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In 1905, the state of Vermont hung Mary Rogers for the murder of her husband, Marcus. There was strong evidence of Mary’s role in the murder—working together, she and her then-lover Leon Perham killed Marcus, staged the death as a suicide, and then tried to collect on his life insurance policy. Despite her apparent guilt, the case sparked public debate over the propriety of condemning a woman to death. The day after her execution, the Times-Leader, a Pennsylvania-based newspaper, wrote, “Had there been one mitigating circumstance; had there been one spark of womanliness in Mary Rogers, had she shown slight possibilities of regeneration, [Gov.] C.J. Bell, of Vermont, might have interfered.”

Like many of the women sentenced to capital punishment in the U.S. both historically and more recently, Rogers became the subject of depictions in both court and the media that sought to highlight the ways she deviated from feminine norms. In cases like hers, those portrayals can function as an attempt to assuage the public’s discomfort with condemning women to death.  

The protections of womanhood? 

Though women currently make up the fastest growing incarcerated population, they comprise just under 2% of those on death row despite committing 10% of murders nationwide. While not everyone convicted of homicides will be sentenced to death—in fact, nationally, the death sentence rate is a little over 2%—men convicted of murder are far more likely to be executed than women. One reason scholars and legal professionals offer for this sentencing disparity is that many homicides committed by women are related to intimate partner violence, which jurors may consider “crimes of passion,” or one-time offenses that would not pose the kind of ongoing threat to public safety that the death penalty purportedly diminishes. Further, homicides committed by women are generally absent of certain “aggravating factors,” like burglary, rape, kidnapping, or a victim who’s a public official or law enforcement officer. Those aggravating factors are what qualify a homicide for capital punishment.

But beyond the specifics of the murders, scholars also posit that juries and judges may be more hesitant to execute women because of paternalistic ideas and notions of chivalry.  For prosecutors seeking the death penalty in cases with women defendants, the task often hasn’t been to dismantle the idea that women are in need of defense—but instead to argue that these defendants are not feminine at all, and that their actions both before and during the crime in question have forfeited them the protection of womanhood.

Dr. Mary Atwell, professor emeritus of criminal justice at Radford University and expert on the death penalty, says that in capital cases involving women defendants, prosecutors attempt to present these womens’ deviation from gender stereotypes as unofficial aggravating factors. In 2007, Atwell published Wretched Sisters, a book examining the stories of 11 women executed by the state between 1976 and 2007. In her research, she found this attempt to condemn women for their failure to adhere to specific notions of femininity to be a common feature in the cases she reviewed.

“In a death penalty case, the law allows certain kinds of aggravating factors to make a case eligible for execution and to persuade the jury that they should vote to execute somebody,” said Atwell in an interview with Prism. “In those cases, those factors do not include being a bad mother, or not taking care of your children or not keeping your house clean or being unfaithful to your husband or any of those kinds of things, which came up repeatedly in the cases that I looked at. It’s really that issue that I think is the most troubling, and it’s persistent.”

‘She keeps a filthy home’

While the pattern of presenting women defendants as unfeminine is pervasive, the ways these depictions are crafted vary depending on each case. Defendants can be presented as promiscuous and hypersexual, bad mothers and bad wives, or hypermasculine, particularly if they are in same-sex relationships. For women of color, particularly Black women who are already denied certain protections of womanhood, race can also complicate how their femininity is challenged during trial.

One of the most recent and infamous cases of condemnation via sexual history was that of Brenda Andrew, a 57-year-old woman currently on death row in Oklahoma. In 2004, Andrew was convicted alongside her boyfriend James Pavatt for the 2001 murder of her husband, Robert Andrew. Over the course of her trial, Brenda was depicted as promiscuous, an image carefully constructed by prosecutors using decades-old diary entries from her husband worrying that she was having extramarital affairs, and testimony from friends and past lovers who were asked about the clothes she would wear. Prosecutors even presented as evidence lingerie that Brenda had packed for a trip to Mexico shortly after her husband’s murder. This evidence was suggestively presented at trial towards the aim of depicting her as an unfaithful wife and a bad person.

Castigating women for their sexual appetites is as common among the prosecution as it is in broader society, but that’s not the only way women defendants can be presented as deviating from feminine standards. Prosecutors also capitalize on instances where women accused of murder appear to have strayed from their role as caretakers or nurturers. Of course, this can occur most clearly in cases where the victims of the homicide are children, as in the case of Christina Riggs, who was executed in 2000 for the murder of her two young children. However, this image can also be conjured up in situations where a woman’s motherhood is completely irrelevant to the details of the case. Lisa Montgomery, the 52-year-old woman currently on federal death row and is scheduled to be executed in January, exemplifies this phenomenon. Prosecutors have repeatedly argued that Montgomery was an unfit mother, says Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and an attorney currently representing Montgomery.

“At the sentencing phase of her trial, her defense team argued that she loved her children, which is true and the prosecutor came back and said, ‘She loves her children? Right, she keeps a filthy home, she doesn’t cook, she doesn’t clean, she doesn’t go to her children’s games,’” said Babcock. “You never would hear that argument in the case of a man. And the shocking thing is that this is at the penalty phase of a capital case. So they’re making these arguments as part of a rationale for why this woman should be exterminated from the human race.”

In cases where a woman’s victim was male, she is often made out to be particularly threatening because of her ability to overpower a man. Atwell has also cited how prosecutors attempt to depict queer defendants or women in same-sex relationships as hypermasculine and thus, unfit for the social protections offered to women.

In the 1988 case of Wanda Jean Allen, a woman executed in 2001 for the murder of Gloria Leathers, her partner at the time, prosecutors attempted to not only dismiss evidence that the relationship between Allen and Leathers was a mutually abusive one, but they also described Allen as “the man” in the relationship. Similar tactics emerged in the case of Aileen Wournos, perhaps one of the most infamous women ever executed by the state.

Interestingly, much of Wuornos’ case includes traits that are more typical of capital crimes: Wuornos committed a series of homicides and her victims were often strangers, but prosecutors in her case still worked to highlight Wuornos’ sexual orientation to the jury. In fact, prosecutors referred to Wuornos as a “lesbian whose hatred of men caused her to murder again and again.”

Condemnation by clickbait

 Like in the case of Mary Rogers, the media routinely amplifies these depictions of women defendants, extending their reach far beyond the courtroom. News coverage has not just reasserted how these women may have transgressed typical notions of femininity, but reporters and have also used monikers like “black widow,” “damsel of death,” “blonde bandit,” and “trigger woman” to villainize these defendants in notably gendered ways. Atwell says this trend is especially prevalent in local news where the crimes hit closer to home and lead to more consistent and unfavorable coverage of capital cases.

This appetite for more salacious media portrayals of women defendants in capital cases—particularly due to their infrequency—can actually boomerang back into the courtroom and impact case outcomes.

In her review of cases involving executed women, Atwell found that three defendants—Judias Buenoano, Betty Lou Beets, and Aileen Wuornos—all had lawyers who were actively seeking book deals about the cases during the trial. Like many other defendants in capital cases, these women and their families could not afford quality, adequate legal representation. Attorneys for Buenoano, Beets, and Wuornos offered to represent them in exchange for signing away the rights to their stories. Not only did these attorneys provide inadequate defenses—Steven Glazer, who represented Wuornos, later admitted he knew nothing about capital law—but the desire to sell the most salacious story possible would likely work against the defense team’s willingness to portray their own client favorably.

In a 1991 affidavit, Robert Miller, a friend and colleague of E. Ray Andrews, the original defense attorney for Betty Lou Beets, shared that Andrews often bragged about the money he would make from Beets’ story.

“He said how he was going to get rich on all this and the case was going to be the biggest thing that ever happened to him, and whatnot. He said the case was going to turn into a big movie and he had all the rights to it,” said Miller. “It was something he talked about pretty often and you could tell he was counting on those rights for a lot of money.”

Buenoano, Beets, and Wuornos were executed in 1998, 2000, and 2002, respectively.

In the same way that the crimes committed by women on death row must be considered in the context of broader systems of patriarchy, depictions of women defendants in the courtroom and in the media also have roots in sexist ideas and biases that can be both overt and implicit.

As reported by Prism, women defendants in capital cases already experience unpredictability when it comes to how their histories of abuse might be treated during the sentencing phase of their trials. Important evidence that reflects their past trauma is often not presented at all and when it is it can be ignored or downplayed by the prosecution. Similarly, gender stereotypes around how a woman ought to behave and how she deserves to be treated can show up in trials with varying outcomes. The perception of women as being weaker and needing protection from the horrors of execution in part works to keep women off death row but any deviation from those same stereotypes can lead women to be judged even more harshly and to be met with death in cases that otherwise would never have garnered such a sentence.

This story is part of Prism’s series on women and the death penalty in the United States. Click here to read part one on Lisa Montgomery and the common history of gendered abuse many women on death row share. Next week, we’ll explore the intersections of race and gender on death row, focusing on the experiences of women of color who’ve been sentenced to execution. 

Tamar Sarai Davis is Prism’s criminal justice staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @bytamarsarai. 

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by our national media. Through our original reporting, analysis, and commentary, we challenge dominant, toxic narratives perpetuated by the mainstream press and work to build a full and accurate record of what’s happening in our democracy. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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The boon to consumers now being protected from surprise medical bills by a provision slipped into the coronavirus relief bill passed by Congress Monday has a downside. It is a very good thing that the practice of providers making money off of consumers by limiting the insurance networks they participate in isn’t going to fall on patients. Unfortunately, they’re going to get their money one way or another and it could come in the form of higher insurance premiums for everyone.

What’s particularly problematic is the success the powerful healthcare lobby had in fighting it off for months and months, succeeding in watering down the strongest policy prescriptions from bipartisan lawmakers. It doesn’t bode well for future efforts by President-elect Biden, or a potentially Democratic Senate and House, to further reform the system. Physicians and hospitals succeeded in their main goal of keeping lawmakers from setting rates—creating a benchmark payment rate for various procedures based on in-network rates that insurers paid and capping payments there. Instead, they wanted arbitration—taking the uncovered part of claims to a third-party negotiator to determine reimbursement amounts from the patient’s insurer—and that’s pretty much what they got. The bill directs the secretary of Health and Human Services to create a provider-patient bill dispute resolution process.

There are some guardrails. While mediators can’t use Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates as their starting point (which would be the commonsense place) they also have to throw out the high charges providers use for providing care, as opposed to the rates they negotiate with insurers. Not allowing “billed charges” as the benchmark rate is a win for insurers. Zack Cooper, an associate professor of public health and economics at Yale who studies healthcare pricing told Kaiser Health News that providers’ bill charges “are totally made up. […] So, the big deal is that arbitrators are not considering charges.”

“No law is perfect,” Cooper said. “But it fundamentally protects patients from being balance-billed,” the industry term for surprise billing from out-of-network medical providers. “That’s a remarkable achievement.” But the millions of dollars spent by provider lobbyists is a horrifying preview for what’s to come when Biden tries to push for the reforms he’s considering, like a public option on the Obamacare exchanges.

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This past year has seen an increase in national protests against racial injustice and police killings of Black folks. As the national outcry for justice continues, video clips and recordings of police-induced violence continue to be revealed on social media, depicting the brutality police officials often respond with at various peaceful protests.

In one recently unveiled incident, bodycam footage of some Boston police officers confirmed protesters’ stories of officers pushing peaceful protesters, pepper-spraying crowds, and even talking about hitting protesters with a police vehicle. The video footage was shared by The Appeal on Friday and depicted officers beating protesters with batons and dousing crowds with pepper spray, in addition to a Boston Police Department sergeant bragging about hitting people with his car.

“Dude, dude, dude, I fuckin’ drove down Tremont—there was an unmarked state police cruiser they were all gathered around,” the sergeant said laughing. “So then I had a fucker keep coming, fucking running,” he continues. “I’m fucking hitting people with the car, did you hear me, I was like, ‘get the fuck—’” It wasn’t until another officer warned the sergeant that the camera was on that the sergeant changed his story.

“Oh, no no no no no, what I’m saying is, though, that they were in front, like, I didn’t hit anybody, like, just driving, that’s all,” he said in an attempt to change the narration. “My windows were closed, the shit was coming in.”

According to Boston.com, the footage is from a May 31 protest in Boston where more than 50 people were arrested and at least 18 bystanders were hospitalized. The video was provided to The Appeal by Carl Williams, an attorney representing some of the protesters arrested during the protest that followed the death of George Floyd. According to The Appeal, Williams received more than 40 videos, about 70 hours of body camera footage, as part of a discovery file. 

“I have placed a Sergeant involved in this incident on administrative leave and I will take any additional action as necessary at the conclusion of the investigation,” Boston Police Commissioner William Goss said in a statement on Friday after the footage was shared publicly. “I want to encourage people to bring these matters to our attention so that we can investigate them appropriately.”

But the sergeant in question wasn’t the only one who used excessive force or talked about abusing protesters. The footage also depicted another officer who forcefully hit a Black woman with his baton despite her hands being up. Additionally, another unidentified member of the force could be heard talking about his use of pepper spray on protesters. “I’ve used two of these already—I’ve got a little left, I want to hit this kid,” the officer said.

The extensive body camera footage continues, depicting similar dialogue in which officers are clearly abusing their position in power. Prior to the release of the footage, officers were praised by the commissioner for their ability to protect Boston amid these protests. “No one is going to take over our city and burn it to the ground,” Gross said the day after the May 31 protests, according to Boston.com.

In a conversation with CNN, Williams expressed that the narrative officers have shared of the night is not the full scope of what happened and that these videos depict that truth.

“Protesters, activists, organizers, Black Lives Matters folks were like, ‘The police attacked us, and they used weapons, and they used advanced weapons and chemical weapons,'” Williams said.

The shared footage sheds light on the importance of officers wearing bodycams at all times while on duty. “We never want to see police officers using more force than necessary, even when tensions are high,” Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said in a statement. “These types of situations are also exactly why we are implementing body worn cameras for all police officers, and why we convened a police reform task force committed to bringing necessary reforms and accountability to the police department.”

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There may not be a more vapid politician in America than Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler. I realize that is a bold statement, given the competition, but there’s a strong case to be made.

HuffPost uses Loeffler’s smiling meet-and-greet with white supremacist leader Chester Doles this week to point out that that Loeffler has made a habit of meeting with white supremacists, anti-Semites, and neo-Nazi sympathizers. The wealthy but almost-comically inexperienced Loeffler insists, through her camp, that she of course didn’t know who Doles was, and that this was just the usual pictures with fans that all politicians engage in, you can’t vet everybody, and so forth.

That would hold some weight except that, as HuffPost observes, this isn’t even close to the first time this has happened, and many of Loeffler’s other little meetups with white supremacists can’t be written off by the campaign with the same gosh, how do all these violence-peddling far-right thugs keep showing up next to our candidate shrug.

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Loeffler fully knew who racist conspiracy-peddling candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene was, and the pair engaged in pro-gun self-promotion. No matter how incompetent Loeffler may be, there’s still no bloody way Loeffler does not know what the “3 percent” militia movement is, or their racist obsessions.

This also wasn’t the first time Doles, who leads the white supremacist group American Patriots USA, had met Loeffler.

A man bearing a large shield with the name of a hate group on it, and who claims his group provided “security” protecting Loeffler from Black Lives Matter activists, is not exactly the random bystander Loeffler’s ever-cynical and dishonest staff is trying to play him off as.

In the end, though, HuffPost’s most solid confirmation that Kelly Loeffler indeed has been courting the anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi elements of the far right was that she herself sat down for and publicly promoted an interview with OAN conspiracy host Jack Posobiec, of “Pizzagate” fame. Posobiec is an infamous would-be mainstreamer of white supremacist and neo-Nazi messages and causes, so notorious as to be the subject of numerous Southern Poverty Law Center reports. Even if they were all born in a cave, and yesterday, there is not a chance in hell that Loeffler and her staff did not know who Posobiec was when groveling to his pro-Trump conspiracy-peddling pseudonetwork.

This was Loeffler intentionally courting the racist far-right, as southern Republicans have done for decades while attempting to dodge consequences. This was Loeffler cynically attempting to enlist the pro-Trump conspiracy base, the QAnon adherents and the most shameless hoax-promoters, as her own advocates. And it was yet another of Loeffler’s specific efforts to portray the Black Lives Matter movement, not the armed far-right or the con-artist hoaxers that sent an armed man looking for a basement sex dungeon in a basement-less and unremarkable pizza parlor, as the real danger to the nation.

So she’s a race-baiting little snot, is what I’m saying, a huckster eager to staple herself to the violent far right’s visions of imminent race wars and whatever other conspiracy theories she can attach herself to, knowing full well that there’s a base of ultra-racist Georgia conservatives just waiting to be scooped up and poured into voting booths so long as you can tell them a few scary stories of Black people, Jews, and Socialists coming to do them nebulous harm.

Loeffler can’t defend herself from that charge, because it is her campaign schtick. It is her only campaign schtick: woodenly delivered, pre-memorized one-liners about “socialism” blurted out as confusing non-responses to whatever question was just asked is her debate and rally staple. Have you actually heard Loeffler debate or answer reporter questions? She makes Donald Trump look like a philosopher. She’s a Polit-O-Tron, a robot programmed with whatever pared-down talking points her staff can insert into her limited memory banks, non of it particularly believed but all of it focused at taking advantage of the con of the moment.

That, then, is where my claim that Kelly Loeffler is the most vapid politico in America comes from. There is no plausible argument that Loeffler doesn’t know she’s cozying up to far-right militias, neo-Nazi propaganda peddlers, hoaxers, and her state’s most notorious racists as she echos claims that come directly from their own mouths. There is a plausible argument to be made that she doesn’t actually give a damn about any of it one way or another, and is simply doing whatever her hired archconservative strategists are telling her to do.

When faced with a once-in-a-century worldwide pandemic, Loeffler’s only notable response was to quickly shift her own stock holdings into companies that would benefit from required mass shutdowns. It was that and, to date, absolutely nothing else. This is not a person who gives a damn about any issue, no matter how life-endangering or enormous. If she later moves to some other state where the racism doesn’t play as well she may well attempt to reinvent herself as anti-racist crusader. Whatever keeps her in office. Whatever keeps her in the halls of power, able to tweak things specifically to benefit her own holdings.

This isn’t Sen. Mitch McConnell, a man whose nihilism is aimed at entrenching Republican power regardless of what the actual voters have to say about it. Loeffler is not a party booster. Loeffler is a Loeffler booster.

That’s probably how her staff needs to respond to these racist-boosting meet and greets. Not by denying that they know who these shield-bearing white supremacist freaks and conspiracy hucksters are and what they stand for, but by pointing out that their candidate is simply to shallow a person to grasp the dangers of any of it. Oooh, is fomenting armed rebellion against the United States in order to purge non-whites bad? My goodness, we had no idea.

Or not. I’m not her keeper, and I don’t care. But her claims that she is not aligning herself with the racist far right are bullshit, provably bullshit, and her little collection of paid-for hacks isn’t fooling anyone with their claims of innocence.

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There’s no question that President-elect Joe Biden’s November victory, now reaffirmed a satisfying bajillion times from the Supreme Court on down to state courts and by state legislators and the Electoral College—so much winning!—helped House and Senate Democrats in negotiating the coronavirus relief package. One that they all consider, and Biden himself declares, is just a “down payment” for what has to happen as soon as he’s sworn in in the new year.

Biden wants talks to resume next month for much more substantive aid, especially for state and local governments that Sen. Mitch McConnell has steadfastly shut out of picture since March. And that, of course, is and will be the problem next year: McConnell. No matter how long Biden and McConnell have known each other, no matter how vaunted Biden believes his negotiating skills are, McConnell has a vested interest in tanking the economy ahead of the 2022 midterms. He also has proved time and again he doesn’t care how many Americans die getting there. Everything good for the nation really does come down to those two Senate seats in Georgia.

Ready to reach voters in Georgia, whether by phonebanking or textbanking, for the Jan. 5 runoff? Click to sign up for a training with Fair Fight—the voting rights group founded by Stacey Abrams—and they will set you up with what you need to start effectively reaching out to Georgia voters.

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That’s the message Democrats need to be hammering in the state. McConnell did blink on the $600 direct payments stimulus checks, which he had been opposing because he thought they’d help the two Georgia Republicans who he reportedly promised a pre-Christmas deal to. And because he somehow thinks a one-time $600 check per person will be seen as a great and generous gift rather than the crumbs that it is. That’s how out of touch with actual people he is. So the message that there could be real and actual help if McConnell loses his majority is a powerful one in the state.

Biden’s vision, an official with the transition said, is more funding for “supporting the covid response effort, reopening schools and helping families, businesses, and state and local governments.” Biden has said repeatedly that the package passed Monday night by Congress isn’t enough. “This is not the end of the deal,” he told reporters earlier this month about the negotiations. That’s certainly his intent, and it’s been the message from every Democrat who’s spoken about the bill—this is a stop-gap, nothing more, and much more work needs to be done.

But now that the president is going to be a Democrat, Republicans’ deficit peacock feathers will be hauled out of cold storage and on full display once more. McConnell will continue to obstruct and the nation will continue to suffer. The vaccine will help, but McConnell’s refusal to provide adequate state and local aid to help its efficient distribution around the country will delay it. The pain will continue.

The start to fighting that is in Georgia. Once that’s secured, if it’s secured, then the fight is to nuke the filibuster and neuter McConnell to the greatest extent possible.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom has chosen who will replace Sen. Kamala Harris after Harris leaves the Senate to become this nation’s next vice president. California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a longtime fixture of California Democratic politics, will take on the role. His term will serve until 2022, when he may face Democratic rivals in his bid to keep the post.

Padilla, an MIT-trained engineer, will become the first Latino California senator in the state’s history.

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President-elect Joe Biden is nominating Connecticut Education Commissioner Miguel Cardona to be his education secretary. Cardona is a former teacher and school principal, meeting Biden’s pledge to pick an educator for the role—unlike Donald Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos.

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Cardona made it a priority to get kids across the state access to laptops and the internet. More recently, he has pressed for in-person education, citing concerns about educational inequities with remote learning. That concern is in line with his longstanding focus on English language learners and racial achievement gaps.

In a 2019 interview, Cardona cited his own experience as a child who arrived in kindergarten having spoken only Spanish at home. He also opposed tying teacher performance evaluations to test scores, saying “Not reducing a teacher to a test score and bringing the voices of teachers and leaders into the process of professional leaning. Those are the two things I really felt like I had to champion.”

Connecticut’s education unions released a statement saying Cardona’s “formative experience as a teacher and administrator has been critical to his accomplishments as Connecticut Education Commissioner. He has been tested by the unprecedented upheaval caused by the pandemic. While this challenge has been a rocky road—and many issues remain unresolved—teachers and school support staff have appreciated his openness and collaboration. If selected as Secretary of Education, Dr. Cardona would be a positive force for public education—light years ahead of the dismal Betsy DeVos track record.”

If confirmed, Cardona will face two huge challenges in the pandemic and in undoing the damage DeVos inflicted on U.S. public education policy over the past four years.

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To say the COVID-19 crisis has decimated the United States would be an understatement. Since March, tens of millions of people have lost their jobs and are now facing food insecurity and eviction. However, there is one group for whom pandemic unemployment has been particularly brutal and unrelenting: Latina immigrants.

Between April and October, Latina immigrants consistently experienced the highest rates of unemployment, according to interactive data tools created by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) that track trends in unemployment for U.S.-born and immigrant workers by gender, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and industry. In May, Latina immigrants saw their unemployment peak at 18.5% before declining to 11.2% in September 2020—”even as jobless rates for immigrant men and U.S.-born men and women never topped 16 percent and fell below 8% in September,” MPI reported. As of November, 8% of immigrant women workers remained unemployed, compared to 6.4% of all workers nationwide.

Broadly, the COVID-19 recession has affected women more than men because women are heavily represented in service jobs that were hit hardest by pandemic closures and restrictions. This also means that younger workers and those without college degrees were disproportionately affected by pandemic-related unemployment. All of these categories overlap with Latina immigrants, who on average are younger than other U.S. workers, have less educational attainment, and are more likely to work in industries that were impacted by the recession COVID-19 created. 

In U.S. reporting and analysis about the effect of the pandemic on “Americans,” it’s unclear if the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants are reflected in the data. Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst with MPI’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, told Prism that when her organization began looking at unemployment rates, they looked at all immigrants, including naturalized citizens, Lawful Permanent Residents, undocumented immigrants, and temporary workers—essentially anyone who was born outside of the United States.

“Losing jobs is hitting unauthorized immigrants much harder in some ways because they don’t have access to the safety nets that legal U.S. residents can access. Unauthorized immigrants aren’t eligible for unemployment insurance, they weren’t eligible for stimulus checks, and depending on the citizenship status of their children, they may or may not be able to get a small amount of food stamps just for their children.” Gelatt said. “A lot of the safety net that’s available, no matter how inadequate it may be for other U.S. workers, it’s not at all available for unauthorized immigrant workers. Their only sources of support are private charities—help from a church, or help from a food pantry.”

Back in May, the Urban Institute predicted that employment and earnings losses related to the pandemic would likely impose an “especially high toll” on Latinx adults who are noncitizens. This was certainly true for Marcela Rodrigues-Sherley, an asylum-seeker from Brazil currently based in New York. As an English speaker and recent college graduate, the 25-year-old says that among Latina immigrants she is “more privileged than most,” but when COVID-19 hit during her last semester of college, she lost everything—her housing and the three jobs that kept her afloat as a full-time student.

In March, Rodrigues-Sherley’s university in Western Massachusetts informed students that they could no longer live on campus and that all on-campus jobs would be frozen. Because of her immigration status, she was part of a tiny percentage of students who were transferred to single rooms on campus and allowed to stay, but they had to adhere to strict social distancing rules or they would be kicked off campus. This largely meant students could not leave their rooms, not even to eat on campus. Given that Rodrigues-Sherley had also just lost her jobs working the front desk at the campus cultural center, assisting a professor, and babysitting, this meant she largely spent all day alone in a small room on a deserted campus, a far cry from her once busy and bustling life.

“I became really, really depressed,” Rodrigues-Sherley said. “I started to struggle really badly with my mental health. I can’t explain how stuck I felt. It was like everything changed in an instant.”

Her depression became so bad that she couldn’t focus on completing the assignments she needed to graduate. For the sake of her mental health, she left Western Massachusetts for New York City with a $1 bus ticket. Her partner lived in the city and the couple had already planned to live together after she graduated. At the time, New York City was the belly of the beast, the epicenter of  the COVID-19 crisis in the U.S. It was eerily quiet when she arrived, but Rodrigues-Sherley said her spirits immediately began to brighten once she was safe inside her partner’s apartment.

It’s been a long road since the move in early April. After Rodrigues-Sherley cranked out her thesis, she joined the ranks of millions of people nationwide looking for employment during the pandemic, but she had an additional barrier. Until U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services sent her work permit in the mail, she could not legally work. As an added setback, this was happening around the same time that nearly 70% of USCIS employees were furloughed because of the pandemic, which created a backlog for immigrants waiting on crucial paperwork.

Rodrigues-Sherley eventually graduated and got her work permit in July, but finding a job wasn’t easy. She was rejected “over and over again,” including when applying to service industry jobs at places like Starbucks and Chipotle. The new college graduate was eventually hired to work at the front desk of a coworking space, but the job didn’t last long after a racist incident led her to quit. Now she’s trying her hand at freelance journalism, another industry ravaged by the pandemic. As Prism recently reported, freelancing is especially challenging for women of color journalists and COVID-19 has only made it worse.

Like other Latina immigrants locked out of even the limited benefits extended to American citizens, Rodrigues-Sherley has leaned heavily on mutual aid and personal connections to financially and emotionally survive the pandemic. As COVID-19 rates surge across the U.S., the 25-year-old urged Americans to remember that the stakes are extremely high for immigrant communities.

“Things have felt very hopeless for a lot of people in the community,” Rodrigues-Sherley said. “I’m just looking forward to the day where it doesn’t feel like every day is just about survival.”

Tina Vasquez is a senior reporter for Prism. She covers gender justice, workers’ rights, and immigration. Follow her on Twitter @TheTinaVasquez.

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by our national media. Through our original reporting, analysis, and commentary, we challenge dominant, toxic narratives perpetuated by the mainstream press and work to build a full and accurate record of what’s happening in our democracy. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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The business of passing  pandemic relief and spending for fiscal year 2021 done, the Senate disbanded for the remainder of the week. That is, all but one. Of course it’s Sen. Rand Paul who decided to stick around and force the clerks and staff of the Senate to remain in the chamber, being exposed to him.

Trump has yet to veto the National Defense Authorization Act, and may not. For whatever reason, Paul wants to help him disrupt everything on his way out. So he’s just being a general pain in the ass, and fighting a bill that contains troop pay. Two weeks ago, he was threatening a government shutdown. Now he’s grandstanding on this. “I very much am opposed to the Afghan war, and I’ve told [leadership] I’ll come back to try to prevent them from easily overriding the president’s veto.” So Monday night’s performance was, well, pointless.

Yet there he was, for hours into the wee hours of Tuesday morning. He didn’t need to do this, because other than garnering attention it accomplished nothing. With no presidential veto yet, there’s nothing for the Congress to vote to override. They’re out now, and won’t be back until after Christmas. Should Trump veto the NDAA, the House will return on December 28 and vote to override it. 

The Senate has come to an agreement to return on December 29 and start the countdown for its override vote. “My intention was and is to ensure the Senate continues fulfilling our obligation to the men and women of our armed forces. I hope the president will not veto this bill,” McConnell said on the Senate floor early Tuesday. If he does, they come back on the 29th and start the ball rolling, potentially having to stay in over New Years if Paul continues in his windmill tilting. It’s possible that a final veto override vote wouldn’t happen until January 3, the day the new Congress is sworn in. 

If Paul manages to delay it beyond noon on January 3, a Trump veto will stand because that’s when this Congress is dissolved. The new Congress would have to start over with the bill, waiting for President Joe Biden to sign it. It would be the first time in 60 years an NDAA wasn’t passed.