The order would declare that “ensuring robust, resilient, and sustainable domestic industrial base to meet the requirements of the clean energy economy is essential to our national security,” according to a draft of the document that remains in the “pre-decisional” phase. That reasoning follows a renewed push from the administration on its climate change priorities in light of shocks in the oil and gas market following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The order would specifically says “domestic mining, beneficiation, and value-added processing of strategic and critical materials from sustainable sources for the production of large capacity batteries for the automotive, e-mobility, and stationary storage sectors is essential to national defense.” The Intercept has reached out to the White House for comment.

Several senators sent President Joe Biden a letter on Wednesday asking him to use authorities such as those contained in the Defense Production Act, which significantly expands the president’s authority to unilaterally alter domestic manufacturing policy in times of crisis, to “support and increase manufacturing capacity and supply chain security for technologies that reduce fossil fuel demand and fuel costs, such as electric heat pumps, efficient electric appliances, renewable energy generation and storage, and other clean technologies.”

The letter — signed by Democratic Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon — encourages Biden to make the U.S. less dependent on oil drilling abroad while simultaneously supporting climate goals: “Producing efficient electric products and exporting those goods to the E.U. and other foreign markets would help many countries lower their dependency on fossil fuels, and thereby strengthen their own energy security.” It’s the latest example of progressives in Congress urging the president to use his considerable authority to achieve policy victories. In a release earlier this month, the Congressional Progressive Caucus outlined a substantial agenda that could be achieved with the swipe of Biden’s pen. That list included utilizing the Defense Production Act to bolster the production of green energy technology.

The oil industry is also using the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an opportunity to push back on Biden’s energy policies and lobby for increased production. In a meeting with oil and gas executives on Tuesday, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon pitched the White House on his own Marshall Plan, Axios reported, to increase energy production in the West and thereby shore up the U.S. and Western Europe’s energy independence from petrostates like Russia. Dimon’s suggestions at the meeting — at which Biden was present, Axios reported — included more liquefied natural gas facilities in Europe.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm also invoked the Marshall Plan in comments earlier this week. “I think it’s a moment for us to ask at this point in our history, what is going to be our version of the Marshall Plan for clean and secure energy in 2022 and beyond?”

“This clean energy transition could be the peace project of our time,” Granholm said, speaking in Paris. “But peace always comes after struggle. So let’s give this peace project the focus and the commitment and the resources of a war time effort. Our Marshall Plan.”

The draft order also plays into domestic priorities. Last week, Granholm and Sen. Joe Manchin also announced a lithium battery supply chain program in West Virginia, which mineral production and processing would support.

So far Biden has held the line that the long-term solution to record-high gas prices and dependence on petrostates lies with a clean energy transition. In a speech announcing the U.S. would ban imports of Russian fuel oil and gas, in early March, the president said, “[Russia’s invasion] should motivate us to accelerate the transition to clean energy.”

The post Biden Administration Drafting Order to Invoke Defense Production Act for Green Energy Storage Technology appeared first on The Intercept.

The results, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said, called the viability of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign into question. “If anybody knows anything about winning the Democratic nomination and about what it takes for a Democratic nominee to win a general election, it is black voters,” Maddow said. “And if Sen. Sanders continues to underperform systematically with black voters, and if we see him get shellacked — not just beaten but shellacked tonight in South Carolina — because of his performance with black voters, that’s an existential question about that nomination.”

“I want every Democrat in the country to see what that looked like tonight: That is what winning looks like,” celebrated James Carville, an old-time political operative MSNBC brings on to panic its viewers. “That is the job of a political party. Not utopian fantasies, but winning elections.”

“The single most important demographic in the Democratic Party spoke up tonight,” said Carville on MSNBC, wearing a U.S. Marine Corps baseball cap. He said Sanders needs to answer for his lack of support in the state: “We get all enamored, and tonight we were reminded of what and who the Democratic Party is.”

“We cannot win unless we prove there’s excitement in the African American community,” said former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an ex-head of the Democratic National Committee, on CNN, going on to endorse Biden officially on air.

Maddow’s, McAuliffe’s, and Carville’s point — which became a major theme of cable coverage for the night — is, in the abstract, undeniable: A Democratic presidential candidate who can’t win the black vote can’t win the nomination. But the cable analysis carried on as if the only available information on the preferences of black voters came from South Carolina. In fact, black voters nationally have regularly been surveyed and, recently, Sanders has taken the lead among the demographic — a fact that was, at best, only mentioned in passing.

MSNBC viewers would be left to conclude that the same minority-voter problem that hobbled Sanders’s 2016 campaign remains a major obstacle. It simply isn’t true.

Last week, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found Sanders besting Biden by 3 percentage points nationally among black voters — certainly a relevant data point when considering whether Sanders can win among black voters. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Biden up 2 percentage points among black voters, while the Hill/HarrisX poll had Sanders up by 9. A Morning Consult survey recently found Sanders beating Biden by 5 points among all black primary voters, and thumping him by a 3-1 margin among black voters under 45.

In other words, the national picture does not exactly portend a “shellacking” among black voters — important context that was kept from MSNBC viewers, who would be left to conclude that the same minority-voter problem that hobbled Sanders’s campaign in 2016 remains a major obstacle. It simply isn’t true.

After SC, @maddow says that if Bernie Sanders "continues to underperform systematically with black voters… that's a existential question."

In reality, among black voters, Bernie finished #2 in NV & is #1 nationally! He's systematically leading. (https://t.co/3YdoKJh8sj) pic.twitter.com/rAzQNpiNpT

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 1, 2020

A handful of commentators, including former Sen. Claire McCaskill, a vituperative opponent of Sanders, acknowledged that South Carolina’s results may not necessarily translate into victory for Biden nationwide. “Unfortunately,” said McCaskill on MSNBC, “there aren’t a lot of Jim Clyburns.” Clyburn, an iconic civil rights leader and the uncontested party leader in South Carolina, as well as the number three Democrat in the House, endorsed Biden last week, giving his campaign the kind of boost that can’t be replicated elsewhere.

There are other reasons to suspect that Biden’s campaign won’t be able to sustain its high note after South Carolina. The state is one of the demographically oldest. According to CNN exit polls, 6 percent of voters were between the ages of 17 and 24, and 5 percent were between the ages of 25 and 29. Around 28 percent of voters in South Carolina were under age 45, compared to 45 percent in Iowa, 35 percent in New Hampshire, and 36 percent in Nevada.

What’s more, Biden spent an enormous proportion of his resources in South Carolina, which he hasn’t done in Super Tuesday states or beyond, and is running low on cash.

In 2016, Sanders was truly shellacked in South Carolina, losing a two-way race to Hillary Clinton by nearly 50 points. She beat him among black voters 86-14, according to exit polls. This year’s exit survey found black voters making up 57 percent of the electorate, with Biden winning 64 percent of that vote to Sanders’s 15 and Tom Steyer’s 13. (Steyer, who only performed as well as he did thanks to the millions he poured into the state, dropped out of the race as the totals came in.)

Everybody else was shellacked: Sen. Elizabeth Warren won 5 percent of the black vote, Pete Buttigieg 3, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar zero. Fortunately for them, they were barely mentioned during the TV coverage.

While MSNBC more or less omitted the forward-looking picture of the race, Fox News was more sanguine about Biden’s chances. Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to President George W. Bush, played down what the win could mean for Biden in other states. Only one of the 14 races Biden will compete in on Super Tuesday have a demographic similar to South Carolina: Alabama. “If he cannot win anywhere without huge numbers of African American votes, the upcoming battlefield is not favorable to him still,” Fleischer said.

Former interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile told Fox News that Biden and other candidates now needed to show they could build a diverse coalition and bring the resources to compete in large and small states to amass delegates they need heading into the July convention. “The name of the game is delegates,” Brazile said. “For Joe Biden, clearly this was a victory that he desperately needed today in South Carolina.”

Overall, Biden is trailing Sanders in a number of recent national polls from Morning Consult, Fox News, and Yahoo/YouGov. The same is true in California, the state with the most delegates, where a Monmouth University poll released last week showed Sanders with support from 24 percent of likely California primary voters, and Biden with 17 percent. A Los Angeles Times/Berkeley poll released this week showed Sanders leading with 34 percent of likely California primary voters, with Warren at 17 percent and Biden, who had led the poll in June, at 8 percent. “Based on his 34% support in the poll, this state alone likely will give him well over 10% of the 1,991 delegates he would need to win the nomination at the national convention this summer,” the LA Times reported.

With the votes nearly all counted, Biden was heading for roughly a 29-point win in South Carolina, with only Biden and Sanders claiming delegates to the national convention; none of the rest seemed likely to meet the 15 percent threshold.

For Biden, it was a big first win of his presidential race — of any of his three presidential races, in fact: He had never won a primary or caucus victory before. “This is leap day, and he needed to leap back into this race,” said former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod on CNN. “This could narrow down very quickly to a race between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.”

Correction: March 1, 2020, 4:11 p.m.
Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story erroneously stated that Ari Fleischer coined the phrase “axis of evil.” The reference has been removed. The story also erroneously stated that Claire McCaskill works for One Country Project; she does not.

The post Don’t Tell Cable Pundits That Bernie Sanders Is Leading Nationally Among Black Voters appeared first on The Intercept.

When Johnson, back in July, gaveled in a hearing in this series, “Unprecedented Migration at the U.S. Southern Border,” the subject was a nationally galvanizing issue. The hearing room was full, cameras were rolling, and the session was briefly interrupted by protesters. For now, the nation has moved on, and Johnson seemed more relaxed.

In recent months, or possibly years, the Senate, under a stubborn Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has been relegated mainly to confirming nominations for various government posts, approving appropriations bills, and quietly turning the judicial branch into a redoubt for the radical fringe of the legal world. At the beginning of Donald Trump’s administration, many vowed to keep close tabs on the workings of the government; fighting “normalization” was a refrain in 2017. But here we are.

The shift in attention allowed Johnson to put forward, without any pushback, a vision of the manufactured humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border as, instead, a bureaucratic nightmare being valiantly managed by the “compassionate” people at the Department of Homeland Security.

This particular session was meant to be a “year in review.” Four witnesses were on the panel, three of whom were Trump-appointed, unconfirmed immigration officials. There was a lot to ask about. On Tuesday, it was widely reported that the Supreme Court is setting up to repeal former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — which gives certain eligible children, who arrived in the U.S. with their parents, temporary legal status. And the Associated Press reported that a record number of migrant children were detained by the U.S. in 2019.

The hearing, however, didn’t seem to have a point other than to exaggerate the need for growing an already whopping immigration enforcement budget. In 2018, according to a recent report by John Washington in The Nation, the total budget was $23.7 billion, up from $9.1 billion in 2003. In 2019, Customs and Border Protection was budgeted an additional $163.6 million simply to hire more Border Patrol agents.

To hear the witnesses speak at the hearing, undocumented migrants are, at best, an inconvenience to the U.S. immigration system. “CBP had to divert resources away from their mission critical duties to care for the children and families,” said CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan. “At times, up to 50 percent of Border Patrol resources were pulled off the line to care for families and children, leaving areas of the border increasingly vulnerable.” USCIS Acting Director Ken Cuccinelli testified that the time it takes DHS to process temporary protected status, or TPS, and DACA requests is time that should be spent adjudicating legal immigration requests instead. (Cuccinelli was named deputy to the new acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf on Wednesday.)

“We’re the most generous nation in the world, by far,” said Cuccinelli later in the hearing, referring to a country that is set to admit no more 18,000 refugees in 2020, the smallest number since the refugee program began following WWII. This year, the European Union has resettled twice that many refugees, missing its goal of 50,000. In October, for the first time in at least 30 years, the U.S. reportedly didn’t admit a single refugee. Johnson, the senator, blamed the historic low number of refugees accepted in the U.S. on the large number of asylum-seekers on the southern border (who Johnson terms “illegal”). “The illegal flow absolutely affects the legal flow, correct?” Johnson asks. Cuccinelli concurs: “We’re shifting resources to deal with that.”

The tactic from DHS officials seemed to be to drum up panic in order to ask for more funding. The current number of daily apprehensions, down significantly from earlier this year, stands at just under 1,400 per day. They mainly attributed the reduction to the so-called Migration Protection Protocols, also known as “Remain in Mexico,” implemented earlier this year, that forces asylum seekers to wait on the Mexican side of the border during their immigration proceedings. (This does nothing to improve the humanitarian crisis, only displaces it.) But Morgan was quick not to let the numbers tell the story: “I’m concerned that the ‘good’ story I’m able to tell this morning regarding the migration crisis has allowed some people to take their eye off the ball,” he said. “But this crisis isn’t over.”

In their telling, the large number of migrants crossing the border is the result of legal loopholes to applying for asylum; Johnson repeatedly spat on “credible fear” as the standard by which asylum-seekers may remain in the U.S. without facing deportation to their home countries, calling it a weak hurdle. In the witnesses’ testimony, such humanitarian standards are “loopholes” that exist primarily for the benefit of drug cartels and criminals. “Make no mistake,” Morgan said. “If you have a methamphetamine in your town or city, it came from the southwest border.” When Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, pointed out that even “as the number of crossings goes down, the drug flow has not” (implying that reducing crossings has no effect on the drug flow), Benner still pointed to “Mexico” as the culprit.

Derek Benner, the acting deputy director of ICE, testified that 3,600 child predators had been arrested by ICE in the 2019 fiscal year, as had 1,800 human traffickers. “Almost every community in this country is now a border community,” he said. Benner praised the use of DNA testing by ICE, and said the agency had found over 600 children who crossed the border multiple times — a process officials call “recycling,” in which children are allegedly used by adults wanting to cross so that the adults can avoid being detained in the U.S. Morgan also said CBP had detected over 6,000 “fake family members.” One Honduran man, according to Morgan, had purchased a child to cross with. “They know if you grab a kid, that’s your passport into the United States,” Morgan said.

As a reporter, my ears pricked up as the numbers flew by unquestioned by Democrats, especially since DHS agencies are known to produce statistics based on fuzzy math. 3,600 “predators”: Where did this number come from? Were those so-called predators actually convicted as such? Who was this Honduran man? By what standard did they determine who is family and who is not? CBP responded to a request for clarification with two links, one from the conservative Washington Examiner reiterating earlier CBP numbers and one from the Epoch Times, a newspaper associated with the controversial Falun Gong movement. “In this story they mention a baby purchased for $80, this may have been what Commissioner Morgan was referring to,” a spokesperson wrote. ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even the Democrats who did show up didn’t exactly push back on the hard-line narratives presented. Besides committee ranking member Sen. Gary Peters, Sen. Tom Carper, and a brief but silent appearance from Sen. Maggie Hassan, there were no Democrats present. Peters, during his allocated time to question the witnesses, asked about how much time CBP and ICE officers spend in training. But he was quick to reassure them that his questions were not intended as criticism: “I don’t see the need for training as a criticism in any way.” Carper used his time to chastise Morgan for having said Congress hadn’t done enough to pass legislation addressing the root problems and to emphasize how many times he had voted to increase CBP funding.

In one gratifying moment, Johnson pushed back against a DHS number. Morgan testified that 86 percent of people who were picked up in the interior of the U.S. this year had a criminal record, but failed to clarify whether that criminal record included crimes related to immigration. Johnson said it would be useful to know what the breakdown was for other types of crimes.

The officials’ unofficial request of the Senate committee was for “surge capacity” along the southern border — that is, a greater number of facilities in order to detain even more people and to examine these so-called false families before releasing them. “There’s no immigration system in the world designed to handle such a massive migration number, not even the United States,” Morgan said. The proposed solution? “We should have 5,000 beds,” said Benner, similar to what FEMA uses to address the aftermath of a natural disaster. This is the closest the hearing ever got to the truth, connecting the number of migrants to the natural disasters, even inadvertently — and to admit that no country, anywhere in the world, is prepared to deal with what’s coming.

The post As House Impeaches Trump, Senate Carnage Plods Along appeared first on The Intercept.

Two Capitol Hill staffers behind me were lamenting the risks of inviting their journalist friend to parties. “I couldn’t believe I had to tell him he couldn’t report on what he heard at the party,” one said. “Yeah,” replied the other, “We agreed long ago that our house was off the record.” “And then when I told him,” continued the first, “he stopped coming to my parties.”

We were waiting to see the D.C. premiere of “The Report,” the new movie written and directed by Scott Z. Burns that chronicles the struggle within the government to release the Senate Intelligence Committee’s five-year investigation into the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” — i.e., torture — following 9/11. The inquiry had roots in a prior investigation, beginning in 2005, into the destruction of CIA tapes showing the waterboarding of detainees. In 2009, the committee voted to initiate an expanded investigation into the CIA’s program. Five years later, the committee released a summary of the report that was heavily redacted and a tenth as long as the full report. The Obama administration and the CIA pushed to remove any details that would lead to real accountability, keeping the CIA officers involved anonymous and blacking out the names of the countries where torture had occurred.

Around 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, after over an hour of open bar and a red carpet expressly set up for Instagramming, Burns — known as the screenwriter for “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “The Informant!” — introduced the movie. He began by thanking Daniel J. Jones — the Intelligence Committee staffer detailed to the investigation into black sites, rendition, and “enhanced interrogation” — and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chair of the Senate committee, both of whom were in the audience. When Burns addressed Feinstein, the packed house in the Newseum auditorium burst into applause. Annette Bening (who plays Feinstein in “The Report”) “sends her regards,” Burns said. “She wants you to know you’re her hero.” I watched the back of Feinstein’s head bob up and down in acknowledgement.

For many in the room that night, the movie was a celebration of the bureaucratic government work that too often doesn’t make it into the limelight. But opening in the midst of an impeachment inquiry sparked by a whistleblower, “The Report” is also a rumination on the internal calculus of government employees who want to revolt against official secrecy — as Jones did — and whether the public’s right to know is best served by revealing illegal government activity through official channels or sharing it with the press.

The movie surfaces another story about how and when congressional staffers decide to leverage journalism for their own purposes, and how whistleblowing is viewed in the culture of the capital.

“The Report” begins, like Spencer Ackerman’s 2016 rendition for The Guardian, with Jones breaking the law. Jones, played by Adam Driver, had been tasked by the Intelligence Committee with sifting through millions of documents, cables, and emails related to the CIA’s interrogation techniques in a windowless room designed to contain sensitive material. One file in particular caught his attention: an internal report prepared by the CIA for former Director Leon Panetta that seemed to corroborate the Senate’s findings. Worried about losing access to this file when it became clear that the CIA was intent on preventing the Senate from releasing anything about the torture program, Jones illegally removed it from the building. That document became a critical piece of leverage in countering the CIA’s resistance to the release of the Senate’s torture report.

The existence of the public Senate report, albeit in its limited form, is something of a bureaucratic miracle. The CIA’s own investigation into the matter, the document produced for Panetta, was deep-sixed, and President Barack Obama made an explicit decision when he came into office not to pursue the investigation. He wanted to appear, as the movie notes, “post-partisan.” Without Jones’s relentless work, we might never have known the depths to which the CIA fell in the years after 9/11.

“The Report” is a useful reminder of the inhumanity and ineffectiveness of torture and of the key fact that no one was held accountable. The graphic reenactments of torture scenes with blaring music, nudity, and physical abuse are second only to the full-throated embrace by a CIA officer of everything from imposing “learned helplessness” to waterboarding.

But the movie surfaces another story about how and when congressional staffers decide to leverage journalism for their own purposes, and how whistleblowing is viewed in the culture of the capital. It’s the same thing those Hill staffers in line were wrestling with, at a different level: A sense of both the value and the danger of the press is instilled from above. A choice moment in the film comes when Feinstein, meeting with a frustrated Jones, asks him what he thinks of Edward Snowden. Jones is silent. “I think he’s a traitor,” Feinstein says.

According to the movie, Jones, who was notoriously reticent when it came to talking to reporters, leveraged the press to his and the report’s benefit only once: when he himself became the subject of CIA intimidation. After having removed the Panetta report, he gives a reporter a cryptic clue, telling him to look into computer hacking targeting the Senate. The reporter asks for more information. “You’re the New York Times national security reporter, you should be able to figure it out.” Jones walks away, leaving the Times reporter incredulous. The crowd in the Newseum giggled.

The movie, here, elides the fact that reporter who actually broke this story was Ali Watkins — then a reporter at McClatchy who only later worked a stint as national security reporter at the New York Times (she now works on the Metro desk). “The Report” is an insider’s movie: It doesn’t name most of the characters, some because they’re CIA officers who were given pseudonyms in the summary that was released, some because they’re staffers who worked with Jones. (I overheard someone wondering out loud, before the movie began, how the composite character that included his friend would be portrayed.) Like the report itself, the story is unwieldy, and giving it a Hollywood treatment necessitates the lionizing of some and the sidelining of others.

At another crucial moment — in December 2014, when Feinstein is in her last week as chair of the committee, as the Republicans come to power during Obama’s second term — Jones again weighs the prospect of talking to the press. A moody Jones puts his entire report into his bag and drives to meet the same reporter in a parking garage. “If the Times had your report, we would print it tomorrow,” the reporter says. Jones struggles for a moment before reaching his conclusion: “No. If it’s gonna come out, it’s gonna come out the right way.”

This approach ultimately pans out. The Democratic caucus in the Senate pressures Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough (played by Jon Hamm, the perfect hotshot), to get the redacted summary of the Senate report out. The movie nails this moment as a crucial indictment of the Obama administration for wanting to move beyond what happened, rather than own up to it. But pause on Jones’s dramatized decision for a moment. He took a leap of faith; he chose to believe in the importance of the process. That time, it paid off (sort of). What if it hadn’t? Jones is something of a unicorn in having moved against the government via official channels and emerging relatively unscathed.

And what does it mean to put something out “the right way” anyway? The implication is that the report gained some kind of authoritative status because it was condoned by the Senate and the White House. The government publicly admitted that it tortured people, and promised never to do it again, even in the fog of the war. But imagine an alternate history, in which an unredacted summary had been released — a version that didn’t eviscerate the details. If that had happened, there would have been a chance at something more than symbolic justice.

The movie portrays Jones as a hero for turning away from the temptations of journalism. As a viewer who is immensely skeptical of official process, I believe that sharing evidence of government malfeasance with the press is a legitimate and often necessary check on power. But how will Americans respond to this movie when it’s released on November 15, after months of headlines about cover-ups, whistleblowers, and leaks?

For the room in D.C., “The Report” felt like a salve on a difficult time, a reassurance that the system can work as it’s set up.

The best-case scenario is that “The Report” helps viewers understand the powerful forces working against transparency. For the room in D.C., the film felt like a salve on a difficult time, a reassurance that the system can work as it’s meant to.

The depressing thing is that getting the truth out there doesn’t always result in change. On my way out, I picked up a free copy of the almost 600-page summary of the Senate’s torture report, reprinted by Melville House. On the back, one line seems to say it all: “The book that inspired the major motion picture.” Oh God, I thought, is this the fate of all that work? A new cover plastered with Driver’s face? After all, Gina Haspel, who played a key role in the destruction of the torture tapes, is now the director of the CIA, as the movie wryly notes in its end cards. Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two of the victims of U.S. torture and the subjects of the destroyed tapes, are still being held in Guantánamo Bay. Not even the Newseum will be around that much longer.

Topic Studios, part of First Look Media, The Intercept’s parent company, helped support production of “The Report.”

The post “If It’s Gonna Come Out, It’s Gonna Come Out the Right Way”: Heroes of Torture Report Movie Are Lauded for Dodging Reporters appeared first on The Intercept.

The resolution, which was passed at a late September convention in Massachusetts attended by delegates from AFL-CIO constituent unions across the country, comes after months of comments from labor leaders criticizing Medicare for All, despite support for the measure among their members. In August and September, Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (an AFL-CIO member union), said publicly that they do not currently support a single-payer plan would ban private insurance, despite assurances from Sen. Bernie Sanders, who authored the Medicare for All plan, that a single-payer option would not sacrifice hard-won benefits for union members. 

“The Massachusetts AFL-CIO urges the national AFL-CIO to endorse a presidential candidate with a demonstrated commitment to the pro-worker agenda that this body has previously endorsed, including but not limited to a $15-dollar federal minimum wage, ending Right to Work nationwide, and a Medicare for All system that recognizes health care as a human right,” reads the resolution, which was put forward by Beth Kontos, the president of the American Federation of Teachers in Massachusetts.

Kontos told The Intercept that members of AFT Massachusetts reached out to her about putting forward a resolution. “This came from our rank and file,” she said, “who all have health care but wanted to make sure there was health care for everyone.” 

“It’s gotten to the point where we have this tiered system with people with nothing,” Kontos said. “We need to look at a way to take the profit out of it.”

The Massachusetts AFL-CIO has not received a response to their resolution from the national AFL-CIO. “I haven’t heard anything negative, nothing one way or another,” Kontos said.

“This came from our rank and file who all have health care but wanted to make sure there was health care for everyone.”

If adopted by the national organization, the resolution would effectively sideline former Vice President Joe Biden, who supports preserving a version of the Affordable Care Act, from being considered for endorsement by the largest federation of labor unions in the U.S. — and instead focus labor support on Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has adopted Sanders’s plan in her platform. During the last presidential election cycle, there was significant support for Sanders within the labor federation, but the AFL-CIO ultimately endorsed Hillary Clinton.

The national AFL-CIO office did not return a request for comment.

Even as members of the AFL-CIO and American Federation of Teachers have endorsed Medicare for All in recent years, their leaders have consistently hedged on the issue. In 2017, the AFL-CIO passed a resolution at its national convention that was generally supportive of Medicare for All in the long run, but with a caveat: “Our longstanding goal for achieving this is to move expeditiously toward a single-payer system, like Medicare for All, that provides universal coverage using a social insurance model, while retaining a role for workers’ health plans.”

Sanders has responded to labor concerns about the details of Medicare for All. In August, he altered his labor plan to stipulate that companies would have to pay out the money they would have spent in health care in other benefits for their employees.

That was apparently not enough for Trumka, the AFL-CIO head. He told Chris Wallace on Fox News over Labor Day weekend that he would “have a tough time” supporting Medicare for All, echoing statements he made to reporters at an event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “We think ultimately you’re going to have to get to a single-payer plan,” Trumka told Wallace, ‘“but there has to be a role for the hard fought high-quality plans that we’ve negotiated. Look, it’s just unfair to say to somebody, ‘You’ve sacrificed over the last 40 years — you’ve given up wages, you’ve negotiated a good health care plan, and now we’re going to ask you to take 50 percent of the health care plan you negotiated.’”

Myles Calvey, IBEW 2222 business manager and a vice president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, said Trumka’s hesitation is understandable, given the tough negotiating positions labor unions often find themselves in. “Our frustration in the union business is we always have to fight, right from the beginning, when someone says, ‘I want to be part of the union,’” he said. But, on the other hand, he added, health care could be “one less thing we have to fight about.”

“We have to understand that the only thing that’s important is our health.”

“It’s going to take a strong Democrat,” said Calvey, who is supportive of the resolution and of a Sanders presidency. “We’re going to end up in dust, so we have to understand that the only thing that’s important is our health.” 

Weingarten, of the American Federation of Teachers, also expressed her opposition to a single-payer plan like the Medicare for All plan authored by Sanders, which would eliminate most private insurance, despite Sanders’s assurances. On September 23, she wrote an op-ed for Politico that argued for the coexistence of public and private options in health care, and for Medicare as “a floor, not a ceiling.”“Preserving the option for employers and unions to continue to innovate in health care is critically important,” she wrote. AFT, which supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, has yet to endorse a candidate for 2020.

A member of the AFT, Ben Curttright, responded in Jacobin, questioning why Weingarten had taken a stand against Medicare for All, which AFT endorsed in 2018, and repeated a private health insurance talking point she made on Hill TV: “The one thing I am afraid of is that in many of the different plans, that if you have too short a horizon in terms of when insurance goes, you’re taking things from people that people rely on right now,” Weingarten told Krystal Ball. (Weingarten then responded on Medium.)

The International Association of Fire Fighters, one of the only unions to endorse a presidential candidate yet this cycle with its vote for Biden, has been staunchly opposed to Medicare for All. “The unique aspect of our profession requires a unique health care coverage,” said Harold Schaitberger, the president of IAFF, in August. It’s unclear whether the delegate for the Professional Fire Fighters of Massachusetts was present for the Medicare for All resolution vote.

Proponents of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO resolution hope that it will encourage other statewide groups to support similar measures and, eventually, build a larger movement for Medicare for All and other left-wing policies. “This is a really old model of how to build support,” said Russ Weiss-Irwin, a middle school ESL teacher in Boston and member of the AFT. “It’s a way to build consciousness among a small group of people.”

In July, the Texas AFL-CIO endorsed a similar resolution encouraging its state lawmakers to support Medicare for All and similar local legislation. The Massachusetts delegates also endorsed resolutions supporting comprehensive immigration reform and a just transition to a green economy that describes the “the twin crises of climate change and economic inequality.” (In his Fox News interview, Trumka was noncommittal on the Green New Deal, saying that the AFL-CIO would support candidates who made the economy work for working people.”)

“I’m very happy that members spoke up,” Kontos said. “We want to encourage this kind of involvement.”

Correction, October 9, 8:35 p.m.
This piece has been updated to clarify Randi Weingarten’s position on health care.

The post Massachusetts Unions Vote to Vet Presidential Candidates on Medicare for All, Breaking With Labor’s Top Brass appeared first on The Intercept.

ICE’s use of ruses — an old tactic in which agents use false pretenses to make arrests, such as posing as local law enforcement or a representative of a company — has been more noticeable in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s repeated threats this summer to round up immigrants in 10 major U.S. cities. While the mass arrests have yet to materialize, ICE’s enforcement operations have continued, and immigrant communities are on alert. Reports of ICE sightings and arrests have been pouring into immigration advocacy groups.

“We know that, we have seen ICE lie about who it is when it knocks on the door, and we have seen ICE dress up as law enforcement or dress down as normal people.”

“ICE’s mission is to apprehend people that it believes shouldn’t be in our communities and it will go to great lengths to do that, particularly in the face of increased knowledge of rights, and willing to bend what we would accept as moral standards of transparency and respect to meet those ends,” said Laura Williamson, an organizer with Sanctuary DMV, a volunteer group in the Washington, D.C., area that runs a rapid response network for ICE raids and an accompaniment program for immigrants attending court hearings or immigration appointments. “We know that, we have seen ICE lie about who it is when it knocks on the door, and we have seen ICE dress up as law enforcement or dress down as normal people.”

Williamson added that the number of so-called collateral arrests — where others present are arrested alongside targeted individuals — has also ramped up. ICE arrested 18 people out of a target list of around 2,000 families earlier this month, along with 17 others who were not targets of the operation. At the same time, a heightened awareness among immigrants of their rights has foiled some of the agency’s arrest attempts.

ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment, which included a list of questions.

Under Trump, immigration arrests have steadily risen, expanding their targets to anyone in the country without proper documents. In the latest indication of the Trump administration’s desire to continue the upward trajectory of deportations, the Department of Homeland Security announced on July 22 its intent to expedite the deportation of immigrants who could not prove they’d been in the U.S. continuously for more than two years.

At the same time, ICE has intensified its use of tactics designed to create confusion and fear in communities, and the agency’s ruses have grown more various and elaborate. Advocates say that ICE agents are more boldly impersonating police officers, potential employers, and normal citizens. They are increasingly using surveillance tactics, following immigrants and detaining them on their way to work, in traffic stops, and on the street. And they are upping their presence at courthouses — if not to make arrests, then to surveil or visually ID immigrants. In New York, for example, from 2016 to 2018, the number of ICE arrests in and around courthouses grew by 1,700 percent.

Despite the Trump administration’s repeated rhetoric about public safety as the rationale for deporting people en masse, even its most hyped operations don’t focus on immigrants with criminal convictions. July’s announced push was focused on individuals who had received final orders of deportation. That category certainly does not preclude people with criminal records, but it also includes many who may not have broken any laws besides ignoring that order — encouraging the perception that all undocumented people are criminals, simply by being here.

ICE’s methods are designed not simply to arrest and deport, but to confuse and terrorize the communities it enters. ICE agents commonly show up at homes early in the morning, when residents are waking up and disoriented, to make arrests. ICE agents, whose authority is generally more limited than that of the police, have a long history of posing as officers to detain immigrants. Ruses include tactics such as wearing shirts or vests that say “police,” yelling “police” at the door of an apartment building, or simply failing to identify themselves as ICE agents.

“They come to the door and they mimic local law enforcement,” wearing dark navy blue and presenting themselves as such, said Genia Blaser, a senior staff attorney with the Immigrant Defense Project in New York. Blaser said that there are two common tactics the agency uses involving decoy photos. In the first instance, agents will show a photo of a person, unknown to the residents they’re speaking with, and with a name they don’t recognize. The agents will then say they are attempting to verify that no one at the residence fits the description, and the targets will give them access to the home. The officials will then proceed to detain the people living there. The other tactic, she said, is to use a photo of someone else but with a resident’s name.

The use of ruses is perfectly legal and has been encouraged by ICE for at least 14 years. Internal memos from ICE under the George W. Bush administration fully embrace ruses as an effective tactic for making arrests. “Ruses can run the gamut from announcing that you are with the DRO [Detention and Removal Operations] and looking for a person other than the target to adopting the guise of another agency … or that of a private entry,” says one 2005 memo. The memo instructs ICE agents to give the entity they wish to impersonate a heads-up prior to using their name, as well as the chance to raise concerns (which may subsequently be ignored). “Private entities can be particularly sensitive to the use of their name in law enforcement operations,” it goes on to say.

In 2017, Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., introduced a bill to Congress that would have prevented ICE officers from wearing uniforms that say “police.” The bill got little traction, but Velazquez reintroduced it earlier this month. Velazquez has noted that ICE’s tactics could erode law enforcement’s trust with communities. “I’ve heard firsthand from families who fear reporting crime or engaging with the police due to the potential of getting caught up with immigration agents,” she said in a 2017 statement. “This only makes our communities less safe.”

Since then, ruses have only gotten more elaborate. The Immigrant Defense Project, a legal advocacy organization that serves attorneys and impacted communities in New York state, has documented more than 1,000 ICE raids in New York state since 2013. There was a case last year in which ICE posed as someone from the local DA’s office, Blaser said, and tried to arrange a meeting on a street corner to talk about a case. There have been other cases, she said, when ICE has called claiming to want to return a lost ID.

While efforts to pressure local law enforcement not to cooperate with ICE have been successful in some areas, it’s not clear that the police or local agencies are aware when ICE uses their likenesses — in apparent conflict with the 2005 memo. In New York, “the local precinct often will have no idea what’s going on,” Blaser said.

Sometimes, agents clarify that they are immigration agents only after an arrest is made. The National Immigration Justice Center filed a lawsuit in December 2018 against officers for allegedly conducting traffic stops without pretext. The suit documents two instances in which ICE agents wore vests that said “police,” and did not identify themselves as ICE, to conduct traffic stops in Chicago and detain those inside the vehicles. The suit is still being litigated, but the plaintiffs allege that “individuals were led to believe they were interacting with Chicago Police officers until they were taken to the ICE office in downtown Chicago,” Tara Tidwell-Cullen, director of communications for the National Immigrant Justice Center, wrote in an email.

“It appears that ICE agents were essentially on call and ready to pick up individuals who were stopped by sheriff’s deputies.”

In Tennessee, ICE agents stopped drivers for minor traffic violations on July 12, according to the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, an immigrant-led group that provides legal services to immigrants and advocates on their behalf to the state legislature. “The sheriff’s officers did not charge the drivers with any crime or bring them into local custody, but instead called ICE agents to the scene,” the group said in a statement. “It appears that ICE agents were essentially on call and ready to pick up individuals who were stopped by sheriff’s deputies.”

The coalition and the Southern Poverty Law Center are investigating the apparent collaboration between the sheriff’s office and ICE. “These arrests are a direct result of an emboldened ICE and local law enforcement who saw the president’s threats as an opportunity to harass immigrant communities,” said Meredith Stewart, senior supervising attorney with SPLC.

There are also cases in which ICE agents work in plainclothes to surreptitiously gain entry into residences and buildings or to convince immigrants to meet them. Last summer, Blaser said, in one of the more elaborate ruses that the Immigrant Defense Project is aware of, someone pretending to be looking for a contractor to work on his house in Newburgh, New York, made an appointment with the immigrant to give an estimate. When he came to the worksite with a colleague, the man, wearing paint-splattered pants, asked him to stick around, saying, according to Blaser, “Our boss is on their way, and I know they’re going to want to talk to you.” Then, an unmarked van came up and arrested the targeted person.

Plainclothes ruses, too, seem to be standard practice. In 2017, a man was arrested by plainclothes officers in Oregon, where he was working on a house. In February, there were reports in North Carolina that ICE agents had posed as day laborers, wearing bandanas and driving a van that had ladders affixed. In response, ICE spokesperson Bryan Cox said that the agency is “non-uniformed.”

Nikki Marín Baena, who works for the national organization Mijente and is a volunteer with Siembra in North Carolina, sees the ruses and detainments on the way to work as a response to immigrants increasingly being aware of their rights. Now that more immigrants know not to open the door, Marín Baena said, the direct result is an increase in deceptive tactics by ICE.

Increasingly, she said, a large number of arrests have been made while folks are on their way to work — which indicates that ICE agents are increasingly following and surveilling their targets before making an arrest. They’ve warned community members to look out for American-made cars with dark tinted windows. When asked whether community members she works with are aware of the surveillance component, Marín Baena said, “People are starting to notice ‘How did they know that? How did they know people would be there at that time?’”

Surveillance also appears to be a growing component of ICE’s approach. Last week, WNYC reported that Palantir, a software company co-founded by billionaire Trump adviser Peter Thiel, is enabling ICE to easily access available data about its targets, including photos from driver’s licenses. (Palantir was previously revealed to be facilitating the arrests of family members of children who crossed the border alone.) And, according to documents acquired by the American Civil Liberties Union in March, ICE is also using readers to read and log license plates in a database.

To underscore the absurdity ICE’s use of surveillance — an expensive endeavor — to go after undocumented people who have done nothing but ignore their final notice of deportation, a civil offense, Marín Baena drew a comparison to tax evasion. “It’s kind of like the IRS issuing administrative warrants for everyone who didn’t file a 1099, and then spending money to go after every single one,” she said.

“The U.S. is the world’s largest detention and deportation system, and an inordinate amount of money is extended into it,” Blaser said. “It’s really a moment to step back and ask ourselves to reevaluate the system and what’s the purpose of such a system that deprives individuals and communities of human rights and dignity and totally dehumanizes groups of people.”

The post As Immigrants Become More Aware of Their Rights, ICE Steps Up Ruses and Surveillance appeared first on The Intercept.

Crowley lost his seat in a stunner a year ago this week, and a shock was in store for Katz, too. As the votes continued to be tallied, Tiffany Cabán, running on a radical decarceration platform, surged into the lead, and supporters of Cabán erupted. She held the lead through the night and declared victory just before midnight, with 99 percent of the precincts reporting, holding on to a lead of 1,090 votes. The outstanding precincts were all in Jackson Heights, a Cabán stronghold, and there don’t appear to be enough absentee ballots outstanding to swing the election.

A local contest that typically has low voter turnout and gets little attention from national media drew endorsements from two of the leading Democratic presidential candidates, not to mention John Legend, along with shocking, if muted, backing from the New York Times editorial board— all for underdog public defender Tiffany Cabán.

Cabán’s apparent victory is a show of force in New York for the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which worked hard for Cabán early, as well as for the Working Families Party and Real Justice PAC. Larry Krasner, the Philadelphia district attorney elected with the help of Real Justice on a similarly radical platform, was in attendance at Cabán’s election night party.

The most significant endorsement, however, likely came from Bronx and Queens Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The district attorney has jurisdiction over all of Queens and its some 2.4 million residents, but Cabán put up huge margins in portions of Queens represented by Ocasio-Cortez, which is both a reflection of their aligned politics and the influence of Ocasio-Cortez. A year ago, the party establishment could claim — whether it was true or not — to have been caught off guard by Ocasio-Cortez. That rationale is absent in Tuesday’s race. The eyes of the country were on Queens, and the machine was as prepared as it could be. It simply couldn’t muscle out the vote.

“Take nothing for granted,” said Daeha Ko, who spent his day canvassing for Cabán in Astoria, early in the night to a fellow supporter. By the end of the night, he might have been talking to Katz.

While Cabán’s election night gathering exploded by the end of the night, Katz’s — at an Irish pub in Forest Hills — was much more muted. As the TVs turned from cheering Cabán supporters to ESPN, she left without conceding, gesturing to the absentee ballots that have yet to be counted. “Mainly they were able to get out the vote,” said Sohail Rana, a volunteer with the Katz campaign. Rana said he supports Katz because of her position on bail and her years in public office.

One of the seven candidates, New York City Councilman Rory Lancman, who led a promising campaign but dropped behind as Cabán’s campaign picked up steam, dropped out with just five days to go. After months of denouncing her for being a career politician and having no criminal courtroom experience, Lancman announced he’d be endorsing Katz. And one of the trailing candidates in the race, former D.C. Deputy Attorney General Mina Malik, told a crowd in Southeast Queens on the Thursday evening before election day that “Bernie Sanders is the reason we have Trump in the White House.”

With a few weeks to go, Katz, the favorite of the Queens Democratic machine, started sending out fliers attacking both Cabán and retired New York Supreme Court Justice Greg Lasak — a move that one strategist close to the race who declined to speak on the record described as a sign that her campaign was “running scared.” Sending out negative mail, they said, is not something a confident frontrunner would do.

But at a time when the nation is grappling with how to address the largest incarcerated population in the world, reckoning with a history of wrongful convictions that have disproportionately landed innocent black people in prison, and reimagining a rehabilitative rather than a strictly punitive justice system, the office overseeing one of New York City’s largest incarcerated populations is finally coming around to change.

Katz, who was running for her sixth elected office in New York in 25 years, had support from former congressman and former Queens County Democratic Party Chair Crowley, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, along with New York Congressional Reps. Gregory Meeks, Tom Suozzi, Carolyn Maloney, and Adriano Espaillat, and a host of local and state unions. Meeks, despite a key vote on Capitol Hill Tuesday, was at Katz’s election night party. Earlier, he slammed Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for endorsing Cabán without consulting leaders of the machine. The move, he said, was “arrogant” and “patronizing.”

But progressive groups coalesced around Cabán and brought the race national attention. Organizers pushing to end the construction of new jails, decriminalize sex work, and build relationships between the district attorney and the communities most impacted by choices the DA makes knocked on doors, organized rallies, and got out the word to propel Cabán’s campaign further than many expected it to go.

The last time Queens elected a new district attorney, the late Dick Brown got lucky. His only primary challenger in the 1991 race, the late Vincent F. Nicolosi, was disqualified for irregularities and at least one case of fraud among the signatures he collected to get on to the ballot. With Nicolosi gone, and overwhelmingly Democratic Queens generally indifferent to the Republican challenger, Kerry J. Katsorhis, Brown’s win was easy. He would stay in office for the next 28 years until his death in May.

Brown had kept the Queens DA’s office behind on the curve of criminal justice reforms being welcomed in other offices across the country, and even in neighboring boroughs of New York City. The Queens office is the last in the city without a conviction review unit and still prosecuted low-level nonviolent offenses like possession of small amounts of marijuana and fare evasion. Each of the candidates promised to change that, and all of them styled themselves as progressives at odds with the way the office had been run for close to three decades under Brown.

With less than a week to go before the Democratic primary, Cabán raked in endorsements from Sens. Warren and Sanders — leading to a brief spat over who was first to back her. She’d already gotten support from district attorneys Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Rachael Rollins in Boston.

The Sunday before election day, New York State Sens. Jessica Ramos, Mike Gianaris, and Luis Sepúlveda; New York City Council members Jimmy Van Bramer and Brad Lander; Comptroller Scott Stringer; and former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon held a rally for Cabán in Queens’s Jackson Heights neighborhood. She also received recent endorsements from Sunrise New York City, the Muslim Democratic Club, the New York State Immigrant Action Fund, Empire State Indivisible, and Central Park Five exoneree Yusef Salaam.

In the last filing period, Cabán received the most individual donations of all of her opponents by more than 3,000 contributions. “Cabán has three times as many donors from Queens as all her opponents combined,” Monica Klein, a spokesperson for the Cabán campaign, said in a statement to The Intercept. During the last filing period, according to Klein, Cabán raised $242,030 from 3,884 donors, including 776 donors in Queens. In the same period, Katz raised $172,152 in 133 contributions, including 57 in Queens — and Lasak raised $144,697 from 211 donors, including 108 in Queens. “We’ve raised the most money in the race and are in the strongest position to win (and just want to note we’ve tripled Caban’s fundraising),” Grant Fox, a spokesperson for Katz, said in a statement to The Intercept.

According to their most recent filings, Malik, Nieves, and Lugo all raised under $40,000 from fewer than 100 donors, including fewer than 20 from Queens.

Lasak, a career judge and former prosecutor, won recent endorsements from the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and New York City’s Citizens Union. In the final days of the race, a campaign aide told The Intercept, they felt confident, having cut into Katz’s base and closed in on her polling lead by 18 points, in addition to swinging undecided voters his way. Lasak’s campaign poured at least an additional $150,000 into TV ads, increasing their spending on digital ads as well and putting another six pieces of mail into circulation. He finished with less than 15 percent of the vote.

Given that Queens leans heavily Democratic, Cabán is all but assured a general election victory, provided she survives whatever challenges Katz files. That election will take place on November 5, 2019.

Correction: June 26, 2019, 11:04 a.m. ET
An earlier version of this story referred to Cynthia Nixon as a mayoral candidate. She was a gubernatorial candidate in New York.

The post Tiffany Cabán Stuns Queens Machine, Holds Solid Lead in Race for Queens District Attorney appeared first on The Intercept.