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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
      Everything you need to know about Super Tuesday
      Key issues in the 2024 US election
      Trump all but certain of Republican nomination
      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

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      Biden calls for compromise while Trump goes full red meat at US-Mexico border

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      It might be seen as the first US presidential debate of 2024. Two candidates and two lecterns but 300 miles – and a political universe – apart.Joe Biden and Donald Trump spent Thursday at the US-Mexico border, a vivid display of how central the immigration issue has become to the election campaign. Since it is far from certain whether official presidential debates will happen this year, the duelling visits might be as close as it gets.And it was as clarifying about the choice facing voters as any verbal clash on the debate stage. Biden came to push legislation and appeal to the head. Trump came to push fear and appeal to the gut. It is sure to be a close-run thing.That they were at the border at all represented a win for Republicans, who have forced Democrats to play on their territory as the debate over immigration in Washington shifts further to the right.Border crossings have been at or close to record highs since Biden took office in January 2021, though they have dropped so far this year, a trend that officials attribute to increased Mexican enforcement and seasonal trends. Democrats have become increasingly eager to embrace restrictions as they are confronted by migrants sleeping in police stations and airplane hangars.Where the presidents went on Thursday, and who went with them, told its own story. Biden headed to the Rio Grande Valley city of Brownsville which, for nine years, was the busiest corridor for illegal crossings. He was accompanied by the homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whom Republicans earlier this month narrowly voted to impeach over his handling of the border.Trump, who has echoed Adolf Hitler by arguing that immigrants entering the US illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country”, travelled to Eagle Pass in the corridor currently witnessing the highest number of crossings – though they have fallen in recent months.The former president was joined by Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican who deployed thousands of national guard troops and laid concertina wire and river buoys to deter illegal immigration through a programme called Operation Lone Star – sparking legal and political standoffs with the White House.It was also Abbott who vowed to “take the border to President Biden” by busing thousands of migrants to Democratic-led cities, a move of diabolical genius that nationalised an issue which has, polls show, overtaken inflation as voters’ number one concern.In public remarks, Trump went full red meat, appealing to racist instincts in ways that offered a sobering reminder of the stakes of the election. “This is a Joe Biden invasion,” he said, insisting that “men of a certain age” were coming from countries including China, Iran, Yemen, DR Congo and Syria. “They look like warriors to me.”The former president – who favours travel bans and “ideological screening” for migrants – plucked assertions out of the air: “It could be 15 million, it could be 18 million by the time he gets out of office … A very big population coming in from jails in the Congo … We have languages coming into our country that nobody even speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign languages.”View image in fullscreenTrump went on to describe the alleged crimes of illegal immigrants and claimed that Biden has “the blood of countless innocent victims” on his hands. It is safe to assume that, at this summer’s Republican national convention, a series of gratuitous and lurid stories will be told along with a parade of victims’ families.Biden, who has been on the defensive on the issue in recent months, had a very different objective. He wanted to shame congressional Republicans for rejecting a bipartisan effort to toughen immigration policies after Trump told them not to pass it and give Biden a policy victory.“Join me – or I’ll join you – in telling the Congress to pass this bipartisan border security bill,” he said, attempting to turn the tables on Trump. “We can do it together. It’s the toughest most efficient, most effective border security bill the country has ever seen. So instead of playing politics with the issue, why don’t we just get together and get it done?”That’ll be the day. But in truth any president would have struggled with this escalating crisis. Congress has been paralysed on the issue for decades. Trump left vital agencies in disarray. Climate change, war and unrest in other nations, along with cartels that see migration as a cash cow, have conjured a perfect storm for Trump’s nativist-populist message to frame the conversation.Clarissa Martinez De Castro, vice-president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS, says: “It seems most people are hearing about the issue of immigration from Republicans rather than from Democrats. That means you are allowing your opponents to define what your position is and that would be political malpractice for any candidate or elected leader.”Last week a Marquette Law School Poll national survey found 53% of voters say Trump is better on immigration and border security, while only 25% favour Biden on the issue. And for the first time a majority (53%) said they support building a wall along the entire southern border – a promise that Trump has been making since he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015.The dynamic leaves Biden caught between trying to please the right while not alienating the left. Republicans and Maga media are demanding draconian measures and pushing emotional buttons by highlighting cases such as the arrest of Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, over the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.Biden duly embraced immigration policies that he ran against as a candidate in 2020 such as restricting asylum laws and promising to “shut down the border” if given new authority. But such measures were condemned by progressives and could put his own coalition at risk in a crucial election year.De Castro adds: “If you go back to the early 2000s, there was similarly a lack of alignment on this issue. It took work to get there, but then, for many years, Democrats were seen as aligned as the party that believed in legal immigration and a path to legality for immigrants here and smart enforcement. In some ways they have lost their voice on this, and they need to recoup that.”If Biden and Trump do share a debate stage later this year, America can only hope for a substantial debate on immigration policy. But the four-year electoral cycle and soundbite age are the enemy of the long-term reform that is sorely needed. This knottiest of political problems goes way beyond America’s borders.Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of NextGen America, a group focused on young voters, says: “Any immigration plan actually has to address the root causes. People are coming out of deep economic need and also fleeing very violent situations. Until you address that it doesn’t matter what kind of barriers they try and create physically at the border to make it more difficult. If they want real solutions, they have to address that.” More

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      Trump attacks Biden immigration policies in Texas speech as both visit US-Mexico border – live

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      Donald Trump has begun delivering remarks during his visit to the US-Mexico border. He begins by commending the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, on his efforts at the border.Trump moves on to say that the US is being “overrun” by “Biden migrant crime”, which he claims is a “new form of vicious violation” to the country.He accuses Biden of being the most incompetent president the US has ever had, and of transporting “entire columns of fighting-aged men” who “look like warriors” to the US.Trump’s comments are the latest example of his campaign rhetoric that seems to be going beyond the lies and exaggerations that are a trademark of his stump speeches and instead are going into the territory of outright extremism or racism.Joe Biden is now delivering remarks in Brownsville in South Texas.Biden begins by speaking about the devastating wildfires in the Texas Panhandle that has crossed into Oklahoma. He says he stands with everyone affected by these wildfires. “When disaster strikes, there’s no red state or blue state,” he says.He then moves on to his visit to the US-Mexico border. He says he has been briefed from officials from the border patrol, immigration enforcement and asylum officers, who he says are all doing “incredible work under really tough conditions”. They desperately need more resources, he says.Trump also speaks about the death of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was out on her morning run at the University of Georgia when authorities say a stranger dragged her into a secluded area and killed her.A Venezuelan man, identified as Jose Antonio Ibarra, has been arrested for the death of Riley. Ibarra is an immigrant who entered the US illegally and was allowed to stay to pursue his immigration case.Trump has blamed Joe Biden and his border policies for the Augusta University student’s fatal beating.Donald Trump has begun delivering remarks during his visit to the US-Mexico border. He begins by commending the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, on his efforts at the border.Trump moves on to say that the US is being “overrun” by “Biden migrant crime”, which he claims is a “new form of vicious violation” to the country.He accuses Biden of being the most incompetent president the US has ever had, and of transporting “entire columns of fighting-aged men” who “look like warriors” to the US.Trump’s comments are the latest example of his campaign rhetoric that seems to be going beyond the lies and exaggerations that are a trademark of his stump speeches and instead are going into the territory of outright extremism or racism.Donald Trump has been meeting with officials from the national guard and the department of public safety as he tours Eagle Pass alongside Texas governor Greg Abbott.The lower house of Alabama’s legislature has passed a law to protect providers of in vitro fertilization care, the Montgomery Advertiser reports, after the state supreme court earlier this month ruled embryos used in the procedure were “children”.The court’s decisions raised the possibility that practices providing the care, which is typically used by people who struggle to have children, could face civil suits or criminal prosecution. The bill, backed by the legislature’s Republican majority, would prevent that by protecting providers from those consequences.Here’s more, from the Advertiser:
      The Alabama state House passed overwhelmingly passed legislation Thursday granting civil and criminal immunity to in vitro fertilization patients and medical professionals.
      The bill passed by a vote of 94-6.
      Filed by Terri Collins, R-Morgan County, HB237 reaffirms Attorney General Steve Marshall’s statement that the state has ‘no intention of using the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision as a basis for prosecuting IVF families or providers.’
      ‘This would at least keep the clinics open and the families moving forward,’ Collins said.
      The state Supreme Court in February ruled that frozen embryos are legally protected as children, a controversial decision that thrust the state into the national spotlight. The ruling has been condemned by both Democrats and Republicans.
      In the wake of the court’s ruling, multiple clinics that offer IVF care in the state halted all appointments indefinitely, including Alabama Fertility and the University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System.
      In Brownsville, Joe Biden is meeting with members of the border patrol on what looks to be the banks of the Rio Grande, which forms the border between Texas and Mexico:Joe Biden has arrived in Brownsville, Texas, before his meetings with federal officials and a speech about border security.According to the White House, he’s expected to meet with officers from US customs and border protection, immigration and customs enforcement and other federal agencies. He will deliver remarks at 4.30pm ET, where he will likely press Congress to act on a border security compromise that Republicans are presently blocking.Donald Trump has arrived in Texas, where he’ll be visiting the border with Mexico in the town of Eagle Pass:Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, will probably outline hard-line measures he would take to stop people from entering the country without permission, if elected. Such crossings have surged since Joe Biden took office, for a variety of reasons. Here’s more about that:The House of Representatives has just approved a measure that will push back government funding deadlines and ward off a shutdown that would have begun after Friday:It’s now up to the Senate to approve the bill, and Congress will then shift to considering full-year appropriations bills. Here’s more on that:Donald Trump’s latest ballot headache is in Illinois, where a judge ordered his name removed yesterday on 14th amendment grounds. The Guardian’s Rachel Leingang reports that he is appealing the ruling:Donald Trump has appealed a decision from an Illinois state judge who decided he should be removed from that state’s ballot because of the 14th amendment, an ongoing issue for Trump in the courts.Tracie Porter, the Cook county circuit judge, made the decision on Wednesday, reversing the previous decision by the Illinois state board of elections, which said Trump could stay on the ballot. The order was put on hold pending an appeal from Trump, which came swiftly on Thursday.The Illinois decision came after the Colorado supreme court ruled similarly, saying Trump couldn’t hold office again because he had participated in an insurrection while an officer of the United States. Another decision in Maine, by the state’s secretary of state, decided to keep Trump off the ballot there as well, though that is now on hold.The Colorado decision went before the US supreme court in February, which has yet to rule on the case, though the justices expressed a load of skepticism of the claims that Trump shouldn’t be allowed to run again.Expect Joe Biden and Donald Trump to outline very different visions for dealing with undocumented migration when they appear on Texas’s border with Mexico today, the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino reports:Joe Biden and his all-but-certain Republican challenger, Donald Trump, will make dueling visits to Texas border towns on Thursday, a rare overlap that sets the stage for an election season clash over immigration.In Brownsville, along the Rio Grande, Biden is expected to hammer Republicans for blocking a bipartisan border security deal after Trump expressed his vocal opposition to the measure. Hundreds of miles north-west, Trump will deliver remarks from a state park in Eagle Pass, which has become the epicenter of a showdown between the Biden administration and the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott.Hours before the president and former president arrived on the 2,000-mile stretch of border, a federal judge sided with the Biden administration and blocked a new Texas law that would give police power to arrest people suspected of entering the US unlawfully.Trump, who Republicans appear poised to choose as their nominee for a third consecutive time, has once again made immigration a centerpiece of his presidential campaign by describing the United States under Biden as overrun by undocumented immigrants who “poisoning the blood of our country”, rhetoric that echoes white supremacists and Adolf Hitler. While in Texas, the former president is expected to lay out his plans for an immigration crackdown far beyond what he attempted in his first term.Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both will appear on Texas’s border with Mexico later today to discuss their approaches to handling undocumented immigrants. They are visiting border crossings in cities experiencing starkly different situations, and the president is expected to press Republicans to support a bipartisan proposal that would tighten immigration policy in exchange for approving military aid to Ukraine and Israel. Meanwhile, a federal judge in Texas blocked a law that would have allowed police to detain people who enter the state illegally, the latest skirmish in an ongoing fight between the Biden administration and Republicans who control Austin.Here’s what else is going on:
      Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, appeared before a House committee and acknowledged mistakes in how he had handled his hospitalization.
      Biden’s campaign will reach out to backers of a protest-vote effort in Michigan’s Democratic primary aimed at signaling discontent with the president’s support for Israel.
      Brian Fitzpatrick, a centrist House Republican, will try to force the chamber’s leaders to hold a vote on Ukraine aid and border security legislation.
      A federal judge has blocked a law enacted by Texas’s Republican-dominated government that would have allowed state police to arrest people who are suspected of entering from Mexico without authorization, the Associated Press reports.Here’s more:
      The preliminary injunction granted by U.S. District Judge David Ezra pauses a law that was set to take effect March 5 and came as President Joe Biden and his likely Republican challenger in November, Donald Trump, were visiting Texas’ southern border to discuss immigration. Texas officials are expected to appeal.
      Opponents have called the Texas measure the most dramatic attempt by a state to police immigration since a 2010 Arizona law that opponents rebuked as a “Show Me Your Papers” bill. The U.S. Supreme Court partially struck down the Arizona law, but some Texas Republican leaders, who often refer to the migrant influx as an “invasion,” want that ruling to get a second look.
      Ezra cited the Constitution’s supremacy clause and U.S. Supreme Court decisions as factors that contributed to his ruling. He said the Texas law would conflict with federal immigration law, and the nation’s foreign relations and treaty obligations.
      Allowing Texas to “permanently supersede federal directives” due to a so-called invasion would “amount to nullification of federal law and authority — a notion that is antithetical to the Constitution and has been unequivocally rejected by federal courts since the Civil War,” the judge wrote.
      Citing the Supreme Court’s decision on the Arizona law, Ezra wrote that the Texas law was preempted, and he struck down state officials’ claims that large numbers of illegal border crossings constituted an “invasion.”
      The lawsuit is among several legal battles between Texas and Biden’s administration over how far the state can go to try to prevent migrants from crossing the border.
      The measure would allow state law enforcement officers to arrest people suspected of entering the country illegally. Once in custody, they could agree to a Texas judge’s order to leave the country or face a misdemeanor charge for entering the U.S. illegally. Migrants who don’t leave after being ordered to do so could be arrested again and charged with a more serious felony.
      After a write-in campaign in protest of Joe Biden’s support for Israel managed to win about 13% of the vote in Michigan’s primary on Tuesday, a top official on the president’s campaign said this morning that they’d be reaching out to the organizers.But the comments on NPR by Mitch Landrieu, the Biden re-election campaign’s co-chair, did not go over well with one of the groups involved in the effort, which did not prevent the president from winning the swing state’s Democratic primary overwhelmingly.Asked to respond to the “uncommitted” votes, here’s what Landrieu had to say:
      We’re going to continue to talk to them. We’re going to continue to listen to what it is that they have to say. When you’re the commander in chief and when, in fact, you are representing the United States’ interests, there are no issues that are easy. And this is obviously a very painful issue for them and for lots of other folks in the United States of America. We’re going to continue to talk to them and then ask them to think about the choices and what the consequences are about electing somebody who wants to have a Muslim ban, electing somebody who is going to be much, much worse than the difficult circumstances that we have right now. The president is going to reach out, we’re going to continue to listen, and he’s going to continue to work with them as we find an answer to this very difficult problem.
      Here’s what Listen to Michigan, one of the groups supporting the write-in campaign, had to say about that: More

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      Biden and Trump to visit US-Mexico border as immigration plays key role in election

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      Joe Biden and his all-but certain Republican challenger, Donald Trump, will make dueling visits to Texas border towns on Thursday, a rare overlap that sets the stage for an election season clash over immigration.In Brownsville, along the Rio Grande, Biden is expected to hammer Republicans for blocking a bipartisan border security deal after Trump expressed his vocal opposition to the measure. Hundreds of miles north-west, Trump will deliver remarks from a state park in Eagle Pass, which has become the epicenter of a showdown between the Biden administration and the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott.Hours before the president and former president arrived on the 2,000-mile stretch of border, a federal judge sided with the Biden administration and blocked a new Texas law that would give police power to arrest migrants suspected of entering the US unlawfully.Trump, who Republicans appear poised to choose as their nominee for a third consecutive time, has once again made immigration a centerpiece of his presidential campaign by describing the United States under Biden as overrun by undocumented immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of our country”, rhetoric that echoes white supremacists and Adolf Hitler. While in Texas, the former president is expected to lay out his plans for an immigration crackdown far beyond what he attempted in his first term.Immigration has become one of Biden’s most acute political vulnerabilities ahead of the 2024 election.Since Biden took office, a record number of migrants have crossed the southern border, driven by war, political upheaval, gang violence and climate change among other factors. Though the number of crossings dropped dramatically in January, according to border patrol data, there were record highs in December.Voters across the political spectrum have expressed growing concern over the situation at the border, and few, as little as 18% according to a survey by the Pew Research center, are pleased with the administration’s handling of it.In the survey, respondents most frequently cited “economic costs and burdens associated with the migration surge or concerns about security” as their top concerns related to migration.At the same time, a rise in immigration last year powered population growth and boosted the US economy.The White House threw its support behind a Senate effort to strike a compromise deal on the border, even endorsing an overhaul of the nation’s asylum system that immigration advocates and progressives denounced as Trump-like. But the deal fell apart amid Trump’s desire not to hand a political win to Biden on a key issue for his campaign. The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said the bill would be dead on arrival.Biden vowed to remind voters of Trump’s interference.Republicans, led by Trump, have blamed Biden. In Congress, they have sought to punish his administration by impeaching the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, over alleged offenses that even conservative legal scholars said were related to matters of policy, not malfeasance. The Democratic-controlled Senate has signaled its intent to quickly dispatch the charges.In January, the Texas national guard seized control of Eagle Pass’s Shelby Park, in effect blocking federal border patrol agents from the 47-acre area. As part of Abbott’s border crackdown, they erected razor wire and closed access to the park. Amid the standoff, a mother and her two young children drowned in a nearby part of the Rio Grande. Texas authorities and the border patrol blamed each other for the tragedy.The supreme court temporarily allowed border patrol agents to remove the wire fence erected by Texas authorities. More

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      Biden and Trump to visit US-Mexico border on same day

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      Joe Biden and Donald Trump will both travel to the US border with Mexico on Thursday, dueling visits by the president and his probable opponent for re-election underlining the importance of immigration as an issue in the coming campaign.Biden will visit Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande valley, while his presidential predecessor will head for Eagle Pass, about 325 miles distant.Conditions at the southern border are widely held to represent a growing problem for the White House, both practically in terms of coping with record numbers of undocumented migrants arriving via Central America and politically in terms of defending against Republican attacks.Biden and other Democrats have attacked Trump and Republicans in Congress for sinking a bipartisan border and immigration deal in the Senate.Demanding a border bill regardless of such machinations by their party, House Republicans also managed, at the second attempt, to impeach Biden’s secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas.Despite the widely held view that the articles of impeachment against Mayorkas do not come close to meeting the standard for conviction and removal from office, the process now moves to the Senate.Alarming leading progressives, Biden is reportedly weighing using executive orders to impose policy changes including restricting access to the US for migrants claiming asylum.On the campaign trail, Trump has upped his far-right, anti-migrant rhetoric, regularly claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.A new poll from Monmouth University on Monday said more than 80% of Americans now see undocumented migration as either a very serious problem (61%) or a somewhat serious problem (23%).A majority, 53%, said they supported building a wall on the border with Mexico. A promise to do so – and to have Mexico pay for it – was a main plank of Trump’s shock victory in the 2016 election. Failure to do so, and debate over the effectiveness and environmental impact of such barriers as were built or maintained, was a constant theme of his presidency.More than 60% of respondents to the Monmouth poll said they supported applicants for asylum having to remain in Mexico.On another central Trump campaign issue, crime, the pollsters said “about one in three (32%) think that illegal immigrants are more likely than other Americans to commit violent crimes like rape or murder”.The poll noted that 65% of Republicans – but only 12% of Democrats – held that belief.“Illegal immigration has taken center stage as a defining issue this presidential election year,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “Other Monmouth polling found this to be Biden’s weakest policy area, including among his fellow Democrats.”In Brownsville on Thursday, Biden will meet border patrol agents, law enforcement officers and local political leaders.“He wants to make sure he puts his message out there to the American people,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said as the president traveled from Washington to New York for a campaign event.Trump will reportedly deliver remarks in Eagle Pass.On Monday, the former president used his Truth Social platform to say: “When I am your president, we will immediately seal the border, stop the invasion, and on day one, we will begin the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals in American history!”A Trump spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, accused Biden of making “a last-minute, insincere attempt to chase President Trump to the border”, which she said would not “cut it” with voters.The Guardian contacted the Biden campaign for comment.In a video released on Sunday by the president’s campaign, Biden was seen watching footage of Trump discussing why he leant on Senate Republicans to sink their own border deal.“It made it much better for the opposing side,” Trump told Fox News.“He just admitted it,” Biden said. “He sabotaged our bipartisan deal to secure the border … you know who the opposing side is? In this case, it’s America. Donald Trump roots against America every chance he gets.” More