Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

View caption Hide caption

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California arrives for a House Republican conference meeting at the Capitol in Washington, Oct. 3.

In a historic vote today, a small group of hard-line conservatives combined with House Democrats to oust Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy, throwing the House of Representatives into disarray.  

The vast majority of Republican lawmakers expressed strong support for Mr. McCarthy and visceral anger toward their own party’s rebels. But they were unable to muster a clear majority to save the speaker with the vacate vote passing 216-210. It was the first time in more than 100 years that the House has held a “motion to vacate” vote, and the first time ever that such a vote has led to the speaker’s forced removal.

Mr. McCarthy’s GOP antagonists, led by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, said they were prompted by his decision to back a temporary spending measure that averted a government shutdown this past weekend. It had more Democratic than Republican support. They also accused him of reneging on promises he’d made to secure the speakership.

Yet today’s drama can be seen as the inevitable outcome of one of those promises Mr. McCarthy made back in January – allowing a single member to force a vote on removing the speaker. With just a four-seat Republican House majority, that put Mr. McCarthy at the mercy of a handful of individuals with outsize leverage.

More broadly, some observers wonder if Republican House leadership faces an impossible dynamic. Divided government by definition requires bipartisan compromise, yet the right wing insists on an uncompromising stance.

“Can you create a durable partisan majority? Maybe the answer is no,” says Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University. “There is a faction of Republicans now in the House who are willing to use all the tools available to block the agenda and undermine the policy process. When you combine that with the narrow majority, this is what you get.”

“Need a marriage counselor”

Some Republicans praised Mr. McCarthy’s ability to get anything done under those circumstances.

“With the slim majority that we’ve had so far, Kevin McCarthy has been a miracle worker,” GOP Rep. Mark Alford of Missouri said on CNN ahead of today’s votes. “We need a marriage counselor, basically, in our conference.”

Mark Schiefelbein/AP

View caption Hide caption

Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida speaks to reporters prior to a vote on his motion to strip House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of his leadership role, at the Capitol in Washington, Oct. 3, 2023.

After the speaker of the House was “hereby declared vacant” in Tuesday’s vote, the clerk declared North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, a top McCarthy confidant, as speaker pro tempore. The choice comes from a succession list Mr. McCarthy submitted when he won the gavel. What comes next could be a period of confusion – an uncertain search for a new speaker whom a majority of House members can support. America has never been here before. 

Although a “motion to vacate” has been filed three times in the history of Congress, today’s vote marks the first time a speaker has been removed via the measure. In 1910, Republican Speaker Joe Cannon introduced a motion to vacate against himself, knowing it wouldn’t pass, in order to show rebellious members that he still had the support of a majority of his caucus. In 2015, Republican Mark Meadows of North Carolina – who would later serve as former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff – filed a motion to vacate the speakership of Republican John Boehner, who resigned before the motion could come to a vote. 

Anger against Representative Gaetz within the Republican caucus runs deep – much of it based on the idea that ambition must be balanced by pragmatism to get anything done in a divided Congress.

“[Mr. McCarthy] is being punished because he actually did what the speaker is supposed to do on the debt ceiling: He passed a bill to everybody’s surprise and negotiated a deal,” Oklahoma Republican and Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole told reporters Tuesday. “And he’s being punished because he did the right thing on Saturday and made sure that the government didn’t shut down, and we bought more time to continue the appropriations process.” 

After Mr. Cole told the House floor that Mr. McCarthy “put his political neck on the line” and that detractors should “think long and hard before they plunge us into chaos,” the majority of Republicans gave Mr. McCarthy a standing ovation. 

Democrats declined to intervene in what they characterized as a Republican family feud, saying they had no interest in helping Mr. McCarthy save his job. Many Democrats still blame Mr. McCarthy for helping revive Mr. Trump’s political career in the wake of Jan. 6, and for failing to refute the former president’s false claims of election fraud.

“Let them wallow in their pigsty of incompetence and inability to govern,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chair of the Progressive Caucus, told reporters following a Democratic caucus meeting. “They are destroying our institution.”

Hard-liner goals could backfire

Ironically, the political maneuvering seemed likely to undercut one of the supposed priorities of Mr. McCarthy’s conservative antagonists – reviving the traditional budget process. With the government now set to run out of money on Nov. 17, Congress has no time to waste if it wants to pass 12 separate appropriations bills before the deadline, as conservatives have been insisting on doing. In recent years, Congress has frequently relied on a single last-minute “omnibus” bill that lawmakers often have no time to read and are forced to simply vote up or down.

“This country does not need any more drama right now,” Republican Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas told reporters Tuesday. “We just took it to the brink of a shutdown. We’ve got another 45 days to finish our work on appropriations, conference our bills with the Senate. ... Anything else outside of that is nothing but a distraction. We need to move.” 

Mr. McCarthy’s critics argued, however, that leaving him in his post was more likely to result in a last-minute omnibus.

“You don’t solve any problems with continuing resolutions and omnibus bills,” said Mr. Gaetz, Mr. McCarthy’s primary antagonist, speaking on the House floor. “That creates more problems, more debt, more inflation, more pain for American families. The way to solve problems is to break the fever dream.”

When he spoke on the House floor in favor of Mr. Gaetz’s motion to vacate, Arizona Republican Andy Biggs said that, under the leadership of Mr. McCarthy, he doesn’t believe the 12 separate appropriations bills are “going to happen.” 

To which dozens of Republicans on the House floor yelled in response: “Not now.”

Torched villages and croplands. Executions of men and boys based on their ethnicity. Sniper fire targeting fleeing civilians. Rampant rape and other forms of sexual violence terrorizing women and girls.

When these atrocities were committed in Sudan two decades ago, an outraged world took notice and took action.

International sanctions were slapped on the Sudanese government. The United States determined that genocide was taking place in Darfur, the western province where the violence was occurring. That designation set in motion a number of actions.

An incensed public got in on the act as well. Bumper stickers implored, “Save Darfur.”

Today a similar array and intensity of violence is again striking Sudan, which is entering a sixth month of fighting between the military and a powerful paramilitary force that has its origins in the Darfur conflict.

Some experts maintain that a genocidal campaign has resumed in the state of West Darfur.

And yet this time a different international community – overwhelmed by mounting conflicts and natural disasters, and navigating a distracting rise of big-power competition – seems to be taking only passing notice.

Sudan’s descent garners only sporadic attention, much to the disappointment of humanitarian workers and human rights activists who are pressing for a stronger international response.

“With what we know from our past experience in Darfur, it’s all the more alarming to hear the stories of violence and ethnic cleansing that are so similar to the worst of those bad days,” says Avril Benoît, executive director of Doctors Without Borders USA. “And in some ways this is worse because we’re seeing unrelenting violence in so many parts of the country all at once.”

AP

View caption Hide caption

Smoke rises over Khartoum, Sudan, June 7, 2023, after appeals by Saudi Arabia and the United States to Sudan's warring parties to implement a cease-fire failed to end the fighting.

The problem, she says, is that the sheer number and intensity of conflicts and other disasters around the world are overwhelming the international community and leaving Sudan to stand in line.

“There is such a deluge of crises, from Yemen to ... Haiti, malnutrition across the Sahel, multiplying climate crises, the floods in Libya, and the earthquake in Morocco, that everyone is just overstretched,” she says.

Yet while the world’s attention has been focused elsewhere, a conflict that started in April as a duel between the military chief and a warlord at the head of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group has expanded into a civil war.

Harrowing tales

More than 5,000 Sudanese civilians have been killed in the fighting, while 5.5 million have been displaced – at least 1 million of them fleeing across borders. More than 400,000 have streamed into neighboring Chad, already staggering under the impact of drought, Islamist extremism, and political upheaval. Another 300,000-plus have fled to Egypt.

Refugees arrive in Chad’s sprawling, bare-bones refugee camps with bullet wounds and malnourished children – and harrowing tales of massacres, indiscriminate bombardments, and the hasty interring of loved ones in mass graves as villages are systematically destroyed.

Internally, acute food insecurity has spiked, with 6 million people on the precipice of famine, according to relief organizations operating inside Sudan.

Yet even as the fighting has expanded and reports of atrocities committed by both sides have mounted, international efforts to stop the fighting have been meager, experts say.

SOURCE:

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

|

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“There are conversations on what’s going on in Sudan, as we saw [recently] at the U.N. But as people are talking day in and day out, people in Sudan are dying, they’re experiencing really horrendous violence,” says Mike Brand, an adjunct professor of genocide studies and human rights at the University of Connecticut. “There’s just no appetite for the kinds of action and mobilization that we saw in the early 2000s.”

Some countries and organizations have pressed recently for international action to quell the fighting – especially at last month’s opening of the United Nations General Assembly.

The heads of 50 humanitarian and human rights organizations addressed an open letter to the Security Council in the run-up to the mid-September gathering of world leaders, demanding the council “move from talk to action.”

At a Security Council session on Sudan, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield painted a picture of dire human suffering and horrific violence targeting civilians based on a recent visit to Sudanese refugee camps in Chad. But no action was taken.

Regional powers

One factor fueling the fighting is the willingness of some regional powers to intervene behind the scenes, primarily by supplying arms to a preferred side in the conflict. Sudan experts say, for example, that the United Arab Emirates is covertly supplying the Rapid Support Forces with an array of weaponry, despite public claims of providing only humanitarian assistance.

The U.S. has joined with Saudi Arabia to organize some talks between the warring parties, but they have gone nowhere. The leader of Sudan’s military and the country’s de facto leader, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, attended the General Assembly session, where he declared himself ready for peace talks – but also called on the international community to designate the Rapid Support Forces a terrorist organization.

Such conditions have meant no meaningful peace talks, and a slide into civil war in a country that in 2019 was celebrated internationally for its pro-democracy movement and initial steps toward democratic governance.

Yet as the fighting continues, humanitarian organizations report the effects of worsening violence and rising displacements both inside Sudan and in refugee camps where each day more Sudanese seek safety.

“The sheer level of displacement tells you that people are terrified,” says Ms. Benoît of Doctors Without Borders. “The stories we hear also make it clear that people have no idea where to turn for safety.” Recently some of the most intense fighting has been right outside hospitals, she says, making people reluctant to come for care.

Moreover, the Doctors Without Borders staff is reporting an alarming rise in cases of severe malnutrition, especially among children. “What we’re seeing are cases where mothers with several acutely malnourished children only bring in one child because the mother thinks she has a better chance of getting help if she comes with only one,” she says.

Craig Ruttle/AP

View caption Hide caption

Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of Sudan’s military and the country’s de facto leader, addresses the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 21, 2023.

Warning of renewed genocide

In June, a group of 94 human rights specialists and Sudan experts – including Mr. Brand from the University of Connecticut – signed an open letter to the international community warning of targeted violence in West Darfur that, if unchecked, could lead to genocide. The letter called particular attention to the region’s Masalit people, a non-Arab Muslim ethnic group.

Three months later, Mr. Brand says he’s convinced the letter’s warning was tragically prescient.

“I believe genocide is occurring, and it’s not just the targeted violence against the Masalit,” he says. “It’s important to use the right terminology at the right time,” he adds, “but it’s also difficult to look at what is taking place and not conclude that it’s an effort to finish the job ... started in Darfur in 2004.”

Still, human rights organizations that have carried out some of the most in-depth investigations into Sudan’s civilian-directed violence are not ready to call it genocide.

“We are investigating; we are gathering the evidence and the experiences of people who fled the places where the worst of the atrocities have been committed, but we’re not yet ready” to issue definitive conclusions, says Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, senior researcher with the crisis and conflict division of Human Rights Watch in Paris.

The organization was one of the first to gather eyewitness testimony from survivors of the wholesale destruction of towns and villages in parts of West Darfur and South Darfur in May and June. Those witnesses recounted harrowing tales of executions of men and boys, gunfire targeting anyone fleeing the violence, including children, and the razing of houses and other buildings.

“Refugees told of a town of about 40,000 people that was destroyed in a day,” says Mr. Gallopin, who was most recently in the conflict zone in August.

Yet while Human Rights Watch has concluded that ethnic cleansing and war crimes have occurred in Sudan’s current conflict, it has shied away from going a step further and issuing a finding of genocide.

Mr. Gallopin notes that the organization never joined other groups in determining that genocide occurred in Darfur two decades ago. He adds, however, that a report expected in the coming weeks will update findings of rights violations in West Darfur and could result in new conclusions about the violence taking place.

In the meantime, Ms. Benoît reports that the violence occurring across Sudan has yet to deter the organization’s Sudanese staff from reporting to work in public hospitals, despite harrowing conditions.

“The staff haven’t been paid for months, and yet they show up every day,” she says. “It’s all the more admirable because of the risks they run to get to work, and then the conditions they face once they’ve made it in.

“Many of them have passports and could leave this behind,” she adds, “but they are determined to serve their fellow Sudanese.”

Jason Janik/Special Contributor for The Dallas Morning News

View caption Hide caption

Jennifer Williams (center) teaches math at Sam Tasby Middle School in Dallas. Texas fifth graders who score high on state tests are automatically placed in advanced math courses in sixth grade.

When Tha Cung looked over his sixth grade class schedule, he took notice of the math block. He had been placed in an advanced class. 

“I didn’t know ‘honors’ even existed,” he says.

Tha was little when his family immigrated to the United States from Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, and, for much of his time in Dallas schools, he took courses designed for children who are learning English. In fifth grade, his standardized test scores showed he was a strong math student – someone who should be challenged with honors classes in middle school.

Under Dallas ISD policy, Tha’s parents didn’t need to sign him up for advanced math. A teacher or counselor didn’t have to recommend him, either. In many schools, those are the hoops a student must get through to join honors classes. But Tha was automatically placed in the advanced course because of his scores on Texas’ STAAR test.

A version of this approach will soon be replicated statewide as part of an effort to remove systemic barriers that can stand between bright students and rigorous courses. It sounds simple: Instead of having to opt in to advanced math, families are given the choice to opt out.

During its regular session, the Texas Legislature passed a bipartisan bill mandating every student who performed in the top 40% on a fifth grade math assessment automatically be enrolled in advanced math for sixth grade. 

“We’re setting up a structure that uses an objective measure to ensure that students who are already showing that they are capable are being put on that advanced math pathway,” says Jennifer Saenz, a policy director with the E3 Alliance, an education collaborative based in Austin, which advocated for the new Texas law. 

Lessons for the rest of the U.S.

How the approach rolls out in Texas could provide lessons for other states. 

Leaders across the country are confronting the need to prepare a new, diverse generation of science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, workers. And after COVID-19, it’s been particularly challenging for students to bounce back from widespread learning loss in math. Eighth graders in Texas scored roughly in line with the national average on the test referred to as the Nation’s Report Card in 2022, seeing a similar dip since 2019.

Before the pandemic, E3 Alliance’s research found that Black and Hispanic students in Texas were routinely left out of advanced classes – even if they earned high test scores. The group hopes the new state law will build pathways for students who have been historically excluded.

Enrolling in advanced math in sixth grade clears the way for a student to take Algebra I in eighth grade. That opens up the possibility of courses such as calculus or statistics during high school. And that can then set a stronger foundation for a STEM major in college and a high-paying career after graduation. 

Advocates for the opt-out policy say it’s a workforce issue in addition to an equity issue.

“Especially in today’s rapidly changing and technology-driven economy, math matters more than ever – for individual students and for the larger Texas workforce to remain competitive,” says Jonathan Feinstein, a state director at The Education Trust, a national nonprofit promoting equity.

On a recent morning at Vickery Meadow’s Sam Tasby Middle School, Principal Nesha Maston observed dozens of students in Room 304 calculating the area of parallelograms and trapezoids. 

In that class was Alexis Grant, an 11-year-old who thinks her year in sixth grade honors math will pave the way for achieving one of her goals: studying at Harvard. 

“I knew it would be challenging,” Alexis says of her math class. “We push each other to get the work done.”

Many of her Tasby classmates – including Tha – are immigrants. Families who send their children to the school collectively speak more than a dozen languages, and the vast majority are low-income. 

When Principal Maston looks in on those honors classes, she sees the population of her school is reflected.  

More diverse classrooms

Ms. Maston’s observations are backed up by Dallas ISD data. Not only are far more students enrolling in advanced math, but those classrooms are more diverse.

In 2018, prior to the opt-out policy, roughly 3,500 sixth graders enrolled in honors math classes. About 17% of Black students in that grade, and one-third of Hispanic students, were in those classes, compared to half of white students. 

Last year, more than 5,100 sixth graders took honors math. And now, 43% of Black students are in honors math when they enter middle school and nearly 6 in 10 Hispanic students are. The percentage of white sixth graders in honors math has also gone up, to roughly 82%. 

Meanwhile, the number of Dallas ISD eighth grade students enrolled in Algebra I nearly doubled between 2018 and last year. 

Texas is home to more than 1,000 school districts, which means vastly different ways students could end up in advanced courses. The decisions were often subjective.

Teacher recommendations are a big factor in some districts. But those decisions can be swayed by implicit biases around what an “honors student” looks or acts like, education advocates say. 

In other places, parents must request advanced classes for their children – but that can leave out students whose parents may not be aware of the option. Students themselves also may not want to opt in because they don’t see themselves as good at math or don’t want the extra workload. 

Some Central Texas districts also already have an opt-out policy, with the help of the E3 Alliance. Those schools have seen far more Black and Hispanic students complete Algebra I in eighth grade, as well as a huge jump among children who are learning English.

In the Hays school district, curriculum officer Derek McDaniel watched as the number of sixth graders in advanced math ballooned over the past five years.

As more districts move in this direction under the new law, Mr. McDaniel urges school administrators to prioritize parent communication. Explaining to families why their child is placed into honors math is critical, he says, adding that parents should know the benefit of this more challenging course load.

Communication with teachers is also key, Mr. McDaniel says. Some honors-level teachers are accustomed to a certain student profile. They expect limited behavior problems and for students to always complete homework assignments on time. 

With an opt-out policy, he says, some students will be new to the advanced track and not have developed uniform study skills in the lower grades. 

“The easy solution is to give up,” Mr. McDaniel says. “We’re gonna stick with the kid.” 

Texas’ unique strategy

A handful of other states have embraced opt-out or automatic enrollment policies.

In North Carolina, for example, a 2017 News & Observer/Charlotte Observer investigation found students from low-income families were placed in advanced coursework at lower rates than their affluent peers who demonstrated the same levels of achievement.

Lawmakers later passed an “automatic enrollment” law. According to a 2022 state report, 92% of North Carolina middle and high school students who scored at the highest level on their end-of-grade math test were placed in an advanced math course.

Texas’ strategy is unique in its focus on sixth grade math as a gateway for more advanced courses.

Recognizing the change could be a heavy lift, the Texas Education Agency has given administrators until the 2024 school year to comply with the law. 

Among the potential challenges: Schools may need to strengthen their pipeline of advanced math teachers. Administrators may also have to build out more time for tutoring or host summer camps to bring more students up to speed on key math skills.

Dallas ISD chief academic officer Shannon Trejo says some students might begin middle school fuzzy on various math ideas. Or, because of the COVID-19 disruption, they may have some gaps in their understanding of foundational concepts. 

“We need to be ready to build those little gaps and not make that be the cause for students to say, ‘I don’t think I want to do this anymore,’” she says.

The payoff may be years away, when current Dallas students begin earning high-paying jobs in science, technology, engineering or math fields.

Tha was placed in that sixth grade honors math class two years ago. Now he’s an eighth grader enrolled in Algebra I. He thinks that will give him a leg up in the future.

“My mom told me that I could be anything,” he says. “So I chose engineer.”

This piece is part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series documenting challenges and highlighting progress, from the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight diverse newsrooms: AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. To read more of the collaborative’s work, visit its website. 

The humanitarian crisis on the U.S. southern border is a political crisis for President Joe Biden. Cities receiving migrants, meanwhile, face a crisis of logistics. 

From El Paso to Denver to New York, elected officials are increasingly calling for more federal assistance to help manage a large number of arrivals. “The absence of federal support to significantly defray state and local costs, long waits for migrants to work legally, and large numbers arriving without connections in the country have combined to create an inordinate burden” for several cities, concludes a recent article by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. 

Doris Meissner, director of the institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, recently shared more on the issue in a telephone interview with the Monitor. She has watched the border transform since the 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, she served as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the precursor to immigration agencies now under the Department of Homeland Security.

Ms. Meissner discussed the context of global migration and a challenging balancing act that has continued to elude Congress – as Border Patrol over the past fiscal year has logged more than 1.8 million encounters along the southern border, nearing the record high set in fiscal year 2022. 

How does the United States remain “open and generous to immigration,” she asks, “but at the same time recognize that there are limits?” This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

Americans have increasingly seen the migration crisis expand past the southern border into interior cities, including Democratic strongholds like New York. How has this altered the politics of the nation’s immigration debate?

It’s clearly brought the issue into higher visibility because it has demonstrated the range in nationalities and the growing numbers of people that are trying to come to the United States. 

It really illustrates the challenge that the [Biden] administration is facing, of trying to achieve border control but at the same time trying to have humane enforcement that recognizes that we are a nation of immigrants. And that we, as part of that tradition, have always offered protection to people who are suffering from persecution or are not able to survive where they are. That is now happening, though, increasingly closer to home. That issue of numbers and scale is very new and very complicated to try to manage and find a good balance.

President Joe Biden’s political opponents paint the volume of border crossings as policy failure. How much of this is typical pressure against an incumbent headed into an election year, as opposed to backlash against his own rule-making?

There’s no question that a good part of it is very political and is a reflection of the polarized politics that we have in general in this country, but of which immigration is one of the main hot-button issues. 

Courtesy of Louis Tinsley/Migration Policy Institute

View caption Hide caption

A former federal immigration official, Doris Meissner now directs the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. How does the country remain "open and generous to immigration," she asks, "but at the same time recognize that there are limits?"

Even before the increases in the numbers that we’ve seen in the last year or two, it’s been quite clear that with President Biden’s election, there was going to be not only change in policy from what had been the case in the Trump administration, but that there would also be real controversy. And that Republicans were primed from the outset to keep this issue burning and keep it one that remained unresolved in order to use it as a political issue in campaigns. 

That said, we are very much in new territory. ... That’s not only the case for the United States in this hemisphere, but it’s globally the case that there are more people displaced and in danger of being displaced than we’ve had, really, since probably the Second World War. Those displacements are a result of authoritarianism, of wars, of climate change, of poverty, of the post-pandemic period where many parts of the world have simply not recovered from the economic harms of the pandemic as quickly as the United States. These forces are all converging and leading to very large numbers of people on the move. 

The question for the United States, of course, is, how do we effectively remain a nation that is open and generous to immigration, but at the same time recognize that there are limits, and there have to be limits, and border control is an essential characteristic and responsibility for any government?

Many consider 1986 the last time Congress passed comprehensive immigration reform. Do you see any indications that members of Congress view this moment as time to renew efforts at federal immigration reform?

Lots of people, of course, remain hopeful that that could be the case. But given what we’re seeing in the Congress, there’s just no – or there’s just so little – willingness to sit down and problem-solve, as compared to point fingers. 

When we look back on our own history, immigration legislation has been infrequent – which is quite interesting, given the fact that immigration is so much a part of our national experience. But real legislative changes have been infrequent. They’ve been decades apart. But when they have occurred, they’ve only occurred through bipartisanship. 

Immigration is one of those issues where on each side of the political spectrum there are extremes. And so in order for there to be progress, there has to be a strong center, and there has to be a willingness across the aisle within both parties to be pragmatic and to find solutions. 

Any issues that could invite bipartisan compromise on immigration policy? 

The issues that could [see] compromise have been around for quite some while, and there hasn’t been any success to show. I think perhaps the most clear example of that is the issue of DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], of young people who are in this country without a legal status, because they came here with their parents but were not born in the United States.

That issue has been really ripe for legislative action for, well, almost two decades. I mean, Sen. [Dick] Durbin [a Democratic senator from Illinois] was the first person to propose tangible legislation to regularize the status of DACA young people [through the never-passed DREAM Act]. At that time, they were called the “Dreamers” – they still are called the “Dreamers.” That was in the early 2000s. So absent legislation, over the course of maybe about 10 years, brought us to 2012 when President [Barack] Obama put an administrative order into place that created DACA, which is an executive action that provides protection from deportation and authorization to work.

But that has been pending now and under challenge in the courts for another 10-plus years and still is not resolved. The latest court action on that again declared that the executive action that President Obama took was outside of the bounds of his authority. 

However, that judge has said that the DACA program can continue for those people who currently hold DACA. Of course, there is a generation coming forward that are no longer eligible for DACA, but also are young people who don’t have a legal status, because they came with their parents when they were young. That is such a compelling example of where legislation is needed.

You oversaw another era of immigration overhaul around the asylum system during the Clinton administration. Which of those policies do you think has most influenced our current challenges around illegal migration and asylum? 

Reforms that we made in the 1990s held for quite a long time. ... We created an entirely new set of offices around the country within the immigration service that handled just asylum claims. We were authorized by the Congress to hire very substantial numbers of asylum officers. ... A whole new infrastructure was put into place for handling asylum claims. ... That system is still in place, but it’s been completely overwhelmed [over the past decade]. And that was not accompanied by commensurate increases in resources and increases in funding support by the Congress. 

What we have now is a system where the asylum claims that are being filed are coming almost entirely across the southwest border. The system prior to that time was not claims that were coming across the southwest border – they were claims that were being filed by people who largely were already [present] in the country, in the United States.

I integrated every school I attended until I went off to college. We were a strongly Catholic family. My father would go on to become a deacon in the church, and so it followed that the schools my parents chose were Catholic. I am Black. The friends I went to school with were all girls, and they were all white. But they were also Italian, Polish, Bohemian, Irish. And while it is true that their ancestors hadn’t come to America as slaves, they’d not been particularly welcomed either.

In the 1970s in our Midwestern city, subtle instances of anti-Catholic discrimination still existed. Nothing as horribly visceral as the Jim Crow laws in the South, but bigotry nonetheless. At school I felt different – but not that different. The ravages of desegregation – the violence, hatred, rock-throwing, destruction, name-calling – were something that, at that time, I believed belonged exclusively to the South. And by that, I didn’t mean South Boston.

But in 1974, U.S. District Judge W. Arthur Garrity ruled that, to achieve a de facto racial balance in Boston Public Schools, students from South Boston, which was predominantly Irish Catholic and white, would be bused into almost entirely Black Roxbury, and vice versa. The resulting violence was splashed on the news every night for a week – and then pe­­­­riodically for weeks – on CBS Evening News. What we saw rivaled anything coming out of Birmingham, Alabama. I can remember watching all this – police riding on horseback, women screaming, rocks flying through school bus windows as students were dropped off at South Boston High School – and thinking, why do these people, so like me in so many ways, hate us?

This question got buried under a mountain of questions about the way things are, but it resurfaced when I read Dennis Lehane’s newest novel, “Small Mercies” – a searing book if ever there were one. He uses the integration of Boston’s schools as the backdrop for an exploration of communities and their limits and of race.

Our guide through this morass is the singularly unlikely heroine Mary Pat Fennessy. She’s a tough lady. Her second marriage has fallen apart. She has lost her son, first to Vietnam and then, fatally, to heroin. She drinks too much. She cusses. She works at menial jobs.

The only things Mary Pat’s got going for her are her 17-year-old daughter, Jules, and what they think of as their community – the few-block stretch of impoverished South Boston, where they’ve lived all their lives. Mary Pat grew up in its projects. She knows its people, its nooks and crannies, and its customs. Without quite realizing it, she thinks of this knowledge, this sense of belonging, as her protection. It is her world until just before the schools are desegregated and Jules disappears – on the same hot summer night that the body of a young, murdered Black man is found on the tracks of a train station near her home.

Like her friends and neighbors, Mary Pat at first believes the man must have been a drug dealer. He has to have been. Why else would he be so far from his own home? It’s not that she hates all Black people. Certainly, she doesn’t think of herself as racist. She’s worked alongside “plenty of good, hardworking, upstanding Negroes” who want the same basic things she wants. She’s even told her children that if she hears them using the classic racist slur to describe Black people, “they better be sure they’re using it about those blacks who aren’t upstanding, don’t work hard, don’t stay married, and have babies just to keep the welfare checks rolling in.”

There’s definite irony here, since Mary Pat matches some of those descriptions.

But I myself grew up in a community that had its share of Black Mary Pats. Hardworking, God-fearing, exhausted women, struggling to keep it together, who would casually use racist slurs to refer to white people without thinking anything about it. They weren’t referring, of course, to the white people they worked alongside, but to the “others” – the ones they thought were so different from them. Many times they said this, just as Mary Pat did, because saying it was how you showed you belonged.     

But if Mary Pat wants to find her daughter, her idea of who belongs and who doesn’t has to become bigger, wider, broader, just as mine had to when I integrated all those schools. It happens to a lot of people as they move from the known into the unknown. Mary Pat has a lot to deal with as she searches out what happened to Jules, and part of what awaits is a racial reckoning. Her daughter is linked to the murdered Black man. Mary Pat’s own casual racism has had consequences she could not have imagined.     

It’s very vogue these days to talk about cultural appropriation. At the outer margins of this, it’s said that Black people should write only about Black characters, white people only about white characters, and so on. But I have no trouble identifying with the African Americans that Irish American Dennis Lehane wrote about. Maybe that’s because he writes about us with such humanity. There are no stereotypes, no long-suffering Negroes, but there are Afros “the size of a toddler,” a vivid Roxbury full of bright, strange, mixed-together colors, a lot of the same poverty that Mary Pat has seen back home in South Boston, and “men” who frighten her at first but, on second glance, turn out to be smiling 14-year-olds.

Mary Pat sees all this when she comes for the funeral of the murdered Black man, who is the son of someone she works with. Mary Pat has been friendly with his mother, but they are not friends. This woman, this family, owns their own home. The house is one of the first things Mary Pat notices: “A small Dutch Colonial on Itasca Street. It’s set up the way white homes Mary Pat aspires to live in are set up. Tidy. Well-kept lawn, recent touch-up on the trim.” But ... “You are others,” Mary Pat thinks before she can kill the thought. But she’s an “other” too, not at all welcome at this particular funeral in this particular neighborhood because of rumors about her and the murder.  

I am still struck by how much these two disparate realities have in common. Mary Pat Fennessy was a most unlikely teacher, but as she moved through South Boston and into Roxbury, she took me with her, and I am grateful to her for that. I’m still much more partial to one side of this story than the other. But I am thankful that Dennis Lehane gave me an opportunity to find at least a partial answer to my question, why do they hate us? Through Mary Pat, he allowed me to look inside a community that frightened me and see glimmers of humanity, even familiarity. Mary Pat taught me that the pull of belonging to the pack can make it hard to see all that we have in common with those outside of it.    

Reuters

View caption Hide caption

People fleeing gang violence take shelter at a sports arena in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Sept. 1.

When it comes to stabilizing failing states and restoring democracy, there’s an unresolved debate over what creates the conditions for success – security or development. On Monday, the United Nations Security Council gave a nod to the former when it approved a new international force to help end a spiral of violence by street gangs in Haiti. The Caribbean nation has been without an elected government since the assassination of its prime minister more than two years ago.

The decision is not without critics. Yet in its modesty – a small complement of police officers and some soldiers led by Kenya will help secure critical infrastructure and institutions – the intervention marks a departure from past large-scale U.N.-led interventions.

As such, it reflects two important principles learned elsewhere. The first is that countries rebuild from within, when competing groups find shared purpose. The second is that the protection of innocence is as much a vital international interest as, say, trade or migration.

“It was more than a simple vote,” Haitian Foreign Minister Victor Geneus said of the Security Council decision. “It is an expression of solidarity with a population in distress.”

In Kenya, the willingness to lead an intervention that no other country would reflects a deeper African norm. “The people who are in Haiti have an African descent, and we have an ubuntu philosophy in Africa: I am because you are, and because you are, I am,” Vincent Kimosop, an economist and policy analyst, told Voice of America.

Although it took a year of negotiations, the vote on Monday affirmed the enduring potential of diplomacy. China and Russia dropped their opposition after months of dialogue led by the United States. If the new force, which will be deployed in January, restores some stability and calm, it may help Haiti rebuild on stones already laid. A broad bloc of civil society, business, and political leaders worked out a transition blueprint last December.

One country that has lately demonstrated the unity to lift itself from collapse is Somalia, Kenya’s northern neighbor in the Horn of Africa. In recent months, the government has joined hands with rural herders and clan elders to regain control of large swaths of the country overrun for more than a decade by the Islamist extremist group Al Shabab. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, the restoration of security now offers an opportunity to renew trust through restored civic goods such as health care, clean drinking water, and honest courts.

Peace “must be proactively waged, because what is at stake for all of us is the quiet miracle of an ordinary life, a life free from violence,” said Pramila Patten, U.N. special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict, in a speech last year. “If we are to truly meet our responsibility to protect, then none of us can rest until every woman and girl, every innocent civilian, can sleep under the cover of justice.”