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Francine was a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico Monday morning Central time, the National Hurricane Center said in its latest advisory. The tropical storm had sustained wind speeds of 50 miles per hour. All times on the map are Central time. By The New York Times Where will it rain? Flash flooding can […] More
A jury trial opening in Austin, Texas, on Monday will seek to hold Trump supporters accountable for allegedly ambushing a Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign bus on the state’s main highway in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.Plaintiffs in the lawsuit allege they were terrorised and intimidated for more than 90 minutes as they took a bus tour canvassing for the Democratic ticket in the final days of the election.At least 40 vehicles flying Make America great again flags formed themselves into a so-called “Trump Train” and encircled the bus, trying to run it off the road and playing what the suit claims was a “madcap game of highway ‘chicken’”.The plaintiffs, who include the bus driver, a Biden campaign staffer and Wendy Davis, the former Texas senator and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, say they were forced to cancel campaign events for fear that the intimidation would be repeated. They are pursuing punitive damages under both Texas law and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a federal statute from the Reconstruction period designed to end political violence and voter intimidation.Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the trial is a test of modern democratic safeguards.“The violence and intimidation that our plaintiffs endured on the highway for simply supporting the candidate of their choice is an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans,” said co-counsel John Paredes, a litigator for Protect Democracy, one of the groups bringing the case.Monday’s case, Cervini v Cisneros, is one of the most substantial legal battles arising from acts of alleged political intimidation by Trump supporters in the 2020 election besides the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. Hundreds of criminal prosecutions have been brought around the events of January 6; by contrast, the Texas trial is a civil lawsuit brought in pursuit of damages by the plaintiffs.But it is extensive in scale, with five named defendants and an unknown number of additional unidentified John and Jane Does alleged to have been involved in a conspiracy to terrorise the Biden-Harris campaigners.The suit accuses the defendants of using force to intimidate a political opponent, claims they engaged in civil assault as well as civil conspiracy designed to stifle the political voice of the Biden-Harris campaign, and calls for punitive damages and compensation.Trouble began almost immediately after the Biden-Harris campaign announced it was staging a three-day “soul of the nation” bus tour through Texas on 27 October 2020. The tour was to take Biden surrogates to a number of featured rallies and gatherings.By 28 October, chatter had begun on social media platforms among Trump supporters calling for the formation of “Trump trains” – gatherings of trucks and other vehicles to demonstrate support for the re-election of the then Republican president. One Trump train member in Alamo posted that day that they should “flood the hell out of them”, in a reference to the Biden-Harris bus.That afternoon the then president’s son, Don Trump Jr, posted on Twitter (now X) an invitation to Trump supporters to assemble. He wrote: “It would be great if you guys would all get together and head down to McAllen and give Kamala Harris a nice Trump Train welcome. Get out there. Have some fun. Enjoy it.”Flag-waving trucks driven by Trump supporters began to follow the Biden-Harris bus on 28 and 29 October. One of the vehicles was decked out as a “Trump hearse”, and said on its bodywork that it was “collecting Democratic votes one dead stiff at a time”.Larger numbers of cars convened on Friday 30 October, with some Trump supporters attracted to the melee because they thought, wrongly, that Kamala Harris would be onboard the Democratic bus that day (she was in fact campaigning in McAllen and Fort Worth). The suit claims a group of Trump supporters conspired to ambush the bus on a stretch of Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe vehicles in the Trump train swarmed around the tour bus, coming within inches of it and forcing the driver to slow to a crawl. Several of the participants livestreamed their actions on social media, bragging about their aggressive driving, the plaintiffs allege.One of the defendants, Eliazar Cisneros, is accused of side-swiping an SUV being driven by a Biden-Harris campaign staffer behind the bus. The complaint says that Cisneros later boasted about “slamming that fucker”.The occupants of the bus pleaded with police to provide an escort but none appeared. A separate case, Cervini v Stapp, was settled in October with local law enforcement admitting that they had fallen short of their standards and agreeing to pay compensation to those whose safety they failed to protect.The suit claims that the plaintiffs have suffered “ongoing psychological and emotional injury”. The bus driver, Timothy Holloway, was so traumatised that he gave up his tour bus business and has stopped driving buses.Wendy Davis, who is best known for the 11-hour speech she made in the Texas senate in 2013 to filibuster an anti-abortion bill, said she suffered “substantial emotional distress”. She feared speaking publicly about her experiences in the bus as it might put her at risk of physical harm from Trump supporters.At the trial, lawyers for the plaintiffs will make the case that while free speech is protected under the first amendment of the US constitution, intimidation and threats against people with different political beliefs is not. “Where groups are permitted to terrorize those with whom they disagree into forgoing their constitutional rights, the functioning of our democracy demands accountability,” the lawsuit says. More
The lawsuit takes aim at federal privacy rules, including one enacted this year that Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, called “a backdoor attempt at weakening Texas’ laws.”Texas has sued to block federal rules that prohibit investigators from viewing the medical records of women who travel out of state to seek abortions where the procedure is legal.The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Lubbock, targets medical privacy regulations that were issued in 2000, and takes aim at a rule issued in April that specifically bans disclosing medical records for criminal or civil investigations into “the mere act of seeking, obtaining, providing or facilitating reproductive health care.”Texas bans abortions in almost all circumstances. Women are not subject to criminal prosecution for obtaining abortions, but state law imposes penalties of as much as life in prison for those who aid in obtaining abortions.The lawsuit claims that the privacy rules ignore federal law that lets states view medical records “for law enforcement purposes.”In a statement on Wednesday, Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, called the April rule “a backdoor attempt at weakening Texas’ laws.” He added: “The Biden administration’s motive is clear: to subvert lawful state investigations on issues that the courts have said the states may investigate.”Officials with the federal Health and Human Services Department did not comment on the lawsuit, but told The Associated Press that the Biden administration “remains committed to protecting reproductive health privacy and ensuring that no woman’s medical records are used against her.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Earlier this week, Texas governor Greg Abbott sent out a press release with an eye-popping headline: his state had removed more than 1 million people from its voter rolls since 2021. Among them were 6,500 non-citizens. A little under a third of those non-citizens had some sort of voting history in Texas, where there were nearly 18 million registered voters as of March, and were referred to the attorney general for further investigation.Two days later, the governor’s office quietly revised the statement posted online. Instead of saying 6,500 non-citizens had been removed, the updated version said 6,500 potential non-citizens had been removed. Renae Eze, an Abbott spokesperson, said that the statement sent out to an email list of reporters on Monday contained the phrasing “potential non-citizens”. She did not respond to a query on why the version that was publicly posted initially omitted the word “potential”.The statement was the latest example of how Republican-led states are touting aggressive efforts to remove people with early voting, scheduled to begin in weeks and less than 70 days until election day. Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Ohio have all made similar announcements recently.Voting rights groups are concerned these announcements are misleading, and that the efforts to purge are putting naturalized citizens – eligible voters – at risk for being removed. There is also concern that these efforts are running afoul of a federal law that prohibits systematic removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.Looking closer at the Texas announcement, there were other questions. The vast majority of people removed had been cancelled for routine reasons – they had either died or moved. The number of voters cancelled for these reasons is similar to totals from past years, according to a New York Times analysis.“Releasing these numbers without context is a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate voters of color and naturalized citizens from exercising their rights to vote, which is particularly concerning given the upcoming election,” said Savannah Kumar, a voting rights attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.“With the state having invented the fabricated issue of widespread illegal voting as a tactic to intimidate people of color from exercising their right to vote, we’re seeing now that the state has to resort to spinning otherwise ordinary data to make it look like it’s addressing this invented problem.”In Tennessee, state election officials sent out notices to more than 14,000 suspected non-citizens on the eve of early voting in June, warning them of the criminal penalty they could face for voting illegally. The effort immediately drew scrutiny because Tennessee was looking to see whether someone reported being a non-citizen at the DMV to flag them as a non-citizen. That kind of comparison has been shown to be unreliable in the past, because people may get a driver’s license and become naturalized citizens before they have to renew it.The state sent out 14,375 notices, and at least 3,200 people – around 22% – responded saying they were in fact citizens. Election officials eventually admitted that those who didn’t respond would not be removed from the rolls, even if they didn’t respond.In Alabama, the state’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, announced that his office had identified 3,251 people on the voter rolls who had received a non-citizen identification number at one point from the Department of Homeland Security. While he acknowledged that some of those people may have since become naturalized citizens and eligible voters, he nonetheless designated all of them inactive voters and requested that they prove their citizenship. All 3,251 were also referred to the Alabama attorney general’s office for further investigation.A coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter to Allen on 19 August warning him that his actions violated the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 federal law that sets guardrails on how states can remove people from the voter rolls. Among other things it says that any systematic efforts to remove people must be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory”. The state also can’t complete any mass removal program within 90 days.“We’re extremely concerned about the chilling effect this has on registered voters generally speaking, and particularly newly naturalized citizens,” said Kate Huddleston, a lawyer at Campaign Legal Center, one of several groups that signed on to the letter warning Alabama that it may be running afoul of federal law.The Alabama secretary of state’s office did not say how many people had responded indicating they were citizens. In Jefferson county, one of the largest in the state, 557 were flagged as potential non-citizens, according to Barry Stephenson, the county’s registrar. Three people have responded to notices that went out so far, Stephenson said. Two people said they did not know how they had become registered voters. The third said they were a citizen.One Alabama voter, a Huntsville man named James Stroop, told the local news outlet WAFF 48 that he had been wrongly flagged. The Alabama department of labor had incorrectly noted he was a non-citizen on a form years ago. Even though he had corrected the issue with the department of labor, he was still marked as a non-citizen when the agency sent data to the Alabama secretary of state.“Imagine if Alabama’s DMV had different information about a different group of voters and they knew that some vanishingly small percentage of people with green eyes were ineligible to vote for some reason,” she added. “And then they pulled everyone with green eyes off the rolls. I think the problem would be obvious to everyone that you can’t just deregister voters because some vanishingly small percentage of them may be ineligible to vote.”In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, issued an executive order noting that his administration had removed 6,303 non-citizens from the rolls since taking office. That represents an incredibly small fraction of the more than 6.3 million people registered to vote in the state as of 1 July.Like Tennessee and Alabama, Virginia is flagging non-citizens on its rolls using both data from its DMV and the Department of Homeland Security to identify potential non-citizens. Anyone removed is given 14 days to indicate they are in fact citizens. It’s unclear how many of the people removed were actually non-citizens and how many simply didn’t respond.“We take seriously the potential for errors in database matching, the consequences for voters and the public at large of any erroneous removal of eligible voters from the voter registration rolls, and Virginia’s recent history of mistakes and errors with data sharing protocols in particular,” a group of civil rights groups wrote to Youngkin and Susan Beals, who runs the state’s department of elections.Ohio’s secretary of state Frank LaRose has promoted his office’s efforts to remove 137 suspected non-citizens from the voter rolls using DMV data. Several naturalized citizens have come forward to say they were wrongly flagged, including one man who said his voter registration was challenged months after he was naturalized.“We know that the number of non-citizens who vote is a vanishingly small number based on all available evidence,” Huddleston said. “By inflating the issue and sweeping in very predictably naturalized citizens, the Alabama secretary of state and others are preventing naturalized citizens from being able to vote and creating this chilling effect.” More
Michael Lacey, 76, co-founded the website that became known for its ads for prostitution. He was convicted on a money laundering charge in a case that included accusations of sex trafficking.A founder of the shuttered classified advertising website Backpage was sentenced on Wednesday to five years in federal prison in connection with a sweeping case that led to the closing of the website and accusations against its executives that they promoted sex trafficking, prosecutors said.Michael Lacey, 76, of Arizona, was convicted on a single count of international concealment money laundering in November after being charged in a 100-count indictment in 2018 with several other defendants who, prosecutors said, conspired to promote prostitution ads and launder earnings of more than $500 million made from the scheme between 2010 and 2018. The case was tried in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona.In addition to the five-year prison sentence, Mr. Lacey was ordered Wednesday to pay a $3 million fine, prosecutors said.The jury that convicted Mr. Lacey last year was deadlocked on 84 other charges against him, including several charges that he helped advertise prostitution on Backpage. The deadlock led U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa to declare a mistrial on those counts. It was the second mistrial in the case. Mr. Lacey would later be acquitted of several of the counts, but could still face 30 of them, according to The Associated Press.Two other executives, Scott Spear and John “Jed” Brunst, were convicted alongside Mr. Lacey on both money laundering and prostitution facilitation counts.They were acquitted on some of those charges in April, but each received 10-year sentences Wednesday, according to a spokesman for the Justice Department, Joshua Stueve.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
A Latino civil rights group is asking the Department of Justice to open an investigation into a series of raids conducted on Latino voting activists and political operatives as part of sprawling voter fraud inquiry by the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton.The League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organizations, said that many of those targeted were Democratic leaders and election volunteers, and that some were older residents. Gabriel Rosales, the director of the group’s Texas chapter, said that officers conducting the raids took cellphones, computers and documents. He called the raids “alarming” and said they were an effort to suppress Latino voters.In a statement last week, Mr. Paxton, a Republican, described the raids, carried out in counties near San Antonio and South Texas, as part of an “ongoing election integrity investigation” that began two years ago to look into allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting. His office has said that it will not comment on the investigation because it is still underway.That investigation is part of a unit, the election integrity unit, which was created as Republican-led states sought to crack down on supposed voter crime after former President Donald J. Trump began making false claims of fraud in the wake of the 2020 election. Experts have found that voter fraud remains rare.For 35 years, Ms. Martinez has been a member of the League of United Latin American Citizens, instructing Latino residents stay engaged in politics.Christopher Lee for The New York Times“I’ve been involved in politics all of my life,” Ms. Martinez said.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Republicans accused Democratic officials of trying to sway the results. But prosecutors found that the problem stemmed from an employee whose attention was diverted.During the 2022 general election, scores of polling places in Harris County, the most populous in Texas, reported shortages of ballot paper, resulting in voters’ being turned away.The failure to properly distribute ballot paper on Election Day prompted several lawsuits and challenges as Republicans accused Democratic county officials of shortchanging Republican polling places in an attempt to sway the results.But the actual reason for the problems with ballot paper was much more banal, a Texas Rangers investigation found: An employee with a key role in determining paper distribution neglected his duties because he had been working a second full-time job without approval.“The result is he didn’t do his job for Harris County,” the district attorney, Kim Ogg, said at a news conference on Tuesday.Ms. Ogg, a Democrat who lost her primary in the spring and recently crossed party lines to endorse Republican Senator Ted Cruz for re-election in November, said the investigation had found no political motivation behind the supply problems.Instead, investigators said, the employee had simply done his job without much care, distributing roughly the same amount of ballot paper to the vast majority of polling locations, instead of taking into account voting patterns and sending more paper to higher-turnout locations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
After a long career as a union organizer, he came out of retirement in 2013 to form the South Texas Human Rights Center and provide lifesaving aid.Eddie Canales, a human rights advocate who fought to save migrants trekking through the harsh terrain of South Texas, died on July 30 at his home in Corpus Christi. He was 76.The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Nancy Vera, his associate at the South Texas Human Rights Center, the nonprofit rescue organization that Mr. Canales founded in Falfurrias, Texas.For over a decade, Mr. Canales placed dozens of water stations — giant blue plastic barrels marked “Agua” filled with gallon water jugs — along the region’s routes for migrants evading a checkpoint on U.S. Route 281, about 70 miles north of the border with Mexico. The migrants, who are usually led (and sometimes abandoned) by smugglers, known as “coyotes,” leave the main road and undertake a perilous journey through featureless scrub and bush to evade the Border Patrol.Some don’t make it. Those who fail succumb to severe dehydration, hunger and exposure to the unforgiving elements in a semi-desert where temperatures can easily reach 100 degrees in the summer and drop below freezing during the winter. Mr. Canales led a campaign to recover, identify and ensure proper burials for the migrants’ remains.The mission required forcefulness and tact. The land is private and belongs to South Texas ranchers, many indifferent or hostile. Some have created armed posses dressed in military gear to hunt up the migrants and turn them over to the authorities, as shown in a trenchant 2021 documentary about Mr. Canales’s work, “Missing in Brooks County.”The migrants “go through the ranches,” Mr. Canales said in a 2015 oral history interview for the University of North Texas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
