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Category: Latinx

  • “Deportation First”: Trump and Harris Compete for Latinx Votes While Pushing Anti-Immigrant Policies

    Seg3 dronemigrants

    With just 19 days until the presidential election, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are ramping up efforts to appeal to a major voting bloc in battleground states: Latinx voters. This comes as both major candidates are boasting hard-line immigration policies that impose harsh conditions on those entering the United States. “It will not be a solution for Vice President Harris to mimic Donald Trump’s policies on immigration. In fact, she has to contrast,” says Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mijente, who says Latinx voters are not moving to the right. “What Latinos are doing is declaring their political independence from partisan politics. … Latinos are looking to see who is going to deliver.”


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Attack on Latino History Exhibit Is “a Repeat of the Red Scare,” Historian Warns

    A political battle is brewing in Washington, D.C., over plans to build a National Museum of the American Latino and the portrayal of American Latino history. Last year, the Smithsonian Institution opened a temporary preview exhibition inside the National Museum of American History that has become the focus of controversy within the Latino community, as Republican lawmakers and others challenge…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump Makes Xenophobic Campaign Pledge to End Birthright Citizenship

    On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump announced on his campaign site that, if he’s elected in 2024, on his first day back in the White House he’d issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship — an action that would be unconstitutional and likely face an immediate challenge in the courts. “As part of my plan to secure the border, on Day One of my new term in office, I will sign an…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Young Doctor Reflects on COVID

    The pandemic isn’t past tense. While COVID-19 vaccines have made it possible to gather with friends and hug loved ones again, the world is still living with the virus – and too many people are still dying because of it. More than a million people in the United States have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began, including about 250,000 people in 2022. To reflect on the lives the world has lost, we’re revisiting an episode that follows a young doctor through her first year of medical residency during the height of the pandemic. 

    Kaiser Health News reporter Jenny Gold spent eight months following Dr. Paloma Marin-Nevarez, who graduated from the Stanford University medical school in June 2020, right before the virus began its second major surge. She was one of more than 30,000 new doctors who started residencies in 2020. Just weeks after graduating, Marin-Nevarez began training as an ER doctor at Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, one of the areas in California hardest hit by the pandemic. 

    Marin-Nevarez faces the loneliness and isolation of being a new doctor, working 80 hours a week in the era of masks and social distancing. She also witnesses the inequality of the pandemic, with Latino, Black and Native American people dying of COVID-19 at much higher rates than White people. Marin-Nevarez finds herself surrounded by death and having to counsel families about the loss of loved ones. We view the pandemic through the eyes of a rookie doctor, finding her footing on the front lines of the virus. 

    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in February 2021. 

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • After Ayotzinapa: Arrests and Intrigue

    Eight months after Reveal’s three-part series about the disappearance of 43 Mexican college students in 2014, the government’s investigation is in high gear. But parents of the missing still don’t have the answers they want. There have been arrests and indictments of high-profile members of the military, and even the country’s former attorney general. But no one has been convicted, and the remains of only a handful of students have been identified. 

    In the first segment, we relive the night of the attack on the students, and chronicle the previous government’s flawed investigation into the crime. We meet independent investigators who succeeded in getting close to the truth, then fled the country for their safety. 

    Then we explore how the election of a new Mexican government led to a new investigation led by Omag Gomez Trejo, a young lawyer who pledged to expose the truth about the crime. 

    We end with a conversation with Reveal’s Anayansi Diaz Cortes and Kate Doyle, from the National Security Archive. They bring us up to date on what’s happened with the investigation since we aired our three-part series, After Ayotzinapa. 

  • John Galvan and Arthur Almendarez Walk Free in Chicago After 35 Years in Prison for Arson

    John Galvan as a child (courtesy of the Galvan family for the Innocence Project).

    Today, Innocence Project client John Galvan was released on an “I bond” from Cook County Jail in Chicago, Illinois, after spending 35 years in prison for a crime that he did not commit. Mr. Galvan was released with his co-defendant Arthur Almendarez, the latter of whom is represented by Joshua Tepfer of The Exoneration Project. Both men have steadfastly maintained their innocence over the last three and a half decades for a 1986 fire that killed two men in Chicago.

    “We have been waiting for this day for 35 years,” Mr. Almendarez’s sister Laura Guevara told CBS News, while waiting outside the jail for her brother to be released. “It’s overdue.”

    Mr. Galvan and Mr. Almendarez — who were teenagers at the time and never given pre-trial bond — were convicted and arrested in 1987 of aggravated arson and first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. 

    Mr. Galvan was convicted based on a coerced confession he maintains involved the use of police torture — including being handcuffed to a wall and beaten — and invalidated arson science testimony by a Chicago arson investigator. Similar evidence and misconduct were used to convict Mr. Almendarez.

    Upon their release today, Mr. Galvan and Mr. Almendarez were awaiting a new trial granted to them by the First Judicial Appellate Court on two occasions in 2019 and 2022.

    John Galvan with his family (courtesy of the Galvan family for the Innocence Project).

    The post John Galvan and Arthur Almendarez Walk Free in Chicago After 35 Years in Prison for Arson appeared first on Innocence Project.

  • Report: Latinos Believe In Better Ways To Improve Safety Than Funding Police

    Almost all Latinos believe there are better ways to make their communities safer than simply funding police departments, according to a first-of-its-kind study conducted by Mijente and other groups.

    In “Futuro y Esperanza: Latinx Perspectives on Policing and Safety,” 93 percent of the Latinos surveyed believe that making their communities safer requires “investing money in things that prevent crime from happening in the first place, such as good schools, access to good-paying jobs, and affordable housing, instead of just funding police to respond to it.”

    The post Report: Latinos Believe In Better Ways To Improve Safety Than Funding Police appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Farmer Co-Ops Are Giving Latinx Communities Room To Grow

    On Sundays, Edith Alas Ortega travels 20 minutes from her home to a farm field in Henderson County, North Carolina, and takes a deep breath. “There’s a mental and physical healing that happens out here,” she said in Spanish. Ortega is one of five members of Tierra Fértil Coop—“fertile ground” in English—an agricultural, worker-owned cooperative for and by Latinx immigrants. The group—three Salvadoran and three Mexican immigrants—meet every week on their one-acre parcel in Hendersonville that provides vegetables for the families involved as well as enough for resale, with a focus on culturally appropriate ingredients for the Latinx market.

    The post Farmer Co-Ops Are Giving Latinx Communities Room To Grow appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Into the COVID ICU

    Dr. Paloma Marin-Nevarez graduated from medical school during the pandemic. We follow the rookie doctor for her first months working at a hospital in Fresno, California, as she grapples with isolation, anti-mask rallies and an overwhelming number of deaths. 

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Celebrating El Tecolote’s 50th Anniversary

    El Tecolote intro graphicEl Tecolote, Beloved Bilingual English/Spanish Newspaper Literary Dialogs with Nina Serrano Celebrates the 50th Anniversary I am so excited about this interview on the 50th anniversary El Tecolote, a bilingual English/Spanish newspaper much beloved in the Latinx community of San Francisco, California, because I was around for the beginning! I still remember the thrill 50 […]

    This post was originally published on Estuary Press.

  • Conspiracy Theories Aren’t the Only Thing Holding Back US Vaccination Efforts

    A sign points to a COVID-19 vaccination clinic offering the Pfizer vaccine to anyone over the age of 12 who wants it, at Crenshaw High School in the predominantly Latinx and Black neighborhood of South Los Angeles, on July 8, 2021. The clinic was empty except for the staff working there.

    When it comes to resistance to receiving the COVID vaccine, you’ve probably heard about the conspiracy theories — the wild assertions that vaccines contain microchip tracking devices, that they can alter your DNA, that they can “shed” or spread from person to person, or even the claim by some that the vaccine makes you magnetic. Much of the discourse around vaccine hesitancy is centered around these bogus conspiracy theories, and as a result, they’ve often been discussed in connection with the U.S. failure to meet the Biden administration’s goal of vaccinating 70 percent of American adults by July 4. But there’s a much less discussed factor when it comes to vaccine hesitancy — and it has nothing to do with conspiracies.

    Many socioeconomic barriers and structural injustices are still impeding vaccination in a variety of communities across the country, particularly in marginalized communities.

    “When we look at the barriers that could be considered structural or access barriers, the most common one that we hear from people does relate to work — and that is the concern about having to take time off of work, specifically due to side effects,” Liz Hamel, director of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Truthout. “We also find concerns around needing to provide documentation. So, about a third of people who haven’t been vaccinated say that they’re concerned they might have to provide a Social Security number or a government-issued I.D. in order to get the vaccine.”

    Although many vaccination sites are required to request Social Security information for the purpose of charging administrative fees to insurance companies or the federal government, providing this information is not an official requirement for vaccine eligibility. However, there is still quite a bit of confusion around the ID requirement, which is exacerbated by the fact that these requirements can vary from county to county — with many requiring some form of photo ID (not necessarily government issued). So, although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated that vaccines are available to anyone — including undocumented immigrants — there needs to be more information available to these communities (and those serving them) detailing specific requirements when it comes to providing identification.

    Another compounding factor in vaccine hesitancy among certain marginalized communities — particularly Black and Latinx communities — is a concern about being able to get the vaccine from a place they trust.

    “There’s already a lot of fear and mistrust out there, but on top of that, you add these structural barriers and it adds another layer,” Olveen Carrasquillo, chief of general internal medicine at the University of Miami, told Truthout. “People fear that they may be arrested by immigration officers, that they’re going to be charged a lot of money, that they are going to somehow owe this debt from being vaccinated, that it’s going to somehow be charged against them if they try to apply for immigration status.”

    Carrasquillo and his team have been working hard to break down many of these informational and structural barriers. They’ve found that working with local and trusted community leaders is helpful in reaching marginalized groups who have yet to be vaccinated. One of these initiatives is the Community Engaged Alliance Against COVID Disparities, which is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Carrasquillo is part of the Florida component of this program, which is a statewide coalition of academics and community members, which, according to Carrasquillo, is trying to increase the vaccine uptake in marginalized communities.

    “One of the biggest challenges is making sure the vaccine is available when people are not working, because not all employers will provide people with paid time off to do this — they have to lose a day of work, lose a day of pay,” he said. “Strategies like offering vaccination to people who work in what we call the ‘after hours,’ either evenings and weekends, is critically important.”

    The Alliance that Carrasquillo is a part of, in Florida, has been able to bring in state workers to administer vaccines in immigrant communities and communities of color during events at which speakers like him provide information to community members to assuage their fears and mistrust.

    “Combining the fact that we made it very convenient right there at their workplace so they can get the vaccine and at the same time there’s somebody addressing their concerns or fears — that was a win. Those are the kind of community-based strategies that really help,” Carrasquillo said.

    However, even the best vaccine access doesn’t address another concern many workers face: the prospect of missing work (and even losing a job) thanks to potential vaccine side effects. Around 24 percent of Americans don’t have access to paid sick leave, and because employers are not required by law to provide this leave, despite being in the middle of a devastating pandemic, concerns about side effects impacting work ability have become a significant factor which can help to explain why the vaccine rollout has begun to slow down. It should be noted that many people don’t experience side effects from the vaccine, and among those who do, often these side effects only last up to a day. However, for folks with little job security, even a day of missed work can be a significant concern.

    As with many aspects of COVID’s impacts, from infection and death rates to the availability of testing, barriers to vaccination fall squarely along race and class lines. The same Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that information and access barriers disproportionately impact Black and Latinx adults.

    “What we’re seeing is that these populations don’t have the flexibility in terms of their current employment or having child care to take care of their kids so they can get vaccinated — and so there are barriers that these populations face with their vaccine access,” Ashley Kirzinger, associate director for the public opinion and survey research team of the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Truthout. “These are not the people that are adamant that they’re not going to get vaccinated. They just need some assistance — whether it’s in terms of time off from their employer or making it part of a routine medical visit, or whatever it may be.”

    There are a number of initiatives being proposed by policy makers which recognize the reality of structural and work-related barriers when it comes to vaccine access. On the federal level, the Biden administration has announced a business tax credit that would offset the cost for employers with fewer than 500 employees to provide full pay whenever employees need to get a COVID-19 vaccination or recover from that vaccination.

    States have also begun to focus on sick leave–related barriers to vaccination. For example, the state of New Jersey has proposed a bill which would provide retroactive sick leave for workers who had to miss work after taking days off because of vaccine side effects or quarantining due to COVID. The bill would require employers to cover two weeks of sick leave if an employee can’t come to work because they are quarantining, experiencing COVID symptoms, awaiting a test result, or caring for a sick family member or child.

    Other states already have similar policies in place. California’s COVID-19 supplemental paid sick leave law went into effect in March and mandates that all California employers with more than 25 employees provide more paid sick leave and add more qualifying reasons for leave, such as attending an appointment to receive a COVID-19 vaccine or experiencing symptoms related to the vaccine itself. Although temporary, policies such as these are an important first step in addressing the vaccine barriers faced by many workers.

    All this is not to say that there aren’t individuals out there who aren’t adamantly opposed to the vaccine regardless of any structural barriers. According to Kirzinger, these individuals comprise roughly 15 percent of those polled and tend to be largely Republican and white Evangelicals, often citing ideological or conspiratorial reasons. However, focusing our attention on the structural barriers faced by those who are open to being vaccinated could bring up the number of vaccinations in the U.S.

    Further, focusing on the informational and structural barriers — particularly the concerns around sick leave from work and out-of-pocket costs — forces us to begin asking larger questions. COVID has, in so many ways, revealed the inadequacies and shortcomings of the way we organize a wide variety of institutions in the U.S., from health care to social services and much more. Vaccine access is just another issue on top of a long list of issues that have starkly exposed the structural racism and classism that permeate every aspect of our society.

    “COVID is just a symptom, right? The fact that COVID disproportionately affected our communities and the fact that the COVID vaccine uptake was low in our communities — those are symptoms that were based on these underlying structural determinants of health that put us at risk,” Carrasquillo said. “Every time we have a major disaster or a major disease outbreak, it disproportionately hits the same communities. At some point, we have to ask why it is that COVID disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable.”

    There are a number of ways to begin answering that question, but it’s hard to imagine an answer that doesn’t include a fundamental critique of our current economic system. The fact that health care is a for-profit industry and that paid sick leave is not guaranteed in this country are major systemic barriers to vaccine access and overall health outcomes in general. Free vaccines and policies attempting to address issues around sick leave are important, but are limited and temporary solutions. Advocates emphasize that more is needed to address the chronic, structural barriers to health in this country.

    “The structural racism and the structural inequalities that result from these policies are key things,” Carrasquillo said. “These are things that doctors themselves won’t be able to address — they require more upstream interventions.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Conspiracy Theories Aren’t the Only Thing Holding Back US Vaccination Efforts

    A sign points to a COVID-19 vaccination clinic offering the Pfizer vaccine to anyone over the age of 12 who wants it, at Crenshaw High School in the predominantly Latinx and Black neighborhood of South Los Angeles, on July 8, 2021. The clinic was empty except for the staff working there.

    When it comes to resistance to receiving the COVID vaccine, you’ve probably heard about the conspiracy theories — the wild assertions that vaccines contain microchip tracking devices, that they can alter your DNA, that they can “shed” or spread from person to person, or even the claim by some that the vaccine makes you magnetic. Much of the discourse around vaccine hesitancy is centered around these bogus conspiracy theories, and as a result, they’ve often been discussed in connection with the U.S. failure to meet the Biden administration’s goal of vaccinating 70 percent of American adults by July 4. But there’s a much less discussed factor when it comes to vaccine hesitancy — and it has nothing to do with conspiracies.

    Many socioeconomic barriers and structural injustices are still impeding vaccination in a variety of communities across the country, particularly in marginalized communities.

    “When we look at the barriers that could be considered structural or access barriers, the most common one that we hear from people does relate to work — and that is the concern about having to take time off of work, specifically due to side effects,” Liz Hamel, director of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Truthout. “We also find concerns around needing to provide documentation. So, about a third of people who haven’t been vaccinated say that they’re concerned they might have to provide a Social Security number or a government-issued I.D. in order to get the vaccine.”

    Although many vaccination sites are required to request Social Security information for the purpose of charging administrative fees to insurance companies or the federal government, providing this information is not an official requirement for vaccine eligibility. However, there is still quite a bit of confusion around the ID requirement, which is exacerbated by the fact that these requirements can vary from county to county — with many requiring some form of photo ID (not necessarily government issued). So, although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated that vaccines are available to anyone — including undocumented immigrants — there needs to be more information available to these communities (and those serving them) detailing specific requirements when it comes to providing identification.

    Another compounding factor in vaccine hesitancy among certain marginalized communities — particularly Black and Latinx communities — is a concern about being able to get the vaccine from a place they trust.

    “There’s already a lot of fear and mistrust out there, but on top of that, you add these structural barriers and it adds another layer,” Olveen Carrasquillo, chief of general internal medicine at the University of Miami, told Truthout. “People fear that they may be arrested by immigration officers, that they’re going to be charged a lot of money, that they are going to somehow owe this debt from being vaccinated, that it’s going to somehow be charged against them if they try to apply for immigration status.”

    Carrasquillo and his team have been working hard to break down many of these informational and structural barriers. They’ve found that working with local and trusted community leaders is helpful in reaching marginalized groups who have yet to be vaccinated. One of these initiatives is the Community Engaged Alliance Against COVID Disparities, which is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Carrasquillo is part of the Florida component of this program, which is a statewide coalition of academics and community members, which, according to Carrasquillo, is trying to increase the vaccine uptake in marginalized communities.

    “One of the biggest challenges is making sure the vaccine is available when people are not working, because not all employers will provide people with paid time off to do this — they have to lose a day of work, lose a day of pay,” he said. “Strategies like offering vaccination to people who work in what we call the ‘after hours,’ either evenings and weekends, is critically important.”

    The Alliance that Carrasquillo is a part of, in Florida, has been able to bring in state workers to administer vaccines in immigrant communities and communities of color during events at which speakers like him provide information to community members to assuage their fears and mistrust.

    “Combining the fact that we made it very convenient right there at their workplace so they can get the vaccine and at the same time there’s somebody addressing their concerns or fears — that was a win. Those are the kind of community-based strategies that really help,” Carrasquillo said.

    However, even the best vaccine access doesn’t address another concern many workers face: the prospect of missing work (and even losing a job) thanks to potential vaccine side effects. Around 24 percent of Americans don’t have access to paid sick leave, and because employers are not required by law to provide this leave, despite being in the middle of a devastating pandemic, concerns about side effects impacting work ability have become a significant factor which can help to explain why the vaccine rollout has begun to slow down. It should be noted that many people don’t experience side effects from the vaccine, and among those who do, often these side effects only last up to a day. However, for folks with little job security, even a day of missed work can be a significant concern.

    As with many aspects of COVID’s impacts, from infection and death rates to the availability of testing, barriers to vaccination fall squarely along race and class lines. The same Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that information and access barriers disproportionately impact Black and Latinx adults.

    “What we’re seeing is that these populations don’t have the flexibility in terms of their current employment or having child care to take care of their kids so they can get vaccinated — and so there are barriers that these populations face with their vaccine access,” Ashley Kirzinger, associate director for the public opinion and survey research team of the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Truthout. “These are not the people that are adamant that they’re not going to get vaccinated. They just need some assistance — whether it’s in terms of time off from their employer or making it part of a routine medical visit, or whatever it may be.”

    There are a number of initiatives being proposed by policy makers which recognize the reality of structural and work-related barriers when it comes to vaccine access. On the federal level, the Biden administration has announced a business tax credit that would offset the cost for employers with fewer than 500 employees to provide full pay whenever employees need to get a COVID-19 vaccination or recover from that vaccination.

    States have also begun to focus on sick leave–related barriers to vaccination. For example, the state of New Jersey has proposed a bill which would provide retroactive sick leave for workers who had to miss work after taking days off because of vaccine side effects or quarantining due to COVID. The bill would require employers to cover two weeks of sick leave if an employee can’t come to work because they are quarantining, experiencing COVID symptoms, awaiting a test result, or caring for a sick family member or child.

    Other states already have similar policies in place. California’s COVID-19 supplemental paid sick leave law went into effect in March and mandates that all California employers with more than 25 employees provide more paid sick leave and add more qualifying reasons for leave, such as attending an appointment to receive a COVID-19 vaccine or experiencing symptoms related to the vaccine itself. Although temporary, policies such as these are an important first step in addressing the vaccine barriers faced by many workers.

    All this is not to say that there aren’t individuals out there who aren’t adamantly opposed to the vaccine regardless of any structural barriers. According to Kirzinger, these individuals comprise roughly 15 percent of those polled and tend to be largely Republican and white Evangelicals, often citing ideological or conspiratorial reasons. However, focusing our attention on the structural barriers faced by those who are open to being vaccinated could bring up the number of vaccinations in the U.S.

    Further, focusing on the informational and structural barriers — particularly the concerns around sick leave from work and out-of-pocket costs — forces us to begin asking larger questions. COVID has, in so many ways, revealed the inadequacies and shortcomings of the way we organize a wide variety of institutions in the U.S., from health care to social services and much more. Vaccine access is just another issue on top of a long list of issues that have starkly exposed the structural racism and classism that permeate every aspect of our society.

    “COVID is just a symptom, right? The fact that COVID disproportionately affected our communities and the fact that the COVID vaccine uptake was low in our communities — those are symptoms that were based on these underlying structural determinants of health that put us at risk,” Carrasquillo said. “Every time we have a major disaster or a major disease outbreak, it disproportionately hits the same communities. At some point, we have to ask why it is that COVID disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable.”

    There are a number of ways to begin answering that question, but it’s hard to imagine an answer that doesn’t include a fundamental critique of our current economic system. The fact that health care is a for-profit industry and that paid sick leave is not guaranteed in this country are major systemic barriers to vaccine access and overall health outcomes in general. Free vaccines and policies attempting to address issues around sick leave are important, but are limited and temporary solutions. Advocates emphasize that more is needed to address the chronic, structural barriers to health in this country.

    “The structural racism and the structural inequalities that result from these policies are key things,” Carrasquillo said. “These are things that doctors themselves won’t be able to address — they require more upstream interventions.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Most Student Debtors Can’t Make Their Payments. It’s Time for Debt Cancelation.

    As college students around the country graduate with a massive amount of debt, advocates display a hand-painted sign on the Ellipse in front of The White House to call on President Joe Biden to sign an executive order to cancel student debt on June 15, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    In recent years, many centrist economists have claimed that canceling student debt is economically regressive in that it would disproportionately favor higher-income households. Yet, study after study has revealed that this is not the case. In particular, a new study by the Roosevelt Institute explains that the “regressive myth rests on a series of misleading methodological foundations,” demonstrating that, contrary to these regressive claims, student debt cancelation at each proposed level of cancelation — Biden’s $10,000 proposal, Warren and Schumer’s $50,000 proposal, or the Institute’s own proposal of $75,000 — would see those most economically marginalized benefiting the most.

    The Roosevelt Institute study authors contend that previous assessments depend too heavily on annual household income, which does not fully account for a household’s overall assets. Instead, they incorporated student debt distribution data by race and household wealth, which is often ignored in studies that show cancelation to be regressive, to demonstrate that canceling student debt is fundamentally progressive while also taking into account the impact of student debt on the entire population, not just student debt borrowers. The authors note that this measure “more accurately depicts the size of the burden experienced by those in lower-income households, for whom each dollar of debt is actually a more substantial barrier to economic security, access to consumer credit, and increases in net worth.” Furthermore, the authors did not include private debt, since only federal student loans are eligible for cancelation under the present student debt cancelation proposals from Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer as well as the Biden administration, while valuing student debt by its costs toward borrowers, not lenders (Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, included private debt in his proposal).

    By looking at the share of wealth, not just student debt in absolute numbers, it becomes clear that borrowers in the lower percentiles are much more burdened than their counterparts in the higher percentiles. In other words, student debt makes up a larger share of their annual household incomes or share of household wealth compared to higher percentile households which makes repayment difficult and almost impossible. This is precisely why the study finds that the greatest benefits of student debt cancelation accumulate to those in the bottom 40 percentile for all racial groups. Moreover, by examining the distribution of student debt by wealth and race instead of the standard income variable, cancelation provides ample evidence that the racial wealth gap would narrow in the process. The study’s authors note that Black borrowers would, in fact, benefit significantly more from student debt cancelation than their counterpart white borrowers at every point on the income and asset distribution continuum, reflecting the fact that Black borrowers must borrow more for expenses than white students of equivalent income levels due to the racial wealth gap in family resources. For instance, Black borrowers in the poorest 10 percent of household wealth would receive around $17,000, whereas white borrowers in the same percentile would receive approximately $12,000 under the Warren-Schumer plan. Meanwhile, the wealthiest households across all race groups would benefit from debt forgiveness by an average of $562.

    It is critical to emphasise the significance of this study. It is another in a long series of studies that have provided evidence that student debt cancelation is progressive from an economic standpoint. A prominent scholar on the topic, Marshall Steinbaum of the University of Utah, showed that the Warren-Schumer plan would see the lowest earners who owe more than their annual income in student debt owe just one-fifth of their annual income. According to a Brandeis University analysis, 76 percent of student loan holders would have their debt canceled with Warren’s $50,000 proposal.

    We have very good reason to believe that canceling student debt provides significant economic benefits that help stimulate the economy, too. Previous research showed that canceling all student debt creates over 1 million jobs per year while increasing GDP by up to $108 billion. Over 10 years, cancelation generates between $861 billion and $1,083 billion in real GDP in 2016 dollars. Freed from the heavy burden of debt, students would utilize the extra money for day-to-day living expenses and pay off other obligations.

    As student debt remains in place, it is causing significant and unequal harm to marginalized borrowers, which can only be reduced and remedied by cancelation. For instance, as shown by a recent report from the Student Borrower Protection Center, students of color disproportionately struggle to pay their student debt at a higher rate than white students — creating a vicious cycle of economic inequality along racial lines. The authors note, “America’s student debt crisis is a civil rights crisis.” Additionally, on average, Black graduates owe $7,400 more than white graduates. Thirty-two percent of Black borrowers and 15 percent of Latinx borrowers are in “default” with their payments. In New York, the six communities with the greatest levels of student loan default are largely non-white and centred in the Bronx, even though they have relatively smaller average loan balances.

    Moreover, the cost of cancelation is not a straightforward concept since the total amount of student debt owed by borrowers and the costs of cancelation are not the same thing. As Sparky Abraham argues, lending money is a gamble on the future. If a substantial number of borrowers struggle to pay off their debt or die in debt, forgiving all the debt would cost less than the total amount owed, $1.7 trillion. The only way the federal government loses revenue through cancelation is when all borrowers pay back their debt.

    That is the direction we are now taking, which implies that the federal government is currently collecting payments and hence, inevitably losing money on a considerably smaller percentage than commonly assumed. The standard system — get the loan, pay it back in fixed amounts over time — only works for roughly a fourth of the loans. A whopping 75 percent of student debt is carried by those who are either not paying or are paying a fixed amount based on their annual income because they can’t afford their normal payments. This suggests that cancelation would cost substantially less than the total owed by borrowers since the federal government would end up losing revenue due to accruing interest and the inability to pay the total balance by student loan borrowers.

    But, of course, the economic costs of cancelation should not even be the principal deciding factor. Even if student debt forgiveness is somehow shown to be economically “regressive,” it would be irrelevant. Forgiveness is an ethical matter, regardless of “cost.” The issue at hand is the harm caused to students and its moral implications. By forcing repayment on their student debt, society is dooming its next generation to miserable and suffering lives for essentially nothing other than to increase neoliberalism’s assault on the general population, as Noam Chomsky points out. Thus, student debt — and not its forgiveness — is the truly regressive policy and an unjust imposition.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Black and Latinx Americans Have Seen “Catastrophic” Declines in Life Expectancy

    Chaplain Kevin Deegan hugs registered nurse Connie Carrillo (right) at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in the Mission Hills neighborhood on February 17, 2021, in Los Angeles, California. The hospital is located in the northeast San Fernando Valley, which was a primary coronavirus hotspot in hard hit Los Angeles County. The patient population is predominantly from the Latinx community.

    Although James Toussaint has never had covid, the pandemic is taking a profound toll on his health.

    First, the 57-year-old lost his job delivering parts for a New Orleans auto dealership in spring 2020, when the local economy shut down. Then, he fell behind on his rent. Last month, Toussaint was forced out of his apartment when his landlord — who refused to accept federally funded rental assistance — found a loophole in the federal ban on evictions.

    Toussaint recently has had trouble controlling his blood pressure. Arthritis in his back and knees prevents him from lifting more than 20 pounds, a huge obstacle for a manual laborer.

    Toussaint worries about what will happen when his pandemic unemployment benefits run out, which could happen as early as July 31.

    “I’ve been homeless before,” said Toussaint, who found a room to rent nearby after his eviction. “I don’t want to be homeless again.”

    With coronavirus infections falling in the U.S., many people are eager to put the pandemic behind them. But it has inflicted wounds that won’t easily heal. In addition to killing 600,000 in the United States and afflicting an estimated 3.4 million or more with persistent symptoms, the pandemic threatens the health of vulnerable people devastated by the loss of jobs, homes and opportunities for the future. It will, almost certainly, cast a long shadow on American health, leading millions of people to live sicker and die younger due to increasing rates of poverty, hunger and housing insecurity.

    In particular, it will exacerbate the discrepancies already seen in the country between the wealth and health of Black and Latinx Americans and those of white Americans. Indeed, new research published Wednesday in the BMJ shows just how wide that gap has grown. Life expectancy across the country plummeted by nearly two years from 2018 to 2020, the largest decline since 1943, when American troops were dying in World War II, according to the study. But while white Americans lost 1.36 years, Black Americans lost 3.25 years and Latinx Americans lost 3.88 years. Given that life expectancy typically varies only by a month or two from year to year, losses of this magnitude are “pretty catastrophic,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and lead author of the study.

    Over the two years included in the study, the average loss of life expectancy in the U.S. was nearly nine times greater than the average in 16 other developed nations, whose residents can now expect to live 4.7 years longer than Americans. Compared with their peers in other countries, Americans died not only in greater numbers but at younger ages during this period.

    The U.S. mortality rate spiked by nearly 23% in 2020, when there were roughly 522,000 more deaths than normally would be expected. Not all of these deaths were directly attributable to covid-19. Fatal heart attacks and strokes both increased in 2020, at least partly fueled by delayed treatment or lack of access to medical care, Woolf said. More than 40% of Americans put off treatment during the early months of the pandemic, when hospitals were stretched thin and going into a medical facility seemed risky. Without prompt medical attention, heart attacks can cause congestive heart failure; delaying treatment of strokes raises the risk of long-term disability.

    Much of the devastating public health impact during the pandemic can be chalked up to economic disparity. Although stock prices have recovered from last year’s decline — and have recently hit all-time highs — many people are still suffering financially, especially Black and Latinx Americans. In a February report, economic analysts at McKinsey & Co. predicted that, on average, Black and Hispanic workers won’t recover their pre-pandemic employment and salaries until 2024. The lowest-paid workers and those with less than a high school education may not recover even by then.

    And while federal and state relief programs have cushioned the impact of pandemic job losses, 11.3% of Americans today live in poverty — compared with 10.7% in January 2020. A federal eviction moratorium, which has helped an estimated 2.2 million people remain in their homes, expires June 30. Without protection from evictions, “millions of Americans could fall off the cliff,” said Vangela Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group.

    Being evicted erodes a person’s health in multiple ways. “Poverty causes a lot of cancer and chronic disease, and this pandemic has caused a lot more poverty,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies health disparities. “The effect of this pandemic on chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, will be measured decades from now.”

    Twenty million adults recently have had trouble putting food on the table. The inability to afford healthy food — which is usually more expensive than salty, starchy fare — can cause both short-term and long-term harm. People with low incomes, for example, are more likely to be hospitalized for low blood sugar toward the end of the month, when they run out of money for food.

    In the long term, food insecurity is associated with an increased risk of diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension, depression, anxiety and other chronic diseases, especially in children.

    “Once the acute phase of this crisis has passed, we will face an enormous wave of death and disability,” said Dr. Robert Califf, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who wrote about post-pandemic health risks in an April editorial in Circulation, a medical journal. “These will be the aftershocks of covid.”

    Less Wealth, Poorer Health

    American health was poor even before the pandemic, with 60% of the population suffering from a chronic condition, such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure or heart failure. These four conditions were associated with nearly two-thirds of hospitalizations from covid, according to a February study in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

    Deaths from some chronic diseases began rising in lower-income Americans in the 1990s, Woolf said. That trend was exacerbated by the Great Recession of 2007-09, which undermined the health not just of those who lost their homes or jobs but the population as a whole. Still, the Great Recession, and its resultant health effects, did not affect all Americans equally. Black people in the U.S. today control less wealth than they did before that recession, while the gap in financial security between Black and white Americans has widened, according to a Nonprofit Quarterly article published last year. And the unemployment rate among Black workers did not recover to pre-recession levels until 2016.

    Researchers have developed a better understanding in recent years of how chronic stress — such as that caused by poverty, job loss and homelessness — leads to disease. Unrelenting stress causes inflammation that can damage blood vessels, the heart and other organs.

    Research shows that people with low incomes live an average of seven to eight years less than those who are financially secure. The richest 1% of Americans live nearly 15 years longer than the poorest 1%.

    People who are poor tend to smoke more; have higher risks of chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease and mental illness; and are more likely to become victims of violence.

    The stress of the pandemic also has led many people to smoke, drink and gain weight, increasing the risk of chronic disease. Fatal drug overdoses spiked 30% from October 2019 to October 2020.

    Jennifer Drury, 40, has struggled with substance abuse, particularly prescription painkillers, since her 20s. She blames the isolation and stress of the pandemic for causing her to relapse — and leading several of her friends to fatally overdose.

    “Idle time is not good for addiction,” said Drury, who fell behind on rent and was evicted from her previous home. She said drug dealers are never far away, especially at the New Orleans motel where she and her husband are now staying. “Drug dealers don’t care about pandemics.”

    Women Losing Ground

    The American Rescue Plan, which provides $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief, was designed to help displaced workers and cut child poverty rates in half. The actual benefits of the law may prove less sweeping.

    Twenty-five states have opted to cut off additional federal unemployment payments, citing concerns that such generous benefits pay people more to stay home than they can earn by working.

    Many women say they would like to return to work but have no one to take care of their children. Nearly half of child care centers have closed and others have reduced the number of children they serve.

    The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis concluded that “economic recovery depends on child care availability.” A March report from the National Women’s Law Center estimates “women have lost a generation of labor force participation gains,” which could leave them and their children financially disadvantaged for years.

    Ruth Bermudez is one of millions of women who have left the workforce in the past year. Bermudez, who was laid off from her job as a behavioral health caseworker in New Orleans last year, said her child care needs have prevented her from finding work. The care of her 6-year-old daughter became her full-time job after the pandemic closed schools.

    Although her daughter has returned to class, Bermudez said school shutdowns due to covid outbreaks have been frequent and unpredictable.

    “I had to be the teacher, the lunch lady, the school bus driver, all at one time,” said Bermudez, 27. “It is exhausting.”

    Life-Altering Evictions

    James Toussaint had just two weeks to find a new place to live after a judge ordered him evicted. His family was unable to take him in.

    “I’ve got family, but everybody has their own issues and problems,” said Toussaint, who had to throw away all his clothes and furniture because they had become infested with bedbugs. “Everyone is trying their best to help themselves.”

    Toussaint is now renting a room in a boarding house with no kitchen and a shared bathroom for $160 a week. He’s had to buy cleaning supplies with his own money in order to sanitize the bathroom, which he said is often too dirty to use.

    Sharing communal space is often unsanitary and increases the risk of being exposed to the coronavirus, said Emily Benfer, a visiting professor at Wake Forest University School of Law. Even moving in with family poses risks, she said, because it’s impossible to isolate or quarantine in crowded homes.

    Benfer co-wrote a November study that found covid infection rates grew twice as high in states that lifted moratoriums on evictions, compared with states that continued to ban them. About 14% of tenants have fallen behind on rent — double the rate before the pandemic.

    Toussaint’s annual lease expired during the pandemic, leaving him to rent on a month-to-month basis. While some states require landlords to show “just cause” for eviction, Louisiana landlords can evict tenants for any reason once their annual lease has expired.

    Property owners have filed for more than 378,000 evictions during the pandemic in just the five states and 29 cities tracked by Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. A growing body of evidence shows that eviction is toxic to health, causing immediate and long-term damage that increases the risk of death. Studies show that evicted people are more likely to be in poor general health or have mental health concerns even years later.

    “This singular event alters the course of one’s life for the worse,” Benfer said. “If we don’t intervene” to prevent mass evictions when the moratorium ends, “it will be catastrophic for generations to come.”

    Eviction’s harms can be measured at every stage of life:

    When pregnant women are evicted, their newborns are more likely to be born early or very small and have a higher risk of dying in the first year. Women who are evicted are more likely to suffer sexual assault, Benfer said.

    Kids who are evicted are at greater risk of lead poisoning from substandard housing, Benfer said. They’re also more likely than others to be hospitalized.

    Evicted adults report worse mental health and are more likely to be hospitalized for a mental health crisis, studies show. They also have higher mortality rates from suicide. Although the causes of addiction are complex, research shows that counties with higher eviction rates have significantly higher rates of drug- and alcohol-related deaths.

    People who are evicted often move into substandard housing in neighborhoods with higher crime rates. These homes are sometimes plagued by mold and roaches, lack sufficient heating, or have plumbing that doesn’t work. Landlords have no incentive to make repairs for tenants who are behind on their rent, Benfer said. In fact, tenants who request repairs or report safety hazards risk eviction.

    Although middle-class Americans take their kitchens for granted — and rely on them to cook healthful meals — more than 1 million homes lack complete kitchens, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

    New Orleans doesn’t require that rental units include stoves, said Hannah Adams, also a lawyer with Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. Toussaint’s new room is equipped with a microwave and small refrigerator, but no sink, oven or stove. He washes dinner dishes in the bathroom. His landlord doesn’t allow residents to have electric hot plates, so most of his meals involve cold cereal, deli sandwiches or meals he can heat in the microwave. His doctor has urged Toussaint, who is borderline diabetic, to lose weight, eat less salt and starch, and stop smoking.

    Toussaint, who lived on the street for two years, said he’s determined not to return there. He hopes to apply for disability insurance, which would provide him with an income if his arthritis prevents him from finding steady work.

    Woolf said he hopes Americans won’t forget about the suffering of people like Toussaint as cases of covid decline. “My worry is that people will feel the crisis is behind us and it’s all good,” Woolf said. His research connecting four decades of declining economic opportunity with falling life expectancy shows “we are in really big trouble, and that was true before we knew a pandemic was coming.”

    The pandemic doesn’t have to doom a generation of Americans to disease and early death, said Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. By addressing issues such as poverty, racial inequality and the lack of affordable housing, the country can improve American health and reverse the trends that caused communities of color to suffer. “How the pandemic will affect people’s future health depends on what we do coming out of this,” Besser said. “It will take an intentional effort to make up for the losses that have occurred over the past year.”

    KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

    Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Naomi Quiñonez, Chicana Feminist Poet

    Naomi Quinonez graphicLiterary Dialogs with Nina Serrano featuring Naomi Quiñonez In this video, I welcome Naomi Quiñonez to Literary Dialogs. We review her background as a Professor of Chicana/o History, Ethnic and Women’s Studies, a poet, and activist. Naomi reads from her books of poetry which include Exiled Moon, Hummingbird Dreams and Smoking Mirror. The interview closes […]

    This post was originally published on Estuary Press.

  • Latinx and Low-Income Communities Are Paying the Costs of Plastic Pollution

    Plastic containers piled up at the recycling center in Wellsville, New York.

    All too often, the issue of plastic pollution is reduced to plastic straw bans led by clipboard-carrying college students, VSCO girls, and bracelets made with a promise of saving turtles. It conjures images of a wad of plastic grocery bags or perhaps a garbage island floating in the middle of the ocean somewhere.

    The problem is that plastic pollution isn’t just an issue of waste accumulation — plastics are also manufactured and often incinerated in communities where poor people and people of color are rarely consulted or alerted to the risks. Our communities are living this pollution every day and understand the connections between air, water, land, ocean, and human health in very personal and concrete ways.

    The Clean Air Task Force estimates that 1.8 million Latinx people in the U.S. live within half a mile of an oil and gas facility, increasing odds of preterm birth and respiratory illness. The production of plastic feedstocks and the raw fossil fuels used to make most plastics affect communities’ immune, reproductive, developmental, and respiratory systems, starting right outside factory fence lines. It is no surprise that our communities have been hit the hardest by COVID-19, as our immune systems are already compromised. Plastic pollution violates our human right to breathe without fear.

    Plastic also fuels the climate crisis and contributes to climate change at every step of its life cycle, from extraction to refinement, manufacture, transportation, disposal, and waste. If plastic production and use grow as currently planned, emissions from plastic production could reach 1.34 gigatons per year by 2030, equivalent to the emissions released by more than 295 new 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants. Ninety-nine percent of plastic is derived from fossil fuels, and the direct impact its production has in our communities is the real global crisis. Studies have shown how rampant the plastic crisis is, finding microplastics in deep sea animals, in fish, in our bodies, and even in rain.

    We stand up for solutions that will protect our communities and families from toxins in our air, water, and soil and will continue to fight for these solutions because justice demands it. But we often have no idea what is being built in our communities until it’s too late because of relaxed notice requirements for plastics facilities. Even if we make it to the public meeting, the language barriers are clear. We have watched children translating technical information while their parents lean over to ask, “Que dijo?” Places like California that are reducing plastics through legislation on producer and consumer responsibility still have two incinerators operating in Latinx communities. Facilities in communities of color have almost twice the rate of toxic release incidents than those in predominantly white neighborhoods.

    Fortunately, the level of public awareness and political will to address these issues is starting to shift toward action. At least a dozen states are now considering plastic producer responsibility laws, forcing plastic makers to plan for the full plastics lifecycle before they put one bottle, bag, or spoon to the mold. Some of those states are including language justice requirements for any new or increased production so that Spanish-speaking communities like ours can have a say. And people are waking up to simple alternatives to single-use plastics, and the cultural significance of reuse that Indigenous and Latinx communities were practicing long before it was a trend.

    Many local solutions to the plastics problem are bubbling up to the national level. Recently, California Rep. Alan Lowenthal and Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley re-introduced the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act (BFFPPA) of 2021 (HR2238/S984) to tackle the crisis of plastic pollution from beginning to end.

    The legislation builds on state laws that reduce one-time plastic use, forces large plastic producers to take responsibility for post-consumer plastic waste, requires a pause on new and expanded industrial facilities including plastic production, chemical recycling, and incineration facilities, and institutes a nationwide bottle bill. Dozens of states such as California, Washington, Oregon, and New York have legislation for producer responsibility moving through their legislatures. New Orleans unanimously passed a resolution that opposed the proposed Formosa Plastics megaplant in St. James Parish and further petrochemical buildout in Cancer Alley. There are over 20 states — including Vermont, Massachusetts, and Montana — that have active bottle bills.

    The BFFPPA essentially turns off the tap on expanded industrial facilities until the EPA can update or create new environmental and health regulations. It also requires any new permits to undergo environmental justice reviews and to deliver them to local communities early in the process. The bill would ensure that publications are translated and that live interpretation is provided at hearings. We can ensure that our communities know what is happening locally through written and oral communication that they can understand, in their native languages.

    States, the federal government, and consumers need to hold companies accountable by incentivizing them to innovate, demanding that they use less packaging, consider reusable or refillable options, and take the plastic lifecycle into account in purchasing. Initiatives that appear across the state and federal efforts include:

    • Incentivising shower gel manufacturers to offer refills or reusable options and to manage any waste they produce with a goal of recycling at least 65% by 2027.
    • Starting as early as 2023, requiring hotels and motels to have bulk stations for shampoo and conditioner instead of the mini shampoo, soap, and lotion containers.
    • Requiring restaurants and food vendors to only give out compostable utensils and plastic straws upon request.

    The plastic industry lobby, backed by the fossil fuels industry, is already pushing back on these state and national efforts. We need to hold accountable those who profit the most from pollution and these bills across the nation and in Washington, D.C., are a great start. The truth is that plastic isn’t cheap. Its cost is externalized to those at the fence lines of extraction, production, and waste.

    It’s time to address the plastic pollution crisis at the national level. Thousands of GreenLatinos and members of the global Break Free From Plastics movement are calling on Congress to break our society’s addiction to plastic. Our Latinx communities have long-standing practices that demonstrate to society ways to live without plastics. We must strive to end the harm that plastics are having on our health, our lives, our climate and our culture.

    Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by national media.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Community Health Centers Are Fueling Vaccine Equity. The Relief Bill Funds Them.

    Travel nurse Tiquella Russell of Texas prepares to administer a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital on February 25, 2021, in Los Angeles, California.

    President Biden approved $7.6 billion in emergency funding for community health centers when he signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan for combating the effects of the COVID pandemic on Thursday. Community health centers are public clinics that primarily provide health care in medically underserved areas and are proving crucial for overcoming massive racial disparities in vaccination rates.

    The Biden administration launched a program last month that provides vaccines directly to community health centers, where the majority of people vaccinated so far are people of color, according to analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. A longtime priority for progressive lawmakers such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, federally funded community health centers provide comprehensive health care to more than 29 million people, including 14 million people living below the federal poverty line, regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay.

    Vaccine shots, of course, are free at community health centers and other sites working with the government. As of March 7, federal data show that 54 percent of people who received one or more vaccine doses at a community health center are people of color, according to Kaiser’s analysis. While there are gaps in the data, roughly 26 percent of people who received vaccines are Latinx and roughly 12 percent are Black. Another roughly 17 percent identify as Asian, mixed-race or Indigenous.

    Higher vaccination rates among people of color at community health centers suggest that these clinics are doing a better job at vaccinating communities of color hard-hit by the pandemic than the national effort overall. Nationally, only 9 percent of people who have received at least one shot are Latinx and 7 percent are Black, but Latinx and Black people make up about 19 percent and 13 percent of the total United States population, respectively.

    The American Rescue Plan provides more than $60 billion in additional funding to staff and expand public health systems that work with community health centers on the front lines of the effort to contain the virus, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC).

    Despite disproportionately high rates of COVID infection and deaths in communities of color and especially among Black people, systemic racism has caused racial disparities in vaccine distribution and access. In February, the vaccination rate among white people in 35 states was more than double the vaccination rate among Latinx people and nearly double the rate among Black people, according to Kaiser.

    Experts point to multiple reasons for these disparities, including longstanding barriers to medical care faced by people of color and a lack of trust in a medical system with a legacy of racist abuse and experimentation. Research shows Black people are far less likely to trust doctors than white people are, due to legitimate fears that they will be denied care and face other forms of racism that undermine medical treatment. Racist immigration enforcement has also created barriers to vaccines, especially in the South.

    Community health centers are designed to address disparities in health care by tailoring their services to the needs of specific communities, whether that means providing access to care in multiple languages, expanding addiction treatment services or focusing on HIV prevention and treatment, to name a few examples. Hundreds of clinics serve rural areas where there are few other providers. Doctors and staff often reflect the people they serve, such as immigrants, people of color and LGBTQ people.

    The percentage of people of color receiving vaccines has increased at community health centers nationally since the Biden administration began working directly with the system to provide vaccines, with the share of patients of color receiving their first shot growing from 47 percent in January to 56 percent in February. This reflects the population served by community health centers, where 63 percent of patients were people of color in 2016.

    Currently, about 250 health centers with more than 4,000 sites are working to make sure that all three COVID vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson) are available to low-income people, houseless people, migrant workers, residents of public housing, patients who speak little English and people living in rural areas, according to NACHC.

    At this time last year, federal funding for community health centers was on the rocks in Congress, even as the clinics worked directly with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to contain the virus in marginalized communities. Staring down a potential fiscal cliff, community health centers nationwide were forced to consider hiring freezes and delay expansions and improvements in clinics and infrastructure.

    “Nearly one year ago we were fighting this pandemic with one hand tied behind our backs and a multitude of challenges that included diminished revenues, shortages of protective gear, supplies and tests,” said NACHC president Tom Van Coverden in a statement this week.

    However, community health centers proved to be crucial for providing care and extending public health messaging about COVID into vulnerable communities, including rural areas with few medical providers and among immigrant communities. In 2020, Congress pumped money into community health centers as the pandemic spiraled out of control under President Trump. The Trump administration attempted to take credit for the funding, even though community health centers often served recipients of Medicaid, the federal insurance program for low-income people that the Trump administration and Republicans worked to severely weaken and defund.

    About 91 percent of people served by the 12,000 community health clinics and satellite sites nationwide are low-income. Community health centers serve about 1.4 million houseless people and one third of people living in poverty.

    Each of the 1,400 health center organizations are run by boards where at least 51 percent of members are patients, according to NACHC.

    “Health center advocates across the country have worked tirelessly to let their leaders in Congress know that to successfully fight the pandemic, we need to have adequate resources,” Coverden said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Remember Me This Way

    In this special episode of the podcast, we hear the story of one of more than 500,000 Americans who’ve died from COVID-19. David León was a father of six; a small-business owner in Fresno, California; and a leader in the city’s Latino community. His death left a hole in that community and with the family he left behind.   


    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Into the COVID ICU

    Dr. Paloma Marin-Nevarez graduated from medical school during the pandemic. We follow the rookie doctor for her first months working at a hospital in Fresno, California, as she grapples with isolation, anti-mask rallies and an overwhelming number of deaths. 

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Latinx COVID Deaths Rise by 1,000 Percent in Los Angeles as Vaccine Rollout Lags

    Latinx COVID Deaths Soar 1,000% in Los Angeles as Vaccine Rollout Lags

    Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Black and Latinx people in the United States have died at higher rates, and new data shows that they are getting vaccinated at much lower rates than white people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports more than 60% of those vaccinated were white, while just 11.5% were Latinx, 6% were Asian, and just over 5% were Black. The CDC data is based on details gathered during the first month of the U.S. vaccination campaign that saw nearly 13 million Americans get a shot, though race and ethnicity was only known for about half of the recipients. Black and Latinx people continue to face a disproportionate risk for COVID-19 in their jobs as essential workers and are more likely to have preexisting conditions. “What we’re seeing illustrated is about 150 years of medical neglect,” says Dr. David Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA School of Medicine. “These disparities didn’t suddenly appear nine months ago at the beginning of the pandemic. These disparities have been built in, decision by decision.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: January marked the deadliest month yet of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. Black and Latinx people in the United States continue to die from the virus at higher rates. Now new data shows they’re getting vaccinated at much lower rates than white people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports more than 60% of those vaccinated so far are white, while just 11.5% are Latinx, 6% Asian, and just over 5% Black. This comes as many Black and Latinx people face a disproportionate risk of exposure to COVID in their jobs as essential workers and are more likely to have preexisting conditions.

    The CDC data was gathered during the first month of the U.S. vaccination campaign, and race and ethnicity are only known for about half of the nearly 13 million recipients. At a press conference Monday, the head of the Biden administration’s Health Equity Task Force said more data is needed. This is Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith.

    DR. MARCELLA NUNEZ–SMITH: We cannot ensure an equitable vaccination program without data to guide us. And the CDC will be releasing additional data regarding race and ethnicity and vaccine uptake soon. But I’m worried about how behind we are.

    AMY GOODMAN: Here in New York City, just 11% of COVID-19 vaccination so far went to Black people, who represent 24% of the population, and 15% went to the Latinx population, who make up 29% of the city’s population, even in predominantly Latinx neighborhoods where vaccination sites reported high numbers of white people from outside the community getting the shot. Mayor Bill de Blasio held a news conference on Sunday and said the disparities are unacceptable.

    MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: What we see is a particularly pronounced reality of many more people from white communities getting vaccination than folks from Black and Latino communities.

    AMY GOODMAN: Across the country in Los Angeles, the number of Latinx patients dying daily from COVID-19 has shot up by 1,000% since November. Latinx people are now succumbing to the disease at a rate over one-and-a-half times that of all Los Angeles residents.

    And that’s where we go now to speak to Dr. David Hayes-Bautista, distinguished professor of medicine and director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

    Dr. Hayes-Bautista, thanks so much for joining us again.

    DR. DAVID HAYES–BAUTISTA: My pleasure.

    AMY GOODMAN: One thousand percent increase in deaths of the Latinx population in Los Angeles. Can you explain what’s happening?

    DR. DAVID HAYES–BAUTISTA: Oh, it’s quite simple. What we’re seeing illustrated is about 150 years of medical neglect of Latino amongst other communities. And in California, all populations of color have much higher death rates than non-Hispanic white, which tells us a lot about where the medical resources are and aren’t.

    But particularly for Latinos, as essential workers who have kept the state going, the farmworkers who kept the state fed, the truck drivers, the packing house workers, the food industry workers, etc., the fact that they have worked during the early days of the pandemic — we didn’t consider them essential workers. We didn’t provide them personal protective equipment. They rarely have health insurance anyway, very low-wage, so that the coronavirus was able to eat its way through them very quickly.

    Your average Latino household across the country has more wage earners per household than non-Hispanic white. So you have more adults leaving the house every morning. They cannot do their jobs from the safety of their living rooms, because they don’t have those kind of jobs. You cannot grow strawberries in your living room. You cannot pick peaches in your living room. Thus they become more exposed to coronavirus. They are more likely to bring that into the household. Latinos have twice as many children per household, and children are often asymptomatic. These are the conditions that the coronavirus just loves. It’s very opportunistic.

    It’s not because they’re Latino that the rates are so high. It’s because they are in those occupational and living arrangement spaces that coronavirus just loves. A lot of exposure, a lot of people — boom, there it goes. And we’ve been seeing this now for nine months.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Dr. Hayes-Bautista, that could be understood in terms of the exposure, but now we’re dealing with the issue of the vaccinations in terms of being able to prevent future exposures. And it’s astounding that these inequities continue, not just in California and New York. Texas, which is 40% Latino, Latinos represent only 9% of the people who have been vaccinated so far, even though the Lower Rio Grande Valley is probably the worst place right now in terms of infections in the entire country. How do you explain the disparities in the vaccination process now?

    DR. DAVID HAYES–BAUTISTA: Well, again, we have to remember, these disparities didn’t suddenly appear nine months ago at the beginning of the pandemic. These disparities have been built in, decision by decision, politically, in terms of medical education, where to place medical resources, etc. Only now we’re seeing them — basically, those chickens come home to roost with the pandemic. Unfortunately, Latinos and other populations of color are paying the price for this maldistribution and limited access to medical resources, in any case. So it’s just making a bad situation multiplied even worse.

    The vaccination rate is very, very low in California amongst Latinos and most populations of color. So, the very populations that have helped keep the state together, kept it fed — if you remember the early days of the pandemic, when people were fighting in the grocery stores over paper towels or toilet paper, I keep saying, imagine if you were fighting over the last bag of potatoes in that store. That would have been some serious fighting. Thanks to farmworkers, we never got there. But the farmworkers have paid a price, because we have neglected them, consistently, for over a century and a half.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of the recent explosion in deaths — because you did a paper that tallied the high death rates among Latinos between May and November. But since November, it’s exploded 1,000%. What’s happening there?

    DR. DAVID HAYES–BAUTISTA: Well, that was 1,000% in some areas of Los Angeles. We got 15 million Latinos in California. So, we’re looking at the state, because we realize that in some areas — we’re doing work in farmworking communities in Ventura County, and in those small areas, it has just exploded. Overall, between actually October 27th and January 27th, the overall state mortality rate for Latinos has doubled. However, it started in October as five to six times higher than white. And in January, it’s still five to six times higher than white. So, compared to white, yes, the death rate is absolutely huge.

    And I am not sure yet that we have peaked. I am on the board of a hospital in East L.A. Ninety-nine percent of its patients are Latino. And we have had increases in admissions over the past four days. We have not seen yet the leveling off that other places may claim to have seen.

    AMY GOODMAN: Dr. David Hayes-Bautista, if you could talk about the issue of language and the issue of the directions that are being given to people? We have two different situations, one when people get sick and the other for people to learn about vaccines and not be afraid they’ll be picked up by ICE if they dare to be vaccinated. I wanted to go to an interview we did last month with Odilia Romero, the Zapotec interpreter and co-founder and executive director of the group Indigenous Communities in Leadership, or CIELO, an Indigenous women-led nonprofit in Los Angeles. This is what she said.

    ODILIA ROMERO: When you hear the privilege of others, when the essential workers are not getting vaccinated, it’s very heartbreaking. And it is, very personally, very frustrating. Like, I wouldn’t have the words to tell you, like, my feeling of anger at times, because I see Indigenous communities at the forefront. From the farm — from the agricultural fields to the hospitality industry to the cleaners, we are there. And we don’t have access to the vaccine. …

    The loss of lives, people being infected, you know, and the loss of knowledge is there, right? Some of the elders have passed away, and there goes a whole worldview. Just last week, someone in the community died. She knew the stories of migration. She was one of the first women that came to the U.S., you know, and she brought a lot of other women. And all the stories are gone. And the language is dying with COVID more than ever, especially here in L.A. with the elders.

    AMY GOODMAN: At places like Standing Rock Reservation, Native American leaders have prioritized the language keepers as those to be vaccinated first, those who speak Lakota and Dakota. But this goes to a number of questions. What languages are people being instructed in, where to go if they have COVID-19, where to go if they have the vaccine? Also, essential workers being prioritized when it comes to vaccines, not just even getting the vaccine, but the fact that they are on the frontlines, whether we’re talking about farmworkers in the fields, people who work in grocery stores, people who keep the whole society alive every day, somehow being protected and reached out to proactively, as opposed to them figuring out where they can go?

    DR. DAVID HAYES–BAUTISTA: Absolutely. Well, I have to say, the bulk of the information is provided in English. Now, we have to remember, Spanish — medical services have been provided in Spanish in California for 251 years, so this is not like something that suddenly happened. This is simply part of California history. And the Spanish spoken in California has been highly Indigenous-inflected. In 1805, the Spanish spoken here is — yes, it was Spanish, but also included Nahua — that is Aztec — Otomi, Lipan and Comanche as part of the larger spoken language.

    Indigenous who arrive from Mexico and Central America, however, are not considered Indians by the U.S. government. They’re just simply immigrants, are not eligible for services under the Indian Health Service. So they’re kind of left out with nothing underneath them except their own communities. We lack interpretation in Spanish. By the way, also in Vietnamese and Filipinic languages and Southeast Asian languages, all underrepresented, much less the Indigenous languages. And yet it is the Indigenous communities that are increasingly forming the backbone of farmworking in California. And our society, our institutions simply hasn’t learned how to communicate with the ones who feed them.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Hayes-Bautista, I’m wondering, in terms of the dissemination of the vaccine, what your thoughts are on the best way to move forward in an equitable fashion. Clearly, there have been these attempts by some local governments to put everything through existing hospital systems. There have been the attempts to open up arenas or stadiums, basically on a not “first come, first serve,” but in a general shotgun approach. Do you think that there has to be a more directed approach into particular industries and jobs or by ZIP code? What would you think is the best way to assure greater equity in the vaccination process?

    DR. DAVID HAYES–BAUTISTA: Well, the extent to which we rely on the existing institutions of healthcare delivery, we’re in trouble, because those existing institutions have not adequately served minority communities in this state for 150 years. However, there are alternative organizations, the community-based clinics, for example, who are a large major provider of healthcare services, particularly in California. We have the community organizations.

    And also we need to deal with the lingering effects of the Trump administration. Just last Sunday at a vaccination event at Dodger Stadium, a group of Trumpy supporter anti-vaxxers actually disrupted and caused closure of that effort for over an hour as they were trying to persuade people not to become vaccinated. And, by the way, their organizing instructions said, “Oh, don’t bring your Trump flags. We don’t want Trump to get any blame for this.”

    So, we have very confusing messages. We have confusing priorities. Up until a few weeks ago, essential workers were a priority. Now the state has shifted to elderly. Well, the essential workers are largely minority. Elderly are still largely white baby boomers. So it’s a very confusing, confusing lack of a plan. But the ones paying the price are the ones who have for 150 years kept the state clothed, fed and functioning.

    AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about what’s happening here in New York. The governor’s Department of Health, nine top leaders of the Health Department have quit amidst the rift of what he’s doing in laying out the vaccine rollout. Bill de Blasio, the mayor, held a news conference Sunday admitting the terrible figures on who actually is getting access to the vaccine. The numbers: 11.5% of the Latinx population — 60% of those getting vaccinated were white, 11.5% Latinx, 6% Asian, just over 5% Black. Even as vaccination sites are put into communities of color, overwhelmingly, people — white people are going to those sites and getting vaccinated.

    The New York Times today has a major editorial on this disparity and what has to happen. The City newspaper did a very interesting piece talking about the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital at its Washington Heights medical center complex, a Latino woman, Olga, coming up and encountering one language barrier after another. No one there spoke Spanish. The reporter was asked to do the translating for the paper. As she said, “We don’t have access to internet. We try to make our online reservations. We can’t. And then when we get here, no one can help us.” What about that issue of these online rollouts of vaccines, and who gets access to that and who doesn’t?

    DR. DAVID HAYES–BAUTISTA: We’ve done a study — a couple of studies, actually — on telemedicine, one particularly on telemedicine and COVID, and how these function. And it turns out that most of the telemedicine efforts that we have, for example, out of the School of Medicine, assumes that you have one screen, and it’s sitting on a desktop with broadband access. A lot of Latino families don’t live in that situation. What they tend to use is something like WhatsApp. But our systems don’t funnel into WhatsApp, which is something more accessible.

    So, again, we have built up our system on the assumption that everyone behaves kind of like in Beverly Hills, has access to all those wonderful services. Most of the population does not. We didn’t even think of that at the beginning of the pandemic. Farmworkers didn’t receive PPE. Until even now, many farmworkers do not receive PPE from their employer or from the state.

    So, follow the admissions committees’ decision — who gets into the medical schools, who graduates — for the past century, and it has not been primarily communities of color or students of color. And now we’re reaping the results of those decisions to reduce medicine to just certain — to be able to serve certain communities and just simply ignore the others.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Doctor, what about the situation, that segment of the Latino population that is undocumented, in terms of access to services, even access to the vaccine? We’re told it’s supposed to be free, but what’s the actual situation from what you can tell?

    DR. DAVID HAYES–BAUTISTA: The message once again is horribly confusing. Is it free? Is it not? Do you go to a county facility? Do you go to a private facility? Will you get a bill? Will you have insurance? Will you be considered having used public facilities if you get a shot? People just — the messages are very, very confusing. And for a lot of folks, given that it’s already difficult to find a physician who speaks your language, that you can pay if you don’t have insurance, much less than the idea of: Is this going to be a public charge again? So, I can understand why people are really confused. And in the best of cases, the best thing to do, they think, is, “Well, do nothing. How can it get worse?” Well, it can. COVID spreads like a communicable disease, but it kills like a chronic disease. It’s very different.

    AMY GOODMAN: Dr. David Hayes-Bautista, can you talk about the protest at Dodger Stadium over the weekend, the COVID-19 vaccination center, one of the biggest in the country, being shut down temporarily by people who are against vaccines and also the far right? The significance of this? And what messages are the Latinx community getting around the safety of these vaccines?

    DR. DAVID HAYES–BAUTISTA: Well, among others — and I was not there, so I’m relying on other reports that I’m getting from people who were — is that this also included this free mask — or, mask-free California coalition. They’ve come together, and apparently, about two weeks ago, they went through the Beverly Center, which is a very upscale shopping center right at the edge of Beverly Hills, and, in groups, entered stores without masks on, and shouting match. There were tug of wars, etc. So it’s not aimed only at Latinos. But there is this very strong element of resistance to doing any public health measures as an infringement upon their freedoms. And I keep saying, “Well, you have every freedom to kill yourself by not wearing a mask. You do not have the freedom to kill me by breathing your germs on me.” But that message has not gone through. And, of course, it’s being stimulated by the remnants of the Trump administration.

    So, once again, we have a very confusing situation. People were waiting in cars to get vaccinated. I have heard that some finally got frustrated, and they left the line, so they’ve lost a chance for a vaccination. So, again, because we did not have a strong plan from the federal government for nine months — in fact, we had an administration that basically turned its back and said it was a hoax and it was going to go away, which it has not — it was left to the states. Many states leave things up to the counties. It is horribly confusing. Although the one consistent message that many undocumented have heard is: “Use public services, you can never become a citizen, even though you fed us during the pandemic.”

    AMY GOODMAN: And is there fear about ICE picking them up if they get on a vaccine line?

    DR. DAVID HAYES–BAUTISTA: I don’t know about a vaccine line, but there was a story earlier this summer out of Denver that was in the Spanish-language medium about a COVID-positive person who was undocumented, was actually admitted to a hospital in Colorado. ICE went in and picked him out. I don’t know what happened, but ICE has been sending known coronavirus-positive refugees back to the countries of origin, Mexico and Central America, thereby seeding the pandemic in the countries with the least resources to respond to the pandemic.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you, Dr. David Hayes-Bautista, for joining us, distinguished professor of medicine and director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles.

    This is Democracy Now! When we come back, big news is breaking around the Sputnik V — that’s the Russian vaccine — that it’s 92% effective. We’re going to go to Moscow to speak with a New Yorker reporter and also about the massive protests that took place this weekend, over 5,000 people arrested. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Renaming Peralta Hacienda Historic Park

    Literary Dialogs with Nina Serrano Featuring Holly Alonso and Diane Wang

    Renaming Peralta Hacienda Historic Park

    This edition of Literary Dialogs with Nina Serrano focuses on the nationwide rethinking of our colonizing and racist history. Oakland’s Peralta Hacienda Historical Park is now holding a public discussion about changing their name. 

    Literary Dialogs with Nina Serrano interviews Holly Alonso, Director of the Peralta Hacienda, and Diane Wang, educator at the Peralta Hacienda Historic Park, about the renaming of Peralta Hacienda Historic Park which is now underway (Fall, 2020). These outstanding women joined Nina on zoom to share the public conversation and some up-coming events. 

    Antonio Maria Peralta House, 2465 34th Ave, Oakland, CA

    The Peralta Hacienda is named after the family that received a land grant of 45,000 acres in what is now Oakland, CA, from Governor Pablo Vicente de Solá, the last Spanish governor of California, in the 1820s. The renaming discussion involves the broad community of indigenous Ohlone people, Fruitvale district neighbors of the park, the Latinx community, descendants of the Peralta family, the city government, the Oakland Department of Parks and Recreation, and other stake holders. Holly Alonso invites the public to join the convrsation by contacting their website. The video reviews the history of the park land, the Peraltas and the Ohlone. 

    The interview, first broadcast on La Raza Chronicles on KPFA FM radio September 8, 2020, begins with Holly Alonso describing about how and why the process began and how she went about creating a public conversation.  

    Then, Diane Wang, educator at the Peralta Hacienda Historical Park, discusses some upcoming events and exhibits at the Park. (contact peraltahacienda.org for more information)

    Events and Programs include:

    The Water Keepers Program

    The Water Keepers Program

    Inside My Mask Exhibit

    Inside My Mask Exhibit

    Black Lives Matter Exhibit

    Black Lives Matter Exhibit

    Undocumented Heart Exhibit

    Undocumented Heart Exhibit

    Meaningful Meals exhibit

    Meaningful Meals exhibit

    Youth Making History Program

    Youth Making History Program

    About Nina Serrano: Nina Serrano is a well-known, international prize-winning inspirational author and poet. With a focus on Latino history and culture, she is also a playwright, filmmaker, KPFA talk show host, a former Alameda County Arts Commissioner, and a co-founder of the San Francisco Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. Oakland Magazine’s “best local poet” in 2010, she is a former director of the San Francisco Poetry in the Schools program and the Bay Area’s Storytellers in the Schools program. A Latina activist for social justice, women’s rights, and the arts, Nina Serrano at 86 remains vitally engaged in inspiring change and exploring her abundant creativity. For more information go to ninaserrano.com or contact her publisher at estuarypress.com. For more detailed information about Nina see About Nina on her website.

    About Estuary Press: Estuary Press is the publisher of Nicaragua Way. It is also the home of the Harvey Richards Media Archive, a repository of photography and video documentaries of various social change and political movements during the 1960s and 1970s. Contact Paul Richards (510) 967 5577, paulrichards@estuarypress.com or visit estuarypress.com for more details.

    MEDIA – For photos & interviews: Paul Richards (510) 967 5577; paulrichards@estuarypress.com

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The post Renaming Peralta Hacienda Historic Park appeared first on .

    This post was originally published on ninaserrano.com.

  • Renaming Peralta Hacienda Historic Park

    Literary Dialogs water graphic intro smallLiterary Dialogs with Nina Serrano Featuring Holly Alonso and Diane Wang Renaming Peralta Hacienda Historic Park This edition of Literary Dialogs with Nina Serrano focuses on the nationwide rethinking of our colonizing and racist history. Oakland’s Peralta Hacienda Historical Park is now holding a public discussion about changing their name.  Literary Dialogs with Nina Serrano […]

    This post was originally published on Estuary Press.

  • In Harm’s Way

    The federal government is quietly expanding its use of “tender age” shelters for migrant kids. We’ll tell you what we know. Then, we revisit a story from Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, looking at how Jesuit priests got away with sexually abusing children.

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • When They Took My Son (rebroadcast)

    We examine the stories of two families separated in 2018 at the U.S.-Mexico border and how what happened to them matches up with what the government said was supposed to happen.

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Coming Soon: When They Took My Son

    At 7 years old, Wilson was taken from his mother as part of the Trump administration’s policy of family separation this summer. Our next show tells you what happened to him.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Ripped Apart: Families Separated at the Border

    President Donald Trump said he was ending family separation at the border this week. But we’ve stayed on the story, investigating the issues that remain: children being drugged at migrant shelters, asylum-seekers being denied at ports of entry and the problems with Trump’s new detention plan.

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • #MeToo: Rape on the Night Shift

    The #MeToo movement has swept from Hollywood to Capitol Hill. The careers of powerful men ended as women spoke out against workplace harassment and assault.

    On this episode of Reveal, we look at what happens when the people involved aren’t celebrities or powerful. We team up with KQED, the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, FRONTLINE and Univision to investigate sexual violence against female janitors.

    They usually work alone at night and that isolation can leave them vulnerable. A lot of them are immigrants, some living in the country illegally.

    Plus, we talk with an investigative editor for The New York Times who helped steer the coverage that toppled Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

    —

    Head over to revealnews.org for more of our reporting.

    Follow us on Facebook at fb.com/ThisIsReveal and on Twitter @reveal.

    And to see some of what you’re hearing, we’re also on Instagram @revealnews.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.