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For Immediate Release
April, 02 2021, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Erin Fitzgerald, Press Secretary at Earthjustice
Robert Valencia, Spanish Language Media Strategist at Earthjustice
First 500 Unaccompanied Minors Sent to Toxic Military Base Fort Bliss
Biden administration reportedly considering multiple contaminated military sites to serve as detention centers for children in immigration custody.
WASHINGTON
Late Tuesday night, 500 unaccompanied children in immigration custody were brought to Fort Bliss, a highly contaminated and potentially hazardous military base in El Paso, TX. Fort Bliss was among several military sites under consideration by the Biden Administration to process and house unaccompanied children who have migrated to the United States, some of whom had been forcibly separated from their families under the previous administration. Fort Bliss has the capacity to hold up to 7,500 children, with up to another 4,000 beds for people in custody at a family residential center.
Many military bases in the United States are known to be riddled with toxic hazards from past military operations, spills, storage of toxic chemicals, unexploded ordnances, and firing ranges. Currently, 130 military bases and installations are considered priority Superfund sites by the Environmental Protection Agency. There are currently 651 Department of Defense and National Guard sites potentially contaminated by toxic chemicals known as PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. PFAS don't easily break down, and they can persist in your body and in the environment for decades.
"We are extremely concerned to hear of plans to detain immigrant children in Fort Bliss. Military bases filled with contaminated sites are no place for the healthy development of any child," said Melissa Legge, an attorney at Earthjustice. "We recognize that the humanitarian situation at the border needs to be addressed in humanity, compassion and expediency. Part of that requires keeping children away from toxic military sites. While we are hopeful that the Biden administration will keep children safe, we remain vigilant and ready to continue protecting detained minors in toxic facilities. Immigrant children under the care of the federal government should not be in cages, let alone toxic sites in military bases."
Several of the military sites under consideration are contaminated with potentially hazardous pollutants and some are even located on or near Superfund sites. Superfund sites under consideration for housing children in immigration custody include the Homestead Detention Facility in Homestead, FL, Moffett Field in Mountain View, CA, and Joint Base San Antonio in Texas. Many of the sites remain inadequately remediated and still contaminated. Without proper environmental reviews, there is no way to guarantee these sites are safe for children, potentially exposing them to toxic chemicals that could have lifelong health impacts.
Fort Bliss is no exception. Earthjustice, along with partners including Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and the National Hispanic Medical Association, released hundreds of documents of searchable documents and an expert analysis of previous plans for construction of a temporary detention center for children and families at Fort Bliss. These records document several problems with the project, including that the Army did not adequately investigate to determine what types of waste had been disposed of at the site, that the methods used for testing the soil samples were inadequate or never completed, and that samples taken after the supposed clean-up still had concerning levels of pollution. Additionally, illegal dumping on the site may continue to this day. As a result, there is now even greater uncertainty about the environmental hazards at the site and a greater need for thorough testing, analysis, and cleanup.
"We are deeply concerned about the decision to open temporary detention facilities for minors at Fort Bliss and the potential health risks to the minors detained in tents there," said Elena Rios, MD, President & CEO of the National Hispanic Medical Association, a client in Earthjustice's 2018 FOIA lawsuit regarding the base. "Based on what we found in our Fort Bliss investigation in 2018, there are still present toxins from past landfills, which means children could be forcibly exposed to toxicity linked to cancer and development defects."
The Biden administration has the opportunity to change course after decades of failed immigration policies. The United States government has shown flagrant disregard for the health of those in custody, most recently including forced sterilization, the use of industrial chemical disinfectants at other migrant detention facilities, and uncontrolled outbreaks of COVID-19. These ongoing failures have created conditions that make it impossible to keep those in custody safe, and we are therefore calling for the immediate halt of any plans to place children in such unsafe facilities, the securing of safe and suitable housing for children while they are required to remain in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services, and the development of solutions that do not involve placing children on or near toxic sites, military sites, or in detention-like settings.
Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment. We bring about far-reaching change by enforcing and strengthening environmental laws on behalf of hundreds of organizations, coalitions and communities.
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'We Are Unafraid': In Face of Trump Win, Champions of Working Class Vow Epic Fight
"We must raise the standard of living for our members and the entire working class through unity, solidarity, and working-class power," said UAW president Shawn Fain. "No matter who is in the White House."
Nov 14, 2024
The results of last week's U.S. elections were cataclysmic for the Democratic Party, which lost control of the White House and Senate as the Republicans gained a trifecta, but economic justice advocates on Wednesday said that for many working people, the fight for a better standard of living and a political system that places people over Wall Street profits remains the same.
United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain acknowledged in a letter to members that while the election outcome was not one that "our union advocated for, and it's not the outcome a majority of our members voted for, our mission remains the same."
"We must raise the standard of living for our members and the entire working class through unity, solidarity, and working-class power," said Fain. "No matter who is in the White House."
Noting that "in a democracy, the four most important words are: The People Have Spoken," Fain suggested that the Democratic Party did not convince a key constituency—working people, including an estimated 78% of Americans who live paycheck-to-paycheck—that it represents their interests, and as a result handed the presidential victory to President-elect Donald Trump.
While the UAW endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris and Fain campaigned with her, he said, "for us, this was never about party or personality. As we have said consistently, both parties share blame for the one-sided class war that corporate America has waged on our union, and on working-class Americans for decades."
Trump ran an openly xenophobic campaign, but won the support of low-income voters from a range of ethnic backgrounds as he demonized undocumented immigrants and made outlandish, racist claims about Ohio residents from Haiti, sticking to his longtime narrative that immigration—not corporate greed—is to blame for the country's housing crisis, economic inequality, and stagnant wages.
"The task for the Democrats is what it should have been all along: remaking the party into the party of the bottom 90%... the party that rejects Elon Musk and the entire American oligarchy."
As numerous progressives have pointed out since the election, the Biden administration has introduced a host of pro-worker policies and Harris unveiled numerous economic justice proposals during her brief campaign—but her decision to campaign with billionaire businessman Mark Cuban and unveil a more Wall Street-friendly tax proposal have been criticized moves that highlighted the Democratic Party's close ties to rich donors and muddied her message to working families.
With the Democratic Party still taking part in the "one-sided class war" referenced by Fain, the UAW leader said that the union "stand[s] today where we stood last week."
"We stand for bringing back American jobs," said Fain. "We stand for taking on corporations that break their promises to American workers. And we stand against the same things we've always stood against. We will never support the destruction of the union movement. We will never support efforts to divide and conquer the working class by nationality, race, and gender. We will never support handouts to the ultra-wealthy or paying for it by cutting crucial federal investments."
"We are unafraid to confront any politician who takes actions that harm the working class, our communities, and our unions," he said.
Fain's comments came as progressive lawmakers including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) spoke at an event titled Delivering for the Working Class.
While the caucus is set to be in the minority in the House and Senate for at least the next two years, the senators used the event to rally Democratic leaders to "learn the right lessons" from Trump's victory.
As Democrats decide who they answer to, Warren asked, "Is it going to be a handful of billionaires? We know what kind of policy they want to set. Or are we going to show voters that Democrats are the ones who are willing to unrig this economy?"
Sanders suggested that Fain's rallying of the UAW's more than 400,000 members will also be a key to fighting Trump's agenda, including Republicans' plans to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare and his likely reversal of Biden's pro-worker policies.
"The antidote to enormous economic and political power on the part of the few is mass organizing at the grassroots level among working people—to stand up and fight for an economy that works for all," said Sanders.
Just after the election last week, Sanders became one of the first members of the Democratic caucus to release a statement on the party's major losses, driving home the same message he has repeated during his decades in public service: "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
On MSNBC on Wednesday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the election results in several red states proved that many of Trump's supporters prioritized working class issues.
"Voters actually want the populist, popular ideas that we have been pushing at the Progressive Caucus, certainly, for quite some time," said Jayapal. "They went to the ballot in three states that voted for Donald Trump... and they voted for a higher minimum wage, they voted for paid sick leave."
Voters in Alaska and Missouri approved ballot measures requiring a higher minimum wage and demanding that employers provide paid sick leave; Nebraska voters also supported a measure allowing workers to earn paid sick leave.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on Thursday also took a close look at voting figures, writing at his Substack newsletter that the election didn't deliver "a very big mandate" to Trump as the president-elect claimed, or even "a 'red shift' to Trump and the Republicans."
"It was a blue abandonment," he wrote. "We now know that 9 million fewer votes were cast nationwide in 2024 than in 2020. Trump got about a million more votes than he did in 2020 (700,000 of them in the seven battleground states). That's no big deal... The biggest takeaway is that Biden's 9 million votes disappeared... So what happened to the 9 million?"
Reich posited that 9 million potential voters refused to vote for Trump, but also didn't turn out for the Democratic Party because they were left thinking, "They don't give a damn about me."
"The task for the Democrats is what it should have been all along: remaking the party into the party of the bottom 90%—the party of people who don't live off stocks and bonds, of people who are not CEOs or billionaires like Mark Cuban, the party that rejects Elon Musk and the entire American oligarchy," he wrote. "Instead, the Democratic Party must be the party of average working people whose wages have gone nowhere and whose jobs are less secure."
He continued:
Blue-collar private-sector workers earned more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are earning now in 2024. This means today's blue-collar workers are on average earning less in real dollars than their grandparents earned 52 years ago.
Yet the American economy is far larger than it was 52 years ago. Where did the additional money go? To the top. So what's the Democrats' task? To restructure the economy toward more widely shared prosperity.
In his statement on Wednesday, Fain said the lives and daily struggles of many working class voters are unchanged after the election.
"Today, our members clock in to the same jobs they clocked into last week," said Fain. "You face the same threats—corporate greed, Wall Street predators, and a political system that ignores us. And we are driven by the same force, as outlined in our UAW Constitution generations ago: 'The hope of the worker in advancing society toward the ultimate goal of social and economic justice.'"
Fain urged union members to get involved in "political action on every level of government, in every state, in every sector has an impact on every contract, every organizing drive, and every standard we win as a union," while Sanders implored the Democratic Party to urgently "determine which side it is on in the great economic struggle of our times."
"It needs to provide a clear vision as to what it stands for," wrote Sanders in a Boston Globe op-ed on Tuesday. "Either you stand with the powerful oligarchy of our country, or you stand with the working class. You can't represent both."
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Watchdog Urges House Panel to Publicly Release Ethics Report on Trump AG Pick Matt Gaetz
"The public has a right to access and review the committee's findings," said Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Nov 14, 2024
A leading government watchdog group on Thursday implored the House Ethics Committee to make public the findings of its yearslong investigation into Matt Gaetz, who abruptly resigned from Congress Wednesday shortly after President-elect Donald Trump named the Florida Republican as his attorney general pick.
"While Mr. Gaetz can no longer be sanctioned by the committee or the House, nothing in committee or House rules bars the committee from sharing its report, findings, and exhibits with the public," Donald Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), wrote in a letter to the leaders of the ethics panel.
"In fact, the committee's charge to prevent violations of and promote compliance with House rules and related statutes by House members, officers, or employees demands release of this information to the public," Sherman added. "The public has a right to access and review the committee's findings. This demand is even more acute given that the committee was also investigating allegations that Mr. Gaetz sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct, and he has now been nominated to become the next attorney general."
Trump's announcement and Gaetz's resignation from his congressional seat came two days before the House ethics panel was reportedly planning to vote to release a report on its findings. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters Wednesday that Gaetz's resignation effectively shut down the ethics committee probe, given that the panel "has no jurisdiction" over former members of Congress.
But CREW observed in its letter that the House Ethics Committee has previously sustained probes and released findings after the lawmaker under investigation stepped down.
"The committee has the discretion to pick and choose when continuing investigations or releasing investigative findings are in the public interest," the letter notes. "It should do so here."
"The sequence and timing of Mr. Gaetz's resignation from the House raises serious questions about the contents of the House Ethics Committee report."
The ethics committee's probe of Gaetz began in 2021 after a New York Timesreport revealed that the Florida Republican was "being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old" and violated federal sex trafficking laws.
The DOJ ended its Gaetz probe last year without bringing charges.
Upon launching its probe, the House ethics panel
said it would examine whether Gaetz "engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House rules, laws, or other standards of conduct."
Calls for the House Ethics Committee to, at the very least, release its findings to senators tasked with voting on Gaetz's confirmation to lead the Justice Department have come from both Democrats and Republicans.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas)
told reporters Thursday that the Senate "should gain access to all relevant information by whatever means necessary," including a subpoena.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Thursday that the House ethics panel must "preserve and share their report and all relevant documentation on Mr. Gaetz with the Senate Judiciary Committee."
"The sequence and timing of Mr. Gaetz's resignation from the House raises serious questions about the contents of the House Ethics Committee report," said Durbin. "We cannot allow this valuable information from a bipartisan investigation to be hidden from the American people. Make no mistake: This information could be relevant to the question of Mr. Gaetz's confirmation as the next attorney general of the United States and our constitutional responsibility of advice and consent."
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US Plastics Industry Dumps Almost Half a Billion Gallons of Wastewater Daily
"Plastics plants are poisoning our waters and contaminating our bodies—and EPA needs to do its job and protect our waterways and downstream communities," said one watchdog leader.
Nov 14, 2024
Amid fears over President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a government watchdog on Thursday called out the EPA for letting the plastics industry pollute U.S. waterways with about half a billion gallons of wastewater every day.
The new report—Plastic's Toxic River: EPA's Failure to Regulate the Petrochemical Plants That Make Plastic—is based on an Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) analysis of records for "70 petrochemical plants that manufacture the most common plastics and their primary chemical ingredients and discharge wastewater directly into rivers, lakes, and other water bodies."
The publication provides just a snapshot of the industry's pollution of U.S. waters. The group focused on plants "that make raw or pure plastics, sometimes referred to as resins, pellets, or nurdles, that are eventually turned into plastic products, like plastic bottles," and did not examine oil refineries or facilities that only make the end-use or consumer products.
"Federal regulations on the wastewater from plastics manufacturing plants have not been updated in over 30 years, are grossly outdated, and fail to protect waterways and downstream communities."
The document explains that "many harmful chemicals released by plastics manufacturers are completely unregulated" by the federal agency, including "dioxins, which are known cancer-causing agents that are highly toxic and persist in the environment; and 1,4-dioxane, a likely carcinogen that EPA scientists recently indicated is threatening drinking water sources."
"Nitrogen and phosphorus pollution discharged from plastics and petrochemical plants—which cause algal blooms and fish-killing low-oxygen zones—are also not controlled by EPA's industrial wastewater rules," it continues. "Although state agencies can set limits for these pollutants in individual wastewater discharge permits, practices vary across states and the limits are inadequate and inconsistent."
EIP found that last year, the 70 plants collectively released nearly 10 million pounds of nitrogen and 1.9 million pounds of phosphorus into waterways. The previous year, eight facilities released an estimated 74,285 pounds of 1,4-dioxane, and 10 of the 17 plants manufacturing polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or its ingredients released 1,374 grams of dioxins and dioxin-like compounds.
The watchdog also found that "although absolute numbers are not known," releases of nurdles into waterways "appear to be common," enforcement of existing regulations is "rare," 58 of 70 plants violated the weak limits "by releasing more pollution than allowed at least once from 2021 to 2023," and 28 facilities are operating with outdated water permits.
"In addition to all these problems, petrochemical plants have been recognized by EPA as potential sources of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, the 'forever chemicals' that persist in waterways and have been linked to increased cancer risk, hormone disruption, reduced ability of the body to fight infections, and reproductive harms, including low birth weight in babies and developmental delays," the publication notes.
U.S. Geological Survey scientists last month published a study on forever chemicals in the journal Science and released an interactive, online map for the Lower 48 states. They estimated that "71 to 95 million people in the conterminous United States potentially rely on groundwater with detectable concentrations of PFAS for their drinking water supplies prior to any treatment."
EIP's new report highlights that "federal regulations on the wastewater from plastics manufacturing plants have not been updated in over 30 years, are grossly outdated, and fail to protect waterways and downstream communities," despite the Clean Water Act's requirement that the EPA "set wastewater discharge limits (called 'effluent limitation guidelines') for harmful pollutants based on the best available technology economically achievable."
"Because treatment technologies improve over time, EPA is supposed to review existing limits every five years and strengthen them when data show treatment options have improved," the document details. "EPA has failed to comply with this mandate, resulting in an excessive amount of potentially dangerous water pollution pouring from plastics manufacturers into America's waterways."
The group's recommendations are to mandate the use of modern wastewater pollution controls, prohibit plastic discharges into waterways, increase accountability at the state and federal level, enhance monitoring requirements in permitting, and improve permit transparency and recordkeeping.
"It is inexcusable that EPA is not following the Clean Water Act and failing to require the multibillion-dollar plastics industry to install modern pollution control systems," EIP executive director Jen Duggan said in a statement. "Plastics plants are poisoning our waters and contaminating our bodies—and EPA needs to do its job and protect our waterways and downstream communities."
Local groups in Lousiana, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia also responded to the report with calls for action.
"Decades of unchecked pollution have transformed the Calcasieu River into a dumping ground for toxic chemicals, with little accountability for the companies responsible," said James Hiatt, executive director of the Louisiana-based For a Better Bayou. "It's unacceptable that these plastics plants, profiting from our natural resources, are allowed to continue to release carcinogens like dioxins into our waterways. We need to hold these polluters accountable—and make them clean up the damage they've caused."
Despite such demands for action, environmental advocates have grave concerns about the EPA's future under Trump, including over his pick of Lee Zeldin, a former Republican member of Congress, to head the agency.
During Trump's first term, his administration rolled back over 100 environmental rules. Although Zeldin, as a congressman, was sometimes "willing and even eager to address environmental problems at home on coastal Long Island," as The New York Timesnoted Tuesday, his voting record and fealty to Trump have green groups fearful for the future.
As Common Dreamsreported earlier this week, Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous declared that choosing a candidate "who opposes efforts to safeguard our clean air and water lays bare Donald Trump's intentions to, once again, sell our health, our communities, our jobs, and our future out to corporate polluters."
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