Abstract
“They told us they no longer provide that courtesy because they don’t like emotional scenes.”
55
—Number of House Democrats (out of a total of 192) who voted with Republicans to defeat an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that would have required law enforcement officials to get a warrant before searching National Security Agency (NSA) data for information on Americans. (The Intercept)
1.1 million
—Number of people who tuned in to a Medicare-For-All town hall video stream with Senator Bernie Sanders. (Senator Bernie Sanders)
900 percent
—Amount by which courthouse arrests and attempted arrests of immigrants increased in New York—a “sanctuary city”—in 2017. (Immigrant Defense Project)
NYPD Must Get Warrants for Cell Phone Tracker
A judge has ruled that the New York City Police Department will have to get a warrant to use the devices known as Stingrays, which mimic cell phone tower signals to harvest data from nearby cell phones. The devices can be capable of intercepting calls and text messages as well as tracking the location of a particular cell phone. A report from the New York Civil Liberties Union had found that the NYPD used the devices over 1,000 times between 2008 and 2015.
A separate investigation by CityLab had found that most of the Stingray use in three cities occurred in low-income communities of color. There have also been concerns that the devices will be used to track participants in legal protests—a concern that has added weight in the wake of the prosecution of around 200 people for simply being part of the Election Day protests in Washington, D.C. In New York, at least, police will now be required to prove that the person they intend to track is a suspect in a crime.
Cities to Ensure Immigrants Facing Deportation Have Attorneys
A new initiative known as the Safety and Fairness for Everyone (SAFE) Cities Network intends to ensure that all immigrants facing deportation in eleven locales around the United States will have free legal representation. Studies have found that few immigrants facing deportation or in detention have access to lawyers, and that having access to legal representation can significantly increase their chances of being allowed to remain in the country.
Atlanta, GA; Austin and San Antonio, TX; Baltimore and Prince George’s County, MD; Chicago, IL; Columbus, OH; Dane County, WI; and Oakland/Alameda County, Sacramento, and Santa Ana, CA are rolling out SAFE Cities programs with a grant from the Vera Institute for Justice for funding and the required public money to match Vera’s funding. The effort bolsters the “sanctuary city” movement already underway, aiming to put some legal muscle to attempts to protect immigrants from attacks from the Trump administration.
Philadelphia Reclaims Control of Its Public Schools
After sixteen years of state control, the city of Philadelphia has begun the process of taking back local control over its school system—a system racked by closures, charter takeovers, underfunding, and inequality. State takeovers have been a key part of the corporate-backed education reform movement of the past few decades, as punishment for failing increasingly high-stakes evaluations—states from Mississippi to New Jersey have utilized these takeovers. In Pennsylvania, as in other places, where the state legislature has tended Republican while Philadelphia is solidly Democratic, this means the schools have been a political football between the state legislature and a series of Democratic mayors of the city whose support for local schools veered toward encouraging charters rather than investing in public schools. But after years of organizing, the city elected a mayor on a platform of bringing back control, and with a more sympathetic governor, the stage was set.
In November, Mayor Jim Kenney formally asked the School Reform Commission (SRC)—the state body that has controlled the Philadelphia schools—to dissolve itself. Weeks later, the commission did just that. Antoine Little, who began organizing to support the public schools when the city announced the closure of sixty-four schools, noted that the fight was not over, but that it was an enormous victory for local activists. “We went out and we organized the community, sat [in] at different SRC meetings, testified, meeting after meeting,” Little said. “At the end of the day, our children’s education is not for sale.”
Manufactured-Home Residents Fight Back
While much of the conversation around the housing crisis focuses on cities, residents of manufactured mobile home communities also face an investor-induced crunch, with well-heeled out-of-towners buying up the parks to crank up the rents and squeeze a profit out of low- and moderate-income residents. And they too have been organizing. In November, manufactured-home residents with the group MH Action (Mobile Home Action) went to Austin, TX to disrupt a “Mobile Home University” run by Frank Rolfe and Dave Reynolds of RV Horizons. Rolfe and Reynolds have been holding their investor boot camps for years, teaching would-be mobile home park titans how to make money on low-income housing. Rolfe called it, to the New York Times, a “contrarian bet on a poorer America,” an assumption that poor people in trailer parks would pay ever-increasing, unregulated land rents rather than move their mobile homes elsewhere.
Manufactured-home parks—what are often referred to as trailer parks—are one of the options that people have turned to for housing as they are pushed out of gentrifying urban cores, notes Kevin Borden of MH Action. The group began as a project of the Center for Community Change in 2012 and branched out on its own, building out membership in manufactured-home communities around the country, teaching them to organize their neighbors, and using the internet to connect disparate communities to one another. They saw similarities between the housing problems that manufactured-home residents faced and the struggles of the urban working class, and in them a way to connect the struggles of white exurbanites with people they might never otherwise encounter. Through partnerships with organizations in urban communities of color, like New York Communities for Change and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, they are trying to build a coalition to take on the investor class that sees their homes as a commodity for profits. They bring together manufactured-home residents from varied backgrounds to try to bridge the differences that seem so calcified in Trump’s America to come up with housing solutions that work for all. “We have to unpackage and deal with language barrier issues, with inherent privilege around race,” Borden says. “But at the end of the day, one of the best ways to move through that is getting people in the same room together and trusting them to work through it.”
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.