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      Jury finds LA protester not guilty of assaulting border patrol agent

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      A Los Angeles protester charged with assaulting a border patrol agent in June was acquitted on Wednesday after US immigration officials were accused in court of lying about the incident.The not guilty verdict for Brayan Ramos-Brito is a major setback for the Donald Trump-appointed US attorney in southern California and for Gregory Bovino, a border patrol chief who has become a key figure in Trump’s immigration crackdown. The 29-year-old defendant, who is a US citizen, was facing a misdemeanor and was the first protester to go to trial since demonstrations against immigration raids erupted in LA earlier this summer.Border patrol and prosecutors alleged that Ramos-Brito struck an agent during a chaotic protest on 7 June in the south Los Angeles county city of Paramount outside a complex where the Department of Homeland Security has an office. But footage from a witness, which the Guardian published days after the incident, showed an agent forcefully shoving Ramos-Brito. The footage did not capture the demonstrator assaulting the officer.The jury delivered its not guilty verdict after a little over an hour of deliberations, the Los Angeles Times reported. Bovino testified earlier in the day and faced a tough cross-examination from public defenders.Bovino was one of four border patrol agents who testified as witnesses, but was the only one to say he saw the alleged assault by Ramos-Brito, according to the LA Times. Videos played in court captured the agent shoving Ramos-Brito, sending him flying backward, and showed the protester marching back toward the agent, the paper reported. The videos did not capture Ramos-Brito’s alleged assault.There were multiple factual discrepancies in DHS’s internal reports on the protest, which initially led to charges against five demonstrators, the Guardian reported in July. A criminal complaint suggested Ramos-Brito and others had attacked agents in protest of the arrests of two sisters, but records showed the women had been arrested in a separate incident that occurred after Ramos-Brito’s arrest.A supervisor later documented the correct timeline and “apologized” for errors, records showed.At trial, Cuauhtemoc Ortega, a federal public defender, sought to cast doubt on Bovino’s credibility, questioning him about facing a misconduct investigation several years ago, which resulted in a reprimand for referring to undocumented people as “scum, filth and trash”, the LA Times reported.After Bovino responded that his comment was in reference to a “specific criminal illegal alien”, Ortega read from the reprimand, signed by Bovino, which said he was describing “illegal aliens”, the newspaper said.Ortega also argued the agent who Ramos-Brito allegedly assaulted lied about the incident and Bovino was “trying to cover up for him”.Bovino has previously faced scrutiny for making false and misleading statements. He defended a major immigration sweep in January by claiming agents had a “predetermined list of targets”, many with criminal records, but documents showed that 77 out of 78 people taken into custody during the operation had no prior record with the agency, a CalMatters investigation revealed.And in June, while defending the arrest of a US citizen in a high-profile case, Bovino falsely claimed on social media that the man was charged with assaulting an officer.In Ramos-Brito’s trial, videos also contradicted initial claims of a border patrol agent who had said he was chasing a man who assaulted him, but was stopped by Ramos-Brito and Jose Mojica, another protester, the LA Times said. The footage showed no chase.Mojica first shared his account of the incident with the Guardian days after his arrest, saying he was assaulted and injured and had not attacked officers. The US attorney’s office subsequently dismissed felony assault charges it had initially filed against Mojica and Ramos-Brito, but then filed a lower-level misdemeanor against Ramos-Brito.Ramos-Brito’s attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.A spokesperson for Bill Essayli, the US attorney appointed by the president earlier this year, declined to comment on the acquittal. Border patrol officials did not immediately respond to an inquiry and requests for comment from Bovino.Essayli’s office has aggressively prosecuted protesters and people accused of interfering with immigration arrests, with more than 40 cases filed in June and July. But prosecutors have repeatedly dismissed some of the felony charges soon after filing them.Carley Palmer, an attorney who served as a supervisor in the US attorney’s office in LA until she left last year, said Thursday it was notable that the federal government had devoted significant resources to a misdemeanor case against an individual with no reported criminal history. Bovino, a senior official, flew in from Chicago for the trial.It is challenging to win convictions in cases like these without video evidence, she said: “The government bears the burden of proof, and if you don’t have footage of the relevant events, then everything is going to rise and fall on the credibility of your witnesses. If the witnesses are law enforcement officers and jurors believe they had bias … that’s really going to hurt their credibility.”The discussion at trial of Bovino’s past misconduct could create challenges for the government moving forward, she added: “In addition to harming the individual case, if a law enforcement witness has their credibility impeached on the stand, that can impact if they can testify in future cases and if their word can be relied on in sworn affidavits going forward.”Meghan Blanco, an attorney who represented Mojica, said it was significant that jurors did not believe the statements of such a senior official.“These jurors had the opportunity to listen firsthand to the CBP officer overseeing enforcement nationally and could not have found his testimony to be credible,” said Blanco, a former federal prosecutor. “It is a bad sign for the federal government. They are doing everything they can to try to legitimize their prosecutions, and thank God the jury and the public are seeing right through it.” More

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      Judges rule against Trump administration on deporting Guatemalan children and Venezuelans

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      The Trump administration has been handed a double defeat by judges in immigration cases, barring the executive branch from deporting a group of Guatemalan children and from slashing protections for many Venezuelans in the US.A federal judge on Thursday ordered the administration to refrain from deporting Guatemalan unaccompanied immigrant children with active immigration cases while a legal challenge plays out.Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee based in Washington DC, kept in place an earlier judicial block on the policy, sharply criticizing the administration’s unproven assertion that the children’s parents wanted them deported.The administration attempted to deport 76 Guatemalan minors being held in US custody in a surprise move in the early morning on 31 August, sparking a lawsuit and emergency hearing that temporarily halted the move.The Department of Justice lawyer Drew Ensign initially said that the children’s parents had requested they be returned home, but the department later withdrew that claim. Reuters published a Guatemalan government report saying that most parents of the roughly 600 Guatemalan children in US custody could not be contacted and of those who could, many did not want their children forced back to the country.Kelly said the justice department’s explanation “crumbled like a house of cards” in light of that report.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the justice department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Kelly said some children were unexpectedly taken from their shelter beds in the middle of the night, driven to the airport and, in some cases, put on planes, leaving them worried and confused. At one shelter in McAllen, Texas, a young girl was so scared that she vomited, Kelly wrote, citing evidence submitted in the case.Immigrant children who arrive at US borders without a parent or guardian are classified as unaccompanied and sent to federal government-run shelters until they can be placed with a family member or foster home, a process outlined in federal law.Meanwhile, late on Wednesday, a federal appeals court rejected an attempt by the Trump administration to set aside a judge’s order holding that it unlawfully rolled back temporary protections from deportation granted to 600,000 Venezuelans living in the US.A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals declined to pause a judge’s 5 September ruling holding that the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, lacked the authority to end the program, known as temporary protected status or TPS.“Vacating and terminating Venezuela’s TPS status threw the future of these Venezuelan citizens into disarray, and exposed them to a substantial risk of wrongful removal, separation from their families, and loss of employment,” the panel said.The justice department has said that if a stay were denied, it might take the case to the US supreme court, which in May put on hold an earlier injunction Chen issued and cleared the way for the administration to end temporary protections for about 348,000 of the Venezuelans at issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the DHS, in a statement said the ninth circuit’s ruling “is nothing short of open defiance against the US Supreme Court”. The administration had contended the supreme court’s May decision meant Chen’s latest ruling had to be similarly paused.“Luckily for us, and for all Americans, the Ninth Circuit is not the last stop,” McLaughlin said.TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event. It provides eligible migrants with work authorization and temporary protection from deportation. The program was created in 1991 and extended under Joe Biden to cover about 600,000 Venezuelans and 521,000 Haitians. Noem reversed the extensions, saying they were no longer justified, prompting legal challenges.Chen’s decision had also applied to 521,000 Haitians. The administration did not ask the ninth circuit to put that part of Chen’s ruling on hold as a second judge in New York had already blocked the revocation of the Haitians’ status. More

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      ‘The dungeon’ at Louisiana’s notorious prison reopens as Ice detention center

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      There were no hurricanes in the Gulf, as can be typical for Louisiana in late July – but Governor Jeff Landry quietly declared a state of emergency. The Louisiana state penitentiary at Angola – the largest maximum security prison in the country – was out of bed space for “violent offenders” who would be “transferred to its facilities”, he warned in an executive order.The emergency declaration allowed for the rapid refurbishing of a notorious, shuttered housing unit at Angola formerly known as Camp J – commonly referred to by prisoners as “the dungeon” because it was once used to house men in extended solitary confinement, sometimes for years on end.For over a month, the Landry administration was tight-lipped regarding the details of their plan for Camp J, and the emergency order wasn’t picked up by the news media for several days.But the general understanding among Louisiana’s criminal justice observers was that the move was in response to a predictable overcrowding in state prisons due to Landry’s own “tough-on-crime” policies. Though Louisiana already had the highest incarceration rate in the country before he got into office, Landry has pushed legislation to increase sentences, abolish parole and put 17-year-olds in adult prisons.Advocates swiftly objected to the reopening of Camp J, noting its history of brutality and violence. Ronald Marshall served 25 years in the Louisiana prison system, including a number of them in solitary confinement at Camp J, and called it the worst place he ever served time.“It was horrible,” Marshall said.It turns out, however, that Landry’s emergency order and the renovation of Camp J was not done to accommodate the state’s own growing prison population. It was in service of Donald Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown.View image in fullscreenEarlier in September, Landry was joined by officials in the president’s administration in front of the renovated facility to announce that it would be used to house the “worst of the worst” immigrant detainees picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents.“The Democrats’ open border policies have allowed for the illegal entry of violent criminals,” Landry said. “Rapists, child-predators, human traffickers, and drug dealers who have left a path of death and destruction throughout America.”Numerous studies have shown that undocumented immigrants commit serious crimes at lower rates than US citizens – and that increased undocumented immigration does not lead to higher crime rates in specific localities.The rollout highlights the way the Trump administration and conservative officials are seeking to blur the legally clear distinction between civil immigration detainees and people serving sentences in prison for criminal convictions – this time by utilizing a prison with a long history of violence and brutality, along with a fundamentally racist past.The Angola facility – which Trump’s White House dubbed the “Louisiana lockup” – follows the opening of other high-profile facilities with alliterative names by states across the country, including in Florida, Nebraska and Indiana. It will have the capacity to house more than 400 detainees, officials said.Recently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a list of 51 detainees it said were already being held at the Angola facility and who allegedly have prior criminal convictions for serious charges. But while the Trump administration similarly claimed that the Florida lockup dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” would house only the worst criminal offenders, a report by the Miami Herald found that hundreds of people sent there had no criminal charges at all.Ice has long utilized former jails and prisons as detention facilities. But there are few prisons in the country with the name recognition of Angola. And the decision to use Angola appears to be as much about trading on the prison’s reputation as it does about security or practicality.At a 3 September news conference, the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, called the prison “legendary” and “notorious”.Once a plantation with enslaved people, the rural prison occupies nearly 30 sq miles of land on the banks of the Mississippi River about an hour’s drive north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s capital. Throughout the 20th century, it gained a reputation as one of the country’s worst prisons – due to the living and working conditions, abuse by guards and endemic violence.View image in fullscreenIn 1951, dozens of prisoners slashed their achilles tendons to protest against brutality at the facility.Medical and mental healthcare at the prison has likewise been abysmal. As recently as 2023, a federal judge found that the deficiencies in treatment at the facility amounted to “abhorrent” cruel and unusual punishment, resulting in untold numbers of avoidable complications and preventable deaths.The prison has also maintained clear visual ties to its plantation past by continuing to operate as a working farm, where mostly Black prisoners pick crops under the watch of primarily white guards. Today, there is ongoing litigation attempting to end the practice of forced agricultural labor at the prison, which is known as the “farm line” and is required of most prisoners at some point during their sentences. Some prisoners can make as little as two cents an hour for their labor, and some are paid nothing at all.Civil rights attorneys have argued that the farm line serves “no legitimate penological or institutional purpose” and instead is “designed to ‘break’ incarcerated men and ensure their submission”.Nora Ahmed, legal director at the ACLU of Louisiana, said that the Angola immigration detention facility seemed like a clear attempt by the Trump administration to use the prison’s name recognition to further their goal of associating undocumented immigrants with criminals.“Angola’s history as a plantation and the abuse and allegations that have surrounded Angola as an institution is meant to strike fear in the American public,” Ahmed said. “It’s the imagery that is deeply problematic.”The Angola facility is also in some ways the natural result of aligning local, state and national trends and policies related to incarceration, immigrant detention and deportations.View image in fullscreenLouisiana has become a nationwide hub for immigrant detention and deportations. Sheriffs across the state have signed contracts with Ice in recent years to let them use their local jails as detention facilities. And Louisiana now has the second largest population of immigrant detainees in the country – after Texas. A small airport in Alexandria, Louisiana, has been the takeoff location for more deportation flights during Trump’s second presidency than anywhere else.It’s also not the first time the state has utilized Angola for something other than housing state prisoners.In 2022, Louisiana’s office of juvenile justice moved dozens of juvenile detainees to a renovated former death row facility on the grounds of Angola, a move that was met with litigation and outcry from youth advocates. While state officials made assurances that they would be kept separated from the adult population, youths at the facility reported being abused by guards, denied education and kept in their cells for long stretches of time.Eventually, a judge ruled that they would need to be moved, calling the conditions “intolerable”.Louisiana also briefly utilized Camp J in 2020 to house incarcerated pre-trial detainees from local jails around the state who had contracted Covid-19.Pictures and videos from the new immigration facility during a tour given to reporters show that while the facility may have been renovated, it still looks decidedly prison-like. Cells have single beds with metal toilets and bars in the front. There are also a number of outdoor metal chain-link cages at the facility, resembling kennels. It is unclear what they will be used for.A DHS spokesperson did not respond to specific questions from the Guardian but instead forwarded the press release with the criminal histories of some of the detainees currently being held at the facility. The Louisiana department of corrections did not respond to emailed questions.The former Camp J is now emblazoned with “Camp 57” – after the fact that Landry is Louisiana’s 57th governor. Photos captured by Louisiana news station WAFB showed the area had been painted with a sign reading “Camp 47” in a nod to Trump, who was sworn into office in January as the 47th US president. But officials evidently changed their minds about that name and then touted it as Camp 57 when it was unveiled.Marshall, now the chief policy analyst for the advocacy organization Voice of the Experienced, said much of what made Camp J so bad were guards that staffed the facility, who promoted a culture of abuse, violence and desperation. But he said that he had little optimism that the conditions would improve under Ice leadership.“Camp J has that reputation,” he said. “It has a spirit there – like it possesses those who are in control or have authority.”Marshall also said that when he was in Camp J there was a sense that prisoners could at least attempt to appeal to the federal government to get relief from the brutal conditions. Now, that’s no longer the case. “You can’t cry out to the federal government for help, because the federal government is actually creating the circumstances,” Marshall said.The problem with conflating civil immigration detention with prison is not only that it sends a message to the public that undocumented individuals are all criminals, Ahmed said – but also that they are entitled to all the legal rights that people being held in the criminal context are entitled to.“By attaching criminality to people in immigration detention, the suggestion to the American public is also that those individuals have a [constitutional] right to counsel,” she said. “Which they do not. This is civil detention, and people are not entitled to have an attorney to vindicate their rights.”There are still unanswered questions about the facility – including who paid for the renovations, whether or not it is being managed by a private prison contractor, or what the conditions are like for detainees. But in these early stages, the Trump administration is already touting the facility as a national model.“Look behind us, Louisiana,” the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said at the press conference in front of the new facility. “You’re going to be an example for the rest of this country.” More

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      GOP lawmaker pulls measure to allow Marco Rubio to revoke US passports

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      The chair of the House foreign affairs committee moved to cut a contentious provision from legislation that would have granted the secretary of state sweeping powers to revoke US citizens’ passports over allegations of supporting terrorism.Representative Brian Mast, a Florida Republican, filed an amendment to eliminate the measure from his department of state policy provisions act, a bill meant to reform the state department in the Trump administration’s image, after widespread criticism from civil liberties advocates, according to the Intercept.The original language would have given Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, the power to deny or revoke passports for individuals the department determines have provided “material support” to terrorist organizations. Given similar language employed by the Trump administration in other contexts, it is believed to have been intended to target pro-Palestinian activists specifically.Since Rubio became secretary of state, he has overseen efforts to deport pro-Palestinian international students and deploy an AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” system to target foreign nationals government authorities allege support Hamas. The US also recently announced it will look for “anti-American” views when assessing visa applications.But the new measure would have significantly escalated these efforts by targeting US citizens. Mast had initially defended the broader legislation, saying it “ensures every dollar and every diplomat puts America First and is accountable to the president’s foreign policy” when the House foreign affairs committee introduced the package last week.However, a committee spokesperson told the Intercept the committee would not allow the passport revocation amendment to “overshadow the bipartisan effort to restore command and control of the State Department to the Secretary”.A committee spokesperson did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment on Mast’s decision to remove the provision.Among other provisions, the bill package also includes a proposal to create a new “state sponsor of unlawful or wrongful detention” designation to penalize foreign governments that detain US nationals and require stronger accountability measures in those cases.The episode unfolded as Rubio wrapped a trip to Israel, Qatar and the UK to discuss Israel’s war in Gaza, ahead of the UN general assembly meeting in New York next week.The amendment to remove the passport provision still requires approval at a committee hearing scheduled for Wednesday. Even without it, the broader state department reform package faces uncertain prospects in the Senate. More

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      ‘It seemed like a ghost town’: LA food vendors on how Trump’s Ice raids affected business

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      From early morning to late at night, food vendors are feeding the people of Los Angeles. They offer nearly anything – tamales, fried fish, crispy tacos, mole, pupusas, fresh fruit, esquites, bacon-wrapped hot dogs – to Angelenos as they start their commutes or head home after the bars have closed.Taco trucks and food vendors are a vital part of the city’s celebrated culinary scene, one that came under attack this summer as Donald Trump ordered mass immigration raids across the city.Shannon Camacho, a senior policy associate at Inclusive Action for the City, a non-profit in the Boyle Heights neighborhood that focuses on community economic development, says that many street vendors made the painful calculation between risking losing much-needed income or being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).“Vendors are in a particularly vulnerable situation, given that they have to work outdoors,” Camacho said. “They rely on foot traffic. They rely on busy neighborhoods and streets … This was something intentional that the Department of Homeland Security was doing – targeting vendors that were outside, understanding that many of them are immigrants and many of them are undocumented.”The LA Vendor Street Campaign, which includes Inclusive Action and three other organizations, has been advocating for the rights of vendors long before this summer. The LASVC led efforts to create a statewide policy decriminalizing street vending throughout the state. Recently, it raised around $100,000 of direct cash assistance for street vendors across Los Angeles county.Still, Camacho says more is needed.“There are thousands and thousands of street vendors, even just in the city of Los Angeles,” Camacho said. “And that’s not even including other parts of Southern California. We don’t have enough to support everybody.”The Guardian spoke to three food business owners in LA about the summer of Ice, and how it’s affected their families and businesses.Juan Carlos Guerra, Taqueria FronteraIt’s Los Angeles … you drive anywhere on the street, you’re going to see pop-ups. You’re going to see street vendors. But it just seemed like a ghost town during that time. No one was out on the street.I was going to open the new Silver Lake location of Taqueria Frontera at the beginning of June. And then the raids happened. It didn’t seem like we should have a celebration or a grand opening.I reached out to Javier Cabral from [the hyperlocal news site] LA Taco, and I said to him, “I want to try to help out. Whatever I can do. Do you know a good organization?” And he said: “Oh, yeah. CIELO is a great organization.”I talked to someone at CIELO, Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (Indigenous Communities in Leadership). I was just like: “Taco Tuesday is usually a thing. Is it okay if I set up something saying that all proceeds of our trompo [taco] – which is what we sell the most – is going to be donated towards fundraising for CIELO so they can help immigrant families during this time?”We did Taco Tuesday with a purpose, and we ended up raising $4,000 from selling the trompo that day alone.Everyone was pretty supportive about it. And not just that day – a lot of people would come in just to check up on us, on my employees, see how they’re doing, how they’re feeling. There’s no way you could live in Los Angeles without being affected by this. And a lot of my clients were like: “I can’t believe this is going on.” Who doesn’t have a friend or family member or co-worker that isn’t undocumented here in Los Angeles?Street vendors are back out now and more people are outside eating. But I think that it’s still in the back of their minds. Could this happen at any time again? Right now it’s pretty calm, but what happens a month from now if they decide to do it again?Bulmaro, street vendorWhen we started the business, there weren’t many jobs out there. We knew how to make tamales, which is what we sell. Due to the lack of jobs and opportunities, we decided to do what we know how to do. From there, business grew and we started getting more clients, little by little. It’s our sole source of income.Because of the raids, everything stopped. We stopped selling for about a month, without working or anything. We just started working again a little more about two weeks ago. A lot of people don’t go out to buy things anymore because they’re scared. Sales have gone down a lot because of the raids. More than half of the clients we had haven’t come back to buy anything because of the fear that continues.We haven’t had phone orders, either. We just bring the day’s supply, and sometimes we come back home with tamales or with atol that didn’t sell. It’s never going to be the same as before the raids.View image in fullscreenIt’s me, my wife and another employee – three of us depend on the business. There’s nothing we can do, we have to keep working. We need to pay rent and bills, even though we’re going outside with fear. There’s no other way. The rent isn’t going to wait. The bills, and the food we need to buy, aren’t going to wait either.Alejandra Rodriguez, Alex Foods and Cemitas PoblanasA lot of our customers stopped coming. They were scared because a lot of them are Latino. Even at the local restaurants in the city of West Hollywood, [the workers] have their visas to be here, but they were still scared because of everything that was going on. They were saying that even if you had a visa, even if you had permission to be here, everybody was still getting kicked out. Our sales dropped more than 70%.Even on the street, there was nobody walking, nobody coming. It did take a very big toll on us … the local people that work at the restaurants, the chefs or the servers or the valet guys, they weren’t coming in to work.We closed down for about 10 days because it wasn’t worth coming out here. And luckily, we had a little bit of money saved up. Usually, when we leave on trips, customers will still call us to place orders. But no, the whole 10 days we were gone, we didn’t go to work. We didn’t get any calls or people asking us when we were going to come back.I had to let one of my two employees go. I couldn’t afford it anymore. And we’ve just slowly been climbing back. We have customers from the local car washes, and they told us that Ice actually got there at that car wash and took about four people. People are still aware. People are still scared. Any time they see a police officer pass by or a sheriff’s department or just somebody, they would flinch.People are just trying to get to work and come back. I know they were able to stay away, maybe for a couple of weeks, but everybody has to pay rent. More

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      Chicago organizers say city needs support, not politicalization by Trump: ‘This is not a serious solution’

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      For months, Donald Trump and his administration have been using violent crime as a justification for ramping up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) operations and sending or threatening to send the national guard to blue cities – first in Los Angeles, then Washington DC and, last week, Chicago.But for those who work on the ground to prevent crime, the White House’s approaches will do little to address underlying causes. Instead, they say, increased law enforcement will only lead to harassment and increased surveillance in communities that are already overpoliced.“[Trump doesn’t] mean well for our community,” said Teny Gross, executive director of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, a non-profit that offers services for people most at risk of shooting someone or being shot. “Yes, there’s a lot of violence, and it’s because of policies over decades. If you want to go after violence, go to the cities and invest in them, not just send in the national guard.”Gross has worked in violence prevention for more than three decades. Over the years, he’s heard Chicagoans talk about the need for increased law enforcement in their neighborhoods, including deploying the national guard – comments he saw as expressions of understandable desperation. He says residents have grown exhausted from witnessing decades of bloodshed and poverty that go unabated under both Republican and Democratic administrations.Still, he said that these issues won’t be solved through the shows of force Trump is enacting. “We deal with grief daily. We see death daily. This is not a serious solution,” he said.Last year, 574 people were killed in Chicago, primarily from gunshot wounds, giving the city a homicide rate of 17 per 100,000 people. This is far below that of some cities in red states, such as Birmingham, Alabama, and Shreveport, Louisiana, whose rates were 59 and 41, respectively, that same year. Still, Chicago’s reputation for shootings is being exploited to normalize military force on city streets and expand law enforcement in neighborhoods that are already highly policed and surveilled, said Ethan Ucker, executive director of Stick Talk, a Chicago non-profit that approaches youth gun-carrying through a harm reduction lens.“Those narratives are strategically being deployed to justify state violence,” Ucker said. “I worry about increasing and accelerating criminalization. But that won’t stop when the national guard leaves. It’s ongoing.”The Rev Ciera Bates-Chamberlain, who leads Live Free Illinois, a coalition of faith-based organizations that advocate for criminal justice reform and public safety, said if Trump actually wants to help, he would emphasize better clearance rates and community-based support services for victims of crime, and would get gun trafficking under control.“We’ve advocated for more community-based resources to be invested in,” she said. “We’ve advocated to improve clearance rates. But to completely disregard those requests is immoral and not about protecting citizens.”Bates-Chamberlain, a native of Chicago’s South Side who’s worked in the violence prevention space for more than a decade, said that “two things can be true at the same time” when it comes to the current national conversation about crime in the US. While Chicago’s leadership is boasting a more than 30% decline in homicides in 2025 so far, there were still nearly 200 people killed in the city by the end of June and many more injured.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The numbers are down, yet communities are still feeling the impact,” she said.But the pain these losses and injuries carry and their reverberations throughout the community won’t be addressed by sending more law enforcement to the street, Bates-Chamberlain said.“He’s politicizing our pain and that is diabolical and despicable for the president of the United States to do,” she said. “This is really harmful.” More

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      US right capitalizes on fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina

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      The random and unprovoked killing of a young woman in North Carolina several weeks ago has become a viral video, a political football, and a powerful rightwing talking point – even as the horror and anger her death has provoked obscures what experts say is a vital story about the failures of the American mental health system.The alleged perpetrator, Decarlos Brown Jr, 34, has a long history of problems with the law and mental health issues. He had been arrested 14 times and served a five-year stint for armed robbery. Brown had also come to believe that there was something alien and malevolent inside him – a “man-made material”, he told people, possibly a computer chip implanted by the government that was fighting him for control of his body.Brown was riding a light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina, last month when he allegedly stood up with a pocket knife, abruptly stabbed a nearby woman, then walked away. The victim, Iryna Zarutska, was a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who worked at a pizza parlor and hoped to become a veterinary assistant. Haunting security-camera footage shows her curled up weakly as she bleeds to death in her restaurant uniform. In a phone call from jail after his arrest, Brown, who reportedly has schizophrenia, told his sister that Zarutska had been trying to read his mind.Initially a tragedy covered by mostly local news outlets, Zarutska’s death has grown in recent days into a cause célèbre on the American right. In more centrist conservative accounts, Zarutska’s killing is a symbol and symptom of a lax criminal justice system that should never have allowed Brown to freely walk the streets. In more inflammatory, far-right discourse, the story of a formerly incarcerated Black man’s killing of a defenseless blond woman has become racist fodder for sinister theories about white persecution and Black criminality.On X, Elon Musk has tweeted or retweeted dozens of posts about the story, many arguing that the media would have covered the story more aggressively if a white person had attacked a Black victim, and contrasting it with the media attention given to cases like that of Daniel Penny, a white man who was arrested in New York in 2023 for killing an unhoused Black man with mental illness on the subway in what he described as self-defense. (He was acquitted in trial.)Viral content online has claimed that Brown targeted Zarutska specifically because she was white, though as of now there is no evidence that he did. Some rightwing accounts have noted with pointed irony that a photo that has circulated of Zarutska appears to show a Black Lives Matter poster in the background. Musk and others have pledged money to a campaign to put up George Floyd-style murals of her across American cities.Outrage has reached the highest levels of the US government. Donald Trump has declared on social media that the “ANIMAL who so violently killed the beautiful young lady from Ukraine, who came to America searching for peace and safety, should be given a ‘Quick’ (there is no doubt!) Trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY.”View image in fullscreenJD Vance, the vice-president, called Brown a “thug” and noted his lengthy arrest record. “It wasn’t law enforcement that failed,” Vance wrote. “It was weak politicians … who kept letting him out of prison.” Earlier this year Brown was arrested for allegedly making unfounded 911 calls, and released after signing a written promise to reappear in court.Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has announced federal charges against Brown – despite the strong possibility that Brown is mentally ill and could thereby be deemed not culpable by reason of insanity, and despite the fact that the federal government would not typically become involved in the prosecution of a tragic but random act of local violence.Emmitt Riley, a professor of politics and African American studies at Sewanee, the University of the South, said that Zarutska’s death is an undeniable tragedy but has become politicized in a way with obvious racial overtones.“Donald Trump has a history of calling for the death penalty, in particular for Black and brown people,” he said – most famously in the case of the Central Park Five, a group of teenagers who were imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a woman jogging in New York. Although they were later exonerated, Trump has never apologized.Experts on mental health and criminal justice believe the true story of this case is less sensational than tragic, and indicative of a fraying American mental health system that failed to protect Zarutska in part because it first failed to protect Brown from himself.“When I hear people define this as [solely] a criminal justice problem or lack of being ‘tough on crime,’ I think: ‘Let’s be real. Let’s define the problem as what it is,’” Sheryl Kubiak, the dean of the school of social work at Wayne State University, said. “We have a mental health crisis in this country, and we need to address it with appropriate mental health resources.”Jails, she said, were not created for treating mental illness, nor equipped to do so.Although Brown had a long history of reckless behavior, his mental problems seemed to get worse after he was released from prison in 2020, members of his family have told the news media. He walked around talking to himself and was given to unexpected angry outbursts.Like many people with seeming severe mental illness, Brown was offered treatment but resisted accepting it. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, his mother told ABC, but refused to take medication. She and other members of the family repeatedly tried to get him help. At one point she asked a hospital to admit him but was told, she said, that the hospital could not “make” a person accept treatment. At another point a mental health facility kept him for in-patient treatment but released him after two weeks.Kubiak and other experts note that cases like Brown’s illustrate two longstanding and overlapping debates about the treatment of mental illness. One concerns “institutionalization”, the treatment of serious mental illness in dedicated institutions segregated from larger society, and the other concerns “involuntary” treatment of those who need treatment but refuse it.In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States built large, then state-of-the-art mental hospitals across the country to house and treat patients. But institutionalization fell out of favor in the 1950s and 1960s, due to changing cultural and legal attitudes, advances in medication, and a fear that institutions were overused and risked abuse. Mental health practices instead emphasized treating people within their communities. Civil libertarians also lobbied for the bar for involuntary treatment to be stricter. Many of the hospitals were shuttered.View image in fullscreenYet the government has not properly funded and organized a system to replace the older one, Jeffrey Swanson, a sociologist and professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, said. Where someone with severe mental health problems might have previously had access to dedicated, long-term treatment facilities, they are now likely to end up in a revolving door of jails, ERs, and psychiatric wards with too many patients and too few beds.“Now we have probably more people with serious mental illnesses on any given day in one of our massive big city jails, like Cook county jail in Chicago or the Los Angeles county jail or Rikers Island [in New York], than we ever had in these asylums,” he said. “And it’s really a scandal.”Some progressives are opposed to involuntary treatment, casting it as a violation of consent. Mental health experts tend to take a more nuanced view, Swanson said, particularly in the case of patients whose illnesses are severe and defined by “anosognosia,” a term that means that someone doesn’t recognize that they are ill.A well-known argument for involuntary treatment, he added, says: “We wouldn’t let our grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease wander around and sleep in the subway just because she doesn’t know that she needs treatment; that’d be inhumane. So why do we tolerate that for young adults with schizophrenia?”His own opinion, he said, is complicated by the inadequacies of the current mental health system. “If you’re going to coerce someone into treatment for their own good, you have to have the system capacity to provide those services. I mean, otherwise, it’s really ironic to say: ‘We’re going to force you into treatment that doesn’t exist. We’re going to force you, but we don’t have a bed for you.’”Zarutska was buried in Charlotte on 27 August. Family members who were also in the US as refugees attended the funeral, but her father, who cannot leave Ukraine due to wartime restrictions, had to watch by video call.The Ukrainian embassy offered to help repatriate her body for burial, according to an uncle who spoke to People, but her family chose to inter her in the US; she had fallen “so much in love with the American dream”, he said.Her death is something “I would wish on no one,” Riley, the professor of political science, said. Yet until the US has better systems for treating mental health, “this will be a repeated cycle.” More

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      in US Politics

      Illinois lawmakers demand answers in Ice killing: ‘A traffic violation should never amount to a death sentence’

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      A US congresswoman from Illinois and local officials in and around Chicago are calling for an investigation into the traffic stop initiated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents that resulted in the shooting death of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez on Friday.A joint statement whose signatories included Democratic US House member Delia Ramirez said Villegas-Gonzalez’s killing in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park illustrated “the inevitable violence” resulting from the deportation campaign mounted by Donald Trump’s administration during his second presidency.The statement also said community members were “outraged” at the “violent spectacle” that killed Villegas-Gonzalez near a school at a time when parents were dropping their children off.“What happened … is not an isolated incident. It is the consequence of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda,” the statement said in part.The Trump-led Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused Villegas-Gonzalez of having “resisted arrest, attempted to flee the scene and dragged a [Ice] officer a significant distance with his car” at the time of his killing.One surveillance video of the incident uploaded to social media shows Villegas-Gonzalez backing up, then driving forward with at least one officer pulling on his door. Another video shows agents trying to get into Villegas-Gonzalez’s car by pulling on a door handle after it crashed into a truck.The agents eventually breaks the glass and unlocks the car from the inside. One of the agents pulls Villegas-Gonzalez’s body several feet away from the car before laying it on the ground. That agent and another both kneel next to Villegas-Gonzalez, whose legs are seen moving before the video ends.Villegas-Gonzalez’s death comes as Ice has ramped up operations in Chicago and the city’s suburbs in what the agency dubbed Operation Midway Blitz. On social media, DHS officials said the operation was meant to honor Katie Abraham, one of two women killed in a car crash in January. Officials investigating that wreck charged Julio Cucul-Bol, a Guatemalan national who was in the US without permission, with leaving the scene of a deadly crash, aggravated driving under the influence resulting in death and reckless homicide.Ice on Friday detained another man, named William Alberto Gimenez Gonzalez, who was in a barber shop at the time of his arrest. The local advocacy group Latino Union of Chicago released a statement expressing concern that Gimenez may have been targeted because of his involvement with a lawsuit against the retail chain Home Depot and off-duty Chicago police officers.A 2024 investigation by the local news outlet and journalism lab City Bureau had found that recently arrived immigrants were being physically assaulted and detained by Home Depot store employees and off-duty officers.Ice was previously sued in 2018 by Illinois advocacy groups and people who were detained by the agency after it conducted warrantless traffic stops on people in the state. The two sides reached a settlement in 2022 that required the agency to develop a nationwide policy on arrests without warrants and traffic stops. The settlement included certain conditions, including immediate release, if Ice arrested someone without a warrant. The settlement terms were valid through May.“While the investigation is ongoing, we know that a traffic violation should never amount to a death sentence,” the joint statement signed by Ramirez and other Chicago political officials said. “We demand a full and thorough investigation into what happened today.”Illinois governor JB Pritzker echoed that statement separately in an online post, saying, the people of the state deserved “a full, factual accounting of what’s happened … to ensure transparency and accountability”.According to Mexico’s consulate in Chicago, Villegas-Gonzalez was a cook and Mexican national. The consulate said it had been in touch with Villegas-Gonzalez’s family and requested more information from Ice about the deadly shooting.A person who knew him said that Villegas-Gonzalez had been dropping off his kids at school, as was his routine, prior to his death and the traffic stop.“He was a good father, looked out for his children – currently he was the one taking care of them,” the person said. “He takes them to school, he arranges to get them picked up – he is with the children nearly full-time. He is not a bad father.”When asked about Villegas-Gonzalez, the person responded about how much care he had for his two young children:“[Silverio was] a person who looks out for his children, takes care of them, and wants to be with them at home, and despite the fact that he was sick. He was undergoing dialysis.“For him to be shot, how he was shot – I don’t think it’s justice.” More