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#Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R)
beardedmrbean · 1 year
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Outgoing Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot took to CNN in order to once again request that Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) stop sending immigrants to the Windy City.
Lightfoot sent Abbott a letter over the weekend to condemn his policy of relocating migrants to so-called sanctuary cities, which she called a “dangerous and inhumane action.”
Read a portion of the letter here:
Chicago is a Welcoming City and we collaborate with County, State, and community partners to rise to this challenge, but your lack of consideration or coordination in an attempt to cause chaos and score political points has resulted in a critical tipping point in our ability to receive individuals and families in a safe, orderly, and dignified way. We simply have no more shelters, spaces, or resources to accommodate an increase of individuals at this level, with little coordination or care, that does not pose a risk to them or others.
I know by your actions that you either do not see or do not care about the trauma these migrants have already faced and continue to suffer under the humanitarian crisis you have created. But I beseech you anyway: treat these individuals with the respect and dignity that they deserve. To tell them to go to Chicago or to inhumanely bus them here is an inviable and misleading choice.
While critics have spoken out against Abbott’s “stunt” of bussing immigrants to Democrat-run cities, his administration has defended its actions as a means of generating political pressure for more action on border security. When Lightfoot discussed this on CNN This Morning, she said she hadn’t heard back from Abbott’s administration, “and frankly, I didn’t expect to hear anything back.”
“I felt like it was important to once again try to engage the governor, but also let him know what his policies and practices are doing in cities like Chicago,” Lightfoot said. “We are completely tapped out. We have no more space. No more resources. And frankly, we’re already in a surge.”
When Kaitlan Collins pressed Lightfoot on Abbott’s reasoning, the mayor stood by her point that the governor refuses to engage with her while sending migrants with “serious medical conditions” into her city.
“So if we don’t put the humanity of these migrants front and center — I understand, and I’m solely compassionate to the fact that the borders are themselves really overrun, but you don’t solve that problem by simply sticking people on buses to a city that they didn’t ask to, for an uncertain future, and now we are literally full.”
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gusty-wind · 4 months
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) tore into Republican Governors over how their states have suffered under GOP leadership.
He started with a quick dismissal of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R).
“One of the worst crime and murder rates in America and one of the worst mental health records of any governor in America,” he told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “I’m not so convinced about the merits of his leadership.”
Newsom said the problem wasn’t limited to Texas.
“8 of the top 10 murder states are Republican states,” he said. “7 of the top 10 dependent states ― God forbid, dependent states ― are red states.”
He was just getting warmed up:
“The life expectancy in the South and they’re not expanding Medicaid and prenatal care and providing child care? It’s jaw-dropping. How they all continue to get reelected is beyond me. Infant mortality? You care about life, and you look at life expectancy? You care about life, and you have kids that are gunned down by weapons of war? Spare me. All in the name of freedom, as you’re banning books?”
"With all due respect, we should not be on the defensive as the Democratic Party," he concluded. "The Republican Party should be on their heels, not us."
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Mike Luckovich
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
NOV 20, 2023
Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety. 
One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government. 
Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele echoed that observation this morning when he wrote, “We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”
Indeed, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo puts it, “the gathering storm of Trump 2.0 is upon us,” and Trump and his people are telling us exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Yesterday, Trump echoed his “vermin” post of the other day, saying: “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”   
Trump’s open swing toward authoritarianism should be disqualifying even for Republicans—can you imagine Ronald Reagan talking this way?—but MAGA Republicans are lining up behind him. Last week the Texas legislature passed a bill to seize immigration authority from the federal government in what is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, and yesterday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he was “proud to endorse” Trump for president because of his proposed border policies (which include the deportation of 10 million people).
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also endorsed Trump, and on Friday he announced he was ordering the release of more than 40,000 hours of tapes from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering the demands of far-right congress members who insist the tapes will prove there was no such attack despite the conclusion of the House committee investigating the attack that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and refused to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol. 
Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly spread a debunked conspiracy theory that one of the attackers shown in the tapes, Kevin Lyons, was actually a law enforcement officer hiding a badge. Lyons—who was not, in fact, a police officer—was carrying a vape and a photo he stole from then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and is now serving a 51-month prison sentence. (Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted: “Hey [Mike Lee]—heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”)
Both E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted yesterday that MAGA Republicans have no policies for addressing inflation or relations with China or gun safety; instead, they have coalesced only around the belief that officials in “the administrative state” thwarted Trump in his first term and that a second term will be about revenge on his enemies and smashing American liberalism. 
MIke Davis, one of the men under consideration for attorney general, told a podcast host in September that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C.,” getting rid of career politicians, indicting President Joe Biden “and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden,” and helping pardon those found guilty of crimes associated with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis said. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”
In the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey talked to former Trump officials who do not believe Trump should be anywhere near the presidency, and yet they either fear for their safety if they oppose him or despair that nothing they say seems to matter. John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told Dawsey that it is beyond his comprehension that Trump has the support he does. 
“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” Kelly said.  
Part of the attraction of right-wing figures is they offer easy solutions to the complicated issues of the modern world. Argentina has inflation over 140%, and 40% of its people live in poverty. Yesterday, voters elected as president far-right libertarian Javier Milei, who is known as “El Loco” (The Madman). Milei wants to legalize the sale of organs, denies climate change, and wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail to show he would cut down the state and “exterminate” inflation. Both Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two far-right former presidents who launched attacks against their own governments, congratulated him. 
In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the question of authoritarianism. Robert J. Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran, wrote to Eisenhower, asking him to cut through the confusion of the postwar years. “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth,” Biggs wrote. Eisenhower responded at length. While unity was imperative in the military, he said, “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” 
Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.” 
Once again, liberal democracy is under attack, but it is notable—to me, anyway, as I watch to see how the public conversation is changing—that more and more people are stepping up to defend it. In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”
Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.
Finally, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who was a staunch advocate for the health and empowerment of marginalized people—and who embodied the principles Sunstein listed, though that’s not why I’m mentioning her—died yesterday at 96. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” former President Jimmy Carter said in a statement. 
More to the point, perhaps, considering the Carters’ profound humanity, is that when journalist Katie Couric once asked President Carter whether winning a Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president of the United States was the most exciting thing that ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me—I think that’s the most exciting thing.”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
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cultml · 4 months
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iwriteaboutfeminism · 2 years
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Wednesday Morning Update
Senate Races:
Pennsylvania- John Fetterman (D) wins! 💙
Georgia- not called yet, 98% reporting
Raphael Warnock (D) leading by 0.9% 🔹
Ohio- JD Vance (R) wins 🟥
Kentucky- Rand Paul (R) wins 🟥
Florida - Marco Rubio (R) wins 🟥
Wisconsin - not called yet, 99% reporting
Ron Johnson (R) leading by 1% 🔺
Arizona - not called yet, 66% reporting
Mark Kelly (D) leading by 5% 🔹
Nevada- not called yet, 72% reporting
Adam Laxalt (R) leading by 2.7% 🔺
Governor Races
Michigan- Gretchen Whitmer (D) wins! 💙
Wisconsin - Tony Evers (D) wins! 💙
Georgia - Brian Kemp (R) wins 🟥
Texas- Greg Abbott (R) wins 🟥
Arizona- not called yet, 66% reporting
Katie Hobbs (D) leads by 0.6% 🔹
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Good
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Someone had damn well better get this stopped before illegal border crossing criminals start getting shot.
THE INVASION MUST STOP ! ! ! ! ! !
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gusty-wind · 4 months
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Parents and family members of children who were killed in the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, demonstrated in front of Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) mansion early on Saturday morning, demanding that he call a special session of the legislature to address gun violence.
The family members, joined by members of the gun reform organization March for Our Lives, gathered around 5:15 am on Saturday to protest the governor’s inaction. Some of the parents held portraits of their children who had been murdered. They also played audio of their children laughing and playing over a loudspeaker, pausing at times to shout the names of their children and to condemn Abbott’s refusal to promote gun reform legislation after the May shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers.
“Our kids are going back to school and asking, ‘Will I be next?'” said Javier Cazares, whose daughter Jackie was among those killed in the shooting.
The family members demanded that Abbott call a special session of the state legislature to raise the age to buy assault rifles and other semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21.
“You do not give a damn, you care more about our guns than you do our children…We remember them, and we are going to make damn well sure that you do to,” said Brett Cross, uncle and legal guardian to Uziyah Garcia, who was killed in the massacre.
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The early morning protest was followed by a larger demonstration on the steps of the State Capitol building, where family members continued to call for gun reform, including Ann Rodriguez, the mother of shooting victim Maite Rodriguez.
“I want to be able to speak about her but also talk about how her life was so meaninglessly taken by this 18-year-old kid who was able to purchase these weapons of war and ammunition, and how I am demanding that the age go up in a special session,” Rodriguez told NPR. “I’m not going to ask — I’m going to demand.”
A spokesperson for Abbott wrote in an email to HuffPost that the governor is leaving "all options" on the table to address gun violence, and that "more announcements are expected in the coming days and weeks as the legislature deliberates proposed solutions."
Abbott has rejected formal requests by the Uvalde City Council, the County Commissioners Court, and the Uvalde school board to hold a special session on the issue. He has also told Uvalde family members directly that raising the age to buy assault rifles would be unconstitutional and that mental health initiatives should be the focus in reducing the number of mass shootings.
But experts say right-wing claims that mass shootings are driven by mental illness shift the focus away from holding gun manufacturers and legislators accountable, and could have detrimental outcomes for people who are mentally ill.
“People with serious mental illness who have access to firearms are no more likely to be violent than people living in the same neighborhoods who do not have mental illnesses,” wrote Brent Teasdale, a professor of criminal justice at Pennsylvania State University, and Miranda Lynne Baumann, then a doctoral candidate at Georgia State University’s criminal justice and criminology program, in a 2018 article for Truthout.
Putting restrictions on people with mental health issues could lead people to avoid seeking treatment, they added.
“There is certainly an argument to be made for the temporary removal of firearm access for individuals actively experiencing mental health crises,” Teasdale and Baumann added. “However, the threat of permanent loss of one’s Second Amendment right could cause harm. People might avoid treatment for fear of losing their guns.”
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rainbowriderjt · 8 months
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Good! Seems To Work Pretty Well!
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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 10 months
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
July 21, 2023 (Friday)
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUL 22, 2023
On June 8 the Supreme Court affirmed the decision of a lower court blocking the congressional districting map Alabama put into place after the 2020 census, agreeing that the map likely violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act and ordering Alabama to redraw the map to include two majority-Black congressional districts. 
Today the Alabama legislature passed a new congressional map that openly violates the Supreme Court’s order. By a vote of 75–28 in the House and 24–6 in the Senate, the legislature approved a map that includes only one Black-majority district. 
Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and many of the other members of Alabama’s congressional delegation had spoken to the Republicans in the state legislature about the map. Editor of the Alabama Reflector Brian Lyman reported that the map’s sponsor said he had spoken to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) too: “It was quite simple,” the sponsor said. McCarthy “said ‘I’m interested in keeping my majority.’ That was basically his conversation.” 
Alabama governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed the bill into law. 
Today, assistant U.S. attorney general Todd Kim and U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas Jaime Esparza wrote to Texas governor Greg Abbott and Texas interim attorney general Angela Colmenero warning that the actions of Texas in constructing a barrier in the Rio Grande between the U.S. and Mexico “violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties.” 
The floating barrier violates the Rivers and Harbors Act, which prohibits the construction of any obstructions to navigation in U.S. waters and requires permission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before constructing any structure in such waters. Abbott ignored that law to construct a barrier that includes inflatable buoys and razor wire.
Mexico has also noted that barrier buoys that block the flow of water violate treaties between the U.S. and Mexico dating from 1944 and 1970, and has asked for the barriers to be removed. So has the owner of a Texas canoe and kayaking company, who says the buoys prevent him from conducting his business. And so have more than 80 House Democrats, who have noted Abbott’s “complete disregard for federal authority over immigration enforcement.”
Unless Texas promises by 2:00 Tuesday afternoon to remove the barrier immediately, the U.S. will sue. 
Abbott has made fear of immigration central to his political messaging. He is now faced with the reality that Biden’s parole process for migrants at the southern border has dropped unlawful entries by almost 70% since it went into effect in early May, meaning that border agents have more time to patrol and are making it harder to enter the U.S. unlawfully. 
Abbott’s barrier seems designed to keep his messaging amped up, accompanied as it is by allegations that troops from the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety have been ordered to push migrants, including children, back into the river and to withhold water from those suffering in the heat. There are also reports that migrants have been hurt by razor wire installed along the barrier.
Abbott responded to the DOJ’s letter: “I’ll see you in court, Mr. President.” 
Yesterday, on the same day that Shawn Boburg, Emma Brown, and Ann E. Marimow added to all the recent stories of Supreme Court corruption an exclusive story showing how then-leader of the Federalist Society Leonard Leo funded a “a coordinated and sophisticated public relations campaign to defend and celebrate” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to advance a bill that would require the U.S. Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of ethics. 
“We wouldn’t tolerate this [behavior] from a city council member or an alderman," committee chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) said. “It falls short of ethical standards we expect of any public servant in America. And yet the Supreme Court won't even acknowledge it’s a problem.” “The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act,” Durbin said, “would bring the Supreme Court Justices’ ethics requirement in line with every other federal judge and restore confidence in the Court.”
Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) disagreed that Congress could force the Supreme Court to adopt an ethics code. “This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court,” he said, although he agreed that the justices need “to get their house in order.”
Today, Dahlia Lithwick and Anat Shenker-Osorio noted in Slate that voters of both parties strongly support cleaning up the Supreme Court.
As signs of an indictment for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election grow stronger, Trump has taken to threats. When asked about incarceration, Trump said earlier this week: “I think it’s a very dangerous thing to even talk about, because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters, much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016. I think it would be very dangerous.”
His loyalists are working to undermine the law enforcement agencies that are supporting the rule of law. On July 11, 2023, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to chair of the Committee on Appropriations Kay Granger (R-TX) asking her to defund Biden’s immigration policies as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which investigates crime.
It is notable that, for all their talk about law and order, the Republican-dominated legislature of Alabama and the state’s Republican governor have just openly defied the U.S. Supreme Court, which is hardly an ideological enemy after Trump stacked it to swing to the far right. 
The Republican governor of Texas is defying both federal law and international treaties. After rampant scandals, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court refuses to adopt an ethics system that might restore some confidence in their decisions. And, aided by his loyalists, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is threatening mob violence if he is held legally accountable for his behavior. 
The genius of the American rebels in 1776 was their belief that a nation could be based not in the hereditary rights of a king but in a body of laws. “Where…is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense. “I'll tell you Friend…that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” 
Democracy is based on the rule of law. Undermining the rule of law destroys the central feature of democracy and replaces that system of government with something else.
In Florida today, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon set May 20, 2024, as the date for Trump’s trial for hiding and refusing to give up classified national security documents.
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
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ejacutastic · 2 years
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On Sept. 17, near the town of Sierra Blanca in rural West Texas, ICE detention center operator Mike Sheppard and his twin brother Mark attacked a group of migrants walking through the desert. Mike saw the group on the side of the road, pulled over next to them, pulled out his firearm and proceeded to shoot at the group. He killed one migrant and injured another.
The Sheppards first claimed that they were looking for grouse, then changed their story to hunting javelina, or wild pigs. This would have been at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday evening, 20 minutes after sunset. They claimed that they did not know what they had shot and left to attend a local Water Board meeting. Survivors’ testimony tells a radically different story: After taking cover near a water tank, they heard men in a pickup truck shouting profanities in Spanish and telling them to come out. The truck revved its engine, then the driver leaned across the hood and fired two shots. One man was struck in the head and killed, and another woman was struck in the gut and wounded.
The attack is reminiscent of other lynchings that have taken place throughout the country such as the horrific killing of Ahmaud Arbery, in which two armed, white vigilantes murdered a Black man jogging by the side of the road.
Mike Sheppard’s actions are part of a larger pattern of violently racist and xenophobic attitudes embedded within U.S. immigration policy. The far right has weaponized immigration as a racist wedge issue. State governors like Greg Abbott of Texas, Ron DeSantis of Florida, and Doug Ducey of Arizona are militarizing their immigration policies while sending thousands of migrants to New York City and Chicago, effectively using immigrants as pawns in their political stunts. At the same time, they have also increasingly advocated for and celebrated vigilantism towards immigrants and people of color. The day after Sheppard’s attack, another man in West Texas, Erick Garibaldi, shot a migrant in the face. 
Gilberto Hinojosa, a chair of the Texas Democratic Party, said in response, “This killing in West Texas is the direct result of Texas Republicans’ violent fearmongering of undocumented migrants. When you continuously use language like ‘invasion’ to describe what is happening at our border, the only logical conclusion is that you want migrants and asylum seekers to be treated like invaders.’” 
Hinojosa is correct about the Republicans’ demonization of migrants. The Democrats, however, are also to blame for harsh border policies and the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants. Under the Biden administration in the past 11 months, more than two million immigrants have been arrested along the southern U.S. border. Biden claims to be implementing a “safe, orderly and humane” immigration system, but the number of migrant deaths is at an all-time high under the Biden administration.
Mike Sheppard, the shooter, has a history of allegations of violent, racist behavior. The light charges he has received so far are a slap in the face to his victims.
Sheppard was fired from his job shortly after the incident, but this is not the first allegation of racist violence that has been leveled against him. A 2018 report by a coalition of legal groups found that African detainees who were transferred to the facility endured “physical assault; sexual abuse; excessive and arbitrary discipline (use of pepper spray and solitary confinement) without cause; verbal insults, including racial slurs; dangerous and unsanitary conditions of confinement; and denial of medical and mental health care.” Sheppard himself was implicated in many of the abuses as were guards directly under his command.
The detention center has claimed that he had been fired “due to an off-duty incident unrelated to his employment.” Apparently, the many years of alleged on-duty incidents of violence directly related to his employment didn’t count in the eyes of the detention center.
The state of Texas has charged Sheppard with manslaughter, defined as “killing without malice.” Given Sheppard’s violent past, history of racist violence in his role as detention center manager, and the allegations that the brothers shouted profanities in Spanish before opening fire, it should be clear that this is in fact a hate crime.
Anything short of a first-degree murder conviction will be an insult to Sheppard’s victims and will signal to other vigilantes that they can commit lynchings with impunity.
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Texas governor says rape victims can prevent pregnancy by taking Plan B | The Hill
The Republican governor also told “Lone Star Politics” that reporting a rape to law enforcement “will ensure that the rapist will be arrested and prosecuted.”
However, very few rape cases result in an arrest. While there were 13,327 reported rapes in Texas in 2020, there were only 1,828 arrests for rape, according to the state’s department of public safety.
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cultml · 1 year
Link
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Git'er done Gregg !!!!!!!
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