US Politics

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) is preparing to resume deportations of asylum seekers after a Trump-appointed Texas judge ruled against a 100-day suspension ordered by Joe Biden.The ruling, in response to a challenge from a leading figure in the Republican effort to overturn the election result, marks the first shot in a legal rearguard action by Trump loyalists intended to stymie the Biden administration’s agenda.Human rights activists said the resumption of flights also raised the question of whether Ice agents, who have been accused of systemic abuse of migrants and detainees, might seek to resist the new administration’s efforts to reform the agency.An Ice plane left San Antonio for Port-au-Prince on Monday morning carrying Haitians detained on the US-Mexican border and expelled under a highly controversial Ice interpretation of public health laws.“Deportation flight to Haiti on the first day of Black history month,” Guerline Jozef, co-founder of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, wrote in a text to the Guardian. “What a slap in the face.”According to activists, there are also 23 Africans facing deportation from an Ice holding facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, as early as Tuesday, including 11 Angolans, seven Cameroonians, two Congolese, and three others of unknown nationalities.Although the Haitian flight would probably have gone ahead even under the Biden moratorium, the expected African flight defies that order, as well as guidelines laid down by the acting homeland security secretary, David Pekoske, that came into effect on Monday. Pekoske called for deportations to be limited to suspected terrorists, convicted felons deemed a threat to public security, and undocumented people caught on the border after 1 November.At least some of the potential deportees have legal cases pending, and one of them was granted an emergency stay by an appeals court on Sunday evening. Others expected to be deported on Tuesday or Wednesday.Ice appears to be pushing ahead with the deportation flight despite reports that Cameroonians deported to their home country last October and November in the midst of a bloody civil conflict had been imprisoned, beaten, gone into hiding – or in some cases simply disappeared.“A lot of them were locked up in military prison, which is where they took a whole bunch of people that are arrested by the army,” said Mambo Tse, a Cameroonian community activist in the US. “It’s not safe.”Lauren Seibert, a Human Rights Watch researcher and advocate, said: “After scores of Cameroonians were denied asylum in the US and deported in recent months, Human Rights Watch has documented multiple cases of deportees facing imprisonment, abuse, criminal prosecution and threats by the Cameroonian authorities after their return. Some of their families have also been threatened and harassed.”On taking office on 20 January, the Biden administration ordered a 100-day halt to deportation flights, with certain limited exceptions, while Ice procedures were reviewed to “enable focusing the Department’s resources where they are most needed”.However, a federal judge in Texas, Drew Tipton, appointed by Donald Trump last June, ordered a stay, blocking the suspension, but not the new guidelines. Tipton’s nomination was opposed by Democrats over concerns over his lack of judicial experience and his support for the reinstatement of a Texas social worker fired for using a racial slur against a black colleague. He argued: “It certainly does not evidence a pattern of hostility against anyone or any people who are of a particular race.”The case against the moratorium was brought by the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, who played a leading role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election result.Paxton addressed Trump supporters in Washington on 6 January shortly before the storming of the Capitol.“We will not quit fighting. We’re Texans, we’re Americans, and the fight will go on,” he told the crowd, according to the Houston Chronicle.Paxton has been indicted for securities fraud allegedly committed before he took office. He has also been accused of abuse of office by seven whistleblowers and is being sued for retaliation after having the whistleblowers fired. He is reported to be under FBI investigation for the abuse of office allegations.Paxton’s lawyer, Philip Hilder, declined to comment on the reports of an FBI investigation.After Tipton’s ruling on deportations, Paxton declared “Victory” on his official Twitter account.“Texas is the FIRST state in the nation to bring a lawsuit against the Biden Admin,” he wrote. “AND WE WON.”VICTORY.Texas is the FIRST state in the nation to bring a lawsuit against the Biden Admin. AND WE WON.Within 6 days of Biden’s inauguration, Texas has HALTED his illegal deportation freeze. *This* was a seditious left-wing insurrection. And my team and I stopped it.— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) January 26, 2021
Echoing the language widely used to denounce the ransacking of the Capitol, Paxton described the 100-day deportations moratorium as “a seditious left-wing insurrection” which he had stopped.In a statement to the Guardian on Monday, an Ice spokesperson said the agency “is in compliance with the temporary restraining order” issued by the Texas court.Justice department lawyers argued against the stay in Tipton’s court, the southern district of Texas, but it was unclear when or whether they would appeal against the ruling. A department spokesperson declined to comment.The American Civil Liberties Union is seeking to challenge the Texan ruling on behalf of immigrant rights groups.“There’s a legal aspect to it and there’s a practical aspect,” Cody Wofsy, an ACLU attorney, said. “Are individual Ice officers who may disagree with the new policies of the new administration going to carry out those policies, or are they going to attempt to carry out a more unforgiving immigration policy that they might prefer?” More

With mere hours left before a deadline for Donald Trump to officially answer the impeachment charge against him, the former president was still scrambling to assemble a legal defense, announcing that he had hired two new lawyers after a five-person team abruptly quit their roles.
Trump has until noon on Tuesday to reply to a charge of incitement of insurrection, for encouraging the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January in which five people died. His trial in the Senate is scheduled to begin on 9 February.
With most Republicans signaling support for the former president, the trial is seen as having little chance of ending in conviction, which would open the way for the Senate to bar Trump, 74, from ever holding office again.
But the trial is still seen as a potentially explosive disruption in Washington, where the Biden administration is laboring mightily to get its agenda off the ground and some Republican leaders have been attempting to creep away from Trump.
The unveiling of Trump’s new legal pairing – one a Fox News commentator and former counsel to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the other a former county prosecutor who opposed charging Bill Cosby with sexual assault – fueled concerns the provisional return to normalcy since Joe Biden’s inauguration was about to be upended.
The trial could be particularly dangerous, legal scholars said, if Trump built his case around his lie that the November election was stolen and Senate Republicans effectively endorsed that lie, in unprecedented numbers, by voting to acquit.
Multiple reports suggested Trump jettisoned his previous legal team because they were unwilling to recite the election fraud lie. Trump’s new lawyers, David Schoen and Bruce Castor, did not indicate what defense they had planned.
“Both Schoen and Castor agree that this impeachment is unconstitutional,” a statement said, adding that Schoen considered it “an honor” to represent Trump.
Castor said: “The strength of our constitution is about to be tested like never before in our history.”
Schoen is an eager media presence whose past clients include Roger Stone, convicted for lying to Congress in the Russia investigation but pardoned by Trump. The attorney also told the Discovery channel Epstein had asked him to take over the defense of his case before the convicted sex trafficker killed himself in prison in August 2019.
“I don’t believe he took his own life,” Schoen said, demonstrating an ease with the conspiratorial thinking that has fed Trump’s election lies and taken over the Republican base.
In a separate interview with the Atlanta Jewish Times, Schoen said: “I still think [Epstein] was murdered.”
Castor was the Republican district attorney for Montgomery county, a Philadelphia suburb. But he lost a re-election effort in 2015 when his decision not to charge Cosby, who was later convicted of aggravated indecent assault, became a campaign issue.
Neither Schoen nor Castor has any expertise in constitutional law, which mainstream scholars see as the most promising path for Trump’s defense. A minority have argued that the constitution does not allow for a trial of a political figure who has left office. Most constitutional scholars disagree sharply, invoking non-presidential precedent.
“The House’s impeachment of Trump – like an indictment – occurred before he was out of office, and therefore requires a trial,” tweeted Daniel Goldman, who led the cross-examination of witnesses before the House judiciary committee during Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump has disagreed with that prevailing reading of the constitution.
“The Democrats’ efforts to impeach a president who has already left office is totally unconstitutional and so bad for our country,” his adviser Jason Miller said.
Other analysts have observed that the nature and strength of Trump’s defense does not matter if Republicans are planning, as they appear to be, to acquit him anyway.
“The ‘crisis’ over Trump’s legal team quitting assumes that the substance of the impeachment case will sway Senate Republicans,” the Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer tweeted. “Most already have their answer. Trump could offer no defense or he can go on the floor to read lines from the Joker movie – they would still vote to acquit.”
Amid reports that Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon was pushing the ex-president to defend himself, a former Trump White House aide said it seemed Bannon, whom Trump pardoned after he was charged with fraud, had at least partially won out over advice offered by Senator Lindsey Graham.
“Show them the Stop the Steal receipts instead of the weenie it’s unconstitutional track,” the former aide said of likely Trump trial tactics, in a message seen by the Guardian. “Gotta love Trump.”
Trump is the only president to be impeached twice. He was first tried in December 2019, on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, regarding approaches to Ukraine for dirt on rivals including Biden. The Senate acquitted him with only one Republican, Mitt Romney, voting to convict.
Trump was able to assemble a relatively strong legal team, including the White House counsel Pat Cipollone, the former Bill Clinton prosecutor Ken Starr, the constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz and the deputy counsel Patrick Philbin. Trump also won support from the conservative constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley. But when Trump sought his involvement this time around, the Washington Post reported, Turley declined.
The Ohio Republican senator Rob Portman told CNN on Sunday any argument Trump made about supposed election fraud “will not benefit him” because “Joe Biden was duly elected” and that is “the view of the Trump Department of Justice” too.
Any lawyer who repeats Trump’s fraud claim before Congress would risk legal sanction, analysts said, noting that in the midst of Trump’s attempts to get ballots thrown out, not even the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani would make certain claims about election fraud before an actual judge.
Giuliani is eager to defend Trump in his new impeachment trial, the New York Times reported – but key Trump advisers are against it. More

Republicans including Donald Trump have raged against Twitter and Facebook in recent months, alleging anti-conservative bias, censorship and a silencing of free speech. According to a new report from New York University, none of that is true.Disinformation expert Paul Barrett and researcher J Grant Sims found that far from suppressing conservatives, social media platforms have, through algorithms, amplified rightwing voices, “often affording conservatives greater reach than liberal or nonpartisan content creators”.Barrett and Sims’s report comes as Republicans up their campaign against social media companies. Conservatives have long complained that platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube show bias against the right, laments which intensified when Trump was banned from all three platforms for inciting the attack on the US Capitol which left five people dead.The NYU study, released by the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, found that a claim of anti-conservative bias “is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it”.“There is no evidence to support the claim that the major social media companies are suppressing, censoring or otherwise discriminating against conservatives on their platforms,” Barrett said. “In fact, it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention, thanks to the platforms’ systems of algorithmic promotion of content.”The report found that Twitter, Facebook and other companies did not show bias when deleting incendiary tweets around the Capitol attack, as some on the right have claimed.Prominent conservatives including Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, have sought to crack down on big tech companies as they claim to be victims of suppression – which Barrett and Sims found does not exist.The researchers did outline problems social media companies face when accused of bias, and recommended a series of measures.“What is needed is a robust reform agenda that addresses the very real problems of social media content regulation as it currently exists,” Barrett said. “Only by moving forward from these false claims can we begin to pursue that agenda in earnest.”A 2020 study by the Pew Research Center reported that a majority of Americans believe social media companies censor political views. Pew found that 90% of Republicans believed views were being censored, and 69% of Republicans or people who leant Republican believed social media companies “generally support the views of liberals over conservatives”.Republicans including Trump have pushed to repeal section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social media companies from legal liability, claiming it allows platforms to suppress conservative voices.The NYU report suggests section 230 should be amended, with companies persuaded to “accept a range of new responsibilities related to policing content”, or risk losing liability protections. More

During one of the most politically divisive years in recent memory, the number of active hate groups in the US actually declined as far-right extremists migrated further to online networks, reflecting a splintering of white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups that are more difficult to track.In its annual report, to be released Monday, the Southern Poverty Law Center said it identified 838 active hate groups operating across the US in 2020. That’s a decrease from the 940 documented in 2019 and the record-high of 1,020 in 2018, said the law center, which tracks racism, xenophobia and anti-government militias.“It is important to understand that the number of hate groups is merely one metric for measuring the level of hate and racism in America, and that the decline in groups should not be interpreted as a reduction in bigoted beliefs and actions motivated by hate,” said the report, first shared exclusively with the Associated Press.The Montgomery, Alabama-based law center said many hate groups have moved to social media platforms and use of encrypted apps, while others have been banned altogether from mainstream social media networks.Still, the law center said, online platforms allow individuals to interact with hate and anti-government groups without becoming members, maintain connections with like-minded people, and take part in real-world actions, such as last month’s siege on the US Capitol.White nationalist organizations, a subset of the hate groups listed in the report, declined last year by more than 100. Those groups had seen huge growth the previous two years after being energized by Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, the report said.The number of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ hate groups remained largely stable, while their in-person organizing was hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.Bottom line, the levels of hate and bigotry in America have not diminished, said Margaret Huang, SPLC president and CEO.“What’s important is that we start to reckon with all the reasons why those groups have persisted for so long and been able to get so much influence in the last White House, that they actually feel emboldened,” Huang told the AP.Last month, as Joe Biden’s administration began settling in, the Department of Homeland Security issued an early national terrorism bulletin in response to a growing threat from home-grown extremists, including anti-government militias and white supremacists. The extremists are coalescing under a broader, more loosely affiliated movement of people who reject democratic institutions and multiculturalism, Huang said.The SPLC’s report comes out nearly a month after a mostly white mob of Trump supporters and members of far-right groups violently breached the US Capitol building. At least five deaths have been linked to the assault, including a Capitol police officer. Some in the mob waved Confederate battle flags and wore clothing with neo-Nazi symbolism.Federal authorities have made more than 160 arrests and sought hundreds more for criminal charges related to the deadly 6 January assault. Authorities have also linked roughly 30 defendants to a group or movement, according to an AP review of court records.That includes seven defendants linked to QAnon, a once-fringe internet conspiracy movement that recently grew into a powerful force in mainstream conservative politics; six linked to the Proud Boys, a misogynistic, anti-immigrant and antisemitic group with ties to white supremacism; four linked to the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary organization that recruits current and former military, law enforcement and first-responder personnel; four linked to the Three Percenters, an anti-government militia movement; and two leaders of “Super Happy Fun America”, a group with ties to white nationalists known for organizing a so-called “straight pride” parade in downtown Boston in 2019.The SPLC made several recommendations for the new administration in its latest report. It called for establishing offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the justice department and the FBI to monitor, investigate and prosecute cases of domestic terrorism. It also urged improving federal hate crime data collection, training and prevention; and for enacting federal legislation that shifts funding away from punishment models and toward preventing violent extremism. More

The Lincoln Project has condemned John Weaver, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Republican group who is alleged to have made unsolicited sexual overtures to males as young as 14.Weaver, 61, is a Republican consultant who worked with presidential candidates John McCain and John Kasich. His alleged online comments to young men were reported in mid-January by the American Conservative and Scott Stedman, an independent reporter who said he received messages from Weaver, data analyst Garrett Herrin and Axios.Then, Weaver said: “The truth is that I’m gay. And that I have a wife and two kids who I love. My inability to reconcile those two truths has led to this agonizing place.“To the men I made uncomfortable through my messages that I viewed as consensual mutual conversations at the time: I am truly sorry. They were inappropriate and it was because of my failings that this discomfort was brought on you.”He also said he would not return to the Lincoln Project after a period of medical leave.But on Sunday, the New York Times published a report based on interviews with 21 men, one of whom it said Weaver messaged when the man was 14, “asking questions about his body while he was still in high school and then more pointed ones after he turned 18”. Weaver did not comment.Formed to campaign against Donald Trump and his Republican backers, the Lincoln Project rose swiftly to national prominence. At the weekend, its threat to sue Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was widely covered – as were the allegations against Weaver, seized upon by Donald Trump Jr among other prominent rightwing figures.In a statement, the Project said: “John Weaver led a secret life that was built on a foundation of deception at every level. He is a predator, a liar, and an abuser. We extend our deepest sympathies to those who were targeted by his deplorable and predatory behavior.“The totality of his deceptions are beyond anything any of us could have imagined and we are absolutely shocked and sickened by it. Like so many, we have been betrayed and deceived by John Weaver. We are grateful beyond words that at no time was John Weaver in the physical presence of any member of the Lincoln Project.”Stedman and Ryan Girdusky, a political consultant and the author of the American Conservative report, disputed that account.“When young men approached them they ignored it,” Girdusky wrote on Twitter. “When they heard I was working on the story they warned Weaver. When I wrote a story they said nothing. When Axios published a story they said he’s just gay. Now he’s a predator. Project Lincoln [sic] lied. They knew. They’re complicit.”Steve Schmidt, another Lincoln Project co-founder, told the Times: “There was no awareness or insinuations of any type of inappropriate behavior when we became aware of the chatter at the time.”Girdusky countered that Schmidt “ignored the first thee stories written about Weaver to respond. They ignored it till they excused him with a Kevin Spacey defense and then called him a predator. There are really no words.” More

One of two attorneys named to defend Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial represented Roger Stone, believes Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself and numbers among his clients “all sorts of reputed mobster figures”, including “a guy the government claimed was the biggest mafioso in the world”.The other declined to prosecute Bill Cosby.Trump’s trial starts next week. He is due to respond to the charge on Tuesday. At the weekend his first team of lawyers quit, reportedly because he insisted his defence against a charge of inciting the deadly US Capitol attack on 6 January should be based on the lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.Given that 45 of 50 Republican senators voted against even holding a trial, Trump seems likely to escape conviction. But the Ohio senator Rob Portman told CNN on Sunday it would not help Trump “if the argument is not going to be made on issues like constitutionality”.The same day, Trump announced the appointment of Bruce Castor, from Pennsylvania, and David Schoen, of Georgia.Castor is a former district attorney known for his decision not to prosecute Cosby in 2005 after Andrea Constand accused the comedian of sexual assault. In 2017, Castor sued Constand for defamation, claiming she destroyed his political career. Cosby was convicted and sentenced the following year.Last September, Schoen told the Atlanta Jewish Times: “I represented all sorts of reputed mobster figures: alleged head of Russian mafia in this country, Israeli mafia and two Italian bosses, as well a guy the government claimed was the biggest mafioso in the world.”He also discussed his work on police misconduct, but opposition to the movement to “defund the police”, and the Stone case. The confessed political dirty trickster was convicted of lying to Congress in the Russia investigation but Trump pardoned him in December. Schoen called Stone “very bright, full of personality and flair” and the case against him “very unfair and politicised”.Schoen said he trained as an actor, “at the Actors Studio and Herbert Berghof Studio”, which he said helped when he appeared in a Discovery Channel documentary about Epstein, a well-connected convicted sex trafficker who killed himself in custody in New York in 2019.Schoen said promotional work included interviews with “Fox, Good Day New York, and [the] Daily Mail” but said he had “had enough. Takes too much time away from legal work. Three different agents have called.”Asked for a “last word on Jeffrey Epstein”, Schoen said: “I still think he was murdered.” More

The Biden administration will consider new sanctions against North Korea as well as other possible actions against Russia said Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, in a television interview on Monday, as the administration continued its foreign policy review.Blinken told NBC News tools aimed at denuclearizing the Korean peninsula include additional sanctions in coordination with US allies, as well as diplomatic incentives he did not specify.Blinken said he was “deeply disturbed by the violent crackdown” on Russian protesters and arrests of people across the country demanding the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.“The Russian government makes a big mistake if it believes that this is about us,” he said. “It’s about them. It’s about the government. It’s about the frustration that the Russian people have with corruption, with autocracy, and I think they need to look inward, not outward.”In the interview, taped on Sunday, Blinken did not commit to specific sanctions against Moscow. He said he was reviewing a response to the actions against Navalny, as well as Russian election interference in 2020, the Solar Wind Hack and alleged bounties for US soldiers in Afghanistan.“The president could not have been clearer in his conversation with President [Vladimir] Putin,” Blinken said of Joe Biden’s call last week with the Russian leader. More

When 27-year-old Mauree Turner sat down at Holy Rollers, the queer-owned vegan Donut Shop in Oklahoma City in July 2020, it was under strange circumstances. First, Turner, who uses non-binary pronouns, had just won Oklahoma’s 88th district by a mere 228 votes. Second, sitting opposite, was the man they had just beaten.Before being elected to office, Turner spent their days doing the behind-the-scenes gruntwork of community organizing as a regional field director with the ACLU: planning workshops, leading trainings on college campuses, coordinating with dozens of volunteers.Jason Dunnington, on the other hand, was a three-term Democratic incumbent in a Republican-led state legislature whose progressive policy proposals struggled in Oklahoma’s Republican-led House. His readiness to compromise with Republicans made many view him as a moderate.“I wanted to sit down and just kind of talk about everything that had happened,” Turner tells me. “But I also wanted to know what I was getting into.”The two are a microcosm of a growing national trend. Left-leaning Democrats with strong community connections are increasingly defeating moderate incumbents with targeted, progressive policy ideas and transparent grassroots campaigns. But in an election year rife with ideological and strategic clashes between Democrats, two political opponents chatting over coffee feels like an outlier.I would have absolutely loved it if I could have been elected and brought in to do this work the same as any white manTurner is diplomatic when speaking of Dunnington, who was kind enough to give detailed handover notes to help their transition. He also offered to endorse Turner after his own defeat – despite efforts from the Republican candidate, Kelly Barlean, to bag his endorsement. But ultimately, Turner believes his loss was the result of marginalized voters wanting more than rhetorical allyship.“When you’re an ally and you do not have that shared lived experience, you are willing to continuously [compromise] the most vulnerable people for whatever piece of legislation gets passed at the end of the day. And I think a lot of people saw that. A lot of people feel it,” Turner says.It is a bit of a surprise that Turner, the first Muslim and non-binary person to to be elected to the state legislature in Oklahoma, even sat down for this interview.Following their win in November, Turner went from doing interviews every other day, to stopping almost completely, because of a media relationship that was too often intrusive and reductive.“People ask you to put yourself in this box continuously. ‘Are you genderqueer or are you non-binary or are you fluid?’ And I’m just like, why? I just got to exist before all of this,” explains Turner, with a half-smirk, when we talk in December.Our interview is by Zoom, but Turner is sitting in their newly christened office surrounded by – well, not much. The bookshelf is completely empty, the walls are blank – the most decorative things visible are the official government seal stitched into Turner’s black leather wingback chair, and Turner’s own deep rose-colored hijab, which they adjust from time to time, absent-mindedly.“People have asked me to justify what it means to be Muslim and queer. I shouldn’t have to justify how I exist. That was really jarring for me – having to sit through a series of interviews where people ask you those probing and prodding questions continuously,” Turner adds.The experience left a lasting impression. At one point, Turner was so physically exhausted from interviews, they thought they had Covid-19. “I would have absolutely loved it if I could have been elected and brought in to do this work the same as any white man.” jokes Turner. “I just want to come in [and say] these are my skills, I want to do this work, and then want to move on.”Turner – who hired laid off and furloughed people in Oklahoma for their campaign, and sent out handwritten postcards to residents – notes that most headlines about their win described them as “first Muslim” or “first non-binary”. Turner accepts and celebrates that the win is historic but finds it frustrating that a fraction of the coverage explored the range of issues they ran and won on.Still, Turner recognizes its power. Reminiscent of the Obama “hair like mine” moment, two eight-year-old Black girls who received Turner’s campaign flyer by mail got in contact asking for new fliers because Turner “looked like them”.Turner obliged, delivering the flyers personally. “It is important for people to be able to see themselves in policy,” Turner explains. Luckily, they had more than enough flyers.“Black families – you do one thing and it’s in the newspaper and they’re like, ‘give me 20 copies!’ So of course, I have all the runoffs at my house” says Turner smiling widely, chuckling at the idea of mailing campaign flyers as gifts for relatives over the holiday season.Growing up in Oklahoma, Turner was a self-described “latchkey kid”. The town they grew up in was small, almost entirely walkable, the kind of place where “everybody knows everybody – [and] everybody’s business”. Their mother worked two or three jobs at time, but there was always a sibling or a neighbor to keep an eye on things.“We knew all of our neighbors. My mom, when she was home, was outside talking to the neighbors. And that’s something you don’t see too much any more,” Turner recalls.They eventually left home to study veterinary medicine at Oklahoma State University, a passion that grew out of spending time around pets and farm animals when they were younger – Turner’s grandfather was “an old school cowboy”.Their time at Oklahoma state inadvertently served as Turner’s most formative years as a young organizer and activist, altering their career path. After graduating, Turner continued and expanded their activism working for the ACLU allowing Turner to immerse themself in some of the state’s most significant social justice issues. Now, Turner will have the chance to prioritize those same issues for Oklahoma’s most vulnerable families.If Oklahoma were its own country, its incarceration rate would be higher than every other nation in the world, including El Salvador, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Oklahoma City’s police department ranks second for police killings in the United States per capita according to most recent data from the Mapping Police Violence database.People have asked me to justify what it means to be Muslim and queer. I shouldn’t have to justify how I existTurner, whose own father was incarcerated throughout their childhood, has major plans for the criminal justice reform in the legislature.Despite consistently looking for employment since being released from prison more than a decade ago, Turner’s father wasn’t able to secure stable employment until about two years ago.“Oklahoma does this really bang-up job of keeping people incarcerated long after they leave prison,” says Turner. “We make it so hard for people to actually reintegrate, whether that’s being able to understand when you can register to vote again or whether that’s banning the box so people can find a job to be able to pay for their families and to be able to pay for themselves.”That’s why Turner’s vision for criminal justice legislation involves improving the lives of people post-incarceration, addressing things like employment support and training, alleviating the economic burden of parole and probation, and improving reentry programs.“There are some barriers to re-entry programs around Oklahoma – and it’s like, if I was at the place that I needed to be to get into a re-entry program, I wouldn’t need a re-entry program,” they say, exasperated, adding. “We know drugs are in our prisons and jails and you’re telling me that I need to be completely sober to enter into this re-entry program?”Turner’s mother’s experience is also a touchstone for their policy. As a child, Turner’s mother worked an administrative job during the day, a warehouse job overnight, and a part-time job at a beauty supply store on the weekends. She made breakfast for Turner and their siblings before school on the morning she had time. After school, Turner saw her for a brief period before she left for her overnight job. And still she struggled to make ends meet.“Working yourself into an early grave just to scrape by? That’s not the Oklahoma I want to create, that’s not what I want my nieces or my nephews to grow up in,” Turner explains.But it is still the reality for Turner’s mother, who currently works two jobs. Turner supports a living wage of at least $15 an hour. They concede that the state’s Republican-led legislature might limit the wage increase to 10 or 12 dollars, but Turner is unperturbed:“That was one of my motivations for running; we need more community organizers in office,” Turner recalls. “We need the folks who are continuously filling the gaps that our government leaves [to run for office] for us to be able to be in the position to change it with policy.” More