July 1776 Was a Shotgun Wedding

During our own time of troubles, it is important to remember that in 1776 the men in powdered wigs who drew up the Declaration of Independence overcame political difficulties far more perilous than our own. Throughout the 1770s and 1780s, in fact, one wrong move in the Continental Congress might well have led to the secession of a regional bloc of states, whether New England, the Middle states, or the Southern states, with possibly cataclysmic consequences for all thirteen: continental civil war.

An apt metaphor capturing the spirit of the early republic is that of a shotgun wedding. If the New England, Middle, or Southern states had split apart into separate confederacies, civil wars would have broken out over finances, commerce, and, most of all, land. For this reason—the prevention of bloody mayhem—the founders reluctantly bound themselves into one Union. They united with the guns of civil war pointing at their backs, but, to their everlasting credit, they also practiced the art of cooperative political maneuvering in order to save the Union from self-destruction.
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Consider early July 1776. American founding myth would have us believe that after years of British abuses and usurpations, the leaders of the thirteen colonies amiably adopted the “unanimous” Declaration of Independence.

In fact, the battle over the Declaration of Independence was an epic tale of secession threats, fears of intercolonial bloodshed, and furtive politics engineered to rescue the Middle states from tragically falling into civil war against New England and the Southern states.

Observers of the American scene had long since forecast that an independent America would self-destruct in civil wars. As James Otis, patriot and author of the influential “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved,” averred in 1765, “Were these colonies left to themselves tomorrow, America would be a mere shambles of blood and confusion.” An English traveler visiting the colonies in 1759 and 1760 concurred, warning, “Were they left to themselves, there would soon be civil war from one end of the continent to the other.”

These were hardly isolated forebodings. After the British Parliament enacted the Coercive Acts in 1774 to punish Boston for its wreckage of more than 340 chests of tea in the harbor, newspapers were filled with anxious prognostications about the consequences of independence: American civil wars.

Read More: The Origins of the Declaration of Independence’s Most Famous Words

“Whenever the fatal period shall arrive,” Reverend Samuel Seabury of New York asserted that year, “in which the American colonies shall become independent on Great Britain, a horrid scene of war and bloodshed will immediately commence. The interests, the commerce of the different provinces will interfere: disputes about boundaries and limits will arise. There will be no supreme power to interpose; but the sword and bayonet must decide the dispute.”

Most of all, Seabury worried about the aggressive tendencies of the four tightly-bound New England colonies. In the event of independence, Seabury predicted, those colonies would “form one Republic,” and, as a result, “a state of continual war with New England, would be the inevitable fate of this province [New York], till submission on our part, or conquest on their part, put a period to the dispute.”

By this time, the founders had already witnessed firsthand the deadly centrifugal forces of disunion acting upon the Continental Congress. Most menacing, four of the five delegates from South Carolina had walked out of the First Congress in an act of nullification of the Continental Association, a proposed trade embargo against Britain that South Carolinians argued grossly disadvantaged their staple-crop economy far more than the diversified economies of the Northern colonies.

According to the South Carolina delegates, the nonexportation clause of the Continental Association, as written, overwhelmingly favored “the Northern Colonies” due to a combination of existing legal patterns of commerce, ship ownership, trade relationships, and those colonies’ expertise in smuggling. Therefore, they demanded a revision, exempting rice and indigo for the sake of the economic survival of their constituents.

When other delegates pushed back, the planters stiffened, declaring not only that they would not sign the embargo without this exemption but also that they would take their leave and return to South Carolina. To evidence their sincerity, they did actually stage a walkout. To prevent the break-up of the Union, the Congress compromised, yielding on rice but not on indigo.

As one South Carolinian delegate, John Rutledge, explained it, defense of their home colony’s economic interests motivated the walkout. The Continental Association, he argued, was biased in favor of the Northern colonies. And, he professed trenchantly, “he could never consent to our becoming dupes to the people of the North.”

By early 1776, the imperial situation had worsened considerably, forcing the question of independence upon the delegates with new urgency. Among other galvanizing events, Lord Dunmore in Virginia had issued an emancipation proclamation freeing all enslaved people who would join British forces, sending shock waves through the Southern states; King George III had declared all-out war on the colonies; and some New Englanders were contemplating the formation of a Northern confederacy because so many delegates from the Middle and Southern colonies continued to insist on reconciliation with Britain.

Primarily owing to the fact that New England soldiers were the ones dying on the front lines in the war with Britain, that region’s delegates in Congress were desperate to obtain a lifesaving military and naval alliance with France. And, as most everyone agreed, King Louis XVI was never going to ally with America until it first declared independence.

Therefore, numerous New England delegates began privately to consider forming a Northern confederation for the purpose of issuing a united declaration of independence. As Sam Adams of Massachusetts wrote to his cousin John Adams, referring to a conversation he had recently held with Benjamin Franklin, “We agreed that it must soon be brought on, & that if all the Colonies could not come into it, it had better be done by those of them that inclined to it. I told him that I would endeavor to unite the New England Colonies in confederating, if none of the rest would join in it. He approved of it, and said, if I succeeded, he would cast in his lot among us.”

In spite of the known risks of disunion, by June 8—the first day of formal debates on a resolution for independence for all thirteen states—representatives from the Middle colonies and South Carolina refused to go along. According to Thomas Jefferson, many of the delegates from those colonies drew a bright red line on the floor of the Continental Congress. “That if such a declaration should now be agreed to,” Jefferson recorded, “these delegates must (now) retire & possibly their colonies might secede from the Union: That such a secession would weaken us more than could be compensated by any foreign alliance.”

So tense and precarious were the battles over independence that the delegates shut down debates altogether, postponing further consideration until July 1, when they agreed they would cast definitive votes.

A letter written by South Carolinian Edward Rutledge in late June to fellow delegate John Jay of New York casts light on at least one American leader’s desperate fears of confederation and independence. Chiefly, Rutledge warned about the present and future dangers of New England dominating the American confederated government. Rutledge made explicit reference, too, the two means by which that region would exercise its oppression: military and naval might and power politics exploiting a weak constitution.

Bragging that he did not fear losing military engagements against New England, the South Carolinian did insist to Jay that entering into a single confederated government with that region of America was a dangerous proposition. “The force of their arms I hold exceeding cheap,” Rutledge declaimed, “but I confess I dread their overruling influence in council, I dread their low cunning, and those levelling principles which men without character and without fortune in general possess, which are so captivating to the lower class of mankind, and which will occasion such a fluctuation of property as to introduce the greatest disorder.”

Nevertheless, as scheduled, the delegates voted on independence on July 1, but before this they heard speeches. The most emotional and impassioned of them was delivered by Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, who begged the other delegates to reject independence. One reason he gave for this course of action was that if the thirteen colonies ever embarked upon a common path of independence the New England colonies would not long remain faithful to the American Union.

Looking into what he called the “Doomsday Book of America,” Dickinson conjectured that New England would break off from the rest within twenty or thirty years of a declaration of independence, making war on New York to gain control of the Hudson River, with unknown cascading consequences for all the colonies. This scenario of American civil war sparked at the Hudson River, he said, was too “dreadful” to contemplate.

Still, they voted on July 1, and the results were disastrous. Only nine states cast ballots for independence. Pennsylvania and South Carolina voted no. Delaware divided, rendering its vote null, and New York abstained, because it lacked permission either way.

This was a moment of extraordinary peril for the American Union because by now diehard New England and Virginia, for sure, had no intention of backing down on independence, and, as the vote evidenced, a supermajority of Congress (nine colonies) was ready to move immediately to a declaration. So, the delegates agreed to work overnight to break the impasse, revoting the matter of independence the following day.

We do not know what was said—or threatened—during the debates of July 1 or later that day and night. What is certain, however, is that the Middle colonies and South Carolina were left with a life-and-death decision to make. Were they going to engage as allies in a war with New England and the other pro-independence states—or against them.

Especially the Middle colonies, squeezed as they were geographically between the New England and Southern colonies, were caught in an impossible military situation. Doubtlessly, if they did not aid New England and the Southern colonies in their war effort, allowing free passage on roads and rivers, as well supplying their armies, chances were that Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York would become the worst fields of blood on the continent in the expanding imperial civil war, now pitting American against American.

Therefore, for the sake of self-preservation, the Middle colonies and South Carolina chose the lesser of two evils. On July 2, under an injunction of “Join or Die,” they threw in their lot with the pro-independence colonies. On that day, twelve states voted for independence, with New York promising to assent to the resolution as soon as it received formal approval by its state legislature. It was indeed a shotgun wedding, one that created a nation.

The Continental Congress formally adopted the resolution for independence on July 2, catapulting the U.S. into an unpredictable future. Two days later, the delegates ratified the “unanimous” Declaration of Independence, dissolving all political bands with Britain and proclaiming to the world that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

As Delaware delegate Thomas McKean later recalled about the high-pressure, perilous days of early July, “Unanimity in the thirteen states, an all-important point on so great an occasion, was thus obtained. The dissension of a single state might have produced very dangerous consequences.”

The founders did it. They adopted the improbable Declaration of Independence. They formed a republic and won the war. And, in the Treaty of Paris, they successfully secured the entire trans-Appalachian West stretching to the Mississippi River, doubling the size of the nation.

George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, and the rest accomplished these stunning feats not only in spite of the tactical advantages of the British army and navy, but also in spite of the overwhelming centrifugal forces of disunion and civil wars that were acting on them every day.

That is one reason Adams predicted that the sacred day the thirteen states launched into independence “will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.”

source https://time.com/6291967/american-independence-july-1776-was-a-shotgun-wedding/

What Killing Affirmative Action Means for the American Workplace

There is good reason Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson worked into her much-talked about dissent in the cases where the majority killed race-based affirmative action, her sense that education saves lives.

So, I write this with no hyperbole intended. Some of us are probably going to die.

Yes. The net effect of the decision to end, at all but the nation’s military academies, race-conscious affirmative action but leave in place admissions preferences for athletes, people related to faculty, alumni, and major donors – a group that a 2019 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found included 43% of Harvard University’s white students and just 16% of other groups – is going to be that significant.
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Read More: The ‘Infamous 96’ Know Firsthand What Happens When Affirmative Action Is Banned

The reason is a simple matter of math, but also the complicated but foreseeable effects of what it means when a country, only growing more diverse by the hour, fails to do all that it can to develop a well-educated and diverse workforce. As Justice Jackson wrote in her dissent:

“Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives. For marginalized communities in North Carolina, it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication). For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”

The idea that a nation needs an educated workforce is at most times – outside of a presidential campaign swing through a part of America where college-graduation rates sit below the national average – beyond dispute. Away from the ecosphere where alarmist conservative information outlets assign continued white dominance oxygen-like importance, the same is true of U.S. Census Bureau’s population projections. They indicate that by 2045, white Americans will no longer comprise the American majority.

Yet when we talk about affirmative action, much of the focus is what it means for colleges and universities, for individual students and their sincere hopes and dreams. And there are, no matter what Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion or seethed about since his Yale University Law School years, well-documented educational and social benefits to a diverse student body. But it also matters a great deal what happens after those accepted to these institutions graduate. If we do not have a diverse group of students reflective of our country on campus, we will not, as the nation itself becomes one with no single racial or ethnic majority, have a diverse professional workforce. The absence of that will have a profound effect on our courts, our schools, our hospitals, and just about every other major institution and function of American life. If nothing else, know this: companies with more diverse leadership also tend to be more profitable for the simple reason that different experiences and perspectives often produce different ideas.

Higher education has so long been central to American conceptions of leadership and readiness to captain the critical institutions and experiences that shape all of our lives that nine out of the first 10 Presidents – all white – were college men, most of them educated at the College of William & Mary or Harvard University. (The 11th President was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the schools, along with Harvard University, at the center of the affirmative-action cases decided last week.)

Read More: The ‘Infamous 96’ Know Firsthand What Happens When Affirmative Action Is Banned

And in the 1940s when the U.S. government planned for the post-war future and what turned out to be one of the largest, longest, widest-spread economic boons, Congress passed what would become colloquially known as the GI Bill. The policy was supposed to cover the cost of a college education for some 15 million soldiers returning from the battlefields of World War II, keep them off the unemployment rolls, prevent another depression, and better equip the country with a workforce ready for the coming world. But the GI Bill got the unanimous support of Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt’s signature in 1944 only after what ought to be a notorious compromise: States rather than the federal government would administer access to the benefit, a demand of Southern members of Congress worried about how to maintain a social order with white people at the top and Black people at a nearly inescapable bottom if education and other relatively new federal creations like the 40-hour workweek and Social Security were available to everyone.

Overall, the share of American adults with bachelor’s degrees or more rose from 4.6% in 1945 to 25% in 1995, according to the National Archives. (That figure is almost 34% today.) But Southern administrators denied GI Benefits to most of the more than 1 million Black returning soldiers. Black veterans were also denied the bill’s housing benefits that helped large numbers of white male GIs get bank loans and buy homes after the war.

All of that has something to do with the way that higher education remains such a profound source of anxiety and attention, the base element of a potent cocktail that’s left some people drunk on entitlement and belligerent or at least irrational about anyone else getting a sip.

“But there is a way in which the narrative about affirmative action gets spun in such a way that it seems raceless, ‘We just want fairness,’” says Shaun Harper, a professor and provost of business and education at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, about the language often used of late by those who argued that race-based affirmative action simply had to end. “White people feel that they are being discriminated against and their highly deserving children are the victims of reverse racism.”

How else does one explain why debate, disputes, and court cases related to affirmative action have all but raged since only a few years after it began? Why else did two of the whitest states in the union – Idaho and New Hampshire – bother to ban affirmative action in college admissions, public-agency hiring, and several other arenas in 2020 and 2012, respectively?

How else shall we make sense of all the chatter about fairness in college admissions when the K-12 feeder system is anything but? Here, in the wealthiest country in the world, we have a patchwork quilt of education policy and quality yet one persistent pattern. That is a massive funding gap between K-12 schools serving mostly white students and those educating kids who are not, says Kimberly Robinson, a onetime roommate of Justice Jackson at Harvard Law, who today serves as a professor of law, education, and human development as well as public policy at the University of Virginia. That’s the school that Thomas Jefferson built in 1819, the start of what the university describes as a “bold experiment – a public university designed to advance human knowledge, educate leaders and cultivate an informed citizenry.” As recently as 2016, the nation’s K-12 racial school funding gap amounted to about $23 billion, according to a report released in 2019 by EdBuild, an education research and funding advocacy organization.

“We do not distribute educational opportunity equally,” Robinson says. “What I think is so interesting is the perception that we have equal educational opportunity. People think we have that.”

Read More: How the End of Affirmative Action Could Affect the College Admissions Progress

If there are any bits of good news on the access-to-education front, they are this: Community colleges and other schools that enroll most of the people who apply – all but about 150 to 190 of the most selective schools – have in the last decade seen overall college-graduation rates (after six years) rise to a high of 62.3%. And while transfer and completion rates at community colleges after six years suggest there’s much work to be done, in the last decade or so, the number of colleges trying to connect community-college students with opportunities to complete their educations at schools up and down the prestige ladder has grown, says Nolvia Delgado, executive director at Kaplan Educational Foundation.

Still, it is the more selective colleges and universities, which have higher graduation rates for all groups of students and often lead to greater professional opportunities, that are at the center of public conversations about considering race in admissions. And, according to Tim Wise, an activist and the author of books like Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America and Dispatches From the Race War, far too many of these discussions echo the arguments once made by the likes of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard who in the 1990s managed to secure nearly 40% of the vote in Louisiana’s Republican gubernatorial primary with a version of white-grievance politics including opposition to affirmative action on the grounds that it discriminated against white Americans.

The way we talk about the debate has shifted over the years, but the idea that accounting for historic and ongoing disparities in education, access to the resources and knowledge of the tactics that allow some students to test well, family inexperience with the college-going process, or the added obligations that a poor student, for example, may need to take on to help keep their family housed causes harm to others – that is, allowing special consideration for Black and Latino applicants means fewer opportunities for white and Asian ones – remains at the heart of the arguments made by affirmative-action opponents, including conservative activist Edward Blum, co-founder and president of Students for Fair Admission, which was the plaintiff in the affirmative-action cases decided last week.

“He’s a man with a crusade,” says Wise, who first encountered Blum in Houston in the 1990s when Blum was challenging a program that sought to diversify who receives public contracts for goods and services like construction. “And he’s spent the last three decades, in and out of court, more or less shopping for the ‘perfect’ victim of affirmative action.” Blum was directly involved in affirmative-action cases that went before the court in 2003, 2013 and 2016, which did not produce the results he wanted. In 2013 he was also involved in a case that ultimately toppled a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. In a decision similar to the majority’s view in the affirmative-action cases decided last week, the majority held that federal oversight of changes to voting districts and voting-related activities in places with a history of discriminatory activity was no longer necessary. It effectively differentiated and victimized those states, and it was the states and counties subject to the law that were in need of the court’s protection.

And yet Students for Fair Admissions never produced a single student with a specific and personal claim of direct harm, says Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, an affiliate of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the nation’s largest and only pan Asian civil rights organization. Instead, the organization submitted statistical analyses and argued that Asian American students had now become the victims of affirmative action at Harvard and white and Asian students at UNC. It traded on the racist appeal of the model minority myth – the idea that Asian Americans are uniformly smart, capable, hardworking, and humble living evidence that there’s nothing wrong with America or its systems except whatever ails Black people themselves – and garnered a lot of public attention with news stories that seemed to accept Blum’s claims as fact, Kohli says. Students for Fair Admissions even purported to speak for Asian Americans, she says, as if Blum’s take were the Asian American view, which it is not.

Read More: The Ambitions of the Civil Rights Movement Went Far Beyond Affirmative Action

Affirmative-action opponents like Blum have argued lately that not even people of color favor race-based considerations. But the nation’s attitudes about affirmative action are complex and often difficult for pollsters to accurately capture, says Sally Chen, an economic-justice program manager with Chinese for Affirmative Action, a California-based civil rights group. Chen is also a Harvard University graduate, a first-generation college graduate and one of only two students who submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in the Harvard University case. The precise language of poll questions about affirmative action and the language in which they are asked appears to significantly shape the measurement of Asian American opinion, Chen says. Those where pollsters ask respondents if they support values that were the goals of affirmative action and do so in more than one language tend to produce data showing a majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action. What’s more, social media platforms and other channels of information exchange have, over the course of the case, been inundated with false information in multiple languages and dialects to which Chen and her colleagues have begun to organize pushback.

“In the face of such intense misinformation, I am proud to see that there is still a very strong contingent of Asian Americans who support affirmative action,” Chen says, “even if TikTok is flooded with ‘I didn’t get into blah, blah, blah university’ videos.

A majority of all but two subgroup of Asian Americans supported affirmative action in a multilingual Pew Research Center poll of 7,006 adults completed in January. Chinese American and Vietnamese American support came close at 45% and 48%, respectively.

In many ways, the language and the methods keep evolving, but the point remains unchanged. Justify racial exclusion and subordination for social, economic, and psychological gain and then, when the consequences of those choices show up in exponential disparities, point to that as so-called evidence that the oppressed group should continue to be constrained to a position from which it is difficult, if not a statistical anomaly, to climb.

Read More: How the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Decision Affects the AAPI Community

Of course, if declaring the enduring influence of race and ethnicity in life opportunities and outcomes simply over because you say so retains some appeal, consider this: a diverse collection of doctors and biological scientists, many of them far from the manor born, probably saved your life in the last five years.

In January 2020, when then President Donald Trump, a man history will no doubt consider a specialist in the dark arts of white grievance and entitlement politics, went over to the National Institutes of Health, he wanted to meet with the people most essential to the work. At the table were world-renowned vaccine and infectious-disease specialists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Barney Graham, and the man who led the human-genome project, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH. They are all older white men. Sitting next to Graham was Kizzmekia Corbett, an NIH research fellow, a then 34-year-old Black scientist whom Graham had named the scientific lead of the vaccine-development team.

When Corbett and her team – scientists scattered all over the country, including a white man who, like Corbett, was the first in his family to go to college, and a Chinese American immigrant trained at an American school – figured out the molecular key to a working coronavirus vaccine and early human trials proved effective, Corbett and Graham were working from their respective homes. But they each broke down and cried.

Today, Corbett, a viral immunologist, is an assistant professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an assistant professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She’s there and she was at the NIH, her mother told me back in 2020, because her third-grade teacher, a Black woman, told her parents an ugly truth: get this child to a better school district, do anything you must because this one will never allow a little Black girl into the classes to develop the capacity the teacher could see Corbett already had.

That is the thing. None of us know where or how or even what form tomorrow’s challenges will take. Assuming that the answers and the leadership needed to face and surmount them rests with one shrinking population poses a tremendous risk to all of us.

Or as Justice Jackson said in her dissent, “Do not miss the point that ensuring a diverse student body in higher education helps everyone, not just those who, due to their race, have directly inherited distinct disadvantages with respect to their health, wealth, and wellbeing.”

source https://time.com/6291900/affirmative-action-workplace-diversity/

A Year After Roes Fall Emboldened U.S. Religious Conservatives Are Lobbying to Restrict Abortion Access in Africa

NAIROBI, Kenya — Nowhere in the world has a higher rate of unsafe abortions or unintended pregnancies than sub-Saharan Africa, where women often face scorn for becoming pregnant before marriage.

Efforts to legalize and make abortions safer in Africa were shaken when the U.S. Supreme Court ended the national right to an abortion a year ago. Within days, Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio declared that his government would decriminalize abortion “at a time when sexual and reproductive health rights for women are being either overturned or threatened.”

But some U.S.-based organizations active in Africa were emboldened, especially in largely Christian countries. One is Family Watch International, a nonprofit Christian conservative organization whose anti-LGBTQ+ stance, anti-abortion activities and “intense focus on Africa” led to its designation as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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In April, Family Watch International helped to develop a “family values and sovereignty” meeting at Uganda’s presidential offices with lawmakers and other delegates from more than 20 African countries. The organization’s Africa director also is advocating for his country, Ethiopia, to revoke a 2005 law that expanded abortion access and dramatically reduced maternal mortality.

“It’s kind of like the gloves are off,” Sarah Shaw, head of advocacy at U.K.-based MSI Reproductive Choices, an international provider of reproductive health services, said in an interview.

In a September speech to the African Bar Association, the president of Family Watch International, Sharon Slater, alleged that donor countries were attempting a “sexual social recolonization of Africa” by smuggling in legal abortion along with sex education and LGBTQ+ rights.

“Sexual rights activists know if they can capture the hearts and minds of Africa’s children and indoctrinate and sexualize them, they will capture the future lawyers, teachers, judges, politicians, presidents, vice presidents and more, and thus they will capture the very heart of Africa,” Slater claimed.

Her speech in Malawi was attended by the country’s president, a former leader of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God movement.

After lobbying lawmakers in the southern African nation not to consider a bill that would have allowed abortion under certain circumstances, the U.S.-based Catholic group Human Life International told its supporters in March that “thanks to you, Malawi is safe from legal abortion.”

The African Union two decades ago recognized the right to abortion in cases of rape and incest or when the life of the mother or fetus is endangered or the mother’s mental or physical health is at risk.

A growing number of countries have relatively liberal abortion laws. Benin legalized abortion less than a year before the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, though Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, allows abortion only to save the mother’s life.

African experts say events in the U.S. could reverse gains in the availability of safe abortion procedures, especially since the U.S. government is the largest global donor of international reproductive health assistance.

Such changes could deeply affect the lives of women of reproductive age in sub-Saharan Africa, where 77% of abortions, or more than 6 million a year, are estimated to be unsafe, the Guttmacher Institute, an international research and policy organization with headquarters in New York, said in 2020.

Unsafe abortions cause 16% of maternal deaths in the World Health Organization’s largely sub-Saharan Africa region, the U.N. agency said last year, “with variations across countries depending on the level of restrictions to abortion.”

Abortion opponents are especially outspoken in East Africa, where countries publicly wrestle with the issue of teen pregnancy but offer little sex education and access to legal abortions in limited circumstances.

A sexual and reproductive health bill introduced in 2021 is still under debate by the East African Community, whose member nations include Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Some Catholic and other conservative organizations have criticized a section that would allow a woman to terminate a pregnancy in cases of rape, incest or endangered health.

Earlier this year, the Protestant Council of Rwanda directed all health facilities run by its member institutions to stop performing abortions, although Rwandan law permits them in certain cases.

“We are having a very strong anti-rights narrative,” Brenda Otieno, research coordinator with the Kisumu Medical and Education Trust in Kenya, said during a Tuesday webinar about the global effects of the U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Abortion providers are often harassed, Otieno said, and a year ago, Kenya passed a national reproductive health policy that paid little attention to safe abortion care.

In Uganda, one rights watchdog said the issue of abortion access is taboo, with advocates facing discrimination, even as some women resort to self-mutilation.

“We’ve seen a number of people losing their lives,” said Twaibu Wamala, executive director of the Uganda Harm Reduction Network.

Abortion is illegal in Uganda, although it can be legally carried out by a licensed medical worker who determines that a pregnancy threatens the mother’s life. But many doctors, fearing medical complications, only offer post-abortion care that may be too expensive or too late to save a woman’s life.

In Ethiopia, civil society workers have asked the government to investigate what they fear is a new trend: fewer public health facilities providing abortions and more women seeking care after unsafe abortions.

Groups that oppose abortion in Africa’s second most populous nation are mostly incited by outsiders and “consider the Supreme Court decision as fuel for them,” Abebe Shibru, the Ethiopia director for MSI Reproductive Choices, said.

___

Associated Press writer Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, contributed.

source https://time.com/6291884/abortion-rights-africa/

Putin to Meet Xi Modi in First Major Summit Since Armed Rebellion Rattled Russia

NEW DELHI — President Vladimir Putin will participate this week in his first multilateral summit since an armed rebellion rattled Russia, as part of a rare international grouping in which his country still enjoys support.

Leaders will convene virtually on Tuesday for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping founded by Russia and China to counter Western alliances from East Asia to the Indian Ocean.

This year’s event is hosted by India, which became a member in 2017. It’s the latest avenue for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to showcase the country’s growing global clout.
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The group so far has focused on deepening security and economic cooperation, fighting terrorism and drug trafficking, tackling climate change and the situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in 2021. When the foreign ministers met in India last month, Russia’s war on Ukraine barely featured in their public remarks but the fallout for developing countries on food and fuel security remains a concern for the group, analysts say.

The forum is more important than ever for Moscow, which is eager to show that the West has failed to isolate it. The group includes the four Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in a region where Russian influence runs deep. Others include Pakistan, which became a member in 2017, and Iran, which is set to join on Tuesday. Belarus is also in line for membership.

“This SCO meeting is really one of the few opportunities globally that Putin will have to project strength and credibility,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute.

None of the member countries has condemned Russia in U.N. resolutions, choosing instead to abstain. China has sent an envoy to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, and India has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

For Putin personally, the summit presents an opportunity to show he is in control after a short-lived insurrection by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

“Putin will want to reassure his partners that he is very much still in charge, and leave no doubt that the challenges to his government have been crushed,” said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

AP Photo/Manish SwarupSecurity personnel check the main venue of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) council of foreign ministers’ meeting, in Goa, India, May 4, 2023.

India announced in May that the summit would be held online instead of in-person like last year in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where Putin posed for photographs and dined with other leaders.

For New Delhi at least, the optics of hosting Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping just two weeks after Modi was honored with a pomp-filled state visit by U.S. President Joe Biden would be less than ideal.

After all the fanfare Modi received from American leaders on his recent visit, “it would have been too soon (for India) to be welcoming Chinese and Russian leaders,” Kugelman said.

India’s relationship with Moscow has stayed strong throughout the war; it has scooped up record amounts of Russian crude and relies on Moscow for 60% of its defense hardware. At the same time, the U.S. and its allies have aggressively courted India, which they see as a counterweight to China’s growing ambitions.

A key priority for India in the forum is to balance its ties with the West and the East, with the country also hosting the Group of 20 leading economies’ summit in September. It’s also a platform for New Delhi to engage more deeply with Central Asia.

“India glorifies in this type of foreign policy where it’s wheeling and dealing with everybody at the same time,” said Derek Grossman, an Indo-Pacific analyst at the RAND Corporation.

New Delhi, observers say, will be looking to secure its own interests at the summit. It will likely emphasize the need to combat what it calls “cross-border terrorism” — a dig at Pakistan, whom India accuses of arming and training rebels fighting for independence of Indian-controlled Kashmir or its integration into Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denies.

It may also stress the need to respect territorial integrity and sovereignty — a charge often directed towards its other rival, China. India and China have been locked in an intense three-year standoff involving thousands of soldiers stationed along their disputed border in the eastern Ladakh region.

Analysts say China, seeking to posture itself as a global force, is becoming a dominant player in forums like the SCO, where interest for full membership from countries like Myanmar, Turkey and Afghanistan has grown in recent years.

“The limitation with the SCO is that China and Russia are trying to turn it into an anti-Western grouping, and that does not fit with India’s independent foreign policy,” said Madan.

The SCO could also prove challenging for Washington and its allies in the long run.

“For countries uncomfortable with the West and their foreign policies, the SCO is a welcome alternative, mainly because of the roles Russia and China play. … I think that highlights just how relevant and concerning this group could be for a number of Western capitals, especially if it keeps expanding,” said Kugelman.

source https://time.com/6291877/putin-modi-xi-shanghai-summit/

What to Know About the Really Long Waits for U.S. Passport and Visa Processing

Seeking a valid U.S. passport for that 2023 trip? Buckle up, wishful traveler, for a very different journey before you step anywhere near an airport.

A much-feared backup of U.S passport applications has smashed into a wall of government bureaucracy as worldwide travel rebounds toward record pre-pandemic levels — with too few humans to handle the load. The result, say aspiring travelers in the U.S. and around the world, is a maddening pre-travel purgatory defined, at best, by costly uncertainty.

With family dreams and big money on the line, passport seekers describe a slow-motion agony of waiting, worrying, holding the line, refreshing the screen, complaining to Congress, paying extra fees and following incorrect directions. Some applicants are buying additional plane tickets to snag in-process passports where they sit — in other cities — in time to make the flights they booked in the first place.
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So grim is the outlook that U.S. officials aren’t even denying the problem or predicting when it will ease. They’re blaming the epic wait times on lingering pandemic-related staffing shortages and a pause of online processing this year. That’s left the passport agency flooded with a record-busting 500,000 applications a week. The deluge is on-track to top last year’s 22 million passports issued, the State Department says.

Stories from applicants and interviews by The Associated Press depict a system of crisis management, in which the agencies are prioritizing urgent cases such as applicants traveling for reasons of “life or death” and those whose travel is only a few days off. For everyone else, the options are few and expensive.

So, 2023 traveler, if you still need a valid U.S. passport, prepare for an unplanned excursion into the nightmare zone.

‘Plenty of time’ to ‘we’ll still be OK’ to big problems

It was early March when Dallas-area florist Ginger Collier applied for four passports ahead of a family vacation at the end of June. The clerk, she said, estimated wait times at eight to 11 weeks. They’d have their passports a month before they needed them. “Plenty of time,” Collier recalled thinking.

Then the State Department upped the wait time for a regular passport to as much as 13 weeks. “We’ll still be okay,” she thought.

At T-minus two weeks to travel, this was her assessment: “I can’t sleep.” This after months of calling, holding, pressing refresh on a website, trying her member of Congress — and stressing as the departure date loomed. Failure to obtain the family’s passports would mean losing $4,000, she said, as well as the chance to meet one of her sons in Italy after a study-abroad semester.

Read More: What to Do When Your Travel Plans Go South

“My nerves are shot, because I may not be able to get to him,” she said. She calls the toll-free number every day, holds for as much as 90 minutes to be told — at best — that she might be able to get a required appointment at passport offices in other states.

“I can’t afford four more plane tickets anywhere in the United States to get a passport when I applied in plenty of time,” she said. “How about they just process my passports?”

The American government has a culprit: COVID

By March, concerned travelers began asking for answers and then demanding help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who widely reported at hearings this year that they were receiving more complaints from constituents on passport delays than any other issue.

The U.S. secretary of state had an answer, of a sort.

“With COVID, the bottom basically dropped out of the system,” Antony Blinken told a House subcommittee March 23. When demand for travel all but disappeared during the pandemic, he said, the government let contractors go and reassigned staff that had been dedicated to handling passports.

Around the same time, the government also halted an online renewal system “to make sure that we can fine tune it and improve it,” Blinken said. He said the department is hiring agents as quickly as possible, opening more appointments and trying to address the crisis in other ways.

Samuel Corum—Sipa USA/APSecretary of State Antony Blinken testifies before the House Appropriations Committee on March 23, 2023.

Passport applicants lit up social media groups, toll-free numbers and lawmakers’ phone lines with questions, appeals for advice and cries for help. Facebook and WhatsApp groups bristled with reports of bewilderment and fury. Reddit published eye-watering diaries, some more than 1,000 words long, of application dates, deposits submitted, contacts made, time on hold, money spent and appeals for advice.

It was 1952 when a law required, for the first time, passports for every U.S. traveler abroad, even in peacetime. Now, passports are processed at centers around the country and printed at secure facilities in Washington, D.C. and Mississippi, according to the Government Printing Office.

But the number of Americans holding valid U.S. passports has grown at roughly 10% faster than the population over the past three decades, according to Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

After passport delays derailed his own plans to travel to London earlier this year, Zagorsky found that the number of U.S. passports per American has soared from about three per 100 people in 1989 to nearly 46 per 100 people in 2022. Americans, it turns out, are on the move.

“As a society gets richer,” says Zagorsky, “the people in that society say, ‘I want to visit the rest of the world.’”

For Americans and others abroad, it’s no picnic either

At U.S. consulates overseas, the quest for U.S. visas and passports isn’t much brighter.

On a day in June, people in New Delhi could expect to wait 451 days for a visa interview, according to the website. Those in Sao Paulo could plan on waiting more than 600 days. Aspiring travelers in Mexico City were waiting about 750 days; in Bogota, Colombia, it was 801 days.

In Israel, the need is especially acute. More than 200,000 people with citizenship in both countries live in Israel. It’s one appointment per person, even for newborns, who must have both parents involved in the process, before traveling to the United States.

Batsheva Gutterman started looking for three appointments immediately after she had a baby in December, with an eye toward attending a family celebration in July, in Raleigh, N.C.

Her quest for three passports stretched from January to June, days before travel. And it only resolved after Gutterman payed a small fee to join a WhatsApp group that alerted her to new appointments, which stay available for only a few seconds. She ultimately got three appointments on three consecutive days — bureaucracy embodied.

“We had to drive the entire family with three small children, an hour-and-a-half to Tel Aviv three days in a row, taking off work and school,” she said. “This makes me incredibly uneasy having a baby in Israel as an American citizen, knowing there is no way I can fly with that baby until we get lucky with an appointment.”

Recently, there appeared to be some progress. The wait for an appointment for a renewed U.S. passport stood at 360 days on June 8. On July 2, the wait was down to 90 days, according to the web site.

Frustrating tales emerge from the trenches

Back in the U.S., Marni Larsen of Holladay, Utah, stood in line in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, in hopes of snagging her son’s passport. That way, she hoped, the pair could meet the rest of their family, who had already left as scheduled for Europe, for a long-planned vacation.

She’d applied for her son’s passport two months earlier and spent weeks checking for updates online or through a frustrating call system. As the mid-June vacation loomed, Larsen reached out to Sen. Mitt Romney ’s office, where one of four people he says is assigned full-time to passport issues were able to track down the document in New Orleans.

It was supposed to be shipped to Los Angeles, where she got an appointment to retrieve it. That meant Larsen had to buy new tickets for herself and her son to Los Angeles and reroute their trip from there to Rome. All on a bet that her son’s passport was indeed shipped as promised.

“We are just waiting in this massive line of tons of people,” Larsen said. “It’s just been a nightmare.”

Damian Dovarganes—APMarni Larsen and her son, Damon Rasmussen of Holladay, Utah, stand in line hoping to snag her son’s passport outside the Los Angeles Passport Agency at the Federal Building in Los Angeles on Wednesday, June 14, 2023.

They succeeded. But not everyone has been so lucky.

Miranda Richter applied in person to renew passports for herself and her husband, as well as apply a new one on Feb. 9 for a trip with their neighbors to Croatia on June 6. She ended up canceling, losing more than $1,000.

Her timeline went like this: Passports for her husband and daughter arrived in 11 weeks, while Richter’s photo was rejected. On May 4, she sent in a new one via priority mail. Then she paid a rush fee of $79, which was never charged to her credit card. Between May 30 and June 2, four days before travel, Richter and her husband spent more than 12 hours on the national passport line while also calling their congressman, senators and third-party couriers.

Finally, she showed up in person at the federal building in downtown Houston, 30 minutes before the passport office opened. Richter said there were at least 100 people in line.

“The security guard asked when is my appointment, and I burst out in tears,” she recalls. She couldn’t get one. “It didn’t work.”

Finally: A happy ending

“I just got my passports!” Ginger Collier texts.

She ended up showing up at the passport office in Dallas with her daughter-in-law at 6:30 a.m. and being sorted into groups and lined up against walls. Finally they were called to a window, where the agent was “super nice” and pulled all four of the family’s applications — paperwork that had been sitting in the office since March 17. More than seven hours later, the two left the office with directions to pick up their passports the next day.

They did — with four days to spare.

“What a ridiculous process,” Collier says. Nevertheless, the reunion with her son in Italy was sweet. She texted last week: “It was the best hug ever!”

—Kellman reported from Tel Aviv, Israel, Santana reported from Washington, and Koenig reported from Dallas.

source https://time.com/6291865/long-waits-us-passports-visa-processing/

Grandmother of French Teen Killed by Police Officer Pleads With Rioters to Stop

PARIS — The grandmother of the French teenager shot dead by police during a traffic stop pleaded on Sunday with rioters to stop as the nation faced a sixth straight night of unrest, while authorities expressed outrage by the targeting of a mayor’s home with a burning car that injured family members.

The grandmother of 17-year-old Nahel, identified only as Nadia, said in a telephone interview with French news broadcaster BFM TV, “Don’t break windows, buses … schools. We want to calm things down.”

She said she was angry at the officer who killed her grandson but not at the police in general and expressed faith in the justice system as France faces its worst social upheaval in years. Her grandson, identified by only his first name, was buried on Saturday.
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The violence appeared to be lessening. But as a new night approached, the office of Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said 45,000 police officers would again be deployed in the streets to counter anger over discrimination against people who trace their roots to former French colonies and live in low-income neighborhoods. Nahel is of Algerian descent and was shot in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.

President Emmanuel Macron was holding a special security meeting Sunday night, and it was not clear whether he would make public comments. Macron has delayed what would have been the first state visit to Germany by a French president in 23 years, starting Sunday evening.

Police said they made another 719 arrests Saturday night, bringing the total number of people detained to more than 3,000 following a mass security deployment. Hundreds of police and firefighters have been injured in the violence, although authorities haven’t said how many protesters have been hurt.

French authorities were appalled on Sunday after a burning car struck the home of the mayor of the Paris suburb of L’Hay-les-Roses. Several police stations and town halls have been targeted by fires or vandalism in recent days, but such a personal attack on a mayor’s home is unusual.

Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun said his wife and one of his children were injured in the 1:30 a.m. attack while they slept and he was in the town hall monitoring the violence. Jeanbrun, of the conservative opposition Republicans party, said the attack represented a new stage of “horror and ignominy” in the unrest.

Regional prosecutor Stephane Hardouin opened an investigation into attempted murder, telling French television that a preliminary investigation suggests the car was meant to ram the house and set it ablaze. He said a flame accelerant was found in a bottle in the car.

Macron has blamed social media for fueling violence. France’s justice minister has warned that young people who share calls for violence on Snapchat or other apps could face prosecution.

The mass police deployment has been welcomed by some frightened residents of targeted neighborhoods, but it has further frustrated those who see police behavior as the core of the crisis.

On a public square in Nanterre, a young man of Senegalese descent said France would learn little from the latest unrest. Faiez Njai said of police: “They’re playing on our fears, saying that ‘If you don’t listen to us,’” — and then he pointed a finger at his temple and fired.

Video of the killing showed two officers at the window of the car, one with his gun pointed at the driver. As the teenager pulled forward, the officer fired once through the windshield. The officer accused of killing Nahel was given a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide.

Thirteen people who didn’t comply with traffic stops were fatally shot by French police last year, and three this year, prompting demands for more accountability.

“Nahel M.’s death first reflects the rules and practices for how police officers use weapons during roadside checks and, more broadly, the flawed relations between the police and young people from working-class neighborhoods,” the newspaper Le Monde said in an editorial on Saturday.

Amid the unrest, a World War II monument in Nanterre commemorating Holocaust victims and members of the French resistance was vandalized on the sidelines of a silent march Thursday to pay tribute to Nahel. The slogans included “Don’t forgive or forget” and “Police, rapists, assassins.” The European Jewish Congress denounced the vandalism as a “shameful act of disrespect for the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.”

Life in some parts of France went on as usual. In the capital, tourists thronged to the Eiffel Tower, where workers set up a nearby clock counting down to next year’s Paris Olympics. A short walk from Nanterre, a shopping mall bustled Sunday with customers from all walks of life. But in the empty square where Nahel was shot, someone had painted “The police kill” on a bench.

At the foot of a bridge near the Eiffel Tower where generations of couples have attached padlocks to symbolize lasting love, a Senegalese man selling cheap locks and keys shook his head when asked if Nahel’s killing and the ensuing violence would change anything.

“I doubt it,” he said, giving only his first name, Demba, for fear of retaliation. “The discrimination is too profound.”

source https://time.com/6291852/grandmother-of-french-teen-killed-by-police-officer-pleads-rioters-stop/

The Biden Administration Guaranteed Attorney Access for All Migrant Screenings. Most Dont Have It

SAN DIEGO — As the Biden administration prepared to launch speedy asylum screenings at Border Patrol holding facilities this spring , authorities pledged a key difference from a Trump-era version of the policy: Migrants would be guaranteed access to legal counsel.

Nearly three months and thousands of screenings later, the promise of attorney access appears largely unfulfilled, based on advocacy group reports and interviews with people directly involved, some of whom spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the effort publicly.

A coterie of involved attorneys estimate that perhaps 100 migrants have secured formal representation, and only hundreds more have received informal advice through one-time phone calls ahead of the expedited screenings.
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Jones Day, one of the world’s largest law firms, has partnered with the administration to provide free legal advice to migrants. Its phone bank handled 460 informal phone consultations, each one typically lasting about two hours, as of June 21, according to one of the people who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity. Jones Day itself had only two formal clients, the person said.

Four other advocacy groups that offer free advice and whose names are posted on the immigration court system’s website have handled far fewer phone consultations, partly because they started much later, the person said. Representatives from those four groups declined to comment or did not respond to requests from the AP.

That represents a mere fraction of the thousands of expedited screenings since early April, though a precise percentage couldn’t be determined. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, whose asylum officers conduct the interviews, didn’t answer questions about attorney representation.

U.S. authorities aim to complete screenings in 72 hours — the limit on holding someone under Border Patrol policy. The Homeland Security Department said the accelerated timeline is meant “to provide relief more quickly to those who are eligible and to more quickly remove those who are not.” AP has repeatedly requested to visit a screening facility to better understand the process.

During the screenings, known as “credible fear interviews,” migrants must convince an asylum officer that they have a “significant possibility” of convincing a judge that they face persecution in their home countries on grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group. If they pass, they are typically released in the U.S. while their case winds through the system.

The percentage of people who passed asylum screenings fell to 52% during the second half of May as the fast-track process picked up, down from 77% the second half of March, just before it began.

The government figures give no explanation and do not say how many expedited screenings occurred in Border Patrol custody without access to legal counsel. Administration officials have attributed lower approval rates in part to a new policy that severely limits asylum for people who travel through another country, like Mexico, to reach the U.S. border.

A lawsuit filed last month in federal court in Washington seeks to end the screenings in Border Patrol custody, noting that applicants get as little as 24 hours to find attorneys after often-harrowing journeys. The lawsuit contends that “leaves virtually no time or ability for noncitizens to consult with anyone or meaningfully prepare for these often life-or-death interviews.

Even migrants who pass are reluctant to discuss their experiences as they to continue pursuing asylum cases. U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, said in a statement that reports of lacking attorney access at Border Patrol facilities are “troubling and disappointing.”

The administration won’t say how many of the screenings it has done at Border Patrol facilities, which prohibit in-person attorney visits, though it is easily thousands. The Homeland Security Department said June 5 that asylum officers did more than 11,500 screenings on the border in the first three weeks after pandemic-related asylum restrictions ended, though some may have been at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement centers, which do allow attorney visits.

Normally, about three in four migrants pass credible fear interviews, though far fewer eventually win asylum. But the results roughly flipped during the five months of the Trump-era program of expedited screenings: Only 23% passed, while 69% failed and 9% withdrew, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Biden ended Trump’s fast-track reviews within a month of Democrats occupying the White House, part of an executive order aimed at “restoring and enhancing asylum processing at the border.”

Renewed screenings began in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley and expanded the following week to similarly sprawling tent complexes in Laredo and El Paso in Texas; Yuma, Arizona; and San Diego — all temporary Border Patrol detention centers built since 2021 with hundreds of phone booths for interviews.

For about three weeks in April, Jones Day attorneys were able to prepare all migrants who sought informal legal advice by phone but were soon overwhelmed, according to one person with direct knowledge of the effort.

Some legal service providers wrestled with whether to participate in the “Enhanced Expedited Removal” program as the screenings process is called. They don’t get paid and some worried it might imply approval and lend legitimacy.

Americans for Immigrant Justice joined the Jones Day-led effort because the interviews carry “life-and death” stakes, said Cindy Woods, national policy counsel.

“It’s a difficult situation to be in, especially because the way that this new iteration has been laid out,” she said.

Calls that come in at night or on weekends are missed, and attorneys say they have no reliable way to respond to messages.

Obtaining formal representation for the screening may require a signature, which requires assistance from agents who may be unavailable. One of Woods’ clients was on the phone for five hours while waiting for an agent to print a consent form and fax it back to the attorney with the migrant’s signature.

The National Immigrant Justice Center, which takes clients through the Jones Day-led phone bank, said in a report that six of 23 clients didn’t have access to pen and paper to take notes.

Jones Day attorneys occupied the highest ranks of the Trump administration, including White House counsel Don McGahn. Despite ties to the former president, who called asylum “a sham,” the firm built a robust practice representing asylum-seekers for free known as the “Border Project,” operating from an office it opened in 2017 on the banks of the Rio Grande in Laredo.

Jones Day says it has provided legal education to more than 10,000 migrants. More than 1,100 lawyers have spent more than 280,000 hours on their cases — an unrivaled investment among major firms.

The firm has declined to comment publicly on its role providing legal advice for the expedited screenings.

source https://time.com/6291848/the-biden-administration-guaranteed-attorney-access-for-all-migrant-screenings-most-dont-have-it/