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    ‘Deterrence is boring’: the US troops at sharp end of Trump’s border crackdown

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    Inside an armored vehicle, an army scout uses a joystick to direct a long-range optical scope toward a man perched atop the US-Mexico border wall cutting across the hills of this Arizona frontier community.The man lowers himself toward US soil between coils of concertina wire. Shouts ring out, an alert is sounded and a US Customs and Border Protection SUV races toward the wall – warning enough to send the man scrambling back over it, disappearing into Mexico.The sighting on Tuesday was one of only two for the army infantry unit patrolling this sector of the southern border, where an emergency declaration by Donald Trump has thrust the military into a central role in deterring migrant crossings at US ports of entry.“Deterrence is actually boring,” said 24-year-old Sgt Ana Harker-Molina, giving voice to the tedium felt by some fellow soldiers over the sporadic sightings. Still, she said she takes pride in the work, knowing that troops discourage crossings by their mere presence.“Just if we’re sitting here watching the border, it’s helping our country,” said Harker-Molina, an immigrant herself who came from Panama at age 12 and became a US citizen two years ago while serving in the army.View image in fullscreenUS troop deployments at the border have tripled to 7,600 and include every branch of the military – even as the number of attempted illegal crossings has plummeted and Trump has authorized funding for an additional 3,000 border patrol agents, offering $10,000 signing and retention bonuses.The military mission is guided from a new command center at a remote army intelligence training base alongside southern Arizona’s Huachuca mountains. There, a community hall has been transformed into a bustling war room of battalion commanders and staff with digital maps pinpointing military camps and movements along the nearly 2,000-mile border.Until now, border enforcement had been the domain of civilian law enforcement, with the military only intermittently stepping in. But in April, large swaths of the border were designated militarized zones, empowering US troops to apprehend immigrants and others accused of trespassing on army, air force or navy bases, and authorizing additional criminal charges that can mean prison time.The two-star general leading the mission says troops are being untethered from maintenance and warehouse tasks to work closely with border patrol agents in high-traffic areas for illegal crossings – and to deploy rapidly to remote, unguarded terrain.View image in fullscreen“We don’t have a [labor] union, there’s no limit on how many hours we can work in a day, how many shifts we can man,” said Maj Gen Scott Naumann of the army. “I can put soldiers out whenever we need to in order to get after the problem and we can put them out for days at a time; we can fly people into incredibly remote areas now that we see the cartels shifting” course.At Nogales, army scouts patrolled the border in full battle gear – helmet, M5 service rifle, bullet-resistant vest – with the right to use deadly force if attacked under standing military rules integrated into the border mission. Underfoot, smugglers for decades routinely attempted to tunnel into stormwater drains to ferry contraband into the US.Naumann’s command post oversees an armada of 117 armored Stryker vehicles, more than 35 helicopters, and a half-dozen long-distance drones that can survey the border day and night with sensors to pinpoint people wandering the desert. Marine Corps engineers are adding concertina wire to slow crossings, as the Trump administration reboots border wall construction.Naumann said the focus is on stopping “got-aways” who evade authorities to disappear into the US in a race against the clock that can last seconds in urban areas as people vanish into smuggling vehicles, or several days in the dense wetland thickets of the Rio Grande or the vast desert and mountainous wilderness of Arizona.Meanwhile, the rate of apprehensions at the border has fallen to a 60-year low.View image in fullscreenNaumann says the falloff in illegal entries is the “elephant in the room” as the military increases pressure and resources aimed at starving smuggling cartels – including Latin American gangs recently designated as foreign terrorist organizations.He says it would be wrong to let up, though, and that crossings may rebound with the end of scorching summer weather.“We’ve got to keep going after it; we’re having some successes, we are trending positively,” he said of the mission with no fixed end date.The Trump administration is using the military broadly to boost its immigration operations.“It’s all part of the same strategy that is a very muscular, robust, intimidating, aggressive response to this – to show his base that he was serious about a campaign promise to fix immigration,” said Dan Maurer, a law professor at Ohio Northern University and a retired army judge advocate officer. “It’s both norm-breaking and unusual. It puts the military in a very awkward position.”View image in fullscreenThe militarized zones at the border sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that prohibits the military from conducting civilian law enforcement on US soil.“It’s in that gray area. It may be a violation – it may not be. The military’s always had the authority to arrest people and detain them on military bases,” said Joshua Kastenberg, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law and a former air force judge.Michael Fisher, a security consultant and former chief of the border patrol from 2010 to 2016, calls the military expansion at the border a “force multiplier” as border patrol agents increasingly turn up far from the border.“The military allows border patrol to be able to flex into other areas where they typically would not be able to do so,” he said.At daybreak on Wednesday in Arizona, Spc Luisangel Nito scanned a valley with an infrared scope that highlights body heat, spotting three people as they crossed illegally into the US, in preparation for the border patrol to apprehend them. Nito’s unit also has equipment that can ground small drones used by smugglers to plot entry routes.View image in fullscreenNito is the US-born son of Mexican immigrants who entered the country in the 1990s through the same valleys he now patrols.“They crossed right here,” he said. “They told me to just be careful because back when they crossed they said it was dangerous.”Nito’s parents returned to Mexico in 2008 amid the financial crisis, but the soldier saw brighter opportunities in the US, returned and enlisted. He expressed no reservations about his role in detaining undocumented immigrants.“Obviously it’s a job, right, and then I signed up for it and I’m going to do it,” he said. More

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      Adelita Grijalva wins Arizona Democratic primary for House seat

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      Adelita Grijalva won the Democratic House primary in Arizona to succeed her father, beating a young social media activist in a closely watched election seen as a test of the party’s generational divide.Raúl Grijalva, a longtime congressman in southern Arizona, died from cancer earlier this year and left a vacancy in the state’s seventh district. The younger Grijalva, a 54-year-old who served for 20 years on a Tucson school board, has been a Pima county supervisor since 2020.Grijalva, a progressive, has said upholding democracy, standing up for immigrant rights and protecting access to Medicaid and Medicare are among her top priorities.“This is a victory not for me, but for our community and the progressive movement my dad started in Southern Arizona more than 50 years ago,” Grijalva said in a statement.She faced an insurgent challenger in Deja Foxx, a 25-year-old social media influencer and activist whose campaign focused on her personal story of using the kinds of government programs the Trump administration has attacked. Foxx also called out Grijalva for her “legacy last name” and said political roles shouldn’t be inherited.“I’m not using my dad’s last name,” Adelita Grijalva previously told the Guardian. “It’s mine, too. I’ve worked in this community for a very long time – 26 years at a nonprofit, 20 years on the school board, four years and four months on the board of supervisors. I’ve earned my last name too.”Grijalva won easily. She led her next closest rival, Foxx, by about 40 percentage points when the Associated Press declared her the winner. She had a large lead in all seven counties that are all or partially in the district, including the most populous, Pima County, which includes Tucson and its western suburbs.Grijalva also racked up a lengthy list of heavyweight endorsements – including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and several state and local officials.The district, which includes parts of Tucson and Arizona’s borderlands, is strongly blue, meaning the winner of the primary is the likely victor of the general. But three Republicans ran in their party’s primary; Daniel Butierez will face Adelita Grijalva in the general on 23 September.National Democratic infighting brought extra attention to the race, with Foxx bringing up questions of seniority and nepotism. Raúl Grijalva was one of three Democratic lawmakers to die in office this year. Foxx received backing from Leaders We Deserve, David Hogg’s Pac, which is challenging incumbents in Democratic primaries as it seeks to remake the party.The seat will not decide control of the US House, but it is one of three vacancies in heavily Democratic districts that, when filled in special elections this fall, will probably chip away at Republicans’ slender 220-212 majority in the chamber. More

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      Arizona Seventh Congressional District Special Primary Election Results 2025

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      The Democratic primary to fill the seat vacated by the death of Representative Raúl M. Grijalva in Arizona’s deep blue Seventh Congressional District in Tucson will be a contest between legacy and change. Mr. Grijalva’s daughter Adelita is the favorite and has the backing of progressive groups, as well as institutional Democrats. But her opponents […] More

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      Arizona Democratic race for House seat highlights party’s internal debate – and previews the midterms

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      A gen Z influencer, a former state lawmaker and the daughter of a former representative are facing off in a special Democratic primary in Arizona on Tuesday that showcases the party’s internal debate in the run-up to the midterm elections.Longtime Arizona representative and progressive stalwart Raúl Grijalva died in office from complications of lung cancer treatment in March at age 77, leaving open a seat representing southern Arizona and its borderlands.His daughter, Adelita Grijalva, herself a longtime elected official in southern Arizona, is the frontrunner in the race and has a laundry list of endorsements. But Deja Foxx, a 25-year-old who’s made her name in viral moments standing up to politicians and who would become the youngest member of Congress, is surging in recent polls. Daniel Hernandez, a former state lawmaker who was at the 2011 shooting of then representative Gabby Giffords, is also pulling in significant support.“It’s a fascinating encapsulation of the different factions and factors that will define all Democratic primaries in 2026,” said Arizona progressive lobbyist Gaelle Esposito. “Adelita represents the progressive wing, Deja’s the blank-slate outsider, Daniel has that big donor lane locked down. Do people want a progressive leader, do they just want to shake up the system or do they want someone who knows how to navigate the DC backrooms?”The district is solidly blue, meaning that whoever wins the Democratic primary is the likely victor in the general election.National Democratic infighting has brought extra attention to the race, as the left wrangles over how to fight Donald Trump and win back voters while the Democratic party brand is flagging. It’s also the first time this seat has been open in more than two decades. Questions over seniority and age in the party have loomed over the race – three Democrats died in office this year, and Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” passed by only one vote. Grijalva’s opponents have attacked her “legacy” last name.“The thing that I need to push back on is this idea that the three members of Congress died because of age,” Grijalva, 54, said. “They died because of cancer. My dad lived in a Superfund site and drank poison water for two decades.”After Zohran Mamdani’s upset win in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, Democrats are looking across the country at how candidates who buck the status quo, and who communicate well to voters and on social media, will fare.Leaders We Deserve, David Hogg’s Pac, endorsed Foxx in the race, saying “she has translated her story to represent a new vision of generational change that speaks truth to Trump’s cruel policies”. His group is spending in Democratic primaries in safe blue districts to support younger progressive candidates and drive out Democrats who are “asleep at the wheel”.The candidates say voters are concerned about immigration, deportations and detentions – the district contains three major ports of entry on the US-Mexico border. The economy looms large, especially with Trump’s new bill that could devastate rural areas in particular, as does the dismantling of democracy.But the race hasn’t dwelled much on the issues; instead it’s zoomed in on an old-versus-new, established-versus-insurgent dynamic that’s played out across the country and will mark the midterms.The candidatesFoxx, a gen Z Filipino American from Tucson, got her start fighting for better sex education in Tucson schools. She has nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok and more than 240,000 on Instagram and has created viral political moments since she was a teenager. When she was 16, she pointedly confronted then US senator Jeff Flake at a town hall over defunding Planned Parenthood, calling him a “middle-aged man” who “[came] from privilege”. In the decade since, she has worked on political advocacy, including on Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign. She attended the Democratic national convention in 2024 as a content creator.Her personal story plays heavily into her campaign: her family relied on food stamps, Medicaid and section 8 housing, all targets for Republican budget-cutting. She experienced homelessness as a teenager. She has worked a “normal-person job” and cleaned toilets at a gas station for $10 an hour.“People are ready to question a political system that prioritizes legacy last names or big-dollar donors, and they’re looking for a candidate who reflects back their lived experiences,” Foxx said.When she filed paperwork to run in the special election in April, she was alone in her bedroom – and she said she did it wrong. She, like other young candidates jumping into primaries across the country, is showing her followers how you run for office in real time.“I am the only break from the status quo, the only change candidate that represents a difference in the tactics it’s going to take to stand up to this administration,” she said. “I would ask people to just imagine what we could do from the House floor. It’s going to take messengers like me who know how to reach the people we are losing.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHernandez, who served three terms in the state legislature, has touted his ability to work with Republicans to pass legislation. He ran in a nearby congressional district in 2022, losing in the Democratic primary.He said voters have told him they’ve been without a voice in Congress since early 2024, when Raúl Grijalva got sick. They’re worried about losing access to Medicare, Medicaid and social security, and they want representation.“I’m the only one that actually has experience delivering results in a Republican environment,” he said. “That’s something that is really important right now, given the very broken and very divided Congress that we’re in.”Adelita Grijalva boasts a stack of endorsements from across the Democratic spectrum, including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Arizona’s two US senators, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly. She has a long résumé in local politics, serving on the Tucson unified school district governing board for 20 years and the Pima county board of supervisors since 2020.She hasn’t shied away from her father’s legacy. Her first campaign video leans into it. “When you grow up Grijalva, you learn how to fight and who you’re fighting for,” she says. “I know how to fight and win because I learned from the best.”She said she learned from her dad the importance of doing your homework and to not take politics personally – a lesson she admittedly has struggled with, especially in this race. “I anticipated low blows. I didn’t anticipate, like, six feet under,” she said.Foxx has called out Grijalva for having a “legacy last name” and inheriting her father’s donor and mailing lists. But, Grijalva notes, her dad was “not a prolific fundraiser”. He raised enough to hire staff and buy food, but wasn’t sending money back to the party. She said 94% of the people who donated to her primary campaign haven’t given to a Grijalva before.“I’m not using my dad’s last name,” she said. “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.”While she’s been attacked as an establishment candidate, her record – and her father’s – are strongly progressive. If elected, she wants to push for Medicaid for all and the Green New Deal. But the race has focused mostly on identity, with attempts to discredit her contributions to the community. “Establishment” and “Grijalva” have previously not really been used in the same sentences, she said, until the last month.“I wonder if my dad were an older white man and I were a junior, if I would be getting the same kind of criticism that I’m getting now,” she said. “And I don’t think I would.” More

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      Trump’s Medicaid cuts are coming for rural Americans: ‘It’s going to have to hit them first’

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      When Hurricane Helene drowned western North Carolina in muck and floodwater last year, it caught folks off-guard.Now, local leaders in places like Asheville expect the Republican-led reconciliation bill – called the “big, beautiful bill” by Donald Trump – to bear down on rural America. And they wonder whether people are missing the warning signs.“It’s going to have to hit them first,” said Laurie Stradley, CEO of Impact Health in Asheville, a Medicaid-funded non-profit providing social services to some people still digging out from the flood.Medicaid is the single largest health insurance program in the US. The public program covers 71 million low-income, disabled and elderly US residents. It pays for half of all US births and the care of six in 10 nursing home residents.When Trump’s sprawling tax-and-spending bill passed on Thursday, it heralded more than $1tn in federal cuts to Medicaid, which experts worry will push Republican-led states to abandon parts of the program and leave people without access to timely healthcare.“This is an extraordinarily regressive bill,” said Joan Akler, executive director and co-founder of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “This is the largest rollback of healthcare coverage that we’ve ever seen and all in service of an agenda to drive tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit wealthy people and corporations.”Medicaid “expansion” is a key provision of Obamacare, formally called the Affordable Care Act of 2010. The expansion provides largely no-cost health insurance to people earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level, or $36,777 for a family of three. Although Obamacare has been the law for more than a decade, Medicaid expansion proved politically divisive in Republican states, and many only recently decided to accept enormous federal subsidies to cover their residents.North Carolina will lose $32bn in the next decadeThe Medicaid cuts in the bill could have particularly acute consequences in North Carolina, a politically competitive state, where experts said the bill could trigger a “kill switch” to end Medicaid expansion.“If the state spends any state dollars to implement the expansion population or expansion coverage, it triggers an automatic ending to Medicaid expansion,” said Kody Kinsley, North Carolina’s former secretary of health and an architect of the state’s Medicaid expansion.North Carolina is set to lose $32bn in federal funding in the next decade, according to an analysis by the office of the Republican senator Thom Tillis, who represents the state. He’s one of just three Senate Republicans who voted against the bill on Tuesday.North Carolina’s expansion only went into effect in December 2023, and in less than 19 months it enrolled more than 650,000 people – all of whom will lose coverage if the program ends.Those North Carolinians are only some of the 17 million people expected to lose health insurance by 2034 across the country, according to estimates from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Nearly 12 million people will lose insurance because of attacks on Medicaid.“Ultimately, Medicaid being cut is going to kill people,” said Molly Zenkler, a nurse at Mission hospital in Asheville. “I deal with people getting their feet literally amputated because they don’t have access to diabetic care. This is just going to get increasingly worse.”The reconciliation bill cuts state funding through a number of provisions. On healthcare specifically, the bill attacks complex financial maneuvers states use to draw down federal funds. It also requires states to spend enormous sums – perhaps tens of millions of dollars per state – implementing work requirements, effectively adding layers of expensive red tape.Congressional Republicans in favor of the bill argue it targets “waste, fraud and abuse”. However, it is already well-known that most Medicaid beneficiaries who can work do, and that Medicaid is one of the most cost-efficient health programs in the US, according to the American Hospital Association.North Carolina is one of a dozen conservative states that wrote a “trigger” law into Medicaid expansion. Not all function like North Carolina’s – the laws are, in the words of an expert with Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, a “lesson in federalism” – but they nevertheless underscore the difficult choices state legislators will face because of congressional Republicans’ cuts.One such program that could be on the chopping block is a pilot with Impact Health, which uses Medicaid expansion funds for social needs that affect health – an effort to reduce long-term costs. Stradley gave the example of a Medicaid-covered child with severe asthma who hit the local emergency room three times a week for breathing treatments.Impact’s program used Medicaid funds to replace moldy rugs with laminate flooring in the child’s home, and to buy a vacuum with a Hepa filter. The cost to Impact Health was about $5,000, “but now this child is going to the emergency room a couple times a year instead of a couple times a month. And so, every month we’re saving about $4,500.”The program’s knock-on effects boost the local economy: the work to replace the rug was done by a local carpenter, and the child’s mother isn’t calling out from work, increasing her job stability.“One of the ways that we talk about this program is that it’s a hand up rather than a handout,” she said. “Almost half of the folks that are recipients in our program are children … Then you look at the adults. Most of them are working multiple jobs, and those jobs don’t come with benefits, because they’re working two or three part-time jobs in order to make ends meet.”The enormity of Medicaid means large cuts to the program imperil not only patients, but the institutions that serve them – especially rural hospitals and clinics hanging on “by a thread”, according to Kinsley.One of US residents’ few rights to healthcare is in emergency departments, where hospitals are required to stabilize patients regardless of ability to pay. That makes emergency departments the go-to source for healthcare for the uninsured.An analysis released by the Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill earlier this year showed that 338 rural hospitals around the country were at risk of imminent closure with the cuts to Medicaid contained in the bill.‘Hospitals will be forced to restrict services, or close’Rural states such as Kentucky are expected to be disproportionately hard-hit as well. Thirty-five of the rural hospitals at risk of closure – about 10% – are in Kentucky, even though Kentucky’s 4.5 million residents comprise about 1.3% of the US’s population. About a third of Kentucky residents are on Medicaid, according to figures from Kentucky’s cabinet for health and family services. The program benefits about 478,900 adults.The situation is similarly dire in Arizona, another battleground state, which also has a trigger law on the books. Although the reconciliation bill may not “trigger” a rollback of Medicaid expansion, it does undermine a key financing mechanism for the state’s program called a “provider tax”.“We estimate Arizona’s healthcare system would lose over $6bn over the next seven years,” said Holly Ward, a spokesperson for the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, in a statement.“In other words, more than 55% of Arizona hospitals would be operating in the red,” she said. “Hospitals will be, at best, forced to restrict services such as obstetrics, behavioral healthcare and other complex services, and at worst, will close their doors altogether.”Another issue is the potential for Republicans’ cuts to drive up the cost of healthcare for Americans who are privately insured, including through employers. As hospitals fight to survive, they will try to extract as much money as possible from other sources of funding – namely, commercial insurance.In addition, rural healthcare providers worry the water will be muddied by the sheer complexity of US healthcare. Private companies have a hand in managing – and therefore branding – state Medicaid programs.“A lot of our rural voters may not even realize that what they have is Medicaid, because there are so many names for it,” said Stradley. However, the precarious situation is already worrying people whose lives have been stabilized because of Medicaid.Amanda Moynihan is a single mother of three children – ages nine, 12 and 16 – living in Kuna, Idaho. Medicaid expansion has helped her become a “functioning human in society”, she said. Routine medical care for herself and her children, along with other assistance programs, has meant the difference between grinding poverty and a shot at the middle class.Idaho, one of the most politically conservative states in the union, expanded Medicaid in 2018 with an overwhelming ballot-referendum vote of 61-39. Even if Idaho’s “trigger law” does not go into effect, the state could face similar fiscal challenges to Arizona.“Back two years ago, before I started school, I was just in fight-or-flight, just trying to pay the bills there. I didn’t ever see a future of what I could do. And then I just started with one class,” she said.Moynihan has completed an associate degree in psychology and is starting the social work bachelor’s degree program at Boise State University in the fall. For now, she’s working part time with the Idaho Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired and planning to pick up work at a gas station because it has a college scholarship benefit.But without stability to pursue higher education, her future “would be making the minimum wage, which is about $15 an hour, barely paying rent in a low-income household”. More

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      After Mamdani Mania, the Next Democratic Test Comes to Tucson

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      Adelita Grijalva remains heavily favored to win the House seat of her late father, Raúl Grijalva, but youthful challengers and tired voters are asking why change is so hard for Democrats.Beatrice Torres is tired of voting for Grijalvas.Year after year, Ms. Torres, 70, dutifully volunteered and cast her ballot for Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a staunch Arizona progressive who was battling lung cancer when he was elected to his 12th term in November. He succumbed in March, the second of three House Democrats to die this year, bolstering the Republicans’ oh-so-slender majority.Now, Mr. Grijalva’s oldest daughter, Adelita, has been asking Ms. Torres to vote for her in the Democratic primary on July 15, another Grijalva to take up her father’s seat. Several challengers are trying to block her, saying that Arizona needs a fresh voice and new ideas, not another Grijalva. And Ms. Torres agrees.“Nobody is listening,” Ms. Torres said, clearly frustrated one scorching morning last week as she sat in her living room on Tucson’s working-class south side, shades drawn against the sun.Ms. Grijalva is still likely to prevail in the heavily Democratic district — dozens of powerful Democrats have endorsed her, including the state’s two Democratic senators. But with two weeks to go, the special election in Arizona’s Seventh District is brewing into the next contest to question what the Democratic Party wants after its defeats of 2024 — experience versus generational change, left versus center, old versus new.And beneath it all is simmering anger over the reluctance of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other aging, ailing Democrats, like Mr. Grijalva, who died at 77, to leave office when their time had come.“We need change,” Ms. Torres said.Ms. Grijalva, 54, is a longtime elected official in Tucson, but to some frustrated voters, she is also the embodiment of their sclerotic party.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democratic Leaders Tried to Crush Zohran Mamdani. They Should Have Been Taking Notes.

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      On Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani shocked the political establishment. There are lessons that national Democrats should take from his strong showing in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. But I worry they won’t. Democrats have a curiosity problem, and it’s losing us elections.After Bernie Sanders mounted a formidable challenge to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential primary, precious few Democratic leaders asked what they could learn from it. Two years later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out of nowhere to defeat the No. 4-ranking Democrat in the House. They again dismissed it as a fluke.The party establishment’s impulse to stifle and ignore some of its most exciting emerging voices isn’t limited to progressives. Take Chris Deluzio in Pennsylvania or Pat Ryan in New York. While decidedly more moderate than Mr. Mamdani, both congressmen campaigned last fall on bringing down costs for people in their swing districts and taking on huge corporations and billionaires, a strategy Mr. Ryan described as “patriotic populism.” Even though it won them both races, Washington Democrats have been hesitant to embrace that strategy.I saw similar complacency last year while advising Ruben Gallego’s successful Senate campaign in Arizona. Although Mr. Gallego was the only Democratic candidate in the race, we struggled to get buy-in early on from the Washington Democratic establishment. It saw his blunt-spoken style as too risky for Arizona. He went on to outperform Kamala Harris by eight points.If Democratic leaders don’t start asking themselves how these candidates won, and what they can learn from their success, we’ll be doomed to fail in the future.Since their losses last fall, Democrats have obsessed over how to reverse their declining fortunes. By and large, the consensus has been that we need candidates with a sharp economic argument that can connect with young people, men, voters of color and the working class.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      I crisscrossed America to talk to people whose views I disagreed with. I now have one certainty

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      View image in fullscreenThe residential community was lodged near a national forest on the outskirts of Scottsdale, Arizona. Forbidding gates and sentry posts restricted access to the exclusive development and its elegant homes. But security here went much further.Each cul-de-sac in the colony had its own individual railway gate, and many of the homeowners had installed gates across their own driveways as well. Anyone coming in or out of those houses would have to clear three checkpoints that set them apart from the wider world beyond.I was astonished. But the security director at the gated community saw nothing unusual in such arrangements. “People shouldn’t be able to just walk into where you live. You should be able to defend yourself against the rest of the world.” Immigration officers were doing exactly the same thing along the country’s border, he added: defending us.I couldn’t help but think about what I had seen in the company of migrant aid volunteers earlier that week in southern Arizona, all the tattered clothes and humble belongings caught in the brush of a desert trail, attesting to the desperation of those who had fled through that harsh terrain.How could people be indifferent to such suffering, I asked one of the volunteers. “It’s like talking to a wall,” he replied.Over the last eight years, I have crisscrossed the United States as an anthropologist, trying to make sense of why the rifts in our national culture run so deep. I have talked with homebuilders in North Dakota and activists for housing justice in north Texas, with diesel truck enthusiasts in Iowa and pedestrian safety planners in Florida, with white nationalist demonstrators in Tennessee and environmental justice organizers in the Hudson River valley. I have logged many thousands of miles on local highways and country roads, striking up conversations with strangers on park benches and in derelict shopping malls.I recount those travels and their lessons in my new book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down. In it I argue that, in the US, we are at crossroads, poised between a politics of suspicion and retreat, and another founded on more expansive relationships of mutual aid and collective solidarity.In the many conversations and encounters that led to this book, I tried to approach people on their own terms, paying heed to their everyday commitments and concerns, often very different from mine. I have come away with a much better understanding of why things are as stuck as they are, and what it would take to truly change them.The challenges are real, as I saw one October in Shelbyville, Tennessee.View image in fullscreen“How are you feeling?” I asked the Nepali woman behind the counter of a gas station. She replied with a single word and a tight-lipped smile. “Scared.”Scheduled that Saturday morning in Shelbyville was a “White Lives Matter” political rally. Businesses downtown were shuttered. Police had cordoned off roads heading into the town. A pervasive thrum was in the air, from helicopters circling overhead. Dozens of officers in riot gear massed on the roofs of low buildings.The October 2017 rally followed the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where clashes between demonstrators and counter-protesters left dozens injured and one young woman, Heather Heyer, dead. The Shelbyville rally was organized by a southern separatist group called the League of the South, working with a larger umbrella of white nationalist groups called the Nationalist Front.“Which side are you on?” an officer asked as I approached the site. Long metal barricades divided the white nationalists from the counter-protesters who were also gathering that morning. I followed a handful of journalists into the security clearance area for the white nationalist demonstrators. I was hoping to talk with some of them, to try to understand why they had come to think of their own wellbeing in such starkly racist terms.Everyone was forced to mill around the checkpoint and submit to a pat-down in the name of safety. The process was long and arduous, so much so that it helped break the ice between a brown ethnographer and the white nationalists in his midst. Here was something we could complain about together, as if this was a painfully slow line at an airport terminal.View image in fullscreenI struck up a conversation with a bearded man who worked at a uniform factory in northern Alabama. He was wearing a red Maga cap, with an American flag draped around his shoulders – flagpoles had been banned. He admitted feeling stupid with a flag on his back. “What would look cool is a Swat vest and a gun,” he suggested, eyeing the officers nearby.Some of the demonstrators came down to the checkpoint in quasi-military formation, with helmeted young men in rows marching behind plastic shields as a ruddy-faced man with a thick white beard led them in a chant: “Closed borders! White nation! Now we start the deportation!” When they halted, I could see that some of them had swastikas and the letters “KKK” tattooed on their arms.Styled as foot soldiers, many startlingly young in age, these men were a deliberately provocative spectacle of fascist unity. They were also a minority among those who gathered for the white nationalist rally in Shelbyville. That left me curious about the other demonstrators who had joined in plain clothes. How did these ideas speak to them?I fell into conversation with a tall white man in a black Carhartt jacket. He didn’t want to divulge who he was, and nor, frankly, did I, but it turned out that he was raised in Brooklyn, not far from the Bronx borough where I was born. In his late 40s, with a salt-and-pepper beard, he had gone to the rally in Charlottesville and had come to Shelbyville for this event.“I have an affinity for this side,” he admitted. I introduced myself as a writer, and we wound up getting into a long discussion.“What do you think of this idea of an ethnostate?” I asked the man, bringing up the vision of a Balkanized white nation floated by rally organizers. “What would you do with people like me?”“What’s your heritage?” he asked.“My family is from India,” I said. “I was born and raised in this country, but my parents immigrated here.”“Aren’t you guys Aryans?” Both of us laughed uneasily.He asked when my family had come to the United States, adding that he had ancestors who came here during the revolutionary war era. “Our ancestors built this country for their posterity. We feel this is our inheritance.”“Let me tell you why I’m here,” I told him. “In the 1970s, there was a shortage of doctors in the United States. The government put out a call, and a whole bunch of them came from India. My dad’s a cardiologist. Over the years, he’s taken care of thousands of patients, saved a lot of lives. Does that give us a place here, or not?”“Yeah, that’s a part of our history,” he replied. “We can accept that. We can absorb a certain amount of other cultures.” The way he spoke, he seemed to be thinking of a national organism, its ability to tolerate some degree of foreign bodies in its midst.Still, the man from Brooklyn insisted, “there’s no living with the other.” What seemed to have gone missing here was the faith that one could live alongside others unlike oneself, sharing a collective life with them rather than living at the other’s expense.“You gotta put your own air mask on first,” he said. “You gotta take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else. You can’t help people if you cut your own throat.”View image in fullscreenPlaces of belonging can be conceived in defensive and xenophobic ways, as that white nationalist rally had in Shelbyville. But they can also be imagined and sustained in a more hopeful manner, as shared spaces of cultural resistance and transformation.I think, for example, of the members of the Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship in north Texas, who led the effort to desegregate their town in the 1960s. I was privileged to meet some of these courageous women during my research.At the turn of the 20th century, the Black community of Denton was anchored in a prosperous enclave at the heart of the town, known as Quakertown. Like many other Black townships at time, Quakertown had thrived, with a school and many churches and businesses. Then, in the early 1920s, white civic leaders in Denton led a campaign to appropriate the Black township’s land, raze its buildings and place a public park for white families there instead.Many Black families were forced to leave Denton altogether, for other towns and states or farther afield. Those who remained rebuilt their community once again on a tract of land south-east of the town, past flour mills and two sets of railway tracks, a distant periphery that remains the nucleus of Denton’s Black population to this day.I met Alma Clark for the first time at the American Legion Senior Center in south-east Denton in 2017, when she was 89 years old. She scoffed at the ideas of health and sanitation used as rationale for Quakertown’s removal. “We went into the homes of white folk and cooked their food and cleaned their houses. We took care of their children. We were good enough for that,” she told me with a tart smile.However much labor the Black women and men of Denton contributed to the wellbeing of the town’s white residents, they had been cast into a space of public neglect. Under these circumstances, families in the community turned to strategies of collective support and caretaking.Women relied on one another to help with their children, as they juggled work and other responsibilities. Families added rooms to their own homes to house Black students admitted to Denton’s universities but denied a place in their dormitories.In the 1960s, Clark and other Black women in Denton came together with some white women in the town to create what came to be known as the Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship. They began by opening their homes to each other, sharing meals for the first time. Eventually, their conversations led to public campaigns that drew dozens of active women in the town. The organization ensured that its membership remained Black and white in equal measure at any given time, and alternated its meetings regularly between Black and white homes.View image in fullscreenWomen in the fellowship made visible the harsh realities of racial segregation. They led a successful campaign to pave south-east Denton’s streets and equip them with streetlights. They organized voting drives to register new Black voters, and took to visiting local restaurants in interracial pairs to support their desegregation. They distributed cards that encouraged Denton city residents to sign a “good neighbor pledge” that affirmed the right of every person to rent, buy or build a home anywhere they wished, even as social and economic forces conspired to keep people mostly where they were.The legacy of the Women’s Interracial Fellowship remains widely visible in Denton today. A vivid mural depicting Clark and several other Black women activists with the organization spans both sides of the railway underpass leading into south-east Denton. An art installation commemorating their work for racial justice adorns a small downtown park, close to the central courthouse square from which a Confederate monument was finally removed in 2020. Contemporary antiracist organizing in the Black Lives Matter era has drawn from historical struggles in the town, on the more inclusive vision of home and community that activists have long summoned.“We had to help each other to survive,” Clark recollected to me in 2022, when I returned to Denton for the Juneteenth celebration that year.She went on to add a striking analogy. “It’s like making cornbread. You need meal, you need flour, you need baking powder, you need eggs. You need to put all those ingredients together to make that cornbread. You can’t do anything if you keep them separate.”View image in fullscreenAll of us have much to lose in the erosion of neighborly concern, the impetus to look out for others we don’t know that well. Neighborliness is a powerful image of collective belonging, especially in a world where relationships span the globe and the consequences of how we live extend to many distant and unseen places.In saying this, I don’t mean to idealize American neighbors and neighborhoods. Contemporary patterns of isolation draw on deep histories of racial segregation and systemic neglect in the United States, lines that have long been drawn between lives that matter and lives that don’t. At the same time, neighborliness has also long been practiced as a more expansive form of conviviality, equipping people to live with the reality of social difference and disagreement.One afternoon a few years ago, passing through a small town in southern Michigan, I went out to a park to catch up on some notes and phone calls. After some time, a white man in his 60s sat down on the bench beside me, and we fell into conversation. He was slightly drunk, a little red in the eye, and keen to talk. He had recently retired from work as a mechanic at a nearby plant. His wife was ailing, mostly bedridden at home, and he was worried about her medical care.I can’t remember how the subject of politics came up, but he told me that he had voted for Donald Trump in 2016. He also wanted me to understand that this didn’t change what he owed me as a newcomer to his town. No, he didn’t know me from Adam, but our meeting was the Lord’s blessing, he told me, and I ought to have someone around there to call on in case of trouble.He scribbled down his number and address on a scrap of paper and insisted that I take it. “I don’t care if you’re brown or red or whatever,” he told me, and I believed him.I was heading out the next morning, but I kept thinking about that unexpected gesture of kindness. It was like a flash of some other solidarity that still remained possible. I picked up a pie at a market nearby, meaning to drop it off for that man and his family. When I pulled up at the address he had shared, the shades were drawn, and no one seemed to be home. I left the pie and a note on the concrete landing of that small tract house clad in blue vinyl siding.I felt a bit nervous and exposed, walking back to my car. I was, after all, a stranger. But it felt like the right thing to do. He had treated me like a neighbor, and I wanted to reciprocate.Such aspirations will face serious tests in the years to come. How will people respond to the deportation of families who have lived beside them for decades, or the gutting of hard-won protections for clean water and air, or the removal of books meaningful to the most marginal members of their communities from local school curricula, or the deepening of media foxholes that celebrate masculine aggression and disdain for the struggles of others elsewhere?Xenophobic and authoritarian politics draw their power from a fear of foreigners and strangers, an idea that the dangers they pose are already around us, needing to be identified and rooted out. But as Toni Morrison observed, such ideas often reflect “an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging”. The problem lies less with the strangers among us than the strangeness within, the consequences of a feeling of radical estrangement from the world.In my writing, I try to show how everyday structures of isolation – at home and on the road, for the body and the mind – magnify the social and political divides we lament so often. These interlocking walls of everyday life sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it hard to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.So much turns on the edges between the familiar and the foreign, these lines we’ve come to live with on a daily basis. Can we learn once again to take these edges as spaces of encounter, rather than hard divides between ourselves and the world beyond?It may be daunting, the idea of making a common life – in public space, in the pursuit of wellbeing on an imperiled Earth, even in the unpredictable span of a conversation – with others unlike ourselves. But we need to find our way back to the communion we may share with those beyond our bounds.We need to rekindle that open spirit of kinship once again.Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Parts of this essay were adapted from his book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, out now.Spot illustrations by Peter Gamlen. More

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      Rare Early June Rainfall Could Reach Phoenix

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      Measurable rainfall in the first week of June has only been recorded 21 times since 1896, according to weather records. The rain would be welcome after a winter of below-normal precipitation.A storm spinning off the coast of Baja California in Mexico on Saturday was poised to dive into the Southwest United States and drag with it remnants of post-tropical storm Alvin.This system, which is uncommonly wet for this time of year, will bring a rare chance for thunderstorms and brief heavy downpours to the region, especially to southeast California, southwest New Mexico and southern Arizona, including Phoenix, Sunday into Monday.The rain would be much welcome in an area with widespread drought conditions after a winter of below-normal precipitation.“For this time of year this is quite unusual,” said Mark O’Malley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Phoenix.The Weather Service’s official gauge for the Phoenix area is at Sky Harbor International Airport. It has recorded measurable rainfall in the first week of June on 21 occasions, with records going back to 1896.“Normal rainfall is zero,” Mr. O’Malley said of the first week in June.There’s a 75 percent chance the airport will record rain on Sunday afternoon or evening, with rainfall chances continuing into Monday.A thunderstorm or two could move over the airport and bring half an inch of rain, or the downpour could hit 10 miles west of the airport, and there would hardly be any rain.This unusual weather setup will bring a chance for rain and thunderstorms to most of the Southwest on Sunday into Monday, including southeastern California, southern Nevada, all of Arizona, western New Mexico, the Wasatch Mountains in Utah and portions of the Colorado Rocky Mountains.“This is a fairly large swath of moisture, so I’d actually say, there’s not just a chance of rain, but rain is likely,” said Peter Mullinax, a meteorologist with the Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center.The chances are highest across southern Arizona, southwest New Mexico and southeast California, and the Weather Prediction Center has put this area under a marginal risk — level 1 out of 4 — for excessive rainfall that could lead to flash flooding on Sunday. A slice of Southern Arizona is at a higher slight risk, level 2 out of 4.Mr. O’Malley said that minor flooding on roadways in the greater Phoenix area is possible.Storms occasionally pass over the Southwest in late spring but they’re usually dry. Rain is more common during the monsoon season that starts June 15 and lasts into September.“These storms come through and you’d never know, other than a little wind,” Mr. O’Malley said. “With this storm, you have that moisture that’s being pulled in from Alvin — that’s the big difference.”Mr. Mullinax said there’s also a strong southerly wind component that’s escorting the tropical moisture northward into the Southwest.Alvin formed over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of west Mexico on Thursday, sending pounding surf to west-central Mexico and southern Baja California. The system has since dissipated and was a post-tropical cyclone over the North Pacific Ocean on Saturday. More