Category: Courts / Laws / legal

A Couple Of Pieces Regarding The Increase in Domestic Violence, & The State Of Resources For Those Looking To Get Away

It’s really as bad as it was before VAWA ever existed; of course it’s not been renewed for several years now thanks to transphobic Republican legislators. I apologize for both articles being here in full; that is how the source-The 19th-formats their sharing. It’s nice most of the time, but now here’s a long post.

In abusive relationships, the end can be the most dangerous part

Two tragedies, in Virginia and Louisiana, highlight the peril that some women and children face during divorce or separation.

This story was originally reported by Barbara Rodriguez, Mariel Padilla and Jasmine Mithani of The 19th. Meet Barbara, Mariel and Jasmine and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Two deadly high-profile domestic violence cases this month highlight how the most dangerous part of a relationship can be when it is ending — particularly for women and families, and especially if guns are involved. 

In Virginia, authorities say former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax fatally shot his wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, in mid-April before killing himself. The two had been in the midst of a divorce.

And on Sunday, a gunman in Shreveport, Louisiana, killed eight children and injured two women in what authorities described as the deadliest mass shooting in the United States in more than two years. Authorities say the gunman killed seven of his children and shot his wife. He also injured a woman who is the mother to three of his slain children. The gunman, who had been scheduled to appear in court as part of separation proceedings, had recently told his stepfather that he was suicidal.

Partners who express suicidal ideation can create heightened dangers for women and families, said Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing who has studied domestic violence and homicide for decades. 

“That desperation, especially combined with access to guns, can be a recipe for tragedy,” she said.

A seated woman and several children hold candles during a vigil at dusk in Shreveport. More people stand in the background outside a strip mall as the sky darkens.
A family attends a candlelight vigil on April 19, 2026 in Shreveport, Louisiana after authorities said a gunman killed eight children and injured two women during a shooting spree that spanned at least three locations. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Every month on average, more than 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in the United States. Everytown gathered a focus group of 43 survivors of this type of violence last year, and 50 percent of participants said separation or divorce was a circumstance leading up to attempted intimate partner homicide-suicide.

The available data emphasizes the vulnerability of that time, said Sonali Rajan, senior director of research at Everytown for Gun Safety.

“At the point when a woman is choosing to try and leave a violent and abusive partner, husband — especially when there are children involved — it means that the violence has escalated for some time,” she said. 

Between 2014 and 2020, the organization tracked intimate partner homicide-suicides and found 5,450 women were killed. In 85 percent of these incidents, a firearm was the primary weapon. When there is a firearm involved, the abuser — which is a man in 99 percent of cases — is five times more likely to kill the victim, according to the research. 

“It’s heartbreaking,” Rajan said. “These are just such devastating instances of violence. Something that, to me, is a really important through line is the presence of a firearm. So I think that’s really important to note and underscore — having a firearm present in the moment of escalation can and often is deadly.” 

Intimate partner violence disproportionately impacts women of color and their families: Black, American Indian and Alaska Native women are victims of intimate partner firearm homicide at the highest rates, according to Everytown. Black women, for instance, are 3.5 times more likely to be fatally shot by an intimate partner compared to White women.

Portrait of Dr. Cerina Fairfax smiling in light-colored medical scrubs, standing in front of a brick wall with green foliage in the background.
Authorities say former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax fatally shot his wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, while the two were in the midst of a divorce. (Dr. Fairfax & Associates Family Dentistry)

In Louisiana, the killings occurred during a shooting spree that spanned at least three locations, according to the police. Authorities identified the gunman as 31-year-old Shamar Elkins, the father of seven of the eight dead children, whose ages range from 3 to 11. Elkins also wounded his wife, Shaneiqua Pugh, and Christina Snow, before dying in a shootout with police officers.

Rajan said children are especially impacted by intimate partner violence, particularly when firearms are involved. Nearly 1 in 10 incidents of intimate partner homicide-suicide also involve the murder of the family’s children, according to Everytown. And for children under 13 who are victims of gun homicide, nearly one-third of those instances are connected directly to intimate partner or family violence. 

“The ripple effects of firearms in the hands of an abuser extend far beyond the intimate relationship itself,” she said.

Doreen Dodgen-Magee, a volunteer with Moms Demand Action and a survivor who lost her sister-in-law and three nieces to intimate partner violence, said children are often involved in domestic violence situations — and that impact has ripple effects through generations and across communities. Her sister-in-law had filed for divorce before being killed.

“I think about the way in which my nieces died and their last experiences, and the way in which their classmates who live down the street — some of them witnessed this as it happened on the front lawn,” said Dodgen-Magee, who also spent years caring for her mother-in-law after she witnessed the deaths and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. “How the brain of a child tries to make sense of that, it’s unimaginable.” 

Campbell said she also worries about the long-term mental health of children impacted by the recent gun violence, including a child who survived the Louisiana shooting by jumping off a roof. 

An outside view of former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax’s home in Annandale, Virginia, on April 16, 2026. (Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images)

In Virginia, two teenage children were home when Justin Fairfax killed Cerina Fairfax and himself. Justin Fairfax served as lieutenant governor from 2018 to 2022 and faced sexual assault allegations in 2019. He denied wrongdoing, but family said the 47-year-old’s mental health unraveled after that. Court records show his wife filed for divorce in 2025 — though they still lived in the same home — after nearly 20 years of marriage. The former couple’s teenage son called 911 to report the shooting.

Those shootings follow the April 1 death of Nancy Metayer, the vice mayor of Coral Springs, Florida. Metayer was widely seen as a rising star in Florida Democratic politics. An activist and environmental scientist, the 38-year-old was the first Black and Haitian American woman member of the Coral Springs City Commission, elected in 2020 and reelected in 2024 before being appointed to serve a second term as vice mayor, according to the city website. According to police, Metayer was found fatally shot in her home, and her husband is charged with premeditated murder. The incident was described as “domestic in nature.” U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz said in the aftermath of her fatal shooting that he was “in shock” and that Metayer was about to announce a bid for Congress.

March for Our Lives, a youth-led organization that advocates for stricter gun control legislation and founded by students after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, said these recent incidents “underscore a truth this country refuses to face head-on; Black Americans are carrying an outsized and relentless burden in the gun violence crisis.” 

“From children like those killed in Shreveport, to Black women facing lethal domestic violence, to families living with daily exposure to shootings that never make national news, the toll is staggering and systemic,” the organization said. “This is what a public health crisis looks like when it is allowed to persist in Black communities.” 

Ujima, the national center on violence against women in the Black community, said “the frequency of these tragedies demands attention.”

“Grief alone is not enough,” Ujima said in a statement. “We must remain focused on prevention, early intervention and ensuring families have access to the support they need before harm escalates.” 

The high-profile incidents show the necessity of a robust response to intimate partner violence, which impacts more than 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men across their lifetimes. But government efforts are chronically underfunded and now understaffed: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Violence Prevention housed units dedicated to stopping firearms deaths, suicide and domestic violence before they happen — but the division was decimated last year. 

Nancy Metayer, the vice mayor of Coral Springs, Florida, was found fatally shot in her home on April 1, and her husband has been charged with premeditated murder, police said. (Nancy Metayer Campaign)

There have been significant disruptions in the federal government’s response to domestic violence as a public safety issue as well. The Department of Justice is the largest funder of domestic violence services across the country, with $713 million appropriated to the Office on Violence Against Women last year. This money goes toward a variety of services assisting survivors of gender-based violence. But as of this month, $200 million in taxpayer funds is gathering dust instead of helping survivors. Money from this year, $720 million, doesn’t look to be coming any time soon either. 

Everytown advocates for a four-part domestic violence approach, which includes background checks on gun sales, prohibiting people convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse from possessing firearms, requiring prohibited people to turn in their guns and barring gun purchases if a background check takes longer than three business days. Rajan said states with laws that keep guns out of the hands of abusers see lower rates of homicide and suicide among intimate partners.

“The moment that the survivor seeks legal assistance — often another time of heightened risk — it makes it even more crucial that laws to remove firearms from homes with domestic violence are effectively implemented,” she said.

Campbell noted the importance of laws that allow for the temporary removal of a firearm from an individual if they pose a risk to themselves or others. Extreme risk protective orders (ERPO), known as red flag laws, have been enacted in 22 states and the District of Columbia. Louisiana is not one of them.

But there is a 2020 ERPO law in Virginia that is supposed to prevent individuals who pose a substantial danger from possessing or purchasing firearms — which Campbell said shows how families still fall through the cracks. She said stakeholders, from family members to police departments to divorce lawyers, can play a role.

“Lots of people go through divorces just fine, but families where things are really fraught, where somebody’s desperate — they need to be able to recognize that possibility,” she said.

For those who are currently in dangerous domestic violence situations, Campbell recommended seeking help by calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 or by texting BEGIN to 88788. 

She also recommended the myPlan app, a free tool designed by Johns Hopkins University, to help survivors of relationship abuse create personalized safety plans in a discreet way. The app is also a helpful resource for those unsure if they’re in a safe relationship.

Rajan added that if you or someone you know is in suicidal crisis or emotional distress to call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org/chat to speak with a counselor. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, provides 24/7 free and confidential support.

After her family members were killed, Dodgen-Magee said, she found journal entries where her sister-in-law had written that she feared for her life and where she wanted her kids to go if she was murdered by her husband. Still, Dodgen-Magee said that when her sister-in-law told people in her community, including church pastors, that she was afraid, she was dismissed as overreacting and told to stay in the relationship. 

On a societal level, Dodgen-Magee said there needs to be a shift: “Believe women when they tell you that they are in danger.”

Domestic violence organizations turn away thousands each day. Julia was one of them.

An already underfunded system is under even more stress, as cases have gotten more complex and the Trump administration has sown confusion.

This story was originally reported by Jasmine Mithani of The 19th. Meet Jasmine and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Content warning: This story references incidents of domestic violence.

On January 18, 2025, Julia Gilbert kicked her fiancé out of their shared apartment. 

“When the apartment door shut, I remember knowing it was right,” she said.

Gilbert, 32, said she had planned to end the relationship for some time. Worried her ex was lying to her, she had been recording their arguments at her therapist’s suggestion. A week after he left, she filed a petition for a harassment restraining order (HRO), which requires the respondent to limit communication and in-person contact. In Minnesota, where she lives, residents can fill out a petition online without an attorney. 

In her January 26 statement justifying the HRO, she alleged physical, financial, sexual and psychological abuse. Her ex had unprotected sex with her without her permission, Gilbert said. After experiencing intense pain and heavy bleeding, she went to the doctor. Medical records viewed by The 19th with her consent say the bleeding could have been a miscarriage.  

She wrote in her HRO petition that after she texted him to say she did not want him to come to the apartment alone, he replied, “I can always come when I want.” She said her relief at the end of the relationship quickly turned into panic about the situation.

“I am scared for my physical and emotional safety and have been unable to relax for days and now am even more frightened in light of this text message from him,” she wrote.

Gilbert’s ex did not respond to multiple requests for comment. This article is based on public court documents, emails, phone logs and extensive interviews with Gilbert.

The HRO was granted in January. Gilbert’s ex contested the restraining order four days after being served, triggering a court hearing in front of a judge. Gilbert had to get a lawyer in two months or face him in court alone.

It felt like a daunting task: Gilbert had moved to Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis, several years ago, away from southern Minnesota where most of her friends and family still lived. She didn’t have a strong support network beyond her two cats, Kato and Scully. She had been relying on buy now, pay later plans and support from her parents, who didn’t really have money to spare, to afford groceries and rent. 

Gilbert’s petition said she wanted to file a police report but was scared to go to the station herself because of personal connections her ex had within the department. Some Hennepin County domestic violence organizations said on their websites they could escort survivors to the police station, but Gilbert said that when she inquired, she was told those services weren’t offered anymore. 

She was disappointed she couldn’t make a police report, but Gilbert was still confident the judge would side with her; she had photographs of bruises and a recording of her ex admitting to unprotected sex without her consent, according to an evidence list submitted as part of the hearing. Also known as stealthing, it’s recognized as a form of sexual violence in some states, but there are no laws against it in Minnesota. 

At the same time Gilbert was struggling to pay rent and fight for her restraining order in court, executive orders issued by President Donald Trump — whom a jury had found liable for sexual abuse — disrupted domestic violence organizations across the country. The federal government is the main funder of domestic violence services, and executive orders redefining gender and banning diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility left groups rooted in addressing gender-based violence confused about what services they could offer, how they could talk about their work and what grant money could be spent on. Notices of funding opportunities from the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women were delayed last year, and $200 million of last year’s appropriations hasn’t yet made it to providers. 

This chaos strained a system that is already under-resourced. Part of why Gilbert was shocked that it was so hard to get help was because she had gone through this all before, with radically different results.

A person with purple hair looks at the camera in a portrait while holding a cat in a living room.
Julia Gilbert says she was looking for housing and employment while also seeking legal representation for her HRO hearing as she dealt with the aftermath of ending a years-long relationship. She wants to be able to keep her cat Kato. (Caroline Yang for The 19th)

Years ago, Gilbert obtained an HRO against a different ex. After the couple broke up, she said, she found her tires slashed and called the police. At the time, she lived in Mankato, a town of 46,000 located 80 miles south of the Twin Cities. She said an officer listened to her whole story and introduced her to that county’s local domestic violence services agency. (The organization did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) There, advocates helped her file the petition, connected her with an attorney, helped her secure a restraining order and supported her through a draining legal battle. In her victim impact statement, she said what she went through not only during the relationship but the legal process afterward caused lasting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  

But by 2025, circumstances had changed, and not just because of the Trump administration. The pandemic saw a surge in domestic violence reports, especially during lockdown, putting stress on an underfunded system. 

The scale of intimate partner violence before the pandemic was already staggering. At least 47 percent of women and 44 percent of men have experienced domestic violence at some point in their lifetime, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2017, the most recent available. Women are more likely to experience sexual violence and severe physical violence. Queer people, like Gilbert, are more likely than straight people to experience relationship abuse. 

The full impact of the pandemic on domestic violence rates is still being researched, but several studies have shown increases of 21 to 35 percent.

The pandemic multiplied stressors on organizations that long depended on in-person work, and lockdown forced the suspension of some services. Demands for housing rose astronomically while shelters shuttered to reduce spread of the virus. Funding shortages meant that even when the world opened up again, offerings temporarily put on hold weren’t able to return. 

Many organizations were buoyed by temporary funds from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, but those expired in 2025. Demand didn’t disappear the way that money did. Economic stress has long been correlated with increased rates of domestic violence, and the affordability crisis brought on by the pandemic didn’t cease once the country reopened.

Survivors’ needs have increased since the pandemic, said Nikki Engel, the co-executive director of Violence Free Minnesota, the domestic violence coalition that helps coordinate strategy for 90 service providers throughout the state. Some of those programs have only one or two staff members.

“The numbers of people they’re serving every year may have stayed flat, or even gone down a little bit, but they’re spending more time with each victim, and each victim has more holistic and complicated needs,” Engel said. Advocates who would have been able to help six or seven victims file for orders of protection each day now have the capacity to assist only two or three with intricate housing, food and legal needs. 

This tracks with what Gilbert described over months of interviews. Immediately after ending the relationship last year, she said, she went from needing help with her rent to help with a new lease to help with groceries when her EBT card stopped working. She was looking for work compatible with her disability and searching for cheaper housing to no avail. It felt impossible to address all of her issues at once. She was juggling everything while seeking legal representation for her HRO hearing, on top of dealing with the aftermath of ending a years-long relationship. 

“When my food and housing and those base level things aren’t being met, I can’t even begin to work on healing the trauma to move forward,” Gilbert said.

Several boxes are piled up in a room.
A stack of belongings left by her ex takes up significant space in Julia Gilbert’s home. (Caroline Yang for The 19th)

Legal services for domestic violence cases, which can span family, civil and criminal courts, are highly specialized and sparse. Not only that, but the demand for them has increased since the onset of the pandemic. Engel said programs have reported a “huge increase in post-separation abuse,” which can involve abusers dragging survivors through the legal system, wasting survivors’ time and racking up fees.

Gilbert’s call log, viewed by The 19th, shows how much effort she put into trying to secure representation in the weeks between the HRO filing and the hearing. She used a free state hotline to try to locate a lawyer but said she kept hitting voicemails and dead ends. The few firms she managed to reach said they weren’t interested in an HRO case. She called the hotlines for help but was referred to the same organizations she had already tried. 

Advocates at domestic violence services organizations aren’t lawyers and typically assist survivors with self-service filing for orders of protection or restraining orders. Only a couple of programs in the state can afford to have attorneys on staff to work with victims, Engel said. Abusers are more likely to be financially advantaged and able to afford their own legal support, another power imbalance. 

Gilbert needed an attorney who could show up next to her in court, like she had the last time she fought for an HRO.

After she called over 30 law firms, per her phone records, a family friend referred her to a practice. Her parents helped her pay for representation. But, she said, she felt unprepared going into the remote hearing. 

It was a disaster for Gilbert: The transcript shows her ex’s lawyer aggressively cross-examining her, casting doubt on her account of physical abuse and bringing up her mental health issues. Gilbert feels her lawyer didn’t adequately intervene during hostile questioning. At one point, the transcript shows the judge scolded Gilbert’s counsel for checking her phone during the hearing. 

In an order for dismissal, the judge ruled that Gilbert and her ex had a “mutual lack of boundaries” and said testimony did not meet the criteria for an HRO. The restraining order was overturned, and Gilbert’s ex was free to contact her again. 

“It was humiliating, I had been getting back on my feet and trying to do things to put my life back together after all of this, and then following that court date, it was like I just fell apart again,” Gilbert said. She said she still has nightmares about the hearing.

Legal assistance is a bottleneck at many organizations. Artika Roller, the executive director at Cornerstone Minnesota, one of the largest domestic violence service providers in the Twin Cities metro area, said a pro bono attorney volunteers once a month to help with complex cases. The demand is overwhelming, so her group frequently ends up referring to outside legal services that don’t necessarily have expertise in domestic violence cases.

After the HRO was overturned, Gilbert found a lawyer to help her with a possible appeal. But she felt dismissed by the attorney; he minimized her assault and didn’t understand why she didn’t want her ex to come back into the apartment to pick up his belongings. Discouraged, Gilbert did not file an appeal.

“At a certain point how do you keep the hope alive?” Gilbert said, reflecting on the labyrinthine process of seeking help for survivors. “How do you keep the flame alive when you keep getting directed in circles?”

Gilbert had been calling the various domestic violence and sexual assault hotlines periodically since before the breakup. In May, a couple of weeks after the hearing, she said, she dialed the number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline once again. She was sympathetic to the strain on advocates. Gilbert says she knew they cared about her and wanted to help. But she was also frustrated and had started to see news articles about funding cuts impacting domestic violence organizations. She began to wonder if these changes had trickled down to her. She decided to record the next call, hoping to get some answers. When Gilbert told the advocate how hard it had been to get help, the advocate on the other side of the phone offered some surprising information.  

“Unfortunately, not just the funding is being affected for a lot of organizations that handle domestic violence,” the advocate said on the recording, which Gilbert shared with The 19th. “Unfortunately, executive orders have also made it difficult, or stopped funding, or made it to where organizations have to stop doing things or addressing certain things in order to continue the funding.”

“It is a very difficult time right now,” the advocate continued. “So I’m sorry that you have to experience that.”

Katie Ray-Jones, the CEO of The National Domestic Violence Hotline, confirmed in a statement to The 19th that many local organizations were forced to lay off staff and temporarily shut down last year. 

She also underscored the massive demand for the organization’s services. “We receive nearly 3,000 calls and messages per day from survivors in need — and no survivor in need should be left alone. And yet, the reality is that the national response to domestic violence overall has historically been overburdened and under-resourced.”

Ray-Jones shared that The Hotline was able to assist with 708,000 calls for help in 2025 — but received 1.3 million requests. Federal funding for the nonprofit has stayed stagnant since 2024, and The Hotline needs at least an additional $20 million to meet the scale of demand, she said. 

She did not address the executive orders directly. (The Hotline remains operational, as do many domestic violence services across the nation. Confidential, anonymous help is available 24/7 through 1-800-799-7233 or online.)  

A woman wrapped in a yellow blanket looks out at a snowy waterway.
Julia Gilbert tried to secure representation in the two months between filing a harassment restraining order against her ex and the hearing but says she kept hitting voicemails and dead ends. (Caroline Yang for The 19th)

The Violence Against Women Act, last renewed in 2022, allows Congress to put $1.1 billion each year toward programs addressing domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. But since its original passage in 1994, VAWA program funding has rarely approached authorized levels — for fiscal 2025, appropriations totaled $713 million. 

The other main source of funding comes through the Victims of Crime Act, which allocates non-taxpayer money gathered from fines instituted on federal cases. But these funds have dwindled since 2018, as prosecutors declined to pursue as many cases against white-collar crime that would top off the money pot. A 2021 bill funneled some money to the associated fund, but it wasn’t enough. Attempts since then to close the funding gap have largely stalled in Congress.

Less money means less staff for roles that are already typically low-paying and require specialized training. Many in the advocacy field have personal experience with domestic violence and are dedicated to the cause, but it is intense work prone to burnout. 

It also means fewer dollars to support survivors. Each year, the National Network to End Domestic Violence tracks how many victims are served by domestic violence advocates over a single 24-hour period. In 2025, the count was 84,146. And on the same day, 13,018 people weren’t able to be helped due to a lack of staffing, funding or other resources. 

Violence Free Minnesota pointed out that the share of survivors who weren’t able to receive help nearly tripled from 2024 to 2025, to 29 percent. 

“We don’t know what’s going to happen on a day to day, week to week basis with our funding,” Roller said, due to the uncertainty from the Trump administration. Combined with changes in annual funding, that means hard conversations about which programs need to be cut back.

“There is no other funding source that provides the amount of funding that we get from the government,” she said. Cornerstone has some individual and philanthropic donors, but Roller said donations dropped in 2025 amid economic uncertainty.

Minnesota does offer significant funding to domestic violence services to supplement federal funds, but the amount was stagnant for nearly a decade. Asks for more money from legislators have been denied, Roller said. 

Violence Free Minnesota has seen providers hemorrhage advocates to jobs at places like Walmart and McDonald’s because they can pay more, said Katie Kramer, the organization’s other co-executive director.

And the services that are meant to protect women aren’t being funded, contrary to the Trump administration’s professed priorities, with potentially deadly consequences.

“The ultimate thing is that we were never funded at capacity, and this is going to impact peoples’ lives,” Roller said. “Organizations like ours are providing life-saving services, and we will lose people because of the inability to provide support.”

Under a proposed 2027 budget, the Minnesota Office of Justice Programs would cut victim services funding by about 20 percent, or $12 million. The shortfall is being blamed on the perpetual gaps in annual grants from the federal Victims of Crime Act funds. 

Roller has been pouring her energy this year into advocating for Minnesota House File 1082, which would use state money to make up for the missing $12 million in federal dollars. Violence Free Minnesota has also testified in support of the bill.

The one-year anniversary of the breakup hit Gilbert hard this past January. 

“I feel like I am in the exact same place a year later, and that wouldn’t be the case if I had just gotten the help that I needed to begin with,” she said.

She constantly grapples with her PTSD and has struggled to stay grounded. The nonstop media coverage of documents related to sex offender Jeffery Epstein — the revelations of who was involved, the lack of accountability, the constant discussions of sexual assault — sent her spiraling. 

“They just don’t give a shit about survivors,” she said, referring to the Trump administration. Her physical and mental health deteriorated, and, in February, she was hospitalized for several days. 

The past year has altered her worldview. Gilbert has become much more cynical; she was never a fan of the Trump administration, but now she’s lost faith in institutions more broadly.

Her health worsened again in March and she temporarily moved in with her parents. Now she is back in her apartment, but she may not be able to stay there much longer. 

When she made the decision to break up with her fiancé, Gilbert had no idea she would be in danger of losing her housing or that she’d no longer be able to afford three meals a day. But she says she would make the choice to leave again, even knowing all the hardship that would come after. 

“Even though this year has been probably the hardest year in my entire life, and it’s a struggle every day, I would not take it back for a second. The decision to leave him was the best decision I ever made.”

She finally feels like she’s getting the space to heal. She wants to become a mother one day and is mourning her suspected miscarriage even as she’s grateful she isn’t tied to her ex with a child. She’s also looking for a therapist who specializes in trauma. Gilbert thinks if she can calm her nervous system down, she can secure steady work and maybe finally find cheaper housing. 

She has been looking for more affordable apartments, but Minnesota is in a housing crisis. Time is running out. All of the options that would let her stay in her apartment don’t work: She doesn’t want to keep her ex on the lease, her income isn’t enough to qualify for an annual lease on her own and the month-to-month price is unaffordable. 

She contacted tenants rights groups for help, but she said they couldn’t do anything; VAWA only provides protections for survivors who need to break their leases, not for those trying to stay. Gilbert doesn’t understand why there aren’t protections that would let her stay. She has resorted to crowdfunding to meet her basic needs. 

As always, rent is due on the first.

Mikki Morrisette of Minnesota Women’s Press contributed reporting.

Do you work at an organization that has struggled to help survivors due to funding cuts? We would love to hear from you. Learn more about sharing a confidential tip with us securely.

Open Windows & Clay Jones

Foiled Again

Trump got caught stealing

Clay Jones

When Texas redistricted last year to give Republicans more congressional seats as Donald Trump demanded, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham called it a “total win for Texas.” After Virginia voters approved a referendum to give Democrats more congressional seats, in response to the shenanigans in Texas, Laura called it a “total travesty.”

After last night’s win for Democrats, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to post, “A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!” Just as he failed to do in claiming the 2020 election was stolen, Trump did not offer any evidence. (snip-MORE, and it’s hot!)

Amy Goodman documentary

Steal This Story, Please!

Ann Telnaes

If you’re in the Seattle area this Thursday, there’s a must-see screening of “Steal This Story, Please” at the SIFF Cinema Uptown. Like most people, I’m familiar with the intrepid “Democracy Now!” journalist Amy Goodman, but after seeing this documentary my admiration and respect has only grown.

After the 7pm screening on Thursday, April 23rd I’ll be participating in a group Q&A with Amy and producer Carl Deal. For my Substack readers here’s a discount code to use when buying tickets: TELNAES

Hope to see you there!

Kash Krash

Kash is about to drink himself out of his job, and I’ll drink to that

Clay Jones

I knew that I would be one of the last cartoonists to do a cartoon about Kash Patel and The Atlantic article because I devoted yesterday to drawing on Virginia’s referendum on redistricting. But I don’t feel bad about being one of the last cartoonists to draw on this issue because, with the exception of one, and just one, every cartoon I have seen on this issue has only made the point that Kash drinks a lot. I knew that if I made any other point that wasn’t saying Kash Patel has a drinking problem, then my cartoon would stand out.

There’s nothing wrong with those cartoons that only point out Patel’s drinking problem. If I had written a cartoon that I believed was hilarious, and it was just a drunk Patel joke, I would’ve gone with it. I’m not riding a high horse here. (snip-MORE)

4th Amendment Workplaces

When ICE Shows Up, These Businesses Will Be Ready

Across the U.S., training, resources and hotlines have emerged to help workplaces exercise their rights in the case of an ICE raid.

By: Emily Nonko

Last April, at the James Beard Foundation’s Chef Action Summit, food industry leaders gathered to discuss the political and economic landscape with one concern hanging grimly in the air: undocumented and immigrant workers were increasingly afraid to come into work after ICE raids ramped up at the outset of Trump’s second term. 

But it just so happened the summit took place in Asheville, North Carolina, where activists had already asked, “What would it take to make this the safest state for immigrants in the south?” as Andrew Willis Garcés, senior strategist with the immigrant justice organization Siembra NC, puts it.

One answer: 4th Amendment Workplaces, a framework developed by Siembra NC and launched at the summit to help restaurants and other businesses train up on legally vetted protocols to defend employees against ICE. The idea quickly took hold — there are now over 1,000 4th Amendment Workplaces across North Carolina, with 4th Amendment Workplace resolutions passed in three cities and similar efforts underway across 12 states. 

It’s emerged as perhaps the most powerful workforce training to help businesses prepare for ICE raids, but it is not the only one. Across the country, training, resources and hotlines have been developed for workplaces, alongside an effort to harness the wider labor movement as a force against ICE. 

Though the ICE raids that make the news often take place on the street, workplaces are in fact a frequent target. “We’ve seen ICE this year go into workplaces more than a lot of other kinds of places where people are gathered,” Willis Garcés explains. “With workplaces, there’s usually an open door you can walk through.”

According to the American Immigration Council, ICE publicly reported at least 40 worksite enforcement actions resulting in over 1,100 arrests within the first seven months of the current Trump administration. Businesses employing noncitizen workers — restaurants, car washes, automotive shops, bakeries, nail salons — are typically targeted. ICE has also scaled up large raids at workplaces like meatpacking and manufacturing plants. 

These raids often represent legal violations, which 4th Amendment Workplaces raise awareness around. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” without a warrant based on probable cause — that is, reason to believe that a crime may have been committed.

In North Carolina, volunteers canvas businesses across the state to share what it means to be a 4th Amendment Workplace: identify invalid ICE warrants, secure private employee areas, document unconstitutional actions and defend all workers, no matter their immigration status. Resources include a workplace guide, organizing toolkit, posters signaling opposition to unconstitutional search and seizures, employee handouts and tips for designating private employee areas. 

Workplaces can request dedicated training, in which organizers help business owners and employees develop workplace-specific protocol, and lead them through roleplaying scenarios. “We help you think through … what would you do right after the fact? What would you do to preserve footage, how do you support families left behind, what’s the immediate triage that needs to happen [after a raid]?” explains Willis Garcés.

Scuppernong Books of Greensboro was an early adopter, participating in training, promoting itself as a 4th Amendment Workplace, hiring a lawyer, regularly keeping staff informed of ICE response protocol, even publishing a book on how to resist ICE. Co-owner Steve Mitchell says it is “absolutely essential” for business owners to step up on behalf of employees, especially if the owners are white and legally protected residents: “It’s important for people like us to say that this isn’t right, and we’re going to stand on this side of the issue.”

Even though there hasn’t been a heavy ICE presence in Greensboro, the bookstore’s work with Siembra NC “gives us some sense of confidence,” Mitchell says. “Whether that’s misplaced or not, it at least helps us know what our rights are in that situation.” He adds that using Siembra’s model has made the business feel connected to a broader network of activists.

Willis Garcés describes that model as “plug and play,” easily adaptable outside the state and across a variety of workplaces. Siembra NC recruited small businesses first, with the goal of expansion into higher-targer workplaces like factories and farms.

Today, some North Carolina farmers display giant vinyl banners about their constitutional rights, a riff on Siembra NC’s signage. In Oregon, organizers dubbed themselves “Baddies for the Fourth.” In Minneapolis, the 4th Amendment Workplace was a central demand in a public-pressure campaign around Target. 

There have been other efforts to develop localized training. In New York, Nonviolent Peaceforce trains mostly within the city’s Asian American community, which it has worked with since the pandemic. Last year, ICE raids erupted across the city’s Chinatown.

Nonviolent Peaceforce’s in-person training happens with trusted community partners and focuses on de-escalation and self-regulation tactics, alongside scenario and role-playing. “We came to develop scenarios really at the request of community members who felt that they really needed to know what it was like to be in the moment,” says Roz Lee, head of the organization’s U.S. efforts. She says simple tactics to slow things down — like introducing yourself, asking ICE agents their name, asking for a warrant and taking time to inspect it — can shift a potentially intense and traumatic interaction. 

Other groups have tied the urgency around ICE to larger labor organizing efforts. Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) emerged to help non-unionized labor organize in response to COVID-19. More recently, EWOC developed resources for resisting ICE, which are tied to broader workplace organizing tactics like facilitating conversation among employees, building a committee and planning collective action together. 

“These steps are very universal, whether you work in an office, in a kitchen, at a nonprofit,” says Wes Holing, an EWOC organizer. “If you’re talking about bread-and-butter issues, or you’re talking about a workplace that’s safe from ICE, you’re still ultimately fighting for a place that respects you as a person.” 

This January, EWOC partnered with Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America to hold a No-Work Workshop to train workers on their rights and protections to participate in the Anti-ICE General Strike. It was part of a much larger mobilization among Minneapolis residents and businesses responding to Operation Metro Surge.

The city mobilized far beyond one-off trainings; instead, an entire ecosystem emerged. “The sheer volume, the sheer magnitude of mobilization … it felt like every single person I knew was extremely active,” says Mike Urbanski, who helps lead legal observer training with Monarca. Monarca is a project under the immigrant justice organization Unidos MN, which canvassed businesses in Twin Cities’ immigrant communities. They’d then direct people to Monarca’s ICE hotline as well as its two-hour, in-person training, which focuses on “upstander” legal observation tactics.

Monarca’s trainings were also shared through social media, word of mouth and within community spaces and houses of worship. “We could post a training with 1,000 people in Minneapolis and fill it within four or five days,” Urbanski says, “And most of those people would come, and another 100 people would just show up.” 

The Workers Solidarity Circle also canvassed and shared resources among Twin Cities businesses, channeling that energy into the Minneapolis Worker’s Assembly this February, which brought together over 300 unionized and non-unionized workers across sectors. “It was about building working class power and coordinated strike action, to really push people into action and not wait on managers, bosses or labor officials to save us,” says organizer Aminah Sheikh.

Now that Operation Metrosurge has wound down, organizers have turned their attention to this upcoming May Day: organizing strike committees, holding strike trainings, conducting labor education and committing unions and community organizations to strike on May 1st. Sheikh says there is a growing realization that workers must build political power far beyond their workplace. 

“Listen, in order for us to really stop — abolish — ICE, like people are saying, from the grassroots,” she says, “then we need to do economic disruption.” 

Most US Voters Support Trans Rights, Even Republicans

This video explains what everyone on the real left already knew instead of forgetting the trans  / woke culture wars and moving right, the center left keeps demanding which is simply code speak for leaning right.  While all the same democratic strategists since the Bill Clinton days demand candidates move to the right to “triangulate” to capture republican voters these polls show what we already knew.  The culture wars are losing for the republicans.  After republicans spent nearly 3 million dollars in ads against trans people the polls showed almost no one felt those adverts influenced their vote.  Even as red states rail against higher education, acceptance, and tolerance of people who are different it is losing them votes.  Some thing the Christian nationalists who are in the height of their influence now in political circles don’t understand is that people who grew up with LGBTQ+ classmates, friends, and even dated some do not find them the evil that these hate religions preach they are.  

*** Personal note.   I explained to Ali in an email that I am not functioning.  For what ever reason wheither it be anemia or something worse I am desperately tired from the time I manage to get up.  I often get up only to a few hours later go back to bed for four or more hours.  I have started taking vitamin B-12 and a woman’s one-a-day vitamin.  That with more red meat which was recommended to me in the past every time I go into anemia.   How ever I get up, I have coffee and stuff with Ron then I need to go back to bed for normally 4 hours, get up and do dishes while watching The Majority Report.  How ever some days like yesterday I did not even get that far, going to back to bed by 2 pm only to have Ron wake me and beg me to eat.

I have done better today only going back to bed for 3 hours later in the morning.  I wanted to go to bed two hours ago, but Ron was all upset he couldn’t sleep due to the neighbors having new skirting put around their home outside our bedroom.  So I got him in his recliner and moved his CPAP out to his chair.  Still he was not tracking.  Good news as I was falling asleep at my desk he woke up and is fixing supper.  At this point I am so tired I don’t really care whether I eat or not.  

I tried to reply to comments, but I couldn’t.  I even started to move old saved open tabs out by making a new cartoon / memes post but I simply couldn’t do it.  Right now the best I can do to function is make doctors appointments and watch videos that don’t take too much thought to understand.  That means most political videos are outside my ability.  I am sorry but right now I am functioning at the level of a confused grandpa.  Sorry.  I hope to get better soon.  Ron says if I don’t clear up by next week we will demand the primary care see me and deal with it. I’m not sure if I want that as my last visit he was insisting I think  about getting a colonoscopy.   Anyway.  This is a good video and one I watched several hours ago when I was much sharper than I feel now.   ***  Hugs

 

All About That Shadow Docket

I subscribe for free to this one, so please do click to read the whole thing. He does great work, and deserves the reads. You do not have to sign in to read.

221. Chief Justice Roberts and the Clean Power Plan

Remarkable reporting from the New York Times provides a peek behind the curtain of the February 2016 rulings that ushered in the modern emergency docket. And what it reveals is pretty discouraging.

Steve Vladeck

Welcome back to “One First,” a newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. I’m grateful to all of you for your continued support, and I hope that you’ll consider sharing some of what we’re doing with your networks.

(snip)

Back in February, I wrote about the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s unsigned, unexplained February 2016 rulings blocking President Obama’s “Clean Power Plan,” and how they ushered in what might be called “the modern emergency docket.” In my earlier post, I raised a series of questions about what had led the Court to do something that, in 2016, was completely unprecedented (blocking an executive branch program then under review in the lower courts), and whether the justices had any idea of the Pandora’s Box they were opening. As I wrote, “because the Court didn’t write then, and hasn’t explained itself since, we’ll never know (at least, until our grandkids can read the justices’ internal papers from that time period).”

It turns out, thanks to some truly remarkable reporting from Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak for the New York Times, that we didn’t have to wait quite that long. On Saturday, Kantor and Liptak published 16 pages of (leaked) internal memoranda from six of the justices providing a window into how and why the Court did what it did on February 9, 2016. And the memos are, at least to me, a remarkable combination of eye-opening and sadly unsurprising. As I explain below, I think there are at least five significant takeaways from these materials—none of which paint the Court in an especially flattering light. And at the heart of most of them is Chief Justice Roberts.

Behind the scenes, Roberts led the charge for the Court to blaze a new trail—relying on statements outside the record; invoking the wrong standard for the kind of relief the applicants sought; failing to even acknowledge the irreparable harm the government (and the environment) would suffer from the Court intervening; and pushing back aggressively when Justices Breyer and Kagan both urged a compromise that should have accounted for his ostensible concerns. I’ve suggested before that the real acceleration of the Court’s modern emergency docket behavior can be traced to 2018, right around when Justice Kavanaugh succeeded Justice Kennedy. But in the first major case in which the Court granted emergency relief as a means of shaping nationwide policy, it turns out that the justice who led the charge was the one who was doing quite a bit more than calling balls and strikes. (snip-the rest is on the page)

The 5-Year FISA Sec. 702 Vote:

It’s a little late in the day, but I’ve been away. I’d set this up for the morning, but it is pretty important for those of us in the USA. The FISA 702 bill reauthorization regarding warrants for surveillance of US citizens was defeated after being brought forward nefariously.

(Note: I’m not on Bluesky. I love that anyone can click onto a post, and go look at it without having to sign in. So, please click below, and go read each little post, because again, this is important.)

In a dramatic scene that unfolded in the wee hours this morning, members of the House defeated a ploy by the administration and Speaker Johnson to ram through a 5-year reauthorization of FISA Section 702. Here’s what happened, and what will/should happen next. 1/20— Liza Goitein (@lizagoitein.bsky.social) April 17, 2026 at 10:34 AM

A Good Reason To Question The Propriety Of Capital Punishment

Because these things happen all the time: laws that are wrong, and poor investigative practices with witnesses.

Can Penn & Teller Magically Get SCOTUS To Consider Wrongful Conviction Appeal?

Charles Flores has been on Texas’s death row for over two decades for a crime the state knows he didn’t commit.

Robyn Pennacchia

Charles Don Flores has sat on Texas’s death row for 27 years for the murder of Elizabeth “Betty” Black in 1998, during the commission of a robbery. The problem is, he did not kill Elizabeth “Betty” Black. That’s not just conjecture or me believing in someone’s innocence; even the state of Texas does not claim that he killed her. The man who actually did kill her was also sent to prison for the crime and was released over a decade ago, but Flores was sentenced to the death penalty for supposedly participating in the crime. Texas, you see, has a law called the “law of parties” that holds every participant in a crime responsible for everything that happened during its commission. So, for instance, if you drive the getaway car and your accomplice kills someone during the commission of a robbery, you are held equally responsible, even if you didn’t even know it happened.

There was no physical evidence, no DNA connecting Flores to Black’s murder. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever beyond his identification by a single neighbor who didn’t pick him out of two photo line-ups and initially said both men she saw where white with an average build and long hair, while Flores, clearly Latino, was a bigger guy with short hair.

So why is he there again? Because that neighbor, Jill Barganier, was later “hypnotized” by a cop who had never hypnotized anyone before. A cop who hinted, repeatedly, at the suspect having short or shaved hair, who told her she would continue to remember even more things about the robbery after the hypnosis. By the time she made it to court — after she had seen Flores’s picture on TV and in the news on many occasions — she was able to point to him in court as the accomplice of the the man who killed Betty Black.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with this case, obviously, but the hypnosis part is what caught the attention of magicians Penn & Teller, who recently submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court asking them to consider Flores’s case. Why? Because, they say, what the officer did is no different than what they do in their Vegas show every night.

“I am bringing this to you with the utmost humility,” Penn Gilette told The New York Times. “I am carny trash. I am uneducated. If you want to say I have a position of expertise, it is that I have lied to people onstage and gotten them to believe it. And I think I could do what that police officer did.”

The brief reads:

Despite the fact that Mrs. Barganier described the passenger in the car she saw at the scene of the crime as a white man with long hair, she was fed repeated suggestions by law enforcement that the passenger had “neatly trimmed” or “short, shaved” hair; she was told by the officer-hypnotist that she would remember more after the hypnosis session; and months later— after photos of Mr. Flores appeared in the press and she saw him seated at the defense table at trial— suddenly she identified him as the passenger. It is of little surprise that she was confident in her in-court identification when she saw this now-familiar face and believed she had produced it from her memory: That is exactly what the officer told her would happen. But it was not real. Some of the same cognitive techniques Penn & Teller use on stage to trick audience members’ memory and alter their perception explain how the investigative hypnosis session induced Mrs. Barganier to abandon all previous descriptions of the suspect and instead point to Mr. Flores.

On the tape, the officer keeps telling her that her memory is like a videotape that she can rewind and fast-forward at will. And it’s very tempting to believe that. It’s very tempting and comforting to believe that our brains are always recording whether we are aware of it or not and that, with the help of something like hypnosis, we can access those recordings. Certainly no one wants to believe that someone can more or less just jump into your brain and make you believe you saw things you didn’t see.

Our minds have a tendency to fill in the gaps if we don’t remember everything that happened in a particular situation, they explain, and memory retrieval process distorts memories — things they take advantage of as magicians.

By manipulating an audience’s memory—both in its formation and its recall—Penn & Teller get the audience to convince themselves that things have happened when, in reality, those things never occurred. That is all well and good for purposes of entertainment. But the same suggestion-based memory manipulation was also on display in the investigative hypnosis of Mrs. Barganier. And the officer-hypnotist left her believing that new things that came to mind later were true “memories” she could testify about, not merely things her brain subsequently filled in.

They can tell you exactly how he did it, as well.

The suggestion inherent in the investigative hypnosis of Mrs. Barganier is obvious: The officer/hypnotist asked her multiple questions about whether either suspect had short, shaved, neatly cut, or trimmed hair—even as Mrs. Barganier reiterated that both had long, wavy hair. The officer then showed Mrs. Barganier a photo lineup in which every photo was of a Hispanic male with short hair. Mrs. Barganier again did not identify Mr. Flores from that photo lineup. But she then also saw his photo in news coverage of the case prior to trial. Combined with the assurances of the officer-hypnotist that she would remember more as time went on, she was primed to “remember” Mr. Flores at trial. And she was particularly primed to do so because she was understandably motivated to assist police in finding the person who had committed a violent murder next door to her home. Pet. 6. Moreover, Mrs. Barganier’s certainty that her belated, in-court identification of Mr. Flores was correct (“over 100%” positive, as she testified), is not surprising. As Penn & Teller have observed, it is “very difficult for the audience to contradict the ideas that they themselves have constructed.”

The truly appalling thing about all of this is that the state of Texas actually knows that they are right about hypnosis being junk science. Just a few years ago, the state banned investigative hypnosis from being submitted as evidence in court. Of course, that was well after Flores was convicted and it had been used in over 1,800 trials over the course of four decades. In 2013, the state also enacted a “junk science” law, allowing for individuals to appeal for a new trial if the forensic science used to convict them has been found, upon further study, to be bullshit. This includes “evidence” like bite mark analysis, fiber analysis, bloodstain pattern analysis and 911 call analysis (one of the scariest ones, in my opinion, given that people have such wildly varying reactions in any kind of emergency).

It has not been going well.

Yet, Texas is fighting against Flores’s appeal and still hopes it will get to execute him. Because it’s Texas, and they really, really like executing people there.

There is a lot that is frustrating about our criminal justice system, but somewhere near the top is definitely the stubborn refusal of many involved with it to correct things when they’ve made a mistake. We see it over and over again, and it’s bad enough when it happens with someone serving any kind of sentence, especially a long one, but it’s unconscionable when we’re talking about the death penalty. There are no take-backs with the death penalty, and nothing anyone, even a magician, can fix once someone is dead.

Looking At This Week With Joyce Vance

(I’d say Josh Johnson called it on Kash Patel last week!)

The Week Ahead

Joyce Vance

We seem doomed to another week of war news. On Sunday, Trump announced on Truth Social that the U.S. military seized an Iranian-flagged ship that he said tried to run the U.S. blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. Marines boarded the cargo ship Touska after it was disabled. Trump posted that the USS Spruance “gave them fair warning to stop,” but that “The Iranian crew refused to listen, so our Navy ship stopped them right in their tracks by blowing a hole in the engineroom.”

But what’s happening with the president as he conducts his war is now completely out of bounds. This morning, just after 8 a.m., he had a long rambling post on Truth Social that concluded, “if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!”

Notice how Trump speaks in the language of an all-powerful businessman, a CEO without a board to tell him what to do. He is sending “My Representatives” to Pakistan and “if they (Iran) don’t take the DEAL,” he’ll do “what has to be done.” It’s crazy on steroids, and well past the point where even his own party should be giving him a pass. The president of the United States is threatening to bomb civilian targets and devastate a civilian population. War crimes, plain and simple.

All of this from the candidate who, in November of 2024, in the closing days of his campaign for the White House, said that “If Kamala wins, only death and destruction await because she is the candidate of endless wars. I am the candidate of peace.”

Every accusation is a confession. And the Truth Social posts happened after Trump called NATO and our allies “absolutely useless” at a Turning Point USA event Friday night. If you’re exhausted, and honestly, at this point, who isn’t, take a deep breath, plan for a little extra fellowship with friends (more on my plans at the end), and remind yourself that we cannot afford to put our heads in the sand and that the effort to overwhelm us in intentional—that’s how authoritarians do it. It’s a good week to talk with people about what’s going on, to encourage them to stop and think, and then to make sure they’re registered to vote.

The U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Mike Waltz, was on ABC’s “This Week,” Sunday morning, and he chimed right in with the president. Host John Karl asked if Trump was prepared to go back to “full-on war” and Waltz responded, “all options are on the table. We could take that infrastructure out relatively easily. The Iranian air defenses have been absolutely decimated.”

He continued, without being prompted, “And just to get ahead of a lot of the critics and hand-wringing, throwing out irresponsible terms like ‘war crimes’, attacking, destroying infrastructure that has clearly and historically been used for dual military purposes is not a war crime.”

Then Waltz did it again on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where volunteering to Kristen Welker, who hadn’t asked about it, that the U.S. could still target civilian infrastructure in Iran if a ceasefire deal wasn’t reached, again claiming that wouldn’t amount to war crimes. “We have a long history of taking down bridges, power plants and other infrastructure that is powering Iran’s military,” Waltz said, as though that somehow made it acceptable. “In the laws of land warfare and the rules of engagement, any type of infrastructure that is co-mingled is absolutely a legitimate target.” He reiterated on CBS, appearing on “Face the Nation,” that because the IRGC is running bridges and power plants, they are “legitimate military targets,” again rejecting the notions that bombing them would be “some type of war crime.”

So bombing civilian targets seems to be top of mind for the president and one of his key spokespeople on these issues, which should concern all of us.

Waltz is a former Army Special Forces Officer, decorated for his bravery. He graduated from Virginia Military Academy, according to his bio from his time in Congress, but he is not a lawyer. Apparently, concerns about launching attacks against civilian populations didn’t stick. Waltz was Trump’s first National Security Advisor this term, but he resigned following Signalgate after serving for just 101 days. (Tonight’s trivia: That’s the second shortest tenure of any NSA. Mike Flynn, who was Trump’s first NSA in 2017, resigned after just 24 days, two Scaramuccis, and was ultimately convicted of lying to the FBI before Trump pardoned him.) Trump nominated Waltz to serve as the U.N. Ambassador the same day he stepped down.

Today, the United States struck yet another vessel in the Caribbean. Three people were killed. The U.S. Southern Command account on Twitter said they were narco-terrorists. These attacks used to be shocking. Now, they barely garner notice. As of the last strike, four days ago, Reuters reported the death toll was “over 170.” Three people were killed in that strike last Wednesday, as well.

Also appearing on the Sunday shows, FBI Director Kash Patel said he would file a defamation case on Monday against The Atlantic, which reported last week, in a story headlined, “The FBI Director Is MIA,” that Patel’s colleagues are “alarmed” by “episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.” Two dozen people interviewed for the story “described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability.”

Nominees for important government positions, and Director of the FBI is among the highest because of access to national security information, are heavily vetted before they take office. But as with so many other norms in the time of Trump, Patel’s questionable personal choices have continued to come to light since he took office. The report says that Patel is “drinking so heavily that meetings need to be rescheduled and his security detail has trouble waking him up. Among the report’s most chilling revelations, “Current and former officials told me that they have long worried about what would happen in the event of a domestic terrorist attack while Patel is in office, and they said that their apprehension has increased significantly in the weeks since Trump launched his military campaign against Iran. ‘That’s what keeps me up at night,’ one official said.”

Screen grab of Patel “celebrating” with the U.S. Men’s Hockey team after their Olympic victory.

This morning, Fox host Maria Bartiromo asked Patel, “So you’re gonna sue them?” “Absolutely,” he responded. “It’s coming tomorrow.” He added that it would be for defamation.



I’m looking forward to discovery. Especially the part where Patel is deposed, under oath. Expect the lawsuit, which he probably has to file to look tough for the audience of one, to be dismissed before it gets that far. Patel would face questioning about his drinking and other misconduct while in office. And he would be exposed to penalties of perjury.

The Atlantic’s report concludes with this story: “Patel has publicly proclaimed that the FBI needs to demonstrate that it is ‘fierce,’ and officials I spoke with said that he is fixated on that image in private as well.” So what is he doing about that? Apparently, Patel “recently expressed frustration with the look of FBI merchandise, complaining that it isn’t intimidating enough.” The Atlantic explains that “Officials have grown accustomed to such behavior, and they have learned to roll their eyes at it. But they said that the absurdity masks real concerns about what Patel’s leadership has meant for an institution that the country relies on for national security and the safety of its citizens. ‘Part of me is glad he’s wasting his time on bullshit, because it’s less dangerous for rule of law, for the American public,’ one official told me, ‘but it also means we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.’”

It’s likely that Patel has little support inside of the building, and that could mean this is just one of many stories that get launched in an effort to ease him out before it’s too late. When the “that” in “That’s what keeps me up at night,” is the Director of the FBI, not a foreign terrorist or criminal threat, then it’s highly likely the career folks, and maybe even some of the politicos, want a “real functioning FBI director” in place.

I started out by saying we’re entering this week already exhausted and it’s important to keep taking care of ourselves. My plan this week involves spending time in person with my #SistersInLaw cohosts Kimberly Atkins Stohr, Barb McQuade, and Jill Will-Banks, when we do the podcast live in Denver on April 23rd. If you’re in Denver, I hope I’ll see you there! If you’re in Atlanta, we’ll be live there on May 3. There is nothing as important as being with the people that we love right now.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Inadvertent Compliance

with the surveillance state.

How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry. Then came another video, and another—and the story turned inside out.


Just when the people of San Francisco thought they’d seen every video—the sidewalk drug runners, the Louis Vuitton mob heisters, the men selling stolen laptops, the smash-and-grabbers snatching a camera from a Prius in traffic, the porch pirates porch pirates porch pirates into infinity, all indexed in the “Lawless San Francisco” section of the great internet video store—yes, just then: Stig Strombeck took out his cell phone camera on April 5 and hit Record.

It was around 7 pm, and Strombeck was on his way to his second job. He’d parked on Lombard Street. Not the famously crooked section up over the hill, but the wide gauntlet that jets toward the Golden Gate Bridge through the Marina district: the preppy hood of woo girls and boat guys and early-career Gavin Newsom and largely law-and-order Democrats. (“Everyone likes to shit on San Francisco, and San Franciscans like to shit on the Marina,” one resident told me. “It’s a victimless crime.”) But lately, even in the Marina, there was no escaping the rest of the city’s problems. The previous November, in a manicured playground just two blocks from where Strombeck was walking, a father said his 10-month-old baby had ingested fentanyl and had to be revived by Narcan—a San Francisco nadir that, to the presumable relief of civic boosters, hasn’t surfaced on film.

On the Lombard sidewalk, Strombeck pulled headphones from his ears and trained his camera on a disturbing scene playing out in the lot of a Shell gas station. Here’s the video: A bear of a middle-aged guy, 5’11”, 230 pounds, faces a rakish, apparently homeless man in his twenties who is wielding a 3-foot-long pole. The older bear of a guy holds his arms up like a boxer as the younger one jockeys with the pole, falls backward off a curb, then lithely spins back to his feet. The older guy blots his eyes and yells, “You’re going to jail, motherfucker.” The younger one, who wears a bright red stocking cap, whacks the bear of a guy across his face, sending him careening to the side. A male voice off camera says “Dude!”—the unmistakable Greek chorus of Wtf, this is insane. The younger guy looks toward the camera. The video stops.

⚠️ WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
The following videos contain graphic content, which some readers may find disturbing.

(see it, embedded on the page, linked in the title above; there are also several .gifs at various points throughout this. I can’t grab ’em, plus it’s easier to just read on the page)

Strombeck stowed his phone, but the action kept spilling into other frames. A daycare’s security cam showed the red-capped figure maniacally chasing the now bloodied man down the Lombard sidewalk before bashing him again. A neighbor pointed his camera down from his third-floor window as the younger guy strode below with the pole in one hand and what looks like the older man’s baseball cap in the other, pumping his arm, looking amped. Another video of the attacker that appears to be shot from a passing vehicle was uploaded to the crime-alert app Citizen, which pinged a software engineer sitting on his couch a few blocks away, who ventured over and filmed the crimson drips and Rorschach splotches of blood leading down the sidewalk. (Strombeck would later testify that by the end of the attack, the big guy was covered in “the most blood I’ve ever seen.”)

The following day, a Marina local named Joan wrote on Nextdoor that she was the mother of Don Carmignani, the man who’d been bludgeoned by the pole: “I want to thank all the neighbors that videoed what was happening & got involved to stop it. If they were not there my son would be dead!” Don was in the hospital, she wrote, with a skull fracture and a broken jaw. City politicians tweeted prayers and a call for more cops. Local news identified Carmignani as a former city fire commissioner, a lifelong San Franciscan and father of two. The assailant: 24-year-old Garret Doty, a recent arrival from Louisiana.

Reports said the attack kicked off when Carmignani asked some homeless people to move away from his elderly parents’ door, which they were blocking. In one TV newscast, a reporter mentions an allegation, from one of Doty’s companions, that Carmignani used “bear spray” during the altercation. The segment then cuts to a close-up interview of Doty’s homeless friend—a striking, red-bearded man named Nate Roye, speaking from under a filthy shearling hood—saying that Doty attacked because Carmignani had been “disrespectful.”

“Is that enough to beat him up?” the journalist asks, incredulously.

“Yeah, sometimes,” Roye replies, with a decisive nod.

San Franciscans know the larger drama that this episode advances, and you probably do too: Tech’s glittering citadel, fallen, with the footage to show it. Within some 40 hours of the Marina attack, in another swank part of the city, a widely admired tech executive named Bob Lee, the former CTO of Square and a founder of Cash App, had staggered past surveillance cameras while bleeding from several stab wounds and later died at the hospital. The two maulings—a beaten fire commissioner, a slain tech executive—upcycled to the national news, putting San Francisco under the national surveillance to which it’s become accustomed, with particularly lip-licking schadenfreude on the right. Here again was Newsom’s and Nancy Pelosi’s doom-looping dystopia, where remote-working techies and fleeing billionaires have ceded the city to IRL Grand Theft Auto.

Carmignani, his family, his attorney, and some witnesses provided images that flickered through the reports and social media: Strombeck’s video from the gas station. A laundromat’s street cam view of Doty grabbing the metal bar out of a trash bin and taking a practice swing. The daycare cam. In the neighborhood itself, the vigorous uptake of these images inspired a kind of hope. Marina residents—forever wary of being pegged as pearl-clutching Karens—thought they finally had their irrefutable proof of how clearly things had gotten out of hand. “Somebody got beat up. It was on camera multiple, multiple places,” one told me. “Like, the best evidence!”

But within days, the clarity crumbled. In the case of tech executive Bob Lee, police arrested not a person off the street but a tech entrepreneur whose sister had been hanging out with Lee. And in private, within the police department, the Carmignani attack was veering off narrative too. A police sergeant, sorting through the symphony of surveillance clips that captured the face-off, played the bodycam footage from a cop who had been interviewing Carmignani’s girlfriend after the attack. The officer asks whether she’d been inside when Carmignani went out to “confront” the guy. She says yes. Then from the ambulance, Carmignani interrupts her, barking a command through his broken jaw, seeming to thicken the plot:

“Don’t say nothing to nobody. Don’t say nothing to any cop, no one.”

In San Francisco there’s always another video. New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive, a culture of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, at scale.

In the city where Nextdoor’s offices sit right in the gritty Tenderloin, sharing Ring cam footage of porch thieves is a bonding exercise between neighbors who’ve never met. All over town, local nonprofits oversee neighborhood-wide networks of cameras funded in part by donations from crypto entrepreneur Chris Larsen. (“That’s the winning formula,” Larsen told The New York Times in 2020. “Pure coverage.”) Platoons of Waymo self-driving cars circulate the streets like Pac-Man ghosts, gathering up videofeeds that cops snag for evidence. You can watch a resident’s live cam to see who’s on the corner of Hyde and Ellis, right now.

True-crime video has become San Francisco’s civic language, the common vocabulary of local TV news broadcasts, the acid punch line to a million social media posts. The feeds intensified during the pandemic, when commuterless streets erupted with synthetic opioid use and property crime. Since then, the city has found itself hobbled through successive breakdowns—a police shortage, a 34 percent office vacancy rate, a federal injunction severely limiting the city from clearing homeless camps. No one seems to be solving San Francisco’s problems, the feeling goes, so by God, people are going to film the dysfunction and post the footage.

A guy who goes by the handle JJ Smith is probably the most vivid personification of this drive. A longtime resident of the Tenderloin whose brother died of a fentanyl overdose in 2022, Smith—not his real name—films unhoused people as he tries to cajole them into considering treatment. Then he posts the footage on X, where he has about 19,000 followers.

In happier cases, he’ll document when people check into a program and come out clean on the other side. But much of Smith’s footage is far grimmer: coroners rolling sheet-draped corpses out of residential hotels; a cold open on a woman’s face as she OD’s on a sidewalk. Smith explains that he’s just given the woman Narcan, pulling you into morbid suspense combined with an awful feeling of Are we really supposed to be seeing this? Other times, Smith dispenses a tough love that edges into trolling, like the time he snatched away a coat draped over a woman’s head so he could scold her for smoking drugs next to a park where his kids play.

People shrug off statistics, Smith says, but “when you’re actually seeing it, it really gets to you.” Supporters credit him with recording a humanitarian crisis. Critics tweet at him, even chide him on camera: He’s exploiting people who have no privacy with footage they haven’t consented to. (Hey, he says, it’s a public sidewalk.)

Some of the discomfort with Smith, who says he knows many of the people he films, stems from the simple fact that, by now, he’s part of a social media bandwagon. Even presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis once stopped by the Tenderloin to shoot a video. Today, Smith is joined by other accounts like FriscoLive415 and Tenderloin Tube—a cadre that lives somewhere on the border between citizen journalists and dystopic paparazzi. Consider the live birth video. Last spring, a Twitter account that typically posts store-looting vids showed something else: an infant, just born and naked, on a Tenderloin sidewalk, its dazed mother trying to pick the baby up. The event is morally excruciating, but so is its existence here, on X, overlaid with the account’s watermark as the video travels the internet to 1.5 million views, churned into headlines like “Caught on Video: Homeless Woman Gives Birth in Broad Daylight on Tenderloin District Sidewalk.”

(snip-a bit more on the page. Of course, there are twists!)

Masters Of War

https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxcRbDnMs-OZRd4YLOay14vzCBEdbb1V7B