Stolen childhood: Life after prison for Palestinian minors

Palestinian children jailed by Israel face trauma and the challenges of trying to regain their childhood

Israeli border guards detain a Palestinian boy during a demonstration outside the Lions Gate, a main entrance to Al-Aqsa mosque compound on 17 July 2017 (AFP)

Chloé Benoist-Monday 5 March 2018

OCCUPIED WEST BANK - Sometimes, 18-year old Mohammad dreams that he is back in Ofer military prison.

“I remember my friends in prison. I feel that I am in there again,” the young Palestinian said softly, looking down as he recalled the eight months he spent imprisoned by Israel between 2016 and 2017.

She lost her childhood because of something we - the world, adults - are responsible for

- Bassem Tamimi, Palestinian political activist

Mohammad, who preferred not to mention his last name for safety reasons, was detained when he was only 16 years old.

According to Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer, 330 Palestinian minors were imprisoned by Israel in January.

Sixteen-year-old Ahed Tamimi stands for a hearing in the military court at Ofer military prison in the West Bank village of Betunia on 1 January 2018 (AFP)

Among them is Ahed Tamimi, the 17-year-old girl whose case has made global headlines since she was detained in December.

“Yes, I feel proud. Yes, she is strong,” said political activist and Ahed's father, Bassem Tamimi. “But she grew up before her age. She lost her childhood because of something we - the world, adults - are responsible for.”

Physical violence

According to Carol Zoughbi-Janineh, administrative supervisor of the East Jerusalem YMCA rehabilitation programme for former child prisoners, the number of Palestinian children detained by Israeli forces has steadily increased since the year 2000.

“When we started the programme [in 2008], we had between 500 and 700 children detained yearly. Last year we had 1,467 children detained,” she told MEE. “It is very alarming.”

While the overwhelming majority of imprisoned minors are boys, Zoughbi-Janineh said girls have increasingly been detained in the past three years, with more than 60 girls detained in 2017, a sharp rise from one or two each year prior to 2015.

Several rights organisations have denounced the incarceration conditions for Palestinian children over the years - pointing to the systematic prosecution in front of military courts, with a nearly 100 percent conviction rate. 

According to Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP), three out of four minors are subjected to physical violence during arrest or interrogation. 

Israeli border police detain a Palestinian youth as crowds make their way through the Israeli Qalandia checkpoint, in the occupied West Bank, to attend Friday prayers (AFP)

Reports by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Israeli rights groups B'Tselem and HaMoked have found that Israeli forces use unnecessary force while detaining children and "routinely" interrogate them without the presence of a parent or lawyer. Several minors reported being slapped, kicked, hit and blindfolded during their arrest or interrogation.

According to human rights groups, minors are often made to sign documents written in Hebrew despite not understanding the language. Moreover, children are usually detained alongside adults.

The Israeli Prison Service (IPS) did not respond to MEE’s request for comment on the detention conditions and reported violations for Palestinian minors, or on what psychosocial services, if any, were available for child prisoners by the time of publication.

Nearly half of Palestinians in the occupied territory are under the age of 18. For Mohammad, Ahed, and many other young Palestinians who have been detained by Israel, the hardship does not stop upon being released from prison. These children must learn how to regain their childhood after such a traumatic experience.

Hailed as heroes

Mohammad was detained by Israeli forces in late 2016 along with several of his friends while they were hanging out near a local youth centre.

Mohammad, 18, spent eight months in Israeli prisons when he was 16 years old (MEE/Chloé Benoist)

According to Mohammad, he was beaten during his arrest and while in Israeli custody and accused of throwing stones, which is a common charge against Palestinian minors.

If convicted, it can lead to up to 20 years in prison, but Mohammad was released eight months later without having been convicted of any wrongdoing.

“When I was released I felt surprise,” Mohammad said, remembering the event nearly a year later. “Liberation after being detained for eight months, after being told that I wasn’t guilty of anything, I felt happy and stunned at the same time because I didn’t expect to be released.”

While prisoner releases are big celebrations in the occupied Palestinian territory, in the aftermath former prisoners are often left grappling with difficult thoughts and emotions as life returns to normal - a complex process, which is much more difficult for children.

“Children are more affected than adults [by prison] because their defence mechanisms are weaker, because their brains are still developing,” Palestinian psychiatrist and psychotherapist Samah Jabr warned. “An experience like this can break the social fabric around the child, their relationship with their family and society.”

 I think it is an attempt to bring the community to its knees. The Israelis wish for Palestinians to become shadows of who they are

- Samah Jabr, psychiatrist and psychotherapist

Prisoners held by Israel are hailed as heroes in Palestinian society, a role which can pressure minors not to exhibit signs of weakness. 

“Sometimes that role puts people in a straitjacket. They cannot express the pain; they cannot seek help; they cannot show their vulnerabilities,” Jabr said.

Both Jabr and Zoughbi-Janineh listed a plethora of psychological symptoms experienced by children after being released from prison, including depression, anxiety, troubles focusing, introversion, or aggressive behaviour.

“If I am with my friends or my family, I don’t feel sad. But if I am alone at home, I start thinking about prison and everything. I start feeling sad,” Mohammad said, adding that he spends much of his time out with friends in order to avoid being alone with his thoughts.

While Jabr said many of the symptoms exhibited by former child prisoners could fall under the umbrella of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the ongoing trauma caused by the 70-year Israeli occupation made it difficult to approach such issues in the past tense.

Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist who works with children that have been imprisoned by Israel, on 25 February (MEE/Chloé Benoist)

“I rarely diagnose these children with PTSD. I think what happens is a more subtle destruction of their personality. It’s not just one traumatic event and then people live in peace forever after,” said Jabr, who is author of Derrière les fronts (Behind the Frontlines), which takes a look at the psychological impact of the occupation. The book is expected to come out later this month. 

'Powerless to protect their children'

From the moment of the arrest - often occuring at home in the middle of the night - child prisoners are scarred by “stunning images of impotence, weakness, and helplessness of parents” unable to protect their children, Jabr said.

[House arrest] is more psychologically devastating because the parents are asked to imprison their own child

- Carol Zoughbi-Janineh, administrative supervisor, YMCA

Zoughbi highlighted an even greater struggle for families in annexed East Jerusalem, where many children are sentenced to house arrest instead of prison.

“At first you might think ‘my child is not in prison,’ but [being] at home is more psychologically devastating because the parents are asked to imprison their own child,” she said. “You no longer look up to your parents as parents. You see them as prison guards."

Upon being released, families often struggle to rebuild the bond of trust between parent and child, as children rebel against parental authority.

Many children struggle to readjust in school, suffering from psychological troubles and falling behind in classes after having spent long periods of time in prison with minimal access to education. As a result, former child prisoners such as Mohammad often drop out of school. Mohammad quit high school and now works two part-time jobs. 

Friendships also end up being affected, as ex-detainee children struggle relating to their peers and exhibit signs of isolation.

“Before prison I would be extroverted, speak loudly, but now I am more silent,” Mohammad said, adding that he felt a stronger kinship with friends who were in prison with him than those who were never detained “because those outside haven’t been through anything like this".

Before prison I would be extroverted, speak loudly, but now I am more silent

- Mohammad, former prisoner

Because he fears being detained again, Mohammad has stopped going to a local youth centre close to where he was detained and he is always home by 10pm at the latest.

A community member told MEE that Israeli forces had raided Mohammad’s hometown and detained the young man and a friend for a few hours, days after the interview. They were released without being informed of why they were held in the first place, confirming Mohammad’s fears.

'When you don't have a choice'

While NGOs like the YMCA provide rehabilitation services to former child prisoners, Zoughbi-Janineh said that the organisation can only take on 400 cases each year at most, highlighting that limited capacities seriously impede outreach to all affected youth in need of support.

Bassem Tamimi is a Palestinian political activist and Ahed Tamimi's father (Photo courtesy of Bassem Tamimi)

Meanwhile, Bassem Tamimi cautioned that many families, particularly in politically active places such as the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, distrusted foreign NGOs tasked with providing psychological services. They are wary that such organisations might discourage the children from engaging in resistance activities.

“Is throwing stones part of the trauma? Someone might evaluate it like that, yes,” he said. “Or is it a treatment for the nervousness inside? Maybe the children heal themselves by not being a victim.”

If anyone gave us a safe place in Palestine, we would put our children there

- Bassem Tamimi, Palestinian political activist

Bassem said that residents of Nabi Saleh, where the Tamimi family lives, had devised their own ways of helping children face the threat of detention. He said that he always strives to explain the situation to his children from a young age instead of shielding them.

“If I scare my children and keep them to the side, then they will be broken inside, and that is worse for them than if their hand was broken,” he said.

Bassem mentioned that the village had organised several training sessions during which children were told what to expect during detention, interrogation and trial, including demonstrations during which minors were blindfolded and handcuffed. Manal Tamimi, Ahed’s aunt, commented on one of these training sessions on Facebook in February saying:

“Yes it’s not normal to put these young children in such a training, and we’re not normalising the situation, but this is our reality and our life and those minors should be ready for everything [that] could happen."

On her part, Jabr expressed reservations about such training sessions.

“I prefer a more general and less anxiety-provoking approach,” she said. “An approach in which we promote the resilience, the strengths of people, their social skills, assertiveness, relaxation techniques,” she said.

Jabr said she worked with school counsellors, teachers, community organisers and coaches to create community networks of adults sensitised to children’s psychosocial needs. It is an approach that she said could bypass the stigma attached to seeking psychological help.

We must train ourselves to deal with this situation, to be strong enough to face it, to raise our children in a different way

- Bassem Tamimi, Palestinian political activist

For Jabr, the incarceration of children marked a conscious Israeli policy targeting Palestinian youth.

“I think this is a very deliberate action to intimidate the Palestinian community,” she said. “When people experience it at a very early age, I think it is an attempt to bring the community to its knees. The Israelis wish for Palestinians to become shadows of who they are.”

Bassem pushed back against perceptions, spread by Israeli officials, that Palestinians care little about their children’s well-being.

“Sometimes they accuse us of using our children, of putting them in danger,” Tamimi said. “If anyone gave us a safe place in Palestine, we would put our children there. But she (Ahed) is not in a position that will allow her to live a normal life.

“Our situation needs a treatment: to end the occupation,” he added. “When you don’t have a choice, what should you do? We must train ourselves to deal with this situation, to be strong enough to face it, to raise our children in a different way.”

What’s in Al Jazeera’s undercover film on the US Israel lobby?

Israeli border guards detain a Palestinian boy during a demonstration outside the Lions Gate, a main entrance to Al-Aqsa mosque compound on 17 July 2017 (AFP)

Chloé Benoist-Monday 5 March 2018 

The leading neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies is functioning as an agent of the Israeli government, Al Jazeera’s forthcoming investigation on the US Israel lobby will reveal.

According to a source who has seen the undercover documentary, it contains footage of a powerful Israeli official claiming that “We have FDD. We have others working on this.”

Sima Vaknin-Gil, a former Israeli military intelligence officer, is said to state that the foundation is “working on” projects for Israel including “data gathering, information analysis, working on activist organizations, money trail. This is something that only a country, with its resources, can do the best.”
Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, commonly known as FARA, US organizations and individuals who work on behalf of foreign governments are required to register with the counterintelligence section of the Department of Justice.

A search on the FARA website shows that the Foundation for Defense of Democracies is not registered.

Al Jazeera’s film reportedly identifies a number of lobby groups as working with Israel to spy on American citizens using sophisticated data gathering techniques. The documentary is also said to cast light on covert efforts to smear and intimidate Americans seen as too critical of Israel.

Israel lobby groups have placed intense pressure on Qatar, which funds Al Jazeera, to shelve the film, fueling speculation it may never be aired.

Covert agent of Israel

Sima Vaknin-Gil, who holds the rank of brigadier-general in Israel’s military, is now the top civil servant at Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

The ministry is in charge of running a covert campaign of sabotage against BDS, the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement in support of Palestinian human rights.

Vaknin-Gil’s ministerial boss is Gilad Erdan, a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Soon after she was appointed to lead the ministry at the start of 2016, Vaknin-Gil promised to “create a community of fighters” who would “flood the internet” with Israeli propaganda that would be publicly distanced from the government.

As well as getting funding from Sheldon Adelson, the anti-Palestinian billionaire and number one donor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has close ties to the United Arab Emirates.

In hacked emails last year the Emirati ambassador in Washington encouraged the foundation to push for moving a US military base from Qatar to his own country.

The film will also reportedly show undercover footage of a junior Israel lobbyist boasting of how close Israel’s ties are with the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf regimes.

UAE, Israel deepening ties

Max Adelstein posing at last year’s AIPAC conference with Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog. (Instagram)

Max Adelstein is said to be seen in the film stating that the lobby has helped Israel and the United Arab Emirates develop security links “all under the table.”

Adelstein was an intern at Washington lobbying firm the Harbour Group. The firm’s clients include the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

It received $2.2 million from the UAE and more than $300,000 from Saudi Arabia during the six months ending 30 September 2017.

Adelstein now says he works for AIPAC, Washington’s most powerful Israel lobby group whose annual conference began Sunday.

The film is said to show Adelstein boasting that ties between the United Arab Emirates and Israel are “getting so much better, and nobody knows it.”

He told an undercover Al Jazeera reporter that “The governments have to coordinate on security. It’s all under the table. But on trade, security, tech, medicine, there’s a lot of cooperation.”

According to The Electronic Intifada’s source, Adelstein is seen in the undercover footage explaining that an American Jewish Committee “study tour” of the United Arab Emirates focusing on “mutual cooperation” was planned.

In January, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a forum of Israel lobby groups whose membership includes the American Jewish Committee, announced it had sent a “large delegation” of leaders to the United Arab Emirates, where it “met with everybody at the highest levels.”

The additional insight into the United Arab Emirates’ cozying up to Israel lobby groups comes as the wealthy monarchy’s activities in Washington are facing renewed scrutiny.

On Saturday, The New York Times reported that special counsel Robert Mueller is expanding his investigation from alleged Russian meddling in the US presidential election to “include Emirati influence on the Trump administration” through the president’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.

“Anti-Semitism as a smear is not what it used to be”

Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is said to be seen in the undercover footage briefing recruits on how to smear Palestine solidarity groups in the US who support the BDS movement.

According to the source, Schanzer admits to the undercover reporter that “BDS has taken everybody by surprise.”

He calls the response by Israel lobby groups “a complete mess,” adding, “I don’t think that anybody’s doing a good job. We’re not even doing a good job.”

According to the source, Schanzer laments that attempts to smear Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine as linked to extremist Islamic terrorism have failed to gain traction.

He is also said to regret that the Israel lobby’s habitual tactic of falsely alleging Palestine solidarity activists are motivated by anti-Jewish hatred is losing its impact.

“Personally I think anti-Semitism as a smear is not what it used to be,” he is said to tell the undercover reporter.

Schanzer’s views echo a secret report endorsed by the Israeli government and distributed to Israel lobby leaders last year. That report, a leaked copy of which was published by The Electronic Intifada, concludes that Israel’s efforts to stem the growth of the Palestine solidarity movement have largely failed.

Film delayed

In October last year, Clayton Swisher, Al Jazeera’s head of investigations, first announced that the Qatari satellite channel had in 2016 run an undercover journalist in the US Israel lobby.

Swisher made the announcement soon after the UK’s broadcast regulator dismissed all complaints against Al Jazeera’s film The Lobby.

That documentary, broadcast in January 2017, exposed Israel’s covert influence campaign in the UK’s ruling Conservative and opposition Labour parties. The film revealed an Israeli embassy agent plotting with a British civil servant to “take down” a government minister seen as too critical of Israel.

Although Swisher promised the US film would come out “very soon,” nearly five months later it has yet to be broadcast.

Israel lobby in Qatar

Over the same period, a wave of Israel lobbyists has visited Qatar at the invitation of its ruler, Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

Among them have been some of the most rightwing and extreme figures among Israel’s defenders in the US, including Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America.

Multiple Israel lobby sources told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper last month that they had received assurances from Qatari leaders late last year that the Al Jazeera documentary will not be aired.
Qatar has denied this.

Pro-Israel groups have gone on the offensive to try and deter Al Jazeera from showing the film.

“Let’s not mince words about what this was – a well-funded, professional espionage operation carried out by Qatar on American soil,” Noah Pollak, executive director of the neoconservative Committee for Israel, has stated.

Ironically, pro-Israel members of Congress are now pressuring the Department of Justice to force Al Jazeera to register as an arm of Qatar, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, just as the Russian-funded network RT was recently forced to do.

Whether this pressure will succeed in burying the documentary for good is perhaps the ultimate test of the Israel lobby influence Al Jazeera journalists sought to expose.

Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist and associate editor with The Electronic Intifada.

Eastern Ghouta deaths total 77 in one day

Monday the deadliest day so far for besieged civilians in Syrian enclave in Damascus, as bodies of a further 12 people killed on Sunday are also retrieved

A wounded Syrian child receives medical treatment after being hit in an airstrike by the Assad regime on a residential area of eastern Ghouta. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Kareem Shaheen in Istanbul and Peter Beaumont Mon 5 Mar 2018 21.06 GMT

At least 77 people have been killed in the besieged Syrian enclave of eastern Ghouta on Monday – the deadliest day for civilians there since the UN Security Council demanded an immediate ceasefire and Russia’s president ordered a daily five-hour truce in the area.

A further 12 people were killed on Sunday but their bodies were only recovered on Monday, doctors said.

The intense violence continued despite the arrival of a humanitarian convoy in the enclave, two weeks into a renewed regime offensive that has killed more than 700 civilians.

The convoy of 46 trucks – a joint effort by the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the United Nations – was allowed to deliver food for about 27,000 of the 400,000 people trapped in the enclave.

It was the first aid delivery to the reach the enclave in weeks, but humanitarian officials said the Syrian military had refused to allow it to bring in critically needed medical supplies.

Ongoing shelling in the area forced the convoy to leave before all the food aid was unloaded.
Pawel Krzysiek, the head of communications for the ICRC in Syria said the situation for civilians trapped inside East Ghouta was “very precarious.”

Krzysiek told the Guardian that thousands of civilians had been sheltering in freezing basements for more than two weeks, without water or proper sanitation.

“It took more than 15 days for their children to see the sunlight. There is no possibility to really go outside because the shelling gets so intense,” he said.

“They also fear to eat in front of other people because pretty much everyone there is hungry. So they are very often forced to go back to their places that are more exposed to eat their food – and unfortunately many of them get caught up in the airstrikes when the planes come or the shelling starts.”

“The people are tired and angry, desperate, exhausted, hopeless. They want it to stop. They want to be able to live with dignity, eat normal food, not spend their days in the basement,” he said.

A desperate shortage of supplies meant that the wounded have been dying from treatable injuries and illnesses, aid organisations said.

Volunteers from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent on Monday. Photograph: Youssef Badawi/EPA

World Health Organisation official Tarik Jašarević told the Guardian that Syrian authorities who inspected the convoy refused to allow in supplies of trauma, surgical and dialysis equipment.

“WHO has long spoken out against the removal or rejection of lifesaving treatments and medical items from aid convoys by national authorities. The health supplies provided by WHO in these convoys are selected after extensive consultations with health partners working in these areas and are desperately needed to save lives and reduce suffering.”

Doctors on the ground said 712 people had been killed and more than 5,600 wounded since 19 February.

The airstrikes and artillery bombardment have been coupled with a ground offensive by the regime of Bashar al-Assad and his allied Shia militias, whose advances are aimed at splitting eastern Ghouta in half and cutting off rebel fighters.

he World Food Programme’s country director in Syria said aid efforts were still paralysed in many places.

“A humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Eastern Ghouta where raging violence has paralysed our response and our ability to reach families who desperately need help,” said Jakob Kern.

Denying access to medical aid and targeting hospitals in eastern Ghouta has been condemned as a deliberate policy of the Assad regime. Photograph: Ammar Suleiman/AFP/Getty Images

He said he hoped a second convoy could reach eastern Ghouta on Thursday with food rations for some extra 70,000 people.

“The longer Eastern Ghouta is deprived of the necessities of life, the more people will die. We appeal to all parties to allow the ongoing and safe delivery of aid to all people in need, no matter where they are.”

Some of the heaviest fighting on Sunday was concentrated in the area of Beit Sawa, on the eastern edge of the densely populated centre of eastern Ghouta, where civilians fled clashes between regime forces and Jaysh al-Islam, one of three main rebel groups.

At a press conference on Sunday evening, Assad vowed to continue what he described as a battle against terrorism in the enclave.

Monday’s roll call of the dead included one doctor. Denying access to medical aid and targeting hospitals in eastern Ghouta has been condemned as a deliberate policy of the Assad regime.

Abdulkarim Ekzayez, a senior fellow at the Centre on Global Health Security, wrote on the Chatham House website last month that targeting healthcare facilities had been used in the past as a tactic to force the displacement of civilians.

A Summer Vacation in China’s Muslim Gulag

An officer speaks into a radio transmitter at a prison in China. (Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images) 

By Special Correspondent- February 28, 2018, 1:35 PM

Since announcing a “people’s war on terror” in 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has created an unprecedented network of re-education camps in the autonomous Xinjiang region that are essentially ethnic gulags. Unlike the surgical “strike hard” campaigns of the recent past, the people’s war uses a carpet-bombing approach to the country’s tumultuous western border region. Chen Quanguo, Xinjiang’s party secretary and the architect of this security program, encouraged his forces to “bury the corpses of terrorists in the vast sea of a people’s war.” But the attempt to drown a few combatants has pulled thousands of innocent people under in its wake.

Sporadic violence has rattled the region since July 5, 2009, when indigenous Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority, took to the streets of Urumqi, the regional capital, to protest the murder of fellow Uighurs who worked in the southern Chinese city of Shaoguan. The protests spiraled into a riot, which claimed 197 lives and nearly 2,000 injuries before order was restored. Insurrection has since spread beyond the capital, and skirmishes between Uighurs and security personnel have become common occurrences.

Amid the protracted conflict and rising Islamophobia in China, Communist Party officials are responding by creating a surveillance state. In the 12 months preceding September 2017 alone, the party-state advertised nearly 100,000 security positions in Xinjiang. Every resident of the region has been affixed with the label “safe,” “normal,” or “unsafe,” based on metrics such as age, faith, religious practices, foreign contacts, and experience abroad. Those deemed unsafe, whether or not they are guilty of wrongdoing, are regularly detained and imprisoned without due process.

Estimates indicate that as many as 800,000 individuals, mostly Uighurs, have been incarcerated in the re-education camps. Based on the current population of Uighurs in Xinjiang, which stands at some 11 million, this amounts to the extrajudicial detention of nearly 10 percent of the ethno-national group.

While Chinese officials maintain that these re-education camps are schools for eradicating extremism, teaching Chinese language, and promoting correct political thought, Radio Free Asia has reported that the detention centers are overpopulated and detainees poorly treated. Those reports are confirmed by testimony from a young Uighur man studying in the United States, torn from the American university where he studied, and where I work, to a Chinese gulag. He shared his story with me over four meetings in 2017 and 2018. (Due to concerns for Iman’s security — the Chinese government has previously targeted the families of Uighur writers — pseudonyms have been used for all parties.)

Iman, from a middle-class Uighur family, came to study in the United States a few years ago. He succeeded in the Chinese education system, even earning a degree from a university in eastern China. In 2017, Iman flew back to China for the summer recess, planning to spend time with friends on the east coast before he returned to Xinjiang to see his mother. Despite the exhaustion from the long flight, he was filled with joy as he landed in the Chinese metropolis where he’d previously lived for several years, despite the discrimination he would likely face. Ethnic minorities in China, especially Uighurs, are often denied hotel rooms.

As he remained strapped in his seat, a flight attendant approached. “They are asking for you,” the woman told him. “It’s probably just a visa issue.” Her words were of little comfort — after all, he possessed a Chinese passport.

Three uniformed Han Chinese border patrol officers waited for the young Uighur student on the jet bridge. Taken into custody, he was subject to a cavity search and then had his devices checked. “I knew to delete any sensitive files before the flight,” Iman recalled with a smirk. Unable to find incrementing files, an officer rattled off a barrage of questions: “What do you do in North America? Where do you study? We found business cards of Chinese professors. You know a lot of important people, don’t you?”

Although unnerved, Iman answered each question with carefully constructed responses. Airport interrogations were nothing new to the young man — he was subjected to questioning after landing in China the previous year — but the protocol was different this time. The inspection was much more thorough, the officers more meticulous and less friendly. “I knew something was wrong when an officer inspected my shoes. They took out the soles, looked inside, turned them upside-down, and violently shook them. This never happened in the past.”

Another officer approached Iman and told him he would be transported to a local jail. The young man demanded an explanation or at least a formal charge. He was given neither. “May I at least call my mother?” Iman asked. “I want to let her know I’ve arrived safely.” His request was denied. “Will you call her for me?” the young man pleaded. The officer retorted, “No, we can’t call her. The local police in Xinjiang should provide her with an update.”

Iman was held for nine days in a local jail while the border authorities contacted law enforcement from his hometown in Xinjiang. He was the only Uighur in a room of 34. On the ninth day of his incarceration, the police squad from Xinjiang arrived. They cuffed Iman tightly and transported him to the train station. “Are the handcuffs necessary?” Iman asked. “Don’t ask questions,” one officer demanded. “We are being lenient — you are supposed to be shackled, too.”

The three Han officers from Iman’s hometown escorted the young man to a train bound for Xinjiang. First, though, these three officers had their own questions. They repeatedly asked if Iman received a notice from his local police station requesting his return before May 20, 2017, in reference to a regionwide order that required Uighurs studying outside China to return to their hometowns. Iman had not. The four individuals spent the next 50 hours packed in a hard sleeper compartment set aside for the security personnel. As they settled on the train, one of the Han officers handed Iman, who observes Islamic dietary laws, a sack of bread. “It was more difficult to find halal food in this city than we expected. This is the best we could do. It has to last you until we reach Xinjiang.”

Iman’s hands remained bound for the entire trip. He was only permitted to leave the compartment to use the restroom but was accompanied by at least one officer on each occasion. While awake, he spent his time reading textbooks he brought from America. “I wore my glasses and read for hours. I thought if I looked as if I was studious, the officers wouldn’t consider me a threat.”

The four detrained in Turpan in eastern Xinjiang. “Put this on,” one officer barked as he shoved a hood stitched of heavy fabric at Iman. The three officers then guided him to a vehicle and departed for Iman’s hometown. The poor ventilation under the hood was made more suffocating by the stale air inside the vehicle, hunger, and dehydration. Iman began suffering from severe nausea. The officers agreed to remove the hood. His symptoms slightly alleviated, and Iman began to engage in small talk with the officers. Coincidently, the chief was Iman’s former classmate, and they reminisced about their school days.

The camaraderie was brief; the vehicle was pulling into the local police station. It was the police chief’s turn to interrogate Iman, who was eating his first proper meal since he landed in China, a bowl of soyman, a dish made of small, flat noodles mixed with vegetables. The meal, however, could not prevent the panic attack that soon overcame Iman. During this third round of interrogation, Iman became dizzy and sweated profusely. “I felt as if I had just played a grueling soccer game. My discomfort induced uncontrollable laughter and then a sensation that I was going to faint.”

The stress intensified as he was taken to the detention center, or kanshousuo. “I was terrified as we approached.” (As we talked, for the first time Iman directed his gaze at the ground, avoiding eye contact.) “The compound was surrounded by towering walls. Military guards patrolled the metal gate. Inside, there was little light. It was so dark,” he continued.

He was immediately processed. An officer took his photograph, measured his height and weight, and told him to strip down to his underwear. They also shaved his head. Less than two weeks before, Iman was an aspiring graduate at one of the top research universities in the United States. Now, he was a prisoner in an extrajudicial detention center.

Still in his underwear, Iman was assigned to a room with 19 other Uighur men. Upon entering the quarters, lit by a single light bulb, a guard issued Iman a bright yellow vest. An inmate then offered the young man a pair of shorts. Iman began scanning the cell. The tiled room was equipped with one toilet, a faucet, and one large kang-style platform bed — supa in Uighur — where all of the inmates slept. He was provided with simple eating utensils: a thin metal bowl and a spoon.

Daily routines were monotonous and highly scripted, Iman said. “We were awoken every morning at 5 a.m. and given 20 minutes to wash. The guards only provided three thermoses of hot water each day for 20 men, though. I had to vie with the others for hot water. I didn’t properly bathe for a week. We were then required to tidy the bed. The guards inspected our work: The corners had to be crisp and the two blankets, which covered the entire platform, wrinkle-free. Breakfast was served at 6 a.m. The menu did not change: moma or steamed bread. After breakfast, we marched inside our cell, calling out cadences in Chinese: ‘Train hard, study diligently.’ Huh, I can’t remember the rest of the verse. I bet it’s on Baidu [Chinese search engine]. Anyway, we marched for several hours. We then viewed ‘re-education’ films until lunch.

“The videos featured a state-appointed imam who explained legal religious practices and appropriate interpretations of Islam. Sometimes the videos had skits warning about the consequences of engaging in ‘illegal religious activities,’ which are displayed on large posters outside every religious site in the region. In one skit, a young man was apprehended for studying the Quran at an underground school, a practice authorities are trying to eliminate. We watched until it was time for lunch, when we were again served moma and ‘vegetable soup,’ minus the vegetables. After lunch, we were allowed to rest in our quarters, but we were only permitted to sit on the platform bed; lying down was forbidden.
 After this break, we repeated the morning routine — more marching and videos — until we got the same food for dinner. We were permitted to sleep at 8 p.m. Beijing time, but the light was never turned off.” (Xinjiang’s real time zone is two hours behind Beijing, but the government imposes a single clock across the country.)

In his crowded cell, Iman suffered from loneliness and isolation. It was often too disheartening to speak to the others, he said, so he kept to himself. “Most of my cellmates had already been incarcerated for over two months without being formally charged. I did befriend a man in his 60s who, during my detention, was sentenced to six years in prison. His ‘crime’? He sent a religious teaching [tabligh in Uighur], a simple explanation of the Quran, though one not produced by a state-appointed cleric, to his daughter using his mobile phone. She shared it with a friend. The authorities convicted him of possession and dissemination of extremist religious content.”

The days in the detention center accumulated with no end in sight. Three days turned into a week. A week into 10 days. Ten days into two weeks. Yet Iman was never formally charged. Although arbitrary and prolonged detentions violate international law, in China law enforcement may detain “major suspects” for as many as 30 days.

On the 17th day of his incarceration, Iman was called over by a guard. “Grab your things,” he shouted as he handed Iman the clothes he wore when he arrived. “You are being released.” A neighborhood watch group, or jumin weiyuan hui, from his hometown arrived at the detention center to escort Iman to his house but not before they delivered him again to the local police chief. The man looked at Iman and warned: “I’m sure you may have had some ideological changes because of your unpleasant experience but remember: Whatever you say or do in North America, your family is still here and so are we.”

Thirty days after landing in China, Iman finally reached home. But there, he was now behind electronic bars. His resident ID card, which would be scanned at security checkpoints ubiquitous to the region, now contained information about his “criminal” past. Trapped inside Xinjiang’s dystopian surveillance apparatus, he wouldn’t be allowed to step foot in any public buildings, board public transportation, or even enter a shopping center.

Yet much to his surprise, Iman was allowed to return to the United States in time for the fall term. Unable to provide a definitive explanation for this abrupt change of fate, Iman offered two possibilities: He did not, after all, commit any crimes and was deemed unthreatening, or a distant relative who worked in law enforcement negotiated his release and ensured his safe return to school.

Although free, Iman now faces the confines of exile. He does not know when or if he can return home. Calling or emailing his mother, who herself has been in a re-education center since last October for traveling to Turkey, risks her safety: Contact with relatives abroad is punishable by interrogation and detention.

The Chinese Communist Party’s approach is radical but one officials will not abandon anytime soon. At a recent security meeting in Kashgar in Xinjiang, a Han Chinese official told a crowd of Uighurs: “You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one — you need to spray chemicals to kill them all.”

Letter N banned from Chinese social media

Dissenting voices found social media posts of the letter N shut down. Source: Shutterstock

By Tech Wire Asia | 2 March, 2018

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT has temporarily imposed a ban on the letter “N” being published online after authorities thought that dissident voices were reusing the character to express their dissatisfaction over Xi Jinping’s decision to amend the Chinese constitution.

Xi Jinping has proposed changes to the Chinese constitution to remove any limits to the numbers of terms he may serve as the leader – from the present two-term limit.

 

 

Critics voicing concerns on Weibo and WeChat quickly came up against the country’s censorship algorithms, with the letter N banned alongside terms like “lifelong”, “disagreement”, and “emigrate”.


In a blog post on Monday, Professor Victor Mair from the University of Pennsylvania said that the ban on the latter was probably due to the letter’s use in phrases like “N terms in office”. The Chinese ideogram is equivalent to the Western algebraic character x.

The use of N may also be in reference to the N of (Y)es/(N)o choices often given by software, which, according to some dissenting voices, it is not a choice presented to the majority of Chinese citizens.
Additionally, phrases like “Xi Jinping” and “indefinite control” were banned alongside images of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger which have been used in the past as criticism of the Chinese leader, following images of his 2013 visit to America, where he was pictured alongside Barack Obama.

In an editorial on Tuesday, China’s state-run Global Times criticised Western critics whose motives were put down torunning scared from, “the rise of China and reaching a critical point where some Westerners cannot psychologically bear it any longer.”

The op-ed goes on to state, “All Chinese people, whether they work for State-owned institutions or not, whether they support the nation’s path or not, even dissidents, are enjoying development opportunities as well as the might of China, which did not come easily.”

CA Yeung, a blogger based in Perth, Australia suggested that “N = infinity”; with Xi Jinping’s latest edicts, infinity is how long many see the Chinese leader’s rule lasting.

Trump says American workers are hurt by immigration. But after ICE raided this Texas town, they never showed up.

A man wrapped in a blanket walks in the cold near the Cactus Islamic Center in Cactus, Tex., last month. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Nick Miroff March 4 at 4:35 PM

CACTUS, Tex. — The DJs at the Spanish-language radio stations gave warnings whenever Immigration and Customs Enforcement came around. “Be careful out there,” they’d say. “The relatives are in town.”

Not on the day of the Big Raid. Nothing leaked out. State police sealed off the highways in and out of town. ICE agents came with a fleet of empty buses and left with them full.

Their target that day was the huge, steam-billowing beef plant here on the high plains of the Texas Panhandle, owned then by meatpacking giant Swift & Co. “Everyone on the production floor was shouting, ‘La Migra! La Migra!’ ” Monica Loya, a former plant worker, recalled. “There were people hiding behind machinery, in boxes, even in the carcasses.”

Operation Wagon Train hit Swift & Co. plants in six states on Dec. 12, 2006, arresting nearly 1,300 workers. In tiny Cactus, 300 were taken into custody — about 10 percent of the town’s population. It was the largest workplace raid in U.S. history.

Cactus and surrounding Moore County have bounced back from the raid, and the plant today is once more thriving, shipping steaks to Walmart and ­ham­burger meat to Burger King. But finding workers remains a perpetual struggle. JBS USA, a Brazilian conglomerate that now owns the plant, has raised starting wages nearly 25 percent in recent years, but like other meat processors across the country, it survived by finding a different set of foreigners to do jobs that used to be filled by illegal workers: refugees.

Steam rises from a JBS USA meatpacking plant in Cactus. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Cows cover a field at the Cactus Feed Yard in Cactus. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

There are Burmese meat cutters a few years removed from refugee camps in Thailand and Malaysia.

“Chuckers” from Sudan, tall and strong, who specialize in separating the spinal cord from a side of beef swinging on a moving chain. Somalis who showed up in such numbers that Moore County at one point had the fifth-highest per capita Muslim population in the United States, accordingto religion survey data, though many of those workers have moved to join a larger community of their compatriots in Minnesota.

A decade after Operation Wagon Train, the Trump administration says it is preparing to crack down on employers who hire illegal workers and may revive enforcement tactics such as big roundups, which fell out of favor under President Barack Obama. But President Trump’s plans to intervene in the U.S. labor market are more ambitious than that. 

[Trump takes ‘shackles’ off ICE, which is slapping them on immigrants who thought they were safe]

Under Trump, the U.S. government is for the first time in decades seeking to sharply restrict legal immigration, particularly the entry of people with few job skills, saying they compete with American-born workers and drive down wages. By limiting immigration and tightening the labor pool, the administration argues, competition will increase among employers, forcing them to raise the wages of blue-collar American workers left behind in the dust of galloping global capitalism.

President Trump on Feb. 13 said his proposal for an immigration overhaul “keeps terrorists, drug dealers, criminals and gang members out of our country.” (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

In deep-red Moore County, where Trump won 75 percent of the vote, the president’s rhetoric on immigration has emboldened some of his supporters to freely vent their frustrations at the meatpacking plant they blame for bringing crime, drugs and civic decline. Their corner of northern Texas has been culturally and economically transformed, and they had never had an American president say the transformation was a bad thing.

And yet, no one seemed to believe the Cactus plant would be filled anytime soon with American workers. People here were not even sure they were American jobs in the first place. At least not since the Vietnamese and Laotians showed up in the late 1970s, a few years after the plant opened.
“Cactus wouldn’t exist without the plant,” said the city manager, Aldo Gallegos, who grew up in the town after his parents moved from Arizona in 1992 to work for Swift. He estimates that about half of all floor workers are refugees and that half are Latino, mostly immigrants.

“The plant didn’t skip a beat,” Gallegos said. “Everyone’s got to eat steak.”

Workers who hang on at the unionized plant earn wages that average more than $17 an hour, in addition to health benefits and free language classes, making it one of the best-paying jobs in the United States for someone who speaks little or no English.

Cactus is not always a melting pot of meatpacking harmony. Workers of different ethnicities and languages struggle to communicate, and sometimes they clash. Turnover among new hires is high. The town’s streets are a jumble of windblown garbage and battered trailers, each one appendaged with dusty vehicles parked at odd angles, like fingers from a hand.

But there is relative prosperity here, too, especially in nearby Dumas, 13 miles south and a comfortable distance from the foul odors wafting around the plant. Busy fast-food restaurants line Dumas’s main drag, anchored by the only Walmart for miles.

Vast feedlots surround the plant, funneling as many as 5,000 cattle a day toward the “kill floor,” where workers with bolt guns begin the butchering. Temperatures there sometimes exceed 90 degrees. The production floor is a giant meat locker kept just above freezing. Cutters slice off fat and hack at gristle with razor-sharp knives that occasionally flay hands and fingers, too.

The floors grow slick with blood and beef fat throughout the day, until crews of Central Americans in full-body suits ­arrive at 11 p.m., working through the night to blast away the gore with high-pressure hoses and chemicals.

“We don’t really see American people in these jobs,” said Lian Sian Piang, 34, a meat quality inspector and ethnic Chin who ran away from conscription in the Burmese army as a teenager, living for years in a Malaysian refugee camp. During his 10 years at the Cactus plant, he said, he has seen only “two or three white guys” cutting meat.

“The work is very hard,” he said. “The chain moves so fast. Most people just can’t handle it.”

CoCal, a Denver-based landscaping company, hires dozens of temporary workers from Mexico each year because it can’t find enough Americans to take the jobs.(Video: Bastien Inzaurralde/Photo: Nick Cote/The Washington Post)

A Valero oil refinery is Moore County’s other big employer, and its workers are mostly U.S.-born. Jobs there require significantly more skills, and fluent English. Asked what it would take for more local workers to take jobs in meatpacking, many here say JBS would have to pay as much as the refinery, where wages are $30 an hour or more.

American packing plants could pay that much, industry experts say. But that would mean much, much more expensive meat, and it would probably drive JBS out of Cactus.

Trouble filling jobs

The Trump administration already is putting its economic theories to the test, tightening immigration at a time of historically low unemployment. The number of refugees admitted into the United States has dropped by about 70 percent since Trump took office, and his administration is phasing out the provisional residency permits of more than 250,000 Haitians and Central Americans who have worked legally in the United States for years under temporary protected status.

The U.S. meatpacking industry was in a labor squeeze before these measures, having opened new plants in recent years to keep pace with soaring export demands and annual U.S. sales approaching $100 billion. Many of the industry’s processing plants are located in remote, ­rural areas of Midwestern states where employers in nearly every industry are struggling to find qualified workers, especially job candidates who will not test “hot” for drugs.

Lucas Gentry leads a conversational English class at the Cactus Nazarene Ministry Center. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Because refugees have a ­reputation for lower levels of drug use, they remain attractive job recruits.
Asked whether his labor shortages have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s immigration policies, JBS spokesman Cameron Bruett said the company was “proud to offer jobs to any qualified individual authorized to work in the United States.”

“The Administration has made a concerted effort to grow the economy and help businesses thrive through tax reform and a common-sense approach to regulation,” Bruett said in a statement. “We believe it will adopt a similarly pragmatic approach to workforce availability in agriculture and other labor-dependent sectors.” 

It was an acknowledgment that a remedy for the labor shortage — “workforce availability” — would come from abroad.

Immigrants have been butchering American meat since the 19th century, when Germans, Irish and Eastern Europeans crammed the Chicago stockyards. Wages in the packing industry increased with unionization and remained high relative to other manufacturing jobs between the 1930s and 1970s, a period of relatively low levels of immigration.

But wages fell as companies began moving their plants out of urban areas and closer to feedlots, driving down union membership.

[How Trump is building a border wall that no one can see]

The changing composition of the workforce in Cactus mirrors modern immigration to the United States. The Vietnamese and Laotian refugees who came to the plant were followed by a flood of Mexican workers, many of whom entered the county illegally, in the 1980s. Then came Central Americans, mostly from Guatemala, in the 1990s.

Swift, like other meat processors, was so hard-pressed to find workers that it offered $500 bonuses to those who could recruit newcomers, creating perverse incentives to falsify documents with borrowed or fake Social Security numbers.

Such offenses were no longer viewed lightly in the post-9/11 era. During President George W. Bush’s second term, ICE raided packing plants across the Midwest in a campaign culminating in Operation Wagon Train.

Loya, the former plant worker, who now teaches English to refugees, remembers driving to the local elementary school that day, after schoolteachers called in a panic. There were children waiting to be picked up, but many of their parents were on buses heading to ICE detention centers.

“I drove to the school, found the kids and just started asking them: Do you have a sister, or an aunt, or a cousin who can pick you up?” Loya said. “It was crazy.”

‘Part of feeding the world’

A tornado hit Cactus four months after the raid, flipping cars and smashing homes. No one died, but people in Moore County would joke that the twister had come to finish the job for ICE.
“Cactus used to be a nice community,” said Paula Gibson, whose family came to Moore County in the late 19th century, a generation after the U.S. Army defeated the Comanche and other horse-mounted Plains tribes who fought the white settlers.

Gibson and her husband, Lee, returned to Moore County in the late 1970s after studying at West Texas A&M University, and over the years they integrated their family farm and ranch into the global economy. They raise cattle, grow corn and run a ­successful manure composting business using techniques Lee picked up as a graduate student. But they say that something in Moore County has been lost and that the meatpacking plant has changed their corner of Texas for the worse.

The sun sets on one of many abandoned trailers in Cactus. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Thieves broke into the Gibsons’ ranch house last month, stealing a gun and more than $100,000 in family jewelry, including the wedding ring of Paula Gibson’s grandmother. The Gibsons do not blame immigrants or refugees, but the plant and the churn of its workforce have made Moore County a transient place of distant strangers.

“We didn’t use to have to lock our doors or lock our cars,” she said. “We went from that to a community with mass immigration, where people don’t even care how their property looks.”

The Gibsons’ adult sons, Braden and Brett, help run the farm and ranch today, and like JBS, the family struggles to attract and retain American workers. Last summer, they hired three South Africans on temporary guest-worker visas.

“We’d do it again,” Lee Gibson said.

Braden Gibson, 36, worries that his son will get less attention at school because the teachers have to spend so much time on the basics.

“They are under pressure to get the kids to learn English and pass the tests to secure their funding,” he said.

The Gibson family thinks Moore County would probably be better off without the plant, even if it meant having to sell their cattle elsewhere. But they have no expectation that the forces of globalization can be so easily bent.

“This is all part of feeding the world,” Braden Gibson said, shrugging. “It’s what America does. It’s part of the gig.”

Then Trump came along

“This used to be an all-white town,” said Moore County Judge Rowdy Rhoades, a former mayor of Dumas. He said it as a matter of fact, not a lament. “Some folks have had a hard time accepting the changes.”

With the arrival of so many refugees to work for JBS, an area that used to have two cultures and languages — Spanish and English — suddenly had 20. The school principal gathered immigrant parents at one point to explain how to use American bathrooms. But the growing pains eased as the refugees settled in, Rhoades said.

“We’re okay,” he said. “We adapt. We’re Texans.”

Then Trump came along, and those who were not okay with the immigrants were a lot less shy about saying as much. When ­Piang, the ethnic Chin, took his car to a local auto body shop last year, the owner screamed at him to go back to Burma, even though he had become a U.S. citizen in 2014. Piang said he drove away and shrugged it off.

“I know most Americans are good people,” he said.

Moore County has come a long way since the first refugees arrived, when Stan Corbin got a call from his church.

“The refugees couldn’t speak English, so they asked me to teach a class,” he said. “It became a calling for me.”

Over the years, Corbin became a one-man welcoming committee and full-time life coach for waves of refugees. He remembers the time some Laotians were arrested for net-fishing in the creek, and the time 64 Burmese showed up from Dallas, or when they got in trouble for tearing out the carpets of their apartment to cook on the floor, just like in the camps.

Corbin helped them pay utility bills and taxes, get driver’s licenses and apply for citizenship, carrying lists of their names, birth dates and Social Security numbers, in case they lost them.

Gay Ku Paw, 20, left, at home in the house bought by her parents, Lah Eh, 50, and Ter Htoo, 53, in Dumas, Tex. Burmese refugees of the Karen ethnic minority, they paid off the home with money saved from a decade of cutting beef at the packing plant in nearby Cactus. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

As a volunteer at First Baptist Church in Dumas, Stan Corbin, 80, has helped waves of refugees navigate American life. “It became a calling for me,” he says. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

“I took them to the doctor, hospitals — they didn’t know how to do anything,” said Corbin, 80, who said he spent so much time with refugees he became estranged from his own son.

[Family ties drive U.S. immigration. Why Trump wants to break the ‘chains.’]

On a recent morning, Corbin visited a family of Burmese refugees from the Karen ethnic group who had bought a home in Dumas, paying it off in three years because they did not like carrying a mortgage.

“My father was always gone when we lived in the camps, working in the rice fields,” said Gay Ku Paw, 20, a nursing student. In the refugee camp, the family lived in a shack with no running water or electricity, she said, and remained in darkness when they could not afford candles and lamp oil.

Her mother, Lah Eh, 50, chops tail meat with a large knife at JBS, and her father, Ter Htoo, 53, operates huge mechanical shears that clip off cows’ hoofs. “It’s a good job,” said Htoo, who prefers sitting on floor to the couch in his living room. It was below freezing outside, but like other Karen, he preferred going barefoot on the carpet. He served cups of jasmine tea from a giant thermos.

Four cars sat in the family’s driveway. “In America, no one tries to take away your property,” Htoo said. The only thing he does not like, he said, is when there are not enough workers at the plant and the chain moves too fast.

“I know there are some here who don’t value these people, but I don’t think we can go back to the way we were,” Corbin said. “The first generation of adults that came here will never be assimilated and will probably never learn much English. They’re so tired from work that they can’t study. But their kids are their hope, and their kids want to be American.”

Corbin voted for Trump, but he does not agree with the president when he says the country needs a merit-based immigration system favoring those with advanced skills.

“What we need is people willing to work hard, and people willing to work at JBS,” he said. “Their children will grow up to be engineers. But right now in our country, there is a great need for laborers.”
..

The sun sets on the JBS USA meatpacking plant in Cactus. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington