Month: January 2018

Brushing aside opposition from the Department of Justice, Republicans on the House intelligence committee voted Monday to release a classified memo that purports to show improper use of surveillance by the FBI and the Justice Department in the Russia investigation.

 

The memo has become a political flashpoint, with President Donald Trump and many Republicans pushing for its release and suggesting that some in the Justice Department and FBI have conspired against the president.

 

Privately, Trump has been fuming over the Justice Department’s opposition to releasing the memo, according to an administration official not authorized to discuss private conversations and speaking on condition of anonymity.

 

At the behest of Trump, White House chief of staff John Kelly and other White House officials have been in contact with Justice Department officials in the past week to convey the president’s displeasure with the department’s leadership on the issue specifically, the official said. In a series of calls last week, Kelly urged the Justice officials to do more within the bounds of the law to get the memo out, the official said.

 

In the hours before Monday’s vote, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders underscored the administration’s position, saying Trump favors “full transparency.”

 

Trump now has five days to decide whether he wants the information released. The panel could release the information five days after the vote if Trump doesn’t object.

 

Democrats are livid about the memo, which they say omits crucial facts and should not be selectively released. They have pushed back on Republican criticism of the FBI, saying it is an attempt to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether Trump’s campaign was involved. The probe has already resulted in charges against four of Trump’s former campaign advisers and has recently moved closer to Trump’s inner circle.

 

The top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, California Rep. Adam Schiff, said last week that Democrats on the panel had put together their own memo.

 

On Monday, the committee voted to make the Democratic memo available to all House members — but not the public. Texas Rep. Mike Conaway of Texas, who’s leading the House’s Russia investigation, said he was open to making it public after House members have a chance to review it.

 

While Trump’s White House signaled he would likely support the memo’s release, his Justice Department has voiced concerns. In a letter to House intelligence committee Chairman Devin Nunes last week, Justice officials said releasing the classified memo could be “extraordinarily reckless” and asked to review it.

 

Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote Nunes that given the panel’s role in overseeing the nation’s intelligence community, “you well understand the damaging impact that the release of classified material could have on our national security and our ability to share and receive sensitive information from friendly foreign governments.”

 

Some senators have expressed concern about the release as well. But John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican and a member of that chamber’s intelligence committee, said last week that Nunes and the Justice Department need to work out their differences. On Sunday, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina both said they don’t think the memo should be released.

 

“No, I don’t want it released yet,” Graham said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I don’t. I want somebody who is without a political bias to come in and look at the allegations that I have seen.”

 

The fate of the memo is the latest flashpoint in the contentious relationship between Trump and the Justice Department.

 

Trump has frequently raged at the head of the department, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from the Russia probe, a move the president believes led to the appointment of Mueller. Trump has bemoaned, both privately and publicly, that Sessions and his department have not shown him the “loyalty” that former attorneys general Eric Holder and Robert Kennedy showed their presidents.
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After they lost their home in Puerto Rico to flooding during Hurricane Maria, Enghie Melendez fled with her family to the U.S. mainland with three suitcases and the hope it wouldn’t take long to rebuild their lives. It hasn’t worked out that way.

More than four months later, the family of five is squeezed into two rooms in a hotel in Brooklyn. While her husband looks for work, they are stuck in limbo, eating off paper plates and stepping over clothes in cramped quarters as they try to get settled in an unfamiliar city.

“After the hurricane hit we told the kids that every day was going to be an adventure, but not like this,” said the 43-year-old Melendez. “This is turning out to be really hard.”

Around the U.S., many Puerto Ricans are similarly adrift in hotels because of the Sept. 20 hurricane. The move north spared them from the misery of the storm’s aftermath on the island. But the transition has often proved to be difficult, disruptive and expensive as people try to find housing, jobs, schools and even furniture and clothes to start fresh on the mainland.

Melendez and her family shuffled between staying with relatives to a homeless shelter to a small hotel in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, forcing her to change schools for her three daughters in the middle of the semester.

“The instability is terrible,” she said as her husband, who worked as a cook at an Army base near San Juan, used a glass bottle to mash plantains to make a traditional Puerto Rican dish.

Adding to the worries for large numbers of Puerto Ricans is that hotel reimbursements from the Federal Emergency Management Agency have started to run out and many say they can’t afford temporary housing without assistance.

“It’s stressful,” said Yalitza Rodriguez, a 35-year-old from the southern Puerto Rico town of Yauco who has been staying at a hotel in Queens with her elderly mother and husband while he looks for work. “If we don’t get an extension we will have nowhere to live.”

Maria destroyed between 70,000 and 75,000 homes and damaged an additional 300,000, said Leticia Jover, a spokeswoman for Puerto Rico’s Housing Department. The effects of the storm included the widespread loss of power, which is still not restored in some places. Many businesses closed. The result has been an exodus to the mainland. 

The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College estimated in an October study that between 114,000 and 213,000 Puerto Ricans would move to the U.S. mainland over the next 12 months. Most were expected to settle in Florida, followed by Pennsylvania, Texas and New York. 

FEMA says there are nearly 4,000 families, more than 10,000 people, receiving hotel assistance from the agency in 42 states because their homes in Puerto Rico are too damaged to occupy. The agency extended the expiration for the program from Jan. 13 to March 20 at the request of the island’s governor, but all cases are reviewed for eligibility every 30 days and the payments could end for some people sooner. It’s impossible to know how many are in temporary housing without any aid or staying with families. 

Leslie Rivera, from the central town of Caguas, has been shuffling among hotels in Tampa, Florida, since December with her three kids, ages 13, 10 and 2.  She was approved for subsidized housing and expects to be settled soon but it has been difficult.  

“I feel like I am on the streets because I have no clothes. I have nothing for my kids,” the 35-year-old said with tears in her eyes.

Marytza Sanz, president of Latino Leadership Orlando, which has been helping displaced families, said many don’t know where they will go after FEMA stops paying for their rooms. 

“There are people with five dollars in their pockets,” she said. “They can’t buy detergent, deodorant, medicine.”

In Kissimmee, in central Florida, Desiree Torres feels nervous. She has spent more than two months in a hotel with her three children. She says she can’t find a job and several local shelters have told her there is no space for her and her children.

“I can’t sleep at night,” said the 30-year-old Torres, who lost her home in Las Piedras, a southeastern town near where the eye of the storm first crossed the island. “I’m worried about my kids.”

After the hurricane, Melendez and her family were forced to sleep for more than three weeks in their garage because of flooding and sewage that entered the home. They left their four dogs with a friend and managed to get on a humanitarian flight. They spent 10 days at Melendez’s father-in-law’s Manhattan apartment and a month and a half in a Brooklyn shelter. A Puerto Rican activist helped them enter the hotel. 

“My kids were in a Manhattan school. We would wake up before 5 a.m. at the shelter to take them there. Now they are in a Brooklyn school,” she said. “Where will they be tomorrow?”

For now, they survive on a $1,700 monthly disability payment that Melendez receives along with about $300 a month in food stamps. 

Her 16-year-old daughter, Enghiemar, does her homework on the floor of the hotel room and tries to keep in touch with friends back home by text. 

“I always wanted to come and live here,” she said. “But not like this.”
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Syrians living under Temporary Protected Status in the United States will know by Tuesday whether the Trump administration is extending those protections or canceling them, as it has done with three other countries in recent months.

The decision, due by January 30, will affect some 6,000 Syrians.

The TPS designation allows some nationals of countries facing natural disasters or extreme violence to remain in the U.S. and work legally.

Since it does not lead to permanent residency or citizenship, TPS beneficiaries who lose the status are subject to deportation — in this case, back to Syria, where civil war rages into a seventh year.

In 2016, the last time TPS was redesignated for Syria, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services cited the continuing armed conflict, which meant that “the return of Syrian nationals to Syria would pose a serious threat to their personal safety.”

Syria is one of the more recent additions to the list of TPS countries. The country was designated worthy of TPS in 2012, before the rise of Islamic State violence. With the extremist group forced out of its de facto capital last year, “the country will now enter a new dangerous and pivotal phase, as the government continues to wage war to retake the country from opposition forces,” according to a January report by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, a non-profit group that provides legal services to immigrants.

“In all, Syria remains unstable, destroyed and wholly unsafe for the return of Syrian TPS holders at this time.”

More than 50 national security and foreign policy experts signed a letter last week, asking Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to extend TPS for Syria. The signers argued that it is not just a humanitarian matter, but also one of national security.

“Our allies look to the United States for leadership,” their letter said. “We have an opportunity to demonstrate that the safety and security of the people of Syria remains a primary objective of the U.S. approach. Ensuring those currently out of harm’s way can safely remain in the United States, rather than face imminent danger, is critical to showing our allies we embrace this mission.”

The Trump administration has cancelled TPS for four countries, most recently El Salvador, affecting almost 200,000 people. Announcements for Honduras, Nepal, Somalia and Yemen are expected later this year.
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Native Americans took to social media Monday to celebrate the pending “death” of Chief Wahoo, the longtime logo of the Cleveland Indians baseball team which features a garish “Indian” caricature that is offensive to America’s first peoples.

But the victory is only a small one for Twitter users, using the hashtag #NotYourMascot: The Cleveland Indians won’t be changing the team’s name; the team will still be able to sell Chief Wahoo merchandise; and fans won’t be blocked from wearing clothing bearing the logo.

In a statement released Monday, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said he told team owner Paul Dolan that the time had come to remove the caricature that has appeared on players’ caps and uniforms since 1948.

“Over the past year, we encouraged dialogue with the Indians organization about the club’s use of the Chief Wahoo logo,” Manfred said. “During our constructive conversations, Paul Dolan made clear that there are fans who have a longstanding attachment to the logo and its place in the history of the team.

“Nonetheless, the club ultimately agreed with my position that the logo is no longer appropriate for on-field use in Major League Baseball, and I appreciate Mr. Dolan’s acknowledgement that removing it from the on-field uniform by the start of the 2019 season is the right course.”

For decades, Native American activists and their supporters have protested the logo, a cartoon of a grinning red-skinned man in a feathered headband.  They have complained that the image is offensive and perpetuates racist stereotypes about America’s first peoples.

In 2014, a group called People Not Mascots filed a federal lawsuit seeking $9 billion in damages.  Two years later, a Canadian man sued the team in an attempt to prevent it from wearing the Chief Wahoo logo during games in Toronto.

In recent years, many schools and universities across the country have stopped using Native Americans in their team names or as mascots.  But according to MascotDB, a database of sports team names and mascots, many hundreds of American teams retain Indian imagery, ranging from local high schools to major teams like the Washington Redskins.

“Today’s announcement marks an important turning point for Indian Country and the harmful legacy of Indian mascots,” said Jefferson Keel, president of the National Congress of American Indians. “These mascots reduce all Native people into a single outdated stereotype that harms the way Native people, especially youth, view themselves.”
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