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      Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw ‘virtually blind’ after eye surgery

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      The Texas Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw said on Saturday that he had undergone eye surgery and would be “effectively blind” for a month.Crenshaw, 37, is a veteran of the elite navy Seals force. He lost his right eye and sustained damage to his left eye in Afghanistan in 2012, when a bomb exploded.“The blast from 2012 caused a cataract, excessive tissue damage, and extensive damage to my retina,” Crenshaw said in a statement. “It was always a possibility that the effects of the damage to my retina would resurface, and it appears that is exactly what has happened.”Crenshaw said the retina to his left eye was found to be detaching after he went to an ophthalmologist because of dark, blurry vision, and that he underwent surgery on Friday.“The surgery went well, but I will be effectively blind for about a month,” according to Crenshaw.Crenshaw, a staunch conservative who has stoked controversy on the national stage, was re-elected in November representing Texas’ 2nd district, in the Houston area. More

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      Crystal Mason Was Sentenced to Five Years Behind Bars Because She Voted

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      The G.O.P.’s war on voting has human casualties. Here’s one.Whenever you hear Republican rants about widespread voter fraud supposedly undermining Americans’ faith in the integrity of their elections, remember the story of Crystal Mason.Ms. Mason, a 46-year-old grandmother from the Fort Worth area, has been in the news on and off since 2016, when Texas prosecutors decided she was a vote fraudster so dangerous that justice demanded she be sentenced to five years behind bars.Her offense? Visiting her local precinct on Election Day that year and casting a provisional ballot for president. Ms. Mason was not eligible to vote at the time because she was on supervised release after serving a prison term for federal tax fraud. Texas, like many states, bars those with criminal records from voting until they have finished all terms of a sentence.Ms. Mason, who had only recently returned home to her three children and had gone to the polls that day at the urging of her mother, said she did not realize she wasn’t allowed to cast a ballot. When poll workers couldn’t find her name on the rolls, they assumed it was a clerical error and suggested she fill out the provisional ballot.Provisional ballots are a useful way to deal with questions about a voter’s eligibility that can’t be resolved at the polling place. Since 2002, Congress has required that states offer them as part of the Help America Vote Act, a law passed in the aftermath of the 2000 election debacle, when millions of ballots were disqualified. Ms. Mason’s ballot was rejected as soon as a search of the database determined that she was ineligible. In other words, the system worked as it was intended to.Tarrant County prosecutors went after her for illegal voting anyway. They said she should have known she was not allowed to vote. The state had sent her a letter telling her so in 2012, shortly after she had been sentenced in the tax-fraud case. The letter was delivered to her home, even though she had already begun serving her sentence. “They sent it to the one place they knew she was not going to be,” said Alison Grinter, Ms. Mason’s lawyer.The prosecutors also pointed out that when she cast her ballot in 2016, she signed an affidavit stating that she had completed all terms of her sentence. Ms. Mason said she had not read the fine print; she was focused on writing down her address in exactly the form it appeared on her driver’s license. She was convicted after a one-day trial and sentenced to five years behind bars for casting a ballot that was never counted.“It’s a surreal experience to be in a courtroom for these trials,” said Christopher Uggen, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Minnesota who has studied the impact of felon disenfranchisement for decades, and has testified as an expert in prosecutions of people charged with illegal voting. “You’ve got the judges, you’ve got the lawyers. You’ve got somebody who often is a model probationer called in, and what’s at issue is whether they voted. I have this overriding sense of, gosh, don’t we have other crimes to prosecute? It really should be a consensus issue in a democracy that we don’t incarcerate people for voting.”Mr. Uggen said that there is a stronger case for criminal punishment of certain election-law offenses, like campaign-finance violations or sabotaging voting machines, that can do more widespread damage to our election system. But in his own work he has found that the people who get punished are more likely to fit Ms. Mason’s description: female, low-level offenders who are doing relatively well in the community. “These are not typically folks who represent some great threat to public safety,” he said.You wouldn’t get that sense from how Ms. Mason has been treated. After her voting conviction, a federal judge found she had violated the terms of her supervised release, and sentenced her to 10 extra months behind bars. That punishment, which she began serving in December 2018, earned her no credit toward her five-year state sentence.Ms. Mason has continued to fight her case, but so far she has lost at every step. In March 2020, a three-judge panel on a state appellate court rejected her challenge to her sentence. The court reasoned that she broke the law simply by trying to vote while knowing she was on supervised release. It didn’t matter whether she knew that Texas prohibits voting by people in that circumstance.This appears to be a clear misapplication of Texas election law, which criminalizes voting only by people who actually know they are not eligible, not those who, like Ms. Mason, mistakenly believe that they are. It’s as though Ms. Mason had asked a police officer what the local speed limit was, and he responded: “Beats me. Why don’t you start driving and see if we pull you over?”Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal cases, agreed to rule on Ms. Mason’s appeal. It’s her last chance to avoid prison for voting. Tossing her conviction would bring a small measure of justice to a woman whose punishment should have been limited to, at most, not being able to cast a ballot.But it wouldn’t give her back the last four years of fear and uncertainty she has endured for no good reason. Ms. Mason’s first grandchild was born a few months ago, another reminder of how much she would miss if she were to lose the appeal and end up back behind bars. “This is very overwhelming, waking up every day knowing that prison is on the line, trying to maintain a smile on your face in front of your kids and you don’t know the outcome,” Ms. Mason told The Times in an interview. “Your future is in someone else’s hands because of a simple error.”Identifying errors like these is the whole point of offering provisional ballots: The crazy quilt of voting rules and regulations that Americans face from state to state can trip up even the best-informed voters, and honest mistakes are common. By prosecuting Ms. Mason, just one of more than 44,000 Texans whose provisional ballot in 2016 was found to be ineligible, the state is saying that you attempt to participate in democracy at your own risk.That risk is almost always higher for people of color. Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, likes to brag about the 155 people his office has successfully prosecuted for election fraud in the last 16 years — an average of fewer than 10 per year. What he doesn’t say out loud is what The Houston Chronicle found in an analysis of the cases he has prosecuted: almost three-quarters involved Black or Latino defendants, and nearly half involved women of color, like Ms. Mason.At this point you might be wondering why Ms. Mason was ineligible to vote in the first place. She had been released from prison, after all, and was trying to work her way back into society. As more states are coming to understand, there is no good argument for denying the vote to people with a criminal record, and that’s before you consider the practice’s explicitly racist roots. There is even a strong case to be made for letting those in prison vote, as Maine, Vermont and most Western European countries do. And yet today, more than five million Americans, including Ms. Mason, are unable to vote because of a criminal conviction. That has a far greater impact on state and national elections than any voter fraud that has ever been uncovered.Given the disproportionate number of Black and brown people caught up in the criminal justice system, it’s not hard to see a connection between cases like Ms. Mason’s and the broader Republican war on voting, which so often targets people who look like her. The nation’s tolerance of prosecutions for the act of casting a ballot reveals a complacency about the right to vote, Mr. Uggen said, and a troubling degree of comfort with voting restrictions generally. “There’s a slippery slope: If you start exempting individuals from the franchise, it’s easy to exempt other individuals by defining them outside the citizenry,” he said. “What is shocking to me is that people view this as acceptable in a political system that calls itself a democracy.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The next Georgia: Texas and Arizona emerge as voting rights battlegrounds

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterAs Georgia Republicans face backlash over new sweeping voting restrictions, activists in other states are escalating efforts to oppose similar restrictions advancing in other states.Texas and Arizona have emerged as two of the next major battlegrounds over voting rights. Texas Republicans last week advanced legislation that would limit early voting hours, prohibit drive-thru voting and give partisan poll workers the ability to record voters at the polls, among other measures. In Arizona, Republicans are moving ahead with an audit of ballots from the presidential race while also advancing legislation that would make it harder to vote by mail.Nationally lawmakers have introduced 361 bills to limit access to the ballot in some way, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. Fifty-five of those bills are advancing in legislatures.After companies like Delta and Coca-Cola faced criticism for waiting too long to speak out against the Georgia legislation, advocates have been heartened by swift corporate condemnation of the Texas measure. American Airlines, which is based in Texas, said on Thursday it was “strongly opposed” to the Texas legislation. Microsoft and Dell also spoke out against the measures. Major League Baseball announced on Friday it was moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to Georgia’s sweeping new law.Joe Straus, the former speaker of the Texas house of representatives, also came out against the measures on Thursday, tweeting that businesses had “good reason” to oppose the bill. “Texas should not go down the same path as Georgia. It’s bad for business and, more importantly, it’s bad for our citizens,” he said.Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, said those statements were significant and could help sway lawmakers, including Dade Phelan, the speaker of the Texas house of representatives. Gutierrez has been involved in fights over voting rights for more than a decade and said he could not recall another instance where there was the kind of broad opposition to the bills that exists now.“A lot of us are thinking that Texas is the next Georgia, but I think the big difference is all these prominent voices weighing in are coming in much earlier,” he said.Attention on Texas, one of the lowest-ranking states for voter turnout in 2020, escalated this week after lawmakers advanced a measure that appears squarely aimed at preventing local officials in urban areas from taking creative measures to expand voting access. In addition to blocking drive-thru and 24-hour voting, two popular options offered in Harris county, home to Houston, in 2020, the law also prevents officials from mailing absentee ballot applications to voters. In addition the bill imposes new requirements on people who assist voters and gives local election officials less flexibility in allocating election equipment.The measures would clearly empower partisan poll watchers. One measure allows poll watchers to record voters at the polls if they “reasonably believe” they are receiving illegal assistance. Another provision makes it harder for local officials in charge of an election precinct to remove poll watchers during voting.“It is a huge deal because of how many incidents we see in Texas of poll watchers misbehaving and needing to be disrupted for a good reason,” Gutierrez said.Texas has, as far as I’m concerned, the most disturbing bill that I have seen“This is an invasion of privacy, it’s an invasion of ballot secrecy, it could be potentially very intimidating,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for the Election Innovation and Research, who works with Republican and Democratic election officials across the country. “Texas has, as far as I’m concerned, the most disturbing bill that I have seen.”In Arizona, a state Joe Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, activists are also pushing a slew of anti-voting measures. One priority is a bill that would make changes to a list voters can join to automatically receive a mail-in ballot each election. About 75% of Arizona voters are on the list, according to the Associated Press (AP), but lawmakers want to enable the state to remove voters from the list if they don’t vote by mail in at least two consecutive elections. About 200,000 voters who didn’t vote by mail in 2018 or 2020 would be removed from the list, according to the AP.“This is a really important piece of our election system. It’s been in place just like it is for more than a decade. People trust it, they love using it,” said Emily Kirkland, the executive director of Progress Arizona, which is lobbying against many of the proposed changes. “This year, obviously fueled by all the conspiracy theories we saw going into and after the election, Republicans in the state legislature are attacking it.”Advocates are also concerned about another bill that would require voters to provide either their driver’s license or voter registration number along with their birthday when they return a mail-in ballot (Arizona currently uses signature comparison to verify the identity of mail-in voters). Those requirements would pose difficulties for many Native American voters, said Torey Dolan, a Native vote fellow at Indian law clinic at Arizona State University.Dolan said that it can be difficult to find out a voter registration number online and noted that the bill currently did not allow for the use of tribal identification cards as a form of identification. Many Indigenous elders, she noted, were not born in hospitals and have delayed birth certificates, and therefore have approximate birthdays.“Arizona election law, before this cycle, was not equally accessible to Native Americans,” she said. “As more barriers go up, it only exacerbates that gap from access.”Aside from legislation, Arizona Republicans are also moving ahead with more efforts to stoke uncertainty about the results of the 2020 election. The state senate, controlled by Republicans, is moving ahead with a recount and audit of 2.1m ballots in Maricopa county, the state’s most populous, months after the state certified the election. The county has already completed an audit of its voting equipment, which found ballots were counted correctly.One of the four firms the senate hired to lead the audit is led by Doug Logan, who has publicly said he believes there was widespread voter fraud in 2020 and advanced other conspiracy theories about the election, according to the Arizona Mirror.“Can you imagine the outcry if Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin in 2016 in a state senate, had decided they wanted to, six months after an election, start an audit of the ballots of an election that was already certified and the people were already in office?” Becker said.“And then they hired the consultant, someone from out of state who had publicly argued that Hillary won the election and the election was fraudulent? That’s a mirror image of what’s happening in Arizona right now.” More

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      Texas Senate Advances Bill That Would Make Voting More Difficult

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      Lawmakers in Texas, a state that already claims the most onerous voting laws in the nation, on Thursday took a major step toward making it even tougher to cast a ballot, the latest in a bevy of Republican-backed efforts to restrict voting ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.The State Senate approved an overhaul of election law that would roll back many steps taken by counties last year to facilitate voting during the pandemic and impose new curbs in their place, including statewide limits on polling-place hours, a new formula for locating polling places and a ban on drop boxes that were widely used nationwide last year to assist mail-in voters.The proposal also would ban anyone except the voter who filled out a ballot from dropping it in a mailbox or delivering it to an election official. It adds new paperwork requirements for voters who need help because of language problems or disabilities. And it would give so-called poll watchers — untrained monitors, usually chosen by candidates or party officials, who are stationed inside polling places — the right to videotape voters if they deem them suspicious.The Texas measure comes on the heels of efforts in Iowa and Georgia, where lawmakers significantly tightened voting rules last month. The Georgia measure has been criticized by executives of several major companies with headquarters in the state. In Arizona, two Republican-backed bills that would erect roadblocks to voting by mail — the method used by eight in 10 voters — are approaching final votes in the State Legislature.American Airlines, which is based in Fort Worth, said in a statement on Thursday that it was “strongly opposed” to the bill that passed the Texas Senate “and others like it.” A similar bill moved through the Texas House’s elections committee on Thursday. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, made tougher voting laws a priority for the current legislative session after party leaders and some legislators embraced the baseless claim that a wave of fraudulent votes was responsible for President Biden’s election last fall. (Though President Donald J. Trump won Texas, drawing 52 percent of the vote.)Despite no evidence of significant election fraud in Texas last year, supporters of the bills in both chambers say those and other measures are necessary to make the state’s elections more secure.“This bill is designed to address areas throughout the process where bad actors can take advantage, so Texans can feel confident that their elections are fair, honest and open,” State Senator Bryan Hughes, a Republican from Mineola, about 100 miles east of Dallas, said during Senate debate on the measure.But David Becker, an expert on election administration who directs the Center for Election Innovation and Research in Washington, said the legislation ultimately would make voting less secure by encouraging voters who would normally vote by mail or in person during early voting periods to vote on Election Day. What little fraud exists can often be spotted by analyzing the ballots cast before Election Day, he said, while fraud or cyberattacks are harder to detect and address in the crush of a big Election Day turnout.Another provision would delay a statewide requirement to use auditable paper ballots until 2026, a move that would almost certainly make Texas the last state in the nation to carry out that basic security measure.Critics of the Senate bill said most of its provisions were less about making voting secure than about making it harder, particularly for urban voters and minority voters, two groups that tend to vote for Democrats.They called the clause allowing partisan monitors to videotape voters an invitation to intimidation, and noted that the voters most likely to be recorded — those with language problems who need assistance filling out a ballot — were disproportionately people of color.Similarly, they said, clauses limiting voting hours to 6 a.m. to. 9 p.m., banning drive-through voting and changing the formula for allotting polling places in counties with more than one million residents would apply largely to counties with big cities like Houston, which expanded its voting hours and allowed for drive-through balloting in November.The Senate bill was widely opposed by the state’s local election officials, including those in many of the biggest urban areas.Stephanie Gómez, the associate director of the advocacy group Common Cause Texas, said in a video conference with reporters that the two bills were “weaponizing legislation to codify widespread voter intimidation.”“If you want to know which state is going to be the next Georgia,” she said, “it’s Texas.” More

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      in US Politics

      Texas ramps up efforts to derail progressive policies

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      Texas has branded itself as an aggressive and litigious arm of the Republican party for years – a rightwing David up against the Democratic Goliath.So, when Democrat Joe Biden took over the Oval Office in January, the state’s conservative leaders were already raring for a knock-down, drag-out brawl.“I promise my fellow Texans and Americans that I will fight against the many unconstitutional and illegal actions that the new administration will take, challenge federal overreach that infringes on Texans’ rights, and serve as a major check against the administration’s lawlessness,” the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, tweeted on Biden’s inauguration day.Just two days later, Texas filed the first major lawsuit against Biden’s administration, successfully blocking a 100-day deportation moratorium that the governor, Greg Abbott, chided as an “attempt to grant blanket amnesty” to immigrants.Far from a one-off burst of hostility, that incendiary case marked a return to Texas politicians’ tried and true playbook of weaponizing the courts to derail progressive policies, a tactic that’s proven surprisingly potent amid ideological warfare with the feds.“They’ve been successful at, like, causing uncertainty,” said Katie Keith, associate research professor for the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. “And making a mess of things that I think other folks feel are otherwise settled.”The state’s leadership leaned heavily on the judiciary under Barack Obama’s administration, which they sued at least 48 times, the Texas Tribune reported, tackling issues as disparate and all-encompassing as immigration, environmental regulations and voting rights.Then, in the aftermath of last year’s presidential election, Paxton went so far as to challenge 20m votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in a far-fetched attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat. And right now, Texas is spearheading yet another existential threat to the Affordable Care Act in the supreme court, even as Biden urges the justices to preserve Obama’s signature healthcare law.Because of the high stakes, these cases often capture national attention, and Texas’s ambitious current and former attorneys general have shown a willingness to trade resources and time for newspaper quotes and TV interviews. The court battles give key players such as Paxton a platform “to demonstrate that they are fighters and they’re looking out for their voters”, said Keith E Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University.“These kinds of lawsuits have become very high-profile events” and allow those involved to “grandstand and send a political message to constituents about all the hard work you’re doing to oppose the administration that they don’t like”, Whittington said.Texas’s judicial activism is part of a larger partisan gambit that’s been going on for years. Politicians undo or delay federal policies they find unfavorable or overreaching, while strategically framing the narrative in the press.“They are good opportunities to really try to influence the messaging about how particular policies or particular laws are understood, and what the potential problems with them are,” Whittington said.Both Republicans and Democrats play the game: when Trump occupied the Oval Office, blue strongholds such as California raced to the courts as a first line of defense from federal decisions that jeopardized their more liberal agendas. Now that Biden is the commander-in-chief, Republicans are naturally starting to do the same, with Texas apparently leading the charge.“If the goal is to win, then certainly that affects the kind of cases you bring forward, what kinds of legal arguments you can make, how carefully you have to prepare for them,” Whittington said.“If the goal instead is to get media attention and score political points – and excite voters and donors – you don’t necessarily need to win. You just need to be able to highlight the issue and get public attention. And sometimes you can get that with pretty bad legal arguments.”Texas has garnered a reputation for its casual relationship to sound legal judgment, with cases ranging from potentially successful to downright bogus. When, for example, Paxton tried to overturn the 2020 election results in the supreme court, a legion of lawyers and former elected officials banded together to decry his “unprecedented argument” that made “a mockery of federalism and separation of powers”.“The case … was clearly without merit, and it is difficult to understand why anybody in the attorney general’s office would have thought otherwise,” said Lisa Marshall Manheim, an associate professor at the University of Washington School of Law.Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor, similarly derided the state’s challenge to the ACA, calling it “galactically stupid” in an interview with the Texas Tribune.But instead of giving Texas and others a slap on the wrist, federal courts have almost encouraged them by issuing nationwide injunctions that hamstring entire policies as long as cases stay tied up. That stalling strategy can sometimes hand state governments a de facto victory, even if they eventually lose.“There’s a world in which all these specious arguments, everything else, could really be discouraged by the courts,” Keith said. That’s definitely not happening in Texas, where she described the bench as “extraordinarily conservative and ideological”, allowing “these lawsuits to go further than most of us think they should”.It’s one thing to “forum shop”, seeking out courts that could be more amenable to your case. Paxton, however, can seemingly “judge shop”. Between 2015 and 2018, almost half of Texas’s suits against the federal government in district courts ended up in Judge Reed O’Connor’ courtroom, the Texas Tribune reported. A conservative favorite aligned with the Texas Republican senator John Cornyn, O’Connor has handed the state victory after victory – including striking down the ACA.“The law is still standing, but it’s been bruised and battered, right?” Keith said. So “why wouldn’t they sort of use a similar playbook for other issues?”Because of the implications nationwide, millions of Americans are watching these lawsuits play out – not to witness a bitter contest between two parties, but to anxiously await a referendum on their futures.“They’re people’s real rights and real livelihoods and just real lived realities that are sort of hanging in the balance,” Keith said. “It’s sort of frustrating to watch these cycles go in and out, because you know that they do affect real people.” More

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      Is there a crisis at the border?: a look at both sides of the immigration argument

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      Along the winding road which follows the Rio Grande west from Mission, Texas, dozens of armed border patrol agents, state troopers, soldiers, and state and local police are dotted about to catch undocumented migrants entering the country from Mexico.This is a so-called hotspot for irregular migration – folks crossing the border river without permission to enter the US – in what the Republican party and anti-immigrant activists are calling a crisis at the border. During one afternoon this week, there were more law enforcement vehicles cruising along this dusty 15-mile stretch towards Los Ebanos, a tiny border community connected to Mexico by a hand operated cable ferry, than there was local traffic.For a couple of hours nothing much happens, until agents chase down a group – six men, and one woman – trying to hide in the dry vegetation.They are handcuffed and processed on the side of the road, each giving their name, age and country of origin to a bilingual border patrol agent, before placing personal belongings – wallet, jewellery and phone – into individual plastic bags. The sun is piercing; the migrants look exhausted.Christian, a lanky 20-year-old from Santa Bárbara,Honduras, seems utterly bewildered by what’s just gone down. His family’s crops were destroyed last November when two deadly hurricanes – Eta and Iota – struck within two weeks of each other. The land was flooded for two months, leaving them no harvest and unable to prepare for next season. “There are no jobs, and we have no money or food,” he said, shaking his head.Christian is among a rapidly rising number of climate refugees from Central America – one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to the impacts of global heating.Emerson, 25, a member of the indigenous Maya Q’eqchi community from Puerto Barrios in Izabal, Guatemala, left behind his wife and two young daughters, hoping to find work. “I’m a machinery mechanic, but the work went down with the pandemic and then things got much worse with Hurricane Eta.”Ingrid, one of two Salvadorans, said she’s 18 but looks much younger. She’s wearing two plastic wristbands – one red, the other white – which reports suggest are used by coyotes (smugglers or guides) to indicate payments had been made to organized crime groups who control the border.Ingrid lived with her uncle in Ilopango, a sprawling town on the outskirts of the Salvadoran capital with high levels of gang violence and police brutality, but said she’d come looking for work and a better life after the pandemic left them struggling to make ends meet. Covid has deepened poverty and hunger across Central America and Mexico, and governments have failed to provide adequate, if any, relief.The migrants were given disposable face masks before being searched and loaded into a green and white border patrol van. They will be expelled; some of them will undoubtedly try to cross again.The border patrol agents won’t answer any questions, but one said to his colleagues: “This is a good day’s work.” Another said he hoped we would give them good publicity.After four years of racist, chaotic, anti-immigration policies by the Trump administration – as well as growing desperation fuelled by the pandemic and extreme climate events – the number of people seeking to enter the US is rising.But advocates in the Rio Grande Valley, where undocumented migrants have long been relied upon for cheap farm labour, reject incendiary claims that the numbers are overwhelming.“Migration goes up and down, that’s the reality of the border. Biden has different values and has given people hope, but there’s no border crisis, to say so is political manipulation,” said Ramona Casas, director of the migrant advocacy group Arise. “We need to address the root causes and transform the broken immigration system, not more militarization.”The current uptick started before Biden’s election, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) figures.Jenn Budd, a former senior border patrol agent turned whistleblower, said: “The only crisis at the border is the children, which the administration is trying to deal with, anything else is simply not true and an attempt to play politics, make Biden look bad and ensure the money keeps flowing to the border security industry.”In 2000, a total of 9,212 border patrol agents detained an average of almost 137,000 undocumented migrants per month on the southern border. In the 2021 fiscal year until February, the average was just over 76,000 per month, but the number of agents is more than double compared to 2000.Earlier this month, the Texas governor Greg Abbott deployed state troopers and the national guard to the border after claiming, without evidence, that illegal immigrants were spreading the coronavirus.“The Biden administration is recklessly releasing hundreds of illegal immigrants who have Covid into Texas communities,” said Abbott in a tweet on 3 March.But illegal or undocumented migrants are not being released into the US. The two groups being allowed in are some existing asylum seekers, thanks to the repeal of Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, and some new arrivals presenting at legal ports of entry, including unaccompanied children and young families, who have been permitted to remain in the country pending asylum court hearings. In Texas, everyone else continues to be turned back, say advocates.Abbott’s unsubstantiated Covid claims came shortly after he announced plans to end the state mask mandate and ordered businesses to reopen at 100% capacity. Texas has one of the slowest vaccination rates in the country. The White House has called out Abbott for refusing federal funds to pay for Covid mitigation measures for migrants.Last week, speaking at a press conference in Mission, Abbott said he’d seen people crossing the river illegally during an aerial tour of the area. “There is a crisis on the Texas border right now with the overwhelming number of people who are coming across the border. This crisis is a result of President Biden’s open border policies,” he said.A couple of days later CNN and Breitbart reported a story after coming across an alleged human trafficking incident within minutes of setting off on the river, from a launchpad behind the wall south-east of Mission where access is controlled by border patrol, which multiple advocates claim was staged to fuel rightwing propaganda.In the video, a man wearing a black balaclava is seen bringing a handful of migrants wearing facemasks and life vests across the river in a raft, with scores more lined up on the Mexican side, waiting to cross. The so-called smuggler then sets off to bring over another load.In general, smugglers try to blend in and so do not cover their faces, in order to pass off as a migrant and avoid trafficking charges if caught. The Guardian travelled 20 miles along the river, which is full of sensors, cameras, and other tracking devices, as well as regular patrols on the levy and river, making it unlikely that such a large group of people could go undetected. The Guardian did not see any people crossing the river.In downtown McAllen, the biggest city in the Rio Grande Valley, a young female volunteer gripping a clipboard leads a small group of Central American families from the Covid rapid testing site to the Catholic Charities respite center where they can shower, rest, make phone calls and eat a modest meal before heading to be with relatives with whom they should stay until their asylum case is ruled on by an immigration court.CBP has released a hundred or more new arrivals every day – all families with children under the age of six seeking asylum at a port of entry – for the past few weeks compared to just a handful before Biden took office.The largest Rio Grande Valley detention center is closed for remodeling, which along with Covid restrictions has reduced capacity and partially explains the transfer of unaccompanied children to other sectors and the release of families into the care of relatives.The rise is significant but manageable, according to Norma Pimentel, director of the respite center.On arrival, the exhausted families are ushered into large white tents erected opposite the bustling bus terminal, where everyone is tested for Covid – a service run by local health officials. Anyone who tests positive must quarantine in a local hotel for two weeks.“There’s a pandemic, so of course some migrants will have Covid, that’s why we’re testing them to keep everyone safe. If the governor cares about the community, why did he refuse federal funds? He’s not interested in solving the problem, he’d rather spend money militarizing our communities and creating an illusion of war,” said Pimentel. “Everyone should be given a fair chance to claim asylum safely, but we need to address the root causes, we will never fix this at the border.”CBP did not respond to questions. As the partisan finger pointing intensifies, desperate people try to change their lives.On a bench in front of the respite center, Alicia Barrios, 31, from Guatemala City, cannot hold back the tears. Barrios, who is seven months pregnant, arrived at the border last week with her husband Nelson Gonzales, 27, and four-year-old daughter Brittany, after a gruelling, four-week overland journey through Mexico. Both have lost weight, and Barrios recalls long nights sleeping in the open air, comforting her daughter as she cried because she was hungry and cold.In Guatemala, they barely had enough to eat over the past year as the economy collapsed and a strict curfew made many odd jobs impossible; Barrios hasn’t had any antenatal care as the hospitals are overwhelmed. She’s waiting for her brother in Houston to send them bus fare, and doesn’t yet understand the lengthy legal process which lies ahead.“The journey was very hard, but we don’t want our children to suffer like we did. I’m so grateful that we made it.” More

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      Texas Republicans pushing slate of bills to make voting even harder in state

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      Texas Republicans are pushing new legislation that would make it even more difficult to cast a ballot in a state that is already one of the hardest places to vote in America.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThere was no evidence of widespread fraud in Texas or elsewhere in 2020, but Governor Greg Abbott in February declared “election integrity” an emergency item for the legislature to consider.Bills introduced so far would prohibit counties from allowing drive-thru voting, curtail early voting hours, restrict the number of voting machines allowed at countywide polling centers, and block local election officials from sending out mail-in ballot applications to all voters. One bill would also make it easier for prosecutors to bring charges against Texans for technical violations and require those who cite a disability to vote by mail – one of a handful of approved excuses in Texas – to provide proof. Such a requirement would amount to a poll tax, critics say, because there is a cost to a doctor’s visit.“These exact kinds of lies about voting led to people dying in the insurrection at the Capitol. This goes way beyond politicians playing legislative chess to retain power,” Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a watchdog group, wrote in an email.Texas saw record turnout in the 2020 election, but still had one of the lowest turnout rates among eligible voters in the US. Many of the Republican bills appear aimed at Harris county, the state’s most populous and home to 2.4 million voters, where county officials took a number of creative steps last year to try to expand access to voting. That included setting up 24-hour drive-thru voting and trying to send a mail-in ballot application to all voters.But Republicans went to court to block those measures in the weeks leading up to the election. Abbott issued a proclamation in October only allowing counties to offer a single absentee ballot drop box. The order meant that Harris county, which stretches over nearly 2,000 sq miles, could only have a single drop box location instead of the 11 it intended to offer.Abbott pointed specifically to Harris county’s efforts to expand voting access during a Monday press conference introducing the new restrictive voting bills.“The integrity of elections in 2020 were questioned right here in Harris county with the mail-in ballot application process,” Abbott said. “The county elections clerk attempted to send unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to millions of voters, many of whom would not be eligible to vote by mail. Election officials should be working to stop potential mail ballot fraud, not facilitate it.”Isabel Longoria, a Harris county election official credited with developing the 24-hour drive-thru voting, blasted the proposals.“To micromanage the creative solutions that we have had to come up with in Harris county under the auspices of some false election integrity narrative, is a bill not based in reality,” she said in an interview.The Republican proposals come amid a wave of similar efforts in state legislatures across the country. But the restrictions in Texas are notable for two reasons. First, Texas already has extremely restrictive voting laws – it doesn’t allow voters to register online (there is currently a limited workaround because of a federal lawsuit), requires voters under 65 to provide an excuse if they want to vote by mail, cuts off voter registration 30 days before an election, and places strict limits on who can register voters. Second, Republicans did extremely well in the state in November; Donald Trump overwhelmingly carried the state and Democrats did poorly in state legislative races. This signals how eagerly the party has embraced efforts to make it more difficult to vote.Voting advocates say the measures are designed to block local officials from taking any action to make voting easier.“It’s really kneecapping local election officials from really adopting to facilitate voting that have proved really popular,” said Zenen Pérez, the advocacy director at Move Texas, a grassroots group that works to improve civic participation.One measure would prohibit early voting after 7pm, a time during which more than 17,000 people cast their ballots, Longoria said. Many of those people were medical workers, parents with young children, and workers at the port of Houston.“There’s some theory out there that nothing good happens after dark … the last time we built laws based on sunset was in the Jim Crow era so I don’t think we should base any more laws based on when the sun sets,” she added.Abbott and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a Trump ally, have been among those who have loudly claimed voter fraud is a problem. According to the Houston Chronicle, the election integrity division in Paxton’s office dedicated 22,000 hours in 2020 to investigating voter fraud cases but has found only 16 cases of any actual voter fraud.Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Harris county, criticized the measures.“What these folks are doing are simply continuing the trend that’s been going on since Reconstruction, through Jim Crow and up to today: trying to confuse voters, intimidate voters and enact policies that keep people from the ballot box.”Longoria said she planned to contest the slate of bills, but thinks the likelihood they will become law is a “coin toss”.“My job is to be a public servant protecting the voters of Harris county, point blank. Voters have told me directly they love drive-through voting. They love 24-hour voting. They love mail ballot voting,” she said. “I will fight for what they love to do and their right to vote until the very last breath I have on this earth. That’s what I’m here to do and that’s what I’m going to keep doing. Anyone who thinks differently, well, good luck to ’em.” More

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      'Masking works': Austin fights back as Texas loosens Covid-19 restrictions

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      Months of hostility and infighting between Texas’s Republican and Democratic leaders reached a breaking point this week, when the state sued Austin and Travis county officials who were still requiring residents to wear masks in public.In a move decried as “reckless” around the United States, Texas ended almost all of its coronavirus-related restrictions on Wednesday, including a statewide mask mandate and capacity limits on businesses.But, bolstered by the formidable body of evidence that shows face coverings mitigate the spread of Covid-19, local jurisdictions such as Austin and Round Rock have decided to keep their safety protocols, drawing ire from state politicians.“I told Travis County & The City of Austin to comply with state mask law. They blew me off. So, once again, I’m dragging them to court,” the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, tweeted Thursday.Steve Adler, Austin’s mayor, said that he and Travis county judge Andy Brown would “fight to defend and enforce our local health officials’ rules for as long as possible using all the power and tools available to us”, though it wasn’t immediately clear how they planned to ensure compliance.“We promised to be guided by the doctors, science and data as concerns the pandemic and we do everything we can to keep that promise,” Adler said in a statement. “Wearing masks is perhaps the most important thing we can do to slow the spread of the virus.”Brown tweeted on Friday that “the requirement to wear masks in Travis county and Austin businesses remains in effect”, after a district judge didn’t block the local policy for the time being.“We return to court March 26,” Adler tweeted. “No matter what happens then, we will continue to be guided by doctors and data. Masking works.”At a press conference earlier this month Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, drew cheers as he announced it was time for his state to open “100%”, presenting the sudden shift in regulations as a gift to business owners and workers who have struggled because of a recession linked to the pandemic.But when Elizabeth Dixie Patrick, executive director of the Austin Independent Business Alliance, heard from local business owners about the policy change, they overwhelmingly expressed confusion, dismay and frustration.“The difference between encouraging mask wearing and mandating mask wearing is about who has to tell people, ‘no, you can’t endanger other people,’” Patrick said. “To place another burden on small business owners right now, when they’re already struggling just to stay afloat, creates all of this unnecessary anxiety.”Abbott has forced businesses into an unenviable catch-22, where owners must either go along with his no-restrictions strategy, knowingly putting staff in danger, or protect public health but “risk being harassed and attacked,” Patrick said.“The governor’s order is emboldening the people who are feeling like they have this right to put their own comfort above the safety of their fellow citizens,” she added.The state’s hasty return to pre-pandemic life comes even as only about 9% of Texans are fully vaccinated, and while a large swathe of the population remains ineligible for the jab. It marks yet another chapter in a seemingly endless saga where state and local officials battle it out, handicapping Texas’s coronavirus response in the process.During the summer, when Texas experienced a devastating spike in coronavirus cases, counties and cities trying desperately to enact and enforce regulations were thwarted by the state. Then, in the winter, Paxton sued almost immediately after Austin announced new restrictions trying to prevent further damage during another surge around the New Year’s holiday.Amid a series of court battles, brash reopenings and mask-related controversies, Texans have suffered more than 2.3 million confirmed infections and over 45,000 deaths from Covid-19.When Abbott announced his decision to sunset coronavirus-related protections earlier this month, other leaders in Texas’s large cities expressed fervent opposition, including Oscar Leeser, El Paso’s mayor, who recounted how his brother was infected and died from the virus after visiting their ailing mother without a face mask.“I share this very personal story not to seek sympathy,” he wrote, but “as someone who is deeply aware of the power and protection that wearing a face mask can provide an individual.” More