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Studies suggest that wide adoption of masks can reduce the spread of the coronavirus. A meta-analysis by Ali Mokdad and his research group at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimates at least a 30% reduction and up to 50%, which can lead to a big difference, as illustrated by Connie Jin for NPR:

Wear the mask.

Tags: Connie Jin, coronavirus, mask, NPR

Trainers, Niantic has allowed us to share a list of Pokémon that will be available to hatch from special 7 KM eggs obtainable globally during GO Fest hours.

These Pokémon are available for everyone, not just GO Fest 2020 ticket holders. The eggs will be obtainable during the following times:

• Saturday: 10 am – 8 pm local time
• Sunday: 10 am – 8 pm local time

GO Fest 2020 7 KM egg hatches

The following Pokémon will be hatching from the special GO Fest 2020 7 KM Eggs:

Niantic hasn’t shared any information on whether or not these Pokémon will have an increased chance to be shiny. We don’t expect it, but will update this article once we have actual field reports.

The post Pokémon hatching from GO Fest 2020 7 KM Eggs appeared first on Pokemon GO Hub.

DC will now require anyone engaging in non-essential travel to or from a hotspot to self-quarantine for 14 days when they come to the District, effective July 27. The mayor’s order affects both DC residents who travel to hotspots for non-essential reasons, and hotspot residents who come to DC for non-essential reasons. DC health will […]

by Abrahm Lustgarten

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Read more about the data project that underlies the reporting.

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge.

The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60% in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83%. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.

Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.

In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100% interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there.

From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.

For most of human history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north. According to a pathbreaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined. By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1% of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing 1 of every 3 people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on. A 2017 study in Science Advances found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a few hours in some places, including parts of India and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.”

People are already beginning to flee. In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and drought have made farming more difficult, the World Bank points to more than 8 million people who have moved toward the Middle East, Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of rural people have been streaming toward the coasts and the cities amid drought and widespread crop failures. Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations.

Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to the places they go. As the United States and other parts of the global North face a demographic decline, for instance, an injection of new people into an aging workforce could be to everyone’s benefit. But securing these benefits starts with a choice: Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only goodwill and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war.

The stark policy choices are already becoming apparent. As refugees stream out of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe and from Central America into the United States, an anti-immigrant backlash has propelled nationalist governments into power around the world. The alternative, driven by a better understanding of how and when people will move, is governments that are actively preparing, both materially and politically, for the greater changes to come.

Last summer, I went to Central America to learn how people like Jorge will respond to changes in their climates. I followed the decisions of people in rural Guatemala and their routes to the region’s biggest cities, then north through Mexico to Texas. I found an astonishing need for food and witnessed the ways competition and poverty among the displaced broke down cultural and moral boundaries. But the picture on the ground is scattered. To better understand the forces and scale of climate migration over a broader area, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica joined with the Pulitzer Center in an effort to model, for the first time, how people will move across borders.

We focused on changes in Central America and used climate and economic-development data to examine a range of scenarios. Our model projects that migration will rise every year regardless of climate, but that the amount of migration increases substantially as the climate changes. In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the course of the next 30 years.

Migrants move for many reasons, of course. The model helps us see which migrants are driven primarily by climate, finding that they would make up as much as 5% of the total. If governments take modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and 2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming, that number jumps to more than a million people. (None of these figures include undocumented immigrants, whose numbers could be twice as high.)

The model shows that the political responses to both climate change and migration can lead to drastically different futures.

As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false precision to the political battles that inevitably surround any discussion of migration. But our model offers something far more potentially valuable to policymakers: a detailed look at the staggering human suffering that will be inflicted if countries shut their doors.

In recent months, the coronavirus pandemic has offered a test run on whether humanity has the capacity to avert a predictable — and predicted — catastrophe. Some countries have fared better. But the United States has failed. The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes. The only way to mitigate the most destabilizing aspects of mass migration is to prepare for it, and preparation demands a sharper imagining of where people are likely to go, and when.

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I. A Different Kind of Climate Model

In November 2007, Alan B. Krueger, a labor economist known for his statistical work on inequality, walked into the Princeton University offices of Michael Oppenheimer, a leading climate geoscientist, and asked him whether anyone had ever tried to quantify how and where climate change would cause people to move.

Earlier that year, Oppenheimer helped write the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that, for the first time, explored in depth how climate disruption might uproot large segments of the global population. But as groundbreaking as the report was — the U.N. was recognized for its work with a Nobel Peace Prize — the academic disciplines whose work it synthesized were largely siloed from one another. Demographers, agronomists and economists were all doing their work on climate change in isolation, but understanding the question of migration would have to include all of them.

Together, Oppenheimer and Krueger, who died in 2019, began to chip away at the question, asking whether tools typically used by economists might yield insight into the environment’s effects on people’s decision to migrate. They began to examine the statistical relationships — say, between census data and crop yields and historical weather patterns — in Mexico to try to understand how farmers there respond to drought. The data helped them create a mathematical measure of farmers’ sensitivity to environmental change — a factor that Krueger could use the same way he might evaluate fiscal policies, but to model future migration.

Their study, published in 2010 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that Mexican migration to the United States pulsed upward during periods of drought and projected that by 2080, climate change there could drive 6.7 million more people toward the southern U.S. border. “It was,” Oppenheimer said, “one of the first applications of econometric modeling to the climate-migration problem.”

The modeling was a start. But it was hyperlocal instead of global, and it left open huge questions: how cultural differences might change outcomes, for example, or how population shifts might occur across larger regions. It was also controversial, igniting a backlash among climate-change skeptics, who attacked the modeling effort as “guesswork” built on “tenuous assumptions” and argued that a model couldn’t untangle the effect of climate change from all the other complex influences that determine human decision-making and migration. That argument eventually found some traction with migration researchers, many of whom remain reluctant to model precise migration figures.

But to Oppenheimer and Krueger, the risks of putting a specific shape to this well established but amorphous threat seemed worth taking. In the early 1970s, after all, many researchers had made a similar argument against using computer models to forecast climate change, arguing that scientists shouldn’t traffic in predictions. Others ignored that advice, producing some of the earliest projections about the dire impact of climate change, and with them some of the earliest opportunities to try to steer away from that fate. Trying to project the consequences of climate-driven migration, to Oppenheimer, called for similarly provocative efforts. “If others have better ideas for estimating how climate change affects migration,” he wrote in 2010, “they should publish them.”

Since then, Oppenheimer’s approach has become common. Dozens more studies have applied econometric modeling to climate-related problems, seizing on troves of data to better understand how environmental change and conflict each lead to migration and clarify how the cycle works. Climate is rarely the main cause of migration, the studies have generally found, but it is almost always an exacerbating one.

As they have looked more closely, migration researchers have found climate’s subtle fingerprints almost everywhere. Drought helped push many Syrians into cities before the war, worsening tensions and leading to rising discontent; crop losses led to unemployment that stoked Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya; Brexit, even, was arguably a ripple effect of the influx of migrants brought to Europe by the wars that followed. And all those effects were bound up with the movement of just 2 million people. As the mechanisms of climate migration have come into sharper focus — food scarcity, water scarcity and heat — the latent potential for large-scale movement comes to seem astronomically larger.

North Africa’s Sahel provides an example. In the nine countries stretching across the continent from Mauritania to Sudan, extraordinary population growth and steep environmental decline are on a collision course. Past droughts, most likely caused by climate change, have already killed more than 100,000 people there. And the region — with more than 150 million people and growing — is threatened by rapid desertification, even more severe water shortages and deforestation. Today researchers at the United Nations estimate that some 65% of farmable lands have already been degraded. “My deep fear,” said Solomon Hsiang, a climate researcher and economist at the University of California, Berkeley, is that Africa’s transition into a post-climate-change civilization “leads to a constant outpouring of people.”

The story is similar in South Asia, where nearly one-fourth of the global population lives. The World Bank projects that the region will soon have the highest prevalence of food insecurity in the world. While some 8.5 million people have fled already — resettling mostly in the Persian Gulf — 17 million to 36 million more people may soon be uprooted, the World Bank found. If past patterns are a measure, many will settle in India’s Ganges Valley; by the end of the century, heat waves and humidity will become so extreme there that people without air conditioning will simply die.

If it is not drought and crop failures that force large numbers of people to flee, it will be the rising seas. We are now learning that climate scientists have been underestimating the future displacement from rising tides by a factor of three, with the likely toll being some 150 million globally. New projections show high tides subsuming much of Vietnam by 2050 — including most of the Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people — as well as parts of China and Thailand, most of southern Iraq and nearly all of the Nile Delta, Egypt’s breadbasket. Many coastal regions of the United States are also at risk.

Through all the research, rough predictions have emerged about the scale of total global climate migration — they range from 50 million to 300 million people displaced — but the global data is limited, and uncertainty remained about how to apply patterns of behavior to specific people in specific places. Now, though, new research on both fronts has created an opportunity to improve the models tremendously. A few years ago, climate geographers from Columbia University and the City University of New York began working with the World Bank to build a next-generation tool to establish plausible migration scenarios for the future. The idea was to build on the Oppenheimer-style measure of response to the environment with other methods of analysis, including a “gravity” model, which assesses the relative attractiveness of destinations with the hope of mathematically anticipating where migrants might end up. The resulting report, published in early 2018, involved six European and American institutions and took nearly two years to complete.

The bank’s work targeted climate hot spots in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America, focusing not on the emergency displacement of people from natural disasters but on their premeditated responses to what researchers call “slow-onset” shifts in the environment. They determined that as climate change progressed in just these three regions alone, as many as 143 million people would be displaced within their own borders, moving mostly from rural areas to nearby towns and cities. The study, though, wasn’t fine-tuned to specific climatic changes like declining groundwater. And it didn’t even try to address the elephant in the room: How would the climate push people to migrate across international borders?

In early 2019, The Times Magazine and ProPublica, with support from the Pulitzer Center, hired an author of the World Bank report — Bryan Jones, a geographer at Baruch College — to add layers of environmental data to its model, making it even more sensitive to climatic change and expanding its reach. Our goal was to pick up where the World Bank researchers left off, in order to model, for the first time, how people would move between countries, especially from Central America and Mexico toward the United States.

First we gathered existing datasets — on political stability, agricultural productivity, food stress, water availability, social connections, weather and much more — in order to approximate the kaleidoscopic complexity of human decision-making.

Then we started asking questions: If crop yields continue to decline because of drought, for instance, and people are forced to respond by moving, as they have in the past, can we see where they will go and see what new conditions that might introduce? It’s very difficult to model how individual people think or to answer these questions using individual data points — often the data simply doesn’t exist. Instead of guessing what Jorge A. will do and then multiplying that decision by the number of people in similar circumstances, the model looks across entire populations, averaging out trends in community decision-making based on established patterns, then seeing how those trends play out in different scenarios.

In all, we fed more than 10 billion data points into our model. Then we tested the relationships in the model retroactively, checking where historical cause and effect could be empirically supported, to see if the model’s projections about the past matches what really happened. Once the model was built and layered with both approaches — econometric and gravity — we looked at how people moved as global carbon concentrations increased in five different scenarios, which imagine various combinations of growth, trade and border control, among other factors. (These scenarios have become standard among climate scientists and economists in modeling different pathways of global socioeconomic development.)

Only a supercomputer could efficiently process the work in its entirety; estimating migration from Central America and Mexico in one case required uploading our query to a federal mainframe housed in a building the size of a small college campus outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, run by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where even there it took four days for the machine to calculate its answers. (A more detailed description of the data project can be found at propublica.org/migration-methodology.)

The results are built around a number of assumptions about the relationships between real-world developments that haven’t all been scientifically validated. The model also assumes that complex relationships — say, how drought and political stability relate to each other — remain consistent and linear over time (when in reality we know the relationships will change, but not how). Many people will also be trapped by their circumstances, too poor or vulnerable to move, and the models have a difficult time accounting for them.

All this means that our model is far from definitive. But every one of the scenarios it produces points to a future in which climate change, currently a subtle disrupting influence, becomes a source of major disruption, increasingly driving the displacement of vast populations.

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II. How Climate Moves People

Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera moved to the outskirts of San Salvador six years ago, after her life in the rural western edge of El Salvador — just 90 miles from Jorge A.’s village in Guatemala — collapsed. Now she sells pupusas on a block not far from where teenagers stand guard for the Mara Salvatrucha gang. When we met last summer, she was working six days a week, earning $7 a day, or less than $200 a month. She relied on the kindness of her boss, who gave her some free meals at work. But everything else for her and her infant son she had to provide herself. Cortez commuted before dawn from San Marcos, where she lived with her sister in a cheap room off a pedestrian alleyway. But her apartment still cost $65 each month. And she sent $75 home to her parents each month — enough for beans and cheese to feed the two daughters she left with them. “We’re going backward,” she said.

Her story — that of an uneducated, unskilled woman from farm roots who can’t find high-paying work in the city and falls deeper into poverty — is a familiar one, the classic pattern of in-country migration all around the world. San Salvador, meanwhile, has become notorious as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, a capital in which gangs have long controlled everything from the majestic colonial streets of its downtown squares to the offices of the politicians who reside in them. It is against this backdrop of war, violence, hurricanes and poverty that 1 in 6 of El Salvador’s citizens have fled for the United States over the course of the last few decades, with some 90,000 Salvadorans apprehended at the U.S. border in 2019 alone.

Cortez was born about a mile from the Guatemalan border, in El Paste, a small town nestled on the side of a volcano. Her family were jornaleros — day laborers who farmed on the big maize and bean plantations in the area — and they rented a two-room mud-walled hut with a dirt floor, raising nine children there. Around 2012, a coffee blight worsened by climate change virtually wiped out El Salvador’s crop, slashing harvests by 70%. Then drought and unpredictable storms led to what a U.N.-affiliated food-security organization describes as “a progressive deterioration” of Salvadorans’ livelihoods.

That’s when Cortez decided to leave. She married and found work as a brick maker at a factory in the nearby city of Ahuachapán. But the gangs found easy prey in vulnerable farmers and spread into the Salvadoran countryside and the outlying cities, where they made a living by extorting local shopkeepers. Here we can see how climate change can act as what Defense Department officials sometimes refer to as a “threat multiplier.” For Cortez, the threat could not have been more dire. After two years in Ahuachapán, a gang-connected hit man knocked on Cortez’s door and took her husband, whose ex-girlfriend was a gang member, executing him in broad daylight a block away.

In other times, Cortez might have gone back home. But there was no work in El Paste, and no water. So she sent her children there and went to San Salvador instead.

For all the ways in which human migration is hard to predict, one trend is clear: Around the world, as people run short of food and abandon farms, they gravitate toward cities, which quickly grow overcrowded. It’s in these cities, where waves of new people stretch infrastructure, resources and services to their limits, that migration researchers warn that the most severe strains on society will unfold. Food has to be imported — stretching reliance on already-struggling farms and increasing its cost. People will congregate in slums, with little water or electricity, where they are more vulnerable to flooding or other disasters. The slums fuel extremism and chaos.

It is a shift that is already well underway, which is why the World Bank has raised concerns about the mind-boggling influx of people into East African cities like Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, where the population has doubled since 2000 and is expected to nearly double again by 2035. In Mexico, the World Bank estimates, as many as 1.7 million people may migrate away from the hottest and driest regions, many of them winding up in Mexico City.

But like so much of the rest of the climate story, the urbanization trend is also just the beginning. Right now a little more than half of the planet’s population lives in urban areas, but by the middle of the century, the World Bank estimates, 67% will. In just a decade, 4 out of every 10 urban residents — 2 billion people around the world — will live in slums. The International Committee of the Red Cross warns that 96% of future urban growth will happen in some of the world’s most fragile cities, which already face a heightened risk of conflict and have governments that are least capable of dealing with it. Some cities will be unable to sustain the influx. In the case of Addis Ababa, the World Bank suggests that in the second half of the century, many of the people who fled there will be forced to move again, leaving that city as local agriculture around it dries up.

Our modeling effort is premised on the notion that in these cities as they exist now, we can see the seeds of their future growth. Relationships between quality-of-life factors like household income in specific neighborhoods, education levels, employment rates and so forth — and how each of those changed in response to climate — would reveal patterns that could be projected into the future. As moisture raises the grain in a slab of wood, the information just needed to be elicited.

Under every scientific forecast for global climate change, El Salvador gets hotter and drier, and our model was in accord with what other researchers said was likely: San Salvador will continue to grow as a result, putting still more people in its dense outer rings. What happens in its farm country, though, is more dependent on which climate and development policies governments to the north choose to deploy in dealing with the warming planet. High emissions, with few global policy changes and relatively open borders, will drive rural El Salvador — just like rural Guatemala — to empty out, even as its cities grow.

Should the United States and other wealthy countries change the trajectory of global policy, though — by, say, investing in climate mitigation efforts at home but also hardening their borders — they would trigger a complex cascade of repercussions farther south, according to the model. Central American and Mexican cities continue to grow, albeit less quickly, but their overall wealth and development slows drastically, most likely concentrating poverty further. Far more people also remain in the countryside for lack of opportunity, becoming trapped and more desperate than ever.

People move to cities because they can seem like a refuge, offering the facade of order — tall buildings and government presence — and the mirage of wealth. I met several men who left their farm fields seeking extremely dangerous work as security guards in San Salvador and Guatemala City. I met a 10-year-old boy washing car windows at a stoplight, convinced that the coins in his jar would help buy back his parents’ farmland. Cities offer choices and a sense that you can control your destiny.

These same cities, though, can just as easily become traps, as the challenges that go along with rapid urbanization quickly pile up. Since 2000, San Salvador’s population has ballooned by more than a third as it has absorbed migrants from the rural areas, even as tens of thousands of people continue to leave the country and migrate north. By midcentury, the U.N. estimates that El Salvador — which has 6.4 million people and is the most densely populated country in Central America — will be 86% urban.

Our models show that much of the growth will be concentrated in the city’s slumlike suburbs, places like San Marcos, where people live in thousands of ramshackle structures, many without electricity or fresh water. In these places, even before the pandemic and its fallout, good jobs were difficult to find, poverty was deepening and crime was increasing. Domestic abuse has also been rising, and declining sanitary conditions threaten more disease. As society weakens, the gangs — whose members outnumber the police in parts of El Salvador by an estimated three to one — extort and recruit. They have made San Salvador’s murder rate one of the highest in the world.

Cortez hoped to escape the violence, but she couldn’t. The gangs run through her apartment block, stealing televisions and collecting protection payments. She had recently witnessed a murder inside a medical clinic where she was delivering food. The lack of security, the lack of affordable housing, the lack of child care, the lack of sustenance — all influence the evolution of complex urban systems under migratory pressure, and our model considers such stresses by incorporating data on crime, governance and health care. They are signposts for what is to come.

A week before our meeting last year, Cortez had resolved to make the trip to the United States at almost any cost. For months she had “felt like going far away,” but moving home was out of the question. “The climate has changed, and it has provoked us,” she said, adding that it had scarcely rained in three years. “My dad, last year, he just gave up.”

Cortez recounted what she did next. As her boss dropped potato pupusas into the smoking fryer, Cortez turned to her and made an unimaginable request: Would she take Cortez’s baby? It was the only way to save the child, Cortez said. She promised to send money from the United States, but the older woman said no — she couldn’t imagine being able to care for the infant.

Today San Salvador is shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, and Cortez is cooped up inside her apartment in San Marcos. She hasn’t worked in three months and is unable to see her daughters in El Paste. She was allowed a forbearance on rent during the country’s official lockdown, but that has come to an end. She remains convinced that the United States is her only salvation — border walls be damned. She’ll leave, she said, “the first chance I get.”

Most would-be migrants don’t want to move away from home. Instead, they’ll make incremental adjustments to minimize change, first moving to a larger town or a city. It’s only when those places fail them that they tend to cross borders, taking on ever riskier journeys, in what researchers call “stepwise migration.” Leaving a village for the city is hard enough, but crossing into a foreign land — vulnerable to both its politics and its own social turmoil — is an entirely different trial.

Seven miles from the Suchiate River, which marks Guatemala’s border with Mexico, sits Siglo XXI, one of Mexico’s largest immigration detention centers, a squat concrete compound with 30-foot walls, barred windows and a punishment cell. In early 2019, the 960-bed facility was largely empty, as Mexico welcomed passing migrants instead of detaining them. But by March, as the United States increased pressure to stop Central Americans from reaching its borders, Mexico had begun to detain migrants who crossed into its territory, packing almost 2,000 people inside this center near the city of Tapachula. Detainees slept on mattresses thrown down in the white-tiled hallways, waited in lines to use toilets overflowing with feces and crammed shoulder to shoulder for hours to get a meal of canned meat spooned onto a metal tray.

On April 25, imprisoned migrants stormed the stairway leading to a fortified security platform in the center’s main hall, overpowering the guards and then unlocking the main gates. More than 1,000 Guatemalans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Haitians and others streamed into the Tapachula night.

I arrived in Tapachula five weeks after the breakout to find a city cracking in the crucible of migration. Just months earlier, passing migrants on Mexico’s southern border were offered rides and tortas and medicine from a sympathetic Mexican public. Now migrant families were being hunted down in the countryside by armed national-guard units, as if they were enemy soldiers.

Mexico has not always welcomed migrants, but President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was trying to make his country a model for increasingly open borders. This idealistic effort was also pragmatic: It was meant to show the world an alternative to the belligerent wall-building xenophobia he saw gathering momentum in the United States. More open borders, combined with strategic foreign aid and help with human rights to keep Central American migrants from leaving their homes in the first place, would lead to a better outcome for all nations. “I want to tell them they can count on us,” López Obrador had declared, promising the migrants work permits and temporary jobs.

The architects of Mexico’s policies assumed that its citizens had the patience and the capacity to absorb — economically, environmentally and socially — such an influx of people. But they failed to anticipate how President Donald Trump would hold their economy hostage to press his own anti-immigrant crackdown, and they were caught off-guard by how the burdens brought by the immigration traffic weighed on Mexico’s own people.

In the six months after López Obrador took office in December 2018, some 420,000 people entered Mexico without documentation, according to Mexico’s National Migration Institute. Many floated across the Suchiate on boards tied atop large inner tubes, paying guides a couple of dollars for passage. In Ciudad Hidalgo, a border town outside Tapachula, migrants camped in the square and fought in the streets. In a late-night interview in his cinder-block office, under the glare of fluorescent lights, the town’s director of public security, Luis Martínez López, rattled off statistics about their impact: Armed robberies jumped 45%; murders increased 15%.

Whether the crimes were truly attributable to the migrants was a matter of significant debate, but the perception that they were fueled a rising impatience. That March, Martínez told me, a confrontation between a crowd of about 400 migrants and the local police turned rowdy, and the migrants tied up five officers in the center of town. No one was hurt, but the incident stoked locals’ concern that things were getting out of control. “We used to open doors for them like brothers and feed them,” said Martínez, who has since left his government job. “I was disappointed and angry.”

In Tapachula, a much larger city, tourism and commerce began to suffer. Whole families of migrants huddled in downtown doorways overnight, crowding sidewalks and sleeping on thin, oil-stained sheets of cardboard. Hotels — normally almost sold out in December — were less than 65% full as visitors stayed away, fearful of crime. Clinics ran short of medication. The impact came at a vulnerable moment: While many northern Mexican states enjoyed economic growth of 3% to 11% in 2018, Chiapas — its southernmost state — had a 3% drop in its gross domestic product. “They are overwhelmed,” said the Rev. César Cañaveral Pérez, who earned a Ph.D. in the theology of human mobility in Rome and now runs Tapachula’s largest Catholic migrant shelter.

Models can’t say much about the cultural strain that might result from a climate influx; there is no data on anger or prejudice. What they do say is that over the next two decades, if climate emissions continue as they are, the population in southern Mexico will grow sharply.

At the same time, Mexico has its own serious climate concerns and will most likely see its own climate exodus. One in 6 Mexicans now rely on farming for their livelihood, and close to half the population lives in poverty. Studies estimate that with climate change, water availability per capita could decrease by as much as 88% in places, and crop yields in coastal regions may drop by a third. If that change does indeed push out a wave of Mexican migrants, many of them will most likely come from Chiapas.

Yet a net increase in population at the same time — which is what our models assume — suggests that even as 1 million or so climate migrants make it to the U.S. border, many more Central Americans will become trapped in protracted transit, unable to move forward or backward in their journey, remaining in southern Mexico and making its current stresses far worse.

Already, by late last year, the Mexican government’s ill-planned policies had begun to unravel into something more insidious: rising resentment and hate. Now that the coronavirus pandemic has effectively sealed borders, those sentiments risk bubbling over. Migrants, with nowhere to go and no shelters able to take them in, roam the streets, unable to socially distance and lacking even basic sanitation.

It has angered many Mexican citizens, who have begun to describe the migrants as economic parasites and question foreign aid aimed at helping people cope with the drought in places where Jorge A. and Cortez come from.

“How dare AMLO give $30 million to El Salvador when we have no services here?” asked Javier Ovilla Estrada, a community-group leader in the southern border town Ciudad Hidalgo, referring to López Obrador’s participation in a multibillion-dollar development plan with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Ovilla has become a strident defender of a new Mexico-first movement, organizing thousands to march against immigrants. Months before the coronavirus spread, we met in the sterile dining room of a Chinese restaurant that he frequents in Ciudad Hidalgo, and he echoed the same anti-immigrant sentiments rising in the U.S. and Europe.

The migrants “don’t love this country,” he said. He points to anti-immigrant Facebook groups spreading rumors that migrants stole ballots and rigged the Mexican presidential election, that they murder with impunity and run brothels. He’s not the first to tell me that the migrants traffic in disease — that Suchiate will soon be overwhelmed by Ebola. “They should close the borders once and for all,” he said. If they don’t, he warns, the country will sink further into lawlessness and conflict. “We’re going to go out into the streets to defend our homes and our families.”

One afternoon last summer, I sat on a black pleather couch in a borrowed airport-security office at the Tapachula airfield to talk with Francisco Garduño Yáñez, Mexico’s new commissioner for immigration. Garduño had abruptly succeeded a man named Tonatiuh Guillén López, a strong proponent of more open borders, whom I’d been trying to reach for weeks to ask how Mexico had strayed so far from the mission he laid out for it.

But in between, Trump had, as another senior government official told me, “held a gun to Mexico’s head,” demanding a crackdown at the Guatemalan border under threat of a 25% tariff on trade. Such a tax could break the back of Mexico’s economy overnight, and so López Obrador’s government immediately agreed to dispatch a new militarized force to the border. Guillén resigned as a result, four days before I hoped to meet him.

Garduño, a cheerful man with short graying hair, a broad smile and a ceaseless handshake, had been on the job for less than 36 hours. He had flown to Tapachula because another riot had broken out in one of the city’s smaller fortified detention centers, and a starving Haitian refugee was filmed by news crews there, begging for help for her and her young son. I wanted to know how it had come to this — from signing an international humanitarian migrant bill of rights to a mother lying with her face pressed to the ground in a detention center begging for food, in the space of a few months. He demurred, laying blame at the feet of neoliberal economics, which he said had produced a “poverty factory” with no regional development policies to address it. It was the system — capitalism itself — that had abandoned human beings, not Mexico’s leaders. “We didn’t anticipate that the globalization of the economy, the globalization of the law … would have such a devastating effect,” Garduño told me.

It seemed telling that Garduño’s previous role had been as Mexico’s commissioner of federal prisons. Was this the start of a new, punitive Mexico? I asked him. Absolutely not, he replied. But Mexico was now pursuing a policy of “containment,” he said, rejecting the notion that his country was obligated to “receive a global migration.”

No policy, though, would be able to stop the forces — climate, increasingly, among them — that are pushing migrants from the south to breach Mexico’s borders, legally or illegally. So what happens when still more people — many millions more — float across the Suchiate River and land in Chiapas? Our model suggests that this is what is coming — that between now and 2050, nearly 9 million migrants will head for Mexico’s southern border, more than 300,000 of them because of climate change alone.

Before leaving Mexico last summer, I went to Huixtla, a small town 25 miles west of Tapachula that, because it sat on the Bestia freight rail line used by migrants, had long been a waypoint on Mexico’s superhighway for Central Americans on their way north. Joining several local police officers as they headed out on patrol, I watched as our pickup truck’s red and blue lights reflected in the barred windows of squat cinder-block homes. Two officers stood in back, holding tight to the truck’s roll bars, black combat boots firmly planted in the cargo bed, as the driver, dodging mangy dogs, navigated the town’s slender alleyways.

The operations commander, a soft-spoken bureaucratic type named José Gozalo Rodríguez Méndez, sat in the front seat. I asked him if he thought Mexico could sustain the number of migrants who might soon come. He said Mexico would buckle. There is no money from the federal government, no staffing to address services, no housing, let alone shelter, no more goodwill. “We couldn’t do it.”

Rodríguez had already been tested. When the first caravan of thousands of migrants reached Huixtla in late 2018, throngs of tired, destitute people — many of them carrying children in their emaciated arms — packed the central square and spilled down the city’s side streets. Rodríguez and his wife went through their cupboards, gathering corn, fried beans and tortillas, and collected clothing outgrown by their children and hauled all of it to the town center, where church and civic groups had set up tents and bathrooms.

But as the caravans continued, he said, his goodwill began to disintegrate. “It’s like inviting somebody to your place for dinner,” he said. “You’ll invite them once, even twice. But will you invite them six times?” When the fourth caravan of migrants approached the city last March, Rodríguez told me, he stayed home.

In the center of town, the truck lurched to a stop amid a busy market, where stalls sell vegetables and toys under blue light filtered through plastic tarps overhead. A short way away, five men sheltered from the searing heat under the shade of a metal awning on the platform of a crumbling railway station, never repaired after Hurricane Stan 14 years earlier. Rodríguez peppered the group — two from Honduras, three from Guatemala — with questions. Together they said they had suffered the totality of misfortune that Central America offers: muggings, gang extortion and environmental disaster. Either they couldn’t grow food or the drought made it too expensive to buy.

“We can’t stand the hunger,” said one Honduran farmer, Jorge Reyes, his gaunt face dripping with sweat. At his feet was a gift from a shopkeeper: a plastic bag filled with a cut of raw meat, pooled in its own blood, flies circling around it in the heat. Reyes had nowhere to cook it. “If we are going to die anyway,” he said, “we might as well die trying to get to the United States.”

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III. The Choice

Reyes had made his decision. Like Jorge A., Cortez and millions of others, he was going to the U.S. The next choice — how to respond and prepare for the migrants — ultimately falls to America’s elected leaders.

Over the course of 2019, El Paso, Texas, had endured a crush of people at its border crossings, peaking at more than 4,000 migrants in a single day, as the same caravans of Central Americans that had worn out their welcome in Tapachula made their way here. It put El Paso in a delicate spot, caught between the forces of politically charged anti-immigrant federal policy and its own deep roots as a diverse, largely Hispanic city whose identity was virtually inextricable from its close ties to Mexico. This surge, though, stretched the city’s capacity. When the migrants arrived, city officials argued over who should pay the tab for the emergency services, aid and housing, and in the end crossed their fingers and hoped the city’s active private charities would figure it out. Church groups rented thousands of hotel rooms across the city, delivered food, offered counseling and so on.

Conjoined to the Mexican city of Juárez, the El Paso area is the second-largest binational metroplex in the Western Hemisphere. It sits smack in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, a built-up oasis amid a barren and bleached-bright rocky landscape. Much of its daily workforce commutes across the border, and Spanish is as common as English.

Downtown, new buildings are rising in a weary business district where boot shops and pawnshops compete amid boarded-up and barred storefronts. The only barriers between the American streets — home to more than 800,000 people — and their Juárez counterparts are the concrete viaduct of a mostly dry Rio Grande and a rusted steel border fence.

To some migrants, this place is Eden. But El Paso is also a place with oppressive heat and very little water, another front line in the climate crisis. Temperatures already top 90 degrees here for three months of the year, and by the end of the century it will be that hot one of every two days. The heat, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, will drive deaths that soon outpace those from car crashes or opioid overdoses. Cooling costs — already a third of some residents’ budgets — will get pricier, and warming will drive down economic output by 8%, perhaps making El Paso just as unlivable as the places farther south.

In 2014, El Paso created a new city government position — chief resilience officer — aimed, in part, at folding climate concerns into its urban planning. Soon enough, the climate crisis in Guatemala — not just the one in El Paso — became one of the city’s top concerns. “I apologize if I’m off topic,” the resilience chief, Nicole Ferrini, told municipal leaders and other attendees at a water conference in Phoenix in 2019 as she raised the question of “massive amounts of climate refugees, and are we prepared as a community, as a society, to deal with that?”

Ferrini, an El Paso native, did her academic training as an architect. She worries that El Paso will struggle to adapt if its leadership, and the nation’s, continue to react to daily or yearly spikes rather than view the problem as a systematic one, destined to become steadily worse as the planet warms. She sees her own city as an object lesson in what U.N. officials and climate-migration scientists have been warning of: Without a decent plan for housing, feeding and employing a growing number of climate refugees, cities on the receiving end of migration can never confidently pilot their own economic future.

For the moment, the coronavirus pandemic has largely choked off legal crossings into El Paso, but that crisis will eventually fade. And when it does, El Paso will face the same enduring choice that all wealthier societies everywhere will eventually face: determining whether it is a society of walls or — in the vernacular of aid organizations working to fortify infrastructure and resilience to stem migration — one that builds wells.

Around the world, nations are choosing walls. Even before the pandemic, Hungary fenced off its boundary with Serbia, part of more than 1,000 kilometers of border walls erected around the European Union states since 1990. India has built a fence along most of its 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh, whose people are among the most vulnerable in the world to sea-level rise.

The United States, of course, has its own wall-building agenda — literal ones, and the figurative ones that can have a greater effect. On a walk last August from one of El Paso’s migrant shelters, an inconspicuous brick home called Casa Vides, the Rev. Peter Hinde told me that El Paso’s security-oriented economy had created a cultural barrier that didn’t exist when he moved here 25 years earlier. Hinde, who is 97, helps run the Carmelite order in Juárez but was traveling to volunteer at Casa Vides on a near-daily basis. A former Army Air Forces captain and fighter pilot who grew up in Chicago, Hinde said the United States is turning its own fears into reality when it comes to immigration, something he witnesses in a growing distrust of everyone who crosses the border.

That fear creates other walls. The United States refused to join 164 other countries in signing a global migration treaty in 2018, the first such agreement to recognize climate as a cause of future displacement. At the same time, the U.S. is cutting off foreign aid — money for everything from water infrastructure to greenhouse agriculture — that has been proved to help starving families like Jorge A.’s in Guatemala produce food, and ultimately stay in their homes. Even those migrants who legally make their way into El Paso have been turned back, relegated to cramped and dangerous shelters in Juárez to wait for the hearings they are owed under law.

There is no more natural and fundamental adaptation to a changing climate than to migrate. It is the obvious progression the earliest Homo sapiens pursued out of Africa, and the same one the Mayans tried 1,200 years ago. As Lorenzo Guadagno at the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration told me recently, “Mobility is resilience.” Every policy choice that allows people the flexibility to decide for themselves where they live helps make them safer.

But it isn’t always so simple, and relocating across borders doesn’t have to be inevitable. I thought about Jorge A. from Guatemala. He made it to the United States last spring, climbing the steel border barrier and dropping his 7-year-old son 20 feet down the other side into the California desert. (We are abbreviating his last name in this article because of his undocumented status.) Now they live in Houston, where until the pandemic, Jorge found steady work in construction, earning enough to pay his debts and send some money home. But the separation from his wife and family has proved intolerable; home or away, he can’t win, and as of early July, he was wondering if he should go back to Guatemala.

And therein lies the basis for what may be the worst-case scenario: one in which America and the rest of the developed world refuse to welcome migrants but also fail to help them at home. As our model demonstrated, closing borders while stinting on development creates a somewhat counterintuitive population surge even as temperatures rise, trapping more and more people in places that are increasingly unsuited to human life.

In that scenario, the global trend toward building walls could have a profound and lethal effect. Researchers suggest that the annual death toll, globally, from heat alone will eventually rise by 1.5 million. But in this scenario, untold more will also die from starvation, or in the conflicts that arise over tensions that food and water insecurity will bring.

If this happens, the United States and Europe risk walling themselves in, as much as walling others out. And so the question then is: What are policymakers and planners prepared to do about that? America’s demographic decline suggests that more immigrants would play a productive role here, but the nation would have to be willing to invest in preparing for that influx of people so that the population growth alone doesn’t overwhelm the places they move to, deepening divisions and exacerbating inequalities. At the same time, the United States and other wealthy countries can help vulnerable people where they live, by funding development that modernizes agriculture and water infrastructure. A U.N. World Food Program effort to help farmers build irrigated greenhouses in El Salvador, for instance, has drastically reduced crop losses and improved farmers’ incomes. It can’t reverse climate change, but it can buy time.

Thus far, the United States has done very little at all. Even as the scientific consensus around climate change and climate migration builds, in some circles the topic has become taboo. This spring, after Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the explosive study estimating that, barring migration, one-third of the planet’s population may eventually live outside the traditional ecological niche for civilization, Marten Scheffer, one of the study’s authors, told me that he was asked to tone down some of his conclusions through the peer-review process and that he felt pushed to “understate” the implications in order to get the research published. The result: Migration is only superficially explored in the paper. (A spokeswoman for the journal declined to comment because the review process is confidential.)

“There’s flat-out resistance,” Scheffer told me, acknowledging what he now sees as inevitable, that migration is going to be a part of the global climate crisis. “We have to face it.”

Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference.

The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”

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Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event on July 21, 2020, in New Castle, Delaware. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

But it might come too late to help some providers in the pandemic.

As Covid-19 runs rampant across California, sickening hundreds of thousands of people, Rosa Carreño’s day care in San Jose has remained open through it all.

“All of us were scared,” Carreño told Vox. It was “a situation that could put my own family at risk.”

But, she said, “we become family with the families that we take care of,” some of which have included essential workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.

“For me, closing was not an option,” Carreño said. “I felt my responsibility was to be there for them.”

But staying open has come with many challenges. Carreño has had to purchase extra cleaning supplies and remove carpets from the day care in order to make the facility safer and comply with new regulations. Even some of the stuffed animals had to go. She had to “figure out a way to continue still having the child care and having fun with the children, but minimizing the risk,” she said.

New supplies and safety procedures cost money, and although Carreño hasn’t seen enrollment drop, other providers around the country have — and many are struggling to afford those extra costs on decreased revenue. A recent survey of California providers by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) found that 77 percent of open child care programs have lost income due to the pandemic, and 80 percent have faced higher costs associated with cleaning requirements. Many providers fear catching Covid-19 at work but can’t afford to close down even for a short period — a survey earlier this year found that 30 percent of centers would have to shut down permanently if forced to close for two weeks or more.

To help child care providers like Carreño stay afloat, many experts have called for a bailout of the child care industry, estimating that providers around the country need about $50 billion to keep paying their expenses amid lower revenues and potential temporary closures. Now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has made such a bailout part of a larger proposal — which also includes provisions to boost workers’ pay and strengthen their power to unionize — to help America’s caregivers.

“If we truly want to reward work in this country, we have to ease the financial burden of care that families are carrying,” Biden said Tuesday during a speech announcing the plan. “And we have to elevate the compensation, benefits, and dignity of caregiving workers and early childhood educators.”

Reforms like the ones Biden proposed are essential, workers and their advocates say. And with the pandemic focusing more attention on the importance of child care than ever before, the time is ripe.

However, actually passing such broad-based reform will require voters and policymakers to understand and accept the enormity of the task at hand. “Public awareness has spiked,” CSCCE director Lea Austin told Vox. “The challenge will be translating that awareness into an understanding of what is needed and the level of resources that are really necessary.”

America’s child care system was broken long before Covid-19

Child care in America “is a system that has not worked very well for anybody,” even before Covid-19, Austin said. “It hasn’t worked particularly well for children, for families, or for the people who are providing services and working in these programs.”

For many families, child care is unaffordable, costing more than $1,000 a month in many states. It’s also extremely expensive to provide: Quality care requires low caregiver-to-child ratios and strict safety protocols, even in normal times — not to mention overhead costs like rent and food for children. Even with fees that are punishingly high for many parents, many programs struggle, Austin said.

They have little cash on hand for emergencies, and they often pay staff poverty-level wages and offer no benefits. Child care workers nationwide make an average hourly wage of just $10.82, and some earn far less. More than half rely on some form of public assistance to get by, and they’re more likely than other workers to lack health insurance and paid sick leave.

Low pay for workers also affects the quality of care that kids receive. Children do best with a consistent caregiver, but low pay leads to high turnover, Rhian Allvin, CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), told Vox. Kids also benefit from having caregivers who are trained in child development and early education, but “if you make $10.40 an hour without a BA and then you make $11.40 with a BA, there’s no incentive to be grounded in the science of early learning,” Allvin said.

All of these problems existed before the coronavirus hit — and now, child care programs and their workers are squeezed even further. Many parents have pulled their children out, leading to a drop in revenue. In some cases, new physical distancing requirements have also limited the number of kids that programs can take. “We had 150+ students,” one provider said in response to the California survey. “Now the most we can have is 48.”

Meanwhile, everything is more expensive, from cleaning supplies to new requirements such as making sure children play and nap at an appropriate distance from each other. Forty-nine percent of providers who operate family child care centers have been unable to pay themselves at least part of the time, and 34 percent have taken on credit card debt to stay afloat, the CSCCE survey found. And even getting the right cleaning products and protective equipment like masks has been a challenge, with 38 percent of providers saying they were unable to obtain the supplies they needed in the previous month.

Providers in California, where Covid-19 cases continue to rise, are scared of getting the virus at work, with 38 percent saying they are concerned for themselves and 38 percent reporting concern for their family members. But many providers can’t afford to close, even if they’re scared — among programs that remain open, 80 percent said they were still operating because they lack the financial resources to survive a closure.

The combination of high costs and low enrollment, however, could force many programs to close permanently in the coming months. In a nationwide survey conducted by the NAEYC in June, an overall two out of five respondents — and half of all minority-owned child care providers — said they are certain they’ll have to close if they don’t get some kind of government help. Only 18 percent of programs said they expected to last longer than a year without public support.

Biden has a plan to help child care workers — now and in the future

For this reason, many child care advocates have called for a bailout of the industry. Members of Congress, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have proposed including such a bailout in larger Covid-19 relief packages — but so far, nothing has passed.

Now Biden is making relief for child care centers part of his larger caregiving plan, which he unveiled on Tuesday in New Castle, Delaware. “As a first step, Biden will immediately provide states, tribal, and local governments with the fiscal relief they need to keep workers employed and keep vital public services running, including direct care and child care services,” states the campaign document outlining the plan. (The campaign did not provide specifics on the among of relief the candidate would make available if elected.)

But the former vice president also promises to go beyond the immediate crisis and invest in child care for the future. His plan would provide free preschool to all 3- and 4-year-olds in the country. And for kids under the age of 3, the plan would create a system of tax credits and subsidies so that families earning less than 1.5 times the median income in their state would pay no more than 7 percent of their income for child care, with “the most-hard pressed working families” paying nothing.

The plan also includes tax credits to encourage employers to construct onsite child care facilities, something companies did during World War II that’s become harder to imagine today, as families (most often mothers) are expected to handle child care on their own.

The proposal would also boost worker pay to the level of elementary school teachers, as well as provide workers with health insurance, paid sick leave, and affordable care for their own children. It also outlines steps to protect workers’ rights to unionize for better pay and working conditions, something they’ve won in some states (including California) but not all.

The proposal “is about easing the squeeze on working families who are raising their kids and caring for aging loved ones at the same time,” Biden said Tuesday. “And it’s about creating jobs with better pay and career pathways for caregivers, and showing them the dignity and respect that they deserve.”

Child care workers and advocates have praised the tenets of Biden’s plan. The proposal “would be a great step forward in a universal system of early care and education in this country,” CSCCE’s Austin said. “What’s really important about what Biden has proposed is addressing the conditions of [the] workforce and calling attention to how low the wages are, and how that is really linked to both educator well-being and the well-being of children.”

The reforms Biden has proposed “would be excellent news for everyone” in the child care workforce, Carreño said. “It’s been long overdue to see our profession as a first priority.”

Supporting child care workers over the long term will require the political will to listen to their needs

Still, some say a potential Biden administration won’t come soon enough for the aid the industry needs. “It’ll be too late for a bailout in January,” NAEYC’s Allvin said. “We need that money now.”

Even if Biden wins the election, real, widespread change will require a sustained commitment from policymakers and the public to the reforms that workers — and kids — need. During the pandemic, “People have realized how critical child care is,” Austin said. But as parents across the country struggle with months of caring for kids while also trying to do their jobs — and as many stare down confirmed or anticipated school closures in the fall — there’s been a focus on child care as a solution without regard to the safety or interests of child care workers.

“Somehow the burden has fallen on child care to be the answer for everybody else to be able to go to work, rather than really examining what we should be doing right now to make sure that workers across occupations can sustain themselves,” Austin said. “It’s this invisibility of the people who are actually doing child care that has allowed the workers and their own well-being to be missing from this conversation.”

Biden’s plan is a step in the right direction for workers, many say. And around the country, workers themselves are making their own voices heard, joining together to form unions and advocate for their rights.

More than 40,000 child care providers in California were granted collective bargaining rights last year, and this week, workers around the state are voting on whether to officially join the Child Care Providers United union. If the vote succeeds (as is expected), “We will be able to have a voice,” Carreño said. “We will be able to sit down at the bargaining table” and draft a contract with the state that includes better pay and benefits.

“Our country finally has come to realize that we are essential,” Carreño said, “and our country really needs to invest in the caregiving workforce and give us the legal protections that we need.”

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Catrina Rugar, 34, a traveling nurse from Florida, treats Covid-19 patients at Doctors Hospital at Renaissance in Edinburg, Texas. The coronavirus is spreading rapidly through the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. | Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

With daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths still on the rise, the coronavirus pandemic is not slowing down in the US.

More Americans are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 than at almost any other point in the pandemic, a grim indicator that the coronavirus pandemic is not slowing down in the US.

On July 23, 59,846 people across the United States were in the hospital after testing positive for the novel coronavirus, according to data reported by the Covid Tracking Project, just below the peak of 59,940 reached on April 15, when the New York City area was the epicenter of the US outbreak. (As the Covid Tracking Project notes, the national and state hospital data are erratic and incomplete at the moment, and reported totals may continue to shift.)

Christina Animashaun/Vox

What’s clear is that Covid-19 has migrated across the country to many more regions in the three months since. In the spring, hospitalizations were overwhelmingly concentrated in the Northeast, but now more than half of hospitalized Covid-19 patients are in the South. The West has also seen the number of hospitalized Covid-19 patients double since April, while the Northeast now accounts for fewer than 5,000 of the nearly 60,000 current hospitalizations.

The current total is likely an undercount. Two states, Kansas and Hawaii, do not report current hospitalization data, and some states may temporarily not be reporting full hospitalization numbers because of a recent change in the reporting system ordered by the Trump administration.

“The hospitalization number is the best indicator of where we are,” Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told Vox. “We’re going to go to new heights in the pandemic that we haven’t seen before. Not that what we saw before wasn’t horrifying enough.”

The growth has been driven by accelerating spread in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, and Texas in particular. On April 15, when New York City hospitals were nearly being overrun with Covid-19 patients, Texas had about 1,500 patients hospitalized with the disease. Today, more than 10,000 Texans are hospitalized with Covid-19.

Some areas are reaching a woeful tipping point of hospitals stretched to maximum capacity, scrambling to find beds in other facilities for Covid-19 patients. Miami-Dade County reported this week that the number of patients in need of ICU care had exceeded the number of available ICU beds. More than 50 hospitals across the state say they have no ICU beds available.

Texas Medical Center in Houston has already filled up its usual non-pandemic ICU unit and been forced to rely on its surge capacity plans to handle the patient load. Earlier this month, 10 out of the 12 hospitals in the Rio Grande Valley reported that they were completely full and needed to start transferring patients to hospitals elsewhere in the state.

This was, unfortunately, to be expected. Nearly all of the states currently experiencing an increase in new cases and hospitalizations started relaxing their social distancing restrictions in May and June before meeting the government’s reopening guidelines of having sufficiently reduced the virus’s spread and adequately ramped up their testing and tracing capabilities. New cases began rising and hospitalizations followed a few weeks after that. Now deaths are ticking up again, reversing a steady decline that had begun in early May.

Four million Americans have had confirmed cases of Covid-19. More than 143,000 of them have died. With hospitalizations surging and several states still reporting thousands of new cases a day, experts say we are in for a difficult August and fall.

“We’ve still got 91 to 92 percent of people who are still vulnerable, who have not been infected,” said Topol. “And so that just shows how many more people can be hurt. Obviously many won’t get so sick, but many will.”

The new hospitalizations, and the untenable pressure they’re putting on the health care system, are also a reminder of how critical it is for states to implement and enforce measures like mandatory face masks, and for the federal government to solve testing and contact tracing problems. “It should be an all-points bulletin to really bear down on this because otherwise there’s no limit on where this might go,” said Topol.

Hospitals are running out of staff, supplies, and beds for Covid-19 patients

Hospitals in hot spots across the country are expanding and even maxing out their staff, equipment, and beds, with doctors warning that the worst-case scenario of hospital resources being overwhelmed is on the horizon if their states don’t get better control of the coronavirus.

“With Covid, a lot of times people who aren’t sick enough yet get pushed to the back, and then they can become really, really sick unfortunately because we were focusing our efforts on the people who are on the brink of death,” an emergency room doctor at the Banner Health system in the Phoenix metro area, who asked to go unnamed fearing retaliation from his employer, told Vox recently.

Other doctors in Arizona, where 85 percent of hospital beds statewide were in use as of Thursday, have said the scarcity of resources means they’ll soon be rationing medical care, as doctors in Italy were forced to do.

“The fear is we are going to have to start sharing ventilators, or we’re gonna have to start saying, ‘You get a vent, you don’t.’ I’d be really surprised if in a couple weeks we didn’t have to do that,” says Murtaza Akhter, an emergency medicine physician at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix.

The rampant transmission of the virus in Arizona and resulting pressure on hospitals are particularly infuriating to some emergency room and ICU staff, who say they’re having to make decisions on the fly that they’re uncomfortable making.

“Sending people with Covid home with oxygen tanks because we don’t have the resources for them? This is something I’ve never done in my life before,” says Akhter. “This is crazy. And this is gonna be even worse in a couple of weeks. So far we’re trying to hold steady, but how long will that last?”

The psychological toll, he says, is serious too.

“To come off a shift and be like, ‘I’m losing hope’ — that’s a dangerous place to be in,” he says. “I don’t want to feel that way. And that’s because despite the horrible numbers, despite the fact I’m still getting the Covid cases [in the ER], despite what we’ve been saying to the media from the front line, I drive home from work and I literally see lots of people congregating together closely and in the grocery store not wearing masks.”

Texas hospitals say they are in better shape now with personal protective equipment than they were in March and April, but that could change as the crisis gets worse. Roberta Schwartz, executive vice president at Houston Methodist, says her facilities have sometimes had trouble getting gowns and disinfectant wipes. John Henderson, who represents a trade association for rural hospitals in the state, says he recently “got a couple of SOS calls.”

Staffing is a universal problem in hot spots. Houston Methodist has already brought in out-of-state nurses and asked its administrative staff with nursing certifications to start doing medical work again. Nurses are also being asked to work longer and overnight shifts.

Rural hospitals in Texas aren’t running out of beds yet, but they are running into a staffing shortage. These facilities might typically have five patients in a given unit, and the hospitals have staffed them accordingly. But now there might be as many as 20 patients.

“You’re working every nurse as much as you can work them and still not meeting the need,” Henderson says.

It’s not clear where more staff could come from. The state has already sent about 2,300 volunteers to the Rio Grande Valley, one of the hardest-hit areas in the state.

“Other areas are requesting that workforce support,” Henderson says. “But there’s not much more in terms of resources to be sent.”

Another concern is ventilators. Rural hospitals in Texas would ordinarily transfer their patients in serious condition, the kind who might be on a ventilator for days, to a larger hospital in the city. But because urban hospitals are already overrun with Covid-19 patients, there is nowhere for the rural hospitals to send their patients. Instead, they are forced to keep those patients, causing their beds to fill up even more quickly.

And while the current coronavirus patients are younger than those seen in the spring, Henderson says his hospitals don’t have enough of the nasal oxygen hookups that are used to help those patients breathe on their own and prevent them from being put on a ventilator.

“They’ve shown to be effective, but everybody’s trying to get them,” he says.

El Centro Regional Medical Center in Imperial County, one of California’s biggest Covid-19 hot spots right now, has already brushed up against its worst-case scenario. The hospital recently saw its available ventilators dwindle to one.

Adolphe Edward, the hospital’s CEO, convened an impromptu committee to evaluate the patients currently on ventilators so they could prioritize if another patient who needed one came through their door. They checked the patients’ lung capacity and considered whether they could risk taking one or two of them off the ventilator if the need arose.

Luckily, Edward figured out a workaround. He called another nearby hospital and asked if they had any ventilators available. They had two, which they shipped over to El Centro. For now, the machines are still there, though Edward says he and the other hospital have stayed in constant contact in case the ventilators need to be transferred again.

Daily deaths are creeping up again but are still far below the earlier peak

While daily Covid-19 hospitalizations are surging, another key metric, daily deaths, was 1,039 on July 23, still less than half of its May 7 peak of 2,742, according to the Covid Tracking Project. Yet the trend is ominous, since daily deaths were dropping steadily by mid-June and then began rising again in early July.

On Thursday, Florida reported a new record single-day death toll of 173. Texas hit its own respective record on Wednesday, with 193 deaths.

Since many Covid-19 fatalities to date have occurred among people who were hospitalized for weeks before succumbing, experts say they expect deaths will continue to rise in the coming days and weeks. Yet it’s possible, they say, that fewer people who are hospitalized will end up dying in this summer stage of the pandemic as compared to the spring.

“Hospitalizations undoubtedly are going to be associated with more deaths or chronic illnesses, but I’m hoping that the deaths are not as steep as they were back in March and April,” said Topol. “And maybe that’s because they are more young people that are sick and they will pull through. Maybe it’s also because the treatments are getting better, not just the drugs but just the whole approach.”

Overall, he says, “The hope is that the relationship between hospitalizations and fatalities won’t be as tight as it was, but we have to watch this closely because that’s the optimistic view.”

Update, July 24: This article and its headline previously stated that hospitalizations had surpassed a peak reached in April. They have been updated to reflect irregularity in the hospitalization data.

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Washington’s NFL team will be known as the Washington Football Team for the 2020-2021 season. ESPN’s Adam Schefter was first to report the team had decided to put off its renaming until it comes up with a permanent new name. Fans will be able to purchase “Washington Football Team” gear soon, Schefter writes. Effective immediately, […]

Earlier this month, we noted that Charter (Spectrum) had been lobbying the FCC to eliminate conditions affixed to its 2015 merger with Time Warner Cable. As part of those conditions Charter had to not only adhere to basic net neutrality (regardless of the fact that lobbyists had already killed FCC net neutrality rules), but it was also prohibited from imposing arbitrary, bullshit usage caps and overage fees, or engaging in the kind of "interconnection" shenanigans that caused Netflix streams to slow for Verizon customers earlier this decade. It also had to expand broadband coverage, which it failed utterly at.

Most of the conditions are fairly minor, expire in another few years anyway, and by and large protect consumers from the kind of behaviors cable and broadband monopolies are known for. As Charter lobbies the government, it's employing some... strange bedfellows in its quest to kill the conditions. In New York that apparently includes the Niagara Falls Boys and Girls Club, which wrote a letter to the FCC urging the regulator to prematurely axe the conditions:

In its letter, the Boys and Girls club insists that a recent $5,000 donation by Charter to the organization certainly helped it weather the COVID-19 storm, and that "lifting these conditions will level the playing field for Charter while having zero impact on the online video marketplace."

The organization did not respond to a request for comment as to why it's rushing to the defense of literally one of the least liked companies in America. Keep in mind, this is a company that lied to regulators so routinely about whether it had been meeting merger build out conditions, that the company was almost kicked out of New York State, something I've never seen in twenty years of covering telecom.

The organization's claims also aren't true. Usage caps aren't technically necessary, drive up costs for consumers (most notably low income communities), and are routinely abused anti-competitively by giant ISPs. They saddle consumers with additional, confusing costs, something that's not particularly helpful during a pandemic-induced economic crisis. While Charter's merger probably should have been blocked completely, the conditions actively protect the folks the Boys and Girls Club is supposed to be representing, and opposing them undermines the groups constituents.

Of course, corporations funding organizations in exchange for support for terrible policies is nothing new.

A wide variety of groups take telecom cash to repeat whatever they're told, whether it's rural Texas school associations, the U.S. Cattlemen's Association, civil rights advocacy organizations, or even balloonist clubs. Some of these groups are created specifically for this purpose. Other times, these groups are "co-opted" without fully understanding what they're actually supporting in a bid to keep funding flowing. For lobbyists the overall is simple: to create the illusion of broad support for bad ideas the actual public -- minority or otherwise -- actually oppose.

And, to be clear, most objective parties don't support eliminating some fairly modest merger conditions affixed to one of the most despised monopolies in America. Of course as the FCC fielded comments up until July 22, a lot of similar groups were doing the same thing hoping nobody notices:

Most of the time this kind of undocumented quid pro quo (we'll donate to a new event center if you support deregulation or our latest merger) simply involves making a few filings to the FCC that the broader public never sees (and the press never covers because this sort of thing doesn't exactly drive ad eyeballs). But the efforts still routinely undermine the constituents these groups are supposed to be representing, and groups should at least take the time to understand the positions they're taking before wading into the fray.

The Chinese flag flies at the Chinese consulate in Houston on July 22, 2020. | Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images

The Trump administration abruptly told China it had to close its Houston, Texas, consulate by Friday.

The United States has ordered China’s consulate in Houston closed by Friday, an escalatory step that deepens the relationship crisis between the world’s top powers and opens up a new front in their burgeoning cold war.

In an early Wednesday morning statement, the State Department accused China of spying and launching influence operations around America, including targeting US government officials. Therefore, State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said, the US ordered China’s Houston diplomatic office closed “in order to protect American intellectual property and American’s private information.” But Ortagus didn’t specify how, exactly, the move would hinder China’s intelligence gathering in the US.

Unsurprisingly, China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t take kindly to the abrupt demand. It accused the US of opening sensitive diplomatic pouches in October and June, a serious allegation the Trump administration has yet to address. Spokesperson Wang Wenbin called the consulate closure an “unprecedented escalation” and asserted that “China will certainly make legitimate and necessary reactions.”

On Friday, that reaction happened: China told the US it had 72 hours to close its consulate in Chengdu, a prominent outpost in the country’s southwest that was vital to America’s efforts to keep tabs on Tibet and Xinjiang. With the US consulate in Wuhan closed due to the coronavirus — Wuhan is the disease’s origination point — the Trump administration now has fewer diplomats on the ground to monitor China and stop spiraling relations from getting worse.

Shortly after the announcement, a heavy police presence guarded the soon-to-be-shuttered consulate.

That somewhat mirrored how the Chinese reacted to the Houston news. Just hours after the Trump administration notified the Chinese government of its decision, Houston locals spotted fires burning and smoke billowing from the consulate’s courtyard, seemingly from pieces of paper incinerated in trash cans.

It’s common practice, when an embassy or consulate is being abruptly abandoned, for diplomatic staff to quickly destroy any classified or sensitive information that could be left behind — and perhaps seen or collected by the host country or others who enter the facility once the diplomats leave.

Police and firefighters in Houston arrived on the scene but didn’t enter the building, since it’s legally Chinese sovereign territory.

A senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, told me the file-burning further confirmed for the Trump administration that “most of” the Chinese diplomats in Houston are “spies.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the acting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also wrote on Twitter that “#China’s Houston consulate is a massive spy center” and that “forcing it to close is long overdue.”

The administration and its allies have a point: Experts say the consulate was used to spy on the oil industry. “Several incidents involving international energy companies, engineering consultants and sub-contractors working for Vietnam can be traced to its operatives,” Bill Hayton, a China expert at the Chatham House think tank in the UK, tweeted on Wednesday. Houston, after all, is the American epicenter of the oil sector.

That alone may have provided the US all it needed to kick Chinese diplomats out of Texas. The 1961 Vienna Convention, a set of international rules governing diplomatic relations, is clear that foreign officials must “respect the laws and regulations of the receiving State” and have “a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of that State.” Ortagus specifically cited those sections of the Vienna Convention in her Wednesday statement.

Of course, every country — including the US — uses its diplomatic facilities to spy on the host country. That’s nothing new. But, if China was using the Houston consulate solely as a major spy hub — instead of its actual function to approve visas and help expats in Texas and nearby states — one could make a strong case Beijing gave up the right to keep that mission.

But the spying angle may not be the only aspect at play here.

President Donald Trump has a reelection to consider, and showing he’s tough on China — by shuttering a diplomatic post that’s been open since 1979 — is one way to boost his national security bona fides.

“The Houston consulate is the only Chinese consulate in a red state, so that probably made it easier,” said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The others are in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the embassy in Washington, DC.

Further, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to give a speech on Thursday discussing what the administration perceives to have been the shortcomings of US foreign policy toward China in the past. Announcing the Houston move gives him something to boast about in the address.

“We put together a series of remarks aimed at making sure the American people understood the ongoing, serious threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party to our fundamental way of life here in the United States of America,” Pompeo told the Washington Times in a Tuesday interview to preview the speech.

Finally, on Tuesday, Washington accused Beijing of working with two hackers who targeted firms working on coronavirus vaccines and treatments. It’s possible the Houston announcement was meant as a retaliation to that case.

Even considering all that, most experts aren’t completely sure why this decision was made now as opposed to any other time if Chinese spying was of major concern to the administration. “At this point, the reasoning behind the US government’s action is unclear,” Aaron Friedberg, a China expert at Princeton University, told me, which is troubling since “closing a foreign consulate is a serious step.”

The answer may not lie in just one incident, but rather in a compendium of transgressions.

For months now, Washington and Beijing have exchanged insults and taken countering actions which have further plunged ties to their worst point since the 1970s. The US closing China’s consulate — and the expected retaliation — likely forms yet another data point in a larger, ongoing struggle between two competing world powers.

“It’s hard to argue anymore that this is not a new cold war,” said Glaser.

The US-China cold war is heating up

Listen to US-China analysts and the first thing they’ll tell you is that the situation just keeps getting worse.

“The downward spiral is picking up speed,” said Jacob Stokes of the US Institute of Peace. “Bilateral relations are plumbing new depths every day.”

Ryan Hass, the China director on the National Security Council from 2013 to 2017, explained to me just why that is: “A pattern seems to have taken hold, with the Chinese taking actions the US finds objectionable, America responding punitively, and then China retaliating in a reciprocal tit-for-tat fashion. I expect the same pattern to play itself out in the case of the closing of this consulate.”

Just look at a few of the events that have happened throughout the course of the Trump administration.

The president launched a trade war against China, imposing tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods. Beijing responded in kind, placing similar penalties on American-made products. Despite reaching a “phase one” deal earlier this year, the general trade relationship between the two countries hasn’t changed — except that products are becoming more expensive to buy in the US.

In March, the Trump administration said only up to 100 Chinese citizens could work for five Beijing-owned outlets in the US. Weeks later, China expelled American journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal from the country. It also forced other outlets, namely Voice of America and Time magazine, to tell the government how they operate in China.

Last week, the US sanctioned multiple Chinese officials for the regime’s forced internment of over a million Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, a region in Western China. One of the officials targeted was Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party secretary for Xinjiang. Almost immediately afterward, China retaliated by targeting US officials, including Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

And on Tuesday, as mentioned, Washington indicted the two hackers. The Justice Department also alleged they went after clergy and human rights activists in the US, China, and Hong Kong. It’s unclear what China will do in response to the 11-count indictment, but it will surely deny having anything to do with the hackers.

During tense times like these, it’s normally best to use any and all channels of communication to stop matters from getting worse. But forcibly closing the Houston consulate potentially makes that harder.

“This further reduces the few remaining diplomatic channels between the two sides and is a step that will prove difficult to reverse,” said Daniel Russel, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs from 2013 to 2017.

Other experts agree. Not arresting the accused and shutting the entire consulate down instead will cause “a further downturn of the bilateral business and people-to-people relations between the two countries, which have traditionally provided some ballast in the relationship when government-to-government relations were strained,” said USIP’s Stokes. “Overall, this is another step toward ‘decoupling’ the United States and China.”

And if the US and China keep drifting further and further apart, the current “war” may not remain so “cold” much longer.

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2 boats at Niagara Falls show stark difference between social distancing in US, Canada

2 boats at Niagara Falls show stark difference between social distancing in US, Canada

DC residents are now required to wear a mask whenever they’re outside their house, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser announced today. Exceptions include eating and drinking, vigorously exercising away from people, and working alone in an enclosed office. Children under three are exempt. Previously, individuals could go maskless outdoors if they felt they could stay six […]

President Donald Trump talks to reporters while hosting Republican congressional leaders and members of his cabinet in the Oval Office on July 20 in Washington, DC. | Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images

It’s a direct attack on the 14th Amendment.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution provides that “representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.”

This text is unambiguous. With a narrow exception for some Native Americans, all persons within the United States must be counted in the decennial census. And all persons must be counted when representation is allocated to states in the House of Representatives.

Nevertheless, on Tuesday, President Trump released an extraordinary memorandum suggesting that he gets to decide who counts as a “person” — and that undocumented immigrants do not qualify.

The memo concerns who should be counted when representatives are allocated to states following the 2020 census. Trump claims that “for the purpose of the reapportionment of Representatives following the 2020 census, it is the policy of the United States to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status.” Thus, if Trump’s view were to prevail — a view that is at odds with the explicit text of the Constitution — undocumented immigrants would not be counted.

The implications of this unconstitutional policy are significant. An estimated 10.6 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States, but they are not distributed evenly among the states. Nearly 20 percent live in California. If Trump succeeds in effectively voiding a provision of the 14th Amendment, the nation’s largest blue state could potentially lose as many as three House seats.

Trump’s memorandum rests on the thinnest legal justification

Trump cites a handful of sources to justify his attempt to neutralize a constitutional requirement, including a federal statute providing that “the President shall transmit to the Congress a statement showing the whole number of persons in each State” after the census is completed, and a Supreme Court decision indicating that this statute gives the president some discretionary authority over how the census is conducted.

Citing the Supreme Court’s decision in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992), Trump’s memorandum argues that “Congress has provided that it is ‘the President’s personal transmittal of the report to Congress’ that ‘settles the apportionment’ of Representatives among the States, and the President’s discretion to settle the apportionment is more than ‘ceremonial or ministerial’ and is essential ‘to the integrity of the process.’”

Trump is correct that Franklin reads federal law to give the president some authority over how the census is conducted. The president’s “duties” with respect to the census, according to Franklin, “are not merely ceremonial or ministerial.” Instead, the president may exercise “his accustomed supervisory powers over his executive officers” who conduct the census.

But the fact that Trump has some discretionary authority over census officials does not mean that he is free to violate the Constitution. Even if federal law did give Trump the power to ignore the 14th Amendment, that law would be unconstitutional.

Nevertheless, without citing any legal authority whatsoever, Trump’s memorandum claims that he should be allowed to determine what the 14th Amendment means.

“Although the Constitution requires the ‘persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed,’ to be enumerated in the census,” Trump claims, “that requirement has never been understood to include in the apportionment base every individual physically present within a State’s boundaries at the time of the census.”

As Trump correctly notes, there are many people who may be present in the United States — tourists visiting from other nations, foreign diplomats, businesspeople, for example — who are not counted in the decennial census. “The term “persons in each State” has been interpreted to mean that only the ‘inhabitants’ of each State should be included,” Trump argues, and “determining which persons should be considered ‘inhabitants’ for the purpose of apportionment requires the exercise of judgment.”

But Trump claims that he is the one who gets to make this “exercise of judgment,” and that his judgment is effectively unlimited. Again, Trump cites no legal authority for the proposition that he can make this judgment, or for the proposition that an undocumented person who resides permanently within a state is not an “inhabitant” of that state.

As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel with the American Immigration Council, told me, “the average undocumented immigrant has been present in the United States for more than 15 years, according to Pew Research.” It is, to say the least, an unusual reading of the word “inhabitant” to suggest that someone who has resided so long in one place is akin to a tourist.

The Constitution itself does not consider immigration status when determining who counts as a “person” for purposes of the 14th Amendment. According to Reichlin-Melnick, “the Supreme Court has made it clear that the term ‘persons’ in the 14th Amendment is not limited by citizenship status” for more than a century.

The idea of an unlawfully present immigrant, moreover, simply did not exist when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. The first US law that sought to exclude some noncitizens from the United States was the Page Act of 1875, a racist law that sought to exclude Chinese women.

The concept of an undocumented immigrant arose out of similar efforts to exclude Chinese nationals. According to Margaret Hu, an immigration law professor at Washington and Lee Law School, America created its first “document-based immigration system” as part of a broad effort to exclude Chinese persons from this country.

But these racist policies did not become law until years after the 14th Amendment was ratified. And if Trump actually had the power to determine who counts as a person under the amendment, the implications of that power would be breathtaking. By this logic, Trump could potentially decree that younger voters, or Democrats, or anyone who has previously attended an Obama rally is not a “person” for purposes of allocating House representation.

After all, there’s as much language in the Constitution supporting the proposition that Obama supporters are not “persons” as there is language suggesting that undocumented immigrants do not count.

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by Jessica Huseman

On March 20, state election administrators got on a conference call with the Election Assistance Commission to plead for help. The EAC is the bipartisan federal agency established for the precise purpose of maintaining election integrity through emergencies, and this was by every account an emergency. In a matter of weeks, the coronavirus had grown from an abstract concern to a global horror, and vote by mail was the only way ballots could safely be cast in the states that had not yet held their primaries. But many officials didn’t know the basics: what machines they would need and where to get them; what to tell voters; how to make sure ballots reached voters and were returned to county offices promptly and securely. “I have a primary coming up, and I have no idea what to do,” Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske said on the call.

She and her colleagues didn’t get the help they were looking for. Of the EAC’s four commissioners, only chair Ben Hovland spoke, and his responses were too vague to satisfy his listeners. The lack of direction was “striking,” said one participant, Jennifer Morrell, an elections consultant and a contractor for The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “It felt to me that there was no leadership. Nobody was saying, ‘Hey, let’s figure this out.’ Questions just went unanswered.”

The commission punted. On a follow-up call, Hovland volunteered the state of Washington, which votes almost entirely by mail, to respond to questions and provide materials. But Washington built its vote by mail system over more than a decade and had accumulated thousands of pages of detailed instructions, too much for other states to implement quickly. Hovland agreed in vague terms to pitch in, but others involved saw little evidence. “We started working with the EAC, and then it just started to get kind of cold,” said Kim Wyman, Washington’s secretary of state. “Nothing happened, nothing good or bad. Just nothing.”

Dogged by partisan infighting, the constant threat of elimination and a budget that bottomed out last year at less than half of what it once was, the EAC has long failed to be effective or even relevant. Current commissioners have dramatically decreased the number of votes taken on important issues. The EAC also hasn’t approved a full set of voting machine standards since 2005. In 2018, new machines pegged to the old standards malfunctioned in Indiana, and decades-old machines in Georgia failed to record a stunning 150,000 votes for lieutenant governor, spurring ongoing litigation.

In a statement, Hovland noted that despite having “one of the smallest budgets in the federal government, and without a dime of the supplemental funding we requested from Congress” to respond to the pandemic, the commission has succeeded in distributing $825 million in grants to state election officials and doubling its staff size since the start of the year. “Now is not the time for keeping score,” he said. “It’s time to focus on getting the job done. ... I am confident that when we look back at this year, and where the EAC was coming from, we will be proud of what we accomplished.”

Now, with the pandemic bearing down for the long haul and state officials begging for help, the commission has neglected key responsibilities or ceded them to other agencies — and two of its commissioners are parroting President Donald Trump’s unfounded warnings about voting by mail. After that March 20 call, it wasn’t the EAC but CISA, two associations of state election officials and a group of election-related private vendors and nonprofits that boiled down Washington state’s information, creating timelines and how-to guides for other states. (EAC didn’t have the budget or staff to develop the guidance on its own, Hovland told me in an interview. “If my failure here is that I let too many people in the tent … and it got done faster, I’ll take that criticism all day. If the house is on fire and you want to pick up a hose, go for it.”)

After compiling the material, the other groups had more problems with the EAC. When they asked the commission to vet the information and host it on its website, one of the commissioners, Donald Palmer, balked. Voter fraud is vanishingly rare, but Palmer complained that the material contained no information on in-person voting and argued that vote by mail should not be promoted over other options, according to a document obtained by ProPublica. Regarding one passage, which stated — accurately, experts say — that the return of some ballots as undeliverable before they reach voters is “normal,” Palmer wrote, “We don’t need commentary.” CISA contractors largely disregarded his criticisms, and the EAC website unveiled the guidelines in late April.

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The Help America Vote Act was Congress’ attempt to ensure that nothing like the bitterly disputed 2000 presidential election happened again. It required states to maintain central voter rolls and set standards for voter list maintenance. It also streamlined voter registration and allowed for the casting of provisional ballots. And it established the EAC, which is made up of an even number of Republican and Democratic commissioners. They are individually appointed by the minority and majority leaders of both chambers of Congress, and the chairmanship alternates each year between the parties.

The law was passed in 2002 with bipartisan support; President George W. Bush said it would “help state and local officials to conduct elections that have the confidence of all Americans.” In a joint statement, former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford said the bill signified “the most meaningful improvements in voting safeguards since the civil rights laws of the 1960s.”

President George W. Bush signs the Help America Vote Act on Oct. 29, 2002, creating the Election Assistance Commission. William Philpott/Reuters

The agency got off to an inauspicious start. While the law required all four commissioners to be in place by late February 2003, they weren’t confirmed until early December. As of early 2004, the agency still had no permanent office or budget. Prodded by Paul DeGregorio, a longtime Republican elections official from Missouri and one of the original commissioners, the EAC disbursed millions of dollars to the states, adopted standards for voting technology and devised data collection practices that the agency still uses. EAC staffers began helping elections officials, especially in small counties with meager budgets, to buy voting machines and create statewide voter lists.

But the agency was embarrassed by various scandals. In 2008, when the EAC spent almost $7,000 on polo shirts for the staff to wear when they visited elections offices, it accidentally overbought, leaving 263 leftover shirts. This tiny fraction of federal spending triggered an investigation by the General Services Administration’s Office of Inspector General. (The inspector general concluded that there had been no mismanagement of funds, and many of the extra shirts have found their way into the hands of current employees, who occasionally wear them as a joke.) In 2009, the agency faced multiple accusations of political hirings and firings and whistleblowers reported a hostile work environment. An investigation found no hard evidence for the allegations, but it criticized poor management and rampant dissatisfaction among staff, something the agency struggles with to this day.

That’s when Gregg Harper, a newly elected congressman from Mississippi, determined that one of his top priorities would be abolishing the EAC. Harper’s view — not explicitly supported by the statute’s language — was that the Help America Vote Act only intended the EAC to exist long enough to distribute the original funds and implement voting machine requirements. It has done both, he told me in an interview, but “somehow [it’s] just hung around.”

Over the course of a decade in Congress, Harper wrote four bills to eliminate the EAC. None became law, but Harper was successful in reducing the EAC’s operating budget from about $11.5 million in 2006 to a low of $8 million in 2019. That’s less than the budget of, for example, the Department of Justice unit that investigates crimes involving Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The agency became so neglected that departing commissioners weren’t replaced. From 2010 to 2014, it lacked the minimum three commissioners needed for any decision, and for some of that time, it didn’t even have one commissioner. Even the people it purported to serve, the secretaries of state, repeatedly voted in favor of disbanding the agency, most recently in 2015. The votes had no practical impact but sent a signal to Congress that the commission was held in low esteem.

Morale plummeted. Talented employees moved to other government agencies, taking with them institutional knowledge and election experience, resulting in more embarrassments, which resulted in more budget cuts. “I honestly don’t know how a government agency survives like this,” Hovland said. “They expect so much — for us to help 50 different states and to perform large roles that take time and expertise. That costs money. It takes attention. It takes staff.”

Today, the EAC’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, looks more like a low-budget call center than a government office. The carpet is curling up off the floor and the paint is peeling. “The place is embarrassing,” one recently departed employee told me. “How do you invite congressmen who are trying to eliminate you to an office like that to show them what you do?”

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Underlying the budget cuts and attacks on the commission lay a deeper problem: A growing dispute over the basic machinery of democracy. Voting methods once thought routine, like absentee ballots, became grist for partisan bickering. The escalating fight over voter fraud has crippled the EAC, often sabotaging its most dedicated commissioners while emboldening those who are less effective.

A U.S. Senate race in 2000 helped spawn the voter fraud hysteria — and launch the careers of key figures on both sides of the debate. Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan was running a close race against incumbent Republican John Ashcroft. Three weeks before the election, Carnahan’s plane crashed in wet, foggy weather into a hilltop near St. Louis. Everyone aboard was killed, including Carnahan; his son, Randy, who piloted the private plane; and Carnahan’s former chief of staff.

The repercussions were unprecedented. It was too late to remove Carnahan’s name from the ballot, but his widow, Jean, became the unofficial candidate. The acting governor, formerly the lieutenant governor, announced he would nominate her for the seat if her late husband won the election. The campaign mailed out thousands of “I’m Still With Mel!” buttons, volunteers turned up by the hundreds and a swell of empathy for the plucky widow swept through Missouri voters. Mel Carnahan became the first senator to win posthumously, and Jean Carnahan became Missouri’s first female senator.

Top: Jean Carnahan announces she will accept appointment to the Senate if her late husband wins. Bottom: John Ashcroft concedes after losing to Carnahan. Bill Greenblatt/Liaison

Hovland was a young staffer on the Carnahan campaign. Devastated by the candidate’s death, he worked 20-hour days, “waking up with calf cramps in the middle of the night, just in agony,” he recalled in the first of three two-hour phone interviews. The victory inspired him. “In a career where you see a lot of astroturfing and the sort of the things that can make you cynical about politics, this was really a rare, genuine moment of all these people who were coming out because they wanted to do something, wanted to be a part of something, wanted to say thank you because Gov. Carnahan had made a difference in their lives,” he said.

Ashcroft, though, was humiliated and convinced that only cheating could explain his loss. Once Bush appointed him U.S. attorney general, he initiated years of intense investigations into voter fraud. These probes found next to nothing, but three lawyers who worked on them at the DOJ would become leading voter fraud conspiracy theorists: Hans von Spakovsky, J. Christian Adams and Kris Kobach. Von Spakovsky uses his perch as manager of the election law reform initiative at the Heritage Foundation to prod Republican legislators and secretaries of state to supply examples of voter fraud to a database. Adams runs the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which sues jurisdictions over largely exaggerated claims of bloated voter rolls, which he claims will lead to fraudulent voting. As Kansas’ secretary of state from 2011 to 2019, Kobach restricted voting rights and headed Trump’s now-defunct voter fraud commission. He’s now running for a U.S. Senate seat.

Even as Ashcroft ramped up his voter fraud investigations, he largely protected the EAC, whose chair, DeGregorio, was a fellow Missouri Republican. But after Ashcroft left his post in 2005, von Spakovsky began badgering DeGregorio.

“He put some heat on me to be more partisan, indicating I was just too bipartisan,” DeGregorio said. “I started getting pressure from people to issue an opinion a certain way or take a more partisan stand, or to not go along with the Democrats so much in the Commission because we had too many unanimous votes.”

In 2007, the EAC hired two respected researchers to study voter fraud. But after they found little evidence of a problem, the commission decided not to adopt their report, saying the extent of voter fraud was open to interpretation. Von Spakovsky had emailed the EAC multiple times to complain about the project and the researchers. Von Spakovsky, who did not respond to questions for this article, told the media and congressional investigators at the time that his communications with the agency were appropriate and that it wasn’t unusual for the DOJ to work with the EAC.

In 2007, DeGregorio was informed that he would not be reappointed to the commission. Roy Blunt, the Missouri senator who had originally recommended him for the role, told DeGregorio that “there were individuals who did not want my reappointment because they felt I wasn’t Republican enough and that I was too bipartisan,” DeGregorio recalled. He was replaced by Caroline Hunter, a Republican operative with no experience in administering elections.

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By 2014, the voter fraud movement was starting to penetrate the commission’s inner ranks. Christy McCormick, who had worked on voting issues at the DOJ that had originated under Ashcroft, was appointed as a commissioner. The commissioners chose Bryan Newby, a Kansas election administrator, as the agency’s new executive director. After he was appointed to the EAC, an audit found that he had misspent county funds in his prior job. But Kobach, who was at the time Kansas’ secretary of state, took no action.

One of Newby’s first moves as EAC director was to approve Kobach’s plan to require Kansans to present documentary proof of citizenship when they registered to vote. A federal judge struck down the plan in 2018, finding that it disenfranchised 30,000 voters and was illegal under the Help America Vote Act. A separate challenge in federal court to Newby’s ruling is pending.

In the waning days of the Obama administration, then-Department of Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson declared elections “critical infrastructure.” The designation gave DHS a formal role in protecting elections from outside intervention, foreign or otherwise. But Johnson’s staff didn’t know where to turn for detailed information about the election process. They considered the Federal Election Commission, but it focuses on campaign finance. Finally, somebody mentioned the EAC.

DHS reached out, giving the EAC an opportunity to weigh in on national policy and foster a uniform approach among states and counties for handling elections. But Neil Jenkins, the then DHS official in charge of leading the discussions, told me he found EAC’s leaders unreliable and combative.

His relationship with McCormick was especially unproductive. After Trump was elected president, she rarely attended meetings and briefings where DHS sought to alert the commissioners to the growing threat of Russian interference, Jenkins said.

Christy McCormick, then chair of the EAC, testifies at a hearing about election security on Capitol Hill on May 22, 2019. Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo

In January 2017, McCormick wrote a post for the EAC’s website describing the idea that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election as “deceptive propaganda perpetrated on the American public” by the outgoing Obama administration. State elections administrators say that she often talked to them about the “hoax.” She told at least two that she “knew the Russian people,” having once lived there, and that they wouldn’t be capable of such villainy.

Later in 2017, Trump appointed her to his Voter Fraud Commission, which also included Kobach, von Spakovsky and Adams. In the first meeting, she claimed to have personally observed voter fraud, without giving details. Emails released by the commission in connection with a lawsuit show that she worked closely with von Spakovsky and Adams to figure out how to collect state data on fraud. She suggested a DOJ statistician as a staffer for the voter fraud commission, calling him “conservative (and Christian too).”

In 2018, then-House Speaker Paul Ryan announced he would not reappoint Matt Masterson, the EAC’s other Republican commissioner, who had earned high praise from state officials for leading cybersecurity training programs and improving the EAC-DHS relationship.

“Republican congressional leadership and the Trump administration simply aren’t interested in ensuring that our elections are protected from Russian interference,” Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, a Democrat, said in a statement released after Masterson’s dismissal.

A person close to Ryan told me that McCormick and von Spakovsky worked to push the speaker to drop Masterson. McCormick had sparred with Masterson on many occasions, according to EAC employees, and told like-minded secretaries of state that he was insufficiently partisan. Ryan replaced him with Donald Palmer, who had been — at the urging of McCormick, former EAC staffers said — hired as a contractor for the EAC months before. Masterson is now a cybersecurity adviser to CISA, and he worked on the vote-by-mail security policies now available on the EAC’s website.

Last year, writing in a Washington Times piece while serving as EAC chair, McCormick acknowledged she had been wrong about Russian interference: Russia had in fact posed a “real and persistent” threat to elections. “The vacillating facts that shaped the earliest assessments of what happened and to whom, as well as my lack of access to classified intelligence briefings that others would have had me swear to in good faith, gave me pause,” she wrote.

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The aspersions that Ashcroft cast on Mel Carnahan’s victory, and the rising fervor over voter fraud, steeled Hovland’s determination to advocate for voting rights. In early 2008, he became an elections attorney for the Missouri secretary of state: Robin Carnahan, Mel and Jean’s daughter.

Next he worked for the Fair Elections Legal Network, litigating ballot access issues, and for the Senate Rules Committee, which oversees the Election Assistance Commission. In 2018, the Democratic Party put him in charge of the search for a new EAC commissioner. Those familiar with his search — and the people he approached about the position — say that no one wanted the job.

“I was asked if I wanted it, and I couldn’t say no fast enough,” one potential candidate said. “You just can’t get anything done there.”

Hovland, though, always felt the agency could play an important role. He likes to quote the defense of the agency by Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken: “What’s the point of having 50 laboratories of democracy if no one is keeping score?” When he couldn’t find anyone to fill the vacancy, he volunteered and was appointed in January 2019.

Ben Hovland, then vice chair of the EAC, speaks before the House Judiciary Committee about the agency’s role in election oversight on Oct. 22, 2019. Susan Walsh/AP Photo

Palmer, former elections director for Virginia and Florida, was appointed at the same time. He had testified at the second and final meeting of Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission. He frequently retweets popular conservative talking points, denouncing Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Palmer’s backyard has an inground pool. On March 18, as election officials across the country grappled with the implications of a pandemic for upcoming primaries, Palmer tweeted a midday poolside selfie. Elections directors were outraged. “I’m trying to I figure out how to completely rehaul my election, and this asshole is tweeting pictures of himself sunbathing,” one texted to me.

On Twitter, Palmer defended taking a break from his duties. “All EAC employees are teleworking,” he said. “And we do have lunch!” He reported that he’d been on a call that day to discuss COVID-19’s impact on the elections. Three people who participated in the call couldn’t recall him saying anything.

Although McCormick has disavowed her contention that Russian interference in the 2016 election was a hoax, she and Palmer promulgate another of Trump’s discredited conspiracy theories: that mail-in voting is rife with fraud. In May, they promoted it on “Red White and True,” a podcast hosted by Catherine Engelbrecht, who runs True the Vote, a Houston-based group that has unsuccessfully sued several states to block expanded voting by mail.

On the show, Engelbrecht warned of massive ballot “harvesting” — political operatives collecting and submitting mail-in ballots — and said “millions” of people should be removed from the rolls. “So all of those folks are going to get ballots, a disaster waiting to happen,” she said, straight to camera, flipping her notes for emphasis.

Then Palmer and McCormick — neither of whom responded to questions for this article — called into the program. They could have referred listeners to the commission’s website to learn how to vote by mail safely and securely, but they didn’t. Instead, McCormick echoed the host’s alarmist rhetoric, saying that voters would be mailed ballots regardless of “whether we know if they’ve died or not,” and that the “security involved is a lot less with a vote by mail scheme than it is with an absentee ballot scheme.”

No Republican, Democratic or nonpartisan elections administrator I spoke to in more than 10 states where vote by mail is well established agreed with these statements. “It’s bollocks. Not a single system works like that,” said one, adding that the podcast made him reluctant to cooperate with EAC. “What elections official wants to work with an agency actively undermining their work?”

Engelbrecht lapped up McCormick’s criticism of vote by mail, saying the “idiocy” was “shocking.” She predicted that widespread fraud would throw presidential election results into question, and that the U.S. Supreme Court would have to decide the winner.

Wrapping up the segment, Engelbrecht told viewers that Palmer and McCormick were “awesome. People forget that the EAC is even there.”

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The EAC’s most vital function — and perhaps its most glaring failure — is the standardization and certification of voting machines. It has not adopted a full set of requirements since 2005. As a result, manufacturers have had little incentive to upgrade machine security, except in a few states that became so impatient at the EAC’s inaction that they introduced their own standards.

The EAC’s first effort to revise the 2005 guidelines ground to a halt in 2010 because it didn’t have enough commissioners to pass new standards. Without a quorum until 2014, staffers plunged ahead by working with elected officials across the country and other federal agencies. Soon after Masterson, McCormick and Thomas Hicks, a Democrat and former congressional staffer, were sworn in at the start of 2015, they approved a partial update, seemingly paving the way for a full overhaul of the standards. Instead, the process was bogged down, especially after Masterson, who was knowledgeable on the subject because he had worked for the EAC’s testing and certifications section that reviews voting machines, wasn’t reappointed.

When Hovland and Palmer joined the commission in 2019, “honestly the standards just weren’t ready,” Hovland said. “They were supposed to be completely ready to go, but they just weren’t.”

In the meantime, the 2015 updates were having almost no impact because they grandfathered in existing machines under the old standards. Manufacturers seized on that loophole, and only one system applied for certification.

In 2018, Georgia’s decades-old voting machines failed to record thousands of votes. The EAC has long delayed issuing new standards that could update machines. Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

This past February, at a gathering of state election directors in Washington, D.C., the four EAC commissioners held a panel to discuss the standards. Led largely by New Jersey’s elections director, Bob Giles, state officials grilled the commissioners on their lack of progress. Asked by Giles about one proposed section, Hovland said that one reason it had not been voted on was because it still contained grammatical errors.

“So, it’s about five pages, so if each of you reviewed one page a day I think you could get it done,” Giles snapped, as the audience in the room laughed.

“I could do that, Bob, but we are traveling around the country, trying to keep an agency alive,” Hovland said.

The exchange galvanized the commissioners. At the end of February, they voted to send out the standards for public comment. They are now reviewing 77 comments and discussing them with state and local officials and other interested parties. Final approval isn’t expected before the November election.

During a virtual public hearing in May, Hicks appeared to admit that he had not read the full 300-page standards.

“I think right now we have an opportunity with this pandemic to be sitting at home, and I’m going through the old adage of: ‘How do you eat an elephant? Basically one bite at a time,’” Hicks said.

Hicks told me that he had read the standards, which he called “a critical agency priority,” and had been going over them for the second time to improve his understanding. His comment was “misunderstood and taken out of context,” he said.

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There are signs that the EAC may finally be ready to fill the role for which it was created. Its budget rose to $11 million this year. Starting last year, for the first time since 2009, it has had a full complement of four commissioners. In recent months, it has recruited several seasoned staffers, even rehiring some who had left the agency in frustration.

After the Office of Personnel Management questioned Bryan Newby’s leadership and described low staff morale within the EAC, Newby wasn’t reappointed in 2019, and he became North Dakota’s elections director. He has filed a complaint with the federal Office of Special Counsel against the EAC’s two Democratic commissioners, Hovland and Hicks, saying they opposed his reappointment for political reasons. This month, the commissioners named Acting Executive Director Mona Harrington, the EAC’s former chief information and security officer, as his permanent replacement.

State officials increasingly acknowledge that they have no choice but to support the EAC. After the 2016 election, they realized that their fledgling state security offices were no match for a hostile nation-state. “Honestly I just don’t know who can certify machines if not the EAC,” said one Republican state elections official. “I used to believe that there was no place in the federal government for the agency, but we need these standards. We have to have the EAC.”

Another said: “I don’t think many of us feel like the agency should go away. We all want them to stay, and things look more promising now than they have since the agency was founded. I hope it stays that way.”

Underscoring the state officials’ change in attitude, the elections committee of the National Association of Secretaries of State voted Tuesday to encourage Congress to keep funding the EAC. Wyman, Washington’s secretary of state, said she regrets her vote in 2015 to abolish the commission. The states “have a different relationship with the EAC now,” she said.

As we concluded our conversation, Hovland recalled an unflattering article in The Hill about the EAC on its 10th anniversary. “Sometimes people ask me what I think the 20-year-in article is going to say,” he said. “I want it to be one of a turnaround. I think we’re getting there.”

The tactics seen recently in Portland, Oregon -- unidentified federal officers grabbing demonstrators off the street and hauling them away in unmarked vans -- are apparently going to be deployed in other cities. The federal government's response to ongoing demonstrations provoked by a Minnesota police officer's killing of an unarmed Black man has been escalating in recent days. In cities like Portland -- where protests have been a continuous fixture since early May -- a blend of CBP, ICE, US Marshals Service, and Bureau of Prisons personnel have been brought in to, supposedly, protect federal property and investigate federal crimes.

But the tactics are disturbing. Dragging people off the street into unmarked cars and taking them to unknown destinations for questioning isn't how America is supposed to work. There doesn't appear to be much probable cause involved (simply being near federal property while protesting isn't indicative of any criminal act) and the lack of identifying info on fatigue-clad officers just makes it that much easier for them to get away with rights violations. Detainees are being released without any paperwork, suggesting a lot of this federal intervention is off-the-books: undocumented and unsupervised.

The DHS likes its new Gestapo-esque tactics so much it's taking them to other cities.

Chicago may see an influx of federal agents as soon as this week as President Donald Trump readies to make good on repeated pledges he would try to tamp down violence here, a move that would come amid growing controversy nationally about federal force being used in American cities.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security, for example, is crafting plans to deploy about 150 federal agents to the city this week, the Chicago Tribune has learned.

Homeland Security Investigations -- a division that includes agents from several components -- will be heading to Chicago to "assist in crime-fighting efforts." No details have been provided by the DHS, leaving it open to speculation whether this will be more spirited-away-in-unmarked-vans action or something more conventional that targets the non-protest-related crime that has been an ongoing issue in Chicago for far longer than the recent unrest.

Money is on it being more of what was observed in Portland. President Trump has already made public statements about sending federal agents to cities "run by liberal Democrats," apparently with an eye on shutting down anti-law enforcement protests.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is one of the "liberal Democrats" Trump is referring to. That's why Chicago is next in line for some secret policing. Lightfoot would prefer this didn't happen.

“We don’t need federal agents without any insignia taking people off the streets and holding them, I think, unlawfully,” Lightfoot said.

But she's not completely opposed to federal help -- as long as it's actual help rather than a show of force meant to intimidate people engaging in protected speech.

If Trump wants to help, she said, he could boost federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives resources and fully fund prosecutors.

Even the Chicago PD seems concerned about the DHS's tactics. The department issued a statement saying it is "critical" that federal law enforcement officers "coordinate" with the PD to "fight violent crime." There's nothing in the statement that says the PD has any desire to deploy its force against peaceful protesters or be perceived as standing idly by while federal agents drag people off the street and into unmarked vehicles.

The city's police union, on the other hand, is pleased with any law enforcement activity -- local or federal -- that gives it an opportunity to criticize the mayor.

“I am certain you are aware of the chaos currently affecting our city on a regular basis now,” John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, wrote in a letter that was posted on the FOP’s Facebook page. “I am writing to formally ask you for help from the federal government. Mayor Lightfoot has proved to be a complete failure who is either unwilling or unable to maintain law and order here.”

Catanzara's opinion is not to be trusted. He runs an organization that helps keep bad cops employed. And he's the best fit for the FOP, given its "no bad cop left behind" focus. Catanzara is one of the most disciplined officers ever to serve in the Chicago PD. He's also the only one to be elected head of the union while stripped of his police powers.

If this is the blueprint for the future, it's goddamn frightening. President Trump may not understand the implications of the words he's using or how they sound to people listening to him, but this statement at a recent press conference appears to indicate Trump prefers martial law and order to regular law and order.

“We’re going to have more federal law enforcement, that I can tell you,” he said. “In Portland, they’ve done a fantastic job. They’ve been there three days and they really have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time, no problem.”

When the feds step in to do the local cops' jobs, that's a move in the direction of martial law. Trump's pro-cop rhetoric -- something that never lets up even when cops are at their worst -- indicates he'd prefer cops to be making the laws, rather than simply enforcing them. His willingness to send federal agents to cities led by politicians he doesn't like suggests he wants to run those cities by proxy. This is a federal police state in the making, one that's going to be increasingly difficult to differentiate from martial law if the feds aren't able to shut down protests quickly enough.

by William Cohan for ProPublica

When I asked Jide Zeitlin late last year about a 10-year-old article accusing him of using “deception to lure a woman into an unwanted romantic relationship,” his denial was absolute. “It’s not true,” Zeitlin stated. “OK? That’s on the record. It’s not true.”

Zeitlin, then the CEO of Tapestry — parent company of luxury brands such as Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman — went so far as to urge me to dig into his background. “I’m pretty certain you’re not going to find any paper trail on me playing those kinds of games,” Zeitlin said.

Tapestry’s communications chief, Andrea Resnick, was even more adamant when I raised the question again in January. She accused me of advancing a “racist agenda” (Zeitlin is Black) and “using your personal credibility … to give a despicable hatchet job new life.” As recently as this month, a law firm hired by Zeitlin threatened to sue if such allegations were published.

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On Tuesday, the company announced Zeitlin had resigned “for personal reasons,” only four months after it had extended his contract for three years. Zeitlin issued a statement to The Wall Street Journal that said, “In the past month, a woman I photographed and had a relationship with more than 10 years ago reached out to various media organizations to express her concerns about what had occurred. … I felt compelled to resign today because I do not want to create a distraction for Tapestry, a company I care deeply about.” (Later in the day, Zeitlin published a post on LinkedIn in which he acknowledged he “drew too close” to the woman but asserted, “I did not use power, wealth, or position to further that relationship.”)

Zeitlin resigned after Tapestry launched an investigation last week into the CEO’s conduct. The company hired the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson to handle the inquiry, which appears to have been prompted by 60 questions I sent the company on June 23 for this article. Zeitlin was allowed to resign, rather than be fired, and received no severance payment.

The resignation represented a calamitous fall for Zeitlin, 56, one that was nearly as improbable as his rise. Born in Nigeria, the son of a maid, Zeitlin was largely brought up by an American family (which eventually became his legal guardian) and rose to become a rare Black partner at Goldman Sachs before eventually becoming one of only five Black CEOs among Fortune 500 companies.

Zeitlin enjoyed a gilded reputation. His partnership at Goldman Sachs earned him more than $100 million when the firm went public and placed him in the financial elite. And Tapestry thrived during his brief tenure as CEO, at least until the pandemic ravaged the business. “What stood out was the thoughtful assessment, new initiatives, methodical approach, and proactive tone from new CEO Jide Zeitlin,” a research analyst at Evercore ISI wrote in February.

Recently, Zeitlin’s star had risen even higher as he propelled himself into the national conversation on race. Zeitlin’s fearless embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement had an authenticity and depth few corporate executives can muster. On June 1, he posted a moving essay on LinkedIn, addressing George Floyd’s killing and the looting that had occurred at a number of Tapestry retail stores. “We can replace our windows and handbags,” he wrote, “but we cannot bring back George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, and too many others. Each of these black lives matter.”

The essay became a sensation, and it made Zeitlin a leading corporate voice for social change. He spoke about the movement in a June 3 appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” and then on June 21, he was on CBS’ “Face The Nation.”

Yet for all of Zeitlin’s accomplishments, there were troubling episodes in his past. Perhaps most surprising, many of the facts were out in the open to an extent that raises the question of how closely, if at all, Tapestry’s board of directors vetted its CEO before appointing him last year. The company didn’t respond when asked how it had missed information, some of it available in a simple Google search.

Some problems seemed like benign business stumbles: For example, a company that he ran in India went bankrupt. But then there was what appeared to be almost a past second life for Zeitlin. Working under an alias, he took photos, many sexual, at least some involving nudity, of women in a studio just feet from where his wife and children lived. He had what he now acknowledges was an “inappropriate relationship” with one of the women he photographed. That life had surfaced in 2009, hindering a chance for him to enter government service, only to be publicly left behind — until today.

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Stirred by Zeitlin’s remarkable rise — he had added the CEO title at Tapestry in September 2019 after previously being its chairman — I approached the digital newsletter Air Mail last fall with the idea of writing a profile of him. The publication commissioned the article, and Zeitlin agreed to be interviewed.

His was a tale worth telling. Since the day he was born to a single mother in sub-Saharan Africa, Zeitlin’s life has been something bordering on the incredible. “You have to get lucky, and I’ve been unbelievably lucky,” he told me during an interview last November at Tapestry’s headquarters at Hudson Yards, the new development on Manhattan’s West Side.

As Zeitlin told it, his path to Tapestry’s corner office began in Ibadan, Nigeria’s third-largest city, where he was born. When he was a baby, his mother sent him to live with relatives in the countryside while she worked as a domestic for foreign families in Lagos, then the country’s capital.

Among those were the Zeitlins, an American family. Arnold Zeitlin was a veteran foreign correspondent for The Associated Press. He and his wife had two young children and when Olajide, or Jide as he was known, would visit his mother at their house, he’d play with one of the family’s daughters. The Zeitlins, thinking Jide would get a better education in Lagos, suggested he live with them, an arrangement his mother embraced. “She was an amazing mother who just didn’t have a lot of resources,” Zeitlin told Forbes Africa in 2012.

When the Zeitlins moved to Pakistan in 1970, they asked Jide, who was 5, if he would like to join the family and move there. Jide said yes. And for the second time, Jide’s mother agreed to let him go. Eventually, the Zeitlins would become his legal guardians, and he took their last name.

“My Nigerian mother gave away her eldest son so that he might have a better life,” Zeitlin said in a 2014 speech. “I cannot imagine giving away any of my three children.” (His mother would later move to London to work in the home of a promising Ghanaian diplomat named Kofi Annan, before he became secretary general of the United Nations. In 2008, she died in a car accident.)

After Pakistan, the Zeitlins were posted to the Philippines but were forced to leave the country in 1975 when Arnold Zeitlin wrote articles that angered its president, Ferdinand Marcos, and his wife, Imelda. From Manila, they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Zeitlins sent him to Milton Academy, a prep school. After that, Zeitlin was off to Amherst College, where he studied English and economics. There he got the Wall Street bug. He wrote to a number of investment banks, seeking an internship. They all turned him down.

A fortuitous meeting with a partner at Goldman Sachs led to a summer internship. He went back every summer, including after his first year at Harvard, where he had gone to get his MBA. When he graduated from Harvard in 1987, Goldman offered him a job in its world-beating mergers and acquisitions department.

Within weeks of his arrival, Zeitlin got another huge break when he became the protégé of Hank Paulson, who was then running Goldman’s Chicago office and en route to becoming its CEO in 1999 and secretary of the Treasury in 2006. In 1996, Goldman named Zeitlin a partner. When the firm completed its own initial public offering in May 1999, his .325% ownership stake was worth $117 million after the first day of trading.

One of Paulson’s top clients was the Sara Lee Corp. Sara Lee also owned Coach, a high-end leather goods maker. Zeitlin helped Coach execute a successful IPO in 2000, impressing then-CEO Lew Frankfort in the process. By 2005, Zeitlin had been invited to join Coach’s board.

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Zeitlin’s ties to Paulson helped him mightily. In 2004, Zeitlin said, Paulson asked him to go to India and figure out a strategy for the firm there. While there, Zeitlin spotted a new opportunity: cellphone towers. At the end of 2005, he formed The Keffi Group, a private investment firm, to do deals, including buying cell towers in India.

Zeitlin soon experienced his first stumbles. In January 2009, a $62.5 million investment in a medical startup went south when the company filed for bankruptcy. Later that year, Zeitlin’s Indian cell tower business, Independent Mobile Infrastructure Ltd., also filed for bankruptcy.

For others, such setbacks might have taken years to recover from. Zeitlin, by contrast, was ready to tackle a new challenge.

Thanks to “a friend of a friend” from his days at Amherst, according to Zeitlin, he was asked to join Barack Obama’s economic transition team and then offered a job at the Treasury Department. Paulson told him to take it, but Zeitlin decided not to, in part, he said, because it was in Washington and his young family was in New York City. Paulson had a different memory, according to an email he provided for this article. Paulson said Zeitlin had done “an excellent job” as a young banker working on Sara Lee. “As far as I know, there were never any complaints about inappropriate behavior by Jide when he was at Goldman Sachs and he left the firm with a good reputation,” Paulson’s email continued. “Jide approached me and said he was seeking a senior job at the Obama Treasury Department and wanted advice and a recommendation. I told him it would be better to start at a lower level. I also asked him about some unseemly rumors I had heard [unrelated to Goldman Sachs] and he denied them. When I discussed him with Treasury I said he was talented but his personal conduct should be looked into.” (Zeitlin lawyers denied any unseemly behavior at Goldman. The firm’s communications chief, Jake Siewert, declined to comment.)

Still, six months later, another government opportunity presented itself. According to Zeitlin, the head of White House personnel asked him to be the U.S. point man on financial reform at the United Nations in New York. He met with Susan Rice, Obama’s U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and came away impressed. On Sept. 24, 2009, Obama nominated Zeitlin for the post of U.S. ambassador for U.N. management and reform.

Zeitlin was about to learn, however, that in the pressure cooker of Washington, your mistakes often mattered more than your triumphs. And Zeitlin’s mistakes were nowhere near as buried as he had thought.

On Nov. 4, 2009, the morning of his Senate confirmation hearing, The Washington Post published an article about Zeitlin’s problems in India. Zeitlin chalked it up to the usual political sparring over nominees that occurs in Washington prior to confirmation hearings. “That’s what’s called ‘Washington theater,’” Zeitlin told me in one of our interviews.

During the hearing itself, with Zeitlin’s family in attendance, he parried questions about the Post’s article from Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez and from Republican Sen. Richard Lugar. “It’s important to me, clearly, to address the issues raised in the article,” Zeitlin said under oath, “and to underscore the fact that, although no one bats one thousand, I have an exceptionally strong investment and financial track record over the last 25 years, and during the last several years.” On Dec. 8, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recommended that the Senate approve Zeitlin’s nomination. It seemed he was poised for the next rung on the ladder.

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Zeitlin’s testimony was not sitting well with Gretchen Raymond, a 38-year-old mother of two in Stamford, Connecticut, then working as a private chef for a billionaire in nearby Greenwich. Raymond had met Zeitlin two years earlier, in January 2007.

On Dec. 9, 2009, the day after his confirmation hearing, Raymond emailed Max Gigle, then a staff assistant to Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, an influential member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This man has put me and my family through hell,” she wrote of Zeitlin. (Gigle said he has no memory of the interaction.)

In her email, Raymond recounted how she met Zeitlin after answering an ad placed on Craigslist, with the headline “Fit yes, experience not necessary,” by a man named James Greene, who said he was a fashion photographer working out of “Sohophoto.” At the time, Raymond was working as a fitness model and needed some photos of herself. After talking with Greene on the phone, she agreed to meet him “for a fitness shoot” at a gym.

In the several weeks before Raymond and Greene agreed to meet for the photo session, there were emails between them focused on what she should wear and what parts of her body he planned to focus on; she also shared other photos of herself. On Jan. 6, 2007, Greene emailed Raymond and thanked her for her photographs: “Now have a lot more to think about,” he wrote. “One of the shots you suggested is of your ass while you are working out with leg weights. As I am trying to envision this, I was hoping that you had some existing shots of your ass. The only shot you sent of your butt is the one in jeans — but the jeans are so busy (the pockets, the stitching, etc..) it’s hard to see you. Do you have any other shots of your butt? A lot of times runners in particular have hard butts, but not much in the way of contours, suspense or drama (in their butts, not their personality).”

In an email on Jan. 12, 2007, Greene also made what he acknowledged was an unusual request: “Please remember not to wear panties or a bra when you come into the city on Monday…” Greene explained that he didn’t want her underwear to interfere with the clothes she wore during the shoot.

On Jan. 15, 2007, Raymond agreed to meet Greene. “Get a good night’s sleep,” he wrote. As if to emphasize that he worked differently than other photographers, Greene had informed her that he used a Hasselblad medium format camera and old-fashioned film. “I tend to shoot very deliberately,” he wrote. “In other words, one shot at a time rather than just pushing the autowind and hoping to get lucky.” She arrived at the photo shoot with her make-up artist Rita Madison, her workout clothes, fishnet stockings with straps and “boy shorts.” The photo shoot went well — although Greene later told Raymond all the photographs he took were lost — and late that night Greene wrote her an email:

“I am about to go to bed and am hoping that I do not wake up at 3:00 a.m. again. Given our day today, however, there is a real risk that I will wake up in the middle of the night with thoughts of you swirling around in my head.” He extolled her “breathtaking beauty and naturalness” and worried someone would take advantage of her openness or desire for recognition. “I know that you read people well and are careful, but please please be doubly careful as you get deeper into this business. There are a lot of remarkably smooth types who make it their business to take advantage of others. (Sorry for my paternalistic lecture.) … I have a thousand questions I would love to ask you over a cup of coffee one day. … Thanks for being so generous with your time today and being so pleasant. I look forward to seeing you again — soon.”

Over the course of the next few months, according to Raymond, she and Greene became friends, then lovers. Their first post-photo shoot meeting was at the NoHo Star restaurant, she said; he was leaving for a Canadian dog sledding trip that day. “We met, spoke and I remember it as a nice connection,” Raymond told me. “When he was gone on his trip, I texted him that I felt a real void without his messages. When he called me from the home that he stayed in after, he told me that he had been thinking of me the entire time and he just loved my text.”

Soon after, Greene confessed to her that he had been living a double life. His real name was Jide Zeitlin. She had become suspicious of him. “It was becoming very clear to me he was not a photographer,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I want to know your real name because I want to Google you.’ He laughed and said, OK, I am James Zeitalin.’ I had him spell it and wrote it down.” The next day, she Googled that name and up popped a picture of Jide Zeitlin.

As Raymond wrote in her letter to Gigle, the Senate aide: “About one month into our friendship (approximately Feb. 24, 2007.) I discovered his true identity. He told me that he wanted to work on his photography and didn’t feel that I would have worked with him if I knew he was not a professional and he just wanted to meet me. He apologized for the deception and told me he was falling in love with me. With great regret I began a romantic relationship with Jide.”

At the time, Zeitlin’s wife, Tina Goldberg, was pregnant. Goldberg, who is also a Goldman M&A department alum, works in the upper reaches of the fashion industry, as the chief commercial officer at Anne Klein International. (Goldberg did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment.)

Their consensual affair lasted until October 2007, according to Raymond. “I was under the impression that he was deeply in love with me and planning a future with me,” she wrote Gigle.

Their affair, Raymond said, ended because Zeitlin told her that he had too much on his plate and needed to “figure out our life.” She was devastated. “I was absolutely heartbroken,” she said.

A month after Zeitlin ended their affair, Raymond’s husband intercepted a text from Zeitlin wishing her a happy Thanksgiving. Furious, her husband called Zeitlin’s wife and told her about the affair. Gretchen Raymond then emailed Zeitlin’s wife; contemporaneous emails between the two women, which I’ve read, make clear this was not a pleasant conversation.

Things would turn uglier still. “One week later someone came to my home and threw a construction brick through my Durango,” Raymond wrote in her letter to the Senate. When the police came, she said they told her, “Somebody is sending you a message.” (Raymond filed a complaint about the incident with the Stamford Police Department; there’s no sign the police took any action.)

Working together, Raymond and her husband began to uncover details about Zeitlin’s photographic work. They learned that Raymond was not the only person Zeitlin photographed. They began to fill in the picture of how he operated. (Neither Zeitlin nor Tapestry responded to extensive written questions about these activities.)

To solicit models, Raymond said, Zeitlin used the same sohophoto@gmail.com address he used to respond to her initial email in December 2006. And Raymond said that Zeitlin’s “Sohophoto studio” was the apartment he had purchased adjacent to his family’s residence on the sixth floor of a Greene Street apartment building in Manhattan’s tony SoHo neighborhood. (Zeitlin later tried to sell the two apartments.) She said Zeitlin took her to the photo studio “at the top of the winding staircase” on the same day as their second NoHo Star meeting. “I had no idea at the time though that his wife and child were right next door,” she said.

Raymond and her husband undertook a two-person detective quest to try to uncover how many women Zeitlin had photographed. Obsessively cross-referencing a modelling-website i.d. that Zeitlin had sent along with the sohophoto@gmail.com email address and other details, and matching some of the photos with visual elements from different pictures (Raymond said she recognized some details as the same studio she had been photographed in), she and her husband identified a series of photos of young women they believed Zeitlin had taken and posted on sites like Model Mayhem and OneModelPlace. (Zeitlin removed his profile on these sites sometime in 2008, according to Raymond.)

All told, Raymond found seven models they believed Zeitlin had photographed, nearly all of them in demonstrably sexual poses, many lying on a bed in skimpy lingerie. Some involved nudity.

One woman, Tamara Williams, confirmed in an email that she had been photographed by a man she knew as “Greene.” She said she was over 18 when she was photographed topless on a bed in Zeitlin’s SoHo studio around 2005, “but nothing bad transpired.” Williams declined to elaborate on her experience.

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In the winter and spring of 2008, in a bid to expose Zeitlin’s hidden life, Raymond contacted a series of FBI agents. To her frustration, however, she was unable to get any traction. She reached out to the FBI again in September 2019 after Zeitlin became Tapestry’s CEO, again without any success. (The FBI office in New Haven, Connecticut, that Raymond contacted did not respond to requests for comment.)

One connection that appeared promising in 2009 was Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Lattman, who had written about the cellphone tower business for the publication. But after Raymond’s husband asked her to stop, she broke off contact with Lattman. Lattman, now overseeing The Atlantic and other media investments for the Emerson Collective (which donates to ProPublica), acknowledged having numerous conversations with Raymond. He said he found her story credible and confirmed in emails to Raymond that I have seen that Zeitlin had used the website onemodelplace.com.

Finally, in December 2009, Raymond struck some pay dirt when Josh Rogin, a reporter at The Cable — a blog of Foreign Policy magazine — became interested in her claims about Zeitlin after she emailed him out of the blue.

A few weeks after Rogin began making calls, he got a tip from Tommy Vietor, then an assistant White House press secretary, that the Obama administration had decided to drop Zeitlin’s nomination. In late December 2009, Rogin broke the news: Zeitlin’s nomination had been withdrawn after “rumors swirled” about his “overall character” and “elements of identity fraud.” Zeitlin was allowed to say he withdrew his nomination for “personal reasons.” (In an email, Vietor, now the co-host of “Pod Save America,” wrote that he has no idea who Zeitlin is; Rogin, now a Washington Post columnist, declined to comment.)

Zeitlin returned to The Keffi Group, remained on the board of Coach (where he became chairman in November 2014) and continued to serve on the board of Amherst College, where he had assumed the chairmanship of the board of trustees in July 2005. In 2014, Amherst gave him an honorary doctorate. In his address, he spoke of his life and experiences. He thanked his wife and three children, adding, “you have trusted me beyond reason and loved me no matter how idiotic I’ve been.”

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Zeitlin was alternately evasive or dismissive last November when I asked basic questions about the events leading up to his sudden withdrawal from the United Nations job in 2009. “Washington is a very different world than Wall Street,” he said, presenting the vitriol hurled his way as an eye-opener. “If you’re sitting in New York, it feels as though it’s very personal. If you’re sitting in Washington, it’s just another day at the office.” That did not seem to mesh with his background (and success) at Goldman Sachs, a place that, like Washington, can be plenty rough and tumble.

Moreover, the allegation — reported by Rogin in 2009 — that Zeitlin “used deception to lure a woman into an unwanted romantic relationship” seemed all the more sensitive. As Zeitlin told me, “Particularly since I’m the CEO of an organization that is 79% women that cares immensely about inclusion, it feels like it’s a gratuitous shot that doesn’t necessarily add up.”

Zeitlin denied everything. He insisted I had “missed” the part of Zeitlin’s Senate confirmation hearing where he was asked about this relationship. (The video record of his confirmation hearing remains available on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s website, but nothing in the hourlong session remotely addressed Raymond or her claims.)

Zeitlin also said he had never “consummated” any relationship with Raymond. “I suspect that I’m one of the few people who has been accused of not consummating a relationship,” he said.

He was just getting started. Zeitlin said political enemies that had been looking to derail his nomination created a lie about him luring a woman into an unwanted relationship. “There is no substance” to the charge, Zeitlin said. “Let’s just be 100% clear [about that].” He repeatedly suggested he was collateral damage in a GOP plot to wound Obama’s foreign policy team.

To buttress his claims of having done nothing untoward, Zeitlin pointed to discussions he said he had in 2015 with people close to then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew about taking a role — six years after he withdrew his U.N. nomination — as undersecretary of the Treasury. “There’s not a chance” the Obama administration would have come back to him, Zeitlin said, if Raymond’s allegations had any merit. To back this up, he showed me (but did not let me have) a few emails on his mobile device that appeared as if he were conversing with someone at the Treasury about a potential job working for Lew.

“At first, in a moment of just weakness and madness, I agreed to go forward with at least learning more about [the position] and talking to people,” Zeitlin said. “[Lew] vetted me fully. They offered me the role and at that point. … I went back to Tina, my wife, and she said, ‘Do you remember what happened the last time you went through this process?’ And so I backed out at that point. If anything about [Raymond] or others actually had validity to it, there’s not a chance they would’ve offered me actually a bigger role than [the U.N. position].”

But that doesn’t seem to check out either. Lew, who now works at Lindsay Goldberg, a private equity firm in New York, said through a colleague that he had no idea who Zeitlin is and that he never considered him for a job at the Treasury. Zeitlin, in response, referred me to Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Lew deputy. She declined to comment about Zeitlin’s potential job at the Treasury.

Then Resnick, Tapestry’s communications chief — she was named as the company’s interim CFO on Tuesday — joined full throttle in Zeitlin’s defense. She emailed a wide-ranging assault on any of the questions that appeared to have sunk Zeitlin’s U.N. nomination in 2009. “Actually, there is, in fact, no more to this than a Jim DeMint political attack,” she wrote. (DeMint is a conservative former U.S. representative and senator from South Carolina. He did not respond to an email seeking comment.)

“DeMint and other far right-wing senators were desperate to take down another Obama nominee before the full Senate vote. … Jide was collateral damage in a wider game,” Resnick wrote. (At one point, she went so far as to claim that Zeitlin had learned of Raymond’s existence only when the White House “diligenced the claim.”)

By July, Clare Locke, a law firm representing Zeitlin, had dispatched a letter threatening a libel suit. The letter alleged that I had misled Zeitlin by originally telling him I intended to publish the article in Air Mail and that a subsequent potential publisher — the Foundation for Financial Journalism, for whom I am treasurer and a director — is a tool for short-sellers and vested financial interests. (Air Mail’s director of communications, Anna Bradlee, said, “A few months ago, the allegations that William Cohan presented to us could not be fully corroborated. He’s a dogged reporter so he took the piece elsewhere, and as of yesterday he was able to get corroboration from Tapestry itself.” The Foundation for Financial Journalism said it decided not to publish the article because, as its editor, Roddy Boyd, put it, “small shop, lots of stories, limited bandwidth.” I’m a freelance writer, and sometimes articles commissioned for one publication are later published elsewhere.)

Clare Locke subsequently sent a second letter accusing me of using a fictitious name and email address — I did not — and placing an electronic “tracking bug” on an email — their term for using a “read receipt” to confirm that Coach’s former CEO had received my email.

In the end, Zeitlin’s downfall occurred before a word was published. He had some common language in his employment contract in which he stipulated that he had never been the subject of any allegation of “harassment, discrimination, retaliation, or sexual or other misconduct” and agreed that “any act or omission” on his part that could have a “material adverse effect” on Tapestry and “its reputation” would be considered “cause” for his termination. Only days after Tapestry’s lawyers began asking questions, Zeitlin stepped down.

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