❧ ICE abducted a Louisiana woman who has been in the U.S. legally for 47 years. On June 25, ICE agents descended on the home of Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian. Without saying a word, and all within 60 seconds, officers parked their unmarked cars, handcuffed her as she was picking figs in her front yard, and drove off. The abduction happened so quickly that Kashanian’s daughter and husband, who were sitting inside their home, didn’t know it was happening until she was gone. ICE agents offered no explanation on the scene.
Kashanian arrived in the US in 1978 on a student visa and later applied for asylum; her father had ties to the overthrown US-backed Shah of Iran. While she was denied asylum, she was granted a stay of removal proceedings on the condition that she attend regular meetings with immigration officers. Over her 47 years in the US, her family says she’s never missed a meeting, nor has she ever been charged with a crime. New Orleans-based organizers hosted a rally on Thursday demanding her release. It remains to be seen how DHS will respond. (Fox 8 Live)
In her nearly five decades in the US, Kashanian raised a family, navigated the notoriously difficult immigration process, and even started a YouTube channel about her cooking. (Image: WWLTV on YouTube)
❧ Meanwhile, Los Angeles restaurants are uniting to fight Trump’s deportations. Since Trump re-took office, more than 50,000 people have been detained by ICE. While this is far short of Trump’s threat to deport 20 million people, the chaotic, militarized rollout seems tailor-made to terrify immigrants and their families. The new budget bill promises to dramatically increase ICE funding, too, giving the agency more than $45 billion for new detention centers. But as the Los Angeles Times reports, restaurants and grocery stores are fighting back by supporting their communities.
In LA, grassroots efforts have emerged to prepare and send baskets of food to families who fear wrongful deportation. The collaboration between restaurants, grocery stores, traditional nonprofits, and newly formed organizations has been successful so far. And sending food to immigrants’ homes is particularly helpful. Thousands of people are unable to work, send their kids to school, attend church, go to the doctor, or go grocery shopping due to the threat of deportation. To be clear, ICE still needs to be eliminated as an agency. But this is nice in the meantime. (LA Times)
❧ Uber and Lyft are blocking bills means to prevent sexual assault. The rideshare apps have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying state legislatures not to adopt laws that would make Uber and Lyft liable for assaults that happen in their cars. In Colorado, Uber threatened to stop service in the state after the legislature passed a law that would have required drivers to record audio of rides. (The law was introduced by representative Jenny Willford, who was sexually assaulted in a Lyft.) Democratic governor Jared Polis ultimately vetoed the bill, citing Uber’s concerns.
This is not the first time Uber has received criticism for its lobbying. In 2022, The Guardian reviewed more than 160,000 internal company documents as part of a sweeping leak. Besides spending millions on lobbying across the US and EU, journalists found that Uber flagrantly violated laws regulating rideshare services and used a “kill switch” to hide data from investigators and police. Notably, former CEO Travis Kalanick resigned in disgrace after allegations of rampant sexual harassment within Uber’s corporate culture became public. It is not a surprise, then, that Uber would be opposed to measures to hold it accountable for violence in its vehicles. (Stateline)
Art by Chelsea Saunders from Current Affairs Magazine, Issue 46, January-February 2024
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ IDF soldiers report being ordered to treat food distribution sites as “killing fields.” IDF soldiers interviewed by Haaretzreported being told to shoot at unarmed Gazans waiting for humanitarian assistance, even when there were no threats present. In a prior News Briefing, we covered the disastrous rollout of Israel’s new aid program in Gaza. Despite aid centers only being open for one hour each morning, more than five hundred Gazans have been killed and more than 4,000 have been wounded since aid distribution began on May 27th.
But this report, released last week, reveals that the deaths were not, as some outlets reported, accidents caused by chaos at distribution sites. Rather, the IDF purposefully shot to kill civilians searching for food. “It’s a killing field,” one IDF soldier said: “they’re treated like a hostile force—no crowd-control measures, no tear gas—just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.” When civilians line up too early or get too close to the centers, IDF soldiers report shooting live rounds at them. But these noncombatants often cannot see the boundaries they must respect, or, as soldiers noted, they are told conflicting information about when aid centers open. (Remember, centers are only open for one hour a day.) But regardless of the specific reasons given for shooting civilians, as one senior reserve officer put it, “this thing called killing innocent people—it’s been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza… that message sank in among the troops.” (Haaretz)
❧ The U.S.-brokered peace deal in the Congo helps (surprise!) the U.S. This week, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo signed a peace deal, hopefully bringing an end to the decades-old conflict between the two countries. This year, Rwandan-backed militia groups have killed thousands and forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of people in eastern portions of the DRC. While Trump and other government officials called the agreement a success, experts are more cautious. The war shows no signs of slowing down, and many previous peace agreements have failed because they didn’t actually force fighting to stop. The militia group causing the most damage today, M23, is itself the byproduct of a failed peace agreement, and they did not participate in these negotiations.
Indeed, the clearest winner in the deal is the United States. The DRC is home to an estimated $24 trillion of metal deposits, including vast reserves of cobalt – the most expensive component of lithium-ion batteries. The peace agreement makes specific note that the U.S. should have access to these minerals in exchange for security guarantees. While in theory this may help the U.S. break China’s near-monopoly on DRC cobalt, further extractive mining could exacerbate the underlying factors of the conflict (such as child slavery, violence, and corruption). (CNN)
❧ Amazon deforestation is close to the point of no return. For years, scientists have argued that the combination of deforestation and rising temperatures could push the Amazon rainforest into a death spiral, where it would transform from a lush green space into a drier savannah. In an interview inthe Guardian, Carlos Nobre, a Brazilian climate scientist, predicted that we could reach that point when more than 25 percent of the Amazon is cut down, or when global temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Right now, the Amazon has been 18 percent deforested and temperatures are at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Other scientific studies have argued that the Amazon is on pace to reach its tipping pointby 2050. (The Guardian)
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)
❧ Clarence Thomas is a weird little creep. Last week, despite the predictions of the infallible New York Times, the Supreme Court was bad. We don’t have the space or emotional stability to cover all of those rulings in-depth in this News Briefing, but there’s one element of one case that we want to bring to your attention. In Free Speech Coalition Inc. v. Paxton, Clarence Thomas wrote for the six conservative justices that Texas could pass a law requiring websites with pornographic materials to verify users’ ages, effectively creating a database of the IDs of everyone who uses the sites. The ruling is a loss for free speech advocates, but even worse, we all now have to live with Thomas’ reminiscing on how porn used to be less extreme back in his day.
As America’s highest-profile porn aficionado, some may have thought Thomas would place importance on the privacy rights of adults who watch adult films. He did not, writing that “the use of pornography has always been the subject of social stigma. This social reality has never been a reason to exempt the pornography industry from otherwise valid regulation.” Perhaps Thomas would feel differently if his own porn habits had come under greater scrutiny during his Supreme Court nomination. Anita Hill gave testimony at the time that Thomas regularly talked about pornography in the workplace, including a specific porn star named “Long Dong Silver.” But in the years since, former partners have alleged Thomas treated watching porn like a hobby. And Jane Meyer and Jill Abramson reported in their 1994 biography of the justice that he once papered every wall in his home with images of nude women. As usual with conservatives, it’s “restrictions for thee, but not for me.”
Still, the decision could have been worse. Sam Alito could have written it, and the 75 year old spent oral argumentgrilling attorneys for a list of the most popular porn sites in the country, and how much softcore material was on each one.
❧ Ohio legislators are trying to re-ban abortion in the state. Ohio Republicans are planning to introduce a law to criminalize abortion as homicide in the state, in defiance of the state constitution. In 2023, Ohio voters passed a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to an abortion in Ohio. But these legislators argue that the 14th Amendment guarantees fetuses the same rights as women, and therefore that abortion has been unconstitutional since the Civil War, to nobody’s knowledge. (This legal theory, known as “fetal personhood,” is gaining traction among conservatives as a way to ban abortions nationwide.)
Fortunately, the pro-choice groups that successfully amended the constitution are rallying to defeat the bill. Last week, protestors interrupted anti-abortion meetings in the Ohio statehouse, and the Ohio Capital Journal reports that more demonstrations will be planned if the bill makes progress in the legislature. (Ohio Capital Journal)
Ohio legislator Levi Dean, a sponsor of the bill. Some would question his knowledge of human anatomy. But don’t worry. Before running for office, he was a plumber. Image credit: Gage Skidmore
❧ Trump’s worst judicial nominee looks to be appointed without significant obstacles. Emil Bove is Trump’s former personal lawyer, who the president has nominated to become a federal appellate judge. He is absolutely unqualified for the role. The executive committee of the U.S. attorney’s office investigated Bove’s work as a prosecutor and ordered that he should be demoted from a leadership role for poor management, according to Politico. And his appointment by Trump to a senior role in the Department of Justice caused a wave of resignations. To put it bluntly, he is not a good lawyer. And poor lawyers make for poor judges.
Also, in case you hadn’t assumed, he has horrible, corrupt politics. He fired the attorney who admitted that the U.S. had deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia by mistake. He ordered the FBI to turn over the names of all agents who worked on January 6th-related cases. He coordinated the dismissal of Eric Adams’ corruption charges, and publicly chastised the attorneys who protested the dismissal. And a new whistleblower complaint alleges that Bove told attorneys at the DOJ that they should tell judges “fuck you” and ignore court orders that impede the administration’s policies. Of course, none of this matters to the Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee, whose goal for years has been to stack the judiciary with as many loyalists as possible. (Balls & Strikes)
AQUATIC MAMMAL FACT OF THE WEEK
This skincare routine will save your relationship!
According to a study published last week, whales use kelp to help their friends exfoliate. Scientists off the coast of the pacific northwest saw orcas using kelp to clean themselves and their pod-mates. The whales bite off sections of kelp and roll the stems between their bodies, which researchers hypothesize helps the whales remove dead skin. Aside from a fun anecdote, this is a remarkable scientific discovery; this is the first time marine mammals have been seen making and using tools in the way primates do. (Current Biology)
Who doesn’t like a back rub? (Image credit: NeedPix)
Writing and research by Grady Martin. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Alex Skopic. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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