Christian Nationalism Is One of Trump’s Most Powerful Weapons
Thursday, January 06, 2022
Opinion | Christian Nationalism Is One of Trump’s Most Powerful Weapons - The New York Times
Wednesday, January 05, 2022
Biden faces highly charged legal fight with migrants whose children were taken away under Trump
Biden faces highly charged legal fight with migrants whose children were taken away under Trump
“Beatriz was 3 years old when U.S. authorities separated her from her father, Jairo, shortly after they arrived from Guatemala at the U.S. border on Christmas Eve 2017. He was detained and developed pneumonia. She was sent to New York, where a woman who took her in hit her so hard with a belt that it left a scar, she told her dad.
Ana fled Guatemala a few months later with her sons Jaime, 8, and Mateo, 7, and she says U.S. officials separated them for seven weeks, adding that Mateo still cannot bathe alone, sleep by himself or stand to be apart from his mother.
These are two of the many allegations behind at least 19 lawsuits — and hundreds of administrative complaints — filed against the federal government by migrants who say their children were separated from them by the Trump administration. The plaintiffs, who use pseudonyms in their legal filings to protect their privacy, are seeking financial compensation after enduring what was widely regarded as one of President Donald Trump’s harshest policies.
But now, much of the anger surrounding the issue has been redirected toward President Biden, threatening to escalate into a bigger furor as he embarks on his second year in office. Negotiations between the administration and the families’ attorneys over a monetary settlement broke down in December, and the lawsuits are starting to resume in court, some this week.
That pits administration lawyers against immigrants who had their children seized — a legally and politically perilous scenario for a president whose support from Latinos and liberals is already shaky.
In a sign of the difficult fight ahead, lawyers in one case refiled motions Tuesday to compel the government to turn over “tens of thousands” of internal documents, including 10,000 pages of Justice Department “emails, records, and handwritten notes” about Trump’s separation policy. The motions had been set aside while talks were underway.
Such clashes could play into a tough political dynamic. On the left, immigration activists are accusing Biden of failing to live up to his promise to repair the damage inflicted by Trump. On the right, critics are seizing on a report that the administration was in talks to pay people up to $450,000 each, saying that amounts to coddling people who sought to cross the border illegally.
A year after taking office, Biden’s efforts to unwind the Trump immigration policies he sharply condemned have been messy, sporadic and politically fraught. After moving quickly to curb some of his predecessor's most controversial approaches, Biden has, in some key ways, adopted a more restrictive posture toward migrants in recent months.
Some activists accuse the administration of cowardice.
“His instinct is a very defensive one,” said Julián Castro, who served as secretary of housing and urban development in the Obama administration and ran for president against Biden. “It tends toward an enforcement-based approach and an approach that sees immigration as a third rail of politics. Generally, the administration is scared of that issue.”
In Castro’s eyes, that was evident in Biden’s initial comments about the family separation cases, when he dismissed a report about the negotiations as “garbage.” Later, Biden said he had only been rejecting the notion that individuals might get as much as $450,000, as reported in the Wall Street Journal — not the basic idea of compensating the families.
The White House has been quiet since then about the settlement talks. But Biden officials defend their approach to immigration more broadly, saying the president is methodically undoing Trump’s harsh policies while contending with an unforeseen and challenging surge of migrants.
“This administration is committed as much today as we were on Day 1 to bringing humanity to our immigration system,” said Biden’s senior adviser for migration, Tyler Moran, who is expected to leave the White House soon. “We’ve faced a number of challenges this year due to changing migration patterns, and we’ve really sought to take those on responsibly and thoughtfully and will continue to work on putting a system in place that we think represents American values.”
The family separation cases show how the politics of immigration have swung wildly in Biden’s first year. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who in 2018 spoke out against separating migrant families, has now introduced a bill to block Biden from compensating them.
“I will continue to monitor the DOJ as they move to litigate these cases individually and push back against any outcome that will result in millions of dollars being handed out to illegal immigrants,” Tillis said in a statement last month after the settlement talks broke down.
Biden — who during a 2020 debate with Trump called the family separation policy “criminal” and then ran an ad highlighting that moment — is saying little about the matter. But some Democrats contend that if the administration does end up paying the families significant damages, it would be politically less complicated for Biden to explain he was forced by the courts to do so.
“If it takes longer than one or two sentences to explain why you’re paying money to people who entered the United States without permission, you’ve already lost the battle,” said Leon Fresco, a Justice Department official in the Obama administration. “It’s easier, in one sentence, to say the judge made them pay.”
When Biden took office, he won some praise for forcefully rejecting Trump’s widely unpopular family separation policy, which had been criticized even by some Republicans, and for creating a task force to help reunite families still living apart.
But complications arose quickly when the families began demanding compensation, some seeking payments in the millions. They described ongoing pain and suffering that included nightmares, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, court filings show.
Both sides pushed for a global settlement rather than a series of individual judgments, hoping to avoid months of costly legal battles. If they went to court, the families faced the potential for lengthy litigation with little payoff, and the government ran the risk that juries would order the administration to make huge payouts.
However, talks stalled in late October, according to people with knowledge of the situation, when the Journal reported that payouts totaling $450,000 per person were under discussion, with some families potentially receiving $1 million or more.
Six days later, Biden appeared caught off guard when he was asked by a reporter about the possibility of such payments, saying the notion was “garbage” and the payments were “not going to happen.”
But the next day, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden was fine with the idea of monetary compensation. He had been reacting only to the dollar amount, which he found excessive, she said.
The president echoed that sentiment two days later. Biden said that separated families “deserve some kind of compensation” and that “the number is what I was referring to.”
Those exchanges highlight just how confounding immigration has become for Biden. He took over from a president who vowed to ban Muslims from entering the United States, promised to build a border wall and referred to immigrants’ countries of origin with a vulgar phrase. But while Biden has dramatically softened Trump’s rhetoric, reversing his policies has been harder.
White House officials say Biden has charted a sharply different path from Trump, citing his reversal of the ban on travelers from some Muslim-majority countries, his order that agencies stop using terms such as “illegal alien,” the relaxation of enforcement tactics inside the United States and the creation of the task force to reunite separated families.
But immigration activists say other Biden moves show a harder-line approach that in some cases extends Trump policies, such as the continued use of a public health order to expel undocumented immigrants from the border, including to nations in turmoil, such as Haiti. They also note that the administration has restored and expanded Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program for asylum seekers — although Biden did try to end the program before he was ordered by a federal court to restart it.
Haitian migrants thought Biden would welcome them. Now deported, they have one mission: Leave again.
To many conservatives, meanwhile, it is outrageous that the United States would pay big sums to people who, as they see it, caused their own problems by trying to enter the country illegally.
“It is unconscionable that the Biden Administration would have considered this astronomical payout that was an insult to all hardworking Americans who will subsequently be funding these large settlements with their hard-earned tax dollars,” Tillis said in his statement last month.
And liberals are equally upset by the notion that the government could seize someone’s children, then neglect to do right by them, particularly when some parents were never ultimately charged with a crime.
“It’s just deeply disappointing,” Castro said. “It seems as though the administration is operating out of fear of the politics of this instead of operating based on the values that we share as Democrats.”
Now that the talks have stalled, those politics are set to burst into the open again.
On Dec. 16, three of the families’ attorneys said the Justice Department had notified them that the negotiations were over.
“We would like to continue the settlement negotiations. The government broke them off,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is helping the families. “There was no offer on the table. We would be happy to continue talking with the government, but not if it’s just going to be dragging us along for months again and wasting time.”
The Justice Department, while confirming that a deal was not in hand, framed it differently.
“While the parties have been unable to reach a global settlement agreement at this time, we remain committed to engaging with the plaintiffs and to bringing justice to the victims of this abhorrent policy,” the department said right after the settlement talks broke down. The Justice Department declined this week to comment further.
Now the administration appears likely to find itself in the awkward position of fighting the separated families in court while stressing that it strongly opposes the Trump policy itself.
The government separated more than 5,500 migrant children and teens from their parents at the southwestern border during Trump’s term, according to government estimates. Trump officials created the “zero tolerance” policy that led to the separations because migrant parents were surrendering at the border with their children in hopes of bypassing immigration jails and entering the country.
Under the Trump policy, parents were often taken to court — typically for a quick guilty plea to a petty infraction — while children were dispatched to shelters overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Immigration lawyers argued that some migrants had legitimate asylum claims, such as Ana and her sons, who won their case in immigration court and now live in Florida.
For Jairo, the process meant he was deported to his native Guatemala in January 2018. He expected officials to send his daughter Beatriz soon afterward, according to the lawsuit he joined, but she did not arrive for five months. When she did, she was no longer fluent in Mam, the Mayan language that her mother speaks.
Nick Miroff in Washington and Kevin Sieff in Mexico City contributed to this report“
Monday, January 03, 2022
Documents Reveal Flaws in Pentagon Dismissals of Civilian Casualty Claims in Iraq and Syria - The New York Times
Documents Reveal Basic Flaws in Pentagon Dismissals of Civilian Casualty Claims
"A Times investigation found inconsistent approaches to assessing claims of civilians killed by coalition forces — including failures to conduct simple internet searches.
The report that came to the attention of the United States military in April 2017 relayed devastating news from Iraq: More than 30 people, among them women and children, had been killed when aircraft from the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Mosul struck a neighborhood known as Siha.
A civilian casualty cell of the U.S. military, which was charged with assessing reports of civilians killed or wounded in coalition operations, learned of the claim in a Facebook post published on April 11 by the news outlet, the Iraqi Spring Media Center.
The Pentagon began an inquiry, but only a week later its assessment officers couldn’t confirm whether coalition aircraft had targeted that location, and they dismissed the claim, saying Siha was not among “known districts of West Mosul.” There would be no further review.
But Siha wasn’t hard to find.
APRIL 12, 2017 — MOSUL, IRAQ
The geographic locations of ‘Siha’ and ‘Bawabat Al-Sham’ do not correlate with known districts of West Mosul or the surrounding area. In the absence of further particularizing information or evidence, this allegation should be treated as not having the potential to be credible.
READ FULL REPORTReporters from The New York Times were able to locate the west Mosul neighborhood using just Google Maps. The name appeared slightly different, as “Sihah” instead of “Siha,” a spelling variation that is common when Arabic words are written in English.
Additionally, a simple Google search revealed several news reports published before April 2017, verifying the existence of Siha and its approximate location.
An analysis of confidential Pentagon documents by The Times’s Visual Investigations unit found that a number of allegations of civilian casualties had been dismissed as “noncredible” based on flawed reviews of evidence — oversights that Times reporters were able to detect using resources widely available to the public. That included websites like Google Maps and Wikimapia, a crowdsourced mapping platform. Typically, U.S. military assessors have access to far more robust resources, such as strike logs and video feeds of airstrikes.
“I’ll tell you what it is: That’s negligence,” said Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon senior intelligence analyst. “That is plain and simple. It is the most basic level of investigation that they should be doing, and not to do it is completely negligent.”
The Times obtained more than 1,300 confidential Pentagon assessments of allegations of civilian casualties in the American-led air war in the Middle East, between September 2014 and January 2018, during the height of the war against the Islamic State. Based on those documents, The Times recently reported patterns of failed intelligence, decision-making and execution behind deadly airstrikes.
These documents detail the criteria and rationales for how the Pentagon chose to classify civilian casualty allegations as either credible or noncredible.
A vast majority of assessments — more than 1,100 — were deemed noncredible. In some cases, there was not enough information for reviewers to search for airstrikes that might coincide with allegations or to conclude that civilian casualties occurred as a result of a coalition strike. However, The Times had found that many allegations of civilian casualties were erroneously dismissed for reasons ranging from insufficient quality and quantity of video to the inability to determine which of many strikes in an area was the subject of a claim.
This investigation focuses on reviewers’ inability to establish details about the locations of strikes. In reviewing 80 assessments, including those with high numbers of reported civilian casualties, The Times repeatedly found what appeared to be simple mistakes. In a dozen instances, Pentagon assessors said that a location could not be identified, even though it was easily found on the internet, or they seemed to have just looked in the wrong place.
Following recent revelations in The Times about botched strikes by U.S. forces, the Pentagon has said that it is committed to investigating its mistakes. But this examination raises further questions about the capability, or willingness, of the U.S. military to accurately count civilian casualties from its air war.
“The entire effort was really about responding to reports of civilian casualties in public and getting ahead of the narrative,” said Daniel Mahanty, one of the lead authors of a 2020 report on how the United States assesses civilian casualty claims, and a former State Department official. “It was certainly not about doing anything differently to prevent harm as the operation proceeded.
Captain Bill Urban, spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said the military “applies a policy of reviewing and assessing all reports of civilian harm, irrespective of their source, and where the information available warrants, conducting investigations, applying critical lessons learned, and acknowledging the civilian harm caused by our actions.” He did not comment on the specific errors identified by The Times’s investigation.
While the Pentagon reviews all allegations of civilian casualties, interviews with experts and current and former military personnel revealed systemic problems, including a lack of training, inaccurate airstrike logs and an overworked, rotating assessment team of usually only a few people.
There were significant inconsistencies in the quality of the assessments, pointing to a process whose success relied more on the skills and commitment of individual officers than on cohesive standards and methods.
Visual Investigations Our investigative journalists use evidence that's hidden in plain sight to present a definitive account of the news. Get an email as soon as our next Visual Investigation is published.
The assessment process
A review into civilian casualty allegations can be prompted in several ways, including reports from the local news media and social media posts monitored by American military personnel. Most incidents are flagged by Airwars, a nonprofit watchdog group based in Britain that collects reports and provides summaries from local sources.
The allegations are typically sent to the civilian casualty cell, whose members receive no standardized training to become assessors.
“Each brings to the task his/her own unique skills, and each are being constantly required to hone those skills over time,” said Captain Urban, the military spokesman.
One former assessment officer, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern for retribution by the U.S. military, said that he had never heard of the civilian casualty cell until receiving the assignment and that many of the skills required to review casualty claims had to be learned on the job.
The Pentagon’s assessment process leaves a paper trail of confidential documents, including “initial assessment forms,” filled out by the civilian casualty cell to determine if a claim warrants further investigation. Such inquiries are often conducted by the command that carried out the strike.
Assessors answer a series of yes or no questions to establish details about an allegation, including location and timing.
In assessing the 2017 claim from Siha in Mosul, reviewers did not appear to have consulted basic resources like Google Maps. In other assessments, they made significant efforts to review claims, using a wide variety of tools to review information.
OCT. 17, 2016 — HASAKA GOVERNATE, SYRIA
Tools used: Google Earth, NGA Charts, GETS Gazetteer map search tool, CJTF-OIR Maps, wikimapia.org, google search engine.
READ FULL REPORTWhen one allegation stated that a swimming pool had been targeted in Syria, assessment experts used satellite imagery to identify “all pools within Raqqa” to search for nearby strikes, showing a thoroughness that wasn’t applied across the board.
If enough information is gathered, the final step of the initial assessment process is to check military records for airstrikes that may have hit the approximate location noted in an allegation. But the former assessment officer said those records could be inaccurate, making it difficult to pinpoint strikes.
Those concerns were confirmed by The Times’s own ground reporting, which found many instances in which the logged coordinates for airstrikes were more than 500 yards from the actual site of impact. One was as far as five miles away.
Some officers noted these inaccuracies in the assessments, with one writing that the logs “shouldn’t be used to identify strikes.” Instead, the officer recommended searching reports by aircrews after missions — a cumbersome and rare practice.
Captain Urban said that strike logs had become more accurate, but he did not provide specific details about the improvements or whether previously dismissed allegations had been reassessed using improved logs.
Basic errors
Sometimes, Pentagon assessors simply misread the allegations, leading to the dismissal of a report.
In an assessment involving Hit, Iraq, Airwars and local sources said that an airstrike had killed two people and wounded three in “Al-Bab Al-Gharbi,” which translates to “the Western Gate” and describes what the area is: the western entrance to the historical center of the city.
APRIL 10, 2016 — HIT, IRAQ
Local sources claimed Coalition planes struck a home in the Al-Bab Al-Gharbi neighborhood of Hit.
READ FULL REPORTWhile the sources clearly referred to “Al-Bab Al-Gharbi” as a single neighborhood, the Pentagon reviewers incorrectly looked for “Al-Bab and Al-Gharbi,” as if they were two distinct areas.
APRIL 10, 2016 — HIT, IRAQ
There are two strikes in Hit on 10 April 17. Strike redacted and redacted with a total of redacted engagements, both dynamic strikes targeting ISIL fighters. Unsure where Al-Bab and Al-Gharbi are located.
READ FULL REPORTThe assessment document shows that the military did carry out strikes in Hit that day, but the claim was dismissed because assessors were unable to find the location.
Captain Urban said the Pentagon could not provide any insight into how this allegation — or any of the others reviewed by The Times — had been evaluated because the assessors “have moved on to new assignments.”
Inadequate Arabic skills
Documents show that even when precise information about the location of a reported strike was available, reviewers sometimes missed it because of a lack of Arabic skills.
In one assessment, the Pentagon deemed as noncredible an allegation that eight people had been killed, including four children, in part because it could not locate the Jerri neighborhood, also in Hit, Iraq.
The Jerri neighborhood can easily be found on Wikimapia — but only if searched for in Arabic.
Although assessors conducted some searches in Arabic, they did not do so routinely. Multiple people who worked on or with the civilian casualty cell told The Times that speaking or reading Arabic was not a requirement.
While Captain Urban said interpreters were available to assessors “where language skills are needed,” the review of documents suggested there were still oversights when it came to Arabic comprehension.
Mixing up locations
In some assessments, the Pentagon simply confused towns with the same or similar names and dismissed the claims, the documents show, as happened with a reported airstrike on a Syrian town in March 2017.
Several social media posts said that the strike had hit a neighborhood in Maskana, part of Aleppo Province in Syria, killing at least eight people. An internal Pentagon team flagged the claim for further review.
The documents show that assessors zeroed in on Maskana, but it was the wrong one. There is a town with the same name in Homs, a different province of Syria. The reviewers were unable to find correlating airstrikes, and the allegation was dismissed.
A few weeks later, military personnel dismissed another claim because they appeared to have mixed up two towns. According to a tweet from a Syrian news outlet, the U.S.-led coalition bombed the village of Sabha in Deir al-Zour Province, killing or wounding about 50 people. Again, an internal group at the Pentagon alerted the assessment team.
Analysts reviewing the allegation looked for a village called Sabha in Deir al-Zour Province. They found one, and stopped there.
But there is another town with the same name close by. That town matches the nearby location of the reported strike described by a local resident in a news story.
In its dismissal of the allegation, the Pentagon said that “the nearest strikes […] were 17 km away” from the Sabha the reviewers had focused on.
The possible strike location identified by Times reporters was almost exactly 17 kilometers away.
Ignoring evidence
The Pentagon’s 2018 procedures for assessing civilian harm prompts analysts to “narrow the date/time/location of the allegation using photo/video evidence.” But in multiple civilian casualty assessments, this wasn’t done, a shortcoming that resulted in assessment officers’ missing important pieces of evidence.
That’s what happened in the assessment of the Sanjari family in January 2017. Friends and relatives had gathered at the family’s home in Mosul to mourn the passing of Aziz Ahmed Aziz Sanjari, a retired Iraqi Army colonel. An explosion ripped through the gathering, killing civilians, according to initial social media and news reports.
Airwars sent the claim to the Pentagon and said that the attack had taken place at a funeral. It included a link to a video from the Amaq News Agency, a news outlet linked to the Islamic State.
Pentagon assessors appear to have wrongly assumed the strike happened at a cemetery in an area about a half-mile from the Sanjari house. In their dismissal, they wrote that “no strikes were found within 100 m of the cemetery boundaries.”
The analysts also reported that they were “unable to access” the video link that Airwars had included in the claim. Whether the link was accessible at the time is unclear, but the video was posted elsewhere online the day of the strike and was easy to find when the Pentagon did its assessment. And it’s still online to this day "— a search that took five minutes on Twitter, using the term “Mosul” in Arabic and the date of the strike.
In not reviewing the Amaq video, the Pentagon missed a key piece of evidence showing that the airstrike had hit just outside a civilian home, not at a cemetery.
Interviews with the family in June 2021 and death certificates confirmed that 11 people had been killed, including an unidentified woman and a girl who were walking near the home.
Ridhwan Ahmed Aziz Sanjari, who lost two of his brothers and his cousin in the airstrike, told The Times, “I just wanted to know why.”
Jeff Parrott, Hiba Yazbek, Abbie Cheeseman and Leila Barghouty contributed research. Momen Muhanned contributed translation. Drew Jordan and Michael Beswetherick contributed production."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)