Let's come together this May to honor and remember the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples (MMIP). Their stories deserve to be heard, their memories kept alive. š #MMIPAwarenessMonth pic.twitter.com/9FfQrBZXRv
— Urban Restoration Counseling Center (@URCCSanDiego) May 6, 2024
Red Dress Day was last week, but I figure better late than never to highlight this important issue…
The crisis of Missing & Murdered Indigenous Peoples has impacted every Indigenous person I know. I'm deeply proud of our efforts across the Biden-Harris administration to help address this violence. At @Interior, we're making historic strides toward tackling this painful legacy.
— Secretary Deb Haaland (@SecDebHaaland) May 5, 2024
As US spotlights those missing or dead in Native communities, prosecutors work to solve their cases https://t.co/s4GWNBsmCj
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 5, 2024
… As people gathered around the nation on Sunday to spotlight the troubling number of disappearances and killings in Indian Country, authorities say the New Mexico case represents the kind of work the U.S. Department of Justice had aspired to when establishing its Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons outreach program last summer.
Special teams of assistant U.S. attorneys and coordinators have been tasked with focusing on MMIP cases. Their goal: Improve communication and coordination across federal, tribal, state and local jurisdictions in hopes of bridging the gaps that have made solving violent crimes in Indian Country a generational challenge.
Some of the new federal prosecutors were participating in MMIP Awareness Day events. From the Arizona state capitol to a cultural center in Albuquerque and the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina, marches, symposiums, art exhibitions and candlelight vigils were planned for May 5, which is the birthday of Hanna Harris, who was only 21 when she was killed on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana in 2013…
Assistant U.S. Attorney Eliot Neal oversees MMIP cases for a region spanning New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Nevada.
Having law enforcement agencies and attorneys talking to each other can help head off other crimes that are often precursors to deadly violence. The other pieces of the puzzle are building relationships with Native American communities and making the justice system more accessible to the public, Neal said.
Part of Nealās work includes reviewing old cases: time-consuming work that can involve tracking down witnesses and resubmitting evidence for testing.
āWeāre trying to flip that script a little bit and give those cases the time and attention they deserve,ā he said, adding that communicating with family members about the process is a critical component for the MMIP attorneys and coordinators.
The DOJ over the past year also has awarded $268 million in grants to tribal justice systems for handling child abuse cases, combating domestic and sexual violence and bolstering victim services.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bree Black Horse was dressed in red as she was sworn in Thursday during a ceremony in Yakima, Washington. The color is synonymous with raising awareness about the disproportionate number of Indigenous people who have been victims of violence.
I visited the MMU's headquarters in New Mexico to learn more about their work and collaborative efforts with other agencies, including @TheJusticeDept. You can learn more at https://t.co/ROB19Xelm6. pic.twitter.com/kbWM2PZVbj
— Secretary Deb Haaland (@SecDebHaaland) May 5, 2024
Alongside @TheJusticeDept, we recently released our response to the Commission's recommendations. Only together can we address this crisis and the pain inflicted. More must be done & our Administration is committed to advancing this shared goal together. https://t.co/a2I8cMN4LQ
— Secretary Deb Haaland (@SecDebHaaland) May 5, 2024
Today on Missing & Murdered #Indigenous Peoples Day, we remember and honor our lost relatives by #WearingRed & sharing their stories. Explore this page from @NIWRC for awareness materials, links to webinars, and a podcast: https://t.co/oLOSNn87mB #WhyWeWearRed #MMIP pic.twitter.com/BtDNczrpuG
— The Office of Indian Education (@OIEIndianED) May 5, 2024
MMIW Awareness: A Day to Remember Centuries of Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women | Opinion https://t.co/D6M9rngxJ7
— Lilian Davis (@DavisLilian) May 6, 2024
rikyrah
Definitely an issue that needs more attention. Far too many Indigenous women go missing in this country.šŖšŖ
geg6
OT: Whereās Kay? Ā Apparently, Hamas has accepted a deal. Ā Not completely confirmed but no word from Bibi on if theyāll accept. Ā Probably not because he needs war to stay out of jail.
geg6
@rikyrah:
Too true.
JaySinWA
@geg6: Israel’s response seems less than enthusiastic.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-hamas-war-humanitarian-aid-8659eae6e0a7362504f0aa4aa4be53e
Old School
@geg6:
@JaySinWA: Jinx!
Geminid
@geg6: The Israelis say that this was not the deal on the table, that Hamas “accepted” a changed deal of their own. The Israelis have not yet said what the changes are they object to though.
In any event, the IDF is continuing the offensive in the Rafah sector they began this morning.
H.E.Wolf
Thank you, Anne Laurie, for highlighting the matter of missing and murdered Indigenous people (and Indigenous women in particular).
I’m glad the current administration takes it seriously and has been increasing resources to address it.
jonas
Can anyone explain, or point me to an explainer, of why Rafah is such an important target for Israel? Is it a major Hamas stronghold or something?
Geminid
@jonas: Actually, Rafah is Hamas’s last major stronghold.
satby
Yes, bless you AL for posting on this neglected issue.
HumboldtBlue
An update on the latest events
It’s 22:00 in London and midnight in the Middle East where there’s been a flurry of events in recent hours ā hereās a recap of the latest developments:
Hamas said it had approved a ceasefire proposal put forward by Qatari and Egyptian mediators
However the exact details of the agreement are still unclear and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the deal is āfar from meeting Israel’s demandsā. Israel will send a delegation to Cairo to negotiate further
In the meantime, Israeli attacks continue in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1.4 million people are currently sheltering. The IDF says it is conducting “targeted strikes” against Hamas in the eastern part of the city
Sirens have sounded in southern Israel with missiles launched from Gaza being intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome system
The ceasefire proposal agreed by Hamas is thought to include release of Israeli hostages and return of displaced Palestinians within Gaza
John Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, says the talks between Israel and Hamas are at a “critical” stage: “I don’t know that it gets any more sensitive than right now,” he said.
Jay
@jonas:
Rafah is where the supply tunnels to Egypt are,
Rafah is also where some “Hamas” members probably evacuated to,
and of course, there is still critical civilian infrastructure (housing, hospitals, power plants, sewage plants, schools) in Rafah that Israel has not utterly destroyed.
JaySinWA
On topic, our attention span on missing and murdered indigenous people seems limited. Horrific stories show up often well after the fact. So there is rarely a “missing white woman” equivalent.
https://www.adn.com/lawless/ from 2020 did significant reporting from Alaska that inspired “Alaska Daily”, a fictional work that lasted 1 season. “Reservation Dogs” had a sub-plot involving sexual violence and murder as well. Canadian news and fiction seem to have more reflection of these events than we do in the US.
It is good that it is getting some legal leg work. Probably less than it deserves, but that seems common in crimes against minorities.
piratedan
@JaySinWA: The Canadian series Three Pines also has this issue as a fulcrum of it’s stories.
schrodingers_cat
Important topic, thanks for highlighting. Its also the AAPI month.
Geminid
@jonas:
@Geminid: Rafah is also where the surviving hostages are being held.
Jay
@JaySinWA:
@piratedan:
Us Canadians arn’t really much better.
Jay
@Geminid:
Maybe. That’s what Israel “claims”, but they have made a lot of empty claims and have run hard and fast away from providing any evidence of their claims.
Geminid
@Jay: The surviving hostages must be somewhere, because Hamas is negotiating over their release. So where do you think they are if not in Rafah?
cain
@piratedan: I was going to mention that! Looking forward to the next season!
NotMax
Open thread FYI.
NASA to launch a test flight to the ISS with astronauts aboard the Boeing*-built Starliner, Scheduled for 10:43 p.m. Eastern.
YouTube link to already ongoing live coverage of the mission.
*I know, I know.
Jay
@Geminid:
Hamas fired their shit rockets, (yes, made with shit) from Northern Gaza into Southern Israel today.
So, rockets, rocket rails and rocket teams remained in Northern Gaza after Israel claimed to have “cleansed” the area.
Hamas “gunmen” also killed 3 IDF troopers at a “crossing” in Northern Gaza today.
The hostages could be held anywhere in Gaza because Israel doesn’t holdĀ or control anywhere in Gaza other than the “fortified” and bulldozed “camps” they are in and the “free fire zones” around them.
Geminid
@Jay: So where do you think the hostages are? Anywhere in the Strip? Rafah seems to be the only secure location, for them and for Hamas’s leadership.
Martin
This is not the only deal being worked on. The bigger one is the Israel/Saudi/US deal that Israel very badly wanted which requires Israel agree to a pathway to statehood for Palestine. This deal removes Hamas from governing authority. Hamas would prefer the deal everyone else here is discussing which is why they’re raising the profile of it. The Saudi deal is the important one – it would pretty much end this.
Martin
@Geminid: I think most died in Israeli attacks, tbh.
MomSense
@JaySinWA:
That was a great series and I hope it brought much needed attention to this issue.
I also want to highlight that Joe Biden is the reason we have the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the 2022 reauthorization expanded the ability of Tribal Courts to prosecute non-native perpetrators.Ā It’s a BFD and it is an issue that Democrats have championed, Biden most of all.
Jay
@Geminid:
Take a building Israel has bombed flat in Northern Gaza,
use one of the tunnels rescuers used to try to find bodies and the living,
Go in, dig a pit.
Drop a hostage or two into the hole. If you are being kind, give them the luxury of a bucket,
Cover the pit with heavy debris.
Once a day, lower some food and water, empty the bucket.
I think they are scattered all across Gaza, and some of them we know, are held by Islamic Jihad, so probably even “HamasĀ leaders” do not know there they are.
Given Israel’s broad spectrum surveillance of Gaza, I would also guess that even “Hamas” doesn’t know where the hostages are,
they just know who knows where that “teams” hostages are.
Geminid
@Jay: I’ve tried to find news about the 3 Israeli soldiers who you say were killed by gunmenn men at a crossing in northern Gaza, and I can’t. Do you have a link or reference?
There were 3 soldiers killed by rockets fired from near Rafah yesterday, at the Kerem Sharon crossing (a 4th died of his wounds). Are you talking about them?
Jay
@Martin:
Not for long. The PA is not set up to take “control” of Gaza and nobody working on the “deal” is going to put “the boots on the ground” that would be required for a decade or two.
Israel can’t even prevent “gangs” from controlling swaths of Northern Gaza.
Geminid
@Martin: A few weeks ago, a retired IDF officer estimated that only half of the ~130 missing were still alive. I am talking about those hostages.
The draft agreement I saw had Hamas releasing a list of the remaining survivors towards the end of the first 42-day phase, after they released 33 women, men over 50 and children under 19. This second set are supposed to be traded for Israeli prisoners during Phase Two.
Bodies and remains are to be released in Phase 3. Some are known to have been carried back to Gaza dead, since Israel and Hamas trade bodies as well as live prisoners. I think we’ll have a good idea of who was killed by Israeli bombing then, and I’m not jumping to any conclusions until then.
Ed.
Martin
@Jay: There are commitments to provide security forces from regional countries if the deal can come together. Israel has already signaled they would approve of Egypt being part of that. The US already provides a lot of funding to Egypt (more than we do to Israel) which could be expanded to fund that effort.
Martin
@Geminid: The problem is that other groups kidnapped a lot of the people – Hamas never had them. Not sure if Hamas was ever able to locate them. This was one of the things Adam was mentioning early on – that Hamas couldn’t promise their return because they only had some of them. Maybe half or a bit more.
Geminid
@Martin: The UAE and Morocco could supply troops as well, as could France. The nitty gritty police work could be done by Fatah, under authority of the Palestinian Authority.
We’ll find out if and when this ceasefire is implemented. There will probably be a Security Council resolution empowering the peacekeeping force.
Kay
Apparently the people who run UCLA have just decided the 1st Amendment no longer exists:
Pure, blatant censorship. They don’t want these opinions expressed so they are just arbitrarily detaining speakers and shutting them down.
If you had told me a university would go full-bore authoritarian and shut down dissenting political speech like this this I would not have believed you. Just shameful.
Geminid
@Martin: Hamas has had 7 months to track down hostages held by other organizations, and Hamas has a lot of power in the Strip. In any event, Hamas is negotiating over their return, and they are not making excuses publically about their incapacity.
But again, these are facts we may only find out when this war ends.
Jay
@Martin:
Only Jordan has a semi-respectable reputation as “peacekeepers” and “security forces”.
And between Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PA and The Gangs it will be a 5 way brutal turf war.
Martin
@Geminid: The US might also oversee the effort, but not provide troops.
Kay
Since it’s apparently illegal now to express dissent regarding US policy in Gaza on college campuses, can the protestors exercise their First Amendment rights somewhere else, or is this a blanket speech ban for the whole country?
Jay
@Geminid:
Senior Hamas probably does not know where they are,
but they probably do know, who knows,
and have “made arrangements”.
Geminid
@Martin: I don’t think the US will oversee a post-war Gaza, or will want to. We just need to help the Arabs set up the apparatus and keep Israel on board, under a Security Council mandate we push through.
Martin
@Kay: Again, LA county sheriff, not UCLA. People overestimate the degree of authority that the university has for non-campus police. They have none. They also have no authority over the prosecutor.
If you go to the cops and say ‘we have concerns about individuals unaffiliated with the university in this activity’ they will arrest every single person there, including people not affiliated with the activity. And then you have to go and fix their dumb shit. We would constantly have to bail out our own students who were wrongfully arrested and plead with the prosecutor (usually unsuccessfully) to not prosecute.
This is why I wrote that you have to put all that work in to keep these things from reaching this point – because you lose all control once you have to rely on the campus police’s judgement, and anything goes once the city/county/state cops arrive.
Cops don’t behave any better around universities than they do anywhere else.
Kay
@Martin:
As far as Iām concerned theyāre just throwing these students to the wolves. They hope to brutalize and scare them enough to shut them up because they want NO discussion of this issue.
What an absolute betrayal. Not just of the students (although it is that) but of everything theyāre supposed to stand for.
Iāll tell you Martin if facism does Ā come to this country Iāll depend much more on people like these students than I will on the cowards who have turned them over to cops.
I think I know which fighters I want on Team Democracy with me and it isnāt any of these fucking groveling, spineless adults.
Martin
@Kay: My point here is that once UCLA lost control of things, everything related to security would then be controlled by the cops, not the campus.
You said “theyāre just throwing these students to the wolves”. None of the reporting indicates that any of the people arrested were students, or affiliated to the university. The students holding a sit in on campus at that same time weren’t bothered. My read here is that the people arrested were unaffiliated and students were free to demonstrate.
That’s not a defense of the arrests, particularly the journalists, just that your read here is premature. It’s jumping as eagerly to conclusions as the GOP have been regarding these events. I mean, your own article concludes with this:
UCLA administration don’t oversee LAPD. Again, I’d like to see an administrator out there when these arrests were happening so they could at least try and stop the police from arresting journalists, but there’s no guarantee they would. I told the story yesterday of when we asked to close a building due to an escalating protest, the police officer sent to lock a door chose to bodyslam an alum who was walking into the building from a side entrance to pick up her diploma. We had to go bail her out, and then plead to not prosecute just because she entered the building before the officer arrived. That officer was unsupervised for all of 30 seconds, and given a very simple task (go lock that door) and chose to assault someone and trigger a lawsuit. Was that our fault for locking the building? Or was that the cops perennially being cops and constantly doing the dumbest shit?
I think it’s completely fair to criticize UCLA for not having better control over UC PD. That’s been a constant problem on every campus. I can enumerate our problems. UC Davis’s failure is quite famous. But that’s different than saying that UCLA sought this result, and that UCLA should have better control over LAPD or LA county sheriff or CHP (who were part of the action Wed).
Kay
@Martin:
The OH AG is now threatening to charge students with felonies.
If they speak out against this absolute human rights catastrophe they will be slapped with a felony.
The universities just handed their students over to these goons without a second thought.
Again, thereās lots of discussion about what happens if Trump wins – no one should count on universities to put up any resistance. Iām better off relying on a group of 19 year olds.
Jackie
OT: All yip yip yip and no bite? š¤
Not having MAGA or TIFG behind her back, makes for a toothless Margie.
Jackie
What the ever loving hell?
NotMax
Crewed launch of Starliner scrubbed due to “an anomaly.” Details probably forthcoming overnight.
Martin
@Kay: The OH AG is free to walk into any university and charge students at any time. You seem to believe that universities are sovereign entities. They aren’t.
Baud
@Jackie:
I never thought I’d say this about Donald Trump, but I hope he keeps talking.
Kay
@Martin:
Universities brought this down on them. They called police. They then didn’t intervene or object when police attacked protestors – some professors did, but they were arrested too.
I know this because it wasn’t handled like that at every university. Ohio State called in police – Michigan State did not. Ohio State’s students are now at risk of felony charges by a bad-actor partisan hack AG for a peaceful protest. Michigan State’s are not.
These are not neutral time, place and manner restrictions. I know this because some universities changed the rules to specifically target this speech and these students – rules that had been in place since the apartheid protests.
They’ll be fine. They have legal defense funds and they’ll have competent counsel and demand jury trials and defend on the 1st Amendment and there will be discovery and we will see communications showing Ohio State managers targeted these students and this speech but they won’t have been defended by their schools. Their schools didn’t defend them or the larger principle at all.