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      The Guardian view on Putin and Kim: an alarming new pact needs close attention | Editorial

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      A shiny, sanctions-busting Russian limousine for Kim Jong-un. A fawning, rapturous reception for Vladimir Putin. These grand gestures may be welcomed by the North Korean and Russian leaders, but are intended as much for their global audience as for each other. The real prize is the strategic partnership treaty that they signed during Mr Putin’s first visit to Pyongyang since 2000. The question is what it will mean in practical terms.The relationship has been reinvigorated by events outside Asia, but hopes of containing it lie within the region. The proximate cause is evidently Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: an isolated and impoverished Pyongyang is already believed to have supplied millions of artillery shells in return for cheap oil, food and other sorely needed goods. Russia might also benefit from North Korean manpower, though much more likely for labour than combat.Further back lies Donald Trump’s disastrous wooing and dismissal of Mr Kim. Entirely predictably, by handing him a top-level summit without any realistic strategy to improve relations in the long term, the then president ensured Mr Kim gave up on improving relations with the US and looked elsewhere. He also prompted Mr Putin and Xi Jinping, who had kept Mr Kim at a distance, to hug him closer.The revival of a Soviet-era pledge of mutual support against “aggression” sounds primarily symbolic given North Korea’s nuclear prowess. More disturbing is Mr Putin’s remark that the partnership could include “military technical cooperation”. US intelligence officials have said that they believe Russia is providing nuclear submarine and ballistic missile technology, though it is likely to extract a high price for such expertise and to have mixed feelings about North Korea’s advances. At a minimum, Russia – which signed up to sanctions in the Obama years – is now obstructing diplomatic action to restrain North Korea.The west has long feared a stronger relationship between Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing. The launch of the Australian, UK and US (Aukus) security pact, a reaction to China’s growing forcefulness in the Asia-Pacific region, has in turn raised Beijing’s hackles. But China does not regard the others as peers and does not want to be seen as part of a trilateral axis with two pariah states, hence the lack of a Beijing stop on Mr Putin’s Asian tour itinerary. It would also like to retain primacy in managing North Korea, and to limit its weapons development. It does not want the US to become more active in the region and is concerned that it is growing closer to Japan and South Korea, which are also increasing their defence capabilities. Mr Kim’s shift from the long-held commitment to unification with the South to stressing hostility has not helped.South Korea also said explicitly that it will consider sending arms to Ukraine in reaction to the Russian-North Korean deal, spelling out the message to Moscow. Until now, Seoul has limited direct support to non-lethal supplies, though it has signed hefty arms deals with allies of Kyiv. Russia, which has also ramped up its own arms manufacturing at speed, may in the longer term seek to rekindle relations with South Korea and Japan anyway; their large economies compare strikingly to the limited attractions of North Korea. That too offers hope that this deal could be constrained both in extent and duration. The danger is how much damage is caused in the meantime. More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr doesn’t meet requirements to take part in CNN debate

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is running as an independent presidential candidate, will not be included in CNN’s debate next week after failing to meet the network’s criteria.A Wednesday midnight deadline passed without Kennedy being able to demonstrate that he had met the conditions necessary to share the debate platform with Joe Biden and Donald Trump.CNN has stipulated that participants need to have secured ballot access in enough states to capture the 270 electoral college votes necessary to win the presidency, while recording 15% support in at least four national polls.Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who has gained a reputation for engaging in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, has been confirmed on the ballot in only five states – Utah, Delaware, Oklahoma, Michigan and Tennessee – according to the Washington Post.Additionally, CNN credited him with being on the ballot in California and Hawaii, where he is the presumptive nominee for several smaller parties where the states have yet to certify him. In total, the states account for 100 electoral votes.As of Wednesday, Kennedy had reached the 15% polling threshold in just three national surveys.Kennedy’s campaign has threatened to sue CNN if it does not include him in the 27 June debate. The campaign has claimed that he is on the ballot for nine states and has collected enough signatures to be given ballot access in 14 more.Kennedy has also filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing that his exclusion is unfair.Analysts have speculated that his competing as a third-party candidate could have a potentially significant effect on the outcome of November’s election, with polls showing Biden and Trump running neck-and-neck, both nationally and in several battleground states.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHowever, it is unclear which of the two main candidates’ prospects are more harmed by his presence. He initially attempted to run as a Democrat before withdrawing to stand independently.While his public profile from sharing the name of America’s most illustrious political families could attract many Democrats, his anti-Covid vaccine views have appeared popular among right-leaning voters who would normally favour Trump. More

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      Trump’s dangerous attacks on rule of law have US historical precedents | Corey Brettschneider

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      Donald Trump’s threats to democracy – including his promise to govern as a dictator on “day one” and his refusal to abide by the norm of a peaceful transition of power – are often called unprecedented. While commentators and journalists are rightly focused on the danger of the moment, there are precedents for what we face today. Three examples, far from minimizing the current danger, show both how fragile American democracy has always been and how American citizens can fight successfully to save it.The first example of a presidential threat to democracy came close to the founding. The second US president, John Adams, criminalized dissent and sought to prosecute his critics. The number of these prosecutions was vast. The most recent research on the subject identifies 126 individuals who were prosecuted. These cases were not just based on the hurt feelings of a thin-skinned president (although they were partly that). They came in response to reports that Adams’s party was attempting a kind of self-coup, not unlike the events of January 6.Specifically, when a newspaper editor published a plan that Adams’s Federalist party had developed to refuse to certify electoral votes for their opponents, Adams signed a retaliatory law that allowed for the punishment of critics of the president. The law was drafted with its targets in mind. It made criticism of the president a crime but held no such penalty for critics of the vice-president, Thomas Jefferson, a leader of the opposition party. And the prosecutions were swift and harsh. Newspaper editors found themselves facing prison for their words.The second example came after the civil war. Andrew Johnson’s presidency was devoted to defending white supremacy and ensuring that the end of slavery did not mean equality for Black Americans. It was also marked by threats against his perceived enemies, including a notorious speech in which he called for violence against his pro-Reconstruction opponents in Congress.The third example came more recently. Like Adams, Richard Nixon sought to silence his enemies, but not by signing a questionable law – by engaging in a criminal conspiracy. We know now that his plans included crimes well beyond those of Watergate, even potentially firebombing the Brookings Institution. Nixon believed that a safe at Brookings held documents damaging to him. When his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, told him that such documents should be retrieved by a legal process, he retorted: “I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”One major target of Nixon’s criminal schemes was Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers. In an an interview shortly before his death, Ellsberg told me that, as recently released evidence suggests, Nixon sought to “incapacitate” him.The danger of presidencies like Adams’s, Johnson’s and Nixon’s consisted not just of their attacks on legal and democratic norms. It also lay in the way they read the constitution to support an authoritarian vision of the presidency. Adams saw analogies between monarchs and presidents. Johnson compared himself to Moses. Nixon spoke of his vast domestic powers that were the result of what he saw as an ongoing civil war with student protesters – a view that led him to famously proclaim, in his interview with David Frost, that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”.In each of these three dangerous moments, however, American democracy fought back. During the Adams administration, the newspaper editors standing trial published stories about their own prosecutions to highlight Adams’s authoritarianism and to demand a right to dissent under the first amendment. They also turned the outrage at Adams into a major issue in the 1800 election, resulting in the election of Jefferson. When Jefferson proclaimed in his first inaugural “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” he sent a clear signal that the Sedition Act, the Adams administration’s tool for prosecuting opponents, would be allowed to expire.As for Johnson, the House impeached him, and though he survived his Senate trial, he was so discredited that he failed to receive his own party’s presidential nomination in 1868. The general election in that year saw pro-Reconstruction citizens elect Ulysses S Grant with the aim of putting down Klan violence and protecting equal citizenship, promises partially realized with the passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act and the indictments of more than 3,000 white supremacist terrorists. Pro-Reconstruction Americans rallied around the cause of equal citizenship championed by Frederick Douglass, who opposed Johnson in a White House confrontation and in his public speeches.In the case of Nixon, Ellsberg, rather than allowing himself to be silenced, only grew bolder in criticizing the president. In fact, he used his own trial to expose Nixon’s abuses, just as newspaper editors had done under Adams. Ultimately the judge in his trial dismissed the case. Finally, the unknown citizens of Grand Jury One, convened in the Watergate trial, fought to gather the evidence of Nixon crimes, handing over information to Congress that led to his resignation.In stark contrast to Nixon’s authoritarian understanding of the constitution, these citizens emphasized the idea that no person, not even a president, was above the law.These three examples demonstrate that the danger to American democracy has always lain partly in the power of the presidency itself. At the founding, Anti-Federalists argued against ratifying the constitution on the grounds that presidential power was too vast and dangerous. The behavior of Adams, Johnson and Nixon shows clearly that the Anti-Federalists’ worries were well founded – and that presidential threats to democracy are not unique to today’s moment.Despite these precedents, however, there is one sense in which the current moment is uniquely dangerous. In these past examples, authoritarian presidents were cast into the dustbin of history, lacking the political power to continue their constitutional abuses. This time, a president who threatened democracy is doubling down, and we risk seeing him take office once again.The current threat is also unique in that Trump has learned from his previous term where the choke points of American democracy lie. Unlike Adams, Johnson and Nixon, he threatens to recapture the presidency with a clear roadmap for toppling the traditional checks on the office.Trump understands, for instance, that with a loyalist attorney general, he might never face accountability for his crimes. He would certainly see to it that such an AG fired special prosecutor Jack Smith, currently pursuing two cases against him. Thanks in part to sympathetic justices he appointed, he might also be immunized by the supreme court for any future crimes committed in office as long as these crimes are construed as “official acts”. While Nixon eventually resigned under threat of impeachment and indictment, Trump withstood two impeachments with no hint of even remotely backing down. Unlike Nixon, Trump not only shamelessly refused to resign but has continued his assault on democracy.So, what can we learn about the threat of the moment from these historical examples? One lesson is clear: we the people are ultimately responsible for rescuing democracy and our democratic constitution. We should find inspiration from those figures who opposed Adams, Johnson and Nixon as we demand accountability in two senses.First, we should demand the legal accountability Nixon escaped. The jury in Trump’s New York case has made the first step here. And that legal accountability should continue in the other cases against the president.Second, and most importantly, the American people need to seek accountability at the ballot box. This election, just like the elections in 1800 and 1868, is a referendum on the future of self-government. In those past moments, the American people rejected authoritarianism and voted for presidents who sought to restore fundamental pillars of American democracy that were under threat.Today, we must persuade our fellow Americans to do the same.
      Corey Brettschneider is professor of political science at Brown University and the author of The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It More

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      Deluge of ‘pink slime’ websites threaten to drown out truth with fake news in US election

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      Political groups on the right and left are using fake news websites designed to look like reliable sources of information to fill the void left by the demise of local newspapers, raising fears of the impact that they might have during the United States’ bitterly fought 2024 election.Some media experts are concerned that the so-called pink slime websites, often funded domestically, could prove at least as harmful to political discourse and voters’ faith in media and democracy as foreign disinformation efforts in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.According to a recent report from NewsGuard, a company that aims to counter misinformation by studying and rating news websites, the websites are so prolific that “the odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake.”NewsGuard estimates that there are a staggering 1,265 such fake local news websites in the US – 4% more than the websites of 1,213 daily newspapers left operating in the country.“Actors on both sides of the political spectrum” feel “that what they are doing isn’t bad because all media is really biased against their side or that that they know actors on the other side are using these tactics and so they feel they need to,” said Matt Skibinski, general manager of NewsGuard, which determined that such sites now outnumber legitimate local news organizations. “It’s definitely contributed to partisanship and the erosion of trust in media; it’s also a symptom of those things.”Pink slime websites, named after a meat byproduct, started at least as early as 2004 when Brian Timpone, a former television reporter who described himself as a “biased guy” and a Republican, started funding websites featuring names of cities, towns and regions like the Philly Leader and the South Alabama Times.Timpone’s company, Metric Media, now operates more than 1,000 such websites and his private equity company receives funding from conservative political action committees, according to NewsGuard.The Leader recently ran a story with the headline, “Rep Evans votes to count illegal aliens towards seats in Congress.”In actuality, Representative Dwight Evans, a Democrat, did not vote to start counting undocumented immigrants in the 2030 census but rather against legislation that would have changed the way the country has conducted apportionment since 1790.That sort of story is “standard practice for these outlets”, according to Tim Franklin, who leads Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative, which researches the industry.“They will take something that maybe has just a morsel of truth to it and then twist it with their own partisan or ideological spin,” Franklin said. “They also tend to do it on issues like immigration or hot-button topics that they think will elicit an emotional response.”A story published this month on the NW Arkansas News site had a headline on the front page that reported that the unemployment rate in 2021 in Madison county was 5.1% – even though there is much more recent data available. In April 2024, the local unemployment rate was 2.5%.“Another tactic that we have seen across many of this category of sites is taking a news story that happened at some point and presenting it as if it just happened now, in a way that is misleading,” Skibinski said.The left has also created websites designed to look like legitimate news organizations but actually shaped by Democratic supporters.The liberal Courier Newsroom network operates websites in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan and Nevada, among other states, that – like the conservative pink slime sites – have innocuous sounding names like the Copper Courier and Up North News. The Courier has runs stories like “Gov Ducey Is Now the Most Unpopular Governor in America,” referring to Doug Ducy, the former Republican Arizona governor.“In contrast, coverage of Democrats, including US President Joe Biden, Democratic Arizona Gov Katie Hobbs, and US Sen Mark Kelly of Arizona, is nearly always laudatory,” NewsGuard stated in a report about Courier coverage.Tara McGowan, a Democratic strategist who founded the Courier Newsroom has received funding from liberal donors like Reid Hoffman and George Soros, as well as groups associated with political action committees, according to NewsGuard.“There are pink slime operations on both the right and the left. To me, the key is disclosure and transparency about ownership,” said Franklin.In a statement, a spokesperson for the Courier said comparisons between its operations and rightwing pink slime groups were unfair and criticized NewsGuard’s methodology in comparing the two.“Courier publishes award-winning, factual local news by talented journalists who live in the communities we cover, and our reporting is often cited by legacy media outlets. This is in stark contrast to the pink slime networks that pretend to have a local presence but crank out low-quality fake news with no bylines and no accountability. Courier is proudly transparent about our pro-democracy values, and we carry on the respected American tradition of advocacy journalism,” the spokesperson said.While both the left and the right have invested in the pink slime websites, there are differences in the owners’ approaches, according to Skibinski.The right-wing networks have created more sites “that are probably getting less attention per site, and on the left, there is a smaller number of sites, but they are more strategic about getting attention to those sites on Facebook and elsewhere”, Skibinski said. “I don’t know that we can quantify whether one is more impactful than the other.”Artificial intelligence could also help site operators quickly generate stories and create fake images.“The technology underlying artificial intelligence is now becoming more accessible to malign actors,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which publishes Factcheck.org. “The capacity to create false images is very high, but also there is a capacity to detect the images that is emerging very rapidly. The question is, will it emerge rapidly with enough capacity?”Still, it’s not clear whether these websites are effective. Stanford University reported in a 2023 study that engagement with pink slime websites was “relatively low” and little evidence that living “in a news desert made people more likely to consume pink slime”.The Philly Leader and the NW Arkansas News both only have links to Facebook accounts on their websites and have less than 450 followers on each. Meanwhile, the Copper Courier and Up North News have accounts on all the major platforms and a total of about 150,000 followers on Facebook.Franklin said he thinks that a lot of people don’t actually click links on social media posts to visit the website.“The goal of some of these operators is not to get traffic directly to their site, but it’s to go viral on social media,” he said.Republican lawmakers and leaders of the conservative news sites the Daily Wire and the Federalist have also filed a lawsuit and launched investigations accusing NewsGuard of helping the federal government censor right-leaning media. The defense department hired the company strictly to counter “disinformation efforts by Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked operations targeting Americans and our allies”, Gordon Crovitz, the former Wall Street Journal publisher who co-founded NewsGuard, told the Hill in response to a House oversight committee investigation. “We look forward to clarifying the misunderstanding by the committee about our work for the Defense Department.”To counter the flood of misinformation, social media companies must take a more active role in monitoring such content, according to Franklin and Skibinski.“The biggest solution to this kind of site would be for the social media platforms to take more responsibility in terms of showing context to the user about sources that could be their own context. It could be data from third parties, like what we do,” said Skibinski.Franklin would like to see a national media literacy campaign. States around the country have passed laws requiring such education in schools.Franklin also hopes that legitimate local news could rebound. The MacArthur Foundation and other donors last year pledged $500m to help local outlets.“I actually have more optimism now than I had a few years ago,” Franklin said. “We’re in the midst of historic changes in how people consume news and how it’s produced and how it’s distributed and how it’s paid for, but I think there’s still demand for local news, and that’s kind of where it all starts.” More

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      In South Carolina, Black voters are split on immigration

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      Republicans claim that their election-year rhetoric about immigration has a new audience in Black communities. North Charleston’s newfound racial complexity tests that claim.The working-class city of about 120,000 people is one of the most strongly Democratic in South Carolina, more so even than Charleston, its larger, storied neighbor to its south. It has also long been split almost evenly between Black and white residents. Immigration has been adding a third dimension to what was a two-way relationship.In the “neck” of the barbell-shaped city, between the primarily white northern neighborhoods and the primarily Black southern neighborhoods, are stretches where the shops advertise in Spanish and almost all the children getting off the school bus are Latino.About 2.5% of North Charlestonians identified as Hispanic in the 1990 census. That rose to 4% in 2000, 10% in 2010 and, on paper, about 12% today, with 8% “other”. But the current census figures are questionable, said Enrique “Henry” Grace, CFO of the Charleston Hispanic Association: “Forget about it. Because Hispanics don’t do the census. Whatever the census says, double it.”Immigration can be a tough topic to discuss in South Carolina’s Black community, which isn’t keen on offering white conservatives who regularly attack cities as “crime-infested” yet another reason to snipe at North Charleston, especially in an election year when immigration rhetoric on the right has become increasingly toxic.But it doesn’t mean they aren’t asking more from Democratic leaders. In early June, Joe Biden announced changes to border policy, significantly curtailing asylum claims in a bid for bold executive action on a campaign issue.The US president’s border order came with political pressure mounting on the president and Congress to resolve negotiations on a bill to change America’s immigration policies and stem undocumented migration. Some of that political pressure comes from big-city leaders like the mayors of New York and Chicago, after border state governors began shipping people who had crossed the border to them last year, straining the social services infrastructure.But the border action has an audience among Democrats in South Carolina, too.Biden was serving red meat to Democratic party loyalists at a January campaign speech in Columbia, South Carolina, talking about his appointment of Black judges and lowering Black unemployment rates, when he threw them one nugget of red-state steak. He complained that Republicans in Congress were thwarting legislation on the border – despite getting almost everything they wanted in the bill – at the bidding of Donald Trump in order to preserve it for him as a political issue.View image in fullscreen“If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” Biden said, to applause.As attendees awaited the president before the speech, Michael Butler, mayor of Orangeburg, South Carolina, a Democrat, expressed sympathy with this idea. “I would expect the president, if he’s elected a second time, to close the border,” Butler said.The population of both the city and county of Orangeburg, about 45 minutes north of North Charleston, is mostly Black, poor, rural and Democratic. Biden won 70% of Orangeburg in the 2020 primary – his best showing statewide – and two-thirds of votes in the November election.Without a careful message, this time could be different. Shipping border crossers to big cities seemed like a publicity stunt, but it was one that worked, in Butler’s view, to highlight how problems at the border are problems everywhere, including Democratic strongholds.“I empathize with those mayors,” Butler said. “They have to deal with the expectations of migrants, and the security of them. You know we’re the land of the free and the brave, and we believe in taking care of all citizens. But those borders need to be secured to protect the citizens.”Butler’s take on immigration isn’t uniformly held across the state.Some Black political leaders in North Charleston beam about how immigration has changed their communities. State representative JA Moore, a North Charleston Democrat, boasts of having the most diverse district in the state. “I’m proud of that,” he said. Moore pushes back, hard, against the suggestion that there’s tension between Black and Latino people about housing or jobs where he lives.North Charleston presents a more nuanced test of the Black electorate’s reaction to immigration, because the growth of its immigrant community has come with booming economic growth and overall population increases. Even so, Moore admits that some could conflate something like the rapid increase in housing prices with the rapid increase in immigration.“The housing market in general and in Charleston is higher than it was 10, 15 years ago,” Moore said. “And also the amount of Hispanics that are moving in has increased tremendously in the past 15 years. They see a Hispanic person move into their neighborhood, and they’re seeing the prices of the houses going up … People may be correlating the two.”Donald Trump is counting on those kind of inferences.Biden’s Republican challenger, known for his increasingly strident immigration rhetoric, responded to the border closure at a rally in the Las Vegas heat after Biden’s announcement, describing it as insufficient while arguing that the president is “waging all-out war” on Black and Latino workers. He falsely claimed that the wages of Black workers had fallen 6% since 2021.The international manufacturers that have driven growth aren’t hiring undocumented labor, said Eduardo Curry, president of the North Charleston chapter of the Young Democrats of South Carolina. “A lot of jobs here in Charleston are skilled labor jobs,” he said. “It’s not just … walk off the street and let me hire you.”The problem, Curry said, is that too few Black workers in North Charleston have the training to take those jobs, even as those employers are yearning for more labor. Working-class Black laborers instead compete with recent immigrants for jobs that require less formal education.Tension between Black and Latino people in North Charleston has been relatively low, but may be rising because of job competition, said Ruby Wallace, a job recruiter at a staffing agency in North Charleston that serves warehouses and distribution centers – working-class employers. “Hispanics are working for whatever they can get at this point,” she said. “And they’re doing a lot of work.”The North Charleston native said her staffing agency has lost 40% of its business year over year after some clients found it less expensive to hire undocumented labor through shady organizations.The neighborhood around the staffing agency has become populated primarily with immigrants, and the office, which has historically employed working-class and poor Black people, turns away undocumented applicants every day.A cottage industry of undocumented labor has emerged, undercutting legal operators by skirting federal E-Verify laws and omitting payments into workers’ compensation and unemployment taxes.Wallace has been reporting the violations she sees to the US Department of Labor, to no avail. “I’m trying to figure out, how is it possible for them to load people up and bring them, working here in South Carolina? Is it not illegal for them to do that?” she said.Republican messaging aimed at Black voters mixes threats about job losses with invective about immigration, crime and cities.Black voters are expected to ignore the racial undercurrent of attacks on cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia or most recently Milwaukee – a “horrible city” in Trump’s most recent tirade – while being receptive to the idea that undocumented people from Central and South America make those cities more unsafe.That hasn’t happened in North Charleston.North Charleston began assessing the city’s racial disparity in arrests and victimization in 2020. A majority of North Charleston’s immigrants are Latino. According to a report released in 2021, Hispanic suspects represented about 7.5% of arrests, while Hispanic residents comprised 10% of the city’s population that year.Violent crime increased during the pandemic in North Charleston, as it did in most cities with more than 100,000 residents. It has fallen since. But it is among the higher-crime cities in the state, with a murder rate about five times the national average.Keeping the peace in North Charleston has meant navigating racial tension in a city experiencing poverty and crime. Immigration adds a new element to that challenge.Reggie Burgess, 58, grew up in North Charleston and served on its police force for more than 30 years – five as its chief – before winning election as the city’s first Black mayor in 2023. He said he contends with a common trope: that undocumented immigrants bring with them an uptick in crime.But that depiction of immigrants as criminals is false; they are measurably less likely to commit crimes than the US-born. Burgess, who has witnessed the changes in his community first-hand, said he has had to meet with immigrants to discuss how they are too often victimized by other poor people who look like him.Back when Burgess was still chief of police in 2017, he found himself conducting role-playing exercises with Latino immigrants about identifying Black people, trying to build some trust with the community.“We would actually turn them backwards, and we’d turn them around real quick and say: ‘Look at this person,’ and turn ’em back around,” Burgess said. “I’d ask, can you give me a description of the person? We were trying to teach them to understand that a Black male was more than this Afro. You’ve got to [describe] a shirt, or this lanyard.”It became evident to Burgess 20 years ago that undocumented individuals were being targeted for robberies because they tended to work in cash trades, he said. That revelation led the city to start pushing the financial-services industry to provide banking services, and was the start of relationship-building exercises between civic leaders and immigrants.But the federal government doesn’t do enough to keep victims from being deported long enough to sustain prosecutions, he said, leaving undocumented individuals as easy targets for crime and exploitation.“The U visa is supposedly supposed to help us lock in the witness for a period of time,” Burgess said, describing a victim witness visa program. “And Hispanics and Latinos would fill out the form, and I’m thinking: ‘OK, we’re good.’ The next thing you know, they tell me the prime witness has to go back or got caught up at a traffic stop and is being deported.”Underlying this issue is unstable housing and endemic poverty.“There’s a lot of need in Charleston in the Hispanic community. Need for everything, housing, jobs, everything,” said Grace of the Charleston Hispanic Association.The undocumented community in North Charleston tends to be concentrated in an area of the city with trailer parks and affordable housing. They are too often living in substandard or overcrowded conditions, said Annette Glover, who operates an immigrant-oriented community ministry in North Charleston.North Charleston is part of a three-county metropolitan area of about 830,000 residents. Glover’s organization, Community Impact, assisted 86,387 people within that area last year, she said, with food, language training, housing assistance and other help. Most were immigrants. About 75% – to 80% were undocumented, she said. With that has come a fear of appearing on the government’s radar, even while applying for help from nongovernmental organizations like hers, she said.“We have found a way to actually get them to fill out applications, by allowing them to understand that we’re not going to be giving it to Ice or to anything like that,” she said.Burgess said economic conditions and education are stress points. “I mean, some of these neighborhoods, the [adjusted median income] is $29,000. And then you can go a little further up, and AMI is probably is $101,000,” he said. “And without education, there’s no options. You have to settle for whatever you get.”The gridlock in Washington DC on immigration has an impact on places like North Charleston.Biden’s move to close the border to asylum seekers is a short-term approach to a long-term problem, Burgess said.Without actual reform to the immigration system, undocumented immigrants will remain in the shadows.“We have to step back and push aside these little personal vendettas and squabbles in these parties, and think as Americans,” Burgess said. “My people came here in chains 400 years ago. We’re free now, right? Why? We’re free because the country said enough is enough. And they fought, brothers and sisters, fought each other, and they said: ‘OK, everybody’s free.’ They could do that in 1865. They can do the same thing in 2024.” More

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      White House disputes Netanyahu’s claim that US is withholding weapons from Israel

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      The Biden administration has reacted furiously to criticisms by Benjamin Netanyahu that the US is holding back weapons and ammunition from Israel in its war in Gaza, reportedly cancelling a high-level meeting with Israeli officials on Iran in retaliation.Netanyahu made the claims of a supposedly deliberate weapons delay in a video posted on X in which he implied that Israel’s ability to prevail in the nine-month war with Hamas was being hampered as a result.Speaking to the camera in English, Netanyahu said he had expressed gratitude in a recent meeting with Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, for American support since last October’s attack on Israel by Hamas, which killed about 1,200 and saw another 250 taken hostage.“But I also said something else,” he said. “I said it’s inconceivable that in the past few months the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel – Israel, America’s closest ally, fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies.”Invoking Winston Churchill, Netanyahu continued: “During world war two, Churchill told the United States, ‘Give us the tools, we’ll do the job.’ And I say, give us the tools, and we’ll finish the job a lot faster.”The broadside appeared to blindside US officials. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters: “We genuinely don’t know what he is talking about.”At a later news conference, Blinken said that the only delayed weapons were 2,000lb bombs that Joe Biden had ordered to put under review because of concerns over an Israeli plan for an incursion into Rafah in southern Gaza, where up to 1 million people are sheltering.“That remains under review. But everything else is moving as it normally would,” said Blinken.The Biden administration finally won congressional approval for a $14bn military aid package for Israel in April after it was held up for months by the House of Representatives. A separate $15bn sale of US F15 aircraft is also set to move forward.Biden has pressed forward with aid despite opposition from within his own Democratic party, where progressives have accused Israel of committing genocide in a war that has now killed more than 37,000 Palestinians.Senior administration officials were said to be angry behind the scenes. Axios, citing two unnamed sources, reported that a bilateral meeting scheduled for 20 June had been called off to send Netanyahu a signal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe report said the US envoy to Israel, Amos Hochstein, had delivered the message to the prime minister personally, telling him that his accusation was “inaccurate and out of line”.“This decision makes it clear that there are consequences for pulling such stunts,” Axios quoted one American official as saying.A spokesperson for the White House national security council did not confirm the cancellation but amplified the perplexity over Netanyahu’s video.“We have been working to find a time to schedule the next SDG [sustainable development goals] that accounts for the travel and availability of principals, but have not yet fully finalized the details, so nothing has been cancelled,” the spokesperson, Eduardo Maia Silva, said in an email.“As we said in the briefing yesterday, we have no idea what the prime minister is talking about, but that’s not a reason for rescheduling a meeting.”Netanyahu is scheduled to visit Washington in late July to address a joint session of Congress, in response to an invitation by the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a close ally of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. More

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      Some immigrants celebrate Biden’s extension of legal status while others left out

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      Hundreds of thousands of immigrants had reason to rejoice when Joe Biden unveiled a highly expansive plan to extend legal status to spouses of US citizens but, inevitably, some were left out.Claudia Zúniga, 35, was married in 2017, 10 years after her husband came to the United States. He moved to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, after they wed, knowing that, by law, he had to live outside the US for years to gain legal status. “Our lives took a 180-degree turn,” she said.Biden announced on Tuesday that his administration will, in the coming months, allow US citizens’ spouses without legal status to apply for permanent residency and eventually citizenship without having to first depart the country for up to 10 years. About 500,000 immigrants may benefit, according to senior administration officials.To qualify, an immigrant must have lived in the United States for 10 years and be married to a US citizen, both as of Monday. Zúniga’s husband is ineligible because he wasn’t in the United States.“Imagine, it would be a dream come true,” said Zúniga, who works part time at her father’s transportation business in Houston. “My husband could be with us. We could focus on the wellbeing of our children.”Every immigration benefit – even those as sweeping as Biden’s election-year offer – has a cutoff dates and other eligibility requirements. In September, the Democratic president expanded temporary status for nearly 500,000 Venezuelans who were living in the United States on 31 July 2023. Those who had arrived a day later were out of luck.View image in fullscreenThe Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has shielded hundreds of thousands of people from deportation who came to the United States as young children and is popularly known as Daca, required applicants to be in the United States on 15 June 2012 and to have been in the country continuously for the previous five years.About 1.1 million people in the US illegally are married to US citizens, according to advocacy group FWD.us, but hundreds of thousands won’t qualify because they were in the US for fewer than 10 years.Immigration advocates were generally thrilled with the scope of Tuesday’s announcement, just as Biden’s critics called it a horribly misguided giveaway.Angelica Martinez, 36, wiped away tears as she sat next to her children, ages 14 and six, and watched Biden’s announcement at the Houston office of Fiel, an immigrant advocacy group. A US citizen since 2013, she described a flood of emotions, including regret for when her husband couldn’t travel to Mexico for his mother’s death five years ago.“Sadness, joy all at the same time,” said Martinez, whose husband came to Houston 18 years ago.Brenda Valle of Los Angeles, whose husband has been a US citizen since 2001 and, like her, was born in Mexico, has renewed her Daca permit every two years. “We can start planning more long-term, for the future, instead of what we can do for the next two years,” she said.Magdalena Gutiérrez of Chicago, who has been married 22 years to a US citizen and has three daughters who are US citizens, said she had “a little more hope” after Biden’s announcement. Gutiérrez, 43, is eager to travel more across the United States without fearing an encounter with law enforcement that could lead to her being deported.Allyson Batista, a retired Philadelphia teacher and US citizen who married her Brazilian husband 20 years ago, recalled being told by a lawyer that he could leave the country for 10 years or “remain in the shadows and wait for a change in the law”.“Initially, when we got married, I was naive and thought, ‘OK, but I’m American. This isn’t going to be a problem. We’re going to fix this,’” Batista said. “I learned very early on that we were facing a pretty dire circumstance and that there would be no way for us to move forward in an immigration process successfully.”The couple raised three children who are now pursuing higher education. Batista is waiting for the details of how her husband can apply for a green card.“I’m hopeful,” Batista said. “The next 60 days will really tell. But obviously more than thrilled because every step forward is a step towards a final resolution for all kinds of immigrant families.”About 50,000 noncitizen children with parents who are married to US citizens could also potentially qualify, according to senior administration officials who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity. Biden also announced new regulations that will allow some Daca beneficiaries and other young immigrants to more easily qualify for work visas. More

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      The ‘weirdo progressive’ son of the Oath Keepers founder running for office in Montana

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      With his thick eyeliner, long blond hair and leather jacket, Dakota Adams does not look like a typical politician.The 27-year-old, who is running as a progressive Democrat in a deep-red, rural corner of Montana, doesn’t have a typical politician backstory either.Adams is the son of Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group who last year was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in the January 6 insurrection. Adams grew up in what he describes as an environment of “extreme isolation and paranoia” – a situation he and his siblings escaped in 2018, when their mother left Rhodes.In the last few years, Adams has been focusing on building his life. He was educated at home while his father led the Oath Keepers, and while he was a voracious reader, other subjects were neglected – Adams was never taught his times tables until he studied for his GED as an adult.After six years out of the movement, he works in construction, takes college courses and rents space in an apartment in Eureka, a town of 1,400 people eight and a half miles from the Canadian border.He first took an active role in politics in 2022, when he began canvassing for other candidates. He noticed that in many county-level elections – as with the seat he’s running for in Lincoln county – there wasn’t even a Democratic candidate on the ballot.“The lack of candidates stepping up, especially in recent years, reinforces that perception that the Democratic party has turned away from rural America and given up the fight completely,” he says.Still, despite his unorthodox appearance, Adams has been well received when he goes door to door.“Montana elections happen at doorstep,” he said. “So far, my reception has been surprisingly positive at doors, [despite] canvassing dressed like Alice Cooper and openly admitting to being a progressive Democrat, or self-identifying even as a Democratic socialist when asked.“I attribute that to there being a Republican supermajority that’s been running the state – it leaves very little room for excuses.”Adams has come a long way from the days when he and his siblings lived with the Oath Keepers movement. His father, whom Adams refers to now as Stewart, founded the organization in 2009 in the wake of Barack Obama’s election.Under Rhodes’ leadership, the Oath Keepers pushed various anti-government conspiracy theories, and Rhodes was committed to the American redoubt movement: a proposal that thousands of conservative Americans and militia members relocate to Montana, Idaho and Wyoming to be free from government tyranny.Rhodes moved his own family to Montana in 2010, but even living 2,000 miles from Washington DC he was paranoid about the federal government, Adams says – a paranoia he passed on to the family. Adams and his family perpetually drilled for end-of-days events, and, he says, his family suffered due to Rhodes’ focus on survivalism and fear of government inspired by conspiracy theories.“Anybody could be a secret government informant, including other people inside the movement or inside Oath Keepers. Child Protective Services was the tool of the new world order that would be used to retaliate against Stewart for defying them, so we had to conceal educational and medical neglect,” Adams says.Adams visited a dentist once in his childhood, when he had “a ton of work done”. Rhodes had bartered the visit to the dentist, who was part of the movement, by offering “infantry tactical training” in return.That upbringing took its toll. Adams has spent time in therapy but still has anxiety, caused by a childhood spent living “in looming dread”, he says.“It’s something that still interferes with my daily life and holds me back. I wouldn’t have the mental bandwidth to attend school, or run for office, or anything if it were not for years of pretty extensive work,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublicans dominate Montana politics. The GOP controls the state legislature and state senate, and the governor, Greg Gianforte, is a Republican. But Adams believes that could be a positive.“Because they have such a strong majority and a trifecta in power, they really don’t have any excuse for the state of things,” he said.Adams says that if he is elected, he wants to actually do things, rather than engage in posturing; he says some state legislatures “have been spending all their time waging performative crusades, especially against queer people and environmental causes”.He discusses how taxes have increased for working-class and middle-class Montanans as wealthy people have moved into the state, driving up the cost of housing. He wants to diversify an economy that has become more and more reliant on tourism.“In recent years, more and more tourism dollars are not turning over multiple times inside the community and changing hands as they circulate,” he said.“[Tourists] are increasingly going to exclusive resorts and to properties and businesses owned by out-of-state corporations. So the profits are extracted directly back out of the state, without going through the local economy whatsoever.”Adams is realistic about his chances: Lincoln county voted for Trump over Biden by 74% to 24% in 2020. But his reception gives him hope.“I am in a long-shot race here. I’m in maybe the second-most-conservative voting area in the state, running as a weirdo progressive,” he said.“And if I’m getting shockingly positive feedback going door to door in the poorest parts of town and in the trailer parks, then I feel like the Republican supermajority in the state is in serious trouble.” More