In ICE Detention, Forced to Pay for Soap

"Inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in Texas’s Jefferson County Jail, René Escobedo González says he’s not getting enough food. ICE requires the privately run jail to serve detained immigrants three meals per day, but, in a clear effort to keep attendance low and costs down, breakfast is served at 3:30 am. Escobedo says that even if he does wake up, the meals are sparse, and often days old. Since ICE detained him in January, Escobedo has been feeling hunger pains, and he’s been forced to ask his family in Florida to constantly refill his commissary account so that he can buy ramen noodles, both for himself and for others in the detention center.



Then came the coronavirus pandemic. In late March, still locked in ICE detention, Escobedo began asking his family for money so he could afford another necessity he would otherwise miss: soap.



“Soap we have to buy from the commissary,” Escobedo says. “They give us a tiny soap that is only good for one use.” He says that once a week, on Tuesday, the jail gives each person a ration of soap, but it lasts about a day. If people want more, they have to pay.



The coronavirus crisis has thrown the archipelago of ICE detention centers run by private prison companies into chaos. In an effort to cut costs, for-profit detention centers ration out goods—like soap—with the expectation that detained people will buy more with money from their commissary accounts if they run out. In many for-profit detention centers, detained people are given one bar of soap per week, for washing their hands and their bodies. In the midst of the pandemic, as detainees fear for their lives, that rationing system has collapsed. Today, washing one’s hands could mean saving one’s life or that of those around them, but Escobedo and others in ICE detention say that taking that basic step still comes at a price.



“We basically have to hunger strike to get what we need,” says Jose Miranda-Gonzalez, a man detained in Georgia’s Folkston ICE Processing center. He says that soap and cleaning products are rationed out in such meager amounts that he and other detainees have periodically stopped eating to pressure the detention center staff to provide enough supplies.



“People who can’t afford commissary can’t have enough soap to wash their hands,” Miranda-Gonzalez says. Last month, he says he bought 10 bars of soap at the commissary and cut them in half to pass out among detainees who couldn’t afford their own.



ICE and multiple for-profit detention centers have contested the allegations. A spokesperson from GEO Group, which runs the Folkston facility where Miranda-Gonzalez is locked, wrote in a statement for this article, “We strongly reject these unfounded allegations, which we believe are being instigated by outside groups with political agendas…. Our ICE Processing Centers provide access to regular handwashing with clean water and soap in all housing areas and throughout each facility.”



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Responding to a request for comment, Danielle Bennet, spokesperson for ICE, pointed to a statement available on the agency’s website, which claims that ICE detention centers run by the agency itself provide ample soap. When it comes to private detention centers, the statement explains, “ICE continues to encourage facilities to follow CDC guidelines as well as those of their state and local health departments.”



“I’m not aware of any hunger strikes related to soap and hygiene products,” Bennet wrote in an e-mail.



However, that statement contrasts with multiple reports from detained immigrants who say they’ve engaged in mass protests in recent weeks demanding soap, cleaning products, and toilet paper. Besides Miranda-Gonzalez in Georgia, detained people in Washington state and Lousiana told me they’ve either taken part in or witnessed hunger strikes. In audio obtained by ProPublica last month, a detained Salvadoran man explains that his detention center—the Hudson County Correctional Facility—gives them only one bar of soap per week. They’re meant to use this small bar both for bathing and washing their hands, so it runs out quickly. In the recording, Ronal Umaña says he and others began hunger striking to pressure the detention center staff to give them soap so they can clean their hands, as well as toilet paper and other hygiene necessities.



At this point, the coronavirus has infected hundreds of thousands of Americans and killed over 50,000. One of the CDC’s most basic guidelines for avoiding COVID-19 is, of course, frequently washing one’s hands. Robyn Barnard, an asylum attorney in Southern California, says that her client contacted her and asked her to put money in his commissary so he could buy soap to wash his hands. Julie Schwietert Collazo, the director of Immigrant Families Together, says that she’s gotten requests for commissary fund grants from detained immigrants across the South who tell her they don’t have “even basic hygiene items.” Natalia Santanna, an immigration attorney based in the Bay Area, says that her clients are rationed some soap each week, but not nearly enough to wash their hands as frequently as the CDC recommends. “If they don’t pay for it from commissary, they can’t wash their hands.”And in New York, Sophia Gurulé, an immigration lawyer who serves as immigration policy counsel for The Bronx Defenders, says her organization has noted the same thing.



“A lot of our clients only get their soap by buying it from commissary,” Gurulé says. She explains that many of her clients aren’t in dedicated ICE detention centers but rather local jails that have contracts with ICE (this is the sort of detention situation Escobedo finds himself in). Still, the situation is the same: “Commissary is where they predominantly get their soap.”



Charging for Soap

Why do ICE detention centers continue to charge money for good as basic as soap during the pandemic?



While there’s no one answer to what prices look like in the commissary, detention centers do seem to have inflated margins. ICE employs different private contractors, including for-profit prison conglomerates like Geo Group, CoreCivic, and LaSalle Corrections, to run many of its facilities. But as a general rule, the prices being charged at commissaries are inflated. In 2019, a bar of Dove soap cost $2.44 in CoreCivic’s Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, according to a Reuter’s investigation; the same bar costs about a dollar at a drugstore.



However, when it comes to private detention facilities’ charging money for hygiene products, the prices themselves aren’t the whole story. The business model of these facilities isn’t necessarily to make a profit on commissary goods but rather to “motivate” immigrants into working in-detention jobs, which can pay as little as $1 per day.



R. Andrew Free is one of the attorneys who has brought multiple lawsuits (along with organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center) against corporations like CoreCivic and Geo Group. At the center of these lawsuits is a shocking allegation: Private detention centers are engaging in forced labor.



Free alleges that detention facilities create “artificial scarcity” in order to coerce the people locked inside into working in-detention jobs. Here’s how that sounds in the words of Wilhen Hill Barrientos, an asylum seeker from Guatemala whom Free and the SPLC represented in a case against CoreCivic filed in 2018: “[You] either work for a few cents an hour or live without basic things like soap, shampoo, deodorant and food,” Hill Barrientos said in a statement about the lawsuit.



And here’s Free describing another lawsuit he filed in a district court in California, this time representing a client detained in Adelanto, a massive Geo Group detention center in Southern California (the same facility where Robyn Barnard’s client now claims he’s forced to buy soap): “We’ve articulated this deprivation scheme,” Free says. “That claims Geo purposely skimps on basic necessities—like food soap, clean water, medicine—in order to make it so that they have a readily available workforce.”



Both Geo and CoreCivic rejected the allegations made in the forced labor lawsuits. A spokesman for Geo called the claims “unfounded,” and Amanda Gilchrist, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, wrote, “All work programs at our ICE detention facilities are completely voluntary and operated in full compliance with ICE standards, including federally established minimum wage rates for detainee volunteer labor.… CoreCivic provides detainees all basic living necessities in accordance with federal detention standards, and it does not deprive detainees of anything to coerce their participation in a work program.”



While a bevy of forced labor lawsuits have been filed against CoreCivic and Geo (starting with Free’s first salvo in 2014), all the cases are still making their way through the federal judicial system, and no ruling has yet been made one way or another. But Free notes that—despite multiple attempts from GeoGroup and CoreCivic to have the cases thrown out—no judge has dismissed any of the suits. “There have been at least 15 different decisions in which Geo or CoreCivic have tried to get a lawsuit thrown out of court, or limited in some way, and in none of them have courts agreed with the companies,” he says. He says that this is indication that multiple judges see enough compelling evidence in the allegations to continue the court proceedings.



Free says that besides creating the incentive for detained people to work, there’s little reason for prison companies to charge for goods like soap, deodorant, or cans of tuna.



“There’s no financial reason these companies couldn’t just provide all of these things for free,” he says. “The amount of commissary, those things are not a showstopper in terms of financial loss to a company if they just provided that for free.”



In private ICE detention facilities, most basic services—from meal service to custodial cleaning—couldn’t run without detained people. Unlike a government-run institution, these private companies’ missions are not to reform criminals or protect detainees while their cases wend their way through courts—the mission of these companies is to maximize profit for shareholders. This for-profit model doesn’t just entail locating the cheapest possible goods and services; it also means hiring as few people as possible.



“These facilities don’t staff even one more person than they need,” Free says, noting that, even in the best of times, they work with near-skeleton staff.



That means that, for many detention centers to run at all, the managing companies rely on detained people’s labor. For people who don’t have any family in the United States, or people on the outside who can wire money into their commissary accounts (which itself comes with shocking fees), the only way to earn money to buy goods is by working the $1-per-day jobs—an incentive many detained people say does its job of being “motivational.”



In the past decade, claims of immigrants’ being coerced into labor, or even “treated like slaves,” have been frighteningly common—though Free points out that it has not just been immigrants. One of his clients was Frank Serna, a United States citizen whom ICE picked up mistakenly and detained illegally for over 300 days.



“One of the things [Serna] told me after he got out was, ‘They were slaving us. How am I supposed to feel about myself for that kind of treatment?’” Free says.



Detention in the Age of Coronavirus

In the midst of an epochal pandemic, the business model of for-profit private detention companies has created a dangerous situation. Miranda-Gonzalez, in the Folkston ICE Processing center, says, “Guards aren’t even showing up for work anymore,” and attorneys like Gurulé say they’re worried that staffing shortages and interrupted supply chains could lead to deteriorating conditions as the pandemic goes on. And the “artificial scarcity” created by the for-profit model means that basic pandemic necessities are hard to get inside: Across the country, people in ICE detention have been reporting a severe lack of now-critical products—not just soap, but also cleaning wipes, disinfectant, and even toilet paper.



“There are times when we literally have to beg for soap,” says Marlen Seo, a woman detained in the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana, operated by Geo Group. “We are just given a four-ounce bottle to use weekly. We are not provided with any sanitary wipes for the phones that we all use, nor are we given any sanitizing lotion.” Other people detained in LaSalle say that at times they’ve resorted to cleaning the showers with shampoo.



When it comes to working these sorts of cleaning jobs, Seo also said that she and the 80 other women in her unit were—up until recently—cleaning communal spaces without any pay. It wasn’t until women that transferred in from other units told them that detained jobs pay money that they began requesting the wages owed to them.



In Escobedo’s jail in Texas—run by LaSalle Corrections, a separate company—Escobedo says that the quality of essentially all services has gone down since mid-March, when the pandemic began to hit the United States. He says they’re getting less food, and the conditions have become filthy, “like a pig sty.” He thinks it has to do directly with COVID-19 affecting staffing and supply lines.



There have also been alleged shortages of PPE. Through much of March and April, people detained in for-profit detention centers across the country reported that few, if any, guards were wearing face masks or other protective gear. Recently, private prison companies have begun providing masks in at least some detention centers, but detained people still report that guards often fail to wear the protective gear.



“I’ve talked to some of the guards and they’re scared too,” says Seo. She says that many of them have said they wish they could stay home. Other people in ICE detention elsewhere in the country have alleged that guards and staff have begun to skip work—potentially contributing to the sorts of deteriorating conditions Seo and Escobedo describe.



Seeking to fill in the gaps, immigrant advocates have tried to funnel money to detained people’s commissary accounts, so they can buy soap and other goods.



Schwietert Collazo’s organization, Immigrant Families Together, has long provided $50 grants to detained people to enhance their commissary funds. “We help them buy soap because often they’re only getting one little hotel bar per week,” she says. Schwietert Collazo says that the people with the least resources—with families who can’t help them—are the ones who are now most at risk for Covid-19, because they can’t afford soap and other goods from the commissary. Recently, she’s been fielding requests largely from Cuban asylum seekers, whose families can’t get money into their accounts.



“These stories are just heartbreaking,” Schwietert Collazo says. “People who have been detained for nine, 11 months. People who are saying I’ve never talked to my family this whole time, I’ve never been able to buy food or hygiene items this entire time.” (Detention centers charge exorbitant rates for phone calls to family and friends.)



In many facilities, to cope with the shortages, detained people will often engage in their own mutual aid efforts and share their commissary funds with others. For instance Escobedo has been buying ramen and other products for the men he’s detained with. Seo says the women who can afford commissary goods will often spread the resources around. And Miranda-Gonzelez says people share soap when they can.



“We support each other, we stick together,” he says.



According to Free, these sorts of mutual support projects are the only reason the public hasn’t heard a flood of alarms about shortages in detention centers.



“If there are places where there are not complaints, it’s because the people inside are helping each other,” he says.



Schwietert Collazo reaches a conclusion about the conditions she’s been hearing about from dozens of different detained people: “When you look at the detention center model, it’s for profit,” she says. “You want to cut costs. You do not want to actually provide care.”edo González says he’s not getting enough food. ICE requires the privately run jail to serve detained immigrants three meals per day, but, in a clear effort to keep attendance low and costs down, breakfast is served at 3:30 am. Escobedo says that even if he does wake up, the meals are sparse, and often days old. Since ICE detained him in January, Escobedo has been feeling hunger pains, and he’s been forced to ask his family in Florida to constantly refill his commissary account so that he can buy ramen noodles, both for himself and for others in the detention center.



Then came the coronavirus pandemic. In late March, still locked in ICE detention, Escobedo began asking his family for money so he could afford another necessity he would otherwise miss: soap.



“Soap we have to buy from the commissary,” Escobedo says. “They give us a tiny soap that is only good for one use.” He says that once a week, on Tuesday, the jail gives each person a ration of soap, but it lasts about a day. If people want more, they have to pay.



The coronavirus crisis has thrown the archipelago of ICE detention centers run by private prison companies into chaos. In an effort to cut costs, for-profit detention centers ration out goods—like soap—with the expectation that detained people will buy more with money from their commissary accounts if they run out. In many for-profit detention centers, detained people are given one bar of soap per week, for washing their hands and their bodies. In the midst of the pandemic, as detainees fear for their lives, that rationing system has collapsed. Today, washing one’s hands could mean saving one’s life or that of those around them, but Escobedo and others in ICE detention say that taking that basic step still comes at a price.



“We basically have to hunger strike to get what we need,” says Jose Miranda-Gonzalez, a man detained in Georgia’s Folkston ICE Processing center. He says that soap and cleaning products are rationed out in such meager amounts that he and other detainees have periodically stopped eating to pressure the detention center staff to provide enough supplies.



“People who can’t afford commissary can’t have enough soap to wash their hands,” Miranda-Gonzalez says. Last month, he says he bought 10 bars of soap at the commissary and cut them in half to pass out among detainees who couldn’t afford their own.



ICE and multiple for-profit detention centers have contested the allegations. A spokesperson from GEO Group, which runs the Folkston facility where Miranda-Gonzalez is locked, wrote in a statement for this article, “We strongly reject these unfounded allegations, which we believe are being instigated by outside groups with political agendas…. Our ICE Processing Centers provide access to regular handwashing with clean water and soap in all housing areas and throughout each facility.”



Responding to a request for comment, Danielle Bennet, spokesperson for ICE, pointed to a statement available on the agency’s website, which claims that ICE detention centers run by the agency itself provide ample soap. When it comes to private detention centers, the statement explains, “ICE continues to encourage facilities to follow CDC guidelines as well as those of their state and local health departments.”



“I’m not aware of any hunger strikes related to soap and hygiene products,” Bennet wrote in an e-mail.



However, that statement contrasts with multiple reports from detained immigrants who say they’ve engaged in mass protests in recent weeks demanding soap, cleaning products, and toilet paper. Besides Miranda-Gonzalez in Georgia, detained people in Washington state and Lousiana told me they’ve either taken part in or witnessed hunger strikes. In audio obtained by ProPublica last month, a detained Salvadoran man explains that his detention center—the Hudson County Correctional Facility—gives them only one bar of soap per week. They’re meant to use this small bar both for bathing and washing their hands, so it runs out quickly. In the recording, Ronal Umaña says he and others began hunger striking to pressure the detention center staff to give them soap so they can clean their hands, as well as toilet paper and other hygiene necessities.



At this point, the coronavirus has infected hundreds of thousands of Americans and killed over 50,000. One of the CDC’s most basic guidelines for avoiding COVID-19 is, of course, frequently washing one’s hands. Robyn Barnard, an asylum attorney in Southern California, says that her client contacted her and asked her to put money in his commissary so he could buy soap to wash his hands. Julie Schwietert Collazo, the director of Immigrant Families Together, says that she’s gotten requests for commissary fund grants from detained immigrants across the South who tell her they don’t have “even basic hygiene items.” Natalia Santanna, an immigration attorney based in the Bay Area, says that her clients are rationed some soap each week, but not nearly enough to wash their hands as frequently as the CDC recommends. “If they don’t pay for it from commissary, they can’t wash their hands.”And in New York, Sophia Gurulé, an immigration lawyer who serves as immigration policy counsel for The Bronx Defenders, says her organization has noted the same thing.



“A lot of our clients only get their soap by buying it from commissary,” Gurulé says. She explains that many of her clients aren’t in dedicated ICE detention centers but rather local jails that have contracts with ICE (this is the sort of detention situation Escobedo finds himself in). Still, the situation is the same: “Commissary is where they predominantly get their soap.”



Charging for Soap

Why do ICE detention centers continue to charge money for good as basic as soap during the pandemic?



While there’s no one answer to what prices look like in the commissary, detention centers do seem to have inflated margins. ICE employs different private contractors, including for-profit prison conglomerates like Geo Group, CoreCivic, and LaSalle Corrections, to run many of its facilities. But as a general rule, the prices being charged at commissaries are inflated. In 2019, a bar of Dove soap cost $2.44 in CoreCivic’s Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, according to a Reuter’s investigation; the same bar costs about a dollar at a drugstore.



However, when it comes to private detention facilities’ charging money for hygiene products, the prices themselves aren’t the whole story. The business model of these facilities isn’t necessarily to make a profit on commissary goods but rather to “motivate” immigrants into working in-detention jobs, which can pay as little as $1 per day.



R. Andrew Free is one of the attorneys who has brought multiple lawsuits (along with organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center) against corporations like CoreCivic and Geo Group. At the center of these lawsuits is a shocking allegation: Private detention centers are engaging in forced labor.



Free alleges that detention facilities create “artificial scarcity” in order to coerce the people locked inside into working in-detention jobs. Here’s how that sounds in the words of Wilhen Hill Barrientos, an asylum seeker from Guatemala whom Free and the SPLC represented in a case against CoreCivic filed in 2018: “[You] either work for a few cents an hour or live without basic things like soap, shampoo, deodorant and food,” Hill Barrientos said in a statement about the lawsuit.



And here’s Free describing another lawsuit he filed in a district court in California, this time representing a client detained in Adelanto, a massive Geo Group detention center in Southern California (the same facility where Robyn Barnard’s client now claims he’s forced to buy soap): “We’ve articulated this deprivation scheme,” Free says. “That claims Geo purposely skimps on basic necessities—like food soap, clean water, medicine—in order to make it so that they have a readily available workforce.”



Both Geo and CoreCivic rejected the allegations made in the forced labor lawsuits. A spokesman for Geo called the claims “unfounded,” and Amanda Gilchrist, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, wrote, “All work programs at our ICE detention facilities are completely voluntary and operated in full compliance with ICE standards, including federally established minimum wage rates for detainee volunteer labor.… CoreCivic provides detainees all basic living necessities in accordance with federal detention standards, and it does not deprive detainees of anything to coerce their participation in a work program.”



While a bevy of forced labor lawsuits have been filed against CoreCivic and Geo (starting with Free’s first salvo in 2014), all the cases are still making their way through the federal judicial system, and no ruling has yet been made one way or another. But Free notes that—despite multiple attempts from GeoGroup and CoreCivic to have the cases thrown out—no judge has dismissed any of the suits. “There have been at least 15 different decisions in which Geo or CoreCivic have tried to get a lawsuit thrown out of court, or limited in some way, and in none of them have courts agreed with the companies,” he says. He says that this is indication that multiple judges see enough compelling evidence in the allegations to continue the court proceedings.



Free says that besides creating the incentive for detained people to work, there’s little reason for prison companies to charge for goods like soap, deodorant, or cans of tuna.



“There’s no financial reason these companies couldn’t just provide all of these things for free,” he says. “The amount of commissary, those things are not a showstopper in terms of financial loss to a company if they just provided that for free.”



In private ICE detention facilities, most basic services—from meal service to custodial cleaning—couldn’t run without detained people. Unlike a government-run institution, these private companies’ missions are not to reform criminals or protect detainees while their cases wend their way through courts—the mission of these companies is to maximize profit for shareholders. This for-profit model doesn’t just entail locating the cheapest possible goods and services; it also means hiring as few people as possible.



“These facilities don’t staff even one more person than they need,” Free says, noting that, even in the best of times, they work with near-skeleton staff.



That means that, for many detention centers to run at all, the managing companies rely on detained people’s labor. For people who don’t have any family in the United States, or people on the outside who can wire money into their commissary accounts (which itself comes with shocking fees), the only way to earn money to buy goods is by working the $1-per-day jobs—an incentive many detained people say does its job of being “motivational.”



In the past decade, claims of immigrants’ being coerced into labor, or even “treated like slaves,” have been frighteningly common—though Free points out that it has not just been immigrants. One of his clients was Frank Serna, a United States citizen whom ICE picked up mistakenly and detained illegally for over 300 days.



“One of the things [Serna] told me after he got out was, ‘They were slaving us. How am I supposed to feel about myself for that kind of treatment?’” Free says.



Detention in the Age of Coronavirus

In the midst of an epochal pandemic, the business model of for-profit private detention companies has created a dangerous situation. Miranda-Gonzalez, in the Folkston ICE Processing center, says, “Guards aren’t even showing up for work anymore,” and attorneys like Gurulé say they’re worried that staffing shortages and interrupted supply chains could lead to deteriorating conditions as the pandemic goes on. And the “artificial scarcity” created by the for-profit model means that basic pandemic necessities are hard to get inside: Across the country, people in ICE detention have been reporting a severe lack of now-critical products—not just soap, but also cleaning wipes, disinfectant, and even toilet paper.



“There are times when we literally have to beg for soap,” says Marlen Seo, a woman detained in the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana, operated by Geo Group. “We are just given a four-ounce bottle to use weekly. We are not provided with any sanitary wipes for the phones that we all use, nor are we given any sanitizing lotion.” Other people detained in LaSalle say that at times they’ve resorted to cleaning the showers with shampoo.



When it comes to working these sorts of cleaning jobs, Seo also said that she and the 80 other women in her unit were—up until recently—cleaning communal spaces without any pay. It wasn’t until women that transferred in from other units told them that detained jobs pay money that they began requesting the wages owed to them.



In Escobedo’s jail in Texas—run by LaSalle Corrections, a separate company—Escobedo says that the quality of essentially all services has gone down since mid-March, when the pandemic began to hit the United States. He says they’re getting less food, and the conditions have become filthy, “like a pig sty.” He thinks it has to do directly with COVID-19 affecting staffing and supply lines.



There have also been alleged shortages of PPE. Through much of March and April, people detained in for-profit detention centers across the country reported that few, if any, guards were wearing face masks or other protective gear. Recently, private prison companies have begun providing masks in at least some detention centers, but detained people still report that guards often fail to wear the protective gear.



“I’ve talked to some of the guards and they’re scared too,” says Seo. She says that many of them have said they wish they could stay home. Other people in ICE detention elsewhere in the country have alleged that guards and staff have begun to skip work—potentially contributing to the sorts of deteriorating conditions Seo and Escobedo describe.



Seeking to fill in the gaps, immigrant advocates have tried to funnel money to detained people’s commissary accounts, so they can buy soap and other goods.



Schwietert Collazo’s organization, Immigrant Families Together, has long provided $50 grants to detained people to enhance their commissary funds. “We help them buy soap because often they’re only getting one little hotel bar per week,” she says. Schwietert Collazo says that the people with the least resources—with families who can’t help them—are the ones who are now most at risk for Covid-19, because they can’t afford soap and other goods from the commissary. Recently, she’s been fielding requests largely from Cuban asylum seekers, whose families can’t get money into their accounts.



“These stories are just heartbreaking,” Schwietert Collazo says. “People who have been detained for nine, 11 months. People who are saying I’ve never talked to my family this whole time, I’ve never been able to buy food or hygiene items this entire time.” (Detention centers charge exorbitant rates for phone calls to family and friends.)



In many facilities, to cope with the shortages, detained people will often engage in their own mutual aid efforts and share their commissary funds with others. For instance Escobedo has been buying ramen and other products for the men he’s detained with. Seo says the women who can afford commissary goods will often spread the resources around. And Miranda-Gonzelez says people share soap when they can.



“We support each other, we stick together,” he says.



According to Free, these sorts of mutual support projects are the only reason the public hasn’t heard a flood of alarms about shortages in detention centers.



“If there are places where there are not complaints, it’s because the people inside are helping each other,” he says.



Schwietert Collazo reaches a conclusion about the conditions she’s been hearing about from dozens of different detained people: “When you look at the detention center model, it’s for profit,” she says. “You want to cut costs. You do not want to actually provide care.”



In ICE Detention, Forced to Pay for Soap

Don Lemon: Trump wants to move on, but this is not over

Georgia governor poised to lift restrictions, despite warnings

"Gov. Brian Kemp appears poised to ease social restrictions that created disruptions for millions of Georgians amid a still-spreading global pandemic.



A month-old shelter-at-home order is set to expire just before midnight Thursday. But Kemp kept Georgians in the dark Wednesday about what comes next in the state’s fight against the coronavirus.



“We will announce more tomorrow,” Candice Broce, the governor’s spokeswoman, said in an email Wednesday. She declined to comment further.



Kemp has strongly hinted — most recently, during a news conference on Monday — that he would lift the shelter-at-home order for all but elderly and sick Georgians. He has spoken forcefully about the economic harm caused by the quarantine, particularly the damage done to countless small businesses.



But by easing the restrictions, Kemp would be disregarding dire warnings from public health officials.



In a study of Georgia coronavirus cases that was released Wednesday, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the virus appears to be more dangerous than previously thought for relatively young and healthy people.



The CDC, with help from the Georgia Department of Public Health, studied the cases of 305 coronavirus patients who were hospitalized in metro Atlanta and Albany in March. More than three-fifths were younger than 65, the CDC said, and slightly more than one-fourth had no medical problems “thought to put them at higher risk for severe disease.”



The findings, the CDC said, show the need for continued social-distancing measures — “not only to protect older adults and those with underlying medical conditions but also … persons in the general population who might not consider themselves to be a risk for severe illness.”



» COMPLETE COVERAGE: CORONAVIRUS IN GEORGIA



» EXCLUSIVE: Hundreds of Georgia’s poultry workers test positive for COVID-19



» UPDATE: Potential COVID-19 drug tested by Emory shows progress, Fauci says



Easing restrictions now would cause the virus to strengthen and spread, said Rebecca Mitchell, an epidemiologist and visiting assistant professor at Emory University. Mitchell is running as a Democrat for a state legislative seat in Gwinnett County.



On the most recent day for which complete data is available, she said, more than 700 new coronavirus cases were confirmed statewide.



“We’re letting each one of these new cases go out and impact more people in the community,” Mitchell said in an online news conference staged by a group seeking to expand Medicaid benefits in Georgia. “It means they will be in contact with many more people.”



Another participant in the news conference said Kemp would be to blame for the harm his decision caused.



“It makes me mad,” said Dr. Karen Kinsell, the only physician in rural Clay County, nearly 200 miles southwest of Atlanta. “We have politicians who know almost nothing about health and health care and biology making decisions … that are going to kill more Georgians. How can that be OK?”



Georgia’s toll from the new coronavirus continues to increase. By Wednesday evening, the state’s public health agency said, 1,096 Georgians had died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. The state crossed the 1,000 mark in deaths just a day earlier.



More than 25,000 Georgians have tested positive for the virus.



Nevertheless, Kemp and his aides have said state data shows the virus’ spread is declining or hitting a plateau. Other experts have questioned their interpretations.



Kemp’s shelter-at-home order prohibited Georgians from going out except for “essential” or “necessary” purposes. It allowed most employers to engage only in “minimum business operations,” and it closed gyms, bowling alleys and “close-contact” establishments such as tattoo parlors, hair and nail salons, and barber shops. The order also suspended dine-in service at restaurants.



Kemp allowed those close-contact businesses to reopen last week and authorized restaurants to open their dining rooms on Monday. Bars and nightclubs remain shuttered.



Barber and shop owner Chris Edwards wears a mask and cuts the hair of customer David Boswell at Peachtree Battle Barber Shop at 2333 Peachtree Road in Atlanta on Friday, April 24, 2020. The first phase of Gov. Brian Kemp

Barber and shop owner Chris Edwards wears a mask and cuts the hair of customer David Boswell at Peachtree Battle Barber Shop at 2333 Peachtree Road in Atlanta on Friday, April 24, 2020. The first phase of Gov. Brian Kemp's plan to reopen Georgia during the coronavirus pandemic included barber shops, hair salons and gyms, though not all chose to open their doors. JOHN SPINK/JSPINK@AJC.COM

Georgians older than 65 and those considered medically fragile — including people with moderate to severe asthma, smokers and anyone who is severely obese — are to remain under self-isolation until at least May 13, when a public health state of emergency expires. The General Assembly could extend the state of emergency at Kemp’s request.



Kemp was among the last of the nation’s governors to impose statewide social-distancing measures and among the first to begin lifting them. Shelter-at-home orders have expired in at least five other states, but most issued “safer at home” guidelines urging residents to avoid going out as much as possible. Some states, such as Tennessee and Colorado, eased restrictions in all but their metropolitan counties.



In Georgia, Kemp’s executive orders have prohibited local governments from adopting their own, more stringent regulations. That prohibition has been controversial among local-government officials, particularly after Kemp reversed decisions to close Georgia beaches.



Maddie Nichols, 8, sits in the car as her mother Blythe Nichols

Maddie Nichols, 8, sits in the car as her mother Blythe Nichols

Shirley Sessions, the mayor of Tybee Island, a small oceanfront town outside Savannah, said she expects a surge of beach visitors this weekend if Kemp lifts the shelter-at-home order.



“I still disagree” with Kemp’s pre-empting local regulations, Sessions said in an interview. “But I accept what we’re faced with. And, rather than fighting it, I’m trying to see how we can make it work for our community without being belligerent or argumentative to the governor.”



As the end date of the shelter-at-home mandate neared, Kemp made it clear he was as worried about business owners and their employees as about the threat from the virus. Many, he said, are becoming “desperate” over the restrictions imposed on them and the resulting economic hardships.



“This is uncharted territory,” Kemp said Monday. “But we also had people on the verge of losing everything.”



Georgia governor poised to lift restrictions, despite warnings

Politics drive Georgia's reopening gamble as coronavirus cases rise | US news | The Guardian

"When John Gianoulidis, owner of the Kafenio Greek Diner, heard the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, announce restaurants could offer dine-in services once again this week, he feared the worst for his restaurant and coffee shop in Atlanta.

Here’s the deal, he typed out on Facebook.

“Kemp mandates restaurants reopen, whether I reopen dining rooms or not. I file for business interruption insurance, it does not go through since I am ‘allowed’ to operate full capacity,” he hypothesized, adding further down in the now viral post, “If things blow up again, they are still on my tab not on the states, since they are no longer employed. Guys, this is about screwing the working class and small business, not about helping us.”

Economists are uncertain if Gianoulidis is entirely correct about the exact rationale behind the sudden announcement to reopen Georgia as coronavirus cases continue to rise, with nearly 25,000 confirmed in the state as of Tuesday afternoon. The state’s reopening has been so early that even Donald Trump urged Kemp not to do it.

But they can agree the most in danger from Kemp’s actions – both economically and healthwise – are those who open their businesses or return to work in Georgia’s new sudden easing of restrictions.

The state’s current count of positive virus cases makes it the tenth highest in the country as employees were cleared to serve meals in a restaurant, offer up tattoos or provide hair and nails services and check-in gym goers for Zumba class. In the last month, Georgia’s department of labor processed 1,090,536 claims, more than the last three previous years combined. Nearly a third of the claims came from the food and accommodation industry, many of whom can now – technically – go back to work as restaurants open.

While that may help ease the burden of claims processed by the state, how it affects the greater economy is unclear, said Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Initiative.

“From an economic standpoint, it’s just not really clear why you open up one set of businesses, versus another set,” she said, referring to Kemp allowing non-essential business to reopen.

Kemp’s office did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. The state’s department of labor did not have much concrete guidance as to whether the reopening would see jobless claims shifted off the government books.

“This is a way for them to continue to receive some of those same benefits as they gradually come back to work. And then when it’s time to get back to work that employer stops filing for them,” the Georgia department of labor communications director, Kersha Cartwright, said.

But it’s unclear when that line between gradual and full time was drawn and by whom it was to be decided – the state or the employer.

Many business owners, like Gianoulidis, will continue to offer carry-out options, but want to wait to hear the risks versus rewards from health officials before opening and seating customers in close quarters, they say.

“I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on. I haven’t heard from the US health department,” Gianoulidis said, adding he would rather hear from health officials than politicians.

But for those businesses that do open up, while the state continues to follow through on its shelter-in-place order until 30 April , this could leave vulnerable employees on even more uncertain grounds, said Gould. Some might not want to go back to work, feeling unsafe while others may be living with elderly family members or those with pre-existing conditions.

Others may return to work, uncertain about the state’s policy on unemployment insurance, Gould added, unsure if they would still qualify now that their place of employment is open.

When asked what would happen if employees of non-essential businesses that could reopen under the state’s mandate chose not to return in fear of their safety, Georgia’s department of labor could not clarify if they would still be eligible to file for unemployment.

“Work with your employer, try to work something out. If you cannot work it out and you decide to separate yourself from that place of employment then we will base our eligibility upon the facts presented in the case,” Cartwright said.

Georgia’s governor might not have felt the pressure to rush his state’s residents back to work if he had more financial support to fill in gaps where the Cares Act did not reach, an April report from American Progress said.

“I think that if the federal government stepped in and actually provided significantly more state and local aid to help them deal with the pandemic and to help them deal with this relief period and the recovery, that would be good for the economy,” Gould agreed.

But the health risks of an early reopening could be even more risky than an economic one.

According to a new analysis of data released by the Daily Beast in collaboration with MIT and Harvard Universities, that could most likely be the case. If the state had continued its current stay-at-home mandate and kept non-essential businesses closed, coronavirus fatalities by mid-June would have been somewhere between 1,004 and 2,922. Instead, the team’s simulation suggests that number could now be as high as 9,748.

“This is a policy that has not been endorsed by experts in public health … one concern going forward is whether it would lead to new outbreaks and contribute to a second wave of growth of the pandemic,” Cornell University labor economics professor Francine Blau said.

For now, Gianoulidis will keep his dining areas closed, like many other restaurants in Atlanta, with too many financial and health risks at play for him to open them with confidence.

“I’m just going to continue doing what I’m doing until we get a better idea of what’s going on,” he said."

Politics drive Georgia's reopening gamble as coronavirus cases rise | US news | The Guardian

Vote safely by mail in November? Not so fast, say Republicans | US news | The Guardian

"An explosive fight is emerging over whether Americans will be able to vote in November without risking their lives.



It’s unclear how safe it will be to gather at the polls during the presidential election, but President Donald Trump and other top Republicans have made it clear that they will oppose efforts to make it easier to vote by mail as an alternative.



Both Republicans and Democrats have long utilized mail-in voting, and voters on both ends of the political spectrum overwhelmingly favor making it easier to do so in the election. But Trump’s opposition appears based on a thinly-veiled political calculus: the fewer Americans who vote, the better the political prospects for the Republican party.



“They had things, levels of voting, that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” the president said in March, dismissing Democratic efforts to expand mail-in voting.



That Republican estimation has been at the center of many of the hotly-contested fights over voting rules in recent years. The party has generally favored restrictions on voting, such as voter ID, while Democrats have pushed to make it easier to cast a ballot.



When it comes to vote by mail, however, the calculation is unsupported by evidence. Making it difficult to vote by mail could actually wind up hurting the Republican party.



“It’s become an explosive issue because President Trump and some others at the top of Republican party, including [RNC chair] Ronna McDaniel, have made it an issue,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. “That puts Republicans in somewhat of a bind, because in many places in the country, vote by mail is a successful and safe way that Republicans get the vote out among their supporters.”



A Stanford study examining the switch to vote by mail in California, Washington, and Utah found that it did not benefit Democrats or Republicans, and only modestly increased turnout. Colorado elected a Republican US senator the year after it switched to all vote-by-mail elections. In Florida’s March primary, Republicans were more likely to vote by mail.



“We would work really hard on absentee ballots. It was a staple of our strategy,” said Mac Stepanovich, a retired Florida Republican political operative, said of past campaigns. “Republicans probably ought not to be complaining about it.”



Even as Republican operatives are seeking to scale up their vote-by-mail operations, congressional Republicans have staunchly opposed efforts in coronavirus stimulus bills that would make it easier to vote. They dismissed plans to require states to automatically mail everyone a ballot, expand early voting, and implement online voter registration. So far, the parties have agreed on allocating $400m to states to help them prepare for elections, a fraction of the minimum $4bn experts say is needed.



“It’s really disappointing that our political leaders aren’t all working to ensure that every eligible American is able to cast a ballot that will count,” said Myrna Pérez, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There used to be a point in time where having free and fair access to the ballot was a bipartisan issue.”



Currently, five US states conduct their elections entirely by mail, while access to mail-in balloting varies widely in others. To run an election that relies heavily on vote by mail would require investing millions of dollars in ballots, staffing, new technology and messaging, according to the Brennan Center.



In Orange county, California, switching to vote-by-mail took three or four years of planning and cost at least $3m, said Neal Kelley, the county’s registrar of voters. In Washington state, it took five years to transition to an all vote-by-mail system. Most US election offices – some with just one or two full-time employees – do not have the resources to make this transition in time for November without support.



“The clock is ticking,” said Amber McReynolds, the chief executive of the National Vote at Home Institute and Coalition, which advocates for vote by mail.



In recent weeks, Democrats and voting groups have filed a slew of lawsuits – taking aim at restrictive state laws that require voters to give an excuse to vote by mail or have an in-person witness for their ballots. Advocates also want states to pick up the cost of postage on mail-in ballots and registration forms, calling it an unconstitutional poll tax.



But Republicans in Texas, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Nevada have opposed these lawsuits. The office of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, even went so far as to say that anyone who advised a voter they could cast a mail-in ballot because of Covid-19 could be subject to “criminal sanctions”.



The Republican National Committee and Trump’s re-election campaign meanwhile, had already planned to spend $10 million to fight Democratic voting lawsuits. An RNC spokesman told NPR the committee would probably spend even more because of Covid-19.



If this political stalemate persists, the US might end up with a large-scale version of the chaotic Wisconsin primary, which took place earlier in April.



With coronavirus cases rising, Wisconsin severely limited early voting and an unprecedented 1.2 million people requested absentee ballots. Election offices were overwhelmed with absentee ballot requests, and some voters never received ballots at all. Turnout didn’t drop as severely as many projected, but voters in Milwaukee were forced to wait hours in line to vote. At least 52 people have since tested positive for Covid-19.



Without action, there could be similar consequences in November. There might be a delay in issuing ballots, and voters might get their ballots too late to vote, said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor. A nefarious actor could intentionally slow down the election process by making multiple ballot requests, forcing the election official to investigate (one clerk in Wisconsin reported a voter requested a ballot 11 times).



“We’re already seeing failure in a low-turnout election. It’s not gonna get any better in a high-turnout election,” McDonald said.



More voting by mail will also slow down reporting of election results, since election officials would have to count ballots coming in after election night. This could leave room for a candidate to question the legitimacy of the results.



“I’m concerned not only that a delay in reporting results will leave room for people to claim fraud, but also potentially for a candidate who’s ahead in an early count to claim victory while the votes may shift as additional votes are counted,” Hasen said.



Breaking from Trump, some Republican officials have embraced vote-by-mail, though modestly. Ohio’s governor and secretary of state encouraged everyone to request an absentee ballot for the state’s primary. Georgia’s top election official, a Republican, is mailing absentee request forms to all active registered voters. Republican officials in New Hampshire and Kentucky have eased restrictions on mail-in voting.



Meanwhile, officials in some Democratic-leaning jurisdictions are not waiting for state support, and plan to send absentee ballot request forms to all registered voters. Such a move could force Republican counterparts to follow suit.



“The intransigence of the Republicans to think that anything that might increase turnout might help the Democrats is very short sighted,” McDonald said. “I think Republicans are making a huge strategic error here if they don’t want to provide resources.”



Vote safely by mail in November? Not so fast, say Republicans | US news | The Guardian

Opinion | Georgia's Coronavirus Reopening Is a Cautionary Lesson - The New York Times

"Here’s what other states can learn from our inept reopening.



Dr. Landman is a specialist in infectious diseases.



ATLANTA — Last week was a bad one for Georgia, and an especially bad one for our governor, Brian Kemp. On April 20, he announced that he would allow Georgia’s tattoo parlors, hair and nail salons and other “high touch” businesses to reopen as early as April 24, ahead of even President Trump’s ambitious plans. In the days since, the state has reverberated with political turmoil. Even the president rebuked Mr. Kemp for moving too fast.



For better or worse, the governor has made our state the nation’s canary in this particularly terrifying coal mine.



Someone had to go first, and Mr. Kemp isn’t the only political leader eager to reopen the country. But the ham-handed way he went about it makes Georgians of all stripes afraid of what comes next, and it leaves us wondering whether he is setting us up for a punishing new wave of infections. He has clashed with city and county leaders and left business owners — the people he was trying to help — in the dark.



From my vantage point as a doctor, an epidemiologist, a journalist and a native Georgian, it’s clear that if there’s anything to be gained from this moment’s anguish, it is the opportunity to help others avoid our mistakes. Here are some of the lessons my state has learned.



Don’t underestimate the importance of good data.

Despite all the warnings in the news media, it can be tempting to cherry-pick evidence that supports a move to reopen. Governor Kemp said his decision was based on “favorable data” and enhanced testing, but the more we looked, the more questionable that data looked: fluctuations among data curves, some of which conflicted with each other; weeklong lags in Georgia’s reporting of Covid-19 cases and deaths.



Never mind that neither of the metrics Mr. Kemp cited — the past week’s average of total daily cases, and daily deaths — was among the federal gating criteria, a set of benchmarks intended to help states decide when to reopen their economies. And while our testing capacity is increasing by the day, we have yet to demonstrate the coordination needed to identify emerging hot spots in real time.



It’s not just about having favorable data, or even enough testing. It’s about having the right infrastructure to assess it and ensure sustained decreases in cases.



“If the answer to all that is not an absolute yes, it raises serious questions about the wisdom of opening up sectors of the economy,” said Joshua Weitz, a quantitative biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who specializes in disease dynamics. Georgia’s public health funding is substantially lower than that of other states; you get the data quality you pay for.



As a consequence of the way our state gathers, reports and publicizes data, many Georgians don’t trust that our leadership is making smart decisions. And while on Monday Mr. Kemp announced some changes in data reporting that will most likely improve transparency, many of my neighbors already share a creeping sense that the most critical decision of his administration was made in a data-free zone.



Don’t punish small businesses by treating their decision to reopen — or not — as a purity test.

Last weekend, Jenn Jones, who owns the Creature Studio hair salon and spa in Atlanta, told me that her business would go under if she didn’t reopen by June. So She’s reopening. She was slowly collecting masks and gloves for her employees, and she had redesigned her salon space to accommodate the social distancing recommended by the Georgia Board of Cosmetology and Barbers.



Her decision does not signal any support for Mr. Kemp. “I don’t align with his policies whatsoever,” she said, echoing a position taken by business owners and politicians across the state. It’s not about politics; it’s about survival.



But you wouldn’t grasp the complexity of these decisions from the responses of people watching them play out from afar. On social media and over email, customers and neighbors are threatening to boycott businesses that reopen, regardless of the degree to which they consider customers’ safety. People on my own neighborhood website are circulating lists of local businesses that do and do not open as a pandemic purity test of sorts, intended to guide the buying decisions people will make when the pandemic is over.



Somehow, we’ve reached the point where caring about public health has become a progressive issue, while the nation’s economy has become a conservative one. This division is false; no one should have to choose between financial annihilation and helping to spread a deadly disease. But thanks to unforgivable failures of political leadership, business owners in Georgia are bearing the burden of that choice — and the same will happen in every state that follows our lead.



We have dangerous tensions between our state and local governments.

The governor’s decision came as a surprise to our mayors, who were not consulted or informed about his executive order in advance — and were barred by one of its clauses from issuing local orders more or less restrictive than his.



Many felt the choice was the wrong one for their communities. Bo Dorough, a Democrat, is the mayor of Albany, Ga., which at one point in the pandemic had the most Covid-19 deaths per capita outside New York City. He pleaded with the governor to “recognize there are exceptions.” Atlanta’s democratic mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who described seeing people lined up for haircuts and manicures in the days following the reopening announcement, said, “What we are essentially saying in Georgia is, ‘Go bowling and we’ll have a bed waiting on you.’”



Even Randy Toms, a Republican who is the mayor of Warner Robins, near Atlanta, said the order was concerning. “I don’t want people to go out and believe the virus is gone,” he said. But the governor didn’t budge.



It’s unclear why Mr. Kemp made such a unilateral decision, but it’s not surprising. The move might be intended as payback: For several weeks in March, Mr. Kemp declined to shut Georgia down despite dire projections of the pandemic’s public health impact. Many local governments issued countywide shelter-in-place orders during that time, which Mr. Kemp’s chief of staff decried as “overreach.”



Fortunately, some other states with imminent plans to reopen, like neighboring Tennessee, have carved out exceptions or given leeway to local governments. But governors, especially Republicans who have historically clashed with Democratic mayors, may be lured into using the reopening as leverage. Don’t. The people who suffer most from the results of uncoordinated public health efforts are often the people who have the least. Save the peevishness for a lower-stakes crisis.



Success is up to us.

Georgia went first. Some of our confusion and fears were inevitable — but the governor exacerbated those with his poor planning, and he may have set us up for a relapse. Inevitably, other governors will make other mistakes, even if they learn from Georgia’s mistakes.



But as we — citizens, business owners and local politicians — are learning, that doesn’t mean we will fail. As other states reopen — and they will — saving ourselves and one another will be up to us.



Keren Landman is a physician who specializes in infectious diseases and a journalist who writes about public health."



Opinion | Georgia's Coronavirus Reopening Is a Cautionary Lesson - The New York Times

Trump and Kushner on the Coronavirus: Wishful Thinking and Revisionist History - The New York Times

Trump spreads lies, lies, and more lies.



"“We did all the right moves,” the president said Wednesday. “The federal government rose to the challenge, and this is a great success story,” said his son-in-law.

.

WASHINGTON — The total number of coronavirus cases in the United States exceeded one million. The American death toll surpassed that of the Vietnam War. And the economy was reported to have shrunk by nearly 5 percent. But the White House on Wednesday declared its response to the crisis “a great success story.”



As states begin to lift quarantines, President Trump is trying to recast the story of the pandemic from that of an administration slow to see and address the threat to one that responded with decisive action that saved lives. Recognizing that the crisis jeopardizes his chances of re-election, he and his allies want to convince his supporters that the cascade of criticism is unwarranted.



“We think we really have crossed a big boundary and much better days are ahead,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday at a televised meeting at the White House with business leaders. The session was intended to highlight what the president hopes will be the resumption of a healthier economy only hours after the release of the most cataclysmic economic numbers of the past decade.



“I often say I see the light at the end of the tunnel very strongly,” Mr. Trump said.



The president waxed at length about restoring life to the United States as if the crisis were nearly over. He disclosed that he plans to fly to Arizona next week and soon after that to Ohio, his first trips out of the White House since early March other than a short visit to Norfolk, Va., to see off a Navy hospital ship dispatched to hard-hit New York. He talked wistfully of going to football games and resuming his campaign rallies. “I’d like to get out,” he said.



In the revised history of the pandemic that Mr. Trump and his team offered, his actions were not belated and inadequate, but bold and effective. “We did all the right moves,” Mr. Trump said. “If we didn’t do what we did, you would have had a million people die, maybe more, maybe two million people die.”



Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser who has been overseeing efforts to provide medical equipment to states hit hard by the coronavirus, presented a similarly revisionist account of the administration’s record on Wednesday.



“We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this, and I think that we’ve achieved all the different milestones that are needed,” Mr. Kushner said on “Fox & Friends,” one of the president’s favorite shows. “The federal government rose to the challenge, and this is a great success story. And I think that that’s really, you know, what needs to be told.”



The comments came on the same day that the Commerce Department reported that the economy contracted by 4.8 percent in the first quarter of the year, the largest decline since the recession of a decade ago and probably the forerunner of a much steeper collapse in the second quarter that could be the worst since the Great Depression.



At the same time, the reported death toll from the virus in the United States topped 60,000 — more killed in eight weeks than the 58,000 American troops killed in eight years of major combat in Vietnam. The death toll has already reached where it was expected to be in August, more than three months from now, according to projections accepted by the White House. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation now estimates that 73,000 will die by August.



Mr. Kushner’s comments drew scorn from critics of the administration. “On what planet is 59,000 plus deaths a ‘success story’?” Michael R. Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor and Justice Department inspector general, asked on Twitter.



Zac Petkanas, a Democratic strategist and campaign aide to Hillary Clinton in 2016, said the public would not be convinced.



“The truth is that Trump and his administration’s response is anything but a success — especially when it comes to testing,” said Mr. Petkanas, now working with a health care advocacy group called Protect Our Care. “They made huge promises that they simply haven’t delivered, including that ‘anybody who wants a test can get a test.’ But they aren’t fooling anyone.”



Presidents have gotten in trouble declaring success at odds with the reality on the ground, perhaps most memorably in recent years when President George W. Bush landed on an aircraft carrier deck in 2003 and declared major combat operations over in Iraq in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner. President Barack Obama later declared that “America’s war in Iraq will be over” when he pulled forces out in 2011, only to have to send troops back nearly three years later.



But Mr. Trump has demonstrated a striking tendency to try to frame the political narrative on his own terms, even when at variance with the facts, through relentless repetition and the power of his bully pulpit.



While making no criminal accusations last year against Mr. Trump, the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III pointedly said his report “does not exonerate” the president. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump declared so many times that it did that 35 percent of the public believed that Mr. Mueller had exonerated him, according to one poll, mainly the core supporters who matter to him most.



The need to shift the narrative was made abundantly clear by the latest spate of polls showing more Americans souring on his handling of the virus and supporting former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, in the November election.



A survey by USA Today and Suffolk University found Mr. Biden leading 50 percent to 40 percent in a two-way matchup, a margin that disturbed Mr. Trump’s strategists, who have said they recognize that the election will turn largely on the coronavirus and resulting economic meltdown.



In his public appearances on Wednesday, Mr. Trump did not dwell on the 60,000 dead or the tens of millions put out of work, but focused instead on what he claimed were the successes of his administration. “A lot of progress had been made,” he said. “It’s pretty incredible.”



Mr. Trump promoted a new study on a possible treatment and predicted that the virus would soon no longer be a major threat. “This is going away,” he said, “and when it’s gone, we’re going to be doing a lot of things.”



Mr. Kushner said May “will be a transition month” as states began reopening. “I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal,” he said. “And the hope is that by July, the country’s really rocking again.”



Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Kushner addressed why the president for weeks played down the virus, comparing it with the ordinary flu, predicting that cases would go down to zero and suggesting that the virus would “miraculously” disappear. People close to the White House have said that Mr. Kushner agreed with Mr. Trump early on that the Democrats and the news media were hyping the virus to damage the president, although Mr. Kushner’s allies have insisted that he always took it seriously.



In his television interview, Mr. Kushner rejected the concerns of governors and public health experts who said that testing remains woefully inadequate to justify reopening the country after weeks of lockdown. Mr. Trump’s administration committed this week to helping states be able to test at least 2 percent of their populations each month, but public health experts said that was a fraction of what is needed to map out how far the virus has spread.



“We’ve done more tests than any other country in the world, so we’ve got to be doing a lot of things right,” Mr. Kushner said, referring to 5.8 million tests as of Tuesday.



“The eternal lockdown crowd can make jokes on late-night television,” he added, “but the reality is that the data’s on our side.”



“And President Trump has created a pathway to safely open up our country and make sure that we can get our economy going and get America back to a place where it will be even stronger than it was before,” Mr. Kushner said."



Trump and Kushner on the Coronavirus: Wishful Thinking and Revisionist History - The New York Times

Trump Officials Are Said to Press Spies to Link Virus and Wuhan Labs - The New York Times

"Some analysts are worried that the pressure from senior officials could distort assessments about the coronavirus and be used as a weapon in an escalating battle with China.



WASHINGTON — Senior Trump administration officials have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak, according to current and former American officials. The effort comes as President Trump escalates a public campaign to blame China for the pandemic.



Some intelligence analysts are concerned that the pressure from administration officials will distort assessments about the virus and that they could be used as a political weapon in an intensifying battle with China over a disease that has infected more than three million people across the globe.



Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with H.I.V., Ebola and SARS.



Mr. Trump’s aides and Republicans in Congress have sought to blame China for the pandemic in part to deflect criticism of the administration’s mismanagement of the crisis in the United States, which now has more coronavirus cases than any country. More than one million Americans have been infected, and more than 60,000 have died.



Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former C.I.A. director and the administration’s most vocal hard-liner on China, has taken the lead in pushing American intelligence agencies for more information, according to current and former officials.



Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser who reported on SARS outbreaks as a journalist in China, has pressed intelligence agencies off and on since January to gather information that might support any origin theory linked to a lab.



And Anthony Ruggiero, the head of the National Security Council’s bureau tracking weapons of mass destruction, expressed frustration during one videoconference in January that the C.I.A. was unable to get behind any theory of the outbreak’s origin. C.I.A. analysts responded that they simply did not have the evidence to support any one theory with high confidence at the time, according to people familiar with the conversation.



The C.I.A.’s judgment was based in part on the fact that no signs had emerged that the Chinese government believed the outbreak came from a lab. The Chinese government has vigorously denied that the virus leaked from a lab while pushing disinformation on its origins, including suggesting that the American military created it.



Any American intelligence report blaming a Chinese institution and officials for the outbreak could significantly harm relations with China for years to come. And Trump administration officials could use it to try to prod other nations to publicly hold China accountable for coronavirus deaths even when the pandemic’s exact origins cannot be determined.



The State Department declined to answer questions about Mr. Pompeo’s role. Spokesmen for the White House and the National Security Council declined to comment. An official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged that the intelligence agencies had not agreed on an origin theory but were tracking down information and frequently updating policymakers.



NBC News reported earlier that administration officials had directed intelligence agencies to try to determine whether China and the World Health Organization hid information early on about the outbreak.



For months, scientists, spies and government officials have wrestled with varying theories about how the outbreak began, and many agree on the importance of determining the genesis of the pandemic. In government and academia, experts have ruled out the notion that it was concocted as a bioweapon. And they agree that the new pathogen began as a bat virus that evolved naturally, probably in another mammal, to become adept at infecting and killing humans.



A few veteran national security experts have pointed to a history of lab accidents infecting researchers to suggest it might have happened in this case, but many scientists have dismissed such theories.



“We do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” five scientists wrote in a paper published in March in Nature Medicine.



Mr. Trump has spoken publicly about the administration’s “very serious investigations” of the virus’s origin and China’s culpability. Those inquiries took on new urgency in late March, when intelligence officials presented information to the White House that prompted some career officials to reconsider the lab theory. The precise nature of the information, based in part on intercepted communications among Chinese officials, is unclear.



The current and former officials did not say whether Mr. Trump himself, who has shown little regard for the independent judgments of intelligence and law enforcement officials, has pressured the intelligence agencies. But he does want any information supporting the lab theory to set the stage for holding China responsible, according to two people familiar with his thinking.



He has expressed interest in an idea pushed by Michael Pillsbury, an informal China adviser to the White House, that Beijing could be sued for damages, with the United States seeking $10 million for every death. At a news conference this week, Mr. Trump said the administration was discussing a “very substantial” reparations claim against China — an idea that Beijing has already denounced.



“President Trump is demanding to know the origins of the virus and what Xi Jinping knew when about the cover-up,” Mr. Pillsbury said.



Major gaps remain in what is known about the new pathogen, including which kind of animal infected humans with the coronavirus and where the first transmission took place.



Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, has told his agencies to make a priority of determining the virus’s origin. His office convened a review of intelligence officials on April 7 to see whether the agencies could reach a consensus. The officials determined that at least so far, they could not.



Intelligence officials have repeatedly pointed out to the White House that determining the origins of the outbreak is fundamentally a scientific question that cannot be solved easily by spycraft.



A former intelligence official described senior aides’ repeated emphasis of the lab theory as “conclusion shopping,” a disparaging term among analysts that has echoes of the Bush administration’s 2002 push for assessments saying that Iraq had weapons of mass of destruction and links to Al Qaeda, perhaps the most notorious example of the politicization of intelligence.



The C.I.A. has yet to unearth any data beyond circumstantial evidence to bolster the lab theory, according to current and former government officials, and the agency has told policymakers it lacks enough information to either affirm or refute it. Only getting access to the lab itself and the virus samples it contains could provide definitive proof, if it exists, the officials said.



The Defense Intelligence Agency recently changed its analytic position to formally leave open the possibility of a theory of lab origin, officials said. Senior agency officials have asked analysts to take a closer look at the labs.



The reason for the change is unclear, but some officials attributed it to the intelligence analyzed in recent weeks. Others took a more jaundiced view: that the agency is trying to curry favor with White House officials. A spokesman for the agency, James M. Kudla, disputed that characterization. “It’s not D.I.A.’s role to make policy decisions or value judgments — and we do not,” he said.



Some American officials have become convinced that Beijing is not sharing all it knows.



Among Mr. Trump’s top aides, Mr. Pompeo in particular has tried to hammer China over the lab. On Wednesday, he said that the United States still had not “gained access” to the main campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of two sites that American officials who favor the lab accident theory have focused on, along with the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention.



Labs in Wuhan research bat viruses and are known to American officials; they are part of a coordinated global effort to monitor viruses. The virology institute has received funding and training from American agencies and scientists.



Mr. Pompeo seemed to refer to internal information about the outbreak during an interview on April 17 with Hugh Hewitt, a conservative radio host.



“We know that the Chinese Communist Party, when it began to evaluate what to do inside of Wuhan, considered whether the W.I.V. was, in fact, the place where this came from,” said Mr. Pompeo, referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.



The State Department declined to indicate what was behind his assertion.



Scientists Weigh In

Scientists who study the coronavirus have maintained that the initial spillover from animal to person could have occurred in any number of ways: at a farm where wild animals are raised, through accidental contact with a bat or another animal that carried the virus, in hunting or transporting animals.



The scientists have also scrutinized the new pathogen’s genes, finding that they show great similarity to bat coronaviruses and bear no hints of human tampering or curation.



The odds were astronomical against a lab release as opposed to an event in nature, said Kristian G. Andersen, the lead author of the paper published in Nature Medicine and a specialist in infectious disease at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California.



He acknowledged that it was theoretically possible that a researcher had found the new virus, fully evolved, in a bat or other animal and taken it into the lab. But, he said, based on the evidence his team gathered and the numerous opportunities for infection in the interactions that many farmers, hunters and others have with wild animals, “there just isn’t a reason to consider the lab as a potential explanation.”



No evidence supports the theory that the coronavirus originated “in a laboratory either intentionally or by accident,” Daniel R. Lucey, an expert on pandemics at Georgetown University who has closely tracked what is known about the origins, wrote this week.



He has called on China to share information about animals sold at a market in Wuhan that was linked to some of the earliest known cases of people infected with the virus, though not the first one. Dr. Lucey has raised questions about whether the market was, in fact, where the virus spilled over from animals to people. The limited information released about environmental samples taken from the market that were positive for the coronavirus do not resolve whether the source was animals sold there or people working or visiting the market, or both, he wrote.



But Richard Ebright, a microbiologist and biosafety expert at Rutgers University, has argued that the probability of a lab accident was “substantial,” pointing to a history of such occurrences that have infected researchers. The Wuhan labs and other centers worldwide that examine naturally occurring viruses have questionable safety rules, he said, adding, “The standards are lax and need to be tightened.”



American officials said they closely watched China’s government this winter for signs of a lab accident but found nothing conclusive. In February, President Xi Jinping stressed the need for a plan to ensure the “biosafety and biosecurity of the country.” And the Ministry of Science and Technology announced new guidelines for laboratories, especially ones handling viruses.



Global Times, a popular state-run newspaper, then published an article on “chronic inadequate management issues” at laboratories, including problems with biological disposal.



And American scientists who had developed relationships with researchers in the Wuhan labs had been in touch with them during the initial outbreak. But by mid-January, American officials said, the Chinese scientists cut off official communications.



William J. Broad and James Gorman contributed reporting from New York."





Trump Officials Are Said to Press Spies to Link Virus and Wuhan Labs - The New York Times

In two months this happened and fools who obviously did not do well in math don't understand exponential growth want to reopen the country now. this is utterly stupid.

Falwell Focuses on Critics as Coronavirus Cases Near Liberty University Grow - The New York Times

"Jerry Falwell Jr. has tried to have journalists arrested as he maintains he has been unfairly maligned. But the coronavirus keeps spreading around Liberty University.



WASHINGTON — Jerry Falwell Jr.’s angry counteroffensive against critics of his decision to invite Liberty University students back to its Lynchburg, Va., campus after spring break has played out in the media, the courts, even with the campus police.



But his campaign has been undermined by the spread of a virus he cannot control.



Since March 29, when the first case was diagnosed in a Liberty student living off-campus, confirmed coronavirus cases in the Central Virginia health district, which surrounds Lynchburg and Liberty, have grown from seven to 78. One person has died. On Tuesday, a Lynchburg city police officer tested positive, forcing another officer into quarantine and setting off a furious effort to trace all of the infected officer’s contacts.



It is not known whether any of those cases are linked to returning Liberty students, but the university community is exposed as well. Liberty said on Wednesday night that two employees had tested positive for the coronavirus, two more had results pending, and seven were quarantined at home. Beyond the one acknowledged infection in a student, who the university said was not enrolled in classes, test results are due Friday on another student. Two other students have been relocated and quarantined in an annex with “no symptoms, no test.”



A worship leader at Thomas Road Baptist Church, which is adjacent to and affiliated with Liberty’s campus, is also sick with Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.



“It’s been quite a two weeks,” the leader, Charles Billingsley, said in an emotional message on Facebook.



Amid those struggles, a Liberty student on Monday filed a class-action lawsuit in a federal court in Virginia, saying that Liberty and Mr. Falwell had “placed students at severe physical risk and refused to refund thousands of dollars in fees owed to them for the Spring 2020 semester,” according to a statement from the law firm filing the suit.



The furor in Lynchburg centers on Mr. Falwell’s decision to open the campus to all students and staff at a time when most American universities were closing for fear of spreading the disease. For weeks before that decision, Mr. Falwell had derided other universities’ coronavirus responses as overreactions driven by a desire to harm President Trump.



“We think it’s irresponsible for so many universities to just say ‘closed, you can’t come back,’ push the problem off on other communities and sit there in their ivory towers,” he told a conservative radio host.



Since the media spotlight trained on Liberty’s decisions, Mr. Falwell, a close ally of Mr. Trump, has protested that his policies were no different than many other university administrators, and that he has been singled out for unfair criticism by liberal journalists bent on his destruction.



“The facts are that Liberty University’s response to the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic is indistinguishable from that of many, if not most, universities, and, more importantly, it had not experienced a single on-campus student or employee testing positive for Covid-19,” he said this week in a statement that ignored illnesses among off-campus members of the Liberty community.



To his supporters, he has been less temperate. The media, he said in a radio interview with John Fredericks, who identified himself as a Trump campaign operative, “just want power, they’re authoritarian, they’re like nothing I’ve seen since, if you go back in history, to Nazi Germany. That’s what they remind me of.”



And he has spared no effort to defend his actions since articles on Liberty’s reopening ran in ProPublica and The New York Times. He pursued arrest warrants for misdemeanor trespassing against two journalists, Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica, and Julia Rendleman, a freelance photographer for The Times. He enlisted a New York law firm to threaten legal action against The Times and, he has said, other outlets as well.



He called a Times reporter shortly before midnight, leaving a voice mail message that said, “you’re in some serious trouble.” He accused the journalists of putting his students at risk because they traveled from New York City. (They did not.)



Last week, Liberty ran full-page advertisements in regional newspapers saying that reopening the campus after spring break put Liberty “in pretty good company” with Virginia Tech, the University of California at Los Angeles, Texas A&M, and Arizona State University.



But all of those actions have had consequences.



Liberty’s legal threat against the photographer elicited a response from the newspaper’s counsel, David McCraw.



“Julia was engaged in the most routine form of news gathering: taking pictures for a news story,” Mr. McCraw said in a statement. “We are disappointed that Liberty University would decide to make that into a criminal case and go after a freelance journalist because its officials were unhappy with press coverage of the university’s decision to reopen campus in the midst of the pandemic.”



Virginia Tech and U.C.L.A., singled out in Liberty’s ad, said Liberty’s portrayal of their on-campus population after spring break was inaccurate and inflated.



Liberty incorrectly said the number of students still living on Virginia Tech’s campus after spring break was 950, when the true number was 483, said Tracy Vosburgh, vice president for university relations at Virginia Tech. Before the ads ran, “we notified Liberty on Thursday, April 9 that the number was incorrect,” she said, and asked that Liberty correct it at the time. Liberty did not.



U.C.L.A. spokesman Steve Ritea made a similar point: Liberty University “inaccurately projected that 20 percent of our student population remained on campus after spring break,” he said. “In fact, that percentage is in the low single digits.”



Officials at Arizona State and Texas A&M said the numbers in the Liberty ad were correct.



About 1,900 Liberty students initially returned to campus; the university has said it does not know how many more returned to off-campus housing in Lynchburg. Liberty said on Wednesday that 1,060 students remain on campus, providing no count of off-campus students.



The university continued in-person teaching for a couple of classes until Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam ordered that all higher education institutions in the state cease such instruction. That order came after The New York Times article disclosed that one Liberty student had tested positive for Covid-19.



Mr. Falwell has announced that residential students who did not return to campus would receive a $1,000 credit toward fees for the next school year, but lawyers leading the lawsuit against him say that is a fraction of the lost residential fees, which were between $9,200 and $16,000 for the 2019-2020 academic year.



Adam Levitt, a partner at the DiCello, Levitt, Gutzler law firm that represents the student who filed the class action lawsuit, said that since filing the suit on Monday, “a substantial number of students and family members have reached out to us.” He put the numbers in double digits but declined to be more specific.



“Like other universities,” Mr. Falwell acknowledged in his statement Wednesday, Liberty has been sued “as a result of state-mandated restrictions.” He added, “we think the law is clear that these claims are without merit.”



City officials say that Mr. Falwell assured them during spring break that only about 300 students, who either live abroad or had nowhere else to go would return after spring break. Then he changed his mind, reopening the campus to a potential population of thousands.



Mr. Falwell has not contacted Lynchburg Mayor Treney Tweedy or the city manager, Bonnie Svrcek, since bringing the students back to campus, a move the mayor called “reckless” at the time.



In an interview on a conservative radio show on Tuesday, Mr. Falwell blamed national media coverage for the backlash. “I really attribute all what the mayor said and what the city manager said to fear that was put into them by lies from the national press,” Mr. Falwell said.



Ms. Svrcek called that characterization “unfounded, ridiculous and insulting.”



“I am not and never have been motivated by fear of anyone,” she said in an email Tuesday night. “My and the mayor’s request of President Falwell to close the university following spring break was based on President Trump’s and Governor Northam’s emergency declaration.”



Last week the city furloughed 47 part-time employees, trying to plug a $4.9 million tax revenue shortfall this year, after coronavirus social distancing measures closed most businesses."



Falwell Focuses on Critics as Coronavirus Cases Near Liberty University Grow - The New York Times