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      Dallas lives with JFK legacy – but hate that spawned assassination simmers

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      The brick walls are painted white. Dozens of cardboard boxes marked “Books” are stacked like a barricade on grimy floorboards. At the south-east corner window, the boxes appear to form a sniper’s perch. It was here 60 years ago on Wednesday that, by official accounts, Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots heard around the world.The assassination of John F Kennedy, the 35th US president, shone an unforgiving light on Dallas, Texas, which came to be known as the “city of hate”. Six decades later, the city has grown beyond recognition and come a long way in grappling with that legacy. But the forces that turned Dealey Plaza into a white hot crucible are arguably more prevalent than ever.A 24-hour news cycle; gun violence; casual accusations of treason; rightwing extremism and Confederate flags; conspiracy theories and distrust of authority – all are part of the story of the Kennedy assassination and, perhaps more than when the 40th or 50th anniversaries were commemorated, all are newly resonant today.“The political climate now is like the closed-minded climate that was in Dallas at the time of the assassination where people believe what they believe,” said Carolyn Barta, 84, a veteran journalist born and raised in Dallas. “‘If you didn’t believe that, you were wrong and I’m not considering your opinion or how you see things.’ It’s the same sort of condition that is now prevalent in the country and it’s frightening.”In the 1960 presidential election, Dallas had voted for the Republican Richard Nixon over Democrat Kennedy by the biggest margin of any major city. Kennedy’s civil rights bill, introduced in 1963, was unpopular in the south. In the nine months before his Texas swing, he received more than 400 death threats nationwide.In Dallas, the buckle on the Bible belt, the hostility was a toxic mix of racism, anti-communism and religious bigotry aimed at America’s first Catholic president – some feared that Kennedy was being controlled by the pope. Extremist groups such as the John Birch Society and the Minutemen were small but vociferous.Mike Rawlings, a Democrat who was mayor of Dallas from 2011 to 2019, said: “There was definitely a very conservative bent. The John Birchers were the worst of it but still there was a lot of folks that were that way. It was the Tea Party and Maga [Make America great again] before the Tea Party and Maga.”The rightwing firebrand Edwin Walker, a former army general who in 1962 was charged (but not convicted) with “insurrection and seditious conspiracy”, moved his base of operations to the city. A protest flyer circulating Dallas in 1963 had photos of Kennedy with the headline: “Wanted for treason.”Bill Minutaglio, a journalist and co-author of Dallas 1963, which examines the extremist elements of the time, also sees modern parallels. “People say you could change the title of that book to ‘United States 2023’ because of a lot of the polarisation and anger and vituperative nature of the political discourse. The social commentary that seemed to be redolent and pervasive back then sure seems to be in existence today.“There was an extreme amount of anger and hate in the city of Dallas in 1963 but it was marshalled by a small minority of people. They just happened to be people that held what I call the public microphone. They had access to the airwaves, church pulpits, newspapers, political forums and they were angry and they were hateful – there’s just no other word for it. They seemed to have cornered the market in terms of the social climate.”There had been hints of danger in Dallas. Four days before the 1960 election, Kennedy’s running mate, Lyndon Johnson, was heckled by protesters who spat in the direction of his wife, Lady Bird, and grabbed her gloves and threw them in a gutter. A month before Kennedy’s visit in 1963, the UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, was spat on and hit on the head with a placard, prompting some advisers to warn Kennedy to stay away.And on the day of the president’s arrival, the Dallas Morning News newspaper contained a full-page, black-bordered advertisement that included 12 rhetorical questions that accused Kennedy of being soft on communism and betraying US allies. Kennedy reportedly read the ad and remarked to his wife Jacqueline, “we’re headed into nut country”.But oligarchs in Dallas, aware of the dangers, had called for a dignified reception for Kennedy and tried to tighten security. About 200,000 people came out to watch the motorcade and give the first couple an effusive welcome, waving signs and flags including the Confederate flag. As they neared Dealey Plaza, Governor John Connally’s wife, Nellie, told Kennedy: “Mr President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”The presidential limousine turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza at around 12.30pm. As it passed below the Texas School Book Depository, gunfire suddenly erupted from a window on the sixth floor, sending onlookers diving and running. Bullets struck the president’s neck and head and he slumped over toward Jacqueline. Governor Connally was shot in the back but survived.The car sped off to Parkland Memorial hospital a few minutes away. A Catholic priest was summoned to administer the last rites and, and at 1pm, the 46-year-old Kennedy was pronounced dead, sending shockwaves around the world. In Britain, Big Ben tolled every minute for an hour and lights dimmed in Piccadilly Circus; in Germany, 60,000 West Berliners held an impromptu torchlight parade.The death of a president gave birth to the 24-hour news cycle as, for the first time, major TV and radio networks cancelled regular programming to provide wall-to-wall coverage of preparations for Kennedy’s funeral and the criminal investigation in Dallas. Hundreds of reporters crammed into the police headquarters, where Oswald held a bizarre press conference and was subsequently shot dead on live television by a nightclub owner, Jack Ruby.That incident sealed Dallas’s fate. The New York Times newspaper described it as “not too many decades removed from the vigilante tradition of the old frontier” (even today, around the corner from Dealey Plaza, Wild Bill’s Western Store sells parody pistols and bullets with the slogan: “We don’t call 911.”)Patricia Puckett-Hall, 71, who remembers Oswald helping her with homework when he rented a room from his grandmother, and who now runs the Oswald Rooming House Museum, said: “The country renamed Dallas the ‘city of hate’ and for about 20 years we could not get tourists to come to Dallas. We couldn’t get conventioneers, we couldn’t get new industry to come to the Dallas area.“We were truly taboo economically and there were thousands of stories where family or businessmen would go north-east and the cab driver, being friendly, would say where you from? If they made the mistake of saying Dallas, the driver would pull over, throw their things on the sidewalk and leave them wherever they were. The word got passed through the grapevine: do not tell them you’re from Dallas.”Within the city, there were attempts to bury the stigma. Some wanted to demolish the book depository. Mary Kay Ash, a cosmetics entrepreneur, told CBS in 1984: “I think what we should have done is tear that building down, not put up that plaza, not do anything to commemorate it and make a parking lot of out of that thing and not have it there for people to remember.”But the book depository was saved and, after much soul searching, the Sixth Floor Museum opened there in 1989. The sniper’s perch at the corner window is recreated based on crime scene photos and encased in glass. Other exhibits include an Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle identical to the one found by investigators, Oswald’s wedding ring, Ruby’s grey fedora hat and a scale model of Dealey Plaza built by the FBI, complete with strings tracing the paths of the bullets.Neither the Warren Commission nor a congressional select committee found any evidence of a plot from extremist rightwing groups or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). But the assassination has spawned a thousand conspiracy theories that Oswald did not act alone, boosted by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK and QAnon.Nicola Longford, the British-born chief executive of the Sixth Floor Museum, said: “We do stay neutral. We don’t tell you what to believe. We present the facts and some people might want to dispute those facts. We always hope that there will be new information that will come forward but so far all the conspiracy theories, and the popular ones, can easily be debunked.”The museum has collected almost 2,500 oral histories and is still collecting them from eyewitnesses, some of whom have stayed silent for decades. Before the coronavirus pandemic, it had more than 400,000 visitors a year; in the last fiscal year, when it opened five days a week, it had 265,000. There is also a daily flow of tourists through Dealey Plaza, with some posing for photos on the infamous “grassy knoll”.Meanwhile, two factors were important in rebuilding Dallas’s reputation. The Dallas Cowboys American football team enjoyed success and were dubbed “America’s team”. The TV soap Dallas ran from 1978 to 1991, starring Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy, enjoying worldwide success and turning outsiders’ first question from “Who shot JFK?” to “Who shot JR?”When Dallas, and the world, marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination in 2013, many found it a cathartic experience. For Rawlings, 69, the former mayor, who delivered a speech during a solemn ceremony at Dealey Plaza, it was an opportunity to research and reflect on the city’s trajectory.He said: “There was a psychosis that the city went through, there’s no question and a real questioning of where you’re from,” he said. “Look, we’re all from someplace it stays with us. Proust said the past is never in the past; it’s with us all the time and it definitely was through the 60s and 70s and as we grew.“But what I understood much better is how Dallas got on with it much quicker than I would have ever thought. It was like: it happened, we had to deal with it. There were some issues but we’ve got to take the future in our hands and do something with it as opposed to kind of stewing in our own pity and guilt.”A decade later, the city is looking forward rather than back. Dallas-Fort Worth is one of the America’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, drawing business looking to expand or relocate, and has the world’s second busiest airport. Increasingly young and cosmopolitan, it is on course to overtake the Chicago area to become the third most-populous metro within the decade.Only a fraction of residents can remember the Kennedy assassination now and there is no official commemoration planned for Wednesday. The former police headquarters, now a law school, recently opened an exhibition that shows Oswald’s jail cell, interrogation room and final steps, but it is by invitation only and not open to the public.But as Dallas finally moves on from 22 November 1963, America is sliding back into distrust, polarisation and violence. A mob driven to a frenzy by President Donald Trump’s election lies stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021; a man last year broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband with a hammer.Minutaglio, author of a new book, A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas, said: “I’ve met some people of Dallas who truly are not surprised by the political environment today because they saw it back then.“They saw the consequence of how people can spread conspiracy theories and supercharge things and just turn the temperature up so high that it becomes an explosive and cancerous and frightening environment. Sadly, I don’t know that we learned a lot of the lessons from back then so we keep repeating the same mistakes of letting extremism fester and then multiply.”Rawlings, who now works in private equity, added: “To me the most fascinating part of the relevancy today – because I don’t believe in a conspiracy theory – is that this sort of vitriol can turn into mental illness so quickly. Someone in Maine can kill people in a bowling alley or people feel alienated and they go into a church private school in Nashville and shoot people.“Everything we do can create this and it did back then and Lee Harvey Oswald pops up. I don’t think there was a big belief that we need to kill Kennedy but there was just that river of hate that’s in us all and, sometimes, people pop up and do bad things.” More

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      Texas: Republican-controlled school board votes against climate textbooks

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      Texas’s Republican-controlled education board voted Friday not to include several climate textbooks in the state science curriculum.The 15-member board rejected seven out of 12 for eighth-graders. The approved textbooks are published by Savvas Learning Company, McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Accelerate Learning and Summit K-12.The rejected textbooks included climate-crisis policy solutions, and conservative board members criticized them for being too negative about fossil fuels – a major industry in the state. Texas leads the nation in the production of crude oil and natural gas.Although Texas adopted standards in 2021 that requires eighth-graders be taught the basics about climate change, some argue that measure does not go far enough.Aaron Kinsey, a Republican board member and executive of an oilfield services company in west Texas, criticized photos in some textbooks as unduly besmirching the oil and gas industry during a discussion of the materials this week.“The selection of certain images can make things appear worse than they are, and I believe there was bias,” Kinsey said, according to Hearst Newspapers.“You want to see children smiling in oilfields?” said Democratic board member Aicha Davis. “I don’t know what you want.”Texas’s 1,000-plus school districts are not required to use board-approved textbooks. But the board’s decision wields influence.Some in powerful positions have tried to sway the board to reject the textbooks. On 1 November, Texas railroad commissioner Wayne Christian – who oversees the state’s oil and gas industry – sent a letter to the education board’s chairman Kevin Ellis, relaying “concerns for potential textbooks that could promote a radical environmentalist agenda”.Also contested was the inclusion of lessons on evolution – the theory addressing the origins of human existence which the scientific community supports and religious groups reject.The decision comes despite pleas from the National Science Teaching Association to not “allow misguided objections to evolution and climate change” to affect the adoption of new textbooks.The deputy director of the National Center on Science Education, Glenn Branch, said: “Members of the board are clearly motivated to take some of these textbooks off of the approved list because of their personal and ideological beliefs regarding evolution and climate change.”Texas is one of six states that has not adopted the Next Generation Science Standards in its K-12 science curriculum. The standards underscore that climate change is a real threat caused by humans and can be mitigated by a reduction in greenhouse gases.Texas has seen some of the most extreme effects of the worsening climate crisis in recent years. According to the Texas state climatologist, John Nielsen-Gammon, the summer of 2023 was the second hottest on record, after 2011.In 2021, Texas experienced an unprecedented winter storm that blanketed much of the state in snow, left millions without power after the electrical grid failed, and resulted in deaths. Houston also bore the wrath of 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, a devastating category 4 hurricane that destroyed homes and buildings while leading to the deaths of more than 100 people in Texas.The states ranks 41st out of 50 in the US.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Texas legislators pass hardline immigration bill denounced as racist

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      The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, is expected to sign a bill that would make crossing into the state without documentation a crime, one of the harshest immigration policies in the US to date.The bill, SB 4, was passed by the Texas house and is awaiting final approval from Abbott.On Wednesday, Abbott said that he looked forward to signing the bill, in a post to X, formally known as Twitter.“I look forward to signing Senate Bill 4, which creates penalties for illegal entry into Texas & authorizes the removal of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border,” Abbott said.In recent months, Abbott, a Republican, has launched a series of controversial programs targeting migrants, including bussing migrants to Democratic-led cities without proper coordination and Operation Lone Star, a multimillion-dollar initiative that has placed razor wire and thousands of troops at the Texas-Mexico border.SB 4 makes it unlawful for anyone to cross into Texas from another country without papers a state misdemeanor that is punishable by up to two years in prison.The law also requires a state judge to order a person to return to the country they crossed from in lieu of prosecution.If a person refuses to return, they could face a felony charge and up to 20 years in prison.The bill also gives Texas officers the ability to arrest anyone who they believe has crossed into the state illegally, a fact that advocates and Democrats have decried as racist.Legal advocates have questioned the bill’s legality, as removing noncitizens from the US falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Experts have also warned that the new bill could cause a dispute with Mexico, as the country and others could choose not to cooperate with state officials.Democratic Texas representatives and advocates soundly denounced the bill as problematic and a waste of state funds.The Texas representative Jolanda Jones called SB 4 and its supporters “racist”.“It’s not all right to be racist. I will stop pulling the race card when you stop being racist,” she said.The Texas representative Ramón Romero Jr posted a video on social media denouncing the passing of SB 4 and emphasizing the importance of winning elections.“We fought really hard but sadly on issues like this, their ears are closed on the other side,” Romero said in a video posted to X, referring to Republicans. “We can say anything and they’re just not listening.”In a statement to X, the Texas Civil Rights Project, a social justice non-profit, said the bill was “creating an entirely new, separate, unequal immigration system in the US” and allowing police to “be both judge and jury to determine a person’s right to stay in the US”.Immigrant rights organizations also rallied outside of the Texas House on Tuesday to protest the vote on SB 4.SB 4 was considered as apart of a separate legislative session requested by Abbott for several anti-immigration bills. More

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      Cody Smith Wins Uvalde Mayor Race

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      Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter was killed last year in a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, lost a special election to become mayor of a city that has struggled with divisions in the aftermath of the tragedy, The Associated Press reported.Cody Smith, a former mayor of Uvalde, will return to the office after running a campaign that called for honoring the lives of the 19 students and two teachers who died in the massacre, while focusing on moving the city forward.Mr. Smith, a senior vice president at First State Bank of Uvalde, was first elected to the City Council in 1994, and then as mayor in 2008 and in 2010. In his campaign, he also called for better communications among police agencies and mobilizing volunteers from the community to help those in need.During her campaign, many voters responded to Ms. Mata-Rubio’s many tributes to the daughter she lost, Lexi Rubio, whose image and favorite color were enshrined on some of her mother’s campaign materials. Ms. Mata-Rubio demanded more accountability for the slow police response to the shooting and advocated stronger gun laws, in addition to calling for more attention to fixing roads and adding stop signs.In third place was an art teacher, Veronica Martinez, who did little campaigning.Ms. Mata-Rubio and Ms. Martinez had been vying to become the first woman and the third Latino to lead the city of 15,000, where Hispanic residents are a majority.The special election was called after the current mayor, Don McLaughlin, announced that he was leaving City Hall to run for a Texas House seat. Mr. Smith’s term will last one year; another election for a full four-year term will happen next year.During the midterm elections, voters in Uvalde County, which also includes six small towns, similarly chose not to support politicians who called for police accountability and more restrictions on guns, delivering a political blow to the victims’ families who had campaigned on their behalf.Mr. Smith will take office on Nov. 14. More

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      ‘We Still Don’t Have Answers’: A Uvalde Mother Is Running for Mayor

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      After her daughter was killed in a mass shooting in Uvalde, Kimberly Mata-Rubio figured it was time to get answers and help her city heal.On a recent Saturday morning, a day after what would have been Lexi Rubio’s 12th birthday, dozens gathered in the Texas city of Uvalde for a run in her honor. Blasting Lexi’s playlist, Kimberly Mata-Rubio, her mother, took off from under a towering mural of Lexi, one of 19 children and two teachers killed in a shooting at her school last year.This was more than a fund-raising run for charity — it was also a campaign event of sorts, as Ms. Mata-Rubio and the other competitors made their way past a series of signs in yellow (Lexi’s favorite color) announcing her candidacy for mayor.Ms. Mata-Rubio, a former news reporter, would be the first woman and only the third Latino to lead the Hispanic majority city, one that has been bitterly divided in the aftermath of one of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings.Her campaign, in which she is vying with a veteran local politician and an elementary school art teacher, often prominently features her daughter’s favorite color and reminders of a tragedy that many would prefer to leave in the past.Ms. Mata-Rubio said she understood immediately that everybody in the small town of 15,000 people had lost something, if not a loved one, then certainly a sense of security. Like other parents, she complained that the authorities had released confusing and often conflicting information that made it hard to understand why they took more than an hour to confront and kill the gunman.Ms. Mata-Rubio, second from right, said she understood immediately that everybody in the small town of 15,000 people had lost something, if not a loved one, then a sense of security.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesUvalde has been bitterly divided in the aftermath of one of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings.Sergio Flores for The New York TimesThe Uvalde parents also pushed for a ban on assault weapons like the one used in the attack on Robb Elementary School. The issue prompted deep divisions in a rural town renowned for white-tailed deer hunting, where many households have guns and rifles are a regular prize at school raffles.But as president of Lives Robbed, an organization made up of mothers and grandmothers of the Uvalde victims, Ms. Mata-Rubio has organized rallies, flown to Washington and sat through legislative hearings in Austin. And it did not feel like she was doing enough.When she saw an opening to run for mayor, she texted her husband, Felix, asking for advice.“You’re Lexi’s mom,” he replied. “You can do it.”For her, the mission is clear.“We still don’t have answers. We still don’t know what role everyone played then and what role everyone is playing now,” she said of the many ongoing investigations into the delayed police response by the local district attorney and others.She said she also wants to bring the town together over the still-contentious issues of assault weapons, and whether police officers who failed to confront the Uvalde gunman should be fired or face criminal charges.“I want to have the difficult conversations so that everybody feels heard,” Ms. Mata-Rubio said. “I’m going to be raising my children in this community. I want to bring the community back together again.”Felix Rubio, Ms. Rubio’s husband, and their daughter, Jahleela.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesIf Ms. Mata-Rubio were to win, she would become the first woman to lead the city.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesShe is running against a veteran local politician who hopes to return to office, Cody Smith, and an elementary school art teacher, Veronica Martinez, who have said during their campaigns that they not only want to bring Uvalde back from the nightmare of the shooting, but also to focus on other issues.In the most recent election in Uvalde County, which includes the county seat and six other small towns, voters largely failed to support politicians who backed more control on guns, delivering a political blow to the families of the victims who campaigned on their behalf. But a much narrower pool of voters will decide the mayor’s race, those who live within in Uvalde itself.Ms. Mata-Rubio’s campaign raised the most money in the 30-day period that ended in September, $80,000 to Mr. Smith’s $50,000, according to the most recent campaign finance report filings, with many of her donations coming from out of town. Ms. Martinez has not sought contributions.The Nov. 7 election, with early voting this week, was called after the current mayor, Don McLaughlin, announced he was leaving City Hall to run for a Texas House seat. The winner will need to run for a full four-year term in 2024.Veronica Martinez, an art teacher at Dalton Elementary School, said she hopes to create an open-door culture in a City Hall that often does not feel inviting to residents.Sergio Flores for The New York TimesCody Smith, a former mayor and a senior vice president at First State Bank of Uvalde, was first elected to the City Council in 1994 and also served as mayor in 2008 and 2010.Sergio Flores for The New York TimesIf Ms. Mata-Rubio or Ms. Martinez were to win, they would become the third mayor of Hispanic ancestry and the first woman to lead the city.George Garza, 85, who in the 1990s became the second Hispanic mayor, said the city’s Hispanic majority has often gone unrecognized in city politics. “Representation is important,” he said.Mr. Smith, a former mayor and a senior vice president at First State Bank of Uvalde, was first elected to the City Council in 1994 and also served as mayor in 2008 and 2010. He declined to be interviewed, but has called for supporting better communication between law enforcement agencies.Ms. Martinez, said she supports in principle some form of an assault rifle ban, but said the city must also focus on local issues that affect everyone, like lowering what people pay in property taxes on their homes.She said she hopes to change the culture in a City Hall that often does not feel inviting to residents.“Maybe I can effect some change, and do some good by having an open-door policy,” she said.Some voters like Amanda Juarez, 42, a teacher’s assistant, want to see a fresh face in city government, but she said that she worries that Ms. Mata-Rubio may focus too much on the tragedy and gun control issues. She said she appreciates Ms. Martinez’s calls for lowering taxes on property like her mobile home, whose assessed value recently went up by several thousand dollars for no apparent reason. “We need people who are going to solve our issues at the local level,” she said.Ms. Mata-Rubio, right, and her campaign manager, Laura Barberena, preparing for the Labor Day weekend parade in Uvalde in September.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesSome voters want to see a fresh face in city government. “We need people who are going to solve our issues at the local level,” said voter, Amanda Juarez.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesTo help win over voters interested in such grass-roots issues, Ms. Mata-Rubio has been knocking on doors and handing over yellow campaign signs and cards with her key campaign issues: Bring People Together, Protect Our History and Boost Our Economy.Moments after taking part in Lexi’s Legacy Run, as it was called, Ms. Mata-Rubio canvassed the streets and she ran into Antonia Rios, 80, a potential voter who was excited to see her. “No te conocía. I didn’t know you. You are very young,” Ms. Rios said, combining English and Spanish as many do in this town 60 miles east of the border with Mexico. “Yo voto por ti. I’ll vote for you.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      A Deal for Aid Into Gaza, and More

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      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.Trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egyptian NGOs for Palestinians wait for the reopening of the Rafah crossing at the Egyptian side, to enter Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.ReutersOn Today’s Episode:Deal Lays Groundwork for Aid to Reach Desperate Gazans, Officials Say, with Vivian YeeBiden Lays Out Stakes for America as He Seeks Aid for Israel and UkraineTexas Has Bused 50,000 Migrants. Now It Wants to Arrest Them Instead., with J. David GoodmanEli Cohen More

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      Ted Cruz faces new Senate challenge as Democrat attracts huge fundraising haul

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      The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz spent time last weekend hobnobbing with Liz Truss, the shortest-serving British prime minister – but news closer to home suggested he might have reason to fear for his own job security.As reported by the Dallas Morning News and the Texas Tribune, the Democratic congressman Colin Allred, Cruz’s most likely opponent for re-election next year, reported $10.9m raised since declaring his candidacy in May.That was nearly 20 times as much as Allred’s closest Democratic rival, but it was also, the papers said, almost $2m more than fundraising reported by Cruz in the same period.The hard-right Republican – who was elected to the Senate in 2012, prompted a government shutdown in 2013 and ran for president in 2016 – reportedly raised $8.8m in the same period.In an email to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Cruz contested the reported figures, pointing to a Fox News report earlier in October which said the senator “brought in $5.4m during the July-September third quarter of 2023 fundraising … up from the $4.4m he raised during the April-June second quarter of fundraising and the $1.8m he brought in during the first three months of 2023.“… The Cruz campaign says they entered October with over $6.7m cash on hand.”Either way, Allred, a former Tennessee Titans NFL linebacker elected to Congress from his native Dallas in 2018, presents a formidable figure.Revelling in the show of fundraising muscle, Allred’s campaign manager, Paige Hutchinson, told the Texas Tribune: “Texans’ enthusiasm to retire Ted Cruz – and to elect Colin Allred to the Senate – is reflected in this quarter’s amazing outpouring of grassroots support.”Allred does seem set to breeze to victory in the Democratic primary and therefore advance to challenge Cruz. His party, however, has had its hopes dashed in Texas before.In 2018, Beto O’Rourke, then a congressman, mounted a strong challenge to Cruz but fell short. O’Rourke parlayed resulting prominence in national progressive circles into a campaign for president in 2020 but that and a run for governor of Texas two years later also ended in disappointment.On Saturday, meanwhile, Cruz tweeted a photograph of himself with his wife, Heidi Cruz, and Truss.“We are so grateful for our British friends and for strong leaders on the global stage who will champion conservative principles and defend liberty,” Cruz said.Truss thanked the Cruzes for their “warm welcome in Houston” and said: “It’s vital that conservatives win the battle of ideas both in the US and UK. The time is now.”Truss was prime minister for 49 days last September and October. Historically speaking, that made her the shortest-serving PM of all. In terms of pop culture, as promoted by the Daily Star, a tabloid newspaper, she lasted less time than a lettuce. More

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      Biden’s border wall won’t fix a broken immigration system – or deter migrants

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      The Biden administration’s plan to erect a new section of border wall is disappointing not only because it contradicts a campaign promise, nor just because physical barriers are a return to the same tired policy responses of the Trump era.Rather, this week’s news around the project – slated for a rural region along the Texas-Mexico border – is upsetting most of all because it stands in stark contrast to the solutions the US immigration system needs right now.Even the highest walls often do not deter desperate migrants and asylum seekers from trying to reach the US. That was true during the previous administration, and it remains true today. Instead, those barriers leave people who cross anyway at higher risk of injury and death, contributing to a growing list of casualties that has turned the US-Mexico border into the world’s most lethal land migration route.Already, blowback to renewed border wall construction has been swift and intense. Representative Henry Cuellar, Biden’s fellow Democrat whose large south Texas district includes the county with the new planned barriers, called it “a 14th-century solution to a 21st-century problem”. To conservation advocates, it means bulldozing “irreplaceable” habitats. Some of the local communities say it feels like “a slap in the face” that will “punish the most innocent”.And, for national immigration advocates, it is yet another letdown that demonstrates a disregard for human dignity within a larger broken immigration system.Given the absence of legislative reforms, and given pressure on the Biden administration to reduce irregular migration, the US-Mexico border is chaotic these days, though not necessarily in the way most Americans think.In the name of deterrence, people fleeing for their lives who might otherwise qualify for asylum are being presumed ineligible because of how they arrived, under a policy that has already been ruled unlawful yet remains in place. Many thousands of non-Mexicans are suddenly being sent back across the border to Mexico, a foreign country where they likely have next to no support or contacts, and where they face grave danger of sexual assault, kidnappings, extortion and other violence.In light of a humanitarian emergency and political repression in Venezuela, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has allowed Venezuelans who made it here by the end of July to access deportation protections and work authorization. Yet Venezuelans arriving today can be directly deported to the same authoritarian regime where US officials explicitly acknowledged a few weeks ago that people could not safely return.Similarly, the Biden administration continues to repatriate Haitians, even as it tells Americans and non-emergency government personnel to depart Haiti for security reasons.Meanwhile, DHS has removed or returned over 36,000 migrant family members in the last few months – more than in any previous full fiscal year. The unluckiest of asylum seekers, families included, are being put through particularly fast-tracked deportations, where they often confront a higher bar to qualify for protection and have almost no time to prepare their case.This tangle of convoluted policies demonstrates why more walls are not the answer that the US’s immigration policy strategy needs: it’s already a labyrinth. Barrier after barrier – some more visible than others, but all formidable – work together to confuse, limit and disqualify people trying to reach the US.Even so, the restrictions have not stopped newcomers.Border patrol documented over 181,000 migrant encounters between official ports of entry at the US-Mexico border in August. That number is expected to rise in September, with early estimates showing roughly 210,000 apprehensions last month, according to CBS News.To try to get here, little girls cry as they crawl beneath razor wire, and in some of the most tragic cases, kids are dying. Amid this humanitarian emergency, a sprawling border wall – to use Biden’s own words – “is not a serious policy solution”. Neither is the House GOP’s sweeping but specious legislative proposal, the Secure the Border Act, which continues to take an enforcement-only approach to immigration by gutting asylum, curtailing other existing lawful pathways, establishing new criminal penalties, and more.There’s so much work Democrats and Republicans – the White House and Congress – should take up. For one, the Biden administration could expand processing capacity at official ports of entry and let more migrants in there, even if they don’t have a pre-scheduled appointment through a government phone app, and without rendering them ineligible for asylum. That way, children and families could walk across an international pedestrian bridge with far less struggle than they can wade through a river or stumble through the desert.Ultimately, however, the buck stops with Congress. The best, most proactive way to keep many people from showing up at the US-Mexico border is to offer them a safer, more orderly pathway here, but such immigration avenues are in woefully short supply right now.It will take both parties working together in good faith to address border security and improve the legal immigration system, a compromise supported by the vast majority of American voters. Lawmakers can expand labor pathways, update the US’s humanitarian protections to meet 21st-century challenges, and offer permanent solutions for people who are already here contributing while stuck in a protracted legal limbo.In other words, they can fight arbitrary cruelty and chaos at the border by making our immigration system work again.
      Alexandra Villarreal is a policy and advocacy associate at the National Immigration Forum. More