Mutasem Murtaja/Reuters

Palestinians search for people wounded or killed at the site of Israeli strikes on houses in Gaza City, Oct. 28, 2023.

Among military professionals, urban combat is widely considered to be the most grueling, intricate, and deadly of operations.

As Israel launches a new phase of its war effort with ground troop incursions into Gaza, its stated goal of destroying Hamas runs up against near-impossible conditions: battling enemies and rescuing hostages while navigating walled-in dead ends, concrete high-rises, and a network of deep and booby-trapped tunnels that its adversary has been preparing for years.

Add Gaza’s civilians to the mix, half of whom are children, and it can seem like a series of no-win trade-offs, even for commanders of well-trained and exquisitely equipped troops. If military leaders prioritize military objectives, then they accept harm to innocent people. If they prioritize civilians, then they accept more casualties among their own forces – and certainty that Hamas will use humanitarian ethical constraints to its advantage.

In short, cities and the people in them don’t fare well during urban warfare, and Gaza has been no exception. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Saturday that a “second stage of the war” has begun, a communications blackout made it hard for ambulances to reach wounded people.

In totals released by each side as of Sunday, more than 8,000 Palestinians, including 3,300 children, have been killed, along with 1,400 Israelis. Hamas continues to hold more than 200 people hostage.

Against this wrenching backdrop, analysts are taking some heart in the close involvement of experienced U.S. officials providing counsel to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). This includes Americans who battled against the Islamic State in the Iraqi city of Mosul from 2016 to 2017.

Felipe Dana/AP/File

A car bomb explodes next to Iraqi special forces armored vehicles as they advance toward Islamic State militant-held territory in Mosul, Iraq, Nov. 16, 2016. The monthslong U.S. campaign symbolized the challenges of urban warfare.

Though U.S. officials stress that all decisions are Israel’s alone, American military officers are “over there to share their perspective and to ask hard questions,” White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters last week.

And that could help, if not prevent harm, then better mitigate it, says Michael Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Israeli military leaders “will be kind of aware that they have this big brother in the room with them watching,” he adds. “And so I think the Israelis probably end up doing this a bit differently than they normally do these things.” 

Poor track record in urban warfare

When it comes to urban warfare, the track record for how militaries “normally” do these things is generally awful for civilians and mixed from a strategic perspective, American and Israeli officials acknowledge.

During the monthlong Lebanon war of 2006, launched in response to Iranian-backed Hezbollah’s incursions, Israeli forces were poorly trained, had incomplete intelligence, and succumbed to an overreliance on air power during urban operations, an Israeli government commission concluded.

In response, the IDF built an urban warfare training center. In 2009, when it launched a two-week ground invasion of Gaza, it succeeded, for a while, in arresting rocket fire coming from Gaza. But a United Nations report accused both Palestinian militants and the IDF of war crimes. 

Israel invaded Gaza for a second time in 2014, when it spent about three weeks trying to destroy Hamas tunnels following a spate of rocket attacks and the killing of three Israeli teenagers. An estimated two-thirds of Hamas’ rocket stash was destroyed or used up. More than 2,200 Palestinians in Gaza were reported killed, and upward of 7,000 homes were destroyed. 

Jack Guez/AP/File

An Israeli army officer gives journalists a tour of a tunnel allegedly used by Palestinian militants for cross-border attacks, at the Israel-Gaza border, July 25, 2014.

For its part, the U.S. military cut its teeth on modern urban warfare in Iraq. The 2004 battle of Fallujah saw some of the military’s fiercest city fighting since the Vietnam War. The United States invaded in April but withdrew in May in the wake of widespread images of destruction, sparking criticism that the civilian population of 250,000 to 300,000 hadn’t been given a chance to leave.

Insurgents used this to their advantage and spent months fortifying their positions. U.S. forces returned in November. In short order, they lost six M1A2 Abrams tanks, says John Spencer, a former Army ranger and chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. “That’s pretty big, even for the U.S. military,” he says.

America “responded to stiff insurgent resistance ... by preemptively destroying everything in the path of U.S. infantry forces,” notes a 2020 paper published by Parameters, the U.S. Army War College quarterly journal.

A dozen years later, the expectation among U.S. military planners was that it would take three months to dislodge the Islamic State from the city of Mosul. The campaign ultimately succeeded, but it lasted nine months and cost as many as 10,000 or more civilian lives. 

In Gaza, Israel is expected to be confronting an estimated three to five times as many fighters as the U.S. faced in Mosul. And while there were almost no buildings six stories or taller in the Iraqi city, Gaza City has around 60 of them, Dr. Knights notes. What’s more, the Islamic State had around two years to prepare Mosul’s defenses; Hamas has had a decade and a half.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

U.S. Marines use explosives to open a metal gate to a house, as they search houses for insurgents in Fallujah, Iraq, Nov. 22, 2004.

The challenge this time

In this Israeli incursion, the low and narrow tunnels that Hamas has built under Gaza will pose particular problems. 

Even as it was constructing an anti-tunnel barrier, the IDF in 2020 discovered a subterranean passage some 230 feet deep that required forces to rappel down ropes. Slightly wider than a person’s shoulders, it was built with nooks for resting, letting comrades pass, and storing weapons. Some of the tunnels require oxygen tanks to navigate. Because of an absence of any ambient light, conventional night-vision goggles don’t work there. 

Hamas will have pre-positioned its headquarters, communication nodes, weapons, and supplies in these tunnels in anticipation of a ground assault by Israeli forces. This will allow fighters to move between “a series of fighting positions safely and freely under massive buildings, even after the IDF drop thousand-pound bombs on them,” Mr. Spencer explains.

Connected to schools, hospitals, and mosques, the tunnels are also part of a strategy to make use of civilians as shields. Many of these tunnels are rigged with hundreds of pounds of explosives, he estimates, to function as bombs under “roads and buildings that the IDF might be lured into.” 

But experts such as Dr. Knights hope that U.S. involvement, combined with Israel’s urban operations expertise, could potentially yield “the least bad result,” as he puts it. There will be “a feedback loop” that the U.S. military didn’t have in Mosul, “because who checks the U.S.’s homework? No one.” 

New technology and equipment

Israelis will bring to the battle deeply specialized equipment, tactics, and units, including combat engineers who specialize in finding, clearing, and destroying tunnels. Israel’s military has a suite of flying or crawling robots to search and map tunnels. Two-story armored bulldozers – with the nickname doobi, or “teddy bear” – are designed to mount barriers and rescue overturned armored fighting vehicles.

The IDF’s military culture has continued to evolve for city fighting as well, including liberal use of “roof knock” explosions to try to warn civilians to clear out, as well as a propensity for punching holes in walls. “Because a door, a window – that’s where the enemy wants you to go,” Mr. Spencer says. Dismounted troops wear floppy hats over their helmets so their silhouettes aren’t as easily recognizable to snipers.

To this, the U.S. will bring “mind-blowing” technology, says Dr. Knights. An enormous number of sensors can detect movement in subterranean structures and map thermal and other chemical signatures, fusing it all together with artificial intelligence to provide an ultrafast map of combat and urban environments. The U.S. Department of Defense is also providing many heavy weapons, including two Iron Dome missile defense batteries.

All this equipment, not to mention political top cover, buys the U.S. a seat at the table, says Dr. Knights. In operational planning meetings, for example, “our guys will be sitting there kind of wrinkling their brows saying, ‘Just as a thought, have you considered whether some of those buildings might collapse even though you’re using small, lightweight munitions?’” 

And while the Israeli military has strong capabilities, the more important counsel will come through stressing the protection of civilians. The aim is to help Israel be “a little bit more patient and intelligent” in the midst of deep anger – to echo President Joe Biden’s caution to operate by the international laws of warfare and not repeat America’s post-9/11 mistakes in becoming “consumed” by rage.

The ultimate hope, Dr. Knights adds, is that two nations widely criticized for brutality in urban battle “are going to want this to be done in a way that surprises people” – particularly those who, in the midst of grief, are braced for the worst.  

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Gabriela, a Venezuelan asylum-seeker, recounts her struggle to navigate life in the United States, at her apartment in Denver, Oct. 14, 2023. “I didn't know the magnitude of how difficult it was going to be,” she says.

Miniature toy soccer players pose in a cluster in the living room, limbs frozen midstride. Like her son’s figurines, Gabriela feels stuck, too.

The Venezuelan asylum-seeker and her teenage son have made it this far, to a one-bedroom apartment in Denver. But the journey to bring him here, to seek critical medical care, meant leaving two other children behind. 

As a lesbian, Gabriela is also fleeing harassment; she says her brother was killed for trying to defend her. Yet a sense of security still eludes her here. Without family or many friends in Denver, and no permission to work legally, she’s behind two months of rent. 

Gabriela, who arrived in July, says she expected life in the United States to be tough. “But I didn’t know the magnitude of how difficult it was going to be,” she says in Spanish. 

As record-high migration along the U.S.-Mexico border continues to make news, so do cities receiving migrants to the north, like Denver, overwhelmed by a crisis of logistics over the past year. Migrants, too, are often overwhelmed. After the ordeal of crossing America’s southern border, declared by the United Nations as the deadliest land migration route in the world, their precarious journeys endure on the other side.

Whether U.S. border authorities should be releasing migrants who entered unlawfully, ahead of far-off court dates, is under fierce debate. Once migrants arrive, however, their basic needs are testing the benevolence and bandwidth of local governments, nonprofits, and strangers. Amid the challenges, stakeholders are taking steps toward trying to stabilize the situation, raising the question of what sustainable support could look like in an era of record displacement globally.

“We have to be realistic about the fact that people are going to keep migrating,” possibly at high levels, says Elizabeth Jordan, director of the Immigration Law & Policy Clinic at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. 

“The solution is not going to be just closing the border and pretending like people aren’t there,” she adds. “They’re going to be desperate enough to keep coming.”

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Miniature soccer players pose in the living room of Gabriela, a Venezuelan asylum-seeker, who came to the United States this year in search of protection and medical help for her son. “I’m not a woman who gives up easily,” she says at her apartment in Denver, Oct. 14, 2023.

Despite her hardship, Gabriela, who like others interviewed preferred not to publish her full name for privacy reasons, has been given a hand. After a brief stay with a friend who recommended Denver to her, Gabriela and her son stayed in a shelter for a few weeks. She also found a local group, SOS Venezuela-Denver, whose donation helped pay for her apartment’s water and electricity – utilities that weren’t always reliable back home. Gabriela says she’s also hopeful about the medical attention her son has received. 

As the asylum-seeker says, “I’m not a woman who gives up easily.” 

Public response 

Unlike New York City, which has received five times as many migrants since 2022, Denver has no right-to-shelter policy obligating the municipality to provide a bed for every migrant in need. The city keeps the locations of its migrant shelters undisclosed and hasn’t seen major protests.

Earlier this month, a girl with two French braids wriggles in her chair in a conference room-turned-migrant reception center. At the city-run site in Denver, adults sit quietly, heads bent over phones, waiting for next steps. Here they’re offered temporary shelter or transportation to the destination of their choice. 

Helmed by a Democratic mayor and home to some 700,000 residents, the city and county of Denver has served around 26,000 migrants since December, when tracking began. The city’s appeal this fall to the state for use of the National Guard was declined, reportedly due to the absence of an emergency declaration, though the state sent other personnel and has provided funding.

Still, adequate staffing, shelter space, and funding remain concerns, says Jon Ewing, spokesperson for Denver Human Services. Earlier this month, the city set new rules on the amount of time migrants can stay in temporary shelters. Meanwhile, the city is reviewing proposals from potential vendors to contract out its migrant response, reports Axios. The Federal Emergency Management Agency reports awarding the city around $10 million since May. 

The Mile High City, meanwhile, reports spending more than $29 million since late 2022 on its migrant response. But by the end of this year, the city government could spend up to $39 million, according to an estimate by the Common Sense Institute, a Colorado think tank that supports free enterprise. These ongoing costs could eventually imperil other financial priorities or increase the cost of city governance, says its recent report.

Looking for work – and workers 

Complicating the scope of needs is the fact that many arriving migrants aren’t eligible for work permits. 

Those who submit asylum applications wait months before obtaining authorization to work. Though President Joe Biden has offered a temporary legal status to certain Venezuelans already here, which opens the door to lawful work, individuals such as Gabriela still must navigate the process to apply. 

Colorado, meanwhile, reports two job openings per every unemployed person in August, though it’s unclear how those open jobs match arriving migrants’ skills. The new arrivals “have skills and talents that Colorado needs,” says a spokesperson for the Colorado Office of New Americans in a statement. “However, without employment authorization, they are unable to enter the formal labor market and fill Colorado’s great need for workforce.”

Thomas Peipert/AP/File

A migrant studies English at a makeshift shelter in Denver, Jan. 6, 2023.

As long as migrants aren’t authorized to work, Denver will need more federal aid to support them, said Mayor Mike Johnston, three months into his first term. 

“We think if you bring someone into the country and tell them they can’t work, there’s no choice but to either encourage them to break the law, or to make them survive on public subsidy,” the Democrat told CNN. “We think neither of those are good options.” 

Separately, the mayor who campaigned on homelessness aims to “house” 1,000 unsheltered individuals by the end of the year. But now some migrants are also ending up on the street.

Some nearby counties have been cautious about – or opposed to – following Denver’s lead, citing capacity, public health, and safety concerns. That includes neighboring Douglas County, which passed a resolution this month stating it was not a “sanctuary jurisdiction” for migrants. One Latino county commissioner, a Republican, frames it as a “message of compassion.” 

“We’re aware of the humanitarian crisis,” says Abe Laydon, who chairs the board of commissioners in Douglas County. Still, he adds, “it’s not humane to welcome individuals into a community without a plan,” especially with winter ahead.

Overburdened systems 

Asylum-seekers themselves, like Abdoul from Senegal, understand their vulnerability.

“Some days we don’t even have something to eat, because we don’t have money,” says Abdoul, one of an unknown number of West Africans who’ve arrived in the Denver metro area this year. He doesn’t want to steal, he says in the Wolof language through an interpreter, but just “be able to work and provide for myself.”

Denver’s scramble to accommodate these newcomers belies a reality long known to border towns: Federal failure to reform U.S.-Mexico border policy is felt farther north. 

U.S. immigration enforcement depends on the capacity of several federal agencies – including those detaining, deporting, and processing individuals in backlogged immigration courts, says Ariel Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. Those systems are strained.

The Biden administration’s attempts to manage migrant arrivals, he says, “will always be contingent on the capacity to implement those policies.” That oftentimes requires congressional funding and support, he adds, which is not always there.

Republican governors, meanwhile, have exerted their own political will. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has publicized the state’s charter of migrant buses to multiple Democratic-led cities, including Denver. Still, some migrants plan to pay their own way, and some arrive by plane. 

Thomas Peipert/AP/File

Joy McCalister (left) and Stevi Soles serve soup to a migrant at a makeshift shelter in Denver, Jan. 6, 2023.

“They’ve helped me a lot”

No matter how migrants arrive, local nonprofits have played a key role in their reception.

At a food bank just west of Denver, a migrant from Venezuela adds groceries to her cart as the child on her hip grips a banana. A friend’s son nearby makes monkey sounds while playing peekaboo. 

“They’ve helped me a lot, since we don’t have stable work,” the Venezuelan says of the nonprofit. “My husband works, but he doesn’t work every day.” Life here is a far cry from the country they left, under political and economic crisis.

Here at the Action Center in Lakewood, adaptation has been key since COVID-19. Pre-pandemic, the nonprofit averaged around 70 to 90 household visits per service day. That swelled to around 200 to 300 during the pandemic, and recently to more than 300 a day – coinciding with more migrants arriving in the state. 

To meet the growing need, the center, which offers services beyond food, is seeking more Spanish-speaking volunteers and recently hired two more bilingual staff members. 

“We don’t do everything that people need, because no one agency can do everything that people need,” says Laurie Walowitz, director of programs. “But we like to be that connector ... to other places that are designed to serve very specific needs.”

Other migrants have found momentum with Centro de los Trabajadores Colorado, also known as Centro Humanitario, which supports workers.

In a red-brick building used by the center in downtown Denver, a few dozen people listen to Norys Castillo. The coordinator of the center’s community economic development program explains how to sign up for English classes offered to members in person and online.

“I recommend in person as much as possible,” she tells them in Spanish. The room seems to murmur in agreement. 

A couple from Venezuela, Johana and Jean Carlos, sit among the crowd. Through the nonprofit, Johana recently completed a cleaning course, Jean Carlos one in sustainable building. They say they’ve started to receive work in the mountains.

“I want to make a difference,” says Jean Carlos, who had a construction company and wants to start a business here. Also, he adds, “not depend on the government.” 

In Aurora, Denver’s neighbor to the east, a Mauritanian named Mamoudou also wants to work with his own two hands. One bears a scar from back home, when he was injured by police, he says.

With a U.S. Air Force baseball cap, Mamoudou explains that he followed a route popularized by Mauritanians through word-of-mouth and social media – first by flying to Turkey, then Latin America, then continuing north to cross the U.S.-Mexico border by foot. He left behind a life of activism fighting for human rights and the end of slavery, whose ugly legacy in Mauritania still endures. Mamoudou says he knows such injustice firsthand, including working for a lighter-skinned man who never paid him. 

By this February, he knew he had to leave. That’s when police took his friend, a fellow activist, to jail and beat him to death, Mamoudou says, speaking in Pulaar through an interpreter. When Mamoudou protested, he says he was brutalized by police.

“I just thought to myself ... I have to leave here, because I might get killed.”

After he was processed by border officials, Mamoudou came to Colorado to meet a family member, with whom he’s living here.

“I just want to be able to have a better life, and then live in peace,” he says. But navigating even basic tasks is difficult, such as knowing how to call up a lawyer to seek help with his asylum application. For newcomers, he says, “there’s a lot of things that we don’t know how to do.”

And yet, as more individuals like Mamoudou arrive, nonprofit legal aid groups report that they’re already stretched to capacity.

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Rafael and Yuletsy, a couple from Venezuela, have found fellowship at a Christian church. It feels “like a family,” says Yuletsy, after the Spanish-language service in Lakewood, Colo., Oct. 15, 2023.

“We just don’t have the resources to meet the need. ... I think it’s a funding issue,” says Emily Brock, deputy managing attorney of the children’s program at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network. In immigration court, when dealing with civil cases, immigrants aren’t entitled to a government-appointed attorney. 

“We need to be moving towards universal representation for people in immigration proceedings,” says Ms. Brock. Access to due process is important, she adds, as “the implication of their asylum applications are life-or-death situations.”

Day labor assistance 

In Aurora, the Dayton Street Day Labor Center has also been overwhelmed, says Mateos Alvarez, the executive director. Before last fall, the nonprofit had primarily served Central Americans and Mexicans. 

Without tracking by jurisdictions beyond Denver to confirm, Mr. Alvarez estimates that hundreds of new migrants have shown up looking for work near his muraled building over the past year in Aurora, many from Mauritania like Mamoudou. It took a few weeks to figure out where they were from, much less what they spoke. 

As new arrivals without work authorization land on Aurora streets, Mr. Alvarez has observed they’re displacing other day laborers who’ve relied on that work for years. He’s also concerned that more idling outside for extended periods of time will become a public health issue, as people move “from a place of hopefulness to one of despair.”

Still, the advocate does what he can, such as offering a safe space and food to new migrants like Abdoul Aziz, a welder also from Mauritania. 

Grateful for the outreach, the asylum-seeker says,  “If I get married and I have a kid, I will name him Mateos,” after Mr. Alvarez.

Helping hands 

Other individuals are lending a hand, sometimes through houses of worship. 

Haydee Rodríguez recalls her own challenge of integration in the late 1990s as a new immigrant from Mexico. Moved to help, she’s driven migrants who’ve arrived at bus stops to a shelter, bought them underwear and socks, and organized additional donations through her Christian church in Lakewood. Members offer rides to migrants who want to worship there.

“They need clothes. They need shelter. They need empathy, more than anything,” she says at the Spanish-language Sunday service. 

Yuletsy and Rafael, a couple from Venezuela, count their blessings. Ms. Rodríguez helped them find an apartment to rent. 

Though they left loved ones back home, the Colorado church is “like a family,” says Yuletsy, at a post-service lunch where tacos are piled onto plates. Her partner agrees. 

“Even if it’s just an hour or two, it feels good,” says Rafael. Here for less than a year, the pair have begun to pay it forward. They drop off food and clothes to a shelter where fellow migrants stay. 

Their gestures reflect a view held by Mr. Ewing, the Denver spokesperson, on the promise and limits of generosity in the area. 

“It’s full of good people,” he says. Still, “we can’t do this alone.”

The first wrongful conviction that outraged Dennis Muñoz was his own. He was in third grade when his teacher hit him with a ruler, a common form of punishment in El Salvador at the time. 

“I wished that one day I could say something about unjust circumstances because I was being punished without having done anything wrong,” Mr. Muñoz says 40 years later at a cafe near El Salvador’s Supreme Court of Justice, located in San Salvador, the country’s capital.  

Mr. Muñoz found a way to channel that deep-seated desire for justice by becoming a lawyer in 2005. But he doesn’t work with just anyone – he goes for the tough cases of human rights abuses. He has defended multiple women who suffered miscarriages but were accused of murder in a nation where abortion is banned without exception. He has fought arbitrary arrests of environmentalists, activists, and average citizens. He could be called a defender of lost causes.

“I’ve been told I run an apostolate. Other lawyers who work for corporations have mockingly told me I’m an attorney for the poor,” he says.

There’s no shortage of demand for Mr. Muñoz’s work in El Salvador, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world. And these days the risks of his work are almost as high as the demand for it.

In March 2022, a monthlong “state of exception” was enacted in response to extreme gang violence. The order suspended basic constitutional rights for those arrested under it. Securing a court warrant before searching private communications was no longer required, for example, and arrestees were barred from their right to a defense attorney and their right to see a judge within 72 hours. 

But what started as an emergency measure has become ordinary practice. The state of exception has been extended every month for more than a year and a half now, with no end in sight. Violence has declined dramatically, but critics say the order’s extreme powers are seeping far beyond the gang-related arrests they were meant to address. Even those detained outside of the state-of-
exception category are having their rights suspended. 

That’s the group Mr. Muñoz focuses on. While he has taken a few state-of-exception cases, he primarily works on human rights violations, with the added burden now of his clients getting caught in the emergency order’s crosshairs. Despite death threats and intimidation, he’s not slowing down. Instead, fellow lawyers doing similarly risky work ask him to be on call if – or, perhaps more likely, when – they themselves are arrested. 

Víctor Peña/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Army officers register residents entering the municipality of Soyapango, one of the most dangerous areas in the country, Dec. 3, 2022.

The government’s legal maneuvers are also serving as a model for other governments in the region, making Mr. Muñoz’s work a fight not only for his clients but also for his profession – and a warning to the rest of Latin America.   

“If I was wrongfully convicted, I’d like someone to care about me,” Mr. Muñoz says, explaining his motivation. “If my daughter was convicted to 30 years of prison, I’d like someone nosy to try and get her out.”

El Salvador suffered 12 years of civil war from 1980 to 1992. The violence between the U.S.-backed government and leftist rebels claimed the lives of some 75,000 civilians. Since the conflict ended, the tiny Central American country, roughly the size of Massachusetts, has often had one of the world’s worst homicide rates. 

For years, national headlines regularly blasted news of unmarked graves and rampant violence. Local gangs extorted everyone from fruit vendors to bus drivers to elementary school principals, often charging monthly “rent” that sapped the earnings of businesses or individuals. Movement across a city or community rarely happened in a straight line, as the gangs that exploded in the aftermath of the civil war controlled who could enter or exit. Visiting a loved one who lived in a neighborhood claimed by a rival gang could be deadly, even if none of the visitors were in gangs.  

For decades, presidents tried different approaches to bring the violence under control. Punitive populism known as mano dura (iron fist) involved mass arrests. The state was sometimes complicit in vigilante efforts by police and soldiers against alleged criminals. And covert negotiations with criminal gangs even took place.

When the last negotiations broke down in March 2022, gang members killed 87 people in one weekend.

That same weekend, the young, populist President Nayib Bukele and his majority in the Legislative Assembly passed the state of exception. Despite quashing constitutional rights, the move has been overwhelmingly popular for providing a long-elusive sense of calm. 

“A tired society, fed up with a lack of answers to the chronic problem of violence, is willing to accept short-term answers,” says Verónica Reyna, director of human rights for the Passionist Social Service, a nongovernmental organization focused on local violence prevention and support of human rights. 

Víctor Peña/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele (center) appears during the incorporation of 4,000 new members of the army April 4, 2022, one week after the state of exception began.

Gustavo Villatoro, minister of justice and public security, acknowledges that the state of exception is affecting more than gang members. Over 7,000 innocent people have been arrested, Mr. Villatoro said in August, noting that some degree of error is inevitable. 

But the consequences of those errors can be grave. Even if a case has nothing to do with gang activity, lawyers can be blocked from visiting their clients in detention, and court hearings can be suspended. Over 71,000 Salvadorans have been arrested under state-of-exception rules. With 6 million people in El Salvador, close to 2% of the adult population is currently behind bars. And many of them, even those not under the emergency order, lack access to a lawyer and may be tried en masse.

Margaret Satterthwaite, the United Nations special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, tweeted in May that in El Salvador, “public defenders reportedly have 3-4 minutes to present the cases of 400 to 500 detainees.” She warned that “fair trial rights must not be trampled in the name of public safety.” 

In the last week of July, Salvadoran lawmakers eliminated a previous two-year limit on pretrial detentions and passed reforms to allow mass trials that could bring together 1,000 individuals in a single appearance before a judge. 

“Maybe they won’t let us be lawyers anymore,” says Mr. Muñoz, “at least not private attorneys with independent criteria.”

“The reforms have disrupted the whole system and have turned innocence into an exception,” says Ursula Indacochea, program director at the Due Process of Law Foundation, based in Washington. “Presumption of innocence is disappearing because the roles have shifted. The state no longer has to prove I’m guilty, but now I’m guilty and have to prove I’m innocent,” Ms. Indacochea said in a Sept. 7 radio interview in El Salvador. 

Yet in some ways, the measure has achieved the government’s goals of sharply decreasing homicide rates and loosening gangs’ near-total domination over towns and hamlets. In 2015, the homicide rate in El Salvador was roughly 103 per 100,000 inhabitants. By contrast, the government projects that 2023 will end with a rate close to 3 per 100,000 inhabitants.

And despite outcry from human rights defenders and international watchdogs about the state of exception being unconstitutional – leading to widespread arbitrary arrests, and hundreds of deaths and instances of torture in prisons – the order has not been successfully contested in court. 

After a century of dictatorships and military rule, El Salvador began its democratic era in 1992. But it was short-lived. Think tanks such as the Human Rights Foundation no longer consider El Salvador a democracy, describing its form of government, instead, as “competitive authoritarianism.”  

In 2021, President Bukele’s party was victorious in the midterms, gaining legislative control by a landslide. With the executive and legislative branches secured, his Nuevas Ideas, or New Ideas, party used its power to take over the Supreme Court of Justice by unconstitutionally dismissing judges unsympathetic to Mr. Bukele and replacing them with his supporters. The court then ruled that Mr. Bukele could run for reelection, despite explicit constitutional bans against a sitting president doing so. The court’s decision was another step in the four-year, systematic process of eliminating checks and balances here. 

Legislators went on to remove an attorney general investigating corruption inside the government, purge one-third of the country’s judges, select a new ombudsperson who supports the state of exception, and prevent independent human rights organizations
from visiting prisons to observe their conditions.

Víctor Peña/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

“I’ve been told I run an apostolate. Other lawyers who work for corporations have mockingly told me I’m an attorney for the poor.” – Dennis Muñoz, attorney in El Salvador

Two years ago, the day after the court released its decision allowing Mr. Bukele to run for reelection, interim chargé d’affaires and former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Jean Manes spoke harshly at a press conference, comparing Mr. Bukele to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and labeling the nation “a democracy in decline.” 

Of the 35,000 authorized lawyers registered in El Salvador, Mr. Muñoz stands out for almost exclusively taking cases of human rights violations.

“Things aren’t easy right now,” he says, describing the justice system as “made to convict.” The government is “criminalizing the job of lawyers,” he adds.

Yet Mr. Muñoz looked anything but cautious at a press conference in early July, where he was the only person wearing a suit at the San Salvador offices of the Christian Committee for Displaced People in El Salvador, a wartime human rights organization. He headed to the podium in the ample room, sparsely decorated with pictures of St. Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador murdered by right-wing death squads in 1980. 

Mr. Muñoz discussed openly a forbidden topic. Five environmentalists were arrested in January over the alleged 1989 murder of a Salvadoran woman during the war. The case was under a court-issued gag order.  

“It’s very serious that environmentalists are being unjustly accused, bending [what are considered] the rules of due process anywhere in the world,” Mr. Muñoz said, staring into the cameras. 

His clients in this case are former guerrilla members, and two of the accused are part of the Association of Economic and Social Development Santa Marta, known as ADES. One of the country’s oldest environmental organizations, ADES was key in achieving the total ban on mining here in 2017. In a country where almost the entirety of war crimes remain unresolved and defendants in active cases are rarely imprisoned, the arrest of these men was an outlier, apparently due to their vocal criticism of the government. The U.N. called for the activists’ immediate release. 

“Dare I say there are crimes being committed against these environmentalists,” Mr. Muñoz said before the media. “It’s nefarious that things like this happen in a country that calls itself democratic but really has a criminal injustice system in place.” 

Víctor Peña/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Dennis Muñoz (wearing a tie) meets with relatives of a taxi driver whom they believe should not have been arrested.

By late August, Mr. Muñoz had successfully convinced a judge to grant an order for his clients’ release. “It’s a crumb of justice, but we shouldn’t celebrate until there’s a dismissal of proceedings,” he said at a later press conference.

It’s hard to reconcile this image of seeming fearlessness with Mr. Muñoz’s request when the Monitor approached him for an interview: Could the piece leave out his last name? The question reflects a sense of fear that has built up over many years of doing this work. 

Mr. Muñoz downplays receiving death threats, normalizing the culture of violence he’s lived under for most of his professional life. “They say they wish that I was extorted or killed because of the people I’ve defended,” he says about the social media threats. He thinks he’s been able to stay off the political radar by censoring his opinions. “I issue legal and technical opinions,” he explains. “Other colleagues have entered the political arena and expose themselves more to attacks.” 

El Salvador’s cracking down on civil liberties and silencing of opponents are familiar governing strategies in Latin America. The region is facing some of its most serious human rights challenges in decades as judicial independence, a free press, and strong civil societies have been intentionally weakened by those in power from Guatemala to Peru, and are virtually nonexistent in Nicaragua and Venezuela. At the same time, the presence of organized crime is gaining strength, giving politicians an opportunity to curtail citizens’ rights in the name of security.

Even so, Mr. Bukele stands out. He’s a hugely popular president, with one of the highest approval ratings in the region. 

“The deterioration of security conditions in many countries of the region increases demand for security measures and is met with the mano dura offer, which is associated with Bukele due to his results and his government’s communication skills,” says Tiziano Breda, a research fellow for the Istituto Affari Internazionali, an Italian think tank focused on crime and politics in Latin America.

But, he points out, this model has proved tough or impossible to replicate due to El Salvador’s specific conditions: “a small, mainly urban topography, a defined criminal landscape, high institutional capabilities, effective state control over jails, and no separation of powers, since a perpetual state of exception would be more contested in a country where the court could intervene and civil society had more power.”

Mr. Bukele himself has noticed his critics, largely made up of human rights organizations, independent media, and other governments. “They’ve never been interested in El Salvador,” he said on Twitter (now known as X) in August 2022. “They fear that if we succeed, then other governments will want to imitate it. They fear the power of example.” 

Honduras enacted its own version of a state of exception in December 2022. Three Guatemalan presidential candidates praised Mr. Bukele’s policies on the campaign trail last summer (though they lost), while other politicians and presidential hopefuls from Colombia to Argentina and from Ecuador to Paraguay have tried to emulate Mr. Bukele and his approach to security. 

Víctor Peña/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Lawyer Dennis Muñoz sits in front of the courthouse where he defends many of his cases in San Salvador, Aug. 8, 2023.

But it’s not just fellow leaders looking at him admiringly: Citizens reaching from Central America to the tip of South America have also expressed support for him on social media and in opinion polls.  

Lawyers like Mr. Muñoz – and the people they have represented over the past several decades – serve as the counternarrative, painting a picture of some of the collateral damage that policies that chip away at civil liberties can have on a society. 

On July 27, lawyer Osvaldo Feusier went to court to defend Victor Barahona, a radio reporter who had spent 11 months in prison, accused of collaborating with gangs. Mr. Feusier says he fears retaliation for defending him, especially because Mr. Barahona went on to denounce jail conditions upon his release. Mr. Feusier uses two adjectives to describe the work of lawyers here today: limited and fearful. 

“There are rumors in the courthouses of a blacklist with the lawyers who have represented people arrested under the state of exception,” Mr. Feusier says. “That would have been impossible before, but now it’s not so hard to believe. 

“I think they’re testing how far they can go,” he says of the government.

Mr. Muñoz has heard the rumors, too – and it’s made him wary. So far, he has taken on four state-of-exception cases. In one, the police said they arrested a woman in a rural town square at midnight, accusing her of carrying cellphones and SIM cards for gang members. But Mr. Muñoz says she was actually arrested in her home at 4 a.m., and no phones or SIM cards were seized. “I took it because the procedural fraud is pretty clear. It’s all made up,” he says. 

Mr. Muñoz was able to get her out of detention on bond. His hypothesis is that the woman was accused by a neighbor with a grudge. These days in El Salvador, that’s enough to get someone thrown in jail, he says.

Yet despite not focusing on state-of-exception cases, Mr. Muñoz is still seen as the first lawyer many who do take those cases would want to represent them. A colleague of his who has worked on nearly 50 such cases recently called him to ask if Mr. Muñoz would defend him if he himself ends up behind bars for his work.   

Mr. Muñoz seems to always be on. Even in his downtime, he says he tunes into legal dramas, from true-crime series to documentaries on smuggling and black markets. In newspaper photos, he’s frequently in sunglasses due to chronic eye infections – not vanity, he assures. He “admits” to having some clients who pay him for his legal work, as if charging for what he does is something to be embarrassed about. 

“Muñoz is not a normal person,” says Dagoberto Quintanilla, a doctor who was a high school classmate and remains a friend. “When we had to do presentations, we jokingly said, ‘Give him the pill,’ because he just wouldn’t stop talking,” Dr. Quintanilla says, adding that Mr. Muñoz can be obsessive, which helps him when he’s investigating a case. 

The lawyer handles medical terms with ease and displays a prodigious memory, recounting details from cases long ago, like a client with a T2 vertebra injury, another client’s precise weight, and a passage that was on page 14 of the case decision for Cristina Quintanilla, a young woman accused of having an abortion, whom he was able to get pardoned. 

Mr. Muñoz doesn’t open up easily, but he gets teary talking about his grandmother. She believed in him long before anyone else did, he says. Before his first case defending a man with paraplegia who was arrested for being in a house where people were consuming drugs, she told Mr. Muñoz, “‘I know you’ll get him out,’” he recalls, “even though I had no experience. Even friends and colleagues were like, ‘Don’t kid yourself.’” But his grandmother was right. The man was pardoned and released.

Yet aside from the woman Mr. Muñoz believes was framed by her neighbor, he has not succeeded in getting his state-of-exception detainees released. They remain behind bars. 

Mr. Muñoz does not come across as a pessimist, but the difficulty of defending people under the current circumstances may explain his decision to stop teaching law. “What for?” he asks, with a hint of defeat in his voice. “What they want is that you ask for your client to be convicted,” which, of course, runs contrary to his mission. 

Instead, he has always aimed to overcome the odds, even though early on in his career, “not even my clients believed in me sometimes,” he says. 

Ms. Quintanilla didn’t believe in him, she admits over the phone from Corrigan, Texas, where she now lives, seeking asylum in the United States. “Most lawyers come to prison and lie to you or try to get money. He arrived, freshly graduated, and told me he would not charge me a penny. I said, ‘You’re playing me.’”

In October 2004, Ms. Quintanilla was pregnant and one day felt strong pains and nausea. Then she passed out. When she woke up, she was in the hospital and her baby had died. She was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated murder in August 2005. 

Mr. Muñoz worked with her for four years. “I thought he was too young and I was his experiment to start his law practice,” Ms. Quintanilla recalls. 

El Salvador’s total ban on abortion has been in effect since 1998 and was later adopted into the constitution. The law disproportionately affects impoverished women and those living in rural areas with limited access to prenatal care. From 1998 through 2019, a total of 181 women who suffered obstetric emergencies were prosecuted for abortion or aggravated homicide, according to a 2020 report by the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion. Without access to legal professionals who can advocate on their behalf, these women face decadeslong sentences.  

In 2009, when Mr. Muñoz showed Ms. Quintanilla the pardon document, she says she had a sinking sensation. “He asked me if I wanted water or a soda. I thought he brought bad news and wanted me to process it,” she recalls. Mr. Muñoz had argued for her pardon on the grounds that the cause of her baby’s death had never been established.

“He gave me the document and asked me to read it. It said my sentence was considered excessive, severe, and disproportional. I just started to cry,” she says. “It’s because of his work that I’m now free.” ρ

The first inkling of cyber trouble for the Judson Independent School District came around 1:30 a.m. on July 17, 2021.

By 3:30 a.m., a district employee lost all contact with the servers. By the time he got to the school at 4:30 a.m., a ransom note had appeared on all the computer screens. The employee called the police and the FBI.

The Texas district – with more than 24,000 students and more than 4,500 employees – had been the victim of a ransomware attack targeting its data and network systems. Ultimately, the district paid a $547,000 ransom and embarked on a recovery process that took more than a year to complete, according to Lacey Gosch, the district’s assistant superintendent of technology, who recently testified before the U.S. House Oversight Committee.

“The mentality that any organization is too small or insignificant to be affected by a cybersecurity breach is living under a false sense of security,” she wrote in a letter submitted along with her in-person testimony. “The truth is that cybersecurity events in organizations need to be viewed not as improbable but as absolute.”

Ms. Gosch’s cautionary tale delivered on Capitol Hill provides insight into what experts say is a growing threat facing schools across the United States. Cyberattacks in recent years have hobbled school systems and operations, putting sensitive information at risk and, in some cases, pausing education. Schools in Des Moines, Iowa; Nantucket, Massachusetts; and Rochester, Minnesota, all temporarily closed earlier this year after digital intrusions.

What’s at stake, experts say, is private information ranging from medical records to Social Security numbers being exposed – all of which could cause immediate or future harm to students, parents, or employees. The attacks can trigger lost instructional time and cost districts money they don’t necessarily have. 

Schools are hardly the only target of cybercriminals. Last month, casinos in Las Vegas made headlines after hackers breached their systems, causing a technology meltdown in the tourism hub. Unlike large corporations, though, school districts typically have much smaller cybersecurity teams – if they have dedicated staff at all. 

The continued attacks in the K-12 sector, however, have been garnering more attention, prompting a White House summit in August. Fortifying schools could hinge on everything from policy changes and staff training to vendor compliance and resource investments, experts and district technology leaders say. 

“Many people outside of education still think of the education sector as little kids with crayons and chalkboards,” says Doug Levin, who serves as national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange (K12 SIX). “They don’t understand how the sector has changed and what’s at risk.”

A “wicked problem”

For years, Mr. Levin has been tracking the burgeoning problem, sifting through information that is publicly available. The map he created, updated annually, shows 1,619 location markers through 2022, spread across all 50 states and in cities big and small. 

Chad McAuslin/Global Resilience Federation

Doug Levin speaks at a conference hosted by the K12 Security Information eXchange (K12 SIX), where he serves as national director, in February. The conference in Austin sold out given the growing cybersecurity issues facing school districts.

The incidents have also gotten the attention of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a subset of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Early this year the agency released its first report about cybersecurity threats against schools. Now, CISA says, they’re at “unprecedented risk.”

The CISA warning mirrors what Mr. Levin has been trying to flag for years. He calls it a “wicked problem” that has been building over time with no easy solution. First came computer labs in schools. Then smartboards and carts full of laptops for classroom use. Now, some schools boast a 1-to-1 technology ratio, meaning every child has a tablet or laptop –  a trend accelerated by the pandemic’s remote learning.

The technology boom in the classroom coincided with a steep increase in monetary demands when a school district gets hit by ransomware.

Seven or eight years ago, the ransom demands ranged from about $5,000 to $10,000, Mr. Levin says. Today, the extortionists routinely demand millions of dollars in exchange for the stolen data. Districts targeted have taken different approaches, with some paying either out of their own budgets or through insurance. Others have refused to comply.

Identity thieves may be particularly inclined to steal student information, he says, because adults’ data tends to be better monitored.

“School districts have plenty of information about students and their families – more than enough for an identity thief to start to establish, essentially, a credit record and then abuse it,” he says. In the case of children, it could be years before they catch on, such as when “they apply for a student loan or [go] to rent their first apartment.”

In 2016, Mr. Levin noticed a smattering of news stories about school networks compromised by cybersecurity incidents. In early 2017, the IRS issued an “urgent alert” about a tax-related email phishing scam spreading to other sectors, including school districts.

“I was just trying to draw attention to it,” he says. “What I saw was district after district after district falling for this same attack, and I was like, ‘Whoa, something is going on here that’s bigger.’”

More discussion about solutions

Fast forward to this year, and it’s no longer an under-the-radar issue. A cybersecurity conference about threats against schools – hosted by K12 SIX – garnered so much interest that it sold out in February. About 150 people from 25 states as well as Canada and New Zealand attended the program in Austin, Texas. He expects a similar sell-out crowd at next year’s conference in Savannah, Georgia.

The gathering came nearly three years after the formation of K12 SIX, which operates as a hub where school districts and their information technology teams can share threat intelligence and help each other ward off network hacks. The organization also prioritizes research and advocating for better defense practices.

“We’re all facing the same exact issues,” says Neal Richardson, a director of technology and chief information security officer for the Hillsboro-Deering School District in New Hampshire. “It’s all the same problems, all the same threat actors.”

Mr. Richardson typically starts checking his email at 5 a.m. and doesn’t stop until he goes to sleep around 11 p.m. He’s checking for any alerts generated by the district’s security defense systems – a bid to be one step ahead of any problems. 

But the alerts aren’t his main worry.

“What scares me the most is something that doesn’t trip our alerting sensors,” he says.

The 1,200-student district in southern New Hampshire hasn’t experienced a cyber intrusion so debilitating that it forced a school closure, Mr. Richardson says. But the district has endured denials of service, which flood the internet router with so much inbound traffic that the system becomes overloaded. 

Damian Dovarganes/AP/File

Alberto Carvalho (center, at podium), superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the United States, speaks about an external cyber incident on the LAUSD information systems in Los Angeles, Sept. 6, 2022.

Other types of cyber incidents include data breaches, email phishing scams, website and social media defacement, and invasions of online classes or virtual meetings.

The common refrain among K-12 technology leaders is that it’s a matter of when, not if, a major intrusion will occur. 

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which educates more than 565,000 students, experienced a large-scale incident that it disclosed in September. The breach involved “2,000 student assessment records,” as well as driver’s license and Social Security numbers, according to reporting from The 74.

The perpetrators – an extortion hacking group known as Vice Society – demanded an undisclosed ransom amount from LAUSD. It’s a tactic that has grown increasingly common: The K-12 Cyber Incident Map run by K12 SIX documented 62 instances of ransomware attacks on U.S. public school systems in 2021.

Balancing education and cyber defense

As cybercriminals fix their gaze on the K-12 sector, school districts are struggling to beef up their cybersecurity teams.

Don Wolff, chief technology officer for Portland Public Schools in Oregon, calls himself a “unicorn.” Unlike many of his peers, he has a small team, including a manager of operational security, dedicated to cybersecurity issues. 

The nearly 50,000-student district is building a cybersecurity program that will train people about the risks and how to avoid them, adopt policies for how data is stored and accessed, and evaluate technology.

But with more enticing salaries in the private sector, he says, school districts often run into challenges even hiring for cybersecurity-related positions. 

“Our primary operative is to educate students and any dollar we take ... to do cybersecurity is taken away from the education of students,” Mr. Wolff says, describing districts’ financial conundrum. “So how do we manage best efforts and keep our students as safe as we can?”

Some dollars have already started flowing. The State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program, a federal initiative through CISA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been doling out money to state and local governments, including school districts. Allocations to states and the District of Columbia ranged from $4.2 million to $17.4 million last fiscal year.  

And, in tandem with the White House cybersecurity summit, the Department of Education released a K-12 Digital Infrastructure Brief that offers some guidance. It notes that school districts should adopt multifactor authentication systems, enforce minimum password strength standards, report phishing attempts, and regularly update software.

“It’s still likely to get worse before it gets better, but at least we’re sort of beginning to marshal resources and get to some consensus on the best ways to move forward,” Mr. Levin says. 

But the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence technology is adding another layer of complexity to the situation. Cybercriminals may be able to leverage AI to replicate someone’s voice, for instance, and hack into accounts, says Eileen Belastock, CEO of Belastock Consulting, which specializes in educational technology.

“On a positive note, what I’m seeing from these companies that have a cybersecurity prevention program is they’re using AI to detect blips in a network,” she says.

Students, parents, and employees can help in a number of ways. For starters, Mr. Richardson, who oversees technology at his New Hampshire district, says they should avoid trying to circumvent district content filters. 

In other words: Signing up for a free service as a workaround to access TikTok could backfire by exposing a student’s personal information. 

“The threat is real,” Mr. Richardson says, “and it’s not going away.”

Reuters

Maine's Governor Janet Mills, U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R), and Senator Angus King (I) take part in a vigil for the victims of the mass shooting, in Lewiston, Maine, Oct. 29.

When the order to stay in place was lifted Friday after the worst mass shooting incident in the United States this year, residents of Lewiston, Maine, did what people often do in communities shaken by violence – they sought comfort in one another. They held early Halloween events to bask in the joy of children. They gathered for interfaith services in their places of worship.

Responses like those can have a welcome healing effect at times of acute mourning. Yet they also point to the storehouses of quiet strength behind a significant shift in thinking about public safety. Increasingly, communities are marshaling their own civic and religious resources to push beyond stuck and divisive political debates. Their solutions often start with qualities like compassion and empathy.

By staying “focused on the things that invite peace into our communities,” the Rev. Allen Austin, a pastor at Pathway Vineyard Church in Lewiston, urged residents at an interfaith service last night, what arises from tragedy is a “kinder people, a more compassionate people, a more merciful people.”

According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a focus on gun violence prevention among foundations and private donors has helped shift more public funding toward community-based approaches to public safety. These strategies focus on the building blocks of healthy communities, such as safe public parks and affordable housing. They emphasize caring for those most vulnerable after gun violence.

Approaches like these, involving faith leaders, police departments, local politicians, and residents, helped Indianapolis achieve a 15% reduction in gun-related homicides during the past year. Violence had declined in New York City and Oakland, California, through similar strategies. Congress has taken note. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act last year earmarked $13 billion to address the root causes of gun violence. It included funding for community-based solutions.

The key, according to a community leader surveyed by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, is to treat potential offenders as human beings who are “not to be thrown away as if they’re of no value.”

“Having empathy isn’t about being a pushover,” a Security magazine study found. “It is about remembering that most people who threaten violence do so because they are in crisis and looking for ways that security leaders can help them solve that crisis or ride it out through support.”

Nearly three decades ago, Boston’s Black clergy responded to high rates of gun violence by engaging gangs and drug dealers. They recovered communities block by block. Their example has now become a model adopted across the U.S. One effect is to replace resignation with individual agency. “We will not be defined by the tragedies that happened,” the Rev. Todd Little, a Pentecostal minister, told residents gathered at the vigil last night. “Fear, anxiety and trepidation will not dictate our present or our future.”

Like communities elsewhere, Lewiston may now discover the resources it needs to heal from violence by turning to a greater love of community.