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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

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      Another bus with dozens of migrants from Texas arrives in Los Angeles

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      Another bus carrying asylum seekers arrived in downtown Los Angeles from a Texas border city early on Saturday, the second such transport in less than three weeks.The bus, which arrived at about 12.40pm at Los Angeles’s Union Station from Brownsville, Texas, held 41 people including 11 children who were with their families, according to a statement from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles (Chirla).The busload of people were welcomed by a collective of faith and immigrants’ rights groups and transported to St Anthony’s Croatian Catholic church, where they were given water, food, clothing, medical checkups and initial legal immigration assistance.The office of Los Angeles’ mayor, Karen Bass, was not formally notified but became aware of the bus on Friday, said Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, in a statement.The asylum seekers came from Cuba, Belize, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and Venezuela. According to a statement from Chirla, most of those on the bus are seeking to reunify with family members or sponsors. Six of them need to fly to Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland, said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a spokesperson for Chirla.Cabrera said the group “was less stressed and less chaotic than the previous time”, referring to the busload of people who arrived at the same major transit hub on 14 June. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, claimed responsibility for that move in a tweet that read: “Small Texas border towns remain overrun & overwhelmed because Biden refuses to secure the border”.Abbott has not mentioned the latest bus – and an attempt to contact him was not immediately returned – but posted figures in a tweet on Saturday that claimed the Texas national guard and state troopers have “apprehended more than 386,000” asylum seekers. “While Biden ignores the border crisis, Texas is stepping up to fill the gaps he created,” Abbott said.Bass tweeted: “Los Angeles believes in treating everyone with respect and dignity and will continue to do so.”Bass said that after she took office last year, she directed city agencies to begin planning for a possible scenario in which LA “was on the receiving end of a despicable stunt that Republican governors have grown so fond of”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Chirla and our partners in Los Angeles are organized and ready to receive these asylum seekers when they get here,” said Angélica Salas, Chirla’s executive director, in a statement. “If Los Angeles is their last destination, we will ensure this is the place where they get a genuine and humane reception.”Earlier in June, the state of Florida picked up three dozen migrants in Texas and sent them by private jet to California’s capital, catching shelters and aid workers in Sacramento by surprise. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, held Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, responsible for the flights of asylum seekers, which came in two waves, and appeared to threaten to file kidnapping charges after the first incident in which a group of migrants was dumped at a Sacramento church. More

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      Ron DeSantis Helicopter Photo Spurs Questions About Campaign Ethics

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      It’s not the first time that the Florida governor has faced accusations of inappropriately blurring the lines between his official duties and his presidential campaign.It was a photo op intended to turbocharge Republican voters, one showing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida posing in front of a helicopter on Sunday at the southern border in Texas.But the display is creating an unwanted spotlight for Mr. DeSantis: The helicopter is funded by Texas taxpayers, raising questions about the political nature of the flight and its cost.Federal law requires presidential candidates to pay the fair-market rate for noncommercial air travel and reimburse providers of flights. In this case, the Texas Department of Public Safety owns the 2008 Eurocopter, according to a Federal Aviation Administration database of aircraft tail numbers.Additionally, ethics rules in Texas bar officials there from using state resources in support of political campaigns.Mr. DeSantis’s office suggested that he was visiting the border in a dual capacity, as both governor and presidential candidate, but his official schedule as governor omitted mention of it. Jeremy Redfern, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis in the governor’s office, referred questions on Wednesday about the helicopter flight to the Texas Department of Public Safety.That agency said Mr. DeSantis was briefed during his visit about joint immigration enforcement activities between Florida and Texas at the border, part of a program known as Operation Lone Star.“The briefing included an aerial tour which was provided by D.P.S. in order to give Gov. DeSantis a clearer understanding of how Florida’s resources are being utilized along our southern border and see the challenges first hand,” Ericka Miller, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in an email on Wednesday. Mr. DeSantis’s campaign shared the helicopter photo on Twitter on Monday, the same day that he proposed a series of hard-right immigration policies in a campaign speech in Eagle Pass, a small Texas border city.Reflecting the split nature of his duties, Mr. DeSantis on Sunday wore a short-sleeve white shirt that said “Governor Ron DeSantis” on the right and “DeSantis for President” on the left.Mr. DeSantis’s use of the taxpayer-funded helicopter was first reported by The Daily Beast, which also noted that he took a boat tour of the Rio Grande as part of his visit. A Fox News reporter accompanied him by air and by water.That boat is owned by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, The New York Times confirmed. The state agency had already deployed the vessel there through a mutual-aid arrangement, and as part of the Operation Lone Star program.Mr. Redfern, in a statement, challenged that there was anything inappropriate about Mr. DeSantis’s ride on the Florida taxpayer-owned boat.“Participating in a routine patrol with F.W.C. is not outside the purview of the governor’s job as the state’s chief executive,” he said.Myles Martin, a spokesman for the Federal Election Commission, said in an email on Wednesday that he was not able to comment about specific candidates or their activities. But he pointed out that federal campaign finance rules require candidates to reimburse federal, state or local government entities when using aircraft owned by them to campaign.Political committees must also pay back costs associated with others means of transportation, including boat travel.Mr. DeSantis has previously faced accusations that he is inappropriately blurring the lines between his official duties and his campaign.As Mr. DeSantis prepared to sign Florida’s record-breaking budget earlier this month, lobbyists and state lawmakers said the governor’s staff called them seeking either campaign contributions or political endorsements — outreach that would normally be made by members of Mr. DeSantis’s campaign. The conversations left the lobbyists and lawmakers afraid that Mr. DeSantis would veto their projects from the budget if they did not comply, they said.And when Mr. DeSantis signed the budget, he vetoed several projects sponsored by state Senator Joe Gruters, a Republican who has endorsed former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner. Mr. Gruters accused the governor of retribution, calling him “meanspirited” and saying he had chosen to “punish ordinary Floridians” because of a political disagreement.The governor’s office denied that the vetoes were political. And at a news conference in Tampa last week, Mr. DeSantis said there was nothing wrong with aides in his office supporting his campaign in their “spare time.”But Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, filed state ethics and elections complaints against three top staffers in the governor’s office. “Any reasonable person could infer from the reporting that our governor was holding the state budget hostage in exchange for political endorsements and donations — actions that are both unethical and illegal,” Ms. Fried said in a statement.Earlier this year, Mr. DeSantis also signed a bill shielding his travel records from public disclosure, preventing an accounting of the taxpayer funds being used to cover security and other costs during his campaign trips. More

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      Ron DeSantis Calls for ‘Deadly Force’ Against Suspected Drug Traffickers

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      Campaigning in a Texas border city, the Florida governor laid out a series of hard-right immigration proposals, including some that would face legal roadblocks or test the limits of presidential authority.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida made a campaign stop in the border city of Eagle Pass, Texas.Brent McdonaldGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Monday proposed a host of hard-right immigration policies, floating the idea of using deadly force against suspected drug traffickers and others breaking through border barriers while “demonstrating hostile intent.”“Of course you use deadly force,” Mr. DeSantis said after a campaign event on a sweltering morning in Eagle Pass, a small Texas border city. “If you drop a couple of these cartel operatives trying to do that, you’re not going to have to worry about that anymore,” he added. He said they would end up “stone-cold dead.”He did not clarify how Border Patrol officers or other law enforcement authorities might determine which people crossing the border were smuggling drugs. He said only that “if someone is breaking through the border wall” while “demonstrating hostile intent or hostile action, you have to be able to meet that with the appropriate use of force.”Mr. DeSantis’s proposal served as an escalation of Republican messaging on the border and was part of a host of plans he unveiled in an effort to match the hard-line immigration stance of former President Donald J. Trump, who privately suggested shooting migrants in the legs during his administration.Mr. DeSantis said that if elected, he would seek to tear down some of the pillars of American immigration law, such as the automatic granting of citizenship to those born in the United States.And he said his administration would “fully deputize” state and local law enforcement officers in states like Texas to arrest and deport migrants back to Mexico — a power now reserved for the federal government — and to detain migrant children indefinitely, despite a court order imposing strict limits on the practice. He also promised to end “phony asylum claims.”“Of course you use deadly force,” Mr. DeSantis said of drug traffickers after the campaign event, held on a sweltering morning in Texas.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThose policies are sure to appeal to conservative voters in the Republican presidential primary contest, but they would be likely to run into legal roadblocks and could test the limits of presidential authority. The Constitution has been held to guarantee birthright citizenship, and the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that states cannot enact their own immigration policy.And while Mr. DeSantis argued that the country needed harsh new immigration rules because the current ones were encouraging dangerous border crossings and the mistreatment of migrant children, some of his proposals could also endanger migrants, including the use of “deadly force” against people cutting through the border wall.“You do it one time and they will never do it again,” he said.His campaign said in a news release that he would follow “appropriate rules of engagement” and that the rules would apply to “those trying to smuggle drugs into the United States.” (The overwhelming majority of drugs are smuggled in commercial vehicles coming across official ports of entry, not carried by migrants, according to U.S. border authorities.)Another plan Mr. DeSantis put forward, which would require certain asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, was previously employed by Mr. Trump, drawing criticism for forcing migrants to live in squalid tent camps where some were reportedly subjected to sexual assault, kidnapping and torture.Mr. DeSantis has made immigration a centerpiece of his campaign, but he has presented few specifics until now. Other policy proposals he released on Monday included:Deploying the military to “assist” Border Patrol agents until a wall is finished.Cracking down on Mexican drug cartel activity, including by blocking precursor chemicals used to manufacture drugs “from entering Mexican ports,” if the Mexican government does not act to stop the cartels.Detaining all migrants who cross the border without authorization until their immigration court hearing date. (Such a policy would most likely require the creation of a vast new prison system.)“These are ideas that have rightly been categorized for a really long time as radical and extremist,” said Aron Thorn, a senior lawyer in the Beyond Borders Program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.The policy rollout on Monday suggested that Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing Mr. Trump by roughly 30 percentage points in national polls, was trying to outflank the former president on immigration. Mr. DeSantis — whose “stop the invasion” language is a hallmark of America’s far right — has argued that he is the candidate most likely to enact conservative immigration policies. He has accused Mr. Trump of “running to the left,” saying that “this is a different guy today than when he was running in 2015 and 2016.”But even among voters who came to see Mr. DeSantis on Monday at a cinder-block-and-steel Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Eagle Pass, some said that they remained more inclined to vote for Mr. Trump.“He’s Trump 2.0, but this isn’t his time,” said John Sassano, 60, a retired teacher in Eagle Pass who described himself as a former Democrat. “I’d love to see him as V.P.”Sandy Bradley, 66, a retired government worker, traveled with two friends from Del Rio, a nearby border town, to hear Mr. DeSantis, buying festive cowboy hats at a Walmart on the way. “I think he will catch up,” she said, adding that Mr. DeSantis seemed to share her Christian values.She added that she wanted a candidate who would address illegal immigration and “stop all the influx.”Mr. DeSantis went directly from the event to a news conference at a ranch along the Rio Grande outside town where the state of Texas had recently constructed fencing with concertina wire in an area where migrants often cross.“This is an ongoing problem,” said Ruben Garibay, who owns the ranch. Mr. Garibay, wearing a black cowboy hat and speaking in the shade of a tree as the temperature neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit, said he had agreed to host Mr. DeSantis but had yet to make up his mind about which candidate to support. “It’s a little early in the game,” he said.Mr. Trump first deployed a so-called Remain in Mexico policy, which the Biden administration later reversed. He also proposed ending birthright citizenship during his first campaign, although he failed to do so while in office, and has recently renewed those calls as a candidate. And, of course, he ran in 2016 on building a wall at the southern border, an issue that helped propel him to the White House.On his social media site on Monday, Mr. Trump said that Mr. DeSantis’s “sole purpose in making the trip was to reiterate the fact that he would do all of the things done by me in creating the strongest Border, by far, in U.S. history.”Hundreds of migrants waiting inside a makeshift migrant camp to be loaded onto buses and taken for processing at a Customs and Border Protection substation in El Paso, Texas, in May. Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesAs governor, Mr. DeSantis last month sent hundreds of Florida law enforcement officers and Florida National Guard members to Texas, saying President Biden had failed to secure the border, a repeat of a similar effort in 2021 ahead of Mr. DeSantis’s re-election campaign.This year, Mr. DeSantis also signed a bill cracking down on undocumented immigrants that was seen as one of the harshest such measures in the country. And he announced a national coalition of more than 90 local sheriffs who said they would band together to fight gang activity and illegal drugs that they argue are the result of the Biden administration’s border policies. (Only a few of the sheriffs are from border states.)Some immigration analysts questioned the viability of Mr. DeSantis’s proposals, suggesting they were driven by the political imperatives of a presidential campaign.“The bulk of the proposal is the usual laundry list of Republican talking points that have not been successful, either in Congress or in the court of public opinion,” said Louis DeSipio, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, citing the idea to end birthright citizenship, among other proposals. “The purpose is probably not a serious policy debate but instead to focus on an issue that is a weakness for Biden and a sensitive one for Trump.”And Jennie Murray, the president of the National Immigration Forum, a nonprofit group that advocates immigration policies that address economic and national security needs, pointed to the difficulties in actually carrying out Mr. DeSantis’s plans.“Deporting huge numbers of immigrants would be costly and extremely detrimental, especially during these times of historic labor shortages,” she said.Miriam Jordan More

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      Three Texas police officers charged with murder after fatally shooting woman

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      Three police officers in San Antonio, Texas, are facing murder charges after fatally shooting a woman in her apartment during a confrontation early Friday.The woman, 46-year-old Melissa Perez, was having what appeared to be a “mental health crisis” when officers encountered her and shot her dead, San Antonio police department (SAPD) chief William McManus said on Friday at a news conference.Police had been called to her apartment complex about 2am after reports that she was cutting wires connected to the building’s fire alarm system, according to local TV news state KSAT.Local firefighters initially responded, but officers later approached Perez, who was walking her dog outside, and she ran to her apartment and locked herself inside. As the officers tried to enter her apartment, she threw a glass candle at them, hitting an officer in the arm, and wielded a hammer, the department said.An officer fired multiple rounds that did not strike Perez. After she moved closer to the officers again with the hammer, the three officers fired at Perez and this time struck her.Emergency medical services pronounced her dead at the scene. The department reported no other injuries from the gunfire.The SAPD released body camera footage from the incident late on Friday afternoon that showed the officers trying to enter her apartment as Perez told them “you ain’t got no warrant”.At Friday’s news conference, McManus said that the officers’ behavior was “not consistent with … policy and training” at the department.“They placed themselves in a situation where they used deadly force, which was not reasonable given all the circumstances as we now understand them,” he said.“This event does not accurately reflect the high level of dedication and commitment demonstrated by our over 2,500 officers nor should it undermine the extensive and advanced training we provide to ensure the health and the safety of both our officers and the community they serve.”The three officers – identified as Sgt Alfred Flores, Eleazar Alejandro and Nathaniel Villalobos – had 14, five and two years of service with the police, respectively. The officers were arrested and suspended from their posts Friday, and they were eventually released on $100,000 bail.The police chief said the officers are being investigated individually, and the local district attorney’s civil right division is reviewing the case.Murder charges against police officers for on-duty shootings are rare, but there has been an uptick after police departments came under global scrutiny in 2020. That year, a police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd.Earlier this year, five police officers in Memphis were charged with the murder of Tyre Nichols, who was recorded being beaten by officers after he was pulled over for allegedly driving recklessly. More

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      Will Hurd Announces 2024 Presidential Election Bid

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      Mr. Hurd, a moderate who represented a large swing district for three terms, called Donald J. Trump a “lawless, selfish, failed politician.”Will Hurd, a former Texas congressman who was part of a diminishing bloc of Republican moderates in the House and was the only Black member of his caucus when he left office in 2021, announced his candidacy for president on Thursday with a video message that attacked the G.O.P. front-runner, Donald J. Trump. “If we nominate a lawless, selfish, failed politician like Donald Trump, who lost the House, the Senate and the White House, we all know Joe Biden will win again,” he said, referring to Republican losses in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections, in addition to Mr. Trump’s own defeat in 2020.Mr. Hurd, 45, represented the 23rd District for three terms before deciding not to run for re-election in 2020, when a host of G.O.P. moderates in Congress chose to retire instead of appearing on a ticket led by President Trump.His district was larger than some states, extending from El Paso to San Antonio along the southwestern border.Mr. Hurd, who also made an appearance on “CBS Mornings,” emphasized in his video that Republicans needed to nominate a forward-looking candidate who could unite the party and country.”I’ll give us the common-sense leadership America so desperately needs,” he said. A formidable gantlet awaits Mr. Hurd, a long-shot candidate in a crowded G.O.P. presidential field. To qualify for the party’s first debate in August, candidates are required to muster support of at least 1 percent in multiple national polls recognized by the Republican National Committee. There are also fund-raising thresholds, including a minimum of 40,000 unique donors to individual campaigns.Before entering politics, Mr. Hurd was an undercover officer for the C.I.A. and his tenure of nearly a decade with the agency included work in Afghanistan.In Congress, he developed a reputation for working across the aisle and drew attention in 2017 when he car-pooled from Texas to Washington with Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat and House colleague.While Mr. Hurd largely toed the Republican line, he was also known for bucking Mr. Trump. During his final term in the House, Mr. Hurd voted more than one-third of the time against Mr. Trump’s positions. Mr. Hurd was a particularly strident critic of the president’s push to build a wall along the entire southern border, a cause célèbre for Mr. Trump that he ran on in 2016. In a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone, Mr. Hurd called Mr. Trump’s border wall initiative a “third-century solution to a 21st-century problem.”It was not the first time that Mr. Hurd had spoken so bluntly in opposition to a piece of Mr. Trump’s agenda.When Mr. Trump signed an executive order in January 2017 blocking citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, one of the first acts of his presidency, Mr. Hurd condemned it, saying the policy “endangers the lives of thousands of American men and women in our military, diplomatic corps and intelligence services.”And when Mr. Trump attacked four freshman Democratic congresswomen of color in 2019, Mr. Hurd denounced the president and criticized the direction of the Republican Party.“The party is not growing in some of the largest parts of our country,” he said in a June 2019 speech to the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative L.G.B.T.Q. group. “Why is that? I’ll tell you.”“Don’t be a racist,” Mr. Hurd continued, according to The Washington Blade. “Don’t be a misogynist, right? Don’t be a homophobe. These are real basic things that we all should learn when we were in kindergarten.”But while Mr. Hurd broke with Mr. Trump on some notable occasions, he also dismayed Mr. Trump’s critics when he voted in lock step with House Republicans against impeaching Mr. Trump the first time in December 2019. Mr. Trump was impeached in a party-line vote by the House for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but acquitted by the Senate. More

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      Who Is Will Hurd? 5 Things to Know About the Presidential Candidate

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      Mr. Hurd, a former congressman from a swing district in Texas, is a former undercover C.I.A. officer and a cybersecurity expert.Former Representative Will Hurd, a Republican from a swing district in Texas who served three terms, faces the daunting task of establishing himself in a field of much better-known presidential candidates.Here are five things to know about Mr. Hurd, who announced his 2024 bid on Thursday.He is a former C.I.A. officer.Mr. Hurd got a job with the C.I.A. straight out of college in 2000 and spent more than eight years as an undercover agent, with stints in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan.His first assignment with the C.I.A. came after Al Qaeda suicide bombers attacked the U.S.S. Cole, an American warship, killing 17 crew members. His next assignment came after Sept. 11.In an interview with The Guardian last year, he said the job had ended his engagement to a fiancée: “You know, it probably had a chilling effect on our relationship, especially when you confirm: ‘Hey babe, I actually work in the C.I.A., and we’re going to Islamabad. Pack your bags. Great!’”He has expertise in cybersecurity.Mr. Hurd has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Texas A&M University and, after leaving the C.I.A., worked as a senior adviser at a cybersecurity firm called FusionX.When he was elected to Congress in 2014, he made cybersecurity one of his main focuses and led the House Oversight Subcommittee on Information Technology.He organized a hearing in 2015 on encryption and its potential effects on law enforcement’s investigative abilities — an issue he discussed in an interview with Motherboard at a hacking conference that year. He opposed efforts backed by intelligence agencies to weaken encryption on smartphones.He has continued to work in the technology arena since leaving Congress in 2021, and joined the board of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence laboratory that developed ChatGPT.He has been critical of Trump.Mr. Hurd has not been shy about criticizing former President Donald J. Trump, and has done so since Mr. Trump first ran in 2016.In October 2016, after the release of the “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump bragged about assaulting women, Mr. Hurd called on him to leave the presidential race. In 2017, he urged Mr. Trump to apologize for claiming there was violence “on many sides” during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. And in 2018, in a guest essay for The New York Times, he wrote that Mr. Trump had “actively participated in a Russian disinformation campaign.”Mr. Hurd also denounced many components of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy — describing his proposed border wall as a “third-century solution to a 21st-century problem,” calling the separation of migrant children from their parents “unacceptable,” and saying that his ban on travelers from a list of majority-Muslim countries “endangers the lives of thousands of American men and women in our military, diplomatic corps and intelligence services.”He was an unusually bipartisan lawmaker.Mr. Hurd represented one of the most competitive congressional districts in the country — a vast, largely Hispanic stretch of South Texas that he won by 2.1 percentage points in 2014, 1.3 percentage points in 2016 and half a percentage point in 2018 — and his voting record reflected that.Breaking from Republican orthodoxy, Mr. Hurd supported legislation to end a government shutdown in 2019 and to protect L.G.B.T.Q. people from discrimination. He also pushed for immigration reform, including protecting young people from deportation.And he drew attention in 2017 for a live-streamed road trip from Texas to Washington with Beto O’Rourke, then a Democratic member of Congress.“My final message for my colleagues as I depart this body: Don’t treat bipartisanship like a four-letter word,” he said in his farewell speech from the House floor.Mr. Hurd did vote the Republican line most of the time. In 2015 and 2017, he supported bills to ban abortion after 20 weeks. And though he voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act in 2017, that was only after it became clear that the bill would pass anyway; he was opposed to the Obama-era policy. He also opposed the Iran nuclear deal and called for a more hawkish policy against the Islamic State.He was one of the only Black Republicans in Congress.When Mr. Hurd was first sworn into Congress in January 2015, he was one of only two Black Republicans in the House. By the time he left in January 2021, he was the only one.He is the son of a Black father and a white mother, and has spoken about his background and his experience as a person of color on many occasions.“Two centuries ago, I would have been counted as three-fifths of a person, and today, I can say I’ve had the honor of serving three terms in Congress,” he said in a statement upon announcing in 2019 that he would not run for re-election.At the time, he said he was leaving in part because he thought he could be more effective in electing more diverse Republicans to Congress from the outside — though that has not ended up being his professional focus. The number of Black Republicans in the House has rebounded slightly, to four. More