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      ‘He’s phoning it in’: why Biden is losing the voting rights fight

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      For months, Biden and other Democrats have raised alarm about efforts to restrict the vote. Republicans have succeeded nonetheless.Since January, Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Arkansas and Montana have all enacted new legislation that impose new barriers to voting. The successful Republican filibuster this week – which stalled the sweeping voting rights legislation, the For the People Act – only underscored how Democrats have failed to stop GOP efforts to curtail the vote.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterDemocrats have pledged the fight for voting rights is far from over, but activists told the Guardian it did not feel like Biden and Democrats were meeting the moment and treating the fight for voting rights with the urgency it deserved. “They’re checking the boxes,” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, an advocacy group that is focused on mobilizing Black voters. “They’re not acting like we are facing an existential crisis. That’s the problem. It’s from the top down,” added Albright, who is currently on a multi-state bus tour across the south to raise awareness about the need for voting protections.After the bill stalled this week, the White House this week made a clear escalation of its efforts on voting rights. Biden announced he is embarking on a nationwide voting rights tour to highlight the threat of new GOP laws. “I’m going to be going around the country, making the case to the American people that this isn’t just about [showing identification] or being able to give someone water in line, this is about who is able to judge whether your vote gets counted,” he said at the White House on Thursday.The justice department also announced Friday that it was filing a major voting rights case challenging a sweeping new voting law in Georgia, one of the biggest voting cases the department has filed in recent years.The suit is a “step in the right direction,” said Albright, and would signal to other states that efforts to restrict voter access would not be tolerated. But Democrats have a narrow window to pass legislation. In August, state lawmakers will begin the once-per-decade process of redrawing US House and other state legislative districts, a procedure Republicans are poised to use to wipe out Democrats’ majority in the US House. The For the People Act would curb excessive manipulation of district lines for partisan gain, and if it isn’t in place by August, Republicans would be free to freely gerrymander districts.“The Republicans, they’re putting everything to stop it. I need that to be matched with the same kind of passion and commitment and to be vocal,” said LaTosha Brown, the other co-founder of Black Voters Matter. “I have not seen the kind of response that makes me believe they’re seeing this as a do-or-die moment for American democracy.”The problem isn’t that Biden isn’t paying attention, the activists say. The president issued a series of modest, but potentially consequential, executive orders expanding voting rights in March. He has appointed some of the country’s top voting rights lawyers to the upper echelons of the Justice Department, which recently announced it was doubling the number of attorneys focused on voting rights issues. And he has a White House adviser focused on voting rights.Biden has also been unsparing in his criticism of Republican efforts to make it harder to vote, ripping the efforts as “sick,” “un-American,” and “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”Still, some think Biden so far has failed to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to treat the issue as an emergency, said Ezra Levin, the founder of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots group.“He’s phoning it in,” Levin said. “We’ll see what the public actions look like. We’ll see how overwhelming the campaign is. So far we’ve seen basically no action, so any action is an improvement.”While the White House has highlighted its public commitment to voting rights, some advisers privately don’t think the GOP-backed rules will be as big a boon to Republicans as some fear, according to The Atlantic. Advisers privately see infrastructure as a better political winning issue for Biden, the Associated Press reported.“Recently, I’ve been encouraged to see him name voting rights as a priority, but at this point, words simply aren’t enough. We have heard more about a watered-down, bipartisan infrastructure bill than we have about how the White House will help House Democrats save our ailing democracy,” Mondaire Jones, a Democratic congressman from New York, said in a statement.“So we need action with the urgency that this crisis demands.”Brown, the Black Voters Matter activist, said Biden and Democrats in Washington should emulate Texas Democrats, who last month walked out of the state legislature, denying GOP lawmakers a quorum needed to pass legislation. Even though the legislature will reconvene in a special session next month and likely ultimately pass the bill, Republicans have already walked back some of the most damaging provisions. The maneuver also offered a jolt of energy and a symbolic win for Democrats after months.Biden has shown some flashes of upping the stakes. In April, he caught many off guard when he endorsed the idea of Major League Baseball moving its All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to Georgia’s new voting law. MLB did just that days later, offering some of the firmest consequences to Republicans to date for a voting law.Earlier this month, Biden also appeared to fire a shot at two moderate Democrats in the senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two of the staunchest defenders of the filibuster, saying there were “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.” The White House quickly walked back the comments, saying Biden was not talking about the two senators.But when Biden gave a speech to Congress earlier this year, he only mentioned voting rights briefly, towards the end of his remarks. “If I’m your opposition, and I tell you something’s important to me, and then I only give it 30 seconds, how seriously are you going to take me?,” Albright said.If Biden and Democrats were ultimately unable to pass voting rights legislation, Brown said, it would be “devastating” to Black voters, who not only played a big role in getting Biden to the White House, but also helped Democrats flip two Georgia US senate seats in January.“The message that it sends is that they’re not willing to go hard to deliver the things that we were expecting when we went out to vote for them and we risked our lives to do so,” Albright said. “The message that they’re sending is that they’re OK with a little bit of Jim Crow.” More

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      ‘Republicans are defunding the police’: Fox News anchor stumps congressman

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      The Fox News anchor Chris Wallace made headlines of his own on Sunday, by pointing out to a senior Republican that he and the rest of his party recently voted against $350bn in funding for law enforcement.“Can’t you make the argument that it’s you and the Republicans who are defunding the police?” Wallace asked Jim Banks, the head of the House Republican study committee.The congressman was the author of a Fox News column in which he said Democrats were responsible for spikes in violent crime.“There is overwhelming evidence,” Banks wrote, “connecting the rise in murders to the violent riots last summer” – a reference to protests over the murder of George Floyd which sometimes produced looting and violence – “and the defund the police movement. Both of which were supported, financially and rhetorically, by the Democratic party and the Biden administration.”Joe Biden does not support any attempt to “defund the police”, a slogan adopted by some on the left but which remains controversial and which the president has said Republicans have used to “beat the living hell” out of Democrats.On Fox News Sunday, Banks repeatedly attacked the so-called “Squad” of young progressive women in the House and said Democrats “stigmatised” law enforcement and helped criminals.“Let me push back on that a little bit,” Wallace said. “Because [this week] the president said that the central part in his anti-crime package is the $350bn in the American Rescue Plan, the Covid relief plan that was passed.”Covid relief passed through Congress in March, under rules that meant it did not require Republican votes. It did not get a single one.Asked if that meant it was “you and the Republicans who are defunding the police”, Banks dodged the question.Wallace said: “No, no, sir, respectfully – wait, sir, respectfully … I’m asking you, there’s $350bn in this package the president says can be used for policing …“Congressman Banks, let me finish and I promise I will give you a chance to answer. The president is saying cities and states can use this money to hire more police officers, invest in new technologies and develop summer job training and recreation programs for young people. Respectfully, I’ve heard your point about the last year, but you and every other Republican voted against this $350bn.”Turning a blind eye to Wallace’s question, Banks said: “If we turn a blind eye to law and order, and a blind eye to riots that occurred in cities last summer, and we take police officers off the street, we’re inevitably going to see crime rise.”Wallace asked if Banks could support any gun control legislation. Banks said that if Biden was “serious about reducing violent crime in America”, he should “admonish the radical voices in the Democrat [sic] party that have stigmatised police officers and law enforcement”.Despite working for Republicans’ favoured broadcaster, Wallace is happy to hold their feet to the fire, as grillings of Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy have shown.He has also attracted criticism, for example for failing to control Trump during a chaotic presidential debate last year which one network rival called “a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck”.Last year, Wallace told the Guardian: “I do what I do and I’m sitting there during the week trying to come up with the best guests and the best show I possibly can and I’m not sitting there thinking about how do we fit in some media commentary.“We’re not there to try to one-up the president or any politician.” More

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      Republicans will ‘move forward’ on infrastructure after Biden veto threat

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      A lead Republican negotiator has welcomed Joe Biden’s withdrawal of his threat to veto a $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure bill unless a separate Democratic spending plan also passes Congress.Senator Rob Portman of Ohio said on Sunday he and fellow Republicans were “blindsided” by Biden’s comment, which the president made on Thursday after he and the senators announced a rare bipartisan compromise on a measure to fix roads, bridges and ports.“I was very glad to see the president clarify his remarks because it was inconsistent with everything that we had been told all along the way,” Portman told ABC’s This Week.Moments after announcing the deal, Biden appeared to put it in jeopardy by saying it would have to move “in tandem” with a larger bill that includes a host of Democratic priorities and which he hopes to pass along party lines.Biden said of the infrastructure bill on Thursday: “If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it.”The comments put party pressure on the 11 Republicans in the group of 21 senators who endorsed the infrastructure package. One Republican, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, told Politico Biden had made his group of senators look like “fucking idiots”.Biden issued a statement on Saturday that said he had “created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to, which was certainly not my intent … The bottom line is this. I gave my word to support the infrastructure plan and that is what I intend to do.”The White House said Biden would tour the US to promote the plan, starting in Wisconsin on Tuesday.“We were glad to see them disconnected and now we can move forward,” Portman said.A key Democrat, the West Virginia centrist Joe Manchin, told ABC he believed the bipartisan proposal could reach the 60 votes needed to become law.“This is the largest infrastructure package in the history of the United States of America,” Manchin said. “And there’s no doubt in my mind that [Biden] is anxious for this bill to pass and for him to sign it. And I look forward to being there when he does.”Manchin also appealed to progressives to support the bill as part of a process which will see Democrats attempt to pass via a simple majority a larger spending bill containing policy priorities opposed by Republicans.“I would hope that all my colleagues will look at [the deal] in the most positive light,” Manchin said. “They have a chance now to review it. It has got more in there for clean infrastructure, clean technology, clean energy technology than ever before, more money for bridges and roads since the interstate system was built, water, getting rid of our lead pipes. It’s connecting in broadband all over the nation, and especially in rural America, in rural West Virginia.”Another Republican, Mitt Romney of Utah, said he trusted Biden. He also delighted in needling Democrats over the separate spending package.“This is a bill which stands on its own,” Romney told CNN’s State of the Union about the infrastructure deal. “I am totally confident the president will sign up if it comes to his desk. The real challenge is whether the Democrats can get their act together and get it on his desk.”Romney said Republicans “are gonna support true infrastructure that doesn’t raise taxes”. Another Republican negotiator, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, told NBC’s Meet the Press he thought the minority leader Mitch McConnell, “will be for it, if it continues to come together as it is”.But, Romney, said, “Democrats want to do a lot of other things and I think they’re the ones that are having a hard time deciding how to proceed.”A leading House progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, told NBC it was “very important for the president to know that … the Democratic caucus is here to ensure that he doesn’t fail.“And we’re here to make sure that he is successful in making sure that we do have a larger infrastructure plan. And the fact of the matter is that while we can welcome this work and welcome collaboration with Republicans … that doesn’t mean that the president should be limited by Republicans, particularly when we have a House majority, we have 50 Democratic senators and we have the White House.“I believe that we can make sure that [Biden] is successful in executing a strong agenda for working families.” More

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      ‘First of all, I’m taller’: AOC dismisses Greene’s ‘little communist’ attack

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has dismissed comments in which the Georgia Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene called her a “little communist” and said she should be locked up, tweeting: “First of all, I’m taller than her.”Greene is a far-right congresswoman and controversialist who was stripped of committee assignments for comments including advocating violence against political opponents. This month, she apologised for comparing public health rules to combat the coronavirus to the Holocaust.Greene has harassed Ocasio-Cortez on Capitol Hill, prompting the prominent progressive to raise concerns for her security and that of others.Greene was speaking on Saturday evening to supporters of Donald Trump at a rally outside Cleveland, staged to bring the former president back to the campaign trail and to target an Ohio Republican who voted for Trump’s second impeachment.Referring to Ocasio-Cortez as “the little communist from New York City”, Greene responded to boos and remarks from the crowd when she said: “Right. Yeah, lock her up too, that’s a good idea.”Chants of “lock her up”, aimed at Hillary Clinton, were a salient and to many observers troubling feature of Trump rallies in the 2016 and 2020 elections.“She’s not an American,” Greene said of Ocasio-Cortez, who was born in the Bronx, to parents born in New York and Puerto Rico. “She really doesn’t embrace our American ways. You want to know why? She has something called the Green New Deal.”Ocasio-Cortez responded with the dismissive tweet.According to another tweet, from 2019, Ocasio-Cortez is 5ft 4in. A CrossFit profile for Greene says she is 5ft 3in.In May, Ocasio-Cortez offered rather more words in response to harassment by Greene in the halls of Congress.According to the Washington Post, two reporters saw Greene shout: “You don’t care about the American people. Why do you support terrorists and antifa?”Speaking to reporters, Ocasio-Cortez referred to the deadly assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January.She said: “I refuse to allow young women, people of colour, people who are standing up for what they believe to see this kind of intimidation attempt by a person who supports white supremacists in our nation’s Capitol.“I’m not going to let kids see that we’re going to be intimidated out of our fight for justice.” More

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      Mike Gravel, former Alaska senator and anti-war campaigner, dies aged 91

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      Mike Gravel, a former US senator from Alaska who read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record and confronted Barack Obama about nuclear weapons during a later presidential run, has died. He was 91.Gravel, who represented Alaska as a Democrat from 1969 to 1981, died on Saturday, according to his daughter, Lynne Mosier. Gravel had been living in Seaside, California, and was in failing health, said Theodore W Johnson, a former aide.Gravel’s two terms came during tumultuous years when construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was authorized and when Congress was deciding how to settle Alaska Native land claims and whether to classify enormous amounts of federal land as parks, preserves and monuments.He had the unenviable position of being an Alaska Democrat when some residents were burning President Jimmy Carter in effigy for his measures to place large sections of public lands in the state under protection from development.Gravel feuded with Alaska’s other senator, Republican Ted Stevens, on the land matter, preferring to fight Carter’s actions and rejecting Stevens’ advocacy for a compromise. In the end, Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, a compromise that set aside millions of acres for national parks, wildlife refuges and other protected areas. It was one of the last bills Carter signed before leaving office.Gravel’s tenure also was notable for his anti-war activity. In 1971, he led a one-man filibuster to protest the Vietnam-era draft and he read into the Congressional Record 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page leaked document known as the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s history of the country’s early involvement in Vietnam.Gravel re-entered national politics decades after his time in the Senate to twice run for president. Gravel, then 75, and his wife, Whitney, took public transportation in 2006 to announce he was running for president as a Democrat in the 2008 election ultimately won by Obama.He launched his quest for the 2008 Democratic nomination as a critic of the Iraq war.“I believe America is doing harm every day our troops remain in Iraq – harm to ourselves and to the prospects for peace in the world,” Gravel said. He hitched his campaign to an effort that would give all policy decisions to the people through a direct vote, including health care reform and declarations of war.Gravel garnered attention for his fiery comments at Democratic forums. In one 2007 debate, the issue of the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Iran came up, and Gravel confronted Obama, then a senator from Illinois.“Tell me, Barack, who do you want to nuke?” Gravel said.Obama replied: “I’m not planning to nuke anybody right now, Mike.“Gravel ran as a Libertarian after he was excluded from later debates. In an email to supporters, he said the Democratic party “no longer represents my vision for our great country”.“It is a party that continues to sustain war, the military-industrial complex and imperialism – all of which I find anathema to my views,” he said.He failed to get the Libertarian nomination.Gravel briefly ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020. He again criticized American wars and vowed to slash military spending. His last campaign was notable in that both his campaign manager and chief of staff were just 18 at the time.“There was never any … plan that he would do anything more than participate in the debates. He didn’t plan to campaign, but he wanted to get his ideas before a larger audience,” Johnson said.Gravel failed to qualify for the debates. He endorsed Vermont senator Bernie Sanders in the contest eventually won by now-President Joe Biden.Gravel was born Maurice Robert Gravel in Springfield, Massachusetts on 13 May 1930. In Alaska, he served as a state representative, including a stint as House speaker, in the mid-1960s. He won his first Senate term after defeating incumbent Ernest Gruening, a former territorial governor, in the 1968 Democratic primary.Gravel served two terms until he was defeated in the 1980 primary by Gruening’s grandson, Clark Gruening, who lost the election to Republican Frank Murkowski. More

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      ‘We have a deal,’ Biden declares – but will his $1tn infrastructure package pass?

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      Joe Biden and a group of Democratic and Republican senators are agreed on a roughly $1tn bipartisan infrastructure package in hopes of fulfilling one of the president’s top economic priorities – but its prospects remain precarious.Biden’s endorsement of the deal this week marked a breakthrough moment in his quest to forge a compromise with Republicans for hundreds of billions of dollars in spending on roads, bridges and other infrastructure needs.“We have a deal,” Biden proclaimed outside the White House on Thursday, standing alongside the group of 10 senators after a meeting in the Oval Office where they outlined their proposal, which would include $579bn in new spending on projects and other initiatives.But the declaration might have been premature. The deal still faces major challenges, and its passage now rests on a delicate two-track dance between the House and Senate to move both it and a separate spending bill, which Democrats plan to force through despite Republican opposition.Biden also spent the weekend trying to clean up a mess of his own making, after he said on Thursday he wanted both bills to pass but would be prepared veto the bipartisan plan.One furious Republican said said that made him and others look like “fucking idiots”. In a statement on Saturday, Biden said that though he had “created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to” that was not his intent and he would support the deal.The two-track strategy remains on course. But the difficulty is that, broadly, Republicans say they are wary of legislation driving large increases in federal spending, while Democrats worry the bipartisan package is too lean and think Republicans are just determined to obstruct anything Biden does.Democrats are placing many of their domestic policy hopes into a separate spending bill that could cost as much as $6tn, in what could be their final chance to push through Biden’s ambitious legislative agenda this year.It comes amid growing concern that the bipartisan package covers only traditional infrastructure projects and omits much of Biden’s original $4tn vision – such as spending to combat climate change – panned by Republicans.To break the logjam, top Democrats have coalesced on a complicated strategy that would see the Senate move on the bipartisan package before the House adopts the separate spending bill – all to ensure both pieces of legislation can be enacted.Laying out the strategy, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Thursday the House would not allow a vote on the bipartisan package until the Senate had passed the sweeping spending bill through reconciliation.“There ain’t gonna be no bipartisan bill unless we’re going to have a reconciliation bill,” Pelosi said, previewing sequencing also endorsed by the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the No3 Senate Democrat, Patty Murray.Pelosi’s move is aimed at giving House Democrats leverage, after some voiced concern that if the bipartisan package was passed first, it could cost moderate votes on the separate spending bill and doom its prospects.The backstop from Pelosi also effectively pressures centrist Senate Democrats – most notably West Virginia’s Joe Manchin – to extend their votes for passing the separate spending bill by reconciliation, if they wanted the bipartisan package to become law.In the House, progressive Democrats will be under pressure to support the bipartisan package, since it contains key authorizations of spending measures left in from Biden’s proposal.But even then, the passage of the bipartisan package, and so also the separate spending bill, is far from guaranteed after the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, declined to say whether he supported the bill.The bipartisan package requires 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a possible Republican filibuster – a threshold that Democrats would probably struggle to meet should McConnell reject the bill and whip the Senate GOP conference in opposition.In another worrying sign, the Republican senator Bill Cassidy, part of the group of 10, told reporters he was dismayed by Democrats’ strategy that could sour the compromise and turn his colleagues against the bill.“We got a very good infrastructure bill that’s president-endorsed bipartisan, which can pass and is paid for. I cannot believe that they’re holding it hostage for their political agenda,” Cassidy said.Still, the balancing act across the House and Senate, if successful, could deliver both bills to Biden’s desk as early as September.Congress would first need to pass the annual fiscal year budget resolution before Democrats can start to consider taking the first step of their strategy and pass the separate spending bill through reconciliation.Senate Democrats are privately considering a sprawling $6tn spending package that would maneuver all the remaining priorities from Biden’s economic agenda, not in the bipartisan bill, around the 60-vote filibuster threshold.At present, the tentative schedule suggests both the House and Senate could vote on the budget resolution by the second week of August, freeing up the Senate to vote on the reconciliation bill in September, according to a source briefed on the matter. More

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      Democrats cite Ku Klux Klan Act in suits over ‘Trump Train’ Texas bus incident

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      A convoy of Trump supporters that swarmed a Biden-Harris campaign bus on a Texas highway last October violated the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which prohibits violent election intimidation, two new lawsuits allege.One suit targets drivers in the self-described “Trump Train”, saying they conspired to intimidate and harass Biden-Harris campaigners.The other suit names as defendants law enforcement officials in San Marcos, Texas, saying they “abdicated” their responsibility to protect the bus “despite repeated calls for help”.The lawsuits were filed by Eric Cervini, an author and volunteer; Wendy Davis, a former Texas state senator and a Biden campaign surrogate; David Gins, now a White House staffer; and Timothy Holloway, the bus driver. Cervini was driving his own car.The FBI previously confirmed it was investigating the incident in which a pack of vehicles flying flags in support of Trump’s re-election effort besieged a Biden bus on a Texas highway.Court documents say some members of a New Braunfels Trump Train were “identified in media reports and on social media as having taken part in the 6 January 2021 insurrection” at the US Capitol.Court papers also say Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act in the aftermath of the civil war and during Reconstruction “to prevent groups from joining together to obstruct free and fair federal elections by intimidating and injuring voters, or denying them the ability to engage in political speech”.The members of the Trump Train “openly and wilfully violated that statutory command”, court papers say.In February a Democratic congressman from Mississippi, Bennie Thompson, joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to sue Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani under the KKK Act, accusing them of conspiring to incite the Capitol attack.The new lawsuits were filed on 24 June in federal court in the western district of Texas. They claim that on 27 October, when the Biden campaign made plans for the bus tour public, Trump Train members in Alamo City and New Braunfels plotted “to intercept and intimidate the bus as it traveled through Bexar, Comal, Hays and Travis counties”. As the bus traveled from Laredo to San Antonio on the morning of 30 October, papers say, about 15 to 20 Trump Train vehicles were spotted on a “feeder road” near the I35 interstate. The bus left the highway due to safety concerns and reached San Antonio.However, court papers say, some Trump Train members “were not dissuaded, and began deploying to pre-planned positions along I-35”. Alamo City Trump Train members started posting on Facebook that they were heading to the highway and would wait for the bus while others said they were in position, court documents say.When the bus left San Antonio, papers say, campaign members started seeing social media posts about “the converging of vehicles”. When the bus left San Antonio city limits, a police escort departed. Not long after, court papers say, “Trump Train vehicles converged on the bus”.The papers say: “Vehicles – most of them large trucks and SUVs – displayed a variety of flags, including Trump campaign flags, Confederate battle flags and many others. The Trump Train began harassing the bus by surrounding it, forcing it to slow down, honking, yelling and making hand gestures. Vehicles started getting close to the bus and taking videos.”[embedded content]After the bus arrived in New Braunfels, a staffer called police, who sent vehicles to escort the bus. “As soon as the police arrived, the Trump Train resumed driving at around the posted speed limit and stopped harassing the bus passengers,” court documents say.“When the bus tour reached the New Braunfels-San Marcos city line, however, the New Braunfels police dropped off, and the Trump Train resumed its harassing behavior.”The bus passengers say they were “terrified” and called police dispatchers in New Braunfels and San Marcos, asking for an escort. San Marcos police “refused to send an escort and said officers would be looking out for traffic violations as usual”, court documents say, adding: “They said that unless the Biden-Harris campaign was reporting a crime, we can’t help you.’”Campaign staffers say they “pleaded” for help. But while San Marcos police “assured” them they would send backup, court documents say, none came.San Marcos police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.One Trump Train participant is alleged to have “side-swiped” a campaign staffer’s SUV. A campaign event was cancelled.Davis, who rose to national attention with a 13-hour filibuster in an attempt to block a draconian abortion bill in 2013, said: “We filed this lawsuit because everyone should be able to engage in peaceful political activity free from fear, intimidation, or threats of violence.” More

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      Kamala Harris takes heat from both sides in daunting border visit

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      The sun beat down on the 30ft border fence that separates El Paso, Texas from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as temperatures headed towards 100F on the southern border that stands as a symbol for so much in American politics.The heat was also on for Vice-President Kamala Harris, who was making her first trip to the border since being tasked with immigration policy by Joe Biden more than three months ago.It is not an easy job. She was handed one of the toughest issues in American politics and one that has plagued successive American presidents for several decades, no matter what political party was occupying the White House.Criticism for Harris came from both sides of the political aisle for the length of time it took her to make the trip on Friday. More attacks came from Donald Trump, who had accepted an offer from Texas’ rightwing governor Greg Abbott to tour the border ahead of an attempt by Republican-run Texas to fund the completion of a border wall. “If Governor Abbott and I weren’t going there next week, she would have never gone!” Trump said.But Trump’s criticism of Harris was hardly the only voice raised against her as she seeks to come to grips with immigration and border security. She was also criticized by immigration activists and many on the left of the Democratic party for the message she delivered during an early June visit to Guatemala.“Do not come. Do not come,” she said. “I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back.”The blunt message was ill-received by those who pointed out that Harris’ parents were also immigrants.“[Her comments] reinforced the years of attacks on the rights of refugees and asylum seekers by the previous administration,” said Dylan Corbett, the director of a local non-profit organization that focuses on immigration policies and aiding migrants in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. “The message should be: ‘How can we, together, build a future where your children don’t have to migrate?’”After touring a border patrol facility to kick off her visit, Harris made an unannounced stop at the Paso Del Norte port of entry, a busy international bridge that connects the downtown centers of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.While there, she met with five girls detained at the bridge’s processing center, aged between nine and 16 and all from Central America. The meeting was closed to the press, but her office described the meeting as positive, with the girls calling Harris an inspiration and drawing photos for her.Approximately 1,600 children just like those girls are being housed in shelters at the US army’s Fort Bliss in El Paso, according to US media, where there are lengthy stays, poor conditions and infrequent meetings with lawyers.But a visit to the controversial shelter on Fort Bliss was not part of the vice-president’s visit, despite the announcement of an investigation of the housing for migrant children.Across the street from her meeting with the girls, a small group of immigration advocates chanted from the corner, “Si, se puede!” after Harris left. She headed back to the airport, where she met with the leaders of immigrants rights organizations. The focus of their discussion was reported as the root causes and drivers of immigration to the United States.Behind the talk, though, is a brutal reality.The trip from Central America for many immigrants is long and potentially lethal, especially for children. There are deaths from heat stroke as migrants trek through triple-digit desert heat, or fall from the 30ft high border wall already in place in high-traffic areas along the international line.Migrants who survive that fall are just a few of the people who are taken to a local non-profit organization, Annunciation House, which operates as a network of shelters, helping to connect migrants with family in the States and legal representation for asylum cases.The injuries range from fractured ankles to head injuries that have left a woman quadriplegic, according to the director of Annunciation House, Ruben Garcia.“We have such little appreciation for what they’re risking to be safe, to put food on the table,” Garcia said. “These people aren’t coming here because they want to put jacuzzis in their houses.”Nor is getting to the border, or even across it, the end of the story. Should migrants survive the trip from their home countries, through Mexico and across the border into the US, in most cases, they are not currently allowed to stay in the US, even when seeking asylum.Nearly 100,000 migrants have been expelled from El Paso, Texas, into Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, since October, according to data provided by the border patrol. The expulsions are still taking place under a policy known as Title 42, implemented by the Trump administration. Thus far, Title 42 has been kept in place by the Biden administration despite outcry from immigration organizations.“The expulsions under Title 42 are still rampant,” Garcia said.The policy falls under the umbrella of public health and was implemented as a response to Covid-19. “We all know it had nothing to do with the pandemic, it had to do with immigration control,” Garcia said. “I tell people: Donald Trump did get his wall. It’s called Title 42.”There was little sign Harris planned to end that. Nor is there much doubt that the debate over immigration and the border in the US will remain toxic after a Trump era when many Republicans – including the former president – made openly racist statements about immigrants.“In the United States, there is an incredibly significant population that doesn’t want you, they speak extremely derogatorily about you,” said Garcia. “They wouldn’t care if you die on the way, they wouldn’t care if you fell off the wall and broke your back.”Harris sought to draw a little of that poison on her trip. “Let’s not lose sight that we’re talking about human beings,” she said.After meeting with Harris, Linda Rivas, the executive director of Las Americas, a non-profit organization that provides legal representation during immigration processes, said she was grateful to share the stories of her clients with the vice-president but also called for more action. “The Biden-Harris administration must improve the asylum process and end the cruel border policies that ripped families apart,” Rivas said.But as the policy debate continues and Harris mulls her next steps, the heat is unlikely to relent – either in US politics or at the sweltering border itself.In a statement last week, US Customs and Border Protection described crossing the border in the desert in the summer. “The terrain along the border is extreme, the summer heat is severe, and the miles of desert migrants must hike after crossing the border in many areas are unforgiving,” it said.At the moment, not much looks likely to change that. 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