By The Washington Post · Jeff Stein, Toluse Olorunnipa
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is rapidly approaching a Monday deadline to avert a government shutdown, but aides and U.S. lawmakers appear flummoxed about his strategy, left to interpret musings from his Twitter feed while he golfs and otherwise remains out of public view.
A large spending bill that Congress passed last week must be signed into law by midnight Monday to prevent many federal agencies from significantly scaling back their operations. After Congress passed the bill, Trump posted a video on Twitter announcing his objections to it, saying that stimulus benefits were too small and that foreign aid was too excessive.
Since he posted the video Tuesday, White House aides have not offered public briefings on Trump’s strategy or plans. Instead, Trump has issued a series of tweets reiterating his demand for changes but not saying much more. Vice President Mike Pence is in Vail, Colo., and has also been out of sight in recent days.
The consequences of inaction are immense.
Starting Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of federal employees would be sent home without pay. And even the many federal employees who continue to work because they are deemed “essential,” such as members of the military, will not be paid until a new funding bill is authorized.
In addition to a government shutdown on Tuesday, eviction protections for millions of Americans would lapse later this week, more than 14 million people could lose access to unemployment benefits, and no stimulus checks would be issued. Without the bill becoming law, no new money would go toward vaccine distribution, small-business aid, the ailing airline industry, schools and more.
“I understand he wants to be remembered for advocating for big checks, but the danger is he’ll be remembered for chaos and misery and erratic behavior if he allows this to expire,” Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said on “Fox News Sunday.” “So I think the best thing to do, as I said, sign this and then make the case for subsequent legislation.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on ABC News said the president was behaving as an “extraordinary narcissist” and almost “pathologically narcissistic” in his eleventh-hour campaign against the bill.
“It is insane. It is really insane, and this president has got to finally get – do the right thing for the American people and stop worrying about his ego,” Sanders said.
Millions of American families who have lost their jobs during the pandemic and are still struggling have no choice but to await the president’s decision.
Deseree and Matthew Cox have had almost zero income since August, when Matthew was terminated from his management job in pest control. His application for unemployment benefits from Florida has never made it through the system’s queue. The $300 per week Matthew, 38, scrapes together driving for DoorDash hardly makes a dent covering bills, rent and food for themselves and their two children who have special needs.
The Coxes have depleted their savings and moved from South Florida to the Indianapolis area for cheaper cost of living and to be near family that could help with child care. But they say they need the extended unemployment benefits, rental assistance, extended eviction moratoriums and direct payments promised by Congress’s $908 billion stimulus package.
At one point, Deseree Cox, 37, said she could not afford a medication her son needs “just for him to be able to function.”
“People will die without this money,” Deseree Cox said. “People will get evicted. People will not be able to get their medication. To [lawmakers], $600 or $2,000, it seems so little. But to the American people right now, it’s just everything.”
When Trump released the video on Tuesday demanding the larger stimulus payments, House Democrats tried to move quickly to approve the measure, but they were blocked by House Republicans on Thursday. They are expected to try again Monday, but their chance of passing the measure with support from Senate Republicans appears small. Their only other option to avoid a government shutdown would be to pass a short-term spending bill, but congressional leaders have not publicly begun discussing that alternative and time is running out.
Trump stunned the nation on Tuesday when he criticized the stimulus legislation previously backed by his own administration as a “disgrace” and called on Congress to significantly amend it. Congress has not met Trump’s demands, and there are no negotiations that could realistically amend the bill for it to be quickly reapproved. Five days after Trump’s video, Congress and the nation are waiting for the president to clarify his intentions about the emergency relief package. So far, he has only tweeted.
“Everybody in the White House is trying to figure out what’s in Trump’s head, if this is a bluff or if he’s going to carry this out. He’s been confronted with all the facts and evidence,” said one person briefed by several White House officials over the weekend, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions. “Nobody knows what Trump is going to do. It’s a bizarre situation.”
One person who interacted with Trump in Palm Beach, Fla., in recent days said the president had not discussed the economic relief bill or the looming government funding deadline. Instead, Trump has been far more focused on his failed effort to reverse the election result, lashing out at Republicans in Congress and members of his own administration for not joining him in the fight.
If Trump vetoes the bill or does nothing, the federal government will shutdown Tuesday. That raises the prospect of a prolonged government shutdown, until Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
The White House has provided virtually no information about what its plans are to head off the potential economic calamity of a shutdown and the failure of the relief effort. A White House spokesman declined to comment when asked about the president’s intentions. Negotiations between congressional leaders and the White House appear to be at a standstill, and a backup plan had not yet materialized as of Sunday afternoon.
Trump discussed the issue while playing golf in Florida with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and issued several tweets again calling for $2,000 stimulus payments instead of the $600 payments pushed by his own treasury secretary in negotiations.
People close to the White House described a chaotic scene in which senior officials anxiously await the president’s next move. Republicans have expressed increasing concern that the president’s move to blow up a carefully negotiated stimulus deal could hurt the party’s prospects in the Georgia Senate races on Jan. 5. If Republicans lose those two seats, Democrats will control the chamber.
The president in his video called on Congress to approve $2,000 payments instead of $600 payments and strip out numerous provisions for foreign aid. Much of the foreign aid decried by Trump was also requested in the White House’s budget proposal.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is expected to hold a vote Monday on $2,000 stimulus payments to showcase Republican opposition to the larger stimulus measure. Pelosi’s attempt to pass the larger stimulus checks through “unanimous consent” was defeated by House Republicans on Friday.
Trump tweeted several times over the weekend to criticize the aid package, saying: “Increase payments to the people, get rid of the “pork.” He also tweeted: “$2000 + $2000 plus other family members. Not $600. Remember, it was China’s fault!”
The 5,593-page bill that is at the center of Trump’s new demands was introduced and approved Monday by the House and the Senate. It was a fast turnaround, but it was supported by broad majorities in both chambers. The Senate passed the measure 92 to 6.
With Trump and Pence ensconced in resort towns, the incoming Biden administration seized on the void to say the Trump administration was exhibiting rudderless leadership.
On Saturday, Biden accused Trump of an “abdication of responsibility” that would lead to “devastating consequences.”
Biden’s transition team announced Sunday that he would deliver remarks Monday after a briefing by his national security team.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris weighed in on Sunday, saying American families needed economic support.
“Educators, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, custodians, and the nurses who keep our schools running are being stretched to their limit by this pandemic,” she wrote on Twitter. She added that she and Biden “are committed to ensuring they get the relief they deserve.”
InternationalDec 28. 2020A Black Lives Matter supporter stands near a supporter of President Donald Trump while they protest the presidential vote count outside TFC Center in Detroit on Nov. 6, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges
By The Washington Post · Dan Balz
WASHINGTON – The year 2020 brought extraordinary and unexpected challenges that tested the strength of basic institutions, demanded courage and sacrifice in the face of a raging pandemic, underscored racial and economic inequities, and produced the biggest turnout of voters in the history of U.S. elections.
In the end, America was as divided as ever.
The election itself resulted in significant change – or no change. President Donald Trump is on his way out of office after a single, tumultuous term, to be replaced on Jan. 20 by President-elect Joe Biden. Turnover in the most important of all elected offices – an office that was the major focus of the election – will bring a new tone, new faces and new initiatives to Washington and the country.
But it was Trump, not Biden, who seemed to have the longer coattails. As a result, Biden will start his term with the smallest House majority the Democrats have had in nearly a century and a half. And unless Democrats win both of the Georgia runoff elections on Jan. 5, he also will be the first newly elected Democratic president without a Senate majority since the election of 1884.
Trump has been the most polarizing of all presidents, with a style designed to divide, inflame and impugn. He has accepted no responsibility for things that have gone wrong, preferring to blame others or pretend nothing went wrong. Even now, he seeks to overturn the November results. Biden’s victory would seem to signal a hunger for something different, something calmer, some change in direction.
But elections are about more than the race for the White House. The 2020 campaign was a victory for Biden and a defeat for Trump, but for the two political parties and the ideas they espouse, it was neither. Instead, it marked a continuation of a long struggle for power that has been fought out for more than a decade without clear resolution.
The broad repudiation of the president that many Democrats hoped for and anticipated did not materialize. The results underscored the persistence of divisions that preceded Trump and that now seem destined to endure when he is out of office, unless Biden, ever an optimist about the state of the country and his own political talents, can somehow coax America to a different place.
Biden’s victory in the popular vote was impressive: He won more than 81 million votes overall, 51.3%. He defeated a sitting president by a margin of 7 million votes. Still, the fact that Trump won 74 million votes, 46.8%, was also notable, and in some ways the bigger surprise, as polls consistently underestimated his support.
Biden’s electoral college total of 306 votes to Trump’s 232 was clear and comfortable – identical to the number Trump posted in 2016, which he always described as “a landslide.” But Biden’s majority, like Trump’s four years ago, was built on a string of narrow victories across key battlegrounds that, with small shifts, could have produced a different outcome.
The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman has noted that, while Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes and came within 77,744 votes of winning the presidency in 2016, Trump lost the popular vote this year by 7.1 million votes and yet came within 65,009 votes of securing a majority in the electoral college and, with it, a second term.
That number – 65,009 – is the combined total by which Biden defeated Trump in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. Had all four gone the other way, Trump would have won the election with 270 electoral votes to Biden’s 268.
Trump has refused to concede, even in the aftermath of the electoral college tally that took place Dec. 14, which is to be ratified by Congress on Jan. 6. He has done far worse than declining to acknowledge Biden as the winner. No president has ever done what Trump has tried to do to change the results. While it is shocking, it is not surprising, given the way he has operated in office.
The president has spread the fiction that the election was stolen, and he has trafficked in conspiracy theories that Biden’s victory was based on widespread fraud across multiple states. He has been rebuffed repeatedly by judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans, including twice by a Supreme Court whose 6-3 conservative majority he helped to shape.
The president’s post-election campaign has been carried out in a way that undermines confidence in the integrity of the vote and potentially Biden’s presidency. While Trump has not been able to overturn the election, the toxicity of his baseless, repeated charges has leeched into the body politic.
Tens of millions of Trump’s followers now believe that Biden was elected illegitimately, causing potentially significant damage to the electoral process and to Biden’s ability to govern effectively. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that more than 8 in 10 Trump voters said Biden was not the legitimate winner of the election. Other polls have found similar results.
Many Democrats believed the election would result in a more significant victory for their party and with it a clearer mandate. Instead, the opposite has occurred – a split decision that left the balance of power little changed, though not insignificantly, with a new president. Even as the two major political parties face their own internal strains, they will begin the new year and a new administration still looking across a wide and seemingly unbridgeable gulf.
Carri Dusza demonstrates outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia on Nov. 08, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Voisard
Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who has decades of experience measuring public attitudes, said the election has left “a divided country even more divided,” adding that he cannot recall a time when there were “fewer points of intersection or overlap” between the two sides of the political divide.
“It’s not just that a Trump voter looks very different from a Biden voter, from where they live to what their demographics are,” he said. “But their belief systems are so fundamentally different that they’re essentially living in two separate realities. . . . When politicians say there is more that unites us than divides us, it’s nice to hear, but it is not descriptive of our current reality.”
Surveys before and after the election underscore the dimensions of the gap that now separates those two worlds. A post-election survey by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican firm, asked whether Republicans and Democrats have less respect for people in the other party than they did four years ago. Eighty-one percent of Republicans and 77% of Democrats agreed.
An October survey by the Public Religion Research Institute revealed that partisans have made harsh judgments about the nature of the opposition. More than 8 in 10 Republicans said the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists, while nearly 8 in 10 Democrats said the Republican Party has been taken over by racists.
The Pew Research Center found in October that 80% of Biden supporters and 77% of Trump supporters said they “fundamentally disagree with the other side on core American values and goals.” About 9 in 10 supporters of Trump and of Biden said there would be “lasting harm” to the country should the other party’s candidate win.
“What this all reflects is . . . this sense that the opposing party is pushing policies that are fundamentally going to do harm to the country,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who has written extensively about polarization.
“It cuts across everything from economic policies to dealing with the pandemic, to immigration, race relations, social issues – you name it,” he added. “This visceral dislike and mistrust and animosity reflects actual disagreement about the way the country should be governed – who should be governing and what policies they should be following.”
Trump’s presidency has expanded the values gap between Republicans and Democrats, Blacks and Whites, those with college degrees and those without, those who attend church regularly and those who do not. Nothing that happened in November appears to have changed that in any significant way.
For Trump supporters, cultural preservation of an America long dominated by a White, Christian majority remains a cornerstone of their beliefs. That helps to explains their attachment to a president who has warned that the Democrats and their allies are determined to rewrite the nation’s history and destroy its heritage.
Although the election has been settled, the country remains unsettled. Differences based on ideology and policy are common to democratic societies. Divisions over the legitimacy of an election could be far more dangerous. “I don’t mean there’s going to be riots or armed militias, but a lack of a unified belief in small-D democratic values is inherently destabilizing,” said Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg.
Although Election Day and the day of the electoral college vote passed peacefully, threats of violence and some clashes continue. Hundreds of Proud Boys – a male chauvinist group partial to Trump and he to them – marched through the streets of the District of Columbia this month, provoking fights. Four people were stabbed, including one who was in critical condition. Earlier, armed protesters gathered outside the home of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, to register their disapproval of the vote there.
Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland whose specialty is the study of the partisan divisions in the country, said that while she sees no sign that polarization is abating, “I actually think that polarization is not as big of a problem anymore as democracy itself.”
She sees Trump’s anti-democratic actions and the support he has received for those efforts from a majority of his party as cause for concern. “He’s really encouraging his supporters to believe in something that’s not true, that’s absolutely false,” she said. “And that makes them really, really angry, which is extremely dangerous.”
Supporters of President Donald Trump rally in Washington on, Dec. 12, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Evelyn Hockstein
Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, describes what has happened to separate the two Americas as a continuum that has turned what once was a ditch into a canyon and then the canyon into a chasm.
Nothing about the cascading events of 2020 – not the pandemic and 330,000 deaths; not the massive economic dislocations; not the killings of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor; not Trump’s stir-the-pot tweeting and attacks on rivals; not an estimated $14 billion spent to sway voters – had much impact on how people voted.
“Very few people moved, and that is, in some sense, shocking to me,” Mellman said. “We used to have presidential elections and elections generally that were much more responsive to events. Now we’re in this situation where it’s a two- to five-point race no matter what.”
Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster, said his firm’s analysis of the election concluded that this was the smallest number of ticket-splitters since his firm began its measurement two decades ago. “We’ve stopped having any intersection [between the two sides],” he said.
In a closely divided country, events can become catalysts for different parts of the electorate, affecting turnout patterns and election results. These shifting patterns produced change elections of one magnitude or another in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018 and now 2020.
In 2006, voters weary of war and souring on the leadership of President George W. Bush toppled the GOP majority in the House. Two years later, those same forces elected Barack Obama president and enlarged his party’s House and Senate majorities.
In 2010, reaction to Obama’s presidency produced a conservative tea party revolt that put Republicans back in control of the House. In 2014, Republicans took control of the Senate.
In 2016, it was the power of White working-class voters registering their disapproval of the political elites who helped make Trump the winner. In 2018, White women with college degrees who were disgusted with Trump provided much of the energy that flipped the House to the Democrats.
In 2020, with the stakes as high as ever and the country reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, racial protests and economic losses, voters came out in force. Nearly 160 million people voted this year, compared with about 138 million four years ago, but they sent mixed signals with their ballots.
The results ran counter to expectations – and to public and private polls, particularly in House races. Down-ballot contests went far more decisively for the Republicans than most analysts anticipated.
In the House, Republicans captured almost all of 27 races listed by the Cook Political Report as toss-ups. They also won seven more seats that were listed as either “likely” or “lean” Democratic. Republicans were expected to lose ground based on pre-election polls. Instead, they gained at least nine seats, with two still to be resolved.
In the Senate, seven Republican seats were listed as toss-ups. Republicans won five, with the two Georgia races going to runoff elections. Democrats picked up two Senate seats held by the Republicans after heading into Election Day with the hope that they would emerge in the majority.
– – –
In the weeks after the election, analysts have studied the results, looking for shifts among particular groups of voters, from suburbanites to young African Americans to Hispanics – particularly those in South Florida and South Texas, where Trump made notable gains – to those under age 45 and those over age 65, to White women with college degrees and White women without degrees, to urban vs. rural.
The analyses offer potential clues to forces that could shape politics in the future, but they cannot obscure the larger reality of a country that remains hardened in its divisions. “Most people have selected a side and predictably stuck with that side,” said Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University. “It matters for election outcomes where these people who split their tickets go. But it’s all appearing against a background where people are clearly on one side or the other.”
Both major political parties have undergone dramatic changes over the past decade. Republicans are caught in the grip of Trump and Trumpism, which represents a sharp departure from the conservatism of former president Ronald Reagan. Despite successes in November, the GOP is heading toward an internal debate about its future, with Trump’s influence remaining as a wild card.
In the election returns, some GOP analysts see the makings of a new coalition, built on White working-class voters and evangelical Christians and with potential support from voters of color, particularly Hispanics. “This election might be the start of that direction,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster.
Democrats see some of those same patterns and worry. Victories in Arizona and Georgia give them hope of redrawing parts of the electoral map in their favor, but they recognize that their weaknesses with some groups of voters leave them vulnerable in northern states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Democrats are feeling the effects of gender, racial, generational and ideological tensions, with rising constituencies demanding more representation and power and energy coming from the grass roots of the party. Those differences were temporarily put aside this fall in the effort to defeat Trump, but Cathy Cohen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, said the results of the election have left Biden with unhappy options.
“Right now he could be facing a Republican majority in the Senate that would push back on most initiatives that would be exciting to the Democratic base,” she said. “On the other hand, he has to offer up something that is substantial in institutional terms of transformation that will engage and excite the left part of the Democratic Party and many young people, particularly young people of color.”
The forces that have shaken both parties appear not to be transitory. “I don’t think we’re ever going back to the old politics in America,” Garin said. “And the new politics is very much a work in progress. But the way in which this transformation proceeds will determine a lot about the future of the country.”
America has remained hardened in its divisions through a series of major shocks – the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the financial crisis and recession of 2008 and 2009 and now a year that included impeachment, a pandemic, a racial reckoning, economic hardship and a campaign unlike any other in memory.
The task of navigating this divided landscape now falls to Biden. He has a robust policy agenda to address some of the most serious problems any new president has faced in decades. But his larger aspiration, as he has said repeatedly, is to heal the country and repair its broken politics. In a nation so divided and hostile toward the opposition, even small progress would count as a significant accomplishment.
Authorities identify Nashville bomber, say his remains were found in wreckage
InternationalDec 28. 2020Investigators with the FBI, ATF and Metro Nashville Police Department investigate a home in Antioch, Tenn., on Saturday. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by William DeShazer
By The Washington Post · Michael Kranish, Paulina Firozi, Brandon Gee, Meryl Kornfield
Anthony Quinn Warner was responsible for the Christmas morning explosion that rocked downtown Nashville, officials said Sunday, and he died in the blast.
Investigators matched human remains found at the scene with Warner’s DNA, confirming suspicions that he blew himself up in a recreational vehicle, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director David Rausch told reporters. Law enforcers said they were investigating a motive.
Authorities had assembled Saturday at Warner’s home in Antioch, Tenn., about 10 miles southeast of the explosion site. Several neighbors described seeing an RV similar to the one that blew up Friday morning, in the backyard of the Antioch home in the months before the blast.
Warner, 63, was not married and rarely ventured from his home, according to neighbors; he lived for years with his parents and then by himself. He once owned an alarm company, and he protected his home with an array of security cameras, rarely returning a neighborly wave and not responding to an offer of Christmas dinner, neighbors said in interviews.
“To describe him as a recluse would be an excellent word,” said Rick Laude, who has lived near Warner since 2010. “You could wave at him and he was like, What are you waving at me for?”
For some time after his father died in 2011, Warner lived with his mother, Betty Christine Lane, before moving into a nearby house, neighbors said. Lane could not be reached for comment.
In November, Warner transferred his property to a Los Angeles woman for “$0,” according to property records of a quit claim deed. The woman said in a brief telephone interview that the FBI told her not to discuss the matter and declined comment.
At one time, Warner ran an alarm company, according to his cousin, who runs a haunted-house attraction about a mile from Warner’s home. “He was into phones and electronics” like his father, Robert Warner said of his cousin.
“He has always been a quiet person,” Robert Warner said. “When we had the family reunions, he brought the RV, or he had a boat.” Robert Warner said he had not talked to his cousin in about 10 years, and he said many members of the family had lost touch with him.
Steve Schmoldt, whose property is on the other side of the fence from Warner’s residence, said Warner had “always just been kind of a loner.” Schmoldt said that Warner used to have dogs, and that they talked about pets, but that such conversations were rare. He recalled how his wife brought Warner a Christmas dinner, but Warner never answered the door.
Three weeks ago, Schmoldt said, he saw Warner climbing an extension ladder to work on a large antenna on his house. “He was like an IT guy,” Schmoldt said, referring to information technology. “He has quite a few security cameras around his house.” Neighbors also noticed that Warner washed the RV, which until recent days they had not seen leave the property.
A Nashville real estate firm, Fridrich & Clark Realty, confirmed that Warner worked there as a computer consultant for about 15 years before announcing his retirement this month. “The Tony Warner we knew is a nice person who never exhibited any behavior which was less than professional,” co-owner Steve Fridrich wrote in a statement.
The RV that detonated was parked in front of the AT&T building in downtown Nashville on Friday. The blast devastated the surrounding area and damaged more than 40 businesses and caused widespread disruptions to cellular and Internet service.
By midday Sunday, AT&T said in a statement that more than 75% of the cell sites affected by the explosion had been restored. “Mobility service in the Birmingham and Huntsville, Alabama areas is now operating normally,” the company said.
While the motive remains unknown to the public, the location of the attack is worrisome, especially considering how widespread disruptions were, Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director of counterintelligence at the FBI, said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
“I think this is a wake-up call and a warning for all of us about how vulnerable our infrastructure is relatively easy it is for a single individual to do this,” Figliuzzi said.
Experts on critical infrastructure said the Christmas morning episode makes clear that federal and local authorities and the private sector ought to find ways to reduce their vulnerability, either through moving key pieces to more fortified locations or building in redundancies.
“We are very vulnerable to these kinds of attacks,” said Adam Rose, a professor at the University of Southern California and director of the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events. He added that the United States has limited options to build resiliency in today’s highly interconnected world, underscoring the need for customers to have their own backup communications systems, such as a home fiber-optic Internet connection in addition to a personal hot spot.
Officers who evacuated buildings before the blast described the moments after arriving at the scene and leading up to the RV explosion.
There was a strange recorded warning, which started to play a 15-minute countdown, coming from the RV. Officers started knocking on doors, contacting dispatch to get access codes to buildings, clearing them floor by floor, warning residents that answered to gather family members and leave.
“That’s stuff that I’ll never forget, the sound of the announcement saying . . . ‘Evacuate now,’ ” said Amanda Topping, one of five officers who spoke to reporters at a news conference. “Just odd. And I’m pacing back and forth because I kept on having to turn pedestrians around.”
The RV began to play music – officer Tyler Luellen told reporters that he later learned it was “Downtown” by Petula Clark. The officers prepared themselves, some going back to their cars for heavier gear.
“As I’m getting ready to walk toward [other officers], walking back toward the RV . . . I literally hear God tell me to turn around and check on Topping, who was by herself,” Officer James Wells said. “As I turn around – for me it felt like I only took three steps, the music stops. As I’m walking back toward Topping, I just see orange and I hear a loud boom. I’m just telling myself, stay on your feet, stay alive.”
Tennessee officials have called for federal support in the wake of the bombing. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said on Twitter that she had spoken with President Donald Trump about the need for federal aid.
“I told him we would appreciate prompt attention to it,” she said in a video message. “And the president has been so good to Tennessee, I have no doubt he will move quickly on this.”
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, asked Trump on Saturday for federal assistance in response to the explosion, noting that the downed communication systems and damage to businesses were too much for the state to handle alone. Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Blackburn along with Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., wrote to Trump in support of Lee’s request.
FEMA spokeswoman Janet Montesi said the request “is currently under review.”
Nashville Mayor John Cooper during a CBS News interview referred to the area affected by the explosion as “part of our historic identity of Nashville, this kind of late Victorian streetscape that ended up being bombed.”
“The businesses there, they’ve just – going through covid, they’ve had the worst nine months that you could have as a business,” said Cooper, a Democrat. “And then now to be affected by a bombing. Of course, we’re going to need help and we may need some help in hardening our infrastructure.”
Benefits lapse for millions as Trump fails to approve stimulus bill
InternationalDec 28. 2020A person shelters inside a restaurant’s closed outdoor dining area as snow falls in the Hells Kitchen neighborhood of New York on Dec. 17. Winter Storm Gail pounded the city as temperatures dropped to 27 degrees with frigid sustained winds up to 35 mph, making dining outdoors unbearable amid the covid-19 pandemic that has already crippled the restaurant industry. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Angus Mordant
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Chris Strohm
Millions of Americans will see their unemployment benefits lapse, at least temporarily, after President Donald Trump let Saturday night pass without signing a $900 billion bipartisan coronavirus stimulus package.
The federal government could shut down on Tuesday absent Trump’s signature on the attached, $1.4 trillion spending bill to fund operations through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
As Trump headed to the golf course on Sunday morning, Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey said the president risked a legacy of “chaos and misery and erratic behavior if he allows this to expire.”
Trump has dug in over the size of direct checks to be sent to many Americans, yet the stimulus accord contains numerous other measures designed to offset the impact of the covid-19 pandemic, including extended unemployment benefits, funding for food banks, rental assistance, support for small businesses and for covid vaccination programs, and other items.
The stalemate comes as the pandemic continues to worsen in many areas, and more U.S. workers are in jeopardy of losing their jobs.
Trump took no action on the stimulus bill that Congress approved, and his administration helped to negotiate, beyond expressing his displeasure with a series of tweets up to and beyond midnight on Saturday. The massive legislation was flown to him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he’s spending the holidays.
Signing the bill as late as Saturday would have triggered action by states to update their computer systems to reflect the ongoing benefits.
Trump has demanded that Congress increase stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000 for eligible Americans – an abrupt proposal that blindsided lawmakers who spent months negotiating the final package, and is opposed by many Republicans. He’s also complained about some of the items in the stimulus plan or in the omnibus spending bill.
“I simply want to get our great people $2000, rather than the measly $600 that is now in the bill,” Trump tweeted on Saturday.
President-elect Joe Biden criticized Trump on Saturday for refusing to sign the bill. Biden said in a statement that as many as 10 million Americans will lose their unemployment insurance benefits. About 14 million people have been receiving unemployment benefits through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation programs.
“It is the day after Christmas, and millions of families don’t know if they’ll be able to make ends meet,” Biden said. “This abdication of responsibility has devastating consequences.”
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said Saturday on Twitter that Trump must “pick up the phone and tell Republicans to stop blocking $2,000 payments.” He added that Trump’s last-minute snag was designed to create “chaos.”
Given the potential lapse in funding, it could take as long as a month before people receive their funds and even longer for the effects to filter into the economy, according to Michael Englund, chief economist at Action Economics LLC.
Any delay in immediate direct payments and gap in special unemployment benefits threaten to deepen economic scarring marked especially by a jump in long-term unemployment.
Democrats plan to vote Monday on new legislation to codify the $2,000 payments for most American adults and children. They could also vote on another stopgap measure to fund the government past the current spending deadline of midnight that day.
While that would avert a government shutdown if the Senate also passes it and the president signs it, it is still unclear what Trump plans to do with the larger pandemic relief and annual spending bill Congress passed on Dec. 21.
Brexit deal should answer concerns over economy, Sunak says
InternationalDec 28. 2020Rishi Sunak, U.K. chancellor of the exchequer, in London in September. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Simon Dawson
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Thomas Penny
U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak said the trade deal reached with the European Union should reassure people worried about the economic damage of Brexit and can be an “enormously unifying moment for our country.”
London will continue discussions with Brussels over access and equivalence for financial services, the chancellor said on Sunday after Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the agreement did not go as far as he wants for the sector.
The deal, which will be voted on by lawmakers in Parliament on Wednesday, “gives us a strong platform to look forward optimistically and put the divisions of the past behind us,” Sunak said in a pooled TV interview. “For those who were anxious about the economic implications of leaving, they should be enormously reassured by the comprehensive nature of this free trade agreement.”
Johnson conceded in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph that the agreement “perhaps does not go as far as we would like” on financial services, though said it offers “access for solicitors, barristers” and a “good deal for digital.”
There is little clarity for financial firms and no decision on so-called equivalence, which would allow firms to sell their services into the single market from the City of London. The agreement only features standard provisions on financial services, meaning it doesn’t include commitments on market access.
Sunak said it gives a “stable regulatory co-operative framework” and “we will remain in close dialogue with our European partners when it comes to things like equivalence decisions.”
Anneliese Dodds, economy spokeswoman for the opposition Labour Party, said ministers should do everything possible to provide certainty for businesses.
“There are big areas, like financial services, where we need to see the Conservative government acting in a much more concerted way to get an agreement so we can ensure we keep jobs in our country,” she told Sky News. “They really need to focus on this far more.”
There was also a warning for Johnson’s government from across the Irish Sea, where Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said any reduction of standards in the U.K. could lead to reduced access to the EU market.
“They have agreed to a non-regression clause in all but name, so we said you can only have access to the market if you don’t reduce your standards when it comes to workers’ rights, the environment, health and safety, product standards, all of those things,” Varadkar told Newstalk radio.
“If they do reduce their standards, or if they don’t keep up with our standards, then that access to our market could be threatened,” he said. “So they do still have to largely follow European rules where they’re relevant.”
Some senior lawmakers from Johnson’s Conservative Party complained there will not be enough time to properly scrutinize the deal when Parliament debates and votes on it on Wednesday.
While the legislation is expected to pass easily as Labour has indicated it will back the deal rather than risk the economic damage of a no-deal divorce from the EU, dissent among Johnson’s rank-and-file lawmakers may spell trouble for the future.
“Whatever you think of this treaty, it is going to affect the rest of our lives,” former Brexit Secretary David Davis told the Observer. “It does require more than just a rubber stamp.”
By The Washington Post · Loveday Morris · WORLD, HEALTH, EUROPE, HEALTH-NEWS
BERLIN – In nursing homes and hospitals from Spain to Poland, the European Union began its official coronavirus mass vaccination program for its 450 million residents on Sunday amid concerns about supply and frustrations over the pace of the roll out.
Leaders of the 27-country bloc had aimed to ensure that the vaccine would be available to every country fairly, with every country beginning their vaccination with the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine from Sunday.
At 8.30 a.m. in Guadalajara, Spain, Araceli Hidalgo, a 96-year-old nursing home resident, became the first person to be vaccinated in the country. In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis was vaccinated live on television. In Italy, which emerged as the epicenter of the pandemic last spring, doctors and nurses at the Spallanzani hospital in Rome were the first to receive the vaccine.
“Today is a beautiful, symbolic day,” Domenico Arcuri, Italy’s emergency coronavirus commissioner told reporters outside the hospital according to the Associated Press. “All the citizens of Europe together are starting to get their vaccinations, the first ray of light after a long night.”
But despite the hopeful scenes across Europe, there has been mounting frustration as Europeans have watched Pfizer and BioNtech’s vaccine, developed in Germany with German federal government funding, roll out first in a string of countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Israel and the United Arab Emirates. And while the bloc has ordered more than 2 billion vaccine doses as it aims to protect all its citizens against coronavirus, it has limited orders of the front running candidates.
“There is simply too little vaccine,” Markus Söder, the state premier of the German state of Bavaria, told the Bild newspaper on Sunday.
The 200 million doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine ordered by the European Union will be equally divided between each of its member states according to population size, meaning that Germany, with 18 percent of the bloc’s population, would receive around 36 million doses – enough to vaccinate 18 million people, just over 20 percent of its population. The country has created a string of mass vaccination centers in sports arenas and exhibition centers.
The companies have said that delivery time frames depend on when orders were placed, and while the United States and the United Kingdom put in orders for the vaccine earlier in the summer, the European Union only finalized their order in November after months of negotiations.
That means that while the United States has a smaller initial order of Pfizer vaccines, it will receive 20 million from an initial bucket of 50 million that are available at the turn of the year, compared to 12.5 million for the European Union.
The delay in ordering was mostly due to haggling over the price, said one person with knowledge of the negotiations, who declined to be named to discuss closed door deliberations.
“Negotiating with 27 countries is not as easy,” the person said. “The advantage is that poorer countries will also receive vaccine. The downside is everything takes longer.”
Stefan De Keersmaecker, a spokesman for the commission, said he could not comment on negotiations but that the aim had been to build a diversified portfolio with different companies and talks had begun before results of trials were available. “There was no certainty that any of the vaccine candidates would be effective and safe,” he said, adding that contracts allow options for orders to be expanded.
However, while the United Kingdom and the United States have already used their options to order more vaccine, the European Union had not signed the contract for 100 million further doses as of Wednesday, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. That’s despite reports that it had come to an internal decision to do so more than a week earlier.
“This is a touching moment of unity,” European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted on Saturday ahead of the vaccination program’s start. “With vaccination, we will put this pandemic behind us.”
But despite a decision to show solidarity with a unified vaccine roll out, Hungary, Slovakia and Germany began vaccinations a day earlier. Karsten Fischer, a local health authority official in the Harz region of Saxony-Anhalt, told German media that he’d seen no reason to wait after vaccines arrived.
Germany is slated to receive 1.3 million Pfizer vaccines by the end of the year, and enough to vaccinate around 13 percent of its population by March. The vaccine was developed by BioNTech, a German firm based in the city of Mainz run by a husband-and-wife team of scientists in collaboration with Pfizer.
Berlin gave the German company $469 million in funding in September to help cover the costs of phase three trials and to expand manufacturing capacity.
The European Union also has a contract to buy 300 million doses of vaccine from AstraZeneca, which could be approved for emergency use in the United Kingdom as early as next week according to British press reports. The vaccine is cheaper and does not have the same complex cold storage requirements as Pfizer and Moderna’s offerings.
Pharmaceutical companies Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline earlier this month said their vaccine would be delayed after showing a weak immune response.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jacqueline Davalos · NATIONAL, HEALTH, HEALTH-NEWS
Workers at a leading commercial laundry firm that cleans sheets for some of New York City’s biggest hospitals say every day on the job places them at greater risk of covid-19 infection.
Industry CEOs from all over the U.S. voiced concern earlier this month about potential outbreaks, too. As a critical component of a health care system buckling under the strain of a nationwide surge, commercial laundry companies have become essential in the fight against the pandemic.
But their employees’ unions contend that while some operators have taken adequate measures to protect workers, others have not.
“Some of my representatives walk in to inspect, and hand sanitizer stations are empty. Workers are typically inches away from each other,” said Richard Minter, assistant manager at Philadelphia Joint Board Workers United. Unions complain that access to masks or gloves can be limited, leaving it to employees who make little more than minimum wage to buy their own.
Unitex Textile Rental Services is among the biggest players in a $3 billion industry that keeps hospitals, nursing homes and other medical facilities running by washing soiled linens, uniforms and gowns. Five Unitex laundry workers interviewed by Bloomberg News contend some workspaces have poor ventilation, or a lack of social distancing and limited access to personal protective equipment.
Brígida Vidal is a production worker at Unitex’s Med-Apparel facility in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where she said workers are given only one mask a day, that gloves are doled out sparingly and that social distancing is rarely enforced. “We don’t have enough to protect us,” Vidal said. “There’s been times where I take gloves I find in the pockets of used scrubs because it’s all I can get.”
Vidal makes $12.50 an hour. A Mexican immigrant and the sole breadwinner for a family of four, she said going to work is a risk she “feels forced to take.” When the pandemic fell like a hammer on the New York metropolitan area last spring, Vidal said she reported symptoms including coughing, fatigue and a sore throat to her manager and Unitex’s company physician.
Instead of a two-week quarantine, she said she was expected to return to work a week later. At the time, covid-19 tests were hard to come by in the U.S. In September, Vidal said she tested positive for coronavirus antibodies. She recently bought face shields and shared them with a few co-workers. “It’s the company’s job to do this,” she said.
Maritza Garcia, another worker in Unitex’s Perth Amboy “soil room,” said managers brush off her requests for more protective equipment. “I’m told there’s not enough,” Garcia said. “I don’t feel safe. For the work we are doing, we deserve better.”
Unitex Chief Executive Officer Robert Potack denied allegations of unsafe working conditions. “Masks and gloves are provided daily and replenished upon request,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg. The company encourages social distancing and hand-hygiene, he said, and has “conducted thorough training on our covid-19 protocols and policies.”
In Unitex’s Mount Vernon facility, just north of New York City, Reynaldo Hernandez said he knew of four co-workers who fell ill with the virus this year. “In the summer, it was really bad,” he said. Sometimes management would provide him with a replacement mask, but other times he was told there weren’t enough.
Hernandez said that while he managed to stay healthy through the first infection wave, he fears this latest surge. “It’s coming back, and we are all crowded together with bad ventilation,” he said. “We are still kept in the dark about who is sick. I’m terrified.”
The catastrophic swell of coronavirus cases gripping the U.S. right now has overshadowed the initial outbreak that killed more than 50,000 in the Northeast last spring, and a second wave that killed tens of thousands more in the South and West following premature re-openings. Now, with more than 17 million confirmed infections and close to 320,000 dead, hospitals and health care facilities in every corner of the nation are filling up.
When it comes to soiled hospital laundry, Lisa Lockerd Maragakis, senior director of infection prevention at The Johns Hopkins Health System, said “evidence suggests that it’s harder to catch the virus from a soft surface (such as fabric) than it is from frequently touched hard surfaces like elevator buttons or door handles.”
But laundry employees contend that handling sheets and gowns used by Covid-positive patients is just part of a perfect storm of crowded workplaces and insufficient company precautions.
Erik Scott, chief executive officer of Soriant Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in health care support services, said linen companies were already busy before covid-19 appeared, thanks to a growing trend of outsourced laundry services. Unitex recently opened a 188,000-square-foot facility in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and said it expects to open another in 2021.
According to industry lobby group Textile Rental Services Association, commercial laundry firms are getting even more work now thanks to health care providers that are reluctant to let their workers wash their own uniforms.
“The grueling services provided by these essential workers have helped ensure the safety of patients.”
It wasn’t until New Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone Jr. and the Speaker of New Jersey’s General Assembly wrote Unitex CEO Potack on Dec. 1 that the company disclosed how many workers had been infected with covid-19, said Albert Arroyo, co-manager of the Laundry, Distribution and Food Service Joint Board, Workers United/SEIU. The union represents workers in 10 of Unitex’s 12 facilities.
“The grueling services provided by these essential workers have helped ensure the safety of patients, medical professionals, and so many others during the ongoing public health crisis,” Pallone wrote. He urged Unitex to “uphold critical covid-19 safety standards.”
On Dec. 3, Potack informed union leaders that 10% of the workforce at the Perth Amboy facility tested positive for covid-19 over the course of the pandemic, according to Arroyo. The union official also said Potack disclosed that in April, Unitex had been aware of eight positive cases among production workers at the facility.
Potack said in an interview that there have been only two cases of covid-19 at the Perth Amboy facility since April. The CEO said the infection rate at the location “is well below” national and state averages, though he declined to provide specific numbers. “There is no evidence to make any claim that the cases were transmitted at work,” Potack added.
The CEO said the company had made previous disclosures to union leaders, but added that he didn’t recall the dates or details. “We responded to and welcomed a conversation with members of Congress to explain the facts,” he said.
A fourth generation, privately owned family business, Unitex is one of the top health care laundry and linen supply providers in the country, according to Grand View Research Inc. It operates facilities across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts, with 1,750 workers processing 300 million pounds of linen annually for hospitals including Manhattan’s Memorial Sloane Kettering, Mount Sinai Beth Israel and New-York Presbyterian. As of 2014, the company generated $150 million in revenue.
Unitex has been embroiled in collective bargaining negotiations over its Perth Amboy facility since July. Potack said he believed union complaints about coronavirus risks are part of a broader strategy to extract concessions. “They are hell-bent on trying to maintain a pension for future employees,” he said of the union.
Citing alleged bad faith, the union filed unfair labor practice complaints against Unitex in July and September with the National Labor Relations Board. Lawyers for both sides didn’t respond to requests for comment, but the case remains open, according to the NLRB.
On Dec. 10, workers gathered in front of Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx to demand a wage increase, the continuation of pension benefits and that Unitex commit to basic covid-19 protections, including providing two face masks daily and requiring six feet of social distance between employees. Potack said the company doesn’t “believe any more policies and procedures need to be included in the collective bargaining agreement.”
New York City Council member Ritchie Torres, who was just elected to Congress, also attended to support Unitex workers. An advocate for health protections in industrial laundries, Torres was a lead sponsor of the Clean Act, a local law which set sanitary standards for industrial laundries in 2016.
“I want to send a crystal clear message to hospitals,” Torres said. You “are judged by the company you keep, and you should hold your contractors accountable for respecting their workers.” Unitex hospital clients including Lincoln, Yale New Haven, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, New York Presbyterian, and Memorial Sloane Kettering didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“The grueling services provided by these essential workers have helped ensure the safety of patients.”
Outside of laundry rooms, Unitex’s truck drivers are also complaining about safety issues.
“It’s not easy work. I’m picking up soiled linens that sometimes aren’t sealed properly,” said Kevin Kucker, a driver for Unitex’s Newburgh, New York, facility, which isn’t the subject of contract negotiations. A lack of transparency around workers getting infected has compounded the anxiety, he said.
If the company said, “‘look-someone got sick [so] we’re going to have to get you guys tested to see if everything’s OK,’ that would show they cared,” Kucker said. “They never did that.”
Kathy Hanshew is a manager of the Chicago and Midwest Regional Joint Board, Workers United/SEIU union, which represents industrial laundry workers across 12 states. She said that, nationally, the union has seen cases where employers weren’t providing masks at all. But some laundry companies have indeed been working with unions and their members.
Pennsylvania commercial laundry company Clean Uniform Rental has responded positively to union demands, said Minter, of the Philadelphia Joint Board Workers United. The company gave out a version of hazard pay: $150 a week in addition to what it calls “hero pay,” which provided a week’s worth of wages to workers across all levels.
“Of course there’s a cost to all of this. But this is a crisis,” Clean Uniform Rental CEO Jim Wasserson said. While the company has had sporadic covid-19 infections, contact-tracing has helped avoid outbreaks, he said. “At least once a week we have a meeting to make sure everyone knows what’s going on,” Wasserson said. “Your employees need to feel safe.”
InternationalDec 27. 2020Kevin Euceda, an asylum seeker from Honduras, in detention at Farmville, Va. As the novel coronavirus sickened detainees in the facility, Kevin wrestled with the question of whether he was better off pursuing his asylum claim or asking to be deported. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson
By The Washington Post · Hannah Dreier · NATIONAL, WORLD, POLITICS, COURTSLAW, RACE, THE-AMERICAS
Kevin Euceda believed he was in imminent danger.
Down the hall in the immigration detention center where he was being held, a man whose psychiatric visits had been suspended because of the pandemic was hallucinating and screaming. Others were shivering and sweating, scared they were going to die. Surrounded by so much sickness, Kevin was growing desperate to find a way out.
A migrant who said he came to the United States when he was 17 years old to escape gang threats in Honduras, Kevin had been living for nearly three years in a place that was now being overrun by covid-19.
And so, last summer, after he was taken in shackles for his daily hour of outside time, he asked for a phone to be passed into his cell and called the pro bono legal clinic that had taken on his case in 2017, when it appeared that he was about to be granted asylum and freed. The lawyer who spoke to him that day remembered his voice sounding shaky, his words coming too fast to understand.
“Whatever you can do to get me out of here, please make it happen,” Kevin said.
The lawyer promised to call a deportation officer, the very person who for three years, Kevin, now 20, had been trying to avoid.
Outside the town of Farmville, Va., is a holding center for immigrants detained by federal authorities. The facility was the site of one of the largest outbreaks of the novel coronavirus in the immigration detention system. The picture above is from 2010. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson
In detention centers on the country, more and more people have been asking for the same thing, seeking their own deportation as the novel coronavirus has spread through facilities and sickened more than 8,000 detainees, according to government data.
The virus has collided with the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” approach toward people looking for refuge and asylum in the United States. Those policies have led to a record number of immigrants being held in detention, including 7,000 people who had cleared the first steps of requesting asylum when the pandemic began and would normally have been released on bond while their cases were processed.
Some immigrants have been withdrawing cases against their lawyers’ advice, saying they’re more afraid of being in detention during a coronavirus outbreak than of what might be waiting in the places they fled. More than 2,500 detainees, most with no serious criminal history, have given up their cases since March, according to records from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group at Syracuse University. Those records also show that detainees put in deportation proceedings in July 2020 were twice as likely to opt for voluntary departure than those from a year before.
During 32 months at the Farmville detention center in Virginia, Kevin had held on through threats from dorm mates, protests about conditions that ended in guards using pepper spray, an outbreak of mumps and long periods of isolation. Again and again, his lawyers had assured him that his claim for asylum was a sound one and that, eventually, he was likely to win release. But now he explained to them that even when he had been targeted for death by gang members back in Honduras, he had at least been able to flee the country. At the detention center, he felt there was nothing he could do to escape the virus. “I’ve never been this scared,” he said.
– – –
Kevin had been living with different forms of danger for most of his life. He had been raised by a grandmother who attacked him when she drank and left him with a V-shaped scar on his forehead. She died when he was 12, and the gang MS-13 took over the house where they had been living, which was little more than a shack. Gang members slept in Kevin’s bed, tortured rivals on the patio, and put him to work selling drugs, he would later say in sworn testimony that was found credible by an immigration judge and also accepted by the government. One night, the leaders forced him to watch as they murdered his cousin for refusing to join the gang. Eventually, in 2017, they told Kevin he had to kill a stranger to prove his loyalty, and he fled to the United States to seek asylum.
After he crossed the Rio Grande on an inflatable raft, Kevin was processed by Border Patrol and sent to a shelter for migrant children. There, as documented earlier this year by The Washington Post, he went through an intake process that included a mandatory mental health therapy session. He told the therapist that he had fled MS-13 and that gang leaders had ordered him killed if he returned. The therapist assured him that their session was confidential, but, because of a new Trump administration policy, her notes were instead shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be used in court proceedings about whether Kevin would be allowed to stay in the United States.
Lawyers for ICE, who argued that Kevin was a threat to the community and should be deported, cited these notes some half a dozen times to keep him from being released as he was moved through shelters and detention centers, ending with his transfer to Farmville, in a rural part of central Virginia.
Twice, a judge ordered Kevin released on bond, and twice ICE appealed. Kevin also was certified as a victim of forced labor and granted asylum. But ICE appealed that ruling, too, and also appealed after a judge granted Kevin protection from deportation under the United Nations Convention against Torture, finding that he would not be safe anywhere in Central America because of widespread MS-13 control and police corruption.
As a result of what the American Psychological Association would later call an “appalling” breach of the right to patient confidentiality, Kevin was still waiting in detention for his case to be settled when the novel coronavirus began to spread through the country.
He was living in a dorm of 100 men, with tables in one corner for meals and toilet cubicles without doors in another. At night, they slept head-to-head on beds bolted flush with each other, close enough to smell each other’s breath, “like husband and wife,” one detainee said.
Kevin’s one connection to the outside world was a shared computer he could use to text with students at Washington and Lee University’s law school, who earned class credits for taking on his case.
“We’re in a very, very strong position,” one of the students, Erick Resek, wrote in March, updating Kevin on their strategy to get him permanent asylum.
“OK, I’ll keep holding on here,” Kevin wrote back, in correspondence the legal team shared with his permission.
“Are you in quarantine?” Resek wrote.
“Quarantine?” Kevin wrote.
“I mean, is Farmville in quarantine yet? Outside, the whole country is in quarantine,” Resek wrote.
“Umm no, we’re not in quarantine at all here,” Kevin wrote.
“Hmm, that’s weird. The whole country is in a total panic,” Resek wrote.
Even as Resek gave Kevin reason for optimism about his case, he was careful to explain that a final ruling was likely to be many months away.
“What if this coronavirus thing lasts for a long time?” Kevin wrote, adding a frowning emoji. “Imagine if the virus got in here. I think we’d all die.”
Three months later, the virus arrived at Farmville when 74 detainees were transferred there from detention centers in Arizona and Florida. It happened in early June, a time in the pandemic when different agencies in charge of prison inmates and immigration detainees were developing different ways of dealing with viral spread. In the federal prison system, for instance, inmate transfers between institutions had been put on hold because of concerns about infection. But ICE was operating with limited restrictions at that point, which allowed a transfer to take place that, as The Post reported, was driven in large part by the Trump administration’s desire to bring federal agents in from other parts of the country to quell anti-racism protests in D.C. ICE agents are not allowed to travel on charter flights unless detainees also are aboard, so, to expedite the agents’ travel to the protests, the transfer was arranged to bring a group of detainees to Farmville, the ICE facility closest to the nation’s capital.
When the detainees arrived on June 2, at least two were feverish. Farmville initially housed the new detainees in separate dorms but then moved several of them into the general population, where they mixed with the 400 other men.
“We were touching their shoes, touching their clothes,” recalled a detainee named Sarafin Saragoza, a 36-year-old from Mexico who earned $1 a day for helping distribute uniforms. “There was no way to keep distance from them.”
Within weeks, 51 of the new arrivals tested positive for the virus, and whole dorm rooms began falling ill.
– – –
Among the first to get sick was Gerson Garcia, a 27-year-old asylum seeker from Honduras. He wrote, “I need to see the doctor” on a sick-call request form and dropped it into a box that was supposed to be checked daily. He was still waiting to see the doctor 10 days later and crying about body aches, when, medical records show, three guards lifted him down from his bed and took him to the center’s clinic.
After that, he was moved to a medical room where there was already another sick detainee. His fever spiked to 103. He lost 30 pounds because of diarrhea. He and the other man remember a night when Garcia felt he couldn’t breathe and pounded on the door until he was too dizzy to stand. “I was begging for help. Finally, the guard came and said there was no doctor at night and he would punish me if I kept banging,” Garcia said. That’s when he decided to ask for deportation.
Another detainee who fell ill was Frank Bauer, who is 39 and moved to the United States from Bolivia as a child. “My lungs hurt,” he wrote in one of a series of near-daily requests for medical attention. “I still haven’t seen a doctor,” he wrote on another. “Please help us – we need medication,” he wrote on another, because Farmville does not provide any medicine, even Tylenol, without a prescription. Then he wrote, “We don’t have any more sick call request forms in this dorm,” on the last form he could find. He, too, decided to ask for deportation.
Some detainees later sued the company that runs Farmville, Immigration Centers of America (ICA), accusing it of failing to protect their health and safety. In a sworn statement submitted in response to that lawsuit, Farmville director Jeffrey Crawford said he tried to slow the outbreak by giving everyone masks, instituting daily temperature checks and distributing hand sanitizer. ICA also posted signs encouraging social distancing, though investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later found that the layout of the dorms, with beds inches apart, made viral spread “difficult to mitigate.”
Asked to comment for this story, ICA said in a statement that it was unable to answer questions “due to pending litigation.” The response continued that ICA has “worked hard” to “adhere to the continuously evolving science and medical recommendations from our local, state and federal health authorities.”
By the third week of June, dozens of people in Kevin’s room were sick. Their coughs echoed through the dorm at night, mixed, some remembered, with the quieter sounds of crying.
Kevin had learned as a child to keep to himself to avoid trouble. He was so polite with the guards that some detainees suspected he might be an informant. But it felt like he was running out of ways to stay safe.
“There are 27 cases of coronavirus here now,” he wrote in a text message to a recent law school graduate, Hollie Webb, who had represented him when she was a student.
“Wow, please be careful,” Webb wrote back.
“Yes, of course, I’m trying,” he wrote.
Farmville had nine medical isolation rooms for nearly 500 men, so most sick detainees had to stay in the dorms, where they were required to stand in front of their beds to be counted each morning. Saragoza, who had helped book in the transfers and was now sick himself, watched one day as his dorm mate passed out. “He fell straight on his face and his head bounced like a basketball,” he said.
There were multiple episodes of fainting, according to interviews with detainees. One man collapsed while waiting in line to see a nurse. Another while taking a shower. Another while walking back to his bed with a blanket around his shoulders. In his statement, Crawford acknowledged that in one dorm, six detainees had passed out over a single weekend.
ICA subcontracts medical care to a company called Armor Correctional Health Services, which has had several government contracts canceled because of recurring complaints that staffers ignore sick inmates. In 2018, Armor was criminally charged with falsifying records to give the appearance that staffers had been checking on a man as he died of dehydration in his cell. In other instances, Armor has hired medical staff with disciplinary records, including the sole doctor at Farmville, Teresa Moore, who had been reprimanded twice by the state medical board, and also had her license restricted, for overprescribing narcotics and misusing her prescription pad.
Citing pending litigation, Armor declined to answer specific questions for this story. In a statement, the company said that it has followed CDC and Virginia Department of Health guidelines for combating coronavirus spread. “We will continue to enhance our plan as new facts about the pandemic materialize,” the company said. Armor also addressed the ongoing criminal case about falsifying records, and said in a statement that its employees’ actions did not reflect a company policy and “the charges filed do not involve any allegations of misconduct or negligent supervision against Armor management.”
Farmville does not track sick-call response times, but a nurse named Jackie Rothwell said the center struggled with an unmanageable caseload after the June 2 transfer. “Most of the staff had never dealt with actual acute care, and the stipulations for care greatly overwhelmed the staff,” said Rothwell, adding that she retired this summer because she felt unsafe.
On June 18, Kevin made contact with Webb again.
“There are 38 people infected with the virus now,” he wrote. “It’s getting crazy.”
– – –
Soon, detainees started protesting the conditions at Farmville. They refused to stand for count and stopped eating meals. They told guards they needed Tylenol for their fevers and wanted the bunkmates who were coughing in their faces to be moved.
The guards also were becoming jumpy. More than two dozen had gotten sick, and some were quitting. “We were all terrified,” said a guard who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works for ICA. Another worker said supervisors were asking guards to come in if they had tested positive for the virus but were asymptomatic, because the center was so short-staffed. Crawford said in his statement that ICA directed its staff to “stay home with any sign of any illness.” A CDC assessment would later find that people were working through nausea, diarrhea and breathlessness.
As the protests continued and grew, guards began responding with pepper spray, which can make the respiratory tract more susceptible to infection. On July 1, guards used several cans of spray after detainees decided not to stand for count, according to Crawford’s statement. One of the men in the room was a 72-year-old Canadian doctor named James Hill, who was in Farmville awaiting deportation after serving a prison sentence for inappropriately prescribing narcotics. Hill began coughing uncontrollably, according to his family and bunkmate, and was taken to the hospital with shortness of breath. He died a month later on a ventilator.
The detainees in Kevin’s dorm decided to sit on their beds instead of standing for count as required after three people were taken away in wheelchairs. That afternoon, the men refused to eat lunch or dinner, and Kevin texted Webb that he was worried about what might happen next.
“People here are losing it and trying to protest,” he wrote. “They’ve locked us all in, and the guards don’t want to come give us any explanations. I think it’s going to get really ugly.”
In the evening, guards in body armor entered the dorm, according to Crawford’s statement. One fired a weapon that made a loud bang and sent everyone running.
The guards pulled Kevin and several others out and led them to a row of cells deep inside the detention center. Kevin sounded panicked when he called the professor supervising his case to report that he was being punished with 30 days in solitary confinement.
“How did you get in there?” the professor asked.
“I have horrible luck,” Kevin said, and explained that he had been lumped in with the protest leaders for, as he put it, “asking questions” when the riot squad came in.
Farmville ranks among the top 10 ICE detention centers nationwide for its use of solitary confinement, according to the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. ICA declined to release Kevin’s discipline record, so his lawyers never knew why he was being punished.
With no natural light in his cell, Kevin began to tell time by the arrival of his three daily meals. He was allowed out once a day, shortly before dawn, to stand in an open-air cage for an hour. Men in the other cells passed time by shouting back and forth about their symptoms. Kevin rarely spoke, but he was getting sick, too. He told a nurse that he had a bad headache, chills and a sore throat. The other detainees sometimes noticed that his eyes were red and wondered if he had been crying.
“I’m in the hole and I hate it,” he wrote to Webb. “The conditions have gotten so hard. Everything is worse.”
By July 9, ICA had tested 286 detainees, and 267 were positive for the coronavirus. The center’s nursing director alerted the health department in an email, writing, “Dr. Moore said good news is that’s almost the whole facility, so can’t go over that much.”
Kevin was tested July 2. “They gave me a covid 19 test today and it was horrible, ha-ha,” he wrote to Webb. The next week, a notation went into his medical chart: “Positive covid result.” But it’s unclear whether Kevin was ever told. His lawyers think he was not informed, because he never mentioned getting his results and continued to call them frantic with worry. After years of arguing for his release into the United States, his lawyers began contacting his deportation officer daily, along with any other official they could think of, asking for Kevin to be removed from Farmville.
For Kevin’s part, he wanted out as quickly as possible. “Life has dealt me a lot of blows, a lot of suffering, and it’s sapped my strength and my will to fight,” he wrote to Webb. He told her he hoped to be deported before serving his full 30 days in solitary confinement.
– – –
Kevin wasn’t the only one who decided that returning to a dangerous place would be better than staying at Farmville. More than a dozen detainees said in interviews that they chose to give up their cases during the outbreak.
Bauer, the man who filed daily sick requests, asked for deportation without telling his wife or U.S.-citizen children, for fear they would try to persuade him to stay in a center where ultimately 339 detainees caught the virus. Now trying to recover from lingering symptoms in Bolivia, he wrote to a judge before being deported that he was abandoning his case because “after contracting covid-19 due to ICE and facility negligence, I fear for my life in this facility.”
A 22-year-old named Zack, who asked that his last name be withheld for his safety, had been seeking asylum because he was a gay man in a North African country where homosexuality is illegal. After being sent to solitary for inciting a hunger strike, he said he struggled to get care for covid symptoms. At one point, he tried covering the camera in his cell with wet toilet paper to attract help, he said, “but still no one came. Then, out of nowhere, the guard opened the slot in the door and pepper-sprayed me.” After a month, he gave up his case. He was assaulted within days of being deported, he said, and is now hiding in a third country from relatives who have threatened to kill him for shaming the family.
A man named Jose Rauda, who also was put in solitary confinement for protesting conditions, decided to request deportation soon after being removed from his dorm. He was killed in El Salvador two weeks after arriving back, according to his mother, by MS-13 members who thought he belonged to a rival gang.
The Farmville outbreak ended in August after the virus infected nearly everyone held there and a federal judge barred ICA from accepting new detainees. Recently, fewer Farmville detainees have been giving up their claims, especially as lawyers advise clients that the next administration is likely to roll back much of Trump’s immigration agenda, dramatically improving their odds of winning legal status and being released while they wait for an outcome.
It is advice Kevin never got to hear. At the end of July, his request for deportation was granted and he was flown back to Honduras in shackles. It was nighttime when he walked out of the airport, and Webb remembers him calling in tears to say how overwhelming it felt to see the stars for the first time in three years. Two days later, he crossed the border into Guatemala, where his 21-year-old sister was living. The gang MS-13 operates in Guatemala as well, but Kevin thought he could hide there, at least for a while.
His sister, who asked that her name not be used because she, too, fears being targeted by the gang, set up an extra bed in her rented room and threw Kevin a party with a cake and the fried fish he had been missing in detention. He continued to wake up before dawn as he had at Farmville, and got a job working at a grocery for $5 a day.
After a childhood spent in forced labor for gang leaders and an early adulthood spent in detention, Kevin began trying to live out some of his earlier daydreams. He adopted a stray cat. He bought a used motorcycle. He also started rebuilding a relationship with his mother, who had left him as a small child. He told her he forgave her and pledged to help support her in the coming years. Everyone was struck by how focused and confident the tall 20-year-old seemed. “He was scared that something might happen to him, but he was so happy,” his sister said.
After a few weeks, Kevin took a day off work to visit a river with his sister – he on his motorcycle, and she riding with a friend. When they got there, the water looked like it was moving too fast for swimming, so they leaned on a bridge and watched it pass. On the way back, his sister lost track of Kevin on the curving highway. When she caught up, he was sprawled on the side of the road, unconscious.
It wasn’t clear whether Kevin had had an accident or been attacked. No witnesses came forward. After an ambulance took him to the hospital, police claimed Kevin’s motorcycle as evidence, and the family says that was the last they heard about the case.
“We’ll never know what happened,” his mother, Erika Euceda, said. “There are lots of people who try to rob motorcycles here. Lots of people who make threats. Or watch people who have just been deported. But the police didn’t try to find any answers.”
At the hospital, doctors said Kevin needed to be sent to a bigger city for surgery. His sister was trying to find the money to have him moved when he suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. The doctors said there was nothing to be done, and so it was that three years after he was a 17-year-old asking for protection in the United States, two years after he was first granted asylum, and four weeks after he returned to Central America, Kevin Euceda died and was in danger no more.
Trump trade czar eyes exit hailing tariff power his critics hate
InternationalDec 27. 2020Robert Lighthizer and Liu He, China’s vice premier, wave before a meeting at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in Washington, on Oct. 11, 2019. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Andrew Harrer.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Shawn Donnan
Robert Lighthizer has built a career on being a wily contrarian.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that President Donald Trump’s trade czar is going out tilting at a consensus among mainstream economists that Trump’s signature policies — his tariffs on billions in imports from China and steel from around the world — have been a failure by most metrics.
The U.S. is on track to end Trump’s presidency and a pandemic-affected 2020 with a trade deficit in goods and services larger than the one he inherited, Lighthizer’s critics point out. At least 100,000 fewer Americans were employed in manufacturing in November than at the start of Trump’s presidents.Yet the U.S. trade representative, who is preparing to leave office in January believing he has overseen a sea change in American trade policy, particularly toward China, sees a different storyline borne out by the data.
Strip away the impact of this year’s pandemic, Lighthizer argues, and it’s clear the Trump trade doctrine has delivered. Five of the six quarters prior to the pandemic saw decreases in the U.S. goods and services deficit, he points out, though in the eight prior to that the trend went the other way. Before Covid-19 hit the economy in February, he adds, the U.S. had gained more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs on Trump’s watch.
Most importantly, though, those changes had translated into higher wages for American workers with the median household income in 2019 rising 6.8% from the year before.
“That’s the highest in American history,” Lighthizer said in an interview.
It may frustrate his critics but Lighthizer’s pushback is evidence that, as in its other forms, Trumpism’s trade legacy may be an enduring one.
President-elect Joe Biden and his aides have already signaled that in part by vowing a pro-worker focus as they rebuild the U.S. economy and a trade policy that will be a component of what they are dubbing a “foreign policy for the middle class.” Though what that means in substance remains unclear.
More clear is that Trump’s protectionist episode and the support it garnered him again in key industrial states like Ohio this year are likely to continue encouraging the Democratic Party’s own trade skeptics and progressives. Which is why the battle over the economics of Trump’s trade legacy matters and will shadow the work of Lighthizer’s likely successor, Katherine Tai, the senior congressional staffer Biden has chosen for the role.
It is in many ways a theological battle. Adam Posen, the head of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which has led the analytical charge against Trump’s trade policies since 2016, likens any statistical defense of them to those offered by climate change deniers, or vaccine skeptics. To critics like Posen, Trump and Lighthizer’s preferred tool — the tariff, or import tax — has just gone through a very public discrediting experiment.
To Lighthizer and his supporters, however, the mighty American tariff has finally been absolved of what protectionists have long argued has been the unfair taint hanging over them since the Smoot-Hawley era of the 1930s, which economists have long blamed for at least prolonging the Great Depression around the world.
Lighthizer argues none of the critics’ predictions of economic or financial market collapses and price surges that accompanied the rollout of Trump’s tariffs in 2018 and 2019 have materialized. “It’s an important lesson that these catastrophes that they predicted didn’t happen,” he says.
Nor have the steel tariffs that critics have pointed to as one cause in the industrial output recession that the U.S. suffered in 2019 really hurt manufacturers, he argues.
Manufacturing jobs grew most robustly in 2018 when the tariffs first went in place and steel prices rose, he points out. And conversely that jobs growth slowed as steel prices fell in 2019. To Lighthizer, that is proof that a rescue effort for an essential industry could be done without major economic disruption.
“You have to have a steel industry,” Lighthizer says. “There is literally no evidence to support this notion that introducing the tariffs had a negative impact on manufacturing.”
Critics would argue the slump in steel prices that followed the initial spike and the softening manufacturing jobs market and industrial output in 2019 were evidence of an impact on demand. Prices rose and demand fell in response. Which meant that by the end of 2019 even U.S. Steel Corp. was announcing layoffs.
The tariffs levied on imports from China worth some $370 billion before they went into place have also had no negative economic effect, Lighthizer insists, despite credible studies pointing to the opposite.
Lighthizer contends the tariffs together with a “Phase One” trade deal signed with Beijing in January have helped rebalance trade with China and been part of an effective pressure campaign to shift supply chains out of China.
“The administration’s policy has put tariffs on things that they had taken advantage of us on. It has helped to block their anti-market industrial policy. It has done all of these things. Without question it has changed the nature and it has set up rules which no one else had done before,” Lighthizer said.
The deal he negotiated with China is often derided by critics as a dressed-up collection of unrealistic purchase commitments that Beijing has yet to live up to. It also failed to address fundamental issues like Chinese industrial subsidies.
Yet Lighthizer and his supporters argue the more important components include a mechanism to deal with bilateral economic disputes and new Chinese commitments on intellectual property. It guarantees greater access for U.S. financial services companies to the Chinese market. Its currency rules may prove important in the future. Beyond the commitment to buy more U.S. agricultural exports by Beijing were real changes in the regulatory barriers to those farm products, Lighthizer says.
“And they’ve implemented almost all of it,” he says.
The Trump administration has helped usher in an awakening around the world to the threat posed by China and its economic model, Lighthizer says, though he conceded that China’s own behavior in recent years has contributed to that.The mainstream view before the Trump administration, Lighthizer says, was that “China was a force for good in the trade world. And that’s completely changed not only here but in Europe and Africa and South America.”
Had Trump won the November election and were Lighthizer staying on he would be continuing to press for change in the relationship with China. Lighthizer believes the Biden administration should use the leverage it has from the existing tariffs to build on Trump’s trade deal and avoid a return to the endless and usually ineffective “dialogues” that prior administrations got caught up in.
Lighthizer believes he might have been able to close a deal with the U.K. before a congressional deadline next year. But he is also not convinced about the economic value of such a deal. His U.K. counterparts seem to want a deal for other reasons including a validation of their post-Brexit place in the world.
Were he to continue in office Lighthizer also would be turning his spotlight to a growing trade deficit with the European Union, one driven largely by automobiles. And to the World Trade Organization, to which he still attributes many of the failings in the global trading system.
Lighthizer is now in discussions with his EU counterpart, Valdis Dombrovskis, over a possible solution to a long-running trade fight over subsidies provided to Airbus SE and Boeing Co. that has led to a new round of WTO-authorized trans-Atlantic tariffs.But Lighthizer’s complaint is that the WTO system now often results in few substantial changes in practice.
That fits into the broader context of a discussion over new rules curtailing industrial subsidies — and China’s in particular — that many trade policy makers would like to see the WTO have. For now, Lighthizer says, the WTO is like a laughably ineffective on that front and the Airbus case is an example of it. He remains convinced some European governments will continue to find ways to subsidize Airbus as it competes with Boeing and wants to see countries like France and Germany forced to pay some sort of compensation.
“It literally is like somebody is robbing your house,” Lighthizer says. “You go to court and have them stop robbing your house and they start robbing your garage.”His skepticism is what drove a U.S. war on the institution’s appellate body, which Lighthizer crippled by blocking the appointment of new judges. He’d like to see a system of one-off arbitration instead and argues the appeals process until now has removed any incentive to negotiate new rules.He also has flagged his desire to see the WTO engage in a global renegotiation of its members’ tariff schedules. Too many large developing economies benefit from high tariff walls negotiated when they first joined the institution, he says.
The answer for Lighthizer is a universal tariff level, a 10% flat tax for trade if you will. With a bit of wiggle room allowed for “some small amount of your goods because you have political reasons.”
Which really comes back to Lighthizer’s belief in the power of tariffs, the one that irritates his critics and economists most. The cure is simple, Lighthizer said: “Everyone ought to have the same tariffs.”
By The Washington Post · Derek Hawkins, Michael Kranish, Simone Sebastian
ANTIOCH, Tenn. – Authorities investigating the Christmas morning explosion in downtown Nashville converged on a home in Antioch, Tenn., about 10 miles southeast of the blast site Saturday afternoon, as law enforcement agents continued to gather evidence and run down hundreds of tips.
Investigators think the person living at that address has a connection to the bombing. One theory investigators are pursuing is that the man blew himself up in the RV, according to two people familiar with the matter, who cautioned that officials are still pursuing numerous leads and that no final conclusions have been reached.
Several neighbors said a light-colored recreational vehicle similar to the one that blew up Friday morning had been parked in the backyard of the home for several months before the explosion. So far, investigators have not found evidence pointing to other potential conspirators or threats to public safety, according to multiple people familiar with the case.
A day after the explosion, AT&T communication networks remained disrupted throughout Tennessee, knocking out residential phones, cellphones and service at 20 call centers for 911. Business and government functions were hobbled, and flights were temporarily grounded at Nashville International Airport.
Tony Rodriguez lives in the second home of the duplex that law enforcement searched today. He said investigators removed a computer motherboard from his neighbor’s home, among other affects.
Rodriguez said he never spoke to his neighbor and didn’t know his name. The few times Rodriguez saw the man, he was tinkering with an antennae above the house and power washing the driveway behind their home. Rodriguez said the neighbor kept several “No Trespassing” and warning signs around his property, particularly where he kept the RV.
“He always seemed like an oddball,” Rodriguez said.
In an afternoon news conference in Nashville, FBI special agent Douglas Korneski said that there was “activity going on” in the Antioch area but that he “can’t confirm any individuals or anybody we’ve identified.”
The blast rocked the city around dawn Friday when an RV detonated near an AT&T transmission building on the city’s busy Second Avenue, home to a strip of honky-tonk bars and restaurants.
The incident – which officials described as an “intentional act” and “deliberate bomb” – left dozens of buildings mangled and sent three people to the hospital with what police said were noncritical injuries.
Officials said Saturday that the city was safe and that there were no known threats, but the area remained sealed off and under curfew over the weekend as investigators combed through the wreckage.
“It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle created by a bomb that throws evidence over multiple city blocks,” U.S. Attorney Donald Cochran said. “They’ve got to gather it, they’ve got to catalogue it, they’ve got to put it back together and find out what the picture of that puzzle looks like.”
Earlier in the day, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee asked President Donald Trump for federal assistance in response to the explosion, saying the damage to businesses and the disruptions in Internet and cell service caused by the blast were too severe for the state to handle alone.
The Republican governor said he spent part of the morning touring the destruction left by the explosion. “The damage is shocking and it is a miracle that no residents were killed,” Lee wrote in a tweet.
In a letter to Trump, Lee referred to the incident as an “attack” carried out with a “vehicle-born improvised explosive device” and called on the president to issue an emergency disaster declaration, unlocking financial and physical assistance from the federal government.
The governor estimated that the state had spent at least $175 million responding to other disasters since early 2019 and said federal help was essential.
“These extraordinary state and local expenditures have reduced our capacity to recover from this current event,” Lee wrote. “Given these factors, the severity and magnitude of the current situation is such that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments.”
The White House has not publicly responded to Lee’s request. Trump was briefed on the situation yesterday and is monitoring developments, a spokesperson said Friday.
The shocking sequence of events leading to the explosion began before daybreak Friday morning, when residents were startled awake by the crackle of gunfire and called 911. Some later speculated that the noise was a recording intended to wake them up.
Shortly afterward, a strange warning began to play from a light-colored, older-model RV parked on Second Avenue.
“It was a computerized message of ‘Evacuate now. . . . This vehicle has a bomb and will explode,'” said Betsy Williams, who lives in a building adjacent to the blast site. The warning soon changed to a 15-minute countdown, prompting some residents to flee.
Police arrived at the scene around 6 a.m. local time. They didn’t see any evidence of a shooting, officials said, but saw the RV and called in a bomb squad. A half-dozen officers went door-to-door telling residents to leave the area, even turning away a man walking his dog.
The vehicle detonated at 6:30 a.m., spraying debris and ash through the streets and sending a column of flames and smoke curling above the rooftops.
Near the spot where the RV was parked on Second Avenue, about 15 people were at the five-story Nashville Downtown Hostel – a much smaller number than the capacity of 300, because of the pandemic and Christmas. Unlike some others in the area who evacuated before the blast, the staff and guests at the hostel were unaware of the situation until the blast went off at 6:29 a.m., a time recorded by the building’s closed-circuit television camera.
The video from the camera, provided by the hostel to The Washington Post, shows a double set of glass doors at the entrance, with “NASHVILLE” printed on them in dark lettering. Three police officers can be seen walking at a steady pace on the street. Moments later, the blast blows out the doors; debris rains down. Flashes of light fill the scene as the concussive force ripped across the entryway.
Ron Limb, 54, the hostel’s owner, was home in bed, awakened by a call from someone at the hostel. It is one of two such properties he owns in Nashville, a city that he said he fell in love with when he moved from California, attracted by its vibrant culture and youthful outlook. The building began life in 1880 and once was a candy factory. Limb bought it in 2011, spent a year restoring it, and has since introduced thousands of guests from around the world to his adopted hometown.
Limb said the staff rushed into action.
“They went around, knocked on every door, got every guest out of the building,” Limb said. “Some were asleep, rushed out in pajamas and underwear, without provisions to deal with the 20-degree weather.”
Limb said fire sprinklers had been activated, causing flooding in the building. Police blocked him from the scene for security reasons, and he spent hours trying to get the city to turn off the water, a task he said was accomplished midday Saturday.
The area around the blast site remained closed off as agents worked their way inward from the outermost perimeter of the crime scene. A curfew remained in effect for the area through Sunday.
While there were no confirmed fatalities, Nashville Police Chief John Drake said in a Friday night news conference that officers found tissue that could be human remains near the explosion that they were preparing to examine. He said police had not identified a suspect or motive. The department released a photo of the RV, which they said arrived on the street at 1:22 a.m. Friday.
Mayor John Cooper said at least 41 businesses were damaged and “there will be others as we see the full extent of this.” He said the city would focus on rebuilding but cautioned that it “will be some time before Second Avenue is back to normal.”
In his letter to Trump, Lee noted that many of the buildings rocked by the blast were historic and needed to be assessed by an engineer to make sure they are structurally sound.
As business owners and residents started to take stock of the damage Saturday, a city non-emergency number for people in the affected area remained out of service.
“We are aware property owners/residents are experiencing difficulties, and are working to resolve them as soon as possible,” Cooper tweeted. “Please know the explosion impact area is still a federal investigation zone.”
A Black Lives Matter supporter stands near a supporter of President Donald Trump while they protest the presidential vote count outside TFC Center in Detroit on Nov. 6, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges
Investigators with the FBI, ATF and Metro Nashville Police Department investigate a home in Antioch, Tenn., on Saturday. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by William DeShazer
A person shelters inside a restaurant’s closed outdoor dining area as snow falls in the Hells Kitchen neighborhood of New York on Dec. 17. Winter Storm Gail pounded the city as temperatures dropped to 27 degrees with frigid sustained winds up to 35 mph, making dining outdoors unbearable amid the covid-19 pandemic that has already crippled the restaurant industry. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Angus Mordant
Rishi Sunak, U.K. chancellor of the exchequer, in London in September. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Simon Dawson
Kevin Euceda, an asylum seeker from Honduras, in detention at Farmville, Va. As the novel coronavirus sickened detainees in the facility, Kevin wrestled with the question of whether he was better off pursuing his asylum claim or asking to be deported. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson
Robert Lighthizer and Liu He, China’s vice premier, wave before a meeting at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in Washington, on Oct. 11, 2019. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Andrew Harrer.
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