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Coachella, Alternativo

Ilustración: Kate Gavino

Gabriel Thompson | Longreads | Abril 2018 | 29 minutos (8,025 palabras)

Esta historia se produjo en colaboración con The Investigative Fund, un proyecto del The Nation Institute. Apoya al proyecto, inscríbete a la lista de correos, o sigue al The Investigative Fund en Twitter y Facebook.

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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 Start en 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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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 Mirage no 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.
 

Este artículo se realizó en colaboración con el The Investigative Fund en el The Nation Institute, y con el apoyo de la Puffin Foundation.

Gabriel Thompson es un periodista que radica en Oakland. La mayor parte de su trabajo versa en temas de migración, mano de obra y organizaciones. Su libro más reciente se titula: “Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture.

* * *

Edición: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Revisión de hechos: Ethan Chiel
Traducción: María Ítaka
Ilustración: Kate Gavino
Correción: Krista Stevens

Coachella, Underground

All illustrations by Kate Gavino

Gabriel Thompson | Longreads | April 2018 | 25 minutes (7,013 words)

This story was produced in partnership with The Investigative Fund, a project of The Nation Institute. Support the project, subscribe to the mailing list, or follow The Investigative Fund on Twitter and Facebook.

LEER EN ESPAÑOL

 
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 by Roberto’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 last visited 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 de quinceañera, 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 article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with support from the Puffin Foundation.

Gabriel Thompson is a journalist based in Oakland and mostly writes about immigration, labor, and organizing. His most recent book is Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture.

* * *

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact checker: Ethan Chiel
Translator: María Ítaka
Illustrator: Kate Gavino
Copy editor: Krista Stevens

Chasing the Man Who Caught the Storm: An Interview With Brantley Hargrove

AP

 

Jonny Auping | Longreads | April 2018| 15 minutes (4,096 words)

 

In his recently released book, The Man Who Caught the Storm, Brantley Hargrove tells the story of an unlikely legend named Tim Samaras, who lived his life grappling with and addicted to one of nature’s most dangerous marvels.

Samaras was a tornado chaser with a simple but absurdly treacherous goal: to get close enough to a twister to glean data from within its core. Hargrove, who spent months on the road chasing tornadoes for the reporting of the book, retraces and recreates Samaras’ most dramatic missions, culminating on May 31, 2014 in El Reno, Oklahoma, where he would face off with the largest tornado ever recorded. That same tornado would take Samaras’ life along with those of his son, Paul, and fellow chaser Carl Young.

“We now live in an era when the Mars Pathfinder rover has touched down on the Red Planet,” Hargrove writes. “The human genome has been mapped. But twisters still have the power to confound even the most advanced civilization the planet has ever known.”

Samaras legacy and life’s work represented a crucial foundation for how to better understand and predict historically unpredictable tornadoes.

But The Man the Who Caught the Storm is hardly a meteorological textbook. Rather Hargrove weaves a uniquely American tale of adventure — “nowhere else on the planet do tornadoes happen like they do in this country,” as he explained to me — diving into the circumstances and makeup that leads a man to chase what he should be running from.

Lacking even a college degree, Samaras was an outsider in the meteorological community, who not only developed one of the most sophisticated information-gathering probes the field had ever seen, but also had the courage (or perhaps unrelenting urge) to personally drop that probe in front of a twister.

Hargrove sat down with Longreads to discuss tornadoes, his own storm chasing, and the addicting thrill of being in the presence of something that can cause unfathomable chaos and destruction.
Read more…

Get With the Modern Age, Sign Up for the Longreads Books Newsletter

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Dear Reader,

Over coffee a few weeks ago, our audience development editor Catherine Cusick told me something remarkable: someone, somewhere is always reading “A Sociology of the Smartphone,” an excerpt from Adam Greenfield’s book Radical Technologies (Verso, 2017) which we published in June of last year. This astute social scientific rumination on our new and profound interconnectedness via the “ubiquitous… slabs of polycarbonate” in our pockets is Longreads’ most-read book feature of all time.

Meanwhile, in “The Death Row Book Club,” our recent excerpt from The Sun Does Shine (St. Martin’s Press, 2018), Anthony Ray Hinton remembers that “the books were a big deal. Nobody had books on death row. They had never been allowed, and it was like someone had brought in contraband.” It is the book, sometimes just a single copytossed from reader to reader across the prison library with a little prayer that it never land too far out of anyone’s reach, since rising from your seat during death row book club is strictly forbidden — which provides a new and profound interconnectedness for the prisoners.


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In another of our recent book excerpts, from Agnès Poirier’s Left Bank (Henry Holt & Co., 2018), we read that when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir founded their literary magazine Les Temps modernes in the rubble of Paris in 1945, they had to request an allocation of paper from the government. They had to bring their own rations to the literary parties. Nevertheless, the magazine was an instant, global success — Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s books became bestsellers, rumors spread that women would swoon when they heard Sartre lecture, even the State Department got Existentialist fever, and Richard Wright bought his entire family steamer tickets to France and wrote in his diary that he “felt relief as he saw the Statue of Liberty” drifting away. He came to Paris to advise Les Temps modernes on their upcoming “America” issue — in which they excerpted books like The Black Metropolis, a groundbreaking sociology of redlining and poverty on Chicago’s South Side.

Of course, in this post-Rex world, the State Department surely no longer has the wherewithal to bother reading such a minor cultural artifact as the first ever Longreads Books Newsletter. Indeed, the founding of Les Temps modernes differs from the first ever Longreads Books Newsletter in, ah, a number of ways — probably the most important of which is that I have not written a 1,000-page philosophical novel to co-promote with this newsletter. But I find myself dwelling on it anyway, comparing our efforts to the past and its apparent perfection. (Or near perfection. According to David Remnick, who is certainly an authority on such things, it was the first issue of The New York Review of Books — also founded, incidentally, at a moment of paper shortage, during the 1963 printer’s strike — which was “surely the best first issue of any magazine ever.”) After all, it’s becoming more and more difficult to stand on the shaky notion that there is some strong dividing line between “the modern times” and “history.” And difficult to think that we should not be making comparisons.

So in the future (no matter how alarmingly it starts to resemble the past), look to this newsletter to encounter new works that hopefully, as Sartre bragged in his introduction to the first issue of Les Temps modernes, “do not… miss a beat on the times we live in,” that “inten[d] to influence the society we live in,” that “take sides.” You’ll read excerpts from new books like Noliwe Rooks’ groundbreaking study of inequality in public education, Cutting School (The New Press 2017); interviews with authors who’ve written remarkable new books that we’re eager to hear more about, like Elizabeth Flock’s study of love, The Heart Is a Shifting Sea (Harper, 2018); essays and discussions about the writer’s craft; and book reviews. Yes, book reviews. This, despite the fact that, in her interview with Longreads, the cultural critic Michelle Dean notes the hysterics to which Norman Mailer was driven by Mary McCarthy’s The Group when he reviewed it in 1963 (in those same venerable pages of the New York Review of Books, although not in the first issue — I checked — but rather the fourth one). Dean tells us that, reading Mailer’s review and others like it, she “starte[d] to have a sense of humor about the value of a review that comes out when a book is initially released.” She continues:

You start to realize how wildly out of sync [contemporary reviewers tend to be] with whatever later opinion of the book developed after people had the chance to digest it and think about it…. The reception adds an element of absurdity to the whole thing.

So there you have it. The modern times are wildly out of sync (more so than ever?) and absurdly wrong about new books; these days books are as ubiquitous as air and as precious as contraband; and we at Longreads have decided it’s the perfect time to start a books newsletter. Welcome and enjoy!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Did Brian Easley Have to Die?

Calvin Easley holds a wallet-sized portrait of his brother, Brian. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Aaron Gell | Longreads | April 2018 | 37 minutes (9,230 words)

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 claimed that 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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

HR Grid

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.

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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.”

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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.”

“I know this,” he said. “He was my brother.”

***

Aaron Gell is the features editor of Task & Purpose and an adjunct instructor at NYU’s Prison Education Program. He has contributed to numerous publications, including New York magazine, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair,

This article was published in collaboration with the editorial team at Task & Purpose. 

***

Editor: Michelle Legro
Photographs: Hector René Membreno-Canales

Fact checker: Matthew Giles
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

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Kevin Williamson (via YouTube/The Cato Institute)

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Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

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Eva Holland | Longreads | April 2018 | 23 minutes (5,900 words)

A lifetime ago, it seems, I used to write fiction. I wrote little stories on scraps of paper as a young kid; throughout grade school, I filled my unused notebooks with attempts at novels; I wrote a few short stories in high school and college. But since I started freelancing full-time a decade ago, I haven’t written a single line of fiction.

For a few years now, I’ve been intrigued by the writers who manage to produce both fiction and nonfiction work — the ones who excel on both sides of the divide. How do they do it? Why? Do they prefer one to the other? Does one feed the other? I had so many questions, I finally decided to convene another writers’ roundtable (last time around, we talked freelancing) and I asked a few writers I admire to weigh in.

Benjamin Percy is a Minnesota-based writer of novels (most recently, The Dark Net), comics, and the nonfiction book Thrill Me: Essays On Fiction. His nonfiction stories have also appeared in the likes of GQ, Esquire, Outside, and Men’s Journal. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at the New York Times, a contributor to GQ and many other fine magazines, and the author of a forthcoming novel. Mary H.K. Choi has written for Wired, GQ, The Atlantic, and more. Her first novel, Emergency Contact, recently debuted on March 27. Adam Sternbergh is an editor at New York magazine and the author of the novels The Blinds, Shovel Ready, and Near Enemy.

ORIGIN STORIES

Eva Holland: When I was younger, I admit I barely even understood that nonfiction writing existed, outside of daily hard news reporting. My understanding of “writing” was entirely “fiction writing,” and I only fell in love with magazines and narrative nonfiction much later. So, my first question is: What came first for you as a writer — fiction, or non?

Benjamin Percy: Growing up, my only doses of nonfiction came from The Oregonian, Time, Newsweek, Fangoria, National Geographic, and Archaeology Magazine. Most of my reading was devoted to novels — mass-market paperbacks with embossed titles and dragons on the cover — and that’s what I hoped to become when I stepped into my first creative writing workshop: a genre novelist. The first time I wrote something that resembled “creative nonfiction,” I was in my mid-20s and only attempted it because a magazine approached me about an assignment.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I was absolutely, definitely, without a doubt going to be a fiction writer or a screenwriter. And then I wasn’t! When I left NYU with a BFA in screenwriting, I realized I had zero version of a plan. I didn’t know what to do, so I got a job that was advertised in the New York Times classifieds (a fiction writer might call this foreshadowing). It was to work at a Soap Opera Magazine. I was still writing screenplays, but they weren’t good—they were cynical, in the way that ’90s screenplays were cynical. And I was taught how to write those things so that they would sell, not so they would be meaningful. So I worked at the soap opera stuff, and I wrote profiles of the actors. I was going to get back into fiction…one day. But it was always hovering in the background. It seemed very fancy to me, to write a novel. And very big and out of reach. I became a freelance writer after a time, and realized I couldn’t devote the amount of time to a novel that a novel would need because I couldn’t bet so many working hours on something that wasn’t a sure thing. Read more…