“They said if you have work movement, you’re not supposed to get your essential days, because your essential days qualify for work,” recalled Raymond, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym to protect his privacy. “I told them that doesn’t make sense.”

Raymond had unknowingly run into a policy quietly implemented by Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart. He wasn’t getting his “essential days,” guaranteed by law, because he also had regularly scheduled permission to go to work.

In 2021, Illinois passed a criminal justice reform bill called the Pretrial Fairness Act that, among other things, extended modest additional privileges to people under electronic monitoring, commonly known as EM. Dart installed a policy to unilaterally limit those privileges — limits that reform advocates said violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the new law.

The law guarantees twice-weekly movement for essential tasks, such as going to the grocery store or a doctor’s appointment, to “any person” subject to house arrest while awaiting trial for criminal charges. Some people under EM, however, also have court orders allowing for recurring movements, such as going to work or attending school. Dart’s office systematically excludes the latter group with regularly scheduled days — people like Raymond — from taking advantage of the extra essential task days bestowed by the reform law.

“Absent a court order specifying days, each participant shall be given a schedule assigned by the contracted vendor,” reads a policy document from Dart’s office obtained by The Intercept through the Freedom of Information Act, referring to the private firm contracted by the sheriff to administer the EM program.

A spokesperson for Dart confirmed that the policy excludes people with fixed movement schedules. “For individuals with court-ordered movement, free movement is not automatically applied,” Matt Walberg, the communications director at the sheriff’s office, wrote in an email. “However, individuals in these situations can request additional movement.” Walberg disputed that the policy is at odds with the law, stating that because the provision about essential movement “follows the paragraph allowing for specific orders of approved movement, it is clear that free movement is to be granted in cases where the individual does not have court or Sheriff’s authorized movement.”

Dart has been publicly critical of the EM reforms, amid a broader campaign of opposition to the Pretrial Fairness Act, ahead of the January 1, 2023 start date of the law’s most substantial provision: the elimination of money bail.

“Passing the law was really the first baby step toward changing the structure of our courts,” said Sarah Staudt, a senior policy analyst at the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts. “We know that there are lots of judges across the state who don’t agree with the elimination of cash bail. We know there are lots of court administrators and sheriffs and state’s attorneys who feel the same way.”

The Pretrial Fairness Act, which was passed as part of a larger bill called the SAFE-T Act, has long been opposed by police, prosecutors, and Republicans in the state. As its provisions have gone into effect, local media, policymakers, and elected officials — including Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat — have tried to undermine it by pointing to pretrial reforms as a driver of crime, despite evidence to the contrary. While ending money bond is a step toward reducing wealth-based discrimination in pretrial detention, it does not prevent courts from locking up people who are awaiting trial if there is a public safety reason for doing so.

Opposition to ending cash bail intensified in the run-up to last week’s election. A right-wing political action committee funded by Republican mega-donor Dick Uihlein ran a racist disinformation campaign about bail reform that included sending out fake newspapers with sinister headlines and mugshots of Black men.

Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, have taken the bait. While they have not gone as far as calling to repeal bail reform, some are considering a measure that would keep more people incarcerated before trial. In September, Democratic state Sen. Scott Bennett introduced a bill to “address concerns by local law enforcement” that would water down a reform requiring citations rather than arrests for minor crimes, expanding the universe of people who could be jailed pretrial and imposing a presumption of jail time for certain charges. A few months earlier, during the final hours of the spring legislative session, the state House passed a bill introduced by one of the lead sponsors of the SAFE-T Act that would allow judges to revoke essential movement permissions for people facing forcible felonies — a special category of charges relating to violent crimes.

“The real reason is not fear for public safety. The real reason is racism, money, and power.”

Bennet introduced his bill amid negotiations between lawmakers, stakeholders, and advocates over a trailer bill that would amend the SAFE-T Act, a priority for passage as the Illinois legislature convenes for a six-day veto session that begins this week. The Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, an advocacy coalition that worked with the Legislative Black Caucus to pass the Pretrial Fairness Act, is advocating for changes that would strengthen the law’s protections. Police groups are pushing to gut it  — with advocates worried they want to scrap it entirely.

Though public debate has largely focused on money bail, the EM reforms are on the chopping block as well. Within the last month, both Dart and Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown have called on lawmakers to curtail them.

Efforts like the one in Illinois to undo reforms are happening across the country. The passage of significant reforms — and the election of prosecutors who stopped or reduced their offices’ use of money bail for people accused of low-level offenses — is consistently met with fierce resistance. Earlier this year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul controversially rolled back the state’s landmark 2019 bail reform law.

Bina Ahmad, a California-based civil rights attorney, said the anti-reform campaign in Illinois appears to follow the same playbook that was used to gut bail reform in New York, where she had worked as a public defender. “It’s one large machine that is running to keep people in jail and make money off of their slave labor in jail, and employ hundreds of thousands of police officers and correction officers and wardens and all the people who make money off of the system,” she said. “The real reason is not fear for public safety. The real reason is racism, money, and power.”

Researchers, advocates, and journalists noted that electronic monitors do more harm than good, including by making it hard for people to get their lives back on track. A 2020 report by the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Pretrial Practices found that there is no research to indicate that EM advances public safety or makes it more likely that people will appear in court.

Raymond, who was put on a monitor after being arrested at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, said the terms of his house arrest made stable employment a challenge. He had a court order allowing him to go to his part-time retail job on a regular schedule. When he moved to a location farther away from work, though, he said the sheriff’s office declined to fully accommodate his need for more commute time. “Getting home is treacherous,” he said. “If they say get in by 6 and I walk in by 6:02 … that’s jail.” That was a risk he was unwilling to take, so instead Raymond quit.

Cook County’s pretrial EM program was introduced in 1989 as a way to reduce overcrowding in local jails. In time, it grew into one of the largest and most restrictive pretrial EM programs in the nation. It also ensnares Black people at highly disproportionate rates, according to an analysis by Chicago Appleseed. “It’s the only program I have encountered where the sheriff has unilateral authority to re-incarcerate people he believes have broken the rule of the program,” said Staudt. “Most programs use EM as a way to monitor people’s location, not as a way to incarcerate them.”

About 21 percent of people on GPS monitors as of October 28 had been awaiting trial for more than a year, with an average span of 7 1/2 months, according to The Intercept’s analysis of the sheriff’s data.

Before this year, program participants were required to get permission from the court or sheriff to leave home for any reason, a process that required advanced notice and burdensome verification. In December, Deputy Public Defender Amy Thompson said that 1,600 people on EM at the time were not able to leave home at all. (The county court’s Adult Probation Department runs a separate EM program, about which there is little publicly available information.)

Last year’s reforms were meant to relieve such barriers to allowing people to address basic needs.

The sheriff’s EM policy sets a fixed schedule for essential movement for people on house arrest, during which time they do not need specific permission to leave home. Yet Dart’s office “continues to nickel and dime people about this movement in ways that are really punitive,” Staudt said.

Staudt was referring to the policy excluding certain populations from essential movement. While the size of the EM population fluctuates daily, numbers provided by the sheriff’s office give insight into the number of people impacted. On November 7, 335 out of 2,012 people on EM had court-ordered movement schedules and were thus not assigned to an essential movement schedule.

The sheriff’s policy states that, for those excluded from essential movement, “one-time movement may be approved without a court order.” That process, however, can be difficult to navigate.

Earlier this year, Lee Mitchell, a 30-year-old photographer in Chicago who was on electronic monitoring, was asked to attend a training session for a new job. Though he had a court order allowing him to leave home for school and work, the training fell outside his approved movement hours, so he had to get separate permission from the sheriff’s office. He submitted documentation for the training, but the sheriff’s office asked for more information. Mitchell’s new employer did not get back to him in time, so he ended up missing the session.

“It’s a hassle. I feel like I’m doing things more than once, and it’s repetitive. Why should I have to do this when I already got permission from the judge, a signed court order saying, ‘You open up his movement,’” said Mitchell, who was arrested during the 2020 racial justice uprising. “That means it don’t matter what the job is or what the hours are. I don’t feel that the employer should have to provide additional documentation.”

Walberg, the sheriff’s spokesperson, wrote that “verification to support the requested movement is necessary to prevent fraudulent requests.” He added: “The Sheriff’s Office works hard to balance the approval of necessary movement that will enable participants to be successful while on the program with our responsibility to ensure participants are abiding by the orders of the court.”

Mitchell’s case was resolved in October, about 19 months after he was placed on a monitor. “I’m still trying to get things together that I couldn’t get together in the two years I was on house arrest,” he said. “Now it’s like I’m actually playing double to get my life in order.”

Still, he has been optimistic about the rollout of the electronic monitoring reforms. In addition to the essential movement provision, the new law also requires courts to review EM orders every 60 days and states that a person must be in violation of the terms of their home confinement for a full 48 hours before they can be charged with felony escape. The latter change is meant to ensure that people don’t face serious charges for minor violations or technical issues with their ankle monitors.

“It’s not working to where we want it to work,” Mitchell said, “but these changes have produced real results for accused people in this county.”

In a March interview, Mitchell added that he didn’t believe other officials were being intentionally obstructionist. “On balance, the leadership here in Cook County — whether it’s the sheriff’s office, the state attorney’s office, the public defender’s office — in general have been very receptive to these changes,” he said. “But certainly everybody doesn’t agree on everything. I think you see sometimes battles in interpretation, battles of implementation.”

“It’s not working to where we want it to work, but these changes have produced real results for accused people in this county.”

Only a few weeks after Mitchell’s interview, however, Dart made clear that his office disagreed with more than how to implement the law. On April 1, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Dart had called for a repeal of essential movement, “at least for those charged with violent crimes.” (The premise of the article is that crime is rampant among EM participants allowed to “roam freely,” despite reporting that only 1 percent of participants had been arrested while on essential movement time.)

That sort of change had previously been proposed by Democratic state Rep. Margaret Croke, who consulted Dart’s office before introducing the legislation, according to emails obtained by The Intercept under FOIA. Last December, a few weeks before the EM reforms kicked in, Croke, who represents majority white neighborhoods on Chicago’s north side, met with Jason Hernandez, the sheriff’s executive director of intergovernmental relations. Afterward, Croke’s chief of staff sent an email that clarified the representative’s interest in the program: “I’m curious if any data exists somewhere for how many EM program participants end up either: 1) violating the terms of their participation 2) end up engaging in another illegal activity.”

Nearly 30 minutes later, Croke followed up. “Can you please share with me what violent crimes the Sheriff’s Office would like to see restricted from being eligible for the EM program? I want to start having conversations with my fellow legislators on the topic,” wrote Croke, copying fellow Chicago-area state Rep. Ann Williams. “I think we can all agree that individuals charged with murder should not be allowed to participate on the program. Furthermore, I imagine more people will be on the EM program after the end of cash bail.”

Hernandez did not answer Croke’s questions by email, but he invited the lawmakers to tour the EM program and meet with leadership. (The visit never materialized due to scheduling conflicts.)

On January 4, Croke again wrote to Hernandez, this time sharing two draft bills. The first sought to prevent people accused of certain violent crimes or sex crimes from having “free unrestricted liberty from 7am to 7pm.” The second was a draft of a bill to expand the list of criminal charges that would make an individual ineligible for pretrial release to home confinement. Croke never introduced the first bill, while the second was introduced on January 12 and then languished in committee.

“It’s important to me when drafting legislation to engage the key stakeholders and entities that will be impacted to ensure we are creating meaningful legislation,” Croke said in an emailed statement to The Intercept. She attributed her interest in electronic monitoring to an increase in constituent outreach about the issue and pointed to a Chicago Tribune article that reports a claim from Lightfoot’s office that more than 130 people were arrested for violent crimes while out on EM in 2021. A follow-up analysis by the Tribune, however, found serious flaws with the mayor’s data methodology.

Mitchell, for his part, maintained his optimism after the November election. “The voters of Illinois spoke this week, rejecting candidates who ran on fearmongering, misleading attacks on the Pretrial Fairness Act and the wider SAFE-T Act. Historic reforms to our state’s criminal legal system are clearly supported by Illinoisans and are on track for implementation in January,” he said in an emailed statement. “That said, good faith negotiations are ongoing to clarify some details of the reforms during the Illinois legislature’s upcoming veto session.”

State Rep. Martin Moylan, a Democrat who represents a suburban district northwest of Chicago, introduced a bill that would make it a felony to tamper with an EM device or signal. The bill, which Croke co-sponsored, was repeatedly scheduled for a hearing but ultimately did not advance.

The bill lawmakers eventually coalesced around — the one allowing judges to take essential movement away from people charged with forcible felonies — could be seen as the legislature’s response to rising crime rates in Chicago. But it’s not based on any statistical evidence, said Alexa Van Brunt, the director of the MacArthur Justice Center Clinic at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

Van Brunt pointed to recent analyses by researchers at the University of Chicago Crime Lab that found it very unlikely that people on EM are responsible for Chicago’s recent increase in gun violence. “To introduce a provision to really make it much more difficult for people to reenter society and take care of their families without any basis in social science is just punitive,” she said, “and really actually achieves the opposite of the goal intended.”

Dart reiterated his opposition to the EM reform in an October budget hearing, claiming that his office is forced to turn off GPS monitoring during a person’s period of essential movement, otherwise the alerts they get for people leaving home with permission would drown out the alerts for people leaving home illegally. The law does not require him to stop tracking people’s locations, and as WBEZ reported, “even if the alerts are turned off, the EM bracelet still tracks a person’s location.”

Meanwhile, a group of nationwide advocates and academics have turned their attention to the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts, which houses a bureau created in the aftermath of the Pretrial Fairness Act dedicated to “increasing equality” in pretrial processes. In a letter sent last week, the advocates expressed concerns that “certain decision-makers” will push back against the law’s progress by either expanding the use of EM or failing to fully implement the provisions of the law. “We encourage you to promote the use of non-punitive programs as part of pretrial release and refrain from expanding the use of pretrial electronic monitoring,” they wrote. “If EM is used, we implore you to ensure that the conditions of EM maximize movement and participation in family and community life, rather than converting homes into jail cells.”

Correction: November 13, 2022, 1:11 p.m. ET
This article has been updated to remove an errant reference to regulations around electronic monitoring for people charged with murder. 

Update: November 18, 2022
The subheadline of this story has been updated.

The post Chicago Sheriff Systematically Denies New Rights Laid Out in Criminal Justice Reform appeared first on The Intercept.

The software, known as ATLAS, takes information from immigrants’ case files and runs it through various federal databases. ATLAS looks for indicators that someone is dangerous or dishonest and is ostensibly designed to detect fraud among people who come into contact with the U.S. immigration system. But advocates for immigrants believe that the real purpose of the computer program is to create a pretext to strip people of citizenship. Whatever the motivation, ATLAS’s intended outcome is ultimately deportation, judging from the documents, which originate within DHS and were obtained by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Muslim Advocates through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

ATLAS helps DHS investigate immigrants’ personal relationships and backgrounds, examining biometric information like fingerprints and, in certain circumstances, considering an immigrant’s race, ethnicity, and national origin. It draws information from a variety of unknown sources, plus two that have been criticized as being poorly managed: the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, also known as the terrorist watchlist, and the National Crime Information Center. Powered by servers at tech giant Amazon, the system in 2019 alone conducted 16.5 million screenings and flagged more than 120,000 cases of potential fraud or threats to national security and public safety.

Ultimately, humans at DHS are involved in determining how to handle immigrants flagged by ATLAS. But the software threatens to amplify the harm caused by bureaucratic mistakes within the immigration system, mistakes that already drive many denaturalization and deportation cases. “ATLAS should be considered as suspect until it is shown not to generate unfair, arbitrary, and discriminatory results,” said Laura Bingham, a lawyer with the Open Society Justice Initiative. “From what we are able to scrutinize in terms of the end results — like the disparate impact of denaturalization based on national origin — there is ample reason to consider ATLAS a threat to naturalized citizens.”

“From what we are able to scrutinize in terms of the end results … there is ample reason to consider ATLAS a threat to naturalized citizens.”

Some critics believe it’s no accident that ATLAS could go after individual immigrants for flimsy reasons. “The whole point of ATLAS is to screen and investigate so that the government can deny applications or refer for criminal or civil or immigration enforcement,” said Muslim Advocates’ Deborah Choi. “The purpose of the secret rules and predictive analytics and algorithms are to find things to investigate.”

The Department of Homeland Security refuses to disclose to the public how exactly ATLAS works or what rules it uses to determine when an immigrant should be flagged to potentially have their citizenship revoked. This secrecy makes it nearly impossible to tell whether ATLAS is targeting immigrants baselessly or not. The Open Society Justice Initiative this week filed a new FOIA request with DHS and its United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, division seeking details on how the algorithm functions.

The revelations about ATLAS come as policymakers await a review of denaturalization policies that the Biden administration began in February to “ensure that these authorities are not used excessively or inappropriately,” as the White House put it at the time. President Joe Biden came to office promising a more “humane” approach to immigration than former President Donald Trump, who stripped dozens of naturalized Americans of their citizenship. A deadline related to the review came and went in May. Months later, the administration has yet to publish the review or speak publicly about the matter.

ATLAS originates within USCIS, a DHS division with responsibility for granting citizenship and other immigration benefits. USCIS has called the software its “primary background screening system,” but ATLAS appears to be a feature of a larger computer program that helps manage case information on every person in the immigration system: USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security Data System, or FDNS-DS. A 2020 DHS assessment of ATLAS’s privacy implications, one of the few public sources of information about ATLAS, shows that when an individual’s information is run through the software — a virtual certainty for any immigrant — ATLAS autonomously scours the databases, including some that contain classified materials.

ATLAS appears to scrutinize not just individual immigrants but also their wider social networks. A 2016 privacy assessment of FDNS-DS said that ATLAS “visually displays linkages or relationships among individuals to assist in identifying non-obvious relationships… with a potential nexus to criminal or terrorist activities.”

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the large online retailer, was hosting the ATLAS system as of 2020. That arrangement is one of many instances in which Amazon has sold its services to a controversial Homeland Security initiative targeting immigrants. Amazon has faced protests both from the general public and its own employees demanding that the company cease any further anti-immigrant work; the company did not return a request for comment.

USCIS spokesperson Matthew Bourke declined to answer any questions about ATLAS.

Tracking Millions of Immigrants With Potentially Catastrophic Consequences

It’s unknown how many individuals have been denaturalized via ATLAS. But a 2019 USCIS press release gave some sense of the program’s scale, noting that the program that year processed more than 16 million “screenings” and generated 124,000 “automated potential fraud, public safety and national security detections requiring further analysis and manual review by USCIS officers.”

Immigrants come into contact with ATLAS, according to the 2020 privacy assessment, when one “presents him or herself” to the USCIS for some reason, of which there are many; when “new derogatory information is associated with the individual in one or more U.S. Government systems”; or, according to the 2016 privacy document, whenever “FDNS performs an administrative investigation.” This apparently can happen even after an immigration-related decision has been made: Among the FOIA documents shared with The Intercept is a USCIS memo noting that ATLAS is used to detect “fraud patterns in immigration benefit filings … either pre- or post-adjudication,” suggesting that an immigrant could be subjected to algorithmic scrutiny indefinitely after their filing is approved.

Once the system is triggered, ATLAS eventually decides whether to flag the immigrant in question, but it’s unclear exactly how it arrives at that decision. How ATLAS reasons — that is, its decision-making “algorithm” — is secret. And although DHS documents list a handful of data types ATLAS can potentially search, they do not indicate what sorts of personal information ATLAS will churn through to reach its decision.

The 2020 privacy document states vaguely that “ATLAS contains a rules engine that applies pattern-based algorithms to look for indicators of fraud, public safety, and national security concerns,” a process described as “predictive.” It gives little information about these rules but does state that it is permissible to use ATLAS to target immigrants by race and ethnicity in “exceptional instances,” a term left glaringly undefined. The document claims that USCIS protects immigrants from discrimination by “limiting the consideration of an individual’s simple connection to a particular country, by birth or citizenship, as a screening criterion, unless such consideration is based on an assessment of intelligence and risk and in which alternatives do not meet security needs.” Caveats aside, the point is clear: ATLAS could be used to target certain ethnic groups or nationalities in “exceptional circumstances” or should DHS deem it a “security need.” Appealing to murky notions of “national security” and “fraud” is a long-standing tactic of the post-9/11 homeland security apparatus, and one that has historically permitted the state to justify efforts to harass or target marginalized communities in the U.S. under the auspices of public safety.

If ATLAS produces a negative review, the next steps can lead to denaturalization, and a 2019 flowchart included in the FOIA documents provided to The Intercept illustrates how: When ATLAS finds something derogatory according to its secret list of rules, the software sends out a “System Generated Notification,” which is then “triaged” and forwarded directly to FDNS-DS if potentially “actionable.” From there, FDNS determines whether the notification constitutes a “possible criminal denaturalization referral,” and, if so, will “refer to ICE for criminal denaturalization action.” All told, going from an ATLAS notification to criminal denaturalization proceedings takes only four steps on the flowchart.

A USCIS spreadsheet summarizing the System Generated Notifications created in 2020, also obtained via FOIA litigation, cites 12 different categories of ATLAS alert. Though the meaning of these codes is unclear, the spreadsheet references notifications relating to “DACA,” presumably the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy that protects some undocumented immigrants from deportation; “DOD,” possibly referring to the Department of Defense; and two different “NS,” or national security, categories whose full names were redacted. Most of the notifications created in 2020 were in the “multiple identities” category, which refers to immigrants deliberately using false aliases.

Legal scholars and technologists have widely criticized attempts to use software to predict national security threats, arguing that terrorism is so statistically rare as to be impossible to foresee by drawing “patterns” from a person’s biography. “Because the rules or factors underlying ATLAS’s screening functionality are unknown, there is no way to assess whether ATLAS is disproportionately flagging certain communities,” Choi of Muslim Advocates told The Intercept. “In fact, the Privacy Impact Assessment for ATLAS states that under certain circumstances, an individual’s country of birth or citizenship could be a screening criterion. As was the case in Operation Janus” — a DHS program that involved a review of past naturalization cases of people from “special interest countries” — “any rule based on country of origin is likely to target individuals from Muslim-majority countries.”

The 2020 privacy document does little to dispel worries that ATLAS is making potentially life-ruining decisions on the basis of bad data. The document states that ATLAS’s output is subject to manual review by the agents who use it; it also notes that the accuracy of ATLAS’s input is taken as a given: “USCIS presumes the information submitted is accurate. … ATLAS relies on the accuracy of the information as it is collected from the immigration requestor and from the other government source systems. As such, the accuracy of the information in ATLAS is equivalent to the accuracy of the source information at the point in time when it is collected by ATLAS.” The document further notes that “ATLAS does not employ any mechanisms that allow individuals to amend erroneous information” and suggests that individuals directly contact the offices maintaining the various databases ATLAS uses if they wish to correct an error. The notion that someone struggling to navigate the U.S. immigration system would have the wherewithal to personally negotiate a correction of the FBI Terrorist Screening Database, or have an opportunity to learn of such an error to begin with, is questionable.

An Opportunity To Stop the Denaturalization Wave

The U.S. government’s use of denaturalization has varied widely over the last century. In the early to mid-1900s, the federal government pursued denaturalization for political, racist, and sexist reasons, even going after U.S.-born citizens. That changed after a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision vastly narrowed the potential uses of denaturalization. For nearly five decades afterward, the government brought denaturalization cases only sparingly, usually against accused war criminals and Nazis — up until the Trump presidency.

In September 2017, the Department of Justice announced its intent to denaturalize three men it accused of lying about their immigration histories on their applications for citizenship. It was a loud proclamation of a new front in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants that would lead to nearly double the number of denaturalization cases filed during two years as compared to the number of cases filed from 2004 to 2016, according to a New York Times Magazine investigation.

The infrastructure that helped the Trump Justice Department identify its first targets for denaturalization was years in the making. Under Operation Janus — an initiative that began at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency and continued under former President Barack Obama — the Department of Homeland Security began to digitize fingerprint data for about 315,000 people whose information was missing from a central database, ultimately identifying 1,029 people who had been naturalized after receiving final orders of deportation under another identity. According to a 2016 report from the DHS Office of Inspector General, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had begun the process of investigating some of those cases to decide whether the individuals should be denaturalized.

“But the Obama administration proceeded with caution, instructing officials only to denaturalize those who appeared to pose a danger to the United States,” writes law professor Amanda Frost in her recent book, “You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.” “After the Trump administration took over, however, the program grew exponentially.”

In early 2018, the Justice Department wrote in a press release that USCIS “has stated its intention to refer approximately an additional 1,600 for prosecution,” and later that year, USCIS announced the creation of a new office focused on denaturalization. (Asked about the status of that office, Bourke, the USCIS spokesperson, said that once the administration’s review of denaturalization policies is complete, “USCIS staffing will be adjusted accordingly to meet the needs of the agency.”) Ahead of the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years, the Department of Homeland Security asked for $207.6 million to fund, among other things, investigations into hundreds of additional leads under Operation Janus, as well as a review of another 700,000 immigrant files under Operation Second Look, a related program. In early 2020, the Justice Department created a new office to investigate “terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders, and other fraudsters who illegally obtained naturalization” for denaturalization.

ATLAS is a direct descendent of these efforts to simultaneously digitize huge swaths of paper fingerprint records and sift through them en masse in order to find damning inconsistencies. One of the FOIA-produced documents shared with The Intercept, the USCIS memo on that office’s fingerprint digitization strategy, notes that ATLAS “will help to ensure USCIS is aware of cases with multiple identity fraud patterns so that officers can address this potentially derogatory information prior to final adjudication of immigration benefits.”

Several of the documents obtained under FOIA suggest that deportation is the end goal of these recent efforts: A heavily redacted, undated USCIS presentation lists “Removal Proceedings (if Amenable)” as the final step in a denaturalization case, while a flow chart on the “Historical Fingerprint Enrollment Denaturalization Workflow” shows the second-to-last step as “Immigration Removal Proceedings Occur,” followed by a decision by an immigration judge. A 2018 USCIS memo states that a key consideration in settlement agreements is to determine if deportation “is a priority or if denaturalization is sufficient,” noting that deportation “would generally be within the enforcement priorities, where the subject is denaturalized with an admission or finding of fraud.” A 2009 ICE memo notes that in cases in which the Justice Department declines to criminally prosecute someone suspected of “identity and benefit fraud,” that person “must, if legally possible, be administratively arrested and placed in removal proceedings. Several of the subjects have been granted citizenship through naturalization. These cases should be given priority.” Additionally, a USCIS spreadsheet listing settlement proposals for 10 denaturalization cases in 2018 and 2019 (all of which were rejected) shows that all of the offers included some sort of protection from deportation — either explicitly or through an agreement to maintain permanent resident status.

Denaturalization experts say that putting an immigrant’s paper trail through the algorithmic wringer can lead to automated punitive measures based not on that immigrant’s past conduct but the government’s own incompetence. Experts have long pointed out that using matches against shoddily maintained fingerprints, many collected on notecards decades ago, as evidence of deliberate “fraud” or malfeasance is likely to ensnare and punish innocent people.

According to Choi, in some cases “denaturalization is sought on the basis of the mistakes of others, such as bad attorneys and translators, or even the government’s failures in record-keeping or the failures of the immigration system.” Bureaucratic blundering can easily be construed as a sign of fraud on an immigrant’s part, especially if decades have passed since filling out the paperwork in question. If ATLAS finds that your name doesn’t match a name associated with your historical fingerprint record, you could be fast-tracked for denaturalization without ever realizing that there was an inconsistency in your paperwork, potentially through no fault of your own. “Many denaturalization cases are based on the government’s allegations of fraud, but the government has never substantiated its sweeping justification of fraud prevention to warrant the irreparable harm to American families and society that is caused by denaturalization,” Choi added.

The Justice Department’s denaturalization prosecutions appeared to slow in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic caused massive delays throughout the judicial system, according to a document obtained by the Open Society Justice Initiative. Another USCIS document obtained by the group, however, shows that there were thousands of cases in the pipeline: As of April 2020, the agency had produced 2,628 “affidavits of good cause,” which are a procedural requirement for initiating civil denaturalization cases, and had assigned 1,265 cases to the USCIS Office of Chief Counsel. Of those, 745 cases were pending with the OCC and 502 had been referred to the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. Asked about the current number of cases it is currently investigating or has referred to the Justice Department for prosecution, USCIS referred questions to the Justice Department. Justice Department spokesperson Danielle Blevins declined to comment on the department’s denaturalization caseload.

Under Biden’s February executive order, the departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security were due to submit a report to the president in early May. The State Department confirmed to The Intercept that it had completed its portion of the review and directed questions about if and when the report would be made public to the White House. Bourke of USCIS told The Intercept that the agency is working with DHS and the Justice Department on the review and that it would “potentially make adjustments following that assessment.” The White House did not respond to questions about the report.

Advocates, meanwhile, have been pushing the administration to dismantle the denaturalization-focused infrastructure built by Trump and to restore the previous status quo of very limited pursuits of denaturalization. In May, Muslim Advocates was the lead signatory among 48 advocacy groups that detailed these demands in a letter to USCIS. The groups recommend that the agency halt its use of ATLAS until completing a “disparate impact review” and publicly release information on the rules ATLAS uses to flag people, demographic information about the people flagged by the system, and the number of screenings and flags, as well as their outcomes.

Sameera Hafiz, policy director at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, who has been involved in advocacy efforts related to denaturalization for several years, said she wants to see the administration do even more. “Our expectation is that the Biden administration will establish a clear process to immediately restore citizenship to all the individuals stripped of their citizenship during the Trump years and commit to dropping the pending denaturalization cases initiated by Trump,” she said. “Unfortunately, Biden’s immigration enforcement tactics continue to instill fear in our communities — this is one important step the administration must take to begin addressing the harms of the Trump years.”

The post Little-Known Federal Software Can Trigger Revocation of Citizenship appeared first on The Intercept.

The J Street U members, along with former staff, have signed on to a letter to the group’s leadership which describes the response to Israel’s impending annexation as “a decisive test for the progressive movement.” The alumni who signed the letter include 28 former J Street U staffers, over a dozen rabbis and rabbinical students, former Obama White House staffers, and congressional and campaign staffers.

“Israel’s leaders are proceeding with annexation because they expect no real consequence for doing so,” the letter reads. “Now, as they threaten to make that control permanent, most American leaders and institutions have expressed outrage, but few have indicated that moving forward will result in material consequences: a tangible erosion of American monetary support.”

“We ask J Street to stand in strong support of any legislation that will reduce American assistance to Israel if it decides, once and for all, to annex the West Bank,” it concludes.

Netanyahu has said he would begin to annex one third of the already occupied West Bank as early as Wednesday of this week — a move that would be in line with President Donald Trump’s one-sided plan for the region. The threat drew pushback in Congress in the form of a letter signed last week by 191 Democrats, expressing opposition to annexation but promising no specific consequences. A subsequent letter, spearheaded by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., pushes further, saying that lawmakers should “pursue legislation that conditions the $3.8 billion in U.S. military funding to Israel to ensure that U.S. taxpayers are not supporting annexation in any way.” Ocasio-Cortez won a resounding reelection victory in her Democratic primary last week, just as New York Rep. Eliot Engel, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, lost decisively to principal Jamaal Bowman, despite millions spent by pro-Israel big-money groups.

On Monday, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee tweeted its opposition to the letter Ocasio-Cortez was circulating, which had also been signed by Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Betty McCollum, and Pramila Jayapal. By Tuesday morning, Reps. Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Raul Grijalva, André Carson, Nydia Velázquez, Bobby Rush, Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, and Danny Davis had signed on, as had Sen. Bernie Sanders, Politico reported.

Tlaib, in a statement, said Israel’s planned annexation would “formalize an apartheid system” funded by U.S. tax dollars. “The implementation of that system would mean our tax dollars — instead of being used to fund health care or replace lead water pipes — would be used to perpetuate and entrench human rights violations in Palestine, including limitations on freedom of movement, further expansion of illegal land theft, home demolitions, and cutting off access to critical resources like clean water. We are coming together as progressive lawmakers today to clearly say: enough is enough.”

Though just 13 members of Congress have so far signed the letter, compared to the 191 who expressed opposition to annexation, there could potentially be many more willing to come forward. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, signed the larger letter but did not join Ocasio-Cortez’s. “If PM Netanyahu continues down the path of planned unilateral annexation on July 1 — breaking international law and violating human rights of Palestinians — Congress must put conditions on U.S. funding to Israel to demonstrate opposition to annexation and the violation of Palestinian human rights,” Pocan said in a statement provided Tuesday to The Intercept.

Sanders is drafting legislation that ties Israel’s ongoing annexation activity to funding, sources familiar with his effort said. A companion House measure is also being drafted.

A congressional aide involved in the effort said that the Ocasio-Cortez letter and the legislation do not hinge on an upcoming Knesset vote on legal annexation, but tie aid to the ongoing annexation activity of the Israeli government. “It’s important to note that de jure annexation isn’t the only trigger for conditioning aid,” said the aide, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, given the early nature of the conversations. “As the letter states, there are also the policies and practices that have been laying the groundwork for de facto annexation for years: land expropriation, the expulsion of Palestinian families, the demolition of people’s homes, and the building of settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and throughout the Palestinian territories. American taxpayers shouldn’t be enabling violations of human rights anywhere, and Israel should be no exception.”

Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian American analyst, told The Intercept, “I think anybody who claims to oppose annexation, Israeli settlement building, or other Israeli violations of human rights and International law, but refuses to support holding them accountable when they do those things, actually doesn’t oppose them at all and is just being an apologist for them.”

Whether the legislation moves beyond that small group and becomes a mainstream public Democratic position has much to do with the decision J Street, and particularly its founder Jeremy Ben-Ami, is now confronted with. Ben-Ami founded J Street in 2008, creating a liberal counterpoint to AIPAC — giving cover to Democrats to buck Israel on policy issues, most notably former President Barack Obama’s Iran deal. The effort to condition aid based on annexation gives J Street another opportunity to wield its influence on Capitol Hill, though one its founder is reluctant to take. If it remains on the sidelines while issuing sternly worded statements, the effort is unlikely to gain enough momentum to change the reality on the ground in Israel. If J Street gives its blessing and puts its formidable lobbying operation to work, however, a sizable majority of the Democratic caucus could get on board.

Last week, J Street applauded a letter signed by the majority of the House Democratic Caucus opposing the forthcoming unilateral Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank. Neither J Street’s statement, nor the underlying congressional letter, however, had much teeth. If Israel were to move forward with its plans, they stated, it would harm the U.S.-Israel relationship, as well as negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians — but did not tie their opposition to any political consequences.

On a leadership conference call Monday, Ben-Ami talked briefly about the protest from J Street U members, arguing that it was a reflection of the younger, more idealistic activists who make up that organization. He said that J Street as an organization needed to “calibrate more finely than activists who just want to stand for principle,” according to notes of his remarks shared with The Intercept. (Many of those alumni are now well into their 30s, and include former staff, who are older still.)

The issue of conditioning U.S. aid to Israel has long divided J Street and J Street U, which is known to support policies well to the left of those supported by its parent organization. In early 2019, nearly three dozen current and former members of J Street U’s board presented a letter to Ben-Ami and the J Street board, calling on the organization to take “bold action … that responds appropriately to this political moment” by “imposing actual, tangible costs” for Israel’s occupation policies. The signatories argued that J Street could afford to take a more leftward stance on the U.S.-Israel alliance without alienating supporters, as the Democratic electorate has moved left on the issue in recent years.

“In recent years, J Street has increasingly played a role of working to prevent a critical mass for accountability from forming among liberals and progressives, which only ends up carrying water for AIPAC, whether they want to acknowledge it or not,” said Munayyer.

When The Intercept asked Ben-Ami about that internal debate last year, he pointed to comments he made last April, after Netanyahu promised to annex Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank. “What I said is that Israel going down the road of annexation puts all aspects of the U.S.-Israel relationship on the table and opens up a really serious discussion about what should happen,” Ben-Ami said in an interview. “That includes the question of to what purposes is the aid that the United States provides to the state of Israel put, and that is a really important conversation.”

In subsequent statements, Ben-Ami distanced himself and the organization from the policy, even as Democratic presidential candidates took a range of positions to the left of J Street’s.

In a statement accompanying their letter, the J Street U alumni acknowledged that J Street has “willingly” disagreed with the Israeli position on annexation, but noted that the organization “has stopped short of advocating for or supporting legislation that would reduce aid to Israel — which relies on U.S. taxpayer money for military assistance — should its government move forward with annexation.”

The post J Street Is Facing New Pressure to Back Conditioning Aid to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Operation Car Wash, or Lava Jato in Portuguese, rocked Brazil’s political and business establishment, leading to the imprisonment of former president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva — a move that barred him from reelection and paved the way for a win for far-right Jair Bolsonaro. It also led to massive fines and economic and reputational harm for some of Brazil’s most important companies. Yet the investigation itself has been mired in controversy, especially after reporting by The Intercept and partners revealed clear misconduct and political bias by the judge and prosecutors who handled the case against Lula.

The nature of the U.S. government’s role in the operation has also generated much public speculation and suspicion among many Car Wash critics. The chats published today show that prosecutors on the Car Wash team intentionally ignored procedures outlined in Brazilian law and a bilateral treaty agreement with the U.S., apparently to keep the executive branch of the Brazilian government — then led by Lula’s successor and ally, Dilma Rousseff — in the dark about their activities. They also appear to have misrepresented their potentially illegal actions to superiors and the Justice Ministry of Brazil. They secretly hosted a delegation of U.S. officials, and coached and facilitated U.S. efforts to secure cooperating witnesses in corruption investigations into state-controlled oil giant Petrobras. With the approval of Car Wash prosecutors, the U.S. negotiated deals with some witnesses without following treaty procedures, which would have given Brazil greater control over the process.

By circumventing the treaty and other relevant law, the Brazilian prosecutors also opened themselves up to criticism that the U.S. had undue influence over politically sensitive investigations — where U.S. interests may not always have lined up with Brazil’s.

Last summer, members of the U.S. Congress demanded answers from Attorney General William Barr about the scope of the relationship and whether the Justice Department was aware of wrongdoing by their Brazilian counterparts, but they have yet to receive a response. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who signed the letter to Barr, said it is “deeply concerning” that the Justice Department has not responded. “The United States has a dark history of intervention in domestic Latin American politics,” she wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Especially given the cozy relationship between the current Brazilian Administration and the Trump Administration, we in Congress need to be sure that our own Department of Justice was not party to this corruption.” The Justice Department declined to comment for this story.

The bilateral relationship, touted by U.S. Justice Department officials as exemplary, resulted in multiple plea deals in U.S. courts in which companies paid over $8 billion in fines to settle corruption charges. A large portion of that money was funneled back to Brazil. Car Wash chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol had his eye on this cash from early on, and early last year, he announced a vague and unprecedented plan to use a portion of the windfall to create an independent fund to “fight corruption,” rather than return the money to the Brazilian government. The proposal was widely criticized as a power grab and eventually deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court last year. The leaked chats suggest that cash was a central consideration in the Car Wash team’s relationship with the Justice Department, and a reason to keep the U.S. partners happy.

The information on the collaboration comes from a massive archive of documents and Telegram chat logs provided exclusively to The Intercept Brasil by an anonymous source. The archive does not include direct conversations with U.S. officials, but some of their dialogues, emails, and working documents were shared in chats between Brazilian prosecutors.

In response to questions from The Intercept and Agência Pública, a Car Wash spokesperson defended the practice of informal international cooperation and argued that the source materials for this article were “obtained in a criminal manner” and “have been decontextualized or altered over the past few months to produce false accusations, which do not correspond to reality.”

The Intercept and partner news outlets have published over 90 articles from the leaked materials, revealing, among other things, extensive evidence of unethical and likely illegal actions by the Car Wash prosecutors and Justice Minister Sergio Moro, who was previously the presiding judge in the case against Lula. Last September, opposition leaders in Brazil’s lower house of Congress attained enough votes to open a formal congressional inquiry into the facts revealed in the reporting. Six months later, this has yet to happen.

“They Asked Us to Keep It Confidential”

Operation Car Wash prosecutors’ relationship with their American counterparts began in March 2014, during the early days of the investigation, and culminated in a series of plea deals in 2018. The task force’s strategy for dealing with the Americans is well-illustrated in their conversations about an early set of meetings presided over by Dallagnol, the chief prosecutor. In February 2015, Dallagnol and two colleagues flew to Washington, D.C., for informal meetings with officials from the U.S. Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Homeland Security. At the Justice Department’s request, Dallagnol’s team tried to keep the trip out of the press, but when the U.S. delegation came to Brazil, he went one step further: He tried to keep the Brazilian Justice Ministry out of the loop as well.

In Brazil, the roles that the Justice Department performs in the U.S. are split between two entities: the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Justice Ministry. Car Wash task force is part of the former, which is led by the prosecutor general and is responsible for prosecuting crimes. The Justice Ministry, which has oversight of federal law enforcement agencies — like the Federal Police, equivalent to the FBI — is responsible for many investigative and enforcement functions and helps guide the government’s policy agenda in the area.

A bilateral Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, or MLAT, sets the rules for how two countries can cooperate for international law enforcement purposes, such as requesting evidence like foreign bank records or police reports, facilitating search warrants, interviewing foreign suspects, and processing extradition requests. Under the MLAT and other relevant treaties, the Justice Ministry’s Department of Asset Recovery and International Legal Cooperation, or DRCI (its Portuguese acronym), should be the DOJ’s point of contact in Brazil, not representatives of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

But on October 5, 2015, unbeknownst to the Justice Ministry, at least 17 officials from the Justice Department, the FBI, and possibly Immigration and Customs Enforcement landed in Curitiba, the capital of the southern state of Paraná, for a four-day conference at the Operation Car Wash headquarters. Dallagnol instructed his press aide to keep the meetings under wraps, as the “Americans don’t want us to divulge things,” he advised. It is not unusual for agents to want to keep an ongoing investigation shielded from public view, but in this case, some details had already leaked to the Brazilian press.

Rather than respond with the names and titles of his American guests and how long they planned to stay, Dallagnol counseled Aras to stonewall. “I suggest that you suggest that they consult the DOJ, because they asked us to keep it confidential. If you understand that you should open up, I can send you the list, but I suggest you think on it, because this could create noise with the Americans.” He later added in a private chat that opponents within the Justice Ministry could “also use this info against us.”

In response to the Justice Ministry’s final question, asking for “other information that you understand to be relevant,” Dallagnol cracked wise: “The contacts are being made in accordance with national and international rules. I suggest that you suggest that the DRCI stop being jealous of the SCI’s relationship with other countries lol,” he said, referring to Aras’s department within the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Aras thanked Dallagnol for his response, but took a more diplomatic tact in the draft response he sent back 20 hours later. He ensured his colleagues that the purpose of the meeting was merely to “facilitate the formalization of future requests for cooperation,” which would go through the DRCI, and that the “American authorities did not come to carry out investigations in Brazil, which would be irregular.” He also reminded them that the Car Wash prosecutors had already made a similar trip to Washington earlier that year and claimed that his team had sent an email the month before to notify the DRCI of the meetings.

Meanwhile, the visit with the Americans continued.

Political Implications

Keeping the DRCI out of the loop was a conscious choice. The Car Wash team was eager for its sprawling investigation to move quickly, and gaining approval through formal channels, like MLATs, can sometimes bog a case down for months or years. For that reason, prosecutors from many countries argue that informal contact, within limits, is a necessity. It’s also clear in the chats that the Car Wash team was wary of potential political interference from the Brazilian government to protect allies who were under investigation — an understandable instinct, but one which legally cannot override the rules governing international cooperation.

Months earlier, Dallagnol had expressed his distrust of the DRCI and Rousseff’s government. In a group chat that included Aras, he said, “I don’t like the idea of the executive looking at our requests and knowing what’s up.” Rousseff and her justice minister are longtime members of Lula’s Workers’ Party, and, as president, Rousseff was under strong pressure to clip the prosecutors’ wings from politicians who feared being swept up in the probe. But she repeatedly refused to do so, which eventually provoked her 2016 impeachment.

Aras also appeared to believe that the country’s political leadership was fearful of U.S. involvement with Car Wash.

October 7, 2015 – Group Chat FTS MPF

Vladimir Aras – 09:16:08 – The Executive is “indignant” (that’s what they told me) with the presence of an American delegation in Curitiba. I think the nervousness is because of the FCPA. There are people afraid of falling on the American’s radar. I already foresee international end of year trips being canceled.

FCPA refers to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the legislation through which the U.S. claims jurisdiction to prosecute the bribery of foreign officials, even if the acts occurred outside of the U.S., as long as the transactions — or the corporations or individuals who made them — use the U.S. financial system. Petrobras is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and many of the financial transactions under investigation at the time involved U.S. financial institutions or U.S. dollars.

Dallagnol may have wanted to avoid political interference in his investigation, but — speaking generally and not about this specific situation — Eduardo Pitrez, international law professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande, says there are good reasons why the Justice Ministry is in charge of matters of international law enforcement cooperation. Under the Brazilian Constitution, the executive branch and Supreme Court are given authority over these processes “because they involve very sensitive elements, such as national sovereignty, international interests and disputes, and bilateral relations,” Pitrez said. Excluding the elected government and courts from the process creates “fragmentation,” he added. Without a central authority, “any judge or prosecutor” could independently establish relationships that directly affect “the government’s agenda on important national concerns, such as an oil company or the competitive capabilities of large national companies.”

In an email to The Intercept, the Car Wash spokesperson wrote that “the federal government’s department for international cooperation was called in whenever necessary.” However, he added, “there is no duty or obligation to share the entire investigation.”

From the U.S. side, even when it comes to informal meetings, the Justice Department requires agents traveling overseas to get permission both from the department’s Office of International Affairs as well as from the foreign government, according to Robert Appleton, a former senior U.S. attorney whose portfolio focused on international investigations. In this case, the Brazilian approval came from the Car Wash prosecutors.

“For a U.S. prosecutor to do anything abroad, they’re out of their country, so they don’t have any power,” said Appleton. “Policy-wise, they’re not supposed to run around any country” and conduct investigations “without the host country’s approval,” he added. “So if someone is doing that, they’re violating the Department of Justice protocols.”

Still, he cautioned, U.S. agents would not typically question whether the people they’re meeting with have gone through the proper channels — in this case, the DRCI.

A U.S. agent could “have a relationship with an agent or prosecutor in a foreign country, and you get your approvals and then go — you don’t know what that person is doing on their end,” Appleton said. “You presume that they’ve gotten their approvals to meet with you, but it’s not like you ask them, ‘Well, show me your approval that you can meet with me.’ That’s usually not something you ask. You take it for granted.”

These issues were particularly sticky with Operation Car Wash, as the investigations involved a former president from the governing party and likely frontrunner in the upcoming 2018 elections. In his eight years in office, Lula had defiantly worked to build regional alliances and weaken U.S. influence in the hemisphere. Also under investigation were Petrobras, the crown jewel of Brazil’s network of state-controlled businesses, and Odebrecht, Brazil’s largest construction firm which, under Lula, ramped up operations across South America and beyond. Both companies were seen as key tools in Brazil’s foreign policy aims — and as a threat to the U.S. corporations that they supplanted. In 2013, the Rousseff government famously canceled a state visit with then-President Barack Obama, after documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the National Security Agency had been spying on Petrobras and the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy. The U.S. government, in other words, might have an interest in bringing down certain Brazilian corporations that went beyond pure motives to stamp out corruption.

“A lot of people think that the U.S. came to investigate these companies in the attempt to find something that would give it a chance to interfere in these processes, by which these companies were evolving and gaining markets,” said Fabio de Sá e Silva, a professor of Brazilian studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Car Wash prosecutors were well aware that any collaboration with the U.S. would inevitably generate suspicions, and were careful to control how the relationship was covered in the media. Nonetheless, the press reported multiple details about the relationship that politicians and others argued were clear examples of improper U.S. influence on the investigations.

A congressman from the Workers’ Party submitted a report to the EU Parliament last year denouncing U.S. cooperation with Brazil as illegal because it did not flow through the Justice Ministry. “Our prosecutors and judges established, in clear defiance of the Constitution, a specific and independent foreign policy towards the U.S.,” the document read.

Eventually, the two countries signed multiple agreements under the MLAT related to Car Wash, but only after the U.S. investigation was well underway and perhaps irreversible. As Dallagnol put it to Aras, the help he and his team provided in secret had set in motion a scenario that “meets the Americans’ needs and they will no longer depend on us. From there on, we will lose strength to negotiate sharing the money they recover. Hence our rush.”

“This Investigation by the Americans Really Worries Me”

Dallagnol and Aras stayed in contact throughout the visit as they attempted to contain the backlash from Brasília, Brazil’s capital. On the evening that the U.S. delegation ended, Aras, who was on vacation in Germany, expressed his concerns in a private chat with Dallagnol, who he called “Delta”:

October 9, 2015 – Private chat

Vladimir Aras – 20:56:12 – Delta, Delta, as we already talked about, this investigation by the Americans really worries me. I was put at ease when you guaranteed that this group of Americans did not do investigations in Curitiba when they were there. You know they have few limitations for using evidence there. Even if they obtain them abroad less formally, they can use them validly in some cases. Hence my initial fear, since the [Public Prosecutor] and [Secretariat for International Cooperation] cannot allow this […] As I said on Monday, the [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] even mentioned the possibility of “unsettling bilateral relations.” Of course, we must comply with passive requests whenever possible, but without falling into traps. As I told you on the phone today, the government remains “nervous” about this story. The temperature in [Brasília] rose because of their numerous presence in Curitiba.

Aras said his worries were assuaged by the assurance that the delegation did not practice “investigative acts”; however, the agenda for the four-day meeting suggests that Dallagnol may have deceived his colleague on that crucial point.

According to the document, the first two days focused on presentations by the Brazilians about key cooperating witnesses in the Petrobras case. The second two were dedicated to U.S. officials meeting with the defense attorneys for Brazilians with whom they hoped to sign cooperation agreements. All of this was facilitated by the Car Wash prosecutors and took place in their offices. In chats with Aras and in his response to the Justice Ministry, Dallagnol neglected to mention the meetings with defense counsels.

Visa requests for at least two of the DOJ prosecutors contradict Dallagnol as well, according to official documents from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry obtained recently by The Intercept. The Americans said they planned to travel to Curitiba “for meetings with Brazilian authorities regarding the investigation into Petrobras,” and that “the objective of the meetings is to collect additional evidence in the case and speak with lawyers about their clients’ cooperation with the investigation underway in the USA.”

Dallagnol and Aras told the Justice Ministry that the visit was meant to “facilitate the formalization of future requests for cooperation” but at least three of the men whose cases were discussed that day reportedly later traveled to the U.S. to cooperate without an MLAT agreement.

Brazilian law is clear that any investigation that occurs on Brazilian soil must be conducted formally and, in the case of international cooperation, that process is always mediated by the Justice Ministry’s DRCI, not the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The U.S. investigation into corruption in Petrobras was ongoing at the time that DOJ officials flew down to Curitiba to acquire information and collaborators for their prosecution and, therefore, should have gone through legal channels.

The U.S. was not the only country to sidestep such requirements. In 2016, a Swiss court ruled that prosecutors had illegally shared bank data with Car Wash prosecutors. Last September, the Brazilian news outlet UOL, in partnership with The Intercept, published documents from the leaked archive that revealed Car Wash prosecutors intentionally broke the law by using evidence that they had received informally from colleagues in Switzerland and Monaco in arrest warrant requests. The article also detailed secret visits to Brazil by the Swiss.

A Car Wash spokesperson told The Intercept that “meetings with foreign authorities — and there were dozens, some in person and others virtual, with different countries — do not require any formalization via DRCI, but only internal authorization from the respective interested bodies.” Aras defended the exchange with the U.S. as legal and “good international practice,” and told The Intercept that the prosecutors were “not obliged to reveal or report these contacts to any authority in the Executive Branch.”

Ricardo Saadi, the head of the DRCI at the time, who has become a vocal supporter of Car Wash, told The Intercept that he did not recall whether the Public Prosecutor’s Office responded to his questions about the October 2015 visit. He added that “informal and direct contact between the authorities of different countries is permitted and provided for in international conventions. For this type of contact, there is no need to prepare an order based on the MLAT.”

Helping the Americans Do a Runaround

The week after the meetings in Curitiba, Car Wash prosecutor Orlando Martello sent Dallagnol a draft of a follow-up email he planned to send to the leaders of the U.S. delegation. The Brazilians could now “convince companies and individuals” to cooperate by “threaten[ing] to inform ‘the American authorities,'” Martello wrote, adding “… (lol).”

He then went on to lay out options for how the Americans could legally depose Brazilian suspects. Any interview that took place in Brazil would have to be “presided” over by Brazilian authorities (“I was not really aware of this fact, but Vladimir Aras reminded me about this understanding of our Supreme Court,” the email reads). Therefore, Martello recommended avoiding that altogether.

“First option — To hear the defendants in the US. This is would be the best option, but I think (as does Patrick)” — a reference to Patrick Stokes, the top ranking DOJ official at the meetings — “that just some of them will agree to go to the US,” he wrote. “We could pressure them a little bit to go to the US,” Martello went on. “Things can change in the future (we never know what will happen in the future!!!). So, we could suggest that it is better to guarantee their immunity as soon as possible.” (Stokes declined to comment. The Car Wash spokesperson told The Intercept that the Public Prosecutor’s Office “had no participation in Petrobras’ decision to cooperate voluntarily with the US authorities.”)

The Justice Department followed Martello’s advice and quickly began closing a series of interview negotiations and collaboration agreements directly with key Brazilian suspects, rather than going through the more cumbersome and regimented MLAT process. It’s unclear if this backfired on the Car Wash team or whether it was their plan all along.

On November 30, less than two months after the Curitiba meeting, Dallagnol appeared to surprise Aras with the news that the Americans were already finalizing collaboration agreements with Brazilian defendants.

“We have no control over the interviews, because there are about 10 collaborators who are already negotiating deals, or made deals,” Dallagnol wrote. “As it will be in the USA, it will be without DRCI,” meaning that it would not go through the MLAT process. The situation, Dallagnol informed Aras, meant that the balance of power in ongoing negotiations between Car Wash and the DOJ had swung in the American’s favor. The Car Wash team needed to hurry along with their cases, because, according to him, the Americans had everything they needed to make theirs, and once that happened “we will lose strength to negotiate the division of the money they recover. Hence our rush.”

Aras said it was “craziness” for the defense lawyers to send their clients to the U.S. without the stronger guarantees provided under the treaty. When they resumed the conversation more than two weeks later, Aras insisted that the DOJ should still follow the official channels and “request this via the DRCI.”

Dallagnol’s response was complex. He resisted the suggestion, reminding Aras that they had already told the Americans that “there would be no problem” if collaborators flew to the U.S. directly. However, he conceded, implicitly, that it may have been a mistake: “We had no restrictions yet, we were operating on automatic, unaware of the extent of the consequences,” he said. At the same time, he admitted that they had been “thinking about applying the treaty directly” — meaning to follow the MLAT, but exclude the Justice Ministry from the process. He added that was “still not out of the question, we are all reflecting, I believe.” The conversation ended without a clear resolution.

As the Brazilians fumbled, the Americans pressed forward. In April 2016, news leaked that cooperating witnesses were traveling to the U.S. to be deposed, with the help of the public prosecutor. Aras presented the article in a chat with Car Wash prosecutors to confirm if it was true, as it was the first he had heard of it.

“It would be good if there was an American request for the voluntary transfers of defendants or witnesses,” he wrote. “We could establish guarantees and restrictions. Done directly, they can move forward without any control over the national interest.”

Dallagnol responded that they’d already discussed this issue multiple times and Aras had agreed to everything along the way. Aras shot back that he remembered the discussions, but not “having agreed with the practice of collaborators receiving some kind of guarantee from the [Public Prosecutor] to travel to the USA, as people are saying.” That should have been approved in a formal treaty request, Aras insisted, and asked whether there was a paper trail. “No papers from us agreeing, for sure,” Dallagnol responded; rather, they had listened to the Americans’ proposal and “didn’t oppose it.”

“It’s better that way. Great,” said Aras.

But Dallagnol appeared determined to break the rules. In a separate instance, in February 2016, Dallagnol alerted Aras of an email he’d sent to American counterparts in which he offered to avoid the proper legal channels to help the Americans with another request. Aras was taken aback, explained at length all of the reasons why this was improper, and responded directly to the Americans to say that they would have to follow the protocols and go through the Justice Ministry.

“Thank you, Vlad, but […] in this case it is not convenient to pass something through the executive,” Dallagnol replied.

“The matter is not convenience. It’s legal,” Aras insisted. “The treaty has the force of ordinary federal law and assigns intermediation to the [Justice Ministry]. […] For now, we need to observe the current rules.”

Money in the Middle

One subject infuses the Car Wash team’s key conversations about collaborations with the U.S. government: money.

An illustrative example of this arose in May 2016. Prosecutor Roberson Pozzobon shared an update with colleagues about their investigation into the Singapore-based Keppel Offshore & Marine, a Petrobras service provider. Pozzobon said that a Keppel lawyer had confirmed a trip to Brazil to meet with Car Wash prosecutors. “I think we have a very good chance to recuperate lots of   .”

Dallagnol had another idea:

May 8, 2016 – Group Chat FT MPF Curitiba 3

Deltan Dallagnol – 23:57:26 – Is there anything visible that would give an opening for American action? Something that happened in the USA, meetings, accounts, headquarters? I ask because if we do an agreement and the USA acts afterward, our fine may become small… If we do it together and with division, we prob increase the value. Perhaps it is the case to ask the USA if they are interested during the negotiations… Just a suggestion…

May 9th, 2016 – Group Chat FT MPF Curitiba 3

Roberson Pozzobon – 00:01:24 – Yes, I think that’s a good one, Delta. It is quite possible that in one of the platforms they have built for Petrobras they have used the US legal or banking structure.

The Car Wash prosecutors felt that the Americans were able to negotiate larger settlements than they could and, in some cases, complex agreements stipulated that fines levied in one country could be discounted from amounts paid to another. Negotiating a settlement only to have a larger one negotiated later for the same crimes would be embarrassing. Nineteen months later, Keppel pleaded guilty to violating the FCPA in a U.S. court and agreed to pay $422 million in fines to the U.S., Brazilian, and Singaporean governments. Half of it went to Brazil.

In the FCPA case against Petrobras, it would appear that money was a determining factor in the Car Wash prosecutors’ strategy in dealing with their U.S. counterparts. In the same message in which Aras lays out the legal and political concerns about their secret meeting in Curitiba in October 2015, he added: “I thought Januario’s idea was great that the USD 1.6 billion (or is it 4 billion?!) fine that the DOJ may apply to Petrobras would be divided between Brazil and the USA. If Patrick Stokes gave a positive sign for Brazil to keep a quarter of that, so much the better.”

Brazil kept 80 percent of the $853 million fine under the final agreement.

In one conversation between Aras and Dallagnol, Dallagnol cited asset sharing as a reason why they had delayed cooperating with the Americans on access to Brazilian suspects. “The reason we’ve held off so far is because we’re still in doubt as to whether we’re going to facilitate things for them and because we wanted to negotiate the issue of asset sharing,” Dallagnol wrote.

In December 2015, there was internal discussion of whether or not to continue assisting the Americans (and whether or not to take a trip to meet with them in the U.S.). Again, at the center of the considerations was receiving a cut from the U.S. agreement with Petrobras. Dallagnol listed two considerations: One, should they end cooperation and how, and two, “can the asset sharing agreement influence the decision in point 1?”

On that point, Aras, the man responsible for ensuring that international partnerships follow the law, counseled the Car Wash prosecutors that it was “best not to invite the DRCI” to conversations with American authorities so as to not “lose negotiating positions” related to asset sharing.

The following year, Aras explained to the task force that there were serious problems in the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s relationship with the DOJ — a lack of reciprocity and long delays in fulfilling requests. Aras requested that Car Wash deny a DOJ request they were then helping with in order to send a message. “Vlad, we understand the need to generate pressure on Americans and that someone has to pay the price,” Dallagnol responded. “However, there are some things that concern me a lot in this specific context of Petrobras, especially the division of assets in the petrobras case. Because of this, I believe that it would be a very high risk to suspend in this specific case, at this time.”

In September 2018, Petrobras agreed to pay the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission $1.78 billion in fines, forfeiture of illicit gains, and interest. Eighty percent of the $853 million fine was transferred to Brazil. In recent years, Brazil-related settlements were also reached with Walmart, Odebrecht, Braskem, Embraer, Rolls-Royce Holdings, SBM Offshore, Keppel Offshore & Marine, Samsung Heavy Industries, and TechnipFMC, among others.

The big-dollar settlements have been touted by Car Wash as signs of success, but the plan to distribute the money also resulted in one of their most high profile defeats. Of the $682.5 million in Petrobras fees destined for Brazil, prosecutors proposed that half go to pay back investors and the rest into a new, privately-controlled “social investment” fund to support initiatives that “reinforce Brazilian society’s fight against corruption.” However, details about the private fund and how it would be administered were vague and prompted a fierce backlash from critics, who considered it to be unconstitutional maneuver. One Supreme Court minister said the proposal was part of a “power struggle” and the Car Wash prosecutors “were participating in a gold rush.” A former Petrobras director convicted under Car Wash filed to have his sentence overturned, arguing that the prosecutors stood to personally gain from his conviction. Last September, the Supreme Court ordered that the funds must be publicly administered, with a portion allocated to protecting the Amazon rainforest and the rest divided between the ministries of education, health, science and technology, and human rights.

The post The Secret History of U.S. Involvement in Brazil’s Scandal-Wracked Operation Car Wash appeared first on The Intercept.

In immigration proceedings, unlike in criminal courts, immigrants bear the burden of proving to the satisfaction of a judge that that they do not pose a danger or a flight risk — or else they are denied bond and locked up. But a November decision by a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts reversed the burden of proof, instead calling on ICE to establish why someone ought to be detained.

The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts last June and went into effect on December 13.

The significance of the ruling, said ACLU of Massachusetts attorney Dan McFadden, is reversing a system that’s been in place since 1999 whereby the government did not have to prove anything to keep noncitizens in jail while their cases were decided — a process that sometimes takes several years. “I think that if our Constitution means anything,” McFadden said, “it has to mean that the government can’t put people in jail without showing that there’s a strong justification for taking away their liberty.”

“It still doesn’t really feel quite real,” said Matt Cameron, a Boston-based immigration attorney.

The ruling applies only to the Boston immigration court, which covers all of New England except Connecticut (which has its own immigration court). Local immigration attorneys say the difference is palpable already.

“It still doesn’t really feel quite real,” said Matt Cameron, a Boston-based immigration attorney. For years, Cameron said, he has had to work quickly to obtain every page of a client’s criminal record — even pertaining to charges that had been dropped — to prove that the client deserved their liberty. “I’m so trained that you just do not show up with anything less than an absolutely 100 percent complete case, because you only get one chance at a bond hearing. You don’t get to do it again. So, you know, I’m always very careful in making sure that I don’t do it halfway.”

Now, if an ICE attorney is unable to prove the inverse — that a noncitizen poses a danger or a flight risk — a noncitizen is likely to be granted release.

9/ BEFORE

IMM JUDGE: Counsel, I don't see a police report for this 1994 shoplifting case

ME: We tried. It's not available

[Bond denied]

AFTER

IJ: DHS, I'm not seeing evidence of this shoplifting conviction you're alleging.

DHS: We tried. It's not available

[Bond granted]

— Matt Cameron (@matt_cam) December 30, 2019

The ICE attorneys, unused to having to justify a noncitizen’s detention, at times appeared exasperated at the bond hearings Cameron attended, he said, “because now they have to get every one of those records that we used to have to get, and they’re already stretched pretty thin.”

ACLU Massachusetts has been monitoring the implementation of the new policy over the last three weeks. McFadden said they have noticed differences in the judges’ adjudication of bond hearings.

“The evidence at this point is early and anecdotal, but it appears that greater numbers of people are getting bond rather than being detained, and it appears that in many cases, the bond numbers have been lower,” he said.

According to the court’s ruling, the Boston immigration court held hearings for 700 noncitizens between November 1, 2018, and May 7, 2019, and the neighboring Hartford court (where noncitizens continue to bear the burden of proof) held such hearings in 77 cases. The courts made decisions in 651 of the Boston and Hartford cases, and denied release on bond in 41 percent of them, with an average bond of $6,302 in Boston and $28,700 in Hartford.

The issue of bond in immigration hearings goes back to a 1999 case in which the Board of Immigration Appeals, an administrative body within the Justice Department, interpreted a statute that governs pretrial detention to mean that noncitizens bear the burden of proving to an immigration judge that they deserve release on bond. The statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a), allows for the federal government to detain noncitizens while  their immigration proceedings are pending and includes a provision on bond, but it is notably silent as to which party bears the burden of proof, and what the standard of proof is.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed bond hearing procedures in Jennings v. Rodriguez, where it decided that detained noncitizens do not have a statutory right to periodic bond hearings every six months. But the court sidestepped the issue of who bears the burden of proof.

“This is an issue that was expressly left open by the Supreme Court in its decision in Jennings in 2018, where it decided certain issues of statutory construction but left open these types of constitutional questions,” McFadden said. In her 23-page ruling in the lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Massachusetts, U.S. District Judge Patti B. Saris also noted that the “Supreme Court expressly declined to address whether the Constitution required these procedural protections.”

Following the ruling in Massachusetts, Cameron believes the issue could ultimately return to the Supreme Court because the underlying statute is so vague.

Detained immigrants have had success in the past challenging their pretrial detention using arguments similar to those lodged by the ACLU attorneys. In 2018, for example, the Massachusetts federal court ruled in the case of Pensamiento v. McDonald that “requiring a non-criminal alien to prove that he is not dangerous and not a flight risk at a bond hearing violates the Due Process Clause.” Saris’s November 27 decision, however, marks the first time a court has ruled that the bond system for detained noncitizens is unconstitutional as applied as a class to a whole immigration court — as opposed as to grant an individual noncitizen’s release. The judge found that the Board of Immigration Appeals’ 1999 policy violated both due process and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Moving forward, the federal government is required to establish by clear and convincing evidence that a noncitizen is a danger, or by a preponderance of the evidence (a lower standard) that they are a flight risk. The ACLU has appealed Saris’s decision with respect to the standard of proof, arguing that the court should raise the bar by requiring the federal government to prove flight risk by clear and convincing evidence as well.

Saris ordered the Boston immigration court to consider a noncitizen’s ability to pay when deciding on bond, as well as to consider alternative conditions of release, like GPS monitoring.

Saris’s ruling applies both to noncitizens who have not yet had their bond hearings, as well as people who have already been denied bond. (In the case of the latter, detained noncitizens may go to a federal court to request a new bond hearing by showing that they likely would have been granted bond under the new standard.)

“We’re fundamentally not changing the nature of the system, which is still as oppressive as possible,” Cameron said. “But at least this is an escape hatch, at least to allow people that should be released to be released.”

The post At Boston Immigration Court, ICE Must Now Justify Detaining Noncitizens — Reversing Decades of Precedent appeared first on The Intercept.

Statehood achieved, his family migrated to New York before Ben-Ami was born. Now 57, he spent three years living in Israel in the 1990s. Like his father, he was a dedicated supporter of the state of Israel. Unlike his father, he was a liberal with a willingness to criticize the government and its treatment of Palestinians. Yet when he tried to participate in debates in the U.S. over the future of Israel, he found that his utterly reasonable views — support for a two-state solution, opposition to an endless military occupation — were considered out of bounds.

To change the political dynamic in the U.S., he theorized, a new group in Washington needed to be formed, one that was pro-Jewish, pro-Israel, and pro-peace, organized and run by Jews supportive of the state of Israel. “It falls to the Jewish people of today to complete the work, to bring the dreams of our grandparents and great-grandparents to fruition,” Ben-Ami writes in his 2011 memoir, “A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of a Jewish Nation.”

“This generation must make the decisions and compromises necessary to ensure the future of the Jewish homeland that my great-grandparents envisioned when they arrived by boat in the historic port of Jaffa 130 years ago in the second year of the First Aliyah.”

The group, Ben-Ami envisioned, would give cover to Democrats to get tough on Israel and pressure them to make a deal with Palestinians. Ben-Ami spelled it out when filing for nonprofit status: J Street’s “theory of change,” the paperwork said, “is that by educating, organizing and mobilizing the large segment (81 percent) of American Jews who support strong U.S. leadership for a two-state solution, we can provide the space and support the president and policy makers need to boldly help Israelis and Palestinians resolve their conflict.”

The group officially launched as J Street in April 2008. Ben-Ami told early staffers that he wanted to make quick work of the conflict, as there were other big issues that needed attention. “I want to try this theory of change,” he would say, according to multiple people who heard his refrain at the time, “and if it doesn’t work, I’ll close down the shop and we’ll work on climate change.”

“I want to try this theory of change and if it doesn’t work, I’ll close down the shop and we’ll work on climate change.”

At inception, Ben-Ami claimed that he did not want to be in charge for long, recalled Ilyse Hogue, who was then a senior official at MoveOn, at J Street’s 10-year anniversary celebration in 2018. “One of my favorite stories to chide Jeremy about is his early insistence that he was just setting this thing up, and then he was going to hand it off to someone else,” she said from the stage. “I smiled and nodded and indulged my new friend, even though it was 100 percent apparent, even at that time, that this was Jeremy’s calling, that J Street needed Jeremy to be all it could be.”

The group chose “J Street” as its name because there is no J Street in the city, and this new group aimed to be something new under the Washington sun. The joke inside J Street is that the “J” now stands for “Jeremy.”

Yet Ben-Ami’s theory proved to have some holes. J Street was able to make space for the Obama administration to put pressure on the Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, but Netanyahu pushed ahead with the ongoing colonization of Palestinian territory regardless. Even for those who believed the United States could be an honest broker of a two-state solution, which would create an independent Israel and Palestine, that goal seems more and more like a fantasy after every new illegal settlement, with Israeli leaders routinely talking about outright annexation. For many supporters of J Street’s mission, the organization hasn’t taken the failure to heart. “When a theory of change was proven to not work, the question is, ‘What happens next?’ And I think that J Street hasn’t really contended with that question, right? Like, what is actually needed?” said Carinne Luck, who was one of J Street’s first staff members, who was a senior official at the organization until 2012. “And I think, frankly, the base would be ready for the next step.”

Ben-Ami recognizes that J Street is a ways away from achieving its initial goal. “We have not resolved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that is true,” he said. “But the creation of a lobby in the United States on these issues, in and of itself, is only one factor in getting to an end of conflict and an end of occupation and to peace.” In addition, “you also need on top of that actual leadership in the region. You need an Israeli prime minister that is actually interested in doing this. You need a Palestinian leader who’s capable of doing it. An American president who’s willing to take some risks and to lead.”

The political reality in the U.S. and in Israel could not be further from the conditions that Ben-Ami described. In the meantime, Ben-Ami’s ambition for rapid change has been taken down a notch. “I perhaps may have been too flip in stating many times that an agreement and an end to the conflict actually was within reach,” he said. “But if you read my book and if you read the things that I wrote, this effort was to set up an institution, not a short-term campaign.” In that, J Street has succeeded.

In the past few years, J Street has solidified into a Washington institution, the kind with a splashy gala and annual conference with powerful keynote speakers. This year’s unfolded at the end of October, featuring remarks by five Democratic presidential candidates, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal — all gathered to celebrate the liberal counterpoint to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Today, Ben-Ami cites the heady optimism of the early Obama days to account for his high expectations. “He did win the Nobel Peace Prize on spec,” he said of Barack Obama’s 2009 award. “I think we all perhaps overstated our optimism, and I definitely glibly commented, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to sort of get this done and move on to other issues?’”

Borders, Not Boycotts

J Street was only a few months old when it confronted its first major challenge. As the global financial system stood on the brink of meltdown in 2008, Israel launched an invasion of Gaza: Operation Cast Lead. After Obama was elected, but before he was sworn in, Israel spent three weeks pummeling the small strip of land. They killed some 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians. J Street took a firm stance against the assault and was savaged publicly by the American Jewish political establishment.

“If I learned anything in that moment, it was that folks are going to have to be brought along to this position, to really take a serious look at some of the claims Israel makes about its security, which are not always right. That security is going to have to be balanced with the necessity of a long-term vision about peace-building, humanitarian concerns, etc.” said Isaac Luria, a founding member of J Street’s staff who helped draft its 2008 statement condemning Israel’s actions. “I think that spooked us, and I know it spooked leadership — that when we took that bold position, it was a hard position to hold.” (Luria now works at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, which was one of the first funders of J Street and recently resumed funding the organization.)

“I believe that the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement should focus on borders, not boycotts, as it is a recognized border that will save Israel’s democratic and Jewish character.”

The backlash led to a reevaluation inside J Street. J Street could only go so far in its criticism of Israel, Ben-Ami reasoned at the time, if it wanted to maintain its credibility among the American Jewish establishment — and perhaps in condemning the Gaza war in such aggressive terms, it had gone too far. “What followed was just like an immediate contraction, and you just saw it in the folks that Jeremy was hiring and in the messaging that came out afterward,” Luck said.

One clear example of that contraction, according to several former staffers, came in March 2012, when Peter Beinart published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for a boycott against goods produced by Israeli settlers. Beinart was scheduled to speak at J Street’s annual national conference a few days later. Beinart’s position was hugely controversial in the Jewish community, and Ben-Ami quickly released a statement distancing himself from it.

After noting that J Street would still welcome Beinart to speak at the conference, Ben-Ami stated that a boycott would be ineffectual because the ideologues driving the settlement enterprise would never change their views. “I believe that the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement should focus on borders, not boycotts, as it is a recognized border that will save Israel’s democratic and Jewish character,” Ben-Ami wrote.

“It was considered a problem to be solved that Peter Beinart had come out ahead on this issue,” said Luck, who left J Street later that year and is now a consultant and political organizer. “That was a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, J Street is not on the leading edge of this issue.’”

J Street has yet to lead on the issue, to the disappointment of many staff members. Even though the majority of people within the J Street orbit personally observe a boycott of products made in occupied territories, J Street itself won’t do the same. The party line on internal calls, according to one former J Street U staffer, was that “there’s probably not a person in the room that would buy products from a settlement, but as an organization, we’re not going to endorse a settlement boycott.”

The tensions between where J Street was as an institution and where its members — particularly, but not exclusively, the members of its student division, J Street U — wanted it to be came to a head in the summer of 2014, when Israel once again invaded the Gaza strip. J Street issued a statement that mourned everyone from the “dozens of Israeli soldiers and civilians to the more than a thousand Gaza residents dead,” but asserted Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks from the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The “And statement” — as it became known by its critics — was a catalyst for those within or formerly affiliated with J Street who firmly believed that Israel’s violent behavior must be met with boycotts or cuts to U.S. aid and that J Street’s positions were too moderate. The dissent led to the creation of IfNotNow, co-founded by Luck in 2014, and a growth in the membership of Jewish Voice for Peace, both to the left of J Street.

The Deal

It may have been that J Street’s theory of change was only wrong when applied to peace talks with the Palestinians. But when applied to the politics of the region more broadly, the idea did indeed bear out. The top geopolitical priority of Obama’s second term was the negotiation of a nuclear deal between the U.S., Iran, and five other nations — a deal to which leaders in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were stridently opposed, advocating for isolation and confrontation of Iran instead.

In December 2013, as the talks were gaining momentum, AIPAC launched its counterattack. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Republican Mark Kirk of Illinois circulated draft sanctions legislation that both the White House and Iran said would end the nuclear talks if passed. HuffPost framed the move — accurately — as an effort to sabotage the Iran talks in a push for war (one of the authors of that story is a co-author of this one). It was swiftly denounced as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the American Jewish Committee. The ADL put out a statement that read, in part:

The initial [front-page] headline, “Saboteur Sen. Launching War Push,” by itself was outrageous and inappropriate. While legitimate arguments can be made in support of and against the legislation, your headline impugned Senator Menendez’s loyalty, insinuating that he is not acting in the best interest of the United States as he sees it. Running a photo of Sen. Robert Menendez speaking at the podium of an AIPAC event further implies that he was trying to “sabotage” the administration’s efforts on Iran for reasons related to Israel under pressure from American Jews. We are shocked that a version of the anti-Semitic theme that “Jews manipulate the U.S. Government” was boldly featured on your site.

The attack was a genuine threat to HuffPost, which was rallying for the deal. J Street came to the rescue, a concrete demonstration of the organization’s ability to create space for criticism of Israel or AIPAC by defusing weaponized charges of anti-Semitism. In a column published by HuffPost, Ben-Ami allowed that “the headline was perhaps misguided and poorly worded — but it hardly amounts to a major anti-Semitic outrage.” He continued:

I fail to see how showing Sen. Menendez with the AIPAC logo in the background is inappropriate. After all, AIPAC does support the Menendez sanctions bill and is actively lobbying for it — as are the American Jewish Committee and most of the organized Jewish community with the prominent exception of J Street. To consciously edit out AIPAC’s part in this story would actually be journalistic malpractice.

Over the next few years, J Street threw its weight behind the push for the Iran deal, and its presence on the Washington scene undoubtedly did exactly what it was intended to do — give cover to Democrats to buck Israel in pursuit of a policy objective. The political sway Israel wields in Congress, it turned out, was much stronger when it came to deepening its occupation of Palestinian territory than in supporting its interest in isolating Iran. To combat the deal, Israel linked up with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the two other most effective D.C. lobbying operations arrayed against the deal. J Street acted as a major counterbalance.

“J Street was one of the most effective organizations that supported the Iran deal because they had a large grassroots network and growing clout on the Hill,” Ben Rhodes, the White House official in charge of shepherding the deal, told The Intercept. “In addition to their advocacy, their membership also stepped up to help several members of Congress who lost AIPAC support because of the deal.” In October, Rhodes was a moderator on stage at J Street’s annual convention, pressing presidential candidates on the conditioning of aid to Israel.

Ben-Ami was quick to credit others in the coalition, which had been funded and organized by the group Ploughshares, but said that he was proud of the legislative work J Street did to cement the deal. “Our piece of that was the advocacy, and to this day, J Street continues to chair advocacy meetings on Iran-related issues,” Ben-Ami said. “When it came time in 2015 for the actual campaign around the vote, we implemented a very, very intense and sophisticated communications effort and speaking and bringing validators from Israel and doing local organizing with a lot of partners.”

The deal was eventually signed in July 2015. To mollify the deal’s regional opponents, the Obama administration had given Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE running room on their neighborhood priorities. For Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that meant fueling a war in Yemen against Iranian allies. For Israel, that meant rapidly expanding settlements and tightly locking down the populations in Palestinian territories, putting a two-state solution — one of J Street’s founding principles — further from reach. The Obama administration, fearful of scuttling negotiations over the nuclear deal, also eased its pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who, with the help of Iranian militias, had been overseeing the mass murder of Syrian civilians. After taking office, President Donald Trump ripped up the Iran deal.

Aversion to Risk

On the heels of its success on the Iran deal, several former staffers said, J Street was in a position to push for more bold action in Washington, especially under a Republican administration that has the friendliest relationship with the Israeli right in U.S. history. Instead, the group has tiptoed around an issue that has become central to the debate on U.S.-Israel relations: whether Israel, which has received billions of dollars of military aid from the United States, should be held to account for its ongoing, systemic violations of Palestinian human rights.

Early this year, members of J Street U’s board, past and present, presented a letter to Ben-Ami and the J Street board, calling on the organization to take “bold action … that responds appropriately to this political moment” by “imposing actual, tangible costs” for Israel’s occupation policies. “Only when confronted with possible cuts of aid or diplomatic support will the Israeli far-right leadership accept the end of occupation, as recent events show.” The letter came as the Israeli government was moving farther to the right, emboldened in part by the Trump administration, and expanding settlements. The letter’s authors pointed to Israeli authorities’ threat to destroy the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar, despite condemnations by more than 80 House and Senate Democrats.

The letter, signed by 35 people who served on the J Street U board from 2013 to 2019, proposed “that J Street develop a strategy that moves the organization toward an agenda of selective aid reduction, i.e. every shekel the Israeli government spends on settlements and home demolitions results in a proportional reduction of American military aid.”

The signatories tied their asks to the leftward reorientation on Israel-Palestine within the Democratic Party, making the case that J Street could afford to take a harder line against Israel without losing support from within its base. “Recently documented shifts in the base of the Democratic Party and the successful campaigns of Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, candidates to J Street’s left who are widely supported by young people in particular, demonstrate that there could be widespread support among the Democratic base for a strategic yet sharper-edged posture toward Israel’s occupation — and that J Street must activate this base, at least partially, in order to be in tune with the politics of our generation,” reads the letter, which was drafted and circulated last November.

Ben-Ami declined to answer specific questions about the board meeting, but he said that internal debate is a part of any “healthy organization.” “I think a healthy organization has real, meaningful discussions about issues with different points of view presented, and that takes place at J Street,” he said. “I think that there are people within J Street who, if you lay them out on a spectrum, there are people whose views are a tick to the right of where J Street stands on some things, and there are people within J Street who may stand a tick or two to the left of where J Street may fall ultimately in its deliberation.”

“Only when confronted with possible cuts of aid or diplomatic support will the Israeli far-right leadership accept the end of occupation, as recent events show.”

Similarly, at that same meeting, members of the senior staff proposed that J Street look for concrete policies to address Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine, including potentially coming out in favor of conditioning U.S. aid to Israel.

When the policy was debated internally earlier this year, it appeared that Ben-Ami and, as a result, the board, were ready to get behind it, but sources with knowledge of the debate say that objections from the group’s Israel office derailed it. Specifically, Yael Patir, J Street’s Tel Aviv-based Israel director, warned that if it endorsed conditioning aid, J Street would lose any influence it had in the Knesset or Israeli politics generally. That influence, countered backers of the policy, was already at zero, so it shouldn’t be a hold-up. But the argument carried the day.

Ben-Ami declined to comment on J Street’s “sausage-making process,” noting that “it’s unfortunate, as always, in these situations when you want to have freedom to have conversations, and some folks decide to talk about them outside the room.”

He referred The Intercept to comments he made months later, in April, after Netanyahu promised to annex Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank. “What I said is that Israel going down the road of annexation puts all aspects of the U.S.-Israel relationship on the table and opens up a really serious discussion about what should happen,” Ben-Ami said in an interview. “That includes the question of to what purposes is the aid that the United States provides to the state of Israel put, and that is a really important conversation.”

The topic of conditioning U.S. aid to Israel — what many view as the bare minimum of what the U.S. could do to address Israel’s occupation against the Palestinian people and expansion of settlements — took center stage at J Street’s October confab, where Ben-Ami told the crowd, “Our aid is not intended to be a blank check.”

He later told +972 Magazine that the U.S. should reconsider its funding activities, like Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes and settlement expansion, that make a two-state solution impossible. The five Democratic presidential candidates who appeared at the conference were asked about the issue, and all seemed to be taking positions further to the left than J Street. The elephant in the room at J Street’s conference had become J Street.

Before the conference was over, Ben-Ami issued a statement trying to make clear that his organization was only going as far as opening up debate on the topic but that it had not endorsed the policy. “J Street believes that our tax dollars should only be used in accordance with our laws and to further our policies and interests,” he wrote. “Saying this does not amount to a call for reducing or conditioning American assistance. It does demand a serious inquiry into the uses to which aid is being put and consideration of what restrictions to its use are appropriate.”

A week later, with the question of where J Street stood on conditioning aid still uncertain, Ben-Ami authored a second statement, again distancing J Street from the policy, while sympathizing with it. “This is not a call to reduce the level of U.S. security assistance, or to ‘condition aid,’” he wrote. “It is a call to ensure that the end uses of the aid we provide, funded by U.S. tax dollars, clearly align with our interests, policies, and laws — and actually advance Israel’s security.”

If Ben-Ami does one thing well, it’s put out statements, former staffers said. “A lot of people see J Street as an organization that puts out statements, not one that is pushing current Democratic candidates or members of Congress to support conditional aid, settlement boycott, or ending the siege on Gaza,” one former J Street U staffer said.

“Equal Opportunity Boss”

J Street has grown into a powerful Washington organization, often punching above the weight of a group with a $10 million annual budget — large enough to matter but with nowhere near the budget of the city’s bigger hitters, such as AIPAC. (The UAE ambassador alone, Yousef Al Otaiba, is said to have at least three times that amount at his disposal.) That growth has not come without its workplace challenges, particularly for women, according to five former staffers. The staffers, who declined to go on the record, described an atmosphere that favored men over women, in which women were sometimes belittled.

“It’s no secret that J Street is not a great place to work if you’re a woman,” Luck said. “I think because it’s an organization where people really, really care about each other — like when you’re there, you really do feel like you’re in the trenches with each other — a certain office culture and a certain organizational culture was allowed to take hold, that I think if the organization started now would just be unacceptable.”

Asked about these concerns, Ben-Ami said that he’s a tough boss who has probably upset both men and women on his staff.

“I try very, very hard to be very supportive of women and men who work at J Street. I like to think of myself as a very equal opportunity boss and hopefully, a bit of a mentor and an encourager of managers,” Ben-Ami said. “I imagine that there are some men who have worked for me who are not too pleased with some of the pressure I may have put on them over performance, and I imagine there are some women who are not too pleased, who have been working for me, but I think it’s relatively equal opportunity.”

The staffers described an atmosphere that favored men over women, in which women were sometimes belittled.

J Street’s senior staff is primarily comprised of women; six out of 10 members of its executive team are women, including the Chief Operation Officer Jessica Smith, who is second only to Ben-Ami. Overall, 55 percent of the organization’s staff are women, and women run a majority of J Street’s departments.

The complaints about the workplace reached a tipping point in 2013, when a committee of staffers known as the “continuous improvement team” called for Ben-Ami’s behavior — characterized by outbursts at underlings — to be dealt with. He responded defensively, noting his great relationships with some women on staff but acknowledged that if he was perceived to have produced a toxic work environment for women, that was a problem in itself. J Street hired an outside consultant to lead an investigation; however, she was instructed that she could interview staff but could not write up her findings, merely issue recommendations.

“We’ve had several different consultants that we’ve worked with,” Ben-Ami said in response to a question about that investigation. “It’s a boon for consultants.”

That was the first of several attempts to address the treatment of women at J Street, including the organization’s widely panned attempt to deal with Israeli author Ari Shavit’s sexual harassment of J Street U leaders in 2014 and 2015. Following those incidents, J Street launched an initiative, led by Shaina Wasserman, the director of community and rabbinic engagement, to develop “state-of-the-art” policies to deal with such issues, Ben-Ami said. “We’ve had several different consultants in, we’ve done trainings, we’ve tried to really create the space for this conversation to take place. The message that I hope that I send is that everything we can possibly do to make J Street the best possible place to work is what we should be doing.”

Smith worked with Ben-Ami 20 years earlier at the progressive PR firm Fenton Communications, before Ben-Ami founded J Street and Smith headed toward a career on Capitol Hill. They remained friends, and she rejoined him three years ago. “He’s one of the most gifted people I know, and very compassionate. He acts a lot like a father and cares deeply about the staff, and treats the whole staff like family,” Smith said. “I am immensely proud of Jeremy and the movement that he — and countless others — have collaboratively created in such a short time. Now the majority of mainstream Jews have a real voice, which didn’t previously exist.”

“We all have our moments,” she said. “This work can be hard, and Jeremy is driven by and cares deeply about the mission. We’re 11 years into this organization; objectively we’re more mature, more professional, more systematic than you’d expect of an organization in its infancy. I think we’ve grown up across the board.”

J Street on Capitol Hill

In November, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the Trump administration considered Israeli settlements to be in line with international law — reversing decades of U.S. policy that the ongoing colonization was illegal. The move was met with severe backlash on Capitol Hill and beyond, as J Street quickly organized 106 members of Congress, who sent a letter to Pompeo decrying the move. The letter was spearheaded by Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich., who traveled to the West Bank on a trip sponsored by the J Street Education Fund in early November and had spoken out against Israel’s denial of water to Palestinian villagers. (J Street’s trips to Israel, which include a sharp focus on the expansion of settlements, are more even-handed than the annual propaganda junket planned by AIPAC.)

That so many members of Congress spoke out against Israeli settlements would have been unheard of just a few years ago and was a testament to the impact J Street has had in Washington.

In recent years, the group has organized a handful of letters opposing the expansion of settlements and pushing back against Trump administration policies, working closely with some of the more progressive members of Congress. Even though she voted against last week’s two-state resolution pushed by J Street, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., made sure to praise J Street for its work and noted that she didn’t fault it for the compromises — such as the deletion of the word “occupation” from the legislative text — she found unacceptable. When Omar was being attacked as anti-Semitic by powerful members of the House Democratic Caucus earlier this year, Ben-Ami went on television to defend her, something Omar hasn’t forgotten. She attended this year’s gala.

Rounding up 100 Democrats to condemn Pompeo isn’t nothing. Yet the brutal realities of the Israeli occupation get worse by the day. J Street was presented with an opportunity to contend with the changing realities earlier this year, when Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., introduced a bill, H.R. 2407, that would bar Israel from using U.S. military aid to detain Palestinian children. McCollum’s bill invoked the Leahy Law, which prohibits the U.S. government from giving money to units of foreign security forces that are credibly believed to violate human rights. As The Intercept reported in July, J Street was skeptical about the use of the Leahy Law to bar aid to Israel because it believes that the law should be applied to only the most extreme human rights violations.

According to an advocate who met with J Street’s Senior Vice President Dylan Williams in May to speak about the bill, J Street was also concerned with a clause that said U.S. military assistance to Israel “enables” the abuse of Palestinian children. Despite these qualms, Williams told the advocate that J Street intended to come out in favor of the legislation before the end of the congressional session.

Slowly, though, J Street appeared to change tack. McCollum’s office met with Williams a few weeks later and sent a letter to Ben-Ami asking for J Street’s support. Ben-Ami’s response was muted; he said the group would consider the bill but unlike Williams, he did not say J Street would support it. And over the summer, a number of congressional offices began to repeat the same talking points that Williams had first presented, the advocate said.

In July, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told The Intercept that the invocation of the Leahy Law was giving even some progressive Democrats pause. (Khanna sponsored the 2017 version of McCollum’s bill, but he has yet to sign on to the current version.)

J Street did not take an official position on the 2017 version of the bill. The group’s positioning against the bill this year represented a “significant shift,” the advocate said. “For three years or so, we had a space where we were operating where J Street was present but not really obstructing in any way, and now I feel they’re sort of keeping people off the bill and using the people to the left of J Street to reinforce their centralness.”

“I think they want to make a contribution, but they have to change with the realities that are changing on the ground.”

Ben-Ami said that J Street supports the spirit of the McCollum legislation but not necessarily the particulars. “We will support legislation that we believe is well crafted and accurate and matches with our policy. Just because we share the concern that the bill is intended to address, which is the question of the treatment of Palestinian minors incarcerated by the army — we share that concern, we think that there should be an expression of concern from the United States and from the Congress in particular — but this legislation has some issues that we have raised with the office,” he said, declining to discuss J Street’s specific concerns.

The group has instead been focused on H.R. 326, a resolution introduced by Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Calif., in the spring of 2019 committing the U.S. to pursuing a two-state accord, stating that the United States had long sought “an end to the occupation, including opposing settlement activity and moves toward unilateral annexation in Palestinian territory.” But even with legislation tied to its signature policy goal, J Street hit some roadblocks.

The Democratic caucus fought over the language of the resolution, as Politico reported in July. Rep. Eliot Engel, chair of the House Foreign Affairs committee, pushed back against a clause in the resolution that said “only” a two-state solution could bring an end to the Israel-Palestine conflict. There was pushback from another corner as well: AIPAC, which remains the most influential pro-Israel group in Washington, felt the references to “occupation” and “settlements” were too critical of the state of Israel.

AIPAC insisted that the language of the resolution be changed, according to sources with knowledge of the debate on Capitol Hill. Sure enough, in October, the bill was amended to remove the reference to “occupation.”

“My sense is that the harder AIPAC pushes, the further into the corner they get and the harder they push, the more folks at J Street are going to have to consider pushing back, and realizing that what they think is the place the debate ought to be is not where the debate ought to be,” said Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, who attended one of J Street’s founding meetings and continues to work with the group. “They just need to … buck up and realize that if they stay with the positions they took five years ago, that they’re becoming less relevant. And I don’t think they want to be less relevant. I think they want to make a contribution, but they have to change with the realities that are changing on the ground.”

The denouement of the push for J Street’s two-state resolution came on December 5, with the first broadside being launched against it by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., a core voice for AIPAC within the Democratic caucus. He wanted to attach an amendment affirming that the U.S.’s commitment to aid to Israel is “ironclad” and free of any conditions. The amendment was adopted, as was one from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, stipulating that the administration should follow the law and provide aid to the Palestinians as well.

With the resolution weakened, Omar, Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., all voted no, as did the chamber’s other Palestinian American, former Republican Justin Amash. Every Jewish Democrat in Congress, though, bucked pro-Israel political forces and voted for the resolution, the first passed in congressional history that opposed “settlement expansion” and “moves toward unilateral annexation of territory.”

J Street took a beat to celebrate the victory but quickly moved on to addressing the next issue: possible use of U.S. weapons and equipment to demolish Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Soon, a letter was circulating among members of Congress.

Correction: December 14, 2019, 9:30 a.m.
The story originally named Benjamin Netanyahu as the Israeli prime minister in December 2008. He assumed office in March 2009. The story also misspelled Carinne Luck’s first name. 

The post The Wax and Wane of J Street’s Influence Over U.S.-Israel Policy appeared first on The Intercept.

Amit Jani took to Facebook in May to celebrate the authoritarian leader’s reelection. 

Jani, whose hiring as AAPI national vote director was announced last week, comes to Biden’s campaign from New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s office. He worked on AAPI outreach on Murphy’s 2017 campaign and Sen. Bob Menendez’s 2018 campaign. 

In May, after Modi secured a second term as prime minister, Jani posted a collection of photos on Facebook and wrote, “Loved the energy and jubilation throughout the state on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s victory in the Indian national elections! Proud of Deepti Jani for all the work you did during the campaign!”

Deepti Jani is identified as Amit Jani’s mother in a 2018 article in the News India Times. It is unclear what work Deepti Jani did during Modi’s campaign, but Amit Jani’s Facebook post includes images of Deepti Jani appearing on TV Asia, where she is identified as “Community Activist, BJP Supporter” — a reference to Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. 

On June 25, 2017, Deepti Jani posted a photo of Amit Jani with the Indian prime minister, apparently taken at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in McLean, Virginia, where the Indian diaspora had organized a “community reception” for Modi the day before his White House meeting with Donald Trump. The photo is captioned, “Amit Jani with Respected Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”

Modi has been a controversial figure on the international stage since at least 2002, when, as chief minister of the state of Gujarat, he oversaw mass violence against the minority Muslim population. For years, Modi was shunned by the West — and even banned from entering the United States — but he has made a comeback since his 2014 election as prime minister. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, has been a consistent defender of the Indian premier in Washington, which includes advocating for a reversal of his visa ban. In 2014, President Barack Obama invited Modi to the White House. (Biden met with Modi at the State Department during that visit.)

Modi’s relationship with the West has thawed even as he and the BJP have taken India in an increasingly nationalist direction, guided by Hindutva — an ideology that views India as a Hindu nation, where adherents of other faiths are second-class citizens. Indeed, religious and ethnic minorities have faced increased discrimination in the five years since Modi entered office.

Biden’s hiring of a Modi supporter comes just weeks after the BJP revoked a constitutional provision that gave autonomy to Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state in the country. Kashmir, which is considered one of the most militarized regions on Earth, has been under near-total lockdown since early August, with Indian forces using brute force against civilians. Additionally, a recent census in the northeastern state of Assam has led to more than 1.9 million people — most of them Muslim — being stripped of their Indian citizenship. The Indian government is building mass detention camps for these people, who have effectively been rendered stateless. 

The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Imraan Siddiqi, a civil rights activist and executive director of the Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the timing of Biden’s hiring of Jani raises red flags. 

“One would think that Modi and his ideology would be a pariah politically around the world.”

“As an Indian-American, who’s seeing the humanitarian crisis imposed on Kashmir by the Modi government — it is truly troubling to see Biden elevating someone who is in support of this now bordering on fascist regime in a leadership position,” said Siddiqi, who drew attention to Jani’s support for Modi on Twitter during Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate, in a written statement to The Intercept. “This week alone, 1.9 Million Indians were stripped of their citizenship in Assam — as well as prison camps being constructed by the Modi government. Add that to the ongoing far-right nationalist lynchings taking place across the country with impunity — one would think that Modi and his ideology would be a pariah politically around the world. But as we are seeing with Tulsi Gabbard and now Biden’s campaign — it appears that BJP/Hindutva politics is influencing both sides of the aisle in American politics.” (During his 2016 campaign, Trump courted Hindu nationalist voters in the United States.)

Democratic presidential contenders Sens. Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke have expressed concern about the recent unrest in Kashmir, but Biden has yet to publicly address the situation. Biden is the preferred candidate in the Democratic primary among Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters, who also named Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren as favorites, according to a recent poll sponsored by AAPI Victory Fund, a political action committee, and Investingin.Us, a political group.

Amit Jani’s father, Suresh Jani, is one of the founders of the Overseas Friends of the BJP in the United States, a sister organization of India’s Hindu nationalist party that was founded, in part, to counter the negative international press the party was receiving.

The late Suresh Jani comes from the same village in Gujarat as Modi, and the two met at a gathering of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a right-wing Indian paramilitary group that is considered the parent organization of the BJP, according to reports in the Indian press. Jani immigrated to the United States in 1987. Six years later, Modi visited the United States, where he stayed with Jani at his New Jersey home.

Suresh Jani relayed some of those experiences to Rediff, an Indian news website, in 2014.

“My mother liked Modi so much that when he was leaving, she blessed him and predicted that one day he would become a great man. She gifted Modi $51 as a shaghun (an auspicious symbolic gift). Around eight years later, when he was about to be sworn in as chief minister, Modi called and asked me to connect him with my mother. He said he still remembers the shaghun and her blessings. Then my mother told him ‘You will become bigger’,” he says.

Once, Jani remembers, they went to Lexington Avenue where many Indian restaurants are located. Modi preferred a North Indian restaurant. The waiter told them that the meal would cost $13 for 13 items.

When Jani was paying the bill, Modi went to the cash counter and said they were served three items less, so how could the restaurant charge the full amount without serving what was promised. So he got a discount of $6 on the bill. That amount Modi asked Jani to give the waiters as a tip. Then Modi advised Jani, ‘Never pay money in haste.’

In a 1993 photo provided by Suresh Jani to the Times of India, the two men stand side by side at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, with Modi holding a bouquet of flowers. Suresh Jani also welcomed Modi at the airport in 1997 and 2000, he told Rediff. 

In 2001, Modi was appointed chief minister of Gujarat, and he was officially elected to the post in February 2002. Soon after, the state became engulfed in anti-Muslim violence. Modi was widely blamed for not doing enough to stop the pogrom, if not actually sanctioning it. A special investigation team in India eventually found that there was not enough evidence to prosecute Modi for his involvement, but there was enough circumstantial evidence to turn him into a political pariah in the West. That was not enough to change Suresh Jani’s opinion of the Indian politician; indeed, it was in 2014, after the United States reversed its travel ban against Modi, that Suresh Jani gave fawning interviews to the Indian press about Modi’s past visits to the U.S.  

Amit Jani made a nod to his father’s involvement in Indian politics in a recent Facebook post, in which he posted photos from an event at which he was apparently recognized “on behalf of New Jersey Leadership Program, as well as my father’s contributions to Indian politics.”

The post A Top Joe Biden Staffer Is a Supporter of India’s Authoritarian Leader Narendra Modi appeared first on The Intercept.

Ninety percent of news articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today that cited the Center for Immigration Studies from 2014 to 2017 did not mention “the extremist nature of the group or its ties with the Trump administration,” according to “The Language of Immigration Reporting: Normalizing vs. Watchdogging in a Nativist Age.” The report, which was produced by researchers at Define American, a nonprofit media and culture organization, and Media Cloud, a project of the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, focuses on immigration reporting in those outlets over a four-year period starting in 2014.

The researchers found that the Center for Immigration Studies — which was founded by the late John Tanton, a white nationalist considered to be the father of the modern anti-immigrant movement — was often cited as a neutral authority in providing expert opinion or data. In 2018, the news outlets did a slightly better job of identifying the group, with context missing only 82 percent of the time, and negative sentiment expressed in 13 percent of references.

“Basic standards of journalistic integrity are that these organizations be properly contextualized as the white nationalist organizations that they are.”

Hassan Ahmad, a Virginia-based immigration lawyer who has sued the University of Michigan for the release of Tanton’s archives housed there, said it’s important for news organizations to explain what these Tanton-linked groups are. Such context is necessary, he said, because the groups’ ideology, which he described as “camouflaged white nationalism,” has become enmeshed in the national conversation.

“When it affects our discourse — or infects our discourse — on immigration so deeply, then it’s hard for even Democrats to stay away from it,” Ahmad said. “And that’s why it’s so important for there to be proper contextualization whenever these organizations speak.”

Ahmad added, “Quite frankly, these organizations, they are not legitimate opposition voice in the immigration debate. They’re a white nationalist voice. If people want to give them airtime, that’s their thing. But I think basic standards of journalistic integrity are that these organizations be properly contextualized as the white nationalist organizations that they are.”

The Define American report also noted that Trump’s rise brought with it an overall increase in immigration coverage. At the same time, however, the study noted that the news outlets under review increasingly used dehumanizing language, such as “illegal immigrants” or “illegal aliens.”

The terms often appeared in direct quotes from Trump or his political allies, an indication that the bump was more a consequence of newsmakers using those terms with increasing frequency, rather than a stylistic shift by the news outlets. Still, the Define American authors say, reporters and editors who choose to repeat such terminology in their work have a responsibility to contextualize it.

“Ideally, we could see a 500 percent increase in immigration stories and zero increase in dehumanizing terms used,” said Kristian Ramos, communications director at Define American and an author of the report.

“This type of reporting is not occurring in a vacuum: White supremacists are killing Latinos in Walmarts to stop an ‘invasion’ of Hispanics into Texas,” Ramos added, referring to the manifesto believed to have been written by the suspect in a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, last month. “The words reporters are using matter. Just because there is more immigration reporting overall does not require reporters to fall into old tropes, outdated language, and dehumanization.”

A Nativist Godfather

John Tanton, who died in July, spent the last four decades of his life building an anti-immigrant movement rooted in white nationalism. An ophthalmologist by training, his interest in immigration was spurred by his concern over population growth — there were too many people competing for too few resources. The solution, in Tanton’s mind, was to restrict immigration by overturning the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, a law that eliminated the racist quota system that had virtually excluded everyone who wasn’t a white European from immigrating to the U.S.

In 1979, Tanton launched the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR. He also founded the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA. The “big three,” as the groups are collectively known, went on to become the intellectual backbone of the nativist movement in the United States.

Tanton’s groups argued that unchecked immigration brought with it unemployment, high crime rates, and other social ills. Their ideas were, for many years, infrequently cited in the mainstream media, where they were considered on the fringe of the immigration debate. Though they are still not widely cited, there has been a noticeable increase in references to these groups since Trump’s rise to political power.

“John Tanton walked in, eyes wide open, and embraced white nationalism as a motivating factor, injecting it into our immigration policy,” said Ahmad. In a bid to make more information about this controversial figure available, Ahmad set out in 2016 to win the release of Tanton’s files, which were to be released by the University of Michigan in 2035. A Michigan appellate court ruling in Ahmad’s favor in June, but the university is in the process of appealing the decision.

Ahmad said Tanton’s long view and network of groups allowed his message to spread far and wide. “It might have ended with him, but he was so influential in creating this entire framework,” he said. “He wasn’t thinking about policies for the next five years or 10 years; he was thinking 100 years. Fear of an ‘invasion,’ ‘Latin onslaught,’ ‘America being less white,’ appealed to — and is in a sick, symbiotic relationship with — bona fide white nationalists.”

The Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda runs parallel to the agendas of the Tanton-linked groups. In 2016, Trump cited a study by the Center of Immigration Studies in a campaign ad that fearmongered about immigrants, accusing them of “collecting Social Security benefits, skipping the line.”

That influence has moved into the halls of power with Trump. A number of individuals formerly employed by groups in the Tanton network now work on immigration at Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Julie Kirchner, who was the executive director of FAIR from 2007 to 2015, is the ombudsperson of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at DHS. Robert Law, who was the government relations director at FAIR from 2013 to 2017, has been a senior policy adviser at USCIS since October 2017. Elizabeth Jacobs, another senior adviser at USCIS, was also a lobbyist for FAIR, where she advocated for ending Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans and reducing refugee admissions. Jon Feere, who was a legal policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, joined U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2017 as a policy adviser.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, has leveraged the revolving door between the Tanton organizations to try to get easy access to information. “Do you know if an actual person I can call at E-Verify for statistics (or maybe in your shop)?” Krikorian wrote to Law, the USCIS adviser, in December 2017, according to a record obtained by American Oversight through a public records request. “I’m trying to go through public affairs, but that may take a while and there’s some problems with the numbers at the E-Verify site, and a PR person isn’t going to know what I’m talking about.”

With the ascent of a fellow traveler into the White House and, with him, a gaggle of former employees from Tanton-linked groups into key policymaking positions, the groups have increasingly been cited as sources in mainstream immigration coverage. These citations are almost always in neutral terms that do not provide context about the groups’ agendas.

Once the researchers working on the Define American report identified instances in which the Center for Immigration Studies, FAIR, and NumbersUSA were cited, two coders manually studied the data to determine whether any context was provided, according to Ethan Zuckerman, a report author and the director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media.

“They looked at each of the mentions, and they looked to see if things were mentioned in any critical terms,” Zuckerman explained. “The theory behind that is that this group of think tanks is a pretty heavily agendaed group of organizations — groups that have been really sort of leading the anti-immigrant movement — and there’s a great deal of a relationship between them. And they’re far from a neutral provider of research and data. So, what we were looking for in that was, was there a caveat that says, you know, ‘This center, which has a track record of advocating against immigration’ or ‘This center, which takes a strong stand against immigration’?” Zuckerman added, “When we’re saying that we don’t find that, that means they’re simply just being cited as a source.”

Mainstreaming Hatemongers’ Words

The Washington Post consistently used what the Define American researchers considered denigrating language more frequently than the other outlets; along with the New York Times, it had a higher percentage of stories with degrading terms as compared to a sample collection of 227 national news sources, as well as collections of news sources that lean left or center-left. Right and center-right sources consistently used denigrating language more frequently than other news outlets.

Despite a 56 percent increase in the use of denigrating terms in the pages of the Los Angeles Times over the four-year period, it had the lowest overall percentage of stories that included such language — even though it had the highest overall increase in immigration coverage.

Zuckerman said the Los Angeles Times stands out as a newsroom that appears to have made a deliberate decision to avoid normalizing language that dehumanizes immigrants.

“They’ve made some very conscious newsroom choices that they don’t want to normalize this language, even by putting it in quotes.”

“We see evidence from our study of the LA Times that they handled it differently,” Zuckerman said. “They’ve been very reluctant to use that denigrating language, and in fact, even after it ticked up for a bit, they’ve brought it back. What that indicates to me is that they’ve made some very conscious newsroom choices that they don’t want to normalize this language, even by putting it in quotes.” He added, “We find that really interesting because that creates clearly an alternative way to handle this language.”

The Los Angeles Times’s style guide allows for the use of “illegal immigration” to describe entry or residence into a country in violation of the law, but it encourages writers to avoid “illegal immigrant” or “undocumented immigrant,” unless it appears in a direct quote. “We know that migration and immigrant communities are essential parts of day-to-day life in Los Angeles and across our region, and we have worked diligently to expand our coverage in recent years,” the paper’s managing editor, Scott Kraft, said in a statement to The Intercept. “Our language and style guidelines for immigration-related topics are fairly strict. They’re based on the expertise of our staff and are intended to help reflect our diverse city.”

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the New York Times shared the paper’s stylebook entry for “immigration status,” which notes that “the language of the immigration debate is often politically charged” and cautions reporters to “be as specific as possible in describing immigration situations.”

Illegal immigrant remains accurate and acceptable, but be aware that some people view it as loaded or offensive. (Illegal immigration, because it describes the issue rather than an individual, is less likely to be seen as troubling.) Undocumented, the term preferred by many immigrants and their advocates, is also acceptable, though using that term exclusively may be seen as one-sided. Unauthorized is also accurate and may be perceived as more neutral than other descriptions.

Consider other alternatives whenever possible to explain the specific circumstances of the person in question, or to focus on actions: who crossed the border illegally; who overstayed a visa; who is not authorized to work in the United States.

Take particular care in describing people whose immigration status is complex or subject to change — for example, young people brought to this country as children, many of whom received temporary reprieves from deportation under federal policies adopted in 2012. The common colloquial term Dreamers may be used sparingly for this group, but avoid making it the routine description, which may seem tendentious.

Do not use illegal as a noun, and avoid the sinister-sounding alien.

USA Today did not respond to a request for comment. The Washington Post did not provide a comment in time for publication.

The Define American report authors posit that U.S. newsrooms face a distinct challenge when reporting on immigration in the age of Trump. “Do they adopt terms used by public figures and use them throughout their coverage?” the report asks. “Do they acknowledge denigrating terminology but parrot the language, separating themselves by using quotation marks to make clear they do not endorse the framing? Or do they resist denigrating language by simply avoiding it, choosing instead to omit or rephrase?”

At present, news outlets are often choosing the middle path. The Define American researchers suggest that journalists think more deliberately about the language of immigration reporting. They offer five basic ethical standards of reporting, including focusing on the people most impacted by policy prescriptions, setting high standards for when it’s necessary to quote newsmakers using denigrating terms, not quoting nativist groups without context about their history and ties to the government, continuing to work toward diversifying newsrooms, and establishing these standards in public style guides.

“This study creates an important opportunity for self-reflection by major news organizations in deciding whether to purge denigrating phraseology in their style guidelines,” Peter Perl, the former assistant managing editor of the Washington Post who oversaw the newspaper’s guidelines, said in a written statement. The use of big data gives journalists “an unprecedented insight into the impact of their language choices and their selection of information sources,” added Perl, who sits on the board of Define American. “We hope they will use this chance to provide a fairer, more balanced presentation of the U.S. immigration debate to better serve their millions of readers worldwide.”

The post With Trump in Office, Newspapers Increasingly Quoted Anti-Immigrant Groups Without Explaining Who They Were appeared first on The Intercept.

POGO’s report analyzed more than 6,000 solitary confinement incident reports, covering a span of slightly more than two years, that were filed to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement by detention centers around the country, from the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency through mid-2018. In roughly 40 percent of those reports, which POGO obtained through a public records request, across both presidential administrations, the detainee placed in isolation had a mental illness diagnosis. The number of placements in solitary confinement jumped by nearly 400 from 2016 to 2017, POGO found.

“Viewed alongside official watchdog reports and insider accounts,” the report reads, “these records depict an immigration detention system in urgent need of more oversight.”

The report builds on “Solitary Voices,” an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The Intercept, in addition to five other reporting partners in the United States and Latin America, into the misuse and overuse of solitary confinement at ICE detention facilities. The investigation, based on reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, found that ICE has isolated thousands of the most vulnerable immigrant detainees, including people with severe mental illness, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities, for extended periods of time.

ICIJ’s investigation, and the new report from POGO, comes amid heightened public scrutiny of the way U.S. authorities detain asylum-seekers and other immigrants. President Donald Trump’s tough stance on immigration has led to the widespread detention of immigrants and asylum-seekers and the slow-walking of their cases, causing the population of ICE detention centers to swell, with more immigrants waiting behind bars as their cases languish in heavily backlogged immigration courts. As of August 3, ICE was detaining more than 55,000 people in detention centers nationwide — a record high — even though Congress has only approved funding to maintain 42,000 detention beds.

Solitary confinement, widely understood to be isolation for 22 hours a day or more in a small cell without meaningful social contact, can spark and worsen anxiety, panic attacks, and other emotional or mental distress, and should be used sparingly or not at all, experts say. The most common reason for placement in solitary confinement is breaking the rules, the ICIJ investigation found.

The U.N. has said that solitary confinement should be banned except in “very exceptional circumstances.” It should never be used to isolate people with mental illness or juveniles — and no one should be held for longer than 15 days, the U.N. says.

In a statement, ICE spokesperson Bryan Cox said that the agency places people in its custody in solitary confinement at rates lower than the national prison population, citing studies ICE conducted in 2012 and 2013 that found that about 1.1 percent of the detained immigrant population is in isolation at any given time, as compared to a national average for prisoners of 4.5 percent. “Any suggestion that the use of segregation in ICE custody is above the norm for detained populations would be a false claim,” he wrote. “In reality, segregation in ICE custody is employed at a rate significantly below the national average for detained populations.”

Immigration detention, however, is civil — it is not meant to be punitive, unlike jails and prisons that house individuals convicted of criminal acts. Civil detention centers are meant to hold immigrants for a short period of time, just long enough for their immigration status to be worked out. In 2017, the average length of stay was 34 days, though some detained immigrants spend months and years behind bars.

POGO identified at least nine cases in which detainees, some of whom were recorded as having a mental illness, were held in isolation for more than a year. A woman with a mental health diagnosis at an ICE detention center in California, for instance, was released from solitary in December 2017 after 454 days. Another woman diagnosed with PTSD was released in August 2017 after 372 days in isolation. (Both of them had been placed in isolation in 2016, while Obama was still in office.) A man “diagnosed with psychotic disorder” was released in April 2018 after 413 days in isolation.

ICIJ’s reporting earlier this year included an analysis of more than 8,400 solitary confinement incident reports from 2013 through early 2017. More than half of those stays lasted longer than 15 days, including 187 cases in which the solitary confinement continued for more than six months. In 32 of those cases, the detained immigrant was isolated for more than a year. Nearly one-third of the overall placements described a detainee diagnosed with a mental illness.

The POGO report’s review of data from January 1, 2016, through May 4, 2018, found more than 4,000 instances of ICE detainees being kept in isolation for more than 15 days. In a quarter of these cases, long-isolated detainees were listed as having a mental illness.

The records obtained by POGO show that 2,565 immigrant detainees were placed in solitary confinement in 2016, the last full year of the Obama administration; about 40 percent of them had a mental illness. In 2017, 2,944 people detained by ICE were placed in solitary confinement; about 39 percent of them had a mental illness. In the first third of 2018, 1,050 detained immigrants were placed in solitary confinement. A POGO analysis estimates that, if the rate of reporting holds steady through the rest of that year, ICE will have placed more than 3,100 people in solitary confinement — about 500 more than during Obama’s final year in office.

The POGO report may add urgency to recent calls by a bipartisan group of lawmakers for ICE to answer questions about its solitary confinement practices.

In June, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., cited ICIJ’s findings in calling ICE’s use of solitary confinement “egregious and appalling abuses.” That same month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called the agency’s practices around isolation “cruel and unnecessary.” Late last month, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., sent a letter to ICE citing ICIJ’s work and demanding answers from the agency on “recent allegations of the misuse of solitary confinement.”

The post 40 Percent of ICE Detainees Held in Solitary Confinement Have a Mental Illness, New Report Finds appeared first on The Intercept.

As the years wore on, some of the region’s dictators fell from power, while others maintained their ironclad rule, setting the stage for protracted regional wars that took an enormous human toll and had global reverberations. Hankir, meanwhile, continued to add to her list of journalists covering the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, and she began to notice a pattern.

“Soon I observed that not only were there more men than women reporting on the region for international media, but most of the reporters were Western,” writes Hankir in the introduction to “Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting From the Arab World,” which the Lebanese British journalist edited. “The gap came as no surprise to me, but to see it in such plain form was a shock nonetheless.”

The sahafiyat, Hankir writes, “intrepidly crush stereotypes” in the age of Donald Trump, the rise of the far-right across Europe, and ISIS. This framing does not do justice to the trailblazing journalists. To say that Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African women are disrupting stereotypes is as cliche as those stereotypes themselves: These women ought to be appreciated for their impressive accomplishments without couching it within Western assumptions about them as docile and subservient. The essayists, in fact, seem unperturbed by how the West may see them and appear beholden only to the communities they come from and whose complexities they seek to explore.

To say that Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African women are disrupting stereotypes is as cliche as those stereotypes themselves.

The contributors to the anthology hail from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen – where a shared linguistic heritage brings people together despite cultural and religious differences. In their essays, the women — some of whom report on the societies in which they were born and raised, while others are daughters of the diaspora — reflect on a wide range of challenges. Their careers have put them in the crosshairs of patriarchy and sexual harassment. Some have confronted a lack of media independence, and others have paid dearly in their personal lives as a result of their work. They grapple with the morality of packaging the misery of some of the world’s most vulnerable people for public consumption, and they wonder whether they’ve done the subjects of their reporting justice. The common thread across their vastly different experiences is the authenticity and knowledge that come with their personal ties to the region.

“Unlike many of the foreign correspondents covering Syria who had never been to the country before the war,” writes Zeina Karam, a Lebanese journalist with the Associated Press, “I had been visiting Syria ever since I was a little girl.”

In an essay on her coverage of the Iraq war, Palestinian Canadian journalist Jane Arraf ponders whether her Arabness contributed to the strength of her reporting on U.S. troops who spoke virtually no Arabic and lacked basic cultural awareness. “Would it have been equally painful to watch the train wreck unfold had I not been Arab?” she writes. “I think the tragic miscalculations of the war would have been. But I might not have been as conscious of the depth of misunderstanding as worlds collided.”

Working Under Pressure

The sahafiyat work across different mediums, some of them for local news organizations that publish in Arabic, and others for international outlets that cater to an English-speaking audience. The tracks are different but equally important: The women producing journalism in and for their home countries often find themselves battling the patriarchy, while those writing for Western audiences play a critical role in improving public understanding of an oversimplified region.

Lina Attalah, an Egyptian journalist who co-founded the independent news site Mada Masr in 2013, finds herself at the intersection of both of those roles. Her work in English made her “an extension of the object of the typical Western gaze,” she writes, “albeit an exciting extension because of the irregularities I presented: I was an Arab woman whose activism was visible to the public, against the odds of the prevalent conservatism and patriarchy associated with the region. Speaking and writing invitations on the back of my gender started rolling in one after another. You may even consider this essay to be one of them.”

Egyptian photojournalist Eman Helal, meanwhile, recounts facing deep misogyny and sexism within her newsroom, where her male colleagues made fun of her work on a project documenting sexual harassment in the streets of Egypt. Zaina Erhaim, a Syrian journalist, found that, despite the promise of freedom that came with her country’s 2011 uprising, she was pressured to conform her style of dress to the expectations of “strange, armed men” while working as a journalist in rebel-held regions. The result was constant self-censorship, even after she fled Syria and found refuge in Europe. “Over the past four years, I have barely had ten articles published, even though I have written eighty pages of outlines and notes saved in a file on my laptop entitled ‘Can’t Be Published,’” she writes.

“I have written eighty pages of outlines and notes saved in a file on my laptop entitled ‘Can’t Be Published,’” she writes.

The countries from which the women reported are among some of the worst countries for press freedom in the world, according to the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index; Sudan, for example, ranks 175 out of the 180 countries on the index. Sudanese journalist Shamael Elnoor writes about working at Al Shorooq, Sudan’s national broadcaster, and being pressured to report on unrest in the country in the light most favorable to the ruling party. “Our youth were being shot dead by the ruling militia, and the police were calling them ‘vandals and criminals,’” she recalls. “As an editor and producer at the channel, I was instructed to repeat those expressions and inject them into my news reports, with no regard to ethics.” She eventually quit that job, but she continued to be critical of the regime in her reporting, leading to a massive, coordinated harassment campaign — encouraged by an imam who was supportive of ISIS in Sudan — in which she was labeled an infidel.

It is the apparent fate of reporters in the Middle East and North Africa to find themselves constantly covering conflict, from Yemen to Palestine, and from Libya to Iraq. “In hindsight, it seems so facile to see Iraqi women only through the prism of their war-ravaged lives, but how else do you report a story where pain is etched on the face of every woman you interview?” reflects Hannah Allam, an NPR reporter who was McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau chief during the Iraq War. The stories she didn’t get to report, about how “witty or sweet or vulnerable Iraqi women could be,” Allam writes, were “written in my heart if not my notebook, and the ones that I recall more easily than any I published under a Baghdad dateline.”

Amira al-Sharif, a Yemeni photojournalist, has made it to her life’s work to tell those seldom-told stories. “Western photographers tend to be drawn to the carnage,” she writes about the war that has gripped her country since 2015, “but I have continued to seek out the other part of Yemen that is full of life, love, and hope.”

Bylines and Identities

Like Hankir, I, too, began to keep tabs on the Mideast reporting corps in the wake of the Arab Spring, paying particular attention to coverage of Syria — the country where my parents were born and from which their families were exiled decades ago. I kept a mental list of Arab writers covering the revolution-turned-war; they became my personal heroes as I set out on a career path toward journalism.

There was Raja Abdulrahim, a Syrian American who reported from inside the country for the Los Angeles Times before moving to the Wall Street Journal. And Alia Malek, another Syrian American who reported discreetly from Damascus and documented her own family’s history in a compelling memoir. There was also the Lebanese Australian Rania Abouzeid, who last year published a masterful, character-driven book based on her years of reporting from Syria’s rebel-held territory. Although not a journalist, Lina Sergie Attar, who initially wrote under the pseudonym Amal Hanano, is in my mind one of the defining writers of the Syrian conflict; her essays, published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Politico, and elsewhere, capture the deep pain of the Syrian experience, of watching our home country unravel from afar and being helpless to stop it.

Seven of the journalists who contributed to Hankir’s anthology spent some portion of the last eight years covering Syria; three of them are of Syrian descent. Their reflections on the evolution of their relationships with Syria felt deeply familiar to me, and their exploration of the links between the personal and the professional are likely to resonate with all journalists whose work intersects with their personal identities.

Like Malas, I always knew I was from Syria, but I never felt fully Syrian. I was, after all, born and raised in the United States and barred from visiting Syria due to decades of entrenched political repression. It was the protests of 2011 that led me down the path of exploring my relationship to the country of my parents’ birth. I suddenly found myself bonding with people through our shared cultural heritage. I straddled the line between activist and aspiring journalist, using Facebook, Twitter, and Skype to forge connections with young Syrian protesters and media activists, many of whom eventually joined the exodus out of Syria.

As a student, I wrote a handful of articles about Syria for niche publications like Syria Deeply and The Majalla. As my journalistic career developed, my interest in Syria persisted, but it became clouded by fears that my personal connection to the country would be seen as a liability — not a plus.

My interest in Syria persisted, but it became clouded by fears that my personal connection to the country would be seen as a liability — not a plus.

This is a feeling Malas reflects on in her essay: “I was so aware—even paranoid—of my personal connection to the story that I strained to project unreasonable neutrality, sometimes to the point of pretending I had no sympathy for any tragedy, on any side.”

Empathy is a key journalistic trait, particularly crucial where reporters are interacting with deeply vulnerable populations. It is, of course, possible to develop empathy without a personal connection to a story, but there is little that can come close to the feeling of being invested in adequately portraying the story of one’s homeland.

I think often of the ways my familial background helped me forge relationships with Syrian strangers. Whether it was the Syrian refugees in Chicago who let me into their homes when I was a graduate student of journalism, or the Syrian women in Turkey who shared their experiences with me when I was on assignment for The Intercept, I have no doubt that my Syrian identity — and the fact that I spoke in Arabic in the same dialect as they did — opened those reporting doors for me.

Which brings me to a more difficult question: Who benefits from these stories we tell? Who benefits when we use our proximity to the story to produce content for the Western gaze? Natacha Yazbeck reflects on this ethical conundrum: “I get thanked a lot for my dedication to the little Alis,” Yazbeck writes, remembering a young boy who was the sole survivor in his family of a massacre in Syria. “It is useful when you can talk to them in their own tongue, because it’s like you are one of them. It’s our capital in English, our brand. Our raseed in Arabic. Our capital. We force our own names over little Ali’s and call it a byline.”

The post The Sharpest Lens on the Arab World Belongs to the Arab Women Reporting There appeared first on The Intercept.

In a Jacksonville, Florida, courtroom, Justice Department attorney Aaron Petty argued that Khan became a citizen by lying to immigration officials and hiding material facts about his immigration history, and therefore, his citizenship should be taken away. Barksdale, after asking Petty about the applicable legal standard in the case, asked, “If the court revokes citizenship, what’s Khan’s status?”

Petty told Barksdale, who sits on the bench in the district court for the Middle District of Florida, that Khan would once again be a lawful permanent resident — a status he gained in 2001 based on his marriage to a U.S. citizen, which opened the door to his naturalization. Barksdale then asked whether Khan could maintain that status or whether he would be at risk of losing it. Petty said that the Justice Department could not attempt to rescind Khan’s green card — the informal name for the document establishing permanent residence —  and it is unlikely that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could act on a 1992 deportation order against Khan. But, he added, it is possible that ICE could initiate new deportation proceedings.

James LaVigne, Khan’s attorney, described Petty’s answer as a “welcome surprise.”

“This is the first time I’ve heard the government say this, that it won’t affect his green card,” LaVigne said after the hearing. He noted that because Khan gave up his green card when he became a U.S. citizen in 2006, and because the Justice Department has argued that Khan illegally procured his permanent residence status as well, it has never been clear what the exact legal effect of Khan losing citizenship status would be.

The questions over Khan’s fate came in the final day of denaturalization proceedings that have consumed nearly two years of his life. In September 2017, the Justice Department marked Khan as one of three targets for denaturalization, the Trump administration’s first public declaration that it would be pursuing such cases under a Department of Homeland Security project called Operation Janus. The initiative, which started at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency and continued under Barack Obama, involved digitizing fingerprint data collected by immigration officials that was missing from a central database, and then combing through about 315,000 cases to determine whether anyone who had been issued a final deportation order later obtained legal status under a different name.

In Khan’s case, the federal government found fingerprint records belonging to Mohammad Akhtar, a Pakistani national who was ordered to be deported in 1992, that matched the fingerprints Khan gave when he applied for permanent residence and citizenship more than a decade later. After linking the two immigration files, the Justice Department accused Khan of becoming a citizen fraudulently by failing to disclose aspects of his immigration history, including the past deportation order — which Khan says he was not even aware of.

It is now up to Barksdale to decide whether the government met its burden to prove that Khan illegally procured his citizenship, or that he obtained it by concealing or willfully misrepresenting a material fact. At trial, Barksdale said she expected to make her ruling about a month following the closing arguments.

Her decision will be a bellwether of what’s to come. If Khan’s citizenship is revoked, despite the fact that he could have been eligible for citizenship even if he had been forthcoming about his history, it could embolden the government to bring more of these cases forward — which it has already indicated it intends to do.

Khan first came to the United States on December 7, 1991, using a Pakistani passport that bore the name Mohammad Akhtar. Immigration officials at the Los Angeles airport noticed that the photo on the passport had been tampered with. They detained Khan, who now says he bought a passport because he thought it would be too difficult to obtain a visa to the United States, where his brother, Suhail Khan, lived. Parvez Khan, whose first language is Urdu and who spoke limited English at the time, was sent to a jail, where he met with an immigration attorney named Howard George Johnson. None of Khan’s cellmates spoke Urdu, and he communicated with Johnson through an Indian cellmate who spoke only Punjabi. The result was an asylum application that incorrectly listed Khan’s name, his mother’s name, and his date of birth.

After about a month in detention, Suhail Khan bonded his brother out, and Parvez Khan traveled to Miami, where he lived with Suhail and became a taxi driver. He never heard from Johnson again, nor did he receive correspondence from ICE about proceedings related to his asylum claim. Unbeknownst to Khan, an immigration judge entered an order of deportation against him in February 1992.

Five years later, Khan met Betty Louise Pope, whom he married in 1998. Within a week of their marriage, he applied for a green card on the basis of that relationship. On his application for permanent residence, he did not disclose that he’d previously used a different name or that he’d been in deportation proceedings and applied for asylum, despite questions to that effect. He was granted permanent residence in 2001. Now, the Justice Department argues that he illegally procured that status by failing to answer honestly about his immigration history.

The Justice Department also argues that Khan became a U.S. citizen illegally because he left those parts of his immigration history out of his 2006 application and interview for citizenship. LaVigne, Khan’s lawyer, argues that the questions on the applications for permanent residence were vague and equivocal, particularly for a layperson who does not understand immigration law, and that Khan would have been eligible to become a U.S. citizen even if he’d been entirely forthcoming about his history.

Khan’s lawyer argues that Khan would have been eligible to become a U.S. citizen even if he’d been entirely forthcoming about his history.

Those points get at the primary issue Barksdale will have to resolve: How material were Khan’s lies and omissions to the overall outcome of his citizenship application? On Tuesday, the judge asked probing questions about what legal standard should apply. Petty argued that Barksdale should decide how material Khan’s actions were to his eventual naturalization by looking solely at prevailing legal precedent — what is known in legal parlance as a question of law — while LaVigne’s position was that materiality is a so-called question of fact, meaning that Barksdale should weigh the evidence to make her determination.

“Our position is that this is a question of law. However, Pallechia testified at length about how Khan’s testimony resulted in a different adjudicatory path,” said Petty, who delivered his arguments in a monotone, laying out the government’s version of events and applicable law, referring to Lisa Pallechia, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer who adjudicated Khan’s application and testified at trial.

The district court has no discretion in denaturalization cases. If Barksdale finds that the Justice Department established by clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence that Khan illegally procured his U.S. citizenship, she will be required to enter an order canceling his certificate of citizenship. Barksdale’s pointed questions to the attorneys about the relevant case law made clear that she’s grappling with the potential consequences of ordering Khan’s denaturalization. After spending several minutes asking Petty about Khan’s future legal status, she revisited the issue during LaVigne’s closing argument. She cautioned, though, that she could not consider Khan’s future immigration status when making her ruling. “It’s not really pertinent to the decision,” she told LaVigne. “I was just curious what his status was.”  Regardless of Barksdale’s ruling, the case will likely head to an appeal.

If Khan’s citizenship is revoked, he could apply for a replacement green card, though that process would be complicated if ICE decided to initiate deportation proceedings against him. A Justice Department victory will open the door for ICE to try to send Khan back to Pakistan, where he has not lived since 1991; the agency would not be obligated to do so, but the amount of resources the federal government has expended on this case, which has involved top Justice Department lawyers, mean the odds are not in Khan’s favor.

A Justice Department victory will open the door for ICE to try to send Khan back to Pakistan, where he has not lived since 1991.

The Justice Department’s efforts to strip people of citizenship — a practice that, for the last 50 years or so, has largely been reserved for war criminals and Nazis — have also expanded significantly under President Donald Trump. In the first two years of the Trump presidency, the total number of denaturalization cases nearly doubled over the total number of cases filed between 2004 and 2016. In a January 2018 press release, the Justice Department wrote that USCIS “has stated its intention to refer approximately an additional 1,600 for prosecution.” Last summer, USCIS said it would be opening a new office in Los Angeles to focus on denaturalization.

In recent years, the Department of Homeland Security has asked Congress for large sums of money to pursue denaturalization. In the last fiscal year, ICE asked for $207.6 million to fund, among other things, an investigation into an expected 887 additional leads under Operation Janus, as well as to review another 700,000 immigrant files under Operation Second Look, a related program. ICE renewed the ask for that funding in its 2020 budget request. Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, was working with USCIS to digitize fingerprints from 650,000 immigrant files, the agency wrote in a budget justification it sent to Congress. “HSI estimates it could receive an estimated 800 referrals/leads from this upload.”

Khan is one of four defendants whose cases the Justice Department has specifically stated were borne out of Operation Janus, and his is the first of those cases to go to trial. Like Khan, the other targets — natives of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — are accused of lying about their immigration histories, not concealing a criminal past.

The federal government has already stripped one of those four people of citizenship, but that case was resolved pretrial because the defendant never responded to the charges against him. A third defendant also never responded to the allegations against him, and the government has asked the court to rule in its favor. The fourth case is likely to go to trial. Khan’s case, then, is the federal government’s first chance to show that it can take cases based on minor omissions by the defendant to trial — and win.

LaVigne, Khan’s lawyer, stressed that the questions Khan answered incorrectly on his applications for permanent residence and citizenship were confusing, and that it should be clear to the court that Khan remains confused by the legal technicalities of his case — something which was evident during the Justice Department’s questioning of Khan at trial.

“The plaintiff’s case is based on Monday morning quarterbacking, hindsight, and going back through reams of paper and saying, ‘Oh, you lied on your I-485,” LaVigne said emphatically at the start of his argument, referring to a form that is part of the application for permanent residence.

LaVigne, despite being comforted by Petty’s claim that Khan would revert to permanent resident status should his certificate of naturalization be canceled, said he does not trust Homeland Security to stick to that. (While the Justice Department litigates denaturalization cases, ICE, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, initiates deportation proceedings.)

“I’m not sure how the current administration is going to interpret anything anymore,” LaVigne told Barksdale.

Khan, a truck driver who spends about 11 hours on the road every day, drove from Atlanta to Jacksonville with his wife, Betty Louise Khan, on Tuesday morning. He sat next to LaVigne during the argument and told me afterward that he’s tired of fighting for his right to stay in the United States.

“If they keep my green card,” Khan said, “I’m OK with it.”

The post If the Justice Department Prevails in a Florida Courtroom, More Americans May See Themselves Stripped of Citizenship appeared first on The Intercept.

The letter was spurred by “recent allegations of the misuse of solitary confinement” in ICE detainment centers, the senators wrote, citing an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Intercept, NBC News, and other reporting partners.

The ICIJ investigation, which involved a review of more than 8,400 reports describing placement in solitary confinement from 2012 to early 2017, found that ICE uses isolation as a go-to tool, rather than a last resort, to punish vulnerable detained immigrants.

Our reporting also included interviews with Ellen Gallagher, a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower who sounded the alarm about ICE’s misuse of solitary confinement for years before going public with her concerns for the first time in interviews with the reporting consortium. Gallagher’s attempts at whistleblowing, which date back to 2014, included outreach to congressional offices. Grassley, along with then-Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., took perhaps the most serious step in response to Gallagher’s complaints, sending a June 2015 letter to then-Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, citing her findings about the use of solitary confinement and demanding an explanation.

“I have been blowing the whistle on this issue for many years to almost complete silence. One notable exception was the willingness of Senators Grassley and Franken in 2015 to write a letter seeking accountability,” Gallagher wrote in an email on Wednesday. “Then as now, it is hard to express my gratitude that a bipartisan pair of Senators remain willing to challenge the widespread, abusive use of solitary confinement for civil detainees. I pray that DHS will treat their concerns and my disclosures with the seriousness they deserve.”

“It is hard to express my gratitude that a bipartisan pair of Senators remain willing to challenge the widespread, abusive use of solitary confinement for civil detainees.”

Grassley and Blumenthal both sit on the Judiciary Committee, which has oversight over ICE. Grassley is the first Republican on the panel to publicly respond to our investigation; though he has not called for a hearing on the issue, a reaction from him could carry more weight than demands by the panel’s Democrats, who do not have the power to independently convene a hearing in the GOP-held Senate.

Blumenthal responded to our May report by calling for an investigation into ICE’s use of solitary confinement. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., last month sent a letter asking Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to convene a hearing on ICE’s “egregious and appalling abuses,” including the use of solitary confinement, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., demanded answers from ICE about its use of solitary confinement.

In the Wednesday letter, addressed to acting ICE director Matthew Albence, Grassley and Blumenthal also cite recent investigations by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, or OIG, which reveal discrepancies in ICE’s documentation of how it uses solitary confinement. “It is imperative that ICE swiftly resolve any lacking oversight or improper documentation pertaining to the use of segregation,” they wrote, using the label that ICE applies to solitary confinement, which is typically understood to mean total isolation with no human contact for at least 22 hours a day.

Grassley and Blumenthal asked the agency to brief their offices on six questions and issues. The senators ask for data on placements in solitary confinement over the last three fiscal years, the steps the agency takes to ensure that the use of solitary is properly documented, and ICE’s practices to ensure that solitary confinement is “appropriate and required.” The senators also asked for information on ICE’s detention facilities and its oversight over contracted facilities.

“What specific assistance from Congress would ICE need to ensure the agency is addressing the OIG’s concerns as it pertains to those detainees who require special attention?” the list of questions concludes.

In their letter, the senators write that there are structural obstacles to effective ICE oversight over the use of solitary confinement.

“Many detention facilities have two basic areas of detention: general population and segregation,” Grassley and Blumenthal wrote. “As noted in the OIG reports, detainees who require special attention are placed in a detention space where only one detainee is held and monitored …. Unlike the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, ICE detention facilities are not funded to assess and address all scenarios; nor are they funded to provide for multi-level detention facilities.”

The post In Letter to ICE, Sen. Chuck Grassley Joins Call for Answers on Solitary Confinement appeared first on The Intercept.

Now, prosecutors across the state of Florida are contemplating ways to work around the new Republican-imposed restrictions and implement the constitutional change while hewing to its original purpose: to give people the vote. State attorneys in at least three Florida counties, covering major cities like Miami and Tampa, are looking into the possibility of modifying the sentences of some indigent people with felony records, potentially by allowing them to do community service rather than pay off often cumbersome court costs.

Amendment 4 restored the civil rights of all people with felonies who have completed their sentences, except those convicted of murder or sex offenses, affecting an estimated 1.4 million people. It was the most significant expansion of voting rights since women won the right to vote in 1920. Though its proponents insisted the reform was a nonpartisan measure — indeed, it passed with 65 percent of the vote in an election in which a Republican won the governor’s race by a razor-thin margin of 0.4 percent — it is largely assumed that the prospective influx in voter registration will benefit Democrats in the critical swing state. Few observers, then, were shocked that the GOP-led legislature moved to quickly pass a law narrowing Amendment 4’s reach.

“I’ve always felt that the requirement to make ex-felons go through the difficult process of rights restoration was partly about voter suppression.”

“I’m not surprised that the legislature passed an implementing bill for Amendment 4,” said Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, whose office is trying to find a way to allow people with felony records to pay off their obligations to the court through community service. “I always knew that there would be pushback because I’ve always felt that the requirement to make ex-felons go through the difficult process of rights restoration was partly about voter suppression.”

Still, the returning citizens who spent a decade fighting to get their lifetime voting ban lifted say they’re not ready to give up just yet. “Big picture-wise, for us, where other people see obstacles, we see opportunity,” said Neil Volz, deputy director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which spearheaded the effort to get Amendment 4 passed last fall. “That is part of the heartbeat of this entire movement. It took us 10 years to get to last November, and we’re in this for the long haul. It’s not about politics, it’s about how you continue to overcome.”

Most court fines and fees in Florida are mandated by the state legislature, essentially creating a criminal justice system that is funded on the backs of the people who pass through it. When people with felonies fail to pay up, those costs can balloon from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands. Not only do the fines now implicate voting rights, they can lead to drivers’ license suspensions and additional time behind bars.

The fines and fees imposed by the state frequently go unpaid — in Hillsborough County, the clerk of the court collected $15 million in court fines and fees from 2007 to 2017, less than 3 percent of the $500 million it had assessed — meaning that many people with felonies remain dogged by the run-ins with the law. What’s more, because the assessments are state-mandated, there’s little room for local officials, including judiciary officials, to affect the levels of the fees and fines.

“When those fines and fees are assessed initially, there’s not a whole lot of judicial discretion with most of them. There’s not a determination made as to whether a person is able to pay, what their income is, what their circumstances are,” said Ashley Thomas, Florida state director at the Fines and Fees Justice Center, which advocates for eliminating fees in the justice system. “These fines and fees are assessed without an analysis of whether the person could ever pay them.”

Would-be Florida voters need to act fast to be able to vote in Florida’s next statewide elections in 2020, with the presidential primary scheduled for March 17 and other primaries slated for August, ahead of the general election in November. The voter registration deadline for the presidential primary is February 18, giving groups interested in helping people register to vote about eight months to make it happen.

The majority of people with past felonies who are impacted by Amendment 4 are immediately eligible to vote, said Volz, whose group is currently focused on going into communities and encouraging civic engagement. “We basically remind everybody that the impact of Amendment 4 is intact, that the lifetime ban is history, and we’re now looking at a situation where we have about 800,000-plus who are immediately eligible, and about 500,000-plus who are not yet eligible because of financial obligations.”

Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle has developed perhaps the most specific Amendment 4 implementation plan to date: It would include a streamlined case review system to help people who owe money they are unable to pay but are otherwise eligible, according to a draft her office shared with The Intercept. In Hillsborough County, a metropolitan area that includes Tampa, State Attorney Andrew Warren intends to set up a “rocket docket” to modify the sentences en masse.

“I agree with Amendment 4. I supported it. I voted for it. And now we have this gap in place where it’s up to localities to implement a process,” Warren said in an interview. “We’ve taken the reins of it here in Hillsborough County so we can do what we can to fulfill the promise of Amendment 4 as voters overwhelmingly approve.”

The moves taken by the state attorneys came after a new law was passed by the legislature in May and signed by DeSantis on June 28. The law made the restoration of voting rights contingent upon the payment of court fines and fees included as part of a sentence, as well as restitution paid to the victim of a crime.

The statute allows for financial obligations to be converted into community service, noting that a completion of community service hours would render a financial obligation met. It also allows the court or victims, in the case of restitution, to waive their right to be paid.

Despite these avenues for relief, the statute complicated Amendment 4 implementation efforts, which include plans to help register voters, because there is no centralized database with information about who could be eligible to vote except for the fact that they owe money to the court. There are 20 judicial circuits in Florida, and the legislature’s failure to issue implementation guidance means that unless elected officials actively seek to help re-enfranchise those with felonies, many will likely get lost in the system.

The state attorneys who are pursuing means to help move toward full implementation of Amendment 4 hail from Democratic counties, among the handful of Florida jurisdictions that went to Hillary Clinton in 2016. The state attorneys are therefore less likely to face strong political backlash for pushing back against the GOP legislature, even as they try to secure bipartisan buy-in for their efforts.

Fernandez Rundle and Warren had been in talks about how to implement Amendment 4 even before the law was passed, though the restrictions imposed by the legislature made their efforts all the more important. Aronberg, the Palm Beach County state attorney, contacted Warren’s office after the Hillsborough County prosecutor floated the rocket docket idea in an interview with the local press.

“We’re trying to figure out a way to do all this,” Aronberg said, referring to the rocket docket idea. “What does that mean? What does that entail?” Last Tuesday, he attended a meeting with interested groups and government entities about Amendment 4. “We haven’t seen a plan yet and obviously we’d be interested to see what others are doing.”

In each jurisdiction, the state attorneys’ offices are in talks with key stakeholders whose cooperation would be critical to any sort of implementation plan. Those include the clerk of court, the public defender’s office, the supervisor of elections, the administrative office of the courts, and the Department of Corrections.

One thing the state attorneys are insistent upon is leaving in place the restrictions for those people with felonies who owe restitution to victims or their families.

“We keep victims in mind whenever we’re doing anything that can impact them. That’s why it’s lower-hanging fruit to address those ex-felons who have nonviolent drug offenses and they just owe court costs and fees,” Aronberg said. “You can move from there to other crimes until you get to victim crimes, and that would be a separate discussion.”

Meanwhile, the future of the new law restricting Amendment 4’s reach will likely be determined by the courts. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center have sued Florida election officials, alleging that the statute is unconstitutional and creates two classes of returning citizens: those who can afford voting rights and those who cannot.

Warren, who was elected in Hillsborough County in 2016 as a reform-minded prosecutor, was the first state attorney to react to the law restricting Amendment 4 by proposing a plan to allow indigent people with felony histories to complete community service in lieu of payment. The biggest hurdle, he said, is “identifying through data the universe of people who we can target for this rocket docket process.”

There are two approaches his office intends to take. The first is to ask people who believe they qualify — people who have completed their sentences, don’t owe restitution, but still owe the court money and are unable to pay it — to self-identify.

“If we determine that the person fits someone who has completed all those terms and is unable to pay, then through some finding of financial hardship, likely relying on whether the person had a public defender appointed for them when they went through the judicial process in the first place,” Warren said, “then we can include them in the expedited judicial process of the rocket docket.”

“It would be extremely cumbersome for people to do it individually, and it would bog down the courts. We want to do it in an efficient way that’s not taking up a lot of court time.”

The other, more difficult task is for the state attorney’s office, working with other government entities, to collect data and identify groups of people who meet the criteria. The clerk of court keeps information on the payment of money owed to the court, while the Department of Corrections tracks whether individuals have completed their sentences. Identifying whether an individual has paid restitution is more complicated, because those payments can be made privately or through the state attorney’s office. The public defender or an outside group like the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, would then reach out to the identified individuals to inform them about the rocket docket process.

One reason the state attorney’s office is at the center of this effort, Warren said, is that the idea was borne out of conversations he had with the legislature about implementing Amendment 4, of which he was an early supporter. Another factor is that his prosecutor’s office can reopen a large number of cases to modify sentences.

“We are the one agency who has standing to go into all these cases and say, ‘Not just for John Smith’s case, but for these thousand cases, we are going to do it.’ Otherwise we’d force individual defendants to take the initiative individually, to navigate the process to be able to do it and reopen their cases,” Warren said. “It would be extremely cumbersome for people to do it individually, and it would bog down the courts. We want to do it in an efficient way that’s not taking up a lot of court time.”

While a rocket docket will help people make their way before a judge to get their fines cleared, people’s difficulties navigating the court system — even letting people know that they need to go into court to ask for a sentence modification —  remains a major hurdle. “Hopefully these rocket dockets will help lower the access-to-court burden, but there’s still the issue of making sure they are advised by counsel and many other issues that may come up,” said Thomas of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. “Sometimes people have cases in more than one jurisdiction, and looking at it holistically and looking at what their situation is and how it can be addressed is going to be tricky.”

In Miami-Dade County, Fernandez Rundle has developed a plan that, while narrower than what Warren has discussed, is the most specific proposal to date. Her office’s draft plan lays out a 12-step process that starts with helping people who have completed their sentences register to vote and leads to something it calls a “streamlined case review” for a modification of a sentence. The case review would help indigent former felons who have yet to pay off their court fines, fees, and costs, unless their sentences included restitution or probation.

“For some time now, State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle has been exploring the existing legal complexities regarding the implementing of Amendment 4,” spokesperson Ed Griffith said in an emailed statement. “Given that any proposed plan to implement the restoration of voting rights will require the involvement of a number of governmental agencies and entities to actually start the process, an organizational blueprint must be in place to actually work.”

Fernandez Rundle’s office plans to work with the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which, according to the draft plan, will set up an online or telephone portal to collect information about ex-felons, their sentences, and their ability to repay the court. Legislative offices could also field requests for assistance, according to the plan. (The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition does not yet have a clear timeline for when such a portal might be ready, Volz said.)

The process laid out in Fernandez Rundle’s proposal would have the state attorney, public defenders, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, and legislators collaborate to bring attention to the plan through advertising; check people’s qualifications for the program through court clerks; double verify that no other obstacles such as disqualifying charges exist; and then finally appraise them of their standing under Amendment 4. Eligible people with past felonies who owe no fines and fees would be told to register; those with outstanding debts would complete a financial affidavit and work with the state attorney’s office to set the case for a streamlined case review.

In cases in which the public defender’s office did not previously represent the individual, they would refer the case to pro bono attorneys. The chief judge would appoint one person to handle streamlined case reviews, and the clerk’s office would work with the court to schedule regular days for that to happen.

Fernandez Rundle’s plan declares that streamlined case review should move along quickly because the initial stages of determining eligibility will already include public defenders and court clerks.

Some state attorneys have bristled at the notion of getting involved in the process. Bernie McCabe, the state attorney for Pinellas and Pasco counties, which border Hillsborough, has said the new law restricting Amendment 4 is in line with what the plan for restoring voting rights was all along. “I thought what they’ve got now is what they advertised,” McCabe told the Tampa Bay Times, of Amendment 4 supporters.

The office of Duval County’s Melissa Nelson, who was elected in 2016 on a reform platform, told The Intercept that implementation of Amendment 4 is not a current focus. In Orange County, which includes Orlando, the fourth-largest city in the state after Jacksonville, Miami, and Tampa, State Attorney Aramis Ayala said she could not independently make decisions about sentence modification.

“As State Attorney I remain focused on the pursuit of justice, and this includes the work necessary to eliminate barriers to reentry,” Ayala, who has implemented significant reforms since her 2016 election and does not intend to seek a second term, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, it is not up to me alone to make determinations regarding fines and fees; therefore, I want to avoid conversations that evoke premature hope. I am proud to stand with the many people dedicated to the research, brainstorming, and planning process that produces tangible results. I remain committed to finding a solution.”

For the state attorneys who are seeking to broaden the implementation of Amendment 4, their hope is that their work setting up processes and systems for giving voting rights back to more people with past felony convictions helps other counties implement similar policies. Griffith, Fernandez Rundle’s spokesperson, said, “The hope was that whatever was created here in Miami-Dade County could become a structure for use throughout the State, thereby creating uniformity for all individuals seeking their voting rights anywhere in Florida.”

The post How Some Florida Prosecutors Are Pushing Back Against GOP Voter Suppression Efforts appeared first on The Intercept.

The documents, released Wednesday by the immigrant rights groups Mijente, Just Futures Law, and Detention Watch Network, show that ICE officials are building arrest target lists for mass raids to meet specific numbers, even as the agency continues to internally and publicly stress a “public safety” rationale for immigration arrests.

Most of the documents relate to a planned September 2017 ICE operation that was meant to target 8,400 noncitizens; ICE called off the raid after details were leaked to the media. But the documents also include information on five other ICE operations with similar objectives, pointing to how the agency repeatedly recycles its logistical plans.

Immigrant rights groups from around the country filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act to collect information on the planned September 2017 raid, dubbed Operation Mega, and other similar operations. ICE did not respond to the FOIA requests, prompting litigation by the groups, through which they have obtained thousands of pages of documents over the last year.

The groups are working on a comprehensive report about the information contained in the documents, but they decided to release the documents because ICE is poised to sweep up thousands of immigrants as soon as this weekend.

Last month, Trump announced a logistically impossible plan to begin arresting “millions” of undocumented immigrants; later reporting revealed that ICE was planning to target 2,000 families who were issued final orders of removal after not showing up to immigration court proceedings. Trump postponed the operation for two weeks after details were leaked to the media. Last Saturday, Trump said the raids were planned for sometime after Thursday, July 4.

“The ongoing threat of mass raids for mass deportations has made it necessary for us to understand the inner workings of ICE’s mass raid operations,” said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network. “We’ve confirmed in government documents that ICE operations are politically motivated. Immigration raids are meant to terrorize communities and instill fear.“

In response to The Intercept’s inquiries about the documents, an ICE spokesperson suggested that the agency did not use arrest quotas for raids. “I’m not sure what language you’ve seen that suggests ICE operates under an arrest quota,” said ICE’s Matthew Bourke. “Agency efforts are not based on competition or meeting a specific threshold. ICE operations are driven by the agency’s mission to enforce the nation’s immigration laws and to uphold national security, border security, and public safety.”

Throughout the documents, ICE describes the purpose of its enforcement operations as furthering public safety. An internal email about Operation Mega said the goal was to target “all aliens who are present in the United States in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), in order to significantly impact public safety, national security, and a lawful border control and immigration system.”

A document about a July 2017 raid that targeted unaccompanied minors and their families lays out three target categories that include “subjects with criminal convictions or indicia of criminality.” Gang membership is also a factor ICE considers regarding unaccompanied minors who are 16 or 17 years old. The memo does not define what “indicia of criminality” actually means, though it does include a section defining “gang member” and “associate gang member.” Factors that indicate gang membership, according to ICE, include tattoos that signify gang membership, two or more arrests alongside known gang members, wearing “gang apparel” or possessing “gang paraphernalia,” and being identified as a gang member by an informant or law enforcement officer.

“These documents expose how quota-driven raids feed the mass deportation and detention machine that treats people like numbers and targets, instead of people.”

ICE, however, built its raids around arrest quotas, which indicates that the agency was more interested in sweeping up thousands of people than it was specifically targeting individuals who posed a threat to public safety and national security.

“These documents expose how quota-driven raids feed the mass deportation and detention machine that treats people like numbers and targets, instead of people,” said Paromita Shah from Just Futures Law.

For Operation Mega, the agency used immigration, criminal, and commercial databases to build a target list of 8,400 people that it shared with the 24 field offices for Enforcement and Removal Operations, ICE’s deportation-focused division, around the country.

In one email exchange, a deportation officer in Waco, Texas, asked about how a certain individual ended up on the target list. The officer noted that the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, which is run by ICE’s National Fugitive Operations Program, helped compile the list, drawing on information like traffic tickets and utility bills. In response, an ICE official described the target list as a “kitchen sink type list with a myriad of sources used to build it.”

A deportation officer in Salt Lake City charged with leading the raid in that area wrote on August 24, 2017, that his field office was “required to have 240 targets. Boise can provide 50 targets, leaving 190 additional needed, 95 from SLC and 95 from LVG” — likely referring to Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, both cities that, along with Boise, Idaho, fall under the purview of the ICE official based in Utah, according to the agency’s website.

Five days later, in an email chain originating from the Salt Lake City office, an officer wrote that “our [supervisory detention and deportation officers] want LVG to provide 200 good targets, and we are on track for that. To be able to hit 40 targets each day + the collateral arrests, we will need a number of arrest teams, 3 roving transport vans, and a processing team.” The term “collateral” refers to noncitizens who are not targets but, because of their proximity to targets, are also swept up in the raids.

A June 2017 email about a separate operation called Cross Check reveals the arbitrary nature of the arrest quota. “Able to come up with 15 showing criminal convictions,” wrote an ICE supervisory detention and deportation officer in Austin, Texas. “I would like to see 30 total on the list. I realize we may have a hard time finding that many outside of the Austin proper area, so to fill out the number we are looking for we can go inside Austin if need be. Main thing is they have Criminal Convictions.”

After the operation was concluded, one ICE officer congratulated another on their “great numbers!”

Even as ICE framed its operations around targeting convicted criminals, the Trump administration’s policy of treating all undocumented immigrants as equal priorities for deportation meant that hundreds of others got caught up in the raids as well. A report from the Philadelphia field office following a raid carried out from February 27 to March 10, 2017, shows that, of the 248 people who were arrested, only 92 were initial targets of the operation, and only 88 had criminal convictions. That means that more than 60 percent of the people arrested were “collateral” — those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“No proactive outreach shall be conducted with non-law enforcement entities on the planning or execution of this operation.”

A document laying out plans for Operation Mega reveals how ICE’s national headquarters was preparing target lists to share with its two-dozen field offices, to be reviewed and approved by field office directors in advance of the raids. The document also underscores ICE’s secrecy around the operation — even when it came to interactions with the legislative branch and local police. One section, titled “Congressional, Community, and Media Relations” says, “No proactive outreach shall be conducted with non-law enforcement entities on the planning or execution of this operation.” The guide also gave ICE offices the freedom not to inform local police departments about the planned raids if ICE supervisors felt that “operation sensitivities are expected to compromise officer safety or operational security.”

The immigrant rights groups obtained a copy of an August 2017 slide deck that ICE had used to train its officers on constitutional rights in preparation for raids. In Texas, ICE officers scheduled a training on Fourth Amendment rights, which protect against unreasonable searches and seizures, ahead of the operation. A June 2017 email about Operation Cross Check notes that “all officers assigned to this Operation have participated in 4th Amendment training within the past 60 days.”

The documents also reveal the enthusiasm of ICE officers to participate in the raids that terrorize immigrant communities. Ahead of Operation Mega, a senior ICE officer in Salt Lake City sent out an email soliciting volunteers for the raid. One officer responded within three minutes, writing, “I would like to volunteer. Thank you.” In an August 2017 email with the subject line “Operation EPIC,” ICE’s San Antonio deputy field office director wrote, “I don’t want anyone to feel left out if we can get them in the field we will but need to ensure we conduct the op properly and account for arrests and manpower needs.”

The post As Trump Announces Mass Immigration Raid, Documents Show How ICE Uses Arrest Quotas appeared first on The Intercept.

The group, Government Accountability Project, cited a report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General issued earlier this month about conditions and practices at hundreds of immigration detention facilities. “We are concerned that the OIG report, while horrific in its findings, merely scratched the surface of systematic abuses and violations reported by whistleblowers,” GAP said in its letter.

“We are concerned that the OIG report, while horrific in its findings, merely scratched the surface of systematic abuses and violations reported by whistleblowers.”

The group is representing multiple immigration whistleblowers, including Ellen Gallagher, who went public with her concerns about ICE’s use of solitary confinement in interviews with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The Intercept last month, following her yearslong effort to raise the issue before governmental oversight bodies.

The inspector general’s recent report “substantively confirmed Ms. Gallagher’s disclosures, made over a period of almost five years, [but] they only exposed the tip of the iceberg,” the watchdog group wrote to members of the Judiciary and Oversight committees in the House, as well as the Senate’s Judiciary and Homeland Security committees. “Ms. Gallagher’s disclosures documented hundreds of examples of ICE’s inappropriate use of solitary confinement, which have yet to be investigated by internal DHS watchdogs. This suggests her concerns are widespread across hundreds of facilities and need to be investigated and addressed immediately.”

Gallagher first became aware of ICE’s misuse of solitary confinement in 2014, when she worked at the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. After reviewing the agency’s segregation reports, she spent the next several years trying to bring the issue before her superiors at DHS, the Inspector General’s Office, the Office of Special Counsel, and congressional oversight committees. Her review of the reports, in addition to case files for some detained immigrants, led her to believe that ICE’s widespread use of solitary confinement, particularly with regard to individuals with “special vulnerabilities” — such as those with serious mental illness — violated the agency’s policies and procedures.

Gallagher said she hopes that GAP will bring critical attention to a dire issue. “Thousands of civil immigration detainees continue to be ‘sentenced’ to solitary confinement where they are denied proper medical care and attention,” Gallagher wrote in an email to The Intercept. “I believe GAP’s advocacy will be instrumental in halting egregious violations of law and policy — and in saving lives.”

The issues she raised were consistent with the results of the investigation, conducted by ICIJ and The Intercept, which included a review of more than 8,400 records of placement in solitary confinement from 2012 to early 2017. The investigation found that ICE was using solitary confinement as a go-to tool, often to the detriment of detained immigrants with mental illness or a physical disability, or LGBTQ individuals who are especially vulnerable in immigration detention.

The Government Accountability Project letter, authored by attorney Dana Gold and national security analyst Irvin McCullough, decried the failure of oversight agencies to respond to Gallagher’s disclosures. The Office of Special Counsel “expressly abdicated its duty to investigate Ms. Gallagher’s disclosures,” the letter reads. “Rather than act upon these urgent pleas and the reams of information associated with them, the OSC instead found it acceptable to defer to the OIG’s own incomplete investigation”

Gold and McCullough called on each of the committees to hold a two-panel hearing to evaluate the June 2019 Inspector General report, ICE detention more broadly, and the executive branch’s oversight failures. “One panel should represent the internal watchdogs responsible for immigration policy” — the DHS inspector general, the civil rights and civil liberties director, and the special counsel — while the other “should allow whistleblowers and subject matter experts, who have primary knowledge of detention facility conditions, to testify to the extent of these violations and pinpoint avenues for further oversight.”

The issue of ICE’s use of solitary confinement has seen its profile rise in recent weeks, following The Intercept and the OIG’s reports. In recent days, two Democratic Party presidential contenders weighed in with calls for accountability. On Thursday, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called for the Republican-led committee to hold hearings on the subject. His letter came several days after Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wrote a letter to ICE leadership demanding answers to a series of questions.

The post A Whistleblower Pointed to ICE Abuse of Solitary Confinement. Now Pressure Mounts for Congressional Investigation. appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter to Graham, Booker, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, referred to solitary confinement as a “form of torture” and cited a recent investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Intercept, NBC News, and four other reporting partners into ICE’s use of solitary confinement. Our reporting, which included a review of more than 8,400 reports describing placement in solitary confinement from 2012 to early 2017, found that ICE uses isolation as a go-to tool, rather than a last resort, to punish vulnerable detained immigrants.

“ICE’s own policy seems to recognize the dangers of solitary confinement.”

“The news stories detail numerous examples of individuals placed in confinement without justification, which prompted a whistleblower to come forward to shine a light on these abuses,” wrote Booker, referring to Department of Homeland Security employee Ellen Gallagher, who quietly raised the alarm about ICE’s use of solitary confinement for four years before going public in interviews with the reporting consortium. While different carceral systems use varying terms to describe solitary confinement — ICE calls it “segregation” — it is generally understood to be the practice of holding individuals in isolation with no human contact for at least 22 hours a day.

“ICE’s own policy seems to recognize the dangers of solitary confinement,” Booker continued. “It appears ICE has been consistently violating its own policy on the use of solitary confinement.”

His letter to Graham comes on the heels of a letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to the acting director of ICE, demanding answers about the agency’s use of solitary confinement and extensively citing our investigation. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., another member of the Judiciary Committee, also called for a hearing into ICE’s use of solitary in response to our investigation last month. The panel’s Democrats do not have independent authority to schedule a hearing, hence the request to Graham.

Booker, in his letter, said that a Judiciary Committee hearing about ICE would give the panel a chance to interrogate “grossly unsanitary conditions at detention facilities,” as well as to gather more information about forthcoming immigration raids that President Donald Trump “flippantly alluded to” on Twitter last week. The president, after announcing that the agency would begin to round up “millions” of immigrants this week — a logistically impossible endeavor — on Saturday put the ICE operation on hold.

Graham, an anti-immigrant hard-liner and apologist for the Trump administration’s harsh policies, convened a committee hearing — at Democrats’ request — in March to investigate Customs and Border Protection for its actions at the southern border. Graham used the hearing as an opportunity for fearmongering about migrants seeking asylum in the United States. The CBP, like ICE, falls under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security.

The oversight hearing on CBP was not enough, Booker wrote. “In order to fully address the scope of ICE’s serious and egregious violations, the Committee must convene an oversight hearing. It’s becoming increasingly clear that ICE has become nothing more than a lethal weapon in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants and communities of color, and we cannot be silent.”

Booker’s harsh stance against ICE in the letter to Graham is in line with the tack he’s taken on the presidential campaign trail, where he’s been a staunch critic of the agency’s policies. In February, he, along with other 2020 hopefuls Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, voted against a spending bill, citing ICE. At the time, Booker said that bill would give ICE and CBP “hundreds of millions of additional dollars with little oversight or appropriate guardrails.” In April, he reintroduced legislation to enact protections for detained immigrants.

Booker has also been an outspoken advocate of the rights of prisoners throughout his federal career. At the same time, he’s remained close to a party boss in his home state who oversees a jail that serves as an immigration detention center and is rife with abuses, drawing the ire of local progressives.

As Politico reported on Tuesday, Booker will be in New Jersey on Friday for a $2,800-per-person fundraiser co-hosted by Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo. In that role, DiVincenzo oversees the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark, which has a $40 million per year contract with ICE — and was called out for poor conditions in two DHS Inspector General reports just this year.

Twenty-one progressive organizations last week sent a letter to Booker calling on him to cancel the fundraiser, Politico reported. “I believe that Booker wants to make sure that the funnel of money keeps coming through, and that’s why he’s supporting Joe [DiVincenzo] right now,” Carrine Murphy, a paralegal who is critical of county jails’ contracts with ICE, told Politico.

In February, the Office of Inspector General identified a number of issues at the jail, including food safety issues, with “potentially contaminated food being served to detainees.” One example noted “a detainee in segregation said the food was so bad that he had started a liquid only diet and was considering a full hunger strike.”

Earlier this month, the Inspector General issued a follow-up report building on the same inspection and said that “detainees are placed in disciplinary segregation before the disciplinary hearing panel finds the detainee guilty of the charged offense.”

The facility has reported making improvements in its solitary confinement practices, “including documenting why detainee strip searches were conducted and revising recreation schedules to add additional recreation time,” the Inspector General wrote.

The ICIJ and Intercept investigation found 100 records of placement in solitary confinement at the Essex County jail from 2013 to early 2017. Twenty-seven of those placements were due to disciplinary reasons, while three of them were the result of a suicide risk. Overall, we found at least 373 instances of detained immigrants being placed in isolation because they were potentially suicidal — and another 200-plus cases of people already in solitary confinement moved to “suicide watch” or another form of observation, in many cases in another solitary cell.

Immigration is expected to be a hot-button issue throughout the presidential campaign. Booker and Warren will both participate in the first 2020 Democratic presidential debate in Miami, Florida, on Wednesday night.

The post As Push Against ICE Exploitation of Solitary Confinement Gains Momentum, Cory Booker Calls for Hearings appeared first on The Intercept.

“I am concerned that ICE continues to overuse and misuse solitary confinement — where detainees are locked down for at least 22 hours a day — as a cruel and unnecessary solution for detainees who have mental or physical disabilities, are disabled, have been victims of sexual assault or torture, or otherwise may be especially vulnerable and in need of protection,” Warren wrote in the six-page letter addressed to the acting director of ICE, Mark Morgan.

Her letter follows an investigation into ICE’s use of solitary confinement published last month by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The Intercept, along with five other news organizations in the United States and Latin America. Our reporting, which included a review of more than 8,400 reports describing placement in solitary confinement from 2012 to early 2017, found that ICE uses isolation as a go-to tool, rather than a last resort, to punish vulnerable detained immigrants.

The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has said that stints in solitary confinement that exceed 15 days constitute “inhuman or degrading treatment.” More than half of the 8,488 logs we reviewed described stays in solitary confinement longer than 15 days. We identified 187 cases in which a detained immigrant was held more than six months, including 32 cases in which the person spent more than a year in isolation. We also found at least 373 instances of people being placed in solitary because they were potentially suicidal, and another 200-plus cases of people already in solitary confinement being moved to “suicide watch” or another form of observation, which in many cases was another solitary cell.

Warren, in her letter, points to the results of our investigation, recent reports by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, and allegations by a DHS whistleblower who sounded the alarm about ICE’s misuse of solitary confinement for years before going public with her concerns for the first time in interviews with the reporting consortium.

“According to a trove of recently released documents, a former DHS employee, and two DHS IG reports that investigated solitary confinement at ICE facilities,” ICE was using solitary confinement sometimes as the only approach when it did not know what to do with individuals in its custody, including people with disabilities and LGBTQ people, Warren wrote.

“There is an urgent need for an expression of unflinching moral authority to challenge the use of torture and the imposition of inhumane conditions for human beings seeking protection required under our long-established body of immigration law,” the whistleblower, Ellen Gallagher, told The Intercept in reaction to Warren’s letter.

“There is an urgent need for an expression of unflinching moral authority to challenge the use of torture.”

ICE’s policies on the use of solitary confinement are laid out in the 2011 Performance-Based National Detention Standards and a 2013 directive. Under the directive, ICE is required to consider whether placement in solitary was used as a last resort for individuals with special vulnerabilities, a category that includes detained people who have a mental illness, have been victims of abuse, or would be at risk in a facility’s general population due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

In her letter, Warren demands that ICE answer seven questions by July 5. She asked the agency to provide information about the number of detained immigrants placed in solitary confinement every year since 2016; how many of those placements in solitary involved individuals with special vulnerabilities; and how many individuals have died in ICE custody after being placed in solitary confinement at any point during their detention since 2016. She also asked for a breakdown of placement in solitary confinement based on the type of detention facility, and whether the agency has taken steps to implement recommendations made by the DHS Inspector General in September 2017 and December 2017 reports.

Gallagher first raised questions about the use of solitary in 2014, after she came across ICE’s segregation logs in her role as a policy adviser at the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. She continued to escalate her concerns within and beyond DHS for four years, including by contacting the Office of Special Counsel, congressional oversight offices, and the DHS Inspector General’s office, where she now works.

“That’s what I’ve waited so long to hear.”

The senator’s office contacted Gallagher on Tuesday, and Warren’s letter represents perhaps the most significant step the legislative branch has taken to date in response to Gallagher’s whistleblowing. In June 2015, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Al Franken, D-Minn., sent a letter to then-Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson with questions about ICE’s use of solitary confinement, based on disclosures Gallagher had made.

Last month, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., responded to the ICIJ investigation by calling for a Senate hearing about ICE’s use of solitary at which Gallagher could testify.

“This report should shock the conscience of every member of Congress,” Blumenthal said. “Putting immigrants fleeing for their lives in solitary confinement, alone and away from any human contact for days, weeks, months is inhumane. It is un-American.”

Blumenthal sits on the Judiciary Committee, which has oversight over ICE. Because Republicans control the Senate, however, he is unable to call a hearing on his own. Warren, for her part, does not sit on any committee that has jurisdiction over ICE. Gallagher is a constituent of Warren’s.

“When Blumenthal said Congress should call a hearing, I felt a spark of hope that a senior senator, a leader, a committee chair would be willing to take seriously the volume of information so clearly displaying unjustified human suffering and take a principled position against it,” Gallagher said.

After learning that Blumenthal lacks the independent authority to call an oversight hearing, she asked Warren’s staffers what the Massachusetts Democrat might promise beyond Blumenthal’s position. “They indicated, ‘We have the bully pulpit.’” Gallagher said. “That’s what I’ve waited so long to hear, that someone in a position of power might look at this information and say, ‘This is clearly wrong; human beings should never be treated this way, period.’”

The post Elizabeth Warren Condemns ICE’s “Cruel and Unnecessary” Use of Solitary Confinement, Demands Answers appeared first on The Intercept.

“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” he tweeted. “They will be removed as fast as they come in.” An administration official later told the Associated Press that the effort would target people who have received final orders of deportation. There are more than 1 million people living in the United States with final deportation orders, among an undocumented population of about 11 million.  

“He obviously wants everyone to believe he’s talking about some mass roundup, which is just not possible,” immigration attorney Matt Cameron said of Trump, “both because of resources and because of due process.”

The genuine fear, coupled with the artificial threat, coming at a time of maximum insecurity for immigrants in the United States, has put immigrant rights’ groups in a bind. They are being careful in their responses to Trump’s tweet, trying to avoid creating panic, while also trying to equip people with resources needed to defend themselves legally. Adonia Simpson, director of the Family Defense Program at the Miami-based Americans for Immigrant Justice, said her group was considering whether to host a know your rights training, noting that, in her experience, immigrants tend to be afraid to go out and access legal resources at times like these. The National Immigrant Justice Center, for its part, has been circulating know your rights information online.

Simpson described people with final deportation orders as the “lowest hanging fruit” of the immigration system. ”The easiest population to go after would be individuals that have final orders of removal and are perhaps going to check in at their local ICE offices,” she said. (People with final orders of removal are sometimes allowed to stay in the United States as long as they periodically check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, often because the agency lacks the resources to deport them, they have strong family ties in the country, or there is no other country willing to take them in.)

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Trump linked his announcement of a mass roundup to recent talks with Mexico and Guatemala to keep asylum-seekers from reaching the United States, which is vastly different from removing people with final deportation orders from the country. This is yet another indication that Trump’s tweet — issued the night before his official 2020 campaign launch — was about appealing to a nativist base rather than an actual policy.

Another possibility is that Trump was referring to the rumored expansion of expedited removal, a program that currently allows ICE to quickly deport people within 14 days of their entry to the United States, if they’re caught within 100 miles of the border. “To be totally blunt, I don’t think Trump is capable of that level of nuance,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

By all measures, a plan to deport “millions” of people is an astounding exaggeration — even beginning to deport millions, as Trump pledged ICE would do, stretches the truth to a breaking point. As Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, pointed out on Twitter, ICE has deported an average of 90,000 people from the interior of the United States in recent years. The largest number of people ICE deported overall — from the interior, as well as recent border crossers — was about 420,000 people in 2012.

In response to a question about Trump’s tweet, ICE sent a statement that referred to interior enforcement. “ICE will continue to conduct interior enforcement without exemption for those who are in violation of federal immigration law,” the statement reads. “This includes routine targeted enforcement operations, criminals, individuals subject to removal orders, and worksite enforcement.”

Regardless of what Trump was referring to, or if such a plan to deport immigrants actually exists, ICE is not actually capable of such a large-scale deportation operation, immigration lawyers and analysts say.

There are about 5,000 officers in Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, an arm of ICE, who carry out deportations. From a basic staffing perspective, that’s not enough people to work to arrest and deport millions of people. Even if ICE transferred personnel from Homeland Security Investigations, the arm that looks into criminal activity and trafficking, to ERO, there would still be a shortage of officers.

“The only way they could really actually do this is to reassign people from HSI without actually going after people with serious criminal records,” said Cameron, who noted that the majority of immigrants with final deportation orders don’t have criminal records. “Potentially they’re giving up serious security investigations,” he added, referring to ICE. “We can talk about the necessity of those investigations, but at least on paper, that’s what they justify their existence with.”

ICE did not respond to a question about whether it would transfer personnel from HSI to ERO.

Another factor that makes it impossible for ICE to effectuate the plan is the lack of available bed space. Deportees don’t go straight from custody to a foreign country, but are generally detained first; there are about 50,000 beds in immigration detention centers around the country. Then there are basic logistics. To track down people with final deportation orders, ICE would probably look them up at their last known address, which, in most cases, is likely not their current address, Cameron said. Immigrants with final deportation orders often don’t have passports, and ICE would have to engage in a monthslong process to obtain travel documents for the people it intends to deport.

One of the first immigration actions Trump took as president was to eliminate a system of priorities that President Barack Obama created for deportations. The system prioritized the deportation of people with serious criminal records or who otherwise posed a threat to public safety, and its creation was an acknowledgement by the Obama administration that it’s simply not possible to deport the 11 million people who live in the United States without proper legal documents. Though the Department of Homeland Security under Trump has gone after all undocumented immigrants with equal zeal, it has maintained that it is doing so in the interest of public safety — a notion that is easily disproven. 

“Trump has abandoned any pretense of any kind of priorities,” Cameron said. “If they’re going to apply that standard for people with final orders, you’re going to give up any pretense that this is about public safety.”

Due process safeguards in the immigration system are another hurdle the administration would face.

“If you start aggressively enforcing against people who have final orders right now, you’re going to see lots of motions to reopen being filed, which would slog up a court system that’s already backed up,” said Cameron, who is based on Boston and works frequently with Central American immigrants.

The same issue would exist even if a future enforcement operation were to expand beyond people with final orders of removal to something like a workplace raid, Simpson said. “Most of these individuals would have the opportunity to have their case heard before the immigration judge,” she said. “These aren’t people who would be immediately deported. This is something that isn’t being considered in terms of effectuating removals of people in the coming weeks.”

The post What You Need to Know About Trump’s Mass Deportation Threat appeared first on The Intercept.

In one Virginia prison, Muslims known to be fasting are not being served breakfast before sunrise, while at another prison, Muslims are being forced to wait at least an hour or more after sunset to receive their dinners, according to a previously unreported letter sent to the Virginia Department of Corrections on Friday by Muslim Advocates, the Islamic Circle of North America’s Council for Social Justice, and the Virginia Prison Justice Network.

“Incarcerated Muslims have a critical right to religious liberty in prisons. Yet, Ramadan after Ramadan, we see prisons across the country needlessly deprive fasting inmates of adequate food and water, which not only disrupts the holiness of the month, but pressures Muslim inmates to choose between their Ramadan fast and their health,” said Nimra Azmi, a staff attorney at Muslim Advocates. “VDOC should act immediately to safeguard the free exercise rights of its Muslim inmates and allow them to observe Ramadan fully and freely.”

In addition to not being fed on time, incarcerated Muslims around the country also face obstacles when trying to congregate for Friday prayers and in getting their hands on copies of the Quran, said Rameez Abid, the outreach director at the ICNA Council for Social Justice, which runs a Muslim Prisoner Support Project. Earlier this year, in fact, Muslim Advocates sued a Florida county jail and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for such hurdles like lack of access to Qurans and an inability to pray as needed.

The Friday letter singles out the Red Onion State Prison in Pound, Virginia, and the River North Correctional Center in Independence, Virginia, but the groups say they believe such conditions are persistent throughout the Virginia prison system.

“We believe that Red Onion and River North are not the only facilities to be impacted by Ramadan-related issues,” the letter’s authors wrote, “and that this is reflective of a broader problem at VDOC facilities.”

The Virginia Department of Corrections did not respond to a request for comment.

While it’s difficult to gauge the size of faith groups within overall prison populations, a 2012 Pew Research Center survey of prison chaplains found that Muslims make up 9 percent of the population in the prisons where those chaplains worked.

Muslims are also more likely to face arbitrary limitations on their religious practice, according to ICNA’s Muslim Prisoners Support Project, which launched in 2018 to support detained Muslims by offering prayer services, Islamic education, and other religious resources. From 1997 to 2008, Muslims in federal prison filed the greatest number of requests for administrative remedies regarding religious observance, according to a 2008 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Religious Freedom.

With approximately 10 days until Ramadan ends, the three organizations are demanding that Muslims observing Ramadan at Virginia Department of Corrections facilities be served their meals in a timely manner and that they be given access to clean water throughout the night. The groups also called on the department to train its staff on Ramadan practices and increase oversight over meal delivery systems for the remainder of this Ramadan and in the future.

At Red Onion, prison staff have “repeatedly and purposefully failed to serve breakfast before sunrise to inmates known to be fasting,” the letter reads. As a result, detained Muslims are pressured to choose between eating that day or going without food or drink until the evening.

At River North, meanwhile, detained Muslims have been forced to wait an hour or more after sundown before receiving their dinners, extending an already 16-hourlong fast. River North staff have also denied fasting Muslims access to enough potable water after fasting hours, whereas the general population at both prisons “receive their food on time, are able to eat meals, and have access to drinkable water throughout the day,” according to the letter.

These conditions, the groups allege, violate the U.S. Constitution and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA, a federal statute that bars prisons from substantially burdening a prisoner’s ability to worship. Under the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion clause, as well as RLUIPA, the government must provide a compelling reason for burdening a detained person’s religious observance.

The prisons’ actions “clearly run afoul of the protections enshrined in both RLUIPA and the First Amendment,” the letter reads. The department’s facilities also violate “RLUIPA and the Fourteenth Amendment by treating Muslim inmates on less than equal terms with other inmates and forcing them to go without meals, adequate clean water, and timely served meals — which are not denied to non-Muslim inmates.” The conditions also violate the Eighth Amendment, because “denying fasting inmates more than a cup or two of drinkable water a day falls far short” of obligations for humane conditions in prison.

Ultimately, said Abid, “these are various ways of aggression toward the Muslim community.”

The post Virginia Prisons Putting Up Obstacles to Ramadan Observance appeared first on The Intercept.

They called it “the yard,” but it was really a metal cage. Still, it was far better than the misery she endured the other 23 hours a day, locked alone in a cell with no one to talk to and nothing to distract her from her increasingly dark thoughts.

Rivera, a 36-year-old transgender woman from Honduras and a longtime U.S. resident, was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2017. She was placed in the Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico, and moved into solitary confinement in May 2018 for harassing other detainees, according to facility records.

The cell had bare walls, adorned only with a few crude metal necessities: a table, sink, and toilet.

“You never know what day it is, what time it is,” Rivera said. “Sometimes you never see the sun.”

A passing guard cut her down before she suffocated, but her ordeal wasn’t over. After a trip to the hospital, immigration officials led Rivera to a different solitary confinement cell — this one with huge block letters across the door reading “SUICIDE SAFE.”

Rivera would spend most of the next year in isolation, in the same conditions that she blames for her mental breakdown.

The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has said that solitary confinement should be banned except in “very exceptional circumstances” and that isolation for more than 15 days constitutes “inhuman and degrading treatment.” People with mental illnesses should never be put in isolation, the rapporteur said.

ICE’s own directives say that isolating detainees — who under federal law aren’t considered prisoners and aren’t held for punitive reasons — is “a serious step that requires careful consideration of alternatives.”

An investigation by The Intercept and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has found that ICE uses isolation as a go-to tool, rather than a last resort, to manage and punish even the most vulnerable detainees for weeks and months at a time.

The Intercept’s and ICIJ’s reporting, which included a groundbreaking review of more than 8,400 reports describing placements of ICE detainees in solitary confinement, found that the immigration agency has used isolation cells to punish immigrants for offenses as minor as consensual kissing, and to segregate hunger strikers, LGBTQ detainees, and people with disabilities.

In nearly a third of the cases, detainees were described as having a mental illness, which made them especially vulnerable to breakdown if locked up alone in a small cell. Records reviewed by ICIJ describe detainees in isolation mutilating their genitals, gouging their eyes, cutting their wrists, and smearing their cells with feces.

The review found that immigrants held in the agency’s isolation cells had suffered hallucinations, fits of anger, and suicidal impulses. Former detainees told ICIJ that they experienced sleeplessness, flashbacks, depression, and memory loss long after release.

“People were being brutalized,” said Ellen Gallagher, who currently holds a supervisory role in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Gallagher has tried for years to sound the alarm within her agency about a wide range of abusive uses of solitary confinement at ICE detention centers.

Gallagher, a whistleblower who is going public for the first time, told The Intercept and ICIJ that ICE, a DHS agency, has violated policies that often require a search for less restrictive measures before people are placed in prolonged solitary confinement. She said she has never been so deeply disturbed by a professional matter. “I lost sleep. I cried,” she said.

ICIJ’s investigation was conducted over five months in collaboration with Grupo SIN in the Dominican Republic; Plaza Pública in Guatemala; Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción in Mexico; and The Intercept, NBC News, and Univision in the U.S.

It comes in the midst of unprecedented public scrutiny of the way that U.S. authorities arrest and detain asylum-seekers and other immigrants. President Donald Trump’s tough stance has caused the population of ICE detention centers to swell, with more immigrants waiting behind bars as their cases languish in heavily backlogged immigration courts — though the routine use of solitary confinement long predates Trump’s presidency.

ICIJ’s investigation included interviews with dozens of detainees, and the review of thousands of pages of audits and other documents. The incident reports reviewed by ICIJ describe placements of detainees in solitary confinement from 2012 to early 2017 — adding up to millions of hours of isolation.

ICIJ obtained the incident reports through a public records request that asked for logs detailing placements of detainees in solitary confinement. The records cover only a portion of all isolation stays in ICE facilities.

ICE said it does not keep records of every solitary confinement placement. Instead, it tracks only cases in which detainees were held in isolation for more than 14 days, and when immigrants with a “special vulnerability” were placed in isolation. This latter category includes detainees who have a mental illness, have been victims of abuse, or would be at risk in a facility’s general population due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The data generally reflects overall migration trends; more than half of the detainees in the data set are from just four countries: Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

In a statement, ICE spokesperson Danielle Bennett said the agency’s policy on segregation — the ICE term for isolation — “protects detainees, staff, contractors, and volunteers from harm.” On average, half a percent of ICE’s population was held in solitary for 14 days or more in 2018, she said.

Explore the data from more than 8,400 reports describing placements of ICE detainees in solitary confinement.

“Gasoline on a Fire”

Some detainees spent weeks or months in isolation.

More than half of the 8,488 incident reports ICIJ reviewed described stays in solitary confinement that lasted longer than 15 days. ICIJ identified 187 cases in which a detainee was held for more than six months. In 32 of those cases, the detainee was confined in solitary for a year or more.

An NBC News review of ICE detainee death reports found that at least 13 detainees who died in ICE custody had spent time in solitary, in some cases up to the time of death. In eight of those deaths, ICE later determined that rules for putting detainees in isolation and procedures for caring for them were not followed, according to agency documents.

ICIJ’s analysis found at least 373 instances of detainees being placed in isolation because they were potentially suicidal — and another 200-plus cases of people already in solitary confinement moved to “suicide watch” or another form of observation, in many cases in another solitary cell.

“This is the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire,” Kenneth Appelbaum, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who has examined ICE’s segregation practices as a DHS consultant, said of using solitary confinement to manage suicidal detainees. “This is a practice that exposes detainees to real psychological and physiological harm.”

Citing nondisclosure agreements with the agency, Appelbaum declined to comment specifically on what he saw at ICE.

Some ICE detention centers — such as Adelanto Detention Facility in California, run by the GEO Group, and Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, run by CoreCivic — reported placing hundreds of detainees in isolation. Both facilities are the subject of class-action lawsuits by former detainees alleging that the two private contractors used solitary confinement to force immigrant detainees to work for as little as $1 a day.

In response to questions from ICIJ, both the GEO Group and CoreCivic said their work programs are strictly voluntary.

Other detention centers appear to use isolation rarely, though there is no way to tell whether a facility is misreporting or underreporting incidents. (One of ICE’s government watchdogs, the DHS Office of Inspector General, has found significant problems with the underreporting of solitary confinement data).

The records show dozens of cases of detainees placed in solitary confinement solely due to a disability, many simply because they needed a wheelchair, cane, crutches, or some other aid. One detainee from Guatemala was put in isolation for more than two months only because he had a prosthetic leg. A Nicaraguan man was put in solitary for almost two months — the only listed reason: “Detainee utilizes crutches — deformed leg.”

“Sometimes I feel like someone is choking me. I have flashbacks, like I’m still confined in that little room.”

The logs also include 182 descriptions of detainees being isolated for going on hunger strike, a form of protest that advocates argue is protected under the First Amendment.

“It was mental torture, nothing else,” said Karandeep Singh, a 29-year-old Sikh from the state of Punjab in northern India who was moved to solitary confinement in the El Paso Processing Center, in Texas, after he refused meals to protest his impending deportation. Singh said that after more than two weeks in solitary, he bashed his head into his cell wall in an attempt to kill himself.

Even months after being released from isolation, Singh and other former detainees said they couldn’t move past the experience.

“After that first or second week, I lost my mind,” said Ayo Oyakhire, a 52-year-old Nigerian, of his nearly seven weeks in isolation at the ICE unit in Atlanta’s jail. “Sometimes I feel like someone is choking me. I have flashbacks, like I’m still confined in that little room.”

A Global Outlier

The origins of solitary confinement date back to European dungeons in the Middle Ages, but the practice was not institutionalized until the rise of the modern penitentiary in the early 19th century. For jailers trying to manage unruly or dangerous prisoners, isolation cells proved a useful tool: Lock them inside an armored box where they can disturb no one but themselves.

Beginning with a raft of tough-on-crime laws in the 1970s, the use of solitary confinement surged in the U.S., along with a major boom in its prison population. In 2016, Amy Fettig, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Stop Solitary campaign, wrote that the use of solitary confinement in America “is a global outlier and human rights crisis.”

Most of the attention paid to solitary confinement has focused on prisons. Its use in immigration detention centers has drawn far less notice.

In 1993, at the start of Bill Clinton’s presidency, a handful of U.S. detention centers held a few thousand immigrant detainees on any given day. Clinton signed into law new requirements that mandated detention of many immigrants who had served prison time and tripled the size of the detention network.

By the time Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, civil detention of noncitizens had become mainstream in U.S. incarceration, with large, private-sector prison companies competing for multimillion-dollar federal contracts to help detain tens of thousands of immigrants. A network of new facilities sprawled across dozens of states, many operated by private contractors or situated within county jails.

In February 2014, Gallagher, the whistleblower, who was then a policy adviser for Homeland Security’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties office, came across ICE logs detailing the placement of detainees in solitary confinement. At first, she couldn’t believe her eyes: The agency was using the punishing conditions of isolation on civil detainees routinely and often with little apparent justification.

Her alarm grew as she gathered more documentation and reviewed cases of ICE detention centers placing mentally ill immigrants in isolation for attempting suicide and for being the victim of a physical attack. One detainee was placed in isolation for the unauthorized possession of a green pepper.

Over several months, Gallagher tracked individual cases and gathered reams of documentation. Coming to believe that ICE was violating its own rules and endangering the lives of detainees, she embarked on a yearslong effort to reform the agency’s practices.

In a succession of whistleblower memos first circulated internally at DHS and then sent to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel — an independent agency where federal employees can file complaints of wrongdoing they think have been ignored — Gallagher alleged that abuses of solitary confinement at ICE had become “urgent and at times life-threatening,” and that the practices contributed to an “ongoing abuse of authority and create a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety.”

ICE’s internal guidelines explicitly require detention officials to document what alternatives to isolation were considered in certain cases. Gallagher often found no evidence that ICE had actually done this.

While a breach of ICE’s directive, by itself, would not amount to a legal violation, departing from agency rules can still be highly significant, said Lucas Guttentag, a professor of law at Stanford University. “The directive is effectively internal agency law that every employee and manager must follow with care and fidelity,” Guttentag said. “Directives are critical to governing an agency effectively.”

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties had examined ICE’s use of isolation through complaint investigations, working groups, and other advice and feedback. The office has worked with ICE “to improve policy and reduce unnecessary use of segregated housing for ICE detainees,” the spokesperson said. The office said that, in 2016, it collaborated with ICE to implement Obama-era recommendations issued by the Justice Department on improving solitary confinement.

DHS’s Office of Inspector General, which Gallagher also communicated with during her whistleblowing — and where she now works as a director in the Office of Integrity and Quality Oversight — pointed to several critical audits it had conducted of ICE facilities since 2016, including one report that focused specifically on the use of segregation and recommended better data-collection practices.

Perhaps the most meaningful step taken in response to Gallagher’s whistleblowing was a previously unreported letter sent in June 2015 by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s chair at the time, Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, and a Democrat on the panel, then-Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota. The letter was addressed to Jeh Johnson, who was the Homeland Security secretary.

“Recent information obtained by the Committee,” the senators wrote, “suggests that ICE continues to place many detainees with mental health concerns in administrative or disciplinary segregation — also known as solitary confinement — contrary to agency directives that limit the use of segregation for the mentally ill.”

Believing that she has exhausted her options for whistleblowing within the government, Gallagher agreed to share her story. Without public action, “this same set of circumstances will not stop,” she said. “And I think it will actually get worse.”

The Suicide Room

Dulce Rivera has led a troubled life. Although her birthplace is unknown, her earliest memories are of the streets of San Pedro Sula in Honduras. She said her mother, a sex worker, abandoned her to fend for herself at age 10. Rivera said she suffered abuse on the streets and began using drugs at an early age. Fleeing destitution in Central America, she arrived in the U.S. when she was 16 and was later granted permanent residency.

In 2013, she was convicted in Santa Barbara, California, of robbery in the second degree, an aggravated felony, according to immigration court filings. She spent the next four years in prison before being transferred to ICE custody.

ICE maintains that while detained in New Mexico, Rivera harassed other detainees, an allegation she denies.

After the suicide attempt, Rivera was put in a new solitary confinement cell that was much like her first, but this time, she was stripped and given a heavy, green smock that couldn’t be torn or otherwise fashioned into an instrument of self-harm.

She was still locked alone almost all of the time in conditions that caused her mind to fester. “They take off all your clothes and they put you in a cell that is more terrible,” Rivera said.

“Due to housing limitations at various facilities, segregation use for suicide observation is a necessity.”

ICIJ found that there is often a revolving door between solitary confinement and medical isolation cells for people deemed at high risk of trying to hurt themselves. Like Rivera, Karandeep Singh, the Indian hunger striker, was also moved again to isolation after he tried to kill himself. He said he remained in what he called the “suicide room” for 24 hours in handcuffs and was then placed in a smock, like Rivera.

In one memo, Gallagher described seeing records of ICE detainees moving “chronically back and forth from the general population to administrative or disciplinary segregation, with periodic, crisis-oriented admissions to psychiatric hospitals punctuating their return to the same disturbing cycle.”

The records ICIJ reviewed contain numerous examples. In Michigan’s Calhoun County, after an Iraqi detainee was admitted to a hospital for cutting himself with a razor, detention officials placed him in suicide watch and then charged him with “a weapons offense and self mutilation,” sentencing him to 30 additional days in isolation, otherwise known as Special Housing Unit, or SHU, as punishment.

In the agency’s response, Bennett, the ICE spokesperson, said agency standards permit it to place potentially suicidal people in isolation as a last resort. “Due to housing limitations at various facilities, segregation use for suicide observation is a necessity,” Bennett said.

The standards also permit ICE to use isolation cells to allow medical staff to monitor detainees on hunger strike when necessary, Bennett said.

Even some of the toughest critics of solitary confinement acknowledge that it can be necessary to separate people from the general population of a jail or detention center for a short time. It can be for their own protection — or to protect others, if a detainee, for instance, is experiencing a fit of violent anger. But experts and human rights advocates say that solitary confinement placements should be rare and last as short a time as possible.

When action must be taken, facilities can first require mediation or anger management classes, or take away privileges, such as television time, experts say. Detainees at risk of harm could be transferred to other units or facilities that have more accommodating populations. If isolation is necessary, detainees should be permitted meaningful contact with others for multiple hours a day, and given a clear road map indicating what they must do to be let out. “Nobody should be on ‘dead time’ in solitary, meaning they perceive that there is nothing to do and nothing will improve their situation,” said Terry Allen Kupers, a psychiatrist and professor at the Wright Institute who has studied solitary confinement extensively.

ICE documentation suggests that the detention center put Rivera in the suicide watch isolation cell as a form of punishment intended to change her behavior.

“She has finally begun to reflect upon her actions,” noted a mental health worker at the facility. “[Rivera] admitted that her actions have cost her a lot, and she didn’t realize how well she actually had it (even in SHU) until being back now [on suicide] watch again.”

Experts say using solitary confinement as a way to manage suicidal detainees is unacceptable. “The only way to respond to suicidal prisoners and help them is to talk to them, to have an evolving therapeutic relationship,” Kupers said. “That’s how we treat suicide in any setting.”

Asking detainees to decide between the threat of violence and the misery of isolation is no choice at all.

In August 2018, ICE moved Rivera to El Paso. There, the transgender woman was given the option of rooming in the general population — or alone in an isolation cell, according to ICE records. (Rivera disputes that she was offered a choice).

Many case logs reviewed by ICIJ indicate that a detainee requested an isolation cell for their own protection. Wes Brockway, Rivera’s attorney, said asking detainees to decide between the threat of violence and the misery of isolation is no choice at all.

“We’re giving the option of being in a population where they might not be safe, or going into conditions where they’re extremely isolated and almost guaranteed to suffer psychological harm,” he said. “It’s completely contrary to the idea of protecting someone.”

Citing a 2015 agency guidance on the treatment of transgender detainees, ICE said it weighs housing options for such individuals with a multidisciplinary team that can include mental health staff and subject matter experts. The agency said that transgender detainees should be placed in segregation only as a last resort and when no other housing options are available.

CoreCivic, which runs the Cibola facility, said that it is contractually required to follow ICE’s detention standards. “We’re committed, as we have been for three decades, to creating a safe environment for the individuals ICE entrusts to our care,” CoreCivic spokesperson Amanda Gilchrist said, “and to following all federal guidelines on the appropriate accommodation of transgender detainees.”

In El Paso, Rivera spent nearly eight months in solitary confinement, mostly under protective custody. On April 9, she was abruptly released from the detention center altogether.

Punished With Isolation

In the incident reports reviewed by ICIJ, “disciplinary segregation” — or punishment for breaking the rules — was the single reason most often given for putting a detainee in solitary confinement.

The infraction most often cited was fighting. Disputes over stolen shampoo bottles and what television channel to watch sometimes boiled over into physical altercations in the reports ICIJ reviewed.

Scattered throughout the reports are descriptions of people being placed in solitary confinement for what seem like minor infractions.

One detainee was placed in isolation for giving haircuts. Another spent 13 days in isolation for consensually kissing another detainee. A third, despite having a mental illness, remained in solitary for 41 days for encouraging other detainees to go on hunger strike.

One detainee was placed in isolation for giving haircuts. Another spent 13 days in isolation for consensually kissing another detainee.

A 2017 audit by the inspector general’s office for DHS identified “problems that undermine the protection of detainees’ rights, their humane treatment, and the provision of a safe and healthy environment.” ICE detention centers were placing detainees in solitary confinement for infractions as minor as improperly sharing a cup of coffee, the audit found. In some cases, the watchdog pointed out, detainees were punished with solitary because they were suspected of having committed an infraction that officials needed time to investigate.

Ilyas Muradi, a 30-year-old longtime U.S. resident from Afghanistan, has spent most of the last four months in solitary at ICE’s South Texas Detention Complex. He said he was accused of entering a shower without authorization, and threatening a guard.

Muradi denied that he threatened a guard, but acknowledged getting into multiple fights with other detainees last year. He said he believes that guards are now punishing him simply because they don’t like him — and he is frustrated because he doesn’t know what he can do to be released from solitary.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Muradi said. At the end of one call to ICIJ, Muradi lost his usual composure, breaking into sobs, asking, “Can you please help me?”

In recent years, some state prison systems in the U.S. have taken steps to limit the use of solitary confinement to discipline inmates for violating facility rules. Texas, where Muradi is detained, outlawed the practice in its correctional institutions. The state prisons use solitary confinement only in cases in which a detainee presents a threat due to gang affiliation or other security risks.

In ICE detention, by contrast, disciplinary isolation is sometimes used to segregate the victim of an attack.

In mid-April 2017, a 27-year-old detainee named Jeancarlo Jimenez-Joseph at ICE’s Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, was placed in solitary confinement for several days for fighting. Video surveillance footage shows Jimenez-Joseph being attacked by another detainee and feebly defending himself.

Not long after he was released from solitary confinement for the fight, Jimenez-Joseph was back in solitary as punishment for jumping off a second-level balcony — an action he told staff was aimed at hurting no one but himself.

After 18 days in segregation, he hanged himself using a sheet tied to a sprinkler head in his small cell.

In a statement, CoreCivic, which runs the Stewart facility, said that it was not responsible for health services at the facility at the time of Jimenez-Joseph’s death.

Lasting Trauma

In the middle of April, on a park bench set back from the din of Amritsar, India, a temple-dotted city near the Pakistan border, Karandeep Singh lifted a pristine New York Yankees baseball cap and pointed to a two-inch scar slanting up from his right eyebrow toward his hairline. It is a reminder of his attempt to end his life in solitary.

The cut has closed, but Singh, who was deported to India in late February, said his mental wounds have been slower to heal. “I am mentally elsewhere. I cannot sleep,” Singh said. He said he has flashbacks that trigger the fear he felt in solitary confinement in Texas. “You are changed; you can’t feel safe,” he said.

ICE detainees who recounted their experiences to ICIJ and its partners gave remarkably similar descriptions of the lasting trauma of solitary confinement.

They spoke of feeling cell-bound long after their release; of insomnia; of suffering vivid flashbacks of isolation, particularly at night; of grappling with depression and memory loss.

Manpreet Singh, a 30-year-old detainee and acquaintance of Karandeep, said ICE placed him in solitary for going on hunger strike at the agency’s facility in Otero County, New Mexico. Manpreet Singh said he suffers flashbacks at night and has lost interest in socializing. “I don’t talk to people much anymore,” he said.

After her release on April 9, Dulce Rivera moved into the Las Cruces, New Mexico, home of a visitation volunteer she had grown so close to in detention that she calls her “Mom.”

She now has her own bedroom with windows that let in the morning light. But at night, the fear creeps back in. She has recurring nightmares, disorientation, and trouble sleeping. And when she goes to bed, she leaves the door open.

Contributors: Emilia Diaz-Struck, Scilla Alecci, Ben Hallman, Richard H.P. Sia, Fergus Shiel, Tom Stites, Hamish Boland-Rudder, Amy Wilson-Chapman, Pauliina Siniauer, Antonio Cucho, Andrew Lehren, Vanessa Swales, Alicia Ortega, Julia Ramírez, Enrique Naveda, Suchit Chávez, Alejandro García, Valeria Durán, Daniel Lizárraga, Andrew Lehren, Vanessa Swales, Lynn Dombek, Talya Cooper, Roger Hodge, Ariel Zambelich, Moiz Syed, and Tamoa Calzadilla.

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