A New Mexico school district says it's improved school discipline. The data is unclear.
Two years after New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica first reported that Indigenous children in New Mexico face disproportionately high rates of harsh school punishment, triggering a state Department of Justice civil rights inquiry, the school district most responsible for that statewide disparity says it has dramatically reduced its number of long-term suspensions. The district has made policy changes to better engage with students and prevent behavior problems instead of just reacting to misbehavior, Gallup McKinley County Schools Superintendent Mike Hyatt said in an email. 'We have been working extensively with our counselors to be more involved in counseling students with social and emotional needs in addition to academic needs,' Hyatt said.Hyatt also replaced the district administrator in charge of student discipline, and that individual has since retired, he said.According to Hyatt, the number of students kicked out of Gallup McKinley County Schools for 90 days or longer dropped from 21 children during the school year 2021-22, to six the following year, and just one student last year. Of those 28 long-term removals, 86 percent (24 cases) involved Native students, Hyatt said in a Jan. 17 email to New Mexico In Depth.The district now appears to be more judicious in imposing long-term removals, reserving them for serious, potentially dangerous infractions. From 2016 to 2020, Gallup McKinley reported long-term removals for disruptive behavior ('disorderly conduct') in its reports to the state, for example. But all of the cases Hyatt listed for 2021-2023 involved more serious infractions: repeated drug possession, drug distribution, assault, armed battery, theft, and weapons possession, including firearms cases, he wrote. New Mexico In Depth cannot independently confirm Hyatt's claim about reducing rates of long-term suspensions because the state refused to provide the newsroom with complete, unredacted discipline data for the years in question.AG's Civil Rights Inquiry In 2022, the news organizations undertook a detailed analysis of statewide school discipline rates that showed Indigenous students disproportionately experience the harshest forms of punishment: exclusions from school for 90 days or more and referrals to law enforcement. Using discipline reports obtained from the state Public Education Department, the news organizations found that Gallup McKinley, which boasts the largest Native student body in the nation, was the epicenter of a statewide trend toward Indigenous children being pushed out of classrooms at higher rates than other students between 2016 and 2020. New Mexico In Depth has been unable to independently examine discipline rates for more recent years because of extensive redactions in the public education department's subsequent data disclosures.New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who heads the state's Department of Justice and its new Civil Rights Division, initiated a review of the matter in late 2023. His investigators ran into similar frustrations in attempting to obtain complete, unredacted data from the public education department, according to emails between the agencies that New Mexico In Depth reviewed.The state justice department inquiry also faced delays in its efforts to obtain student discipline data from Gallup McKinley, emails show. Investigators at one point took the school district to task for violating a statutory deadline in responding to their Inspection of Public Records Act request. Other emails evidenced investigators' frustration over repeated efforts from late 2023 through mid-2024 to get meetings with public education department officials who could provide more detailed data and answer investigators' questions.In early June 2024, the state justice department Special Counsel Sean Sullivan urgently requested an in-person meeting with public education department officials to discuss student discipline data, citing connectivity issues during a previous virtual meeting months earlier. The new meeting occurred June 20. But by July 1, Sullivan noted investigators still needed more detailed data from public education department, and had to resort to using summary enrollment data from the public education department's website and a preliminary dataset public education department provided the previous year.In August, Sullivan repeatedly sought answers about missing data from public education department's data manager.Despite repeated inquiries from New Mexico In Depth throughout 2024 and this month, state justice department has not answered questions about the inquiry's progress and whether or not Gallup McKinley and public education department provided the detailed data its investigators sought. On January 17, the organization filed another public records request with the state justice department.(NMDOJ spokeswoman Lauren Rodriguez told New Mexico In Depth on Saturday morning the agency's investigation is ongoing.)Gallup Superintendent Reports Policy ReformsGallup McKinley district officials are working with teachers and staff to foster positive relationships with students and deescalate tense interactions, and to help identify students who need behavioral health services, Hyatt said in an January 15 email to New Mexico In Depth. Hyatt pushed back on New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica's reporting about harsh disciplinary practices. He said that after news headlines in 2022, an internal review identified extensive data entry errors in the district's quarterly student discipline reports to the state. Punishments reported to the state as expulsions should instead have been logged as suspensions, he said. (The district also changed its definition of expulsion; at the time of the newsrooms' analyses, the district defined expulsions as removals of 90 days or longer. Expulsion is now defined as permanent removals.)But New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica found that student removals from school for 90 days or longer — regardless of what those removals are called — remained far higher for Gallup McKinley than the rest of the state.The public education department refused to retroactively accept the district's changed student discipline reports for previous years in the state's discipline database, Hyatt said.After meeting with Torrez about state justice department's inquiry in September 2023, Hyatt contracted with a Kentucky-based financial consulting contractor, Unbridled Advisory, to examine a subset of the district's 'cleansed' and revised student discipline data from school years 2015-16 through 2022-23. The report shows Unbridled Advisor did not conduct a specific analysis of the harshest forms of punishment, like the analysis conducted by the news organizations. Instead, the company's analysis included a broader set of disciplinary actions: referrals to the justice system, in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, orders that students be sent to 'alternative educational settings,' and supervised student isolation ('seclusion'). It did not include expulsions.Including less severe punishments in the analysis, like in-school suspensions or seclusion, might obscure larger racial disparities in harsher punishments. Even so, their report showed that Native students' discipline rates were modestly higher than other students, but not high enough in their view to be significant. The company used a statistical test commonly used to assess hiring discrimination, known as the '80% rule test.' Asked why the district's contractor used that test instead of a U.S. Department of Education-approved test specifically designed to identify higher rates of student discipline among minority groups, Hyatt said he was uncertain which test would have been more suitable.
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Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
National Park Service employee fired for displaying trans-pride flag over El Capitan
A National Park Service employee was terminated and may be criminally charged for unfurling a trans-pride flag over El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, park officials said. The firing has sparked an outcry from LGBTQ+ activists, who are accusing the federal government of firing the worker to silence them. On May 20, a group of LGTBQ+ activists and climbers ascended El Capitan — an iconic vertical wall formation in Yosemite National Park — to display a 55-by-35-foot trans-pride flag to affirm transgender identity and support biological research that showed natural occurrences of sex switching in other animals, according to a news release. Among the group were Shannon Joslin, a biologist at Yosemite, and Pattie Gonia, a prominent environmental and LGBTQ+ activist. 'Raising this flag in the heart of El Capitan is a celebration of our community, standing in solidarity with each other and all targeted groups,' said Joslin, whose pronoun is 'they.' 'Being trans is a natural, beautiful part of human and biological diversity.' Joslin, 35, worked as a wildlife conservationist, statistician and chiropterologist — an expert in bats — at Yosemite since 2021. A doctoral graduate from UC Davis, they managed the Big Wall Bats program and created Yosemite climb guidebooks in addition to volunteer work, according to the release. Two hours after the flag went up, the group was ordered by park officials to take it down. Climbers who participated said that park officials outlined no consequences after they ordered the flag removed and that the group left peacefully. Video of the demonstration shows Joslin was not in park uniform during the climb, and the news release added that they also were not on duty at the time and used no park materials to rig the flag. But on Aug. 12, Joslin was terminated by park officials for their participation in the flag raising. The National Park Service and Department of Justice said they were pursuing administrative action and possible criminal charges against several park visitors and employees who were alleged to have 'violated federal laws and regulations related to demonstrations' by not obtaining a permit. 'We take the protection of the park's resources and the experience of our visitors very seriously, and will not tolerate violations of laws and regulations that impact those resources and experiences,' said Rachel Pawlitz, chief spokesperson for the National Park Service. The National Park Service pointed to a recent rule that the agency said went into effect the date of the incident. The rule prohibits guests or employees from hanging signs or banners over any 'natural or cultural feature' in the park. Joslin says that rule did not exist at the time, and an archive of the park's rules five days before the incident does not include a prohibition on flags. Another archived version of the page from the following month, on June 15, includes the new flag prohibition and is dated back to May 20. 'The National Park Service rewrote the park rules to ban hanging large flags in wilderness areas, including the face of El Capitan,' the climbing group's news release said. Multiple flag demonstrations have taken place at Yosemite before, such as employees flying an upside-down American flag in protest of Trump administration cuts to federal funding and a 'Stop the Genocide' flag hung in protest against the Israeli and U.S. governments last year in response to the war in Gaza. 'In America, our freedoms matter,' Joslin said. 'Our team followed every written and unwritten rule, left no trace, and honored Yosemite's accepted traditions.' While not expressly banned, guests and employees must obtain a permit to display flags over the natural landscape in Yosemite, Pawlitz said. The decision to fire Joslin sparked outrage among LGBTQ+ advocates and activists. Gonia said in a statement that she believes the termination was a part of a broader push by the Trump administration to crack down on political demonstration and LGBTQ+ visibility. 'To strip [Shannon Joslin] of their position is not only an affront to their personal freedom but an attack on the very values of service, dedication, and community that [Joslin] embodies,' Gonia said. 'This is about silencing those who oppose injustice and we must not let that happen.' The climbing group and other activists want Joslin reinstated and demand an independent investigation into the park's conduct and hiring practices, the release said. They have also cited President Trump's executive order on 'Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship' as reason for reinstatement. The order, signed on Trump's inauguration date, said it would 'ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.' 'My firing isn't just about one ranger,' Joslin said. 'It's about whether everyone has the right to speak freely in the United States. This kind of targeting threatens the rights of civil servants, and by extension, all Americans, to speak freely.'
4 hours ago
Trump moves to use the levers of presidential power to help his party in the 2026 midterms
President Donald Trump has made clear in recent weeks that he's willing to use the vast powers of his office to prevent his party from losing control of Congress in next year's midterm elections. Some of the steps Trump has taken to intervene in the election are typical, but controversial, political maneuvers taken to his trademark extremes. That includes pushing Republican lawmakers in Texas and other conservative-controlled states to redraw their legislative maps to expand the number of U.S. House seats favorable to the GOP. Others involve the direct use of official presidential power in ways that have no modern precedent, such as ordering his Department of Justice to investigate the main liberal fundraising entity, ActBlue. The department also is demanding the detailed voter files from each state in an apparent attempt to look for ineligible voters on a vast scale. And on Monday, Trump posted a falsehood-filled rant on social media pledging to lead a 'movement' to outlaw voting machines and mail balloting, the latter of which has become a mainstay of Democratic voting since Trump pushed Republicans to avoid it in 2020 — before flipping on the issue ahead of last year's presidential election. The individual actions add up to an unprecedented attempt by a sitting president to interfere in a critical election before it's even held, moves that have raised alarms among those concerned about the future of U.S. democracy. 'Those are actions that you don't see in healthy democracies,' said Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan organization that has sued the Trump administration. 'Those are actions you see in authoritarian states.' Bassin noted that presidents routinely stump for their party in midterm elections and try to bolster incumbents by steering projects and support to their districts. But he said Trump's history is part of what's driving alarm about the midterms. He referenced Trump's attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which ended with a violent assault on the Capitol by his supporters. 'The one thing we know for certain from experience in 2020 is that this is a person who will use every measure and try every tactic to stay in power, regardless of the outcome of an election,' Bassin said. He noted that in 2020, Trump was checked by elected Republicans in Congress and statehouses who refused to bend the rules, along with members of his own administration and even military leaders who distanced themselves from the defeated incumbent. In his second term, the president has locked down near-total loyalty from the GOP and stacked the administration with loyalists. The incumbent president's party normally loses seats in Congress during midterm elections. That's what happened to Trump in 2018, when Democrats won enough seats to take back the House of Representatives, stymieing the president's agenda and eventually leading to his two impeachments. Trump has said he doesn't want a repeat. He also has argued that his actions are actually attempts to preserve democracy. Repeating baseless allegations of fraud, he said Monday during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that 'you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots.' Earlier this month, Trump said that, because he handily won Texas in the 2024 presidential election, 'we are entitled to five more seats.' Republicans currently have a three-seat margin in the House of Representatives. Trump pushed Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional map to create up to five new winnable GOP seats and is lobbying other red states, including Indiana and Missouri, to take similar steps to pad the margin even more. The Texas Legislature is likely to vote on its map on Wednesday. There's no guarantee that Trump's gambit will work, but also no legal prohibition against fiddling with maps in those states for partisan advantage. In response, California Democrats are moving forward with their own redistricting effort as a way to counter Republicans in Texas. Mid-decade map adjustments have happened before, though usually in response to court orders rather than presidents openly hoping to manufacture more seats for their party. Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford University, said there's a chance the redrawing of House districts won't succeed as Trump anticipates — but could end up motivating Democratic voters. Still, Diamond said he's concerned. 'It's the overall pattern that's alarming and that the reason to do this is for pure partisan advantage,' he said of Trump's tactic. Diamond noted that in 2019 he wrote a book about a '12-step' process to turn a democracy into an autocracy, and 'the last step in the process is to rig the electoral process.' Trump has required loyalty from all levels of his administration and demanded that the Department of Justice follow his directives. One of those was to probe ActBlue, an online portal that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in small-dollar donations for Democratic candidates over two decades. The site was so successful that Republicans launched a similar venture, called WinRed. Trump, notably, did not order a federal probe into WinRed. Trump's appointees at the Department of Justice also have demanded voting data from at least 19 states, as Trump continues to insist he actually won the 2020 election and proposed a special prosecutor to investigate that year's vote tally. Much as he did before winning the 2024 election, Trump has baselessly implied that Democrats may rig upcoming vote counts against him. In at least two of those states, California and Minnesota, the DOJ followed up with election officials last week, threatening legal action if they didn't hand over their voter registration lists by this Thursday, according to letters shared with The Associated Press. Neither state — both controlled by Democrats — has responded publicly. Trump's threat this week to end mail voting and do away with voting machines is just his latest attempt to sway how elections are run. An executive order he signed earlier this year sought documented proof of citizenship to register to vote, among other changes, though much of it has been blocked by courts. In the days leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to reverse his 2020 loss, Trump's allies proposed having the military seize voting machines to investigate purported fraud, even though Trump's own attorney general said there was no evidence of significant wrongdoing. The Constitution says states and Congress, rather than the president, set the rules for elections, so it's unclear what Trump could do to make his promises a reality. But election officials saw them as an obvious sign of his 2026 interests. 'Let's see this for what it really is: An attempt to change voting going into the midterms because he's afraid the Republicans will lose,' wrote Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, on X. Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the idea of seizing voting machines in 2020 was a sign of how few levers the president has to influence an election, not of his power. Under the U.S. Constitution, elections are run by states and only Congress can 'alter' the procedures — and, even then, for federal races alone. 'It's a deeply decentralized system,' Muller said. There are fewer legal constraints on presidential powers, such as criminal investigations and deployment of law enforcement and military resources, Muller noted. But, he added, people usually err in forecasting election catastrophes. He noted that in 2022 and 2024, a wide range of experts braced for violence, disruption and attempts to overturn losses by Trump allies, and no serious threats materialized. 'One lesson I've learned in decades of doing this is people are often preparing for the last election rather than what actually happens in the new ones,' Muller said.
USA Today
10 hours ago
- USA Today
North Korea wired an agent $2M to smuggle weapons, tech and disguises out of California
Shenghua Wen, 42, was sentenced to eight years in prison in connection with the scheme that earned him $2 million from North Korean handlers. It comes after he pleaded guilty in June. North Korean agents paid a Chinese national $2 million to smuggle U.S. weapons and technology that were to be used for a surprise attack on South Korea, federal prosecutors said Aug. 19. Shenghua Wen, a 42-year-old illegal alien living outside Los Angeles, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the scheme, the Department of Justice announced. He was tapped by North Korean handlers to export guns, ammo, sensitive technologies and eventually disguises, court papers show. Wen smuggled three shipping containers of guns and ammunition to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) before he was caught, prosecutors said. "Wen's crimes jeopardized the national security of the United States and that of its ally, South Korea," prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum in the Central District of California. "Defendant's conduct was bold, and the purpose of his mission was alarming. According to defendant, he was charged with procuring the weapons and sensitive technology for North Korea so North Korea could prepare for a surprise attack against South Korea." In addition to the three shipping containers' worth of arms, Wen planned to send 60,000 bullets and sensitive technologies, including a device to identify chemical threats, a thermal imaging device to be mounted on aircraft and an engine meant to be the precursor for a North Korean drone program, according to court papers. The North Korean asset also planned to send military uniforms that the DPRK could use to disguise troops sent into South Korea, prosecutors said. Wen's sentencing comes after he pleaded guilty on June 9 to acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government and conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which regulates trade with nations hostile to the U.S. DPRK handlers paid Wen around $2 million for the scheme, which dates back to 2022 when he was first contacted online by North Korean officials, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. In a letter to the judge, Wen's lawyers said the Chinese national accepted responsibility for what he had done. "Mr. Wen is truly a book that is not best judged by its cover," his public defender Michael L. Brown II wrote. "The offense conduct suggests that he is someone sophisticated and bold as the government claims when in reality he was a lowly agent, without much agency, in desperate financial straights when he committed the offense conduct." Wen's lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment. A surprise attack in the making Wen came to the United States in 2012 on a student visa, according to prosecutors. His lawyers said he was seeking asylum after Chinese authorities had persecuted him for practicing Catholicism, which has been outlawed to varying degrees in communist China. Prosecutors say he was already planning to become a North Korean asset at that point. Wen told the FBI in interviews that before moving to the U.S., he met with DPRK handlers at a North Korean embassy in China, court papers show. North Korean officials contacted Wen online about 10 years later, provided him the money for a Federal Firearms License to allow him to deal arms and the California-based DPKR asset began making trips to Texas to buy guns. Wen exported the weapons from Long Beach, near LA. He told U.S. authorities he was shipping a refrigerator, court papers show. He "admitted that he believed the North Korean government wanted the weapons, ammunition, and other military-related equipment to prepare for an attack against South Korea," prosecutors said. Investigators also found many images on his phone of U.S. military uniforms. Prosecutors said the photos were related to a plan to provide North Korean troops with disguises for the eventual attack. U.S. arms in foreign hands Wen's case is just the latest in international arms dealers making use of the American firearms market. The top five weapons manufacturers in the world as of 2023 were all American companies, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Lockheed Martin's $60.8 million revenue was greater than the top three Chinese companies combined. But American firearms have a way of making it into the hands of the nation's adversaries, from North Korean soldiers to cartels south of the border in Mexico. The FBI regularly catches foreign nationals in the United States exporting arms to places around the world that American authorities consider hostile. In March, federal officials charged a pair of men in Cleveland in connection with an operation to sell around 90 rifles and a machine gun to undercover agents posing as cartel members. Mexico sued U.S. gun manufacturers over the avalanche of American guns that wind up south of the border, although the Supreme Court eventually ruled against the U.S. neighbor. In April 2024, the Department of Justice charged a pair of foreign businessmen with conspiring to send anti-aircraft rounds, grenade launchers and automatic rifles to Iraq and Sudan.
