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      in US Politics

      At the US’s latest border hotspot, aid workers brace for volatility

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      Jacqueline Arellano is driving up and down the 15 freeway in southern San Diego county on a recent morning in mid-April, boxes of donated clothing and safety gloves in her trunk.She stops in a Home Depot parking lot and hands a man the spare stroller she grabbed from her house. He’d mentioned to her earlier that day how tiring it was to move around the city with his toddler in his arms.Arellano is director of US programs for Border Kindness, a non-profit migrant relief organization that runs weekly Day Laborer Outreach programs in San Diego and Imperial counties. Organizers hand out donations in spots where migrants congregate, and while doing so listen to people’s stories and answer their questions, as best as they can.The needs at the US-Mexico border here in California are larger than ever. In April, San Diego was the busiest sector for arrivals of the entire US-Mexico border. Meanwhile, immigration has risen to the top of voters’ concerns in the November presidential election, with Joe Biden facing bipartisan calls to stem the flow of people crossing the border and Donald Trump vowing an aggressive crackdown.The eight years she’s spent doing this work have given Arellano a window into the ever-shifting dynamics of immigration at the San Diego-Tijuana border. Back in 2016, when she first started to make these outreach runs, the people she met at the various Home Depot parking lots were primarily day laborers, waiting to be picked up by contractors working across the region. Many were undocumented, originally from Mexico, and had been based in the US for some time.After Trump moved into the White House the following year, the workers’ prevalent fear was being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and facing deportation, she said. So while handing out donations, volunteers would also pass on red printed cards that informed workers of their rights when faced with Ice.View image in fullscreenGradually, Arellano and other aid workers realized that the information they were sharing was no longer relevant to the day laborers they were meeting. “Within the last couple of years, we’ve seen global migration reflected in the community,” she said. First they saw an increase in people arriving from Haiti, then people from all over the world. The people arriving now speak languages other than Spanish, she said, and they have more recently arrived on US soil. Crucially, they are not trying to avoid immigration enforcement authorities. Rather, they have filed for asylum and want to see their cases work their way through the system.Of the 43 men who lined up to receive work gloves that day in mid-April, most are from Mexico and Haiti, but there are people from Venezuela, Bolivia, Guatemala, Brazil and Ecuador. After handing out supplies, Arellano spends an hour talking one-on-one with some of them. A few ask about basic necessities, like where to buy food.One man from Ecuador shows her paperwork saying he is expected at immigration court in Chicago. “So he’s over here in San Diego with a court date in Chicago – has no idea what to do. He doesn’t have an attorney. He doesn’t know how to get an attorney. He has no money. He was asking me literally: ‘How do I get a phone? What is a Western Union? Where do I go?’”Newly arrived migrants often don’t know how to navigate the immigration system even as they’re relying on it to secure legal status in the US, Arellano said. She connects them with partner organizations that can help provide legal services, shelter and other assistance, like Al Otro Lado, a non-profit providing legal and humanitarian aid to people.These connections with other aid workers on the ground have become increasingly essential as the needs of people at the border keep changing and expanding. “This is being held down by groups of ordinary people, by groups of friends, in large part,” she said about the support system for newly arrived groups. “It shouldn’t be like that. It shouldn’t be just groups of friends coming together to plug our fingers in a sinking ship.”Part of the breakdown in resources for asylum seekers, according to Dara Lind, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, a non-profit immigration advocacy group, is inaction at the federal level. “All the civil society help in the world isn’t sufficient to actually make sure that people know where they’re supposed to go,” Lind said.Because Congress hasn’t made meaningful updates to the immigration system in 34 years, Lind explained, the system is coming apart at the seams, affecting both border enforcement and legal immigration.In the California desert, migrants, including children, have been detained in open-air border camps before their asylum requests can be registered. Most receive a court date to appear for an immigration hearing more than a year away – that’s just how backlogged the immigration court system is.Still, Lind said, “it hasn’t created sufficient urgency for Congress to fix it. And instead, it’s become a way that presidents of both parties have justified taking aggressive, proactive executive action because someone needs to do something, and Congress isn’t doing its job.”Lind said despite years of border crises, no one is holding the federal government accountable for both the human suffering and the overall inefficiency that aid workers like Arellano see day-to-day at the border.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionErika Pinheiro is the executive director of Al Otro Lado. Among many services, her organization provides life-saving supplies at the open-air detention sites on the California-Mexico border. Providing supplies in the desert is becoming more perilous as border patrol moves these sites into more remote areas, Pinheiro said.“It’s a very hostile environment to work in,” she said, listing armed robbers, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, rising temperatures, concertina wire – and hostility from border patrol agents. “We’ve had our staff followed, pulled over multiple times, harassed, told to leave,” she said.Al Otro Lado is one of several organizations seeking to address immediate emergencies at the US-Mexico border. Volunteers with another arm of Border Kindness, for example, hike into the desert to place water bottles, tinned food and weather-appropriate clothing for people crossing the border in remote locations.View image in fullscreenFinancial support for humanitarian aid is waning, Pinheiro noted. “The philanthropic funding, I think due to a lot of the anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from both sides of the aisle, has really dried up,” she said. California has also cut state funding, particularly affecting the shelter system for individuals waiting for their day in immigration court, and Pinheiro said donations from individuals were also down.“The work has become so politicized, whereas really giving formula to a baby shouldn’t be a political issue.”In this election year, both Al Otro Lado and Border Kindness are bracing for further repercussions. “Regardless of outcome, elections are always destabilizing for the immigrant community,” Arellano said.Should Biden win re-election, she expects to see the situation at the border remain largely unchanged. The past years, Arellano said, “in many ways have been the worst it’s ever been at the border”, but there’s been less public outrage than Trump’s immigration policies elicited.If Trump wins a second term, however, she expects a “further decimation of legal protections and processes that can really impact people for years”.Pinheiro expects Democrats to push through changes in asylum law if Biden were elected. While adjudicating cases more quickly could help alleviate some of the pressure, she cautioned, expediting asylum requests could also result in fewer people receiving asylum who are qualified for it.“Forcing asylum seekers to go through these interviews while still detained in border patrol custody is not the answer,” she said, especially if they are not given access to information and legal representation.Should Trump be elected, Pinheiro expects humanitarian aid and legal workers at the border to face increased criminalization. During the last Trump presidency, she and other lawyers, human rights activists and journalists were put on a watchlist and interrogated at the border, she said. Targeting humanitarian and legal assistance could be a Republican administration’s way of stopping groups like Al Otro Lado and Border Kindness from documenting what’s happening at the border, she fears, and would curtail their ability to respond to people’s needs. More

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      in US Politics

      Do you know how the US economy is actually doing? Try our interactive quiz

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      The United States is less than six months away from sending either Joe Biden or Donald Trump back to the White House.For many voters mulling this decision, the economy is front of mind. But how it’s doing, and how it’s feeling, are not one and the same.A majority of Americans believe the US is in recession, according to a Harris poll conducted for the Guardian. It isn’t.Do you know how the US economy has been performing? The Guardian created this quiz to find out. 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format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GTGuardianTitlepiece-Bold.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GTGuardianTitlepiece-Bold.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:700;font-style:normal}[data-gu-name=headline] h1{background-color:unset;color:unset;padding:unset;margin-top:10px}@media (min-width:1330px){article.content–interactive:after{content:””;background:#000;width:100%;height:721px;top:240px;left:0;position:absolute;z-index:-1}} More

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      in US Politics

      Inflation, election lies and racial tension weigh on voters in Georgia swing county: ‘We all got to eat’

      by

      Less than six months before the US presidential election on 5 November, anxiety over the economy looms large. While official figures show a significant recovery since the pandemic, many Americans aren’t buying it. As polling day approaches, the Guardian is dispatching reporters to key swing counties to gauge how they are feeling – and how they might vote.Rows of pecan and peach trees frame the scenery throughout Peach county, Georgia, a rural area of central Georgia, about 100 miles south of Atlanta. A field of yellow school buses pack a lot on the way into Fort Valley, the county’s seat, where the buses used across the US are manufactured.Peach county is a swing county in what has emerged as one of the most important swing states in the presidential election. And, according to a March 2024 poll conducted by Emerson College, the economy is the most important issue to Georgia voters. About 32% of those polled said the economy was their top priority, trailed by immigration at 14% and healthcare at 12%.In 2020, Joe Biden won the state of Georgia by 0.2 percentage points. Donald Trump won Peach county by just over 500 votes, 51.8% to 47.2%. Emerson’s last poll found 46% of voters in Georgia currently support Trump to 42% supporting Biden, with 12% undecided – setting the state, and Peach county, on course for another nail-biting election where views on the economy will be key.For Victoria Simmons, a retired local newspaper editor who lives in Byron, the economy is a top issue. “People can hardly afford to buy groceries and are losing hope,” she said. “We need to be focusing more on our own country rather than sending millions to places like Ukraine.“If the election is fair and there is no tampering, I believe we will see a Trump victory,” she said.Like many in the US, Anna Holloway, a retired professor in Fort Valley, doesn’t seem enamored by either candidate. She identifies as a “classical liberal” and campaigned and voted for the independent Evan McMullin in 2016, but voted for Biden in 2020 and said she intended to do so again.“I am opposed to big government but voted for Biden and will do so again just because he’s less likely to fracture our political system than Donald Trump,” she said.Inflation remains a big concern for everyone. LeMario Brown, 38, a former city council member in Fort Valley and local pecan farmer, has seen prices rise first-hand. It costs tens of thousands of dollars and years of work to get a pecan farm into production, not including costly and difficult to obtain insurance to cover any crop losses due to natural disasters.“It doesn’t matter if we’re Republican or Democrat, we all got to eat,” he said.He also knows how important just a few votes in the county can be. He came up short in the 2021 election for mayor of Fort Valley by just 19 votes.Born and raised in Fort Valley, Brown explained the transitions in the area he had seen over the years and his hopes for improving the local economy and retaining young people and graduates of the local historically Black university, Fort Valley State University.Brown has been involved with a local non-profit started in 2018, Peach Concerned Citizens, an organization focused on non-partisan civic engagement efforts including voter registration, increasing voter turnout, increasing US census engagement and responses in Peach county and surrounding counties, and educating voters so they have the necessary information to be able to vote and do so informed of who and what they are voting on.“Most individuals are standoffish because politics are like religion,” said Brown. “They don’t want to offend, Democrats or Republicans, but most of the time once you engage a person from a social standpoint, they tell you what the issues are if you’re listening because it’s either they’re going to do what they want to do, or we don’t have enough money to do this, or my light bill or gas is too high, so if you listen you’re going to figure what issues you can actually tackle.”For all this talk of crisis and the loss of hope at the top level, Peach county – like the rest of the US – appears to be doing well. The unemployment rate in the region is just 3.3%, below the US average of 3.9%. Inflation is also trending below the national average. But those macro trends don’t seem to be cutting through locally where people are still feeling the pinch of price rises on everyday living and interest rates seem stuck at heights unseen in 20 years.With the state’s voters splitting evenly between Republicans and Democrats, the candidates are fighting for the 18% of voters Pew Research reported don’t lean either way.“We have some independent voters and I’ve heard the stories of: ‘Well, it’s the lesser of two evils, Biden isn’t doing that, Trump is doing this, Trump is going to do that, Trump isn’t doing that, Biden will do that.’ It’s kind of mixed, but I think it all stems back to economics,” Brown added. “People want to be able to pay the light bill, put gas in the car, feed their family, the basic necessities of being a productive citizen in the community.”But the economy will not be the only issue on the ballot come November. Georgia was also one of the main states where Trump supporters focused their efforts to try to overturn the 2020 election. And for Tim Waters, the chairman of the Peach County Republicans, the number one issue concerning voters in Peach county in 2024 will be corruption, from the local to the federal level.The 2020 election “was stolen and everybody knows it was stolen”, said Waters. “They just keep up this lying nonsense.”“People are sick and tired of the corruption from the absolute travesty of going after Donald Trump again and again and again. That’s why this cabal is trying to destroy this country. People are waking up to it. They’re sick and tired of it and they want change and they want it now,” said Waters. “That is absolutely what I’m seeing.”“They’re still going to cheat again in the elections,” said Waters. “I do not trust the secretary of state. I don’t trust the attorney general of the state of Georgia, Chris Carr, and I do not trust the governor, Brian Kemp. He’s out there at Davos when he should be here focusing on his constituents.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRace will also be a big factor in Peach county. The county has a population around 28,000, 45% Black and 51% white. Racial and economic demographics largely segregate the county, the Black population centered around the county seat of Fort Valley, with the white, higher-income population predominantly concentrated in the parts of the city of Byron that fall in the county’s north-eastern boundary.Democrats have traditionally won Black votes in Georgia by overwhelming margins. Trump has been courting Black voters despite a long record of racist remarks and some recent polls have suggested he is gaining ground with Black voters. Kattie Kendrick, a retiree and CEO of Peach Concerned Citizens, politely noted that Trump’s old remarks could be an issue come November.“Back when I grew up in the country, all of the children played together. The thing I didn’t like, no disrespect to anyone, but when they turned 16, we had to call them mister and miss, but we were playing together all this time and all of a sudden,” said Kendrick.She noted the resurgence of racism and division in politics, such as Trump telling the far-right extremist group Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 presidential debate.“I think what happened was it was there all the time, but they pulled the rug back, it became more of an accepted norm and it should never be. I don’t think people should be fake or phoney, but I don’t think we were put here to be mean to each other either,” added Kendrick.She founded the non-profit in 2018 after she ran for a seat on the county commission in 2016 and noticed some of the civic engagement and outreach gaps in the region, in Peach county and other nearby counties as well including Crawford, Taylor, Marion and Lee counties.Kendrick cited numerous issues facing the county, from economic inequities in development and resources and the pressing need for medical coverage, doctors and expansion of Medicaid.“We have a lot of people who only believe they need to vote in a presidential election but the president doesn’t necessarily pave the roads, streets, the utility bills, so we try to get information out to the people where it affects them right now,” she said.The Rev Leon Williams, pastor at the Fairview CME church in Fort Valley, knows that inflation has hurt people but he hopes that voters will put the current situation in perspective.“We just came through Covid-19 where nobody could work, no products were available, so what do you expect when something like that happens? Prices are going to go up, products will be hard to find, supply will be limited, you expect this, it’s going to take time for us to get over that,” said Williams.Voters should “listen to the parties and see what they say what they will do” and not all the negative attacks on the opposition, he said.“Our main focus as I see it is to get the people out to vote, motivate people to get out to vote. That is who is going to win, the people more motivated to vote. The Black community, you don’t need to tell them how to vote, they can listen and see what’s being said,” added Williams.As November’s election inches nearer, Williams worries about the already heated political environment and where it will lead. “I don’t like the direction everything is going right now. Of course, we have problems, but we can work them out,” said Williams. “Those who you divide and want to put down, where are you going to put them? We all have to live here, so we need to find some kind of way to get along instead of getting divided.” More

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      in US Politics

      Jailed Trump adviser predicts mass deportations as second term priority

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      The first 100 days of a second Donald Trump presidency would see the sacking of the Federal Reserve head, Jerome Powell, mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and higher tariffs on Chinese imports, the ex-president’s former trade adviser Peter Navarro has said.Navarro, the maverick former head of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy in Trump’s first administration and a key loyalist, made the forecasts in an interview conducted from prison – where he is serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress.Speaking to the website Semafor, Navarro predicted that axing Powell – an establishment figure who was initially appointed as Federal Reserve chair by Trump in 2018 before being reappointed by Joe Biden – would be among the first acts of a newly re-elected President Trump.“Powell raised rates too fast under Trump and choked off growth,” Navarro told Semafor in responses emailed from a prison library in Miami, where he has been putting the finishing touches to a new book, The New Maga Deal, whose title references the former president’s Make America Great Again slogan.“To keep his job, Powell then raised too slowly to contain inflation under Biden,” Navarro said to Semafor. “My guess is that this punctilious non-economist will be gone in the first 100 days one way or another.”He predicted that Powell – who served in the presidential administration of the late George HW Bush – could be replaced by either Kevin Hassett or Tyler Goodspeed, both former chairs of the council of economic advisers.The first order of business in a second Trump presidency, however, would be intensifying a rumbling trade war with China, said Navarro, a noted hawk on Chinese trade policy.“At the top of the trade list is Trump’s Reciprocal Trade Act, first introduced by congressman Sean Duffy in 2019,” he wrote. “If countries refuse to lower their tariffs to ours, the president would have the authority to raise our tariffs to theirs.”Asked about unfinished business likely to be revisited, Navarro identified mass deportation and reinforcing a “buy American” policy.“Trump will quickly close down the border and begin mass deportations,” he said, accusing Biden of “importing a wave of crime and terrorism along with an uneducated mass that drives down the wages of Black, brown and blue-collar Americans”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDespite – or perhaps partly because of – his incarceration for refusing to cooperate with the congressional investigation into Trump supporters’ 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Navarro remains an authoritative source on insider thinking in the former president’s camp.Several members of Trump’s inner circle have visited Navarro during his confinement in a minimum security facility, according to Semafor, fuelling speculation that he could play a key role in a future administration.Reinforcing that impression, Navarro said his book identified 100 actions that Trump would take in the first 100 days of a second presidency. He said he planned to attend the Republican national convention in mid-July – where Trump is expected to be anointed as the GOP presidential candidate – if he is released from prison in time.While he was close to the former president throughout his first administration, Navarro’s views on trade are considered fringe by many mainstream economists. He is a vocal critic of Germany, as well as China, and has accused both countries of currency manipulation. More

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      Biden is dramatically out of touch with voters on Gaza. He may lose because of it | Moira Donegan

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      Joe Biden’s re-election team is playing it cool. The Biden campaign has long been shrugging at the president’s fading polls, turning down opportunities to put him in front of voters, and generally doing their best to portray an air of confident nonchalance. The campaign’s apparent lack of concern seems, or perhaps is meant to seem, like an expression of certainty in the outcome: that Biden will win re-election, and that it won’t be close. They want us to think that they’ve got it in the bag.They do not. Biden is in no way guaranteed re-election, and all available information suggests that the contest will be close. Donald Trump has been narrowly but consistently ahead in national polls. A new dataset released by the New York Times on 13 May found that Biden was trailing in five key swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania – and suffering from disillusionment among young voters as well as Black and Latino ones.In typical style, the Biden camp brushed this off. “Drawing broad conclusions about the race based on results from one poll is a mistake,” Geoff Garin, a pollster for the Biden campaign, told the New York Times. But at this point, it’s not just one poll. It’s a lot of polls.What’s driving this discontent among young voters and voters of color – those cornerstones of Biden’s coalition that were so key to his 2020 victory over Trump in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania? There are several factors, but one issue remains consistent in these voters’ accounts of their dissatisfaction with Biden: his handling of Israel’s assault on Gaza.The indiscriminate bombing and civilian massacres that have accompanied Israel’s assault on Palestinians are a moral catastrophe that has shaken many Americans’ souls. The United Nations now estimates that more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the start of the fighting. Since many human bodies are buried beneath the rubble of Gaza’s bombed homes, schools and hospitals, that number is likely to be a significant undercount. The dead are mostly women and children. More than 1,000 children in Gaza have lost limbs to Israel’s war of revenge.If that figure cannot shake you into moral recognition, consider that many of those children have endured their amputations without anesthesia, since medicine – like food – has largely been prohibited from being delivered to Gaza by Israeli authorities. More than 75% of Gaza’s population is now displaced, according to the UN; they have left homes, worlds, entire lives that they will never be able to retrieve. More than 1.5 million people are now sheltering in Rafah, the strip’s southernmost city, which Israel is currently bombing and is poised to invade. Many human rights advocates and experts in international law have described Israel’s actions against Gazans as genocide. The death toll will keep climbing.Many voters believe, with good reason, that none of this would have happened without Biden’s assent. Biden has continued to speak of Israel’s attack on Palestinian civilians using the absurd language of “self-defense”. He has insulted Jewish Americans and the memory of the Holocaust by invoking them to justify the slaughter. And though his White House repeatedly leaks that he is “privately” dismayed by Israel’s conduct of the war, he has done little to stop the flow of US money and guns that support it.Even after the US state department issued a vexed and mealy-mouthed report on Israel’s conduct, which nevertheless concluded that it was reasonable to assess that Israel was in violation of international humanitarian law, the Biden administration has continued to fund these violations. That state department report was published on 10 May. The Biden administration told Congress that it intends to move forward with a $1bn arms sale to Israel. “OK, [Israel] likely broke the law, but not enough to change policy,” is how one reporter summarized the administration’s judgment. “So, what is the point of the report? I mean, in the simplest terms, what’s the point?”Meanwhile, Biden has expressed public disdain for the Americans – many of whom he needs to vote for him – who have taken to protest on behalf of Palestinian lives. Speaking with evident approval of the violent police crackdowns against anti-genocide student demonstrations, he said coolly: “Dissent must never lead to disorder.”It is a creepy and nonsensical claim, almost chilling in its Orwellian ahistoricism. But Biden does not see the protest movement against his war support as a legitimate instance of dissent, because he does not seem to understand concern for Palestinians as a legitimate moral claim. At times, he has seemed almost incredulous that any Americans would take sincere offense at the massive violence and waste of Palestinian life, as if such a concern was incomprehensible to him.But it is not incomprehensible to the voters he needs in order to win re-election. The genocide in Gaza has quickly become a moral rallying cry for many Americans, particularly young people and people of color. And the disgust at Israel’s massacres is not confined to campus radicals: more than half of Americans now disapprove of Israel’s handling of the Gaza war, according to a recent Gallup poll. Maybe that’s one of the same polls that the Biden campaign feels determined to ignore. But they shouldn’t: the “uncommitted” movement that aimed to express displeasure at Biden’s support for the attack on Gaza in the Democratic primary produced vote tallies higher than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in some states.Biden’s supporters are quick to point out that the alternative to Biden’s re-election will be dramatically worse, both for Americans domestically, and for those Palestinians who suffer as a result of US policy. And they are right. Biden supporters are right, too, that voting is a binary choice, between the options available. And they are right that abstaining from voting hastens a statistically likely Trump victory.But these lesser-of-two-evils argument do not lessen the tax on the conscience that many anti-war Americans will feel when they consider whether to vote for Biden in spite of his support for the genocide in Gaza. And they are certainly not justifications for Biden’s continued aid to Israel’s war project. Rather, the extreme dangers of a second Trump presidency are all the more cause for Biden to abandon this support, and to align himself with the moral cause championed by the voters he needs.On the issue of Gaza, Biden is dramatically out of touch with the voters he needs to win re-election. If he will not be moved by morality to stop his support of this war, he should be moved by vulgar self-interest. Gaza is not a distant foreign conflict: it is an urgent moral emergency for large swaths of voters. Biden will lose those voters – and may indeed lose the election – if he does not cease his support of these atrocities.Biden has that rare opportunity in politics: to help the country, and himself, by doing the right thing. But he must do so now. Both the Palestinian people and his own election prospects are running out of time.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr lists foreclosed New York home as voting address

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr has listed a home in foreclosure for non-payment as his voting address, though he does not own the property and is not listed in public searches as one of its residents, according to online records.In a statement late Sunday to the New York Post, which first reported on the home in question and how neighbors have never seen him there, the independent candidate’s presidential campaign insisted that the property was his “official address”.“He receives mail there,” said the statement provided to the publication, which noted how the candidate’s father, Robert F Kennedy Sr, served as a US senator for New York before his assassination in 1968. “His driver’s license is registered there. His automobile is registered there. His voting registration is from there. His hunting, fishing, falconry and wildlife rehabilitation licenses are from there. He pays rent to the owner.”Kennedy went on the defensive about his ties to the luxury home on Croton Lake Road in the Westchester county community of Katonah as both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have perceived him as a threat to their prospects in November’s race for the White House.Both the the Democratic incumbent and the former Republican president fear that the conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist – who is averaging about 10% in national polls – could siphon off enough votes to swing the race.Voting records first reviewed by the New York Post show Kennedy used the Croton Lake Road address in eight primary or general elections between 2008 and 2020.Property records show the home’s owner is Barbara Moss, an interior and landscape designer who is married to Timothy Haydock – a doctor, Kennedy’s longtime friend and the father of the candidate’s goddaughter.Moss received notice in late April that the US Bank Trust company in March had filed to foreclose on the Croton Lake Road home, saying she owed more than $46,000 plus interest on the property. A conference to settle the matter was scheduled for 7 June.The Post said it interviewed neighbors of Moss – and even local authorities – who described themselves as “shocked” that the home was linked to Kennedy, also known for being the nephew of both John F Kennedy and Ted Kennedy.One police officer told the Post, “No … he doesn’t live here.” And publicly accessible property search records show Kennedy’s most recent addresses are in Los Angeles as well as Foxborough, Massachusetts.But in an interview that he granted to the Post, Kennedy’s brother, Doug, said Robert lived or at least stayed with Moss and Haydock “for a number of years”.The statement added that Kennedy moved to Croton Lake Road long term – at Haydock’s invitation – after his declaration as a presidential candidate in the spring of 2023 prompted the landlord at his old place in nearby Bedford, New York, to ask him to relocate over fears about “becoming embroiled in political controversy”.Kennedy had not been seen on Croton Lake Road since running for the presidency required him to constantly travel to other states, according to his campaign’s statement to the Post.Among other things, the campaign also claimed that Kennedy has always planned to resettle in New York permanently after his wife, the actor and comedian Cheryl Hines, retires from her film and television career.Kennedy, 70, grappled with Sunday’s revelations less than two weeks after the New York Times published a story about a 2012 deposition in which he said he had endured a previous neurological problem because a worm got in his brain, “ate a portion of it and then died”.He later boasted that he could “eat five more brain worms and still beat” both Biden, 81, and Trump, 77, in a staged debate. More

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      ‘There’s no fraud here’: how a Republican official is addressing election denialism in his rural county

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      Abe Dane would be the first to admit he had concerns about election fraud during the 2020 election. He believed the elections in his own county, where he had worked the polls, were clean – but he wasn’t sure about other counties in the state, where unfounded claims of fraud swirled in 2020.That was before he took a position in local election administration. Now, with first-hand experience, Dane, the director of elections in Hillsdale county, Michigan, is confident in the process.It’s convincing others that’s the challenge now.Since 2020, deep-red Hillsdale county has been a flashpoint for election anxieties. Stephanie Scott, the elections clerk from Adams Township – one of the offices in Dane’s jurisdiction – earned the attention of figures in Donald Trump’s inner circle as she spread false claims of fraud and refused orders by the secretary of state’s office to turn over voting equipment for regular maintenance. Scott was ousted in a recall campaign by activists who were fed up with her insistence on spreading the false claim that the last election was stolen from Trump.On 8 May, the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced felony charges against Scott and her attorney, Stefanie Lambert, for allegedly turning over private voter data from the 2020 election to an unauthorized third party.Meanwhile, Scott has filed paperwork to challenge Dane in his fall election for Hillsdale county clerk.The Guardian spoke with Abe Dane about running an elections office during troubled political times – and his own shifting view of election security.View image in fullscreenIn a more conservative area, like Hillsdale, where people know that their neighbors are mostly going to be voting along a certain party line, do you still see the same kind of politicization around election administration as elsewhere? What does that look like for you, in a conservative town, as an elected Republican?Being a Republican and administering elections, I’m pushing back on that [politicization]. I try my best when I’m at township meetings, or city meetings, to choose my words carefully.I guess when I first started, I was a little bit more cautious. Here’s an example: I would say, “In Hillsdale county, there is no election fraud going on. We are doing things right in this county.” I’d always say “in this county”. I’ve gotten to the point now where I personally believe that our elections nationwide are completely fine. And so I’m starting to stop that, and to stop trying not to offend my fellow Republicans in my county. I’ll just say flat out, like, “I don’t think there was election fraud anywhere. I think people have a different worldview than you and you can’t accept that.”You mentioned earlier you had doubts about the election and concerns about election fraud, but it sounds like your view now has shifted. Can you tell me about that evolution?Well, to start with, in 2020 and before, I wasn’t in county government at all.I began to be an election inspector in the 2020 elections, and I knew things were on the up-and-up here. I didn’t have any questions about our own county. But I had questions about, you know, Detroit or Wayne county – things like that. As I got into election administration, I started seeing the processes, the checks and balances, the security that’s involved, and got familiar with a qualified voter file – the state’s voter registration system – and how they manage that list.There’s no good training to be an election administrator that’s from an accredited school. So, our education comes from our peers, and our associations – I’m rubbing shoulders with the elections director in Wayne county and [officials] all over the state, and we’re developing these relationships, and I’m saying, “You know, these are people just like me.” They care about their voters, they care about everyone having access to the polls. They care about making sure everything balances, and every vote is counted. And there’s no partisanship in that.Clerks should be non-partisan, because all we care about is allowing people to have access to the voting process.So no, there’s no fraud here.Given that you are part of this community, do you think that your evolution on this has given some credibility to election processes, with you having seen it from the inside and being able to communicate about it?I wish I had that much influence. It’s really just the people that are in my circle, that know me on a personal level, that I would have that kind of an impact on. So unfortunately, it’s not like that.No, it’s a battle that all of us election administrators have to fight – to help people understand what we’re trying to do and the process that’s in place to keep it accurate and honest. It’s going to take time and this election coming up – depending on how it goes – it might set us back another number of years in trying to get people to the point where they can trust our elections.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAmong our clerks and election inspectors, there are a good percentage of them that actually have concerns about people causing trouble in the precinct on these big elections. We’re working with our local law enforcement to try and visit the precincts, and even this one I had yesterday, I talked to the sheriff and I said: “It would go a long way if you just popped in there. It’s just one little precinct open, but they would love to see you there sometime.” And he did.Now that we’re getting a little bit closer to the election, what types of security threats are you preparing for? Or does it not feel that tense here?I would like to say it doesn’t feel that tense here, but we need to be prepared for anything.So we’re getting ready to do our inspector training – every election inspector in our county that will be working all the precincts in August and November will need to take their two-year recertification, and I’ll be doing that. So it’s a big ordeal. It takes two months to go through and I think there’s close to 300 people that we have to train.And in that, [security] is going to be one of the things that we talk about – and that’s the preparation. It’s: OK, what if this happens, what do you do? Who do you call?If I have the time, which is difficult with my time restraints right now, I’m trying to develop a document that will help facilitate communication if something does happen – whether it’s security, or whether it’s a weather issue, to facilitate communication between myself and the clerk’s office and the sheriff’s department or central dispatch, 911 operation and any county maintenance and stuff to be able to get things orchestrated, if we have to change a precinct location or if we have to deal with emergency in a precinct.View image in fullscreenAs the 2024 general election approaches, at the national and also local level, people who rejected the results of the 2020 election are getting more active. What’s been the most effective way that you’ve been able to push back against election denialism?I would say the most effective way is to have the time to be able to go out in the community and talk at public events or clubs and organizations and even the township and city meetings, and just give presentations to give that information about how our processes work.I’ve seen in other communities where they have more staff, and more time, where they can invite people in and have trainings just for the community on elections – not necessarily to make them inspectors, but to just teach them about the processes and inviting them in to conduct audits of an election precinct voluntarily.On a different subject, I am curious – is Stephanie Scott campaigning against you? Is that election a concern?To be honest, I’m not losing sleep over it. I put a lot of time and effort, blood, sweat and tears into this place. So I want to win. But if I lose, then I have a market where I can easily find another job that pays better and is less stressful and less hours. So it’s a win-win either way for me.So you’d stay in election administration?I do love election administration. And I love this community. And I want my family to grow up here. So yeah, I want to stick it out. More

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      Trump allies push bill to bar non-citizen voting, even though it’s already illegal

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      Dozens of Donald Trump’s allies and election denialists, including extremists like lawyer Cleta Mitchell and ex-adviser Stephen Miller, are promoting a bill to bar non-citizens from voting in federal elections, even though it’s already illegal and evidence that non-citizens have voted in federal races is almost nil.The push for the bill is seen as further evidence of extremist tactics used by ex-president Trump and his Maga movement to rev up his base of supporters for the 2024 election with outlandish claims designed to scaremonger over election fraud and far-right rhetoric detached from reality.It also fits a pattern, that many Trump allies appear to be laying the groundwork for false complaints of election fraud should Trump suffer electoral defeat again in 2024 – raising fears that the US could see a civic crisis similar to what followed the 2020 contest when his allies attacked the Capitol in Washington DC.The legislation’s rationale, which Trump touted at a Mar-a-Lago event with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, last month, has drawn sharp criticism from voting experts and even some Republicans.At the bill’s formal unveiling on 8 May, Johnson was joined by Mitchell, Miller and leaders of rightwing groups such as the Tea Party Patriots and the Arizona Freedom Caucus, who have formed the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, which boasts some 70 members pushing the measure.Johnson hyped the Save act – or Safeguard American Voter Eligibility act – framing illegal citizen voting as a more serious threat than Trump’s false charges that Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 due to voting fraud.Johnson – whose 8 May press conference drew the bill’s lead sponsors, the senator Mike Lee of Utah and the representative Chip Roy of Texas – allowed that “we all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable.”View image in fullscreenA lawyer and key Trump ally, Johnson was a central player in Trump’s baseless drive to overturn his 2020 defeat. Johnson led an amicus brief that more than 100 House GOP members signed backing a Texas lawsuit that tried to block the results in four key states that Biden won.“Even if you weren’t concerned about the drop boxes and the ballot harvesting and the mail-in ballots in 2020,” Johnson said on 8 May, referring to some of the phoney fraud claims Trump and his allies made about Biden’s win, “you definitely should be concerned that illegal aliens might be voting in 2024.”Actually, studies have shown that non-citizens are extremely unlikely to vote in federal elections, and that the minuscule number who attempt to vote have no impact on the outcome.One Brennan Center for Justice study that focused on the 2016 election revealed that just 0.0001% of votes across 42 jurisdictions, with a total of 23.5m votes, were suspected to include non-citizens voting, or 30 incidents altogether.A more recent Arizona study showed that less than 1% of non-citizens try to register to vote, but the large majority of those are believed to be errors, as the Washington Post initially reported.“These lies about widespread non-citizens voting fuel xenophobic fears and unwarranted doubts about the integrity of our elections. They appear intended to lay the groundwork to baselessly challenge any election results. Americans should be confident that our elections are safe and secure,” said Andrew Garber, an elections counsel at the Brennan Center.Even some Republican stalwarts say the bill is aimed at spurring more votes for Trump and his allies in Congress by raising the specter of a phoney election-fraud issue.“This is all political,” the veteran Republican consultant Charlie Black said. “The people who are promoting it know it is already illegal. But they hope by promoting the issue to convince voters that illegal immigrants are voting.”Other Republicans concur. “This is a messaging bill,” said former representative Charlie Dent, who noted it was “already illegal” for non-citizens to vote. “They’re trying to tie this to the border issue. It’s completely campaign-driven by challenging Democrats to vote against it.”Critics warn that the Save Act, which is seen as unlikely to pass the Senate if the House approves the bill, would make it harder to register people to vote since it would require citizenship proof such as a birth certificate or passport, which many Americans lack.Federal law now just requires voters to fill out a form swearing they are a US citizen.View image in fullscreenLittle wonder that the legislation is fueling hefty support from many well-funded, Trump-allied election-denialist groups and their leaders.Rightwing lawyer Mitchell, who runs the election-integrity network at the Conservative Partnership Institute where she is a senior legal fellow, has been in the vanguard of promoting conspiracies about non-citizen voting.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMitchell raised the specter of non-citizen voting in February on a conservative Illinois talk radio show where she said: “I absolutely believe this is intentional, and one of the reasons the Biden administration is allowing all these illegals to flood the country. They’re taking them into counties across the country, so that they can get those people registered, they can vote them.”A little-known group that Mitchell quietly set up last year, dubbed the Fair Elections Fund, which she is president of, is listed as a member of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition.A longtime election conspiracist, Mitchell was on Trump’s call with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on 2 January 2021 when Trump exhorted him to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn Biden’s win there.Similarly, Stephen Miller, who runs the rightwing litigation outfit America First Legal and served as Trump’s hardine immigration adviser, has been working zealously to promote fears of illegal voting by non-citizens.“Democracy in America is under attack,” Miller said at the 8 May press event. Miller decried the “wide-open border and obstruction of any effort to verify the citizenship of who votes in our elections”.View image in fullscreenNotwithstanding the dearth of evidence that non-citizen voting is a real threat, Miller has repeated bogus conspiracy theories that Democrats are bringing voters into the US to boost Biden winning in November.The Maga world’s obsession with non-citizen voting was palpable at a Las Vegas event last month hosted by the former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, who leads the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which drew a number of sheriffs and other elected officials from several states. Mack, an ex-board member of the extremist Oath Keepers, said in April that “election fraud and the border go hand in hand”, a claim that lacks any evidence.Voting experts are alarmed at the growing efforts of Trump allies to highlight a virtually nonexistent threat and promote legislation that would require voters to show documents to register that millions of Americans do not have.“Millions of eligible American citizens lack easy access to a passport or birth certificate, so requiring eligible voters to show either one to register to vote would impose a significant hurdle with no real benefits for election security,” said Garber of the Brennan Center.Other voting specialists voice similar concerns.“Instead of taking meaningful action to strengthen our critical election infrastructure, Speaker Johnson is adding fuel to the fire by linking immigration policy to election security,” said Carah Ong Whaley, director of election protection at Issue One, a bipartisan political reform group.Instead, Whaley urged Johnson and his allies to work in a bipartisan way “to increase federal funding to ensure that officials have the resources they need to guard against growing foreign interference concerns and cybersecurity threats”.Republican figures also express strong misgivings about what is driving the bill’s backers.“Since Trump has surrounded himself with the losing general election narrative about fraud in 2020, he needs to change the narrative,” said Republican consultant Chuck Coughlin. “These types of proposals pushed by his allies are critical to him duping American voters to vote for him again.” More