What Happened Today: May 12, 2023
Legal questions at the border; Fishermen cheat too; Musk makes strange hire for Twitter CEO
The Big Story
At 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, Title 42, the immigration law from the COVID-19 era, finally ended. Title 42 allowed the government to quickly deport illegal border crossers without processing any asylum claims due to public health concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus. As the end date neared, the Biden administration raced to create new policies to discourage huge waves of illegal migration and improve infrastructure for a legal pathway to immigration. On Tuesday, May 9th, administration officials said they were still working toward the opening of 100 processing centers in the Western Hemisphere where potential migrants can apply for entry into the United States, Canada, or Spain, but that it will take time to get them up and running. On Wednesday, the administration put into effect a rule that would make it much harder for immigrants to get asylum in the United States without first applying either online or in another nation during their journey here. While many were expecting the largest surge of migrants to sweep in starting today, now that Title 42 is lifted, it appears that the wave occurred over the past week.
There are already legal challenges to the Biden administration’s new policies. A Florida judge ruled on Thursday that Border Patrol cannot release migrants into the United States without issuing a formal notice to appear at an immigration hearing. This process can take 90 minutes, and with the incredible number of migrants at the border, Border Patrol has benefited from a truncated process. The ACLU, meanwhile, sued the Biden administration on Thursday, arguing that its new rules for asylum seekers are functionally impossible for the migrants to follow. In its suit, the ACLU wrote, “After campaigning on a promise to restore our asylum system, the Biden administration has instead doubled down on its predecessor’s cruel asylum restrictions. … Seeking asylum is a lawful pathway protected by our laws regardless of how one enters the country.”
Read More: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/11/1175378000/title-42-expires-asylum-us-border-texas
In The Back Pages: Under the Eyes of Our Lady of Guadalupe
The Rest
→ Active-duty Marine Corps member Daniel Penny, who was charged with second-degree manslaughter for the death of Jordan Neely on the New York subway on May 1, surrendered to NYPD police on Friday morning. Penny was riding the F train in lower Manhattan when Neely entered the car and began shouting aggressively. Penny brought Neely to the ground, where he applied a choke hold that ultimately killed Neely. Initially, NYPD officers on the scene let Penny go after getting his statement, but after growing protests in New York calling for Penny to be charged, the Manhattan DA’s office decided to act. Neely had a history of violent behavior toward strangers, including punching a 67-year-old woman in the face in 2021, for which he pled guilty to felony assault. His family says he was suffering from schizophrenia, PTSD, and depression. The NYPD is also doing an internal investigation into whether Penny should have been held following his statement. If convicted, Penny faces up to 15 years in prison.
→ In another trial that got national attention, Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky were sentenced to 10 days in jail for cheating in September’s Lake Erie Walleye Trail fishing competition. Runyan and Cominsky had been filling their catch with lead weights to boost their chances at victory, but they were caught by tournament overseer Jason Fischer, who now has suspicions about Runyan and Cominsky’s past victories. “I guess we’ll never know about the other ones,” he said. Runyan told the court it was the “most ignorant decision I’ve ever made in my life,” and Assistant County Prosecutor Andrew Rogalski pulled no punches in affirming that, saying, “After today, they’ll be convicted felons. And nobody should feel bad for them, because they deserve this and they earned this.”
→ Yet another Norfolk Southern train derailed on Wednesday in New Castle, Pennsylvania, with 9 out of 200 railcars going off the tracks. None of the cars are believed to have been carrying hazardous materials. Locals, however, are understandably anxious. “We made sure there was no toxins because we have seven kids in our house,” one New Castle resident told Pittsburgh’s WTAE. “We shut the windows. We shut our doors. I told them, ‘Don’t open up the doors, just stay in the house until we find out,’ because I could smell the smoke in the air.” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman described these latest derailments as “same shit, different day” and said that it’s time to hold “the big rail companies accountable for … harm they continue to cause with this dangerous, reckless behavior.”
→ Thread of the Day:
https://twitter.com/blakezeff/status/1656679337267982336
Writer and documentarian Blake Zeff on Thursday tweeted a series of audio clips from an aborted project profiling serial liar and Republican Congressman George Santos. In one of the clips, Santos does his best “New York Jew” routine, and in another he blames his campaign consultants for the stream of lies he dished out during his run. On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced 13 counts against Santos, including seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives. Santos apparently also took unemployment in 2020 despite being employed.
→ Most of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, is now run by competing gangs that have been using extreme violence and terror to enforce their fiefdoms and project dominance. Since April 24, however, the Haitian people have been fighting back. When police intercepted a minibus of gang members traveling in the capital, a group of civilians surrounded the bus and stoned and burned the gang members to death, triggering a wider movement in the country called Bwa Kale, Haitian Creole for “peeled wood.” Since that first act of vigilante justice, the country’s citizens have grown bolder, enforcing swift, brutal justice on their former overlords, sometimes even fighting alongside police. On Tuesday, while encouraging an international intervention, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk commented that the developing vigilantism would “fuel the spiral of violence.”
Read More: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/haiti-bwa-kale-port-au-prince-gang-warfare-1.6833758
→ Accounting giant PricewaterhouseCooper’s Australian office apparently used the government’s confidential tax-policy plans to advise private clients. For now, the clients who benefited have not been identified, and many of the partners involved have also been kept anonymous. However, in light of the ongoing scandal, PwC Australia CEO Tom Seymour has stepped down, as have the Australian financial advisory managing partner, Pete Calleja, and—ironically but oh so predictably—“risk and reputation officer” Sean Gregory. Deborah O’Neill, an Australian senator from the Labor Party, told the Financial Times, “This is not a couple of bad apples. It is a widespread cultural problem and has reached far beyond Australia.”
→ With Twitter’s ad revenue plummeting since Elon Musk took the reins, Musk has announced he is stepping down as Twitter CEO to focus on overseeing the more technical aspects of the company as CTO. In his stead, he’s bringing in Linda Yaccarino, currently the global advertising chief for Comcast NBCUniversal. Last month at the marketing conference Possible in Miami, Yaccarino and Musk had a conversation about Twitter’s relationship to advertiser influence. Yaccarino pushed Musk to accept more advertiser influence in order to boost investment, in spite of his concerns about how that might curtail freedom of speech. Yaccarino may appear an odd choice given Musk’s criticisms of COVID-19 vaccines and the World Economic Forum; Yaccarino is chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Taskforce on the Future of Work, and as chair of the Ad Council’s board of directors, she was heavily influential in the COVID-19 vaccine ad campaign. Perhaps Musk sees Yaccarino as the right person to help him turn Twitter into “X,” the “everything app.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
My Two Moms by Nina Lichtenstein
The very different lessons I learned from my mother and my mother-in-law
Matchmaker, Matchmaker—Now Streaming by Rokhl Kafrissen
A new Netflix series’s spin on the ‘shadkhn’
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
This piece was originally published in Tablet, December 2022
Under the Eyes of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Catholic churches in El Paso offer assistance to a new wave of migrants amid an uncertain future for Title 42 pandemic restrictions
El Paso, Texas, has always been a place of transition and cultural mélange. Short for “El Paso del Norte,” literally the pass to the north, the border city between Texas and Mexico has long been used to people passing through their city, or staying to make it home. But a recent wave of migrants, over 1,500 on the evening of Dec. 11 alone, are part of a larger influx for which the city was unprepared. The surge of people across the border heightened concerns about the arrival of even larger numbers as the end of Title 42 pandemic-related restrictions on migration were set to expire on Dec. 21. But the arrival making headlines on Dec. 11 occurred on the eve of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Catholic feast and Mexican celebration of national and religious identity. The symbolism of the Virgin Mary dressed as an Aztec princess, ubiquitous throughout the majority-Hispanic city, has taken on various meanings almost from the beginning. It takes on new resonance as El Paso encounters unprecedented numbers of migrants from all over the world.
She is recognizable even to non-Catholics, appearing on candles, shirts, flags, murals, and tattoos. The Guadalupe image itself is considered by many Catholics to be miraculous, said to have appeared instantaneously—just 10 years after the fall of the Aztec empire to Hernán Cortés—on the garment of a recently converted indigenous man, Cuauhtlatoatzin, renamed Juan Diego at baptism. Both the Guadalupe image and the legend surrounding it (the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to Juan Diego and, in some tellings, spoken to him in his native Nahuatl language), are golden examples of the type of syncretism that often occurred as Christianity took root in new cultures.
In Mexico, as in other times and places, missionaries appropriated traditional symbols and practices to reflect the region’s newly established Catholic religion. Over the centuries, the Guadalupe image itself would be appropriated again and again in support of various political and societal causes. But in El Paso today, the Catholics with whom I spoke are less interested in proselytizing than they are in simply meeting the most basic needs of the men, women, and children showing up at their churches, often unannounced, hoping to head to points beyond. For some, it is a further expansion of the Guadalupe image and legend, and its inclusive themes of compassion and solidarity, to people of other faiths and nationalities.
My plane touched down on Dec. 12, the date on the Roman Catholic calendar dedicated to the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In this unmistakably Catholic and Hispanic city, where a life-size nativity scene greets airport visitors, the Guadalupe image shows up on the walls in nondescript office parks as well as churches. That evening, St. Mark Catholic Church held a special Mass in honor of the day. The church boasts a shrine with towering statues of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Juan Diego, around which visitors have placed candles and flowers. Indicative of the image’s centrality as an expression of Mexican identity, there is also a picture of Vanessa Guillen. The young Mexican American soldier was murdered at Fort Hood in 2020, and her ongoing disappearance gripped Hispanic media for some time before the grisly discovery of her body made national news. Inside the church, drummers and dancers in brightly colored traditional indigenous clothing and feathered headdresses, emblazoned with the Guadalupe image, participated along with the standard coterie of altar servers, priests, and ministers during the Mass. The presiding priests’ vestments also bore the Guadalupe image, one even featuring a Mexican flag. All the priests wore medical masks, as did many in the congregation, a lingering mark COVID-19 has left on a city that was heavily affected during the height of the pandemic.
It was ostensibly a bilingual Mass, but the Spanish-to-English ratio was probably roughly 80:20. Like many Mexican Americans, as Cheech and Chong knew, my Spanish is of the limited, half-remembered high school variety. Nevertheless, I was able to pick up the themes of the priest’s homily. Mentioning the difficulties faced by the indigenous people of Mexico under the Conquistadors, he addressed how Juan Diego (recognized as a saint by Pope John Paul II in 2002, making him the first indigenous saint from the Americas) was empowered by his visit from the Virgin Mary. She gave him a mission to speak to the powerful religious leaders of the day, he said, despite his lowly social status.
There is a 16th-century account, published later in the 17th century but widely believed to have been written by an indigenous author, which has become the standard version of the Guadalupe apparition. It is quoted in the Roman Catholic breviary, the book of psalms that the church’s priests are obliged to pray five times a day. According to the account, in December of 1531, Juan Diego claimed to have encountered the Virgin Mary while on his way to Mass. The site of her appearance, Tepeyac Hill, in what is today Mexico City, was known as a site of mother-goddess worship by the Aztecs (a literal coincidence, which either bolsters or undermines the veracity of the legend, depending on the source). The bishop of Mexico disbelieved Juan Diego’s account, as well as his assertion, on two separate occasions, that the Virgin Mary had requested a church be built in the area. Juan Diego said he encountered the Virgin Mary a third time while going to find a priest to minister to his sick uncle. This time, he told the bishop she had directed him to a hilltop spot, covered with blossoming Castilian roses, which were out of season for early December. When he arrived to tell the bishop about this encounter, the author writes, Juan Diego unfurled his simple traditional tunic, called a tilma, to display the roses he said he had collected. When he did so, the tilma displayed the now-famous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The tilma hangs in a popular shrine today in Mexico City.
At St. Mark, on the anniversary that tradition says the Virgin Mary first appeared to Juan Diego, the priest spoke in his homily of the legend’s themes of justice and compassion: “We are all Juan Diego, we are all someone special,” he said. Believers and skeptics both point to scientific studies to prove the tilma’s authenticity, but there is little question that the image has had enduring power. Images of Our Lady of Guadalupe rallied disenfranchised mestizos during the Mexican War for Independence, and later, Zapatista rebels during the Mexican Civil War. The Guadalupe image’s syncretic adaptation of specifically European depictions of the Virgin Mary, with Aztec trappings (her clothing is said to reference both a description generally understood by Christians to refer to Mary in the Book of Revelation, and traditional Aztec costume), seem tailor-made for the former “New Spain.” Our Lady of Guadalupe emerged as a symbol of Mexicanismo, not least to Mexicans who had left their native country, as with the adoption of the image by Cesar Chavez in the 1960s.
The Guadalupe image appears in far more modest quarters elsewhere in El Paso, at the parish hall of Holy Family Catholic Church. A large, framed print hangs in a quiet corner of the noisy room, vases of roses beneath. On the wall next to it is a billboard displaying numbers for bus companies. The priest in charge is Father Jarek Wysoczanski. Dressed in “civilian” clothes, he comes across to the uninitiated as a spritely middle-aged layman. His frequent, ready smiles and soft voice convey a contagious sense of peace and relaxation. He told me that their refugee intake area was once the site of a convent. A dwindling congregation and the closure of a larger temporary housing site for migrants in El Paso, the Casa del Refugiado (CDR), made Holy Family’s property a convenient site to accommodate the influx of migrants coming across the El Paso border. Wysoczanski said Holy Family’s facility opened in September of this year.
I arrived just as a group of migrants in the shelter were preparing to board a bus. Shouted names began to echo throughout the multipurpose room filled with cots. The departing residents with reservations collected reusable shopping bags containing food, snacks, and clean clothes. Volunteers at the shelter told me that the longest they have seen anyone stay there is two days, before they depart for other places. For most of them, El Paso is a temporary stop where they connect with sponsors elsewhere in the country who help them procure bus or plane tickets to other cities within the U.S.
This particular group lined up in the parking lot, where portable toilets and mobile shower units, marked “City of El Paso Fire Department,” were stationed. They boarded the bus to begin the next leg of their journey. No sooner did the bus depart than word began to circulate that 50 more migrants would be arriving that day, an announcement that came earlier than usual, according to volunteer Sister Mary Peter Diaz.
Diaz volunteers along with Sister Joannes Klas, a Franciscan religious sister originally from Wisconsin, who spent nine years working with Guatemalan refugees in Honduras, and an additional nearly three decades in Guatemala itself. They told me about the other religious sisters working with migrants in motels in the city, where migrants who test positive for COVID are quarantined.
The Trump administration migration restrictions of Title 42 were poised to end in the coming days, bringing an anticipated increase in arrivals across the border. But various people familiar with the work of Catholic groups and churches with migrants spoke of the already ongoing strain of COVID-19 on their ability to service the migrants’ needs. Diaz and Klas told me that Holy Family is unique among other volunteer-run shelters, in that it is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whereas others run only Monday through Friday. But there simply are not enough volunteers, with many saying the pool of available help has winnowed since the onset of the pandemic. Since the dispersal of migrant care after the July closure of the 135,000-square-foot CDR, employees from the City of El Paso’s Emergency Management department are now present at the Holy Family shelter. Diaz said they arrive in two daily shifts of eight hours each.
Another volunteer told me that the Border Patrol has just released a large number of migrants to a volunteer-run charity that coordinates a network of shelters around the city to receive migrants and refugees. A spokesman for the Diocese of El Paso, which oversees all the Catholic Churches in the area that run shelters, said that it currently lacks a central processing hub for migrants.
Wysoczanski is no stranger to life in a border town, he told me, having grown up in Poland, on the border with Germany. He said Holy Family receives migrants from South America and Haiti, even Turkey and Uzbekistan. Fittingly, considering the name of his shelter, Wysoczanski said their shelter receives Title 42 exceptions—people, often families, who are fleeing persecution and other traumas, including natural disasters. For this reason, he said, they usually bring with them emotional scars and wounds. But he smiled as he told me about the 3-day old infant who recently came through. “It was amazing,” he said. “We are very happy.” It is a gift, he said, “to touch the suffering humanity.”
Wysoczanski is a Franciscan, the same order of priests who came to Mexico following Cortes’ invasion. But in his mind, he is not a missionary for Catholicism. “For me, it is more important to be human,” he said. “We are doing this because we wanted to embrace everybody. Everybody.” He described occasionally saying Mass and realizing that most of the people in his congregation belong to other religions than his, although he said he is unsure, since he doesn’t ask their affiliation. Sometimes, Wysoczanski said, his primary work is to listen to the migrants’ stories, rather than to proclaim. “We are together and we are listening,” he said. “I’m here only to be with them.”
This is a commitment Wysoczanski takes seriously. He said he sleeps in the shelter himself one night a week. That past Sunday, he said, there were 82 people in the shelter, which he estimates usually sleeps around 40 or 50 daily. “It is incredible,” he said, explaining that for many, it is their first night of real rest after a difficult, dangerous journey.
“For us, the feast of Virgin Mary is every day,” he said, alluding to the Guadalupe image that hangs in the corner of the shelter. Out of respect for the diversity of the people passing through, there was no special observance on the 12th, at the Holy Family shelter, but he said throughout the day, he saw individuals going by to pray in front of the image privately. “She is like a mother who is embracing them here,” he said.
Wysoczanski told a story about the Turkish family he encountered one night while staying at the Holy Family shelter: “The dear child, a girl, maybe 3 or so, was crying,” he said. The crying went on throughout the night, and Wysoczanski described waking up at one point to see the family standing in front of the Guadalupe image. Through Google translate, he and the family were able to communicate and rule out potential causes. “I look at the Virgin Mary,” he said, and at that moment wondered if the toddler wasn’t experiencing some culture shock in an unfamiliar environment. “I said, ‘Lady, help this girl.’ At once, the man took his iPhone and put the music from Turkey, and when she started to listen [to] this music, immediately became quiet.” Wysoczanski laughed. “I said, ‘Thank you, Mary!’”
In the account of Juan Diego and the Guadalupe apparition, the Virgin Mary is described as soothing the man’s anxiety by asking in his native language the rhetorical question, “Am I not here who am your mother?” Wysoczanski’s story of this late-night Turkish music iPhone concert, taking place before the depiction, filtered through European art conventions, of a young Jewish woman dressed like Aztec royalty, is a testament to the wide adaptability of the Guadalupe image and legend. It is the appeal of a mother who sees and understands amid the unfamiliar and unknown.
Christmas was just around the corner at the time of my visit, when Mary, her son, and his foster father, Joseph, known together by Catholics as the Holy Family, are front and center this time of year. The Christmas narrative tells a story of a time when this family were themselves without a place to stay, and later, refugees fleeing to Egypt from King Herod’s murderous designs on the infant Jesus. “I see in the face of everybody the face of God,” Wysoczanski said. His two favorite moments are when the migrants arrive and he observes the change in their facial expressions when he welcomes them, and the other is when they board the bus for their next destination. “It is for me the face of God, the face of Jesus, of Mary, of Joseph,” he said, “And God is traveling from here to the airport or to the bus station.”
Holy Family is a quick trip from downtown El Paso, a thriving cultural hub that obscures the crisis that has garnered national attention. The morning of the 13th, the day after the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, my downtown hotel lobby was a hive of activity as staff, security, and local police awaited the imminent departure of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to meet with local authorities regarding the influx at the border. But just a short walk from the lobby stands the impressive Minor League Baseball stadium for the El Paso Chihuahuas, a farm team for the San Diego Padres. There are also high-end boutique hotels, hip eateries and bars, renovated art deco architecture, and brilliant street art. In the afternoon, the lunch rush of soldiers from nearby Fort Bliss packed the restaurants. Along the I-10 highway, across which arriving migrants have been known to attempt to run to safety, billboards for the University of Texas at El Paso promise a bright future for El Paso in the field of robotics.
The local news that day (and into the next morning) included coverage of a fire downtown that had destroyed a shoe store, which fire crews were having difficulty fully extinguishing, their trucks blocking off an entire section of the street. It was the kind of thing that might have been bigger news in a midsize city like El Paso, but instead was fighting for equal time alongside stories about the pressure on local homeless shelters, many at capacity due to arriving migrants, and massive delays for delivery truckscoming across the border from Mexico due to increased vehicle inspections. Further delays are likely with a plan to reassign border agents from customsto migrant processing.
I received a tip about young undocumented Venezuelan migrant who had shown up at a church in the morning. Rather cosmically on-the-nose, his name was Jesús. When I met him, he had a sandwich the priest had made for him, a bag containing a change of clothes, and a bus ticket that evening to Denver.
In many ways Jesús fit a profile Father Wysoczanski had described to me that morning at Holy Family. Venezuelans in particular pose a challenge for the work of places like Holy Family, according to him. Typically, migrants released by the Border Patrol to NGOs for processing have sponsors somewhere else in the country that they are trying to reach. The Venezuelans who have been arriving recently often do not, said Wysoczanski, which makes rendering assistance challenging for the shelters, whose primary function is to serve as a temporary way station for the newly arrived as they make arrangements. But, he said, “it’s the mysteries of God, I don’t know how, but they go out, they look,” he said. “And they are able.” Somehow, through providence, they find sponsors, he said.
Twenty-five-year-old Jesús still didn’t have a sponsor when we spoke, but he was definitely relying on the mysteries of God. He said he had left Venezuela due to the economic situation and lack of security, where you might have enough food for two days before returning to uncertainty. After passing solo through “seven countries and one jungle” over two months by foot, bus, and cargo train, Jesús said he had crossed the border into El Paso the day before, when he noticed a group of Venezuelans and followed them. They found a small gap in the wall, he said, that they crawled through “like little ants.” That night, Jesús slept at a transportation terminal with some other migrants. A Catholic himself, he said he began looking for churches, arriving at one the next morning. According to Jesús, people arriving from Venezuela generally know that they can get help getting tickets for transportation at churches. Jesús was sick when he arrived at the church, where he said he was fed, given a place to stay, and medicine to treat his symptoms. Unused to the cold, Jesús said, he was unable even to swallow when he arrived, but with “thanks to the help of God and the padre,” he was doing better when we spoke.
The bus station from which he was to depart was packed with men, women, and children of all ages, seemingly occupying every available surface. The garish artificial light overhead felt like its primary function was to serve as a mocking reminder that it was dark outside, and enabling sight was simply a collateral fringe benefit it grudgingly bestowed on bystanders. But it was not a desperate scene. Jesús said he was enthusiastic, and he did not seem to be the only one. Indeed, while a few toddlers slept on the floor on blankets, in many ways, the familial and group dynamics on display around us appeared, on the surface at least, like those in any transportation terminal waiting room.
Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/lady-guadalupe-title-42-el-paso