REENGINEERING LIFE

Fresh Off Her Nobel Prize Win, Jennifer Doudna Predicts What’s Next for CRISPR

The new Nobel laureate chats with ‘Future Human’ about what her gene-editing companies are up to.


Emily Mullin

Photo illustration; Image source: picture alliance/Getty Images

Reengineering Life is a series from Future Human about the astonishing ways genetic technology is changing humanity and the world around us.

When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on October 7 that she had won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry, Jennifer Doudna was still fast asleep at home in California. It was just before 3 a.m. when a phone call woke her up. It was a reporter from Nature, asking if she could comment on the award.

“Well, who won it?” Doudna asked.

Doudna, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, share the award for the discovery of the gene-editing technology CRISPR. The two biochemists began collaborating in 2011 and just a year later published a groundbreaking paper on CRISPR, which has revolutionized our ability to edit genes.

Short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, CRISPR is actually a naturally occurring bacterial immune system. When viruses attack bacteria, bacteria in turn grab snippets of genetic material from their viral invaders and incorporate these bits into their own DNA. This helps bacteria recognize viruses later on and thwart future invaders. Bacteria do this by producing an RNA molecule that acts as a guide, which cuts up the viral genome.

Doudna and Charpentier realized they could harness this cutting ability to edit genes in just about any living thing. In their 2012 paper, they described how this bacterial system could be used as “DNA scissors,” and the gene-editing technology CRISPR was born.

Declared as one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century, CRISPR is faster, cheaper, and more accurate than previous gene-editing systems and has since become ubiquitous in labs around the world. Scientists are using it in an attempt to treat serious genetic diseases, restore eyesight in people with a type of inherited blindness, engineer crops that are more resilient to disease and climate change, and eliminate disease-carrying pests like mosquitoes and mice. And researchers are already working on newer and improved versions of CRISPR that are even more precise.

The power to edit genes also opens up many ways for CRISPR to be abused. In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui was widely condemned after revealing that he used CRISPR to make the world’s first known gene-edited babies. He is now serving a prison sentence, but the revelation has raised fears that CRISPR could lead to genetically enhanced “designer babies.”

After the Nobel announcement last week, I talked with Doudna about what’s next for CRISPR, the field of gene editing, and her own scientific work.

This interview has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

Future Human: First off, congratulations. What an incredible honor. How surprised were you to find out that you had won a Nobel prize?

Jennifer Doudna: Oh, total shock! I mean really. Coming out of a deep sleep and getting news like that — I couldn’t believe it. I said to the reporter who had called me, “I can’t talk to you right now. I have to call somebody and find out if this is official.”

We’re seeing a handful of clinical trials for CRISPR-based treatments get underway right now. What diseases do you see CRISPR being most promising for in the near future?

Certainly, diseases that are caused by single genes or genetic mutations. A great example, and we’ve already seen early results from one trial, is for sickle cell disease. But I think going forward, we’ll see opportunities to use CRISPR for other kinds of blood disorders, genetic diseases of the eye, and then, maybe in the longer term, cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, which are also genetic diseases.

What do you think is going to be the biggest obstacle to getting these treatments to patients?

It’s probably delivery. One of the reasons why blood disorders have been some of the early targets of CRISPR is that the genome editing that’s used to correct those mutations can be done in cells that are taken out of a patient. The editing is done in the laboratory before reintroducing them versus a disease like cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy, where the editing would actually need to be done inside the body, in the right cells, to have a clinical benefit. That’s a hard challenge right now.

Your company, Mammoth Biosciences, is working on a rapid CRISPR-based test for Covid-19. What role do you think CRISPR diagnostic tests will play in the future?

There are several efforts underway to develop CRISPR diagnostics in comparable companies and academic labs. I think we’re going to see everything from high-throughput laboratory tests that require robotic equipment and experts to point-of-care tests that can be run in a research lab, a doctor’s office, or an emergency room. Down the road, we hope to have an at-home test that would work like a pregnancy test for Covid. What’s exciting with the CRISPR technology is that it’s potentially a faster and more direct way to detect the presence of the virus and also relies on a different supply chain than what’s necessary for the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test.

What’s the status of your company’s Covid-19 test?

Mammoth Biosciences is planning on rolling out its test to a few partner labs for initial beta testing in November. Depending on how those experiments go and how those results turn out, we’ll expand to other labs after that. We want to see how it compares to the PCR test.

You recently just launched another CRISPR company, Scribe Therapeutics. What’s the focus of this new startup?

This is the thing about CRISPR: There’s so many different ways that it can be deployed. For clinical applications, the reason we’re seeing a lot of early efforts focused on blood disorders like sickle cell disease and, to some extent, diseases of the eye or even the liver is because those tissues are easier to introduce gene-editing molecules into. With Scribe Therapeutics, we’re looking at opportunities to use CRISPR for neurodegenerative diseases. For those disorders, the technology obviously needs to be very robust and very safe. It also has to get into brain cells and neural tissue where it can have an impact. We want to make sure that the editing tools are the best they can be and then figure out the best way to introduce them into the brain. That’s really the focus of the company.

What do you think is going to be the next big CRISPR advance?

That’s always a hard question. We’ve so much going on in the field. I think one interesting possibility is that we’ll see CRISPR being used not to edit genomes, or at least not to make permanent changes to genomes, but instead to regulate them, to control levels of human proteins that are produced from different genes. This is a newer way of using the CRISPR technology. I think it has a lot of potential to allow control of cells that doesn’t require actual permanent chemical changes being made to the DNA.

After the birth of the CRISPR babies in China in 2018, there’s been a lot of talk around the idea of germline or heritable genome editing. Do you think that should be off-limits to scientists right now?

I don’t think it needs to be completely off-limits. I was pretty pleased with the recent report that came out from the National Academies and the U.K. Royal Society that recommends a kind of a measured approach to developing the technology for use in the human germline. They’re encouraging research to understand how the technology works in embryos. First, the technology will need to be proven safe. Secondly, any clinical use [to establish a pregnancy] would need to be restricted to cases of serious genetic disease where there are few or no other options to treat the disease. I think those are both pretty high bars. Those situations are pretty rare. I personally think there are more viable strategies today, like embryo screening and selection in an IVF (in vitro fertilization) clinic, rather than using genome editing.

The report you mentioned also calls for “extensive societal dialogue” before countries decide to permit the use of heritable human genome editing. You’ve talked in the past about public engagement around CRISPR. How do we educate and engage the public about CRISPR?

Yeah, that’s really critical. I think the media has an important role to play in terms of large-scale education. Interactive media, like videos and documentaries, can also help. The challenge of course is making sure that the science is right.

How do we make sure that the public’s voice is heard in regard to how CRISPR is used?

It’s a really important question. It’s a challenge because, on one hand, I think it’s critical to have more public engagement in important decisions like this about how technology is used. On the other hand, that requires a level of understanding about the technology that the average person might not have or maybe doesn’t want to have. So, I think it’s important to have different formats and forums for encouraging discussion. We’ve already seen this with CRISPR in some way. On the one hand, there are highly technical meetings that include discussion of ethical and societal issues from a pretty detailed technical standpoint. But there are also increasingly conferences and events that don’t get into the weeds of the science per se, but they spend a lot more effort thinking through CRISPR’s implications and its different uses. Inviting people who are nonspecialists to engage in those meetings has been really effective.

Other than medicine, where else do you think CRISPR could be transformative?

Agriculture is the other area where it’s going to be impactful. We’re already seeing a lot of use of CRISPR in making plants that have genetic changes that can enable things like better crop yield, resistance to drought, higher levels of nutritional value, things like that. I think that’s really exciting, and there’s clearly a lot more to be done there. That’s likely to be the area where we’ll see a broader impact in the near term.

Given CRISPR’s potential for misuse, how do you think it should be regulated?

Fortunately, I think there’s quite a good regulatory framework in the United States and in most places that have major research operations that can serve to regulate the use of CRISPR. That really goes back to the 1970s [at the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA], when voluntary guidelines were put in place for using some of these early tools of molecular biology, like molecular cloning. That being said, as we discussed, there are certain applications of CRISPR like in human embryos, where I think there needs to be special attention.

Who are the CRISPR scientists you really admire?

Many. It’s become a huge field. It used to be tiny, and now it’s vast. One is Luciano Marraffini. He’s a scientist at Rockefeller University. He works on the fundamentals of CRISPR biology and understanding how it works in bacteria as an immune system. Jill Banfield at Berkeley is continuing to do work on bacteria that are not cultured in the lab but are growing in various environmental niches. She was one of the very early discoverers of CRISPR systems and bacteria, and she continues to find a lot of new ones. In plant biology, I really like the work of Pamela Ronald at the University of California, Davis. She’s doing work primarily in rice, where they are using CRISPR to make modifications to the rice genome that I think are going to be really important as rice farmers face the challenges of climate change. On the biomedical side, I’m really excited about the work of Charles Gersbach at Duke University.

What’s next for you?

CRISPR is going to keep us busy for a while. There are still a lot of fundamental questions about how these pathways operate that I really like to try to answer. Jill Banfield is a close collaborator of ours, and she continues to supply us with many, many new CRISPR pathways that we’re excited to investigate. We’re also really interested in genome editing in natural microbial communities. I think there’s a really interesting opportunity to be able to manipulate certain microbes. I think those are areas where I’ll be focusing my efforts in the near term.


WRITTEN BY
Emily Mullin
Staff writer at OneZero and Future Human, where I cover biotechnology and genetic privacy. I also teach science writing at Johns Hopkins.

Future Human is a science publication from Medium about the survival of our species. It is run by the OneZero editorial team, which also publishes stories about major forces in technology through its namesake publication and stories about gadgets on Debugger.

NASA Finally Made a Toilet for Women

The new lavatory is a symbol of the agency’s growing recognition of female astronauts’ needs.

MARINA KORENOCTOBER 12, 2020

NASA / SHUTTERSTOCK / THE ATLANTIC

Buzz Aldrin remembers feeling “buoyant” and “full of goose pimples” when he stepped onto the moon in 1969, becoming the second person to touch the surface of another world. The view was magnificent.

The first thing he did was examine the ground beneath his boots. “I immediately looked down at my feet and became intrigued with the peculiar properties of the lunar dust,” the Apollo astronaut recalled in one of his memoirs. “If one kicks sand on a beach, it scatters in numerous directions with some grains traveling farther than others. On the moon the dust travels exactly and precisely as it goes in various directions, and every grain of it lands very nearly the same distance away.”


The second thing he did was pee.

Aldrin, the first person to urinate on the moon (into a special collection device worn around his waist) is one of hundreds of astronauts who, in between doing extraordinary things, have done the most mundane thing. In the nearly 60 years since human beings first went to space, engineers have worked carefully on the technology inside spacesuits, shuttles, and capsules to accommodate this very earthly act, and the effort continues today: Astronauts are preparing to install a brand-new toilet on the International Space Station soon.

NASA spent $23 million on the Universal Waste Management System, which might make it the most expensive toilet in the universe. The privy represents the state of the art in NASA’s off-world bathroom facilities. It is smaller and lighter than the old version. It’s easier to maintain, which is handy because when a space toilet springs a leak, astronauts can’t call in a plumber. Its metal pipes are now 3-D-printed, and still capable of withstanding the acid used to treat astronauts’ urine before it becomes their drinking water.

Read: A very relatable moment on the International Space Station

But the most important new feature is the one that allows astronauts to do something that the rest of us mostly take for granted on Earth. There’s no artful way to put this, so I’m just going to say it: The current toilets on the International Space Station aren’t conducive to peeing and pooping at the same time.

This matters more for the women in the astronaut corps, for whom the two bodily functions can be trickier to separate. For years, women astronauts have been carefully positioning themselves over the bowl, exchanging tips with their colleagues on best practices, and trying to make do with hardware that wasn’t built for their bodies.

Space toilets don’t look quite like the one in your bathroom. With the older latrine models on the ISS, astronauts urinate into a handheld funnel and defecate into a device that looks like a smaller version of a traditional toilet seat. A fan inside each apparatus suctions the waste away from the body, an important function in an environment where everything floats. The urine is transformed into the next day’s water, while the feces are compressed in a removable container and eventually dispatched on a special trash spacecraft that burns up in the atmosphere in the majestic manner of a shooting star. It’s careful business for men and women alike. Hold the funnel too close to the body, cutting off airflow, and liquid can end up pooling near the top. Lose contact with the seat, and waste might escape. Forget to turn on those fans before you start, and things can get messy.The current bathroom in the American segment of the International Space Station (JACK FISCHER / NASA)

This configuration is more challenging for women, who more commonly perform “dual ops,” a popular NASA euphemism for simultaneous evacuation. “It’s a little bit difficult to be on the seat and still get the funnel where it needs to go,” Jessica Meir, a NASA astronaut, told me. Special instructors train the astronauts on how to use and repair the toilet, in the same building at Houston’s Johnson Space Center where astronauts practice spacewalking around a replica of the station inside a swimming pool. (They wear diapers for that activity, in rehearsals and during the real thing.)

Meir said the training is crucial for understanding the old toilets’ plumbing, but the best advice for actually using them comes from her fellow astronauts. When Meir flew to the ISS last year, her best friend, Christina Koch, was already there. Koch showed her how to situate herself and which handrails and foot restraints helped most. “I actually found that I could do it with the existing toilet, even though other females haven’t been able to. So, definitely some anatomical differences, or maybe just some technique differences,” Meir said. “I was so relieved to realize that I could do it, because I was just like, This is going to be really annoying if I can’t do it.”

The newest lavatory was designed specifically with female anatomy in mind. In this way, the Universal Waste Management System is more than a toilet. It is a symbol of a changing American space program that for its first two decades took only men to space. Although men still make up the majority of NASA’s astronaut workforce, there are more women astronauts than ever before, and the agency has recognized that it must adapt its technology to meet their needs. “It’s about time,” Nicole Stott, a retired NASA astronaut who flew two missions to the space station, told me.

NASA consulted women astronauts in the design for the new system, including Stott. While the basic setup is unchanged, engineers have “completely recontoured” the urine funnel to better accommodate the female anatomy, according to Melissa McKinley, the project manager for the effort. They also made changes to the positioning of both the urine funnel and the toilet seat, allowing women to more comfortably use them at the same time. As an added bonus, astronauts don’t have to turn on the toilet before relieving themselves; as soon as they remove the urine funnel from its cradle or lift the toilet lid, the fan kicks on.

It might seem baffling, even a little absurd, that the organization that put men on the moon more than half a century ago did not, until this year, enable them to go number one and number two at the same time. But the problem originates in that very achievement: NASA put men on the moon. The existing toilet on the American side of the space station was developed in the 1990s, using a Soviet model. The gender balance of astronauts in the United States and Russia was even more lopsided at the time than it is today, so male anatomy and needs drove the design. Astronauts used a similar design on the space shuttles, which delivered the hardware to assemble the ISS.

Read: If everyone left the International Space Station

Stott and Meir likened the clumsy toilet design to NASA’s supply of spacesuits for astronauts working outside the space station. Last year, the agency was forced to reshuffle a spacewalking assignment because there weren’t enough spacesuits on board to fit Koch and Anne McClain, who both wore a size medium. A male astronaut replaced McClain on the spacewalk. NASA’s current spacesuit wardrobe, much of it designed in the 1970s, was meant to be customizable, with mix-and-match parts. Production on the smallest sizes was halted in the ’90s because of budget cuts, and because NASA had never planned a two-woman spacewalk before 2019, the ISS simply wasn’t prepared with enough garments for its female crew members.


NASA’s vision for the next line of spacesuits is tailored for the more diverse group of astronauts that the agency hopes will return to the moon later in this decade. NASA wants to send the first woman to the moon as part of its Artemis program for lunar exploration, named for Apollo’s sister in Greek mythology. The latest space toilet technology is expected to follow her there; in addition to the toilet NASA sent to the ISS, the agency created one for the capsule, still in development, that will deliver her crew to the moon.

As a beloved, best-selling children’s book put it, everyone poops—but it’s far more interesting when an astronaut does it. There’s an entire catalog of YouTube videos of astronauts describing how they do mundane things in space. People want to know how they brush their teeth, wash their hair, sleep, exercise, and even cry in microgravity. In space, the tedious tasks of human existence become curiosities.

And although astronauts can’t give as realistic a walk-through of their lavatories as they do of the onboard gym and bunks, they’re willing to talk about the bathroom process, sometimes even eager to. Consider Michael Collins, one of the Apollo 11 astronauts, who remained in orbit around the moon while Aldrin and Neil Armstrong descended to the surface. In the decades since the mission, reporters have bombarded Collins with questions about what it was like to be so alone, even though he’s always insisted that he was just fine. When I asked him last year whether he wishes people would ask about something else, he replied with: “How do you go potty in space?” No one had ever asked him that, and he was eager to reveal the answer: “Carefully.”



MARINA KOREN is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

MORE STORIES


Why Women Weren't Allowed to Be Astronauts MARINA KOREN


The Outdated Language of Space Travel MARINA KOREN


The Astronaut Wives Know Exactly What to Expect MARINA KOREN

Why We’re Fighting for a World Without ICE
Under the cover of post-9/11 antiterrorism, the Department of Homeland Security has unleashed a carceral assault on immigrant families and children


UnitedWeDream.org





This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, which comprises 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.

By Cristina Jiménez Moreta and Cynthia Garcia

Immigrant youth and our families courageously left everything behind in our countries of origin to move to the United States. Some of us fled poverty, military coups, violence, and wars, while others simply wanted to go after a better life. While adapting to a new place, we’ve experienced some of the worst this country has to offer: workplace exploitation, wage theft, racial profiling, fear of deportation, and police violence. But as part of the immigrant youth movement at United We Dream (UWD), we’ve also experienced the power of people coming together, taking action, and winning change.

The seeds of our movement began with the idea that we have to protect and defend our families from deportation and fight for our right to access higher education. In the early 2000s, tens of thousands of undocumented students were graduating from high school each year. All of us lived with the fear of deportation and the looming possibility that our families could be torn apart, while simultaneously facing barriers to college education, exploitation at work, and a future filled with uncertainty.

This fear of deportation was heightened after September 11, 2001, as we witnessed how immigration enforcement and national security were being conflated in new and troubling ways. In the name of fighting terrorism, President George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002, within which immigration and immigrants were considered matters of national security. This not only led to increased racial profiling and xenophobia, but as a result, local and federal law enforcement were targeting Muslims, Black immigrants, and non-Muslim immigrants of color at higher rates, often leading to detention and/or deportation.

Nationwide, thousands would be implicated by the post-9/11 enforcement regime, which produced an expanding infrastructure that supported local and federal law enforcement efforts to criminalize, target, detain, and deport immigrants. Within this infrastructure, we saw the increase in racial profiling, greater policing of Black and Brown communities, enhanced militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, and the implementation of racist federal policies, such as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which targeted immigrants from 25 countries.

Among the thousands who were affected by the post-9/11 regime were Kamal Essaheb and Walter Barrientos in New York and Marie Gonzalez in Missouri — three young undocumented immigrants who were threatened with deportation.

Their deportation cases spurred some of our first advocacy efforts that would eventually carry us forward in later forming UWD in 2008. Together, along with activists and organizers from across the country, we mobilized people to write letters and telephone elected officials to demand that the government allow Kamal, Walter, and Marie to stay in the United States, winning extensive media attention. Although Marie’s parents were deported, our organizing efforts stopped the deportations of Marie, Walter, and Kamal. This was a bittersweet moment in our fight to protect immigrants, as it further exposed the human impact of the enforcement regime in not only deporting immigrants but also tearing apart families.


In the early 2000s, tens of thousands of undocumented students were graduating from high school each year. All of us lived with the fear of deportation and the looming possibility that our families could be torn apart, while simultaneously facing barriers to college education, exploitation at work, and a future filled with uncertainty.

This moment also taught us that people closest to the pain are closest to the solutions our communities need. At the time, undocumented immigrants publicly fighting against deportations were unheard of. Yet, in defiance of conventional wisdom, undocumented youth and their families launched campaigns to share their stories, pressure those with decision-making power, and win deportation relief. It was clear that our movement had the power to create real change.

This was even more evident in 2012, when the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was created as a direct result of our organizing efforts. Under the Obama administration, enforcement programs and collaboration between ICE and local police were aggressively expanded, leading to an increase in the number of immigrants being detained and deported even for minor violations, such as traffic infractions. Under the political calculation that ramping up enforcement would bring members of Congress from both parties to the negotiating table, the Obama administration deported a record number of immigrants from the United States. During Obama’s eight years in office, more than 3 million individuals and families were deported and separated from their loved ones. His administration failed to pass legislative immigration reforms, while the enforcement regime steadily grew in resources and power.

As organizers and directly affected people, we recognized this as a moment of leverage: By sharing our stories, we could pressure President Obama to take action. Our movement successfully created the conditions that led President Obama to implement DACA, which protected close to 800,000 young immigrants from deportation. The program continues to be the most significant policy breakthrough and victory on immigration in almost three decades. By sharing our stories and leading direct action and civil disobedience to get ICE agents out of our communities, we recognized the power we had in winning protection from deportation through policy changes.

This and other victories have strengthened our movement and brought hope to our communities — but as we have seen, mass detention and deportation have not stopped. ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the two agencies primarily responsible for immigration enforcement, have continued to carry out a racist and white supremacist agenda, targeting immigrants — particularly Black and Brown immigrants — for detention and deportation with little oversight or accountability. Clearly our fight is not over.

Year after year, failure at the immigration-policy negotiation table has been followed by near-silent acceptance of growing annual budgets and authority for ICE and CBP. Together, the two agencies employ more than 80,000 people, with a massive budget of $25.3 billion in 2020 ($8.4 billion for ICE and $16.9 billion for CBP), which is more than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. Yet, while resources for the deportation force have grown, schools and hospitals in our communities often remain underfunded and suffer from a lack of federal support.

The deportation force of ICE and CBP, built by administrations on both sides of the aisle, has been completely unleashed under the Trump administration. ICE and CBP have carried out a list of attacks against immigrant communities, including putting children in cages; targeting immigrants in their workplaces, schools, places of worship, hospitals, and homes; and breaking down doors and abducting parents from their children. But the Trump administration hasn’t stopped there.

Throughout his four years in office, Trump consistently tried to dismantle DACA, reduce refugee programs, and detain and deport an increasing number of immigrants. Under his administration, we have seen 57 immigrants, including children, die in detention camps, the deportation of a woman who served as a key witness into reports of sexual assault and harassment inside ICE facilities, reports of forced hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women, and eight immigrants who have died as a result of Covid-19 while in ICE custody.

Facing these and a number of other attacks, UWD has fought tirelessly to protect and demand justice for immigrant communities. Over the past decade, UWD alone fought on behalf of more than 1,000 people threatened by deportation. Facing hundreds of calls per week on our community “Migra Watch” free hotline, UWD community organizers responded to immigrant families reporting interactions with ICE and CBP agents and needing help when their friends and loved ones faced detention and deportation.

In one instance, Tania, a cancer survivor in Georgia, was taken to a detention camp after a traffic stop. ICE agents kept Tania locked away for four months, away from her children and the cancer treatment she needed to live. UWD has fought on behalf of individuals like Hector, who was taken away after being stopped for expired tags on his license plate, and high school students like Dennis, who was dragged away by ICE agents after reporting being bullied at school.

Our history and the present moment have shown us that the risk of harm, detention, and deportation will always exist wherever police and federal law enforcement do. Our vision is for all people in this country, regardless of immigration status, to be able to live freely, with full dignity, and thrive. To get there, we must unite in the larger struggle against white supremacy and racism, which are rooted in interlocking systems of policing, mass incarceration, and immigration enforcement that, by design, target and further dehumanize immigrants, especially people of color.

At the same time, we must also acknowledge the historic erasure of Black and Indigenous people from immigration conversations and center these communities in our fight for immigrant justice. The United States’ legacy of genocide and colonialism cannot be ignored, as the impact of this continues to be felt today. We have seen indigenous immigrants die as a direct result of the U.S. immigration system’s failure to provide interpretation and translation services to immigrants who speak indigenous languages. In 2018, two children from indigenous Maya communities in Guatemala died in CBP custody after not receiving proper medical attention, as medical services were not translated in Q’eqchi’ and Chuj, the two indigenous languages that the children and their families spoke.

This is why, over the past decade, UWD leaders have made the demand of abolition and justice for all central to our vision, work, and movement strategy. Grounded in our lived experience, we know that ICE and local police work together to racially profile immigrants. For many in our communities, a traffic stop or any other contact with local police is the first entry point into the deportation pipeline.

Thus, when we call for the abolition of ICE, we are also calling for the abolition of enforcement on all levels and the systems that support it, from detention facilities to prisons. The abolition of ICE is inherently tied to the abolition of all other forms of enforcement and incarceration. Hence, UWD stands unequivocally with the Movement for Black Lives and its demands to defund the police, because we know that the police, ICE, and CBP work together to disproportionately target Black and Brown immigrants. We also know that the same people who profit from the mass incarceration of U.S.-born Black and Brown people also profit from immigrant detention and deportation.

We are engaged in a lifelong journey toward racial, gender, and economic justice. With each victory, our sense of what is possible should grow and our understanding of the vulnerabilities of our adversaries should deepen. A world where our communities do not have to live with the fear of deportation and detention is possible. A world in which we and others in the movement have abolished ICE — and where the safety, health, education, and well-being of our communities is a priority. We have witnessed and participated in a movement of undocumented people who have transformed the politics and policy of immigration with a bold vision of freedom and dignity for all people, regardless of immigration status. That movement has proven that when we follow the leadership and vision of those closest to the pain and injustice, a new world is possible.



Cynthia Garcia is an out, queer, undocumented womxn living in Oklahoma City. She serves as the national campaigns manager for community protection at United We Dream, where she runs a nationwide hotline of support for immigrants whose family members have been abducted by ICE agents and teaches them how to organize and fight back. Cynthia is herself protected from deportation because of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Cristina Jiménez Moreta is a community organizer, strategist, and freedom fighter who is a co-founder of United We Dream (UWD). Cristina migrated to Queens, New York, from Ecuador with her family at the age of 13 seeking a better life and grew up undocumented. She is the former executive director of UWD. Under her leadership, UWD grew into a powerful grassroots network of 800,000 members across 28 states.

Fix America by Undoing Decades of Privatization


Investing in public infrastructure should be at the center of a 21st-century civil-rights agenda.OCTOBER 11, 2020

K. Sabeel Rahman

  

GETTY / THE ATLANTIC


As the covid-19 pandemic continues into the fall, the Trump administration has ruled out any further action on a federal relief package. Meanwhile, state and local governments, lacking federal support, are considering deep cuts to budgets and public services. These measures reflect a deep problem in American policy and culture: the systematic undermining of public infrastructure.



When I refer to public infrastructure, I mean something much more expansive than roads and bridges; I mean the full range of goods, services, and investments needed for communities to thrive: physical utilities such as water, parks, and transit; basics such as housing, child care, and health care; and economic safety-net supports such as food stamps and unemployment insurance. But under America’s reigning ideology, public infrastructure like this is seen as costly, inefficient, outdated, and low-quality, while private alternatives are valorized as more dynamic, efficient, and modern. This ideology is also highly racialized. Universal services open to a multiracial public are vilified, coded in dog-whistle politics as an undeserved giveaway to communities of color at the expense of white constituents. The result has been a systematic defunding of public infrastructure since the 1970s.

Read: Privatization is changing America’s relationship with its physical stuff

Now under the extreme pressures of the pandemic and the economic collapse, the true costs of this underinvestment have become appallingly clear. As the country looks at how to respond to both the recent demands for racial justice and the needs of survival and rebuilding from the COVID-19 crisis, any recovery agenda will have to overcome these ideological and institutional attacks on the idea of public infrastructure, and commit to investing more dollars into our public infrastructure, dismantling racialized barriers to access, and embracing an economic narrative that defends these public goods.

On an economic score alone, massive investments in public infrastructure would pay off. Every dollar invested in transit infrastructure generates at least $3.70 in returns through new jobs, reduced congestion, and increased productivity, without accounting for the environmental and health benefits. For each dollar invested in early-childhood education, the result is $8.60 worth of economic benefit largely through reductions in crime and poverty. A universal health-care system would save Americans more than $2 trillion in health-care costs (even accounting for the increased public expenditure that would be needed) while securing access to life-saving care for more than 30 million Americans. The fact that federal and state governments fail to make these investments is not a matter of limited resources, but rather of skewed priorities. The 2017 Trump tax cuts of $1.9 trillion sent most of its gains to corporations and the wealthiest Americans; the United States has spent more than $820 billion on the Iraq War since 2003, and hundreds of billions every year to fund the prison-industrial complex.


Any 21st-century civil-rights and economic agenda must involve a massive shift in our public investments. The human cost of the failure to invest in these crucial social goods falls disproportionately on Black and brown communities. In the midst of the current economic crisis, more than a quarter of Black and Latino households report missing their last rent payment, and more than one-fifth of Black and Latino households are food insecure. Our public-investment decisions reflect who and what we value: Too often, the decision to underinvest in public infrastructure has stemmed from a desire to restrict access to those goods and services for people of color, in an attempt to preserve the benefits of public infrastructure for wealthier and whiter communities.

The public provision of certain services, and universal access to them, has been a central fault line in the long quest for economic and racial inclusion—and for democracy. In the 19th century, for example, as the industrial revolution began to transform the economy, local judges and reformers became concerned with the problem of private actors controlling access to new infrastructural services such as water, electricity, or transportation systems. If control remained in private hands, owners could employ arbitrary, profit-driven policies that left individuals and communities utterly dependent on those owners’ benevolence and good will.

Eric Klinenberg: Worry less about crumbling roads, more about crumbling libraries

The response of reformers was to imagine a radical alternative: public oversight and control of these utilities, if not outright municipalization. This “sewer socialism,” at the state and municipal levels, led to the first electric, water, and transportation utilities. Over time, the idea of the public utility became the forerunner of the modern administrative and regulatory state, as state officials pioneered public-utility regulation over other necessities, including milk, ice, and banking. Practically as soon as public utilities and other public services emerged, they became the heart of the struggle for racial equity. After the Civil War, Congress briefly seized the opportunity to advance a variety of foundational civil-rights provisions. A hostile Supreme Court invalidated these efforts, helping usher in a century of Jim Crow segregation—until the civil-rights movement vindicated the aspiration for desegregation and equal access to public goods.


But even formal desegregation has not assured equitable access to public infrastructure. Governments, usually at the prompting of coalitions of business interests, wealthy Americans, and white voters, have restricted access to these services and systems through a range of other hidden strategies. Austerity and privatization have driven the defunding of public infrastructure—even as wealthier and whiter communities have maintained access to their own private versions of these systems. Schools are the perfect example: The shift to desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education prompted vociferous efforts by white communities to relocate to more homogenous suburbs, while civil rights made conservative appeals for lower taxes and deregulation more potent as “public” goods came to be seen as racially inclusive goods. More broadly, the rise of conventional anti-government and anti-tax rhetoric has been more politically effective since the late 20th century for this very reason: Corporate interests committed to deregulation made common cause with opponents of desegregation to form a shared anti-government coalition that has powered the modern conservative movement. These measures effectively ensured that wealthier and whiter communities could maintain preferential access to parks, schools, and other municipal infrastructure without sharing them with the wider multiracial public. Meanwhile, the trend toward onerous bureaucratic requirements for enrollment into safety-net programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance reflects paternalistic and racialized attitudes against beneficiaries of these programs, and has further winnowed away access.


What, then, is the way forward? First, the public needs to broaden its conceptions of public goods and infrastructure. Beyond roads and bridges, reformers should focus on those services and systems that are essential for full-fledged membership and well-being, that expand the capabilities and capacities of individuals and communities, and where leaving the provision in private hands would create too great a risk of exclusion or unfair, arbitrary, and extractive pricing. Concretely, this means focusing on two types of public infrastructure in particular: foundational back-end services such as water, electricity, mail, credit, broadband, and the like; and the safety net and systems for community care, including health care, child care, public schools, and more.

Second, we need to ensure that these infrastructures are, in fact, public. That means subjecting them to stringent regulations ensuring quality, nondiscrimination, fair pricing, and equitable access. It might mean outright public provision—either through a public option as in the health-care debate, or through outright nationalization or municipalization. And it means creating oversight to ensure racial and gender equity in access, just as the Civil Rights Act led to the creation of administrative offices charged with preventing discrimination and resegregation in access to services including hospital health care.


Bobbi Dempsey: When middle-class values determine what’s essential

Many reformers and social movements today have advanced proposals that evince this broader recommitment to public infrastructure. In the face of the COVID-19 crisis, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations have proposed an “Essential Workers Bill of Rights” to fill gaps in access to the safety net and a broader push to create a public-care infrastructure spanning child care and elder care as part of the new post-pandemic social contract. The Medicare for All debate is fundamentally about public options and the public provision of health care; other advocates have also proposed public options and the public provision of basic banking and credit systems. Critics of big tech, meanwhile, have proposed that information platforms such as Facebook be regulated like public utilities as a way to fight the proliferation of disinformation and extractive data mining, an approach that also addresses some First Amendment concerns about online-speech regulation. The climate-justice movement has, over time, embraced proposals to convert energy utilities into more democratic utilities with mandates for assuring equity.


Inevitably, these proposals will crash into old frames and rhetoric. “Can we afford it?” “How do we know public versions will actually be high quality and effective, instead of corrupt, costly, and hapless?” These ready retorts are more about how deep our anti-public conventional wisdom runs, and less about reality. As the trillions of dollars of crisis spending in the early months of COVID-19 highlight, we have ample resources to fund extensive public infrastructure. The Movement for Black Lives’ demands for defunding the police turn in part on exactly this point: The billions we spent on mass incarceration and the policing of Black and brown communities dwarf what we spend on positive public infrastructure; radically reallocating our budgetary priorities would transform our economy and society for the better. Nor is the fear of public corruption or failure that compelling: We’ve all seen that the private provision of essential services, including food, health care, and banking, is often predatory, extractive, exclusionary, and not especially efficient. Nevertheless, we should not be Panglossian about the prospects of public provision; real public infrastructure will also require truly democratic, accountable, and responsive administrative bodies.





If we are to survive this crisis—and imagine a more equitable, dynamic economy to come, we must start with a recommitment to the value of universal, inclusive public infrastructure. Tens of millions of Americans currently face homelessness, are unable to put food on the table, and lack access to schools or child care or health care, even as the stock market booms and CEOs like Jeff Bezos gain billions in wealth. Instead, we could have an economy where these public needs are fully funded, securing the health and well-being of millions. That alternative future is still possible—should policy makers choose to make it real.



K. SABEEL RAHMAN is the president of the think tank Demos. He is also an associate professor of law at Brooklyn Law School.


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This is the expanded, book-length version of a paper given at a Conference on Hegel, Marx and Global Crisis at the University of Warsaw, Poland, October 22-23, 2012. It is currently available from the AK Press, online catalog: https://www.akpress.org/rupturing-the-dialectic.html Consider this pdf version a "look inside the book" feature, better than that provided by Amazon.com.

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Majority of Gen Z Canadians close to insolvency amid coronavirus pandemic, poll finds

Kerri Breen 

© Global News Files A new poll found that just under half of Canadians are $200 away from insolvency or already insolvent.

Canadians are experiencing the economic effects of COVID-19 very differently — and it largely depends on how vulnerable they were prior to the pandemic, a new poll suggests.

The youngest people in the workforce — those in Generation Z — appear to be struggling the most, according to the poll, which was commissioned by insolvency firm MNP.

Nearly 70 per cent are $200 or less away from insolvency, which includes 39 per cent who are already insolvent, meaning their financial resources aren't enough to cover their current obligations.

Other groups among the hardest hit in the pandemic include renters — 57 per cent who are in that same position — about half of women, and 67 per cent of households earning under $40,000.

"The younger generation, those still with student loans, Z generation ... renters, they're feeling the pinch," said Grant Bazian, president at MNP LTD.

Canada is starting to see a K-shaped recovery, Bazian said.

That's when the economy bounces back after a recession, but instead of the growth being uniform, different sectors and groups recover more quickly than others.

Young people, renters and lower-income Canadians are not the only ones who could be left out of the recovery. Throughout the pandemic, advocates and experts have also highlighted the disparate impact of COVID-19 on seniors, racialized Canadians and those with disabilities.

Read more: Racialized groups in Canada will ‘lose’ in the post-pandemic economy. Experts aren’t surprised

The poll findings come from the MNP Consumer Debt Index, a quarterly survey that takes the temperature of Canadians' finances. The index is currently at its second-lowest result of 94 points (the weaker the score, the worse Canadians are feeling about their debt).

Overall, the poll found that just under half of Canadians are $200 away from insolvency or already insolvent.

That figure is on the rise, having increased four points since July, the last time the poll was published.

Canada's bankruptcy and insolvency statistics suggest the billions in government supports rolled out this year are saving people from having to take such action — at least in the short term. In August, consumer filings were down more than 40 per cent compared with the previous year.

Federal income supports have recently been extended for many, and jobs are recovering. Canada added 378,000 positions last month, a stronger result than economists expected but still 720,000 jobs shy of pre-pandemic levels.

Read more: Canada adds 378K jobs in September, beating expectations

Insolvency trustees across the country, however, are starting to hear from more people who are struggling, Bazian said. He also expects an uptick in inquires come tax time, because benefits like CERB are taxable.

His advice is to get in touch with a professional to learn about the options before your finances reach a tipping point.

"Reaching out earlier — sooner than later — will help people decide what course of action take when it gets really bad for them," he said.

The MNP Consumer Debt Index was compiled by Ipsos on behalf of MNP LTD between Sept. 1 and 3, 2020. For this survey, a sample of 2,001 Canadian adults were interviewed. Weighting was then employed to balance demographics to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ±2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled.

Italian woman in Vatican financial scandal investigation arrested

ROME (Reuters) - A 39-year-old Italian woman was arrested on Tuesday in connection with the Vatican's latest financial scandal, police said.

© Reuters/GUGLIELMO MANGIAPANE FILE PHOTO: 

Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu speaks to the media in Rome

Cecilia Marogna had worked for Cardinal Angelo Becciu, a top Vatican official who was fired by Pope Francis last month and accused of embezzlement and nepotism. Becciu has denied all
wrongdoing.

An Italian finance police official told Reuters Marogna was arrested in Milan. Italian media reports said she was arrested under an international warrant issued by Vatican magistrates.

In recent days, Italian media have run interviews in which Marogna said she had received 500,000 euros ($587,350) from Becciu to run a "parallel diplomacy" to help missionaries in conflict zones. She has denied wrongdoing in the interviews.

Her purported work for the Vatican's Secretariat of State, where Becciu held the number two position until 2018, was not previously known.

Becciu's lawyer Fabio Viglione, has said the cardinal knew Marogna but that his dealings with her had been "exclusively about institutional matters".

Marogna, who like Becciu is from Sardinia, has said that the funds she allegedly received from Becciu went through a company she started in Slovenia.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

India frees top Kashmir politician after more than a year in detention

By Fayaz Bukhari 

© Reuters/Fayaz Kabli FILE PHOTO: Mehbooba Mufti, president of People's Democratic Party, speaks after police stopped her protest march in Srinagar

SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - Indian authorities released a top Kashmiri politician late on Tuesday, the last major leader held since August last year when the federal government withdrew the troubled region’s autonomy and arrested politicians.

© Reuters/Danish Ishmail FILE PHOTO: Mufti president of PDP speaks with media during a protest rally in Srinagar

Mehbooba Mufti, a former Chief Minister of the state, was released late on Tuesday, government spokesperson Rohit Kansal said on Twitter. He did not give a reason for her release.

A government order seen by Reuters said Mufti's detention under the Public Safety Act, which allows for detention without trial for up to two years, was being revoked with immediate effect.

© Reuters/DANISH ISMAIL FILE PHOTO: Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti speaks during an interview with Reuters at her residence in Srinagar

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government said at the time that ending Kashmir’s special status was necessary for closer integration of the Muslim majority territory into the rest of India.

The government imposed a communication blackout with mobiles phones, internet links and landlines down and detained scores of people including Mufti to prevent large scale protests from erupting over the loss of autonomy for Kashmir.

Top politicians Farooq Abdullah and his son Omar Abdullah, both former Chief Ministers of the state, were released earlier this year.

Mufti's daughter had filed a habeas corpus petition in the country's Supreme Court, challenging her mother’s detention under the Public Safety Act. The case is scheduled to come up for hearing on Thursday.

(Reporting by Fayaz Bukhari, writing by Shilpa Jamkhandikar; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Women in states with fewer reproductive health restrictions have healthier babies, study finds

By Lauren Mascarenhas, CNN 

Women in states with fewer reproductive health restrictions deliver healthier babies, at least as measured by birth weight, researchers reported Tuesday.

© Ian Waldie/Getty Images AsiaPac/Getty Images SYDNEY, NSW - JUNE 07: A pregnant woman holds her stomach June 7, 2006 in Sydney, Australia. Australia is currently enjoying a baby boom, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics registering a 2.4% increase in births from 2004 to 2005, which represents the highest number of births since 1992. The Australian Federal Government has been encouraging people to have more babies, with financial incentives and the slogan by treasurer Peter Costello to "have one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country". The Federal Government has identified falling fertility rates and the ageing population as long-term problems for Australia's growth and prosperity. (Photo by Ian Waldie/Getty Images)

When states did less to restrict a woman's reproductive health rights, babies were more likely to be born at healthier weights, the researchers reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The researchers suggest that systematic racism may be at play.

"The U.S. has a long history of oppressive reproductive policies and ideologies that results in the devaluation of certain lives, mainly racial/ethnic minorities," the research team wrote.

May Sudhinaraset, an associate professor at the UCLA School of Public Health, and colleagues analyzed the records from 3.9 million births across the US in 2016.

They assessed the restrictiveness of each state's reproductive health policies by looking at indicators such as mandatory waiting periods for abortion services, expanded eligibility for Medicaid family planning services, and the percentage of women living in counties with abortion providers.

The researchers found that that women living in states with the least restrictive reproductive health policies were 7% less likely to deliver a baby with low birth weight than those in the most restrictive states. Black women in those states were 8% less likely to have a child with low birth weight than their counterparts in the most restrictive states.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, babies born under 5 lb. 8 oz. are considered to have low birth weight. This can place some babies at greater risk for health problems, including breathing issues and infection.

"We know that compared to normal weight babies, low birth weight babies are more at risk for a number of different problems, including developing infections in the first few days of their lives, to more long-term outcomes, like delayed social development or learning disabilities," Sudhinaraset told CNN.

The study shows that the birth weights of babies born to Black women who had themselves been born outside of the US appear to be less impacted by restrictive policies. These women "may have had less time exposed to the historical and contemporary features of structural racism that restrict access to health promoting resources and opportunities among people of color in the U.S.," the researchers note.

The team categorized 20 states, including Texas, Colorado and Louisiana, as having the most restrictions on reproductive rights and called for further research into the impact of reproductive health policies as they change over time.

"Reproductive rights policies can inhibit women from achieving their full health potential, and that in turn can cause chronic stress that results in worse birth outcomes," Sudhinaraset said.

She added that these policies can play a large role in determining whether women have access to reproductive health services that they critically need.

"This study really speaks to the real and important ways that reproductive rights policies are critical social determinants of health," Sudhinaraset said. "To really address issues of health inequity, we need to enact policies for women to be able to make decisions for their own bodies, and their lives and their children, if they want to have them."

© Elsevier This map indicates the reproductive rights policy climate for each state plus the District of Columbia in the year prior to when women gave birth in 2016 (i.e., preconception year). Data were compiled in 2014 and 2015.

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY 

'We Need to Take Away Children': Startling Details from Internal Report on Family Separation Under Trump

Diane Herbst 


Trump administration officials have denied that they systematically carried out a policy of separating migrant children — including infants and toddlers — from their parents or adult family members who had arrived at the southern border to enter the country illegally.

© Provided by People John Moore/Getty

But a draft of a forthcoming report by the Justice Department's internal watchdog, obtained by The New York Times and NBC News, indicates they were not telling the truth.

In May 2018, public outcry immediately began to grow over President Donald Trump's newly announced "zero tolerance" policy of seeking federal prosecutions for all migrants who illegally cross into the U.S., which is a misdemeanor, rather than seeking immigration proceedings against them.© John Moore/Getty “Don’t bring them in," one prosecutor wrote in a note. "Won’t give amnesty to people with kids”

Around the same time, five federal prosecutors stated they were "deeply concerned" about the practice of family separation and tried to push back against the order, reports the Times, citing the draft from the Justice Department's inspector general.

Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions conveyed a message to the prosecutors from Trump: "We need to take away children," Sessions said, according the draft of the report as described by the Times.

The paper further reports that one prosecutor scribbled this note: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”

A week later, according to the Times, Rod Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, had a call with the same prosecutors in which he "went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute the two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants."

NBC News reported that, according to the draft report, a federal prosecutor told his colleagues at one point that Rosenstein also said "per the [attorney general's] policy, should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child."

By that June, some medical experts were calling the separations "child abuse" while the United Nations declared the practice was illegal, violating the children's human rights.

At the time, federal government officials publicly denied they actively separated families.

On June 17, 2018, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has largely borne the blame for the policy, falsely tweeted: “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”

The draft of the watchdog report not only refutes this, it undercuts Sessions' previous public comments that the Justice Department was not so directly involved in the separation policy and was more focused on prosecutions.

Rather, the inspector general found that Justice officials "were aware that full implementation of the zero-tolerance policy would result in criminal referrals by [the Department of Homeland Security] of adults who enter the country illegally with children and that the prosecution of these family-unit adults would result in children being separated from families," according to the Times.

The paper reports that various government officials viewed the separation policy as a successful deterrent of the migrants Trump had campaigned against stopping.

© Provided by People Win McNamee/Getty Jeff Sessions (left) and Rod Rosenstein


The policy, in place until a federal judge ordered the end of the practice on June 26, 2018, resulted in the separation of more than 4,200 children since 2017, according to the ACLU, which has filed lawsuits to stop family separations.

The youngest child was 4 months old, according to the Times.

The inspector general's draft report described the Justice Department as having a "single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions" which "came at the expense of careful and effective implementation of the policy, especially with regard to prosecution of family-unit adults and the resulting child separations," according to the Times.

A Justice Department spokeswoman told the Times that the draft it reported on "contains numerous factual errors and inaccuracies."

The spokeswoman also seemed to shift scrutiny back to border officials under Homeland Security: "While D.O.J. is responsible for the prosecutions of defendants, it had no role in tracking or providing custodial care to the children of defendants. Finally, both the timing and misleading content of this leak raise troubling questions about the motivations of those responsible for it.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from PEOPLE.

Sessions declined to speak with the inspector general, though Rosenstein did, according to the Times. In a statement to the paper, Rosenstein insisted that he had "never ordered anyone to prosecute a case.”

“If any United States attorney ever charged a defendant they did not personally believe warranted prosecution, they violated their oath of office,” he said.

According to the Times, the timeline for the watchdog report's release is unclear and it "could change," though the inspector general "had been preparing to release his report since late summer."

President Trump, who campaigned on limiting both legal and illegal immigration, made the border prosecutions and resulting separations a key and widely controversial part of fulfilling that promise — drawing international backlash.

The 86-page draft report contains other revelations.

One government prosecutor, according to the Times, wrote to his supervisors of a pilot program at the border in 2017, predating the more official family separations: “We have now heard of us taking breastfeeding defendant moms away from their infants. I did not believe this until I looked at the duty log.”

Additionally the Times reported that, according to the draft report, a Texas prosecutor told Justice Department officials in 2018 that due to the focus on detaining and prosecuting migrants, Border Patrol missed more serious criminal cases and "sex offenders were released" as a result.