The $27 million in regressive sales tax money diverted from potentially legitimate Blueprint projects to enhance the football experience of powerful white friends of the Chamber of Commerce and Florida State University (FSU) trustees who could care less about poor people in general and Black and brown people in particular, represents a betrayal. It is a betrayal by Nick Maddox and every single Black politician that sold their souls in support of this FSU monstrosity. These include Bill Proctor, Carolyn Cummings, Curtis Richardson and Dianne Williams Cox.
Civil rights defenders on Thursday welcomed a ruling by a federal judge who struck down parts of a Florida voter suppression law, calling racism “a motivating factor” in the GOP-backed legislation’s passage.
In a 288-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker blocked provisions of Florida’s Senate Bill 90, a massive attack on voting rights signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2020. The law empowers partisan poll watchers, imposes strict voter ID requirements, criminalizes so-called “ballot harvesting,” limits ballot drop boxes, and bans advocacy groups from handing out food or water to voters waiting in long lines.
“At some point, when the Florida Legislature passes law after law disproportionately burdening Black voters, this court can no longer accept that the effect is incidental,” Walker wrote. “Based on the indisputable pattern set out above, this court finds that, in the past 20 years, Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters because of their propensity to favor Democratic candidates.”
Cecile Scoon, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida — the lead plaintiff in the case — said in a statement that “for democracy to work, it must include all voices. A federal judge has ruled that the Florida Legislature has engaged in decades of intentional discrimination against Black voters with a series of voting laws” like S.B. 90.
In an extraordinary move, the judge also placed Florida under preclearance requirements for the next decade — a power granted to federal courts under Section 3(c) of the VRA if they find that jurisdictions have engaged in intentional discrimination in voting practices.
“Senate Bill 90 was clearly an anti-voter measure that raised barriers to voting for marginalized groups with specific impacts on elderly voters, voters with disabilities, students, and communities of color,” Scoon added. “The league is gratified that once again the constitutional rights of all of Florida’s voters have superseded partisan politics and that the targeted attack on Black voters will be stopped.”
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) senior counsel Amia Trigg said that “today’s decision is a huge win for Florida voters. This decision recognized that S.B. 90 is the latest stain in a long history of voting laws which restrict Black political participation.”
Walker’s ruling also placed Florida in Voting Rights Act preclearance status — meaning the state must receive federal approval before passing new voting laws — for the next decade, because its Republican officials have “repeatedly, recently, and persistently acted to deny Black Floridians access to the franchise.”
“Without preclearance, Florida could continue to enact such laws, replacing them every legislative session if courts view them with skepticism,” the judge wrote. “Such a scheme makes a mockery of the rule of law.”
Walker also took aim at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holderruling, accusing the justices of “gutting” the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance regime.
“As Judge Walker acknowledged, this is part of a larger assault on voting rights that continues across the country,” Trigg said. “We’re seeing the right to vote being targeted at every level of government. Therefore, it is crucial that we continue this fight.”
“Every voice deserves to be heard in our democracy, and state officials must ensure that by making elections fair and accessible — not by creating unnecessary obstacles to the ballot box,” she added. “This ruling is extremely encouraging for those of us on the frontlines.”
Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the advocacy group Common Cause, said that “our ‘government by the people’ is stronger and more representative when all of us can participate in it.”
“But as the court found today, for the past 20 years, ‘Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters’ as the Legislature worked to pick and choose the voters they want to participate in our government — and the voters they want to exclude,” she added. “This is completely antithetical to our ideals of what a government ‘by the people’ ought to look like. We particularly appreciate that Judge Walker is insisting on 10 years of preclearance through his court.”
According to Edward Hailes, the then-general counsel for the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the intentional disenfranchisement by GOP-led Florida officials of thousands of Black voters “was outcome-determinative” in the state’s — and therefore the nation’s, given the decisive role played by Florida — 2000 presidential election results.
Some observers noted the unlikelihood of Walker’s ruling surviving an appeal to the 11th Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court, with its 6-3 right-wing supermajority.
This opinion in Florida voting rights case is extraordinary. It’s a full throated (and in my view entirely appropriate given Congress’s intent) application of the Voting Rights Act, calling out Fla for its discrimination against Black voters, knowing it will likely be reversed.
“We’ve seen other district courts do aggressive things in election law cases, and we’ve seen a lot of those decisions get reversed by appellate courts or the Supreme Court,” Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor and election law expert, toldThe New York Times.” I wouldn’t be shocked if this litigation falls into that pattern.”
Just after dawn on September 16, 2021, E.E. and six other African immigrant men were resting in their bunks at the Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Florida, when Captain John Gadson and a group of at least 15 sheriff’s deputies stormed in, as Truthout reported, pepper spraying them in the eyes before dragging them to solitary confinement cells.
E.E. and the others sat in solitary with pepper spray burning their skin, prohibited from showering until the next day. On September 17, E.E. received paperwork with charges — but someone else’s name was on it. Nine days later, he and the others finally had a hearing. They learned Glades would keep them in solitary for 30 days, the maximum time allowed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policy, under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“We are being targeted,” wrote E.E. in a formal complaint to the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Seventy-seven such complaints have been submitted by or on behalf of people detained at Glades since 2017, particularly for denial of medical care and excessive force, according to the new Florida Detention Database from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida. Advocates say testimonies like these played a key part in the pressure that led to ICE’s decision on March 25 to “limit” the use of Glades County Detention Center. Understanding the history of the Glades County Detention Center shows why ICE’s attempts at reform are not enough.
“It May Smell Like Money to Some People”
Conditions in DHS’s immigration prisons have been under scrutiny the entire 20 years of ICE’s existence, just as the agency’s predecessors had also experienced critiques, arguably all the way back to Ellis Island in the 1890s. But there are major differences under ICE — namely, the massive scale of detention, both in the number of people and the amount of time they are held.
This has resulted in a major upsurge in national and international interest, and outrage over the immigration policies that have become a defining characteristic of the United States, right alongside its unmatched behemoth of a prison system. Groups that may have previously focused on reforms and piecemeal improvements via legislation and litigation are joining in the call for a complete “shut down” of ICE detention centers.
Nonpartisan groups like the ACLU have joined much smaller, and often grassroots, volunteer-led organizations, issuing powerful statements, such as this one from September 2021, by ACLU Campaign Strategist Isra Chaker: “While the Biden administration has halted some of the former administration’s cruelest policies, far too many unjust anti-immigrant policies remain, and thousands of immigrants are paying the price.” Chaker noted that, until the 1980s, most immigrants were not detained while navigating the legal process, but today detention has become the norm rather than the exception.
The reason has become painfully obvious to most anyone who takes a look, including the Government Accounting Office (GAO), which issued a report on ICE detention in February 2021. The report notes that of the $3.14 billion provided to operate its immigrant prisons, hundreds of millions in public dollars are wasted on empty beds, often being paid for under the terms of private contracts.
These profiteering interests operate over 70 percent of ICE facilities, and they lobby hard to keep them open.
Citing a similar profit motive, in March 2021, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) led a letter to President Biden’s Director of Domestic Policy Susan Rice and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, calling for an end to ICE contracts with local jails and prisons. “Some of the worst examples of abuse and retaliation against detained immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic … occurred in jails and prisons operated by localities,” wrote Omar.
In 2018, the Vera Institute’s “In Our Backyards” series, which took a close look at the financing of jails and prisons around the U.S., did a deep dive into the history of one such local facility contracting with ICE, in Glades County, Florida. The history and present-day happenings at Glades reflect a much bigger picture of abuse and corruption at all levels, but also of the resistance that is bringing urgent changes to the immigrant detention policies of this country.
The Vera report on Glades highlighted the shady dealings that landed the financing to build a far bigger jail than the county would ever need. The Vera report also looked at the social history of county. As the authors, Jacob Kang-Brown and Jack Norton, summarized it:
What is now called Glades County was a place of refuge where people would go to try and live full lives away from state-sponsored racial violence. In the decades before Florida was admitted to the union as a slave state in 1845, Creek and other native people migrated to Spanish-controlled Florida along with enslaved people of African descent fleeing the United States. Their descendants created the Seminole nation in what is now known as the Everglades — swampland that extends from present-day Orlando to the end of the peninsula. During the Seminole Wars in the nineteenth century, many of their descendants were killed or forcibly relocated to Oklahoma by the U.S. government. Many of those who remained were moved to a number of small reservations, including the Brighton Reservation which lies within the borders of Glades County…
Burning sugar cane and a rainbow near Clewiston, on the route to Glades County, Florida.Wendy King
Kang-Brown and Norton note that in the 1920s and ‘30s, Glades County’s swampland was drained so sugarcane could be farmed there. Clewiston-based U.S. Sugar, in nearby Hendry County, now owns much of Glades County’s land. “During the harvest season, sheets of thick white smoke rise above the fields where workers burn the cane before harvesting and shipping it to the nearby refinery,” wrote Kang-Brown and Norton. Visitors to the Glades County Detention Center (GCDC) have noticed sugarcane ash dusting their cars, and a distinct smell in the area.
“It has an odor,” said County Commissioner John Ahern, in an interview with Kang-Brown and Norton. “It may smell like money to some people.”
Most of the land in the county — 86 percent — is farmland. Much of what isn’t U.S. Sugar’s property is owned and ranched by the Lykes Brothers corporation, where 65,000 cattle outnumber people at a near five to one ratio, as of 2020 reports.
At first glance, it could be easy to write off the area as another rural stronghold of conservative and reactionary politics, ripe for a prison economy. A closer look paints another picture. The Seminole and Miccosukee people on and off the reservation lands of South Florida continue to consider themselves unconquered. While a significant number of their population was shipped out to Oklahoma in tandem with the Trail of Tears, the war waged against their community of Indigenous and escaped African refugees is considered by historian Richard J. Procyk as the “most protracted armed conflict engaged in by U.S. armed forces” until the Vietnam War. But resistance in the area is not just history from 150 years ago.
Seminole people have continued to push back on the U.S. government for much of the past century on issues including relations with Cuba; gaming rights; land and water use; and energy infrastructure. Into the ’80s and ’90s, the more recently arrived local people, largely descendants of European settlers, have been fighting land use battles against the county’s cattle barons. After a campaign of sabotage against Lykes’ fences that limited public access to the county’s much-loved Fisheating Creek, a 1998 victory in circuit court ruled that the waterway belonged to the people of Florida, liberating over 18,000 acres surrounding the waterway back into the commons.
And in Collier County, one county over from Glades, lies the farmworker stronghold of Immokalee, where the immigrant agricultural workers, primarily from Mexico, Central America and Haiti, have been capturing international attention since the ’90s and 2000s for labor sit-downs, blockades, hunger strikes and massive anti-corporate boycotts that brought multinational fast-food giants like McDonald’s and Taco Bell to the negotiating table.
This history is the backdrop for the fight to shut down ICE at GCDC just as much as that of big sugar, corporate cowboys and corruption.
“If You Build It, We’ll Fill It”
Since the construction of the immigrant detention center, Glades County commission meetings have had three predictable elements: the Pledge of Allegiance, a prayer for the county and Commissioner Ahern reporting on how many “customers” ICE is sending to the jail.
The county began building this $33 million facility in 2002, the same year that Congress — riding a wave of nationalism and xenophobia in the wake of 9/11 — passed the bipartisan legislation that created ICE. Hoping this new agency would imprison hundreds of immigrants at a time in their rural county, Glades County leaders constructed a 546-bed jail, with about 450 beds reserved for those in ICE custody.
“They said if you build it, we’ll fill it,” noted Stuart Whiddon, Glades’ sheriff at the time. If filled, the jail would be profitable to the county. ICE would pay $80.64 per person, per day (raised to $90 in 2017, according to county and ICE records). Only 22 percent of that would go to food and medical care for those detained, which has led to inevitably deplorable conditions. Food was reported as frequently bug-infested and rancid; “shit water,” as one detained man called it, poured into sleeping areas from a broken second floor toilet; medical staff denied life-saving medications and surgeries. “The nurse told me that just having a heart attack or being on the floor is the only way to get me to the hospital,” another detained man reported.
Shaving what they spend on detained people down to a sliver has left sizable chunks for sheriff’s department wages, as their staff oversees day-to-day operations, and for investors.
Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Florida.Rebecca Talbot
Though the Glades detention center is not owned by a private, for-profit company like GEO Group (which does happen to operate a state prison directly across the street), the county jail nevertheless has investors hoping to profit from the incarceration of immigrants. Specifically, OppenheimerFunds, Inc. in New York City purchased a majority stake of the tax-exempt bonds that covered the entire $33 million it cost to build the jail, expecting to be paid back with interest once it was full. Lest the county be held liable if the bonds couldn’t be repaid, Glades County leaders, including Ahern and Whiddon, formed a nonprofit called the Glades Correctional Development Corporation as a buffer. During an IRS audit in 2017, the nonprofit converted the bonds to taxable to comply with new regulations, by which time it had helped bondholders avoid $23.5 million of income tax. (OppenheimerFunds was acquired by Invesco in May 2019, at which point it managed over $229 billion in assets.)
Over the years, Ahern’s reports on jail numbers have been riddled with anxiety. In 2014, when numbers in detention dipped to 68, the jail nearly closed. Only during Donald Trump’s presidency was ICE consistently filling Glades with “customers.”
At every commission meeting, between the pledge of allegiance and Ahern’s “customer” report, the commissioners pray that they would do their best to serve Glades County. They do not mention pepper spray, or burning skin and eyes. They never say the name of Valery Joseph, a Haitian 23-year-old with learning disabilities who died at Glades the year after the detention center opened. They never mention Onoval Perez Montufar, a 51-year-old Mexican man who died of COVID-19 there in 2020. And they don’t speak of the multiple women who have come forward about sexual harassment and violations of the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
Serving Glades County, as the commissioners define it, means praying their jail stays full.
“Boy, You’re in Glades County”
“When it comes to us, the Africans, they have a problem with us,” said one of the African men who was assaulted and pepper sprayed along with E.E. Just one month before these seven Africans were targeted, seemingly for their race and ethnicity, GCDC had been required to pay damages to five other detained African immigrants they had targeted earlier with religious discrimination, racial slurs and violent abuse.
Before coming to Glades, these five had spent 40 hours shackled to their seats –– chained at the wrists, legs and waists –– on an ICE-chartered flight in December 2017, along with 87 other Somali men and women. The plane left for Somalia, then sat in Senegal for 23 hours after stopping there to refuel, then abandoned the deportation and returned to Miami, citing logistical problems.
During those 40 hours, the 92 Somalis report being forced to urinate in bottles or in their seats when the toilets filled up after so many people spent so much time on board. They were beaten, choked, threatened, violently dragged down the plane aisles, denied medical care and placed in full-body restraints just for asking guards questions. When they landed in Miami, some of the men had serious injuries, doctors reported.
After the horrors of their flight, more than half of the Somalis on board were imprisoned at Glades, where abuse continued. Glades staff “said things like, ‘We’re sending you boys back to the jungle,’” according to Lisa Lehner, an attorney at Americans for Immigrant Justice. Much like E.E., they were thrown in solitary confinement for no reason, pepper sprayed in the face until they vomited, and then denied showers to wash the burning chemicals from their skin.
Through all this abuse, Glades denied them the right to seek solace in the rhythms of their faith. The lawsuit that required Glades to pay damages, filed February 27, 2019, stated that Glades prevented prayer services “deprived plaintiffs of religiously compliant meals and instead provided them with food that is inedible, nutritionally deficient, or both; and failed to provide Plaintiffs with essential and commonplace religious articles that are necessary for their religious practice, including Qur’ans, prayer rugs, and head-coverings.”
When one of the Somali nationals confronted the chaplain about this, the latter allegedly retorted, “Boy, you’re in Glades County.”
History repeats itself in Glades County because no amount of oversight, bad press or even financial consequences seem to curb the sheriff department’s racist abuse.
Even in 2018, the complaint that documented the abuse against the Somali nationals noted, “These allegations against Glades are not new. For many years, nonprofit organizations have documented abuses and inadequacies at Glades.”
Lehner added, “The guards and the administration up there at Glades, they think they’re immune. To me, it’s so brazen to be doing this. They know there’s a federal case. They know we’re up there all the time. They know there are investigators up there.”
The Glades County Detention Center, like ICE itself, has shown that it cannot be reformed.
“All Stuck in an Unsanitary Box Together”
The alleged pattern of brazen abuse at Glades, coupled with the profit motive that drives the center to skimp on life-saving medical care and basic sanitation, has made it one of the nation’s worst detention centers for COVID-19 infections. This medical neglect is what led to the death of Onoval Perez Montufar on July 11, 2020, just one week after he arrived at Glades. His niece has described how Perez Montufar begged for medical care to no avail. He was not even taken to the hospital until one of his dorm mates demanded an ambulance.
Immigrant advocates hold a vigil for Onoval Perez-Montufar, who died of Covid-19 at the Glades County Detention Center on July 11, 2020.Wendy King
Those detained at Glades had long feared such an outcome. In March 2020, at the very start of the pandemic’s spread in the United States, about 100 detained immigrants at Glades went on hunger strike, using one of the few methods of resistance available to them to protest the deterioration of already unhygienic conditions. The hunger strikers reported “a lack of antibacterial soap, lack of testing, overcrowding, inedible food and the danger posed by in-transfers from other facilities.”
It would be the first of many hunger strikes and other actions taken by people inside Glades as COVID-19 spread, leaving death and debilitating symptoms in its wake for the hundreds of people exposed to the virus there. From the start of the pandemic to the present, imprisoned immigrants at the facility have protested the conditions of their confinement. In addition to the hunger strikes, they initiated commissary boycotts, federal complaints, op-ed articles and a lawsuit against ICE.
Immigrants imprisoned protest their life-threatening exposure to Covid-19 at the Glades County Detention Center in June 2020.Wendy King
Their actions were part of national resistance inside the walls of detention centers. When COVID-19 began to spread worldwide, detained people knew exactly what it would mean for them. They knew it would be impossible to social distance. They knew there could be no meaningful steps to sanitize squalid, deteriorating facilities. They knew ICE cared nothing for their lives.
“Please, if this gets out, we are helpless,” one detained person at Glades said of the virus. “We are all stuck in an unsanitary box together.”
Immigrants went on hunger strike nationwide. One hundred and forty immigrants at Hudson and Essex, two county-owned facilities outside of New York City, went on strike for 15 days from late 2020 to early 2021. Immigrants in the nearby Bergen jail went on hunger strike for a month just prior to that. “We are tired of the inhumane treatment we receive from the authorities,” a hunger striker wrote. “We are tired of being treated like the worst criminals.”
At York County Prison in August 2021, 35 immigrants went on hunger strike to demand their release after the county terminated its contract with ICE. With the facility closing, they wanted to join loved ones close by rather than being transferred to a distant facility. ICE swiftly retaliated against the York hunger strikers, denying them access to phones, TVs and showers. Five of the strike’s organizers were thrown in solitary.
When York and Essex closed, many who had been detained there were sent a thousand miles south to Glades — including E.E. — in what appears to have been a retaliation transfer, using the poor conditions and known racism in Florida jails and prisons as punishment for resistance.
Yet many of those transferred from the Northeast continued to resist, joining those already detained at Glades. They’ve continued to file federal complaints, speak to the media and make public declarations.
In mid-September 2021, as ICE filled Glades with men and women transferred from other states, around 100 people went on hunger strike to demand immediate release, sanitary conditions, personal protective equipment, access to phones and no deportations. The strikers also raised concern about how crowded the facility was as yet another COVID-19 outbreak tore through the facility and Glades kept everyone “quarantined” together: seriously ill people, people with symptoms and those who were still healthy — just as Glades has done throughout the entire pandemic.
“Winning the Fight of Our Lives”
Even as the Biden administration has taken steps toward improving the path to citizenship for some immigrants, there are nearly 5,000 more immigrants in detention in March 2022 than at the end of the Trump administration. The number of detained people had dropped to 15,000 in January 2021, down from 38,000 in March 2020, pre-pandemic (which was also down significantly from May 2019, when ICE reported 52,398 detained immigrants — the highest in the agency’s history). But, despite widespread protests demanding abolition of the agency entirely, the number detained began climbing steadily since the White House last changed hands.
“We did have hope for the Biden administration that they would at least very significantly limit or lessen the use of immigration detention,” said Kathrine Russell, an immigration attorney with RAICES (Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services). “Unfortunately, that does not seem to have happened whatsoever.”
Advocates continue to express that even the promise of citizenship is not enough so long as immigrant communities are being crushed by the abuse and trauma of detention in places like Glades and deported away from loved ones and communities.
“We cannot act like the path to legalization is a path flowing with milk and honey,” writes Subhash Kateel, co-founder and former co-director of Families For Freedom, a human rights organization by and for families facing and fighting deportation. “It is a necessary step in a path towards a greater vision of social justice.”
That greater vision of social justice, writes Kateel, must build power in immigrant communities.
We must stop talking about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants and build with those most affected. This is the only way to build a movement with more depth. Families that have survived the prison-industrial complex are not sob stories and charity cases; they are individuals that have survived one of the most sophisticated systems this society has for marginalizing someone.
The solutions, according to Kateel, must come from immigrants themselves and must protect what they have already learned and built on the road to freedom. Lastly, winning “the fight of our lives” must also confront DHS directly and creatively.
Kateel initially wrote these words in his essay, “Winning the Fight for Our Lives,” published by Prison Legal News and other outlets back in 2008, and then included in a 2012 book anthology, Beyond Walls and Cages.
While it has been over a decade since its initial publication, the crux of the position rings true, louder than ever, following the past two years of COVID-19-related protests, uprisings and lawsuits from inside prisons and detention facilities.
“If the immigrant rights movement doesn’t understand raids, detention, and deportation in the context of the greater prison-industrial complex, and organize accordingly, we will lose the fight of our lives — a fight we can and must win,” writes Kateel, making the case that detained immigrants and non-immigrant prisoners, their families and support networks, have much to learn from each other.
“If Glades Continues to Break the Law, ICE Must Terminate Its Contract”
The fight at Glades is not over, but the Shut Down Glades Coalition — a grassroots group of local and national organizations — has seen wins, and a growing glimmer of future victories to come. Most significantly, by the latter part of March 2022, no one was detained in ICE custody at Glades, and on March 25, ICE announced that it was “limiting the use” of Glades, and would stop paying Glades for the guaranteed minimum of beds that it had begun funding during the pandemic (first 425 beds, and then 300).
“The long, disturbing record of inhumane treatment at this facility demands this move,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida), who has led members of Congress in calling for a full closure. “I will continue to closely monitor this contract, and press for its complete termination if anything close to the abhorrent mistreatment persists.”
The coalition continues to push for the contract to end and never be reinstated, as is happening in other local jurisdictions across the country, including two other county-run ICE detention centers in Florida: Monroe and Wakulla.
“Through our monitoring of immigration detention,” said Sofia Casini, Director of Visitation Advocacy Strategies at Freedom for Immigrants, “we have documented that ICE often empties detention centers in the face of public scrutiny only to refill them months later under a veil of secrecy. We won’t let that happen here. Reform is not possible. This has been proven time and again. The Biden administration must cut the Glades contract before it’s up for renewal next month.”
The Shut Down Glades Coalition points to media exposure of Glades’ abuses as central to their strategy. This media coverage, combined with social media pressure and requests from the coalition, has led members of Congress to call on DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas twice now to shut the detention center down for good. Most recently, on February 2, 2022, a group of 17 members of the U.S. House called for the immediate closure of Glades, citing at least 15 civil rights complaints having been filed during the Biden administration alone, causing oversight divisions of DHS to launch investigations. Additionally, environmental law organization Earthjustice joined the Shut Down Glades Coalition in calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate GCDC for exposing immigrants to toxic chemicals multiple times a day. (Civil rights complaints requesting an investigation by DHS can be filed whenever a person’s rights are violated while they are in detention. Complaints can be made via an official DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties form or by writing a letter. See below for the mailing address and email address.)
On top of these numerous complaints and actions, the ACLU of Florida and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) announced on January 24, 2022, that, unless Glades provides prompt redress, they will pursue legal action against the facility for illegally deleting video surveillance footage — a violation of federal regulations, which could be used to substantiate the multiple reports of abuse under investigation.
“The deletion of surveillance footage at Glades is the latest example of ICE’s appalling failure to follow and uphold critical recordkeeping laws,” said CREW Senior Counsel Nikhel Sus, in a statement about filing their complaint alongside the ACLU. “It is shameful that ICE appears to be comfortable with keeping the public in the dark about abuses taking place in one of its detention centers. ICE and NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] must intervene as legally required, and if Glades continues to break the law, ICE must terminate its contract with the center.”
The CREW statement explains that Glades’ destruction of security footage isn’t the only example of ICE attempting to dodge recordkeeping laws. “In 2019, ICE obtained permission from the National Archives to destroy years’ worth of sexual assault and death investigation records from ICE facilities across the country — a plan later blocked by a federal judge following a lawsuit filed by CREW.”
Most importantly in all of this work, organizers with Shut Down Glades say, is that deportations have been halted and people have been released.
Just days after E.E. participated in a federal complaint about the threats and brutality he was targeted for at Glades, ICE attempted to deport him and two other Liberian men who had been targeted alongside him. E.E. contacted his lawyer soon after he was transferred, en route to his deportation flight. Advocates in South Florida, as well as those in the Northeast who had known these men earlier, worked together to contact members of Congress in Florida and Pennsylvania, who then demanded a halt to the deportations. Calls to action blasted across social media. A small group of coalition members showed up unannounced at the ICE field office and demanded a meeting with the field office director — and then posted the video of ICE officials trying to dissuade them, until they eventually got their meeting. Ultimately, these three men were granted Z-holds, temporarily halting their deportations while ICE and the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties investigated both their original complaint and the deportation attempt.
Soon after, a Liberian man who was one of the seven African immigrants, was released.
ICE tried a second time to deport E.E. and others referenced in the complaint. His deportation was halted once again through a combination of advocacy and his own resistance.
Today, E.E. is free. His immigration case is entirely closed, and he is at home with his family in Pennsylvania. He says the first thing he did upon release was spend time with his two children, as many among the more than 22,000 currently remaining in ICE detention also long to do. “If Glades is closed,” E.E. told the Shut Down Glades Coalition in January, shortly after his release, “the people who are there now should be released. People need to be with their families.”
DHS Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Complaints can be emailed to CRCLCompliance@hq.dhs.gov or mailed to: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Compliance Branch, Mail Stop # 0190, 2707 Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave., SE, Washington, DC 20528-0190.
Republicans in Georgia have proposed their own version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, days before the deadline to submit new proposals in the legislature.
Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill passed the state Senate this week. If Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signs the bill, it will ban primary school teachers from discussing LGBTQ issues in classrooms, and restrict the ways that gender and sexuality can be discussed in high schools. LGBTQ advocates say that the bill will have disastrous outcomes – including preventing students from discussing issues that matter to them, and making it easier for students to bully their LGBTQ peers in the hallways.
The version of the bill that is currently being considered in Georgia differs slightly from Florida’s bill, in that it places restrictions on private schools in the state that receive government funding. But like Florida’s legislation, the bill would ban teachers from talking about “sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner not appropriate for the age and developmental stage of the student.”
Opponents of the bill were quick to criticize the group of 10 Republican legislators who proposed it at the last minute, some of whom are running for higher office in the state.
“GOP, get it through y’all’s heads that LGBTQ Georgians are not piñatas to bash in your campaign ads,” said state Rep. Matthew Wilson, an openly gay Democrat in Georgia’s House. “Your performative cruelty won’t erase us.”
The bill is “a throwback to decades of stigma that existed in the past,” said Jeff Graham, executive director of Georgia Equality. “It’s a concerted effort to roll back the clock and try to eliminate LGBTQ folks from public life.”
Although the bill has little chance of being passed by the time the legislative deadline hits, legal experts have warned that the bill could instead be offered up as an amendment to other bills, including to a separate piece of legislation that seeks to ban the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts” (such as the history of racism in the U.S.) in public school classrooms.
“The danger [of the bill] is lessened given the timing, but nothing is final ’til the gavel comes down on sine die,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University. “Beware the Christmas Tree Bill at the last hour.”
The Republican-controlled Florida legislature passed a bill on Wednesday that would create a special elections police force meant to monitor elections at the behest of far right Gov. Ron DeSantis, who says that he will sign it into law.
The bill would establish an Office of Election Crimes and Security within the Department of State, which is overseen by DeSantis. The 25-person office would allow DeSantis to appoint 10 police officers to investigate supposed election crimes —despite the fact that experts have repeatedly proven that election fraud doesn’t exist at a scale that would even begin to approach affecting election results.
Appointing police officers to monitor elections to probe for non-existent voter fraud is nakedly fascist. This move is indicative of the fact that the U.S. is in fascism’s “legal phase,” as fascism scholar Jason Stanley noted in The Guardian late last year.
The bill is the most extreme yet in Republicans’ push to suppress voters en masse, and voting rights advocates say that it will disproportionately affect Black voters.
“The governor’s personal goon force will exist to do only one thing: intimidate Black voters,” Walter Shaub, senior ethics fellow for the Project on Government Oversight, said on Twitter.
“It’s also gonna be a felony to take your sick grandma’s ballot to a drop box for her, unless you strap her in a cart and wheel her down there with you,” Shaub continued, referencing the fact that the bill makes it a felony for a voter to bring other people’s ballots to a dropoff location, which would disproportionately affect disabled or elderly people. The punishment for that is a hefty fine of up to $50,000 and five years in prison.
Even before Republicans began passing exceedingly punitive voter suppression laws, Black voters were already punished harshly and disproportionately for supposed election fraud, often in cases where they had just made a simple mistake. Black people are also disproportionately the target of police violence and surveillance.
Republicans claim —as they have for over a year as they pass dozens of voter suppression bills across the country —that the new bill is about election integrity. But the laws are actually an extreme reaction to former President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020, and an attempt to give Republican lawmakers more control over election results in the future.
Republicans haven’t provided any evidence that widespread voter fraud is a legitimate issue. Though increased voter suppression laws from Republicans have already alarmed voting rights advocates, the current bill is one of the starkest signs yet that the GOP is openly embracing authoritarianism.
“Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking Orwell’s 1984 and running with it into a despotic dystopia of his own feverish imagining with his hoped-for, first-in-the-nation creation of an Office of Election Crimes and Security to ensure ‘elections are conducted in accordance with the rule of law,’ though, in fact, they already are,” wrote Abby Zimet for Common Dreams.
The blatant voter suppression is just one example of the right’s increasing embrace of facism; as Henry Giroux noted for Truthout in November, DeSantis and the GOP’s attacks on education, and their efforts to punish educators for teaching about race, LGBTQ issues, and diversity, are also a sign of rising fascism on the right.
Republicans’ attacks on public and higher education are “closely aligned to a fascist politics that despises anyone who holds power accountable and sees as an enemy anyone who fosters liberating forms of social change or attempts to resist the right wing’s politics of falsehoods and erasure,” Giroux wrote.
We speak with Chase Strangio of the ACLU about recent anti-LGBTQ measures in Florida, Texas and Idaho, and pending bills in other states. Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” education bill aims to ban the mere discussion of sexuality and gender identity in schools. A bill in Idaho criminalizes gender-affirming healthcare for transgender children and teens. Meanwhile, welfare officials in Texas have begun to carry out Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s directive to launch child abuse investigations against parents who seek gender-affirming care for their transgender children. “What we’re seeing is a national, well-funded effort to attack and eradicate trans youth and trans lives specifically,” says Strangio, who is also an attorney in the ACLU’s lawsuit against Abbott.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. The Florida Senate voted Tuesday to ban the discussion of sexuality and gender identity in schools. The legislation known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill has faced mounting criticism from Democrats, rights advocates, many students and educators. Meanwhile the Idaho State House has passed a bill that would criminalize gender-affirming healthcare for trans children and teens. The bill makes it a felony punishable with life in prison for a doctor who provides gender-affirming care including surgeries and hormone treatments. It would also make it a felony to take trans youth out of the state to receive that care elsewhere. This all comes as a fight escalates in Texas over a directive by the Republican Governor Greg Abbott that orders state welfare officials to launch child abuse investigations against parents who seek gender-affirming care for their trans children. We go now to Chase Strangio, Deputy Director for Trans Justice with the ACLULGBTQ & HIV Project. The ACLU is part of a lawsuit to block the Texas directive. Chase, let’s start with Florida and what happened there.
CHASESTRANGIO: Thanks, Amy, and good morning. Starting specifically with Florida, we now have the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill that heads to Governor DeSantis’ desk. He has indicated his support for the bill. I want to make two just quick points about this piece of legislation as it relates to the legislation and the national context. First, we’re hearing a lot from supporters about how this is really targeting young children in classrooms, with an explicit prohibition in the K through three context. But as a parent of a fourth-grader, what are families like mine supposed to do? What are kids like mine supposed to do? Those are grades where people are urged to talk about their families, so what this does is it erases the possibility that young people can speak about their own lives, their own truth. That connects to this larger national context where what we’re seeing is a national well-funded effort to attack and eradicate trans youth and trans lives specifically. And that is not an effect of what we are seeing; that is the intention.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Can you talk a bit more about the context in which this and other bills are being advanced by Republican lawmakers, especially in Florida where DeSantis clearly is a potential presidential candidate?
CHASESTRANGIO: I think what we are seeing nationally is an effort to leverage and weaponize misinformation particularly about trans people to mobilize a political base in the lead-up to 2022 and 2024. This is happening in state houses across the country that are deeply gerrymandered, that have shifted incredibly far to the right as a result in large part of the Supreme Court’s decision in 2013 to gut the Voting Rights Act with the Shelby County versus Holder decision. So we can’t understand this national context without understanding the voter suppression that is happening, without understanding the efforts to restrict access to reproductive healthcare. There is a dynamic process that is mobilizing state control over people’s bodies through voter suppression structures in order to make it harder for people to survive in the lead-up to major national elections in 2022, the midterms, and then in 2024 with the presidential election. That is what we’re seeing from GOP leadership not just in Florida but also in places like South Dakota and Texas as well.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Chase, you’re an attorney in the case of Doe versus Abbott in Texas. Can you describe that case and what has happened so far?
CHASESTRANGIO: We really have to understand that there is an absolute crisis in Texas. Families are being terrorized by Governor Abbott’s completely extralegal and impermissible directive to the child welfare agency to start investigating families and threatening the general public with criminal prosecution if they do not report trans youth and their families to the child welfare agencies. Right now on the ground, we know that families are being investigated solely because they have transgender children. Teachers are being asked to report transgender children and their families to child welfare authorities and providers have cut off healthcare across the state. So the practical impact is catastrophic, and people are suffering. We filed a lawsuit to try to block this directive. We are currently in state court in Austin to try to stop the implementation of this directive at every level and that litigation continues. But the reality is that this national conversation and the actions by the Alabama legislature, Florida Legislature, and executive officials in Texas is having the effect of making it difficult if not impossible for trans young people to survive.
AMYGOODMAN: Texas, Chase. Are they threatening to take trans children away from their parents?
CHASESTRANGIO: They are threatening to take trans children away from their parents for the sole and exclusive purpose that their parents are loving and supporting them and providing them with medically necessary doctor-recommended healthcare. I cannot stress this enough. They are coming into homes, investigating families solely because parents love their kids and are providing care consistent with the recommendations of every major medical association in the United States.
AMYGOODMAN: The significance of what happened on Friday, the Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest pediatric hospital in the country announcing it is stopping prescribing gender-affirming hormone therapies?
CHASESTRANGIO: They have cut off care, canceled appointments. And we’re talking about lifesaving necessary care, so we have young people who are relying on this care to stabilize their health and well-being. A lot of this care is time-specific, so they’re pulling young people off of care that’s going to force them into their endogenous puberty. The extent of the fear and trauma is unimaginable right now and there’s very little recourse for many people. So we are fighting with everything we have to stop not only the implementation of these directives, but the fallout from them. Because it is not just these large hospitals, but individual providers, because of fear of criminal prosecution if they continue to follow their ethical obligation as doctors to treat their patients.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We only have about a minute left, but I’m wondering if you can talk about some of the legislation occurring in other states, for instance in Idaho, Iowa or Utah?
CHASESTRANGIO: I just want to highlight briefly that both Idaho and Alabama currently have felony bans on healthcare pending. If those bills pass—in Alabama, there’s one vote left in the House. In Idaho, it has to make it to the Senate. These are bills that also would be similarly catastrophic for trans people and we already have such a bill that thankfully we enjoined in Arkansas but our litigation continues there, and of course there are dozens of bills across the country still pending.
AMYGOODMAN: Specifically in Idaho, what you’re most concerned about happening there?
CHASESTRANGIO: I am concerned that this bill passes and all care is cut off. And not only is it cut off, that bill would make it a felony with potential life imprisonment not only to treat people in-state, but you take someone out of state to get the treatment. What are families supposed to do? As a parent, I simply cannot imagine what it must feel like to face criminal prosecution to try to keep your kid alive.
AMYGOODMAN: How many bills like this have been introduced around the country, Chase?
CHASESTRANGIO: We are facing a context now where over 35 states have introduced bills targeting transgender young people. Thankfully, we are able to stop some of them, but we are continuing to fight to the very end of these legislative sessions because there is an aggressive push to move these quickly through state legislatures.
AMYGOODMAN: We want to get into the details of these, so we’re going to do part two of our discussion with you right now. Chase Strangio, Deputy Director for Trans Justice with the ACLULGBTQ & HIV Project. That does it for our show. Democracy Now! is currently accepting applications for a Human Resources Manager. Learn more and apply at Democracynow.org. Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, Maria Taracena. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. Stay safe.
The Florida state senate passed legislation dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics on Tuesday as part of a broader attack on lessons about LGBTQ identity, sex education, racial justice and other subjects that are routinely exploited by right-wing media outlets and politicians to galvanize their base.
The legislation, known officially as HB 1557, would ban teachers from discussing sexual and gender identity in all classrooms below the fourth grade and require lessons for older students be “age appropriate,” a vague standard that opponents say would swamp cash-strapped public schools with expensive litigation. As advocates point out, the bill is also a “Don’t Say Trans” bill that comes as Republican policymakers in Texas, Alabama and beyond are attempting to score political points by eroding the rights of transgender youth and their parents.
LGBTQ and civil rights groups warn the legislation would muzzle teachers and students and foster an environment of intolerance at school for LGBTQ youth and students with gay, queer, trans and non-binary parents. Along with efforts to stifle history lessons and anti-racist curriculums, advocates say that putting LGBTQ students in the crosshairs of this partisan culture war is detrimental to their emotional and psychological well-being and flies in the face of efforts to prevent bullying.
For Black students and students of color who already struggle to feel safe at school, the harms of the anti-LGBTQ legislation would be “amplified ten-fold,” according to David J. Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), a leading Black LGBTQ+ civil rights group.
“No one gains from watching elected officials bully vulnerable children and their families in an attempt to deny that LGBTQ+ people exist and deserve love and respect,” Johns said in a statement.
Transgender, non-binary, gay, lesbian and bisexual youth report discrimination and mental health distress at notably higher rates than their cisgender and heterosexual peers, and LGBTQ youth of color are more likely to report suicidal thoughts, depression and anxiety that white LGBTQ youth. Nearly 52 percent Black LGBTQ+ students already feel unsafe in school due to their sexual orientation and 40 percent feel unsafe due to their gender expression, according to a national survey by NBJC.
“The reality is simple — this will hurt children, increase suicide rates among the LGBTQ+ kids, and hurt non-LGBTQ+ children who would benefit from learning to celebrate diversity and build skills that enable them to thrive in the real world,” Johns said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has defended the legislation and could soon sign the bill into law as school walkouts and protests continue to erupt in Florida. Students launched popular online petitions opposing the legislation, including one successful petition demanding that a student suspended from a high school in eastern Florida for organizing protests be allowed back into the classroom.
Victoria Kirby York, the deputy executive director of NBJC who is raising a young child with their wife, said DeSantis and Republicans such as Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas are exploiting the fears of a fringe minority in the GOP by othering queer kids with anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ policies in order to win back the White House in 2024.
“And the sad thing is that they are not thinking of the impact the other way around, or they are thinking about it or they don’t care, which is really a tragedy,” York said in an interview. “Kids who are queer-identified or kids of color, they are worried about getting their teachers fired for talking about their families.”
Like other right-wing bills targeting educators, the Florida legislation allows reactionary parents to file lawsuits against schools if they believe their child was exposed to “inappropriate” material. Nationally, only 28 percent of middle and high school students report learning about LGBTQ people and issues at school to begin with, according to the Trevor Project, a mental health advocacy group.
Advocacy groups say LGBTQ students in Florida and across the country are already denied inclusive sex education that affirms their identities and give them tools for staying safe and healthy, and the bill threatens to have a chilling effect on even the current (and already inadequate) educational efforts where they exist.
York said many young children are trying to figure out sex and gender as well as racial identity before their parents feel ready to talk about the “birds and the bees” — and some parents never have these conversations in the first place. Young children also want to talk about their parents at school, but what will teachers in Florida do now if queer parents come up? Will some children be able to talk about their parents, while kids with gay, bisexual, queer, trans and/or nonbinary parents feel punished because they are not allowed?
“Stigma and shame start early,” York said.
For many, public schools are seen as a safe haven for students who are not accepted by their parents, but the legislation would prohibit school policies that meant to prevent students from being outed to their parents and potentially facing abuse or even expulsion from their homes. Only one in three LGBTQ youth surveyed last year said their household was LGBTQ-affirming. Homelessness among LGBTQ youth is a longstanding problem, with up to 16 percent Black and multiracial youth reporting that they have experienced homelessness.
The legislation could also discourage educators from creating spaces for students that affirm their gender and sexual identities. Youth with access to such spaces reported lower rates of attempted suicide in 2021, the Trevor Project reports.
“Attempting to prevent students from knowing and feeling comfortable using words, histories and experiences will not make those words, histories and experiences disappear,” Johns said.
Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation comes as Abbott moves to block transgender kids from receiving gender-affirming health care in Texas. Lawmakers in Idaho passed similar legislation to block gender-affirming health care for youth this week. York said these measures — and the message they send to children, teenagers and adults — target some of the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our communities, including Black and Brown people who must also contend with the reality of racism at a young age.
Regardless of what politicians like DeSantis and Abbott do, York said parents must affirm their children and their identities, which is a “key indicator of success for our kids.”
“Parents like me are continuing to love and affirm their children … their identity and who they are begins to get shaped very early, and it’s important that they hear affirming messages early,” York said.
On Tuesday, activists promised action after the Florida legislature passed a bill that aims to restrict discussion of LGBTQ issues in classrooms throughout the state.
The Parental Rights in Education bill, which LGBTQ activists and allies have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, passed in the Florida Senate by a vote of 22 to 17. Two Republican senators crossed the aisle to join all Democratic lawmakers in the chamber in voting against the legislation.
The bill, which previously passed in the state House of Representatives, is now headed to the desk of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. In past statements, DeSantis has indicated that he supports the bill.
Activists have warned of severe consequences if the bill becomes law — including increased harassment of LGBTQ students and fewer consequences for individuals who bully them, due to vague language in the bill that might prevent victims from stepping forward.
If DeSantis signs the bill into law, it would go into effect starting July 1, meaning that it wouldn’t affect the current academic year but would apply to schools in the fall.
The author of the bill, Florida state Rep. Joe Harding (R), claims that the legislation isn’t meant to harm LGBTQ students, but rather to restrict school districts from “insert[ing] themselves” into discussions best left to families. However, the Senate sponsor of the bill, Sen. Dennis Baxley (R), has stated that the bill is meant to reduce the number of children that are coming out as LGBTQ in the state.
Although the bill is supported by some conservative parents and political groups in the state, polling from last month demonstrates that most Floridians are against its implementation. A University of North Florida poll found that 57 percent of state residents oppose the bill, while only 34 percent of residents want it to be passed.
Activists and lawmakers have decried the bill as hateful and detrimental to the well-being of children in Florida.
“The ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill isn’t just hateful — it’s homophobic and ignorant, and it only moves us further away from the progress we’ve made as a nation,” said Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Florida).
“All youth deserve to be validated, supported, and included in our schools,” GLAD said in a statement on Twitter. “This censorship bill sends a dangerous message to #LGBTQ+ youth and will hurt all Florida students’ ability to learn about their world.”
Others vowed to take legal action if the bill was signed into law and caused harm to LGBTQ youth.
“Let us be clear: should the vague language of this bill be interpreted in any way that causes harm to a single child, teacher, or family, we will lead legal action against the State of Florida to challenge this bigoted legislation,” read a social media post from Equality Florida, an LGBTQ rights group in the state.
On Monday, more than 500 students protested against the legislation by staging a walkout at Winter Park High School in Orange County, Florida. Will Larkins, a junior who helped organize the demonstration, vowed that students would continue protesting if DeSantis signed the bill into law.
“This is going to continue. If this passes, there will be protests everywhere,” Larkins said.
On Monday, hundreds of students staged a walkout at a high school in Orange County, Florida, demonstrating against a proposed bill that would limit discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools throughout the state.
More than 500 students participated in a protest at Winter Park High School, organized to oppose legislation — colloquially known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — that is currently being debated in the state Senate. The legislation would ban discussion of LGBTQ issues in primary school classrooms and severely curtail what can be discussed in older grades, and could have disastrous repercussions beyond lesson plans.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has signaled that he will sign the bill into law if it reaches his desk.
Students at Winter Park High School shouted slogans in support of their LGBTQ peers, chanting “We say Gay” to demonstrate their opposition to the bill. Students taking part in the demonstration also held signs in support of transgender students.
Students at my alma mater, Winter Park High School, protesting the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Will Larkins, a junior at the high school and one of the students who helped organize the protest, said that the walkouts would continue if the legislation moved forward or was eventually passed into law.
“We wanted to show our government that this isn’t going to stop,” Larkins said to CNN. “There were walkouts all last week. This is going to continue. If this passes, there will be protests everywhere.”
Jack Petocz, a junior who helped organize the walkout against the anti-LGBTQ bill, said that the principal of the school told him ahead of the event that he wasn’t allowed to hand out rainbow flags.
The school’s principal questioned “the intentions of our protest, asking if pride flags were relevant to opposition to the bill,” Petocz later explained. “I decided to move forward and handed the flags to other student organizers for distribution at the event.”
After the protest concluded, Petocz said that he was called into the principal’s office yet again, and suspended for being “disrespectful and openly advocating against staff.” The junior says that he plans to speak to his family’s lawyer about the events.
Experts predict that the “Don’t Say Gay” bill will have a detrimental effect on students if it is passed into law. “The likely outcome of the bill would be to deter teachers from addressing these issues and to chill open discussions and support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students,” Ryan Thoreson, a researcher at Human Rights Campaign, said in February.
It’s also possible that the bill could result in increased harassment of LGBTQ students, and less consequences for those who bully them; due to the bill’s vague language, students might feel as though they are unable to discuss their situation with teachers, and may be less willing to share that their LGBTQ status is the basis for their harassment
As the 2024 presidential campaign season comes into view, Republican hopefuls have been jockeying to position themselves on the hard-right edge of U.S. politics.
Their jockeying is not surprising, given how successful far right politicians like Donald Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, as well as strategists such as Steve Bannon, have been at riling up Republican primary voters.
Nowhere has this pivot rightward been more apparent than in Florida.
Since the 2020 election, Florida’s position on a range of issues — from abortion to the minimum wage — has only gotten more uncompromising. On abortion, legislators are currently contemplating a Mississippi-modeled 15-week ban. And in response to the grassroots push for a minimum wage, legislators are debating whether to bar cities from being able to create their own local living wage requirements that are higher than the statewide minimum. GOP state senators are also crafting legislation designed to massively dilute an initiative, passed with more than 60 percent support in 2020, that puts the state on a path to reach a $15 per hour minimum wage by 2026. Meanwhile, pandering to Trump’s big lie about the last election having been stolen from him, the Florida Senate is debating a bill to create a special police force devoted exclusively to rooting out purported voter fraud.
In recent months, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican legislators in the Sunshine State have begun vying with Texas to see which of the two red states can come up with the hardest-right policies, especially when it comes to immigration. Abbott, who is running for reelection later this year, has championed a Texas law encouraging undocumented immigrants to be arrested and prosecuted for trespassing, and has, over the past year, sent thousands of his state’s National Guard troops to the border.
Back in June 2019, DeSantis signed into law SB 168, which mandated that local law enforcement agencies cooperate with federal immigration authorities through enforcing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainer requests, and which banned local authorities from declaring their cities to be “sanctuary cities” in the face of then-President Trump’s onslaught against immigrant communities.
Critics compared it to the notorious SB 1070, passed in Arizona in 2010, which unleashed sheriff’s deputies and police against undocumented immigrants and led to a huge upsurge both in deportations from the state and in undocumented immigrants relocating to other, less harsh, locales.
Late last year, the Florida Department of Children and Families announced new rules aimed at cracking down on organizations such as shelters and churches that offer assistance to children who have crossed the border to the U.S. unaccompanied by adults. The department threatened not to renew the licenses or the funding of these organizations, in the hopes of forcing them to turn away the youthful would-be asylees.
More recently, Florida Republicans have advanced a bill, HB 1355, which ostensibly cracks down on companies that provide transportation to migrants who enter the country without documentation, prohibiting the state and municipalities from doing business with these companies. The bill, which was introduced by State Rep. John Snyder, is reportedly also a priority for DeSantis.
HB 1355 is worded in such a catch-all manner that it would target churches, food pantries and any other nonprofits that try to offer humanitarian assistance to migrants. As a result, the bill has no buy-in from Democrats. It is being aggressively pushed by DeSantis seemingly as a way to shore up his right flank against rival candidates such as Donald Trump, or Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, as he prepares for a possible presidential bid.
On Thursday of last week, the House State Affairs Committee passed the bill — which, in addition to clamping down on those who offer assistance to undocumented immigrants and would-be-asylees, also requires local law enforcement agencies to enter into so-called 287(g) agreements with ICE — making it all but certain that it will soon be the law of the land in Florida.
Snyder denies that his bill targets undocumented children, but it’s worded in a way that puts the burden of proof for a person’s immigration status on that individual, including children. The ACLU reacted furiously, putting out a statement asserting:
The most concerning provision of this bill is that it shamelessly targets children and asylum seekers by banning private businesses and organizations from providing transportation to immigrants in Florida. This would lead to private entities requiring proof of immigration status from every child or adult who intends to utilize their transportation service, would open the door to unlawful interrogations, and would exacerbate racial profiling and discrimination.
This is the exact sort of discrimination that law enforcement agencies such as Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s department in Maricopa County, Arizona, perfected after SB 1070 was passed, leading to numerous lawsuits and an increasingly fraught and polarized political environment in the state. This eventually culminated in Arpaio being driven from power by a newly organized, immigrant-led coalition.
The governor is proving adept at exploiting the sorts of wedge issues that most rile up the GOP base. His nativist policies will almost certainly end up harming young, vulnerable would-be asylees, without in any way addressing the huge, complex problems that lead so many young people to seek asylum in the first place. But despite this — or maybe because of it — he has enjoyed wild popularity among Republicans after pushing these policies. DeSantis is polling eight points ahead of his likely Democratic rival, one-time Gov. Charlie Crist, in the upcoming election. In fact, DeSantis’s positioning of Florida as a perceived counterpoint to the Biden administration and its immigration policies have helped him carve out a position as a standard-bearer for conservatives over the coming election cycles. I doubt he will relinquish that position any time soon.
Legislation aimed at curtailing conversations relating to LGBTQ issues in Florida classrooms may become more restrictive than originally planned, as the bill’s author has placed an amendment on the proposal that would require teachers to “out” their students to their parents if they discover their sexual orientation is anything but heterosexual — even if doing so produces predictable harms to a child’s well-being.
The legislation, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Joe Harding, bans discussion of LGBTQ issues in primary school classrooms and places severe limits on how such topics can be talked about in older grades, subjecting a wide range of discussions to an undefined age-appropriate litmus test.
“The likely outcome of the bill would be to deter teachers from addressing these issues and to chill open discussions and support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students,” Ryan Thoreson, a researcher at Human Rights Campaign, wrote earlier this month.
The bill also originally required teachers to disclose to parents or guardians information about a student’s sexual orientation if they found out that a student is gay, transgender, or anything other than a cisgender heterosexual person. But the bill as it was initially written allowed for teachers to hold back on releasing that information to parents if they believed doing so could result in abuse or neglect of the student.
Harding’s latest amendment removes that option, instead requiring teachers or other school staff to “out” students to their parents or guardians within six weeks of discovery, regardless of possible detrimental and harmful outcomes.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is supportive of the bill, said he backs the amendment, saying recently that he opposes keeping parents “out in the dark” about their children’s LGBTQ status. But activists said the idea is a dangerous one that could cause harm to children in the state.
The amendment is an “all-out attack on LGBT students and families,” said Michael Womack with Equality Florida, adding that Republicans have “doubled down on the cruelty of this bill with this new amendment and it’s disgusting.”
“Discovering one’s sexuality and sharing that information (or not) is for an individual to decide, not for a school administrator to creep around, seeking to weaponize their ‘findings,’” the Color of Change Twitter account opined.
Alejandra Caraballo, clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, also noted that the bill as proposed could result in a new way for bullies to harass their peers in the hallways, without a way for LGBTQ students to tell school staff about it, lest they get outed to their parents, too.
“A horrific aspect of the new Don’t Say Gay bill amendment is that it creates a massive incentive for students to extort and blackmail queer students,” Caraballo wrote. “They couldn’t tell a teacher because the school staff will still be forced to out the kids. How much abuse will this bill enable?”
A plurality of Floridians have stated that they are against the implementation of the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, even before the new amendment was added on. According to findings from a Public Opinion Research Lab survey, nearly half (49 percent) of Florida residents oppose adopting the measure, while just 40 percent say they want it passed.
Police have been handing out department-made fliers advertising a website selling Donald Trump merch to drivers at traffic stops in Miami-Dade County, the Miami Heraldrecently reported.
The fliers included a link to a website — miami-dadeclerk.com — where people with traffic citations can pay off fines or register for driving school. But the first instance of the link on the flier was missing a hyphen, even though the correct link was included later in the flier.
People who visited the incorrect link were redirected to an online store with Amazon links. The page, at findsale.com, advertised items including pro-Trump flags with sayings like “Let’s Go Brandon” and “Hillary Belongs in Prison, Joe Belongs in a Nursing Home.”
Also for sale was a 97-minute film called Trump 2024: The World After Trump, which features far right figures like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and PragerU founder Dennis Prager. The film bills itself as exposing the “aggressive movement to transform America, strip away its freedoms and Judeo-Christian values.”
It’s unclear why the link, which now redirects to a Florida judicial commission website, originally redirected to the website with the Trump merchandise. The Washington Post found that the non-hyphenated site is hosted by Epik, which also hosts far right websites like Gab and Parler, which were kicked off of other hosting services for platforming hate speech and violence.
Greetings, Miami Beach Twitter: Were you stopped by Miami Beach police and issued one of these fliers on how to resolve a minor citation online? Would like to hear from you. pic.twitter.com/HbD3xZciq0
Miami Beach police spokesperson Ernesto Rodriguez told the Miami Herald that the incorrect link was a typo and that police are launching an inquiry into the incident. According to Rodriguez, the department had received copies of the flier with the correct links from the county, but it “produced its own version of the notices and the error was inserted at some point during the printing process.”
One state judge, Judge Steve Leifman, said that it was “disgusting” to see government sources directing people toward political merchandise.
It’s possible that the website redirect was an unfortunate coincidence; the police union defended officers handing out the fliers, saying that officers didn’t check the links to make sure they were correct.
In recent years, however, police have become increasingly vocal in their support of right-wing political candidates and far right extremism. For instance, officials are currently investigating dozens of off-duty police officers who participated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021.; Capitol Police officers who were supposed to be holding the crowd back were also allegedly involved in helping the crowd enter the building to interrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
A leak of member rolls from the far right militia Oath Keepers last year contained names of active police officers in major cities, and research has shown that domestic terrorist plots and attacks committed by law enforcement personnel and active duty or reserve military figures have increased over the past few years in particular.
The citizen initiative process that gave Floridians the power toraisethe minimum wage andrestore voting rightsis under grave threat after the state’s House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday advanced a Republican proposal to dramatically limit the scope of future ballot measures.
Led by state Rep. Mike Beltran (R-57), House Joint Resolution 1127 would alter Florida’s constitution to limit citizen initiatives to “matters relating to procedural subjects or to structure” of the government — a restriction that likely would haveblocked$15 minimum wage, voting rights, medical marijuana, andconservationamendments.
Having passed out of the GOP-controlled judiciary panel, the proposal is soon expected to receive a vote in the full state House of Representatives. If the Florida Legislature passes Beltran’s resolution, voters will have to approve the amendment for it to be added to the state constitution.
Final approval of the resolution would effectively spell the death of the state’s citizen initiative process, the ACLU of Florida warned in astatementTuesday evening.
“These proposed changes to the citizen initiative process are not about fixing problems — they are about interfering with the will of Floridians,” said Kara Gross, the group’s legislative director and senior policy counsel. “Through ballot initiatives, citizens have been able to improve the lives and well-being of Floridians.”
Gross characterized the Florida GOP’s attack on the citizen initiative process as part of a broader trend of “politicians trying to rewrite the rules because they do not like it when voters use their power.”
“Florida lawmakers should respect the will of the people and Floridians’ right to participate in our democracy through the citizen initiative process,” Gross added. “They should vote no on these proposals and end the crusade of sabotaging the right of the people to be heard.”
A proposal that would obstruct Floridians' right to participate directly in democracy through the citizen initiative process passed in the House Judiciary Committee today despite opposition from advocacy organizations across the state.
House Joint Resolution 1127 is hardly the Florida GOP’s first attempt to gut the citizen initiative process, which empowered voters to enact broadlypopular policiesthat would’ve gone nowhere in the GOP-dominated state Legislature.
In 2020, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantissignedinto law a bill containing a number of new ballot initiative restrictions, including an increase of the signature requirement. Last year, DeSantissigneda measure limiting donations to citizen initiative campaigns — a limit that was laterblockedby a federal judge.
Aliki Moncrief, executive director of Florida Conservation voters,tolda localCBSaffiliate on Tuesday that the state GOP’s efforts are “basically about limiting the power of people to raise important public policies and important public issues that they don’t feel the Legislature is considering.”
“So, it’s horrible in a word,” Moncrief added. “If the people really wanted this done, they would have done it.”
Date on which the Florida Senate Education Committee gave initial approval along party lines to a bill sponsored by Republican state Sen. Manny Diaz Jr. and championed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” when teaching about racism: 1/18/2022
Number of days later that a Florida school district canceled a college professor’s seminar for teachers on the history of the civil rights movement, citing in part concerns over critical race theory: 1
Month in which DeSantis held a campaign-style event in which he called critical race theory — a decades-old academic movement examining the intersection of race and law — “crap” and said he’d press for legislation banning it from being taught in his state’s schools: 12/2021
Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), suggested on Sunday — contrary to all evidence — that the white supremacist rallies held in Orlando over the weekend were staged.
Pushaw questioned the authenticity of these demonstrations, baselessly claiming that the neo-Nazis could be Democrats trying to make her boss and other Republicans look bad.
“Do we even know they’re Nazis? Or is this a stunt like the ‘white nationalists’ who crashed [then-GOP candidate for governor Glenn Youngkin’s] rally in Charlottesville [Virginia] and turned out to be Dem staffers?” Pushaw said in a now-deleted tweet.
The Lincoln Project said on the day of the event that their action had been satirical in nature. The demonstration “was our way of reminding Virginians what happened in Charlottesville four years ago, the Republican Party’s embrace of those values, and Glenn Youngkin’s failure to condemn it,” the organization said in a statement.
The events in Florida over the weekend, however, were authentic white supremacist demonstrations.
After criticism of her tweet spread, Pushaw deleted the social media post and dismissed the idea that she was questioning the legitimacy of the far right neo-Nazi demonstrations. But she did defend her original tweet later on, doubling down on the errant connection to the Youngkin event and wrongly claiming, once again, that Democrats were behind the action rather than the Lincoln Project.
Pushaw also continued to like and promote tweets that came to her defense, Florida Politics reported.
Florida House Democratic Leader Rep. Evan Jenne said that Pushaw knew that there was no way the neo-Nazi demonstrators were connected to Democrats.
“Her immediate deletion of that tweet shows she was just talking trash,” Jenne said. “No more or less.”
A Florida college professor’s lecture on the civil rights movement was abruptly canceled Wednesday by the Osceola County School District last week after his proposed talk on the civil rights movement raised a “red flag” among those who oppose teaching students about racism in U.S. history.
Michael Butler, who serves as Kenan Distinguished Professor of History at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida, was set to deliver a lecture on “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” which focused on how the civil rights movement began before and lasted longer than the life of Martin Luther King Jr.
As the date for his lecture approached, the curriculum director in charge of coordinating his and other seminars in the district canceled the talk after concluding that the materials included in Butler’s lecture would raise “red flags” relating to critical race theory, despite that CRT was not part of his planned remarks.
Butler said he was shocked at the cancellation notice, which was delivered days before the lecture was set to happen this past weekend. He also derided the “climate of fear” that Republican lawmakers in Florida, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, were creating that have “blurred the lines between scared and opportunistic.”
“The victims of this censorship are history and the truth,” Butler said in comments given to NBC News. “The end game is they’re going to make teaching civil rights into ‘critical race theory,’ and it’s not.”
In a statement he made on his Twitter account last week, Butler also warned that Florida’s “war against CRT” is really about “making it difficult — if not impossible — to teach any history that considers the Black experience.”
The news of Butler’s canceled lecture comes as the Florida state legislature is advancing a bill that would make the teaching of history even more difficult. Senate Bill 148 would forbid the teaching of any material that could give students “discomfort.” Critics have lamented how such a law could severely curtail or eliminate the teaching of racism and the enslavement of Black Americans in U.S. history classes, if the legislation passes.
“This bill’s not for Blacks, this bill was not for any other race. This was directed to make whites not feel bad about what happened years ago,” Democratic state Sen. Shevrin Jones, the ranking member of Florida’s Senate Education Committee, said last week.
“At no point did anyone say white people should be held responsible for what happened,” Jones added, “but what I would ask my white counterparts is, are you an enabler of what happened or are you going to say we must talk about history?”
My first class for the Spring semester begins in a couple of hours. I still do not know if I’m teaching in person or moving the class online. Governor DeSantis says I’m teaching in person. The university, where I work, says I’m teaching in person.
“I have tenure. Why the hell am I teaching in person?” I ask my partner.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Do you think I’m going to die?” I ask.
“Good news: we’re all going to die,” he says, and this makes me laugh in a macabre way. We’re both poets. He teaches at Harvard and flies back in a couple of weeks.
I walk into my home office and play music. The playlist I want is bizarre, but at least I’m clear on what I want to listen to: Aphex Twin’s “Alberto Basalm,” Tristen’s “Baby Drugs,” Schubert’s “Trio No. 2” and Hole’s “Malibu.”
I apply makeup and think: What would Courtney Love do? Courtney Love is disabled. What if Courtney Love were a poetry professor about to teach in person?
She’d cancel, I decide. She would definitely cancel.
I change my mind. No, she would mask up, walk in the classroom and say, “Well, here we are.”
***
In Fall 2021, I did not deliberate as much about teaching in person. I just did it.
I had applied for this job as a creative writing professor at Florida State University (FSU) three times. Twice, I had been rejected. When the job ad appeared, yet again, I nearly did not apply.
“Why give them the chance to reject me again?” I asked my partner.
“The search committee changes,” he said.
So I applied a third time. And landed the job.
I was thrilled. I returned to teach at my alma mater. As an undergraduate, I had appreciated neither the education at FSU nor the 14 practicing writers on faculty. I was just an in-state student who could not afford out-of-state schools.
***
On the road to teach in person, I call my colleague, the novelist Mark Winegardner, and say, “Mark. What are we doing? Talk to me like I’m your high-risk disabled friend. And I’m about to teach in person.” “You’re vaxxed, right?” Mark says.
“I’m vaxxed and boosted and I’d take a fourth hit if they’d give it to me,” I say.
“I think you’ll be fine. But don’t take my word for it. Do what you think is right,” he says.
“I just passed a COVID testing site. The line of cars is out of this world,” I say.
***
In the Fall, I felt a sense of camaraderie about teaching in person.
I’m tenured, I thought. What can I do with my tenure? Okay, I’m not going to sit at home and luxuriate. I’m not going to teach online because I have job security. Not while adjuncts and grad students and staff have to be there, in person, on the job.
I’m a disability rights activist, so I know how much it means when allies show up. And I know how much it hurts when allies don’t show up.
But I’m no martyr, no moral authority. I cuss like a sailor. I have been a coward on more occasions than I’ve been a hero.
In the Fall, this felt like an adventure. Recklessly going into the unknown.
***
But now here we are. Omicron is blowing up. What are the risks?
***
It probably helps if you know that I was born disabled due to Agent Orange. My dad was drafted into Vietnam in the 70s (“what a stupid war,” he has said), and he served as a pharmacist in Long Bình. He sat on a barrel and he dispensed pills.
That barrel he sat on? It contained Agent Orange. Then again, so did the fields around him. Did I get my disability from the barrel or the fields? Does it matter?
My parents, reformed hippies, wanted me to have all the information. So even though I was a kid, I learned about the potential for my own death. Each surgery came with a new talk about “the risks.”
“Do you understand the risks?” my parents would say.
***
Am I teaching in person? What are the risks? Not just for me, but for my students. Where is the uprising of professors? Where is the change.org petition?
Percy Shelley, of all people, keeps popping into my mind: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
If that’s true, then I am the legislator. I am the keeper of attendance.
I could turn this car around. I could send one email: “We’re going online.” I could disobey my superiors and the State. But I don’t. I go in there, double-masked, and say to my students, “Welcome to class.”
***
To my critics, who wonder, “Why don’t you just get an accommodation?”
Have you applied for one? Would you risk additional exposure to visit your doctor’s office for his or her signature on the paperwork? Would you risk possible re-traumatization since your university wants your complete medical history from 1981? Would you be fine with all of this even if your university decides to decline your request? Or would you wish that you had never asked?
If you never ask, then you are never denied.
If you are never denied, then there is no record.
If there is no record, you can take your classes online. Wait to be reprimanded. Reply, “I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid of dying.”
***
Though I may feel alone, I am not alone. Mia Mingus has just published “You Are Not Entitled to Our Deaths” on her blog. One part of the essay reads, “We know the state has failed us. We are currently witnessing the pandemic state-sanctioned violence of murder, eugenics, abuse and bone-chilling neglect in the face of mass suffering, illness and death.”
I do not have answers.
I am walking into class, again, in 20 minutes. Dramatic Technique.
Today we will talk about Sarah Kane’s play Crave. Kane was a queer, disabled playwright. Here is one of the lines from her play that I’d really like to believe: “You’re never as powerful as when you know you’re powerless.” Another line? “I have a bad bad feeling about this bad bad feeling.”
A common refrain in the Trump era was that despite all of Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic ambitions, he was too incompetent to carry out a wholescale remaking of U.S. society. There’s no question his four years in office had a profound, disastrous effect on the people and communities his administration targeted — immigrants, Muslims and trans people, just to name a few. Plus, his openly fascist rhetoric — and sometimes actions — significantly emboldened the far right. However, both his legislative agenda, and to a lesser extent his exercise of executive authority, were likely hampered by his lack of experience in elected office and overall laziness, lack of discipline and inattention to detail.
Many advocates understandably fear that Trump’s eventual Republican presidential successor, whoever they are, could combine the most toxic elements of Trumpism with a greater degree of technocratic skill. A more-competent Trump could do even greater damage to U.S. political infrastructure, like the refugee resettlement system that Trump dismantled, that could take decades to rebuild. A more-competent Trump could also potentially shepherd through a legislative agenda that far exceeded Trump’s, which consisted primarily of a standard-fare Republican tax cut for the wealthy.
Currently, the most likely GOP successor to Trump seems to be Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who regularly ranks as Republicans’ top choice in the 2024 presidential primary if Trump declines to run. Trump’s polling lead over DeSantis appears to be narrowing in recent months, though any surveys this far out should be taken with a grain of salt. Everything in DeSantis’s public record suggests that he poses a serious threat to democracy, the working class and marginalized communities. DeSantis recently signed into law some of the nation’s most stringent anti-critical race theory legislation, and ordered a review of the state’s university system to determine if professors were “indoctrinating” students into a “stale ideology,” clearly a reference to ideas ranging from anti-racism to socialism. He’s also pushing a bill that would prevent teachers and private businesses from making white people feel “discomfort” when learning about the history of racist oppression in the United States.
DeSantis has also recently staked out his position as more anti-vaccine, anti-booster than Trump himself. In December, the Florida governor refused to say if he’d gotten a COVID booster when asked by Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. “I’ve done whatever I did, the normal shot,” DeSantis said. DeSantis got the Johnson & Johnson single dose in April, and stonewalled in October when asked if he would get a booster.
These statements, as well as DeSantis’s rising stature in the national Republican Party, seem to have rankled Trump. In comments that were widely understood to be directed at DeSantis, Trump criticized politicians who wouldn’t say if they had gotten a COVID booster shot. Many Republican politicians had in fact gotten the booster, “but they don’t want to say it. Because they’re gutless,” Trump said on the far right One America News Network. “You gotta say it — whether you had it or not.” (At a rally in December, Trump told the crowd that he’d gotten the booster. They booed him in response.)
Several days later, Axiosreported Trump has been calling DeSantis a “dull personality” in private meetings. Also, in that report, Trump aides claimed the former president was angry that DeSantis hasn’t pledged not to challenge Trump in the 2024 GOP primary, should he run again. The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman tweeted that she’d heard similar frustrations from those in Trump world, who said Trump thought DeSantis should be showing him more “deference.”
DeSantis, for his part, has taken shots at Trump as well. On the conservative “Ruthless” podcast, the governor said one of his biggest regrets since taking office was not being “much louder” in opposing Trump’s calls for soft lockdowns as COVID initially spread throughout the country and world.
DeSantis also appears to be shoring up support from conservative media stars to build a parallel track of public support, separate from his standing with Trump. On the anniversary of the January 6 storming of the Capitol, the Florida governor gathered “nine prominent social media stars in Tallahassee,” Politicoreported. Blaze TV’s Sara Gonzales told Politico it “would be a mistake for DeSantis not to run,” and that many conservatives were “hungry for someone with the guts to speak for them without fear of repercussions, but also without the obvious baggage that Trump carries.”
However, despite the simmering tensions between the two men, neither appears eager to engage in an all-out attack on the other. Last week, Trump told reporters that he has a “very good relationship” with DeSantis. He reminded them of his early support for the Florida politician when he was a relatively unknown congressman making a longshot bid for governor. DeSantis “won the [gubernatorial] election the day I announced that I was going to give him my endorsement,” Trump said on the call. He made similar comments to New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters in a forthcoming book, underscoring the degree to which Trump believes he’s responsible for DeSantis’s success. “Look, I helped Ron DeSantis at a level that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump told Peters.
Despite the emerging personal rivalry between DeSantis and Trump, the two are ideologically nearly identical, and also govern in a similar manner. DeSantis reportedly rules Florida with an iron fist and demands total fealty and loyalty, just as Trump does. “Ron DeSantis is essentially the speaker of the House, the president of the Senate and the chief justice of the Supreme Court right now,” one Republican legislator recently toldPolitico. Another GOP state legislator said in the same report that it’s “well known you can’t go against him. If you cross him once, you’re dead.”
In another clear echo of Trumpism, DeSantis is pushing for the creation of a new, so-called election police force. The new sub-agency, whose proposed official name is the Office of Election Crimes and Security, would operate under the Department of State, which is controlled by the governor. Voting rights advocates are understandably alarmed, citing the extremely low levels of deliberate voter fraud and arguing that the goal of the new sub-agency is to depress turnout, particularly among Black voters and other groups historically targeted for harassment.
Also worrisome is a new proposed congressional district map released by DeSantis’s office, an incredibly rare phenomenon. “DeSantis’ map would cut in half the number of African American districts from four on current proposed congressional maps to two, while boosting the number of seats Donald Trump would have won in 2020 to 18 from the 16 on the map currently being considered by the GOP-led Florida Senate,” Politicoreported.
The 2024 primary will semi-officially start this year, after the November midterms. Trump hasn’t announced whether he’ll run, but all signs suggest that he will. DeSantis is a young, popular, far-right politician who doesn’t command the base of the party like Trump does, but comes closer than any other potential challenger at the moment. Ever since Trump’s upset victory in 2016, those on both the right and the left have wondered what Trumpism without Trump might look like. In DeSantis, we could be seeing an answer.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did not wait for fellow Republicans in the Senate to finish blockading federal voting rights legislation to start ramping up racist suppression efforts in his home state.
In an unusual move on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, DeSantis proposed an alternative political map for Florida that experts said would dilute the power of Latino voters and effectively eliminate two majority-Black voting districts out of only four in the state. DeSantis then asked Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature for nearly $6 million to fund a new police agency to enforce election laws, including sweeping new voting restrictions he signed into law last year.
DeSantis’s proposed poll patrols would ultimately answer to the governor, raising fears of voter intimidation in a state where Republicans gutted a constitutional amendment meant to restore voting rights for hundreds of thousands of formerly incarcerated people. Ash-Lee Henderson, the first Black woman to serve as co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, the legendary incubator for the southern civil rights movement where King and Rosa Parks trained, said DeSantis’s call for an Office of Election Crimes and Security targeting voters “wasn’t even a dog whistle, it was overtly racist.”
“I’m disgusted, because literally residents across the state — and Florida is a huge state — said that formerly incarcerated people deserve the right to vote, said they wanted drive-through voting and mail-in ballots, and his response is, ‘all this is voter fraud,’” Henderson said. “But there is no scientific evidence to show there is this intentional voter fraud happening.”
DeSantis is hungry for right-wing media attention, and the proposals were a broad swipe at Democrats and civil rights groups, who spent the past year accusing Republican-controlled states of reviving Jim Crow with a wave of voter suppression laws. The laws passed in the wake of former President Trump’s mendacious attempts at overthrowing the 2020 election with false claims of voter fraud.
DeSantis is signaling that the GOP will take up every inch of ground abandoned by Democrats in the fight over ballot access, which has once again ignited mass civil rights protests. While it’s unclear whether DeSantis will ultimately implement new election police in Florida, he knew the federal legislation that could block such a proposal was likely to fail on Wednesday. And it did.
After an intense day of debate over race and democracy in the U.S., the Senate rejected by a razor-thin margin the Democratic push to pass their landmark voting rights bill, the Freedom to Vote: John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which was championed by Black leaders as an important step toward addressing racist suppression. The Senate’s 50 Republicans united against the bill, which they deride as a federal takeover of elections — a revival of segregationist arguments against the original Voting Rights Act of 1965, according to voting rights groups.
Henderson and other observers say DeSantis’s timing is obvious as Republicans continue to push back on any progress made by Black people since the 2020 uprisings for racial justice. The governor rails against anti-racist education, and is pushing a bill designed to shield white people from feeling “discomfort” from discussion about the nation’s racist past at work and in public schools this week.
“DeSantis is using his bully pulpit to wave a flag of white supremacy and fascism and anti-democracy in the face of what has been amazing multi-racial, Back-led movement for voting rights and racial justice,” Henderson said.
Two Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who say they support the voting rights bill, sided with Republicans and refused to tweak filibuster rules so the bill could pass with a simple majority. Both senators refused to budge on the filibuster despite intense pressure from civil rights activists and warnings from colleagues and President Joe Biden that a “no” vote would land them on the wrong side of history.
“When exceptions to the filibuster are made to raise the debt limit and to push through Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, we refuse to believe that you can’t make the exception so that Black and Brown folks, folks with disabilities, folks with criminal records, and so many more of us can have our right to vote protected,” said Rep. Cori Bush, a Black Democrat from Missouri, in a statement after the vote.
Thousands of Texans are receiving letters from the state informing them that they are flagged as potential non-citizens and could be purged from voter rolls, forcing long-time U.S. citizens to hand over paperwork, according to the Associated Press. Dana DeBeauvoir, the clerk of Travis Country, which includes Austin, said hundreds of mail-in ballot applications were rejected due to confusion over strict new ID requirements passed by the Republican lawmakers last year.
“My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like,” DeBeauvoir said in a press conference on Tuesday.
While DeBeauvoir tussled with Republican state officials over who’s to blame for the confusion over the ID rules, voting rights groups warned a number of other changes to Texas law are designed to intimidate voters and purge them from the rolls. The Texas law, known as SB1, enhanced criminal penalties and paperwork for people who assist voters, creating hurdles for elderly and disabled voters and the people who care for them.
“Different needs require different forms of assistance,” said Molly Broadway, a voting support specialist with Disability Rights Texas, told KXAN Austin. “They can misinterpret a proper form of assistance as illegal assistance.”
About 200 new measures passed in at least 19 states last year that make it harder to vote, and more are expected to come now that the Senate failed to pass the voting rights legislation. Along with other measures, the voting rights bill would make Election Day a federal holiday, mandate two weeks of early voting and restore federal oversight of states that erected barriers for Black and Brown voters in the past.
Henderson said the gears of voter suppression are now grinding beyond Texas and Florida, including in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Henderson, who is a leader of the Movement for Black Lives coalition, said it’s clear why voters are increasingly threatened with criminal penalties, polling police, empowered partisan poll watchers and immigration enforcement in the wake of intense protests against police violence. After all, Black and Brown are disproportionately criminalized and targeted by police.
“It’s not hyperbolic to understand this as a racist intervention; the highest concentration of Black people in the country is in the South,” Henderson said. “The timing of it is very clearly and overtly a response to Black, Brown, Indigenous and Asian-descended and white folks coming out to say we have a different vision, a vision for Build Back Better and defunding the police.”
Republicans flatly reject that their “election integrity” efforts have a racial dimension and say Jim Crow ended years ago, but Henderson said the fight for voting rights did not end in the 1960s. Voters in majority-Black districts still wait in long lines all over the country. Attempts at racial gerrymandering in states such as Texas and Florida follow a long tradition splitting up Black, Brown and Indigenous voter strongholds to dilute their power.
“It’s a tactical intervention in order to consolidate their wealth and power because they are losing it,” Henderson said.
Democrats exploit their structural advantages as well, including through gerrymandering, allowing Republican to paint the voting rights legislation as a partisan power grab. However, Republicans have controlled a majority of state legislatures for the past decade, giving their party disproportionate control over political maps that shape elections. Before losing the Senate majority, the GOP stacked federal courts with conservatives as voting rights cases wound their way through the judiciary.
In 2020, unprecedented voter turnout gave Democrats their own an advantage by handing the party control of Congress and the White House — and, activists say, a mandate to deliver on voting rights. Yet Manchin and Sinema ensured that the Democrats could not use this advantage, and the voting rights fight would continue as it has for decades.
“We are not starting a conversation yesterday,” Henderson said. “We are talking about a centuries-old conversation in this country — if Black people are able to patriciate in this democracy.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is pushing for the passage of a bill that would forbid public school teachers from teaching information that could cause students to feel “discomfort,” in yet another GOP attempt to censor lessons about the history of racism in the U.S.
The bill would also apply to companies that require their employees to receive training on combatting racism and discrimination in the workplace.
“An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race,” reads Senate Bill 148, which was approved by the Republican-controlled Senate Education Committee on Tuesday.
All Democrats on the committee voted against the bill’s advancement, saying that it would lead to a number of lawsuits and censorship in classrooms across the state. They also said that there were no real-world instances that would justify a need to pass the bill, and noted that the legislation could potentially prevent educators from teaching factual accounts of history.
The legislation was condemned by Sen. Shevrin Jones (D), the ranking member of the Education Committee.
“This bill’s not for Blacks, this bill was not for any other race. This was directed to make whites not feel bad about what happened years ago,” Jones said. “At no point did anyone say white people should be held responsible for what happened, but what I would ask my white counterparts is, are you an enabler of what happened or are you going to say we must talk about history?”
DeSantis’s promotion of the bill comes after his repeated attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT), an academic field that emerged in the 1970s to examine how institutions perpetuate racial and gender inequality in the U.S. Although most K-12 schools do not teach CRT, conservative lawmakers have manufactured a false narrative about its prevalence in U.S. classrooms, likely to stir up support among their base through racist fear mongering. (One of the many lies being pushed by Republican lawmakers is that CRT teaches white people to hate themselves.)
Jones said that DeSantis, whose name is being considered for the GOP nomination for president in 2024, is traveling “across the country with his racist rhetoric on critical race theory.”
In a recent Instagram post, anti-racist author Ibram X. Kendi pointed out that the notion that white people should be protected from “discomfort” was also used to justify segregation.
“I am reminded of segregationists who justified separate restrooms, elevators, waiting rooms, restaurants, phone booths, water fountains, parks, schools, pools, and even cemeteries by claiming White adults and children felt ‘discomfort’ around Black people,” Kendi said. “And now this.”
“I am living on a boat and selling coconuts on Miami Beach,” Orlando Boquete told me in December 2021. Mr. Boquete spent 23 years wrongly convicted, and since being freed and exonerated by DNA evidence in 2006 has been working hard to rebuild his life.
“Estoy bien, no te preocupes (I am good, don’t worry).”
In one way or another, Mr. Boquete, who came to the U.S. as a Cuban refugee in 1980 has always been on the move. He calls himself a survivor, and makes friends easily, everywhere he goes.
Since we first met at the Innocence Project Network Conference in San Antonio in 2016, we became fast friends and Mr. Boquete and I have kept in touch. Months later, he asked me to get him a last-minute slot in the Brooklyn half marathon, without having trained for it, to commemorate 10 years of his freedom. I was moved to tears to see him, along with fellow exoneree Jeff Deskovic, cross the finish line in Coney Island as he threw boxing jabs and danced around like Muhammad Ali.
“Life is great because I’m free.”
In the time that I’ve known him, he’s lived a nomadic life, frequently calling from a new cell phone number, but always with the same message: “Life is great because I’m free.” Even when he calls from the bed where he sleeps in his truck, a temporary motel room, or the gym where he bathes.
In the summer of 2020, I spent several weeks with Mr. Boquete in Chicago and teamed up with VeryTaste to produce a short film about Mr. Boquete’s extraordinary path to freedom and his life today.
At the time of his trial, he only spoke Spanish, was unable to navigate the complicated legal system, and was let down by his legal team. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison and the day he arrived at the maximum security prison, he had one goal and that was to leave.
Mr. Boquete was wrongly convicted of attempted sexual battery and assault in Florida in 1983. Two years later, he escaped Florida’s Glades Correctional Institution — a place he never should have been — and lived on the run as a fugitive from injustice for 11 years before he was caught and reincarcerated. The Innocence Project then took up his case, and he was freed by the courts — with an apology from the State Attorney’s Office — in 2006.
Because of Mr. Boquete’s non-violent criminal record from the years he was a prison escapee, Florida will not compensate Mr. Boquete for any of the time he spent wrongly imprisoned. It is the only state in the country with a so-called “clean hands ban” in its compensation statute — one that prevents people with unrelated convictions from being compensated altogether.
Mr. Boquete lives on a disability subsidy of $783 per month.
Since his exoneration in 2006, Mr. Boquete has frequently been homeless. Due to his post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, he is unable to work full-time and lives on a disability subsidy of $783 per month.
Mr. Boquete, along with Robert DuBoise, Clemente Aguirre, Nathan Meyers, and other exonerees, the Innocence Project and the Florida Innocence Project have lobbied the Florida legislature to remove the “clean hands” clause as well as a prohibitively short 90-day filing deadline that prevents many exonerees from actually being compensated. This year, two bills — S.B. 526 and H.B. 241 — could bring justice to Mr. Boquete, Mr. DuBoise, and many others exonerated people who are struggling to make ends meet after spending decades in prison for crimes they did not commit.
Mr. Boquete maintains a high spirit and wants people to know that while he is homeless and urges the state of Florida to fix the law, he holds onto joy through boating, fishing, and his love for children. He returned to Cuba for the first time in 2018, raising money and supplies to give back to his hometown, where many live below the poverty line. He dreams of opening a gym, Real Innocent Fugitive, to give children whose families are experiencing poverty a chance to become boxers and athletes in Miami.
“I want to get the youth on a positive path. I want to use my story to do beautiful things,” Mr. Boquete said.
A Run for Freedom: Orlando Boquete’s Story
Presented by Innocence Project
A verytaste Co-Production
Director: Alicia Maule
Producers: Alicia Maule, Daniel Selby
Translation: Isabel Vasquez
Cinematography: Johnny Castle, Nick Castle, VeryTaste
2022 marks 10 years since fast food workers in New York first went on strike to demand higher wages, better working conditions, and the right to unionize — sparking the Fight For $15 movement. Since that time, the movement has gained traction, with California raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour and several other states passing legislation that will gradually do so.
Republican lawmakers in Florida have submitted legislation that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a measure similar to a near-total abortion ban in Mississippi that is currently being upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The ban, which was introduced on Tuesday by State Sen. Kelli Stargell (R) and Rep. Erin Grall (R), contains no exceptions for rape or incest. Individuals would only be allowed to get an abortion after the 15-week mark if their pregnancy puts them at risk of serious injury or death, or if the fetus has a fatal abnormality.
If passed, the measure would create one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country. Florida currently bans most abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy.
The proposal, which was submitted on the first day of the Florida legislature’s 2022 session, was inserted quietly into another bill meant to revise the state’s tobacco education and prevention program. In addition to restricting abortion access, the legislation would require medical facilities to report “the number of infants born alive or alive immediately after an attempted abortion” – a measure that gives undue weight to a false narrative pushed by anti-abortion activists.
On Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) indicated that he would sign the legislation into law if it landed on his desk. This position was condemned by Democrats, who noted the irony of DeSantis proclaiming Florida to be the “freest” state in the nation during his State of the State speech earlier this year.
“If Florida is truly a free state, free our women and leave them the hell alone,” said Sen. Shevrin Jones (D).
State Rep. Anna Eskamani noted that if the legislation were to pass, the nearest abortion facility for many Florida residents would be two states away, in North Carolina.
“And when you get to North Carolina, you have to go through their 72-hour wait period. So, you can imagine the cost associated with that,” Eskamani said.
The issue of reproductive justice will likely play a significant role in the 2022 midterms, particularly if the Court makes abrupt changes to the abortion precedent that has been in place for nearly five decades. Most Americans support keeping Roe intact, with an ABC News/Washington Post poll last fall showing that 60 percent of voters supported the ruling, while only 27 percent wanted the ruling overturned.
Starbucks workers are filing to unionize at a fast pace, with employees at five Starbucks locations in five different states having filed for a union election over the past six days.
NEW: A Tallahassee Starbucks store has become the first in Florida to file for a union election.
With the addition of this store (at John Knox Rd. & North Monroe St.), workers at 7 Starbucks locations have filed in the past two weeks. pic.twitter.com/EAnNBihPgv
The filings come amid a wave of unionizing activity among workers at the coffee company’s corporate-owned locations. Stores in 11 states have filed for unions. This is a remarkable pace; as Labor Notes reporter Jonah Furman noted on Tuesday, in the most active organizing sector in the U.S. last year, the cannabis industry, 13 workplaces filed for a vote over the entire year.
On Tuesday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certified election results for the Genesee Street location in Buffalo, New York, with employees voting 15 to 9 in favor of the union. Along with the Elmwood location, also in Buffalo, two locations have voted to form a union so far. The union is disputing its loss at a third store, Buffalo’s Camp Road.
Workers in Tallahassee and New Jersey expressed solidarity with other unionizing locations in letters to Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson, and sharply criticized the company for its union busting efforts.
“We are aware of your partnership with the notorious union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson. We are not intimidated by such blatant tactics: we are emboldened to join our fellow partners across the United States as we stand for what is right,” Tallahassee workers wrote. “We are outraged that partners you claim to care so deeply about are being mistreated, gaslighted, and harassed in their own stores due to your union busting efforts.”
Hopewell workers expressed a similar sentiment. “We are angered and disappointed by the blatant anti-union behavior you and other management have shown in stores who are simply trying to become equal partners in this company through unionization,” the workers said. Like many unionizing Starbucks employees before them, the Hopewell workers have urged the company to sign onto a list of “Fair Election Principles” crafted by the union, Starbucks Workers United.
The company has thus far shown no interest in following such principles, which ask Starbucks to not interfere with the unionization process. Indeed, the company appears to be focusing on union-busting efforts in Mesa, Arizona, where a union election is slated to start next week.
An email sent to Mesa employees by Andrea Streedain, regional vice president of the Western Mountain region for the company, which encompasses six states in the northwest, flat out tells workers to vote against unionizing. “We want you to vote no,” the email says, as uncovered by More Perfect Union.
The NLRB recently handed the company a loss in its attempts to quash a union in Arizona. The company had moved to make the union district-wide – a classic anti-union move that would dilute the election to encompass stores that haven’t been embroiled in official organizing efforts. But a regional director of the labor board ruled against the company, allowing votes to proceed store by store.
The company has pulled out other tactics to fight against the union. For example, Starbucks sent executives to Buffalo during workers’ initial union drive to surveil and potentially intimidate workers in organizing stores. Workers at the Depew location in Buffalo said that the company is scheduling employees erratically to disrupt employees schedules and throw a wrench in organizing efforts. It has also taken other moves to divide workers – something that the company dubiously claims the union would do – like closing organizing stores temporarily, supposedly for training purposes.
And, as Tallahassee workers mentioned, the company has hired law firm Littler Mendelson to help in union busting efforts, which has been infamous for its decades-long mission of destroying union efforts. It is one of the biggest union-busting firms in the country.
A Florida agency tasked with disbursing state funds to assist people born with neurological disorders was recently accused of withholding aid – but instead of pursuing change internally, the agency spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring a public relations firm, a new ProPublica investigation found.
The Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association (NICA) spent nearly $200,000 hiring a PR firm while it was under investigation by ProPublica and the Miami Herald. The news outlets were in the midst of uncovering a “no, no, no culture” from the agency, one parent told reporters.
That parent, Dan Bookhout, said that he constantly had to fight NICA for aid – so it was suspicious when the agency suddenly offered him a $30,000 device that would help his 5-year-old daughter walk. The agency also asked Bookhout to help promote the device to other parents.
That offer appears to have been part of a strategy recommended by the PR firm Sachs Media. While NICA rejected requests for wheelchairs and other aid for people with disabilities, it solicited Sachs to help the agency get out ahead of reporting on its alleged corruption.
“The Miami Herald has been conducting an investigation into NICA for several months, submitting numerous requests for public records and interviews,” Sachs executive Ryan Cohn wrote in an email to NICA in late 2019. “We see this as the path forward to win in the court of public opinion and to protect your mission and the future of the organization.”
After offering the device to Bookhout, the PR firm placed two stories in a local newspaper, praising the agency and its offer to buy devices to help children walk. The agency also offered contact information for parents in the program to the firm, despite having previously withheld that information from parents who sought to form a community around taking care of children with disabilities.
The agency, which has nearly $1.7 billion in funding, currently faces a state audit. NICA was created under a law that bars parents from suing medical officials, with the promise that they would receive financial assistance from the state – but reporters have found that families have largely been deprived of that aid. Instead, parents have had to fight to receive critical resources like drugs and blenders that make food more accessible. The agency has also repeatedly resisted distributing larger items like wheelchairs.
Other investigations into the agency have come to a similar conclusion: ultimately, it appears that NICA’s priority isn’t distributing the assistance that parents were promised, but instead ensuring that it can continue to withhold aid.
The Miami Herald found that since the agency’s founding in 1988, it has spent around $18 million on lawyers and lobbyists, often with the aim of engineering methods to decrease aid. They paid one pediatric neurologist $1.1 million, over the course of years, to prevent his own patients from receiving the aid that they needed, the Miami Herald reported.
In response to these reports, the Florida legislature has issued reforms that mandate higher first-time payments and increasing other benefits. Parents say that there have been improvements since that bill was signed, but it’s unclear if the changes will be temporary.
On Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) proposed new legislation that would allow parents to sue school districts if critical race theory or other lessons involving racial equity are taught in Florida classrooms.
In doing so, DeSantis absurdly suggested that his proposal would have been supported by the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
DeSantis’s bill is called the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (WOKE) Act. In a press release announcing the legislation, DeSantis said that it would be “the strongest legislation of its kind in the nation and will take on both corporate wokeness and Critical Race Theory.”
“We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other,” DeSantis said.
The Florida governor promoted his legislation by utilizing the words of Martin Luther King Jr.
“You think about what MLK stood for. He said he didn’t want people judged on the color of their skin but on the content of their character,” DeSantis said. “You listen to some of these people nowadays, they don’t talk about that.”
As The Washington Post has noted, King’s children have rejected similar claims made by other conservative lawmakers, who have wrongly asserted that King would be in favor of banning lessons on racism and racial justice in K-12 classrooms.
If passed, the bill wouldn’t stop at school districts. The legislation would also allow state residents to sue private companies that require workers to engage in racial sensitivity training.
State lawmakers and commentators have lambasted the proposed bill.
“Let’s be clear, Gov. DeSantis and his administration know full well that CRT is not taught in K-12 schools or workplaces,” said Florida Sen. Shevrin Jones, the ranking Democratic member of the state Senate Education Committee. “It’s unfortunate that instead of running on forward-looking ideas to improve people’s daily lives, Republicans would rather manufacture a crisis out of a non-issue, all in the hopes of fanning the flames of a culture war for political gain.”
“FFS. Stop creating fake problems @GovRonDeSantis to divide us,” tweeted state Rep. Anna V. Eskami (D), “& start focusing on crises in front of us: exodus of educators, unaffordable housing, awful health disparities, FPL undermining democracy & trying to end net metering, corporations not paying their taxes to name a few.”
Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali also condemned the bill, pointing out that DeSantis was using the legislation as a strategy to attract political support from racists in his state.
“It’s a racist dog whistle but with a facially neutral cover,” Ali pointed out. “It’ll work in the long run because Democrats refuse to engage in the culture war.”
The U.S. Supreme Court this week heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a high-profile case about the constitutionality of Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed the law, which has no exceptions for rape or incest, in 2018, with the intention that it would take effect if Roe v. Wade were overturned. That landmark 1973 case set out a legal framework that protected the right to an abortion until fetal viability at 24 weeks of pregnancy.
The Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s sole abortion provider, sued the state over the law, and the case ended up at the high court. As the Dec. 1 arguments unfolded there, the majority of justices on the conservative-dominated court appeared sympathetic to the arguments of Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, who rejected the idea of a constitutional right to abortion and said the issue should be left to the states. Katherine Kraschel, a lecturer at Yale Law School and a reproductive health policy expert, told the nonprofit newsroom The 19th that she previously thought Roe would be incrementally gutted but after hearing the oral arguments is now “more convinced that there are five justices poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
Abortion rights are already severely limited in the South, and 11 of the 26 states likely or certain to ban abortion should Roe fall are in the region, according to a Guttmacher Institute analysis from October: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Ten of those 11 Southern states already have on the books what are known as “trigger bans” — laws or constitutional provisions outlawing abortion that would take effect automatically if the Supreme Court overturns Roe.
Only three states in the South — Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia — do not currently have such abortion bans on the books. Facing South spoke with reproductive rights advocates in those states about how they’re preparing in advance of the Supreme Court’s ruling, expected in June.
Drumbeat of Resistance in Florida
In Florida, people can now seek an abortion up to 24 weeks into a pregnancy. However, they must attend state-directed counseling designed to discourage it and have an ultrasound performed beforehand with the option to view the image, and the parents of minor patients must be notified in advance. But its abortion laws are much less draconian than in neighboring Alabama, for example, which — in addition to having a trigger law on the books — imposes a 48-hour waiting period for people seeking an abortion, bans abortions 22 weeks after the last menstrual period, and requires parental consent for minor patients.
“[Given] the restrictions that exist in our neighboring states, we have been seeing patients coming here for care for quite a while,” said Amy Weintraub, the reproductive rights program director for Progress Florida, an organizing nonprofit based in St. Petersburg. “When you compare Florida to other states we also have a much larger number of providers.”
A recent attempt to effectively ban abortion in Florida failed. In September, state Rep. Webster Barnaby, a Republican who represents part of Volusia County, introduced HB 167, a copycat version of the controversial Texas law that enforces a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy by allowing anyone to bring a civil lawsuit against anyone who assists in the abortion — from a doctor to an Uber driver — and collect a $10,000 penalty from them. Unlike the Texas law, though, the Florida bill added exceptions for rape, incest, or a life-threatening medical emergency. But state House leaders grew skeptical of the financial payout component, as the Florida Phoenix reported, and the bill did not advance.
Historically, the Florida Supreme Court has safeguarded the right to an abortion. In 1989, for example, it ruled that a pregnant minor’s right to privacy outweighed protecting an embryo or fetus, and it reaffirmed that decision in 2003, as Slate reported. But since taking office in 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has appointed five conservatives to the court, which has gone on to issue 14 decisions that directly or indirectly overturned precedents on various issues, according to Slate’s analysis.
Weintraub expects a 15-week abortion ban bill will be introduced during the 2022 legislative session, which begins in January. In anticipation of that, her group and Floridians for Reproductive Freedom, a coalition made up of over 70 advocacy groups, have planned a Jan. 12 march at the state capitol in Tallahassee to support abortion rights. Organizers are providing bus transportation and meals to make the demonstration accessible to more Floridians.
“We need to keep that drumbeat of resistance against abortion bans going throughout the legislative session,” Weintraub said.
Undeterred in North Carolina
Reproductive rights advocates in North Carolina faced a major policy victory and a setback this year. In June, a federal appeals court ruled that a law banning abortion after 20 weeks, which has been on the books since 1973, remains unenforceable. But then last month, Gov. Roy Cooper (D) signed the into law the state budget passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, which included funding for crisis pregnancy centers — nonprofit organizations that discourage people from getting abortions.
“There’s a lot of money allocated for these pregnancy crisis centers, which may not seem on the face directly related to abortion care. But it really is, because these are fake clinics that are getting state funding, and their goal is to lead people away from abortion clinics,” said Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler, director of engagement at the Carolina Abortion Fund, a nonprofit that helps people pay for and access abortion services in the Carolinas. She pointed out that crisis pregnancy centers are often not staffed by medical professionals and exist to “run down the clock” for pregnant people seeking abortions.
North Carolina currently has 15 clinics that perform abortions, far more than many other Southern states, including neighboring South Carolina and Tennessee. “We already do see people from South Carolina coming into Charlotte, because Charlotte has four clinics,” Tara Romano, the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina, said during a recent webinar. “If Roe is overturned, we might see more people coming into North Carolina.”
The Carolina Abortion Fund reports that, since Texas passed its draconian abortion ban, it has helped two people who needed funds to travel from that state to North Carolina for abortions.
Orlovsky-Schnitzler said her organization is undeterred by what’s happening at the Supreme Court. “People need procedures every single day and will continue to need procedures, regardless of what happens with the court system,” she said.
She noted that the biggest challenge the abortion fund faces is raising awareness of their services to help low-income people who cannot afford the full cost of abortions, followed by funding, which primarily comes from individual donations. The organization is particularly focused on reaching rural Carolinians in need of abortion care, given that most clinics are clustered in urban areas.
Political Sea Change in Virginia
Virginia currently has the South’s most liberal abortion laws. Last year the Democratic-controlled legislature passed the Reproductive Health Protection Act (RHPA), which ended a 24-hour waiting period for abortion along with mandatory ultrasounds, biased counseling, and requirements that clinics have standards similar to hospitals and that only physicians can perform abortions.
“RHPA did do a lot to lift those barriers for people across the board, but especially for some of the most marginalized people in the commonwealth,” said Tarina Keene, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia.
Abortion rights advocates are now pressing state lawmakers to pass the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which which would establish comprehensive insurance coverage for reproductive health services including family planning, abortion care, prenatal and postpartum care, and routine cancer screenings for all Virginians, regardless of income, immigration status, gender identity, or type of insurance. RHEA would overwhelmingly help low-income people of color, said Carlota Arias, interim manager of the Virginia office of the Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, a national organization headquartered in New York that also has offices in Florida, Texas, and Washington, D.C.
“I think every Virginian should have the full range of access to reproductive care regardless of their income, background or immigration or migration status,” said Arias.
But the recent elections in Virginia dramatically changed the state’s political landscape, with the election of anti-abortion Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor and the GOP’s capture of the state House. Only the state Senate remains under Democratic control. However, exit polls conducted last month showed that most Virginians support legal abortion in most or all cases.
“We know that the majority of Virginians will not accept any type of attack on abortion rights or access,” Keene said. “They will not accept bans on abortions, they certainly will not accept a Texas-style abortion ban, and they will hold legislatures and the governor accountable for any and all action they take to roll back their rights.”
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — The Democratic Florida congressional candidate who lost a special election primary by five votes has filed two lawsuits asking that the result be thrown out, alleging his opponent’s support of a universal income plan amounted to bribing voters.
Dale Holness alleges Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick’s support of a proposal that would pay most U.S. adults $1,000 a month was an attempt to illegally bribe voters. His lawsuit also wants counted 18 overseas mail-in ballots received from military members and others that were rejected by elections officials because they arrived after Election Day and, officials said, didn’t qualify for an extension. He also says Cherfilus-McCormick should be disqualified because she did not file a financial disclosure form with the U.S. House.
Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick waits for the results of a machine recount at the Voting Equipment Center in Lauderhill, Fla., Nov. 5, 2021.
Cherfilus-McCormick, a health-care company executive, won the Nov. 2 primary to replace longtime U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, who died of cancer in April. Florida’s 20th District is overwhelmingly Democratic and she is heavily favored to win the January general election to fill the last year of Hastings’ term. The state certified her victory two weeks ago, saying she received 11,662 votes to Holness’ 11,657.
“None of the three allegations are even close to having merit. They are not in a gray area,” her campaign’s attorney, Mitch Ceasar, said Tuesday. He said the issues were already raised with the canvassing boards that oversaw the election and were dismissed.
In the lawsuits, filed jointly on Thanksgiving Eve in Palm Beach and Broward County circuit courts, Holness pointed to several campaign fliers and billboards where Cherfilus-McCormick touted her support for the “People’s Prosperity Plan.” It calls for the federal government to pay $1,000 monthly to every adult who makes less than $75,000 annually. While some progressive Democrats in Congress have supported such plans, there is no chance one would pass in the foreseeable future.
Holness, a Broward County commissioner, called Cherfilus-McCormick’s support “a gimmick designed only to motivate people to vote for her.”
“The ‘plan’ is intended to offer false hope to underserved communities with the intention and purpose of procuring votes,” Holness’ attorneys wrote. They said some district voters told elections officials they had cast ballots for Cherfilus-McCormick and wanted information on how to claim their $1,000.
Ceasar said Cherfilus-McCormick’s proposal is an “aspirational hope” that is protected by her First Amendment free speech rights.
Holness also claims Broward County erred when it rejected some mail-in ballots as being late. Under Florida law, mail-in ballots must be received by 7 p.m. Election Day with one exception: ballots sent by military personnel and other Floridians living outside the country have 10 additional days to arrive, if postmarked by Election Day. Broward County officials said they rejected the ballots, which arrive in special envelopes, because they appeared to have been mailed from within the United States or had no postmark indicating where they were mailed from.
Holness argues the lack of proof that the ballots were sent from a foreign country should not disqualify them, but Ceasar said some of the ballots were postmarked within the district.
Holness also said Cherfilus-McCormick’s failure to file a financial disclosure form with the House disqualified her from running. She loaned about $2 million to her campaign and Holness argues voters have a right to know how she earned that money. While the forms are required, many non-incumbent candidates fail to file them and that does not result in their disqualification as the House cannot punish someone before they are a member. Ceasar said she has filed for an extension.
A basic-income pilot program in Florida will give monthly stipends to 115 formerly incarcerated people.
Participants will receive $1,000 in January 2022, then $600 every month for a year.
The program hopes to lift recipients out of poverty and prevent reincarceration.
The letters are already in the mail: Hundreds of formally incarcerated people in Alachua County, Florida, will soon receive invitations to apply for a basic-income pilot.
The program, run by the local nonprofit Community Spring, will offer monthly stipends to 115 Alachua County residents who were released from prison or jail with a felony conviction on or after June 1. People charged with felonies who began probation in Alachua County — whose largest city is Gainesville — on or after June 1 are also eligible.
Participants will be chosen randomly among the applicants. From there, they will receive an initial $1,000 payment via direct deposit in January 2022. After that, they’ll get $600 every month for a year. They can spend the money however they like.
Critics of basic income argue that free stipends reduce the incentive for people to find jobs or may encourage them to make frivolous purchases. But the program’s creators hope it will lift people out of poverty and prevent them from re-entering the prison system.
The US has one of the highest recidivism rates in the world: Nearly 77% of people released from prison are rearrested within five years. Formerly incarcerated people are also 10 times more likely to be homeless than members of the general public. And they have a 27% unemployment rate — higher than the national unemployment rate during the Great Depression , according to data from the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative.
These same people are often required to pay probation fees, which can cost anywhere from $10 to $150 per month. Many are also charged for ankle monitors, court-ordered drug testing, and mandatory classes, such as anger management therapy. Failure to pay fees could result in additional arrests or reincarceration.
“We see people all the time get reincarcerated just for money,” Kevin Scott, the pilot’s project manager, told Insider. “That is straight up criminalizing poverty. The crime is you’re too poor to be free.”
Raul Lopez, 47, wears an ankle monitor at home in Richmond, California, on September 24, 2019.
Spending $7,600 on a formerly incarcerated person is cheaper than housing them in prison
Alachua County’s basic-income pilot is privately funded by two organizations: a social impact organization called Spring Point Partners, and mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a coalition of mayors that support basic income in their cities.
Several members of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income have already unveiled their own basic-income pilots, mostly through private funding. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey donated $15 million to the coalition in 2020.
The former mayor of Stockton, California, Michael Tubbs, launched one of the US’s first guaranteed-income pilots in 2019. That program gave 125 residents $500 per month for two years. Researchers found it reduced unemployment, increased full-time employment, improved participants’ emotional well-being, and decreased anxiety and depression.
Other cities have followed Stockton’s lead. Saint Paul, Minnesota, approved a basic-income pilot last year, in which 150 low-income families will get $500 a month for up to 18 months. And Oakland, California, just closed its applications for a basic-income pilot, which gives $500 monthly payments to 600 low-income families for 18 months.
Davion Hampton, who was formerly incarcerated in Florida, sits by Lake Monroe, on the outskirts of Orlando, on September 30, 2020.
Scott said the Alachua County pilot opted for fewer participants and larger individual stipends to account for the unique financial barriers that formerly incarcerated people face. The total cost per person — $7,600 for one year — is much lower than the annual price states pay, between $15,000 and $70,000 per year to house one person in state prison.
Researchers are tracking whether the pilot reduces recidivism
The Alachua County pilot was designed by people directly impacted by the justice system — including Scott himself, whose own incarceration ended almost six years ago.
“I’m a white guy, so very much born on third base,” he said. “[I] had advantages and had people that cared about me and supported me and tried to give me material support — as much as they could, anyway — and I barely made it.”
After prison, Scott said, he found it difficult to support himself. He said monthly stipends would have helped cover his probation fees or buy pants, a bicycle, or a bus pass.
“There’s this hovering axe of ‘I gotta make these probation payments or they’re going to reincarcerate me,’” Scott said, adding, “if somebody could have spared me just that piece of my re-entry struggle, that would have opened up my whole world.”
Scott said he’ll consider the basic-income pilot a success if it prevents even one person from being reincarcerated due to poverty. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Suffolk University will examine whether the program lowers recidivism and improves housing security and well-being.
Ideally, Scott said, the payments will be “meaningful enough that somebody could further their lives — not just scratch by, but hopefully be able to invest in themselves.”
BREAKING: In a sweeping victory for voting rights in Florida. Federal federal judge STRIKES DOWN key provisions of voters suppression law SB90. Congrats to our clients 
