Delivering the commencement address to the graduating seniors at Morehouse College today, President Joe Biden addressed the nation. After thanking the mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and all the people who helped the graduates get to the chairs in front of the stage, Biden recalled Morehouse’s history. The school was founded in 1867 by civil rights leader Reverend William Jefferson White with the help of two other Baptist ministers, the Reverend Richard C. Coulter and the Reverend Edmund Turney, to educate formerly enslaved men. They believed “education would be the great equalizer from slavery to freedom,” Biden said, and they created an institution that would make the term “Morehouse man” continue to stand as a symbol of excellence 157 years later. 

Then Biden turned to a speech that centered on faith. Churches talk a lot about Jesus being buried on Friday and rising from the dead on Sunday, he said, “but we don’t talk enough about Saturday, when… his disciples felt all hope was lost. In our lives and the lives of the nation, we have those Saturdays—to bear witness the day before glory, seeing people’s pain and not looking away. But what work is done on Saturday to move pain to purpose? How can faith get a man, get a nation through what was to come?” 

It’s a truism that anything that happens before we are born is equidistant from our personal experience, mixing the recent past and the ancient past together in a similar vaguely imagined “before” time. Most of today’s college graduates were not born until about 2002 and likely did not pay a great deal of attention to politics until about five years ago. Biden took the opportunity to explain to them what it meant to live through the 1960s. 

He noted that he was the first in his family to graduate from college, paid for with loans. He fell in love, got a law degree, got married and took a job at a “fancy law firm.” 

But his world changed when an assassin murdered the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King—a Morehouse man—and the segregated city of Wilmington, Delaware, erupted with fires, looting, fights, and occasional gunfire. For nine months, the National Guard patrolled the city in combat gear,  “the longest stretch in any American city since the Civil War,” Biden recalled.

“Dr. King’s legacy had a profound impact on me and my generation, whether you’re Black or white,” Biden explained. He left the law firm to become first a public defender and then a county councilman, “working to change our state’s politics to embrace the cause of civil rights.” 

The Democratic Party had historically championed white supremacy, but that alignment was in the process of changing as Democrats had swung behind civil rights and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Biden and his cohort hoped to turn the Delaware Democratic Party toward the new focus on civil rights, he said. In 1972, Biden ran for the Senate and won…barely, in a state Republican president Richard Nixon won with 60% of the vote. 

Biden recalled how, newly elected and hiring staff in Washington, D.C., he got the call telling him that his wife and daughter had been killed in a car accident and that his two sons were gravely injured. The pain of that day hit again 43 years later, he said, when his son Beau died of cancer after living for a year next to a burn pit in Iraq. And he talked of meeting First Lady Jill Biden, “who healed the family in all the broken places. Our family became my redemption,” he said. 

His focus on family and community offered a strong contrast to the Republican emphasis on individualism. “On this walk of life…you come to understand that we don’t know where or what fate will bring you or when,” Biden said. “But we also know we don’t walk alone. When you’ve been a beneficiary of the compassion of your family, your friends, even strangers, you know how much the compassion matters,” he said. “I’ve learned there is no easy optimism, but by faith—by faith, we can find redemption.”

For the graduates, Biden noted, four years ago “felt like one of those Saturdays. The pandemic robbed you of so much. Some of you lost loved ones—mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, who…aren’t able to be here to celebrate with you today….  You missed your high school graduation. You started college just as George Floyd was murdered and there was a reckoning on race. 

“It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you. 

“What is democracy if Black men are being killed in the street?

“What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave[s]…Black communities behind?

“What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?

“And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a Black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?” 

The crowd applauded.

Biden explained that across the Oval Office from his seat behind the Resolute Desk are busts of Dr. King and Senator Robert Kennedy, challenging Biden: “Are we living up to what we say we are as a nation, to end racism and poverty, to deliver jobs and justice, to restore our leadership in the world?” He wears a rosary on his wrist made of Beau’s rosary as a reminder that faith asks us “to hold on to hope, to move heaven and earth to make better days.” 

“[T]hat’s my commitment to you,” he said. “[T]o show you democracy, democracy, democracy is still the way.”

Biden pledged to “call out the poison of white supremacy” and noted that he “stood up…with George Floyd’s family to help create a country where you don’t need to have that talk with your son or grandson as they get pulled over.” The administration is investing in Black communities and reconnecting neighborhoods cut apart by highways decades ago. It has reduced Black child poverty to the lowest rate in history. It is removing lead pipes across the nation to provide clean drinking water to everyone, and investing in high-speed internet to bring all households into the modern era. 

The administration is creating opportunities, Biden said, bringing “good-paying jobs…; capital to start small businesses and loans to buy homes; health insurance, [prescription] drugs, housing that’s more affordable and accessible.” Biden reminded the audience that he had joined workers on a picket line. To applause, he noted that when the Supreme Court blocked his attempt to relieve student debt, he found two other ways to do it. He noted the administration’s historic investment in historically black colleges and universities. 

“We’re opening doors so you can walk into a life of generational wealth, to be providers and leaders for your families and communities.  Today, record numbers of Black Americans have jobs, health insurance, and more [wealth] than ever.”

Then Biden directly addressed the student protests over the Israeli government’s strikes on Gaza. At Morehouse today, one graduate stood with his back to Biden and his fist raised during the president’s speech, and the class valedictorian, DeAngelo Jeremiah Fletcher, who spoke before the president, wore a picture of a Palestinian flag on his mortarboard and called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, at which Biden applauded.

“In a democracy, we debate and dissent about America’s role in the world,” Biden said. “I want to say this very clearly. I support peaceful, nonviolent protest. Your voices should be heard, and I promise you I hear them.” 

“What’s happening in Gaza…is heartbreaking,” he said, with “[i]nnocent Palestinians caught in the middle” of a fight between Hamas and Israel. He reminded them that he has called “for an immediate ceasefire…to stop the fighting [and] bring the hostages home.” His administration has been working for a deal, as well as to get more aid into Gaza and to rebuild it. Crucially, he added, there is more at stake than “just one ceasefire.” He wants “to build a lasting, durable peace. Because the question is…: What after? What after Hamas? What happens then? What happens in Gaza? What rights do the Palestinian people have?” To applause, he said, “I’m working to make sure we finally get a two-state solution—the only solution—for two people to live in peace, security, and dignity.” 

“This is one of the hardest, most complicated problems in the world,” he said. “I know it angered and frustrates many of you, including my family. But most of all, I know it breaks your heart. It breaks mine as well. Leadership is about fighting through the most intractable problems. It’s about challenging anger, frustration, and heartbreak to find a solution. It’s about doing what you believe is right, even when it’s hard and lonely. You’re all future leaders, every one of you graduating today…. You’ll face complicated, tough moments. In these moments, you’ll listen to others, but you’ll have to decide, guided by knowledge, conviction, principle, and your own moral compass.”

Turning back to the United States, Biden urged the graduates to examine “what happens to you and your family when old ghosts in new garments seize power, extremists come for the freedoms you thought belonged to you and everyone.” He noted attacks on equality in America, and that extremist forces were peddling “a fiction, a caricature [of] what being a man is about—tough talk, abusing power, bigotry. Their idea of being a man is toxic.” 

“But that’s not you,” he continued. “It’s not us. You all know and demonstrate what it really means to be a man. Being a man is about the strength of respect and dignity. It’s about showing up because it’s too late if you have to ask. It’s about giving hate no safe harbor and leaving no one behind and defending freedoms. It’s about standing up to the abuse of power, whether physical, economic, or psychological.” To applause, he added: “It’s about knowing faith without works is dead.”

“The strength and wisdom of faith endures,” Biden said. “And I hope—my hope for you is—my challenge to you is that you still keep the faith so long as you can.” 

“Together, we’re capable of building a democracy worthy of our dreams…a bigger, brighter future that proves the American Dream is big enough for everyone to succeed.”

“Class of 2024, four years ago, it felt probably like Saturday,” Biden concluded. “Four years later, you made it to Sunday, to commencement, to the beginning. And with faith and determination, you can push the sun above the horizon once more….”

“God bless you all,” he said. “We’re expecting a lot from you.”

—

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/05/19/remarks-by-president-biden-at-the-morehouse-college-class-of-2024-commencement-address-atlanta-ga/

https://www.inquirer.com/news/a/wilmington-del-riots-occupation-martin-luther-king-jr-national-guard-20181207.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/morehouse-graduation-thanks-god-woke-class-2024-2024-05-19/

Share

Since launching his campaign to replace Portland’s progressive district attorney last year, Nathan Vasquez says he’s knocked on nearly 20,000 doors to make his pitch. “Hi, I’m running for District Attorney for Multnomah County,” he usually begins his spiel. “The last four years haven’t gone well, but I have a vision to get us back on track.”

What he’s talking about are the four rocky years that have gripped Portland since the summer of racial reckoning in 2020. After video footage of George Floyd’s death spread like wildfire, Portland—one of the whitest cities in America—was roiled by protests for more than a hundred days. In June of that year, only a month after Floyd’s death, the city council voted to strip the city’s police department of $15 million in funding and cut 84 positions, representing 8 percent of its officers. 

In the subsequent years, the homicide rate tripled, car theft soared, and much of downtown was overtaken by open-air drug use. The murder rate has since dropped but violent crime overall remains up 17 percent from 2019 levels. That is why Vasquez, a senior prosecutor for Multnomah County, is challenging his own boss—Mike Schmidt, a registered Democrat who ran on a “bold, progressive vision” to confront “historical and systemic racism.” To Vasquez, a registered independent, Schmidt’s tenure has been a flop—and he says the people of Portland agree.

“A line I hear in Portland on an everyday basis is that people tell me, ‘I’m very progressive, or I’m very liberal, but things have gone too far.’ ”

On Tuesday, voters will decide if they agree with that statement. In 2020, voters elected Schmidt with a nearly 77 percent landslide win. Now, polls show Vasquez leading Schmidt by 19 points when voters were “presented with basic information about the two candidates.” When they face off in Portland’s nonpartisan primary, any candidate that garners more than fifty percent of the vote will win the office. 

“What I believe is that it will be decided next Tuesday,” says Vasquez, who was previously registered as a Republican until he found himself “disgusted” with former president Donald Trump. 

Other progressive district attorneys have already gotten the axe. In 2022, halfway through his term, San Franciscans overwhelmingly voted to recall Chesa Boudin, the former district attorney, who campaigned on a promise to “dismantle our racist system of mass incarceration.” Now, Pamela Price, the district attorney in nearby Alameda County, is facing a recall election this November. The move to recall Price, who campaigned with the slogan “justice with compassion,” comes as violent crime is on the rise in Oakland, where roughly one out of every thirty residents has been the victim of car theft. 

Some of their peers have survived the heat, including José Garza, the district attorney in Travis County, who won his March primary even though the homicide rate is still above pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, Larry Krasner, a George Soros–backed progressive, is still in office in Philadelphia despite having been impeached by Republicans in the state house (he’s now awaiting his trial in the Senate).

Still, the tides seem to be turning. 

A growing share of Americans say crime is one of their top issues heading into this year’s presidential election. In 2021, when President Joe Biden took office, 47 percent of Americans said crime “should be a top priority” for his administration. Now, 58 percent of voters say that crime “should be a top priority for the president.” And the voters seeking stronger law and order are not necessarily the people you’d expect, says Vasquez. 

When I asked him if any of his supporters are the same Portlanders who marched in the streets in 2020, demanding $50 million in cuts to the city’s police department, he said “certainly.”

“A lot of people still want social justice, and that’s a wonderful part of what we’re trying to do,” he added. “But what they also want is a safe community.” 

Olivia Reingold is a writer for The Free Press. Read her piece “Addiction Activists Say They’re ‘Reducing Harm’ in Philly. Locals Say They’re Causing It” and follow her on X @Olivia_Reingold.

And to support more of our work, become a Free Press subscriber today:

Subscribe now

Brian, a U.S. Border Patrol agent who works along the south Texas border, is haunted by something that happened a few years ago. A man—a Mexican cartel member, he believes—emerged from the banks of the Rio Grande carrying two toddlers. The children, a boy and a girl, were wearing nothing but diapers. The man darted across the border, dropped the children fifty feet away, and then raced back into the river to Mexico. 

“I picked up these toddlers and looked fifty yards south,” said Brian, a ten–year veteran of the agency, who, like all agents we spoke to for this story, insisted on using a pseudonym. That’s when he saw six adult migrants running across the border as fast as they could. The children, he realized, had been a decoy. “They use these kids to distract us so they can run their illegals up in other places,” he said. As he helped the children to safety, he was outraged. “When I couldn’t pursue those men, I felt like I was letting the American people down.” 

Another veteran agent said he’s witnessed the same problem on his watch—and much worse. “We regularly see things that people should never see, like rotting human remains, abuse of every kind, babies and kids dying or dead,” he told The Free Press. 

“Do you know what that does to you over time?” he asked. “You have to shut down a part of yourself to keep going.” 

Last summer, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, Joseph V. Cuffari, reported that the number of people who eluded capture—also known as “gotaways”—rose over 300 percent from 2019 to 2022, reaching more than 600,000. Many of the gotaways are people seeking a better life. But border officials acknowledge that many others are fentanyl smugglers, human traffickers, or convicted criminals. According to immigration officials, agents intercept just 5–10 percent of the drugs that cross the southwest border. 

Now, three-plus years into the worst border crisis in American history, the men and women of the Border Patrol are facing a crisis of their own. By all accounts, those who work along the southern border are a demoralized group. Unable to go after the “bad guys” because they are overwhelmed by the sheer number of migrants, and feeling abandoned by the Biden administration, many agents “just get kind of numb,” said Chris Clem, a twenty-seven-year veteran who retired as chief border agent of the Yuma, Arizona, sector last year.

“We all knew under this administration there’d be a change,” he said. “We expect that every time there’s a political change. But when it turned out that the job became nothing more than processing and releasing these people, that was very hard to take.”

Before the crisis, processing migrants was secondary to “working the line,” as agents call patrolling the border. Today, because of the sheer numbers of people coming into the country, there is little time for anything else beyond processing.

“It feels like a bait and switch,” said Mark, a retired agent who remains in federal law enforcement and works closely with his former colleagues. “We are meant to serve a law enforcement purpose. That’s what we signed up for and are trained for. But suddenly, we’re now expected to act as a humanitarian relief agency, which requires an entirely different set of skills, expectations, resources, and responsibilities. . . ones that most of us don’t have.”

Even when agents spot something suspicious, there is little they can do. “Even if my spidey senses go off, I have to ask myself, how much time can I devote to this?” said Clem. “Because I’ve got 200 more people in line I have to process. They even took away our ability to use DNA testing, so we no longer have the resources to see whether or not we’re processing a real family unit.

“A lot of agents are just trying to go to work and survive,” Clem continued. “And that’s not where you want to be when you’re in law enforcement.” 

This accumulation of the frustrations these agents describe has led to a mental health crisis in their ranks. In 2022, there were fourteen suicides among the Border Patrol’s 25,000 agents—nearly twice the number of suicides in 2020, and three times that of 2014. That’s more than double the percentage of suicides among all law enforcement agencies. And, according to several studies, agents suffer from poorer mental health than police officers and the general population.

As a result of the crisis, several congresspeople have introduced bills to fund suicide prevention programs for border guards. In 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal agency that oversees the agents, brought in Dr. Kent Corso, a suicidologist. He hosts a series of podcasts about suicide prevention posted on the CBP website, among other services. (Corso did not respond to several emails from The Free Press.)

But according to seven Border Patrol sources who spoke to The Free Press, most agents are unwilling to tell their superiors they are depressed or having suicidal thoughts, out of fear it will damage their careers. According to Brandon Judd, the president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union that represents the majority of Border Patrol agents, those who acknowledge mental health problems are usually reassigned to desk duty, which not only stigmatizes them but results in a substantial pay cut, thanks to the loss of overtime. When The Free Press asked Judd why struggling agents don’t reach out for help, he replied rhetorically, “Why would you?”

John Fitzpatrick, a former associate chief who spent nearly thirty years in the Border Patrol, said that “many agents are sympathetic with migrants for making the journey.” One agent told The Free Press that he sometimes finds himself spending time helping mothers who have crossed the border with infants. “I know how to make formula because I raised two kids. . . I know how exhausted that mother is.” He said he’ll often tell the mothers he meets, “ ‘Mama, lay down. I’ll feed your kids.’ ” 

But while the agent is helping that mother, dangerous people are infiltrating the country. “There are serious, hardened criminals—MS-13 gang members, potential terrorists, and simply people who have extensive criminal histories,” said Fitzpatrick. “There’s really nothing stopping them from coming here at this point.”

Juan joined the U.S. Border Patrol almost four years ago, shortly before Joe Biden became president. In his early thirties, he was assigned to a post along the Rio Grande in Texas.

He arrived expecting to do the job he had been trained to do: protect America from criminals and potential criminals. But with so many migrants crossing the border—a staggering 2.5 million encounters in 2023 alone—it hasn’t turned out that way.

Instead, he spends his days processing migrants who have crossed the river—sometimes in groups of one hundred or more. “We call them ‘give-ups’ because when they cross the border they don’t try to evade us. They just give themselves up,” he told The Free Press. 

“When I was out there in the dark, and I came upon a family of five—true story—and they started hugging me because they were abandoned by their smuggler,” Juan said. “They were eaten up by mosquitoes, and they hadn’t eaten in three days, and they’d been drinking river water—you know, that’s the humanitarian aspect. I gave them my lunch, and then I personally brought them to the station so that mom, dad, and three kids with them could all get sandwiches and water.”

The Biden administration’s policy has been to release migrants into the U.S. so long as they say they have “credible fear” of returning to their native countries. The migrants have all been instructed to use the phrase—and the agents feel hamstrung when they hear it. In December 2023, for example, over 75 percent of the nearly 250,000 migrants who illegally crossed the border were released into the U.S. with nothing more than a notice to appear at some future date in immigration court. Immigration courts are currently backlogged with more than 3 million pending cases.

Juan said he has seen and heard terrible things, including stories of rape almost daily. “I had to sit there and listen to a 13-year-old girl from El Salvador tell me how she’d been raped twice by her smuggler. She was traveling with her 9-year-old brother, and the smuggler said he would hurt the boy if she didn’t cooperate. So she let him do what he wanted.” 

Law enforcement officers have long been identified as an at-risk group for mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. More recently, they have also been identified as a group at risk of what psychologists call “moral distress” and “moral injury”—conditions that result when people are forced to compromise their most deeply held values and beliefs or when they feel those values and beliefs are violated or betrayed. Border Patrol agents may be uniquely at risk for all these conditions. 

Indeed, every agent The Free Press spoke to said they believed the administration is not interested in protecting the border. Several said the Biden administration had forced them to make impossible choices, calling its treatment of them a betrayal.

Mark, the former agent, put it this way: “How would you feel when you have a guy in front of you, demanding asylum, holding his young daughter’s hand, smiling at you, and lying to your face, using the same line he’s been coached what to say to get into the country, even though his rap sheet shows he was arrested for sexual abuse of minors, including the young girl? If you separate the child, she’ll scream and be traumatized. If you keep them together, then you run the very high risk that she’ll be sexually traumatized again. You tell me, which trauma is the lesser evil?”

Judd, the union president, said, “We recognize when you sign up for law enforcement that you’re going to be thrust into situations that can be very, very stressful. You’re willing to accept that stress if you feel like you’re accomplishing something, and right now, there is no sense of accomplishment.” 

Mayra Cantu, 44, is married to a Border Patrol agent who she declines to name. They live with their three children in Edinburg, Texas, a half-hour from the border, which is also the headquarters of the Rio Grande Valley Sector, where some 3,500 agents patrol 17,000 square miles. With Border Patrol agents barred from speaking to journalists, she has taken it upon herself to become their voice, talking to reporters and, last September, testifying before Congress.

“We’ve always lived in border towns,” she said during a Zoom call with The Free Press. “We’ve always lived around illegals. My husband joined the Border Patrol because he wanted to be sure that the job was getting done, that our town and our families were being protected.”

During the first year of the Biden presidency, she said, her husband was in a daze—hardly believing that, as he saw it, Border Patrol agents couldn’t do their job anymore. “These men took an oath, which they took very seriously. They were being forced to betray that oath,” she said. Her husband, she added, “would come home from work ‘a blank page.’ He stopped talking to me. I couldn’t read him. There were a lot of very quiet days.”

As time progressed, he would erupt in anger over the littlest things—one of the kids spilling a glass of water, say. “It was just rage. I started to question myself. Am I doing something wrong? Are the kids doing something wrong? We were all walking on eggshells. It was hurting our marriage.” Sometimes at night, he would scream out. “I realized he was reliving the trauma of work in his sleep.”

In his anger and dismay, Cantu’s husband began spending hours at the computer at night researching the border crisis—“to prove that what the White House was saying was wrong.” In the fall of 2021, several agents on horseback were accused of whipping some Haitian migrants. Biden vowed to make the agents “pay” for their behavior. This infuriated many agents, who knew the accusation was unfounded and felt stabbed in the back by the president. Sure enough, the following spring, the agents were cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. No apology ever came from the administration.

For Cantu, the possibility of suicide is ever-present. In 2022, one of her husband’s friends took his own life; afterward, her husband recalled that the guy had wanted to talk after his shift ended but he hadn’t had time—and the subsequent guilt was enormous. Last summer, she said, another friend, in the middle of a divorce, was on the brink of suicide, but was saved by a group of agents and their wives who gave him what he didn’t have at work: a feeling of self-worth. “Thankfully, we were able to talk to him and console him and surround him with community to make sure people were checking up on him. And I can say now he’s in a way better place.” 

In a lengthy statement to The Free Press, a spokesman for the agency said it was working to get more agents back on the line, “thanks to innovation and efficiencies.” He said that “maintaining morale supporting frontline personnel, and ensuring our resilient workforce has the resources available to maintain a healthy work-life balance is a top priority for CBP leadership.”

But agents patrolling the southern border told The Free Press that help has yet to arrive. In the meantime, agents are doing all they can to cope with the mental and moral onslaught. 

“I’ve talked to other agents about this,” Brian said. “Like, how do you continue to do your job without saying, you know, ‘Fuck it. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ And I’ve been told you just have to drive forward and have resilience.”

Michele DeMarco is an award-winning mental health writer, therapist, and trauma researcher. She is the author of Holding Onto Air: The Art and Science of Building a Resilient Spirit and writes the blog Soul Console at PsychologyToday.com. Joe Nocera is a Free Press columnist. Madeleine Rowley contributed reporting to this article.

Read Peter Savodnik’s piece, “A Report from the Southern Border: ‘We Want Biden to Win.’ ” And become a Free Press subscriber today:

Subscribe now

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through Bookshop.org links in this article.