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    An Arizona town is dreading plans to turn its prison into an ICE facility: ‘It’s morally objectionable’

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    In an Arizona town where farmers have long wrested a living off the arid land, reports that a former prison complex may be turned into an immigration detention center have sparked a fierce backlash, with residents seeing the potential transition as the latest undesirable symbol of the Trump administration’s massive escalation of immigration enforcement.The facility in Marana, a town of about 63,700 people located north of Tucson, sprawls across a flat expanse of desert studded with scrubby bushes and hardy trees. It was shuttered almost two years ago, and the Management and Training Corporation, the private company that owns it, informed the town manager of company plans to operate a detention center in the prison.During a town hall meeting on 23 October, residents crowded into a school auditorium to learn more from representatives of local government and advocacy organizations about the plan. Many attenders spoke against the jailing of immigrants amid Donald Trump’s crusade to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible.Karla Jones, one of the attenders, said she abhorred the idea of having a nearby detention center to hold immigrants – whose only crime in many cases is lacking US legal status, a civil offense – for extended periods of time. “That’s breaking up families,” she said. “And it’s people who are paying taxes, it’s people who are working. So I don’t want my community to support that.”Federal legislation passed in July provided $45bn for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to build more detention centers for adults and children as part of a larger $75bn, four-year package for the federal agency. To vastly increase detention capacity, the federal government is relying heavily on for-profit private companies that run prisons.The Utah-based Management and Training Corporation (MTC) is one of those companies. MTC built the Marana prison in the mid-1990s, when the population in the then largely farming community was about 2,000. It was the first private prison in the state.In 2013, Arizona bought the prison for $150,000. In December 2023, the state – citing high costs and a decreasing incarcerated population – closed it. This past summer, after Arizona lawmakers rejected a bill that would have leased the prison for $1 a year to the federal government for use as an immigration detention center – MTC paid the state $15m to get it back.View image in fullscreenMarana’s town manager, Terry Rozema, said there was little the town could do to prevent the use of the building complex as a detention center. “The facility is privately owned by MTC and is already properly zoned for use as a prison or an ICE facility. As such, the town doesn’t have authority to restrict its future use as long as it meets current zoning,” Rozema said in an emailed statement.Emily Lawhead, MTC’s director of communications, declined an interview but wrote in an email that the company was “in discussions with several public agencies that may have a need for additional bed space”. ICE did not respond to questions regarding plans to use the onetime prison, but an agency spokesperson cited the need for “greater detention capacity” due to “a significant number of arrests”.MTC already operates five immigration detention centers in California, New Mexico and Texas.Its record in Arizona is spotty. In 2015, the state canceled a contract with the company after a riot at a prison it operated in the town of Kingman left more than a dozen incarcerated people and guards injured. A subsequent investigation by the Arizona department of corrections concluded that the company had “a culture of disorganization, disengagement and disregard” for state policies. MTC did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about those allegations, but the company has previously described the investigation’s findings as flawed.Jennifer Allen, a member of the board of supervisors for Pima county, where Marana is located, said that given reports about the poor conditions facing ICE detainees across the country, she and her constituents were concerned about the treatment of people in the Marana facility if it were to be converted and about oversight of the facility. She criticized the federal government for showering immigration enforcement with resources while simultaneously cutting funding for social safety net programs for older adults, children and other vulnerable populations.At the town hall, the federal government received plenty of criticism for its aggressive immigration agenda. Many attenders spoke against not just having a detention center in the vicinity, but also about the impact of social harms of the crackdown. Some residents brought signs bearing the slogan “Stop the kidnappings, protect your neighbors”, alluding to forceful arrests of immigrants in their homes, at work and in the streets.Speaking to the crowd, Tucson resident Maximiliano Torres likened the Trump administration’s detention and deportation campaign to Arizona’s 2010 Senate Bill 1070, commonly known as the “show me your papers” law that empowered police to conduct immigration enforcement. Although police can still inquire about immigration status, it’s no longer required because courts have largely struck down the law as unconstitutional.Recalling the law’s impact, Torres told the crowd: “They turned [crossing the border without authorization] into a criminal act, so they could justify putting those people in prison and forcing the federal government to pay private prisons.”While Trump has repeatedly promised immigration enforcement efforts would be focused on undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, statistics show that those being held in detention are primarily people without criminal convictions. As of September, 71.5% of the 59,762 immigrants in detention had no criminal conviction, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Many convictions involved traffic violations and other minor offenses.Under the Biden administration, immigrants with strong community ties and no serious brushes with the law would generally be released and be asked to check in with ICE periodically, since the government prioritized deporting people with criminal convictions, said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “Now everybody gets arrested, everybody gets detained,” she said.The Trump administration has significantly expanded mandatory detention to keep immigrants in confinement during proceedings to remove them from the country, she said. “More and more often, people are just giving up and agreeing to be deported instead of sitting in jail trying to fight their case,” the attorney said.In Marana, resident Tom Flynn left the town hall clutching one of the protest signs. He detests the possibility of an immigrant detention center in his town. “No 1, it’s morally objectionable,” he said. “No 2, it’s a detriment to the overall economy; it reduces the number of people who have been in the area, it depresses home values. And it’s so obviously politically driven.”Marlis Dinning said what she heard at the town hall about the possible detention center was disturbing. “It seems like all of this has happened behind closed doors,” she said. She’s against the detention of immigrants, many of them asylum seekers who entered the country legally, and who now “have no way to get citizenship”, she said.After the town hall, Jones was feeling quite unsettled by the overall discussion. But she vowed to participate in the mounting community pressure to keep the detention center at bay. “I really hope we can stop it from opening,” she said. More

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      ‘The city that draws the line’: one Arizona community’s fight against a huge datacenter

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      A company’s opaque plan to build a huge datacenter outside Tucson, Arizona has roiled the desert city over the past few months, the latest US community to push back as tech companies aggressively seek to build out infrastructure for cloud computing and to power the AI boom.The proposed datacenter, known as Project Blue, would span 290 acres in Pima county, and become the biggest development ever in the county, or anywhere in the southern part of the state.The $3.6bn project wasn’t on most Tucsonans’ radar until 17 June, when the county board of supervisors narrowly agreed to sell and rezone a parcel of land just south-east of town to the developer Beale Infrastructure.The San Francisco-based company hoped to get the project annexed by the city, a necessary step for it to be supplied by the public utility, Tucson Water.But since the parcel sale agreement, the proposed center has faced stiff pushback from a community upset over the enormous amounts of water and electricity it would require, and the lack of transparency with which the developers and some in local government have pursued the project.Conflict over the project made what is normally a sleepy time for Tucson politics – the city council is off in July amid searing heat and, with luck, monsoon downpours – into “the craziest seven weeks I’ve seen in Tucson”, said Michael Bogan, an aquatic ecologist and hydrologist at the University of Arizona who has long worked in the area.View image in fullscreenThe episode in Tucson illustrates the secretiveness and tenacity with which developers are rushing to build datacenters throughout the US, and the emotionally charged mix of issues that confront communities, weighing sometimes murky promises of economic incentives and jobs against effects on the environment and natural resources.In Memphis, Elon Musk’s xAI built one of the world’s biggest supercomputers, bringing in tax revenue to an economically depressed area, while also setting off a battle over air quality concerns related to the development’s methane turbines. Phoenix has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of datacenters, which keeps expanding, encouraged by tax incentives and local business leaders; local opposition and ordinances around noise pollution and water use are also on the rise. High-profile projects have been postponed or cancelled due to local pushback in recent months in northern Virginia, the nation’s biggest datacenter hub; in St Charles, Missouri; and in several towns in Indiana.But in even more locations, datacenters are moving forward, often under a cloud of secrecy.Quest for AI computing powerThe project in Tucson is one of many emerging in the quest for AI computing power and to serve data-intensive companies.The project envisions a vast warehouse full of computers in the Sonoran desert, including $2.4bn worth of equipment. Community outrage over the project grew soon after the city council’s 17 June vote, and much of it centered around the issue of water.Datacenters use water in two ways: to maintain a steady humidity, and to cool off the hot computers, which is often accomplished by running cold water past the machines, consuming water in the form of steam.Communities throughout the US have seen groundwater depletion and contamination after datacenters crept up. Tucson has long embraced water conservation, and this protective ethos is more salient there than many other communities, said Ed Hendel, president of Sky Island AI, a Tucson-based company. As one example, the city treats wastewater and releases it to the Santa Cruz River, home to wildlife such as endangered fish.Hendel’s daily work relies on datacenters, but he said they should be built where they make sense. Placing water-guzzling warehouses of computers “in a hot desert is not a good starting point”, he said. “Putting them in a hot desert in the midst of a drought is even more absurd, because that water is precious.”View image in fullscreenBeale did not detail exactly how much water it would use and from where in the weeks after the June vote, even though it claimed the project would be “water positive”. In the absence of details, Bogan set out to analyze how the project would be water positive, projecting it would be most likely to use treated water that now flows into the Santa Cruz. But even if the company went that route, Bogan wrote in a white paper on 11 July, it could dry up significant portions of the river, harming the many plants and animals that live there.The city manager, Tim Thomure, acting as an intermediary between Beale and the public, released the first concrete details about the project’s planned water use in mid-July after Bogan’s white paper came out: Project Blue would not affect the Santa Cruz River, he said. It would use three sources of water, including from two locations where treated wastewater is currently stored underground for future use, as well as the Tucson airport remediation plant, which treats contaminated groundwater that currently stays on site. And it gave an estimate of water use: over 1,900 acre-feet, or 620m gallons, enough to supply more than four typical 18-hole Pima county golf courses, according to Thomure.Beale also pledged to invest $100m in a pipeline to transport and use treated wastewater, and create 180 jobs.But this is not “water positive”, and it would rather cause “net depletion of our groundwater resources to supply Project Blue”, said Bogan, the aquatic ecologist. He pointed to a city document which notes that if Project Blue were to use more groundwater than it could replenish, it could make payments, or “water positivity rates” to make up for it.Lisa Shipek, executive director of southern Arizona’s Watershed Management Group, agreed with Bogan’s assessment. By possibly paying for using up groundwater, Project Blue, Shipek said, would potentially “replace wet water with ‘paper water’”. The tactic – paying for consuming wet water, or offsetting it in another way, whether in the form of water conservation or education measures – has been used to deplete groundwater throughout the world.Water not the only concernWater wasn’t community members’ only concern. Beale Infrastructure is not a typical developer, but rather a subsidiary of the asset management company Blue Owl. On 21 July, the local news site Arizona Luminaria published a story revealing that Pima county staff possessed a memo stating that Project Blue would be financed by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The story prompted fresh outcry from community members frustrated with Amazon’s anti-union actions, and overtures by its owner, Jeff Bezos, to the Trump administration.An AWS spokesperson said: “AWS has previously engaged in standard due diligence processes in Arizona, like we do in any geographic location we consider building and operating our infrastructure. We do not have any commitments or agreements in place to develop this project.”But the company declined to answer a question about whether AWS was affiliated with Project Blue in the past, or, potentially, in the future.A Beale spokesperson said: “We cannot comment on our tenants until a more advanced stage of the project.”Another wrinkle that added to the uproar was a news release from Tucson Electric Power (TEP) put out hours after the county vote on 17 June, announcing it was requesting a 14% rate increase to offset grid investments and inflation. With datacenters driving up electricity demand across the country, many community members assumed the rate hike was related to Project Blue, said the county supervisor, Matt Heinz.It wasn’t. The timing was coincidental, and a huge mistake, he said. “It’s unfortunately really plagued this whole project.”A TEP spokesperson, Joseph Barrios, said that the rate increase had nothing to do with Project Blue, but was based on costs already incurred in 2024 and before.View image in fullscreen“We understand that any rate increase could have an impact on our customers and it’s not something we take lightly,” he said.Outrage over Project Blue grew rapidly over the summer. Eliseo Gomez, a local high school teacher and organizer, convened with a small group at the base of Tucson’s “A” mountain shortly after the 17 June vote. “We were like: what can we do?” They decided to target the annexation vote. The group started a website and social media channels named No Desert Data Center, encouraging people to express their concerns with the mayor and city council.In response, the city arranged for two public meetings with presentations from Beale Infrastructure, as well as Tucson Water and TEP. The majority of attenders at both meetings were clearly opposed, most wearing red shirts saying “no to Project Blue” or holding protest signs. Union members, enticed by promises of construction jobs, made up a supportive minority at the events. Attenders grew increasingly upset, Gomez said, as they felt their concerns and queries were dodged or ignored. By the second meeting, on 4 August, many locals appeared fed up. Beale executives gave similar speeches, without providing much further detail, incensing the crowd, whose boos and shouts made it difficult for presenters to continue.Many citizens presented their own research. “I feel like I learned more about Project Blue from the public than the city,” said city councilman Rocque Perez.On 6 August, in an unscheduled vote, council members unanimously decided to discontinue discussions with Beale, each sharing short speeches revealing sharp opposition to Project Blue. Tucsonans packing the council chambers cheered and celebrated; Beale executives, appearing stunned, were booed as they left.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionImpact on Tucson politicsStill, Beale hasn’t given up. In mid-September, the company proposed moving forward with an air-cooled system that uses less water than the original design. Beale co-filed a state application with the TEP, to be supplied with up to 286 megawatts – enough to power to up to 250,000 homes.In a statement, Beale has described the new design as a closed-loop system that “uses minimal amounts of water that are continuously recirculated, thereby eliminating water loss”.Several local leaders said the Republican-led Arizona Corporation Commission, which oversees electricity use in the state, is likely to approve the project’s electricity request. That would mean Beale’s main remaining hurdle is finding a water source. The company has not said how it would obtain any such water, however, and given the city council’s vote, they cannot be supplied by the city’s public utility.Meanwhile, the controversy has had a profound impact on Tucson politics. Even supporters acknowledge the Project Blue process started poorly, partly because non-disclosure agreements between Beale and city staff dating back to 2022 meant that most elected leaders knew little to nothing about it until some time this year.Supervisor Jennifer Allen said the first meeting between Beale and the board in late May was short on details, including water use, and her requests for more information turned up nothing concrete. It was “a lot of greenwashing”, she said. She voted no on 17 June, as did her colleague Andrés Cano.Heinz, a longtime Democrat, said he voted for the rezoning and sale because the project had long been championed by city staff, including city manager Thomure, and because the tens of thousands of hi-tech jobs in the area will need access to nearby datacenters.Though there weren’t detailed water use estimates at first, Heinz said he wasn’t worried as Beale would be working with Tucson Water and the city would be “putting in those guardrails”.View image in fullscreenThe new design, he said, “will be an even better fit for southern Arizona”.“I frankly wish they’d approached us with this air-cooled design to begin with.”Heinz, as well as supervisors Rex Scott and Steve Christy, have come under withering scrutiny from constituents, who have implored the board to revisit the sale agreement. Heinz said that wasn’t going to happen. “There’s no vote before the board,” Heinz said. “It’s done. And I don’t want to reverse it.”Scott acknowledged that NDAs played a negative role in the affair and noted that both the county and city had already implemented new guidelines for handling them, which should grant more transparency to the process, Scott said.The city council has also since passed new rules to give more transparency and oversight over big water users, and they are developing specific guidelines and guard-rails to govern any future proposed data centers.‘Cities across the country are being sold the same story’While Beale’s air-cooled system may use less water, it has highlighted the other enormous costs of datacenters: electricity. Air-cooled systems use huge amounts of energy and are less energy efficient – especially in a desert where the daily average high is 29C (84F).It’s now a national issue – a 2024 report to Congress co-authored by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher AB Siddik estimates that datacenters consumed 4.4% of the nation’s total electricity as of 2023, which could rise to as much as 12% by 2028.TEP’s involvement has brought scrutiny to the private utility; locals have recently been protesting at their headquarters. On 23 September, the mayor and council announced they plan to intervene in the utility’s request to the state for the rate hike, saying in a statement such an increase “will strain families and small businesses and slow the transition to clean, affordable energy”.View image in fullscreenThe saga has also raised the possibility that the Tucsonans or their leaders could consider pursuing a public utility to replace TEP when its contract is due for review in 2025, though that could be an enormous effort, Perez said.“I’m disappointed that Tucson Electric Power is partnering with Beale despite strong community concerns,” said councilman Kevin Dahl. “It certainly makes an argument for public power.”TEP spokesperson Joseph Barrios said that the utility’s involvement with Project Blue would not raise customers’ rates or affect their service.“We have an obligation to serve, and that includes all customers within our service area,” Barrios said.As far as the possibility of public power, “we feel our community is better served by continuing to work together”, he added.Council member and vice-mayor Lane Santa Cruz said this wasn’t just about Tucson, though.“What’s happening here isn’t unique to us: cities across the country are being sold the same story, with promises of jobs, innovation and progress,” she said. “But what’s not being talked about is who really benefits and what it costs us.”Too often, she added, these projects are extractive, using a community’s water, electricity, and labor – while providing only a small number of jobs – instead of being a sustainable partner.“We need to be the city that draws the line,” she said. 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      Arizona sheriff’s office misused millions set aside to remedy racial profiling

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      The sheriff’s office for metro Phoenix spent millions of dollars budgeted for compliance costs in a racial profiling case over Joe Arpaio’s immigration crackdowns on things that had little or nothing to do with a court-ordered overhaul of the agency, according to an expert’s report.The report released on Wednesday criticized the use of compliance money by the Maricopa county sheriff’s office to fund personnel costs and tasks, either in part or in full, that are not connected to the overhaul.It also pointed out inappropriate spending: $2.8m for surplus body-worn camera licenses that went beyond the court’s orders; $1.5m in renovations in the relocation of an internal affairs office; over $1.3m to buy 42 vehicles; and an $11,000 golf cart to bring staff from headquarters to the internal affairs operation, even though the department was leasing parking space at the latter location.For over a decade, Maricopa county taxpayers have picked up the bill for remedying constitutional violations found in a 2013 profiling verdict over then sheriff Arpaio’s traffic patrols targeting immigrants.The racial profiling case centered on 20 large-scale traffic patrols launched by Arpaio that targeted immigrants from January 2008 through October 2011. That led to the profiling verdict and expensive court-ordered overhauls of the agency’s traffic patrol operations and, later, its internal affairs unit.The county says $323m has been spent so far on legal expenditures, a staff that monitors the sheriff’s department’s progress and the agency’s compliance costs. The county has said the total is expected to reach $352m by July 2026.The federal judge presiding over the case expressed concerns about transparency in spending by the sheriff’s office and ordered a review, leading to the blistering report from budget analysts. The report was prepared by budget analysts picked by the case’s monitor.The report concluded 72% of the $226m in spending by the sheriff’s office from February 2014 to late September 2024 was either wrongly attributed or “improperly prorated” to a compliance fund.Budget analysts who reviewed hundreds of employee records over roughly that time period found an average of 70% of all positions funded by compliance money were “inappropriately assigned or only partially related to compliance.”Those expenditures were unrelated to or unnecessary for compliance, lacked appropriate justification or resulted from purposeful misrepresentation by the sheriff’s office, county leaders or both, the budget analysts wrote.Sheriff Jerry Sheridan’s office released a statement saying its attorneys are reviewing the report to identify areas of common concern and any findings it may dispute. Sheridan, who took office this year, is the fourth sheriff to grapple with the case.Raul Piña, a longtime member of a community advisory board created to help improve trust in the sheriff’s office, said the report opens up a broader conversation about the integrity of the sheriff’s office.“You will have to double-check now whenever the agency talks about statistics,” Piña said.Beginning earlier this year, county officials ramped up their criticism of the spending. They said the agency shouldn’t still be under the court’s supervision a dozen years after the verdict and shouldn’t still be paying such hefty bills, including about $30m to those who monitor the agency on behalf of the judge since around 2014.The report criticized Maricopa county and its governing board for a lack of oversight over the spending.Thomas Galvin, chairman of the county’s governing board and a leading critic of the continued court supervision, said the board’s legal counsel is reviewing the report. “The board has confidence in MCSO’s budgeting team and will respond accordingly,” Galvin said.Since the profiling verdict, the sheriff’s office has been criticized for disparate treatment of Hispanic and Black drivers in a series of studies of its traffic stops. The latest study, however, shows significant improvements. The agency’s also dogged by a backlog of internal affairs cases. While the agency has made progress on some fronts and garnered favorable compliance grades in certain areas, it hasn’t yet been deemed fully compliant with the court-ordered overhauls. More

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      Why is the US House speaker refusing to seat an elected Democrat? | Moira Donegan

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      The people of Arizona’s seventh congressional district – a vast territory extending across the state’s south, along the Mexican border – have been denied representation in Congress for weeks. That’s because Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has refused to swear in Adelita Grijalva, their representative-elect, who won a special election to fill the seat vacated by her father, the late Raúl Grijalva, in a landslide late last month. Grijalva, a Democrat, has been largely ignored by the speaker. Unlike sworn representatives, she has to go around the Capitol with an escort. There’s an office with her name on the door, but she hasn’t been allowed inside, and has worked instead out of a conference room on another floor.It is an unprecedented abuse of procedural power on the part of the speaker, one that has had the effect of silencing a political opponent and denying representation to the citizens of her district. In refusing to seat Grijalva, Johnson has defied the will of Arizona’s voters, and effectively nullified, at least for the time being, a legitimate congressional election. He has persisted in this even in defiance of his own promises, after saying on Friday he would seat her this week once the House returned to session – and then telling lawmakers they wouldn’t reconvene this week after all. Last week, Grijalva showed up to a three-and-a-half-minute pro forma session, hoping to be sworn in then. (Johnson has sworn in other representatives at pro forma sessions in the past.) But the Republican presiding over the session, Morgan Griffith, ignored the effort. On a weekend talkshow, Grijalva said she had heard “absolutely nothing” from the speaker about the timing of her swearing in.Grijalva thinks she knows why. There is no political calculation that could justify Mike Johnson’s refusal to seat a duly elected member of the House: Grijalva won her race, and both his oath to the constitution and his responsibilities to the body that he leads require Johnson to seat her. But in lieu of deference to these higher aims, Grijalva suspects that Johnson is pursuing a much more cynical one: in refusing to swear her in and allow her to take up the office to which she has been elected, Johnson, Grijalva thinks, is aiming to stop her becoming the final member of Congress whose signature is needed to force a vote on the release of confidential files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Currently, the petition has 217 signatures; it needs only 218. Grijalva has pledged to support it. “Why the rules are different for me – the only thing that I can think of is the Epstein files,” Grijalva told the New York Times.The Epstein scandal, and the ensuing fallout from new and resurfaced revelations about Donald Trump’s deep and longstanding friendship with the deceased child sex trafficker and financier, has long plagued the Trump administration. One of the few genuine threats to Trump’s grip over his coalition came a few months ago, when his justice department refused to release files relating to the case, causing outrage among a group of rightwing podcasters, media personalities and conspiracy theorists who had long traded on speculation about the case and accusations that powerful Democrats were involved in a cover-up.The discharge petition, if passed, would not be likely to result in the actual release of the documents. The move has little support in the Republican-backed Senate; there is no chance that Donald Trump, who has opposed the release of the Epstein files, calling them a “waste” of “time and energy”, would sign a bill into law making them public. But what the move would accomplish is forcing a full chamber vote on the matter, requiring every member of the Republican caucus to go on the record either endorsing the release of the files – and thereby displeasing Trump – or opposing it – thereby displeasing their voters. The Times has reported that Johnson’s delay is giving the White House more time to pressure Republicans who have already signed on to the discharge petition to remove their signatures before the Grijalva is sworn in.And so it seems that Johnson is ignoring the constitution and subverting the will of the voters in order to buy time, in an effort to spare his party embarrassment over their president’s one-time close confidence with a pedophile.But the refusal to seat Grijalva has broader implications. In using his procedural control over the functioning of Congress to deny a seat to an elected Democrat, Johnson is setting a dangerous precedent and raising questions about future transfers of power. If a Democratic majority is elected in 2026, will the outgoing Republican speaker duly swear in its members? Or will he use his procedural powers to delay one, several or many of them from taking their oaths of office – either under the pretext of election fraud or personal ineligibility, or out of sheer, bald unwillingness to hand over power to members of a party that the president and his allies have repeatedly described as illegitimate?These are no longer fanciful questions; they are ones that must be asked. The Republicans who refused to subvert the law for Trump’s benefit on January 6 are now largely gone; the ones who have replaced them appear much more willing to place party before country. Every day that Grijalva is not sworn in, the shadow they cast over 2026 darkens.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Mike Johnson hasn’t sworn in this new Democrat. Is it because she wants to release the Epstein files?

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      Congress’s newest member, Adelita Grijalva, came to Washington DC this week, expecting to be officially sworn in by the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.Two days later, she returned to her southern Arizona district disappointed, if not a little confused. No swearing-in ceremony had been organized, meaning Grijalva, a Democrat who easily won a special election last month to replace her late father, Raúl M Grijalva, was not able to start her new job.Trapped in the purgatorial status of representative-elect, she had to be escorted around the Capitol building by her soon-to-be-colleagues, like any other member of the public. Her name is on the door of her new office, but she does not have the keys.“I want to get to work and I can’t,” Grijalva said.She thinks she knows the reason why Johnson is in no rush to administer the oath: in addition to co-sponsoring bills on the environment, public education and other issues she campaigned on addressing, Grijalva plans to provide the final signature on a petition that would force a vote on legislation to release files related to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – which the speaker and Donald Trump oppose.“I can’t think of any other reason. It’s not like my being sworn in changes the majority,” she said.The matter of the Epstein files has for months been a thorn in the side of the president and his allies in Congress. Though Trump has decried it as a “Democrat hoax”, a small group of dissident Republicans have joined with all of the Democrats in the House of Representatives to pursue the legislative maneuver, known as a discharge petition. It just needs the signatures of 218 lawmakers to succeed, and has currently received 217 – Grijalva’s would be the last one.The petition is a rare instance of defiance among congressional Republicans, who have given Trump much of what he wants ever since he returned to the White House. But even if it succeeds and the legislation passes the House, it is unlikely to go far. The Senate’s Republican leaders have shown little interest in the issue, and it is difficult to imagine Trump signing the bill.Another complication, both for the petition and Grijalva’s hopes to taking her seat: the House was out of session all this week. Johnson last month called off planned work days to pressure Senate Democrats into voting for legislation the chamber has approved to fund the government and end the ongoing shutdown.However, the House did hold a three-and-a-half-minute procedural session on Tuesday – one Grijalva attended along with dozens of Democrats, in hopes of getting Johnson to swear her in. No luck, even though Johnson administered the oath to two Republicans who won special elections in Florida during a similar session earlier this year.“That doesn’t make sense, why I wouldn’t be sworn in, in the same pace that they were?” Grijalva said. “And who is losing out are the constituents that need a Congress to work for them.”A spokesperson for Johnson pointed to his comments signaling that Grijalva will be sworn in when the House returns to session, but that will not happen until funding is restored to the government.“The House will come back into session and do its work as soon as Chuck Schumer allows us to reopen the government,” Johnson said today, referring to the top Senate Democrat whom the Republicans blame for the funding lapse.Grijalva along with her family had planned to be in Washington again by Tuesday of next week, in hopes the House would be back to work. On Friday afternoon, Johnson announced that it would take the whole week off.“Now I have to change, blow up all of the travel plans that I made for everybody,” she said. “So, that’s frustrating.” More

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      Adelita Grijalva wins her late father’s House seat in Arizona special election

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      Adelita Grijalva, the daughter of the late progressive congressman Raúl Grijalva, won a special election on Tuesday to fill the seat left open when her father died earlier this year.Grijalva faced Republican challenger Daniel Butierez in the heavily blue seventh district in Arizona, which covers the southern parts of the state and the borderland areas.Raúl Grijalva held the seat for more than two decades, until his death at 77 in March. His daughter will become the first Latina that Arizona has sent to Congress.Filling the seat narrows Republicans’ advantage in the House, where Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” passed by only one vote.Adelita Grijalva, a longtime local elected official in southern Arizona, fended off Democratic challengers in a primary that attracted national attention amid an ongoing debate over the future of the Democratic party, and in particular its ageing candidates, as Raúl Grijalva was one of multiple Democratic lawmakers to die in office this year.The younger Grijalva, 54, faced criticisms from her main challenger, Deja Foxx, a 25-year-old influencer, over what Foxx called her “legacy last name”. Grijalva defended her own record in politics, but didn’t shy away from her family’s legacy in the district either. She served for 20 years on a Tucson school board and has been a Pima county supervisor since 2020. She also received endorsements from scores of heavyweight progressives and statewide elected officials.“I’m not using my dad’s last name,” Grijalva told the Guardian earlier this year. “It’s mine, too. I’ve worked in this community for a very long time – 26 years at a non-profit, 20 years on the school board, four years and four months on the board of supervisors. I’ve earned my last name, too.”Grijalva, a progressive, has said upholding democracy, standing up for immigrants’ rights, and protecting access to Medicaid and Medicare are among her top priorities. She said during the primary that, if elected, she wants to push for Medicaid for All and the Green New Deal. More

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      in Elections

      Arizona Seventh Congressional District Special Election Results 2025: Grijalva vs. Butierez

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      Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press.By The New York Times election results team: Michael Andre, Emma Baker, Neil Berg, Andrew Chavez, Michael Beswetherick, Matthew Bloch, Lily Boyce, Irineo Cabreros, Nico Chilla, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Leo Dominguez, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Joyce Ho, Will Houp, Jon Huang, Junghye Kim, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Jasmine C. Lee, Joey K. Lee, Alex Lemonides, Ilana Marcus, Alicia Parlapiano, Jaymin Patel, Dan Simmons-Ritchie, Charlie Smart, Jonah Smith, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang.Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press. More

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      in US Politics

      Charlie Kirk memorial mixes rally and revival as mourners vow to spread Maga message

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      Hours before the sun rose over the Arizona desert, tens of thousands of mourners snaked through the Valley toward the State Farm stadium in Glendale – where the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was lionized as a “prophet” for the streaming era and a defender of free speech, martyred in the line of duty.The memorial was part spiritual revival and part political rally, with a program that included Donald Trump and prominent members of the president’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement. Mourners obliged the red, white and blue “Sunday best” dress code, filling the at-capacity venue with stars, stripes and Maga hats.“We’ve got it from here,” said vice-president JD Vance, memorializing Kirk, his friend and the founder of the youth activist group Turning Point USA, as one of the most pre-eminent voices on the American right.Inside the domed stadium, emotions were already raw when Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, took the stage. She inhaled deeply and looked heavenward then dabbed tears from her eyes and began her remarks before a rapt audience, Trump among them.She said her husband’s work was devoted to saving the “lost boys of the west” who lack direction and meaning, including the 22-year-old suspect charged with his murder. “That man,” she said, her chest heaving. “I forgive him.” A tearful crowd rose to its feet in sustained applause as Kirk cast her eyes upward.A political widow in an instant, Kirk will succeed her husband as the chief executive of the political movement he founded. “I will make you proud,” she said.Her words marked the emotional crest of an hours-long service that began with Christian worship songs and ended with a live performance by Lee Greenwood of God Bless the USA – and a speech from the president to a “nation in mourning”. “America loved Charlie Kirk,” Trump said, admiring the 31-year-old’s ability to “always draw a crowd”.As the afternoon wore on, the speeches became sharper and more political – a battle cry that implored the government officials present to be aggressive in “wielding the sword against evil”. There were only a handful of explicit references to Democrats and the left – but many speeches mixed personal remembrances of Kirk with a searing vilification of his ideological opponents.“To those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing,” said Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, his voice rising with indignation.“You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build.”Prosecutors have said Kirk was killed by a lone gunman, Tyler Robinson, who has been charged with capital murder and could face the death penalty if convicted. While authorities have not revealed a clear motive for the shooting, prosecutors say texts from Robinson indicated he had enough of Kirk’s “hatred”.“We are all Charlie Kirk now,” said Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who began her political career helping to “battle the socialist indoctrination on college campuses” as Turning Point USA’s national Hispanic outreach director.Before the memorial began, conservative media personalities and influencers circulated in the VIP section of the stadium. Colorado congresswoman Laura Boebert, wearing a blue blazer, mingled with Kyle Rittenhouse, who became a cause célèbre on the right after being acquitted of fatally shooting two men during protests against a police killing in Kenosha, Wisconsin.“Honored to be here,” tweeted billionaire businessman and former Trump administration adviser Elon Musk. Musk was seated next to Trump, a reunification Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet said Kirk had wanted “so badly”.View image in fullscreenEddie Wallin crossed the Atlantic to attend Kirk’s memorial. His journey took him from Sweden to Texas, where he rented a car and drove 17 hours to reach Glendale, subsisting on bananas and other provisions that he could eat behind the wheel.Wearing a white shirt emblazoned with the word “Freedom”, Wallin recalled meeting Kirk in 2019, during a trip to Texas. He said Kirk, smiling, told him he never expected to meet a Swedish conservative. Six years later, Wallin said he encountered Kirk again during the 2024 presidential election won by Trump and was surprised the organizer, by then a hugely prominent figure in Maga politics, remembered him.“After so many years, he remembered me,” Wallin said. “I will remember him for my whole life.”Friends and colleagues shared personal anecdotes, depicting Kirk as a tireless promoter of conservative cultural values and a “Maga warrior” who encouraged those he loved to get married and have “millions of kids”.Turning Point USA staff described Kirk’s journey from a teenager with an “idea and a folding table” into the leader of one of the most influential conservative youth movements of the modern era. One suggested Kirk was having “heavenly Fomo” – fear of missing out – looking down on the event, the largest in the organization’s history. The memorial, with Super-Bowl level security at the stadium where Taylor Swift launched her historic Eras tour, was pulled together in just 10 days.The stage bore stamps of a Turning Point production: columns of sparklers flared, red lights blinked and two large American flags featured prominently, atop the TV screens that reflected the program to the audience.Mike McCoy, Kirk’s former chief of staff, quoted philosopher Soren Kierkegaard: “The martyr dies and his rule has just begun.” The audience roared.Several speakers, including Trump, spoke of their shock at learning that Kirk had been fatally shot. Frank Turek was there on the Utah Valley University campus, standing feet from Kirk when he was struck by a single bullet. Turek recalled the harrowing minutes that followed, including a struggle to pull Kirk’s 6ft 5in frame into a car as medics performed first aid. “His face was looking at mine but he wasn’t looking at me,” Turek said. “He was looking past me, right into eternity.”Long before the speaking program began, mourners wiped their eyes, swayed to the music, their arms raised in worship. Parents brought young children – even babies – to the memorial. One father padded the lining of his jacket with diapers, as no bags were allowed under the rigorous security in place for the event.Near one of the entrance’s, Turning Point Action registered voters and handed out information to students interested in starting new chapters on their high school or college campuses – a political movement Erika Kirk vowed would grow “10 times greater through the power of his memory”.Several stands sold T-shirts with a sketch of Kirk and the text, “This is our turning point.”Many supporters and speakers vowed to carry on Kirk’s work.Jeffrey Barke, a physician with a large online following, came with a group of friends from Orange county, California, on what he called a “pilgrimage of sorts” to honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy.“What you’re seeing here is not just a tribute to his movement, you’re seeing a revival of his message: faith, family, freedom,” Barke said, gesturing to the crowd of supporters. Though only 31, Kirk left a lasting spiritual and political legacy, Barke said.“I think every one of us needs to be a bit more uncomfortable than we’re used to in spreading Charlie’s message,” he said, pledging to use his own platform and social media presence to do so.Christina Sawick, wearing a “Trump was right about everything” hat, said she was inspired by the attendance to pay tribute to Kirk, whom she had followed since 2016. On Sunday, she left her home in Mesa at 3am to attend the service. Sawick said the country seems to have reached a turning point, and she hopes Americans will follow Kirk’s legacy.“I want people to get behind our president,” she said. “And that there’s nothing wrong with making America great again.” More

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      in Elections

      Election deniers now hold posts on local US election boards, raising concerns for midterms

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      A number of people who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and often of other elections in which Republicans have not been victorious, have been elevated to positions of power since Donald Trump’s re-election, raising concerns about the potential for partisan meddling in critical parts of the country such as Arizona and Georgia.State by state, activists aligned with the “election integrity” movement have found their way on to local elections boards and elections offices, raising red flags for Democrats who have already started efforts to have them removed.“I think Republicans want to put us in jail,” Fulton county commissioner Dana Barrett said, moments after a contempt hearing in an Atlanta, Georgia, courtroom in August, where she and five other county commissioners were fighting a battle to reject the appointment of two Republican election denialists to the Fulton county board of registrations and elections.The commission’s charter says the board must appoint two nominees made by each political party. A finding of criminal contempt could have resulted in commissioners being jailed until they agreed to make the appointment, but Fulton county superior court judge David Emerson found the board in civil contempt last month for refusing to vote for the appointment as ordered by the court. A $10,000 daily fine for failing to make the appointment is on hold, pending appeal.“At the end of the day, we have no choice but to resist,” Barrett said. “This is not a particularly strategic move on my part, but rather a move to defend the integrity of our elections and to do what I can in my corner of the world to try to help hold this democracy together. If that means I’m resisting, then by all means, I’m resisting.”One of the two appointees in question, Julie Adams, works for the Election Integrity Network, an election denial activist organization founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere. The other, Jason Frazier, is a consultant for EagleAI, software that collects open-source data of dubious validity to aid activists making thousands of voter challenges at a time. Frazier was a plaintiff in a 2023 lawsuit demanding voter registration purges by the county and the state.“I believe that Jason Frazier and Julie Adams are election deniers,” Barrett said.“We all find ourselves in positions where we have to make tough decisions considering the climate in our country,” said Fulton county commissioner Mo Ivory. “I’m glad to be standing up for the people that put me in office, and continue to fight for our democracy, not for partisan politics, but for what it means to live in a democracy.”In Georgia, board appointments to county election offices are idiosyncratic. Fulton county’s charter gives power to the board of commissioners and to the political parties’ county committees. In neighboring DeKalb county, the appointments are made by the chief judge of its superior court, who is free to reject a nominee by one of the party’s committees if that person doesn’t meet the judge’s legal standards.Such was the case earlier this year, when Shondeana Morris, chief judge of the DeKalb county superior court, rejected William Henderson after a letter campaign by the county’s Democratic committee and voting rights activists. But the judge did allow the appointment of Gail Lee, another Republican activist linked to the Election Integrity Network.During a DeKalb county election board meeting last week, local political activists challenged the qualification of Jason Lary, a former mayor of Stonecrest, Georgia, to run for the city council. Lary recently returned from federal prison, where he was serving a sentence for fraud after being convicted of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal Covid-19 relief funds allocated to the city.Lary is a Democrat and the board has a Democratic majority, but after a brief discussion, the board voted unanimously to kick him off the ballot and strip him of his voter registration, given that he was still under supervision for his sentence and thus ineligible to vote.“The one thing that became clear is the importance of the public to remain vigilant on little things like people who qualified for office,” Lee said at the end of the meeting. “Because if a person hadn’t come for and challenged the candidates then they would have gone forward and possibly had a felon in office.”There’s only so much a Republican activist can accomplish on a five-person board with a Democratic majority, as is the case in metro Atlanta’s core counties. When Adams refused to certify a primary election in Fulton county in 2024, state superior court judges ruled that she was required to do so by state law, a decision affirmed by the Georgia supreme court this week. The duty to certify is “ministerial”, a pronouncement that is obligatory, not discretionary.And many if not most decisions by an elections board involve mundane procedural questions about where to site a voting drop box or how to schedule poll worker training. Even contentious issues often result in unanimous votes.But elections offices are staffed by human beings maintaining sensitive equipment and critical records, all of which are vulnerable to someone with authority and an agenda.Protect Democracy, an advocacy organization, describes a strategy of election subversion in three parts: deceive, disrupt and deny.Disinformation from influencers suggests that voter fraud or noncitizen voting occurs often enough to swing an election. Then these influencers call on their supporters to disrupt election administration and voting process and introduce chaos into the system. Finally, they attempt to interfere or halt the certification process and “declare the true result untrue, unknown, or unknowable”, Protect Democracy’s advocates wrote.The object is to allow the loser to claim victory regardless of the results, forcing a court to either choose a winner or order a new election, delegitimizing a fair vote.Changes wrought by a new law specific to Spalding county, Georgia, populated its board with Republican election activists. The board members and the county’s new elections director called for a hand-count of ballots following elections in 2022 and 2023. The process, observers noted, was painfully slow and riven by inaccuracies that took days to rectify, with an end result that showed Dominion machines had counted votes correctly.They did not hand count ballots in 2024.Spalding county’s Republican elections board members – Ben Johnson, Roy McClain and James Newland – are among the many defendants in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn a law permitting mass voter challenges passed in the wake of the 2020 election that voting rights advocates argue violates the Voting Rights Act.Meanwhile, Maricopa county’s board of supervisors has been in a political war with the county’s elected recorder Justin Heap to prevent this outcome. Maricopa county contains Phoenix and almost two-thirds of Arizona’s population.Heap, a former state representative, defeated the incumbent Republican in 2024 while refusing to say if he believed the 2020 and 2022 elections were fair and calling Maricopa county elections a “laughingstock”.After Heap’s victory, the board stripped the recorder’s office of its duties to manage in-person early voting and some IT management of voter rolls. Negotiations broke down in May, leading to lawsuits and acrimony. Heap retained America First Legal, a Trump-aligned firm, to represent him in the lawsuit.“Justin Heap is lying about me, and going forward, he better keep my name out of his lying mouth,” Maricopa county supervisor Steve Gallardo said in a July release, refuting claims by Heap that Gallardo had agreed to restore power to the recorder’s office. “Since his election, Justin Heap has taken actions that have confused voters and damaged relationships. This must end. Justin Heap should stop the performative theater and just do his job.”Some states appear to be more fertile ground than others for election denialist’s influence on boards.North Carolina’s Republicans controlled the state legislature with a veto-proof majority last year, even though its former governor Roy Cooper was a Democrat. After Josh Stein, another Democrat, won the governor’s race, legislators stripped the governor of the power to appoint members to state and county elections boards, handing it to newly elected state auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican.The state’s Republican-majority supreme court ratified the law in May after court challenges. Boliek almost immediately replaced 3-2 Democratic majorities with 3-2 Republican majorities across all 100 county election boards.Those appointments have drawn pushback from election denialists as well as from Democratic activists.Places such as Durham county, where less than 10% of voters are registered Republicans, now has a Republican majority on its elections board. But most new board members appear to have been rewarded for their loyalty to the party and not their fidelity to election denialism.“There are concerns that there are people that are getting rewarded as a political favor, as opposed to their working knowledge and their experience in elections,” said Jim Womack, Lee county GOP chair and the president of the non-profit North Carolina Election Integrity Team, speaking to North Carolina news site The Assembly. More