The Dictatorship
Indiana community fights to keep needle exchange going after Trump order
JEFFERSONVILLE, Ind. (AP) — Inside a storage room at the Clark County Health Department are boxes with taped-on signs reading, “DO NOT USE.” They contain cookers and sterile water that people use to shoot up drugs.
The supplies, which came from the state and were paid for with federal money, were for a program where drug users exchange dirty needles for clean ones, part of a strategy known as harm reduction. But under a July executive order from President Donald Trumpfederal substance abuse grants can’t pay for supplies such as cookers and tourniquets that it says “only facilitate illegal drug use.” Needles already couldn’t be purchased with federal money.
In some places, the order is galvanizing support for syringe exchange programs, which decades of research show are extremely effective at preventing disease among intravenous drug users and getting them into treatment.
In others, it’s fueling opposition that threatens the programs’ existence.
Republican-led Indiana passed a law allowing exchanges a decade ago after the tiny city of Austin became the epicenter of the worst drug-fueled HIV outbreak in U.S. history. Unless lawmakers extend it, that law is scheduled to sunset next year, and the number of exchanges has been dwindling. State officials told remaining programs to comply with Trump’s order — and even to discard federally funded supplies such as cookers and tourniquets.
For now, Clark County health workers have found a way to keep distributing cookers and other items: buy them with private money and package them in “mystery bags,” assembled by employees who aren’t paid with state or federal funds.
Democratic-led California, meanwhile, has continued using state funds for supplies such as pipes and syringes. California is home to a rising number of exchanges, with 70 of the more than 580 listed by the North American Syringe Exchange Network.
Some public health experts lament that syringe services programs have become subject to growing politicization and dissent.
Clark County Health Officer Dr. Eric Yazel says IV drug users will likely inject themselves with or without clean supplies. Exchanges prevent people from sharing needles and spreading disease, he said, “decreasing the public health risk for the whole population.”
But Curtis Hill, a Republican former Indiana attorney generalis among critics who raise the same concern Trump’s order does: “We don’t want to get into a situation where we’re promoting drug use.”
Help without judgment
When participants arrive at the Clark County health department, they look down at a list of services and say they are there for “No. 1.”
They choose from a cart with needles, bandages, sharps containers and the overdose reversal drug naloxone. They can receive testing for HIV and hepatitis C; information on drug treatment; and fliers on food banks, housing, and job placement. There are even handmade knit hats with encouraging notes like, “You’ve got this!”
“We spend a half hour, 45 minutes or so talking to them about where they are, if they want treatment, if they’re ready,” Program Director Dorothy Waterhouse said. “These are our brothers, our sisters, our mothers, our fathers. … We need compassion to make sure they’re getting into treatment.”
It’s the closest exchange to Austin, a 35-minute drive away. Scott County, where Austin is located, already ended its program.
Joshua Gay lived in an apartment across the street when he used the Clark County exchange. He shot up meth daily.
“The addiction, it took away everything. It took away my life. It took away my job, took away my health. I mean, it made my mind so bad that I wouldn’t even shower,” said the 44-year-old, who now lives in Austin. “God was telling me, ‘You need to do something,’ and he led me to the needle exchange.”
He’s sober today. He sought drug treatment at LifeSpring Health Systems after encouragement from health workers and now encourages others in recovery to stay healthy.
He believes the syringe exchange not only saved him, but helped him save someone else, providing the naloxone he used to revive a friend who overdosed on heroin.
Keeping the program going
After Trump’s order — which focused on homelessness — Indiana health officials told exchanges that certain items they provided were now off-limits, citing a letter from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Although Clark County workers have found ways to provide privately funded items for now, they worry about Indiana’s exchange law expiring on July 1. Six counties have exchanges — down from nine in 2020 — despite the programs’ successes.
Statewide, exchanges have made more than 27,000 referrals to drug treatment and provided naloxone that reversed nearly 25,000 overdoses, according to information collected by the nonprofit Damien Center in Indianapolis.
Since its 2017 start, Clark County’s program alone has given out more than 2,000 doses of naloxone; made more than 4,300 referrals to drug treatment; and made more than 4,400 referrals for HIV or hepatitis C testing. Its syringe return rate is 92%.
Local and national public health and addiction experts point to research showing exchanges don’t increase syringe litter, crime or IV drug use — and that every dollar invested returns an estimated $7 in avoided health care costs.
Exchanges are associated with an estimated 50% reduction in the incidence of HIV and hepatitis C, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last year. Scott County — where the HIV outbreak ultimately sickened 235 people — had fewer than five new cases a year in 2020 and 2021, just before that syringe program ended. The numbers have stayed low.
“When these programs first started, I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t get it,” Yazel said. “And then I took a deep dive and started to understand the impact.”
Elsewhere, a mix of support and opposition
Indiana is among 43 states with syringe services programs, according to health care research nonprofit KFF.
Support remains strong in many places. This year in Hawaii, for example, legislators passed a law allowing people to get as many clean needles as needed rather than only one for one.
But bills elsewhere, including two introduced in West Virginia this year, propose eliminating syringe programs.
This month, West Virginia’s Cabell-Huntington Health Department stopped giving out needles. Naloxone and fentanyl test strips remain available, along with services such as education, disease testing and links to care.
“The folks who come in to see us are going to get the same smiles and the same hugs,” said Health Officer Dr. Michael Kilkenny. “We’re just not going to be dispensing syringes or the other things that are in disfavor.”
Andrew Nixon, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, stressed in an email that federal funds can still be used for “life-saving services” like education and naloxone, reflecting a “commitment to addressing the addiction and overdose crisis impacting communities across our nation.”
A murky future
Yazel expects a difficult path ahead in Indiana.
“To be very blunt,” he said, “we have an uphill battle coming up this legislative session.”
Damien Center CEO Alan Witchey, whose organization runs a syringe program, said he and a group of advocates created a website with information and a way to contact lawmakers. They’ve met with elected officials, and a state senator introduced a bill to extend the sunset date to 2036.
“Without these programs, there will be one less tool to address the diseases of substance use disorder, hepatitis C and HIV,” Witchey said. “And that could lead to a very dangerous place for us. We have seen where this leads.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The Dictatorship
What Tom Emmer said about Somalis was racist. What’s worse is he doesn’t believe it.
ByMichael Tisserand
There was a time when President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans didn’t think House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., had a sufficient understanding of who his enemies ought to be. But in remarks he made Wednesday at a Capitol Hill event sponsored by Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, Emmer did his best to signal that Trump’s enemies are his enemies, too.
Emmer’s 11-minute talk, during which he expressed racism and transphobia and railed against abortion, also served as yet another contrast to the memory of what Republicans in Minnesota used to be. The name of the state party used to be Independent-Republicansand the late U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger used to describe the state party’s worldview, without irony, as progressive Republicanism.
Emmer’s talk served as yet another contrast to the memory of what Republicans in Minnesota used to be.
That party is long gone. At Wednesday’s event, Emmer theatrically dismissed a few sheets of paper he said were his talking points and proclaimed, Trump-like, that he was going rogue. He took aim at transgender youth (“there’s a reason why Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed”), at “elite radical lefties,” at “evil Marxists,” at the media, called his state’s abortion laws “as bad as North Korea” and called the state itself the “People’s Republic of Minnesota.”
But Emmer earned some of the most enthusiastic applause in his racist rant against the state’s large Somali American population. “Sometimes Minnesotans are so afraid that you’re going to call us a racist, you’re going to call us an Islamophobe,” he said, before saying, “But I’m done being careful. Even the least bit careful.”
He said, “I don’t really care where you come from. But if come to this great country, you have to understand, you’re coming here to be an American.” Somalis “don’t assimilate,” he said, “And if they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from.”
Among the people who responded angrily to Emmer’s slander of Somalis was Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who was born in Somalia. “I assimilated all the way to Congress and this idiot still tells me to go back to where I came from,” she wrote on X.
In the debacle that followed Kevin McCarthy being voted out of the House speakership in 2023, Emmer was not elected to replace him because, by MAGA standards, he was too moderate. Trump called him a “Globalist RINO” and was still fuming that after Joe Biden won the race for president in 2020, Emmer voted to certify that election.
Emmer has worked harder to be seen as MAGA since then. In December, he appeared on “Varney & Co.” on Fox Business to support an Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge that made Somalis among its primary targets and became known as Operation Metro Surge. He offered up conspiracy theories and lies about Somali Americans committing 80% of the crime in the Twin Cities. He said money was being stolen from Minnesota state and federal programs to fund the Somali-based terrorist group al-Shabab.
When he signed up with the so-called Sharia Free America Caucus in February, he railed against letting “anti-American ideologies take root in our communities” and said he had been fighting against the nonexistent threat of Sharia law since he was a state legislator. I was unable to find stories of Emmer as a state legislator fearmongering about Sharia law. However, in 2015, when one of Emmer’s fellow Republicans was being rightly rebuked for attending an anti-Muslim event in St. Cloud, Emmer was a voice of reason and tolerance. He wanted his constituents to know that Somali Americans were contributing to the Minnesota communities they had made home and that they were “some of the fastest-assimilating populations.”
That same year, Emmer joined then-Rep. Keith Ellison, the Democrat who’s now the state’s attorney general, to found the Congressional Somalia Caucus: to help Somali Americans here and to promote peace and stability in Somalia.
Now Ellison is taking the lead in legal challenges against the ICE assaults Emmer champions.
This is the ticket into MAGA world: an embrace of abdication of decency and a necessary rejection of the spirit of welcome and tolerance one once held.
This is the ticket into MAGA world.
In April, a west central Minnesota event called “Understanding Immigration: A Community Conversation,” included Ayan Omar, a Somali American from St. Cloud, as a speaker. She works as equity director for the public schools and has been active in interfaith dialogues in the city.
Omar spoke of coming to the U.S. as a child, learning English by watching “The Simpsons” and learning self-value by watching “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The message from Mr. Rogers, she said, was especially important because “I just wanted to cower and hide away because I stood out. Not only because I was a Somali-American refugee, but I was also poor.” It was learning about Frederick Douglass that inspired her to become a teacher.
What she was describing was the process of her becoming more and more American. Countless other Somali Americans have had similar experiences. OEmmer knows that.
And not so long ago, he wasn’t afraid to say it.
Michael Tisserand
Michael Tisserand is a Minnesota-based writer whose works include “Krazy,” a biography of cartoonist George Herriman, and Sugarcane Academy, a memoir of his family’s experiences of Hurricane Katrina. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is currently writing a book about Charlie Chaplin and “The Great Dictator,” for Oxford University Press.
An appeals court on Friday upheld Harvey Weinstein’s2022 rape and sexual assault conviction in California, but ordered the trial judge who gave him 16 years in prison to resentence him.
A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal unanimously issued the decision, saying his trial judge did not violate the former movie magnate’s constitutional rights.
“We reject his attempts to disturb the jury’s guilty verdicts,” the judges wrote in their opinion.
Weinstein spokesperson Juda Engelmayer said in an email that “We are disappointed by today’s decision and respectfully disagree with the Court of Appeal’s conclusions regarding the fairness of Mr. Weinstein’s trial. At the same time, the court correctly recognized that his sentence cannot stand.”
The decision came a day after prosecutors in New York decided Weinstein would not face a fourth trial there, dropping the #MeToo-era case after the accuser said she could not bear to testify again.
The California panel said that resentencing was necessary because the judge that sentenced him considered New York convictions that were later thrown out as an aggravating factor. California’s attorney general agreed.
Weinstein, 74, still stands convicted of another sexual felony in New York, and he remains behind bars awaiting a September sentencing there. Prosecutors there are seeking a 20-year prison term.
In California, Weinstein was convicted in December 2022 of one count of rape and two counts of sexual assault against an Italian model and actor known during the trial as Jane Doe 1. He would serve his new sentence there only after his New York term is complete.
After the trial, Jane Doe 1 came forward under her name, Evgeniya Chernyshova, when she sued Weinstein in civil court.
The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly as Chernyshova did. Her attorney also said she consented to being named.
Chernyshova testified that Weinstein arrived uninvited to her hotel room during the 2013 LA Italia Film Festival and assaulted her.
Weinstein’s defense argued that Weinstein deserved a new trial because Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lisa B. Lench wrongly prevented his trial lawyers from asking about Facebook messages between Chernyshova and festival head Pascal Vicedomini that would have shown they had a sexual relationship.
The questioning would have demonstrated that she perjured herself when she said she and Vicedomini were just friends and colleagues, the defense said. And the lawyers argued it would have bolstered their assertion that she was not even in her room on the night of the alleged assault.
“The lower court all but gutted Mr. Weinstein’s defense,” attorney Jennifer Bonjean told the appeals judges at April 23 oral arguments.
But the appeals court said in its ruling that Weinstein did make the arguments he wanted during the trial based on other evidence, including another set of Facebook messages that Lench allowed.
“Thus, there was no denial of Weinstein’s constitutional right to present a defense,” the panel wrote in its opinion.
The three judges also found that Weinstein’s lawyers failed to adhere to California’s rape shield law prohibiting evidence of an accuser’s sexual history when they tried to introduce the messages. Weinstein’s lawyers had argued that the shield law was not pertinent because they wanted to use the messages only to impeach the witness’s credibility.
And the appeals judges said testimony from accusers describing sexual assaults Weinstein was not charged with was appropriate, and allowed under state law.
Before his sentencing, Weinstein told the judge that this was a “made-up story” from a woman he had never met.
The Los Angeles jury acquitted Weinstein of the sexual battery of a massage therapist and failed to reach verdicts on counts involving two other women.
“This is not the end of the appellate process,” Engelmayer said in his email Friday. “We intend to seek review in the California Supreme Court because we continue to believe significant legal errors affected the proceedings and warrant further review.”
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said it would not have comment on the decision until the office reviewed it.
An email seeking comment from Chernyshova’s attorney was not immediately answered.
ByGarry Pierre-Pierre
One of the first people, and the very first doctor, to publicly receive a Covid-19 vaccine in the United States was Dr. Yves Duroseauthe chair of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.
At a time when fear had emptied city streets and refrigerated trucks were lined up near hospital loading docksthat son of Haiti was a face of hope.
For Haitians, that image carried a deeper resonance. Ours is a community that America has often noticed only in moments of crisis. For once, the country was looking at a Haitian because he represented hope.
Ours is a community that America often noticed only in moments of crisis.
That memory from five and a half years ago is one reason the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday allowing the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians hit me so hard. Not with anger, but with deep sadness.
When I took the oath of citizenship decades ago, I believed America rewarded commitment with belonging. I still want to believe that. Thursday’s ruling suggests that, for some immigrants, the word “temporary” didn’t just describe their legal status but the nature of America’s welcome.
The first TPS recipients from Haiti arrived after the magnitude 7 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and killed hundreds of thousands of people in 2010. Today, Haiti faces a different catastrophe. Armed gangs control much of the capitalthousands have been killed or displaced and the State Department continues to warn Americans not to travel there.
For many TPS holders, the country they fled has not recovered. In many ways, it has become even more dangerous.
They believed something basic: that the United States would not send them back to a country engulfed by political violence, armed gangs and institutional collapse. TPS was created for those for whom returning home is unsafe. That humanitarian commitment should matter just as much as the lives those TPS holders have built since arriving.
They waited for Congress to do what some members had pushed for for years: create a pathway from temporary protection to permanent belonging. Instead, the years passed. Children became adults. Mortgages were paid. Careers were built. Entire lives unfolded while Washington postponed action. Temporary Protected Status became less a bridge than a waiting room. The finish line kept moving. Now, for many, it has disappeared altogether.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Haitian nurses, home health aides and other essential workers were hailed as heroes. Their work was indispensable then, and healthcare leaders say it remains indispensable today.
This dependence is not sentimental. It is measurable. The Boston Globe, citing data from the National Domestic Workers Alliancereported that roughly 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants each day, caring for an estimated 65,000 patients.
According to a report by Massachusetts lawmakers Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, ending TPS for Haitians “threatens to seriously disrupt the health care, senior care and disability care workforces amid a nationwide health care crisis and persistent staffing shortages.”
Roughly 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants each day, caring for an estimated 65,000 patients.
There is nothing temporary about the lives these TPS holders have built. There is nothing temporary about paying taxes for decades, buying a home, planting a garden or knowing your neighbors by name. There is nothing temporary about raising children who begin each school day by pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. There is nothing temporary about risking your life to care for strangers during a once-in-a-century pandemic.
I never imagined that, decades after taking my own oath of citizenship, I would be writing about a generation of immigrants who walked that same path with the same faith only to discover that the road ended before they reached their destination.
As the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, it must also confront a question that has shadowed much of its history: Who gets to belong?
Too often, America has answered that question by welcoming people when their labor is needed most, only to question their place later.
Perhaps that is the greatest irony of all. The people we continue to call temporary have spent years proving their commitment to this country. This ruling is bigger than Haitians or Syrians. It speaks to the covenant a nation makes with the people who answer its call during moments of need.
Though that process has never been smooth, America has always been at its best when it expanded the circle of belonging. Italians, Jews, Asians and even Black Americans born here were all told at one time that they could never fully be American. The country was not diminished by widening the definition of who belongs — it was strengthened by it.
The question is no longer whether Haitians who have their built lives here belong. They have answered that question through years of work, sacrifice and service.
The question is whether America still remembers what it means to be a country that welcomes immigrants.
The U.S. has every right to enforce its immigration laws. But laws do not exist in a vacuum.
The U.S. has every right to enforce its immigration laws. But laws do not exist in a vacuum. They also reflect the promises a nation makes about who belongs. After more than 16 years, the Haitians affected by Thursday’s ruling are no longer strangers passing through. They are co-workers, parishioners, homeowners and taxpayers woven into the fabric of neighborhoods from New York to Florida to Massachusetts.
Pull one thread and you do more than remove one person. You weaken the fabric itself.
Garry Pierre-Pierre
Garry Pierre-Pierre is a Pulitzer-prize winning, multimedia and entrepreneurial journalist. In 1999, he left The New York Times to launch the Haitian Times, a New York-based English-language publication serving the Haitian diaspora. He is also the co-founder of the City University Graduate School of Journalism‘s Center for Community and Ethnic Media and a senior producer at CUNY TV
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