Biden’s Mass Deportations … Or Not?
Thurs., Sept. 23: Who’s in charge at UNC? + UNC Health says get vaxed or get out + Epic v. Apple, continued + the U.S. murder surge, but not in NC cities + the sacrificial zone of Robeson County
+6 TOP STORIES
1. UNC-CH Trustees Ask Who’s In Charge of What
This summer, the UNC System’s Board of Governors passed a resolution ordering its universities’ boards of trustees to “adopt a proposed resolution amending and restating in detail all delegations of authority … and providing that any authority not delegated expressly by such resolution is vested immediately in the board of trustees of that constituent institution.”
The BOG gave its institutions an Oct. 1 deadline. Yesterday, the UNC-CH board of trustees started that process. (N&O)
BOT chairman Dave Boliek: “This is an opportunity to take a look at where responsibilities lie within the university. If you know where the responsibility is, you then know where the accountability is for decision-making.”
The faculty says that’s been a problem, given how prone to political meddling the BOG is.
UNC-CH faculty chair Mimi Chapman, a founding member of the group, said many of the recent controversies on the Chapel Hill campus—including Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure, the Silent Sam Confederate monument and COVID-19 reopening plans—are rooted in the governance structure of the UNC System. That includes the UNC-CH Board of Trustees and the UNC System Board of Governors.
“There’s a level of interference in campus affairs that just simply complicates decision-making and has taken away autonomy from campuses,” Chapman previously told The News & Observer. “The administration doesn’t have the delegated authority it needs.”
Speaking of UNC controversies: The U.S. Department of Justice accused UNC-CH and Eastern Carolina University of falsifying volunteer hours to get Americorps grant money over a five-year period. The two universities denied the charges but agreed to pay $375,000 and $140,000, respectively, to settle the claim.
2. 0.2% of UNC Health Workers Resign Over Vaccine Mandate
Sixty—out of 30,000—UNC Health workers have quit rather than get a COVID vaccine.
Let’s pour one out for Brittany Minahan.
Some UNC Health workers told WRAL News that they're concerned about the safety of the available vaccines, their quick roll-out and potential long-term side-effects.
"I quit a job that I literally loved because I didn’t want to put something in my body," said Brittany Minahan, whose last nursing shift at Wayne UNC Healthcare, in Goldsboro, was Sunday.
Minahan received a religious exemption from vaccination, but she resigned after being told she would need to undergo coronavirus testing twice a week.
Another thousand or so UNC Health employees are on probation and have until Nov. 2 to get their shots. They’ll miss out on part of their annual performance bonus.
Fewer than 200 Duke Health employees are on unpaid leave because they haven’t gotten vaccinated. They have until Tuesday, the N&O reports.
RELATED: As a silver lining for Brittany Minahan, she’ll have no trouble getting into the State Fair, which isn’t requiring vaccinations for entrance.
3. Apple Gives Epic the Finger
Last week, a federal judge split the baby in Cary-based Fortnite maker Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple, ruling that while the tech giant isn’t a monopoly, its App Store behaved noncompetitively by forcing apps to funnel in-app purchases through Apple, then collecting a handsome commission. The judge issued an injunction allowing developers to inform users of alternatives payment methods.
App developers believe the ruling could relieve them of the 30% commission they pay on in-app purchases—the ruling sent Apple’s stock tumbling—though it’s not clear whether that’s what will actually happen.
As The New York Times explained:
There is plenty of room for interpretation in the judge’s order on Apple’s steering rules, which said that Apple cannot prohibit developers from “including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing,” the judge’s decision said.
There is debate about the difference between buttons and links, which could make the effect of the ruling less significant than it seems. If a button, like a shopping cart icon or “pay now” call-out, isn’t the same as a link, then Apple could interpret the ruling as allowing things that look like buttons but don’t take users to external sites when they tap them. This might set up more fights between Apple and developers.
Apple had reason to declare victory, too. The judge ordered Epic to fork over $6 million for breaching its contract by circumventing the app’s fees.
Both sides appealed. The legal fight could take years to wrap up.
Until that happens, Apple says it’s keeping Fortnite out of the App Store.
Since Fortnite is the Biggest Game in the Known Universe, that’s a big deal. As one gamer site pointed out (yes, I went trawling through gamer sites; it’s a weird universe, friends):
With this in mind, we are most likely a long way away from the possibility of a Fortnite App Store return. With this now confirmed by Sweeney, it is time to find alternatives for players hoping to play Fortnite on their iOS or Mac devices.
There is always the ability to play on another platform, like console, PC, or Android, or you can play a different but similar game. There are other battle royale games on iOS, like PUBG Mobile, the upcoming New State, the currently-in-beta Apex Legends Mobile, Call of Duty Mobile, and more.
4. U.S. Murder Rate Rose by Nearly 30%
This is a grim lede:
The United States in 2020 experienced the biggest rise in murder since the start of national record-keeping in 1960, according to data gathered by the F.B.I. for its annual report on crime.
The New York Times says the feds will report a 29% increase in 2020.
“The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7 percent increase in 1968. The national rate—murders per 100,000—still remains about one-third below the rate in the early 1990s.”
“Separately, an independent analysis of big cities finds at least one promising sign that the murder rate may be starting to flatten this year: The increase in murders this summer does not appear to be as large as the record spike last summer.”
The last bar on this graph is something else.
The NYT said the FBI uploaded the Uniform Crime Report a few days early, but unless I’m reading its link wrong, the 2020 data has been removed. The SBI doesn’t have statewide homicide numbers available for 2020, either. But I have compiled data for North Carolina’s biggest metros.
Here are (criminal) homicides by municipality for 2020, 2019, and 2018. You can get a sense of how—and where—they’ve spiked.
Charlotte: 121 / 103 / 57
Raleigh: 28 / 31 / 17
Greensboro: 61 / 44 / 38
Durham: 38 / 37 / 32
Winston-Salem: 28 / 28 / 23
Fayetteville: 34 / 24 / 22
Cary: 1 / 1 / 0
Wilmington: 22 / 9 / 9
High Point: 14 / 19 / 19
Concord: 6 / 4 / 4
If my math is right (never a safe bet), only Wilmington, Greensboro, Fayetteville, and Concord beat the national average, though the latter had a small sample size.
Charlotte and Raleigh saw much bigger jumps from 2018 to 2019.
There’s a lot of debate about what’s driving the numbers. But I tend to think that each city has its own story; if circumstances work out, I plan to dig into some of them over the next year.
The best story I’ve seen on the subject came from ProPublica, which used Philadelphia—where I used to live—as a reference point:
As elsewhere, there was no clear consensus about what was behind the drop in violent crime. Criminologists offered up a string of possible explanations, among them the passing of the crack epidemic, the expansion of police forces in the 1990s, and the reduction of childhood lead exposure in house paint and gasoline.
The debate was largely academic, a friendly argument over a happy story. In recent years, however, the trend started to reverse in Philadelphia and much of the country—first gradually, and then last year sharply. …
This soaring toll, which is heavily concentrated in Black neighborhoods, has brought new urgency to understanding the problem. But the terrible experience of the past year and a half has also offered an opportunity to make sense of what drives gun violence, and how to deter it. The coronavirus pandemic, and the decisions that officials made in response to it, had the effect of undoing or freezing countless public and social services that are believed to have a preventative effect on violence. Removing them, almost simultaneously, created a sort of unintended stress test, revealing how essential they are to preserving social order.
5. Biden’s Mass Expulsion of Asylum-Seekers … or Not?
According to UNICEF, Haiti is facing “multiple crises, including growing socio-political instability and deteriorating economic conditions, rising food insecurity and malnutrition, the Haitian-Dominican migration dynamic, waterborne disease epidemics, and high vulnerability to natural hazards, all of which have been further exacerbated by [COVID].”
According to the Biden administration, the country is “grappling with a deteriorating political crisis, violence, and a staggering increase in human rights abuses.”
Yet the same administration announced last week that it would begin flying the 14,000 Haitian nationals who’d gathered in the border town of Del Rio to seek asylum back home, then its Border Patrol agents charged the crowd on horseback, some using their reigns as whips.
On Monday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the media, “This is not the way to come to the United States. Trying to enter the United States illegally is not worth the tragedy, the money, or the effort.”
Yeah, but:
Last year, the Trump administration used the pandemic as a pretext to cut off access to asylum: A DHS order suspended asylum hearings indefinitely, while a CDC order allowed the government to reject anyone who shows up at a U.S. port seeking asylum.
The Biden administration has kept the latter, called Title 42, in place; it’s his legal justification for deporting tens of thousands of Haitians without giving them a chance to apply for asylum.
As of Monday, the U.S. had reportedly removed 6,000 of the Haitian nationals, according to The Intercept, which accused the administration of “carrying out what could be the largest mass expulsion of would-be asylum-seekers in recent American history.”
Nearly all of them are Black.
Once on the ground in Haiti, the expelled families and individuals will find themselves in a country utterly devoid of resources and infrastructure to receive them. “When Haitians are arriving, they haven’t been fed, they haven’t been given water, they haven’t showered, they haven’t slept, and they’re terrified—they didn’t even know they’re going to be deported. Many have been away from the country for years,” [Nicole Phillips, legal director at Haitian Bridge Alliance] said. …
“They’re not able to handle hundreds, if not thousands, of people. There just isn’t the infrastructure in place,” Phillips said. “Not only is there not the administrative support for this, there’s also not the infrastructure to even receive them physically if their family members cannot come to pick them up, which is likely.”
The Biden administration has taken heat from Democrats for its apparent eagerness to deport the asylum-seekers, which liberals see as a sop to critics on the right.
But the AP reports that Biden may not be sending as many Haitians home as it first seemed:
Many Haitian migrants camped in a small Texas border town are being released in the United States, two U.S. officials said, undercutting the Biden administration’s public statements that the thousands in the camp faced immediate expulsion.
Haitians have been freed on a “very, very large scale” in recent days, according to one U.S. official who put the figure in the thousands. The official, who has direct knowledge of operations, was not authorized to discuss the matter Tuesday and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Many have been released with notices to appear at an immigration office within 60 days, an outcome that requires less processing time from Border Patrol agents than ordering an appearance in immigration court and points to the speed at which authorities are moving, the official said.
There’s no clear rationale for who stays and who goes, though it seems like single adults, as opposed to families, are most likely to get the heave-ho.
“Everybody in this country and around the world should be up in arms about the fact that we have an immigration system that operates as such a black box. Right now, we have no official access to understand what processes are under way, what protections are being provided for the migrants,” said Wade McMullen, an attorney with Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit human rights advocacy organization.
Biden is going to catch hell from Republicans—fairly or otherwise—for anything related to the border. I’m not sure a policy that a) cites a Trump policy while b) publicly projecting the rule of law as more important than human suffering while c) at the same time secretly ferreting some asylum-seekers to safety based on arbitrary guidelines is going to make the politics of this mess any easier.
6. [Read This] The Contested Swamps of Robeson County
For The Assembly, Barry Yeoman went to Robeson County, a “sacrifice zone” where environmentally hazardous projects that wouldn’t be tolerated in more affluent areas end up. As with everything Barry writes, the reporting is thorough and vital, and the narrative is gorgeous (and makes me jealous as hell).
Wakulla, North Carolina, is an unincorporated expanse of modest homes and soybean fields, scattered along flat two-lane roads and crisscrossed by wetlands. Its 200 residents, according to the census, are all Indigenous, which in Robeson County means Lumbee and Tuscarora.
Just past the speed-limit sign sit two buildings that form Wakulla’s heart: Oxendine Elementary School, whose slogan is “Brave hearts, Brave minds, Brave strong,” and Cherokee Chapel Holiness Methodist Church, founded in 1914 to minister to American Indians. The congregation initially worshipped under a brush arbor, until two men and their mules hauled long-leaf pine logs from the swamp to build a more permanent structure.
Much of Wakulla’s history lies underground. The soil is thick with artifacts, including ceramics, that likely indicate the site of at least one Indigenous village. “You don’t take a bunch of pottery with you when you go hunting or fishing,” said anthropologist Stan Knick, who taught for 30 years at UNC Pembroke.
This summer, Piedmont Natural Gas, a Duke Energy subsidiary, opened a facility in Wakulla that stores one billion cubic feet of natural gas, cooled to liquid form and concentrated 600-fold. Two pipelines connect it to the existing natural-gas infrastructure. Piedmont says the giant tank, and its 10 to 12 permanent employees, will assure a steady fuel supply when winter temperatures drive up demand.
By the time it announced the project in July 2018, Piedmont had logged the trees on much of its 675-acre property, according to Google Earth satellite images. An archeological team, commissioned by the utility, then combed the site. They cataloged artifacts from across the millennia, including ceramics that might date back to the Early Woodland period, starting in 1000 B.C.
But those objects had been ruined—“destroyed or obscured by the clearing and grubbing of the land,” said the survey report. Logging had jumbled the archaeological record, it said of one site, “making it impossible to discern distinct cultural horizons.” A few items had survived intact, but “the majority of artifacts are out of context and do not possess significant information about the prehistoric past.” Given the irreversible damage, the consultants encouraged Piedmont to proceed with construction “without further archaeological considerations.”
It was Jefferson Currie II who discovered the report. Currie, 49, is a member of the Lumbee tribe, which is the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River, though the federal government doesn’t recognize it as sovereign. He is also the Lumber Riverkeeper, paid by the non-profit Winyah Rivers Alliance to advocate for the local watershed.
His is a formidable job. Robesonians sometimes describe their county, which runs from just below Fayetteville to the South Carolina line, as a “sacrifice zone”: a favored location for industries that would be (and have been) run out of more affluent places. Factory-scale poultry farms broadcast an ammonia stench and raise the specter of water pollution. A wood-pellet plant, soon to open on a previously contaminated brownfield, has sparked a legal battle over wastewater discharges. Until its cancellation last year, the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline was supposed to terminate in Prospect, an Indigenous community five miles from Wakulla. Many local leaders support these projects, saying the county needs jobs and that the economic benefits outweigh the environmental burdens.
It’s hard for opponents to mount a proper defense, in part because of everything else Robeson County contends with. The county has too few doctors, too many preventable hospital stays, and more than its share of low-birthweight babies. Violent crime is high. Almost half the children live in poverty. Covid-19 is running so rampant that the hospital in Lumberton, the county seat, brought in a mobile morgue in August. An index of health outcomes, published by the University of Wisconsin, ranks Robeson last among North Carolina counties.
Moreover, Robeson never fully recovered from Hurricanes Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018. The two storms hollowed neighborhoods, flooded schools, and foreshadowed what climate change might inflict in the future.
It’s no coincidence, say organizers, that controversial industries flock to a county that’s 43 percent Indigenous, 24 percent Black, and 9 percent Latino—the very definition of what policymakers call an “environmental justice” (or “EJ”) community. “If it’s an issue with pollution in Robeson County, it’s EJ, period,” Currie told me.