MAY JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES 9McConnell and helped set up workshops on nuts-and-bolts
tactics like organizing a precinct. She was mulling a run for
a local oice like magistrate but decided to aim higher with
some prodding from the state party.
“I always saw myself as the person who does that research
that allows policymakers to make evidence-based decisions,”
Lovell says, explaining why she decided to mount a bid. “And I
started to see less evidence in a lot of the decisions being made.
So that started to concern me.” Now she keeps in touch with
other first-time candidates in Kentucky on a private Facebook
group for educators like herself and another for women run-
ning with the support of Emerge Kentucky, an organization
that helps Democratic women seeking oice.Taking back the Texas Legislature—or for that matter,
picking up another US House seat in Alabama—is still a proj-
ect best measured in geologic time. No one recruited Seger
to run for oice, and her district isn’t on anyone’s watch list.
With no primary to worry about, her campaign was getting
off to a slow start. Her first stop on the trail would come just
a few days after we spoke, when she would steer her bright
red tractor down Main Street in the Go Texan Parade. Seger
is realistic about her chances but says, “If it’s ever going to
happen, this is probably the year it’ll happen.”
“People don’t ever want to run a race they might lose,” she
adds. “I just don’t care. If I lose, I’ll continue farming. If I win,
I will be a representative and continue farming.”ROB DOBI
VIDEO GAMESA REMOTE
CHANCE
As more immigration
hearings are held via
teleconference, thousands
of detainees never
get their day in court.tess feldman stood in an empty San
Francisco courtroom, facing a three-foot-
wide television screen. “Good morning!” she
shouted toward a camera connected to the
TV. “Can you hear me?”
A stunned-looking man in an orange
prison jumpsuit appeared on screen. An
inmate at the Mesa Verde Detention Facility
in Bakersfield, California, nearly 300 miles
away, he was facing deportation and weighing
his legal options. His father had been mur-
dered back in Oaxaca, Mexico, he told Feld-
man, and he was afraid to return. That madehim a potential candidate for asylum, but he
worried he would sit in a cell for months as
his case wended through the courts. “That
takes a long time, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” Feldman said. She checked her
phone for the time. “I’m so sorry, but we
only have one minute left to talk.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said, and walked
offscreen, shoulders slumped.
Twice a month, Feldman, a senior im-
migration attorney for a Bay Area legal
nonprofit, serves as the counsel of the
day for detainees at Mesa Verde and other