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Denver Isn’t the Only City Seizing Homeless People’s Gear

by Rich6968mhoql Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, Denver’s mayor, Michael B. Hancock, announced that city police officers would be asked to stop seizing sleeping bags, blankets, tents, and other items that help homeless people keep warm in the winter. The announcement came after a video showing officers confiscating blankets in frigid weather provoked outcry. And while the announcement was a win for Denver’s homeless, Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, notes that the seizure or destruction of homeless people’s property is common practice in the United States.

Belongings are often seized under anti-camping laws or laws that prohibit sleeping in public—part of a larger trend of what Foscarinis calls “the criminalization of homelessness.” Earlier this year, her organization released a study tracking the phenomenon in 187 cities. It found that one-third of cities prohibit camping citywide, an increase of nearly 70 percent over a decade ago. But many courts have ruled such practices unconstitutional. Here’s a rundown of what’s happening in a few key cities.

Los Angeles: In March, lawyers sued on behalf of four homeless people whose property was destroyed by the city. One plaintiff, Judy Coleman, was hospitalized for pneumonia after her tent and blanket were taken. The judge in the case issued a preliminary injunction requiring the city to stop seizing homeless people’s belongings during arrests or clean-ups. The order also prohibits the city from storing seized items in a manner that makes them difficult to reclaim—a common problem, according to the Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. A similar case from 2014 is in the process of being settled out of court.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles City Council approved a law limiting the storage of items in parks, alleys, and sidewalks to what will fit in a 60-gallon container. Under the law, homeless people may also be cited or arrested if they fail to take down their tents between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. An LAPD spokesman told me the department is no longer doing sweeps of homeless encampments. The current policy on seized possessions, he says, is to store the items, unless they are too wet or are deemed unsanitary—that determination is left to the officer’s discretion.

Denver: The mayor’s order only applies until April, when officers may resume seizures of bedding and camping gear. In the interim, police still intend to enforce the pubic camping ban—violators can face fines of up to $999. Back in August, a group called Denver Homeless Out Loud filed a class-action lawsuit arguing that the city’s sweeps are unconstitutional.

Seattle: The city’s regular raids on homeless camps have come under fire due to the loss of personal property and the city’s failure to give homeless residents proper notice. Seattle has been embroiled in an ongoing debate about how best to handle its sweeps, some of which have been halted by city civil rights monitors because the approved protocols were not followed.

San Francisco: Homeless sweeps are common in San Francisco. According to Mission Local‘s examination of the Department of Public Works records, the city only preserved 23 people’s seized belongings over a six-month period this year. On Tuesday, Bay Area civil rights groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the California Department of Transportation over the seizure of items such as stoves, tents, and bedding by Caltrans employees.

Honolulu: Though winter survival is less of a problem in Hawaii, Foscarinis points out that homeless people are also at risk in warm weather when their belongings are essential to keeping cool. In a survey of homeless residents by the Department of Urban Planning at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, nearly 60 percent reported losing personal identification, 40 percent lost tents, and 21 percent lost medicine in sweeps. The National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness report stated, “The city has been transparent about its goal of removing Honolulu’s homeless population from view” and has proposed to “relocate homeless people to a separate island that previously served as a garbage dump and former internment camp during WWII.”

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Denver Isn’t the Only City Seizing Homeless People’s Gear

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How One Plan to Bring Undocumented Immigrants out of the Shadows Could Get Them Deported

by FrancisZxm Posted on December 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Since 2015, California has issued about 800,000 licenses to drivers who lack proof of legal residence. In Illinois, more than 212,000 people have received what are known as temporary visitor driver’s licenses. Connecticut has approved around 26,000 drive-only licenses for undocumented immigrants, and nine more states plus the District of Columbia have similar programs.

To date, these initiatives have been widely hailed as a reasonable way to try to improve public safety, by helping make sure that everyone behind the wheel was a competent driver. But now, with the incoming Trump administration seemingly committed to deporting undocumented individuals, there is worry among immigration advocates that the identifying data collected as part of these programs—names, addresses, copies of foreign passports—could be used by federal authorities looking to send people back to their home countries.

Last month, Trump said he would deport or incarcerate as many as 3 million undocumented immigrants who have criminal records. A 10-point immigration plan on Trump’s transition website lists “zero tolerance for criminal aliens,” along with a promise to “ensure that other countries take their people back when we order them deported.” The plan also calls for blocking funding for so-called “sanctuary cities” that historically have limited their cooperation with federal immigration agents.

“The discussion up to this point has been hypothetical or theoretical, and now it’s feeling very real,” said Jonathan Blazer, advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU. “People start to think, ‘Are things going to look completely different than they’ve ever looked before, in terms of what the federal government might try to do?'”

Nothing in federal law specifically entitles immigration agents access to state data on drivers who may be in the country illegally, according to Blazer. To get states to produce a list of these drivers, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—which includes the federal government’s deportation arm—might have to rely on its administrative subpoena power. Even then, states could refuse to provide the information, thereby forcing the federal government to sue for the driver data or narrow its request, Blazer and other legal experts said.

“If ICE just came and said, ‘Hey, give me all your driving privilege card holders, ‘I would say, ‘No,’ and they would have to take some sort of different legal action that is beyond my control,” said Scott Vien, the director of Delaware’s Division of Motor Vehicles, which has so far issued about 3,500 driving credentials to undocumented immigrants. Some of the records they maintain include copies of birth certificates, foreign passports and consular identification cards.

Uncertainty already surrounds the fate of more than 700,000 undocumented immigrants who first arrived in the United States as children, and who obtained temporary reprieves from deportation through a 2012 executive action of President Barack Obama. In applying to the program, these individuals submitted all sorts of personal information to the federal government, including home addresses and the names of family members. Immigrants and their advocates now fear that this information could be turned over to federal immigration officials after Obama leaves office, for use in tracking down undocumented individuals.

Driving records, it is now clear, constitute another vast store of data on US residents who may not be residing in the country legally. In all, more than 1 million licenses meant for people without proof of legal immigration status have been issued across the country.

There have already been some instances of ICE seeking to get and use driver’s license information in bulk from states that do not have the special programs for the undocumented—New Jersey among them. In 2012, ICE’s Newark field office obtained from the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission a list of people who had applied for restricted licenses using valid but temporary immigration documents. An initial review “resulted in the identification of numerous foreign-born individuals who fall under ICE priorities,” according to an April 2012 letter from the field office director, who also requested that New Jersey continue to supply updated lists.

That same year, the Atlanta field office proposed gaining access to the names of foreign-born residents with temporary driver’s licenses, as well as lists of rejected license applications, as part of its efforts to achieve that year’s “criminal-alien removal target.” That DMV project was not implemented, according to an ICE official’s email from 2014, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Immigration Law Center.

The Illinois secretary of state’s office has said it cannot guarantee the safety of temporary license applicants’ information from federal immigration authorities. If the office receives a “legally valid request” for information on license applicants who lack proof of legal residence, it will comply, according to an FAQ published by the state earlier this year.

“If ICE did come to us with a subpoena, we’d probably have to go and get a legal opinion, from the attorney general,” said Dave Druker, a spokesman for the Illinois secretary of state’s office. “It hasn’t happened yet.”

The state has had a problem with protecting applicant information before. About three years ago, an employee of the secretary of state’s office alerted ICE about an undocumented immigrant who had applied for a temporary license. The applicant was then apprehended upon showing up at a state office for an appointment in February 2014. Due in part to outcry from immigrant rights advocates following the incident, the state has said it will no longer proactively volunteer information to ICE about temporary license seekers, as long as they do not have any records of felony criminal activity or appear on any terrorism watch list.

“In order to find out the legality, someone needs to be willing to sue, and because of data sharing and how it operates, a lot of times it’s going to require a political actor to do that—a state, a locality,” said Mark Fleming, the national litigation coordinator for the National Immigrant Justice Center. “That’s often a political decision for a lot of elected officials.”

ICE already enjoys limited access to basic state driver’s license information through a law enforcement data exchange network called Nlets. However, the information ICE can see wouldn’t necessarily give away someone’s immigration status.

In California, any driver’s license information that the state makes available to law enforcement agencies through data-sharing systems does not indicate whether the driver provided evidence of legal immigration status, according to Artemio Armenta, a spokesman for the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

In the Illinois system, however, there’s a potential giveaway: Driver data for a regular license includes a Social Security number, whereas temporary license records will list a consular card or foreign passport number instead.

Other states that offer driving privileges to undocumented individuals include Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Vermont. In Washington state, no resident has to provide evidence of legal presence or citizenship to obtain a standard license. Even so, many immigrants who lack proof of legal residence face a dilemma in deciding whether or not to take advantage of these programs and apply for driving credentials.

“People can’t be afraid to get the license that would enable them to learn the rules of the road and hold them accountable for driving,” said Tanya Broder, a senior staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Center. At the same time, “we’ve told people that if they’re at high risk, if they don’t want to be seen or found, that the DMV database makes them easier to find.”

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How One Plan to Bring Undocumented Immigrants out of the Shadows Could Get Them Deported

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Oh god, they’ve discovered even more oil in Texas.

by ElliottClaudio Posted on November 18, 2016

Into the ocean, it seems. New satellite data show the total area of global sea ice dipping wayyy below the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s record for this time of year.

In fact, Arctic sea ice has dropped well below the next-lowest seasonal extent ever observed (which was in 2012). That year’s all-time record low was narrowly avoided in September, the month when Arctic sea ice levels typically are at their lowest. But the fact that ice levels are lower now than they were this same time in 2012 is part of what makes this latest data so alarming.

Meanwhile, Antarctic sea ice is also much lower than usual at the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.

We’ve gotten somewhat used to broken records here, but watching sea ice levels flatten out when they should be peaking is well beyond normal understanding of record lows and highs.

Meanwhile, the temperature at the North Pole right now is a not-cool 36 degrees F above average. Is this what the Upside Down feels like?

Excerpt from – 

Oh god, they’ve discovered even more oil in Texas.

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Watch people on the frontlines of the Dakota Access fight defend their water and their rights.

by ReynaMarie942 Posted on November 18, 2016

Into the ocean, it seems. New satellite data show the total area of global sea ice dipping wayyy below the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s record for this time of year.

In fact, Arctic sea ice has dropped well below the next-lowest seasonal extent ever observed (which was in 2012). That year’s all-time record low was narrowly avoided in September, the month when Arctic sea ice levels typically are at their lowest. But the fact that ice levels are lower now than they were this same time in 2012 is part of what makes this latest data so alarming.

Meanwhile, Antarctic sea ice is also much lower than usual at the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.

We’ve gotten somewhat used to broken records here, but watching sea ice levels flatten out when they should be peaking is well beyond normal understanding of record lows and highs.

Meanwhile, the temperature at the North Pole right now is a not-cool 36 degrees F above average. Is this what the Upside Down feels like?

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Watch people on the frontlines of the Dakota Access fight defend their water and their rights.

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A bundle of food-related measures passed on Tuesday.

by MadgeEltham Posted on November 9, 2016

Protestors with forest advocacy group Stand erected a giant, cardinal-red coffee cup in Seattle’s Westlake Center on Thursday, pressuring Starbucks to make its holiday cups recyclable.

Starbucks has struggled with reinventing its disposable products for years. It aimed to make all of its cups reusable or recyclable by 2015, but that hasn’t happened yet.

The night before, Westlake Center had been the site of a large protest against Donald Trump, who promises to gut existing measures to fight climate change.

So why focus on cups? Stand’s U.S. Campaign Director Ross Hammond told us: “Where we can make change is forcing companies to do things they should be doing but don’t want to do.”

Patrons of the original Starbucks store in Pike Place Market — a few blocks from the protest — had a different take:

“I don’t know how we can go from the [Trump] protests last night … to protesting red cups,” said Steph K., 28, of Los Angeles. We have a national identity crisis, she said, and “this is what we’re talking about?”

Starbucks told Grist that it is “committed to reducing the impact of waste generated in our stores,” and that its cups are recyclable in some places, like Seattle, already.

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A bundle of food-related measures passed on Tuesday.

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Chart of the Day: For the 7th Straight Year, Illegal Immigration Remains a Non-Crisis

by YettaPreiss Posted on September 20, 2016

Mother Jones

Here’s the latest from Pew:

The U.S. unauthorized immigrant population — 11.1 million in 2014 — has stabilized since the end of the Great Recession, as the number from Mexico declined but the total from other regions of the world increased, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on government data. …Mexicans remain the majority of the nation’s unauthorized immigrant population, but their estimated number — 5.8 million in 2014 – has declined by about half a million people since 2009.

The immigration hawks claim that this all changed in 2015, and once we get that data we’ll see that the ravaging hordes are back. You betcha. But until we get that data, the actual facts remain about the same as always: the population of unauthorized immigrants in the US has been stable for nearly a decade, and it’s well below its 2007 peak. As crises go, illegal immigration is a pretty poor one.

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Chart of the Day: For the 7th Straight Year, Illegal Immigration Remains a Non-Crisis

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A Brief History of Donald Trump’s 9/11 Controversies

by JamisonJose503 Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Sunday, Americans will commemorate the 15th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. In the years since this national tragedy, Donald Trump has landed in a handful of 9/11-related controversies. Here’s a look back:

He falsely said “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City cheered the destruction of the Twin Towers.

“I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down,” Trump claimed at a rally last November, and refused to back down after the comments sparked a firestorm. “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos the next day. Trump also insisted, falsely, that it was “well covered at the time.”

The claim was actually a conspiracy theory that had no evidence or reports to back it up. Trump himself had made no mention of celebration at the time. Media outlets that fact-checked the claim, including the Washington Post and the Newark Star-Ledger, could find only isolated, unverified reports that small celebrations might have taken place. “There is no media record. There is no police record. There is nothing,” Jersey City’s mayor, Steven Fulop, told the Star-Ledger.

He claimed he saw people jumping from the World Trade Center from his Midtown apartment.

“I witnessed it, I watched that,” Trump said at a rally in Columbus, Ohio, last November. “I have a view, a view in my apartment that was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center.”

As CNN pointed out, Trump’s apartment in Trump Tower is located more than four miles from the World Trade Center, making this claim dubious at best.

He got $150,000 in economic recovery aid for small businesses for his building at 40 Wall Street.

Trump was one of many of the big names who got recovery funds after the attack from a New York state agency called the Empire State Development Corporation. Trump’s building fit the criteria for aid: it was south of Manhattan’s 14th Street, had suffered economic harm from the attacks, and employed fewer than 500 people. But the last condition was controversial. The New York Daily News found in 2006 that the program had “ignored the federal definition of a small business and adopted a much looser standard. The ESDC used employee counts…to determine whether applicants were small businesses. Federal law requires that the size category of the types of businesses most common in lower Manhattan—finance, insurance, real estate and law firms—be determined based on annual revenue.”

Local politicians fumed about the aid money to the Daily News earlier this year, and Rep. Jarrod Nadler (D-N.Y.), whose district includes the World Trade Center, issued an open letter demanding that Trump return the money. “On behalf of the countless New York citizens and businesses who worked so hard to heal after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, I have a simple question: When do you plan on returning the taxpayer money that was designated to ease the suffering of our city’s small business owners?” Nadler wrote in May.

He did give an eloquent defense of New York’s response to 9/11.

When Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) attacked what he called “New York values” during a Republican debate in January, Trump responded with a defense of the city’s spirit in recovering and rebuilding after the World Trade Center collapsed. “We rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched,” Trump said to applause, “and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers.”

On the other hand…

Trump ignored pleas to help 9/11 first responders pass the reauthorization of the James Zadroga Act, the law that set up a health care fund for the police, firefighters, and other rescue workers. Several other candidates had backed the reauthorization, but Trump remained silent despite receiving “multiple letters and calls requesting his support” from Citizens for the Extension of the James Zadroga Act, according to ABC. “Talk is cheap,” Rich Alles, one of the group’s board members, told ABC. “I’m mortified that he can stand in front of the nation…and wrap himself in the flag.”

But, as Mother Jones‘ David Corn reported in April, Trump somehow escaped widespread criticism for dodging the issue, even during the New York primary.

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A Brief History of Donald Trump’s 9/11 Controversies

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More Cuts Are Coming to the Private Prison Where Our Reporter Worked as a Guard

by RobtReecetmdl Posted on August 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Justice Department plans to stop contracting with private companies to run federal prisons, but states are still free to privatize their penal systems. Louisiana has just renewed its contracts with the state’s two privately run prisons, including Winn Correctional Center, the subject of a recent Mother Jones investigation. The agreement means even more cuts at a prison that’s experienced problems with security, health care, and programs for inmates.

Under the new contract, Winn will operate less like a prison and more like a jail, with fewer medical staff and rehabilitative programs, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. At the time that reporter Shane Bauer worked there, the medium-security facility was operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, one of the country’s largest private prison companies. It was later taken over by LaSalle Corrections, which also operates facilities in Texas and Georgia.

The Louisiana Department of Corrections also renegotiated its contract this month with Allen Correctional Center, operated by the GEO Group. Like Winn, the prison will now operate more like a jail, the Times-Picayune reports.

The two correctional centers have been facing major budget cuts. Earlier this month, the Louisiana Department of Corrections announced it would only pay private prisons about $25 per inmate per day, down from $32, in a bid to save the cash-strapped state money. As the Times-Picayune reports:

But the conversion to jails means Allen and Winn won’t be providing the same services or be able to take in the same types of inmates as they used to handle. So while the private prisons payment rate was reduced to save the state money, the Department of Corrections will have to absorb many of those cuts at other facilities and elsewhere in its budget. Allen and Winn, for example, will no longer operate cell blocks designed to house offenders that are prone to disciplinary issues and violence.

Inmates with chronic medical conditions and mental health issues also have to be held at another facility. As jails, the private centers will no longer be responsible for providing medical or dental care. Allen will only have a physician at the facility for the equivalent of about 20 percent of a full shift, according to its new state contract…Prisons are also required to have certain rehabilitation and other programming available for inmates. Jails don’t have to have the same programs, so that might be cut from Winn and Allen under the new contracts.

Louisiana Corrections Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc previously criticized the budget cuts, saying they would force layoffs and make prisons “unmanageable.” Mother Jones‘ investigation documented high rates of violence at Winn, including stabbings and use of force by staff.

LaSalle Corrections, which runs Winn, had hinted that a tighter budget would mean a shift to bare-bones operations. “There are going to be big cuts to programming, which I hate,” Billy McConnell, the company’s managing director, told the Advocate. “But we have to be able to pay our bills.”

The Louisiana Department of Corrections gave LaSalle the option to back out of its contract for Winn, but the company decided to stay because it had already invested $2 million into the prison’s operations, the Advocate reported. McConnell told the newspaper that the company had seen significant safety improvements since taking over from CCA, including a decrease in assaults and hospitalizations.

For more about Winn Correctional Center, check out Shane Bauer‘s full story.

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More Cuts Are Coming to the Private Prison Where Our Reporter Worked as a Guard

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

by RandolphBeaureg Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Three years ago, the Supreme Court gutted an important provision in the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to a succession of voting restrictions. But recent court decisions have stymied efforts by mostly Republican-led legislatures to restrict voting access in Texas, North Carolina, North Dakota, and elsewhere before the November election.

Still, as the following stats show, the fight for voting access isn’t over yet:

Sources: Card 1: Brennan Center for Justice; Card 2: National Conference of State Legislatures, Brennan Center for Justice; Card 3: North Carolina State Board of Elections, Veasey v. Perry opinion, Frank v. Walker opinion, University of California, San Diego; Card 4: TMJ4, Frank v. Walker opinion; Card 5: University of California, San Diego; Card 6: The Sentencing Project; Brennan Center for Justice; Card 7: 2012 Survey on the Performance of American Elections; Card 8: Justin Levitt, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

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Coal lobbyists are the loneliest lobbyists

by CedricGWXofk Posted on August 16, 2016

sad!

Coal lobbyists are the loneliest lobbyists

By on Aug 16, 2016Share

The lifeboat keeping the coal industry afloat is getting a little lonely these days, as everyone abandons ship.

According to a report released Tuesday by Climate Investigations Center, coal lobbying groups American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, National Mining Association, and World Coal Associate have been hemorrhaging member companies in recent years.

At least nine companies confirmed they left ACCCE, and another seven left NMA; additional companies have been removed from the groups’ website but did not confirm their status.

As they shrink in members, the groups’ revenue and spending have shrunk, as well. Take ACCCE, which lost $27 million in revenue from 2008 to 2014:

American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity IRS filings, 2008-2014

Many of the groups cited the lobbying groups’ opposition to climate change legislation for quitting. Last December, the automaker Volvo left the National Mining Association, calling the lobby’s efforts to oppose the Clean Power Plan “crazy.” Other companies to flee the groups since 2014 include Wells Fargo, Chevron, and Michelin.

“Coal mining companies continue to promote climate denial and oppose any serious effort to reduce carbon pollution,” Joe Smyth, the author of the report and a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center, told Grist. “So it makes sense that these companies are departing.”

The shrinking political might of coal country can be felt in other ways, too. More than 50 coal companies, including heavyweights like Peabody, have filed for bankruptcy since 2012.

Maybe someone should start handing out life preservers.

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Coal lobbyists are the loneliest lobbyists

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