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      in Elections

      Videos Show Exchange of Gunfire at Houston Megachurch

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      The videos released by the Houston police left open the question of who shot a 7-year-old boy as his mother, armed with an assault-style rifle, exchanged fire with off-duty officers.Just before opening fire with an assault-style rifle in the lobby of a Houston megachurch this month, Genesse Ivonne Moreno walked around the side of her sport utility vehicle and opened a rear passenger door for her 7-year-old son, who got out of the vehicle and followed her into the church.Moments later, as deafening gunfire erupted in the church, the boy stood in an alcove with his hands pressed to his ears, according to surveillance and body-camera videos released on Monday by the Houston Police Department. At one point, the boy appeared to reach up for Ms. Moreno, as if asking to be picked up.Security camera footage shows the shooter entering Lakewood Church with her 7-year-old son.Houston Police DepartmentLater, he could be seen lying motionless on the carpeted hallway floor after being shot in the head.The videos provided a clearer picture of the Feb. 11 shooting in Lakewood Church, one of the nation’s largest megachurches, led by the televangelist Joel Osteen. But they did not provide a complete account of what took place.And they did not show the boy being struck, leaving open the question of who shot him. He remained hospitalized in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head, officials said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Texas Governor Greg Abbott Announces Military Base Camp in Eagle Pass

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      The base for up to 2,300 soldiers will establish a significant state law enforcement infrastructure in an area where Texas is contesting the federal government’s sole authority.Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said on Friday that the state would begin building a forward operating base in the border city of Eagle Pass for up to 2,300 soldiers, creating the most significant military infrastructure yet to support the state’s efforts to limit the number of people crossing illegally from Mexico.While Texas has been deploying National Guard troops and state police officers up and down the state’s border since 2021, the move to create an 80-acre base camp cements a large law enforcement infrastructure in the region and signals Texas’ commitment to a security role that previously belonged almost exclusively to the federal government.“This will increase the ability for a larger number of Texas military department personnel in Eagle Pass to operate more effectively and more efficiently,” Mr. Abbott said in his announcement, as he was flanked by a row of armed National Guard members. The camp, Mr. Abbott added, “will amass a large army in a very strategic area.”Mr. Abbott did not say on Friday how much money the state was spending to build the base, but added that the financial impact would be “minimal” in view of the state’s existing expenditures to house those deployed on the border.The camp, which will include a 700-seat dining facility, a gym, a laundry and medical services, will save on hotel costs for the existing deployment. And it will presumably make way for additional states that are sending troops to help patrol the border as part of a widening rift between Republican governors and the federal government over border enforcement.Mr. Abbott has been testing the legal limits of what states can do to enforce immigration law. Several of his Republican cohorts, including the governors of Florida and Georgia, have sent their own National Guard troops to help patrol the border in Texas, where record numbers of migrants have been crossing without authorization in recent years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Least 1 Dead and 5 Injured After Vehicle Crashes Into Texas Hospital

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      Police were investigating what caused the crash at St. David’s North Austin Medical Center.One person died and at least five people were injured, including two children, after a vehicle crashed into a hospital emergency room in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday, the authorities said.The vehicle crashed into the St. David’s North Austin Medical Center at 5:38 p.m., the Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services said on social media, adding that two children and one adult were taken to the Dell Children’s Medical Center.One child had “potentially serious injuries,” and the adult and the other child had injuries that were not life-threatening, the authorities said.A second adult was taken to the St. David’s Round Rock Medical Center with “potentially serious injuries,” county officials said.The driver of the car died, officials said.Police were investigating the crash, Captain Christa Stedman, a spokeswoman for the Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services, said at a news conference on Tuesday night.Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services initially reported that as many as 10 people had been injured, but officials said later that five people were injured.Dr. Peter DeYoung, chief medical officer of St. David’s North Austin Medical Center, said at the news conference that another eight patients, who were not injured in the crash, were being taken to other hospitals to help the emergency room regroup. The hospital’s emergency room was prepared to handle walk-in patients, but it was closed to ambulances, Dr. DeYoung said.“We are in the process of sending patients away so we can better manage,” he said.None of the hospital’s operations were disrupted outside of the emergency department, Dr. DeYoung said, adding that the facility was in “good condition” despite damage to the building’s doors and exteriors.Video of the aftermath posted to social media showed a chaotic scene.The vehicle appeared to leave a trail of mangled waiting chairs inside the emergency room before it became pinned in a hall near the reception desk. The room appeared mostly cleared, but officials and hospital staff could be seen pulling what appeared to be one adult out of the wreckage.The car’s tires could be heard screeching and its engine was still heaving as it filled the room with white smoke, its red taillights still visible. More

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      in US Politics

      Stabbing of Palestinian American in Texas a hate crime, police say

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      The recent stabbing of a 23-year-old Palestinian American in Texas meets the standard for a hate crime, police announced on Wednesday.Bert James Baker, 36, was arrested on Sunday for allegedly attacking 23-year-old Zacharia Doar after Doar and friends were returning from a pro-Palestinian protest on Sunday near the University of Texas at Austin.In a Wednesday update, the Austin police department said that the Sunday stabbing does “meet the definition of a hate crime”.Information on the case will be provided to the Travis county district attorney’s office, which will then make the final decision on whether to pursue hate crime charges against Baker, according to the police department’s statement posted to Facebook.In an earlier statement, Austin police said they believed the attack was “bias-motivated”.Baker is accused of stabbing Doar after the 23-year-old and his friends were driving back from a pro-Palestinian protest on Sunday, the Associated Press reported.According to an arrest affidavit detailing the incident obtained by the AP, Doar and three others were riding in a truck when Baker, who was on a bike, opened the doors of the vehicle and began yelling racial slurs at the group.The group then got out of the vehicle and approached Baker, who first punched Doar in the shoulder. After a scuffle, Baker stabbed Doar in the rib.Doar’s father, Nizar Doar, told NBC News that Baker had actually dragged Doar out of the truck and initially charged at Doar’s friend with a knife. Doar was stabbed when he attempted to intervene in the attack.In an earlier statement prior to Wednesday’s update, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) accused Baker of initially attempting to remove a flagpole with a keffiyeh scarf reading “Free Palestine” from the truck Doar was riding in.Doar was also one of four Muslim Americans in the car when Baker allegedly attacked.Doar was hospitalized after the attack with non-life threatening injuries. His father told NBC that Doar was stabbed three inches from his heart and sustained a broken rib from the attack.Baker was arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and vehicle. He is being held in jail on $100,000 bail as of Thursday, AP reported.Richard Gentry, Baker’s attorney, was unavailable to provide comment to the Guardian.In a statement to the Guardian, Cair’s deputy executive director, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, called Sunday’s stabbing “the latest in a series of violent attacks on Muslim and Palestinian Americans” and praised the Austin police department for “recognizing the hateful motive for this stabbing”.“These attacks, the bigoted rhetoric that inspires them, and the Gaza genocide at the root of this violence, must end,” Mitchell said.The latest attack is the most recent example of violence facing Palestinians in the US since the 7 October attack in Israel by Hamas. Threats of violence against Muslim and Arab Americans have also surged in recent months.In November, three Palestinian college students were shot and injured in Vermont after they say a man specifically targeted them for being Palestinian. More

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      in US Politics

      The unprecedented situation at the US-Mexico border – visualized

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      Record levels of migration are straining an immigration system left nearly broken by decades of congressional inaction.Republicans have spent years amplifying scenes of turmoil and tragedy at the southern border, but Democratic leaders are also worried now, particularly big-city mayors and blue state governors who are demanding more federal resources to shelter and feed an influx of migrants.With many voters now saying immigration is a top priority, what exactly is happening at the US border to make so many people concerned?There has been a surge of encounters at the US borderSince the pandemic there has been a spike in global migration, coinciding with Joe Biden’s presidency. Across the globe, people are fleeing war, political insecurity, violence, poverty and natural disasters. Many of those in Latin America, in particular, travel to the US in search of safety.View image in fullscreenIn the last three years, the number of people attempting to cross the US’s southern border into the country has risen to unprecedented levels.In the month of December 2023 alone, border patrol agents recorded 302,000 encounters (these include apprehensions and immediate expulsions), a new high. The monthly average from 2013 to 2019 was 39,000.Arrivals are coming from more countriesThe collapse of Venezuela, political instability in Haiti, violence in Ecuador, a crackdown in Nicaragua, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, repression in China and other conflicts have fueled a historic shift in migration patterns.Mexico was the single most common origin country for US border encounters in 2023, but Mexican nationals made up less than 30% of the total share, compared with more than 60% a decade ago.Their journey is more perilousNearly 9,000 people attempting to reach the US from the south have been recorded missing or dead in the Americas in the past 10 years, according to the Missing Migrants Project.Some never make it through the notorious Darién Gap at the southern end of Central America, where a US deal with Panama and Colombia to stop migrants in their tracks has caused an outcry.The vast majority of recorded fatalities (5,145), however, occur at the US-Mexico border crossing, according to the project’s data.Many of the deaths occurred in southern Arizona when people attempted to cross open desert, miles from any roads.Fatalities are also concentrated along the treacherous stretch of south-western Texas where the Rio Grande river becomes the borderline. Further inland, hundreds of deaths have been recorded in the sparse, humid scrubland around Falfurrias.View image in fullscreenTheir cases languish in courtsThe border rules are complicated: some people apprehended at the border will face expedited deportation, but others will enter formal deportation proceedings and qualify for temporary release into the US, with a date to appear before a judge.Resolving those immigration cases and asylum claims can take years. The backlog of immigration cases has grown steadily – there were an astounding 3.3m cases pending as of December 2023, but just 682 immigration judges. That means the average caseload is more than 4,500 per judge.In the meantime …People arriving often find themselves in unofficial camps all along the US border. Some are waiting to cross, others have been met by US border patrol, yet others have been turned away. Some border states such as Texas have put tens of thousands of people awaiting their asylum claims on buses and sent them to other states, including California and New York, without their knowledge or permission.As for Congress, it continues to argue over clamping down on unlawful border crossings and alleviating the deepening humanitarian crisis – an increasingly irreconcilable divide between those who want to expand the immigration system and those who want to restrict it.View image in fullscreen More

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      Texas Will Expand Effort to Control Land Along Mexican Border, Abbott Says

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      Flanked by Republican governors, Gov. Greg Abbott said that Texas would expand the immigration enforcement efforts at the center of a legal confrontation with the federal government.Locked in a legal battle with the Biden administration over immigration enforcement, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said on Sunday that he was expanding his effort to establish state control over areas near the Rio Grande in an effort to deter migrants.Mr. Abbott, flanked by 13 other Republican governors, said that Texas would not limit its high-intensity efforts to the small municipal park along the river in Eagle Pass where the state has taken over and limited access for federal agents. A top Texas official said state law enforcement officers were also looking to move in on riverside ranch land north of the city that migrants have continued to use for crossing.Texas has deployed National Guard troops and state police officers up and down the Texas border since 2021, and began stringing concertina wire along the banks of the river the next year. What changed last month in the park, known as Shelby Park, is that Texas began preventing federal agents from routine access to the riverbank or from using the park to detain and process large numbers of migrants.“As we speak right now, the Texas National Guard, they’re undertaking operations to expand this effort,” Mr. Abbott said during a news conference at the park. “We’re not going to contain ourselves to this park. We are expanding to further areas to make sure we expand our level of deterrence and denial of illegal entry into the United States.”Mr. Abbott described the arrival of migrants as an “invasion” that permitted Texas, under the U.S. Constitution, to take on the job of enforcing immigration laws, an area that the Supreme Court has in the past left to the federal government. Whether he has the power to do so is being contested in court by the Biden administration.A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency has previously said that it, not the state, is responsible for detaining and processing those who have crossed the border illegally.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      At Rally for Border Security in Texas, Fears of ‘Invasion’ and ‘Civil War’

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      A conservative convoy gathered on the Texas border to support the state’s defiant stance on immigration. Despite worries over potential violence, the event was peaceful.A line of trucks and campers, cars and vans — from South Dakota and North Carolina, Washington and Pennsylvania — snaked over farm roads before gathering on the winter-brown grass of a ranch, steps from the Rio Grande, in the rural community of Quemado, Texas.The gathering on Saturday marked the final stop of a days-long journey: a convoy of conservative Americans who drove to the border to demonstrate their frustration, fear and anger over what they saw as a broken immigration system.The location in Quemado had been chosen for its proximity to the city of Eagle Pass, a flashpoint in the pitched confrontation over border security and immigration between the Biden administration and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas. Other convoys this week reached the border in Yuma, Ariz., and San Ysidro, Calif., all with the goal of spurring tighter controls on migrants crossing the border.The final stop of a days-long journey at Cornerstone Children’s RanchErin Schaff/The New York TimesConcerns over potential violence followed the convoys as the federal government and Republican state leaders appeared to be on an increasingly imminent collision course. In December, the federal government recorded 302,000 encounters with unauthorized migrants, the record for a month.In the end, the rally in Texas — part political protest, part Christian revival — attracted a modest crowd to the ranch, and no outbreaks of violence. Many in attendance were retired and had decided to make the trip almost spontaneously after having heard about it on social media or the local news.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Texas’s ‘states’ rights’ argument in the border dispute sets a dangerous precedent

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      Over the past few weeks, a quiet legal crisis has been unfolding on the US-Mexico border. Texas has seized control of part of the border and claimed the right to prevent federal authorities from exercising jurisdiction there. After the US supreme court ruled that the federal government could tear down razor wire erected by Texas authorities, the state vowed to erect more – and Governor Greg Abbott claimed that because the federal government had failed to protect his state from an “invasion” of refugees, it has “broken the compact between the United States and the States” and lost the right to exercise authority over the border altogether.To understand why this is so alarming, you need to see it in two historical contexts. The first is the notion of a “compact” between the states. This idea holds that the constitution is not the supreme law of the land but rather a mere agreement between independently sovereign states. Those states hence retain the right to decide when certain actions by the federal government break the compact – and to reclaim their independence accordingly.This idea – sometimes known as “compact theory” – was key to the quasi-legal arguments deployed by the Confederate states in the 19th century to justify first secession, and then civil war. As well as being rejected by the framers of the constitution, it was also explicitly ruled incorrect by the supreme court once the civil war was over. Nowadays, there is really no such thing as “compact theory” outside of the imagination of neo-Confederates and other far-right groups – there’s just federal law, and actions that break that law.Secondly, the erroneous idea of the compact and the broader agenda of “states’ rights” of which it is a part have often been deployed in order to advance a white supremacist agenda. Slavery is the most notable example. But the southern states – including Texas – also invoked these ideas to defend the system of Jim Crow, which within living memory denied full rights to generations of African Americans. Only the civil rights movement forced a change.Another part of this tradition is the inversion of the realities of power and violence which lie at its heart. Slavery was justified in part by arguments that the slaves, if freed, would threaten and even exterminate the white race. Jim Crow was reinforced by the related idea that free Black people would, if not physically eradicate white people, destroy the white body politic by contaminating it with unfit citizens. In each case the reality of who was really a threat to whom – the slavedriver to the slave, the Klansman to the free Black citizen – was hidden by an elaborate ideology of fear which in reality was used to justify the continuation of white supremacy.By claiming the right to nullify federal authority in order to wield lethal force against non-white migrants, Abbott is placing himself squarely in the center of these two traditions. His actions have already contributed to the death of two children and a mother who drowned in the Rio Grande as Texas authorities prevented federal agents from coming to their aid. Refugees are among the most powerless people in the world, but to Abbott they are elements of an “invading” force which threatens the security of Texas and the United States. Like his predecessors, he believes that even the constitution shouldn’t stand in the way of his ability to harm them.But just because Abbott is invoking some of the most sordid chapters in American history to justify his actions doesn’t mean we should have confidence that he will fail.One of the most disturbing aspects of this whole affair is that despite Abbott’s arguments having no legal merit, four supreme court justices were willing to endorse Texas blocking federal authorities from removing the razor wire at the border. The fact that this case was so narrowly decided is a five-alarm fire that suggests we are only one new court decision or one new Republican supreme court appointment away from a radical restructuring of America’s constitutional order. Future historians may look back on the 2020s as a turning point as profound as the civil rights movement of the 1960s – and one in which the pendulum swung back the other way.What Texas is doing also dramatically raises the stakes of this year’s presidential election – and not just because the next president may be able to pick another supreme court justice. With so many Republicans endorsing the idea that the situation at the border can be characterized as an invasion, the road seems to be open for a Republican president to make a federal invasion declaration.This would not only pave the way for an even more militarized treatment of refugees, but also allow the federal government to suspend the rights of millions of Americans living in border areas if it deems such a step necessary to repel the supposed attack.Luckily, there are legal and institutional barriers to such a step – many constitutional scholars believe that a federal invasion declaration requires an act of Congress. But in this case as in others, all roads lead to the supreme court, and it has already signaled its openness to many extreme ideas. America is in a time of great constitutional danger, and the border may be both an early warning sign – and the place where the country ultimately comes unstuck.
      Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University. He writes a newsletter called America Explained More