cut herself.

“I started crying,” she said. “This is someone who has made me suffer since I was 14 years old. I had to leave my country because of fear of him. … All of this ran through my head and left me feeling like I wanted to die.”

ICE Director Sarah Saldaña testifies before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about DHS policies regarding apprehension, detention, and release of undocumented immigrants on March 19, 2015, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

What happens next in the case remains to be seen. The Brazilian consulate initially told The Intercept it was unaware of the detention of Vilas Novas and her daughter. After confirming they were indeed being held, the consulate said in a statement, “The deportation of both of them should be suspended by the American authorities.”

ICE declined to address any of the specifics in Vilas Novas’s case. When asked whether it had looked into her allegations that she had been the subject of retaliation for her complaints at Berks, the agency said in a statement that it “remains committed to providing a safe and humane environment for all those housed by the agency. ICE does not retaliate in any way against individuals who file grievances against facility conditions or staff. Consistent with agency policy, Berks residents are afforded the opportunity to privately express any concerns they have with the facilities. These filings often undergo many levels of agency scrutiny to ensure residents’ concerns are quickly and adequately addressed.”

On the issue of Vilas Novas’s attempts to secure a new interview, ICE directed questions to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Executive Office for Immigration Review. The former said it could not comment on decisions in individual cases; the latter did not respond. Berks did not respond to a request for comment.

With family in Massachusetts offering to take responsibility for Vilas Novas and her daughter, including an uncle who is a U.S. citizen and an aunt who is a lawful permanent resident, the pair could be safely released as the case continues, Donohoe and her team argue.

For now, the open DHS civil rights investigation is preventing ICE from deporting Vilas Novas and her daughter. When that will conclude, however, is unclear. According to Hoffmann, the young mother hasn’t taken the news well and doesn’t know how much longer she can hold out.

“All of the lawyers who’ve worked on Jayne’s case, the lawyers here and the lawyers back in Texas, have said this is one of the strongest cases they’ve seen and they can’t understand how her RFRs [requests for review] keep getting denied — she has so much documented abuse, documented threats,” Hoffmann said. “The good thing in her case right now is that she does have this stay because of the ongoing investigation by the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, so she’s protected, but the problem is she’s so miserable in detention,” she said. “Staying there is better than going back to Brazil, but it’s really bad.”

Busloads of mothers and children were dropped off in San Antonio, Texas, after their release from the Karnes and Dilley family detention centers.

Courtesy of RAICES

The pushback against the Obama administration’s family detention apparatus has been substantial — and has gotten some results.

In January, Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services announced that it would not renew Berks’s license to operate as a “child residential facility” because the facility was “operating as a residential center for the detention of immigrant families, including adults,” rather than its approved purpose. The facility has been permitted to continue operating while it appeals that decision. In September, DHS released the results of a specially appointed committee’s year-and-a-half-long review of the government’s family detention practices. The first recommendation of the 158-page report, highlighted in red, was that the detention of families needs to stop. Earlier this month, hundreds of women and children were released from the for-profit detention centers in Texas after a judge ruled that the licensing for the facilities “contravenes Texas Human Resources Code … and runs counter to the general objectives of the Texas Human Resources Code” — meaning all three of the nation’s immigrant family detention centers are currently operating without licenses.

And yet for all of the progress that’s been made, immigration advocates are profoundly worried about what the future might hold. Donohoe, the Pennsylvania immigration attorney, met with senior officials from DHS when the committee’s findings on family detention were released. Sarah Saldaña, the director of ICE, was also present. According to Donohoe, Saldaña’s message was that family detention is here to stay. It’s an immensely frustrating argument for immigration attorneys who have spent the last two years pointing out that family detention, in its present form, didn’t exist before 2014.

“It’s not a law,” Donohoe said. “There is no law that mandates family detention.” Still, Donohoe said the ICE director’s position was clear. “She said, ‘It’s for the next administration to deal with the report.’”

“I’m sure she didn’t know or think that the next administration would be Donald Trump,” Donohoe said.

Rising to power on a platform of anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump has vowed to deport anywhere from 2 to 11 million undocumented immigrants and implement the most aggressive enforcement of immigration laws possible. The president-elect has also promised a federal hiring freeze that advocates say would bring the nation’s already disastrously overburdened immigration courts to a grinding halt, resulting in more people held in detention. Aside from his infamously hardline positions on Syrian refugees, Trump has been characteristically vague on what exactly he would do with people who come to the U.S. fleeing danger in their home countries, though on the campaign trail, he at one point called for an increase in “standards for the admission of refugees and asylum seekers to crack down on abuses,” and his talk has consistently reflected a vision of zero tolerance for anyone who comes to the U.S. without papers. All of this, attorneys worry, points to a world in which the very worst elements of the Obama administration’s immigration legacy are taken to new levels and the problems inherent in the current family detention apparatus become further entrenched.

“That’s the whole thing,” Donohoe said. “For the past year everybody has been saying, ‘Oh, god, what would Trump do to immigrants? What would Trump do?’ It’s like, if you care about what Trump would do to immigrants, Obama is paving the way.”

“He has paved the way for everything that Donald Trump says he is going to do,” she said. “It’s his Department of Justice that argued that kids in family detention aren’t covered under Flores. It’s his Department of Justice that is arguing that these habeas moms don’t deserve a day in court.”

“I say if you are afraid of Donald Trump, then you tell Obama,” Donohoe said. “This is all Obama. He can end it. He can shut it down.”

The post A Mother and Child Trapped in Obama’s Brutal Family Deportation System appeared first on The Intercept.

Morataya came to the U.S. as a young girl, her family fleeing the civil war in Guatemala — her uncle was one of thousands disappeared in the conflict and her father, a student activist, feared he too could be targeted by Guatemala’s U.S.-backed security forces. Morataya grew up on the North Side of Chicago. She went to school and started a family there, and ultimately became a lawful permanent resident. In 1997, she was arrested on a minor drug charge, accused of attempting to sell $10 worth of crack cocaine. While it’s unclear if the police ever found the drugs, Morataya faced up to 35 years in prison if convicted. Her lawyer at the time advised her to plead guilty.

“It’s my word against the police officers,” Morataya said of her decision. She served a yearlong probation, paid her fines, and, she thought, proceeded to move on with her life. “Fifteen years later, immigration came knocking on the door.”

The officials informed Morataya that she had been slated for deportation. She was told that she would have an opportunity to present her case before a judge at a bond hearing. As it turned out, that wasn’t exactly true.

Morataya spent the next 2 1/2 years fighting from behind bars. She watched others in the facilities she was sent to, people with stories similar to hers, give up and submit themselves to deportation. For Morataya, that was unacceptable. She was a single mother with three dependent children.

“I had to fight to stay in this country for my children,” Morataya told The Intercept. “I appealed a lot,” she said. “I tried it all.”

It’s a practice that will now be challenged before the Supreme Court, with oral arguments beginning Wednesday. The class-action suit, Jennings v. Rodriguez, addresses whether individuals held in long-term immigration detention have the right to a bond hearing before a judge.

Filed by the ACLU, the lead plaintiff in the suit is Alejandro Rodriguez, a longtime lawful permanent resident who was detained for more than three years, facing deportation, on charges of possession of a controlled substance and “joyriding,” without a judge considering the merits of his detention.

Rodriguez’s deportation was ultimately canceled and the suit that stemmed from his ordeal led to an injunction, affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, requiring that members of the class in question be provided hearings before an immigration judge at least every six months.

Lawyers for the Obama administration, who appealed the decision, have argued that the 9th Circuit was “fundamentally wrong” in its conclusions. The opposing sides will now make their cases to the nation’s highest court. With President-elect Donald Trump vowing to make the deportation of undocumented immigrants with criminal records a top priority, while also calling for a federal hiring freeze that would likely stall immigration court proceedings in profound ways, immigration advocates see the questions at the heart of the Jennings case as particularly crucial.

“I think we all fear that under President-elect Trump that problem is only going to get worse,” said Michael Tan, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights project. Tan added that “one of the saddest ironies” of the current immigration and detention system is that some of those with the greatest stakes in staying in the U.S. — longtime lawful permanent residents raised in the U.S. and asylum seekers fleeing oppressive states — are often the most likely to stick it out and fight their deportation, meaning they often spend the most time locked up.

The emotional and financial toll of spending weeks, months, or years in detention waging those fights is often profound — and in some cases, entirely avoidable. The Jennings suit, for example, includes an Ethiopian asylum seeker who fled abduction, torture, and a year of captivity in his native country. Once he made it to the U.S., the man passed his credible fear screening — the first step on the road to asylum — but was still held in DHS detention for nine months because U.S. officials had identified “an apparent correlation with all the Somalian Detainee’s [sic] that present [sic] a paradigm of deceit and paralleled ambiguity of events and identity.” Lawyers for the Jennings plaintiffs have pointed out that had the man “been afforded a bond hearing, he would have had the opportunity to point out, among other things, that he was not Somali, as his government-issued photo identification showed.”

Prolonged Detention Stories, a multimedia project by the NYU School of Law’s Immigrant Rights Clinic and Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement, has compiled other stories of individuals swept up in the immigration detention system for extended periods, including other asylum seekers, U.S. military veterans, and numerous lawful U.S. residents, such as Morataya, whose story features prominently on the school’s site.

After being taken into custody in 2013, Morataya was shuttled to a series of facilities around the Midwest before landing in Wisconsin. Her children had been relocated to live with family in Iowa, a six-hour drive away. She saw them just three times in the years she was locked away, in meetings that never lasted more than half an hour and were sometimes conducted through a TV screen. A five-minute long distance phone call to her kids cost $25, Morataya recalled.

“What can you really tell your family member in five minutes?” she asked.

Morataya longed for the opportunity to appear before a judge and rejected the idea of trying to go underground if she was released. “I wasn’t trying to escape,” she said. “I wanted to show up in court.” Instead, she said, she was treated like a “menace to society.”

Morataya did what she could to learn and understand the rules and laws arrayed against her. Eventually, she discovered a potential means to be released. Years earlier, she had been kidnapped by a former partner. The man held her captive for two days, beating her repeatedly. After escaping, Morataya helped law enforcement convict her abuser by testifying in court. The man received six months in prison — a fifth of the time Morataya spent behind bars. (He was later convicted of another domestic violence offense and sentenced to 35 years.)

Because she was a victim of domestic abuse and had previously cooperated with law enforcement, Morataya learned that she was eligible for a U visa, which could protect her from deportation and get her out of detention. With the help of immigration attorneys from Chicago, who she says came down “like angels from the sky,” Morataya was able to successfully make the U visa argument. She was released last year.

The grim implications of how she won her freedom are not lost on her. “If I wouldn’t have got beat up, I wouldn’t be here right now,” Morataya said.

Still, Morataya’s newfound freedom has been riddled with challenges, including an inability to find work. “I haven’t had a job in three years,” she said. She tries to explain the gap on her resume in job interviews, she said, but “nobody wants to hear that.”

“I’m back to starting from the bottom.”

Top photo: The U.S. Supreme Court.

The post A Mother’s Appeal to the Supreme Court: “I Had to Fight to Stay in the Country for My Children” appeared first on The Intercept.

“I definitely didn’t think twice,” Carlos, who came to the U.S. when he was 4 years old, said of his decision to sign up.

Carlos threw himself into activism in the years that followed, ultimately landing a position working on a major New York City initiative, the largest of its kind in the country, to inform and educate immigrants about their rights. When the 2016 race for the presidency rolled around, Carlos, who is now 31, watched Donald Trump’s rise with alarm, but like many others, he believed Hillary Clinton would ultimately pull off the win.

On the night of the election, the Vargas family gathered at their home in Staten Island to watch the results come in. It was well after midnight, Carlos said, when the reality of what was playing out on the television began to sink in: that Donald Trump, a man who built much of his campaign around the racist scapegoating of immigrants, was going to take the White House.

“We just looked at each other like, ‘He won. This guy actually won. He’s going to be the next president of the United States,’” he recalled.

Carlos Vargas celebrating his fifth birthday in Brooklyn, New York, in May 1990, three months after arriving in the U.S.

Photo: Courtesy of the Vargas family

Through his job at Make the Road New York, a grassroots advocacy organization, Vargas is now spending his post-election days running know-your-rights trainings around the city, answering questions from immigrants fearing that their loved ones could soon be taken from them.

Carlos said more than 100 people showed up at his most recent training session, eager for information about how their lives could change. Most of their questions dealt with the prospect of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent knocking at their door. “What happens if ICE gets me and my children have no one?” some would ask. “Will I be able to bring my kids with me?” others would say. Carlos does his best to inform people and to avoid stoking panic, even as DACA, the program he and some 742,000 others signed up for, sits a pen stroke away from being repealed on Trump’s first day.

“We don’t want to inflict fear,” he said. “But they should be prepared.”

For many undocumented immigrants, and for the lawyers and organizations that advocate on their behalf, Trump’s election has cast a shadow of fear unlike anything in recent memory. It has prompted deep concerns that an already pernicious system of immigration enforcement and deportation will be ramped up, and that the next four years could see profound struggle and suffering in immigrant communities across the country.

“Let me just take a breath,” Alexandra M. Goncalves-Pena, an immigration attorney in New Jersey, said before laying out the array of threats that Trump’s vision poses to any possibility of a humane U.S. approach to immigration.

The fate of DACA is certainly up in the air, Goncalves-Pena said. She and other organizations have advised those who have not yet applied for the program to hold off. Concerns over what the incoming administration might do with personal information volunteered by immigrants have swirled since the election, with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio suggesting that immigrant data maintained by the city could potentially be deleted if a Trump White House came looking for it.

For Goncalves-Pena, the fact that the safety of immigrants’ personal data is even being questioned is particularly painful. “When the DACA program started, people were so scared to sign up,” she recalled. “People were terrified” at the thought of outing themselves as undocumented to the federal government. “We were, as advocates, just trying to be supportive and encourage people to apply,” she explained. “I feel, personally, like I let people down.”

With Trump coming in and filling senior positions with infamous anti-immigrant, right-wing, and white supremacist figures along the way, the mission of immigrant rights advocates should be one of organization and collaboration, Goncalves-Pena said, in hopes of ensuring that vulnerable communities are not let down again. “There will be a battle,” she said. “This will be difficult. That is all too clear. But what we need to start doing now as attorneys, as advocates, is having that conversation.”

Any success that immigration rights advocates might achieve in pushing back on Trump’s agenda will require access to information. So far, that’s been an uphill battle. Despite centering immigration in his campaign rhetoric, details on precisely how Trump intends to achieve his objectives have been limited. The president-elect’s official website lays out a “ten-point plan to restore integrity to our immigration system” but elaborates on none of the proposals.

As a candidate, Trump proposed deporting as many as 11 million people, banning Muslims from coming to the U.S., forcing Mexico to build a multibillion-dollar border wall, and tripling the number of ICE agents. While Trump has shifted on some of his past proposals in recent weeks, for example claiming that he will initially focus deportation efforts on individuals with criminal records — an estimated 2 to 3 million people by his erroneous count — the particulars of exactly what he is going to do remains opaque.

“That uncertainty itself is unjust,” said Manny Vargas, the senior counsel and founder of the Immigrant Defense Project. “People just don’t know what the future is going to be.”

What is clear, Vargas explained, is that Trump will have at his disposal a number of already broadly written laws that could be used to target immigrants who have come into contact with the criminal justice system. Drug offenses, no matter how minor, can be used to trigger deportations, Vargas said. “It doesn’t even have to be a crime under the law of the convicting jurisdiction,” he explained. “If it’s a violation of the law or regulation relating to a controlled substance, it can make you deportable.” But it goes beyond that, Vargas pointed out. So-called crimes involving moral turpitude, which can include offenses as minor as turnstile-jumping, can be leveraged to support deportation cases.

Carlos Vargas at his high school graduation.

Photo: Courtesy of the Vargas family

“I think a lot of people don’t realize there aren’t these protections in the immigration system like there are in the criminal justice system,” Vargas said. “One has to keep all of this in mind when you hear the talk about deporting millions of folks with past criminal convictions. “

Despite the seemingly innumerable ways in which a determined prosecutor can argue for an individual’s deportation, Goncalves-Pena is quick to point out that immigrants have rights enshrined in the Constitution. “Due process does apply to immigrants,” she said. “That is where we attorneys that do this litigation day in and day out in immigration courts, as well as immigration advocates, we need to start thinking and having conversations together about the legal avenues to challenge certain policies, certain responses, certain attacks against our clients, on the communities that we love, in order to ensure that due process is respected.”

For Carlos, the delicate work of educating those deeply shaken communities goes on. “I’d like to say, ‘Oh, it’s fine, I’m not worried. I’m positive,’” he said. But the reality, he admitted, is that nobody knows what’s coming next. “We really don’t know how to prepare,” he said. “We feel like our hands are tied behind our backs.”

Top photo: Immigrant families and community members stand together during a press conference to speak about the Supreme Court oral arguments regarding the DACA/DAPA executive actions on April 13, 2016, in Miami, Florida.

The post Childhood Immigrants Once Protected by Obama’s Program Now Face Betrayal and Deportation appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week, the scenario at the heart of Jaffer’s argument ceased to be rhetorical.

“I know as well as anyone how broad those powers are and how much damage somebody could do with them,” he told The Intercept in an interview last week. “I’m very aware of the risks that we now face.”

Jaffer has outlined those dangers in a new book, “The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy and the Law.” Published this week, the book does not mention the president-elect. Instead, it outlines the legal and policy framework of the remote killing program Trump will soon inherit. The documents that make up the bulk of the project — long-classified memos and white papers obtained through hard-fought litigation or offered up by the Obama administration after years of public pressure, as well as speeches by key government officials — are in Jaffer’s view “a reflection of a deep transformation in American attitudes and society.”

While the collection of materials will no doubt prove useful to many in the coming years, what makes the “Drone Memos” a truly valuable public service is the context and experience Jaffer employs in detailing how the Obama administration’s precedent-setting apparatus for killing came into being.

When Jaffer joined the ACLU in 2002, the nation’s long descent into the war on terror was still in its infancy. The notion of a global network of secret American torture chambers was still remarkable, the scope of the U.S. government’s appetite for surveillance still largely secret, and there was still a sense, at least in some quarters, that the response to the September 11 attacks would be finite. The wars didn’t stop, though, and when debates about the role American principles of justice would play in those conflicts spilled into courtrooms, it was often through the work of Jaffer and his ACLU colleagues.

During the Bush years, the cases Jaffer litigated offered him a window into a string of notorious post-9/11 scandals, from warrantless wiretapping to mind-bending interpretations of due process at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp. Jaffer continued to fight executive overreach under the Obama administration, challenging drone combat operations that included thousands of covert airstrikes in nations where the U.S. was not at war, resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties, and the government’s premeditated killing of an American citizen without charge or trial.

In an extended introduction to the “Drone Memos,” Jaffer provides a ringside perspective on the legal fights that defined the era. He details how selective leaks, media portrayals trumpeting the good judgment of Obama and his advisers, and the administration’s recruitment of prominent human rights attorneys were leveraged to provide credibility to secret killings. Above all, he drives home the point that what the Obama administration created over the last eight years was a formalized structure for killing individuals in secret — one that that will soon be passed to Donald Trump.

For many civil liberties advocates working on issues of national security, the oncoming Trump administration is already being viewed as an unprecedented threat, and so-called targeted killing is only one part of the concern. “It would be wrong not to be deeply worried about the way that President Trump will use those powers, but this goes beyond the drone campaign,” Jaffer said. “Something similar is true of the surveillance powers.”

While surveillance may have more legal oversight than drone operations, “the oversight is conducted by a secret court in proceedings that are one-sided,” Jaffer explained. “The congressional committees that are tasked with supervising the intelligence agencies have proven themselves, over and over again, not up to the task.”

Jaffer identified a handful of areas in the national security realm in which the Obama administration could still make a positive difference before leaving office. “The more progress they can make on closing Guantánamo, the better,” he said.

After years of criticism, the Obama administration did adopt a set of rules intended to constrain counterterrorism operations abroad, and this summer the president signed an executive order requiring investigation into operations that might have resulted in civilian casualties. Jaffer said the future of those efforts is now uncertain.

“A lot of those things that the Obama administration has described as constraining are executive branch policies that can be reversed relatively easily by the next administration,” he explained. “That’s the unfortunate truth.”

The veteran civil liberties attorney isn’t celebrating the prescience of his warnings about the unchecked powers of the national security apparatus in light of Trump’s election.

“This book coming out now is both great and awful,” Jaffer said. “I’ve been proved right — I guess that’s good. But on the other hand, I’m ambivalent about spending all of this energy complaining about the Obama administration when something much worse is on the horizon.”

Top photo: A U.S. Air Force MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicle returns from a mission to an air base in the Persian Gulf region on Jan. 7, 2016.

The post Donald Trump Is About to Inherit Obama’s Unchecked Drone Program appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week, the Pentagon released its second civilian casualty assessment from the ongoing conflict, covering 24 U.S. airstrikes. While providing little detail, the report states that investigators “thoroughly reviewed the facts and circumstances surrounding each report” of civilian casualties and found evidence of 64 civilian deaths, bringing the official total for the campaign to 119.

The new figure represents a fraction of the civilian deaths documented by journalists and outside monitoring groups. According to Airwars, a transparency project that tracks airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, at least 1,787 civilians have died in coalition airstrikes in the two countries since the beginning of the campaign. Just last month, Amnesty International called on the Pentagon to respond to evidence it gathered surrounding 11 suspected coalition strikes in Syria, which, the group claimed, killed an estimated 300 civilians. Neil Sammonds, Amnesty’s lead Syria researcher, said the Pentagon deserved credit for publishing its civilian casualty data. “It’s not easy to say you killed these civilians,” Sammonds told The Intercept. But he questioned why the Pentagon’s figures were so low. None of the 11 strikes documented by Amnesty investigators, Sammonds said, were addressed by the Pentagon’s release.

Discrepancies between government and independent counts of civilian casualties are not new. Over the past eight years, President Obama’s counterterrorism operations have killed thousands of people across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. At the low end of casualty estimates are the administration’s own figures: roughly 2,400 or so over seven years in Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Pakistan, resulting in a very small number of “non-combatant deaths” — between 64 and 116. External estimates compiled by Micah Zenko (and covering a slightly longer period of time) are far higher — 4,189 militants killed, along with 474 civilians — more than four times as many as the White House estimate.

Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has found that going by the government’s own numbers, U.S. strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are more than 20 times as likely to kill civilians than those in Iraq and Syria. That may have to do with which agency is pulling the trigger. According to an NBC news report from March, only the Pentagon is authorized to use drones to kill ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, with the CIA confined to an intelligence-gathering role. Outside of conventional war zones, where civilian casualty rates appear to be much higher, the CIA has carried out its own strikes.

In July, when it released its estimates on civilian casualties outside of conventional war zones, the Obama administration addressed the issue of discrepancies in compiling such estimates, arguing that it had access to sensitive information NGOs and journalists did not, and making the case that misleading reports of civilian casualties produced by militant groups sometimes made their way into non-government counts.

“We have teams who work full time to prevent unintended civilian casualties,” Central Command spokesperson Col. John J. Thomas said in a statement last week. “We do all we can to minimize those occurrences, even at the cost of sometimes missing the chance to strike valid targets in real time.”

Marty Lederman, a professor at Georgetown Law and former Department of Justice official, said that he hoped the practice of reporting on civilian casualties is continued by the Trump administration. “It’s very valuable,” he said. “A better-informed republic can make better choices about the costs and benefits of war.”

Top photo: A U.S.-led coalition B1-b flies over the Syrian city of Kobane on Nov. 13, 2014, as seen from the Turkish border village of Mursitpinar.

The post Pentagon Civilian Casualty Toll in ISIS War a Fraction of Independent Estimates appeared first on The Intercept.

In a 41-page ruling delivered last Monday, Judge Charles Haight Jr. argued that due to the NYPD’s “systemic inclination” to flout rules governing its surveillance practices, he could not approve a settlement the city had spent more than a year hammering out with civil liberties attorneys.

In lieu of approval, the judge proposed three recommendations to strengthen the role of a proposed civilian representative tasked with providing oversight in certain NYPD investigations. Each suggestion had been proposed during settlement negotiations, lawyers for the plaintiffs said, but were rejected by the city and left out of the final settlement proposal.

“I certainly wasn’t expecting this,” Jethro Eisenstein, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told The Intercept. “From our point of view, we rolled the rock up the hill as far as we could take it.”

Eisenstein described the judge’s ruling as a sign of encouragement. “He’s saying, ‘No, it has to go further.’”

The view from New York City officialdom has been less glowing. In a statement to the press, the city’s legal department said it was “disappointed” with elements of the judge’s decision-making but added that it “will explore ways to address the concerns.”

Judge Haight’s ruling was the final act in a process that began in April in which the public was invited to weigh in on the settlement and the proposed changes to NYPD surveillance practices.

The historic litigation had brought together two separate legal challenges. The ACLU and the CLEAR Project at the City University of New York filed one of the cases in June 2013. The plaintiffs in that case, known as Raza v. the City of New York, included two well-known New York City imams, two mosques, and a Muslim college student whose circle of friends was infiltrated by an NYPD informant.

The second case, Handschu v. the City of New York, is a class-action suit that has served as a civil liberties and public security bellwether for generations. The suit was filed in 1971 in response to years of NYPD surveillance targeting anti-war protesters, the Black Panthers, the ACLU, the NAACP and others. Eisenstein, the lawyer who welcomed the recent decision, was 26 years old when he sat down at his typewriter to draw up the original complaint.

Judge Haight has presided over the Handschu suit for 40 years. He oversaw a settlement in the case in 1985, which laid out guidelines prohibiting any component of the NYPD other than its intelligence division from launching investigations into political activity and requiring that those investigations include evidence of a crime. Eisenstein and his colleagues have served as the suit’s legal guardians since then, reviving the litigation whenever the NYPD fails to follow the guidelines.

Those rules were still in place in 2002, when David Cohen, a former senior CIA officer hired to remake the NYPD’s intelligence division, submitted a document to the court arguing they had become a relic of the past. “In the case of terrorism, to wait for an indication of crime before investigating is to wait for too long,” Cohen wrote.

Acknowledging that the original Handschu rules “addressed different perils in a different time,” Haight agreed to modify the guidelines, eliminating the requirement for specific information indicating a “crime had been or was about to be committed” before launching an investigation, and relaxing rules for deploying undercover officers for intelligence work.

In challenging the fallout from the NYPD’s post-9/11 evolution and Haight’s fateful decision a decade later, the plaintiffs’ attorneys drew evidence from a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories published by the Associated Press revealing how the police department sent undercover officers and informants deep into Muslim neighborhoods, mosques, and student groups in and around New York City, where they would record information on who they saw and what they heard.

The AP stories suggested violations of even the loosened Handschu guidelines and provided a crucial foundation for the attorneys challenging the NYPD’s practices. Building on that information, the 2013 Raza suit was eventually folded into the Handschu case, and after much legal wrangling, the two teams of lawyers went to work negotiating a settlement with attorneys for the city and police department.

Announced in January, the resulting settlement included new limits on the length of NYPD investigations involving surveillance of political activity and a first of its kind stipulation that race, religion, or ethnicity should not serve as a driving force in launching such investigations. The agreement also called for the creation of a committee, made up of 11 senior NYPD officials and one civilian representative, that would review intel investigations on a monthly basis.

When the settlement was put to the public this spring, the reception was decidedly mixed. Lawyers for the plaintiffs and their supporters argued that while the settlement was an imperfect compromise, it was a rare opportunity to impose important restrictions on NYPD surveillance. Those opposed to the deal, including Muslim activists and members of the legal community, countered that the agreement was insufficient. In particular, critics argued that the civilian representative lacked authority to truly hold the police department accountable.

As the implications of the settlement were being debated, a report published in August by the Office of the Inspector General for the NYPD called the department’s adherence to its surveillance guidelines further into question. The report examined a random sampling of intelligence division investigations from 2010 to 2015. In addition to finding that more than 95 percent of those investigated were Muslim “or engaged in political activity that those individuals associated with Islam,” the report concluded that “more than half the time, investigations continued even after approval of the operation expired.”

The combination of community involvement in the hearing process and the IG report appear to have made a major impact on the judge, who called for police oversight beyond what the plaintiffs’ lawyers had agreed to.

In his ruling, Judge Haight wrote the “proposed role and powers of the civilian representative do not furnish sufficient protection from potential violations of the constitutional rights of those law-abiding Muslims and believers in Islam who live, move and have their being in this city.” He suggested ways to strengthen the position, including allowing the civilian representative to bring surveillance concerns to the court directly, without having to approach the police commissioner first about perceived infractions.

The judge also quoted heavily from the IG report, making the case that the NYPD’s respect for the Handschu guidelines has become suspect over the years. Referencing the department’s tendency to keep investigations open beyond approved periods, Haight wrote, “Those failures suggest a systemic inclination on the part of the Intelligence Bureau to disregard the guidelines’ mandates.”

Iman Boukadoum, a board member with the Association of Muslim American Lawyers who was active in community conversations regarding the settlement, said Muslim community members deserve credit for making their voices heard throughout the process. “Grassroots groups from mosques to associations were at the forefront of pushing Judge Haight to reconsider the proposed settlement,” Boukadoum told The Intercept.

Haight’s decision is not without its criticisms. Fahd Ahmed, the executive director of DRUM, an organization that works closely with New York City communities impacted by police surveillance, said even with the judge’s recommendations, the ruling does not address shortcomings in key areas.

“The threshold of unverified allegations to start an investigation and send undercovers and informants into communities and organizations is entirely too low,” Ahmed told The Intercept. “Too much manipulation and fabrication can and does take place once that door is opened.”

If opposing sides in the legal fight over the NYPD’s surveillance practices cannot come to a new agreement, the challenge could go to trial.

“The ball is in the NYPD’s court,” Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept. “Obviously the plaintiffs are going to be quite happy with these additional protections and so it’s really going to be up to the police department.”

Top photo: People hold signs while attending a rally to protest NYPD surveillance tactics near police headquarters in New York on Aug. 28, 2013.

The post Judge Who Approved Expanding NYPD Surveillance of Muslims Now Wants More Oversight appeared first on The Intercept.

In a press release issued Tuesday night, Amnesty said it has presented the Pentagon with evidence that 11 coalition airstrikes in Syria over the past two years appear to have led to the deaths of as many as 300 civilians — and that so far that evidence has been met with silence.

“U.S. authorities have provided no response to a memorandum Amnesty International sent to the Department of Defense on September 28 to raise questions about the conduct of coalition forces in Syria,” the group claimed.

“We fear the U.S.-led coalition is significantly underestimating the harm caused to civilians in its operations in Syria,” Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty’s Beirut regional office, said in a statement. “Analysis of available evidence suggests that in each of these cases, coalition forces failed to take adequate precautions to minimize harm to civilians and damage to civilian objects.”

Maalouf added that some of the strikes in question “may constitute disproportionate or otherwise indiscriminate attacks.”

U.S. Army Maj. Josh T. Jacques said CENTCOM, the component of the U.S. military running the coalition war against the Islamic State, “is aware of the letter from Amnesty International and is currently evaluating the allegations of civilian casualties it contains.”

“The coalition takes great care — from analysis of available intelligence to selection of the appropriate weapon to meet mission requirements — in order to minimize the risk of harm to non-combatants,” Jacques said in an email to The Intercept. “Civilian casualty allegations come from various sources, including our own internal reviews and unit self-reporting, media reports, non-governmental organizations, or other U.S. government departments.”

While the Syrian military and its Russian allies have been responsible for the vast majority of civilian casualties resulting from airstrikes within Syria’s borders, the 27-page memorandum Amnesty sent to the Pentagon last month painted a detailed picture of nearly a dozen incidents in which coalition operations frequently described by U.S. officials as the most careful and precise in the world appear to have gone deeply awry.

“For several incidents, no military objective could be discerned and reports indicate that the only casualties were civilian,” the memo noted. “The loss of civilian life was so high in a few attacks that it is difficult to see how a significant enough military advantage could have been anticipated that would have outweighed the risk to civilians.”

More than a third of the deaths Amnesty catalogued were the result of bloody operations to liberate areas around and in the Syrian city of Manbij from Islamic State control over the summer. While death counts from airstrikes during that offensive varied, Amnesty claims that attacks launched on one village, al-Tukhar, may have resulted in the greatest loss of civilian life in the history of the coalition’s war on ISIS, with 73 civilians — including 27 children — killed, according to evidence Amnesty compiled.

While the U.S. has confirmed that it launched an investigation into the high-profile incidents in Manbij, its broader efforts at investigating alleged civilian casualty incidents in the war on the Islamic State have been repeatedly called into question.

A Defense Department official said that the Pentagon had not yet incorporated Amnesty’s report, but as of October 13, had received 249 allegations of civilian casualties stemming from coalition operations in Syria and Iraq. Of the complaints received, 62 resulted in closed investigations, with 31 conclusions announced publicly — 13 in Syria and 18 in Iraq. The Pentagon deemed 179 of the allegations not credible. In Syria, five investigations remain open. All told, the Pentagon claims that 55 civilians have been killed and 29 injured over two years and thousands of airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

The figures pale in comparison to civilian casualty estimates offered up by human rights organizations and other monitoring groups, which claim that anywhere from 600 to more than 1,000 civilians have died in coalition airstrikes. In the case of the 11 strikes Amnesty examined, the human rights group reported that to date CENTCOM has acknowledged only a single civilian casualty resulting from those operations.

“Based on Amnesty International’s research and analysis, some attacks known or suspected to have been carried out by coalition forces may have violated international humanitarian law,” Amnesty’s memorandum to U.S. officials noted.

The reported failure to follow up on alleged civilian casualties, the group argues, appears to fall short of an executive order issued by President Obama in July, which requires U.S. authorities to investigate when civilians are believed to have died in U.S. counterterrorism operations.

“This is totally contrary to the president’s stated commitments to transparency and accountability on this issue,” said Naureen Shah, director of Amnesty’s Security with Human Rights program. “The Defense Department must acknowledge and investigate these civilian deaths immediately.”

The post Pentagon Ignored Evidence of Civilian Casualties in ISIS Strikes, Human Rights Group Says appeared first on The Intercept.

Submitted just three weeks before thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Mexico City to commemorate the disappearance of 43 college students in 2014, the State Department report made the case that on issues of torture, enforced disappearance (kidnappings implicating government forces), detention, and the investigation of human rights violations, Mexican authorities are improving.

It’s a claim at odds with the conclusions of many experts who track security issues and human rights in Mexico. “All the concerns that were there last year are still with us this year,” Alejandro Hope, a national security expert based in Mexico City, told The Intercept.

Maureen Meyer, director of the Mexico program at the Washington Office on Latin America, agreed. “Nothing has really changed in Mexico, from our point of view, to justify saying there’s progress,” Meyer said, adding that by certain metrics, conditions on the ground in Mexico have actually deteriorated since funding was held back last year.

In an email to The Intercept, State Department spokesperson John Kirby stood by the request for aid. “We concluded the government of Mexico is meeting the criteria stipulated by the law, while recognizing that some serious human rights challenges remain,” Kirby wrote. “The United States remains committed to working with the Mexican government and civil society to support Mexican efforts to protect human rights, strengthen the rule of law, and promote transparency and accountability.”

The money in question comes from the Merida Initiative, an aid package born out of the U.S. government’s support for the drug war in Mexico, which has appropriated $2.3 billion to Mexican law enforcement and the military since 2008. Under U.S. law, 15 percent of Merida funds are subject to certain conditions each year, including that those on the receiving end are at least making an effort not to be human rights abusers.

It falls on the State Department to provide lawmakers with its assessment on whether those conditions are being met. Historically, diplomats in Mexico have submitted so-called “15 percent reports,” a reference to the percentage of aid subject to human rights conditions, in favor of the U.S. government’s drug war allies, despite mountains of evidence that security forces at all levels of the Mexican government are routinely implicated in human rights abuses. The continued U.S. support has caused critics to view the State Department as a rubber-stamping body that would stand by Mexican security forces no matter what.

Last year the State Department declined to endorse the Mexican government’s commitment to human rights for the first time ever and even raised the bar for authorities there on certain human rights conditions. Still, that rare rebuke has been tempered by the longstanding practice of U.S. officials working in Mexico of prioritizing a host of issues ahead of human rights.

“Human rights has never been at the core of the bilateral relationship between Mexico and the U.S.,” said Hope, noting that trade and economic issues, as well as energy and border security, typically take precedence over human rights in bilateral talks. Those issues appear to have taken center stage again, Hope said.

This year’s presidential campaign may also have impacted the White House’s priorities, Hope added. Obama administration diplomats might not “want to make Mexico look bad in the electoral campaign in the U.S., given that Mexico has played such a prominent role in Donald Trump’s campaign,” he said.

By all accounts, the $2.4 million the State Department is now requesting is a drop in the bucket compared to Mexico’s national defense budget. By comparison, over the course of just 100 days in 2013, Mexico purchased $6 million worth of bullets alone from the U.S.

But to focus exclusively on the money the State Department provides misses a broader problem, Meyer said. “From our point of view, there are parts of U.S. assistance that could be beneficial,” she said. “Certainly strengthening Mexico’s judicial system and investigative capacity is important, much more than giving Mexico a bunch of helicopters that are going to be used in the drug war.”

The problem, Meyer argued, is the political message the U.S. sends when it declares that Mexico is making progress on human rights despite copious evidence that it is not. “Regardless of the sensitivities between the two governments, this is not the time, I think, to give the Mexican government a pat on the back in terms of the human rights situation in the country,” she said.

The post Despite Ongoing Abuses, U.S. Seeks to Restore Aid to Mexico’s Security Forces appeared first on The Intercept.

The officers, members of the Richland County Sheriff’s Department tactical team, were descending on a modest one-story house looking for drugs and guns. The team smashed through the windows of the home with iron pikes, then stormed the front door with rifles raised.

Inside, they found a terrified family of four, including an infant. As the family members were pulled outside, Atkinson’s camera captured a scene that plays out with startling regularity in cities and towns across the country, one of many included in his new documentary, “Do Not Resist,” an examination of police militarization in the United States.

The police begin rooting through the trash. “Where the fuck is the weed?” one officer asks, as the team ransacks a car parked in the driveway. “Boy that was sweet,” another says, commenting on the speed of the raid. One officer finds a backpack, which yields a bit of marijuana — it’s not enough to roll a joint, but it’s something.

The officer in charge questions the owner of the backpack, a young African-American man. In a conversation captured on Atkinson’s microphone, the young man, a local community college student, tells the officer he runs a small landscaping business.

Knowing he’s being taken into custody, with his hands cuffed in front of him, he asks the officer for a favor: Can he remove the $876 in his pocket set aside for new lawn-care equipment and give it to one of his employees to go to the hardware store?

Instead of handing the cash to the arrestee’s co-worker, the tactical team seizes the money.

“I never one time said you’re a bad person,” the officer tells the young man before he’s led off. “I just have a job to do, and you happen to be in the middle of it.”

The pernicious practice of civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement to grab cash or property during the course of raids, then requires people to prove the assets were not related to criminal activity in order to get them back — and allows police to keep the assets if they fail to do so — has been well documented.

What’s less common is to see one of those interactions play out on camera. Capturing those kinds of moments is what “Do Not Resist” is all about.

Trailer for “Do Not Resist,” a new documentary examining police militarization in the United States.

Atkinson’s directorial debut has already taken home this year’s prize for best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival and is currently making the rounds in select cities around the country. Radley Balko, author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces,” has called the film “terrifying,” “powerful,” and “important.”

Based on substantial on-the-ground reporting, “Do Not Resist” is both unsettling to watch and necessary to see. The film begins in Ferguson, Missouri, on a rainy night of protest in August 2014 that erupted into a melee of tear gas and screaming. It then quickly moves to a seminar with Dave Grossman, a law enforcement guru who gives trainings on lethal force and the application of a warrior mentality in the name of the law.

“The policeman is the man of the city,” Grossman begins, before explaining that cops he’s spoken to routinely describe their first on-the-job kill as a prelude to the best sex of their lives. “Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex,” Grossman says. “There’s not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it.”

Grossman believes that a violent reckoning between law enforcement and critics of police militarization is fast approaching. “We are at war,” Grossman tells the crowd, “and you are the front-line troops in this war.”

The language reflects a theme that runs throughout “Do Not Resist.”

Atkinson began the project three years ago in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. The images of armored cars and commando cops in the streets resonated for him on a personal level. Atkinson’s father spent 29 years as a police officer outside Detroit — 13 of them on a SWAT team, where he held the rank of commander. Atkinson and his brother would take part in their dad’s training, playing the part of hostages when they were little and mock shooters when they were big enough to handle weapons.

Watching the footage from Boston, it was obvious to Atkinson that something profound had shifted since his dad’s days on the force. He set out to create a film that would capture that shift. The “Do Not Resist” crew attended expos and trade shows, community meetings and federal hearings, training seminars and SWAT contests. All told, the team traveled to 19 states, went on roughly 20 police ride-a-longs, observed half a dozen raids, and interacted with hundreds of police officers.

The hope was to be on-hand for an incident in which a SWAT team’s use of heavy weapons would be unquestionably warranted. “I thought the whole time I would be able to show something that would kind of reflect the entire scope of what a SWAT officer might go through sometimes, where you actually do need the equipment,” Atkinson explained.

Instead, the filmmaker repeatedly found himself watching police with military-grade weaponry executing dubious search warrants. The frequency of the raids was particularly shocking, with one of the officers in the film claiming his team does 200 such operations a year. By comparison, Atkinson notes, his father performed a total of 29 search warrant raids over his entire 13 years in SWAT — according to some estimates, SWAT teams now carry out between 50,000 to 80,000 raids across the country annually.

“The search warrants, we’re told, are always used for massive drug dealers and kingpins, and then we run in these homes and we never found anything,” Atkinson said.

Beyond the day-to-day breaking down of doors, “Do Not Resist” explores the growing role of private surveillance companies in local policing, and law enforcement’s thirst for technology that can predict crimes before they happen.

An analyst inspects video feeds of a wide-scale aerial surveillance system being utilized by local police departments.

Photo: VANISH Films

The film highlights Persistence Surveillance Systems, a company offering low-cost aerial surveillance honed in Fallujah to domestic law enforcement. “We’re not out to watch the whole world, just all the world that’s got crime,” Ross McNutt, the president of the company, insists.

“That’s the next wave in the militarization of police,” Atkinson told The Intercept in an interview. “What we found was a whole slew of retired military officers now in the private sector now selling the exact same surveillance technology that they just got back from Iraq and Afghanistan with to local law enforcement for small money on the dollar.”

The intent of “Do Not Resist,” Atkinson said, is to provide a glimpse inside the realities of American policing, challenge the policing-for-profit model that has caused departments in economically depressed communities to treat their citizens as walking ATM machines, call out a warrior culture that divides law enforcement from the public they’re sworn to serve, and flag the dangers of war-zone technologies being applied domestically.

For the most part, the reaction from law enforcement has been positive, Atkinson said.

“I’ve had a lot of law enforcement really respond well to the film and say that it reflects these issues that a lot of them have been working on themselves,” he said.

As for his father, Atkinson said, watching the film stirs up uncomfortable feelings.

“His major reaction was just disappointment in seeing how far the mission creep had actually gone,” he said. “It’s obviously disappointing to see something that you were dedicating your life to so completely, evolve into something that you would never want to be a part of.”

Top photo: A military surplus armored vehicle, acquired for free by local police departments, tours the streets of Juneau County, Wisconsin.

The post “Do Not Resist”: The Police Militarization Documentary Everyone Should See appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter sent to the White House on Thursday, the groups pressed for investigations into several specific attacks that occurred on the president’s watch. The letter calls for public acknowledgement as well as “prompt, thorough, effective, independent, impartial and transparent investigations” into 10 incidents over the last seven years. A dozen groups signed on, including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

The letter also calls for the methodology of those investigations to be made public, to include “only those redactions necessary to protect information that is properly classified” and to offer clear explanations for any discrepancies that might arise between the government’s conclusions and those reached by outside parties, including NGOs and journalists.

The executive order that Obama signed requires the government to investigate allegations of civilian casualties caused by U.S. operations, then take responsibility when they occur and provide compensation to the family members of victims.

That order was released alongside a report detailing the government’s estimate of civilians killed in airstrikes outside conventional war zones — part of an effort by the Obama administration to present itself, after years of virtually blanket secrecy in these matters of life and death, as setting a tone of transparency for its successors.

In a recent interview with New York magazine, Obama reflected on the dangers of institutionalizing a regime of secretive borderless warfare executed primarily by drones, and claimed that his administration had done much to rein in “institutional comfort and inertia with what looks like a pretty antiseptic way of disposing of enemies.” He insisted that the decision to pull back the program somewhat “had less to do with what the left or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or other organizations were saying and had more to do with me looking at sort of the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up.” But he nonetheless credited “having these nonprofits continue to question and protest” as an influence on reform.

Despite the talk of transparency, the administration still hasn’t responded to many specific, well-documented instances of civilian harm. While estimates vary widely on the total number of civilians killed in Obama-era airstrikes outside conventional war zones — from several hundred to more than 1,000, according the Bureau of Investigative Journalism — the White House has acknowledged just two civilian deaths by name over seven years: those of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, an American and Italian, respectively, who were kidnapped by militants and then mistakenly killed by a CIA drone strike in Pakistan.

“We understand that since that date the U.S. government has agreed to pay compensation to the family of Giovanni Lo Porto,” the rights groups wrote. “These are welcome initiatives that should be followed in a systematic fashion, which the executive order commits to doing.”

The 10 specific incidents listed in the letter all occurred in two countries — Yemen and Pakistan — and, in total, are alleged to have killed roughly 137 civilians. Most of the operations cited have been widely reported, either by human rights organizations, journalists, or both. While most are suspected to be the result of U.S. drone strikes, one of the attacks, launched on December 9, 2009, was the result of a cruise missile strike fired from a U.S. warship. That attack allegedly killed 14 militants and 41 civilians, including 21 women and children.

In July, shortly after the executive order was issued, Amnesty International invoked it in asking the CIA to respond to the death of Mamana Bibi, an elderly woman, in a strike in Pakistan. The CIA never responded.

Asked about the letter, a spokesperson for the National Security Council said, “We are not in a position to speak to specific operations.”

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In the interview, with New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, Obama expressed agreement with one of the most salient critiques of his drone war, that it risks creating “institutional comfort and inertia with what looks like a pretty antiseptic way of disposing of enemies.”

Obama explained that he had looked at “the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you were seeing both DOD and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this.”

He continued: “And it troubled me, because I think you could see, over the horizon, a situation in which, without Congress showing much interest in restraining actions with authorizations that were written really broadly, you end up with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.”

[See update below, in which the White House press secretary says Obama was actually talking about how he felt before he instituted his reforms.]

The president expressed a sense of urgency to rein in these powers that seems particularly appropriate given that both candidates for the White House have indicated receptiveness to intensifying the use of military force abroad, with Donald Trump going so far as expressing openness to killing the families of suspected terrorists.

“By the time I leave here, the American people are going to have a better sense of what their president is doing,” Obama said. “Their president is going to have to be more accountable than he or she otherwise would have been. The world, I think, will have a better sense of what we’re trying to do and what we stand for. And I think all of that will serve the American people well in the future.”

But the one existing transparency measure Obama touts as an example in the interview — the administration’s release of its tally on civilian casualties from drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia — was viewed by many in the human rights community as a farce, largely because it pointed to a death toll far lower than outside observer tallies.

The release, made public on the Friday afternoon of Fourth of July weekend, reported that between 64 and 116 civilians were killed during Obama’s two terms. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, by comparison, has estimated that between 492 and 1,077 civilians have been killed by drone strikes during the eight years of Obama’s presidency.

And critical questions about those operations remain unanswered, such as the circumstances that led to the death of Momina Bibi, a 68-year-old Pakistani grandmother killed in an October 2012 airstrike; or the reason for the attack that took the life of Salim bin Ahmed Ali Jaber, an anti-al Qaeda imam in Yemen a month earlier; or the full story of how American forces came to target a wedding convoy, also in Yemen, a year later, killing 12 people.

Those questions remain unanswered, in part because when the administration released the civilian casualty report, it did so without detailing a single specific incident in which the deaths of civilians were confirmed — thus foreclosing any possibility for follow up or public accountability for those operations. (See The Intercept’s series The Drone Papers describing the secret military documents that exposed the inner workings of Obama’s drone wars.)

What’s more, the alarming changes that Obama describes as over the horizon are already here.

“What’s so interesting is that President Obama acknowledges this problem — that future presidents will be empowered to kill globally, and in secret. What he doesn’t acknowledge is how much of a role his administration had in making that a bizarre normal,” Naureen Shah, director of national security and human rights at Amnesty International, told The Intercept.

“There is something so strange about the person who many would say is very responsible for this situation actually acknowledging it and saying he tried to plan for it,” Shah added. “What we’ll be left with from the Obama administration is a far more dangerous precedent of secret, global killings than what we started with.”

From the very beginning of his presidency, Obama tightly embraced legal arguments, including the “state secrets privilege,” to deflect inquiries into the government’s use of lethal force in foreign countries; he fought vigorously for years to keep his rationale for assassinating an American citizen secret; he never explained how the U.S. came to kill that same American citizen’s 16-year-old son; and he has never once forced his premier intelligence agency to publicly answer for the deaths of non-Western civilians — of which there have been many — during an eight-year covert bombing campaign.

In the New York magazine interview, Obama gave human rights groups and “the left” credit for pushing him on issues of transparency in targeted killing — but at the same time indicated they had little impact on his own decisions.

“I’m glad the left pushes me on this,” Obama said. “I’ve said to my staff and I’ve said to my joint chiefs, I’ve said in the Situation Room: I don’t ever want to get to the point where we’re that comfortable with killing. It’s not why I wanted to be president, to kill people.”

“Do I think that the critiques are fair or fully informed?” the president went on to say. “Not always. Sometimes they are. Much of the time they’re not. To give you the most basic example: People, I think, don’t always recognize the degree to which the civilian-casualty rate, or the rate at which innocents are killed, in these precision strikes is significantly lower than what happens in a conventional war.”

While the Obama administration characterizes drones as a surgically precise weapon, the facts don’t always support that conclusion. In 2013, for example, research by Larry Lewis, a former research scientist at the Center for Naval Analysis, found that drone strikes in Afghanistan were 10 times more likely to kill civilians than piloted airstrikes.

Obama’s critique of Congress — that it doesn’t seem to care enough to rein in the drone program — is both on point and ironic, coming from him. Far from encouraging Congress to weigh in, the Obama administration has actively fought Congress’s attempts to even get basic information about drone strikes. The White House, for instance, refused to show the legal memos authorizing the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki to Congress until 2014, when Obama nominated the memos’ author to become a federal judge, and a group of senators threatened to hold up the confirmation until they could read the memos.

Chris Anders of the American Civil Liberties Union said he was not impressed by Obama’s own sense of restraint. “The president has left behind very broad claims of executive authority to order lethal strikes away from traditional battlefields. Even if he’s instituted some processes, and some minor levels of transparency — such as aggregate levels of casualties — it is still a very broad power with almost no meaningful checks on it.”

Update: 6:15 p.m. ET
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Monday told reporters that Obama’s comments about a future president potentially waging perpetual wars actually referred to a state of affairs in the past, which he has since averted.

“He was talking about the situation he inherited,” Earnest said. “In the early days of the administration, he was considering the tools that had been made available to him, and considering the way in which they were being used, and he was considering how, over the horizon, was a scenario in which there would not be sufficient transparency in place to contain this extraordinary authority that, based on new technology, could be wielded by the president of the United States.”

Earnest insisted that “what the president and his team have steadily worked to do is to try to impose greater transparency and to impose constraints that would address those concerns that the president had from his earliest days in office.”

But rather than wind down a Bush-era program, Obama dramatically escalated the pace of drone warfare, conducting nearly nine times the number of strikes as his predecessor.

Obama’s moves toward increased transparency and accountability are, as mentioned above, limited. And Congress has neither conducted oversight nor passed legislation that would restrain a future president.

And as Obama himself said in the interview, he has not arrived at “a perfect solution.” He told New York magazine that the country still needs to find a balance between “not elevating every terrorist attack into a full-blown war” and “pretending as if we can just take shots wherever we want, whenever we want, and not be answerable to anybody. What I’ve tried to do is to move the needle in the right direction, to set some trends in the right direction. But there’s gonna be a lot more work to do.”

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Precisely how those relationships play out, however, is often shrouded in secrecy.

A recently published audit by the Department of Justice has now offered a startling glimpse behind the scenes of those operations, revealing a world in which hundreds of millions of dollars have been doled out to thousands of informants over the last five years. Those informants include package delivery personnel, bus company employees, and Transportation Security Administration agents moonlighting as drug war spies — all operating with abysmal oversight and scant evidence of return on investment.

Published Thursday by the DOJ’s Inspector General, the audit reports that from 2010 to 2015, the DEA boasted more than “18,000 active confidential sources assigned to its domestic offices, with over 9,000 of those sources receiving approximately $237 million in payments for information or services they provided.” By comparison, the FBI is said to maintain a roster of some 15,000 informants.

Exactly how useful the DEA’s sources are is unclear — even, apparently, to the DEA itself.

“Because DEA’s files do not detail the universe of information provided by its sources, it is unable to examine their reliability and whether they frequently or rarely provide useful information, or whether the information DEA agents acted upon resulted in identifying individuals involved in illegal activity or instead caused DEA to regularly approach innocent civilians for questioning,” the audit noted.

“We are deeply concerned about this inability to assess source reliability, which seriously impairs DEA’s ability to oversee and manage the activity of these sources and the Confidential Source Program overall.”

Built on 50 interviews with DEA and DOJ officials, the report examined data from nine field site locations, as well as the agency’s Office of Special Intelligence and its Special Operations Division.

So-called limited-use informants, the audit found, are among the highest earners in the DEA’s ecosystem of sources, with 477 such informants earning an estimated $26.8 million during the period the DOJ examined — an average of about $56,000 per source.

Ostensibly, limited-use sources are “tipsters” who require the lowest level of supervision and operate independent of law enforcement direction. In reality, the DOJ reports, these sources have frequently worked hand in hand with the DEA, often for many years, sometimes for decades, unbeknownst to their employers. Many are cultivated by DEA interdiction units, which typically target “employees in the travel and parcel industries with access to passenger information or private facilities,” who are then “paid to conduct searches on proprietary databases, or access packages shipped through private companies, to provide traveler and package information to the DEA to assist in interdiction activities.”

The audit identified at least 33 DEA sources working at Amtrak, including train attendants and ticket agents, who collectively were paid more than $1.4 million over four years. On a daily basis, these sources would provide the DEA with printouts of passenger manifests and other information, allowing special agents to conduct background checks or brief interviews based on that information. In reviewing the DEA’s relationship to its well-paid Amtrak sources, the DOJ determined the information the sources dug up could have been provided by Amtrak authorities to the DEA at no cost to the federal government — DEA officials claimed that going through the proper channels to obtain the information was too time consuming. In one case, the DOJ identified an Amtrak employee who had worked as a DEA informant for 20 years, earning $962,615 for providing information.

In a statement to The Intercept, Amtrak said it “participates in a joint task force with the DEA to share intelligence about suspected criminal behavior … at no cost to the federal government.”

“The DEA violated federal regulations by selectively approaching and paying Amtrak employees for information that the DEA would have received for free,” the company said of the DOJ audit. “Amtrak does not tolerate fraud, waste, abuse or any behavior inconsistent with our company values and standards of conduct. Our employees are expressly prohibited from sharing information for personal gain.”

The DOJ also found at least eight TSA employees who had secretly worked as DEA informants, marking the extension of a practice the Inspector General had first flagged as a problem earlier this year. Security screeners were used to “identify and provide the DEA with information pertaining to suspicious passengers carrying large sums of money that were identified during the course of the sources’ TSA duties,” the audit noted. “The OIG’s investigation found that registering a TSA security screener as a confidential source violated DEA policy, which precludes registering as a confidential source ‘employees of U.S. law enforcement agencies who are working solely in their official capacity with DEA.’”

DEA informants were also found working in the commercial airline industry — “because they had access to corporate airline databases containing detailed passenger information” — and for private intercity bus companies. In particular, the DOJ focused on DEA informants in the parcel and packing industry, noting that these sources were attractive to the agency “because they had access to company databases, access to parcels en route, or authority to administratively open parcels without a search warrant, which increases the potential for identifying suspicious parcels.”

In one case, the DOJ found a parcel company employee who had worked for the DEA for 12 years, earning more than $1 million. Over the course of the source’s secret employment for the agency, the individual intercepted more than 180 parcels, which were regularly forwarded on to the DEA. No drugs were ever found.

The DOJ cited numerous problems with DEA’s limited-use sources, including the agency’s payment to other government or quasi-government employees to act as its eyes and ears outside the official structures of intergovernmental cooperation. In addition to raising the prospect of widespread Fourth Amendment violations, the audit noted that in the case of the TSA, employees are already required by law to share information of suspected criminal activity with law enforcement, “therefore the DEA agreed to pay for information that the screener was already obligated to provide.”

The TSA did not respond to a request for comment.

The audit also describes tens of millions of dollars paid to hundreds of sources whose status was “deactivated” by the DEA, meaning their relationship to law enforcement was meant to be cut off because they had an arrest warrant or had committed a serious offense. In one case, a source who was deactivated for providing false testimony in trials and depositions was reactivated by senior DEA officials, earning more than $400,000 over five years before being terminated again for providing false statements to a prosecutor.

While the DEA’s secretive Intelligence Division was unable to provide a list of its payments to sources, the IG’s office estimated that “during the five-year period of our review, the Intelligence Division paid more than $30 million to sources who provided narcotics-related intelligence and contributed to law enforcement operations, $25 million of which went to just nine sources.”

“The report is certainly pretty damning,” said Sean Dunagan, a former DEA intelligence analyst, in an email to The Intercept. Dunagan, who is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization seeking to end the war on drugs, highlighted the audit’s focus on the DEA’s use of so-called sub-sources — essentially informants working under other known DEA informants — as a major area of concern.

According to the audit, “The DEA has no controls, policies, or procedures for interactions with these ‘sub-sources.’” Though his work was focused abroad, in Mexico, Dunagan said, “The use of sub-sources is very sketchy” and offers the DEA “a workaround that leaves no room for oversight.”

Reacting to the DOJ’s findings, Michael German, a fellow at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, told The Intercept, “If the policies around domestic sources are this loose, I’d be very concerned about what’s happening overseas.” (While the IG audit was limited to the DEA’s domestic operations, the agency indeed maintains a significant presence abroad, often working closely with other members of the intelligence community on secretive programs and initiatives — in 2014, The Intercept revealed the DEA’s involvement in a sweeping top-secret NSA program aimed at collecting the content of every cellphone call made in the Bahamas.)

German, who spent 16 years in federal law enforcement, including as an undercover special agent with the FBI, said he found it “surprising to see a report like this in 2016″ given the instances of federal agencies coming under criticism for their use of informants in recent years. “So many other agencies have been through such public criticism over those activities you’d think [the DEA] would have curbed that long before this IG report came out.”

The DEA did not respond to a request for comment.

Update: September 30, 2016
This story has been updated to include comment from Amtrak.

Top photo: A Drug Enforcement Administration agent’s badge is pictured on July 22, 2009, in Houston, Texas.

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