Immigration Minister Sean Fraser rises during Question Period, in Ottawa, Dec. 10, 2021. Fred Chartrand/The Canadian Press
Six months after the federal government promised to help thousands of Afghan women leaders, human- rights activists and journalists flee to Canada, the first planeload has landed.
Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced the arrival of 252 Afghan refugees on Tuesday, including the first 170 admitted through a special program for people the government deems to be human-rights defenders.
“It is a privilege to welcome today this cohort of Afghan refugees, who face persecution as a result of their work to protect the human rights of others,” Mr. Fraser said in a statement.
“I am grateful for their work to document and prevent human rights abuses and proud that they now call our country home.”
The Liberal government launched the special program in July after weeks of criticism from angry Canadian veterans upset Ottawa wasn’t doing more to help Afghans facing possible Taliban reprisals for having worked with Canada in the past.
Mr. Fraser’s office said the 170 who arrived through the special program had been referred to Canada by the Ireland-based human-rights organization Front Line Defenders, which has been working to identify those most at risk.
The Liberals have promised to resettle 40,000 Afghan refugees to Canada, but nearly all of those are expected to be people living in UN camps in Pakistan and other neighbouring countries.
With Monday’s arrivals, the government says it has so far resettled about 6,750 Afghan refugees in Canada. Fraser suggested last month that it could take up to two years for the government to meet its promise of bringing in 40,000 Afghans.
Veterans and refugee groups aren’t the only ones who have lamented the pace of the government’s efforts when it comes to helping Afghans escape to Canada, with opposition parties also joining the chorus of criticism in recent months.
Iranian was 15 when he arrived by boat in Australia seeking sanctuary. Despite formal recognition as a refugee he hasn’t been free since – he turned 24 on Friday
When undocumented migrants cross the U.S.–Mexico border into southern Arizona, they face a perilous journey through the Sonoran Desert, some of the most inhospitable terrain in North America. Summer temperatures in the region routinely top 100 degrees Fahrenheit and water sources are few and far between. Hundreds of migrants die every year in the area, often succumbing to the effects of heat and dehydration.
Seeking to understand the impact of the extreme environment on migrants making the trek, a team of researchers modeled the physiological stress of walking through a commonly traversed stretch of the desert from Nogales to Three Points, Arizona. The study, which was published in the journal Science, shows that migrant deaths are concentrated in areas where evaporative water loss and dehydration are more likely.
“Crossing the border across these extreme environments is really dangerous for humans to do and in the next 30 years, with rising temperatures, it’s going to become even more extreme and push those levels to even further beyond what humans can actually sustain,” co-author Hallie Walker, a researcher at the University of Idaho, told The Guardian. “It is incredibly dangerous.”
In the 1990s, border-wall construction and heightened enforcement strategies near high-traffic corridors along the border led to greater numbers of undocumented migrants crossing through rugged, often desolate stretches of desert to avoid apprehension. More than 7,800 migrant deaths were reported from 1998 to 2019, “with many more deaths likely unreported,” according to the paper. Unauthorized crossings spiked to unprecedented levels in 2021, a trend that coincided with a record number of migrant deaths reported by U.S. Border Patrol.
Using information from migrant interviews, human physiology studies and fine-scale climate data, the researchers simulated the rate of water loss for a human traveling on foot along various routes to estimate the “water costs” of making the journey during summer months, including for adult males, pregnant and non-pregnant women, and children.
The researchers then combined multiple, publicly available climate-projection models to predict monthly temperature estimates for 2050. Based on a middle-of-the-road warming model, the projected increases in temperature over the next 30 years are likely to increase the average water cost during migration by 30 to 34 percent.
“Taken together, these results indicate that undocumented migration across the southwest border of the United States will become increasingly dangerous over the next 30 years, which will likely result in increased mortality of migrants,” the authors write.
As political, economic and climatic conditions — paired with an enforcement strategy that funnels migrants into extreme environments — force a growing number of migrants to attempt unauthorized crossings through the Sonoran Desert, assessing the “intersecting impacts of social policy and climate change on human stress and physiology will be of increasing importance as the climate warms,” the researchers say.
The Black Experience in the Americas has always been, by circumstance, design and by purpose, inextricably tied to the land and to forms of Resistance expressed through different peoples in different territories throughout the Americas. Climate change affects communities and regions differently, even within the same country, depending on their cultural, economic, environmental, political and social context. But climate change also affects people differently within these same communities and regions depending on their race and genders, both at an individual and collective level.
For Black communities, an underspoken issue that is usually left out of organizing spaces related to climate change is migration.
The asylum seekers on the Poland-Belarus border are not aggressors: they are desperate pawns in a disgusting political struggle
One thought is a constant in my head: “I have kids at home, I cannot go to jail, I cannot go to jail.” The politics are beyond my reach or that of the victims on the Poland-Belarus border. It involves outgoing German chancellor, Angela Merkel, getting through to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus. It’s ironic that this border has more than 50 media crews gathered, yet Poland is the only place in the EU where journalists cannot freely report.
Meanwhile, the harsh north European winter is closing in and my fingers are freezing in the dark snowy nights.
Forget the palm trees and warm ocean breeze. The upper Midwest could soon be the most sought-after living destination in the United States.
The curb appeal of the Great Lakes region is that it appears to be a relatively safe place to ride out the wild weather of the future. It’s far from the storm-battered Eastern seaboard and buffered from the West’s wildfires and drought, with some of the largest sources of fresh water in the world. The Great Lakes help temper the bitter winds of winter and cool the muggy summer. And rising temperatures are beginning to take some of the bite off that winter weather: Michigan, in fact, is turning into wine country, with vineyards growing warm-weather grapes like pinot noir and cabernet sauvignon.
Long-simmering speculations about where to hide from climate change picked up in February 2019 when the mayor of Buffalo, New York, declared that the city on Lake Erie’s eastern edge would one day become a “climate refuge.” Two months later, a New York Times article made the case that Duluth, Minnesota, on the western corner of Lake Superior, could be an attractive new home for Texans and Floridians looking to escape blistering temperatures.
“In this century, climate migration will be larger, and is already by some measures larger, than political or economic migration,” Parag Khanna, a global strategy advisor, told me over the phone. His recent book, Move: The Forces Uprooting Us, analyzes where people are relocating to and how the “map of humanity” will shift in the coming decades, with an eye toward climate change, politics, jobs, and technology. Khanna is particularly bullish on Michigan. When I mentioned I grew up in northern Indiana a couple of miles south of the Michigan border, he said, “Go back and buy property now. At least, that’s the way some people are interpreting it.”
There’s a big market for mapping out where people will live in a hotter climate, with the consensus landing mostly on northern latitudes buffered from rising seas, heat, and drought. These forecasts are already shaping reality, with Great Lakes cities planning for an influx of residents and rich preppers buying bunkers in New Zealand to ride out the apocalypse. Vivek Shandas, who studies climate change and cities at Portland State University, says he regularly gets calls from real estate investors asking where to buy up property.
The optimal geographies for human habitation are shifting as temperatures rise. Red indicates that regions may become unsuitable by 2070 or sooner, while green means that regions may become more suitable.
NASA, National Academy of Sciences, Chi Xu, Marten Scheffer
More Americans are moving for jobs and affordable housing than because of climate change, Khanna says. But migration from wildfires, hurricanes, and drought is already well underway. “The global answer is, it’s already happening, right?” Khanna said. “In America, you’re only seeing early signs of it.” Around 25,000 migrants fleeing Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 settled in Orlando, Florida, and as many as 5,000 moved to the proclaimed “climate haven” of Buffalo. Many of the thousands of evacuees from the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, relocated to the nearby town of Chico.
Recent headlines have predicted that the state of Michigan will be “the best place to live by 2050” and that cities in upstate New York will be among the “the best ‘climate havens’” in the world. In October, a local paper in Minnesota declared that “climate-proof Duluth” was already attracting migrants from the smoke-filled, wildfire-ridden West.
With as many as 143 million people worldwide expected to be on the move because of climate change by 2050, would-be havens are sure to face new challenges — gentrification, housing shortages, and issues scaling up services quickly. But advance planning can alleviate the stress on cities as well as on their newcomers. With expert advice, these climate havens can learn how to become a fair and welcoming refuge for everyone, as opposed to a hostile citadel surrounded by, say, a giant wall.
Step 1: Figure out what a ‘climate haven’ really is
There is no escape from the effects of an overheating planet, even in a so-called haven. The Great Lakes region is witnessing heavy flooding: 11,000 people in central Michigan evacuated last year as severe rains overwhelmed dams. This summer, wildfire smoke from Canada blew into Minnesota, bringing an unprecedented haze and making it hazardous to breathe.
So defining what makes a city a “refuge” isn’t simple. A recent study by researchers at MIT and the National League of Cities attempted to lay out the qualities of “climate destinations” like Duluth, Buffalo, and Cincinnati, Ohio. First, the effects of climate change should be considered “more manageable” than other places — in other words, not subject to monster hurricanes, fast-moving wildfires, and the relentless rise of the sea. Havens should also have ample fresh water, lots of affordable housing, and infrastructure to support several thousand new residents.
The final qualifications are a bit squishier: These cities must express a “desire to grow and be welcoming” and work on becoming sustainable and resilient. The study points to Duluth investing $200 million over recent years into improving its shoreline protections and wastewater system, and Cincinnati’s plans to cut carbon emissions and host climate migrants (prompted in part by a wave of former New Orleans residents that moved to the city after Hurricane Katrina in 2005).
A flooded street in Sanford, Michigan after a dam was breached on May 20, 2020.
Gregory Shamus / Getty Images
Nicholas Rajkovich, a professor studying resilience and urban planning at the University at Buffalo, says he wants more concrete action behind Buffalo’s “climate haven” promises. “In some cases, it’s become more of an economic development slogan than the real detailed and robust planning that is going to be necessary to actually make these places a haven from climate change,” Rajkovich said.
Step 2: Put people first
Cities that want to attract climate migrants emphasize the opportunities that come with people moving in, like economic growth and attracting new, skilled workers. But it’s important to remember that “migrants are not a tool to an end” and that they get the support they need, said Susan Ekoh, an adaptation fellow at the America Society of Adaptation Professionals, an organization preparing towns in the Great Lakes for the expected waves of future inhabitants.
Some residents in self-declared climate havens don’t want the title. Ekoh has had conversations with business groups, environmental justice organizations, local and state officials, and representatives from tribes around the region. She often hears worries about gentrification, that their towns will attract wealthy people, drive up housing prices, and push out poorer residents. Another critique is that climate “refuges” are failing to protect the people that already live there. For all the talk of Michigan being surrounded by ample freshwater, it’s also known for lead-poisoned water in cities like Benton Harbor.
Shandas, the professor at Portland State, said cities should implement housing policies that can guard against gentrification and also prepare for a backlash. Idaho, for instance, has seen an influx of California expats escaping fires and drought and looking for someplace more affordable. One researcher told Politico that some locals, conservatives and liberals alike, resent the newcomers, painting things like “California sucks” on highway overpasses.
“That’s the kind of stuff I worry about,” Shandas said. “We can build the schools, we can build the housing, but is that local community ready for big shifts of people moving into the location, and potentially people who are very different from them?”
A reception center for Puerto Rican refugees at the Orlando International Airport on November 30, 2017, after Hurricane Maria. RICARDO ARDUENGO / AFP via Getty Images
Step 3: Build smart
The next step is to make the city an appealing place to live while trimming emissions, using resources wisely, and keeping the dangers of climate change at bay.
There are many ways to cut a city’s carbon output, like building dense housing, improving public transit, and cleaning up the electric grid. “You’d want to build in such a way where you have a lot of access to renewable and decentralized power,” Shandas said. But what you don’t build is also important. Constructing a new “green” building still leads to a lot of carbon emissions; retrofitting existing buildings is often cheaper and less wasteful.
The Midwest is already prone to flooding, and climate change is expected to make it worse. So building in floodplains is not ideal, nor is covering everything in impermeable pavement. Cities should also find ways to beat the heat — parks keep things cool, while highways make it hot. Nothing here should come as a surprise to city planners. “I mean, it’s not rocket science,” Shandas said. “We’ve been doing this for a while.”
Shandas said he’s heard people in Midwest cities get pretty excited about their future. “I was in a couple of meetings with a group of folks in the Great Lakes, and they were just like, ‘We are the climate haven — we are going to be the best place in the country and people are gonna flock to us,’” he said. While that kind of enthusiasm is “fantastic,” Shandas said, if cities don’t start preparing for the actual reality of thousands of people moving in, “it’s going to be a hard sell.”
We map out the rising number of high-tech surveillance and deterrent systems facing asylum seekers along EU borders
From military-grade drones to sensor systems and experimental technology, the EU and its members have spent hundreds of millions of euros over the past decade on technologies to track down and keep at bay the refugees on its borders.
Poland’s border with Belarus is becoming the latest frontline for this technology, with the country approving last month a €350m (£300m) wall with advanced cameras and motion sensors.
An abandoned life jacket in the Aegean Sea in 2016 | Photo: Picture-alliance/AP Photo/L.Pitarakis
A post by Marion MacGregor published on 15 November 2021in ‘Infomigrants’ brings out an awful truth which I have to face up to even though Greece is my adopted country. In the face of Turkey ‘weaponsing’ migrants, it is trying its hands at deterrence in the hope that it will diminish the pressure of inflows
Greece and other European countries are increasingly using the threat of criminal proceedings against aid workers and those migrants who ended up being marked as migrant smugglers.
Hanad Abdi Mohammad is in prison, he says, because of something he was forced to do. The Somali is serving an impossibly long sentence of 142 years (!) after he was convicted last December for driving an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants to Greece. He says that he didn’t have a choice, because the smuggler hit him in the face and threatened him with a gun before abandoning the boat in rough seas. As 28-year-old Mohammad told journalists and members of the European Parliament who visited the prison last week, he “didn’t think saving people is a crime.”
In the same prison on the Greek island of Chios two men from Afghanistan, Amir Zaheri and Akif Rasouli, both in their 20s, are also serving sentences of 50 years for similar criminal offences. The men’s convictions and staggering prison terms show how far Greece is ready to go in order to stop migrants in their tracks.
On the day the smuggler abandoned them at sea between Turkey and Greece, Mohammad and nearly three dozen other migrants were only concerned about their lives. Mohammad says that he called the Turkish coast guard repeatedly, begging to be rescued. But when it arrived, the Turkish patrol boat circled the migrants’ dinghy sending water into the boat and gradually pushing it toward Greece. In the chaos, two women fell overboard and drowned, AP reports.
The survivors were finally rescued by the Greek coast guard, and Mohammad helped others onto the rescue boat. He admitted to having driven the boat after the smuggler left. It didn’t cross his mind that would lead to him being prosecuted as a smuggler.
“It’s not possible that someone who comes to claim asylum in Greece is threatened with such heavy sentences simply because they were forced, by circumstances or pressure, to take over handling a boat,” one of the lawyers representing the three imprisoned in Chios, Alexandros Georgoulis, told AP. Greek authorities, he said, “are essentially baptizing the smuggled as the smuggler.”
From file: Sara Mardini and Seán Binder | Screenshot from Amnesty International Ireland
Greek authorities have also accused aid workers and volunteers helping migrants in Greece of serious crimes. In one widely publicized case, the Syrian human rights worker Sara Mardini, a refugee herself, and an Irish volunteer Sean Binder were arrested and detained for months in 2018 on suspicion of espionage, money laundering, human trafficking and other offenses. Due to face trial on the island of Lesbos alongside 22 other civil society activists later this week, Binder says he is “terrified.”
“I’ve had a taste of life in prison on Chios. It was all scabies and bed bugs with 17 of us packed in a cell,” Binder told The Guardian. “The police holding cells were even worse, the most awful place on earth; squalid, windowless rooms full of asylum seekers just there because authorities had nowhere else to put them.”
AP reports that, according to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Germany, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Spain and Greece have initiated 58 investigations and legal proceedings since 2016 against private entities involved in search and rescue.
“I think it’s important to challenge these in the courts, to not at all sit back and accept that we should be cast as smugglers or spies because I offered CPR, (or) more often than not just a smile, to someone in distress,” Binder told the news agency. “It is preposterous that we should be cast as criminals. I don’t accept it….It doesn’t matter who you are, you don’t deserve to drown in the sea.“
Binder told The Guardian that he has not bought a return ticket to the UK, where he has been studying. He and Mardini face a maximum eight-year sentence, convertible into a fine. They are still under investigation for offences which could carry 25-year sentences if they are convicted.
Not directly related but possibly relevant is recent legislation in Greece, adopted on November 11, 2021, that makes it a criminal offence to spread “fake news.” Human Rights Watch said that the Greek government should immediately move to revoke the provision, which is incompatible with freedom of expression and media freedom. “In Greece, you now risk jail for speaking out on important issues of public interest, if the government claims it’s false,” said Eva Cossé, Greece researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The criminal sanctions risk making journalists and virtually anyone else afraid to report on or to debate important issues such as the handling of Covid-19 or migration or government economic policy.”
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, and his Russian counterpart and key ally, Vladimir Putin, have come in for much criticism from the Western media since coverage of the crisis began, with both leaders being accused of ‘orchestrating’ the current situation, allegedly in a bid to destabilise the EU, and also as a retaliatory measure taken by Minsk in response to EU sanctions imposed as a result of it successfully repelling a Western-backed colour revolution launched against it last August following the re-election of Lukashenko – again, the warmongers who actually created the refugee crisis in the first place via their colour revolutions and ‘humanitarian’ interventions, have come in for virtually little to no criticism from the Western MSM amidst the coverage of the current crisis, their ire seemingly reserved for Lukashenko and Putin instead.
Whenever David Schulte came home from studying Tangier Island in recent years, he couldn’t stop talking about what he was seeing. The spit of land in the Chesapeake Bay was washing away faster than any of the baseline predictions. Rising seas, spurred by climate change, had kicked erosion into overdrive, and the town, where people have lived for at least 200 years, was sinking under the waves.
His high-school aged son, Zehao Wu, listened with fascination. “It was all he could talk about at the dinner table,” Wu said. He was particularly struck by the plight of the islanders, most of whom lacked the resources to move elsewhere: The median household income on Tangier is $42,000 a year.
This week, Wu and Schulte, a marine biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, published a paper in the journal Frontiers in Climate showing that Tangier Island has lost more than half its habitable area since 1967, and predicting that it will be totally uninhabitable by 2051 without drastic measures.
Those measures are mind-bogglingly expensive. Staving off erosion enough that residents could remain on the island would cost at least $250 million, the researchers found. Moving the entire town to the mainland, meanwhile, would come with a price tag between $100 to $200 million. Both are expensive propositions, especially considering the town has just under 400 residents. That breaks down to between $550,000 to $750,000 per person to stay, or $220,000 to $430,000 per person to leave.
Tangier Island is just one canary in a coal mine, signaling a much larger problem. Officials need to be preparing to relocate hundreds of communities, but there’s a stubborn attachment to place that keeps many people from moving, said Nicholas Pinter, who studies flooding at the University of California, Davis. “The city Pattonsburg, Missouri, moved after the 1993 flood — but it had been inundated 32 times before that,” Pinter said.
There are about 200 million people worldwide at risk of inundation by 2100, and that’s if countries manage to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The numbers go up as emissions increase. Already, Boston is considering a mega barrier around its harbor, Norfolk is proposing a $1.4 billion seawall, and San Francisco is lifting buildings and moving freeways. The world is beginning to glimpse just how much work and money it will take “to do nothing.”
“People are going to start getting a wakeup call on just how much climate change is going to cost us,” Schulte said.
Sea water collects on the front walk way of a home in Tangier, Virginia, May 15, 2017, where climate change and rising sea levels threaten the inhabitants of the slowly sinking island.
Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
“There is this very important disparity between those who are most affected by climate change and those who can afford to make the necessary adaptations,” Wu said. “That makes it more important for government to step in and help these people.”
In 2015, Schulte published a study in the journal Scientific Reports suggesting that the residents of Tangier Island would need to abandon the town between 2030 and 2065. The study received widespread media attention, and Wu waited for news that Tangier would finally get the help it needed, in the form of money, infrastructure, or guidance. Instead, the mayor of the town, James “Ooker” Eskridge, received a call from former president Donald Trump. “He said not to worry about sea-level rise,” Eskridge, an ardent Trump supporter, told reporters. “He said, ‘Your island has been there for hundreds of years, and I believe your island will be there for hundreds more.’”
It was a shock for Wu to see that no one acted: “I figured some help must be coming for these people, but no help came.”
If no one else was going to do anything, Wu decided he should. He began studying aerial photographs of the island over the years, and realized he could see the waters creeping up. Lowlands turned dark as the seawater penetrated the soil. It was easy to distinguish these spongey wetlands from the lighter highlands, he said. He realized that if he plugged these images into mapping software, he’d be able to accurately chart the rate of inundation.
“When he showed me the results, I got pretty excited,” Schulte said. Wu had figured out a way to strengthen a weakness of his dad’s 2015 paper, which based its predictions on the shrinking of the entire island rather than focusing in on the parts that mattered — the ridges where people live, which stand two to five feet above sea level.
The paper’s findings suggest that sea-level rise is eroding these ridges more rapidly than previously thought. All the islands in the Chesapeake Bay are eroding, and several disappeared before the onset of climate change. Rising seas are accelerating the process. The first ridge will complete its conversion to wetlands by 2033, the second by 2035, and the highest and smallest ridge by 2051, Wu and Schulte predict. The impacts are already clear: The pair found that the population of the town has declined by more than half as the livable area shrunk.
“When your front yard is converted into a swamp over the course of your life you tell your grandkids, ‘You’ve got to leave,’” Schulte said.
Lower Lafitte, Louisiana — The blades of grass are just beginning to push through the thick, marsh mud in Russell Rodriguez’s yard as the mid-October sun beats down on southeastern Louisiana.
A bald eagle soars high above the tall trees. Morning rays glimmer off the rippling waters of nearby Barataria Bayou as it pushes toward the Gulf of Mexico.
It would be idyllic if not for the widespread destruction.
Homes are wrecked, pushed off their pylons and shattered. Fishing boats are upended onto dry land. Coffins washed out of local cemeteries sit cracked open, the bones inside still waiting to be claimed.
It’s more than Rodriguez can take. After decades in lower Lafitte about 65 miles south of New Orleans, he and his wife are leaving their home and their neighbors of the United Houma Nation for higher ground.
“It’s a life-changing event,” said Rodriguez, a Houma citizen. “I don’t like the idea of having to leave but I don’t want to go through another storm. Climate change is definitely causing this. People who deny that need a lesson in science.”
Rodriguez is among tens of thousands of tribal citizens across Indian Country forced to choose between staying in their ancestral lands or moving out to protect themselves from the devastation wreaked by climate change.
Indigenous peoples along coastal areas and waterways across the United States from Alaska to Florida and California to Maine are facing floods, rising sea levels, coastal erosion and increasingly powerful hurricanes. Those in the Southwest and Plains have been hit with unprecedented drought, wildfires, heat, lowered water tables and depleted waterways. They’re all facing loss of habitat and a reduction in traditional food sources for people, livestock and wildlife.
And migration has already begun, with at least a half-dozen tribal communities formally deciding to relocate to higher ground. For others, the migration out is more subtle, coming quietly and without fanfare as the realities of climate change reach Indigenous homes and livelihoods, Indian Country Today found in an informal survey of tribal nations across the United States.
The impact on Indigenous cultures, histories and languages is immeasurable.
In the Houma Nation, elders who can’t afford the emotional or financial toll of rebuilding are among those most likely to move away, creating a void that can’t be filled, Houma Chief August “Cocoa” Creppel said.
“It’s very hard,” Creppel said. “This is where they were born and raised. This is where their parents were, our grandparents. It’s causing us to lose our way of life, living on the bayou.
“It’s hard to see the elders move away.”
Louisiana
The Houma Nation has no official tribal territories, but its 19,000 citizens are concentrated in southeastern Louisiana in six parishes, the Louisiana equivalent of counties. Most live in the areas around the towns of Dulac, Jean Lafitte and Houma, named in the 1830s for the tribe.
Nearly 11,000 of the Houma Nation’s citizens suffered damage when Hurricane Ida pushed ashore near Port Fourchon, Louisiana, on Aug. 29 — 16 years to the day that Hurricane Katrina struck the Louisiana coast, Creppel said.
It is one of the worst storms on record to hit the United States, and the worst to hit Louisiana, surpassing Katrina with 150-mph winds, a 12- to 14-foot storm surge and more than 15 inches of rain in some areas.
More than six weeks after Ida moved through, sounds of rebuilding can be heard among the wreckage, but many homes appear too shattered to be salvaged.
Rodriguez’s home is among those shuttered, with a power boat sitting askew in the drying mud under the battered carport. He and his wife, Judith, purchased the home in 1995, and had it raised onto pylons more than eight feet above ground after Katrina flooded the area in 2005.
The home took on more than two feet of water during Hurricane Ida, nonetheless, and now sits just a few feet above the layers of mud brought in by the storm. It remains without electricity.
Rodriguez, 73, and his wife, who is a few years older, fled before the storm arrived and have spent weeks living miles away, first with family and then in motels. They travel back periodically to survey the damage.
“It’s a long commute,” he said. “I’m just not able to deal with the heat as well as I used to.”
The Houma area is facing the same problems that have caused devastation in other communities in southern Louisiana. Barrier islands that once slowed storms as they moved onshore are vanishing, victims of erosion and rising sea levels. Man-made channels in the marsh grasses provide access for oil workers but allow the Gulf saltwater to push farther inland and with greater force. Rains are now torrential.
Citizens of other Louisiana tribes are also making plans to move out. Southeast of Houma, the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indian Tribe has been hit repeatedly with hurricanes, and took another hit from Hurricane Ida. Tribal citizens have lived for generations on the narrow island in the bayous of Terrebonne Parish.
The Isle de Jean Charles Band joined with the Houma Nation in proposing resettlement off the island, saying the destruction posed an existential threat to their communities and culture. Since 1955, Isle de Jean Charles has lost 98 percent of its land mass and at least 75 percent of its residents, according to a 2020 Government Accountability Office report.
The state, with federal funding, has purchased 515 acres in Shriever, Louisiana, about 40 miles north on the mainland, to relocate tribal citizens. About 15-20 houses are now under construction, and 39 families are expected to be moved in by spring, Chief Albert Naquin told Indian Country Today.
Citizens of the nearby Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe, who live along a bayou of the same name, also faced destruction from Ida, as did Grand Isle, a barrier island that has repeatedly been battered by storms. The Pointe-au-Chien citizens are also considering whether to relocate.
Some tribal citizens, however, aren’t waiting to make the move.
Naquin said he left Isle de Jean Charles for the next town over after Hurricane Carmen struck in 1974 because he could no longer get to work. Many are now packing up and leaving their homes behind in shambles after Ida.
“People have left by force or by choice,” Naquin said.
Alaska
Nearly 5,000 miles from southern Louisiana, climate change is destroying the Yup’ik village of Newtok in southwestern Alaska.
Newtok once sat on high ground, protected from storms by sea ice. The frozen ground, permafrost, held firm. Now, the ground melts and slumps, and wave action and storm surge wash away the soil. The village has already lost a mile of land to erosion. Barges can no longer land, and the river is approaching the runway used by small planes to bring supplies.
The village is located between two rivers, the Newtok and the Ninglik, near where they enter the Bering Sea. The village has flooded several times in the past decade, and in September 2005, a fall storm caused floodwaters to surround the village on all sides, making it an island.
Erosion in 2021 has been particularly bad, as the crumbling shoreline has allowed the river to move even closer to the community, said Tribal Administrator Phillip Carl.
“We must have lost … probably about 100 feet,” Carl said. “The school’s water plant is the closest to the erosion. It must be like about 190 feet (away from the current shoreline).”
Carl said the village had not yet faced high winds this fall but they were expected to hit soon.
“There’s one power pole that’s about to go over,” he said. The one house served by the power pole will be abandoned.
Alaska is among the states hardest hit by climate change, with at least 31 Native communities threatened with destruction within the next 25 years because of flooding and erosion, according to assessments by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the GAO.
Newtok is one of four Alaska Native villages identified as being at risk for “imminent destruction,” meaning they are expected to become uninhabitable within the next five years, according to the government reports.
Of the four — Newtok, Kivalina, Shishmaref and Shaktoolik — only Newtok has made substantial progress in relocating its residents.
Newtok began planning to move in the 1990s, getting small grants here and there for studies. It picked a site and negotiated a land swap with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that was approved by Congress in 2003.
The swap allows the eventual relocation of the village’s 350 or so residents to Mertarvik, which means “fresh water,” a site on Nelson Island about nine miles away or 25 minutes by boat. Mertarvik is within the tribe’s traditional lands and provides access to subsistence resources. It’s also resistant to erosion.
As of December 2019, construction had been completed on a quarry, landfill, barge landing, temporary airstrip, roads, power plant, fuel storage, treatment plants for water and wastewater, and 21 homes, the GAO reported.
At least 135 people have already made the move. The rest were forced to stay behind until more homes are built.
Other threatened villages in Alaska are also making plans to move. About 370 miles north of Newtok in the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, residents voted in 2016 to relocate their community because of erosion and flooding attributed to climate change.
Shishmaref sits on Sarichef Island, a barrier island that is a quarter-mile wide and three miles long in the Chukchi Sea just outside the Arctic Circle.
State and federal agencies have spent an estimated $25 million since 2004 to expand and reinforce a seawall in an attempt to hold back the sea, yet Shishmaref continues to lose about three to five feet of shoreline to erosion each year, according to a report by the nonprofit Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange. Several homes and the National Guard Armory have already been moved inland because of erosion.
It will be a painful move. Inupiat people have lived on the island for at least 4,000 years and ancestors’ remains are interred in a cemetery there. Relocation is in the planning stages and costs have yet to be determined, according to the Shishmaref Strategic Management Plan.
About 35 miles east of Newtok, the Yup’ik village of Akiak is also fighting erosion. The tribe recently moved six homes being undermined by the Kuskokwim River, said Michael Williams Sr., chief of the Akiak Native Community.
“We’re assessing a few more homes and structures, and if they are within 200 feet from the river, we want to consider moving them,” Williams said.
“The permafrost is receding and it’s getting thinner and thinner,” he said. “Our Chinook returns have been low and our chum didn’t come back this year. The last five, 10 years, we’ve experienced real hot summers, a lack of rain, a lack of snow in the headwaters, and a lack of ice. The thickness of the (river) ice needs to be about seven feet. It’s been less than three feet.”
Warmer temperatures have meant warmer water. Dead fish have been found on the Tanana River and changes in caribou migration present new challenges for subsistence hunters, he said.
Williams, 69, said the conditions he’s seeing are all new — conditions not known to his grandparents and great-grandparents.
“The warming is tremendous,” he said.
In the northern Inupiat village of Kivalina, the community voted to relocate off the barrier island where it now sits on the Chukchi Sea, 83 miles inside the Arctic Circle.
Officials haven’t yet been able to find a suitable site with good hunting, fishing and water, however. One site chosen in 2000 was deemed by the Army Corps of Engineers to be too at risk to adverse effects of climate change.
Relocation of the entire community is out of reach for years to come, so residents are trying to adapt, Tribal Administrator Millie Hawley said.
An evacuation road was completed in November 2020, and a school and community center will come next on the mainland near the village.
“We’ve got to live with what we’ve got,” she said. “Where are we going to go? We live on an island. The nearest village is 70 miles away.”
Northwestern Territories
There’s a sense of urgency in the Quinault Nation community of Taholah in northwest Washington state.
Taholah was flooded in January 2021 when the ocean breached a seawall, and models prepared by the state Department of Natural Resources show the community is at risk of a potential tsunami 40-50 feet deep. The encroaching ocean has washed away chunks of the coastline, and water levels are expected to rise more than 2.5 feet by 2100.
Construction is underway to build a new Upper Village at a higher elevation about a half-mile away from the existing village center, beyond the expected reach of rising seas and tsunamis.
Quinault hopes to have its new village complete in 2030, with a variety of housing types, a K-12 school, a park, trails, a community center and offices for tribal government and emergency services. Construction on a new school is set to begin in early 2022.
The infrastructure costs alone — for communications, roads and utilities — are estimated at more than $50 million.
A bill now pending in Congress would contribute about $500,000 to help the tribe with infrastructure costs. The bill also includes about $1.5 million in funding for the Quileute Tribe in La Push, Washington.
The Quileutes have also sustained heavy flooding, rising sea levels and erosion, and are at increased risk of a tsunami. The tribe has decided to relocate to higher ground about 2.5 miles away, and construction of a new school is underway.
Still, some will remain behind at the lower village, where the Quileute people have harvested fish and shellfish and hunted off the coast of northwest Washington for centuries.
Other tribes in the western and northwestern United States are also being affected by climate change, but have not yet made the decision to relocate tribal operations. No one knows, however, how many citizens may have slipped away quietly to areas less at risk of devastation.
In Oregon and Idaho, five tribal nations that make up the Upper Snake River Tribes Foundation — Burns Paiute Tribe, Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribes, Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Fort Hall, and Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of Duck Valley — have documented shifts in species and habitats driven by increasing temperatures and changing precipitation patterns.
In northeastern Oregon, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation report that traditional foods — what they call First Foods — are being affected by warming temperatures.
In Montana, three tribes banded together in August to save homes, lives and cultural sites as wildfires fueled by hot, dry conditions burned nearly 200,000 acres. Hundreds of families in the Flathead Indian Reservation, the Fort Belknap Indian Community and the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation were evacuated.
And in California’s Kern Valley, heat and drought are affecting the Tubatulabal Tribe’s access to traditional foods, as well as their overall quality of life. The air this year was thick with smoke from fires in the drought-parched region, tribal Chairman Robert Gomez said.
“We had fire after fire and the smoke was terrible,” he said. “We had 67 days with temperatures over 100 in the county.”
Southwestern Droughts
Hopi elder Vernon Masayesva didn’t want to miss the final katsina dance last July, when tribal lands were “bone dry” in the midst of unprecedented drought. The ceremonial dance brings prayers for rain.
“It’s very important in our community,” he said. “I wanted to hear the final prayer.”
Just before the dance began, however, a deluge erupted. Pouring rains created rivers through the streets, and the village plaza turned into a lake. Some homes in lower-lying areas were flooded.
“There was a huge storm,” he said. “A cloudburst. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Masayesva decided to leave before flooding got worse, but his daughters stayed behind to wait it out. The clouds parted just in time for the last dance. The rains had stopped.
It was a spiritual moment for many, though the unexpected rains meant different things to different people. For some, they were a blessing, a sign that prayers for rain had been answered; for others, they served as a warning that Hopis and others need to change their ways.
“You can take it both ways,” he said. “This is what the ceremony was all about, about rain .. (But) it’s a signal from Mother Earth that mankind needs to settle down. It’s a world out of balance.”
Water is at the heart of climate change in the southwestern United States, where the Hopi, Navajo, Pueblos and other tribes have lived for generations. Water and rain are growing scarce, leaving corn to die in the fields, causing sheep and wildlife to forage farther for food and drink, and forcing families to wait in lines to get water for their homes.
The smell of smoke from wildfires fueled by the hot, dry conditions is all-too-familiar for Indigenous people in the region.
Sometimes the drought is followed by torrential rains before the dry heat takes a grip again on local Indigenous communities, affecting their families, cultures and traditions.
Masayesva, a former chairman of the Hopi Tribe, is from the village of Hotevilla. He said he is not aware of tribal citizens migrating away from the homelands because of climate change. They have been leaving for decades for other reasons.
“There are many Hopi families that have left but it was way before this climate situation,” he said. “It was these people who wanted good-paying jobs. There’s none on the rez. They wanted their kids to go to the best schools. Our schools are in really bad conditions. For those kinds of reasons, many have left a long time ago.”
But they don’t stay away too long, he said.
“They don’t permanently leave,” he said. “They have clan homes. Ceremony — that brings them all back.”
Southeastern, East Coast Communities
The Seminole Tribe of Florida is among dozens of tribes across the southeastern United States and East Coast that are facing devastating impacts of climate change.
Increasingly powerful hurricanes, rising sea levels and erosion coupled with heat and periodic drought are threatening the Seminole homelands that have sustained their people for centuries.
“The Seminoles’ home in the low-lying Everglades is critically threatened by climate change,” according to a recent report on the looming disintegration of the historic Egmont Key, an offshore island near Tampa Bay where Seminoles were temporarily locked up while waiting to be shipped west.
The Seminole Tribe, which oversees six tribal territories with about 5,000 citizens, stretches from southern Florida northward in the Florida Everglades and in areas near Lake Okeechobee.
The tribe, owner of a restaurant and hotel empire that includes Hard Rock and Seminole gaming, recently hired its first climate resiliency officer, Jill Horwitz, to build a local program that combines traditional knowledge with science. The tribe is also working with state officials to draft a response plan to climate change.
“Climate change touches all of us, and we each have a role,” Horwitz said.
Horwitz said tribal lands — already subject to hurricanes and other storms — have been prone to shifts between drought and flooding in recent years. But she’s not aware of citizens who have decided to leave the area because of climate change.
“No residents have needed to relocate due to sea-level rise,” she said.
Other tribes in the southeastern United States are feeling the effects. The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, which has a long history with the Lumbee River and the upland coastal plains, is facing increasing flooding and unprecedented hurricanes.
The state-recognized tribe, with about 60,000 citizens, is the largest in the eastern United States, and most of its tribal citizens live within or near the Lumbee River watershed, according to a 2018 study of the impact of climate change on the Lumbee by Dr. Ryan E. Emanuel, a Lumbee citizen and professor at North Carolina State University who is moving next year to Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment in Durham.
The tribe does not have tribal lands, though thousands of citizens are private landowners within the watershed.
“The Lumbee Tribe has strong historical, cultural, and socioeconomic ties to the Lumbee River, and climate change has the potential to modify hydrological and ecological conditions along the river, across its connected wetlands, and within its watershed in ways that have serious implications for the tribe,” Emanuel concluded in the study, which was published in the Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education.
The impact will be felt on hunting, fishing, foraging, basket-making, pottery, medicinal plants and religion.
“We value those swamps and we value those wetlands,” Emanuel told Indian Country Today. “The flooding makes it difficult for us to stay close to our waters. Our ancestors fished, boated, relied on the water a lot more than we do now … We (now) have a hard time forming bonds with the rivers and swamps.”
Migration is happening slowly, as people move out of flood-prone areas. Some property owners were bought out of their homes after Hurricanes Matthew and Florence in 2016 and 2018, he said. Others are making the move quietly on their own.
“I don’t see evidence of large-scale migrations of Lumbee people out of our homelands, and that is because the floods, even though they have been traumatic in recent years, are localized,” he said. “You’re seeing piecemeal movement of people who live in the lowest-lying areas who are moving to higher ground.”
Emanuel grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, but his parents grew up in Robeson County, the heart of Lumbee country. His family has close ties to the area.
“My grandmother, my aunts, uncles, cousins, all lived in the Lumbee community,” he said.
Climate change is looming, however. The Lumbee Tribe recently passed a resolution calling for research into flooding and the impacts on tribal territories, he said.
“The tribal council passing this resolution means they’re ready to take a more proactive stance,” he said. “It signals to me that they’re starting to look ahead.”
Focusing on Recovery
Back in Louisiana, jars of peanut butter and canned goods are stacked along the halls at the United Houma Nation’s new tribal administration building, as workers help citizens stock up on supplies and apply for aid.
The building, a former nursing home recently donated to the tribe, was being renovated for its new use this summer when the storm hit. The new sheetrock is now torn out and the inside walls are mostly stripped to the studs. The tribe had insurance, however, unlike many of its citizens.
Renovation plans may be altered to allow the building to serve as a shelter for residents when the next storm hits, said Tribal Administrator Lanor Curole. A back-up generator is also being added to the plan.
Creppel, the Houma chief, said he is working to provide support in whatever capacity is needed — for tribal citizens who are staying, those who are leaving, and those who haven’t made up their mind.
“The hardest thing about being chief — 11,000 of my people were affected by the hurricane and in just a matter of hours, their lives have changed,” he said. “People ask, ‘Why do y’all stay there?’ If it wasn’t for hurricane season, it would be paradise.”
The Houma Nation is the largest state-recognized tribe in Louisiana, but without federal recognition it is not eligible for certain federal disaster relief funds. It’s a sore subject, and the tribe is fighting once again for federal recognition.
Creppel said some people can’t afford to move. Others can’t afford to rebuild. Many tribal citizens make their livings off the water, and lost both their house and their boat. Those who still can fish have nowhere to sell their catch, since the local seafood distributors were also damaged in the storm.
“People heal physically but not emotionally,” he said.
At tribal headquarters, counselor Louise Billiot, a Houma citizen, helps residents with their applications before taking a visitor on a tour down the bayou south of Houma in Dulac, where she grew up.
She’s seen the climate migration first-hand. After Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav, many residents fled from Dulac to the Ashland area, where a large mobile home community sprung up with housing for more than 100 families.
Many of those homes were destroyed in Ida, leaving residents to decide once again whether to move.
“We had a large migration after Katrina and Gustav,” Billiot said. “Now this hurricane has just devastated this community.
“It wasn’t high enough.”
The impact on the tribe has been devastating, she said.
“Years ago, we were a community, a close-knit tribal community,” she said. “What has happened, with the weather and the devastation of the hurricanes, is it has relocated us. We’re not practicing our culture as much. We’re losing that — I don’t want to say Indian-ness — but we’re losing a lot.”
In lower Lafitte, The United Friendship nonprofit organization has set up a tent to distribute food and bottled iced tea, toilet paper and other supplies.
Gregory Creppel, a Houma citizen and cousin to the chief, and his wife, Lisa, started the nonprofit to serve the community. They set up the tent in lower Lafitte because no one else was providing help to the area, he said.
The tent sits just steps away from a community cemetery that was pounded in the storm. Some of the coffins washed out of their crypts, toppled and cracked open in the floodwaters. The same marsh mud that Gregory Creppel’s grandmother used to mold into clay ovens now coats them all.
Gretchen Billiot Boudreaux, the tribal council member who represents the area, is helping hand out the supplies. She understands the dilemma many citizens are facing.
“Half of the people can’t afford to come back,” she said. “They’re wondering, ‘What else do I do? Where do I go?’ Now our kids don’t get to know the history that these elders could have taught them.”
A Red Cross van stakes a spot near The United Friendship tent to hand out meals of homemade jambalaya. A sparse but steady stream of residents move in for a hot meal.
Rodriguez and his wife are not among them, however. They are now house-hunting for a place closer to New Orleans, either behind a protection levee or at an elevation high enough they won’t need one.
“It’s a hard decision to make,” Rodriguez said. “But it’s going to have to be that way. It’s diminishing returns.”
Holding On to Traditions
Not everyone in lower Lafitte, however, is packing up to leave.
Giovanni R. “Jay” Santini, the oldest citizen of the Houma Nation in the area, said he is not leaving the bayou lands where he has lived for most of his 86 years. He grew up there, and his mother taught him traditional ways, including how to make huts from palmetto leaves.
He’s fished, driven boats, worked as a carpenter, and lived off the land.
“I made my whole living here,” he told Indian Country Today. “I used to hunt alligators. We’d trap muskrat. Fish, catfish. I picked black moss and green moss for a living. I fished for a living. There ain’t nothing I didn’t do.”
His sturdy, bright blue home, built by his own hands about 50 years ago, towers above many in the neighborhood. He’s had damage five times in those years, and raised his home more than 10 feet after Hurricane Rita struck in 2005.
This time, with Ida, his home didn’t take on water but he had roof damage that allowed water to come into some of the rooms. The electricity still runs, however, which means air conditioning, and a blue tarp covers the damaged sections of roof.
For now, he’s fighting with government officials to dredge the mud out of the ditch along the street so the winter rains will drain properly. A sign posted at the top of his front stairs sends the message.
“86 years old,” it reads. “Looks like I have 2 dig my own ditch. HELP.”
But he knows others are facing ruination. Some residents are focused on restoring their capsized boats before they can make their homes livable again.
“It hurts,” he said. “It hurts just to look at all the houses that are destroyed completely. People don’t have nothing at all to start with. At least I was blessed. I’ve got a house with four walls and a roof. I’ve got something to come back to. Some people don’t have nothing at all.
“Just looking at the place will make you cry,” he said.
He knows the loss of tribal citizens in the community, particularly elders, can cripple the cultural and historic connections to the land for others. But he understands why some can’t return.
“I feel sorry for them,” he said. “I know they love the place over here.”
Up to 2,000 people living in desperate conditions in northern France now face “very dangerous” weather as winter approaches, volunteers in Calais say.
“Very dangerous”
People living rough in fields and scrubland in the French port is a common sight, with settlements more temporary and dispersed in recent years following the destruction of the so-called ‘Jungle’ camp.
Many speak of their long and difficult journeys to get to Calais after fleeing horrors of war and torture in their home countries thousands of miles away. Some spend months living there trying to cross to the UK every day, risking their lives trying to board lorries or getting into dinghies bound for the English coastline.
Care4Calais volunteer Matt Cowling told the PA news agency:
The people that we meet every day here all have one thing in common: they’re just trying to find safety
Speaking at the migrant charity’s warehouse in Calais, he added:
Unfortunately we don’t have a fair asylum system for the UK.
These people are forced to make very dangerous journeys across the Channel… people are in really terrible conditions at the moment so it’s really important that people are coming in here to volunteer and to donate clothes and things like that.
He warned that dropping temperatures were making conditions “very dangerous” for those sleeping rough in Calais and appealed for donations. Fellow volunteer Imogen Hardman blamed French authorities for “almost daily” evictions of migrants in Calais as well as UK asylum policy. She told PA:
People just have nowhere to settle and people who have escaped really difficult situations are just not finding a place of safety at all.
Volunteers go through donated clothes at the Care4Calais warehouse (Gareth Fuller/PA)
Deadly travels
While large numbers of people who pass through Calais make it safely to the UK – nearly 20,000 this year – the routes by both sea and lorry can be deadly. Since the beginning of 2019, more than a dozen people have died or gone missing while trying to cross the English Channel in small boats.
They are among about 300 border-related deaths in and around the English Channel since 1999, according to a report by the Institute of Race Relations, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal London steering group and French group Gisti.
It’s feared as many as three people are missing after trying to cross from France to the UK in a dinghy last week. Two men – both Somali nationals – were rescued off the Essex coast, but searches for any remaining survivors were later called off.
In October 2020, a boat sank off the coast of France leading to the deaths of seven people, including five from a Kurdish-Iranian family.
The family were named as Rasoul Iran-Nejad, 35, Shiva Mohammad Panahi, 35, Anita, nine, Armin, six, and Artin, 15 months.
When Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of the San Diego-based Haitian Bridge Alliance, learned that she had won this year’s RFK award, she wanted to celebrate in another way. She brought the ceremony to the border and led a group, including Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights staff and musician Wyclef Jean, to the Tijuana Immigration Shelter and then to the Otaimesa Detention Center, which houses detainees at the Immigration and Customs Department.
“We wanted to bring this award to people on both sides of the border and let them know that it was for them,” Joseph said. “We hear them. We see them. We keep fighting for them.”
“We went to the border because we heard there were Haitians,” she said in a speech outside the detention center, recalling the early days of her organization’s activities in Tijuana. “We went for the Haitians, but we stayed for everyone, and we continue to fight for everyone.
Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, has known Ms Joseph for three years since working together to help Haiti and Cameroon immigrants in Tijuana.
“The great thing about Guerline is that she’s tackling a big problem. She works in a crucible of poverty, race and immigrants,” Kennedy said. “
According to Joseph, her parents gave up a comfortable life in Haiti to move to the United States after the coup. Back in Haiti, they had a big house and her father was the mayor. In the United States, the father became a taxi driver and the mother became a housekeeper. Both worked long hours to take care of their families.
Experts say Home Office risks traumatising refugees by housing them in courthouse turned into hostel
Asylum seekers are being housed by the Home Office in a former courthouse turned hostel which promised nights in “an authentic prison cell” to backpackers.
Hundreds of people are understood to be in the facility – which appears to have been a form of court and prison cell “theme park” accommodation – including some who were imprisoned in the past in their home countries, including Libya.
A team of researchers published a study on Thursday confirming what Indigenous people already knew: The colonization of North America resulted in near-total land loss for the continent’s original inhabitants.
One of the most detailed reckonings of tribal land loss to date, the study compiles a massive set of data on the lands that were taken from tribes and the migrations many tribes were forced to make. In the continental U.S., Indigenous tribes lost close to 99 percent of their combined historical land bases through European colonization and the expansion of the United States.
Justin Farrell, a sociology professor at Yale University and the lead author of the paper, said that not only were tribal lands stolen, shrunken or wiped off the map completely, but that tribes’ present-day lands face “increased exposure to climate change risks and hazards, especially extreme heat and less precipitation.”
Like the displacement of pre-American peoples, the disproportionate impact of climate change on tribal lands is not a novel discovery. But Farrell said the aim of the research was to create the foundation of a publicly accessible database on land-loss that could be expanded by others and used to inform future research and policy-making.
“In some ways, we’re looking at an issue that everyone already knows about,” Farrell said. “But we’re trying to start a research project where we’re really zooming out and looking at the full scope of change.”
Ruins and a petroglyph along a rock face in southeastern Utah, within Bears Ears National Monument. Mountain Girl Photography / Aurora Photos / Getty Images
To determine the extent of land loss and the impacts of forced relocation, the team first had to map the historical territories of tribes in the continental U.S. The researchers pulled information from a broad set of historical sources, including land cession treaties and judicial records, as well as tribal publications and archives. After estimating the historical territories of hundreds of federally- and state-recognized tribes, they compared the total area to the tribes’ present-day lands.
According to their analysis, Indigenous people had a documented presence in more than 2.7 million square miles of what is now the contiguous U.S. The government-recognized tribal land base of today is 93 percent smaller, at roughly 165,000 square miles. Because many areas historically contained multiple tribes, the team also computed a cumulative sum for the ancestral lands of all the tribes in their study. They estimated that tribes held sway over a combined total of more than 21 million square miles — an area that was subsequently reduced by 98.9 percent.
Roughly 42 percent of the Indigenous groups from the historical period have no federally- or state-recognized land base, such as a reservation. Of the tribes that still have a land base, their territories are an average of 2.6 percent the size of their ancestral lands.
Kyle Whyte, who is an author on the paper and an environmental justice professor at the University of Michigan, said the history of land reduction and forced migration has resulted in unintended environmental consequences for tribes. The study found that present-day tribal lands experience more extreme-heat days — those with a maximum temperature over 100 degrees Fahrenheit — and nearly 23 percent less precipitation annually, compared to the historical period.
A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Whyte said studies like this are a critical step toward a fuller understanding of the indirect impacts that centuries of displacement have had on Native populations.
“Whether it’s within the U.S. context or in other parts of the world, Indigenous people are calling for recognition that the reason why they are often facing more severe climate threats than other populations is because of the impact of land dispossession,” Whyte said.
The team also concluded that tribes’ present-day lands are less economically valuable in that they are less likely to contain subsurface oil and gas resources. Although Indigenous rights advocates have rallied widespread opposition to extractive fossil fuel projects in recent years — from Standing Rock to Line 3 to a proposed gas pipeline in North Carolina — Whyte said it was important to note that tribes have been largely excluded from a highly profitable energy industry that was built on stolen land.
“While we don’t support extractive fossil fuel industries, the study demonstrates that tribes were never part of the game plan to build the U.S. energy system,” Whyte said.
Cross-checking their information with crowdsourced data compiled by Native Land Digital, an Indigenous-led organization that maps tribal territories, the researchers amassed hundreds of thousands of records over the course of the project.
“When you think about Indian removal and displacement to reservations, it is so complex and covers such a long period of time that, to take all that evidence and put it into one dataset is almost inconceivable,” said Donald L. Fixico, a regents professor of history at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study. The ethnohistorian, who is a member of the Shawnee, Sac and Fox, Muscogee and Seminole tribes, wrote an analysis piece that accompanies the article in Science.
While the research team hopes to build on the dataset for future projects, the authors acknowledge the limitations of their records and the need to gather more information from Indigenous people themselves, as opposed to relying on settler-colonial records. They plan on incorporating oral histories, tribal documents and archaeological records in future analyses.
Noting the historical exclusion of Indigenous voices in scientific literature, Whyte said the study’s importance extends beyond its findings on land loss and climate impacts.
“I think it’s important to tell stories in a lot of different ways,” he said. “And by telling this story in a scientifically rigorous way, I really think this study can empower further Native scholars and others to see how some of these methods we’ve been excluded from can actually be used to support our sovereignty and self-determination.”
On Thursday, the National Security Council released a long-anticipated report on what environmental advocates are calling one the most pressing issues of our time: climate change-induced migration. The report is the first U.S. government report on the effects of climate on migration and arrives right as President Biden is slated to attend a major United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland known as COP26.
The 37-page report, which was commissioned by President Joe Biden in February with an August deadline, notes that climate migration, both within countries and between them, is already here, but is set to get a lot worse. Climate change is expected to displace as many as 143 million people, nearly three percent of the populations of Latin America, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, by 2050. Roughly a quarter of those are expected to migrate internationally as a result of their displacement. The sheer mass of migrants will have “significant implications for international security, instability, conflict, and geopolitics,” the report says. This includes climate change-induced wars and conflicts over natural resources, namely water.
National security officials suggested a series of both preventive and adaptive steps in the report, such as increasing U.S. aid to countries regularly ravaged by severe weather events, more robust support for U.S. climate scientists to track these events, and legislative actions to protect climate migrants and offer asylum. They also urge the U.S. government to establish an interagency working group on climate migration — much like the White House’s interagency working group on climate change — to coordinate its efforts to address the challenge. That group would be the one in charge of drafting U.S. policy, strategies, and budgets to help those impacted by climate change and migration, either domestically or internationally. Although it isn’t clear how or when the group will be created, it seems to be the best shot to put in motion policy changes, according to advocates.
The report is “an important acknowledgment of a troubling lack of a policy framework to protect those uprooted by the climate crisis,” as the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, or LIRS, pointed out in a statement. However, the response from climate and migration experts seems to be general disappointment. While many organizations praised the fact that the document exists, others also pointed out how it failed to include actual policy prescriptions and pathways to move forward.
“It’s really disappointing,” said Amali Torres, founder and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Climate Refugees. “We went from a bold call and vision to, well, nothing.”
Two Syrian boys stand amidst the muddy water outside their tent that has been flooded as a result of heavy rain at a refugee camp built to host those who were forced into internal displacement as a result of the Syrian Government’s 2019 military offensive in Ma’arrat al-Nu’man.
Anas Alkharboutli / Picture alliance via Getty Images
When the report was announced in February, climate migration advocates and researchers were excited, Torres recalls. Her group and others held long conversations and presented their recommendations to the White House. Torres’ organization introduced several ideas, like updating the training for refugee, asylum, and immigration officers so it’ll recognize how climate change interacts with asylum law, or establishing a new ‘climate change’ resettlement category for refugees who cannot return to their countries due to environmental risks.
As months went by, the images of escalating violence in the U.S.-Mexico border against migrants started eroding Torres’ hope. Then, in July, the first strategy discussing the root causes of migration in Central Americafell flat. And when the report missed its intended deadline in August, Torres’ excitement had completely shifted into frustration.
The final report doesn’t reflect any of the policy recommendations her group and others brought up during consultation, Torres said. ”It doesn’t feel like it’s a step forward,” but a repetition of what’s already known, she added.
Kayly Ober, senior advocate and program manager for the Climate Displacement Program at Refugees International, echoed the disappointment felt amongst advocates. “The report is long on description and too short on prescription,” she said. “It seems that it took them eight months to put together this report that is essentially a literature review, which required much deeper thought.
However, noting that the report was a regurgitation of ideas and facts already well-documented by advocates across the globe, Erol Yayboke, a director at Center for Strategic and International Studies, says it was significant in uplifting these ideas to the White House.
One of the key legislative suggestions offered by the report was the expanded use of an already established migrant protection program known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS — a proposition floated around by Yayboke’s policy think tank last year. Historically, TPS has offered temporary residence to individuals from a designated list of countries that have been struck by natural disasters or political unrest causing displacement, but in its 30 years of existence, it has only been extended to roughly 20 countries. Expanding the program could potentially prevent build-ups at the border like we saw this year after Hurricanes Eta and Iota devastated Central America — and it could be done without congressional support.
“The fact that it’s now in a National Security Council Report means that it’s got a lot more legs behind it,” Yayboke, who was a co-author of a report on the use of TPS for climate refugees last year, told Grist. “That’s one step closer to implementing new and strengthened pathways for the millions of people who are going to be affected by climate change.
Yayboke says he understands why many groups may be disappointed with the report, but notes it an important step forward — especially given the country’s documented inability to pass climate legislation. “Very few people would say with a straight face that our current protections are sufficient — but this document is just meant to be a report,” he said. “Some of this may take congressional action, which we can all agree is really hard in today’s climate and the administration needs to take its time to make sure that their plans are durable from rollbacks from future administrations.”
While that may be true, the report made one thing clear about the country’s role in protecting climate migrants — despite being the largest greenhouse gas emitter in history: the country has no obligation to support climate migrants. “The United States does not consider its international human rights obligations to require extending international protection to individuals fleeing the impacts of climate change,” the report states.
Climate Refugees’ Amali Torres believes that’s a mistake, since “climate change destabilizes entire existences, it marginalizes people who are already oppressed, and it erodes their rights, their abilities to feed themselves, to work, to withstand disasters, to survive increasing costs of living,” she said. “This is a failure to not recognize all of that in your policy prescription.”
The Vanuatu Red Cross Society (VRCS) is one of the first humanitarian organisations to intervene and support the volcano internal refugees who were victims of eviction order at MCI on the road to Blacksand last week.
Emma Mesao, senior branch officer of SHEFA Red Cross, said the organisation dealt with the lives of people, and they responded to natural disasters.
While the eviction was not a natural disaster, people’s living and welfare had been affected.
On Thursday, a team was deployed to the area to assess the situation and identified two priority needs, including shelter and water.
The Red Cross distributed two tarpaulins and two jerry cans to each household. More than 60 households received their share of emergency supplies.
Mesao confirmed that when distributing the supplies, they had also encouraged the people to boil water before drinking to avoid other health issues.
Relocated to other settlements
Most of the families have relocated to other settlements.
Many of them went to Blandiniere Stage Three, and Crystal Blue Area.
Others went to other areas within the peri-urban areas of Port Vila, including Blacksand and Erangorango.
The Red Cross team visited all the areas to distribute the water containers and tarpaulins.
Speaking on behalf of the families at MCI, Lai Sakita, thanked the Red Cross for providing the families with the tarpaulins and jerry cans.
These emergency supplies would allow the people to set up temporary shelters while they resettled.
SHEFA Provincial Government Council, through its National Disaster Management Office officer supported VRCS in the logistics, during the distribution rollout.
He said these families were victims of the ash-fall from Tanna’s Yasur volcano.
Everywhere around the globe, people have told stories about a Great Flood. You probably know the basics: an angry deity, a world gone underwater, and a chosen handful who survived. The Bible tells of Noah and his family on the high seas, clinging to life on a zoolike ark. The Aztecs imagined a couple waiting out the floodwaters sealed within a hollow cypress tree, with just two ears of maize to eat. An ancient Chinese flood myth pictures a brother and sister surviving the deluge inside of a giant, magical gourd.
Stories like these are usually considered ancient works of fiction, impermeable origin myths or fanciful fables, but there’s reason to believe that many tales of drowned lands began as eyewitness accounts. People have been passing down these memories for thousands of years, embellishing and exaggerating them along the way, says Patrick Nunn, a geology professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. His new book, Worlds in Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory, and Myth, is a thorough account of how lands got submerged over the course of history and how people responded as their homes started going under.
Nunn isn’t exactly the sort of person you’d expect to write a book about things like Atlantis. He’s been part of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since the 1990s, sharing the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to scientists on the panel in 2007. He has spent much of his career in the Pacific, studying rising seas, islands, and history and culture, and writing a handful of books along the way. His 2018 book The Edge of Memory explored the treasure trove of knowledge contained in oral history — like the cataclysmic explosion of Mt. Mazama that created Oregon’s Crater Lake 7,600 years ago, a story of caution repeated across countless generations of the local Klamath Tribes. That theme is echoed in Worlds in Shadow, where Nunn writes that much of what scientists claim to have “discovered” about drowned lands “was actually already known, preserved in cultural memories.”
Just as people had reason to fear volcanoes, they also had reason to fear unpredictable seas. Sometimes lands drowned abruptly because of earthquakes or rapid ice melt, and towns were suddenly underwater. Other times, the ocean crept up slow and steady. Over the millennia, each generation of people living along the coasts, Nunn writes, would have noticed profound changes in the landscape. Twenty-thousand years ago, the planet was in the throes of the last ice age, with vast stores of water locked away in ice sheets. Then the world warmed and that ice melted, flooding coastlines and engulfing islands. Between about 15,000 and 6,000 years ago, the ocean’s surface rose nearly 400 feet on average across the world — plenty of fodder for stories of life-changing floods.
Credit: Petra Nunn / Bloomsbury
“This loss of land,” Nunn writes in the book, has “shaped human history to an extent that most of us underestimate.” People resisted the encroaching ocean, building sea walls, or relocated, moving uphill or paddling offshore to find new homes.
Today, history is repeating itself. With the climate warming dramatically, ice sheets are melting again. The ocean has risen about 8 inches over the past century — a faster rate than any time in the past 10,000 years.
Grist caught up with Nunn over Zoom to ask some hard-hitting questions, such as: Is there any truth behind movies like Atlantis and The Little Mermaid? And more importantly, what do ancient stories about submerged lands tell us about the future? His answers were more reassuring than you might expect. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q. I feel like people are pretty anxious about sea-level rise right now. What do you want them to know about the changes that are coming?
A. I think it should give people some degree of comfort to understand that this situation, in many ways, is precedented. This has happened before, and it has happened many times within the era of modern humans. What we’re being confronted by at the moment in terms of rising sea level is unprecedented in its rapidity. That’s something that we have to realize is a point of difference.
The best science that we have about the future seems to suggest that the level of the ocean surface is going to be at least a meter [3.3 feet] higher by the end of the century, and that the rise in sea level is going to continue for possibly another 100 or 200 years after that. And of course, many people when they hear that, they throw their hands up in horror, and they say, “How are we all going to cope?” Well, I think the message of Worlds in Shadow is that we will get past this. This is not a challenge that threatens the existence of humanity, not by any means.
Q. What are some of the ways that people responded to their homes getting swallowed up by the ocean?
A. Well, in the book, I start with an example from Haida Gwaii, or the Queen Charlotte Islands, as many people know them, off the west coast of mainland Canada. There are Haida stories that go back as much as 12,700 years that talk about the sea level rising and submerging coastal settlements, even submerging entire islands, and then the people who live there being forced to disperse to other places where there was dry land. When I first read that I was incredulous — you know, that’s a story that has survived for a very, very long time.
In Australia, it’s incredible. Some of the Aboriginal stories actually talk about how people feared the ocean would rise and cover the entire land, and then what would they do? The stories also talk about some of their responses, about how, probably around 7,000 or 8,000 years ago, people were going out and rushing to build sea defenses and wooden palisades and things like that.
Q. You write a lot about the importance of oral history and how stories like these have typically been dismissed by scientists. Why do you think that is?
A. I still go to geological conferences and try to convince my colleagues that there is some merit in looking at these stories, and I get a lot of pushback. And I think it’s simply because the stories are communicated in a language that is not the language of science. It’s really a prejudice. It’s something that I called, in an earlier book, “the arrogance of literacy” — the idea that if you can read or write, then you tend to privilege reading and writing above oral communication, you tend to think of oral societies as backward, and you tend to say, “Well, they have nothing of value to offer the literate world.” I think that’s nonsense.
Q. In the book, you said that movies like Atlantis and The Little Mermaid have this tiny nugget of truth in what they were originally based on. Could you say more about that?
A. Absolutely. Mermaids, you know, those stories have been around for 3,000 years or more. It seems almost certain to me that stories about mermaids and similar folk elsewhere in the world represent, at their core, memories of lands becoming submerged. You know, “Oh, sometimes we see mermaids over there sitting on the rocks, combing their long hair” — that’s a way of keeping alive the memory in an oral society.
Plato, who wrote about Atlantis around 360 B.C., was concerned with what makes an ideal society, and he tried without success to get his ideas taken up by the rulers of various places in the Mediterranean, and they didn’t. So he invented a story about a place that had been like that, and had run very successfully, called “Atlantis.” And then, of course, things started to go wrong, and then the gods submerged Atlantis cataclysmically as a result. It’s very interesting because where Plato was writing from in the eastern Mediterranean, there are islands that blow themselves up, and there were earthquakes that moved the land up and down and created giant waves. So, all these elements of the cataclysmic end of Atlantis were drawn from real life to make the narrative more compelling to many listeners.
A cataclysmic eruption around 1500 B.C. blew up much of the island of Santorini. It created the tidal wave that destroyed Knossos, perhaps inspiring the Atlantis legend. This engraving depicts an eruption on Santorini in 1866.
Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Q. There’s this new word I’ve come across lately, “solastalgia” — a kind of homesickness for changes in the place, the landscape, we grew up in. What do we know about how people in the past reacted emotionally to losing their homes?
A. This is something that interests me incredibly. In many places around the world, we have evidence that the loss of coastal places was lamented, and is still talked about today. I’ve spent some time in Tamil Nadu in southern India. And the Tamil people have this extraordinary tradition about the submerged land of Kumari Kandam, which they say once lay off the south coast of peninsular India. All the poetry and the literature about Kumari Kandam is full of regret. You know, “If this hadn’t happened, we would be the greatest people on earth, we would rule the world, but fate or some perverse god took it away from us and left us in this situation.”
There are similar stories from Northwest Europe, including from the coast of Brittany in France, but also from England and Wales. This is something that you find, where something terrible happens in the environment and people blame themselves. “What did we do as a society that led to us being punished like this?”
Q. Any lessons from what the past can teach us about responding to sea-level rise today?
A. I am trying to explain to many coastal planners and politicians that “building back better” in the same place is not a long-term adaptation option. The most sensible thing to do right now — I’m not saying it’s the most practical thing — is basically moving from exposed, low-lying coastal areas upslope. This is something that we’re trying to roll out in the Pacific Islands, where people don’t have the money to build engineering structures that can stop the ingress of the ocean. If you move far enough up the hill, then you won’t have to move again for another few hundred years.
At the same time, I’m not some naive scientist who believes that everyone is going to instantly do what I say. I think we have to understand people’s reluctance to move. We have to understand people’s fear of societal upheaval. But the bottom line is that we can do it.
When Hurricane Ida hit New York City on September 16, it dumped more than three inches of rain an hour. Sewers overflowed, streets turned into rivers, and thousands of homes and basements across the city’s five boroughs flooded. Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas saw the devastation firsthand when she toured her constituent neighborhoods of Corona, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Woodside in Queens. Family after family, mostly low-income immigrants, told her they’d lost almost all of their possessions in the storm. But as González-Rojas encouraged residents to seek help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, she learned that those who were undocumented were ineligible for aid.
Other elected officials, including state representative Catalina Cruz and city council member Darma Diaz, discovered the same thing. Cruz’s office fielded dozens of phone calls from undocumented immigrants struggling to recover from the flooding, with no place to turn for help. As pressure mounted, Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $27 million fund to help undocumented survivors of Ida in the city — the first initiative of its kind in the country. The fund will provide up to $72,000 to about 1,200 households with undocumented members to pay for things like repairing homes and replacing essential items.
“We have been fighting for this kind of disaster relief in our communities,” said Lucas Zucker, policy and communications director at the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, or CAUSE, in California. “The fact that New York is taking this step is historic.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul speaks during a tour of neighborhoods affected by Hurricane Ida in Queens on September 7.
Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images
Despite the growing impacts of climate-related disasters from coast to coast, the New York program is the first time a state or the federal government has invested in supporting undocumented immigrants after a disaster. This reality has left millions of people across the U.S. in a state of “hyper-marginalization,” explains Michael Méndez, an environmental justice and public health researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “The way that we have set up our disaster infrastructure — at the federal, state, and local levels — are rendering invisible undocumented migrants because of cultural and racial norms of who is considered a worthy disaster victim.”
An estimated 10 million people live in the U.S. without legal authorization, according to the Pew Research Center. Most of them — around 61 percent — are concentrated in fewer than 20 metro areas located in some of the most vulnerable states to climate change, places like New York City, Miami, and Houston. Research has found that low-income, racial, and ethnic minorities, as well as the elderly, renters, non-native English speakers, and those with mobility challenges, are disproportionately affected by flooding. The legacy of racist urban planning practices like redlining also relegated Black, Latino, and other racial and ethnic minorities to flooding-prone neighborhoods in some major metro areas.
In the best-case scenarios, local authorities are jumping through hoops trying to help undocumented immigrants access federal aid only authorized for U.S. citizens or those with immigration papers, said Katy Atkiss, disaster equity manager at Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, or HILSC. In the worst, they’re simply doing nothing.
“One of the biggest barriers to climate resilience in our society is that millions of people in this country are almost completely excluded from the safety net due to their immigration status,” Zucker said.
Typically, after a disaster strikes, the federal government sets up a network of programs to support survivors: Homeowners who don’t have insurance or are underinsured can ask FEMA for funds to repair their houses. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, provides federally-backed insurance and loans to cities, counties, and states to meet recovery needs in low-income communities. Families can apply for supplemental, short-term food stamps, as well as disaster unemployment assistance for up to 26 weeks. States can also tunnel federal funds from other programs to support survivors.
In theory, families with undocumented residents that have one or more U.S. citizens can apply for federal help. But many in this position are wary of asking for aid. FEMA is under the Department of Homeland Security, and its forms state that other Homeland Security agencies — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in charge of deportations — could access the information, explained Mendez. Additionally, if the undocumented members eventually become eligible for citizenship, receiving federal funds while undocumented can play against them during their application. As a result, Mendez said, they avoid applying for disaster aid.
Unauthorized immigrants often find themselves particularly vulnerable even before disaster strikes.
During the Thomas Fire, Mendez found, immigrants from different Mixtec Indigenous communities living in Southern California were unable to read the English and Spanish evacuation orders and recommendations.
In some cases, their migratory status keeps people away from shelters out of fear of being asked for ID, said Cesar Espinoza, executive director at FIEL, a grassroots group working in the greater Houston area. Espinoza recalls that when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in 2017, Department of Homeland Security trucks were parked outside of the largest shelter in Houston to help secure the building. Many undocumented immigrants didn’t go because they were afraid of being asked for their papers. “They wondered, ‘Are we going to be safe there?’” he said. “So a lot of people were in eight, nine feet of water” during the disaster.
A woman mops up floodwater in her bedroom in Houston, Texas following Hurricane Harvey in September 2017.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
The unavailability of federal funds has left many nonprofits as the only sources of assistance for unauthorized immigrants in the wake of natural disasters. But these too are often hard for the undocumented community to access. In the aftermath of Harvey, many undocumented people in Texas not only lost their homes, they lost their cars and work-related tools as well, particularly those who worked in construction, Espinoza said. When they reached out to non-governmental organizations for help — those that didn’t exclude unauthorized residents from their funds — the fact that they couldn’t prove their identity, didn’t have proof of income, or didn’t have a bank account for the electronic transfer left them ineligible for support. So FIEL raised $300,000 that they distributed hand-to-hand in the community.
In California, these organizations have struggled to deploy the infrastructure needed to assist so many people after fires, said Zucker. After the Sonoma Complex Fire scorched 87,000 acres of Sonoma County in 2017, the grassroots organization Community Foundation Sonoma County launched the first private disaster relief fund in the United States specifically for undocumented migrants. Others followed: After the Thomas Fire, the Ventura County Community Foundation raised $2 million to assist more than 1,400 families who were impacted by both the fire and the mudslides that followed.
Yet it soon became obvious that the needs exceeded the organizations’ capabilities.“Our waiting list was over 1000 families long for months and months and months. People were lining up out the doors early in the morning. Our cellphones were just ringing off the hook. It took us over a year to get the relief for a lot of those families,” Zucker said. “As proud as I am of everything we’ve done, it does not make up for the lack of support and policy.”
Things remained pretty much the same until last year when COVID-19 hit. Low-income people — with or without documents — were disproportionately suffering from the virus. “[The pandemic] really accelerated our learning and evolved how we’re dealing with disaster preparedness, response, and recovery,” Atkiss, of the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, said.
In early 2020, California, Oregon, and several cities and counties, including New York City and Harris County, Texas, launched funds for those who lost their jobs because of the pandemic, including undocumented immigrants. But it was Washington’s $40 million in COVID-19 relief funds that changed the game, Atkiss said. Besides state dollars, Washington used money from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or the CARES Act. The state took advantage of a loophole in 1996 welfare reform, which limits cash help to authorized immigrants — except for one-time emergency disaster relief. Washington leaders argued that since COVID-19 is an emergency, they were allowed to give undocumented immigrants a one-time disaster relief payment, explained Atkiss.
“Other places have used that loophole but not been so brazen about it for fear of lawsuits,” she said. “And as far as I know, Washington was not sued.” Now, she and other advocate groups in Texas are working to convince Harris County leaders to use the same legal argument to extend the eligibility of one of the county’s COVID-19 relief funds, which also uses federal dollars. A similar push is taking place in Iowa.
Advocates believe the “one-time emergency” framework used during the pandemic opens the door for exploring similar strategies for natural disaster aid.
“Whether it’s a fire, whether it’s COVID, whatever kind of crisis comes, when you’re excluded from the safety net, you have nothing to put a roof over your kid’s head and food on the plate,” Zucker said. “That is a truly horrific and immoral thing.”
Since the Tampa affair, humanitarian issues have been used to manipulate the public. The refugees still exiled in Papua New Guinea will suffer the consequences
Last week the Australian government announced it will end “offshore processing” in Papua New Guinea within three months. This shock announcement is deeply destabilising for refugees who have been in limbo for more than eight years on Manus Island and now in Port Moresby. For many of us who have been following Australia’s cruel and punitive refugee policies over the past two decades, this was not unexpected in the lead-up to an election year.
Recently I delivered a talk at Canterbury University of New Zealand alongside Abbas Nazari. Abbas was one the children rescued by the Tampa in 2001. After a period of uncertainty and limbo Abbas and his family were finally transferred to New Zealand. It was a surreal moment when the two of us, having been subjected to Australia’s cruel and inhumane policies and actions, two decades apart, were united, standing in front of young political science students, analysing Australia’s policies towards refugees. We were like two pieces of a puzzle, carrying the same story, a story which has been repeated again and again over the past two decades.
Chris* had never been charged with a crime, never accused, never questioned. But his visa was summarily cancelled, and he was no longer welcome in Australia, the only country he had ever known as home.
Chris had lived in Australia for more than 30 years since the age of one, but had his visa cancelled in 2019 for having once been a member of an “outlaw motorcycle group”, the Mongols – despite that group not being outlawed in the state where he lived.
The UN must urgently appoint a special rapporteur on climate change and human rights to galvanise action on the biggest threat to fundamental freedoms
Climate breakdown is making a mockery of human rights.
Start with the most fundamental right of all: the right to life, liberty and security. Two million people have died as a result of a five-fold increase in weather-related disasters in our lifetimes. And given that 90% of these deaths have occurred in developing countries, which have contributed the least to global heating, the climate crisis is also making a mockery of the notion that we are all born equal – as the UN Declaration of Human Rights and numerous national constitutions assert.
Law firm says attempts to evaluate a 15-year-old Afghan held in a hotel had been prevented, breaching the child’s rights
Fresh concern over the plight of thousands of refugees living in UK hotels has emerged after a council requested that the Home Office shut down temporary accommodation housing child refugees over “safeguarding concerns” and a lawyer revealed how he had been blocked from assessing unaccompanied minors.
Brighton and Hove city council has asked the Home Office to stop using a hotel holding scores of child refugees, claiming that no initial Covid-19 risk or safeguarding assessment had been carried out. Meanwhile, a law firm said that attempts to evaluate a 15-year-old Afghan held in a hotel had been prevented, breaching the child’s rights, with other unaccompanied minors subject to “unlawful forced imprisonment”.
The United Liberation Movement of West Papua has blamed the Indonesian military over the attack at a hospital in Kiwirok, near the Papua New Guinean border, in which a nurse was killed.
Interim president Benny Wenda of the ULMWP has issued a statement in response to accusations by the Indonesian authorities against the West Papuan army, saying that the upsurge in violence is because of the militarisation of the region to protect business and a “destroy them” policy directive from Jakarta against West Papuan resistance.
But Wenda claimed, according to sources he has spoken to, the clash was started by an Indonesian migrant doctor threatening people with a pistol.
“This triggered a West Papua Army investigation. A nurse fled from the scene and fell down a slope, fatally injuring herself,” said Wenda.
Indonesia had deployed more than 21,000 new troops since December 2018, displacing tens of thousands of civilians from Nduga, Intan Jaya, Puncak Jaya and Sorong.
Not keeping Papuans safe
“These troops are not there to defend Indonesia’s ‘sovereignty’ or keep my people safe; they are there to protect illegal mining operations, to defend the palm oil plantations that are destroying our rainforest, and to help build the Trans-Papua Highway that will be used for Indonesian business – not for the people of West Papua,” Wenda said.
“The Indonesian government is creating violence and chaos to feed these troops. As the head of the Indonesian Parliament, Bambang Soesatyo, ordered, ‘destroy them first. We will discuss human rights matters later’.
“Indonesian soldiers murdered the two brothers in April last year. Months later troops tortured and killed the pastor,” Wenda said.
Indonesian soldiers to blame
“In both cases, the military blamed the West Papua Army for the attacks – but Indonesia’s own human rights commission and military courts found that Indonesian soldiers were to blame. A similar pattern will unfold with the events in Kiwirok.”
Wenda said Indonesia must allow the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights into West Papua to investigate this violence and produce an independent, fact-based report, in line with the call of 84 international states.
“Indonesia’s ban on media, human rights groups and aid agencies from entering West Papua must be immediately lifted. If Indonesia is telling the truth about these events, why continue to hide West Papua from the world?,” he said.
“This war will never end until President Widodo sits down with me to solve this issue. This is not about ‘development’, about how many bridges and roads are built.
“This is about our sovereignty, our right to self-determination — our survival.”
Several reporters described the actions of Border Patrol agents mounted on horseback as using the reins of their horses to threaten migrants who had waded across the Rio Grande—which is exceptionally low at this point. The El Paso Times reported Monday that an agent ”swung his whip menacingly, charging his horse toward the men in the river.”
The refugees assembled in a makeshift camp under the freeway bridge on the US side of the river have been crossing back into Mexico to get food and other supplies, rather than risk crossing through lines set up on the US side of the camp by the Border Patrol and Texas state police, who would arrest them and ship them off for immediate deportation.
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