The site of a roof collapse at an Amazon distribution center in Edwardsville, Illinois a day after a series of tornadoes dealt a blow to several U.S. states.
REUTERS/Drone Base
Amazon workers had minutes of warning before a tornado ripped through the warehouse, the company said.
The Illinois facility got tornado warnings Friday between 8:06 p.m. and 8:16 p.m. At 8:27 p.m., the tornado struck.
The Amazon employees who were working at an Illinois warehouse when a deadly tornado tore through the facility had just minutes of warning before the roof of the building collapsed, the e-commerce giant said Monday.
The company said that the Amazon delivery station in the city of Edwardsville received tornado warnings between 8:06 p.m. and 8:16 p.m. on Friday and site leaders directed workers inside to “immediately take shelter.”
Minutes later, at 8:27 p.m., the devastating tornado roared through the 1.1 million-square-foot facility, causing the roof to collapse, Amazon said.
According to Amazon, the tornado appeared to have formed in the parking lot of the facility, ripped through the warehouse, and then disappeared in an “incredibly fast” amount of time.
Management at the warehouse worked to get employees inside into a tornado shelter at the site and the “majority” of workers did take shelter there, the company said.
“There was a small group who took shelter in a part of the building that was then directly impacted by the tornado, and this is where most of the tragic loss of life occurred,” Amazon said.
The victims were identified as Austin J. McEwen, 26; Deandre S. Morrow, 28; Kevin D. Dickey, 62; Clayton Lynn Cope, 29; Etheria S. Hebb, 24; and 46-year-old Larry E. Virden.
Forty-five people made it out of the wreckage safely, officials have said.
“My heart is broken,” Emily Epperson, 23, a driver at the Edwardsville warehouse and friend of McEwen, who was also a driver, told Insider on Monday. “I’m a little at a loss for words.”
Epperson had planned to pick up an extra shift on Friday, but “at the last moment” did not, sparing herself from the disaster.
“In Illinois, we have these tornadoes and these random storms all of the time, so I don’t think anyone really could have imagined the severity of it,” she said. “I think it was just such a regular day to everyone that no one even thought twice until the tornado sirens went off.”
Epperson said that she heard from other co-workers who were at the warehouse that night that when the tornado sirens went off “everyone was told to go to a storm shelter that we have there.”
“Some people chose to go home and some people chose to go to the shelter,” she said. “I’m sure there were some people that didn’t make it or didn’t know what to do.”
One of Epperson’s co-workers told her that he “witnessed the roof being peeled off of the building and we believe that’s what caused one of the walls to collapse initially.”
Epperson said she went to the Amazon warehouse the next day when her pal, McEwen, had been missing for about 13 hours.
“Everything was in ruins,” Epperson said, adding that she learned from McEwen’s best friend while she was at the site that McEwen was among the dead.
Speaking of McEwen, Epperson said, “He would light up any room that he walked into and he was the most down to earth person you would ever meet.”
“He was a very good friend, co-worker and person in general,” she said.
In a statement to Insider, an Amazon spokesperson said, “We’re deeply saddened by the news that members of our Amazon family passed away as a result of the storm in Edwardsville, IL.”
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their loved ones, and everyone impacted by the tornado. We also want to thank all the first responders for their ongoing efforts on scene. We’re continuing to provide support to our employees and partners in the area,” the company said.
US President Joe Biden participates in the 74th annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon of Peanut Butter in the Rose Garden of the White House November 19, 2021 in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Presidents have the sweeping ability to commute sentences, immediately freeing any federal prisoner.
They can also grant pardons, which erase a criminal conviction from a person’s record.
But Biden, like others before him, has been hesitant to use the power early on in his presidency.
At this point in his presidency, Joe Biden has pardoned just two sentient beings: Peanut Butter and Jelly, 40-pound turkeys from Jasper, Indiana.
Former President Donald Trump, by contrast, had pardoned three: a pair of flightless birds and Joe Arpaio, the ex-Arizona sheriff known for illegally detaining Latinos.
Over the past three decades, that’s pretty much been the norm, regardless of which political party claims the White House. Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush all waited until at least their second year in office before granting clemency to a human being.
That’s not because there is a dearth of potential candidates. As of October 2021, the Department of Justice had just under 17,000 pending petitions for clemency, up from 15,000 around the time of the 2020 election.
The problem, critics say, is one of urgency, or the lack thereof.
“Just because that’s what the situation has been doesn’t mean that’s how it has to be,” Nkechi Taifa, an attorney, activist, and leader of the progressive Justice Roundtable, said in an interview. “Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
President Joe Biden has a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Nov. 15, 2021.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
That’s the message Taifa delivered to the Biden White House. In an early December meeting with Susan Rice, director of the Domestic Policy Council, and staff from the Office of the White House Counsel, she implored the administration to act now.
More than 7,700 federal inmates are currently on home confinement, granted release from prison on the grounds that they pose no security threat and are at a heightened risk of suffering severe complications from COVID-19. When the public health emergency is declared over, they could be forced to return. Leading Democrats, including Senate Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, have argued it would be an injustice to send them back, urging the White House to consider granting clemency en masse.
In the meeting, White House staff appeared to agree, Taifa said. That’s not the problem.
“Their rhetoric says that they understand what we’re saying, and that they’re working on it,” she said. The issue is the conversation is taking place in December.
“If it’s going to take this long for a first step, how long is it going to take for the rest?”
A ‘bureaucratic morass’ to wade through
Biden has never been a favorite of those advocating criminal justice reform.
In the 2020 primaries, he was arguably the most conservative Democrat running for his party’s nomination. But he was also not the same man who, as a senator from Delaware, helped author legislation that put many people behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses.
On his campaign website, Biden promised to use his clemency power, like Obama, “to secure the release of individuals facing unduly long sentences for certain non-violent and drug crimes.”
But others pledged to go further. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a former prosecutor, proposed a new clemency advisory board that could issue recommendations directly to the White House, bypassing what is currently a seven-step process.
Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., participate in a Democratic presidential primary debate in Las Vegas on Feb. 19, 2020.
AP Photo/John Locher
“What we’ve got is this bureaucratic morass,” Mark Osler, a former federal prosecutor, said in an interview. “There’s seven levels of review, one after the other, and the first four levels are all in the Department of Justice, which of course is conflicted because they’re the ones who sought the sentence in the first place.”
The first step is the Office of the Pardon Attorney, which is currently led, on an acting basis, by Rosalind Sargent-Burns, a career department lawyer former Attorney General William Barr appointed. They then present their recommendations on who should get clemency to the deputy attorney general’s office, where another staffer reviews it and passes it on — maybe — to their boss. Then it goes to the staff for the White House counsel, then the actual counsel, then an aide to the president and then, if all goes well, to Biden himself.
The president could, at any time, bypass this process. Trump did when he pardoned Arpaio and his other allies, such as Roger Stone and Steve Bannon.
If anything, Osler, now a professor at the University of Saint Thomas, told Insider he thinks Biden is too committed to the way things were. It’s one thing to respect the Justice Department’s career bureaucracy when it comes to deciding who deserves prosecution but, he said, “it doesn’t make sense in terms of clemency.”
A White House official told Insider the president is “exploring the use of his clemency power” for non-violent drug offenders who were moved to home confinement at the start of the pandemic, a transfer authorized by the March 2020 CARES Act — specifically, those with fewer than four years left on their sentences (one activist who has engaged the White House expects those with less than two years remaining will also be excluded).
“At the same time,” the official said, Biden “continues to consider requests for pardon and commutation that are submitted in the ordinary course.”
That’s not exactly what reformers want to hear. While Obama granted clemency to more than 1,900 people — compared to just 200 under George W. Bush and 238 under Trump — the byzantine process for requesting one’s freedom, “the ordinary course,” means many more deserving cases likely never reach the president’s desk for consideration.
The American Civil Liberties Union has called on Biden to immediately grant clemency to 25,000 people, namely those serving sentences longer than those handed out today, nonviolent drug offenders, and the elderly.
“If it’s unjust at the end of the term,” when presidents typically wait to grant pardons, “it’s unjust during the entire term,” Cynthia Roseberry, deputy director at the ACLU’s national policy advocacy department, told Insider.
She argued that it would be a failure if the administration tried to achieve its stated goals — of racial justice and correcting past wrongs — by relying on prosecutors and judges who sent people to prison to co-sign petitions for release.
“Justice hasn’t been done under that draconian system, and we can’t expect justice from that kind of system going forward,” she said. “It has to be radically changed.”
The Department of Justice declined to comment on how many petitions for clemency have received favorable recommendations within the department or have been referred to the White House. It is impossible to say for sure, then, how much the delay in granting pardons is due to bureaucracy or stalling by political actors.
But sticking with the opaque status quo is itself a political decision — the president could unilaterally discard it — and it’s a disappointment, if not a surprise, to people like Osler. He’s not expecting big things.
“I haven’t heard anything from the administration that gives me hope,” he said.
Reform, denied
In 2020, there appeared to be a new consensus.
Joe Biden greets Sen. Bernie Sanders before the Democratic presidential primary debate in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 14, 2020.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
A “unity” task force composed of Biden supporters and those backing Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont issued a report endorsing the creation of a independent board to recommend pardons, saying it would “ensure an appropriate, effective process for using clemency, especially to address systemic racism.” The call also made it into the Democratic Party platform.
But it didn’t make it into the president’s agenda. Respect for institutions, however slow and flawed, is one explanation. Bureaucracy could also explain the lack of pardons. It’s not clear where in the process the 17,000-odd petitions for clemency are — if they are sitting on the president’s desk or in a cabinet somewhere else in the White House or Department of Justice.
The fear of political fallout could be another reason. Reports of someone who received a presidential pardon going on to commit a serious crime are extremely rare. But if it happens, that’s a television ad; the benefits of mercy toward those who go on to lead quiet lives in obscurity are perhaps less obvious.
The current political environment at least raises the question. Since the start of the pandemic, major cities in the US, red state and blue state alike, have seen an uptick in violent crime. Daring instances of smash-and-grab robberies have gone viral. And the opposition party has been eager to pin blame on the White House, despite the trend beginning under its previous inhabitant.
“It’s less about the review process and more about power,” Jeffrey Crouch, an expert on federal clemency at American University, told Insider. New presidents are, of course, focused on passing the big-ticket items in their agenda — think infrastructure and “building back better.”
They “may want to avoid potential controversy before a midterm election,” Crouch added.
Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, likewise thinks pardons are a victim of competing priorities, and not something that a new administration wants leading the news cycle.
“Some pardons are probably politically popular,” he said, “but many of them don’t actually look that good, which is why presidents tend to issue a lot just before leaving office.”
The vast majority of pardons, in fact, are uncontroversial. No one, for example, criticized Trump when he granted clemency to Alice Marie Johnson, a Black woman in her 60s who had already served two decades behind bars for a nonviolent drug offense.
U.S. President Donald Trump signs a document as Alice Johnson looks on during an event in the Oval Office of the White House August 28, 2020 in Washington, DC.
Anna Moneymaker/Pool/Getty Images
But it is the “bad” pardons — of political allies, be they Trump’s former aides or, under Clinton, Democratic donor Marc Rich — that tend to stick out.
The president’s unique, unchecked power to commute sentences and free the imprisoned could, then, be seen as a potential liability with little upside.
But fear is not typically a good basis for policy.
“I think it reflects an outdated view of the clemency power as something politically risky,” Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, told Insider.
There may always be demagoguery associated with incarceration, but in recent years there has been increasing bipartisan agreement that too many people have been locked up for too long. Indeed, thousands of federal prisoners are serving sentences that would not be handed out today thanks to 2018 reform legislation that Trump signed into law.
“I understand the fear of backlash for perceived leniency — as if any tampering with the federal system, which is excessively punitive through and through — would be ‘lenient’ vs. ‘just,'” Grawert said, “but I don’t know if there’s a constituency for that.”
‘I pretty much lost all hope’
On the surface, an article The New York Times published last May was a victory for reformers.
“Biden Is Developing a Pardon Process With a Focus on Racial Justice,” the headline asserted, and this was the substance: that the president would begin to aggressively employ the power of his office ahead of the 2022 midterm elections — “identifying entire classes of people who deserve mercy.”
But to Rachel Barkow, a vice dean and law professor at New York University who is one of the nation’s leading advocates of clemency reform, the piece was anything but inspiring.
“It was kind of the death knell,” she said in an interview. “There were so many red flags that this was going to be a disaster that I pretty much lost all hope then.”
For starters, the piece said the Biden administration would continue to “rely on the rigorous application vetting process” at the Department of Justice. That process was established, in part, not by the US Constitution — which does not mention it at all — but by former President Ronald Reagan, whose administration issued strict guidelines on who is even eligible to ask for reprieve.
From left: Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, George Bush, and Barack Obama.
Mandel NGAN/AFP via Getty; Ben Gabbe/Getty Images for Common Sense Media; Win McNamee/Getty; Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty; Scott Olson/Getty; Shayanne Gal/Insider
What the White House is calling “the ordinary course” was, Barkow said, an “historical accident.” And not a best practice.
“No state does this,” she said. “‘Ordinary course’ is not that you ask the same prosecutors who brought a case, ‘Should this person now get clemency?’ No one in their right mind would set clemency up that way.”
Every administration deals with competing priorities, and Biden, objectively, was dealt a bad hand, inheriting an economy still struggling to recover from a pandemic that continues to kill more than a thousand Americans every day. And his agenda is constrained by a slim Democratic majority in the House and a 50-50 Senate.
But that’s also why people like Barkow are so disappointed.
They’re passionate about freeing those they see as unjustly incarcerated, but they are not simply naive idealists, unaware of political realities. Clemency is an area where Biden can act alone and immediately improve lives. Democrats may feel constantly on the defensive over issues of criminal justice, but none other than Trump saw clemency as such a feel-good winner that his campaign ran a Super Bowl ad telling the story of one woman he freed from prison.
“Anyone who has spent any time with people who are incarcerated, with their loved ones, who have talked with people who were formerly incarcerated, would get the urgency of this,” Barkow said. “You wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”
But there doesn’t appear to be urgency at the White House.
So far, roughly 1,200 petitions for pardons or commutations have been closed “without presidential action,” per the Department of Justice. Each day, loved ones are separated due to policies that the current president helped shape, which he now says were mistaken — contributors to racial injustice — and which he has thus far declined to ameliorate.
“It’s very depressing,” Barkow said. “I think it’s words on paper,” she said of the administration’s talk of change.
“It’s just not really something that they’re feeling in their bones. And as a result, it’s not getting done.”
A healthcare worker collects a swab from Bronwen Cook for a PCR test against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) before traveling to London, at O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, South Africa, on November 26, 2021.
The B.1.1.529 variant contains hallmarks of being more transmissible or dangerous than other strains.
But scientists have just begun to examine Omicron’s threat, including its unfamiliar mutations.
A coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa has now spread to several other countries, including Israel and Belgium, prompting a spate of travel restrictions across Europe, Asia, and North America.
The new variant, called Omicron, carries a concerning number of mutations that could make it more transmissible or perhaps more likely to cause severe disease than the Delta variant, public-health experts warn.
The World Health Organization labeled Omicron a “variant of concern” on Friday — a designation given to variants like Delta that require close scrutiny from public-health officials. Preliminary evidence suggests that Omicron may increase the risk of reinfection relative to other variants of concern, the WHO said.
But scientists have barely begun to examine Omicron’s threat: Fewer than 100 of the variant’s genome sequences have been reported globally, compared to Delta’s more than 2.8 million sequences.
“We don’t know very much about this variant yet,” Maria van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19, said at a Thursday briefing. “What we do know is that this variant has a large number of mutations, and the concern is that when you have so many mutations it can have an impact on how the virus behaves.”
Researchers sequence coronavirus samples at the microbiology laboratory of the University Hospital of Badajoz in Spain on April 15, 2021.
Javier Pulpo/Europa Press/Getty Images
She added that “it will take a few weeks for us to understand what impact this variant has.”
Many scientists are hoping for answers much sooner than that, Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist at UTHealth School of Public Health, told Insider. The variant could be lying undetected in some parts of the globe, she said.
“I would not be surprised if it’s already landed in the US,” Jetelina said. “We’ve already seen that this has been transmitting in communities like Turkey, Egypt, Belgium, Israel.”
Omicron contains several new, unfamiliar mutations
South African researchers identified the first Omicron case on November 9, then reported the variant to the WHO on Wednesday. Scientists are hopeful that they spotted the variant early, since the majority of known cases are still concentrated in southern Africa.
“South Africa has one of the best genomic surveillance systems in the world, so we know that they’re really constantly evaluating this virus,” Jetelina said. “For them to have ‘only’ detected 100 cases thus far in South Africa really gives us hope that this is the beginning stages of spread.”
Still, a number of markers suggest that Omicron is highly transmissible relative to other coronavirus strains. For one, South Africa’s coronavirus cases have risen sharply over the last few weeks: Average daily cases have risen 13-fold since the variant was first discovered on November 9, from around 275 to 3,700 cases per day.
Doctors Without Borders nurse Bhelekazi Mdlalose performs a COVID-19 test on a health worker at the Vlakfontein Clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa on May 13, 2020.
Michele Spatari/AFP/Getty Images
Omicron also contains several worrisome mutations found in other variants of concern — including Delta and Alpha — that could help it spread, render vaccines less effective, or potentially lead to more severe disease.
The new variant carries some unfamiliar mutations, as well.
“There are a number of mutations that we don’t have any information about,” Jetelina said. “They’ve never seen them on previous variants of concern. So I think one of the first questions is: What are these? Do we need to worry about them or not?”
So far, scientists have identified 32 mutations on the variant’s spike protein — the sharp, crown-like bumps on the surface of the virus that help it invade our cells. Other variants of concern have had fewer spike mutations.
“The spike protein is basically the key into our cells to infect us, so once that protein changes for better or for worse, then we need to really pay attention to it,” Jetelina said. “That is probably what is creating this increase in cases that we’re seeing in South Africa right now.”
Public-health experts say there’s no need for panic yet
A higher number of mutations doesn’t necessarily make a variant deadlier or more transmissible — nor does it suggest on its own that Omicron will pose a greater challenge to vaccines than other variants of concern.
“We don’t know yet if this new variant is out-competing Delta,” Jetelina said. “We also still don’t know if it will evade our vaccines yet, either.”
Mike Ryan, WHO director of health emergencies, during a press briefing at WHO headquarters in Geneva on March 11, 2020.
Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
Scientists are still waiting on lab studies to determine how well coronavirus antibodies — either from natural infection or vaccines — hold up against Omicron. They’re also watching carefully to see how quickly the variant spreads across the globe, particularly in countries with higher vaccination rates. (South Africa has fully vaccinated just 24% of its population so far; compared to 59% in the US)
“We really just need to hold tight to see how this plays out and what our next move is,” Jetelina said.
People who have been fully vaccinated and wear masks in public indoor settings shouldn’t feel compelled to change their behavior right now, Jetelina added.
Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health-emergencies program, shared a similar message on Thursday.
“Viruses evolve and we pick up variations. It’s not the end of the world. The sky is not falling in,” he said. “There is this idea that we’re just waiting for the next variant and I don’t want people to spend their lives worrying about that every day.”
North Korea claimed that a missile test in late September involved a new hypersonic missile. That weapon appears to have been on display at a big event this week.
KCNA via REUTERS
North Korea showed off what appears to be a hypersonic missile at a defense exhibition in Pyongyang.
The weapon looks like it could be the purported hypersonic missile tested late last month, experts said.
At Monday’s event, Kim Jong Un vowed to build an “invincible military” to fend off US hostility.
Surrounded by various weaponry, Kim said at the Self-Defense 2021 exhibition in Pyongyang that North Korea is “not discussing war with anyone” but aims to “prevent war itself and to literally increase war deterrence for the protection of national sovereignty.”
During the big defense event, the North Korean leader reviewed various missile systems, including intercontinental ballistic missiles theoretically able to reach the continental US. Some systems have been tested, while others have only been displayed at military events.
Among the North Korean weapon systems presented at the exhibition and displayed in state-run media reporting on the event is what experts said appears to be the hypersonic missile that North Korea claims to have tested last month – the Hwasong-8.
“That looks like the same glider they tested last month,” Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told Insider, pointing out that “we can now see its shape more clearly. It’s not a cone but rather a winged body with a flat bottom.”
He added that the concept seems similar to the DF-17 that China unveiled in 2019 at a military parade marking the country’s National Day.
Military vehicles carrying DF-17 hypersonic missiles travel past Tiananmen Square during the military parade marking the 70th founding anniversary of People’s Republic of China.
REUTERS/Jason Lee
In both cases, the weapon design features a ballistic missile carrying a boost-glide vehicle on a transporter-erector launcher.
The rocket gets the hypersonic glide vehicle up to speed (at least Mach 5) before it detaches, moving along an unpredictable flight path that makes it harder to intercept as it rushes toward its final destination.
For North Korea, while it is clear that it is now in the competition to develop new hypersonic missiles, a competition that involves powerful countries like China, Russia, and the US, it is difficult to know where they are in the development process or how the system performs.
Ankit Panda, a North Korea expert and a Stanton Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained to Insider that “it certainly looks like what we’d expect a notional hypersonic glider to look like.” But, he said, “that tells us little about the materials it’s made from or its real-world aerodynamic performance.”
South Korean military leaders said after last month’s missile test that “it appears to be at an early stage of development that would require considerable time for actual deployment.”
Panda said that while the weapons technology on display is noteworthy, “the bigger picture here is that this event was a full-scale celebration of North Korea’s defense scientists and technicians right as the new military modernization campaign spins up.”
“Kim’s trying to ensure that this community is full-on morale, especially while the broader economic picture in the country looks quite dire.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Monday banning vaccine mandates in the state.
Legal experts told Insider the order is unlikely to have an impact on large businesses that will have to comply with a proposed federal vaccine mandate.
Law professor Dale Carpenter called Abbott’s order “more of a political statement than a legal statement.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order banning vaccine mandates in the state is unlikely to have much of an impact on large businesses looking to require their employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, legal experts told Insider.
After the Republican governor’s executive order was announced on Monday, Insider spoke to legal experts at Southern Methodist University (SMU) and the University of Houston who said that President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for large businesses will supersede Abbott’s order as soon as it becomes official.
Biden announced last month that the Department of Labor was developing a rule to require companies with more than 100 employees to have their workers get vaccinated or face weekly testing.
The president also signed an executive order requiring all federal executive branch employees to be vaccinated, as well as federal contractors and their employees.
Dale Carpenter, a law professor at SMU, said that he expects companies that have already started making their employees get vaccinated will continue to do so, because the Biden administration’s proposed mandate will eventually “preempt” Abbott’s order.
Carpenter called Abbott’s order “more of a political statement than a legal statement.”
“Ultimately, I don’t think it will have a real legal effect,” he said of Abbott’s executive order.
Abbott’s order raises specific questions about Texas-based American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, since both are government contractors that fall under the purview of Biden’s vaccine mandate executive order. American is giving employees until November 24 to get vaccinated or face termination. Both airlines issued statements on Tuesday saying they wouldn’t be calling off their mandate plans, according to Reuters.
“According to the president’s executive order, federal action supersedes any state mandate or law, and we would be expected to comply with the president’s order to remain compliant as a federal contractor,” the Southwest statement, obtained by Insider, read.
David Crump, a law professor at the University of Houston, said airlines have the power to ignore the state mandate because it’s trumped by the federal order.
“The supremacy clause to the Constitution says that federal law is the ‘supreme’ law of the land, and state laws give way to it,” Crump said. “The state mandate is of no effect in that case.”
In this Wednesday, April 17, 2019 photo reviewed by U.S. military officials, the control tower is seen through the razor wire inside the Camp VI detention facility in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.
Alex Brandon, File/Associated Press
The Biden administration is seeking to run a migrant detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, per NBC News.
A government contract solicitation says that guards must speak Spanish and Haitian Creole.
The listing comes as the Biden administration has struggled to accommodate Haitian migrants.
As the Biden administration struggles to process an influx of Haitian refugees at the US Southern border, it is seeking a private contractor to open a migrant detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, according to NBC News.
In a public government contract solicitation, the Department of Homeland Security says that it seeks to establish the facility at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with a capacity of holding 120 people.
The solicitation also includes a requirement that guards running the facility speak Spanish and Haitian Creole.
“The service provider shall be responsible to maintain on site the necessary equipment to erect temporary housing facilities for populations that exceed 120 and up to 400 migrants in a surge event,” the solicitation says.
Insider reached out to the White House for comment.
“DHS is not and will not send Haitian nationals being encountered at the southwest border to the Migrant Operations Center (MOC) in Guantanamo Bay,” a DHS spokesperson told Insider.
“The MOC has been used for decades to process migrants interdicted at sea for third-country resettlement. The request for information (RFI) recently posted is a typical, routine first step in a contract renewal, and unrelated to the Southwest Border. The contract was initially awarded in 2002 with the current term ending on May 31, 2022,” the spokesperson added.
The NBC News report has stirred up frustration within immigrant rights organizations that have also been demanding that the administration end Title 42, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention public health order started during the Trump administration that has effectively closed border crossings and enabled the rejection of asylum seekers.
The Biden administration, however, has chosen to defend Title 42 in court. It said this week that it plans to appeal a judge’s decision to challenge Title 42.
“The treatment of Haitians and Black migrants by the Biden administration is inhumane and unacceptable,” the Immigrant Justice Network told Insider in a statement. “For months, advocates have called on the Biden administration to end Title 42, a Trump-era policy that has been used to deport thousands of asylum seekers.”
“We call on President Biden to immediately stop deportations and grant Haitian migrants humanitarian parole,” the statement added, “Sending Haitian migrants to Guantanamo Bay, a place known for human rights abuses, was a mistake in the 1990s and would be a mistake now.”
Although most famously known as a controversial holding site for terror suspects, in the early 1990s, the US sent up to 12,000 Haitian migrants attempting to seek refuge in Florida to migrant detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay, under the George H.W. Bush administration. According to NBC News, the policy was ideated by then-Attorney General William Barr.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the proposed Guantanamo Bay move “utterly shameful,” in a tweet on Wednesday.
Bob Carey, the former director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement under the Barack Obama administration, told Insider that, “There are few good solutions for the administration during a time of multiple crises in the context of COVID.”
“While the use of Guantanamo is a regrettable solution, it is far better than forced return to Haiti in the context of current conditions there,” he added. “Guantanamo is outside the US and that has legal implications as well, but wherever people are, they have a right to make an asylum claim.”
In recent weeks, as thousands of Haitians have crossed mainly into Del Rio, Texas, fleeing instability, an earthquake, and violence in Haiti, the Biden administration has resumed deportation flights to Haiti, and scenes of border agents on horseback scattering Haitian migrants have stirred outrage and prompted an official rebuke from the administration.
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 06: Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) preside over a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Congress has reconvened to ratify President-elect Joe Biden’s 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump, hours after a pro-Trump mob broke into the U.S. Capitol and disrupted proceedings.
Erin Schaff – Pool/Getty Images
John Eastman is a lawyer and senior fellow at The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank.
CNN this week published a two-page memo he wrote for Trump’s legal team.
A longer version, obtained by Insider, claims Mike Pence could have handed the election to Trump.
A six-page memo, presented to former President Donald Trump’s legal team just days before January 6 – and obtained by Insider – details a right-wing lawyer’s argument for how the previous administration could remain in power despite losing the 2020 election.
On Monday, CNN published a two-page memo from the attorney, John Eastman, that it said had been obtained by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa and detailed in their new book, “Peril.”
That document outlined a six-part plan for former Vice President Mike Pence to follow on January 6, arguing that the Constitution granted him the right to reject electors from states where Trump’s legal team falsely alleged there was significant voter fraud.
But Eastman, a senior fellow at The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, told Insider that document was a “preliminary draft.” He provided a longer document – “the full memo,” dated January 3 and labeled “privileged and confidential” – that expanded on the novel and extraordinary claim, made in the purported draft, that the 12 Amendment to the US Constitution empowered Vice President Mike Pence to not just count the votes from the Electoral College but unilaterally determine their legitimacy.
“There is very solid legal authority, and historical precedent, for the view that the President of the Senate does the counting, including the resolution of disputed electoral votes,” Eastman wrote, stating that “all the Members of Congress can do is watch.”
Under this scenario, Eastman maintained that Pence could decide to count “Trump electors” that had been approved by Republican-led state legislatures – even after those states had already sent a certified slate of electors, approved by their governors, for President Joe Biden.
Even if there were not competing, pro-Trump slates, Eastman argued, Pence could thwart Biden’s victory by deciding for himself, “based on all the evidence and the letters from [pro-Trump] state legislators calling into question the executive certifications,” to not accept any slate.
Kermit Roosevelt, an expert on constitutional questions at the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law, told Insider the arguments are shocking. “We knew this theory was out there, but it’s alarming to see that it was written up and presented to Trump’s legal team and presumably taken seriously by them,” he said.
Roosevelt said that, while he did not doubt Eastman’s sincerity, he could not understand the reasoning.
“Legally speaking, the analysis is bad,” he said. Even if there were dual slates of electors – there were not – “it’s a fringe view to say that the vice president gets to decide which is valid.”
“I would say that this is a proposed coup cloaked in legal language,” Roosevelt added.
In total, Eastman suggested Pence could reject slates of electors from seven battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, disenfranchising millions of voters. To bolster this argument, he claimed it was “a position in accord with that taken by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe.” A former Obama administration official, Tribe had cowritten an article in September 2020 – on scenarios where Trump could attempt to subvert the will of voters – that noted elections are decided by who has a majority of electors that are “appointed,” not necessarily the majority of electors from all states.
In a post on Twitter, Tribe accused Eastman of taking “snippets of my work wholly out of context.” He has never argued the vice president alone can determine the legitimacy of a state’s electors.
Eastman, who told Insider he presented the memo to Trump’s lawyers, said he only intended to cite Tribe’s uncontroversial view that there is no minimum requirement for the number of electors that ultimately decide a presidential contest.
The legislative director of Texas Right to Life, the group behind Texas’ abortion whistleblower site, told Insider that the state’s new abortion law has been an “unmitigated success” so far.
Texas recently enacted a law that forbids anyone from receiving an abortion if they are six or more weeks pregnant. Private citizens are able to enforce the law by suing anyone receiving an abortion, the abortion provider, or anyone who “aids and abets” a procedure.
Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion advocacy group, created a website that solicits anonymous tips about people getting or helping people get abortions. The tip site went offline after its web host, GoDaddy, said it violated its terms of service. Before the site went down, TikTok users spammed its tip form with “Shrek porn”, the script of “Bee Movie,” and other internet memes.
Cybersecurity experts warned Insider about there are extreme risks that accompany an organization collecting such sensitive health information. Abortion rights advocates told Insider that the data collection itself places abortion-rights advocates in danger.
“I shudder even to consider the implications of an extremist anti-choice group having a database of Texans who are known to support reproductive freedom,” Dina Montemarano, the research director of NARAL Pro-Choice America, told Insider in an email.
But Texas Right for Life doesn’t seem to be fretting about its whistleblower site going offline.
Employees and representatives from the organization both said abortion rates have plummeted in the state since the Texas law went through – and to them, that’s what matters most.
“We’re looking at 15 days out of the strongest pro-life bill in the country being followed,” said John Seago, the legislative director at Texas Right to Life. “And that is unmitigated success.”
Texas’ new law has cut down the number of abortions in the state, The 19th reported. At Whole Women’s Health clinics, which provide abortions in the state, almost half of the doctors stopped working once the law went into effect.
Texas Right to Life also said the group is undeterred by repeated efforts from local and federal officials to invalidate the Texas law.
Kimberlyn Schwartz, the spokesperson for Texas Right to Life, wrote that “Texas will not be intimidated” by the US Department of Justice’s emergency motion to block the law. She said Texas Right for Life is working with several other states to pass similar laws around the US.
Schwartz also saidthe organization doesn’t mind the “limited victory” that Planned Parenthood had in a September lawsuit and echoed Seago, noting that Planned Parenthood already announced its intention to comply with Texas’ new abortion restrictions.
“Despite receiving a limited victory in the Travis County court, Planned Parenthood announced they will continue to comply with the law and cease all elective abortions after six weeks,” Schwartz said in a different post on Texas Right to Life’s website. “Approximately 100 babies and pregnant women per day will continue to be saved by the law.”
Schwartz and Seago each told Insider that Texas Right to Life is working on restoring their abortion whistleblower website but didn’t say when the site would return. They said the organization is adding additional security features to the whistleblower website before it comes online again.
US Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks to an audience at the 30th anniversary of the University of Louisville McConnell Center in Kentucky on September 12, 2021.
(AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley
Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Stephen Breyer have tried to defend the Supreme Court’s integrity.
“This court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” Barrett said at the McConnell Center this week.
Yet experts said they’re ignoring the realities of how politics affects the court and its justices.
While critics blast the Supreme Court as hyperpartisan, Justice Amy Coney Barrett this week attempted to sway public perception, insisting the institution is independent from politics.
“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she told attendees at the 30th anniversary of the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, a department founded by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Republican lawmaker who championed Barrett’s nomination to the bench and introduced her at Sunday’s event.
Barrett’s colleague, Justice Stephen Breyer, likewise tried to protect the integrity of the Supreme Court this week.
“A lot of people will strongly disagree with many of the opinions or dissents that you write, but still, internally, you must feel that this is not a political institution,” he told The Washington Post on Monday.
The “single most important point that I hope people will take” from my 27 years on the nation’s high court “is judges are not junior league politicians,” Breyer, 83, added.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images
“It’s naive to think people will – it’s hard to believe that you can convince people of that,” William Lasser, a Clemson University professor focused on the politics of the Supreme Court, told Insider in response to the two justices’ comments.
Though the conservative and liberal members of the court sought to defend their roles, they are ignoring what experts claim is the obvious: politics undeniably affects the Supreme Court and its justices.
“If the justices have to defend themselves from being partisan, that’s already a problem in and of itself,” Lasser added. “The court has always been a political institution for its history.”
Public approval of the Supreme Court is at an all-time low
Justices have long tried to uphold confidence in the federal judiciary, often dismissing criticisms that its members are loyal to the Republican or Democratic presidents who appoint them. In one instance in 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts pushed back on then-President Donald Trump labeling a judge who ruled against his policy an “Obama judge.”
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement at the time. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
Despite their efforts, public approval of the US’ highest court appears to be eroding. Just 37% of Americans – an all-time low – approve of the way Supreme Court is handling its job, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday. A Gallup poll conducted in July also found that public approval in the Supreme Court declined by 9 percentage points compared to the same month in 2020.
Members of the Supreme Court pose for a group photo on April 23, 2021. Seated from left are Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. Standing from left are Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP, Pool
“Certainly, if you disagree with either of these justices, it’s hard to look at Justice Barrett, as a Democrat, and say, ‘I believe that she’s not acting like a Republican,'” Lasser said. “It’s hard to look at Breyer, if you’re a Republican, and not see a Democrat.”
Lasser took particular issue with Barrett’s comment on Sunday that the justices’ “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.”
“It’s true that their judicial philosophies are authentic and they believe them very deeply,” he said, but “they’re underestimating the extent to which these partisan viewpoints influence their judicial philosophies.”
Allison Orr Larsen, a law professor at the College of William and Mary, shared a similar point, telling Insider that it’s over-simplistic to call the justices political, but that the justices aren’t immune from politics.
“They have views about the way the world works and those views necessarily influence how they decide cases, particularly the high-profile ones,” she said. “I would not call that partisan behavior, but I would not call it strictly legal. There are political beliefs and normative commitments that divide the Justices from one another, and that is undeniable.”
Protesters gather outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Monday, Sept. 13, 2021, in Chevy Chase, Md.
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
‘The court is inevitably enmeshed in politics’
There are several other glaring ways in which the Supreme Court is plagued by politics.
To name a few: Republican and Democratic candidates regularly campaign on issues the Supreme Court rules on, the US president selects a Supreme Court nominee that the Senate then confirms them, and Americans frequently take sides in Supreme Court cases based on their political beliefs.
The heated confirmation hearings of Trump nominees Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett highlight how politics have affected the court in recent years, according to Lawrence Baum, a political science professor at Ohio State University, whose expertise is the federal judiciary.
“Regardless of how the justices do their job, the court is inevitably enmeshed in politics,” Baum said. “It’s inescapable that the court is linked to a larger political world.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
Trump, McConnell, and the Republican-led Senate faced widespread backlash last fall for rushing to confirm Barrett in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election.
Barrett has largely avoided the public spotlight since, but her comments at the McConnell Center over the weekend have sparked new criticism. Her choice to appear at an event hosted by the GOP leader while trying to persuade the public that justices aren’t partisan wasn’t “wise,” Larsen told Insider.
But Lasser, the Clemson University professor, pointed out: “Where else could she go?”
“She’s not gonna go to a very liberal place and give a speech because she’s not going to be invited to give a speech there,” he said. “These worlds have become, as all our politics has become and as our society has become, increasingly polarized around these very issues that the court has both shaped and responded to.”
Following the Biden administration’s announcement that employers with more than 100 employees will be required to mandate vaccines or weekly testing – a move that will impact more than 80 million workers- an employment law expert told Insider that the devil is in the details.
On Thursday, President Biden announced a six-point plan to try to beat back a rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations and to increase the country’s vaccination rate. This includes enforcing fines of up to $14,000 per violation for employers that ignore the mandates.
Biden announced COVID-19 vaccine requirements for federal employees, contractors of federal agencies, and staff at all healthcare facilities that receive federal funding from Medicare or Medicaid. Unlike employees at private companies, these workers would not have the option to get routinely tested as an alternative to being vaccinated.
“We could see a fair amount of challenges regarding the details – who is going to provide testing, who is going to pay for it, are employers going to be required to pay people for the time they spend testing?” Domenique Moran, an employment lawyer with Farell Fritz, told Insider.
Business Roundtable, a lobby group including Amazon, Walmart, Apple, Google, and Home Depot, said in a statement Thursday that it “applauds” the plan requiring companies with over 100 workers to mandate vaccines or weekly tests.
However, as the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) drafts its emergency temporary standard to carry out the mandate, Moran insisted that the language of the mandate will dictate the potential legal challenges from employers.
“We got a very high-level vaccine or test mandate, the questions and challenges are likely to come from the detail,” Moran said.
“For the OSHA rule to be enforceable, employers need to be given time and they’re going to need clarity on expense – burdening businesses with cost of vaccine, testing, and time off without federal support could undermine the economic wellbeing for businesses,” Moran said.
In April, the Biden administration implemented a paid leave tax credit, promising to cover costs necessary for businesses with 500 or fewer employees to “to provide full pay for any time their employees need to get a COVID-19 vaccination or recover from that vaccination.” And on Thursday, Biden said that qualifying employers would be required by the new mandate to provide paid time off for their employees to get vaccinated.
That credit expires on September 30, 2021, and Moran said that employers may need an extension given the new plan.
Another scenario that Moran described was how the one hundred employee mark for a business is defined by the OSHA ruling.
“There is a question regarding what are 100 employees, does the business have 100 employees always, or seasonally?” Moran said, adding that the order could leave questions open around how full and part-time employment are counted.
Overall, from an employer side, Moran said that challenges on the constitutional merit of the mandate will be incredibly difficult.
“Because here is a built in accommodation for those who don’t wish to be vaccinated, I think the fundamental policy articulated is less subject to be challenged,” Moran said.
