The official end of the pandemic public health emergency on May 11, and the lifting of a key measure used to expel migrants, had Washington and border communities bracing for a massive border surge.

So far, that hasn’t materialized. But the concerns and countermeasures surrounding that policy change are putting a new spotlight on the ongoing challenge of record-high levels of illegal immigration – and whose responsibility it is to fix it.

Many are skeptical that Congress can pass comprehensive immigration reform. Still, Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent, sees areas of agreement. Both sides want better control over the border, he says, and many would like to help the “Dreamers” – the children of unauthorized immigrants. Every business group that comes to his office highlights workforce challenges, yet he points to asylum-seekers in Maine who want to work but can’t.

“I believe there’s a deal [to be made],” he says. “The difficulty – and I can tell you as a person who has worked on this for some time – is knowing what to do at the border.” 

The current U.S. system can’t cope with the number of asylum-seekers, and migration is only likely to increase due in part to climate change in tropical countries, he adds. “I haven’t run into anybody yet that has a clear, unequivocal, easy solution.” 

Democrats say a comprehensive deal is needed to fix an obviously broken immigration system, and that securing the border can’t be separated out from other problems, including addressing the underlying reasons so many migrants are coming to the United States.

Republicans beg to differ. They say the Trump administration already showed that illegal immigration could be vastly reduced through a combination of disincentives and stepped-up enforcement. And while they offer a variety of legislative proposals – from increased funding for law enforcement to restarting construction of a border wall – they say the situation at the border is too serious to wait for a gridlocked Congress to act.

“Right now, the No. 1 most immediate threat to our national security is this open border,” said Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, a member of the Homeland Security committee, last Thursday, after touring a makeshift migrant camp in Brownsville, Texas.

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

GOP Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas (center) speaks to reporters on May 11, 2023, after touring Camp Monument, a former golf course clubhouse in Brownsville, Texas, where migrants who cross the nearby Rio Grande are met and put on buses. He is flanked by Brandon Judd (left) of the National Border Patrol Council and fellow Republican Sens. Ted Budd of North Carolina (second from right) and John Hoeven of North Dakota (far right).

On the banks of the Rio Grande

Later that night, Senator Marshall and a few other Republican lawmakers stood along the banks of the Rio Grande warning of the dangers of illegal immigration. On the other side, migrants gathered around campfires, as festive music wafted across the river that stood between them and a new life. 

A stray turquoise flip-flop and flattened toothpaste tubes lay on the dusty path up which thousands of migrants had passed in recent days. The concertina wire does little to stop them, nor does the prospect of a dangerous journey.  

Amid a global migration surge, U.S. Customs and Border Protection registered a record 2.4 million encounters along the southwestern border in the last fiscal year – nearly triple pre-pandemic figures. More than 850 migrants died trying to cross during that period, points out Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. In addition, there are widespread reports of smugglers sexually assaulting women and girls.  

Chris Cabrera, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council – the agents’ union – told the Monitor of seeing a grandmother who was beaten up for protecting her granddaughter from being assaulted. He also described pulling the bodies of children out of the brush, and seeing a 12-year-old girl’s body pulled from the river – scenes he says would change the minds of people and policymakers opposed to stricter border enforcement measures.

“If they see what we see, they would realize that the most humane thing to do was to deter people from coming,” he says. 

To Republicans, reviving the Trump playbook is an obvious solution. That included efforts to construct a border wall, deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and “Remain in Mexico,” a program under which asylum-seekers awaited the results of their claim in Mexico rather than being released into the U.S. Another aspect less touted by GOP lawmakers was the family separation policy, which was highly controversial but seen by many as an effective deterrent. Once the pandemic started, the administration also added Title 42 to allow the expulsion of migrants on public health grounds.

With those programs in place, illegal immigration dropped by more than 50% from 2019 to 2020, just before the pandemic shut down much of the world. It then tripled during the first year of the Biden administration, reaching a total of 1.7 million encounters – a proxy for illegal immigration flows, even though some of those individuals are turned back. In addition, Department of Homeland Security head Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress, there were 389,155 “known gotaways”– migrants picked up by cameras and other technology who slipped away before border agents could get to them. There are presumed to be unknown gotaways as well.  

In 2022, the number of encounters grew to a historic high of 2.4 million – about 700,000 more than the previous record, in 1986. 

Border Patrol union leaders say agents are overwhelmed, too often bogged down with administrative tasks, and demoralized by not being able to do their jobs. 

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Brandon Judd (left) and Art Del Cueto, Border Patrol agents who serve respectively as president and vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, pause by the border on a nighttime tour for senators and journalists in Brownsville, Texas, May 11, 2023.

“I think the most frustrating thing is that when you arrest individuals, they laugh at you,” says Art Del Cueto, vice president for the Western region. 

Another concern is the amount of fentanyl coming across the border; in the first half of fiscal 2023, nearly as much fentanyl was seized as in the entire previous year, which was already four times higher than in 2019. According to a government report earlier this month, the rate of fentanyl deaths in the U.S. tripled from 2016 to 2021.  

Nearly 90% of those seizures occurred at official ports of entry along the southern border, but Border Patrol agents and lawmakers say that’s because it’s much harder to interdict drugs along the long expanses of the border outside official crossings – especially when the Border Patrol is coalescing around groups of migrants who often need immediate humanitarian assistance. Cartels will amass a large group of migrants and send them across the border to distract border agents, and then send drug smugglers through an unpatrolled area, says Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council.

“When you’re in a secure location and you can go through every single vehicle, you’re going to catch more stuff,” says Mr. Judd. “But when you’re between the ports of entry ... where the cartels reign, they’re pulling our agents out of the field, creating gaps in our coverage, and that’s when they’re bringing stuff across.”

A “shift” toward legal pathways

Many on both sides of the aisle were bracing for already high levels of illegal immigration to balloon when Title 42 was lifted May 11. The emergency provision had been used to expel 40% of migrants seeking to cross the southwestern border illegally in recent months.

However, daily crossings – which spiked to more than 10,000 last week – are down to less than half of that.

In a media call Monday, Biden officials credited their expansion of legal pathways over the past two years, including a sixfold increase in refugee admissions from Latin America in fiscal 2022.

Gregory Bull/AP

A woman holds up her wristband to show U.S. Border Patrol agents that she and her daughter have been waiting the longest between two border walls to apply for asylum, May 12, 2023, in San Diego.

“We’re starting to see this shift of people understanding that it is to their advantage – and lifesaving – to use a lawful pathway, rather than to put themselves in the hands of some of the unscrupulous actors in the region,” said Marta Costanzo Youth, principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. 

The administration also introduced a rule last week that prevents those who traveled through another country prior to reaching the U.S. from applying for asylum if they did not do so in the third country, with limited exceptions.

Another factor that may be dissuading migrants is the fact that whereas those expelled under Title 42 faced no penalty for attempting to cross again, now removal comes with a five-year ban on reentry and potential criminal prosecution. In addition, Mexico and Guatemala have stepped up enforcement along their southern borders. And the U.S. has sought to counter cartels’ marketing to vulnerable populations looking for a better life, most recently focused on Venezuela.

But the Biden administration is facing lawsuits from across the political spectrum for nearly all the measures it’s trying to implement.

“This shows just how dysfunctional and broken the immigration system is – and why we need Congress to step up in a bipartisan manner to resolve these issues,” said Blas Nuñez-Neto, assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security. 

Bills in Congress

Democratic Rep. Vincente Gonzalez, who represents Brownsville, reintroduced his Safe Zones Act last month to streamline the asylum process and establish areas in Mexico and Guatemala where migrants can apply for asylum without undergoing a dangerous journey.

On May 11, as Title 42 was set to expire, the Republican-controlled House passed the Secure the Border Act by a narrow margin, 219-213. The sweeping bill, which includes restarting border wall construction, limiting who can apply for asylum, and calling for a new employment eligibility verification system to be used by all employers, has virtually no chance of passing the Democratic-led Senate.

Andrew Harnik/AP/File

President Joe Biden holds a letter given to him by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that outlines laws the governor said would make a great difference, if enforced, as Mr. Biden arrives at El Paso International Airport in Texas, Jan. 8, 2023.

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona introduced a bill May 5 that would replace Title 42 with a temporary expulsion authority that would last for two years. That could potentially give Congress time to work out more comprehensive immigration reform – something Biden officials and allies say is desperately needed. 

For now, Brownsville resident Juan Rodriguez has taken matters into his own hands – hiring two recent Venezuelan migrants to weed his yard, and helping them earn money to get to New York, where they have family. 

“Congress is all about black and white,” says Mr. Rodriguez, whose family has been in this area since it was part of Mexico. He faults lawmakers for paying “very little” attention to the humanitarian dimensions of the crisis, leaving that to grassroots efforts. 

“Right now, it’s people helping people,” he says. 

Russia’s most successful military leader in the Ukraine war so far is not a soldier at all.

Yevgeny Prigozhin is a former convict and Kremlin-connected entrepreneur whose private army, the Wagner Group, has borne the brunt of the long, grinding, and incredibly costly battle that has raged since last summer amid the ruins of Bakhmut, once a quiet Donbas mining town.

And over the past 10 days, he has publicly threatened to pull his forces out of Bakhmut, appearing in a video with a field of dead Wagner troops he claimed were victims of Defense Ministry negligence. A week ago he accused Russian troops of “fleeing” the battlefield near Bakhmut, leaving his men exposed. “Soldiers should not die because of the absolute stupidity of their leadership,” he said.

This extraordinary spectacle has led to speculation about a rift in Moscow’s upper echelons of power, an imminent collapse of Russian lines around Bakhmut, or perhaps even a political challenge to the Kremlin by Mr. Prigozhin and the right-wing nationalist hawks who revere him.

Russian experts say there is indeed a struggle for influence and resources between Mr. Prigozhin and the Russian military bureaucracy, which clearly hates the private contractor. But they say he is not so much challenging the powers that be in Moscow, as he is jockeying for his own post-war position in what is anything but a monolithic Putin-era Russian establishment.

“Prigozhin is trying to act like a politician, and Putin may not be ready to tolerate too much independence,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center who continues living and working in Moscow. “But this is a strong authoritarian state which is ready to use all sorts of people to achieve goals that look very strange for the 21st century. For Putin, right now, it’s extremely important to fight and win this war. He needs men who can get things done, and that’s why he tolerates Prigozhin.”

A construct of Mr. Putin’s system?

Mr. Prigozhin, who served a decade in prison for robbery and fraud in the 1980s, began with small-scale businesses in post-Soviet St. Petersburg, mainly in the food catering field. After Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia’s wealthy elites had a choice between accepting political obedience or leaving the country, and Mr. Prigozhin, by then a successful grocer and restaurateur, chose the former.

Mr. Prigozhin became close enough to the Kremlin that he earned the sobriquet “Putin’s chef.” He grew wealthy on official catering contracts and began to branch out. Among other things, he started the Internet Research Agency, a cyber-trolling outfit that became notorious in the United States for allegedly interfering in the 2016 elections.

Although Mr. Prigozhin publicly denied it until last September, he’s best known for founding the Wagner Group, a private military contractor he says was modeled on U.S. examples like Blackwater, in 2014. The group was reportedly named for the call sign of its first commander, Dmitry Utkin, and its goal was to assist Ukrainian separatists in the Donbas without leaving official Russian fingerprints. The Wagners extended operations to Syria and several countries in Africa, where they were able to support Russian foreign policy goals in various ways, yet enable Moscow to maintain official deniability. Estimates of the size of the Wagner forces vary, but they generally seem to be somewhere in the tens of thousands of troops.

Prigozhin Press Service/AP

Yevgeny Prigozhin, in this still from a video statement filmed in an unknown location and released May 12, 2023, mocks the Russian Defense Ministry's report claiming that its forces regrouped to take more favorable positions, saying they effectively fled and "our flanks are crumbling."

Andrei Soldatov, a specialist in Russian secret services who is now with the Center for European Policy Analysis, argues in a recent piece for Foreign Affairs that, far from being a wild card or a threat to Russia’s power structure, Mr. Prigozhin’s entry into private military operations was probably sponsored by Russian military intelligence, the GRU, and is very much in line with the traditional Kremlin style of creating different forces to pursue various goals and to play against each other.

“The GRU was instrumental in the emergence of the Wagner group, and the agency established a special department to supervise it,” says Mr. Soldatov. “Lately it looks as though Prigozhin is desperate to preserve the reputation of Wagner as the only force that’s capable of going on the offensive,” hence his strange public antics. “But this doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s a loose cannon” or a threat to the Kremlin, he adds.

Many argue that Mr. Prigozhin and his private army are ultimately a construct of the system created by Mr. Putin and that he serves at the pleasure of the Kremlin.

“The Wagners are an outsourcing model, who are able to do things that the state might not be able to openly carry out, such as recruiting prisoners straight out of jail and sending them into battle,” says Mr. Kolesnikov, the Carnegie expert. But “Yevgeny Prigozhin is simply a state hireling.”

“He wants to build his brand”

After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the Wagner role grew immensely. Already involved in the Donbas conflict for several years, the group honed its skills at assaulting heavily defended Ukrainian positions, especially around Bakhmut. Mr. Prigozhin made the rounds of Russian prisons last September, offering freedom for any convict who would volunteer and serve six months on the Ukrainian front. It’s not known how many signed up, but Mr. Prigozhin recently noted that about 5,000 men have completed that service and returned to normal life.

Unlike the Defense Ministry, he has also been fairly honest about the casualties his men have suffered in the grueling attritional fighting around Bakhmut, putting losses at about 90 soldiers per day – which, he insisted, was far less than Ukrainian casualties. The ministry may also envy his relative success as the leader of the only Russian force that has consistently moved forward, however slowly and painfully, over the past several months.

In fact, Mr. Prigozhin has been in a constant squabble with the Russian military brass. He has cited them for allegedly failing to supply his Wagner stormtroopers with enough ammunition to blast through the rows of high-rise buildings in western Bakhmut, where Ukrainian troops still hold on. He has also accused the regular Russian troops who are meant to be securing the Wagners’ flanks of poor performance.

Not being a professional soldier – or even part of the chain of command – enables Mr. Prigozhin to take his complaints directly to the public via social media and sympathetic Russian journalists. Though he gets very little coverage in mainstream Russian media, everyone knows his name, and polls suggest that Wagner forces are more popular than the official Russian army. Hence, Mr. Prigozhin’s social media appeals get enormous traction.

Major public opinion agencies, like mainstream Russian media, have conspicuously avoided polling the public about Mr. Prigozhin and the Wagners. But one less formal survey carried out by the “Myusli Lavrov” Telegram channel found that 80% of its respondents would sooner sign a contract with Wagner than with the official Russian army. And at least one Russian military unit has posted a video appeal asking to be transferred to the Wagners.

“Prigozhin is something like a Russian version of Elon Musk, and his relationship with the Defense Ministry is like that of a huge, successful corporation struggling with government bureaucracy,” says Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser. “Private corporations can be very effective, though perhaps it’s dangerous to give them too much power. But Prigozhin has been moving forward, street by street, in Bakhmut because he’s an effective leader, he has an excellent team whom he pays very well, he’s innovative. He rewards success and punishes failure. ...

“The Russian army’s problems are mainly the burden of bureaucracy. Communications on the battlefield take hours for them, whereas the Wagners do it in minutes,” he says.

Mr. Markov argues that Western analysts are mistaken to view Mr. Prigozhin as a potential political challenger to the Kremlin.

“Prigozhin’s popularity may be a threat to the military bureaucracy, but not to Putin,” he says. “Prigozhin doesn’t want to be president. He wants to build his brand, to become the most powerful private army in the world. He wants to have projects in many countries and become very rich. Right now, he needs to win in Bakhmut.”

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, for years persona non grata, is set to travel to Riyadh Friday to attend an Arab League summit.

It’s a stunning turnaround and recognition that the regional bloc’s pledge of “maximum pressure” against his regime has failed, more than a decade after the Arab League suspended Syria’s membership and Gulf Arab states mounted a campaign to oust him from power over Syria’s systematic killing of peaceful protesters.

Despite the legacy of the 12-year Syrian civil war – 300,000 civilians killed, 5 million refugees, three foreign armies’ involvement in Syria, and the birth of the Islamic State – Arab states are now reconciling with the Assad regime out of simple realpolitik.

The Gulf states are eager to extend a spring of cooperation and diplomacy blooming across the region to Syria, a country geographically located at the heart of the Arab world that some leaders have described as an “estranged brother.”

By offering normalization, legitimacy, and badly needed funds to Damascus, they hope to create a willing partner to tackle the issues of militias, illicit drugs, and refugees, all of which are spilling over Syria’s borders.

Yet observers warn that Iran’s influence in Syria and Syria’s sense of impunity over the failure of Arab pressure may encourage Damascus to drive a difficult bargain. And U.S. sanctions and international court cases may limit Arab states’ options.

Normalization with conditions

Friday’s public embrace of Mr. Assad will come weeks after Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Egypt held meetings with Syrian ministers in Jeddah and Amman and outlined their conditions for moving normalization forward – steps the Assad government reportedly accepted.

Arab states’ immediate priority is for Syria to stem the production and flow of illegal narcotics to its neighbors; the estimated $4 billion annual business reportedly is a major source of revenue for Mr. Assad and his allies.

Syrian Presidency Facebook page/AP

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (right) meets with the Saudi ambassador to Jordan, Nayef al-Sadiri, in Damascus, Syria, May 10, 2023. Mr. Assad is traveling to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to attend an Arab League summit on Friday.

Captagon, a highly addictive amphetamine, is produced in Syria and smuggled by armed drug cartels through Jordan and then on to Gulf states. Jordan’s military has engaged in multiple deadly firefights with Syria-based drug cartels on Jordan’s borders in recent years and describes the drug trade as a “national security threat.”

Other Arab priorities include allowing humanitarian aid to continue reaching rebel-held northern Syria and systematic steps to allow the return of Syrian refugees – starting with an end to the persecution, arrest, torture, and disappearance of returnees.

Arab states also want Damascus to take legal measures to allow exiled Syrians to regain homes, farms, and properties that have been appropriated by the state or Iranian-backed militias.

“Arab normalization with Syria is driven mainly by bilateral interests and geopolitics,” notes Syrian journalist Ibrahim Hamidi, executive editor of Al Majalla magazine. “In terms of geopolitics, they have decided it is better for Damascus to regain control over the northwest and northeast of the country.”

New way of doing business

If Damascus takes initial steps over the next six months and demonstrates it can, as one Arab diplomat described, “behave as a good actor,” Arab states will warm ties, provide funds to the government to replace its narcotics revenues, and begin discussing financing for reconstruction.

In the long term, Arab states hope that their engagement and financial support will eventually facilitate a Syrian national political dialogue, political reforms, and the reunification of territories currently outside Mr. Assad’s control – the latter a key motivator driving his reembrace of Gulf Arab states.

“Normalization is not only a carrot; it is replacing one way of doing business with another,” says Mohammed Baharoon, director of B’huth, the Dubai Public Policy Research Center. “This is providing a different means of engagement with the Syrian government.”

The shift in the Gulf approach began in 2021, when the UAE and Kuwait reopened their embassies in Damascus. With Saudi Arabia on board after a recent detente with Iran, Arab states are rapidly pushing normalization.

Arab states have another goal: empowering Damascus at the expense of armed non-state actors, particularly Hezbollah and Iran- and Turkey-backed militias whose influence in Syria rivals that of the government.  

“An undermined state is problematic, and that is exactly what happened in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen,” says Mr. Baharoon. Arab states, wishing to avoid the mistakes of the Gulf boycott of post-2003 Iraq, hope “statehood can be regained” in Syria, he says.

“Normalization is more of an enabling measure than just a carrot,” he adds.

Saudi Press Agency/AP

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (center) talks with Gulf Arab leaders during a Gulf Cooperation Council Summit, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Dec. 9, 2022.

Overcoming mistrust

Yet Arab diplomats must overcome a recent history of the Assad government’s broken agreements with Jordan and Gulf states regarding drugs and the persecution of returning refugees.

“To say the very least, it is an environment of mistrust and a lack of reliability,” says Mansour Almarzoqi, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the Prince Saud Al Faisal Institute for Diplomatic Studies in Riyadh.

Then there is the question as to what extent Mr. Assad is able to meet Arab states’ demands; his regime remains reliant on Iranian military power and aid and the presence of Hezbollah – a bitter rival of the Gulf states.

However, with March’s restoration of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran, brokered by China, Arab states believe there is an opening to positively engage Damascus and transform what was a proxy war with Tehran into a peaceful competition for influence in Syria.

“This is a step-by-step, quid-pro-quo approach,” notes Dr. Almarzoqi. “We are still far away from any full normalization and a return to Syria’s role prior to the crisis. We are in the stage of exploring full normalization.”

Skepticism remains. Not all Arab states are as bullish about the potential of normalizing with Syria, particularly Jordan and Qatar.

Tellingly, Jordan carried out airstrikes in southern Syria last Monday targeting a notorious drug kingpin and a drug lab, one day after the Arab League voted to readmit Syria.

According to Arab diplomats and observers, the airstrikes, which were not coordinated with Damascus, were a message from Jordan and a foreshadowing of an “alternative” way of doing business: If you fail to take real steps to tackle drugs and militias, we will take matters into our own hands – normalization or no normalization.

Proponents of normalization believe Damascus, eager to regain legitimacy and territory, will follow through.

“It would be very difficult to imagine that the Syrian government, out of this entire experience, did not learn anything,” says Mr. Baharoon of B’huth.

Hosam Katan/Reuters/File

People inspect a site hit by what activists said were barrel bombs dropped by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo, Syria, in March 2014.

Damascus, in addition to craving legitimacy, faces acute economic and humanitarian problems; 15.3 million Syrians need humanitarian assistance.  

Syria has taken some modest steps recently. 

Last week the Assad government extended the passage of aid to rebel-held territories for another two months and ordered Iranian militias across the country to lower the Iranian flag at bases, checkpoints, and on vehicles.

Sanctions and justice

If Mr. Assad is being embraced by the very leaders who once wished to overthrow him, there will be two elephants in the room in Riyadh: international justice and Western sanctions.

The Caesar Act, imposing U.S. sanctions that went into force in 2020, and multiple cases in European courts against the Assad regime alleging crimes against humanity and the systematic killing of civilians, will limit how much financial aid and economic cooperation Arab states can dangle as carrots to Damascus.

“The Caesar sanctions have put a ceiling on Arab normalization; I think they, along with these court cases, are big challenges,” says Mr. Hamidi, the Syrian journalist.

In addition to justice for Syrians killed, disappeared, and dispossessed, there are the outstanding issues of the autonomous Kurdish-run regions, and Turkey’s and Russia’s military presence on Syrian territory.

“This is just the beginning of a long, long process,” says Mr. Hamidi. “I hope the Arab countries have the stamina for it.”

Brian Snyder/Reuters/File

Plants grow through an array of solar panels in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in May 2022.

Sugar cane has always grown at the intersection of Highways 3127 and 20 in St. James Parish. Even as subdivisions gradually eat away row after neat row of pasture, the crop has survived on rural Vacherie’s landscape as an unofficial timekeeper, marking the seasons across the unincorporated community’s more than 300-year modern history.

But alongside new stalks in this area, just west of New Orleans, is a mounting conflict over a newer and fast-growing part of America’s rural economy: renewable energy development.

Last year, the New York-based hedge fund D.E. Shaw Group’s renewable energy investments arm introduced a proposal to construct a large-scale solar installation on the sugar cane acreage near the intersection. The St. James Parish planning commission’s rejection of the proposal in May last year was followed in August by a 6-1 vote among Parish Council members for a temporary moratorium on solar projects.

Council members say they aren’t opposed to solar power – or to plans by local electric utility Entergy to expand it in Louisiana.

“I’m OK with that,” council member Jason Amato says.

But in a pattern that has been mirrored in various ways across the country, leaders here say they want to carefully consider issues ranging from the aesthetics to the local economic benefits of specific proposals.

“Renewables got to have a proper place,” Mr. Amato says. “It has to be in the right location.”

The turmoil over local decision-making threatens to slow nationwide efforts backed by the Biden administration to combat climate change by expanding solar and wind energy. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provides a massive boost in federal support for transitioning toward clean energy, and last week the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposed rule change prodding electric utilities to dramatically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

What’s happening here in Vacherie is a reminder that the energy transition’s speed will depend on more than just federal dollars, regulatory mandates, and willing business investors. With the energy transition in recent years has come a rising wave of community pushback that’s playing out from Delaware to California, as municipalities grapple with how clean energy technology and community responsibly coexist.

“Louisiana is part of a national story,” says Lawrence Susskind, a professor of urban and environmental planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This is not NIMBYism.”

Rather, similar projects across the United States “have been stopped for what I call good reasons.”

Council member Amato, a retired Shell employee who has served on the council since 2007, worries that the parish’s 2014 land use plan lacks guidance for these types of projects. He has called for developing an ordinance so that “in the future, we’ve got something to vote yes or no on, and to make a smart decision for everybody.”

Mr. Amato claims local elected officials were caught off guard by the project. The D.E. Shaw investor group did not respond to a request for comment.

A gold rush, with complications

For many, the renewable push equates to a contemporary gold rush, especially across the nation’s energy-rich Sun Belt and Great Plains regions. Solar power made up less than 3% of U.S. electricity production in 2021, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But that’s changing, with solar generating capacity expected to more than triple by 2027, according to the agency’s latest outlook report.

That’s if proposed projects can get approved and built.

Dr. Susskind and fellow MIT researchers set out to understand why some renewable energy infrastructure projects were blocked or failed through community opposition. They explored 53 cases across various regions – 22 of which were solar projects – and found pushback was often tied to lack of community engagement prior to a project’s intention to break ground. Additional factors including debates over the best use of land, intergovernmental disagreement, and concerns over the impact on the environment or Native American communities. Researchers at Michigan State University have reached similar conclusions.

If private investors “had sat down with the people who are going to be upset beforehand, they could have worked it out,” Dr. Susskind says. “But that’s not what investors in renewables do.”

MIT researchers discovered a pattern among private renewable energy investors: Projects usually begin through straw deals – purchases made on behalf of another entity or individual – that then work quickly and in secrecy before landowners can grasp the project’s impact on a property’s value. Quietly, an engineering firm is hired to use satellites, for example, to map out a project according to zoning and size. The proposals are submitted for regulatory approval, and may sail forward if they’re in states committed to increasing renewable energy capacity.   

That is, until some communities push back.

It’s the “decide, announce, defend” model, says Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University and the author of the 2019 book “Solar Power: Innovation, Sustainability, and Environmental Justice.” “There’s very little community input. Someone makes a decision behind closed doors, and they announce to the public that they’re going to build a solar farm. Then they basically spend the whole time defending the project.”

Even when projects are approved to be built, private investors face other hurdles, from equipment shortages to a waiting list for connecting to the power grid. In fact, some power grid managers say they are overwhelmed and are putting a hold on new connections. 

From sugar to oil to solar power

St. James Parish appeared on a map as one of Louisiana’s original 19 parishes authorized by the 1807 Orleans Territorial Legislature, but its founding dates to early 18th-century Colonial settlers near the Mississippi River who grazed cattle. Vacherie loosely translates to “cowshed” in French.

Sugar cane cultivation arrived in 1742, as New Orleans became a trade depot, and sugar became a major export built on slave labor. Today, the state remains a “sugar bowl,” but this region’s economy has shifted increasingly toward energy – dominated in the 20th century by petrochemical facilities. Those too have stirred their share of local controversy.

When the council here voted for the temporary moratorium on large-scale solar projects, Clyde Cooper was the lone no vote on the seven-member body. His vote was intended to make a point among his governing peers.

“We have ordinances in place where we could have approved or disapproved” of the 3,900-acre solar farm project in Vacherie, council member Cooper says. The same ordinances brought the refineries to the parish, he adds.

“Not saying I’m for or against, but a decision could have been made.”

Dr. Susskind worries that the renewable energy industry is mirroring oil and gas’s strong-armed traits – and could suffer as a result. But the renewable energy industry still has time for a course correction.  

That could begin with better ensuring third-party mediators are involved in infrastructure negotiations with communities, if the project is intended as a public-private funding partnership. Meanwhile, publicly owned large-scale renewable utilities could represent a better option for communities that would prefer to stand on their own rather than depend on outside corporations.

But before any of that can happen, communitywide conversation must occur first.

That was the sticking point among most failed renewable energy infrastructure projects, the MIT researchers learned as part of their work earlier this year.

“There was no conversation,” Dr. Susskind says of their group’s findings. Private investors “could have easily changed the design, offered them compensation, offered communities to be a partner and own part of the facility. Then the community would be totally supportive of it.”

But he adds, “That’s not been the pattern of private capital.”

Somewhere, Miss Marple is wryly smiling, possibly while industriously knitting something fluffy. 

The women of a certain age crime-solving trend continues to cast a gimlet eye over a world that really should know better, and readers are all the richer for it.

And while book lovers are waiting for the fourth outing of the consistently outstanding Thursday Murder Club this fall and pining for a sequel to last year’s wickedly funny and feminist “Killers of a Certain Age,” this spring offers several new mysteries to test their wits against.

The puzzlingly clever “howdunit”

Judith, Suzie, and Becks are back with more crosswords, wild swimming, and murdered gentry in “Death Comes to Marlow,” by Robert Thorogood. A wedding party to celebrate the upcoming nuptials of a local lord ends with said lord crushed beneath a cabinet of his ancestors’ scientific collection. The door is locked, and the key is in his pocket.

His estranged son, meanwhile, was outside talking to our intrepid trio, giving him a perfect alibi. But Judith, who had a phone call from the groom-to-be the day before his death, is convinced it’s murder. Now, to convince the police.

The three women are in fine fettle, with dog-walking grandmother Suzie finding local fame (if not fortune) on the radio and septuagenarian Judith still crafting fiendishly clever crosswords and scandalizing local birdwatchers by skinny-dipping even in winter. Perfect housewife Becks, meanwhile, is acting distinctly squirrelly, to her two friends’ growing concern.

Not to give away her secrets, but never, ever bet against a vicar’s wife in a British mystery. More of a “howdunit” than a whodunit, “Death Comes to Marlow” understands the satisfaction that comes from a clever solution, and author Thorogood constructs his puzzles with care.

A hungry, heartwarming mystery

If “Death Comes to Marlow” appeals to the head, “Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers” is all heart. Jesse Q. Sutanto – whose “Dial A for Aunties” takes a madcap look at the lengths Singaporean women will go for their loved ones – here creates a stalwart character full of pathos and life lessons she longs to bestow, if only anyone would take the time to listen.

With her husband dead and her lawyer son too busy to answer her texts, Vera maintains her crumbling teahouse in San Francisco’s Chinatown with a clientele that has dwindled to one. One morning, she comes downstairs to find a body in the middle of her shop. To her disgust, the police aren’t sure it’s murder. (Vera may have swiped some incriminating evidence, after carefully outlining the body with a Sharpie. Not only do the police not appreciate her efforts, they refuse to drink her tea.)

Marshall Chen was a loathsome man who everyone had reason to kill. Vera quickly identifies four main suspects: His widow, brother, and an artist and a programmer who are pretending they don’t know the dead man. All four are the beneficiaries of Vera’s top-quality meddling and propensity for whipping up eight-course feasts on a daily basis.

Sutanto writes with pure affection for Vera and her adopted brood of hapless chicks, er, suspects. The only downside is that Vera is right. And someone is guilty. “Vera Wong” is a total joy and made me hungrier than anything I’ve read all year. And given that Julia Child is a character in our next mystery, that is truly saying something.

Karen Norris/Staff

Murder weapon: Julia Child’s knife 

Colleen Cambridge first turned Agatha Christie’s housekeeper into a crimesolver in “Murder at Mallowan Hall” and its sequel. Now, in “Mastering the Art of French Murder,” American expat Tabitha Knight has moved to Paris to care for her aging grandfather and Uncle Rafe as her skills manufacturing airplanes are considered de trop now that World War II has ended. Tabitha keeps her trusty Swiss Army knife in her purse along with her lipstick.

She’s been befriended by a family of Americans in Paris: Julia and Paul Child. While Tabitha can rivet bombers with the best of them, she can’t boil eggs. Meanwhile, Julia is enrolled at the classes at Le Cordon Bleu that will change her life and the course of American cooking.

As the book opens, the biggest mystery is why Julia’s mayonnaise refuses to come together. Then a woman is found stabbed with Julia’s chef knife after a late-night theater party hosted by her sister. The police are eyeing the expats, and Julia asks Tabitha, whose grandfather and uncle have Resistance connections, to clear their names.

The book strays into encyclopedia-speak on occasion, particularly when it comes to post-war Paris, but the mystery’s solution is a clever one. Those who have read Child’s memoir may balk at the idea of Julia playing second fiddle to anyone, but Cambridge has clear affection for both subject and setting. The amount of butter used is totally authentic, and Julia gets the last word. 

Austen scions as sleuths  

While Jane Austen never got to try her hand at a detective story, she and her characters have had remarkably fruitful fictional careers uncovering evil-doers, from Stephanie Barron’s long-running Jane Austen Mysteries to the incomparable P.D. James’ “Death Comes to Pemberley.” 

But Claudia Gray’s 2022 novel, “The Murder of Mr. Wickham,” offers the kind of virtuoso performance that goes well beyond parroting the famous first line of “Pride and Prejudice,” or offering a slightly less well-written variation of Frederick Wentworth’s letter in “Persuasion.” Last year, it was the book I recommended the most to friends stuck in a reading slump. 

Part of Gray’s genius was in having two scions of Austen’s romances, Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney, do the sleuthing while their literary parents stayed mostly offstage.

In the sequel, “The Late Mrs. Willoughby,” Jonathan has been invited to Devonshire by some school friends deemed highly suitable by his parents. (One of them is named John Willoughby of Allenham.) And after the recent “unpleasantness” in Surrey, Juliet is on her way to Delaford, to Marianne and Colonel Brandon, where, her parents fervently hope, she will not encounter any more murders. (That kind of thing can give a young girl a reputation.)

Alas, the newly and unhappily married Mrs. Willoughby commits the unpardonable faux pas of drinking port after a party, and drops dead on the spot. With the villagers only too willing to believe Marianne, the woman Mr. Willoughby jilted, to be the murderer, Juliet enlists Jonathan once again to help clear her friend’s name. “There is always someone willing to think the worst. It is work for which volunteers are never lacking,” as Juliet says. 

Witty observations abound, as do suspects. The budding romance between our very proper sleuths is not quite a slow burn – more of a sedate simmer. And the solution lies in past hurts. As Jonathan says, “Resentment is, I believe, an even more insidious poison than arsenic.”

AP

Retired Gen. Paulino Coronado, the Colombian commander of soldiers who committed extrajudicial executions, hugs Blanca Nubia Monroy, the mother of one victim of those killings, during a reconciliation event in Soacha, Colombia, May 10, 2022.

In December, the African nation of Zambia simultaneously enacted one new law abolishing the death penalty and another decriminalizing defamation of the president. That unusual combination of legal reforms – in some countries, dissent is still a capital offense – uniquely captured a shift in global norms. Zambia embraced a type of justice that views individuals as capable of innocence and goodness.

The shift in norms is clear from a new global survey on the death penalty by Amnesty International. While known executions rose 53% in 2022 – mainly in a small club of outliers including China, North Korea, and Iran – the real trend is in the other direction. Six countries ended the death penalty altogether. Several more adopted or extended moratoriums. “Notwithstanding the drawbacks ... the world continued to move away from the death penalty,” the report stated.

In one measure of that progress, 125 nations – nearly two-thirds of all U.N. members – have signed a United Nations moratorium on use of the death penalty. Governments aren’t the only actors making the shift. In Colombia, for example, the end of a long civil war in 2016 was marked by reconciliation between the combatants – leftist guerrillas and the military – and families of their victims.

For a handful of states, execution is seen as a necessary tool of intimidation to quell dissent. Yet many countries abolishing capital punishment argue that stable and democratic societies are predicated on a recognition that life is a universal right and redemption after a crime is inseparable from innate dignity.

Those convictions share roots across religious traditions.

In 2022, for example, when Papua New Guinea abolished the death penalty, Prime Minister James Marape said, “For us as a Christian nation, the notion of ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ still prevails.” In Kazakhstan, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called abolition a step “to fulfill a fundamental right to life and human dignity.” In Zambia, President Hakainde Hichilema justified the end of the death penalty by saying, “We believe in showing strength through compassion.”

Although the heavy-handed tactics of authoritarian states rightly stir international alarm, particularly when used to stamp out the democratic aspirations of their peoples, their deadly tactics are running out of room. “The taking of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another – even when backed by legal process,” argued former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon a decade ago. As the Amnesty report shows, humanity is moving irreversibly toward justice defined by compassion and redemption rather than condemnation and annihilation.