The retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had prompted speculation and fear among supporters of reproductive rights even before President Trump nominated D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace him. In the Supreme Court’s decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, Kennedy joined with several colleagues to protect the “core holding” of Roe v. Wade, and he had remained a supporter — if not exactly an ardent one — of a precedent-based right to abortion. If the Senate confirms Kavanaugh, many supporters of reproductive rights fear that a five-justice majority will then stand prepared either to overrule Roe outright, or else to chip away until Roeis reduced to an empty husk.

Given that the Supreme Court will likely limit the right to reproductive choice, meaningful access to abortion would become contingent on the will of state legislatures.

Forceful advocacy for reproductive choice at both the national and state level has seldom been more important. And it’s time for men to join the front lines of the fight.

Abortion is usually framed as a women’s issue. In some ways, this makes sense: Reproductive choice — and its absence — affects what happens within women’s bodies. And for the one in four women who have had an abortion, the issue is particularly personal. But it is important to remember that men also benefit greatly from safe and legal abortions. A partner’s abortion has enabled men to finish school, allowed men to pursue their chosen careers, saved men from the loss of a spouse because of medical complications, kept men from economic hardship and spared men the emotional burden of unwanted parenthood. Men should be deeply invested in reproductive freedom, too.

Yet in the face of the current threat to reproductive freedom, calls to action have been disproportionately directed toward women. Consider the strategy of sharing personal stories, which is designed to destigmatize abortion and to emphasize its importance. Following upon a Supreme Court amicus brief in which women lawyers recounted the importance of abortion to their professional and personal well-being, a recent New York Times opinion piece suggests that more women who have had abortions should speak up and tell their stories. While this nuanced essay makes clear that no one is obligated to tell her story, others — including many men — have called upon women to tell their stories more forcefully.

What we too seldom hear is that men should also tell their abortion stories. We need to hear from the man who was able to stay in college, the man who did not become a single parent to two daughters after his wife died during a complicated pregnancy, the man whose uninterrupted research while a graduate student yielded a lifesaving cancer treatment and the man whose family did not become homeless during a stretch of unemployment — all because their partners had access to safe and legal abortion. Mathematically speaking, millions of men have such stories. The one-in-four women who have had an abortion did not get pregnant on their own.

These stories are powerful. Yet we rarely hear these perspectives, and more rarely still do we hear calls for men to describe how abortion has affected them personally. This needs to change.

At a fundamental level, men can relate to other men’s stories, in much the same way as advocates hope women can relate to other women’s stories. This person could be my best friend. It could be my son. It could be me. Maybe it was. Reproductive choice advocates often say that everyone knows and cares about a woman who has had an abortion. This is true. It’s equally true that everyone knows a man whose life is much better because abortion is safe and legal — or maybe they are such a man themselves.

Because men have also benefited from abortion, they should do more to share the responsibility for defending it. Women often face terrible repercussions when their abortions become public: They are attacked online, slut-shamed and in some instances face legal repercussions. None of this should happen, of course — but it does, and it’s time for men to shoulder more of that burden. Indeed, the burden might not be as heavy for men: When it comes to sex, research shows that women are more likely than men to be stigmatized for identical behavior, and men would therefore face less scorn for disclosing how a partner’s abortion benefited them. And if men came forward with personal narratives about how abortion has affected — and improved — their lives, perhaps abortion as a whole would become a less stigmatized topic.

Urging men to share their abortion stories does not imply that men should get to decide whether women have abortions. Women should have the absolute right to determine what happens to their own bodies. But in practice, many couples decide how to handle an unplanned pregnancy together. Research by Arthur Shostak and his colleagues found that about half of women are accompanied to abortion waiting rooms by men, indicating that they are involved in the process of choosing and seeking abortion care. And when women have the opportunity to choose, men also benefit.

For decades, men have benefited from the availability of safe and legal abortion. And it’s time for men to start taking threats to reproductive freedom personally. To all the men who know the importance of reproductive choice from firsthand experience: If you are ready, share your abortion stories with your families, your friends and your community. Call your representatives and insist that they only confirm justices who will respect the long-established precedents of Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood. And, when the time comes, hold your representatives accountable at the ballot box for protecting reproductive freedom. Abortion is your issue, too.

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A 30-year-old woman has been charged with attempted murder in an attack on a 91-year-old man on the Fourth of July, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

Laquisha Jones was also charged with elder abuse and infliction of injury in connection with the attack, in which an elderly man was struck with a brick in Willowbrook last week, the district attorney’s office said. Prosecutors are asking that bail be set at $1.125 million.

Prosecutors said Jones attacked Rodolfo Rodriguez near 118th and Robin streets. Following the assault, they said, Rodriguez was taken to the hospital and Jones fled the scene.

Century Station detectives arrested Jones on Tuesday night.

Rodriguez had gone out for a walk in Willowbrook about 7 p.m. on July 4 when he was assaulted, according to a GoFundMe campaign set up by his family. Rodriguez has a broken cheekbone and bruises on his face.

His family said a woman confronted Rodriguez after he reportedly bumped into a little girl who was with her. Rodriguez was then struck from behind, and “as he fell on the ground, he blacked out,” Sheriff’s Det. Matt Luna said.

Misbel Borjas, who lives near Rodriguez, was passing by in a car when she saw him walking and trying to pass a woman and a girl. Then, Borjas said, she saw the woman push Rodriguez and start to hit him with a block of concrete.

“She was yelling at him, ‘Go back to your country,’ or ‘Go back to Mexico,’” Borjas recalled. “It was racist.”

But authorities said that through their investigation, “detectives have discovered that this is not a hate-related incident.”

Jones is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday afternoon. The felony complaint includes special allegations that she used a deadly and dangerous weapon (the brick) during the commission of the crime and that she committed great bodily injury upon the victim, according to the district attorney’s office.

The charging document alleges that Jones was previously convicted of making criminal threats in 2017, in an unrelated case.

If convicted as charged, Jones faces a maximum possible sentence of 29 years in state prison.

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Sitting before an immigration judge in this south Texas detention center Thursday, a Central American mother separated from her son pleaded for asylum.

“Your honor, I’m just asking for one opportunity to be here,” said the woman wearing a blue prison uniform and a red plastic rosary around her neck. “You don’t know how much pain it has caused us to be separated from our children. We’re kind of losing it.”

Judge Robert Powell’s face was stern. During the past five years, he has denied 79% of asylum cases, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

“What you’re describing is not persecution,” he said.

“I’m asking for an opportunity,” the woman replied in Spanish through an interpreter.

“I’m not here to give you an opportunity.” He ordered her deported.

Immigrant family separations on the border were supposed to end after President Trump issued an executive order June 20. A federal judge in California ordered all children be reunited with their parents in a month, and those age 5 and under within 15 days. On Thursday, the administration said up to 3,000 children have been separated — hundreds more than initially reported — and DNA testing has begun to reunite families.

Port Isabel has been designated the “primary family reunification and removal center,” but lawyers here said they have yet to see detained parents reunited.

To qualify for asylum in the U.S., immigrants must prove they fear persecution at home because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group,” and that their government is unwilling or unable to protect them. Most of the Central American parents detained here after “zero tolerance” fled gang and domestic violence. But that’s no longer grounds for seeking asylum, according to a guidance last month from Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions. Immigration courts are part of the Justice Department, so judges are following that guidance.

Because immigration courts are administrative, not criminal, immigrants are not entitled to public defenders. And so, each day, they attempt to represent themselves in hearings that sometimes last only a few minutes.

The courtrooms are empty. That’s because, like a half dozen others nationwide, the court is inside a fortified Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. Access is restricted, and may be denied. The Times had to request to attend court hearings — which are public — 24 hours in advance. After access to the facility was approved last week, access was denied to the courtrooms when guards said the proceedings were closed, without explanation.

Detainees have little access to the outside world, including their children. It costs them 90 cents a minute to place a phone call. When they do, they can be nearly inaudible. They receive mail, but when reporters wrote to them last week, the letters were confiscated and guards questioned why they had been contacted, according to a lawyer. Lawyers also said some separated parents have been pressured into agreeing to deportation in order to reunite with their children.

UNICEF officials toured Port Isabel Thursday. A dozen pro bono lawyers visited immigrants. But they were spread thin. None represented parents at the credible fear reviews, where judges considered whether to uphold an asylum officer’s finding that they be deported.

Immigration Judge Morris Onyewuchi, a former Homeland Security lawyer appointed to the bench two years ago, questioned several parents’ appeals.

“You have children?” he asked a Honduran mother.

Yes, Elinda Aguilar said, she had three.

“Two of them were with me when we got separated by immigration, the other is in Honduras,” said Aguilar, 44.

“How many times have you been to the U.S.?” the judge asked.

Aguilar said this was her first time. The judge reviewed what Aguilar had told an asylum officer: That she had fled an ex-husband who beat, raped and threatened her. “He told you he would kill you if you went with another man?” the judge said.

Yes, Aguilar replied.

The judge noted that Aguilar had reported the crimes to police, who charged her husband, although he never showed up in court. Then he announced his decision: deportation.

Aguilar looked confused. “Did the asylum officer talk to you and explain my case?” she said.

The judge said he was acting according to the law.

Although she was fleeing an abusive husband, he said, “your courts intervened and they put him through the legal process. That’s also how things work in this country.”

Aguilar knit her hands. She wasn’t leaving yet.

“I would like to know what’s going to happen to my children, the ones who came with me,” she asked the judge.

“The Department of Homeland Security will deal with that. Talk to your deportation officer,” he said. Guards led her away as she looked shocked, and brought in the next parent.

Denis Cardona, 31, told the judge he fled Honduras to the U.S. with his son Alexander.

“Where is he?” the judge asked.

“He’s here, detained, but I don’t know where,” Cardona said. “I was told he’s an hour away.”

The judge reviewed Cardona’s case. It was his first time crossing the border to the U.S. He had fled threats from the MS-13 gang after a land dispute with a cousin.

“And you did not report this to authorities in your country?” the judge said.

Yes, Cardona said, “but they didn’t listen.”

“It’s difficult for police to get where we were, and also the police do not help poor people,” he said.

Why hadn’t he told the asylum officer all that, the judge asked. Cardona said he had. He leaned his head on his hand. He looked tired.

Moments later, the judge ruled.

“This is a family dispute. This is not grounds for asylum in the United States,” he said. Deported.

Down the hall, Judge Powell heard appeals from separated parents appearing by video feed from Pearsall Detention Center to the west. Though he denied most asylum cases, there are exceptions. Recently, after an asylum officer denied a claim by a Central American woman who said police raped and threatened to kill her, Powell reversed that decision. She can now pursue her asylum claim, though she still hasn’t been released or reunited with her kids.

On Thursday Nora Barahona, of Honduras, told Powell she had fled to the U.S. after her husband beat and raped her, abusing their children. She crossed the border with her 12-year-old daughter, but was separated by immigration officials.

“They told me they had sent her to Florida,” she sobbed.

The judge ordered Barahona deported, as he would a dozen others who appeared before him. He read from a script, telling each that they had failed to meet the requirements for asylum. He ended with: “Good luck in your home country.”

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The words appear on a scrap of paper, scrawled in pencil by an immigrant mother held at a detention center: “We beg you to help us, return our children. Our children are very desperate. My son asks me to get him out and I’m powerless here.”

In another letter, childish print on notebook paper, a mother spoke of her son: “It’s been a month since they snatched him away and there are moments when I can’t go on.… If they are going to deport me, let them do it — but with my child. Without him, I am not going to leave here.”

At least 2,053 children were separated from their parents due to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Officials have said they reunited 538 of those children, but didn’t intend to reunite them with parents who were detained. In more than a dozen letters collected by volunteers, detained mothers separated from their children shared their despair, pleaded to be released and sent messages of love to their children.

Trump issued an executive order last month to end the practice of separating families, but when and how the government will reunite them is unclear. On Tuesday, a federal judge in California ordered officials to return small children to their parents in two weeks, others within a month, but Justice Department lawyers said Friday they need more time and planned to detain families longer.

Families were initially separated at a Border Patrol processing center in the Texas border city of McAllen into chain-link fence cells, which the mothers called “dog kennels.” Reporters were recently given guided tours of the center, but forbidden from interviewing or photographing detainees. Some detention centers do not allow reporters to visit detainees, who must pay for phone calls.

Last week, The Times asked volunteers and attorneys visiting detained immigrant parents in Texas to convey written questions. More than a dozen mothers at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, 30 miles north of Austin, responded. Volunteers from local nonprofit Grassroots Leadership shared their letters with The Times, identifying the women by first name because some of their asylum claims are still pending.

The mothers left various countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Their letters provide a glimpse of why they came to the U.S., how they were separated from their children and what they hope will happen now.

Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions has directed Justice Department lawyers to reject asylum claims based on fears of domestic and gang violence, the two main reasons many of the mothers fled Central America. One asylum seeker asked how the U.S. could enforce such a policy.

“Is it that the president doesn’t have any children so he can ignore the pain he is causing us?” a mother of two wrote, adding that she ran away from her country “because they threatened to kill me and my children … but here they killed us alive by taking away our children.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have said parents were separated from their children when they were charged with illegal entry and taken to federal criminal court, a new practice under the zero-tolerance policy.

In their letters, detained mothers described the separations as painful, especially for their children.

“He screamed, begging them to please not separate us. He hugged me, crying. He asked me not to let them separate him from me,” wrote Lesvia, recalling how her son tried to kiss her between the bars of his cell until an official made him sit down.

Officials said parents were given forms in Spanish explaining the separation process. But in several letters, mothers said they were told little or nothing about the process. Some mothers describe being reassured as they headed to court that they would see their children again, only to return and find them gone.

A mother who asked not to be named wrote that she and her 15-year-old son were detained separately and that she was told to board a bus to another detention center.

“I asked about my son and they wouldn’t respond. I insisted on knowing and they told me, ‘Ma’am, your son is not here, he is far away and you’re being deported to your country.’”

She said that’s when she started to cry and “pleaded with them to let me stay with my son.”

“The official told me, ‘Don’t make me use a Taser gun on you,’” she wrote.

Friends later told her that’s when she fainted. At the time she wrote the letter, she had not heard from her son in 23 days.

Miriam, a single mother, said she was separated from her 10-year-old son, Kennet, on June 3 after the she came to the U.S. seeking asylum from gang threats and sexual harassment in El Salvador.

“I didn’t know about the new law separating children and mothers,” she wrote, adding that her asylum claim was initially rejected and she was not allowed to call her son for 14 days. When she and her son finally spoke, Miriam wrote, he had a fever and a sore throat and “from the beginning of the call to the end of the call he could not stop crying, begging me to please get him out of that place and bring him to be with me.”

Federal officials have said that immigrant parents separated from their children have been in touch with them by phone. But many of the mothers echoed Miriam’s comments, writing that they had not talked to their children for weeks, didn’t know where they were and worried about their safety. Some mothers said guards told them they would never see their children again.

“They said after June 4, which was my court hearing, I would be able to see him, but that wasn’t true,” a mother named Antonia wrote.

When Antonia was allowed to call her 12-year-old son June 20, she wrote, “He was begging me to get him out of that place. He was crying and it made me feel helpless, not being able to do anything from inside here to get my son back.”

Sandra wrote that when she was separated from her 12-year-old son on June 1, she was told she would see him again “in a matter of hours.”

“It was all a lie,” she wrote in a letter dated June 28. “From that day to this, they have not told me if they will give him to me or what will happen.”

Yasmin said she also wasn’t told she would be separated from her two daughters, ages 12 and 13, after they were detained May 22, according to her letter.

“They told me it was temporary and that I would later be reunited with them, but it wasn’t like that,” she wrote.

Days passed, and as she and other mothers despaired, Yasmin wrote that their guards laughed.

“Around me were many mothers crying for their children. Several would often faint because what they would hear is that we would be deported and they weren’t going to return our children, they would stay behind,” she wrote of the guards. “For seven days I didn’t know anything about my children because they wouldn’t give any information about them, not to any mother.”

Some detained parents told lawyers last week that they have been pressured by immigration officials to abandon their asylum claims if they want to see their children. Others have already been deported without their children, lawyers said. The American Civil Liberties Union, Texas Civil Rights Project and other legal advocacy groups have objected, saying the government is interfering with the immigrants’ right to due process.

Over the weekend, mothers at Hutto — many of whom have applied for asylum — told volunteers from Grassroots Leadership that they had been notified by immigration officials to prepare for transfer to a temporary detention center at Fort Bliss Army post outside El Paso for reunification with their children and deportation.

Despite concerns about the possibility of being deported, in their notes to their children, the mothers tried to stay positive.

“I miss you a lot, I love you and we will be together soon,” Noyma wrote to her son. “I don’t want you to be sad.”

“Every day I pray to God that we will be together again, and we will never be separated again because you are the most beautiful thing God has given me,” Miriam wrote.

“I love you despite living this nightmare.… I’m not going to give up until I have you in my arms,” Lesvia wrote.

“When we’re together again, I will spoil you like always. I will cook your meals and we will go on walks and I’ll lie next to you until you fall asleep,” Claudia wrote to her 7-year-old son Kevin. “I love you, my prince. I hope to God and the Virgin Mary, my child, that we will soon be together and we’ll never be separated again. I love you baby, sending you kisses.”

Learn more at LA Times

Nearly every day, an immigration lawyer makes his or her way to a barbed-wire enclosure along Hungary’s border with Serbia, ready to walk an asylum seeker through the daunting process of pleading for safe haven in one of the most refugee-resistant countries in Europe.

Now these lawyers risk jail time if they so much as help a client fill out a complicated Hungarian-language form. Hungary’s parliament last week approved a legislative package aimed not only at barring the gates to almost any outsider — but also decreeing punishment for those who try to aid would-be migrants.

Amid paroxysms of immigration-related political strife in the United States — family separations at the border with Mexico, the Supreme Court’s upholding of the administration’s travel ban targeting nationals from certain Muslim-majority countries — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a self-professed fan of President Trump, is savoring his latest and most sweeping victory in the migration wars shaking Europe.

The new measures, set to take effect as early as this weekend, allow for the prosecution and jailing of human rights workers and volunteers for providing services, advice or support to migrants and asylum seekers. The package, which prompted vehement criticism from the European Union and human rights groups, could still be vetoed by Hungary’s president, Janos Ader, but such a scenario is seen as highly unlikely.

Hungary has taken in vanishingly small numbers of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, but Orban — whose populist Fidesz party swept to victory in April elections, securing him a third term — sees vindication in the draconian anti-immigration measures increasingly espoused not only by hard-right leaders elsewhere in Europe, but also by the U.S. president.

Even before the latest stringent measures, Hungary earned a reputation for hostility toward migrants who surged through Europe three years ago, a wave made up largely of Syrian war refugees trying to make their way to friendlier destinations such as Germany and Sweden. Hungary erected a barrier on its border with Serbia and Croatia; state media relentlessly bashed Muslims as a threat to Christian Hungary. A much-viewed video showed a Hungarian camerawoman tripping a Syrian man as he ran across a field carrying his child, sending him sprawling.

Orban, who crowed at being the first European head of state to congratulate Trump on his 2016 election victory, sees the U.S. president as a kindred spirit. Critics agree, often portraying the pair in the same unflattering light, particularly on immigration issues.

Jan Egeland, the secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, tweeted last week that Budapest and Washington were seemingly in a “race to the bottom” when it came to dealing with foreigners seeking refuge from violence.

Hungary has responded with defiance toward those who say Orban’s aspirations to an “illiberal state” — with moves that have included a constitutional rewrite and a crackdown on press freedom — mark a blatant break with EU norms and values.

“We want to keep Hungary a Hungarian country, and we don’t think that multiculturalism is by definition good,” Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told the BBC this week.

Orban’s government, like the Trump administration, has repeatedly cited border security and the need for anti-smuggling measures as a pretext for the newly tightened laws. And like Trump, the Hungarian leader appeals to his base with routine use of harsh, heightened language to characterize immigrants.

”The invasion should be stopped!” Orban told reporters in Brussels on Thursday.

Adding fuel to the fire, the EU’s internal struggles over the migrant issue have been greeted with seeming glee from both Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, set to meet next month in Helsinki, Finland.

At a moment when leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron are trying to maintain a united European front in the face of aggressive trade moves by Trump and the threat of election interference from Russia, migration is perhaps the most polarizing issue confronting the bloc. Merkel, speaking Thursday to Germany’s Parliament, called it a “make-or-break” question.

The battle is in many ways paradoxical. The number of arrivals in Europe has dropped off dramatically since the 2015 crisis.

But in an echo of the U.S. dynamic of falling rates of migrant arrivals coinciding with ever more strident efforts to place the issue at political center stage, Orban has set himself up as the champion of an anti-migration faction mainly made up of countries that were satellites of the former Soviet Union.

That cohort also includes a chorus of far-right voices in countries that weren’t part of the Soviet bloc, such as Austria and Italy. One of the most vocal and vitriolic of those is Matteo Salvini, Italy’s combative new interior minister, who is also the deputy prime minister.

Leader of the anti-immigration League party, Salvini has taken aim at ethnic minorities including Italy’s Roma population, blocked refugee rescue boats from docking and declared that the country needed “mass cleansing.”

Salvini was among the Italian officials who met Tuesday with John Bolton during the U.S. national security advisor’s Rome stopover en route to Moscow to lay groundwork for the Trump-Putin meeting.

An emergency gathering Sunday by a group of leading European Union members, which was boycotted by Hungary and several other states, was meant to engineer at least a show of unity on migrant burden-sharing. Instead it showcased deep divisions, rendered all the more painful by Trump’s apparent glee over splintering of the EU and political schisms within member states that count among America’s closest allies.

This month, the U.S. president shocked Germans with his open jeering of Merkel over the pressures her governing coalition faces on the migration issue, coupling his gibes with a false insistence that migrants have driven up German crime rates.

Vessela Tcherneva, program director for the European Council on Foreign Relations and the head of its Bulgaria office, cited Trump’s use of “nativist, nationalistic forces” to deepen splits within the bloc as well as efforts at inroads in individual member states where his message might resonate.

Orban has long proudly showcased his affinity for Trump, and the two leaders had a friendly phone call this month as a political storm gathered over the U.S. president’s since-softened policy of separating migrant parents and children at the southwestern border.

For Orban, “the immigration issue is an area of commonality with Trump policies,” Tcherneva said. She cited a “wider context of what kind of societies these politicians want to lead, being sovereign and powerful at the expense of others…. This is very alien to the nature of the European Union.”

Former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, exiled from the White House but focused on offering encouragement to Europe’s hard right, has had particularly kind words for Orban. Appearing at a conference in Budapest last month, he hailed the Hungarian leader as “Trump before Trump.”

In Hungary, activists say the new immigration legislation portends a long struggle. Marta Pardavi, the co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human-rights watchdog group, said the harsh new measures, while not unexpected, were nonetheless “very, very shocking.”

Some of Orban’s critics have called for the invoking of Article 7 of the EU’s founding Treaty of Lisbon, which calls on all member states to “respect the values” of the bloc. Hungary has already been called out in the European Parliament for at least a dozen democratic breaches, and the European Commission could launch a so-called infringement proceeding, which could open the way to contesting the measures in court.

But a two-day EU summit that began Thursday brought more messy public acrimony, with Orban and his partisans loudly spurning calls for migrant burden-sharing. Most observers believe that at most, the bloc may manage symbolic accord on tightening Europe’s external borders and steps such as creating incentives for third countries to dissuade migrants from trying to reach Europe’s shores.

In the meantime, activists say, Hungary’s new measures are likely to have a profound chilling effect, made all the worse by uncertainty, on those who try to move ahead with previously legal forms of migrant aid.

“You don’t have to be convicted for this to massively disturb your day-to-day work, and your personal and family life,” said Todor Gardos, who carries out Eastern European research for New York-based Human Rights Watch.

“The law is very vague, but at the same time allows for very specific application,” he said. “Suddenly you have people who view your files, the police and prosecution can be investigating you … and without even knowing, you can be entering into the criminal justice system.”

Learn more at LA Times

They were here because of Parkland. And before that: Sandy Hook. Before that: Columbine.

Outside, as the sun came up, kids wearing “March For Our Lives” T-shirts clogged the streets carrying signs reading “PROTECT KIDS NOT GUNS.” It was the weekend of the young people’s protest.

These 21 strangers gathered inside, away from the noise. They had traveled to Washington, D.C., not to march, but to take part in an experiment. They were victims of gun violence, and gun collectors, and cops and lawyers and hunters and teenagers and moms.

Could they do a better job talking with a group of strangers than they had managed to do with their own families? Could they agree on some measures to mitigate the crisis? Could they have a productive conversation, or even a civil one?

A gun, by its nature, is a polarizing thing. A gun forces us to envision ourselves on either one end of it or the other. A gun is an equalizer, a tool, a symbol of liberty and power and slaughter and loss.

Some of the 21 gathered here saw a gun as an instrument of protection. One kept an AR-15 atop the armoire. A few often wore guns strapped to their bodies, under their clothes.

Others had been threatened with guns. They feared that guns empowered people who would marginalize or silence them. They had been intimidated, mugged, raped. They’d lost mothers and cousins and uncles and friends.

They’d been recruited from around the country and across the political divide in an attempt to see if it was possible to create an experience that might build understanding. They would spend two days learning to listen, and then they’d join 130 others in a conversation on Facebook, where people often go to hear only what they already believe.

None of them were entirely sure what they were getting into.

Here was Malak Wazne, 18. Before this experiment was over, a Michigan teenager a lot like her would be shot at while knocking on a door asking for directions. Would Malak’s ideas be welcome?

Here was Dan Zelenka, a lawyer and competitive shooter, who knew just about everything there was to know about guns. He came to teach. Would he also be willing to learn?

Here was Alexis Intili, who could spot a liberal a mile away. “Dumb idiot morons,” she called them, to their faces. The marchers outside annoyed her. She would never, ever have anything to learn from a high school kid. What did they know?

In a small room, they sat in a circle, close enough that their knees touched. Group leaders coached them to ask better questions, to avoid marginalizing words, to think about how they naturally embed assumptions inside questions.

“It seems to me that this issue all comes down to safety,” said Mathilde Wimberly, a retired educator from Metairie, La., who favors gun control. “My question is, What are you so afraid of? But that’s offensive.”

She thought for a moment.

“Can you tell me more about why you feel that you need lots of guns?”

It’s the difference, a group leader said, between asking, “What are you so afraid of?” and “What sorts of things make you feel afraid?”

Each person wrote on a Post-it note one thing they wanted the others to understand about them:

“All I want is to come home at the end of the school day.”

“As a law-abiding gun owner, I am not a danger to you.”

“I feel like I’m fighting for my right to be alive.”

Alexis hoped someone would insult President Trump so she could go off. She’s from Staten Island, where recently she saw two people have a fistfight in a Dunkin’ Donuts over whether the last episode of The Sopranos was any good.

She’s comfortable with confrontation. She was primed for it. But emotion?

“I didn’t want to listen to other people’s damn stories and their crying.”

She’s a financial adviser, and in business, she thought, emotion makes you weak. She grew up in an I’ll-give-you-something-to-cry-about house in a Republican bubble.

“I never got a chance to know anyone else,” she said. “Nor did I want to. I didn’t care.”

She’s pro-gun, but her niece and nephew, ages 10 and 7, are hiding under desks during lockdown drills at school. So something has to change.

She sized up the others in the group. Too young. Too liberal. Too stupid. But she had asked to be part of this, and she decided to give it her best. Then the other members of the group shared their stories. And she listened.

She heard stories about PTSD, rape, suicide and stone-cold killing.

“There’s a lot more to this,” she said to herself. “Damn, man. I’m a closed-minded bitch.”

The conversation that began in Washington, D.C., migrated to Facebook, where it included about 150 people over the next month.

Alexis gave up Netflix so she could settle into bed with her laptop each night and take her role in the conversation seriously. Dan checked his Facebook feed almost constantly.

They were forced to consider the roots of their deeply held beliefs. The questions they would ask gave voice to their prejudices and fears.

Why is your personal safety worth more than mine?

If you saw me walking down the street carrying a gun, what would you honestly think?

Is the right to bear arms unalienable, as some believe the Declaration of Independence suggests? Is this right endowed by God, or bestowed by the government in the Bill of Rights? With an eye on history and another on current events, they re-examined language they thought they understood.

Security. Militia. Well-regulated. Free State.

On a warm Sunday morning, on the edge of St. Tammany Parish outside of New Orleans, past Rick’s Catfish Cabin and Todd’s Country Corner, Dan pulled his FordExpedition into an earthen quarry and unloaded a bunch of guns.

“My toys,” he said.

He pulled out his M1A1 Thompson submachine gun, his M1 Garand, his German MP40, his Swedish “K”, his M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle and his German MG42. He also brought along a few AR-15s—assault rifles, as they’re widely known. The guns Dan and his pals shoot every fourth Sunday in friendly competition. The guns he wants to demonstrate and destigmatize, even as they have become the weapon of choice in mass murders across America.

On Facebook, Dan had offered a lengthy explanation to the oft-asked question, Why would anyone need an AR-15? Lots of reasons, he wrote. It’s the most popular rifle in America. Adaptable for many types of hunting, easier to shoot accurately than a handgun.

Dan’s nephew J.P., a high school sophomore, dragged metal targets across the Louisiana dirt speckled by spent shells that twinkled in the sunlight. Time to shoot.

At age 3, Dan wore toy six-shooters to his aunt’s wedding. At 10, his dad bought him a .22 rifle for Christmas. “Forty-five years worth of guns,” he said.

Dan likes to shoot, and he loves to defend the Constitution, especially the Second Amendment.

“We are,” he said, “the arsenal of democracy.”

His mind was made up. He was so resolute some in the Facebook group thought he was a mole for the National Rifle Association.

Gun crimes are down sharply since the mid-’90s, he pointed out correctly. “America has gotten safer, but we watch night after night the news about the epidemic of gun violence.”

The problem, then?

“It’s the criminals,” he said. He supports changes to stop violent criminals from getting guns. But he does not support restrictions on broad, ill-defined categories of guns.

“The term assault weapon means nothing and it means everything,” he said, “because the term is infinitely expandable to mean whatever they make it up to be. And every time they change it, it expands to include more and more firearms.

“If you really sat down and looked at the numbers—took all the emotion away—then you have to support gun rights,” he said.

He has known four people who have been present at mass shootings. Two young women he met hiking in the Grand Tetons wound up inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in July 2012, when a madman opened fire. One of the women took a bullet to the knee. Twelve were killed, 70 injured—the largest number of casualties in one shooting in modern U.S. history, until the 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which held the distinction until the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas, where Dan’s old girlfriend had been listening to country music. That’s three. The fourth was his friend Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Congressman shot through the hip last year when a man opened fire at a Republican baseball practice near the U.S. Capitol.

On Facebook, Dan posed and then considered the essential question: Are school shootings the price we pay for a certain level of liberty?

“What we should never do is allow the criminal conduct of a few to be the catalyst for the infringement of any right protected by the Constitution,” he wrote.

Throughout our history, he wrote, we have sent young people to fight for American rights and ideals. “If someone began attacking our schools demanding that we surrender our freedom of religion or freedom of speech or right to vote, would we comply? I think not. Would we be willing to pay a price in blood to protect our freedom?

“Clearly, if history is an indicator, the answer is yes.”

On this Sunday, Dan coached his nephew, lying on his belly, staring down the scope of a German machine gun that fires 20 rounds per second.

“You’re going to have to use some muscle,” Dan told him. “Pull it hard. Pull it real hard.”

Behind the scenes of the Facebook conversation, an army of moderators took turns in shifts, helping people craft comments and reframe questions. They nudged women and young people to speak up, and they gently asked a couple of white guys to quit hogging the mic.

Helene Cohen Bludman felt shouted down by Dan and his lawyerly recitation of gun statistics. So the moderators set her up in a one-on-one conversation with Jon Godfrey, a military veteran in New York, who was one of the 21 initial participants in D.C.

Jon talked about living in a rural area, in a house at the end of a long, dark driveway, where police response times were not comforting. He told her about the gun he leaves with his wife when he’s away. He put together a presentation for Helene illustrating the things they had in common: sports, dogs, grandchildren.

“I felt myself understanding for the first time,” said Helene, a freelance writer from Bryn Mawr, Pa. “Honestly, this was such an epiphany for me. I did not change my feelings about guns, but I understood that good, smart people could feel differently.”

Three people got kicked out of the Facebook group. A few faded away. The moderators struggled with how to handle the mansplainers. Were people participating or advocating? Would pulling them aside help?

They read 13,500 posts and replies in the course of the month.

A group from Pittsburgh gathers on the East Front of the Capitol before joining the student-led March for Our Lives rally on Pennsylvania Avenue to call for action to prevent gun violence on March 24, 2018.

“The litmus test was are people trying? Do they want to have this conversation?” said Eve Pearlman, the co-founder of Spaceship Media, the firm that helped lead the conversation. “If they are, we can work with them on the habits they’ve worked on over a lifetime. If they want to keep trying, we can keep trying with them.”

Brittany Walker Pettigrew, another moderator, found herself scrolling comments on her lunch hour at her day job when she came across one that made her freeze. The post, by a white male gun-rights supporter, was an attempt to answer the question “Why do people need to own guns?” It has since been edited, but it said, in essence, I need my guns like Rosa Parks “needed” to sit at the front of the bus.

For Brittany, a 45-year old African-American child-welfare manager in Oakland, Calif., that post was so blatantly offensive that she had to sit down.

She and the other moderators debated how to handle things. Was this guy racist? Should he be banned? But Brittany, channeling the spirit of the group, decided to talk to him and try to explain why people just can’t bring Rosa Parks into all this.

Afterward, Brittany wasn’t entirely sure if the man understood. But she realized that he had actually been trying to say something useful. And then, over time, something much more powerful started to sink in.

“I was heard. And I heard him,” she said. “And there’s nobody in my family that has ever spoken to a white person about racism and not been killed for it.”

In the end, they didn’t propose legislation or draft a resolution or circulate a petition. They didn’t even change their minds.

“We explicitly don’t have the goal of changing minds,” said Eve. “There is such a breakdown in public spaces for civil discourse. The act of humanizing each other is itself the goal.”

But one weekend in April, Helene, the freelance writer from Pennsylvania, was organizing a community march for gun violence, passing around handouts, when she scanned the suggestions for protest signs and cringed. “The NRA is evil.”

That would not have bothered her before, but now she knew that NRA members don’t like to be called evil any more than liberals like to be called socialists. Her experience in the group helped her learn to listen again.

“Now that extends to when I have conversations that are not about gun violence,” she said. “I see the shades of gray where before I couldn’t.”

Alexis, the Staten Island financial adviser, swears the change she felt in D.C. has been lasting. She considers her D.C. counterparts friends for life. Even the liberals. She never wants to return to the closed-minded, bubble-dwelling name caller she used to be. When she got into a disagreement with a work colleague, she says she suppressed the reflex to call him “dumb idiot moron,” and instead said, “Tell me why you feel that way.”

April ended, and so did the conversation—on official channels, anyway. Ruth Grunberg of Cortland, N.Y., started a book club for members of the group, and they got too busy chatting to read any actual books. Ade’Kamil Kelly of East Orange, N.J., recorded a podcast.

Dan, the Louisiana lawyer, attended the NRA convention in Dallas. Alexis went to a business meeting in Las Vegas, where gun laws are as loose as the necklines, so she asked Dan where she should go to shoot something big. He directed her to Battlefield Vegas, where Alexis said she paid $330 to shoot an AK-47, a Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum revolver, a German MG42 machine gun and a Barrett M107A1 .50-caliber sniper rifle.

She wanted to feel a kickback that knocked her out of her shoes. The weight of the guns. The flames shooting out of the barrel. The smell of hot metal and powder. The thunder that made people around her back up. The vibrations from the guns firing in the lanes beside her. She wanted to embrace the moment when she, a 45-year-old financial adviser, fired a gun that could blow a plane out of the sky.

And then she thought: “You could shoot down a room full of people in seconds.”

And: “What if one of these other people in here is crazy?”

And: “Why are these guns even around?”

And: “It’s not worth everybody being slaughtered.”

Dan would never forgive her for saying it, she thought, but ban them. Ban automatics. Ban semi-automatics too.

Then, on May 18, Santa Fe High School.

Alexis heard when she got back from Las Vegas. The details were blurry. Was it eight kids dead? Was it only eight this time?

Only?

Other members of the Facebook group took in the news having mostly returned to the bubbles of their lives. Malak, who had joined the conversation knowing she represented both Muslims and high school students, got the news in theater class in Dearborn, Mich. She walked from fifth period to sixth watching the live feed on her phone. The feeling among her friends was one of defeat, a collective shrug.

It was eight kids dead, in fact. And two teachers. Thirteen injured. The shooter, a 17-year-old in a trench coat, used a pump-action shotgun and a .38 revolver owned legally by his father.

David Preston, a courier in Mobile, Ala., who was robbed at gunpoint years ago while delivering pizzas, wrote a public post on his personal Facebook page: “What is going to be The Narrative of the gun grabbers when it is revealed that the Texas school shooter used a Remington 870 instead of an AR-15?”

David says he was working for Papa John’s when a gunman ordered him to hand over his tip money. Thirty-five bucks. The next day he bought a gun.

Helene had accepted his friend request just days before. Now he was calling the Parkland students pawns of a liberal media.

Helene thought it wouldn’t matter to the families of those dead kids what kind of weapon it was, and she felt all the old familiar powerlessness and resignation and despair.

Had they learned anything, really? Would any of them change? Not their minds—that had never been the point. But their hearts?

Helene clicked his profile, and then she clicked:

Unfriend.

So where does it all lead? As each of them take whatever kernel of empathy or understanding or consternation into the rest of their lives, what will they reap? If an experiment doesn’t produce a new law or at least a campaign slogan, did it do any good? In Staten Island, Alexis is organizing a splinter group, hoping to repeat the project. She figures her neighbors are stubborn like her, and the group leaders had better bring their A-game. Another new group is starting in Alabama.

Last month, MassLive.com, an Advance Local newsroom in Massachusetts, led a new group in a two-day moderated gun conversation that mirrored the one in D.C.

A woman who had lost a son, a mom who had been shot in the face and a hunter still in his camo all came together and felt the same connection and sense of wanting to do … something.

They stood in a circle when it was over and tried to articulate their hopes.

“I want my words to have power.”

“I want to make people who look like me less threatening.”

“I want to grow as a person, and be better.”

Share your story

Want to understand why someone could feel so differently about guns? Do you feel like those on “the other side” don’t understand how you’ve gotten to your point of view? As a part of “Guns: An American Conversation,” Advance Local and Essential Partners launched their Heart-to-Heart story sharing initiative to pair you anonymously with one other person somewhere in the USA. They receive your story, then you receive theirs. Find the form at www.heart2heartstory.com, or call 1-877-209-5717 and you’ll get the form by mail. We’re hoping to keep conversations like this going all over America.

About this project

“Guns: An American Conversation” convened people on opposite sides of the social and political spectrum to engage in a dialogue around the polarizing topic of guns. The project began with a workshop for 21 participants on March 24 and 25 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and expanded to 150 people who participated in a monthlong moderated Facebook group. It was launched by a coalition of American newsrooms owned by Advance Local, in partnership with the journalism organization Spaceship Media, Essential Partners and TIME. This article and a documentary video on the project are being published jointly in TIME and Advance news outlets across the U.S.

Learn more at TIME

The case President Trump and his allies have built against the Justice Department and the FBI is circumstantial at best.

And on Thursday, the various arguments Trump and his Republican allies have leaned on to suggest or outright claim FBI bias against the president got knocked down, one by one, by the top of the bureau's chain of command.

What's more, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray categorically denied these characterizations of the FBI's work while under oath. Wray and Rosenstein, who appointed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, testified Thursday for hours to the House's Judiciary Committee.

Let's run down the top GOP attacks thrown at the Russia investigation and what Rosenstein and Wray had to say about them.

1. GOP argument: The Russia investigation is led by Democrats

Some members of Mueller's team have donated to Democrats. But not all, as Trump frequently frames it.

And at least one of those same Mueller staffers also donated to Republicans. In addition, as Wray and Rosenstein underscored Thursday after questioning from Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.), they aren't Democrats.

“I do not consider myself an angry Democrat,” Wray said.

“Are you a Democrat?” Gutiérrez asked Wray. “No I am not,” he replied.

Gutiérrez: “Mr. Rosenstein, are you a Democrat?”

Rosenstein: “I am not a Democrat, and I am not angry.”

What's more, Rosenstein said he wasn't aware of any conflicts of interest Mueller himself might have, which Trump cryptically referred to in a tweet Thursday morning.

2. GOP argument: Rosenstein inappropriately approved spying on the Trump campaign

House Republicans declassified a memo this February arguing that the FBI leaned on politically biased information to get a warrant to spy on a former Trump campaign official, Carter Page. In that memo, Rosenstein was mentioned — right as it was reported that Trump was considering using the memo to fire Rosenstein.

Legal experts have said Rosenstein played by the book on authorizing a warrant renewal to spy on Page, which is known as a FISA warrant. Plus, he wasn't a big part of it. The original decision to spy on Page happened before Rosenstein was in the job. And he's not the one who approved subsequent spying; only federal judges on a secret court can do that.

Rosenstein underscored all of that Thursday: “It'd be a dereliction of duty for me to fail to approve a FISA that was justified by the facts and the law,” Rosenstein said.

3. GOP argument: The Justice Department is hiding something when it doesn't immediately hand over documents to Congress

Rosenstein and House Republicans have been tangling for the better part of a year over various House Republican requests for documents as they investigate both the probe of Hillary Clinton's emails and the motives behind the Russia investigation. In the middle of Thursday's hearing, Republicans voted to demand Rosenstein turn over sensitive documents to Congress.

But is tussling over classified documents a natural tension between Congress and the Justice Department or, as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tried to frame it, a sinister move by the Justice Department? “We have caught you hiding information,” Jordan accused.

Rosenstein pushed back on that. Hard. He got visibly upset, and he denied under oath that the Justice Department has any nefarious intentions.

“When you find some problem with production and questions, it doesn't mean I'm personally concealing something from you,” Rosenstein said. “It means we are running an organization that is trying to follow the rules.”

4. GOP argument: FBI agent Peter Strzok's personal bias affected the conclusion of the Hillary Clinton email investigation

Republicans have argued it's implausible that an agent who was near the top of both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia investigation demonstrated political bias against Trump in personal texts but didn't bring that bias to work.

But that flies in the face of findings from an independent report by the Justice Department's inspector general. The report said Strzok's texts weren't professional but found no evidence that Strzok's bias actually influenced the outcome of any investigation. He's since been removed from the Russia investigation.

Wray reiterated that Thursday: “My understanding of it is that [the inspector general] found no evidence of political bias actually impacting the investigation that he reviewed.”

Earlier in the hearing, Wray, unprompted, defended his agency from broad characterizations (made by the president) of bias: “This report is about a specific set of events and a specific set of employees. Nothing in this report impugns the integrity with our workforce as a whole or the FBI as an institution.”

On those texts, Rosenstein later added: “There were violations of the rules, I recognize that. . . . I can assure you that the cases that are brought under our watch are going to be under compliance of the rules. The folks we work with day in and day out there are almost all there to do the right thing.”

5. GOP argument: Rosenstein should recuse himself from the investigation

Getting rid of Rosenstein would get rid of a lot of Trump's self-professed problems. Rosenstein appointed Mueller and approves Mueller's work; Trump could appoint someone else to oversee the Russia investigation.

On Thursday, Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) asked Rosenstein why he hasn't stepped aside if he oversaw parts of the investigation that DeSantis and Trump and allies think were skewed politically.

Rosenstein replied he had no reason to: “I can assure that, if it were appropriate for me to recuse, I'd be more than happy to do so and let somebody else handle this. But it's my responsibility to do it.”

Both Wray and Rosenstein, prompted by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), also took the opportunity to say they wouldn't bow to political pressure to leave their jobs.

Rosenstein: “Congressman, in the DOJ, we are accustomed to criticisms of our work, and it doesn't affect our work.”

Wray: “Congressman, as I've said repeatedly, I am committed to doing this job by the books in all respects, and there is no amount of political pressure that is going to dissuade me from that by either side.”

Learn more at Washington Post

A day after a San Diego federal judge issued an injunction ordering the Trump administration to reunite thousands of migrant children with their parents within the next 30 days, the next central question seems to be: Now what?

There was no clear answer Wednesday as various federal agencies struggled with how to abide by the order, especially given the confusion that continues in light of President Trump’s executive order last week to end family separations at the border.

Asked about the injunction, Trump offered no complaint, saying, “We believe the families should be together also, so there's not a lot to fight.”

But details on a plan of action were scarce.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which is in charge of the separated children, referred questions Wednesday to the Justice Department, which in turn said it was up to Congress to deal with the border situation.

“Without this action by Congress, lawlessness at the border will continue, which will only lead to predictable results — more heroin and fentanyl pushed by Mexican cartels plaguing our communities, a surge in MS-13 gang members, and an increase in the number of human trafficking prosecutions,” a DOJ representative said.

HHS is caring for about 12,000 migrant children, including some 2,000 who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border with a parent.

The department's Administration for Children and Families said in a statement that it was “focused on continuing to provide quality services and care” to minors being held in Office of Refugee Resettlement-funded facilities and reunifying children with relatives or appropriate sponsors.

“Reunification is always the ultimate goal of those entrusted with the care of unaccompanied alien children, and we are working toward that for those unaccompanied alien children currently in our custody,” it said.

But Robert Carey, who led the refugee office during the Obama administration, said the agency will probably struggle to link children with their parents, especially if parents are still detained or have already been deported.

Historically, children in the refugee office's care arrive alone in the U.S., with personal documents or a contact for a relative already in the country, making it easier to place them with a sponsor. But there have been widespread reports of children being taken from their parents unexpectedly, and where neither side knows where the other is.

In his order, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw was highly critical of the reunification process, arguing that administration officials were only trying to reunite kids who were being removed from the country. When parents were not immediately removed, it was essentially up to the parent to try to locate a child.

“The facts set forth before the court portray reactive governance — responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the government's own making,” he wrote.

The ACLU, which requested the injunction as part of a federal lawsuit in San Diego, celebrated Sabraw’s order Wednesday and said it would be closely monitoring the government for compliance.

Here are some of the central questions surrounding family separations and what the injunction means.

What exactly did the injunction do?

The preliminary injunction calls for all immigrants in U.S. Department of Homeland Security custody to be reunited with their separated children within 30 days, or 14 days for youngsters under 5. It also requires parents to have telephone contact with their separated children in government custody within 10 days.

The order prohibits future immigrants in DHS custody from being detained without their children. And if the parent is released, then their children must also be released into their custody. Children must also be deported with their parents.

There are some exceptions: If a parent is found to be unfit or a danger to the child, or if a parent voluntarily declines to be reunited while in DHS custody or for deportation.

Is the injunction just for those who cross the border illegally?

No, families who present themselves at a port of entry with a claim for asylum have also been separated — including a Congolese woman known as Ms. L. in the San Diego lawsuit — so the injunction covers them, as well. These separations usually occur if immigration officials cannot verify the parental relationship with the children or because a parent had some kind of criminal history. It is not yet clear how the judge’s order will affect these cases.

“We are a country of laws, and of compassion,” Sabraw stated in his order regarding asylum seekers. “We have plainly stated our intent to treat refugees with an ordered process, and benevolence, by codifying principles of asylum. The government’s treatment of Ms. L and other similarly situated class members does not meet this standard and it is unlikely to pass constitutional muster.”

Is this timeline for reunification reasonable?

The American Civil Liberties Union , which requested the injunction, thinks so.

“This is more a matter of priority or urgency than an inability to deal with logistics,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday. “When the U.S. government puts all its resources to work, it can get something like this done easily.”

He said the ACLU doesn’t care about the specifics of the plan, as long as it gets done. He said thousands of volunteers and nonprofit agencies stand ready to assist the government in getting children back together with their parents.

The government argued in a briefing just a day earlier that a court order would slow down the reunification process and “cause confusion and conflicting obligations.”

There are logistical challenges. Children are being kept in shelters across the United States — many are thousands of miles from the border. Many immigrant parents say they haven’t been able to locate their children because the parents don’t have their “A number,” or “alien number.”

Immigration authorities will have to determine whether to detain families as units — a difficult proposition because of a serious lack of bed space appropriate for families and a court settlement limiting the amount of time children can spend in detention. Authorities could also parole them into the community, possibly under GPS monitoring. The Trump administration has been reluctant to offer parole to immigration detainees, a practice that was used by the Obama administration.

The government is seeking to have family detention quarters set up on military bases, possibly including Camp Pendleton, but it is unknown how soon the facilities would be up and running.

And then there are the unknown number of parents who have already been deported from the U.S. without their children.

Can the government appeal?

The government can request an emergency stay of the injunction — a step it would probably take if it did not want to begin immediately complying with the order — and it can appeal the injunction to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The 9th Circuit option might be taken if the Trump administration wants to fight the order’s prohibition of family separations.

It is not clear yet what the government will do.

How does the injunction affect criminal immigration prosecutions under the ‘zero-tolerance’ policy?

The injunction does not have a direct effect on criminal prosecutions.

Under its “zero-tolerance” policy, the Trump administration has vowed to criminally prosecute 100% of people caught illegally crossing the border. That means immigrants are arrested and taken to a criminal detention facility.

The injunction does not order parents to be released from criminal detention or for children to be reunited with a parent in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service. Instead, the order directs reunification once the criminal case is over and the parent is released into DHS custody for civil immigration proceedings.

For those who are charged with misdemeanor illegal entry — the charge that makes up the vast majority of arrests under zero tolerance — the criminal case usually takes a few weeks to a month in the Southern District of California.

To confuse matters, Trump’s executive order on family separation indicates families caught at the border facing criminal entry charges will be detained together in the future.

Since that executive order, the Border Patrol has generally declined to refer parents apprehended with children for criminal prosecution unless the parent has a criminal record or there are extenuating circumstances.

What was the judge’s reasoning for granting the injunction?

Sabraw disagreed with the government’s argument that the executive order settled the family separation issue and thus an injunction was not needed. The executive order did not address reunifying the 2,000-plus children already separated, and it is not absolute in its promise to halt separations.

Sabraw ruled that the way families have been separated “shocks the conscience,” which is a legal standard used when weighing such injunctions, and found that the separations caused irreparable harm to children.

He noted the lack of an effective system or procedure to track separated children, noting that detainees’ personal property is better accounted for than their children are. He concluded that nothing in the injunction would stymie Trump’s ability to enforce criminal and immigration laws.

“The Government would remain free to enforce its criminal and immigration laws, and to exercise its discretion in matters of release and detention consistent with law. It would just have to do so in a way that preserves the class members’ constitutional rights to family association and integrity.”

Learn more at LA Times

CORRAL DE MULAS, El Salvador — Arnovis Guidos Portillo remembers the authorities in green uniforms telling him that this would only be temporary.

They told him that his 6-year-old daughter, Meybelin, should really go with them, he recalled. The holding cell was cold, he said he was told, and the child was not sleeping well. Don’t worry, he was assured, she would take the first bus, and he would follow soon.

“What’s best is we take her to another place,” he recalled a U.S. official telling him.

It’s a conversation this 26-year-old farmer from El Salvador has replayed for nearly a month. His daughter was taken from him on his second day in U.S. immigration custody in Texas, he and his lawyers said, and she remains somewhere in the United States.

Guidos was deported Thursday back to this small Central American nation, where he lives in a one-room, dirt-floor shack with no electricity and two goats in the yard.

He and his daughter are one of more than 2,000 migrant families who have firsthand experience with President Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. The decision to prosecute all those caught crossing illegally into the United States meant that parents and children were sent to separate detention centers and shelters. Although Trump ended family separations in an executive order last week, many parents are still trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare, far from their children and unsure how they will be reunited.

“I would advise anyone who wants to travel to the United States with their children not to do it,” he said. “I would never want them to have to walk in my shoes.”

And yet, Guidos is ready to travel again, if he cannot find Meybelin soon, even if he must retrace his recent 1,500-mile journey: crossing Mexico crammed in the back of a refrigerated cargo truck after weeks in U.S. detention with frigid rooms and scalding showers and mocking guards.

Details of Guidos’s case were confirmed by court documents and his lawyers.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said in a statement that the agency takes all allegations of mistreatment seriously and that its men and women “perform their duties professionally and treat everyone equally with dignity and respect.”

“Children represent the most vulnerable population and as such every CBP employee carries the fundamental ethical and moral belief as well as a legal obligation to put the welfare of any child first,” the statement said.

A spokeswoman for ICE, Sarah Rodriguez, said that Guidos, on June 19, “submitted a written request that he be removed to El Salvador without his child.”

Parents in ICE custody “have the opportunity to wait in detention for a coordinated removal with a child or may waive their right to such coordination,” she said.

Guidos arrived home Friday evening in the coastal province of Usulutan, far out on a remote peninsula jutting into the Pacific Ocean. He works on a corn farm, earning $7 a day, and helps a local organization hatch baby sea turtles from eggs laid on the beach.

He built his house from scrap wood his brother gave him. It has two mattresses — one for him, one for Meybelin — a hammock, a pink dresser for her clothes. A few minutes after arriving home, he had taken her best white dress out of its plastic bag, a reminder of her, when his cellphone rang and Meybelin’s tiny voice, from wherever she was, entered the room.

Guidos was holding back tears from the first moments. He asked her how she was, whether she had eaten. Was she playing or studying or going to church? Despite endless requests over the past month, no one had told him her location or when she might be freed, and she was too young to know.

Had the people there bathed her, he asked? Combed her hair? Given her toys?

“Papa,” she said. “When are you going to take me out of here?”

And that’s when he really began to cry.

Years of troubles

Guidos’s problems began two years ago on a soccer field cut out of the jungle behind his house, he said. He got into a fight with a player whose brother was a top member of the Barrio 18 gang in Puerto El Triunfo, the town across the bay.

In recent years, gangs seized control of the one paved road running down this rural peninsula. Teenagers manned checkpoints with rifles slung over their shoulders and extorted passersby. It could cost $100 in $5 and $10 payments just to get off the peninsula, he said.

Two years ago, El Salvador had one of the highest murder rates in the world. Gang violence has displaced hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, many of whom seek refuge in the United States. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a ruling earlier this month that immigration judges generally cannot consider gang violence as grounds for asylum.

After the fight on the soccer field, Guidos went into hiding. Gang members lived within sight of his shack, and they hauled away a brother-in-law at one point and put a pistol in his mouth, he said.

Twice Guidos fled north, hoping for asylum, but was deported once from Mexico and once from Louisiana. By then, he had separated from Meybelin’s mother. He decided to take his daughter out of kindergarten and make one more try. His brother lived in Kansas, and he hoped to make it there.

“It’s hard to hide here,” he said of Corral de Mulas. “Everyone knows you.”

On May 26, after nearly a week of travel, Guidos and Meybelin boarded a raft, floated the Rio Grande, and walked into the scrub near Hidalgo, Tex., to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol and ask for asylum.

He did not know exactly where they were taken, but normally migrants are processed at CBP facilities before going to court and moving on to a longer-term detention center. On their first day in detention, they were given Mylar blankets and ham sandwiches every six hours, he said.

Now, he considers this his best day in detention because Meybelin was still with him.

Once she was taken away, yelling and crying, he could get no answers about where she had gone. On May 29, three days after arriving, he pleaded guilty to crossing the border illegally and was sentenced to time served, according to federal court documents.

Afterward, he begged for information about his daughter. He recalled one U.S. official telling him: “They may have taken her to Florida or New York.”

“That’s when I really felt hell come down on me,” he said.

Guidos was transferred to an ICE detention center outside of Laredo, Tex., after his court appearance, according to paperwork he was given. Authorities there would regularly ask migrants if they wanted to sign papers approving their own deportation, he said. For two weeks, he declined, insisting he would not leave the United States without Meybelin. Eventually, he said, he was told that nothing would change. He lost all hope and signed the document for his removal.

“He told me, ‘You’re never going to get information about your daughter here,’ ” Guidos recalled one official saying. “It’s better to go back to your country.”

A sorrowful arrival

Guidos was in tears when he walked out of the deportee processing center in San Salvador on Thursday afternoon, carrying his belongings in a plastic bag.

“Imagine, all of her life she’s been with me and now she’s not,” he said of his daughter. “And I don’t even know where she is.”

He got into the bed of a pickup truck with his other relatives for the three-hour drive to his village.

The day he arrived in El Salvador, he received his first call from Meybelin since their separation. It’s unclear whether she knew her relatives’ phone numbers or was given them by shelter staff.

When Meybelin called again the next evening, she used a phone number that is associated with a shelter in Phoenix, run by Southwest Key Programs, a ­Texas-based nonprofit organization that has received $1.1 billion in federal contracts to house migrant children since 2014.

A Southwest Key Programs spokeswoman said she could not confirm if Meybelin was at the Phoenix shelter and referred queries to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. An HHS spokesman said it would take days to confirm her location and, even then, the department might not be able to speak about her case because of privacy concerns.

Immigration lawyers working with detained families say that family reunification is an expensive process that can take years due to the difficulty of obtaining information across various government agencies.

“There is no clear path made by the administration to reunite the 2,300 children already taken from their parents,” said Jennifer Falcon, communications director at RAICES, an organization that is representing Meybelin through her family. “And every day, it gets more difficult as they continue mass deportation of their parents.”

Falcon spoke before a late Saturday announcement by the Trump administration about a plan to reunify the migrant families.

Meybelin has been able to periodically call relatives in the United States and El Salvador, but the family has had trouble getting answers from shelter staff.

“They won’t let her pass the phone to anyone,” said her grandmother, Sonia de Jesus Portillo. “I’ve run out of tissues, I’ve been crying so much. We’re desperate.”

When Meybelin called on Friday evening, Guidos tried to stay calm.

“How are you, mi amor?” he asked.

“Good.”

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.”

She told him she wanted her clothes and didn’t like the food. She said she had tried to call her mother twice but no one answered.

“Mi amor, don’t worry. We’re going to get you, do you hear?”

He promised to take her to the park when she was home.

“Meybelin,” he said as the tears ran down his face. “I love you, mi amor.”

“Me too, papa.”

When the call ended, he sat down on his mattress, three countries away from this ­6-year-old girl, and cried into his hands.

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There are more than 393 million civilian-owned firearms in the United States, or enough for every man, woman and child to own one and still have 67 million guns left over.

Those numbers come from the latest edition of the global Small Arms Survey, a project of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

The report, which draws on official data, survey data and other measures for 230 countries, finds that global firearm ownership is heavily concentrated in the United States. In 2017, for instance, Americans made up 4 percent of the world's population but owned about 46 percent of the entire global stock of 857 million civilian firearms.

With an estimated 120.5 guns for every 100 residents, the firearm ownership rate in the United States is twice that of the next-highest nation, Yemen, with just 52.8 guns per 100 residents. In raw number terms, the closest country to the United States is India, with 71.1 million firearms in circulation. These numbers do not include firearms owned by law enforcement agencies or militaries.

On gun ownership, the United States stands out among the world's wealthiest nations, with an ownership rate more than three times higher than the rate in the next-highest country, Canada. The gun ownership rate in the United States is more than six times higher than the average among similar wealthy nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The Obama years were a boom time for America's gun manufacturers, which doubled their annual output between 2009 and 2013, fueled in part by fears of a federal crackdown on gun ownership that never materialized. “In the United States alone civilians acquired at least 122 million new or imported firearms during the period 2006–17,” the Small Arms Survey found.

If global gun ownership is concentrated in American hands, American gun ownership is concentrated even more narrowly in the country's gun-owning households. As of 2017, Gallup found that 42 percent of American households reported owning guns. With an estimated 118 million households in the United States, per the U.S. Census, that would mean that the country's 393 million guns are distributed among 50 million households. The implication is that the average gun-owning household owns nearly eight guns.

A separate Harvard-Northeastern study published in 2016 found that 3 percent of American adults (individuals in this case, not households) own half the nation's firearms. Combined with the latest Small Arms Survey estimate, that would mean that 3 percent of American adults own nearly one quarter of the world's civilian firearms stockpile. It's worth noting, however, that the Harvard-Northeastern study, which was based on a survey of gun owners, estimated a much lower number of guns in circulation: 265 million as of January 2015.

Because there is no official tally of American gun ownership, there's a margin of error around any estimate of either gun ownership or the number of guns in circulation. Some gun owners may be disinclined to answer survey questions, for instance, which would result in an undercount of the number of households and individuals owning guns.

Similarly, any estimate of the number of guns in circulation has to make an assumption about attrition — the number of firearms that are destroyed or otherwise become unusable in any given year. The number of guns in circulation could be subject to overcount or undercount, depending on how researchers model the effects of attrition.

Regardless, the big-picture trends are not in dispute. Measured in rates or in raw terms, the United States is the civilian gun capital of the world.

Learn more at Washington Post

One morning this past September, Kiarra Boulware boarded the 26 bus to Baltimore’s Bon Secours Hospital, where she would seek help for the most urgent problem in her life: the 200-some excess pounds she carried on her 5-foot-2-inch frame.

To Kiarra, the weight sometimes felt like a great burden, and at other times like just another fact of life. She had survived a childhood marred by death, drugs, and violence. She had recently gained control over her addiction to alcohol, which, last summer, had brought her to a residential recovery center in the city’s Sandtown neighborhood, made famous by the Freddie Gray protests in 2015. But she still struggled with binge eating—so much so that she would eat entire plates of quesadillas or mozzarella sticks in minutes.

As the bus rattled past rowhouses and corner stores, Kiarra told me she hadn’t yet received the Cpap breathing machine she needed for her sleep apnea. The extra fat seemed to constrict her airways while she slept, and a sleep study had shown that she stopped breathing 40 times an hour. She remembered one doctor saying, “I’m scared you’re going to die in your sleep.” In the haze of alcoholism, she’d never followed up on the test. Now doctors at Bon Secours were trying to order the machine for her, but insurance hurdles had gotten in the way.

Kiarra’s weight brought an assortment of old-person problems to her 27-year-old life: sleep apnea, diabetes, and menstrual dysregulation, which made her worry she would never have children. For a while, she’d ignored these issues. Day to day, her size mostly made it hard to shop for clothes. But the severity of her situation sank in when a diabetic friend had to have a toe amputated. Kiarra visited the woman in the hospital. She saw her tears and her red, bandaged foot, and resolved not to become an amputee herself.

Kiarra arrived at the hospital early and waited in the cafeteria. Bon Secours is one of several world-class hospitals in Baltimore. Another, Johns Hopkins Hospital, is in some respects the birthplace of modern American medicine, having invented everything from the medical residency to the surgical glove. But of course not even the best hospitals in America can keep you from getting sick in the first place.

It was lunchtime, but Kiarra didn’t have any cash—her job, working the front desk at the recovery center where she lived, paid a stipend of just $150 a week. When she did have money, she often sought comfort in fast food. But when her cash and food stamps ran out, she sometimes had what she called “hungry nights,” when she went to bed without having eaten anything all day.

When I’d first met Kiarra, a few months earlier, I’d been struck by how upbeat she seemed. Her recovery center—called Maryland Community Health Initiatives, but known in the neighborhood as Penn North—sits on a grimy street crowded with men selling drugs. Some of the center’s clients, fresh off their habits, seemed withdrawn, or even morose. Kiarra, though, had the bubbly demeanor of a student-council president.

She described the rough neighborhoods where she’d grown up as fun and “familylike.” She said that although neither of her parents had been very involved when she was a kid, her grandparents had provided a loving home. Regarding her diabetes, she told me she was “grateful that it’s reversible.” After finishing her addiction treatment, she planned to reenroll in college and move into a dorm.

Now, though, a much more anxious Kiarra sat before her doctor, a young white man named Tyler Gray, who began by advising Kiarra to get a Pap smear.

“Do we have to do it today?” she asked.

“Is there something you’re concerned about or nervous about?,” Gray asked.

Kiarra was nervous about a lot of things. She “deals by not dealing,” as she puts it, but lately she’d had to deal with so much. “Ever since the diabetes thing, I hate hearing I have something else,” she said softly, beginning to cry. “I’ve been fat for what seems like so long, and now I get all the fat problems.”

“I don’t want to be fat,” she added, “but I don’t know how to not be fat.”

Kiarra’s struggles with her weight are imbued with this sense, that getting thin is a mystery she might never solve, that diet secrets are literally secret. On a Sunday, she might diligently make a meal plan for the week, only to find herself reaching for Popeyes fried chicken by Wednesday. She blames herself for her poor health—as do many of the people I met in her community, where obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are ubiquitous. They said they’d made bad choices. They used food, and sometimes drugs, to soothe their pain. But these individual failings are only part of the picture.

In Baltimore, a 20-year gap in life expectancy exists between the city’s poor, largely African American neighborhoods and its wealthier, whiter areas. A baby born in Cheswolde, in Baltimore’s far-northwest corner, can expect to live until age 87. Nine miles away in Clifton-Berea, near where The Wire was filmed, the life expectancy is 67, roughly the same as that of Rwanda, and 12 years shorter than the American average. Similar disparities exist in other segregated cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago.

These cities are among the most extreme examples of a national phenomenon: Across the United States, black people suffer disproportionately from some of the most devastating health problems, from cancer deaths and diabetes to maternal mortality and preterm births. Although the racial disparity in early death has narrowed in recent decades, black people have the life expectancy, nationwide, that white people had in the 1980s—about three years shorter than the current white life expectancy. African Americans face a greater risk of death at practically every stage of life.

Except in the case of a few specific ailments, such as nondiabetic kidney disease, scientists have largely failed to identify genetic differences that might explain racial health disparities. The major underlying causes, many scientists now believe, are social and environmental forces that affect African Americans more than most other groups.

To better understand how these forces work, I spent nearly a year reporting in Sandtown and other parts of Baltimore. What I found in Kiarra’s struggle was the story of how one person’s efforts to get better—imperfect as they may have been—were made vastly more difficult by a daunting series of obstacles. But it is also a bigger story, of how African Americans became stuck in profoundly unhealthy neighborhoods, and of how the legacy of racism can literally take years off their lives. Far from being a relic of the past, America’s racist and segregationist history continues to harm black people in the most intimate of ways—seeping into their lungs, their blood, even their DNA.

When kiarra was a little girl, Baltimore was, as it is today, mired in violence, drugs, and poverty. In 1996, the city had the highest rate of drug-related emergency-room visits in the nation and one of the country’s highest homicide rates.

With her father in and out of jail for robbery and drug dealing, Kiarra and her mother, three siblings, and three cousins piled into her grandmother’s home. It was a joyous but chaotic household. Kiarra describes her grandmother as “God’s assistant”—a deeply religious woman who, despite a house bursting with hungry mouths, would still make an extra dinner for the addicts on the block. Kiarra’s mother, meanwhile, was “the hood princess,” a woman who would do her hair just to go to the grocery store. She was a teen mom, like her own mother had been.

Many facets of Kiarra’s youth—the fact that her parents weren’t together, her father’s incarceration, the guns on the corners—are what researchers consider “adverse childhood experiences,” stressful events early in life that can cause health problems in adulthood. An abnormally large proportion of the children in Baltimore—nearly a third—have two or more aces. People with four or more aces are seven times as likely to be alcoholics as people with no aces, and twice as likely to have heart disease. One study found that six or more aces can cut life expectancy by as much as 20 years. Kiarra had at least six.

She and others I interviewed recall the inner-city Baltimore of their youth fondly. Everyone lived crammed together with siblings and cousins, but people looked out for one another; neighbors hosted back-to-school cookouts every year, and people took pride in their homes. Kiarra ran around with the other kids on the block until her grandma called her in each night at 8 o’clock. She made the honor roll in fifth grade and got to speak in front of the whole class. She read novels by Sister Souljah and wrote short stories in longhand.

Yet Kiarra also describes some jarring incidents. When she was 8, she heard a loud bop bop bop outside and ran out to find her stepbrother lying in the street, dead. One friend died of asthma in middle school; another went to jail, then hanged himself. (Other people I spoke with around Penn North and other recovery facilities had similarly traumatic experiences. It seemed like every second person I met told me they had been molested as a child, and even more said their family members had struggled with addiction.)

Kiarra told me she got pregnant by a friend when she was 12, and gave birth to a boy when she was 13. Within a year, the baby died unexpectedly, and Kiarra was so traumatized that she ended up spending more than a month in a psychiatric hospital. When she came home, her boyfriend physically and sexually abused her. He “slapped me so hard, I was seeing stars,” she said.

She took solace in eating, a common refuge for victims of abuse. One 2013 study of thousands of women found that those who had been severely physically or sexually abused as children had nearly double the risk of food addiction. Kiarra ate “everything, anything,” she said, “mostly bad foods, junk food, pizza,” along with chicken boxes—the fried-chicken-and-fries combos slung by Baltimore’s carryout joints.

At first, she thought the extra weight looked good on her. Then she started feeling fat. Eventually, she said, “it was like, Fuck it. I’m fat.” As her high-school graduation approached, she tried on the white gown she’d bought just weeks earlier and realized that it was already too tight.

Kiarra didn’t know many college-educated people, but she wanted to go to Spelman, a historically black college in Georgia, and join a sorority. Her family talked her out of applying, she said. Instead, she enrolled in one local college after another, but she kept dropping out, sometimes to help her siblings with their children and other times because she simply lost interest. After accumulating $30,000 in student loans, she had only a year’s worth of credits.

So Kiarra put college on hold and worked at Kmart and as a home health aide—solid jobs but, as she likes to say, “not my ceiling.” She longed for a purpose. Sometimes, she had an inkling that she was meant to be an important person; she would picture herself giving a speech to an auditorium full of people. But she remained depressed, stuck, and, increasingly, obese.

She began doing ecstasy, and, later, downing a pint of vodka a day. She remembers coming to her home-health-aide job drunk one time and leaving a patient on the toilet. “Did you forget me?” the woman asked, half an hour later. Kiarra broke down crying.

Soon after, she checked into Penn North for her first try at recovery. This past year’s attempt is her third.

Sandtown is 97 percent black, and half of its families live in poverty. Its homicide rate is more than double that of the rest of the city, and last year about 8 percent of the deaths there were due to drug and alcohol overdose. Still, its top killers are heart disease and cancer, which African Americans nationwide are more likely to die from than other groups are.

The way African Americans became trapped in Baltimore’s poorest—and least healthy—neighborhoods mirrors their history in the ghettos of other major cities. It began with outright bans on their presence in certain neighborhoods in the early 1900s and continued through the 2000s, when policy makers, lenders, and fellow citizens employed subtler forms of discrimination.

In the early 1900s, blacks in Baltimore disproportionately suffered from tuberculosis, so much so that one area not far from Penn North was known as the “lung block.” In 1907, an investigator hired by local charities described what she saw in Meyer Court, a poor area in Baltimore. The contents of an outdoor toilet “were found streaming down the center of this narrow court to the street beyond,” she wrote. The smell within one house was “ ‘sickening’ … No provision of any kind is made for supplying the occupants of this court with water.” Yet one cause, the housing investigator concluded, was the residents’ “low standards and absence of ideals.”

When blacks tried to flee to better areas, some had their windows smashed and their steps smeared with tar. In 1910, a Yale-educated black lawyer named George McMechen moved into a house in a white neighborhood, and Baltimore reacted by adopting a segregation ordinance that The New York Times called “the most pronounced ‘Jim Crow’ measure on record.” Later, neighborhood associations urged homeowners to sign covenants promising never to sell to African Americans.

Some of Baltimore’s rowhouses are so long-forsaken, they have trees growing through the windows. They are in themselves harmful to people’s health.

For much of the 20th century, the Federal Housing Administration declined to insure mortgages for blacks, who instead had to buy homes by signing contracts with speculators who demanded payments that, in many cases, amounted to most of the buyer’s income. (As a result, many black families never reaped the gains of homeownership—a key source of Americans’ wealth.) Housing discrimination persisted well beyond the Jim Crow years, as neighborhood associations rejected proposals to build low-income housing in affluent suburbs. In the 1990s, house flippers would buy up homes in Baltimore’s predominantly black neighborhoods and resell them to unsuspecting first-time home buyers at inflated prices by using falsified documents. The subsequent foreclosures are a major reason so many properties in the city sit vacant today.

Some of Baltimore’s rowhouses are so long-forsaken, they have trees growing through the windows. These dilapidated homes are in themselves harmful to people’s health. Neighborhoods with poorly maintained houses or a large number of abandoned properties, for instance, face a high risk of mouse infestation. Every year, more than 5,000 Baltimore children go to the emergency room for an asthma attack—and according to research from Johns Hopkins, mouse allergen is the biggest environmental factor in those attacks.

The allergen, found in mouse urine, travels through the air on dust, and Johns Hopkins researchers have found high levels of it on most of the beds of poor Baltimore kids they have tested. When kids inhale the allergen, it can spark inflammation and mucus buildup in their lungs, making them cough and wheeze. These attacks can cause long-term harm: Children with asthma are more likely to be obese and in overall poorer health as adults. Getting rid of the mice requires sealing up cracks and holes in the house—a process that can cost thousands of dollars, given the state of many Baltimore homes.

The mice, of course, are just one symptom of the widespread neglect that can set in once neighborhoods become as segregated as Baltimore’s are. One study estimated that, in the year 2000, racial segregation caused 176,000 deaths—about as many as were caused by strokes.

All summer, Penn North’s aging air conditioners strained against the soupy heat outside. For Kiarra, the first few months at the recovery center felt like boot camp. The staff woke the residents before 7 a.m., even if they didn’t have anywhere in particular to be. Kiarra’s days were packed with therapies: acupuncture in the mornings, meant to help reduce cravings; individual meetings with peer counselors; Narcotics Anonymous sessions, in which dozens of strangers slumped on metal folding chairs and told stories of past drug binges.

Once a week, Kiarra would leave her post at the front desk and walk across an empty playground for an appointment with her psychotherapist, Ms. Bea (who asked that I not use her full name). Kiarra would climb the steep, narrow staircase of Penn North’s clinical building, then stop at the landing to catch her breath.

Healing the Divide: Kiarra’s Story

Ms. Bea’s goal was to help Kiarra understand how her substance abuse, her weight, and her difficult childhood were interconnected. Like many young people in Baltimore, Kiarra had spent her life trying to attain ordinary things—love, respect—that seemed always to skid beyond her grasp. She wanted male attention, but then she got pregnant. The baby made her happy, but the baby died. Her siblings started having kids and she loved them, but she was jealous. She fell into a deep-sink depression. She’d eat a second dinner, then get so drunk that she’d scream at her friends. She’d realize that she was going to wake up to a blistering hangover and would keep drinking. It was coming anyway, so why not? “Struggle days,” she called these times.

During one appointment in August, Kiarra told Ms. Bea that she had been attending Overeaters Anonymous meetings by phone. Something another member had shared, about why people are sometimes reluctant to shed weight, had stuck with her. “He was saying when you lose the fat, you lose a part of you,” Kiarra recalled.

A few years earlier, she had founded a club for plus-size women called Beautiful Beyond Weight, with some of her best friends. The goal was to help overweight women feel better about themselves. They put on fashion shows that she described as “Beyoncé big, but on a Christina Aguilera budget.” She worried that if she lost too much weight, the other girls in the club would think she was a hypocrite. She decided she would aim to be “slim-thicc”—not too skinny.

“So imagine if you were a size 14,” Ms. Bea said. “What would be happening here—with you?”

Ms. Bea was trying to help Kiarra see how she sometimes uses her size as a form of protection, a way of making her feel invisible to men, so that she could eventually work through her fear.

In Kiarra’s experience, disappearing could be useful. She told me that once, when she was 17, before she had gotten so big, she met a guy in an online chat room. She went over to his place, where they watched TV and started having sex. But then—the skid—his three friends barged into the room and raped her. She fled, half-dressed, as soon as she could.

“Yeah,” Kiarra said, envisioning herself many sizes smaller. “I wouldn’t be able to take it.”

Kiarra has trouble concentrating sometimes, and she thinks the reason might be that she and her brother were exposed to lead from old paint. When Kiarra was 6, her grandmother heard that a girl living in another property owned by the same landlord had been hospitalized. She took Kiarra to get tested. The results showed that the concentration of lead in her blood was more than six times the level the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers elevated—an amount that can irreversibly lower IQ and reduce attention span. Kiarra, too, was hospitalized, for a month.

Scientists and industry experts knew in the 19th century that lead paint was dangerous. “Lead is a merciless poison,” an executive with a Michigan lead-paint company admitted in a book in 1892. It “gradually affects the nerves and organs of circulation to such a degree that it is next to impossible to restore them to their normal condition.” But as late as the 1940s and ’50s, trade groups representing companies that made lead products, including the Lead Industries Association, promoted the use of lead paint in homes and successfully lobbied for the repeal of restrictions on that use. Lead-paint companies published coloring books and advised their salesmen to “not forget the children—some day they may be customers.” According to The Baltimore Sun, a study in 1956 found that lead-poisoned children in the slums of Baltimore had six times as much lead in their systems as severely exposed workers who handled lead for a living.

In speeches and publications, Lead Industries Association officials cast childhood lead poisoning as vanishingly rare. When they did acknowledge the problem, they blamed “slum” children for chewing on wood surfaces—“gnaw-ledge,” as Manfred Bowditch, the group’s health-and-safety director, called it—and their “ignorant parents” for allowing them to do so. In a letter to the Baltimore health department, Bowditch called the lead-poisoned toddlers “little human rodents.”

Even after stricter regulations came along, landlords in segregated neighborhoods—as well as the city’s own public-housing agency—neglected properties, allowing old paint to chip and leaded dust to accumulate. Some landlords, seeking to avoid the expense of renovating homes and the risk of tenant lawsuits, refused to rent to families with children, since they would face the greatest risk from lead exposure. Poor families feared that if they complained about lead, they might be evicted.

Partly because of Maryland’s more rigorous screening, the state’s lead-poisoning rate for children was 15 times the national average in the ’90s; the majority of the poisoned children lived in the poor areas of Baltimore. In some neighborhoods, 70 percent of children had been exposed to lead. The city’s under-resourced agencies failed to address the problem. Clogged by landlords who hid behind shell companies, Baltimore’s lead-paint enforcement system had ground to a halt by the time Kiarra was poisoned. According to Tapping Into The Wire, a book co-authored by Peter L. Beilenson, the city’s former health commissioner, Baltimore didn’t bring a single lead-paint enforcement action against landlords in the ’90s. (A subsequent crackdown on landlords has lowered lead-poisoning rates dramatically.)

When Kiarra was 14, her family sued their landlord for damages, but their lawyer dropped the case because the landlord claimed he had no money and no insurance with which to compensate them. Kiarra remembers her grandmother not wanting to give up, demanding of the lawyer, “What do you mean there’s nothing you can do?”—only to get lost in a tangle of legal rules she didn’t fully understand.

On a hot saturday this past August, Kiarra brought her nieces with her to work and corralled them in the front office. She was babysitting that day, and staffing was short at the center. The girls climbed restlessly on the stained office chairs and under the tables.

Kiarra is close with her family. She spends much of her free time texting her favorite sisters on her cracked cellphone, and she talks to her grandmother every few days. Any familial strife upsets her deeply: She can vividly recount a long list of times her mother disappointed her. Then again, sometimes she feels like she’s the one who has let everyone down, with all her drinking and dropping out.

Near the end of the day, Kiarra’s cellphone rang. It was her father, calling to yell at her because she hadn’t come to see him recently. “I’ve been busy,” Kiarra told him.

When Kiarra was little, and when her father wasn’t incarcerated, he had provided for his children—unlike many dads she knew. She’d sought his approval by researching Islam, his religion, and trying to reconcile it with the strict Christianity of her grandmother’s home. A few years ago, she tried to impress him by joining a tough-seeming social club that turned out to be too much like a gang. (It “wasn’t a good fit,” she told me.)

On some level, she still respected her father. But he had an explosive personality and struggled with depression and addiction. Kiarra told me he taught her what men are supposed to be: fierce protectors who sometimes turn their wrath on the women in their lives.

Kiarra usually tried to see her father’s outbursts as a cry for help. But today, she decided to confront him. Their conversation escalated as they accused each other of failing at fatherhood and daughterhood.

“How many of my plays have you been to?,” Kiarra demanded.

Her father launched into a tirade. “I will come for your fucking dumb ass!,” I overheard him yell at one point. “You going to respect me!”

“Respect works both ways,” Kiarra said. “I’m not that little girl that’s gonna let you slap the shit out of me.”

What bothered Kiarra most was that her father had never hit his other daughter that way, so why her? Why did it feel like he was always rejecting her? (Her father later confirmed that he had hit her as a child, saying, “Discipline is a must, whatever form you choose.”)

As he continued screaming—“I’m gonna put your fuckin’ head in the dirt”—Kiarra’s eyes glazed over. “Death gotta be better than here,” she said.

She hung up, then wiped away tears. Just today, he had called her at 12:30 a.m., 3:48 a.m., 7:47 a.m., 11:24 a.m., 3:33 p.m., and 4:44 p.m. One time when she didn’t answer the phone, Kiarra said, he showed up in person at Penn North.

Her father called back, rambling less coherently than before. “How much of my life did you spend incarcerated?,” Kiarra asked him. When she was little, she would go out hustling with him. “I was 14 fucking years old seeing dead fucking bodies, and you’re talking about where the fuck did this drinking shit come from?”

Kiarra hung up, this time for good. Then she wept. “As long as I’m fucked up, this man is cool, but as soon as I decide I want to get my fucking life together it’s like …” Her voice trailed off. She turned and told me she wanted to go to McDonald’s. “McDonald’s is killing me,” she said, “but it’s a special treat.”

She ordered her usual—a McDouble and a McChicken, along with a sweet tea—and waited silently amid the beeping of the cash registers.

Most of the people I met at Penn North were optimistic and surrounded by fiercely loyal friends. But their lives also seemed, like Kiarra’s, unrelentingly stressful. Between the hugs and handshakes, I heard a lot of trepidation. I have to move again … Where will I go? Will I get this job at Target? Will I ever walk again? Will I get to eat today?

Research shows that this kind of day-in, day-out worry can ravage a person’s health. Certain stressful experiences—such as living in a disordered, impoverished neighborhood—are associated with a shortening of the telomeres, structures that sit on the tips of our chromosomes, which are bundles of DNA inside our cells. Often compared to the plastic caps on the ends of shoelaces, telomeres keep chromosomes from falling apart. They can also be a measure of how much a body has been ground down by life.

Some researchers think stress shrinks telomeres, until they get so short that the cell dies, hastening the onset of disease. Different kinds of prolonged emotional strain can affect telomeres. In one study, mothers who had high stress levels had telomeres that were as short as those of a person about a decade older. Another study found that children who spent part of their childhood in Romanian orphanages had telomeres that shortened rapidly.

Even among people making $175,000 a year or more, blacks are more likely to suffer from certain diseases than whites are.

Arline T. Geronimus, an expert on health disparities at the University of Michigan, has found that African Americans have more stress-related wear and tear in their bodies than white people do, and the difference widens with age. By measuring telomere length in hundreds of women, Geronimus estimated that black women were, biologically, about seven and a half years older than white women of the same age.

Unrelenting stress also affects our daily behaviors: Stress causes some people to eat more, especially calorically dense foods, and to sleep less. On average, African Americans get about 40 minutes less sleep each night than white people do. Among women in one recent study, poor sleep alone explained more than half the racial disparity in cardiovascular-disease risk.

Living in a dangerous neighborhood like Sandtown requires a vigilance that can flood the body with adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones are supposed to kick in only long enough for us to get away from an immediate threat. If they trickle through us constantly, they can raise the risk of heart disease and compromise the body’s immune system.

These kinds of changes in body chemistry aren’t limited to people living in poverty. Even well-off black people face daily racial discrimination, which can have many of the same biological effects as unsafe streets. Thomas LaVeist, the dean of Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, has found, for example, that even among people earning $175,000 a year or more, blacks are more likely to suffer from certain diseases than whites are.

In an emerging field of research, scientists have linked stress, including from prejudice, to compounds called methyl groups attaching to our genes, like snowflakes sticking to a tree branch. These methyl groups can cause genes to turn on or off, setting disease patterns in motion. Recently, a study linked racial discrimination to changes in methylation on genes that affect schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and asthma.

Several studies also show that experiencing racism might be part of the reason black women are about 50 percent more likely than white women to have premature babies and about twice as likely to have low-birth-weight babies. Researchers think the stress they experience might cause the body to go into labor too soon or to mount an immune attack against the fetus. This disparity, too, does not appear to be genetic: Black women from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are less likely to have preterm births than African American women are, possibly because they’ve spent less time living in America’s racist environment.

hroughout the fall, Kiarra kept her doctor appointments, and she began working out at the small gym at Penn North, placing a picture of Chrissy Lampkin, the curvaceous girlfriend of the rapper Jim Jones, on her treadmill as motivation.

But Kiarra still wasn’t losing much weight. Like most Americans, she got advice from her friends on what to eat—but that advice at times proved confusing and contradictory. She tried a boiled-egg diet, which left her with hunger pangs and a lot of leftover eggs in the fridge. She went seven days without meat but wound up eating more starches, which sent her blood sugar soaring.

One bright day in late September, Kiarra returned to Bon Secours to see Ebony Hicks, a behavioral-health consultant who, like Kiarra’s doctor, works through Health Care for the Homeless, a Baltimore nonprofit that cares for the very poor. Hicks began by asking Kiarra what her goal was. Kiarra said getting down to an even 200 pounds “would be awesome.” Her weight remained, stubbornly, about 150 pounds higher than that. But she stayed optimistic, writing down Hicks’s aphorisms about needing to be patient and not expecting immediate results—“Anything overnight usually lasts about a night!”—in a notebook she’d brought with her.

Gently, Hicks asked Kiarra what she had eaten that day.

“French fries,” Kiarra said.

“All you’ve had is french fries?,” Hicks asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

It was 3:30 in the afternoon.

They walked to a room across the hall, and Kiarra stepped onto a scale.

“I gained two pounds,” she said quickly, “so now I’m depressed. I eat too much.”

“We have to work on getting you more regularly eating throughout the day,” Hicks said.

Kiarra asked whether “detox tea,” something she’d heard about from a friend, was healthy.

“You can detox with lots of fiber-filled vegetables,” Hicks said.

“What’s that?,” Kiarra asked.

Hicks pulled up a web page describing fruits and vegetables that contain fiber. She listed them off one by one.

Would Kiarra eat avocados?

No.

Coconut? Also no.

“I do eat berries,” Kiarra said. “Let’s put that down.” Kiarra doesn’t know why she dislikes so many fruits and vegetables. Her grandmother cooked healthy meals, putting turkey in big pots of greens for flavor. She had a rule that you could never leave the table without eating your vegetables. Kiarra would fall asleep at the table.

Hicks gamely pressed on. “Peas? You like peas?”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Kiarra said, grimacing.

“Chickpeas,” Hicks offered. “You ever ate hummus?”

“What is hummus?”

Fried food has long been Kiarra’s legal high—cheap, easily acquired, something to brighten the gloomiest day. It is also one of the few luxuries around.

Predominantly black neighborhoods tend to become what researchers call “food swamps,” or areas where fast-food joints outnumber healthier options. (Food deserts, by contrast, simply lack grocery stores.) One study in New York found that as the number of African Americans who lived in a given area increased, so did the distance to the nearest clothing store, pharmacy, electronics store, office-supply store. Meanwhile, one type of establishment drew nearer: fast-food restaurants.

That’s not a coincidence. After the riots of the 1960s, the federal government began promoting the growth of small businesses in minority neighborhoods as a way to ease racial tensions. “What we need is to get private enterprise into the ghetto, and put the people of the ghetto into private enterprises,” President Richard Nixon said around the time he created the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, in 1969. As Chin Jou, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, describes in her book, Supersizing Urban America, fast-food companies were some of the most eager entrants into this “ghetto” market.

Fast-food restaurants spent the next few decades “rushing into urban markets,” as one Detroit News report put it, seeking out these areas’ “untapped labor force” and “concentrated audience.” In the 1990s, the federal government gave fast-food restaurants financial incentives to open locations in inner cities, including in Baltimore. The urban expansion made business sense. “The ethnic population is better for us than the general market,” Sidney Feltenstein, Burger King’s executive vice president of brand strategy, explained to the Miami Herald in 1992. “They tend to have larger families, and that means larger checks.” (Supermarket chains didn’t share this enthusiasm; in part because the widespread use of food stamps causes an uneven flow of customers throughout the month, they have largely avoided expanding in poor areas.)

One reason college graduates live longer, researchers believe, is that education endows people with the sense that they control their own destiny.

Fast-food executives looked for ways to entice black customers. Burger King made ads featuring Shaft. KFC redecorated locations in cities like Baltimore to cater to stereotypically black tastes, and piped “rap, rhythm and blues, and soul music” into the restaurants, Jou writes. “Employees were given new Afrocentric uniforms consisting of kente cloth dashikis.” A study from 2005 found that TV programs aimed at African Americans feature more fast-food advertisements than other shows do, as well as more commercials for soda and candy. Black children today see twice as many soda and candy ads as white children do.

The marketing and franchising onslaught worked, and the diets of low-income people changed dramatically. Before the rise of fast food and processed foods, many low-income black families grew their own food and ate lots of grains and beans. In 1965, one study found, poor and middle-income blacks ate healthier—though often more meager—diets than rich whites did. But over the next few decades, the price of meat, junk food, and simple carbohydrates plummeted, while the price of vegetables rose. By the mid-’90s, 28 percent of African Americans were considered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to have a “poor” diet, compared with just 16 percent of whites.

At carver Vocational-Technical High School, which Kiarra and Freddie Gray attended at the same time, only about a third of students go on to enroll in college—yet another factor that could be contributing to the area’s low life expectancy, given that college graduates outlive high-school dropouts in every racial category.

One reason college graduates live longer, researchers believe, is that education endows people with the sense that they control their own destiny. Well-educated people seek out more nutritional information because they’ve been told they can achieve anything—why not perfect health, too?

Kiarra, by contrast, wasn’t yet sure what she could accomplish. She wanted to live up to an image in her mind of a “fly, crazy, daring, dream-chasing girl,” but she cycled between getting excited about new possibilities and being flattened by setbacks. Sometimes, she would dream of turning Beautiful Beyond Weight into a business—one that would sell T-shirts and caps with empowering messages for plus-size women. But she wasn’t really sure how to do that.

When Kiarra felt especially adrift, she would visit Steve Dixon, Penn North’s director, in his tiny office at the end of the hall, and ask him for advice on finding her purpose. He would tell her to pray and meditate. “When you pray, it’s like you’re talking to God,” Kiarra told me once. “But when you meditate, it’s God talking to you.”

In November, some combination of prayer, meditation, and research led Kiarra to enroll in a medical-assistant training program. The class added another $7,000 to her student-loan debt, but Kiarra seemed to thrive in it, and a few weeks before Christmas, she was excitedly planning her post–Penn North life. Once she had her medical-assistant certificate in hand, she would move to Philadelphia, get a job at Temple University, and take classes to become a registered nurse. Eventually, she hoped to become a nursing professor. That future held everything she wanted: helping people, being a leader, making her own money, having her own place.

Feeling chipper, she decided to browse the wigs at a nearby store, stroking the hairpieces and whispering to the best ones that she would be back for them on payday. She had a new reason to get dolled up: a truck driver, “fine as wine” and with no kids—and, accordingly, no messy entanglement with another woman. She tried to boss him around, but he told her to mind her own business, and she kind of liked that. His birthday was approaching, and she wanted to take him someplace fancy. She would wear a black dress, and he would wear a black suit.

To help pay for everything, Kiarra decided to register as a Lyft driver. All that was required was a $250 deposit; she began calling around to different relatives to raise the money.

Twenty-seventeen, she thought, had been her best year yet.

A few weeks later, a bitter cold settled through the East Coast, and Kiarra’s sunny mood had faded. Things had ended with the truck driver over some mean Facebook posts and the fact that he’d lied to her about not having kids. She was also reconsidering her plans for the future, now thinking that instead of setting her sights on Temple, she should focus on graduating and finding a job—any job—that would pay well enough and provide insurance that would cover her extensive health-care needs. Her grandmother said driving for Lyft in Baltimore was too dangerous. She might not move to Philly after all.

Kiarra figured that if she really wanted to have a successful plus-size clothing brand, she’d at least have to live long enough to see it happen.

But a new opportunity presented itself. Because of a change in her insurance plan, Kiarra had to switch doctors. Right away, her new doctor asked her whether she had considered bariatric surgery. Kiarra said she was scared of the complications, such as digestive problems and infections, but the doctor reassured her that complications are rare. She was interested in the gastric sleeve, a procedure that would dramatically reduce the size of her stomach, causing hormonal changes that would help her lose much of her body fat.

Kiarra still felt conflicted about losing her identity as an overweight woman. She couldn’t relate to the people on the Overeaters Anonymous calls who said they hated their bodies. She liked hers. “People say, ‘Hey, you’re fat,’ ” she said. “And I’m like, ‘That’s obvious.’ ” But she was motivated by her diabetes—which was already causing her vision to blur and her feet to tingle—along with the looming threat of other “fat diseases,” as she called them, frightening ones like heart failure. She figured that if she really wanted to have a successful plus-size clothing brand, she’d at least have to live long enough to see it happen.

She decided on the spot to go forward with the surgery, worried that she might change her mind otherwise. She signed up for the mandatory pre-op classes that prepare participants to eat just half a cup of food for every meal, at least initially, after the surgery. Her mother was nervous, but her sisters were all for it. Her grandmother told her to put it in God’s hands.

Earlier that month, Kiarra had organized a birthday party for her 2-year-old niece, Brooklynn, in Penn North’s community room, decking out the dingy yellow walls with pink balloons and ribbons. Within a few weeks, it was decided that Kiarra would gain custody of Brooklynn for a while so that Kiarra’s sister could go back to get her high-school diploma.

Kiarra was happy with this arrangement—she already sometimes referred to Brooklynn as her “daughter-girl”—and she began to see Brooklynn as a reason to stay on track. Juggling coursework and single parenthood exhausted her at times, but she wanted to be the successful role model for Brooklynn that she never had herself. In the chatty toddler who loved dress-up and Moana, Kiarra had found, if not her purpose, at least a purpose. “It feels like the Earth is full, you know?” she told me one day this spring.

Her new status as the child’s guardian meant that her stay at Penn North could be extended, through some alchemy of program definitions, for nearly another year. Staying on would mean cheap housing for Kiarra and Brooklynn, two people who desperately needed it.

With that settled, Kiarra turned her attention to the six-month process of hoop-jumping that was required to qualify for the gastric-sleeve surgery. The first pre-op class was an hour and a half long and took place at a hospital 30 minutes from Penn North. Kiarra thought the time commitment seemed excessive; with a smirk, she wondered aloud why the doctors couldn’t just tell her and the other patients, “Y’all fat. We gonna cut you up.”

But the doctors needed Kiarra to understand that the surgery was not something to take lightly. To qualify, she would have to get her sleep apnea and diabetes under control. She would have to keep a food journal, submit to behavioral evaluations, write an essay explaining why she no longer wanted to be morbidly obese. For the rest of her life, she’d need to wait 30 minutes between eating a meal and drinking a beverage. When one of Kiarra’s classmates said that after the surgery, eating too much would cause you to get violently sick for an hour, Kiarra recoiled a little.

All of the rules and obligations seemed more intense than Kiarra had expected. “Six months, you’re going on like 16 appointments,” she said. “Whoo, that’s a lot.” Given all she had to contend with, I wondered whether she would end up meeting the requirements—and, given the stakes, what might happen to her if she didn’t.

Tony Conn, a Penn North staffer with whom Kiarra is close, calls her a “wonderful, brilliant person.” Early on in my reporting, he told me her biggest flaw is that she sometimes doesn’t see things through to the end. “As soon as [something] looks like it’s gonna come to light, she’s like, ‘Okay, I did that. So let’s find something else,’ ” he said.

But lately, Kiarra had shown a new sense of calm and dedication. One day while she worked the front desk, an older man flirted with her as he signed the attendance sheet.

“When you look in the mirror,” he said, “and see how beautiful you are, what do you say to yourself?”

“We’ve come a long way,” she said quietly. “Let’s stay there.”

Learn more at The Atlantic

It’s been nearly two months since the Trump administration announced its new “zero tolerance” policy regarding illegal immigration, which federal officials say has led to about 2,000 undocumented immigrant children in government custody being separated from their parents.

The first tent city that’ll house immigrant children opened in El Paso on Friday. Some families have been separated for months; some parents have been deported without their children.

We’ve compiled a list of organizations that are mobilizing to try and help children that have been separated from their parents at the Texas-Mexico border:

Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project works to prevent the deportation of asylum-seeking families fleeing violence. The group accepts donations and asks people to sign up for volunteer opportunities here.

South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project is providing free legal services to asylum seekers detained in South Texas.

RAICES is a nonprofit that provides free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children, families and refugees in Texas. It’s accepting donations and volunteers at its website. In addition, the #postcards4families campaignwill donate $5 to RAICES for every postcard kids write to help the separated immigrant children.

The CARA Project is currently recruiting attorneys, law students and paralegals with experience in asylum work. The group asks volunteers to be fluent in Spanish or willing to work with an interpreter.

Kids In Need of Defense partners with major law firms, corporations and bar associations to create a nationwide pro bono network to represent unaccompanied children through their immigration proceedings. Volunteers don’t need to have immigration law experience.

The El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center provides legal representation to immigrants who might not be able to afford it otherwise. It’s accepting volunteers and donations.

The Austin Bar Association Civil Right and Immigration Section is coordinating training for pro bono attorneys to handle credible fear interviews for asylum seekers. 

Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley shelters immigrants who've recently been released from U.S. Border Patrol custody. 

American Gateways provides legal services and representation to detained parents. It's currently seeking volunteers to represent detained parents and is accepting donations.

Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services is the largest provider of free and low cost immigration services in West Texas and says it's the only organization in El Paso serving unaccompanied children.

Justice for Our Neighbors provides free and low-cost legal services to immigrant individuals and families in Texas.

The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights is looking for more child advocates to visit the immigrant kids inside the detention centers weekly and accompany them to immigration proceedings. It is also raising money for advocates who will deal specifically with family separation cases.

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is raising money to provide immigrant children "immediate shelter and beds, medical services, counseling and therapy to help them deal with the trauma of family separation."

Together Rising is collecting money that'll go to advocacy groups that are working to reunify immigrant children with their families. 

Comfort Cases is raising money to provide backpacks to the separated immigrant children. Each case will contain items such as blankets, pajamas, toiletries, a stuffed animal, a book, a journal and art supplies.

The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights is training adults who want to become “child advocates” who will work one-on-one with unaccompanied immigrant children while they are subject to deportation proceedings.

Tahirih Justice Center is providing free legal and social services to immigrant women and girls fleeing gender-based violence.

Circle of Health International has staffed a clinic caring for refugees and asylum seekers immediately upon their their release. Their McAllen clinic is currently seeing upwards of 100 patients a day.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement requires that all people who want to foster one of the unaccompanied immigrant children be fully licensed by their state. If you are not already licensed, the agency recommends contacting organizations such as United States Conference of Catholic Bishops or the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services.

Annunciation House is helping serve immigrants and refugees in El Paso. The organization is accepting donations here.

The Human Rights Initiative of North Texas is representing asylum seekers as well as unaccompanied minors — including those separated from parents.

The Salvation Army of El Paso is supporting 17 shelter rooms for separated families while they await reunification with their children and their court hearings.

Baker Ripley's team of immigration attorneys are providing representation to detained families seeking asylum as well as working to reunite children and parents.

La Posada Providencia in San Benito runs a shelter for people who have applied for asylum and been released from detention centers while their cases are pending.

The Children’s Immigration Law Academy has pro bono attorneys representing children in immigration-related proceedings. It's also providing specialized training to legal service providers and volunteers who're serving unaccompanied immigrant children.

The Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee in El Paso started the Fronterizo Fianza Fund, which will go toward things like posting bond for asylum seekers.

The Migrant Center for Human Rights is providing free and low-cost legal services for detained asylum seekers in Texas.

Learn more at The Texas Tribune

BROWNSVILLE, Tex. — For more than a year, the old Walmart along the Mexican border here has been a mystery to those driving by on the highway. In place of the supercenter’s trademark logo hangs a curious sign: “Casa Padre.”

But behind the sliding doors is a bustling city unto itself, equipped with classrooms, recreation centers and medical examination rooms. Casa Padre now houses more than 1,400 immigrant boys in federal custody. While most are teenagers who entered the United States alone, dozens of others — often younger — were forcibly separated from their parents at the border by a new Trump administration “zero tolerance” policy.

On Wednesday evening, for the first time since that policy was announced — and amid increased national interest after a U.S. senator was turned away — federal authorities allowed a small group of reporters to tour the secretive shelter, the largest of its kind in the nation.

Inside, where there was once a McDonald’s, cafeteria workers served chicken, vegetables and plastic fruit cups. In the former loading docks, children watched the animated movie “Moana,” dubbed in Spanish. In what used to be a garage, six young people played basketball.

“They used to do oil changes in here,” said Martin Hinojosa, director of compliance for Southwest Key Programs, the nonprofit group that runs Casa Padre under a federal contract.

Texas-based Southwest Key has grown quickly in recent years, fueled by surges of young Central Americans seeking refuge north, an expansion that has helped push annual compensation for the nonprofit’s chief executive, Juan Sanchez, to nearly $1.5 million, filings with the Internal Revenue Service show. The organization now houses 5,129 immigrant children in three states — approaching half the approximately 11,400 currently in federal custody — in facilities that are being strained to capacity, according to Sanchez.

The policy of criminally prosecuting all who cross the border illegally is creating a new category of residents at these holding centers, young boys and girls who are grappling with the trauma of being unexpectedly separated from their mothers and fathers. To accommodate them, Sanchez said, Southwest Key is retrofitting some facilities with smaller bathrooms, smaller sinks, smaller everything.

“We’re trying to do the best that we can taking care of these children. Our goal ultimately is to reunite kids with their families,” he said. “We’re not a detention center. . . . What we operate are shelters that take care of kids. It’s a big, big difference.”

Southwest Key has long sheltered teens who arrived at the border alone, and such youths makeup the largest group in Casa Padre. The typically younger children who have been separated from their parents make up about 5 percent of residents at Casa Padre and 10 percent of all Southwest Key residents, Sanchez estimated.

Federal officials have not allowed reporters to visit the facilities that house the youngest children, and it is not clear precisely how many of those children are being held or where. In the two weeks after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the separation policy, on May 7, 638 adults were prosecuted, and they had been accompanied by 658 children, federal officials have said.

Advocates for immigrants worry that shelters across the border, including Casa Padre, do not have a sufficient number of employees or the experience to help so many young children in such difficult circumstances.

Each day, the federal government sends Casa Padre a list of children detained at the border to be placed in the shelter, said Jaime Garcia, program director for Southwest Key. They arrive in white vans, half a dozen at a time. After they are fed, are clothed and get showered, the boys spend up to 72 hours in “intake” as they are vaccinated and checked for tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases and other maladies.

Once they are medically cleared, they join the throng of boys in the shelter, where they stay for an average of 49 days, according to Southwest Key officials. The number of children at Casa Padre is constantly rising — on Wednesday it was 1,469.

They line up in hallways featuring murals of U.S. presidents and inspirational quotes. President Trump’s image is the first a visitor encounters, drawn in black and white against the backdrop of an American flag. “Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war,” reads the quote, a line from his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal.”

A mural of former president Barack Obama contains a quote taken from a 2014 speech in which he announced protections for some undocumented immigrants: “My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.”

The bedrooms at Casa Padre are doorless, with walls reaching halfway to a 20-foot-high industrial ceiling that serves as a constant reminder of the building’s past.

It used to be four beds to a room. But as the shelter fills to capacity, a fifth bed — a cot — has been added to each. Atop one boy’s pillow lay a teddy bear, a bow around its neck and a smile on its upward turned face.

Yellow lines on the ground mark the area boys must line up. In the cafeteria, a mural tells kids to speak quietly, ask before getting up and not share food. Next to their beds are lists of each boy’s belongings: two T-shirts, three pairs of socks, three pairs of underwear, one polo, a pair of jeans. Lights go out at 9 p.m. and come back on at 6 a.m.

There are so many children that they attend school in two shifts: one in the morning, the other in the afternoon. They sit in small, numbered classrooms with yellow walls covered in posters of planets. On Wednesday, through tiny windows, they waved to the reporters outside.

“You might want to smile,” Southwest Key executive Alexia Rodriguez told the journalists at one point. “The kids feel a little like animals in a cage, being looked at.”

They spend two hours outside each day, including one hour of physical exercise and one hour of free time, which many kids spend playing on dusty soccer fields, Southwest Key officials said.

The boys are allowed to make two phone calls a week. Southwest Key officials said it sometimes takes days — or weeks — for children to reach their parents.

The unusually high number of unaccompanied immigrant children crossing the southern border in recent years has been good for Southwest Key’s business. The organization has received more than $1.1 billion to shelter unaccompanied minors since 2014, including $310 million in the current fiscal year, federal spending records show.

Learn more at Washington Post

National immigration policy has shifted significantly in recent weeks, as the Trump administration implemented a controversial “zero tolerance” policy of criminally charging and detaining more migrants who cross the border illegally, separating parents from children.

So many migrants are being detained, the federal government announced plans to house children at military bases and adults at federal prisons, the largest in Victorville, Calif. At the same time, the number of migrants caught crossing the southern border has remained steady for the last three months.

We sat down to discuss the news with U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan during his visit to agents in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the epicenter of migration in recent years.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you come to Rio Grande Valley this month and last, and what have you learned from your visits?

It's our busiest sector border-wide for illegal crossings between ports of entry for the Border Patrol. It’s the sector with the highest amount of narcotics being smuggled between ports of entry. And it's one of our most critical locations from Laredo to Brownsville, with the eight ports of entry, in terms of trade and travel flowing through our ports.

So, you know, 10% of my workforce is in between Laredo and Brownsville and it's an important place to visit. And again it's our highest-tempo operation. So I need to stay very much in tune with what the challenges are our men and women are facing, understand them, understand what resources they need, how policy decisions are affecting them, to make sure that I'm on top of it.

Can you say anything about how many immigrants were caught crossing the southern border illegally last month? This would include people apprehended entering the country illegally and “inadmissibles” applying for asylum.

We've had consistent levels of apprehensions and inadmissible crossing since March. March and April were pretty much level at 50,000, both between apprehensions between ports of entry at that 36,000-37,000 level, and inadmissibles arriving at ports of entry between 12,000 and 13,000. So we remain day to day at those levels, which presents a number of challenges operationally.

Has “zero tolerance” had any impact, or is it too early to say?

It’s too early to say what the increased ability to apply consequences for crossing the border illegally — what effect that will have on the traffic coming towards us. The smuggling cycle is 25 to 30 days from a family or an individual making a decision in Central America to go to the United States and starting that journey with the smuggling organization. So the zero tolerance efforts have not been in place long enough to really assess how that's affecting the decision-making of folks attempting to enter our country.

What about other impacts of zero tolerance? Do you have enough space to hold people in the temporary holding areas?

U.S. Border Patrol has managed a consequence-delivery system for a decade or so. They’ve always sought to apply the appropriate consequences for someone entering the country illegally. If they're someone who's committed a crime in the U.S. — who’s coming back a second or third time — you want to make sure that's prosecuted and addressed with a successful repatriation.

So we've done significant numbers of prosecutions in the past in some areas of the border with courts and U.S. attorneys that have more capacity. Del Rio sector… has been a strong proponent of Operation Streamline [which quickly processes immigrants in the federal criminal court system]. We have more prosecutions happening routinely. So the notion of increasing consequences, increasing prosecutions for those crossing illegally, is not foreign to us.

What [zero tolerance] means: We prosecute more when we don't exempt categories of people crossing illegally from prosecution, that we just have additional processes to take with those individuals that are being set up for prosecutions. There are different forms and systems that we have to use to set up the prosecution for the U.S. attorney's office. That's an additional processing effort. But the intent is for that to dissuade crossing between ports of entry, which is dangerous for the people making those crossings.

We have significantly increased rescues in Rio Grande Valley sector this year for people that are in distress. You've seen the tractor-trailer cases, where smuggling organizations are putting people at risk by putting them in situations where they are in the back of a tractor-trailer with 100-degree heat with high humidity. It’s extraordinarily dangerous. They also pay smugglers much more money to cross illegally, which means that it strengthens transnational criminal organizations that are threatening the safety of Mexican citizens to our south and the security of the government of Mexico. Increasing prosecutors will hopefully dissuade that.

Do you have the capacity to deal with the number of people being apprehended now? There have been some reports of disease outbreaks. What lessons did U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement learn from the influx of migrants in 2014?

We learned a lot of lessons from 2014 and have created different processes, including the Central Processing Center [in McAllen, Texas], to help manage different flows. We have not seen a significant outbreak issue. We have not seen a significant increase in time in custody. It's essentially the same number of people; they're just being handled differently. Some of them spend time in U.S. marshals’ custody instead of going directly to ICE, but then they go to ICE after they are processed. So it's a different set of steps, but it's not a dramatic change in the overall level.

How are you handling the family separations?

We still have children in the same place where we had unaccompanied children.

It's really important for your readers to understand the difference between the concept of family separation and prosecuting adults who cross the border illegally, even if they are bringing in children with them.

We do not have a policy of administrative separation. We are not doing that. Families or people that come across as a group, as a family-unit group, are being separated only if the adults are being prosecuted or if there's a determination made by the agent that there's not actually a family relationship, which has happened several hundred times just in the sector this year.

We do see the attempt by smugglers and those crossing to try to exploit the loopholes created by court decisions which don't allow for ICE to detain family units through the completion of their immigration process. So they have to release them within 20 days. That means it’s incentivizing people to pretend to be families even if they're not. That’s [happened] 600 times just in Rio Grande Valley sector this fiscal year.

We're prosecuting the parents; they're temporarily separated for prosecutors. So they go to the U.S. marshals; they will be prosecuted by the U.S. attorney's office. Then they're detained by ICE while the child is sent to Health and Human Services, in the custody of HHS.

So that’s incentivizing people to come fraudulently with kids?

That's the catch-and-release loophole due to the interpretation of the Flores [2015 class-action lawsuit] settlement by the 9th Circuit District Court that says that ICE cannot detain families more than 20 days. So instead of being allowed to keep that family together through their immigration process, ICE is forced to release the family. So that's the loophole that incentivizes people to present as a family even if they're not.

Is there anything you can say about the U.S. potentially classifying Mexico as a “safe third country” for asylum seekers, which would force them to seek asylum there?

I've traveled to a refugee camp in Turkey, the Norway border with Russia, the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala — all to understand migration phenomena. And from those experiences, it's very clear that the best way to manage migration flows and to assist populations that are struggling in their home country is for destination countries and transit countries to be aligned, and for efforts to aid the populations in their country of origin.

U.S. policy very clearly, for this administration, is to support Central American security and prosperity. We need to invest in their governance efforts and their economic development and in their security against gangs, smugglers, drug cartels and so forth to help prevent the push factors from existing in those countries and to help support their economic development.

But migration flows respond to incentives and success. If they believe that they will be allowed to stay in the destination country, they will try to make it. If they believe that they will be slowed down or turned around by a transit country, that will change the process.

All you have to do is look at the Arctic route in Norway. In 2015, in three months,. 5,500 people from 38 countries arrived from Russia. The Norwegians worked with Russia to recognize the Russian asylum system and that shut down overnight — those 5,500 stopped coming.

With [German] Chancellor Angela Merkel and [Turkish] President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, they reached an agreement in 2015 on the flow of Syrian nationals through Turkey to Greece and said that they would support refugee camps in Turkey. Those flows stopped overnight from Turkey to Greece.

You need to collaborate on regional migration. Mexico has been a leader in the region. They've gathered Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Panama and the U.S. together to talk about ways we can all get better at managing our policies in this area. Continued dialogue would be outstanding — to partner with all countries in the region on migration flows.

What about critics who say the U.S. would be shifting the burden of these asylum seekers onto Mexico?

The most effective response to deter illegal flows of migration, of migrants, is detaining people through their immigration proceedings and effectively repatriating them.

This is what, during the Obama administration, [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary [Jeh] Johnson did when we had a spike in family units in 2014. He detained them in a DHS facility through their immigration process and actually removed them back to Central America. That was highly publicized with the leadership of Guatemala and Honduras. They don't want their youth and energy to leave, so they are welcoming them home. And that created a dramatic deterrent. Crossings of family units dropped off almost immediately from that successful high-profile repatriation.

The challenge we have now is that tool of detaining families through their immigration procedure has been taken away by subsequent court decisions.

Immigrants who say they are fleeing persecution have long been allowed to approach U.S. officials to apply for asylum. There were some reports about asylum seekers getting turned back on border bridges to Mexico — has there been any policy change?

When our ports of entry reach capacity, when their ability to manage all of their missions — counter-narcotics, national security, facilitation of lawful trade — is challenged by the time and the space to process people that are arriving without documents, from time to time we have to manage the queues and address that processing based on that capacity.

Does that mean people are turned away, or they're turned away temporarily but they can come back?

We're not denying people approaching the U.S. border without documents. We're asking them to come back when we have the capacity to manage them.

So there's been no change in terms of migrants with paperwork being allowed to seek asylum at ports of entry?

No.

Learn more at L.A. Times

Many of the children who visit the St. John’s Well Child and Family Center at 58th and Hoover in South Los Angeles are anything but well.

The dentists treat children who suffer excruciating pain from swollen gums and rotting teeth.

“I just had a 2 1/2-year-old I had to refer for full mouth reconstruction,” said Dr. Shidrokh Mafi, who gets frustrated by parents who don’t follow advice about making sure their children brush, floss and avoid baby bottle syndrome — the decay caused by sugars from juice and soft drinks.

The doctors routinely see chronic preventable diseases common in third-world countries, and developmental delays are standard. Dr. David Bolour said he sees children daily who suffer from trauma they’ve experienced in their high-crime neighborhoods or in the places they fled, particularly Central American countries torn by violence.

“I had a 6-year-old who witnessed his grandfather’s hands being chopped off right in front of his eyes,” said Bolour, who seemed a bit traumatized himself after three years of working with children haunted and damaged by things that are a routine part of their lives.

“I had a 14-year-old yesterday whose mother was deported to Mexico, and he can’t even answer my questions about it. … He has anger toward his mother, actually. About 50% of the 20 patients I see in a day are dealing with something psychological or emotional, and it’s affecting their health.”

Bolour said common aches and pains in children can have different causes than he was fully aware of before he began working in South L.A.

“I’m seeing severe headaches, chest pain, abdominal pain, leg pains, dizziness — things that in my training were not addressed in a psychological way or thought to have a psychological root,” Bolour said . “But I’m seeing them so commonly here, and there’s a clear link.”

California, home to the world’s fifth-largest economy, has the dubious paradoxical distinction of unmatched wealth and nation-leading poverty rates. In one of the most recent studies, the California Budget & Policy Center reported that more than 20% of the state’s children live in families who can’t afford basic necessities, thanks in part to the state’s housing crisis and high cost of living.

Such reports are laden with sobering statistical analysis and valiant calls for legislative action to supplement existing support. But they usually lack the most important part of the story.

Children.

We all know there’s a divide, particularly in a state like California, where unimaginable abundance lives not far from economic despair.

But if you live in poverty as a California child, what do you eat in a day, what do you wear, what are your housing conditions, the crime rates in your neighborhood, the quality of your schools?

What are your hopes, and what are your fears?

You can find some of those answers with a visit to the doctor’s office. St. John’s, a nonprofit, has 15 medical centers and treats about 100,000 low-income residents in South Los Angeles and Compton. A big part of the mission is to provide health and nutrition education and advocacy for clients, but the deficits in people’s lives can be staggering and the challenges can seem insurmountable.

“What we’re seeing is huge amounts of people being displaced, more and more food insecurity, housing insecurity, people moving, families doubling up, and all kinds of slum housing conditions that cause people to be sick,” said St. John’s CEO Jim Mangia.

“We pull cockroaches out of kids’ ears every week,” he said.

Jessica, 26, takes a prenatal class at the main St. John’s clinic. A few minutes after I began asking about her living conditions, she dropped her head and began weeping. Her sobs were muffled, maybe to keep her 3-year-old son from seeing his mother in such distress. He sat on the floor, playing with a game on his mother’s phone.

They had their own home in Guatemala, said Jessica, who asked that her last name not be used. She was an assistant to the head of a bank, and her husband was a barber. They lived a good life, her son was cared for by his grandmother when she was at work and she’s expecting a second child in November.

But extortion and violence are commonplace in her country, she said. Her husband was given an ultimatum: Pay a protection tax to a local syndicate, or his family would be killed. He went to the police, who were no help. So he shut down his business, the family cleaned out its savings, got tourist visas and flew to Los Angeles two months ago.

Distant relatives took them in, but the arrangement is temporary. Jessica, her husband and son live in one small room of a house shared with four other people. Her husband finds construction jobs some days and contributes to the household food budget, and her son gets enough to eat, she said.

But Jessica often goes hungry, even though her baby is due this fall and nutrition is key at this point. She said she doesn’t want to impose any more than she already does on a family who is allowing them to stay rent-free for now, but not forever.

“Sometimes I’m embarrassed to get more food,” she said.

Jessica thought she’d be able to file for political asylum because of threats against her family in Guatemala, but an attorney told her that might not be possible, especially in the current political climate, in which parents and children fleeing their countries are being separated. So she wonders what will come of them when their tourist visas run out, her hosts ask her to move and she can’t go back home but might not be allowed to stay in the U.S.

“I don’t know what will happen,” Jessica said, but she feels safer here than she did in Guatemala. “At least I know I’m not going to be left a widow.”

Ronda Davis, who brought her four kids to the clinic for checkups, said she has lived in her car and in shelters. She said the family has dressed in parking lots, and she has washed the children with baby wipes when no bath was available. She said they often were cold at night.

Davis said she regrets starting a family when she was so young and repeating the cycle that began when she and her mother were homeless and her father died of an overdose.

“But they’re here,” she said of her kids, “and I’m going to do the best I can.”

The eldest has been acting out in school and is slightly overweight. The youngest child has delayed speech. The 3-year-old, badly asthmatic, sat glumly on an exam table with a mask over her face and steam pouring out of it.

“That sounds much better now,” Dr. Patricia Campbell said after applying a stethoscope and listening to the girl’s breathing.

Campbell said asthma is caused by dust, mold, carpets, smoke, proximity to highways and vehicle exhaust — all the things children are exposed to daily in low-income communities.

“Obesity, chronic care and developmental issues are the three main things we see. And lots of speech development issues,” Campbell said.

Obesity is not necessarily about eating too much, but about eating the wrong foods. Mangia, the CEO, said the clinics see cases of “blood sugar levels through the roof” when a patient runs out of money and may eat nothing but tortillas for days. For too many children, diets are high in processed food. Salt, sugar and fat outlets dominate the fast-food landscape in South Los Angeles, where pork rinds are a little easier to find than kale chips.

“Healthy food can be expensive,” said Campbell, who talked about Westside friends as if they lived in a different universe, flush with organic diets, books and daily exposure to healthy, rather than harmful, experiences. She said she sees a disproportionate amount of teenage diabetes at the clinic and thinks developmental disabilities are tied to a lack of intellectual stimulation, in part because so many parents are busy just trying to survive. Campbell said she’s raising money to buy books for her patients.

Just down the hall, Bolour examined a young boy who had been diagnosed with autism a year earlier but was showing some improvement. Bolour said it can be difficult to distinguish between autism and the developmental disabilities associated with poverty. The boy’s mother said the family lives in a backyard cottage and their only income is from her husband’s job at Panda Express.

“We try our best,” said the mother, “but fruits and vegetables are high right now.”

Bolour, who grew up on the Westside, said it’s impossible to not get attached to the families he sees, and to wonder, at the same time, how much longer he can do a job that’s as emotionally draining as it is rewarding.

“Every time I drive here, I feel like I’m coming to a different country,” the doctor said.

“A friend of mine had a baby and asked me if 6 months old was too early to put the baby in one of those running strollers. I never got that question in my three years in South L.A.”

Learn more at L.A. Times

Commenting on Supreme Court decisions is probably above the pay grade of a lowly art critic. Still, there’s an important point to be made about Monday’s much-debated decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop vs. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The key conflict in the case of the Christian baker who refused to make a cake to celebrate the wedding of Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins may be gay rights vs. religious freedom—but at its heart it also represents social conservatives pressing a new and unexpected union of art and politics.

What is important to grasp (and what some of the legal commentary leaves unsaid) is this: The issue was not whether businesses, in general, may deny service to same-sex couples because of religious conviction. The issue was whether artists, specifically, may deny service to same-sex couples because of religious conviction.

In effect, the baker and his lawyers have sought to draw upon the exceptional quality of artistic labor in order to carve out an exception to the anti-discrimination laws that American business owners must otherwise observe.

“I serve everybody,” Jack Phillips, the baker, emphasized on Good Morning America on Tuesday. “I just don’t create cakes for every occasion that people ask me to create.”

Asked if their legal campaign amounted to an attempt to legitimate anti-gay discrimination, Phillips’s lawyer Kristen Waggoner—of the Christian advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom—was clear: “Absolutely not, the court made very clear, as we made clear in our argument before the court, that Jack loves and serves anyone who walks into his store. But he doesn’t express all messages.”

In essence, they are trying to carve up the cake of discrimination. They say that while Phillips may have to serve everyone equally in routine business, there are parts of his business that are not routine. Those are the parts that bring into play his creativity and expression, which therefore touch on his inner life—the unique artistic aspects of his work.

Thus, Waggoner went on to stress: “He’s an expert baker, so when you go into his cake shop, he sketches, he sculpts, he hand-paints these custom cakes that are one-of-a-kind cakes, and that is what the court dealt with yesterday.”

An amicus brief put together by the Center for Religious Expression puts the comparison of cake-baking to art in even more flowery terms. Signed by 479 “creative professionals”—including the president of the company that produced The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; the actor who played Jesus in film The Gospel of Matthew; and Sharon Halverson, a piano teacher—it stated:

Jack Phillips is a creative professional. Wedding cakes are his works of art. In lieu of watercolors or pastels, Phillips uses fondant icing or frosting. He does not wield brushes, but icing bags and various tips, in carrying out the designs. The cake itself acts as his canvas and conveys his message. And Phillips’ shop, Masterpiece Cakeshop, is the gallery where his art pieces are displayed.

Since he did not, in fact, ask Craig and Mullins what message they wanted on their cake, denying them service based on the fact that any cake would of necessity be a pro-gay statement, the whole thing becomes about symbolism in the abstract. Indeed, arguments around the Masterpiece Cakeshop case have invoked the oeuvres of Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock as evidence that purely abstract form can be “expressive” of deep personal and social ideas.

This, clearly, leads to some serious problems of the slippery-slope type. Here’s the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin describing arguments when Masterpiece was argued last December:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg [asked] if a person who designs wedding invitations is also an artist, who could refuse to do business with gay customers. [Kristin] Waggoner hedged, and Kagan jumped in. What about the jeweler who designs the rings? “It would depend on the context,” the lawyer responded. But Kagan was just warming up. What about the hair stylist? An artist? “Absolutely not,” Waggoner said. “There’s no expression or protected speech in that kind of context.” Kagan asked, “The makeup artist?” Not an artist, Waggoner said.

“It’s called an artist,” Kagan shot back. “It’s the makeup artist.” The courtroom audience, which is usually sedate, roared with laughter. Kagan wasn’t done. What about the chef who cooked the wedding dinner? Not an artist, Waggoner said. “Whoa!” Kagan replied. “The baker is engaged in speech, but the chef is not engaged in speech?”

Justice Breyer would go on to spell out the implications of the line of questioning. “The reason we’re asking these questions,” he said to Waggoner, “is because obviously we want some kind of distinction that will not undermine every civil-rights law, from the year one… including everybody who has been discriminated against in very basic things of life, food, design of furniture, homes, and buildings.”

So it is that the question of how you draw a line around something called “art” becomes a burning political issue of our day.

It is important to realize how we arrived at this juncture. The Alliance Defending Freedom was founded in the early ‘90s by a consortium of hard-right religious conservatives as a counterweight to the American Civil Liberties Union, with the intent of finding ways to press social conservative values through the law. The Alliance’s rhetoric has been extreme enough that at one time it was branded a hate group. Its longtime director, Alan Sears, penned a charming little tome in 2003 titled The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today.

According to an article in the New York Times last year, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case is emblematic of the Alliance’s new, deliberately less openly homophobic public relations strategy—an attempt to sweeten their message, so to speak. As an ACLU lawyer explained, “[T]hey are no longer leading with the messages they used to, which are ‘gay people are pedophiles and we need to keep them away from our kids.’”

To this end, the ADF has been actively cultivating a network of Christian small business owners—in particular creatives like graphic designers, videographers, and florists—who are open to the argument that anti-discrimination laws force them to violate their values by forcing them to accept creative work from LGBT+ clients. The ADF has offered them media training and slick PR campaigns, and sued cities preemptively on their behalf as fast as it can get them to sign on.

The attempt to use artistic freedom to undermine the scope of gay rights in the wake of the legalization of gay marriage in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case may be compared to another right-wing attempt to roll back the clock: the very successful, decades-long strategy to undermine abortion rights after Roe v. Wade. By finding enough legal loopholes and pressing relentlessly to expand them, intransigent social conservatives have rendered the “right to choose” effectively inoperable in many places by eliminating any meaningful choice—all without having to repeal Roe.

Given the ADF’s history, goals, and general methods, it may be that the definitional slipperiness around “creative labor” noted by Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Ginzburg is exactly the point, despite reassurances to the contrary in court and to the media. Once you establish an exception for discrimination that involves “expression,” you potentially open up a large class of exceptions indeed. In The Managed Heart, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the now-popular term “emotional labor,” noting that a substantial and growing proportion of jobs in our economy include some “emotional” or “expressive” or “creative” components. (The classic example is a flight attendant, for whom some portion of work is dedicated to keeping things pleasant for passengers.)

ADF’s description of Phillips (and its other “creative professionals”) is heavy on rhetoric about how craft overlaps with deeply held internal beliefs. A small irony is that, to the extent that Masterpiece Cakeshop is indeed similar to “the gallery where [Phillips’s] art pieces are displayed,” it is the cakes that he says he actually is willing to sell to gay clients—cakes produced, presumably, according to his own designs, which later find a buyer—that are most analogous to artworks in a gallery. Generally, you go to an art gallery to get something that has been produced with an independent vision, not to commission something new. It is the value placed on this independent vision that gives us the myth of the “autonomy” of art.

On the other hand, the kind of custom cake-making that Phillips refuses to do for a same-sex wedding resembles perfectly ordinary design work. As a category of labor, design is far, far more common than art (despite a consistent effort by “creative economy” pundits to blur the two together). Commissioned labor, whether or not it involves goods that are “hand-painted” or “one-of-a-kind,” generally involves using one’s skills within parameters set by a client.

I cannot pretend to be clever enough to resolve the legal issues here. I mean, hell—even the Supreme Court wasn’t able to. Many observers have interpreted the decision as dodging the central conflict, instead reversing the Colorado Court of Appeals decision on the technical grounds that it had not been impartial. “The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts,” Justice Kennedy wrote in the decision.

What I can say is that long-term, these matters are won in the court of public opinion as well as in the court of law, with the frame of debate changing as the scope of what is thinkable shifts. So one should note, since the battle goes on, how the terms of the struggle are shifting.

It is true, of course, that a large and growing share of the rising generation identifies as LGBT+—one in five—and a much, much larger percentage is sympathetic to gay rights or identifies as an ally. If you were betting on businesses to succeed over the long run, you would still not bet on the ones that proudly flew the flag of anti-gay marriage animus.

But pressing the association between religious liberty and artistic liberty is simultaneously a legal strategy to advance a cause, a political strategy to galvanize the conservative movement, and a PR strategy to turn the tide of public support. Rhetorically, it goads its opponents to choose between sounding as if they support creative autonomy—an incredibly cherished, if highly mythologized, value in our hyper-alienated society—and equal rights.

At one time, the maxim that “everyone is an artist” was considered a lefty call-to-arms. Associated with German artist Joseph Beuys, it meant that everyone should think of themselves as creatively empowered, no matter what they did; to cast off alienation and infuse their work and world with personal meaning. It is amusing, perhaps, to see social conservatives—normally perhaps the last you’d associate with a broad and plural notion of what art should be—now echo that rhetoric as a means to an end. But it is also alarming.

It represents a new phase in our renewed culture wars. And it is one that people need to take the measure of, because unfortunately, all signs indicate that this particular cake is just an appetizer of what is to come.

Learn more at Artnews

U.S. border authorities, in a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, are planning to introduce a fast-track prosecution program to criminally charge more people who cross the border into California illegally, according to attorneys in San Diego.

Under the program, called Operation Streamline, migrants will be moved through the criminal justice system in group hearings, with cases handled in a matter of hours, from arraignment to sentencing.

Mass prosecutions of up to 100 migrants per day occur in federal districts in Arizona and Texas but would mark a major shift for California’s southern district, based in San Diego, which hasn’t seen expedited judicial proceedings since the border was overrun with illegal immigration decades ago.

Most people who cross illegally into California are not criminally prosecuted, but the numbers would increase substantially under Streamline.

The plans were recently announced to members of the Criminal Case Management Committee, a group of attorneys, judges and law enforcement officials convened by the district’s chief judge, Barry Moskowitz, to address surging caseloads in the district.

The plans have yet to be finalized, but prosecutors told the committee that they want to charge anywhere from 35 to 100 people per day, including first-time crossers, according to Jeremy Warren, a longtime criminal defense attorney who attended a meeting of the committee Wednesday.

“They want anybody arrested crossing the border to be prosecuted with illegal entry,” Warren said, adding that discussions are still underway on how the court will accommodate the additional cases. Prosecutors want the program to start in one month, he said.

Federal and court officials, including from the departments of Homeland Security and Justice, declined interview requests.

Kelly Thornton, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego, said prosecutors are working with the courts to manage increasing immigration caseloads “in a manner that respects the constitutional rights of defendants.”

The U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego arrests, on average, about 120 migrants per day along the 60-mile stretch it patrols. Cases are rising sharply following the announcement of a zero tolerance policy in April by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions.

U.S. authorities say border prosecutions are an effective deterrent, and have made it a cornerstone of President Trump’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration. Streamline is a U.S. Border Patrol program that requires coordination with U.S. attorneys and federal court judges to set prosecution goals.

It has long generated controversy and protests, with critics calling it “assembly-line justice” that undermines basic rights of criminal defendants.

To deal with rising caseloads, judges in the district at times keep courtrooms open late, immigration agents assist with security, and defendants are shuttled into court from detention centers as far away as Arizona.

In a rare step, Moskowitz formed the criminal case management committee last month, including prosecutors, judges, and criminal defense attorneys.

“The increase has and will cause strains, issues and problems for the court and its personnel,” Moskowitz said in his order creating the committee.

The border patrol introduced Streamline in Texas in 2005 as a way of penalizing migrants who would otherwise be deported without being charged. Implementation of the program varies from district to district, depending on resources and enforcement priorities, but the program generally aims to increase prosecutions by expediting the judicial process.

Within a day of their arrest, migrants appear in courtrooms, where prosecutors offer them misdemeanor plea agreement deals.

The maximum sentence for the crime of “improper” entry into the country is six months, but most defendants plead guilty and are deported after a few days or weeks in jail.

The southern district of California is one of the nation’s busiest, handling significant numbers of healthcare and white-collar fraud cases as well as major gang and drug cartel cases.

The district, unlike those others with Streamline programs, has had relatively low illegal border crossing activity for years. Immigration prosecutions were focused on more-serious offenders, including human smugglers and repeat crossers with criminal records.

Defense attorneys have long criticized Streamline, saying it sacrifices constitutional due-process protections for speed. With several court appearances combined in one, attorneys have limited time to confer with clients that can be complex, they say.

“We’ll defend the cases that are brought, but we don’t want to be in position where we’re processing people like parts in a factory.… People who have been separated from their children are not in a position to make a decision in half an hour,” said Warren.

Charles LaBella, a former senior federal prosecutor in the district, called Streamline “turnstile justice” that is not what the federal courts were meant to do.

“It takes the emphasis off serious criminal aliens and eyes off white-collar criminals, Medicare fraud, bank fraud … to use resources to prosecute misdemeanors against people who are coming to pick fruit or find menial work to send money back home,” he said.

But supporters say the program provides a strong message that the law will now be strictly enforced all along the border — a scenario that will deter many people from trying to cross again and be charged with a felony.

“Most of these folks are not people who want to spend time in jail with a rapist or a drug dealer,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls on immigration.“They are regular folks, dishwashers, landscapers … for the most part they are not involved in that kind of criminality. But the crime they are committing is sneaking across the border, and the message needs to be sent that this is not something you will be able to get away with.”

Border districts are already showing signs of strain as the zero tolerance policy takes hold. In south Texas, up to 40 shackled defendants at a time appear in courtrooms to plead guilty. In southern Arizona, Chief Judge Raner Collins said the district can’t raise the current limit of 75 defendants per day without getting more resources.

Activists in the past have picketed courthouses and attempted to stop migrant-filled buses from reaching the federal building in Tucson. Judge Robert Brack, who is believed to have handled more Streamline cases than any other judge in the country, recently told The Times that has decided to step down as a full-time judge in his New Mexico district.

“I have presided over a process that destroys families for a long time, and I am weary of it,” Brack said. “And I think we as a country are better than this.”

Learn more at L.A. Times

With a key deadline a month away, two national paint companies are turning up the pressure on California lawmakers to absolve them of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in legal penalties from lead paint hazards.

The companies, Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra, have hired five lobbying firms, sponsored a website, purchased advertisements and spent at least $2.8 million on a political campaign. At issue is a state court ruling finding that the companies promoted the use of lead paint in homes even after they knew the material could harm children, and making them financially responsible for cleaning it up.

Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra are behind a proposed November ballot initiative that would overturn the court decision, eliminate their financial penalty and instead authorize a $2-billion taxpayer-funded bond to fund the cleanup of lead paint and other health hazards in homes and schools.

Instead of taking the initiative to voters, the companies would prefer to strike a deal with lawmakers to relieve some of their burden. Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra face a June 28 deadline to withdraw the measure, which is expected to have collected enough valid signatures to get the secretary of state's blessing for placement on the statewide ballot.

"I think it's fair to say that there's interest," Anthony Dias, a Sherwin-Williams attorney, said of conversations the companies have had with lawmakers, though he declined to name any of the legislators. "The Legislature understands that they are better equipped to deal with an issue than the courts are."

There are no pending bills that would address the companies' concerns. Publicly, lawmakers are reacting to the companies' push with fury. A half-dozen legislators have written bills that would further penalize the paint companies, including one that would add a new $2 fee on all paint sold in California — by any paint company — that would go into effect if the November initiative passes.

Lawmakers took turns pillorying the companies at a public hearing last week on the proposed initiative.

"I've never heard such deceptive testimony in my life," Assemblyman Bill Quirk (D-Hayward) said. "It takes a lot to get me angry. You have gotten me angry."

Striking some compromise would spare the paint companies potentially tens of millions in campaigning to pass a statewide ballot measure. A failed 2008 effort by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens to provide billions in state subsidies for consumers to purchase natural gas vehicles fueled by companies Pickens owned cost $23 million.

The dispute over who's responsible for cleaning up lead paint, which became illegal to use in homes in 1978, dates back 18 years. Ten cities and counties, including Los Angeles, sued Sherwin-Williams, ConAgra and NL Industries, arguing that lead paint in homes was a public nuisance and that the three companies should have to pay to get rid of it.

In November, a state appeals court largely upheld a lower-court ruling that put the companies on the hook for cleaning up paint in homes built before 1951, an amount likely to be hundreds of millions of dollars. Earlier this month, the plaintiffs settled with NL Industries for $60 million and as part of the deal that company withdrew its support for the proposed initiative.

Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra are pursuing an appeal of the case at the U.S. Supreme Court while also ramping up efforts in the Legislature. They argue that the court ruling, specifically the declaration that lead paint in homes is a public nuisance, harms not only them but also homeowners. The court required the companies to clean up pre-1951 homes, but provided no funding to get rid of lead paint in those built afterward.

This finding, Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra contend, makes owners of homes built after 1951 responsible for the lead cleanup. That's an assessment shared by the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce among other business groups. The companies started a website warning that the court ruling "red tags" millions of California properties. Lawmakers have said they've received thousands of emails from their constituents in response.

The companies and their supporters went further in the hearing last week, arguing that the implications of the court decision for homeowners were akin to the racist government-backed mortgage lending policies in the 1930s known as redlining and the recent lead crisis in Flint, Mich.

The cities and counties that sued Sherwin-Williams and ConAgra vigorously disagree with the companies' legal argument, and independent observers share that stance. Sean Hecht, a UCLA School of Law professor who has followed the litigation, said the court decision doesn't increase homeowners' liability.

The companies "want to scare people into thinking this is going to be this dramatic problem for the real estate community and maybe tenants, and it's hard for me to see how the ruling does what they say at all," Hecht said.

Instead, cities and counties argue, the paint companies are trying to use the threat of a ballot measure and their current lobbying efforts to erase their current legal problems and avoid future ones. The existing court ruling applies only to the 10 local governments that sued and, unless the laws change or the initiative is successful, others in California could do the same thing.

"Our lawsuit sets forth a blueprint by which city attorneys, county counsels, other public prosecutors for other jurisdictions throughout this state can file similar public nuisance lawsuits and obtain similar funds," Jenny Lam, a deputy county counsel in Santa Clara, told legislators at last week's hearing.

Learn more at L.A. Times

Reports of federal authorities losing track of nearly 1,500 immigrant children in their custody. Scathing criticism over children being taken from their migrant parents at the border. Proposed rallies.

In the recent days, outrage about treatment of children taken into U.S. custody at the Southwest border has reached a fever pitch, exploding in a barrage of tweets and calls to action with the hashtags #WhereAreTheChildren and #MissingChildren.

How accurate are certain claims circulating online? Are these children really missing? What do those children have to do with the Trump administration’s new immigration enforcement policies? How many families are being separated? And why is there so much outrage about it now? We take a look at how the story has snowballed.

Did the United States really lose track of 1,475 immigrant kids?

In short, yes. During a Senate committee hearing late last month, Steven Wagner, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services, testified that the federal agency had lost track of 1,475 children who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on their own (that is, unaccompanied by adults) and subsequently were placed with adult sponsors in the United States. As the Associated Press reported, the number was based on a survey of more than 7,000 children:

From October to December 2017, HHS called 7,635 children the agency had placed with sponsors, and found 6,075 of the children were still living with their sponsors, 28 had run away, five had been deported and 52 were living with someone else. The rest were missing, said Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary at HHS.

Health and Human Services officials have argued it is not the department’s legal responsibility to find those children after they are released from the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which falls under HHS‘s Administration for Children and Families. And some have pointed out that adult sponsors are sometimes relatives who already were living in the United States and who intentionally may not be responding to contact attempts by HHS.

However, neither of those arguments has done much to quell outrage surrounding the testimony by Wagner, a principal deputy at HHS who oversees the Administration for Children and Families.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), chairman of the Senate subcommittee, has repeatedly argued that it was a matter of humanity, not simply legal responsibility, citing a case in which federal officials had turned over eight immigrant children to human traffickers.

“These kids, regardless of their immigration status, deserve to be treated properly, not abused or trafficked,” Portman said in the subcommittee. “This is all about accountability.”

Portman reiterated his stance in an April 24 “Frontline” special called “Trafficked in America,” which documented the plight of the eight children who were forced to work on an egg farm in Ohio.

“We’ve got these kids. They’re here. They’re living on our soil,” he told the PBS program. “And for us to just, you know, assume someone else is going to take care of them and throw them to the wolves, which is what HHS was doing, is flat-out wrong. I don’t care what you think about immigration policy, it’s wrong.”

According to HHS, approximately 85 percent of sponsors who ultimately acquire custody of unaccompanied minors are parents or close family members.

Were these 1,475 children separated from their parents at the border?

No. The children unaccounted for in last year’s HHS survey all arrived at the Southwest border alone. The government refers to these children as “unaccompanied alien children,” or UACs.

Are children being taken from their parents after they cross the border into the United States?

Yes. On May 7, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Justice Department would begin prosecuting every person who crossed the Southwest border illegally — or at least attempt to prosecute “100 percent” — even if some of them could or should be treated as asylum seekers, as the American Civil Liberties Union has argued.

Although Sessions said he understood that some people were fleeing violence or other dangerous situations, he has also stated that the United States “cannot take everyone on this planet who is in a difficult situation.”

“If you cross the border unlawfully … then we will prosecute you,” he said in a pair of speeches in Scottsdale, Ariz., and San Diego. “If you smuggle an illegal alien across the border, then we’ll prosecute you. … If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that.”

The consequence of this new “100 percent” policy is that children will be separated from their parents as the adults are charged with a crime, even if the adults are seeking asylum and present themselves at official ports of entry.

Under federal rules, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transfers unaccompanied minors, and now children of detained adults, to Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement within 48 hours of their crossing the border, according to the AP.

Are child-parent separations being used as a tool to deter border crossings?

That would appear to be the case. As The Washington Post’s Sari Horwitz and Maria Sacchetti reported, internal discussions about separating families at the border suggested that it was to dissuade people from attempting to cross the border:

Senior immigration and border officials called for the increased prosecutions [in April] in a confidential memo to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. They said filing criminal charges against migrants, including parents traveling with children, would be the “most effective” way to tamp down on illegal border crossings.

The “zero-tolerance” measure announced Monday could split up thousands of families because children are not allowed in criminal jails. Until now, most families apprehended crossing the border illegally have been released to await civil deportation hearings.

In a May 11 interview with NPR’s John Burnett, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly referred to family separation as something that would be a “tough deterrent” to migrant parents who may be thinking of bringing their children to the border.

“Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people,” Kelly told Burnett. “But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from — fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. … They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. But a big name of the game is deterrence.”

What are some of the issues that these children face during separation?

For months, stories have abounded of families separated by immigration authorities at the border: Three children were separated from their mother as they fled a gang in El Salvador; a 7-year-old was taken from her Congolese mother who was seeking asylum; and so on, in reportedly hundreds of cases. In almost every case, the families have described heart-wrenching goodbyes and agonizing uncertainty about whether they would be reunited.

According to the Florence Project, an Arizona nonprofit organization that provides legal and social services to detained immigrants, there have been more than 200 cases of parents being separated from their children since the beginning of the year in the state alone.

“The type of devastation that we’re talking about … where a separated mother doesn’t know where her child is for four days, that’s entirely common right now in this administration,” Laura St. John, the group’s legal director, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “Children and parents who are separated sometimes don’t have any way to communicate with each other for days, for weeks — I’ve seen months where a parent had no idea where their child was after the U.S. government took their child away.”

St. John noted her group also was seeing increasingly younger children being taken into custody by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, as opposed to the migrant teenagers who had previously crossed the border themselves.

“Just last week we saw a 53-week-old infant in court without a parent,” St. John told Hayes. “What we’re seeing now is that, because the government is separating the children from the parents, the government is actually rendering these children as unaccompanied minors and bringing them to the shelters.”

On the same program, Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project, told Hayes that the number of separations his group has seen was “unprecedented.”

“This is the worst thing I’ve seen in 25-plus years of doing this civil rights work,” Gelernt said. “I am talking to these mothers and they are describing their kids screaming, ‘Mommy, Mommy, don’t let them take me away!’ … The medical evidence is overwhelming that we may be doing permanent trauma to these kids, and yet the government is finding every way they can to try and justify it.”

The Office of Refugee Resettlement reported that children spent an average of 34 days in their custody during the 2015 fiscal year.

What has the government’s response been?

In his May 11 NPR interview, the White House chief of staff danced around a question about whether it was “cruel and heartless” for U.S. border officials to take an immigrant child away from his or her mother.

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Kelly told Burnett. “The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.”

Many members of Congress have expressed concern about family separations. In February, 71 Democratic lawmakers signed a letter to Nielsen stating that they were “deeply disturbed” by the increasing practice, which “suggests a lack of understanding about the violence many families are fleeing in their home countries.”

On May 16, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) questioned Nielsen about the “immoral” policy and asked whether she had been directed to separate families to deter future border crossing attempts. Nielsen denied that the new policy was an act of deterrence.

“What purpose have you been given for separating parents from their children?” Harris asked.

“So my decision has been that anyone who breaks the law will be prosecuted,” Nielsen said. “If you’re a parent or you’re a single person or you happen to have a family, if you cross between the ports of entry, we will refer you for prosecution. You’ve broken U.S. law.”

Nielsen also tried to recast questions that characterized children being removed from their parents’ custody as family separations. When Harris demanded to know whether or how Border Patrol agents were trained to take children from their parents, Nielsen interrupted.

“No, what we’ll be doing is prosecuting parents who have broken the law, just as we do every day in the United States of America,” she said.

“I can appreciate that,” Harris continued, “but if that parent has a 4-year-old child, what do you plan on doing with that child?”

“The child, under law, goes to HHS for care and custody,” Nielsen said.

“They will be separated from their parents,” Harris said, slowly. “My question then is, when you are separating children from their parents, do you have a protocol in place about how that should be done and are you training the people who will actually remove a child from their parent on how to do that in the least traumatic way? I would hope you do train on how to do that.”

Nielsen said she would provide that information to Harris later.

Although the hearing took place two weeks ago, Harris tweeted footage from it on Saturday afternoon, calling Nielsen’s responses “beyond insufficient.”

How has HHS responded?

On Monday night, HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan said in a statement that “the assertion that unaccompanied alien children (UAC) are ‘lost’ is completely false. This is a classic example of the adage ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’”

Hargan’s statement said that ORR “began voluntarily making calls in 2016 as a 30-day follow-up on the release of UAC to make sure that UAC and their sponsors did not require additional services. This additional step, which is not required and was not done previously, is now being used to confuse and spread misinformation.

“These children are not ‘lost’; their sponsors — who are usually parents or family members and in all cases have been vetted for criminality and ability to provide for them — simply did not respond or could not be reached when this voluntary call was made. While there are many possible reasons for this, in many cases sponsors cannot be reached because they themselves are illegal aliens and do not want to be reached by federal authorities.

“This is the core of this issue: In many cases, HHS has been put in the position of placing illegal aliens with the individuals who helped arrange for them to enter the country illegally. This makes the immediate crisis worse and creates a perverse incentive for further violation of federal immigration law.”

He added that “the tracking of UAC after release is just one of the recent headlines that focus on the symptoms of our broken immigration system while ignoring its fundamental flaws. President Trump’s administration has been calling on Congress to put an end to dangerous loopholes in U.S. immigration laws like the practice of ‘catch and release,’ in which federal authorities release illegal immigrants to await hearings for which few show up. In the worst cases, these loopholes are being exploited by human traffickers and violent gangs like MS-13. Until these laws are fixed, the American taxpayer is paying the bill for costly programs that aggravate the problem and put children in dangerous situations.”

Why are we hearing about these issues now?

As mentioned, reports of the 1,475 children HHS could not account for first emerged in April, and proposals to crack down on migrant families crossing the border were discussed as early as last year.

Nevertheless, the story snowballed this past week, with thousands expressing outrage online about both family separations or the HHS survey from last year. Why? As with other topics that mushroom inexplicably on social media, it’s unclear. The issues may have drawn renewed attention in part because of a widely shared column in USA Today by Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini.

Friday also happened to be International Missing Children’s Day, producing what some called an ill-timed tweet from the recruiting arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Although ICE is not the agency that is responsible for migrant children, it has since President Trump took office cracked down on deporting undocumented immigrants who previously would not have been a priority.

As mentioned before, the 1,475 children were not separated from their parents at the border. However, many who have expressed outrage online about family separations have been appending their tweets with the hashtags #WhereAreTheChildren or #MissingChildren, intentionally or unintentionally linking the two issues.

Some who should have been better informed also conflated the two, implying that federal officials had lost 1,500 immigrant children who had been taken from their parents, when this was not the case.

Other officials and celebrities seized on the hashtag to propose protests and spread the story further, sometimes with erroneous information. For example, some mistakenly accused ICE, a different agency, of “losing” 1,500 children. Many began recirculating an Arizona Republic slideshow with photos from 2014 of a federal detention center for child immigrants.

However, as Vox immigration reporter Dara Lind pointed out in a long thread about both matters, the fact that HHS has already admitted that it cannot account for nearly 1,500 migrant children previously in its custody does not inspire confidence that the agency could perform better with an expanded scope of responsibilities.

“Is this relevant to their newly expanded duties to care for kids separated from parents? You bet it is,” Lind wrote. “But that’s [because] it’s the agency failing at its TRADITIONAL function, and now being asked to perform a new one.”

The topic gained traction Saturday morning when Trump tried to blame Democrats for “the horrible law that separates children from parents once they cross the Border” — even though there is no such law, and even though it was a policy supported by his administration.

Trump also tried to use the issue to drum up support for his proposed border wall.

“He used DACA kids as a bargaining chip, and it didn’t work,” said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. “So now he’s using vulnerable Central American families for his nativist agenda. It’s shameless.”

Tuesday morning, apparently responding to a segment on “Fox and Friends,” the president returned to Twitter to criticize some of the lawmakers and others on the left whose the #WhereAreTheChildren tweets had used archival photos showing unaccompanied minors in federal custody.

Learn more at The Washington Post

The van pulled up to John F. Kennedy International Airport on a recent Thursday evening. Around it, passengers poured out of taxis and headed toward their gates. Inside the van, Prince Gbohoutou gripped his seat belt in fear.

The government was about to put the 26-year-old tattoo artist from Maryland on a flight to his native country in Africa.

A month earlier, Gbohoutou, a recently married asylum seeker from the Central African Republic, had gone to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement appointment in Baltimore hoping to get a work permit. Instead, the New Carrollton resident was detained in front of his American wife and told he was being deported.

Now, ICE agents opened the van’s door and ordered him out. But Gbohoutou, with shackled hands, said he held fast to the seat. He was afraid to return to the Central African Republic, where he said his mother had been killed.

As suitcase-toting bystanders looked on, Gbohoutou said, an ICE agent struck him on the legs with a baton while others tried to yank him out of the van.

Eventually, the ICE agents cut the seat belt with a knife — nicking Gbohoutou’s hand — before handcuffing him to a wheelchair and taking him to his flight, he claimed. But the airline refused to take an unwilling passenger, Gbohoutou said, and ICE was forced to return him — at least temporarily — to his cell.

Justine W. Whelan, an ICE spokeswoman, said in a statement that “all allegations of physical abuse and mistreatment by ICE officers in this case are patently false.” She said an immigration judge ordered Gbohoutou deported seven years ago, his appeal was denied, and it was the agency’s “duty to execute that final order.”

But Gbohoutou’s story, including the dramatic airport scene on May 24, has sparked a new campaign to allow him to remain in the United States, where he came legally as a child and spent much of his life.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has become an advocate for Gbohoutou, saying he is “part of our community” and could be in “imminent danger” if deported. Van Hollen said he has contacted officials at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, warning them that his removal would be “unjust.”

“I’ll be killed if I go back,” Gbohoutou said Saturday in a telephone interview from an ICE detention center in Frederick, Md. “I’m just hoping some people find it in their hearts to [let me stay].”

Similar, if less dramatic, encounters have played out with increasing frequency across the country as the Trump administration cracks down on illegal immigration. Undocumented immigrants without criminal records, like Gbohoutou, who were generally off limits under the Obama administration, are now fair game, officials say.

Gbohoutou came to the United States legally in 2006, when he was 14, to join his father, who worked for their country’s ambassador in Washington. His mother stayed behind in the Central African Republic, which is one of the world’s poorest countries and has long been wracked by religious and civil conflict.

When the situation there worsened, his father applied for asylum, including his son as a dependent. But the application was rejected. When their appeal was also denied, his father thought it better to remain in the United States illegally than return.

“The fact that he was brought here as a kid means he’s really blameless,” said Adam Crandell, Gbohoutou’s immigration attorney, noting that he graduated from High Point High School in Beltsville, Md., and was eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program to protect undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children.

Gbohoutou was still in high school when he met the woman who would become his wife. He was on a D.C. bus when on stepped Shaniece.

“He was cute, I was cute,” she said. “We exchanged words, and then we exchanged numbers.”

For their first date, he took her to her favorite restaurant, TGI Friday’s. For their second, she went to his senior prom.

But as they dated, Gbohoutou’s life began to fall apart. Shortly after his family’s asylum application was denied, his mother was kidnapped in the Central African Republic by political rivals, he said.

“I guess they wanted my dad to go back,” Gbohoutou said. “They tortured her. And they beat her to death.”

His father died a few weeks later — a “physical manifestation of grief,” Crandell said — leaving Gbohoutou to navigate life in the United States as an undocumented immigrant.

That life was not without incident. Gbohoutou was arrested in 2011, when he was 19, accused of shoplifting from a mall, Crandell said, but the charges were dropped. His only other criminal charge, for failure to present identification to police during a traffic stop in 2016, was also dropped.

In 2014, Gbohoutou was detained by ICE for about six months. Crandell said it was unclear why his client was held, but it might have been connected with the shoplifting charge.

Since then, Gbohoutou has been required to check in with ICE periodically. Despite worries over the new administration, his first few check-ins under President Trump went without a hitch.

The last one, on Shaniece’s birthday, seemed to be a sign that his hard luck had ended. The couple wed last May and had recently begun the process to get him a green card. This spring they vacationed in Florida.

When they returned, there was an envelope from ICE waiting. The agency asked Gbohoutou to come in on April 19 but didn’t say why. The couple hoped it was so he could receive a work permit.

“We didn’t have any fear,” Shaniece said. “We thought, what could go wrong?”

At the Baltimore office, Gbohoutou’s name was called while Shaniece was in the bathroom. When an ICE agent asked him if he had a relative to take his things, his stomach dropped.

When his wife returned, Gbohoutou told her to be strong.

“I put my head down and started crying,” she said. When she looked up, he was gone.

With the help of the immigrants rights group Sanctuary DMV, Shaniece hired Crandell and began a campaign to free her husband. On May 16, Crandell filed a motion to reopen Gbohoutou’s case.

But on Thursday, after missing a call from Gbohoutou, Shaniece rang his detention center only to be told he was being transferred to New York to be deported.

Crandell says he thinks his client was spared Thursday only because no ICE agent was scheduled to accompany him to Africa. But he hopes the airport incident has bought him enough time to persuade the Board of Immigration Appeals to reopen Gbohoutou’s case.

Crandell said that ICE was within its rights but that sending his client back to the Central African Republic would be “hamfisted and cruel.”

Gbohoutou said he hopes to remain in the United States, become an architect and start a family.

“I’m not a bad person,” he said, but added that if ICE tries to deport him again, “I’m still not going to get on the plane.”

Learn more at The Washington Post

Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs says that for way too long, his city has been known for headlines about bankruptcy, violent crime and the housing collapse.

In the future, he wants it to be known as a place willing to test bold solutions.

Bold, and a little controversial.

Tubbs, a Stockton native and Stanford graduate who is all of 27 years old, wants to give at least $500 a month to a select group of residents. They'll be able to spend it as they wish, for 18 months, in a pilot program to test the impact of what's called guaranteed basic income.

If the very sound of that knocked you half off your chair, this next initiative might finish the job.

Stockton is about to award stipends of up to $1,000 a month to residents deemed most likely to shoot somebody. This program is called Advance Peace, and it's modeled after a crime reduction program in the Bay Area city of Richmond.

The idea is that a small number of people are responsible for a large percentage of violence, and offering them an alternative path — with counseling and case management over an 18-month period, along with a stipend if they stay the course — can be a good investment all around.

"Let me be clear, Advance Peace is not a get out of jail free card," Tubbs wrote in explaining the program on Stockton's public safety website. "Participating in this program doesn't erase the past, but it does help these young men learn how to make better choices for their own and our community's collective future."

There's a difference between a vision and a hallucination, and time will tell with Tubbs. But I like the young man's mix of rebelliousness, impatience and willingness to take risks.

We met last year when I wrote about how Stockton had gone from housing collapse to housing boom. Workers in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco-Oakland area, driven out of the cuckoo housing markets in those communities, have snapped up cheaper properties in Stockton, accepting the bargain of killer commutes.

But Stockton still suffers the crushing burdens of poverty, crime and now the rising rents and home prices that come with gentrification. For those who don't have the education or training to work 60 miles away on tech's front lines, Stockton still struggles to develop jobs that pay a living wage, and I paid the mayor another visit last week to talk about his plans for residents whose most pressing problems have not lifted.

"We get 50 constituents a week, if not more, calling and emailing us to explain why they would benefit" from a $500 monthly stipend, Tubbs said. "It's heartbreaking that they're asking, but it's also exciting that we can do something for these people."

"Exciting" is not the way everyone describes the program.

"You've got to be kidding," Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and vice presidential running mate, tweeted last month.

But Tubbs responded with a Twitter touche.

"Actually modeled after the Alaska Permanent Fund," he wrote. "Are you familiar with it?"

The Alaska fund shares the wealth on state oil revenues, awarding residents roughly $2,000 a year.

The first thing you need to know about Stockton's stipend plans is that taxpayers aren't footing the bill. Nor will they pay for Tubbs' "Stockton Scholars" program, which will tap a $20-million grant from the California Community Foundation in an effort to triple the number of Stockton students who go to college.

"I firmly believe that talent and intelligence are universal, but resources and opportunities are not. Stockton Scholars is born out of that belief," Tubbs said when he introduced the program this year.

Tubbs said that when he became mayor last year, he had a habit of sending late-night emails to a crack team of volunteer research assistants. One night he asked them to look into novel ways to attack poverty.

"They came back with guaranteed income," said Tubbs, and it jogged a memory for him. In college, he read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s book "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community," in which King promoted a guaranteed annual income.

So the idea of stipends isn't exactly new — Canada and Finland have tried it; Oakland has a pilot program — nor is it exclusively a liberal pipe dream. In some form, the pitch has supporters and detractors on both the right and the left, although on the right, it's often framed as a substitute for existing safety net programs.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Space X's Elon Musk have both pitched the idea in terms of inevitability, given the growing income gap and the threat of massive job losses because of automation.

Tubbs attended a San Francisco conference on those very topics last year and met Natalie Foster of the Economic Security Project, whose ambitious goal is to find ways to lift people out of poverty and to rebuild the middle class. Foster co-chairs the project with Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

"One thing we wanted to do was spur our first mayor-led demonstration project in the U.S.," said Foster, who began working on the details with Tubbs and expects Stockton's program to begin early next year.

As small as the program will be, it's not going to dramatically affect many Stockton residents, but the goal is to get a sense of whether such an infusion on a broader scale can significantly alter lives and boost the economy. Still to be worked out are details on who will be eligible and how recipients will be selected. Mayor Tubbs said he wants middle-class residents to be eligible, because lots of people making $50,000 to $60,000 a year struggle to get through each month.

To those who say there's dignity in work, and that free money might remove the incentive, Tubbs notes that he grew up poor despite the efforts of an overworked mother. A large percentage of Stockton's poorest people have jobs, he said, but no economic security.

"Working 12 to 14 hours a day and not being able to pay the bills creates more stress than dignity," he said.

Tubbs said what he's heard from residents is that if their number comes up, they won't use the extra $500 a month to buy a new car or television. They'll pay bills. One mother said it would help with inflated food and utility costs when her kids come home from college for the summer.

"Or it pays for child care so you can work more," said Tubbs. "Or you could work less and spend more time with the kids, or take care of your sick parents, or pay for your rising rent."

Jason Furman, a Harvard professor and former economic advisor to President Obama, is no fan of this idea. He said he'd prefer wage supplements or tax credits over the awarding of money with no strings attached.

If the goal is to eventually make guaranteed income a publicly funded program, Furman said, the necessary tax increase would be huge "and unlikely to materialize." And if it did, programs that pay for specific needs might get shredded. Furman also believes the better approach would be to develop a new economy of better-paying jobs and find ways to encourage work, rather than surrender to the threat of automation.

Natalie Foster had an answer for that.

"You shouldn't live in poverty in the richest country on earth at the richest moment in time," she said. "It's not a question of where the money comes from. It's a question of political will, and there are a number of ways to finance it, from fees on the people making millions shuffling paper on Wall Street to a carbon tax."

Well, let's see how it goes in Stockton first. I'm not quite ready to pay a tax to fund this kind of a giveaway, but as long as this is a small demonstration project financed by private and nonprofit sources interested in greater distribution of the wealth, why not?

Even under those terms, it's easy to find those in Stockton who can't believe what sounds to them like liberal claptrap, and they've got plenty of reasonable questions.

What if people use the money for drugs? Why won't they be required to work or perform a public service? And don't we already have welfare?

"I think it's not smart," said insurance agent Evelyn Vega, who wouldn't mind it so much if the free money went to people with legitimate need, rather than being awarded randomly and without requirements. "After Bill Clinton passed the welfare-to-work act, my mom had to go back to school and it eventually motivated her."

"Obviously, it's a dumb idea," said deli operator Robin Luna-Gonzalez, who was referring to the Advance Peace initiative. She said she has an autistic son whose care center is closing in a budgetary crunch.

"Why are we paying criminals?" she asked.

Her husband, James Gonzalez, said he thinks automation will create some jobs as it eliminates others. He might be open to the concept of supplemental pay if it's aimed at education or job training, but not if it's do-whatever-you-want cash, green and easy.

"We already give away billions of dollars to people who sit at home on welfare and make no effort to work," he said.

Herk Washington, Mayor Tubbs' barber, told me he and his wife do well and don't need an extra $500 a month. But he showed me the bus schedule that has his $2 off haircut coupon for transit riders, and told me when he rides the bus, he talks to a lot of people barely getting by. And supplemental income has been a hot topic in his clip shop.

"There was a man sitting in that chair right there, a hard-working man, and he said he could use the help," said Washington, who hadn't known about the man's financial struggles until that day.

Washington said he's all for the stipend, and for the Advance Peace program. It'll cost a few dollars, he said, but it might save lives and money.

"Nothing is guaranteed," said Washington. "But to do nothing is worse than to do something."

Learn more at L.A. Times

For Mother’s Day last year, Ebony Thomas’s new husband, Anthony, gifted her a car, a white Volkswagen Passat bought secondhand.

She had just started a new job, working as a medical assistant at a facility near to their home in Lakewood Heights, in southeast Atlanta.

“My husband wanted me to have a car to get around better, especially with the new job,” she told me. One month later, with Anthony out of town for work, Ms. Thomas decided to make a run to the store. Two blocks from home, Ms. Thomas was stopped by a police officer.

Her tag light was out and she had yet to purchase appropriate stickers for the car. She also had an outstanding seatbelt ticket from another traffic stop in 2015. “I didn’t really have the money to pay that ticket. Then we moved and I honestly just forgot about it,” she said.

Because the ticket went ignored, and Ms. Thomas had failed to appear in court, her license had been suspended. The arresting officer “was going to let me go, after I reasoned with him some,” Ms. Thomas said. “He let me out of the squad car and was just going to tow my car.”

Then another officer arrived, and he persuaded the original officer to go through with the arrest.

“I remember he said, ‘If we let everybody go, there’d be nobody in prison,’” Ms. Thomas said.

She was taken to Atlanta’s Fulton County jail, and she was in jail for three days before a family member found her. Her relatives had been frantic, calling all the local hospitals and police stations. “This is really embarrassing, but I couldn’t remember anybody’s number by heart,” Ms. Thomas said. “I couldn’t call anybody, so I just sat there.”

A judge set Ms. Thomas’s bail at $1,500. Bail is paid at 10 percent. Her family couldn’t afford $150, so Ms. Thomas remained in jail for eight days.

During that time, her name was picked up by several organizations that had banded together for a Mother’s Day initiative last year that would pay bail for black mothers who couldn’t afford it. The organizations, which include National Bailout and the nonprofit Color of Change, eventually paid for over 100 black mothers around the country to leave jail. (National Bailout says they bail out all varieties of black mothers: “queer, trans, young, elder and immigrant.”) Ms. Thomas was one of them.

"Our ultimate goal is to end money bail,” said Clarice McCants, the criminal justice campaign director of Color of Change. But for now, “there are mothers, away from their families, languishing in jail just because they lack the funds to make bail.”

In the United States, a bail payment is intended as collateral. It’s meant to ensure that a person charged with a crime will appear in court if they are released before trial. As such, bail payments are not meant to be prohibitively expensive — they are meant to incentivize a person to return to court. The Eighth Amendment, in particular, outlaws “excessive” bail amounts, but there is a national crisis of sky-high bail amounts.

As a result, pretrial detention is the norm, rather than a limited exception. In 2016, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, around 70 percent of county jail inmates nationwide had not been convicted of a crime.

Ms. Thomas’s bail may not have counted as “excessive,” but for her it was still outside the realm of affordability. Expensive bail, in general, is a far more widespread problem for black women, as they are four times as likely to be imprisoned as white women. Black defendants routinely receive higher bail amounts than white defendants with similar charges.

Many things happen while people are held awaiting trial. Families lose income. Children suffer the absence of a parent. The costs of incarceration — whether its fees paid to probation officers or payments made to bail bondsmen — add up, and can be debilitating for families that are already financially vulnerable.

A secondary fear, for many, is the involvement of Child Protective Services. Ms. Thomas felt fortunate that her son, Jorden, was seventeen at the time of her arrest, and her family intervened to care for him while she was away.

But her inability to afford bail still resulted in a chain of personal disasters. She lost her job because of the extended period of absence. She now has a criminal background, which makes finding work difficult. Her court fines, coupled with a fee she pays to see her probation officer every month, came to $150 — the original amount of bail she could not pay.

“It’s absolutely ludicrous,” she said. “I make a way, doing odd jobs and babysitting here and there. But I’m not a criminal, you know. I didn’t hurt anybody, or kill anybody.”

Since her release, Ms. Thomas has become a spokeswoman for the organizations that bailed her out. “They use my face in the advertisements,” she said, and laughed.

This year, the groups have reunited to bail out more mothers. Color of Change has counted 59 women bailed out by Friday, a number expected to grow. Organizers are planning a similar initiative in June to bail out black fathers for Father’s Day.

In the meantime, Ms. Thomas is facing the continuing costs of bail as they come. “I just lean on God, you know?” she said. “I depend on him.”

Learn more at The New York Times

The Trump administration’s first year of immigration policy has relied on claims that immigrants bring crime into America. President Trump’s latest target is sanctuary cities.

“Every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants, drug dealers, traffickers, gang members back into our communities,” he said last week. “They’re safe havens for just some terrible people.”

As of 2017, according to Gallup polls, almost half of Americans agreed that immigrants make crime worse. But is it true that immigration drives crime? Many studies have shown that it does not.

Immigrant populations in the United States have been growing fast for decades now. Crime in the same period, however, has moved in the opposite direction, with the national rate of violent crime today well below what it was in 1980.

In a large-scale collaboration by four universities, led by Robert Adelman, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, researchers compared immigration rates with crime rates for 200 metropolitan areas over the last several decades. The selected areas included huge urban hubs like New York and smaller manufacturing centers less than a hundredth that size, like Muncie, Ind., and were dispersed geographically across the country.

According to data from the study, a large majority of the areas have many more immigrants today than they did in 1980 and fewer violent crimes. The Marshall Project extended the study’s data up to 2016, showing that crime fell more often than it rose even as immigrant populations grew almost across the board.

In 136 metro areas, almost 70 percent of those studied, the immigrant population increased between 1980 and 2016 while crime stayed stable or fell. The number of areas where crime and immigration both increased was much lower — 54 areas, slightly more than a quarter of the total. The 10 places with the largest increases in immigrants all had lower levels of crime in 2016 than in 1980.

And yet the argument that immigrants bring crime into America has driven many of the policies enacted or proposed by the administration so far: restrictions to entry, travel and visas; heightened border enforcement; plans for a wall along the border with Mexico. This month, the Justice Department filed alawsuit against California in response to the state’s restrictions on local police to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants charged with crimes. On Tuesday, California’s Orange County signed on in support of that suit. But while the immigrant population in the county has more than doubled since 1980, overall violent crime has decreased by more than 50 percent.

There’s a similar pattern in two other places where Mr. Trump has recently feuded with local leaders: Oakland, Calif., and Lawrence, Mass. He described both cities as breeding grounds for drugs and crime brought by immigrants. But Oakland, like Orange County, has had increasing immigration and falling crime. In Lawrence, though murder and robbery rates grew, overall violent crime rates still fell by 10 percent.

In general, the study’s data suggests either that immigration has the effect of reducing average crime, or that there is simply no relationship between the two, and that the 54 areas in the study where both grew were instances of coincidence, not cause and effect. This was a consistent pattern in each decade from 1980 to 2016, with immigrant populations and crime failing to grow together.

Learn more at New York Times

Without legal proof of your existence, you can’t do many things. You can’t vote, and you can’t drive. You can’t start a bank account, or access government services. Good luck getting into a bar.

According to the World Bank, more than a billion people have no way to prove their identity. The un-verified include refugees, trafficked children, the homeless, and other people who slip through society without developing many institutional affiliations. The problem feeds on itself: the longer a person goes without associations, the harder it is provide enough of a record to create them. But as bitcoin’s popularity swells, a small group of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and social entrepreneurs is trying to put the cryptographic ledger that underpins the novel currency to work in service of the vulnerable. They see promise in using blockchain technology to create an immutable record, one that has the added side effect of making financial transactions cheaper and more efficient.

Though best known for underpinning volatile cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain technology has a number of qualities which make it appealing for record-keeping. A distributed ledger doesn’t depend on a central authority to verify its existence, or to facilitate transactions within it, which makes it less vulnerable to tampering. By using applications that are built on the ‘chain, individuals may be able to build up records over time, use those records across borders as a form of identity—essentially creating the trust they need to interact with the world, without depending on a centralized authority, like a government or a bank, to vouch for them.

For now, these efforts are small experiments. In Finland, the Finnish Immigration Service offers refugees a prepaid Mastercard developed by the Helsinki-based startup MONI that also links to a digital identity, composed of the record of one’s financial transactions, which is stored on the blockchain. In Moldova, the government is working with digital identification experts from the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) to brainstorm ways to use blockchain to provide children living in rural areas with a digital identity, so it’s more difficult for traffickers to smuggle them across borders.

Among the more robust programs is a pilot the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) launched in Jordan last May. Syrian refugees stationed at the Azraq Refugee Camp receive vouchers to shop at the local grocery store. The WFP integrated blockchain into its biometric authentication technology, so Syrian refugees can cash in their vouchers at the supermarket by staring into a retina scanner. These transactions are recorded on a private Ethereum-based blockchain, called Building Blocks. Because the blockchain eliminates the need for WFP to pay banks to facilitate transactions, Building Blocks could save the WFP as much as $150,000 each month in bank fees in Jordan alone. The program has been so successful that by the end of the year, the WFP plans to expand the technology throughout Jordan. Blockchain enthusiasts imagine a future in which refugees can access more than just food vouchers, accumulating a transaction history that could stand in as a credit history when they attempt to resettle.

ID2020, an alliance of large companies like Accenture and Microsoft, with UN agencies, nongovermental organizations and governments, is developing technology that helps undocumented people secure elements of identity, from children’s vaccination cards to voter registration. While most of these systems are enabled by existing technology, like the internet, recently the group has started to review blockchain-based opportunities. In an upcoming pilot program, the alliance will incorporate blockchain into a biometric system used by the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, to facilitate transactions like cash transfers, shelter or food.

In addition to helping the aid group save on bank fees and making sure that aid goes directly to refugees, a blockchain-based system can help refugees build a more permanent identity. Right now, when refugees enter a camp run by UNHCR, they’re issued documentation, but there’s no way to extend your UNHCR identity once you leave. But by recording these transactions on the blockchain, which keeps an indelible record, there’s the possibility the system could function as identification in a new country.

This approach is finding backers beyond those who work with refugees. A New York City startup called Blockchain for Change has developed an Android app called Fummi that allows homeless people to access food pantries and shelters, tap into financial services, and generally manage their digital identities. In December, the startup teamed with a group that relies on federal subsidies to provide smartphones to low-income people to distribute mobile phones to 3,000 homeless people, starting in the Bronx. The app shows when people have checked into shelters, or how much they have paid for showers or haircuts.

The app has a digital wallet for dollars, and also a cryptocurrency created for the project. To start, the currency can be redeemed for talk-time and data. But the goal is to help people connect to services more regularly and efficiently, while bringing down the cost of the services. Because those without homes tend to move around regularly, many re-apply for a federal program like food stamps in a new place every few months at great administrative cost. Because their transactions, which compose their identity, are permanently stored on the blockchain, the startup hopes federal program can tap into the permanent transaction recorded on the blockchain to reduce the sign-up costs.

But as technology is deployed rapidly in service of the world’s most vulnerable populations, there’s a risk that it will alter services in ways that will harm the people it’s set up to help. In the earliest days of the web, which turned 29 earlier this week, its proponents believed that they held the potential to make the world a more free and open place. They didn’t anticipate the degree to which it would consolidate power in the hands of a few corporate and government interests. ID2020 Executive Director Dakota Gruener points out that historically, there’s always been a trade-off between offering access to services and providing privacy and security. “It’s always been a binary,” she says. “People are quite excited that it appears there's now a model in which you could provide people broad access to the services that they need in a privacy-protecting way.” She’s clear, however, that blockchain is not a panacea, and while it may be helpful for certain aspects involved in shoring up a digital identity, ID2020 primarily relies on existing technology.

Learn more are WIRED

On an eerily warm afternoon in mid-February, the French street artist JR is in a Bushwick, Brooklyn, warehouse with three members of his artistic team. Clad in matching, deep-green jumpsuits, they’re busily at work on JR’s latest New York project, using wheatpaste to adhere giant photographs of migrants onto sturdy steel armatures. The looming, 25-foot-tall photographs of two men, five women, a young boy, and a baby are enlargements of images from the archives of Ellis Island. Size aside, they appear rather straightforward.

The artist, sporting his characteristic fedora and dark sunglasses, gestures to the massive photo installation in progress. “Do you know the little trick of these images?” he asks, excited.

It’s there, in plain sight: JR replaced the Ellis Island immigrants’ faces with those of present-day refugees he met at the Zaatari camp, on the Syria-Jordan border.

“The real process of my work is to actually connect people,” JR tells me. “I wish I could bring these people here physically, but they cannot travel—they’re stuck in a camp, they can’t enter Jordan and yet can’t go back to Syria. So I’m bringing their images, and I’m bringing a discussion.”

Titled So Close (2018), and presented by The Armory Show, Artsy, and Jeffrey Deitch, the new photographic mural is the centerpiece of the Manhattan art fair’s Platform section this year. Anyone riding on the West Side Highway this week will catch a glimpse of it, and it’s the first thing fairgoers will see upon entering the The Armory Show at Pier 94—a vision of immigrants in a line, waiting.

Learn more at artsy

In January, the U.S. State Department lifted refugee resettlement restrictions for 11 of the “high-risk” countries once targeted under President Donald Trump’s infamous travel ban. Now, displaced families fleeing unrest and oppression in areas on that list, likely to include places like Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, are again able to enter the U.S.—but only on a strict case-by-case basis. And as the number of refugees the country accepts shrinks—in 2017, the U.S. took in its lowest amount in more than a decade—the global refugee crisis grows.

According to the United Nations Human Rights Council, a global resettlement agency, the number of global refugees reached its highest level in measurable history by the end of 2016: Today, 65.6 million people live in some state of displacement. Most refugees in the last decade came from Syria, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They’ve been recently joined by an estimated 800,000Rohingya Muslims who have been expelled from their native Myanmar. Every minute around the world, 20 people are forcibly displaced.

The disparate impact of war and upheaval on civilians is often random, and always cruel. But researchers are attempting to use technology to ensure that the journey of resettlement, at least, doesn’t have to be.

The existing process of moving refugees from camps (many of which are located in Bangladesh or Jordan or Lebanon) into more permanent homes in places like the U.S. can be a time-consuming and often imperfect process. Once a week, U.S. resettlement agencies gather to determine the number of refugees that have been processed by the State Department who need to be resettled stateside. Those individuals are then allocated into cities, and placed under the jurisdictions of particular nonprofits.

All of this work is done by resettlement agency workers, who know refugees’ needs as well as what resources local organizations have at their disposal (such as hospitals, health clinics, housing, and local aid workers with knowledge of certain languages).

Over time, resettlement patterns have emerged, and pockets of refugee communities have grown around the country: Somali neighborhoods in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Nepali avenues in Burlington, Vermont; Rohingya enclaves in Kitchener, Ontario and Buffalo, New York. There, refugees can hopefully find the same social supports that have sustained generations of American immigrant communities—ethnic networks and local infrastructures in place to help them adjust.

It’s a very analog system. “[Agency workers] have a sense of each refugee profile, they have a great relationship with communities, and they know how to place people … manually, spreadsheet by spreadsheet,” said Alex Teytelboym, Oxford economics associate professor and co-founder of Refugees’ Say, an organization developing new refugee matching technologies. “You just think of the best place to put them and you trust your instinct.”

Now, however, researchers have begun to ask if if those instincts could be aided by data-driven algorithms. Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab, for example, has developed a new tool for matching refugees to host cities, which sorts for where a given refugee will find the best employment potential. Teytelboym, meanwhile, is working on a different sort of algorithm with Refugees’ Say co-founder Will Jones. Theirs is designed to take into account a subtler interplay of factors—the real preferences of both refugees and the host countries that will eventually absorb them.

The hardest part of automating this kind of extremely high-stakes human decision-making: determining what a computer should prioritize, and in what order.

Jobs, jobs, jobs

Immigration policy organizations like Stanford’s have spent years developing improved education systems, job training programs, and language learning labs to give refugees a better chance at landing work. But such programs are costly and hard to scale. “So our attention shifted to this geographic allocation,” said Jens Hainmueller, a Stanford researcher and one of the algorithm developers. “That’s an area where if you can come up with a better way, you get these increased employment rates at basically zero cost.”

Stanford’s algorithm uses existing employment data to first analyze where refugees have been sent in the past, and whether or not they’ve been successful in their job searches. Then it uses this knowledge to match new refugees with similar characteristics. In test runs, a team of researchers used data on 30,000 refugees, ages 18 to 64, who were placed in the U.S. and Switzerland from 2011 to 2016. The majority were originally from Somalia, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. They compared rates of actual employment to the chances of finding work via algorithm. With a robot on board, employment rates would have been 41 percent higher, they estimate. At the algorithm’s best, they say, employment opportunities for those it places could increase by up to 70 percent. “Some of these improvements are coming from the fact that there’s quite a lot of synergy between places and people,” said Hainmueller.

In the current allocation system, for example, a French-speaking refugee bound for Switzerland would have the same chance of landing in a German-speaking region of the country, rather than a French-speaking one. Their prospects of finding a job in the latter, however, are 40 percent higher.

The takeaway is obvious: Send refugees where they can speak and understand the language. Another easily programmed priority: Send people who can do certain jobs where those jobs are most needed.

“The nice thing is that there’s a multitude of these synergies,” said Hainmueller. “And the algorithm—by seeing how well [refugees have] done in the past—is learning all of those by basically picking up these patterns of where refugees of certain characteristics find work or not.”

But employment odds are not static, nor are labor supplies. Say the job market for meatpackers is saturated, or Afghans are starting to experience discrimination that cuts them out of the workforces where they’ve historically found support. The algorithm will identify these trends, learn from them, and update its predictions accordingly.

Early employment was chosen as a primary matching factor because it’s a tangible advance that has proven and positive trickle effects. “Employment is the pathway by which a refugee can get agency,” said Mike Mitchell, associate vice president of U.S. programs with HIAS, a Maryland-based refugee resettlement agency. “By getting a job, they can progress, and build an income and build assets and integrate into American society.”

Swift employment is also touted as a shortcut to cultural immersion. “People meet other people at work, they learn the language,” said Hainmueller. Relying solely on in-group networks without forging ties to host communities has been shown to hinder future financial stability.

“Even if there’s controversy because of the Trump administration, Americans on the whole tend to be open.”

There’s another good reason to focus on employment metrics: they’re the statistics governments are actively collecting. “We know 90 days after arrival whether they’ve found work or not, because this is the declared goal of [the U.S.’s] refugee resettlement program—to transition refugees into quick self-sufficiency,” said Hainmueller.

But employment can be a touchy issue among the communities that accept refugees, thanks to fears that hordes of newcomers will snap up jobs that existing residents should be doing. Matching refugees to labor networks that need them can work to dissolve the misconception that refugees are job-stealers—they’re filling gaps in an existing labor market, not duplicating American skills.

But it also feeds into the notion that in order to be an American you have to be “skilled”—and that the worth of immigrants is tied to their productivity, not their humanity.

According to Mitchell, finding a job is less important than finding the right job: one with room for growth; that will help you build skills and save for retirement. “If refugee A is working in a CVS, stocking, and refugee B is working in a computer company on a path to getting a certification at Microsoft, that makes all the difference,” he said. A better algorithm would include factors like the kind of job, length of commute, and quality of the family’s school district. “That’s all going to contribute to the stability of a refugee’s family, which is going to help ensure integration.”

Teytelboym agrees: “Being employed within three months is not necessarily a measure of success—it’s just an easy political gain for the host countries, and it puts pressure on refugees to end up in low-paying jobs. We would prefer a holistic view.”

The bigger picture

The Refugees’ Say algorithm is designed to measure that thus-far immeasurable (or unmeasured) whole.

Before placement, refugees spend days in meetings with State Department officials and attending cultural orientations, getting briefed on their placement options—but rarely their opinions. Teytelboym proposes surveying refugees in the camps, allowing them to tell placement agencies exactly where they’d prefer to build a life. Then they’ll build an algorithm around it.

“Some things are kind of hard to observe. That’s exactly where precise preference comes in,” said Teytelboym. “It’s the ultimate arbiter of what good welfare is: to what extent people’s own individual, idiosyncratic, perhaps strange or unusual preferences are taken into account.”

And it’s not just about preference: Every family’s needs are multidimensional. One member of a family might have specific medical needs, or speak a rare language, and another might have unusual or important skills. Their ultimate destination should be a place that can support all or most of those realities. Those idiosyncrasies are mirrored at the city level. A host city like Burlington might have better hospitals than those in Kitchener, or more Afghani restaurants. In the algorithm Teytelboym is building, those location metrics are weighed, too.

Measurable emotional considerations—like keeping family members together—are built-in as algorithm overrides.

Asking host cities for their “preferences” could have some less desirable effects: It might conceivably make racial profiling easier, opening the door for cities to enforce their own local-level versions of President Trump’s “Muslim ban.” But Teytelboym and Mitchell say that while the administration has slowed the flow of refugees at the federal level, local agencies are far less reticent.

“By and large we find the opposite,” said Teytelboym. “These communities want to take a lot more refugees than the State Department is willing to move.”

That’s what Mitchell says, too. “Our experience at HAIS is that the communities where we resettle refugees are really welcoming,” he said. “Even if there’s controversy because of the Trump administration, Americans on the whole tend to be open.”

Of course, there is no such thing as an “American whole.” A September study by Dartmouth researchers complicates this narrative: They found that even liberals who support refugee resettlement on the national level balk at accepting new families into their communities.

To avoid discrimination, however, Teytelboym’s algorithm codes “preferences” as linked to resource availability. Esoteric medical needs? Don’t choose us. Speak Afghani? We’re ready for you.

A digital tool for a human crisis

Refugees’ Say is partnering with refugee resettlement organizations to collect preference data themselves, while Stanford’s program is limited based on existing data. But if jurisdictions began to track other, more intangible indicators of refugee well-being, Stanford’s algorithm could easily be tweaked to include more human dimensions. “We’d very much encourage governments to [collect more data] in order to get a broader read of refugee integration success,” said Hainmueller. For now, however, measurable emotional considerations (like keeping relatives together) are built-in as algorithm overrides.

As adaptable as both algorithms are, they’re not meant to entirely automate government’s placement processes. Agencies can’t simply send thousands of refugees to the place an algorithm identifies as the best labor market, without taking into consideration the shares and capacities of local offices. And a human touch is still beneficial, especially when dealing with such a human crisis.

“This is just one way of considering how to make decisions on behalf of the people we serve,” said Mitchell. “This is probably the start of something that will transform the decision-making we do for clients that is needed—not only in refugee resettlement, but in the nonprofit sector.”

Learn more at Citylab