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      This Texas border city is tired of being a ‘pawn’ in Trump’s ‘political games’

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      Just a few blocks from a riverbank park in Eagle Pass that’s been turned into a no-go militarized zone by Texas troops, local pastor Javier Leyva was attempting a normal Sunday.He was cultivating fellowship with congregants of his First United Methodist church and other residents downtown, on the US-Mexico border. But, as so often, events were to intrude. A fringe, rightwing group was headed to town.His small city is under unwanted global scrutiny because of people migrating here and the forces that want to stop them.People sporadically cross the Rio Grande from Mexico after being denied legal entry into the US because of tight government restrictions. Sometimes there are tragic consequences, sometimes migrants are detained by US federal agents, other times they run afoul of the $11bn Texas border security plan known as Operation Lone Star, designed to deter migration.Leyva is tired of the heavy-handed and expensive law enforcement presence, that has transformed the picturesque riverbank and not only skews perceptions of Eagle Pass but is costly, while he sees local services suffer.“It’s all a political show and they’re using Eagle Pass as a pawn for their political games,” Leyva said. “I’m for border security, but if they would use that money for the infrastructure here, we’d be in hog heaven,” he said.About 23% of Eagle Pass residents are estimated to live below the federal poverty line, more than double the national rate, according to the US Census Bureau.Colonias, a Spanish word to describe low-income neighborhoods, are found along the border and often have street drainage issues or lack running water and sewer connections.Leyva says more infrastructure investments in the colonias are one of the ways the community would greatly benefit from taxpayer funds being spent by the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, on Operation Lone Star, which has blighted Eagle Pass and caused a clash with the federal government.The border town with a population of 28,000 has experienced many ups and downs in the spotlight of immigration issues.View image in fullscreenMigrants seek asylum sometimes in large numbers, but recently in very low numbers. At times, dozens of journalists descend upon the remote town 140 miles south-west of San Antonio. Year round, hundreds of military and law enforcement officers are deployed to the city from in-state and around the US.And within the last year, far-right groups have homed in on Eagle Pass as a destination for aggressive demonstrations against immigration and in favor of Donald Trump.While Leyva was delivering his sermon at church last weekend, a so-called Take Our Border Back Convoy was en route from Dripping Springs, Texas, to Eagle Pass, roughly a 200-mile (322km) drive, aiming to protest on both sides of the border.In response, the local police, Texas department of public safety (DPS) troopers and national guard soldiers deployed by Texas were on high alert and prominent in the quiet streets of Eagle Pass.A previous convoy by the same group in February rolled dozens of trucks and hundreds of outsiders into town, many armed, and led to a border patrol facility being evacuated after extremist threats.Last weekend, police once again set up roadblocks leading to Shelby Park, the municipal park on the Rio Grande that has been taken over by Operation Lone Star and militarized. And the city braced as several police and trooper units were called in to stake out different parts of downtown or to patrol, in a city that is already policed out of proportion to the local population.But, in the event, fewer than 10 vehicles arrived, with US flags flying and Trump bumper stickers, and stopped in a pawn shop parking lot.One participant told the Guardian they had come “to pray on both sides of the border”. In fact, the small group of about 20 people walked across the international bridge on to the Mexican side and used a megaphone to shout in the general direction of Mexico: “We don’t want the illegals coming across our border destroying America,” and: “We declare these borders closed in the name of Jesus Christ.”View image in fullscreenThe group’s flyer features a picture of retired army officer Michael Flynn. But there was no sign of him in Eagle Pass last Sunday. He was then president Trump’s first national security adviser, who was disgraced and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with a Russian official. Trump pardoned him and Flynn said Trump should deploy the military to “re-run the 2020 election” in the swing states Joe Biden won.Despite the small turnout this time the uninvited visitors heightened the sense for ordinary residents that their city has become a battleground and that Christian faith is being usurped.“The convoy has been deceived,” Leyva said. “God didn’t send you here, you sent yourself using God as justification.”He added: “They think they’re trying to do the right thing, the patriotic thing. But they’re taking the law into their own hands and that’s not how this country runs.”Locals typically spend weekends shopping with family, dining at restaurants, and attending church services. Residents from the Mexican sister city, Piedras Negras, regularly cross the international bridge to shop downtown. People talk of experiencing peace in border living – a reality that the wider world doesn’t see or hear much about.Several blocks away from the Methodist church is immigration attorney Cesar Lozano’s law office where he specializes in cases dealing with asylum and deportation. Lozano is an immigrant himself and came to the US with his family from Durango, Mexico, as a child. He recalled the natural anxiety and nervousness that immigrating to a new country brings and is something he relates to among clients.With Eagle Pass in the spotlight, he said: “One side says it’s attention for us and there’s a lot of people that have benefited from the economic activity” – brought by multiple law enforcement agencies basing themselves in the area.“On the other side, it’s sad to see that we are on the map for the wrong reasons. We are used as props, no one used to care about us until now, we continue to be a venue for marches and convoys,” he said.Safety is the ultimate concern for residents whenever anti-immigrant groups or hostile individuals target the region, Lozano said, rather than when migrants arrive.A Tennessee man affiliated with a militia was arrested earlier this year by the FBI for plotting to travel to Eagle Pass while aspiring to kill both migrants and federal agents.During the February convoy, a friend of Lozano’s who works for the Mexican consulate in Eagle Pass was told to go home early because the authorities didn’t know what to expect from all of the people descending upon the region.Trump and his supporters talk of “open borders” and migration as spreading crime. Meanwhile, gaining entry to the US is difficult on many levels, whether people are undocumented or not.View image in fullscreen“The borders are not open and this is just political rhetoric,” Lozano said. “That’s ridiculous and insulting because my clients are going through a system where they’re vetted, must have a sponsor, have to go through background checks, and all the info submitted on applications is verified.”He questioned Operation Lone Star’s legality, as immigration enforcement is the exclusive responsibility of the federal government, which is in a long legal battle with the state.Meanwhile, downtown, Yocelyn Riojas is leading a group exhibition in Eagle Pass of more than 40 artists who have created works on the theme of “The Border is Beautiful.”“It’s meant to connect us with different perspectives of what our lives are like at the border,” Riojas said. “A lot of the artwork is nostalgic of earlier days, before this militarization.”Riojas said locals dislike the city’s lack of willingness to openly discuss political issues concerning things like the controversial buoys placed by Texas in the river and the mayor in effect signing away Shelby Park to the state.And she added: “If you don’t live here, then you have no understanding of what’s going on. Before anybody speaks for the community, they need to come learn and educate themselves on what is actually happening and how locals actually feel about the issues.” More

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      Republicans want to grill Harris for her immigration record – but what is it?

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      This week, the House passed a Republican-led resolution condemning Kamala Harris for her role in the Biden administration’s handling of immigration, part of a ramped-up effort to portray the presumptive Democratic nominee as dangerously lax on border security.Following Joe Biden’s decision to bow out of the presidential race, Donald Trump has also unleashed a barrage of fresh attacks on the US vice-president’s record on immigration, a politically volatile issue expected to play a central role in the November presidential election.“She was the border czar, but she never went to the border,” Trump said, repeating two falsehoods in a single attack line during a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday.As vice-president, Harris was handed a daunting mission at the onset of her term: to address the “root causes” of migration from the northern-triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. But at no point was she put in charge of border policy. That is the responsibility of the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was with Harris when she visited the border in June 2021, three months after she was given the assignment.Instead, Harris’s mandate, as laid out by the president, was to meet with government officials and private-sector partners to tackle enduring problems in the region, such as poverty, violence and a lack of economic opportunity, that drive people to migrate from their home countries to the United States, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a senior adviser of immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.“It was a diplomatic and development focus,” she said, “not a border focus.”The distinction has not stopped Republicans from misleadingly branding Harris as the nation’s “border czar” and blaming her for the sharp upticks in migration under the Biden administration. In a statement on Thursday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, accused the vice-president of having done “nothing to address the worsening crisis at the border”.“The result of her inaction has been record high illegal crossings, overwhelmed communities and an evisceration of the rule of law,” he said.Republicans are pouring tens of millions of dollars into ads hammering that connection while highlighting past comments in which Harris had expressed an openness to certain progressive-leaning proposals, such as reimagining Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and decriminalizing border crossings.Democrats’ tolerance for such immigration policies, however, has receded greatly since then, as migration levels climbed and it became a top issue for voters. For the first time in decades, a majority of Americans say there should be less immigration, according to a Gallup survey.As encounters at the border reached record levels last year, Harris endorsed a bipartisan border security package opposed by many immigration rights advocates that would have dramatically limited the number of people allowed to claim asylum at the US-Mexico border while bolstering funding for asylum and border patrol officials and for combatting fentanyl smuggling. But congressional Republicans abandoned the proposal after Trump urged them not to hand Biden an election-year political victory.With Congress refusing to act, Biden issued an executive order in June that temporarily suspended asylum between ports of entry.While the number of border crossings between legal ports of entry had already fallen from a record high of 250,000 in December, due in part to increased enforcement by Mexico, it plunged further in the months since Biden’s clampdown took effect.In June, border patrol made 83,536 arrests, the lowest tally since Biden took office in January 2021.Early on in her career, as the district attorney of San Francisco, Harris quickly established herself as a vocal supporter of immigrant rights, publicly denouncing legislation that would have criminalized providing assistance to undocumented immigrants.But in 2008, she broke with immigrant rights advocates and supported a policy proposed by then mayor Gavin Newsom to notify federal immigration authorities if an undocumented juvenile was arrested in suspicion of a felony, regardless of whether they were actually convicted of a crime, according to the Sacramento Bee. (Later, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris’s campaign told CNN that the policy “could have been applied more fairly”.)As California’s attorney general, Harris also worked to ensure state agencies assisted undocumented immigrants applying for U visas, a form of immigration relief designated for victims of certain crimes.In the Senate, after Harris was elected in 2016, she became a leading advocate for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, and an outspoken critic of Trump-era border policies. In her maiden speech as a US senator, Harris assailed Trump’s policies targeting immigrants. “I know what a crime looks like, and I will tell you: an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal,” she said, a refrain Republicans have resurfaced to use against her.Many immigration advocates recall her sharp questioning of Trump officials during a senate hearing on the administration’s policy of separating children from their parents as a form of immigration deterrence.As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris unveiled a plan to shield millions of undocumented people from deportation through the use of deferred actions programs and to make it easier for Dreamers to apply for green cards. The Biden administration recently announced a series of similar executive moves.But as the administration’s chief liaison to the three northern-triangle countries, progress can be hard to measure, analysts say.“She was given something that is not a quick fix and it’s arguable whether or not you can make substantial change in only one presidential term,” said Cardinal Brown, citing the endemic nature of some of the issues.Harris’s efforts to improve economic opportunity in the region have generated $5.2bn in private-sector commitments since May 2021, the White House said. Apprehensions of people from those countries crossing the US-Mexico border fell considerably between the 2021 and 2023 fiscal years, even as migration from across the hemisphere surged.At the same time, the narrow strategy, focusing solely on Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, was not reactive to the “paradigm shift” taking place at the southern border, Cardinal Brown said. Now people are fleeing crises all over the world, with a growing number of arrivals coming from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti.Harris also struggled to overcome early stumbles. During her first trip to Guatemala, the vice-president delivered a speech in which she memorably told people considering migrating north: “Do not come. Do not come.” The statement, which was instantly turned into a meme, was widely panned by immigration advocates who saw it as dismissive of the harsh conditions that cause people to flee – the very issues she was tasked with improving.While in Guatemala, Harris sat for an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, who pressed her on why she hadn’t yet visited the US-Mexico border.“I’ve never been to Europe,” a frustrated Harris responded. “I don’t understand the point you’re making.”Republicans again seized on the exchange to accuse her of ignoring an issue that is front-of-mind for many Americans. Harris visited the border shortly after, but her approval ratings sank and didn’t recover.Yet despite conservatives’ yearslong effort to tie the vice-president to the Biden administration’s challenges at the border, new public opinion research found that immigration was not one of the top issues voters associated with Harris – at least not yet.“Republicans are really enthusiastically trying to tie her to that, but the voters don’t,” said Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster for the Democratic research group Blueprint, which conducted the survey.While immigration was a clear potential vulnerability for Harris, as it is for most Democratic candidates, Roth Smith said she came to the issue with considerably less baggage than Biden had.“We’re not at some catastrophic level of doubt around her record on immigration,” he said. “Trump just has a trust advantage because he hasn’t shut up about immigration for eight years.”Many immigration advocates, meanwhile, see hope in Harris, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, who was elected to public office in a border state with a large undocumented population.Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, called Harris a “champion for Dreamers” and other undocumented people living in the United States.Cárdenas was confident Harris will draw a sharp contrast with Trump, who has pledged to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history”, removing “millions of illegal migrants”. But she urged the vice-president to go further by articulating a vision to expand legal pathways to citizenship – policies Harris has advocated for throughout her political career.“Falling back into an enforcement-only focus would actually be detrimental to her and would impact people that are enthusiastic about her now,” Cárdenas said, adding: “I don’t think she can avoid this issue. She’s going to have to outline it, and my hope is that because she knows it well that she’s going to be a forceful voice and advocate for positive change.” More

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      ‘A dystopian plot’: how will Trump’s Project 2025 affect California?

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      Donald Trump has not been shy about attacking California on the presidential campaign trail, telling fellow conservatives that “the place is failing” under Democratic party leadership. And all signs suggest that a second Trump administration would not hesitate to take a sledgehammer to principles and policy priorities that the Golden state and other progressive bastions hold dear.The Project 2025 policy document, a blueprint for a second Trump presidency drawn up by former Trump administration officials and sympathetic thinktank analysts, takes specific aim at California on abortion rights, fuel emissions standards and the transition to electric vehicles.The document also raises the possibility of a large-scale crackdown on immigration and an intense focus on border security – a cornerstone of the Trump campaign that could upend the lives of millions of immigrants living in California as well as parts of the state economy, especially agriculture, that depend heavily on immigrant labor.That is not to mention the other ways Project 2025 envisions overhauling the US government, with implications for California as much as the rest of the country: enhancing the power of the presidency and eroding the independence of the justice department, dismantling what it calls “the administrative state”, abandoning efforts to combat the climate crisis and curbing the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans.“Project 2025 is more than an idea,” the California congressman Jared Huffman has warned, “it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.”What remains to be seen, though, is how much of the wishlist laid out in Project 2025’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” is actually achievable. Trump himself has sought to distance himself from the document, as Democrats like Huffman have started using it as a cudgel with which to attack his campaign. And a number of policy experts at one remove from the heat and hyperbole of the election campaign believe that any dystopian plot might quickly give way to a lot of lawsuits likely to slow or halt parts of the Trump agenda for months or years.“I don’t think they are capable of pulling off a lot of the things they want to pull off,” said Christopher Thornberg of the Los Angeles-based research and consulting firm Beacon Economics. While an immigration crackdown similar to the one in Trump’s first term seems inevitable, mass expulsions of millions of people as promised by the former president would be dizzyingly expensive and near-impossible to pull off, he argued.As for California’s more ambitious environmental targets that Project 2025 wants to disrupt, some – getting rid of gas-powered cars by 2035, for example – are probably unfeasible.On many other issues, California can draw on its experience of the first Trump presidency to throw up roadblocks or pass its own state legislation. The Project 2025 document may be a sign that Trump and his allies are more ready to govern this time, but – as the political consultant and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project Mike Madrid argues – California and other blue states are better prepared, too.“Whatever the federal government decides to do, California can compensate,” Madrid said. In the event of a second Trump presidency, he expected the state to start filing lawsuits almost immediately, as it did more than a hundred times during the 2017-21 presidency, and find administrative or legislative solutions to many of the problems a new Trump administration might try to create.“This state is good at finding ways around the policies,” he said. “The size of the economy makes it easier to do that.”In one instance – a proposal in the Project 2025 document to end a legal waiver that has enabled California to set its own fuel efficiency standards for the past half-century – the courts have already heard a suit brought by several Republican-run states and ruled in California’s favor.None of that diminishes the threats that Trump and his supporters have been directing at California’s political leadership, or the nastiness of some of their language. In speeches over the past year, Trump has mischaracterized California as a place with so little water that even rich people in Beverly Hills can’t take proper showers, a place where shoplifting and other crimes are so rampant the only solution is to shoot criminals on sight, a place where undocumented immigrants are, implausibly, offered pension funds and mansions on arrival and can vote illegally multiple times over. “The world is being dumped into California,” he told state Republicans last September. “Prisoners. Terrorists. Mental patients.”Project 2025’s approach has been less fanciful and much more focused on policy detail. It rails, for example, against what it calls “abortion tourism” in California and other states and proposes a number of administrative remedies to track women who travel there because of abortion bans in their states, and to withhold Medicaid and other federal funding if California continues to insist that insurance companies make abortion part of their health coverage.None of this, though, is as frightening to abortion rights activists in California as the part that is left unsaid: the desire of many on the political right to institute an outright national abortion ban. Asked whether she believed Trump when he said he would not support such a ban, Jodi Hicks of the Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California responded with a flat “No.”To her, the fight in California is not about the fine print of the Hyde amendment or the Weldon amendement – tools invoked by Project 2025 that Republicans have used in the past to try to restrict abortion around the country – but rather about control of Congress to avert even the possibility of a national ban.Hicks has identified eight swing districts in California that she believes can determine control of the House of Representatives and her organization is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the Democratic candidates there. “The road to reproductive freedom runs through California,” she said. “We know what the intention is – they want to take away abortion rights all across the country, including California. What we need is a Congress that can push back and protect us.”The best way to thwart the Republicans’ plans, in other words, is to vote against them. California, as a solid-blue state, will do its part to keep Trump out of the White House. What the rest of the country does remains to be seen. More

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      Donald Trump claims to ‘know nothing’ about Project 2025

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      Donald Trump is trying to claim he has “nothing to do” with Project 2025, a political roadmap created by people close to him for his potential second term.The project, which is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, seeks to crack down on various issues including immigration, reproductive rights, environmental protections and LGBTQ+ rights. It also aims to replace federal employees with Trump loyalists across the government.Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”The former president’s post came a day after the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said the US was in the midst of a “second American revolution” that can be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”. He made the comments on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back”.In response to Trump’s post, several critics were quick to point out that it appears unlikely that he is unaware of Project 2025, given that many individuals involved in the project are his closest allies.“Many people involved in Project 2025 are close to Trump world & have served in his previous admin,” CNN’s Alayna Treene said.Economist and Guardian columnist Robert Reich wrote: “Don’t be fooled. The playbook is written by more than 20 officials Trump appointed in his first term. It is the clearest vision we have of a 2nd Trump presidency.”The Trump campaign has previously pushed back on claims that he would follow the policy ideas set out in Project 2025 or by other conservative groups. His campaign told Axios in November 2023 that the campaign’s own policy agenda, called Agenda47, is “the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House”, though the campaign added that it was “appreciative” of suggestions from others.Still, Heritage claimed credit for a bevy of Trump policy proposals in his first term, based on the group’s 2017 version of the Mandate for Leadership. The group calculated that 64% of its policy recommendations were implemented or proposed by Trump in some way during his first year in office.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Heritage Foundation also created the first Mandate for Leadership that heavily influenced Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1981.The foundation claims that Reagan gave copies of the manifesto to “every member of his Cabinet” and that nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations it laid out were either “adopted or attempted” by Reagan. More

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      At the Arizona-Mexico border, residents are fed up: ‘The politicians are creating the mayhem’

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      A few hundred feet from the US-Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona, Laura Aldana chuckled at the suggestion – made by both leading presidential candidates – that the region had fallen into chaos.“Where?” she asked rhetorically. She gestured toward the street outside the downtown formalwear boutique where she works. “There’s almost too little to do here.”Elsewhere in town, Oscar Felix Jr, a local radio host, shook his head at the idea that there was a crisis. “Yeah, no we are good.”And a hundred miles east, in the border town of Douglas, Peggy Christiansen, a pastor at the First Presbyterian church, cringed. “I look at those conversations on TV, or on the news – and it just makes me mad,” she said. “The politicians are creating the mayhem.”In Arizona – a key battleground state – residents living near the border are finding their region the centre of attention in a presidential election cycle where immigration has emerged as a top concern for voters.The issue has darkened Joe Biden’s hopes for re-election – and the president, sensing this weakness, has promised to “secure the border and secure it now” with harsh new restrictions on people seeking asylum in the US. During the presidential debate last week, the Donald Trump honed in on the issue – redirecting questions about the economy, abortion and the environment to immigration and painting a cataclysmic scene of millions arriving at the border to “destroy our country”. If he wins in November, the former president has promised the detention and mass deportation of unauthorised immigrants, and an expanded border wall.View image in fullscreenHere along the border, residents interviewed by the Guardian had many different ideas about how the US should respond to one of the largest surges in migration in the country’s history. But even those with wildly different political views and background were united in their scepticism that all that rhetoric would amount to much.Some said they were increasingly feeling like pawns in a political game. Many were worried that the election year would further defer the sorts of broad reforms they’ve been requesting for years.“It is interesting because every time it’s a political campaign, the migrants become a problem,” said Felix Jr, who runs the local Spanish-language radio station Maxima FM. “But they never talk about what is really affecting us.”At the beginning of the year, the border’s Tucson sector – which stretches from Arizona’s border with New Mexico in the east to the edge of Yuma county in the west – became the busiest region for migrant crossings. Across the border, authorities were apprehending a record number of people – including about 2.4 million people in the fiscal year ending in September 2023.Panicked local leaders have been publicly calling for more funding and resources from the federal government to shelter and feed the influx of people. In high-profile news reports, disgruntled ranchers and hardened immigration critics have recoiled at what they perceive as intruders on their land.“I’m afraid of how the media has covered this, and how politicians have exploited that,” said Mark Adams, a coordinator for Frontera De Cristo, a Presbyterian ministry based in Douglas and across the border in Agua Prieta. He and other locals have bristled at characterizations of Douglas and other border towns as chaotic or overrun.In September of last year, amid a rush of arrivals, Customs and Border Protection started releasing asylum seekers who had been granted humanitarian parole into small, rural communities including Douglas, Bisbee, Nogales and Casa Grande, rather than transporting them to bigger cities. Many of the mayors and sheriffs of these towns balked.But in Douglas, a town of about 15,500 people, locals sprang into action, Adams said. The local Catholic and Presbyterian churches, along with Frontera de Cristo, arranged housing for families and individuals. Local restaurants donated catered meals, and home cooks contributed giant pots of pozole.Over a six-month period, the coalition welcomed about 8,500 people. The volunteer-run migrant welcome centre ran so smoothly. “Hardly anybody who wasn’t involved knew that this was even happening,” Adams said.View image in fullscreenIn recent months, as the number of migrant apprehensions dropped, officials once again began busing new arrivals directly to Tucson, where they could more easily seek out legal resources and flights to reunite sponsors or family members in other states. But some in his congregation were almost disappointed they wouldn’t get to welcome more people, Adams said.“I told them ‘No!’ It’s so much better for them to go to Tucson,” he said, laughing. “But this is a small community and there was just such an outpouring of support. So to see this narrative that the migrants are a burden to our towns is really upsetting.”Within the town, and all along its outskirts – where remote cattle ranches and scattered homesteads blend into desert and red rock mountains – other residents said the national rhetoric on immigration and the border often clashed with their realities.Trump’s references, especially, to the border as a “war zone” make her wince, said Christiansen, the pastor.“But I’m really disappointed that Biden and his people are just starting to do the same thing,” she said. “It’s like people are just starting to sprout this rhetoric that isn’t based on reality.”Christiansen, who grew up on a cattle ranch about 30 minutes drive out of town and still lives in the country, often sees migrants crossing through her property, as do family members and neighbours. She can empathise with the complicated feelings some locals have about the surge in migration. Many have to contend with trash on their property, cut cattle fences, drained water tanks and other property damage that can cost ranchers earning slim margins of hundreds or thousands of dollars. Some worry about the threat posed by cartels who smuggle people across the border, she said.But, she added: “In my family, if someone crosses the fence or some smuggler drops them off in the desert, if they need help we give them water and shade and a place to charge their phones. And then we mind our own business.”Recently, she had offered a drink to a young man who was desperate and dehydrated when officers showed up at her door asking after a person of his description. “I don’t lie, so I had to tell them,” she said. “But this was just a young man and he was desperate. I hugged him, and I said I was sorry.” West of Nogales, where the border wall slices across the ancestral land of the Tohono O’odham, Faith Ramon sees a monument to an immigration system that has failed both her community and the migrants it was built to deter.“I keep thinking, why does it have to be like this?” she said.Construction of the wall during the Trump administration destroyed sacred Tohono O’odham sites and desecrated burial grounds, wreaking ecological disaster in its path. In the ensuing years, she said, enhanced border security measures in the region have led to the near-daily harassment of Tohono O’odham nation members.Anyone who doesn’t look white is at risk of getting pulled over or interrogated, said Ramon, a member of the Tohono O’odham nation and a community organiser with the progressive group Lucha, which is challenging an Arizona ballot measure that would empower local law enforcement agents to similarly target and question anyone they suspect to be undocumented.View image in fullscreenLast year, border patrol agents shot and killed 58-year-old Raymond Mattia outside his home on the Tohono O’odham reservation. “If they want to secure the border, then they should be doing that,” she said. “Not hanging around my grandma’s backyard or my community store.”“People are coming just for the quote-unquote American dream. And it’s becoming a nightmare,” she said, for everyone.In a region where people have long felt ignored by both political parties, residents were divided over Biden’s recent executive order – which shuts down the border to nearly all asylum seekers once the average for daily unauthorised crossings hits 2,500.When Biden announced the order earlier this month, Kat Rodriguez, the activist in Tucson, had just completed an annual 75-mile trek from Sasabé, Mexico, through the desert to Tucson, to honour migrants who died making the long journey north. “Every election, historically and consistently, the border becomes this poker chip that politicians throw in there to show that they’re tough,” she said. “And it seems like there’s this race to the bottom with some of these policies of who can be more draconian.”She and other advocates worried that the restrictions would further push desperate people to try to cross covertly rather than wait to apply for asylum. “People are already waiting for unreasonable amounts of time,” she said. “And this just puts even more people in a vulnerable position.”Some immigrant advocates and local leaders have also pointed out the order doesn’t come with additional funding or resources for enforcement, or for cities struggling to provide for the influx of people. And it’s unclear that the order would deter economic migrants crossing unlawfully, many of whom understand they do not qualify for asylum and therefore make treacherous journeys across the desert to evade authorities.Others were more optimistic. “It makes me think Biden is looking out for the country,” said Rob Victor, a retired border patrol agent who has since settled in Douglas. Agents have been overwhelmed in recent years, he said, as have cities not just along the border and across the country who lacked the resources to shelter asylum seekers waiting in the US for their cases to be worked out in immigration courts.That order, along with Biden’s executive action shielding the undocumented spouses of US citizens from deportation, are steps in the right direction to allow the immigration judges and patrol agents to focus on existing applications and border security, he said.But on their own, the actions aren’t enough to address pressure at the border, he continued. “The answers are not at the border enforcement level, or at the border patrol level. We need comprehensive immigration reform,” he said.View image in fullscreenHe’d like to see the US hire hundreds more immigration judges, so that those seeking asylum don’t have to wait for years for a court date without the ability to earn money for themselves. And there should be more opportunities for temporary work visas for people who come to the US primarily looking for work, he said. “That has to be negotiated between the Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “Let’s get the Squad involved in this. And let’s get some conservative Republicans too. And Kyrsten Sinema – she’s a Democrat but moderate,” he said, referring to the Arizona senator, who visited Douglas earlier this year to deliver the bad news that congressional action on immigration was unlikely in 2024 after Trump helped sink the effort in February.But Congress has repeatedly failed to reform the immigration system for decades. And people on both sides of the border have grown weary.“For me it’s been three years,” said Maria Luisa Garcia, 55, who waits on the Mexican side of the border in Nogales, Sonora, each week – to meet with her niece on the US side, in Nogales, Arizona.Garcia cannot cross to the US until her visa application is processed and her niece, who is also applying for residency, cannot cross south while her application is pending.The two link fingers through the gaps in the rust-red steel bollards. “One more year, and return, they told me. One more and one more.” she said, shaking her head.Read more reporting from the US-Mexico border:
      In this Arizona town, business has slowed as a border crackdown ramps up
      At the US’ latest border hotspot, aid workers brace for volatility
      US hospital treated 441 patients with severe injuries from border wall last year More

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      Rees-Mogg tells young Tories he wants to ‘build a wall in the English Channel’

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      Jacob Rees-Mogg has said he wants to “build a wall in the English Channel” in a leaked recording, in which he heaped praise on Donald Trump and the hardline Republican response to immigration.Speaking to young Conservative activists, Rees-Mogg doubled down on his backing for the former US president, saying he took the right approach by building a border wall.“If I were American I’d want the border closed, I’d be all in favour of building a wall. I’d want to build a wall in the middle of the English Channel,” the former cabinet minister said.Rees-Mogg is fighting a strong Labour challenge in his North East Somerset and Hanham constituency against Dan Norris, the mayor of the West of England, who was previously MP in the seat until he was defeated by Rees-Mogg in 2010.Rees-Mogg, a popular figure among Tory party members, is likely to be influential in the Conservative leadership race if he retains his seat. Support for Trump’s White House bid is a sharp divider within the party between the right and the centrist One Nation group. Those who have given public backing to the former president, who has been convicted on 34 felony counts, include the Conservative former prime ministers Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, who said Trump’s return would be a “big win for the world”, and the former MPs Andrea Jenkyns and Jake Berry.In January 2024, Jenkyns said: “We’d be a safer place if Trump came back.”; Berry told ITV the US should “bring him back”.Speaking before a pub crawl in March organised by a Young Conservative group, Rees-Mogg said: “Every so often, I slightly peek over the parapet, like that image from the second world war of the man looking over the wall, and say if I were an American, I would vote for Donald Trump and it’s always the most unpopular thing I ever say in British politics, but I’m afraid it’s true. I would definitely vote for Donald Trump against Joe Biden.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the recording, Rees-Mogg claimed Biden “doesn’t like Britain” and said that was his biggest concern going into the election. “That’s … much more important for me than whether somebody closes the border between the US and Mexico … I want Trump to succeed as he looks like the candidate. And one does to some degree worry about the mental acuity of President Biden.”The Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, has also been a champion of Trump, appearing at multiple rallies in the US and suggesting he wants to mirror the Republican candidate’s success in mounting a takeover of the right.At a rally on Sunday, Farage said he would “make Britain great again” in an echo of the former US president’s slogan. He has previously said Trump “learned a lot” from the provocative speeches he himself made during his years in Brussels.Rees-Mogg did not respond to a request for comment. More

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      US-Mexico border crossings fall to three-year low after Biden’s executive order

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      Undocumented crossings at the US’s southern border have fallen to a three-year low, marking the lowest in Joe Biden’s presidency just a short time after he signed a controversial executive order limiting immigration there in June.The latest data from the federal Customs and Border Patrol obtained by CBS News is the most recent since Biden signed his executive order – and comes as the president is accused of failing to address concerns about the amount of people crossing into the US without permission.About 84,000 people crossed into the US without documentation in June, the lowest monthly total since Biden assumed office in January 2021, CBS reported.That reduction forms part of a broader trend that has seen the number of people who have entered the US without authorization steadily decrease since February, when 141,000 were apprehended at the border.Biden’s executive order restricts asylum seekers from crossing the southern border when a daily limit of crossings has been exceeded. Biden signed the order after Republicans blocked a bipartisan immigration bill that was set to limit asylum.“We must face a simple truth,” Biden said when the order was signed. “To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now.”The mandate received condemnation from Democrats, particularly progressives and immigration advocates, who viewed it as punitive and reminiscent of the Donald Trump White House’s previous asylum ban.“It violates fundamental American values of who we say we are – and puts people in danger,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy organization, to the Guardian. “It’s part of a trap that the Democrats are falling into – they’re buying the narrative the right is pushing on immigration.”Biden’s action came amid polling which showed that a majority of registered voters don’t approve of his handling of immigration, a top-ranking issue in the 2024 presidential election. The Democrat’s executive order has done little to persuade disgruntled voters, according to a recent poll from Monmouth University.Biden has also faced consistent criticism from Republicans for failing to address record amounts of migrants arriving into the US through its border with Mexico.During Thursday’s presidential debate, Trump – the presumptive Republican nominee – repeatedly brought up the murder and assault of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, who was killed in Texas by two Venezuelan men who reportedly entered the country illegally.“There have been many young women murdered by the same people he allows to come across our border,” Trump said, as Reuters reported. “These killers are coming into our country and they are raping and killing women. And it’s a terrible thing.” More

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      Republicans have a ghoulish tactic for distracting from Trump’s criminality | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump is already showcasing the big surprise he will spring on Joe Biden at their debate. It’s not a surprise; it’s his most morbid, ghastly and predictable trick.On Friday, his campaign arranged and publicized a telephone call to the mother of a young woman who had been murdered by an undocumented immigrant to express his heartfelt sympathy. That day, the former president posted three similar stories of gruesome murders on his Truth Social account. “We have a new Biden Migrant Killing – It’s only going to get worse, and it’s all Crooked Joe Biden’s fault. He’s a disgrace to the Office of President, he’s a disgrace to America. I look forward to seeing him at the Fake Debate on Thursday. Let him explain why he has allowed MILLIONS of people to come into our Country illegally!”In the debate, Trump will cast the president as responsible for those who stalk, rape and kill innocent young women. He will accuse Biden and his policies on the border of being the source of vicious crimes. Biden will be the villain. He will be shown to have no empathy. He will be exposed as secretly conspiring to unleash a reign of terror. He will be unveiled as the criminal. The chivalrous Trump will ride as the white knight to rescue vulnerable women from swarthy rapists and killers. The original scenario of this plot was The Birth of a Nation.Trump’s planned attack in the debate is pulled from his repertoire of ploys like a hack comedian on the Strip drawing from a roomful of old joke files. For years he has exploited these tragedies as set-ups and the anguished parents as props. According to Fox News, “he has lent hope and compassion to those who have lost family members or other loved ones in recent years due to heinous acts committed by individuals who had come to the US illegally”. Alongside its portrayal of Trump as the sincere consoler of the grieving, truly a minister of souls, Fox News helpfully highlighted a story headlined: Illegals Charged with Murder, Rape and Kidnapping in a Week of Shocking Crimes Across the US. (Hyped after that, the next story: Transgender Utah Woman Shot Parents Dead.)Trump has been deploying this gambit since his first campaign in 2016, which featured a cavalcade of members of stricken “angel families”. Most recently, in February, before Biden’s State of the Union Address, he called the parents of a young woman allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant and afterward described how the “beautiful young woman” was “barbarically attacked”.When one of the people he had accused was later acquitted, Trump stated that the verdict was the reason there was “no wonder” why Americans are “so angry with illegal immigration”. Trump ghoulishly trolls for this specific and unusual type of murder, and when the details don’t match his grisly story, it doesn’t matter because there’s still a dead woman he can pretend to mourn.Trump’s call last week to another devastated family was a revival of his failed effort to disrupt Biden’s State of the Union. His Maga zealot, House member Marjorie Taylor Greene, elbowed her way to the aisle of the House chamber as Biden entered. Wearing a red “Make America Great Again” cap and a T-shirt reading “Say Her Name”, a slogan appropriated from the Black Lives Matter movement to protest against the police killings of Black women, she thrust a button with a victim’s name into Biden’s hand.In his speech, Biden lamented that the Republicans in the Senate had killed a border security bill, chiefly crafted by the very conservative senator James Lankford, Republican from Oklahoma, and initially backed by the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Biden had exerted considerable political capital to get the Democrats to agree to the bill, which many, if not most, found distastefully draconian. But it was not the Democrats who killed the conservative bill. Trump opposed it. Instead, he wanted the festering problem for his campaign. Under Trump’s pressure, the Republicans caved and even Lankford voted against his own bill.When Biden mentioned the demise of the bipartisan border bill at the hands of cowed Republicans, some Maga members began to jeer him. “Oh, you don’t like that bill, huh?” Biden replied. “That conservatives got together and said it was a good bill? I’ll be darned. That’s amazing.” Lankford was caught on camera muttering: “That’s true.”“Say her name!” shouted Greene. Biden held up the button she had given him, naming Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant. “Laken Riley,” said Biden, “an innocent woman who was killed by an illegal,” and added: “To her parents I say my heart goes out to you, having lost children myself.”Biden’s forthrightness deflated the intent of Greene’s stunt. In the face of the calculated effort to rattle him and make him lose his composure, he sidetracked his hecklers.After Biden spoke, the Alabama senator Katie Britt delivered the Republican response. As part of the overarching plan to pin murders by undocumented immigrants on Biden, she raised the murder of Laken Riley but created a weird dissonance speaking in her strange sing-song “fundie baby” voice. “This could have been my daughter. This could have been yours … From fentanyl poisonings to horrific murders, there are empty chairs tonight at kitchen tables just like this one because of Biden’s senseless border policies.”The orchestrated razzing at the State of the Union was the warm-up for the same tactic that Trump will undoubtedly use in the debate. Trump will make another attempt. Now that he is a convicted felon, he is more desperate than ever to shift the taint of criminality on to Biden.The Republicans following his playbook are seeking every opportunity to label Biden the true “criminal” and suppress mention of Trump’s conviction. “What he’s doing to the country is criminal,” the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham parroted on Fox News on 19 June. “His border policies are allowing people to be raped and murdered on the street.”That Trump was adjudicated a rapist in his E Jean Carroll defamation case and has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting more than a dozen women only makes the stories about the murders of innocent women by undocumented immigrants that much more politically necessary.To protect Trump’s reputation, House Republicans have banned any reference to Trump as a convicted felon from congressional speeches as a supposed violation of the rules, a suppression of members’ speech not seen since the Gag Rule of the 1840s forbidding antislavery statements. Then the Republicans pivot to the stories of murders by undocumented immigrants. The Republican National Committee – under its co-chair, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump – has created a website called “Biden Bloodbath”. In bold red letters, it screams: “Migrant Crime: There Is Blood on Biden’s Hands”.If the facts matter, a definitive study in 2020 conducted by a team of academic researchers from the University of Wisconsin for the libertarian Cato Institute showed: “Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years.”The researchers concluded from data collected in Texas: “The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45% below that of native‐​born Americans in Texas. The general pattern [is] of native‐​born Americans having the highest criminal conviction rates followed by illegal immigrants and then with legal immigrants having the lowest holds for all of other specific types of crimes such as violent crimes, property crimes, homicide, and sex crimes.”A new study published in 2024 by Stanford University experts for the National Bureau of Economic Research stated: “We find that, as a group, immigrant men have had a lower incarceration rate than US-born men for the last 150 years of American history. The differences in incarceration have become more pronounced starting in 1960, with recent waves of immigrants being 50–60% less likely to be incarcerated than US-born men (30% when compared to US-born white men). This relative decline in incarceration has occurred among immigrants from all major countries of origin, and it cannot be explained by changes in immigrants’ observable characteristics or in immigration policies.”The reality, moreover, is that crime, which shot up during and immediately after Trump’s incompetent and malignant handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, is now plummeting under Biden, mainly as a result of steadily improving economic conditions. Based on FBI statistics gathered from more than 11,000 police agencies across the country, Biden has noted: “In the first quarter of this year, murders decreased by 26%, robberies by almost 18%, and violent crime overall by 15%.”Since the Republicans under the influence of Trump voted down their own border bill, Biden has issued a series of executive actions. They include suspending entry into the US of those unlawfully crossing into the US, granting citizenship to those legally married to an American and resident in the country for 10 years, and giving quick access to work visas to qualified Daca recipients (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or Dreamers) who have graduated college and have jobs.Biden’s actions have been taken on his own because he has no Republican partners. His Republican critics, who made his unilateral actions necessary, pretend he has not done anything at all.Despite what Biden has tried and effected, Trump’s enduring contempt for facts extends not least to the question of murders by undocumented immigrants. His ability to continue manipulating the calamities of “angel families” for his own ambition has depended upon his wrecking a Republican-written border security bill, his defiance of the facts that undocumented immigrants are the least likely group to commit crimes, and his enlistment and intimidation of Republicans to do his bidding and echo his demagogy.Trump, however, can’t help himself from undermining the frenetic Republican attempts to protect him and the party from his criminality. He just keeps raising it. At every rally, he promises that he will pardon the violent criminals imprisoned as a result of their participation in the January 6 insurrection. He calls them “hostages” and “warriors”.The news is awash in stories of Trump’s filings and motions to delay his trials for his alleged coup attempt and alleged stealing of national security documents. Present and former associates constantly surface to the top of the crime news.Fifty-two people involved in Trump’s fake electors scheme have been indicted in four states. He is under indictment himself in Georgia and an unindicted co-conspirator in Michigan. His personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has been indicted in three states. Another of his attorneys, Boris Epshteyn – who pleaded guilty in 2021 to disorderly conduct after being accused of groping women in a nightclub (the sexual assault charges were dropped) – has been indicted in Arizona. A third Trump attorney, Jenna Ellis, has been indicted and says she regrets ever representing Trump. Another attorney, Kenneth Chesebro, also indicted, has flipped and turned state’s evidence. Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has been indicted in three states.His former campaign manager and senior White House adviser, Steve Bannon, has been sentenced to prison for contempt of Congress for failing to honor a subpoena from the January 6 committee. Bannon also faces an October trial in New York state for an alleged scheme to fleece Trump supporters in a “Build the Wall” fraud, another money-making opportunity after Mexico declined to pay for Trump’s empty promise to Americans that our friendly neighbor to the south would pony up after Trump called immigrants “Mexican rapists”. Trump had pardoned Bannon from federal prosecution for that same charge.For Trump, the emotional manipulation of the compelling anecdotal fallacy is all that matters. New “angel families” are ordered up and brought to his attention to be used and discarded one after another. He will always find the next terrible tragedy involving some immigrant somewhere to illustrate his false narrative to sustain the problem whose solution he has thwarted in order to be able to inflame it in his interest. Then, wet with crocodile tears, he can stage lachrymose scenes of people’s genuine affliction by which to demonize Biden.Demonstrating his piety and virtue, while showing no remorse for his felonies as he awaits sentencing, Trump endorsed the state of Louisiana’s edict to post a copy of the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom. “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER.” Trump did not specify those “many other places”. He made no announcement about posting the Ten Commandments at Mar-a-Lago or any other Trump golf club.“READ IT – HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? THIS MAY BE, IN FACT, THE FIRST MAJOR STEP IN THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION, WHICH IS DESPERATELY NEEDED, IN OUR COUNTRY. BRING BACK TTC!!! MAGA2024” Give me that old time Maga TTC.Trump endlessly cavorts before a credulous audience that either swallows his routine as they did the fakery of Trump as master of the universe in The Apprentice or else don’t care any more than Trump does so long as his pantomime advances him. As Trump said in his Access Hollywood tape, laying out the only commandment he has ever upheld: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More