Tag Archives: justice

Army Halts Construction of Dakota Access Pipeline

by MaybellMullens Posted on December 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will not grant a permit for the controversial Dakota Access pipeline to cross under Lake Oahu in South Dakota, a decision that could halt construction of the last link of the controversial pipeline that has been the subject of protests for the better part of this year. The water protectors, as they refer to themselves, have set up camps in the path of the pipeline in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which opposes the project. This weekend, veterans from around the country converged on the region to show their support.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe issued a statement commending “the courage that it took for Barack Obama, the Army Corps, the Department of Justice and the Department of Interior to take steps to correct the course of history and do the right thing.” Tribal chairman David Archambault also expressed hope that the incoming Trump administration would “respect this decision.”

In its statement, the Army said it believes the pipeline route should be subject to a full environmental impact statement “with full public input and analysis.” That process typically takes multiple months, often years.

Mother Jones’ Wes Enzinna is currently enroute to the area and will continue covering this developing story.

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Army Halts Construction of Dakota Access Pipeline

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How Did Police From All Over the Country End Up at Standing Rock?

by Antonio96O Posted on December 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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When protests at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation began in April, there were only a handful of activists camping out in defiance of the Dakota Access Pipeline project. As their numbers have grown into the thousands, so too has the police presence confronting them. Police departments from 24 counties and 16 cities in 10 different states (including North Dakota) have poured into Standing Rock, according to the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, the local law enforcement agency.

It’s rare for police forces to cross state lines to handle problems in neighboring places, much less travel more than 1,500 miles to respond to protests, as the St. Charles Parish (Louisiana) Sheriff’s Department has. So why is Standing Rock teeming with cops from across the country? The answer lies in an obscure federal law that’s usually deployed to help states deal with environmental disasters.

In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton signed the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC). The statute was created in response to Hurricane Andrew, which wrought an estimated $25 billion in damages when it hit Louisiana and Florida in 1992, necessitating large-scale, interstate relief coordination. EMAC, an agreement eventually entered into by all 50 states, allows for states to share resources and coordinate emergency personnel in case of a crisis. The good-neighbor style law was invoked for disaster relief for Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and, more recently, Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

Governors have almost always employed EMAC in the wake of natural disasters, but the bill contains a stipulation that makes it applicable during other types of emergencies including “community disorders, insurgency, or enemy attack.” On August 19, when North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple declared a state of emergency at Standing Rock, he relied on this language to issue an EMAC request.

Standing Rock is one of the few times that EMAC has been called upon to respond to social activism. In April 2015, during Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death while in police custody, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency and sent out an EMAC request. About three hundred state troopers from Pennsylvania and another 150 from New Jersey responded. The city racked up an estimated $20 million in extra policing costs.

Since the state issuing the EMAC request is on hook for the tab, that means North Dakota taxpayers will pay for the out-of-state officers at Standing Rock. This will include wages, overtime costs, meals, lodging, and mileage reimbursement. On November 2, North Dakota officials agreed to borrow $4 million to cover escalating policing costs and extend the state’s line of credit for emergency law enforcement to $10 million. (The state was already staring down a $1 billion revenue shortfall in 2016.) Governor Jack Dalrymple said state officials have asked for contributions from the federal government, the pipeline company, “and any entity we can think of,” though the federal government has thus far declined to pitch in. North Dakota Emergency Services spokesperson Cecily Fong told the Associated Press that total state law enforcement costs for the protests had reached $10.9 million as of November 22, while Morton County had spent an additional $8 million. Meanwhile, local courts and jails have struggled to process around 575 arrests.

The increased law enforcement presence at Standing Rock has coincided with mounting concerns over police brutality. The deployment of military-grade equipment, including landmine-resistant trucks and armored personnel carriers, as well as the use of pepper spray, rubber bullets, and alleged strip searches led Standing Rock Sioux tribal chairman Dave Archambault II to ask the Justice Department to investigate civil rights abuses. “Local and state law enforcement have increasingly taken steps to militarize their presence, to intimidate participants who are lawfully expressing their views, and to escalate tensions and promote fear,” Archambault wrote in his letter.

Some of the police details that have arrived in Standing Rock are among the largest recipients of military transfers from the federal government, according to an In These Times investigation. The South Dakota Highway Patrol has received $2 million worth of military equipment since 2006. The Lake County Sheriff’s Office in Northwest Indiana obtained $1.5 million worth of military equipment over the same time period. The Pennington County Sheriff’s office in South Dakota, the Anoka County Sheriff’s office in Minnesota, and the Griffith Indiana Police Department have all received assault rifles through military equipment transfer programs as well.

Police departments answer EMAC requests on a voluntary basis. Some forces, like Minnesota’s Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department, have been deployed to North Dakota amid objections from their local communities. Others are withdrawing from the action. A phone-banking and email-writing effort led Montana’s Gallatin County Sheriff Brian Gootkin to turn his detail around before they even arrived at Standing Rock. Gootkin told Yes Magazine that people who contacted his department expressed concern that EMAC was meant to address natural disasters and catastrophic events, not for protecting a corporation’s pipeline construction. Sheriff Dave Mahoney from Wisconsin’s Dane County, who withdrew his force after one week, said he did so after talking with “a wide cross-section of the community who all share the opinion that our deputies should not be involved in this situation,” he said. “We have enough priorities here in our community to address.”

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How Did Police From All Over the Country End Up at Standing Rock?

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The Feds Just Handed the Private Prison Industry a Big Score

by AmeeCoventry444 Posted on December 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Three months after the Department of Justice announced that it would phase out its use of private prisons, the Department of Homeland Security has gone in the opposite direction. In a report finalized on Thursday, a subcommittee of the DHS’s advisory council recommended that Immigration and Customs Enforcement continue to use facilities run by private prison companies to detain undocumented immigrants.

The council, which was tasked with reviewing ICE’s use of for-profit facilities, noted concerns about the agency’s ability to oversee private detention centers as well as reports of substandard medical care in some private facilities. But it concluded that the already widespread use of privately run detention centers, combined with their lower cost made it unrealistic to seriously consider eliminating their use. ICE reports that it costs $144 per day to keep a detainee in a private detention center while it costs $184 per detainee per day in ICE facilities.

“Much could be said for a fully government-owned and government-operated detention model, if one were starting a new detention system from scratch,” the committee wrote. “But of course we are not starting anew.” ICE will review the report and implement any appropriate changes, according to a department spokeswoman.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson ordered the advisory council to undertake the two-month review in August, after the Justice Department declared that it would reduce or end its contracts with private prison companies. The DOJ announcement came on the heels of a Mother Jones investigation into a troubled Louisiana prison operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, the major private prison company that recently rebranded as CoreCivic. Private-prison stocks plunged following the announcement.

But the for-profit prison industry’s slump now appears temporary. The election of Donald Trump caused private prison stocks to soar, and CoreCivic has continued to sign lucrative contracts with both ICE and the Department of Justice. If Trump follows through on his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, it would require ICE to significantly expand its detention capacity, likely by turning to private prison companies.

According to the DHS committee’s new report, for-profit detention allows ICE to “respond to surges in migration flows” by expanding its detention capacity. “Capacity to handle such surges, when policymakers determine that detention will be part of the response, cannot reasonably be maintained solely through the use of facilities staffed and operated by federal officers,” the report stated. Last month, Johnson announced he had authorized ICE to acquire new detention space following a roughly 25 percent increase in undocumented immigrant arrests between August and October.

But the deals this fall were moving so quickly that some ICE officials worried there would be no time to ensure that the new detention spaces conformed to certain quality requirements or regulations adopted as a result of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, the Wall Street Journal reported. ICE is now pursuing a deal with CoreCivic to reopen the company’s 1,129-bed Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico as an immigration detention center, even though the Bureau of Prisons shut down the prison this year following a series of inmate deaths and repeated citations for deficient medical care.

The DHS committee’s report comes less than week after the death of a 36-year-old Guatemalan woman at the Eloy Detention Center, a CoreCivic immigrant detention facility in Arizona. Raquel Calderon de Hildago was arrested near Tucson by Border Patrol officers the day before Thanksgiving. She died on Sunday after having a series of seizures. Calderon was third person to die in ICE custody in the last two months and the 15th person since 2003 to die after being held at Eloy.

Marshall Fitz, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and member of the DHS advisory council, disputed the council’s main conclusion that ICE’s continued use of private prison is inevitable. “The review undertaken by the subcommittee points directly toward the inferiority of the private prison model from the perspective of governance and conditions,” he wrote in a footnote in the report. “Any shift away from such reliance would take years, carry significant costs, and require congressional partnership…but I disagree that these obstacles require our deference to the status quo.”

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The Feds Just Handed the Private Prison Industry a Big Score

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After a failed police crackdown, North Dakota now plans to attack activists with fines.

by EsmeralGrafton Posted on November 30, 2016

Amnesty International investigators interviewed laborers as young as 8 working on plantations that sell to Wilmar, the largest palm-oil trader. Palm oil goes into bread, cereal, chocolate, soaps — it’s in about half of everything on supermarket shelves.

Wilmar previously committed to buying palm oil only from companies that don’t burn down forest or exploit workers. Child labor is illegal in Indonesia.

When Wilmar heard about the abuses, it opened an internal investigation and set up a monitoring process.

It’s disappointing that Wilmar’s commitments haven’t put an end to labor abuses, but it’s not surprising. It’s nearly impossible to eliminate worker exploitation without addressing structural causes: mass poverty, disenfranchisement, and lack of safety nets.

Investigators talked to one boy who dropped out of school to work on a plantation at the age of 12 when his father became too ill to work. Without some kind of welfare program, that boy’s family would probably be worse off if he’d been barred from working.

The boy had wanted to become a teacher. For countries like Indonesia to get out of poverty and stop climate-catastrophic deforestation, they need to help kids like this actually become teachers. That will require actors like Wilmar, Amnesty, and the government to work together to give laborers a living wage, and take care of them when they get sick.

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After a failed police crackdown, North Dakota now plans to attack activists with fines.

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Forget the Wall. If You Want Less Illegal Immigration, Go After Employers.

by BrandyBergeron Posted on November 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Controlling illegal immigration has never seemed all that hard to me. The vast majority of those who are in the United States illegally—either by crossing the border or overstaying their visas—are here to find jobs. So if you want to reduce illegal immigration, you need to make it hard for employers to hire anyone who’s not authorized to work. But in the LA Times today, Wayne Cornelius says that’s not in the cards:

There has never been much public or congressional appetite for a harsh crackdown on employers, especially the small businesses that depend most heavily on workers in the U.S. illegally. They are pillars of their communities and campaign contributors. Besides, immigration agents have had higher enforcement priorities — tracking down immigrants who committed serious crimes or pose national security threats.

President-elect Trump has called for full implementation of an electronic employment eligibility verification system called E-Verify….E-Verify, however, is no panacea. It does not prevent immigrants who are ineligible to work from getting jobs by providing valid information pertaining to other people (borrowed documents). And as long as penalties are weak, requiring employers to use E-Verify will not significantly reduce violations.

Will Congress approve crippling fines or even prison sentences for business owners who ignore E-Verify rules? Will lawmakers direct the Justice Department to make these scofflaws a top priority? Unless and until that happens, many employers will continue to view hiring those in the U.S. illegally as a low-risk, high-reward crime. In 2014, the probability that one of the nation’s 6 million employers would be investigated for violating immigration laws was 0.03%.

I don’t personally care all that much about the level of illegal immigration. The current numbers strike me as reasonable. But obviously a lot of people do care, and most of them are Republicans. They talk tough, they build walls and fences, and they promise to hire lots of border enforcement agents. But this is all a sham. If the economic incentives continue to exist, so will illegal immigration.

The problem is that Republicans can’t come to grips with their two main constituencies. Social conservatives generally hate undocumented workers and want to deport them all. Business conservatives want no such thing. So Republicans thunder on TV that borders are borders, and by God we need to control them. Then they quietly go back to their jobs and do nothing.

The obvious way to cut down on illegal immigration has always been to go after employers. Not only does this attack the root of the problem, but it’s practically self-funding. You hire lots of ICE auditors and then pay for them by levying big fines on employers who break the law. As the problem diminishes, you collect less money but you also need fewer auditors.

E-Verify isn’t perfect. Nothing is. But it could be made good enough. And once that’s done, enforcement could be made pretty widespread and the fines could be made pretty high. If you do that, you can forget about the wall. It’s just a distraction.

Bottom line: Anyone who claims to be fiercely opposed to illegal immigration but doesn’t support strong employer sanctions is just lying to you.

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Forget the Wall. If You Want Less Illegal Immigration, Go After Employers.

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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tells Standing Rock water protectors to move on.

by WilfredoOlvera9 Posted on November 28, 2016

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon and right-wing pundit, told Fox News that President-elect Trump has asked him to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. (Trump tweeted that he is “seriously considering” Carson for the post.)

Carson has already turned down a chance to be Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services on the grounds that he is unprepared to run a federal agency. So how is HUD any different? Good question.

Carson lacks any relevant experience. HUD is charged with developing affordable and inclusive housing. Under the Obama administration, it has promoted smart-growth goals, such as linking low-income housing with mass transit.

During Carson’s unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he never proposed any policies to promote low-cost or integrated housing. Asked on Fox about his knowledge of HUD’s work, Carson pointed to his experience growing up in a city.

Trump is also reportedly considering Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino to run HUD. Under Astorino, the county has failed to comply with a 2009 settlement in which it agreed to build more affordable housing.

So Trump will nominate either someone wholly unqualified or someone who opposes affordable housing. It’s almost as if the luxury real-estate developer once sued for discriminating against black tenants doesn’t care about affordability or integration.

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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tells Standing Rock water protectors to move on.

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Here’s what Standing Rock looked like on Thanksgiving.

by DesireeDaley Posted on November 28, 2016

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon and right-wing pundit, told Fox News that President-elect Trump has asked him to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. (Trump tweeted that he is “seriously considering” Carson for the post.)

Carson has already turned down a chance to be Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services on the grounds that he is unprepared to run a federal agency. So how is HUD any different? Good question.

Carson lacks any relevant experience. HUD is charged with developing affordable and inclusive housing. Under the Obama administration, it has promoted smart-growth goals, such as linking low-income housing with mass transit.

During Carson’s unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he never proposed any policies to promote low-cost or integrated housing. Asked on Fox about his knowledge of HUD’s work, Carson pointed to his experience growing up in a city.

Trump is also reportedly considering Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino to run HUD. Under Astorino, the county has failed to comply with a 2009 settlement in which it agreed to build more affordable housing.

So Trump will nominate either someone wholly unqualified or someone who opposes affordable housing. It’s almost as if the luxury real-estate developer once sued for discriminating against black tenants doesn’t care about affordability or integration.

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Here’s what Standing Rock looked like on Thanksgiving.

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Trump Considers Petraeus for Top Job, But His Security Violations Were Worse Than Clinton’s

by CarsonCallaway Posted on November 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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After months of attacking and threatening to jail Hillary Clinton for allegedly mishandling classified information, President-elect Donald Trump has apparently decided none of that stuff really matters. Trump is meeting today with retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus to consider him for Clinton’s former job as Secretary of State. Petraeus pleaded guilty last year to sharing classified information with his mistress in a case that was more serious than the Clinton email server episode.

Petraeus admitted to passing secret information to Paula Broadwell, a former Army officer with whom he had an affair while she was writing a biography of him in 2011 and 2012. Petraeus was CIA director at the time, and he gave Broadwell eight notebooks of highly sensitive information that, according to the Washington Post, “included code words for secret intelligence programs, identities of covert officers, war strategy and deliberative discussions with the National Security Council.” The scandal broke in 2012 when Broadwell began harassing Jill Kelley, a Tampa socialite whom she may have thought was making advances on Petraeus. Kelley went to the FBI, which discovered intimate emails between Broadwell and Petraeus and uncovered his security breaches, forcing him to resign as CIA director in 2012. In a plea deal, Petraeus acknowledged that his actions had been “in all respects knowing and deliberate, and were not committed by mistake, accident or another innocent reason.” He also lied to FBI investigators, telling them he had not given secrets to Broadwell, a charge that is a felony in itself. He was eventually charged with only a misdemeanor and sentenced to two years’ probation and a $100,000 fine.

Trump often claimed during the campaign that Petraeus’ case was far less serious than Clinton’s, but FBI Director James Comey said the truth was the exact opposite. During a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in July, Comey contrasted Petraeus’ case to Clinton’s in response to Rep Elijah Cummings’ (D-Md.) question: “Do you agree with the claim that General Petraeus, and I quote, ‘Got in trouble for far less,’ end of quote? Do you agree with that statement?”

“No, it’s the reverse,” Comey replied.

Days before the hearing, Comey announced that the FBI would not bring charges against Clinton, saying there was no evidence that Clinton or her staff had intentionally mishandled or deleted the information. Petraeus’ case, however, was a clear-cut and grave violation, and Comey did not mince words. “The Petraeus case, in my mind, indicates the kind of cases that the Department of Justice is willing to prosecute,” he said. “You have obstruction of justice, intentional misconduct and a vast quantity of information.”

If Petraeus receives a job in the Trump administration, he won’t be the only former general in the new administration who committed serious security violations. According to a recent article in the New Yorker, soon-to-be National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a onetime Army general and Defense Intelligence Agency director, was investigated for improperly giving classified information to other NATO countries and “had technicians secretly install an Internet connection in his Pentagon office, even though it was forbidden.” The latter action is a major violation of security procedures for top-secret information, which is held in tightly controlled facilities that ban outside phone and Internet connections. Former NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey said on Twitter, “Honestly, other than actual espionage, I’ve never seen as serious a willful security breach.”

As a candidate, Trump professed great scorn for anyone who improperly handles classified information. Yet as a president-elect, he has changed his tune: from lock-her-up to let-them-in.

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Trump Considers Petraeus for Top Job, But His Security Violations Were Worse Than Clinton’s

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Hate Crimes Are Rising But Don’t Expect Them to be Prosecuted

by ShannanRosser3 Posted on November 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, the FBI announced there were 5,850 hate crimes in 2015—a 7 percent increase over the year before. But that total, which is based on voluntary reports of hate crimes from local and state police departments, is likely far lower than the real number. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated about 260,000 hate crimes annually in a 2013 report looking at hate crimes between 2007 and 2011. The BJS’s estimate was based on anonymous responses to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which the bureau conducts every year.

But most of those crimes are never heard by a jury. Federal prosecutors pressed forward with just 13 percent of hate crime cases referred to them between January 2010 and August 2015, according to an analysis of DOJ data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, and only 11 percent of those referrals ended in conviction. Data on hate crime prosecutions at the state level are scarce, but, in its 2013 study, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that only 4 percent of these crimes even result in an arrest.

Given the apparent extent of the problem, why do so few hate crimes end up in court?

One reason is that these crimes never get reported to law enforcement. Approximately one-third of those that do, according to the FBI, are crimes such as vandalism or destruction of property that don’t involve physical contact between the alleged offender and the victim. “These people burn crosses and run away, so you don’t know who did it,” says Michael Lieberman, who serves as legal counsel to the Washington, DC, branch of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a civil rights organization that fights anti-Semitism. In fact, he notes, the FBI’s 2015 data reflects several hundred fewer known hate crime offenders than actual incidents because officials often don’t know who committed the crime. Even the 5,500 offenders counted as “known” by the FBI have not necessarily been identified by law enforcement officials. (The FBI counts offenders as “known” when it has a piece of information, such as race or gender, that can help them eventually identify the perpetrator.)

Then there is a problem of material evidence. Many hate crimes are committed with what are known as “weapons of opportunity”—bricks and bottles, for instance, or baseball bats, says Jack Levin, a hate crimes expert at Northeastern University in Boston. So even when the victim and offender actually cross paths and violence ensues, there’s often no evidence linking the suspect to the attack. If an offender had used a gun, its shell casing could be traced.

But a more fundamental dynamic often short-circuits hate crime prosecutions. The perpetrator of a crime must be motivated by bias and that’s difficult to prove. Bias is usually established by the use of a slur or epithet during the encounter, or offensive graffiti left at the scene, Levin notes. In other instances, the suspect might leave hate propaganda at the scene or investigators might find it in their car or home or on their computer or social media presence. Membership in a hate group is also solid evidence of bias. “Without that information, it becomes very difficult to prosecute the offender,” he says.

Federal prosecutors rejected nearly 90 percent of hate crime cases recommended to them for prosecution in the more than five years covered by TRAC’s analysis, and more than half were rejected because of insufficient evidence. Some police departments in cities such as Boston, New York City, and Phoenix have designated units that investigate hate crimes around the clock. But many smaller departments throughout the country lack the resources for that kind of specialization, Lieberman from the ADL says.

Even with some evidence, prosecutors are often reluctant to file hate crime charges, as was the case early last year in North Carolina. Prosecutors filed murder charges against Craig Hicks—who allegedly killed three members of a Muslim family by shooting them each in the head in their Chapel Hill apartment in February, 2015. Hicks’ attorney maintained that the shooting was motivated by a parking dispute between Hicks and his neighbors. But the victims’ relatives have said they believe Hicks killed them because they were Muslim.

Prosecutors did not include hate crime charges against Hicks, says Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernadino, because they probably felt there was not enough evidence to prove he was biased against Muslims.

“Hicks’ Facebook page really didn’t have a lot of anti-Muslim stuff on it. It was more anti-religion in general, and anti-Christian,” Brian Levin says. Hicks had regularly harassed the victims, and the father of two of them said one of his daughters had told him she believed it was because they were Muslim. But that might not be enough to convince a jury in the absence of direct evidence of bias from Hicks himself, Brian Levin said. While Levin’s center considers the shooting a potential hate crime, it did not include it in its data because law enforcement officials have not declared it one. Jack Levin from Northeastern University agrees: A parking dispute may have catalyzed the shooting, but “it’s hard to believe that these three Muslim students were not targeted because of their religious identity.”

On the other hand, Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white man who, in June 2015, killed nine black parishioners in a storied Charleston, South Carolina, church, “left a lot of evidence that he was a white supremacist,” Brian Levin says. Roof posted photos online that showed him posing with the Confederate flag and wearing a jacket embellished with a symbol of South African apartheid. He referred to black people using the N-word in his manifesto. And survivors of the shooting said that before he opened fire, Roof announced that he was there to “shoot black people,” according to law enforcement officials. The US Department of Justice has filed federal hate crime charges against Roof, but South Carolina is one of five states that doesn’t have a hate crime statute. State prosecutors brought murder charges against Roof.

Many incidents that are recorded as hate crimes by police are not ultimately prosecuted that way, Brian Levin says. Prosecuting hate crime charges sends a symbolic message, but the charges are added to another offense, and prosecutors sometimes have to make a careful calculation as to whether they are worth bringing up at all. “There may be instances where a prosecutor—using their discretion—may determine that the additional elements of a hate crime will be too difficult to prove and might risk confusing the jury, and possibly risk the whole case,” he says. Similarly, in situations where the punishment for the base offense is already severe—as with murder—a prosecutor might decide not to pursue additional charges when a conviction would have little to no impact on the final sentence. That could also explain why North Carolina prosecutors did not pursue hate crime charges against Hicks, who will likely already be convicted of a triple murder, Brian Levin says.

In the absence of state hate crime charges, only particularly heinous crimes—like Roof’s massacre—can be prosecuted federally under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crime Prevention Act, passed by Congress in 2009. Federal officials are also investigating Hicks’ shooting as a hate crime but have yet to make a decision about charges.

Brian Levin is concerned that federal enforcement of the hate crimes act could weaken during a Trump administration, with his nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general. “I think it remains a legitimate question as to how vigorous Mr. Sessions will be in prosecuting a statute that he was one of the chief opponents of,” Levin says.

Sessions’ nomination has already been contested by civil rights groups because of a series of racist comments he reportedly made early in his career. He was also a strong opponent of the federal hate crimes act. The law extended hate crime protections to members of the LGBT community and expanded the DOJ’s ability to direct federal resources to assist local and state police departments with hate crime investigations in their jurisdictions. It also mandated that the attorney general—or a designee—approve all criminal prosecutions brought under the act.

In 2015, there was a 7 percent increase in hate crimes nationwide and a sharp, 67 percent increase in crimes against Muslims. The Southern Poverty Law Center tallied more than 700 incidents of intimidation and harassment in the week after the election, many of them in schools, and at least two recent killings of black men—one outside of Richmond, California and another in Charleston, West Virginia—are being investigated as hate crimes. Law enforcement officials in several cities have vowed to crack down on hate crimes in their jurisdictions.

Jack Levin explained why it’s important to prosecute hate crimes with the full force of the law in an interview with Mother Jones: “The perpetrator is sending a message when he commits the hate crime,” Levin said, noting that hate crimes send ripples throughout the targeted community. “We need to send the message back that we as a society will not tolerate this kind of intolerance. That we do not encourage and support the perpetrator. That we are not hate-filled people.”

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Hate Crimes Are Rising But Don’t Expect Them to be Prosecuted

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An injured Standing Rock activist could lose an arm, but her resolve remains strong

by VioletRignall80 Posted on November 23, 2016

Since graduating from Williams College this spring, 21-year-old Sophia Wilansky has devoted herself full-time to fighting for environmental justice, her friends say. In a standoff Sunday night with police in Standing Rock, N.D., she might have lost an arm for it.

Yet as doctors worked to treat her injuries Tuesday, Wilansky had no doubt about where the attention should be. “Even though she’s lying there with her arm pretty much blown off,” Wilansky’s father said outside a Minnesota hospital, “she’s focused on the fact that it’s not about her. It’s about what we’re doing to our country, what we’re doing to our Native Peoples, what we’re doing to our environment.”

Emergency workers airlifted Wilansky to Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis after she was injured during an encounter between law enforcement and anti-pipeline activists, friends and family say. News reports and social media accounts show that police confronted the activists, who call themselves “water protectors,” with an array of militarized tactics, including projectiles and a low-pressure water cannon in freezing temperatures.

The Standing Rock Medic & Healer Council said it treated 300 people after the standoff, sending 26 to the hospital. A statement issued Tuesday by the council quotes Sophia’s father, New York attorney Wayne Wilansky, describing the injuries to his daughter’s arm, which he said surgeons hope to save from amputation with a potential 20 surgeries:

A grenade exploded right as it hit Sophia in the left forearm taking most of the undersurface of her left arm with it. Both her radial and ulnar artery were completely destroyed. Her radius was shattered and a large piece of it is missing. Her medial nerve is missing a large section as well. All of the muscle and soft tissue between her elbow and wrist were blown away.

The Morton County Sheriff’s Department told the Los Angeles Times that police “didn’t deploy anything that should have caused that type of damage” and maintained that “we’re not sure how her injury was sustained.” A sheriff’s spokeswoman told the Times that medical officials first encountered Wilansky away from the scene, at a nearby casino, and suggested she might have been injured when protectors were rigging their own explosives.

Activists counter that the demonstration was peaceful, and no one at the protectors’ camp has created explosives or even has the materials to do so.

Wilansky’s father put the blame squarely on law enforcement. “The police did not do this by accident,” he said. “It was an intentional act of throwing it directly at her.” He said surgeons removed grenade shrapnel from her arm, which will be held for evidence.

Standing outside the hospital Tuesday afternoon as sloppy snow fell, Wayne Wilansky said Sophia had planned to join the thousands of people from the Standing Rock Sioux and hundreds of other tribal nations who plan to camp out through the winter in attempts to block completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Three weeks ago, he said, she set off for North Dakota with a subzero sleeping bag.

It wasn’t the first time Wilansky has put her body on the line for a cause. Her friend Alex Lundberg, who protested a pipeline with her in Vermont, told Grist that she has also stood up to a Spectra Energy pipeline in New York and the West Roxbury Pipeline in Massachusetts.

“That’s three pipelines in one region she’s thrown down hard for,” Lundberg said, “in communities she’s not that familiar with, just wanting to show up and be supportive and be there with the people resisting.”

She got involved with Standing Rock the same way, he said. “She felt the calling to go out there and stand with the people against a continued cultural genocide and to help protect the water.”

A friend in New York, Becca Berlin, told Grist that Wilansky had been looking for a ride to North Dakota for weeks. In the meantime, she participated in direct action around New York City and the East Coast, attending protests organized by groups like NYC Shut It Down — activists fighting against racial injustice and militarized policing.

“It’s really not a hobby,” Berlin said. “It’s something that she’s been doing constantly.”

Wilansky was actually due to appear in court today in West Roxbury, Mass., said climate activist Tim DeChristopher, who was arrested alongside her this summer at a pipeline protest. Instead, she was shuttling in and out of surgery.

Wilansky’s injury occurred in just the latest of many escalating standoffs over the pipeline, which the Standing Rock Sioux say endangers their sacred sites and water. The pipeline also poses questions of tribal sovereignty. In an appeal to the United Nations this September, the nation said the pipeline violates human rights and breaches treaties.

This summer, hundreds of water protectors converged in North Dakota to voice anger and anxiety about the pipeline route. Over the past few months, photos and live videos on social media have shown aggressive tactics used by police against the protectors.

According to her father, Sophia’s body also shows welts from rubber bullet shots that she had received previously.

A collection of weapons used by police against protesters at Standing Rock.REUTERS/Stephanie Keith

“It’s unbelievable that governments are violently attacking citizens who are there peacefully,” Wayne Wilansky said. “We need everyone in this country to step up and say we’re not going to do this anymore, we’re not going to kill innocent people.”

Wayne said that his daughter’s arrival at the hospital was delayed for several hours because police have blocked roads, making it difficult for travel — including by emergency vehicles — between the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and Bismarck, where Sophia was taken before being airlifted to Minnesota. On Sunday, activists said, they were trying to clear two vehicles blocking a bridge on the main road.

The Morton County Sheriff’s Department described the protectors’ actions on Sunday as aggressive. “We’re just not going to let people and protesters in large groups come in and threaten officers,” said Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier. “That’s not happening.”

But Wayne Wilansky says he holds police and elected officials responsible for his daughter’s injury. “I hold the governor of North Dakota, the police, the National Guard,” he said. “Even President Obama, who I love, said two or three weeks ago, ‘Well, we’re going to wait and see.’ There’s nothing to wait and see. These people need help. They need to diffuse the situation before people die. And people will die if the situation isn’t stopped.”

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An injured Standing Rock activist could lose an arm, but her resolve remains strong

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