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    Not just Alcatraz: the notorious US prisons Trump is already reopening

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    Donald Trump’s proposal to reopen Alcatraz, the infamous prison shuttered more than 60 years ago, sparked global headlines over the weekend. But it isn’t the only notorious closed-down jail or prison the administration has sought to repurpose for mass detentions.The US government has in recent months pushed to reopen at least five other shuttered detention facilities and prisons, some closed amid concerns over safety and mistreatment of detainees. While California lawmakers swiftly dismissed the Alcatraz announcement as “not serious” and a distraction, the Trump administration’s efforts to reopen other scandal-plagued facilities are well under way or already complete, in partnership with for-profit prison corporations.The shuttered prisons are being revived for immigration detainees, unlike the US president’s purported plan for Alcatraz, which he claimed on social media would imprison “America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders”.US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has sought to reopen the California city correctional facility, a state prison in the southern California desert region that closed last year, according to government contract records. The facility is owned by CoreCivic, a longtime Ice detention partner, and previously housed more than 2,000 people.California Democrats have also warned that Ice was interested in reopening Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin, a US prison shuttered last year amid scandals surrounding systemic sexual abuse by staff, and concerns about mold and asbestos. The correctional officers’ union has reported that staff were recently forced to do maintenance work at Dublin in hazardous conditions, seemingly to prepare for a reopening, but Ice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP), which runs Dublin, have not commented on plans.Communities in California, the country’s most populous state and home to nearly a quarter of immigrants in the US, have long opposed Ice detention centers, and there are currently no Ice jails in the state north of Bakersfield in the Central Valley, said Susan Beaty, senior attorney for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.View image in fullscreen“When there are fewer beds for Ice to incarcerate people, there are fewer arrests and less enforcement,” said Beaty, who represents people in Ice and BoP detention. “We don’t want Ice to expand their ability to cage our community members, because we know that will lead to more incarceration and allow them to terrorize our communities even further.”In rural Lake county, Michigan, Geo Group, another prison corporation, is reopening the closed North Lake correctional facility, which has capacity for 1,800 people and would be the largest immigration detention center in the midwest, according to the local news site MLive.com. Over the years, the facility has housed imprisoned teenage boys, out-of-state incarcerated people and immigrants. But it has sat dormant since it closed in 2022 under the Biden administration.In 2020, detainees at North Lake went on a hunger strike, alleging they were denied access to their mail and religiously appropriate food, their complaint paperwork was destroyed, and they were placed in extended solitary confinement. Geo Group denied the claims at the time.In Newark, New Jersey, Geo Group has recently reopened the closed Delaney Hall facility for immigration detainees even as the company faces a pending lawsuit from the city alleging it failed to file required construction permits or allow inspectors inside, according to news site NorthJersey.com.“They are following the pattern of the president … who believes that he can just do what he wants to do and obscure the laws,” Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, said on Monday.Christopher Ferreira, a Geo Group spokesperson, said in an email that the firm had a “valid certificate of occupancy” and complied with health and safety requirements. The mayor’s opposition was “another unfortunate example of a politicized campaign by sanctuary city and open borders politicians in New Jersey to interfere with the federal government”, he added.In a December 2024 earnings call, Geo Group said it was in “active discussions” with Ice and the US Marshals Service about their interest in six of its facilities that were idle.In Leavenworth, Kansas, CoreCivic is working to reopen an immigration detention center closed in 2021 under Joe Biden. The proposal for the Midwest Regional Reception Center (MRRC) has sparked backlash from the city of Leavenworth, which sued CoreCivic in March, alleging the company has not followed the proper permitting protocols.View image in fullscreenIn 2021, the ACLU alleged that the Leavenworth facility was beset by problems, including frequent stabbings, suicides and contraband, and that “basic human needs [were] not being met”, with food restricted, contact with counsel and family denied or curtailed, limited medical care and infrequent showers. A federal judge called the facility a “hellhole”.Ryan Gustin, a CoreCivic spokesperson, defended the company’s decades of operations in Leavenworth in an email on Monday, saying understaffing amid the pandemic “was the main contributor to the challenges” and “the issues were concentrated in about an 18-month period”: “We’re grateful for a more stable labor market post-pandemic, and we’ve had a positive response with nearly 1,400 [applicants] expressing interest in one of the 300 positions the facility will create.“At any of our facilities, including MRRC, we don’t cut corners on care, staff or training, which meets, and in many cases exceeds, our government partners’ standards,” he said. He also pointed to a recent op-ed by the warden, who argued the facility “is and always has been properly zoned”.CoreCivic also reopened a family detention center in Texas last month.The use of shuttered prisons is just one way Ice is expanding detention for Trump’s mass deportations. He has also moved immigration detainees into BoP facilities currently housing criminal defendants, causing concerns about poor conditions, rights violations and a lack of basic resources as staff manage multiple populations under one roof. Trump has also pushed to expand local jail contracts and use military bases for Ice.Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, which has obtained public records on Ice’s expanding detention, said Ice was ignoring safety concerns in previously shuttered facilities.“This is a continuing pattern of the Trump administration’s willingness to knowingly place immigrants in detention facilities already well-known for having dangerous conditions,” she said. “They’re putting people in facilities where the conditions are so dire … that people simply give up their valid claims of relief to stay in the United States.”There is growing local backlash to these facilities, Cho added: “When people realize what is happening in these facilities, it’s not something they want to see up close. People are becoming very aware that billions of dollars are being spent to enrich private prison companies to hold people in abysmal conditions … including their neighbors, co-workers and friends.”Ice did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.Donald Murphy, a BoP spokesperson, did not answer questions about the reported reopening of Dublin for Ice. William K Marshall III, BoP director, said in a statement that the bureau would “vigorously pursue all avenues to support and implement the president’s agenda” and had ordered an “immediate assessment” to determine “our needs and the next steps” for Alcatraz: “We look forward to restoring this powerful symbol of law, order, and justice.”Corene Kendrick, ACLU National Prison Project deputy director, dismissed Trump’s Alcatraz statement as a “stunt”, noting that the prison’s cellblock has no running water or sewage and limited electricity.“I don’t know if we can call it a ‘proposal’, because that implies actual thought was put into it,” she said. “It’s completely far-fetched and preposterous, and it would be impossible to reopen those ancient, crumbling buildings as anything resembling a functioning prison.” More

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      Trump says he will reopen Alcatraz prison for ‘most ruthless offenders’

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      Donald Trump has said he is directing his government to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on an island off San Francisco that has been closed for more than 60 years.In a post on his Truth Social site on Sunday evening, Trump wrote: “For too long, America has been plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat Criminal Offenders, the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering. When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”He added: “That is why, today, I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”Trump’s directive to rebuild and reopen the long-shuttered penitentiary is the latest salvo in his effort to overhaul how and where federal prisoners and immigration detainees are locked up.But such a move would likely be expensive and challenging. The prison was closed in 1963 due to crumbling infrastructure and the high cost of repairing and supplying the island facility, because everything from fuel to food had to be brought by boat.Bringing the facility up to modern-day standards would require massive investment at a time when the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been shuttering prisons for similar infrastructure issues.The island is now a major tourist site that is operated by the National Park Service and is a designated national historic landmark.The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat whose district includes the island, questioned the feasibility of reopening the prison. “It is now a very popular national park and major tourist attraction. The President’s proposal is not a serious one,” she wrote on X.The prison – which was considered inescapable due to the strong ocean currents and cold Pacific waters that surround it – was known as “the Rock” and housed some of the nation’s most notorious criminals, including Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly.In the 29 years it was open, 36 men attempted 14 separate escapes, according to the FBI. Nearly all were caught or did not survive.The fates of three inmates – the brothers John and Clarence Anglin, and Frank Morris – are the subject of some debate, with their story dramatised in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz starring Clint Eastwood.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that the agency “will comply with all presidential orders”. They did not immediately answer questions from the Associated Press regarding the practicality and feasibility of reopening Alcatraz or the agency’s possible role in the future of the former prison given the National Park Service’s control of the island.The order comes as Trump has been clashing with the courts as he tries to send accused gang members to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, without due process. Trump has also floated the legally dubious idea of sending some federal US prisoners to the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.Trump also directed the opening of a detention centre at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, to hold up to 30,000 of what he has called the “worst criminal aliens”. More

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      Trump can’t withhold funds from sanctuary cities, says federal judge

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      The Trump administration cannot deny federal funds to cities and counties that have passed laws preventing or limiting cooperation with US immigration officials, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.The US district judge William Orrick issued a temporary injunction sought by San Francisco, Santa Clara county and and more than a dozen other municipalities with “sanctuary” policies, and declared that portions of Donald Trump’s executive orders were unconstitutional.“The cities and counties have also demonstrated a likelihood of irreparable harm,” Orrick wrote in his order. “The threat to withhold funding causes them irreparable injury in the form of budgetary uncertainty, deprivation of constitutional rights, and undermining trust between the cities and counties and the communities they serve.”On his first day in office, the US president issued an order directing the attorney general and homeland security secretary to withhold federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions as part of his administration’s crackdown on immigration. In another order, he directed the federal government to ensure funds to state and local governments don’t “abet so-called ‘sanctuary’ policies that seek to shield illegal aliens from deportation”.Meanwhile, on Thursday the US transportation department threatened states with the loss of federal funding if they do not comply with US immigration enforcement efforts.Under the judge’s order, the federal government is prohibited “from directly or indirectly taking any action to withhold, freeze, or condition federal funds”. The Trump administration must provide written notice of his order to all federal departments and agencies by Monday.The plaintiffs have argued the orders amounted to overreach and that the Trump administration was attempting to force cities to participate in its “reckless and illegal mass deportation efforts”.“The federal administration is illegally asserting power it does not have, as courts already determined during the first Trump Administration,” David Chiu, the San Francisco city attorney, said in a statement.“They want to commandeer local police officers as federal Ice agents, while strong-arming local officials with threats of withholding federal funds that support our police department, our efforts to address homelessness, and our public health system.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe federal government has not yet attempted to withhold specific amounts or lay out conditions on specific grants, and during a hearing on Wednesday attorneys for the justice department argued it was too soon for the judge to issue an injunction for that reason.Orrick, who was nominated by Barack Obama, said government lawyers made the same argument during Trump’s first term when the Republican issued a similar order.“Their well-founded fear of enforcement is even stronger than it was in 2017,” Orrick wrote. He pointed to the executive orders and directives from Pam Bondi, other federal agencies and justice department lawsuits filed against Chicago and New York.San Francisco successfully challenged the 2017 Trump order and the ninth US circuit court of appeals agreed with the lower court that Trump exceeded his authority when he signed an executive order threatening to cut funding for “sanctuary cities”.The cities and counties who sued to stop the administration’s most recent orders praised the judge’s decision.“At a time when we continue to see tremendous federal overreach, the court’s ruling affirms that local governments can serve their mission and maintain trust with the communities they care for,” said Tony LoPresti, counsel for Santa Clara county, in a statement.Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      From peppercorns to plastic forks: US businesses that rely on Chinese products reel from Trump tariffs

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      Chang Chang, a Sichuan restaurant in Washington DC, was already noticing that some of its business had dropped off after tens of thousands of federal workers living in the area lost their jobs. But the recent tariff rate hikes mark an even greater blow for the restaurant.Sichuan peppercorns, which create the signature numbing spice of the regional Chinese cuisine, along with other ingredients, face an at least 145% tariff after last week’s tit-for-tat trade battle between China and the United States. The steep rate is an existential threat for restaurants across the country that rely on specialty ingredients imported from China to craft the authentic flavors of their dishes, said operators who were blindsided.“We’re really worried,” said Jen Lin-Liu, the director of events for Chang Chang. The restaurant is part of the Peter Chang restaurant group that operates a dozen Sichuan restaurants across Washington, Virginia and Maryland.The restaurant group sources meats and vegetables from local farmers, including an Amish community in the Finger Lakes region that supplies its shiitake mushrooms and organic pork. Still, it is dependent on imported items such as fermented chili peppers and soy sauce, which give the dishes their unique taste.“Some of the products that we need just do not exist in the United States,” Lin-Liu said.The cost of other items is rising as well. “There are increases in any supply you can think of, from takeout boxes to printer paper to menu printing paper,” she said, adding that if the tariff rates stick, the price of a $20 dish may rise to $35 or $40.View image in fullscreenGeorge Chen, the chef who created Eight Tables, a fine-dining restaurant in San Francisco, said that while some of the items on his menu may be replaceable with options from Taiwan, it undermines the integrity he’s put into sourcing the unique ingredients for his dishes.“Replacements disrupt complex long-term relationships,” explained Chen. “It took me years to find the special spice vendors or the organic tea farmer in China from my many years living and working there.”Eight Tables is part of a larger marketplace called China Live, which includes a dining hall, a cold-drinks bar and a shop that sells wares including chopsticks, glass tea mugs and pots.“The area most concerning is our retail platform,” said Chen. For those items, “it’s not possible to re-order at the tariff rates”.For direct importers, like the Mala Market, an online shop, the tariffs on Chinese products threaten its entire business model. Sichuan peppercorns are popular on the site, but it also sells a number of items produced in their original region using traditional methods. The owner, Taylor Holliday, calls these “heritage products”, which include soy sauce handcrafted in Zhongba, fermented soybeans aged for three years in Sichuan and sesame paste stone-ground in Shandong.“These are products which have been made in that exact area for hundreds if not thousands of years,” said Holliday. “They have such a history, there’s no way these products can be made anywhere else.”While part of Holliday’s business supplies wholesale items to restaurants around the country, the majority of its orders are from home cooks.“A lot of our customers are people who have a cultural or emotional attachment to China,” Holliday said. “It’s more than just the food, it’s a cultural attachment to these products.”EMei, a Sichuan restaurant in Philadelphia, sources not only its peppercorns from China but also items such as chopsticks and plastic cutlery for takeout orders. Similar to many Chinese restaurants, delivery is a major part of the restaurant’s business.“So far, this is the main impact for us,” said Dan Tsao, the owner of EMei, who said the tariff hikes add about $1 to $1.50 to each delivery order.The tariffs may also create a supply issue for these items.“Importers are pausing more of their orders from China. They think 125% is crazy,” Tsao said.While the restaurant sources many of its ingredients from local farmers, it still relies on some imports from other countries. It orders broccoli from Mexico, shrimp from Ecuador and rice from Thailand. Rice is especially critical; the restaurant runs through a supply of about 200 pounds each night, Tsao said. Since Donald Trump’s “liberation day” announcement earlier this month, the price per pound has already risen more than 25%.View image in fullscreenThe frenetic nature of the tariff policy shifts has left owners and suppliers cautious about which steps to take and how to plan for the future.Tsao has plans to open two more restaurants later this year and has noticed some construction estimates for renovations rising. Most of the building materials come from China, too.“I’m hesitating now,” he said. The possibility of a recession while the prices of supplies and renovations keep going up may change his calculation. “There will be all these ripple effects on the system and there’s so much economic uncertainty,” he added.Holliday said she has one container of product already on the way from China that is scheduled to clear US customs in about five weeks, but will not raise prices until she is forced to.“I’m praying that something happens by then,” she said. But if it doesn’t, she’s resigned to paying the tariffs.“There’s no other way we can run our business,” she said. More

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      Fear grows among US’s 390,000 undocumented Chinese immigrants: ‘So many policies have changed’

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      In 2014, a few years after the birth of her second child, Jenny left China to flee an abusive relationship and government persecution for violating the one-child policy. She brought her younger daughter to San Francisco and, though undocumented, found work at a childcare facility and eventually married a US citizen.Because of extended delays in visa processing, her green card application remains in limbo after three years, but she’s never been particularly afraid of her immigration status. That is until Donald Trump won re-election last November, fueled in part by a promise to conduct the largest mass deportation program in US history.Jenny – the Guardian is using an alias to protect her identity – said she had been afraid to go to work, buy groceries or even meet her friends outside. Her husband, she said, urged her not to leave the house unless absolutely necessary until her visa is approved. Many other Chinese immigrants in her community share her fears, she said.“People are very scared,” Jenny said. “My husband and I are very scared. So many policies have changed and so many more are coming from White House that might have an impact on us.”On the campaign trail, Trump said he would prioritize deporting Chinese nationals of military age, suggesting without proof that they are building an army in the US. Immigrant rights advocates say Trump’s targeted rhetoric has instilled an unprecedented level of fear and anxiety in Chinese communities, both among newly arrived migrants and undocumented immigrants who have lived in the US for decades.Two months into his return to office, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) have already stepped up arrests across the country, conducted raids in major cities, detaining people at restaurants, local businesses and other public spaces. Ice operations have also occurred in sanctuary cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles.View image in fullscreenRoughly 390,000 undocumented Chinese immigrants live in the US, according to the Migration Policy Institute, with more than a quarter residing in California. Nearly 38,000 of them are thought to have final removal orders, according to Ice data from November.Jose Ng, the immigrants-rights program manager at Chinese for Affirmative Action, said there was a lot of fear among undocumented Chinese immigrants where he works in the Bay Area, especially those with final removal orders, a ruling that formalizes an individual’s deportation from the US. The organization operates a rapid response hotline for emergency immigration situations. Over the past six weeks, Ng said the service has received an uptick of frantic calls, up to 40 per night.“We have people reporting Ice activity and presence in their neighborhood,” he said. “We have people sending us information about Ice pickups.”Chinese for Affirmative Action, Ng said, works closely with ethnic media to inform undocumented Chinese immigrants about their rights and the latest immigration policy updates. It also organizes “know your rights” clinics with community members and conducts training on Ice protocols.That prospect has become increasingly likely. In the past eight months, Ice has sent five charter flights to China carrying hundreds of Chinese migrants. Experts say deportations have increased as the Chinese government said it is willing to repatriate confirmed Chinese nationals – a more cooperative stance than it has taken in the past. Many undocumented Chinese people, Ng said, have lived in the US for decades but have had no viable way of obtaining legal immigration status. They are worried about being deported to a homeland they have not set foot on in years.The GOP’s anti-Chinese stance on immigration, experts said, is partially a reaction to the influx of Chinese migrants at the southern border over the past few years. In 2023, more than 35,000 Chinese migrants traversed the dangerous Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama and entered the US from Mexico – 10 times higher than the previous year’s figure. (Crossings have dropped significantly since then due to stricter enforcement from US and Mexican authorities.)View image in fullscreenThe Darién Gap has not historically been a popular route for Chinese people who, in the past, have largely entered the US on tourist visas then overstayed, say experts. But as China’s economy faltered, and visas and other legal paths to immigration in the US became prohibitively difficult to obtain, more migrants have turned to border crossing as an alternative. The social media platform WeChat, which provides detailed instructions on crossing the Darién Gap and finding boarding houses, is also responsible for the influx of Chinese migrants at the southern border, said Connie Chung Joe, chief executive officer of the civil rights organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California.“There’s a whole system set up for Chinese migrants who are mostly going through San Diego,” she said.The Trump administration said the crackdowns would first target violent criminals. But across the country, reports of Ice agents rounding up migrants and people with permits are causing concern in immigrant communities. Fewer than half of the roughly 8,200 people arrested from 20 January through 2 February have criminal convictions, according to an analysis of government data from ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.Chung Joe said Trump’s deportation campaign had caused “a lot of concern and anxiety” in Chinese enclaves in Los Angeles such as Monterey Park and Alhambra.Frank Hwu, an Alhambra-based lawyer who has represented thousands of Chinese undocumented immigrants, said that in the past, Chinese migrants were primarily single men and young adults seeking better financial opportunities in the US. The more recent arrivals have come together as a family. “They have young children and grandparents,” Hwu said.Martin Kim, director of immigration advocacy at Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, said it was unlikely that Trump has the authority or resources to fulfill his hardline promises on immigration, given the astronomical cost of mass deportations. (The American Immigration Council estimated the cost of removing 1 million people a year to be about $88bn.)Despite the administration’s fearmongering tactics, Kim said undocumented people should not hesitate to seek legal advice about their rights and how to deal with Ice.“It’s important to note that fear is exactly what this flurry of policy changes is meant to inflict,” Kim said. “There is a difference between what he’s indicated he wants to do and what he’s able to do.” More

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      Trump picks Maga darling Harmeet Dhillon to lead civil rights cases at DoJ

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      Donald Trump picked Harmeet Dhillon, a Maga darling and ardent supporter, to lead civil rights cases at the US Department of Justice, a sign of major changes ahead in the agency’s priorities.Dhillon made her name in Maga circles by taking on culture-war cases as a San Francisco lawyer and became a fixture in rightwing media, appearing often on Fox shows. She has filed various lawsuits over election “integrity” issues and supported Trump’s quests to overturn results in 2020.In announcing Dhillon’s nomination, Trump cited a laundry list of cases she’s working on, including “taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers”.He also mentioned how Dhillon’s lawsuits on election law fought to “ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted”.“In her new role at the DOJ, Harmeet will be a tireless defender of our Constitutional Rights, and will enforce our Civil Rights and Election Laws FAIRLY and FIRMLY,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.“I’m extremely honored by President Trump’s nomination to assist with our nation’s civil rights agenda,” Dhillon wrote on Twitter/X after the nomination. “It has been my dream to be able to serve our great country, and I am so excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers led by @PamBondi. I cannot wait to get to work!”Trump previously announced Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida and a Trump defense attorney, as his pick to lead the justice department.As a lawyer in California, Dhillon has sued the University of California, Berkeley for its speech policies, represented rightwing undercover operation Project Veritas and the former Fox host Tucker Carlson, and filed lawsuits over pandemic restrictions. She served as a legal adviser to Trump in 2020 and ran to replace Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee in 2023, seeking to make the party organization more Trump-friendly. During the 2024 election, she was dispatched to Arizona by the Trump campaign, a decision that some saw as a sign the campaign was ready to make aggressive legal moves if needed to win there.She founded a legal non-profit, the Center for American Liberty, which uses the courts to go after violations of civil liberties and defend against the “coordinated assault on our civil liberties from corporations, politicians, socialist revolutionaries, and inept or biased government officials”, the organization’s website says.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA Guardian investigation in 2023 found that the non-profit paid Dhillon’s law firm, Dhillon Law Group, at least $1.32m, which experts said was “problematic”. The reporting also noted that Dhillon was paid a $120,000 salary from the non-profit for working two hours a week.Democracy Docket said Dhillon has emerged as “one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country”. It tracked Dhillon or other attorneys at her firms as being involved in more than a dozen lawsuits across the states that challenged voting rights, election processes or Trump’s eligibility for office. She defended Trump in the Colorado case challenging his ability to run for office because of the January 6 insurrection.“Democrats are conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history, right before our eyes, as government officials avert their eyes to the mockery of the constitution and our laws,” she said in late 2023 of efforts to keep Trump off the ballot. “This is a low point in American history.”Dhillon also faced hateful backlash from the far-right over her religion after appearing at the Republican convention in 2024. Dhillon, who is Sikh, gave a Sikh prayer at the convention, which some far-right figures called blasphemous. Before her rise in Trumpworld, she gained public attention for writing legal memos defending Sikhs who wore turbans from racial profiling after the 9/11 attacks. More

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      Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie elected mayor of San Francisco

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      After years of negative headlines and post-pandemic economic struggle, San Francisco has picked a wealthy Democratic outsider with no government experience to serve as the city’s new mayor.Daniel Lurie, 47, is one of the heirs to the Levi Strauss jeans company fortune, and previously spent 15 years as the executive of a San Francisco non-profit he founded. He defeated several Democratic challengers, including the current mayor, London Breed, in an election that was expected to break local campaign spending records.“I’m deeply grateful to my incredible family, campaign team and every San Franciscan who voted for accountability, service and change,” Lurie said in a statement. “No matter who you supported in this election, we stand united in the fight for San Francisco’s future and a safer and more affordable city for all.”Lurie poured more than $8m of his own money into his campaign, while his billionaire mother, Mimi Haas, backed him with another $1m. He will be the first San Francisco mayor since 1911 to win office without previously serving in government, making him the city’s “least experienced mayor in a long time”, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.But the Chronicle also ended up endorsing Lurie, praising the “balance of compassion and toughness” in his planned approach to dealing with the people in San Francisco struggling with homelessness, and saying the city needed a change in leadership, making Lurie’s inexperience potentially worth the risk.Lurie had touted his experience funding and building affordable housing at the Tipping Point Foundation as evidence that he could lead San Francisco in the right direction.San Francisco is dominated by Democrats, and so the choice was effectively between moderates and progressives, with voters focusing on pragmatic centrists. Lurie beat and will replace Breed, the city’s first Black female mayor, who has led the city since 2018.Breed, who was raised by her grandmother in public housing, conceded the race on Thursday when it became clear she could not overcome deep voter discontent and was trailing Lurie, a philanthropist and anti-poverty non-profit founder.“At the end of the day, this job is bigger than any one person and what matters is that we keep moving this city forward,” Breed said, adding that she had called Lurie to congratulate him. “I know we are both committed to improving this city we love.”The northern California city has come to represent the challenges faced by many large US cities that have struggled with an uneven economic recovery and rising cost of living since the Covid-19 pandemic. Standout issues across all candidates’ campaigns were housing and crime, even with crime down 32%.San Francisco has the highest median household income among major US cities, but homelessness remains intractable. Since a June supreme court ruling, Breed’s administration has been actively sweeping unhoused encampments.Her critics pointed out that sweeps are temporary fixes and the city has not done enough to offer shelter to its unhoused population.In an interview with Reuters, Lurie said sweeps were a tool for the city to combat homelessness and promised to stand up 1,500 emergency shelter beds in his first six months in office.Lurie is an heir to the Levi Strauss & Co fortune through his mother, Mimi, who wed Peter Haas when Lurie was a child. Peter Haas, a great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss, was a longtime CEO of the iconic clothing company who died in 2005.Both the Levi’s name and Haas family philanthropic foundations are deeply embedded in San Francisco’s history and identity.Lurie’s father, Brian Lurie, is a rabbi and longtime former executive director of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Federation. More

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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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      The evolution of Kamala Harris: from activist in pigtails to presidential candidate

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      View image in fullscreenIt was the first week of July. News of the presidential election had been mired, for eight days, in alarming assessments of Joe Biden and that shambolic debate. The president had started but not finished sentences, slurred words and at points stood with his mouth slightly agape while his opponent, Donald Trump, ignored questions and lied without fact-check.Now, on 6 July, inside New Orleans’s convention center, the 30th annual Essence Festival of Culture was under way. Kamala Harris was set to speak, one of the vice-president’s biggest in-person events since Biden’s performance had seemingly upended the race. The attendees – mostly Black women, drawn to this long-running music-festival-meets-women’s-expo – were waiting to see Harris. Some were chattering about the possibilities: did her future lie at the top of the Democratic party’s ticket? What could, or should, happen next? The press corps now trailing Harris had swelled in size, and began to scribble notes and scramble for a look as Harris walked across the stage as the defiant second chorus of Beyoncé’s Freedom boomed. A rousing cheer came from the standing-room-only crowd in the cavernous, 600-seat room.“Who is Kamala Harris?” Caroline Wanga, the CEO and president of Essence Ventures asked, as she began a “Chief to Chief” conversation, the live version of an interview published each month in Essence, the Black women’s magazine. The conversations are supposed to illuminate what makes the subjects human, their struggles and lessons learned, the moments of victory and defeat and what distinguishes Black women who lead.“The vice-president of the United States,” Harris responded, setting off another extended cheer from the crowd. “I am a wife. We have children. I am a god-mommy. I am an auntie. I am a best friend. I am a good cook … and you know, I am a fighter for people. I am prepared to fight.”Until late July, Harris had been the running mate of the oldest man to seek the presidency. Today, Harris, the nation’s first Black and south Asian and female vice-president, who was once characterized as a public official struggling to find her footing, is a presidential candidate with a narrow lead. When the big change happened – not by death but by swelling doubt – Harris appeared to have surprised all but those who have long known her.People who know Harris well say what the US is witnessing is the confidence, charisma and net effect of practical experience at multiple levels of government, a woman raised to work hard, to operate with compassion and to push past the comfortable toward what is necessary and right. That’s always been there, but it was, perhaps, not always grasped by the public or press. Harris, friends and mentors say, was subjected to constant and unusual forms of scrutiny and given a series of particularly complex, intractable tasks that no one could wrap in a single term as vice-president.What is indisputable is that Harris is a woman running for the nation’s highest office at a moment when democracy is at stake. Her candidacy is historic, and the next few weeks leading up to the presidential election will alter the course of American politics for better or worse.‘She was at marches in a stroller’“She’s always been a go-getter,” said Areva Martin, a CNN legal analyst and lawyer who first met Harris in the late 1980s. Martin, then a student at the University of Chicago, was visiting her brother, a student at Howard University in Washington DC, where Harris was also enrolled, when the two first connected. The women hit it off and have remained friends. “She’s always had a lot of confidence and a concept that anything that wasn’t right, that wasn’t working, was hers to try and change,” Martin said. “If you hear her talking about growing up with her parents, who were very active in the civil rights movement, it’s in her DNA. She was at marches in a stroller.”Born in October 1964, Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother who met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. The Harrises were committed civil rights activists during a time of radical political thought and activity and also, respectively, an economist and a breast cancer researcher. Harris was a toddler when Donald Harris’s academic career forced the family to decamp to Illinois, where Harris’s younger sister, Maya, was born. When Harris’s parents split up in the early 1970s, Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, moved Kamala and Maya back to Berkeley. The girls were raised with direct engagement with two cultures and a firm grounding in the realities of race in the United States. There were trips to an area Hindu temple, and lots of south Indian food which, with a few spice changes, Gopalan would often make into soul food.At home, there were ample amounts of gospel music, which Gopalan, a singer, loved. The Harris girls also went with a neighbor to a Black church and sang in the children’s choir. During summers with their dad, there was lots of jazz. Gopalan, for her part, counted writers and activists among her closest friends. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris wrote in her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold. “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls and she was determined to make sure that we would grow into confident, proud Black women.” (Harris’s staff declined to make Harris available for this story.)View image in fullscreenGopalan and the girls lived in a Black neighborhood, and the children were bussed along with other Black students to a white school in another part of town as part of the school district’s integration plan. Harris was a civil rights foot soldier in pigtails. Later, at Howard University – widely considered the nation’s premier institution of all the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) – Harris encountered so many Black people with different interests, class backgrounds, experiences and cultures that, she wrote in her book, she felt like she was in heaven. She was one of at least two Kamalas on campus.Harris, then fond of popped collars and her short natural curls, studied political science and economics. Yearbooks show she was active in the California Student Association and the debate team and chaired the economics society. It was at Howard where she ran for her first office: freshman class representative. She had a summer gig at McDonald’s, as well as internships with a US senator and at the Federal Trade Commission. At the National Archives, where the original Declaration of Independence, constitution and Bill of Rights as well as every administration’s papers are held, the country’s future first female vice-president was on research. And while working as a tour guide at the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Harris got her first official code name: “TG-10” for “tour guide No 10”.Then there was Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc, one of the nine Black sororities and fraternities, which Harris joined while she was an undergraduate. The groups were founded during the early 20th century so that a select group of college-educated Black Americans might have networks through which they could access jobs, loans, business deals, healthcare and even a safe place to stay. The Divine Nine, as the collective is called, were countervailing forces in a segregated country where the social order planted white Americans at the top and was often enforced by violence.Being an AKA has been a way for Harris to embrace self-affirming merriment and matters of global significance. “On Fridays, my friends and I would dress up in our best clothes and peacock around the Yard,” she wrote in her book. “On weekends, we went down to the National Mall to protest apartheid in South Africa.”“She’s just always been a force,” said Inez Brown, who pledged AKA with Harris in the spring of 1986. “I always said, Kamala is going to be a supreme court justice, because once I knew she was headed for law school, I was like she is going to do something really different. That was just her energy.”When Maya gave birth to a daughter at 17, Harris went back home to California for law school, opting for the state university system’s oldest law school, then known as the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (or UC Hastings, now UC Law San Francisco). When Harris was a student there, she and her mother helped to care for her niece, so that Maya could graduate from the University of California, Berkeley and then Stanford Law School on time.In law school, Harris led the Black Law Students Association and was among an early, small group of Black students who spoke of wanting to become prosecutors, said Shauna Marshall, a semi-retired professor at the law school and co-director of its Center for Racial and Economic Justice. Marshall has known Harris since the early 1990s. While Harris was in law school, she and a few other students had begun to understand a district attorney’s powerful decision-making authority – who should be charged, if at all, with what, and how long a judge should be asked to jail those convicted – and wanted it applied more fairly.“I think both of their career choices came directly from their mother’s activism,” Marshall said about the Harris sisters.In 1988, Harris took an internship in the Alameda county district attorney’s office, the place where the supreme court justice Earl Warren – a chief justice whose court transformed the nation, vastly expanding civil rights and liberties to millions of Americans – had been chief prosecutor. She was one of a handful of Black lawyers in the office. It was the height of the crack epidemic, and Harris managed to convince a court to free a woman wrongly arrested in a drug raid. But, like 40% of people who took the California bar exam the next summer, Harris failed. She passed on her second try in 1990 and joined the Alameda prosecutor’s staff, specializing in the prosecution of sex crimes.In a 2019 speech, Harris told the South Carolina NAACP that when it was time to decide what type of lawyer she would be, her family gathered for a conversation. They wanted to know: “Kamala, what are you going to do in your fight for justice?” Explaining why she wanted to be a prosecutor to that group was a bit like defending a thesis, she said.“I know and I knew then prosecutors have not always done the work of justice,” Harris said. “There have been prosecutors who refused to seat Black jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemned Black men to death row and looked the other way in the face of police brutality.” But, Harris said, like other lawyers she admired, she decided to “believe in what can be, unburdened by what has been”.There have been moments that convinced her it was the right choice. Once inside the Alameda county prosecutor’s office, Harris was one of a handful of Black prosecutors. One day, she overheard white colleagues chatting in the hall about how to prove that defendants had been in gangs to apply longer sentences. The conversation was riddled with assumptions and stereotypes. One person suggested looking at the person’s neighborhood. Another suggested the truth was in a defendant’s clothes or music. Harris interrupted: the neighborhood they had discussed was one where she had friends and family. The clothes they described were considered stylish. The music, well, she had that on a tape in her car outside.From district attorney to state attorney generalAfter nearly a decade, Harris was recruited to run the career criminal unit in the San Francisco district attorney’s office, focused on violent and repeat criminals, and was responsible for many of the cases whose outcomes were shaped by California’s contribution to the “tough on crime” era – actions states were incentivized to take under a 1994 federal crime bill brokered by then senator Joe Biden.California’s “three strikes” law and federal money to build more prisons made anyone convicted of three felony crimes, even non-violent offenses, eligible for a life sentence. Harris was among those in the San Francisco district attorney’s office who pushed the agency to seek third-strike treatment only if the felonies involved were serious or violent crimes. But the issue and the racial disparities it deepened were bigger than any one prosecutor or DAs office. Today, the Vera Institute for Justice describes California as “one of the epicenters of mass incarceration in the United States, incarcerating more people than any other state except Texas”.Harris lasted in the San Francisco career criminal division for 18 months before San Francisco’s city attorney called. She wanted Harris to come work on child welfare cases. Harris took the job with a condition: she would do court work and policy.“The work was meaningful, empowering and … [i]t also boosted my confidence that when I saw problems, I could be the one to help devise the solutions,” Harris wrote in her book. “All those times my mother had pressed me – ‘Well, what did you do?’ – suddenly made a lot more sense.”The experience was instructive. Harris, prompted by a friend she had met while serving on a non-profit board, ran for San Francisco district attorney. She defeated the incumbent, her old boss, and became the first person of color or woman to serve as district attorney. She was one of three elected Black district attorneys in the entire country.Just two years into her first term, Harris launched what was then a rare program, Back on Track, wherein first-time defendants aged 18-30 would plead guilty to non-violent crimes – and in exchange for getting a job or going to school, performing community service and making use of social workers, see their records expunged. Most years during the rest of Harris’s tenure, the program enrolled 100 or fewer participants, according to district attorney office data. But, only 10% of participants wound up back in the criminal justice system, compared to about half of otherwise comparable defendants in California. The program was evidence that Harris was trying to make good on the logic that had driven the decision to become a prosecutor, said Marshall, who served on the program’s advisory committee.The push and pull between being an insider who wants to change a troubled system, and working inside a system that has helped to sustain American racial inequality created tension for Harris after she ran for and won the California attorney general’s office in 2010, another role once held by Warren.In the attorney general’s office, Harris found herself defending the decisions of what she described as her clients – state agencies – in court. In 2011, that included the corrections department’s decision not to release all prisoners as per a US supreme court order, after evidence of malnutrition and dangerous levels of overcrowding were found in California’s prisons. Governing magazine found that California finally met the court’s mandates in 2015, while Harris was attorney general. What made the difference: voters approved measures reducing the punishment for a number of crimes, prompting prison populations to fall.View image in fullscreenCritics also often point to Harris’s belief that lives could be saved by disrupting the link between truancy and crime. In San Francisco, Harris’s team had discovered that many children missed school not because of their families’ views about education but because they had significant family problems such as no home, no clean clothes, or they needed to babysit an ill sibling so that parents would not miss work. So, they offered these families services that cut truancy by 23% in two years, according to San Francisco school district data reported by the attorney general’s office. But even in this system, some parents were hit with misdemeanor criminal charges, fines and other deterrent measures.Anthony Rackauckas Jr, a “law and order” tough-on-crime district attorney in southern California, used the state truancy law that Harris had championed to have a number of parents, many of them Black, Latino or caring for disabled children, arrested. Harris bore much of the public blame. The law remains in place, as do real differences in the way some district attorneys apply it.In a 2019 interview with HuffPost, Jeff Adachi, a former chief public defender of San Francisco, said: “I think it was a good thing that [Harris] shined a light on [truancy]. There is a correlation between children who fail at school and what happens later in life. [But] the idea of locking parents up, or citing them with a crime because they’re not taking their children to school – it doesn’t address the root of the problem.”Meeting Doug EmhoffIn 2014, at 49, Harris got married for the first time. Harris met Douglas Emhoff, a California lawyer, on a blind date set up by Harris’s best friend. The connection came with habit-aware instructions: you are going on a date. Do not Google him in advance. You will give him a chance. Harris has said she abided by two of the three.Harris discovered that she liked Emhoff almost immediately, she wrote in her book. Emhoff has said that he too was instantly smitten. So, when Harris warned him on that first date that she was a very busy woman, Emhoff went home and emailed a list of dates when he was available for the next few months. People around her noticed the difference Emhoff made.“They would later refer to that era as ‘AD – After Doug’,” Harris wrote. “They loved how much he made me laugh. I did too.”At their August wedding, officiated by Harris’s sister, Harris put a flower garland around Emhoff’s neck, a traditional Indian wedding practice, and he stomped on a covered glass, a Jewish wedding tradition. Harris really liked Emhoff’s kids: his son, Cole, and daughter, Ella, named after John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald. Harris instituted a tradition of sit-down Sunday dinners with her new family. Cooking together and talking in the kitchen, Harris has said, features prominently in her memories of her own mother, who died of cancer in 2009.Harris and Emhoff were still newlyweds when the US senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, announced that she would not seek a sixth term in January 2015. One week later, Harris was in the Senate race. Joe Biden, then the vice-president, swore her into office.Family and lots of friends, including Brown and several more of Harris’s AKA sisters, watched Harris become the first Black senator from California and the only Black woman in the US Senate. In fact, Harris was only the second Black woman to become a senator in the US and the first woman of south Asian descent to do so.White House ambitionsWhen Harris decided to launch a 2020 bid for the White House, she’d been in the Senate about three years. Harris had sponsored 164 bills and/or co-sponsored another 1,197. (Twenty-five have since become law, according to federal records.) As a member of the Senate judiciary committee, she had grilled some witnesses – Brett Kavanaugh, the future supreme court justice among them – in ways that had, for a time, captured the country’s attention.But, her 2020 presidential campaign never seemed to gain momentum under the weight of the widespread condemnation of the American criminal justice system that peaked after the murder of George Floyd.The most significant moment of the short-lived campaign probably came on a primary debate stage. Harris asked Biden to acknowledge that during his long tenure in the Senate, his work with avowed segregationists to stymie federal funding that would have facilitated more busing to integrate schools had been wrong. One of those children to whom bussing had brought opportunities, Harris said on stage, “was me”.View image in fullscreenBut just as the broader culture was undergoing an alleged racial reckoning, similar discussions were happening inside politics. Biden wasn’t the only white power player already well over 70 and going nowhere. Black women, long the backbone of the Democratic party’s voter and organizing base remained scarce in senior positions. Outside consultants and party officials often spent money and political capital in the pursuit of white swing voters, a relatively small group. So, when decisions were being made, when policy priorities were being set, few Black women, and few people born after the July 1964 Civil Rights Act, for that matter, were in those rooms. There was a sense that a debt was owed, the bill was due.Political leaders like Karen Finney, a political strategist and former spokesperson for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, and communications director at the Democratic National Committee; Glynda Carr, president and CEO of Higher Heights for America, which works to grow Black women’s political power; Donna Brazile, a political strategist, two-time chair of the Democratic party and the first Black woman to run a presidential campaign; and Minyon Moore, a former Clinton administration official and political consultant, now serving as chair of the 2024 party convention, began to talk about the fact that there were Black women qualified for the vice-president’s job and they should be considered, Finney said.Their recommendation – made in a Zoom meeting with Biden and his team – was Harris.When the story is told by Harris’s opponents, she is the typecasted VP, someone selected in a process that didn’t start with résumés or even political calculus. In reality, just about every vice-president was picked much the same way. Only, time and time again, no Black women had been considered.“It’s a political strategy on the part of the Republican party to undermine [Harris] and to undermine her qualifications,” Finney said. “And unfortunately … this is a very typical playbook that’s often used.”Women’s issues? ‘Oh, you mean the economy’In the White House, Biden gave Harris early tasks which, at minimum, must be described as hard. Chief among them: identifying and helping the administration to address the root causes of the increase in undocumented immigration. Getting to the root causes and their solutions by traveling to Guatemala and Mexico was never going to generate photos of Harris hanging out of the top of a tank or standing at the border with a bullhorn. That really wasn’t Harris’s style or the nature of her assignment, either.Harris didn’t stave off the critics. During a sit-down interview, Harris laughed when Lester Holt, the NBC Nightly News anchor, asked when she would visit the US-Mexico border. The causes of illegal immigration don’t begin within a few feet of the Rio Grande and she hadn’t personally visited Europe either, she responded, saying no one was accusing her of ignoring or avoiding issues there. Republican officials pounced. There was, in Trump’s view, an “invasion” at the border. And many Democrats weren’t happy with a directive Harris issued to undocumented immigrants in a subsequent press conference: “Don’t come” – seeking asylum at a US border crossing is a legal act.“We had never had a Black female vice-president,” said Finney. “She was basically doing the job in her own way but it’s a role that was created for white men. So of course she’s not going to be doing it in the same way all the men before her did it.”The rest of Harris’s portfolio has been largely complicated or long-running matters of domestic concern including gun violence, barriers to entrepreneurship and full economic inclusion for all Americans, maternal healthcare and “gender policy”. Harris has said that when people ask her to talk about “women’s issues”, she often replies: “Oh, you mean the economy.”View image in fullscreenAs vice-president in Washington, Harris cast 33 tie-breaking votes in the US Senate, many to complete or move forward Biden’s nominees for various senior-level federal jobs. She also broke ties more than any other vice-president in history. And she has become the administration’s foremost voice on abortion access.She spoke about it in ways that many who weren’t in the meetings on other issues or working in the vice-president’s office began to notice in March when Harris became the first vice-president to visit a healthcare facility offering abortions in St Paul, Minnesota. There, Harris discussed women’s healthcare and the situation emerging in states that have banned abortions, and warned reporters and others there to brace themselves because she was going to use anatomically correct terms and use the “bouquet of microphones” to share women’s experiences. Tim Walz, the governor, was standing right behind her.“When she was given the roles … then she was able to speak, and she did so very confidently, very boldly,” said Christian Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW).The birth of the Harris campaignOn 21 July, Harris’s campaign filed paperwork only hours after Biden’s announcement, making her an official candidate for the White House. By that evening, it was clear: this was different.More than 40,000 Black women gathered for a Zoom meeting that night to recognize the significance of the moment, raise money and start organizing. The volume of interest required an exception to Zoom’s virtual meeting size limits, and $1.6m was raised in a few hours. The concept of extremely frank, in-group conversations – about this moment and the specific responses different groups of voters could have, and the stakes they should contemplate – gained traction. White Dudes for Harris, Black Men for Harris, Evangelicals for Harris and Republicans for Harris have gathered in the weeks since.One participant in the estimated 160,000-person white women’s Zoom said every woman and girl in the country faced real threats under a possible second Trump administration, including a loss of control over their bodies and, with that, their lives. “Your whiteness,” one woman in the same Zoom meeting said, “will not save you.” At the same time, over on social media, Kamala was chartreuse green; Kamala was brat. Supercuts of Kamala captured her dancing with marching bands and confidently delivering lacerating, pro-Harris assessments of Trump, some of them backed by the sound of Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us and Chappell Roan’s Femininomenon.“You can’t buy that,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster and founder of the political strategy firm Brilliant Corners who knows Harris and may be best known for his work on the Obama campaigns. “That’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars and it has to happen organically.”Four days after Harris declared herself a candidate for the presidency, she was in Indianapolis, inside the Indiana convention center to address more than 6,000 members of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc, another member of the Divine Nine.“In this moment,” Harris told the people seated at a sea of round tables before her, “I believe that we face a choice between two different visions for our nation, one focused on the future and the other focused on the past. And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”“Recognize there are those who are trying to take us back,” Harris continued. “But we are not going back.”It was the birth of the Harris campaign. More