Tag: news

America’s immigration detention system was a travesty before the coronavirus outbreak. But now it has also become dangerous, not just to the health of those in it but also those on the outside. It’s way past time to release the detainees and dismantle this awful edifice.

One does not need a degree in epidemiology to understand that the cramped and unhygienic living conditions in the 22 detention camps and hundreds of county jails used by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are fertile breeding grounds for the virus. ICE isn’t known for transparency—it took a whole year to report a 2018 mumps outbreak—but it is already reporting that nearly 1,600 of its inmates have contracted the coronavirus, compared to 287 on April 23. Last month, COVID-19 cases in Texas’ 10 detention centers quadrupled in two weeks.

Thanks to its grossly inadequate capacity, ICE has tested less than 8 percent of its 35,000 or so inmate population—but close to 50 percent of those tested have come back positive. A few detainees have already died from the coronavirus, and the actual death count might be higher, according to the University of Denver criminal immigration law expert César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández. Why? Because the agency might be releasing those with symptoms so that they die at home instead of on its watch.

All of this is causing unrest among the detainees. Hunger strikes are raging in several ICE centers. In the Farmville detention center, about 160 miles southwest of D.C., hundreds went on strike during the initial weeks of the pandemic.

The conditions in the camps are straight out of Orange is the New Black. In Louisiana’s LaSalle facility, 80 people are crammed into dorms lined with bunk beds. They have six toilets, three showers, one microwave and eight sinks between them. They even have to fight over bars of soap. And in those in repurposed county jails, the situation tends to be even worse.

Social distancing is impossible. Detainees have complained to investigators from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) that ICE does not even provide them safety information or adequate disinfecting supplies. LaSalle guards don’t always make it a point to wear protective gear inside the facilities. And when the detainees protested, POGO reports, they were met with pepper spray. Unsurprisingly, days after POGO published its report, scores of inmates tested positive for the virus. The families of two guards—not ICE itself, mind you—revelaed that they died from the virus.

ICE says it has made adequate arrangements to protect those in its care. But what does that mean? In New Jersey’s Hudson County Correctional facility and elsewhere, coronavirus positive detainees get quarantined and everyone else gets locked up in their cells for 23 hours a day, apparently to reduce the amount of communal time. Detention centers have completely stopped all visits by family members, and some segregate immigrants in separate floors, depending upon whether they have been exposed to someone who has tested positive. But that doesn’t protect them from non-quarantined ICE staffers who go home every evening. Worse, detainees told POGO that ICE routinely ignores people presenting symptoms and doesn’t provide timely medical care, leading sometimes to horrific situations.

And ICE stonewalls family members when their loved ones fall sick, hiding behind privacy laws. ICE would not even tell the family of a coronavirus-positive detainee at its Otay Mesa facility, one of the worst hit, whether he was alive, let alone what kind of care he was receiving. He was suffering from pulmonary embolism, ulcers, and a hernia yet ICE was refusing to release him. “They treat them like animals,” wailed his mom.

That particular prisoner, Noe Perez, 41, was awaiting deportation because, evidently, serving a 22-year prison sentence for assault with a firearm as a teenager wasn’t enough. That sort of record is far from the norm: As the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University points out, most civil immigrant ICE detainees do not have a single criminal conviction. In March 2020, in fact, 61.2 percent of the detainees had no conviction, not even for a minor petty offense. Even among immigrant detainees who do have a conviction, few are for the sorts of serious crimes that pose a threat to public safety. As of July 2019, just one in 10 detainees—less than 6,000 detainees nationwide—had a serious criminal conviction on record. That’s a five-year low.

That’s not surprising, given that the Trump administration scrapped the late-Obama-era policy of apprehending only serious criminals during interior roundups. It also started locking up asylum seekers rather than releasing them while their application is considered, even if they had passed an initial screening showing they had a “credible fear” of persecution or harm back home.

All of this has caused the detained population to explode. At its peak last July, Garcia Hernandez’s data shows, 55,654 immigrants were in detention—an all-time high—even though Congress had previously appropriated funds only for around 39,000. To confine the extra population, the Trump administration repurposed funds from elsewhere in the Department of Homeland Security.

Nothing in the law actually mandates that these folks be kept under lock and key. It’s an administrative policy choice meant to advance Trump’s harsh anti-immigration agenda. There is little risk to public safety from releasing asylum seekers. And few of them would want to abscond before their final hearing, since they don’t want to give up their shot of living in the country legally. If the government is really worried that they will, it could keep an eye on them much less invasively—and, in the the age of coronavirus, much more safely—by fitting them with electronic ankle bracelets.

After the pandemic erupted, the detained population has shrunk by about a third. Some of that might be attributed to fewer interior roundups. But the bigger and more perverse reason for the reduction, according to Garcia Hernandez, is that the administration has been using the coronavirus as an excuse to illegally turn away asylum seekers without any due process, even unaccompanied minors. It recently even tried to reinvent its notorious child separation policy by offering migrant parents the choice of abandoning their asylum petitions and accepting deportation in exchange for letting their kids get out of detention and remain in America. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority declined.

Migrant rights outfits have filed close to 50 lawsuits and secured the release of a few hundred medically vulnerable detainees, arguing among other things that consigning them to illness and death for these immigration infractions violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Yet when Attorney General Bob Barr ordered federal prisons to “immediately maximize” the release of prisoners to home confinement to prevent the spread of the virus, he demanded no systematic review of the imprisoned immigrants. Even as federal prisons release Americans who committed real crimes, immigrants who committed no crime are likely to remain locked up.

But individual ICE facilities don’t need permission from the top to release immigrants. They have total discretion to “parole” anyone not subject to mandatory detention—that is, the majority  of those in their custody given that they are in for civil not criminal violations.

They should do that. And Congress should defund a detention program whose only purpose is to terrorize peaceful immigrants looking for jobs or safety in America—along with creating more expansive guest worker and asylum programs, so that no one has to live here illegally. And the undocumented immigrants already in the country should get legal status pronto, ending the draconian interior roundups that are breaking up and traumatizing Latino communities. The small subset of criminally inclined intercepted at the border or picked up in America can be held in other venues until they are deported.

This is not just a matter of returning some humanity and fairness to America’s immigration system. It’s a matter of protecting general public health. Many of these detention centers are located in rural areas with rudimentary medical facilities that struggle to meet basic health care needs even in normal times. It won’t take much to overwhelm them, or for secondary outbreaks to ricochet through their communities.

The pandemic has thrown the hidden dangers of America’s institutions of mass incarceration into sharp relief. These institutions are particularly tragic when they are used to lock up peaceful people whose only crime is to search for a better life for themselves—and to provide one for Americans. These detention facilities had no good reason to exist before the coronavirus. They have even less now.

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The country’s local lockdown orders are slowly easing up, but in an often arbitrary manner.

Take Contra Costa County, California. On June 2, the Bay Area county’s Health Services department issued an updated shelter-in-place order that limited outdoor social gatherings to 12 people from the same “social bubble” but rescinded a mass gathering ban to allow for political protests of up to 100 people. This version of the order maintained a prohibition on outdoor religious gatherings.

“I know there’s a lot of frustration out there, but it’s important to keep in mind that interventions like social distancing have saved lives,” said Chris Farnitano, the county’s health officer, in a press release.

A subsequent order issued Friday allows for outdoor religious services and cultural ceremonies of up to 100 people. As with protests, these services and ceremonies are expected to maintain physical distancing between participants. Unlike protests, the organizers of worship services and cultural ceremonies have to keep a list of attendees for up to 14 days.

Yet Friday’s order still restricts social gatherings to 12-person social bubbles. These bubbles are defined as a stable group of 12 people that are part of either a Household Support Unit, a Childcare Unit, or a Children’s Extracurricular Activity Unit. All three types of units have separate definitions laid out in the health order’s appendix.

These 12-person social bubbles are not required to abide by social distancing requirements, but bubble members over the age of 12 are still encouraged to maintain six feet of physical distance from each other and to wear face coverings.

Outdoor dining is now also permitted in Friday’s order, although that too comes with a number of social distancing guidelines.

All this falls within state guidelines. On May 25, California allowed counties to permit in-person protests, funerals, and religious services (inside and out) of up to 100 people. It’s still up to county health departments to implement these guidelines. Contra Costa County has lifted its restriction on protests and religious services, but it still maintains a prohibition on funeral services of more than 10 people.

The county’s reopening schedule, and the voluminous details that accompany it, are rather arbitrary and not particularly realistic. It doesn’t make much sense from a public health perspective to ban outdoor gatherings of a 13-person “social bubble” while allowing a crowd of 100 strangers. It’s true the latter has to comply with social distancing requirements, but anyone who’s been to a protest knows that that’s not always going to happen.

One could argue that political protests and religious services raise particular First Amendment concerns and therefore can’t be held to the same strict guidelines as other activities. But if that’s the case, the county might as well just ditch all its restrictions, given that people are going to go to protests of a bunch of strangers and then go interact with their social bubble.

I think county officials are also overestimating their ability to set the parameters of people’s social interaction. It’s doubtful many in Contra Costa are going to read through a 17-page public health order and its six separate appendices to figure what exactly is allowed at their barbeque.

At least the arbitrariness of the county’s reopening schedule doesn’t appear to be politicized in the way a lot of public health discourse has recently. Both New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy have said explicitly that violating mass gathering bans is OK if the gatherings are to protest police violence and racism. That’s a position apparently held by a number of public health officials too.

Yet the more distinctions and caveats public health officials and politicians add to their stay-at-home orders, the less credibility they have, and the less they’ll likely be listened to by a public that is ready to get back to some sort of pre-pandemic normality.

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James Bennet resigned as editorial page editor of The New York Times on Sunday, following a successful campaign by irate staffers to oust the person who published an inflammatory op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) that suggested the government deploy federal troops to “restore order in our streets.”

“Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years,” Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said in a note to the paper’s staff. “Both of us concluded that James would not be able to lead the team through the next leg of change that is required.”

This development is remarkable for several reasons. First, Bennet was widely expected to be a frontrunner for the Times‘ top job, executive editor, when current chief Dean Baquet retires. His sudden fall from grace opens up unexpected opportunities for others.

But more importantly, Bennet’s resignation was an instructive show of force from those Times staffers who want the paper to be more transparently progressive. Their successful strategy—describe their opposition to someone else’s speech as a matter of personal safety—is straight out of the woke left’s playbook. Dismayingly, we should expect to see this tactic deployed more frequently in the future.

Cotton’s op-ed was poorly argued, constitutional unsound, morally questionable, and factually flawed. But Cotton is not some random right-wing kook. The fact that he is a key policymaker of the Trump era, might suggest that publishing his authoritarian dictates is a better course of action than keeping Times readers in the dark about them.

A cadre of staffers reacted with apoplectic rage that the paper would dare solicit Cotton’s opinion on such a sensitive topic. “As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this,” said Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Times reporter who has also been credibly accused of making factual errors, though don’t expect any walkouts at the Times over it.

Vox‘s explanation of the Cotton clash, which quotes several anti-Bennet staffers anonymously—their names redacted “for fear of retaliation,” an amusingly mixed-up concern—paints the issue as one of Times reporters growing increasingly frustrated. They were frustrated with Bennet, and with opinion page writers Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss, whose columns are generally conservative, contrarian, or otherwise at odds with the paper’s left-leaning staff. (For what it’s worth, I’ve criticized Stephens but find Weiss genuinely insightful and interesting.) Some of their frustrations are understandable, if not entirely defensible: News reporters are generally discouraged—or even prohibited outright—from expressing their opinions on social media, which might put some in the position of feeling like they can’t publicly dissent from opinion pieces published under their own banner. Vox claims that some Times reporters are losing stories because sources won’t talk to them after the Cotton op-ed, though it’s hard to put blind trust in anonymous claims.

In any case, Times staffers merely denouncing the op-ed would have been one thing. The op-ed deserves denunciation, so it would be hard to argue that they were wrong to do so, considerations about keeping news and opinion separate notwithstanding.

But here’s the key aspect of this affair: The progressive group didn’t just say that the op-ed was wrong and shouldn’t have been published. They stated directly that publishing it undermined their personal safety. Their choice of phrasing was deliberate—part of an effort to gird their opposition to the op-ed in the language of workplace safety, according to a piece by Times media columnist Ben Smith:

That pattern continued last week, as Times staff members began an extraordinary campaign to publicly denounce the Op-Ed article written by Senator Cotton. Members of an internal group called Black@NYT organized the effort in a new Slack channel and agreed on a carefully drafted response. They would say that Mr. Cotton’s column “endangered” black staff members, a choice of words intended to “focus on the work” and “avoid being construed as hyperpartisan,” one said. On Wednesday evening around 7:30, hours after the column was posted, Times employees began tweeting a screenshot of Mr. Cotton’s essay, most with some version of the sentence: “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.” The NewsGuild of New York, later advised staff members that that formulation was legally protected speech because it focused on workplace safety. “It wasn’t just an opinion, it felt violent—it was a call to action that could hurt people,” one union activist said of Mr. Cotton’s column.

This is quite obviously nonsense: Cotton’s words placed no one in imminent danger. Sadly, it’s becoming distressingly common for progressive employees who wish to silence a dissident view to cite workplace safety as a pretext. To take just one example, this was how conservative writer Kevin Williamson got fired from The Atlantic.

This is a disturbing trend that ought to concern everyone—liberals included. It’s an insult to actual workplace safety issues, for one thing. For another, it makes the office a dangerous place to express a potentially unpopular opinion. Journalistic institutions shouldn’t live in fear of difficult conversations, or of provoking offense. But the necessary consequence of this new regime of safetyism will be everybody walking on eggshells.

My book Panic Attack contains countless other examples of woke young people weaponizing ever-expanding definitions of safety against people who disagree with them. In the book’s closing pages, I observed that they’d been able to “hijack existing, well-intentioned harassment law in order to make campuses more repressive places. It’s not impossible to imagine the same thing happening in the work place.” Not impossible at all: It’s happening before our very eyes.

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Members of the Minneapolis City Council say they will stop funding local police. On Sunday, a majority of council members pledged support to disbanding the city’s entire police department.

“Nine of the council’s 12 members appeared with activists at a rally in a city park Sunday afternoon and vowed to end policing as the city currently knows it,” the AP reports. One council member, Jeremiah Ellison, said the council would “dismantle” the Minneapolis Police Department.

Council President Lisa Bender said the aim was “to end policing as we know it and recreate systems that actually keep us safe.”

No formal moves have been made, so it remains to be seen whether this is anything more than empty words from Minneapolis city leaders. (For now, the state of Minnesota has opened a civil rights investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department in response to the killing of George Floyd.) Cities have disbanded their entire police departments before, as the AP points out:

In 2012, with crime rampant in Camden, New Jersey, the city disbanded its police department and replaced it with a new force that covered Camden County. Compton, California, took the same step in 2000, shifting its policing to Los Angeles County.

It was a step that then-Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department was considering for Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown. The city eventually reached an agreement short of that but one that required massive reforms overseen by a court-appointed mediator.

Of course, if you replace a particular police department or units with a similar structure, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get much different results.

The city of Columbus, Ohio, disbanded a portion of its police unit—the violence-, scandal-, and FBI-investigation-besotted vice squad—back in 2019, with promises to orient efforts around more community-minded actions. But Columbus city cops were doing the same old vice policing under different branding not long thereafter. Indeed, the city didn’t even give it a rest during the brief pause: It simply relied on county cops or federal agents to do things like prostitution stings.

Defunding law enforcement has become a big rallying cry in recent protests against police brutality and the state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Americans. This has not just law-and-order conservatives but a lot of centrists somewhat freaked out.

Hey conservatives those police you don't want to defund are the same ones who ticketed you at church recently in case you forgot.

— Austin Open The Economy Petersen (@AP4Liberty) June 8, 2020

It’s a slogan, you guys. It’s short and easy to write on signs. It’s also somehow broad enough to accommodate a range of intentions—to be meant quite literally by some and by others as light hyperbole in the way of protest slogans immemorial. It’s become shorthand for proposals all the way from total police and prison abolition to reforms like curtailing federal funds for local police, ending the provision of military gear, or simply cutting police budgets. Despite the big talk from Minneapolis officials right now, a full-fledged defunding of the police is an idea with little chance of actually taking hold anytime soon. It’s the kind of ask you start with to move the Overton window on potential reforms.

Some on the side of police reform have been expressing well-intentioned worries that “defund the police” rhetoric will discredit protesters or scare off moderate supporters. Perhaps. But it seems to me that just about anything protesters do draws consternation from certain quarters and will be sensationalized in the press no matter what. When reformers admonish people for calls to cut police budgets, they’re doing the work of those they’re supposed to be working against.

I think it’s ultimately futile to spend time fretting about how relatively mild rhetoric like defund the police will play out politically, and that it distracts from more productive discussion. Instead of simply writing off the line as politically toxic, perhaps it would be more useful to try and demystify and deradicalize the idea of cutting police budgets. Two good places to start: looking at how such efforts played out in the past, and stressing which parts of police budgets are most ripe for defunding.

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QUICK HITS

• On Friday, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan promised that police would refrain from tear gassing protesters for at least 30 days. Here’s how that worked out:

Literally *yesterday* Seattle's mayor and police chief said they would ban the use of tear gas for 30 days. See how good their word is? https://t.co/RZsWJ3a34z

— Heather Alexandra (@transgamerthink) June 7, 2020

• In Washington, D.C., thousands of people gathered for a peaceful protest march around Capitol Hill, the National Mall, and the White House on Saturday.

• Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), allegedly on Joe Biden’s short list for vice presidential picks, is one of the top Congressional recipients of police union money:

Top congressional recipients of police union donations:

House:
Bill Pascrell (D-NJ): $43,160
Steny Hoyer (D-MD): $35,500

Senate:
Patrick Leahy (D-VT): $21,250
Amy Klobuchar (D-MN): $15,000https://t.co/GBFmsLzQcm pic.twitter.com/PMYTOxjjym

— Thaddeus Russell (@ThaddeusRussell) June 8, 2020

• Expect these seven Supreme Court decisions in the next few weeks.

• The U.S. Marine Corps just banned public displays of the Confederate flag.

• Florida’s schools have become a high-stakes experiment in classroom policing.

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The tumult over needed police reform reminded me of an idea I had a long time ago, but never wrote up. It’s a preliminary sketch of a framework for discussion, I don’t claim to have a detailed proposal that would answer all the questions the proposal raises.

Here goes: In a big city like New York, why not divide the police department into, say, five separate operating units, run by separate private companies under contract with the city (with the officers still officers of the state). Judge them annually via an independent consulting firm on various measures, like crime rates, crimes solved, complaints of misbehavior, etc. The company that performs best each year gets to extend its jurisdiction by, say, 5%, the worst performing company loses five percent. Over time, the best company patrols more and more of the city, the worst less and less. Maybe the latter eventually disappears; maybe it improves. The key, though, where unlike today police departments are primarily beholden to political bosses and union leaders, the folks running the operating units would be accountable to objective standards of performance.

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