This month, Ohio reproductive freedom advocates delivered 42 boxes of petitions — over 700,000 signatures — to state officials to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot. The proposed amendment guarantees every individual the right “to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion,” until fetal viability. It also prohibits the state from interfering with or penalizing “a person or entity that assists an individual exercising this right.” Both clauses contain exceptions for medical necessity. And neither limits these rights to adults.

Protect Women Ohio, an anti-abortion coalition that includes Ohio Right to Life and the Center for Christian Virtue, calls the proposal an “extreme anti-parent amendment” that will “permit minors to undergo sex change operations without their parents’ knowledge or consent and allow painful abortion on demand through all nine months.” A video in PWO’s multimillion-dollar ad campaign opens with a shot of a troubled-looking white girl. “Your daughter is young, vulnerable, online,” it begins. She could be “pushed to change her sex or get an abortion” and “you” — the parent — “could be cut out of the biggest decision of her life.” The Republican-dominated Ohio legislature has done everything it can to head off the reproductive freedom initiative, including calling a special election on a measure that would make it harder to amend the constitution.

In fact, the Ohio ballot initiative does not allow abortion up to the day of birth, and it does not mention trans care. Still, the opponents’ characterization is not entirely wrong. By recognizing a right — a fundamental, universal right — to reproductive autonomy, initiatives like Ohio’s do rein in the prerogative of parents, particularly hostile ones, to control their children’s decisions. The demotion of parental prerogative implies the assertion of young people’s bodily autonomy. And if youth have autonomy in reproductive matters, it follows that they are free to do other things with their bodies, such as bring their genders into concordance with how they feel. Blue-state politics have conformed to this logic. All the states that have safeguarded reproductive rights legislatively or constitutionally have also passed laws protecting LGBTQ+ youth.

That any lawmakers are venturing to eliminate the age of consent for abortion or gender-affirming care is a radical, and welcome, development. It’s unlikely they would have had the courage absent the abortion crisis created by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the trans panic manufactured by Ron DeSantis & Co.

In the ensuing legislative battles, both sides are charging the other with illogic or hypocrisy — or, as the Heritage Foundation put it , “utter madness” — regarding child welfare. But to focus on inconsistency is to miss the coherent worldviews the policies embody. These worldviews suggest answers to the more important questions: How do we balance children’s health with their bodily autonomy? How do we reconcile child protection with children’s rights?

When Maine Democrats approved a bill that permits trans minors to get treatment without parental consent, Republicans cried hypocrisy: The state requires parental permission to use a tanning bed or get a tattoo. Why not these “potentially life-changing decisions”?

Washington Senate Republican Leader John Braun released a statement with a similar message during debate over Senate Bill 5599 , enacted this year to provide sanctuary and confidential gender-affirming care to homeless trans kids estranged from their parents. “Right now, [Democrats] are sponsoring a juvenile offender sentencing bill based on ‘the expansive body of scientific research on brain development, which shows that adolescents’ perception, judgment, and decision-making skills differs significantly from that of adults,’” he wrote. “It’s revealing how brain research matters to them when juveniles break the law, but not when they seek life-altering, potentially irreversible health care.” * Braun added that S.B. 5599 would “cause harm by driving a wedge between vulnerable kids and their parents.” As if the wedge had not already been driven.

The left can point a finger too. In Iowa, the governor signed a “fetal heartbeat” law protecting 6-week-old embryos and a law prohibiting “gender transition procedures” for minors. During the same session, a bill supported by multiple industry associations was introduced to lift restrictions on 14- and 15-year-olds working in meat coolers, industrial laundries, and factories. Arkansas passed one law requiring parental consent for “gender transition” and another eliminating parental permission for work.

Oregon’s Republican state representatives walked out for six weeks , preventing the quorum necessary to pass bills, over two Democratic proposals. House Bill 2002 guaranteed “every individual” — not every adult — “a fundamental right to make decisions about [their] reproductive health.” In that spirit, it eliminated parental consent for abortion at any age. The Republicans’ other bête noire was H.B. 2005, which, among other things, raised the age to buy a firearm from 18 to 21.

To end the impasse, the Democrats amended H.B. 2002 to stipulate that before prescribing abortion pills or performing a termination on a minor under 15, a health care provider had to get the approval of a second provider (there’s still no parental consent for anyone). The legislators also dropped the age requirement in the gun safety bill, scaling it back only to ban “ghost guns.” Both bills passed.

The Republicans were morally hypocritical — or bankrupt. As long as “Second Amendment rights” were secure, these child-savers were apparently OK risking first-graders being mowed down by mass shooters, most of whom are men under 21. But the Democrats didn’t exactly stick to their principles either. As parental surrogates, health care professionals are presumably less biased than the old white guys who’ve been dictating pregnant minors’ fate in judicial-bypass states. The second-provider rule might be excused as medically prudent or practically inconsequential. But it’s neither.

The regulation is what abortion advocates litigate against as TRAP laws: targeted restrictions on abortion providers. TRAP laws have nothing to do with protecting the patient and everything to do with harassing the provider — and, by extension, the patient . Dems claim to uphold the fundamental right of bodily autonomy. But they’re not averse to negotiating bits of it away when the body in question is under a certain age.

When it comes to getting legislation passed, it’s hard to avoid appearing like a hypocrite. But if you look more closely at the proposals from each side, a cohesive worldview begins to take shape.

The left’s efforts to expand reproductive autonomy and trans rights while restricting youth incarceration represent a libertarian progressive worldview: promoting freedom and opposing punishment. Policies like parental permission for tattoos, meanwhile, represent the sort of busybody statism the right legitimately derides — and liberals should desist from.

On the right, repressive “child protective” statutes controlling everything from drag performance s to lessons about slavery would seem at odds with the deregulation of child labor. But as the feminist legal scholar Nan Hunter forcefully argues in The Nation , the two are interlocking elements of an anti-democratic, kleptocratic “new confederacy,” which could soon govern 140 million Americans. A third of the 24 states that have passed the worst anti-trans laws are also among the most boldly gerrymandered, she notes. “Parental rights” is shorthand for the attack on public schools , which is part of a concerted transfer of public money into private, often religious, hands. Anti-abortion, anti-trans, and “don’t say gay” laws and their vigilante enforcement mechanisms smuggle in “new surveillance techniques in local jurisdictions.” Retaliation against teachers’ unions for defending their own and students’ speech rights undermines unions, destroying the most reliable institution of workers’ economic advancement and hastening the upward distribution of wealth. “It is urgent to defeat extremist legislation,” Hunter concludes. “But it is no less urgent to build a longer-term political framework that fully integrates sexuality and gender issues with efforts to redistribute wealth downward, reversing the trickle-up effects of a half-century of neoliberal policies.”

In truth, everybody, including those who most cynically use children as political props, wants to protect children. From what, by whom, and by what means — there lies the rub. For conservatives, children need protection, but they don’t have rights; “parental rights” are paramount (except if the parents support their queer kids, don’t worship a Christian god, or are otherwise “woke”). Liberals and progressives proclaim the rights of the child. But while they want to protect children’s safety, they are ambivalent about defending children’s rights.

Democrats are not unanimous on the issue of parental notification for medical care. Like Oregon’s second-provider workaround for abortion, the Maine statute now allows trans kids to get treatment without notifying their parents or guardians but empowers medicine as the gatekeeper in their stead. Along with fearing harm from unsupportive parents, the minor must be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and undergo psychological counseling. Adults seeking gender-affirming care in Maine do not have to check these boxes.

And even while progressives grapple with the extent of minors’ right to bodily autonomy for abortion or trans care, there’s one bodily function that’s off limits: Nobody but nobody will risk political capital lowering the age of consent for sex. The result is ridiculous. In many states, a person legally exercising their right to end a pregnancy has broken the law getting pregnant. In Washington, where you can have an abortion at 15 without parental notification, the age of consent for sex is 16. In Oregon, where the age of sexual consent is 18, 15-year-olds can choose to be sterilized.

Roe did not predicate the constitutional right to abortion on the age of the pregnant person. The 14th Amendment — the one that should have undergirded Roe — guarantees equal protection under law to all persons, not all persons over the age of 12, 15, or 18. Bodily autonomy is a universal human right. It belongs to everyone.

Injustice to children often opens the door to injustice to adults.

Practically speaking, most things that are unhealthy for children are also unhealthy for adults. If tanning beds cause skin cancer, they should be outlawed to protect public, not just children’s, health. What is unjust for adults is also unjust for children, and injustice to children often opens the door to injustice to adults. Minors were the first — along with people dependent on government-funded medical care — to lose the rights won in Roe. Once parental consent was adopted around the country, other restrictions more easily followed suit. Recently, attacks on trans students and student athletes — couched as parental rights to protect their own kids — have metastasized into bans on gender-affirming care for all minors, and then for trans adults too . And, just as after Roe, a common instrument of restriction is the denial of Medicaid coverage for treatment.

But universality is an ideal, which resides in the real. Just as equity-promoting policies like affirmative action are needed to achieve the vision of racial equality, we cannot realize the vision of a universal human right of bodily autonomy without attending to the disproportionate risks and harms certain groups of people , both adults and children, face in trying to exercise it.

What endangers these adults also endangers their children. Children, moreover, are even more powerless than the least powerful adults. The institutionalized, people of color, and people with disabilities have long been subject to involuntary medical experimentation and eugenic sterilization. Given the histories of bodily coercion, a policy like Oregon’s allowing 15-year-olds to “elect” sterilization with “informed” consent seems naïve at best. (It’s ironic too, as reproductive justice, the basis of recent legislation, includes freedom from forced sterilization.) Progressive libertarianism is a defense of freedoms with progressive values intact, including the obligations to racial and gender justice and care of the vulnerable. Children are only as safe as the world around them.

The next battle will be over the oral contraceptive norgestrel, approved this month by the Food and Drug Administration for nonprescription sale in drugstores without age restrictions. Although the progestin-only “mini-pill” is safe and effective for almost everyone of reproductive age, its over-the-counter sale to everyone of reproductive age is all but certain to be challenged by anti-abortion forces.

Will the left defend teenagers’ freedom to purchase birth control without being carded? To protect minors from real, not manufactured, harms, we must fight for their right to bodily autonomy.

* It’s important to note that gender-affirming care, while life-altering, is usually reversible. Genital surgery on minors is vanishingly rare. Top surgery is more common, but on teens, not children, and among those teens, research finds that almost none experience regret. The most common treatment for younger kids, puberty-postponing medication, ceases to work if the person stops taking it and has no lasting effects.

The post Defending Bodily Autonomy Is Real Child Protection appeared first on The Intercept .

The culture war raging throughout American politics has, of late, created an unexpected alliance between the Republican Party and some conservative Muslim Americans. Once derided as terrorist fifth columnists, a growing number of Muslims have joined the GOP base in protests opposing sex and gender education programs in public schools, with many even featured sympathetically on outlets like Fox News .

The shift represents a stark contrast with the hostile relations between Republicans and Muslims over the past two decades, as well as the integration of many younger Muslim Americans into progressive politics. The GOP’s outreach, reported on recently by Semafor and other outlets, also comes at a moment when the current Republican presidential frontrunner is tripling down on the most directly anti-Muslim government policy in U.S. history: the so-called Muslim ban.

At a campaign speech in Iowa last Friday, former President Donald Trump promised that he would bring back the controversial policy. “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” Trump said.

The notion of a ban was first introduced by Trump early in his 2016 presidential campaign, when it was marketed explicitly as a prohibition on all Muslims entering the United States. After Trump was elected, he instated a ban targeting travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, prompting chaos in airports and inside the government . Later, the Trump administration began referring to the policy more antiseptically as a “travel ban,” modifying it to include restrictions on some non-Muslim countries like Venezuela and North Korea.

Yet in his speech in Iowa last weekend, Trump made very clear that the target of his policy would be Muslims, conflating Islam with terrorism and extremism. “Under the Trump administration, we imposed extreme vetting and put on a powerful travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country,” Trump told the audience to applause.

Trump’s statements highlight an awkward contradiction. On one hand, some Muslim Americans, bound by a shared commitment to conservative social values, are enjoying a period of warm relations with the Republican Party and conservative activists who share their opposition to LGBTQ+ education in schools. At the same time, the wildly popular leading Republican presidential candidate — and the center of gravity in the party — is publicly vowing to revive a policy aimed at curtailing the presence of Muslims in the U.S. entirely.

“This will be a challenging moment for the Muslim community, but I do believe that the issue of LGBT education in schools will become a wedge issue,” said Ani Zonneveld, president of Muslims for Progressive Values, a progressive human rights organization. “On a state and local level, many conservative Muslim voters will likely vote for candidates who are anti-LGBT, which will mean mostly Republicans, while on a national level, the same people may choose to vote for a Democrat.”

In one sign of warming relations between Muslims and the Republican Party, major Islamic civil rights organizations have spoken out in support of the recent GOP-supported protests aimed at letting parents opt their children out of LGBTQ+ readings in schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has been among the most vocal, collecting hundreds of signatures to demand that parents be allowed to remove their children from gender- and sex-based courses.

CAIR has been a favorite target of the Republican Party and conservative activists over the past two decades, with the group being labeled as a front for terrorism and Islamic extremism. On this issue, however, they find themselves aligned, even applauded, by erstwhile foes.

In a statement to The Intercept, CAIR said its positions reflect an agnosticism toward the partisan divide in American politics.

“CAIR defends the rights of Americans to live according to their sincerely held religious beliefs,” said Corey Saylor, CAIR’s research and advocacy director. “We decide our policy position based on principle, not party.”

The initial ban resulted in chaos at American airports, as people from targeted countries whose documents were otherwise valid found themselves abruptly detained by U.S. border security. In some cases, people with permission to enter the U.S. wound up stranded abroad without recourse, with some even dying or taking their own lives after being trapped in immigration limbo by the measure.

The cruelties and absurdities brought by the ban also impacted many people living in the U.S. who found themselves separated from loved ones. In one infamous case, the Yemeni mother of a 2-year-old Yemeni American boy dying of a terminal illness was forced to fight a legal battle to come and see him in the hospital after being denied entry to the U.S. because of the ban. She was later granted a waiver to the rule, arriving in the U.S. just days before her son died in the hospital.

The Supreme Court shot down two versions of the “Muslim ban” as unconstitutional, before finally upholding the measure in a 5-4 decision handed down in 2018.

After taking office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order lifting the ban entirely. The precedent, however, remains.

Trump has made reviving the measure a notable part of his reelection campaign, reportedly telling his advisers in May that he would bring back an expanded version of the infamous travel restriction — a policy that he called “beautiful.”

Trump’s renewed vow to ban Muslims from the U.S. comes at a time when some Muslim Americans have begun to gravitate back to the Republican Party. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Americans tended to vote as a majority for Republicans, by some accounting providing the crucial swing vote that tilted Florida for George W. Bush in 2000 .

Many Muslim Americans who found themselves transformed into punching bags for Republican politicians in later years came to rue their decision to support the GOP. Trump’s initial proposal of the “Muslim ban,” which was met with enthusiastic approval by his base, was only the capstone of a long, ugly falling out between Muslims and Republicans.

With tensions around terrorism and U.S. wars in the Middle East ebbing, some conservative Muslims seem to be turning back to the party.

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s promotion of a new and improved “Muslim ban” will sour the halting rapprochement between these two groups. Muslim Americans have transformed into solidly Democratic voters in recent decades, with several Muslim members of Congress taking up highly visible roles in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Even during the period when Trump had imposed the ban, however, some exit polls in the 2020 election showed as many as 35 percent of Muslim voters supporting the candidate who had made the legal exclusion of their coreligionists from the country a highlight of his presidency.

Muslim voters who choose to buck Trump’s GOP might find little reprieve in his chief rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2015, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, at the time a member of U.S. Congress, sponsored a bill that sought to ban refugees to the U.S. from a number of Muslim-majority countries where the U.S. had conducted military operations. In recent months, DeSantis has also pushed measures through state legislatures banning foreigners from owning certain properties or even enrolling in public universities to people from countries like Russia, China, and Iran. These bans provide a window into how lists of targeted nationalities could be used to deprive individuals of rights well beyond travel in the future.

Trump’s remarks in Iowa suggested that he might impose other restrictions for Muslim immigrations, making remarks aimed at radical terrorists in the same breath as those about farm ownership. “We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers,” Trump said. “We don’t want people blowing up our cities, and we don’t want people stealing our farms. So it’s not gonna happen.”

As for LGBTQ+ issues in the Muslim community, Zonneveld of Muslims for Progressive Values said that her community needed to spend more time coming to grips with the specifics of the materials that are becoming an increasingly bitter culture war flashpoint.

“We should be taking those books and educational materials that people have issues with and sitting down on both sides to decipher what the problem is and how we can resolve this. In many cases, people are not even sure what’s in the books in question, and this approach of simply shouting at one another doesn’t help,” said Zonneveld, who recently wrote a piece for the website Religion News Service about the controversy. “One thing to emphasize, however, on principle, is that LGBT people are human beings created by God, just like you and I, and they should not be discriminated against, end of story.”

The post Trump Revives “Muslim Ban” While GOP Courts Muslim Voters for 2024 appeared first on The Intercept .

On May 5, as Chancellor Pradeep Khosla began his opening remarks at the 44th University of California San Diego Alumni Awards at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, some 60 academic worker activists took the stage carrying a cardboard sign. They were there to present him with UC’s “Most Overpaid Worker” award; Khosla had received a $500,000 raise while, the union says, the university was simultaneously refusing to fully implement their recently ratified collective bargaining agreement.

Khosla quickly left the stage amid chants of “Pradeep, Pradeep, the rent is too steep!” When the police arrived, the graduate students had relocated outdoors to the sidewalk where, separated by a glass wall, they continued chanting their demands: “What do we want? Our promised wages. When do we want them? Now!”

While the action ended peacefully, just over a month later, the university charged 59 graduate student workers from the event’s registration list with “physical assault,” “physical abuse and threats to health and safety,” and “disruption of university activities.” Almost half of the people accused deny even being in attendance.

The university claims workers “bumped” Khosla and stole the microphone. The union disputes the allegations and points to a livestream of the action by a member, which, though blurry, does not show evidence of either charge. The students now face disciplinary hearings for the union action, which could result in probation or even expulsion from the university.

It was the latest provocation by the university in what workers say is an escalating retaliation campaign against them since ratifying a collective bargaining agreement late last year. The university has now brought multiple sets of misconduct charges against students and workers following three separate union-led protests.

Michael Duff, a law professor at St. Louis University, said the repeated charges speak to a pattern. “You can’t see this in isolation. There’s been a pattern of retaliation against the members involved,” he said, noting that “the nature of this case seems overly aggressive.”

Nearly 50,000 academic workers across the University of California system went on strike for six weeks last winter, the largest higher education strike in U.S. history. They won substantial wage increases, unprecedented new protections against workplace bullying, and immigrant worker protections.

But since ratifying their collective bargaining agreement last December, workers at UC San Diego say the university has not implemented aspects of their contract like establishing an office to process complaints of workplace misconduct or hiring workers at 50 percent of full-time employment, which is the standard appointment for graduate student researchers. Workers also say there have been dramatic reductions in teaching assistant appointments in certain departments and that two dozen students received unsatisfactory grades for participating in the strike.

“We signed a legally binding contract, and instead of implementing it, they’re trying to punish us.”

“We signed a legally binding contract, and instead of implementing it, they’re trying to punish us,” Udayan Tandon, who was recently elected as a unit chair of United Auto Workers Local 2865, told The Intercept.

Most recently, three UC San Diego graduate student workers were arrested by university police in their homes for writing pro-union slogans on the sidewalk during an action a month prior. Charged with conspiracy and vandalism, some union members believe the arrests are an extension of the pushback student workers have been facing on campus.

“Under the First Amendment, speech restrictions, which are based on the content of the speech, face strict scrutiny in the courts,” said Will Bloom, a labor lawyer who deals with First Amendment cases. It is “a standard that virtually no restrictions can survive,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine the university pursuing felony charges for kids chalking a hopscotch court on the sidewalk outside of the marine center.”

In a public statement on the arrests, university officials said, “UC San Diego supports its community members rights to voice their concerns lawfully. UC San Diego does not tolerate vandalism or other damage to university property.” While the union says it used “washable chalk,” the university claims the students used “materials other than chalk,” costing over $12,000 to repair.

The workers’ arraignment, scheduled for Monday, was delayed because the university has not submitted the cases for review with the district attorney’s office, which they have up to three years to do. As a result, no charges have been filed by the DA at this time. UAW locals 2865 and 5810 rallied outside the San Diego Court House prior to the scheduled hearing to demand the university drop the charges.

“Employers have certain rights to protect property, but the timing seems off to me,” said Duff. “I find it interesting they were immediately taken to jail” despite having left and gone home for a month prior to their arrests. “Normally there would be some legal process before [an arrest] would happen [at a separate location]. That strikes me as odd.”

After being held in custody for over 12 hours, Jessica Ng said she felt dehumanized. “You lose your autonomy,” said Ng, who is a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Chained to a chair, you have to ask for permission just to use the restroom or to drink water. I sat there for hours, deprived of sleep, not knowing what was going to happen.”

Ng said she doesn’t regret the union organizing she’s done and that “it’s on the university, which hasn’t been honoring our contracts. Instead of seeing our protests as a sign that they need to honor the contract, they’ve been trying to crack down on union activity.”

“It’s been a bit shocking to see just how far the university is willing to go,” fourth-year chemistry Ph.D. student Conor O’Herin told The Intercept. “We went on strike for six weeks, collectively bargained a fair contract, and now they’re refusing to abide by what they agreed to.”

According to workers, the university is pointing to financial strain to justify austerity measures, but Khosla’s half-million dollar raise — totaling nearly twice as much as the next highest paid UC president — says otherwise. The university, led by Khosla, also announced $1.1 billion plans for a new student center and campus housing.

“We are an essential component, and the university acts like it doesn’t have money to pay us while it expands its real estate empire.”

“We are an essential component,” said Daniel Primosch, a third-year Ph.D. student in physics, “and the university acts like it doesn’t have money to pay us while it expands its real estate empire.”

Soon after the contract ratification, workers began hearing about reductions in teaching assistant positions and incoming Ph.D.s from department heads. Last year, Adu Vengal said, the university admitted 44 doctoral candidates to the math department; this year, there were 10. And while historically, masters students would be given teaching assistant positions, the university changed that practice as well, only hiring doctoral students in the spring quarter. “A lot of masters students went on strike to get living wages,” explained Vengal, who is a third-year math Ph.D. student and recording secretary for United Auto Workers Local 2865. “Now they aren’t getting any wages.”

Instead, Vengal said, they began hiring more undergraduate tutors to do the work, which the union filed a grievance for. And then, “in May, the math department announced a restructure that would halve the number of [teaching assistants] per 100 students. After we grieved it, they said they would stop,” Vengal said, “but that’s exactly what this restructuring plan does.” The grievance has not yet been resolved.

These significant reductions in teaching assistant appointments come at the same time that the university has seen a major uptick in the undergraduate population, with an increase of 15,000 enrolled since Khosla took over .

Another major concern for graduate student workers is the university’s continued refusal to hire them at 50 percent of full-time. Their contract stipulates they be paid commensurate with their workloads of 20 hours per week, but in several departments at UC San Diego, workers are getting hired at arbitrary rates of 38 percent or 42 percent. Workers say this used to be common practice prior to the union, but now that it’s in the contract, it’s legally unacceptable.

“They try to justify it by claiming we work less than 20 hours a week,” said Ahmed Akhtar, a sixth-year Ph.D. student in physics. “In reality, we work more than full-time, and they won’t even pay us for half that. The result is the accumulated theft of millions of dollars.” Workers say this is most common in STEM departments.

On the eve of the strike, hundreds of workers received emails from professors warning them they would still need to attend “academic training” activities, which workers say would constitute crossing the picket line.

Two dozen workers across three departments were given unsatisfactory , or “U,” grades for allegedly neglecting their schoolwork while participating in the strike, which could affect their current and future employment. The university has defended this practice against accusations of union busting by saying the “U” grade was assigned to them as students, not workers. Workers say the university’s manipulation of their dual-status is an effort to circumvent bargained rights and protections — and also pointed out that the class in which they received the “U” grade is a placeholder course to represent their research and that it does not have a syllabus, exams, or written classroom expectations.

On January 26, two overlapping groups of union activists, who say they were unable to successfully reach the professors who had given students “U” grades, “marched on the boss.” First, they approached chemistry professor Jeremy Klosterman, who workers said would not speak to them without conferring with university officials but did agree to a meeting in his office at a future date. Workers say when they arrived at his office for the meeting, a sticky note on the door said he was unavailable.

Then, graduate student workers went to speak with Primosch’s advisor, physics professor Massimiliano Di Ventra, who had recently been the subject of a letter from his former employees to the department asking that he be held accountable for an “abusive” and “punitive” advising style. Di Ventra described the comments in an email to The Intercept as “very hurtful” and “an attempt to maliciously harm my reputation.”

Akhtar said after Di Ventra refused to speak with them outside, students followed him and fellow physics professor Ivan Schuller into class, where they canceled the lecture and called the police. “We were entirely peaceful, but persistent in wanting to address the retaliation,” Akhtar said.

In an email to The Intercept, Di Ventra clarified it was his colleague who called the police because a “mob of around 30 students blocked me in my office for several minutes, yelling and pounding at my door, trying to open it.”

A few weeks later, the university sent misconduct charges to eight of the involved union activists, alleging disruption of university activities, physical abuse and threats to health and safety, and failure to comply and obstruction. The university eventually dropped the latter two, prosecuting the workers on the sole charge of disruption of university activities.

In the official UC San Diego student conduct review report that was produced as part of the trial, the responding police officer said he “did not interpret the crowd to be unruly, violent, or a threat to the campus community.” Despite Di Ventra telling the officer that he was “scared of what the students might do to him,” the report determined that there was no threat to physical health and safety.

On June 29, the accused workers, who Akhtar noted are all leaders in the union, were put on one-year probation, which bars them from participating in future “disruptive” protests under the threat of suspension or expulsion from their program.

O’Herin, who was one of the workers put on probation, said the disciplinary action can not only jeopardize the students’ enrollment, but also impact their decision to engage in union activity in the future. He added about the process, “It’s completely controlled by UC with no oversight from an outside body.”

The jury, which consists of students and staff members, is overseen by a chair chosen by the university. “There is a veneer of neutrality, but the facilitator was clearly biased against the union. He went on a rant about how [union activists] need to take responsibility for their actions, which were inherently disruptive union tactics. This is the university intimidating us through a process which they have total control over.”

With the nearly 60 new misconduct trials just beginning, and now three separate legal cases, the two sides seem far from any resolution thought to be settled with a contract. Workers say they will continue to apply pressure on the university until they see the agreement honored.

Tandon, the unit chair — who has not yet had the administrative resolution meeting for his role in the alumni action, which is the first step in the student misconduct trial process — acknowledges organizing is not without risk. He is on a worker visa from India, which puts him in a precarious position as his visa is tied to his employment and education. But he says he’ll continue to fight alongside his co-workers, “not only because peaceful protest is protected by worker rights, but more importantly because I know 48,000 union members are standing right behind me. I’m confident knowing that.”

The post California Grad Students Won A Historic Strike. UC San Diego Is Striking Back With Misconduct Allegations and Arrests. appeared first on The Intercept .

Rodrick Reed was preparing to fly to Washington, D.C., for a vigil commemorating the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling that briefly abolished the death penalty when he got the news: The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, or the CCA, had once again ruled against his brother Rodney Reed, who has been on death row since 1998 for a crime he swears he did not commit.

The news made Rodrick’s remarks at the vigil even more urgent. “My brother was convicted of the murder and rape of Stacey Stites, and since that time, we’ve been living a nightmare that we cannot wake up from,” he said. “The reason I say it’s a nightmare is because the truth is out there, but nobody is willing to look at it or to pay attention to it. Evidence is out there that proves my brother’s innocence, but nobody is admitting it into the court.”

“I say, let all the evidence be looked at and heard and give him a new trial,” he continued. “We don’t need to free Rodney Reed, the truth will free Rodney Reed.”

“We don’t need to free Rodney Reed, the truth will free Rodney Reed.”

Reed, who is Black, was sentenced to death for the 1996 rape and murder of 19-year-old Stites, who was white. Her body was found on the side of a country road just outside Bastrop, Texas. Sperm recovered from Stites’s body was eventually matched to Reed, which prosecutors called the “Cinderella’s slipper” linking Reed to her death. But Reed insisted he was innocent; he said he’d been having an affair with Stites, who was engaged to a white police officer named Jimmy Fennell. Fennell denied the possibility of an affair, claiming that he and Stites had a loving relationship and she didn’t know anyone named Rodney Reed. Fennell was questioned several times but was never seriously considered as a suspect.

In the decades since Reed’s conviction, a host of evidence has emerged showing that Reed and Stites did know each other and Fennell was aware of their dalliance, dismantling the state’s theory of the crime. Evidence of Fennell’s propensity for violence has also surfaced; in 2008, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman while on duty and in uniform. He threatened to kill her if she told anyone about it. Meanwhile, the courts — most notably the CCA — have shrugged their shoulders and rebuffed Reed’s efforts to win a new trial.

In a pair of rulings issued on June 28, the CCA again denied Reed’s pleas, which the court has now done at least a dozen times since 2000. Each time, the court has flatly rejected the mounting evidence of Reed’s innocence, often in ways that mischaracterize the evidence or interpret the law to make the revelations meaningless. In the most recent rulings, the court trivializes nearly every detail that casts doubt on Reed’s guilt.

I have covered Reed’s case for more than 20 years and have repeatedly fielded questions from people bewildered by the CCA’s position. Dozens of witnesses have come forward with information that supports Reed’s account and points to Fennell as the more likely killer, including friends of Stites’s and Fennell’s law enforcement colleagues. How can the court discount every single one of these witnesses? There are no good answers. The conclusion I’ve come to is one that is beyond the law and something that veterans of Texas’s criminal legal system have grumbled about for years: There are just some defendants the CCA judges don’t like and will steadfastly rule against, regardless of the evidence that might support their bid for a new trial or release. Rodney Reed is one of them.

A Secret Affair

When Reed was first questioned by police in connection with the murder, he denied knowing Stites aside from what he’d seen in the news. It was only after his DNA came back as a match that he relented and said the two had been having a clandestine affair. Although the CCA has pointed to Reed’s initial denial as undercutting his claim of an affair, which they deemed “manufactured and implausible,” it isn’t hard to see why Reed might have withheld this information: Even in mid-1990s Texas, a Black man dating a young white woman engaged to a white cop would have been a risky endeavor.

With the DNA match to Reed, the state devised a theory of the crime. Stites left the apartment she shared with Fennell around 3 a.m. to make the 30-mile commute to the grocery store in Bastrop where she worked the early shift stocking produce, only to be waylaid by Reed. Traveling on foot, Reed somehow stopped Stites’s vehicle, overpowered her, then raped and strangled her with her own belt — all presumably inside the truck — before dumping Stites’s body on the roadside and leaving the truck in the Bastrop High School parking lot.

Prosecutors didn’t offer any conclusive evidence demonstrating how all of this might have taken place. And the timeline itself was predicated on information that Fennell provided to investigators. He wasn’t awake when Stites left that morning, he told them, but he filled them in on what he said was her normal routine. Inexplicably, the cops failed to search the apartment the couple shared, even though it was the last place Stites was known to be alive. Days after the murder, the state released the truck to Fennell, who immediately got rid of it.

Although Reed’s trial attorneys promised to deliver evidence of his alleged affair with Stites, they fell far short, calling to the stand only a few witnesses, each with some connection to the Reed family. The defense was hamstrung by the fact that they had done little work to prepare for the capital trial. Records reflect that they only began working on the case in earnest a month before jury selection — hardly enough time to conduct their own investigation into who might have known what. They repeatedly asked the judge to postpone the trial but were denied.

In contrast, prosecutors told the jury that they had interviewed anyone with a plausible connection to the case — including all of Stites’s co-workers at the grocery store — and found no one who could back up Reed’s story. Investigators talked to “every boyfriend, every co-worker, every friend, every family member, everybody,” prosecutor Lisa Tanner told the jury. “Nobody connects them. Nobody. Folks, this secret affair was so secret that Stacey Stites didn’t know about it. That’s how secret it was — because it didn’t exist.”

Straining Credulity

It wasn’t long after Reed was convicted that other witnesses started coming forward. Not only did they confirm a preexisting relationship between Reed and Stites, but they also shared stories about Fennell’s jealousy, racism, and volatility — indications that he knew about the relationship and was furious about it. Every time, however, the CCA rejected the evidence.

There was a woman named Mary Blackwell, for example, who said she’d been in a law enforcement training class with Fennell. In an affidavit she provided to Reed’s lawyers in 2004, she said she heard Fennell tell a fellow trainee that if he ever caught his fiancée cheating on him, he’d strangle her with a belt. Texas prosecutors pointed out that no one else had admitted to hearing the comment, leading the CCA to discredit Blackwell’s story.

More recently, the CCA’s reflexive dismissal of witnesses whose claims call the state’s case into question has bordered on the absurd. In 2021, a judge in Bastrop presided over a nine-day evidentiary hearing that featured dozens of witnesses, including friends of Stites’s from work, members of law enforcement who knew Fennell, and former inmates imprisoned with Fennell. The witnesses testified that Stites and Reed had been involved in a relationship, that Fennell knew about it, and even that Fennell had confessed to Stites’s murder. None of these witnesses had any connection to Reed or his family.

Among the witnesses was a co-worker of Stites’s named Suzan Hugen, who testified that she and Stites were friends. She said she was aware that the relationship between Fennell and Stites was off; among other things, she’d seen finger-shaped bruises on Stites’s arms, which the younger woman tried to hide. Hugen also said that Stites had introduced her to her friend “Rodney.”

Hugen provided this information to the state well before Reed’s 1998 trial, yet it was never turned over to Reed’s attorneys. In fact, it wasn’t until just before the evidentiary hearing commenced in 2021 that the state finally made Hugen’s information available, along with statements from three other individuals that suggested other grocery store employees might also have known about a relationship between Stites and Reed. The decades-late disclosures prompted Reed’s lawyers to file an appeal claiming that the state had violated its obligation to turn over exculpatory information to the defense as required by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as Brady v. Maryland .

Despite overwhelming testimony in favor of Reed, the judge presiding over the evidentiary hearing fully embraced the state’s position that none of Reed’s witnesses were credible. Judge J.D. Langley signed off on findings written by the state, concluding that only the state’s witnesses, including Fennell, were reliable.

Reed’s attorneys challenged the ruling before the CCA, arguing that Langley had abdicated his responsibility to make independent determinations about witness credibility by simply adopting the state’s proposed conclusions, which were rife with errors and factual misrepresentations about various testimony, including Hugen’s.

In one of the rulings released on June 28, nearly two years after the evidentiary hearing concluded, the CCA lamented the errors — it listed several in a footnote with the caveat that the list was “by no means exhaustive” — before undertaking its own assessment of the witnesses’ credibility. Ultimately, the CCA concluded, as Langley had, that none of Reed’s witnesses were credible, save for one man whose father lived in the apartment just below Stites and Fennell, who reported hearing violent arguing on multiple occasions.

The man, Brent Sappington, said that he and his father, Bill, who has since died, approached a prosecutor the family knew at church to report what they’d heard. According to Sappington, the prosecutor, a man named Ted Weems, told them to hush up because investigators already had their suspect. Weems testified that Bill had reported the fighting upstairs, but he denied discouraging the family from coming forward. The CCA credited Sappington only to the extent that Weems “corroborated” his account; where the stories diverged, the CCA concluded that Weems was the one telling the truth. Sappington explained that he was initially hesitant to come forward because Fennell was in law enforcement and he feared his story would be dismissed, an explanation the court found to be an excuse that “strains credulity.”

Several other witnesses provided similar reasoning, saying they didn’t come forward sooner because they feared retaliation from a law enforcement community that they expected would protect its own. The court repeatedly found this explanation unconvincing. Other witnesses, who said they didn’t realize that what they knew was important, were dismissed as likely fabricating their recollections. While it’s true that memory can be tricky, the CCA failed to engage with any nuance and instead deployed a false-memory blanket across multiple witness statements as a one-stop discrediting device.

“For 23 years, Texas illegally hid evidence that could have exonerated Rodney Reed.”

Where Hugen was concerned, the court stated that the account she offered was “unremarkable, even mundane.” The judges also took aim at her recollection about seeing bruises on Stites’s arms, concluding that jurors would not have believed that since no bruises were found on Stites’s arms during the autopsy.

As for the state’s alleged Brady violation, the CCA concluded that the information Hugen had was “immaterial” since one witness had previously testified at Reed’s trial that she’d seen Reed and Stites together at the grocery store. Hugen’s account wouldn’t have added anything, the judges wrote, despite the fact that Hugen had no connection to the Reed family, and had her information been disclosed in a timely way, it would have offered Reed’s defense another avenue of investigation.

The court took the position that other witness statements were immaterial because the state had deemed them dead leads. In other words, if Texas prosecutors decided that the statements were meaningless, then they had no obligation to turn them over — a bastardization of Brady’s disclosure requirement that would afford prosecutors total discretion over what evidence is released to the defense. Although prosecutors cited their Brady obligation in releasing the witness information to Reed’s attorneys in 2021, the CCA’s opinion seemed to endorse the notion that it would have been perfectly fine for them to leave the information forever buried in the state’s files.

“The Whole World Will Know”

That the CCA would rule against Reed is neither new nor surprising — nor is the judges playing mental gymnastics with legal standards to get them to their desired result.

For decades, the court has been a myopic, hegemonic institution, composed largely of middle-aged, white, male jurists who were former prosecutors — a mix of factors that has created an insulated worldview within the court’s chambers in Austin. When the current presiding judge, Sharon Keller, first ran for a seat on the court back in 1994, she described herself as “pro-prosecutor,” meaning, she told a reporter, “seeing legal issues from the perspective of the state instead of the perspective of the defense.” That view has dominated the CCA bench for the last 30 years and reflects its approach to the Reed case.

The judge who wrote the June 28 opinions was its newest member, Jesse McClure, a former prosecutor-turned-Houston district court judge who was appointed to the bench in December 2020 by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Notably, he is only the third Black CCA judge since the court’s establishment in 1891. One judge, Scott Walker, dissented from the rulings but did not explain why.

Reed’s lawyers are frustrated. “For 23 years, Texas illegally hid evidence that could have exonerated Rodney Reed. He is an innocent man,” Jane Pucher, a senior staff attorney with the Innocence Project, said in a statement. “Texans should be outraged that prosecutorial misconduct is going unchecked, and the state is being given a license to cheat — even if it means sending an innocent man to his death.”

Pucher said Reed’s legal team is considering all its options, including asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. Meanwhile, a separate legal effort to obtain DNA testing on key crime scene evidence, including lengths of the braided belt used to strangle Stites, is ongoing. Texas has long fought Reed’s bid to have the evidence tested; predictably, the CCA sided with the state, offering a novel interpretation of Texas’s DNA testing law to block Reed’s access. The dispute made it to the Supreme Court on a technical point, and this spring, the court ruled in Reed’s favor, sending the case back to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Rodrick is frustrated by the CCA’s continued hostility toward his brother, but he has vowed to keep fighting. At the vigil in Washington, D.C., he recalled something that his mother, Sandra, told the court back in 1998 when Reed was convicted. “She said, ‘You may try to take my son’s life, but I guarantee you the whole world will know about it.’”

The post Dozens of Witnesses Say Rodney Reed Is Innocent. Texas Court Says They’re All Wrong. appeared first on The Intercept .

Ces dix dernières années, toutes les mesures d’exception ont fini, d’une manière ou d’une autre, par entrer dans le droit commun et s’étendre à l’ensemble de la population. De l’état d’urgence de 2015 aux lois antiterroristes et de surveillance numérique adoptées sous les mandats d’Emmanuel Macron, cette règle s’est toujours confirmée.

Cet article Le gouvernement veut activer à distance les téléphones portables pour surveiller la population « suspecte » est apparu en premier sur La Relève et La Peste .

Their protest encampment razed, the Indigenous-led environmental movement at North Dakota’s Standing Rock reservation was searching for a new tactic. By March 2017, the fight over the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline had been underway for months. Leaders of the movement to defend Indigenous rights on the land — and its waterways — had a new aim: to march on Washington.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Law Enforcement Collaboration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spreading Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheriffs vs. Indigenous and Environmental Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frick replied, “One big circle.”

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

The man who crashed into a group of mostly Venezuelan migrants in Brownsville, Texas, on Sunday — killing eight of them — sounds in the media like a cipher, if not a monster. A video of the collision shows his vehicle knocking people down like matchsticks. A reporter I know told me that human gore and bone lay in the grass for hours afterward, putrefying in the heat and reeking. On Democracy Now! , a human rights activist called the killings a hate crime.

The driver was identified as George Alvarez. The police charged him with manslaughter, and they are investigating whether he committed hate crimes or acted intentionally. During a press conference, Brownsville Police Chief Felix Sauceda pointed to a list of Alvarez’s numerous criminal priors. One was “assaulting a public servant.”

Sauceda failed to clarify that it was Brownsville police who assaulted Alvarez years ago, not the other way around. For contesting that false claim in court, Alvarez was once considered a civil rights hero. (More about this later.) Meanwhile, the narrative around the killings has ignored details about history and current conditions in Brownsville — about animus against people like Alvarez that spans generations. That hostility may bode badly in the coming weeks and months, in Texas and throughout the country as we reach the end of Title 42.

Title 42 is an obscure regulation that allows the U.S. to turn back people at borders during public health emergencies. Former President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant Rasputin, Stephen Miller, revived it in 2020 during the Covid crisis, to keep people from applying for asylum. President Joe Biden has since used it to excuse his administration’s fear of aggressively crafting policy to help millions of asylum-seekers from South and Central America to move north to safety. On Thursday night, the rule expired. With its end and without robust federal assistance to help settle an anticipated wave of refugees, local communities are susceptible at worst to murderous hostility fueled by the right, and at best to pathological indifference.

The canary in the coal mine for these risks might be the chokehold. We’ve heard much about it lately in New York City, following the fatal strangulation of Black subway entertainer Jordan Neely , who had a history of mental illness, by white former Marine Daniel Penny, assisted by other riders. We’ve heard less about the chokehold’s use against people like Alvarez, in Texas.

Brownsville is an antique city. Downtown, it looks Caribbean the way New Orleans does, with French Quarter-style architecture dating from the 19th century. True to its appearance, the city’s history is Southern. It served as a cotton-smuggling port for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and a monument to Jefferson Davis stood in a park until 2020 .

The city is 94 percent Latino, mostly Mexican American. Its poverty rate is over twice the national average. It is filled with Border Patrol and ICE agents, who take these jobs because they pay well over twice the local per capita income. In Brownsville, almost every Mexican American has a relative who is an immigration agent.

I lived there during the Trump administration. I reported on endemic dehumanization of poor people by law enforcement, and not just against immigrants. In the whirlpool of my nice gym in a nice part of town, I used to hear muscled men and well-coiffed women joke about this injustice, particularly when it came to migrants. A small crew of local rights activists resisted this generalized nastiness, but they barely made a dent.

I knew about the Ozanam Center , a nonprofit shelter for unhoused people and the site of Sunday’s tragedy. The eight migrants were staying there before they were killed. It’s been operating for decades. When I first moved to Brownsville to do reporting on immigration, an activist suggested that I go to Ozanam and offer some Hondurans $20 an hour plus lunch to help unload the moving van. I did so. After that, I heard nothing about the place. It was low key and out of the way.

Ozanam lies on the corner of Houston Road, which, along with nearby Travis and Crockett roads, are named after leaders of the 1835 Texas independence war with Mexico. Historians now concur that the rebellion was started by U.S. Southerners eager to import their Black chattel into Texas — where importation was illegal because Mexico owned Texas, and Mexico outlawed slavery.

Crossing Houston Road is Minnesota Avenue, not far from Iowa, Indiana, and North Dakota avenues. Midwestern whites migrated to Brownsville in the early 20th century and leveled the Latino ranching economy, replacing it with agribusiness fruit and vegetable farms. Along with their crops, they institutionalized the segregation of Mexican Americans, whom they derided as mixed-race “ mongrels .”

Today, Alvarez lives in this neighborhood, where the houses near Ozanam are cramped and run-down. A friend who knows the area calls it “a very sad place.”

As a ninth-grade special-education student in 2005, Alvarez was arrested on suspicion of burglarizing a vehicle. He’d just turned 17 and, according to a later court filing, already was having problems with substance abuse. In his cell, he became frustrated about a broken phone and banged it. An officer who weighed 200 pounds threw 135-pound Alvarez to the ground and put him in a chokehold, with other officers assisting, the filing states. Alvarez was then charged with assaulting a public official, a major felony.

The incident had been captured on video, but the recording was never given to internal investigators. In a legal complaint he filed years later, Alvarez said he had feared that if he went to trial he would be convicted on the officer’s word and given a long sentence. Still a minor, he pleaded guilty and agreed to eight years of probation. Within months, he’d lapsed into drug addiction and violated probation. He was sent to state prison for eight years.

A few years later, according to court documents, another man, accused of the same crime by the same officer, found the recording of his own stay in detention, which proved the officer had lied and perpetrated the assault himself. Alerted that recordings existed, Alvarez demanded and received his and discovered the same lie. A judge ordered him freed after four years of hard time. He sued the city of Brownsville in federal court, a jury awarded him $2.3 million, and his case was listed in the University of Michigan’s National Registry of Exonerations .

But Brownsville appealed the decision, and the case went to the notoriously conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans. Judges there overturned the jury’s verdict, reasoning that prosecutors do not have to reveal exculpatory evidence if a defendant pleads guilty. Alvarez’s lawyer went to the Supreme Court, which in 2019 declined to consider the case. Alvarez was denied a financial win that might have changed his life.

According to his lawyer , he now works at an industrial sandblasting company and has six children. But he is covered with tattoos that mark a brown man on the border as a lumpen, a pariah. He’s had additional arrests for driving while intoxicated and for assaulting other people, though most charges have been misdemeanors and most have been dismissed. He seems angry if not broken.

On Tuesday the Brownsville police said that toxicology tests were still being done on Alvarez, but early findings documented cocaine and marijuana in his system, as well as benzodiazepines — the ingredient in Valium, Xanax, Ativan, and Klonopin. These are highly addictive sedatives used to treat conditions including anxiety, panic attacks, insomnial, and bipolar disorder. They alter reflexes and can make driving dangerous. High doses of cocaine can cause agitation, paranoia, aggression, and dizziness.

At about 8:29 on Sunday morning, Alvarez was driving a mile from his home. He ran a red light and barreled into the migrants. He himself was injured, and witnesses said he seemed disoriented. Some survivors kicked and beat him as he yelled anti-immigrant epithets. In subsequent interviews, some migrants cited these slurs as evidence that Alvarez committed a hate crime, and the press has pushed that narrative. Yet police have presented no evidence that Alvarez was motivated by hate, and none of his insults surpass the border shit talking I used to hear from the good citizens of Brownsville in the whirlpool.

Alvarez’s carnage may well turn out to have been an accident, and its location by a migrant shelter simply a horrible coincidence. Even so, publicity surrounding the crimes has suddenly turned Ozanam into a hate magnet. According to management, some people have blamed the organization’s sheltering of migrants for the killings. Earlier this week a young man tried to enter the parking lot while brandishing a handgun . Police charged him with reckless driving and drug possession.

Meanwhile, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott warns of a migrant “ invasion ” and is sending 450 National Guard members to the border. Biden is sending 1,500 troops, even as he announced this week that migrants will not be allowed to apply for asylum if they traversed another country first and did not apply there. Several border cities have issued disaster declarations .

In the north, New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week suspended “right to shelter” entitlement for asylum seekers. He has said New York City has no more resources for migrants. Until a few weeks ago, he’d averred that they were welcome. In the face of his new coolness, will ordinary New Yorkers cool too? Will they grow hateful?

Such questions bring us back to chokeholds. The mayor has lately scared straphangers about subway passengers with mental illness and argued that increased policing is necessary to control them. A civilian fatally choked Neely. But despite strong evidence that the killer acted as a vigilante, the district attorney’s office did not announce until 10 days later that he would be criminally charged — and only for manslaughter.

Across the country, anti-immigrant rhetoric is hardening into policy. Policy is churning out more rhetoric. Both are pushing people to the brink who are already addled and enraged. Under such pressure, will we be able distinguish anymore between hate crimes and accidents? Is there even a difference?

The post A Hate Crime Narrative Takes Hold Around a Tragedy in Texas appeared first on The Intercept .

La Cour de cassation a estimé, ce vendredi, les conditions réunies pour que la justice française poursuive deux ressortissants syriens mis en cause pour des actes commis en Syrie àl’égard de la population syrienne.

«L’avantage espéré consistait, pour Nicolas Sarkozy, à obtenir un soutien financier occulte à la campagne électorale de 2007 pour la présidence de la République.» Dans un réquisitoire long de 425 pages, le Parquet national financier (PNF) retrace une décennie d’investigations sur une tentaculaire affaire d’États.