THE WEEKLY REVEAL

Hello! In this issue:

• What a post-Roe v. Wade world looks like.

• How migrant children’s shelters are ill-equipped to handle serious mental health episodes, leaving children to bear the tremendous toll.

• How police disproportionately arrest unhoused people 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

The Religious Right Mobilized to End Roe. Now What?

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, 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.

NEW

Scores of Migrant Children Considered or Attempted Suicide in US Custody, Records Show
By Aura Bogado

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 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 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.

RELATED

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

NEW

Police Know Arrests Won’t Fix Homelessness. They Keep Making Them Anyway.
By Melissa Lewis

A Reveal analysis 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:

• 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.

In Case You Missed It

In The News

The Supreme Court also struck down 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. 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 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 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. 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.