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This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center and co-reported with NPR.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Carolina Wassmer piloted a gray SUV around the city, dropping off canvassers from the civic engagement group Poder Latinx one by one. It was a muggy day, but the canvassers hopped out with their clipboards and pens, ready to engage in a longstanding American tradition: the voter registration drive.

Poder Latinx’s canvassers were fanning out to help eligible voters in Latino neighborhoods join the rolls or update their registrations. But the work of such groups, which often focus on young voters and voters of color, is getting harder in Florida and around the nation.

Since the 2020 election, at least six states have passed legislation cracking down on voter registration drives. Many groups view the laws — enacted by Republicans in Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana and Tennessee — as an existential threat to their work, and several have shut down operations rather than risk financial penalties or prison time.

“It’s been a nightmare in every way,” said Davis Hammet of Loud Light in Kansas. His group halted voter registration efforts after a 2021 law imposed criminal penalties for impersonating an election official, something engagement organizations fear could be inadvertent. “If you’re [convicted of] a felony, you lose your right to vote. So you could lose your right to vote for registering voters,” Hammet said.

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In Florida, state legislators in 2022 upped the maximum fine a voter registration group could receive from $1,000 to $50,000. The next year, they boosted it again to $250,000. They also limited how and where organizations can return forms, and barred non-U.S. citizens and people with certain felonies from doing the work.

“These are rules that everybody needs to tighten up a little bit,” said Florida Rep. Rick Roth, a Republican who supported the changes. “You have to do it the right way. We don’t want any hiccups.”

Several Florida groups shut down their voter registration drives after the 2023 law. “As a consequence of all these threatening provisions, the League no longer collects paper voter registration applications,” said Cecile Scoon of the League of Women Voters of Florida. The League has registered tens of thousands of Floridians, but a $250,000 fine would be greater than its annual budget in recent years.

“We’re not as effective as we once were,” Scoon said.

State data shows that in the months after the Florida law took effect in 2023, registrations through drives fell by 95%, compared with the same months four years earlier.

Republican legislators in Florida cite concerns about fraud and trust in elections as reasons for the new restrictions. Voter registration groups have missed deadlines for returning applications in some cases, leaving potential voters ineligible for upcoming elections. And six canvassers were arrested in April 2023 after allegedly falsifying 58 voter registration applications in two counties. Yet a state investigator in Florida wrote that the people involved “were not part of an organized criminal conspiracy to corrupt the election process.” And there’s no broader indication of widespread fraud in voter registration drives across the country.

Americans can’t vote without being registered, except in North Dakota, and the registration process represents the largest barrier to casting a ballot for many potential voters. For over a century, voter registration drives have set up shop at parks, churches, grocery stores, campuses and community events to register eligible Americans.

These drives — with a long history stretching back to women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights movement — register some of the nation’s hardest-to-reach potential voters. They are especially key in states, like the six with new restrictions, that do not have automatic voter registration.

Advocates say many of the voters they register would be left out of the elections process otherwise. Black and Latino voters, along with naturalized citizens and people who didn’t graduate from high school, are more likely to rely on third-party voter registration efforts, according to census data.

And Republicans elsewhere are seeking to limit this form of voter outreach. Legislators in at least seven states considered bills this year, according to data from the Voting Rights Lab. The proposed legislation sought to erect new barriers to voter registration drives, create new criminal penalties or, in the case of Indiana, make such drives illegal entirely.

“This is part of a national effort,” said Nimrod Chapel Jr. of the Missouri NAACP.

‘The better democracy’

On a hot Saturday, Humberto Orjuela paced the parking lot of Presidente Supermarket #49 east of downtown Orlando. Friendly and soft-spoken, Orjuela was approaching shoppers and asking if they wanted to register to vote.

“When more people participate in elections, the better democracy we will have,” Orjuela said in Spanish between conversations with potential voters. He typically talks to shoppers while they’re loading up their car with groceries, when they feel less rushed.

Around lunchtime, he approached two women leaving the store. The sisters weren’t on the voter rolls but wanted to be. Orjuela walked each sister through the application, section by section. When Wilmarie Rivera got to the section about political parties, she was stumped about which to register with. Her sister piped in, asking which presidential candidate she preferred.

“Ah, Trump!” she responded with a laugh. “Eres Republicana,” Orjuela noted. He helped Rivera finish the paperwork, and the two sisters climbed in their red Dodge Charger and drove off. 

Orjuela does his outreach work in Spanish. Wassmer, Poder Latinx’s Florida program director, said that makes a difference. “People don’t feel confident. Or they’re not sure how to register, or why to register,” she said. “So the language really helps meeting people where they’re at.” 

But the Florida Legislature wants Orjuela to stop registering voters. A 2023 law, SB 7050, banned noncitizens like him from conducting voter registration drives, even though lawful permanent residents can handle registration applications as employees of Florida’s state or local election offices. The new restriction had been paused by a court, allowing Orjuela to continue registering voters. Wednesday, the same court said the state cannot enforce the provision.

Orjuela did civil engineering work in Colombia before coming to the U.S. He can’t vote himself, so the unglamorous, sweaty work of registering voters in parking lots is his contribution. He considers it a successful day if he can help around 10 Floridians join the rolls or update their registrations. 

But Orjuela said he was concerned about Florida’s law. “It’s a law that seems unjust to me, because if one has the right to work, well, one should be able to exercise that right. It shouldn’t come with so many limitations,” he said.

Legislators also shortened the window for groups to send completed applications to elections officials, from 14 days to 10; they barred people with certain felonies, including elder abuse, sexual offenses and perjury, from registering voters; they required groups to provide a receipt for each application; and they added a mandate that groups re-register with the state after every election cycle.

Additionally, SB 7050 criminalizes retaining the personal information of people registering to vote, now a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. (This has also been blocked by a court for now.) Groups say information like addresses and phone numbers had been a key part of their voter outreach.

The legislation sailed through Florida’s heavily Republican Legislature last spring, with the state’s election director, Maria Matthews, commenting in an internal email that “the bill appears to have the legs of [a] teen cross-country sprinter.” According to deposition testimony, many of the law’s provisions were recommended by Matthews and her colleagues at Florida’s Department of State, which oversees elections. The head of the agency, Cord Byrd, is a former Republican state representative and close ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

In a statement, Department of State spokesperson Mark Ard said that “Floridians put a great deal of trust in [voter registration groups] to ensure that their voter registration applications are submitted to the appropriate Supervisors of Elections in a timely manner. However, that is unfortunately not always the case.”

The agency’s election crimes unit increased its scrutiny of voter registration groups in 2023, saying in its annual report that issues with these groups “have plagued the state for years.” It noted the agency received “over 50 civil complaints” from county election officials about groups returning applications late.

But Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida, said there are no widespread issues with third-party voter registration groups, sometimes referred to as 3PVROs.

“There are certainly some bad apples with respect to the efforts on the ground. But they are rare,” he said. 

Only 1.2% of voter registration applications submitted by these groups from 2016 to 2023 were alleged by the Department of State to have violated statutes. That’s according to plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging SB 7050. A federal court heard arguments in the suit, brought by civic engagement groups and voting rights organizations, in April. A decision is expected later this year.

Voter registrations way down, fines way up

Smith submitted an expert report for the plaintiffs, finding that more than 2.1 million Floridians relied on these groups to register or update their voter registrations in the last decade.

“Not every individual is the same. Not every individual has the same opportunities to register or re-register. They have various types of barriers. Maybe it’s transportation, maybe it’s information, maybe it’s concern about health, maybe it’s financial,” he said. “3PVROs really fill the gap.”

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Black and Latino voters are far more likely to rely on voter registration drives than white voters. In his report, Smith found that 12.8% of Black voters in Florida had used voter registration drives to register or update their registration since 2012.

That compared to 10.3% for Latino voters, and just 2% for white voters.

In deposition testimony, the state elections director, Matthews, acknowledged that she was aware of data showing voter registration drives disproportionately reached Black and Latino voters.

Republicans reject the notion that race has anything to do with the laws. “This is not targeting anybody. This is saying we are concerned” with how voter registration groups are operating, Roth said. “I am personally concerned.”

Joe Scott, supervisor of elections in South Florida’s Broward County, doesn’t share those concerns. “There’s a segment of the population that really relies on these groups being able to come out and do a voter registration drive in order for them to get registered to vote,” he said.

Scott, a Democrat, said Broward County has seen “a dramatic decrease” in voters registering through drives since SB 7050 became law. That echoes a statewide trend. Just 3,860 Floridians registered through drives in the first three months of 2024. During the same time frame in the last presidential election year, 40,963 voters did so.

That massive drop is driven, in part, by groups that responded to the new laws by stopping their voter registration work. LaVon Bracy’s Faith in Florida is one of them.

Bracy is a longtime civil rights activist. She was the first Black student to graduate from Gainesville High School in 1965 and has personally registered hundreds of voters in Florida.

“The restrictions are unbelievable,” she said in the Orlando church she and her husband founded. Bracy decided to halt voter registration drives last year because Faith in Florida couldn’t afford to pay fines of up to $250,000 per year if something went wrong. “It was a necessary decision, financially. We had to pivot,” she said.

Fines issued to voter registration groups have soared in recent years, according to documents in the lawsuit. They rose from under $4,000 in 2019 to over $64,000 last year.

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To avoid fines and criminal sanctions, Faith in Florida has begun sharing QR codes with potential voters, directing them to the state’s registration website. That means they are not directly registering people, and staff are unable to return applications on voters’ behalf. 

Bracy fears the new laws mean Faith in Florida will reach many fewer voters, including senior citizens who may struggle with the state’s online registration system.

She sees a racial motive behind the bills regulating voter registration drives, particularly following the 2018 gubernatorial election, in which DeSantis won by less than half a percentage point against Democrat Andrew Gillum, who is Black. “The aim is to keep Black and brown people from voting,” Bracy said. “If it wasn’t so important, they wouldn’t come up with all of these rules.”

‘Making it scary to do this work’

Florida is not alone. 

Five other Republican-controlled states have passed laws restricting voter registration drives since the 2020 election. Many of the laws share similarities and have been challenged in court.

“What I see as uniting a number of cases I’ve worked on, both past and present, is making it scary to do this work,” said Danielle Lang of the Campaign Legal Center, pointing to the financial and criminal provisions in the laws. Lang’s organization has been involved in legal challenges in Florida, Montana and Missouri.

The active cases in several states mean that laws can go into effect, then be blocked by courts, only to later be ruled constitutional — the legal sands shifting under the ground of organizations forced to decide if and how they want to register voters.

In Idaho, Sam Sandmire’s BABE VOTE, which seeks to register young voters on college campuses, at music festivals and elsewhere, has been grappling with the fallout from a 2023 law.

Youth registration in Idaho soared in recent years, growing faster between 2018 and 2022 than in any other state, according to a Tufts University analysis.

The law passed by the state Legislature established the types of identification voters could use to register and prove residency, which include a deed of trust, credit card statement or concealed weapons license, but does not include student ID. “That hurt, that forced us to suspend our voter registration drives,” Sandmire said.

BABE VOTE’s lawsuit called the changes “a surgical attack on Idaho’s youngest voters,” but the case was rejected by the state Supreme Court in April. (A separate case in federal court over the law remains active.)

The group’s volunteers restarted registration drives this spring, after a nine-month pause. But Sandmire said the changes to ID requirements have meant the group has to turn away perhaps a third of eligible Idahoans they encounter who are interested in registering.

In Missouri and Kansas, new laws triggered concern among voter registration groups that their work risked criminal penalties.

The Kansas law criminalizes impersonating an election official, in language that civic engagement groups say is so vague that they’ve been forced to suspend operations. (An attorney defending the law for the state said in a hearing that “I will acknowledge that this legislation did not represent the high water mark of legislative craftsmanship.”) Groups say that their staff and volunteers carefully explain who they are but are sometimes mistaken for government employees anyway — and now could face a fine of up to $100,000 and 17 months in prison over that mistake.

“This is me sending young people out, knowing that I might be sending them to get a felony charge that could just wreck their life,” said Hammet, the Loud Light president. “This is not even a misdemeanor, it is a felony charge.” 

His group had been planning an event celebrating the anniversary of the 26th Amendment, which reduced the minimum voting age to 18. But Hammet canceled it after the law passed.

“So we couldn’t register voters on the anniversary of young people getting the right to vote,” he said. 

A legal challenge is ongoing, but the process has dragged on for years. Hammet said his organization has missed out on registering thousands of voters.

Missouri’s law, passed in 2022, has also been challenged in court, with a trial scheduled for August. A state judge there granted a preliminary injunction, meaning aspects of the law are not currently in effect. The NAACP and other plaintiffs say vague provisions leave them at risk of criminal sanctions.

The law bans payment for voter registration work, which the Missouri NAACP has interpreted to include travel reimbursement as well as food and drinks for volunteers. “You can’t give them donuts, you can’t give a volunteer a T-shirt. And so it really gets draconian in that way,” said Chapel, who fears the restrictions could end his group’s ability to conduct voter registration drives at back-to-school events and on Juneteenth.

The law also requires people who solicit more than 10 applications to be registered to vote with the state, freezing out Missourians whose felony sentences bar them from casting ballots. 

“It really brings home what the folks who passed the law are trying to do, which is restrict our ability to register new voters at all,” Chapel said.

In a response in court, attorneys for the state denied the allegations made by the NAACP and other groups. Andrew Bailey, Missouri’s attorney general, told the Center for Public Integrity and NPR that he was “proud to be leading in the fight to ensure the integrity of Missouri’s elections.”

A 2023 law in Montana created criminal penalties for voters who “purposefully remain registered” in another jurisdiction when registering in a new one. Groups that conduct registration drives fear their staff and volunteers could be criminally charged for helping people register, and filed suit. In late April, a federal judge prevented the state from enforcing the provision for now.

Millions of voters register through drives

Voter registration drives have been a fixture of the elections landscape for nearly as long as registration has existed.

“What people understood from the beginning was that there was a role for groups to be engaged in helping people clear that hurdle,” said Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky.

Douglas studied the history of registration drives and found that they assist millions of voters each cycle.

Drives gained force during eras when the franchise expanded. “The big pushes for voter registration were women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights movement,” he said. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 also set off a wave of registration by standardizing application paperwork.

Efforts to restrict these drives have a history, too. A 2012 report from the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for expanded voter access, found that the practice had “come under attack” nationally.

Among the legislation proposed at the time was a 2011 law in Florida that added several new restrictions, including a requirement that groups return applications within 48 hours. A federal judge permanently enjoined many aspects of the law in 2012, but an academic report found that voter registrations among Black Floridians were impacted more than other groups while the law was in effect.

A 2019 law in Tennessee, establishing hefty fines and prison time, met a similar fate: A federal court blocked it.

The legislative attention came one year after the Tennessee Black Voter Project collected over 90,000 voter registration applications. “There is always a backlash to our efforts to claim progress, and to have any sort of semblance of equality,” said Charlane Oliver, a nonprofit executive who was a key figure in the registration drive.

Oliver, a Democrat, was elected to the state Senate in 2022. This year, she watched the introduction of new legislation restricting such drives. Several of the provisions echo Florida’s recent laws, including requiring groups to provide a receipt, establishing fines and barring people with certain felonies from doing the work.

In a statement to Public Integrity and NPR, Tennessee Rep. Tim Rudd, the bill’s sponsor, said he drew inspiration from Florida. He thought Florida’s $50,000 fine for people with certain felonies doing voter registration work was high, though, and proposed a $5,000 one.

Rudd, a Republican, rejected the argument that Oliver and others have made that legislation restricting voter registration drives harms Black voters. He said the bill “has nothing to do with race, but everything to do with protecting Tennesseans from voter registration fraud and elder abuse via reasonable limited guidelines and restrictions. Those opposed to this legislation must not want accountability, plain and simple.” The measure was signed into law by Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee earlier this month.

At least seven states besides Tennessee have considered legislation this year to ban or restrict voter registration drives: Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, New York and West Virginia.

“It is a really disturbing trend that these types of bills are circulating nationally,” said Saumya Sarin, a volunteer with Idaho’s BABE VOTE.

Bills in three of those states remain active and could become law, according to the Voting Rights Lab.

Advocates say drives reach many groups beyond Black, Latino and young adults who face barriers to voting. “Voter registration drives are really important across Indian Country,” said Jacqueline De León of the Native American Rights Fund. “Too many Native Americans simply are never asked the question, ‘Would you like to register to vote?’”

Registering online is not a viable option for some Americans. “A lot of our rural communities don’t even have broadband access. So how are they going to get registered to vote online?” said Tennessee’s Oliver.

Small shifts in voter registration could play a key role in what polls show is an exceedingly close presidential election. And the makeup of the electorate is poised to affect the down-ballot races that will determine who serves as governor, mayor, state supreme court justice and more in communities across the nation. In Florida, ballot measures on marijuana and abortion access could come down to small margins.

Not everyone who registers will vote. But anyone who doesn’t register can’t vote.

Voter registration drives “raise awareness,” said Scott, the supervisor of elections for Broward County’s 1.9 million residents. “They’ll be there, they’ll set up a table, and they’ll do their voter registration drive there, for folks who maybe aren’t being exposed to this idea that you need to get registered to vote.”

Correction, May 16, 2024: An earlier version of this story included a quotation in which the speaker said those charged with a felony lose their right to vote in Kansas. A felony conviction would prevent a Kansan from voting while the sentence is in effect.

The post ‘The restrictions are unbelievable’: States target voter registration drives appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

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Lead poisoning is often treated as if it’s a problem of the past. But its harmful legacy lingers today, particularly in the soil of urban centers across the United States. 

One in every two American children under the age of 6 tested between late 2018 and early 2020 had detectable levels of lead in their blood. Studies show soil exposure is a major reason. 

The lead pumped out of exhaust pipes and industrial smokestacks decades ago can still be found in soil. Lead paint used extensively throughout the first half of the 20th century remains on the interior and exterior walls of many homes, degrading to chips and dust that also end up in soil. And although the U.S. began phasing out lead in automobile gasoline and consumer paint in the 1970s, new lead pollution continues to be dumped on communities every year from industrial sites and the aviation gas used by small aircraft. 

Yet while the threat of lead exposure via paint and water is well documented, soils aren’t systematically tested and mapped to prevent exposure to this invisible neurotoxin.

The Center for Public Integrity and Grist have created a toolkit to help fill these information gaps and arm journalists and community members with the skills needed to do their own testing and analysis. The detailed guide walks readers through how to test the soil, map their results and investigate potential sources, both present and past. 

As part of this effort, Public Integrity and Grist will host several training workshops on the major tools and takeaways from the new guide. For journalists interested in coverage ideas and information about testing, join us either April 23 or April 25, both at 1 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific).

For those interested in learning more about how to tackle soil lead contamination in their communities, join us April 30 at 1 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific). Register here. You’ll also get an invitation to an additional brainstorming session to further tailor these approaches to your area.

Experts say that identifying the environmental sources of contamination is key to preventing lead poisoning in children. Once a child has been exposed, the damage cannot be reversed, which makes environmental testing and mapping imperative. 

Decades of research have shown the lasting harm for children exposed to lead, from brain development impacts — the capacity to learn, focus, and control impulses — to later health risks like coronary heart disease. No amount, scientists say, is safe. 

Our toolkit offers suggestions no matter what stage you’re at in your journey to learn about soil lead contamination. If you’d like to know what existing data indicates, for example, this map referenced in the toolkit shows how common elevated lead levels are in children by census tract or ZIP code in 34 states. Public health agencies fail to adequately test children’s blood for lead exposure, research shows, but existing data can point to potential trouble areas for soil, paint, or water exposure.    

If you’d like to know whether the soil in your city might be contaminated but don’t have the resources to conduct widespread testing, you can start small by testing in your backyard or a handful of properties in your neighborhood. The toolkit includes information about the online portal Map My Environment, an initiative that allows you to send in test samples to be analyzed for free. You’ll also see recommendations on lead interventions.

The post How to protect your community from the toxic lead lurking in soil appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

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CULPEPER, Virginia — For years, Angie’s parents resisted her pleas to bring her to the United States. There was no legal path to bring her here from Guatemala, and she was too young to travel by herself. 

But the pandemic changed everything. Two years ago, the family — parents, grandfather and uncle — put their savings together to pay a smuggler to bring the teen to the U.S.

“We were afraid that we would never see her again,” said Angie’s mother, Norma, 38. “We didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Angie arrived in 2021. The federal government released the teen to her mother a few weeks after she was taken into custody by Border Patrol after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. She was finally home with the family that left her behind in Guatemala 10 years ago.

“What I like the most about the U.S. is being with my whole family for the first time,” said Angie, 16. “I missed them every day.” (The Center for Public Integrity is not publishing Angie’s and Norma’s full names to protect their identities.)

Angie is the third generation of her family from the town of Huehuetenango in the western highlands of Guatemala to come live here. She is also one of more than half-a-million immigrant children who have come to the U.S. alone in the past decade. Almost half came from Guatemala, federal data show.

While most of these children are more likely to live in major U.S. cities, hundreds are also arriving in rural counties and towns like Culpeper. At least 428 minors made Culpeper their home between 2014 and 2021 after crossing the border without a parent or guardian, data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows.

Almost half, or 190, came in 2021 when the U.S. southern border was closed to most asylum seekers except a few, including unaccompanied minors, under a Centers for Disease Control emergency order known as Title 42. The order was enacted in March of 2020 and later lifted in May of 2023.

Culpeper was among the top three rural counties with the most unaccompanied children placements nationwide in 2021, according to department data analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity and Scripps News.

Many of them came here to fill labor shortages caused after the border was closed while others, like Angie, came to be reunited with their loved ones, according to dozens of interviews with immigrant children, sponsors, community leaders, social service providers, law enforcement officials, attorneys and immigration experts by Public Integrity and Scripps.

For at least three decades, immigrants from Guatemala have found refuge and work in this rural town of some 20,000 people nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Northern Virginia. Angie’s grandfather came here in the late 1980s fleeing persecution during the country’s 36-year-long civil war. Others came after droughts and floods uprooted their lives but most were driven out by extreme poverty and hunger.

Angie's mother, Norma, came with a temporary visa in 2011 to work at an industrial greenhouse in a neighboring county. She joined her husband who came to work here with his father in 2007, shortly after Angie was born. Norma said it was a hard decision to leave Angie in the care of her parents. She never thought they would be apart for so long.

Angie's father joined the family’s tree trimming business built by his father, where his brother also works. Angie’s mother overstayed her visa when she learned that they were pregnant with their second child.

“I knew she [Angie] was in good hands and that I could help her and my parents who were struggling financially,” Norma said.

Poverty, inequality and corruption

Guatemala has a population of more than 17 million people, and more than half of them live below the national poverty line, according to the World Bank.

To survive, millions of families across Guatemala rely on remittances or money sent by their loved ones living and working abroad. In 2023, remittances reached a record $19.8 billion, according to Guatemala’s Central Bank. That’s more than the government’s entire annual budget.

A 2022 study by the Migration Policy Institute found that 80% of migrants returned to Guatemala left the country for economic reasons, 10% were fleeing violence, and 7% left to reunify with their families.

The number one cause of migration in Latin America is inequality, according to a 2018 presentation from Alicia Bárcena, former executive director of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a United Nations research organization. Bárcena said the top 10% make up to 70 times more than the bottom 10% across Mexico and Central America.

In Guatemala, inequality is driven mainly by a handful of families that control most of the country's major industries, including cement, metal products, and sugar, according to Juan Alberto Fuentes Knight, an economist and Guatemala’s former finance minister.

These powerful, wealthy families have “strangled the economy” and controlled the government to benefit themselves for over a century, he said. He blames low wages and a lack of social services on the greed of these families.

Knight said for many families in Guatemala, immigration is the only feasible way to escape poverty. He said it’s not uncommon for families to pitch in and invest to send someone north to work or go to school.

“With these children, it’s not that they’re just sending them irresponsibly,” Knight said. “They want them to have a better life and they are investing a lot of money to do that.” 

Family ties

Víctor Díaz Sánchez came to Culpeper in 2018 from Colotenango, a municipality in Huehuetenango. The same department or state Angie and her family came from. With a population of about 35,000, Colotenango consists of at least eight villages separated by mountains, each with its own Mayan dialect and traditions, according to Sánchez.

Sánchez drank a black coffee from the 7-Eleven across the street on a cool spring morning as he explained the different variations of Mam and K’iche’ spoken by the 50 or so men soaking up the sun and having breakfast at a regular Culpeper day-laborer pickup spot.

“I don’t think most of us want to be here,” said Sánchez, 27. “But because we were born poor in a country run by corrupt individuals, we are forced to leave.”

Migration from Guatemala to the U.S. has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Census data show the Guatemalan foreign-born population living in the U.S. more than tripled, from 320,000 in 2000 up to 1 million in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center.

Sánchez said day laborer sites here typically swell with workers during the spring and summer and subside with the cold weather. Most of the immigrants he’s seen were young men until 2021 when teenagers began to outnumber the adults. 

“Look, he came here a few weeks ago from Guatemala,” Sánchez said as he pointed towards a young man sitting a couple of feet away from him, wearing a black Venom sweatshirt and skinny jeans, outside the 7-Eleven. The 15-year-old who did not want to disclose his name said he’d crossed illegally into the U.S. through the Arizona desert. He came here from the western highlands of Guatemala to find work trimming trees like his brother and cousins did years ago.

About 200,000 Guatemalans turn 15 every year and enter the labor market, but there are few new jobs for them, according to Bárcena, who led the ECLAC from 2008 to 2022.

The majority of these Guatemalan children arriving in the U.S. alone are coming from the department or state of Huehuetenango, according to an ongoing study of deported Guatemalan unaccompanied minors by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM works with the United Nations to advocate for safe and legal pathways for migrants worldwide.

Huehuetenango has one of the highest child malnutrition rates in Latin America. Guatemala is among the five most food-insecure countries in the world, according to a 2021 report by MPI and the World Food Program, an organization within the U.N. About 47% of children in Guatemala suffer from malnutrition compared to 1% in the U.S. and 13% in Mexico. In Huehuetenango, that number is 68%, according to the report.

Most communities in the western highlands also lack access to quality hospitals, schools and other public and social services, according to the study. 

But things have been this way for a long time for people in this region, according to Juan José Hurtado Paz y Paz, director of Associacion Pop Noj, an organization that runs immigrant shelters for children in Guatemala. Paz y Paz co-authored a 2022 report with MPI and IOM titled, “Migration from Huehuetenango in Guatemala’s Western Highlands.”

For more than a century, Guatemalans from this region have migrated in great numbers to coffee plantations located near the country’s Pacific coast and across southern Mexico to find seasonal work. Others have migrated to Guatemala’s major cities looking for better job opportunities, according to the report.

In the 1960s, some communities in the region, including families from Huehuetenango, began immigrating to the U.S. These immigration patterns were accelerated in the 1980s when the region was ravaged by violence including multiple massacres during the country’s civil war, according to the report. 

Most migrants moved to California, Florida, Nebraska, Texas, and major metropolitan areas like New York and Washington, D.C. One of the first studies about migration conducted in this region in 2004 showed that up to one-third of families from Huehuetenango had a relative living in the U.S. 

“These networks and routes to the U.S. have facilitated and are a driving force behind the intense migration we’ve seen from this region,” said Paz y Paz.

Support from afar

While living in Huehuetenango, Angie received money from her parents in Culpeper every month. She used the money to pay for her school, food and clothing. 

A 2020 study by the Catholic Diocese of Huehuetenango found more than 80% of people living here had a close family member living in the U.S. Many families rely on money from relatives abroad to survive.

In 2022, the money sent from abroad to this country totaled $18 billion, nearly four times the amount of money sent in 2012, according to Guatemala’s Central Bank. Half of that money was spent on food, according to the MPI and Paz y Paz study.

Back in Culpeper, Angie was sitting on the front steps of her multi-generational home scrolling through her mom’s phone with her 10-year-old sister, who was born in the U.S. The two had not met in person until Angie came to the U.S. The elder sister said she thanks God each morning for her life in the U.S. and for her parents who fought so hard to bring her. 

Even so, Angie is anxious about her future. She checks the mailbox every day dreading a letter from immigration court summoning her to appear before an immigration judge who will decide her fate and possible future in the U.S. 

“I want to stay, but I know there’s a possibility that I get sent back,” she said. “Either way, I want to continue studying and I know my parents will support me as best they can from nearby or afar.”

The post Why are kids from Guatemala coming to Culpeper? appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Pauly Denetclaw
ICT

WASHINGTON — Marianne Williamson, a 2020 presidential hopeful, promised before an auditorium of Indigenous leaders, elders and voters that under her administration the White House would formally apologize and atone for the horrific treatment of Native Americans by the federal government, alluding to genocidal policies enacted by the United States.

In 2019, Williamson was one of 11 presidential candidates who attended the historic Frank LaMere Native American Presidential Forum in Sioux City.

Williamson is one of three Democratic candidates running for president of the United States in 2024. She’s also in the race against incumbent President Joe Biden and Cenk Uygur, co-founder and host of The Young Turks, a progressive news program.

“Biden’s done some good things in Indian Country, but not everybody’s happy with everything,” said Mike Stopp, a Republican political consultant. “Even Deb Haaland, who I like, even though we disagree on a lot of policies, has irritated a lot of people in Indian Country. Just because you are Native doesn’t mean you’re going to do what everybody wants all the time. We’re very diverse.”

The 2024 presidential election also has two Independent candidates, political activist Cornel West, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the late Robert F. Kennedy and an environmental attorney.

There are 9 Republican candidates:

1. Former president Donald J. Trump
2. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley
3. Biotech investor and newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy
4. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson
5. Megachurch pastor and businessman Ryan Binkley
6. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
7. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
8. North Dakota Gov. Doug Bergum
9. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott

Most of the presidential candidates mention nothing publicly about what their policies are for tribal nations, leaving voters to speculate what it could be from past legislations, social media posts, comments and speeches. ICT has created a database of presidential candidates that includes information specific to tribal nations. The database gives users a brief overview of each candidate and their engagement with tribal nations.

The presidential race is stacked this election but the two frontrunners are, obviously, Biden and Trump.

“I see Trump/Biden 2.0 in 2024, and I don’t think that makes anybody happy, but I think that’s where we are. I think what we’re going to see is a lot of Democrats turn out because they’re anti-Trump and they’re not super excited about Biden either, but he’s the president and the candidate,” Stopp said. “You’re going to see a lot of Republicans, quite a few of them were very pro-Trump, but a lot of ’em are really anti-Biden that are coming out. They would like to see someone more practical than Donald Trump.”

Current polling shows Biden leading with more than 60 percent. Williamson at around 5 percent and before Kennedy changed parties he hovered around 15 percent in the Democratic primary.

“I do believe that President Joe Biden is going to go down in history as one of the most supportive advocates for tribal sovereignty that we’ve seen in a U.S. president,” Angelique EagleWoman, a scholar of Indigenous law and policy. “I say that because of his ability to see the grassroots support for appointing the first Native person as the US Secretary of the Interior. So by appointing Secretary of Interior, Deb Haaland, who’s Laguna Pueblo, into that role, he set a standard that we haven’t seen at that level for a U.S. president.”

Trump is dominating the packed Republican primary. He stays around 60 percent in the polls with DeSantis, Haley and Ramaswamay trailing behind.

“Now, when it comes to Indian policy, Donald Trump actually had some decent advisors when he did it,” Stopp said. “I was one of them. There were a few others that I worked with in making sure that federal Indian policy didn’t take a step back.”

Another was Tyler Fish, Cherokee, who was a White House senior policy advisor and tribal liaison during the Trump administration. Texas federal judge Ada Brown, Choctaw, was nominated by Trump. She became the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge. On her father’s side she is a descendant of the Muscogee Creek Freedmen.

Trump signed the CARES Act that allocated $8 billion in funding for tribal governments and an additional $2 billion for the Indian Health Service. Many nations used this funding to provide direct support for their citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic.

DeSantis started off as a strong contender against Trump but his polling has since lagged. He stays around 15 percent.

“I don’t see any standout on the Republican side that has a knowledge basis or the ability to embrace tribal nations, our issues and our sovereignty,” EagleWoman said.

DeSantis supported the Seminole Tribe of Florida on the road to having a monopoly on sports betting in the state. The Seminole Tribe donated millions to DeSantis’ gubernatorial campaigns. Unfortunately, the tribal gaming compact has been caught up in legal challenges and will likely head to the Supreme Court for review.

“We see in Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, the absolute elimination of Native Americans in history or understanding the role of Euro-Americans in causing harm,” EagleWoman said. “A great nation should be able to understand its mistakes and its faults to do better.”

Trump stopped hosting the White House Tribal Nations Summit, rarely did meaningful consultation with tribal leaders, released budget requests that cut funding for IHS and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and supported energy projects that were incredibly unpopular in tribal nations.

“We have the former U.S. President Donald Trump who before entering politics opposed tribal casinos and tribal gaming and tribal business development,” EagleWoman said. “During his administration, he tried to rescind a reservation for the Wampanoag. He put on hold the ability of Alaska Native villages, as tribal governments, to take land into trust. He mocked tribal historical figures. He refused to engage in consultation. So, there’s just not many pluses I can find for that former administration.”

Recently, former Vice President Mike Pence was the first high-profile candidate to drop out of the race, saying it was clear that it wasn’t his time. Others that have dropped out are Miami mayor Francis Suarez, former Cranston, R.I. mayor Steve Laffey, and former Texas congressman Will Hurd.

A Republican candidate with lots of experience with tribal nations is North Dakota Gov. Doug Bergum. The state has five federally-recognized tribes, these include the Mandan, Hidatsa, & Arikara Nation (Three Affiliated Tribes), Spirit Lake Nation, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Nation.

“Doug actually has had very good relations with tribes,” Stopp said. “Actually, a good friend of mine who used to be the staff director for the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs actually is advising on his campaign because he worked for him as governor and in the Indian Affairs office.”

In May, with the support of Bergum, North Dakota codified the federal Indian Child Welfare Act into state law as the Supreme Court wrangled with the constitutionality of the act. He displayed tribal flags at the state Capitol; doubled Native American scholarships to $1 million; signed legislation that would bring IT and cybersecurity to tribal schools and colleges; and went into oil tax revenue-sharing compacts with the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.

“I do think he is probably the most pro-tribal, pro-Indian candidate in the Republican mix right now,” Stopp said. “Unfortunately, I don’t see him getting very far. I actually find him to be a very practical person, and in today’s environment, practicality loses to sensationalism.”

Biden administration

The difference between the top two contenders is stark when it comes to tribal nations. The Biden administration has poured unprecedented amounts of funding into tribal governments, appointed more Native Americans to key roles than any other administration, continues to do meaningful consultation, hosted the first-ever Native American Heritage Month reception at the White House, and nominated an Indigenous woman to be a federal judge.

Biden also selected the first Native American person to ever be part of the president’s cabinet, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and the first Native American U.S. Treasurer, Chief Lynn Malerba, Mohegan.

Last year, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both made speeches at the White House Tribal Nations Summit. Around half of the cabinet members were walking around during the summit talking with tribal leaders.

Any candidate would have a difficult time matching Biden’s commitment to tribal nations.

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Reading Time: 8 minutes

It was nearly a quarter century ago when thousands of Black farmers filed a class action discrimination lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to receive financial compensation. More than 15,000 got $50,000 lump sum payments, and a small number were approved for larger payments. Some had hoped that it would finally help them get out from under debt to the department.

But for some farmers, the funds weren’t enough. And a second version of the settlement reaching other Black farmers in 2010 didn’t solve the underlying problem either.

“The toxic debt just continues to stick around,” said Sylvia Stewart, research communications director and senior research associate for the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, who’s conducting a study on the impact of the lawsuit Pigford v. Glickman and its settlement for Black farmers.

After Black farmers filed the Pigford suit, Native American, Latino and female farmers filed similar lawsuits claiming discrimination by the department in loan and benefit programs. All ended with settlements.

And yet, nearly 25 years later, USDA officials said they are still trying to address disparities stemming from discrimination in farm loan lending.

But the USDA of today, under the Biden administration, said it wants to correct racial discrimination by taking a broad-based approach to equity that targets all borrowers in financial distress and finds any discriminatory actions that have affected farmers of all races in its farm loan programs. Black borrowers are the racial group that most struggles to get out from their USDA debt.

The USDA is grappling with how to identify which individuals should get compensation for historical injustice done to groups of people many years ago, and how that gets done in legislation that is specific to contemporary phenomena, like COVID. But it’s also up against the context of one side of Congress being controlled by Republicans who deny the existence of racial inequality as a modern-day problem. Their idea of a “colorblind” government and justice system that denies any responsibility for righting injustices based on past discrimination was buoyed by a recent Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions.

“Race is not the only factor that we consider as we’re trying to reach equity,” said Dewayne Goldmon, senior advisor for racial equity to the secretary of agriculture.

Given the history of USDA, it’s difficult to make “significant improvements” without at least acknowledging that there are “disparities that exist among the different races of customers that we’re trying to assist, and try and figure out a way to address those disparities in a very transparent and productive way,” Goldmon said.

The current administration is attempting to address disparities through new programs included in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 that do not rely on racial identification to help farmers get out from under their USDA debt.

However, the efforts came after a federal judge blocked implementation of debt relief to farmers of color in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a COVID-relief bill, on grounds that it discriminated against white farmers. As a result, Congress changed course.

One of the programs in the Inflation Reduction Act provides debt relief for borrowers of any race who are considered economically distressed. Congress appropriated $3.1 billion for borrowers who are behind on loan payments or face other financial risks. Financial assistance includes loan payments of past due amounts and the next installment of loan payments.

The USDA began releasing payments in October 2022 and as of May 23, it has distributed $1.1 billion in debt relief payments.

In another program in the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress appropriated $2.2 billion in financial assistance to farmers of any race who experienced discrimination in USDA’s farm loan programs prior to Jan. 1, 2021. For this program and others, USDA is working closely with community-based organizations, which are trusted by the diverse populations it’s trying to reach, said Zach Ducheneaux, administrator of the Farm Service Agency, the arm of the USDA that manages loans.

“We’ve been intentional about developing and cultivating relationships with outside NGOs to ensure we’re reaching the folks that may need a little extra hands on technical assistance to meaningfully participate in all of our programs,” Ducheneaux said.

The discrimination program will potentially reimburse farmers for federal payments that were garnished, or offset, to repay loans that are found to be tied to discrimination in the agency’s farm loan programs.

Farmers who fall delinquent in their loans may see federal payments like Social Security checks, income tax returns, pensions and farm subsidies garnished, or offset, and put toward their debt. A loan becomes delinquent after a borrower fails to make a scheduled payment on their loan.

An ‘ill fate’

In 1997, Timothy Pigford filed the initial suit that eventually became a class action lawsuit. Known as Pigford vs. Glickman, the civil case alleged the federal agency engaged in racial discrimination against Black farmers in how the agency allocated its loan programs by delaying or denying loans to Black farmers. It also claimed that the USDA had consistently failed to address official complaints about that discrimination.

The case never went to trial. In 1999, the parties agreed to a settlement that presented farmers with two different categories of claims — Track A and Track B. Each farmer had to pick a track to pursue as part of the settlement agreement.

Track A included a $50,000 award and the chance to have outstanding debt in a loan program forgiven if it was connected to the claim of discrimination. But farmers who chose Track A had to show that when they applied for a USDA loan, that the loan was denied, delayed or decreased. They needed to show that a white farmer with a similar situation had been treated more favorably than they were. Finally, they’d need to be able to show that all of that added up to an economic loss.

For Track B, farmers were allowed to claim full damages, but they were also required to provide a “preponderance of evidence” of discrimination. Farmers would need to show an arbitrator that USDA discrimination had cost him more than $50,000 in damages by providing evidence including documents and present it at a mini trial. But if the farmer succeeded, they could be compensated for all of the costs tied to the discrimination they’d faced.

Despite the strict eligibility criteria, the process was full of accusations that some money went to the wrong people. The New York Times in 2013 published an investigative report that detailed massive fraud, “a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees.”

In all, 15,645 claims were approved for Track A and 115 claims were resolved in Track B from the 22,721 eligible class members.

Among them, a small portion — about 425 people, or 2.7% of claimants — received debt relief.

Eleven years later, a second settlement was created for people who were too late to participate in the initial suit. Between both Pigford settlements, more than 60,000 people submitted claims. Roughly half won some kind of damages.

Listen to what Timothy Pigford has to say about the USDA

As a result of Pigford, the federal government returned more than $2 billion to claimants.

Black farmers have lost $326 billion in land between 1920 and 1997, according to a study published by the American Economic Association last year.

But since most didn’t get debt relief, many used their settlement money to pay off other debt that they had to take on to continue farming, according to the Pigford Project, a research initiative by the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity at Brandeis University and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund.

Although USDA could not foreclose on farmers while their claim was being processed, claimants were still obligated to make payments on their loans. Meanwhile, interest accrued. The process dragged on for years. And in the end, some claimants never had their debt forgiven, according to the Project.

“Farmers applied to track A to get their debt relieved and be free and clear,” said Stewart, of Brandeis University. “However, we only have those big picture figures of how many people got [debt relief], or what [loans were] forgiven. We don’t have a strong list of who got what and why and what the reasons are.”

It’s also unclear how many of those Pigford class members who were successful in their claims were later subject to offsets, or garnishments. However, some offset payments were given back to some claimants after the claims process.

Local farmers who sat on county committees and had influence over who was deemed credit worthy and employees of the Farm Service Agency might send farmers into offset “in retaliation for applying for the Pigford claims,” said Stephon Bowens, an attorney who represented some claimants that disagreed with the settlement agreement in the lawsuit.

Offsets will factor into the amount of financial assistance that is offered to a borrower, such as a Pigford claimant who no longer has an active loan, who actually suffered from past discrimination in farm lending programs, said Goldmon, the senior advisor for racial equity to the USDA secretary.

There were outcomes that did not meet the expectations of class members. For example, when some relief was provided, and a farmer didn’t get total relief, they were subjected to offsets from loan balances that they thought would have been paid off.

“What we’re trying to do is come up with a system that will hopefully provide some financial assistance for those folks that have suffered from that ill fate,” Goldmon said. “And at the same time though, connect them with access to a more responsive, more inclusive Farm Service Agency, farm lending programs that give them better access as they go forward.”

This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

The post Can USDA’s efforts on equity help Black farmers overcome ‘toxic debt’? appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Reading Time: 10 minutes

BOLEY, Okla.

The biggest weekend of the year in this tiny town kicks off with an hours-long parade. Cowboys and cowgirls trot their horses along downtown blocks lined with watchful spectators and vendors selling their juiciest barbecue meats.

Inside a squatty stone community center, a vintage photography exhibit documents Boley’s better days, when a pair of banks and dozens of homegrown businesses on those same streets bustled as the town center of a prosperous agricultural region.

The parade kicks off the Boley Rodeo & Barbecue Festival, one of the nation’s more well-known celebrations of Black cowboy culture, taking place as it does in the largest of what once were 50 Black towns in the state.

Only 13 still exist.

The rodeo celebrates a certain Black presence in Oklahoma and the history of the Western frontier, as well as its place in Black farming, past and present.

Nearly half the Black-operated farms in the nation today are beef cattle ranches. In Oklahoma, it’s two of every three. And most of the Black farms are in the eastern part of the state, where Boley is located.

Yet, the Memorial Day weekend festivities also celebrate a place Boley, other Black towns, and the Greenwood section of Tulsa — home to the “Black Wall Street” destroyed in 1921 — occupy in America’s history.

Black folks, “not only farmers, but doctors, lawyers, and craftsmen of all kinds,” came here seeking “greater opportunities and more freedom of action than they [were] able to find in the older communities North or South,” Booker T. Washington, the noted Black educator and civil rights leader, wrote after visiting the town just two years after its official establishment in 1903.

Back then, Black folks by the thousands came west. Land was plentiful, and so were the cattle. The soil was fertile. Cotton, the region’s king crop, was high.

“Boley, like the other negro towns that have sprung up in other parts of the country, represents a dawning race consciousness, a wholesome desire to do something to make the race respected,” Washington wrote, “something which shall demonstrate the right of the negro, not merely as an individual, but as a race, to have a worthy and permanent place in the civilization that the American people are creating.”

The land that made Boley

Without the Trail of Tears, Boley as Booker T. Washington described it would not have been. And the Trail of Tears was a dispute over rich agricultural land.

In 1830, Congress passed and President Andrew Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act, which effectively evicted thousands of Native Americans who made up the “Five Civilized Tribes” from their ancestral homelands in the Southeast and the Plains and gave their stolen lands to white settlers.

Thousands of Native Americans were displaced to land that included what is now Oklahoma.

The Muscogee Creek Nation was one of the tribes, along with the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole, rooted in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and North Carolina. The Muscogee enslaved people and brought those enslaved with them to the area around what now is Boley.

The Muscogee aligned themselves with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Several factors may have influenced the decision, including the tribe’s historic ties to the American South and to white Southern ancestors, religious ties, the defense of separateness and anti-Blackness as an idea and economic reality, according to David Chang, author of “The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929.”

Afterwards, in order to be accepted back into the Union, they agreed to grant Black people freedom as well as full tribal citizenship. Over time, they were forced to give up much of their land to the federal government. They were also pushed to allot land to all tribal citizens.

One of the newly enfranchised Creek Freedmen was James Barnett, and 160 acres of land was allocated to his daughter, Abigail. Boley, about 70 miles southwest of Tulsa, would rise on that land, as would the lives of those who would make it their home, place of business or ticket to success.

“At this time, the U.S. is an agricultural society. So to seek opportunity, to seek economic independence, is often to seek land ownership,” Chang said.

Black cowboys are born

Enslaved people weren’t the only thing the Muscogee brought to the land that later would become Oklahoma and part of its Black Cowboy culture. Cattle had been an essential part of their economic life in the Southeast, and they brought their herds and their know-how, too.

Some tribes in the Indian Territory had already been cattle herding, but struggling to do well. Not the newcomers. With the help of those they had enslaved, they developed a successful cattle industry on the new frontier.

After the Civil War, the Muscogee economy struggled. Next door in Texas, cattle farming was booming, and many of the large herds were driven to railheads and to slaughter on trails that went through the Indian Territory. Black cowboys became a skilled workforce for those drives.

Many had been trained as cowhands on cattle ranches prior to the Civil War, and they operated those ranches when their slaveholders went off in support of the Confederacy.

After the war, the formerly enslaved were able to move around freely, and that gave them the opportunity to work nearly every type of job on the long drives to Kansas and other key markets.

And cowboy work paid more than sharecropping, the other principal way for a Black man to make a living. They often were paid the same amount as the white men who rode beside them, and more than the Mexican vaqueros and the Tejanos whose ancestors had been so critical in the years before.

Generations in the making

Much of the land obtained by Oklahoma’s first-generation Freedmen was great for growing cotton. In other areas, the financial grass was greener on the other side — rich in coal and oil.

Abigail Barnett’s land, as it turned out, was most valuable because of its location. It was smack dab on the path of a developing railroad route west from the transportation hub of Fort Smith, Arkansas, just across the eastern border.

There were no towns in the region, so Boley became its regional business center. It would be an early 20th century town run by Black folks for Black folks, a place where local governments empowered by Black voters would control most of the essential institutions of daily life.

“It might be somebody who can sell the inputs that you need for your farm,” said Chang, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota. “It might be a small bank, and the idea of a small financial institution is very important in this situation because of course, capitalism is about capital and you have to have access to capital. And who has the capital? The banks.”

Boley would have two, including the first nationally chartered bank in the nation owned by Black folks. Eventually, it also would have three cotton gins, its own electrical plant and more than its share of bustling, Black-owned businesses.

Its townsfolk were among Boley’s biggest boosters. They took out ads in newspapers and sent word to family and friends back East, telling them how good the living could be in this place with more promise and prosperity than persecution and punishment.

“It was a project that was generations in the making for these African American people,” Chang said. “This kind of sovereign institution, whether it be a farm or a church, or a growing store or a small bank, is an effort of taking away the fragility of many African Americans at this time.”

A raisin in the sun

As much as Booker T. Washington’s prose described Boley’s beginnings and what it could be, another Black man’s poem, written some four decades later, might well describe the condition of so many Black Americans years later, including those who’d planted their seeds of hope in Boley. “What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asked, in his poem “Harlem.” Does it shrivel up, he wondered, “like a raisin in the sun?”

But the dream of Boley was deferred long before the town was established.

The Indian Appropriations Act of 1889 opened up two million acres of forcibly unoccupied land for claim by U.S. citizens, mostly white settlers, including some who rushed in to claim land before the official opening date. Those early rushers are the “Sooners” of Oklahoma lore, those claimants who acted sooner than the others.

The settlers assumed considerable governmental power when Oklahoma became a state in 1907. They used it in the same way that other states, most prominently those of the former Confederacy, did.

Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has discussed that period and process in American history as Redemption, “when the gains of Reconstruction were systematically erased and the country witnessed the rise of a white supremacist ideology that, we might say, went rogue, an ideology that would long outlast the circumstances of its origin.”

Segregation in schools and public transportation would become law, not just culture. Black voting would be suppressed and Black voters disenfranchised. The promise of a better life that had drawn Black folks to Boley and the rest of the state would seem more and more to be a return to what they had sought to put behind them.

Boley’s Black-run local government created somewhat of a protective bubble for its residents. But other problems intruded.

“The population started declining in the ’20s when the boll weevil came along, which is a bug, and it chewed up the cotton,” said Henrietta Hicks, the town historian and Boley native. “Plus the fact, the [federal] government stopped the farmers, especially Black farmers, from growing the amount of cotton that could feed a family.”

The Great Depression hastened the town’s decline, as did the fate of the Fort Smith and Western rail line: Founded in Boley in 1899, it ceased operation in February 1939.

“And then on top of that, there’s the increasing rabidity of white supremacy across the nation, and especially in Eastern Oklahoma,” said Chang, the University of Minnesota history professor.

“The rise of outlaw elements of white supremacy, like the Ku Klux Klan, and very much legal instruments of white supremacy — like much of the government of the state of Oklahoma and all of its counties — made it difficult for these towns to really survive.”

By 1950, Boley’s population — about 4,000 several years after it was incorporated in 1905 — was 646.

Today, Boley is barely an echo of its past.

Most of the businesses are dusty, vacant shells. The schools have all shut down. Machines do much of the work that field hands did before. And the charms of city life seduce the young.

Still, a younger generation of Boley Bears, locals who’ve taken on the name of the old high school’s mascot, want to keep the town alive. Some have returned and some never left.

They know they’re investing in a Boley that isn’t what it was.

But who says it can’t be better?

This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

The post In Oklahoma’s Black Belt, land ownership and power built Black wealth appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

With House Republicans delaying progress on 2024 budget negotiations under an October 1, 2023 deadline, the effects of a government shutdown if an agreement is not reached could be a swift and brutal blow to rural America, according to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

“The extreme Republicans pushing this… represent a small minority that don’t seem to care if the government shuts down,” said Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack in a Daily Yonder interview. “Farmers, ranchers, and producers all across rural America are going to feel this.”

There are 12 appropriations bills that dictate spending for federal agencies that require annual approval from Congress. Negotiations over how much the government should spend is always a lengthy process, but this year especially so, as House Republicans quarrel over how much money should be allocated to agencies like the Department of Agriculture, Interior, Justice, and more.

According to Vilsack frustration toward the group of Republicans stalling progress on this year’s budget is acute. And the drawn-out negotiations could mean spending will grind to a halt come this Sunday, October 1.

Government support payments and loan applications for farmers would be put on pause, according to Vilsack. Benefits from the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program could end as early as next week, and benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would dry out at the end of October.

According to 2018 data from the Food Research and Action Center, rural Americans rely the most on SNAP benefits. Food banks would be the only other option for those who rely on these benefits, a support system not always accessible to the country’s most rural communities.

The five-year Farm Bill is set to expire on October 1. Congress is likely to extend the lifespan of the bill until the end of 2023, but Vilsack warned that progress would be slow if policymakers are also contending with a government shutdown.

“It slows [the Farm Bill] down because people aren’t there to work on it,” Vilsack said. “We’ll be focused on getting the government back open, and maintaining funding for the offices that service farmers and ranchers.” Commodity prices could skyrocket with a delayed Farm Bill, affecting food prices for consumers across the country. These are just some of the concerns at the top of policymakers’ minds as negotiations on the 2024 budget continue to stall.

Thousands of federal employees could be furloughed come Monday without pay, national forests and parks would be closed, and new homebuyers would be unable to access loans. Many publicly funded assistance programs that require annual budget approval would halt payments if their money ran out during the shutdown as well.

“It’s so unfortunate that a small handful of Republican extremists want this when no one else does,” Vilsack said.

The post USDA’s Vilsack Warns of Rural Fallout with Government Shutdown Likely appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died on Thursday evening at the age of 90, leaves behind a long and complex legacy on climate and environmental issues. Feinstein represented California as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate for more than 30 years, becoming the longest-serving woman in Senate history, and during that time she brokered a number of significant deals to protect and restore the natural landscapes of the West. In recent years, as politics shifted, she found herself on the receiving end of criticism over her approach to tackling the climate crisis.

After taking office in 1992 following a decade as the mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein established herself as a champion for conservation. She worked to pass legislation that would protect millions of acres of California wilderness from development and extractive industry, using her deft skills as a negotiator to bridge disputes between competing interests. She succeeded in that conservation effort where her predecessors had failed, spearheading a 1994 bill that created the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks, which encompass millions of acres. She later passed bills to protect Lake Tahoe, the California redwoods, and the Mojave Desert.

Feinstein also supported action to reduce carbon emissions for much of her Senate career, and she was a key backer of a cap-and-trade bill that failed to pass the Senate during the first years of the Obama administration. She also authored successful legislation on automobile fuel economy standards, and pushed forward new regulatory standards for oil and gas pipelines following a 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people.

Even so, as a compromise-oriented legislator from California, she often had to weigh the competing interests of farmers, ranchers, and environmentalists, and at times she angered all of them. This tendency toward centrism was evident in her legislative work on water in the state’s Central Valley. She brokered a monumental restoration agreement on the valley’s overstressed San Joaquin River in 2009, but then helped override species protections for fish on that same river in 2016.

“That is wrong, it is shocking,” her colleague Senator Barbara Boxer said at the time, according to E&E News.

Even so, as the pace of the climate crisis advanced, Feinstein attracted criticism from the left for not supporting more ambitious policies to tackle climate change, and her reputation as a broker of compromise came back to haunt her. In early 2019, a group of activists with the Sunrise Movement confronted Feinstein in the Capitol building, urging her to support progressive calls for Green New Deal legislation.

Feinstein rebuffed the protestors.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’ve been doing,” she said in a viral video. “You come in here and say it has to be my way or the highway.” Her office later released a statement on the incident that mistakenly referred to the protestors as part of the “Sunshine Movement.”

In the following years, following reports that Feinstein was experiencing a loss of her mental faculties, some politicians called for her to step down from the Senate. She resisted those calls and instead said she would retire at the end of her current term, which would have lasted through next year’s election.

The senator’s death will create even more turmoil in Washington, D.C., as lawmakers tangle over a looming government shutdown. The Senate has moved closer to passing a resolution to fund the federal government over the course of the week, but it’s unlikely to pass the House of Representatives thanks to a revolt from hardline Republicans.

Feinstein cast her final vote on Thursday morning on a procedural item relating to the Federal Aviation Administration, but she didn’t vote on an environmental bill later that afternoon. In the vote she missed, Republican lawmakers tried to override President Biden’s veto of a bill that would have rolled back endangered species protections for the prairie chicken. The final vote total was 47 Republicans to 46 Democrats, not enough to override the veto.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the outcome of a vote on endangered species protections.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Dianne Feinstein dies, leaving a complicated legacy on climate issues on Sep 29, 2023.

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At six or seven years old, John Slaughter remembers getting up at night to use the bathroom and seeing his father, Eddie, asleep on the couch with his boots still on.

“I took his boots off when he was still asleep, being exhausted all day, trying to farm and work the job that he had at the time,” John Slaughter said. “He fell asleep trying to figure it all out.”

It wasn’t just the on- and off-farm work. Black farmers like him faced decades of discrimination from the federal government, and he was a tireless advocate pressing the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make it right.

He battled for that — in particular, for farm loan debt relief for the Black farmers who needed it — until the very end. Slaughter died suddenly Wednesday morning after experiencing shortness of breath at his home in Buena Vista, Georgia, according to friends and family.

He was 72.

Slaughter spoke at length with Public Integrity as a source for stories about discrimination against Black farmers. He is featured in the upcoming season 3 of Public Integrity’s The Heist podcast, in partnership with Pushkin Industries. In episode four, Slaughter said he was still actively fighting for Black farmers.

“Till the day I die, or we receive justice,” Slaughter said. “Whichever come first.”

Errick Thornton, one of Slaughter’s stepsons, was grieving both his loss and the unfinished battle.

“He said, ‘For us to get out of this debt, we’re going to have to die.’ And that’s so overwhelming,” Thornton said. “He never saw what he was pushing for.”

Slaughter was born in Buena Vista but mostly grew up in Miami.

“I was like a fish outta water,” Slaughter told the Center for Public Integrity last year. “I was country when country wasn’t cool.”

Every summer break from school, he would return to Buena Vista. Eventually, in his early 30s, he moved back for good. He wanted to be a farmer. And relatives showed him the ropes.

“When you finally get stuff up and it’s growing and you finally are able to harvest it and eat it, you become full circle,” Slaughter said. “And I wanted to learn so much more about it.”

Slaughter got a loan from the USDA. But as his lending relationship with the department grew, so did his debt. He alleged that he was encouraged to open more loans, buy more equipment and take on more debt, to meet department guidelines.

“That was the worst mistake I made because when you get into it with them, you fight them forever,” Slaughter said.

In 1997, Slaughter testified at a congressional hearing the Congressional Black Caucus held on USDA lending discrimination. He also became a claimant in Pigford v. Glickman, a class action lawsuit against the USDA that resulted in a settlement for Black farmers in 1999. Slaughter always contended that the $50,000 he received as part of the settlement was too little to cover his damages.

Although he said he was able to settle his debt under the Trump administration when he asked Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue for a debt compromise, he continued to advocate on behalf of other Black farmers still tangled up in loans they saw as predatory. He organized Zoom meetings with them and alerted members of Congress to challenges they were facing with the USDA in his home state.

Politically, he was tough to pin down: He felt both Democrats and Republicans had failed Black farmers. At the local level, constituents have better contact with their elected officials, but Slaughter thought it could be tough to hold federal officials accountable, John Slaughter said. They could be too far removed from the people they’re serving and those like Eddie Slaughter, who didn’t fit neatly as a Democrat or a Republican, John Slaughter said.

Beyond his advocacy, friends and family say they will remember Slaughter’s service as a local pastor and his love of both God and his expanding family. He had six children with his first wife, Angeline, who died in 2017. About four years ago he married Gloria, who was also a widow and has nine children. Their families had known each other for years. With Gloria by his side, several family members said Slaughter’s faith in God grew.

Over time, though, Slaughter’s body started to fail him.

He was a double amputee. He told the Center for Public Integrity that he had been on dialysis for 12 years. In 2013, he had a kidney transplant. He was blind in his left eye. He had stents put in his heart. He’s had gangrene.

None of that stopped him from farming.

“He would go out there and get on that tractor and he’d plow them acres,” said Thornton, his stepson. “The biggest part that will tie me to Mr. Slaughter is probably going to be his ability to work even after some people would have call it quits.”

The post Eddie Slaughter, longtime advocate for Black farmers, dies appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.