The very first story reporter Lena Nozizwe produced for FSRN was about a transgender college student. Today her last report for us is about the beginnings, and the end of FSRN.

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The year was 2000. The state of Vermont became the first to pass legislation legalizing same-sex couple unions. Hillary Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate. And in a contested presidential race, the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush was the winner.

2000 also marked the birth of Free Speech Radio News, founded when a group of reporters went on strike against the Pacifica Radio network. The strikers said management was censoring coverage of internal politics at the flagship community radio organization. Independent radio stations across the country supported the strike by airing the newscast.

“One of my first recollections of Free Speech Radio News was when it split from Pacifica and became an entity all to it its own – an entity that was very collective in it’s nature which was rather unique,” says General Manager of WERU in Blue Hill, Maine, Matt Murphy, who was a listener and fan from the beginning. “This was an independent group and a group that we really valued very much. Free Speech Radio News rapidly became our daily news that came on the airwaves just before Democracy Now.”

FSRN became a worker-run collective and pioneered the decentralized newsroom model, with production staff in different cities around the world, rather than concentrated in media hubs like New York or Washington, D.C.

Nell Abram soon joined the international team.

“Staff were in their offices or their homes or their studios, all around the world and gathered via conference calls to make decisions about what stories they could cover,” Abram recalls.

That was part of the allure for former FSRN anchor Dorian Merina: “On any given day at FSRN you could have an editor sitting in New Delhi, another in Oaxaca, Mexico, a producer in Miami, Florida, another in Los Angeles, and another still in the Philippines. And to me, this is what made FSRN so special. You had a network of people all over the globe coming together to decide what story should be told and how they should be told. And it made for something unlike anything else on the air during its time.”

More than 100 stations across the country soon began airing the daily newscast. One of them was KPFT in Houston, where FSRN grabbed the attention of Shannon Young as a listener in 2002.

“That’s when I heard Fariba Nawa on FSRN,” says Young. “She had phoned in a commentary that succinctly summed up just why it’s so important to go to journalists who are from or who live in the communities they report on, precisely because they understand and can convey a nuance that outsiders simply don’t pick up on.”

During seventeen years of reporting the news often ignored in the corporate media, hundreds of reporters around the world amplified the voices of the people in their communities – content that went into producing more than 23,000 headlines, features and documentaries heard on more than 100 stations around the United States.

Then in late 2013, all of FSRN’s voices, including Nawa’s, were silenced. The program ran out of funding after their main client and distributor fell months behind – and then defaulted – on payments.

During the silence, a skeleton team retooled and a few months later relaunched as FSRN, the Weekly Edition. Since early 2014, FSRN has been produced and edited by a bare bones staff of two, Abram and Young, plus part time technical engineer, Reaux Packard.

But even so, producing the program comes at a price that FSRN is no longer able to pay. Despite continued support from individual members and carriage fees paid by radio stations, it’s simply not enough. Abram says credible, well produced content is expensive.

“We’ve had no luck finding major funding, like grants from foundations or organizational support from The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and despite station carriage our direct distribution using social media has been slashed by algorithms that drastically limit the reach of our content,” Abram explains.

The loss is already felt by news director Aileen Alfandary, who says FSRN has been a staple at KPFA Community Radio in Berkeley, a station that was supportive of the initial strike that led to FSRN’s creation. And she wonders about the impact on journalism.

“FSRN’s demise comes at a time when too much of the news has been reduced to short soundbites, or yes tweets. The commitment of FSRN to dive deep into an issue has been more important than ever,” Alfandary says. “I am also concerned about what happens to the freelance journalists who have been filing for FSRN and whether if this will tip some of them out of the field, whether this will be the straw that broke the camel’s back, especially at this time, we need more independent journalism, not less. I am very, very sorry to see FSRN go.”

And she’s not the only one.

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Lawmakers go through the motions of appropriations showdown ritual

In what’s become a ritual on Capitol Hill, the U.S. House and Senate faced off in a government shutdown showdown this week. FSRN’s Nell Abram has more.

Texas House passes most hardline immigration bill since Arizona’s SB 1070

In the wee hours Thursday morning, the state’s lower house passed a bill immigration policy observers say is the most radical state legislation since Arizona’s controversial SB 1070. It comes on the heels of a 9th Circuit Court ruling against the Trump administration’s attempts to deny federal funding to cities where local police do not take on federal immigration enforcement duties. The Texas bill, SB 4 passed the state Senate in February. Lawmakers from both chambers must reconcile final language before the bill heads to the desk of the governor who openly supports the measure. Shannon Young has more.

Turkish officials carry out fresh purges as opposition continues to contest referendum results

In Turkey, the government carried out a fresh series of raids this week, arresting another 1000 people and purging the police force of more than 9000 officers allegedly connected to the US-based cleric who President Recip Tayyip Erdogan blames for last summer’s attempted coup.

The country remains under a state of emergency, extended after protesters took to the streets decrying what they say was fraud in the recent referendum. The plank of constitutional reforms that would grant President Erdogan much of the powers previously held by Parliament and the Judiciary officially passed with 51 percent of the vote, but opposition parties are contesting the results. Umar Farooq reports from Istanbul.

Snake charmers in India lament loss of culture following outlawing of their practice

Since ancient times in India, snake charming has been a popular form of entertainment. It’s also been the only source of livelihood for hundreds of thousands of snake charmers. But several years ago the practice was declared illegal, leaving practitioners in dire economic straits. Bismillah Geelani, brings us the story of a community struggling for survival.

Whistleblowers play a key role in Nigerian anti-corruption push…at their own risk

In Nigeria, millions of dollars of stolen public funds have been recovered in recent months, as President Muhammadu Buhari wages a war against corruption. Whistleblowers are playing a major role, but exposing corruption can come at great cost in Nigeria, a country where graft is deeply entrenched and impunity has long been the norm. Whistleblowers, like journalists and anti-corruption activists face threats, including the risk of assassination. FSRN’s Sam Olukoya reports from Lagos.

FSRN signs off the air after 17 years of grassroots radio journalism

Since 2000, Free Speech Radio News’ mission has been to provide factual reports on important international and domestic news stories often missing in the corporate press — and to amplify the voices of the ignored and unheard. Those voices have been broadcast on radio stations across the U.S. in tens of thousands of news stories spanning 17 years. Today FSRN itself is in the news because of the stories we can no longer tell.

The very first story reporter Lena Nozizwe produced for FSRN was about a transgender college student. Today her last report for us is about the beginnings, and the end of FSRN.

Music in today’s program is by Sway via Jamendo.com 

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Friday morning, the House authorized a one-week extension to keep the lights on while they try to reach an agreement on funding for the balance of the current fiscal year.

Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee called the continuing resolution a can-kicker, saying lawmakers still need to grapple with a budget proposal that undermines the governance of the nation.

“My Houston Housing Authority has now stopped vouchers for families in Section 8 Housing for fear of not having the money,” the Texas Democrat told her colleagues on Friday. “They had breaking news two days ago saying those families ‘Don’t don’t show up, because we have no money to house you — similar to no money and no room at the inn.”

The Senate followed suit hours later.

The continuing resolution came a day after the GOP once again pulled a proposal for rewriting the nation’s health care law, failing a second time to rally enough votes within their own party. Moderate Republicans were concerned that insurers would be able charge consumers with pre-existing conditions exorbitant premiums.

President Trump also capitulated on a trade-off: leaving subsidies to offset health insurance premiums for the poor in place while backtracking on a demand for a $1.4 billion “down payment” on the southern border wall he has repeatedly boasted Mexico would pay for.

But plans to ramp up an immigration clampdown appear to be on track, with funding to expand immigration detention capacity by at least 21,000 beds and hire thousands of new Border Patrol and ICE agents still in the budget request.

The country remains under a state of emergency, extended after protesters took to the streets decrying what they say was fraud in the recent referendum. The plank of constitutional reforms that would grant President Erdogan much of the powers previously held by Parliament and the Judiciary officially passed with 51 percent of the vote, but opposition parties are contesting the results. Umar Farooq reports from Istanbul.

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Every day since the referendum, thousands of people have taken part in protests like this one in Istanbul.

“We are protesting here today because there were some frauds,” explains an anonymous protester. “We noticed the – I don’t know how to translate it – election committee, let’s say, changed the rules while the voting was still going on, and we think these changes were just for the government – Erdogan’s government’s – profit.”

Scores of protesters have been detained, leaving some, like this man, too frightened to give their names. But they keep coming out each night because they are angry at Turkey’s Supreme Election Commission, which has refused to entertain allegations of fraud. The Commission’s decisions are final and cannot be appealed to any court.

Gürkan Özturan is part of Dokuz 8, one of several civil society groups that monitored the voting and collected evidence of electoral irregularities like ballot stuffing and the presence of armed men inside polling stations.

“Mostly these kinds of stories but also reports regarding unstamped ballots, the invalid ballots. They have been reporting throughout the day, starting from morning until evening, that people have been saying that on the envelopes, on the ballots, there were no official stamps making it a valid ballot,” says Özturan. “So this we have started seeing throughout the day, from very early hours.”

Opposition parties, as well as a team of monitors from the European Union, say both the campaigning and the vote itself were not free and fair. With the results, so close and the stakes so high, they are calling for a revote.

But Harun Armagan, a member of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, says the opposition is unhappy with the results and is trying to sidestep what was a historic moment for Turkey’s democracy: “When the result is very close – in terms of percentage, not in terms of numbers, because the numbers say 1.4 million difference between two votes – they just want to create an atmosphere to create a question for national and international bodies, that this result is not trustable [sic].”

Armagan says Turkish voters approved the constitutional reforms that consolidate power in the president’s office, so their demands can be more efficiently met by the government.

“This is about taking the country to a more democratic system and taking the country to a more efficient system, a more progressive system. Because we have seen the system that Turkey currently has was set up to dysfunction. It’s a very slow process, it’s taking a lot of time to make even simple decisions, and there are a lot of coalitions that don’t last long,” says Armagan. “And the president and prime minister usually are from different political opinions, which creates problems for Turkey. And we have seen that how Turkey can actually progress a lot when these are not the problems. We have experienced this personally, during AK Party time.”

The referendum ended up being not so much about the balance of powers in the country, but about the track record of Erdogan’s party. Since it came to power in 2002, Turkey’s GDP per capita has tripled, and many legal restrictions on overt religious practices, for instance wearing the headscarf in public schools, have been repealed. There was even a period where the government engaged in a peace process to end a three-decade old separatist Kurdish insurgency.

For many of Turkey’s conservatives, Erdogan is the man who can ensure those policies continue, even if that means he must be handed broad powers. As long as Erdogan keeps winning elections, Armagan says, he cannot be called a dictator.

But for activists like Özturan, the referendum, and Turkey’s struggle to become a true democracy holds an important lesson for the rest of the world.

“When democratic process is considered as a tool of the few, or a certain kind of ideology this, in time, tends to create an antithesis, an anti-system party decides to become more radical, and over time can become more popular among the society depending on the number of people who feel excluded from the system from the society and from the legal procedure,” Özturan explains. “If people feel their vote does not count, their rights cannot be sought through the legal procedure, then populist waves can come, and if the people feel the discomfort they will eventually slide towards more populist authoritarian figures which promise them leadership and comfort.”

Opposition parties have announced they will appeal the referendum results to the European Court of Human Rights. But there is little indication the government will reconsider the raft of constitutional amendments, which it says now has the public’s support.

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After 16 hours of heated debate that ran until 3 a.m. Thursday, the Republican majority of the Texas House of Representatives pushed through SB 4, known as the ‘anti-sanctuary city’ bill. It prohibits cities and counties from enacting laws that prevent the use of local resources for immigration enforcement. During the hearing phase of the bill, even police chiefs and sheriffs spoke out against it, saying that it will undermine public safety.

Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice Education Fund, says the bill is a radical measure in the national context.

“This is a dramatic enabling of a federal strategy with a now coerced, local cooperation to make undocumented immigrants and their families so terrified of staying that, if they’re not picked up and deported that they pick up and leave on their own,” Sharry says.

SB 4 not only mandates collaboration between federal and local police, but an amendment tacked onto the bill could allow for the removal or criminal prosecution of elected officials or law enforcement who refuse to comply.

Austin City Council member Greg Casar says the measure is unconstitutional and he will continue to openly oppose it: “I represent the most immigrant parts of Austin, in north Austin. Many of my neighborhoods are majority immigrant neighborhoods. And during the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement door-to-door raids that occurred, I saw terror in homes and in children’s eyes like I’ve never seen before. I sat in constituents’ homes where they had duct-taped sheets across the windows and were packing all their things up to go and abandon homes that they themselves owned. What this bill is asking us to do is not only unconstitutional, but is trying to push us into making children and families feel that kind of fear every time they see a police officer, not just every time that there is an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid.”

In addition to its substantial population of immigrants with legal status, Texas is home to 1.5 million undocumented residents, according to estimates by the Migration Policy Institute. The state is also one of four so-called ‘minority-majority’ states, where people of color outnumber whites.

Jose P. Garza, Executive Director, Workers Defense Project says SB 4 is the latest example of a bill that marginalizes members of the state’s demographic majority.

“This act of discrimination perpetuated by the state legislature is not an act that is happening in isolation,” Garza points out. “In the very recent history, at least three federal courts have found that the State of Texas passed legislation that had a discriminatory impact and a discriminatory intent. Some of those findings were specific to populations along the Texas-Mexico border.”

The counties in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas are the most heavily Latino in the United States, with 9 in ten residents identifying as Hispanic according to U.S. Census data.

“Those communities are so militarized right now, what with local law enforcement, what with the Department of Public Safety, Border Patrol, state guard,” Terri Burke, Executive Director of the ACLU of Texas, says SB4 plus militarization in border communities is a recipe for abuse of power. “This is an invitation to racial profiling. When 90 percent of the people who live in an area are brown skinned and look ‘foreign,’ they’re going to be asked for their papers, they’re going to be asked to prove that they have legal status.”

The ACLU is already seeing dash cam footage of Texas Department of Public Safety troopers detaining people for more than an hour during traffic stops so that immigration agents can check their status. While legal permanent residents can show a green card, for citizens the documentation can be bulkier.

“If you’re a U.S. citizen, a native-born, I guess, you’re going to have to carry your birth certificate or passport,” says Burke. “I mean, I think that people are just going to have to carry a little pouch of all their documents to prove that they’re here legally.”

While cities in California double down on resisting the Trump Administration’s anti-sanctuary policies, Texas’ SB4 is putting the Lone Star state and its large immigrant population on the front lines of a 21st century civil rights battle.

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At the Surajkund Craft Fair on the outskirts of Delhi, a group of local folk musicians is entertaining the visitors. Wearing orange dresses with matching turbans, they play melodious tunes of popular Hindi songs on the gourd flute – or Been. Their performances enthrall the audience and many break into dance. But the musicians themselves don’t look very enthusiastic.

“This is not what we want to do; it’s been thrust upon us,” says 75-year-old Badri Nath, who heads the troupe. “But since our original work has been banned, this is the all we can do. Whether we are happy or not doesn’t matter.”

Badri and his companions are all snake charmers. For generations, they made their living street performing with snakes in villages and towns across India. But snake charming in no longer legal, and Badri says that leaves them unable to make ends meet.

“Snakes and snake charmers have been together from time immemorial. This is the only thing we and our ancestors have known and lived on for centuries. Now it has been taken away from us. We have not only lost our livelihood we have been cut off from our roots,” says Badri. “These performances here can sustain a few us for a few days, but what after that? And what about the rest of the community?”

Snake charming was banned under the Wildlife Protection Act in the late 1990s. The law prohibits catching, owning and performing with snakes. Initially, the government didn’t enforce the ban, and snake charmers carried on with their work. But a few years later, animal rights activists pressured authorities to clampdown on snake charmers.

“They basically dehydrate them; they stick them in a box and forget about them, use them whenever they want to make a performance or beg some money from people,” explains Kartik Satyanarayan, from the conservation group Wildlife SOS, who says the charmers abuse the snakes, and there’s been a noticeable decline in their numbers. “Once the job is done they just throw the snake away, because they don’t care, and snake then sometimes dies, it takes some weeks of starvation to die because the fangs have been removed, the venom glands have been removed, they can’t really hunt and fend for themselves any more.”

But nnake charmers strongly deny the charges of animal cruelty. The ban affected an estimated 800,000 snake charmers living in India. Many switched to other occupations, like rickshaw pulling, street vending and working as construction and agricultural laborers. But an overwhelming majority remain jobless.

Some, however, refuse to give up the tradition.

Like this snake charmer performing on a Delhi street. He opens his baskets, and three cobras rise up, flaring their hoods in a menacing stance and appearing to dance to the music from his Been.

He then moves closer to the audience, showing them the reptiles and explaining differences between the species. But soon a policeman arrives and the snake charmer quickly flees the scene.

His brother, Birju Nath, says they are used to playing this game of hide and seek with the both the police and forest officials.

“They arrest us and take away our snakes. But if we stop doing this, what else is there for us?” Nath asks. “We have no business or land to fall back on. Without this we will simply starve to death.”

But the younger generation shows no interest in continuing the legacy. Youth, like 21-year-old Shankar, want to do something more attune to modern times.

Back at the craft fair, the snake charmers are playing a Sufi song – or Qawwali. The audience is swaying and whirling to its tunes. With their baskets empty, the snake charmers are pinning all their hopes on the Been.

Another member of the music troupe Vikrambir Nath, explains: “There are so many musical instruments out there but the Been stands out. It belongs exclusively to us and it is completely homemade. We make it with gourd and bamboo. It represents us as a community and our unique way of life and it is part of India’s cultural heritage. It needs to be preserved and that would require state patronage and promotion.”

Vikrambir Nath says unless the government invests in preserving the history and music of the snake charmers, within a few decades the centuries long practice will disappear without a trace.

And without cultural preservation, the very instrument with which they’ve plied their trade – the Been – could become extinct.

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Street protests to call on the Nigerian government to combat corruption and provide basic public services like water infrastructure, electricity, roads and healthcare have become commonplace.

Infrastructure is often either lacking in Nigeria or poorly maintained due to widespread corruption like looting of the public coffers or cutting corners in the construction of public works projects.

The current president, Muhammadu Buhari, has been trying to make good on campaign promises to root out corruption and has thus far been successful in a number of high profile cases. Some of them involve billions of public dollars. In these investigations whistleblowers have played a key role, and some have paid a high price.

Olu Ibirogba said he was fired from his job as a school financial administrator and harassed after he brought forward allegations of corruption at his workplace.

“My office was sealed off; my official residence where I was staying was locked up. And I am being persecuted and I was remanded in prison custody for two weeks. Even the psychological trauma is there,” Ibirogba recalls. “I am suffering here in silence. Those who have done the right thing should not be made to look as if they have done the wrong thing.”

A crowd in Nigeria welcomed a former state governor after he served a jail term in Britain. This is the Nigerian irony. Many of those who steal public funds give part of the loot to people who become their loyal supporters. These supporters always stand by them, especially when they get into trouble with looted funds.

Most of those involved in high profile corruption cases are senior government officials. They’ve been known to use their positions to hunt down those who exposed them. Key witnesses in corruption cases have been harassed or even assassinated.

The same silencing tactics have also been deployed against journalists uncovering corruption. Stella Nwofia is with the International Press Center in Lagos.

“Most times journalists who are involved in whistleblowing are arrested, detained and nothing comes out of it,” explains Nwofia. “For example one journalist was beaten to a point of stupor and nothing was done about it. So, most times journalists are at risk for doing their job, bringing information to the people.”

Even members of parliament are not immune to  intimidation tactics. Abdulmumin Jibrin, a parliamentarian who accused some of his colleagues of corruption, was shouted down on the floor of the house mid last year. He was subsequently suspended from parliament and he had to flee Nigeria following death threats.

Many who were victimized on account of exposing corruption are not as powerful and have fewer recourses to fight back against retaliation.

Bamidele Ajinde, who lost his job after exposing corruption, says he is going through difficult times: “So, I have been jobless, my last son is at home now. I can’t send him to school. Even to eat now is extremely difficult. Even, I can’t perform my minimum responsibility as a father and a husband at home.”

There are now calls for a law to protect whistleblowers giving the risks they face. Rashidat Okoduwa is of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, ICPC. The commission prosecutes people involved in corrupt practices. She says she looks forward to the enactment of a law to protect whistleblowers.

“We do hope it will be enacted very soon because it is a major obstacle to our work. People are afraid that when they blow the whistle on corrupt acts, they will be victimized, their lives might be in danger. You will find that when you protect them, they know that they are protected, their families are protected they will come out more,” Okoduwa points out. “We still have people reporting now, but they are doing it under a lot of fear. We have people working in organizations, they report some people in that organization they are afraid for their lives, so we want that law to be enacted.”

The irony perhaps is that, while on the one hand, the government is fighting corruption, majority of the attacks on whistleblowers are being instigated or perpetrated by government officials who still want to remain corrupt in spite of the anti-corruption drive.

Which hand wins will come down to the force of political will.

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Organizers in Brasilia estimate more than 3,000 Indigenous people protested outside of the nation’s congress Tuesday before police dispersed them using tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets and pepper spray.

Kleber Karipuna, an indigenous leader from the Amazon state of Amapa, said that it was a peaceful protest that turned violent because of the police.

“What happened today was a demonstration of how this illegitimate government treats its people, in our case, indigenous people: with total disrespect, not fulfilling their duties, being confrontational and attacking indigenous people like they have always been attacked,” Karipuna says.

Indigenous groups from across the country are camped near the seat of Congress as part of a four-day mobilization of indigenous people in Brazil called Free Land Encampment, an annual event now in its 14th year, organized by the Articulation of Brazil Indigenous People.

This year’s event is focusing on indigenous demarcations, which give indigenous people land tenure and legal mechanisms to defend their territory against encroachment by invading groups, like illegal loggers or miners.

The process of enshrining demarcation in law has stalled and no new territorial demarcations have been decreed in more than a year.

Participants in the Free Land Encampment also say the post-impeachment government [of current President Michel Temer] is weakening indigenous institutions like Brazil’s National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI) by funding cuts and advancing legislation like congressional amendment PEC215 which would transfer demarcation power to Brazil’s Congress.

The event comes as indigenous leaders say their communities’ rights are under increasing threat from a government heavily aligned with agribusiness and resource extraction interests in the midst of economic recession.

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The Trump administration hits its 100-day benchmark this week and is reaching to check off bullet points from its list of campaign promises: several of them pertaining to immigration enforcement. Within days of taking office, President Donald Trump signed executive orders, calling for expanded criteria under which agents can detain and deport foreign-born residents. As part of those orders, the administration required periodic progress reports from both the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice.

Tom Jawetz, Vice President of Immigration at the Center for American Progress, says the Trump administration has accomplished two important things not on the list of goals: “First, he’s managed to spread fear and chaos in immigrant communities across the United States, breaking apart families and diminishing public safety. And second, he’s managed to galvanize widespread, popular opposition to those attacks on immigrants, which has both strengthened the resolve of state and local elected officials and also helped to build the foundation for progress in the years ahead.”

The 100-day benchmark also comes as Congress goes through the motions of its now-routine government shutdown showdown over federal budget appropriations. The White House has insisted Congress loosen its purse strings to put a so-called down payment on the border wall Trump boasted Mexico would ultimately pay for. But the request has encountered opposition, including from Republican lawmakers representing border states.

On Monday, Trump indicated he’s backing off that demand, but funding to expand immigration detention capacity by at least 21,000 beds is still in the budget request.

“The expansion of the detention system is designed to create more due process violations, and so if folks aren’t given a chance to fight their cases then we’ll see a decrease in percentages of folks who are able to win their cases because they were never given the chance to fight them,” says Mary Small, Policy Director of the Detention Watch Network.

Another thing the appropriations request seeks to fund is a hiring surge of Border Patrol and immigration enforcement agents. Many of them would be deployed in the strip of territory that extends 100 miles inside the physical border and is nicknamed ‘the Constitution-free zone’ because not all legal protections guaranteed elsewhere in the U.S. apply. Christian Ramirez of the Southern Border Communities Coalition says this will only exacerbate militarization on the ground for tens of millions of residents.

“We get racially profiled on our way to school,” Ramirez explains. “In fact, if I want to take my child to visit his grandparents in the neighboring county, of Imperial County in southern California, I have to go through a checkpoint. If I want to take my child to visit Disneyland in neighboring Orange County, north of where I live, I also have to go through a border control checkpoint.”

In order to rapidly expand the force, the administration has suggested scrapping precautionary measures like polygraph tests for job applicants. Tom Jawetz says the those tests were put in place by Congress after the last hiring surge resulted in inadequate vetting of the force and an increase in corruption complaints and use of force violations.

“The polygraph has shown a function of trying to weed people out early in a process that we don’t end up both spending money on them in the academy and then having to reject them because they fail to meet the qualifications, or even more dangerously, letting them get into the process, letting them become agents, and then having that deteriorate the quality of the corps,” Jawetz points out.

Border Patrol and immigration agents in the border region’s constitutional exception zone already have broader powers than their civilian police counterparts in the interior. Ramirez says lowering vetting standards to beef up staffing can be a dangerous combination for border residents.

“We even asked the administration and several law enforcement experts, including the Police Executive Research Forum and the Homeland Security Advisory Council, proposed in current reforms to ensure that CBP was able to abide by 21st century law enforcement best practices,” says Ramirez. “So, to have a police force that is unaccountable, that has very little oversight mechanisms, that is opaque at best, and deploy these folks to our communities clearly undermines our safety.”

The administration continues to insist the so-called ‘bad hombres’ and immigrants with violent criminal histories are the focus of what may shape up to be the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history. But Trump’s first 100 days of immigration policy have shown that foreign born individuals without current authorized status can be deportation priorities – including immigrants with U.S. born children who have been reporting to authorities for regular check ins for years and even people with residency and work permits under DACA.

While still early in the administration, data sets from its first few weeks indicate the vast majority of removal proceedings initiated since Trump’s inauguration have been against people whose only crime is living in the U.S. without immigration authorization.

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Tens of thousands people gathered in downtown Los Angeles Saturday, carrying signs evoking anger and irony, and heavy on science puns. The march brought out scientists and average citizens worried that statements and policy out of Washington not only ignore scientific conclusions, but undermine science itself.

“There is a force coming out of Washington, D.C. called the Trump administration that is out to deny truth and bury science,” said Tom Steyer, founder of NextGen Climate. “They’re doing this because they’re putting corporate profits ahead of clean air, clean water and the safety of the planet. “

“Our job is to try to understand reality, not to make decisions for society. When I worked with Mayor Garcetti at city hall, I didn’t tell him what to do. I came in to make sure he understood the implications of his decisions,” seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones recalled. “That’s what science is about – making sure we understand what’s real.”

“My years on the house science committee taught me that policy should be guided by scientific consensus,” said U.S. Congressman Brad Sherman.

They were among dozens of speakers who scolded the administration for dismissing scientific research.

They say the proposed six billion dollar cut to the National Institute of Health, the slashing of earth science research at NASA, whacking the EPA’s budget by 30 percent, and policies like the rollback of fuel economy standards, amount to a war on science by a president who’s cabinet includes climate change deniers. And when one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gasses backtracks on international climate agreements, the results are global.

Protesters say the Trump administration is only the most immediate threat in a longer-term war on evidence-based research. They say the march was a grassroots response to disciplines that should never be politicized.

“Scientific research has reached certain conclusions, and those are irrespective of politics,” explains Philip Wheeler is a former chemist and co-organizer of the Los Angeles rally. “However, when politicians decide to ignore scientific research, or, more important, scientific findings, evidence, data that goes against their ideology, they’re the ones bringing politics into it.”

What started off as a march of literal scientists in Washington, D.C. quickly morphed into a worldwide phenomenon, a grassroots outpouring aided by social media and modeled on the Women’s March in January.

Professionals in science disciplines are not accustomed to promoting their work; they assume it speaks for itself. But the American public doesn’t always agree.

A 2014 Pew poll showed significant gaps between the views of scientists and the general public. Eighty-six percent of scientist polled said childhood vaccines should be required, but only 68 percent of the general public thought so. Eighty-seven percent of scientists said climate change was caused by human activity, versus only 50 percent of the public.

Saturday’s marches are partly an acknowledgement that professionals in scientific fields need to do a better job of communicating the difference between scientific conclusions and opinion.

“As scientists, we need to stand up for the fact that what we do is important and has real world implications for what’s happening today and what’s going to happen in the future,” oceanographer Adam Savosh said.

“We realize that we have to preserve science as an institution because it’s under attack right now at the federal level,” said Eddie Isaacs of 314 Action. “And we want to recruit scientists, engineers, doctors to get involved in public life and eventually run for public office.”

“If it’s not all of us making this change, then it will be just a few lawmakers who profit from the oil and gas industry making decisions that affect all of us living beings,” educator Leah Garland explained.

Organizers admit that one day of protest won’t be enough to turn around years of political attacks on science-related fields. They say in coming weeks they’ll be brainstorming on how to harness the energy of these rallies and push back on those who try to marginalize science.

Or as one banner put it: “What do we want? Science-based policy. When do we want it? After peer review.”