The Religious Right and Roe, plus how migrant children’s shelters are ill-equipped to deal with serious mental health episodes.

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** THE WEEKLY REVEAL
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Saturday, June 25, 2022

Hello! In this issue:
* What a post-Roe v. Wade ([link removed]) world looks like.
* How migrant children’s shelters ([link removed]) are ill-equipped to handle serious mental health episodes, leaving children to bear the tremendous toll.
* How police disproportionately arrest unhoused people ([link removed]) in major cities up and down the West Coast.
* From boycotts to guns, a look at two important court decisions – with a Reveal context.


** THIS WEEK’S PODCAST
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** The Religious Right Mobilized to End Roe. Now What?
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Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion, was overturned yesterday. With no federal protection in place, states can now pass their own laws around the procedure, including whether to keep abortion legal or criminalize it outright.

But how did we get to this point and what’s next? On this week’s Reveal ([link removed]) , we take a look at the influence anti-abortion religious activists have had for decades and their next frontier: pushing a treatment that they claim can reverse the abortion pill. On the abortion rights side, we hear how some faith communities are fighting back by shuttling people who need an abortion out of state to get the procedure.
Listen to the episode ([link removed])
🎧 Other places to listen: Apple Podcasts ([link removed]) , Spotify ([link removed]) , Google Podcasts ([link removed]) , Stitcher ([link removed]) or wherever you get your podcasts.
📸 Some of the thousands of people attending a Bans Off Our Bodies abortion rally in Santa Ana, Calif., in May confront religious protesters. Credit: Mark Rightmire/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images


** DIG DEEPER
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Our team has been investigating what a post-Roe world might look like.

📄 Abortion Providers Ask for Protection as They Prepare for Post-Roe Harassment and Violence ([link removed]) : As a wave of bans on the procedure takes effect across the U.S., some cities and states are recognizing the mounting risks that abortion providers and patients will face in places where clinics remain open.

📄 Abortion’s Last Stand in the South: A Post-Roe Future Is Already Happening in Florida ([link removed]) : In a first-of-its-kind analysis, we found that police calls across the state related to clinic harassment, disturbance and violence doubled over the past six years. The court’s decision yesterday is expected to trigger a new wave of clashes as abortion is likely to be curtailed or banned across the country and the remaining open clinics will offer anti-abortion protesters and extremists fewer and clearer targets.

📄 Mastermind of the Texas ‘Heartbeat’ Statute Has a Radical Mission to Reshape American Law ([link removed]) : Jonathan Mitchell and his allies argue that the 1850s statutes that made it a crime to help someone get an abortion in the state – the laws overturned by Roe v. Wade in 1973 – were never actually repealed and thus are still in force. And they claim that grassroots abortion funds, which raise money to help Texas patients pay for the procedure, are breaking those old laws and should be prosecuted. Ditto for ordinary citizens who’ve donated to one of those groups. They may sound like novel legal arguments, but they’re already being adopted by lawmakers and tested in courts.

🎧 How Texas Trumped Roe v. Wade ([link removed]) : To see what the future of abortion could be in the United States, look to Texas. This is the story of how the Lone Star state enacted the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country.

📄 Facebook and Anti-Abortion Clinics Are Collecting Highly Sensitive Info on Would-Be Patients ([link removed]) : Privacy experts are sounding alarms about all the ways people’s data trails could be used against them if some states now criminalize abortion. But we found that Facebook is already collecting data about people who visit the websites of hundreds of crisis pregnancy centers, violating its own policies and promises.


** NEW
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** Scores of Migrant Children Considered or Attempted Suicide in US Custody, Records Show
By Aura Bogado
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Illustration by Lola Avigliano for Reveal

NOTE: This story discusses instances of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts by children. ​​If you’re thinking about suicide, are worried about a friend or loved one, or would like emotional support, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

We sued the federal government in 2020 to better understand how migrant children are treated in U.S. custody. Now, the latest batch of records ([link removed]) shows how ill-equipped shelters are to deal with a major problem: children who consider or attempt suicide.
* In President Joe Biden’s first three months in office, Reveal found nearly 600 episodes in which migrant children in the government’s custody said they’d considered or attempted suicide, either before or since arriving in the United States.
* Records document 141 instances in which migrant children expressed thoughts of suicide while in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody and at least 10 times when they attempted suicide.
* Children often complained about their length of stay, the isolation they felt after their friends were released and the suffering they experienced being away from family. The children were in custody an average of 37 days at the time of the episode.

These examples ([link removed]) illustrate the stakes for children desperate to get out of custody and reunite with their families:
* A 10-year-old boy from Honduras tied his jacket around his neck and said he wanted to end his life after an altercation with another child. He told his clinician that he’d never thought of ending his life before that day. He said he wants to “go back home to his mother.”
* A 17-year-old girl from Guatemala told her clinician that “the government was just going to keep inventing one thing after another so that she could never leave.” She said she was thinking of ending her life. She’d already been in custody 90 days despite having a sponsor who’d passed a home study.
* A 14-year-old girl from Guatemala ripped her hair out, tried to cut herself and began having trouble breathing while in custody at an emergency shelter. The local hospital said it was an “acute reaction to situational stress,” but she was sent back to the shelter anyway.

Read the full investigation ([link removed])


** RELATED
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📄 Part 1: The Disappeared: Migrant Kids Separated From Family for Six Years ([link removed])
📄 Part 2: US Detained Migrant Children for Far Longer Than Previously Known ([link removed])
📄 Part 3: Government Shelters Are Turning Refugee Children Over to Police ([link removed])


** NEW
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** Police Know Arrests Won’t Fix Homelessness. They Keep Making Them Anyway.
By Melissa Lewis
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Police in Portland, Ore., accompany city workers removing an encampment in Laurelhurst Park during summer 2021. Credit: Spencer Eagleton/Street Roots

A Reveal analysis ([link removed]) of arrest data from Portland, Oregon, and five other major West Coast cities shows what’s driving a vast criminalization of homelessness: local residents calling police on their unhoused neighbors.

Our new story shows how the phenomenon is generating unaffordable fines for unhoused individuals, sapping police resources and failing to address the core problems fueling homelessness.

📍 The cities we analyzed: Portland; Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and Oakland, California; and Seattle, Washington.

Our analysis found ([link removed]) :
* The unhoused are disproportionately arrested. But these arrests are less likely to be for serious crimes. Although the homeless population in all the cities reviewed was less than 2% of the overall population, they accounted for anywhere from 7% of arrests in Oakland to about half of all arrests in Portland.
* The infractions they are accused of reflect the reality of living outside. Across the cities, the unhoused frequently were ticketed for things like loitering and drinking alcohol in public.
* The unhoused often are arrested in connection with old offenses. In more than 40% of the arrests of unhoused people in Portland, the only purpose was to execute a warrant, most often for failing to show up for a court hearing.

Some cities have begun programs to divert police calls related to homelessness to unarmed social workers. But the programs are still limited in scope and funding. Police are still largely the first line of response, and even many police officials say it shouldn’t be their job. Yet it’s rare for cities to lean away from policing as the primary response.
Read the full investigation ([link removed])


** In Case You Missed It
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Abortion in the crosshairs ([link removed])
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She Helped Create the Big Lie. Records Suggest She Turned it Into a Big Grift ([link removed])


** In The News
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What’s happening in the news — with a Reveal context
The U.S. Supreme Court. Credit: EQRoy/Shutterstock.com

The Supreme Court also struck down ([link removed]) on Thursday a New York law restricting the carrying of concealed guns. The decision marked the first time the court declared there is a constitutional right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense. In writing the opinion for the 6-3 majority, Justice Clarence Thomas compared the right to carry a gun to free speech, writing, “The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules.’”

We reported on the hurdles to creating real gun control in a recent episode, Shooting in the Dark: Why Gun Reform Keeps Failing ([link removed]) . The show noted that overturning this New York law could force states around the country to loosen restrictions on guns at a time when gun violence deaths are at an all-time high. The fallout from this Supreme Court decision could mean New York and other states having to nix laws that are in place to curb gun violence.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld ([link removed]) an Arkansas state law that says boycotts are not free speech. In Arkansas, people who work as contractors for the state government have to pledge not to be involved with any boycotts of Israel. These laws, which exist in dozens of states, aim to counter the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which pushes to exert nonviolent pressure on Israel to improve its treatment of Palestinian people.

The Arkansas Times filed suit to block the anti-boycott law ([link removed]) after a state college refused to advertise with the newspaper unless the paper signed the pledge. The newspaper isn’t engaged in a boycott against Israel, but it argued that the law unconstitutionally undermined free speech ([link removed]) . With the court ruling that boycotts fall under commercial activity, which the state has a right to regulate, the law could shape other laws regarding boycotts around the country.
In 2019, we covered the right to boycott ([link removed]) and anti-boycott laws in an episode that profiled a translator and poet who turned down a job with a Texas art museum after he realized the job required him to agree to never be involved in a boycott of Israel.

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