by Anna Challet
New America Media

The 2020 Census is off to a rocky start, with crucial preparations already delayed or falling to the wayside, largely a result of inadequate funding from Congress.
Some of the nation’s oldest civil rights organizations, while fearing the worst, say there’s still time for Congress and the Trump administration to turn things around – but the window is “closing fast,” according to Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“We’re increasingly worried that the Administration and Congress have not prioritized support for a fair and accurate census, and that ill-advised decisions in the next few months will further erode the chance [for success],” Gupta said on a nationwide press call for ethnic media.

“There’s really too much at stake to ignore the growing threat to a successful census,” she says. “Being undercounted in the census deprives already vulnerable communities of fair representation and vital public and private resources … The health and well-being as well as the political power of all the diverse communities in America rest on a fair and accurate count.”

The consequences of a botched census would ripple across the country, affecting everything from funding levels in education and health care, to redistricting and the implementation of the Voting Rights Act. Data from the census is used to allocate resources for all kinds of services nationwide, from hospitals to transportation.
“A good census is a sound investment in everything we hold dear in this country – a representative democracy, government and elected officials that are accountable to the people, and business and industry investment to drive economic growth, good jobs, and innovation,” says Terri Ann Lowenthal, former staff director of the House Census and Population Subcommittee, and now a consultant to the Leadership Conference Education Fund.

Lowenthal says that the 2020 Census is facing a “confluence of unprecedented factors” amounting to “a perfect storm.” The Census Bureau’s prior director, John Thompson, resigned in May of this year, and the agency is “facing a leadership vacuum at a time when it is faced with critical decisions” on its methods and use of resources,” according to Gupta.

In addition to the nomination of a “qualified, non-partisan candidate to lead the Census Bureau,” Gupta says the agency is in dire need of more adequate funding.
Lowenthal says that funding for the 2020 Census has been so far “insufficient, uncertain and frequently late.” Following the 2010 Census, Congress for the first time set a cap on census costs. The Census Bureau was directed to spend no more on the 2020 Census than it did on the 2010 Census; following that, says Lowenthal, Congress “shortchanged the census in annual funding bills throughout much of this decade.” Lawmakers later decided that the 2020 Census would in fact receive less funding than the 2010 Census.

Congress failed to allocate sufficient funds in 2017, according to Lowenthal, and now the Trump administration has requested far less funding in 2018 than the Census Bureau needs, she says. As things stand now, there will be fewer than half as many temporary census takers in the 2020 Census as there were in 2010.

“The window of opportunity to right this ship is closing fast,” says Lowenthal. But, she says, “Congress can demonstrate leadership by adjusting the budget cuts upward in advance starting this fall for the next three years.”

The lack of adequate funding has already had real consequences, says Arturo Vargas, the executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund.
The Census Bureau failed to complete a Spanish-language test census that was planned for Puerto Rico, and is also failing to test and implement methods for more accurately counting people in remote and rural areas.

The agency also won’t be testing certain local outreach and messaging strategies to get people to complete their census forms, Vargas says.

Outreach strategies have become more crucial among some marginalized communities. “We know that there is increasingly a climate of fear among immigrant communities and immigrant households,” he says, due to the current political atmosphere and an uptick in anti-immigrant rhetoric under the Trump administration.

“We have seen immigrant families opting out of participating in programs in which they have any kind of contact with government, including health care programs and school lunch programs,” says Vargas. “As a result we believe it will be even more difficult to encourage these immigrant populations to participate” in the census.

Indeed, it’s groups like “people of color, low-income families, people with disabilities, and limited English proficient individuals” who would be most affected by an inadequately funded census, according to John C. Yang, the executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “Any gap in testing and any gap in discovering deficiencies” in methodology, he says, would have the greatest impact on these communities.

Trump hailed Joe Arpaio’s “admirable service” in Arizona. There’s more to his career than that

by Ryan Gabrielson

President Donald Trump issued his first pardon to Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County sheriff famous for using his local police force to aggressively pursue undocumented immigrants. In its official statement, the White House credited Arpaio with “more than fifty years of admirable service to our nation,” which made him “a worthy candidate” for a pardon.

Below is a list of essential reading on one of the most reviled and beloved lawmen in the U.S.

In November 2004, Arpaio won re-election to his fourth term as sheriff and quickly set about reorganizing the police force by transferring some 140 deputies to different positions. Mark Flatten, then a reporter at the East Valley Tribune, found evidence the moves were tied to the deputies’ political loyalty, or lack thereof, to Arpaio. “Those who worked to re-elect the sheriff moved into more prized positions,” Flatten wrote. “An analysis of the transfers of sworn officers by the Tribune shows deputies who backed Saban, Arpaio’s rival in the Republican primary last September, were moved to such jobs as transporting prisoners or standing watch in courtrooms.”

The sheriff’s office had long feuded with the Phoenix New Times, an alternative weekly newspaper that broke major stories about misconduct by Arpaio’s force. In August 2007, the agency’s top commanders teamed with local prosecutors to subpoena seemingly every document inside the newsroom, ostensibly as part of a criminal probe. The order warned the New Times that it was a crime to disclose anything about the subpoena. Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, then New Times’ publishers, did not remain silent.

That October, the newspaper plastered across its front page the headline: Breathtaking Abuse of The Constitution,” and provided the public with every detail. The subpoena demanded “every note, tape, and record from every story written about Sheriff Arpaio by every reporter over a period of years,” the publishers wrote. Worse yet, the sheriff’s office wanted information on the newspaper’s readers, including “every individual who looked at any story, review, listing, classified, or retail ad over a period of years.” Sheriff’s deputies arrested Lacey and Larkin at their homes the evening they published, and held them for several hours.

Arpaio allowed William Finnegan, staff writer at The New Yorker, to attend his meetings, ride along in his car, and interview his top commanders at great length in early 2009. The result of that access is a revealing, unsparing profile of Arpaio and the police force he ran at the peak of its illegal immigration enforcement.

In July 2008, the East Valley Tribune published a multipart investigation of the sheriff’s office’s immigration enforcement and overall police work. The agency’s arrest rate had plummeted, emergency response times soared, deputies were shelving sex crime cases without investigation, and the immigration arrests often involved unconstitutional practices. Arpaio was also using the immigration operations as a form of patronage. The sheriff’s office argued it pursued undocumented immigrants because they were a public safety threat. But agency records showed Arpaio often directed deputies to target day laborers along specific locations at the request of his supporters in the state Legislature and local businesses in his hometown of Fountain Hills. “I have a strange old philosophy that if someone does something for you, gives you resources, gives you money, I think if they want something back, we ought to do it,” Arpaio said in an interview.

Jacques Billeaud, a reporter for The Associated Press, revisited the office’s uninvestigated sex crime cases in 2011, and detailed multiple cases in which children were reportedly assaulted. The story prompted Arpaio to apologize for these failures for the first time.

Maricopa County taxpayers spent roughly $92 million on court settlements, awards, and legal bills during Arpaio’s 24 years as sheriff, The Arizona Republic calculated. Of that, $28 million was paid for “legal matters listed as civil-rights violations, false arrest, conspiracy and malicious prosecution.” And $30 million was spent on lawsuits stemming from the county’s jails.

New Times has reported scores of stories about egregious abuse and misconduct by sheriff’s employees inside the jails. Among them is a 1997 story about Richard Post, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, who suffered a broken neck when corrections officers strapped him in a restraint chair for six hours. A decade later, Ambrett Spencer was pregnant with a baby girl while an inmate in Maricopa County jail. Suffering severe pain, Spencer waited four hours for the jail to transfer her to a hospital. Her daughter, Ambria, died of internal bleeding before she was delivered. Pregnant women were in significant peril in Arpaio’s jails. From the New Times: “The water well in the facility where pregnant women are jailed has been infested with mice and mice feces since 2005, Maricopa County Environmental Health Services Records show.”

Joe Dana, a reporter at Phoenix’s NBC affiliate, revealed that the sheriff’s office spent nearly $300,000 in 2007 and 2008 to build a criminal intelligence data system and provide training for the Honduran national police. It remains unclear why this occurred.

The sheriff’s office effectively entrapped an inmate in a fake plot to assassinate Arpaio, for which the agency purchased bomb parts, as told in an exhaustive Phoenix Magazine narrative. The inmate was acquitted at trial and later won a million-dollar legal settlement.

The sheriff’s office also helped gain clearance for a Chinese software engineer to work inside an intelligence center in Phoenix that houses federal and local law enforcement, including FBI counter-intelligence agents, for several months in 2007, reporting by ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting found. The engineer worked on a facial recognition system using Arizona’s driver’s license database. He abruptly returned to China, taking time to aggressively erase the computers he’d worked on, while packing other hardware, before boarding his flight home.

by the El Reportero’s wire services

Anti-US rhetoric predicted to accompany Mexico’s presidential election campaign

Five days of trade talks wrapped up Sunday with a commitment by all three NAFTA partners to accelerate the process in the coming months.

An early finish to negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement will benefit Mexico, which would prefer to see it done before campaigning begins for next year’s presidential election.

In a joint press release on Sunday, representatives of Mexico, the United States and Canada said last week’s meetings covered more than two dozen different negotiating topics.
“Negotiators from each country will continue domestic consultations and work to advance negotiating text through the end of August, and will reconvene in Mexico for a second round of talks from Sept. 1-5,” the statement said.

The three parties have agreed that negotiations will continue “at a rapid pace,” moving to Canada in late September and returning to the U.S. in October. Additional rounds are being planned for the remainder of the year.

Mexico Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo said the idea is to conclude the negotiations at the end of the year or in early 2018 before election campaigns begin for the Mexican presidency and U.S. Congress.

According to a Canadian analyst, accelerating the talks has turned the process around, putting the tougher issues on the table — including automobiles and rules of origin — first rather than waiting till the end.

That, says public policy analyst Meredith Lilly, is a sign that “the Americans realize that they could be put in a [difficult] position because of the Mexican calendar.”

That calendar means anti-U.S. political posturing could begin early in the new year as parties and candidates come out hard against U.S. President Donald Trump as an election tactic, said Lilly.

But an unnamed source told Reuters the schedule was exceedingly fast, given that past trade deals took years to negotiate.

One of the stickier issues in the talks will be rules of origin for the automotive industry. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has made it clear that strengthening those rules was a priority. They are also the main factor behind U.S. trade deficits, an issue deemed critical by President Trump.

Source: El Universal (sp), CBC (en), Reuters (en).

Differences emerge in trade negotiations

Neither Mexico nor Canada support changes to rules of origin in auto industry

Rules of origin in the automotive industry have emerged as the biggest sticking point among other differences between Mexico and the United States in talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The United States is demanding higher U.S. content in auto manufacturing but Mexican Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo said he doesn’t support the implementation of specific national rules of origin into a renegotiated NAFTA.

His position is shared by Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland.

In his opening statement, United States trade representative Robert Lighthizer said “Rules of origin, particularly on autos and auto parts, must require higher NAFTA content and substantial U.S. content. Country of origin should be verified, not deemed.”

However, automotive groups from all three countries are urging negotiators not to change rules of origin to avoid upsetting complex supply chains.

Industry sources say the U.S. also pushed for the establishment of a wage system in the manufacturing industry, an issue that had not previously been publicly raised by the U.S. government.

Both Mexico and Canada sought instead to formalize international wage mechanisms in the agreement such as those provided by the International Labor Organization (ILO).

The U.S. has also made it clear that it wants to restore what it perceives as an imbalance in the agreement with Lighthizer saying, “We need to assure that huge trade deficits do not continue.”

However, Mexican foreign trade undersecretary Juan Carlos Baker said, “I would strongly contest whether emphasizing trade deficits is the real metric for how our relationship should be measured” and both Mexico and Canada have argued that the deficit is due to a low U.S. domestic savings rate.

Another clash came on the issue of intellectual property. Mexico wants to grant eight years patent protection while the U.S. wants 12.

More differences are likely to arise with talks scheduled on a dispute settlement system for anti-dumping and anti-subsidy cases. The U.S. wants to eliminate the system while Mexico and Canada want it maintained.

Mexico and the U.S. clashed earlier this year over subsidies and dumping in the sugar industry.

Guajardo played down any suggestion that NAFTA was wavering due to difficult issues or differences. He said that after two days of talks, progress has been made and that there are issues that have benefits for all parties.

Common ground has been found on not using currency manipulation to make markets more competitive and a desire to reduce Asian imports in the textile industry.

The first round of talks started in Washington on Wednesday and will run until Sunday. The second round is scheduled for Mexico in early September.

Source: El Universal (sp), Milenio (sp), Reuters (en).

US warns of violence in tourist destinations

Increased criminal activity, more homicides bring new travel alert

Crime increases in five Mexican states have triggered a new travel warning for Mexico by the United States Department of State, which offers a new caution about several tourist destinations.

The alert cites increased criminal activity in Baja California, Baja California Sur, Chiapas, Colima, Guerrero, Quintana Roo and Veracruz, warning U.S. citizens about gun battles between rival criminal organizations or with authorities on the streets and in public places during broad daylight.

Caution is urged in Baja California, including Tijuana, Rosarito, Ensenada, Tecate and Mexicali, particularly at night.

As with several other state-specific warnings, that for Baja California says most homicides appear to be targeted, criminal organization assassinations, but turf battles have resulted in violent crime in areas frequented by U.S. visitors.

The warning announced that U.S. government personnel are only allowed to travel on the Mexicali-Tijuana toll highway during daylight hours.

Criminal activity and violence remain an issue throughout Baja California Sur, said the State Department, which included Los Cabos and La Paz in its warning, making the same caution about violence in tourist areas.

In Chiapas, including Palenque and San Cristóbal de las Casas, U.S. officials must now remain in tourist areas and are not permitted to use public transportation.

Inter-city travel at night is prohibited for government personnel in Colima, as is traveling within 19 kilometers of the border with Michoacán and traveling on highway 110 between La Tecomaca and the Jalisco border.

Source: El Universal (sp), CBC (en), Reuters (en).