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      Why Senate Democrats Are Outperforming Biden in Key States

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      Democratic candidates have leads in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Arizona — but strategists aligned with both parties caution that the battle for Senate control is just starting.It was a Pride Weekend in Wisconsin, a natural time for the state’s pathbreaking, openly gay senator to rally her Democratic base, but on Sunday, Tammy Baldwin was far away from the parades and gatherings in Madison and Milwaukee — at a dairy farm in Republican Richland County.“I’ll show up in deep-red counties. and they’ll be like, ‘I can’t remember the last time we’ve seen a sitting U.S. senator here, especially not a Democrat,’” said Ms. Baldwin, an hour into her unassuming work of handing out plastic silverware at an annual dairy breakfast, and five months before Wisconsin voters will decide whether to give her a third term. “I think that begins to break through.”Wisconsin is one of seven states that will determine the presidency this November, but it will also help determine which party controls the Senate. President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump are running neck-and-neck in the state, which Mr. Trump narrowly won in 2016 and Mr. Biden took back in 2020.Ms. Baldwin, by contrast, is running well ahead of the president and her presumed Republican opponent, the wealthy banker Eric Hovde. Polls released early last month by The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College found Ms. Baldwin holding a lead of 49 percent to 40 percent over Mr. Hovde. In late May, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report put the spread even wider, 12 percentage points.That down-ballot Democratic strength is not isolated to Wisconsin. Senate Democratic candidates also hold leads in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. A Marist Poll released Tuesday said Mr. Trump led Mr. Biden in Ohio by seven percentage points, but Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, leads his challenger, Bernie Moreno, by five percentage points, a 12-point swing.The Huff-Nel-Sons Farm in Richmond Center, Wis., hosted the annual dairy breakfast on Sunday.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Waupun Prison Warden and 8 Employees Charged in Inmate Deaths

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      Inmates had complained about a monthslong lockdown that cut them off from family members and timely medical care.The former warden of a Wisconsin prison and eight other prison employees were charged on Wednesday in connection with multiple inmate deaths over the last year, the local sheriff said.The prison, Waupun Correctional Institution, about 70 miles northwest of Milwaukee, was the subject of a 2023 report by The New York Times and Wisconsin Watch that found that inmates had been confined to their cells for months and denied access to medical care.The prison’s former warden, Randall Hepp, had left his job earlier this week. He was charged with misconduct in public office, a felony. Mr. Hepp’s arrest was first reported by The Associated Press. His attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.The other prison employees, most of whom worked as correctional officers and registered nurses, were charged with abuse of an inmate. Two of the correctional officers and a sergeant were also charged with misconduct.In announcing the arrests during a Wednesday news conference, Dale J. Schmidt, the sheriff for Dodge County, Wis., said Mr. Hepp and the other employees had failed to adequately care for inmates in their custody. Sheriff Schmidt described in detail four deaths, including one involving a prisoner who had not eaten in days and was “drinking sewage water” and “played in the toilet.” The medical examiner said the cause of death was malnutrition and probable dehydration, and ruled it a homicide.Randall Hepp, former warden of Waupun Correctional Institution.Dodge County (Wis.) Sheriff’s OfficeDo you, or does anyone you know, work for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections?

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      The fake elector defense: what Trump allies are saying to justify the 2020 scheme

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      Three allies of Donald Trump were charged in Wisconsin Tuesday for their roles in advancing the fake electors plan, but the 10 fake electors themselves have not yet been criminally charged.That might be because the Wisconsin fake electors, like other fake electors across the US, have said in media interviews they were misled to believe their documents could only be used if court challenges went for the former president. Others have said they were following lawyers’ advice when they signed on.Wisconsin attorney general Josh Kaul’s office has said it is still investigating and hasn’t ruled out charges against the individual electors, who have faced a civil suit they settled by agreeing not to serve as electors for Trump again.In April, 18 people were charged in Arizona in that state’s inquiry into the fake elector scheme. Defense attorneys representing some of those charged in Arizona have used similar justifications, saying they were following lawyers’ advice when they signed on.One told the Arizona Republic that his client, Jim Lamon, was relying on “lawyers from back east” who said the slates would only be used if the state’s results changed. Another told the paper that there wouldn’t be any evidence of their client’s intent to commit fraud or forgery because they got legal advice from Trump’s lawyers that led them to believe they weren’t doing anything wrong.These claims pop up frequently by fake electors and those involved in the scheme to overthrow the 2020 election results, as do other defenses relying on historical precedent and changing election law. Defenders of the fake electors cite a 1960 election in Hawaii and changes to congressional procedure to count electoral votes among their justifications..Some of the defenses have shown up in legal motions in Georgia, which is further along in its case against some fake electors there. But the justifications are largely happening online as the cases move more slowly than the internet, with rightwing influencers saying the scheme had a historical precedent and wasn’t illegal.Edward Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, has started to see the false electors in two tiers: those who were clearly in “cahoots with Trump” and intended to subvert the election’s outcome, and others who were duped. Andy Craig, director of election policy at the Joseph H Rainey Center, has come around to this idea as well, saying it depends heavily on the facts in each fake elector’s case, but some of them did seem misled.“I do think, to my mind, it’s fair to say that some of these fake electors are the victims of Trump’s fraud and [Rudy] Giuliani’s fraud,” Foley said. “They were relatively low-level political operatives who were trying to do something for the team and were doing it because the leader of their team was asking them to. That doesn’t justify what they did, but I’m not sure I would think criminal punishment would be appropriate for them because again, I think they’re the victims of the crime, not the perpetrators.”In Georgia, prosecutors granted many of the fake electors, nearly all of them little-known party loyalists, immunity from prosecution. Only three of the 16 have been charged criminally, all of whom appear to have a more hands-on role in the scheme.And in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, for example, the fake electoral certificates contained a caveat that they would only be considered valid if courts eventually ruled in Trump’s favor and deemed him the legitimate winner. Fake electors in those states have not faced prosecution in large part because of that language.As a reminder, the US doesn’t elect presidents via a popular vote. Instead, voters in each state turn out at the polls, which dictates a slate of electoral votes that get sent to Congress, called the electoral college. Whichever candidate wins the electoral vote wins the presidency, and this is sometimes different from who wins the popular vote. At issue in the fake electors scheme is that Trump supporters signed falsely that Trump had won their states’ votes, when in reality Biden had won.Other defensesLegal experts say the fake electors’ other defenses hold less water – the 2020 scheme is much different than the 1960 Hawaii election, and any changes in the Electoral Count Reform Act don’t affect the illegality of what the false electors did.The 1960 Hawaii election, which involved two slates of electors, is a long-running justification on the right for the fake electors. In 1960, Nixon narrowly led Kennedy initially in Hawaii, though the margin was so small it kicked off a recount. Before the recount could be completed, the state had to send its electoral votes to Congress for counting, so electors for both Kennedy and Nixon signed separate documents saying they were the state’s electors and sent them off.After the recount, the results showed Kennedy actually won the state, and so Kennedy’s electors met again to sign that he won. Nixon, who was presiding over the electoral count in Congress as vice-president, accepted this final submission. No one got in trouble for the previous slates, though it was also possibly illegal for the Democrats to have met and signed as though Kennedy won before the recount concluded. Hawaii’s votes didn’t affect who won the presidency, as Kennedy had already clinched the win.“Hawaii is a very odd situation because it ultimately ended with then vice-president Nixon, who was one of the candidates, being willing to accept the Kennedy slate, which didn’t matter one way or the other, wasn’t going to affect the outcome of the electoral college majority” Foley said. “It was sort of like a politician trying to be magnanimous.”Influencers like Charlie Kirk, the leader of rightwing youth organization Turning Point USA, brought up Hawaii after the Arizona charges. In a post on X, Kirk cited the “precedent created by Democrats” in Hawaii in 1960.“The Arizona Trump electors were doing what they thought was a legally necessary step as part of a wider political and electoral dispute,” Kirk wrote. “They acted in the belief that Donald Trump was the true winner of Arizona in the 2020 election.”The major difference: there was a legitimate, ongoing, good faith debate over who won in Hawaii, and a razor-thin margin of less than 200 votes that led to a full recount. By contrast, the margins in the seven states involved in the 2020 plan were much higher, and legal avenues to overturn results had largely run out.“All of these states were won by bigger margins, far beyond what any kind of recount or litigation was ever realistically going to overturn,” Craig said. “And so there was no good basis to believe that the results would legitimately flip in these states.”Another line of defense, used less frequently, revolves around changes to the electoral count process after the fake electors scheme in 2020.Rightwing commentator Mike Cernovich said after the Arizona changes that “multiple electors were LEGAL until the law was recently amended”, presumably a reference to the changes to the Electoral Count Act.The original Electoral Count Act stemmed from the contentious mess of the 1876 election, where there were multiple competing slates of electors and no consensus over who had won the election. It spelled out the process and deadlines for how states would send electoral votes and how Congress would count them.“What the Electoral Count Act did and still continues to do is to furnish Congress with a procedure to evaluate competing claims by competing slates of electors,” said Jim Gardner, an election law expert at the University at Buffalo School of Law. “And that’s all it does. So it is a piece of congressional self-regulation. It does not in any way regulate the behavior of other parties outside Congress.”The 2022 reform act makes clear that the vice-president, when presiding over the count, can’t use their role to get involved in disputes over electors – stemming from the effort to pressure then vice-president Mike Pence to throw out the Biden electors in key states.It also says that governors must certify the electors and send them to Congress. None of the Trump fake electors were certified by their states’ governments, a required part of the process for Congress to accept a slate.These changes, though, aren’t evidence that fake electors were allowed under the act before it was amended, legal experts say. Additionally, the charges these electors face in some states are violations of state-level laws against forging documents or committing fraud – not violations of a federal law to count electoral votes.“I don’t think it’s correct to say that somehow it’s an acknowledgement that any fake submission before this was not criminal,” Foley said.Sam Levine contributed reporting More

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      Wisconsin attorney general charges three former Trump associates in plot to overturn 2020 election

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      Wisconsin’s attorney general, Josh Kaul, filed felony charges on Tuesday against three men who played a key role in the effort to appoint fake electors in the state as part of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.Kenneth Chesebro, Jim Troupis and Michael Roman were each charged with one felony count of forgery, according to court documents. The crime is a class H felony punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to six years in prison.Chesebro was the architect of the fake elector plan. Five days after the election, he emailed Troupis, a retired judge who was leading the Trump campaign’s legal efforts in Wisconsin, to muse about the possibility of throwing out Joe Biden’s win in Wisconsin and appointing a Trump slate of electors. The two developed the scheme over the next few months. Chesebro would later work with Roman to coordinate the efforts across states and to get the slates of fake electors to Washington.Chesebro pleaded guilty to conspiracy to filing false documents for his role in the scheme in a separate case in Georgia earlier this year. Roman faces charges in Georgia and is also a defendant in an Arizona case.This is the first time Troupis, who sits on a judicial ethics panel in Wisconsin, has been charged.Wisconsin governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, released a one-word statement praising the charges. “Good,” he said.The Wisconsin complaint lays out how Chesebro, Troupis and Roman – a Trump campaign aide – coordinated to draft false electoral certificates to be signed by swing state Republicans for Trump and the former vice-president, Mike Pence. The men debated the language to be used on the false elector certificates, considering adding language to qualify that the unofficial slate of electors were contingents in the event that somehow the election results in those key swing states changed before the election was certified.In Wisconsin, the complaint notes, the false elector documents contained “no qualifying language” and presented the Trump-Pence electors as duly elected.On 14 December, the day that the Wisconsin false electors convened, Chesebro celebrated in messages to Troupis and Roman: “WI meeting of the *real* electors is a go!!!”Even as Wisconsin’s slate of false Trump electors submitted their electoral certificates, their chances of reversing the results of the 2020 election appeared increasingly slim. By a narrow 4-3 ruling, the Wisconsin supreme court on 14 December tossed Trump’s lawsuit attempting to overturn the election, accusing the campaign of “challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began”.Chesebro and Troupis were not ready to give up.In the days after the Wisconsin Trump electors met to submit their unofficial certificates, the two men flew to Washington DC to meet with Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn 17 December, Chesebro acknowleged in a message to Roman that the scheme was looking “less plausible”. Still, he argued, the Electoral Count Act could be “weaponized” to deliver Trump the election.The charges in Wisconsin come after prosecutors in four other swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Michigan – have filed criminal charges against those involved in the fake elector plot.Unlike his counterpart in the other states, Kaul did not file charges against the fake electors themselves. Earlier this year, Wisconsin’s 10 fake electors reached a settlement in a civil suit in which they agreed to never serve as presidential electors again in an election involving Trump. They also acknowledged Biden’s win.The indictments come as Trump has successfully maneuvered to delay the two criminal cases he faces for subverting the 2020 election until after November. More

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      Biden Underestimates How Much Black Americans Care About This Issue

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      Black voters will not only be a driving force in the 2024 elections; they will most likely be the driving force. Recent polls showed that roughly 20 percent of Black voters said they would probably vote for Donald Trump if the election were held today — the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the civil rights era. An additional 8 percent said they wouldn’t vote at all.Democratic campaign officials are rightly worried, but there’s still time for President Biden to make up the ground he has lost. One way he could do it is by talking to Black America, especially young Black voters, about a sleeper issue: the climate crisis.As an environment and climate researcher, I have found that despite the growing threat posed by climate change, politicians often seem to downplay the crisis when courting Black communities. Democratic strategists seem to see climate change as a key political issue only for white liberal elites and assume that other groups, like Black voters, are either unaware of or apathetic about it.In reality, Black Americans are growing increasingly concerned about climate change.An April poll from CBS News showed that 88 percent of Black adults said it was “somewhat” or “very important.” That makes sense: The most severe harms from climate change, from heat waves to extreme flooding, are already falling disproportionately on their communities. And it’s starting to be reflected in their political priorities. A poll conducted by the Brookings Institution last September showed that climate change is now a greater political concern for Black Americans than abortion or the state of democracy.If Democrats are serious about making inroads with some of the people they have lost in these communities, they should begin by talking to voters about what the climate crisis looks like for them. In major Democratic strongholds such as Cleveland, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, heat waves and flooding are driving up electricity bills and destroying homes. If Mr. Biden were to routinely speak about these challenges and commit to creating forums for Black Americans to discuss climate concerns with government officials, his administration could earn back some of the faith it has squandered.As a start, Mr. Biden could focus more intently on young Black people, a group passionate about climate change. Until May 19, when he gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, the president had largely refrained from direct engagement with young Black audiences on the campaign trail. When he speaks to Black voters, climate often is a footnote, or it’s mentioned in a policy buffet along with the economy, abortion and voting rights. During his speech at Morehouse, he mentioned the climate crisis explicitly only in a stray line about “heeding your generation’s call to a community free of gun violence and a planet free of climate crisis and showing your power to change the world.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Migrants, real and imagined, grip US voters, 1,500 miles north of border

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      Rhinelander is closer to the Arctic Circle than to Mexico, so it is no great surprise that few people in the small Wisconsin city have laid eyes on the foreign migrants Donald Trump claims are “invading” the country from across the US border 1,500 miles to the south.But Jim Schuh, the manager of a local bakery, is nonetheless sure they are a major problem and he’s voting accordingly.“We don’t see immigrants here but I have relatives all over the country and they see them,” he said. “That’s Biden. He’s responsible.”Large numbers of voters in key swing states agree with Schuh, even in places where migrants are hard to find as they eye cities such as Chicago and New York struggling to cope with tens of thousands of refugees and other arrivals transported there by the governors of Texas and Florida.Trump has been pushing fears over record levels of migration hard in Wisconsin where the past two presidential elections have been decided by a margin of less than 1% of the vote. A Marquette law school poll last month found that two-thirds of Wisconsin voters agree that “the Biden administration’s border policies have created a crisis of uncontrolled illegal migration into the country”.Trump has twice held rallies in Wisconsin over the past month at which migrants have been a primary target. In Green Bay he called the issue “bigger than a war” and invoked the situation in Whitewater, a small city of about 15,000 residents in the south of the state.Republican politicians have turned Whitewater into the poster child for anti-migrant rhetoric in Wisconsin after the city’s police chief, Dan Meyer, appealed for federal assistance to cope with the arrival of nearly 1,000 people from Nicaragua and Venezuela over the past two years.Meyer made clear in a letter to President Joe Biden in December that he was not hostile to the foreign arrivals as he expressed concern about the “terrible living conditions” endured by some.“We’ve seen a family living in a 10ft x 10ft shed in minus 10 degree temperatures,” he wrote.But the police chief said that his department was struggling to cope with the number of Spanish-speaking migrants because of the cost of translation software and the time taken dealing with a sharp increase in unlicensed drivers. Meyer also said that his officers had responded to serious incidents linked to the arrivals including the death of an infant, sexual assaults and a kidnapping.However, he told Biden that “none of this information is shared as a means of denigrating or vilifying this group of people … In fact, we see a great value in the increasing diversity that this group brings to our community.”That did not stop Republican politicians from descending on Whitewater to whip up fear.The Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, a close ally of Trump who has spoken at the former president’s political rallies, and a Republican member of Congress from the state, Bryan Steil, held a meeting in the city to denounce what they described as the “devastating” consequences of the migrant arrivals.Johnson blamed “the whole issue of the flood of illegal immigrants that have come to this country under the Biden administration”.Steil declined to back Meyer’s appeal for federal financial assistance and said the answer lay in legislation to secure the border. However, the congressman was among those Republicans who killed off a bipartisan border security law after Trump opposed the legislation in an apparent move to keep the crisis a live political issue going into the presidential election.View image in fullscreenRepublican members of the Wisconsin legislature wrote to Biden in January demanding action over what they claimed was a surge in violent crime in Whitewater even though Meyer has said he sees no threat to residents from the migrants and that “we are a safe community”.Some Whitewater residents are furious at the political intervention. Brienne Brown, a member of the city council for six years, said residents had been welcoming of the migrants, with community organisations providing food, furniture and bedding to many.“The spotlight fell on us because Ron Johnson and Bryan Steil decided to make it a political event for themselves. Most people here were incredibly angry. They feel like they’ve been used as a political football,” she said.“The crime that is occurring is super low level, which is mostly our police department pulling over somebody in a car who doesn’t have a licence.”The police chief has called for migrants to be allowed to obtain driving licences but the Wisconsin legislature will not allow it.Brown said that the serious incidents of assault involved domestic violence as well as the case of a woman who abandoned her newborn baby in a field, and that those kind of crimes remained uncommon.Wisconsin has long relied on migrant workers, many of them undocumented, as farm labour. Studies have suggested that the state’s dairy farms would grind to a halt without foreign workers. Historically, most were from Mexico. Whitewater tended to attract people from Guanajuato as migrants from the Mexican state sent word back about job opportunities.Brown noticed a change during the Covid crisis.“I’d knock on doors a lot just to talk to my constituents right around the pandemic. I started noticing that a lot of them were not from Mexico. They were from Nicaragua and Venezuela,” she said.Brown said the workers moved into accommodation left by students forced to return home by the pandemic lockdown.“We have a lot of farms, a lot of chicken farms, a lot of egg farms. There are factories that make spices, there are factories that can food. They’re always looking for low-paid workers and they never have enough. So there was plenty of work available,” she said.Schuh, like many other Americans critical of what they describe as Biden’s open border policy, makes a point of distinguishing between those who go through the formal process of immigration with a visa and those walking across the border to seek asylum or work illegally.“I have nothing against immigrants but it has to be done the right way,” he said.Trump continued to stoke the issue at a rally in Michigan earlier this month when he blamed Biden for the murder of Ruby Garcia in March. The former president claimed his administration had deported the man who has confessed to the shooting, Brandon Ortiz-Vite, and that “crooked Joe Biden took him back and let him back in and let him stay in and he viciously killed Ruby”. Ortiz-Vite was deported in 2020 following his arrest for drinking and driving. It is not clear when he returned to the US.Trump told the rally that he spoke to Garcia’s family and that they were “grieving for this incredible young woman”. But Garcia’s sister, Mavi, denied that anyone in the family spoke to the former president and accused him of exploiting the murder for political ends.“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” she told WOOD-TV.“It’s always been about illegal immigrants. Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?” More

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      On a Day of Graduations, Berkeley’s Protests Stand Out

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      At the University of California, Berkeley, hundreds of soon-to-be graduates rose from their seats in protest, chanting and disrupting their commencement. At Virginia Commonwealth University, about 60 graduates in caps and gowns walked out during Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s speech. At the University of Wisconsin, a handful of graduates stood with their backs to their chancellor as she spoke.After weeks of tumult on college campuses over pro-Palestinian protests, many administrators prepared themselves for disruptions at graduations on Saturday. And while there were demonstrations — most noisily, perhaps, at U.C. Berkeley — ceremonies at several universities unfolded without major incident. Many students who protested did so silently.Anticipating possible disruptions, university administrators had increased their security or taken various measures, including dismantling encampments, setting aside free speech zones, canceling student speeches and issuing admission tickets.Some administrators also tried to reach agreements with encampment organizers. The University of Wisconsin said it had reached a deal with protesters to clear the encampment in return for a meeting to discuss the university’s investments.Some students, too, were on edge about their big day — many missed their high school graduations four years ago because of the pandemic and did not want to repeat the experience.In 2020, David Emuze and his mother had watched his high school graduation “ceremony,” a parade of senior photos set to music on Zoom, from their living room in Springfield, Ill. This time, he and his classmates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign heard that other schools, like the University of Southern California and Columbia University, had canceled their main-stage commencements altogether because of campus unrest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Activists march for immigrant rights in Wisconsin: ‘We’re making this country strong’

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      Led by a mariachi band, hundreds of demonstrators on Wednesday morning marched across Milwaukee to the Fiserv Forum – the home of the Milwaukee Bucks and, in July, the venue of the Republican national convention.The rally, organized by the immigrant and workers’ rights group Voces de la Frontera, is an annual event, but in 2024 it holds particular weight. The focus of the rally extended beyond immigration, to fear of authoritarianism under Republican candidate Donald Trump and critique of Joe Biden’s handling of the US role in Israel and Gaza.This year, May Day also fell on the same day as a Trump campaign event in Waukesha, which organizers seized on to denounce Trump’s immigration policy and call on Biden to use his executive authority to adopt protections for undocumented workers.“We reject [Trump’s] political platform, which promises dictatorship, deportations and separation of families,” Voces de la Frontera executive director Christine Neumann-Ortiz told the crowd Wednesday, to applause.As the 2024 presidential campaign season ramps up, Trump has increasingly stoked anti-immigrant sentiment, railing on anecdotal examples of what he calls “migrant crime” and casting the Biden administration’s border policy as insufficiently harsh. In an interview with Time magazine published 30 April, Trump proposed mass deportations, facilitated in part by the US military, during his possible second term in office and claimed that undocumented immigrants are not civilians.For Omar Flores, the co-chair of the Coalition to March on the RNC, the Wednesday rally was an occasion to draw attention to the RNC on 15 July.“A sense that people are getting in Milwaukee is that they’re a little afraid of the RNC coming here,” said Flores, who grew up in Kenosha and said he worries about political repression and rightwing vigilante violence under a second Trump term. “I know it’s scary, but we still have to march.”The Republican party has pushed for the Secret Service to move protesters away from the arena in July, and Flores said the Coalition to March on the RNC is working with the American Civil Liberties Union to ensure access.As the Republican party seizes on immigration and the border to rally support before the 2024 elections, Biden has also shifted to the right on the issue, endorsing a measure to restrict asylum-seeking and referring to an immigrant as the pejorative “illegal” during his State of the Union address. Speakers at the event offered different perspectives on how to respond to Biden’s posture on immigration and Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which Voces de la Frontera has repeatedly denounced as a “genocide”.Dr Roa Qato, a Palestinian-American OB-GYN with a practice in Milwaukee and a featured speaker at the rally said she would rather vote third party than for Biden. “It sends the message that if you don’t listen to us, we’re following through – we’re not voting for you, your empty promises are not going to work,” she said.Neumann-Ortiz said Voces de la Frontera’s political arm, which endorsed the “uninstructed” protest vote in Wisconsin’s presidential primary and forms the largest Latino voter network in the swing state, will nonetheless support Biden.“[Trump] is someone who tried to legally and through violent action undermine a democratic election, and this is someone who will follow through with their threats on mass military deportation,” said Neumann-Ortiz.“I think we’re just being very clear with President Biden and his advisers, that we can do what we can do, but if you are not listening, and you don’t take seriously the opposition that is coming from the Palestinian rights movement, from the immigrant rights movement … you’re gonna lose.”For other attendees, the May Day rally offered an opportunity to remind politicians and the broader Wisconsin community about the contributions of immigrants to their home state – documented or not.Sonia Torres, a machine operator at a furniture manufacturing company in De Pere, said that with the help of Voces de la Frontera organizers, she was able to receive temporary protected status amid a workplace dispute.“I want people to realize that we have rights,” said Torres in Spanish. “Companies only view us as a part of the budget, as a means of making money – but we need to realize we have rights.”In recent months, commentators and politicians on the right have seized on the town of Whitewater, Wisconsin, which has seen a recent influx of immigrants, to stoke anxieties about immigration. Whitewater officials have asked for federal resources to accommodate the influx of an estimated 800-1,000 new residents in the last two years but have rejected politicization of their shifting population.“Señor Donald Trump, listen, this message is just for you,” Jorge Islas-Martinez, an interpreter and bilingual educator from Whitewater told the crowd.“We are not the people that you think that we are. We are here to work and we’re changing and making this [country] strong.” More