The Washington Post National Weekly - October 28, 2018

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2018 . IN COLLABORATION WITH SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2018 . IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE ABCDE NATIONAL NATIONALWEEKLY WEEKLY

To Toescape escapetoto U.S., U.S.,migrants migrants find findaanew newpath path With Withborder bordercrackdown, crackdown, 12 asylum claims asylum claimsspike spikePAGE PAGE 12 8

Politics Trump’s targets get targeted 4 Nation In the gulf, a hidden oil spill 8

5 Myths Apple 23

OCTOBER 28, 2018 2 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2018

3 SUNDAY, October, 28, 20183

KLMNO WEEKLY KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX THE FIX

BattleBattle over over House is tightening House is tightening HELPING REPUBLICANS, voter enthusiasm is now high on both sides: AllREPUBLICANS, election HELPING voter enthuA MBER P HILLIPS cycle, Democrats havesiasm enjoyed a palpable, ith Election Day just days away, the is now high onreboth sides: All election markable level of votercycle, enthusiasm. battle for control of the House ofDay just days away, the Democrats have enjoyed a palpable, reith Election During the primaries, Democrats theenthusiasm.

Representatives is suddenly tightmarkable levelacross of voter battle for control of the House of country had record turnout and put a record Democrats across the ening. Washington insiders were During theup primaries, Representatives is suddenly tightnumbers of candidatescountry running.

Inrecord Texas,turnout that and put up a record saying as early as July that Democrats appeared had ening.

Washington insiders were has put one of the most powerful more likely than not tosaying pick upasthe majority. numbers of Republicans candidates running. In Texas, that early as JulyBut that Democrats appeared in Congress, Rep. Pete Sessions, at risk of losing some fresh data suggest thatlikely the battle will has put one of the most powerful Republicans more than not tobe pick up the majority. But his seat to a well-funded challenger much more competitive than it looked just a that the battle will be inDemocratic Congress, Rep. Pete Sessions, at risk of losing some fresh data suggest who has never held office. few weeks ago. his seat to a well-funded Democratic challenger much more competitive than it looked just a But: There’s evidence the Kavanaugh Democratic operatives aware whothat has never held office. few are weeks ago.that races drama breathed some urgency into previously are tightening, but say they’re still confident But: There’s evidence that the Kavanaugh Democratic operatives are aware that races Republican voters. The NBC-WSJ poll finds that their chances to win House forbut the first drama breathed some urgency into previously arethe tightening, say they’re still confident that Democrats and Republicans both hightime in eight years are as their goodchances as ever.toThey Republicanarevoters.

The NBC-WSJ poll finds that win the House for the first ly enthusiastic about that voting.

The Post-Schar have the largest battlefield a decade.

Butas good as ever. They Democrats and Republicans are both hightime inineight years are School survey found that 6 in 10 likely voters Republicans are breathing sighlargest of relief after ly enthusiastic about in voting. The Post-Schar have athe battlefield in a decade. But each party say they areSchool more motivated to vote seeing their base voters suddenly enthusiastic survey found that 6 in 10 likely voters in Republicans are breathing a sigh of relief after JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST as a result of Kavanaugh getting the court. about voting after the divisive to get suddenly Voter enthusiasm each partyon say they are more motivated to vote seeing theirbattle base voters enthusiasticrose after the fight to get Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on the after Supreme Brett battle M. Kavanaugh the Supreme Court. as a result of Kavanaugh getting on the court. about voting the divisive to get onVoter enthusiasm rose after the fight to get HELPING Court.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on the Supreme Brett M. Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. DEMOCRATS, Trump and Republicans control all major levers ofDEMOCRATS, governVirginia and Utah.

“Our prospects are Court. much better than they HELPING Trump and ment: Your taxes. Your Republicans health care. The nation’s were a month ago,” said one control all major levers of governVirginia and Utah.

“OurRepublican prospects workare much better than they deficit and any concerns youYour maytaxes. haveYour about HELPING DEMOCRATS, overall, voters ing to help keep GOP control the House.

“Butone Republican ment: health care. The nation’s were aof month ago,” said workyouroverall, and your family’sdeficit future.and Republicans are you may have about them: By 10 percentage points, accordin order for us to hold House, almost any concerns HELPING DEMOCRATS, voters ing tothe help keep GOP controlprefer of the House.

“But more vulnerable to beyour blamed anyfamily’s of these ing House, to a Post analysis prefer of recent polls. everything is going to in have to break the to GOP’s andfor your future. Republicans are them:

By History 10 percentage points, accordorder for us hold the almost issues thanHistory Democratsmore because they control the suggests that’s enoughing of atopopularity boost to way down the home stretch.” vulnerable to be blamed for any of these a Post analysis of recent polls. everything is going to have to break the GOP’s White House, andthan justDemocrats sealed conSo will it? Here’s how to down argue the about control issues because they control the boostCongress to way home stretch.”help flip the House. suggests that’s enough of a popularity servative control of theWhite Supreme Court.

But: A recent NBC/Wall Street of the House.

House, Congress and just sealed conhelp flip the Journal House. poll So will it? Here’s how to argue about control But:Journal Trump’s recentservative approvalcontrol rating of stands finds Democrats’ popularity driven

by Street the Supreme Court.

But:isAbeing recent NBC/Wall poll of the House. percent, to aTrump’s weekly recent Gallupapproval rating stands voters who are less likely vote in midterm HELPING REPUBLICANS, polls are But: findstoDemocrats’ popularityatis 44 being drivenaccording by which is aroundatas44 high as it’s ever been. to a weekly Gallup elections,polls specifically and younger tightening in the most HELPING competitive races: A percent, according voters who are less peolikely tosurvey, vote in midterm REPUBLICANS, are Latinos is alsosurvey, chugging along, withas high as it’s ever been. ple. A Gallup pollAfromelections, late September showed new Washington Post-Shar School which is around specifically LatinosThe andeconomy younger peotightening in thesurvey most competitive races: Septembershowed marking the lowest unemployment thatSchool about asurvey quarter of voters under werelate September shows that in 48 House President The economy is also chugging along, with ple.

A Gallup poll30from new districts Washington Post-Shar rateunder in decades, and there are no major interna“absolutely” certain tothat vote.about a quarter of voters Trump won in 2016 that could that decide of districts September marking the lowest unemployment 30 were shows inthe 48fate House President And athe Post of the lowest-voting the House majority, the candidates polling rate in decades, and there are no major interna“absolutely” certain to vote. tional disasters.

Trump won inare 2016 that could decide fateanalysis of But an important counterpoint to that councountiesare in polling the United States that 200 of of the about evenly. tional disasters.

And finds a Post analysis lowest-voting the House majority, the candidates terpoint: Trump doesn’t seem enough them are majority nonwhite and But: Democratic operatives say that’s actuBut anpopular important counterpoint to that councounties in theinclude United aStates finds that 200 of about evenly. to help all thedoesn’t other seem popular enough significant Hispanic includes ally a good thing. It meansBut: that Democratic their candidates terpoint: Trump them are That majority nonwhite and Republicans include a withstand operatives say that’s actu- population. electoral his party right now.withstand such places as the borders of Texas and Southare competitive in traditionally conservative to help Republicans all the other significant Hispanic population.

Thatstruggles includes facing ally a good thing.

It means that their candidates n ern California. districts such as in Kansas, Kentucky,inOhio, ©The Washington Post electoral struggles facing his party right now. n such places as the borders of Texas and Southare competitive traditionally conservative ern California. districts such as in Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, ©The Washington Post BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

W W BY

LMNO KLMNO WEEKLY

CONTENTS

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our by editors at The This publication was prepared partner publications across the country.

Washington Post All forarticles printingand and distribution by our columns have previously appeared in The Post or onthe country. AllPOLITICS partner publications across articles and washingtonpost.com andcolumns have been edited to fit this have previously appeared in The THE Post NATION or on format. For questions orwashingtonpost.com comments regarding content, and have been editedTHE to fitWORLD this please e-mail weekly@washpost.com.

If you have a format. For questions or comments regarding content, COVER STORY question about printingplease quality,e-mail wish to subscribe, or weekly@washpost.com.

If youODD haveJOBS a would like to place a hold on delivery, contact your question aboutplease printing quality, wish to subscribe, BOOKS or local newspaper’s circulation would department. like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your OPINION © 2018 The Washington Postlocal / Yearnewspaper’s 5, No. 3 circulation department.FIVE MYTHS © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 5, No. 3

WEEKLY

CONTENTS 4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Border Patrol agent Robert Rodriguez ON THE COVER Border Patrol POLITICS 4 the Rio agent Robert Rodriguez THEapproaches NATION the banks 8 of near McAllen, in approaches the banks of the Rio THEGrande WORLD 10 Tex., August.

Photo by 12 CAROLYN VANnear McAllen, Tex., in Grande COVER STORY HOUTEN Post August.

Photo by CAROLYN VAN ODD JOBS of The Washington 16 HOUTEN of The Washington Post BOOKS 18 OPINION 20 FIVE MYTHS 23

3 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2018

SUNDAY, October, 28, 2018 20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Democracy itself is on the ballot this year MICHAEL WALDMAN is author of “The Fight to Vote” and president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. The Brennan Center helped write ballot measures in Florida, Michigan and Utah. This was written for The Washington Post.

The midterm elections have been marred by controversy over alleged voter suppression in Georgia, North Dakota and elsewhere. Once again, partisans want to make it harder for fellow citizens to cast their ballots. It’s ugly. ¶ But amid the dispiriting bid to curb voting, something else is happening: For the first time in years, citizens have re­ sponded with a robust push to expand democratic rights.

Breakthrough ballot measures across the country would expand voting rights and improve representation. If enact­ ed, they could add up to a democracy wave, regardless of which party prevails.

Start with Florida, where the presidential recount in 2000 launched the recent voting wars.

The state has an extraordinarily harsh felony disenfranchisement law, one that dates to the Jim Crow era and bars citizens with any kind of felony conviction from voting for a lifetime. A drug-possession conviction at 18 means a 60-year-old can’t cast a ballot. Today, 1.6 million otherwise eligible Floridians are disenfranchised, including 1 in 5 black people of voting age.

A measure on the ballot this November would restore rights for most people with criminal convictions. The proposal must win 60 percent of the vote to pass, but recent polling shows nearly three-fourths of voters support it. Notably, the measure has united religious communities and skirted ideological splits. (The Kochbacked organization Freedom Partners gave a ringing endorsement.) Formerly incarcerated people have led the drive, going door to door to drum up support.

Then there’s partisan gerrymandering. Politicians have manipulated district lines since the country’s founding, but computers have transformed

gerrymandering into a precision mechanism to blunt the voice of voters. This year, the Supreme Court declined to make a major constitutional ruling to restrict extreme partisan gerrymandering. With Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh replacing Anthony M. Kennedy, hopes have dimmed for a legal breakthrough at the court.

Here, too, while courts dither, citizens have acted. The best reform would have district lines drawn by a nonpartisan, independent commission, as in Arizona and California. In Michigan, despite a rebuff at first from party leaders and labor unions, activists are on track to garner 400,000 signatures for a ballot measure to create a nonpartisan panel to draw future districts. Similar reforms are on the ballot in Utah and Colorado. Missouri voters will decide on a different but strong approach. Earlier this year, Ohio voters backed a measure to block the legislature from redistricting on a partisan basis.

This is all quite extraordinary.

Gerrymandering was an arcane topic beloved only by political science professors and tobaccostained party bosses. Last

LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS

Cynthia Lazo, 25, casts an early ballot in the midterm elections in Norwalk, Calif., on Oct. 24.

decade, similar reform efforts failed in states including Ohio and California. It speaks volumes about our electoral breakdown that ordinary citizens now seem to understand how badly the system is tilted.

Voters are also tackling one of the biggest barriers to effective elections: our ramshackle voter registration system. Today, voters can fall off the rolls when they move or if there’s a typo in their state’s records. Some people never manage to sign up to vote in the first place. We are alone among major democracies in running our system this way.

At least 13 states, though, have approved a version of automatic voter registration that uses data supplied at their departments of motor vehicles or other agencies to securely and accurately update registration information.

This paradigm shift would add tens of millions of people to the rolls, reduce costs and bolster election security. Next month, Nevada and Michigan voters will decide whether to adopt strong versions of the plan.

Will elected officials heed this shout from the electorate? Some signs are positive. House Democrats announced they will make democracy reform the basis of their first piece of

legislation — the auspiciously named H.R. 1 — should they win.

It would include national rules on automatic voter registration, redistricting reform and smalldonor public financing of campaigns to curb the role of big money. Dozens of new members may form a reform caucus akin to the class of “Watergate babies” who won in 1974 and transformed Congress.

But don’t trust incumbents to act, regardless of what they say.

In the weeks after the midterms, we need to press lawmakers to put their votes where their tweets are. We also need to keep an eye out for legal challenges against these measures from forces that stand to lose from a fairer system. Conservative activists could try to convince the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority that ballot measures instituting electoral reform are unconstitutional. If the Supreme Court tries to choke off the voice of the voters, it would demolish public confidence and provoke a constitutional crisis.

For now, all eyes are on election night. This is not just an important midterm cycle politically speaking; it’s also a chance for democracy itself to prevail at the ballot box. n

64

SUNDAY, October,28, 28, 2018 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

How employers push voter turnout More than 135 companies are part of a “Time to Vote” campaign aimed at getting more employees to the polls.

B Y J ENA M C G REGOR

F

ormer presidents, pro sports teams and pop singers aren’t the only ones calling for Americans to make sure to vote Nov. 6: More employers, too, are taking an increasingly active role in trying to get their workers to the polls on Election Day. At Cava, the chain of Mediterranean fast-casual restaurants, its 1,600 workers will get two hours of paid time off to vote on Election Day this year if they request it in advance, a nationwide perk for its workers.

For the first time, Tyson Foods, the meat company, has launched a companywide voter registration initiative, with many plants participating in an effort to register employees and offer details about early voting, absentee ballots and voting locations.

Levi Strauss & Co. has named volunteer “voting captains” in its offices and distribution centers to hold registration drives and educate workers; it’s also giving employees, including retail workers, paid time off to vote.

Many employers have held getout-the-vote drives or encouraged workers to vote in past elections, and some companies have even made Election Day a corporate holiday. But in a year when interest in the midterm elections has reached a fever pitch, nonprofits that are focused on voter turnout say they are seeing a noticeable uptick in the enthusiasm and creative approaches that many employers are using this year to get more workers to the polls — whether by closing stores or offices, making paid time off or flexible work arrangements available, or by trying to remove obstacles to voting, such as securing transportation for workers or discouraging meetings for the day.

There are also several efforts by businesses or get-out-the-vote nonprofits that have been pushing the issue in campaigns this year. More than 135 employers, including Walmart, Gap Inc. and Farmers Insurance, announced in September a “Time to Vote” cam-

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Companies hold registration drives, give paid time off on Election Day paign aimed at increasing awareness about what employers can do to allow time for employees to vote. It followed a call in June by Rose Marcario, the chief executive of outdoor retailer Patagonia, which grabbed headlines for closing its stores and giving workers paid time off for 2016’s Election Day — something it will do again this year — and has been encouraging other employers to follow its lead.

Meanwhile, a Vote.org project launched in March known as ElectionDay.org has gotten more than 250 employers, such as Pinterest or spirits maker Diageo, to sign on to offer some kind of paid time off or flexible leave on Election Day. TurboVote Challenge, an initiative by the nonpartisan group Democracy Works to involve employers in trying to boost voter turnout, said its number of

corporate business partners grew from 18 in 2016 to 40 this year.

“The enthusiasm from our corporate partners is exceptional for a midterm election,” said Mike Ward, TurboVote’s program director. “Honestly, if you had asked me in March 2016 what we expected to be happening in October of 2018, I would have expected way, way less.”

Others said employers are making internal policy changes.

“In the past, companies have assumed this was something that was taken care of from a legal standpoint,” said Colette Kessler, director of partnerships for Vote.org, a nonpartisan group that seeks to increase voter turnout.

More recently, she said in an interview, companies have been taking an inventory of their policies and looking for creative

ways to prevent work excuses from keeping people from the polls.

A spokeswoman for online weddings marketplace WeddingWire, for instance, said it had declared Nov. 6 a “no meetings” day to “minimize any barriers to voting,” which will make it easier for employees to go to the polls and not be able to use a full calendar as an excuse. (A 2014 Pew Research Center report found 35 percent of surveyed voters said conflicts with work or school schedules got in the way of voting.)

There are no federal laws requiring employers to give workers time off to vote. State regulations vary, from having no laws on the subject to mandating paid time off for several hours, according to the nonprofit Workplace Fairness. Many do not have consequences, however, for noncompliance, and even those states that do specify offering paid time off may require it only if employees don’t have enough time to vote before or after work. n ©The Washington Post

57

SUNDAY, October, 28, 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2018

POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Making Trump’s whims a reality

BY P HILIP R UCKER AND A SHLEY P ARKER

T

he great election-eve middle-class tax cut began not as a factual proposal, but as a false promise.

When President Trump abruptly told reporters last weekend that middle-income Americans would receive a 10 percent tax cut before the midterm elections, neither officials on Capitol Hill nor in his administration knew anything about such a tax cut. The White House released no substantive information. And although cutting taxes requires legislation, Congress is not scheduled to be back in session until after the Nov. 6 elections.

Yet Washington’s bureaucratic machinery whirred into action nonetheless — working to produce a policy that could be seen as supporting Trump’s whim.

One such option now under discussion by administration officials is a symbolic nonbinding “resolution” designed to signal to voters ahead of the elections that if Republicans hold their congressional majorities they might pass a future 10 percent tax cut for the middle class. And House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) said Tuesday that he would work with the White House and the Treasury Department to develop a plan “over the coming weeks.”

The mystery tax cut is only the latest instance of the federal government scrambling to reverseengineer policies to meet Trump’s sudden public promises — or to search for evidence buttressing his conspiracy theories and falsehoods.

The Pentagon leaped into action to both hold a military parade and launch a “Space Force” on the president’s whims. The Commerce Department moved to create a plan for auto tariffs after Trump angrily threatened to impose them. And this past week, Vice President Pence, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House all rushed to try to back up Trump’s unsupported claim that “unknown Middle East-

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

Officials scramble to create plans, find evidence to back the president’s false public assertions erners” were part of a migrant caravan in Central America — only to have the president admit Tuesday that there was no proof at all.

“Virtually no one on the planet has the kind of power that a president of the United States has to scramble bureaucracies in the service of whim,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Trump has a pattern of catching his aides off guard with random policy announcements that are rooted more in his imagination and desires than any organized administration initiative.

Trump has sometimes issued directives publicly if he believes his subordinates are not executing his agenda forcefully enough or taking his wishes seriously. “He thinks, ‘Hey, if I say it on Twitter, then these guys will have to follow,’” said one former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candid-

ly share the president’s process.

In July 2017, Trump revealed in a tweet his decision to ban transgender individuals from serving in the military. His social media missive preempted a policy review with several options that he was set to receive from administration officials. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and his staff scrambled to react and reconcile the president’s sudden demand with the military’s practices and protocols.

The Pentagon was also forced to develop a “Space Force” after Trump announced last spring that he wanted to create a sixth branch of the military. The president initially said it was conceived as a joke, but “Space Force” has become a frequent chant at his campaign rallies, and he has tasked Pence with overseeing the initiative.

After winning the electoral college in 2016, Trump falsely claimed he only lost the popular vote against Hillary Clinton be-

Vice President Pence at a National Space Council meeting Tuesday, where he discussed progress for President Trump’s plan for a “Space Force. The Pentagon was forced to develop the “Space Force” after Trump announced lthat he wanted to create a sixth branch of the military. The president initially said it was conceived as a joke.

cause of widespread voter fraud — leading to a formal commission on the issue chaired by Pence. The panel was eventually disbanded after it became mired in lawsuits and only managed to hold two meetings.

Trump has set off similar surprises in trade. Incensed that his initial tariffs were not bending Canadians, Japanese and Europeans to his demands, Trump in June threatened to impose import duties on all foreign auto imports before a government plan was ever put together.

The threat, which he had repeated numerous times and once referred to as the “mother lode,” prompted the Commerce Department to move forward with a review and spooked U.S. allies.

Trump’s pledge to cut taxes, which he first floated a week ago Saturday, followed a familiar pattern.

The president has been boasting for days about an imminent tax cut, despite the lack of legislation so far — as well as any concrete details of the plan shared by any of the people who would need to be involved.

At a rally Monday night in Houston, Trump said, “We’re going to be putting in a 10 percent tax cut for middle-income families.

It’s going to be put in next week.”

He added, “We’ve been working on it for a few months,” and singled out Brady, who was seated in the audience and responded with a sign of affirmation.

Trump went on: “This is for middle-income people, all middleincome people, a big tax, 10 percent. We’ll be putting it in next week.”

Meanwhile, racing to respond, administration officials began discussing a far more modest step of asking Congress to eventually vote on a nonbinding resolution for a 10 percent tax cut in the future.

But no decision has been made, and for the most part, lawmakers and senior administration officials are trying to temper expectations and deflect questions over a tax plan that, as of now, exists only in the president’s telling. n ©The Washington Post

46

SUNDAY, October,28, 28, 2018 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Targets of Trump’s ire face new threats Political leaders from both sides decry thwarted attacks on Democrats, CNN

MANUEL BALCE CENETA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

BY

P HILIP R UCKER

I

n the home stretch of the fall campaign, President Trump has called Democrats “evil” and argued they are “too dangerous to govern.” He has denounced Barack Obama’s presidency and demonized former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, inspiring chants of “Lock her up!” at his rallies.

The president has also used his bully pulpit to taunt Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) as a “low I.Q. individual,” impugn former CIA director John Brennan and fan conspiracy theories about liberal philanthropist George Soros. And

he has called the news media “the enemy of the people,” singling out CNN’s reporting as “fake news.”

This past week, these targets of Trump’s rhetoric became the intended targets of actual violence in the form of pipe bombs, many of which turned up Wednesday. On Thursday, additional devices were discovered at the homes of former vice president Joe Biden and actor Robert De Niro, who have both spoken out against the president at high-profile events and were also targets of Trump verbal attacks this year. On Friday morning, devices addressed to Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and former director of national intelligence James

R. Clapper Jr. were found, bringing the total to at least 12.

A man in Florida was arrested Friday in connection with the bombs, FBI and Justice Department officials said. No evidence had surfaced connecting the acts to any political campaign as of Friday morning, but a common theme among the targets was unmistakable: Each has been a subject of Trump attacks.

Trump and other Republican leaders rushed last week to decry the thwarted attacks on Democrats and CNN, saying that such acts cannot be tolerated. For many politicians, the day was a reckoning — a sobering pause just days

After potential explosive devices were sent to political figures, President Trump on Oct. 24 condemned any “acts or threats of political violence.”

from Election Day to reflect on a political atmosphere notable for apocalyptic imagery and violent confrontations.

Speaking from the East Room of the White House on Wednesday, Trump said, “We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.”

The president sounded a call to all Americans to unite, though he did not address the tone of his own campaign rhetoric.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-

57

SUNDAY, October, 28, 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2018

POLITICS

MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS

Calif.) responded to Trump in a joint statement: “President Trump’s words ring hollow until he reverses his statements that condone acts of violence.”

They went on to argue that Trump has “divided Americans with his words and actions,” citing his cheers for Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) for body-slamming a journalist; his equivocations over the deadly neo-Nazi and white supremacist rally in August 2017 in Charlottesville; his encouragement of supporters at rallies who have gotten violent with protesters; his praise for foreign dictators who kill their own citizens; and his attacks on the free press as “the enemy of the people.”

Trump traveled Wednesday to Wisconsin for a campaign rally, where he sought to make a show of behaving himself by pointing out during his speech that he was “trying to be nice.”

“No nation can succeed that tolerates violence or the threat of violence as a method of political intimidation, coercion or control,” Trump told the crowd in Mosinee.

Trump again shirked responsi-

bility for his own inflammatory contributions to the political discourse and instead assigned blame to others. “The media also has a responsibility to set a civil tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative — and oftentimes, false — attacks and stories,” he said.

The president, who has made a sport out of mocking his political rivals with nicknames such as “Crooked Hillary,” also exhorted others in the political arena to “stop treating their opponents as morally defective.”

Trump has bristled at commentators who have highlighted his rhetoric when discussing the explosive devices, tweeting shortly after 3 a.m. Friday that CNN was “blaming me for the current spate of Bombs.”

Jon Meacham, a journalist, historian and author of the book “The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels,” said the most divisive political periods of the nation’s history have resulted in violence against political figures. He said he has worried history could repeat itself in the Trump era.

“We have examples of political violence in the United States in the age of Jackson, in the road to Civil War, during the Civil War, in the Progressive Era and in the cataclysm of the 1960s,” he said. “What happened today is a reminder of the stakes of the era in which we’re living. This is an era of fundamental redefinition of politics and culture. It requires leadership that is steadying, not incendiary, and we’ve seen far too much incendiary language from the top.”

CNN President Jeff Zucker said that the White House has “a total and complete lack of understanding” about the consequences of their attacks on the media.

“The president, and especially the White House press secretary, should understand their words matter,” Zucker said in a statement. “Thus far, they have shown no comprehension of that.”

Trump has long assailed the targets of the packages. He regularly excoriates Obama’s presidency and was a leading proponent of the falsehood that the nation’s first black president was not born in the United States.

Police do a secondary sweep after the report of a suspicious package in Manhattan on Friday. The package was addressed to former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.

KLMNO WEEKLY

Despite defeating Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, Trump still goes after her in his speeches, inspiring chants from crowds to “Lock her up!” Before Trump’s appearance at the Wisconsin rally Wednesday, the crowd erupted in a “Lock her up!” chant while Senate Republican candidate Leah Vukmir was attacking Clinton.

At his rallies, Trump also routinely mocks Waters and attacks CNN as reporting “fake news,” to which his rally crowds regularly chant back, “CNN sucks!” And Soros has long been a target of farright groups and the subject of conspiracy theories with anti-Semitic overtones.

In the wake of angry protests over Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle, Trump and other Republicans have tried to cast Democrats as the party of the “mob” and attempted to link specific candidates to radical figures on the left.

A number of Trump’s supporters advanced the “false flag” theory on social media and talk radio, arguing that the potential explosive devices may have been sent by liberals with the intention of reversing the “mob” argument and painting Democrats as victims of unruly conservatives.

Explaining the theory, conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said on the air Wednesday, “For the last few weeks, the Democrats have had all of that horrible PR, all of these angry mobs . . . Wouldn’t it serve you up here if you’re a Democrat operative to make it look like the Republicans are a bunch of insane lunatics and have some mobsters on their side as well?”

The “mob” frame has not only been a feature of Trump’s rally speeches, but also central to some GOP campaign advertising.

In Minnesota’s rural 1st Congressional District, the National Republican Congressional Committee has repeatedly sought to tie Dan Feehan, an Army veteran who was awarded a Bronze Star, to leftist anti-fascist activists who have clashed with police and right-wing protesters.

“Feehan works at a liberal organization bankrolled by George Soros, chief financier of the global left and anti-American causes,” a narrator says in one spot, as the sound of smashing glass plays over images of anarchist protesters. n ©The Washington Post

8 12

SUNDAY, October,28, 28, 2018 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

The border is tougher to cross than ever. But there’s still one way into America.

BY

N ICK M IROFF in Hidalgo County, Tex.

PHOTOS BY CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

C

rouched low in the brush along the riverbank, Border Patrol agent Robert Rodriguez watched the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, waiting. A norteño ballad drifted from a radio somewhere on a nearby farm, and two pigs cooled themselves at the water’s edge, wading to their bellies. For a moment, one of the border’s busiest places for illegal crossings looked placid. ¶ Then a raft appeared. ¶ Within seconds it was in the water, a teenage guide steering the current while his boss, an older man, stood watch on the bank. In less than a minute, the teenager delivered a woman and a boy to the U.S. side and they climbed out, shoes sinking in the wet silt. ¶ Rodriguez stepped onto the path to stop them, but the woman and the boy did not run. They wanted to be captured. This is how it works now.

The era of mass migration by Mexican laborers streaming into California and the deserts of Arizona is over. Billions spent on fencing, sensors, agents and drones have hardened the border and made it tougher than ever to sneak into the United States. The migrants coming today are increasingly Central Americans seeking asylum or some form of humanitarian protection, bearing stories of torture, gang recruit-

Asylum claims soar as migrant families take the administrative path, buckling the immigration system

ment, abusive spouses, extortionists and crooked police.

They know the quickest path to a better life in the United States is now an administrative one — not through mountains or canyons but through the front gates of the country’s immigration bureaucracy.

Last year, U.S. immigration courts received nearly 120,000 asylum claims from migrants facing deportation, a fourfold in-

crease from 2014. Those filings have pushed the number of pending cases before U.S. immigration courts to more than 750,000, collapsing the system and upending President Trump’s sweeping promises to lock down the border.

The extraordinary surge of asylum seekers is testing the limits of whom, exactly, the United States is willing to protect, challenging the stone-carved ideal of America as the place that welcomes the tired

139

SUNDAY, October, 28, 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2018

COVER STORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

recognize a familiar look of confusion.

“My stepfather,” she said. “It started when I was 10.”

After a decade in prison for rape, her stepfather was free now, stalking them, blaming her for ruining his life, Ulloa said. “He’s going to kill us.”

Police in Honduras had told her there was nothing they could do, she said, so she and her son left for the United States. They wanted asylum.

Chances were they would be denied. But it could take months, or longer, for the U.S. immigration system to determine whether Ulloa and her son deserve protection. They would probably not be sent back to Honduras anytime soon.

and poor, “yearning to breathe free.”

It has also presented Trump with one of the most vexing policy challenges of his presidency, and virtually every measure taken so far has made the problem worse.

Trump this spring deployed a nuclear option — separating parents from their children — in an attempt to stop families from coming. It backfired. The controversy generated by the policy and its abrupt rollback six weeks later handed smuggling guides across Central America a potent sales pitch. They now tell potential customers the Americans do not jail parents who bring children — and to hurry up before they might start doing so again.

Families asking for mercy constitute a greater-than-ever portion of those taken into custody. More than half of all arrests along the Mexican border last month were migrant family members or unaccompanied minors, up from 13 percent in 2013.

This spring, Trump fixated on a caravan of asylum seekers traveling through Mexico, about 300 of

whom eventually crossed into the United States. Now, a much larger procession of as many as 7,000 Central Americans is trekking north toward the border, despite threats from the president to stop them with U.S. troops and sever aid to their countries.

There is a sinking feeling, among Department of Homeland Security officials, that more caravans are yet to come and that they will only get larger.

Families are coming in caravans and on their own because it works. Only 1.4 percent of migrant family members from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who crossed the border illegally in 2017 have been deported to their home countries, according to DHS officials.

The United States has neither the detention space nor the legal authority to hold children long enough to process their parents’ claims, so families are typically released from custody to await court hearings that could be months, even years, into the future.

Trump has long derisively re-

Border Patrol agent Robert Rodriguez apprehends Cecilia Ulloa, 25, and her son Darwin, 13, moments after they are delivered onto the U.S. side of the river. The family did not attempt to run.

ferred to this as “catch and release” and used it as an attack line against Democrats. But in the months since ending family separation, Trump has now made it his de facto policy.

The administration has drafted plans to add thousands of detention beds in an attempt to hold parents with children longer. DHS officials have also proposed new rules that would allow the government to withdraw from a 1997 federal court agreement limiting the amount of time children can be held in immigration jails to 20 days.

But in the meantime, so many families are coming through highvolume corridors such as the Rio Grande Valley that Rodriguez and other agents have come to describe them as “non-impactables,” because they say there is nothing they can do to stop them.

As Rodriguez radioed another agent to pick up the woman and the boy, she handed him her Honduran identification card. Cecilia Ulloa was 25. Darwin, her son, was 13. The math took a moment to sink in, and Ulloa appeared to

Credible fear Some migrants’ stories of gang threats and police indifference have a rehearsed quality, suggesting they are concocted. The smuggling guides who charge $10,000 or more for the trip provide transportation and meals, but also coaching, including the key words migrants should say to convince U.S. asylum officers that their fears meet credibility standards.

But there are many with no need to make things up. The countries they are running from have some of the highest murder rates in the world. Their criminal justice systems barely function. Some have been victimized already.

Lisa Brodyaga, an immigration lawyer in South Texas who has worked with Central American migrants since the late 1970s, said adult asylum seekers who appear before immigration judges “are almost all being deported.”

“I think judges felt freer to follow their gut under Obama than they do now,” she said.

Migrants have adapted just as quickly. As asylum officers and immigration judges reject more claims, the number of single adults who arrive claiming fear of persecution is dropping. The fastest-growing portion comprises parents coming with children, preventing their long-term detention and significantly reducing the likelihood they will be deported.

Last month, border agents arrested 16,658 individuals who arrived as members of “family units,” an all-time high, up from 9,247 in July.

Migrant advocates have docu-

10 14

SUNDAY, October,28, 28, 2018 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

mented cases of rejected asylum applicants being killed after they were sent back. But a full picture is difficult to obtain because U.S. government statistics do not track what happens to deportees once they leave the United States.

DHS officials point to improving public-safety statistics from Central America as evidence that the asylum trend is not driven by worsening violence.

Those fleeing lawlessness and crime are also lured north by job opportunities and the desire to reunite with parents, siblings and other relatives already living here. The United States offers not only safety but also a chance at a dramatically better life.

And with the U.S. unemployment rate at a 50-year low and employers across the Midwest desperate for labor, the Trump-era economy is undermining the Trump-era immigration agenda.

“Migrants from Central America seek asylum in the U.S. to escape gangs, violence and lack of opportunity,” said Doris Meissner, who is policy director at the Migration Policy Institute and ran the U.S. immigration system under President Bill Clinton. “This mixture of humanitarian and economic migration is happening in other parts of the world, too.”

“However, only some of those in peril are actually eligible for asylum,” said Meissner, co-author of the new report “The U.S. Asylum System in Crisis.” “Granting them protection but keeping asylum systems from being overwhelmed or misused requires broad solutions, including attacking the reasons people flee.”

For people like Ulloa and her son, here’s how it works.

Those who cross the border and turn themselves in are interviewed by a U.S. asylum officer to determine whether they have a “credible fear” of facing persecution back home. The Supreme Court has ruled that an asylumseeker’s fear is considered “wellfounded” if there is a 10 percent chance they will face persecution, and those who potentially qualify are referred to an immigration judge.

Between Oct. 1, 2017 — the start of the 2018 fiscal year — and June 30, the period for which the most recent statistics are available, the government received more than 73,000 credible-fear claims, up from 5,000 during all of 2009. Of

alien may be released from custody into the United States and possibly never show up for an immigration hearing,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a September speech to a group of 44 newly hired immigration judges that he said was the largest class in history.

those 73,000 who were interviewed, 76 percent were found to have a credible fear of return.

The finding does not mean that a judge will eventually grant asylum. Justice Department statistics show that fewer than 10 percent of Central American applicants are awarded asylum, but the process of applying offers a shield from deportation and a toehold, however tenuous, in the United States.

Trump officials view this as a too-permissive approach to asylum claims that amounts to a milewide loophole in the American immigration system. U.S. generosity is being exploited by smugglers and cheats, they say, and the dysfunction encourages more to make a dangerous journey.

Under Trump, asylum denial rates have reached their highest levels in more than a decade. But nearly half of those rulings are issued in absentia, because the applicant does not appear in court.

That is the breach Trump officials see: If asylum seekers think their case is likely to be denied, they can drop out of the court system and disappear, remaining in the United States illegally. The latest Justice Department figures show U.S. courts issued more than 40,000 removal orders in absentia during the government’s 2017 fiscal year, nearly twice as many as in 2014.

“Saying a few simple words — claiming a fear of return — has transformed a straightforward arrest for illegal entry and immediate return too often into a prolonged legal process, where an

A Border Patrol helicopter flies overhead. After being detained at the border in Mission, Tex., the men were given an electrolyte beverage, processed and placed in a van for transport.

‘Private’ violence In the absence of a physical wall, the Trump administration is laying down new legal barriers to the asylum process. The U.S. immigration court system is a branch of the Justice Department, not the judiciary, and the attorney general effectively functions as a one-man Supreme Court. In June, Sessions issued a sweeping ruling that overturned the case of a Guatemalan domestic-violence victim who had demonstrated that police failed to protect her from spousal abuse and rape.

Sessions’s ruling said asylum laws are meant to shelter those facing persecution for political or religious beliefs, or their membership in a well-defined social group, not those fleeing what he called “private” forms of violence.

“The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes — such as domestic violence or gang violence — or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim,” Sessions wrote.

Under Sessions, the Justice Department has attempted to reduce the court backlog by adding dozens of immigration judges and imposing quotas that compel them to process more cases. It has taken steps to prioritize the claims of the most recent arrivals, as a way to discourage asylum seekers from taking advantage of the court backlog. And it has instructed judges and asylum officers to take a more adversarial approach to migrants’ claims.

U.S. asylum laws were shaped in the aftermath of World War II, when the United States and other Western nations developed international treaties based on the principle of “non-refoulement” — that those fleeing persecution should not be sent back to places where they are likely to killed or persecuted.

Applicants who reached U.S. soil could prove eligibility for asylum on the basis of past persecution or a fear of future abuse on the

Apprehensions at the southwest border remain below historical highs ...

Total southwest border apprehensions by fiscal year 1.5m

1m

500k

0

2000

396,579

2018

... but applications for asylum have risen ...

Defensive asylum application filings 120,000

104,416 Proj. for Q4

90,000 60,000 30,000 0

2008

2018

... and the immigration backlog has continued to grow.

Pending immigration cases at the end of each fiscal year 915,913 Proj. for Q4

800,000 600,000 400,000 200,000 0

2008

2018

Note: Data available through the third quarter of 2018. The 2018 total includes a fourth-quarter projection.

Source: Customs and Border Protection; Justice Department Workload and Adjudication Statistics LESLIE SHAPIRO/THE WASHINGTON POST

basis of their “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”

In practice, historians and immigration scholars say, political considerations have often superseded humanitarian ones. During the Cold War, refugees fleeing communist and left-wing governments in Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua were welcomed in large numbers, while those escaping U.S.-friendly military dictator-

11 15

SUNDAY, October, 28, 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2018

COVER STORY ships in El Salvador and Guatemala were denied.

“The United States has never solely pursued asylum on the basis of humanitarian principles,” said Roberto Suro, a migration expert at the University of Southern California and former director of the Pew Hispanic Center. “American approaches have always been ad hoc and driven largely by foreign policy concerns and domestic policy concerns.”

Sessions has directed judges and asylum officers to adhere to a narrower definition of “membership in a social group” — the category had been used in recent years to grant protection to victims of domestic violence.

“An alien may suffer threats and violence in a foreign country for any number of reasons relating to her social, economic, family or other personal circumstances,” Sessions wrote. “Yet the asylum statute does not provide redress for all misfortune.”

The president demonstrated even less patience this spring, when a large group of asylumseeking Central American families formed a caravan to travel northward. Trump took their journey as a personal affront.

“We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country,” he wrote on Twitter. “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came.”

More than 400 caravan members eventually crossed, according to DHS statistics. Among them was Carlos Aldana, who now lives with his partner and young daughters outside Seattle, waiting to see a judge. The monitoring device strapped to his leg has been on so long he barely notices it anymore.

His family’s asylum claim epitomizes the intertwined push-andpull factors that bring Central Americans to the United States — and that make it unlikely he, his partner and their two daughters will be allowed to stay.

The family had a small farm near the Caribbean coast, on land purchased with money sent home by a brother working in the United States. When traces of gold were found on the property, Aldana said, he and his siblings invested in mining equipment and began digging.

Then a local crime boss found

As approvals have stayed flat, the percentage of asylum applications that are denied has risen Asylum grants and denials

Q4 projections

20,000

24,024 projected denials

10,000 0

12,553 projected grants

10,000

2009

2018

Immigration cases are increasingly decided in absentia In absentia removal orders for all immigration cases

45,723 Projection for Q4

40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 0

2018

2008

Note: Data available through the third quarter of 2018. The 2018 total includes a fourth-quarter projection.

Source: Justice Department Workload and Adjudication Statistics LESLIE SHAPIRO/THE WASHINGTON POST

out about their discovery. He showed up at the property with a carload of men, offering to “go into business together,” Aldana said.

Aldana’s family declined, and the man returned and said he had heard others were planning to kill them. He offered protection.

Again, Aldana and his siblings refused.

The threats worsened. Then one of Aldana’s brothers was killed. Aldana said his family was too scared to go to the police.

“They work for him,” he said of the gangster.

The family fled to another part of Honduras and attempted to start over, but a year later the man found them and the threats resumed, Aldana said.

This time Aldana and his family fled to southern Mexico. They were arrested by Mexican authorities and sent back to Honduras.

They tried to start over again.

Worried that he was putting the whole family in danger, another of Aldana’s brothers left. His body was found a few months later, tortured and mutilated.

Aldana fled with his family to Mexico a second time, then found out about the caravan. Like others who joined, they saw it as a safe, affordable way to reach the border.

“The United States has never solely pursued asylum on the basis of humanitarian principles.”

Roberto Suro, a migration expert at the University of Southern California and former director of the Pew Hispanic Center

‘The most horrifying stories’ Asylum seekers who make their claims at official border crossings — not on the banks of the Rio Grande — are not breaking the law. But U.S. agents have to let them cross the bridge first.

On a recent morning in South Texas, immigration lawyer Jennifer Harbury walked across the river into Mexico under a blazing sun, waiting for a nun to pick her up. They drove to a Reynosa migrant shelter in a neighborhood full of cartel lookouts and stash houses used by smugglers to stage illegal crossings.

Harbury is an irritant to U.S. border officials as well as the cartels. She provides free legal advice and assistance to asylum seekers, so the nuns who run the shelter call her often to see whether she can help migrant families desperate for legal advice. Harbury’s pro bono work takes profits away from traffickers, because they charge a “tax” of several hundred dollars to those who cross illegally along the river. They earn nothing from the migrants Harbury escorts to the official border crossing.

Harbury is one of the activists who also help asylum seekers stranded in the no man’s land on the pedestrian bridge over the river. In recent months, U.S. officers have been turning migrants away, telling them to come back later.

Harbury and others have criticized the practice as unlawful, but DHS officials say that port officers have multiple responsibilities and that busy border crossings have capacity limits.

It was Harbury who provided ProPublica with the surreptitious audio recording of a child screaming for her mother that dealt a severe blow to the family-separation policy.

“These people have the most horrifying stories I have ever heard,” she said. “I don’t think people have better claims than those running from the cartels.”

The shelter in Reynosa was crowded with newly deported Mexicans. The nuns had asked Harbury to help a young mother stranded for more than a week, Maria Magdalena Gonzalez, 21, and her son, Emiliano, 3. A gangster in Gonzalez’s home state of Guerrero was threatening to kill her for rejecting his advances, she said. But when she and her son tried to approach the U.S. border

KLMNO WEEKLY

crossing a few days earlier to seek asylum, they had been turned away.

With more and more Central Americans showing up at the port of entry, U.S. officers had set up an impromptu checkpoint over the middle of the Rio Grande, blocking them from setting foot on the U.S. side to start the asylum process.

Those who fail to cross are put at risk, because cartel lookouts ply the Mexican side of the bridge, watching for Central Americans who have been turned away. The migrants are prime targets for kidnapping because criminal groups assume they have relatives living in the United States with enough money to pay a ransom.

Harbury was there to make sure Gonzalez and her son weren’t rejected again.

A nun drove them to the bridge over the river, and Harbury walked alongside them until a Mexican immigration official stood in the way. He had been looking for asylum seekers from Central America, but Gonzalez and her son were Mexican, so there was nothing he could do to detain them.

He told Harbury the U.S. agents had not been letting asylum seekers through, or were making others wait three or four days to be allowed to approach the American side.

Harbury, Gonzalez and the boy continued walking until three American officers blocked them halfway across the bridge. “We want asylum,” Gonzalez said softly, more a question than a demand. An agent told her to stand aside and wait.

Harbury asked how long, and the officers said it could be several hours, perhaps days. She sat down on the pavement with Gonzalez and the boy. “We’ll wait,” she said.

The officers appeared to notice a reporter taking notes and called a supervisor. He arrived and waved everyone through.

Gonzalez reached the inspection booth and pushed her paperwork forward. The officers directed Gonzalez and her son to an adjacent waiting room.

“They made it,” Harbury said.

She waved goodbye through the glass. The room wasn’t full, not even close. There were more than 60 chairs in the waiting area, and all but two were empty. n ©The Washington Post

812

SUNDAY, October,28, 28, 2018 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

For gulf oil spill, no end in sight Taylor Energy and federal officials kept quiet for years about the disaster, which has been leaking since ’04 An aerial image of an oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, taken on April 28.

D ARRYL F EARS in New Orleans BY

A

n oil spill that has been quietly leaking millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico has gone unplugged for so long that it now verges on becoming one of the worst offshore disasters in U.S. history.

Between 300 and 700 barrels of oil per day have been spewing from a site 12 miles off the Louisiana coast since 2004, when an oil-production platform owned

by Taylor Energy sank in a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan. Many of the wells have not been capped, and federal officials estimate that the spill could continue through this century.

With no fix in sight, the Taylor offshore spill is threatening to overtake BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster as the largest ever.

As oil continues to spoil the gulf, the Trump administration is proposing the largest expansion of leases for the oil and gas industry, with the potential to open nearly the entire outer continental shelf to offshore drilling. That includes the Atlantic Coast, where drilling hasn’t happened in more than a half-century and where hurricanes hit with double the regularity of the gulf.

Expansion plans come despite fears that the offshore oil industry is poorly regulated and that the planet needs to decrease fossil fuels to combat climate change, as well as the knowledge that 14 years after Ivan took down Taylor’s platform, the broken wells are releasing so much oil that researchers needed respirators to study the damage.

“I don’t think people know that we have this ocean in the United States that’s filled with industry,” said Scott Eustis, an ecologist for the Gulf Restoration Network, as a six-seat plane circled the spill site on a flyover last summer. On the horizon, a forest of oil platforms rose up from the gulf’s waters, and all that is left of the doomed Taylor platform are rainbow-colored oil slicks that are often visible for miles. He cannot imagine similar

OSCAR GARCIA-PINEDA/WATER MAPPING

development in the Atlantic, where the majority of coastal state governors, lawmakers, attorneys general and residents have aligned against the administration’s proposal.

The Taylor Energy spill is largely unknown outside Louisiana because of the company’s effort to keep it secret in the hopes of protecting its reputation and proprietary information about its operations, according to a lawsuit that eventually forced the company to reveal its cleanup plan. The spill was hidden for six years before environmental watchdog groups stumbled on oil slicks while monitoring the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster a few miles north of the Taylor site in 2010.

The Interior Department is fighting an effort by Taylor Energy to walk away from the disaster.

The company sued Interior in federal court, seeking the return of about $450 million left in a $666 million trust it established with the government to fund its work to recover part of the wreckage and locate wells buried under 100 feet of muck.

Taylor Energy declined to comment. The company has argued that there’s no evidence to prove any of the wells are leaking. Last month, the Justice Department submitted an independent analy-

sis showing that the spill was much larger than the one to 55 barrels per day that the U.S. Coast Guard National Response Center (NRC) claimed, using data supplied by the oil company.

The author of the analysis, Oscar Garcia-Pineda, a geoscience consultant who specializes in remote sensing of oil spills, said there were several instances when the NRC reported low estimates on the same days he was finding heavy layers of oil in the field.

“There is abundant evidence that supports the fact that these reports from NRC are incorrect,” Garcia-Pineda wrote. Later he said: “My conclusion is that NRC reports are not reliable.”

In an era of climate change and warmer open waters, the storms are becoming more frequent and violent. Starting with Ivan in 2004, several hurricanes battered or destroyed more than 150 platforms in just four years.

On average, 330,000 gallons of crude are spilled each year in Louisiana from offshore platforms and onshore oil tanks, according to a state agency that monitors them.

The gulf is one of the richest and most productive oil and gas regions in the world, expected to yield more than 600 million barrels this year alone, nearly 20 percent of the total U.S. oil produc-

tion. Another 40 billion barrels rest underground, waiting to be recovered, government analysts say.

About 2,000 platforms stand in the waters off the Bayou State.

Nearly 2,000 others are off the coasts of its neighbors, Texas and Mississippi. On top of that are nearly 50,000 miles of active and inactive pipelines carrying oil and minerals to the shore.

And the costs are high.

For every 1,000 wells in state and federal waters, there’s an average of 20 uncontrolled releases of oil — or blowouts — every year. A fire erupts offshore every three days, on average, and hundreds of workers are injured annually.

Fourteen years after Taylor Energy’s oil platform went down, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is still in the early stages of a resource assessment of marine life that could explain the impact of the spill and is more than three years behind a deadline to issue a biological determination of the BP spill’s impact on marine life.

In July, Earthjustice, a nonprofit legal organization that represents conservation groups, sued NOAA for failing to produce a timely study.

Like Eustis, Amos said Atlantic Coast residents should be wary.

139

SUNDAY, October, 28, 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2018

NATION But in that region, where beaches and tourism enrich nearly every state, distrust over offshore leasing and drilling is bipartisan.

Governors, state lawmakers and attorneys general lashed out at the Trump administration’s proposal to expand leases for oil and gas. New Jersey passed a law that forbids oil and infrastructure in state waters three miles from shore, crippling any effort to run pipelines from platforms to the shore. Other states passed similar laws.

In the Carolinas, where Hurricane Florence’s winds topped 150 mph and produced a monster 83foot wave as it neared landfall, governors who represent both political parties implored Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to rethink the plan.

Meanwhile, in the gulf, Taylor Energy was down to a single employee — its president, William Pecue.

At a 2016 public forum in Baton Rouge, Pecue made the case for allowing the company to walk away from its obligation to clean up the mess. Taylor Energy had been sold to a joint venture of South Korean companies in 2008, the same year it started the $666 million trust. A third of the money had been spent on cleanup, and only a third of the leaking wells had been fixed. But Pecue wanted to recover $450 million, arguing the spill could not be contained and Taylor Energy had no control over the hurricane.

But Ivan was no freak storm.

It was one of more than 600 that have been tracked in the gulf since records were kept in the mid1800s, according to NOAA. Fourteen years after the Taylor spill, and 10 years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the federal government still doesn’t know the spills’ full impact on marine life.

And there is no economic analysis showing the value of the oil flowing into the sea and potential royalties lost to taxpayers. Activists also want an analysis to determine if oil is ruining marshland and making its way to beaches.

“Even though oil did not reach a lot of these beaches [during the BP spill], the fact that the public heard about it, it killed the beach economy for quite some time,” Sarthou said. “You don’t want to go to a beach with tar balls or oil washing up.” n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Finger-pointing begins as U.S. fertility rates collapse BY

A RIANA E UNJUNG C HA

A

s 2017 drew to a close, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) urged Americans to have more children. To keep the country great, he said, we’re “going to need more people.”

“I did my part,” the father of three declared.

Ryan’s remarks drew some eye rolls at the time, but as new data about the country’s collapsing fertility rates has emerged, concern

FATCAMERA/GETTY IMAGES

New data from the CDC confirms historic declines in U.S. birthrates across all races, in both urban and rural areas.

has deepened over what’s causing the changes, whether it constitutes a crisis that will fundamentally change the demographic trajectory of the country — and what should be done about it.

Women are now having fewer babies and at older ages than in the past three decades, a change that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reported this year, and which was confirmed recently with the release of additional data that shows that the trend holds across races and for urban and rural areas.

The CDC said earlier this month that the total fertility rate — a theoretical figure that estimates the number of births a woman will have in her lifetime — fell by 18 percent from 2007 to 2017 in large metropolitan areas, 16 percent in smaller metro areas and 12 per-

cent in rural areas. A similar downward trend holds for white, black and Hispanic women.

From 2007 through 2017, total fertility rates declined for each urbanization level, but differences between rural and metro counties widened.

Fertility and birthrates are among the most closely monitored indicators of a country’s economic health. When too high, a surging youth population might be unable to find work and become susceptible to unrest. When too low, economies can rapidly contract, and a small working-age population has to support a large retired population. The United States is somewhat more buffered because of its relatively high levels of immigration, but if the decline in fertility continues, demographers say, the country may face an extreme population imbalance in the future.

Theories — social, economic, scientific, environmental — about why fertility is falling so sharply in the United States abound. Many agree that cultural shifts, such as women getting married later and focusing on education or work, play a big role. But there’s considerable debate, some of it more political than evidence-based, about other possible causes.

Economist Lyman Stone has blamed the United States’ lessthan-generous parental leave and pay policies. Human Life International, a missionary group, blames “pro-abortion population control groups like Planned Parenthood.”

Tucker Carlson claims it has to do with immigration, arguing that immigrants drive wages down, which hurts the attractiveness of men as potential spouses — “thus reducing fertility.”

Some have even wondered whether the decline might be influenced by sperm quality. Recent medical journal publications have indicated that exposure to pollutants might be harming reproductive health, including the motility and quantity of sperm, which could delay childbearing and overall fertility.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Hans-Peter Kohler, who studies fertility and birthrates, said the data indicated that many shifts affecting fertility are occurring “in the transition to adulthood.” The biggest recent drops in birthrate have been among teenagers as well as people in their 20s. In 2016, the teen birthrate hit at an all-time low after peaking in 1991.

William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, said that what struck him about the new report is the figures on Hispanic women, who have traditionally had high fertility rates.

From 2007 to 2017, Hispanic women experienced a 26 percent drop in fertility rates in rural areas, a 29 percent drop in smaller metro areas and a 30 percent decline in large metro areas.

He said the fertility rates for Hispanic women in urban areas are now below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman, which would keep the population stable.

“They may be following the same pattern as the rest of the population,” Frey said, an important finding that should figure into the debate over immigration.

John Rowe, a professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, predicts that fertility rates will drop even lower in the coming years. He said he thinks the country should be ready to deal with the impact on Social Security and the workforce but that he does not believe there’s reason to panic. He said that some other wealthy countries, such as Japan and Germany, are grappling with low fertility rates, and there’s a lot to learn about how they have managed their smaller workforce to maintain high productivity.

“The emphasis should not just be on the number of people but their productivity. So we have to invest in education to enhance the productivity of younger individuals to compensate for reduction in numbers,” Rowe said. n ©The Washington Post

14 16

SUNDAY, October,28, 28, 2018 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER

KLMNO WEEKLY

ODD JOBS

The secrets of the royal ravenmaster He treats Tower of London’s cherished birds to biscuits soaked in blood

For 11 years, Ravenmaster Christopher Skaife has been charged with caring for the seven ravens that live at the Tower of London.

W ILLIAM B OOTH in London BY

T

here are some weird gigs associated with the British royal household. There’s a keeper of the queen’s stamps. Who knew? There’s a piper to the sovereign and a grand carver and a royal clock winder.

And then there’s the ravenmaster, Christopher Skaife, charged with caring for the seven corvids that reside at the Tower of London, the 11th-century walled fortress that today is one of Britain’s most popular tourist sites.

Every tour, every article, every book mentioning the Tower ravens includes the legend about how King Charles II issued a royal decree to protect the ravens evermore, after being warned that if the birds ever flew the palatial coop, “the Tower itself will crumble to dust and a great harm will befall the kingdom.”

Great story, total codswallop, says Skaife, who has pored through the archives and found zip. The first mention of ravens at the Tower appears not in the 1600s, when Charles reigned through the years of plague and fire, but during the Victorian age, when gothic revival was all the rage and Charles Dickens kept a raven as a pet.

Still, Skaife is obsessive in his care of the birds, who are now celebrities, regardless of the misty myths. He has found himself dangling from a weather vane atop a high turret trying to recover a wayward raven. He treats them to dog biscuits soaked in blood. They offer him the occasional rat’s tail in return.

I met up with the ravenmaster on a drizzly Saturday morning. He was wearing his everyday uniform: a flat-brimmed hat and dark blue tunic with a scarlet insignia honoring the queen. He is a big, brawny fellow, a former machinegunner, who after 24 years of service in the British army became a Yeoman Warder, one of 37 elite guards, who may carry swords but today serve as keepers of tradition — and tour guides.

Well, well,” he said, pointing

LAURA HYND FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

upward. “There’s Merlina, right on cue.”

On the roof of the half-timbered Queen’s House within the Tower complex, a big black raven sat, eyeballing damp visitors as they trundled across the bridge over the waterless moat.

The ravenmaster has spent the past 11 years around these birds, living at the Tower with his family — a life he details in a newly published autobiography He is sweet on all his ravens, but especially Merlina. (First named Merlin; ravens are notorious for how difficult it is to determine their sex.)

She can be a bit standoffish, Skaife said, admiringly. “Likes to do her own thing.”

He explained that the ravens residing at the Tower these days come from bird breeders.

They are wild but “humanized.”

They are free but not free.

At night, Skaife coaxes them into airy enclosures (safe from their nemeses, foxes, which ate two ravens in 2013).

In the morning, he releases them from their dormitories, in

order, from the least to the most dominant. They take up their territories and waddle-hop the premises. Up close, the ravens look like enormous crows dipped in oil.

They’re positively iridescent, with tool-like claws and beaks “like a Swiss army knife,” Skaife said.

What do they do all day? They perch on benches. They play with the magpies. They rummage the trash bins.

Skaife said the ravens, like most Brits, have a weakness for potato chips, which they scavenge and then wash in puddles if the flavoring — say, cheddar and onion — is not to their liking.

One raven, Poppy, will allow herself to be petted by Skaife. But he warns the public to stand back.

These are not docile pets — and the ravenmaster bears the scars of nasty bites.

The ravens can fly, but not very well and not too far.

Previous caregivers trimmed the feathers so as to deny them flight. One day a raven named Thor climbed up some repair scaffolding on the White Tower, the oldest structure. When Skaife

reached out to capture him from the heights, Thor leaped but did not soar and landed with a thud.

“He died in my arms,” the ravenmaster said.

After that, Skaife vowed to trim as little as possible. He calls it “feather management,” just a snip.

And yet, they’ve escaped.

A bird named Munin — from Norse mythology, where ravens play an outsize role — once flew from the Tower down the Thames River toward the Royal Observatory and the Greenwich meridian line.

A local birdwatcher managed to get Munin into a gym bag. He guessed she belonged to the Tower because of the bracelet on her leg — and the sad fact that although there are 13,000 raven pairs in Britain, they have been extirpated from the London area.

“Oh, look at that,” Skaife said on the morning of my visit, as the male raven Harris joined Merlina on the gable. “A bit of bonding going on?” The ravenmaster arched an eyebrow: “Something to keep an eye on.”

Ravens mate for life, more or less, he explained. But at the Tower things can get complicated. Ravens like literal pecking orders.

Their courtship rituals can include: preening, croaking, puffing, tail fanning and attack. And ravens are choosy partners. In the wild, before they find one another, young ravens live in a large flock called a “conspiracy” or an “unkindness,” which are great words for crossword puzzles.

“They’re surprisingly like us,” Skaife observes in his book. “They are versatile, adaptable, omnivorous. They are capable of great cruelty and great kindness.”

Ravens are associated with carrion — and so with battlefields and execution grounds. That makes them a good fit for the Tower, which is of most interest to visitors these days as the macabre setting of torture and execution.

“I sometimes think that the Tower is just a vast storehouse of the human imagination,” Skaife observed, “and the ravens are its guardians.” n ©The Washington Post

15 23

SUNDAY, October, 28, 2018 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Apple BY

H ARRY M C C RACKEN

Even after the rise of Google and Facebook, Apple remains the most closely watched technology company. From the Apple II’s debut in 1977 through the iPhone — the 21st century’s defining gadget, which took Apple to profitable new heights — skeptics and hyper­loyal fans have tracked its every move. It shouldn’t shock anyone, then, that Apple has always generated an unusually high volume of misunder­ standings masquerading as common knowledge.

MYTH NO. 1 Apple is the most valuable company in history.

Apple achieved a historic feat when it hit a value of $1 trillion in August.

But Apple’s milestone was specific to market capitalization on a U.S. stock exchange. Eleven years before, PetroChina — the Chinese state-owned oil and gas company — briefly hit $1.2 trillion on its opening day on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Another state-owned petroleum behemoth, Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, is worth $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion today, according to most analysts’ estimates.

At any rate, a trillion dollars isn’t what it used to be.

Adjusting for inflation, as the Motley Fool’s Alex Planes has pointed out, centuries-old shipping conglomerates make Apple look downright dinky.

The value of the Dutch East India Company peaked at more than $7 trillion in modern dollars during the “tulip mania” bubble in the 17th century.

MYTH NO. 2 Apple doesn’t profit from its users’ personal information.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is fond of reminding us that the company is unlike some other tech giants — think Google and Facebook — because its main business is selling hardware, not pelting consumers with targeted advertising based on information it’s collected about them.

It’s true that Apple has opted

out of the ad business and doesn’t snoop on users of its products; it even makes it tougher for other companies to do so (the Safari browser was the first to block third-party cookies by default). But a recent Goldman Sachs report estimated that Google will pay Apple $12 billion next year to remain the default search engine on the iPhone, iPad and Mac. The only reason Google would be willing to fork over a sum anywhere in that range is because targeting Apple fans with ads is so profitable.

MYTH NO. 3 Apple designs its products to become obsolete quickly.

From the moment Apple announced its first iPhone in 2007, pundits have accused the company of willfully curtailing its smartphones’ life spans, the better to sway us into buying new ones on a regular schedule.

All but lost in the controversy was Apple’s sensible (and true) explanation: It was “throttling” those iPhones because their aging batteries tended to cause abrupt shutdowns — a flaw that, left unchecked, might have not only been irritating but also led consumers to replace their phones prematurely. The company responded to consumer ire by offering discounted battery replacements and adding an option in iOS to turn off the battery-health monitoring feature that initiated the slowdowns — steps that, if Apple

ANDREW BURTON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Apple CEO Tim Cook, above, has been criticized for being less innovative than his predecessor, Steve Jobs.

had taken them in the first place, might have allowed it to sidestep the kerfuffle.

MYTH NO. 4 A disrupter under Steve Jobs, Apple now plays it safe.

Critics frequently charge that the company has “lost its mojo” under Cook, as an NPR writer put it in 2017, because it no longer turns entire sectors upside down.

But this revisionist history has a few problems. One, the gaps between Apple innovations under Jobs were greater than people recall: Almost six years elapsed between the iPod and the iPhone, for instance. Second, Jobs was often criticized precisely for offering unexciting, incremental improvements. A Jobs presentation in August 2006 produced “one yawn after another,” observed a Wired writer, unsatisfied with a new Mac and a new operating system that was “more about tweaks than big new functions.”

In truth, Jobs’s product development skills always had as much to do with evolution as revolution.

MYTH NO. 5 Macs aren’t susceptible to viruses and other malware.

Back in 2006, Apple pitched the Mac on TV with a commercial that showed comedian and writer John Hodgman introducing himself as a PC, sneezing uncontrollably and then toppling over — to dramatize the fact that there were “114,000 known viruses for PCs.” Actor Justin Long, portraying a Mac, wasn’t susceptible to any of them.

“There are, as far as we know, no Mac OS X viruses in the wild,” reported Fortune in 2009.

It is true that Macs are less malware-ridden than their Windows counterparts. But partly that’s because Apple ships only 7 percent of the world’s computers, making it a far less juicy target for bad guys. Still, the software company Malwarebytes reported a 270 percent increase in Mac-specific viruses from 2016 to 2017. n McCracken, the technology editor for Fast Company, also covered the tech industry for Time and founded the Technologizer site.

16

SUNDAY, October, 28, 2018

Want more good reads?

Check out these popular publications from The Wenatchee World.

Foothills Magazine

Wenatchee Valley Business World

A bi-monthly lifestyle magazine about North Central Washington.

The region’s leading business magazine.

ALL OF NORTH

CENTRAL WAS

HINGTON

OOTHILLS WENATCHEE

◆

◆ AND ◆ CHE LAN LEAVENWORTH

er 2018 November-Decemb

Wenatchee Valley

Read online at

ED BUSINES S MAG

AZINE

ld r o w s s e n i s u B OCTOBER 2018 |

$2

N: CHERI DUDE K-KUH RE A COMPAN Y’S CO VA LUES MATTE R

GY PS Y LO TUS: FOR YOUR ‘INNE R HIPPIE ’

SEE PAGE 6

SEE PAGE 3

See ya, Big Red

WINTER BLISS

thrills for chills and ‘Tis the season

YOUR FAMILY- OWN

8- DECA DE RUN RE D DE LICIOUES:NE ARS AN END PL AS TOP AP PAGE 16 SE E

BUSINESS WOR

LD’S

SPONSORS PRESENTING

Read online at

ncwfoothills.com/digital/

wvbusinessworld.com/digital/

No subscription required.

No subscription required.