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Trump’s EPA isn’t so tough on law-breaking polluters

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This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is more likely to give polluters a pass when they violate laws intended to keep the air healthy and water clean, according to recent reporting by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a watchdog group.

By analyzing public data and interviewing past and current EPA employees, EDGI documented notable declines in agency law enforcement this year, particularly in EPA Region 8, which includes Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and 27 Indigenous nations. According to an internal EPA report, by mid-year, Region 8 had opened 53 percent fewer enforcement cases in 2018 than in 2017. And it concluded only 53 civil cases in 2018, less than half the number in any year since at least 2006. Nationally, EDGI found a 38 percent drop in the number of orders requiring polluters to comply with the law, and a 50 percent drop in the number of fines.

EDGI’s analyses are based on provisional numbers, which the EPA routinely cleans up at the end of each year, so the exact figures could change when the agency’s annual enforcement report is released. Still, EDGI expects the general trend to hold.

“It’s another iteration of EPA’s industry-friendly approach,” said EDGI member Marianne Sullivan, a public health expert at William Paterson University. “It says we’re prioritizing industry’s needs and desires over the health of our environment and the health of our communities.”

In the short term, dialing back enforcement could be a particularly effective way to relieve industry of the burdens of environmental protections. President Trump’s EPA appointees have tried to formally roll back regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan and a rule safeguarding water from toxic coal ash. But it’s a slow and public process that invites lawsuits. Simply declining to enforce the law, however, can subtly accomplish the same thing, because it happens largely out of public view, and EPA administrators have wide discretion over it.

EPA officials deny ignoring violations of the law. “There has been no retreat from working with states, communities, and regulated entities to ensure compliance with our environmental laws,” spokesperson Maggie Sauerhage wrote in an email. “Focusing only on the number of federal lawsuits filed or the amount of penalties collected fails to capture the full range of compliance tools we use.”

Still, the agency acknowledges a shift in focus from “enforcement” to “compliance.” That means it’s likely to work less as a cop than an adviser with the companies it regulates, an approach critics say could incentivize companies to cut corners.

“Focusing on compliance instead of enforcement is a way of saying, ‘We might make people get back into compliance, but we’re resistant to the idea of punishment,’” explained David Janik, an attorney who managed Region 8’s legal enforcement program until 2011. But punishment helps you achieve compliance, Janik added. It deters polluters from spoiling the air and water in the first place, just as traffic tickets make drivers think twice about speeding. “If I go 90 and I get caught, I’m paying $200 for punishment,” he said. “If one chemical company has a big case and they pay $40 million to settle it, other companies will say, ‘Maybe I should hire another guy to make sure we don’t slip into noncompliance.’”

In some cases, lackluster enforcement since Trump took office appears to have been a boon to corporate pocketbooks, while the environmental benefits remain murky. Consider the difference in how a series of oil and gas cases were handled under President Barack Obama.

In 2015, the EPA and the state of Colorado jointly entered into a landmark settlement agreement with Noble Energy covering thousands of gas storage tanks that were leaking volatile organic compounds. VOCs are part of the toxic soup that contributes to smog levels on Colorado’s Front Range that exceed federal limits, exacerbating asthma and other respiratory diseases.

The settlement required Noble to pay a nearly $5 million fine, spend $60 million to reduce VOC emissions, and report its progress to the public. Two parallel cases resulted in smaller, but still substantial costs to companies in Colorado and North Dakota.

But under [former] EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, three similar cases came with remarkably cushier terms, according to the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project. In all three, the EPA declined to assess fines for the violations at all. And it’s unclear what, if anything, the companies were required to do to fix the problems. The companies were all Oklahoma-based, raising questions of favoritism from Pruitt, a pro-oil-and-gas Oklahoman.

The Noble case was part of an Obama-era National Enforcement Initiatives program focused on air pollution from oil and gas drilling. National initiatives historically targeted problems particular to certain industries and they’re where big enforcement cases were often made. But in August, Susan Bodine, EPA’s current head of enforcement, announced that the program was being renamed “National Compliance Initiatives,” and that the agency would discontinue the campaign on oil and gas in 2019, a move industry pushed for.

“It’s really about who’s going to benefit,” Sullivan said. “If industry doesn’t have to capture as much pollution, that may be good for their bottom line. But it puts the burden on the public. You can’t pollute for free. Either industry pays to capture it, or people pay with their health.”

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Trump’s EPA isn’t so tough on law-breaking polluters

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Trump halted a study of coal’s health effects in Appalachia

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration has told the National Academy of Sciences to stop working on a study about the potential health risks for people living near mountaintop coal-removing sites in Central Appalachia.

“Everyone knows there are major health risks living near mountaintop removal coal mining sites,” Bill Price, the senior Appalachia organizer at the Sierra Club, said in a statement. “It’s infuriating that Trump would halt this study on the health effects of mountaintop removal coal mining, research that people in Appalachia have been demanding for years.”

In 2014, a West Virginia University study found that dust from mountaintop removal coal-mining sites was linked to increased incidences of lung cancer. The following year, the state formally asked the Obama administration for help in studying these health effects, and in 2016, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) gave the NAS $1 million to determine the human health effects for people living near coal mine operations.

But last week, in an Aug. 18 letter to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the OSMRE said that the Department of the Interior has begun an agency-wide review of all its grants and cooperative agreements that exceed $100,000, as part of the department’s “changing budget situation” and that the agency should halt all work on the study. The NAS says that it is ready to resume work on the study when the review is complete.

“Communities living with daily health threats were counting on finally getting the full story from the professionals at the National Academies of Science,” Price said. “To take that away without warning or adequate reason is beyond heartless.”

Not only can coal have an impact on public health, burning it releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has been aligned with climate skeptics, and throughout his campaign and presidency, Trump expressed support for the coal industry.

When he announced a new agenda for the EPA, Administrator Scott Pruitt told a group of coal miners that “the coal industry was nearly devastated by years of regulatory overreach, but with new direction from President Trump, we are helping to turn things around for these miners.” At an Iowa rally in June, Trump promised to put coal miners back to work. “We’ve ended the war on clean, beautiful coal,” he said.

Bill Price, from the Sierra Club, says that revoking this study demonstrates the administration’s real priorities when it comes to coal. “It appears that the only people Trump cares about in Appalachia are coal executives,” he wrote, “not the people who’ve lived and worked here for generations.”

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Trump halted a study of coal’s health effects in Appalachia

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Women Are Now Living With the Fear of Deportation If They Report Domestic Violence

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump’s January executive orders on immigration worried advocates working with survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, who argued that their clients and other victims of crime would no longer be willing to seek help or cooperate with law enforcement. Their concerns were further justified when police departments in Los Angeles and Houston announced that Latinos in those cities were reporting sexual assaults at lower rates in the wake of hostile rhetoric and enforcement activity targeting undocumented immigrants. Now, a new survey provides the data that demonstrates a noticeable shift in immigrant survivors’ contacts with victim services providers in recent months.

“The results of this survey are troubling,” Cecilia Friedman Levin, senior policy counsel for ASISTA Immigration Assistance, said in a recent press call discussing the survey results. “It represents that there is uncertainty and distrust around the institutions that are supposed to provide survivors with protection and safety.”

The “2017 Advocate and Legal Service Survey Regarding Immigrant Survivors” was conducted last month by a coalition of national organizations focused on domestic violence and sexual assault. The sponsors included the Tahirih Justice Center, ASISTA, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, and the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence. The groups collected responses from roughly 700 advocates and attorneys from 46 states and Washington, DC, asking them about the issues confronting immigrant survivors seeking services and information about specific incidents. They found that a majority of respondents are seeing an increase in fear among their immigrant clients, some of whom are fearful of even calling 911 or seeking medical assistance. Here are some of the highlights:

62% of respondents—a group that includes both social and legal services providers—said they have seen an increase in immigration-related questions from survivors;
78% of respondents said that survivors had expressed concerns about contacting police due to fears that it would open them up to deportation;
75% said that survivors had expressed concerns about going to court for a matter related to their abuser, a concern that was likely exacerbated by the highly reported courthouse arrest of a domestic violence victim seeking a protective order against her abuser earlier this year;
43% of respondents also said that the survivors they have worked with have dropped criminal or civil cases related to their abuse because they were fearful of potentially opening themselves up to enforcement.

Anecdotes from respondents also shed light on the increased level of fear among immigrant survivors. “Survivors have a lot of questions about how they can safety plan under the new administration,” the report says, adding that some victims now question if they should submit petitions for relief to the federal government. In another response, the survey report notes that a 16-year old survivor attempted suicide because she feared that her offender would report her family to federal enforcement officials.

In the months since the immigration executive orders were announced, there has been confusion about what protections were still in place for the vulnerable subset of survivors of domestic abuse. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has maintained that agency protections covering immigrant survivors and other victims of crime are still in place. But, in practice, the picture is quite different. The administration has largely overlooked these crime victims both in its statements on immigration and in the resources it has provided. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security launched a new office focused on crimes committed by immigrants and the president’s proposed 2018 budget promises to dedicate significant resources to immigration enforcement and crack down on sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse to participate in aggressive targeting of undocumented immigrants. The shift in tone has already had an effect: Earlier this week, a Baltimore defense attorney was arrested after allegedly offering an immigrant rape victim $3,000 to not testify against her alleged assailant, telling the woman that she risked deportation should she appear in court.

Immigrant survivors can still qualify for protections under the Violence Against Women Act, a 1994 law protecting victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. But the administration’s activity could further exacerbate survivors’ reluctance to seek assistance. “We’ve seen a lot of people reach out and ask specifically for what people can do outside of the legal system because they’re afraid of deportation, or they’re afraid of law enforcement and they’ve been hearing a lot about raids,” Qudsia Raja, policy director at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, told reporters. “We’re having to work with advocates on safety planning outside of legal recourse.”

Advocates are also concerned that legislation working its way through Congress would negatively impact survivors’ willingness to report. Of particular concern is the Davis-Oliver Act, a bill that would give state and local law enforcement the power to enforce federal immigration laws, impose harsher penalties on undocumented immigrants, and punish sanctuary cities. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) has argued that the bill is necessary to ensure public safety.

Those who actually work with immigrants disagree. They say public safety will suffer if harsh immigration policies are allowed to push immigrant survivors into the shadows. “The fear among immigrant survivors is still rampant,” Archi Pyati, chief of policy and programs at the Tahirih Justice Center, a group working with women and girls fleeing gender-based violence, told Mother Jones. “So long as the federal government continues down this road there are going to be immigrant women who are going to be hurt.”

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Women Are Now Living With the Fear of Deportation If They Report Domestic Violence

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David Clarke, America’s Most Terrifying Sheriff, Says He’s Joining the Trump Administration

Mother Jones

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David Clarke, the controversial sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, will “accept an appointment as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security,” he reportedly told a local radio host Wednesday. Clarke said he will take a position at the Office of Partnership and Engagement. In that role, he would help coordinate DHS outreach to local law enforcement agencies, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

So far, DHS isn’t confirming Clarke’s appointment. “Such senior positions are announced by the Department when made official by the Secretary,” a department spokeswoman said in an email to Mother Jones. “No such announcement with regard to the Office of Public Engagement has been made.”

Clarke, who rose to national prominence last year as a vocal Trump supporter and a frequent guest on Fox News, has made headlines in recent months due to lawsuits filed against him alleging mistreatment of inmates in the jail he oversees. Last year, four people died in that jail. As we reported in March:

Clarke has faced two federal lawsuits since December, in the wake of four deaths that occurred last year in the Milwaukee County Jail. In mid-March, the family of a man who died of dehydration in April 2016 sued Clarke and the county, alleging that jail staff subjected the man to “torture” by denying him water as he pleaded for it over 10 days. County prosecutors are considering bringing felony charges against jail staff for neglect. Another lawsuit, filed last December, seeks damages for the death of a newborn in the jail last July, after jail staff ignored the infant’s mother as she went into labor and for more than six hours thereafter, according to the suit.

A grand jury recently recommended charges against several jail employees in the case of the man who died of thirst. A separate lawsuit alleges mistreatment of pregnant inmates at the jail:

In that suit, a woman alleges that, during a seven-month stint at the jail in 2013, she was forcibly shackled with a “belly-chain” that tied her wrists and legs to her stomach during her hospitalization for pre-natal care, while she was in labor, and while she received treatment for post-partum depression after she gave birth. The restraints made giving birth more painful for the woman, left marks on her body, and made it more difficult for doctors—who insisted she be freed—to give her an epidural, the lawsuit says. The jail has a policy that inmates be shackled while receiving medical care that makes no exceptions for pregnancy, according to the lawsuit, which also states that more than 40 women were subjected to the same treatment.

Clarke has apparently been angling for a job with the Trump administration for months. Last year, he spent so many days away from his office while stumping for Trump that local officials have called for his resignation:

Clarke visited 20 states in 2016, according to financial disclosure documents he filed with the county, often to give paid speeches in which he praised Donald Trump. He spent about 60 days out of state last year, the documents show. (Before he campaigned for Trump, Clarke took a trip to Moscow in December 2015 with a delegation from the NRA, during which they met with Russian officials.)

In January, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an editorial calling for the sheriff to step down, citing the jail deaths, his habit of attacking his political opponents on social media—which he does on his department’s official Facebook page—and the fact that Clarke seemed more focused on “pining for a job in the Trump administration” than on his responsibilities as county sheriff. County auditors have launched an investigation into whether Clarke abused his power following an airplane flight in January when he had six deputies and two K-9 units confront a passenger at the gate with whom Clarke had an unfriendly exchange on the plane.

Clarke has also faced pushback from local activists and officials critical of his plan to enroll his sheriff’s department in a controversial immigration enforcement partnership with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security. In his role at DHS, Clarke would presumably be recruiting other agencies to participate in the program.

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David Clarke, America’s Most Terrifying Sheriff, Says He’s Joining the Trump Administration

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Trump Administration Launches Office Focused on Crimes by Immigrants

Mother Jones

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The Trump administration officially launched an office on Wednesday dedicated to the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants—an effort that immigrant advocates say does not align with actual crime data and appears designed to demonize immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office, which will provide aid to people affected by crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. According to DHS and officials with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—which will house the office—this assistance will include a hotline to answer questions about the immigration enforcement process and a notification system to provide updates to registered victims about the custody status of immigrant perpetrators.

The services provide by VOICE are not new: Most are already offered by ICE’s community engagement office, and the office draws upon personnel and resources that the agency already has. But administration officials have shifted the tone of the conversation by focusing on victims of crimes committed by immigrants.

“All crime is terrible, but these victims are unique—and too often ignored,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said during the Wednesday launch event in Washington. “They are casualties of crimes that should never have taken place, because the people who victimized them oftentimes should not have been in the country in the first place.”

In reports and statements leading up to the launch, VOICE has been described as focusing exclusively on people affected by crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. But DHS officials on Wednesday said that the office would provide services to victims of “crimes with an immigration nexus,” suggesting that the scope of the agency could expand beyond the undocumented. DHS officials told reporters that VOICE will focus on crimes committed by anyone who could potentially face deportation, a grouping that could include immigrants with legal status.

The office has been in the works for several months and was developed with input from victims and their families, many of whom attended the launch event. It was first mentioned in the president’s January executive order addressing illegal immigration, and its purpose was further clarified in a memo published by Kelly in February. President Donald Trump first spoke publicly about it in his February address to Congress, when he said, “We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media and silenced by special interests.”

The launch drew immediate criticism from immigration advocates. “The goal of this program is to instill fear of non-white immigrants,” the National Day Laborer Organizing Network said in a statement. “It is another deliberate step taken by the Trump administration towards creating institutions that legitimize racist propaganda. That’s what this is about, instilling fear in order to subject people to double suspicion, double punishment, and deprivation of due process.” Others have argued that while the administration focuses on crimes committed by immigrants, it has pulled back from assisting immigrant crime victims, leaving many immigrants fearful of reporting crimes to police.

“I think it is absurd to highlight the crimes committed by a small group of people without reporting on the crimes committed by everybody,” Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said in an interview before the Wednesday launch. With the establishment of VOICE, he added, the administration appears to be “trying to show how dangerous a group of people is when they have no statistical evidence towards that claim.” Crime data suggests that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens.

At Wednesday’s event, DHS officials argued that VOICE is not about demonizing immigrants, but instead will focus on assisting victims and families who are confused about how immigration enforcement works. “The immigration system is so complicated, there wasn’t anyone there to tell victims what has been happening on the immigration side,” said DHS spokesman David Lapan. “This office can help victims’ families understand the immigration elements of the crimes committed.”

But that mission has been complicated by the president’s rhetoric on immigration and the undocumented. Trump has frequently highlighted the immigration records of violent offenders. One of his central campaign promises was to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, and he has pledged to ramp up deportations.

Launching just days before Trump’s 100th day in office, VOICE comes at a difficult moment for the administration. On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked part of the president’s order that would have withheld funding from so-called sanctuary cities, which refuse to comply with Trump’s call to detain and deport undocumented immigrants.

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Trump Administration Launches Office Focused on Crimes by Immigrants

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How a Private Prison Company Used Detained Immigrants for Free Labor

Mother Jones

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When Carlos Eliezer Ortiz Muñoz arrived at the Denver Contract Detention Facility in Aurora, Colorado, in 2014, he was given a clothing package and assigned to a housing unit, where he’d have to stay for months. Like tens of thousands of other immigrants across the country who are kept in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention each night, Ortiz and his fellow detainees were waiting to see if they’d win their immigration cases or face deportation.

Before long, the private prison company that ran the detention center put Ortiz to work. Each day in his housing unit, guards assigned a crew of six detainees to clean the private and common living areas; scrub down toilets, showers, and eating tables; and sweep and mop floors. “None of us got paid anything,” Ortiz said in a court statement. But he couldn’t protest—he knew he could be sent to solitary confinement if he refused to do the cleaning. “Some of the guards would threaten us by saying, ‘¿Quieres ir al hoyo?‘” Ortiz said. “‘You want to go to the hole?'”

The GEO Group, the private prison company that operates Aurora, allegedly forced more than 50,000 immigrants like Ortiz to work without pay or for $1 a day since 2004, according to a lawsuit that nine detainees brought against the company in 2014. On February 27, a federal judge ruled that their case could proceed as a class action, breathing new life into a suit that exposes the extent to which the for-profit company relied on cheap or unpaid detainee labor to minimize costs at the Aurora facility.

“If we’re right, and these practices are illegal, it has tremendous implications on the ability of the government to use detention in the immigration enforcement architecture,” says Andrew Free, an immigration attorney on the detainees’ legal team. “It would prompt a serious rethinking of whom to detain, and how much it’s going to cost.”

GEO incarcerates more immigrants (and receives more public money to do so) than any other detention center operator, according to an analysis by the anti-detention group CIVIC. And its business detaining immigrants for ICE is only expected to grow “with this increased and expanded approach to border security,” CEO George Zoley said in a February earnings call.

According to the lawsuit, there were two ways GEO cashed in on cheap labor from detainees. There was the facility’s sanitation policy, under which detainees like Ortiz were required to work as janitors without pay. If they didn’t, they risked being punished with solitary confinement, according to GEO’s local detainee handbook. Detainees could also apply for a job in Aurora’s voluntary work program, which paid them exactly $1 a day to keep the facility running.

In a statement, GEO spokesman Pablo Paez wrote that GEO’s volunteer work program policies follow federal standards. “We have consistently, strongly refuted the allegations made in this lawsuit, and we intend to continue to vigorously defend our company against these claims,” he said. “The volunteer work program at all immigration facilities as well as the minimum wage rates and standards associated with the program are set by the Federal government under mandated performance-based national detention standards.”

ICE’s standards for immigration detention centers say that voluntary work programs are intended to give detainees “opportunities to work and earn money while confined.” Yet David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, says it’s questionable whether such programs are truly voluntary for people “held in captivity, against their will.” While working may be a positive outlet for incarcerated people, Fathi says, “the problem isn’t the existence of the work program. The problem is this inherently coercive relationship that makes the workers uniquely vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.”

Some people in Aurora’s program stripped and waxed floors, while others did laundry, prepared food, cut hair, or worked in the library. Shifts lasted between three and eight hours, according to a copy of Aurora’s detainee work program policy, and detainees were paid the same $1 no matter how long they were assigned to work.

Lourdes Argueta volunteered. She was given a job as a janitor in the medical unit, where she and other detainees “clean toilets, sweep and mop floors, pull carpets and clean floors, clean windows, remove trash, clean patients’ rooms (including cleaning up blood, feces and urine), and perform other cleaning tasks,” she said in a statement to the court. She also worked in GEO’s booking area, creating new detainee files and putting together packages of clothing for new detainees.

During a deposition, GEO’s assistant business manager at Aurora testified that if there were no “voluntary workers” like Argueta, the company would need to bring in additional officers, paid at hourly wages set by rules in GEO’s contract, to get the same work done. So how much would the company have to shell out if it didn’t rely on cheap detainee labor? Under GEO’s contract with ICE, which incorporated federal wage regulations, the lowest allowable employee wage at the Aurora facility was $10.90 an hour for food service workers. A typical shift in the voluntary work program lasted approximately seven hours, according to the detainee work program policy—so if GEO had hired additional employees to do the work, it would have cost the company nearly $76.30 per shift. (That’s a lowball estimate, given that some detainees worked jobs that would have paid significantly more.) Instead, they spent $1.

That translates to huge cost savings. Take, for example, November 2012, when detainees took hundreds of voluntary work program shifts. If GEO had hired employees to do those jobs instead, the company would have spent more than $125,000 in wages and benefits that month. GEO’s actual payments: $1,680.

That number only increases if you account for Aurora’s sanitation policy, under which all detainees in the facility did janitorial work in the housing units for no pay, the lawsuit alleges. GEO employees doing the same work would have been eligible for $12.01 per hour in wages, under the company’s contract with ICE.

“If GEO was absorbing all of the labor costs, its profit would be less,” explains Nina DiSalvo, executive director of Towards Justice, one of the firms representing the detainees. Andrew Free, the attorney, goes further: “It turns their profits upside down,” he claims. “It would be a money-losing enterprise if they had to pay the people to operate this facility under the current contract.” (Given that the Department of Homeland Security pays an average of $126.46 per day to detain one immigrant, that may not be a stretch.)

So how does the company get away with it? The “dollar a day” policy dates back to 1978, when Congress passed an appropriations bill funding voluntary detainee work programs, says Jacqueline Stevens, the head of Northwestern University’s Deportation Research Clinic, whose research on detainee labor informed the 2014 suit. But that was before the rise of private prison companies, she adds—and it was initially implemented in government-run facilities, not those run by for-profit companies beholden to shareholders. “GEO’s privately held, so there’s an extra concern that they may be exploiting people in a way an institution run by federal government would not be,” Stevens explains.

When immigrants inside Aurora filed grievances asking why they weren’t paid more, GEO’s assistant business manager replied by saying that ICE, not the company, set the daily rate. But in February’s order, Colorado District Court Judge John Kane ruled that while ICE only reimburses GEO for $1 per detainee shift, the company could pay more if it wanted. (And in fact, in at least one other location, it appears to have paid detainees more than the $1 ICE reimbursed it for, Stevens says.) While the detainees aren’t eligible for employment under GEO’s contract, their lawsuit argues that GEO “unjustly enriched” itself by misleading them about how much it could pay.

“By far the greatest expense of running any detention facility is labor,” Fathi says. “GEO has got to be worried that if this practice is unlawful at one facility, it’s presumptively unlawful at all facilities.” If they lose, he adds, “they have to be looking at not just what they would have to pay at Aurora.”

The lawsuit also argues that the sanitation policy violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, a modern anti-slavery statute. To maintain cleanliness in the housing units, GEO used housekeeping crews like the one Ortiz was assigned to when he arrived at Aurora. According to GEO’s local detainee handbook, refusing to clean was considered a “high moderate”-level offense and was punishable by several possible sanctions, including up to three days of so-called “disciplinary segregation”: solitary confinement. Plaintiff Demetrio Valerga told the court in a statement that he “did the work anyway because it was well known that those who refused to do that work for free were put in ‘the hole.'” With the sanitation policy in place, the company employed just one janitor for the 1,500-bed facility.

ICE’s own standards say detainees can’t be required to work, except for keeping “immediate living areas” neat: making their beds, stacking loose papers, and keeping the floor and furniture uncluttered. Under questioning during a deposition, Aurora’s assistant warden of operations made it clear that GEO considered all parts of the housing unit (bathrooms and day areas, as well as cells) to be fair game. Yet a federal watchdog agency recently found that requiring detained immigrants to clean any common areas used by all detainees was a violation of ICE standards.

“Imagine you see people being yelled at by guards and thrown in solitary all the time,” Free says. “In order to avoid solitary yourself, you have to maintain the sanitary nature of the facility you’re being housed in. And then they say, ‘If you want, we’ll pay you a dollar a day to do something else. If you don’t, you’re still going to work when we tell you to.’ And the company that’s on the other end of this is making millions.”

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How a Private Prison Company Used Detained Immigrants for Free Labor

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Invoking Immigrant-Induced Mayhem, Sessions Announces Crackdown on Sanctuary Cities

Mother Jones

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions has set his sights on a new target: sanctuary cities and counties. In a guest appearance at Monday’s White House press briefing, Sessions announced that the Justice Department will begin cracking down on state and local governments that do not help the administration identify and deport undocumented immigrants. Painting a picture of violence perpetrated by “aliens,” Sessions announced that the department will punish sanctuary jurisdictions by withholding federal grants.

“Today, I’m urging states and local jurisdictions to comply with these federal laws,” he said. “The Department of Justice will require that jurisdictions seeking or applying for Department of Justice grants to certify compliance with US Code 1373 as a condition for receiving those awards.” Sessions’ announcement comes as several mayors have expressed an unwillingness to use local police forces to help detain and deport undocumented immigrants. According to Sessions, the Justice Department issues more than $4 billion in grants each year that would be subject to the new restrictions.

Sessions announcement is in keeping with an executive order President Donald Trump signed in January mandating the withholding of federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions. Sessions added that the department would seek to “claw back” grants to localities that later appear to willfully violate the law. The statute Sessions referred to, 8 US Code 1373, prohibits government officials from restricting communications between a government agency and immigration enforcement about the immigration status of any individual. But the language in the statute is vague, and it’s unclear if the federal government can force local law enforcement to engage in immigration enforcement, a situation that will likely lead to court challenges to Trump’s executive order and Sessions’ new policy.

In his remarks, Sessions depicted undocumented immigrants as a violent scourge—raping, murdering, and sexually abusing children. “Countless Americans would be alive today and countless loved ones would not be grieving today if these policies of sanctuary cities were ended,” he said. That characterization is in line with the president’s critical language about immigrants, and last week, at Trump’s direction, Immigration and Customs Enforcement published its first weekly list of the crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in sanctuary cities. But the depiction is misleading, since immigrants are less likely than native-born citizens to commit crimes.

Sessions’ remarks also ignore the academic literature showing that sanctuary cities improve public safety by increasing trust and communication between immigrant communities and law enforcement. As three researches noted in a Los Angeles Times op-ed recently, “Sanctuary jurisdictions—39 cities and 364 counties across the country have policies that limit local law enforcement’s involvement in enforcing federal immigration laws—increase public safety.” They noted a study published last year by the University of Chicago Press in which a majority of 750 police chiefs and sheriffs across the country expressed opposition to using local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws. Other studies have also found lower crime rates in sanctuary jurisdictions.

One thing that is likely to hurt public safety, however, is withholding federal grants that help fund law enforcement.

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Invoking Immigrant-Induced Mayhem, Sessions Announces Crackdown on Sanctuary Cities

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6 Ways President Trump Wants to Hamstring the EPA

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump promised during the campaign to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency “in almost every form.” That probably isn’t going to happen, but if recent reports are correct, the White House is planning massive cuts to the agency, potentially wiping out up to a quarter of its $8.1 billion budget and eliminating as many as 3,000 jobs.

Cleanup projects, scientific research, and the office responsible for enforcing air quality standards are all reportedly on the chopping block. Any funding related to climate change is at risk of being zeroed out. The Oregonian has a list of 42 EPA cuts outlined in a leaked version of Trump’s proposed budget. Not all of these cuts will necessarily be enacted by Congress; a few Republicans, including EPA administrator Scott Pruitt himself, have already balked at some of the proposed reductions to state environmental grants. Nevertheless, here’s a selection of just some of what could happen if Trump does get his way:

Environment Justice

The EPA’s environmental justice program focuses on reducing the burden of pollution that falls disproportionately on communities of color—for example, lead in drinking water and poor air quality. In 2016, the agency released a four-year roadmap for improving the health of the most vulnerable communities, which would incorporate justice concerns into new rulemaking, scientific studies, enforcement, and permitting decisions. The Washington Post reported that the program could “vanish” under the White House budget.

EPA Enforcement

The EPA currently spends $171 million per year enforcing environmental protections.The proposed budget cuts that by 11 percent to $153 million, according to a Reuters source. The agency’s enforcement arm goes after polluters that violate clean air and water laws, such as when Volkswagen was caught cheating on emissions tests. Shrinking the enforcement budget would be the easiest way the administration could undermine regulations already on the books—regulations that otherwise could only be repealed through a lengthy rulemaking process.

Pruitt wants the EPA to partner with states rather than telling them what to do. But states can’t fill the vacuum left by the federal agency for a variety of reasons—one of them is that state enforcement is partially funded by the federal government. If grants to states are also cut, as proposed, the Trump administration could undermine state enforcement as well.

Lead Cleanup

The EPA sends funds to states to enforce monitoring and treatment standards for drinking water. According to Reuters, Trump wants to cut 30 percent of state grants for lead cleanup and funding for lead testing and education. The EPA’s program to certify that renovated buildings don’t contain lead paint also faces a 29 percent cut.

Radon Testing

About one in 15 homes have high levels of radon, an odorless, colorless gas that is a leading cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers. For some reason, the EPA’s relatively small educational program to promote testing in homes is at risk of being zeroed out, according to the Washington Post.

Abandoned Industrial Sites

Since 1980, the EPA has been in charge of identifying and cleaning up former industrial sites and the dirtiest hazardous waste. When the polluting company can’t pay for the full cleanup, the government does—through the Superfund and brownfields programs. There are more than 1,300 Superfund sites and 450,000 brownfield sites in the country. While Pruitt has said he would not want to see these programs cut, the Trump budget proposal would reportedly reduce funding to brownfields by roughly 40 percent.

Environmental Restoration

Trump is reportedly proposing cuts of at least 90 percent to programs to restore the Chesapeake Bay, whose watershed stretches across six states; the Puget Sound, the second-largest estuary in the United States; and the San Francisco Bay. Meanwhile, an effort along the US-Mexico border to reduce litter affecting San Diego and the Pacific Ocean would be cut by almost two-thirds.

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6 Ways President Trump Wants to Hamstring the EPA

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Donald Trump Can Deport People Without Even Giving Them a Hearing

Mother Jones

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Last week, the Trump administration released its blueprint for implementing the president’s executive orders on immigration. Not only did it lay out plans to vastly increase the number of undocumented people vulnerable to deportation, but it also revealed that the feds intend to deport many more people caught in their immigration crackdown immediately after their arrest.

“Expedited removal” is the term the government uses to describe the swift deportation of undocumented immigrants without an appearance before an immigration judge—and, as pro-immigrant advocates point out, without due process protections. Previously, only undocumented immigrants who had been in the United States for less than 14 days and were apprehended within 100 miles of the US border were eligible for expedited removal. According to a new memo signed by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, expedited removal can now be applied nationwide to those who cannot produce documentation that they have been in the country continuously for at least two years.

Jennifer Chang Newell, a senior staff attorney on the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights’ Project, said expedited removal has long been marred by widespread, well-documented abuse and that it “violates due process absolutely.” In 2014, the last year for which there are public statistics, 176,752 people were given expedited removal orders. That number, advocates point out, is now sure to go up.

The expansion of expedited removal is part of the administration’s attempt to bypass the bottleneck of immigrants already awaiting deportation in the immigration court system. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) estimates that it has the capacity to deport 400,000 people annually, but there is currently a backlog of more than 500,000 cases in the courts. Expedited removal allows the administration to skip the courts and summarily deport people without a lawyer, or even a phone call.

Under the new plan, apprehended immigrants will be asked for proof (such as receipts, phone records, or identification) that they have been in the country over the past two years. If they can’t produce the necessary documentation, they will be deported in as little as 24 hours. In effect, Newell said, “the police officer who arrests you and interrogates you also convicts you.” While this obviously is a concern for the tens of thousands of immigrants estimated to have illegally crossed the border since 2015, Alyson Sincavage, a legislative associate at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), argues that it could affect all undocumented immigrants who can’t immediately make their case to immigration officials—even those who’ve been here for years. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

And then there’s the question of how this might influence asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. Since 2014, there has been a surge of Central American immigrants—many of them unaccompanied minors or women with children—crossing the southern border due to increased gang violence and instability in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Both Newell and Sincavage expressed concerns that this group, many of whom have valid asylum claims, could be wrongly slated for expedited removal in the general chaos of a large-scale immigration overhaul. A 2013 study by the ACLU found that some asylum seekers were quickly deported because Customs and Border Protection agents failed to adequately screen them in so-called credible-fear interviews, which immigrants must pass before getting a full hearing before an immigration judge. (The Trump administration has indicated that CBP agents should “elicit all relevant information from the alien as is necessary to make a legally sufficient determination” during credible-fear screenings; CBP did not respond to a request for comment.)

Causing further concern, the administration has suggested that many immigrants apprehended at the border could be immediately sent back to Mexico, rather than to their home countries. Luis Angel Gallegos, a program coordinator at the Institute for Social and Cultural Practice and Research, a Mexico City-based nonprofit focused on migrant issues, wrote in Spanish that sending immigrants to northern Mexico would present an enormous logistical challenge and endanger already-vulnerable immigrants. “There is no infrastructure to host and receive them,” he said. “Shelters that help immigrants are often full. Immigration detention centers are full.” Gallegos argued that this could make immigrants targets for extortion, kidnapping, and other crimes by the criminal syndicates operating in the border region.

Even if the Mexican government blocks this part of the plan—on Friday, the Associated Press reported that Mexico’s interior secretary said the country had rejected it in meetings with American leaders—Newell and Sincavage stressed the cruelty of removing people so quickly without a phone call, let alone a day in court. Expedited removal leads to people being “ripped from their communities and whisked away and deported in a matter of hours, based on shoddy paperwork,” Newell said. “This violates our most American notions of fairness.”

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Donald Trump Can Deport People Without Even Giving Them a Hearing

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The Capital’s Hottest Restaurants Will Shut Down To Protest Trump

Mother Jones

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Urban dwellers in Washington, DC, will have a tough time dining out tomorrow: A growing number of the city’s restaurants and bars will be closed in solidarity with a strike dubbed “A Day Without Immigrants.” Fliers circulating on social media are urging all immigrants to skip work and school and to refrain from shopping on Thursday in defiance of President Donald Trump’s harsh immigration pledges.

Immigrants made up roughly 17 percent of the District’s workforce in 2013. “Without us and our contribution this country is paralyzed!!!!” reads a flier for the strike in a photo posted by chef Jorge Hernandez on Twitter.

Several high-profile restaurants such as Busboys and Poets and Bad Saint will be closed during DC’s planned strike, while others will be operating with limited service; Eater is updating a list of participating eateries as it hears about them. José Andrés—a popular immigrant chef from Spain who has been feuding with Trump ever since he backed out of opening up a restaurant in Trump’s luxury hotel in downtown Washington, DC—announced that he’d be shuttering all of his restaurants in the nation’s capitol and the surrounding areas for the day.

The strike mirrors Milwaukee‘s Day Without Latinos, Immigrants, and Refugees protest on February 13, when thousands of immigrants in the Wisconsin city refused to work and instead took to the streets to protest Trump and Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. (Clarke Jr. recently made comments about helping federal agents crackdown on immigrants.) “No matter what status you have, we’re here to work hard,” Mayra Estrada, a 33-year-old protester, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “And we’re not taking anybody’s job, we’re doing our job.”

A Day Without Immigrants is centered in DC, but the Washington Post is reporting that immigrants across the country are planning to take part as well. The strikes, which are intended to show how economically paralyzed communities would be without immigrants, come on the heels of several high-profile raids last week. Nearly 700 undocumented immigrants, including a “DREAMer” granted temporary legal status under DACA, were arrested in sweeps that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials called “routine.” On Twitter, Trump referred to the sweeps as a “crackdown.”

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The Capital’s Hottest Restaurants Will Shut Down To Protest Trump

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