A BRIEF CRITIQUE OF THE LAS CRUCES PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICT’S EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

      I have read The Bulletin’s 21 November coverage of re-elected School Board members and their current thinking about educational problems to be addressed and the educational solutions to be adopted.  I am appalled.  Their greatest concerns are matters of accommodating students on the basis of their feelings of belonging and comfort.  So they decry the discomforts of students facing tests or having homework.  Not surprisingly, not one of them shows the least concern about the lack of educational attainment by K-12 students.  Not one mentions the persistent decline in proficiency scores in basic subjects, namely, reading and mathematics. 

An etymological note: “education” derives from a blend of two Latin words, “educare” (to bring up, rear, train) and “educere” (to lead out).  Semantically, the blend means a development from an exclusive responsiveness to one’s inner world (infantile narcissism) to a comprehensive responsiveness to and mediation of one’s inner world and the outer world (adult maturity).  The Las Cruces Public School District has no awareness of this meaning of “education.”  In fact, its philosophy amounts to a rationalization of infantilism.

 

The School Board and the Superintendent yield to the many parents who complain about the number of tests and the homework assigned to their children.  There is too much homework, it is too time-consuming, it is too hard—one re-elected Board member said that not all students can get the multiplication table and urged that the schools should settle for whatever learning happens—, it upsets their children, and it causes too many problems at home.  They also yield to the many teachers, especially elementary school teachers, who cannot teach what the state curriculum requires.  Past Superintendents Stan Rounds and Karen Trujillo admitted to me that none of them knows grammar; neither meant to remedy this professional deficiency.

 

As a result of accommodating these complaints, the standards of educational attainment are simply whatever the student does, without regard to subject-matter mastery.  Board members with many years experience as teachers have no more sense about education in public schools than people with none at all, and perhaps less.  Worse, these Board members act on the soft bigotry of low or, in their case, no expectations of a school population predominantly Hispanic.  They conceal their bigotry with a show of sympathy for the students facing tests and homework, not a commitment to them as future adults who will have lives to live as citizens with personal needs, social obligations, and economic responsibilities.

 

To show the slackness of the educational philosophy of the Las Cruces Public School District, I analyze and evaluate its overarching statements of vision, mission, and values.

 

First, its “Vision Statement: Where all learners thrive.”  This vision is blurred by its vagueness.  Thriving suggests to me potted plants in an environmentally controlled greenhouse.

 

Second, its “Mission Statement: The Las Cruces Public Schools provides a safe, caring, equitable, and student-centered learning environment that cultivates civic and community engagement, promotes excellence, and honors diversity.”  This statement fails to state a mission usually expressed as a purpose, that is, to do something.  Providing a “learning environment” suggests ensuring only suitable classroom conditions, sufficient furniture, and functioning equipment.  Such environments per se do not cultivate engagement, promote excellence, and honor diversity; there is no need to encourage them.  Engagement and diversity are tangential to and distractions from education; they give teachers and students excuses to do something besides teaching and learning something.  The idea of promoting excellence in an education regime which has no standards other than accepting as good enough whatever the student does is risible.  For student-centered learning dilutes, filters out, or limits learning subject matter.  The main purpose of public education is the transmission of knowledge and skills from teacher to students; once students acquire them, they have enhanced capabilities to pursue their interests, without guidance, direction, or indoctrination by the schools.

 

Third, its “Core Values: Our expectation is that our schools are diverse, equitable and provide [sic] opportunities for the development of critical thinking and democratic ideals and that our schools will uphold these core values:

• Be accountable for every child.

• Foster growth and innovation, grounded in research and evidence.

• Guide all decisions through the lens of equity, sustainability, and respect.

• Commit to the inclusion and success of every student.

• Maintain a safe, healthy, and caring environment.

• Cultivate and maintain partnerships with parents, students, staff, and community members.

• Embrace the power of collaboration.”

 

I note that this statement is devoid of any reference to the schools’ obligation to foster educational achievement in terms of knowledge and skills except for a reference to “critical thinking.”  I doubt that, at the moment of reading this blog, any member of the School Board or the Superintendent can give a cogent definition of critical thinking.  Moreover, they apparently assume that critical thinking can occur in the absence of knowledge or skills.  For nothing in these core values suggests that they believe in the importance of the acquisition of knowledge and skills in academic subjects, whether in the various trades, the various arts, history, literature, mathematics, or science.  Finally, their idea of “excellence” allows an anything-goes standard and accepts annual average proficiency scores in reading and math much below fifty percent.

 

The bankruptcy of the Vision Statement, the Mission Statement, and the statement of Core Values goes a long way to explaining the abysmal education provided by the Las Cruces Public School District.  So long as its leaders maintain their bovine indifference to an education focused on knowledge and skills, they will continue to support and defend teachers who are incompetent and unmotivated—in a word, not committed to teaching their subjects for the good of their students.  But it will celebrate the many LCPS graduates who will continue to lack the education to achieve personal enrichment, constructive civic participation, and professional satisfaction, and tout the teachers who make their educational deficiencies possible.

WHAT J. D. VANCE’S HOPE FOR HIS WIFE’S CONVERSION TELLS US

      I do not think that Vice President J. D. Vance is much good for anything but political self-advancement and expressions of retrogressive political views, personal attacks on opponents, and denigrations of multi-faceted bigotry.  He celebrates the robber-baron and KKK America of the 1920s and excuses the antisemitic and pro-fascist expressions of fellow Republicans. 

Vance’s perverse propensities make his public comment about his hope that Usha Vance, his Hindu wife, will adopt his Catholicism intriguing.  Many have wondered why he made this odd comment in public.  They wonder whether he was undermining his marriage.  They even wonder whether he meant to undermine it.  If so, they would have to wonder why he would.  After all, an annulment would be highly unlikely at this point, and adultery would be contrary to his professed faith and possibly detrimental to his political ambitions.  (I am unsure about the latter point since the MAGA tribe disregards misconduct on their side of the political divide and might approve of his discarding a Hindu wife.)  Some have implied that his public, seemingly intimate embrace of Erika Kirk, Charlie’s ex-wife, at a Turning Point USA gathering in Oxford, MS, on 29 October suggests that he might have an extra-marital romantic interest or intend a post-divorce courtship.

 

I believe that Vance’s remarks and conduct reflect lapses in judgment.  I also believe that they reflect tensions in his marriage arising from rapidly changing circumstances in the past dozen years of his life.  Consider his major life events of those years.  He graduated from Yale law school in 2013, married Usha in 2014, worked in different law and finance jobs, fathered three children born between 2017 and 2021, converted from atheism to Catholicism in 2019, was elected to the Senate in 2022, and became vice president in 2025.  Notable is his conversion after his marriage and between the births of his children.  Understandings and assumptions before his conversion and the birth of a child might change or lapse after them because of new perceptions of, feelings about, and relationships with his wife.  When he was an atheist and childless, his wife’s religion might not have mattered to him; his conversion to Catholicism and his fatherhood might have made her religion a matter of concern.

 

I have no idea how J. D. and Usha’s marriage will evolve.  It is none of my business, and it is none of yours.  It is only their business and the business of their families and perhaps their closest friends.  There I and we should leave it.

 

But for one thing: Vance brought his hope of her conversion into the public domain, not once as a slip, but several times: once, shame on us for making anything of it; more than once, shame on him for what is likely a political motive.  For marriage is a personal and private matter, not a political and public one.  By making his hope public, Vance is likely not only jeopardizing his marriage, but also attempting to advance his political standing.  He seems to be trying to be more than he is, more Christian than most by pushing his faith on his wife and presenting himself as the male head of the family—aspects of virtue to the MAGA tribe and evangelicals.

 

Vance is practicing what most or all of us do at one time or another, but he is practicing it at all times: fashioning oneself to give an advantageous appearance of himself to others.  Most of us have moments of weakness when we worry about how we present ourselves to others.  Do we pretend to be more successful than we are?  Do we give a false but favorable impression of ourselves on social media?  Do we worry that our clothes are not suitable for the occasion or that we speak ungrammatically?  Do we worry about which spoon to use for the soup?  (I recall the old joke about the punishments of those tortured eternally in Hell for their sins: Jews for eating pork, Catholics for eating meat on Friday, Episcopalians for using their salad fork to eat the entrée.)  What we do on a small scale, politicians do on a large scale.

 

Many, if not most, politicians like Vance—in fact, many politicians not like Vance—make a professional practice of fraudulent self-presentations.  The most notorious example is, of course, Donald John Trump, who would have us believe that he is the best at anything, smartest, most stable, most successful, most popular, and on and on.  Aside from the necessary hypocrisy of such self-presentation, there is the threat of self-delusion.  Trump probably does believe himself to be the “est-iest.”  The possibility that he might believe that “Trump is always right,” thereby mislead himself, and endanger all of us should scare the bejesus out of everyone.

 

Environmental influences can effect the same sort of self-delusion.  Rumor has it that, after acting in so many westerns, John Wayne came to adopt the proto-Republican philosophy and its “rugged individual” posture of the cowboy.  Likewise, Ronald Reagan, who began life as a Democrat but, hired as a salesman or spokesman for Republican-owned companies, came to believe his scripted lines and became a Republican.

 

The problem with adopted or induced identifications is a loss of true identity—will the real Vance or Trump or Wayne or Reagan please stand up—and a loss of integrity.  Again, Vance is an interesting specimen.  The many life changes in his short life, from hillbilly to high-tech entrepreneur, suggest his chameleon-like adaptability.  After being an atheist most of his life, he converted to Catholicism and makes a public display of it.  Yet his new-found faith gives no hint of benign influence on his political beliefs or conduct; his professed identity does not square with personal integrity.  Given his conversation, it is remarkable, the more so in view of his narrative of childhood abuses and deprivations, that he shows no concern for the disadvantaged and the discriminated against, and no respect, not to mention love, for his political opponents.  So the question is, who is J.D. Vance?  What is core except personal ambition?  We need answers to these questions because he is more than likely to be a candidate for the presidency in 2028 (and an occupant of the White House even sooner if impeachment or cheeseburgers do not remove Trump from office before then).

MEDIA SILENCE ENABLES LOCAL OFFICIALS’ INCREMENTAL MILITARIZATION OF LAW ENFORCEMENT

     Dona Ana County Detention Center (DACDC) in Las Cruces has been notorious for years, if not decades, for mismanagement, fiduciary deficiencies, and carceral abuses.  On 16 October, a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of six detainees added to its notoriety.  On that date, KTSM and KVIA/ABC, two El Paso television stations, posted reports on that lawsuit.  On 20 October, I distributed my blog, “ICE-Like Abuses at Dona Ana County Detention Center Implicate County and Center Leaders,” to over 300 people and posted it for many more.

 

I am unaware of any public response to the television reports.  I received exactly one comment by a local citizen from my over three hundred readers, many of whom are local and state officials.  Since then, local media—Las Cruces Sun-News, The Bulletin, KRWG, and KTAL—and our more prominent media commentators—Peter Goodman, Walt Rubel, Shaunna Pfeiffer, and Heath Haussamen—have ignored the story for two weeks (and counting).

 

In fairness, I have to consider that I am impatient about, not the tardiness of media coverage, but the lack of it altogether.  In fairness, I can dismiss that consideration.  The lawsuit claimed that the DACDC used detainees, some awaiting trial—that is, innocent unless and until convicted of an offense—, as guinea pigs for prisoner control exercises by violent and humiliating means.  The two TV reports should have prompted front-page or first-lead stories and featured editorials in the local media.  But, to paraphrase a line from the movie The Big Easy, this is Las Cruces, darling, and we have a certain way of not doing things here and not talking about not doing them.

 

The usual response of public officials to such horrific reports is the pious claim that “this is not who we are.”  The statement implies the officials’ innocence and denies the facts.  But DACDC abuses, the silence covering them up, and the refusal to confront and correct them are who we are.  The media and their columnists are accessories after the fact.  The members of the Board of Commissioners are accessories both before and after the fact.

 

The elected representatives of Dona Ana and Las Cruces citizens represent a moral laxity though they act with malice aforethought.  Two years ago, the Board approved the acquisition of 150 tasers and other equipment for law enforcement and detention.  DACDC employees have used tasers, not to control riots, but to threaten, punish, and torture detainees.  Although legally limited to work within the confines of the DACDC, members of its Special Operations and Response Team (SORT) have been deployed at Board of Commissioners’ meetings.  SORT is morphing into an off-the-books police force under the control of the County Manager.

 

Meanwhile, as I have noted several times, Las Cruces Police Chief Jeremy Story requested that the Las Cruces City Council seek state funding for five Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) vehicles.  Council did so.  My inquiries about the rationale for them to Story directly or through my District 1 Representative Cassie McClure have received no responses, and State Representatives Joanna Ferrary and Nathan Small have promised to inquire but either have not done so, received no response, or refused to share any information obtained.  With little or no public discussion, much less approval, elected officials are funding training of law enforcement personnel in military tactics, and equipping them with military-style weapons and vehicles

 

Their use and abuse become more likely every day.  President Trump and major federal departments and agencies (DHS, DOJ, FBI, ICE, CBP) are equating peaceful demonstrations or protests with riotous disturbances, even insurrections.  Such incendiary language might prompt poorly qualified, poorly trained, over-equipped, over-eager law enforcement personnel to maim or kill people, damage property—actions far more harmful to the communities in which they operate than anything which demonstrations might do—, and violate laws and constitutional rights in the process.  ICE and CBP agents are already acting like the goons which unaccountable law enforcement personnel invariably become.  Accordingly, they sweep up, assault and batter, and jail even citizen bystanders witnessing their street muggings and abductions—and charge them with offences against government agents.  Just weeks ago, Las Cruces Police Department (LCPD) officers trained rifles on peaceful demonstrators, mostly Hispanic, at the Albert N. Johnson Park.

 

Situations in which federalized National Guard or active-duty troops are stationed in cities already exist.  They and officers from the aforementioned agencies patrol streets, suppress demonstrations, and support arrests and abductions.  Other situations might arise in which states use their National Guards or state police in similar actions.  Notably, the federal government is trying to persuade state and local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal agencies in their daily operations.  In the end, federal law enforcement will influence, if not direct, state and local law enforcement with little sensitivity to state and local conditions.

 

These trends in law enforcement suggest that Dona Ana County and Las Cruces might be no exception; they are already militarizing their law enforcement departments.  Although it is not too late for them to take control of their local constabularies, they are unlikely to do so.  They would have to explain spending public funds and then reversing their decisions on training and arming police officers for military-style operations.  Instead, they are more likely to prepare pious public statements of surprise or concern, or lame, after-the-fact excuses.  The local media’s silence about the ACLU lawsuit ensures the public’s silence and thus precludes political pressure to rectify a potentially dangerous situation.  In that event, officials will continue to acquiesce in the incremental militarization of local law enforcement agencies.

CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM AND THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN TRADITION VERSUS JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN VALUES

      Much talk about Christian nationalism and some talk about a Judeo-Christian tradition prompted me to consider Christian and Jewish values which presumably underlie them.  The first thing to say about Christian nationalism and a Judeo-Christian tradition is that both are non-religious constructs.  Nationalism is obviously a political matter, and a claimed Judeo-Christian tradition, given pronounced, even antithetical, differences between Jewish and Christian beliefs, is a historical matter which falsely implies a commonality between them.  The tradition is often invoked to exclude people, particularly Muslims, from America’s body politic.  The second thing to say about them is that both have little, if anything, to do with the professed values of their faiths.  Christian nationalists—my examples are J.D. Vance and Charlie Kirk—express little Christian love of non-Christians (not to mention non-whites), and Christians and Jews have shared more hostile than friendly relations over two millennia; consider only their quite different recent experiences during, and subsequent reactions to, the Holocaust.  I say no more about the Judeo-Christian tradition because I have nothing to add to my 2016 blog on the subject.

 

There are many lists of Christian and Jewish values.  The several lists of each religion which I reviewed on Google differ slightly but not significantly; all values listed are representative.  I offer one list of Jewish values and of Christian values without the associated principles found in the texts hyperlinked.

 

Righteous Giving/Justice                 Love and Compassion

Repairing the World                         Forgiveness

Loving-Kindness                              Honesty and Integrity

Compassion                                      Humility

Preservation of Life                          Kindness and Gentleness

Truth/Integrity                                   Faithfulness and Obedience

Peace and Harmony                          Self-Control

Study of Jewish Texts/Education      Justice and Responsibility

 

All of the lists of Jewish values omit repentance and forgiveness.  I digress on this absurdity because many Christians think of Jews as unforgiving and revengeful: an eye for eye, a tooth for a tooth.  But rabbis understand this text to be, not the Lex Talionis, or law of revenge, but a law of just compensation, the payment of a penalty proportional to the harm done.  The omission is inexplicable because of the prominence of the Jewish holy days of Rosh Hashanah, new year’s day, and, ten days later, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar except for the weekly Sabbath.  Between these two holy days, Jews are supposed to make special efforts to repent wrongs which they have done to people and seek their forgiveness; on Yom Kippur, they are supposed to repent wrongs to God and pray for forgiveness.  Just as Jews repent to achieve forgiveness for their wrongs, so they forgive those who repent their wrongs (but, differently from Christians, only those whom they deem sincerely penitent).

 

All of the values on all of the lists are worthy ones.  Neither separately nor together do the lists comprehend all religious values (for example, the serenity of some Asian religions).  The values partly overlap and partly differ.  Jewish repairing the world and Christian peace and justice partly align with one another; so, too, Jewish truth/integrity and Christian honesty and integrity.  With a few exceptions, all of the values are personal ones; they do not state or imply political, especially partisan, ones.  Nothing on the list of Jewish values suggests the Christian value of humility; nothing on the list of Christian values suggests the Jewish value of education.  There is no objective way to establish that any value or any set of values is superior to another.  Indeed, the values on each list implicitly preclude competition or conflict with values on the other list.

 

But the nature of the values on both lists opposes those of Christian nationalism and the Judeo-Christian tradition, the purposes of which are antithetical to the values of the religions which they purport to profess.  For what is political cannot be what is personal, and vice versa.  Both religions are personal but may be communal.  However, when the communal is institutionalized, it often becomes political and departs from its religious values.  Under the Trump regime, the growth of Christian nationalism reflects the growth of conservative political power which adorns itself with the honorific title of “Christian” to mislead the gullible.  Whether it will persuade a majority of Americans to accept it as the basis of a theocratic polity remains to be seen.  If it does, Jewish and Christian values will be a measure, by contrast, of its abuses.

 

I provide an AI-generated summary of the values and principles of Christian nationalism because they are unfamiliar to many.  “Christian nationalism does not have a formal, static set of doctrines, but rather encompasses a consistent set of core beliefs and associated social/political values that have remained largely stable over time.  The ‘values’ of Christian nationalism, in the view of scholars and critics, are distinct from the general tenets of the Christian faith and are primarily focused on the fusion of a specific, conservative form of Christianity with American civic life.”  Its values and principles include:

 

• Fusion of Christian and American Identity: The central belief that American identity is inseparable from Christianity, that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and that the government should take active steps to maintain this status.
• Hierarchical Social Order: A preference for a traditional social hierarchy that emphasizes specific, patriarchal gender, sexuality, and family structures. This includes the belief that men should lead, women should support as wives and mothers, and that traditional marriage is exclusively between a man and a woman.
• Ethno-Racial Boundaries: An overlap with white supremacy and nativism, which envisions a “preferred citizen” who is typically white and native-born. This often translates to anti-immigrant sentiment and opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, which are viewed as weakening the nation.
• Authoritarian Control: A belief that strong rules and a strong leader are necessary to maintain social order and that the nation’s “God-ordained” status is under constant threat. This can lead to a willingness to bend or break democratic norms to achieve their vision and a higher likelihood of endorsing political violence.
• Perceived Victimhood and Conspiratorial Thinking: A pervasive sense that the “true” American way of life and values are under attack by “elites” and minority groups. This often involves an embrace of anti-establishment politics and a greater likelihood of believing in conspiracy theories.
• Prioritizing Specific Rights: An emphasis on certain rights like gun rights, religious expression in public spaces, and states’ rights, while potentially limiting access to other civil liberties and voting rights.
• Free-Market Capitalism: The belief that free-market capitalism, including privatization and deregulation, is God’s preferred economic system, and a general opposition to social spending or “creeping socialism.”

 

“The values of Christian nationalism are not ‘new’ in the sense of a recent ideological shift, but rather a set of long-held beliefs that have become more prominent and politically organized in recent years, often in response to changing demographics and perceived threats to their cultural dominance.”

 

Clearly, Christian nationalism cannot be Christian according to the values regarded as distinctively Christian.  Moreover, its nationalism is both antithetical to fundamental American values and principles, foremost among them the created equality of all people, and threatening.  It touts America as a nation, that is, presumably, as a country of a people sharing and united by a common descent, ethnicity, history, culture, or language.  America is not such a country and thus not such a nation.  Its diversity of peoples from different countries, of different ethnicities, with different histories, cultures, and languages disqualifies it in the usual terms and conditions defining a nation.  Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) recognizes this fact—which Christian nationalists and their sympathizers oppose vigorously by attempts to ignore demographic and delete historical facts.  In this limited sense, Christian nationalism is false to the facts.  In a larger sense, it implies the need to cleanse America of or repress those who depart from the standard which Christian nationalists advocate or, by their actions, imply, by erasure, enclosure, or elimination.  Enclosure is more likely and would lead to the creation of an apartheid state since white Christians constitute only about 40-44% of the American population.

 

What makes, or can make, America a nation of diverse peoples is a shared dedication to democracy which centers itself on the equality of all people and a government legitimized by the consent of the governed, a government of, by, and for the people.  The values of both religions, if more widely accepted and acted upon, would help unify and uphold such a nation.

ICE-LIKE ABUSES AT DONA ANA COUNTY DETENTION CENTER IMPLICATE COUNTY AND CENTER LEADERS

      This former intelligence officer knows better than to trust a single source of information except for special reasons.  The ACLU’s filing in the Third Judicial District Court for its six plaintiffs against the Dona Ana Board of Commissioners doing business as the Dona Ana County Detention Center (DACDC) is one of those single-source exceptions.  The ACLU is generally reliable; in a court filing about widespread, long-term abuses, it can be trusted to be responsible with the facts and the law 

Few Dona Ana or Las Cruces residents have learned about systematic abuses at the Detention Center.  The ACLU filed its lawsuit on 16 October.  In El Paso, both KTSM and KVIA/ABC reported on the filing on the same day.  Since then—it is now 20 October—, in Las Cruces, neither the Las Cruces Sun-News nor The Bulletin has mentioned it.

 

The ACLU filing provides the basic facts about the abuses committed at the DACDC.  I first quote the first paragraph and then build an account based on the 26 “factual allegations” of its complaint.  For convenience in presenting these allegations in this blog, I have rewritten them without differentiating between quotations or paraphrases and added some comments of my own.  I have substituted “prisoners” for “detainees” because the latter implies political incarceration.  Readers may check the accuracy of my account by using the hyperlinks provided.

 

For years, Doña Ana County Detention Center’s corrections officers have embarked on a terror campaign using paramilitary operations, violent midnight operations, training drills on actual detainees, surprise flash bang grenades, and other threatening and harmful conduct. The officers’ actions subject detainees to anxiety, fear, and uncertainty daily, never knowing when their pod will be the next one subjected to inhumane paramilitary tactics or for what innocuous behavior they might be targeted. These unwarranted and abusive operations at the Doña Ana County Detention Center do nothing to further security or safety and egregiously violate the rights of the people housed within the detention center.

 

In 2018, DACDC contracted with a private firm to provide training in military tactics to a select group of officers designated the Special Operations and Response Team (SORT).  By virtue of this training, SORT is a paramilitary group trained to handle high-risk situations, including riots, evacuations, and all other situations which exceed the abilities of regular officers.  They are required to know, among other competencies, the use of deadly force, “conceptual pod dynamic domination,” “controlled F.O.R.C.E. operations,” and breaching operations.  They are trained to use Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) equipment including, but not limited to, tactical vests with armor plate inserts, shotguns, AR-15s, 9mm weapons, and gas masks.

 

DACDC intended SORT for use only as the last resort using “control measures” only when necessary.  Yet, so I am told, “the County Manager started using their guards—presumably SORT folks—for crowd control at the recent contentious BOCC Meetings.  That is totally against the law—those folks are for Detention Center duty only, and specifically NOT for crowd control.”  This dangerous mission creep outside the DACDC has no apparent restraints.

 

The first officers trained under this program graduated in 2019 and were soon deployed within the center.  The abuses apparently began in that year and have continued ever since.  According to the ACLU media statement, SORT “has conducted at least 112 such operations since January 2023.”  The abuses are astonishing in an American carceral institution.

 

Since 2019, DACDC has directed or allowed SORT to conduct unwarranted operations day or night with paramilitary tactics and psychological warfare against prisoners who are not resisting and who comply or try to comply with SORT’s often conflicting commands.  Its operations often occur late at night after housing units (“pods”) have been locked up or early in the morning while prisoners are asleep.  It conducts random, violent operations when no critical incidents have occurred or are occurring.  It escalates routine cell shakedowns into excessive force situations to practice using special tactical gear and to run training scenarios for new SORT officers.  In other words, SORT trains officers to use military tactics and riot weapons on unsuspecting prisoners who have done nothing wrong.  Sometimes, they use tasers or other weapons on compliant, restrained prisoners just because they ask questions about why they are being abused.

 

SORT, with weapons drawn, sometimes storms a pod while prisoners are playing cards, watching TV, getting a haircut, engaging in Bible study, or sleeping.  Its operations often begin with officers firing Bore Thunder flash bangs without warning, cause, or provocation.  A Bore Thunder is a 12-gauge muzzle flash bang that produces approximately 174 decibels of sound.  Its 150 decibels can burst a person’s ear drum; even short-term exposure to any sound above 140 decibels can cause permanent damage.

 

After firing flash bangs and disorienting prisoners in the pod, SORT officers often cause confusion by shouting conflicting commands such as one officer yelling “on your feet” and another officer shouts “get on the ground.”  In addition to the confusion which they have created, officers further escalate the unwarranted encounters and abuse by firing more flash bang rounds.  Even when prisoners comply with their commands, officers still point their guns and threaten or actually use physical force against them.

 

Some DACDC and SORT officers conduct themselves in violation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act.  During strip searches, they point tasers at prisoners’ genitals and tell them that if they make any sudden movements or if any contraband is found on them, they will be tased in the genitals.  Sometimes, officers point non-lethal guns with rubber bullets at prisoners’ genitals during strip searches and make the same threats.  There is no legitimate purpose or reason for an officer to point weapons at prisoners’ genitals.  DACDC and SORT officers  engage in this behavior for the purpose of humiliating, degrading, and frightening prisoners.

 

As a direct result of the SORT’s abusive tactics at DACDC, prisoners housed within the detention center have suffered emotional distress, psychological injuries, dignitary harm, and physical injuries.

 

These ICE-like abuses have not occurred in a vacuum.  DACDC officers have perpetrated them, and DACDC and Dona Ana County officials have permitted or tolerated them.  Not one can claim ignorance of the facts, at best, only indifference to them, at worst, approval of them.

 

Bryan Baker has been the DACDC Director since September 2020.  He began as a DACDC cadet in 2001 and became a sergeant, lieutenant, and captain.  He manages DACDC's day-to-day operations, security, finances, and staff.  Although he might not have initiated the idea of SORT in 2018 or launched its first operations in 2019, he has invested in and directed it throughout his tenure.  The Director reports to the County Manager.

 

Fernando Macias (Jan 2018-May 2024), Stephen Lopez (interim, May-Oct 2024), and Scott Andrews (Oct 2024-present) have been County Managers throughout the existence of SORT at the DACDC.  The County Manager is not directly responsible for the DACDC but is responsible for overseeing all county departments, including the DACDC.  The County Manager appoints the Director.  The Doña Ana County Sheriff's Office is not in charge of and has no operational relationship with the DACDC.

 

Nine people serving as Commissioners on the Doña Ana Board of Commissioners have held office during SORT operations:

District 1: Christopher Schaljo-Hernandez (2019-present)

District 2: Susanna Shapato (2019), Diana Murillo-Trujillo (2020-2024), Gloria Gameros (2024-present)

District 3: Shannon Reynolds (2019-present)

District 4: Isabella Solis (2019), Lynn Ellins (2019-2020), Susana Chaparro (2021-present)

District 5: Manuel Sanchez (2019-2025)

Those commissioners serving for only short periods of a year or so—Shapato, Gameros, Solis, Ellins—might not have known much about SORT, but those serving long periods—Schaljo-Hernandez, Murillo-Trujillo, Reynolds, Chaparro, and Sanchez—must have known a lot.

 

These officials share responsibility for SORT operations and its abuses of prisoners.  Baker is directly responsible for them.  County Managers have indirect responsibility.  Commissioners have at most indirect responsibility and at least guilty knowledge.  Accountability should mean that Baker be fired, SORT officers be demoted and permanently denied promotion, and cadets be discharged.  Andrews should be fired.  Schaljo-Hernandez, Reynolds, and Sanchez should be recalled or defeated in the next election.  The only reason for not taking these steps to hold these officials accountable is a belief that they define and exemplify the moral and political character of the residents of Doña Ana County.

 

In Las Cruces, similar possibilities are emerging in Police Chief Jeremy Story’s request for five SWAT vehicles.  No member of City Council questioned this request.  District 1 Councilor Cassie McClure, at my request, made a perfunctory request for information, was ignored, and dropped the matter.  District 37 State Representative Joanne Ferrary told me that she was concerned and would make inquiries.  If she did—I believe that she did not—she got no response which she shared with me.  District 36 State Representative Nathan Small acted likewise.  The failure of these three elected officials in particular to question the need for the LCPD to have a large number of military-type vehicles and related equipment should be alarming at a time when state and federal forces are being deployed against civilians.  To put it bluntly, Trump has a lot of sympaticos among local officials.

WHAT AILS ACADEME IN AMERICA?

Many are the woes of academe.  To enumerate, much less discuss, all of them would take up more space than I allot to my longest blogs.  So I shall address the few which have manifested themselves in areas near to my studies and scholarship.  English language and literature is my general field, with Shakespeare my specialty.  After discovering and disclosing a grammatical error—isn’t that what you think English teachers do?—in one of my girlfriend’s favorite books, she, a little irritated, declared me “a fucking English PhD.”  We laughed about it then and laugh about it still, but her jibe does raise questions, among many others, about the field of English, the merits of humanities, and their purposes in colleges and universities.

 

Whatever lofty language describes the purpose of colleges and universities, the fact is that their purpose has been almost exclusively vocational.  From the beginning, in the tradition of England’s two oldest universities, Oxford (1096) and Cambridge (1209), Harvard (1636) and Yale (1701) educated men to be priests or ministers.  The later evolution of schools, up until about the mid-nineteenth century, expanded the curriculum to include law and medicine; then the humanities: philosophy, history, and (national) literature; then the sciences and engineering; then it was too late for Katy to bar the door.  The Morrill Act (1862), which established land-grant universities, marks the shift in America.  The founder of Cornell University (1865) declared, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

 

As late as the mid-1970s, most non-sectarian colleges and universities subscribed to the concept of a well-rounded education, at least in colleges of arts and sciences and often in vocational colleges.  The concept was embodied in distribution requirements across major academic domains for the first two years of matriculation.  One reaction to the Vietnam War was the erosion of those requirements; they are weakened or non-existent today.  Ever since, with the emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and health, with their favorable reputation and higher salaries for graduates, the humanities have suffered, not only by scornful comparison, but also by shrinkage in enrollments, faculties, offerings, and budgets.  In how many movies in the 70s and 80s were the inept identified as English majors?

 

In large part, with the rise of technical or professional studies, the humanities came to be seen as increasingly remote from the concerns of their times and pathways to remunerative careers.  What could an English major contribute to questions of, say, foreign affairs or environmental policy?  My parents were appalled when, the day in 1958 when I arrived at Cornell and was then enrolled in engineering physics, I said that I intended to transfer to arts and sciences.  I did not want to make spaceships or nuclear weapons.  Ironically, after my graduate studies, I became a consultant doing lots of defense work, some of it concerning Reagan’s SDI and nuclear weapons.

 

Ten years later, the humanities found themselves on the outside looking in on the social turmoil created by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements.  Students who sought deferments from the draft entered graduate schools, brought their politics with them, and imposed their politics on the subject matter of their fields to make the humanities relevant, so they thought.  But these politically motivated graduate students and their faculty sympathizers defeated themselves by a combination of arrogance and ignorance.  Their politics were ideological templates for analysis and, worst of all, for class discussion and student grades—the teacher’s way or the highway.  Yet they were not very good at politics.  One distinguished professor wrote that Macbeth, who became king by force and fraud, was nevertheless legitimate because he had been formally declared so by a council of thanes ignorant of his conduct.

 

The humanities departments, especially English departments, brought upon themselves what ails their departments by trying to be relevant to selected domestic issues of public concern.  Mission impossible.  Political approaches to such issues are contrary to the nature and purpose of the humanities.  Politics is about governance, its policies and practices, and the power to effect them; it seeks answers to public issues.  The humanities are about human nature and human experience; they seek insights into the human condition and learn to appreciate others without necessarily approving what is learned.  The idea, centuries old, is “that nothing human is alien to me.”  Yet, for half a century, humanities departments have dedicated themselves to exploring the distribution and deployment of power by race, gender, or class—the fashionable triad of leftist issues, more the stuff of culture wars than major community concerns—and weakened the study of what people have thought, felt, and done in different cultures, times, or places—and disappointed many students.

 

Despite this distinction, I offer an instance showing that study in the humanities can provide insights into issues requiring answers.  In 2003, almost no one doubted that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had a nuclear weapons program.  The inference was that his refusal to let inspectors into the country meant that he had something to hide.  I knew that the only thing which he had to hide was that he had no program.  My reasoning: Hussein had domestic and foreign enemies; refusing inspectors created the impression that he had nuclear weapons; he used that impression to deter his enemies; he was bluffing.  How did I know?  I imagined myself in Hussein’s position as I had learned to do in analyzing characters in novels and plays.  This instance does not imply that reading in the humanities is a sure, not to mention the only, way to such insights, but it can help.  (Some CIA work assesses not only an enemy’s capabilities, but also its intentions, quasi-literary analysis of his decision-maker’s character and motives in the circumstances.)

 

The decline of English departments (and, I assume, other humanities departments) is not likely to be reversed simply by reforms in critical approaches and curriculum offerings; it will require help in promoting the idea of the humanities and the importance of educational well-roundedness.  C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” made the humanities and the sciences appear adversarial.  Snow was right to say that humanists need to know more about the sciences.  He failed to say that scientists need to know more about the humanities, though many in his time did.  In the early 40s of the Manhattan Project, scientists with a well-rounded education became increasingly alarmed about an atomic bomb as their work came closer to producing one, but, working in secret, they had no influence on decision-makers.  It took the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to alert humankind of the threat of nuclear weapons.  Today, a few computer scientists among thousands are warning that artificial intelligence might be dangerous by becoming capable of developing itself independently, perhaps without serving human interests or purposes.  Unlike nuclear weapons, it is proliferating without the restraint of a dramatic incident to prompt restrictions on its development and deployment; its danger might be realized only when it might be too late to take corrective action.  The humanities might contribute to public discussion of its possible threat to the stability, even the survival, of societies by the introduction of this and other, especially biomedical, technologies.  To put it too starkly, today’s scientists understand the technologies but not the consequences; humanists understand the consequences but not the technologies.  We need both and the ability of each to understand the other.

 

Which implies that colleges and universities need to return themselves to the older tradition which promotes well-roundedness.  The concept is not hard to understand or difficult to implement; if there is a will, there will be a way.  The problem is that leaders of colleges and especially universities have surrendered to a corporate mentality, not sustained their academic orientation.  Too many regents or trustees are appointees with corporate backgrounds rewarded for campaign contributions and without experience in education and an appreciation of its unique nature.  Chancellors and presidents are expected to play the politics of funding and thus, as we have seen recently, making their colleges and universities vulnerable to financial extortion.  They have shown themselves submissive because they do not respect the distinctive role which colleges and universities play in the country’s welfare and thus lack the convictions required by courage to defend academic freedom, including the freedom to criticize the society in which they exist.  If colleges and universities were committed to a well-rounded education, the various departments of technical studies might be almost equally involved with departments of humanistic studies in addressing issues of public moment.

 

The passivity of college and university leaders contrasts with the activism of students, mostly from the humanities.  Indeed, the public’s perceptions of colleges and universities are largely shaped by the political activism more common in the humanities than in the sciences.  Student protests involve controversial subjects not widely shared by the public, but they can prevail, as they did during the Vietnam War.  Whatever else might be said about the protests about the Israeli-Hamas conflict, they constituted a threat to the Trump administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East.  Using antisemitism as a pretext but lacking funding leverage on the humanities, the Trump administration has attacked scientific research programs by withholding their funds in a roundabout way to attack the humanities.  It knows that the source of criticism of its policies, programs, and practices most commonly arise in departments promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and anything which appears to be “woke” (whatever they mean by the term).  So it seeks to control college and university policies and practices in enrollments, curriculums, and instruction, with the humanities being the primary targets.  If more of the public itself had received a well-rounded education, it might have a greater appreciation not only of the humanities, but their benign influence on thinking about current issues of public concern.