Friday, May 15, 2026
They Were Promised New Septic Tanks. Trump Called It ‘Illegal DEI.’
They Were Promised New Septic Tanks. Trump Called It ‘Illegal DEI.’
“The Trump administration ended a settlement with Alabama that provided funding for septic tanks in the Black Belt region, a predominantly Black area with a long history of sewage issues. The settlement, which was part of the Biden administration’s first environmental justice investigation, aimed to address the sanitation crisis disproportionately affecting Black residents. Without federal aid, local nonprofits are struggling to install septic systems, leaving many homeowners without a solution.
The Justice Department ended a deal that had helped fund a solution to the sewage crisis in rural Alabama. “Almost like we are starting all over again,” one activist said.
Bernard Mokam spoke to more than a dozen residents in Alabama’s Black Belt region.
Behind Dana Anderson’s home in central Alabama, a plastic pipe carries waste from her toilet through her backyard, discarding it outdoors. Three or four times a year, a spell of heavy rain forces the excrement back up into the house.
It is a plight that has long plagued residents across Alabama’s Black Belt, a stretch of largely rural counties so named for its dark soil and history of slavery. Cotton flourished in the region for the same reasons that conventional septic tanks fail there: The soil is dense and holds onto water. Today there are more than 50,000 people in the region who pipe raw sewage into open trenches and pits.
Now, a seeming solution to the public health problem has been stymied by an unlikely force: the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Three years ago, the Biden administration concluded in its first-ever environmental justice investigation that Alabama officials had failed to adequately address the sanitation crisis disproportionately affecting the Black residents of Lowndes County. The state agreed to an interim agreement that unlocked millions of dollars in federal funding to provide homeowners with septic tanks that could handle the difficult soil.
But soon after President Trump returned to office last year, the Justice Department ended the settlement, calling it “illegal DEI.”
The administration also scuttled a separate $14 million E.P.A. grant that had been earmarked to install new systems and provide work force training across Lowndes, Hale and Wilcox Counties.
Community activists fear the region may be doomed to enduring wastewater challenges forever.
“We thought we had a solution,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, the founder of the Alabama-based Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, who has helped put a spotlight on the crisis. “It is almost like we are starting all over again.”
The funds have been filtering through the Alabama Department of Public Health to local nonprofit groups, which have taken on the responsibility of installing the systems.
Now, though, the money that flowed from the settlement will expire in October. So the groups are turning to whatever other funds they have and telling some homeowners that they may have to keep waiting for relief.
In interviews, many Black Belt residents said they had never heard of D.E.I. One woman even wondered whether the term originated with the president.
Some questioned what role race had actually played in their wastewater challenges. “I don’t think it’s a race issue,” said Ms. Anderson, noting that the leadership of Wilcox County was predominantly Black. She was one of the homeowners who would have gotten a new septic tank and is now out of luck.
But others tied the sanitation struggles to the legacies of slavery and segregation, linking the persistent poverty in the Black Belt to systemic racism.
The agreement that Alabama had reached with the Biden administration stopped the state from leveling fines and other penalties against Lowndes County residents who violated sanitation laws. It also ensured that the state would be an active participant in the solution — requiring it to track the number of residents without reliable sanitation, disseminate information about the health risks from raw sewage exposure, and seek funding sources to comply with the agreement.
In a statement, the Alabama Department of Health denied that it had discriminated against Black residents and said that it would continue “to expend grant funds associated with the installation of wastewater systems until funds expire.”
Some leaders fear the Supreme Court’s recent blow to the Voting Rights Actmay further diminish political support for the majority-Black region.
“We cannot return to a time when the basic needs of these communities were ignored,” said Representative Terri Sewell, who represents the region in Congress and had championed the 2023 federal agreement.
Across the Black Belt, circumstances vary. Some homeowners have straight pipes snaking behind their homes, where the untreated waste creeps over their property line onto their neighbor’s land. Others purchased conventional septic tanks decades ago, which have since failed and deteriorated into cesspools and lagoons.
The flies and odor can prevent homeowners from spending time in their backyards. One day in March, a property owner had a swarm of gnats perched on the walls of his bathtub that appeared to be waiting for waste to rise through the drain.
State researchers estimate that up to four million gallons of raw sewage enter the region’s water system per day.
The burden of installing septic systems falls on property owners if they live outside the limits of a municipal sewer system, as many in the Black Belt do. But many residents cannot afford the costly, engineered systems that are needed to withstand the impermeable clay soil. And local counties do not generate enough tax revenue to help.
In Lowndes County, for example, the poverty rate hovers around 30 percent, almost three times the national average.
Several nonprofit groups have taken on the work of installing septic tanks in the county. But two of them do not regularly share information, and one has implied that the other has committed fraud.
Still, the groups admit that the system would benefit from more collaboration. Some activists have faulted state officials for making local nonprofits play such a vital role.
“There needs to be an overseeing body,” said Carmelita Arnold, president of the Lowndes County Unincorporated Wastewater Program.
And the groups agree that without federal aid, the issue will persist.
“If the current administration doesn’t change their mind about funding, it won’t be solved,” said Sherry Bradley, the executive director of the Black Belt Unicorporated Wastewater Program. We have a solution, she added, “but it takes funding.”
Ms. Bradley worked at the state health department for four decades and oversaw the wastewater issue as the agency’s bureau of environmental services director.
She said she knew back then that there had been raw sewage on the ground, and had even issued violations in Lowndes County. But she said that she was not aware of the full extent of the crisis until 2017, when a United Nations report compared the conditions in the county to those in the developing world.
For many Black Belt residents, land has been passed down through generations.
Andrew Rives, 83, still raises horses and goats on the 40 acres that his grandfather purchased many years ago near Tyler, Ala., in Lowndes County.
He was proud of owning the land. After the Civil War, the government reneged on its promise to give emancipated people 40 acres and a mule, but Mr. Rives said his grandfather was determined to buy the 40 acres.
Waste flows from his mobile home through a 50-foot pipe into a trench near a creek. When it rains, he said, the waste ends up in the watershed.
Mr. Rives signed up for a new septic tank two years ago, but it is unclear if he will get one before the funding expires. The Lowndes County Unincorporated Wastewater Program has installed around 35 septic tanks since 2024. The group still has around 140 homeowners on its list and Ms. Arnold, the president, hopes to install 30 more systems by October. But slow permit approval could get in the way, as could bad weather.
The organization has also been hampered by a lack of cash reserves to be able to pay for the work upfront. Last May, it took out a $1 million loan from a local bank in order to make progress.
Murline Wilson, 67, has been promised a new septic tank at her home in Wilcox County. She’s eager for her grandchildren to be able to play in the backyard, but she feels terrible for the dozens of homeowners who won’t get one now.
Community outreach officials in the county have whittled a list of 100 homeowners hoping for septic tanks down to 20 by drawing 13 names from a hat, and then giving seven others priority because they signed up first.
“It is really sad. This is one of the poorest counties in Alabama, and we need them,” said Ms. Wilson, referring to the septic tanks. “I was just blessed to get funding.”
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
The supreme court’s takedown of American democracy is complete | Austin Sarat | The Guardian
The supreme court’s takedown of American democracy is complete | Austin Sarat
"Writing in 1943, the historian Henry Steele Commager delivered both a stern history lesson and a warning about the United States supreme court. The court, he said, had never been a friend to US democracy, and it never would be. For anyone committed to the advancement of majority rule, he added, judicial review “is wrong in theory and dangerous in practice”.
The danger that Commager noted was on full display on 29 April 2026, when the supreme court eviscerated section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As the Department of Justice explains, section 2 “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups … or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group”.
But the Voting Rights Act decision is only the latest in a string of decisions in which the conservative-dominated supreme court has used its version of constitutional interpretation to wage war on constitutional democracy. Those decisions have opened the floodgates to the corrupting influence of money in politics, removed the federal government from the business of ensuring that states do not draw legislative districts in ways that disadvantage minority voters, and given the green light to partisan gerrymandering.
As we try to come to terms with what the court did to section 2, we need to keep those other decisions in mind. They show what Commager long ago observed: that the only reliable way to preserve and improve US democracy is to act democratically by winning at the ballot box and prevailing in the legislative process.
That lesson should inspire a massive turnout in the November election and a mass movement to pressure Congress to take steps to protect and reinvigorate democratic institutions and practices in this country.
Before saying more about the court’s gutting of section 2, let’s recall the recent supreme court cases that undermined the pillars of US democracy.
In 2010, the court took a truly significant step in that direction when it handed down its ruling in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. That case arose, as the Brennan Center for Justice notes, “when a conservative nonprofit organization challenged campaign finance rules that stopped it from promoting and airing a film criticizing then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton”.
The court used the case to deliver the death knell to almost all campaign finance restrictions. In a 5-4 ruling, the court struck down “century-old prohibitions on corporate ‘independent’ spending – money that doesn’t go directly to a candidate or party”.
The majority held that under the first amendment, “corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited … [and] that political speech is indispensable to a democracy, which is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation”.
As the Brennan Center observes: “The justices who decided Citizens United held that independent spending could not pose a substantial risk of corruption … [and] that existing transparency rules would require all the new spending they were permitting to be fully transparent.”
Both assumptions, it adds, “have proven to be incorrect”, with Super Pacs playing key roles in recent presidential campaigns and even leading voter outreach operations.
In 2013, the court took the next step in its campaign against democracy, declaring two key provisions of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. One of them, section 4, contained a formula for determining which states had to obtain preclearance from the justice department before making any changes to their voting laws. The other, section 5, described the pre-clearance requirements.
Writing for the majority, chief justice John Roberts found that the Voting Rights Act was “no longer responsive to the current conditions” in the voting districts to which they were applied. He argued that sections 4 and 5 “represent an unconstitutional violation of the power to regulate elections that the Constitution reserves for the states”.
The result was a rash of new efforts to make voting burdensome for the very groups whose voting rights had been protected by the pre-clearance requirements of sections 4 and 5.
Step 3 in the court’s effort to turn the constitution into a weapon against democracy came in 2019, when it said that states were free to engage in partisan gerrymandering and to draw legislative districts with the express purpose of giving electoral advantages to the party in power.
Here again, Roberts led the way, turning to history to argue that, “aware of electoral districting problems”, the Framers “chose a characteristic approach, assigning the issue to the state legislatures, expressly checked and balanced by the Federal Congress”, with no “suggestion that the federal courts had a role to play”.
The court, as the attorney Emmet Bonderant argues, disregarded “thirty years of [its own] precedent” and reached a result that allows politicians to pick their voters and limits the ability of voters to pick those whom they prefer to represent them. It also allowed state legislatures to engage in racial gerrymandering if they claim it is motivated by partisan, not racial, considerations.
So it should not have been surprising that the court would do what it did on 29 April, when it made it almost impossible for anyone to prove that race plays a role in redistricting decisions.
The court found that the only way to do so is to provide convincing evidence that the legislatures intended to discriminate when they made those decisions – and it disregarded a clear congressional statement to the contrary.
In 1982, Congress enacted legislation to make clear that “a plaintiff could establish a violation of the section if the evidence established that … [a] standard, practice, or procedure being challenged had the result of denying a racial or language minority an equal opportunity to participate in the political process”.
The court swept aside what Congress did and decided that section 2 protected minority voters only from what justice Samuel Alito called “present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting” and nothing more.
Reacting to Alito’s reasoning, Georgia senator Raphael Warnock said that the court’s attack on section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “is nothing less than a massive and devastating blow – not only to our democracy, but particularly to people of color in the South … This question about intent is … misleading, and it ignores our history.”
In the end, the court may have ignored our history, but we should not ignore its history. Commager would not have been surprised by what has unfolded since 2010, but he would have warned Americans against despair. He would want us to get busy trying to save what is left of our democracy by using our votes and our voices.
There is no time to waste.
Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty"
US Democrats urge Jen Kiggans to resign for agreeing with racist ‘cotton-picking’ remark | US politics | The Guardian
US Democrats urge Jen Kiggans to resign for agreeing with racist ‘cotton-picking’ remark
"The Republican congresswoman says she did not condone radio host’s language
Jen Kiggans, a Republican congresswoman, has faced calls from Democrats to resign for agreeing with a radio host after he said top US House Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, should get his “cotton-picking hands off of Virginia”.
Kiggans, who represents Virginia’s second US House district, has said she was agreeing with the host that Jeffries – who is the first Black American to lead a party in Congress – should stay out of Virginia politics. She also said she did not condone the host’s language, which multiple Democrats criticized as racist.
The term “cotton-picking” is widely considered offensive due to the US history of slavery, when enslaved people – the overwhelming majority of whom were Black – picked cotton.
“If Hakeem Jeffries wants to be involved in Virginia politics, then I suggest he does what a bunch of New Yorkers are doing,” Rich Herrera, a conservative radio host, saidon Richmond’s Morning News on Monday. “Leave New York, move down here to Virginia. Run for office down here – you can represent us. If not, get your cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.
Kiggans replied: “That’s right. Ditto – yes, yes to that.”
She later issued a statement on X.
“The radio host should not have used that language and I do not – and did not – condone it. It was obvious to anyone listening that I was agreeing Hakeem Jeffries should stay out of Virginia,” Kiggans’s statement said.
On Tuesday morning, the interview was not available on the Richmond’s Morning News archive on the Apple Podcasts platform. It was listed on the Richmond’s Morning News website but didn’t seem as if it would download. A spokesperson for Audacy, which owns the radio station airing Richmond’s Morning News, has been asked for comment.
Christine Stephenson, a spokesperson for Jeffries, issued a statement on Tuesday saying that Kiggans had an opportunity to “disavow the vile, racist and dehumanizing comments from … Rich Herrera” but instead “she doubled down”.
“It was a stunning failure of judgment and leadership” for someone “representing a large, vibrant African American community in Virginia”, Stephenson’s statement added.
The statement also said it is “pathetic” to “endorse disgusting, vile and racist language”.
Katherine Clark, the US House minority whip, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said the Republican lawmaker should resign.
“Now they are using brazenly racist language to attack Black leaders,” Clark said on X.
“Every Republican should be denouncing this racist statement,” Newsom’s office added.
“I am deeply appalled by anyone who promotes this rhetoric,” Aaron Rouse, a Democratic Virginia state senator, said in a statement. “We are no longer enslaved on plantations. We now hold positions of power our ancestors fought for.”
Republicans currently hold slim majorities in the US Senate and House, but control is up for grabs in the midterm elections in November. After his second US presidency began in January 2025, Donald Trump launched a national mid-decade redistricting battle between the two parties that is also playing out in Virginia.
Virginia voters on 21 April approved a new Democratic-drawn congressional map in a special election that could have flipped four Republican US House seats. But the state supreme court on 8 May threw out the results, ruling in favor of a Republican challenge that Democratic lawmakers did not follow proper procedures when they passed the proposed referendum and put it on the ballot.
Virginia Democrats on Monday asked the US supreme court to revive the congressional map designed to boost their party’s chances in November’s midterm elections.
Kiggans is running for re-election in November’s midterms to a seat that is also being sought by Elaine Luria, a Democrat who previously served on the congressional committee that investigated the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol that was carried out by Trump supporters after his first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden."
Monday, May 11, 2026
Justice Department makes it easier to deport those with DACA status
Justice Department makes it easier to deport those with DACA status
“The Trump administration is making it easier to deport DACA recipients. A new precedent decision from the Board of Immigration Appeals states that being a DACA recipient is not sufficient grounds for deportation relief. This decision, stemming from the case of Catalina “Xóchitl” Santiago, potentially weakens DACA protections for hundreds of thousands of individuals.
The order in the case involving Catalina "Xóchitl" Santiago came from the Board of Immigration Appeals, an administrative court within the Justice Department.
The Trump administration is making it easier to deport immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
A new precedent decision published Friday by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) says being a DACA recipient is not enough reason to provide relief from deportation.
A three-judge panel of appellate immigration judges sided with Department of Homeland Security lawyers who appealed a decision from immigration judge Michael Pleters terminating removal proceedings for Catalina "Xóchitl" Santiago, citing Santiago's active DACA status. They sent the case back to a different immigration judge for review.
Although the decision does not mean Santiago will be immediately deported, it potentially weakens DACA protections for hundreds of thousands of others.
Santiago's case gained national attention after she was detained by Customs and Border Protection officers while boarding a domestic flight at the El Paso airport in August. She was placed in immigration detention until a federal judge granted her release last October. She has been fighting the threat of deportation in the immigration court system since.
The BIA is an administrative court within the Justice Department. After a case is heard by an immigration judge, both the immigrant and DHS have the right to appeal that decision to the BIA. BIA's public decisions set the precedent and tone for how immigration judges nationwide should make decisions and how the general public should interpret immigration law and policy. Friday's order is the latest step by the Trump administration to strip away protections from DACA recipients.
"For over a decade, DACA has endured relentless, politically motivated attacks," said Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, deputy director of Advocacy and Campaigns at United We Dream, an organization fighting for the rights of immigrants.
"This decision is yet another step in dismantling the program without the government taking responsibility for ending it outright. ... This is a quiet rollback of protections, and our communities are paying the price in real time."
The BIA order, which is technically known as an interim decision, notes that DHS argued Pleters, the immigration judge, should be recused from the case because he is married to Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, who has been outspoken about DACA issues on Capitol Hill, this case specifically and whose district includes El Paso. Neither the judge nor Escobar are identified by name in the interim order.
The BIA did not sustain DHS' appeal based on that argument, however, instead saying that "the Immigration Judge erred" by basing his decision to terminate removal proceedings solely on Santiago's DACA status.
DACA, created in 2012 to protect children who arrived in the country illegally prior to 2007 from deportation, now covers around half a million people. Starting last year, DHS officials began urging DACA recipients to self- deport, arguing that the program itself does not equate to automatically providing legal status.
The DACA program is meant to offer temporary protection from deportationbut is not an immediate path to citizenship or a green card. Participants have to renew their protection every two years.
This second Trump administration has tried to strip 505,000 DACA recipients, also known as Dreamers, of benefits, though no regulatory changes have been made to end the program. Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services said it would make DACA recipients ineligible for the federal health care marketplace and the Education Department said it was looking into five universities that offer financial help for DACA recipients.
In a letter to senators earlier this year, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that between January and November of last year, 261 DACA recipients were arrested and 86 were removed from the country.
In the letter, Noem reiterated that DACA is temporary.
"It comes with no right or entitlement to remain in the United States indefinitely," she wrote.
DHS did not respond to an immediate request for comment on whether active DACA recipients are at risk of removal.
Board of Immigration Appeals underscores Trump's policies
Over the last year, attorneys with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who represent DHS in immigration court, have increasingly appealed more decisions to the BIA.
According to a recent NPR analysis, BIA decisions backed government lawyers in 97% of publicly posted cases last year; that's at least 30 percentage points higher than the average over the past 16 years.
The board's decisions have made it harder for immigration courts to offer immigrants bond in lieu of detention. It's eased the way to deport migrants to countries other than their own. And a new proposed regulation would make it harder for people to appeal their immigration decisions at all.
All these actions over the last year came as the board pumped out 70 published decisions, a record number of precedent-setting cases.
Immigration courts are housed within the Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, at the Justice Department. They are not a part of the judiciary.“
Democrats express ‘grave concerns’ over secretive ICE deportation flights | US immigration | The Guardian
Democrats express ‘grave concerns’ over secretive ICE deportation flights
"A group of 40 House Democrats have described “grave concerns” over the Trump administration’s secretive program of deportation flights and demanded the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) address allegations of mistreatment and inhumane conditions on ICE charter jets.
In a letter shared with the Guardian and addressed to FAA administrator Bryan Bedford, the lawmakers describe the “urgent need for transparency” over ICE’s expanded use of commercial airliners to transfer detained immigrants and its “inappropriate and dangerous” efforts to shield these flights from public scrutiny.
“Credible reports indicate that individuals have been placed on flights without notice to counsel or family members, effectively disappearing from public view when flights are inappropriately shielded from tracking systems,” the letter states. “Families are left searching for their loved ones, and attorneys are denied meaningful opportunities to intervene, raising serious due process concerns.”
The letter references an investigation by the Guardian, based on leaked flight data, which revealed the Trump administration transported detained immigrants in ways that routinely violated their constitutional rights. The reporting also identified allegations of abuse and rights violations at a private detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, a central node in the administration’s deportation program.
The Trump administration’s hardline immigration agenda saw a surge in the number of ICE flights during 2025, according to monitoring by human rights groups that tracked an 84% increase from 2024.
“Concerningly, information regarding these [ICE] flights is nearly impossible to find, which undermines congressional oversight and prevents the public from understanding the scope and conditions of these flights,” the letter states.
The Trump administration has previously described claims of “hidden” or “weaponized” transfer and deportation flights as “categorically false” and argued its detention centers have “higher standards than most US prisons”.
The lawmakers ask the FAA to provide a detailed report of “all ICE air operations” since Trump was sworn into office, including flight origin and destination data as well as how many passengers were held onboard each flight. It addresses reporting by the Associated Press, which revealed how dozens of charter jets used for deportation flights were granted unusual permission by the FAA to block certain data, including tail numbers, from public flight tracking sites – making it harder to monitor ICE air operations in public.
“This transparency is important for the American people to understand what is happening every single day because there are so many violations of due process and legal rights happening that if people knew about them they would find it deeply problematic,” said New Jersey congressman Rob Menendez, the letter’s lead author. “We want people to understand what is happening on their dime.”
The signatories also include Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who authored a bill earlier this year aiming to block airline operators from hiding their tracking data while carrying out federal government services, as well as New York congressman Jerry Nadler, the ranking member on the House judiciary committee.
The letter also calls on the FAA to provide detailed information on how the agency assesses humanitarian conditions on ICE flights, including the controversial use of full body restraints during deportation flights. The lawmakers ask the FAA how restraining passengers in this manner affects evacuation and emergency procedures onboard and how ICE officers and flight attendants are trained to handle such scenarios.
The Trump administration has previously stated its use of restraints on ICE flights as “long-standing, standard ICE protocol” designed to “ensure the safety and well being of both detainees and the officers/ agents accompanying them” and argued the practices are “fully in line with established legal standards”.
Menendez, who sits on the influential energy and commerce committee, said he expected representatives from airline companies working with ICE as well as private companies operating detention centers to face greater pressure to testify before Congress should Democrats win back control of the House following the midterm elections later this year.
“We are putting pressure on now. But when we have the majority and the gavels there is so much more work and oversight that we will be able to do to demand and get accountability for the American people so all options will be on the table,” Menendez said.
“People who think they can do this [immigration detention and transfer] work without there being any consequence are wrong.”
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