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      ‘People don’t like to see poverty:’ inside San Francisco’s vicious race for mayor

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      When the supreme court’s conservative majority ruled this summer that cities could fine and jail unhoused people for sleeping on the streets, London Breed, the Democratic mayor of famously liberal San Francisco, greeted the decision as a victory.With more than 8,000 people in the city unhoused, Breed has increasingly embraced law-and-order policies. The supreme court’s ruling would “help cities like San Francisco manage our public spaces more effectively and efficiently”, she argued.Homelessness has been an enduring challenge for San Francisco’s leaders, including for Breed. The relentless emergency is one of the top issues in this year’s elections in the city, and Breed’s re-election is uncertain. She’s facing a host of Democratic challengers – the most prominent of whom are echoing her law-and-order rhetoric.Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist, former interim mayor and former member of the board of supervisors, has said he wants to call in armed national guard troops to deal with the city’s fentanyl crisis and would embrace “zero tolerance” and abstinence-focused responses to addiction as mayor. Daniel Lurie, a former non-profit executive and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, whose billionaire mother is backing his campaign, has proposed using ankle monitors and geolocation technology to ban people arrested for drug dealing from returning to certain city neighborhoods. “It’s basically Find My iPhone for drug dealers,” he explained. “It is time to end the perception that lawlessness is an acceptable part of life in San Francisco,” Lurie pledged on his campaign website.The only progressive in the mayor’s race, the longtime city supervisor Aaron Peskin, was polling so far behind over the summer that the Los Angeles Times ran a story on it. His ratings have increased slightly since then, but he is still expected to lose the race.The tough-on-crime mayoral rhetoric has fueled national headlines about San Francisco voters moving to the right. But local political experts point out that the city’s leadership has long been more centrist than its international reputation might suggest. Local residents and business owners have described a tension between wanting to fix the humanitarian crisis they see playing out around them, and worrying about the optics of the crisis for themselves and for the city, which has long been dependent on tourist dollars.“People in San Francisco don’t like to see poverty. They can be very liberal at a distance,” said Tony Sparks, an urban policy expert at San Francisco State University. The city is built on “a very boom and bust economy, and during the boom times, people don’t want to see the leftovers of the bust times”.What is new is the growing political engagement of a generation of tech executives and investors in the region, many of whom have come to believe that progressive policies that guided the city during the pandemic and in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprising have set the city on the wrong track. They’re using their wealth and their public social media platforms – both sizable – in an effort to reshape the city’s politics, spending millions on local races.Money has always played a role in the city’s politics, but the mayor’s race is expected to be the most expensive in San Francisco history.Slow pandemic recovery and flexing of moneyBreed was elected in 2018 as the first Black woman to become mayor of San Francisco. She brought personal experience to many of the city’s struggles: she grew up in public housing, lost a younger sister to a drug overdose, and has a brother who is incarcerated.A longtime community activist, she was known as a centrist, one with significant support from the city’s business and tech elite. She has long argued that her approach to the homelessness and addiction crises is shaped not by rich donors, but by the views of San Francisco’s middle-class and working-class residents.View image in fullscreenSince the pandemic, those dual crises seem to only have grown, while yet others have appeared on the horizon. Most US cities bounced back quickly after the early pandemic: San Francisco did not.The transition to remote work turned its downtown business district into a shadow of itself. The much emptier streets made homelessness and public drug use – including more than 3,000 people living unsheltered on the streets or in tents – more visible and more unsettling, giving way to a national debate over whether the city was caught in a “doom loop”, in which the struggling downtown area would never be able to attract back the office workers, shoppers, and tourists it desperately needed to survive. The city’s public schools’ pandemic closures lasted much longer than in other parts of the country, sparking frustration among some parents. Accidental drug overdose deaths have claimed between 600 and 810 lives a year since 2020.Concerns about safety in the city were never supported by violent crime statistics, which have continued to show that San Francisco is relatively safe among large American cities. But they were confirmed by people’s visual experiences downtown, said Eric Jaye, a Democratic political consultant who has worked in San Francisco politics for decades. People are unlikely to feel safe when they see people injecting drugs on the street or living in tents in public spaces.San Francisco’s pandemic-related crisis were a regular laughingstock on Fox News, where Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson railed that California’s ultra-left politicians were reaping what they sowed.And while a caricature, the argument that progressive government was at least partly to blame for some of the problems resonated with many tech leaders and venture capitalists in the region, said Keally McBride, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.Funneling money through a network of locally-focused “grey money” groups, tech, real estate and venture capitalist leaders bankrolled the successful recall of Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s young, progressive district attorney. They backed the recall of several discredited members of the San Francisco school board. They threw their weight behind centrist candidates for board of supervisors seats. They weren’t always united in all their causes, but together, “they are spending insane amounts of money on local elections,” and they are “out to bring the hyper-progressive elements in San Francisco government down”, said McBride.View image in fullscreenSeveral challengers, similar policiesBreed, too, has embraced law-and-order policies as a way out of the emergency. She supported the recall of Boudin – replacing him with a political ally – as well as the recall of the school board members.This spring, she boosted ballot measures that gave the police department more power to use surveillance tools and that instituted drug tests for local welfare recipients. On her campaign website, she touts among her successes doubling drug arrests in 2023, and said she hopes to expand a program in which city officials buy homeless people bus tickets out of town, with a target of “1,000 people per year”.Many observers say that Breed’s leading mayoral challengers are not suggesting substantially different policies – with all of them promising to clear away the unhoused people sleeping in tents on streets and in public parks, expand the number of city police officers and put an end to public drug use.“The current mayor, and all of the prospective mayors, their aim right now is not to solve homelessness or fix homelessness or even shelter homeless people, it’s just to get them out of sight,” Sparks said. “We’re back in the 90s. Wide leg pants are in, Birkenstocks are in and so is law and order and mass incarceration.”View image in fullscreenThe number of people who are being evicted or losing access to shelter in San Francisco is constantly overwhelming the city’s ability to house them, Sparks said. An honest reckoning with California’s housing shortage, a massive problem that was decades in the making, would probably require both statewide and federal action, he argued.But it’s not just tech billionaires who want a quicker fix, he said. “At the end of the day, it’s the average San Francisco voter that is really demanding that they don’t want to see people living on the streets.”Asked about critics who said Breed’s law-and-order approach marked a return to 1990s policies, Joe Arellano, a Breed campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that “San Francisco is a city that believes in and offers second chances, but it is also a city of accountability”. He also noted that Breed had been endorsed by the San Francisco police union.The conservative media’s depiction of San Francisco as a bastion of far-left policies has always been a fiction, said Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University. Just look at the national politicians who have emerged from San Francisco: Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris, people “pretty close to the center of the Democratic party”, he said.The city’s current debate is still “firmly liberal”, he argued. “San Francisco voters are still compassionate. They’re willing to spend a lot of money on government services,” McDaniel said. “It’s not a conservative approach, which is, ‘Let’s not “waste” money on people who don’t deserve it.’”But having invested public money in city services for addiction, mental health treatment and other issues, many liberal voters are upset to still see so much public disorder in the streets, McDaniel said. “Politicians are saying part of the problem is people are rejecting those services – not going to homeless shelters,” for instance. Critics point at a crippling bureaucracy, inefficient local government and several corruption scandals. Measured success and divided donorsBreed’s chances of re-election may have slightly improved over the past year, as she has appeared to make progress in some of her goals.A recent analysis from the Associated Press found that many streets in San Francisco were now empty of tents and other makeshift encampments. The number of people sleeping outdoors dropped to under 3,000 in January, the lowest the city has recorded in a decade, according to a federal count. The number has likely dropped even lower as a result of ramped up enforcement of anti-camping laws following the supreme court decision in August, the AP said.But even as tents have disappeared, the total number of unhoused people in San Francisco has grown by 7%, according to the same federal count.Steven Burcell, who is living in a tiny cabin provided by the city, told the AP that unhoused friends of his had all of their possessions taken by the city in one of the encampment “sweeps”.“Now they have nothing. They don’t have any shelter at all,” he said. “They just kind of wander around and take buses, like a lot of people do.”The increased enforcement and intense political rhetoric about homelessness are taking a toll on the people at the heart of the debate, Sparks said.“People living on the street are feeling embattled. They’re stressed. They’re having to constantly be on the move and on the lookout,” he said. “When sweeps go up, people hide.”The tech donors are divided over who they want to see as mayor. The Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen has donated hundreds of thousands to Breed’s re-election campaign. The billionaire William Oberndorf gave $500,000 to Farrell’s campaign, and the former supervisor has won the backing of several other figures from the real estate and finance sectors. Lurie, the Levi Strauss heir, has poured more than $8m of his own money into his mayoral campaign. His mother also spent $1m to back his campaign.View image in fullscreenAs the race for that role enters its final weeks, allegations of improper financial behavior are shadowing both Breed and Farrell. A city official who led Breed’s “Dream Keepers Initiative” initiative went on leave in September, after investigations by the San Francisco Chronicle and the SF Standard raised questions about the official’s spending, including $1.5m in contracts she approved for a non-profit run by a man with whom she shared an address. It wasn’t the first time that close associates of the mayor have run into ethics problems: Breed was for a time in a relationship with the city’s former director of public works, who later pleaded guilty to fraud and public corruption charges.Meanwhile, Farrell is facing accusations that his campaign is using a fund ostensibly dedicated to supporting a local ballot initiative to improperly funnel money to his mayoral campaign and dodge campaign finance limits.None of the three leading campaigns made their candidates available for a phone interview with the Guardian, and Farrell’s campaign did not respond to questions.Arellano, Breed’s campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that the mayor had led “the biggest anti-corruption clean-up in our city’s history” and that “nearly all the recent examples in the news were identified because of the process she initiated to root out waste, fraud and abuse”.Breed had acted swiftly in response to the news about the “unfortunate events” at the Dream Keepers Initiative, including asking the director to resign, and “remains committed to the program”, he said.In the wake of the investigation into Farrell and the Dream Keepers Initiative, the Chronicle’s editorial board announced that though Breed was a “safe choice” for mayor, it was endorsing Lurie as someone who could bring much-needed change to the city government.The Chronicle’s endorsement was blunt: “Is Lurie’s inexperience concerning? Absolutely … We won’t sugarcoat the reality that supporting Lurie is a risk.”Though Lurie’s plans offered “a welcome balance of compassion and toughness”, some of his promises for addressing the homelessness crisis were “hyperbolic” or even, frankly, “a fantasy”, the paper noted.But the Chronicle argued that Lurie’s measured demeanour and extensive, if “unearned”, family connections, would likely enable him to hire and manage an impressive staff of city employees, who might be able to do a better job on day-to-day governance issues than Breed had done.Lurie has been running a “very outsider, populist campaign”, arguing that his lack of experience in city hall “is a good thing, from his point of view”, McDaniel, the political scientist, said. That kind of message, from a “very rich person” who has spent more on his own campaign than all the other candidates combined, is not one that McDaniel expected would resonate with San Francisco voters. But, he said, Lurie “has done better than I thought, and he could still win”.San Franciscans will use a ranked-choice voting process to select a mayor in November, meaning that candidates can pick up second and third-choice votes in the race from supporters of other candidates. Voters who support Peskin, the underdog progressive candidate, will probably be one of the key second choice vote swing groups. So far, influential local progressives have divided on who to endorse as their second choice, with some choosing Lurie, and others, Breed, McBride, the politics professor, said.“It’s all just messy,” she said. The Chronicle’s latest poll, from mid-October, showed Lurie surging to first place.Breed’s spokesperson accused Lurie and his family of trying to “buy the election”, and said: “Lurie would be at 1% if he wasn’t spending an unprecedented amount of money to cover up the fact that he has no experience to be mayor.”A spokesperson for Lurie’s campaign responded that Breed and Farrell also had billionaire backers: “Their attempts to cry foul about a resource disadvantage are the result of bad strategy and tactical blunders – not an actual lack of resources.”Jaye, the longtime Democratic consultant, said that he believed that some of the city’s ascendant tech donors are “well-meaning, but arrogant and naive”.“They are telling themselves because they are successful in technology that they know a lot about government or crime or housing or homelessness.”Their involvement has sometimes turned up the temperature of the campaign, with inflammatory late night tweets upping the ante. Elon Musk, whose political donations are playing an outsized role in the presidential race, has repeatedly tweeted that progressive city officials in San Francisco should be put in prison. Garry Tan, the CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator and a prominent political donor, sparked a police investigation after he tweeted the names of seven city supervisors, including Peskin, saying they should “die slow motherfuckers”.Local tech leaders have also been working for years to “remake” the city “so it’s their San Francisco, not the San Francisco of the people who live here now”, Jaye argued.While Musk announced this summer that he would be moving the headquarters of X, his struggling social media platform, out of San Francisco, new, more ascendant tech startups are moving in. OpenAI, a major player in artificial intelligence, reportedly leased a second office space in San Francisco in September, part of a reported boom in AI businesses renting office space in the city.You have to “follow the money”, Jaye said. “It’s probably five times more than has ever been spent in an election cycle in San Francisco, and we’re not done.” More

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      Incarcerated Californians can’t vote. A prison held an election anyway

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      An estimated 4 million US citizens are barred from voting because they have a felony conviction. That includes most Americans serving prison sentences.But last week at San Quentin, the 172-year-old prison in the San Francisco Bay Area, residents had a rare opportunity to weigh in on a US election where so much is on the line.As incarcerated residents jogged on the yard and played pickleball, dozens stopped by the prison’s education department and slid paper ballots into a locked metal box with an American flag and the word “vote” painted on it.The voters were participating in a mock election, organized by Juan Moreno Haines, a journalist incarcerated at San Quentin, and Mount Tamalpais College (MTC), a liberal arts institution based at the prison.“It’s important for me to have a voice, especially if it’s being heard on the outside,” said Michael Scott, 45, who is due to be released next year after having been incarcerated for more than two decades, before casting his vote.California, like most US states, prohibits incarcerated people with felonies from voting, affecting more than 90,000 people in state prisons. The US is a global leader in its incarceration rate and an outlier in its sweeping disenfranchisement; a recent report identified more than 70 countries with no or very few restrictions on voting based on criminal records. Roughly 1.7% of the US voting-age population can’t vote, with Black Americans disproportionately excluded and restrictions potentially affecting election results.For San Quentin’s election, MTC, which recently became the first US accredited college exclusively operating behind bars, directed incarcerated students in its American government class to design ballots, choosing which races and initiatives to poll.MTC sent all 3,247 residents a ballot. After a week of voting, 341 ballots had been returned, representing 10.5% of the population. Fifteen volunteers from MTC and the League of Women Voters tallied the results: Kamala Harris won 57.2% of votes, and Donald Trump won 28.2%. Claudia De la Cruz of the Peace and Freedom party, a socialist ticket, won 3.5% of votes; the Green party’s Jill Stein won 2.6%; Robert F Kennedy Jr won 2.1%; and Chase Oliver, a libertarian, won 0.3%.View image in fullscreenIn the California senate race, Adam Schiff, the Democratic candidate, defeated Republican Steve Garvey with 33.7% of votes, though nearly half of respondents left this question blank. Nearly 60% favored Prop 5, which would boost affordable housing funding; 78% favored Prop 32, which would increase the minimum wage; and 57.2% rejected Prop 36, which would increase penalties for certain drug and theft crimes.Prop 6 would change the state constitution to abolish forced prison labor, making it a high-stakes measure for incarcerated people. Just more than 77% of respondents backed it.The state of California, like most others in the US, allows for incarcerated people to be forced to work against their will. California profits from this form of involuntary servitude, with residents providing vital services for negligible wages. Most people in prison currently make less than $0.75 (£0.58) an hour for their jobs.Prop 6 is meant to allow incarcerated people to choose their jobs and prohibit prisons from punishing those who refuse an assignment. Dante Jones, 41, said he wished he could vote for Prop 6 on 5 November: “We’ve got legalized plantations … They say they want us to be citizens, they want to rehabilitate us, but then they don’t do anything that allows that to happen. Technically, by the constitution, we’re slaves and they can whip our backs.”Jones said he hopes if Prop 6 passes, incarcerated people can earn better wages to afford commissary, including food.Jones’ assessment of the presidential race was grim: “I think we’re losing either way.” He reluctantly supported Harris despite her prosecutorial record and reputation for harshly punishing Black defendants: “She ain’t for her people. Do you know how many Black and brown people she put in prison? … She’s gonna be like a Bill Clinton, a conservative Democrat who is tough on crime.” Despite those misgivings, he couldn’t stomach supporting Trump: “Since he’s been in politics, he’s been courting racist white people who think that people who aren’t white are taking their country.”Jaime Joseph Jaramillo, 53, said he supported Trump, appreciating his promise of mass deportations to “get rid of the drug cartels” and favoring him on foreign policy: “I want him to bomb Iran and drill, drill, drill.” He expressed sympathy for Palestinians, but said: “I want him to take out Hamas.”Nate Venegas, 47, said he, too, favored Trump because “our system needs somebody who’s not a politician”. He thinks Trump could be more swayed on prison reform, citing the former president’s decision to pardon a woman’s drug offense after lobbying by Kim Kardashian while he was in office. But he also called Trump a “clown” and said he disliked his vigorous support of capital punishment: “I don’t believe there should be a death penalty. I don’t believe a man should kill another man.”Scott voted for Harris “because she gives me something to look forward to. Trump hasn’t given me anything that he plans to do, except lock down the borders. We have problems with homelessness, jobs and climate change.”Gabriel Moctezuma, 32, said he considered Harris “the lesser of two evils” and supported her on reproductive rights and immigration: “I think there would be a lot of progressive changes. There have been a lot of human rights taken away from people and she’ll bring some of those policies back.” But he worries about divisions in the country: “No matter who wins, this country is going to be split and I’m really hoping that there’s not the same amount of violence as January 6.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenOn their ballots, some offered handwritten notes about why they voted:“We have not always had the right to vote. So I would like to cast my vote for each of my [African American] ancestors that was denied access.”“I only ever voted once in my life and I want to do so again.”“Democracy is at stake.”“I want to feel like I am a part of history.”“[I’ve] been in prison for 29 years and never had an opportunity to vote.”Vermont, Maine and Washington DC are the only places in the US where all incarcerated people can vote.Amy Jamgochian, the chief academic officer at MTC, said the disenfranchisement of incarcerated people was a reminder that the US is “very confused as a society about what incarceration is for”.“Is it for depriving people of humanity and rights? Will that help them? Are we trying to help them? Or are we just trying to warehouse them? If [the goal] is rehabilitation, then I don’t think we want to dehumanize them. We want to actually deeply respect their humanity, including giving them the right to vote.”Venegas, who has been incarcerated for 25 years and is part of a civic engagement group at San Quentin, said he did feel society’s views on the purpose of the criminal justice system are shifting. He noted how, 20 years ago, the system was primarily focused on punishment, with little interest in getting people ready to come home.Last year, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, renamed San Quentin a “rehabilitation center”, pledging to turn the prison into a complex resembling a college campus focused on programming and re-entry.It’s just another reason why efforts like the mock election matter, Venegas argued. “People are starting to listen to us and care about having us as neighbors when we get out,” he said. “So our voices really matter … and I’d give anything to be able to vote and have a say.”

      Juan Moreno Haines is an incarcerated journalist at San Quentin and editor-in-chief of Solitary Watch. Sam Levin is a staff reporter at Guardian US More

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      in US Politics

      Man arrested with guns near California Trump rally sues sheriff for defamation

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      A Nevada man who was arrested over the weekend with guns at a security checkpoint outside a Donald Trump rally in the southern California desert has filed a lawsuit accusing the sheriff of falsely characterizing his arrest as a thwarted assassination attempt for his own personal gain.The man, identified as 49-year-old Vem Miller of Las Vegas, had been driving an unregistered black SUV with a “homemade” license plate when he was stopped by deputies assigned to the rally in Coachella, east of Los Angeles, Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco said on Sunday at a news conference.Miller had a shotgun, loaded handgun, ammunition and several fake passports in his vehicle, Bianco said. Miller was released the same day on $5,000 bail.The lawsuit filed on Tuesday in US district court in Nevada said Bianco had lied about the fake passports, and that he “created a narrative so as to be viewed as a ‘heroic’ Sheriff who saved Presidential candidate Trump”. It named as defendants the sheriff, the Riverside county sheriff’s department and a sheriff’s deputy.A call to the sheriff’s executive office for comment on Wednesday was deferred to the department’s communications office, which did not respond to an email. The Associated Press also emailed Miller’s lawyer, Sigal Chattah, for comment.Security has been very tight at Trump rallies following two recent assassination attempts. Last month, a man was indicted on an attempted assassination charge after authorities said he staked out the former president for 12 hours and wrote of his desire to kill him. The Florida arrest came two months after Trump was shot and wounded in the ear during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.Bianco said that Miller also claimed to be a journalist, but that it was unclear if he had the proper credentials. Deputies noticed the interior of the vehicle was “in disarray” and a search uncovered the weapons and ammo, along with multiple passports and driver licenses with different names, Bianco said.Miller’s lawsuit accused the sheriff’s department of illegally searching the SUV. It also said that he had willingly disclosed to officers at the checkpoint that he had weapons but intended to leave them in the vehicle.Miller is scheduled to appear in court in January in the weapons case. He was arrested on suspicion of possessing a loaded firearm and possession of a high-capacity magazine, according to online records. More

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      in Elections

      2 Men Charged in Killing of 7 People in Baltimore Gang Case

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      Prosecutors said Cornell Moore and Keith Russell were involved in a murder-for-hire enterprise with a gang operating in Baltimore City and elsewhere in Maryland.Two men who prosecutors say were hired to carry out a string of killings and violence in the Baltimore area have been charged with murdering at least seven people, including a woman who was seven months pregnant, the authorities said Tuesday.Since October 2020, Cornell Moore and Keith Russell, both 39, were involved in a murder-for-hire scheme with a criminal enterprise operating in Baltimore City and elsewhere in Maryland that intimidated its rivals through violence, the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City, Ivan J. Bates, said at a news conference.The indictments allege that Mr. Moore and Mr. Russell killed seven people, including Angel Smith, who was seven months pregnant, and her fiancé, Yahmell Montague, who were gunned down in May 2022 outside Ms. Smith’s home. The baby survived, according to the police.They also attempted to murder three other people, the indictments say. According to the documents, the two men used carjacked and stolen vehicles to carry out their crimes.Mr. Moore has been indicted on 41 counts, and Mr. Russell has been indicted on 37 counts. Those counts include participation in a criminal gang, first-degree murder, use of a firearm in the commission of a crime of violence, felony possession of a firearm, attempted first-degree murder and conspiracy, among other charges.“The ongoing multiyear investigation into this violent criminal enterprise has been one of our office’s most significant efforts in our continued fight to bring justice to Baltimore,” Mr. Bates said. “This represents the devastating impact a small number of violent perpetrators can have on our communities.”Prosecutors have yet to charge anyone with hiring Mr. Moore and Mr. Russell, and the size and scope of the criminal enterprise was unclear on Tuesday evening. Mr. Bates declined to name the gang or say how many more arrests the authorities expect to make, citing the ongoing investigation.“We’re not finished,” Mr. Bates said. “We’re coming for all those individuals involved.”The charges are the first step in a yearslong, multiagency investigation with Baltimore Police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.According to Mr. Bates, a gang contracted Mr. Moore and Mr. Russell as hit men to stamp out its rivals through terror and violence. Gang members were compensated for committing acts of violence to protect their its reputation and help maintain its dominance, the authorities said.In July 2021, gang members stole a person’s identity to buy a car in California that they then drove to Maryland, the indictment said. Mr. Moore and Mr. Russell shot and killed Shabro Meredith on or around Sept. 21, 2021, and then used that car to flee, the documents said.The indictments do not name any of the other members.Mr. Moore and Mr. Russell were also charged with the murders of David Reid, Rashad Dendy, Tyree Davis and Tayvon Scott. Mr. Scott’s murder took place just outside of Baltimore County and is being prosecuted by officials there, Mr. Bates said. More

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      in Elections

      Kamala Harris recurre a su experiencia en el combate a la delincuencia transfronteriza en su campaña

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      Como fiscala general de California, Kamala Harris dio prioridad a la lucha contra los traficantes de drogas y personas. Es una parte de su biografía de la que no siempre ha hablado.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Cuando la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris ha prometido tomar medidas enérgicas contra la inmigración ilegal en la frontera sur del país, ha hecho hincapié en su experiencia como fiscala general de California en la persecución de grupos criminales que trafican con drogas, armas y personas entre Estados Unidos y México.“Fui la máxima responsable de la aplicación de la ley en el mayor estado del país, California, que también es un estado fronterizo”, dijo el jueves en un acto con votantes de Nevada. “Me enfrenté a organizaciones criminales transnacionales”.Los colaboradores y aliados de Harris afirman que su lucha contra la delincuencia transnacional arroja luz sobre cómo podría abordar los retos en la frontera. El tema está a la vanguardia de las preocupaciones de los votantes después de que los cruces fronterizos ilegales aumentaran durante los primeros años del presidente Biden en el cargo, y mientras el expresidente Donald Trump y sus aliados alimentan falsedades sobre bandas de inmigrantes y combinan la inmigración con la delincuencia.Ahora, su historial de persecución de la delincuencia transfronteriza está siendo examinado por demócratas y activistas de la justicia social y tergiversado por los republicanos. Y ya no está dispuesta a afirmar que apoya algunas de las tácticas que había adoptado. He aquí lo que hizo como fiscala general de California, por qué es importante y por qué podría tener implicaciones si gana en noviembre.Cambio de estrategiaHarris hizo de la lucha contra la delincuencia transnacional una prioridad en su campaña para fiscal general de California en 2010 y durante sus seis años en el cargo.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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      Trump sparks outrage after calling for army to handle enemies on election day

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      Donald Trump has provoked an angry backlash from Democrats after calling for the US armed forces to be turned against his political adversaries when voters go to the polls at next month’s presidential election.In comments that added further fuel to fears of an authoritarian crackdown if he recaptures the White House, the Republican nominee said the military or national guard should be deployed against opponents that he called “the enemy within” when the election takes place on 5 November.He singled out the California congressman, Adam Schiff, who was the lead prosecutor in the ex-president’s first impeachment trial, as posing a bigger threat to a free and fair election than foreign terrorists or illegal immigrants, his usual prime target for abuse.Trump’s comments, to Fox News in response to a question on possible election “chaos”, triggered an angry reaction from Kamala Harris’s campaign, which likened them to previous remarks that he would be a dictator “on day one” of a second presidency and his suggestions that the US constitution should be terminated to overturn the 2020 election result, which he falsely claims was stolen by Joe Biden.Trump and the vice-president are locked in a tight contest as election day looms. Most national polls put Harris narrowly ahead, but in the crucial swing states which will decide the election, the contest appears much tighter and offers Trump numerous paths to a potential victory.After initially saying election chaos would not come from his side, Trump launched a vituperative attack on his opponents when the interviewer, Maria Bartiromo, raised the possibility of outside agitators or immigrants who had committed crimes.“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people,” he said on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures programme.“It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the national guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and expert on fascism at New York University, told NBC that Trump was flagging up what he planned to do as president, which she compared to the “‘strongman’ ruling templates of Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin, the leaders of Hungary, India and Russia respectively.“He’s actually rehearsing, in a sense, what he would be doing as head of state, which is what Orbán does, Modi is doing, Putin has long done,” she said.Trump also turned his fire on Schiff, who is a candidate for the US Senate in next month’s poll. He said: “The thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff.”It was his second attack in two days on Schiff, who earned Trump’s enmity when he was the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee during his presidency, when he said there was evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016. The House later voted, under Republican leadership, to censure Schiff over his comments.At a rally in Coachella, California – a state he has virtually no chance of winning – on Saturday, Trump mocked Schiff’s physical characteristics and labelled him a bigger threat than foreign adversaries, including the Chinese president Xi Jinping.“He [Xi] is somebody that we can handle,” Trump said. “The worst people are the enemies from within, the sleaze bags, the guy that you’re going to elect to the Senate, shifty Adam Schiff. He’s a major low-life.”He claimed, without providing evidence, that Schiff was engaged in mass voter fraud. “They send millions and million of ballots all over the place,” he said. “[In] California, you don’t have anything like a voting booth. They take ballots and they just send them all over the place. They come back and they say, oh, somebody won by 5m votes.”Schiff responded on Twitter/X by accusing Trump of inciting violence in the same manner as he was widely accused of doing on 6 January 2021, when a mob attacked the US Capitol in an effort to stop certification of Biden’s election win.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Today, Trump threatened to deploy the military against the ‘enemies from within.’ The same thing he has called me,” Schiff wrote.“Just as he incited a mob to attack the Capitol, he again stokes violence against those who oppose him.”Harris’s campaign issued a more extensive condemnation. “Donald Trump is suggesting that his fellow Americans are worse ‘enemies’ than foreign adversaries, and he is saying he would use the military against them,” campaign spokesperson Ian Sams said.“Taken with his vow to be a dictator on ‘day one’, calls for the ‘termination’ of the constitution, and plans to surround himself with sycophants who will give him unchecked, unprecedented power if he returns to office, this should alarm every American who cares about their freedom and security.“What Donald Trump is promising is dangerous, and returning him to office is simply a risk Americans cannot afford.”While Trump, being out of power, will be in no position to deploy troops on election day, his call for military power to quell political opposition is familiar, recalling his demand that soldiers be deployed in the streets of Washington DC in 2020 to disperse thousands of demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd.Gen Mark Milley, the then chairperson of the joint chiefs of staff, reportedly came close to resigning over the demand.Milley, who has since fallen foul of Trump, is quoted in a new book by Bob Woodward – the journalist who, along with Carl Bernstein, helped to expose the Watergate scandal of the 1970s – as calling the ex-president “a total fascist” and has voiced fears that he could be recalled to service and court-martialled if he returns to office. 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      Man arrested near Trump rally on gun charges ‘deeply admires’ ex-president

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      A man arrested on gun possession charges near a Donald Trump rally in California on Saturday, spurring significant safety concerns, said that he was a major supporter of the former US president and would never harm him.“Yes, I’m 100% a Trump supporter,” the man, Vem Miller, told Fox News Digital in an interview. Miller, 49, denied the local sheriff’s allegation that he was bringing weapons to Trump’s event to kill him.“This is a man that I deeply admire,” the Las Vegas resident also said. He claimed to be a registered Republican and “all-in” with the Republican presidential candidate since 2018.Miller was not able to get anywhere near Trump. Law enforcement agencies –including the Riverside, California, sheriff’s office, Secret Service and the Los Angeles US attorney – said that Trump was not in any danger.While authorities said that Trump had been safe, the incident came in the wake of two assassination attempts, fanning the flames of fear over his safety. During a presser on Sunday, the Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco claimed: “I truly do believe we prevented another assassination attempt,” stoking concerns still more.Miller was taken into custody at a checkpoint at approximately a half-mile from an entrance to Trump’s Coachella Valley campaign stop, shortly before it was scheduled to start. Authorities claimed that Miller was in possession of a loaded shotgun and handgun, as well as a high-capacity magazine.Miller was arrested before Trump arrived at the site, according to KTLA. He was released from jail on $5,000 bail shortly after his arrest, according to police records.Bianco said that Miller caught the attention of law enforcement after he managed to access the initial perimeter near Trump’s campaign stop. Bianco cited visual “irregularities”, noting that Miller’s SUV was not registered and had an “obviously” fake license plate.A sheriff’s deputy “eventually found multiple passports with multiple names and multiple driver’s licenses with different names”, Fox 5 News quoted Bianco as saying.Bianco claimed that Miller, who two years ago ran for Nevada’s state assembly, was a “sovereign citizen”. The sovereign citizens do not think they must abide any government laws without consent, and this movement is considered extremist and right wing.Miller told Fox News Digital that he had firearms due to death threats over his website America Happens Network. “I don’t know anything about guns. I am beyond a novice,” he said. The website claims it intends to fight censorship and “rage against the mainstream media”.“I always travel around with my firearms in the back of my truck,” Miller said, nonetheless insisting: “I’ve literally never even shot a gun in my life.”Miller also slammed Bianco’s claim that he was among the “sovereign citizen” movement, saying: “I don’t think there’s such a thing.”“Government is an inanimate object, it’s the individuals within government that matter, so no, I’m not a part of any of that,” he reportedly said.“These accusations are complete bullshit,” Miller told the Press-Enterprise. “I’m an artist, I’m the last person that would cause any violence and harm to anybody.”Miller also released his own video, “because of the false information that is currently being released by the police department”, and said that his website was focused on protecting freedom of press and speech.“While we are currently, and we have been, for closely eight years staunch supporters of President Donald Trump, we don’t align ourselves with any political party except for one that supports our freedoms … and gets rid of the tyranny of corrupt politicians,” he said.“President Donald Trump has been near and dear to our hearts because he’s one of the only individuals that I’ve seen have the courage to actually stand up to the tyranny against we the people,” Miller continued, referring to the preamble to the US constitution. More

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      The California community caught between a powerful megachurch and far-right extremists

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      This is the third in a series of three stories on the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election in Shasta county, a region of 180,000 people in northern California that has emerged as a center of the election denial movement and hotbed for far-right politics. Read the first and second story.For years, an extremist far-right movement has worked to transform one of California’s most conservative regions. Since gaining a majority on Shasta county’s governing body, they have managed to spark an exodus of government workers, attempted to do away with the voting system and fought the state over policies pertaining to Covid-19 and the second amendment.Earlier this year, voters in the community of 180,000 – perhaps tired of Shasta’s national notoriety as a hotbed for extremist politics and election denialism – declared they had had enough. In a stunning rebuke, they voted out a far-right leader by an enormous margin, handing his seat to a political newcomer.Matt Plummer, a Yale-educated former college football player who owns a corporate training business, pledged to provide an alternative to the “hostility and division” tearing Shasta apart. Supporters view Plummer, with his focus on issues such as crime, roads and homelessness, as someone who can help the community chart a path out of the upheaval.But others are concerned about Plummer’s connection to another powerful and ultra-conservative force that has reshaped the region: Bethel church. The megachurch has more than 11,000 members, including Plummer, and a school of “supernatural ministry” that serves 2,000 students a year.View image in fullscreenBethel leaders once said that God wanted Donald Trump to have a second term and have claimed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election by “fraud”. Church members have become major players in local government – three of the five members on the city council in Redding, the county seat, attend Bethel. The city’s vice-mayor is a church elder.The church is involved in nearly every part of Shasta county, and is a cornerstone of the local economy, said Doni Chamberlain, a longtime local journalist and chronicler of the area.Shasta’s extreme political landscape has forced residents to choose between a toxic rightwing movement and a church that also has deeply conservative and extreme beliefs, she said.“This is the bind we’re in,” she said. “Shasta county is in this weird extremist sandwich where we have the rightwing pushing for guns and splitting the state. And there is the other extreme side of the sandwich that is Bethel church. Then the middle where people are trying to figure out how to survive in this place.”Before Shasta county garnered national attention for its fierce opposition to Covid-19 restrictions and efforts to institute a hand-count voting system favored by those who believe lies about election fraud, it was Bethel church that raised the region’s profile.There are churches – of which Shasta county has plenty – and then there is Bethel, a behemoth institution without parallel in the area. First established in a private home in 1952, it now has more than 11,000 members – more than 10% of the population in the city of Redding – where the church is based.Bethel’s transformation came under the direction of Bill Johnson, the son of a long-serving pastor who began leading the church with Beni, his wife, in 1996. The church has grown significantly, opening a school, a youth outreach program and Bethel Music, a record label that produces popular worship music and reported $18m in revenue in 2023. Justin Bieber is a fan and has filmed himself covering a song from a Bethel artist. Today several of Johnson’s children work as senior leaders in the church.But it’s Bethel’s school of supernatural ministry, which has been called a “Christian Hogwarts”, that is often credited with its growth. The program was founded by Kris and Kathy Vallotton, the senior leaders of the church, and teaches students that they can perform miracles and heal through prayer. “Students will learn how to read, understand, and ‘do’ the Bible, how to practice His presence, to witness, heal the sick, prophesy, preach, pray, cast out demons and much more,” the school website states.People travel to Redding from around the world, more than 100 countries, to attend the vocational program. Students have been known to approach people in the city, particularly those in casts or with walkers, to offer prayers for healing. The focus on “supernatural power” is fundamental to the church, which in 2019 asked members to pray for the resurrection of a two-year-old girl.Bethel has long believed in the power of healing people through prayer. Chamberlain joined the church as a child after her mother died and her siblings were adopted by a local couple who were members. When they learned that Chamberlain and her twin sister had a neurological disorder that caused involuntary movements, church elders came to treat their “demons” and the children were made to throw away their medications, Chamberlain recalled.“When you have a bunch of adults circling around you and putting their hands on your heads and shaking you, it was pretty intimidating,” she said, adding that they coached her on how to speak in tongues.“It’s like being waterboarded, you just give up and give in so they leave you alone. Then you’re in the club.”Since its founding in 1998, Bethel’s supernatural school has brought thousands of people to Redding. They are a visible presence around the city, in its grocery stores and the hip cafes and bakeries operated by Bethel members. And as the church’s footprint has grown, so too has criticism of its role.Supporters say the church has been a positive force in Redding and that it’s natural for a large institution to attract scrutiny but that members want to be a part of the community in which they live. They often point to local volunteer work or when the church donated money to fund police positions in Redding and began leasing the local auditorium when it appeared the city would have to close it down.Bethel did not respond to multiple requests for comment.View image in fullscreenBut other Shasta county residents argue the church has changed the fabric of the community and worsened an existing housing shortage by drawing thousands of students to the area while driving up costs.“If you look from the outside in, there seems to be positives. They’ve done good things, but I don’t feel like on balance what they’ve done is for the good of the community in general,” said Robert Sid, a Shasta county resident who supported Plummer. “Their Hogwarts supernatural ministry has really played into flooding the market and artificially pricing things that the regular Redding person can’t afford.”Critics have expressed discomfort with church members who hold key positions in local government voting on proposals from Bethel to expand. Some residents have joined a Facebook group to identify businesses connected to the church.“[The owners] tithe to the church. If you patronize a Bethel-affiliated business then now some of those profits are being tithed to the church. You’re kind of indirectly supporting the church by doing that,” said Rachel Strickland, who started the group. “People don’t want to do that.”And for some in this deeply conservative region, where Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one, the church’s political ties have been cause for concern as well. Religious experts have described it as closely related to the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement built around the idea of modern-day prophets and apostles that aims to have Christians transform society and rule over key political and cultural institutions, referred to as the “Seven Mountain Mandate”.Johnson co-authored a book, Invading Babylon: the 7 Mountain Mandate, which advises Christians to exert influence in seven core areas: church, family, education, government, media, arts and commerce.Matthew D Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish studies who has studied Bethel, argued that the church appears to be trying to implement the Seven Mountain Mandate in its community.“I think they very much intend to enact this bigger vision of Christian supremacy and Christian dominance in the Redding area. It doesn’t mean they are always overt about that,” said Taylor, the author of a book on the New Apostolic Reformation for which he interviewed Johnson.Bethel leaders endorsed Donald Trump, and in 2021 one apologized for incorrectly prophesying that he would win a second term. The church has come out against efforts to restrict conversion therapy. In 2019, several figures associated with the church attended an Oval Office event with Trump to pray over the president. Bethel has sought to distance itself from January 6, however, Taylor said.“They are trying to tone down public rhetoric and make themselves [seem] less extreme than they are but as far as I can tell they haven’t moderated their extremism. They are just trying to package it in a better way,” he argued.The church has long emphasized that the beliefs of individual church members are not necessarily reflective of the church’s positions. Chamberlain, who left the church as a young adult, argues it is important to distinguish between the church leadership and its members.“You have to separate the leaders of the church, the people who are millionaires and drive expensive cars, cars that cost as much as somebody might pay for a house. They have vacation homes and eat at The French Laundry,” Chamberlain said.They live a life of the rich and famous, she added, while some Bethel members, and students, leave their homes abroad and live in extreme poverty to be close to the church.Members point out that they are not a monolith.Matt Plummer’s journey to Redding began the same way thousands of others have – with Bethel. He moved to the city in 2016 with his wife and daughters to attend the church, and remains a member, he said in an interview with the Guardian.Plummer, who grew up in rural New Jersey where his first job was on a horse farm, was drawn to the region’s access to nature from hiking to swimming holes, he said, and the family has developed deep ties to the area.He decided to run for the board of supervisors after working in several political campaigns and seeing the intense polarization and problems that have plagued Shasta county.“We have tied basically for the highest suicide rate in the state. You have one of the highest rates of childhood trauma and one of the highest rates of kids being born with drug withdrawal effects,” he said. “This is a pretty cool community that has a lot to offer but at the same time if you look at all these dimensions of what makes a community thrive, we’re trailing.”View image in fullscreenHe had a tough race ahead of him seeking to unseat Patrick Jones, who previously served on the Redding city council and had been a supervisor for three years as well as a leader of the anti-establishment movement that has come to define local politics.Jones, a gun store manager, led some of the county’s most controversial efforts, including attempting to upend the voting system and moving to allow people to carry firearms in public buildings in violation of state law. He also spread conspiracy theories, telling a conservative national news outlet: “Elections have been manipulated at the county level for decades.”He once responded to a reporter’s query by telling them to “drop dead”.While polarizing, Jones was well-known and had been in politics for years, Plummer said, and had the backing of a Connecticut magnate who has poured millions of dollars into local elections.Plummer made up for that by making personal contact, and personally knocked on about 9,000 doors, he said (there are about 23,000 registered voters in his district).“People care if you show up and meet them,” he said.He sought to stay out of ideological debates and focus on what residents were worried about, primarily public safety, roads and homelessness. The number of unhoused residents has grown significantly in recent years from 793 in 2022 to 1,013 people in 2023.“My opponent had been on the board almost four years and he had been on city council for eight years, which had some jurisdiction over the same things. And they had all gotten worse,” he said.His affiliation with Bethel was a concern, he acknowledged, one he tried to address and alleviate. “I’m not speaking on stage and not this type of celebrity at Bethel. I just go there on a Sunday morning.”View image in fullscreen“One of the things I said is: ‘I’m not running to represent Bethel and so my job is not to defend Bethel’ and so when people would attack Bethel for things, I’d say OK, that’s fine. That’s actually not my priority here,” he said.Strickland, who has described Bethel as a cult, said the choice put the community in a tough position, but that even in her Facebook group people seemed to be leaning toward Plummer. “For me Patrick Jones is much more dangerous.”Plummer received the endorsement of Chamberlain’s publication, A News Cafe, drawing backlash from some readers who started referring to the outlet as Bethel Cafe.“It was a tough call. I have a problem with Bethel on a lot of levels, but just kind of putting on your thinking cap sometimes the Bethel candidates were the best choice for the positions,” she said.“Do we vote for Patrick Jones who is pushing guns and open carry? Or do we vote for Matt Plummer who is a Bethel member? He’s also articulate, educated and smart.”And in the current political climate in the county, Chamberlain mused, few people would want to subject themselves to running for office. “The Bethel people are kind of impervious to it. It’s scriptural.” More