EL PASO/DAYTON MASS SHOOTINGS - Brought to You by the GOP, #45, and the NRA (continued)

"El Paso shooting stuns tight-knit community that welcomes diversity" PBS NewsHour 8/5/2019

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  At least 22 people were killed when a gunman opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso on Saturday.  The alleged shooter referenced white supremacist ideology in a manifesto posted online shortly before the massacre.  Judy Woodruff talks to William Brangham, reporting from El Paso on why the violence is so “jarring” in a largely welcoming and harmonious community adjacent to the U.S. border with Mexico.

"After massacre, Dayton residents demand political action on guns" PBS NewsHour 8/5/2019

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Less than 24 hours after a shooting massacre in El Paso, another nine people were gunned down in a busy nightlife area of Dayton, Ohio, early Sunday morning.  Police quickly killed the alleged gunman.  Judy Woodruff talks to Yamiche Alcindor, reporting from Dayton on how stunned residents are coping with the tragedy, what they think is causing the violence and the political change they want to see.

"Dayton’s mayor on her grieving community, gun control and Trump’s visit" PBS NewsHour 8/7/2019

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  On Wednesday, President Trump traveled to Dayton, Ohio, where a gunman killed nine people and wounded 26 early Sunday morning.  Ahead of his visit, Mayor Nan Whaley expressed concerns about the President’s previous rhetoric and said she hoped his visit would “add value” to the grieving community.  Whaley joins William Brangham to discuss what she told Trump about her stricken city and gun safety.

"Why El Paso residents felt ‘deeply divided’ about Trump’s visit" PBS NewsHour 8/7/2019

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  President Trump visited grieving El Paso Wednesday.  An “El Paso Strong” rally was held to coincide with his arrival -- and protest his rhetoric on race and immigration.  Judy Woodruff talks to Dan Bush, reporting from El Paso, about the mood in the “deeply divided” city, how residents felt about the President’s visit, Trump’s agenda while in town and what Sen. Ted Cruz [R-Tx] said on the somber occasion.

EUROPEAN POLITICS - Hungary's Extremism

"Hungary’s extremism may be harbinger of Europe’s political future" PBS NewsHour 11/3/2018

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban was once thought to be the best person to lead a sphere of former Soviet states toward western-style democracy, but he has instead taken the country on a more populist course, one that's alarmed other European leaders who criticize his treatment of migrants, the media, NGOs, and academia.  NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Christopher Livesay reports.

TRUMP AGENDA - Corporations Profiting From Immigrant Detainees’ Labor

"Investigation: Corporations Are Profiting From Immigrant Detainees’ Labor.  Some Say It’s Slavery." by Victoria Law, In These Times 5/29/2018

IMHO:  It IS slavery!

Excerpt

At privately run detention centers, immigrants say they're forced to work for $1 a day.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP VOWED IN MARCH, “My administration will focus on ending the absolutely horrific practice of human trafficking.  And I am prepared to bring the full force and weight of our government, whatever we can do, in order to solve this horrific problem.”

Trump is using this specter of human trafficking to justify beefed-up border walls and a vicious crackdown on immigrants.  Experts say his cure has nothing to do with the disease.

“It’s a fantasy, what the President is promising,” says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at George Mason University who studies trafficking in Mexico and Central America.  “People will still come, escaping poverty and violence.  Trafficking happens when they are forced to work along the route—drug smuggling, sex work.  By increasing border enforcement, you’re just making the journey more expensive and longer, and making people more vulnerable to traffickers.”

But some people caught in this sweep say that the federal crackdown itself subjects them to another, pernicious form of trafficking.  They say the corporations that operate immigrant detention facilities illegally force detainees to work.  There’s reason to believe thousands of the roughly 35,000 people in immigrant detention are currently being coerced into labor.

Under federal law, human trafficking is defined as subjection to involuntary labor through “force, fraud or coercion.”  Within the past year, four lawsuits have been filed by seven people who say they were victims of trafficking at the hands of the nation’s two largest private detention center operators: CoreCivic and GEO Group.  The suits charge that at five CoreCivic facilities and one GEO Group facility, the corporations violated the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act by threatening solitary confinement or withholding basic necessities, such as food, toilet paper and soap, if detainees refused to work.  According to the lawsuits, the companies did so to reduce labor costs and maximize profits.

The four new suits join one already wending its way through the court system.  Filed in 2014 against GEO Group, the suit was certified as a class action this February.  Approximately 62,000 people currently or previously detained in a GEO Group facility in Colorado might have been affected.

Each of these five lawsuits concerns the Voluntary Work Program, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program that puts detainees to work for $1 a day.

“The name ‘Voluntary Work Program’ is misleading since, in most cases, it actually means forced labor,” says Liz Martinez, director of advocacy and strategic communications at Freedom for Immigrants, a nonprofit working to abolish immigrant detention.  Noting that detained people are wholly dependent upon detention staff for basics such as food, toilet paper and even time outside, “the detention facilities create an inhospitable atmosphere that incentivizes people to join these Voluntary Work Programs,” she explains.

Asked about the size of the Voluntary Work Program, ICE spokesperson Danielle Bennett wrote, “Voluntary Work Programs currently exist at the five government-owned Service Processing Centers (SPCs) and at over 25 privately run facilities.”  Bennett would not clarify what “over 25” meant.  A 2014 New York Times investigation by Ian Urbina found that 55 U.S. detention centers had Voluntary Work Programs, 34 of which were run by private corporations.

Though only privately run detention centers have been named in the lawsuits, advocates don’t rule out the existence of forced labor in government-run facilities.  “In county jails and other public facilities, they’re also put to work,” says Martinez.  Not all of that labor falls under the Voluntary Work Program.  Urbina found that Butler County Jail in Ohio, for instance, is not a formal participant, but approximately 50 of the 300 immigrants detained under the jail’s contract with ICE clean and perform maintenance.  A county representative told Urbina that utilizing unpaid immigrant labor means the jail does not need to hire outside janitorial workers, saving the county hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

However, lawsuits have targeted privately run detention centers because of the number of reported violations, as well as the outrage surrounding the fact that corporations and shareholders are profiting from this labor.

WORKING FOR $1 A DAY AND SANITARY NAPKINS

Martha Gonzalez was already a trafficking survivor.  Fleeing an abusive relationship in Mexico, she hired coyotes to bring her and her daughter across the border, and was forced into sex work after the coyotes threatened them with violence.

In October 2017, after 14 months in ICE custody, Gonzalez was released and issued a T-1 visa, reserved for trafficking victims.  Now, she is demanding restitution from CoreCivic.  In February, she sued the company for labor trafficking.

Gonzalez spent those 14 months being shuttled through three of CoreCivic's Texas detention centers, in La Salle County, Hutto and Laredo.  At both Hutto and Laredo, she says, prison officials verbally abused detainees, threatened them with solitary confinement and deprived them of basic necessities in order to coerce them into working seven days a week.  For instance, Gonzalez tells In These Times, if she tried to take a day off, detention center staff refused her toothpaste and other essentials.  When she was menstruating, they limited her sanitary napkins to two per day unless she worked.

5,532:
DAILY POPULATION IN U.S. IMMIGRANT DETENTION CENTERS IN 1994
39,322:
DAILY POPULATION IN U.S. IMMIGRANT DETENTION CENTERS IN 2017
Though the suit doesn’t specify how many others were allegedly threatened into working, Gonzalez says she wasn’t the only one who suffered retaliation for refusing to work.  She also alleges that the paltry wages sometimes went unpaid, thus depriving her of the means to stay in touch with her family.  In 2016, she filed a formal complaint about not being paid for some of the days she had worked.  In retaliation, she says, staff didn’t allow her to work at all.  Without that $1 a day, Gonzalez could not afford phone cards to call her daughter and mother.  Calls from CoreCivic’s Texas detention centers typically cost 50 cents per minute.

Gonzalez and her attorney are seeking class-action status on behalf of every detainee who worked for no pay or $1 or $2 per day at any CoreCivic detention facility from February 2007 onward.  It’s not yet known how many people could become part of this lawsuit if the court agrees, but her complaint estimates the number to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.  Gonzalez wants the court to force CoreCivic to stop the practice.  She and her attorney are also seeking minimum wage payments for labor performed while detained.

AMERICAN POLITICS - 2020 False Census

IMHO:  The purpose of the census is ONLY to count how many people live in the United States of America, citizen OR non-citizen.

"Wilbur Ross Overruled Career Officials at Census Bureau to Add Citizenship Question" by Justin Elliott, ProPublica 3/27/2018

The Commerce secretary wrote a memo arguing that the benefits of the controversial question would outweigh any harm.

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross’ decision Monday to add a controversial question on citizenship to the 2020 census came in the face of opposition from career officials at the Census Bureau who fear it will depress response rates, especially from immigrants.

Two people with knowledge of the deliberations said career leaders in the Census Bureau, which is part of the Commerce Department, had scrambled to come up with alternatives to adding the question.  Those efforts were unsuccessful.

In a memo announcing his decision, Ross said that “The Census Bureau and many stakeholders expressed concern that [a citizenship question] would negatively impact the response rate for non-citizens.”

But Ross added that “neither the Census Bureau nor the concerned stakeholders could document that the response rate would in fact decline materially.”

The Census Bureau recently noted greater fear and reluctance to fill out the survey in the current political climate.  In a November presentation, a bureau official cited a recent increase in respondents expressing concerns about confidentiality of data related to immigration.  It cited particular concerns among participants in what it labeled an Arabic focus group and among Spanish-speaking respondents.

A Census spokesman referred questions to the Commerce Department.  A Commerce spokesman said that Ross “took a hard look” at an alternative proposal by the Census Bureau to get citizenship data without adding the question.  But he ultimately decided the proposed method “would provide an incomplete picture."  The Ross memo argues that the value of the data collected from the new question will outweigh any harm.

ProPublica first reported in December that the Justice Department had submitted a last-minute request that the Census Bureau add a question on citizenship to the 2020 survey.  The Justice Department argued that better data on citizens was needed to better enforce voting rights protections for minority groups.  But civil rights groups and Democrats fear that the question will lower response rates, affecting congressional redistricting and distribution of federal dollars for a decade.

It would be the first time since 1950 that the full, once-a-decade census asks people about their citizenship.  The Constitution requires a count of all residents of the country every ten years.  The Census Bureau conducts a separate detailed survey of a sample of U.S. households that includes questions about citizenship.

The driving force behind the request for the new question, according to internal emails, was a Justice Department political appointee who spent years as an attorney in private practice defending GOP redistricting maps around the country.  That raised even more concerns among civil rights groups that opposed the addition of a citizenship question.

In response to Ross’ decision, the state of California filed a federal lawsuit Monday night in U.S. district court seeking to block the question.  “California simply has too much to lose for us to allow the Trump Administration to botch this important decennial obligation,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement.  “What the Trump Administration is requesting is not just alarming, it is an unconstitutional attempt to discourage an accurate census count.”

Update, March 28, 2018: This story has been updated to include a comment from the Commerce Department.