Stand together to demand an END to family separation

Saturday, June 23rd, 10:00 A.M.

San Francisco War Memorial Court

335 Van Ness Avenue at Fulton

Endorsed by:

Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity

Latino Community Foundation

NAACP SF

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Donald Trump Jr.

Hey, Bungalow Bill

What did you kill

Bungalow Bill?

He went out tiger hunting with his elephant and gun

In case of accidents he always took his mom

He's the all American bullet-headed saxon mother's son.

All the children sing

Hey Bungalow Bill

What did you kill

Bungalow Bill?

Deep in the jungle where the mighty tiger lies

Bill and his elephants were taken by surprise

So Captain Marvel zapped in right between the eyes

All the children sing

Hey, Bungalow Bill

What did you kill

Bungalow Bill?

The children asked him if to kill was not a sin

Not when he looked so fierce, his mother butted in

If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him

All the children sing

Hey, Bungalow Bill

What did you kill

Bungalow Bill?

The Beatles

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Listen to 'The Daily': Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?

By Michael Barbaro, May 30, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/podcasts/the-daily/kevin-cooper-death-row.html?emc=edit_ca_20180530&nl=california-today&nlid=2181592020180530&te=1

Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via RadioPublic | Via Stitcher

The sole survivor of an attack in which four people were murdered identified the perpetrators as three white men. The police ignored suspects who fit the description and arrested a young black man instead. He is now awaiting execution.

On today's episode:

• Kevin Cooper, who has been on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California for three decades.

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Feds extend deadline for public comments on future draft

The feds initially provided only a few days for the public to submit comments regarding the future of the draft in the United States. This mirrored their process of announcing public hearings with only a few days notice. Due to pressure, they have extended the deadline for your online comments until September.

They need to hear from us!

It's time to end draft registration once and for all.
Don't expand the draft to women. End it for everyone.
No national service linked to the military--including immigration enforcement.
Until the US is invaded by a foreign power, stop pretending that the draft is about anything other than empire.
Submit your own comments online here.

As we have been reporting to you, a federal commission has been formed to address the future of draft registration in the United States and whether the draft should end or be extended.

The press release states "The Commission wants to learn why people serve and why people don't; the barriers to participation; whether modifications to the selective service system are needed; ways to increase the number of Americans in service; and more."

Public hearings are currently scheduled for the following cities. We encourage folks to attend these hearings by checking the commission's website for the actual dates and locations of these hearings (usually annouced only days before).

June 26/27, 2018: Iowa City, IA
June 28/29, 2018: Chicago, IL
July 19/20, 2018: Waco, TX
August 16/17, 2018: Memphis, TN
September 19/21, 2018: Los Angeles, CA

For more background information, read our recent post "Why is the government soliciting feedback on the draft now?"

Courage to Resist Podcast: The Future of Draft Registration in the United States

We had draft registration resister Edward Hasbrouck on the Courage to Resistpodcast this week to explain what's going on. Edward talks about his own history of going to prison for refusing to register for the draft in 1983, the background on this new federal commission, and addresses liberal arguments in favor of involuntary service. Edward explains:

When you say, "I'm not willing to be drafted", you're saying, "I'm going to make my own choices about which wars we should be fighting", and when you say, "You should submit to the draft", you're saying, "You should let the politicians decide for you."
What's happening right now is that a National Commission … has been appointed to study the question of whether draft registration should be continued, whether it should be expanded to make women, as well as men register for the draft, whether a draft itself should be started, whether there should be some other kind of Compulsory National Service enacted.
The Pentagon would say, and it's true, they don't want a draft. It's not plan A, but it's always been plan B, and it's always been the assumption that if we can't get enough volunteers, if we get in over our head, if we pick a larger fight than we can pursue, we always have that option in our back pocket that, "If not enough people volunteer, we're just going to go go to the draft, go to the benches, and dragoon enough people to fight these wars."
The first real meaningful opportunity for a national debate
about the draft in decades . . .

Courage to Resist -- Support the Troops Who Refuse to Fight!

484 Lake Park Ave. No. 41, Oakland, CA 94610

510-488-3559

www.couragetoresist.org

facebook.com/couragetoresist

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Incarceration Nation

Emergency Action Alert:
RELEASE DRAFTERS OF THE AGREEMENT TO END HOSTILITIES FROM SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
In October, 2017, the 2 year court monitoring period of the Ashker v. Governor settlement to limit solitary confinement in California expired. Since then, the four drafters of the Agreement to End Hostilities and lead hunger strike negotiators – Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, Arturo Castellanos, George Franco, and Todd Ashker, have all been removed from general population and put in solitary in Administrative Segregation Units, based on fabricated information created by staff and/or collaborating "inmate informants." In Todd Ashker's case, he is being isolated "for his own protection," although he does not ask for nor desire to be placed in isolation for this or any reason. Sitawa has since been returned to population, but can still not have visitors.
Please contact CDCr Secretary Scott Kernan and Governor Edmund G. Brown and demand CDCr:
• Immediately release back into general population any of the four lead organizers still held in solitary
• Return other Ashker class members to general population who have been placed in Ad Seg
• Stop the retaliation against all Ashker class members and offer them meaningful rehabilitation opportunities
Contact Scott Kernan. He prefers mailed letters to 1515 S Street, Sacramento 95811. If you call 916-324-7308, press 0 for the Communications office. Email matthew.westbrook@cdcr.ca.gov and cc: scott.kernan@cdcr.ca.gov
Contact Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.,  c/o State Capitol, Suite 1173, Sacramento, CA 95814; Phone: (916) 445-2841; Fax: (916) 558-3160; Email: https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov39mail/
As a result of the administrative reviews established after the second prisoner hunger strike in 2011 and the Ashker settlement of 2015, California's SHU population has decreased from 3923 people in October 2012 to 537 in January 2018.  Returning these four men and many other hunger strikers back to solitary in the form of Ad Seg represents an intentional effort to undermine the Agreement to End Hostilities and the settlement, and return to the lock 'em up mentality of the 1980's.
Sitawa writes: "What many of you on the outside may not know is the long sordid history of CDCr's ISU [Institutional Services Unit]/ IGI [Institutional Gang Investigator]/Green Wall syndicate's [organized groups of guards who act with impunity] pattern and practice, here and throughout its prison system, of retaliating, reprisals, intimidating, harassing, coercing, bad-jacketing [making false entries in prisoner files], setting prisoners up, planting evidence, fabricating and falsifying reports (i.e., state documents), excessive force upon unarmed prisoners, [and] stealing their personal property . . ."
CDCr officials are targeting the Ashker v. Governor class members to prevent them from being able to organize based on the Agreement to End Hostilities, and to obstruct their peaceful efforts to effect genuine changes - for rehabilitation, returning home, productively contributing to the improvement of their communities, and deterring recidivism.
Please help put a stop to this retaliation with impunity. Contact Kernan and Brown today:
Scott Kernan prefers mailed letters to 1515 S Street, Sacramento 95811. If you call 916-324-7308, press 0 for the Communications office. Email matthew.westbrook@cdcr.ca.gov and cc: scott.kernan@cdcr.ca.gov
Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.,  c/o State Capitol, Suite 1173, Sacramento, CA 95814; Phone: (916) 445-2841; Fax: (916) 558-3160; Email: https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov39mail/
Read statements from the reps:
Joint Statement from the 4 – Don't let CDCR reverse our Hunger Strike-won legal victory
Sitawa – Brutha Sitawa: CDCr and Soledad Prison retaliate with false reports to return me to solitary confinement
Arturo – Statement by Arturo Castellanos
Todd – We stand together so prisoners never have to go through the years of torture we did (with Open Letter to Gov. Brown, CA legislators and CDCR Secretary Kernan)

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"There Was a Crooked Prez"

By Dr. Nayvin Gordon

There was a crooked Prez, and he walked a crooked mile,

He found a crooked lawyer upon a crooked isle,

They bought a crooked election which caught a crooked mission,

And they both lived together in a little crooked prison.

April 28, 2018

Dr. Gordon is a California Family Physician who has written many articles on health and politics.

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It is so beautiful to see young people in this country rising up to demand an end to gun violence. But what is Donald Trump's response? Instead of banning assault weapons, he wants to give guns to teachers and militarize our schools. But one of the reasons for mass school shootings is precisely because our schools are already militarized. Florida shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was trained by U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) program while he was in high school.
The Armed Services Committees in Congress can stop the JROTC programs in our schools. Tell Senator McCain and Representative Thornberry, of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, to take the war machine out our schools!
Yesterday, Divest from the War Machine coalition member, Pat Elder, was featured on Democracy Now discussing his recent article about the JROTC in our schools. The JROTC teaches children how to shoot weapons. It is often taught by retired soldiers who have no background in teaching. They are allowed to teach classes that are given at least equal weight as classes taught by certified and trained teachers. We are pulling our children away from classes that expand their minds and putting them in classes that teach them how to be killing machines. The JROTC program costs our schools money. It sends equipment. But, the instructors and facilities must be constructed and paid for by the school.
The JROTC puts our children's futures at risk. Children who participate in JROTC shooting programs are exposed to lead bullets from guns. They are at an increased risk when the shooting ranges are inside. The JROTC program is designed to "put a jump start on your military career." Children are funneled into JROTC to make them compliant and to feed the military with young bodies which are prepared to be assimilated into the war machine. Instead of funneling children into the military, we should be channeling them into jobs that support peace and sustainable development.
Tell Senator McCain and Representative Thornberry to take the war machine out of our schools! The JROTC program must end immediately. The money should be directed back into classrooms that educate our children.
The Divest from the War Machine campaign is working to remove our money from the hands of companies that make a killing on killing. We must take on the systems that keep fueling war, death, and destruction around the globe. AND, we must take on the systems that are creating an endless cycle of children who are being indoctrinated at vulnerable ages to become the next killing machine. Don't forget to post this message on Facebook and Twitter.
Onward in divestment,
Ann, Ariel, Brienne, Jodie, Kelly, Kirsten, Mark, Medea, Nancy, Natasha, Paki, Sarah, Sophia and Tighe
P.S. Do you want to do more? Start a campaign to get the JROTC out of your school district or state. Email divest@codepink.org and we'll get you started!

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October 20-21, 2018

Cindy Sheehan and the Women's March on the Pentagon

A movement not just a protest

By Whitney Webb
WASHINGTON—In the last few years, arguably the most visible and well-publicized march on the U.S. capital has been the "Women's March," a movement aimed at advocating for legislation and policies promoting women's rights as well as a protest against the misogynistic actions and statements of high-profile U.S. politicians. The second Women's March, which took place this past year, attracted over a million protesters nationwide, with 500,000 estimated to have participated in Los Angeles alone.
However, absent from this women's movement has been a public antiwar voice, as its stated goal of "ending violence" does not include violence produced by the state. The absence of this voice seemed both odd and troubling to legendary peace activist Cindy Sheehan, whose iconic protest against the invasion and occupation of Iraq made her a household name for many.
Sheehan was taken aback by how some prominent organizers of this year's Women's March were unwilling to express antiwar positions and argued for excluding the issue of peace entirely from the event and movement as a whole. In an interview with MintPress, Sheehan recounted how a prominent leader of the march had told her, "I appreciate that war is your issue Cindy, but the Women's March will never address the war issue as long as women aren't free."
War is indeed Sheehan's issue and she has been fighting against the U.S.' penchant for war for nearly 13 years. After her son Casey was killed in action while serving in Iraq in 2004, Sheehan drew international media attention for her extended protest in front of the Bush residence in Crawford, Texas, which later served as the launching point for many protests against U.S. military action in Iraq.
Sheehan rejected the notion that women could be "free" without addressing war and empire. She countered the dismissive comment of the march organizer by stating that divorcing peace activism from women's issues "ignored the voices of the women of the world who are being bombed and oppressed by U.S. military occupation."
Indeed, women are directly impacted by war—whether through displacement, the destruction of their homes, kidnapping, or torture. Women also suffer uniquely and differently from men in war as armed conflicts often result in an increase in sexual violence against women.
For example, of the estimated half-a-million civilians killed in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, many of them were women and children. In the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the number of female casualties has been rising on average over 20 percent every year since 2015. In 2014 alone when Israel attacked Gaza in "Operation Protective Edge," Israeli forces, which receives $10 million in U.S. military aid every day, killed over two thousand Palestinians—half of them were women and children. Many of the casualties were pregnant women, who had been deliberately targeted.
Given the Women's March's apparent rejection of peace activism in its official platform, Sheehan was inspired to organize another Women's March that would address what many women's rights advocates, including Sheehan, believe to be an issue central to promoting women's rights.
Dubbed the "Women's March on the Pentagon," the event is scheduled to take place on October 21—the same date as an iconic antiwar march of the Vietnam era—with a mission aimed at countering the "bipartisan war machine." Though men, women and children are encouraged to attend, the march seeks to highlight women's issues as they relate to the disastrous consequences of war.
The effort of women in confronting the "war machine" will be highlighted at the event, as Sheehan remarked that "women have always tried to confront the war-makers," as the mothers, daughters, sisters and wives of the men and women in the military, as well as those innocent civilians killed in the U.S.' foreign wars. As a result, the push for change needs to come from women, according to Sheehan, because "we [women] are the only ones that can affect [the situation] in a positive way." All that's missing is an organized, antiwar women's movement.
Sheehan noted the march will seek to highlight the direct relationship between peace activism and women's rights, since "no woman is free until all women are free" and such "freedom also includes the freedom from U.S. imperial plunder, murder and aggression"that is part of the daily lives of women living both within and beyond the United States. Raising awareness of how the military-industrial complex negatively affects women everywhere is key, says Sheehan, as "unless there is a sense of international solidarity and a broader base for feminism, then there aren't going to be any solutions to any problems, [certainly not] if we don't stop giving trillions of dollars to the Pentagon."
Sheehan also urged that, even though U.S. military adventurism has long been an issue and the subject of protests, a march to confront the military-industrial complex is more important now than ever: "I'm not alarmist by nature but I feel like the threat of nuclear annihilation is much closer than it has been for a long time," adding that, despite the assertion of some in the current administration and U.S. military, "there is no such thing as 'limited' nuclear war." This makes "the need to get out in massive numbers" and march against this more imperative than ever.
Sheehan also noted that Trump's presidency has helped to make the Pentagon's influence on U.S. politics more obvious by bringing it to the forefront: "Even though militarism had been under wraps [under previous presidents], Trump has made very obvious the fact that he has given control of foreign policy to the 'generals.'"
Indeed, as MintPress has reported on several occasions, the Pentagon—beginning in March of last year—has been given the freedom to "engage the enemy" at will, without the oversight of the executive branch or Congress. As a result, the deaths of innocent civilians abroad as a consequence of U.S. military action has spiked. While opposing Trump is not the focus of the march, Sheehan opined that Trump's war-powers giveaway to the Pentagon, as well as his unpopularity, have helped to spark widespread interest in the event.

Different wings of the same warbird

Sheehan has rejected accusations that the march is partisan, as it is, by nature, focused on confronting the bipartisan nature of the military-industrial complex. She told MintPress that she has recently come under pressure owing to the march's proximity to the 2018 midterm elections—as some have ironically accused the march's bipartisan focus as "trying to harm the chances of the Democrats" in the ensuing electoral contest.
In response, Sheehan stated that:
"Democrats and Republicans are different wings of the same warbird. We are protesting militarism and imperialism. The march is nonpartisan in nature because both parties are equally complicit. We have to end wars for the planet and for the future. I could really care less who wins in November."
She also noted that even when the Democrats were in power under Obama, nothing was done to change the government's militarism nor to address the host of issues that events like the Women's March have claimed to champion.
"We just got finished with eight years of a Democratic regime," Sheehan told MintPress. "For two of those years, they had complete control of Congress and the presidency and a [filibuster-proof] majority in the Senate and they did nothing" productive except to help "expand the war machine." She also emphasized that this march is in no way a "get out the vote" march for any political party.
Even though planning began less than a month ago, support has been pouring in for the march since it was first announced on Sheehan's website, Cindy Sheehan Soapbox. Encouraged by the amount of interest already received, Sheehan is busy working with activists to organize the events and will be taking her first organizing trip to the east coast in April of this year.
In addition, those who are unable to travel to Washington are encouraged to participate in any number of solidarity protests that will be planned to take place around the world or to plan and attend rallies in front of U.S. embassies, military installations, and the corporate headquarters of war profiteers.
Early endorsers of the event include journalists Abby Martin, Mnar Muhawesh and Margaret Kimberley; Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly; FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley; and U.S. politicians like former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Activist groups that have pledged their support include CodePink, United National Antiwar Coalition, Answer Coalition, Women's EcoPeace and World Beyond War.
Though October is eight months away, Sheehan has high hopes for the march. More than anything else, though, she hopes that the event will give birth to a "real revolutionary women's movement that recognizes the emancipation and liberation of all peoples—and that means [freeing] all people from war and empire, which is the biggest crime against humanity and against this planet." By building "a movement and not just a protest," the event's impact will not only be long-lasting, but grow into a force that could meaningfully challenge the U.S. military-industrial complex that threatens us all. God knows the world needs it.
For those eager to help the march, you can help spread the word through social media by joining the march's Facebook page or following the march'sTwitter account, as well as by word of mouth. In addition, supporting independent media outlets—such as MintPress, which will be reporting on the march—can help keep you and others informed as October approaches.
Whitney Webb is a staff writer forMintPress News who has written for several news organizations in both English and Spanish; her stories have been featured on ZeroHedge, theAnti-Media, and21st Century Wire among others. She currently lives in Southern Chile.
—MPN News, February 20, 2018
https://www.mintpressnews.com/cindy-sheehan-and-the-womens-march-on-the-pentagon-a-movement-not-just-a-protest/237835/

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Major George Tillery
MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION
SEX FOR LIES AND
MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY
April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony.
These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors.

Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony
For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault. Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence. The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes. Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters.

Homicide detectives and prosecutors threatened Claitt with a false unrelated murder charge, and induced him to lie with promises of little or no jail time on over twenty pending felonies, and being released from jail despite a parole violation. In addition, homicide detectives arranged for Claitt, while in custody, to have private sexual liaisons with his girlfriends in police interview rooms.
In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies". In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery.org.
Without the coerced and false testimony of Claitt there was no evidence against Major Tillery. There were no ballistics or any other physical evidence linking him to the shootings. The surviving victim's statement naming others as the shooters was not allowed into evidence.
The trial took place in May 1985 during the last days of the siege and firebombing of the MOVE family Osage Avenue home in Philadelphia that killed 13 Black people, including 5 children. The prosecution claimed that Major Tillery was part of an organized crime group, and falsely described it as run by the Nation of Islam. This prejudiced and inflamed the majority white jury against Tillery, to make up for the absence of any evidence that Tillery was involved in the shootings.
This was a frame-up conviction from top to bottom. Claitt was the sole or primary witness in five other murder cases in the early 1980s. Coercing and inducing jailhouse informants to falsely testify is a standard routine in criminal prosecutions. It goes hand in hand with prosecutors suppressing favorable evidence from the defense.
Major Tillery has filed a petition based on his actual innocence to the Philadelphia District Attorney's Larry Krasner's Conviction Review Unit. A full review and investigation should lead to reversal of Major Tillery's conviction. He also asks that the DA's office to release the full police and prosecution files on his case under the new "open files" policy. In the meantime, Major Tillery continues his own investigation. He needs your support.
Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years
The Pennsylvania courts have rejected three rounds of appeals challenging Major Tillery's conviction based on his innocence, the prosecution's intentional presentation of false evidence against him and his trial attorney's conflict of interest. On June 15, 2016 Major Tillery filed a new post-conviction petition based on the same evidence now in the petition to the District Attorney's Conviction Review Unit. Despite the written and video-taped statements from Emanuel Claitt that that his testimony against Major Tillery was a lie and the result of police and prosecutorial misconduct, Judge Leon Tucker dismissed Major Tillery's petition as "untimely" without even holding a hearing. Major Tillery appealed that dismissal and the appeal is pending in the Superior Court.
During the decades of imprisonment Tillery has advocated for other prisoners challenging solitary confinement, lack of medical and mental health care and the inhumane conditions of imprisonment. In 1990, he won the lawsuit, Tillery v. Owens, that forced the PA Department of Corrections (DOC) to end double celling (4 men to a small cell) at SCI Pittsburgh, which later resulted in the closing and then "renovation" of that prison.
Three years ago Major Tillery stood up for political prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanded prison Superintendent John Kerestes get Mumia to a hospital because "Mumia is dying." For defending Mumia and advocating for medical treatment for himself and others, prison officials retaliated. Tillery was shipped out of SCI Mahanoy, where Mumia was also held, to maximum security SCI Frackville and then set-up for a prison violation and a disciplinary penalty of months in solitary confinement. See, Messing with Major by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Major Tillery's federal lawsuit against the DOC for that retaliation is being litigated. Major Tillery continues as an advocate for all prisoners. He is fighting to get the DOC to establish a program for elderly prisoners.
Major Tillery Needs Your Help:
Well-known criminal defense attorney Stephen Patrizio represents Major pro bonoin challenging his conviction. More investigation is underway. We can't count on the district attorney's office to make the findings of misconduct against the police detectives and prosecutors who framed Major without continuing to dig up the evidence.
Major Tillery is now 67 years old. He's done hard time, imprisoned for almost 35 years, some 20 years in solitary confinement in max prisons for a crime he did not commit. He recently won hepatitis C treatment, denied to him for a decade by the DOC. He has severe liver problems as well as arthritis and rheumatism, back problems, and a continuing itchy skin rash. Within the past couple of weeks he was diagnosed with an extremely high heartbeat and is getting treatment.
Major Tillery does not want to die in prison. He and his family, daughters, sons and grandchildren are fighting to get him home. The newly filed petition for Conviction Review to the Philadelphia District Attorney's office lays out the evidence Major Tillery has uncovered, evidence suppressed by the prosecution through all these years he has been imprisoned and brought legal challenges into court. It is time for the District Attorney's to act on the fact that Major Tillery is innocent and was framed by police detectives and prosecutors who manufactured the evidence to convict him. Major Tillery's conviction should be vacated and he should be freed.

Major Tillery and family

HOW YOU CAN HELP
Financial Support—Tillery's investigation is ongoing. He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom.
Go to JPay.com;
code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC

Tell Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner:
The Conviction Review Unit should investigate Major Tillery's case. He is innocent. The only evidence at trial was from lying jail house informants who now admit it was false.
Call: 215-686-8000 or
Email: justice@phila.gov

Write to:
Major Tillery AM 9786
SCI Frackville
1111 Altamont Blvd.
Frackville, PA 17931
For More Information, Go To: JusticeForMajorTillery.org
Call/Write:
Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009, Kamilah29@yahoo.com
Rachel Wolkenstein (917) 689-4009, RachelWolkenstein@gmail.com

Obtain Updates: www.justice4majortillery.info

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Free Leonard Peltier!

On my 43rd year in prison I yearn to hug my grandchildren.

By Leonard Peltier

Art by Leonard Peltier

Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman I
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Donations can be made on Leonard's behalf to the ILPD national office, 116 W. Osborne Ave, Tampa, FL 33603

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Reality's trial
is postponed
until October 15th.

That's 500 Days in Jail,
Without Bail!

Whistleblower Reality Winner's trial has (again) been postponed.
Her new trial date is October 15, 2018, based on the new official proceedings schedule (fifth version). She will have spent 500 days jailed without bail by then. Today is day #301.
And her trial may likely be pushed back even further into the Spring of 2019.

We urge you to remain informed and engaged with our campaign until she is free!

"Why We Should All Look Closer At Whistle Blower,
Reality Winner's Case"
One supporter's excellent report
on the details of Winner's imprisonment

~Check out these highlights & then go read the full article here~
"Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Winner is also not allowed to change from her orange jumpsuit for her court dates, even though she is "innocent until proven guilty." Not only that, but during any court proceedings, only her wrists are unshackled, her ankles stay. And a US Marshal sits in front of her, face to face, during the proceedings. Winner is not allowed to turn around and look into the courtroom at all . . .
Upon checking the inmate registry, it starts to become clear how hush hush the government wants this case against Winner to be. Whether pre-whistleblowing, or in her orange jumpsuit, photos of Winner have surfaced on the web. That's why it was so interesting that there's no photo of her next to her name on the inmate registry . . .
For the past hundred years, the Espionage Act has been debated and amended, and used to charge whistleblowers that are seeking to help the country they love, not harm it. Sometimes we have to learn when past amendments no longer do anything to justify the treatment of an American truth teller as a political prisoner. The act is outdated and amending it needs to be seriously looked at, or else we need to develop laws that protect our whistleblowers.
The Espionage Act is widely agreed by many experts to be unconstitutionally vague and a violation of the First Amendment of Free Speech. Even though a Supreme Court had ruled that the Espionage Act does not infringe upon the 1st Amendment back in 1919, it's constitutionality has been back and forth in court ever sense.

Because of being charged under the Espionage Act, Winner's defense's hands are tied. No one is allowed to mention the classified document, even though the public already knows that the information in it is true, that Russia hacked into our election support companies."
Want to take action in support of Reality?

Step up to defend our whistleblower of conscience ► DONATE NOW

FRIENDS OF REALITY WINNER ~ PATRIOT & ALLEGED WHISTLEBLOWER
c/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610 ~ 510-488-3559

Standwithreality.org

@standbyreality (Twitter)

Friends of Reality Winner (Facebook)

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Working people are helping to feed the poor hungry corporations!

Charity for the Wealthy!

GOP Tax Plan Would Give 15 of America's Largest Corporations a $236B Tax Cut: Report

By Jake Johnson, December 18, 2017

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/12/18/gop-tax-plan-would-give-15-americas-largest-corporations-236b-tax-cut-report

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1) Shunned by Italy, Migrants at Sea Arrive in Spain
By Raphael Minder, June 17, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/world/europe/spain-migrant-ship-italy.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront
Spanish medical staff carried out preliminary health checks on the migrants at Valencia's port.CreditAlberto Saiz/Associated Press

MADRID — More than 600 migrants disembarked from three ships on Sunday in the port of Valencia, Spain, more than a week after they had been rescued at sea only to be turned away by Italy and Malta.
Arriving separately, the Aquarius, a rescue ship, and two Italian Navy vessels reached Valencia carrying a total of 630 migrants — including pregnant women and children — that the Aquarius had originally picked up from six rubber dinghies in the Mediterranean Sea off Libya.
After their exhausting journey, migrants shouted with joy as their ships entered Valencia's port. Some disembarked singing.

The fate of the Aquarius has underlined the deep divisions in Europe over how to handle an influx of migrants mostly from the Middle East and Africa.

The Aquarius is operated by two European humanitarian groups, SOS Méditerranée and Doctors Without Borders. David Noguera, the president of the Spanish branch of Doctors Without Borders, said on Sunday that the migrants had completed a journey that was "too long and generates contradictory feelings."
He added, "The blockade of European ports sets a very negative precedent."
The landing in Spain opens a new chapter in a saga that began last Sunday, when Italy's new populist government followed through on anti-immigration campaign promises by refusing to let the Aquarius dock at an Italian port.

Italy's interior minister and the leader of the anti-immigrant League, Matteo Salvini, had argued that "an army of fake refugees" had long exploited what he called the country's lax rules.
That left the ship, which at the time was overburdened with the rescued migrants, stranded at sea in dangerous conditions.

The migrants will be granted a special humanitarian permit to stay in Spain for 45 days while the authorities review their cases and give them medical attention. The Spanish government said it would review all of the 630 migrants' cases to decide whether to grant them asylum. Those who do not fulfill the criteria would face deportation.
Italy's decision to bar the migrants drew a furious reaction from humanitarian groups and other European countries. Spain brought an end to the standoff when its new Socialist government offered to let the migrants land there instead.
During the standoff, Italy allowed emergency services to board the Aquarius to check on the migrants, who were crammed on board. The Italian government also sent two navy ships to escort the Aquarius to Spain and to help transport the migrants to reduce overcrowding.
Mr. Salvini has cast his government's turning away of the Aquarius as a political victory. His party campaigned on promises to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants and to prevent new arrivals from landing on Italian shores.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain said his government's decision to let the refugees land was an "obligation to avoid a human catastrophe." Mr. Salvini responded acerbically to the Spanish decision. He welcomed the "good heart" of Mr. Sánchez's government and urged him to "also use his generosity in coming weeks" to welcome more migrants, given that Spain has received far fewer than Italy.
Even as the Aquarius migrants reached safety in Valencia after their week at sea, others faced a similar ordeal.

Mr. Salvini warned on his Facebook page on Saturday that "two other ships with the flag of Netherlands — Lifeline and Seefuchs — have arrived off the coast of Libya, waiting for their load of human beings abandoned by the smugglers."

He said Italy would block those other rescue ships, too, writing: "These gentlemen know that Italy no longer wants to be complicit in the business of illegal immigration, and therefore will have to look for other ports (not Italian) where to go."
On Sunday morning, Spanish medical staff boarded the Dattilo to carry out preliminary health checks when the Italian Navy ship reached its assigned dock at Valencia's port, shortly before 7 a.m. local time. Spanish police officers began registering the first migrants once they were allowed to disembark. The Orione, another Italian Navy vessel, was the last to reach Valencia, more than six hours after the Dattilo.
The first migrant who completed the registration process was a 29-year-old man from Sudan, according to Spanish news reports. Over 2,000 people helped receive the migrants in Valencia, including Red Cross workers and interpreters.
Some of the migrants are expected to be transferred to France, after the government of President Emmanuel Macron announced that passengers from the Aquarius who wished to resettle in his country would be welcomed.
Aquarius's arrival coincided with the rescue of almost 1,000 migrants off the southern coast of Spain over the weekend. The migrants were picked up by the country's maritime rescue services as they were trying to cross the waters separating Morocco from Spain in dozens of dinghies.
"Spain faces an avalanche of migrants because of the call effect," the headline on the front page of ABC, a Spanish right-wing newspaper, read on Sunday. The newspaper said that "almost 1,000 illegals" had reached southern Andalusia, calling it the largest influx of migrants since 2014.
According to ABC, the message sent by the Socialist government's humanitarian gesture could be "used by the mafias that traffic human beings to increase their activity, because it allows them to make their clients believe that the entrance to Spanish territory — and hence that of Europe — will be easier from now."

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2) A Legal Resident, an Arrest by ICE and Father's Day in Jail
By Sarah Mervosh, June 17, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/us/legal-resident-arrested.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Jose Luis Garcia, 62, with his granddaughter Marley. Mr. Garcia, who came from Mexico and is a legal resident of the United States, was arrested by immigration officials because of a misdemeanor conviction from nearly 20 years ago, his lawyer and family said.

Jose Luis Garcia was watering his lawn and drinking his morning coffee outside his home in Southern California last Sunday when federal immigration authorities showed up.
Mr. Garcia — a 62-year-old Mexican immigrant who has been a legal resident since the 1980s, according to his family — shouted for help.
He spilled his coffee on the sidewalk as agents arrested him, said his daughter Natalie Garcia, who ran outside and saw her father handcuffed. She said the authorities told her they had a warrant for his arrest related to a misdemeanor domestic violence charge that was resolved nearly two decades ago.
"They are kidnapping people from their home, starting with my father, who has the legal status," said Ms. Garcia, 32.

A week later, Mr. Garcia was still being held by immigration officials, and his family was preparing to spend Father's Day without him.
Mr. Garcia and his family are among those who have been swept up in the Trump administration's immigration policy, which cracks down not only on illegal immigrants but also on legal residents. The administration makes it a priority to remove those who have pending criminal charges or any convictions in their past.
United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 162 people during a three-day roundup in the Los Angeles area last week. In a news release, the agency emphasized that the operation targeted immigrants who posed a safety risk, such as one Mexican who was a known gang member and had been convicted of rape.
But Mr. Garcia's case appears to show just how sweeping ICE can be in making arrests regardless of an immigrant's legal status or how long ago their criminal case was resolved. An agency spokeswoman said ICE did not exempt any class of "removable aliens" from potential enforcement as it seeks to uphold immigration law and protect public safety.
Mackenzie W. Mackins, an immigration lawyer representing Mr. Garcia, said it was a waste of taxpayer money to target her client.

"This is just an example of them going into our communities on a Sunday morning and picking people up who aren't a danger or a threat or a flight risk," she said.
But that is the new reality under the Trump administration, she said, adding, "Everyone is an enforcement priority."
Mr. Garcia was 13 when he came to the United States, traveling from Mexico with his teenage brother, his daughter said. From then on, "he worked diligently to achieve the American dream," she said.
He picked fruit in fields in Northern California, tried to make it as an amateur boxer and worked as a truck driver. But he has spent most of his career working as a machine operator at a factory, she said.
Her father received his green card and became a permanent legal resident in 1988, Ms. Garcia said.
In 2001, Mr. Garcia was convicted of a misdemeanor stemming from a dispute with his wife, according to his lawyer and his family. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Superior Court said he was sentenced to 25 days in jail and three years of probation. Ms. Garcia said that her father completed probation.
It was a domestic dispute they settled years ago, and "they are still married to this day," Ms. Garcia said.
A spokeswoman for ICE said in a statement that Mr. Garcia was arrested because he "has past criminal convictions that make him amenable to removal from the United States."

The spokeswoman would not specify the convictions, citing privacy rules. Ms. Garcia said she was not aware of other convictions in her father's past.
Today, she said, he is a husband, a father to his five adult children and a "jolly grandpa" to his nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Ms. Garcia, a single mother who works full time in public relations, said her father is helping to raise her 6-year-old daughter, Marley, who calls him Dad. Ms. Garcia often calls upon her father to pick up Marley from school or to help cook dinner.
The family had planned to celebrate Father's Day with a barbecue, and Ms. Garcia had gifts already picked out.
Marley planned to give him a photo of the two of them, with the words "Best Dad!" in a heart. Ms. Garcia said she bought her father what she gives him for every occasion: clothing with the logos of his favorite teams, the Los Angeles Lakers and the University of Southern California Trojans.
Instead, Mr. Garcia will spend Father's Day at the Theo Lacy Facility, a maximum-security jail complex in Orange, Calif. His first court appearance is scheduled for June 29.
"It's killing me," Ms. Garcia said. "I'm a daddy's girl. I miss him so much."

Jack Begg contributed research.

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3) Separated at the Border From Their Parents: In Six Weeks, 1,995 Children
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis, June 15, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/politics/trump-immigration-separation-border.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer
Keilyn Enamorada Matute, from Honduras, with her 4-year old son, this year as they surrender themselves to Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to the United States.CreditLynsey Addario for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said on Friday that it had separated 1,995 children from parents facing criminal prosecution for unlawfully crossing the border over a six-week period that ended last month, as President Trump sought to shift blame for the widely criticized practice that has become the signature policy of his aggressive immigration agenda.
From April 19 to May 31, the children were separated from 1,940 adults, according to a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke during a conference call with reporters that had been described as an effort to correct the record about immigrant families being split up at the border.
Administration officials insisted on anonymity to explain the president's policy and deny many of the damaging stories that have appeared about it in recent days. That included an anecdote about a 4-month-old taken away from her mother by immigration authorities as the baby was breast-feeding, which one official said the department had tried unsuccessfully to verify.

"I hate the children being taken away," Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday morning in front of the White House. "The Democrats have to change their law — that's their law."

A short time later, he wrote on Twitter, "The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda."
But Mr. Trump was misrepresenting his own policy. There is no law that says children must be taken from their parents if they cross the border unlawfully, and previous administrations have made exceptions for those traveling with minor children when prosecuting immigrants for illegal entry. A "zero tolerance" policy created by the president in April and put into effect last month by the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, allows no such exceptions, Mr. Trump's advisers say.
The president's efforts to deflect blame for the practice reflected the degree to which it has become politically unpopular, with Democrats, civil rights and immigrant advocacy groups and religious leaders condemning it as inhumane. Republicans have also begun to express unease about the practice. Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, said on Thursday that he was not comfortable with it, and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio tweeted on Friday: "Quit separating families. It's that simple."
The number released on Friday suggests that thousands of children have been taken from their parents at the border since late last year. The New York Times reported in April that about 700 children had been separated from their parents as they were processed at stations on the southwest border, including more than 100 under the age of 4. As the number of children in its custody grows beyond the capacity of existing detention centers, the Trump administration reportedly plans to erect a tent city in Tornillo, Tex., to house them.
The homeland security official said that the administration had drawn a "bright line" against taking babies from their parents because the government was unable to appropriately care for children that young, but could not immediately provide information about the age cutoff below which they would decline to take a child.

The official also denied that department personnel were using false pretenses to take away children, such as saying that they were going to bathe. But lawyers and members of Congress who have spoken with migrants separated from their children in recent days have reported hearing otherwise.
Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, who recently visited 174 women apprehended at the border and being held in a federal prison facility in SeaTac, said some of them reported having been told that they needed to briefly leave their children to be photographed or see a judge, only to return and find the children had been taken away.
"They were forced to leave their children in this room, and then when they came back, the children were gone, and not a single one of them was able to say goodbye," Ms. Jayapal said in an interview on Friday. One woman, she said, told her that a border agent had said she and the other detainees "should let all their friends back home know that this is what would happen if they tried to come into the United States illegally."
Even as they defended the tactics, administration officials argued on Friday that they would prefer not to have to use them, and called on Congress to support legislation to change immigration laws so they would no longer be necessary.
At one point, the official complained that Joe Scarborough of MSNBC had been disrespectful for having said during a broadcast that the tactics being employed to separate children from their parents unwittingly were "just like the Nazis," calling the comparison "disgusting." Without naming Mr. Scarborough, he demanded an apology.

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4) Why Aren't More Men Working?
By N. Gregory Mankiw, June 15, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/business/men-unemployment-jobs.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=13&pgtype=sectionfront
With unemployment at 3.8 percent, its lowest level in many years, the labor market seems healthy.
But that number hides a perplexing anomaly: The percentage of men who are neither working nor looking for work has risen substantially over the past several decades.
The issue, in economist's jargon, is labor force participation. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys households, every adult is put into one of three categories. Those who have a job are employed. Those who are not working but are searching for a job are unemployed. Those who are neither working nor looking for work are counted as out of the labor force.
This last group is ignored when calculating the unemployment rate. The presumption is that if a person without a job isn't looking for one, then he or she doesn't want one, and the joblessness is not a problem. But is that really accurate?
The data show some striking changes over time. Among women, the share out of the labor force has fallen from 66 percent in 1950 to 43 percent today. That is not surprising in light of changing social norms and the greater career opportunities now open to women.

Men, however, exhibit the opposite long-term trend. In 1950, 14 percent of men were out of the labor force. Today, that figure stands at 31 percent.
Some of this change is easy to explain. People now spend more years in school, delaying their start of work. In addition, as life expectancy rises, people have longer retirements. A man retiring at age 65 in 1950 could expect to live another 13 years. Today, a man retiring at that age has an average retirement of 18 years.
Yet schooling and retirement explain only part of what has occurred. Consider prime-age men, those from the ages of 25 to 54. These men are generally well past their schooling and well before their retirement. Yet this group has also been exiting the labor force.
In 1950, only 4 percent of prime-age men were not working or looking for work. Today, that figure is 11 percent.

Why has that number nearly tripled?
One likely hypothesis, discussed in a recent paper by the economists Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa S. Kearney, is that the rise in nonparticipation is related to declining opportunities for those with low levels of education.

Economists who study rising inequality, like my Harvard colleagues Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, attribute a large share of it to skill-biased technological change — the tendency for advances in technology to enhance the productivity and wages of workers who have certain skills while reducing the demand for those who don't. Unskilled workers are left with the choice of accepting lower wages or leaving the labor force. This hypothesis is consistent with the fact that labor force participation has fallen more for workers with lower levels of educational attainment.
Compounding these trends is international trade, which can have much the same effects as technology. Whether an American manufacturing worker is replaced by a robot or a Chinese worker, the result is the same: job displacement. (The benefit to consumers — lower prices — is the same, too.) If the jobs that remain available are much less attractive than the one a worker just lost, he may give up looking.
One might wonder how these less educated, prime-age men support themselves after leaving the labor force. The social safety net plays a role. In a study for the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, Scott Winship reports that "75 percent of inactive prime-age men are in a household that received some form of government transfer payment." Mr. Winship believes that government disability benefits in particular are one reason for the lack of interest in work.
Moreover, the social safety net extends beyond government aid. For many young adults, living with their parents is a viable option, even if not an attractive one for all participants. The recent court case brought by a couple to evict their 30-year-old son from the family home is just one facet of a broader social trend.
For many non-workers, being out of the labor force is intermittent rather than permanent. In his recent Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, John Coglianese documented the rise of what he calls "in-and-outs" — prime-age men who temporarily leave the labor force. While not working, these men live off their savings or the income of their spouse or cohabiting partner.
It is an open question how policymakers should respond, or whether they should at all. The decision to look for work is a personal one, and in a free society people will naturally make different choices. Yet it is troubling that rising nonparticipation is most pronounced for those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

One step in the right direction would be to expand opportunity by increasing educational attainment and skills training. Doing so would help expand opportunity, as well as address many other problems facing the economy. But that is easier said than done.
Spending more on education might help, but is a tough political sell. And improving the educational system could require not just more money, but fundamental reforms that are hotly contested by the various stakeholders.
The data on labor force participation show that the economy is changing in profound and disquieting ways. The literature on this phenomenon is growing but has yet to yield any easy answers.

N. Gregory Mankiw is the Robert M. Beren professor of economics at Harvard University

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5) Test the DNA of Kevin Cooper, Says Kim Kardashian West to Jerry Brown
By Narda Zacchino, June 16, 2018
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/kim-kardashian-west-to-jerry-brown-test-the-dna-of-kevin-cooper/
Prison guards walk down a corridor in the Adjustment Center at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif., where Kevin Cooper is detained. (Ben Margot/AP)

Kim Kardashian West, coming off her recent success in getting President Trump to pardon a grandmother serving a life sentence, has taken to Twitter to ask California Gov. Jerry Brown to give San Quentin death row inmate Kevin Cooper the DNA tests he has been denied, tests that could prove his innocence.
Cooper has been imprisoned for 34 years for a savage crime he insists he did not commit—the 1983 slaughter of chiropractors and Arabian horse breeders Doug and Peggy Ryen, both 47, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes. Christopher was a friend of Joshua Ryen, 8, who was attacked and left for dead.
Though Cooper has lost all his appeals, in 2009 five judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals asserted he was framed by the San Bernardino, Calif., Sheriff's Department. The judges were joined by six colleagues in asking for a hearing to prove his innocence. Cooper's attorneys continue to gather new evidence that he did not commit the crime.
What separates execution and exoneration in the case are modern DNA tests that Cooper's attorneys claim could prove he was framed. They are being fought by the San Bernardino district attorney's office and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who say enough DNA testing has been done and no more is needed. The tests could be ordered by the governor, but he has made no public move to do so. Brown has been sitting on Cooper's clemency petition, which details numerous examples of law enforcement misconduct in the case, for almost two and a half years.
Following a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof about Cooper, California Sens. Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein urged Brown to let the tests proceed. The tests could clear Cooper or confirm his guilt and could possibly identify the actual killers, initially described by the sole eyewitness, Josh Ryen, as three white assailants.
Cooper's attorneys have focused attention for years on a white man who was implicated in the murders by his girlfriend, who called deputies after he came home the night of the murders wearing bloody coveralls, which she handed over to a deputy sheriff. She told the deputy her boyfriend was a convicted murderer of a 17-year-old girl and he had been out of prison less than a year. She also reported that the tan T-shirt he was wearing the day of the murders exactly matched the bloody shirt that was found and his missing hatchet resembled the bloody hatchet found near the crime scene.
No one from homicide ever called her, as she requested, or picked up the coveralls from the deputy. They were never tested for the victims' blood, and they were thrown in a dumpster on orders of a supervisor six months later, at the start of Cooper's preliminary hearing. Eleven months after the murders, when the girlfriend called the sheriff's department to find out why she had never been interviewed, the boyfriend was interviewed by two homicide detectives, denied owning the coveralls, and said his girlfriend thought the killers had stopped by her house during their escape and dropped off the coveralls, which were left in his bedroom closet. When asked if he would take a polygraph test, he said yes; however, the detectives changed their minds and said it would not be necessary.
Kevin Cooper is a Truthdig contributor. His clemency petition and other documents in his case can be found here.
Journalist Narda Zacchino has been investigating this case for over a year. Her next story on Kevin Cooper's bid for exoneration will appear on Truthdig next week.

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6) The Racist Trope That Won't Die
By Brent Staples, June 17, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/opinion/roseanne-racism-blacks-apes.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

The comedian Roseanne Barr resurrected one of the oldest and most profoundly racist slanders in American history when she referred to Valerie Jarrett, an African-American woman who served as an adviser to President Barack Obama, as the offspring of an ape.
This depiction — promoted by slave traders, historians and practitioners of "scientific" racism — was used to justify slavery, lynching and the creation of the Jim Crow state. It made the leap to the silver screen in deeply noxious films like "The Birth of a Nation" and haunted American popular culture well into the 20th century.
The toxically racist ape characterization has been pushed to the margins of the public square. Nevertheless, a growing body of research shows that it has maintained a pernicious grip on the American imagination. It is especially problematic in the criminal justice system, where subhuman treatment of African-Americans remains strikingly visible.
That message comes through powerfully in research by several social scientists, but particularly in the work of the Stanford University psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt and Phillip Atiba Goff, president of the Center for Policing Equity at John Jay College in New York. In six studiespublished with collaborators a decade ago, Mr. Goff and Ms. Eberhardt found that even younger study participants who were born since the civil rights revolution and claimed to know nothing of the ape caricature of blackness were swayed by it when making judgments about black people. In one study, white male undergraduates who were subliminally exposed to words associated with apes — for example, "chimp" or "gorilla" — were more likely to condone the beating of those in police custody when they thought that the suspect was black.

In another study, the authors analyzed death penalty cases covered in The Philadelphia Inquirer between 1979 and 1999. They found that black defendants convicted of capital crimes were four times more likely than whites convicted of capital crimes to be described with labels associated with apes, such as "savage," "brute" or "beast." The researchers also discovered that defendants who were implicitly portrayed as more apelike in the newspaper were more likely to be executed by the state.
This process of dehumanization often leads Americans to view African-American men as larger and more fearsome than they are. This pattern of misperception is troubling. Police officers are often exonerated for killing civilians on the premise that they fired their weapons out of fear for their lives. This issue famously came up in the 2014 killing of Dontre Hamilton, an unarmed black man in Milwaukee who was shot 14 times by Officer Christopher Manney. Officer Manney later portrayed Mr. Hamilton as hulking and muscular, saying he feared being "overpowered." An autopsy showed that Mr. Hamilton was actually of modest build — 5 feet, 7 inches tall and 169 pounds.
The tragedy of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was killed by a Cleveland police officer in 2014 while playing with a toy gun, fits this pattern. An officer at the scene described him as being 20 years old. Black children are often seen as significantly older and more menacing than they actually are. And, research suggests, the automatic presumption of threat provoked by a black face applies even the when the face belongs to a 5-year-old child.
Mr. Goff and his colleagues published a striking set of studies the year Tamir was killed. They found that when a group of mainly white college students were shown photographs of white, black and Latino boys, they overestimated the ages of black boys ages 10 to 17 by an average of 4.5 years. In other words, they perceived 13-year-old boys as adult men — and viewed black children as more culpable for crimes.

The ape caricature plays a role here, too. The more participants associated black people with apes, the authors showed, the greater the discrepancy between their guesses of the ages of black children and their actual ages — and the more severely the participants judged the children's culpability. A related analysis of police personnel records determined that officers who associated blacks with apes were more likely to have used force against a black child in custody.
These findings have much to say about disparate treatment in the criminal justice system, especially given the recent spate of episodes in which black people were confronted by law enforcement and, sometimes, hauled off to jail for living their lives at Starbucks, among other places.
The backlash that forced ABC to cancel Ms. Barr's television series reflects a distaste for passé, plainly stated racism in a society that likes to see itself as having put bigotry behind it. Nevertheless, centuries of institutional racism — and the dehumanization of black people upon which it relied — have left an indelible imprint on how Americans process blackness.
The notion that the country might somehow move past this deeply complex, historically layered issue by assuming an attitude of "color blindness" is naïve. The only real hope of doing that is to openly confront and talk about the powerful, but submerged, forms of discrimination that have long since supplanted the undisguised version.

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7) "I Can't Go Without My Son" a Mother Pleaded as She Was Deported to Guatemala
By Miriam Jordan, June 17, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/us/immigration-deported-parents.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Elsa Ortiz, 25, was deported to Guatemala from the United States on June 5 without her son Anthony, 8.CreditMarian Carrasquero/The New York Times

They'd had a plan: Elsa Johana Ortiz Enriquez packed up what little she had in Guatemala and traveled across Mexico with her 8-year-old son, Anthony. In a group, they rafted across the Rio Grande into Texas. From there they intended to join her boyfriend, Edgar, who had found a construction job in the United States.
Except it all went wrong. The Border Patrol was waiting as they made their way from the border on May 26, and soon mother and son were in a teeming detention center in southern Texas. The next part unfolded so swiftly that, even now, Ms. Ortiz cannot grasp it: Anthony was sent to a shelter for migrant children. And she was put on a plane back to Guatemala.
"I am completely devastated," Ms. Ortiz, 25, said in one of a series of video interviews last week from her family home in Guatemala. Her eyes swollen from weeping and her voice subdued, she said she had no idea when or how she would see her son again.

As the federal government continues to separate families as part of a stepped-up enforcement program against those who cross the border illegally, the authorities say that parents are not supposed to be deported without their children. But immigration lawyers say that has happened in several cases. And the separations can be traumatic for parents who now have no clear path to recovering their children.

"From our work on the border, we have seen a significant increase in the number of moms separated from their children, and many of them have reported they didn't even have a chance to say goodbye before the separation, " said Laura Tuell, the global pro bono counsel at Jones Day, an international law firm providing assistance to refugees in Texas, whose lawyers spoke with Ms. Ortiz.

"Some of the women we have encountered in detention at the border have reported facing pressure to deport voluntarily in order to be reunified with their children," she said.
Critics say that Ms. Ortiz's saga is the latest indication that the administration's new enforcement strategy was rolled out without adequate planning. The processing and detention of migrant families can involve three Homeland Security agencies — Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services — as well as the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services. Poor coordination among them has made it hard to track children and parents once their paths diverge in the labyrinthine system.
"I cannot convey enough how much utter chaos there is," said Michelle Brané, director of migrant rights and justice at the Women's Refugee Commission, a research and advocacy organization that monitors immigration issues. "The government does not have a proper system in place to track families and coordinate."

In some cases, parents and children have gone weeks without being able to communicate with one another and without knowing one anothers' whereabouts. From April 19 to May 31, a total of 1,995 children who arrived with 1,940 adults were separated from their parents, according to administration officials.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the "zero tolerance" policy officially in early May to stanch the flow of migrants, mainly from Central American countries like Guatemala. It calls for prosecuting nearly all of those who are found to have entered the United States illegally. Previously, most border-crossers who were caught would have faced deportation but not criminal charges, and would not have been separated from their children.
Children whose parents have been arrested are transferred to the custody of the Health and Human Services Department, whose staff screens them, finds housing and remains responsible for them.
From that point, migrant parents and children become separate legal cases in the maze of government bureaucracy, and keeping them linked has proved challenging. Different legal protections are afforded to juveniles and adults in the immigration system, and as a result, reuniting families can take months or longer, several legal experts said.

In federal court, parents typically plead guilty to the misdemeanor offense of illegal entry. Many are then likely to accept "expedited removal" from the country, in the hope of being reunited quickly with their children. But children cannot be subject to expedited removal; they are automatically entitled to a full hearing before an immigration judge, and their cases take longer to resolve.
"Once the parent and child are apart, they are on separate legal tracks," said John Sandweg, who was acting director of ICE during the Obama administration.

Reunification becomes particularly difficult when a parent is deported without the child and is no longer on American soil, Mr. Sandweg said; in those cases, "there is a very high risk that parents and children will be permanently separated."
Federal immigration officials say parents are not supposed to be deported without their children, and if this occurs, parents have two options: They can have a family member who is living in the United States take sponsorship and custody of the child, or the child can be flown home and delivered into the custody of the authorities in the parent's home country — and from there to the parent.
Normally, an ICE spokeswoman said, the agency works with the Health and Human Services department "to reunite the parent and child at the time of removal, and with the consulate to assist the parent with obtaining a travel document for the child." In any case, she said, the agency has procedures in place to make sure detained parents have either telephone or in-person contact with proceedings related to their child. A government hotline has been set up to help parents locate their children.
A spokesman for Health and Human Services said that the department does not discuss individual cases of minors in its facilities.
Ms. Ortiz's greatest fear is that she won't be able to return to the United States to claim custody of her son, and that without her intervention, he won't be returned to her.
Ms. Ortiz provided detailed accounts and documents that attest to her detention, criminal prosecution and separation from her son. The story of how the two of them came to be in the United States involves years of difficult single parenthood in Guatemala, with both economic setbacks and threats of violence from the rising lawlessness in her community.
A few years ago, Ms. Ortiz fell in love with a "good man," she said, who treated her son as his own child. The man, named Edgar, moved to the United States to work in construction and had been sending money to help support them. He asked that his last name not be disclosed because he fears repercussions from federal authorities.

This year, Ms. Ortiz, fearful of the thugs who were increasingly preying on people in her neighborhood, decided it would be best to take her son and join Edgar in the United States.
They made it to Texas safely, but shortly afterward, as they walked along a road, they were intercepted by border agents, arrested and taken to a station. Ms. Ortiz said she was interviewed the next day by border officials, and that is when she was told her son would be separated from her. "I begged, please don't do this, don't take him," she said.
About an hour later, her son's name was called. Mother and son stood up, and over Ms. Ortiz's loud protests, Anthony was led away. A 12-year-old girl went with him.

A few days later, Ms. Ortiz said, she boarded a bus filled with migrants and was taken to a federal court in South Texas, where she pleaded guilty to illegal entry. Ms. Ortiz was later transferred to another facility, in Laredo, Tex., where she was finally able to make telephone calls.
She contacted Edgar to tell him that their plan had gone awry, and that she and her son had been arrested and then separated.

"She was crying desperately," Edgar recalled in a telephone interview.

By this time, it had been more than a week since she had seen Anthony, and she still had no idea where he was.
At one point, an immigration officer handed her a handwritten note on a pink slip of paper with the words, "Call Shelter Son" and a telephone number. But before Ms. Ortiz could get access to a phone to make the call, she said, another officer summoned her and several other women to inform them that they were booked on a deportation flight that was leaving shortly.
What about Anthony? No one would listen, she said.
Ms. Ortiz recalled sobbing heavily as she reluctantly climbed the steps to the plane that would take her and dozens of other deported migrants back to Guatemala early in June. She said she was the last to board.
"Please don't put me on the plane," she remembered pleading over and over in Spanish. "I can't go without my son."
"I was shaking, I could barely walk," Ms. Ortiz recalled. She said that an American immigration officer escorting her across the tarmac was also in tears. "She told me to talk to the boss when I got inside the plane," Ms. Ortiz said.
But he did not listen.
"I cried the entire flight," she said. "When I arrived at the airport in Guatemala, I was almost fainting. They gave me a tranquilizer."

She phoned Edgar from Guatemala the next day, and he reached out to a lawyer at Jones Day, who provided him with the government hotline number.
After several attempts, Edgar got a woman on the line who asked for the boy's name and date of birth. "She told me he is fine — he has clothes, shoes and his own bed, we are taking good care of him," Edgar recalled.
Later that day, a caseworker from the shelter called the cellphone number of the boy's grandfather, José Ortiz, in Guatemala — the only telephone number the boy had memorized. She put Anthony on the phone, and his grandfather said he seemed cheerful.
"He shared how he was learning English, playing games and being well treated," Ms. Ortiz said.
Finally, on Thursday, she got to speak to Anthony herself. She told him to be good. They joked about an imaginary character — "the clown" — who they always pretended slept between them in the bed they shared. But she said Anthony seemed worried — about her.
"Mammy, are they treating you well in the house where you are at? Anthony asked.
"Yes," she said, knowing that he would not know — not until the shelter workers told him, and she dreaded how he'd respond when they did — that the house was in Guatemala.

Marian Carrasquero contributed reporting from Guatemala.

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8) What Happens When Prosecutors Break the Law?
By Nina Morrison, June 18, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/opinion/kurtzrock-suffolk-county-prosecutor.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region
Glenn Kurtzrock in 2016.CreditJoseph D. Sullivan

A major scandal unfolding on Long Island over the last 13 months shows how the justice system all too often falls silent when the culprit is a prosecutor, and the victim is an ordinary citizen accused of a crime.
In May 2017, Glenn Kurtzrock, a homicide prosecutor in Suffolk County, N.Y., was caught red-handed concealing dozens of pages of material from Messiah Booker, a young man charged with first-degree murder who maintained he was innocent.
Mr. Booker was arrested and spent more than 18 months in jail awaiting trial before his defense lawyer discovered that Mr. Kurtzrock had altered hundreds of pages of police records to remove a wealth of exculpatory information. That included evidence pointing to another suspect he knew Mr. Booker's lawyer had been investigating. The prosecutor had also removed the covers of two police notebooks to make it look like his altered versions of the documents were the originals.

After the defense attorney discovered the misconduct and alerted the court, the district attorney promptly fired Mr. Kurtzrock and dismissed the murder charge against Mr. Booker in mid-trial. (Mr. Booker then pleaded guilty to attempted robbery, a reduced charge, which ensured he would be released from prison before his son finishes elementary school.) As he dismissed the case, the judge called it a "travesty."

It was clear that Mr. Kurtzrock had violated the 1963 the Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland which held prosecutors must turn over any exculpatory evidence to defendants.
Yet there was more.
Over the last year, as the district attorney's office reviewed all of Mr. Kurtzrock's case files, prosecutors informed the court that four more murder convictions had been tainted by Mr. Kurtzrock's illegal suppression of evidence. All four have now been overturned by the courts.
Most recently, in February, a man named Shaun Laurence was exonerated of murder and freed from a sentence of 75 years to life after the district attorney's office discovered that Mr. Kurtzrock had concealed 45 different items of exculpatory evidence at trial — with the presiding judge declaring that the prosecutor's misconduct was "absolutely stunning."
So what's happened to Mr. Kurtzrock?
Nothing.
Thirteen months after his public firing, and five murder cases overturned because of his illegal actions, Mr. Kurtzrock hasn't been charged with a single crime. Not fraud, not tampering with government records, not contempt of court.

And he hasn't even been suspended from practicing law, much less disbarred. He's now working as a defense lawyer in private practice. That's right: he's making a living representing people accused of crimes, in the same courthouse from which he was (supposedly) banished a year ago. His law firm website even touts his experience as a "former homicide prosecutor."
The law also makes it virtually impossible for Mr. Kurtzrock's victims to sue him, with the Supreme Court having declared that individual prosecutors and their offices are "immune" from civil rights lawsuits in all but the rarest of cases.
Mr. Kurtzrock's case may be the most recent example of the system's egregious failure to hold a rogue prosecutor accountable, but it's hardly anomalous.
The National Registry of Exonerations, based out of the University of California, Irvine, reports that "official misconduct" — by police, prosecutors or both — was a factor in roughly half of the nearly 2,200 exonerations across the country since 1989.
To date, only one prosecutor in the country (Ken Anderson, who withheld exculpatory evidence from my former Texas client Michael Morton) has ever been jailed for misconduct causing a wrongful conviction. And Mr. Anderson served just eight days in the county jail — starkly different from the 25 years that Mr. Morton languished in state prison.
That's true even when prosecutorial misconduct taints thousands of cases.
Last June, a Massachusetts judge issued a blistering 127-page decision finding that two former assistant attorneys general had committed "egregious misconduct" and "fraud on the court" in failing to disclose evidence that a former state lab analyst was addicted to drugs while on the job for years. After five years of litigation, the state has agreed to throw out more than 8,000 drug convictions tainted by laboratory and prosecutorial misconduct.
The lab analyst served 13 months in prison for her crimes. But the former prosecutors? Neither have faced criminal charges, and both are still licensed attorneys. Indeed, even though my office filed formal complaints against them in July 2017 the Massachusetts Bar has yet to even hold a public hearing on their law licenses. And both have found other jobs as senior government lawyers, their salaries funded by taxpayers.

It doesn't have to be this way. Rather than tolerate a bar "discipline" process that is marred by lengthy delays, operates in secrecy, and too often results in little to no consequences for even serious misconduct, legislators should create commissions to regulate prosecutors' conduct and law licenses, with greater accountability and transparency.
Last week, the Republican-controlled New York State Senate passed a landmark bill, sponsored by Senator John DiFrancisco and Assemblyman Nick Perry, that would require these reforms. The Assembly takes up the bill on Monday; if approved, it will head to Gov. Andrew Cuomo's desk. And if he signs it into law, New York will be the first state in the country to create such a commission.
If an elected district attorney is unwilling or unable to bring criminal charges against an assistant prosecutor who so flagrantly violates the law, the attorney general or governor should step in and appoint a special prosecutor.
Most prosecutors are hard-working public servants and committed to fair play. But those who break the law and face no consequence are a stain on their colleagues — and the legal profession.

Nina Morrison is a senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project in New York.

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9) When Did Caging Kids Become the Art of the Deal?
By The Editorial Board, June 18, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/opinion/trump-children-border-immigration-nielsen.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

Watching President Trump blame Democrats for his administration's inhumane practice of snatching immigrant children from their parents at the border evokes nothing so much as an abusive husband blaming his wife for the beatings he delivers:
Why do you make me do this? I hate doing this! If you'd only be reasonable and listen to me, things wouldn't have to be this way.
As anyone paying even minimal attention to politics knows, this immoral policy is not "the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime," to quote one randomly spelled and capitalized tweet out of three to that effect in a little over 12 hours. It's not really Republicans' fault, either — at least not yet. Both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations began efforts to curtail the flow of people across the southern border, but neither went so far as to pursue a "zero tolerance" approach that tore apart families en masse. Congress has not passed any bills requiring the practice since then. This bit of nastiness belongs entirely to Mr. Trump — he has made a choice to torment undocumented families — and his attempt to pass the buck is dishonest and gutless. In other words, it's what we've come to expect when Mr. Trump finds himself in an uncomfortable spot.
But the horror show at the border has gotten awkward for Mr. Trump. When the normally fawning Rev. Franklin Graham and other conservative religious leaders start publicly questioning this president's inerrancy, you know Mr. Trump has really distinguished himself in his iniquity. Even the first lady felt moved to publicly distance herself from her husband's cruelty, calling for a nation "that governs with heart." Things have gotten so radioactive that, at a Monday briefing, the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, found it easiest to fall back on incoherence, alternating between blaming Congress for the situation and denying that any such situation existed.
Perhaps recognizing the growing political hazard, the president is headed to Capitol Hill Tuesday evening to try to drag Republican House members deeper into his dumpster fire. Marc Short, his legislative affairs director, has said that the president will explain to Republican lawmakers the logic and "history" behind the decision to split up families. "The policy is incredibly complicated, and it is one we need to do a better job of communicating," Mr. Short said.

Right, that's the root of the problem here: inelegant messaging.
Mr. Trump is also expected to inject himself into the conference's already fraught debate over immigration legislation, voicing support for two proposals that the G.O.P. House will likely be voting on in the coming days.
The president's preferred bill is a hard-line plan fathered by Representative Bob Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. That bill would, among other steps, tighten asylum standards, slash legal immigration by 25 percent by ending both the diversity visa lottery and doing away with most family-based immigration, and consign Dreamers to permanent limbo by requiring them to re-up their status every three years. And, of course, the bill would fund The Wall. It all fits nicely with Mr. Trump's tendency to talk about immigrants as though every one of them is an aspiring MS-13 foot soldier.
The president also has said — after some initial confusion on his part, according to the White House — that he'd be willing to sign the "compromise" plan hammered out in large part by House leadership. The Border Security and Immigration Reform Act of 2018, much like Mr. Goodlatte's bill, would tighten asylum standards, kill the diversity visa and fund The Wall. It would be somewhat more flexible about family-based immigration and make provisions for some Dreamers to ultimately apply for green cards. It would deal with the current policy of splitting up families by allowing for children to be kept in ICE detention along with their parents. Jailing families together: This is what is considered progress in the current immigration climate.
Whatever the details, Mr. Trump will be using the Tuesday meeting as an opportunity for some additional arm-twisting. If Republican lawmakers have any sense of self-preservation, much less moral decency, they will refuse to engage with Mr. Trump over immigration while he is attempting such grotesque political blackmail.

For the president, this vile border mess has become a test to see how hard he can squeeze lawmakers. The White House has made clear that it regards immigrant children as useful levers to force Congress to pass legislation. With the midterms looming, Republican House members are desperate to look like they're making progress on this issue. Mr. Trump (whose administration is planning a fresh wave of immigration crackdowns in the coming months) is betting that, with enough pressure, he can bend enough nervous moderates to pass a bill through the House on a party-line vote — and maybe, if he keeps hammering away at Democrats, even squeak it through the Senate.
In reality, by making the immigration topic even more radioactive, Mr. Trump has made a rational legislative debate much less likely. House Democrats would be nuts, politically and on policy grounds, to swallow either of the unpalatably conservative plans they are being offered. And even if a bill passes the lower chamber, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is unlikely to let his troops take a politically noxious vote during a high-stakes election cycle. No matter how much Mr. Trump beats his chest, it's hard to see any proposal becoming law any time soon.
Lawmakers should not negotiate with the president until he puts a stop to this "zero tolerance" insanity. Even if Republican members can't be swayed by the immorality of the practice, they should look at this situation in terms of preserving their own power: If they let Mr. Trump roll them by using innocent children as hostages, he will learn the lesson that brutality is the key to getting what he wants.
Maintaining checks and balances can be tricky with any president, but that's especially true when a commander in chief has authoritarian impulses. As made evident by his slavering over such brutal autocrats as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, Mr. Trump believes that effective leadership is all about crushing anyone who stands in your way, collateral damage be damned. If lawmakers aren't willing to stand up to him in a case where justice and public sentiment are so clearly on their side, they might as well hand him the keys to the Capitol right now.

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10) A Troubling Prognosis for Migrant Children in Detention: 'The Earlier They're Out, the Better'
By Benedict Carey, June 18, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/health/migrant-children-mental-health.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Migrants from Central America were taken into custody last week by Border Patrol agents near McAllen, Tex.CreditJohn Moore/Getty Images

Some youngsters retreat entirely, their eyes empty, bodies limp, their isolation a wall of defiance. Others cannot sit still: watchful, hyperactive, ever uncertain.
Some compulsively jump into the laps of strangers, or grab their legs and hold on for life. And some children, somehow, move past a sudden separation from their parents, tapping a well of resilience.
The Trump administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents has alarmed child psychologists and experts who study human development.

It is not clear how long the administration plans to hold onto the 2,000 children in detention centers near the border, nor how long before they are returned to their families.

But psychologists have learned a great deal about what happens to institutionalized children over time, and in that research there are clues to the potential emotional harms faced by migrant children severed from their parents.
A number of medical organizations, including those governing psychology, psychiatry and pediatrics, have issued letters of protest, citing an increased risk of anxiety and depression in the children, as well as post-traumatic stress and attention-deficit disorder.
"Traumatic life experiences in childhood, especially those that involve loss of a caregiver or parent, cause lifelong risk for cardiovascular and mental health disease," wrote the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners.
The longer-term consequences of separation and institutionalization are hard to predict and depend on many factors, like the age of the child at separation and the time away from family.
Lengthy deprivation between infancy and school age, for example, raises the risk of lasting emotional problems.

The risk of mental health consequences also depends on the holding facility itself — the staff, the turnover, whether children know where their parents are, and how long they'll be held.
And much depends on the individual child. Resilience can be forged in such situations, for reasons no one understands. But success for the institutionalized child is far from the norm.

Institutions — even the best and most humane — by their nature warp the attachments children long for, the visceral and concentrated exchange of love, tough and otherwise, that comforts, supports and shapes a child's heart and mind.
In orphanages and other institutional settings, "turnover rate of caregivers is high, as is the number of children per caregiver," Marinus van IJzendoorn, a professor of human development at Erasmus University Rotterdam, said in an email.
"This causes impersonal, unstable and fragmented care, which not only impacts on attachment or stress regulation but also on physical growth parameters such as height, weight and head circumference, and brain development."
Children in institutions, Dr. van IJzendoorn continued, "bide their time hoping for better, personalized care that only families can provide." Once these children enter foster care or are adopted, their development accelerates, and many catch up to peers within two or three years, Dr. van IJzendoorn said.

But much depends on how long they were held in detention: a longer stay at a later age requires the longest recovery period, he noted.
"So many of these parents are fleeing for their lives," Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, wrote in a public statement after a recent trip to the border. "So many of these children know no other adult than the parent who brought them here."
Even the study of parental deprivation has been ethically fraught.
In the 1950s, the American psychologist Harry Harlow took young rhesus monkeys from their mothers and found that the youngsters became reclusive.
In one experiment, he found that they would quickly cling to "cloth mothers," inanimate figures with a soft exterior. Those sad images still haunt the psychological literature.
Early in this century, American researchers working with Romanian officials found that children moved from that country's notorious orphanages into foster care later had higher I.Q.'s on average than a comparison group of their peers deliberately left behind in the orphanages by the scientists.
Perhaps the most influential of them all, to modern child psychologists, was John Bowlby, the British scientist whose writings in the mid-20th century argued that infants were evolutionally primed to form attachments, not only for protection but also for emotional and cognitive development.
The quality of the primary attachment to (usually) a mother — whether strong and loving, uncertain, or absent — helps determine the trajectory of a child's unfolding life.

Dr. Bowlby's attachment theory informs many approaches to the treatment of children torn from their parents by circumstance or, in the case of current administration policy, by design.
Kalina Brabeck, a psychologist at Rhode Island College who works with immigrant children who lose their parents to deportation or for other reasons, said that the experience of loss often leads to a form of post-traumatic stress — the paralyzing vigilance, avoidance and emotional gusts first identified in war veterans.
Most of the children held on the border will have accumulated traumas, Dr. Brabeck said. Even before their parents were detained, many already had run the gauntlet of immigration itself, fleeing with little resources from often violent communities.
One goal of treatment, she said, is to overcome what is a daily identity crisis.
"We try to get them to tell a story: who they are, where they were born, what they're good at, their migration story," she said. "We may do that with pictures and drawings, as well as words — to walk through it in very detailed way."
The therapy includes grief counseling, she said, and prodding the children to confront unconscious assumptions — for example, that the world is an inherently unsafe place. "We also work to connect them to other supports, like coaches, teachers and churches," she said.
For all the dislocation, strangeness and pain of being separated forcibly from parents, many children can and do recover, said Mary Dozier, a professor of child development at the University of Delaware.
"Not all of them — some kids never recover," Dr. Dozier said. "But I've been amazed at how well kids can do after institutionalization if they're able to have responsive and nurturing care afterward."
"The earlier they're out, the better," she added. "The most important thing for these children now is what we do next."

Benedict Carey has been a science reporter for The Times since 2004. He has also written three books, "How We Learn" about the cognitive science of learning; "Poison Most Vial" and "Island of the Unknowns," science mysteries for middle schoolers.

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11) 'If It Could Happen to Them, Why Can't It Happen to Us?'
By Jeanine Cummins, June 19, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/opinion/children-border-separated-foster-care-trauma.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

The kids showed up in our driveway on a Tuesday afternoon. The boy wore a backpack full of diapers for his sister; she wore neon-pink tennis shoes and wouldn't let go of his hand. Their case worker gave me some paperwork and was gone before I had time to process the thought: Now I'm a foster mom. Their panic was palpable. Mine probably was, too.
The little one didn't sleep so much as lose consciousness in moments when her small body demanded a break from her otherwise ceaseless crying. This happened with no discernible pattern. My two biological daughters, then 7 and 3, watched with concern as her cries turned to whimpers and then sloped into the ragged breath of sleep. She could nod off anywhere except in her crib: at swimming lessons, at the dinner table, sprawled on the kitchen floor.
Sometimes her cries went the other direction, too, spiking into screams, her body rigid with terror. Attempting to remove her sneakers provoked such hysteria that for the first three nights, my husband and I let her wear them to bed.
We may have been experienced parents, but we were inexperienced at parenting a traumatized child. I didn't know how to change the diaper of a baby who was afraid of me. I didn't know how to comfort a child who became frantic when I tried to touch her.

During the months that followed, the crying diminished and the children began to trust us. We tried to provide a safe, stable home for them. We gave them clothes, toys, grandparents. We laughed at their jokes and cried with them when visiting their parents was difficult. We loved them.
And yet we were, inherently, part of their trauma. Their parents were, for the moment, unable to provide a safe home for them. But even when it's necessary, removing children from their parents causes acute distress. I witnessed that suffering. It lived in my home.
My older daughter began having nightmares that "the people" would take her away from us and give her to another family. She was inconsolable. "If it could happen to them," she asked with the cleareyed logic of a 7-year-old, "why can't it happen to us?"
I tried telling her that it happens only to parents who don't, or can't, take care of their children. It happens only when parents aren't doing what they're supposed to do.

It turns out she knew something I didn't.
I've tried not to read the headlines about migrant children being separated from their parents. The stories of frantic parents and sobbing children are painfully familiar. It is too easy to imagine a little girl shrieking in her new foster mother's kitchen, writhing and kicking at the unfamiliar hands attempting to soothe her. I can see her falling into a fitful sleep in her hot-pink sneakers.
I told my kids this kind of separation happens only to children whose parents don't do the right thing. But now it's happening to people who are behaving exactly as good parents should. To parents who endure inconceivable hardship to get their children to this country, precisely in order to protect them. They come from places of violence and poverty and they travel, in some cases, thousands of miles carrying their children on their backs, all in the hopes of providing those children with a chance at safety. Their perseverance is the very model of parental sacrifice.
My husband, an immigrant, tried to soften the emotional spasm of my response to this news. "Surely a temporary separation would be worth it," he said, considering how we would feel if we were asylum-seekers, "if that's what it took to get our children out of a dangerous situation."
But, I countered, "It's like forcing someone to choose between diabetes and cancer." It's not a deterrent; it's forcing migrants to make an absurd, unnecessary, detestable choice: Would you prefer to keep your children in a dangerous place or risk losing them in a place you can only hope will be safer?
Republicans are ostensibly the party of Christian family values. Their leader is making a mockery of those values at our borders, separating even asylum-seekers from their children, and then using those children to force migrants into voluntary departure. In immigration court, migrants are being told that the best way to see their kids again is to plead guilty, to return to whatever they're running from. And yet even if they do just that, some parents still don't get their children back. Where is our righteous Christian outrage?
After six months, our foster kids went home to their parents, and what remained with me was a new perspective on the fragility of family. We love our children so much, it's easy to mistake the strength of that feeling for invincibility. Now I understand that it's not always merit-based, who gets to keep their kids and who doesn't. It can be arbitrary — a matter of unlucky geography — even in 2018, even in the United States of America.
My daughter was right to be afraid.

Jeanine Cummins is the author of the forthcoming novel "American Dirt."

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12) Protesters Confront Kirstjen Nielsen at Mexican Restaurant: 'Shame!'
By Sarah Mervosh, June 20, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/kirstjen-nielsen-protesters-restaurant.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Ms. Nielsen at a White House press briefing on Monday in which she defended the administration's policies.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times

Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America, which works for social and economic justice, claimed responsibility for the protest. A spokesman for the group said that a diner had tipped off the group that Ms. Nielsen was eating at MXDC Cocina Mexicana, and that about 15 activists arrived at the restaurant around 8 p.m. He said he believed that Ms. Nielsen left after the protesters did.

The group interrupted what a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security described as a "work dinner."

"While having a work dinner tonight, the secretary and her staff heard from a small group of protesters who share her concern with our current immigration laws that have created a crisis on our southern border," a department spokesman, Tyler Q. Houlton, posted on Twitter. He shifted the focus to Congress, asking people who are concerned about immigration to reach out to their representatives.

Ms. Nielsen also took to Twitter on Tuesday night, retweeting a message from President Trump saying that she did a "fabulous job" at a news conference on Monday. She also posted that she would "work tirelessly until our broken immigration system is fixed, our borders are secure and families can stay together."
Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America released a statement from a member of its steering committee, Margaret McLaughlin: "We will not stand by and let Secretary Nielsen dine in peace, while she is directing her employees to tear little girls away from their mothers and crying boys away from their fathers at our border."
She added that while Ms. Nielsen's dinner "may have been ruined, it is nothing compared to the horrors she has inflicted on innocent families."
A worker who answered the phone at MXDC Cocina Mexicana late Tuesday referred inquiries to a public relations representative, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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13) Microsoft Employees Protest Work With ICE, as Tech Industry Mobilizes Over Immigration
By Sheera Frenkel, June 19, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/technology/tech-companies-immigration-border.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
At Microsoft's main campus in Redmond, Wash. Microsoft employees posted an open letter on Tuesday protesting the software maker's work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.CreditStuart Isett for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — In an open letter posted to Microsoft's internal message board on Tuesday, more than 100 employees protested the software maker's work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and asked the company to stop working with the agency, which has been separating migrant parents and their children at the border with Mexico.
"We believe that Microsoft must take an ethical stand, and put children and families above profits," said the letter, which was addressed to the chief executive, Satya Nadella. The letter pointed to a $19.4 million contract that Microsoft has with ICE for processing data and artificial intelligence capabilities.

Calling the separation of families "inhumane," the employees added: "As the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit. We are part of a growing movement, comprised of many across the industry who recognize the grave responsibility that those creating powerful technology have to ensure what they build is used for good, and not for harm."

The letter is part of a wave of tech workers mobilizing this week against the Trump administration's new "zero tolerance" policy that refers for criminal prosecution all immigrants apprehended crossing the border without authorization. The policy has resulted in about 2,000 children being separated from their migrant parents, raising a bipartisan outcry.

At Silicon Valley companies including Google, Apple and Facebook, employees have in recent days circulated internal emails asking for donations to nonprofit groups that support immigrants. Many have shared information about protests in San Francisco and Washington. And some of the workers have spoken to their managers about the issue or called on internal message boards for their chief executives to respond.
The activity has had an effect. Late on Tuesday, after Microsoft's employee letter went up, the company released a memo from Mr. Nadella in which he called the immigration policy "cruel and abusive" and said Microsoft was not working with the federal government on any projects to separate families. Microsoft's president, Brad Smith, also published a blog post titled, "The Country Needs to Get Immigration Right."
Their comments came after other tech chief executives spoke up on Tuesday. Apple's chief, Timothy D. Cook, in an interview with The Irish Times, called the immigration policy "heartbreaking." Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted that he was a "top donor" to the American Civil Liberties Union and said that "if there is some way for me to help these kids I will do so." Sundar Pichai of Google, Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber and Chuck Robbins of Cisco also tweeted their opposition to the policy.
On Facebook, two former employees of the social network started a fund-raiser on Saturday to collect $1,500 for migrants who needed legal assistance because of the new policy. By Tuesday afternoon, the effort had garnered more than $5 million from donors who included numerous tech workers, according to a spokeswoman for the fund-raising drive.
Among the donors were Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, a Facebook spokesman said. In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg called for more donations and said the policy of splitting up immigrant children from their families needed to be stopped. Ms. Sandberg, in her own Facebook post, called the cries of the children taken from their parents "unbearable" and added that the practice "needs to end now."
The activity by tech workers is reminiscent of protests in January 2017when many Silicon Valley employees were up in arms over an executive order from President Trump that suspended immigration from seven mostly Muslim countries. At the time, Google employees held rallies to object; Amazon and Expedia were among the companies that filed in court to stop the order. (Many tech companies comprise workers who are first-generation immigrants or who grew up in immigrant families.)
Since then, tech workers have watched their companies increasingly come under scrutiny for their moral and ethical behavior. Many tech employees have begun organizing against actions by their own companies — in April, for example, thousands of Google employees signed a letter protesting the company's involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence in weaponry.

On Monday, the A.C.L.U. also demanded that Amazon stop selling a facial recognition software tool, called Rekognition, to police and other government entities because it feared it could be used to unfairly target immigrants. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., publicly promoted its work with ICE in January in a blog post, citing it as an example of the success of its technology.
At the same time, Microsoft has been positioning itself as tech's moral leader. Mr. Nadella and Mr. Smith have publicly said they want to protect user privacy and establish ethical guidelines for new technology like artificial intelligence.
"We need to ask ourselves not only what computers can do but what computers should do," Mr. Nadella said at Microsoft's developer conference last month.

Some Microsoft executives earlier objected to the Trump administration's new immigration policy. On Sunday, Mr. Smith penned a LinkedIn post, saying the news of migrant children being taken from their families was "especially poignant."
Yet criticism of Microsoft's work with ICE began to grow. One Microsoft engineer, Larry Osterman, tweeted on Monday to ask how working with ICE matched with the company's "ethical stances."

Mat Marquis, an independent developer who works with Microsoft, also said in a tweet on Monday that he no longer planned to work with the company because of its ICE contract. When he receives his last payment from Microsoft, he said, he plans to donate the money to a group providing support to families that had been separated at the border.
Late Monday, Microsoft issued a statement saying that it was not working with federal agencies to separate children from their families at the border and that it was not aware of its services or products being used for that purpose. It also said it was "dismayed" by the immigration policy and urged that it be changed.
But for many Microsoft employees, that was not satisfactory. A group of about a dozen employees began working together to draft the protest letter, in which they said the company's statement "does not go far enough."
The employees continued, "We are providing the technical undergirding in support of an agency that is actively enforcing this inhumane policy."
The letter added that Microsoft should not only cancel its contract with ICE but be open to a review of its contracts with government agencies domestically and internationally, and that it should create a policy stating it would not work with those "who violate international human rights law."
Microsoft declined to comment on the employee letter, which was posted internally on Tuesday afternoon. Within hours, it had received more than 100 signatures.
It was only later that the messages from Mr. Nadella and Mr. Smith decrying the immigration policy were released. "We will always stand for immigration policies that preserve every person's dignity and human rights," Mr. Nadella said.

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14) 'Tender Age' Shelters Opening for Young Children Separated From Parents
By Caitlin Dickerson, June 20, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/tender-age-shelters-family-separation-immigration.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Toddler separated from parents is crawling across a multi-colored mat inside a "Tender-Age" shelter in Brownsville, TX

Immigration authorities have opened shelter space for children under the age of 12, referred to as "tender age" detainees, who are entering the detention system in ever-larger numbers under the Trump administration's practice of separating children from parents who enter the country illegally.
Many of the children are toddlers and babies and require special care, and their numbers have been rising since last month, when the government enforced a "zero tolerance" policy on people crossing the border. Since then, estimates suggest that more than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents.
Three centers in southern Texas are being outfitted to accommodate the younger children.
A shelter housing babies and toddlers is in Brownsville, Tex., and is run by the same nonprofit group that operates a shelter at a former Walmart, Southwest Key Programs. The shelter that includes tender-age children, called Casa El Presidente, is in a former medical center.
A person inside the shelter took a series of pictures and supplied them to The New York Times. One image shows a toddler girl who is about 12 months old, playing on a colorful mat decorated with the letters of the alphabet and drawings of animals. The workers and others standing around the little girl wear blue hospital-style bootees to keep the wooden floor clean.

The girl was separated from her relatives for about a month as part of the family-separation policy, according to the person who took the photo, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to release an image.

The internet erupted with fury on Tuesday night after The Associated Press first reported news of the shelters. The MSNBC late night host Rachel Maddow broke down crying on the air as she read The A.P. article.
Referrals of young children have risen "exponentially" since the "zero tolerance" policy was announced, according to Elizabeth Frankel, associate director of the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights. The center pairs migrant children with adults who act as guardians until the children are reunited with parents.
"Nobody knows what to do," Ms. Frankel said, explaining that her colleagues have been charged with caring for "a number of infants," including some as young as 8 and 10 months. Many of the children are too young to speak, Ms. Frankel said. Without knowing where or even who the parents are, Ms. Frankel's colleagues have struggled to advocate for the children.

Ms. Frankel said that contract workers were well trained and doing their best to help but that the youngest children are struggling even more than older ones because they cannot understand what is happening. "The young kids think that their parents have abandoned them, or that something very bad has happened to them," she said.
"They're in crisis. They're just crying uncontrollably," she said. "We've seen young kids having panic attacks, they can't sleep, they're wetting the bed. They regress developmentally, where they may have been verbal but now they can no longer talk."
Since the administration's policy became public, doctors and child welfare experts have spoken out about the potential health implications of separation, citing an increased risk for children of anxiety and depression, as well as post-traumatic stress and attention-deficit disorder.

The potential for long-term effects, such as prolonged emotional problems, will depend in part on the age of the children as well as the length of time during which they are separated from their parents, experts have said.
The shelters are run by private organizations that contract with the federal government to provide education and health care.
Representatives of the Health and Human Services Department, which cares for the children, did not respond to requests for data on Wednesday on the number of tender-age children in custody. But Ms. Frankel said that her organization had been informed that government facilities were at capacity.

"They are placing the children wherever there is an available bed," she said. Some are being flown thousands of miles away from their parents.
Ms. Frankel said most of the youngest children were being placed overnight in temporary foster homes, and then transported during the day to government facilities for case management and other services. Children who were old enough were going to school during the day, she said, while the babies are kept together in rooms where they are cared for by contract workers.

Manny Fernandez contributed reporting from Brownsville, Tex.

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15) Children Taken at the Border Arrive in New York
By Liz Robbins, June 20, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/nyregion/children-separated-border-new-york.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Central American asylum seekers are taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas. Many children have been separated from their parents at the border, and some of them have landed in New York shelters.CreditJohn Moore/Getty Images
The crisis at the southern border has reached New York City, as waves of children separated from their parents have been arriving in the area.

At least 74 children have been sent to nine shelters in New York, according to the office of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
That number appeared to increase overnight, as a video captured by NY1 showed a group of young girls being led in the darkness into a shelter in East Harlem run by Cayuga Centers, an agency that has a contract with the federal government. The shelter also has contracts with the city and the state to house children. A director for Cayuga, when reached by phone Tuesday, said she was not able to comment because the contract prohibited her from speaking to the news media.
The federal agency that cares for unaccompanied minors — the Office of Refugee Resettlement — did not immediately return a request for comment.
The children have been separated from their parents at the southern border, as part of the federal government's zero tolerance policy, in which adults are prosecuted for entering the country illegally, and their children are taken from them and placed into custody separately. More than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in the last two months.
Jessica Lynch, a lawyer for Catholic Charities of New York, which represents the children in immigration court, said that since the policy was announced, "we've had a surge in minors coming who have been separated from their parents in the shelters."
New York State regulates the shelters, which are also on Long Island, in Westchester and the Bronx, that care for what the federal government calls unaccompanied minors. But Mr. Cuomo said that the facilities have been instructed by the federal government not to speak to state authorities, a process he deemed problematic.
Mr. Cuomo said on Tuesday that he intended to sue the federal government within the next two weeks for its zero-tolerance policy because it violated the constitutional rights of parents to care for their children.
"There's been a lot of talk about the morality of this practice," Mr. Cuomo said on Tuesday. "But we also believe that this practice is illegal."

The children are entitled to their own court hearings and, according to lawyers who deal with their cases, they are asking to be sent back to Central America. That is a shift from earlier cases, in which children who often arrived alone at the border would be placed with family members in New York and seek to stay in the United States.
The children arriving now, " didn't make the decision to come," said Anthony Enriquez, the director of the unaccompanied minors program for Catholic Charities. "They said, 'I just followed my mom here.' I am dealing with that trauma, of family separation."
But sending children back can be difficult because often the government does not know where the parent is, or, whether the parent has been deported ahead of the children.
"There is no system whatsoever to track these family separations, no efforts systematically to reunite these families," Mr. Enriquez said. "There is no supervisor, there is no database saying, 'child here, parent there,' so they can come back together."

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16) New York City Will End Marijuana Arrests for Most People
By Benjamin Mueller, June 19, 2018
"Some of the categories of people who will still be arrested on charges of smoking in public are overwhelmingly nonwhite. For example, as of 2007, three-quarters of the people on probation in New York City were black or Hispanic, compared to 17 percent of probationers who were white, according to the most recent publicly available probation profile. ...In the first four months of this year, 80 percent of those given tickets for marijuana possession were black or Hispanic."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/nyregion/nypd-marijuana-arrests-new-york-city.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Most people will soon avoid a trip to the police station if they're caught smoking marijuana in public in New York City.CreditHilary Swift for The New York Times

The New York Police Department plans to slash arrests for publicly smoking marijuana by more than half and give people tickets instead, but will keep arresting some of those who have past arrests or convictions, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Tuesday.
The changes come amid strong signals from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's administration that it will push to legalize marijuana across New York State. But with any new legislation months away, and Mr. de Blasio facing mounting pressure to address a steep racial disparity in marijuana arrests, the city took another step on Tuesday toward shrinking a pool of arrests that no longer exists in some states.

The new policy, which will take effect on Sept. 1, will not curb police officers' power to stop and search people who they think are smoking marijuana. And because it exempts from the no-arrest policy certain people with criminal records, many of them black, it is unlikely on its own to shift the focus of marijuana enforcement away from the nonwhite New Yorkers who have for decades been the targets of arrests.
People caught smoking marijuana in public will still be handcuffed and taken to a police station house for fingerprinting if they have been arrested in connection with a violent crime in the last three years, are on probation or parole or have an open arrest warrant. Around 17,500 people are arrested each year on marijuana possession charges in New York City, but Mr. de Blasio said about 10,000 of those arrests would be eliminated and replaced with criminal summonses under the new policy.
The mayor, caught between progressive allies who want to end marijuana arrests and a Police Department loath to relinquish its broad powers, has seemed content of late with the city's enforcement policy. In January, he said the annual arrest count was "a normal level in the sense of what we were trying to achieve."
Governor Cuomo, too, has been reluctant to reconsider a prohibition on marijuana, saying as recently as last year that it was a "gateway drug."
But with Cynthia Nixon criticizing Mr. Cuomo's position as she bids for the Democratic nomination for governor and the New York City Council pressing the Police Department to explain the disparities in arrests, the two oft-feuding Democrats have reached a sort of consensus that public opinion has shifted.
"We're doing what we can do right now," Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference.
Tuesday's announcement was another attempt by the city to preserve the Police Department's enforcement powers without falling too far behind a broad shift in favor of legalizing marijuana.
The police commissioner, James P. O'Neill, convened a 30-day working group in May to review enforcement after The New York Times published an analysis of the racial disparities, and Mr. de Blasio said one of the goals of the new policy would be to reduce those disparities.

But the working group's 19-page report did not attempt to explain the racial disparity, beyond suggesting that nonwhite people may smoke marijuana in public at higher rates and that racially skewed enforcement was a byproduct of broader societal forces.
It also did not lay out any reasoning in support of having police officers continue to arrest some people for smoking marijuana, not because the city believes smoking merits an arrest on its own, but because those people have a criminal history.
Research has found "there is no good evidence" that marijuana arrests in New York City are associated with reductions in serious crime. The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., found in a six-month study that marijuana arrests "waste an enormous amount of criminal justice resources for no punitive, rehabilitative, deterrent or other public safety benefit."
At the news conference with the mayor, Mr. O'Neill said that people with criminal histories should be punished more harshly for so-called quality-of-life crimes.
"If you have a propensity to commit crimes, and our job is to keep people safe, and if you're going to commit quality-of-life violations, I think the consequences have to be higher," he said.
Criminal summonses for marijuana possession, already climbing in New York City since Mr. de Blasio said in late 2014 that the police would largely give summonses instead of making arrests for carrying personal marijuana, would rise further under the new policy. People given a summons are generally allowed to continue on their way after the police check databases for open warrants and previous arrests and convictions, and are told to appear in a courtroom.
Many of the tickets later become arrest warrants if the person misses a court date. Just over 7,000 of the summonses given last year in New York City for the unlawful possession of marijuana — about a third of all such marijuana summonses — later became active warrants, according to court statistics. Overall, there are roughly 1.2 million active warrants in New York City relating to missed court dates, a courts spokesman, Lucian Chalfen, said.

Summonses for unlawful possession of marijuana, a noncriminal violation, can come with fines up to $100, though city officials said the fine amounts were ultimately up to judges and could change depending on someone's criminal history.
Defense lawyers say the real impetus for marijuana enforcement is often not an arrest or summons itself, but rather the opportunity for police officers to stop and search people and check for open warrants in other cases. They said the fact that the new policy preserves officers' authority to search people they stop for smoking marijuana suggests that the Police Department believes smokers merit closer scrutiny than people, for example, who are caught drinking in public — something they say there is little evidence to support.
Beyond the arrests based on someone's criminal history, people caught smoking in public would also be arrested if they did not have identification or were smoking in a way that created an "immediate threat to public safety," said Rodney Harrison, the Police Department's chief of patrol. He said, for example, that officers would be given discretion to arrest people who are smoking around children in a park or smoking while operating heavy machinery. To protect against unsafe driving, people caught smoking in the driver's seat of a car would also be arrested.
Chief Harrison said that officers could make a case for arresting someone in a place that has been the subject of repeated public complaints about marijuana smoke. He said every arrest has to be approved by a precinct supervisor.
He said the police had to arrest people caught smoking while on parole or probation because it represented a violation of the terms of their release. The number of people held in city jails on state parole violations has increased in recent years, a trend that runs counter to the city's goal of closing Rikers Island.
The district attorneys in Manhattan and Brooklyn both said recently that they planned to stop prosecuting many marijuana cases, creating the potential for a patchwork of different policies across the city's five boroughs. The city's new policy was intended to create a more consistent strategy. And the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, who appeared alongside the mayor at Tuesday's news conference, voiced support for the exceptions in the city's new policy.
But the Manhattan district attorney, Mr. Vance, said in an interview that while the new policy was a step forward, continuing to arrest people on the basis of their criminal records "stands in contrast with the overarching goal of increasing fairness at the same time as maintaining public safety."

He said people caught smoking marijuana in public should be treated like people caught drinking in public, who are given a civil summons and not arrested even if they are, for example, on probation or parole. There is no evidence, he said, that marijuana smokers are unusually violent. And Mr. Vance said his office would decline to prosecute people arrested because of their parole or probation status unless the police made a persuasive case there was a public safety threat.
Some of the categories of people who will still be arrested on charges of smoking in public are overwhelmingly nonwhite. For example, as of 2007, three-quarters of the people on probation in New York City were black or Hispanic, compared to 17 percent of probationers who were white, according to the most recent publicly available probation profile.
There are already disparities in people who receive tickets for marijuana in New York City. Two-thirds of those given criminal summonses for marijuana possession last year were black or Hispanic, and 13 percent were white, with the race of many of those given tickets — the vast majority in certain precincts — not specified in police records, according to data the Police Department provided to the City Council.
In the first four months of this year, 80 percent of those given tickets for marijuana possession were black or Hispanic.
Carrying personal marijuana is already supposed to lead to summonses instead of arrests in New York City under a policy announced in late 2014, but that policy allowed officers to continue to make arrests for smoking in public. Since then, arrests on marijuana possession charges have fallen from about 26,000 people in 2014.

J. David Goodman contributed reporting.

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BAUAW NEWSLETTER

6/20/2018

bauaw2003 BAUAW NEWSLETTER, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 2018

Listen to 'The Daily': Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?

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October 20-21, 2018

Cindy Sheehan and the Women's March on the Pentagon

A movement not just a protest

Different wings of the same warbird

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Free Leonard Peltier!

On my 43rd year in prison I yearn to hug my grandchildren.

By Leonard Peltier

Art by Leonard Peltier

Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman I
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Donations can be made on Leonard's behalf to the ILPD national office, 116 W. Osborne Ave, Tampa, FL 33603

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GOP Tax Plan Would Give 15 of America's Largest Corporations a $236B Tax Cut: Report

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6/20/2018

bauaw2003 BAUAW NEWSLETTER, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 2018

Listen to 'The Daily': Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?

Feds extend deadline for public comments on future draft

They need to hear from us!

Courage to Resist Podcast: The Future of Draft Registration in the United States

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------**---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*October 20-21, 2018

Cindy Sheehan and the Women's March on the Pentagon

A movement not just a protest

Different wings of the same warbird

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------**---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------**---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Free Leonard Peltier!

On my 43rd year in prison I yearn to hug my grandchildren.

By Leonard Peltier

Art by Leonard Peltier

Write to:Leonard Peltier 89637-132 USP Coleman I P.O. Box 1033 Coleman, FL 33521Donations can be made on Leonard's behalf to the ILPD national office, 116 W. Osborne Ave, Tampa, FL 33603*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

GOP Tax Plan Would Give 15 of America's Largest Corporations a $236B Tax Cut: Report

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October 20-21, 2018

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Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman I
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Donations can be made on Leonard's behalf to the ILPD national office, 116 W. Osborne Ave, Tampa, FL 33603

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