This is the third in a three-part series on gun violence.
In part one, long after the shooting at her old high school, Megan Stielstra worries about her father’s heart.
In part two, Nicole Piasecki writes a letter to the wife of the shooter who killed her father.
In part three, Megan and Nicole talk about the shooting that changed their lives, who owns the story, and what to do with fear.
* * *
On December 16th, 1993 there was a shooting at my high school in Chelsea, Michigan. A sleepy little town west of Ann Arbor, the reporter called it. I was a freshman in college. I watched it unfold on the national news from a thousand miles away. This was years before Twitter, before we all had cell phones in our pockets. I couldn’t get through to anyone at home. I couldn’t find out what had happened. One fatality, said the reporter. A local school administrator.
My father was a local school administrator.
Hours later, I heard his voice on the phone. Anyone who has been through such waiting knows that planet of relief. But here’s the brutal truth: as I learned that my dad was alive, another girl learned that hers was not. Our superintendent and friend, Joe Piasecki, was killed that day. He had a daughter a year younger than me. Her name was Nicole.
I’ve thought about writing to her at least a hundred times.
A few years ago I started working on an essay about my relationship with my dad. He lives on an island now in the Gulf of Alaska. He had heart problems while hunting in the mountains, and, after surgery, went right back up. I was angry at the risks I thought he was taking with his health. I was scared I would lose him and I didn’t know what to do with that fear, but I learned something in the writing about the choices we make to keep living. He’d quit his job and moved to Alaska not long after the shooting. He needed those miles. He needed that mountain. I get that now.
After I finished a draft, I looked Nicole up online. She’s a writer now, and a writing teacher, same as me. How do you start with someone you haven’t spoken with in 20 years? I wrote. I sent her the essay, asking if she wanted me to change anything, cut anything, leave it in a drawer. I’d never given anyone that kind of power over my work but in in this case it felt vital. It didn’t matter who I was as a writer. It mattered who I was as a person. Read more…
This is the second in a three-part series on gun violence.
In part one, long after the shooting at her old high school, Megan Stielstra worries about her father’s heart.
In part two, Nicole Piasecki writes a letter to the wife of the shooter who killed her father.
In part three, Megan and Nicole talk about the shooting that changed their lives, who owns the story, and what to do with fear.
* * *
Dear Alice,
1. I’ve started to write this letter at least 20 times in as many years. Just imagine me sitting alone in my office surrounded by crumpled pieces of paper. Since you’re a writer yourself, I know you understand the difficulty of saying it just right. I have spent way too much time trying, and I need to find a way to finally be done with this.
2. When I first walked into your high school English class in Chelsea, Michigan, I saw a light in you that I wanted for myself. Your chestnut eyes were always welcoming, your smile always subtle, yet warm. In person, you were impossible to hate.
3. “The center is a point,” you said to our class during the daily segment on commonly misused phrases. “One centers on a point, not around one.”
4. I had never given much thought to my teachers’ lives outside of school. I knew you within the context of your 11th and 12th grade classes. I rarely even saw you in the hallways of Chelsea High. You were a fixture in that corner classroom, a woman who seemed to exist wholly there. I knew you as humble and intelligent, absent of the complexities and fallibility of the literary characters we discussed in class.
I never would have imagined that you were married to a man who kept a gun beneath his pillow.
5. I took Chemistry I with your husband in 1992, when I was a sophomore. I remember that he played loud rock music on the stereo while we did experiments. He wore that plaid and wool hunting jacket and drank coffee out of that small, plastic cup that doubled as a lid to his tall vacuum thermos. His hands sometimes shook when he lifted the cup to his lips. He kept his haggard ponytail pulled back with a thin rubber band. I remember the fluorescent classroom lights shining on his balding head as he lectured. During class, he stroked each side of his wide mustache with his thumb and first finger, while he waited near a wooden podium for a student to answer a question. Sometimes he started class at his instructor’s desk with a lab sink and used test tubes and chemical reactions to create sudden, violent bursts of flames. That was his signature method of making chemistry seem cool.
Though I interpreted his personality as arrogant and strange, I didn’t dislike himas much as I quietly despised the subject of chemistry. You should know that I have always struggled with solving complicated formulas.
6. My dad never told me things that a teenager didn’t need to know, and I never thought to ask him. He mostly kept his work life separate from home life. I didn’t know what a school superintendent did all day, and I never thought to ask him.
One night, though, when I was standing in our kitchen by the sliding glass door, my dad walked up to me with his hands in the pockets of his faded weekend jeans and said, “Hey Nick? When you went in early for chemistry help, did Mr. Leith ever act weird around you?”
I looked at my dad for a few seconds and wrinkled my brow. “What are you talking about?” I replied.
My dad dropped the subject without explanation, and I quickly forgot about it.
Even when it was just the two of us — your husband and I — in his chemistry lab, he had never said anything inappropriate to me. He just buzzed around the room while I sat in the middle, an island among a sea of empty desks. He answered my questions about the homework and continued preparing for the school day.
I wasn’t a pretty girl. I was self-conscious and tomboyish. Acne spotted my jaw line and chin. My chest was as flat as a boy’s. And I was the boss’s daughter.
You should know that I have always struggled with solving complicated formulas.
7. Earlier that year, the mother of a quiet, long-haired, senior girl called our home telephone at an unusually late hour. I answered the call in the kitchen. “Dad, it’s for you,” I said in the direction of the living room. He took the call in private.
8. One of my favorite photographs of my dad is the one where he’s sitting next to my hospital bed at St. Joe’s in Ypsilanti, right after my knee surgery during my senior year. He sat in that uncomfortable chair, staying day and night, as my left leg moved, bending and straightening in a Constant Passive Motion machine. In the photograph, he’s wearing jeans and a blue sweater with a tired, loyal smile on his face. He only stepped out of the room when the nurse arrived to help me use the bedpan. Back then I never saw his commitment to me as remarkable because it was all I had known.
9. Through high school it seemed that my teachers somehow belonged to me. “Mrs. Leith is my favorite teacher,” I often said, not even realizing the implication of the possessive determiner, the inherent egocentricity of the teenage mind that places everyone and everything in her life on a single orbit.
10. Surely you know all about the giddiness that your high school students felt on the Thursday before Christmas break. My energy that day felt boundless. I practically bounced from seventh period, across the grass, and straight to the outer window of my dad’s office. I knocked on his window, and he tilted it open. He was eating an ice cream sundae from McDonald’s out of a small, clear, plastic cup. He smiled his full-faced smile when he saw me, and I returned a grin. He reached out and dropped the car keys into my hand so I could drive to physical therapy. My mom planned to pick him up later so they could finish the Christmas shopping. As I turned to walk toward the parking lot, my dad said, “Have fun. See you later,” and tipped the window to close it.
At physical therapy, my friend Carey and I both rode Stairmasters, and we listened to the Lemonheads album, It’s a Shame about Ray, on the stereo. We moved our arms like we were dancing. The snow fell quietly outside; the cold windows had white paper snowflakes taped to them.
Mid-workout we overheard someone say there had been a shooting at Chelsea High School. We stepped off of the Stairmasters and huddled around an AM/FM radio to try to learn more. Our first instincts developed concern for our friends who may have been attending a sporting event in the school gymnasium. We imagined that the shooter must have been a kid from another school.
It never crossed our minds that the shooter could have been your husband or that the victim could have been my dad.
Carey and I changed into our street clothes without finishing our workout. We quietly puzzled over all the possible scenarios that could have led to gunfire in our small hometown, but we couldn’t add it up.
11. When the details of that afternoon — the day your husband killed my dad — slowly leaked out from police reports and school employees, I learned that your husband had been reprimanded for sexually harassing female students in the school hallways. I learned that he was on the verge of losing his job. I learned that your husband had stormed out of the grievance meeting with administrators not long after the school day had ended. I learned that you and your husband carpooled home from school together that day. I learned that you were with him and his anger for the 20 minutes it took you to drive home.
I learned that when you arrived home, your husband disappeared upstairs. He returned with a 9mm, semi-automatic pistol in his hand. He asserted, “He is going to die.”
I learned that your husband got back into the car alone and sped toward the school administration building where my dad and two others continued the meeting.
Twenty minutes.
That’s how long it took your husband to drive back to the high school.
I learned that you didn’t call the police whose small-town headquarters were only blocks from the school. You didn’t call the administration building to warn the three men whose lives were at stake, sitting ducks. Instead, you called the teachers’ union office in Ann Arbor, 20 minutes in the opposite direction.
Since nobody had cell phones then, my dad and the others in the room received no proper warning that your husband was coming back to the meeting with a gun and intent to kill.
Your husband wore a long trench coat with pockets of ammunition. He squealed his tires in the school parking lot. He told someone who approached him that he had “unfinished business” to attend to.
He walked into the administration building. Turned the corner into the doorway of the small office. He lifted the gun and pointed it, first, at my dad (Daddy, Dada, Pops).
My 47-year-old dad’s last words were: “Steve, you don’t have to do this.”
Your husband fired round after round. He killed my dad. He injured two others.
You didn’t call the police.
12. Why Alice? Why the fuck didn’t you call the police? Why? Why? Why?
13. After your husband shot my dad, a pocket of time existed where my dad was not gone, and it was still just a Thursday in December. I was still just a teenager, happily riding the Stairmaster at MedSport looking through icy windows with paper snowflakes taped to them. My brother, Brian, was still just a fresh-faced Private First Class, wrenching bolts on the engines of fleet vehicles at the Marine base in Okinawa, Japan. My mom was still a wife of 26 years and a middle school special education teacher at a neighboring school district.
You were still just my favorite high school teacher — the one who made me love words.
14. I can’t remember if it was you or I who initiated the meeting two days after your husband murdered my dad at our school. I hadn’t slept since I found out. I had been desperately pulling his photographs from sticky plastic pages of family photo albums and taping them to the bathroom mirrors: Dad sitting on a chaise lounge chair on the beach in Cancun the previous December; Dad sitting on a tree stump by Higgins Lake smoking a corn-cob pipe and holding a cup of morning coffee in his relaxed hand; Dad with his arm around my brother Brian at the Marine boot camp graduation ceremony at Camp Lejeune less than four months prior.
Still, I was worried about how you might be feeling. I was eager to believe in you — to affirm that we were both unknowing victims of your husband’s violent actions, to tell you that I didn’t blame you.
I sensed some hesitation from my mom, but she took me to meet you anyway. The story was still developing. I couldn’t imagine any scenario wherein you were not the hero. She could.
We learned that you had been staying with your friend and colleague, Pam. When we arrived at her house, Pam took our damp jackets, and I saw you sitting alone in a wingback chair at the far corner of the large room. You didn’t rise to greet us when we entered the Christmas-ready living room. Your face displayed a low, distant gaze. Your fingertips fidgeted with a pinch of fabric on the bottom of your sweater. I don’t know what kind of welcome I had expected.
Finally, you approached me. You said something like, “This is for you,” and your tone was solemn. You reached out and handed me a hardcover book and hand-written letter. Did the book have a tree on the cover? Do you remember the title?
I never read the book. I meant to. My head was too clouded with grief in those days to concentrate for long. I stuffed the book into a drawer in my bedroom and never looked at it again.
I did read your short letter. Your words were scrolled diagonally across the yellow legal paper that you’d folded like a business letter. The one thing I’ve always remembered about the letter was the part I understood the least. “Maybe we can make a circle someday,” it said.
I’ve been wanting to ask you for years: What does that mean?
15. I returned to school only three weeks after my dad died, often arriving late and unprepared, driving up to the school in the used Chevy Corsica that was still registered in his name. My other teachers offered me unspoken allowances for my unimpressive academic performance during the second half of my senior year. My government teacher passed my late, biased research paper that took a stance against the death penalty. I called capital punishment “an option that doesn’t warrant enough suffering.”
I was scheduled to take your English class, but the counselor intervened. Instead, I met with your student teacher in the library. I don’t remember her name, only that her severe psoriasis frightened and distracted me. I was afraid it was contagious, and I couldn’t bear any other complications in my life. We read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as an independent study. I was just barely getting by. I remember how tired Santiago was while trying to reel that large Marlin into the boat. I supposed that I wouldn’t have had it in me to keep going like he did.
On the one-month anniversary of my dad’s death, I doodled “un mes” on the top of my worksheet in Spanish III, instead of listening to Señora’s lecture. I wanted someone to understand the dispassionate nature of time — that it kept moving forward, creating more and more space between my dad’s terminated life and my enduring one. It had been one month since your husband killed my father. But I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t scream or cry or even say that I was sinking, that I needed help. I couldn’t say that my 17 years of gentle experiences hadn’t come close to preparing me for this.
That final semester of high school, I don’t remember speaking to you. Surely I must have seen you in the hallways. Did you see me?
If I could forget about Hamlet, the Lilliputians, stream-of-consciousness writing, and all the prefixes and suffixes in the English language, maybe nothing would remind me of you.
16. It was confusing to see you in the courtroom, on the opposing side, sitting next to your mother-in-law, then taking the stand, making a case for your husband’s insanity defense, trying to get the jury to say, not guilty. The defense attorney led you through a detailed account of your husband’s bizarre actions. I remember the story of your husband killing your pet bird, how he broke its neck with his bare hands. You recounted a Christmas when he curled himself beneath a piano and sobbed like a baby. You explained his obsessions with guns — how he usually kept one within reach.
An aisle in the courtroom divided my family from his, yours. You never once looked across.
I often wonder why I expected some sort of loyalty from you. I was one of thousands of students who had filtered through that corner classroom, but you had made me feel like an insider.
17. I know exactly where I was when I learned that you lost your battle with cancer. I stood courtside in the main gymnasium at Adrian College. I wore my baggy, white shorts, a bulky knee brace, and jersey #25, covered with a bright gold warm-up top. My blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and it was wispy on top from my sweat. I was a sophomore at Adrian and had just finished playing an NCAA, Division III basketball game. My mom came to watch my game because it was the second anniversary of the day your husband killed my dad, and anniversaries held a weakening force for us. It seemed that we should be together.
“I have some news,” Mom said. She had done the right thing by waiting until after the game was over to tell me.
“Alice died.”
“When?” I asked.
“Her funeral was today.”
18. You taught me to love the nuances of words. You were the first to introduce me to Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Swift. If I could forget about Hamlet, the Lilliputians, stream-of-consciousness writing, and all the prefixes and suffixes in the English language, maybe nothing would remind me of you, except there will always be circles.
19. Did you ever attend the National Council of Teachers of English convention? I have barely missed a year since I began my own career as an English teacher.You’re gone, so I don’t have to worry about running into you there, in an elevator going up or in the cafeteria at lunch. But I must admit that sometimes I still think I see you places. I see a modestly dressed woman with shoulder-length brown hair, and downward-pointing chestnut eyes, and my breath catches in my throat. Then I remember.
20. The last time I saw you in the flesh, I was a freshman at Adrian College and you were still an English teacher at Chelsea High School. In a moment of capriciousness, I drove the hour north on Michigan 52 and parked in a visitor space in front of the high school. The campus was quiet. All the students sat in class, which left me alone to walk the cement pathways.
I walked past the art building where I had taken half a dozen studio art classes in drawing, painting, pottery, and jewelry; past the science building where I had taken chemistry with your husband; past the building where I had taken Spanish every semester; past the administration building where I had spent so much time waiting for my dad so that we could ride home together, the same building where I saw him, an hour before he died, eating his ice cream sundae and smiling through the propped-open window.
It still seemed strange that life just continued on in that place. A different teacher stood in front of your husband’s old classroom, a new superintendent sat at a desk in my dad’s old office, new kids replaced those of us who had graduated.
I entered the English building and walked down the locker-encased hallway to your classroom.
I peeked into your classroom window, a thin, rectangular pane of glass. I saw you leaning on a desk just a few feet from the door, helping a small group of students. I stared through the window until you saw me. When you looked up, your body froze for a moment. I wonder what you were thinking then.
I hadn’t told anyone that I was coming, and still find it hard to explain my motivation to see you that day.
You looked weak, frail, and sick, a dimmer version of your former self. I remember that you stepped into the hallway and faced me. You looked me straight in the eyes. You wore an expression that I decoded as a combination of mercy and fear.
Even with your full attention, I couldn’t speak a single word. All I could do is stand in the hallway and look at you, standing three feet away.
I searched your face and eyes, and you searched mine, as if all the questions were written there. You never asked me why I had come. You seemed to understand, maybe more than I did.
How long did we stand there, saying nothing at all?
21. It never occurred to me that you would die from a cancer recurrence soon after that day we stood together in silence outside of your classroom door at Chelsea High School. I didn’t know our impromptu meeting would signify a final goodbye between teacher and student, woman and girl.
I always imagined that someday I would write you a letter, that someday you would hold it in your hands. That someday I would have the answers to all of the questions I never had the courage to ask.
* * *
Nicole Piasecki teaches undergraduate writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado Denver. Her creative writing has been featured in Hippocampus, Motherwell, Brevity Blog, Word Riot, and Gertrude Pressand is forthcoming in Literary Mama.
The "Wall of Guns" at the 2013 NRA Convention in Houston, Texas. (K Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)
Crime levels are down in the United States, gun manufacturers are laying off workers and going bankrupt in the face of plunging sales and profits, yet that won’t stop the National Rifle Association from using fear to manipulate people into buying a gun.
At The New Republic, “military veteran, big game hunter, and gun owner” Elliott Woods goes undercover at the Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade Show in Las Vegas to learn about how the NRA marketing machine has gone into high gear to combat what they’re calling the “Trump Slump.”
Since the 1990s, the NRA has been enormously successful at stoking white Americans’ fears about their darker-skinned fellow citizens while simultaneously cultivating paranoia about left-wing politicians seeking to take away their guns. Barack Obama’s presidency was a watershed event in this dynamic. During his eight years in office, the NRA’s membership grew from three million to five million. The organization’s combined political spending during election cycles increased from about $6 million in 1998 to nearly $60 million in 2016. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of gun owners who cite “protection” as their top reason for owning a gun grew from 26 percent in 1999 to 67 percent in 2017. During roughly the same period, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, firearms manufacturers increased their annual output of handguns more than fourfold, from 1.3 million to 5.6 million. Firearms imports also surged, from about 900,000 guns in 1999 to over five million in 2016.
Last September, the parent company of gunmaker Smith & Wesson released its first-quarter 2018 earnings report: Net sales were down 37.7 percent from the previous year, and shares had lost a quarter of their value. The company had to cut 200 jobs later that year. At Sturm Ruger, another major gunmaker, the picture was equally bleak. Profits were down by half, and net sales were down by more than 25 percent. In February, Remington, which manufactured the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle that Adam Lanza used in the Sandy Hook massacre, filed for bankruptcy. “Nothing was worse for the gun industry and the NRA than getting Trump elected,” Richard Feldman, a former NRA lobbyist and author of Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist, said. “I’ve been very nervous for a long time over the [gun] issue being the province of the Republican Party, and now we see it coming to a head, because the NRA got in bed so hard with Trump.”
Viktøs, an apparel company based in Wisconsin, ran a billboard-length ad for flip-flops next to one of the escalators, with the tagline GEAR FOR YOUR DAILY GUNFIGHT. At one of the many booths promoting AR-15 accessories, I found a poster from a Florida-based custom AR-15 manufacturer called Spike’s Tactical that showed a squad of thickly muscled dudes in the foreground, backs to the viewer, dressed in jeans, black T-shirts, and ratty ball caps. Each of them wore body armor and carried some iteration of an AR-15. They stood in front of a concrete Jersey barrier, facing down a mob of ruffians wearing ski masks and bandannas who appeared to be burning down a city. None of the rioters carried firearms. The text at the top of the poster said: BERKELEY—PORTLAND—CHARLOTTESVILLE—BOSTON—>NOT TODAY ANTIFA.
I’d heard passing comments all week about the threats posed by Black Lives Matter and the so-called antifa, and I wondered how we had reached a point where conservative white Americans fantasize about taking to the streets, bristling with weapons, flanked by fellow vigilantes, prepared to violently confront other Americans who are exercising their First Amendment rights to assembly and free speech. It was one thing for the NRA and the gun industry to promote concealed carry of small pistols to defend against muggers and rapists, but it was another thing entirely to promote group vigilantism at a time when the country’s racial and political tensions are actually getting people killed.
Ian Frisch| Longreads | April 2018 | 32 minutes (8,040 words)
When 59-year-old Jack Mack wandered from picket station to picket station to ask the Question, he tried as best he could to ease into the conversation. He didn’t want to scare anyone off. It was two months into the strike, and tensions were high. “You know, we handle some pretty nasty stuff in there,” he’d say. Or, if the guy was older: “C’mon, you’ve been here as long as I have! You know everyone!” Sometimes, if he already knew the person, he’d cut to the chase: “Wasn’t there a guy you worked with down there that was diagnosed with cancer a few years back? Did he make it through?” If they didn’t answer, staring instead at their steel-toed boots, Mack would lean in and say, “You know, I’m sure you heard, but I was diagnosed with cancer myself. Beat it, but — you know.” Then he’d turn toward the sprawling complex across the street — the site of the only job he’d ever had — and nod, adjusting the cap perched on his head. “Yup. Forty years.” He’d inhale deeply, nearly a sigh. “That’s a lot of hours around those chemicals.” He’d shake his head, unsure if he should blame himself or Momentive Performance Materials, the chemical plant in Waterford, New York, where he had dedicated so many years of his life.
Like Mack, many of the employees on the picket line had worked at Momentive for decades, and while they didn’t know for sure that working at the plant caused their cells to metastasize, the workers certainly knew of the inherent consequences that stemmed from handling carcinogenic chemicals on a day-to-day basis. That fear of a link is what troubled Mack and his cohort, and it’s why in November 2016, nearly 700 unionized workers at Momentive went on strike, protesting what they thought was an unfair contract — one that pushed for more expensive and restrictive health insurance for workers and the elimination of health care for retirees altogether, “many of whom,” according to leaflets handed out during the strike, “are suffering from job-related illnesses caused by exposure to dangerous chemicals.” For decades, the workers had mixed and churned chemicals in a variety of forms to produce an endless array of products, which included specialized goods such as F14 fluids and rubber stoppers on syringes along with items encountered on a day-to-day basis like exterior coatings for soft drink bottles and the rubber used to manufacture nipples for baby bottles.
Now, though, those same workers were walking out for the first time, and the union outfitted a defunct hot dog shack across from the plant into a headquarters. Nearly all of them had been picketing the plant’s nine entrances 24 hours a day, powering through snow squalls, huddling around burn barrels for warmth, trudging through slush puddles.
Union strikers around a burn barrel outside Momentive’s Water Treatment Facility. (Jonno Rattman)
On the picket line, in rare close quarters with men who worked elsewhere in the massive plant, Mack learned his coworkers’ stories. He took a few minutes out of each day to ask strikers if they’d had cancer or knew anyone who did. Sometime after Christmas, Mack had started jotting down the names — current and retired, dead and alive.
He kept the handwritten list folded up in his jacket pocket, adding new sheets as he collected new stories: six pancreatic cancers, seven bladder cancers, nine brain cancers, 11 throat cancers, 18 prostate cancers — spine, skin, stomach, and more. While these are cancers that do afflict men of a certain age—according to the American Cancer Society, one in nine men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer—the diagnoses outpace certain national averages. Brain cancer afflicts .006 percent of adult males, far below the roughly 2 percent of the strikers with throat cancer whom Mack surveyed. By mid-January, he had 85 names. Many of these men had worked in the plant for more than 20 years, which meant they’d tallied up decades of exposure to dangerous chemicals. (Of the scores of men on Mack’s list, I’ve independently confirmed the cancer diagnoses of two dozen, through interviews with either the men themselves or, in the case of 11 who died, with family and friends.) Mack himself had long known coworkers with cancer. To him and other employees, it was almost commonplace to know a guy who had been diagnosed. “Three other electricians I worked with in waste treatment also have cancer,” he told me. “Long-term exposure — in some of these buildings, there’s no way you can avoid that.” Mack, an electrician who works on the machines that process the plant’s chemical waste was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2014. His brother, who also works at the plant, was diagnosed with tongue cancer the next year. Their father, who worked at the plant for 36 years, died of cancer in 1994.
Mack’s oncologist, Dr. Kandasamy Perumal, who specializes in urology and has operated a practice in nearby Troy for 35 years, is no stranger to cases like his. “As time went on, more and more people came from that area with instances of malignancy, rather than Troy or Latham or other towns. My practice sees comparatively disproportionate numbers of tumors from people who live in Waterford and Mechanicville,” he said. “But do we know if they all worked at the plant? I don’t know for certain,” he added, explaining that his practice is not obligated to collect workplace information from patients. Momentive said that it was unaware of any chronic health problems among employees as a result of exposure to raw materials, and that their well-being is its highest priority. “The company takes all necessary actions to ensure strict adherence to all federal and state health guidelines,” said a Momentive spokesperson.
There were risks in taking on this kind of work, Mack knew. So did many of the men whose names were folded up in his pocket. But there had been some promise of security at Momentive, a belief that their jobs would take care of them — a good living, a secure retirement, health care. Today they’re not so sure. After the plant was acquired by a private equity firm in 2006, things took a dark turn. A decade of control by Wall Street brought pay cuts and a litany of increasingly rancorous labor disputes — culminating in the massive strike.
When I visited Momentive in January 2017, workers sat at the booths inside the hot dog shack wearing camouflage jackets, reading newspapers, drinking coffee, and eating hot dogs and stale pastries. One checked in picketers who, after nine weeks on the line, were eligible for unemployment. They were also paid $400 a week by the union. The 104-day walkout began November 2 and ended February 14, and during that time these men were constantly on edge, both about the security of their job but more importantly about the precariousness of the benefits they desperately relied upon. The men were on strike for many reasons, but high-quality, affordable health care was their main concern. It was what they needed most.
Bill Tullock, a 55-year-old senior advanced control operator, whose doctor had found a tumor in his throat during an endoscopy for acid reflux in 2015, maintains that he’d never have gotten the routine procedure that led to his cancer diagnosis without Momentive’s old health insurance. At the time, his annual deductible was $500; now it’s $3,500. Tullock doesn’t solely blame the plant for his cancer, but he’s adamant that were it not for the generous coverage, he’d never have known he was sick.
“I dodged a bullet,” Tullock said of his battle with cancer, which, thanks to the low deductible he paid courtesy of his previous health care coverage, was caught early. “With the new insurance, I am pretty confident I would’ve never had the endoscopy, and would’ve never known there was a tumor. Then it would’ve spread, and I wouldn’t have known.” Under the new contract, once he retires, he’s on his own. “I dedicated myself to this place,” he said during the strike in January, sitting in the basement of the hot dog shack, holding back tears. “I should have never started working here. And now they are trying to give us this shit insurance and just — what, ‘Go die?’” He rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Our health insurance is like the final firewall of personal protection,” he said. “It’s all we’ve got.”
Bill Tullock was told by his doctor to get an endoscopy in 2015; it turned out he had a tumor in his stomach. Jack Mack sits down with his list of sick workers while on a break at union headquarters. (Jonno Rattman)
The men who’ve worked at the plant for decades and battled cancer — whether they think it’s from the chemicals they handled or not — now face a task familiar to millions, one from which they thought they had a reprieve: They must either sign up for the company’s onerous coverage or fend for themselves to get health insurance, with costs varying widely through the complicated, cumbersome public exchange overseen by the government — the precariousness of which is compounded by the Trump administration’s promise to gut the Affordable Care Act, leaving workers in an even more fretful state of uncertainty.
Like so many Americans, they’re threatened by a toxic triumvirate of lax chemical-safety regulations, costly health coverage, and growing pressures on Wall Street to perform — the latter of which has forced businesses to perform under expectations that set them up to fail, with employees taking the brunt of the downfall
The decade of private equity ownership had gradually worn down a generation of workers, stoking a divide between those who would be taken care of and those who would go without. “Sacrifices were made with the expectation that we would get adequate health care when we retired,” Mack said. “If you are going to work in environments like this, you are going to need affordable health care.” The strike marked dividing lines between worker and owner and financier, but it also revealed a rift so deep that it was often left unspoken: What do American workers owe to one another?
***
Waterford, New York, is one of a cluster of manufacturing towns situated north of Albany, where the Mohawk River joins the Hudson. It blossomed into a factory hub as early as the mid-1800s and was known for its paper mills. A reported stop on the Underground Railroad, it was even visited by Alexander Hamilton and Frederick Douglass. Drive into town from across the Hudson and you’re greeted by a memorial to Waterford’s veterans, including men who fought in the Revolutionary War. Keep driving north on Route 4, past the village center, and the Momentive complex flanks both sides of the road, sprawling across an 800-acre plot.
The town greeting in Waterford, New York. (Jonno Rattman)
The chemical plant is one of Saratoga County’s largest employers. First built by General Electric in 1947, it anchors the region both economically and culturally. For decades, the plant with its hundreds of union jobs offered its primarily male workforce a stable, middle-class kind of prosperity, one where high school graduates could eventually earn a six-figure salary. There was a sense of local pride: The soles of the boots in which Neil Armstrong took his one small step were made of silicone rubber manufactured here. “If you’re from here, this is where you work,” said Vinny Anatriello, a third-generation employee. “And if you don’t work here, you work in the school where all the guys’ kids go to, or you work in the doctor’s office where the guy’s sick wife goes, or you work in the grocery store.”
It’s no secret to the workers that materials used in Momentive’s Waterford plant can be dangerous. It’s been this way for decades. The plant sources silicone ore and, through reactions with various chemicals, produces materials used in consumer products ranging from shampoo and medical equipment to caulking and car parts. Numerous longtime workers say that the current operations use dozens of toxic chemicals, among them benzene, lead, mercury, and hydrochloric acid. The waste it has produced over the years — over 11.4 million pounds in 2015 alone — has at times included more than three dozen toxic chemicals, 11 of which are carcinogens, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
There used to be even more, workers say, decades ago when GE owned the plant. Numerous workers said that until the early 1980s, they cleaned their winter coats with pure trichlorethylene, now a known carcinogen, and used fiberglass and lead as fillers in chemical mixtures. For some processes, they weighed out raw lead by hand. “Back then we’d scoop it like it was salt,” said George LaMarche, 65, who retired in July 2017 after 44 years at the plant and whose doctor is closely monitoring his elevated prostate-specific antigen levels — potentially an early sign of prostate cancer. “We never wore any protection for that.” In a statement, a Momentive spokesperson said that the company provides all its employees with protective equipment, extensive training, and instructions in how to properly handle the materials they work with: “When employees act in accordance with the policies and procedures Momentive has in place, potential risks are mitigated.”
Millions of American workers are exposed to carcinogens, or possible carcinogens, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that researches and investigates workplace safety and health. In 2012 alone, upward of 45,000 diagnosed cases of cancer — and, since the agency is still investigating and uncovering potentially carcinogenic materials used by the American worker, perhaps twice that many — were caused by past workplace exposure. On average, nearly eight times as many people die each year of diseases acquired on the job as die from injuries sustained on the job.
He kept the handwritten list folded up in his jacket pocket, adding new sheets as he collected new stories: six pancreatic cancers, seven bladder cancers, nine brain cancers, 11 throat cancers, 18 prostate cancers.
Since 1976, federal law has required all new industrial chemicals to be submitted for review by the Environmental Protection Agency. (Tens of thousands of industrial chemicals already in use were grandfathered in.) But after that initial environmental review, many industrial chemicals — which don’t necessarily have to get tested before being used in manufacturing — may never get a closer look by regulators. Once chemicals have entered the market, U.S. law only requires the EPA to collect data on the roughly 3,700 of them that are used at a rate of at least 500 tons per year. The data collected pertain mainly to their effects on the environment or the consumers of the products they produce — not on the workers who handle them.
“These chemicals are never sent back with actual information from the workplace,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s health program. “The regulations are focused on the end of the pipeline. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle at that point. People are already affected.”
Updates to the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was amended by Congress in 2016, mandated more pre-market testing for new chemicals seeking federal approval and required the EPA to review already-approved chemicals in widespread use. Ten of the most toxic of those are slated to be tested in 2018, but it’s unclear whether that deadline will be met. (Two of the chemicals have been commonly used at Momentive.) Since then, however, President Donald Trump has promised to scale back regulations broadly and has targeted federal agencies, the EPA chief among them, for sharp funding cuts.
Momentive Performance Materials, a chemical plant in Waterford, New York (Jonno Rattman)
In May 2017, Nancy Beck, a former industry advocate and executive at the American Chemistry Council (of which Momentive is a member), was selected to become the deputy assistant administrator of the EPA unit tasked with implementing the updates to the toxic-chemicals law. Just two months earlier, she had gone before a Senate subcommittee as a then-executive at the ACC to push back against the review process. According to an investigation by Eric Lipton at The New YorkTimes, the EPA has spearheaded “a broad initiative by the Trump administration to change the way the federal government evaluates health and environmental risks associated with hazardous chemicals, making it more aligned with the industry’s wishes.” This included reevaluating plans to ban certain uses of two chemicals that have caused dozens of deaths or severe health problems: methylene chloride and trichloroethylene, both of which have been used by Momentive employees.
Regardless of these policy reversals, tens of thousands of chemicals that have been in production for decades still need review. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental-advocacy group, estimated in 2015 that it could take 50 years to reevaluate 1,000 of the most toxic chemicals on the market. “Most toxins have not been adequately studied, employees have no tools to act on their suspicions, the companies have a disincentive to learn the full truth about what its chemicals do in terms of health impact, and the government is underfunded and doesn’t have sufficient tools to fully investigate,” said Dr. Steven Markowitz, director of the Barry Commoner Center for Health and the Environment at Queens College. “It’s a recipe for making the health consequences of working with toxic chemicals invisible.”
***
Tim Larson is a tall, broad-shouldered man who wears a musty cap tossed on his head. When I met him during the strike, he carried a megaphone that he used to shout chants on the picket line. His face lit up when he screamed, and his eyes — which seemed to hang out of his skull — bulged even further from their sockets. I stood with Larson most nights while I was there — he held the late shift on the picket line — and he explained that the plant is a complex of various buildings, each housing in a different part of the production line. You’re either breaking down raw ore, reacting the rock with chemicals, mixing together intermediate materials, packing products, or organizing them for storage and shipment.
Tim Larson steps off a bus before a protest in Momentive CEO Jack Boss’s neighborhood in Saratoga Springs. (Jonno Rattman)
Larson, a chemical operator, began working at Momentive in 1988 when he was 35 years old. He told me stories about the different parts of the plant, including Building 78. This area of the massive plant is home to the Waterford plant’s fluorosilicone manufacturing operations. There, a silicone base is reacted in roughly 100-gallon “dough” mixers at more than 240 degrees Fahrenheit to produce fluorosilicone gum for use in automobile gaskets and aerospace products. (The mixers are also used to produce “intermediates,” which are unfinished products that passed from building to building within the plant, and included different grades of polymers and fluids.) Long-term exposure to seven chemicals used in Building 78, according to Momentive material-safety data sheets, are suspected of or known to be reproductive toxins. Another chemical, Tris(2-chloroethyl) phosphite, is a carcinogen. Workers call the building the One-Nut Club, for reasons that to them seem less ominous than inevitable.
When GE owned the plant, risks from fluorosilicone production had been on the company’s radar since the 1970s. In a “strictly private” 1977 safety audit, a safety specialist said that research had shown that materials created by these processes, when ingested — which could mean breathing in the chemical or having it touch one’s skin — shrank rats’ prostates and testes “and may have similar effects in man.” The specialist also wrote that tests showed that the chemical compound handled by workers was “probably not a carcinogen.” GE performed a similar toxicity review 20 years after its initial testing and analyzed several chemicals used to the produce fluorosilicones. “The data, although not definitive, did not give rise to any concerns over the potential for carcinogenicity,” the report concluded.
“Nobody admits there is a correlation, but we put stickers on the tanks that hold this stuff, saying that it causes cancer,” Larson told me, referring to the warning stickers that California state law required them to affix. (Many of their products are shipped to the Golden State.) “It’s right there in front of you.”
“After six years, my eyes started bulging out of my head,” he told me, pointing to his face. He was diagnosed in early 1996 with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder that affects the thyroid. “I had to get my eyelids sliced, because I couldn’t close my eyes,” Larson said. He knows he can’t prove a direct link, he added, but he is “convinced that all my autoimmune problems are directly related to working here.” Soon after his diagnosis, Larson transferred to another area of the plant.
The men were on strike for many reasons, but high-quality, affordable health care was their main concern. It was what they needed most.
Other workers voiced their concerns about Building 78. In 1998, a GE-employed research chemist named Herman Krabbenhoft wrote a letter to two operators who worked there, Joe DeVito and Dan Patregnani, explaining that the previous year he had expressed concerns to managers about the vapors released during fluorosilicone operations. Krabbenhoft wrote that GE’s health and safety manager was supposed to have initiated a study of how to measure the vapors’ concentration, but that after a year nothing had been done, adding that he was told by a colleague to “back off on pushing this because it might affect how GE’s managers viewed me and my performance.”
“Herman was on our side,” DeVito said.“He said, ‘Stay away from it. It’s going to kill you.’” Shortly thereafter, DeVito said, Krabbenhoft was fired. (Multiple attempts to reach Krabbenhoft for comment were unsuccessful; GE declined to comment for this article, referring all questions to the plant’s current ownership, who also declined to comment on the specific incident.)
The building’s ventilation system was updated in the early 2000s, multiple employees who worked there said. The system was supposed to be air and temperature controlled. “It never worked, never sealed the room properly,” said John Ryan, who worked in Building 78 at the time, adding that temperatures could reach 110 degrees in the building due to the faulty system. In 2005, Ryan said he filed a formal grievance, asking to spend less time near the mixer, explaining that he didn’t want to be exposed to the hazardous mixture and its vapors. “But nothing changed,” he said. “And they never fixed the dough mixer either. Materials would come out into the air or spill onto the ground. That’s still going on, until this day.” In mid-2017, Momentive installed a second dough mixer to Building 78 to ramp up production, and though the machine suffered at first from issues relating to its packing seal, there haven’t been any recent health-related complaints. (Both the venting system and the initial dough mixer have also been serviced and are reportedly in working condition.)
Joe DeVito was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2013. He worked in Building 78. (Jonno Rattman)
Now, DeVito said, workers must wear full-face respirators when they clean the mixers, which have to be pristine before the machine can be used to produce another product. The fluorosilicone is so sticky, Larson claimed, that he used to have to climb into the 100-gallon drum and scrape off any lingering substance with a razor blade. “Fluorosilicone is a highly resistant chemical — oil, water, you name it,” he said. “That’s why it is used on gaskets and car bumpers, or in rocket ships.” According to DeVito, “Momentive took more steps for safety over the years,” but the process itself and the chemicals used in it remained the same. Additionally, the company’s material-safety data sheets do not indicate whether the vapors produced from these chemicals are hazardous to humans, despite there being a warning that TFPA vapors, which are highly toxic, may evolve from the products used to make fluorosilicone gums and polymers. “The company raised certain health issues related to the chemicals used in this building, but despite a very incomplete knowledge base, they draw the conclusion that there is no cause for concern,” said Dr. Markowitz of Queens College, who reviewed the documents. “My conclusion would’ve been: ‘There’s a big gap in what we know versus what we don’t know.’ That’s the proper conclusion.”
DeVito was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer in 2013, after a bump on his neck swelled to the size of a golf ball. DeVito told me he knows of five other control operators who worked in Building 78 who were diagnosed with cancer. He told his doctor about his decades of exposure to fluorosilicone vapors. “She said, ‘It would take years to prove that it happened from work,’” he explained. “‘Take care of this and just move on.’” His treatment, radiation, and chemotherapy, were successful. He retired in early 2018.
Some workers, like Tony Pignatelli, who worked in the plant for 34 years, weren’t so lucky. Pignatelli was diagnosed with brain cancer in January 2000 and passed away three weeks later. “My dad knew the risks, but he did it because they took care of them with good pay and health care,” his daughter said. “But I can’t even begin to understand what those guys are going through down there now with this new contract.”
***
Employees accepted the risks associated with working in the plant, the backbone of their community, for over half a century. They felt taken care of: stable pay, a sizable pension, affordable and quality health care, good communication with management, camaraderie with fellow workers. But that all changed when GE sold its global silicone operation, with the Waterford plant as its centerpiece, to a Wall Street investment firm in 2006 in a leveraged buyout. “When it was GE, they treated you like family,” Jack Mack said. “After the sale, everything changed.”
Matthew, Kenny and Vinny Annatriello—father, nephew, and son—on the picket line. (Jonno Rattman)
Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm that manages $249 billion in assets, bought a controlling stake for $3.8 billion, then saddled the corporation (which changed its name to Momentive Performance Materials in December 2006) with $3 billion in financing debt while it collected a $3.5 million that first year for “financial and strategic advisory services.”
Many employees didn’t understand the implications of the sale until 2009, when nearly 400 production workers received surprise pay cuts. Brian Cameron Jr., a 34-year-old second-generation employee, was making $27 an hour as a chemical operator. He had just bought a house in Waterford and a new Dodge Ram pickup the previous summer. “Everything was going good. I paid my bills,” he said. “I thought I was set for life.” Then his wages were slashed to $17 an hour. He eventually took a higher-paying position at the plant, but his debt piled up too fast. “I thought if I moved quickly, I would be able to save my life,” he said. “But it was too late.” He lost his house, gave back his truck, and moved into a coworker’s apartment.
The cuts meant that his coworker Ron Gardner, then 53, and his wife, Donna, could no longer afford the $1,300 monthly payments on their two-bedroom ranch home in Grangerville. “We were struggling,” he said. A few years later, in 2013, they abandoned it and moved into a trailer park in Saratoga Springs, just two miles from Momentive’s current CEO Jack Boss’s $950,000, 4,375-square-foot home. They took out personal loans to pay for a $23,000 double-wide, then used savings and loans from family members to pay for the roof and the lot’s rental fees. Unable to sell their ranch, they filed for bankruptcy and began paying off their new debts.
The local union contested the wage cuts, and 18 months later, in 2010, with their contract soon to expire, Momentive agreed to settle by issuing back pay — more than $50,000 before taxes for some workers — while making the wage cuts permanent going forward. Gardner, Cameron, and others who had lost their homes or been pushed into bankruptcy by the cuts couldn’t turn down the chance to repay their debts. “People were so broke from the wage cuts, they voted yes for that contract,” said local union president Dominick Patrignani, who has worked at the plant for over 30 years and was the chief bargainer during last year’s strike. “They were given no alternative.”
Ron and Donna Gardner lost their home, then Ron developed esophageal cancer. Dominick Patrignani, president of the local union, is the chief bargainer for the 700 strikers. (Jonno Rattman)
But Momentive wasn’t done. In 2013, the company froze pensions for workers under 50 and those with less than 10 years of service. “Every contract, they slashed benefits and made it harder for me to do what my father did: provide for his family,” Cameron told me during the strike. All of this is par for the course for private equity firms like Apollo. According to a study led by Josh Lerner, professor of investment banking at Harvard Business School, private equity buyouts lead to sizable reductions in earnings per worker compared with traditional companies, as well as modestly greater job loss, with a comparative decline of 4 percent over a two-year period.
“If a private equity firm needs to goose their returns, they will take it out of worker’s compensation — wages, pensions, benefits, all of it,” said Eileen Appelbaum, a co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the co-author of Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street. To her, private equity firms only care about one thing: profit. “The fastest and easiest and least controversial way, in their point of view, is to cut compensation. They make a dollar every time they take a dollar out of workers’ compensation,” she said. “Private equity controls management and the board of directors. They can fire anyone at any time. They sit at both sides of the table. There is no one looking out for the workers.”
In 2014, still under Apollo management, Momentive filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, trimming its debt obligations from $3.2 billion to $1.2 billion. This is also a familiar tactic for the firm. “It makes sense [Apollo did that] because you create money out of thin air,” said Tony Casey, professor of law at the University of Chicago, who studied the Momentive bankruptcy case. “Apollo is an aggressive investment firm,” he added. “They are not shy when it comes to using bankruptcy to their advantage.” The company announced a public offering three years after it emerged from bankruptcy, but the offering was postponed. When it did, Apollo owned the largest stake of shares.
Taking advantage of bankruptcy courts is also a preferred method of President Trump, who counts Apollo CEO Leon Black as a friend. And while Trump boasts about his dedication to the American worker, the company he keeps deliberately erodes the foundation upon which the middle class is built. In a 2011 interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News, Trump said: “If you look at our great businesspeople today — Carl Icahn, Henry Kravis, Leon Black of Apollo — all of them have done the same. They use and we use the laws of this country, the bankruptcy laws, because we’ll buy a company. We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. … You know, it’s like on The Apprentice. It’s not personal. It’s just business. OK?”
“Every contract, they slashed benefits and made it harder for me to do what my father did: provide for his family.”
During Momentive’s bankruptcy proceedings, GSO Capital Partners, the credit arm of Blackstone Group, one of America’s largest hedge funds — headed by Steve Schwarzman, who chaired President Trump’s defunct Strategic and Policy Forum — translated its bond investment in Momentive into public stocks, a 6.8 percent stake. (A spokesman for Blackstone said the firm sold its stake in Momentive on August 3, 2016 — the same day union workers voted to strike if a contract agreement could not be reached. The spokesman, however, could not provide documentation of the sale. The spokesman also confirmed that Blackstone senior adviser John Dionne is still on Momentive’s board of directors.)
In 2013, Blackstone had bought a 20 percent controlling stake in another longtime upstate New York employer, then-declining Eastman Kodak, which had already slashed retiree health care benefits and pensions (though the company did restore elements of its pension plan upon emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2013). When Carl Icahn, the recently ousted special adviser to the president on regulatory reform — whom Trump also counts as a close friend — came to Trump’s rescue and retained full control of his Taj Mahal casino through a bankruptcy proceeding, he shut down the operation rather than give the union employees better health benefits. Roughly 3,000 people lost their jobs. “It’s a classic take-the-money-and-run — Icahn takes hundreds of millions of dollars out of Atlantic City and then announces he is closing up shop,” Bob McDevitt, the president of the local union, said in a statement after the closing.
Others in Trump’s family and inner circle have deep ties with these Wall Street operators, whose business tactics, like those being implemented in Waterford, affect middle-class families. Blackstone has loaned Kushner Companies, the real estate empire of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, more than $400 million for real estate deals since 2013. The firm is one of the company’s largest lenders. Two months ago, the New York Times reported that Joshua Harris, a founder of Apollo, met with Kushner several times in 2017, at one point even discussing a possible job opening in the White House; by November of last year, Apollo would lend $184 million to Kushner Companies. (While Kushner is no longer CEO of the real estate company and has sold a chunk of his stake, he still reportedly holds properties and other interests in Kushner Companies — those investments are worth upward of three-quarters of $1 billion.) Kushner Companies is also on the clock to pay the $1.2 billion mortgage debt for 666 Fifth Avenue, a 41-story albatross in Manhattan that the company purchased in 2006, which is due February 2019.
Jack Boss joined Momentive as an executive vice president in March 2014, one month before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and he officially became CEO that December. The union believes that Apollo brought in Boss specifically to weaken the union during the next contract negotiation, which was slated for 2016. “They planned this entire thing,” Dominick Patrignani, the local union president, told me. “They knew what they were doing.”
Dan Patregnani, a union member who worked in Building 78, and the headquarters of Apollo Global Management at 9 West 57th Street in. New York City. (Jonno Rattman)
In mid-January 2017, workers rallied outside the midtown Manhattan headquarters of Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm that had bought their company more than a decade prior. About a month later, members of their parent union, the Communications Workers of America, also handed out leaflets near the White House as President Trump met with Schwarzman, whom he had named an economic adviser and head of the Strategic and Policy Forum during the early days of the strike. (The 16-member group would disband just months after this meeting.)
Jack Mack, the second-generation worker who compiled the list of employees with cancer, trekked down to New York City to participate in the demonstration outside Apollo HQ. He stood with dozens of other workers and supporters, and his hot breath crusted in the frigid air as he called out Leon Black by name. This was the first time I met Mack — the strike had just begun. As the event came to an end and the NYPD began to shuffle protesters off the street, I asked Mack what he planned to do next.
He looked me in the eye and said, “Go back up to the plant and stand out there until this whole thing comes to an end — until we get what we deserve.”
***
The labor negotiations broke down over the summer of 2016, and by August a strike seemed imminent. In early September, 85 percent of workers rejected an offer that would have forced current employees into more expensive health insurance plans and eliminated the much-beloved benefit for future retirees altogether. They officially went on strike November 2. Five days later they voted again, with the same result — they rejected the offer by a larger margin.
Ron Gardner retired on New Year’s Day 2015. He was 61. He’d already lost his home and moved into his trailer, and he’d spent much of the previous summer at Saratoga’s venerable racetrack, watching and sometimes betting on the races. “I won enough to keep going the entire season,” he said, seated at his dining room table, television game shows audible in the background. Soon after he retired, he changed his health insurance on Momentive’s recommendation, switching providers and opting for a plan that was cheaper from month to month but caused his deductible to rise from zero to $3,500. He wasn’t worried. “I had never been sick a day in my life,” he said. But shortly before he retired, right around Thanksgiving 2015, he began having trouble swallowing. “It scared me,” he recalled. “I couldn’t even swallow my own spit.” There was a nearly two-inch tumor in his esophagus: adenocarcinoma, a form of cancer.
Gardner had begun working at GE’s Schenectady plant in 1973 and transferred in 1988 to Waterford, where he held various positions over the years, including the production of chemical mixers for caulking After GE sold the plant in 2006, he worked for more than two years refining chemicals in Building 30, filtering out cloudy imperfections before transferring those same liquids into drums to be sold to consumers. “I often inhaled a lot of vapors,” he said.
The water treatment facility at Momentive Performance Materials. (Jonno Rattman)
Gloves, Gardner said, weren’t required for the job. According to material-safety data sheets, gloves are required only if a risk assessment deems them necessary. “He would come home covered in this caulking shit, all over his clothes and his hands,” his wife, Donna, said. “It would be everywhere.”
He transferred five years later to wastewater treatment, where he ran presses that compacted hazardous waste into dry, disposable cakes the size of kitchen tables before dropping them into trailers for disposal. He had to clean up spilled waste by hand and scrape out the presses if the cakes didn’t fall properly. The plant, he added, didn’t require respiratory protection for that particular job. “I breathed that stuff in for three and a half years,” he said. By the time Gardner began his last job at Momentive, the white walls of the facility had long turned gray from the dust produced by the waste. “That’s where I think I got the cancer from.”
Starting in January 2016, Gardner began a six-week course of chemotherapy and a month of radiation, paying off the $3,500 deductible in installments. Despite the treatment’s apparent success, Gardner’s doctor pressed him to undergo an esophagectomy. The operation — which would remove part of his esophagus and reconstruct it with the upper portion of his stomach — would be risky, and one of his lungs would have to be temporarily deflated during the procedure. Gardner decided against it.
By October 27, 2016, his cancer had returned. He needed the surgery to survive. But now he was racing against two clocks: the cancer and the company. Labor negotiations had broken down months before; the strike would begin within a week, and his current insurance coverage would run out at the end of December. “Company-paid medical, dental, vision, and drug coverage will not extend for the duration of employee strike activity,” a letter to employees from Momentive said.
“I wrote all the numbers down, in case I didn’t make it through the surgery, so Donna could get my pension,” Gardner said. “I didn’t trust Momentive to call her and say she was entitled to it.” He called his lawyer and had his will updated. He went into surgery on November 29, and spent nearly two weeks in the hospital. “I wish I could’ve been out there on the picket line,” he said. “It was all such bad timing.”
Once home, Gardner was told by Momentive to sign himself and Donna up for new health insurance through Mercer, a private online benefits marketplace, where employees can choose from a variety of providers and plans. A 2014 Aon Hewitt survey found that despite accounting for only 5 percent of current plans, 33 percent of employers said they would begin offering insurance through private marketplaces in the next three to five years. In a 2016 report, Mike Gaal of Bloomberg BNA wrote that large employers pitch private exchanges to employees as a way for them to “buy down” to more appropriate levels of coverage. “While this may be true,” he wrote, “the reality is that the plan savings, in this example, are derived through shifting costs to employees through high deductible, copayments and out-of-pocket limits.”
“I wrote all the numbers down, in case I didn’t make it through the surgery, so Donna could get my pension,” Gardner said. “I didn’t trust Momentive to call her and say she was entitled to it.”
The Gardners’ 2017 deductible would drop to $600 each, but their monthly premium soared from $262 to $1,152 per month — a hike Momentive promised to offset for already-retired workers under 65 with a $400 monthly subsidy. He got his first subsidy check on January 27, 2017. As a retiree, Gardner was one of the lucky ones. The younger generation was battling a contract that offered them expensive insurance while they worked — and nothing when they were finished with their working lives.
***
As the strike wore on, it drew the attention of elected officials in the area. Twenty-one Albany County lawmakers wrote to Momentive chief executive Jack Boss that the proposed contract seemed “to greatly hurt retirees and take too many health care and retirement benefits away from active employees.” State comptroller Tom DiNapoli reached out to Apollo; he has New York’s state-employee pensions partially invested through the firm. “I urge you to encourage Momentive to work diligently towards an expeditious settlement of this dispute on terms that are fair to labor and management,” he wrote. On the picket line in Waterford, one popular sign slung around the necks of strikers called out Apollo’s chief executive by name: hedge fund billionaire leon black, tell momentive: don’t destroy good jobs.
Union strikers hold a sign outside of Momentive CEO Jack Boss’s home near Saratoga Springs. (Jonno Rattman)
In early February 2017, likely facing pressure from the governor’s office and intense publicity around both the strike and Momentive’s high-profile shareholders, Boss contacted the union’s regional leadership, bypassing the local chapter, and offered to resume negotiations. Four days later, a tentative deal was reached. Governor Andrew Cuomo, in his first public statement on the strike, announced his support for the deal, calling it key to “investing in the [union’s] world-class workforce, restoring operations at the plant and keeping upstate New York moving forward.”
Under the proposed new contract, to be voted on February 13 and 14, Momentive would keep matching 401(k) contributions of workers whose pensions had previously been frozen and would pay each striking employee a $2,000 bonus upon returning to work. In exchange, the union would accept the proposed health care amendments for current workers — more expensive premiums and deductibles. The company, rather than provide health insurance to future retirees, agreed to give at least 100 veteran workers a $40,000 cash bonus upon retirement — around $23,000 after taxes — that would hopefully cover any medical expenses before workers were eligible for Medicare at age 65. Though this was a win for the union, the next round of negotiations, in 2019, could decide the future of whether retirees will continue benefitting from Momentive’s medical coverage. “We have the right to negotiate now, which we didn’t have before last year’s strike,” says Patrignani. “It was going to sunset, but it’s still a topic of bargaining for future contracts.”
“You either have a preexisting condition, or you have an underlying condition, or you have an undiagnosed condition because of the inherent risk of working in a chemical plant,” said Robert Hohn, a 55-year-old employee. “You would probably have to pay a high premium and a high deductible. Would $23,000 cover that if something went wrong?” Hohn’s wife has degenerative disc disease, which requires constant care, and chronic gastrointestinal inflammation. Under the new contract, Hohn would have to pay $74 per week for him and his wife, with a $3,500 deductible and an annual maximum payment of $7,000. (Most workers signed up for this plan, which is the cheaper of the two; the other option has a $12,000 out-of-pocket maximum for a family). “The health care is going to kill me,” he said the day of the vote. “With my wife’s condition, we will definitely be hitting the maximum every year.” When the new contract came up for a vote, he felt he had no choice but to vote no. (At the beginning of 2018, Hohn’s wife left the insurance plan; he now pays $36 per week and a deductible for himself of $1,750.)
But many other workers feared that if the contract didn’t pass, some would cross the picket line to return to work, giving up their representation and fracturing the union. “They are pitting us against one another and using that to their advantage,” one worker said as he waited in line to vote on the proposed contract. “People are scared, feeling forced to vote ‘yes,’ even though the contract isn’t much better than what we went on strike for.”
A classified ad for temporary replacement chemical operators in the Saratogian newspaper on a table in the union’s break house.
This internal tension became more and more apparent as the strike wore on, endless weeks of picketing outside during the coldest part of the year for upstate New York. “When it comes to these guys losing their health care, I should give a fuck?” one Momentive worker, speaking on condition of anonymity, wondered aloud in January, before the new union contract was ratified. “Why should I care about you when you didn’t give a shit about me in the past?”
Like some other younger union workers at the plant, he was in the minority and had voted yes on the contract back in September, recalling the wage cuts and pension freezes of years past. To them, the older generation were on their way out; the younger workers needed this place to provide for their families for decades to come. They wanted a fair contract for everyone, but they didn’t want to ruin what they had already — a stable job — and were willing to sacrifice benefits in the process.
Apollo has shut down other manufacturing plants in the past, and that threat was real for workers on the picket line. Noranda Aluminum’s Missouri plant once employed over 800 union workers. Then it began a slow decline, and after Apollo sold its position in 2015, the plant shut down in early 2016. To some workers, a long and intense strike could make that possibility a reality. “To me, it’s not worth losing all of this. If they shut down, where will we go?” said another during the strike. “Stop whining and move forward. These old guys, they’ve had it so good for so long that they don’t want to give anything up. Sometimes, to me, it’s better to take one step back so I am able to still move forward — not like this situation now.”
The contract passed on February 14, 2017. The men went back to work within days. “They didn’t achieve everything they wanted,” said Bob Master, the union’s legislative director for the region. “But sometimes the fruits of victory don’t show up until later on, during the next round of negotiations, when the company remembers the spirit and determination of a united workforce.”
***
Robert Hohn and his coworkers are already anxious about what new concessions their next contract negotiation in 2019 might bring. Since the company’s sale to private equity a decade ago, men like Ron Gardner, who went into bankruptcy after leaving his home for a double-wide trailer and fought cancer from exposure at the plant, have watched as their Wall Street–backed corporation trimmed job benefits they’d counted on for decades — benefits all the more crucial now, as they face retirement tinged with the threat of cancer. This time around, it was health care for retirees. What will it be next time?
Outside the entrance gate of the Momentive chemical plant. (Jonno Rattman)
Apollo, meanwhile, announced in July 2017 that the firm had raised $24.7 billion for its latest global buyout fund, the largest sum of leveraged-buyout capital ever raised by a private equity firm, poised to pave the way for many more acquisitions like the one that created Momentive. Up in Waterford, there are whispers that Apollo is even trying to force the landlord to sell the hot dog shack — which the union still uses as it’s headquarters — and its surrounding land rights.
But despite these big-picture moves by corporate financiers, workers at the plant are still focused on their benefits — assets that are crucial to their survival. “I still don’t trust Momentive,” Gardner told me. The company had already cut his pay. What, he wondered, would prevent it from eventually taking away the insurance subsidy he received each month? If he lost the subsidy before he got Medicare, he explained at his dining room table, he won’t be able to afford health insurance. “After that, I don’t know what would happen,” he added, looking out the window. It was starting to rain. “If the cancer came back and I didn’t have coverage, I would die.”
***
Ian Frisch is a journalist based in Brooklyn. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, Playboy, and Vice, among others. His first book, on magic and the secret lives of the subculture’s most prominent young magicians, will be published in 2019 by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
En la primavera de 2016, mientras Trump se aferraba a su nominación como el candidato republicano para la presidencia, yo manejaba hacia el este del Valle de Coachella, en busca de un jornalero llamado Roberto. Mi celular se había quedado sin batería y no pasó mucho tiempo antes de que me perdiera entre los caminos rurales, en los que rara vez me topaba con otro vehículo. Cuando por fin encontré a Roberto, lo hallé de pie junto a su remolque esperando pacientemente, llevaba un sombrero vaquero en la cabeza y una sonrisa divertida en el rostro.
* Por razones de seguridad, los nombres de algunas de las personas que aquí se mencionan han sido cambiados.
Al norte y oeste del remolque se podían ver otros más estacionados; mientras que en los flancos sur y este, el jardín de Roberto* desembocaba en el desierto, en donde se podían encontrar algunos campos de lechuga y viñedos. Esta era la tierra que Roberto había trabajado durante los últimos 20 años. Se trataba de ese tipo de tierra que te hacía sentir pequeño pero no insignificante. Entramos al remolque y nos sentamos frente a la mesa de la cocina. Las sombras se imprimían ante el calor, y Roberto le quitó el sonido a la televisión de la sala, en donde el conductor de un noticiero en español hablaba sobre el muro que Trump había propuesto construir en la frontera sur de Estados Unidos. Roberto vestía una playera gris descolorida y unos pantalones de mezclilla rotos de las rodillas, tenía una complexión rolliza, hombros anchos y el abdomen un poco abultado. Primero tomó un trago de la botella de agua, luego puso sus manos nudosas sobre la mesa y comenzó a hablar.
A medida que conversaba, quedó claro que había muchos motivos para tener miedo de cómo sería todo si Trump llegara a la presidencia. Al igual que su esposa Leticia*, él era un inmigrante mexicano indocumentado. Sus tres hijos habían nacido en México. La hija menor cursaba el octavo grado y tampoco tenía documentos. La hija de en medio estaba en el colegio comunitario y tenía la protección del Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, por sus siglas en inglés, programa creado en la era de Obama y que Trump amenazaba con eliminar. El único miembro de la familia que era residente legal era su hijo mayor, quien estaba casado con una ciudadana estadounidense. Trump era como una granada que podía caer dentro de una familia y explotar, expulsándolos a todos en diferentes direcciones. Roberto pronunciaba el nombre de Trump raramente, en cambio, se refería a él como el “disturbio”.
Pero este no era solo el caso de Roberto, casi todos sus conocidos se encontraban en una situación parecida. Él vive en una comunidad no incorporada llamada Themal, misma que, de acuerdo con el censo de Estados Unidos, es 99.9% latina (para ser exactos, a excepción de 3 personas, los 2,396 habitantes son latinos). De igual forma, la comunidad de Oasis, ubicada a varios kilómetros de distancia, es 98.2% latina. Por su parte, Coachella, la ciudad más cercana, es 97.5% latina. En este lado del desierto se habla un español con toques de inglés, y no al revés
Este era mi primer viaje hacia el este del Valle de Coachella, y mi objetivo era recopilar historias de la voz de los jornaleros. Durante estas conversaciones, Trump era un tema frecuente. Su nombre empezó a ser como el de un espectro que acechaba la región, sus amenazas resonaban en la radio y la televisión; aunque también era un poco como una broma. En ese momento nadie con quien hablara seriamente consideraba la idea de Trump como presidente. Y entonces ganó. Repentinamente, el candidato, cuya campaña arremetía de manera directa en contra de la gente que vivía en este valle, se había convertido en la persona más poderosa del mundo. Inicialmente, había ido a Coachella para saber cómo era la vida de un jornalero, pero ahora surgía una pregunta nueva: ¿Cómo era vivir en un lugar en donde todos se sentían blanco de ataque?
* * *
El Valle de Coachella es un tramo de 72.42 kilómetros de largo de terreno abrasador, el cual empieza cerca de Palm Springs y llega hasta el sureste del Salton Sea. Se trata de una tierra de extremos imposibles, un lugar que no tiene sentido pero que sin embargo existe, un testimonio de la soberbia, del trabajo duro, de los canales de riego y también del racismo. Cerca de Palm Springs uno se encuentra rodeado de campos de golf, mansiones deslumbrantes y country clubs con albercas y canchas de tenis. Conforme uno atraviesa el valle con dirección al suroeste, estos lugares se ven reemplazados, como si se tratará de un espejismo, por campos de agricultura y campamentos polvorientos de remolques. En Palm Springs uno se puede llegar a gastar hasta $1 millón de dólares en una estadía de dos noches en algún lujoso resort. Como contraste, en el lado este, los terrenos están cubiertos aquí y allá por tiraderos ilegales de basura, y el agua potable se encuentra envenenada con arsénico.
Si has escuchado hablar de Coachella, es muy probable que sea por el festival musical y artístico del Valle con el mismo nombre. Se trata de una bacanal que se celebra cada año en terrenos donde se practica de polo, a casi 16 kilómetros de distancia del remolque de Roberto. Para la edición 2017 del festival, Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga y Radiohead fueron los artistas principales, y se recaudó una cifra récord de $114.6 millones de dólares. Los boletos VIP costaron $900 dólares cada uno, mientras que las parejas que no quisieran escatimar en gastos podían rentar una moderna yurta durante el fin de semana por $7,500 dólares. Sin embargo, el festival tiene poca relevancia en la vida de las personas en el lado este del valle, excepto quizás si se trata de un recordatorio de lo fácil que resulta no percatarse de ellos.
La belleza de la región es impresionante. Las montañas se alzan dramáticamente al oeste y los árboles de dátiles se enfilan hacia el difuso horizonte. La tierra es fértil, y en ella se producen cerca de $640 millones de dólares anuales en cultivos, como uva de mesa, limones, pimiento morrón y mucho más.
También es un lugar donde la vida es dura. Aproximadamente una tercera parte de los residentes del poblado de Thermal viven por debajo del umbral de pobreza, incluyendo a casi la mitad de los niños. No es fácil ser jornalero en ningún lado, pero aquí el trabajo es particularmente extenuante, las altas temperaturas del verano pueden alcanzar hasta los 48° C. Las viviendas se saturan tanto en la temporada de cosecha de uvas, que muchos jornaleros migrantes duermen en sus carros o sobre cajas de cartón aplanadas que instalan en los estacionamientos. Algunos incluso se bañan en los canales contaminados por las escorrentías de los pesticidas.
Sin embargo, el festival tiene poca relevancia en la vida de las personas en el lado este del valle, excepto quizás si se trata de un recordatorio de lo fácil que resulta no percatarse de ellos.
La comunidad más grande de Thermal se encuentra cerca de la Avenida 66 y Tyler Street, y es sede de tres escuelas que se encuentran una junto a la otra en medio de lo que, de otro modo, serían campos vacíos: se trata de la escuela primaria Las Palmitas, la secundaria Toro Canyon y la preparatoria Desert Mirage. El año pasado, durante una nublada mañana de abril, me encontré con María, maestra auxiliar en Las Palmitas y mujer purépecha, grupo indígena proveniente del estado mexicano de Michoacán con una presencia considerable en el poblado de Thermal. El día escolar acababa de terminar, y nos sentamos en una mesa larga de una cafetería vacía mientras observábamos a los niños correr en el patio. Era el cumpleaños de María – ahora tenía 21 años-, y los niños se habían pasado el día entero cantándole canciones de cumpleaños en diferentes idiomas.
“Mi primito me llamó la noche de la elección”, me contó María “Me dijo ¿ya votaste? Estoy muy preocupado por mi mamá”. Al día siguiente llamó llorando para preguntar si María había iniciado el proceso para arreglar la condición de inmigrante de su mamá para que no pudieran deportarla, como si el trámite fuera una simple cuestión de papeleo. “No pude responderle” dijo María suavemente. Luego hizo una pausa y miró hacia la mesa. “Al final le dije ‘Sí, ya lo estoy haciendo’. Lo hice solo para que se tranquilizara.” Me dijo que ahora su primo estaba mejor porque pensaba que su mama ya era residente legal. También me contó que muchos otros padres han usado la misma estrategia con la esperanza de proteger a sus hijos y evitarles preocupaciones.
El día después de la elección, los estudiantes de Las Palmitas subieron aturdidos al autobús. Al principio muchos de ellos estaban en silencio, pero poco a poco las preguntas comenzaron a salir a borbotones. ¿Cuándo llegue a casa mi mamá seguirá ahí? ¿ya construyeron el muro? ¿en México dan clases de educación especial? ¿quién me va a enseñar a leer? Algunos maestros cancelaron sus lecciones y usaron la clase para conversar sobre lo que todos estaban pensando. “Normalmente llegan con energía, bromeando y correteándose entre ellos” dijo Adam Santana, maestro de artes del lenguaje en Toro Canyon, pero “ese día todos estaban callados. Era como si una tragedia hubiera ocurrido en el campus. Finalmente, uno de los estudiantes preguntó ‘¿De verdad van a haber deportaciones?’”
En el caso de los estudiantes de preparatoria el miedo era menos evidente. “Los estudiantes más grandes suelen interiorizar su estrés mucho más” dijo Karina Vega, asesora de tiempo completo para casi 19,000 estudiantes en el distrito de escuelas unificadas del Valle de Coachella. El día que nos vimos, se había descompuesto el aire acondicionado de su cubículo, el cual se encuentra dentro de las oficinas centrales de Thermal; su rostro estaba ruborizado y lucía preocupada. Vega creció en Mecca y es hija de jornaleros. En un rincón de su oficina se podían ver apiladas cajas de dátiles provenientes del rancho de su padre. Su hijo, Anzel, estaba cursando su último año en la preparatoria Desert Mirage, la cual tiene una larga historia de activismo. En 2016, los estudiantes salieron de clases y marcharon casi 9.5 kilómetros para protestar en las oficinas del distrito a favor del alza de salarios de sus maestros. Un par de años antes, los estudiantes marcharon en contra del despido de su director y subdirector. “Nuestros chicos tienen corazón, uno muy grande”, me dijo Vega.
En algunas escuelas del país, Trump inspiró a los niños blancos a cantar “¡Construyan el muro!” ante sus compañeros latinos. Este tipo de situaciones no pasarían aquí porque no hay niños blancos. Santana, el maestro de secundaria, trata de preparar a sus alumnos para encuentros como estos en el mundo fuera de Thermal. “Les digo, cuando vayan a la universidad, o si se mudan o consiguen un trabajo en otro lugar, las cosas van a ser muy diferentes. No todos tendrán apellidos parecidos a los suyos o el mismo color de cabello, ni todos van a hablar español”. El aislamiento se ha convertido en una fuente de fuerza y comodidad. Por ejemplo, un alumno del último año de preparatoria y beneficiario de DACA me dijo que antes vivía en el condado de San Bernardino, en donde otros chicos lo golpeaban y agredían porque seguía aprendiendo inglés. “Nos mudamos aquí cuando estaba en segundo grado; yo quería hablar inglés y español, y todos podían hablar ambos idiomas. Yo estaba como, ‘Oh, así que aquí es a donde pertenezco’. Ellos entienden mi personalidad y mis luchas, y yo los entiendo a ellos.”
Desde el día de la elección Vega ha tenido que lidiar con una ola de comportamiento autodestructivo entre los estudiantes de preparatoria. “En el caso del duelo podemos darnos cuenta”, me dijo, “Si alguien muere, sé qué hacer con eso”. Sin embargo, el ambiente de miedo generalizado, las amenazas de separación de la familia, el hecho de que nadie sabe qué va a pasar; estos son los problemas existenciales que, según me dijo, “no pueden recibir ningún tipo de consejo”. Poco antes de eso, Vega había ido a una capacitación en donde una oradora describió que, durante un tiempo especialmente difícil en su vida, llegó a beber salsa picante. “Cuando sentía el ardor recorrer su garganta ella se decía, ‘Bueno, aquí estoy’”, señaló Vega. “Siento que en nuestra comunidad nos encontramos en un momento parecido. Tenemos la necesidad de sentir. No quiero decir que esto no haya sido una realidad con Obama, pero ahora es una constante. Se escucha en todos lados, es el único tema del que hablan.
* * *
Durante la presidencia de Obama los inmigrantes indocumentados estaban lejos estar a salvo. A lo largo de esta administración se alcanzó una cifra récord de 2.8 millones de deportados. De igual manera, se supervisó la expansión dramática de un programa llamado “Comunidades Seguras”, que permitía el intercambio de información entre el Departamento de Seguridad Nacional y las fuerzas policiacas locales. Esto condujo a la deportación de muchos individuos con infracciones mínimas, como la de conducir un auto con un farol trasero roto. Fue sólo durante los últimos años de su presidencia, y gracias a la presión de activistas, que Obama disminuyó su mano dura en temas de inmigración, creando así el programa DACA, que protegía a jóvenes inmigrantes indocumentados. También se intentó, sin mucho éxito, extender esa protección a sus padres. En el mejor de los casos, se puede decir que el legado de esta presidencia tiene resultados mixtos.
Sin embargo, en el caso de Trump nada es mixto. Durante su campaña, las calumnias en contra de los mexicanos se repetían sin cesar en los noticieros en español, lo que robaba el oxígeno en los hogares en el Valle de Coachella como si se tratara de un miembro de la familia rebelde y ruidoso. Posteriormente su victoria llegó, y las amenazas empezaron a cobrar sentido. En su primer mes en el poder, Trump firmó una orden ejecutiva que dejaba a un lado el escalonado sistema de Obama, provocando que, en esencia, cualquier indocumentado se considerara como prioridad para deportación. A esta acción le siguieron varias semanas de historias sobre inmigrantes que habían sido detenidos a lo largo y ancho del país, incluyendo 161 en el área de Los Ángeles. En tiempos de Obama se habían llevado a cabo acciones similares, pero ahora parecía como el primer ataque de guerra. Bajó el mandato de Trump, a los agentes de Inmigración y Aduanas de los Estados Unidos, ICE, por sus siglas en inglés, se les otorgó el poder de detener a cualquier persona que encontraran a su paso, algo que la agencia definió como “arrestos colaterales”. Tan solo en el primer año, las aprehensiones se multiplicaron 40 por ciento. Los agentes arrestaron a defensores que se hallaban dentro de las cortes, a indigentes en busca de refugio en las iglesias, e incluso a un joven de 23 años protegido por DACA. “Las medidas enérgicas contra criminales ilegales no es más que el cumplimiento de mi promesa de campaña,” tuiteó Trump el 12 de febrero de 2017. Aquí en Coachella, lugar que también alberga una estación de la patrulla fronteriza, el mensaje era claro: nadie estaba a salvo.
Berta*, que vive a unos metros de Roberto, fue la primera en hablarme sobre las redadas en el Valle de Coachella. El 15 de febrero de 2017, se encontraba en casa trabajando como niñera al cuidado de dos niños, cuando a eso de las 10 am recibió una llamada. Era una amiga que le dijo haber escuchado de un vecino que había camionetas de la Patrulla Fronteriza estacionadas frente al local de Cardenas, una cadena de tiendas de abarrotes que ofrece productos para latinos. Luego llamó su cuñado, quien había leído una publicación en Facebook que señalaba que se estaban haciendo redadas en ese momento. Las llamadas siguieron entrando durante el espacio de una hora. Berta perdió la cuenta después de las primeras 10, al tiempo que el alcance de la operación seguía creciendo. La captura de migrantes continuó en las tiendas Cardenas, Walmart y Food 4 Less en Cathedral City y Coachella, dos ciudades cercanas. Los agentes demandaban que cualquier persona que entrara o saliera de éstas mostrara sus documentos. Algunos trataron de huir, dejando atrás carros de supermercado llenos de comida. Otro se refugiaron en el lugar, rehusándose a salir. En las calles, los agentes de la patrulla fronteriza establecieron retenes, deteniendo a todo conductor que no pudiera probar que se encontraban en el país legalmente.
Conforme las llamadas siguieron entrando, Berta empezó a precipitarse hacia un colapso nervioso. Su esposo, también indocumentado, trabaja en la demolición de edificios y se traslada a diferentes lugares en construcción a lo largo del Valle de Coachella. Cuando ella se comunicó con él, se encontraba en su lugar de trabajo, cerca de Cathedral City, y ya había recibido por Facebook numerosos mensajes de alerta.
Berta caminaba de un lado a otro dentro del remolque, intercambiaba mensajes de textos, enviaba decenas de mensajes de Facebook, recibía la ola de pánico y la hacía circular de nuevo. Su esposo se encontraba a casi 50 kilómetros de distancia; un movimiento en falso y lo mandarían de vuelta a México. Finalmente, Berta a llamó a su cuñada, que era ciudadana estadounidense. Al igual que todos los demás, estaba enterada de las redadas y se había ofrecido a recorrer en su auto las calles en donde supuestamente se encontraban los retenes de la Patrulla Fronteriza.
La cuñada de Berta manejo durante más de una hora sin encontrar un solo retén. No encontró agentes en Cardenas, Walmart o en Food 4 Less. De hecho, ese día no se habían llevado a cabo ningún tipo de redadas, ni se habían instalado retenes en el Valle de Coachella. Cuando Berta se enteró, lloró de alivio.
Hablamos a mediados de abril; dos meses después de que se esparcieran los falsos rumores que habían aterrorizado al valle. Cuando Berta relató lo ocurrido ese día, sus manos empezaron a temblar y comenzó a llorar de nuevo. “Decidí no preocuparme más,” dijo mientras se secaba las lágrimas. “Es muy estresante pensar en todo lo que puede pasar.” Se detuvo por un momento y pensó en esas probabilidades. “¿Qué pasaría si agarran a mi esposo?” se preguntó. ¿O si me agarran a mí? ¿Qué pasaría con mis hijos? Su hijo mayor, de 18 años, acababa de renovar su permiso de DACA, mientras que su hijo menor, entonces de 14 años, era demasiado joven como para unirse al programa.
Berta acababa de escuchar en las noticias que la nueva prioridad de Trump era deportar a gente que se había quedado en el país después del vencimiento de sus visas. Este era su caso, y el gobierno tenía la dirección de su cuñado, que era la persona que ella había dicho que supuestamente visitaría. “Ese va a ser el primer lugar al que irán a buscarnos,” dijo. Miró su reloj, eran las 3:30 de la tarde. Estábamos sentados dentro de su remolque con las cortinas cerradas. Su esposo siempre llegaba mucho más tarde, pero ella ya empezaba a preocuparse.
* * *
La sede del Centro Migratorio y Estacional Head Start de Thermal es un edificio amarillo de un piso ubicado frente a la oficina de la consejera escolar Vega. Visité el lugar meses antes de que Trump tomara el poder y conocí a Beatriz Machiche, directora y ex-jornalera. Al final del pasillo había un salón vacío en cuya puerta estaba pegada una hoja de papel con la leyenda: “Cerrado hasta nuevo aviso. Enero 2017.” Habían cerrado el salón debido a que no asistían suficientes niños. El año anterior en la misma época tenían una lista de espera de 200 niños. Machiche me dijo que sospechaba que los padres ya no querían dar información al gobierno federal por miedo a que los deportaran. Ella y su equipo habían empezado a visitar los campos para pasar la voz sobre sus servicios, pero hasta ese momento la gente se mostraba reacia. “Los padres dicen que vendrán, pero no lo hacen,” dijo. Machiche nunca había visto algo parecido en los diez años que llevaba trabajando en esa oficina.
Esta era una de las peores consecuencias del miedo: los inmigrantes se mantenían alejados de aquellas instituciones que estaban diseñadas para ayudarles y educar a sus hijos. De igual modo, muchas de las otras agencias migratorias y estacionales Head Start en California habían reportado caídas en las inscripciones de entre 15 y 20 por ciento en el transcurso de ese año. Una de las subvenciones más grandes del tipo Head Starten el país es la del Consejo Migratorio de Texas, que opera en siete estados. Sin embargo, el año pasado, el número de niños que atendían cayó 11 por ciento. En Texas, el número de estudiantes apoyados a través del Programa de Educación al Migrante, que apoya a niños de jornaleros migrantes con obstáculos para tener acceso a la educación, cayó 22 por ciento del 2016 al 2017, mientras que en California la disminución fue de 7 por ciento.
El miedo también hacía que la gente pasara hambre. Tras los falsos rumores de las tiendas Cardenas, Verónica García, trabajadora de Borrego Health, proveedor de atención médica sin fines de lucro, se dedicó a tocar puertas en un campamento de remolques en Thermal. Una mujer de unos 60 años le dijo a García que muchos de sus vecinos habían dejado de hacer compras porque estaban convencidos de que los agentes de migración tenían en la mira a las tiendas de abarrotes. Conforme sus armarios empezaron a vaciarse, la mujer visitaba los sitios locales de distribución para recolectar víveres gratuitos que repartía entre familias agradecidas. Mientras platicaba con García, varios niños hambrientos pasaron por su casa para que les diera emparedados de mantequilla de maní. Al terminar la conversación, las mejillas de la mujer estaban surcadas por el llanto.
“Nos estaba informando sobre lo difícil que se ha puesto la situación para todos ahí,” dijo García. “La gente tiene miedo de salir.” Anteriormente, García trabajó en el banco de alimentos del Valle de Coachella, Food in Need of Distribution o FIND, por sus siglas en inglés. Fue así como ella decidió contactar al banco para explicar la gravedad de la situación. Después de un buen rato, un camión llegó al campamento y, en cuestión de horas, casi 200 personas habían recibido alimentos.
Chantel Schuering es la directora de relaciones comunitarias de FIND, y señala cada año se inscribían 3,000 familias para recibir cupones de alimentos y Medicaid. Tras la elección, sus cifras cayeron a más de la mitad, tendencia que duró hasta la primavera. De igual manera, los programas de alimentos para los necesitados en todo el país registraron caídas drásticas en sus inscripciones. En California, el número de participantes de WIC, o “Programa suplementario de nutrición para mujeres, infantes y niños”, cayó 7 por ciento en el último año. En Florida, las bajas fueron aún mayores, con un 9.6 por ciento, mientras que el número de participantes en Texas disminuyó 7.4 por ciento.
Esta era una de las peores consecuencias del miedo: los inmigrantes se mantenían alejados de aquellas instituciones que estaban diseñadas para ayudarles y educar a sus hijos.
Muchas de las personas que entrevisté recalcaron que no podían explicar con certeza las caídas en las inscripciones, pero creían que el miedo a la deportación era uno de los factores. No obstante, muchas veces la relación entre el temor y la situación era directa. Tras una redada en febrero de 2017 en Woodburn, Oregon, durante la que ICE detuvo a dos camionetas de jornaleros, muchas familias locales respondieron llamando a la “Coalición para el desarrollo de los niños en Oregon” –la cual ofrece atención del tipo Head Start en el estado- para exigir que sus nombres fueran eliminados de las bases de datos. En Coachella, FIND recibió numerosas llamadas de los residentes, quienes querían saber cómo podían interrumpir su inscripción a los cupones de alimentos y Medicaid. En febrero de este año, los temores fueron confirmados, Reuters reportó que la administración de Trump estaba trabajando en reglas nuevas para sancionar a los inmigrantes que inscribían a sus hijos nacidos en los Estados Unidos en programas como Head Start, cupones de alimentos, entre otros.
Al parecer, el miedo también está provocando que los migrantes vacilen en reportar crímenes. En abril del año pasado, el jefe de la policía de Houston anunció que el número de hispanos que reportaron casos de violación disminuyó casi 43 por ciento en los primeros tres meses del año, en comparación al mismo periodo del año anterior. Durante los primeros seis meses de la administración de Trump, los reportes de violencia doméstica entre latinos disminuyeron 18 por ciento en San Francisco, 13 por ciento en San Diego y 3.5 en Los Ángeles (entre las comunidades no latinas no se percibió prácticamente ningún cambio). Por su parte, Sarah Stillman, quien escribe para el New Yorker, reportó que en un barrio latino de Arlington, Virginia, los reportes de violencia doméstica disminuyeron más de 85 por ciento en los primeros ocho meses de 2017, en comparación con el año anterior; mientras que las denuncias por violación y ataques sexuales cayeron 75 por ciento.
En los meses que sucedieron a la elección, la gente de Coachella cambió sus rutinas diarias, recalculando los riesgos que podrían correr. Asimismo, la asistencia a la iglesia católica más grande del Valle de Coachella, Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, cayó entre 10 y 15 por ciento. “[En algún punto] la gente se sentía segura aquí,” señaló el Padre Guy Wilson. “Bajo este nuevo clima político parecería como si fueran a perseguirlos a todos.”
Otra mujer me contó que su esposo, un inmigrante indocumentado, había dejado de usar camisetas con mensajes políticos, lo que de algún modo se traducía en una anulación sutil de su personalidad. Otros dejaron de ir al cine o a restaurantes, ya que cada salida aumentaba la posibilidad de ser detenidos por la Patrulla Fronteriza. Una tarde llevé en mi auto a una mujer indocumentada a recoger a su hijo de una clase en una escuela comunitaria. Varias veces durante el trayecto, ella agarraba el volante y veía todos los espejos, revisando si había alguna de las camionetas verde con blanco de los agentes. Cuando regresamos a su remolque, los dos colapsamos aliviados en el sillón. Esto no se sentía como un modo de vida aceptable en lo absoluto.
En abril del año pasado, Desert Sun, un diario local, reportó que los centros de salud estaban percibiendo un declive en el número de pacientes. Doug Morin dirige Coachella Valley Volunteers in Medicine, clínica local gratuita que atiende a personas sin seguro médico. Este lugar llena la brecha en una región en donde la proporción médicos-población es cuatro veces mayor a la recomendada por la federación. En algún momento, la clínica llegó a ser un proyecto fuerte. “Nuestros números aumentaban cada mes, cada año,” me comentó Morin. En enero, cuando Trump llegó a la presidencia, las consultas se desplomaron. Ese mes recibieron 171 pacientes; una caída con respecto a los 429 en enero de 2016. En septiembre, cuando conversamos, me dijo en el transcurso del año las visitas habían disminuido 25 a 30 por ciento.
Morin también me contó el caso de una mujer mayor que había acudido quejándose de un dolor abdominal. La señora ya había ido a la sala de urgencias de un hospital local, en donde los doctores descubrieron que tenía un bulto en el útero, pero que como no tenía seguro médico decidieron mandarla a la clínica de Morin. Ahí, un médico determinó que el bulto no era un fibroma, condición bastante común y tratable, sino que probablemente se trataba de un tumor canceroso. Mientras un miembro del personal hacía el papeleo para ingresar a la mujer a programa Medi-Cal de urgencias, que está a disposición de inmigrantes indocumentados, la hija de la señora llegó a la oficina.
“Nos dijo, ‘borren todo’” relató Morin. “No quería que nadie proporcionara el nombre ni la dirección de su madre”. El personal trató de explicarle la gravedad de la situación, pero la hija tomó los papeles y salió del lugar con su madre. “Se fue tan rápido que nadie pudo siquiera darle a la señora algo para el dolor” recordó Morin.
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El año pasado, en la época que el invierno se torna en primavera, visité el remolque de Roberto en varias ocasiones; siempre lo encontraba desafiante, sin miedo. Los rumores de redadas inundaban el valle y los supervisores de Roberto habían recomendado a los trabajadores moverse en grupos pequeños para no llamar la atención de los oficiales de migración. Roberto se encontraba con los agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza casi todos los días, a veces detrás de su carro cuando el semáforo estaba en rojo, otras veces en la fila para comprar café de un mercado cercano. Cuando le pregunté qué sentía cuando veía una camioneta de la patrulla fronteriza por el retrovisor, simplemente se encogió de hombros. Ellos estaban haciendo su trabajo, y él el suyo.
Me contó que había perdido el miedo diez años antes, cuando su hijo Ángel había estado a punto de morir. Ángel tenía 16 años en ese momento y estaba recogiendo uvas con él cerca de Bakersfield. La temperatura alcanzó los 40 grados, y Ángel empezó a decir que se sentía mareado y muy débil para seguir trabajando. Después de que Roberto insistiera en que trasladaran a su hijo al hospital, la compañía subió a Ángel en una camioneta, le pusieron bolsas de hielo debajo de las axilas y lo llevaron a una clínica.
Ángel fue enviado de regreso a su casa esa misma tarde, lucía débil y pálido. No fue capaz de indicarle a su padre el tratamiento que había recibido, si es que siquiera le había dado algo. Pasó la noche entera sudando y vomitando en una habitación de 50cm x 50cm, la cual compartía con los otros cuatro miembros de su familia dentro del primitivo campo de trabajo en el que se encontraban. Fue solo hasta que un organizador del grupo de jornaleros United Farm Workers [Jornaleros Unidos]llevó a Ángel al hospital que los doctores finalmente le diagnosticaron un golpe de calor y descubrieron que estaba infectado por el virus del Nilo Occidental. La insolación había debilitado el sistema inmune del muchacho, provocando que el Nilo Occidental evolucionara en meningitis, afección que inflama las membranas alrededor del cerebro y la médula espinal. Ángel entró en coma y, por un tiempo, creyeron que no iba a sobrevivir. Cuando Ángel recuperó la conciencia, su padre se encontraba en la habitación del hospital. Después de recibirlo con un abrazo, Roberto salió al pasillo y se arrodilló: él también se había recuperado.
“Eso te quita el miedo”, me dijo. “¿Qué me pueden hacer ahora?” Antes, él trabajaba duro pero en silencio; después del roce de Ángel con la muerte, Roberto viajaba hasta Sacramento para compartir su historia y promover medidas que protegieran a los jornaleros contra el calor, mismas que se implementaron en 2005, después de que el entonces gobernador, Arnold Schwarzenegger, firmara su entrada en vigor. Roberto ahora retaba a aquellos supervisores que no respetaban a los trabajadores. También empezó a llevar su teléfono a los campos para grabar a jornaleros hablando sobre sus vidas. Por otro lado, su hija mayor, Rosa*, se estaba preparando para ser periodista, mientras que Roberto mismo se estaba convirtiendo en una especie de jornalero-periodista; pues subía a Facebook los videos que había tomado. Inclusive, en uno de ellos se dirigió directamente a Trump. “Estas son las personas que los policías no quieren, pero mientras estos duermen, toda esta gente trabaja en los campos de todo California,” dijo, al tiempo que un grupo cosechaba apio detrás de él. “Y le mando un saludo a Donald Trump, que no nos quiere. Lo invito a que venga aquí y se entere de nuestro trabajo. Esto que ven es el apio que le da sabor a esta sopa.”
Palpar el miedo en el valle no resultaba difícil, pero al mismo tiempo se sentía la resistencia. Una tarde decidí visitar a Jorge Ortiz en su casa en Coachella, donde vive con su esposa Imelda y sus tres hijos. Su sala estaba llena de cajas sin desempacar -acababan de cambiarse de casa-, y Ortiz permanecía en el sillón, exhausto y encorvado. El hombre de 44 años acababa de llegar a su hogar después de un largo turno como capataz en una compañía de diseño de jardines. Los fines de semana trabajaba en una empresa de catering, y a veces aceptaba alguno que otro trabajo en construcción o jardinería. “Mi historia es la misma que la de los demás: pensaba quedarme dos o tres años aquí y luego regresar a México”, me dijo. Eso fue hace 17 años, pero cuando empezó a ascender dentro de la compañía de jardinería, mando a traer a su esposa y a sus hijos. Los dos mayores tienen el DACA; mientras que el menor es ciudadano estadounidense. Jorge e Imelda siguen siendo indocumentados.
Dado que se rehúsa a esconder su identidad cuando da entrevistas a los medios, Ortiz se ha vuelto uno de los activistas en migración más identificables en el área. Uno de sus clientes en jardinería es un veterinario que cuida a los perros de la Patrulla Fronteriza. Cuando los agentes llegan al consultorio, Ortiz los saluda. El 1° de mayo del año pasado, se unió a colegas activistas en una protesta frente a la estación de la Patrulla Fronteriza. Una semana antes, él y su familia acababan de aparecer en un popular y muy difundido video de AJ+ que reseñaba su activismo. “Quisiera mandar un mensaje a mi gente latina: muestren sus rostros,” dijo a la cámara. Sin duda, esta postura ponía nerviosos a aquellos que lo rodeaban. Durante la protesta del mes de mayo, un participante le insistió a Ortiz que usara un sombrero negro y lentes de sol para ocultar su rostro, mientras que otro asistente se mantuvo a su lado todo el tiempo, para evitar cualquier intento de los agentes por capturarlo.
Pienso que Ortiz podía notar lo difícil que me resultaba entender su falta de miedo. Me contó que su trabajo como activista había iniciado una década antes, en un grupo llamado Consejo de Federaciones Méxicanas, COFEM, el cual ayudaba a los padres de familia a tomar el liderazgo en las escuelas de Coachella. Conforme fue teniendo más facilidad para expresarse, otros inmigrantes indocumentados empezaron a llamarle para pedir consejos o simplemente para externar sus preocupaciones sobre el futuro. Desde el triunfo de Trump, las llamadas aumentaron vertiginosamente, y él había podido ver cómo el miedo se extendía de tal manera que la vida cotidiana estaba dejando de parecer vida.
‘Quisiera mandar un mensaje a mi gente latina: muestren sus rostros,’ dijo a la cámara.
Ortiz admitió que, por supuesto, también tenía miedo. No quería que lo separaran de su familia y quería que sus hijos siguieran estudiando en Estados Unidos; pero tampoco quería que el miedo se apoderara de él, por lo que su respuesta fue hacerlo a un lado e ir hacia delante. “Si llamas al miedo, el miedo llega,” me dijo. “Pero si llamas a la fe, esta llega también.”
* * *
Un sábado de junio me estacioné en la entrada del remolque de Roberto. Era un poco más de medio día y la temperatura estaba alcanzando los 41° C. Roberto se encontraba afuera, bajo la sombra de una cochera que había construido hace poco, junto a la cerca que acababa de terminar de poner y que colindaba con un cobertizo que había descombrado y convertido en un pequeño estudio musical. Le gustaba llegar a casa después del trabajo y entretenerse afuera, ya que solía pasar su turno encerrado en una oficina con aire acondicionado.
Ese día, sin embargo, no estaba trabajando. En sus hombros colgaba un acordeón, del que extraía una melodía. En una mesa cercana había extendidos varios chiles jalapeños que el mismo había cortado antes del amanecer. Normalmente la mirada de Roberto emitía un destello juguetón, pero esta vez resplandecía.
“Rosa se gradúa hoy del colegio,” dijo. Puso el acordeón a un lado, sacó un banquillo y me ofreció una silla. Aunque tenía que arreglarse e irse a Los Ángeles pronto, estaba disfrutando el momento. Rosa era la razón por la que había llegado a Estados Unidos. Cuando vivía en Mexicali, Roberto trabajaba para una empresa de pan llamada Bimbo, en donde era el encargado de monitorear la línea de tostado. Cuando pidió que le dieran un día libre para ir al bautizo de Rosa, su supervisor le negó la petición y Roberto, quien nunca había faltado al trabajo, no hizo caso y se fue a la celebración. ¿Cómo iba a perderse el bautizo de su propia hija? Debido a esto, el supervisor lo suspendió por 15 días y Roberto, furioso, salió del lugar y nunca más volvió.
Nunca pudo encontrar un trabajo estable, por lo que la familia vino a Estados Unidos con una visa de turista y nunca regresaron. Una brisa suave acariciaba mi cuello sudoroso. Roberto, que no sudaba – o al menos eso me parecía- hablaba sobre el futuro de su hija. Sabía que ella era trabajadora y que su sueño era ser periodista, pero no estaba seguro de cuáles eran sus planes para después de graduarse. Rosa ya se movía en un mundo diferente y se encontraba feliz y en ascenso. Eso era todo lo que él necesitaba saber. “Le dije, no porque te hayamos ayudado quiere decir que nos debes algo”, señaló. “Haz tu propio camino y no te preocupes por nosotros.”
Después de media hora de estar conversando en el patio me fui para que Roberto entrara a tomar un baño. Para este gran día había escogido un atuendo esplendoroso: una lustrosa camisa morada con azul, pantalones negros, botas vaqueras blancas y un sombrero que le hacía juego. A pesar del “disturbio”, la familia seguía adelante.
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Jose Simo es un consejero de voz suave del College of the Desert, escuela comunitaria en el Valle de Coachella que impulsa a los niños a tomar otro camino que no sea el de trabajar en los campos. En 2008, Simo fundó “Alas con futuro”, club que atiende a estudiantes indocumentados y los conecta para obtener becas y apoyo financiero. El 5 de septiembre, el club llevaría a cabo su primera junta del año escolar 2017-18. El plan era presentar al grupo de estudiantes de nuevo ingreso. Horas antes de la reunión, Trump anunció la cancelación del DACA. A partir de ese momento, el teléfono de Simo no dejó de recibir mensajes de texto. La junta se convirtió en una especie de confesionario, y los estudiantes se movían alrededor de la mesa compartiendo sus miedos y secándose las lágrimas. “La gente estaba simplemente devastada,” dijo Simo. “Fue extremadamente difícil. Aun así, siempre me sorprende lo fuertes que son los estudiantes. El cinco de septiembre fue duro, como también lo fue el seis; pero para el día siete ellos ya estaban con la mirada hacia adelante”
Varias semanas después, Simo se encontraba en una de las salas de juntas de la escuela, en donde casi una treintena de personas se habían juntado para tomar una sesión informativa sobre DACA. Al frente del salón se encontraba Luz Gallegos, con un grupo llamado TODEC Legal Center. Ella inició el taller compartiendo la historia de su primera campaña como activista en 1986. Gallegos tenía 7 años cuando viajó a Washington D.C. con sus padres con el objeto de presionar a los miembros del Congreso para que aprobaran una reforma migratoria. Aunque habían juntado suficiente dinero para su vuelo, no tenían para pagar el alojamiento, por lo que durante su estancia de una semana en Washington durmieron debajo de un puente. Cada mañana iban a una iglesia local para asearse y bajar al Capitolio.
El punto de la historia era que la victoria se puede alcanzar: el presidente Ronald Reagan, un republicano conservador, firmó la ley de reforma migratoria que legalizaba a casi tres millones de inmigrantes indocumentados. En otras ocasiones había tenido la oportunidad de ver a Gallegos en acción, y este era siempre su mensaje: Si puedes pelear, puedes ganar. “No están solos,” le dijo a los estudiantes. “No deben tener miedo, porque eso es justo lo que ellos quieren. Detrás de ustedes hay mucha gente que los apoya. No olviden que son lo mejor de lo mejor, la crema y nata.”
Trump declaró que el 5 de marzo de 2018 sería la fecha oficial del fin de DACA, aunque los beneficiarios cuya protección había caducado podían aplicar para obtener una prórroga de dos años. La fecha límite para mandar peticiones de renovación era el 5 de octubre, y Gallegos luchaba para informar a tantas personas como le fuera posible, llegando a dar hasta tres talleres diarios. En una ocasión, me dijo que después de la elección su organización había implementado una política de auto-cuidado, para evitar el desgaste del personal y ayudarles a lidiar con el estrés emocional de trabajar en una comunidad en crisis. Esto había pasado hace cinco meses, pero no parecía que ella hubiera tomado un solo día libre. Cuando se lo pregunté, ella simplemente se rió. El momento para descansar vendría después. Se excusó para ir a ayudar a una estudiante con su papeleo.
Cuando llegué al remolque de Roberto, este estaba inusualmente callado. “¿Piensas que nos equivocamos con Dolores*?” preguntó. Su hija menor había cumplido 15 años en julio, lo que quería decir que era elegible para obtener el DACA, pero Roberto vacilaba en dar información al gobierno federal con Trump como presidente. Ahora esa limitada protección también había desaparecido. ¿Y qué sería de Rosa, cuya vida post-escolar apenas comenzaba?
“Trabajamos, y quizá parecemos felices ante los ojos de otros,” dijo. “Pero tenemos mucha incertidumbre”. Estaba en el sillón, acompañado de la siempre silenciosa Leticia. La pareja lucía agotada. La temporada había cambiado una vez más, y ahora se dedicaban a sembrar apio por $10.50 dólares la hora. Lo tenían que hacer de noche, para proteger las semillas del calor del día. “No sabemos qué puede pasar mañana,” dijo, sus ojos se posaron en la novela que pasaba por la televisión. “A veces nos vamos a trabajar a las dos o tres de la mañana, migración nos puede detener y hasta ahí llegamos.” Esta fue la primera vez que Roberto insinuó la posibilidad de la derrota. Habló de envejecer sin tener ahorros para el retiro; de una vida sin seguro de empleo o de salud; de sus padres en México, quienes murieron sin que él pudiera despedirse bien de ellos. Estos fueron los sacrificios que tuvo que hacer por el bien de sus hijos. ¿En verdad podía todo esto desaparecer en un instante?
Durante mis visitas anteriores Dolores nunca estaba ahí, pero ese día ella se encontraba en casa y salió a platicar a la sala. La estudiante de preparatoria tenía una larga cabellera negra y un fleco que enmarcaba un rostro amplio y una sonrisa alegre. Su familia se mudó a los Estados Unidos cuando ella tenía dos años y, con excepción de algunos viajes a Bakersfield durante el tiempo de cosecha de uvas, había pasado toda su vida en aquel campamento de remolques. Me contó que su área de juegos era el desierto circundante, en donde inventaba personajes y hablaba con las palmeras. “Me inventaba la historia de que era un caballero tratando de salvar a una princesa,” dijo riendo. “Estoy segura que mi papás pensaban que estaba zafada.”
Dolores daba la impresión de estarse tomando las noticias de la cancelación del DACA mejor que su padre. A veces se sentía perdida y preocupada por su hermana Rosa, que era su mentora y mejor amiga. Dolores siempre había soñado con estudiar fuera; idea que ahora parecía imposible. Sin embargo, aún tenía en la mira la misma meta: asistir a la Universidad de California en Berkeley. “Si tengo que trabajar el doble o el triple, no tengo duda alguna de que lo voy a hacer,” dijo. “Mi hermana siempre me dice ‘No es difícil, sino que lleva tiempo.” Esta frase se ha vuelto una especie de mantra para Dolores, que estudia hasta cinco horas al día y hace sus notas a mano, pues la familia no cuenta con una computadora. Su horario de clases habitual incluye: historia mundial, literatura multicultural, español, matemáticas, física y danza, todas bajo el esquema educativo estadounidense de “colocación avanzada”, AP, por sus siglas en inglés). “Debes tratar de entrar a todas las clases de colocación avanzada que puedas, porque te van a ayudar mucho,” comentó, lamentándose de que Desert Mirageno ofreciera más cursos avanzados. Sus calificaciones siempre habían sido las más altas.
Dolores me dijo que quería ser la primera de su familia en graduarse con una toga blanca; honor reservado para los 10 estudiantes más destacados de la escuela. Todavía no sabe qué va a estudiar, pero lo que sí sabe es que jamás quiere poner un pie en los campos, y que con un buen empleo será capaz de ayudar a sus padres. “Ellos trabajan horas extras y les pagan muy poco”, señaló. “Sé que les gritan. Recuerdo a mi papá con las manos llenas de moretones y a mi mamá con las rodillas adoloridas. Llegan muy cansados a la casa.” Mientras Dolores hablaba, Roberto se había quedado dormido en el sillón y roncaba suavemente.
* * *
La última vez que visité a Roberto fue un día después del de acción de gracias”, a la hora del crepúsculo. El cielo de Coachella tenía un bello tono púrpura. Rosa estaba de visita de Bakersfield, en donde había encontrado un empleo como defensora de inmigrantes. Estábamos afuera de la casa rodante, disfrutando la brisa vespertina mientras ella platicaba sobre su trabajo. Había estado en protestas y escrito artículos, y pronto viajaría a Washington, D.C., para apoyar a la “Ley Dream”[Sueña], misma que, si era aprobada, le abriría el camino de la ciudadanía a los jóvenes indocumentados. Roberto estaba a su lado, sonriente.
El miedo en el Valle de Coachella parecía estar emprendiendo retirada. Después de los rumores de redadas y deportaciones masivas, mucha gente me dijo que las cosas habían llegado a una especie de normalidad. Doug Morin, del grupo de voluntarios médicos del valle de Coachella, señaló que las visitas de los pacientes se habían reactivado. Por otro lado, las inscripciones al Head Start también aumentaron, en parte gracias a la enérgica difusión de Beatriz Machiche y de su equipo. Sin embargo, no resultaba difícil imaginar lo rápido que todo podía cambiar. En las primeras semanas de 2018 hubo un aumento evidente en el número de agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza a lo largo del Valle de Coachella, lo que generó nuevas preocupaciones de acciones policiales (aunque, de nuevo, ninguna de ellas se materializó). En febrero, como parte de una serie de medidas enérgicas a los empleadores, los agentes de ICE visitaron muchos negocios locales para llevar a cabo auditorías. En un restaurante, un grupo de clientes abandonó el lugar de manera abrupta después de que los agentes entraran, y regresaron más tarde solo a pagar sus cuentas. Para las familias de indocumentados, el miedo podía resurgir sin previo aviso.
Un poco antes del Día de San Valentín, Roberto me llamó para darme buenas noticias: Dolores había obtenido el 8° lugar de su clase entre un grupo de 516 estudiantes, lo que significaba que la chica cumpliría su sueño de graduarse de blanco. También le había pedido a sus padres que le organizaran su fiesta de quince años, que es cuando las jóvenes celebran su presentación ante la sociedad. Dolores había cumplido 15 en julio, pero no le había hecho ninguna fiesta porque estaban apretados de dinero y, por supuesto, la situación seguía igual. No obstante, Roberto me dijo “ella nunca nos ha pedido nada”, por lo que él y Leticia le había prometido a su hija que le harían una gran fiesta, cuya fecha se fijó para mayo. Era necesario contratar músicos y alguien que tomara video, ofrecer comida a los invitados y rentar un espacio. Según sus cálculos, Roberto pensaba que el evento costaría $ 7, 000 dólares. No tenía idea dónde iba a conseguir ese dinero, pero estaba convencido de que lo lograría. Aunque estaba casi a punto de cumplir 50 años, él también era un soñador.
In the spring of 2016, as Trump was clinching the Republican nomination for president, I drove east into the Coachella Valley, looking for a 48-year-old farmworker named Roberto. My cell phone had died and I soon became lost, meandering along country roads where I rarely passed another vehicle. When I finally found Roberto, he was standing outside a single-wide trailer, waiting patiently in his cowboy hat, with an amused smile on his face.
To the north and west of his trailer were more trailers. To the south and east his yard opened into the desert, which gave way, in places, to lettuce fields and vineyards. This was the land Roberto had worked for the past 20 years, the kind of land that made you feel small but not insignificant. We stepped inside and sat at his kitchen table. The shades were drawn against the heat, and Roberto muted the television in the living room, where a newscaster spoke in Spanish about Trump’s proposed wall along the southern U.S. border. Roberto, who wore a faded gray t-shirt and jeans torn at the knees, was built thick, with broad shoulders and the hint of a gut. He took a swig of bottled water, placed his gnarled hands on the table, and began to talk.
As he spoke, it became clear that there were plenty of reasons for him to fear a Trump presidency. He was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, as was his wife, Leticia. (I’ve changed all the family names.) All three of their kids were born in Mexico. His youngest daughter was in eighth grade and also undocumented. His middle daughter was in college and protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, an Obama-era policy Trump had threatened to end. Only his oldest son, married to a U.S. citizen, was a legal resident. Trump was like a grenade that could land inside the family and explode, sending people flying in all directions. Roberto rarely uttered Trump’s name, instead referring to him as the disturbio, the disturbance.
But it wasn’t only Roberto — just about everyone he knew was in a similar situation. He lives in an unincorporated community called Thermal, which, according to the U.S. Census, is 99.9 percent Latino (all but three of its 2,396 people, to be exact). In nearby Mecca, another unincorporated region of nearly 9,000, Latinos also make up 99.9 percent of the population. The community of Oasis, several miles away, is 98.2 percent Latino. Coachella, the closest city, is 97.5 percent Latino. On this side of the desert, you hear Spanish peppered with English, not the other way around.
It was my first trip to the Eastern Coachella Valley, and I was collecting the oral histories of farmworkers. During those conversations, Trump was a frequent topic. He began to feel like a specter haunting the region, his threats blasted out on the radio and television. He was also something of a joke. At the time, no one I spoke with seriously considered the idea of a Trump presidency. Then he won. The candidate who had campaigned directly against the kind of people who lived in this valley was suddenly the most powerful person in the world. I had originally come to Coachella to learn what it was like to be a farmworker here. Now there was a new question: What was it like to live in a place where everyone felt under attack?
* * *
The Coachella Valley is a 45-mile stretch of scorching terrain that begins near Palm Springs and runs southeast to the Salton Sea. It is a land of impossible extremes, a place that doesn’t make sense but exists nonetheless, a testament to hubris and hard work and irrigation canals, and also to racism. Near Palm Springs, you are surrounded by golf courses, sprawling mansions, and country clubs with swimming pools and tennis courts; as you travel southeast through the valley, they are replaced, mirage-like, by agricultural fields and dusty trailer parks. In Palm Springs you can spend $1 million renting out a lush resort for two nights. On the east side, the land is dotted with illegal dumps and the drinking water is laced with arsenic.
If you’ve heard of Coachella, it’s almost certainly because of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, an annual bacchanalia that plays out on polo grounds about 10 miles from Roberto’s trailer. The 2017 festival, headlined by Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga, and Radiohead, brought in a record $114.6 million. VIP tickets went for $900 apiece, and couples looking to splurge could rent a modern yurt for the weekend for $7,500. But the festival has little bearing on the lives of people on the valley’s east side, except perhaps as a reminder of how easy it is to not see them.
The region can be strikingly beautiful, with dramatic mountains to the west and date trees that march to the hazy horizon. The land is rich, producing some $640 million in crops — table grapes, lemons, bell peppers, and much more — each year.
It’s also a hard place. In Thermal, about a third of the residents live below the poverty line, including nearly half of all children. Being a farmworker isn’t easy anywhere, but here it’s particularly grueling, with summertime highs that can top 120 degrees. Housing is so tight during the grape harvest that many migrant farmworkers sleep in their cars or on flattened cardboard boxes in parking lots. Some bathe in canals polluted by pesticide runoff.
But the festival has little bearing on the lives of people on the valley’s east side, except perhaps as a reminder of how easy it is to not see them.
Thermal’s largest community spot lies near the intersection of 66th Avenue and Tyler Street, home to three adjacent schools in the middle of otherwise empty fields: Las Palmitas Elementary School, Toro Canyon Middle School, and Desert Mirage High School. On a cloudless morning last April, I met up with Maria, a teacher’s assistant at Las Palmitas who is a member of the Purépecha, an indigenous group from the Mexican state of Michoacán that has a sizable presence in Thermal. School had just gotten out, and we sat at a long table in an empty cafeteria, watching children race around the playground. It was Maria’s birthday — she was now 21 — and kids had spent the day serenading her with multilingual renditions of “Happy Birthday.”
“I had my little cousin call me on election night,” Maria told me. “He said, ‘Have you voted already? I’m just really worried about my mom.’” The next day, he called in tears to ask if Maria had begun the process of fixing his mother’s immigration status so that she wouldn’t be deported, as if it were a simple matter of paperwork. “I could not respond to him,” Maria said softly. She paused, looking down at the table. “At the end, I told him, ‘Yes, I’m already doing that.’ Just to keep him calm.” She told me that her cousin was doing better now, because he thought his mother had become a legal resident. Many other parents, she said, had used the same strategy, hoping to protect their kids from worry.
On the morning after the election, students at Las Palmitas filed off the bus in a daze. Many were silent at first, but the questions eventually tumbled out. When I get home, will my mom still be there? Is the wall already built? Do they have special education classes in Mexico? Who will teach me to read? Some teachers put aside lesson plans and opened up class to a discussion about what was on everyone’s mind. “They usually come in with energy, joking around and chasing each other,” said Adam Santana, who teaches language arts at Toro Canyon. “That day they were silent. It was as if there had been a tragedy on campus. Finally, one of the students asked, ‘Are there really going to be deportations?’”
With the high school students, the fear was less on display. “The older students tend to internalize their stress a lot more,” said Karina Vega, who is one of just two full-time counselors for the almost 19,000 students in the Coachella Valley Unified School District. We met on a day when the air conditioning had gone out in her portable office, located at the district headquarters in Thermal, and her face was flushed and worried. Vega grew up in Mecca and is the daughter of farmworkers; stacked in the back of her office were boxes of dates from her father’s ranch. Her son Anzel was completing his senior year at Desert Mirage High School, which has a history of activism. In 2016, students walked out of class and marched nearly six miles to protest at the district office in support of higher salaries for their teachers. A couple of years before that, they marched out after the principal and vice principal were fired. “Our kids have hearts, big hearts,” Vega told me.
In some schools across the country, Trump inspired white kids to chant, “Build the wall!” at their Latino peers. That sort of thing wouldn’t happen here, because there aren’t any white kids. Santana, the middle school teacher, tries to prepare his kids for encounters like that in the world outside Thermal. “I tell them, when you go off to college, or if you move and get a job somewhere else, it’s going to be very different. Not everybody is going to have similar last names as you, or the same hair color. They’re not all going to speak Spanish.” The isolation has become a source of strength and comfort. One high school senior, a DACA recipient, told me that he first lived in Bloomington, in San Bernardino County, and was beaten and bullied by kids because he was still learning English. “We moved here when I was in second grade, and I would want to speak Spanish and English, and everyone was able to talk both. I was like, ‘Oh, so this is where I belong.’ They understand me and my struggles, and I understand them.”
Since the election, Vega has dealt with a surge of self-destructive behavior among the high school students. “With grief, we can figure it out,” she told me. “If someone dies, I know what to do with that.” But the general climate of fear, the threats of family separation, the fact that no one knows what’s coming next — these were existential problems that she told me “couldn’t be counseled.” She had recently attended a training that featured a speaker who described, during a particularly rough stretch of her life, drinking hot sauce. “When she would feel the fire going down her throat, she would be like, ‘Oh, there I am,’’ Vega said. “I feel like that’s where we are right now as a community. We need to feel. And I’m not saying that all of this wasn’t real under Obama, but now it’s a constant. It’s all you hear, it’s all they talk about.”
* * *
Undocumented immigrants were far from safe under Obama. During his administration, a record 2.8 million people were deported. He also oversaw the dramatic expansion of a program called Secure Communities, which allowed for information sharing between the Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement agencies and led to the deportation of many individuals with infractions as minor as driving with a broken taillight. It was only during his final years in office, under pressure from activists, that Obama became less hawkish on immigration, creating the DACA program to protect young undocumented immigrants, and trying, unsuccessfully, to expand those protections to their parents. His legacy was, at best, mixed.
There was nothing mixed about Trump. During the campaign, Trump’s slander against Mexicans was repeated incessantly on Spanish-language news programs, sucking up the oxygen in living rooms across the Coachella Valley like a loud and unruly family member. Then he won and his threats started to mean something. In his first month in office, Trump signed an executive order that abandoned Obama’s tiered system, essentially making any undocumented immigrant a priority for deportation. That was followed by several weeks of stories about immigrants being swept up across the country, including 161 in the Los Angeles area. Similar actions had been carried out under Obama, but now they felt like the opening shot in a war. Under Trump, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were given new powers to pick up anyone they encountered, in what the agency termed “collateral arrests,” and apprehensions in the first year jumped 40 percent. Agents arrested defendants inside courthouses, homeless people seeking shelter at a church, and even a 23-year-old protected by DACA. “The crackdown on illegal criminals is merely the keeping of my campaign promise,” Trump tweeted on February 12, 2017. Here in Coachella, which is also home to a Border Patrol station, the message was clear: No one was safe.
Berta, who lives down the road from Roberto, was the first person to tell me about the raids in the Coachella Valley. (I’ve changed her name.) On February 15, 2017, she was home at work as a nanny, watching two young children when she got a call around 10 a.m. It was a friend, who heard from a neighbor that Border Patrol vans were parked in front of the local Cardenas, a grocery store chain that caters to Latinos. Then her brother-in-law called; he’d read a post on Facebook that raids were underway. Over the next hour, the calls kept coming — Berta lost count after 10 — and the scope of the operation expanded. Immigrants were being rounded up at Cardenas stores in two nearby cities, Cathedral City and Coachella, and at a Walmart and a Food 4 Less. Agents were demanding documents from anyone entering or leaving. Some attempted to flee, leaving behind carts filled with food. Others sheltered in place, refusing to exit. On the streets, Border Patrol agents set up checkpoints, sweeping up drivers who couldn’t prove their legal status. News of the raids soon leaped from social media to a local Spanish-language radio station.
As the calls kept coming, Berta veered into something close to a breakdown. Her husband, also undocumented, works in demolition and travels to construction sites across the Coachella Valley. When she reached him, he was at a jobsite not far from Cathedral City. He had already received numerous warning messages on Facebook.
Berta paced her small trailer, exchanging texts, shooting off Facebook messages, absorbing the panic and sending it back out. Her husband was 30 miles away; one wrong turn and he’d be sent back to Mexico. Finally, Berta called her sister-in-law, a U.S. citizen. Like everyone else, she had heard about the raids, and she volunteered to drive through the streets where Border Patrol checkpoints had reportedly been set up.
Berta’s sister-in-law drove for more than an hour and didn’t come across a single checkpoint. There were no agents at Cardenas, or Walmart, or Food 4 Less. There were, in fact, no raids or checkpoints in the Coachella Valley that day. When Berta got the news, she broke into tears of relief.
It was mid-April when we spoke, two months after the false rumors had terrorized the valley. As Berta described that day, her hands shook and she began to cry all over again. “I decided not to worry anymore,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It’s too stressful to think about all the possibilities.” She paused and thought about the possibilities. “What would happen if they got my husband?” she asked. “Or if they got me? What would happen to my kids?” Their oldest son, at 18, had just renewed his DACA permit; their youngest son, then 14, was too young to enroll.
Berta had just heard on the news that Trump’s new priority was to deport people who had overstayed their visas. Berta had overstayed her visa, and the government had the address of her brother-in-law, whom she had said they were visiting. “That’s the first place they’re going to look for us,” she said. She looked at her watch. It was 3:30 in the afternoon. We were seated in her trailer with the curtains pulled shut. Her husband wasn’t due to be home for several hours, but she was already beginning to worry.
* * *
Thermal’s Migrant and Seasonal Head Start center is located in a yellow one-story building across the street from Vega’s office. When I visited, several months after Trump took office, I met the director, Beatriz Machiche, a former farmworker. Down the hallway was an empty classroom with a sheet of paper taped to the door that read, Cerrado hasta nuevo aviso, Jan 2017. They had closed the classroom because they didn’t have enough kids. This time last year, they had a waiting list 200 kids long. Machiche told me she suspected parents no longer wanted to turn over their information to the federal government for fear of being deported. She and her staff had started making trips to the fields to spread the word about their services, but so far, people were reluctant. “Parents say they will come, but they don’t,” she said. In more than a decade at the office, she’d never seen anything like it.
This was one of the harshest consequences of the fear: Immigrants were staying away from the very institutions designed to sustain them and elevate their children. In California, several other agencies that provide Migrant and Seasonal Head Start care reported drops in enrollment last year of between 15 and 20 percent. One of the largest Migrant and Seasonal Head Start grantees in the country is the Texas Migrant Council, which operates in seven states; last year, the number of kids they served dropped 11 percent. In Texas, the number of students assisted through the federally funded Migrant Education Program, which provides assistance to children of migrant farmworkers who face special obstacles accessing education, dropped 22 percent from 2016 to 2017. In California, the drop was 7 percent.
The fear was also causing people to go hungry. After the false Cardenas rumors, Veronica Garcia, who works with Borrego Health, a nonprofit health care provider, was knocking on doors at a trailer park in Thermal. A woman in her 60s told Garcia that many of her neighbors had stopped shopping, convinced that immigration agents were staking out grocery stores. As their cabinets emptied out, she had begun to travel to local distribution sites to collect free food that she’d pass out to grateful families. As she spoke to Garcia, hungry kids walked by her home to pick up peanut butter sandwiches. By the end of the conversation, tears were streaming down the woman’s face.
“She was letting us know how bad it had gotten for everybody there,” said Garcia. “People were too scared to come out at all.” Garcia had previously worked at Coachella Valley’s food bank, Food in Need of Distribution, or FIND. She contacted them and explained the gravity of the situation, and several hours later a truck rolled into the trailer park. Within hours, nearly 200 people had been fed.
Chantel Schuering is the community relations director for FIND, and says that they typically sign up about 3,000 families a year for Medicaid and food stamps. After the election, their numbers dropped by more than half, a trend that lasted into the spring. Across the country, programs that feed the hungry have seen sharp drops in enrollment. In California, the number of participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, dropped 7 percent last year. In Florida, the decrease was even higher, at 9.6 percent. Texas participants were down 7.4 percent.
This was one of the harshest consequences of the fear: Immigrants were staying away from the very institutions designed to sustain them and elevate their children.
Many people I interviewed emphasized that they couldn’t definitively explain the drops in enrollment, but they believed that fear of deportation was a contributing factor. Sometimes, though, the link was direct. After a raid in February 2017 in Woodburn, Oregon, during which ICE picked up two vans of farmworkers, several local families responded by calling the Oregon Child Development Coalition, which provides Migrant and Seasonal Head Start services for the state, to demand that their names be expunged from the database. In Coachella, FIND received numerous calls from residents wanting to learn how to unenroll from food stamps and Medicaid. This February, those fears received confirmation: Reuters reported that the Trump administration was working on new rules to punish immigrants for enrolling their U.S.-born children in Head Start, food stamps, and other programs.
The fear also appears to be causing immigrants to hesitate before they report crimes. Last April, Houston’s police chief announced that the number of Hispanics who reported rape had dropped nearly 43 percent in the first three months, compared to the same period the previous year. During the first six months of the Trump administration, domestic violence reports among Latinos dropped 18 percent in San Francisco, 13 percent in San Diego, and 3.5 percent in Los Angeles. (There was virtually no change in reporting among non-Latinos.) Sarah Stillman, writing in the New Yorker, reported that in one Latino neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, domestic violence reports dropped more than 85 percent in the first eight months of 2017, compared to the previous year, while rape and sexual complaints were down 75 percent.
In the months after the election, people in Coachella altered their daily routines, recalculating risks. Attendance at the largest Catholic Church in the Coachella Valley, Our Lady of Soledad, dipped between 10 to 15 percent. “People [once] felt pretty safe here,” said Father Guy Wilson. “In the new political climate, it’s like they’re going to go after everyone.”
Another woman told me that her husband, an undocumented immigrant, had stopped wearing political T-shirts, which amounted to a subtle erasing of his personality. Others eliminated trips to the movies or to local restaurants, because each journey increased the chance of being stopped by Border Patrol. One afternoon, I rode in the car with an undocumented woman who was picking up her son from a community college class. During the drive she gripped the steering wheel and repeatedly scanned her mirrors for the green-and-white truck of an agent. When we got back to her trailer we both collapsed on the sofa, relieved. This did not feel like a sustainable way to live.
Last April, the Desert Sun, the local newspaper, reported that medical clinics were seeing drops in the number of patient visits. Doug Morin directs Coachella Valley Volunteers in Medicine, a free clinic that serves individuals without health insurance, filling a gap in a region where the doctor-to-population ratio is more than four times federal recommendations. The clinic once did a brisk business. “Every month and every year, our numbers went up,” Morin told me. In January, when Trump took office, patient visits nose-dived. They had 171 patient visits that month, down from 429 in January of 2016. When we spoke in September, he said visits were down by 25 to 30 percent for the year.
Morin told me of one elderly woman who had come to the office complaining of abdominal pain. She had previously gone to the emergency room of a local hospital, where doctors discovered a mass on her uterus, but because she didn’t have insurance, she was sent on her way. At Morin’s clinic, a physician determined that the mass wasn’t fibroids, a common and treatable condition, but likely a cancerous tumor. As a staff member filled out paperwork to enroll the woman in Emergency Medi-Cal, which is available to undocumented immigrants, the woman’s daughter entered the office.
“She told us, ‘Delete everything!’” said Morin. “She didn’t want her mother’s name or address to be shared with anyone.” They tried to explain the severity of the condition, but the daughter grabbed the paperwork and marched her mother out. “She left so quickly that we weren’t even able to give her mother anything for her pain,” recalled Morin.
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Last year, as winter turned to spring, I stopped byRoberto’s trailer several times and always found him defiant and unafraid. More rumors of raids had swept through the valley, and Roberto’s supervisors had recommended that employees travel in small groups to avoid attracting attention from immigration officials. Roberto saw Border Patrol agents just about every day, sometimes idling behind his car at a red light, other times in line when getting coffee at a nearby market. When I asked him how he felt when he saw a Border Patrol truck in the rear mirror, he shrugged. They were doing their jobs and he was doing his.
He told me that he had lost his fear a decade ago, when his son, Angel, had nearly died. At the time, Angel was 16 and picking grapes near Bakersfield with him. The temperature hit 104 degrees, and Angel began to complain that he felt dizzy and too weak to work. After Roberto insisted that his son be taken to the hospital, the company put Angel in a truck, placed ice bags under his armpits, and brought him to a clinic.
Angel was dropped off at home that evening looking pale and weak. He couldn’t tell his father what kind of treatment — if any — he had received. He spent the night sweating and vomiting in the 14-foot-by-14-foot room that their family of five then shared in their employer’s primitive labor camp. It was only after an organizer with the United Farm Workers drove Angel to the hospital that doctors finally diagnosed him with sunstroke and discovered that he’d been exposed to the West Nile virus. The sunstroke weakened his immune system, likely causing the West Nile to develop into meningitis, an infection that inflames the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord. Angel went into a coma, and for a time it seemed he might not survive. When he regained consciousness, Roberto greeted his son in the hospital room. Then he stepped into the hallway and kneeled on the ground, overcome.
“That takes your fear away,” he told me. “What can anyone do to me now?” Before, he had been a hard but quiet worker. After Angel’s brush with death, Roberto traveled to Sacramento to share his story and speak out in support of heat protections for farmworkers, which were signed into law in 2005 by then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Roberto now stood up to supervisors who disrespected workers; he had also begun to take his phone into the fields, where he videotaped farmworkers speaking about their lives. His oldest daughter, Rosa, was majoring in journalism, and Roberto had become something of a farmworker-journalist himself, uploading the videos he took to Facebook.In one, he addressed Trump directly. “These are the people that the politicians don’t want, but while they sleep at this hour, all these people are working in the fields across California,” he said, as a crew harvested celery stalks in the background. “And a greeting to Donald Trump, who doesn’t want us. I invite him to come here and find out about our work. This here is celery, which gives flavor to this soup.”
It wasn’t hard to find fear in the Coachella Valley, but there was resistance as well. One evening, I visited Jorge Ortiz at his house in Coachella, where he lives with his wife, Ymelda, and their three sons. Their living room was filled with unpacked boxes — they had recently moved — and Ortiz sat on the couch, hunched over and exhausted. The 44-year-old had just arrived home from a long shift as a foreman at a landscaping company. He worked weekends as a caterer, and sometimes picked up the odd gardening or construction job. “I have the same story as everyone else: I was going to stay here two or three years and go back to Mexico,” he told me. That was 17 years ago. When he started to rise at the landscaping company, he sent for his wife and kids instead. Their two oldest kids have DACA, while their third son is a U.S. citizen. Jorge and Ymelda remain undocumented.
Because he refuses to hide his identity when giving media interviews, Ortiz has become one of the most recognizable immigrant activists in the area. One of his landscaping clients is a veterinarian who cares for dogs used by the Border Patrol; Ortiz greets the agents when they arrive. Last year, on May 1, he joined fellow activists at a protest in front of the local Border Patrol station. Just a week earlier, Ortiz and his family had been profiled in a widely watched video made by AJ+ that showcased his activism. “I would like to send a message to my Latino people: show your faces,” he told the camera. It was a stance that made the people around him nervous. At the May protest, another participant insisted Ortiz don a black hat and sunglasses to conceal his face; another walked alongside him to guard against any attempt by border agents to seize him.
Ortiz, I think, could sense that I was struggling to understand his lack of fear. He told me that he had got his start as an activist a decade ago with a group called the Council of Mexican Federations, or COFEM, which helped parents become leaders within Coachella schools. As he became more vocal, other undocumented immigrants starting calling him to ask for his advice, or simply to worry aloud about the future. Since Trump’s election, the calls had skyrocketed, and he had seen how fear could grow until the life you were living didn’t look much like a life at all.
‘I would like to send a message to my Latino people: show your faces,’ he told the camera.
Ortiz admitted that he did, of course, have fear. He didn’t want to be separated from his family, and he wanted his sons to be able to continue their studies in the United States. But he didn’t want to be ruled by fear. So his answer was to push the fear aside and charge forward. “If you call for fear, fear will come,” he told me. “But if you call for faith, faith will also come.”
* * *
On a Saturday in June, I pulled into the driveway of Roberto’s trailer. It was a few minutes past noon and the temperature was on its way to 106. Roberto was outside, in the shade of a carport he had recently built, next to a fence he had recently completed, adjacent to a shed he had cleaned out and converted into a small music studio. He liked to come home from a day in the fields and tinker around out back, as if he’d spent the shift bottled up in an air-conditioned office.
Today, though, he wasn’t working. An accordion was slung over his shoulders and he was squeezing out a melody. Several large jalapeño peppers rested on a nearby folding table, which he had risen before the sun to pick. Roberto often had a playful sparkle in his eye, but now he was positively beaming.
“Rosa graduates from college today,” he said. He put the accordion down, pulled up a stool, and offered me a chair. He would need to clean up soon and head into Los Angeles, but right now he was luxuriating in the moment. Rosa was why they had landed in the United States in the first place. Back in Mexicali, Roberto worked at a bread company called Bimbo, where he monitored a toasting line. When he asked to have a day off for Rosa’s baptism, his supervisor denied the request. Roberto, who had never missed a day of work, went anyway. How could he miss the baptism of his own daughter? For that, the supervisor suspended him for 15 days. Furious, Roberto walked out and never came back.
After that, he hadn’t found steady work, so the family came to the United States on a tourist visa and never went back. As a slight breeze tickled the sweat on my neck — Roberto didn’t sweat, as far as I could tell — he talked about Rosa’s future. He knew that she was a hard worker and had dreams of being a journalist, but he wasn’t sure of her plans after graduation. She moved in a different world already and was rising and happy. That was all he needed to know. “I told her, just because we helped you out, you don’t owe us anything,” he said. “You make your own path and don’t worry about us.”
After half an hour, I left Roberto so that he could go inside and shower. He had picked out a sparkling outfit for the big day: a sleek purple and blue dress shirt, black slacks, white cowboy boots and a matching white tejana, or cowboy hat. Despite the disturbio, his family was moving forward.
* * *
Jose Simo is a soft-spoken counselor at the College of the Desert, a community college in the Coachella Valley that serves as many young people’s path out of the fields. In 2008, he founded Alas Con Futuro, or Wings to the Future, a club to support undocumented students and connect them with scholarships and financial aid. On September 5, the club held its first meeting of the 2017-18 academic year, where they planned to introduce the group to new students. Several hours before they met, Trump announced that he was canceling DACA, and Simo’s phone started buzzing with texts. The meeting turned into a confessional, with students going around the table, sharing their fears, wiping away tears. “People were just devastated,” said Simo. “It was incredibly difficult. Yet I’m always amazed at how resilient the students are. The fifth of September was hard, and the sixth was hard, but by the seventh, they were just going to move forward.”
Several weeks later, Simo was in a meeting room at the college, where two-dozen people had gathered for a DACA clinic. At the front of the room stood Luz Gallegos with a group called TODEC Legal Center. She began the workshop with a story about her first activist campaign, in 1986. Gallegos, at age 7, traveled with her parents to Washington, D.C., to lobby members of Congress on immigration reform. While they had raised enough money for their airfare, they couldn’t afford lodging, so they spent their week in Washington sleeping under a bridge. Each morning they’d clean up at a local church and descend on the Capitol.
Her point was that victory was possible: President Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican, had signed an immigration reform bill that legalized the status of nearly three million undocumented immigrants. I’d seen Gallegos in action before, and this was always her message: You could win if you fought. “You are not alone,” she told the students. “You don’t need to have fear, because that’s what they want you to feel. There are so many people behind you, supporting you. Don’t forget that you are the very best of the best, the crème de la crème.”
Trump had announced March 5, 2018, as the official end date for DACA, though recipients whose protections expired before then could apply for another two-year reprieve. The deadline to send in renewals was October 5, and Gallegos was scrambling to reach as many people as she could, giving upward of three workshops a day. She’d once told me that after the election her organization had instituted a policy of self-care to prevent burnout and help staff manage the emotional stress that came with working with a community in crisis. That was five months ago, and she didn’t look like she had taken many days off since. When I asked her about it, she just laughed. Time for rest would come later. She excused herself to help a DACA student fill out her paperwork.
When I swung by Roberto’s trailer, he was uncharacteristically quiet. “Do you think we made a mistake with Dolores?” he asked. In July, his youngest daughter had turned 15, which meant she was eligible to apply for DACA, but Roberto had been hesitant to turn over any more information to the federal government as long as Trump was president. Now even that limited protection was gone. And what about Rosa, whose life after college was just starting to unfold?
“We work, and maybe from the viewpoint of others we look happy,” he said. “But we are uncertain.” He was seated on the couch next to Leticia, who remained quiet throughout, as she often did. The couple looked exhausted. The season had shifted again, and they were now planting celery for $10.50 an hour, a task performed at night to protect the young seedlings from the daytime heat. “We don’t know what will happen tomorrow,” he said, his eyes turned to a soap opera on the television. “Sometimes we get off work at two or three in the morning and we could just be pulled over by immigration and that’s it.” For the first time, he hinted at the prospect of defeat. He spoke of getting older without any retirement savings, of a life without unemployment insurance or health care, of his parents in Mexico, who had both died without him being able to say a proper goodbye. Those were all sacrifices made for the benefit of his kids. Could everything really be wiped away in an instant?
Dolores hadn’t been around during earlier visits, but today she was home and came out of her room to chat. The high school sophomore has long black hair with bangs cut short across her forehead, framing a broad face and bright smile. She was 2 when the family moved to the United States, and except for trips to Bakersfield during the grape harvest, she’s spent her entire life in the trailer park. She told me that her playground was the surrounding desert, where she invented characters and talked to the palm trees. “I would make believe that I was a knight and I would be trying to save princesses,” she said with a laugh. “I’m pretty sure my parents thought I had a screw loose.”
Dolores seemed to be taking the news of DACA’s cancellation better than her father. At times she felt lost, and she worried about her sister Rosa, who was her best friend and mentor. Dolores had always dreamed of studying abroad, which now seemed impossible. But she still had the same goal in sight: to attend the University of California at Berkeley. “If I have to work twice as hard, three times as hard, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m going to do it,” she said. “My sister tells me, ‘It’s not hard — it’s time consuming.’” The phrase has become something of a mantra for Dolores, who studies up to five hours a day, writing by hand because the family doesn’t own a computer. Her current class schedule includes AP world history, AP multicultural literature, AP Spanish, math honors, physics, and dance. “You try to get as many AP and honors classes as you can, ’cause they’re going to help you out,” she said, saying she was frustrated Desert Mirage didn’t offer more advanced courses than it did. She’s only ever received A’s.
Dolores told me that she wanted to be the first person in her family to graduate in a white gown, an honor reserved for the 10 best students in the school. She doesn’t yet know what she wants to study. What she knows is that she never wants to step foot in the fields, and that with a good job she can help support her parents. “They work extra hours and are paid so little,” she said. “I know they’re being yelled at. I remember my dad with all of his hands bruised and my mom’s knees aching. They come home so tired.” Behind Dolores, Roberto had fallen asleep on the couch and was snoring gently.
* * *
When I lastvisited Roberto, it was dusk on the day after Thanksgiving and the sky over Coachella had turned a gorgeous purple. Rosa was visiting from Bakersfield, where she had gotten a job advocating for immigrants, and we stood outside the trailer, enjoying the evening breeze as she described her work. She attended protests and wrote articles and would soon be traveling to Washington, D.C., in support of the Dream Act, which, if passed, would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented youth. Roberto stood next to her, smiling.
In the Coachella Valley, fear appeared to be in a moment of retreat. After rumors of raids and massive deportation forces, many people told me that things had entered a period of normalcy. Doug Morin, of Coachella Valley Volunteers in Medicine, said patient visits had rebounded. Enrollment at Migrant and Seasonal Head Start had also bounced back, thanks in part to the aggressive outreach of Beatriz Machiche and her staff. It wasn’t hard, though, to imagine how quickly everything could change. In the first few weeks of 2018, there was a visible increase in Border Patrol agents throughout the Coachella Valley, which led to fresh worries of an enforcement action (though, again, none materialized). In February, as part of a national crackdown on employers, ICE agents visited several local businesses to conduct audits. At one restaurant, a number of customers abruptly left after the ICE agents entered, only returning later in the afternoon to pay their bills. For undocumented families, fear can surface at a moment’s notice.
Shortly after Valentine’s Day, Roberto called with good news: Dolores was ranked eighth in her sophomore class of 516 students, which meant she was on track to graduate wearing white. She had also recently asked her parents to organize a fiesta dequinceañera, the coming-of-age celebration for girls when they turn 15. Dolores had turned 15 last July, but the summer had passed without a party because money had been tight. Money was still tight, of course. But Roberto told me “she has never asked for anything,” and so he and Leticia promised their daughter a big party, setting a date for May. They needed to hire musicians and a videographer, feed everyone, and rent out a space. Roberto estimated it would cost $7,000 to pull it off. He didn’t know where they’d get that kind of money, but he had no doubt that they would. He was nearly 50 years old, but he was a dreamer, too.
This feature is published in collaboration with Task & Purpose, whose team of veterans, military family members, and journalists tell the stories of the military and veterans communities.
The thing that everyone remembered about the man in the light gray sweatshirt was how composed he was, how polite and respectful. One morning this past summer, he quietly entered a Wells Fargo bank branch in the Atlanta suburbs in a desperate state. But he didn’t curse or even raise his voice. He just calmly relayed the litany of setbacks and obstacles that had led him to an extraordinarily reckless act.
Brian Easley, 33-years-old, standing 6 feet 2 inches with close-cropped hair and glasses, had woken up on the morning on July 7, 2017, in Room 252 of a $25-a-night hotel nearby, where he’d been living, scraping by on a small monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
A former lance corporal in the Marine Corps, he had served in Kuwait and Iraq as a supply clerk, separating with an honorable discharge in 2005. But his transition to civilian life had been fraught. Joining his mother in Jefferson, Georgia, he found himself suffering from backaches and mental illness. He met a cashier at the local Walmart, and soon they married had a daughter together, but he disappeared for long stretches as his symptoms worsened. After his mother died in 2011, he bounced around — alternating between relatives’ spare rooms, VA mental hospitals, and nonprofit housing facilities. During a few especially difficult periods, he slept in his car.
By the summer of 2017, Easley had lost even that option. His usual disability check from the VA had mysteriously failed to materialize, and the rent was due. If he couldn’t cover it, he’d be on the street, and the thought terrified him. In the first week of July, Easley called the Veterans Crisis Line repeatedly to inquire about the status of his disability payment. When they hung up on him, he called back. On Monday, July 3, Easley made his way to the VA’s Regional Benefits Office in Atlanta. But after an argument with staffers there, he left in humiliation, his issue unresolved.
A few days later at around 9:30 a.m, the Marine veteran entered the Wells Fargo branch, a faux colonial building on Windy Hill Road, a six-lane commercial roadway, and claimedthat the backpack slung over his shoulder contained C-4 explosive. He allowed several employees and customers to exit and informed the two remaining employees that they should lock the doors and stay put. Then he began making calls, dialing 911 to let the authorities know what was happening, and a local news station, WSB-TV, to explain his predicament. “They took everything,” he told the assignment editor who picked up the phone. “With my last little bit of money I got I’ve been able to hold up at a hotel, but I’m going to be out on the street and I’m going to have nothing. I’m not going to have any money for food or anything. I’m just going to be homeless, and I’m going to starve.”
The Wells Fargo bank in Marietta, Georgia where Brian Easley took hostages during a three-hour standoff with police. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)
Easley spent nearly 38 minutes on the phone with the editor, relating his military history, his love for his young daughter, and his frustrations with the VA. At one point, he allowed her to speak with the hostages. One described her captor as “very respectful.”
Easley insisted he didn’t want to harm anyone. “I already told them if I detonate this bomb, I’ll let them go first,” he promised. “These ladies are very nice, and they’ve been very helpful and supportive.” He said he had no intention of robbing the bank, and though an employee had fled leaving piles of cash just sitting out at their workstation, he showed no interest in it. His focus was exclusively on his own money — that monthly disability payment from the VA.
“How much money are we talking about?” the editor asked.
“Not much,” Easley said. She pushed for a dollar figure.
“Eight hundred and ninety-two dollars,” he answered.
As Cobb County police deployed around the Wells Fargo, establishing an incident command center in the parking lot of the nearby Texaco gas station, two snipers, Officers Dennis Ponte and Brint Abernathy, took up positions at the edge of the bank’s rear parking lot. Chief Mike Register, who’d only recently taken over the department, arrived on the scene shortly thereafter. Easley, meanwhile, spent most of the morning on the phone.
In addition to WSB, he spoke to his wife, Jessica, and her cousin, Yolanda Usher. He fielded calls from random bank customers, politely informing them that there was an emergency underway and that they should call back later. He told his daughter, Jayla, then 8, that he loved her and to work hard in school. “Okay, Daddy,” she said. “I love you.” Through it all, he kept his cool, even indulging in some dark humor. He mused that he might be the “worst bank robber ever.” And when the WSB editor asked him for his Social Security number, he joked, “You’re not going to steal my money too, are you?”
As the three-hour ordeal unfolded, he remained unfailingly polite to his captives, allowing them to place calls to their loved ones and even maintain contact with police. “He just kept saying, ‘Ladies, I’m so sorry,’” one of the hostages told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation later. “And I was like, ‘I feel really bad. I understand. You’re in a hard spot.’ And he said, ‘Thank you. I appreciate that.’”
As reasonable and mild-mannered as he seemed, Easley did show some clear signs of mental illness. In his call with WSB, he explained that he was being followed and had been the victim of four kidnapping attempts, which he attributed to his halfbrother Calvin and a secret society. “I don’t know these people,” he said. “They seem to be able to track me wherever I go. They have my information.” During several difficult moments, he held his head in his hands and sobbed, muttering softly, “I just snapped.”
In an effort to understand the many factors that led to the Windy Hill Road incident, I spent seven months speaking to Easley’s family members and fellow Marines, officers of the Cobb County Police Department, Veterans Affairs officials, community activists, and experts in law enforcement, mental health, and military transition.
I found a story that was considerably more complex than it first appeared, involving the failure of the nation’s safety net; VA policies better designed to exploit former warriors than to assist them; a confused police response; and maybe an undercurrent of racial bias, one that the community liked to think it had outgrown long ago.
It was also the story of four former members of the U.S. armed forces, whose paths converged one morning in July on a busy suburban thoroughfare. Before the day was over, two would be recounting the incident to investigators, another would be facing the news media, trying to explain to the public just how it happened, and a fourth would lay dead on the floor of the bank, his head pierced by a single gunshot.
***
Born in 1983, Brian Easley was a mama’s boy as a child, his thumb rarely straying from his mouth. The youngest of eight kids, Easley lived with his siblings and parents, Barbara Easley and Bobby Lee Brown, in a ranch home in Williamstown, New Jersey. It was a tight fit — 10 of them in all, crammed into three bedrooms — but they made it work. Located south of Philly, it was a safe, quiet neighborhood with a small-town feel, notable mostly for the aroma of pizza sauce from the local cannery, which wafted across the local sports fields every afternoon. Barbara was an indomitable woman, laboring tirelessly to make sure none of her children ever felt neglected despite their parents’ modest income. Brian was the baby, her very last, and she doted on him.
Easley had few friends growing up, but he was close with his brother James, the next oldest, joining him in PlayStation marathons that typically went on until there was no more game to play. Despite his height, he was soft-spoken and timid as a teenager. In school, he was painfully shy around girls, later confiding to his fellow Marines that he’d been a virgin when he signed up at 18.
Twelve weeks of basic training at Parris Island outwardly transformed him, precisely as the military intended. Watching him graduate in a ceremony at Camp Lejeune, his family members were dumbstruck. “I could not believe my eyes, how polished he was, how sharp, tall, strong,” said his brother Calvin, the oldest sibling. “I sat there in awe the whole entire time. He went in a little boy, and they turned him into a man.”
Calvin Easley with a portrait of Brian from his service in the Marine Corps. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)
Assigned to the 2nd Marine Logistics Group, based at Camp Lejeune, the soft-spoken recruit fell into a circle of friends who each quickly took him under their wing. To them, Easley seemed less a warrior than a big goofy kid, more content to eat cereal and watch his favorite anime series than to hit the local bars or shoulder a rifle.
The group formed a tight bond, fortified during their deployment to Kuwait in 2003. Though Easley’s fellow Marines would roll their eyes at his devotion to Tolkien novels and compare him to Steve Urkel, the teasing was affectionate. His tranquil demeanor, generosity, and maddening compulsion to apologize for the smallest offense — and then apologize for doing so — earned him the nickname Easy. He mostly stayed out of the boisterous debates that often preoccupied his unit, only to pipe up seemingly out of nowhere with some deliberately inane assertion, like, “I hear Somalia has the world’s strongest navy,” and then hold a poker face as long as he could — which usually wasn’t long.
Deployed to Iraq in 2005, Easley was stationed at the Al-Taqaddum Air Base, known as TQ, where he served as a warehouse clerk with the 2nd Supply Battalion. Easley’s job was to fill requisition orders for Marine combat units operating throughout Al-Anbar province, where insurgents, including the nascent al-Qaeda in Iraq, were mounting a surprisingly fierce campaign to drive American forces from the Western Euphrates River Valley.
As the three-hour ordeal unfolded, Easley remained unfailingly polite to his captives, allowing them to place calls to their loved ones and even maintain contact with police
The work was arduous — up to 17 hours a day for months at a time without a break — contributing to the chronic back pain that would plague Easley when he eventually returned to civilian life. “The warehouse jobs are out in the rear, so I wasn’t on the front lines,” Easley told WSB. “I had one close call during a security detail, but that’s about it.” Nevertheless, according to James Dunlap, who served with him, mortar fire was a regular feature, often sending everyone scrambling for bunkers. “I’m thinking, ‘We’re in supply, we’re not going to see this type of action,’” he recalled. “But when they say ‘Every Marine is a rifleman,’ they mean it.”
Following his honorable discharge in 2005, Easley returned to his mother’s home in Jefferson. He met a woman, Jessica Tate, and they moved in together and eventually got married. Around Jessica, Brian seemed fine — strangely quiet maybe, but also devoted, sweet, and easygoing. To his family, though, it was clear that something was wrong. “We noticed a difference in him right away,” Calvin recalled. Diagnosed with PTSD, and suffering from schizophrenia and paranoia, Easley told relatives he was barred from reenlisting. He often set off on long walks by himself. On one occasion shortly after his discharge, he grew so upset at a sibling’s teasing that he flew into a rage that left the family shaken.
These symptoms are not uncommon. “After we got out, it got rough for everybody on the tour,” James Dunlap explained. “It’s easier to be in a war zone than live life out here. You’re not in the Marine Corps anymore, so what’s your purpose?”
***
In 2008, Jessica became pregnant. Both of Brian’s parents fell ill around the same time, and he found himself in New Jersey helping to help care for them, visiting Georgia only briefly for the birth of his daughter, Jayla, but vowing to come back soon.
“He never did come,” Jessica recalled. His phone rang and rang. Eventually, family members told her how he’d just stood up one day, announced he was going for a walk, and never returned. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I just had his baby and he disappeared. Is he leading a double life?’” she said. Fearing for his safety, she spent many nights crying herself to sleep. “I’m tearing up now just thinking about it.”
It turned out Easley had checked himself into a VA mental hospital. Upon his release, he stayed with a brother in New Jersey. Aside from one trip to Georgia to meet Jayla when she was about 3, he mostly kept his distance. He explained to Jessica that people were after him — he wouldn’t say who — and he didn’t want to put his family in danger.
Just a week or so before Barbara Easley died, in 2011, Brian ley once again “up and walked off,” Calvin said. Voicemails and texts went unreturned. The funeral came and went with no sign of Brian, and years went by without a word. After calling every VA hospital in the directory, Jessica tried to move on.
Brian with his daughter, Jayla, possibly around 2014. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)
When he surfaced again around 2014, Easley moved in with Calvin in Georgia, taking his medication, keeping his VA appointments, and generally trying to get his life back on track.. He said he’d been in Orlando, enrolled in filmmaking classes. He made no mention to his brother about a brief spiritual detour, as a follower of the Black Israelites, a religious sect famous for preaching that African Americans are the true Jews. But perhaps it isn’t surprising that in his troubled state, Easley had gravitated toward a tight-knit community. “I think he wanted to belong to something larger than himself,” recalled Dunlap, who was in touch with Brian during this period. Eventually Easley “woke up,” Dunlap said, and was ejected from the group.
Easley didn’t spend much time in Georgia with Calvin and his wife, Anita—maybe a half year or so—before he was on the road again, moving to New Jersey to live with another brother. After several episodes, though, he returned to Marietta in early 2017, enrolling in computer classes at Lincoln College of Technology, a for-profit college located in a strip mall in Marietta. He had bought Jayla a phone and called regularly, helping her with homework and joining her in a prayer via Facetime nearly every night. Some of his money from the government went toward child support, and he wired more whenever Jayla needed it. Not long before Brian walked into the Wells Fargo, he had the idea to surprise Jayla with a dog. Jessica thinks the realization that he wouldn’t be able to follow through may be what set off the episode.
***
In the spring of 1971, 10-year-old Mike Register was walking through an affluent neighborhood of Macon, Georgia, when a pair of young men in a car waved him over with a proposition: How would he like to earn $5 helping out with some yard work? It was a tempting offer, but the situation seemed off. For one thing, Register was white, and the men in the car were black. Job offers like that just didn’t happen in Macon in those days. Register bolted toward the woods, but the men gave chase, abducted him, and later kept him captive in an abandoned house, demanding a $5,000 ransom from his family. His mother alerted the authorities and delivered the money as instructed.
All told, Register spent 20 hours as a prisoner, while the men debated whether to kill him. Eventually, they essentially let him go, threatening to slaughter his family if he said a word. The boy didn’t heed the warning. At some point, he’d managed to snag an ID belonging to the ringleader, 20-year-old John Plummer. After his release, Register presented the card to local police, resulting in Plummer’s arrest and eventual conviction. (The other two men were never identified.) At the trial, which drew charges of racial bias from the defense team, the all-white jury found Plummer guilty of kidnapping, then deliberated for just 10 minutes before suggesting a life sentence.
Surprisingly unguarded for a chief of police, now leading a department of more than 600 officers, Register is a voluble storyteller, recounting this traumatic chapter from a difficult childhood in an easygoing, buttery drawl without a hint of disquiet. Asked how the terrifying crime he experienced as a child may have affected his response to the Wells Fargo hostage-taking, he insisted it had no impact. “I certainly have empathy for anyone who is held against their will,” he said. “Certainly that’s a part of my life, and I’m very thankful that it turned out the way it did for me. But no matter what my life experience may have been, I certainly try to be objective with any situation.”
Cobb County’s Chief of Police, Michael J. Register. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)
Register enlisted in the reserves in his early twenties, joining the 11th Special Forces Group and becoming what was then known as “SF baby,” jumping right into commando training without any prior military experience. He thrived in the reserves, taking time off from his work as a police officer with the Cobb County PD for intensive training and deployments to Germany, Haiti, and Belize, among other countries.
By 2002, when Brian Easley entered the Marine Corps, 40-year-old Register was in Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group, serving on a mobile reconnaissance team. After retiring from active duty in 2005, the same year Easley left the service, Register worked for the Department of Defense, devising strategies to counter the insurgency’s devastating use of IEDs. In 2014, he returned to suburban Atlanta and eventually resumed his career in law enforcement, becoming chief of police for Clayton County, 20 miles south of Atlanta.
Register was recruited as chief of police for nearby Cobb, which includes the city of Marietta, just three weeks before Brian Easley walked into the Wells Fargo. Though both counties belong to the metropolitan Atlanta area, they pose distinct challenges for law enforcement. Whereas Clayton is economically depressed and predominantly black, Cobb County is a mostly white, affluent bedroom community that was represented in Congress by a former leader of the nativist John Birch Society for nearly a decade and was long known for its “legendary intolerance,” as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it.
Though an influx of recent transplants, mostly young professionals, has tilted Cobb’s politics left, the county retains its reputation as a stronghold of white conservatism. Despite the 2017 opening of a new stadium for the Atlanta Braves, Cobb had for years steadfastly refused to allow the construction of a rail link to Atlanta’s transit system, in part out of a longstanding desire to wall itself off from the so-called “black Mecca” across the Chattahoochee River. (Years ago, a county commissioner infamously declared he’d stock the river with piranha to block rapid transit.)
Although the violent crime rate is considerably higher in Clayton than in Cobb — with nearly eight times as many murders on a per capita basis in 2016 — Register’s new position is in some respects trickier to navigate, given Cobb’s fast-changing demographics and more fraught political atmosphere. As chief of police for Clayton County, Register was an advocate of transparency and community policing initiatives, and Cobb community activists viewed him as an ideal choice to take the helm of their department as it sought to transform itself from a hidebound reminder of the region’s troubled past into an exemplar of the bighearted cosmopolitan New South.
To judge by the stream of racially charged incidents that have made the news in the area in recent years, change was long overdue. In 2015, the county’s only black commissioner reported what appeared to be racial profiling by an undercover officer — a complaint that elicited a shrug from her fellow commissioners. A few months later, the same officer was involved in a disturbing encounter with a black driver that was captured on dashcam. (“Go to Fulton County,” he said. “I don’t care about your people”). Following a suspension, the officer resigned.
The front desk of Cobb County Police Headquarters in Marietta, Georgia. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)
The community’s negative perception of the department was confirmed last year in an independent report on police operations drawn up at the county’s behest by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Although the report did not find evidence of systematic bias, it identified “a concerning deficit of public trust in and among a portion of the population.” It also made 34 recommendations, many of which Register is now implementing. Among a host of other changes, he ordered that all members of his department receive additional training in crisis intervention, crime prevention, cultural diversity, and fairness in policing. The chief has also considered a proposal by the Cobb Coalition for Public Safety to ensure that mental health professionals be called upon on in crisis situations. Some departments mandate that specially trained teams be deployed whenever an incident involves a potential mental health emergency, but in Cobb County, such experts are only brought in at the request of the crisis negotiation team. In Easley’s case, no such request was ever made.
***
According to the Marshall Project, law enforcement is the third most common occupation for military veterans, after truck driving and management. In part, this is attributable to the preferential hiring encouraged by initiatives like the 2012 federal program Vets to Cops. A career in law enforcement has an additional appeal to veterans, offering, as few occupations do, the sense of fellowship, duty, and shared risk that they experienced in the military. “I think that everyone, no matter who you are, you want to belong to something,” Register said. “People that have served in the military understand that they are part of something that is great, admirable, honorable, and that is important.” A police force, he added, “is a natural transition” — conferring membership in what Ken Vance, executive director of the Peace Officer Standards and Training Council of Georgia, termed a “blue brotherhood.”
A substantial percentage of CCPD officers are veterans — several of whom, like Chief Register, played key roles in the Wells Fargo incident. Sgt. Andre Bates, the lead negotiator, served in the Marine Corps, as did Officer Dennis Ponte, the sniper who took Easley’s life.
In his 2016 book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger advances a powerful case linking veterans’ struggles with PTSD largely to the difficulty of navigating the fraught transition from the tight-knit world of the armed forces to the more isolating and superficial existence of life on the homefront.
This certainly tracks with Brian Easley’s experience. Joining the Marine Corps at 18, the former wallflower quickly found the camaraderie, friendship and shared sense of purpose that had largely eluded him until that point. After his discharge, cut off from his social group, he found himself increasingly alienated and adrift — an experience that undoubtedly contributed to his mental illness. Soon, aside from his immediate family and Jessica, he was more or less on his own, so lonesome in those early years that in addition to his primary job at a Home Depot distribution center, he took a second gig at a Church’s Chicken, not for the money, he told Jessica, but “just to pass the time while you’re at work.”
A career in law enforcement has an additional appeal to veterans, offering, as few occupations do, the sense of fellowship, duty, and shared risk that they experienced in the military.
When I asked Register how he has dealt with his own traumatic experiences — the kidnapping as well as his later service in Afghanistan — he shrugged off the question, more comfortable speaking about the prevalence of PTSD in general. But as frightening as his childhood ordeal clearly was, his success in dealing with it is not surprising: After helping to foil his own abduction, he was hailed as a hero by the national news media. In recognition of his bravery and quick-wittedness, the local police department named the 11-year-old its honorary chief of detectives.
“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary,” Junger wrote in Tribe. “Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” Register seems to have found his purpose and his community in law enforcement, as did Bates, Ponte, and the many other veteran members of the CCPD.
***
As Brian Easley told the editor at WSB, the two hostages, and the crisis negotiator — basically anyone who would listen — his monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs came to $892. The VA confirmed that his last payment, for that precise amount, was sent on June 1. So perhaps it’s no wonder that when July 1 came and went, and the expected funds were not in the account, Easley began to panic.
According to WSB investigative reporter Aaron Diamant, Easley called the VA’s Veterans Crisis Line eight or nine times that week, including twice on the morning of the incident, and he was “hung up on a few times.” (When contacted, a VA spokesperson declined to comment on Diamant’s reporting.) According to its mission statement, the VCL was established in 2007 to “provide 24/7, world class suicide prevention and crisis intervention services to veterans, service members, and their family members.” But as the demand for its services has surged, the program has been plagued with issues. A March 2017 report by the VA’s Office of Inspector General found a number of shortcomings with the VCL, including deficiencies in operations and quality assurance. In response, the VA issued a press release touting improvements; a few months after Brian Easley’s death, it announced plans to open a third call center to handle another spike in demand.
According to Lincoln Educational Services senior VP for student financial services Rajat Shah, Easley visited the school’s Marietta campus on June 30 to discuss the possibility that his money had been garnished due to a tuition issue. A counselor at the school called the VA directly, and Easley was given an appointment at the VA’s Regional Benefits Office on July 3. He “was extremely agitated and belligerent,” a VA spokesperson told me , and as a result was briefly placed him in handcuffs. “Once Easley calmed down,” the spokesperson said, “police removed the handcuffs and a VA benefits supervisor … explained to him that his compensation check was recouped due to a debt he had created by his failure to complete college courses.” Easley agreed to return on July 6 with the proper documentation to set up a payment plan “and left the regional office voluntarily.” He never returned.
Perhaps unwittingly, Easley had become caught in a financial squeeze involving what are known as overpayments — a common pitfall for recipients of Post 9-11 GI Bill tuition assistance. Government tuition payments are made in full directly to an academic institution, but if a veteran drops too many courses or fails to attend class, the VA will initiate a process to recover the money directly from the student. According to Shah, Easley last attended class in late November 2016. He would have had to miss just six days of his module to trigger a mandatory notice to the VA, though Shah said the school tries to contact a student before taking that step. Easley’s overpayment was $1,163, so after the $892 was deducted from his account, he owed a mere $271.
Objects found in Brian Easley’s pockets after his standoff with the Cobb County police. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)
If, in fact, Easley did miss some classes, it would hardly be a surprise. He was suffering from a severe mental illness, something the Department of Veterans Affairs, which was responsible for his care, certainly knew. Although the VA claims it sent Easley five letters informing him of the overpayment, his erratic housing situation meant he probably never received them.
“This happens literally all the time,” said Carrie Wofford, president of Veterans Education Success, a nonprofit watchdog and advocacy group focused on veterans education. A 2015 report by the General Accounting Office estimated that a quarter of all veterans receiving tuition assistance are billed for overpayments, many without ever fully understanding how the system works. “Because VA is not effectively communicating its program policies to veterans,” the report said, “some veterans may be incurring debts that they could have otherwise avoided.”
Although Shah said Lincoln staffers tried to help Easley with the VA, the school has drawn criticism in the past for an apparent indifference to the welfare of its students. “The programs are costly, more than twice as much as at local community colleges,” the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee the committee wrote in a 2012 report, “and Lincoln makes virtually no investment in student services despite enrolling the students most in need of these services.” The committee said student retention and loan repayment rates were among the worst it had seen, and the report concluded, “Although the majority of students leave the company’s schools with no degree or diploma, the company also receives increasing amounts of Federal taxpayer dollars and profit.”
***
Shortly after Easley spoke to the 911 operator that Friday morning in July, the Cobb County Police Department showed up in force. They closed Windy Hill Road to all civilian traffic. They made sure those sheltering inside the Popeye’s, the Waffle House, the Wendy’s, the Subway, and the Chick-fil-A all knew to keep clear of the windows in case a detonation shattered the glass. The fire department was dispatched to the scene, as was the bomb squad, SWAT team, crisis negotiators, and a K-9 unit. Officers of the Sheriff’s Department handled traffic duties. Representatives from the Marietta PD, the ATF, the FBI, and its state equivalent, the GBI, turned up as well.
Register arrived within the hour, taking up a position at the makeshift command post. Solidly built, with a tree-trunk physique and wispy brown hair fading to gray, Register was viewed by community leaders as a reformer. The incident at Windy Hill Road would be his first test.
Michael Register was recruited as chief of police for Cobb County just three weeks before Brian Easley walked into the Wells Fargo. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)
Meanwhile, inside the bank, Easley was getting a crash course in how TV news gets made. WSB-TV boasts one of the top local news organizations in the country: In the June ratings period, the station had attracted nearly two-thirds of TV news viewers in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Now, the staff had landed an incredible scoop simply by picking up the phone, and they knew it. On an audio recording of the call turned over to the GBI, one can hear the assignment editor’s colleagues scrambling to press their advantage. As she works to nail down what to Easley must have sounded like trivial details (“You said you had lived in Marietta previously, when did you live in Marietta?”), it seemed to dawn on him that her interest lay less in solving his problem than in working the story. “Okay, ma’am, I’m sorry,” he finally said, “but I’m about to wrap this up.”
As the call ended, two of the editor’s colleagues could be heard discussing how to proceed. “What can I report?” one asks. The exuberant reply: “Everything!”
Sometime after 11 a.m., Sgt. Andre Bates, the incident’s lead crisis negotiator, settled into a black Ford Taurus at the Texaco. He took a deep breath and dialed the number given to him by the 911 operator. Bates — who, like Easley, is black — established a rapport with the hostage taker almost instantly based on their shared military background. “I’m going through it with Veterans Affairs myself, so I know it can be difficult when they drag their feet,” he said.
Their status as former Marines further cemented the bond. “Semper Fi, sir. I’m a West Coaster, MCRD San Diego,” Bates said. “What can we do to resolve this, sir, and help you out? From one Marine to the other?” Although only Sgt. Bates’s side of the conversation is audible on the recording, his skills as a negotiator are evident. He gets Easley talking about his back injury and mentions his own knee and ankle issues. He assures Easley nobody is going to get hurt: “That’s my responsibility — to make sure you stay alive.” He compares the police force to the Marine Corps and engages Easley as a fellow enlisted man. “I have three of my chiefs that are personally here … guys walking around with stars just like it is in the Marine Corps . . . they’re not happy,” he said. “Just asking from one Marine to the next — to show that you and I are communicating and we’re on the same program — could you release one of those ladies, please?” And he appeals to Easley’s personal dignity, reminding him, “Your honor is worth more than the $892 the VA owes you, sir.”
Around noon, Easley agreed to a deal: A pack of Newports in exchange for one of the hostages. He seemed to mean it. As soon as he got off the call, Easley turned to his two captives and invited them to decide which one would leave. They told him they couldn’t choose. “Well, you’re just the teller,” he told one, “so I’ll let you go, and I’ll keep the branch manager here so they won’t blow my head off.”
The deal marked a significant breakthrough. They were working together now. A resolution seemed well in hand. In a brief interview, Sgt. Bates expressed absolute confidence that Easley would have honored his side of the bargain. “We were brothers who had bonded with each other,” he said. “I felt that me and him had connected as men, as Marines, and as family men.”
Bates hustled over to brief his superiors in the mobile command center, a large RV parked nearby. Among them were Register and the incident commander, Maj. Jeff Adcock. Reporting to him were Lt. Joel Preston, another Marine veteran, who commanded the tactical team, and Lt. Jorge Mestre, the crisis team commander.
It was a formidable group, with decades of experience. Mestre was a key figure in a 1999 incident in which he was wounded after trying to reason with a local man who was reportedly suffering from paranoid delusions. After opening fire on the officer, the man barricaded himself inside the house with his aging mother, and later killed two members of the Cobb County SWAT team after they stormed the family home. The tragedy is viewed as a critical lesson among tactical-policing experts, who blamed the incident on poor intelligence and inadequate staffing, revising standard procedures accordingly. For some members of the Cobb County PD, the killing may have carried an additional lesson: In a barricaded subject situation, avoid unnecessary risks.
The negotiator tried to appeal to Easley’s personal dignity. ‘Your honor is worth more than the $892 the VA owes you, sir.’
As Adcock and the other commanders quickly began hammering out a plan to deliver the cigarettes without endangering their officers, they had good reason for optimism. According to Chris Grollnek, a former SWAT officer who now provides training in dealing with active-shooter situations, “Ninety-nine percent of the time, when a negotiator is making a deal for one thing for another, the incident ends peacefully.”
Around the same time, another opportunity to end the standoff safely presented itself. One of the hostages who’d been on the phone with the police throughout much of the morning reported to Officer Christopher Few, Bates’s colleague on the crisis negotiation team, that Easley had gone to the bathroom. He was in there for more than a minute, it seemed, long enough for both hostages to potentially run out the doors. Once Few understood what was happening, he began to walk the hostage through an escape plan. But seconds later, Easley returned. “He’s out,” she said quietly.
Meanwhile, along the wood line, the snipers lay on the ground, squinting through scopes at the action inside the bank. One of them, Officer Ponte, had also served in the Marine Corps, working as a helicopter crew chief before his discharge in 1992. On assessing the situation, he’d selected a Lapua .338, a $5,000 semiautomatic rifle billed as “The Long Arm of the Free World,” and loaded it with Sierra MatchKing .338 250 grain ammunition, a combination he felt certain would have the power to penetrate the two glass doors and still maintain its trajectory. Then he’d aimed his laser at the building and noted a range of approximately 66 yards. Every once in awhile, as he peered through the scope, he got a good visual of the man in the gray sweatshirt. He radioed Lt. Benjamin Cohen, the assistant SWAT commander, and advised him that he had a clean shot. Should he engage the threat, he asked. Word came back: “Not at this time.” The rest of the tactical team was not yet in position. Stand by.
Minutes passed. On the SWAT team’s radio frequency, Ponte heard indications that a hostage might be released, but from what he could see, he later told the GBI, “There was no effort or energy being put forth toward releasing somebody.” Then Ponte made a fateful decision.
Around 12:15 p.m. on July 7, a single shot rang out on Windy Hill Road, ending the three-hour ordeal in the Wells Fargo and adding Easley’s name to the list of 236 mentally ill people killed by police in 2017.
***
Not only were Sgt. Bates and the various commanders caught off guard by Ponte’s action, his own fellow SWAT team members were as well. In a well-planned operation, the tactical team would have reacted instantly to the gunshot. Instead, nine long seconds ticked by before an officer put the CCPD’s BearCat armored vehicle in drive and began barrelling toward the door of the bank, inadvertently endangering the hostages, who were just then preparing to dash out in the opposite direction. After the BearCat struck a column and backed up, its hood covered with broken bricks, the hostages escaped, and members of the SWAT team hustled them into the back of the vehicle, which quickly reversed away from the bank.
The standoff was over. But exactly what happened to Brian Easley — and who made the decision to kill him — would remain a mystery for months. Addressing the news media shortly after 1:30 p.m., Register incorrectly framed the incident as an extraction operation gone awry. “We had a SWAT team, tactical team, move up on the bank to help get the hostages out,” he said. “During the extraction process, contact was made with the suspect, and it appears the subject is deceased.” The explanation seemed to imply that Easley had been shot during some kind of confrontation with the entry team rather than by a sniper hidden in the woods. No mention was made to the public of Bates’s negotiations with Easley to release one of the women for a pack of smokes. Although the entire command team knew of the arrangement — as did the two hostages and other members of the CCPD — it is only being made public now as a result of an open records request.
Barricaded-subject incidents, especially those involving hostages, are among the most difficult circumstances police officers face. Typically, attempting to negotiate a peaceful resolution is the preferred approach, with a tactical assault reserved as a last resort. But the balance between crisis negotiators and SWAT elements is a delicate one. Negotiators are trained to strike up a rapport with a suspect, calm them down, appeal to their sense of reason. Tactical officers, increasingly outfitted with military-style gear, are primed to take swift, decisive action.
The Cobb County Police Department’s internal Policy Manual states that in a hostage situation like the one at the Wells Fargo, a tactical solution must only be initiated “should communication with the subject fail to resolve the incident,” and that “the ultimate decision [on how to respond] will be made by the On-Scene Commander.” In the case of Brian Easley, communication was making genuine progress, and the On-Scene Commander, Major Adcock, had decided to let the negotiations play out. According to Ponte’s own testimony, he made the ultimate decision himself, an apparent violation of both policies. He cited no particular action on Easley’s part — an erratic movement or aggressive gesture, for instance — that might have indicated an elevated risk. When I reached him for comment, Ponte declined to speak except to say that his side of the story would be told “at the appropriate time.”
The standoff was over. But exactly what happened to Brian Easley — and who made the decision to kill him — would remain a mystery for months.
Sgt. Bates, the crisis negotiator, refused to criticize the actions of a colleague and fellow Marine. But asked whether he’d been sincere when he’d promised Easley that nobody would hurt him if he cooperated, Bates told me, “I meant that from the bottom of my heart. I’m out there to do a job. I’m pretty good at what I do, and the things I’m telling him are coming from the heart, one human being to the next. My job is to protect everyone so we can all walk out of there and play out whatever happened in court. That is the win for me.”
All of the experts I contacted were careful to emphasize they lacked a complete picture of what happened, and they expressed reluctance to second-guess CCPD’s handling of a dangerous and chaotic situation. They agreed, however, that the decision to shift away from a negotiating posture and initiate a tactical operation is not typically made lightly or based on the judgment of an individual officer, and that the situation on Windy Hill Road might well have concluded peacefully had negotiations been given more time.
Easley “articulated he’s not going to do anything to harm the hostages, so that’s a great sign,” said Randall Rogan, a crisis negotiation expert and co-interim dean of communications at Wake Forest University. “If a suspect is emotionally calm at the beginning of a siege or incident, that is the most critical moment.” He added that Easley’s demands were extraordinarily modest. “He’s not asking for a helicopter and $2 million dollars and taking two hostages on a plane.”
“Easley was very calm, he indicated wasn’t looking to hurt anybody, and he demonstrated a willingness to cooperate,” noted Jack Cambria, a 33-year veteran of the New York City Police Department who spent more than a decade in tactical operations and, later, as commander of the NYPD’s crisis negotiation squad, responded to more than 4,000 incidents. “Tactical assault is reserved for the last option, when it becomes absolutely necessary.”
Following a grand jury hearing, Ponte was cleared of any wrongdoing in connection with Easley’s death. District Attorney Vic Reynolds told WSB that the officers “followed the law and did what they were supposed to do.” According to the policy manual, “ability, opportunity and jeopardy” must all be present for a shooting to be justified. As far as anyone knew, Easley had the ability to cause harm to the hostages with a backpack full of explosives. He had the opportunity to do so. And the hostages were plainly in jeopardy.
Cambria, who trains law enforcement agencies around the country in crisis and hostage negotiation, agreed that Ponte likely acted within the law. Nonetheless, he pointed out, “Just because an action might be lawful doesn’t mean it was necessary.”
The operation appears to have been flawed in several additional respects. Given Ponte’s testimony that the hostages were not in sight when he opened fire, he ran the risk that one might have been injured by debris or a wayward bullet. A poorly aimed round might have set off the explosives Easley claimed to have in the backpack, mere inches from where the shot made contact. And there was one more possibility to consider: “When there are people alive near the subject, you very rarely will take a shot to neutralize him in the event that God forbid, he has a dead-man’s switch,” Grollnek said, referring to a detonator wired to explode if a trigger is released. Such devices, which work like a hand grenade, are simple to engineer. Had Easley been using one, Ponte’s shot could well have caused the deaths of the hostages. Finally, the haphazard extraction of the two captives also indicated that the decision to act may have been taken too hastily.
As the hostages were whisked to safety, a robot entered the bank and retrieved Easley’s backpack, placing it in a “total containment vessel.” It was eventually deemed harmless, and inside investigators found a Bible, some papers, and a small machete, among other incidentals. (Easley had never taken out the knife or mentioned having it, and Calvin later suggested he may have been carrying it for protection.) On his body, they found a wallet, a broken cross pendant, and an electronic device one hostage had assumed was a switch to detonate a bomb. In fact, it was a tool for detecting hidden listening devices, perhaps a prudent purchase for a man suffering from the paranoid delusion that he might be kidnapped at any time.
Before long, patrons of the nearby establishments, who’d been on lockdown all day, were finally allowed to go about their business. After being interviewed by police and GBI agents, the two hostages went home to their worried families. The local news teams packed up their gear. Easley’s body taken to the Cobb County’s Medical Examiner in Marietta. Chief Register addressed the media and then headed back to headquarters. Traffic on Windy Hill Road resumed in both directions.
***
The killing of Brian Easley was just the first of several crises to engulf the Cobb County Police Department in the early months of Register’s tenure. In late August, WSB aired bodycam footage from November 2016 in which Officer James Caleb Elliot is seen firing multiple shots at the back of an unarmed teenager as he flees through a residential neighborhood, striking him in the leg. A grand jury declined to recommend charges against Elliot, and DA Reynolds noted that officers pursuing a fleeing suspect in a “violent, forcible felony” are allowed to use lethal force. The fact that the teenager was not actually involved in a carjacking was viewed as immaterial, since the officer merely had to believe he was.
The new chief, for his part, indicated that legalities aside, the shooting endangered the public, and he used the release of the video as an opportunity to initiate additional use-of-force training. He also noted that the department recently purchased a new simulator to better prepare officers to handle such situations. Elliot left the force three weeks after the shooting, and a lawyer for the victim announced plans to file a federal lawsuit.
Then on August 31, Channel 2 released another dashcam video, this one from the summer of 2016. In it Lt. Greg Abbott, who is white, is heard remarking to a white motorist, “Remember, we only kill black people.” Though many observers pointed out the officer’s sarcastic tone, the starkness of his statement at a time of heightened concern over police shootings of African Americans (the killing of Philando Castile outside St. Paul, Minnesota, had happened just four days before the traffic stop) seemed emblematic. The video went viral. National outlets picked up the story. Representatives for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network told Register a protest march was being organized. Register’s office was bombarded by media calls from as far away as the United Kingdom. This time, Register moved swiftly, announcing that the process to terminate Abbott had begun.
“It’s been one of those weeks in Cobb County,” Register told me with a sigh not long after. The decision, he said, had not been easy. But Register was unmoved by the argument that Abbott had been trying to gain the motorist’s compliance by creating a casual rapport, calling the statements “inexcusable and inappropriate” and “not indicative of the values and the facts that surround the Cobb County Police Department and this county in general.”
A vocal contingent within the CCPD expressed unhappiness that he hadn’t defended Abbott. “They took it as me not supporting them,” Register said. After a local talk radio jock went after him — taking care to inform listeners that the police chief’s wife is African American and even noting her place of work — white nationalists went on the offensive, sending Register hate mail in which they called him “a disgrace to the white race.”
Following the decision, Register scheduled a set of mandatory staff meetings in which he laid out his rationale for demanding Abbott’s ouster. The radio station apologized. Eventually, the controversy seemed to die down. Still, it was clear the job was weighing on him. “I’ve got to tell you,” he admitted, “sometimes I’m like, ‘Damn, maybe I should have stayed in Clayton County.’”
***
The tendency of police departments to close ranks in an effort to shield their actions from public scrutiny is well established and perhaps unsurprising. The same “blue brotherhood” that bonds law enforcement officers can easily slip into a form of tribalism when a member of the team is under threat. The commitment to one another that keeps officers alive in dangerous situations also seems to discourage self-reflection when things go wrong. Initially, after I asked Register about the killing of Easley, he mounted a strong defense of Ponte. “He saw this thing unfolding and felt that this might be the only chance to immobilize the suspect and save the two women, and he took it,” Register said. “If we would have waited five more minutes, and he had detonated explosives and killed himself and the two hostages, then we may have been having a conversation — ‘Now, why did we wait so long?’”
Register also emphasized that Ponte — who was cleared by a grand jury following another fatal shooting in 2016 — had struggled in the aftermath of the Wells Fargo incident. “One reason why it’s been so hard on this young man who took the shot,” he said, “is that he is a veteran himself and a Marine. It’s very hard on him. It makes you want to cry.” (Although Register repeatedly spoke of his officer as a “young man,” records indicate that Ponte was born in 1966.)
A month later, when I pressed Register about the revelations contained in the GBI report, which he indicated he had not yet seen, he reconsidered his position. While reiterating that the shot was legal, he said, “I do call into question the timeliness of it.” He also said he’d be looking into the apparent breakdown in command and control, explaining that he would “dig deeper and ensure that if there were any issues that created the dysnchronization between the negotiating team and the tactical team that we address that and we fix that. Certainly, as the event was unfolding, I don’t know if the communication was transpiring as quickly as it possibly should have.”
If we waited five more minutes, and he had detonated explosives and killed himself and the two hostages, then we may have been having a conversation — ‘Now, why did we wait so long?’
The next morning, Register called back. He mentioned an additional change he’d implemented a few months before, a monthly training session with his incident commanders to do “tabletop exercises,” reviewing some of the scenarios they might face in the field. He added that he’d been up half the night digging into the reports on the Easley shooting, and he’d scheduled a weekly meeting with his leadership staff to talk about developing a procedure for identifying mistakes so they won’t be repeated. “We have to take some time to look at what the findings were and come back for after-action reviews,” he said. “That’s the only way we were going to be better.”
***
Whatever mistakes may or may not have been made on Windy Hill Road on July 7, there’s one issue about which everyone seems to agree: Brian Easley himself bears a good portion of the blame. Even when one takes into account his mental illness and the other formidable struggles he was facing, the fact remains that Easley alone made the choice to enter the bank, claimed he had a bomb, and hold two women against their will.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” Calvin Easley told me when I visited him and his wife, Anita, in their tidy home in the Atlanta suburbs. “I’m sorry he went in there and took hostages. I’m very sorry for that. He was not in his right mind. But they didn’t have to kill him. He just wanted to get his story out.”
On a phone call from the Wells Fargo, Easley told his daughter Jayla that he loved her and to work hard in school. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)
That story is one that many veterans can relate to. The same military experience that helped make him a man left him anxious, troubled, and eventually unable to work. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he discovered a sense of brotherhood and meaning in the Marine Corps, one he was unable to replicate once he returned home.
But Easley did what he could. He cared for his daughter, calling her every day and sending gifts when finances allowed. He battled the VA for years to receive the benefits he’d earned through his service. He sought an education, hoping to start a career, support his family, and make a new life, only to find himself in a trap that has ensnared thousands of his fellow veterans.
Then, one morning in July, he woke up to find that the money he counted on to make it through simply wasn’t there. And just like the Marine Corps had taught him, he took initiative. He called the hotline. When they hung up, he called again and again. Finally, he walked into the benefits office to plead his case in person. But instead of recognizing a veteran in crisis and working out a plan, or perhaps directing him across the street to the hospital, writing a prescription, and getting him back on track, they sent him away in search of paperwork.
“The problem was bigger than the Cobb County Police Department and Mr. Easley,” Bates told me. “The problem is the system — how they treat retired veterans. You should get more than ‘I appreciate your service.’ The VA owes these guys more. They’re willing to put their life on the line for their country, and when they separate from military they deserve better.” In particular, he criticized the VA’s decision to handcuff Brian Easley rather than help him. “That’s where the whole thing went bad, I believe,” he said.
He was not in his right mind. But they didn’t have to kill him. He just wanted to get his story out.
“I’m just baffled about what is so hard to negotiate,” said John Delorme, a Marine who served with Easley. “This isn’t a terrorist. This is a guy who fought against terrorism. As a veteran it makes me feel smaller than a grain of sand, the way he was treated.”
“I just don’t want his little girl to grow up to think her dad was a bad person,” said Ian Emmett, another battle buddy. “He was a good person.”
Alecia Miller, who dated Easley for two years when he was in the military, agreed. “I hate for him to be painted as this crazy deranged person,” she said. “This is someone who the system failed, and because of that, a decision was made out of desperation, and someone has lost their life because of it.”
“You go over there and you fight a war for our country and everybody’s out to kill you,” Calvin Easley told me. “You don’t know nobody. You’re in a foreign land. But the real sharks? The real sharks are back at home. There’s no reintegration. You don’t get support from the country that you fought for.”
It was late. Anita stood behind him as he spoke, patting his back. “I’m livid,” he went on, fighting back tears. “He was a hero. He was not some psycho on the corner. He was not. He was a gentle giant until you pushed him. If you pushed him to the max, then you’d see a different person. But it took an awful lot. It took a lot.”
Since November 8th, 2016, like so many other Americans, I’ve lived in a state of utter shock and disbelief over the results of the presidential election and everything that’s followed. Author Steve Almond found himself equally bewildered, but after wallowing in dread for a few weeks, he decided to try to make sense of what happened through the lens he’s most familiar with as a journalist, author, and co-host of the New York Times ‘Dear Sugars’ podcast: story. The result is his new book, Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, in which he contends that the election of a racist, misogynist, bullying con artist like Donald Trump wasn’t just possible; it was inevitable. He says it’s the result, in part, of our buying into a litany of “bad stories” — about our country and its history, and ourselves. In 17 essays, the book covers vast swaths of American history, from the birth of the nation, to Watergate to now. Here I’ve picked an excerpt of the book in which Steve focuses on his own “bad story,” and those put forth by the Fourth Estate, having to do with his years as a young journalist. I also spoke with Steve for an edition of the Longreads Podcast. – Sari Botton, Essays Editor
Listen to the Longreads Podcast Interview with Steve Almond here:
***
I spent the first half of my adult life almost comically devoted to the belief that journalism would preserve American democracy. I still believe in the sacred duties of a free press. But if I’m honest about my own experiences in the field, the lessons that emerge most vividly are these:
1. Reporters are no more virtuous than anyone else, and often less so
2. Journalism hardly ever tells the most important stories
3. Even when it does, not much happens
***
Consider this story: the summer before my last year in college, I took an internship at the Meriden Record-Journal, a tiny paper in central Connecticut. I was asked, toward the end of my tenure, to undertake what sounded like an ambitious project: documenting 24 hours in the life of the city. I was teamed with a veteran reporter named Richard Hanley, an energetic psychopath who sustained himself on a diet of steamed cheeseburgers and Kent cigarettes and who, wisely, consigned me to the graveyard shift.
Had I been serious about this assignment, I would have consulted with police, city officials, maybe a historian to map out an itinerary. I would have hung out with workers on an overnight factory shift, tagged along with a cop, visited an emergency room or a jail or a radio station or a homeless shelter. Instead, I spent most of the night camped in diners and donut shops, cadging quotes from bleary waitresses, then roaming the empty downtown waiting, I suppose, for the essence of Meriden, Connecticut to descend from the dark summer sky and reveal itself, like an arch angel. I eventually retired to the bucket seats of my Mercury Bobcat.
This piece stays with me, I think, because it begins to capture the audacious fallacy at the heart of modern journalism, the idea that a subjective (and frankly haphazard) account of one night in Meriden, compiled by a lazy 20-year-old who has never even lived in the city, can be touted as a definitive version of the place.
Or maybe the lesson is this: my bosses actually liked the story I handed in. The executive editor later called me into his office. He was a towering silver-haired reptile, reviled by that entire small, ill-tempered newsroom. But he looked upon me fondly, probably because I was obsequious and poorly dressed. He floated the idea that I drop out of school and come to work full-time for him. When I demurred — and this part of the story I’ve never quite figured out — he slipped me an envelope with $350 cash inside. “Go buy something for your girlfriend,” he murmured mystically. “Go get her some cocaine.” Read more…
Manuel Betancourt | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (2,170 words)
Confronted by a historical record that mostly excludes and often disparages them, queer communities have long been forced to write their own histories — or, more often, to scrub them clean. After all, such histories can be dangerous to write, and the act of memorializing can sometimes feel like just another burden to bear.
In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love warns against this, writing that “given the new opportunities available to some gays and lesbians, the temptation to forget — to forget the outrages and humiliations of gay and lesbian history and to ignore the ongoing suffering of those not borne up by the rising tide of gay normalization — is stronger than ever.”
Three recent novels, all of them decades-spanning narratives centered on LGBTQ characters, are attempts to connect recent queer history with contemporary gay life. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair, John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and Tim Murphy’s Christodora are each expansive visions of post-war queer life. Set in London, Dublin, and New York City respectively, they tell stories about men and women living in the decades before and after gay liberation, through the AIDS crisis, and into the present. They depict everything from restroom cruising encounters and gay conversion therapy appointments to ACT UP meetings and late-night Grindr hookups. And they ask us to consider how past traumas haunt the 21st century. Read more…
Andrew Friedman | Excerpt adapted from Chefs, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession | Ecco | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4,560 words)
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He spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him.
You could begin this story in any number of places, so why not in the back of a dinged-up VW van parked on a Moroccan camping beach, a commune of tents and makeshift domiciles? It’s Christmas 1972. Inside the van is Bruce Marder, an American college dropout. He’s a Los Angelino, a hippy, and he looks the part: Vagabonding for six months has left him scrawny and dead broke. His jeans are stitched together, hanging on for dear life. Oh, and this being Christmas, somebody has gifted him some LSD, and he’s tripping.
The van belongs to a couple — French woman, Dutch man — who have taken him in. It boasts a curious feature: a built-in kitchen. It’s not much, just a set of burners and a drawer stocked with mustard and cornichons. But they make magic there. The couple has adventured as far as India, amassing recipes instead of Polaroids, sharing memories with new friends through food. To Marder, raised in the Eisenhower era on processed, industrialized grub, each dish is a revelation. When the lid comes off a tagine, he inhales the steam redolent of an exotic and unfamiliar herb: cilantro. The same with curry, also unknown to him before the van.
Like a lot of his contemporaries, Marder fled the United States. “People wanted to get away,” he says. Away from the Vietnam War. Away from home and the divorce epidemic. The greater world beckoned, the kaleidoscopic, tambourine-backed utopia promised by invading British rockers and spiritual sideshows like the Maharishi. The price of admission was cheap: For a few hundred bucks on a no-frills carrier such as Icelandic Airlines — nicknamed “the Hippie Airline” and “Hippie Express” — you could be strolling Piccadilly Circus or the Champs-Élysées, your life stuffed into a backpack, your Eurail Pass a ticket to ride.
Marder flew to London alone, with $800 and a leather jacket to his name, and improvised, crashing in parks and on any friendly sofa and — if he couldn’t score any of that — splurging on a hostel. He let himself go, smoking ungodly amounts of pot, growing his hair out to shoulder length. In crowds, he sensed kindred spirits, young creatures of the road, mostly from Spain and Finland. Few Americans.
Food, unexpectedly, dominated life overseas. Delicious, simple food that awakened his senses and imagination. Amsterdam brought him his first french fries with mayonnaise: an epiphany. The souks (markets) of Marrakech, with their food stalls and communal seating, haunt him. Within five months, he landed on that camping beach, in Agadir, still a wasteland after an earthquake twelve years prior. He lived on his wits: Back home, he’d become fluent in hippy cuisine; now he spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him, like the couple in whose van he was nesting. Food was as much a part of life on the beach as volleyball and marijuana. People cooked for each other, spinning the yarns behind the meals — where they’d picked them up and what they meant in their native habitats. Some campers developed specializations, like the tent that baked cakes over an open burner. Often meals were improvised: You’d go to town, buy a pail, fill it with a chicken, maybe some yogurt, or some vegetables and spices, and figure out what to do with it when you got back.
Marder might as well have been on another planet. “This was so un-American at that time,” he says. Read more…
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