Racism is alive and well, Thanks Trump and his supporters!

[Lois]

Pregnant Woman Indicted For Baby's Death After Being Shot

An Alabama woman who was shot in the stomach, resulting in the death of her five-month-old fetus, was indicted on a manslaughter charge by a grand jury. The reason? She started the dispute that led to her getting shot.

Initially, police charged 23-year-old Ebony Jamison for shooting 27-year-old Marshae Jones in December of 2018 outside a Dollar General in Birmingham. But according to AL.com, a police investigation determined that it wasn’t Jamison who was to blame for the shooting—it was Jones, for starting it:

“The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby,’’ Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid said at the time of the shooting. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”

Reid added that the fight began over the unborn baby’s father, and that the investigation found that Jamison was defending herself.

Reid’s latest statement reiterates what he said at the time of the shooting, which was:

“When a 5-month pregnant woman initiates a fight and attacks another person, I believe some responsibility lies with her as to any injury to her unborn child,’’ Reid said. “That child is dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations.”

Alabama recently passed a near-total ban on abortion, and it’s not unheard of for a woman to face jail time for miscarrying. While shocking, this case clearly delineates in the most gruesome terms what we already know: That women’s lives are not valued.

#Resist

FUCKING SERIOUSLY?  Is this because men can not be expected to keep control of themselves or just walk away?

[joan1984]

So, Ebony was the 'good gal with a gun', who protected herself from Marshae, the attacker, both in the Dollar Store, and outside the Dollar Store...

Good to put the blame where it belongs, and I presume Ebony had the required State documents and permission to Carry, perhaps she felt it was necessary from other encounters at other Dollar Store type interactions with the community.

Go Ebony.

(The 'baby daddy' is only given a glancing mention, so I suppose no responsibility there, or at least none claimed.)

Good thing was "just a fetus", so expendable, not a real baby, eh?

Expect when Marshae gets paroled, will replace her fetus, soonest.

Q: What does the only man in this story, the unnamed 'baby daddy' have to do with anything? Seems he did just walk away, from Marshae, the fetus, and/or Ebony.

Pregnant Woman Indicted For Baby's Death After Being Shot

An Alabama woman who was shot in the stomach, resulting in the death of her five-month-old fetus, was indicted on a manslaughter charge by a grand jury. The reason? She started the dispute that led to her getting shot.

Initially, police charged 23-year-old Ebony Jamison for shooting 27-year-old Marshae Jones in December of 2018 outside a Dollar General in Birmingham. But according to AL.com, a police investigation determined that it wasn’t Jamison who was to blame for the shooting—it was Jones, for starting it:

“The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby,’’ Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid said at the time of the shooting. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”

Reid added that the fight began over the unborn baby’s father, and that the investigation found that Jamison was defending herself.

Reid’s latest statement reiterates what he said at the time of the shooting, which was:

“When a 5-month pregnant woman initiates a fight and attacks another person, I believe some responsibility lies with her as to any injury to her unborn child,’’ Reid said. “That child is dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations.”

Alabama recently passed a near-total ban on abortion, and it’s not unheard of for a woman to face jail time for miscarrying. While shocking, this case clearly delineates in the most gruesome terms what we already know: That women’s lives are not valued.

#Resist

FUCKING SERIOUSLY?  Is this because men can not be expected to keep control of themselves or just walk away?

[Athos_131]

A mother reported a teen bully for racially taunting her son. Then he beat her unconscious, attorney says.

When Beronica Ruiz went to pick up her 12-year-old son from school in Passaic, N.J., last week, it wasn’t the first time that day she needed to be there. Hours earlier, Ruiz and her husband had met with the school’s vice principal over concerns that their son was threatened by other students who allegedly chanted “All Mexicans should go back behind the wall,” the family’s attorney told The Washington Post.

The New Jersey couple were upset the school didn’t inform them about the taunts but left the June 19 meeting feeling “somewhat reassured” after the vice principal said he would contact the students and their parents, said Daniel Santiago, the lawyer.

But as Ruiz, who was pushing her 1-year-old daughter in a stroller, walked home from Passaic Gifted and Talented Academy School No. 20 with her son that afternoon, the boy noticed they weren’t alone. Three boys trailed behind — and he recognized them.

“He turned to his mother and said, ‘Mom, those are the children that were threatening me, and they’re following us,’ ” Santiago said.

Moments later, a 13-year-old boy allegedly attacked. Santiago said the boy first punched Ruiz’s son in the face. When the 35-year-old mother tried to step in, the teen hit her and “threw her to the ground,” causing her to lose consciousness, Santiago said.

“This was a brutal hate crime, and it was committed by a 13-year-old,” Santiago said. “I don’t know what circumstances could give rise to a 13-year-old boy having such hate in his heart that he would commit this brutal attack and leave a woman essentially to die in front of her children without any remorse or any twinge of conscience.”

Ruiz was hospitalized for two days after the alleged beating, which left her with facial fractures and a concussion, Santiago said.

On Tuesday, the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office announced that the 13-year-old, who fled the scene, had been arrested and charged following the June 19 incident. He faces one count each of aggravated assault and simple assault, and has been released to his parents pending an appearance in family court, according to the news release. The attack was condemned by Passaic City Mayor Hector C. Lora, who said in a statement to The Post he was “outraged” and added that “what happened to the mother is unacceptable.”

“This incident is being taken extremely seriously. I have met with and spoken personally with the family,” Lora said. “I have met with my chief of police, local officials and school administration as well as board members to make sure there is accountability and that this family receives justice as well as any help and resources we can provide so they can heal and feel safe.”

However, Santiago maintains that the violent attack could have been avoided if the school had responded differently to the initial bullying complaint, noting that he is planning to file a lawsuit on behalf of the family. School officials did not respond to requests for comment late Tuesday.

“Just practically speaking, if the boy wasn’t in school, if he had been disciplined for actually using racially charged slurs, this attack would not have happened,” the attorney said.

The 13-year-old suspect is African American, Santiago said. Ruiz and her husband are Mexican and are in the United States on work permits while they await green cards, but their children are American citizens, he said.

The day before the alleged assault, Santiago said Ruiz’s son was in the school cafeteria when a group of students started mocking him about his ethnicity, telling him, “Go back behind the wall.”

In response to the bullies, Santiago said the boy “quite astutely” pointed out, “We’re all immigrants, so what are you talking about?” But instead of defusing the situation, “the other boys became violent” and started threatening Ruiz’s son, Santiago said.

“He pulled one of the teachers aside and said, ‘I’m scared for my safety,’ ” the lawyer said. “The teacher grabbed the attention of a security guard, and they essentially sequestered my client’s son in a room for his own safety.”

Though the school appeared to see “the threat as very real,” Santiago said Ruiz and her husband were not made aware of what happened until their son told them.

During the meeting with the school’s vice principal, the administrator admitted fault, telling the parents that “it slipped his mind” and “he should have contacted them,” Santiago claimed.

“That in itself is a woefully inadequate response,” he said, later adding, “If my son’s health and his well-being and indeed his life was in danger and the school knew about it and they failed to report it to me, someone dropped the ball. That is a failure on the school district’s part.”

It is not exactly clear what motivated the 13-year-old to allegedly go after Ruiz and her son, but the mother told NBC New York that the teen was swearing loudly when he approached the family on the street. Ruiz said when she tried to get the 13-year-old to stop, he told her to “shut up” and punched her.

By the time she regained consciousness and called the police, her attacker was gone, Santiago said. But it wasn’t long before Ruiz saw him again.

When Ruiz was released from the hospital, she and her husband took their son back to school only to discover that the teen was still attending classes “as if nothing had happened,” Santiago said.

“They spoke to the vice principal again, and the response they received was, ‘Well, he has the right to an education just as much as your son does,’ ” Santiago said.

The boy was suspended only after Ruiz’s husband called Lora, the mayor, Santiago said. (Lora has not commented on his involvement.) It is unclear whether the other two boys present that afternoon have faced disciplinary action, though Santiago said they “tried to stop the 13-year-old.”

The school has also now offered to pay for the family’s medical bills, Santiago said.

“We do appreciate the gesture,” he said, “but at this point, it’s too little too late.”

Santiago said that while Ruiz’s physical injuries have started to heal, “her emotional wounds are slower to recover.”

“My son, he can’t sleep, and I don’t sleep because I am very worried,” Ruiz told ABC7 News.

In Tuesday’s statement, prosecutors made no mention of hate crime charges, although that’s how Santiago categorizes what happened.

“This began by boys chanting that Mexicans should go back behind the wall,” he said. “What spurred them to threaten violence was Ruiz’s son advising that we all come from immigrants. . . . That anger triggered in this young boy enough hate and enough fury to attack a woman, an adult, with no fear.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Donald Trump Jr. Shares, Then Deletes, a Tweet Questioning Kamala Harris’s Race

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, shared another person’s tweet with his millions of followers during the Democratic debate on Thursday that falsely claimed Senator Kamala Harris was not black enough to be discussing the plight of black Americans.

“Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves,” Ali Alexander, a member of a right-wing constellation of media personalities, wrote on Twitter. “She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.”

Mr. Trump, a valuable Republican surrogate as his father faces a bruising 2020 race, posted the tweet of unverified information, then asked his more than three million followers: “Is this true? Wow.” By the end of the night, Mr. Trump had deleted his message, and by Friday, a spokesman said it had all been a misunderstanding.

“Don’s tweet was simply him asking if it was true that Kamala Harris was half-Indian because it’s not something he had ever heard before,” said the spokesman, Andy Surabian, “and once he saw that folks were misconstruing the intent of his tweet, he quickly deleted it.”

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But by then, the original message, questioning the background of a presidential candidate who is of Indian and Jamaican descent, had already spread far and wide. For people like Mr. Alexander — an alt-right fringe figure who has also gone by the name Ali Akbar — the entire point of commenting was to go viral and counteract any progress made by a Democrat like Ms. Harris. She caught Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumed front-runner, off guard on Thursday night by questioning his track record on race.

Because his tweet was elevated by valuable surrogates like the president’s son, Mr. Alexander has become part of a loose network of accounts weaponized by the Trump campaign as part of its effort to discredit candidates.

The facts are these: Ms. Harris, a first-term senator from California and a former prosecutor, is the biracial daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother. She has faced repeated questions about her race throughout her career, but has at times resisted being put into one category or another. In an interview with The Washington Post this year, Ms. Harris called herself “an American,” defying calls at various points for her to choose.

“My point was: I am who I am,” Ms. Harris said at the time. “I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.”

On Thursday evening, Ms. Harris was more forceful in relaying her experiences with racism. “Growing up, my sister and I had to deal with the neighbor who told us her parents couldn’t play with us because she — because we were black,” Ms. Harris said.

She was also forceful in her criticism of Mr. Biden, who served as vice president to the nation’s first black president but who drew intense scrutiny a week ago for expressing a willingness to work with lawmakers who have different views — a group that at one point included segregationist senators.

Ms. Harris told Mr. Biden during the debate that it was “hurtful” that he’d worked with segregationists. She also accused him of working with them to oppose busing students to schools to better integrate them, a claim Mr. Biden denied.

“And, you know,” Ms. Harris said, “there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

Her impassioned embrace of her personal history was what Mr. Alexander and then Mr. Trump pounced on. By the end of the evening, even though Mr. Trump had deleted his tweet, a round of accounts began sharing the contents of Mr. Alexander’s tweet questioning Ms. Harris’s background.



This activity caught the attention of Caroline Orr, a Virginia-based researcher who studies disinformation and elections. Mr. Alexander is a real person, but Ms. Orr hinted that the activity may have been the work of Twitter bots meant to spread his misinformation.

“A lot of suspect accounts are pushing the ‘Kamala Harris is not Black’ narrative tonight,” Ms. Orr wrote on Twitter. “It’s everywhere and it has all the signs of being a coordinated/artificial operation.”

On Friday, Mr. Alexander denied that his tweet had been part of an organized effort to spread that message at all, and he has characterized as racist inquiries into what he meant by his original tweet.

Lily Adams, an aide to Ms. Harris, on Friday criticized Mr. Trump’s tweet. “This is the same type of racist attack his father used to attack Barack Obama,” she said. “It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, had moved on: He sent a fund-raising text message to followers of the Trump campaign.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Riz Ahmed's Star Wars Celebration Chicago Appearance Was Canceled Because Homeland Security Wouldn't Let Him Board His Flight

On the first day of Star Wars Celebration Chicago this past April, it was suddenly announced that Riz Ahmed—who played Imperial courier-turned Rebel hero Bodhi Rook in Rogue One—had to cancel his appearance at the convention. Now, the actor’s revealed why, and it’s another reflection of being a minority attempting to travel in the U.S.

As THR reports, speaking recently at CAA’s Amplify leadership summit—which examines issues pertaining to diversity, treatment of minorities, and multicultural issues in both politics and the sports, entertainment, and tech industries—Ahmed brought up his appearance (or rather lack thereof) at Celebration Chicago.

He revealed that the reason he couldn’t attend as planned is that the Department of Homeland Security stopped him from getting on his flight—far from the first time the actor has been impeded in travel efforts in his career:

Hassan Minhaj can win a Peabody, I can win an Emmy, Ibtihaj Muhammad can go to the Olympics, but some of these obstacles are systemic and we can’t really face them alone, we need your help. I’m basically here to ask for your help, because it’s really scary to be a Muslim right now, super scary. I’ve often wondered, is this going to be the year when they round us up, if this is going to be the year they put Trump’s registry into action. If this is going to be the year they ship us all off.

Muslim travelers have long faced prejudice during air travel, the spectre of the war on terror (and prejudices stoked long before it) still being felt in the years since the 9/11 terror attacks, but Federal scrutiny has spiked under the Trump administration as the President has spent much of his tenure seeking to instate travel bans on people from Muslim-majority countries.

Ahmed’s case is not the first time an artist traveling to meet fans at a convention has found themselves turned away by Federal agents because of scrutiny and discrimination like this, and sadly, it’s unlikely to be the last while President Trump is in office (and, even sadder, likely beyond even that). And if someone as recognizable as Ahmed—literally a main character in a Star Wars movie—is being stopped for the simple reason of being a minority, how many untold stories of this prejudice are out there?

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes

Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings.

In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in May while in custody at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Texas. One member posted a GIF of Elmo with the quote, “Oh well.” Another responded with an image and the words “If he dies, he dies.”

Created in August 2016, the Facebook group is called “I’m 10-15” and boasts roughly 9,500 members from across the country. (10-15 is Border Patrol code for “aliens in custody.”) The group described itself, in an online introduction, as a forum for “funny” and “serious” discussion about work with the patrol. “Remember you are never alone in this family,” the introduction said.

Responsible for policing the nation’s southern and northern boundaries, the Border Patrol has come under intense scrutiny as the Trump administration takes new, more aggressive measures to halt the influx of undocumented migrants across the United States-Mexico border. The patrol’s approximately 20,000 agents serve under the broader U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which has been faulted for allegedly mistreating children and adults in its custody. The agency’s leadership has been in turmoil, with its most recent acting chief, John Sanders, resigning last week.

ProPublica received images of several recent discussions in the 10-15 Facebook group and was able to link the participants in those online conversations to apparently legitimate Facebook profiles belonging to Border Patrol agents, including a supervisor based in El Paso, Texas, and an agent in Eagle Pass, Texas. ProPublica has so far been unable to reach the group members who made the postings.

ProPublica contacted three spokespeople for CBP in regard to the Facebook group and provided the names of three agents who appear to have participated in the online chats. CBP hasn’t yet responded.

“These comments and memes are extremely troubling,” said Daniel Martinez, a sociologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who studies the border. “They’re clearly xenophobic and sexist.”

The postings, in his view, reflect what “seems to be a pervasive culture of cruelty aimed at immigrants within CBP. This isn’t just a few rogue agents or ‘bad apples.’”

The Border Patrol Facebook group is the most recent example of some law enforcement personnel behaving badly in public and private digital spaces. An investigation by Reveal uncovered hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers who moved in extremist Facebook circles, including white supremacist and anti-government groups. A team of researchers calling themselves the Plain View Project recently released a hefty database of offensive Facebook posts made by current and ex-law enforcement officers.

And in early 2018, federal investigators found a raft of disturbing and racist text messages sent by Border Patrol agents in southern Arizona after searching the phone of Matthew Bowen, an agent charged with running down a Guatemalan migrant with a Ford F-150 pickup truck. The texts, which were revealed in a court filing in federal court in Tucson, described migrants as “guats,” “wild ass shitbags,” “beaners” and “subhuman.” The messages included repeated discussions about burning the migrants up.

Several of the postings reviewed by ProPublica refer to the planned visit by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, including Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Veronica Escobar, to a troubled Border Patrol facility outside of El Paso. Agents at the compound in Clint, Texas, have been accused of holding children in neglectful, inhumane conditions.

Members of the Border Patrol Facebook group were not enthused about the tour, noting that Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from Queens, had compared Border Patrol facilities to Nazi concentration camps. Escobar is a freshman Democrat representing El Paso.

One member encouraged Border Patrol agents to hurl a “burrito at these bitches.” Another, apparently a patrol supervisor, wrote, “Fuck the hoes.” “There should be no photo ops for these scum buckets,” posted a third member.

Perhaps the most disturbing posts target Ocasio-Cortez. One includes a photo illustration of her engaged in oral sex at an immigrant detention center. Text accompanying the image reads, “Lucky Illegal Immigrant Glory Hole Special Starring AOC.”

Another is a photo illustration of a smiling President Donald Trump forcing Ocasio-Cortez’s head toward his crotch. The agent who posted the image commented: “That’s right bitches. The masses have spoken and today democracy won.”

The posts about Escobar and Ocasio-Cortez are “vile and sexist,” said a staffer for Escobar. “Furthermore, the comments made by Border Patrol agents towards immigrants, especially those that have lost their lives, are disgusting and show a complete disregard for human life and dignity.”

The head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Joaquin Castro, reviewed the Facebook discussions and was incensed. “It confirms some of the worst criticisms of Customs and Border Protection,” said Castro, a Democrat who represents San Antonio. “These are clearly agents who are desensitized to the point of being dangerous to migrants and their co-workers.” He added that the agents who made the vulgar comments “don’t deserve to wear any uniform representing the United States of America.”

Vicki Gaubeca, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, said the postings are more evidence of the sexism and misogyny that has long plagued the Border Patrol. “That’s why they’re the worst at recruiting women,” said Gaubeca, whose group works to reform the agency. “They have the lowest percentage of female agents or officers of any federal law enforcement agency.”

In another thread, a group member posted a photo of father and his 23-month-old daughter lying face down in the Rio Grande. The pair drowned while trying to ford the river and cross into the U.S.; pictures of the two have circulated widely online in recent days, generating an outcry.

The member asked if the photo could have been faked because the bodies were so “clean.” (The picture was taken by an Associated Press photographer, and there is no indication that it was staged or manipulated.) “I HAVE NEVER SEEN FLOATERS LIKE THIS,” the person wrote, adding, “could this be another edited photo. We’ve all seen the dems and liberal parties do some pretty sick things…”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Twitter Racist Who Allegedly Sent Death Threats to Muslim Lawyer Now Facing Federal Charges

After allegedly sending a death threat to a Muslim lawyer on Twitter last year, a North Carolina man is facing federal felony charges of issuing a threat via interstate commerce that could land him in prison for up to five years, the New York Times reported on Monday.

According to the Times, the charges stem from a March 2018 incident in which Virginia lawyer, author, and now-Democratic nominee for State Senate Qasim Rashid received a slur-filled message from a pseudonymous account containing the phrase “view your destiny” alongside a photo that appeared to be of the infamous 1915 lynching of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank in Georgia. Rashid had no idea who sent the tweet but flagged it in a screenshot to Twitter, which later suspended the account. He also reported it to the FBI, according to the Associated Press.

He first learned that FBI agents had identified the man behind the tweet as 52-year-old Joseph Cecil Vandevere last week, the Times wrote.

Per the Times, as of Monday evening the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina said a warrant has been obtained for Vandevere’s arrest, though he was not yet in custody:

In an indictment filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina on June 20, Joseph Cecil Vandevere of Black Mountain, N.C., was charged with issuing a threat via interstate commerce, which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.

A warrant has been issued for Mr. Vandevere, 52, who had not been arrested as of Monday night, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the district. He could not be reached on Monday evening, and it was unclear whether he had a lawyer.

The Daily Beast reported archived snapshots of Vandevere’s alleged account, @DaDutchman5, showed the threat directed at Rashid followed “at least a year of unhinged attacks against other politicians and public figures” as well as posts in favor of the crazed Pizzagate conspiracy theory, among others.

That Vandevere is facing charges is notable because Twitter is essentially overrun with these kind of threats, despite the site and its founder Jack Dorsey having repeatedly promised to do something about it for years. In May 2019, Twitter’s head of legal, policy, and trust and safety Vijaya Gadde told Vice that the site was still examining whether to ban literal Nazis—a policy so blindingly obvious that even scandal-ridden Facebook, a company that civil rights organizations have relentlessly criticized for its inaction on hate speech, has at least officially implemented.

Gadde told Vice that the company believes “counter-speech and conversation are a force for good, and they can act as a basis for de-radicalization, and we’ve seen that happen on other platforms, anecdotally.”

It’s also noteworthy because law enforcement often does not take social media threats seriously, Rashid told the Daily Beast.

“It’s not very common that they actively pursue these kinds of death threats,” Rashid said. “It’s going to make social media safer, and it’s actually going to protect speech for those who engage in constructive dialogue as opposed to violent extremism.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

It's Time To Get Upset About Sneakers Again

Earlier this week, Nike pulled the release of what the Wall Street Journal described as “a U.S.A.-themed sneaker” that had been slated to be released on July 4. The sneakers, which featured the circa-1770 “Betsy Ross flag” on the heel of the shoe, were shipped to retailers and then recalled. “Nike has chosen not to release the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July,” Nike said in a statement, “as it featured the old version of the American flag.”

The Journal revealed that this was not quite the embarrassing quality-assurance blooper that the company’s statement suggested, reporting that blackballed quarterback and Nike spokesperson Colin Kaepernick had objected to the use of a flag that flew while slavery was still practiced in the United States, and that Nike had withdrawn the sneakers in part at Kaepernick’s behest. Nike still hasn’t addressed that, although its initial statement was later upgraded to, “Nike made the decision to halt distribution of the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July based on concerns that it could unintentionally offend and detract from the nation’s patriotic holiday.”

What happened next was more or less what happened the last time Nike and Kaepernick appeared in the same sentence. The people you’d expect to lose their shit—the people whose entire politics resolve to always losing their shit over trivial Mad Libs mini-outrages like this—vigorously and seemingly quite gladly went on to lose it again. This bottomless capacity and eagerness to take this kind of theatrical offense over things like this, and to just absolutely go to town on whatever superheated slop is dished out by the partisan media ecosystem that exists to serve it up, is by now both a sort of political identity and identity politics unto itself. This performance of being upset, which is both consciously performed and seemingly also in total lizard-brain earnest, fills the vacuum of the broader moment—specifically with the smell of burning sneakers and the sound of offended people wailing about how offended other people are.

The spectacle of all that is still strange, because the specifics of it are, just on their basic merits, so goofy. The shit-losing community yowls about how offensive and ridiculous they find the offense that they presume other people to have taken; they do this into the front-facing camera on their phones, or into a webcam they’ve set up on the dashboard of their car, or into the cursor blinking on some social media site’s little text box. They direct these complaints at a multinational corporation that manufactures athletic equipment, over literal or figurative piles of smoldering athletic socks and desecrated basketball shoes that they have just immolated/defaced. These people are not themselves upset—they are never upset, which is easily ascertained because of how reliably they insist upon that—but they are disappointed and embarrassed on Nike’s behalf, or just kind of laughing in a not-mad way at how upset other people get, and also how easily offended people are these days.

It doesn’t really matter that there is nothing really to this, and that it fundamentally resolves to people 1) insisting that it is unpatriotic to deny the American flag the right to appear on a tacky sneaker, and 2) saying “fuck Colin Kaepernick” for the umpteenth time. It’s not about Kaepernick’s reading of the flag, which can be both correct—“under the guise of ‘heritage,’ symbols of early US history have long been adopted by hate groups set on returning to a time when all non-white people were viewed as subhuman and un-American,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Keegan Hankes said, identifying the flag’s use in recent recruiting material from racist reactionary organizations—and maybe also a bit much. None of that really matters to anyone, because none of the people getting upset about this withering insult to Betsy Ross herself, or the bedrock constitutional right to put a flag on a sneaker so people will buy it or whatever really had an opinion on any of this before Colin Kaepernick had his.

The whole story has had an almost algorithmic feel about it from the jump, like one of those text-jammed procedurally generated t-shirts you see on Facebook except that this one says You’re Damn Right I Will Defend Betsy Ross From Sneaker Companies And Free Agent Quarterbacks. It is hot outside and a lot of people are off work today, and yet this story continues to run smoothly even on autopilot. Various grouches and weirdos rise in turn to deliver themselves of speeches and sermons that consist of the same 50 words arranged in slightly different order. It is useless, or useful only in demonstrating which members of Congress are willing to tweet feet pics and which prefer to rely on ominous line breaks to make their point. All of them make the same point, which is not really a point at all so much as it is pretending to be oppressed by what some other person thinks or some sneaker company does.

It is reasonable to wonder what a flag would even be doing on a shoe, where it could get dog shit mushed onto it or be dunked in a mud puddle or otherwise suffer the sort of indignities from which flags are generally protected. The short answer is that it was there because someone at Nike thought it might help the shoes sell, although that’s not a thing flags are supposed to be used for, either. But the way these symbols get used necessarily change over time, and to fit the interests of those using them. “In Betsy Ross’s time, the flag was strictly utilitarian,” Betsy Ross House director Lisa Moulder said. “It was a military tool. It wasn’t commercialized until much later. In the 18th century, flags helped troops on land or at sea identify each other, so you’d know if you were firing on military troops or an ally.” There’s always some war to find.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Nicaraguan migrant, 52, dies at Arizona hospital

A Nicaraguan man who died Friday at an Arizona hospital is the 12th person to die in the custody of US immigration authorities since September.

Three dozen people from Central America, including the 52-year-old man, had turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents west of Sasabe, US Customs and Border Protection said in a statement. They were being processed at a Border Patrol facility in Tucson when he fell into medical distress.

CBP expressed its condolences to the man's family.

Eleven others have died in US custody, including a 30-year-old Honduran man who died in ICE custody last Sunday at a hospital in Humble, Texas, the agency said.

Yimi Alexis Balderramos-Torres entered ICE custody on June 6 and less than two weeks later was transferred to the Houston Contract Detention Facility in Houston, Texas.

On June 30, he was found unresponsive in his dormitory and attempts to revive him were unsuccessful, ICE said.

Other detainees to die in ICE custody since November include a 58-year-old Cuban man; two Russian nationals, a 40-year-old man and a 56-year-old man; a 54-year-old Mexican man; and a 21-year-old Indian national. A 25-year-old Salvadoran transgender woman, Jonathan Alberto "Johana" Medina Leon, died in the agency's custody in early June.

Besides the 12 migrants who have died in US custody, a 2-year-old boy from Guatemala died in May at an El Paso hospital. The boy had suffered from complications of pneumonia and was not identified and not in US custody at the time of his death, Tekandi Paniagua, the Guatemalan consul general in Del Rio, Texas, told CNN. He had previously been in US custody.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

LOL This Fucking Guy

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, the guy who went on a Twitter rampage last Tuesday over Nike’s decision to pull its Betsy Ross Fourth of July sneakers, and the guy who vowed to quash $1 million in incentives for the company to bring a manufacturing facility to the state, apparently can’t live without his Nikes.

Or maybe he’s just another Republican politician claiming the mantle of patriotism by latching onto the latest racist campaign targeting private businesses over decisions they make out of respect for people of color.

At 2 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Ducey posted a thread of nine tweets saying he was “embarrassed for Nike.”

“Instead of celebrating American history the week of our nation’s independence, Nike has apparently decided that Betsy Ross is unworthy, and has bowed to the current onslaught of political correctness and historical revisionism,” he wrote.

“Nike has made its decision, and now we’re making ours. I’ve ordered the Arizona Commerce Authority to withdraw all financial incentive dollars under their discretion that the State was providing for the company to locate here,” he added.

Here’s the thread:

https://twitter.com/dougducey/status/1145980544909340672

Two days later, Ducey was photographed at a Fourth of July barbecue wearing Nike shoes. The photo was shared on Twitter by the Coconino County Democrats.

https://twitter.com/CoconinoDems/status/1146957975317147648

In case you didn’t click on it, here’s a closer look at his feet:



To be clear, the criticism here isn’t that Ducey is wearing Nikes—he can wear any fucking type of shoes he wants to. What’s laughable is that a) he’s a hypocrite and b) he’s willing to risk hundreds of local jobs over a political stunt that makes him look patriotic to racist voters, but then does it half-ass. MAGA!

That probably shouldn’t surprise anyone, though, since Ducey’s Twitter account is plastered with GOP patriotism porn. But at least make some kind of effort, dude. Maybe keep one shoe and burn the other? Stick your feet on the grill? I don’t know.

A spokesman for Ducey offered a sarcastic response to a request for comment by Business Insider: “Really? Yes, the governor owns Nikes. Stop the presses.”

They’re stopped.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Man stabs and kills 17-year-old for listening to rap music at gas station in Arizona

Peoria police say a man stabbed and killed a 17-year-old at a Circle K on the 4th of July.

According to the department’s Facebook post, 27-year-old Michael Adams walked into the store and stabbed the victim in the neck. The victim was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. Adams was arrested not far from the scene.

FOX 10 reports that Adams told officers that the victim was listening to rap music and “that type of music makes him feel unsafe because he’s been attacked in the past by people who listen to rap music.”

He claimed he was trying to prevent a future attack involving the victim and admits the two never spoke.

Adams attorney told the TV outlet that he suffers from mental illness and had been previously released from jail without medication. He said his client should be admitted to the hospital for treatment.

The suspect is currently back in jail with a bond set at $1 million.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Hungry, Scared and Sick: Inside the
Migrant Detention Center in Clint, Tex.

Since the Border Patrol opened its station in Clint, Tex., in 2013, it was a fixture in this West Texas farm town. Separated from the surrounding cotton fields and cattle pastures by a razor-wire fence, the station stood on the town’s main road, near a feed store, the Good News Apostolic Church and La Indita Tortillería. Most people around Clint had little idea of what went on inside. Agents came and went in pickup trucks; buses pulled into the gates with the occasional load of children apprehended at the border, four miles south.

But inside the secretive site that is now on the front lines of the southwest border crisis, the men and women who work there were grappling with the stuff of nightmares.

Outbreaks of scabies, shingles and chickenpox were spreading among the hundreds of children who were being held in cramped cells, agents said. The stench of the children’s dirty clothing was so strong it spread to the agents’ own clothing — people in town would scrunch their noses when they left work. The children cried constantly. One girl seemed likely enough to try to kill herself that the agents made her sleep on a cot in front of them, so they could watch her as they were processing new arrivals.

“It gets to a point where you start to become a robot,” said a veteran Border Patrol agent who has worked at the Clint station since it was built. He described following orders to take beds away from children to make more space in holding cells, part of a daily routine that he said had become “heartbreaking.”

The little-known Border Patrol facility at Clint has suddenly become the public face of the chaos on America’s southern border, after immigration lawyers began reporting on the children they saw — some of them as young as 5 months old — and the filthy, overcrowded conditions in which they were being held.

Border Patrol leaders, including Aaron Hull, the outspoken chief patrol agent of the agency’s El Paso Sector, have disputed descriptions of degrading conditions inside Clint and other migrant detention sites around El Paso, claiming that their facilities were rigorously and humanely managed even after a spate of deaths of migrant children in federal custody.

But a review of the operations of the Clint station, near El Paso’s eastern edge, shows that the agency’s leadership knew for months that some children had no beds to sleep on, no way to clean themselves and sometimes went hungry. Its own agents had raised the alarm, and found themselves having to accommodate even more new arrivals.

The accounts of what happened at Clint and at nearby border facilities are based on dozens of interviews by The New York Times and The El Paso Times of current and former Border Patrol agents and supervisors; lawyers, lawmakers and aides who visited the facility; and an immigrant father whose children were held there. The review also included sworn statements from those who spent time at El Paso border facilities, inspection reports and accounts from neighbors in Clint.

The conditions at Clint represent a conundrum not just for local officials, but for Congress, where lawmakers spent weeks battling over the terms of a $4.6 billion humanitarian aid package for facilities at the border. The lack of federal investment, some argue, is why the sites have been so strained. But the reports of squalor prompted several Democratic lawmakers to vote against the final bill, which did not have oversight and enforcement provisions.

By all accounts, the Border Patrol’s attempt to continue making room for new children at Clint even as it was unable to find space to send them to better-equipped facilities was a source of concern for many people who worked there.

“I can’t tell you the number of times I would talk to agents and they would get teary-eyed,” said one agent, a veteran of 13 years with Border Patrol who worked at Clint.

Mary E. González, a Democratic state lawmaker who toured the Clint station last week, said that Border Patrol agents told her they had repeatedly warned their superiors about the overcrowded facility, but that federal officials had taken no action.

“They said, ‘We were ringing the alarms, we were ringing the alarms, and nobody was listening to us’ — agents told me that,” Ms. González said. “I genuinely believe that the higher-ups made the Clint situation happen.”

A Forward Operating Base
Architects designed the Clint station as a type of forward base — replete with fueling stations, garages for all-terrain vehicles and horse stables — from which agents could go on forays along the border.

The station was never intended to hold more than about a hundred adult men, and it was designed with the idea that migrants would be detained for only a few hours of processing before being transferred to other locations.

Officials have allowed reporters and members of Congress on controlled tours of Clint, but prohibited them from bringing phones or cameras inside, and from entering certain areas. But through interviews with dozens of people with knowledge of the station — including lawyers, former detainees and staff members — The Times was able to model the main areas where children were held: the station’s central processing area, with its cinder-block cells; a converted loading area and yard; and a warehouse on the property.


Parts of the site resemble what might be seen at many government buildings. Photographs in the hallway celebrate the work of the Border Patrol, showing agents on horseback and in all-terrain vehicles. A conference room features high-backed chairs upholstered with faux leather.

But the sense of normalcy fades away the deeper one goes into the station. A detachment of Coast Guard personnel, sent to assist overworked agents, stock an ad hoc pantry with items like oatmeal and instant noodles. Monitors in blue shirts roam the station, hired through an outside contractor to supervise the detained children.

Beyond the pantry, a door leads to the site’s processing center, equipped with about 10 cells. One day this month, about 20 girls were crowded into one cell, so packed that some were sprawled on the floor. Toddlers could be seen in some cells, cared for by older children.

One of the cells functioned as a quarantine unit or “flu cell” for children with contagious diseases; employees have at times worn medical masks and gloves to protect themselves.

A part of the processing area was set aside for detained children to make phone calls to family members. Many broke into tears upon hearing the voices of loved ones, episodes so common that some agents merely shrugged in response.


Clint is known for holding what agents call U.A.C.s, or unaccompanied alien children — children who cross the border alone or with relatives who are not their parents.

Three agents who work at Clint said they had seen unaccompanied children as young as 3 enter the facility, and lawyers who recently inspected the site as part of a lawsuit on migrant children’s rights said they saw children as young as 5 months old. An agent who has worked for Border Patrol for 13 years — and who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the situation — confirmed reports by immigration lawyers that agents have asked migrants who are teenagers to help care for the younger children.

“We have nine agents processing, two agents in charge of U.A.C. care and we have little ones that need their diapers changed, and we can’t do that,” the agent said. “We can’t carry them or change diapers. We do ask the older juveniles, the 16-year-olds or 17-year-olds, to help us out with that.”


As immigration flows change, the scene inside Clint has shifted as well. The number of children in the site is thought to have peaked at more than 700 around April and May, and stood at nearly 250 two weeks ago. In an attempt to relieve overcrowding, agents took all the children out of Clint but then moved more than 100 back into the station just days later.

Unaccompanied boys are kept in a converted loading area that holds about 50 people. Until a few weeks ago, older boys were kept in a tent encampment outside.

Families, including adult parents, were also sent to Clint earlier this year, and Representative Will Hurd, a Republican whose Texas district includes Clint, said that 11 adult males “apprehended that morning” were also being held at the site when he visited on June 29.

Before the influx of migrants began to wane in recent weeks, the agents said they had kept the families in a warehouse normally used to house A.T.V.s. It was converted into two holding areas initially intended to house 50 people each.

A Chief Agent Under Fire
At least two Border Patrol agents at Clint said they had expressed concern about the conditions in the station to their superiors months ago. Even before that, senior Homeland Security officials in Washington had significant concerns about the El Paso Sector’s brash chief patrol agent and his oversight of the facility over the past year, when tighter security along other sections of the border prompted a steep rise in migrant crossings along the section that runs from New Mexico through West Texas.

The situation became so severe that in January, officials at Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, took the unusual move of ordering the sector chief, Mr. Hull, to come to headquarters in Washington for a face-to-face meeting. The officials were concerned that Mr. Hull, an agency veteran who speaks with a pronounced Texas twang, had moved too slowly to put safety measures in place after the deaths of migrant children, according to a Homeland Security official. After the meeting, Mr. Hull moved forward with the new procedures.

But tension has persisted between Mr. Hull and officials in Washington, particularly in recent months, as the number of migrants continued to increase at his facilities. The officials believe that Mr. Hull and Matthew Harris, the chief of the Clint station, have been slow to follow directives and communicate developments at the facilities in their sector, according to two Homeland Security officials.

Mr. Hull is seen as a hard-liner on immigration issues. He has often been heard saying that migrants exaggerate the problems they face in their home countries.

Officials at the border agency declined multiple interview requests.

Last month, the acting head of C.B.P., John Sanders, ordered an internal investigation into the Clint facility. The investigation — which is being conducted by the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the department’s inspector general — has examined allegations of misconduct.

As part of the review, investigators have conducted interviews and watched hours of video footage to see how agents treated detainees. So far, investigators have found little evidence to substantiate allegations of misconduct. But they have found that the facility is several times over capacity and has horrendous conditions.

The uproar over the site is drawing scrutiny on Border Patrol facilities that are some of the least-regulated migrant detention centers in the United States.

That is in part because they are intended in most cases to hold migrants for no more than 72 hours, before they are turned over to better-equipped facilities operated by other government agencies with stricter regulations on, say, the number of toilets and showers required. But the 72-hour limit has been frequently breached during the current migrant surge; some children have been housed at Clint for weeks on end.

Lawyers who visited the Clint station described children in filthy clothes, often lacking diapers and with no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap, prompting people around the country to donate supplies that the Border Patrol turned away.

But Mr. Hull painted a far different picture of his need for supplies in April, when the numbers of children held in Clint were soaring. Mr. Hull told commissioners in Doña Ana County in Las Cruces, N.M., in April that his stations had more than enough supplies.

“Twenty years ago, we were lucky if we had juice and crackers for those in custody,” Mr. Hull said, as quoted in The Las Cruces Sun-News. “Now, our stations are looking more like Walmarts — with diapers and baby formula and all kinds of things, like food and snacks, that we aren’t resourced or staffed for and don’t have the space to hold.”

An Inspector Arrives
One day in April, a man from Washington arrived unannounced around midday at the Clint station. He introduced himself as Henry Moak, and told the agents inside that he was there to inspect the site in his role as Customs and Border Protection’s chief accountability officer.

The Clint station was far over capacity on the day of Mr. Moak’s visit, bulging with 291 children. Mr. Moak found evidence of a lice infestation; children also told him about going hungry and being forced to sleep on the floors.

One girl, a 14-year-old from El Salvador, had been in custody for 14 days in Clint, including a nine-day stretch in a nearby hospital during which Border Patrol agents accompanied her and kept her under surveillance. Mr. Moak did not specify in his report why the girl had been rushed to the hospital. When the girl returned to Clint, another child had taken her bed so she had to sleep on the floor.

Two sisters from Honduras, one 11 and the other 7, told Mr. Moak that they had to sleep on benches in the facility’s hold room, getting their own cot only when other children were transferred out. “The sisters told me they had not showered or brushed their teeth since arriving at Clint station,” Mr. Moak said in his report. Showers had been offered twice during the girls’ time in custody, but the girls were asleep each time, his review showed.

Mr. Moak in the end stated that Clint was in compliance with standards.

One of a team of lawyers who inspected the station in June, Warren Binford, director of the clinical law program at Willamette University in Oregon, said that in all her years of visiting detention and shelter facilities, she had never encountered conditions so bad — 351 children crammed into what she described as a prisonlike environment.

She looked at the roster, and was shocked to see more than 100 very young children listed. “My God, these are babies, I realized. They are keeping babies here,” she recalled.

One teenage mother from El Salvador said Border Patrol agents at the border had taken her medicine for her infant son, who had a fever.

“Did they throw away anything else?” Ms. Binford said she had asked her.

“Everything,” she replied. “They threw away my baby’s diapers, formula, bottle, baby food and clothes. They threw away everything.”

Once at Clint, she told Ms. Binford, the baby’s fever came back and she begged the agents for more medicine. “Who told you to come to America with your baby, anyway?” one of the agents told her, according to the young woman’s account to Ms. Binford.

Border Patrol agents have said they have adequate supplies at Clint for most of the migrants’ needs. The facility lacks a kitchen, they said, so the ramen, granola bars, instant oatmeal and burritos that serve as most of the sustenance for migrants has been the best they could do.

Children sometimes could be seen crying, said one Border Patrol agent, who has worked for seven years at the Clint facility, but it most often seemed to be because they missed their parents. “It’s never because they’re mistreated; it’s because they’re homesick,” she said.

A Father Finds His Sons
Not long after Mr. Moak signed off on the conditions inside Clint, a man named Ruben was desperately trying to find his sons, 11-year-old twins who both have epilepsy.

The boys had crossed the border together in early June with their adult sister. They were hoping to reunite with their parents who had come to the United States earlier from El Salvador in order to earn enough money to pay for the boys’ epilepsy medications. They require daily injections and a strict regimen of care to prevent the seizures they began having at age 5.

But the twins were separated at the border from their sister and sent to Clint.

The first time they spoke to Ruben on the phone, the two boys sobbed intensely and asked when they would be able to see their parents again.

“We don’t want to be here,” they told him.

Ruben asked that his last name and the names of his sons be withheld for fear of retaliation by the American government.

Only later did Ruben learn that the boys had been given at least some of their epilepsy medication, and neither one had had a seizure. But one boy reported breaking out in a skin rash, his face and arms turning red and flaky. Both had come down with fevers and said they had been sent temporarily to the “flu cell.”

“There is no one to take care of you there,” one told his father.

It took 13 days after the boys were detained to speak to their father over the phone. A lawyer who had entered the facility, Clara Long of Human Rights Watch, met the boys, tracked down their parents, and helped them make a call. The boys were stoic and quiet, she said, and shook her hand as if “trying to act like little adults” — until they spoke to their father. Then, they could answer only with one- or two-word answers, Ms. Long said, and were wiping tears from their faces.

Much of the overcrowding appears to have been relieved at Clint, and overall arrivals at the border are slowing, as new policies make migrants, mainly from Central America, return to Mexico after they request asylum, as the summer heat deters travelers and as Mexico’s crackdown on its southern border prevents many from entering.

A Border Patrol agent who has long worked in the El Paso area said agents had tried to make things as easy as possible for the children; some bought toys and sports equipment on their own to bring in. “Agents play board games and sports with them,” he said.

But the Border Patrol long “took great pride” in quickly processing migrant families, and making sure children did not remain in their rudimentary stations for longer than 72 hours, the agent said. Clint, he said, “is not a place for kids.”

In the surrounding town, many residents were puzzled and sad at the news of what was happening to children in the station on Alameda Avenue.

“I don’t know what the hell happened, but they’ve diverted from their original mission,” said Julián Molinar, 66, a retired postal deliveryman who lives in a house facing the station. He served in the Army in Europe as the Berlin Wall came down, he said, and was dismayed that there was now talk of building a border wall near his home. As for the Clint facility, he said, “children should not be held here.”

Dora H. Aguirre, Clint’s mayor, expressed sympathy for the agents, who are part of the community in Clint and neighboring El Paso. “They’re just trying to do their job as a federal agency,” she said. “They are trying to do the best they can.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Why Trump will likely lose the census citizenship fight

President Donald Trump’s fight to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census is one he seems likely to lose.

Eleven days after an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling, a new team of Justice Department attorneys must persuade three district court judges that a June 30 printing deadline a previous DOJ legal team insisted had to be met no longer applies — even though, the Commerce Department said last week, the questionnaires are being printed already.

To pass muster with the Supreme Court, the new DOJ team must find a rationale that the high court will rule consistent with regulatory law and also believable — a tough assignment given that the court said in its ruling that the previous rationale was not.

“I think over the next day or two you’ll see what approach we’re taking, and I think it does provide a pathway for getting the question on the Census,” Attorney General William Barr told reporters Monday.

But that effort has been undermined repeatedly by Trump, who last week appeared to concede that his purpose was political. “Number one, you need it for Congress, you need it for Congress, for districting,” he said last week. “You need it for appropriations — where are the funds going? How many people are there? Are they citizens or are they not citizens?” (Districting and appropriations decisions are in fact based on the census's raw population numbers, not on any citizen count.)

“It just feels like a farce,” said Vanita Gupta, a former head of DOJ’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama and current president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which opposes adding the citizenship question. “There are people who view this as the president asking the Justice Department to do unlawful things and to violate and undermine the rule of law.”

The idea that judges will agree to ignore existing evidence in the case, Gupta said, “seems absurd.”

Trump’s continued insistence on adding the citizenship question increases the risk of additional disclosures about the White House’s role in the effort.

On Friday one of the three district court judges, Maryland-based U.S. District Judge George Hazel, ordered the start of discovery, a chance for both parties to seek out related evidence in the case.

Civil rights groups say they plan to use that opportunity to pry into communications between the White House and the Commerce Department and Justice Department officials involved in ordering the new query. They may also seek more details on Trump’s own involvement. That will likely trigger renewed legal battles over executive privilege and the confidentiality of White House interactions.

The district court judges will need to be convinced that whatever new rationale the DOJ lawyers produce for adding the census question isn’t undermined by earlier evidence that, among other things, suggested a deceased Republican redistricting strategist, Thomas Hofeller, sought to ask about citizenship to create an electoral advantage for Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.

Hazel previously ruled that only Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s intent was relevant to the legal issues in the case. But with the litigation now focused on issues of intentional discrimination and a conspiracy to deprive Latinos of their civil rights, the plaintiffs are planning a broader effort to turn up evidence that could be problematic for the administration.

“A civil conspiracy claim is what makes the intent of a larger number of people relevant,“ said Denise Hulett of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which represents plaintiffs in the two related cases before Hazel. “We think that’s going to come into play even more than it did before because it’s clear a large group of people were involved in the decision.”

Another lawyer for the plaintiffs said some document demands and deposition subpoenas that were taken off the table during the last rounds of litigation may now be in play again. “We know we didn’t get certain things before and they may now be subject to being revisited,” said Niyati Shah of Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

One of the plaintiffs’ new targets in discovery will be Trump aides who may have been involved in the decision to add a citizenship question.

“It’s been our contention throughout that the White House was directly involved,” Hulett said, “facilitating connections between Ross and whoever they needed to connect him with.”

Hulett noted that just after Ross announced his decision to add the question, Trump’s reelection campaign sent out an email saying the move was the president’s idea.

“The president wants the 2020 United States Census to ask people whether or not they are citizens,” the March 19, 2018, email said.

The civil rights groups’ efforts to obtain more behind-the-scenes details seem certain to trigger further legal battles. “We anticipate resistance,” Hulett said. “Executive privilege is always difficult to overcome, but it’s not sacrosanct.”

Any attempt to add a citizenship question at this point also could run into trouble with logistics and cost.

Trump said Friday the administration had considered “four or five ways” to ask about citizenship on the census, including printing an addendum to the standard questionnaire. But an addendum could cause its own problems, according to John Thompson, a former Census director who spent more than three decades with the bureau and resigned in May 2017.

“I think that's probably a recipe for disaster,” he said. “It hasn't been tested, and it will most likely cause confusion and errors.”

The bureau would likely need to send an addendum in a separate mailing — a significant undertaking considering that the Census Bureau seeks to reach 330 million people in more than 140 million households.

The 2020 census will be the first to feature a digital questionnaire, and the Census Bureau has said it will encourage the majority of households to complete the survey that way. Any change to the digital questionnaire would be easier technologically than adding a printed form, but it would still require approval from the Office of Management and Budget and could run afoul of existing court orders.

Another stumbling block could be the sudden move to assign new attorneys to the census case, according to Andrew Reamer, a research professor with George Washington University’s Institute for Public Policy, who’s been tracking the census legal battle.

DOJ announced the new group of lawyers Sunday, but did not offer a reason for the change.

“They just lost their legal staff on this, the guys who have been dealing with this for a year,” he said. “Now they’re stuck with a whole bunch of lawyers from the consumer protection branch.”

Still, he said the change of personnel reflects a broader difficulty in arguing the Trump administration’s position in court.

“I think the staff would have been in personal jeopardy if they had to go forward and argue that June 30 didn’t matter anymore,” he said. “It would have been a professional stain on their careers.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Mother of Child Who Died After ICE Custody Shares Heart-Wrenching Testimony

Last year, 1-year-old Mariee Juárez, a child from Guatemala, died of a respiratory infection that she contracted while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody with her mother. In this past year, at least six more children have died while in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody, after almost a decade of no child deaths.

On Wednesday, her mother, Yazmin Juárez, shared her powerful, blunt, and tearful testimony before a House subcommittee. Juárez alleged that ICE falsified her daughter’s medical records, and said she wanted to appear before Congress to make sure no more children die from the treatment they receive in ICE and CBP custody.

“I’m here today because I want to tell all people of all the world, in all countries, especially in the United States, that we need to make a change and make a difference to actually care and protect kids more,” Juárez said, her testimony translated into English. “ICE detention centers are terrible, inadequate places to lock children up—I’m sorry to say—as if they were animals.”

Speaking before the committee, Juárez told its members that Mariee was healthy when she was checked out by a nurse when they were first detained in March 2018, fleeing fear-inducing conditions in their home country. She said they were packed in a room with 12 people, with at least one child clearly sick.

As Mariee became ill, first with a weeks-long cough, then a persistent fever, Juárez alleged that doctors refused to examine Mariee’s lungs more closely. She said she would wait in a line morning after morning for an appointment, only to be given Tylenol, Pedialyte and Vicks VapoRub, the latter which Juárez later found out isn’t safe to give to children younger than 2 years old.

She recalled how hot her daughter’s little body and head felt. One night, she said, the toddler wouldn’t wake up when her mother roused her for dinner. Still, Juárez wasn’t given an appointment for Mariee; she told New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that at one point, her toddler was given a popsicle, with her mother told that it would help with the fever.

When Juárez finally gotten an appointment, the family was cleared for release from ICE. Mariee’s medical records, which Juárez provided to the committee, showed she was medically cleared for travel, but Juárez said that was false, and that she was never seen by a doctor. “How many more fraudulent medical records might be out there?” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz asked during her questioning.

Reached for comment via email, ICE responded that it couldn’t comment on Juárez’s testimony or ongoing legal cases, but said it was “committed to ensuring the welfare of all those in the agency’s custody, including providing access to necessary and appropriate medical care,” and cited a 2017 DHS inspector general report which said that family residential centers are “clean, well-organized, and efficiently run.”

Tearfully, Juárez recalled how her daughter was in the hospital for weeks, poked and prodded with tubes. Weeks later—on Guatemala’s Mother’s Day—Mariee died.

“It is very hard to see so many children and for none of them to be my daughter, and to think that I will never see her again, or hug her, or enjoy being with her, or tell her how much I love her,” Juárez said. “You have no idea how hard it is to move on without my little girl. It’s like they tore out a piece of my heart, like they tore out my soul.”

Responding to a question from Ocasio-Cortez about mistreatment she saw or experienced herself, Juárez alleged that she was told by an immigration agent that the U.S. is a country for Americans only, that Trump was their president, and that they could take Mariee away from her and put her in jail.

Juárez sued the U.S. government for $60 million last year. Earlier this year, Juárez filed another lawsuit against the city of Eloy, AZ, which had a contract with ICE to oversee the South Texas Family Residential Center hundreds of miles away in Dilley, TX, where she and Mariee were detained. She’s suing Eloy, which operated as a middleman between ICE and CoreCivic, for $40 million for Mariee’s “wrongful and preventable death,” claiming that the city neglected to ensure that children at Dilley received adequate medical care and sanitary living conditions.

In September, Eloy pulled out of the contract with CoreCivic and ICE, which garnered the city roughly $430,000 in fees annually.

“My daughter is gone. The people who are in charge of running these facilities and caring for these little angels are not supposed to let these things happen to them,” Juárez said. “It can’t be so hard for a country like the United States to protect kids who are locked up.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Contempt within the Border Patrol is reinforced by none other than Trump

THE CRUSH of migrants that overwhelmed U.S. border facilities in the spring, producing appalling conditions for migrant children at Customs and Border Protection stations, has eased with summer’s arrival as scorching temperatures and deterrent measures adopted by Mexican authorities drove down border-crossing arrests by nearly a third between May and June. Together with the $4.6 billion in supplemental funding enacted by Congress and signed by President Trump, that is taking pressure off the government’s capacity to manage the flow of migrants, especially the families and minors that have transformed the immigration landscape.

What will remain, however, are urgent questions about the Border Patrol, and the degree to which the agency’s failings of culture exacerbated a shocking humanitarian crisis on the southwest frontier. If crisis exposes character, then the agency manning the front lines of America’s border with Mexico needs to take a hard look at its own shortcomings — not only of resources but also of professionalism.

Without doubt, thousands of Border Patrol agents have struggled to contend with the biggest spike in migrant border-crossing in more than a decade, and many went the extra mile — playing with children in their care and displaying a hundred other kindnesses. Much of the apparently inhumane treatment of some migrants was reported by Border Patrol agents themselves to watchdog groups and higher-ups in the agency. Homeland Security officials have added additional medical personnel and opened new facilities to accommodate minors.

Still, the accounts of visitors to the Border Patrol’s station at Clint, in far west Texas, and reporting on the same facility by the New York Times, strongly suggest that Border Patrol officials failed to respond to warnings of filthy, unhygienic and dangerous conditions for unaccompanied minors there. True, it was a shortage of bed space that produced a bottleneck in which hundreds of migrant children were stuck in facilities such as the one in Clint, originally built to hold adults. But the fact that those children, some of them infested with lice, were forced to endure weeks at the station without clean clothing, soap, toothpaste and other basic necessities — even as the Border Patrol sector chief for that region, Aaron Hull, insisted that the agency had maintained humane conditions — is a sign of institutional indifference and callousness.

That impression is reinforced by reports of private Facebook group pages linked to current and former CBP agents that feature obnoxious, sneering and obscene references to undocumented migrants and Hispanic members of Congress. Border Patrol and Homeland Security officials insist the pages and commentary are unacceptable and unrepresentative; they have ordered investigations and taken disciplinary action against some personnel.

It’s anyone’s guess how deeply infected the Border Patrol has become by the toxic attitudes reflected in those Facebook groups. What’s worrying is that the intolerance and contempt for migrants afoot within the agency have only been encouraged by Mr. Trump, whose constant disparagement of migrants is a hallmark of his rhetoric. Little wonder it has found echoes in the far bureaucratic reaches of his administration.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

A black principal, four white teens and the ‘senior prank’ that became a hate crime

The principal saw a swastika first. It was inky black, spray painted on a trash can just beside the entrance to the high school. David Burton switched off the engine of his SUV, unaware, even then, of the magnitude of what he was about to see.

This was the last day of the year for the class of 2018 at Glenelg High School. There was going to be an awards ceremony, a picnic, that end-of-a-journey feeling that always made Burton so proud of his job. But as he was on his way to work at 6:25 a.m., the assistant principal had called, agitated and yelling about graffiti. “It’s everywhere,” he kept saying, so Burton had leaned on the gas and rushed the last few miles.

Soon, everyone would be telling him how shocked they were. This was Howard County, after all: a Maryland suburb between Washington and Baltimore that is extremely diverse, extremely well-educated and home to Columbia, a planned community founded on the principles of integration and inclusion. People moved their families here for that reputation just as much as for the good schools.

“Pleasantville,” Burton liked to call it, but as a black man, and as the principal of the county’s only majority-white school, he knew this place was more complicated. When he stepped out into the bright spring day, he confronted the reality of just how much more.

Beneath his dress shoes, there were more swastikas. Spray painted around them were crude drawings of penises.

Then Burton saw the letters “KKK.” He saw the word “Fuck” again and again next to the words “Jews,” “Fags,” “Nigs” and “Burton.”

were more than 100 markings in total, though he didn’t bother to count.

He turned a corner and saw something written in large capital letters on the sidewalk: “BURTON IS A NIGGER.”

He paused only for a moment, looking at the words, trying to comprehend that all of this was real.

Later, school district officials, county administrators and prosecutors would have a name for what happened here. They would repeat it, condemn it and vow to prevent it from occurring again. Hate crime.

The phrase has become inescapable as hate-fueled incidents have spiked across the country. A quarter of all hate crimes reported to the FBI, more than any other category, are similar to the attack discovered at Glenelg on May 24, 2018. Vandalism and destruction of property, a physical marking of an age-old threat: You don’t belong here.

The majority are repaired, washed away or painted over without anyone arrested. When the perpetrators are caught, they are rarely charged with a hate crime. Here, there would be consequences, and with them, a division between those who wanted to confront the racism in their midst and those determined to explain it away.

But first, Burton, 50 years old and dressed in one of his best black suits, would walk back over the graffiti, retreat into his office, close the door and pray.

His staff scrambled to cover the spray paint with tarps, carpet pads, anything they could find. The maintenance team searched for a sandblaster. But there was too much to cover and too little time before the students and parents began arriving. The seniors were wearing red caps and gowns, ready for their awards ceremony. Everyone was directed to alternative entrances, away from the worst of the damage. But photos of the graffiti were already being texted, emailed and Snapchatted.

In the auditorium, Imani Nokuri looked for her family, who had come to see her perform the national anthem. She was one of fewer than 20 black students in the class of more than 260 seniors. She and her younger sister, a freshman at Glenelg, had been rapid-fire texting all morning, comforting each other. But when Imani saw the look of deep concern her grandmother gave her, she forced a smile onto her face. “It’s okay,” she promised. “I’m fine.”

In the central office, teachers who had led diversity and empathy training for students were crying. Police were arriving, asking to see security footage. Phones were ringing with calls from reporters. Photos of the damage were about to be broadcast on TV, making their way into homes across the region.

In one of those homes, 72-year-old Susan Sands-Joseph was watching. She knew Glenelg well. She was one of the first black students to attend the school after desegregation. Suddenly, all the memories that she tried not to dwell on were dredged up again: the words she was called, the tomatoes thrown at her head, the looks her parents gave her when she came home saying scalding hot soup had been pushed into her lap again. “It’s okay,” she had promised them. “I’m fine.”

By the time the awards ceremony was about to begin, Principal Burton had rewritten the speech he had been planning to give. “We are not going to let this ruin your celebration,” he would now tell students.

He emerged from his office with notes clutched in his hand and stopped to check in with the police. The security footage, they told Burton, confirmed what he had suspected.

The principal entered the auditorium to a burst of applause. He stepped up to the podium. He stood before his students, looked out into their faces and felt certain: The people who did this were looking back at him.

Seth Taylor tipped his head down so his graduation cap would block his view of the podium. It felt, he said later, like the principal was staring right at him. But he and the others had hidden their faces behind masks the night before, Seth reminded himself. How could anyone know they were the ones who had done it?

All morning, he had been replaying the vandalism in his mind. He’d been at his buddy Matt Lipp’s house, where the parents of all their friends had gathered the evening of May 23 to sort out the details of Senior Week. The teens’ parents had rented them a house in Ocean City, the annual destination for thousands of local students celebrating graduation, and were divvying up tasks: who would drive the group to the beach, who would stock their fridge, who would cook them dinners before leaving them for a week of beer pong, sunburns and meetups with houses full of girls.

Afterward, Seth stayed to watch a Washington Capitals playoff game. He loved these kinds of nights and, really, everything about high school. Cheering crowds at his football and baseball games, late-night Xbox sessions, fishing trips, parties in their parents’ basements. He could do without the academic part — he was a B student, at best — but he was planning to join the Army Reserve and maybe go to community college.

With him at Matt’s was Josh Shaffer, a hockey player he’d been friends with since seventh grade, and Tyler Curtiss, the baseball team captain who had been homecoming king and prom king.

Matt and Josh declined interview requests, but Seth and Tyler agreed to talk to The Washington Post about the vandalism. When they tell the story of that evening, they start with the end of the Caps game, when everyone but Seth was deep into a supply of Bud Light, and the conversation turned, once again, to their senior prank.

Tyler wanted to superglue locks. Seth suggested they grease up three pigs and release them into the school.

Or, somebody said, they could go spray paint the words “Class of 2018.”

Within minutes, they were driving to the school with spray paint from Matt’s parents’ garage. They parked at the church next door, tied T-shirts into masks over their faces and sprinted through the woods.

A shake of the can, the smell of fumes. The words went down easily, just as they had planned: “Class of 2018,” they wrote across the sidewalk.

And then Seth watched as Josh wrote something else: “BURTON IS A” it began.

Later, this was the moment he agonized over — the point at which he could have turned back. “I wish I said something, like, ‘This is stupid, guys. It’s not worth it. We could actually get in trouble for this.’”

Why he didn’t, he would always struggle to explain: “I don’t know. Everyone was doing it. We didn’t realize the consequences.”

“It was just spray paint. It just happened. It is all a blur.”

The blur went on for about seven minutes, during which all of them sprayed something hateful. Josh targeted the principal. Matt attacked Jewish, gay and black people. Tyler drew two swastikas. Seth drew swastikas, “fags” and “KKK.”

When a car drove by, they leaped behind the brick columns near the front entrance, hiding. A moment later, they started spraying again.

Finally, they ran back to their cars. They chucked their paint cans in the woods. They swore to each other that they would never admit what they did.

Seth came home to a quiet house. His sister was away at college, his father was on a business trip, and his mother was asleep. He went to the fridge and found the breakfast she had made for him to eat the next morning. Seth popped the eggs into the microwave. When he went to grab them, the plate slipped. The hot eggs tumbled onto his arms and legs. The shock somehow made it hit him. What had he just done?

Panicked, he started Googling:

“How long do you go to jail for vandalism?”

And then: “Can you get a hate crime for painting swastikas?”

Now he was sitting in the Glenelg auditorium, thinking about what he’d told his mom. Early that morning, she’d received an email from the school informing parents about the graffiti. Horrified, she texted Seth, warning him what he would find when he arrived at the awards ceremony.

“Who would do that?” he had texted back.

And in a sense, he meant it. He had already begun to separate what he’d done from who he believed himself to be. He hadn’t intended to hurt anyone, he said. He would always maintain he wasn’t an anti-Semite, a homophobe or a racist.

From the podium a voice said: “Tyler Curtiss.”

Seth looked up. His friend was walking toward the stage. But Tyler wasn’t getting in trouble. He was accepting an athletic leadership award. He was walking across the stage and shaking the principal’s hand.

Seth felt a tap on his shoulder. The athletic director was standing over him. “Seth,” he said quietly. “You need to come with me.”

Seth followed him out, trying not to look at his classmates. On the other side of the auditorium doors, two police officers were waiting to take him to the office of the school resource officer, Steve Willingham.

On the TV screen inside was security footage from the night before. Seth could see his own stout frame, paint can in hand, frozen in high definition.

“I bet you don’t want to see that, do you?” he remembers Willingham saying.

“No,” Seth answered.

“Do you know why you’re in here?”

“Yes,” Seth said. He didn’t know then that the officers had been strategic in pulling him out first. Willingham had coached Seth’s sister in soccer. He was friends with Seth’s dad. He suspected that of all the boys, Seth was the most likely to confess.

It took only one question: “What happened?”

“Things got out of hand,” Seth recalls telling him. “I was under the impression we were going to do a prank, and it got bad.”

He started to cry. He would be the only one who immediately admitted what they did. The others, court records show, would deny it. Tyler wished Willingham good luck in finding out who did it.

Eventually they were told: The school’s WiFi system requires students to use individual IDs to get online. After they log in once, their phones automatically connect whenever they are on campus.

At 11:35 p.m. on May 23, the students’ IDs began auto-connecting to the WiFi. It took only a few clicks to find out exactly who was beneath those T-shirt masks.

“You have the right to remain silent,” an officer said to Seth before long. “Anything you say or do . . . ”

They told him to remove his graduation cap and gown. They cuffed his arms behind his back.

Seth realized they were about to march him outside, past the windows of the cafeteria. By now it would be filled with students eating lunch.

“Can you cover my face so that the kids don’t videotape me?” he asked.

“No,” an officer replied. “You deserve this.”

By the end of the day, charges had been filed. Not just vandalism and destruction of property, but a hate crime. Prosecutors believed the young men had committed their acts with animosity toward protected groups — and that they could prove it. In Maryland, that meant that the punishment could be intensified. It meant they were looking at up to six years of incarceration.

Before they were released from jail that night, the four students watched on a small TV screen outside their holding cell while their crime was broadcast on the local news — as it would be over and over in the coming days. Viewers saw four white teens, scowling at the camera, and the school system’s superintendent vowing at a news conference to hold them accountable.

“Howard County stands out as a place where diversity and acceptance are cherished,” Michael Martirano said. It sounded like something any superintendent would say. But here, many knew, it came with a story: one taught to children in school, bragged about to visitors and proclaimed on signs.

In the early 1960s, before the Fair Housing Act and the legalization of interracial marriage in Maryland, a white developer named James Rouse began purchasing huge swaths of Howard County farmland to build a planned community named Columbia.

He envisioned it as a mixed-race, mixed-income utopia. “The next America,” he called it, and although racial tensions could never be completely erased, to many people, that is what it became. Today, the suburb — home to a third of the county’s 300,000 residents — is renowned for its ethnic diversity, interracial marriages, interfaith centers and high-achieving schools. It appears frequently on national “Best Places to Live” lists.

Most are unaware of the history that came before Columbia. The farmland Rouse purchased included former slave-holding plantations. An estimated 2,800 people were enslaved in the county at the beginning of the Civil War. A century later, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 that schools must be desegregated, Howard County was so resistant that it took more than a decade for the black-only school, Harriet Tubman, to close its doors. The opposition to black students learning alongside white ones was so fierce, a cross was burned. It happened outside a school dance at Glenelg High School.

Glenelg is in western Howard, the most rural part of the county, then and now. While the rest of Howard’s high schools have no racial majority, 76 percent of Glenelg students are white.

On the news that night, though, only students of color were interviewed.

“It’s just a small number of students who decide to make these decisions that negatively impact the image of our school,” one said.

“This is not representative of what Glenelg stands for,” said another.

That week, after Seth, Tyler, Matt and Josh were released from jail without having to pay bail, their classmates began to argue over whether those statements were true.

Tyler Hebron, a senior who was president of the school’s black student union, typed her feelings into an Instagram post. “It shouldn’t have taken this event to occur for us to observe the hateful actions of our peers,” she remembers writing. “We shouldn’t say we are surprised. We are not.”

During her freshman year, a student flew a Confederate flag at a football game. Swastikas were scratched into the bathroom stalls. In 2017, someone had written the n-word and Principal Burton’s name on a baseball dugout. She had heard boys play a game to see who could yell the n-word the loudest. To her, this crime was just high-profile proof of the hostility she had always felt.

Soon, comments started appearing beneath her Instagram post.

“You’re racist,” one said. “All you do is blame straight white males.”

The night before graduation, she found herself thinking about whether she should pack pepper spray in her purse. She wasn’t sure, she told her parents, that she felt safe.

Among black families like hers, there were doubts that the white teens would face the kind of punishment black teens receive for similar crimes. Two years earlier, a group of students had painted swastikas on a historic black schoolhouse in Northern Virginia. A Loudoun County judge sentenced them not to jail time or community service, but to reading: along with visiting the Holocaust museum, each had to choose a single book about Nazi Germany or the Jim Crow era and write a report on it.

Two black families came to Burton and told him they were pulling their kids out of Glenelg before the next school year. The principal tried to persuade them not to go.

But in his own house, his wife, Katrina, was wondering if he should leave, too.

They had two daughters to think about, an eighth-grader and a senior at another Howard County high school, who on the day of the hate crime had come home and collapsed in her mother’s arms, sobbing. Katrina knew about the parents who warned Burton not to talk about the incident in his speech at the graduation ceremony, and watched as some of them refused to stand and clap for him that day.

“Are you safe?” she kept asking her husband.

There had been so many incidents in his life that had made Burton question just that. When he was 16, and the parents of a white friend in his Michigan hometown called him the n-word. In college, when he and his fraternity brothers were pulled over and questioned by a group of white cops seemingly for no reason. At a convenience store in South Carolina just a few years ago, when a hostile clerk refused to serve him and his family.

But inside a school, he was an authority figure, the man in charge. For most of his career, he’d led schools in Prince George’s and Howard counties filled with students of color.

And then to his surprise, he was asked in 2016 to leave Howard County’s Long Reach High School, where a third of the students are black, and take over at Glenelg, where less than 5 percent are black. Here, he suspected, it would take time to win over the community.

He started standing in the halls every morning and every class break, looking students in the eye as he said hello. He attended as many games and plays and art shows as he could. He made sure the swastikas scratched in the bathroom were documented and investigated, but quietly, to avoid giving those who drew them the attention they were seeking.

After two years, he felt that he had earned the respect of this place, and these people. They welcomed him when he arrived at the annual end-of-the-year celebration for the senior class at an Ellicott City resort. Parents gave him hugs and thanked him for what he had done for their kids.

That night, he learned that one senior had been caught trying to order alcohol at the bar. The student was kicked out of the event, but the next day, Burton decided he didn’t want to be overly harsh in his punishment.

“Even though you did this, I am going to allow you to go to the school picnic,” he told the teen.

Less than a week later, it was the same student, Josh Shaffer, who would scrawl Burton’s name and the n-word onto the sidewalk.

“The person you married is not about to cower,” the principal told his wife. He wouldn’t be leaving Glenelg.

He could use the summer, he thought, to plan what he was going to do the following school year, the message he needed to send.

And if the prosecutors sought his help in holding his students accountable, he knew what his answer would be.

Every time Seth walked from the parking lot of the Howard County Circuit Court to its entrance, he passed a small, decaying building with barred windows and a slanted roof. He rushed by with his head down, passing a plaque that explained the structure's history. Here, slaves who'd tried to run to freedom were held before being returned to the people who owned them.

In late March, Seth entered the courthouse dressed in one of his father’s suits, accompanied by his parents. It was his final appearance in front of the judge overseeing all four Glenelg cases: William V. Tucker, a black man with a reputation for his interest in the way the criminal justice system handles young people.

One by one, they had come before him and pleaded guilty, or been found guilty after agreeing to a statement of facts.

Two of them had tried to have the hate-crime charges dismissed. Their attorneys claimed that their First Amendment rights were being violated. They could be punished for the vandalism, the argument went, but not for what they wrote.

It didn’t work.

Now, it was Tucker’s job to answer a question the community had been debating for nearly a year: What consequences did these young men, now 19, deserve?

They hadn’t been allowed to walk at graduation. Their post-high-school plans had been derailed, and they were working in landscaping, asbestos removal and, in Seth’s case, office furniture construction. Their names and mug shots were seared into Howard County’s memory and the Internet’s search results. It was up to Tucker to decide whether, on top of that, they should spend time in jail.

His view became clear when Joshua Shaffer was the first to be sentenced on March 8, 2019. Seth stayed home and kept refreshing his Internet browser, waiting for news. Finally, the local TV station published a video: Josh was being walked out of the courthouse in cuffs. He had been sentenced to three years of probation, 250 hours of community service and 18 consecutive weekends in Howard County Jail.

Seth’s parents called his attorney, Debra Saltz, in a panic. His case was different, she reminded them. He was different. They just had to persuade the judge to see that.

Saltz stood in court that March morning and pointed to her client.

“Your honor, I truly believe justice and mercy call on us to consider who he is,” she said. “And I believe it requires the court to consider what has happened in his life, what he has done since May 24.”

Seth, she explained, had been working to make amends. He’d completed 181 hours of community service. He’d written an apology letter to Principal Burton. He’d visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and volunteered at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. He’d spent time with an African American pastor and attended regular diversity training with an African American counselor.

He did it all with the support of his parents, who had spent the year agonizing over how their son could have done something so heinous. Seth’s father, Scott Taylor, stood to tell the judge he blamed himself.

“The letters ‘KKK’ were painted on the school. Seth didn’t understand the pain, suffering and terror associated with those letters, because I never told him,” the father said. “I never told him how the Klan used to collect money after church in my neighborhood when I was growing up in the South, and how they would stand in the road like the fire department.”

“I’ve come to realize I did fail,” he continued. “It’s not what I said in my home; it’s what I didn’t say.”

When it was Seth’s turn to speak, he assured his parents that it was not their fault.

“You taught me better,” he said. “This isn’t who you raised.”

He apologized to the principal and to the communities he hurt.

“It was the worst decision I have ever made in my entire life. What I did there keeps me up at night. I deserve whatever punishment I get,” he said. “I have worked hard since that day to show my family, my school, my community and Principal Burton how sorry I am.”

Seth said he just wanted all of them to understand: He is not a racist.

Later, he would explain himself this way: “I never really understood the symbol of the swastika. I knew it was wrong to plaster it somewhere. I didn’t learn exactly what the Nazis were doing to the Jews until I went to the Holocaust Museum. I never learned that they were mutilated. I knew that they were, like, burned. But I never learned that they had experiments done on them, were injected with diseases. The school didn’t include that. They just included the burning and the train cars.”

His understanding of the KKK was limited, too, he said. “Some people think it’s just a word, or a symbol or three letters put together. . . . But they were lynching people, hurting people for no good reason.”

Now, he said, he knows. But he still doesn’t believe his actions that night make him a bigot.

“I spray paint one racist thing and, suddenly, I become a racist? Just because I did it doesn’t mean I hate Jews, gay people or black people.”

He was standing before the judge, pleading guilty to a hate crime, but he would not admit that he harbored any hate.

All around him, the adults agreed.

“He will forever be known as the racist kid at Glenelg, but that’s not who Seth is,” his father said in court that day.

“I told him that his act was racist, but don’t let it define him as a racist. He can and I pray that he will go on and do better,” Maxwell Ware, the African American pastor he met with, wrote in a letter supporting him.

“He is not a racist . . . he has a good heart,” his attorney told the judge.

Behind her, Principal Burton was listening. He’d heard Joshua Shaffer’s attorney give a similar speech. When Matthew Lipp was sentenced, he would hear it then too. Tyler Curtiss had written it in a Facebook apology the day after the crime. Tyler, Burton knew, had turned to Jesus, joining a church where he talked openly about the swastikas he painted that night. He had spent months telling his story to Jewish congregations, interfaith groups and the county’s board of rabbis. Come the day of his sentencing, Tyler would say: “I hold no hatred toward any human being, especially those in the communities that were affected.”

They all believed it was possible to do what they did without really meaning it.

Burton wanted to look them in the eye and say: “You did something very racist. How you don’t think you’re a racist, I don’t know.”

What he did know was what they’d been taught in school: Glenelg covered the Holocaust and the Klan in detail, in U.S. history and American government and world history and in the books they read for language arts.

He believed what possessed them to draw those words and symbols that night wasn’t a lack of knowledge, but something deeper, something ugly, something taught to them, consciously or unconsciously, along the way. If they couldn’t admit that now, maybe they never would. But it wasn’t his responsibility to educate them any more.

When it was Burton’s turn to speak at Seth’s sentencing, he didn’t say the word “racism.” He talked about all the people the crime had affected — the teachers crying in his office, the parents who pulled their kids out of his school, his daughter in tears, and for just a few moments, himself: “I know I give up my time, my effort, I give up my life for my students,” he said. “I think the only thing I am asking in return is just a little bit of respect.”

The courtroom waited in silence for Judge Tucker to reach his decision. Seth kept his gaze on the table. His father rubbed his mother’s back.

“I appreciate the fact that you are now trying to show that you are not a racist, that you committed a racist act,” Tucker finally told Seth. “But part of what I need to do is punish you. So the sentence is going to be as follows.”

Three years probation. Two hundred fifty hours in community service. And nine consecutive weekends in jail.

“A normal weekend incarceration is Friday 6 p.m. to Sunday 6 p.m.,” Tucker said. It was a Thursday. “For this weekend, it begins today.”

A black sheriff’s deputy stepped behind Seth and pulled out her handcuffs. His mother began to cry.

“Alright, Mr. Taylor, good luck to you,” the judge said, and the metal closed around Seth’s wrists.

Six weeks later, Seth backed his car out of his parents' driveway, headed to his final weekend in jail.

Good behavior during his weekends locked up meant he had to serve only two-thirds of them.

The following weekend, Tyler Curtiss, who had painted two swastikas, would finish his weekends, five in all.

Matt Lipp, whose graffiti attacked Jewish, black and gay people, would serve 11 of the 16 he was sentenced to. He has filed an appeal, still arguing that his First Amendment rights had been violated.

Josh Shaffer, who targeted the principal, was sentenced to the most jail time: 18 weekends. He would serve 12.

All four will be eligible to get the hate crimes expunged from their record when their probation is finished.

Together they had figured out how to navigate their 48-hour stints locked up: how to make the time pass, how to hide their toilet paper so it wouldn’t be stolen, what to do when the other inmates threw dominoes at their heads.

Seth didn’t know the names of the people who gave them trouble, but he had nicknames he made up for them. “String Bean,” for the tall, lanky one. “Pistachio” for the one with the mustache.

“Two black kids who just do not like us,” he called them.

Now he drove past the high school, yawning as he turned toward the highway. He’d been up late the night before, playing Mortal Kombat with strangers on his Xbox. He felt comfortable there, behind the anonymity of his username. He didn’t feel that way anywhere in Howard County. He grew nervous anytime he saw a person of color, wondering if they recognized him and knew what he had done.

He didn’t think anyone would recognize him come Monday, when he was going to start a new job in a heating and cooling apprenticeship program an hour away. It was going to pay $14 an hour. If he liked it, he might get his HVAC license. And then in three years when his probation was over, he thought he might move to Florida. Do some fishing. Start over.

He pulled into the jail parking lot 20 minutes early, switched off his engine and pulled out his phone. He turned on Kodak Black, who started rapping about “nigga s---.”

A truck pulled up beside him and Seth rolled down his passenger window.

“Hey,” he called to Josh. The two were the only ones in the group who had stayed close friends. During the week, they went to the gym together late at night, when they wouldn’t see other people.

“You ready to play three hours of checkers?” Josh asked.

“I’m finding a book, man,” Seth said. “I can’t play Uno again. I’m never playing Uno again in my life as soon as I leave this jail.”

Josh pulled out a can of tobacco dip. Seth took a hit from his strawberry-flavored Juul. They sat there until Josh said, “You ready?” and then Seth followed him inside.

The principal steered into the high school lot a month later and parked in the same spot he had a year before. He stepped out of his SUV in one of his best black suits. It was the last day of school for the class of 2019.

Once again, there was going to be an awards ceremony and a picnic, but this year, there was no graffiti waiting for him.

In the weeks since his former students were sent to jail, he and his wife had been asked again and again what they thought of the punishment. People were outraged — either that the young men had received a “slap on the wrist” or that they had been so persecuted. Burton wouldn’t take a side. “To me, it felt like a crime,” he said. “But what happens because of that crime is not up to me to figure out.”

He had to focus on his 1,200 current students: the LGBTQ kids who still felt isolated. The Jewish girl who told the local paper she still wishes she could transfer. Whoever was still scrawling swastikas on the bathroom stalls.

In the past year, he’d created a task force of diverse students to work on the school’s climate. Soon every freshman would go through an empathy workshop. And nearly 40 of his employees had spent the year meeting to discuss the book “Waking Up White,” a memoir of a white woman who comes to understand that racism is a system that she had been shaped by and contributed to her entire life without even realizing it. Maybe, he thought, that lesson would get passed on to Glenelg’s students.

But on this morning, his job was to celebrate his seniors. He stood outside as they arrived in their red caps and gowns. Their parents and grandparents followed behind, cameras in hand.

Then he saw it: this year’s version of a senior prank. A tractor was pulling into the parking lot. On the front was an old couch bolted to the forklift, a sign that read “2019,” and a few students sprawled on the cushions. On the back was a blue flag. “TRUMP,” it read, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

The assistant principal set off after them, and Burton decided to let him handle it. Instead he made his way to the auditorium. He stepped up to the podium, looking out at his students’ faces. Then their names were called, and they came on stage to shake his hand.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Migrant kids in overcrowded Arizona border station allege sex assault, retaliation from U.S. agents

The poor treatment of migrant children at the hands of U.S. border agents in recent months extends beyond Texas to include allegations of sexual assault and retaliation for protests, according to dozens of accounts by children held in Arizona collected by government case managers and obtained by NBC News.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan boy held in Yuma, Arizona, said he and others in his cell complained about the taste of the water and the food they were given. The Customs and Border Protection agents took the mats out of their cell in retaliation, forcing them to sleep on hard concrete.

A 15-year-old girl from Honduras described a large, bearded officer putting his hands inside her bra, pulling down her underwear and groping her as part of what was meant to be a routine pat-down in front of other immigrants and officers.

The girl said "she felt embarrassed as the officer was speaking in English to other officers and laughing" during the entire process, according to a report of her account.

A 17-year-old boy from Honduras said officers would scold detained children when they would get close to a window, and would sometimes call them "puto," an offensive term in Spanish, while they were giving orders.

Earlier reports from investigators for the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General from the El Paso and Rio Grande Valley sectors in Texas detailed horrific conditions for children and other migrants held in overcrowded border stations where they were not given showers, a clean change of clothes or the space to sleep. The reports from the Yuma CBP sector describe similar unsanitary and crowded conditions but go further by alleging abuse and other misconduct by CBP officers.

President Donald Trump has pushed back against reports of poor conditions for children, and Kevin McAleenan, acting secretary of the DHS, which oversees CBP, has said the reports are "unsubstantiated."

In a statement about the Yuma allegations, a CBP spokesperson said, "U.S. Customs and Border Protection treats those in our custody with dignity and respect and provides multiple avenues to report any allegations of misconduct. ... The allegations do not align with common practice at our facilities and will be fully investigated. It’s important to note that the allegation of sexual assault is already under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General."

Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Wednesday that the allegations are under investigation and will face multiple reviews.

"Anyone involved in sexual assault or physical harassment like that I would, of course, expect to be fired, not merely disciplined," he said on MSNBC.

The DHS had been sounding the alarm on overcrowding in border facilities for months, resulting in a $4.5 billion emergency funding bill recently passed by Congress. In Yuma, a soft-sided tent facility was opened at the end of June to accommodate overcrowding at the border station.

But in almost 30 accounts obtained from "significant incident reports" prepared between April 10 and June 12 by case managers for the Department of Health and Human Services, the department responsible for migrant children after they leave CBP custody, kids who spent time in the Yuma border station repeatedly described poor conditions that are not pure byproducts of overcrowding. They reported being denied a phone call, not being offered a shower, sleeping on concrete or outside with only a Mylar blanket, and feeling hungry before their 9 p.m. dinnertime.

One child reported "sometimes going to bed hungry because dinner was usually served sometime after 9 p.m. and by that time she was already asleep," according to the documents.

All children who gave accounts to case managers had been held at the border station longer than the 72 hours permitted by law.

Laura Belous, an advocacy attorney for an organization that provides legal services to migrant children, the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, said her group was "horrified and sickened by the allegations of abuse ... But unfortunately, we are not surprised."

"The children that we represent have reported being held in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions for days," Belous said.

"Our clients tell us that they have seen CBP agents kick other children awake, that children do not know whether it’s day or night because lights are left on all the time, and that they have had food thrown at them like they were wild animals."

"Our clients and all migrants deserve to be treated with dignity and respect," she said.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said Wednesday that he had visited the Yuma border station in April "and the human condition that I observed in Yuma was the worst state of the human condition I have ever seen in my life." But Gaetz also said, "I could tell you that the Border Patrol agents and the Homeland Security agents that were there were dealing with conditions that they had not trained for, they were not equipped to handle, and they were doing the very best they could under terrible circumstances."

Nearly every child interviewed by the HHS case workers after leaving the Yuma border station reported poor sleeping conditions. A 17-year-old boy from Guatemala reported having to sleep outside even though his clothes were wet from having recently crossed a river, likely the Colorado River.

Once he was transferred inside, the conditions were not much better. "He shared that there was not always space on the floor as there were too many people in the room. He further shared that there would be room available when someone would stand up," his report stated.

Many migrant children said they were either not given a mattress, a pillow or a blanket, or were just given a Mylar blanket instead.

Other children described being scared of the officers and said the officers would get angry if they asked for anything. One child wore soiled underwear for the 10 days he was in the border station because he was afraid to ask the officers for a clean pair, according to one of the reports. Another, a 15-year-old girl from Guatemala, described the food as "gross and cold most of the time."

Health and Human Services referred NBC News to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.

In a statement, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, said, "These allegations are very concerning and need to be fully investigated. The president has denied any problems with these detention centers — despite multiple confirmed reports to the contrary — but it is the Trump administration’s own policies that have contributed to this humanitarian crisis and this lack of accountability."

Cummings has called on McAleenan to testify about the poor conditions for immigrants at the border.

#Resist

[MintJulie]

This poor woman.  It's body shaming, plain and simple.   There is nothing wrong with her style of dress.  It's a cute outfit.  

Woman Required to Cover Up on American Airlines Flight Says Race Was a Factor

[Athos_131]

A White Man’s Republic, If They Can Keep It

Seven years ago, as the Supreme Court considered a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, Justice Antonin Scalia said the quiet part loud.

The 2006 near-unanimous renewal of the landmark civil-rights bill was “attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement,” Scalia lectured then–Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli. “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”

Scalia’s logic was clear: The 1965 law, which guaranteed black Americans’ right to the franchise in the South for the first time in 100 years, was a “racial entitlement” that Congress itself would never remove, and so the high court was duty-bound to remove it. When Chief Justice John Roberts issued his ruling invalidating the law’s provisions determining which jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination must submit to oversight by the federal government, however, Scalia’s rationale was absent from the decision. Also absent was any mention of what part of the Constitution the invalidated provision violated.

Roberts didn’t call the Voting Rights Act a “racial entitlement.” Rather, he insisted that while he agreed with the law’s intentions—“any discrimination in voting is too much,” he wrote—close federal oversight of local election laws to prevent discrimination was no longer warranted. “Things have changed dramatically,” Roberts concluded. Shortly thereafter, Republican-controlled states moved as quickly as possible to impose restrictions on voting targeted at minority communities, as if determined to make Roberts look a fool or a liar.

The disparate approaches taken by two of the Court’s conservatives to the Voting Rights Act reflect the right’s dueling impulses toward civil-rights laws. Where Scalia rejected the very effort to guarantee black people the same right to cast a ballot as white people as a “racial entitlement,” Roberts insisted that he agreed with the law’s underlying premises, but that the statute now did more harm than good.

Lingering beneath the surface was a defining question for the American right: Does it agree with Roberts that “any discrimination in voting is too much”? Or with Scalia, who saw ensuring equal participation in the polity as a black “racial entitlement”?

The Supreme Court’s looming decision over the addition of the citizenship question on the U.S. census will hinge on the answer to that question. The census provides the basis for congressional apportionment and the distribution of federal resources. Empirical studies of the impact of adding the question have determined that it would result in a dramatic undercount of Latinos and immigrants—exactly contrary to one of the Donald Trump administration’s stated rationales, that it would provide a more accurate count.

Since the rise of Trump, the American right has been offered a stark choice between the democratic ideals it has long claimed to believe in, and the sectarian ethno-nationalism of the president, which privileges white identity and right-wing Christianity over all. Scalia didn’t quite have it right: The fundamental question for American democracy since the founding has indeed been whether it is a “racial entitlement,” but only because of those who have tried for centuries to ensure that white people alone are entitled to it.

The Roberts Court has already taken steps in this direction. Last year it endorsed Trump’s travel ban, despite the president’s public statements identifying Muslims as the ban’s target, on the basis that the order itself did not mention religion, a blueprint for allowing further discriminatory efforts to pass constitutional muster as long as the high court’s conservatives retain control. Later that year, the conservative justices, self-styled champions of the freedom of religion, denied a request by a Muslim death-row inmate to have an imam present for his execution, forcing the condemned man to make do with the prison’s Christian chaplain. In both cases, the Court’s conservatives could hide behind the letter of the law in dismissing the government’s official disapproval of Islam. But recent revelations in the census case will force the Roberts Court to decide whether America is a nation for all of its citizens, or a white man’s republic.

On the surface, State of New York v. United States Department of Commerce appears to be a dry question of administrative and constitutional law. In January 2017, the news leaked that the Trump administration wanted to add a question asking census respondents whether they were American citizens. The Trump administration enlisted the acting head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, John Gore, to state that the question should be included to improve enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Wilbur Ross, the head of the Department of Commerce, which administers the census, insisted to Congress that this was the reason for the addition of the question. In fact, Ross had sought the addition of the question long before this rationale was provided.

A recent Court filing by groups challenging the addition of the citizenship question shows what the administration really had in mind. The filing shows that Thomas Hofeller, the late Republican redistricting expert, concluded that adding the citizenship question would, in his words, “be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” That analysis was offered in a 2015 memo, as Hofeller was helping Republicans draw redistricting lines that they believed would cement a majority in Congress. That memo, along with a 2017 document written by Hofeller on the subject, which contains some language identical to a later Justice Department memo on the matter, was turned over to the liberal group Common Cause by Hofeller’s daughter after his death.

Voting districts are typically drawn using total population. A switch to using the voting-age citizen population would, Hofeller concluded in his 2015 memo, expand white political power at the expense of people of color, and thereby increase Republican advantage. But, Hofeller wrote, that shift could only occur with the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, which would provide the federal government with data necessary for that switch. This argument, which reappears in Hofeller’s 2017 memo, was adopted by the Justice Department in its justification for adding the citizenship question to the census, along with the legal pretext of wanting to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.

In other words, long before Trump was even elected, Republican Party insiders were plotting to increase white political power at the expense of people of color. After Trump was elected, they implemented this plan by insisting that their actual goal was the protection of minority voting rights. As with the Voting Rights Act, there was the real reason and the stated reason, the truth and the pretext. The nationalism, and the delusion.

“It just seemed like a new level of mendacity, and putting their goals out there in black and white in a way we hadn’t seen before,” says Dale Ho, one of the American Civil Liberties Union attorneys who submitted the filing on behalf of the challengers in the census case. “No one believes that anyone in this administration has any intention of enforcing the Voting Rights Act.”

The use of the Civil Rights Division, which was established to protect Americans’ fundamental rights, to undermine those very rights is a perversion of justice. But it also illustrates that Trumpism merely traveled a few stops down the road from where the Republican Party leadership had been. The risk with Trump was not that the GOP would become a vehicle for the preservation of white political and cultural hegemony; it was that he would discredit that project by making its agenda explicit, by saying, as Scalia did, the quiet part loud.

That the Republican effort to increase white political power might be motivated by partisanship rather than racism is little solace. Segregationist Democrats might not have insisted on disenfranchising black voters after Reconstruction had those voters not been staunch Republicans. Whether motivated by partisanship or racism, though, the result is the same. If the Roberts Court does not draw a line here, this will not be the last step toward reestablishing a white man’s government it will be asked to take.

The census case does not hinge on whether the citizenship question is discriminatory. Rather, as a matter of administrative law, the executive branch must follow certain procedures before making decisions. The Trump administration’s blatant dishonesty settles the question of whether it followed procedure definitively: It did not.

“This kind of smoking-gun evidence of what the real illicit reason is behind a government action is incredibly rare. Court decisions don’t require it, and it’s really quite shocking to read it so explicitly,” Wendy Weiser, a voting-rights expert at the Brennan Center, told me. “Every procedural constraint on agency decisions was violated in this case, and the reason that was provided, every lower court found, was not the real reason that the secretary of commerce added the citizenship question.”

The Trump administration has fiercely denied that Hofeller’s reasoning influenced the administration. But like most Trump-administration denials, this appears suspect. Not only did a Trump transition official, Mark Neuman, testify in a deposition that he spoke with Hofeller, who urged him to add such a question to the census, but Neuman later became an adviser to Ross. (Neuman testified that Hofeller told him that the change would increase Latino political participation.) As The New York Times reported, Neuman provided Gore with the draft of a memo endorsing the citizenship question that echoes Hofeller’s language in a 2017 document found on his hard drive word for word, and a later, more detailed memo to Ross from the Justice Department further adopts Hofeller’s reasoning and uses some of his language. The Trump administration’s reply to the filing dismisses this evidence of Hofeller’s influence on the process as “pure speculation.”

Ironically, because conservatives on the Roberts Court appear to believe that government remedies for racial discrimination are worse than racial discrimination itself, there is considerable apprehension among left-leaning attorneys about providing the high court with concrete proof of racist intent in this case or any other. They fear that such proof is liable to make the Court’s conservatives more likely to rule against them. In this case, however, the evidence that adding the question was intended to bolster white political power is also further proof that the administration did not follow the law in adding the question.

The census case is not ultimately about administrative procedure; it is, more fundamentally, about whether the Trump administration can use the federal government for the explicit purpose of increasing white political power. The Trump administration, and by extension, the conservative masses, are already on board, convinced by years of right-wing propaganda that all the opposition’s victories at the ballot box are suspect. Those elements of the Republican establishment that funded and conceived of the census scheme are all in, as well. The only remaining question is whether, and to what extent, the high court is willing to ratify this step toward white man’s government. It is not the first time it has been asked to do so.

Even before William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically,” the modern conservative movement has struggled to reconcile the ethno-nationalism that moves masses of its voters with the pluralism embodied in the notion that all persons are created equal.

Trump’s victory settled the question of whether the GOP would seek to expand its base by diversifying it, or rely on the imposition of white political hegemony over a changing electorate. This is a counter-majoritarian strategy that, in the long run, relies on abandoning the pretense of liberal democracy in favor of something else: A white man’s republic, if they can keep it.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Democratic lawmaker criticizes GOP's Kaepernick ad

Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu (Calif.) on Thursday called on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to “fire those who were responsible” for a GOP ad featuring activist and former NFL player Colin Kaepernick.

Lieu retweeted a post from the veterans advocacy group VoteVets that included a link to a Yahoo News story alleging Kaepernick's skin had been darkened in the ad.

“Dear @GOPLeader Kevin McCarthy: I served with you in the California legislature and now in Congress. I do not believe you are a racist,” Lieu tweeted Thursday. “If the below is true, then I hope you will fire those who were responsible.”

The ad, reportedly sent on Wednesday by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) — which serves to get Republicans elected to the House of Representatives — shows a photo of Kaepernick and includes a mug with the “Betsy Ross” flag, which has recently been the subject of controversy after Nike scrapped plans for its “Betsy Ross” flag-themed sneakers.

“WHO DO YOU STAND WITH? DONALD TRUMP AND THE BETSY ROSS FLAG OR ANTI-AMERICAN FLAG COLIN KAEPERNICK?” the ad said, according to Yahoo News.

NRCC communications director Chris Pack told Yahoo News that “the photo was not darkened.”

Other groups, including VoteVets, have continued to rip the NRCC for the ad, tweeting Thursday that if the group intentionally darkened Kaepernick’s skin, “then forget apologies — they ought to be forced to explain to America why they believe darker skin makes someone look worse, in their eyes.”

“Any answer they could give would be un-American,” the group said.

#Resist