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In an election year in which California’s races have the potential to be among the most consequential in the US, one of the most fascinating contests is shaping up somewhere unexpected: Sacramento.The leading candidate to replace the city’s mayor is a progressive public health expert running for elected office for the first time. Flojaune Cofer has pledged to reject corporate donations, cut police budgets in favor of workers trained to deal with issues such as mental health and tackle the city’s spiraling homelessness crisis.Cofer, a 41-year-old epidemiologist who would be the first Black woman elected as Sacramento mayor, won the most votes of any candidate in last month’s primary with an almost 8% lead over her closest competitor.Her rise comes as political commentators have argued Californians, disheartened by crime, are growing frustrated with progressive policies. In March, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that the city’s status as a longtime liberal bastion is no more after voters approved a controversial measure that will require welfare recipients to be screened for drugs.Sacramento has struggled with many of the same issues as San Francisco and Los Angeles from a growing unhoused population and unaffordable housing to downtowns that have struggled to rebound after the pandemic. Cofer’s vision for the city, which she hopes will one day serve as a model for dealing with the most pressing problems of the era, has appealed to voters, particularly those in lower-income neighborhoods.“I just feel we are so close to being able to do something powerful,” she said in a recent interview. “We don’t have to live in a city where people don’t have their basic needs met. This can be a city that’s affordable, prosperous, innovative, that’s connected.”Cofer, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, moved to Sacramento 20 years ago for a public health fellowship and decided to make her home in the city after finding a deep-rooted sense of community. “It reminded me a lot of Pittsburgh, with the tight neighborhoods and rivers flowing through it and being a midsize city in a state with larger cities that often get more of the attention,” she said.She worked for the state’s public health department before becoming a senior public policy director for a public health non-profit. In recent years, Cofer served on several city committees and was a visible presence in Sacramento politics before she decided to run for office.She faced a crowded field with well-known and high-profile candidates, including two former state lawmakers, vying for the role and arguing they were best equipped to address the problems ailing the city.Sacramento has changed considerably in recent years with the redevelopment of its downtown, growing population and a seemingly ever worsening housing shortage.Homelessness has been the defining issue in city politics in recent years. The capital is in the midst of a growing emergency as the number of unhoused residents climbed almost 70% from 2019 to 2022.At least 9,278 people in the county are estimated to be without a home, the majority of whom sleep outdoors or in vehicles. Encampments have developed on levees, near schools and next to busy roads, while advocates have said the city has failed to create meaningful solutions to match the scale of the massive problem.“I think one of the things that we’re already in agreement on is that what we’re doing right now is not working,” she said. The crisis is affecting everyone in the community, she said, from unhoused people who say they are being harassed and targeted without receiving the support they need to business owners who say people don’t want to go downtown.The city can create change “if we do right by the people who are experiencing homelessness, and we actually make sure people have a place to go, instead of just moving them block to block without a clear destination, and we make sure that they have the facilities and things that they need, like showers and bathrooms”, she said.“There’s data to show us that these things can work. Instead, it seems like we are insistent upon trying to do things expediently that don’t work and that make the problem worse.”Cofer has backed greater protections for renters as well as managed encampments. She has also advocated cutting $70m from the police budget and redirecting that funding to hire trained workers who can respond to calls about mental health and homelessness while police prioritize violent crime.She wants to invest in programs from non-profits and community groups that have a track record of reducing violence in the city – pointing to the city’s investment in similar initiatives that led to a two-year period with zero youth homicides before that funding was cut.“That’s the kind of thing that you can feel in a community when you’re not worried about being shot, when your young people aren’t worried about it, when nobody is in the active stage of grieving and hanging up RIP banners on their high schools,” she said.“I’m looking at what will save us money, what will save us lives, and will allow us all to be able to experience safety, not just the performance of safety.”Despite the so-called backlash against progressive policies in other parts of the state, Cofer’s message appears to have won over voters across the city. Her campaign knocked on 30,000 doors, she said, and she engages directly with voters on Twitter, even those who are frequently critical of her.She saw support from all income levels, but particularly in the lowest-income neighborhoods in the city, according to an analysis from the Sacramento Bee.“Our message resonates,” Cofer said. “We’re talking about people who have largely not felt seen, heard and represented. When we change the narrative, invite people into the conversation, they see things differently and they’re hopeful in a different way and they’re reaching out in a different way.”She was endorsed by the Sacramento Bee’s editorial board, which described her agenda as “[in] some ways fiscally conservative and in other ways socially and economically progressive”.“She has the most potential to dramatically transform the Sacramento political landscape in the next four years, and that landscape desperately needs transformation,” the board wrote.In November, Sacramento voters will choose between Cofer and Kevin McCarty, a Democratic state lawmaker. Some political analysts have argued Cofer faces long odds with votes no longer divided among multiple candidates, but Cofer remains hopeful about her candidacy and the progressive movement in the city.“Sacramento is in a different position than some of the other places where we haven’t actually had an opportunity to try these progressive ideas out here,” she said. “We have the benefit of having watched what did and did not work in places in the Bay Area and southern California and to really learn from that.” More
Shomari Figures, an attorney and Obama White House executive from a politically-prominent civil rights family, has won the Democratic nomination to run in Alabama’s redrawn second congressional district Tuesday night, defeating state representative Anthony Daniels.The runoff election has been closely watched because of its implications for control of Congress in November, and for the effect of supreme court orders requiring southern states to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act and eliminate racial gerrymandering.Republicans currently control Congress by a margin of 218 to 213, with four vacancies. A win by Figures in November represents one seat flipping control from Republicans to Democrats.Alabama legislators resisted complying with the order of the US supreme court last year, requiring the state’s congressional map to add an additional district that would be politically competitive for a Black candidate. The courts eventually appointed a special master to oversee redrawing district lines, creating a new second district in southern Alabama, stretching through the “Black Belt” of counties with large African American populations.Just under half of the residents are Black. The Cook Political Report rates Alabama’s second congressional district as “leans Democratic” with a +4 Democratic partisan advantage, which Republicans believe may still provide an opportunity to hold the seat.Tuesday night, Republicans chose Caroleene Dobson, a real estate attorney and political newcomer, to face Figures in November. Dobson, a Harvard graduate and Federalist Society member, ran as a more conservative candidate than her runoff opponent, former State Senator Dick Brewbaker, who served a Montgomery-area district for 10 years.The Republican runoff candidates had contributed about a million dollars to their campaigns by March election filing deadlines, a sign of how hard fought the contest will be in November.The campaigns of Figures, 38, and Daniels, 41, differed less by ideology than biography. Daniels is the youngest Black man to lead Democrats in the Alabama house of representatives. He grew up in a small Black Belt town south of Montgomery, but represents Huntsville, Alabama, a prospering north Alabama city from which he has built a statewide power base.Daniels developed a reputation as a political dealmaker while serving in the legislature, navigating a political environment that is hostile to Democrats to get legislation passed that eliminated state income taxes on overtime pay. But Daniels could not overcome Figures’ financial advantages in a runoff.Figures is the kind of Alabama political royalty whose engagement five years ago was announced in the New York Times. Figures’ father, Alabama state Senator Michael Figures was a crusading attorney who famously bankrupted the Alabama Ku Klux Klan in the ’80s. His mother, state Senator Vivian Davis Figures, won the seat held by her husband after his death in 1996 and has held it since.Figures resigned his job as the deputy chief of staff and counselor to Merrick Garland, the attorney general, to compete in the crowded March primary. His longstanding connections to national politics helped him draw nearly $2m in outside spending from groups like Protect Progress, a Washington-based political action committee. More
When I began working as a consular officer at the US embassy in Ankara, Turkey, I was at the beginning of what was supposed to be a 20-year diplomatic career. Maybe I didn’t love all of US foreign policy, but in my routine visa assignment I was deeply committed to treating everybody I interviewed fairly and playing my part in facilitating the American immigrant dream. Then, on 27 June 2017, Donald Trump issued orders to begin implementing the “Muslim ban”. My routine job had suddenly become deeply morally fraught and instead of blandly facilitating the American dream, I was denying it to people based on their faith.My first instinct was to draft a resignation letter, but I didn’t immediately send it because it felt at the time like I was part of a nigh-unanimous institutional rejection of an illiberal policy. More than 1,000 US diplomats put their signatures on an internal dissent cable against the Muslim ban when it was proclaimed. My boss hated the ban, my boss’ boss hated the ban, and the dozens of US ambassadors summoned to the foreign ministries of Muslim-majority countries to explain the policy tried to disown it as much as they possibly could. When I pushed back as much as I could, I did so with the full support of my bosses and colleagues. But, and this is the most important part, we always did so within the regulations.We wanted to get waivers and exceptions for every applicant possible, so we sounded out exactly what criteria for waiving the ban Washington would accept. (Family separation? Loss of a valued employee for an American business?) We found where the bar was, we created templates and standard operating procedures, and got to work slotting as many people as we could into them. Within a few months, the ban interviews were rote checklists rather than impassioned pleas for humanity. Every applicant we got who checked the boxes was a moral victory; every one who didn’t make it was tragic. But, hey, we got to tell ourselves that we tried. As time wore on, I realised that fighting for individual waivers and exemptions was resistance by pedantry. What I found myself engaging in was a deeply non-confrontational performance of virtue rather than an act of sabotage.Joe Biden repealed the Muslim ban on the first day of his presidency. When secretary of state Antony Blinken informed us that the policy had ended, he declared that the ban was “a stain on our national conscience”. It was never said in as many words, but the implication was that because we managed the policy to optimise exemptions and because we felt bad about it, and because leadership repudiated the policy in retrospect, it meant that we weren’t implicated. That the issue was settled.But it isn’t settled. The presidential proclamation repealing the Muslim ban did not surrender a single iota of the authority to implement future bans. It was only when the Muslim ban was finally over that I fully realised what I had been part of; we created another tool in the toolbox, a set of procedures and standards for processing travel bans, waivers and exemptions that could be put to literally any purpose. Our internal resistance was fundamentally morally agnostic because we fought within the technical bounds of policy implementation rather than the fact of its declaration.I quit the US state department a few months later. I quit because, despite all of our efforts from within the system to fight against the Muslim ban, there is nothing stopping a future president from reinstating it, or something like it. Trump has outright promised to reinstate an expanded and harsher Muslim ban if re-elected. I am confident that junior US diplomats in the same position I was will be disgusted, will try to push back. They might even dust off some of the old templates I made. But they will only serve to make things run smoother next time. A certain proportion of Muslim immigrants will find waivers. Some – maybe thousands, maybe most – sadly won’t, but the people implementing the ban will be better positioned to repudiate another future “stain on our national conscience”.Resistance that shaves off the rough edges of inhumane policy without reversing it is not resistance, it is complicity. As theorist Stafford Beer says: “The purpose of a system is what it does,” and an immigration system with a smoothly running Muslim ban that has generous provision for waivers and exemptions is still an immigration system that bans Muslims. I quit the US diplomatic corps because internal resistance to a racist and illiberal political project is a losing bargain.
Josef Burton is a former US diplomat who served in Turkey, India and Washington DC More
Six former Mississippi law enforcement officers – prosecutors said the group called themselves the “Goon Squad” – who tortured and abused two Black men in a racist attack were sentenced to between 15 and 45 years in prison on Wednesday.Brett Morris McAlpin, formerly the fourth highest ranking deputy in the Rankin county sheriff’s department, was sentenced to 20 years. Christian Dedmon was sentenced to 25 years. Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke were both sentenced to 20 years, while Hunter Elward was sentenced to 45 years and Joshua Hartfield was sentenced to 15 years.The Rankin county circuit judge Steve Ratcliff gave the men state sentences shorter than the amount of time in federal prison that they already received last month. Their sentences will run concurrently with their federal prison sentences. The men were all ordered to pay $6,431 within two years of release, and to permanently surrender their law enforcement certificates.In March, the former Rankin county sheriff’s deputies each received federal sentences of at least one decade: McAlpin, 53, was sentenced to serve about 27 years; Dedmon, 29, was sentenced to serve 40 years; Middleton, 46, and Opdyke, 28, both were sentenced to 17.5 years; Elward, 31, was sentenced to about 27 years; while the former Richland, Mississippi police officer Hartfield, 32, was sentenced to serve 10 years in federal penitentiaries.During the federal hearing, US district judge Tom Lee sentenced Dedmon for both his role in the group attack and for an incident the month before the attack. The six men pleaded guilty to state charges last year. He also noted that he viewed Hartfield, who was neither a member of the Rankin county sheriff’s department, nor a member of the “Goon Squad”, in a different light, saying that he was “not there by accident” because he made some “bad choices”.After the federal sentencing hearings, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said: “The depravity of the crimes committed by these defendants cannot be overstated, and they will now spend between 10 and 40 years in prison for their heinous attack on citizens they had sworn to protect.”The Mississippi attorney general’s office brought state charges of conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice against each officer in August. Dedmon, who kicked in a door, was charged with home invasion. Elward was charged with both home invasion and aggravated assault. Hartfield was off-duty when he took part in the attack.The attackThe six white officers called themselves the “Goon Squad”, a celebratory nickname that referenced their use of excessive force and their cover-up of the racist attack on Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker in January of 2023.The attack came after a white neighbor complained to McAlpin that Black people were staying with a white woman who owned the home in Braxton in which the assault took place. McAlpin texted other members of the “Goon Squad”, and the group went to the home without a warrant.Parker lived there while helping to care for the owner of the home. Inside, the officers handcuffed Jenkins and Parker, poured liquids over their faces while verbally assaulting them with racial slurs. They also forced the men to strip naked and shower together.The officers kicked, waterboarded and used Tasers on the two men, while attempting to sexually assault them during the ordeal. Prosecutors said McAlpin urinated in a closet during the attack; Hartfield used a Taser on the two victims while they were handcuffed and tried to dispose of evidence of the assault.Opdyke and Dedmon also assaulted the two men with a sex object during the more than 90-minute assault, according to court documents.Elward removed a bullet from the chamber of his gun and forced the gun into Jenkin’s mouth before pulling the trigger in a “mock execution”. After no bullet was fired the first time, he pulled the trigger a second time. Jenkins eventually landed in the hospital with a lacerated tongue and broken jaw.Officers did not give Jenkins medical attention, but instead began discussing “false cover story to cover up their misconduct”, and planting and tampering with evidence, according to court documents. They agreed to plant drugs on the two men, prompting false charges that would stand for months.Prosecutors said McAlpin and Middleton threatened to kill other officers if they reported the assault. Still, Opdyke was first to admit to what they did, showing investigators a WhatsApp thread in which they discussed their plans.In his victim statement, Jenkins shared that he can no longer sing or play drums for his church.“I wake up at night covered in sweat because of the nightmares of my attack. Loud noises, police lights, sirens, all give me extreme fear and anxiety. I am broken inside and I don’t ever think I’ll be the person I was,” his statement read.Parker, too, said in his statement that he now lives in constant fear.“My life was not perfect. But it was mine. I doubt if I’ll ever experience it again … They should be given what they gave me and Michael Jenkins – which was no mercy and I pray for the maximum sentence,” he said.Some of the officers apologized for their participation in the attack, but an investigation by the Associated Press found that some of the officers were linked to at least four violent, racist attacks going back at least until 2019 that left two Black men dead. More
Donald Trump bemoaned a lack of immigrants to the US from “nice” countries “like Denmark [or] Switzerland”, offering millionaire donors at a Florida fundraiser a reprise of infamous racist Oval Office remarks about people coming to America from “shithole countries”.Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president again, despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties for tax fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.According to the New York Times, which cited an unnamed attendee at the Saturday event in Palm Beach, Trump told his audience: “These are people coming in from prisons and jails. They’re coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster.“And when I said, you know, ‘Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries,’ I’m trying to be nice. Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”The millionaires in the crowd “chuckled”, the Times said.Trump made his “shithole countries” remark in January 2018, in a White House meeting on immigration reform.“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to the Washington Post, which cited aides briefed on the meeting.Trump then “suggested that the US should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway [and] suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the US economically”.That kicked off a storm over Trump’s racism. Six years later, the remarks about “nice countries” reported by the Times landed in a country well used to the 45th president’s vulgarity, racism and lying.Trump is using so-called chaos at the southern US border as a central campaign issue, to the extent of directing Republicans to block bipartisan reform.On Saturday, the Times said, Trump complained of criticism over his “shithole countries” comment: “And you know, they took that as a very terrible comment, but I felt it was fine.”He also complained that migrants were coming to the US from Yemen, “where they’re blowing each other up all over the place”, and said migrants from Latin America “make the Hells Angels look like extremely nice people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They’ve been shipped in, brought in, deposited in our country, and they’re with us tonight. In fact, I don’t think they’re on this island, but I know they’re on that island right there. That’s West Palm. Congratulations over there. But they’ll be here. Eventually, they’ll be here.”Palm Beach, where Trump spoke at the home of a billionaire, is 93.8% white. West Palm Beach, across a waterway, is nearly a third people of color.The Times also reported that Trump claimed Joe Biden had “soiled” the Resolute desk in the Oval Office at the White House.“The attendee who witnessed the moment said that dinner guests laughed and that Mr Trump’s remark was interpreted as the former president saying that Mr Biden had defecated on the desk,” the paper said.
Biden v Trump: What’s in store for the US and the world?On Thursday 2 May, 8-9.15pm GMT, join Tania Branigan, David Smith, Mehdi Hasan and Tara Setmayer for the inside track on the people, the ideas and the events that might shape the US election campaign. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live More
Several recent polls have suggested that Donald Trump may be on course to receive more support from Black voters than any Republican presidential nominee in history. Some have argued the polling isn’t representative enough.
This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the historian and author Leah Wright Rigueur about whether or not Trump can really win over more Black voters than Joe Biden can afford to lose. Or should his main concern be those disaffected voters who don’t turn to Trump, but instead don’t turn out at all, choosing to stay home?
How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More
The anti-immigration extremist, white nationalist and former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller is helping drive a plan to tackle supposed “anti-white racism” if Donald Trump returns to power next year, Axios reported.“Longtime aides and allies … have been laying legal groundwork with a flurry of lawsuits and legal complaints – some of which have been successful,” Axios said on Monday.Should Trump return to power, Axios said, Miller and other aides plan to “dramatically change the government’s interpretation of civil rights-era laws to focus on ‘anti-white racism’ rather than discrimination against people of colour”.Such an effort would involve “eliminating or upending” programmes meant to counter racism against non-white groups.The US supreme court, dominated 6-3 by rightwing justices after Trump installed three, recently boosted such efforts by ruling against race-based affirmative action in college admissions.America First Legal, a group founded by Miller and described by him as the right’s “long-awaited answer” to the American Civil Liberties Union, is helping drive plans for a second Trump term, Axios said.In 2021, an AFL suit blocked implementation of a $29bn Covid-era Small Business Administration programme that prioritised helping restaurants owned by women, veterans and people from socially and economically disadvantaged groups.Miller called that ruling “the first, but crucial, step towards ending government-sponsored racial discrimination”.Recent AFL lawsuits include one against CBS and Paramount alleging discrimination against a white, straight man who wrote for the show Seal Team, and a civil rights complaint against the NFL over the “Rooney Rule”, which says at least two minority candidates must be interviewed for vacant top positions.Reports of extremist groups planning for a second Trump presidency are common, not least around Project 2025, a blueprint for transition and legislative priorities prepared by the Heritage Foundation, a hard-right Washington thinktank.Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, told Axios: “As President Trump has said, all staff, offices, and initiatives connected to [Joe] Biden’s un-American policy will be immediately terminated.”Throughout Trump’s term in office, Miller was a close adviser and speechwriter – though one of the 45th president’s less successful TV surrogates, ridiculed for using “spray-on hair”.Controversies were numerous. Among them were reported advocacy for blowing up migrants with drones (which Miller denied); for sending 250,000 US troops to the southern border; and for beheading an Isis leader, dipping the head in pig’s blood and “parad[ing] it around to warn other terrorists” (Miller denied it and called the source of the story, the former defense secretary Mark Esper, a “moron”).In 2019, after Miller was discovered to have touted white nationalist articles and books, 55 civil rights groups wrote to Trump, protesting: “Stephen Miller has stoked bigotry, hate and division with his extreme political rhetoric and policies throughout his career. The recent exposure of his deep-seated racism provides further proof that he is unfit to serve and should immediately leave his post.”On Monday, Cedric Richmond, co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign, said: “It’s not like Donald Trump has been hiding his racism … [but] he’s making it clear that if he wins in November, he’ll turn his racist record into official government policy … It’s up to us to stop him.”Despite his legal advocacy in the cause of eradicating “anti-white racism”, Miller is not himself a lawyer.Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House lawyer, recently told the Guardian those close to the former president were now “looking for lawyers who worship Trump and will do his bidding. Trump is looking to Miller to pick people who will be more loyal to Trump than the rule of law.” More
