My name is Julie Castle. I am the CEO of Best Friends Animal Society and I’m writing this to declare Best Friends’ opposition to the Southern Red Sands (SRS) frac sand mining operation adjacent to Best Friends Animal Society headquarters in Kanab, Utah. We also oppose the Kane County, Kanab City and Kane County Water Conservancy District support of the SRS proposal. SRS is a Salt Lake City based LLC with undisclosed backers who are prepared to invest millions in mining leases and claims, processing facilities and mining equipment.

I am a proud Utahan through and through. My great grandfather, David Marshall Stuart arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 with the first wave of pioneers as part of the Abraham O. Smoot/George B. Wallace Company. Since then my family and I have called this great state of Utah home.

I was fortunate to attend Southern Utah University, during which time I interned in Washington, D.C., for the Senate Republican Conference, where my “beat” was covering the White House. I then interned for Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch as part of his press office. These were invaluable experiences that gave me a behind the scenes look at how government deals are made that effect the rest of us.

Best Friends is one of the three largest animal welfare organizations in the United States with a support base of hundreds of thousands of active members across the country. We are also the largest employer in Kane County and a major contributor to the regional economy. Best Friends provides full time jobs for over 400 Kanab area residents. In 2018 we paid $17.2 million in local wages and invested another $4 million into local goods and services including construction jobs. That doesn’t count any tourist dollars that the 35,000 annual visitors to Best Friends bring to local restaurants, shops, hotels and gas stations, nor does it include the numerous volunteers and visitors who invest in second homes.

We have been voted Harris Poll Interactive, Animal Welfare Brand of The Year for six of the last nine years, a reputation that enhances public interest our work and our unique location in southern Utah’s red rock country.

We are proud to invest in a community that offers so much in return — spectacular beauty, rich history and an unwavering spirit of generosity and integrity among our community members many of whose roots run deep.

However, the health and quality of life of our community is at great risk right now.

SRS has acquired access to 1,200 acre-feet of water/year in leases via rights held by the city of Kanab and the conservancy district. Kane County Planning and Zoning has also waived the project along. Their plan is bulldoze trees and other vegetation and to strip mine sand for use in oil and gas fracking extraction in the Uintah Basin of Utah and the San Juan Basin in New Mexico.

The potential scope of the Kanab-area mining claims held by SRS includes 12,000 acres of environmentally sensitive public land that abuts Best Friends Animals Society’s 3,700-acre animal sanctuary north of Kanab.

As has been documented by a hydrologic study and confirmed by Utah Geological Survey (USG), SRS water extraction will, without question, reduce spring flows that are critical to Best Friends operation as well as reducing the water level in Kanab Creek. As problematic as that is, it pales in comparison to the real threat posed by the scope of the sand mining and the reclamation plan.

The 12,000 Kanab-area acres of the proposed mine is situated in the sand hills that include dune formations, slot canyons and riparian areas. The entire area overlays the upper and lower Navajo Aquifers, the only source of spring and well water for Kanab. The sand hills and dunes are the recharge zone, via rain fall and snow melt for the springs that are primary sources of summer flows in Kanab Creek, the only source of irrigation for Kanab farmers.

Frac sand mining and cleaning is known to release fine silica particulates into the air. These airborne particles will be a significant health risk to hundreds of our community members who work and volunteer at Best Friends, many of whom work outside all day. It will have a profoundly negative impact on our 35,000 visitors and volunteers every year.

Even worse, the SRS reclamation plan involves replacing the strip-mined sand hills and dunes with the unwanted sand, clay and silt mix that has been separated from the desired frac sand through washing with flocculent or chemical cleaner that separates out the unwanted material. The flocculant, polyacrylamide, while nontoxic itself, can break down in the environment into acrylamide which is a neurotoxin and is classed as a probable carcinogen. So, a mix of clay, silt and rejected sand, coated in a potential neurotoxin is what will be spread across 12,000 acres of the Navajo aquifer. This area is also a pristine recreation area for off road vehicles, hiking, hunting and grazing.

Rainfall and snowmelt that seeps through this layer can carry this poison into our water supply and that of the city of Kanab. It stands to eventually contaminate our springs and our wells. Are we willing to compromise the health and well-being of our community members, young and old, just so a few remote investors can profit at our collective expense?

So what exactly is the value proposition of this mining operation for our community? SRS is offering 40 shift jobs and $150,000 - $391,000 per year to the city in water leases, depending on actual use, in exchange for risking the health of our citizens, reducing spring flows, stripping away the sand and vegetation from undisturbed wildlife habitat and a popular recreation area, contaminating the aquifer and threatening the viability of the county’s largest employer which provides more than a $21 million annual financial infusion into the local economy. How does any of this make sense?

Julie Castle is chief executive officer of Best Friends Animal Society.

Jacob Weitlauf’s big number in this year’s “Saturday’s Voyeur” is a fast-paced vocabulary lesson.

As the University of Utah student performs “50 Ways to Name Your Gender,” words appear on a screen behind the stage. Trans. Queer. And then lesser-known terms: Verself, terself, perself. Hirs, ze. Tri-gen, high-femme, bi-gen and neutrois.

“Call me a non-bine, no he-she combine; We like being defined, just listen to Ve,” Weitlauf sings. “It isn’t my member, that speaks to my gender; You gotta remember, we just wanna be free.”

Weitlauf’s casting marks the first time in the annual satire’s 41-year history that a nonbinary actor is performing as a nonbinary character. And the story arc of Weitlauf’s character, Jayden, is essentially a public service announcement — educating and enlightening Salt Lake Acting Company audiences about gender identity, gender-neutral pronouns and a growing but still marginalized community.

Weitlauf, a third-year student in the U.’s Musical Theater Program who uses the pronouns “they” and “them,” said they were surprised by the role.

“‘Saturday’s Voyeur’ is known for its progressive approach to liberal politics, and representation of the gay male narrative has often been a part of that,” they said in an email.

“However, there are very few characters within the theater world that are written as nonbinary, and most Utah audiences haven’t been exposed to a story like Jayden’s.”

A preference for pronouns

By December of each year, “Voyeur” director Cynthia Fleming said, creators Nancy Borgenicht and Allen Nevins might have a concept in mind for the annual musical, a sharp critique of national and local politics, religion and culture.

But that idea often changes and the show takes shape as they get closer to rehearsals. While looking over 8-by-10-inch photos of the 2019 cast with Nevins, Fleming noticed Weitlauf’s picture on the table.

“I turned to Al, the playwright, and said, ‘Jacob’s pronouns are they and them,’” she said, explaining she wanted to make sure Nevins knew to use the gender nonspecific pronouns. “Because when an individual’s preferred pronouns are knowingly not used or acknowledged by others, it creates an unsafe environment.”

Having 21-year-old Weitlauf, a SLAC newcomer, in the cast inspired Jayden’s character and story.

Julie Silvestro Waite plays Sister Jane, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, who initially dismisses requests to refer to Jayden as “they” and “them.”

After Jayden refers to a New York Times article describing more than 50 gender-neutral pronouns, Jane groans, “How is a person my age ever going to figure out 57, and counting, gender types, weird pronouns and made-up names?!”

Although her age isn’t clearly stated, Silvestro Waite said in an email that Jane likely is close to 40, making her an older millennial or younger Gen Xer.

More than 60% of Americans in those generations are likely to have heard about the use of gender-neutral pronouns, according to a January 2019 Pew Research Center report.

About three-quarters of young people — born after 1996 — say they have heard about the practice. Half of America’s boomers, now 54 and older, and nearly half of those over 73 in the silent generation are aware that some people use gender-neutral pronouns.

But data for the number of people who identify as nonbinary is limited and flawed.

While the character Sister Jane might not fully understand gender identity or her own microaggressions toward Jayden, the “Voyeur” character Brother D intentionally singles Jayden out and ridicules them, like in the following scene.

Brother D: It’s this queer and this illegal that displeases the Lord. And tell this gay that he needs to shape up or ship out and repent!

Jayden: Brother, I respectfully ask you to refer to me as they, not he.

Brother D: And tell him to take a wife and have a quiver of 10 children.

Jayden: Excuse me, but I no longer identify with he and him and should be addressed using the pronouns “they” and “them.” I’m gender nonspecific.

Brother D: What is this, some new little, pervert cult come to Utah?

‘Beautiful collaboration’

Because “Voyeur” undergoes revisions during workshops and rehearsals, actors can advocate for their characters and their journeys, Weitlauf said. They played a significant role in educating the cast and crew and in crafting Jayden’s scenes.

Many people still confuse sex and gender — while sex is biological, gender is an expression, Weitlauf said.

“Nancy and Allen were upfront in their lack of knowledge about current conversations around gender identity and realized that most of their audiences were in the same position,” they said.

“This was as much of a learning process for them as it is for most patrons that walk into the theater.”

While Borgenicht and Nevins researched gender identity, Fleming said, Weitlauf’s input was invaluable.

“I was constantly checking in with Jacob, and then sending notes to Al, and then Al would revise [the script],” she said. “ ... It was a beautiful, beautiful collaboration.”

Sharing their own experiences and educating audiences through Jayden’s perspective has been a special treat — but it’s not without its challenges, Weitlauf said.

It was important to find the right language to share newer ideas about gender politics, and each word is important because audiences can digest only so much new information at once, they said.

And they wanted to find the balance between Jayden’s humor and advocating for an underrepresented community.

“Laughter brings people together like nothing else and is often the easier way to make a message stick,” Weitlauf said.

“However, the reality is that a lot of gender politics aren’t a joke — the LGBTQIA+ (especially transgender individuals of color) face violence and discrimination because of the ignorance of many communities.”

‘Empathetic recognition and acceptance’

Toward the end of the musical, as Sister Jane and Jayden perform “Blue Skies,” she uses their preferred pronoun for the first time.

And as they sing, Jayden finds self-acceptance.

Although resistant at first, Jane is willing to learn, Silvestro Waite said. She, too, is learning to shift readily into using correct pronouns and new terminology.

“It’s a struggle for a lot of people and can really be frustrating on both sides,” Silvestro Waite said. “But the more we talk about it and the more we can put that language out there, the more commonplace it will become. It just takes awareness and good intentions.”

“Blue Skies” follows a line about the LDS Church wanting Jayden to go to conversion therapy, a widely discredited practice that seeks to change a person’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity.

The church teaches that same-sex attraction itself is not a sin — but acting on it is. It has disavowed past therapies to change orientation, although therapists with LDS Family Services are willing to help members who “desire to reconcile same-sex attraction with their religious belief,” a spokesman has said. Earlier this year, it abandoned a policy that deemed same-sex married couples “apostates” and had generally barred their children from baby blessings and baptisms.

Fleming, the director, said “Voyeur” calls out the church “mostly because of their past statements, their past rules, their past behavior ... how they regard homosexuals or the LGBTQ community and gender in general, and how hurtful it’s been for many, many people.”

The hope, she said, is that the show can be a catalyst for change. And Silvestro Waite believes that change may already be happening.

Sister Jane, she said, represents Latter-day Saints who love the church and want to be obedient, but also are more progressive members who recognize problems around them and don’t feel their voices are being heard.

And if Jane can change, why can’t the church — or our communities, or ourselves?

“It’s an empathetic recognition and acceptance of every individual,” Silvestro Waite said, “which in turn binds us together as a human race and always makes our communities stronger.”

Fleming said she once teared up watching Weitlauf perform during rehearsals as she imagined a gender nonbinary audience member seeing them on stage.

“To be able to have perhaps a role model or be inspired, it kind of got to me in the best way,” she said.

‘I left the theater on a high’

Since moving to Salt Lake City, Weitlauf said, they have been surrounded by a supportive and open-minded community. That wasn’t always the case in their native Kentucky. Weitlauf said they receive more pushback on social media from people they knew while growing up than they do from new people they meet.

And while some people might be confused about Weitlauf’s pronouns, they often find people are willing to learn and understand.

After a recent weekend show, an elderly woman made her way to Weitlauf.

She is an active Latter-day Saint, she explained, and she often finds herself defending the gay community. Her nephew is gay, she said, and she loves him dearly.

The woman said she goes to shows like “Voyeur” to “keep herself educated so that she doesn’t fall into the habitual ignorance she sees within her community,” Weitlauf recalled.

She then asked for additional help understanding the pronouns Weitlauf sang about earlier.

“After engaging in conversation with her for a minute,” they said, “she felt confident that she would be able to accurately address people she meets that don’t identify within the gender binary.”

Then the two hugged.

“I left the theater on a high,” Weitlauf said, “... knowing that I was able to help someone open their mind.”

SEEING ‘SATURDAY’S VOYEUR’

The 2019 version of “Saturday’s Voyeur” ranges from President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia and his love of Fox News and Twitter, to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ new insistence on the use of its full name, to the Utah Legislature’s replacement of voter-backed initiatives and Mitt Romney’s predestined Senate victory.

When • Now until Sept. 15

Where • Salt Lake Acting Company, 168 W. 500 North

Tickets • $50-$60

Information • saltlakeactingcompany.org

JOIN THE SLAC PARTY

Salt Lake Acting Company’s annual fundraiser includes a performance of “Saturday’s Voyeur,” food, drinks, meeting the cast, and live and silent auctions.

When • Aug. 10; party at 5:30 p.m., show at 7 p.m.

Where • Salt Lake Acting Company, 168 W. 500 North

Tickets • $100-$125

Details • saltlakeactingcompany.org/support-slac/the-party

Millcreek • The patient had been sedated, and that’s when the anesthesiologist decided to ask David Petersen something.

“He’s like, ‘Hey, your building is in the news,’” Petersen, an eye surgeon, recalled Thursday. “Are you a part of that whole thing?”

That “whole thing” is the fraud the owners of Washakie Renewable Energy have admitted to while pleading guilty in federal court. Prosecutors say the company wrongly obtained $511 million from a government biofuels program and laundered it through businesses and real estate, including the purchase of the medical building at 4400 S. 700 East where Petersen leases space for his practice. The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a notice it plans to seize the building to help reimburse taxpayers.

There’s no allegation the ophthalmologists, optometrists and opticians in the building had any role in the crimes, but since The Salt Lake Tribune reported Monday on the government’s plans to take the real estate, staffers in the eye practices say they have received calls from concerned patients. They also worry that patients may not be calling them for appointments at all.

The Washakie owners are members of the polygamous sect known as the Kingston Group, or the Davis County Cooperative Society and the Latter Day Church of Christ. The eye care professionals and their staff say they’ve also fielded questions on whether they and their practices are part of the sect, too. They have tried to assure everyone they are not.

“We’re just innocent bystanders,” said Kevin Charlton, one of the physicians at Rocky Mountain Eye Care Associates, which leases space in the building.

Janet Gardner, who works in billing for Rocky Mountain Eye Care Associates, said Monday she received a phone call from a patient who asked if she had read The Tribune that morning.

“She had some kind of surgery coming up with Dr. Charlton,” Gardner said, “and she was worried he would not be in business.”

Donna Hoppe, office manager at Rocky Mountain Eye Care Associates, said she fielded four similar calls Monday and Tuesday. Staffers also worry that physicians elsewhere may no longer be referring patients to them.

“We live by referrals,” said Petersen, whose specialty at Rocky Mountain Eye Care Associates is correcting misaligned eyes. “Ninety percent of the patients I see here have been referred.”

The medical offices at 4400 S. 700 East are independent eye care practices, some of which can trace their beginnings to before the building was constructed in the mid-1980s. When the building came up for sale in 2013, the tenants banded together and put in a bid.

Kari Rasmussen, practice administrator at Rocky Mountain Retina Consultants, said their offer was $2.3 million — close to market value. Members of the Kingston family offered more, paying $3.1 million cash, Rasmussen said. The new owners then incorporated a company that is the legal owner of the property and gave that company a name similar to many of the eye practices, calling it Rocky Mountain Eye Center LLC. The building owners did not return messages seeking comment.

No federal court documents in the fraud specifically discuss the building or Rocky Mountain Eye Center LLC, but in their plea agreements, Washakie owners Jacob and Isaiah Kingston have acknowledged laundering money through other businesses and using inflated invoices to do so. Other businesses, homes and agricultural property with no direct ties to Washakie, but whose purchases were financed by other companies with links to the Kingston Group, also have appeared on the list of properties to be seized.

Petersen said he paid attention to news of Washakie for years, wondering what would happen to his eye practice if that company’s problems created some for the larger sect.

“It certainly made us nervous,” Petersen said.

The owners of the eye center will be allowed to make a defense for keeping the building. If the government does take the property, the eye professionals interviewed Thursday said they have been told by their attorneys that existing leases would be honored. The professionals have not heard from the feds.

Petersen tries to see the government’s potential seizure of the building as an opportunity.

“We’re still hoping we can acquire it,” Petersen said, “which is what we always wanted.”

Gone are the days when the Utah Royals FC picked up 13 points in its first six games. Gone are the days when the narrative was how stingy the Royals were on defense, racking up clean sheet after clean sheet after clean sheet. The team with championship aspirations now sits seventh in the nine-team National Women’s Soccer League with only 11 games remaining in the 2019 season.

Lately, the Royals have been creating many more opportunities to score compared to earlier in the season, but not finishing them. In the process, Utah has given up seven goals in the last four games. It appears that in their desire to put more balls in the back of the net, opponents are taking advantage of the spaces that creates in their defense.

“The more we are trying to press, get forward, get our chances, we are creating more,” midfielder Desiree Scott said after last Saturday’s loss to the North Carolina Courage. “Obviously when we're pushing numbers forward, that's going to leave gaps and holes. So I think it's finding that balance of still being that defensive rock that we know we can be [and] not getting stretched while still creating those chances.”

Right now, the Royals are somewhat caught in between two styles of play. Goals win games, but so does not allowing them. It’s a balance every team in the league has to strike, and Utah has found difficulty in recent weeks figuring out how to marry the two.

But that doesn’t mean team has completely lost sight of what it does best.

“I think that our M.O. or what Utah Royals are known for is being hard defensively,” forward Amy Rodriguez said. “We’ve had a few little mistakes here and there in the last couple of games that have led to some goals. But I wouldn’t say that we’re getting away from our identity.”

Utah Royals midfielder Desiree Scott and striking a balance between creating more chances and locking down defensively. #URFC #NWSL #woso pic.twitter.com/gFy7eIstBj

— Alex Vejar (@AlexVReporting) August 2, 2019

What’s happening to the Royals right now could possibly be explained by the fact that they just got back three integral players in Becky Sauerbrunn, Kelley O’Hara and Christen Press — they were in France for more than two months winning a Women’s World Cup — and are going through an adjustment period. Rodriguez said something similar happened after she returned to the now-defunct FC Kansas City from the 2015 World Cup win.

“We play differently with Press and Becky and Kelley, so that is a readjustment,” Rodriguez said. “But if anything, they’re contributing to our team in massive ways. We need to figure out how to get the best out of them and us and collective as a team [to] make it work so we can put three points on the board.”

There’s been disappointment emanating from the Royals locker room after the last few games. The team knows they’re creating enough chances to win. But coach Laura Harvey has said that the goals her team has conceded are avoidable.

Harvey said she thinks creating more chances is a direct result of having her best players on the field at the same time, particularly against the Courage. She seemed to like that development, but it comes down to the other side of the field.

“When we have our best players here, and we want to play expansively, we have to make sure that we give nothing away on our end,” Harvey said. “That comes from being really diligent defensively that not giving anything away.”

Rodriguez said the key to balancing offense and defense is focus — no taking breaks, no momentary lapses, no taking feet off the gas. She wants the Royals to be a team that no opponent wants to face because they’re going to keep imposing their will on the field and not stop.

Rodriguez believes that is still a possibility for the Royals.

“I think that we can be both,” Rodriguez said. "I think that we can be tight defensively and also an attacking threat. But it just comes down to not even taking a minute off in a game and just head down, work hard. That’s the identity that the Utah Royals want and that’s what we’re going to hopefully show out there.”

Salt Lake City • Former Vice President Joe Biden says he’ll make a campaign stop in Utah at the end of September.

The Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign said Friday in a news release that Biden will be in Park City on Sept. 28. Details about the event weren’t made public.

Biden is set to make 15 campaign stops in September, starting in Iowa and finishing in Nevada, Utah and Colorado.

The campaign says Biden is trying to visit all the states holding primaries on Super Tuesday in March. Utah is among them after lawmakers moved the state's primary up several months earlier.

Biden is considered a front-runner in a packed field of Democratic candidates.

Utah leans heavy Republican and hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Washington • More than half of Democrats support launching an impeachment inquiry, according to a tally by The Associated Press — a strong signal of ongoing liberal frustration with President Donald Trump but a milestone that seems unlikely to move House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Rep. Salud Carbajal of California said Friday that he would support such an inquiry — the beginning of proceedings that could lead up to an impeachment vote — tipping the tally to 118, or a majority of the 235 House Democrats. But that comes as Pelosi has remained steadfast that she wants to finish investigations that are already underway before making a final decision. She has signaled since she became speaker in January that she is unwilling to move toward impeachment without a groundswell of public support.

Impeachment supporters had hoped that former special counsel Robert Mueller's testimony last month would be the tipping point, and more than two dozen Democrats have called for a beginning to proceedings since then. But those calls were muddled by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler's assertion that the committee is essentially already doing the work of impeachment, with or without a formal House vote.

"Too much has been made of the phrase impeachment inquiry," Nadler said, noting the panel's ongoing probes of the president and his associates.

Still, the calls for an inquiry show a growing dissatisfaction among members of the caucus, even among some of Pelosi's allies, with what is being done to stop what they see as egregious behavior by the president.

The calls for impeachment grew not only after Mueller's testimony, which detailed episodes in which Trump attempted to stop the Russia investigation, but also after Trump's racist tweets earlier this month urging four female House Democrats of color to "go back" to where they came from.

Democrats would need 218 votes to approve impeachment charges against the president, and the Republican Senate would be unlikely to vote to convict.

No Republicans have called for Trump’s impeachment or an inquiry, though Republican-turned-Independent Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan announced his support for impeachment shortly after he said he read Mueller’s findings about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Spring football practice ended in April at Marshall University in West Virginia. Offensive lineman Alex Locklear, seeking a different experience for his last season of college eligibility, placed his name in the NCAA transfer portal and waited to see what would happen.

No dating app ever worked this efficiently. His phone started ringing right away.

“Utah actually hit me up before I was able to clean my locker out,” Locklear marveled this week, as he started practicing with the Utes. “They showed interest, like, literally the first minute.”

Utah coach Kyle Whittingham expressed concern after spring practice about his offensive line’s depth, and he did something about it. Within a month, the Utes landed Locklear and former Washington State lineman Noah Osur-Myers.

With his No. 1 kicker having given up football, Whittingham also invited UCLA graduate transfer Andrew Strauch to compete as a walk-on in August, with the promise of a scholarship if he earns the job. And in July, only three weeks before preseason camp, Utah added former Southern Methodist tight end Hunter Thedford.

Welcome to this “different world” of recruiting, as Whittingham described it last spring, when the Utes were losing transfers such as receiver Siaosi Mariner (who would sign with Utah State) and running back Armand Shyne (Texas Tech).

Player movement is nothing new in college sports, and Utah is not exempt. Whittingham even lost his nephew, defensive lineman Jackson Cravens, who transferred to Boise State this summer. What’s different is the grad transfer phenomenon, with athletes able to play immediately at the next stop as a reward for completing their degrees.

So Whittingham and his staff began filling personnel needs with a modern method. Utah would have had at least one grad transfer in the 2019 starting lineup, but linebacker Manny Bowen retired from football this week. The other newcomers will try to create opportunities for themselves, with Thedford perhaps the most likely transfer to have a regular role as a blocker in offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig’s scheme.

As Locklear’s story suggests, Whittingham assigned a staff member to monitor the transfer portal, almost minute by minute.

“Absolutely, watches it every day. Every day,” Whittingham said. “And he reports to me. And the transfer portal is not really well organized. It's just kind of haphazardly put in there. … There's no real systematic approach to it. They just throw names in there. So it's a tedious job.”

Then comes the competition for players — although, as Whittingham pointed out, not every player finds a new destination. And his policy is that once a player enters the portal, he’s gone from Utah.

Locklear played in 35 games over three seasons at Marshall, a Group of Five program in Conference USA, but started only two games. He was not promised a starting job as a senior, according to The Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, W.Va., although the newspaper credited him with good work in a 38-20 win over South Florida in the Gasparilla Bowl as the Thundering Herd rushed for 282 yards.

Locklear suddenly was in demand. “Almost immediately, I started getting phone contact from places all over the nation,” he said.

He chose Utah, with the opportunity to play for line coach Jim Harding in a Power Five program. Osur-Myers, who missed Washington State’s 2018 season with a shoulder injury, moved from one Pac-12 school to another in a similarly brief process.

“Life in the portal for me was pretty quick and painless,” Osur-Myers said. “So once Utah reached out, I kind of focused my energy on them. I landed here, and it’s a good fit.”

Thedford picked the Utes after studying Ludwig’s scheme at Vanderbilt, where a “12” personnel package (one running back and two tight ends) was a big component of the offense. He became a late addition, Whittingham said, after the staff determined “deficiencies based on what Andy wants to do, based on our personnel, what we lack.”

Thedford spent two months in the portal. “Summer was difficult,” he said. “It was a long process, finding a home. I knew I’d find a school to land at; the worst thing was not having a team to work out with. That’s what worried me the most. But I ended up where I ended up, so I’m fine.”

The 6-foot-6, 260-pound Thedford is expected to function mainly as an extra blocker, having caught only three passes as an SMU junior. That job description may disguise him as a receiver. That happened last September, when he scored the winning two-point conversion in overtime against Navy — coached by Ken Niumatalolo, the father of Ute tight end Ali’i Niumatalolo.

Utah tight end Hunter Thedford on how studying Andy Ludwig's Vandy offense made his move from SMU appealing. pic.twitter.com/6NKeUmQHaO

— Kurt Kragthorpe (@tribkurt) August 2, 2019

Saoirse Kennedy Hill, the 22-year-old granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy, died Thursday at the family's compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, a family member confirmed to The Washington Post.

Authorities are investigating the "unattended death," which was reported early Thursday afternoon.

"Our hearts are shattered by the loss of our beloved Saoirse," the Kennedy family said in a statement to The Post. "Her life was filled with hope, promise and love."

The Cape and Islands District Attorney's Office said police responded to a home on Marchant Avenue, where the Kennedy compound is located, according to the Boston Herald.

"The matter remains under investigation by Barnstable Police and State Police detectives assigned to the District Attorney's Office," assistant district attorney Tara Miltimore said in the statement.

Officials did not identify the person or indicate a cause of death.

According to CNN, Hyannis Fire Lt. David Webb said a person was transported to the Cape Cod Hospital on Thursday after a call for assistance from 28 Marchant Ave. Hill's grandmother, Ethel Kennedy, 91, lives at the residence, the New York Times reported.

Hill was the daughter of Courtney Kennedy Hill and Paul Hill, an Irishman who was wrongly imprisoned for 15 years after he and three others were coerced into confessing to deadly bombings in England in 1974. Saoirse Kennedy Hill shared her father's passion for soccer and the two regularly attended games together at RFK Stadium, a venue in Washington named after her late grandfather, The Post's Steven Goff reported in 2014. Before she was enrolled in prep school in Massachusetts, Hill also played in Washington's largest youth soccer league, D.C. Stoddert Soccer.

At the time of her death, the 22-year-old was a student at Boston College, a spokesman told the Boston Globe. A LinkedIn profile matching her name said she was a junior at the private university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, "with a passion for the study of mass media and communication."

"I seek a career where I can merge my studies with my interest in politics and contribute to the national dialogue on the issues that are most important to me through TV, radio, music, and film," the account read.

The Kennedy family said in its statement that Hill cared deeply about human rights and women's empowerment causes, adding that she "found great joy in volunteer work, working alongside indigenous communities to build schools in Mexico."

"The world is a little less beautiful today," Ethel Kennedy said in the family's statement.

The Kennedy family's storied past includes a number of untimely deaths and calamities. In 1944, Joseph Kennedy Jr., the older brother of former president John F. Kennedy, was killed at 29 when his plane went down during World War II. Four years later, his 28-year-old sister Kathleen Kennedy also died in a plane crash. In the 1960s, President Kennedy and his brother Robert, a senator, were both assassinated.

Since then, other members of the Kennedy family have died young in incidents ranging from a drug overdose to a skiing accident. In 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette were killed after their plane crashed while en route to Martha's Vineyard.

On Thursday, the Kennedys once again found themselves mourning the loss of one of their own.

"She lit up our lives with her love, her peals of laughter and her generous spirit," the family said in its statement about Hill. "We will love and miss her forever."

_ _ _

The WashingtonPost’s Tim Elfrink contributed to this report.

In June, I published a book (“This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto”) arguing that immigration is a form of reparations, drawing forth a fusillade of hatred — on Twitter, in my inbox, under the rocks of 4chan and Reddit — suggesting that I return to India. One reviewer on Amazon called for me to be “skinned alive” and to go back to my “turd-world country.” Someone else tweeted, “This cockroach needs sent back to whatever s--- hole he crawled out of.”

Meanwhile, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference,said I had argued that "immigrants should not join the mainstream or try and preserve and protect what makes America great, but should just take over from the 'white power structure.'" (I've said no such thing, of course.) Wax accused immigrants like me of being culturally inferior: "Most inhabitants of the Third World don't necessarily share our ideas and beliefs . . . Our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites."

I’ve been told to “go back” ever since 1977, when I enrolled in an extravagantly racist all-boys Catholic school in Queens, N.Y. — birthplace of President Donald Trump, who recently became the biggest, loudest mouthpiece for this line of rhetoric when he tweeted that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” The idea is: White Americans get to decide who is allowed to come in and what rules we are to follow. If you come here, don’t complain. Be grateful we took you in. “Go back” is a line that’s intended to put immigrants in our place - or rather, to remind us that our place in this country is contingent, that we are beholden to those who came here earlier.

To this I say: No, we are not. I take my place in America — an imperfect place — and I make it my own; there’s a Constitution that protects my right to do so. I will not genuflect at the white American altar. I will not bow and scrape before my supposed benefactors. I understand the soul of this nation just as well, if not better, than they do: a country that stole the futures of the people who are now arriving at its borders, a cacophonous country, an exceptional country, but one that seems determined to continually sabotage its journey towards a more perfect union. Nobody powerful ever gave the powerless anything just because they asked politely, and immigrants don’t come hat-in-hand. I am an uppity immigrant. I am entitled to be here. Deal with it.

Should today’s migrants be “grateful” to the countries that caused them to move in the first place, the ones that despoiled their homelands and made them unsafe and unlivable? For example, in Somalia — birthplace of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. — the United States sent $1 billion dollars to the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, and the ensuing civil war quite literally blew up Omar’s childhood. She should be grateful that her family had to escape their land and their people, and live in a tent in a refugee colony for four years? Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., should be grateful that her parents had to leave the West Bank and seek shelter in the country principally responsible for backing (and sending billions annually to) the government that occupies their hometown? Central American immigrants, too, should be grateful to the United States? An American banana company, for instance, owned 42 percent of all the land in Guatemala, and for decades Washington replaced democratically elected Latin leaders with dictators more malleable to its will. Now, at our southern border, we turn away people seeking asylum from the consequences of those policies.

The West has despoiled country after country through colonialism, illegal wars, rapacious corporations and unchecked carbon emissions. And now their desperate migrants are supposed to be grateful to be let in by the back door at the mansions of the despoilers, mansions built with the stolen treasure of the migrants' homelands?

It's not exactly all wine and roses for the immigrants who get to America, either. Never in my 42 years here has anti-immigrant sentiment run so strong. For many immigrants, particularly the skilled ones, America is just one of many countries vying for their attention. But once people get here, they find a broken health-care system, some of the worst infrastructure in the developed world, mediocre urban public schools and a judicial system of mass incarceration that disproportionately targets its poorest and weakest. They find a culture where people don't respect their elders and where a successful life is prescribed by people like Amy Chua as "the gaining of money and position."Most of all, they experience a profound, pervasive sense of alienation and loneliness, in a culture where people live behind closed doors and don't know their neighbors.

Immigrants can address these problems. (We do not come empty-handed, mine host!) We are businessmen, infantrymen, doctors, lawyers, elected officials, artists. My tribe — Indian Americans — has the highest average income and educational achievement of any group in the country. My family moved here in the 1970s, and America is the better for it, so I claim the right to reside here by manifest destiny, for myself, my cousins and uncles and children. For this, I am told that I don’t know my place.

Don't I?

Having come here, I’ve stayed, because I fell in love with America. It was a passion that started the summer after the fourth grade in Mumbai, when I first read “Huckleberry Finn.” Five years later, I lit out for the Territory, as Huck says — I moved to America. I am in love with the profound emptiness of the high desert on the California-Nevada border, a sense of space I have felt nowhere else. With what Hemingway did to language — prose that freed mine from English circumlocution and ornamentation. With the humor of “Seinfeld” and the exquisite sadness of Miles Davis’s “Flamenco Sketches.” With the neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens, where I grew up in a building in which people who had been killing each other just before they got on the plane were now sharing each other’s foods, their kids dating each other. With the families of the victims of a 1991 massacre by a Chinese foreign student at my alma mater, the University of Iowa; these families,a month later, invited all the other Chinese foreign students over for Thanksgiving dinner, because they wanted to show the demagogues: If they didn’t hold a grudge, no one else should. With the people of Raleigh, N.C., who elected my brother-in-law, Jay Chaudhuri, to the state Senate — a brown-skinned man running against a white opponent in a district that’s 82 percent white. With the scrum and tumble of robust political debate: this messy mix, this redneck rondeau, this barbaric yawp. For these and a thousand other American excellences, I am not so much grateful as I am — deeply, head-over-heels — in love.

As I am in love with many things about the country of my birth, India, or other places where I have lived: the green hills of England; the lights along the Seine in Paris; the samba bars of Brazil. I am grateful to those countries and their people for showing me their wonders. The Earth, it is a marvelous place. To the 64 percentof Americans who've never left the country: You should try it sometime. This beautiful blue-green oasis in the universe belongs to all of us.

But in all my travels, I never thought I could be English, French or Brazilian, the way I can be American. I don't know if an American who moves to India can truly feel Indian. I love America most of all because it is a country made up of all the other countries. This is the American exceptionalism. This is what I will fight with all my power as a writer to defend.

I will never let anyone — least of all a racist failed businessman and television-huckster son of a slumlord from Queens and an immigrant from Scotland - define my Americanness. I am an American, Kolkata-born. I will call my adopted country loudly, with all my strength, to account, as in my last book I called India to account for its shabby neglect of its cities and rampant political violence. This is part of the obligations of citizenship, as well as the covenant of my guild. (As the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifertnoted, for anybody else, not to tell the truth can be a tactical maneuver. But a writer who is not telling the truth — even if he is just staying silent — is lying.)

We are all Americans now, for better or worse. My critics may not like my being here, but they're stuck with me, as I'm stuck with them. Trump is stuck with Omar as she is with Trump, and they're both getting paid to move the country forward. How do we work together? Those who came before will have to make space for those who are coming now. Both will become richer, in all senses of the word.

There is hope for this more perfect union, if you know where to look. The Jackson Heights Jewish Center, a conservative synagogue, has hosted Passover celebrations and bar mitzvahs since immigrant Jews moved to the neighborhood in the 1920s.These days, there aren't as many Jews in the area since they prospered and moved to the suburbs. So the center now offers services for many religions, including Islam, and the space echoes with verses from the Koran, honoring the God that all the children of Abraham worship, and resonates with Pentecostal and Hindu chanting. The clash of civilizations is heard all the time in Jackson Heights, and it makes a joyous sound. We should all be dancing to its beat.

Suketu Mehta is an associate professor of journalism at New York University, and the author, most recently, of “This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto.”

@suketumehta

The verbal gymnastics used by pro-abortion advocates are an exercise in obfuscation — and the recent responses to Abortion-Free Utah’s new campaign demonstrate this.

There are two primary questions at the core of the abortion issue. First, what is the status of the developing human being; and second, when is it acceptable to end the life of the developing human being.

The discussions these two questions generate are difficult to have if the unborn baby is referred to using dehumanizing rhetoric. For years, Planned Parenthood called an unborn child “a clump of cells.” This description has failed as developing technology has revealed the astonishing and advanced development of human babies in utero. By week four, the baby’s eyes and ears are beginning to form, and it has a brain and a beating heart. By week six, it has fingers and toes.

Imagine encountering such a being on another planet — the world would erupt in applause at the discovery of an undisputed life. Here on Earth, however, humans at this stage of development are often referred to as “an inconvenience” or “annoyance” that can be easily and rapidly dispatched with little disregard for the life being ended.

Those favoring abortion still cling to terms such as “a pregnancy” and “fetus” in order to dehumanize the growing baby. One Democrat state representative even claimed that babies do not exist inside the womb (which probably comes as a shock to millions of pregnant women and their doctors) and referred to those not yet born as “utero potential individuals.” It takes significant effort to conjure up awkward terms that attempt to describe a baby without admitting that it is a baby.

The second discussion centers on when it is acceptable to end the life of that developing human being — and again, pro-abortion activists employ a range of euphemisms in an attempt to argue that electively ending the life of unborn children is acceptable.

The latest term is “reproductive choice,” which ignores the fact that the choice to reproduce has already been made. Abortionists somehow believe that merely employing this term gives them the moral high ground to end the life of the child that resulted from exercising such choice. A parent does not have the moral right to terminate their child’s life, whether one month after birth or one month before, merely out of a belief that they are entitled to the “choice.”

Another popular refrain — “my body, my right” — also fails to acknowledge in any way that there are two bodies involved. A woman’s right to control her body does not give her the right to destroy the body she invited to develop within her.

We also hear the claim that “women will never be free until they can have safe, legal abortions.” This doublespeak fails on many levels. First, there is rarely a discussion about the lifelong psychological impact upon a woman due to such a decision, on top of the physical impact. Nothing will ever erase the memory of her child. Second, calling abortion “safe” ignores the fact that a living human being — an unborn baby — dies. Abortion is certainly never safe for its victims. Finally, abortionists trumpet the fact that abortion is legal. So was slavery. So was child labor. So were a whole host of things that we are glad are no longer legal.

Finally, abortion advocates tell us, “You have no right to tell me what do to.” Again, this is a complete failure to acknowledge that laws govern the preservation of life and always have. We have every right to pass laws that you cannot murder your 3-year-old child, or your son with Down Syndrome, or your month-old baby. Indeed, one of the primary roles of government is to protect life — and an unborn baby is a living human being.

At the core of the abortion debate is the fact that a living human child is growing. That baby has dignity. It has the right to live. And except in extremely rare circumstances, that right to live surpasses everything.

Semantics aside, abortion is the poisoning or dismemberment of a living, growing human baby. All the war of words will never change this simple truth.

Merrilee Boyack is chair of Abortion-Free Utah, executive director of Family Watch International, an attorney, and author.

Three environmental groups are suing the federal Bureau of Land Management, arguing the agency reopened thousands of acres in southern Utah to unfettered motorized use without investigating the potential environmental impacts.

The groups — the Natural Resources Defense Council, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and The Wilderness Society — say off-roading in the area will cause soil erosion, worsen air and water quality and could hurt an endangered species of cactus, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in Utah’s U.S. District Court.

The BLM reopened 5,300 acres around Factory Butte in Wayne County, east of Capitol Reef National Park, on May 20, just before Memorial Day. The land around the signature rock formation had been closed to cross-country off-road traffic since 2006, after a petition from SUWA to protect the cactus and soil.

The move also opened the 100-acre Caineville Cove OHV play area, near Caineville of State Road 24.

Previously, the BLM had restricted motorized vehicles to specific routes within the area.

While the groups filing suit said in a news release they didn’t agree with the BLM’s decision to reopen the land without any sort of notice or public comment period (or to reopen to the land in general), they also believe the agency broke the law.

A BLM representative declined The Salt Lake Tribune’s request for comment, saying the bureau doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

In a news release about the reopening, the BLM said it had been monitoring and installing infrastructure for a decade to protect the endangered cactus species, known as Wright fishhook cactus, so it can “enhance recreational access at Factory Butte,” adding the agency had met “all of the necessary criteria” to reopen to off-roaders.

According to the National Environmental Policy Act, a government agency undertaking a major federal action that affects the environment must assess the likely impacts of whatever project it undertakes.

The groups allege the BLM didn’t do such testing before reopening thousands of acres near Factory Butte to off-roading.

BLM field manager Joelle McCarthy wrote in a May 24 memo regarding the reopening that staffers had installed warning signs, fences and information kiosks in the area to make sure the endangered cactuses in the area were safe from off-roaders.

McCarthy also said the BLM added monitoring measures to keep track of the impacts of off-roading on the cactus population. McCarthy didn’t elaborate on what those monitoring measures were.

Laura Peterson, an attorney with SUWA, said the cactuses are not the only natural resources in the area that should be protected.

“The bottom line is there’s a lot more problems than just the endangered cactus. There is the soil erosion, especially as climate change is becoming more prevalent...,” Peterson said. “It impacts air quality, water quality — all things they should have looked at before opening all this.”

The environmental groups’ lawsuit asks a judge to reverse the BLM’s decision until the agency complies with the National Environmental Policy Act and conducts environmental testing.

The curriculum of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has its members around the world devoting August, September and October to studying portions of the letters of Christianity’s most indefatigable early missionary.

It’s gratifying to see so much attention paid to Paul, because the old Gospel Doctrine manual breezed through the epistles much too quickly. (One day — just one day! — on Romans?)

But just like the old manual, the new curriculum is far more focused on the “practical Christian living” aspect of the New Testament than it is on actual history or theology.

In part, that’s just what church curriculum does, in an effort to keep things simple and applicable to daily life. But I believe there are particular reasons why the Pauline section is even more historically acontextual (or even downright anti-contextual) than the program’s other sections on the New Testament. And that’s because Latter-day Saints still don’t know quite know what to do with that irascible outsider, Paul.

1. He was an “apostle,” but outside the Twelve.

Latter-day Saints are fine with calling Paul an apostle; that honorific is right there in the King James Version, after all. Dig a little deeper, though, and people’s discomfort begins to show. How could Paul be an apostle when those seats were already filled?

Contemporary Latter-day Saints like their New Testament to resemble in every particular the structure and leadership of their own 21st-century church, so it’s discomfiting to realize that Paul’s apostleship was entirely of the self-proclaimed, charismatic variety. Paul’s leadership self-help bestseller could be broken down into three basic stages. Step One: Have a vision of Jesus. Step Two: Stop persecuting Christians and become one. Step Three: Put yourself in charge of the movement you just joined five minutes ago.

In Latter-day Saint eyes, the first two are fine, and the third is damnable heresy. Why, there are channels of authority! There is an expected chain of command! Paul never even met Jesus, for crying out loud; the Savior was long crucified before Paul came on the scene. Yet the Bible wants us to believe that God chose this aggressive outsider in addition to the Twelve, many of whom had actually walked with Jesus and paid their dues.

Even more troublingly from the correlated perspective, Paul considered other people, including women, to be leaders in the church. He called women his fellow laborers, and named them as deacons and even apostles. Junia in Romans 16 is one hotly contested example. In fact, that whole chapter of Romans is filled with women — and that whole chapter is ignored in the new curriculum, which pragmatically advises that we read Romans 12 to 16 to find “one or two” aspects that can teach us “how Saints should live.”

Well, here’s my take on how we can improve Christian lives, based on those chapters: Let’s go back to including women among the apostles! That would be a start.

2. He had a knockdown fight with Peter, and then wrote about it.

Paul just wasn’t as nice as Latter-day Saints are supposed to be. The curriculum rather endearingly, and repeatedly, glosses over his rough edges.

For example, you could read the entire lesson “Walk in the Spirit” and never get the sense that Paul was exceptionally pissed off when he wrote that letter to the Galatians. Paul was a passionate guy. It’s like those emails you dash off in the heat of the moment but have the good sense to delete before sending so you don’t burn down all your relationships.

Well, Paul sent his. It’s called the Book of Galatians.

N. T. Wright’s biography of Paul gets into the historical context of this really well, but the basic gist is that Peter appears to have reneged on that lovely ideal he had reluctantly espoused in Acts — the part about Jews and Gentiles living in harmony. Succumbing to outside influences, Peter had recommenced observing the old Jewish rule about not sitting at table with the uncircumcised.

And Paul, seeing the train wreck the church was about to become if Jews wouldn’t eat with Gentiles, called Peter out on it, in public, in Antioch. “When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.”

Let’s take a moment to digest this. Not only is Paul questioning a major decision of the Christian movement’s most prominent leader, he asserts he’s right to do so because Peter is about to lead the whole church straight to hell. This is not in the Latter-day Saint curriculum, which asks class members to read Chapter 2 but only begins the discussion with Chapter 3.

Paul tells this story in the letter because he sees the Galatian church falling prey to the same kind of message that he rebuked Peter for in the past. It’s like a franchise movie sequel where the plot is eerily similar to the first installment: More folks have come into the church claiming that Jews can’t hang out with Gentiles, and that in fact Gentiles need to keep Jewish law if they want to be part of the Christian church. That included being circumcised. Paul is so furious about having to go through all this again that he indicates in Galatians 5:12 that if these interlopers are so concerned with that particular part of the male anatomy, they may as well cut their own off and have done with it.

The “Come, Follow Me” curriculum picks up with Galatians 5:13.

3. He was really adamant about the grace thing.

A final reason Latter-day Saints don’t know what to do with Paul is because he sounds so uncompromising, so absolute, about grace. Paul wrote that by grace we are saved through faith, and that it’s not the result of works. He also equates the law with death, which seems a bit harsh.

The new curriculum demonstrates the theological evolution the church has been evincing during the past two generations, by which “grace” is no longer something that is the sole province of born-again evangelicals. To give you a sense of the past, Bruce R. McConkie wrote in the 1960s that “grace is granted to men proportionately as they conform to the standards of personal righteousness that are part of the gospel plan.”

Now, there are things in McConkie’s writing that were not mainstream Mormon theology even in the 1960s, but his approach to grace was quite typical, emphasizing that it’s the individual member’s responsibility to “grow in grace” and that the fullness of grace is experienced only by those who keep the commandments.

This conditional approach to grace runs headlong into Paul. Full-on Pauline grace is scary to Latter-day Saints. It sounds lawless and potentially dangerous, like all the traffic lights have been turned off and people have license to drive as recklessly as they please. Is Paul really saying that people don’t need to keep the commandments to be saved? Latter-day Saints like rules. Presbyterians may have popularized the phrase “decently and in order,” but Latte-day Saints have exalted order to an art form.

And actually, Presbyterians didn’t invent the phrase; Paul did (1 Cor. 14:40). That should tell us something. Paul was about balance, for all his bombastic rhetoric. And so, for its part, is the new church curriculum, which tries to have it both ways: neither grace nor works is irrelevant. The Romans lesson for next week emphasizes that keeping the commandments is not what saves us — Christ’s atonement does that — but that through faithful obedience to the commandments we help to open our hearts to receive grace as “an enabling power.”

Maybe Latter-day Saints are figuring out what to do with Paul after all.

Editor’s note • The views expressed in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.

Herriman • Throughout the season, Real Salt Lake has made several tweaks in how it approaches its play on the field. A preseason focus on defense here. A midseason pivot in how it prepares for opponents there.

Even before the season started, the additions of players like Sam Johnson and Everton Luiz sent the message that it was time for the organization to bring in veteran players to buttress the young core. Johnson in particular added a whole new dynamic and set of skills to the attack.

All those changes, while not earth-shattering, point to a club constantly looking for ways to improve, ways to win, ways to solidify an identity. But with the last third of the season looming, and a playoff position hanging in the balance, it doesn’t yet appear the team has found the right formula.

“I think the team is still trying to find kind of an identity and kind of a system,” captain Kyle Beckerman said last week. “We’ve had a lot of injuries, we’ve had a lot of call-ups and just different things. The continuity has been tough when you’re constantly switching things and it’s different lineups, so it’s hard to get that consistency.”

Bofo Saucedo on #RSL’s identity. pic.twitter.com/QjkcsutacR

— Alex Vejar (@AlexVReporting) August 1, 2019

RSL currently sits under the playoff line at eighth place in the Western Conference standings, but is just six points away from fourth place and a home playoff game. Four of the next five games are at Rio Tinto Stadium, another key stretch in an important month of July for Salt Lake.

It feels like a long time ago that RSL beat Atlanta United for its third-straight win, the longest such streak of the season. Since that game, Real have a 3-4-3 record. Assistant coach Freddy Juarez said in games against Atlanta, Philadelphia and Toronto, the team's identity spoke loudly.

But the nature of the Major League Soccer schedule makes it difficult to sustain those types of efforts. There are three-game weeks, weather conditions, rotations and injures to account for, Juarez said, and those will throw teams out of rhythm.

“We know what we want,” Juarez said. “But the challenge for every team is — I think the coaches all know what they want, they players know what they want — it’s finding that consistency to do it day in, day out, day in, day out.”

When asked where he thought the team was as a whole in regards to its identity, second-year defender Aaron Herrera mentioned club’s payroll in passing.

“Our identity is always to work hard and defend as a team,” Herrera said. “I think as long as we can keep doing that — everyone knows we’re not a super high-paid team all around. But that doesn’t really matter if everyone works hard and just works as a team.”

#RSL defender Aaron Herrera on the team’s identity. pic.twitter.com/09MmY6uZSt

— Alex Vejar (@AlexVReporting) August 1, 2019

Forward Sebastian Saucedo spoke of the team’s dynamic in the locker room, as well as the self-belief among the players that RSL can reach its goal of a second-consecutive playoff berth.

“I think it takes this group that believes,” Saucedo said. “Because at the end of the day, we have fans and we have other people that talk and say that we’re not going to make it to playoffs here and there. And the only group that will believe in making the playoffs is us in the locker room. That’s really what we need to trust.”

Time is running out for Salt Lake to find a consistent formula. There are only 12 games remaining in the regular season, although seven of those are at home. But Juarez hopes RSL can put together a good run of form down the stretch.

“What our hope is is that we end the season like we have in all the recent years — just continue to get better and better and peak at the right time and stay close enough to the line,” Juarez said.

Ten-year-old Jeffery Kraft didn't usually stay up this late, so he drank a cup of coffee. He was a little nervous. Jeffery, who is typically a food critic, had never interviewed anyone before. But now he was about to talk to people billing themselves as the next president of the United States.

The candidates made their way off the stage in Detroit to greet the gaggle of reporters just after 10 p.m. Wednesday. Jeffery snaked his way to the front of the line so he could see, and he looked for Marianne Williamson, the New Age guru and unofficial "Orb Queen" of the 2020 campaign. Earlier, he had tried to ask the author what pet she would bring to the White House but he froze and couldn't, and she promised to come back. Now, Jeffery was ready.

"Hi!" Williamson said, remembering him. "We met earlier today."

Jeffery didn't hesitate. "So do you have a pet?" he asked.

"I had a cat," she said, and then, morosely, "and the cat died."

What happened next has amazed Jeffery. His first-ever interview question was heard around the world in a viral 14-second video clip that Jeffery insists was really not that interesting. Headlines reported: "Williamson delivers grim message to child reporter," describing him as "speechless" or possibly traumatized. But everyone seemed to get it wrong, Jeffery said. By the end of the night, as he watched the moment blow up, he had already learned his first lesson: "They exaggerated it on the internet," he told The Washington Post.

Jeffery, the son of a single mom from Guatemala, said he traveled from Culver City, California, to Detroit to ask the candidates the kinds of questions he didn't think the mainstream media was asking enough: about animals and their habitats. Dressed in his best suit and bow tie, he scored a seat in the press room courtesy of KidScoop Media, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that grants kid journalists access to some of the most high-profile events at venues ranging from the White House to NASA to red carpets in Hollywood. At the debate, he met candidates including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif.

After his Marianne moment, he became so popular that he was invited onto a skit on "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah." By the second night of debates, the campaigns all knew his name, granting him immediate access to the presidential candidates.

"Hi, bud," the communications director for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., said to Jeffery, immediately recognizing him. "Did you talk to Marianne Williamson yesterday? You did a really good job. And are you learning how to become a reporter? Is that what you want to be when you grow up?"

"I'm testing it out," Jeffery said.

"Wow. You're getting ahead of the game, aren't you," she responded, before bringing him to the senator.

Preparing for his trip, Jeffery had practiced many questions, ranging from queries on forest protection to ocean conservation. But, pressed for time, Jeffery typically just stuck to the one that was the most fun: the candidates' preferred White House pets. President Donald Trump does not have a pet. Jeffery was hoping the Democrats would commit to changing this, and all of them did.

"I learned a lot while I was there," he said. "The main thing that I would say is learning more about the candidates and what they feel they should do and how they feel about bringing a pet back to the White House. Most everyone said they would bring a dog or cat. I was thinking about one thing: Maybe for a change, a hamster could be a White House pet."

KidScoop Media's founder, Michelle Mayans, said she created the organization in 2008 to get kids out of their shells and explore a journalism career in venues they wouldn't typically be able to access. "It's about nurturing curiosity," she said. "Kids don't always know what they want. This way, they can sample being a journalist for a day."

Jeffery was a natural from the start, she said, describing him as an "old soul." He started out with KidScoop as a foodie, writing reviews about his favorite restaurants. He wrote in one: "I'm sure if Darth Vader had a meal at Pasta Sisters he would have been just a bit nicer." He got it published in the Culver City News, his local newspaper. Mayans thought he might want to go out for the big leagues.

He started practicing. He penciled the questions in his notebook in large letters so he could see them easily.

For Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.: "When you become president, what would be the first thing you would do about our national parks and forests? As a Boy Scout, I am concerned."

For Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, a veteran: "Have you ever met a military dog?"

For anyone: "When you become president, what is your plan to stop the glaciers from melting?"

"Needless to say, I'm so proud of him and that he was actually able to stay that long and be focused," said Jeffery's mom, Londy Hernandez. "It was really surreal for me."

An immigrant who lived in Canada before coming to the United States, Hernandez said her son has helped her with her own writing, since English is her second language. He recently finished reading "Moby Dick" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," she said. "This summer, he's actually writing a book," a sci-fi chapter book, she said.

Jeffery said he plans to continue covering the candidates this summer should another opportunity arise.

He particularly would like to see Williamson again, the nicest candidate in his opinion, because he felt like he should have said something about her dead cat. It was his only regret, he said.

“I wish I would have told her to maybe rescue a cat from a rescue center or a shelter for animals,” he said.

Provo • As Sione Takitaki draws rave reviews for his familiar relentless style of play and fanatical effort at the Cleveland Browns’ training camp this month, BYU football coaches have started the search in earnest for the middle linebacker’s replacement in Provo.

It could take awhile.

“You just don’t replace a guy like that,” defensive coordinator Ilaisa Tuiaki said during June’s media day. “They don’t grow on trees.”

Middle linebacker — or Mike linebacker, as they call it — is an incredibly important position in head coach Kalani Sitake’s 4-3 defensive scheme, and the Mike is more often than not the leading tackler on the team. Standouts such as Cameron Jensen, Brandon Ogletree, Uani Unga, Harvey Langi and Butch Pau’u (before a string of injuries) have manned the spot in recent years.

Who’s next?

Coaches made a surprise move when camp opened Wednesday, moving oft-injured running back Kavika Fonua over to defense and saying he’s already in the mix in the middle. Linebackers coach Ed Lamb said Fonua and redshirt freshmen Payton Wilgar and Jackson Kaufusi are “the top three guys right now competing for that spot.”

Kaufusi and another redshirt freshman, Max Tooley, were listed as the potential starters after spring practice, with true freshman Alex Miskela also making the depth chart published in the media guide. That’s partly because Wilgar, who is from St. George’s Dixie High, didn’t participate in spring drills.

“In 2016, [Fonua] was one of the leading tacklers on the team, playing mostly special teams,” Lamb said. “He is a veteran defender and we moved him up to the top of the depth chart, although I told those three guys — at least the first day — that those three are all [considered] starters and we will mix that up going forward.”

Sitake said the Cougars are suddenly deep at running back with graduate transfers Emmanuel Esukpa and Ty’Son Williams pushing sophomore Lopini Katoa for playing time so coaches agreed to move Fonua to linebacker.

“He has played safety and linebacker,” Sitake said. With his speed and his ability to cover a lot of ground, I think he can help us there. He has some experience playing the game, so it is not like it will be brand new for him being out on the field.”

Wilgar appeared in three games last year without making a tackle, while Kaufusi made one in four games.

A pair of linebackers who missed spring camp due to injury — senior Zayne Anderson and junior Isaiah Kaufusi — have been penciled in as the starters at flash and weakside linebacker. Anderson said despite the inexperience it will all work out because the players trust the coaches to make the right decision.

“I think Kavika moving over, that’s a good move,” said Anderson, who has made 73 career tackles. “All those guys are battling for that position right now. So are the guys behind them. It is kind of a position that is open right now and we’ve got some good talent right there. I feel confident with all those guys.”

BYU coach Kalani Sitake on how physical preseason training camp will get. pic.twitter.com/43dEp3vaB5

— Jay Drew (@drewjay) August 1, 2019

Lamb said he’s got 15 players in camp for the three starting linebacker positions.

“So we have a true five-deep and I really think it is realistic that the fourth and fifth guys could end up being the second guy, assuming Zayne and Isaiah work hard and protect their position and keep the job they have," he said.

Former linebacker Hirkley Latu has moved to defensive end, while former West High star AJ Lolohea, a transfer from Weber State, is no longer on the roster.

Remaining linebackers include Chaz Ah You, Sam Baldwin, Ben Bywater, Matthew Criddle, Solofa Funa, Drew Jensen, Tooley, Miskela, Keenan Pili, Kade Pupunu and a newcomer, Navy transfer Pepe Tanuvasa.

In a recent commentary, Don Gale makes an astonishingly ignorant comparison between the traumatic experiences of stillbirth, miscarriage and abortion.

As someone who has had an abortion, runs a support group for post-abortive women, and works closely with a dear friend who has experienced miscarriage, I share our stories to expose falsehoods and inaccuracies in Mr. Gale’s piece:

When I became unexpectedly pregnant at age 17, my boyfriend and I did not reach out to family or friends. Fearful and immature, we instead walked into a Planned Parenthood and ended the life of our child. Even though I was crying, nobody asked if I was unsure or offered to counsel me on other options. Instead, I was quickly ushered through the procedure despite my obvious distress.

After the abortion, we sobbed in the car knowing we had just killed our baby. Not a “lump of cells,” as Gale described. There was no going back. That day brought me into a truly dark place and led me to make self-destructive decisions, as I soon began to spiral out of control.

My friend Deanna had an experience much different from mine. She has described what it was like to hold her tiny 9-week baby in her hands she had lost to a miscarriage. To simultaneously marvel at the tiny perfectly formed features while also mourning the loss of life. This was no “lump of cells” either, but a delicately formed human child. Her child. It is unthinkable that any adult can still use the medically inaccurate “lump of cells” argument.

According to Gale, there is no real difference between my friend’s experience and mine. He states, “The end result for all three events is the same: a developing fetus is aborted.” In reality, these are very different. Medically, terms like “spontaneous abortion” are used to refer to a miscarriage. This is why Gale can claim all three experiences end up with an “aborted fetus.” However, his semantics are inconsistent with Utah law, which states that abortion is intentional killing and does not include miscarriage, stillbirth or treating an ectopic pregnancy. To equate these is unconscionable.

As for labeling those in the pro-life movement “careless busy-bodies,” we are busy, but we are anything but careless. Before spouting thoughtless clichés about pro-lifers, take the time to stand with us on the sidewalk outside abortion clinics as we offer real choices to women in crisis. I wish every day that someone had been on the sidewalk offering help to me that day; if they had, my son would be alive.

We believe women deserve better than abortion (and its devastating consequences) and that all children deserve to live. My past abortion allows me to offer these women love and understanding, as I was once in their shoes. Never have I seen the hate, judgment or condemnation towards these women that Gale speaks of from anyone I work with. His description of the pro-life movement is decades behind reality. Attend a baby shower we throw for a woman in need, and allow yourself to understand the pro-life cause before spewing pro-choice platitudes about what we do or do not do.

My friend and I will always feel the pain of losing a child, but I have the added burden of knowing I was complicit in the death of mine. Rather than embrace abortion as a supposed “right,” we wish to spare women the pain I (and many other post- abortive women) experience by offering them something better.

Don Gale can stand aside as we work to help women and their babies have the best chance.

Lindsey Tafengatoto is the outreach director for Pro-Life Utah, runs Utah Abortion Healing and is a trained sidewalk advocate.

Cheyenne, Wyo. • The U.S. Forest Service wants to reduce designated habitat in Wyoming and Nevada for a ground-dwelling bird.

The agency said Friday its plan would target 300 square miles now set aside for sage grouse in Wyoming and Nevada, with nearly all of the reduction in Wyoming.

A Wyoming official says the proposed changes simply align Forest Service plans with Wyoming's map of state-designated sage grouse habitat.

More than 8,000 square miles of national forest land has been set aside as protected habitat for the birds in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

The Natural Resources Defense Council says the proposed reduction "unravels" a 2015 Forest Service conservation plan.

The agency said then the birds would not be listed as threatened or endangered because state and federal agencies had come up with plans to conserve its habitat.

San Juan, Puerto Rico • Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló resigned Friday as promised, clearing the way for veteran politician Pedro Pierluisi to be sworn in as his replacement, a move that threw the U.S. territory into a period of political uncertainty.

Rosselló had promised to step down in response to weeks of popular protest over mismanagement and a series of leaked chats in which he and advisers denigrated a range of Puerto Ricans. Because of problems with the qualifications of members of Rosselló's administration in the constitutional line of succession, it was unclear until the last minute who would become governor.

Pierluisi was named secretary of state, the next in line to be governor, in a recess appointment this week. In an emailed announcement from his office, Rosselló said Pierluisi would succeed him. He was sworn in by a judge at 5 p.m., the hour Rosselló had set to leave office.

The territory's House of Representatives confirmed Pierluisi as secretary of state Friday, but the Senate has not yet voted on his appointment. Rosselló said confirmation by both houses was unnecessary for a recess appointment, an assertion that appeared certain to generate legal challenges.

Two hours after taking the oath, Pierluisi emerged at the governor's residence to address the press and said he would only promise to serve as governor until Wednesday, when the Senate has called a hearing on his nomination. If the Senate votes no, Pierluisi said, he will step down and hand the governorship to the justice secretary, the next in line under the constitution.

Nothing more was heard from Rosselló.

Pierluisi said he was "fully capable and authorized to act, but the Senate will have its say."

Depending on the Senate's action, his tenure "could be very short-lived," he said. He did not plan to move into the governor's mansion until after the vote. He also he would avoid any major changes and concentrate on meeting with top government officials.

The down-to-the-wire maneuvering risked political chaos and sowed bitterness and pessimism among Puerto Ricans about the fate of their island, which has been battered by years by bankruptcy and Hurricane Maria in 2017, one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.

Only days ago, there was jubilation over the success of the popular movement to force Rosselló out of office. On Friday, Puerto Ricans bemoaned the confusion that left them not knowing who would be their next governor.

"People are disgusted with the government in general, not just Ricardo Rosselló, everyone," said Janeline Avila, 24, who recently received her degree in biotechnology.

Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz, a member of Rosselló's party seen as a possible future governor, criticized Rosselló for naming Pierluisi and appeared to hint at fighting the succession plan.

"He never regretted anything," Schatz said of Rosselló. "He did not respect the demands of the people. In fact, he mocked them, using new accomplices."

Schatz said that order and morals will prevail: "No one should lose faith."

Hundreds of protesters marched to the governor's residence, the Fortaleza, banging pots and drums and singing the national anthem. Protesters had not been highly critical of Pierluisi before Friday but expressed disgust with the succession process and Pierluisi's ties to the federal control board that has promoted cutbacks on the island.

Bryan Carhu Castro Vega, a 21-year-old university student, said he was disappointed.

"It's obvious that the constitutional setup that we have isn't working for the people," he said. "None of the options is one the people chose or want or deserve."

Rosa Cifrian, a 47-year-old professor of nursing, said Pierluisi would not be a good governor "for the people."

"He'll keep promoting policies of austerity, cutbacks, everything that the board says," she said.

The legislature, which is controlled by Pierluisi's New Progressive Party, erupted into cheers when the House voted 26-21, with one abstention, to confirm Pierluisi as secretary of state.

One constitutional amendment states that everyone in line to become governor has to be confirmed by both House and Senate, except for the secretary of state.

Constitutional law professor Carlos Ramos and other legal experts questioned the validity of that amendment and believed Pierluisi must be confirmed by the House and Senate because the amendment contradicts the intent of the constitution and its statement of motives.

Lawmakers and Pierluisi himself expressed concern that the continuing political uncertainty would damage Puerto Rico's efforts to get federal funds to recover from the hurricane and confront the economic crisis.

Several legislators have accused Pierluisi of a conflict of interest because he worked for a law firm that represents a federal control board overseeing the island's finances, a body that has repeatedly clashed with local officials over demands for austerity measures.

Pierluisi, whose brother-in-law is the board's chairman, tried to dispel those concerns in his opening remarks.

"Who better than me to advocate for our people before the board? Who better than me to facilitate the process that will force the board to leave? That is what we all want," he said.

The board was created by Congress to oversee the restructuring of more than $70 billion in public debt after Puerto Rico declared a form of bankruptcy.

Pierluisi told lawmakers he is against several austerity measures demanded by the board, including laying off public employees and eliminating a Christmas bonus.

He said he supports public-private partnerships and the privatization of the island's public power company.

"The people want a change, and I don't blame them," he said.

A key obstacle for Pierluisi has been Rivera Schatz, who wants to run for governor himself next year. Several legislators have said they prefer Rivera Schatz over Pierluisi, but the Senate leader is a powerful figure deeply associated with Puerto Rico's political and business elite, and his elevation to the governorship could re-ignite popular outrage.

Pierluisi was Puerto Rico's non-voting representative in Congress from 2009 to 2017 and then ran against Rosselló in the 2016 primaries and lost. He also served as justice secretary under Rosselló's father, Pedro Rosselló, when he was governor.

Rosselló joined more than a dozen government officials who have resigned in the wake of an obscenity-laced chat in which they made fun of women, gay people and hurricane victims.

___

Associated Press writers Mariela Santos in San Juan and Michael Weissenstein in Havana contributed to this report.

Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election amounted to a “cyber 9/11” attack, the nation’s No. 2 intelligence official told a Utah audience Friday. And the leader of U.S. House Republicans added that such efforts to make it tough to discern truth are a growing national security threat.

“One of the things that people talk about a lot is what a cyber 9/11 would look like. I think that election interference was a good example of a cyber 9/11 because I can’t think of anything worse than making us not believe in ourselves,” said Susan Gordon, principal deputy director of national intelligence.

“We are clear-eyed in what we see as the ability of adversaries to use information to get into our social fabric to make us question whether what we are seeing is what is actually there. And this is true whether it is in social trends, in our electoral systems and our battlefield awareness,” she said. “We saw this in 2016 with Russian influence” in that election.

Gordon made the comments during Rep. Chris Stewart’s annual Security Summit in Salt Lake City. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also spoke and said such threats show the need for America to keep a lead in technology to expose and stop such efforts. He also said efforts need to be made to narrow bitter political divides that may make the country vulnerable to exploitation.

Stewart, a member of the House Intelligence Committee who has acknowledged Russian election meddling but says it did not aim to tip scales to help President Donald Trump, said that perhaps the biggest threat to national security “is that no one knows what is true anymore.”

For example, “You can look at a video and you don’t know whether it truly is real or not,” and analysis to find out takes time, he said. “I think the final outcome of that is people just not believing anything, including some things that are true.”

“This is why we have to keep ahead of where technology is going,” McCarthy said. But he also warned that increasingly polarized politics provide enemies openings to make even greater splits among Americans.

“I watch people on both sides of the aisle go on television and they scream, they yell, they demean the other person to show that they are more liberal or more conservative. That’s not who we are,” he said.

McCarthy said this kind of divisive approach to policy led this year’s Defense Authorization Act to become partisan this year, while he says it had been bipartisan for the previous 15 years.

“When you’re in battle it doesn’t matter what party you belong to,” he said, adding enemies cheer such division because they want to see America fail. “This is a place we cannot let it get to” — and urged softer but full debate.

Gordon said technological advances are making analyzing intelligence trickier, while it also causes people outside government to have less confidence in what they see and hear.

“This notion of using information to cause us to question whether what we're seeing is actually there … is one of the more interesting trends that we have,” she said.

She worries ways may be sought to hack the increasing numbers of weapons system that use algorithms and machines to help speed decisions. “We need to think about what manipulation of the threat picture or the effectiveness or the command and control would be.”

Gordon spoke in Utah as news broke that President Donald Trump abruptly dropped plans to nominate Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, as the new national director of intelligence. It heightens speculation about whether Gordon will take over as interim chief — after Trump earlier tweeted that he may try to avoid elevating her.

Gordon left the Utah summit before a news conference where she was scheduled to appear with Stewart and McCarthy.

McCarthy, in speaking to reporters, praised the Trump administration on two pieces of breaking news: the United States formally withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on Friday, and the president’s vow to impose more tariffs on China.

With the INF treaty, McCarthy said it was not so much a case of America pulling out as with “Russia never abiding by it. The world is becoming less safe. It is not just America saying this, it is NATO countries as well. It was the right decision.”

National news media reported that after withdrawal from the treaty, the United States is now set to test a new nonnuclear mobile-launched cruise missile developed specifically to challenge Russia in Europe.

About Trump’s threatened 10% tariffs on China by Sept. 1 on items he has yet to tax, McCarthy said it may actually be the best way to reach solid trade agreements with China.

“He wants an agreement at the end of the day,” McCarthy said. “I’ve watched China negotiate with us and then backpedal” so the threat may be wise. “Tariffs are challenging, but at the end of the day we want and need an agreement that works for all of us.”

West Valley City • When Humberto Sanchez tried to sign up for classes at Salt Lake Community College, he had no idea where to start.

Being undocumented, he didn’t have a Social Security number. He wasn’t sure, either, if he should put his actual name down on the application or if that would give him away. He didn’t know what scholarships he could pursue. And he didn’t know who he could trust to ask for help — or who might report him and his family to immigration officials.

“But,” he said choking back tears, “that’s not the way it has to be.”

On Friday, Sanchez held a gigantic pair of scissors and snipped into a white ribbon to mark the opening of SLCC’s new Dream Center, which is meant to help students like him — students who are immigrants and want to go to school, students who don’t know where to start. This place was his idea.

“It came from my own struggles,” Sanchez said.

The Dream Center is housed at SLCC’s West Valley City campus. More than 70 people came for the unveiling, crowding into the lobby and competing for space with the hundreds of yellow, blue and white balloons. Many wore T-shirts that said, “I support undocumented students.” A few shouted, “Muchas felicitaciones” and took photos after counting down, “Uno, dos, tres.”

Mostly, the attendees hugged and cheered.

“We don’t have to go through this alone,” Sanchez said. “We’ve got each other. And now we have our own space to connect and support each other.”

Overall, SLCC has one of the most diverse college populations in the state, with 34% students of color. But this campus — one of 10 at the school — is also the only one in Utah to sit in West Valley City, which has a unique “minority majority” of residents. Nearly 50,000 Latinos call this city home, according to the most recent U.S. census estimates.

So it was the easy and obvious choice for the Dream Center.

“The reach will expand far beyond the walls,” said Richard Diaz, the interim director of diversity and multicultural affairs at SLCC. “This will be the first point of contact for many families in the community.”

The center will have academic advisors specifically for undocumented students, many of whom were brought to the United States as young children and are often nicknamed “Dreamers.” There will be scholarship assistance and financial aid. There will be help for those filling out applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, currently in limbo, which helps immigrants go to school and work legally.

There will also be a community here that understands what these students are going through.

Sanchez left Mexico with his parents and siblings in 2000 and fled to the United States to get away from poverty. He was raised in Salt Lake City, and is 20 now and studying sociology and graphic communication. He worries that under President Donald Trump’s administration, which has cracked down on illegal immigration, he could be deported.

“I hear him calling us animals,” he said. “It’s tough. Why do they have to treat us like this?”

He’s walked around campus, too, and seen hateful posters telling him to leave. One was tucked on top of a newspaper stand, he said, and colored red, white and blue. “Report and deport illegal aliens,” it said.

It shocked him. Then, Sanchez noticed more of the posters and stickers, too. Some had the phone number for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They were stuck on lampposts and bulletin boards and windows.

“It was a smack in the face,” he said.

He wanted to start this Dream Center as a way to oppose that. SLCC partnered with the University of Utah, which has its own center, to open this place. Now, there are two in the state. And there are 59 in the country.

Faculty members from the U. came to celebrate the opening, too, including the director of that Dream Center, Alonso Reyna Rivarola. “Being a student and being undocumented is very difficult,” he said. “It affects your learning.”

Reyna Rivarola and Sanchez hope that Utah Valley University and Weber State University, along with other schools in the state, might also be persuaded to create their own centers.

Agustin, an undocumented student who preferred to use only his first name for privacy, graduated from SLCC last year and attends Weber State now. He said he would love to see a center there — and is happy to see one open at his alma mater, where he still works to help first-year students like him.

“It’s hard to find the right people to help you out,” he said. “Having this center, it centralizes everything.”

At SLCC, there are roughly 500 undocumented students, said Idolina Quijada, chair of the school’s Undocumented Student Resource Committee. It’s hard to know the number for certain, she added, but “undocumented students are here to stay."

The opening ceremony ended Friday with the attendees releasing monarch butterflies — a symbol of Dreamers because of their long migrations between the United States and Central and South America. A few were painted on the walls inside. Next to them was a row of decorated graduation caps. One noted in glittery writing: “My dreams don’t have borders.”

One day soon, Sanchez hopes to wear his own cap when he finishes his studies at SLCC. “I’m just trying to go to school and work,” he said. “And this place is a sign of hope. It’s a sign that we’re welcome.”