A New Political Force Emerges in Georgia: 

Asian American Voters


Sabrina Tavernise
Wed, November 25, 2020

James Woo, a Korean outreach leader for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, in Norcross, Ga., on Nov. 13, 2020. (Nicole Craine/The New York Times)

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — Four years ago, Maliha Javed, an immigrant from Pakistan, was not paying attention to politics. A community college student in suburban Atlanta, she was busy paying for books and studying for classes. She did not vote that year.

But the past four years changed her. The Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban affected some of her friends. The child separation policy reminded her of living apart from her parents for three years during her own move to the United States. Then, this summer, the discovery that she was pregnant made it final: On Election Day, she marched into the Amazing Grace Lutheran Church near her house and voted for the first time in her life. She chose Joe Biden.

“I want it to be a better country for him to grow up in,” said Javed, who is 24 and is having a boy.

Javed is part of a small but powerful new force in Georgia politics: Asian American voters. She lives in Gwinnett County, Georgia’s second-most populous county and the one with the largest Asian American population. Biden, who narrowly defeated President Donald Trump in Georgia, won Gwinnett County by 18 percentage points, a substantial increase over Hillary Clinton’s performance four years ago and only the second time the county went blue since the 1970s.

The county is also the heart of the only tightly contested House seat in the entire country that Democrats flipped this year — Georgia’s 7th Congressional District. A survey of Asian American early voters in that district found that 41% reported voting for the first time, said Taeku Lee, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped conduct it.

The emergence in Georgia of Asian American voters is a potential bright spot for a Democratic Party counting on demographic changes to bring political wins across the country. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing segment of eligible voters out of the major racial and ethnic groups in the country, according to the Pew Research Center; their numbers, nationally and in Gwinnett County, more than doubled between 2000 and 2020.

Families of Asian descent in the United States come from dozens of countries, but according to Pew, a vast majority of the voting population comes from just six. China, the Philippines and India account for more than half, followed by Vietnam, Korea and Japan.

But interviews with Asian Americans in Gwinnett County showed that their political preferences are fluid. While many voted for Biden, they are hardly a done deal for the Democratic Party. A large portion are socially conservative, often observant Christians and owners of small businesses.

Many new voters were drawn to the presidential race because it had loomed so large in American culture. But that also means they are no guarantee for Democrats in Georgia’s runoffs for two critical U.S. Senate seats in January, in which control of the upper chamber hangs in the balance.

“People are like, ‘What?’” said Cam Ashling, 40, a Democratic activist, referring to new voters’ responses when she raises the runoffs, which she referred to as “a giant uphill battle.”

She added: “We have to try very hard to keep Georgia blue. It is not solid.”

As a group nationally, Asian Americans tend to prefer Democrats, but that masks deep differences by ethnic origin and generation. AAPI Data, a data analytics firm that focuses on Asian Americans, has found that many Vietnamese immigrant voters lean Republican, for instance, while very few Bangladeshi voters do. And American-born Vietnamese voters lean less toward Republicans than do their foreign-born parents.

Two-thirds of all eligible Asian American voters in 2018 were naturalized citizens, according to Pew, the highest ratio of any major racial or ethnic group.

“I would love to be a Republican, but right now they’re just crazy,” said Jae Song, 50, an IT worker who was picking up lunch at Vietvana Pho Noodle House in Duluth, an upscale town in Gwinnett County that is 24% Asian American. Song, a Korean immigrant, said he loved Trump on the economy, but hated him on the coronavirus. His daughter in New York has had racist slurs flung at her. But he said he was also confused by Democrats’ priorities.

He had heard a lot of the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” and he understood that. But this also led him to wonder, “What about us?”

Surveys suggest a substantial increase in Asian American votes this year, a jump that follows the expansion of the group’s population in the state. About 2.5% of Georgia’s voters were Asian American this year, up from 1.6% in 2016.

The Asian American population in Georgia is mixed economically. Some are doctors and upper-income professionals, but others are owners of beauty supply stores, restaurants, mobile phone franchises and laundromats.

James Woo, 35, who immigrated from Seoul to Meridian, Mississippi, in the late 1990s, said Korean immigrants had a saying that whatever the business of the person who picked you up at the airport would become yours, too. His father was picked up by his brother-in-law who owned a beauty supply store. Now Woo’s extended family owns more than two dozen beauty supply stores in Georgia and Louisiana.

In the early years, being Asian American was not easy, and Woo, who moved to Georgia in sixth grade and worked at his parents’ shop on the weekends up through college, had searing experiences of discrimination.

“I saw that growing up, the discrimination, and I don’t want that for my kids,” he said. “I want them to feel like we belong. Because we do. This is our home.”

He said he realized that the way to achieve that was to elect more Asian Americans to office in Georgia. He now works full time as the Korean outreach leader for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, an advocacy group. He said about half of the voters he helped this cycle were voting for the first time.

“For me it’s not about the state turning blue or belonging to one party or another,” he said. “It’s seeing people who look like me with similar backgrounds to mine get elected.”

For years, the few Asian Americans in elected office in Georgia were often Republicans, and organizing was more focused on raising money from economically established immigrant voters than registering working-class immigrants. Nationally, voter participation among Asian Americans has historically been low: In 2016, they had the second-lowest turnout after Hispanics of all major groups.

“Voter participation had always been an iffy question because those communities had not matured politically and the younger generation had not really become active,” said Baoky Vu, former commissioner to George W. Bush’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who lives in DeKalb County.

Today, Asian immigrants have reached a critical mass and their children, entering their 30s and 40s and many of them educated in the United States, are pushing for representation. In Gwinnett County, about 12% of people are of Asian heritage, according to William Frey, senior demographer at the Brookings Institution.

When Stephanie Cho moved to Georgia from California in 2013, “there were lots of Asians but they had very little power,” she said. Cho, who is now the executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, said she remembered walking the halls of the State Legislature and seeing just two Asian Americans: a Republican named Byung J. Pak and a member of his staff.

Now there will be six Asian Americans in the Statehouse, including Michelle Au, a Chinese American doctor who was elected to the state Senate as a Democrat this month, the result of aggressive voter registration and turnout efforts. In this election, Woo put ads in Korean-language newspapers, started chats with dozens of voters on KakaoTalk, an app popular among Korean immigrants, and made announcements at his church.

Bee Nguyen, a Democrat who was elected to Georgia’s House District 89 in 2017, said she only realized just how ignored Asian voters had been in 2016 when she was canvassing for Sam Park, the first openly gay Korean American to run for a State House seat.

“The pattern we saw when we were knocking on doors was that no one had ever talked to these people before,” said Nguyen, 39, who was born in Iowa to Vietnamese refugees.

An important turning point for Asian American voters came in 2018, several Democratic activists said, when Stacey Abrams in her race for governor had a staff member assigned to Asian immigrant communities. Exit polls later showed that 78% of Asian American voters cast their ballots for her.

But not all Asian Americans are Democrats. According to AAPI Data, about a fifth of Korean immigrants in the country voted for Trump in 2016, and a number in Gwinnett County this month said they trusted him more on the economy.

Kyung Baek, 58, a Korean immigrant who sells shoes and cloth flowers in the H Mart in Duluth, said she voted for Trump because she liked his tough talk against Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, whom she sees as a bully, and also because Trump looked past the “smaller issue” of the virus to the “bigger one” of the economy.

“Trump’s concern is big things, not small things,” she said. The economy, she said, is the top priority: “When America is rich, I can be rich.”

The generational divide is particularly pronounced among Vietnamese Americans. Many of the older generation came to the United States after the fall of Saigon, and a fear of communism runs deep.

“If you went to a Viets for Trump rally they spoke with broken English and if you went to a Viets for Biden rally they spoke broken Vietnamese,” said Ashling, 40, who came to Georgia in 1988 as a Vietnamese refugee.

This year has stood out, second-generation Vietnamese-Americans said in interviews, because of a flood of misinformation targeting older Vietnamese voters in the form of videos in Vietnamese that have cast Biden as a communist.

Ashling said she had found countering it nearly impossible.

She prefers to spend the weeks that remain before Georgia’s crucial Senate runoff elections on more persuadable voters. Javed, the community college student from Lawrenceville, was one. She said she had become increasingly furious about the cost of higher education, feelings she said she would channel into a vote for each of the Democrats.

She has already marked down Election Day for the runoff races, Jan. 5, in her calendar.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

Coronavirus pandemic could wipe out 25 years of increasing gender equality, new data from UN suggests


Ben Farmer
Thu, November 26, 2020
  

Childcare employees protest in Piazza Castello city square in Turin, northern Italy - Shutterstock

Economic and domestic turmoil caused by the Covid-19 pandemic could wipe out 25 years of increasing gender equality, new United Nations data suggests.

Lockdowns, job losses, school closures and dwindling income from the coronavirus have seen women take on significantly greater shares of housework and childcare.

Employment and education opportunities are likely to be lost and women may suffer from poorer mental and physical health.

"Everything we worked for, that has taken 25 years, could be lost in a year," the UN Women deputy executive director Anita Bhatia told the BBC.

Women's new burden of care posed a "real risk of reverting to 1950s gender stereotypes", she said.

Women already conducted most of the unpaid care and domestic chores in the world before the arrival of the pandemic, but that proportion has now risen further, research found.

The research found that women on average did three times as much of such work as men before the pandemic, though figures varied from 1.8 times as much in the UK, and 1.4 times as much in Canada, to 9.2 times as much in Egypt.

"If it was more than three times as much as men before the pandemic, I assure you that number has at least doubled," said Ms Bhatia.

"More alarming is the fact that many women are actually not going back to work," says Ms Bhatia.

"In the month of September alone, in the US, something like 865,000 women dropped out of the labour force compared to 200,000 men, and most of that can be explained by the fact that there was a care burden and there's nobody else around," she said.

Campaigners have warned that the effects of the pandemic are increasing existing inequalities and women and girls are bearing a disproportionate amount of the impact - the subject of the Telegraph's Equality Check campaign.

A survey released in September by the aid charity Care International found that 55 per cent of women respondents reported losing their job or income, and were 60 per cent more likely than men to report that this was one of Covid-19’s biggest impacts on their life.

Women were more likely to have jobs in service and informal sectors, which have been particularly hard hit by coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions. But even in the formal sector the virus seems to be widening inequality, the report found, with women in Bangladesh six times more likely to lose paid working hours than men.

Mnuchin 'making it up' on stripping Fed of emergency loan funds: former TARP inspector

Brian Cheung
·Reporter
Wed, November 25, 2020

A former government official in charge of overseeing 2008 bailout funds said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is defying the law in locking away excess funds from the Federal Reserve’s emergency loan programs.

Neil Barofsky, a former special inspector general of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), said that parking $455 billion in leftover money in the Treasury’s General Fund violates the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

“[Mnuchin’s] making it up, this can’t be any more clear,” Barofsky told Yahoo Finance Live in an interview Wednesday.

Mnuchin last week ordered the Fed to close down nine of its 13 backstops to various financial markets and return about $429 billion in unused money appropriated by the CARES Act. The Treasury will also return about $26 billion in funds for it to directly loan to companies, for a total of $455 billion.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the Treasury was going to move the money into the General Fund as opposed to the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), which means the money could not be redeployed under a Biden administration without Congressional action.

Mnuchin has argued that he is the interpreter of the CARES Act. But Barofsky counters that if that were the case, he would have no reason not to place the money in the ESF, where the Treasury would at least have the option to reuse the money for emergency purposes.

  

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin talks with reporters about negotiations on another coronavirus stimulus package, outside the White House, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

“The only justification for taking what is a legally questionable act of moving these funds out of the reach of the Biden administration is to salt the Earth, to limit their options, and leave the country in a more dangerous place for political purposes,” said Barofsky, now a partner at the law firm of Jenner & Block. “Full stop. There is no legal justification for this.”
Flashbacks to TARP

Barofsky was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2008 to oversee TARP funds used to save banks, insurance companies, and automakers during the Great Financial Crisis.

He told Yahoo Finance that there is precedent to reallocating emergency funds, pointing to the Obama administration’s efforts to redirect $225 billion in TARP into the Treasury’s General Fund. Barofsky said an act of Congress was needed to move that money.

For the CARES Act money, Barofsky points to Sec. 4027 of the bill, which notes that on January 1, 2026, any remaining funds are to be transferred into the Treasury’s General Fund for deficit reduction.

“The statute doesn’t allow him to do this until 2026,” said Barofsky.

Ultimately, Barofsky said the Biden administration could choose to ignore Mnuchin’s move and shift the funds back into the ESF once the White House changes hands. But he said he does not expect the Biden administration to take such aggressive action, adding that he also would not bet on the Fed launching a legal challenge.

As Mnuchin has clarified, the ESF still has under $80 billion for the Treasury and the Fed to restart its liquidity facilities if needed. But the scale of those facilities would be far smaller than under the $455 billion originally committed.

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is moving $455 billion of unspent stimulus money into a fund the incoming Biden administration can't deploy without Congress

Joseph Zeballos-Roig
Tue, November 24, 2020, 3:03 PM MST·3 min read

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is moving $455 billion in unspent stimulus money into a fund that the incoming Biden administration cannot deploy without Congress, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

It will leave Mnuchin's likely successor, Janet Yellen, with only $80 billion in relief funds at her discretion.

Experts say Mnuchin's move greatly limits the tools available to the Biden administration to manage the economic fallout of the pandemic.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is moving $455 billion in unspent stimulus money into a fund that the incoming Biden administration cannot deploy without Congress, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

That amount includes money that Mnuchin is yanking from the Federal Reserve and unused loans for companies. The funds will be deposited into the Treasury's General Fund, which requires legislative approval to use the money elsewhere. The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move, experts say, will likely undercut the ability of Mnuchin's likely successor, Janet Yellen, from restarting the Fed's lending programs at a similar scale early next year. Instead, she will have only $80 billion at her discretion.

Ernie Tedeschi, a policy economist at Evercore ISI, called Mnuchin's decision "a dangerous move" as the US economy faces a perilous moment in the pandemic.

"It's one more enormous risk we are piling onto the winter in the US atop of other risks already there," Tedeschi told Business Insider. "We may need that backstop again as cases have now blown through their prior peaks, state and local governments are making cuts, and we're about to kick off millions of people from unemployment insurance."

Bharat Ramamurti, a Democratic member of a congressional panel overseeing the funds, criticized the move.

"This is Treasury's latest ham-handed effort to undermine the Biden Administration," he wrote on Twitter. "The good news is that it's illegal and can be reversed next year."

The development came after Mnuchin recently announced he was not extending most of the Fed's emergency lending programs past December 31, including those supporting markets for corporate bonds and another providing loans to medium-size businesses and state governments.

The Treasury and central bank jointly operate the lending programs under the CARES Act, which Congress approved in March. The pandemic relief law doesn't mandate Mnuchin move the money into the Treasury's General Fund -- it could keep it within easy reach for President-elect Joe Biden in another pot of money until 2026.

Mnuchin also requested last week that Fed Chair Jerome Powell return unspent stimulus money. He objected and said the lending programs should continue, sparking a rare public clash between two figures that had collaborated closely to contain the economic devastation from the pandemic. The Fed later said in a letter it would return the funds.

Mnuchin then called on Congress to repurpose the unspent money, and he drew support from Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

"We don't need this money to buy corporate bonds. We need this money to go help small businesses that are still closed or hurt, no fault of their own, or people who are going to be on unemployment that's running out," he told CNBC last week.

Congress has been fiercely divided on passing another coronavirus relief bill that most economists say is urgently needed. Nearly 12 million workers are at risk of losing all of their federal unemployment aid next month, according to an analysis from the progressive Century Foundation.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Fed will return unused funds after Treasury orders central bank to wind down emergency loan programs

Brian Cheung
·Reporter
Fri, November 20, 2020

The Federal Reserve says it will return the unused money allocated to it by the Treasury to set up its emergency support programs during the COVID-19 crisis.

On Friday, Fed Chairman Jay Powell said he “will work out arrangements... for returning the unused portions of the funds” appropriated to the central bank and the Treasury in March by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

The announcement comes a day after U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin ordered the Fed to allow nine of its 13 liquidity facilities to close on December 31. Those closures would end backstops to corporate bond markets (Primary, Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities), small- and medium-sized businesses (Main Street Lending Program), and state and local government bond issuers (Municipal Liquidity Facility).

The Fed responded with an unusually barbed response Thursday, protesting that the central bank “prefer that the full suite of emergency facilities...continue to serve their important role.” Powell’s letter on Friday softened in tone and acknowledged the Treasury Secretary’s “sole authority to make certain investments” in the Fed facilities.

For its part, the Treasury argued that the programs’ low uptake warrant a return of $429 billion in unused money.

The fallout between the Fed and the Treasury raised a number of questions, first about what will happen to the various liquidity facilities, but secondly about the political consequences of not having the backstops.
What’s closing down on December 31?

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Fed opened up 13 liquidity facilities (details on each facility are detailed here), 12 of which were set up to expire on December 31. The Treasury letter from Thursday orders the Fed to allow nine of them to close:

-Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility (PMCCF)

-Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF)

-Term Asset-Backed Lending Facility (TALF)

-Main Street New Loan Facility (MSNLF)

-Main Street Priority Loan Facility (MSPLF)

-Main Street Expanded Loan Facility (MSELF)

-Nonprofit Organization New Loan Facility (NONLF)

-Nonprofit Organization Expanded Loan Facility (NOELF)

-Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF)

Mnuchin authorized a 90-day extension for the four remaining facilities:

-Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF)

-Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF)

-Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF)

-Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility (PPPLF)
How much will the Fed have to return?

The CARES Act appropriated $454 billion to the Fed and the Treasury to set up these facilities. The Fed has used only $25 billion of that money through its emergency facilities.

Mnuchin’s letter asks the Fed to return the remainder: $429 billion. Powell’s letter on Friday did not clarify exactly how much it will return.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, left, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin leave after a House Financial Services Committee hearing about the government’s emergency aid to the economy in response to the coronavirus on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2020. (Caroline Brehman/Pool via AP)

Both Mnuchin and Powell insist that the Fed and Treasury could re-open some of those facilities with money from the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF). Mnuchin told CNBC Friday that combined with the Fed’s existing loans, the ESF could support over $750 billion in loans to the economy (compared to $2 trillion of potential capacity using the CARES Act funds).

What does this all mean for the markets?

Markets traded down slightly on Friday as investors digested the news, with the Dow having fallen over 200 points at the closing bell.

Markets directly backstopped by the Fed’s facilities did not appear disrupted by the news. Bloomberg reported Friday that Carnival Corp. was able to drum up $11 billion in orders for corporate bonds despite the news that the Fed’s corporate credit facility would not be operating past December 31.

Still, some worry that with rising COVID-19 cases, the lack of fiscal support and now, Fed support to financial markets, may create trouble.

Evercore ISI wrote in a note November 19 that “US credit markets will have to get through the winter months in which the surging new wave of the virus and exhaustion of savings from prior fiscal stimulus threaten a loss of economic momentum.”
Does this increase the onus on Congress to pass fiscal stimulus?

Mnuchin argued in his letter that returning the unused money will allow the government to redirect funds toward a new Paycheck Protection Program “that won’t cost taxpayers any more money.”

But Isaac Boltansky, analyst at Compass Point, wrote Friday that the Fed and Treasury development doesn’t change the fact that the White House and Congress have not appeared close to a stimulus deal for weeks.

“There is no sign whatsoever that Congress is close to a stimulus deal and [Mnuchin’s] ‘hope’ for a legislative agreement is distinct from the decision to sunset existing Fed facilities,” Boltansky said.

On the claim of redirecting money at no cost to taxpayers, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office did not attribute any deficit to the Fed and Treasury funds because the lent money would have to be paid back at some point. That means that reallocating the money doesn’t save the government money from an accounting standpoint.
Does this increase the onus on the Fed to do more?

Evercore wrote that this could tilt the Federal Open Market Committee toward taking action in its final policy-setting meeting of 2020 on December 15 and 16. The Fed had already been teeing up the possibility of leaning more heavily on its asset purchases, or quantitative easing, in that meeting.

The concern: with the lack of backstops and COVID-19 cases rising, the Fed may have to do more than originally planned.

“One side effect is that it increases the likelihood that the FOMC will strengthen QE in December, with additional duration and guidance, and if things get bad enough, a faster pace of purchases too,” Evercore wrote. “However, QE is a very imperfect substitute for a credit market backstop.”

U.N. decries police use of racial profiling derived from Big Data

Stephanie Nebehay
Thu, November 26, 2020

GENEVA, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Police and border guards must combat racial profiling and ensure that their use of "big data" collected via artificial intelligence does not reinforce biases against minorities, United Nations experts said on Thursday.

Companies that sell algorithmic profiling systems to public entities and private companies, often used in screening job applicants, must be regulated to prevent misuse of personal data that perpetuates prejudices, they said.

"It's a rapidly developing technological means used by law enforcement to determine, using big data, who is likely to do what. And that's the danger of it," Verene Shepherd, a member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, told Reuters.

"We've heard about companies using these algorithmic methods to discriminate on the basis of skin colour," she added, speaking from Jamaica.

Shepherd, a historian, led the 18 independent experts in drafting a "general recommendation" to the 182 countries that have ratified a binding international treaty prohibiting racial discrimination.

Minorities and activists have complained about the growing use of artificial intelligence, facial recognition and other new technologies, she said.

"It's widely used in the United States of America, and we've had complaints from black communities in the European Union as well. And Latin America where people of African descent and indigenous people complain about profiling," Shepherd said, citing Brazil and Colombia. "These are the hotspots where we hear about cases of profiling being more prevalent."

Protests against racism and police brutality erupted across the United States following the death in May of George Floyd, an African-American who died afer a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Many police use "predictive" profiling systems that lead to identity checks, traffic stops and searches, based on previous arrest data about a neighbourhood, Shepherd said.

The committee recommends that people who have been targeted deserve compensation, she said, adding: "If they live to tell the tale, by the way, because we know sometimes it ends up badly." 

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Congress Pays $850,000 to Muslim Aides Targeted in Inquiry Stoked by Trump


Noam Scheiber and Nicholas Fandos
Wed, November 25, 2020, 

The U.S. Capitol building in Washington on Thursday evening, Nov. 19, 2020. 

(Stefani Reynolds/The New York Times)

The House of Representatives quietly paid $850,000 this year to settle wrongful termination claims by five Pakistani-American technology specialists, after a set of routine workplace allegations against them morphed into fodder for right-wing conspiracy theories amplified by President Donald Trump.

Together, the payments represent one of the largest known awards by the House to resolve discrimination or harassment claims, and are designed to shield Congress from potentially costly legal action.

But aides involved in the settlement, which has not previously been reported, said it was also an attempt to bring a close to a convoluted saga that led to one of the most durable — and misleading — story lines of the Trump era. The aides said its size reflected a bid to do right by a group of former employees who lost their jobs and endured harassment in part because of their Muslim faith and South Asian origins.

What started as a relatively ordinary House inquiry into procurement irregularities by Imran Awan, three members of his family and a friend, who had a bustling practice providing members of Congress with technology support, was twisted into lurid accusations of hacking government information.

In 2018, Trump stood next to President Vladimir Putin of Russia at a now-infamous news conference in Helsinki, and implied that one of the employees involved in the House case — a “Pakistani gentleman,” he said — could have been responsible for stealing emails of Democratic officials leaked during the 2016 campaign. His own intelligence agencies had concluded that the stolen emails were part of an election interference campaign ordered by Moscow.

“It is tragic and outrageous the way right-wing media and Republicans all the way up to President Trump attempted to destroy the lives of an immigrant Muslim-American family based on scurrilous allegations,” said Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., who had employed Awan and is chairman of the Ethics Committee.

“Their names were smeared on cable TV, their children were harassed at school, and they genuinely feared for their lives,” Deutch added. “The settlement is an acknowledgment of the wrong done to this family.”

The case originated in 2016, when officials in the House, then controlled by Republicans, began investigating claims that the specialists had improperly accounted for purchases of equipment and bent employment rules as they worked part-time for the offices of dozens of Democratic lawmakers.

In the hands of the chamber’s inspector general and later the Capitol Police, the investigation slowly expanded to include concerns that the workers had illicitly gained access to, transferred or removed government data and stolen equipment.

In early 2017, the House stripped their access to congressional servers, making it impossible for them to continue their work. One by one, the lawmakers terminated them.

But as the inspector general’s findings were shared with Republican lawmakers and trickled into conservative media in early 2017, they began to take on a life of their own. The Daily Caller, which led the way, published allegations that the workers had hacked into congressional computer networks, and other right-wing pundits speculated that the group were Pakistani spies.

Trump, in addition to his comments in Helsinki, repeatedly amplified conspiracy theories about the investigation on Twitter, where he referred to a “Pakistani mystery man.” At one point, he publicly urged the Justice Department not to let one of the workers “off the hook.”

But in the summer of 2018, the department did just that, taking the unusual step of publicly exonerating Awan. The department concluded in a court filing that after interviewing dozens of witnesses, and reviewing a Democratic server and other electronic records, it had found “no evidence” that Awan illegally removed data, stole or destroyed House equipment, or improperly gained access to sensitive information.

The statement came during a sentencing hearing for an unrelated offense — that Awan had lied about his primary residence on an application for a home-equity loan, for which he was sentenced by judge to one day of time served and a three-month supervised release.

House officials and the Capitol Police revisited their investigation of Awan and his colleagues after the Justice Department’s findings became public. The review found that the original investigation had reached certain conclusions about misbehavior that were not necessarily supported by facts, but upheld the ban on their access to the House computer network, preventing their reinstatement, congressional aides said.

Awan’s lawyers approached the House after Democrats took control of the chamber in 2019 to discuss a possible settlement. Many of the lawmakers who had employed him pushed their leaders to strike a deal.

The resulting agreement was signed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the chairwoman of the Administration Committee, in January and paid out this summer. It resolved claims brought by Awan and the other four staffers under the Federal Tort Claims Act that House officials behaved negligently in their second inquiry after the Justice Department found no evidence of illegal conduct.

The settlement also resolved claims that House officials inflicted emotional distress on the group, and that the initial investigation was motivated by the employees’ religion, national origin, race, or political affiliation.

In a statement, Lofgren said that the employees had threatened to sue various House members, offices and other employees, “seeking millions of dollars in compensatory and punitive damages.” She said the House decided to settle “due to the likelihood of an unfavorable and costly litigation outcome,” although she asserted that based on the information it had at the time, the House had been right to revoke their network access.

Awan declined to comment on the settlement. Peter Romer-Friedman, one of the Awans' lawyers, said that they would “never forget the courage and kindness” of lawmakers who had stood by his clients.

Awan was born in Pakistan in 1980 and moved to Northern Virginia in 1997. While in college, he worked as an intern for a company that provided IT services to congressional offices. He was hired directly by the office of Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida after graduating and worked setting up email accounts and new equipment like phones and laptops for staff members.

Over the years, other Democratic members of Congress hired Awan to perform similar work under an arrangement that made him a “shared employee” and for which he was typically paid $20,000 each year per member of Congress. As the workload grew, Awan brought on two of his brothers, his wife and a friend to assist him, and they became shared employees as well. Together they eventually worked for more than 30 members of Congress.

Their employers included Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, who was recently named by President-elect Joe Biden to a top White House position. The connection to Wasserman Schultz, who was the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee at the time of the 2016 email hack, is what prompted the baseless theories seized on by Trump that Awan, not the Kremlin, was responsible.

House investigators found that Awan and his four co-workers violated certain administrative rules — for example, working as a team in which they would provide services to offices that didn’t technically employ them, and breaking up payments for equipment like iPads into increments that were below $500, the point at which a purchase would trigger a more cumbersome procurement process.

But Joshua Rogin, Deutch’s chief of staff, said in a declaration accompanying a separate defamation lawsuit brought by the Awans against the Daily Caller and others that he did not believe that the arrangements violated House rules and that he was unaware that the rules the five were accused of violating had been enforced against any other House employees.

“I understood this investigation to be both politically motivated and based on bias over their nationality, ethnicity and religion,” he said in the declaration.

Conservative outlets have continued to spin out unsupported theories about Awan.

In January of 2019, Luke Rosiak, a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation who had written more than two dozen stories about Awan, published a book in which he reported that one or more of the family members had hacked congressional servers, stolen cellphones and laptops and sent equipment to government officials in Pakistan. The book also refers to Imran Awan as a “mole.”

In an interview with the Epoch Times in July of that year, he referred to Awan as “basically an attempted murderer, an extortionist, a blackmail artist, a con man.”

Awan and the family members and friend who worked with him on Capitol Hill are suing Rosiak, The Daily Caller and Salem Media Group, the owner of Rosiak’s book publisher, Regnery, for defamation and unjust enrichment. The case is currently pending in court.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

Florida governor Ron DeSantis accused of ‘killing spree’ after extending ban on cities from imposing own mask mandates

James Crump Thu, November 26, 2020

Florida governor Ron DeSantis speaks at the Donald Trump’s make America great victory rally at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, on 29 October 2020 ((EPA))

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been accused of overseeing a “killing spree”, after he extended a ban on cities in the state imposing their own mask mandates.

On Wednesday, Mr DeSantis extended an executive order issued in September, which prevented local governments from fining residents who refused to wear face masks, or from closing restaurants not complying with coronavirus measures.

The decision on 25 September prompted the start of the state’s third phase of pandemic measures, which allowed restaurants and bars to open at 100 per cent capacity.

Florida Democratic officials criticised the governor for the extension of the executive order on Wednesday, amid a spike in cases in the state.

Chris King, the 2018 Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, quote tweeted a local news story about the decision, adding: “Alternate headline: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Continues Killing Spree.”

Alternate headline: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Continues Killing Spree https://t.co/Wh0spcg3RG
— Chris King (@ChrisKingFL) November 25, 2020

Miami-Dade mayor Daniella Levine Cava called the decision “deeply frustrating” in a series of tweets on Wednesday evening.

“Bipartisan governors nationwide are putting mask orders in place as one of the best tools we have to fight #COVID19.

“It’s deeply frustrating that @GovRonDeSantis continues to block local actions and make it harder for local leaders to keep our communities safe,” the mayor wrote.

Bipartisan governors nationwide are putting mask orders in place as one of the best tools we have to fight #COVID19. It’s deeply frustrating that @GovRonDeSantis continues to block local actions and make it harder for local leaders to keep our communities safe.#MaskUpMiami 😷 https://t.co/32yI1MA5Eo
— Daniella Levine Cava (@MayorDaniella) November 25, 2020

Last week, a bipartisan group of Florida mayors pleaded with Mr DeSantis to allow mask mandates to be enforced in areas across the state, according to Forbes.

The governor rejected their plea..

Florida is the largest state in the US to have lifted a majority of its coronavirus restrictions and is one of only 13 that have not issued statewide mask mandates.

It has seen a spike in coronavirus cases over the last couple of months, as the number of Covid-19 infections reported in a week has tripled since Mr DeSantis lifted restrictions, according to CNN.

Last week, the state recorded 53,000 positive tests, which was three times more than the week before Mr DeSantis’ executive order in late September.

The governor has not addressed the increase in cases, and has only tweeted about Covid-19 five times since election day on 3 November.

Since the start of the pandemic, Florida has recorded more than 962,000 Covid-19 cases and at least 18,253 deaths.

According to a tracking project hosted by Johns Hopkins University, there are now more than 12.7 million people who have tested positive for coronavirus in the US. The death toll has reached 262,266.

The Independent has contacted Mr DeSantis’ office for comment.

THIRD WORLD USA
Homeless patients with COVID-19 often go back to life on the streets after hospital care, but there's a better way


J. Robin Moon, Adjunct Associate Professor, City University of New York
Wed, November 25, 2020

Union Square in Manhattan, where many of New York City's homeless live.

Noam Galai via Getty Images

In 2019, about 567,715 homeless people were living in the United States. While this number had been steadily decreasing since 2007, in the past two years it has started to increase. For New York City, even before COVID-19, 2020 was already turning out to be a record year for homelessness. But as the lockdown commenced in mid-March, the 60,923 homeless people staying at the city’s shelter system found themselves disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

That’s not all of the city’s homeless, of course; the 60,000-plus doesn’t include homeless people hidden within patient rolls and emergency department waiting rooms. In 2019, the city’s annual count of hospital homeless shows more than 300 on any given night who are patients or using the hospital as temporary shelter.

As a health care practitioner, educator and researcher in the field of public health and social epidemiology who works in the city, I’m fully aware of the challenges faced and the tragedies already seen. As of May 31, the New York Department of Homeless Services had reported 926 confirmed COVID-19 cases across 179 shelter locations and 86 confirmed COVID-19 deaths. In April alone, DHS reported 58 homeless deaths from COVID-19, 1.6 times higher than the overall city rate. While there is no reliable analogous data for other cities, what happens in New York can be a lesson for others.

A protest supporting the homeless men given temporary living quarters at New York City’s Lucerne Hotel in the Upper West Side. Steven Ferdman via Getty Images

Homeless shelters are vulnerable

The susceptibility of the homeless population to COVID-19 is not unique to New York City. Homeless shelters nearly everywhere are particularly vulnerable to disease transmission. Shelters are typically unequipped, heavily trafficked and generally unable to provide safe care, particularly to those recuperating from surgery, wounds or illnesses.

Add to that the inability to isolate, quarantine or physically distance the homeless from one another during COVID-19. New York City responded by using almost 20% of its hotels as temporary shelter facilities, with one to two clients per room. That helped, but it was hardly a perfect situation.

So the question is: Where do homeless patients go to convalesce when discharged from acute medical care, especially in the post-COVID-19 era?

Homeless patients discharged from hospitals or clinics who then go to drop-in centers, shelters or the street sometimes do not fully recover from their illnesses. Some inevitably wind up back in the hospital. The result is a detrimental and costly cycle for both patients and the health care system.

And the situation continues to deteriorate: Between July 2018 and June 2019, 404 of the city’s homeless died – 40% higher than the previous year and the largest year-over-year increase in a decade. There is no data since the outbreak began, but early evidence suggests that the number of deaths is higher between June 2019 and June 2020.

A former Radisson Hotel in New York City converted to a homeless shelter.

John Nacion/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Medical respite: A possible solution

Medical respite is short-term residential care for homeless people too ill or frail to recover on the streets, but not sick enough to be in a hospital. It provides a safe environment to recover and still access post-treatment care management and other social services. Medical respite care can be offered in freestanding facilities, homeless shelters, nursing homes and transitional housing.

Medical respite has worked in municipalities across the U.S.; health outcomes for patients have improved, and hospitals and insurance providers, particularly Medicaid, have saved money. But these programs are few and far between. In 2016 there were 78 programs operating across 28 states. Most programs are small, with 45% having fewer than 20 beds.

The care models vary, but essentially they provide beds in a space designed for convalescence, follow-up appointment support, medication management, medically appropriate meals and access to social services such as housing navigation and benefits assistance. Some programs provide on-site clinical care.

Research shows that homeless patients in New York City stay in the hospital 36% longer and cost an average of US$2,414 more per stay than those with stable housing. By discharging patients to respite programs, hospitals reduced emergency visits post-discharge by 45%, and readmissions by 35%. The New York Legal Assistance Group, conducting a cost-benefit analysis, showed savings of nearly $3,000 per respite stay (the provider saved $1,575, the payers saved $1,254) through reduced hospital readmissions and length of stay.

Studies outside of New York also show improved health outcomes in a variety of ways. One noted that 78% of patients were discharged from respite “in improved health.” Patients showed 15% to 19% increases in connection with primary care after discharge to medical respite. Moreover, at least 10% and up to 55% of medical respite patients who discharged eventually went to permanent or improved housing situations.

Next steps

While there are agreed-upon national standards for medical respite, program models can adapt to meet the needs of a specific community. Already, dozens of respite models exist across the country, in both major cities and small towns. One complication, however, is the sheer breadth of the medical respite approach. Because it intersects housing, homelessness and health care, medical respite does not fit neatly within a single system and would require collaboration and agreement among multiple city and state agencies.

Still, a growing number of communities are looking to medical respite to fill the gap. Chicago is partnering with providers to deliver health care to the homeless. This includes providing them with temporary residential facilities and clinics to help blunt the impact of COVID-19.

There is a dire need to help the homeless with both housing and health care. Medical respite is a potential solution. It has successfully provided recuperative housing and medical care during a pandemic. Why shouldn’t it become a permanent part of our service system?

Andrew Lin, Supportive Housing Program Developer at BronxWorks, a non-profit group that offers homeless and housing support services in the Bronx, contributed to this article.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: J. Robin Moon, City University of New York.

Read more:
Busting 3 common myths about homelessness

As few as 1 in 10 homeless people vote in elections – here’s why

J. Robin Moon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

S.D. tribes say they're 'trapped in a house on fire' — fighting Covid while governor lets it rage

Erik Ortiz
Wed, November 25, 2

In the early weeks of the pandemic, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota enacted drastic measures to fend off the spread of the coronavirus across its stark and sprawling prairie land.

The tribe installed checkpoints in April on roadways cutting through the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation to limit drivers without official business — part of a robust contact tracing program.

"We are doing this to save our residents, their lives," tribal Chairman Harold Frazier told NPR in May, when there was just one case of Covid-19 on the reservation, where about 12,000 people reside.

Even as case numbers stayed low, tribal officials imposed a mask mandate over the summer and rolled out mass testing events. And after South Dakota logged a record number of infections this month, Frazier on Monday began a 10-day lockdown of Eagle Butte, the remote town where the tribe's headquarters are located.

IMAGE: Harold Frazier (Cliff Owen / AP file)

The efforts are in sharp contrast to how South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has overseen the pandemic in her state of nearly 885,000 residents.

Noem, a Republican, has avoided statewide mask mandates, lockdowns and the closing or restricting of businesses and churches. She said in a message last week that "we won't stop or discourage you from thanking God and spending time together this Thanksgiving" — a lenient message compared to those of the leaders of most other states, who have enforced curfews, stay-at-home orders and restrictions on indoor gatherings in the face of a surge in case numbers nationwide.

Noem has also criticized the checkpoints set up by the Cheyenne River Sioux, as well as other Native American tribes in the state. In May, she asked the Trump administration to help intervene in a compromise to allow checkpoints on tribal roads but not state and federal ones within reservations.

Tribal members and other Indigenous-led groups in South Dakota say the lack of sweeping action — and the overt displays of opposition — on the part of state and some local officials stand to undermine their tribal sovereignty and attempts to protect their people during an intensifying public health crisis.

While the overall number of new Covid-19 infections has eased in recent days after it hit a record of more than 2,000 positive cases on Nov. 12, South Dakota this week still has among the highest rates of positivity and per capita deaths in the country, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"It's like we're trapped in a house on fire, and we're doing our best to put it out," said Remi Bald Eagle, a Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe spokesman. "We see the firetrucks coming in the form of a vaccine, and we're wondering if it will get here in time before the fire burns us to death."
A disproportionate effect

The Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation has had more than 1,100 cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, with at least 13 deaths, tribal health officials say.

Statewide, Native Americans have been the hardest hit of any ethnic or racial group: While they make up only 9 percent of the population, they represent 14 percent of all cases and 15 percent of all deaths, according to Johns Hopkins' data.

Bald Eagle said many tribal members were previously diagnosed with underlying health conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease, and had limited access to health care on the reservation, which is partly in one of the most impoverished counties in the country.

The tribe has scrambled to set up makeshift beds and units, some of them in hotels and bingo halls, to supplement the eight hospital beds at the Cheyenne River Health Center, an Indian Health Services facility. The closest large hospitals, in Rapid City and in Bismarck, North Dakota, are two to three hours away, and health care professionals in South Dakota have warned of an overburdened health system.

A disturbing disconnect has also emerged among some patients. A South Dakota emergency room nurse's tweets went viral this month after she said she had encountered people dying of Covid-19 who didn't believe the virus was real.

Bald Eagle said tribes have a lot to lose if they ignore the science or take a hands-off approach, as the state has largely done.

"Some of those who died were our elders," he said. "They're some of our magnificent treasures. When they die, they take with them some of our language and our culture and our heritage, and we won't get that back."

IMAGE: Gov. Kristi Noem (Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The governor's office responded by referring to Noem's remarks at a news conference last week in which she encouraged hand-washing and social distancing.

"I've consistently said that people that want to wear masks should wear masks, and people that don't shouldn't be shamed because they choose not to," Noem said.

In a statement, the South Dakota State Medical Association said it supports a statewide mask mandate: "Masks work to decrease the risk of infection for everyone."
Checkpoint dispute

Tension has been escalating between tribes in South Dakota and Noem since the checkpoints went up.

In June, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe sued the federal government alleging that ever since Noem's plea for the White House's help, the Trump administration has abused its power by coercing the tribe to end its Covid-19 response plan, including its checkpoints.

The coercion included "threatening both monetary penalties and forcible dismantling of the Tribe's law enforcement program," the complaint alleges.
 Cheyenne River Sioux safety checkpoint

 (Chairman Harold Frazier, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe)

Noem has said that South Dakota has rights that allow residents and travelers to access roadways and that the federal government has "an interest in interstate commerce," as well. But the tribe argues that it has jurisdictional powers over the state, and a 1990 appeals court ruling dictates that the state doesn't have control over roadways that cut through Native lands without tribal consent.

The lawsuit continues, and the tribe plans to respond in the coming days to the federal government's request to dismiss the case, said Nicole Ducheneaux, a tribal member and attorney. In the meantime, the tribe's nine checkpoints remain up.

"We are unspeakably vulnerable, and the state that surrounds us and the federal government that is supposed to protect us have decided to elevate a petty political agenda over human life," Ducheneaux said. "In the broader scheme of things, it was not so long ago that my people witnessed catastrophic disease and death that decimated our population, destabilized our society and almost wiped us out. If it were not for our sovereign powers of self-government, we would be at the mercy of Donald Trump and Kristi Noem, which would be a disaster of potentially existential proportions for our people."

A spokesman for the Interior Department, which is named in the suit, said tribal leaders had to follow federal regulations shared in early April about what steps to take to restrict access to or close roadways within reservations.

The federal government seeks to have the tribe's suit dismissed, in part because, it said, the checkpoints were operating with "unlawfully deputized individuals who did not have the required background investigations and/or basic police training."
Camp crackdown

The worsening pandemic has led other Native American groups in South Dakota to spar with local governments.

In October, police in Rapid City, the state's second-largest city, ordered the dismantling of an outdoor settlement — called Camp Mniluzahan — where Native Americans struggling with substance abuse and other hardships were provided shelter and food.

Police cited five of the volunteers, known as Creek Patrol, with obstruction and resisting arrest. A sixth person utilizing the camp was also cited. City officials said the camp was erected without proper permits in an area considered a flood zone. The camp has since moved from public property to land jointly owned by the Oglala, Rosebud and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes.

Rapid City Mayor Steve Allender said he didn't endorse the camp, and he hinted at the tensions last month.

"Every conversation about the homeless in the last month has been peppered with phrases like 'stolen land' and 'treaty violations' and 'getting land back' and that sort of thing," Allender said, according to NBC affiliate KNBN of Rapid City. "And so it appears that there's something much larger at hand than simply seeking shelter for the homeless."

Mark Tilsen, a Creek Patrol volunteer and member of the Oglala Lakota, said the lack of adequate social services or support from the local government underscores how Native Americans have historically had to cope with insufficient resources.

The camp's new location, which provides Covid-19 testing, helps 30 to 60 people daily, Tilsen said.

"We're essentially banding together to solve our problems as they come up," Tilsen said, crediting the efforts of previous generations of Native volunteers and activists. "We are lucky that we have found a way that the city cannot interfere with our work."

Natalie Stites Means, a director of the local Meals for Relatives program for Native American families affected by Covid-19 and a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, said she worries that the disparate impact of the coronavirus on Indigenous communities is only going to worsen in the coming weeks because of lax attitudes. There is already a waiting list for families in need of food assistance, and Means counts on volunteers to help cook and transport meals.

"I'm not counting on Noem's administration to have the chops to do anything," Means said. "We're on our own."

mniluzahancreekpatrol

Our relatives who were arrested by the RCPD the night of Oct. 16th, for remaining in ceremony and taking a stand in defiance of ongoing state violence towards unsheltered relatives, will have court on Dec. 15th.

In preparation, we are seeking donations specifically for legal funds. @ndncollective has offered 15k; we are inviting you all, who have offered generous and consistent support to us, to match this amount so we can ensure that all legal expenses are covered. Please share and offer what you can. Lila pilamayapi.

mllegalfund.org

mniluzahancreekpatrol

Indigenous people living in the US are fighting for their land back

Biba Adams
Thu, November 26, 2020

Mashpee Wampanoag tribe descendants are fighting to reclaim 300 acres of land in two states they say was stolen.

As millions of Americans gather today for the Thanksgiving holiday, the fact that the feast commemorates the disenfranchisement of indigenous people is becoming more and more apparent.

As the country has faced racial reckoning from marginalized communities like African Americans and Latinos, native Americans are fighting to remain a part of the national conversation about ratifying injustices.

Guillermo Rosette and Linda Velarde join hundreds of other native Americans and their supporters in a traditional round dance at a 2017 protest in front of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Descendants of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, which is at the center of the Thanksgiving legend, are fighting to reclaim what they maintain was stolen land.

According to a CNN report, “the Mashpee Wampanoag have lived in what’s now Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island for more than 12,000 years.”

The tribe is currently in a battle to maintain a trust that turned 300 acres of land into a reservation.

The trust status meant the land couldn’t be taken away from the Mashpee Wampanoag without the approval of the federal government. It also gave the tribe sovereignty, allowing it to build housing, a school and a police department on the land, CNN reports.

However, under the administration of President Donald Trump, the Department of the Interior reversed that decision after a lawsuit brought by area residents, saying the land was ineligible for trust status because the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe wasn’t under federal jurisdiction in 1934.

The U.S. moved to take the land out of trust, endangering the health, housing and safety of the tribe.

A federal judge blocked the decision, but the Interior Department appealed, and that the appeal is still pending.

The Mashpee Wampanoag are not the only tribe fighting for their land in this country. The Wiyot tribe is battling the state of California for protections of the Duluwat Island, where they dwell. The area has been transformed and polluted by shipping businesses.’

In Oklahoma, the Wyandotte Nation got their land back from the United Methodist Church after two centuries.

So, as families and friends gather to celebrate this year — hopefully in smaller groups, as recommended, because of the coronavirus pandemic — it is ever-important that the indigenous souls at the center of Thanksgiving, people who are still fighting for freedom in America, never be forgotten.