'A nightmare': why were a black couple targeted in a shocking Texas police raid?
While the police in Fort Worth, Texas, ransacked Nelda Price’s home, an officer directed her to put her hands together – as if she were praying – so he could restrain her with zip ties.
“I told him, ‘I am praying. Because I don’t understand why you’re here, and I don’t know what this is about,’” Nelda told the Guardian.
On 11 March, she and her husband John, both Black and in their late 60s, had been chatting in the dining room, dressed for bed, when a noise interrupted them. Nelda’s first instinct was to get up and investigate, but after John thought he heard gunshots, he pushed her to the floor.
By the time they looked up, Fort Worth police had already broken through their iron gate and were storming the front door, guns drawn. Without any explanation, the officers demanded that John and Nelda put their hands up, then took them outside for questioning.
In a traumatic spectacle that lasted hours, about 20 or 30 policemen loudly tore through the Prices’ belongings as emergency vehicles swarmed the block. The elderly couple waited outdoors in their pajamas and nightgown; after asking several times, Nelda was finally allowed to grab a sweater.
“It was like a nightmare,” she said. “You just don’t expect something like that to happen.”
No one would answer any of the Prices’ questions about what was happening, even as several officers pointed out red flags that their colleagues had targeted the wrong people. Police refused Nelda’s pleas for John’s medication – until his blood pressure spiked so high that they called an ambulance.
Once Nelda and John were allowed back inside, they discovered a search warrant lying on the dining room table, allegedly connecting them to methamphetamines and narcotics trafficking.
“We simply don’t know why the Fort Worth police department got things so terribly wrong. We only know that they did,” said Kay Van Wey, a personal injury trial lawyer representing Nelda in her lawsuit against the city.
Fort Worth police have refused to provide Van Wey with the underlying basis for a no-knock search warrant against the Prices and told the Guardian they could not comment on pending or current litigation.
Unlawful detention, excessive force and violations of the Prices’ constitutional rights all factored in the devastating incident last March, the suit alleges, representing another example in a litany of high-profile tragedies that have underscored the department’s record of racial profiling and bias-based policing.
The department has faced widespread condemnation for years because of police brutality against minority communities.
“We certainly contend that this was not a product of an individual’s behavior, but rather the product of systemic, structural and institutional racism,” Van Wey said.
Almost a decade ago, Fort Worth officer Jon Romer fatally shot dis
abled father Charal “Ra Ra” Thomas as Thomas’s children watched. Romer was only fired in 2019 after being convicted of aggravated perjury in connection to a separate beating of a young Black man.
In 2015, officer Courtney Johnson, who later resigned, accidentally shot and injured Craigory Adams, a man with mental health issues who carefully dropped to one knee as Johnson approached him. The following year, when Jacqueline Craig called Fort Worth police for help because a neighbor had choked her young son, officer William Martin violently arrested her and her teenage daughters instead.
After Dorshay Morris reported a domestic disturbance involving her boyfriend in 2017, police tasered her to the ground and shackled her with handcuffs. Then, last year, Atatiana Jefferson became the sixth person killed by Fort Worth officers in a matter of months when Aaron Dean shot her through a window while she was babysitting her eight-year-old nephew.
Community members believe that Fort Worth “is doing little or nothing to improve race relations, racial equity, and cultural awareness”, the city council’s taskforce on race and culture wrote in a 2018 report. African Americans represented 41% of all arrests in 2016 and 2017, despite only accounting for 19% of the city’s population, the taskforce found.
More recently, an expert review panel expressed concerns that the
Fort Worth police “are not consistently adhering to policies to avoid force during encounters with community members”, and that the department isn’t enforcing those safeguards, either.
“They are operating like this is the wild, wild west, and there are no rules,” said Pamela Young, a community organizer with the grassroots organization United Fort Worth. “There’s no consistent accountability.”
As police rummaged through the Prices’ house, they were surrounded by antiques John had collected and other indicators that they were inside the modest home of two senior citizens. They still tossed shoes and suits around like trash, and ravaged the new kitchen cabinets Nelda and John had saved for years to afford.
“I actually felt violated,” Nelda said. After the incident, she was too nervous and upset to work for days, while John got quiet and stopped acting like himself. He told her he was OK, but after half a century of marriage, she knew better. John died in May of unknown causes.
“He was my protector,” Nelda said. “He took care of us.”
She still has no idea why her home was attacked, and, now alone, she’s triggered by something as seemingly innocuous as a police SUV circling her block.
“What we’re really, really asking for, is that the city take a very hard look at what happened here, and be willing to begin a dialogue with Nelda, listen to her story, and use this incident as a training example,” Van Wey said. “A way to figure out where their systems broke down, and fix them.”
of the large ground-floor windows of his new home, he pointed to the lush expanse of open country outside. “Any of this could be exploited for lithium soon. Possible exploration orders hang over all of it.”
In the past few years, small groups of anxious residents have come together across Portugal, concerned about the government’s lithium plans. With few facts in the public domain, these groups started making inquiries to local planning departments and town halls. In Inacio’s case, he said that he was told his requests would be “passed on”. He never heard any more.
At the same time, early-stage exploration works, led by the likes of Savannah and the Portugal-based Lusorecursos, were reportedly sighted across the country. An objector unearthed a technical assessment of Portugal’s lithium resources commissioned by the energy ministry in 2016. Eventually, a government spokesperson confirmed that discussions were under way with various mining companies, but said no firm decisions had yet been made.
Then, in January 2020, a map began circulating among the various WhatsApp and Facebook groups set up by concerned residents like Inacio. The map, put together by a local software developer specialising in cartography, appeared to confirm their worst fears. A tapestry of geometric shapes spread across the country’s interior, abutting designated nature reserves. A series of local and national protests, including a march in Lisbon last year, sought to raise awareness about the impacts of modern mining on the natural environment, including potential industrial-scale habitat destruction, chemical contamination and noise pollution, as well as high levels of water consumption. They also raised concerns about the impact on tourism – an economic mainstay for the country’s interior, with an annual turnover of €18.4bn in 2019.
All these concerns appear in a “national manifesto” recently published by a coalition of civic movements. Despite vociferous local media coverage, they have made little impact so far. In part, this reflects the relative weakness of the national environmental movement. Portugal is one of the few countries in Europe not to have a Greenpeace affiliate, for instance, and according to an EU survey, of all European consumers, the Portuguese are the least likely to pay more for eco-branded products.
For Maria Carmo, a 43-year-old university lecturer from the village of Barco, in the central district of Castelo Branco, such lack of engagement reveals the alienation that most urban or coastal-dwelling Portuguese feel towards the country’s rural heartlands. The trend in the past 50 years or so has been one of continued rural depopulation. Hundreds of thousands of people have left Portugal’s poor and already under-populated interior for new lives abroad or in the country’s coastal cities. Few of them return.
If a mining licence is granted in their region, Inacio and a small core of diehard supporters are prepared to fight it in the courts. Carmo is less sure. Her campaign group in Castelo Branco has already split, with half its members now open to the possibility of an openpit lithium mine above her village. It will happen anyway, they say, so why not negotiate some guarantees? Barco used to have a tin mine, the villagers argue, and it wasn’t so bad.
But Carmo feels it’s a mistake to compare the two operations. Her own father and grandfather both worked in the Argemela tin mine outside the village before it closed in the early 1960s. Back then, mining was smallscale and subterranean. A new mine, in contrast, could see half the hill disappear, potentially damaging the remains of a bronze-age settlement on its peak. Villagers also fear that chemical runoff will pollute the nearby Zêzere river, which they depend on for their crops.
After a three-year struggle, Carmo is exhausted and ready to give in. She feels the government is deaf, and that her fellow citizens aren’t interested. “So much destruction,” she said. “And for what? So eco-minded urbanites in Paris and Berlin can feel good about driving around in zero-emission cars.”
Advocates of Portugal’s hoped-for lithium boom argue that local disruption is a small price to pay for tackling the climate crisis. They point out that innovations such as windfarms, solar energy parks and hydroelectric plants, while contributing to lowering CO2 emissions in the long term, all have some impact on local populations. In a note to investors, Savannah observes that its proposed mine (which boasts projected revenues of US$1.55bn over its initial 11-year lifespan) will contribute to enough battery packs to prevent the emission of 100m tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Savannah’s chief executive, David Archer, goes even further. Speaking from his London office, he pitched his firm’s multimillion-dollar investment as advancing the overall “quality of the global commons”. The equation he offers is simple: lithium equals batteries, which equals electric cars, which equals an end to transport emissions, which equals a world less vulnerable to today’s climate emergency. He adds the prospect of new jobs in the local area (up to 800 in Trás-os-Montes), higher tax revenues and a €437m boost to Portugal’s economy. From a development perspective, he said, it’s a “no-brainer”.
The Portuguese government concurs. In a promotional video targeted at foreign investors, the secretary of state for the environment named his country “one of the world’s leaders in energy transition”. The short film stresses the current government’s “strong commitment” to a policy of eco-innovation.
Objectors say that where there is profit to be made, local environmental impacts are almost always overlooked. The same dilemma has set back international climate talks for decades, said Harjeet Singh, global climate lead for the campaign group ActionAid. The global north wants stricter emissions targets; the global south wants economic development now, and reasonably feels that the burden of tackling the climate crisis should fall on the post-industrial societies primarily responsible for causing it. “Green technologies are essential for the transition to renewable energy,” Singh said, “but they are not without negative impacts [and] we need to ensure these don’t always fall on the poorest and most marginalised communities.”
In Chile, the battle over the impact of mining has been going on for years. Born and brought up in the copperproducing region of O’Higgins in central Chile, community activist Ramón Balcázar, now 36, became aware of the potential damage of large-scale mining at an early age. Long-running disputes – over land use, water rights and chemical contamination – provided the background to his youth in the 90s. Then, six years ago, he moved to the northern outpost of San Pedro de Atacama. On the lip of the country’s famed Andean salt flats, the town looks out to a coarse, sun-baked carpet of crystalline whites and smudgy grey. There, under this huge, cloudless desert sky, Balcázar finally felt able to breathe freely.
He did not know it, but he had walked into another battle zone. San Pedro lies on the westernmost point of a mining area that spreads north across the Atacama desert to Bolivia and west into Argentina. Fifty times drier than California’s Death valley, the area’s parched surface conceals an underworld rich in minerals. Historically, mining companies have exploited its lucrative deposits of copper and, to a lesser extent, iodine and nitrates. By some estimates, it also contains as much as half the world’s lithium reserves. In the early to mid-2010s, when talk of lithium-ion batteries began circulating in every mining town, a raft of new licences were requested, investments made, and extraction facilities expanded. The area became known as the “lithium triangle”.
The mining companies insist their operations are sustainable. Balcázar, speaking from Mexico City, where he is studying for a graduate research degree, said they have no evidence for this claim. No one knows what effects lithium extraction on such a large scale will have on the Atacama’s fragile natural ecosystem. Unlike in Portugal, lithium here is found in brine, so the mining operations use no dynamite and no earthmovers, and threaten to leave no unsightly craters. Instead, they consist of a series of large, neatly segregated evaporation pools filled with millions of litres of brine that have been pumped from below the surface and left to evaporate in the sun.
The fears of residents like Balcázar are focused on the area’s cavernous, subterranean aquifers, from where the brine is pumped. Here, they maintain, a disaster is unfolding. There is a risk that the reserves of clean water, which are found in a separate layer above the brine deposits, may become contaminated.
Balcázar has been working with the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats, a network of expert scientists and concerned citizens, to chart changes to the local ecology. The weight of their evidence – shrinking pasturelands, failing crops, disappearing flora and fauna – all point towards a process of desertification which they believe is exacerbated by lithium extraction. The impact of disturbing a “huge, complex hydrological system” is not visible from one day to the next, said Balcázar. “But the two are interlinked, without any doubt.”
Plans by lithium mining firm SQM to expand its operations were recently blocked by a Chilean court on environmental grounds, but almost every other effort to get the backing of the authorities has failed. In Chile, Balcázar said, certain territories and natural environments have always been “sacrificeable” in the name of progress.
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While mining firms scour the world’s deserts and countryside for lithium concentrate, a parallel search is on to find ways of producing battery-grade lithium without sending in the diggers. On an industrial estate surrounded by fields in rural Saxony, Christian Hanisch set out to discover a solution in recycling. “What if, instead of extracting virgin lithium from the ground, we use what we already have?” he said. Half a million tonnes of lithium has been extracted and refined in the past decade, much of which now sits in discarded mobile phones and laptops approaching obsolescence.
In his modest first-floor office at Duesenfeld, the company he cofounded while working on his PhD at Braunschweig University of Technology, Hanisch, 37, admitted that the logistics are challenging. The lithiumion batteries in everyday devices are typically small and fiddly, so to make his venture viable, Hanisch decided to start big, with used electric car batteries (which each contain about 8kg of reusable lithium). He pointed out of the window, where several recently delivered samples were piled up on the tarmac outside the factory next door, each the size of a chunky mattress.
Removing the battery’s heavy plastic casing is easy enough; the challenge is how to access the lithium inside the battery cell itself. Currently, two main options exist: either heat the components to about 300C to evaporate the lithium, or apply acids and other reducing agents to leach it. Both approaches are complicated by lithium’s extreme volatility (it is prone to exploding) and its amalgamation with other metals (which are added in for better conductivity).
With market analysts predicting a potential 12-fold increase in the value of the global lithium recycling industry over next decade, to more than $18bn by 2030, competition among recycling innovators is hotting up. In Germany alone, Duesenfeld faces competition from at least three other early-stage lithium recyclers. Across the border in Belgium, a former smelting firm turned urban waste recycler, Umicore, is developing its own technology, but releasing no details. Another significant European player is Snam, in France.
Hanisch is confident that his procedure has an edge. Rather than smelting (which is highly energy intensive) or leaching (extremely toxic), Duesenfeld’s approach is based on mechanical separation. This method involves physically breaking the battery down into its component parts and then extracting the residual lithium via a combination of magnetisation and distillation.
In the company’s factory, amid a cacophony of whirring and clanking, a submarine-like cylindrical contraption (“that’s the crusher”, shouted Hanisch through the ear protectors clamped to my head) occupies the back wall. Filling the space between is a jungle of pipes, funnels and conveyor belts punctuated by worktops. Quite where the production line begins or ends is unclear. Hanisch regarded his invention with a blissful expression. “It’s noisy,” he conceded, “But it’s the greenest way of recycling lithium there is.”
Hanisch was brought up in a farming family in rural Lower Saxony, a background that inspired his environmental ambitions. Earlier this year he launched a consultancy venture, No Canary, advising on low-carbon methods for producing not just a battery, but an entire electric vehicle, from the materials stage through to final disposal. “Greta [Thunberg] was right”, he told listeners to his inaugural webinar. “We aren’t moving nearly fast enough on decarbonisation.”
Shifting away from petrol and diesel is not the only concern. Manufacturing any car, electric or otherwise, causes carbon emissions, be it from the coal used to smelt the steel for its body work or the diesel oil burned when shipping its electronic components across oceans. The extra materials and energy involved in manufacturing a lithiumion battery mean that, at present, the carbon emissions associated with producing an electric car are higher than those for a vehicle running on petrol or diesel – by as much as 38%, according to some calculations. Until the electricity in national grids is entirely renewable, recharging the battery will involve a degree of dependence on coal or gasfired power stations.
Lithium accounts for a small part of the battery’s cost, which means there is less incentive for manufacturers to find an alternative. As it is, recycling lithium costs more than digging it out of the ground. For Hanisch, one of the chief costs comes at the end of the process: converting the recovered lithium from its recycled state (lithium sulphate) into a battery-ready form (lithium carbonate). Without the resources to build his own chemical plant, Duesenfeld sends his end product – a grainy composite of precious metals known as “black mass” – to a hydrometallurgical facility for final processing.
For existing recycling plants, lithium is not where the money lies, said Linda Gaines, an expert in battery recycling systems at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. As she said: “The main purpose is to recover the cobalt, as well as nickel and copper. The lithium doesn’t add much.”
As with wind turbines and solar panels, the price of recycled lithium will very likely come down as battery manufacturers scale up. Supposing this proves true, there’s a huge supply-demand imbalance to get over. Before the pandemic, total sales of electric vehicles were projected to more than quadruple in the next five years, to more than 11m units. Demand for lithium will rise accordingly, with one industry estimate suggesting annual consumption could easily reach 700,000 tonnes by the middle of this decade. So, even if Duesenfeld and its competitors were able to recycle every last ounce of lithium produced in the last decade, come 2025, it would only be enough to power new electric vehicle batteries for nine months.
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As it turns out, the recession caused by the pandemic may have granted campaigners a reprieve, halting the immediate need to open new lithium mines. With the world facing a prolonged crisis, new cars – even ecofriendly ones – are not at the top of most people’s priorities. As manufacture has slowed down, a glut of lithium on global markets has dampened the white oil boom, if only temporarily.
But investors remain bullish about lithium’s long-term prospects. With a change of regime in the White House, there is hope for renewed support for measures to tackle the climate crisis. In the fortnight after the US election, the stock price of Chile-based lithium mine company Albermarle rose by more than 20%. In the UK, Boris Johnson’s announcement about bringing forward a ban on new diesel and petrol cars to 2030 gave the market a boost.
The European commission still wants a lithium industry to call its own. In September, the Slovak diplomat and a commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič publicly endorsed Por
tugal’s plans as “necessary” for the automotive sector. What’s more, the European Investment Bank would be on hand to help, he promised. His comment chimed with the launch of a new EU strategy on raw materials, which, among other goals, seeks to increase Europe’s lithium supply 18-fold by 2030, while reducing Europe’s dependence on third-party countries.
This is discouraging for the opponents of lithium mines in Portugal, but Šefčovič offered them a crumb of comfort. The decision to mine has to be taken in dialogue “with local communities”, he asserted, adding that “we need to assure these communities that these projects are not only of the greatest importance, but will also benefit the region and the country”.
The modern corporate responsibility movement is built on such logic. First, it does not promise to eliminate all negative industrial impacts. Instead, it pledges to “manage” them, and then to balance out any damage with compensatory “benefits”, to use Šefčovič’s phrase. In the case of Savannah’s mine in northern Portugal, the company concedes there will be local environmental impact, but argues that it will be outweighed by the upsides (inward investment, jobs, community projects).
Godofredo Pereira, a Portuguese environmental architect based at the Royal College of Art in London, is sceptical. His first-hand observations of the exploitation of Chile’s salt flats suggest that offers of dialogue can be superficial. Even in Atacama, where international accords give indigenous groups the right to “free, prior, informed consent”, detractors such as Balcázar struggle to be heard. Instead, the view of pro-mining community groups is taken as universal. If necessary, the obligation to gain consent can be weakened simply by defining lithium as a mineral of “strategic” or “critical” national value – which is easy enough, given lithium’s contribution to slowing global heating and cleaner air.
Nor, very often, do the promised trade-offs turn out to be quite what they initially seem, according to Pereira. The voluntary nature of corporate responsibility means mining firms can backtrack if it suits them. Even when local groups succeed in negotiating a fixed royalty (3.5% of sales, in the case of one major extractor in Atacama), communities frequently split in the subsequent fight for the spoils.
Digging up Portugal’s mountains in the name of green technology may still be avoidable. An alternative, less controversial technology could break on to the scene. Green hydrogen, for instance, could help offset up to 10% of Europe’s emissions. A more immediate solution would be to rethink how we get around. As Thea Riofrancos at Providence College pointed out, if everyone were to adopt “rational forms of transport” – such as trains, trams, ebuses, cycling and car-sharing – then demand for passenger vehicles of all kinds would shrink overnight.
For Portugal’s anti-mining groups, however, the clock is ticking. Godofredo argued that citizens must demand a dialogue, in order to “get a conversation going about what model of development we want”. If people were better informed, he reasoned, it’s just possible that public opinion could swing to their side, and the country’s lithium mining plans could get shelved. In this regard, recent demands by Portugal’s Green party for a national impact evaluation of mining policy is promising.
Portugal’s protesters can see that blocking green growth won’t get them far. These interior regions need investment. Hence the banner hanging from the playground fence in João Cassote’s neighbouring village, which reads “Sim à Vida” (Yes to life) beside “Não à Mina” (No to the Mine). “Life” for opponents of the mine, including Mario Inacio and Maria Carmo, is eco-tourism, regenerative farming, local supply chains, and other tenets of low-carbon living. For Cassote, it means a decent wage for a decent day’s work. For a green future, it’s going to be vital to accommodate both visions.
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the family, which largely relies on disability payments, is out of renovation money.
McFarlane’s difficult situation illustrates how families that received inadequate relocation packages still haven’t been able to fully rebuild their lives. While the village paid landowners up to 10 times the value of their empty parcels, homeowners were only given 1.4 times the value of their homes, and the village issued the assessment.
Mount Pleasant offered a relocation payment of $22,000 to McFarlane, who was a renter, and over $500,000 to his mother, Sherri Shaver, who was a homeowner. It also housed McFarlane temporarily in a village-owned home, and the family was shocked to discover as they moved in that it had sat vacant for several years. Aside from no heat or working toilets, it had been vandalized, had three feet of water in the basement, was mold infested, had doorways that were too small for McFarlane’s wheelchair, and its sinks spit out tainted water that left rashes on his kids’ skin.
Then the situation took another ugly turn: Mount Pleasant’s leadership withdrew its offer for McFarlane’s payment, he said, and threatened to sue Shaver over an unrelated matter if he fought them. Despite tearfully pleading for the money before the Mount Pleasant board of trustees, the relocation payment never arrived. McFarlane said he was told by village officials that the payment to his mother was enough for the entire family.
“There’s no explanation for why they did it, except that they could, and I felt like a stupid dummy for trusting them,” McFarlane said. “I don’t know why I did. I feel like I let my family down.”
Still, McFarlane said he was grateful to be starting fresh in a new town.
“I’m just glad we’re not in Mount Pleasant any more. Thank God,” he said.
Village leadership looks across the Foxconn site with a different view than the Mahoneys and McFarlanes. They see a project that’s already creating “thousands” of construction jobs while priming the land for investment. They note that Foxconn is already kicking in over $1m in tax revenue, and in 2023 it must start paying $30m annually in taxes, even if the project is dead. (Foxconn did not respond to queries.)
But recent history shows Foxconn plans from Pennsylvania to Indonesia have fallen short. Meanwhile, Lois, the consultant, recently ran a similarly structured deal in Illinois that fell apart in spectacular fashion. It ended with a developer in prison for fraud, the FDIC shutting down a bank, and Lois suing online commenters who criticized his performance.
Should the Foxconn deal meet a similar fate, state taxpayers are on the hook for 40% of nearly $1bn in debt that Mount Pleasant will probably owe.
The project is already extremely unpopular around Wisconsin, said Randy Bryce, an activist and former congressional candidate. Residents question why the state’s limited resources are being directed to a foreign company, he said.
“Especially now – look at how that money could be used to help struggling businesses during Covid,” Bryce added.
Though Trump and the former Republican Wisconsin governor Scott Walker declared with the 2017 Foxconn announcement that they had revived a critical upper midwest swing state’s manufacturing sector, the project is now viewed as a loss for Republicans. Meanwhile, there’s a growing sense that Mount Pleasant residents’ lives were upended for what was little more than elaborate political theater designed to score a phony public relations win for Trump and Walker.
But while the “political stunt” is galling, it’s the battle with local officials that’s most demoralizing to Mahoney.
“It’s disgusting that the people who are supposed to represent you are the ones who stomp on you,” she said.
There was a bit of evilness to all of this. The kind of things they pulled really did traumatize a lot of people
Kelly Gallaher