Jack Healy

But when you are one of just two Democrats in the House to vote against the impeachment inquiry, the subject is impossible to avoid. As a conservative Democrat in a rural district that voted for President Donald Trump by a 30-point margin, Peterson is a man in the lonely middle, now besieged on all sides — by Republican rivals determined to yoke him to impeachment and by Democrats who want their congressman to stand up to a president they detest.

As public testimony begins Wednesday in the impeachment hearings against Trump, it is all very awkward for Peterson and other elected Democrats in Trump-supporting corners of the country. In a statement, Peterson criticized the closed-door depositions being run by fellow Democrats as opaque and “hopelessly partisan.”

“I don’t have a lot of confidence in what they’re up to,” he said one frozen morning last week after he met with 100 potato and sugar-beet farmers.

Many farmers from the Red River Valley who crowded into a hotel meeting room to discuss how weeks of cold, rainy weather had devastated their crops agreed with Peterson about impeachment. They had voted for Trump, and even as new revelations tumbled out that morning indicating that the president had demanded that Ukraine investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, as a condition for getting military aid, many of the farmers brushed off the entire investigation. Instead, they saw it as a political distraction while their livelihoods were being strangled by Trump’s unpopular tariffs and a bad harvest.

“It gets sickening at times,” said Erik Bakke, 44, a sugar-beet farmer in Ulen, Minnesota, who said he still supported Trump and Peterson. As farmers got ready to head back to their fields, a few said the anti-impeachment vote had probably made Peterson more popular with his farmer constituents.

Still, Republican rivals smell blood. One Republican hoping to unseat Peterson labeled him a “puppet” of Democratic leaders trying to take down the president. Another held an anti-impeachment rally outside one of Peterson’s local offices.

But Peterson’s stance on impeachment puts him in a precarious spot with another constituency that rural Democrats also desperately need — the small but committed clusters of progressive voters galvanized by Trump’s election who now breathlessly follow every twist and news alert in the saga.

They fired off outraged emails after Peterson joined Rep. Jeff Van Drew, D-N.J., in voting against endorsing the impeachment inquiry. They called Peterson’s office to demand answers. A few liberal voters even flirted with not supporting him again.

“It’s almost inexcusable,” said Sally Suby, 70, a retired teacher from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, who has begun posting roadside signs with slogans like “Demand Truth” to counter the Trump signs that speckle fields.

With conservative groups already attacking Democrats who voted for the impeachment inquiry in more conservative districts in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Michigan and elsewhere, western Minnesota has become another battleground in how impeachment might — or might not — sway rural and small-town voters.

Peterson, a pro-gun, anti-abortion politician who frequently votes with Republicans, is one of the few rural Democrats standing in a state that has followed the country’s bifurcation between bluer cities and suburbs and red rural areas. He is the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and has won endorsements from the Minnesota Farm Bureau, whose president called him “a champion for agriculture.”

His district spans almost the entire length of the state, from the Canadian border through lakefront tourist towns and soybean, corn and potato fields. He is on a first-name basis with voters who talk about “calling Collin” and tell stories about getting Collin’s help with a medical bill or Collin’s advice about a complicated farm program.

But his margins of victory have dwindled like winter daylight. Even as Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms, Dave Hughes, an Air Force veteran endorsed by Trump, came within a few points of beating Peterson. In neighboring rural districts, conservatives flipped two Democratic-held seats in mining country and a white, rural stripe of southern Minnesota, raising Republicans’ hopes of winning Minnesota in 2020 for the first time in a half-century.

The first campaign rally Trump held after the House’s impeachment inquiry began was in Minneapolis, where he condemned Democrats for trying to “erase your vote like it never existed” and stoked the crowd’s anger over Minnesota’s large population of Somali immigrants.

Michelle Fischbach, a former lieutenant governor running in the Republican congressional primary, has turned impeachment into an attack line. She blamed impeachment for bogging down the passage of a trade deal between the United States, Mexico and Canada, even as Peterson (who supports the deal) tells farmers he expects it to pass within weeks. She said other votes by Peterson had been a tacit endorsement of impeachment.

“The Democrats have been so obsessed with impeachment that they haven’t been doing anything to help the farmers,” she said. “I know Collin’s out meeting with people, but he’s not standing up to Nancy Pelosi and saying, ‘We’ve got to stop this impeachment.’”

Kevin Paap, president of the Minnesota Farm Bureau, said that while impeachment was consuming Washington and die-hard partisans, many Minnesota farmers were too busy trying to salvage what crops they could after a muddy slog of a harvest season. Some potato farmers have lost 90% of their crop to the cold. Farm machinery is getting mired in the mud. Some farmers have abandoned Trump because of his trade policies, but others say they still support him.

“No disrespect, but quite frankly, if you’re not on the radio I’m listening to in a truck or a tractor combine cab, I’m not paying a lot of attention,” Paap said. “We’re on Day 23 of harvest.”

In small towns such as Morris, population 5,300 and home to a liberal arts campus of the University of Minnesota, the political fissures created by impeachment are often right next door.

One afternoon, Tom Collins, 63, and his family were lugging floor tiles into a cafe they are turning into a nutritional-supplement club. It was 25 degrees out, and Collins wore a black Trump 2020 sweatshirt that read “Screw Your Feelings.” His wife’s son, Tanner Gross, 25, was ordering a liberal-baiting T-shirt that said “Trump-eached.”

They said they have been following the impeachment news through church friends and social media, and planned to vote against every Democrat on the ballot next year, no matter how the farm economy was faring. “I think it’ll be a landslide this time,” Collins said.

On the other side of the brick wall, four women who lead the local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible were ordering salads and wraps at a recently opened restaurant that specializes in local fresh food.

Judy Flicker, 67, said that they had a “messy relationship” with Peterson, but that they had knocked on doors for his campaigns and would most likely vote for him again. Still, they were frustrated that the impeachment debate was leaving out people who did not fit into neat categories of urban liberals and rural conservatives, and said they would keep calling Peterson’s office to press him to support impeachment.

“We live in a small town,” said Sara Lam, a professor of elementary education. “We are a part of rural America just as much as a farmer.”

This article originally appeared in

For a Rural Democrat, Talking Potatoes Is Easy. Impeachment Is Really Hard.

CROOKSTON, Minn. — Collin Peterson just wanted to talk about soybean prices and dying potato crops when he flew home to the western Minnesota farmlands that he has represented in Congress for almost 30 years.

A new pork processing plant was hiring workers for $15.95 an hour — nearly 10 times what Pretrick, 26, made. He would get a one-way plane ticket. A hotel room. Free meals. Cash to send home to his wife and two sons. Hundreds of other Micronesians had already signed up.

“It was big money for us,” Pretrick said. “We left.”

Poverty propelled the Micronesians to take jobs trimming pork carcasses, jobs that few Americans want in an era of record low unemployment. And a quirk of law made Micronesians like Pretrick uniquely valuable to employers who might be worried about becoming the next target of the Trump administration’s workplace immigration raids: They were legal, allowed to work in the United States without visas or green cards under decades-old agreements rooted in the U.S.’ atomic testing and military history in the Pacific.

But what unfolded after 200 Micronesians made the 7,000-mile journey over the past year to the cornfields and hog farms of western Iowa became a tangled migration saga of what the workers called mistreatment and broken promises.

The workers said their pay was siphoned off to repay their $1,800 plane tickets. They said a recruiter for the pork plant seized their passports and threatened to have the workers deported if they got sick or missed shifts. The workers struggled to find their footing in an unfamiliar city where they knew nobody, spoke little English and spent their days being shuttled back and forth between their hotel and 10-hour shifts at the pork plant.

“We were lost,” Pretrick said.

For decades, thousands of people from Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands have migrated to work in the United States at nursing homes, cleaning companies, coffee farms and food plants in Hawaii, Arkansas, Missouri and elsewhere. They arrive and can work legally under agreements called Compacts of Free Association, but they are usually ineligible for Medicaid or other federal benefits — an omission that advocates said leaves many islanders impoverished and sick in the United States.

Now, as the Trump administration slashes refugee admissions and arrests hundreds of immigrant workers in high-profile raids at meatpacking plants in Mississippi and Tennessee, Pacific Islanders are becoming an increasingly attractive option for businesses searching for entry-level workers.

“These employers understand we’re legal residents,” said Jocelyn Howard, program director for We Are Oceania, a Hawaii-based advocacy group. “For recruiters in America, it’s a good opportunity because we’re legal.”

The workers who landed in Iowa were recruited to work at a huge new pork plant operated by Seaboard Triumph Foods that employs 2,400 people and butchers about 21,000 pigs a day.

Seaboard Triumph touts its technological advances and community awards, but it is now facing an international public relations mess after a video went viral showing one of the company’s recruiters yelling at workers in a hotel lobby and then grabbing for a woman who had been recording him.

The embassy of the Federated States of Micronesia sent the State Department a letter calling for an investigation. The union that represents most workers at the plant began looking into the allegations. Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa said the state would temporarily block millions of dollars in incentives for Seaboard Triumph.

A spokeswoman for Seaboard Triumph said the company followed all labor laws and had not forced or coerced Micronesians to travel to Iowa. The company said it helped its Micronesian recruits adjust to life and work in the state by paying for temporary housing, meals and transportation after they arrived. It gave each worker a $100 gift card.

After the complaints erupted, Seaboard Triumph said it had suspended the recruiter who was seen on the video yelling at Micronesian workers and declaring that the female workers were “my women.” Last week, Seaboard sent a letter to its Micronesian employees saying it was canceling their obligations to repay their airfare.

“We’ll continue to support you as one of our valuable employees,” the letter said.

Micronesian recruits who arrived over the past year, some with little more than shorts and flip-flops, said in interviews they had no problem with their working conditions at the plant.

Micronesians were hardly the first immigrants to go to work in western Iowa’s packing plants. While much of the landscape is overwhelmingly white and conservative — voters here narrowly elected anti-immigrant Rep. Steve King to a ninth term in 2018 — a more diverse future is taking shape in meatpacking towns like Storm Lake and Sioux City.

At factory shift changes, a polyphony of dialects from Central America, Africa and Myanmar floats through parking lots. The Virgin of Guadalupe hangs from some rearview mirrors; pastel leis dangle from others. On Saturday afternoons, Latino families line up for tangy mangonadas at La Palapa, a food trailer in Sioux City. The Hong Kong Food Store stocks its shelves with dried shrimp, spicy kimchi, taro, palm oil and other flavors of distant homes.

“We’re a meatpacking town,” said Mayor Bob Scott of Sioux City. “They came, they assimilated, they’re coaches in our schools.”

Micronesian workers said their trouble began soon after they boarded flights from the island of Pohnpei for the two-day trek to Iowa. Many were nervous about traveling outside Micronesia for the first time, and they said that a guide who had been promised to them to navigate their airport transfers never showed up.

They landed at 3 a.m. for long layovers in Honolulu, often confused and hungry. Some did not have enough money for an airport meal. They were thirsty because they did not realize they could ask a flight attendant for more juice or soda. One worker kept visiting the airplane bathroom to refill a plastic water glass, said Mele Tataipu Arati, a Hawaiian Samoan relative of some workers who lives in northern Iowa.

Howard, the Hawaii-based advocate, said that members of Oahu’s Micronesian diaspora began rushing to the airport with food and water for arriving workers and helped them connect to their mainland flights.

“These people were so hungry,” she said. “In our culture we’re so trusting and respecting and caring for each other. We expect the same. But in America it’s different. You’re on your own.”

Several workers said that a recruiter for the plant took their passports, ostensibly to verify their legal work status and get Social Security numbers, but then refused to return them. They said they did not have any other identification to cash checks, open bank accounts or wire money back home. Seaboard Triumph said it was not holding any employees’ passports.

Outside the plant one afternoon, Danifer Mark said he felt stranded. He was bewildered by the U.S.’ immigration bureaucracy and was contemplating whether he should quit and try to move in with relatives in Cincinnati.

“How can I go back?” he asked. “I’m stuck. I don’t have money. What am I going to do?”

Curtis Weilbacher, a Micronesian citizen who helped hire many of the workers, attributed the problems to cultural divides, misunderstandings and misbehavior by workers who drank too much and caused trouble. (Weilbacher is not the recruiter who was suspended after being captured berating workers on the video)

“The mistake we made is we sent all of them at once,” Weilbacher said, as he headed into a workers’ meeting to discuss their grievances. “When you pick apples, the next day there are some rotten ones inside. You need to remove them.”

Some of the Micronesian workers said Seaboard and the local hotel that housed them had been fair and welcoming. The hotel provided dinners, karaoke nights and a free shuttle to take them to the plant. They said their countrymen and Micronesian officials had blown the complaints out of proportion on social media.

But others were adrift. They struggled to find apartments or come up with the advance rent and security deposits that U.S. landlords required, and felt as if they had no option but to stay on at the downtown hotel that had initially put them up free.

“There’s three of us, and it’s $1,500 a month,” said Jowain Alexander, 34, who trims pork shoulders. “They told us they’d find a house for us. They didn’t. They said they’ll provide food. But now we have to pay for our own food. I don’t want to go out on the streets, sleeping under a bridge.”

Other workers had quit and had moved to Colorado, to other towns in Iowa, or even back home to jobs that pay $1.75 an hour.

“I’ll stay,” Alexander said. “My wife and my kids need money.”

They Crossed an Ocean to Butcher Pigs. It Was No American Dream.

SIOUX CITY, Iowa — Anthony Pretrick was scraping by as a fisherman in his Pacific island homeland of Micronesia when he met a job recruiter with an irresistible offer: There was a fortune to be made slaughtering hogs in a faraway place called Iowa.

Some 3,000 visitors were beaming into his tiny hometown this weekend, snapping selfies outside the secretive Area 51 military test base, running through sagebrush in alien costumes and dancing to throbbing club beats as part of a viral online joke bewitched to life.

Day pointed to the signs nailed to his front gate in Rachel, Nevada, population 40ish (50 on weekends).

People in this sparsely populated expanse of scrub desert and sun-blasted mountains have gotten used to conspiracy theorists and UFO chasers who make the two-hour drive from Las Vegas hunting for an extraterrestrial truth behind the secrecy and security of Area 51 — and leave with nothing but an alien tote bag or a roll of little-green-man toilet paper from the souvenir shop.

But in late June, law enforcement and residents here began bracing for an onslaught, after 2.1 million people said they would rush the base on foot at an event organized on Facebook called “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us.” The event creator later said the whole thing had been a joke, but online masses committed to launch anyway.

Residents worried that even a tiny fraction of that many out-of-towners could lead to chaos, choking the two-lane roads, scarring the desert with trash and camper trailers, and even draining the water table.

“People in Rachel moved out here to be away from all the crap,” Day, 61, said Friday morning. “We don’t know what to expect.”

But by Saturday, it appeared the invaders had come in peace. Law enforcement officials said they had made just a handful of arrests, including one man charged with indecent exposure after relieving himself at Area 51’s security gate.

Most people were heeding warnings from county sheriffs, state police and the Air Force not to assault the gates of a heavily guarded military base. At 3 a.m. Friday, about 150 people made the 9-mile drive up a dusty road and surged toward the back gate, but mostly just laughed and pantomimed an invasion.

Police officers stationed just outside the back gates laid down the ground rules — do not cross that line, watch out for rattlesnakes — and politely deflected selfie requests from hundreds of people who drove up throughout the day.

When a green alien asked if he could get a photo of one of the officers pretending to handcuff him, the officer offered these terms: “Once the handcuffs go on, they don’t come off.” The alien demurred.

“They’re hiding something,” said Noah Nelson, 16, who drove from Alberta, Canada, and took part in the storming-not-storming. “Maybe it’s aliens.”

“Or the moon landing set,” his brother, Austin, 21, said.

Like a lot of people here, they were joking. Sort of. A few visitors in alien goggles said they accepted the reality that Area 51, part of the Nevada Test and Training Range, had been used to develop spy planes, not hide alien spacecraft. But like the “X Files” poster said, they wanted to believe.

“We just wanted to see people like us,” said Mike Main, who drove with his mother from Tampa, Florida.

While some local residents spent the weekend pounding No Trespassing signs into the ground and stringing plastic webbing around their trailer homes, Don Williams said he had been won over by the visitors, who had arrived from as far as Massachusetts and even Australia.

“I love it,” Williams, 54, said as he and his brothers built a green concession stand — Outpost 51, obviously — on their property.

As one of the very few black residents within 50 miles, Williams said, he remembered feeling like a visitor from another world when he first moved to Rachel 25 years ago, homeless and looking for any place where he could find shelter and a job.

He now works on an alfalfa farm outside of town and helps care for some of Rachel’s older residents, including his 78-year-old mother, Lula Fike, who moved out here three years ago. On Friday, Fike parked her scooter along the dusty frontage road to watch people arrive in spacesuit costumes, foil hats and just-printed T-shirts declaring they had Stormed Area 51 (a bargain at $30).

“I don’t think they’re looking for trouble,” Fike said. “But I know how to shoot a gun, and I’ve got weapons in my house.”

For days, interlopers have been streaming into town in camper vans and RVs, motorcycles and in some cases cramped two-door sedans that barely made the drive from Fort Worth, Texas. Since there are nearly no hotels for 50 miles, they set up tents in the dirt, bargained with residents for a bedroom in a trailer and rented $80-a-night camper spaces. Some just pulled onto a patch of empty land and slept under the stars.

Retirees who roam the country said they had detoured to Rachel and the nearby Hiko, Nevada, home to the Alien Research Center, where another weekend event featured music and speakers steeped in the search for intelligent life and the history and lore of the military base.

Some organizers were discovering that online fandom didn’t necessarily mean people would burn a weekend driving into the Nevada desert. The music at the Hiko site was called off for Saturday after so few people showed up, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, though organizers said in a Facebook message that there would still be food stalls and alien discussions.

Twenty-somethings who had driven from Los Angeles said they were sick of hypercommercial concerts and festivals, and liked being able to pull into a dirt lot where music was blasting from stage and people were lining up for pancakes outside one of the few businesses in town, the Little Al’E’Inn.

“We don’t have a Woodstock,” said Seth Carlson, 32. “I can’t tell my kids I didn’t make it to Area 51. This is history.”

Area 51 Raid: How a Town of 40 Coped With an Invasion

RACHEL, Nev. — The alien invasion was underway, and David Day wanted no part of it.

Jade Lopez scooped up her 11-month-old son, José, and wiped the long black bangs out of his eyes as he showed off a dirty plastic humidifier he had found. It had been just one day since Hurricane Dorian flooded the family’s trailer and gutted their taco shop, and already the stench of rot was creeping in.

Her husband had torn up the soggy carpet, and Jade Lopez, 21, had scrubbed the floors and heaped the soaked clothes in the bathtub. But as she and her two children sat in the broiling kitchen Saturday afternoon, with the power out and their flooded generator out of commission, she said she felt surrounded by that smell, and by the scale of what they had lost.

While Hurricane Dorian largely spared the U.S. coast, it leveled a direct hit on 800 people who had remained in the village near the southern tip of Ocracoke Island, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. A 7-foot surge from Pamlico Sound washed over the island, gushing into people’s living rooms and burbling up through their heating vents and cracks in their floorboards. Seawater filled bathtubs from the drain up and sent people racing to the second floors of their homes — and then it retreated just as quickly as it had come.

Unlike in the Bahamas, where the death toll from the storm is in the dozens and rising daily, no lives were lost in Ocracoke. But much of the village was left a soggy, isolated mess.

“I’ve been through every storm,” said Dan Garrish, 66, as he sat in a love seat in his driveway, surrounded by a dripping pile of clothes, books and everything else from his bedroom. “I’ve never seen water come in like this.”

Unless you happen to be a piece of driftwood, it is hard to end up living on Ocracoke by accident. The mainland is nearly three hours away by ferry, and there are no roads on or off Ocracoke Island, a 16-mile-long blade of sand that mostly belongs to the National Park Service. Residents of the village cherish it as a beachside Brigadoon where streets did not receive official names until 1999, according to a local newspaper. Dorian’s blow knocked out the power and water service, and for a time, halted the ferries that tie Ocracoke to the mainland.

Ferries loaded with heavy National Guard cargo trucks and pallets of supplies began trudging across Pamlico Sound to the island Saturday with emergency food and water, cleanup crews and hundreds of emergency workers. But the island remained under mandatory evacuation Sunday, meaning that residents who had fled before the storm were still not being allowed back on the ferries.

So a tiny makeshift fleet of power-boaters — most of them residents or second-home owners — assembled at a boat launch in Swan Quarter, near the ferry terminal, to set off for the island, carrying water, food and even a pair of shoes for an 88-year-old woman who had stayed during the storm.

To get to Ocracoke on Saturday morning, a photographer and I hitched a ride with an extremely unofficial five-man volunteer relief crew who said they had helped pull people from floods during Hurricane Harvey in Houston in 2017 and Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas last year.

They had cases of water, military rations and chainsaws to clear debris. What they did not have was a boat that could make the 30-mile trip across Pamlico Sound. About an hour into the journey, the outboard motor on their 20-foot fishing boat groaned and died.

We bobbed listlessly for an hour while the relief crew called for a tow, spliced wires and performed oil-covered surgery on the smoldering motor. I flagged down a private fishing boat of part-time Ocracoke residents who graciously let the photographer and me scramble aboard. After ensuring that the relief crew was not in danger and had enough engine power to putter back to land, we roared off for Ocracoke.

As the boat pulled into the harbor, three generations of the West family — Peter, his son, Chris, and his grandson, Spencer — pointed out splintered wooden walkways and piers that rippled like roller coaster tracks. A 100-year-old boathouse was gone.

“The roof is over there,” Chris West said, pointing to a neighbor’s yard.

Hurricanes and floods are part of life on the island, so ingrained that older houses were built with scuttle holes to allow floodwater in and out, so the houses would not float off their foundations. One of Ocracoke’s markets makes a ritual of serving free post-hurricane coffee, residents said. There are white signs nailed up outside the Village Craftsmen showing the high-water mark of storms going back to 1985. A new one for Dorian is about 2 feet above any of the others.

Joyce Gordon, 83, was second-guessing her decision to stay through the storm. She said she had nervously drunk wine and paced through her home as the water rose and as neighbors debated whether it was time to rescue her by boat.

As residents walked through the streets with bottles of bleach Saturday and celebrated the return of running water, several said they had stayed on the island because they felt they could endure Dorian’s Category 1 winds, and did not want to be cut off from their homes for days after the storm passed. Many spent the weekend airing out their absent neighbors’ homes and calling them with updates about the flood damage.

“We’re pretty resilient,” said David Frum, 69, who works at the local water plant.

But in a grassy backyard cluster of rented trailer homes where Lopez’s family and others live, there was little discussion about rebuilding or calling contractors. Unlike the homeowners whose losses are covered by federally backed flood insurance, Lopez said, her family did not have any insurance on their personal belongings, nor did they have coverage for the kitchen equipment or the food they lost at their now-destroyed taqueria.

Compared with the families who have lived for a century in the same cedar-shingled homes, Lopez was a newcomer to Ocracoke. She did not fish or boat or duck-hunt, or even care much about going to the beach. The ocean scares her 11-month-old son, José, and her 3-year-old daughter, Melissa.

But five years ago, an aunt who cleaned houses here told her there was opportunity on the island, and Lopez — who was born in the United States but raised in Mexico — said she decided to leave Hidalgo, Mexico, and finish high school in Ocracoke.

She and her husband, José Alfredo Suazo, started the taqueria last year. People loved their mahi-mahi tacos and chimichangas, and though making money was hard when they had to pay more than $2,000 in rent on their shop and trailer home, Lopez said they poured their profits back into the taco stand and a new food truck.

“It was nice,” her brother-in-law, Wilmer Dominguez, said as he sifted through the food-covered kitchen of the taco stand. “Before.”

Ocracoke’s tourist-dependent restaurants and hotels have to make enough money during the summer to survive the emptier winter months, and some residents said that Hurricane Dorian had slammed the doors early on this year’s busy season. Lopez said she did not know whether they would reopen, or even stay on Ocracoke.

“After this?” she said. “No.”

They Rode Out Dorian in the Outer Banks, but Now Comes the Hard Part

OCRACOKE, N.C. — The baby was playing on the flooded floor again.

Gonzalez was one of six innocent people who collectively spent 77 years in prison in the murder of a 68-year-old woman named Helen Wilson, whose death haunted this rural county for decades. Now, years after DNA evidence exonerated the defendants, they are about to collect a $28 million civil rights judgment against Gage County, which prosecuted them based on false confessions.

But because the county has limited financial resources and a dwindling population, nearly all of its 22,000 residents must foot the bill by paying hundreds or thousands of dollars in higher property taxes. County leaders have pleaded for help from state lawmakers and even flirted with declaring bankruptcy.

“Do I think it’s fair these people are going to have to pay us off?” Gonzalez asked. “No. But it wasn’t fair what they did to us, either.”

The $28 million jury award is one of the largest judgments ever levied against such a small place, say experts who study wrongful convictions. It has stirred resentment in the coffee shops and bars of Beatrice, a small town where suspicions about the defendants — known as the Beatrice Six — still linger like an oil stain on the road.

“There’s a feeling of, ‘Why us?’” said Myron Dorn, a state senator and former county supervisor who has introduced a bill that would allow Gage County to impose a sales tax to help raise money. “Why are we being held accountable for paying this off?”

The Beatrice case is an extreme example of the difficulties faced by those who have been promised compensation for being wrongfully convicted and spending years behind bars.

In Illinois, exonerated prisoners spent months waiting for compensation as state lawmakers dithered over passing a budget. Michigan’s wrongful compensation fund ran low on money earlier this year and exonerees told The Detroit News that they were left to wait for payments as a bill to replenish the fund with $10 million moved through the state Legislature.

Some in Gage County say the community has a moral obligation to compensate the Beatrice Six. Other residents say they should not be held financially responsible for an investigation and prosecution that unfolded more than three decades ago.

“I wasn’t even born,” said Nick Faulder, 25, who manages a paint store. He expects to pay an additional $3,500 in property taxes this year on his family’s 320-acre farm. “I’m unfortunate enough to have to pay for the mistakes of the past leadership.”

But a darker view also pervades conversations across Beatrice’s downtown among those who still believe that the six people who were convicted are guilty, despite the pardons, the DNA evidence and the state-run investigation identifying a different killer.

“They knew too much about it to be innocent,” Karen Probst said one afternoon as she chatted with customers inside her family’s quilting store. Her family owns hundreds of acres of precious irrigated land outside Beatrice, with tax bills that she said were likely to increase by $10,000 or more.

“They had some part in it,” her daughter, Ann Freese, said.

The tangled case began in February 1985, when Wilson was found inside the apartment where she lived by herself. She had been beaten, raped and suffocated.

Wilson was the heart of her family, recalled her grandson, Bob Houseman. She volunteered at a Methodist church in town, composed little poems for her grandchildren on their birthdays and was forever snapping photos and making tape recordings at family parties to preserve the memories.

“She’s the forgotten person in this,” Houseman said one morning, standing at the counter of his family’s dry cleaning business, where he has spent 30 years answering people’s questions about his grandmother’s murder.

As the official investigation went cold, a former Beatrice police officer, Burdette Searcey, was pursuing his own private investigation, and eventually took over the case after he was hired as a Gage County sheriff’s deputy in 1989.

Searcey, who did not respond to a request for comment, focused on six mostly poor, troubled people with loose ties to Beatrice. Some had substance abuse problems and criminal records. One of the three women charged in the murder said she had been sexually assaulted multiple times as a girl and had spent her life dealing with mental illness. Another had developmental disabilities and said she had been raped by her stepfather.

“None of us were living aboveboard lives,” Gonzalez said. “We were all partyers. We were all basically chemically induced idiots. That made us disposable. That made it OK for them to throw us away.”

Gage County built its criminal case against the Beatrice Six by drawing out false confessions and manufactured memories from three of the defendants, a state-run inquiry and court reviews would later find. Investigators showed them photos of the crime scene. They dangled cooperation as a way of serving shorter sentences and avoiding the electric chair. They even urged the defendants to reach into their dreams to recall “suppressed memories” of the murder.

It was enough to convince five of the six to plead guilty or no contest in Wilson’s murder. Only one, Joseph White, took his case to trial, and he was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to life in prison after three of his co-defendants gave false testimony against him.

White never stopped insisting that he was innocent, and in 2008 he and his lawyers were able to obtain DNA tests that cleared White and the other five.

A task force led by Nebraska’s attorney general then identified the real killer as Bruce Allen Smith, who had been 22 at the time of the murder and was seen heading toward Wilson’s apartment building the night she was killed. Smith died in 1992.

After the Beatrice Six were exonerated, they filed a lawsuit against Gage County and the investigators who had put them behind bars.

Gage County spent a decade and nearly $2 million in legal fees fighting the suit, rejecting offers to settle for $15 million, before its final appeals were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court early this month. The county’s insurance will not cover the judgment, which puts taxpayers on the hook for the full $28 million.

As people around Beatrice wait for this year’s tax bills to arrive, the case boils up constantly in conversation, said Dana Hydo, whose family runs the Gems and Junk shop downtown.

“I’m amazed at how many people believe they did it,” she said one afternoon as she was tagging inventory. “I truly believe we put them in jail illegally.”

One of her customers piped up: “No way,” she said. “I think they did it.”

The Beatrice Six are not there to be part of the debate. They scattered across Nebraska and the rest of the country after being released from prison and cleared, and they do not speak much to one another. White, who spent almost 20 years in prison, was killed in a workplace accident in Alabama in 2011. One of the six still believes the false confession she gave implicating herself.

“It ruined all of our lives,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez now works as a cashier at a grocery store in the tiny town of York, Nebraska, and said the $2 million she is owed could come in handy. She needs to buy a car, see a dentist to fix her teeth and install air-conditioning in her house before Nebraska’s summer swelter descends.

But in her view, the judgment is also poisoned, the money forever rooted in the murder of one innocent woman and the wrongful convictions of six others.

“This is not something you win at the lottery, something I’m inheriting from a rich relative,” she said. “Nobody wants this.”

Gonzalez, a voracious reader, often gets to work early to read the newspapers in the grocery store break room, and not long ago came upon a letter to the editor from a Gage County farmer who argued that his taxes should not have to go up on account of someone else’s actions 30 years ago.

Gonzalez said she was struck by the irony.

“Because I know about paying for something somebody else did,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/us/beatrice-six-nebraska.html" id="4106cebc-673f-3b9d-aefd-855b2a9117a5">The New York Times</a>.

A Rural County Owes $28 Million for Wrongful Convictions. It Doesn't Want to Pay.

BEATRICE, Neb. — Kathy Gonzalez knows that many people across the cornfields and cattle ranches of eastern Nebraska believe she is a murderer. It does not change the fact that they owe her millions of dollars.

Now, with an inland sea of water surging downstream, towns along the Missouri River and beyond are stacking up sandbags and wondering whether their own levees could be the next to fail. At least 50 levees have been breached or overtopped by rivers engorged with late-winter rains and snowmelt, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.

The failures have raised questions among residents about the durability of the flood system and renewed criticism from conservation groups who say that America’s scattershot approach to flood control and development near rivers is simply setting the stage for future disasters.

Here is a look at the damage, what is at stake now, and the risks when the next floods come.

— How bad is the damage?

Counties in Iowa and Nebraska that were left underwater when the earthen walls of their levees caved in say that they have never seen such widespread damage to their flood-protection systems.

Some estimated the repair costs in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and said they had no idea how their rural communities could afford to rebuild them. Or whether they even should.

“It was catastrophic,” said Larry Hurst, director of emergency management in Mills County, Iowa, where there were eight breaches. “How are we going to fix it and who’s going to fix it? The tax base isn’t there to build a whole new levee. What are we going to do?”

— Who oversees the levees?

About 100,000 miles of levees stretch across the United States, most of them built of earth and covered with grass to protect the estimated 14 million people who live behind them, according to the National Committee on Levee Safety, which was set up by Congress in 2007.

But there is no single agency that regulates or monitors all of them, or even sets safety rules. Only about 14,800 miles of those are part of Corps programs, with the vast majority of the country’s levees falling under local or state control.

As far as what condition those levees are in, and how vulnerable they are to flooding, it is almost impossible to know. According to the National Committee on Levee Safety, there are no national policies or standards on levee safety, and there is no full assessment of their condition and performance. Only 10 states keep a list of their levees, and fewer than half have a state agency responsible for levee safety.

“We’ve adopted this piecemeal approach,” said Nicholas Pinter, a geology professor at the University of California, Davis. “We built these walls up to give the illusion of protection.”

— Why did so many fail?

From above, the lines of earthen levees that line the Missouri River in Mills County, Iowa, look like they have been decimated by a marauding army. Frigid, murky floodwater pours through huge, ragged gaps and spreads out for miles.

The county’s levees held during 2011 floods that inundated towns across the Midwest, but “this is different,” said Hurst, the county’s emergency management director.

Heavy rains from what meteorologists called a “bomb cyclone” storm that ripped across the plains fell onto frozen ground, and instead of soaking in, the rains and snowmelt poured into tiny creeks, tributaries and into the Missouri River.

Hurst said he watched the flow rate at one marker along the Missouri River soar from 16,000 cubic feet per second to 90,000. Water cascaded over the top of levees “like a waterfall,” he said, eroding the earthen banks and opening eight breaches.

Downriver, in northwest Missouri, volunteer crews and emergency workers were racing to build their own makeshift levees out of heaped dirt and sandbags in the hopes of pinning back the floodwaters. They did not hold.

Emergency officials said there were as many as 30 levee breaches in Atchison and Holt counties, and that the breaks brought walls of water rushing into tiny towns like Craig and Watson. In some places, the Missouri River now seemed to stretch 5 miles wide, said Rhonda Wiley, Atchison County’s director of emergency management.

“It just seems to be getting worse with river management,” she said. “When you’ve got that much water, it has no place to go. It goes up.”

— Should they be rebuilt?

There are no easy answers along the rivers when it comes to balancing the interests of farmers, conservation groups and growing urban populations at a time when experts say that climate change is likely to lead to heavier rains and worse flooding.

While many communities will seek to rebuild their destroyed levees, conservation groups say the repairs only buy time before the next inevitable flood comes along, and that local and federal governments should more seriously consider relocating to higher ground and placing levees and development farther away from rivers and their floodplains.

“If we were to put our levee systems farther back, we’d be able to accommodate more floodwaters and there would be less breaching, and we’d be able to restore more habitat,” said Eileen Shader, director of floodplain restoration at American Rivers. “We could end up with a healthier river.”

Scientists who study levees say the one certainty is they provide no absolute protection from flooding. Wiley, the Atchison County emergency director, said this week was a reminder.

“Everybody in the area, they understand that these levees can fail,” she said. “We’ve experienced it so many times.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/midwest-floods-levees-fail.html" id="fb80b4e0-2d84-3bcb-a571-28596bb11701">The New York Times</a>.

Anxious Wait Along Rivers: Which Levee Will Be Next?

As record-breaking floods swamped the Midwest this week, dozens of levees built to protect people from flooding have catastrophically failed. The destruction has caused billions of dollars in damage and exposed weaknesses in the country’s piecemeal approach to flood management.

It has been a summer of fear, protest and tension in this crunchy college town ever since the popular Saturday morning farmers market was jolted by allegations that a husband and wife who had been longtime sellers of organic tomatoes and kale were also white nationalists.

The accusations exploded into public view after activists and online sleuths used federal court records and the leaked archives of a far-right message board to uncover a digital trail they say connects the couple who own Schooner Creek Farm to an organization that promotes white nationalism and “white American identity.”

The rumors of white supremacy amid the stalls of clover honey and sweet corn left farmers and shoppers reeling: Not even their seemingly placid farmers market was immune from the battles over extremism convulsing the country at a time of rising alarm over white supremacist violence.

In recent weeks, residents packed public meetings to debate whether Schooner Creek should be asked to leave or allowed to stay. There were protests and counterprotests. Some decided to stay away from the turmoil. Others, like Williams farmer friend, were so disturbed by the unrest they considered arming themselves.

The situation grew so volatile that Bloomington’s mayor suspended the market late last month over public safety concerns. It abruptly short-circuited the heart of Saturday morning life in this heavily white, liberal town of 85,000 that is home to Indiana University. The market has more than 130 vendors and draws as many as 12,000 people downtown at the height of the growing season.

“It’s been the most challenging, complex, difficult situation this market has faced in its 45-year history,” said Marcia Veldman, the market coordinator.

Anti-fascist protesters showed up one weekend dressed in black to stand in front of Schooner Creek Farm’s vegetable stall. A week later, armed members of a conservative militia group drove into Bloomington to support the farm against what they called anti-fascist enemies. Online, members of white nationalist groups have seized on the story and rallied behind Schooner Creek.

Schooner Creek’s owners deny being white supremacists, and say they keep their political beliefs out of the market. They have said on social media that they are being harassed, demonized and hounded out of the farmers market by left-wing activists because of “a handful of mildly pro-white comments.” They have not been accused of any wrongdoing or violence, and say they are the ones who have become victims of “the cult of the left.”

The farmers did not respond to questions about their beliefs or political activities, but Sarah Dye, one of Schooner Creek’s owners, told the Fox 59 television station in Indianapolis that “we absolutely reject supremacy.”

“I am disgusted at the level of lies, misinformation, falsehoods and intimidation by those who do not know me or my family,” she said. Dye referred to herself as “an identitarian,” which she described as a worldview that “emphasizes the importance of identity.”

Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, described the European-rooted identitarian movement as repackaged white supremacy that opposed immigration and promoted white identity.

The sense of unease grew in early August when Bloomington police said they were investigating flyers found around town that showed a hooded Klansman and proclaimed a Klan “neighborhood watch” — a menacing reminder that one of the largest, most powerful branches of the Ku Klux Klan was once centered in Indiana. A police spokesman said they have identified no suspects and made no arrests.

“It wears on you,” Williams, the gluten-free baker, said, referring to the tension around town.

His wife, Brandi, who is biracial, said the couple began worrying for their safety after she spoke up at a public meeting. She spotted a car passing back and forth in front of their home, and now has her husband, a former jail officer, sleep in the living room some nights so he can be close to the front door. The Williamses and other couples said they have stopped bringing their children to the market.

“All the joy has been sucked out of it,” Brandi Williams said. “I do not feel safe.”

In an email, Dye, who runs Schooner Creek with her husband, Douglas Mackey, said she had no plans to leave the market despite pressure from activists who now hand out buttons that say “Don’t Buy Veggies From Nazis.”

“I have helped establish other farmers markets in the area and we have strong ties to our community,” Dye wrote. “We look forward to participating in the Bloomington Community Farmers Market for many more years to come.”

Local market vendors said there had been rumblings and puzzling outbursts involving Schooner Creek Farm since late 2016. People would silently position themselves in front of Schooner Creek’s stand or aggressively ask the owners about fascism or hating Jews. Schooner Creek’s owners told Bloomington police they were targets of intimidation by anti-fascist activists.

“I thought it was a prank,” said Susan Welsand, who sells chiles at a nearby stand. She said the uproar has turned the market into a “Trump tweet.”

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Justin Williams was baking a tray of gluten-free seeded bread for the next morning’s farmers market when his phone buzzed. It was a friend who grows organic sprouts, nervously wondering if he should bring along a shotgun to market.

Jack Healy

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