Clips

America’s Toxic Prisons: The Environmental Injustices of Mass Incarceration

Earth Island Journal and Truthout

With $5,000 from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Truthout teamed up with Earth Island Journal to investigate the sites of some of the worst environmental injustices: prisons.

Our series encompasses nine stories examining the intersection of mass incarceration and environmental injustice across the United States. The series informed the introduction of Rep. Ayanna Presley and Sen. Ed Markey’s “Environmental Health in Prisons Act” in July 2024. It also prompted the Environemtnal Protection Agency to add prisons to its environmental justice mapping tool, known as “EJ Screen.”

Texas’s Crypto-Mining Racket

Texas Observer and The Nation

With $10,000 from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Texas Observer teamed up with The Nation to examine how public officials are propping up a Texas Bitcoin boom that’s threatening water and energy systems while afflicting locals with noise pollution. I became the first reporter to publish a whistleblower account detailing Riot Platform’s rampant labor and safety violations inside the nation’s largest cryptomine in Corsicana, Texas.

The two-part series used open source techniques to map more than 60-plus Bitcoin mines guzzling public water and electricity and used public records to show how local officials are granting both cryptomines and artificial intelligence data centers massive tax breaks despite their ballooning utility burdens.

Bo French’s Blood-and-Oil Bid for Railroad Commissioner

Texas Observer

I covered the former Tarrant County GOP chair’s statewide runoff campaign against incumbent Railroad Commissioner Jim Wright, and the way in which the campaign displaces blame for the fossil fuel industry’s ravages onto the far right’s favored scapegoats.

This type of deflection is likely to proliferate as the climate crisis accelerates in tandem with the rising racial resentment on display in Bo French’s campaign. (This is all something I’ve spent the last several years researching for my forthcoming book, Blood, Soil, and Oil: Far Right Acceleration in the Age of Climate Crisis.) 

As License Plate Readers Expand in Texas, Privacy Advocates Are Fighting Back 

Texas Observer

The Kyle City Council voted to apply for more state grant money for Flock Safety cameras despite a string of local-level contract cancellations of the booming surveillance company’s services.

I obtained a local data set of license-plate reader audit logs that show police from 18 other agencies across 10 states conducted at least 117 searches of the local Flock data that were related to immigration enforcement this year, with well over half of the searches flagged as “ICE.” One query listed “Obstructing Justice – Suspicious female filming traffic stop and making comments about ICE” as the reason for the search.

Last Year, a Corpus Christi Cryptomine Guzzled over 11 Million Gallons. Now, Its Water Usage Is Being Kept Secret.

Texas Observer

Amid its water crisis, the city declined to supply public records on the Bitcoin mine’s usage, citing a state law that allows nondisclosure of an individual customer’s account.          

I reported on the facility’s water burden last year in a series examining the cryptomine and artificial intelligence data center boom unfolding across the state. From May to August last year, the Bitcoin mine consumed 11,563,000 gallons, according to water utility records that I previously obtained via a local resident’s public information request. I recently joined “Texas Standard” to discuss this story.

A Year After Blackout, Texans Navigate Climate Trauma in a Failing Fossil State

Texas Observer and Truthout

As many as 70,000 Texans lost electricity during a February 2022 cold snap due to localized issues, including downed power lines and isolated supply losses.

But the details of recent power outages’ specific causes may be less important than their lasting emotional and physical impact: Much like a year ago, Texans are once again navigating the lingering effects of climate trauma and even working through post-traumatic stress disorder-like responses to the recent freeze.

Exploiting More Than the Land: Sexual Violence Linked to Enbridge Line 3 Pipeliners

Truthout

As the national fight over Enbridge’s 337-mile Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota intensified throughout 2021 amid protests by Indigenous Water Protectors, one toxic byproduct of the pipeline’s construction went largely escaped public scrutiny: sexual assaults and harassment incidents linked to Line 3 workers.          

Staffers and advocates with shelters in northern Minnesota told me they were handling more cases of sexual assault directly linked to contractors building Line 3.

A Tribal Camp in South Texas Is Vowing to Resist Trump’s Wall

Truthout

In 2019, the Esto’k Gna tribe vowed to protect sacred sites including a 154-year-old cemetery threatened by President Donald Trump’s border wall.

This piece won a “First Amendment Award” from the Fort Worth chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in the “Defending the Disadvantaged” category. It also won a “National Native Media Award” from the Indigenous Journalists Association.    

Indigenous Asylum Seekers Face Language Barriers and a Legacy of Oppression at the Border

Truthout

An Indigenous asylum-seeker who primarily speaks the Mayan dialect of K’iche’ described her ordeal in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention jail in 2018.

This piece won a “First Amendment Award” from the Fort Worth chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in the “Defending the Disadvantaged” category. It also won a “National Native Media Award” from the Indigenous Journalists Association.        

Vets Say We Need a Strong VA to Combat Coronavirus and Win Medicare for All

Truthout

In 1982, Congress expanded the Veterans Affairs’s role beyond providing care, benefits and burial services to the nearly 9 million veterans it currently serves. Its additional role is to provide a backup health care system in a national emergency — for example, taking on non-veteran patients in the event of a global pandemic.

This piece was part of a series on the COVID-19 pandemic that earned Truthout the 2020 I.F. Stone award from the Park Center for Independent Media.        

Democrats Must Do More To Turn Out Latino Voters in 2020

In These Times

In the weeks before the 2016 election, President Donald Trump stoked fear over a group of 3,000 displaced Central Americans heading north through Mexico toward the U.S. border. It was part of a transparently racist attempt to rile up his base.

But Latino advocacy groups were ready to counter, using Trump’s own views against him in the final push of un-precedented voter mobilization efforts: Latino early voting participation increased by 174 percent compared to the 2014 midterm, and Latinos contributed to key victories in several states. Spokespeople for these advocacy groups tell md that Democrats cannot take such turnout for granted.

This piece was part of an In These Times magazine cover series examining how progressives can win in the 2018 mid-terms.