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      Mass deportations, detention camps, troops on the street: Trump spells out migrant plan

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      Donald Trump is planning to unleash the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history should he win re-election in November, involving legally questionable deployments of military and police units and the creation of vast detention camps along the southern border.Trump has laid out his vision for a “record-setting deportation operation” in a series of rally speeches, newspaper articles and social media posts. He intends to move swiftly after inauguration day next January to stage mass roundups of immigrants across the country, conducting raids inside big cities where he would face certain Democratic opposition.“On day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan, on Wednesday. He told his adoring supporters that immigrants were coming in by the millions from foreign prisons and “insane asylums” leading to the “plunder, rape, slaughter and destruction of the American suburbs, cities and towns”.Immigration experts say that the deportation plans for a Trump White House 2.0 dwarf anything previously seen – both in scale and in the intensity of the former president’s determination to run roughshod over legal guardrails. He attempted workplace raids during his 2016 presidential term, but they were largely stymied in the courts.“This time we need to take Trump at his word,” said David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “When he talks about mass deportation – in boxcars, or bus loads, or planes, or whatever – that’s what he’s going to do.”Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior White House policy adviser and hardline immigration guru who is likely to be central in a second term, told the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in a podcast interview that the plans were going to be pushed through. “I want everybody to understand this is going to happen. If President Trump is back in the Oval Office in January, this is going to commence immediately.”In an interview with Time magazine this week, Trump emphasized that speed was critical to his strategy for removing many of the at least 11 million people without legal status living in the US today.“We’re going to be moving them out as soon as we get to it,” he said.To skirt around due process laws protecting asylum seekers,Trump has said he will invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act which allows for summary deportation of any non-citizen from a foreign enemy country. He says he will apply the provision in the first instance against “known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members”.Immigration experts fear that such summary removals could ensnare US citizens in the dragnet.“Trump will have his agents remove people, then ask questions later. If somebody looks like they’re undocumented, meaning they have brown or black skin, or speak with an accent, they could be included irrespective of their citizenship,” Leopold warned.Mass deportation would form the centerpiece of a Trump second term. It aligns with other aspects of his vision for the 47th presidency, which promises to be more ruthless, radical and revenge-laden than any administration in modern times.The former president will be counting on the rightward shift in the federal judiciary, which he effected when he was last in the White House. Over the four years of his presidential term, he placed more than 200 judges on the bench, and succeeded in transforming the US supreme court into a rightwing bastion.View image in fullscreenWith Trump and his team setting their sights on deporting more than a million people each year, the operation would inevitably require major infrastructure including new detention camps. Miller said that “large-scale staging grounds” would be constructed near the border, probably in Texas.“You create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft,” Miller told Kirk.Flesh has been placed on the bones of Trump’s immigration plans by Project 2025, a presidential transition operation spearheaded by the rightwing Heritage Foundation that has compiled a 920-page policy review aiming to “institutionalize Trumpism”. By its calculations, the daily number of beds in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centers would need to rise from the current 34,000 to more than 100,000.Ice itself should be given free rein to carry out “civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate”, Project 2025 says (emphasis in the original). The Trump campaign has stressed that outside groups like Heritage do not speak for the former president, but the policies contained in the review hew closely to his intentions and are likely to provide foundations for administration policy.Even with its 21,000 employees, Ice would be overwhelmed by the task of rounding up millions of people without the involvement of other entities. Trump told Time magazine that he would turn initially to the national guard, and then to the US military.“If I thought things were getting out of control, I would have no problem using the military,” he said.When Time pointed out that under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, the military is prohibited in most circumstances from acting domestically against civilians, Trump replied: “Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren’t legally in our country.”In fact, undocumented immigrants are civilians (though not citizens). As such, they enjoy equal protection rights under the US constitution.Trump likens his immigration plans to the mass deportation of some 300,000 Mexicans by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955. Though Trump is contemplating massively greater numbers, the two plans bear striking similarities.Both schemes were justified using racist stereotypes of immigrants. Eisenhower’s was called “Operation Wetback” and portrayed Mexicans as dirty and dangerous.Trump repeatedly talks about “migrant crime” at his rallies, telling Wednesday’s crowd in Michigan that prisons and mental institutions all around the world were being “emptied into the United States like we are a dumping ground”. Notably, criminologists report that immigrants – whether they have legal status or not – are more law-abiding than US-born citizens.Mass roundups are likely to threaten the “Dreamers”, the more than half a million immigrants who came to the US as undocumented children and who have been granted partial rights to remain under the deferred action program known as Daca. Trump has indicated he intends to tear up the Daca scheme, which he tried and failed to do in his first term.View image in fullscreenTrump also plans to use state and local police forces to assist Ice in roundups. That would be embraced with alacrity by Republican-controlled states like Texas where the governor, Greg Abbott, is already striving to give state police the power to arrest undocumented migrants.But it would be fiercely opposed in Democratic states which have tended to place a firewall between their law enforcement officers and federal immigration activities. Undocumented people are concentrated in big cities under Democratic control, such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, raising the specter under Trump’s plans of open confrontation between law enforcement agencies receiving conflicting orders from authorities led by the two main parties.Miller said that Republican governors would be encouraged to deploy their national guard over the border into Democratic-controlled states where undocumented migrants enjoy so-called “sanctuary city” protections. Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, could send troops into Maryland which has a Democratic governor, Wes Moore.“If you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close,” he told Kirk’s podcast.Leopold predicted that pitching one state against another would quickly deteriorate into a “police state mentality”.“Are we going to see a complete breakdown of the unity of the American state?” he said. “It’s possible.” More

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      Trump and Mike Johnson push for redundant ban on non-citizens voting

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      Donald Trump and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, plan to push for a bill to ban non-citizens from voting, the latest step by Republicans to falsely claim migrants are coming to the country and casting ballots.Voting when a person is not eligible – for instance if they lack US citizenship – is already illegal under federal law. It is unclear what the bill Johnson and the former president will discuss in their Friday press conference at Mar-a-Lago will do to alter that. But it is one more way for the former president to focus on election security and to ding the Biden administration over the situation at the US-Mexico border, a key issue for likely Republican voters this November.Like the other claims Trump makes about the 2020 election being stolen, the talking point about migrant voting does not have facts to back it up.There is no evidence of widespread non-citizen voting, nor are there even many examples of individual instances of the practice, despite strenuous efforts in some states to find these cases. A large study by the Brennan Center of the 2016 election found that just 0.0001% of votes across 42 jurisdictions, with 23.5m votes, were suspected to be non-citizens voting, 30 incidents in total.One review in Georgia found about 1,600 instances of non-citizens registering to vote from 1997 to 2022. In these instances, safeguards in the process worked: none of these attempts led to someone being allowed to register, because they did not submit proof of citizenship needed to be added to the voter rolls.The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, has a database of voter fraud cases across the country, which, according to the Washington Post, includes just 85 cases of non-citizen voting since 2002.Some of the isolated instances of non-citizens voting in the last decade have involved people who were confused about their eligibility and did not do so intentionally.In general, people who are undocumented avoid scenarios that could leave them vulnerable to deportation, such as voting illegally.The lack of prosecutions over migrant voting has not stopped Trump from making claims on the campaign trail that it will somehow steal the election from him, or that it has already happened in other elections in which he was on the ballot.“I think they really are doing it because they want to sign these people up to vote. I really do,” Trump said in Iowa in January. “They can’t speak a word of English for the most part, but they’re signing them up.”Trump is not the only one spreading this falsehood – it’s part of a longstanding Republican line of attack on immigration and Democrats. Now, the myth is also being pushed by Elon Musk, the owner of X, and the prominent Trump-aligned figure Cleta Mitchell, who has been circulating a two-page memo laying out “the threat of non-citizen voting in 2024”, according to reporting by NPR, which obtained the memo.Because this is a concern Republicans consistently bring up, some states have added new laws to try to remove non-citizens from voter rolls or undertaken audits of their voters to assess citizenship status.But, voting rights advocates have warned, these often run the risk of ensnaring naturalized citizens and other people who are eligible to vote and booting them from the voter rolls. One attempt in Texas in 2019 led the then secretary of state to send letters to nearly 100,000 people, including US citizens who were erroneously warned they might not be eligible to vote.Widespread voter fraud, in general, does not exist in the US. There are instances of voter fraud prosecuted across the US every election, but even statewide taskforces have been unable to uncover large numbers of cases, and certainly nothing close to the scale that could swing elections. More

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      Mitt Romney says Alejandro Mayorkas’s actions do not merit impeachment

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      Alejandro Mayorkas is not guilty of a high crime or misdemeanour, the Republican senator Mitt Romney said, making clear he will not vote to remove the US homeland security secretary from office if his impeachment goes to a trial.“Secretary Mayorkas is following the position of his party and of the president who was elected,” Romney, from Utah and his party’s nominee for president in 2012, told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday.“We have pointed out that President Biden is for open borders, as are the Democrats, and Mayorkas is simply following that policy. It’s the wrong policy, it has a huge damaging effect on the country – but it’s not a high crime or misdemeanour.”Republicans have zeroed in on undocumented migration and the southern border as campaign issues in an election year.House Republicans impeached Mayorkas in February but have not yet formally sent the articles of impeachment across the Capitol to the Senate. On Tuesday, John Kennedy, a Republican senator from Louisiana, told reporters that process would now be delayed until Monday.Under article two, section four of the US constitution, “the president, vice-president and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanours”.Debate over what exactly constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanours” is a constant of US political life.Impeachment is meant to be rare: from the founding until Donald Trump only two presidents were impeached and both, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, were acquitted at trial.Donald Trump, however, was impeached twice: first for seeking to blackmail Ukraine for dirt on political rivals, second for inciting an insurrection, the attack on Congress of 6 January 2021.Romney was the only Republican to vote to convict both times. Now a lonely anti-Trump Republican voice, he will quit Congress this year.Democrats control the Senate, making conviction and removal of Mayorkas a near impossibility. But Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, must still decide what to do. Republicans are pressing for a trial. Schumer has indicated Democrats will do so, though they do not have to.Romney said: “Precedent is a matter of interpretation in this case. There have been impeachments that have been brought forward that did not go to trial in part because the people left office.”The last impeachment of a cabinet official concerned William Belknap, secretary of war to President Ulysses S Grant, in 1876. Belknap resigned, was tried anyway on charges of corruption, and acquitted.Romney did not say if he would vote to table the articles of impeachment, thereby avoiding a trial.“What does one do will depend on what the legal options are,” he said. “When to vote and how is uncertain at this stage. I believe a high crime or misdemeanour has not been alleged.” More

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      Arizona court rules Mexico can proceed with lawsuit against five US gun dealers

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      A trial court in Arizona has ruled that the Mexican government may proceed in its trailblazing lawsuit against five US gun dealers, who stand accused of facilitating gun trafficking across the border into Mexico.Mexico argues that the companies’ marketing campaigns and distribution practices mean that they are legally responsible for the bloodshed that their guns contribute to.This is the second such case that the Mexican government has brought in US courts this year, having also accused US gun manufacturers of facilitating the cross-border arms traffic in a case in Massachusetts.“[The Mexican lawsuits] emphasize the responsibility of companies regarding how they produce and sell their weapons,” said Carlos Pérez-Ricart, a political scientist in Mexico.Gun sales are highly restricted in Mexico itself, where there is just one gun store, run by the state.Yet the Mexican government estimates that 200,000 firearms are smuggled over the border from the US every year.This fuels a level of insecurity and violence that is extraordinary in peacetime: for the past six years, Mexico has seen more than 30,000 homicides a year.Some 70% of the guns used in homicides in Mexico have serial numbers that can be traced back to US gun shops.Between the two cases, Mexico is seeking $25bn in damages. But it also seeks to shine a light on industry practices and force change, thereby reducing the flow of weapons into Mexico and the gun violence they add to.In both cases, the gun companies sought protection under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents them from being held liable when crimes have been committed with their products.The trial court in Massachusetts initially dismissed Mexico’s case on those grounds, but Mexico appealed, and the decision was reversed in January.The gun manufacturers have said they will ask the supreme court to take the case on. But the supreme court only takes a fraction of cases where review is sought by defendants.By contrast, the trial court in Arizona accepted Mexico’s case against gun dealers. This means the “discovery” phase can begin right away, in which Mexico is entitled to ask for documents from defendants, and company executives may be questioned under oath.“We’re off to the races in the Arizona case,” said Jonathan Lowy, president of Global Action on Gun Violence, which is co-counsel in both cases.To win, Mexico will need to convince the juries that the companies’ design choices, marketing campaigns and distribution practices are sufficiently connected to gun violence in Mexico for them to be considered responsible.The lawsuits could provide a template for future legal actions to change the way the gun industry operates, for example forcing manufacturers to produce firearms in a way that makes it harder to convert for greater lethality.“This could lead to a massive reduction in the sale of crime guns supplying both cartels in Mexico and also criminals in the US, because the same industry practices supply both,” said Lowy. “It would save a great deal of lives – on both sides of the border.”Even if Mexico doesn’t win the lawsuits, it has put the issue of smuggled firearms as a catalyst of violence squarely into the public debate for the first time.“For many years the conversation was dominated by drugs going from Mexico to the US, and nobody mentioned firearms,” said Pérez-Ricart. “It’s crucial that we talk about firearms as a matter of greatest importance in foreign policy.” More

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      Arizona county fears ‘homelessness on steroids’ as migrant shelter funds end

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      An Arizona migrant shelter that has housed thousands of asylum seekers plans to halt most operations in two weeks when funding from Washington runs out, a problem for towns along the border where officials fear a surge in homelessness and extra costs.Arizona’s Pima county, which borders Mexico, has said that at the end of the month its contracts must stop with Tucson’s Casa Alitas shelter and services that transport migrants north from the border cities of Nogales, Douglas and Lukeville.The Pima county administrator, Jan Lesher, said the county could not afford the roughly $1m a week that previously would have been covered by federal funds.The amount “is not something that can be easily absorbed into a Pima county budget”, she said.Funding predicaments similar to Pima county’s are playing out in other border regions and faraway cities like New York City, Chicago and Denver that have received migrants.As in Tucson, other local governments anticipate that without federal dollars, communities will face many more migrants living on their streets, greater demands on police, hospitals and sanitation services.Pima county, which since 2019 has received over 400,000 migrants who have been processed by USborder authorities, estimated 400 to 1,000 migrants with nowhere to stay could start arriving daily in Tucson beginning in April.Congress faces a Friday deadline to fund the US Department of Homeland Security, which pays for migrant services, along with other federal agencies. Current money could be temporarily extended as a stopgap measure to keep DHS and other federal agencies running.View image in fullscreenBut additional funding for the shelter and transportation services has been caught in broader political battles about illegal migration and government spending, and Congress is at an impasse, largely due to election-year politics.Immigration is among the top three concerns for voting-age Americans, and Arizona is an election battleground state that could help decide control of the White House and US Senate.President Joe Biden, a Democrat running against the Republican former president Donald Trump for re-election on 5 November, has tried to appeal simultaneously to the Democratic base in favor of protecting asylum seekers while also courting other voters who want to reduce the number of illegal crossings from Mexico.Biden has grappled with record numbers of such migrants since he took office in 2021.In recent months, Biden has toughened his stance, blaming Republicans for opposing additional border security funding and legislation that would grant him new enforcement authority.Republicans counter that Biden should reinstate restrictive Trump policies and end new legal entry programs before Congress devotes more money to border security.‘Homelessness on steroids’Casa Alitas started in 2014 as a church effort to help Central American migrants whom authorities dropped at Tucson’s bus station. By 2023 it had served over 180,000 asylum seekers, mostly families, who are legally entitled to stay in the US as they pursue their immigration cases.While some migrants come from Mexico, Guatemala and other Latin American countries, Casa Alitas has recently housed people from west Africa, India and elsewhere.At one of five Casa Alitas shelter sites last week, migrants rested on cots and received meals, clean clothes, toiletries and assistance planning onward travel.Sara Vásquez González, 45, came with her husband and three of her six children from Chiapas, Mexico, where cartel violence has driven Mexican families to flee to the US.As they ate breakfast sandwiches, Vasquez said criminals had shot at their house, forcing them to seek refuge in the US.View image in fullscreen“We lost our house, our corn, our harvest,” she said.Casa Alitas has already told two-thirds of its 60-person workforce that they will be dismissed due to lack of funding, according to Diego Lopez, the executive director.The shelter plans to reduce its capacity from 1,400 people a day to 140, a level that may not even be enough to house all incoming families with infants and toddlers, he said.In December, Pima county received 46,000 migrants – more than ever before, according to county figures. Numbers have been just below 30,000 a month in January and February.In a February memo to Pima officials, Lesher said migrants being released by border patrol without shelter services could result in “homelessness on steroids”.Tucson officials are considering setting up a migrant site with bathrooms but no sleeping accommodations. By giving migrants “some place where they can go”, the city hopes to avoid people living on the streets and resulting calls on police and emergency services, said a county spokesperson, Mark Evans.The Democratic Arizona governor, Katie Hobbs, last week sent a letter to top US lawmakers on funding committees saying her state needed at least $752m in shelter funds. In the meantime, Hobbs said in a press conference that her office was working to find ways to deal with the situation.‘Stopping the flow’In Congress, lawmakers representing the area are divided on the issue of shelter funding.Representative Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat who represents part of Pima county and more than 350 miles (563km) of the Mexico border, called for more federal funds and said Republicans were “continuing to exploit the humanitarian crisis for their political gain.”Representative Juan Ciscomani, a Republican whose district includes another part of Pima county, said in an interview that Biden should reinstate more restrictive Trump-era policies and increase deportations before Congress provides more money for migrant shelter and transportation.“We need to focus on what would actually solve the problem, which is stopping the flow at the border,” Ciscomani said. More

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      Katie Britt defends sex trafficking story she falsely links to Biden presidency

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      In her first interview since delivering her widely ridiculed rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, Republican senator Katie Britt refused to apologize for invoking a story about child rape that she implied resulted from the president’s handling of the ongoing crisis at the southern US border – even though the abuse occurred years earlier in Mexico while her party controlled the White House.Britt, 42, appeared on Fox News Sunday and denied hiding the fact that the rape and sex trafficking case to which she referred had actually occurred during the presidency of George W Bush. She also made it a point to criticize what she called “the liberal media” for how they have covered her rebuttal to Biden’s speech on Thursday, which earned being parodied on the latest episode of Saturday Night Live.“I very specifically said … I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12. So I didn’t say a teenager – I didn’t say a young woman,” Britt replied after being asked whether she intended to give the impression that the abuse occurred under the Biden administration’s watch. “[It was] a grown woman … trafficked when she was 12.”Britt also said: “To me, it is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked.”The junior Alabama senator’s remarks to Fox News Sunday came after even her fellow Republicans pronounced her rejoinder on Thursday to Biden’s State of the Union speech – from the setting of a kitchen – “one of our biggest disasters”.During that rebuttal, as she oscillated between smiling and seeming to fight back tears, Britt described traveling to the Del Rio sector of the US-Mexico border and speaking to a woman whom the senator said had relayed horrific experiences.“She had been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12,” Britt said. “She told me not just that she was raped every day – but how many times a day she was raped.”Britt avoided saying when or where the abuse took place. But she strongly implied that it had stemmed from the Biden administration’s management of immigration issues at the southern border.“We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America. And it’s past time we start acting like it. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace,” Britt said. “It’s despicable, and it’s almost entirely preventable.”On Friday, in a seven-minute video on TikTok, author and former Associated Press reporter Jonathan Katz established that Britt was describing events that unfolded in Mexico in between 2004 and 2008, when Bush was president.The tale centered on Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who in May 2015 testified to Congress about her experiences at the hands of sex traffickers who held her captive between the ages of 12 and 16 in her native Mexico. Britt met Jacinto Romero on a visit to the border with other Republican senators in January 2023.But while the meeting with Jacinto Romero, now 31, occurred shortly after Britt took office, her abuse occurred as many as two decades earlier and not in the US.Katz lambasted Britt as dishonest and misleading, and many others have since done the same. A Biden White House spokesperson on Sunday issued a statment which said Britt had peddled “debunked lies”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA spokesperson for Britt confirmed to the Washington Post that the senator was referring to Jacinto Romero in her speech Thursday. Yet that spokesperson also insisted Britt’s presentation of Jacinto Romero’s story was “100% correct”. And Britt doubled down on that position Sunday.“This is a story of what is happening,” Britt said. “We have to tell those stories, and the liberal media needs to pay attention to it because there are victims all the way coming to the border, there are victims at the border, and then there are victims all throughout the country.”Britt’s guest spot on Fox News Sunday came hours after the actor Scarlett Johansson stood in a kitchen portraying the Alabama senator and satirized the latter’s State of the Union rebuttal on Saturday Night Live’s cold open.Among other things, Johansson said sarcastically: “I’ve invited you into this empty kitchen because Republicans want me to appeal to women voters and women love kitchens.”Britt went out of her way Sunday to explain “exactly why [she] was sitting at a kitchen table” when she rebutted Biden.“Republicans care about kitchen table issues,” Britt said. “We care about faith, family. We care about freedom.” More

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      Trump takes bizarre turn as he ratchets up racist rhetoric against migrants

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      Reaching for racist rhetoric bizarre even for him, Donald Trump compared undocumented migrants to the US to Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer and cannibal famously played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the Oscar-winning 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs.“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums,” the former president and probable Republican presidential nominee claimed in an interview with Right Side Broadcasting Network on Monday. “You know, insane asylums, that’s Silence of the Lambs stuff.“Hannibal Lecter? Anybody know Hannibal Lecter?”To laughter from the audience at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump added: “We don’t want ’em in this country.”Trump has made such statements before, including in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland last month. As framed to Right Side, they were the latest piece of extremist and dehumanizing invective from a candidate seeking to make immigration a core issue of the 2024 presidential campaign.Trump has a long history of such racist statements, having launched his successful 2016 presidential campaign by describing Mexicans crossing the southern border as rapists and drug dealers.His liking for Lecter led him to claim, at a rally last October, that the actor who played the character “said on television, ‘I love Donald Trump’, so I love him”.Hopkins has not publicly said he loves Trump. In 2018, he told the Guardian: “I don’t vote because I don’t trust anyone.” Brian Cox, another actor to have played Lecter on screen, has called Trump “such a fucking asshole” and “so full of shit”.In 2016, Mads Mikkelsen, who played Lecter on television, told CBS News that though he could “definitely laugh at some of the stuff [Trump] says”, he “can also go, ‘Oh my God, did he say that?’ I think he’s a fresh wind for some people.”Trump is an alleged serial offender, facing 91 criminal charges as he runs for office.Yet despite those charges (17 for election subversion, 40 for retention of classified information, 34 for hush-money payments to an adult film star) and multimillion-dollar civil penalties over his business affairs and a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”, Trump dominates the Republican primary.He also leads Joe Biden in most general election polling – surveys subject to warnings from experts about sampling techniques and accuracy so far out from election day.Super Tuesday: read more
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      Trump spoke to Right Side the night before Super Tuesday, when 16 states and one territory were scheduled to hold primary votes. Trump’s last, pulverised Republican opponent, Nikki Haley, was widely expected to end her campaign soon after.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs in his successful run for president in 2016, Trump is seeking to use problems at the southern border – high numbers of arrivals from Central America presented as a crisis, real or not – as a central campaign issue.At his direction, Senate Republicans sank a bipartisan deal on border and immigration reform. House Republicans have refused to move on the issue.Biden has sought to emphasise Trump and Republicans’ refusal to work on solving the border problem. The president’s campaign has also repeatedly slammed Trump for using far-right, fascistic language when discussing migrants, including a repeated claim migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. The Biden campaign directly compared those remarks to Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric during his rise to power in Germany.Speaking to Right Side, Trump repeated another campaign-trail complaint, about languages spoken by migrants to the US.“We don’t even have teachers of some of these languages,” he said. “Who would think that? We have languages that are, like, from, from the planet Mars? Nobody, nobody knows how to, you know, speak it.”On Trump’s father’s side, his ancestors spoke German. His mother was also a migrant, growing up in the Scottish islands, in a household that spoke Gaelic. His first wife, Ivana Trump, the mother of his three oldest children, spoke Czech. Melania Trump, his third wife and the mother of his son Barron, is Slovenian.Trump also made a blatantly false claim about everyday life in cities where large numbers of migrants have arrived, many bussed or flown in by Republican governors.“We have children that are no longer going to school,” Trump said. “They’re throwing them out of the park. There’s no more Little Leagues [children’s baseball], there’s no more sports, there’s no more life in New York and so many of these cities.” More

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      A young woman’s killing in Georgia stokes a familiar rightwing war

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      All murders are not treated equally.The killing of the 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley on the campus of the University of Georgia on 22 February has drawn national media interest and political activity in ways that other homicide cases do not, in part because it provides an easy target for rightwing election sloganeering.Homicide rates fell by historic amounts last year after a spike in violence during the pandemic. Early estimates suggest that across the country violence has returned to near-60-year lows.Despite the data, most Americans believe violence is increasing because violence increasingly drives media attention. And the murder of any young woman by a stranger is bound to draw additional news coverage simply because these killings are rare. FBI statistics show 3,653 women were murdered in 2022 – comprising fewer than one in four victims – and according to data tracked by the Violence Policy Center, about 92% of women who are murdered know their attacker. The murder of Laken Riley by a stranger is statistically one in a million.Where Riley died adds to the attention.The campus of the University of Georgia holds particular social and political significance among Georgians. A murder on campus is, for many, a desecration of hallowed ground. UGA is a dominant force in Georgia sports culture. Three out of four college students in Georgia attend a state school, and the flagship university is a top goal for almost all of them. About a quarter of state legislators are University of Georgia alumni, as are five of Georgia’s 14 Congress members and Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp.But the main reason we know Riley’s name, and not the names of the other 300-350 women killed by a stranger in the last year, or the names of the other eight people being held on a murder charge at the Clarke county jail, is because the suspect – 26-year-old Jose Ibarra – is an undocumented migrant who has been previously charged with a crime without being deported, and the victim is young, female and white. Of such things are press conferences born.“It is an understatement to say that this is a major crisis,” Kemp said on Monday morning during a news conference, attacking the Biden administration on its immigration enforcement policies. “Because of the White House’s failures, every state is now a border state. Laken Riley’s murder is just the latest proof of that.”Georgia’s state penitentiaries hold about 50,000 prisoners, and according to the Georgia department of corrections, about 1,600 prisoners had ICE detention orders at the end of January, up by about 100 since the start of Biden’s term as a result of increased enforcement activity. Of all Georgia’s prisoners, about 9,100 have been imprisoned for killing someone – murder, manslaughter or other homicides. Of the 7,050 murderers, 182 are subject to deportation.Estimates from the Pew Research Center suggest that Georgia’s undocumented population fell between 2011 and 2021 by more than 10%, to about 350,000, or about 3.2% of Georgia’s residents. Immigrants – legal and illegal – are less likely to be charged with an act of violence than the native-born US population.View image in fullscreen“There’s a long and unfortunate history of politicizing immigrants and suggesting that they commit crimes at higher rates,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications and public affairs for the Migration Policy Institute, and a UGA alumna. “As we’ve seen in US context … they see anecdotal reporting of individual, sad tragedies that they somehow extrapolate that this, therefore, means that a whole class of people are more likely to commit crime.”The media amplification of stories about an innocent female victim killed by a person of color is a historical trope in southern politics that harkens back to Reconstruction-era politics. Conservatives have made immigration central to their political messaging today, often disregarding the ugly history of this commentary when a case like the Riley murder presents itself.Enter Donald Trump.“Crooked Joe Biden’s Border INVASION is destroying our country and killing our citizens!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The horrible murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley at the University of Georgia should have NEVER happened! The monster who took her life illegally entered our Country in 2022 … and then was released AGAIN by Radical Democrats in New York after injuring a CHILD!!”Trump has habitually amplified murder cases when the victim is an American citizen and the accused is not. Laken Riley’s death has provided him another opportunity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2016, the Trump campaign rallied around the prosecution of Jose Ines Garcia-Zarate, who was charged with fatally shooting Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco. Garcia-Zarate, a homeless undocumented migrant who had been repeatedly deported, was ultimately acquitted of murder in 2017 and subsequently pleaded guilty to a weapon possession charge.Legislators have begun agitating for changes to Georgia law in response to the Riley case.“There are certainly also questions surrounding the administration of justice at the local level, and house leadership will be pressing for answers over the coming days as to why exactly the suspect and his brother continued to roam freely in the Athens area,” wrote the Georgia House speaker, Jon Burns, the day after Ibarra’s arrest. Three bills are advancing quickly through the legislative process, one mandating that police and sheriff’s departments help identify, arrest and detain undocumented immigrants for deportation.The high-profile death in Athens, Georgia, intensified the spotlight on the county’s district attorney, Deborah Gonzalez, long a target for conservative lawmakers for progressive policies. Gonzalez has called for a special prosecutor for Ibarra’s case, and declared she would not pursue the death penalty.Congressman Mike Collins, who represents Athens in Congress, sent a letter to Athens’ mayor, Kelly Girtz, and the Clarke county sheriff, John Q Williams, yesterday demanding they end “sanctuary” policies for undocumented migrants. Collins cited the sheriff’s policy of refusing to comply with immigration detainers for 48-hour holds, and an Athens-Clarke county resolution “to foster a community where individuals and families of all statuses feel safe, are able to prosper, and can breathe free”.Georgia state law expressly forbids Georgia cities from adopting “sanctuary city” policies of noncompliance with federal immigration policies, but Collins suggested in the letter that Athens had become one “in word and deed”, citing the Center for Immigrations Studies’ listing the county as a sanctuary city.The Center for Immigration Studies was founded by the avowed white supremacist John Tanton and is itself listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.Leaders among Georgia’s immigrant-oriented organizations met on Wednesday to formulate a response to the politicization of the Riley murder. “I have a 21-year-old daughter that goes to college in Nashville, you know, and I worry about her constantly. And so my first reaction was as a father, as a human being – it was heartbreaking, you know, devastating,” said Santiago Marquez, CEO of the Latin American Association in Georgia.“My second reaction was one of great disappointment, because, you know, I just couldn’t anticipate what was going to come and … you know, there will be a lot of backlash in our community.” More