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      ‘Latinos deserve a district’: alarm as new Texas maps dilute voting power in Austin

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      When representative Greg Casar won his election last year, he became the first Latino to represent the Texas capital city of Austin in the US House of Representatives. A panel of federal judges had drawn his district’s lines after a prolonged legal battle over racial gerrymandering.But under the map Texas Republicans unveiled last week, Casar would instead live in the modified version of his neighboring district to the west, which would swallow east Austin – a gentrifying but historically working-class area home to Mexican American and Black residents once forced by segregation laws to live on the east side of town.“Even a conservative supreme court said central Texas Latinos deserve a district, and that’s why my district exists,” Casar said. “If Donald Trump is able to suppress Latino voters here in Austin, he’ll try to spread that plan across America.”Texas Republicans took the unusual step of redistricting several years early in an attempt to deliver more congressional seats to Donald Trump ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Democratic state lawmakers fled the state Sunday to try to thwart the GOP redistricting plan by denying state lawmakers a quorum needed to pass it into law. The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, said Monday he would seek to arrest and possibly unseat and replace Democratic lawmakers who do not return.In majority-minority Texas, where Black and brown voters have traditionally leaned left, the overtly political ploy is teeing up another in a series of legal battles over racial gerrymandering that have erupted repeatedly for more than a decade.The dramatic reshaping of Casar’s district 35 is one of the most egregious examples cited by civic groups concerned that the new map will dilute Latino voter strength and make it harder for candidates of color to win congressional elections.“The map as proposed clearly violates the Voting Rights Act and is unconstitutional,” said Lydia Camarillo, the president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. “It’s canceling out districts that are part of the Voting Rights Act … and it’s not giving Latinos the right to represent their voice based on their population growth.”Hispanics are the largest population segment in Texas, at about 40%. Only one-fifth of the state’s 38-member House delegation is Hispanic, however.Since the last census, civic groups like Camarillo’s have contended that the state’s booming Hispanic population growth merits two more Latino-majority congressional districts under the Voting Rights Act – one in Houston and the other in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. A dozen organizations and several individuals are pressing Texas to create the two Latino-majority districts in an ongoing federal lawsuit in El Paso.The new GOP-drawn map not only fails to provide those two Latino-majority districts, but it significantly dilutes the voting strength of the ones that exist, critics say.“This is a calculated move that exploits Texas’ historically low voter turnout for those in charge to maintain power,” Jackie Bastard, the executive director of the voter turnout group Jolt Action, wrote in an email. “By deliberately diluting Latino voting strength across districts, these maps would severely diminish the impact of our ongoing voter mobilization efforts and silence the voices of Texas’ fastest-growing demographic.”Those intricacies are often difficult to tease out. Congressional district nine, represented by Democratic representative Al Green, for example, is a so-called “coalition district” under the current map, with no one ethnic or racial group holding a solid majority. In practice, however, it functions more like a Black-opportunity district in a state where African American voters are becoming a smaller share of the electorate.Under the new map, district nine’s Black population plummets to 11%, while the Hispanic voting age population now holds a majority.But the historically low voter turnout rate there raises doubts that the district will actually function as a Latino-majority district, said Gloria Leal, the general counsel for the League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the plaintiffs in the El Paso case. Representative Sylvia Garcia’s district 29 also dropped enough to raise concerns, while retaining a majority on paper.Representative Henry Cuellar’s district 28, on the other hand, saw the opposite approach under the new map – Hispanics voters shot up to roughly 90% of the voting age population.“They added like 20 percentage points to that district to pack us all in,” Leal said. “We oppose the current map that exists and we adamantly oppose the proposed map,” she added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAny redrawing of Texas districts is likely to draw the scrutiny of the federal courts, given the state’s long history of voter suppression. The Voting Rights Act, which will celebrate its 60th anniversary on Wednesday, prohibits both diluting a protected groups’ votes across multiple districts and packing voters into a single one.Carrying out such sweeping changes so quickly at the request of the White House may also raise legal questions that go beyond the Voting Rights Act, according to Thomas A Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is representing the plaintiffs in the El Paso case.“This is clearly improper,” Saenz said. “Trying to circumvent judicial review by acting so close to an election is straight-up unlawful.”Political analysts had widely viewed Republicans’ goal of finding five congressional seats for Trump as an overly ambitious one that may backfire. The map that Republicans came up with in 2021 to fortify their current lopsided majority in the congressional delegation appeared hard to alter without making the party more vulnerable to Democratic challenges.Texas conservatives appear to have exceeded those expectations, according to Rice University political scientist Mark Jones – partly by “riding roughshod” over the Voting Rights Act.“I underestimated the level of disregard of the Voting Rights Act,” Jones said. “It’s not clear how the Voting Rights Act constrained this map in any significant way, with the exception that Republicans focused on hitting absolute majorities of Hispanics in a few districts.”Still, Jones said, Republicans drew the map with an exceptionally favorable year in mind. If Republicans fail to consolidate the inroads they made in last year’s election, which is normal during a midterm, the new map could easily fail to produce a single new GOP congressional seat in Texas. It might even lead Republicans to lose a seat, according to Jones.“One thing that is very clear about this whole process is these maps are being drawn under a very rosy scenario,” Jones said. “And with Trump not on the ballot, with the natural referendum on his presidency, an economy that may be problematic – it’s tough to imagine Republicans hitting 2024 numbers in 2026.” More

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      Texas House reconvenes without quorum as Democrats flee state

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      Texas Democrats in the state legislature denied its speaker a legislative quorum Monday by leaving the state, forestalling plans proposed by the White House to redistrict Texas’s congressional lines to more greatly favor Republicans.When the legislature gaveled in at 3pm local time on Monday, Republicans fell short of a quorum by eight votes after Democrats fled to Illinois, a legislative conference in Boston, New York and elsewhere.In an extraordinary escalation, the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, said he he had ordered the Texas department of public safety to “locate, arrest and return to the House chamber any member who has abandoned their duty to Texans”.“There are consequences for dereliction of duty,” Abbott said in a statement on Monday, after the Republican-dominated House issued civil arrest warrants in an attempt to compel the return of the members who fled. “This order will remain in effect until all missing Democrat House members are accounted for and brought to the Texas Capitol.”Democrats hold 62 of the 150 seats in the legislature’s lower chamber, so as long as at least 51 members remain out of Austin, the Texas legislature cannot move forward with any votes, including a plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to give Republicans five more seats in Congress.The Texas speaker, Representative Dustin Burrows, adjourned the house until 1pm on Tuesday after issuing a call for absent lawmakers and threatening their arrest. He cited pending legislation on flood relief and human trafficking – and not the contentious redistricting proposal before the chamber – in his call for Democrats to return.“Instead of confronting those challenges, some of our colleagues have fled the state in their duty,” Burrows said. “They’ve left the state, abandoned their posts and turned their backs on the constituents they swore to represent. They’ve shirked their responsibilities under the direction and pressure of out-of-state politicians and activists who don’t know the first thing about what’s right for Texas.”Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who fled his own impeachment hearings and refused a court order to release his travel records after speaking at the rally in Washington that preceded the January 6 insurrection, has described wayward Democratic legislators as “cowards”.Speaker Burrows said the house would not sit quietly. “While you obstruct the work of the people, the people of Texas are watching and so is the nation, and if you choose to continue down this road, you should know there will be consequences.”The Texas House Democratic Caucus said in response: “Come and take it.”“We are not fighting for the Democratic party,” state representative James Tallarico said in a video message recorded at an airport. “We are fighting for the democratic process, and the stakes could not be higher. We have to take a stand.”Most of the Democratic caucus absconded to Chicago, a city with a Democratic mayor and city council in a state with a Democratic governor and legislature.Illinois governor JB Pritzker, who owns the Chicago Hyatt hotel, announced on Monday he would provide free rooms to the Texas Democrats for as long as they are out of state.A special session of the Texas legislature lasts for 30 days, but Abbott can renew the call for a special session at will. Under new rules the Texas house adopted in 2021, each lawmaker will be fined $500 a day for each day they abscond from the state. More

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      Illinois governor says Texas Democrats who left will be protected amid arrest threats

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      The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, has vowed to protect the Democratic members of the Texas house of representatives who left the state in an attempt to block Republican efforts to redraw Texas’s congressional maps.“We’re going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them and make sure that – ’cause we know they’re doing the right thing, we know that they’re following the law,” Pritzker said at a press conference on Sunday in Illinois alongside some of the the Texas Democratic lawmakers.The Texas Democrats fled the state on Sunday in an effort to prevent the Texas house from reaching the quorum on Monday needed to vote on a newly proposed congressional map.In response to the Democrats’ actions, Greg Abbott, the Republican Texas governor, threatened to expel the Texas Democrats from the state house if they do not return by Monday at 3pm CT – when the legislature is set to resume. Ken Paxton, Texas’s Republican attorney general, also condemned their actions on Sunday and threatened their arrest.“Democrats in the Texas House who try and run away like cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately,” he said in a statement. “We should use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law.”But Pritzker, who said he will support the Texas Democrats, described their actions as “a righteous act of courage”, saying that they “were left no choice but to leave their home state, block a vote from taking place, and protect their constituents”.Pritzker, a billionaire and potential 2028 presidential candidate, is reportedly helping the Democrats find lodging and meeting spaces, but is not assisting with the $500-a-day fine that each lawmaker will have to pay under new rules the house adopted in 2021, according to the Texas Tribune. The outlet reported that the Democrats have been fundraising from large Democratic donors to help pay that fine.The redistricting plan, unveiled last week by Texas Republicans, could allow Republicans to gain as many as five additional US House seats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Currently, Republicans hold 25 of Texas’s 38 seats, and in the overall House of Representatives, Republicans hold a small majority of 220-212.The proposal came after pressure from Donald Trump, who urged Texas Republicans to redraw the maps.“There could be some other states we’re going to get another three, or four or five in addition. Texas would be the biggest one,” Trump told reporters in mid-July. “Just a very simple redrawing, we pick up five seats.”Abbott called a special session this summer and included on the agenda the redrawing of Texas’s maps in addition to proposals to aid victims of the 4 July Texas flooding and other matters.Many of Texas’s 62 house Democrats have gone to Illinois, with others attending the National Conference of State Legislatures in Boston this week and others meeting with the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, in Albany.“We’re leaving Texas to fight for Texans,” Gene Wu, the Texas house Democratic caucus chair who fled to Illinois, said in a statement on Sunday.“We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent” he added.During the news conference in Illinois on Sunday, Pritzker criticized the redistricting proposal, saying it would “steal five congressional seats, silencing millions of voices, especially Black and Latino voters”.“Let’s be clear, this is not just rigging the system in Texas, it’s about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come,” he added. More

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      Texas Democrats flee state to prevent vote on redrawing congressional map

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      Texas Democrats are fleeing the state to prevent a vote on Monday that could see five new Republican-leaning seats created in the House of Representatives.About 30 Democrats said they planned to flee to Illinois, where they plan to stay for a week, to thwart Republican efforts by denying them a quorum, or the minimum number of members to validate the vote’s proceedings.In a statement, Texas Democrats accused their counterparts, the Texas Republicans, of a “cowardly” surrender to Donald Trump’s call for a redrawing of the congressional map to “continue pushing his disastrous policies”.“Texas Democratic lawmakers are halting Trump’s plan by denying his bootlickers a quorum,” the statement read.The scheme to flee the state is reported to have been put together by the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who met with the Texas Democratic caucus late last month and has directed staff to provide logistical support for their stay.The Texas group has accused Texas governor Greg Abbott of withholding aid to victims of Guadalupe River flooding last month in a bid to force the redistricting vote through.“We’re leaving Texas to fight for Texans,” Gene Wu, the Texas House Democratic caucus chair, said in a statement. “We will not allow disaster relief to be held hostage to a Trump gerrymander.”“We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent,” Wu added. “As of today, this corrupt special session is over.”Last week, Texas Republicans released a proposed new congressional map that would give the GOP a path to pick up five seats in next year’s midterm elections, typically when the governing party loses representation in congress.The areas affected by the redistricting plane would target Democratic members of Congress in and around Austin, Dallas and Houston, and two districts in south Texas that are Republican but nudging closer toward Democrat control.The plan to flee the state is not without potential consequences. Members of the Texas Democrats face a $500-a-day fine and possible arrest, a measure that was introduced in 2023, two years after Democrats left the state for three weeks to block election legislation that included several restrictions on voting access.Ultimately, that bill passed but not before Democrats were able to claim something of a moral victory after stripping the measure of some of its provisions.The latest plan to leave the leave the state came after a House committee approved new congressional maps on Saturday.“This map was politically based, and that’s totally legal, totally allowed and totally fair,” Cody Vasut, a Republican state representative and committee member, told NBC News.Vasut pointed to disparities in other states, including California, New York and Illinois, where the weighting of seats to votes is strongly in Democrats favor.“Texas is underperforming in that. And so it’s totally prudent, totally right, for Texas to be able to respond and improve the political performance of its map,” he said.The political backdrop to the Texas redistricting fight colors Pritzker into the picture of a national fight. Pritzker, a billionaire member of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, is seen as looking toward a bid for the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination.In June, he addressed Democrats in Oklahoma where he met privately in a “robust” meeting to discuss about Texas redistricting, according to NBC News. He later met with Texas Democrats, where offered assurances he would find them hotels, meeting spaces and other logistical assistance.The absence of the Democrats on Monday threatens to derail other issues Abbott is tabling, including disaster relief after to the deadly central Texas floods last month.“Democrats in the Texas House who try and run away like cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately,” Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, said in a post on X. “We should use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law.”Texas house speaker Dustin Burrows said that if, at 3pm on Monday, “a quorum is not present then, to borrow the recent talking points from some of my Democrat colleagues, all options will be on the table”. More

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      Texas Republicans unveil congressional map that could gift them five seats

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      Republicans have unveiled a new congressional map in Texas that would allow the party to pick up as many as five additional congressional seats, an aggressive maneuver that has already met decisive outcry from Democrats and comes as the GOP tries to stave off losses in next year’s midterm elections.Republicans already hold 25 of Texas’s 38 congressional seats. But at the urging of Donald Trump, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, called a special session this month to redraw the state’s congressional districts. After contentious hearings across the state, Republicans unveiled their proposed map on Wednesday.“We expected them to be greedy,” said Sam Gostomski, executive director of the Texas Democratic party. “The bottom line is, they are going to turn Texas into almost certainly the most gerrymandered state in the country.”Had the map been in place for the 2024 election, Trump would have carried 30 of the districts, while Kamala Harris would have carried just eight, according to data from Dave’s Redistricting App, an online tool that allows for analysis of voting districts.On first glance at the maps, “it was more packing and more trying to divide people,” said state representative Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, a Democrat from San Antonio and a member of the Texas house’s redistricting committee. “We’re trying to digest it and look at it and look at the numbers and see how it all plays out.”Republican legislators held three hearings to hear from voters about redistricting. But the proposed maps were not presented at the meetings, rendering the legally required hearings into a pro forma exercise.“How do people even know what to comment on if the maps aren’t published?” she said. “I call it a sneak attack to put the maps out after the hearing.”The map unveiled on Wednesday represents the most aggressive effort for Republicans. While analysts said Republicans could target three Democratic seats easily, trying to claim more risked spreading GOP voters too thin.One of the proposed changes in the maps would consolidate two Democratic seats in Austin, currently held by Representatives Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett. Other changes include shifting boundaries of districts in south Texas, where Republicans have made inroads among Hispanic voters.“Merging the 35th and the 37th districts is illegal voter suppression of Black and Latino Central Texans,” Casar said in a statement. “If Trump is allowed to rip the Voting Rights Act to shreds here in Central Texas, his ploy will spread like wildfire across the country. Everyone who cares about our democracy must mobilize against this illegal map.”The map also radically redraws district lines in Houston, eliminating one majority people of color seat held by Democrats.“The map is extreme invidious discrimination and accomplishes what the President has demanded of the governor and more,” said Al Green, a member of the US Congress. “The DoJ demanded that the race card be played, and the governor dealt the people of Texas a racist hand.”Green pledged to run for re-election, despite the changes in district boundaries.Democrats narrowly won two seats in south Texas where a majority of voters also chose Trump. The redistricting widens the margin a Republican congressional candidate might expect to win, given the 2024 result.Democrats have already denounced the Republican efforts as a naked partisan power grab and have contemplated redrawing maps in states where they hold the power to do so. A Super Pac supporting House Democrats has pledged to donate upwards of $20m to target Republicans.The redistricting process in states typically occurs at the start of each new decade, when new census data is available.“This proposed map is a racially discriminatory, brazen power grab. It is an insult to all Texans, who have demonstrated overwhelming, bipartisan opposition to President Trump’s order to draw a mid-decade gerrymander. Texans deserve better than this, and if the legislature and the governor follow through with enacting this egregious gerrymander, it will face fierce legal challenges,” said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, which has opposed the Texas effort.Democrats have few options to fight the redistricting. While a court challenge will be filed almost immediately, federal judges in the conservative fifth judicial circuit may not resolve the dispute before the 2026 election, and may not resolve it in their favor.The Texas house select committee on redistricting has scheduled a public hearing on the proposed maps for Friday. The Texas AFL-CIO put out a call on Wednesday afternoon to pack the capitol in Austin and testify.Democratic legislators may leave the state in order to deny Republicans a legislative quorum and prevent them from passing law. Doing so presents practical and legal costs for those who do, but may be the last remaining bargaining chip they have before the issue enters the courts.“I can tell you that our members are going to fight it for as long as it takes,” Gostomski said, “but at the end of the day, the only real legal mechanism in place is, at some point, the GOP leadership has to decide if they are more interested in representing their constituents than protecting Donald Trump’s power.” More

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      She fled Cuba for asylum – then was snatched from a US immigration courtroom

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      Jerome traveled a thousand miles from California to El Paso, Texas, so he could accompany Jenny to her immigration hearing. He and his wife had promised to take her after she had fled Cuba last December, after the government there had targeted her because she had reported on the country’s deplorable conditions for her college radio station.Everything should have been fine. Jenny, 25, had entered the United States legally under one of Joe Biden’s now-defunct programs, CBP One. By the end of the year, she could apply for a green card.But a few days before her hearing, Jerome started to feel like something was off. Jenny’s court date had been abruptly moved from May to June with no explanation. Arrests at immigration courthouses peppered the news.And when Jenny went before the court, the government attorney assigned to try to deport her asked the judge to dismiss her case, arguing vaguely that circumstances had changed.View image in fullscreenInstead, the judge noted that Jenny was pursuing an asylum claim and scheduled her for another court date in August 2026 – the best possible outcome.“She turned around and looked at me and smiled. And I smiled back, because she understood that she was free to go home,” Jerome said.But as Jenny left the courtroom and approached the elevator to leave, a crowd of government agents in masks converged on her and demanded she go with them. Just before she disappeared down a corridor with the phalanx of officers, she turned back to look at Jerome, her face stricken, silently pleading with him to do something.“I said, ‘She’s legal. She’s here legally. And you guys just don’t care, do you? Nobody cares about this. You guys just like pulling people away like this,’” Jerome recalled telling the agents. “And nobody said a word. They couldn’t even look me in the eye,” he told the Guardian.Footage of her apprehension was taken by those advocating for her and shared with the Guardian.Now Jenny is languishing in immigration custody. Her hearing for August 2026 has been replaced with a date for next month when the government attorney might once again attempt to dismiss her case, and her case been transferred from a judge who grants a majority of asylum applications to one with a less than 22% approval rate.“There’s no heart, there’s no compassion, there’s no empathy, there’s no anything. [It’s] ‘We’re just going to yank this woman away from you, and we don’t care,’” Jerome said. The Guardian is not using his or Jenny’s full name for their safety.Similar scenes have played out again and again at immigration courthouses across the country for weeks, as people following the federal government’s directions and attending their hearings are being scooped up and sent to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention.The unusual tactics are happening while Donald Trump and his deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, push for Ice to make at least 3,000 daily arrests – a tenfold increase from during Biden’s last year in office. Ice agents have suddenly become regulars at immigration court, where they can easily find soft targets.At first, the officers appeared to focus arrests on a subset of migrants who had been in the US for fewer than two years, which the Trump administration argues makes them susceptible to a fast-tracked deportation scheme called expedited removal. Ice officers seem to confer with their agency’s attorneys, who ask the judge to dismiss the migrants’ cases, as they did with Jenny. And, if judges agree, the migrants are detained on their way out of court so that officials can reprocess them through expedited removal, which allows the federal government to repatriate people with far less due process, sometimes without even seeing another judge.View image in fullscreenBut reporting by the Guardian has uncovered how Ice is casting a far wider net for its immigration court arrests and appears also to be targeting people such as Jenny whose cases are ongoing and have not been dismissed. The agency is also snatching up court attendees who have clearly been in the US for longer than two years – the maximum timeframe that according to US law determines whether someone can be placed in expedited removal – as well as those who have a pathway to remain in the country legally.After the migrants are apprehended, they’re stuffed into often overcrowded, likely privately run detention centers, sometimes far from their US-based homes and families. They’re put through high-stakes tests that will determine whether they have a future in the US, with limited access to attorneys. And as they endure inhospitable conditions in prisons and jails, the likelihood of them having both the will to keep fighting their case and the legal right to stay dwindles.“To see individuals who are law-abiding and who have received a follow-up court date only to be greeted by a group of large men in masks and whisked away to an unknown location in a building is jarring. It breaks my understanding and conception of the United States having a lawful due process,” said Emily Miller, who is part of a larger volunteer group in El Paso trying to protect migrants as best they can.One woman Miller saw apprehended had come to the US legally, submitted her asylum petition the day of her hearing, and was given a follow-up court date by the judge before Ice detained her.“My physical reaction was standing in the hallway shaking. My body just physically started shaking, out of shock and out of concern,” Miller said. “I have lived in other countries where I’ve been a stranger in a strange land and did not speak the language or had limited language abilities. And as a woman, to be greeted by masked men is something we are taught to fear because of violence that could happen to us.”Elsewhere in Texas, at the San Antonio immigration court earlier this month, a toddler dressed in pink and white overalls ran gleefully around the drab waiting room. Far more chairs than people lined the room’s perimeter, as if more attendees had been expected. A constantly multitasking employee at the front window bowed her head in frustration as the caller she was speaking to kept asking more questions. Self-help legal pamphlets hung on the wall – a reminder that the representation rate for people in immigration proceedings has plummeted in recent years, and the vast majority of migrants are navigating the deportation process with little to no expert help.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn one of the courtrooms, a family took their seats before the judge. Their seven-year-old boy pulled his shirt over his nose, his arms inside the arm holes. The government attorney sitting with a can of Dr Pepper on her desk promptly told the judge she had a motion to introduce, even as the family filed their asylum applications. She wanted to dismiss their cases, she said, as it was no longer in the government’s best interest to proceed.The judge said no. She scheduled the family for their final hearings just over a year later. And she warned them, carefully, that Ice might approach them as soon as they left her courtroom. What happened next, she said, was not in her control.Her last words to the family: “Good luck.”Men in bulletproof vests were hanging around in the hallway, but the family safely made it into the elevator and left the courthouse for the parking lot. Stephanie Spiro, associate director of protection-based relief at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), said that for the most part, Ice is leaving families with children alone (with notable exceptions). It’s “single adults” they’re after, people who often have loved ones in the US depending on them, but whose immigration cases involve them alone, she said.A few days later, two such adults – a man and a woman – separately went before a different immigration judge in San Antonio, whose courtroom had signs encouraging people to “self-deport”, the Trump administration’s phrase for leaving the country voluntarily before being removed.The government attorney that day moved to dismiss both the man’s and the woman’s cases, which the judge granted, dismissing the man’s case even before the government attorney had given a reason why.Using a Turkish interpreter, the judge then told the man it was likely that immigration authorities would try to put him into expedited removal – despite the fact that he had entered the US more than two years earlier.Soon after, the woman – who had been in the country for nearly four years – went before the court without a lawyer. The judge tried to explain to her what might happen if her case were dismissed, but as he finished, she admitted in Spanish: “I haven’t understood much of what you’ve told me.”View image in fullscreenThe woman went on to say that she was deep in the process of applying for a visa for victims of serious crimes in the US – a visa that provides a pathway to citizenship. But the judge was upset with her for not also filing an asylum application, and he threatened to order her repatriated. It was the government attorney who “saved” her, the judge said, by requesting the case be dismissed instead.As soon as the woman walked out of the courtroom, agents approached her and directed her out of the hallway, into a small room. Around the same time, outside the building, men wearing gaiters over their faces ushered a group of people into a white bus, presumably to be transported to detention.Spiro of the NIJC, meanwhile, works in Chicago and said she and fellow advocates have documented Ice officers in plainclothes coming to immigration court there with a list of whom they’re targeting – and court attendees are apprehended whether or not their case is dismissed.“People are getting detained regardless,” Spiro added. “And once they’re detained, it makes it just so much harder to put forth their claim.”Migrants picked up at the court in Chicago have been sent to Missouri, Florida and Texas – to detention spaces that still have capacity, but also to where judges are more likely to side with the Trump administration for speedier deportations. Many of them end up far from their loved ones, and a lag in Ice’s publicly accessible online detainee locator has meant some of them have at times essentially disappeared.As word of mouth has spread among immigrant communities in Chicago about these arrests, the once bustling court has gone eerily quiet, Spiro said. That, in turn, could have its own serious consequences, as no-shows for hearings are often ordered deported.“They don’t want to leave their house because of the detentions that are happening,” Spiro said of Chicago’s immigrants. “So to go to court, and to go anywhere – they don’t want to come to our office. To go anywhere where there’s federal agents and where they know Ice is trying to detain you is just terrifying beyond, you know, most people’s imagination.” More

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      Joe Rogan anoints a new progressive star – can James Talarico triumph in Texas?

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      In late May, four of Texas’s top Democrats convened on Zoom to strategize about the 2026 election. The upcoming Republican primary battle for Senate pits incumbent senator John Cornyn against the state’s more right-leaning attorney general, Ken Paxton, and is expected to be bruising – greasing the skids for a potential Democratic pickup. With governor, attorney general and lieutenant governor also in play, the question the liberal quartet aimed to answer was whether they might divvy up these contests, thereby avoiding a contentious primary of their own.On the call were three fixtures of Lone Star Democratic politics: Beto O’Rourke, Colin Allred and Representative Joaquin Castro. Less well-known was the fourth man, a 36-year-old member of the state’s house of representatives from Austin’s district 50 named James Talarico. A former middle-school language arts teacher and aspiring Presbyterian minister with the earnest demeanor and yearbook-ready countenance of a young Ron Howard, Talarico had begun his political career in 2018, flipping a swing district to become the youngest member of the house. A good bit greener than his colleagues, Talarico seemed an unlikely aspirant for the Senate run.Then along came Joe Rogan.The world’s most influential podcast host had learned of Talarico from comedian Brian Simpson, who had been awestruck by a viral clip of the state senator taking a Republican colleague to task for her “idolatrous” bill forcing public schools to display the Ten Commandments. A producer reached out, and within a few weeks the virtually unknown official was stepping into Rogan’s Austin studio to offer his gloss on the radical teachings of Jesus. If the conversation was friendly – about two hours in, Rogan was practically begging Talarico to run for president – the reviews from Rogan’s right-leaning, MMA-loving fanboys were less so. Many took particular issue with Talarico’s reading of the Bible as arguably pro-choice or at least ambivalent about abortion.Even so, Daniel had entered the lion’s den and held his own. Within hours of the show’s airing, Politico was enthusing that “Joe Rogan’s Latest Guest Might Turn Texas Blue” and Talarico’s beaming choirboy mug was front and center on the Drudge Report.“I learned this when I flipped the Trump district at the beginning of my career,” Talarico said. “It’s almost like asking someone on a date, or any relationship in your life – you have to put effort into it. If we’re not going to make the effort to show up in these places where people are, then we can’t be surprised when they don’t make the effort to get off the couch and vote for us.”The week marked a notable turnaround for a politician who just a few years ago hit what he calls his political “rock bottom”. It was the fall of 2021, a year that had begun with the January 6 insurrection and a catastrophic winter storm that killed hundreds of Texans. Meanwhile, “Maga” was ascendant in the Lone Star state. Officials rammed through the nation’s most unforgiving abortion ban, legalized permitless carry and implemented a new civics curriculum Talarico describes as a “historical whitewash”.Then came an aggressive attempt to curtail voting rights that led him and dozens of Democratic lawmakers to flee the state in an attempt to deny the legislature a quorum. After 38 days, Talarico was among a handful who saw the writing on the wall and returned to Austin. As he explained in a lengthy op-ed, Texas Democrats held a dwindling stack of cards, and Congress would need to address the problem at the federal level. (The House delivered, but the bill failed in the Senate due to opposition from senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema.)Despite Talarico’s hopes that ending the standoff might preserve a modicum of bipartisanship, it was not to be. In October, the legislature voted to redraw the state’s congressional districts – an attempt to dilute the political power of Black and Latino voters and “kill me off politically”, he said. “Walking on to that floor and realizing that my [Republican] colleagues weren’t looking me in the eye, I felt like I had lost hope, not just in my colleagues and the institution, but in whether democracy was even possible in such polarized and divided times. It was my lowest point in public service so far.”Overcoming an urge to pack it in, he opted to fight. As it happened, a seat in solid-blue Austin, where he’d grown up, was open. Talarico moved home and won handily. (Now, Texan Republicans are contemplating another redistricting as a way to further dilute the Democratic vote. “Clearly their gerrymandering didn’t hold from five years ago, and so now they’re having to get back in there and do some touch-ups and fortifying,” Talarico said.)Following his crisis of political faith, he made another critical life decision, enrolling in the seminary with the goal of becoming a minister. “Jesus gave us these two commandments, to love God and love your neighbor,” he explained, noting that he considers his political career a vehicle for doing the latter. Now he understood: the two injunctions went hand in hand. Getting in touch with God, “or whatever you consider to be the ground of your being”, is what Talarico says makes love of neighbor sustainable. “Whether that’s in public service, as a teacher or a nurse or a firefighter or a police officer, or whether it’s with activism or volunteering or just being a good person in your community, it is difficult and sometimes exhausting work, and that’s why we have to be connected to something deeper.”An outspoken progressive Christian is something of a unicorn in today’s political environment – a sign not only of the secularism that has characterized the Democratic party since the Reagan years but of the ever-increasing ties between the far right and the evangelical movement. Perhaps nowhere is this alliance more pronounced than in Texas, where the last legislative session saw a flurry of bills that would, among other things, allow prayer in public schools, fund parochial schools with taxpayer money and outlaw the provision of litter boxes for students – an actual bill based on a debunked rightwing hoax. The latter proposal stalled after Talarico’s polite if methodical humiliation of the bill’s author became one of his many viral TikToks; the others, including the Ten Commandments bill, became law.Talarico has done more than simply oppose what he considers to be bad legislation. He regularly calls out fossil fuel barons Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who backed the legislative crusade. “They basically own every Republican member of the state senate,” he said, noting that they are by far the state’s biggest political donors. “They own a majority of Republicans in the state house. They own every statewide elected official. And they run a massive network of thinktanks and advocacy organizations and media outlets. So their empire has really taken over state government. And they have a pretty extreme theocratic vision for for the state and the country.” Asked whether a Handmaid’s Tale-style dystopia seemed possible, he said, “We’re a lot closer than people think.”Talarico defines the effort to wed government with biblical ideology as Christian nationalism, “the worship of power – social power, economic power, political power, in the name of Christ”, as he put it in a 2023 guest sermon. Accusing adherents of turning Jesus “into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fear-mongering fascist,” he declared it “incumbent on all Christians to confront it and denounce it”. Posted to YouTube, the sermon has since garnered 1m views.The question now is not merely whether Talarico can translate that kind of social media buzz into votes but whether he wants to. He expects to obtain his master’s in divinity next year, and he often speaks of his desire to one day take over the ministry at his home church, St Andrew’s Presbyterian.But a slight detour to the US Senate seems increasingly possible – an indication of his growing popularity and ambition as well as a notable vibe shift on the left. A recent poll found that 62% of Democrats wanted their party’s leadership replaced. And a strong contingent has shown a hunger for candidates, such as Talarico, who are willing to lean into progressive values without apology (he has, for example, mounted a forceful defense of gender-affirming care for trans kids).While Talarico makes a strong case for the undercurrent of wealth redistribution inherent in Jesus’ teachings, he doesn’t call himself a socialist – certainly not in Texas. Still it’s not hard to see parallels between his meteoric rise and that of New York City’s socialist mayoral hopeful, Zohran Mamdani, another young state legislator whose online savvy, bold progressivism and evident sincerity have endeared him to liberal voters. (In 2019, Talarico walked across his 25-mile district – nearly double the distance of Mamdani’s recent Manhattan hike.)For Talarico, the key to winning over the electorate is authenticity. “Voters can sniff out that consultant-driven messaging,” he said. “The poll-tested stuff is just not going to cut it.”Moreover, voters are spoiling for a fight. One quality they appreciated in Trump, he said, was the aggression he’d shown on behalf of his vision, however malevolent. Democrats, he said, need to bring that kind of energy to the fight for a better world. And while Jesus Christ was famous for his humility and pacifism, Talarico noted, he was also an uncompromising radical who could tap into a combative side when needed.“If we are doing our best to mimic Jesus, being kind and humble and meek are all part of it,” he said. “But when the powerful are abusing people, we have to stand in the way, and that requires courage and bravery, and speaking truth to power.”In late June, Talarico appeared at a town hall in San Antonio alongside Castro and O’Rourke, a show of unity before what may well turn into a heated primary race. Befitting his status as the youngest and least seasoned politician on the stage, he spoke first. But as Talarico recalled the story of Jesus’s cleansing of the temple, when he ejected the money-changers and merchants from the Lord’s house, he didn’t sound like a man inclined meekly to wait his turn to run for higher office. “To those who love democracy, to those who love our neighbors,” he proclaimed, “it’s time to start flipping tables.”As for the Senate race, Talarico is praying on it. He’ll make a decision this summer, he said. More