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      Texas questions rights of fetus in prison guard lawsuit despite arguing opposite on abortion

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      In defending themselves against a lawsuit, Texas officials have argued that an “unborn child” may not have rights under the US constitution, putting them in tension with arguments made by the state’s attorney’s general’s office as well as Republican lawmakers to support restrictions to abortion.A guard at the state prison in the community of Abilene filed the lawsuit in question after she asserted that her superiors barred her from going to the hospital while she experienced intense labor pains and what she suspected were contractions while seven months pregnant and on duty.The guard – who is named Salia Issa – was finally able to leave to go to the hospital two and a half hours after the pain started. She was rushed into emergency surgery after doctors were unable to find a fetal heartbeat, and she ultimately delivered the baby in a stillbirth. The lawsuit claims that if Issa had been able to get to the hospital sooner, the baby would have survived.Issa and her husband sued the Texas department of criminal justice and three supervisors, arguing the state caused the death of their child. They seek restitution in medical and funeral costs and for pain and suffering.The prison agency and the Texas attorney general’s office have argued in defense of the lawsuit that the agency should not be held responsible for the stillbirth and that it is not clear the fetus had rights as a person. Both entities advance those positions despite consistent arguments made in lockstep by the attorney general’s office and Texas legislators that “unborn children” should be recognized as people starting at fertilization.“Just because several statutes define an individual to include an unborn child does not mean that the 14th amendment does the same,” the Texas attorney general’s office wrote in a legal filing in response to the lawsuit, referring to the constitutional right to equal protections afforded to US citizens. The filing also notes that the stillbirth occurred before the US supreme court in June 2022 eliminated the Roe v Wade precedent which had established nationwide rights to abortion protection.The US magistrate judge Susan Hightower last week allowed the lawsuit to proceed in part, without addressing the arguments over the rights of the fetus.The overturning of Roe v Wade allowed several states to enact laws which prohibited the termination of many – if not most – pregnancies. Many states, however, have been met with lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the bans which remain unresolved. More

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      Man Who Threatened Arizona Election Officials Gets More Than 3 Years in Prison

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      The man called for a mass shooting of poll workers and also threatened the families of two county officials, saying that someone needed to get “these people and their children.”A man who called for a “mass shooting of poll workers” and threatened two Arizona county officials and their families over the 2022 election was sentenced on Thursday to three and a half years in federal prison, prosecutors said.The man, Frederick Francis Goltz, 52, pleaded guilty in April to two counts of interstate threatening communications in connection with his threats to two Republican Maricopa County officials in Arizona, the authorities said: Stephen Richer, the county recorder, and Tom Liddy, the county attorney’s civil division chief.Mr. Goltz, who is a Canadian citizen and lived in Lubbock, Texas, believed in 2022 that rampant voter fraud was occurring in Arizona, prosecutors said, so he resorted to online threats, saying in a post on a right-wing forum site that referred to Maricopa County officials: “Someone needs to get these people AND their children. The children are the most important message to send.”His threats continued for weeks. He wrote in an online forum that he was “willing to take lives” in order to fend off a “tyrannical government,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas said in a statement.Mr. Richer said in a statement read aloud by a prosecutor on Thursday that while he had been the person directly threatened in the case, “the impact of such threats is felt by a much larger community: the thousands of committed election workers who operate our democratic processes.”Mr. Liddy testified during the sentencing hearing that his wife and his four children were assigned round-the-clock protection and given body armor in response to Mr. Goltz’s threats.Mr. Goltz’s lawyer, Michael L. King, did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment on Friday. The two election officials who were targeted also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The case has highlighted how right-wing skepticism of election results has often fueled threats against election officials, particularly in battleground states. Such animosity has prompted several beleaguered officials across the country to resign from their election posts.The case also underscores the dangerous effect that online disinformation has had, as aggrieved social media posts call for threatening actions with real-world consequences.In November 2022, shortly after the midterms, Mr. Goltz posted threats to poll election workers on Patriots.win under the name “FreeSpeechMaster,” according to a criminal complaint. That month, he also posted Mr. Liddy’s home address, telephone number and commented that “it would be a shame if someone got to” his children, the complaint states.On Nov. 23, 2022, Mr. Goltz noted in a post that Mr. Richer had a wife but wasn’t sure if he had children, the complaint states.“Kids are off limits,” one user replied.“No,” Mr. Goltz replied, according to court documents. “NOTHING is off limits.”He then said that he wished someone would “send a message” to Arizona by going after Mr. Richer’s children.Later that year, on Dec. 1, Mr. Goltz wrote he was “willing to take lives” and that the children were “not off limits, either,” the complaint states.The F.B.I. shared the posts with Mr. Liddy, who told the agency that he felt “afraid for himself and his family,” prosecutors said.Dr. Yotam Ophir, a professor of communication at the University at Buffalo who researches misinformation, said by phone on Friday that former President Donald J. Trump is responsible for almost all election fraud misinformation, which he has amplified for years, particularly after losing the 2020 presidential election.“In the past, we had a hope that inciteful, violent, hate-driven misinformation online would stay online,” Dr. Ophir said. “But I think in recent years, unfortunately, it’s becoming clear that what starts in the dark corners of the internet, it doesn’t stay there.”He said it appeared that the legal system and the intelligence community were beginning to realize “the massive threat that online digital environments can have toward democracy.”The man who attacked former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband last year appeared to have a copious online presence as he shared angry and paranoid postings on a blog. Nearly three-quarters of people across 19 countries believe that the spread of false information online is a “major threat,” according to a survey released by the Pew Research Center last year.“In recent years, it became clearer that people who are being radicalized online, especially on the far-right, pose a real threat,” Dr. Ophir said. “And again, it doesn’t end online.” More

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      Black US journalism professor wins $1m over botched university appointment

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      A Black journalism professor who was hired by Texas A&M University before objections in some quarters over her history of promoting diversity foiled the job offer has secured a $1m settlement from the institution.Kathleen McElroy also received an apology from officials at Texas A&M, the largest public school in the US, who in a statement Thursday acknowledged “mistakes … made during the process”.In her own statement, McElroy said she would remain in a tenured teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin, and hoped the settlement would “reinforce A&M’s allegiance to excellence in higher education and its commitment to academic freedom and journalism”.“I will never forget that … students, members, former students and staff voiced support for me from many sectors,” McElroy’s statement also said.The payment and apology to McElroy all but closed an episode that unfolded as Republican lawmakers across the US eye the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at college campuses. Such programs are in conservatives’ crosshairs after the Republican supermajority on the US supreme court’s bench ruled in June that race-conscious college admissions decisions were unconstitutional.That court ruling effectively ended affirmative action in the US’s higher education system.Texas A&M announced in June that it had hired McElroy – a school alum and former New York Times editor – to refurbish its journalism department in June. Hiring McElroy away from a more liberal rival at the University of Texas won the school plaudits from some sectors.But then, in a July interview with the Texas Tribune, McElroy revealed that she had encountered pushback at Texas A&M because she had previously worked to diversify newsrooms and make them more inclusive.Documents released Thursday to media organizations including the Associated Press and the local news outlet KVUE showed that six of the school governing board’s members had expressed “concerns” about McElroy after the right-leaning website Texas Scorecard reported on her prior diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.Alums and active students had also called and emailed the university president’s office to challenge the hiring of “a DEI proponent … to serve as director of the new journalism program,” said the documents, which summarized Texas A&M’s investigation into the McElroy matter, according to the AP.Subsequently, as the professor told it, the school president Katherine Banks reduced McElroy’s job offer to a five-year position as opposed to one that was on track to be tenured, which implies certain longer-term employment protections. McElroy told the Tribune that the five-year position – from which she could be fired at any time – was then reduced to a one-year post.At that point, McElroy rejected the job and indicated that she would stay in her teaching role at the University of Texas at Austin.Banks maintained she was not involved in modifications to the contract offered to McElroy. Nonetheless, she resigned from the presidency on 21 July, and the Texas A&M board later negotiated a settlement with McElroy.McElroy was one of two reasons why Texas A&M drew national headlines in July. In a separate case, A&M professor Joy Alonzo was suspended within hours of speaking critically about Texas’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick during a lecture on the ongoing opioid crisis.Alonzo’s suspension, along with McElroy’s botched hiring, have prompted concerns among many in higher education that colleges are increasingly clamping down on free speech at campuses in the face of political pressure.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Our Immigration System: ‘A Waste of Talent’

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      More from our inbox:Cruelty at the BorderLimiting the President’s Pardon PowersAre A.I. Weapons Next?U.S. Food Policy Causes Poor Food ChoicesMateo Miño, left, in the church in Queens where he experienced a severe anxiety attack two days after arriving in New York.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesTo the Editor:“As Politicians Cry Crisis, Migrants Get a Toehold” (news article, July 15) points up the irrationality of the U.S. immigration system. As this article shows, migrants are eager to work, and they are filling significant gaps in fields such as construction and food delivery, but there are still great unmet needs for home health aides and nursing assistants.The main reason for this disjunction lies in federal immigration law, which offers no dedicated visa slots for these occupations (as it does for professionals and even for seasonal agricultural and resort workers) because they are considered “unskilled.”Instead, the law stipulates, applicants must demonstrate that they are “performing work for which qualified workers are not available in the United States” — clearly a daunting task for individual migrants.As a result, many do end up working in fields like home health care but without documentation and are thus vulnerable to exploitation if not deportation. With appropriate reforms, our system would be capable of meeting both the country’s needs for essential workers and migrants’ needs for safe havens.Sonya MichelSilver Spring, Md.The writer is professor emerita of history and women’s and gender studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.To the Editor:We have refugee doctors and nurses who are driving taxi cabs. What a waste of talent that is needed in so many areas of our country.Why isn’t there a program to use their knowledge and skills by working with medical associations to qualify them, especially if they agree to work in parts of the country that have a shortage of doctors and nurses? It would be a win-win situation.There are probably other professions where similar ideas would work.David AlbendaNew YorkCruelty at the BorderTexas Department of Public Safety troopers look over the Rio Grande, as migrants walk by.Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Officers Voice Concerns Over Aggressive Tactics at the Border in Texas” (news article, July 20):In the past year, I have done immigration-related legal work in New York City with recently arrived asylum seekers from all over the world: Venezuela, China, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador and Ghana. Most entered the U.S. on foot through the southern border. Some spent weeks traversing the perilous Darién Gap — an unforgiving jungle — and all are fleeing from horribly violent and scary situations.Texas’ barbed wire is not going to stop them.I am struck by the message of the mayor of Eagle Pass, Rolando Salinas Jr., who, supportive of legal migration and orderly law enforcement, said, “What I am against is the use of tactics that hurt people.” I desperately hope we can all agree about this.There should be no place for immigration enforcement tactics that deliberately and seriously injure people.I was disturbed to read that Texas is hiding razor wire in dark water and deploying floating razor wire-wrapped “barrel traps.” These products of Gov. Greg Abbott’s xenophobia are cruel to a staggering degree.Noa Gutow-EllisNew YorkThe writer is a law school intern at the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.Limiting the President’s Pardon Powers Tom Brenner for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “U.S. Alleges Push at Trump’s Club to Erase Footage” (front page, July 28) and “Sudden Obstacle Delays Plea Deal for Biden’s Son” (front page, July 27):With Donald Trump campaigning to return to the White House while under felony indictment, and with Hunter Biden’s legal saga unresolved, there should be bipartisan incentive in Congress for proposing a constitutional amendment limiting the president’s pardon power.A proposed amendment should provide that the president’s “reprieves and pardons” power under Article II, Section 2, shall not apply to offenses, whether committed in office or out, by the president himself or herself; the vice president and cabinet-level officers; any person whose unlawful conduct was solicited by or intended to benefit any of these officials; or a close family member of any of these individuals.Stephen A. SilverSan FranciscoThe writer is a lawyer.To the Editor:Beyond asking “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Donald Trump may now ask, “Where’s my Rose Mary Woods?”David SchubertCranford, N.J.Are A.I. Weapons Next? Andreas Emil LundTo the Editor:Re “Our Oppenheimer Moment: The Creation of A.I. Weapons,” by Alexander C. Karp (Opinion guest essay, July 30):Mr. Karp argues that to protect our way of life, we must integrate artificial intelligence into weapons systems, citing our atomic might as precedent. However, nuclear weapons are sophisticated and difficult to produce. A.I. capabilities are software, leaving them vulnerable to theft, cyberhacking and data poisoning by adversaries.The risk of proliferation beyond leading militaries was appreciated by the United States and the Soviet Union when banning bioweapons, and the same applies to A.I. It also carries an unacceptable risk of conflict escalation, illustrated in our recent film “Artificial Escalation.”J. Robert Oppenheimer’s legacy offers a different lesson when it comes to advanced general-purpose A.I. systems. The nuclear arms race has haunted our world with annihilation for 78 years. It was luck that spared us. That race ebbed only as leaders came to understand that such a war would destroy humanity.The same is true now. To survive, we must recognize that the reckless pursuit and weaponization of inscrutable, probably uncontrollable advanced A.I. is not a winnable one. It is a suicide race.Anthony AguirreSanta Cruz, Calif.The writer is the executive director and a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute.U.S. Food Policy Causes Poor Food Choices Steven May/AlamyTo the Editor:Re “Vegans Make Smaller Mark on the Planet Than Others” (news article, July 22):While I agree that people could help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by eating plants only, I find it crucial to note that food policy is the main reason for poor food choices.Food choices follow food policy, and U.S. food policy is focused on meat, dairy, fish and eggs. Our massive network of agriculture universities run “animal science” programs, providing billions of dollars’ worth of training, public relations, research, experimentation and sales for animal products.Our government provides subsidies to the meat, dairy, fish and egg industries far beyond what fruits, vegetables and other plant foods receive. Federal and state agriculture officials are typically connected to the meat or dairy industry. The public pays the cost of animal factories’ contamination of water and soil, and of widespread illness linked to eating animals since humans are natural herbivores.No wonder the meat, dairy, fish and egg industries have so much money for advertising, marketing and public relations, keeping humans deceived about their biological nature and what is good for them to eat.David CantorGlenside, Pa.The writer is founder and director of Responsible Policies for Animals. More

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      States’ rights make a comeback as Republicans rush to defy Washington

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      The message was blunt: “Texas will see you in court, Mr President.”The words of defiance came from Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, making clear that he would not comply with a justice department request to remove floating barriers in the Rio Grande. And Abbott is not the only Republican governor in open revolt against Washington.In May Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bill allowing the death penalty in child rape convictions despite the supreme court banning capital punishment in such cases. Earlier this month, Kay Ivey of Alabama signed into law a redistricting map that ignored a supreme court ruling ordering the state to draw two Black-majority congressional districts.The disobedience is sure to score points with the Republican base. It reflects a trend that has seen state parties embrace extreme positions in the era of Donald Trump and Maga (Make America great again). And while there has always been tension between states and the federal government, it now comes with the accelerant of political partisanship and blue (Democratic) v red (Republican) state polarisation.“This is an onslaught against the federal government’s reach, power, effectiveness,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “We’re seeing it across the board in immigration, healthcare, education – it is defiance. If you think about America breaking into red and blue states, this is like the culmination. It’s literally the red states separating from the federal government and the rule of national law.”With Democrat Joe Biden in the White House, Republican governors are seeking to assert their independence, with red states such as Florida and Texas styling themselves as bulwarks of resistance even if that means rattling America’s increasingly fragile democracy.In Texas, Abbott has been testing the legal limits of states’ ability to act on immigration for more than two years, erecting razor-wire fencing, arresting migrants on trespassing charges and sending busloads of asylum seekers to Democratic-led cities in other states. The governor recently introduced a roughly 1,000ft line of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys on the Rio Grande to stop migrants from entering the US.This week the justice department sued Abbott over the floating barrier, claiming that Texas unlawfully installed it without permission between the border cities of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Mexico. The White House has also raised humanitarian and environmental concerns. Abbott sent Biden a letter that defended Texas’s right to install the barrier and tweeted: “Texas has the sovereign authority to defend our border, under the US Constitution and the Texas Constitution.”The lawsuit is not the first time the Biden administration has sued Texas over its actions on the border. In 2021 the attorney general, Merrick Garland, accused the state of usurping and even interfering with the federal government’s responsibility to enforce immigration laws after Abbott empowered state troopers to stop vehicles carrying migrants on the basis that they could increase the spread of Covid-19.But it is not just a Democratic president feeling the backlash. Even the supreme court, now heavily tilted to the right by Trump’s appointment, is facing defiance from states over rulings that they do not like.The court made a surprise decision that upheld a lower court ruling that a map in Alabama – with one Black-majority district out of seven in a state that is 27% Black – probably violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Black residents. But six weeks later the Alabama state legislature approved a new map that failed to create a second majority-Black congressional district.A group of voters who won the supreme court decision say that they will challenge the new plan. A three-judge panel has set a 14 August hearing and could eventually order a special master to draw new lines for the state. The outcome is likely to have consequences across the country as the case again weighs the requirements of the Voting Rights Act in redistricting.Chris England, a state representative and Black Democrat, noted that change in Alabama has often happened only through federal court order. “Alabama does what Alabama does,” he said in a speech. “Ultimately, what we are hoping for, I guess, at some point, is that the federal court does what it always does to Alabama: forces us to do the right thing. Courts always have to come in and save us from ourselves.”In Florida, meanwhile, DeSantis declared that the supreme court had been “wrong” when its 2008 ruling found it unconstitutional to use capital punishment in child sexual battery cases. He signed a law – authorising the state to pursue the death penalty when an adult is convicted of sexually battering a child under 12 – intended to get the court, now under conservative control, to reconsider that decision.The posturing comes within the context of years of anti-Washington rhetoric from politicians led by Trump, who has long railed against the “deep state” and vowed to “drain the swamp”. Other Republicans have used Washington as a punchbag, a symbol of political elites out of touch with ordinary people.Jacobs added: “This has been a battle that’s been going on for hundreds of years. At this moment you’ve got this toxic mixing of state resentment of the national government when in the hands of the other party along with this really virulent populism. What’s unique about this period is pushing back against and defying Washington is now good politics. Ron DeSantis’s main campaign theme is: I said no to Washington.”Trump has also spent years sowing distrust in institutions and fanning online conspiracy theories. Loss of faith in elections led a violent crowd to storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. The supreme court has compounded the problem with a series of extremist rulings and ethics scandals. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that the court has a 30% approval rating among registered voters – the lowest since Quinnipiac first asked the question in 2004.Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said: “The integrity of the court has definitely been eroded. Both liberals and conservatives have less faith and feel less obligated to follow its rulings. It’s entirely a situation of the supreme court’s own making.“The justices have been acting politically, the shadow docket [where the court rules on procedural matters], the refusal to be transparent about ethics and gifts, and some of the comments that Justice [Samuel] Alito for example has made in public forums that sound more like a politician’s comments.“When the court acts politically then people see it as a political institution. It just follows as night follows day. It’s going to be difficult to have state governors and legislatures follow supreme court rulings when they have less faith in the integrity of the body and the general public has less faith.”Yet until recently, talk of rebellion against the government had seemed to belong only in the history books. The supremacy clause in the US constitution says the federal government, when acting in pursuance of the constitution, trumps states’ rights.In the mid-19th century, southern states believed that they had the right to nullify federal laws or even secede from the Union if their interests, including the exploitation of enslaved labour, were threatened. With the north increasingly turning against slavery, 11 southern states seceded in 1860-61, forming the Confederate States of America. It took four years of civil war to reunite the nation and abolish slavery.A century later, the landmark supreme court case of Brown v Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, but many southern states resisted integration and refused to comply with the decision. President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a case known as the “Little Rock Nine”.In 1963, the Alabama governor, George Wallace, declared “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama to express resistance to the court-ordered integration. In response, President John F Kennedy federalised national guard troops and deployed them to the university, forcing Wallace to yield.Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die, said: “Sometimes we have the idea that the local level is where grassroots democracy thrives but actually, in the history of American democracy, federal power has been used for ill but it’s also been used as a democratising force. We haven’t seen this confrontation reach this same level since the 1950s, 1960s.”Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, added: “The major breakthroughs in American democracy have come when the federal government has either passed national legislation – think of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act – or had to intervene.“Major moments of backsliding have happened when the federal government turns a blind eye to what’s happening in the states. The 1890s are replete with examples of the supreme court essentially turning a blind eye to abuses at the state level. So in a way the confrontation between the states and the federal government is a confrontation over democracy.” More

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      DoJ sues Texas governor over refusal to remove anti-migrant buoys from river

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      The US Department of Justice has sued the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, over his refusal to remove a floating barrier placed on the Rio Grande to stop migrants entering the US from Mexico.The move is the latest in a growing political spat between Abbott and the Biden administration, heightened by Republican attempts to scaremonger over immigration as the 2024 presidential election looms.The lawsuit filed by the federal government asks a court in Texas to force the state to remove the roughly 1,000ft line of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys the Biden administration says raises humanitarian and environmental concerns.The suit also says Texas unlawfully installed the barrier without permission, near the border city of Eagle Pass.The suit was filed on Monday, after Abbott refused to comply with instructions to remove the barrier.“Texas will fully utilise its constitutional authority to deal with the crisis you have caused,” Greg Abbott wrote to Joe Biden in a letter reported by CNN and other outlets.“Texas will see you in court, Mr President.”It was the latest confrontational move by a governor who for more than two years has escalated measures to stop migrants entering the US, pushing legal boundaries along the 1,200-mile border with Mexico.Blowback over the tactics is widening, including from within Texas and particularly in light of a state trooper’s account of razor wire leaving asylum seekers bloodied and officers denying migrants water in 100F (37.7C) heat and being told to push children into the river.Last week, the US justice department told Texas to remove the river barriers, citing federal laws against obstructing waterways and imposing a Monday deadline. On Monday, Abbott said that in refusing to comply, he was “assert[ing] Texas’s sovereign interest in protecting [its] borders” in his role as the “commander-in-chief of [the] state’s militia”.Repeating a common Republican talking point, the governor also wrote to Biden: “If you truly care about human life, you must begin enforcing federal immigration laws. By doing so, you can help me stop migrants from wagering their lives in the waters of the Rio Grande.”Saying migrants could attempt to use legitimate ports of entry, Abbott said: “While I share the humanitarian concerns noted in your lawyers’ letter, Mr President, your finger points in the wrong direction. Neither of us wants to see another death in the Rio Grande … Yet your open-border policies encourage migrants to risk their lives by crossing illegally through the water, instead of safely and legally at a port of entry. Nobody drowns on a bridge.”A White House spokesperson said Abbott’s behavior was “ making it hard for the men and women of border patrol to do their jobs of securing the border and putting both migrants and border agents in danger”.Biden’s border enforcement plan, the spokesperson added, had “led to the lowest levels of unlawful border crossings in over two years. Governor Abbott’s dangerous and unlawful actions are undermining that effective plan.“If Governor Abbott truly wanted to drive toward real solutions, he’d be asking his Republican colleagues in Congress why they voted against President Biden’s request to increase funding for the Department of Homeland Security and why they’re blocking the comprehensive immigration reform and border security measures that would finally fix our broken immigration system.”The White House also said Republicans “have no plan and are just playing political games”.Criticism of Abbott is growing within his own state.Speaking to the Associated Press, David Donatti, an attorney for the Texas American Civil Liberties Union, said: “There are so many ways that what Texas is doing right now is just flagrantly illegal.”Aron Thorn, a Texas Civil Rights Project attorney, described “a very strong correlation” between Abbott’s border policy and “the Trump and post-Trump era in which most of the Trump administration’s immigration policy was aggressive and extreme and very violative of people’s rights and very focused on making the political point.“The design of this is the optics and the amount of things that they sacrifice for those optics now is quite extraordinary.”In Eagle Pass, Jessie Fuentes, a kayaker, has filed his own lawsuit over work done on the river. On Monday that suit, Epi’s Canoe & Kayak Team v State of Texas, was cited in the suit filed by the federal government.Citing measures including floating barriers and shipping containers and razor wire placed along riverbanks cleared of vegetation, Fuentes recently told the Eagle Pass city council: “The river is a federally protected river by so many federal agencies, and I just don’t know how it happened.”A member of the Eagles Pass council, Elias Diaz, told the AP: “I feel like the state government has kind of bypassed local government … and so I felt powerless at times.”Hugo Urbina, a farmer whose land abuts the river, said he supported efforts to reduce border crossings via the Rio Grande. But Urbina said Abbott and his administration “do whatever it is that they want … breaking the law and … making your citizens feel like they’re second-hand citizens”.The Texas land office has said it will permit “vegetation management” on the banks of the river as part of anti-migration efforts. The state military department has cleared out carrizo cane, which the land office has called an invasive plant. Environmental experts are concerned changes to the landscape will affect the flow of the river.Tom Vaughan, co-founder of the Rio Grande International Study Center, said: “As far as I know, if there’s flooding in the river, it’s much more severe in Piedras Negras” – on the Mexican side – “than it is in Eagle Pass because that’s the lower side of the river.“And so next time the river really gets up, it’s going to push a lot of water over on the Mexican side, it looks like to me.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Will Hurd Searches for a 2024 Republican Base

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      Hoping to break through a crowded presidential field in 2024, the former Texas congressman is pitching himself as a modern and moderate Republican with a bipartisan vision.It is the stuff of viral internet legend now. After snow disrupted their flights, Will Hurd, the former Republican congressman, and Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat from a neighboring district, climbed into a rented Chevy Impala and took a cross-country road trip from their home state of Texas to Washington.As they live streamed what they called “a bipartisan town hall” to millions of Americans on Facebook and Twitter, featuring hourslong policy debates on health care, singalongs to Willie Nelson and doughnut runs, the two captured the national attention as Americans watched them cultivate a friendship, even as they disagreed.More than six years later, on a sunny day this July, Mr. Hurd was on the road again, this time as a longer than long-shot presidential candidate, a moderate whose penchant for bipartisanship puts him at odds with the party’s current mood.Riding in a rented gray S.U.V. and cutting through the wooded highways of New Hampshire, he was seeking the spotlight once again, in a race for the Republican nomination that is being driven by some of the party’s loudest and most partisan voices.Mr. Hurd is already a long-shot candidate, and his penchant for reaching across the aisle is something of an outlier in a race led by former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.David Degner for The New York Times“Have I changed my opinion that more unites us than divides us? No,” Mr. Hurd said, recalling the lessons he took from his trip with Mr. O’Rourke. “People were craving something different — craving it.”Mr. Hurd, 45, wants to show voters that he brings something different to the race. A Black Republican who has represented a majority Latino district and wants to broaden his party’s appeal, he is not, as he puts it, about “banning books” or “harassing my friends in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.”It’s a hard sell in a primary that so far has been dominated by culture-war issues that are the focus of the front-runners as well as by the legal issues surrounding former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Hurd has the most difficult of paths ahead. He has been on the campaign trail for only a little more than a month and is lagging behind his opponents in staffing, name recognition and fund-raising. The latest quarterly filings showed he had just $245,000 in cash on hand.He may fall short of the qualifications for the first Republican primary debate on Aug. 23, which requires candidates to draw a minimum of 40,000 unique donors and at least 1 percent of voter support in three approved polls.Even if he were to meet those requirements, he still might not get on the debate stage: He has refused to fulfill the Republican National Committee’s most disputed stipulation, that candidates sign a pledge to support their party’s eventual nominee. Not having a seat at the debate table means losing the most important lever to gaining attention in the primary.At a pit stop outside Manchester, Mr. Hurd said he had no issue with championing another Republican. But he said he would not support Mr. Trump. “I’m not going to lie to get a microphone,” Mr. Hurd said, digging into a Philly cheesesteak and salty fries.Back on the road, Mr. Hurd did not downplay the challenges. In interviews, town halls and political events, he is often quick to refer to himself as a “dark horse” or “a start-up,” meticulously targeting the kind of voter that data suggests might be most open to his background and message. Those voters, he added, include a cross-section of people — Republicans, independents and moderates — who are tired of the toxicity in politics, reject Mr. Trump and want someone with a vision for the future of the Republican Party. Proving that group of people indeed exists as a coherent base of support will be the ultimate test of his candidacy.Mr. Hurd believes his voter base includes an eclectic mix of people who are looking for a new chapter in Republican politics.David Degner for The New York TimesMr. Hurd’s charisma and enthusiasm for wonky policy comes across in one-on-one conversations, but it remains to be seen how well his expertise will translate on the stump. At a 2024 presidential candidate speaker series at Dartmouth College, where he arrived that afternoon, an audience of more than 50 people seemed to gradually warm up to Mr. Hurd after a stiff start.“We are in a competition — the Chinese government is trying to surpass us as a global superpower,” Mr. Hurd said, warning that A.I. could lead to unemployment but could also help bridge inequality in education. “And I’m very specific. I say, the Chinese government. It’s not the Chinese people. It’s not the Chinese culture. It’s not Chinese Americans.”In the audience, Alice Werbel, 78, a retired nurse practitioner who drove in from Norwich, a bedroom community in Vermont, said she saw Mr. Hurd as “up and coming” and commended him for his courage in refusing to sign the debate pledge.Even those who admire Mr. Hurd’s politics are not necessarily set on giving him their support. One voter who saw Mr. Hurd speak at Dartmouth said she planned to vote for President Biden.David Degner for The New York TimesBut when Mr. Hurd’s remarks concluded, she did not seem convinced he had a road to the presidency. She said she planned to vote for President Biden in 2024.“Biden should appoint him technology czar or A.I. czar or cabinet secretary of technology,” she added.Afterward, at a dinner where Mr. Hurd spoke with a small group of students, Josh Paul, 21, a conservative and a government major, was not sure if the Texas Republican could pull off a win either, but he said he was going to help Mr. Hurd try. He had found Mr. Hurd’s rejection of Mr. Trump so refreshing that he sought out a campaign staffer to sign up as a volunteer.“I don’t understand how, if conservatism is all about fidelity to your oath and to the Constitution, how you can possibly sit silently by while this guy lies and lies and lies and incites an insurrection,” Mr. Paul said, referring to Mr. Trump and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.For three terms, Mr. Hurd represented one of the most competitive congressional districts in the country — a wide, largely Hispanic area that stretches from El Paso at the western tip of Texas, all along the nation’s southwestern border, to San Antonio. The only Black Republican in the House when he announced his retirement in August 2019, Mr. Hurd said one of the reasons he was leaving Congress was to help diversify his party’s ranks.Mr. Hurd sometimes toes a difficult line in his party, embracing some core values, like opposing abortion, while taking more complicated stances on others.David Degner for The New York TimesMr. Hurd has been a fierce and consistent critic of Mr. Trump but has remained a steadfast Republican with conservative values. Before the students at Dartmouth, he said he would be willing to sign a 15-week ban on abortion, with exceptions for certain cases, such as rape or incest. Like his Republican rivals of color, he walks a thorny line between rejecting the existence of a system of racism in America while describing situations that appear to fit the definition.On the road trip through New Hampshire, he said that when his parents first arrived in San Antonio, they had to live in the only neighborhood where an interracial couple could buy a home. “There are still some communities that don’t have equal opportunity,” he said. But, “I don’t know if I’d call that systemic racism. I don’t call it that.”At a Friday town hall at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, Thalia Floras, 60, a district retail manager and undecided Democrat, said her one concern with Mr. Hurd was his support for a ban on abortion. Yet she appreciated that he seemed open to listening to opposing views and did not resort to using phrases like “woke mob” or “radical left.”Marie Mulroy, 75, a retired public health worker and an independent raised by a Republican mother and Democratic father, said she had donated to Mr. Hurd because he was compassionate, liked to work across the aisle and had “a better understanding of the world and where we are going in the future.”In every good political argument, she said, “you have to have the thesis, antithesis and synthesis. But, “we don’t get the synthesis anymore,” she said. “And this is where the voters are — the voters are sitting in the synthesis.” More

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      How Texas Republicans are catering to election deniers in this county

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      On 22 November 2020, Heider Garcia, the elections administrator for Tarrant county, Texas, was awake in his living room until around 3am, unable to sleep over fears that a stranger might show up at his house, he recalled.An account had posted his family’s home address on Twitter during weeks of false conspiracy theories and death threats about his role in the 2020 election. Donald Trump’s supporters refused to believe that Tarrant county, a major, diverse county that encompasses the cities of Fort Worth and Arlington, had broken its Republican voting patterns for Joe Biden.Garcia spent Thanksgiving break installing security cameras – but he didn’t quit his job or stay quiet in the wake of the threats. Rather, as he detailed in his 2022 Senate testimony, his office devoted the next 18 months to championing transparency, from releasing public records to speaking with skeptics.Garcia “has an open door, he would answer the phone, and he would walk people through the process”, said Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College and the director of the elections and voting information center. “A lot of election officials are not willing to be as open and transparent as that.”But after weathering attacks from the outside, Garcia was driven to quit in April by events closer to home. His resignation letter alluded to differences with a Republican county judge who has catered to election deniers. The judge helped set up a taskforce focused on investigating and prosecuting election crimes, which critics view as doing little but feeding the anxious climate around elections.Across the US, conservative officials who entertain Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election have raised alarms about voter fraud, despite a dearth of evidence that it’s a problem. Some election skeptics have sought positions that influence how local elections are run, persisting even as their attempts to win and interfere with elections have mostly failed.Tarrant county exemplifies the fallout of this movement in one of the most populous counties in the country. Democrats have asked the US justice department to intervene to protect voters of color in Tarrant county from intimidation. The county judge has dismissed their concerns as “partisan” and “pathetic”.After Garcia resigned, the hiring process to replace him included a candidate who, as an election “integrity” activist, went to a voter’s home to deliver a letter questioning their choice of polling place.Garcia declined to comment on his resignation. But he said that politicians who focus on election integrity like to play the hero, and it will continue as long as they are rewarded for it. “There is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing anywhere,” he said. “Yet it seems that there’s still a quest to find a villain.”Meanwhile, the taskforce, which handles complaints through the sheriff’s criminal investigations division and is part of the public integrity unit in the DA’s office, reports no filed cases. But Texas Democrats see it as part of a bigger problem.State representative Chris Turner, a Democrat in Tarrant county, called it “one more element in a years-long Republican strategy at the national, state and local level to undermine the confidence in our elections, to provide a pretext for disputing the results of elections when they don’t go your way”.A new taskforceTarrant county has over 2 million people, about half of whom are Black, Latino or Hispanic, according to the 2022 census estimate. Republicans have maintained their long hold on the county, even as voters slimly rejected Trump in 2020. Democrats paint last year’s election of county judge Tim O’Hare, a former Tarrant county Republican party chair, as an ideological shift to the right.O’Hare campaigned on finding voter fraud, though an audit of the 2020 election by Republican state leadership determined that the county’s election was “quality” and “transparent”. He has fanned doubts about voting methods and echoed allegations that his opponent, the county’s former Democratic party chair, led “a sophisticated vote-harvesting operation”. She called the allegations “libelous”, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.O’Hare did not respond to requests for comment.In February, after the election, O’Hare, the county sheriff, Bill Waybourn, and the district attorney, Phil Sorrells, also elected Republicans, announced the taskforce focused on election fraud.The county already had a way to submit election complaints through the secretary of state’s office, but Republicans said the taskforce would give people a central place to file complaints and bolster confidence in elections.The taskforce began printing a non-emergency number for the sheriff’s office on voting receipts, as recently as the June runoff election.The Tarrant county commissioner, Alisa Simmons, a Democrat, said she fielded a few calls about the phone number. “People were confused by it and uncomfortable with it,” she said.The taskforce is “a publicity stunt”, said Kat Cano, who previously served as the alternate judge of the ballot board and central counting station, and the Democratic member of the public testing board, which together conduct elections oversight.“They wanted to look like they were doing something about elections integrity,” she said.Julie McCarty, CEO of the True Texas Project, which boosted false claims about the 2020 election and has ties to O’Hare, questioned why Democrats were so concerned about the unit. “I can only assume it’s because it thwarts their plans to cheat,” she wrote in an email.As of the 6 May election, the sheriff’s office had received seven complaints in the days before the election, ranging from rude poll workers to a candidate being too close to a polling station entrance; all were closed with no criminal activity found, a spokesperson wrote in an email. The DA’s office has two incidents under investigation and no cases filed, according to their spokesperson.“The taskforce is working as designed,” Sorrells wrote in an email. “Legal and fair elections encourage more people to vote because they know their vote counts.”In other states, Republicans have announced election integrity units in a climate where Trump has sought to undermine elections for his own benefit, despite the lack of evidence that voter fraud is a serious issue. Many have little to show for their efforts, or, as is the case in Florida, are prosecuting people with felony convictions who mistakenly thought they could vote.Criminalizing and investigating voting has long been used as a tool of intimidation, voting rights experts say, especially of voters of color. Crystal Mason, a Black woman, was sentenced in Tarrant county to five years in prison for mistakenly casting a provisional ballot in 2016 when she was on federal supervised release.The taskforce’s orbit is also broader than voters. Democrats say the 2021 election restrictions in Texas already made it more difficult to recruit election workers, who are nervous about making a mistake, and the taskforce heightens that concern.In May, someone posted an anonymous YouTube video of Cano from 2022, doing what she called “normal work” with the ballot board, but insinuating that she was manipulating ballots. (In the video, a sheriff’s deputy appears to almost always be in the room.)With the atmosphere around the taskforce, she said, “any kind of accusation then becomes a sort of exercise in paranoia”.She didn’t know if she was actually reported. But the fear, along with concerns about public perception, contributed to her decision to resign at the time, she said. “I didn’t know whether they were going to try to make an example of me the way they made an example out of Crystal Mason.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA resignationGarcia submitted his letter of resignation in April, just under three weeks after he testified in Austin on behalf of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators. They opposed a bill to eliminate countywide polling locations, which has been a focus for election fraud activists.“Judge O’Hare, my formula to ‘administer a quality transparent election’ stands on respect and zero politics; compromising on those values is not an option for me,” he wrote. “You made it clear in our last meeting that your formula is different, thus, my decision to leave.”O’Hare, in response, said that supporting the creation of the taskforce was “all about quality, transparent elections”.Garcia, who had held his position since 2018, had over a decade of experience working for Smartmatic, a voting technology company in the private sector, a position that put him in direct opposition to election denialism.John Scott, who served as the interim Republican Texas attorney general, told Votebeat that Garcia was the “prototype” for an election administrator.“We defended Garcia on a regular basis to [those] who came to us so upset,” said McCarty.Elections administrators are the “stewards of democracy”, who work on everything from making sure citizens have access to the ballot to serving as the first point of contact for voter registration, said Gronke.“It is very disturbing when Garcia, who has shown such openness to talking with everyone, felt that his position was simply just not tenable any more,” he added.A poll of local election officials published by the Brennan Center for Justice in April found that 30% had been “abused, harassed or threatened” because of their roles. And it’s not just voters they are concerned about: more than half were somewhat or very worried about political leaders interfering with how they do their jobs in the future. As recently as June, an elections director in Arizona resigned, citing attacks from Republican officials.In Tarrant county, Democratic officials highlighted both Garcia’s resignation and the taskforce in their May letter requesting an investigation from the justice department. “O’Hare has consistently challenged Mr Garcia’s efforts to uphold the integrity and racial fairness of our elections,” they wrote.O’Hare responded to their letter in a statement that did not mention Garcia. “Let me be clear: this ‘letter’ is a political document. It alleges no actual wrongdoing or facts,” he wrote.‘Strange times’O’Hare was part of the commission picking Garcia’s replacement. One candidate who advanced was Karen Wiseman, a Republican poll watcher who hand-delivered a letter to a lawful voter questioning their address during the fall 2022 election according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and challenged a contract renewal for instrumental elections software that was needed for the June runoff.Garcia told Votebeat in a text message that he wasn’t surprised to see a partisan candidate in the mix. There is “an expectation that the [elections administrator] will play politics”, he said. (Wiseman did not respond to requests for comment.)The vast majority of elections officials treat their jobs as non-partisan, according to elections experts. Some people, however, view “these positions not [as] umpires, but as players”, said Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Brennan Center’s elections and government program.“They have some role to play, not in just following the rules, but in helping to determine the outcome.”It’s still a “tiny minority”, he emphasized. But some of the problems he has seen range from giving improper access to election equipment to refusing to certify elections.Ultimately, in Tarrant county, another candidate, Clinton Ludwig, who was chosen for the job, definitively said “no” when asked if he had any reason to doubt the results of the 2020 election, according to Allison Campolo, the departing Tarrant county Democratic party chair who was on the hiring commission.O’Hare picked people who were “to me, very highly partisan”, she said, though she ultimately felt the hiring process was fair.“I don’t think he’s a partisan individual,” she said of Ludwig.Simmons, the Democratic commissioner, expressed concern that Ludwig has no experience in elections administration. “Everybody should be concerned about that,” she said.Ludwig declined to comment in an email, noting he hadn’t started his job yet. But in a statement, he pointed to his 20 years of experience in the Marine Corps. “You can trust that I will further Tarrant county’s legacy of conducting free and fair elections,” he wrote.Campolo and O’Hare both praised Ludwig.But the taskforce – and the environment around it – only adds to “how difficult it is to do an election administrator’s job”, Campolo said.“We’re in strange times,” Garcia said.Sam Levine contributed reporting More