(DEARBORN, Mich.) — Twenty years and 600 miles from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, the nation’s largest Arab Muslim community is still quietly reeling from the 2001 terror attacks and a psychological blow dealt to Islamic American identity.
“This is, perhaps, the unspoken tragedy of what happened two decades ago,” said Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The group of terrorists who claimed to be acting in the name of Islam, taking nearly 3,000 innocent lives, set off a wave of Islamophobia in America that many peaceful and patriotic Muslims said still reverberates years later.
“People associate people who look like us with an event that we didn’t create,” said Rima Imad Fadlallah, a Michigan native and co-host of the Dearborn Girl podcast exploring Arab American female identity. “We, quite frankly, shouldn’t be made to feel like we’re apologizing for others.”
Over the past two decades, Muslim Americans have reported in public opinion surveys a near constant scrutiny of their religion and skepticism of their patriotism that’s triggered a quiet struggle over the meaning of citizenship, faith and belonging.
“Ours is a community that continues to be ‘otherized,'” said Petra Alsoofy, who studies public opinion of Islam with the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonprofit group created in Michigan in 2001 to help combat misconceptions about Islam.
“Are you American? Are you a Muslim? Is there a conflict between these identities? Actually what the research shows,” said Alsoofy, “is the stronger the religious identity, the stronger the American identity.”
ABC News Live traveled this month to Dearborn, Michigan, home to thousands of American immigrant families from Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, to hear directly from residents and community leaders about the lasting impact of the 9/11 attacks.
Many lamented the uncomfortable spotlight that comes with each Sept. 11 anniversary and many worried the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan this month will rekindle a focus on religious extremism.
“Once again, when you turn on the TV these days, it’s showing all these Muslim radicals,” said Imam Ahmed Qazwini of the Islamic Institute of America in west Dearborn. “And this reflects on my religion that we share the same name — Islam — but there is nothing else. There’s no other common denominator.”
The sleepy suburb on the outskirts of Detroit — home to Ford Motor Company — has become a model for the peaceful co-existence of American Muslims, Christians and Jews, all thriving together.
“Maybe politics is separating people from each other, but the coffee is bringing them to one table,” said Ibrahim Alhasbani, owner of Qawah House, a popular local shop serving up steaming pots of aromatic Yemeni brew along the city’s main drag.
Dearborn is an oasis of global cultures and cuisines, home to a regional health care hub, transit point for railroad freight and producer of sausages that bear the city’s name. It’s also home to the largest concentration of Muslims in the United States.
“We have many unique communities here and everyone kind of retains their identity,” said 30-year-old mayoral candidate Abdullah Hammoud, who will become the first Muslim to lead the city if he’s elected this fall.
But Dearborn’s success as a diverse and growing Rust Belt city — and claim to the nation’s largest mosque, the Islamic Center of America — have also made it a frequent target.
Since 2001, outsiders have used the city as a stage to advance conspiracy theories, bigotry and hate. Some political extremists have maligned it as “Dearbornistan” and mocked its high school as “Hezbollah High,” despite the fact that neither the city nor its residents have had any connection to terrorism.
“This community has been the epicenter of anti-Muslim hate and xenophobia,” Walid said. “President (Donald) Trump’s rhetoric allowed people who harbored anti-Muslim bigotry, racism and xenophobia — gave them license to say it publicly and act upon it.”
An ABC News review of FBI hate crime data from the past two decades found that the number of reported anti-Muslim incidents spiked nationwide immediately following Sept. 11, 2001, but never fully returned to pre-2001 levels.
“When it comes to school bullying, workplace discrimination and harassment by government officials — this has steadily gotten worse,” said Walid.
Three in four Muslims nationwide reported experiencing “a lot” of discrimination in American society, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted 16 years after the attacks. Half of all U.S. adults in the same survey said they believed Islam is still not part of mainstream society.
“If you asked me to choose where my American and Muslim and Arab identities start and end, I would not be able to do that,” said Yasmeen Kadouh, co-producer of the podcast with Fadlallah. “I think post-9/11 we really were made to feel like they were mutually exclusive, which is kind of hard to grapple with.”
“I don’t remember a world before 9/11, and I do know as a kid, you don’t know what racism is, but you feel it,” she added.
Imam Qazwini, who grew up in Dearborn and whose father was a community faith leader on 9/11, said more American Muslims are recognizing the need to knock down myths about their faith.
“9/11 had a huge impact on Muslims living in the U.S.,” Qazwini said. “We need to be more vocal. We need to speak out and show America what the real religion of Islam is. It’s a peaceful religion, a religion of love.”
A grassroots movement of young Muslim Americans — like Kadouh, Imad Fadlallah, Hammoud and Alsoofy in Dearborn, all children back in 2001 — is now determined to change the narrative from the bottom up.
“I don’t have to put an American flag on my front porch to show that I’m patriotic. I am patriotic because I love this country,” said Imad Fadlallah. “If my parents — people who came here with little opportunity, heavy Middle Eastern accents — are able to be that bold, I have no excuse to put up with things that I shouldn’t have to put up with.”
(NEW YORK) — The sky was clear and blue. The gray towers stood, both guarding and welcoming, at the gateway to the nation. Out of nowhere came the impact, the blaze, the smoke — and then the towers were gone. When the dust and flames finally cleared, a new world had emerged.
The death and destruction defined that late summer day and remain seared in the minds of those who lived through Sept. 11, 2001. From the ashes and wreckage rose a new America: a society redefined by its scars and marked by a new wartime reality — a shadow darkened even more in recent days by the resurgence of fundamentalist Islamist rule in the far-off land that hatched the attacks.
Twenty years later — with more than 70 million Americans born since the crucible of the attacks — the legacy of 9/11 remains. From airport security to civilian policing to the most casual parts of daily life, it would be nearly impossible to identify something that remains untouched and unaffected by those terrifying hours in 2001.
This week, ABC News revisits the 9/11 attacks and unwinds their aftermath, taking a deep look at the America born in the wake of destruction. “9/11 Twenty Years Later: The Longest Shadow” is a five-part documentary series narrated by George Stephanopoulos. Episodes will air on ABC News Live each night leading up to the 20th anniversary of the attacks, from Sept. 6-10. The series will be rebroadcast in full following the commemoration ceremonies on Saturday, Sept. 11.
Two decades later, after years of unjustified suffering on a fortified island military base halfway around the world, Boumediene says the reality is clear: “They destroyed my life.”
In the frenzied post-9/11 hunt for terrorists, the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay was pressed into service as what then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously called the “least worst option” to house suspected terrorists captured in what officials described as the new Global War on Terror.
At its height, the facility held 800 men, each supposedly having varying degrees of ties to terrorists or terrorist groups. According to American intelligence, some of the inhabitants were known to be hardened veterans of anti-Western terrorism, including some of the alleged masterminds and organizers of the 9/11 attacks. Some had tenuous, though concrete, connections to suspected terrorists. And still others were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.
For Boumediene, merely having worked with a sibling of a known al-Qaeda terrorist may be what earned him a seven-and-a-half-year stay at a jail that has, to many, come to symbolize the mistakes and excesses of America’s response to the hijackings and killings of Sept. 11, 2001.
“Twenty years later, I can’t find the truth behind my imprisonment in Guantanamo,” Boumediene said.
Located some 500 miles southeast of Miami, Guantanamo spans a pristine stretch of shoreline on the Cuban coast. In many ways, the base looks and feels like a small Florida town, complete with beautiful beaches, an Irish pub and a McDonald’s. It earned a slice of fame in the 1992 Tom Cruise film “A Few Good Men,” but it is now known around the world as the home to some of America’s darkest hours.
“Anybody who does not know about Guantanamo I think today would be surprised at some of the things that went on there,” said Marion “Spike” Bowman, the former deputy general counsel for national security at the FBI.
Despite years of public outcry over conditions in the prison camp there — and disputes over the legal justification for its existence — 39 detainees still remain within its walls.
“The creation of Guantanamo was the right action at the beginning,” said Roger Cressey, a former top counterterrorism official on the National Security Council during the administrations of both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. “And then it turned into Frankenstein’s monster.”
Gitmo, as many know it, wasn’t meant to be a monster, but a legal “black hole.” Former officials said Guantanamo was born out of necessity as a place to house those who needed to be held and interrogated when the U.S. attacked Afghanistan in order to destroy the terror network that committed the 9/11 attacks.
The Bush administration determined that the Sept. 11 attacks were more akin to acts of war than a crime, so those captured in connection with 9/11 would be “enemy combatants” who would be tried in military courts — instead of criminals who would have constitutional protections in the American legal system and would be tried in civilian courts.
“We worried about bringing these terrorists into the United States for a couple reasons,” said Alberto R. Gonzales, a former Bush White House counsel and U.S. attorney general who was deeply involved in the decision-making. “We felt the American people wouldn’t stand for it, to have these terrorists on American soil. We also were unsure about what rights — constitutional rights — that they would automatically secure once they were on American soil.”
The Bush administration sought to “deal with them in a way that was out of the U.S. legal system,” said retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Guantanamo Bay was the answer. The detainees would be transferred to the detention facility, where they would be interrogated and then tried in something called “military commissions,” a cross between a standard trial and a military court martial, which had been used — albeit rarely — in times of war. Within months of Sept. 11, Bush issued the order directing Rumsfeld to organize the commissions, effectively circumventing the U.S. court system. Separately, Rumsfeld also authorized 18 interrogation techniques in late 2002 that could be used on detainees said to be resisting — including slapping and sleep deprivation.
The two orders would come to define Guantanamo and serve as the backdrop for the debate over America’s actions in the name of a War on Terror that continues to rage.
At the time, “there was a lot of concern about a second wave” of attacks, “and being alert for that,” Gonzales said. It was that sense of urgency to gather intelligence on possible follow-up attacks that led to Guantanamo’s worst abuses, according to Bowman, who also had been a naval intelligence officer and assistant judge advocate. Bowman eventually attempted unsuccessfully to talk Pentagon officials out of the abuses that allegedly occurred there.
It was under those desperate circumstances that American officials resorted to the darker means of extracting information, called “enhanced interrogation” by some — and “torture” by others. Fearing more attacks, U.S. officials sought approval for the techniques, which included extreme physical and psychological stresses.
The newly approved interrogation methods set the stage for a dramatic intragovernmental conflict. The dispute pitted two groups of investigators — one from the military, the other largely made up of intelligence officials — against one another.
The military investigators, dubbed the Criminal Investigation Task Force, sought to weed out innocents from the detainees. The intelligence officers, called Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, were dispatched to interrogate the detainees for information about future terrorist plots. Largely inexperienced in interrogation, they allegedly inflicted severe abuses on detainees who resisted questioning — and then retroactively attempted to justify their methods through legal loopholes, according to documents and court cases.
Many experts, including Susan Burke, a lawyer who has represented Guantanamo detainees, remain unconvinced of the legality of the methods.
“It has been well-established that you cannot torture people,” said Burke. “So, this notion that, somehow, because we use the vernacular of ‘Global War on Terror,’ that we can do whatever we want to other human beings? Wholly illegal.”
Bowman became increasingly concerned by what agents based in Cuba were reporting back to FBI headquarters about what they had been witnessing a year after the 9/11 attacks. The dispatches described physical abuse and sexualized physical contact with the Muslim detainees, as well as duct-taping one prisoner’s head and forcing another to remain in a cell flooded with light for months without darkness, causing “extreme psychological trauma,” according to one FBI document.
Critically, Bowman said, the forceful means to extract intelligence didn’t work in the first place, and then subsequently undermined efforts to gather reliable information — ultimately shaping the public’s image of the camp.
“They wanted to do what they thought would be faster to get information than the FBI’s rapport-building type of activity,” Bowman said. “My problem was the techniques they were using were not techniques that had ever been proven to be effective in interrogation.”
Boumediene says he can still recall one night in particular — during his early days at Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray detention compound — when he says “they tried to break me.”
“At two o’clock in the morning, the inspector said to the soldiers, ‘Come on, make him run,'” Boumediene said. “They forced me to run with them, but I couldn’t run because I was handcuffed. I couldn’t run with them. When I would fall, they would pull me along the gravel … if I remember, ten days, 15 days like that, every day.”
In Washington, the dispute over aggressive interrogation techniques, including questions of whether they were illegal torture and if they were an effective instrument of intelligence-gathering, gave way to a fight over the legal justifications — and whether such practices were permissible under the Geneva Conventions, a 1949 set of agreements regulating the use of force during wartime. Mindful of those requirements, officials even used a specific nomenclature for those being held.
“We weren’t calling them prisoners of war at that time, as I recall,” Wilkerson said. “We were calling them detainees, because that was the term of art that didn’t bespeak Geneva and so forth.”
The Bush administration made the case that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda terrorists, interpreting those guidelines as “an incentive to individuals to fight according to laws of war,” Gonzales said, and asserting that the rules applied only to those fighting on behalf of the nearly 200 nations that signed the treaty in the wake of World War II.
“Because al-Qaeda had not been a signatory to the Geneva Conventions,” Gonzales argued, “they would not automatically qualify for the protections — and the same thing with the Taliban.”
John Bellinger, who was the chief lawyer for the National Security Council on 9/11, said that denying accused terrorists protections under the Geneva Conventions had been a mistake.
“This opened us up to a huge amount of international criticism that we were holding detainees in Guantanamo … in a legal black hole, in a law-free zone,” he said. “And to a certain extent, this was really true.”
The legal conundrum was compounded by reports of the mistreatment of detainees. As Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials lauded the new interrogation techniques, those who witnessed them expressed horror — and news reports started to emerge depicting the extreme conditions detainees were forced to endure.
“Secretary Rumsfeld was told about much of this stuff,” Bowman said in a recent interview. “He really just rolled it off. And that, frankly, rolls downhill.”
In November 2002, Rumsfeld even jotted in the margin of a memo authorizing harsh interrogation techniques for “counter-resistance” by saying, “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”
U.S. Air Force Reserve Capt. Mark McCary served as a judge advocate at Guantanamo, responsible for ensuring that Criminal Investigation Task Force interrogators drawn from each military branch’s investigative agencies remained within their legal bounds. A veteran of a decade of deployments that focused on counterterrorism, he arrived on the island base with a duffle bag filled with law books. What he soon learned of the JTF-Guantanamo interrogations “did not comport with American values and principles that we’re trained with, including justice, Geneva Conventions, and the basic equities of interrogation and training,” he said.
McCary confronted military leaders and penned a series of memos outlining conditions at the camp and calling for intervention. The Pentagon ignored them.
“They didn’t appreciate my opinion or my legal assessment,” he said.
McCary redeployed back home. Guantanamo, he found, “was a career-ender” for him and for many judge advocates appointed as defense counsel or prosecutors in the military tribunals, he said.
Meanwhile, Bowman, unable to persuade the Pentagon to abandon its program of “enhanced interrogation,” went to the press, he said. In early 2005, the New York Daily News ran a headline, “AT WAR WITH GITMO GRILLING.”
“Military lawyers at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison tried to stop inhumane interrogations but were ignored by senior Pentagon officials, the Daily News has learned,” read the story.
The article included details of a memo McCary had written outlining abuses at the prison camp. Bowman, who was quoted as an unidentified source in the story, characterized McCary as an “unsung hero.”
“I thought people needed to understand that there were people on the scene, not just in Washington like me, but people on the scene who were seeing what was going on, who were trying to make a difference. And I wanted that known,” he said.
McCary left his unit in March of 2003 and says he has not communicated with anyone at the Pentagon or the FBI since. What he witnessed at Guantanamo left him with scars of his own, he said.
“I desired to actually return to duty and could not do that because of a medical diagnosis: bipolar with PTSD,” he said. “There was a time where I could’ve been a homeless vet … I struggled immensely with all of that.”
Two decades and three presidential administrations have passed since 9/11, and Guantanamo remains open — albeit as a shadow of its former self. Its most high-profile inhabitant, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who has confessed to plotting the 9/11 attacks, remains there in legal limbo. He stands charged with killing nearly 3,000 people in the worst terror attack in history, and is awaiting trial as his case resumed this week following a delay in pretrial motions.
“The fact that the individuals responsible for 9/11 are sitting there — they have not been tried — the system that was designed to bring them to justice has proven to be a failure,” said Matt Olsen, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center who was charged with closing the prison under the Obama administration.
Despite Guantanamo’s complicated legacy and the moral burden it placed on the American conscience, many officials responsible for what happened there stand by their decisions — and claim that the ends justified the means.
“To the families of the victims, 20 years later, I would say that, even though these individuals are simply detained and not brought to justice in a court,” Gonzales said, “there is some level of justice in the detention itself.”
Others feel differently.
“Looking back 20 years later, I think it was correct to treat the response to 9/11 as a war, as an armed conflict,” said Bellinger. “But decisions that were subsequently made that flowed from that, the creation of military commissions, the decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions to the people who we were holding — I think these were mistakes that were made by the Bush administration.”
In 2004, three years after 9/11, Boumediene and other detainees were finally afforded legal counsel. By 2007, Boumediene’s case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices determined that Boumediene and other detainees were entitled to habeas corpus, the constitutional right of anyone detained in America to know the reasons for their arrest and detention. A federal judge then found that Boumediene should be released, citing a lack of evidence against him.
“And then it was over,” Boumediene said.
“It is a day I will never forget.”
ABC News’ Kate Holland, Lauren Minore, Lara Priluck, Emma Seiwell, Ibtissem Guenfoud, Jenny Wagnon Courts, Olivia Rubin, Tonya Simpson and Jinsol Jung contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — A wide-ranging lawsuit claims New York City’s education system is racist in design and operation — effectively separating largely white and Asian students from Black and Latino students through a discriminatory testing processes for its gifted and talented (G&T) programs and curriculum.
Unlike other lawsuits that have demanded equal access to education, IntegrateNYC v. The State of New York, filed by students and advocates against the state and city, along with other defendants, takes the debate a step further.
“It’s a wholesale attack on racial inequality at school,” said Derek Black, a professor of education and constitutional law at the University of South Carolina School of Law who filed multiple amicus briefs on the issue of school segregation. Other cases such as Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota have demanded desegregation of schools for the purposes of better learning and equal opportunity but “this case is far more aggressive,” Black said.
The suit, originally filed in March, argues that New York City has perpetuated racism by upholding racially discriminatory screening processes for gifted programs that begins early in children’s lives as well as admission to elite schools. It also claims city schools, which remain some of the most segregated in the country, teach a Eurocentric curriculum and fail to sustain a racially diverse educator workforce.
The suit seeks to bar the use of what the plaintiffs call a discriminatory entrance exam into gifted programs and ensure recruitment of a diverse workforce. Use of the exam was suspended this year because of a contract issue.
The action has generated controversy, specifically from some members of the Asian community, who argue that by being grouped with white people as being overrepresented in the city’s G&T programs and specialized schools unfairly suggests that they are privileged when many are in fact impoverished.
A spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education said in a statement that the agency was reviewing the suit and that “the administration has taken bold, unprecedented steps to advance equity in our admissions policies — suspending academic screens in middle schools, removing district priorities in high schools, and dismantling a system that uses the test results of four year olds to determine their academic success.” The mayor’s office did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Here’s what to know ahead of the next court date on Sept. 30:
How it all started
When former Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the public school system in 2002, admission to the highly competitive G&T programs was centralized through standardized testing for children starting at age 4.
Though the intention was to diversify the racial makeup of the programs and eliminate bias against minority students, the result was the opposite: fewer and fewer Black and Hispanic students were admitted to gifted programs at a younger age which hindered them from being prepared for the entrance exam to the city’s specialized high schools, according to the complaint.
During the 1994-’95 school year, the largest racial group at Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the eight elite specialized high schools in the city, was Black, comprising 37% of the total student population. In 2021, Black students made up less than 6% of the school’s population, according to state enrollment data.
According to the suit, white and Asian students were disproportionately offered admission to G&T programs (representing 35% of the kindergarten population but 81% of G&T offers for that grade in 2017-’18) compared to Black and Latino students (representing 65% of the population but 18% of offers).
Before Bloomberg enacted mayoral control, the procedure for identifying gifted students varied between schools, which could choose to utilize a combination of multiple identification methods including grades, teacher referrals and parent referrals.
Chien Kwok, the co-founder of PLACE NYC — a parent-led organization advocating for expanding access to G&T programs — and a recently elected member of the Community Education Council of District 2, said the old system yielded a more diverse student population.
Under the Bloomberg-imposed testing system, the duty of identifying gifted students fell to parents, who had to opt for their children to test for an extremely limited spot in the G&T programs. Some parents could not easily navigate the complex path to G&T testing either because of time constraints or financial restraints, according to Kwok, who attended New York City schools in the 1980s and attended Brooklyn Tech.
“(Centralizing) made it hard for families with parents working two jobs… to go through a very onerous process,” said Kwok.
The Department of Education announced in February 2021 that the city would temporarily eliminate the use of a single test into gifted programs and instead revert to lottery and teacher referrals – a process that the lawsuit contends does not address the existing segregation and is not “pedagogically sound.”
Teachers, like others in society, may hold racialized and gendered perceptions of students, and those perceptions affect whether they think a student might be gifted or not, said Rachel Fish, a professor at New York University studying racialized constructions of disability and giftedness.
Her research, in which she showed teachers films of fictional students demonstrating academic giftedness, found that teachers are more likely to perceive white students’ academic strengths as natural and conversely fail to recognize the same level of objective academic ability in students of color.
‘Caste system’
Claude Hibbert, a 17-year-old rising senior at Brooklyn Tech and one of the student plaintiffs, said as a Black student, racist and racially charged expressions such as the “n-word,” “fried chicken” and “Kool Aid” were frequently cast at him by other students. When he sought guidance from teachers, he said he would be told to just “push through,” or “that’s just the way it is.”
“You’re being harmed and you’re going to somebody for help and having your experience invalidated,” Hibbert told ABC News.
According to the suit, a teacher at Hibbert’s school kept a list of racist incidents reported by Black and Latino students between 2012 and 2015, including racially charged jokes and perpetuating stereotypes. The teacher reported the incidents to school leadership, but “the school enacted no meaningful policy changes,” the complaint says, and the documents say that the system leaves the students to fend for themselves.
The racism that students of color say they experienced in school is part of a system that they say is racist itself, the lawsuit alleges.
“The system reproduced by the New York City public schools is fundamentally one of caste: an artificial, graded ‘ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of,’ in the United States, race,” the suit says.
This system, the complaint says, is accomplished by effectively setting groups apart at an early age and perpetuating those divisions.
“Consequently, the demographics of the City’s G&T programs reflect disparate familial resources, enrolling predominantly white and certain Asian students,” the suit says. The system culminates in admissions to specialized high schools, which it says cements the notion that certain groups are privileged while others are not.
“The City and State intentionally maintain and sanction this system despite their knowledge — acquired through decades of experience and reflected in their own admissions — of its racist character and outcomes,” the complaint says.
Privilege a complex issue
One of the more nuanced concepts advanced in the suit is that of privilege — and Asian students being lumped in with white students as being predominantly represented in gifted programs. The complaint acknowledges that both the city and state treat Asians as a monolith and that “this treatment obscures severe economic stratification and diverse English language acquisition needs within Asian American and Pacific Islander communities,”
The fact that Asian Americans, who had the second highest poverty rate in the city, according to the city’s most recent poverty measure report in 2018, have high representation in gifted programs is not because they are all privileged, Kwok said.
A Chinese mother of three in New York City, who requested anonymity due to fear of retribution from her neighbors, told ABC News that as the sole breadwinner of her family, she struggles to finance her children’s education.
“All the money I make, I just save for my children’s education,” she said. She lives in government housing, works as a part-time home care aide and said she used her earnings for her children’s Specialized High School Admissions Test preparation courses. Her youngest son is currently a student at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, one of the city’s eight specialized high schools.
At Stuyvesant, more than half of Asian students were eligible for free and reduced-price meals in 2020, which is what the DOE uses as a poverty indicator. In comparison, 45% of Black students, 29% of Hispanic students and 16% of white students qualified.
Mark Rosenbaum, the plaintiffs’ attorney from Public Counsel, a pro bono public interest law firm, said that rather than being divisive, the suit is about achieving equality for all students.
“If there are to be gifted and talented programs, and if there are to be specialized high schools, they have to be accessible to all… They must be retained in a way that all children, regardless of their race, have equal access to these schools,” Rosenbaum said.
(NEW YORK) — In the two decades since the Sept. 11 attacks, forensic scientists have been hard at work trying to identify the 2,753 people who were killed at the World Trade Center — but the road hasn’t been easy.
As of this week, the Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) in New York City has identified 1,647 victims, mostly using DNA from the human remains found at the site of the attack. But still, 40% of the Ground Zero victims haven’t been identified.
Mark Desire, assistant director of the OCME Department of Forensic Biology and manager of the World Trade Center DNA Identification Team, told reporters during a video call Wednesday that the investigation has been challenging, but after all this time, the team’s mission remains the same: to help the families of the victims find some closure.
Thankfully, new technology could help speed up the identification process.
“We’ve adapted, we’ve overcome and we’ve pushed that science, day after day,” Desire said.
Desire and other forensic scientists who’ve worked on the identification project said there are numerous factors that have made identification difficult. For starters, the remains at Ground Zero were exposed to several elements that can destroy DNA, including jet fuel, mold and fire.
John Butler, a fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who assisted with the World Trade Center identification efforts shortly after the attacks, told ABC News that it has taken a long time to get a manifest of all of the fatalities at the site, which included first responders, airplane passengers and crew, office workers and other civilians.
He noted that scientists had to gather as many DNA samples from the victims — whether it was from old toothbrushes, pieces of clothing or close family members — as possible to have a database to match the remnants found at Ground Zero.
“There wasn’t an inventory of everyone in the lab. They had to go out and get samples,” he said.
Desire also said there are victims for whom no additional DNA samples have been able to be retrieved.
“Maybe [the victim didn’t] have family or the family has accepted it and don’t want to be notified,” he said.
Over 22,000 human bone and tissue samples have been recovered from Ground Zero over the years, according to OCME. And by the end of May 2002, 736 victims were identified without DNA matching, according to a report issued by Butler a decade ago.
But he said one of the biggest issues that forensic experts still struggle with is the fragmented nature of the DNA recovered from the site, which is why he worked for months to come up with a new type of analysis for short tandem repeat (STR) markers in the DNA, which are unique among related persons.
“You can recover more information from a sample that has been broken into smaller pieces,” Butler said, adding that 20% of the identifications that have been made so far were done using the “miniSTR” tests that he helped develop.
Desire said the World Trade Center DNA Identification Team continues to work on analyzing the data they’ve gathered from the victims and making those DNA matches. On many occasions, the tests on a sample will match with a victim who has already been identified, but those matches still help in the long run, because it gives the team a more defined blueprint of that victim’s identity.
“It’s the samples we have gone back to over and over and over again,” he said.
Desire said his team is in constant contact with victims’ families — many who are still awaiting for their loved ones to be properly identified.
On Tuesday, for the first time in nearly two years, the office identified two victims. One of them is Dorothy Morgan, of Hempstead, New York, who worked for an insurance company at the North Tower. The identity of the second match is being withheld from the public at the family members’ request, OCME said.
Nikiah Morgan, Dorothy Morgan’s daughter, told WABC that she held out hope for years that “she was just out there somewhere.”
“I didn’t expect it after all this time,” she said.
Desire said he can’t give a timetable of when the next identifications will be made, but he believes new technology will lead to more matches.
The World Trade Center DNA Identification Team will soon be using a process known as next generation sequencing, which has been used by the military for long-term investigations involving unknown victims.
Desire said the technique has helped identify the remains of soldiers who died as far back as the Korean War.
“It allows us to look at samples that we had no hope in the past,” he said.
Overall, Desire said his team’s progress over the last 20 years has been remarkable, given the scope and conditions of the investigation. However, he said they’re still pushing to complete the identifications, for the sake of the victims’ loved ones.
“We won’t stop, because we know we can continue to make identifications,” Desire said.
(TEXAS) — Texas’ new abortion ban is notable for several reasons — chief among them how it is enforced.
The statute, which is the most restrictive abortion law in the country, bars physicians from providing abortions once they detect a so-called fetal heartbeat — technically the flutter of electrical activity within the cells in an embryo. That can be seen on an ultrasound as early as six weeks into a pregnancy — before many women even know they’re pregnant. There is an exception under the Texas law for abortions in cases of medical emergencies.
The law — which is enforced civilly, rather than criminally, by members of the public — can potentially have very broad applications and could result in numerous lawsuits over one suspected illegal abortion, experts told ABC News.
Here’s a look at how the law, known as SB 8, might work in practice.
Who can sue, and be sued
Under SB 8, private citizens — including those who live outside of Texas — can sue a person they “reasonably believed” provided an illegal abortion or assisted someone in getting it in the state, up to four years after the act. Government officials are expressly prohibited from enforcing the law.
“This is a very unusual way to enforce abortion prohibitions, or almost anything else,” Seth Chandler, a law foundation professor at the University of Houston Law Center, told ABC News. “We either criminalize the conduct or we give people who are actually injured by the conduct the right to sue.”
SB 8, rather, “gives virtually anyone on the planet the right to sue, regardless of whether they suffered any injury from the abortion,” he said.
Under the law, plaintiffs can file in the county where they reside, if they live in Texas; where the alleged illegal abortion took place; or where any of the defendants live.
Since anyone can sue, there could potentially be a lawsuit filed in all 254 Texas counties against one doctor for the same abortion, Chandler said. The law also prohibits the consolidation of lawsuits or a change of court venue, which could further burden defendants, he said.
However, doctors found in violation of the law would only have to pay damages once if there were multiple lawsuits filed over a single abortion.
“The pro-SB 8 forces can make life completely miserable for the doctor that they believe has performed an unlawful abortion,” Chandler said. “If you lose once then you can make the other cases go away. But in the meantime, you’re going to have to incur potentially large litigation expenses defending yourself against multiple lawsuits.”
Doctors aren’t the only potential defendants; as stated in the law, they could also be anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion, including paying for or reimbursing the costs of an abortion through insurance or otherwise.”
That opens it up to any number of defendants, Priscilla Smith, a senior fellow at the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at Yale Law School, told ABC News.
“It could be somebody’s mom who gives them a phone number” for an abortion provider, she said. “It could be your best friend who drives you to the clinic. It could be anybody.”
The law further states that a lawsuit can be brought against someone “regardless of whether the person knew or should have known that the abortion would be performed or induced” — a broad interpretation of which experts say could further widen the scope of potential defendants to, for instance, an unwitting ride-share driver. In fact, days after the law went into effect, the CEOs of Uber and Lyft both announced they would cover all legal fees for drivers sued under SB 8 while driving on their platforms.
Determining standing
In federal court, only the injured parties may sue, though “those rules need not apply in state court,” Chandler said. “A state’s constitution could give a broader class of citizens the right to sue.”
There is a debate if Texas law is in fact broader than federal law, he said.
“That’s the initial step — there’s a question as to whether they have standing or not,” he said.
If the case proceeds, a defendant might be able to file a lawsuit in federal court to enjoin proceedings in the state court, Chandler said. Normally federal intervention in state courts is not permitted, but an SB 8 lawsuit could be a strong case for an exception, he said.
The defendants would raise the defense of Roe v. Wade and argue that SB 8 is unconstitutional, and the court would decide if it protects them, Smith said.
Burden of proof
The plaintiff would have to show that a doctor performed an illegal abortion. That could involve the medical records — protected health information under HIPAA — of the person who received the abortion, who wouldn’t be a party in the lawsuit.
There is some precedent in requesting medical records for parties not named in a lawsuit, Kelly Dineen, an associate professor of law and the director of the health law program at Creighton University School of Law, told ABC News. For example, that could arise during a dispute over a non-compete clause, with medical records requested to show proof of a violation, she said.
“HIPAA does provide a couple of ways that that could, in theory, happen,” Dineen said.
In the case of SB 8, one way could be by the court issuing an order to the abortion provider to disclose the information, she said.
“Let’s say that the person bringing the lawsuit says that an abortion was provided on X date to X person — then that could be specified in the court order,” she said.
The information could also be released during discovery, if the woman the health records are about received notice and didn’t raise any objections, or any objections raised were resolved and the court permitted the disclosure, Dineen said.
The health records could also be obtained through a qualified protective order, which has restrictions on how the information is used, she said.
“The HIPAA requirements make it very unlikely that you could just have generalities,” Dineen said. “You’d have to have pretty good information, and then it would be subject to all those protections as well.”
Lawsuits may come from people with personal knowledge of what happened, Chelsey Youman, the Texas director for the pro-life group Human Coalition Action, told Austin ABC affiliate KVUE.
“It could be the unborn child’s father who knows that there was an abortion conducted and he’s sad he lost a child,” she told the station.
Financial impact, and beyond
There are significant financial penalties at stake, should a plaintiff prevail. Each defendant would be subject to paying $10,000, as well as cover the costs and attorney’s fees of the plaintiff.
“The risk to somebody who just wants to help their friend get an abortion is financially huge,” Smith said. “The risk to a provider is also financially huge.”
There are licensure penalties that can apply as well, which could result in providers losing their license, Smith said.
The law also creates a “retroactive liability” should the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade within the four-year statute of limitations that someone can sue, according to Charles Silver, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and co-author of “Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care.”
“The history of Republican legislatures has been to eliminate or narrow causes of action,” Silver told ABC News. “But here, the legislature is going in exactly the opposite direction.”
Even if there aren’t any lawsuits filed under SB 8, “the intimidation factor is huge” for medical practitioners, Silver said. “I don’t think we want laws that operate through intimidation, when those laws are themselves unconstitutional.”
Some state lawmakers have already said they will attempt to mimic the near-total abortion ban. Though there could be broader applications if it is successful, law experts said.
“The recipe that SB 8 has developed is not restricted to abortion,” Chandler said. “It can be used for any constitutional rights that people don’t like. And that’s why this bill is so pernicious.”
ABC News’ Alexandra Svokos contributed to this report.
(CHICAGO) — A Black woman said she was walking out of a closed park in Chicago, adhering to police instructions, when a white police officer attempted to tackle her, allegedly unprovoked.
On Aug. 28, Nikkita Brown said the officer drove up to her as she was walking her dog in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago and told her to leave the area immediately.
Brown agreed, but the officer insisted on driving behind her as she walked out of the park, and eventually got out of his vehicle to follow her on foot, she told ABC News in an exclusive interview airing Thursday on “Good Morning America.”
Brown said she consistently told him, “I am leaving” and “I am walking away,” as she actively walked toward the exit.
The officer got out of his car and told her, “You can go to jail,” according to a video taken by Brown who recorded part of the encounter. Brown said he also allegedly told her she would never see her dog again.
Brown said she took her cell phone out to record the altercation and call for help.
“Even if somebody didn’t answer,” she said, she wanted to “at least leave a voicemail and say, ‘if you call me in the morning and you don’t reach me, I’m in jail, or worse.'”
The unmasked officer continued to approach Brown, ignoring her request to stay 6 feet away, videos show.
In one clip, the officer can be heard saying, “I don’t need a mask on, I’m outside,” shortly before attempting to tackle Brown, appearing to restrain her by kicking her legs and knocking her phone out of her hands.
After a 2-minute-long physical altercation during which Brown remained on her feet and screamed for help, Brown and the officer separated and both left the scene without the officer making an arrest.
“I knew if he got me on the floor, I would be dead,” Brown told ABC News.
According to the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), the group inquiring into the incident, the investigation is ongoing.
“We have a responsibility to investigate allegations of police misconduct and determine if they are well founded based on the facts and evidence of each case,” interim COPA chief Andrea Kersten said in a statement. “If violations did occur, COPA will hold the officer accountable.”
A Chicago Police Department spokesperson told ABC News that “the officer in question has been placed on desk duty as the COPA investigates the video.”
Brown said there were others in the area that night, and she felt profiled because of her race.
“I walked past four kids that were behind me… white males. As soon as I saw the car pull up, I looked behind me to see if he said anything to the kids. He didn’t,” Brown said.
At a press conference on Aug. 30, the CPD Superintendent David O. Brown said the investigation into the incident was opened in the Bureau of Internal Affairs and had since been transferred to the COPA.
If COPA determines that the officer violated a policy, a disciplinary recommendation will be forwarded to David O. Brown, at which point he is given the choice to agree or disagree with COPA’s recommendation, the superintendent said during the press conference. If he disagrees with COPA, the incident goes to the Chicago Police Board for adjudication.
The officer has not been identified yet due to privacy reasons, a COPA spokesperson said. Brown’s attorney, Keenan Saulter, is requesting the identity of the officer be released in order to file a formal complaint against him.
“There were other individuals in the park that night. So we still have to come back around to the question of ‘why her?'” Saulter said. “The worst scenario would have been that he writes her a ticket for being in the park after 11:00 p.m.”
The officer has allegedly been involved in previous cases of racial profiling, Saulter said, and should be fired from the force.
Now, Brown said she feels anxious leaving the house.
“If anything, I should feel even more protected by a police presence as a single woman walking at night, not be fearful that I’m going to die at the hands of an officer,” Brown said.
(NEW YORK) — The last memory Scott Larsen has of his late father is eating breakfast together on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
He was only 4 years old when his dad, a New York City firefighter, left home for what would be the last time.
Joshua Powell, another son of a New York City firefighter who was in carnage of the 9/11 terror attacks, said he used to eat Cap’n Crunch with his father every morning.
Florence Amoako was eight months pregnant with her second child when she said goodbye to her husband as he went to work at the World Trade Center that day. Paulina Cardona, Katy Soulas and Lisa Reina were also pregnant at the time. Their husbands never made it home.
Over the past 20 years, ABC News has periodically gathered with this group of women who were pregnant when they lost their partners in the terror attacks. Their children, born after the attacks, grew up without meeting their fathers.
Our most recent gathering took place in late June of this year, where this group shared their perspectives on loss, grief and resilience.
Joshua Powell was 5 years old when his father, New York City firefighter Shawn Powell, was killed in the terror attacks.
“Although I was a kid, you realize one day, he’s not coming back, and sometimes when I was in class, I used to just look over at the door and in my head just imagine him walking through, and coming to pick me up to take me home. And nothing had happened, as if everything was OK,” Powell told ABC News.
Now at 25, Joshua Powell says he’s trying to make his father proud.
”I wanted to follow in his footsteps… I wanted to face danger fearlessly,” he said.
Powell said he didn’t become a firefighter because his mother was afraid to lose him the way she lost his dad. He has decided to pursue a career in medicine instead.
“Being a doctor, for me, or even being a surgeon, would be that same thing: running into the burning building. Running toward something that people are running away from,” he said. “Like when this pandemic happened, a lot of people were running away, but there were many people who ran toward it. I think that’s what I want to do.”
(NEW YORK) — Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar revealed Thursday that seven months ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer and is now cancer-free after a lumpectomy and one course of radiation.
“It’s something that no one wants to hear, and no one wants to experience, but it’s really renewed my faith in the people around me and in my purpose,” Klobuchar, a Democrat, told Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts, herself a breast cancer survivor, in an exclusive interview. “I feel much better now.”
“In February of this year, doctors at Mayo Clinic found small white spots called calcifications during a routine mammogram. After this was discovered, I had a biopsy at Piper Breast Center in Minneapolis, and then learned that I had Stage 1A breast cancer,” Klobuchar wrote. “Of course, this has been scary at times, since cancer is the word all of us fear, but at this point my doctors believe that my chances of developing cancer again are no greater than the average person.”
According to the nonprofit Breastcancer.org, early stage means the tumor measures “up to 2 centimeters and the cancer has not spread outside the breast; no lymph nodes are involved.”
Klobuchar, who was treated at the Mayo Clinic, recounted the poignant memories of her harrowing experience — her husband taking her to her radiation treatment, her daughter’s phone calls, nurses giving her a red, white and blue mask, and “the perfect stranger” who would help her at the airport with her suitcase, unaware of her condition as she shuttled between Washington and Minneapolis.
“There’s just a lot of people who helped me get through this. I learned every day is a gift,” Klobuchar told Roberts.
Klobuchar said her primary message for Americans is not to ignore routine medical exams especially during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Right now, thousands of women have undetected breast cancer. One in three Americans have put off going to any kind of routine examination or procedure [during the pandemic],” said Klobuchar. “So, the doctors over and over are telling me that they’re seeing people with much bigger problems than if they’d gone in early. So, that’s my first practical advice. Get those screenings. Go in, get a mammogram. Get whatever health checkup that you should normally be getting … and the second is, just be grateful for the people around you.”
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people being diagnosed with breast cancer has declined by half, suggesting fewer people are visiting their health care providers, according to research released last year.
Despite the serious illness and treatment, Klobuchar kept up a grueling schedule in the Senate. As chair of the Senate Rules Committee, Klobuchar was responsible for intensive hearings analyzing the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and its cascading security failures. She then shepherded her caucus’ effort to pass sweeping election security legislation that was eventually blocked by Republicans.
Through all of it, she quietly took inspiration from those around her, never revealing her own challenge.
“Some of my colleagues who had cancer before gave me inspiration, even though they didn’t know I had [cancer] at that time,” the senator told Roberts.
Klobuchar said she underwent radiation just two days after her father, Jim Klobuchar, a renowned sportswriter and journalist, died from Alzheimer’s.
Klobuchar’s diagnosis came not long after her husband suffered a serious medical emergency. A little more than a year ago, as Congress was toiling on a major COVID-19 economic rescue package, Klobuchar’s husband contracted COVID-19 and was seriously ill for a time.
Klobuchar had to live apart from her husband and continue work at the Capitol through the long hours of debate and final passage.
Klobuchar was first elected to the Senate in 2006 on a blue wave that saw Democrats take control of Congress. Before that, she was a prosecutor in her home state’s largest county.
In 2020, she mounted an ill-fated run for the presidency, later becoming a key surrogate for then-Vice President Joe Biden.
When asked by Roberts what she would say to people who are going through their own personal challenges right now, Klobuchar replied, “Reach out to those that you love, and people will surprise you.”
“I would say, ‘Know that people have your back.’ As much as is going on right now in our country, there are still people who want to help you,” she said. “Continue to follow your dreams and purpose, but know that people have your back.”
(KABUL, Afghanistan) — With the U.S. military and diplomatic withdrawal now complete after 20 years in Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken over the country, including the Kabul airport, the site of an often-desperate evacuation effort in past weeks.
But even as the last American troops were flown out to meet President Joe Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline, other Americans who wanted to flee the country were left behind. The Biden administration is now focused on a “diplomatic mission” to help them leave but some hoping to evacuate are still stuck in the country. Meanwhile, the Taliban has announced its new “caretaker” government which includes men with U.S. bounties on their heads — and no women.
Here are the latest developments. All times Eastern:
Sep 09, 8:41 am
Americans, foreigners to leave Kabul on first flight since Taliban takeover: Qatari envoy
A Qatari Airways flight has landed at Kabul’s international airport and will be the first to fly out of Afghanistan’s capital since the Taliban seized power, with U.S. citizens and other Westerners on board, Qatar’s special envoy for Afghanistan announced on the tarmac Thursday alongside the Taliban’s spokesperson.
A State Department spokesperson told ABC News, “As we have said, our efforts to assist U.S. citizens and others to whom we have a special commitment are ongoing, but we aren’t in a position to share additional details at this time.”
Mutlaq bin Majed al Qahtani, the Qatari envoy, told reporters during the joint press conference, “Call it what you want, a charter or a commercial flight — everyone has tickets and boarding passes.”
He said the airport in Kabul will be fully up and running, telling reporters, “Hopefully life is becoming normal in Afghanistan.”
While the number and breakdown of passengers it’s unclear, this is the first large departure — the first flight out — of Americans and other foreigners since the U.S. evacuation operation ended last week, leaving hundreds of U.S. citizens and thousands of Afghan partners behind.
Sep 08, 3:00 pm
All US service members who died in Kabul attack to be awarded Purple Heart
All 13 U.S. service members who died in the Aug. 26 airport attack in Kabul will be posthumously awarded the Purple Heart.
Both the Marine Corps and the Army told ABC News their members will receive the decoration after the Navy announced on Tuesday that the one member of its service that died was posthumously promoted and would also be awarded the Purple Heart.
“The 11 Marines killed-in-action while supporting Operation Freedom’s Sentinel will be awarded the Purple Heart,” said Capt. Andrew Wood, Marine Corps spokesperson on Tuesday.
The Army’s 1st Special Forces Command said in a press release the day after the attack that its member who died, Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, was awarded the Purple Heart, Bronze Star medal and Combat Action Badge.
