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Tag: Border security

  • Fact-checking Alejandro Mayorkas’ claim about deportations

    Fact-checking Alejandro Mayorkas’ claim about deportations

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    Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas rebutted the unfounded theory that the Biden administration is allowing migrants to illegally enter the U.S. to increase the Democrats’ chances of winning elections.  

    “Is it the policy of the Biden administration to allow as many migrants to come across the border in order to change the political dynamics, the electoral dynamics of America?” CNN’s “State of the Union” host Dana Bash asked Mayorkas on March 3.

    “Of course not, and the facts indicate that that is absolutely false,” Mayorkas said, citing his agency’s deportation statistics as evidence. “Since May of last year we have removed or returned more individuals than in any year since 2015 and we haven’t even run 12 months.”

    Bash cited comments from former President Donald Trump, who said during a campaign rally that “Biden’s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” and that Biden wants to “nullify the will of the actual American voters.”

    “Over the last three years we’ve removed, returned, or expelled more people than in all four years of the prior administration,” Mayorkas continued. “You know, the facts matter. And the rhetoric, we should brush aside.”

    Facts matter to PolitiFact, so we fact-checked Mayorkas’ comments. We found that his cautious wording — focusing on specific metrics — accurately reflected the available data. But someone hearing his claim might conclude that he meant all sorts of deportation efforts. And it’s not true, looking more widely, that the past nine months of data exceeded any single year since 2015. Fiscal year 2022, during the Biden administration, would have been the highest, because it included a public health policy that allowed quick expulsions of migrants.

    Here’s an overview of deportation jargon, the numbers over the past few years and their context amid increasing illegal immigration. 

    What ‘removed or return’ represent and how it’s flowed over the years 

    The federal government classifies deportations as the removal of noncitizens from the U.S. It tracks it in a few different ways:

    • Removals: When people are sent out of the U.S. via an official court order and often penalized for illegal entry. This can include people who have lived in the United States for years and people who recently arrived.

    • Returns: When people are returned to their home countries without legal penalties and without being placed in formal removal proceedings. This happens at the border.

    • Title 42 expulsions: These happened from March 2020 to May 2023 under a public health policy. Some people arriving at the border were not let into the United States and were expelled without legal penalties.

    Mayorkas was careful with his terminology. He is on track that there have been more returns and removals in the past nine months than in any full fiscal year since 2015, according to DHS data. 

    From May 2023 to January 2024, the latest available data, there have been 520,000 returns and removals. The next highest number is the 518,000 returns and removals in fiscal year 2019, under the Trump administration.

    But to someone who is unfamiliar with deportation metrics and jargon, it could sound as if the past nine months of returns and removals exceeded any full year since 2015. If we include Title 42 expulsions, the numbers change. 

    From fiscal years 2015 to 2024, “returns” and “removals” were the lowest in 2020 to 2022, because most people encountered at the border were turned away under a different enforcement strategy — expelled under Title 42. In 2020 — removals, returns and Title 42 expulsions added up to 608,000, and increased to 1.4 million in 2022.

    A time frame Mayorkas focused on in his comparison — the past nine months — did not include any Title 42 expulsions. The administration stopped those expulsions in May 2023. Title 42 expulsions also weren’t available for the majority of the fiscal years Mayorkas included in his comparison.

    Removals and returns have increased, but so have encounters 

    Since the public health expulsion policy ended, removals and returns under Biden have increased. But so have Border Patrol encounters with people trying to cross the U.S. border. As a result, returns and removals are low as a proportion of the total number of these stops.

    For example, in fiscal year 2015, there were about 592,000 apprehensions and 453,000 returns and removals. From May 2023 to January 2024, there were 520,000 removals and returns but 2.6 million encounters. (DHS started using the term “encounters” in March 2020 to include apprehensions under immigration law and expulsions under Title 42).  

    We asked immigration experts why returns and removals haven’t kept up with the increase in encounters, and what that disproportion tells us about the Biden administration’s efforts to remove people who are here illegally. 

    The rise in returns and removals under Biden’s administration shows “increased effort, even if appropriations ultimately set a hard limit on how high it can go,” said David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He said absolute return and removal numbers matter more than their proportion to encounters because “DHS has no control over the number” of people who show up at U.S. borders.  

    Congressional appropriations determine return and removal capacity

    The numbers tell us only part of the story, immigration experts told us. 

    The mismatch between returns and removals, and encounters under Biden’s administration is “primarily a reflection of the mismatch in resource allocation by Congress, which has failed to adequately fund the immigration system in its entirety,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. 

    That removals and returns have not kept up with the increase in encounters shows that “there are hard limits to the amount of enforcement that can be carried out absent additional funding from Congress, changes in the laws, or changes in international diplomacy,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, an immigrant-rights advocacy group. 

    Migrants’ nationality influences how easily they can be deported 

    Under Biden, the nationalities of people encountered at the border have increased, the Migration Policy Institute wrote in a January report. And to deport people, the U.S. needs a working relationship with their countries of origin.

    China, for example, does not take back its citizens, even if U.S. authorities order their removal. People from countries that don’t cooperate with removals must be released because they legally cannot be indefinitely detained.

    Mexico also plays a key role in the U.S. government’s ability to remove Venezuelans and people from other countries who would otherwise be difficult to deport from the U.S. because of fraught diplomatic relationships.

    Mexico has agreed to take 30,000 Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans or Haitians a month who arrive at U.S. borders and are removed.

    “Without this collaboration, the U.S. would severely struggle to implement returns and removals at the current rate,” Putzel-Kavanaugh said.

    Our ruling

    Mayorkas said, “Since May of last year we have removed or returned more individuals than in any year since 2015.”

    He’s right about this precise data. Over the past nine months, immigration officials have carried out 520,000 returns and removals, more than the previous high of 518,000 in fiscal year 2019.

    But someone who is unfamiliar with deportation jargon could conclude that the past nine months have accounted for the largest number of times people have been sent out of the country since 2015. That’s not the case when accounting for expulsions under a public health policy that lasted from March 2020 to May 2023. In fiscal year 2022, people were removed, returned or expelled 1.4 million times.

    Mayorkas’ statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. We rate it Mostly True.

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  • Biden says her name — Laken Riley — at urging of GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

    Biden says her name — Laken Riley — at urging of GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — It was what the Republicans demanded, but never expected.

    President Joe Biden said her name.

    “Laken Riley.”

    Even before Biden started speaking, the topic of border security was certain to rise as one of the most tense moments in the State of the Union address.

    Biden was confronted as he walked into the House chamber by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hardline Republican, decked out in a red Trump MAGA hat and a t-shirt emblazoned with the message, which was also on a button she pressed into his hand.

    “Say her name,” it said, the phrase evoking the language used by activists after the death of George Floyd and others at the hands of police.

    The death of Laken Riley, a nursing student from Georgia, has become a rallying cry for Republicans, a tragedy that they say encompasses the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S-Mexico border amid a record surge of immigrants entering the country. An immigrant from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally has been arrested and charged with murder.

    Midway through the speech, Biden started talking about border security and called on Congress to pass legislation to secure the border and modernize the country’s outdated immigration laws, praising the bipartisan effort that collapsed when his likely Republican presidential rival, Donald Trump, opposed it.

    Greene interjected, “Say her name!”

    The congresswoman from Georgia yelled, pointing a finger, and jabbing it toward Biden.

    And then Biden did just that.

    He held up the white button, and said: “Laken Riley.”

    Biden spoke briefly of her death and he made reference to his own family’s trauma — his first wife and young daughter were killed in 1972 after an automobile crash. His son, Beau, died of brain cancer in 2015.

    And then he urged Congress to work together to pass a border security compromise.

    “Get this bill done!” Biden said.

    He even called on Trump to stop fighting against any border deal.

    “We can do it together,” he said.

    With immigration becoming a top issue in the presidential election, Republicans are using nearly every tool at their disposal — including impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — to condemn how the president has handled the border.

    Hours earlier, the House voted to pass the “Laken Riley Act,” which would require the Department of Homeland Security to detain unauthorized migrants who are accused of theft.

    Authorities have arrested on murder and assault charges Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan man who entered the U.S. illegally and was allowed to stay to pursue his immigration case. He has not yet entered a plea to the charges.

    Trump has used Riley’s death to slam Biden’s handling of the border and at one event this month told the crown that the president would never say her name.

    Biden has also adopted some of the language of Trump on the border, and on Thursday night, he called the man charged with murdering Riley an “illegal.”

    That was disappointing to Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “I wish he hadn’t engaged with Marjorie Taylor Greene and used the word illegal,” she told the AP after the speech.

    Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, the speaker emeritus, said afterward on CNN, “Now he should have said ‘undocumented,’ but it’s not a big thing.”

    Greene had handed out the buttons earlier in the day. Biden also looked up to the gallery where many guests were seated, but Riley’s parents were not there.

    Rep. Mike Collins, a Georgia Republican, said this week that he had invited Riley’s parents to the State of the Union address, but they had “chosen to stay home as they grieve the loss of their daughter.”

    __

    Associated Press writers Farnoush Amiri and Jill Colvin contributed to this story.

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  • PolitiFact – Sorting out what Marco Rubio said about Senate immigration bill’s ‘asylum corps’

    PolitiFact – Sorting out what Marco Rubio said about Senate immigration bill’s ‘asylum corps’

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    Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who has led attempts to update immigration law, this month rejected a bill that would have given immigration officials more funding and changed how asylum is decided for people arriving at the U.S.’ southwest border.

    Rubio justified his decision in a Feb. 11 CNN interview, saying the bill would have led to the hiring of bureaucrats who would easily let people into the country to give them work permits or asylum and a path to citizenship. 

    “The bill basically creates an asylum corps … thousands of bureaucrats, asylum agents that would be empowered right at the border to either allow people into the country with an immediate work permit,” Rubio said. “Or they have the power to immediately release them and grant them asylum.”

    The bill, which failed in the Senate on a 49-50 vote, sought to hire more asylum officers. But Rubio omits that these officers are already part of the immigration system. Currently, they decide the cases of people who already live in the United States and are not in deportation proceedings. 

    The Senate bill wanted to enable these officials to also decide the cases of new southwest border arrivals who would have applied for asylum as a defense against deportation. Immigration experts questioned Rubio’s characterization that the bill would have made it easier for people to get asylum.

    PolitiFact emailed Rubio’s press office for comments but did not hear back.

    Although this bill is no longer being considered, asylum law and policies remain major contention points within Congress and in its negotiations with the Biden administration. So, here’s an analysis of the asylum provisions of this bill, which could influence future legislation.

    Bill aimed to reduce asylum waiting periods

    There’s a backlog of millions of asylum cases that immigration judges and asylum officers must decide. That amount of cases is pending largely because of the high numbers of people applying and the low number of resources available to adjudicate these applications.

    The border bill sought to shorten the asylum decision process from years to six months and to expedite the issuing of work permits to eligible migrants. The bill also tried to make it harder to get asylum by raising the initial screening standard and adding new eligibility criteria (if people could move within their own home country to avoid persecution, they wouldn’t be eligible for asylum in the United States.)

    Would the bill have created bureaucrats and an ‘asylum corps’?

    The bill would have funded the hiring of thousands of new asylum officers who work for the executive branch, specifically the Department of Homeland Security. 

    But asylum officers have been deciding cases for a long time within DHS’ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a Migration Policy Institute policy analyst. USCIS handles cases of people who are already in the United States, not necessarily people who are newly arriving at U.S. borders.

    Rubio in 2013 co-sponsored a bill that would have enabled asylum officers “under certain circumstances” to grant asylum to people arriving at the border, according to the Congressional Research Service.

    Immigration judges, who Rubio suggested he preferred, also are employed by the executive branch, specifically the Justice Department. 

    Both asylum officers and immigration judges receive extensive training on immigration laws, said Bush-Joseph.

    What new powers did the bill try to give asylum officers?

    Asylum officers would have had the power to decide the cases of people arriving at U.S. borders. This responsibility has rested only with immigration judges. Also, a newly created board of asylum officers would review case appeals. Currently, immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals (a group of 23 appellate immigration judges within the Justice Department) have this responsibility.

    Under the bill, people arriving at the border who seek asylum would have been released from custody and monitored remotely by immigration officials. 

    Asylum officers would then have had 90 days to interview them and to decide whether there is a “reasonable possibility” that the person is eligible for asylum. People who passed that initial interview could become eligible for work permits and be referred for another asylum interview.

    Asylum officers would also have been able to conduct a second interview within 90 days. This is where immigration courts usually step in. The officers’ supervisors would review decisions to give people asylum after the second interview. 

    There would also be another way to get asylum. During the first interview, if people proved an even higher standard, that they had “clear and convincing evidence,” they would be granted asylum without a second interview.  A supervisor would also review that decision. 

    People not interviewed within the first 90 days would remain in the asylum queue, but become eligible for work permits. (Democratic state and city leaders have asked the Biden administration to issue work permits faster so fewer migrants rely on government services.)

    Did the bill make it easier to get asylum?

    Rubio gave the impression that asylum officers would be more lenient and approve asylum more often than judges. Immigrant advocacy groups say the opposite. 

    The “rapid and truncated procedures will undermine the fairness and thoroughness of asylum screenings” the American Immigration Lawyers Association said in a Feb. 5 statement.

    The bill made it harder for people to get asylum because immigration judges would not have the power to reverse asylum officers’ decisions, said the National Immigrant Justice Center.

    Currently, when asylum officers deny a case, it is sent to immigration courts. In this venue, people may apply for asylum again to prevent their deportation.

    Oftentimes, people who are denied asylum by asylum officers are granted asylum by immigration judges, said Bush-Joseph. She said this might be because by then people have had more time to find attorneys who “may be able to find more evidence or experts who can support their case.”

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  • Conservative Gerrick Wilkins Advocates Defunding the UN to Invest in Domestic Projects

    Conservative Gerrick Wilkins Advocates Defunding the UN to Invest in Domestic Projects

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    GARDENDALE, Ala., February 16, 2024 (Newswire.com)
    –
    In a recent event held in Gardendale, Alabama, Gerrick Wilkins, the conservative Congressional candidate for Alabama’s 6th District, unveiled his decisive plan to defund the United Nations (UN). This bold stance comes in response to revelations by the Center for Immigration Studies about the UN’s budget allocation for U.S.-bound migrants in 2024.

    The report highlighted that the UN, partially funded by American taxpayers, is set to allocate millions for migrants heading to the United States. “This is not just concerning; it’s an outright affront to our national sovereignty and security,” stated Wilkins. “To learn that an organization we help finance is supporting these efforts at our southern border is unacceptable. This is one of the reasons why I am calling for an immediate termination of U.S. funding to the United Nations.”

    Wilkins’ plan to defund the UN is rooted in a commitment to redirecting those substantial resources toward critical domestic priorities. The United States contributes approximately $10 billion annually to the UN, a figure that represents nearly a quarter of the organization’s budget. Wilkins proposes that these funds be better employed in addressing urgent domestic issues, particularly those affecting Alabama and the nation as a whole.

    “Imagine the impact of those billions on our infrastructure, veteran support, and most crucially, on securing our borders,” Wilkins elaborated. “We can use this funding to widen I-65, provide better housing for our homeless veterans, and fortify our southern border against this ongoing issue.”

    By advocating for the reallocation of UN funds, Wilkins underscores his commitment to fiscal responsibility, national security, and his “Alabama First” philosophy. His proposal reflects a broader platform, which focuses on fostering economic growth, strengthening national security, and enhancing the quality of life for Americans.

    “A move to defund the UN and invest in our nation’s critical needs aligns perfectly with the values and priorities of the people of Alabama,” Wilkins concluded. “It’s time we take a stand against international organizations that act against American interests and focus on building a stronger, more secure America.”

    Gerrick Wilkins combines his extensive background in business and community service with a deep commitment to conservative principles, including accountability, transparency, and fiscal responsibility.

    For further details on Gerrick Wilkins’ stance and his campaign initiatives, please visit www.WilkinsforAL.com.

    Source: Wilkins for Congress

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  • The Real Difference Between Trump and Biden

    The Real Difference Between Trump and Biden

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    Listen to this article

    Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.

    Americans likely face a choice this fall between two men they don’t want for president. Or they can stay home and get one of the two guys they don’t want for president anyway. The reasons for voter disdain are clear enough: Poll respondents say Joe Biden is too old, an impression reinforced by last week’s special-counsel report, and they have always been troubled by Donald Trump’s judgment and character (though a majority think he’s too old too.)

    Voters have genuine questions about both men. But we’ve seen each occupy the presidency. One thing the two administrations have made clear is that whereas Biden follows an approach to governance that seems to offset some of his weaknesses, Trump’s preferred managerial style seems to amplify his.

    Many people treat elections as a chance to vote a single individual into office; as a result, they tend to focus disproportionately on the personality, character, and temperament of the people running. But voters are also choosing a platform—a set of policies as well as a set of people, chosen by the president, who will shape and implement them. The president is the conductor of an orchestra, not a solo artist. As the past eight years have made very clear, the difference in governance between a Trump administration and a Biden administration is not subtle—for example, on foreign policy, border security, and economics—and voters have plenty of evidence on which to base their decision.

    But for the sake of argument, let’s consider the potential effects of Biden’s failures of memory and Trump’s … well, it’s a little tough to say what exactly is going on with Trump’s mental state. The former president has always had a penchant for saying strange things and acting impulsively, and it’s hard to know whether recent lapses are indications of new troubles or the same deficits that have long been present. His always-dark rhetoric has become more apocalyptic and vengeance-focused, and he frequently seems forgetful or confused about basic facts.

    To what extent would either of their struggles be material in a future presidential term? One key distinction is that Biden and Trump have fundamentally different conceptions of the presidency as an office. Biden’s approach to governance has been more or less in keeping with the traditions of recent decades. Biden’s Cabinet and West Wing are (for better or worse) stocked with longtime political and policy hands who have extensive experience in government. Cabinet secretaries largely run their departments through normal channels. Policy proposals are usually formulated by subject-area experts. The president’s job is to sit atop this apparatus and set broad direction.

    Read: The presidency is not a math test

    Biden doesn’t always defer to experts, and he has clashed with and overruled advisers on some topics, including, notably, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Such occasional clashes are fairly typical—as long as they’re occasional. As my colleague Graeme Wood wrote this week, “The presidency is an endless series of judgment calls, not a four-year math test. In fact, large parts of the executive branch exist, in effect, to do the math problems on the president’s behalf, then present to him all those tough judgment calls with the calculations already factored in.”

    This doesn’t mean that Biden’s readily apparent aging doesn’t bring risks. The presidency requires a great deal of energy, and crises can happen at all hours and on top of one another, testing the stamina of any person. The oldest president before Biden, Ronald Reagan, struggled with acuity in his second term, an administration that produced a huge, appalling scandal of which he claimed to be unaware.

    In contrast to the model of the president as the ultimate decision maker, Trump has approached the presidency less like a Fortune 500 CEO and more like the sole proprietor of a small business. (Though he boasts about his experience running a business empire, the Trump Organization also ran this way—it is a company with a large bottom line but with concentrated and insular management by corporate standards.) As president, Trump had a tendency to micromanage details—the launching system for a new aircraft carrier, the paint scheme on Air Force One—while evincing little interest in major policy questions, such as a long-promised replacement for Obamacare.

    At times, Trump has described his role in practically messianic terms: “I alone can fix it,” he infamously said at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He has claimed to be the world’s foremost expert on a wide variety of subjects, and he often disregarded the views of policy experts in his administration, complaining that they tried to talk him out of ideas (when they didn’t just obstruct him). He and his allies have embarked on a major campaign to ensure that staffers in a second Trump administration would be picked for their ideological and personal loyalty to him. Axios has reported that the speechwriter Stephen Miller could be the next attorney general, even though Miller is not an attorney.

    Perhaps as a result of these different approaches to the job, people who have served under the men have divergent views on them. Whereas Biden can seem bumbling and mild in public, aides’ accounts of his private demeanor depict an engaged, incisive, and sometimes hot-tempered president. That’s also the view that emerges from my colleague Franklin Foer’s book The Last Politician. “He has a kind of mantra: ‘You can never give me too much detail,’” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has said. “The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it, because he is sharp, intensely probing, and detail-oriented and focused,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last weekend. (As Jon Stewart noted on Monday night, the public might be more convinced were these moments videotaped, like the gaffes.)

    Former Trump aides are not so complimentary. Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly called Trump “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law,” adding, “God help us.” Former Attorney General Bill Barr said that he “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.” Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper described him as “unfit for office.” Of 44 former Cabinet members queried by NBC, only four said they supported Trump’s return to office. Even allowing for the puffery of politics, the contrast is dramatic.

    Read: A Hail Mary to save ‘The Daily Show’

    None of this is to say that Biden’s memory lapses aren’t worth concern or that he is as vigorous as he was as a younger man. But someone voting for Biden is selecting, above all, a set of policy ideas and promises that he has laid out, with the expectation that the apparatus of the executive branch will implement them.

    Voting for Trump is opting for a charismatic individual who brings to office a set of attitudes rather than a platform. Considering the presidency as a matter of individual mental acuity grants the field to Trump’s own preferred conception of unified personal power, so it’s striking that the comparison makes the dangers posed by Trump’s mentality so stark.

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    David A. Graham

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  • House impeaches Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas

    House impeaches Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas

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    WASHINGTON — The U.S. House voted Tuesday to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, with the Republican majority determined to punish the Biden administration over its handling of the U.S-Mexico border after failing last week in a politically embarrassing setback.

    The evening roll call proved tight, with Speaker Mike Johnson’s threadbare GOP majority unable to handle many defectors or absences in the face of staunch Democratic opposition to impeaching Mayorkas, the first Cabinet secretary charged in nearly 150 years.

    In a historic rebuke, the House impeached Mayorkas 214-213. With the return of Majority Leader Steve Scalise to bolster the GOP’s numbers after being away from Washington for cancer care and a Northeastern storm impacting some others, Republicans recouped — despite dissent from their own ranks.

    President Joe Biden called it a “blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games.”

    The charges against Mayorkas next go to the Senate for a trial, but neither Democratic nor even some Republican senators have shown interest in the matter and it may be indefinitely shelved to a committee. The Senate is expected to receive the articles of impeachment from the House after returning to session Feb. 26.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called the case against Mayorkas a “sham impeachment” and a “new low for House Republicans.”

    In a frantic scene of vote-tallying on the House floor, the GOP effort to impeach Mayorkas over his handling of the southern border took on an air of political desperation as Republicans struggle to make good on their priorities.

    Mayorkas faced two articles of impeachment filed by the Homeland Security Committee arguing that he “willfully and systematically” refused to enforce existing immigration laws and that he breached the public trust by lying to Congress and saying the border was secure.

    But critics of the impeachment effort said the charges against Mayorkas amount to a policy dispute over Biden’s border strategy, hardly rising to the Constitution’s bar of high crimes and misdemeanors.

    The House had initially launched an impeachment inquiry into Biden over his son’s business dealings, but instead turned its attention to Mayorkas after Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ally of former President Donald Trump, pushed the debate forward following the panel’s months-long investigation.

    Greene, who will serve as an impeachment manager in a potential Senate trial, hugged Scalise afterward and posed for photos with other lawmakers. She said senators “better pay attention to the American people and how they feel, and then they need to read our articles of impeachment.”

    Border security has shot to the top of campaign issues, with Trump, the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, insisting he will launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if he retakes the White House.

    Various House Republicans have prepared legislation to begin deporting migrants who were temporarily allowed into the U.S. under the Biden administration’s policies, many as they await adjudication of asylum claims.

    “We have no choice,” Trump said in stark language at a weekend rally in South Carolina.

    At the same time, Johnson rejected a bipartisan Senate border security package Mayorkas had spent weeks negotiating. But the speaker has been unable to advance his Republicans’ own proposal, which is a nonstarter in the Senate.

    “Congress needs to act,” Biden said in a statement after the vote, “to give me, Secretary Mayorkas, and my administration the tools and resources needed to address the situation at the border.”

    Three Republican representatives who broke ranks last week over the Mayorkas impeachment — Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Tom McClintock of California — all did so again Tuesday. With a 219-212 majority, Johnson had few votes to spare. His margin got even smaller later Tuesday night when New York Democrat Thomas Suozzi won a special election to the seat once held by Republican George Santos before his expulsion from Congress.

    Several leading conservative scholars along with former Homeland Security secretaries from both Republican and Democratic administrations have dismissed the Mayorkas impeachment as unwarranted or a waste of time.

    Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said what the Republicans “have succeeded in doing is degrading and tarnishing the constitutional meaning of impeachment.”

    But Scalise told reporters after the vote, “It sends a message that we’re not just going to sit by while the secretary of homeland security fails to do his job at keeping our homeland safe.”

    Mayorkas is not the only Biden administration official the House Republicans want to impeach. They have filed legislation to impeach a long list including Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

    Never before has a sitting Cabinet secretary been impeached, and it was nearly 150 years ago that the House voted to impeach President Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, over a kickback scheme in government contracts. He resigned before the vote.

    Mayorkas, who did not appear to testify before the impeachment proceedings, put the border crisis squarely on Congress for failing to update immigration laws during a time of global migration.

    “There is no question that we have a challenge, a crisis at the border,” Mayorkas said over the weekend on NBC. “And there is no question that Congress needs to fix it.”

    Johnson and the Republicans have pushed back, arguing that the Biden administration could take executive actions, as Trump did, to stop the number of crossings — though the courts have questioned and turned back some of those efforts.

    “We always explore what options are available to us that are permissible under the law,” Mayorkas said.

    Last week’s failed vote to impeach Mayorkas — a surprise outcome rarely seen on such a high-profile issue — was a stunning display in the chamber that has been churning through months of GOP chaos since the ouster of the previous House speaker.

    At the time, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, who had been hospitalized for emergency abdominal surgery, made a surprise arrival, wheeled into the chamber in scrubs and socks to vote against it — leaving the vote tied and leading to its failure.

    “Obviously, you feel good when you can make a difference,” said Green, describing his painstaking route from hospital bed to the House floor. “All I did was what I was elected to do, and that was to cast my vote on the issues of our time, using the best judgment available to me.”

    Republican holdout Gallagher, who had served as a Marine, announced over the weekend he would not be seeking reelection in the fall, joining a growing list of serious-minded Republican lawmakers heading for the exits.

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    By LISA MASCARO – AP Congressional Correspondent

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  • Senator Chris Murphy Makes Bizarre Admission: Illegal Immigrants Are Who Democrats ‘Care About Most’

    Senator Chris Murphy Makes Bizarre Admission: Illegal Immigrants Are Who Democrats ‘Care About Most’

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    Opinion

    Screenshot: RNC Research

    Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) pulled the curtain back on his own party during a new interview in which he said “undocumented Americans” are the people Democrats “care about most.”

    Murphy apparently stumbled upon a new term for illegal immigrants when discussing the matter with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. They are not undocumented, they are illegal, and they most certainly are not Americans by any definition.

    Hayes began the discussion by asking Murphy for his thoughts on the $118 billion Senate foreign aid bill that was rejected by Republicans.

    “This time around, the negotiation didn’t have a path to citizenship. It was entirely on their [Republicans’] terms in order to get Ukraine funding, right?” Hayes asked.

    Murphy called so-called negotiations on immigration and border security “a failed play.”

    “You are right that that has been the Democratic strategy for 30 years, maybe, and it has failed to deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country,” he responded.

    RELATED: Biden Ripped: American President Wears ‘My Ukraine Tie And My Ukraine Pin’ While Begging For More Money For Ukraine

    Democrat Admits That llegal Aliens Are Who We Care About Most

    By “undocumented Americans,” Senator Murphy is referring to the millions of illegal immigrants that President Joe Biden has resettled in communities across the country.

    Democrats are telling you exactly where their priorities lie, and it’s not with the American people.

    Need more proof besides seeing videos of the invasion at the border on a nearly daily basis? The White House announced that ICE will reduce deportations and the capacity to detain illegals if the $118 billion foreign aid bill is not passed.

    They are literally threatening the lives and jobs of the American people, holding them hostage, if they don’t get their Ukraine funding. Their priorities lie with Ukraine and every illegal alien that pours across the southern border. America last.

    President Biden dismantled border security as soon as he took office. He and the Democrats have adamantly opposed virtually every enforcement mechanism already available, like detention and deportation.

    And Biden has all the authority he needs to reverse his executive actions, enforce existing U.S. law, and end the border crisis right now. He certainly doesn’t require a bill that provides a fraction of the funding for the border to fix the problem he started.

    RELATED: Failure Theater Continues: Republicans Vote Down Impeachment Of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas

    What The Hell Is An ‘Undocumented American’, Chris Murphy?

    So pleased was Senator Murphy with his newly made-up term that he repeated the clarion call to “rescue” the “undocumented Americans” later in his interview.

    “I am of the belief that this was a moment where you had to show some big bipartisan momentum and progress on the border, or you would never ever have the ability to try to rescue the undocumented Americans that desperately need help,” he told Hayes.

    Notice that there is no concern for the American people who desperately need help. No cries from Democrats that the American people are the ones they “care about most.”

    And there is certainly no bill being debated in the Senate or the House that would rescue documented Americans or legal immigrants.

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  • Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’

    Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’

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    Confrontations over immigration and border security are moving to the center of the struggle between the two parties, both in Washington, D.C., and beyond. And yet the most explosive immigration clash of all may still lie ahead.

    In just the past few days, Washington has seen the collapse of a bipartisan Senate deal to toughen border security amid opposition from former President Donald Trump and the House Republican leadership, as well as a failed vote by House Republicans to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for allegedly refusing to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Simultaneously, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, supported by more than a dozen other GOP governors, has renewed his attempts to seize greater control over immigration enforcement from the federal government.

    Cumulatively these clashes demonstrate how much the terms of debate over immigration have moved to the right during President Joe Biden’s time in office. But even amid that overall shift, Trump is publicly discussing immigration plans for a second presidential term that could quickly become much more politically divisive than even anything separating the parties now.

    Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last month on social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.

    “What this means is that the communities that are heavily Hispanic or Black, those marginalized communities are going to be living in absolute fear of a knock on the door, whether or not they are themselves undocumented,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. “What he’s describing is a terrifying police state, the pretext of which is immigration.”

    How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.

    Such deployment of red-state forces into blue states, over the objections of their mayors and governors, would likely spark intense public protest and possibly even conflict with law-enforcement agencies under local control. And that conflict itself could become the justification for further insertion of federal forces into blue jurisdictions, notes Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School.

    From his very first days as a national candidate in 2015, Trump has intermittently promised to pursue a massive deportation program against undocumented immigrants. As president, Trump moved in unprecedented ways to reduce the number of new arrivals in the country by restricting both legal and illegal immigration. But he never launched the huge “deportation force” or widespread removals that, he frequently promised, would uproot the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the United States during his time in office. Over Trump’s four years, in fact, his administration deported only about a third as many people from the nation’s interior as Barack Obama’s administration had over the previous four years, according to a study by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

    Read: The GOP’s true priority

    Exactly why Trump never launched the comprehensive deportation program he promised is unclear even to some veterans of his administration. The best answer may be a combination of political resistance within Congress and in local governments, logistical difficulties, and internal opposition from the more mainstream conservative appointees who held key positions in his administration, particularly in his first years.

    This time, though, Trump has been even more persistent than in the 2016 campaign in promising a sweeping deportation effort. (“Those Biden has let in should not get comfortable because they will be going home,” Trump posted on his Truth Social site last month.) Simultaneously, Miller has outlined much more explicit and detailed plans than Trump ever did in 2016 about how the administration would implement such a deportation program in a second term.

    Dismissing these declarations as merely campaign bluster would be a mistake, Miles Taylor, who served as DHS chief of staff under Trump, told me in an interview. “If Stephen Miller says it, if Trump says it, it is very reasonable to assume that’s what they will try to do in a second term,” said Taylor, who later broke with Trump to write a New York Times op-ed and a book that declared him unfit for the job. (Taylor wrote the article and book anonymously, but later acknowledged that he was the author.)

    Officials at DHS successfully resisted many of Miller’s most extreme immigration ideas during Trump’s term, Taylor said. But with the experience of Trump’s four years behind them, Taylor told me Trump and Miller would be in a much stronger position in 2025 to drive through militant ideas such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented migrants. “Stephen Miller has had the time and the battle scars to inform a very systematic strategy,” Taylor said.

    Miller outlined the Trump team’s plans for a mass-deportation effort most extensively in an interview he did this past November on a podcast hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In the interview, Miller suggested that another Trump administration would seek to remove as many as 10 million “foreign-national invaders” who he claims have entered the country under Biden.

    To round up those migrants, Miller said, the administration would dispatch forces to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Then, he said, it would build “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation. From these camps, he said, the administration would schedule near-constant flights returning migrants to their home countries. “So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets,” Miller told Kirk.

    In the interview, Miller acknowledged that removing migrants at this scale would be an immense undertaking, comparable in scale and complexity to “building the Panama Canal.” He said the administration would use multiple means to supplement the limited existing immigration-enforcement personnel available to them, primarily at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. One would be to reassign personnel from other federal law-enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the DEA. Another would be to “deputize” local police and sheriffs. And a third would be to requisition National Guard troops to participate in the deportation plans.

    Miller offered two scenarios for enlisting National Guard troops in removing migrants. One would be in states where Republican governors want to cooperate. “You go to the red-state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard,’” he said. “We will deputize them as immigration-enforcement officers.”

    The second scenario, Miller said, would involve sending National Guard forces from nearby Republican-controlled states into what he called an “unfriendly state” whose governor would not willingly join the deportation program.

    Read: The specter of family separation

    Even those sweeping plans understate the magnitude of the effort that mass deportations would require, Jason Houser, a former chief of staff at ICE under Biden, told me. Removing 500,000 to 1 million migrants a year could require as many as 100,000–150,000 deputized enforcement officers, Houser believes. Staffing the internment camps and constant flights that Miller is contemplating could require 50,000 more people, Houser said. “If you want to deport a million a year—and I’m a Navy officer—you are talking a mobilization the size of a military deployment,” Houser told me.

    Enormous legal resources would be required too. Immigration lawyers point out that even if Trump detained migrants through mass roundups, the administration would still need individual deportation orders from immigration courts for each person it wants to remove from the country. “It’s not as simple as sending Guardsmen in to arrest everyone who is illegal or undocumented,” said Leopold, the immigration lawyer.

    All of this exceeds the staffing now available for immigration enforcement; ICE, Houser said, has only about 6,000 enforcement agents. To fill the gap, he said, Trump would need to transfer huge numbers of other federal law-enforcement agents, weakening the ability of agencies including the DEA, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service to fulfill their principal responsibilities. And even then, Trump would still need support from the National Guard to reach the scale he’s discussing.

    Even if Trump used National Guard troops in supporting roles, rather than to “break down doors” in pursuit of migrants, they would be thrust into highly contentious situations, Houser said.

    “You are talking about taking National Guard members out of their jobs in Texas and moving them into, say, Philadelphia and having them do mass stagings,” Houser said. “Literally as Philadelphians are leaving for work, or their kids are going to school, they are going to see mass-deportation centers with children and mothers who were just in the community working and thriving.” He predicts that Trump would be forced to convert warehouses or abandoned malls into temporary relocation centers for thousands of migrants.

    Adam Goodman, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of The Deportation Machine, told me, “There’s no precedent of millions of people being removed in U.S. history in a short period of time.” The example Trump most often cites as a model is “Operation Wetback,” the mass-deportation program—named for a slur against Mexican Americans—launched by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. That program involved huge sweeps through not only workplaces, but also heavily Mexican American communities in cities such as Los Angeles. Yet even that effort, despite ensnaring an unknown number of legal residents, removed only about 250,000 people, Goodman said. To deport the larger numbers Trump is promising, he would need an operation of much greater scale and expense.

    The Republican response to Texas’s standoff with the Biden administration offers Trump reason for optimism that red-state governors would support his ambitious immigration plans. So far, 14 Republican-controlled states have sent National Guard troops or other law-enforcement personnel to bolster Abbott in his ongoing efforts to assert more control over immigration issues. The Supreme Court last month overturned a lower-court decision that blocked federal agents from dismantling the razor-wire barriers Texas has been erecting along the border. But Abbott insists that he’ll build more of the barriers nonetheless. “We are expanding to further areas to make sure we will expand our level of deterrence,” Abbott declared last Sunday at a press conference near the border, where he was joined by 13 other GOP governors. Abbott has said he expects every red state to eventually send forces to back his efforts.

    But the National Guard deployments to Texas still differ from the scenario that Miller has sketched. Abbott is welcoming the personnel that other states are sending to Texas. In that sense, this deployment is similar to the process under which George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden utilized National Guard troops to support federal immigration-enforcement efforts in Texas and, at times, other border states: None of the governors of those states has opposed the use of those troops in their territory for that purpose.

    The prospect of Trump dispatching red-state National Guard troops on deportation missions into blue states that oppose them is more akin to his actions during the racial-justice protests following the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020. At that point, Trump deployed National Guardsmen provided by 11 Republican governors to Washington, D.C., to quell the protests.

    The governors provided those forces to Trump under what’s known as “hybrid status” for the National Guard (also known as Title 32 status). Under hybrid status, National Guard troops remain under the technical command of their state’s governor, even though they are executing a federal mission. Using troops in hybrid status isn’t particularly unusual; what made that deployment “unprecedented,” in Joseph Nunn’s phrase, is that the troops were deployed over the objection of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

    The hybrid status that Trump used in D.C. is probably the model the former president and Miller are hoping to use to send red-state National Guard forces into blue states that don’t want them, Nunn told me. But Nunn believes that federal courts would block any such effort. Trump could ignore the objections from the D.C. government because it’s not a state, but Nunn believes that if Trump sought to send troops in hybrid status from, say, Indiana to support deportation raids in Chicago, federal courts would say that violates Illinois’ constitutional rights. “Under the Constitution, the states are sovereign and coequal,” Nunn said. “One state cannot reach into another state and exercise governmental power there without the receiving state’s consent.”

    But Trump could overcome that obstacle, Nunn said, through a straightforward, if more politically risky, alternative that he and his aides have already discussed. If Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792, he would have almost unlimited authority to use any military asset for his deportation program. Under the Insurrection Act, Trump could dispatch the Indiana National Guard into Illinois, take control of the Illinois National Guard for the job, or directly send in active-duty military forces, Nunn said.

    “There are not a lot of meaningful criteria in the Insurrection Act for assessing whether a given situation warrants using it, and there is no mechanism in the law that allows the courts or Congress to check an abuse of the act,” Nunn told me. “There are quite literally no safeguards.”

    Read: America’s immigration reckoning has arrived

    The Insurrection Act is the legal tool presidents invoked to federalize control over state National Guards when southern governors used the troops to block racial integration. For Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to instead target racial minorities through his deportation program might be even more politically combustible than sending in National Guard troops through hybrid status during the 2020 D.C. protests, Nunn said. But, like many other immigration and security experts I spoke with, Nunn believes those concerns are not likely to dissuade a reelected Trump from using the Insurrection Act if courts block his other options.

    In fact, as I’ve written, a mass-deportation program staffed partially with red-state National Guard forces is only one of several ideas that Trump has embraced for introducing federal forces into blue jurisdictions over the objections of their local leaders. He’s also talked about sending federal personnel into blue cities to round up homeless people (and place them in camps as well) or just to fight crime. Invoking the Insurrection Act might be the necessary predicate for those initiatives as well.

    These plans could produce scenes in American communities unmatched in our history. Leopold, to take one scenario raised by Miller in his interview, asks what would happen if the Republican governor of Virginia, at Trump’s request, sends National Guard troops into Maryland, but the Democratic governor of that state orders his National Guard to block their entry? Similarly, in a huge deportation sweep through a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles or Chicago, it’s easy to imagine frightened migrant families taking refuge in a church and a Democratic mayor ordering local police to surround the building. Would federal agents and National Guard troops sent by Trump try to push past the local police by force?

    For all the tumult that the many disputes over immigration are now generating, these possibilities could prove far more disruptive, incendiary, and even violent.

    “What we would expect to see in a second Trump presidency is governance by force,” Deana El-Mallawany, a counsel and the director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group focused on threats to democracy, told me. “This is his retribution agenda. He is looking at ways to aggrandize and consolidate power within the presidency to do these extreme things, and going after marginalized groups first, like migrants and the homeless, is the way to expand that power, normalize it, and then wield it more broadly against everybody in our democracy.”

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  • The Special Election That Could Give Democrats Hope for November

    The Special Election That Could Give Democrats Hope for November

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    In late 2021, Tom Suozzi made an announcement that exasperated Democratic Party leaders: The third-term representative would give up a reelection bid for his highly competitive New York House district to mount a long-shot primary challenge against Governor Kathy Hochul.

    Suozzi got trounced, but the ripple effects of his ill-fated run extended far beyond his Long Island district. Democrats ended up losing their narrow majority in the House, in part because the seat Suozzi vacated went to a little-known Republican named George Santos. He’s not so little-known anymore. Nor is he in Congress, having been expelled in December after his colleagues discovered that his stated biography was a fiction and that his campaign was an alleged criminal enterprise.

    Steve Israel: How a perfectly normal New York suburb elected a con man

    In a special election next week, Suozzi will try to reclaim the seat he abandoned—and bring the Democrats one step closer to recapturing the House. He’s made amends with party leaders (including Hochul), but he’s not apologizing. “I don’t regret any of my decisions,” Suozzi told me recently. “When things don’t work out, that’s the way it is.”

    A pro-business moderate, Suozzi helped start the cross-party Problem Solvers Caucus in the House after Donald Trump won the presidency. He told me that his penchant for bipartisanship makes him “a very poor candidate” in a Democratic primary—he’s now lost two such gubernatorial campaigns by more than 50 points—but a much better one in a general election.

    Officials in both parties give Suozzi a slight edge; he has more money and is much better known than his GOP opponent, Mazi Pilip, a county legislator who spent her teenage years in Israel and served in the Israeli Defense Forces. But Suozzi is trying to run as an underdog, shunning a Democratic brand that he believes has been soiled on Long Island by voter frustration with the migrant crisis, the high cost of living, and turmoil overseas. He’s kept his distance from President Joe Biden, who, according to both Democratic and Republican strategists, is no more popular in the district than Trump. “If I run my campaign to say, ‘I’m Tom Suozzi. I’m the Democrat, and my opponent’s the Republican,’ I lose this race,” Suozzi said at a rally before members of the carpenters’ union on Saturday.

    The third congressional district borders the blue bastion of New York City and includes a sliver of Queens, but Republicans have clobbered Democrats across Long Island in recent years. Tuesday’s special election represents the Democrats’ first attempt to claw back some of that territory and test out messages that they hope can resonate in suburban swing districts across the country this fall.

    Like other Democrats, Suozzi is emphasizing his support for abortion rights, an issue that has helped the party limit GOP gains since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But he’s also pitching himself as a bipartisan dealmaker—his campaign slogan is “Let’s fix this!” Suozzi is betting that voters are angered as much by congressional inaction on issues such as immigration and border security as they are by Biden or his policies. If he’s right, the GOP’s rejection this week of a bipartisan border deal that its leaders had initially demanded will play into his hands.

    Whether Suozzi’s campaign proves effective next week will offer clues about the swing districts that could determine control of Congress. A win could point the way for Democratic candidates to redirect attacks on Biden’s record and ease fears that the border impasse could be an insurmountable liability this fall. But his defeat in a district that ought to be winnable for Democrats would suggest that the party is in real trouble as the general election begins.

    Next week’s election will also serve as a test of whether Democrats can turn out voters for a candidate who, like Biden, doesn’t inspire much enthusiasm.

    Read: Is Biden toast?

    Suozzi, 61, is a familiar figure on Long Island; he became a mayor at 31 and then won two terms as a county executive overseeing a population of 1.3 million people in Nassau County. But he’s also suffered his share of defeats. Eliot Spitzer beat him by more than 60 points in the 2006 primary for governor. Suozzi then lost two campaigns for county executive before winning a House seat in 2016. “He felt that he was destined to be president of the United States,” former Representative Peter King, a Republican who served alongside Suozzi in the House and has known him for decades, told me. “Tom started off as the young superstar, and then suddenly you become old.”

    On Saturday, local labor organizers amassed several hundred members of the carpenters’ union in a banquet hall for the rally. Most of them had been bused from outside the district, and many of them weren’t exactly excited to be there. “We’re here under protest,” one union member grumbled as I searched for actual Suozzi supporters in the crowd. The murmuring laborers showed so little interest in the speakers who were touting Suozzi that the candidate at one point awkwardly grabbed the microphone and implored them to pay attention.

    Some of the attendees who did live in Nassau County weren’t thrilled about the Democrat, repeating attacks from GOP ads that have been airing nonstop in recent weeks. “Suozzi’s terrible on the border,” said Jackson Klyne, 44, who told me he didn’t plan to vote for either Suozzi or Pilip next week. A Biden voter in 2020, Klyne said that “it would probably be Trump” for him in November.

    Suozzi must also win over Democrats who are unhappy that he abandoned his congressional seat to challenge Hochul, leading to the election of Santos. “It was a dangerous choice,” Stephanie Visconti, a 47-year-old attorney from New Hyde Park, told me. “I thought it was self-serving.”

    Visconti volunteers with Engage Long Island, an affiliate of the progressive organizing group Indivisible that endorsed a primary challenger to Suozzi for Congress in 2020. But she fully backs him now; on Saturday, she and other members of the group were knocking on doors for his campaign. “He is the right candidate for right now,” she said, citing the need for Democrats to win back control of the House. “Looking at the global big picture, this for us is the first step toward making bigger and broader changes.”

    Biden carried the district in 2020, but Republicans have been ascendant on Long Island ever since. They swept the House races in the midterms and won big local races again last year. Santos defeated the Democratic nominee in the third district by seven points in 2022, and Suozzi isn’t sure he would have won had he been on the ballot. When I asked him what he’d say to people who argue that he bears some responsibility for Santos’s election, Suozzi replied, “‘Thank you for your endorsement, because you’re saying I’m the only person who could have won.’”

    Republican leaders are relying on Biden’s unpopularity and their party’s prodigious turnout machine to keep the seat. They picked Pilip as their candidate—the special election had no primary—in part because in the aftermath of October 7, they hoped that her connection to Israel would resonate in a district where about 20 percent of the electorate is Jewish. (Suozzi is also a longtime supporter of Israel. Within a week of Pilip’s selection, he traveled there to meet with the families of hostages held by Hamas.)

    With only a few exceptions, Pilip has kept a low profile for a political newcomer. She’s agreed to just one debate with Suozzi, three days before the election, and she hasn’t held many publicly promoted campaign events. (Her campaign did not make her available for an interview.) Nassau County Republicans scheduled their biggest rally of the election for a Saturday, when Pilip, who observes the Sabbath, would not be able to attend. She filmed a short video to be played in her absence. “The strategy is intentional,” Steve Israel, a Democrat who represented the third district in the House for 16 years, told me. “She is untested, and Republicans fear that she will say something that could effectively lose the election. They’d rather take their lumps for hiding her.”

    That approach could be risky given the district’s experience with Santos. “We’ve already had someone we didn’t know. We don’t want that again,” Judi Bosworth, a Democratic former town supervisor, said as she campaigned with Suozzi.

    Abortion has been a central issue in the race; Democratic ads have warned that a vote for Pilip could lead to a national ban. But in the closing weeks, the migrant crisis has come to the fore. GOP commercials blame Suozzi and Biden for the “invasion” at the southern border, and Suozzi has criticized Pilip for opposing the bipartisan border-security deal unveiled this week in the Senate. Although national issues are dominating the race, neither candidate wants to be associated with their party’s leaders in Washington. Pilip, until recently a registered Democrat, has declined to say whether she voted for Trump in 2020 and has yet to endorse his comeback bid. When House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries spoke at a rally for Suozzi on Saturday, the Democrat’s campaign did not invite the press. The day before, the Pilip campaign kept quiet about an appearance by Speaker Mike Johnson.

    The outcome next week could have an immediate impact in the narrowly divided House, where Republicans have only a three-vote majority. Earlier this week, Republicans fell just one vote short of impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; a Suozzi victory would likely keep it on hold, at least for the time being. But Suozzi wants to make a deeper impression in a second stint in Congress. He has campaigned not as a dispassionate centrist but as an impatient negotiator anxious to get back to the bargaining table.

    He had wanted a bigger job altogether, but he assured me that he would not be bored by a return to the House. I asked him what message his victory would send. He rattled off a list of bipartisan deals he wants to strike—on the border, Ukraine, housing, climate change, and more. “If I win,” he said, “I can go to my colleagues in Washington and say, ‘Wake up. This is what the people want.’”

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  • Aid package for Israel fails in the House, dealing another setback to GOP leaders

    Aid package for Israel fails in the House, dealing another setback to GOP leaders

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    WASHINGTON — A bill to provide Israel with more military aid went down to defeat Tuesday in the House, spoiling Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempt to separate Israel from other national security priorities, including helping Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s military invasion and deterring crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.

    The vote gave individual lawmakers another chance to show voters their support for Israel and could be used on the campaign trail to criticize those who voted against it. But it did little to generate momentum toward passage of a final emergency spending package.

    It was also the second setback of the day for House Republican leaders. Just minutes before the vote their drive to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas fell short due to opposition from three House Republicans.

    The House had already gone on the record in support of an Israel aid package. Johnson brought that package up in November on one of his first days as the new House speaker. The vote was in response to Hamas and other militants killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking captive some 240 men, women and children in an Oct. 7 attack.

    Last year’s measure also included budget cuts to the Internal Revenue Service. This time, there were no attempts to offset the new spending, which ended up alienating some of the Republican members concerned about federal deficits. Meanwhile, Democrats largely remained opposed, concerned passage of the bill would leave no way to get Ukraine more aid. The bill did manage to gain more Democratic support than during November’s vote but not nearly enough to pass.

    Johnson resorted to moving the bill through an expedited process that requires a two-thirds majority for passage. That’s because Republicans were unlikely to even muster the simple majority needed to set the terms for the bill’s debate. Such a procedural vote is generally a routine matter, but has become problematic for the current Republican majority, which can generally afford to lose only three Republicans on party-line votes. The vote for more Israel aid was 250-180, well short of the two-thirds threshold necessary for passage.

    Fourteen Republicans ended up voting against the bill, concerned about the lack of spending cuts to offset the $17.6 billion price tag. That compares to 204 Republicans who voted for it. On the Democratic side, 46 voted for it and 166 against.

    Prior to the vote, the White House issued a statement announcing President Joe Biden’s intent to veto the bill if it were to reach his desk. And Democratic leaders in both chambers said the only way forward requires a bipartisan approach.

    “The time has come for House Republicans to end the political stunts and come together in support of a comprehensive approach to our national security priorities,” Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and other members of leadership told colleagues before the vote.

    The bill called for about $17.6 billion in military aid for Israel and for the replenishment of U.S. defense systems. About $4 billion would have gone to replenish Israel’s missile defense systems and $1.2 billion to counter short-range rockets and mortar threats. There’s also funding for the procurement of advanced weapons system and to enhance the production of artillery and other munitions.

    To ensure the support does not compromise U.S. readiness, it includes $4.4 billion to replenish U.S. stocks of weapons provided to Israel. There’s also $3.3 billion for current U.S. military operations in the region.

    Johnson said before the vote that since the House passed its first Israeli military aid package, the “situation has gotten much more dangerous.”

    “We need to stand with Israel right now and we cannot wait any longer,” Johnson said.

    After the vote, he said Democrats were using Israel to force through other priorities that don’t enjoy the same degree of consensus.

    “Leveraging Israel aid as it fights for survival is wrong,” Johnson said.

    Democrats said presidential politics played into the route House Republicans took in going ahead solely with aid for Israel.

    “Trump doesn’t want to support Ukraine, and he also doesn’t want a border deal because it hurts him politically. What they get out of it is Donald Trump‘s approval,” said Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democratic member of the House Armed Services Committee.

    Rep. Lois Frankel of Florida was one of the Democrats who spoke in favor of the bill, saying she feared that “a divided Congress will embolden Israel’s adversaries and put our own military in harm’s way.”

    “Israel’s security is our security,” Frankel said.

    Across the Capitol, a similar political debate took shape. Republicans overwhelmingly criticized a carefully negotiated plan unveiled over the weekend that included policies intended to curb illegal crossings with $60 billion in wartime aid for Ukraine, plus billions for Israel and humanitarian aid for civilians in Gaza.

    Republicans said the border security provisions were inadequate while Democrats said Republicans were simply afraid to buck Trump even though they had insisted earlier that border security be included in an aid package for Ukraine. The divide leaves in question whether any emergency spending package will be passed.

    “We all know what’s going on here: Donald Trump would rather keep the chaos at the border going so he can exploit it on the campaign trail, instead of letting the Senate do the right thing and fix it,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “He would rather let Ukraine suffer on the battle field instead of being tough on Putin.”

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  • PolitiFact – No, the Senate immigration bill does not allow 5,000 people to illegally enter the U.S. daily

    PolitiFact – No, the Senate immigration bill does not allow 5,000 people to illegally enter the U.S. daily

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    A new Senate immigration bill allows the Biden administration to bar most migrants from seeking asylum if unauthorized immigration at the border reaches a specific number a day. 

    The bill is sponsored by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz. and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. But it’s facing a tough outlook in the House, where Republican leaders pledged it will not get a vote because it would “incentivize” more illegal immigration.

    “Here’s what the people pushing this ‘deal’ aren’t telling you: It accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., in a Feb. 4 X post.

    But that’s not what the bill does. 

    The bill raises the legal standard to pass initial asylum screenings, expedites the asylum process and funds additional detention space. It also compels the Homeland Security secretary to use an emergency authority to bar people from requesting asylum if officials record 5,000 encounters a day over seven consecutive days. But that’s not the same as accepting 5,000 people into the U.S. daily.

    “This is one of the most widely mischaracterized provisions in the Senate bill,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute’s communications director. “The legislation would not allow for the entry of ‘5,000 illegal immigrants a day.’”

    The bill’s Republican, Independent and Democratic sponsors have all pushed back against Scalise’s characterization. 

    5,000 encounters at the southern border would trigger emergency authority

    The Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024 changes immigration law to let the executive branch quickly stop people from coming in through U.S. borders and prevent them from applying for asylum under certain conditions.

    The bill allows the Homeland Security secretary to exercise this authority if there are an average of 4,000 daily encounters at the southern border during seven consecutive days. 

    And the bill requires the Homeland Security secretary to exercise this authority if there are:

    • An average of 5,000 encounters a day during seven consecutive days, or

    • 8,500 encounters on any single day. 

    In December 2023, the latest month with available data, there were 302,034 encounters at the southern border. The daily average of 9,743 encounters would have triggered the emergency authority.

    Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden used a similar authority, Title 42, to mitigate COVID-19’s spread and quickly expel migrants at the border. But that policy could be used only during a public health emergency. 

    This is not the same as letting in 5,000 people a day

    The encounters-based trigger doesn’t mean the U.S. is allowing “5,000 illegal immigrants” to enter the U.S. 

    “This is not a number that is ‘allowed in.’ It is a threshold of ARRIVALS that triggers a new authority,” wrote Theresa Cardinal Brown, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s senior adviser for Immigration and border policy, in an email.

    Encounters track the number of times immigration officials stop people trying to enter the U.S., not the number of people who are released into the country. 

    “There is this idea that we control how many migrants attempt illegal crossings. We do not,” Brown said. “We control what happens once we encounter someone who has already crossed the border illegally.”

    The emergency authority would change what happens when people try to cross the border. But the bill doesn’t allow people to just come in without any application of immigration law.

    “Once that trigger is activated,” Mittelstadt said, “no one crossing the border between ports of entry would be eligible to be considered for asylum.”

    How immigration law works today and what the emergency authority would change

    Under current immigration law, someone who tries to illegally enter the U.S. can be quickly removed without going to immigration court unless that person signals “an intention to apply for asylum,” Brown said.

    However, even when people don’t seek asylum “we don’t just ‘turn them back,’” she said. Instead, border officials take migrants into custody and try to find them in U.S. databases, check their background checks to identify any threats and then try to deport them, she said.

    Mexican migrants can quickly be sent back to Mexico. However, if Mexico doesn’t agree to receive people from other countries, the U.S. keeps them in custody until deportation to their home countries can be arranged.

    However, limited resources — not enough border officials, detention space or immigration judges — results in some people being released into the U.S. to determine later whether they can stay, Brown said. 

    The emergency authority would temporarily circumvent that process. Even then, Brown said, the authority’s effectiveness will hinge on available resources and Mexico’s cooperation. 

    “In short, there is no authority that Congress could pass that would allow for a ‘complete and total shutdown of the border,’” Brown said. “That’s just not how borders work in any real sense. Especially not our border with Mexico.”

    Our ruling

    Scalise said the Senate’s border bill “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day.”

    The bill directs the Homeland Security secretary to stop people from coming in and to deny them from applying for asylum if there are an average 5,000 migrant encounters at the southern border over seven days.

    But that doesn’t mean that 5,000 people would be let in each day before then. A person can be encountered and not let into the country. The encounters data tracks how many times officials stop migrants, not how many are let in.

    Before the emergency authority is triggered, immigration law will continue to be enforced with a higher standard for asylum interviews, a faster adjudication process and increased detention space.

    The number of encounters triggers the emergency authority, and the authority changes what happens when people try to cross the border. The bill does not allow any number of people to illegally cross the border.

    We rate the claim False.



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  • GOP governors back at Texas border to keep pressure on Biden over migrant crossings

    GOP governors back at Texas border to keep pressure on Biden over migrant crossings

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    EAGLE PASS, Texas — As more than a dozen Republican governors gathered Sunday on the Texas border, Kyle Willis was across the river in Mexico considering his next move to enter the U.S.

    The 23-year-old Jamaican, who said he left his country after facing attacks and discrimination due to his sexuality, had followed the path of a historic number of migrants over the past two years and tried crossing the Rio Grande at the border city of Eagle Pass. But he waded back across the river after spending hours, in soaking clothes, failing to persuade Texas National Guard soldiers behind a razor wire fence to let him through.

    “It’s not just something they’re saying to deter persons from coming in. It’s actually real,” said Willis, who for now is staying at a shelter in Piedras Negras.

    His experience would be considered a victory for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who returned to Eagle Pass on Sunday surrounded by GOP governors who have cheered on his extraordinary showdown with President Joe Biden’s administration over immigration enforcement. But declines in crossings are part of a complex mix of developments along the U.S. border, including heightened enforcement in Mexico. Meanwhile, migrants are moving further down the river and crossing elsewhere.

    The issue was also at the forefront in Washington, where senators on Sunday raced to release a highly-anticipated bill that pairs border enforcement policy with wartime aid for Ukraine.

    Abbott said he would continue expanding operations along the Texas border but did not provide details. For nearly a month, Texas has restricted U.S. Border Patrol’s access to an area along the river known as Shelby Park, accusing the Biden administration of not being tough enough on crossings.

    “We are here to send a loud and clear message that we are banding together to fight to ensure that we will be able to maintain our constitutional guarantee that states will be able to defend against any type of imminent danger,” Abbott said.

    The record number of border crossings is a political liability for President Joe Biden and an issue that Republicans are eager to put front and center to voters in an election year. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last week committed to send more National Guard troops to Texas and other governors are also weighing new deployments.

    Although DeSantis wasn’t present Sunday in Eagle Pass, Abbott was joined by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkanas and Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee, among other Republicans.

    Eagle Pass is where Texas has been locked in a power struggle with the Biden administration for the past month after the state began denying access to U.S. Border Patrol agents at Shelby Park.

    Crossings in recent weeks are down overall along the entire U.S. border, including areas without such a heavy security presence.

    Tucson, Arizona, which has been the busiest of nine Border Patrol sectors on the Mexican border, tallied 13,800 arrests in the weeklong period that ended Friday. That is down 29% from a peak of 19,400 in week ended Dec. 22, according to John Modlin, the sector chief.

    Just a day after Biden expressed “his appreciation for Mexico’s operational support and for taking concrete steps to deter irregular migration” in a call with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican immigration agency said Sunday that in the last week, they had rescued 71 immigrants – 22 of them minors— in two groups stranded on sand bars of the Rio Grande, between Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras. They were from Mexico, Central America, Ecuador and Peru.

    A Honduran woman and her 1-year-old baby were also rescued from the water and the emergency team also found three corpses, apparently migrants who died trying to cross into the U.S.

    Biden, now sounding increasingly like former President Donald Trump, is pressing Congress for asylum restrictions that would have been unthinkable when he took office. Immigration remains a major worry for voters in the 2024 election: An AP-NORC poll earlier this month found that voters voicing concerns about immigration climbed to 35% from 27% last year.

    The arrival of GOP governors to Eagle Pass rounds out a weekend that has kept the small border city of roughly 30,000 residents in an unwitting spotlight. Hundreds protesting Biden’s immigration policies held a “Take Back Our Border” rally on the outskirts of the city on Saturday where vendors sold Donald Trump-inspired MAGA hats and Trump flags.

    The number of crossings in Eagle Pass has recently fallen to a few hundred a day. Texas closed access to federal agents at Shelby Park after the number of crossings decreased sharply at the end of December. Mike Banks, who Abbott appointed last year to oversee Texas’ border operations, described the park as a “magnet” for migrants trying to enter the country.

    “So we’ve taken that pull factor away,” Banks said.

    Mexico has bolstered immigration efforts that include adding more checkpoints and sending people from the northern border to southern Mexico. The country has also deported some Venezuelan migrants back home.

    Melissa Ruiz, 30, arrived at the Piedras Negras shelter, across the river from Eagle Pass, along with her four children. The Honduran mother said gang members back home had tried to recruit her 15-year-old son, her oldest, prompting her to reluctantly flee.

    Ruiz said she had little awareness of the tightening security on the Texas side, having heard of many people crossing into the U.S. since she arrived at the shelter. The main deterrence for her, she said, is the cold weather and the river’s increased flow after recent rainfall. Drownings in the river are tragically common.

    “What they say that one suffers so much on this road, it’s true,” Ruiz said.

    ___ Associated Press reporters Maria Verza in Mexico City anf Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.

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  • PolitiFact – Imágenes no muestran al líder islámico azerbaiyano, Movsum Samadov, en la frontera de EE. UU.

    PolitiFact – Imágenes no muestran al líder islámico azerbaiyano, Movsum Samadov, en la frontera de EE. UU.

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    Publicaciones en las redes sociales dicen que un hombre azerbaiyano entró a los Estados Unidos por la frontera sur, pero el hombre en la publicación no es quien ellos dicen. 

    “Los d3m0cratas estan permitiendo que Los enemigos de EUA entren por la frontera. Movsum Azerbaijani, pertenece al partido Islamic0”, dice una publicación en TikTok del 23 de enero. “Fue condenado por 12 años en prision por tratar derrocar su gobierno y ahora llega a causar ‘problemas’ en USA”. 

    Otro video en TikTok muestra a un hombre en la frontera que dice en inglés, “Pronto sabrán quien soy”, y añade en subtítulos en inglés que supuestamente él es Movsum Samadov. 

    Samadov, el jefe del Partido Islamico de Azerbaiyán, fue arrestado en el 2011 y sentenciado a 12 años en prisión. Él fue condenado por cargos criminales incluyendo la preparación de terrorismo, portar armas ilicitamente y por tratar de derrocar a su gobierno.

    Human Rights Watch reportó en el 2011 que antes de que Samadov fuera condenado, él fue arrestado por publicar un discurso en YouTube denunciando el mandato del presidente azerbaiyano, Ilham Aliyev, por prohibir a las mujeres usar pañuelos en la cabeza en escuelas y universidades. Él fue liberado el 19 de enero de 2023, después de completar su sentencia, según la Comisión de los Estados Unidos para la Libertad Religiosa Internacional. 

    PolitiFact encontró que las imágenes virales del migrante se originaron el 20 de enero en una cuenta en X llamada, @1strespondersmedia, la cual se auto describe como un medio de comunicación. La publicación original dice que el migrante quien cruzó a los Estados Unidos ilegalmente amenazó al creador del video cuando le preguntó su nombre y de dónde venía. Pero la publicación no dice que el hombre en el video es Samadov. El hilo en la publicación también dice que el encuentro sucedió en Sasabe, Arizona. 

    El Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium, el cual provee información y análisis de grupos terroristas, publicó en X que Samadov fue identificado erróneamente como el hombre que cruzó la frontera ilegalmente.

    Usuarios en las redes sociales mostraron una foto de Samadov del 2011 para afirmar que él era el hombre en las publicaciones, pero imágenes más recientes y videos en YouTube lo muestra luciendo mayor, y con pocas similitudes al hombre del video en las redes sociales.

    Samadov le dijo a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty en una entrevista del 24 de enero que él no es el hombre en las publicaciones. (Traducimos la entrevista de azerbaiyano a inglés usando Google Translate). 

    Samadov dijo que la persona en el video no se parece a él, y señaló que el hombre tiene pocas similitudes a él, excepto por sus lentes. 

    ‘

    La imagen en la izquierda es un screenshot de una publicación en Facebook y la imagen en la derecha es de la cuenta en Facebook de Samadov.

    Samadov también dijo en la entrevista que él tiene prohibido dejar Azerbaiyán. Él dijo que trató dos veces de visitar Estados Unidos, pero no le dieron permiso. 

    No pudimos identificar al hombre en el video o su país de origen, pero un vocero del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional de los Estados Unidos le dijo a PolitiFact que él está en custodia estadounidense.

    PolitiFact contactó a la Oficina de Aduanas y Protección Fronteriza de Estados Unidos, y al Servicio de Control de Inmigración y Aduanas, pero no recibió respuesta. 

    Calificamos la declaración de que Samadov entró a los Estados Unidos por la frontera como Falsa. 

    La investigadora de PolitiFact Caryn Baird contribuyó a este reporte. 

    Lea más reportes de PolitiFact en Español aquí.

    Read a similar fact-check in English.

    Debido a limitaciones técnicas, partes de nuestra página web aparecen en inglés. Estamos trabajando en mejorar la presentación.



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  • Doomed Border-Security Deal Was a Bad Bet for Kyrsten Sinema

    Doomed Border-Security Deal Was a Bad Bet for Kyrsten Sinema

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    Deal or no deal, Sinema is in trouble.
    Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

    Kyrsten Sinema’s claim to fame is that she’s one of those “bipartisan deal-makers” that the Senate periodically produces, particularly in times of divided partisan control of Congress. Some of her Democratic constituents in Arizona tend to believe her wheeling and dealing is a betrayal of the progressive principles she once embraced with wealthy interests the beneficiaries more often than not. It’s no accident that she faced a strong 2024 primary challenge from Congressman Ruben Gallego before changing her partisan self-identification to “independent.”

    Sinema is now approaching various legal and practical deadlines for a 2024 reelection run as an independent. But true to her “brand,” she’s been focused less on Arizona politics than on tense and lengthy Senate negotiations on a border-security deal that has become the condition precedent to passage of a foreign-aid package containing emergency assistance for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. It’s unclear whether she hoped the deal would be a valedictory accomplishment before she retires from the Senate or a trophy that would prove her worth on an issue important to her border state and justify her reelection. If the latter is the case, she may be overestimating voter consciousness of murky inside-the-Beltway machinations, as the Washington Post explains:

    A Republican consultant familiar with the recent internal deliberations within Sinema’s tight-knit circle said that the team’s debate involves one central question: In today’s hyperpartisan environment, do voters value elected officials who bring both sides together to deliver legislation?

    “If she is able to get a border security deal across, do you know she will have accomplished something that hasn’t been done in 30 years as a first-term senator,” the Republican asked. “But do voters even care?”

    Maybe not so much, as limited polling of a projected three-way race showing Sinema trailing Gallego and Republican Kari Lake suggests. Perhaps announcement of a border-security deal could burnish her reputation and remind Arizonans of her rather unique standing in the Senate (with Joe Manchin retiring this year, Sinema really does stand alone in a position between the two parties; she’s always eager to use her leverage no matter how many former allies and current constituents she offends). But the really bad news for this deal-maker is that the deal itself is looking stillborn, as Politico reports:

    As senators returned for a critical two-week sprint in D.C. before a lengthy recess, Republicans are starting to doubt whether the agreement — which would be tied to billions in foreign aid — can pass their chamber. GOP leaders first set out to find a compromise that could win a majority of Republican senators over, but that’s only grown more challenging as conservatives, Speaker Mike Johnson and former President Donald Trump hammer the deal.

    Asked if the agreement appears to be on a path toward passing the Senate, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) replied: “It certainly doesn’t seem like it.”

    “There are a number of our members who say, ‘Well, I’ll join a majority of the Republicans but if it doesn’t enjoy that sort of support, then count me out,’” Cornyn said in an interview. “The whole idea of passing something that the House won’t even take up is another challenge.”

    So Sinema’s investment of precious time in a border-security deal is not going to produce pay dirt, it appears. Theoretically, she could run for reelection not as a regularly successful deal-maker but as a proponent of the spirit of compromise that ought to prevail in Congress but sometimes doesn’t because there just aren’t enough Kyrsten Sinemas in Washington. She has enough cash stored in her campaign account (nearly $11 million) to promote that message, though her fundraising has fallen into a hole and she has made few visible preparations for a tough campaign. Given her past Democratic affiliation and its own strong preference for incumbents, it’s possible Sinema could still get financial and logistical support from the Senate’s Democratic campaign committee, but if (as appears to be the case right now) Gallego looks like a better bet to keep Kari Lake out of the Senate, her former friends in that chamber will drop her decisively.

    No one pretends to know Sinema’s plans for the rest of this year, but Arizona is going to be a red-hot battleground for both parties in the presidential and Senate contests, and her eccentric style of politics could clash with fierce partisan polarization. It’s a bad sign for her that she is dithering about running for reelection and can’t get visible results in the Senate. The odds are good that she will follow Manchin into retirement.


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  • PolitiFact – This video doesn’t show people headed to Texas. It shows a 2019 protest in Oregon.

    PolitiFact – This video doesn’t show people headed to Texas. It shows a 2019 protest in Oregon.

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    A video showed dozens of people, mostly clad in black, walking up a spiral ramp, some carrying U.S. flags and others recording the scene on their phones. 

    “Heading to Texas to stop the Biden Border Invasion. We’ve. Had. Enough,” read the text on the Jan. 28 Instagram video. It appeared to refer to legal battles between Texas and the Biden administration over border security.

    Screenshot from Instagram

    The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

    But the video doesn’t show people heading to Texas to protest now. The video is 4 years old. The protesters gathered for a different issue. And the protest was nowhere near Texas. 

    The video was filmed in 2019, when right-wing protesters and antifa clashed in Portland, Oregon.

    The claim also circulated on X, with one Jan. 26 post drawing a Community Note that said the footage is from 2019 in Portland. The note cited an X post by Ford Fischer, News2Share editor-in-chief, who attached a YouTube video of the 2019 event.

    The News2Share YouTube video showed far-right groups including the Proud Boys at an “End Domestic Terrorism” rally against antifa.

    The YouTube footage does not show the exact same scene that the Instagram video depicts, but some people appear in both clips. For example, a man with glasses, brown cap, scarf and backpack who is seen up close in the Instagram video also appears in the News2Share YouTube video at the 2:44 timestamp. 

    Using satellite imagery, we verified where the Instagram video was shot. We identified features in the video, such as buildings, that corresponded with a satellite image of the view from the spiral ramp next to Morrison Bridge in Portland. The colors of the boxes show how they match.

    Left image screengrabbed from Instagram post, right image screengrabbed from Google Earth

    There are efforts to organize people who want to visit the Texas border to stop migrant crossings. 

    But this video doesn’t show that. We rate that claim False.



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  • House Republicans taking a key vote toward impeaching Mayorkas as border becomes 2024 campaign issue

    House Republicans taking a key vote toward impeaching Mayorkas as border becomes 2024 campaign issue

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    WASHINGTON — House Republicans are preparing to take a key vote Tuesday toward impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over what they call his “willful and systematic” refusal to enforce immigration laws as border security becomes a top 2024 election issue.

    The Homeland Security Committee is pushing through a day-long hearing on two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, a rare charge against a Cabinet official unseen in nearly 150 years, as Republicans make GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s hard-line deportation approach to immigration their own.

    “The actions and decisions of Secretary Mayorkas have left us with no other option but to proceed with articles of impeachment,” said Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn.

    The articles charge that Mayorkas “willfully and systematically refused to comply with Federal immigration laws” amid a record surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and that he has “breached the public trust” in his claims to Congress that the border is secure. A committee vote would send the articles to the full House for a vote as soon as next week.

    “We cannot allow this man to remain in office any longer,” Green said.

    With an unusual personal appeal Mayorkas wrote in a letter to the committee that it should be working with the Biden administration to update the nation’s “broken and outdated” immigration laws for the 21st century and an era of record global migration.

    “We need a legislative solution and only Congress can provide it,” Mayorkas wrote in the pointed letter to the panel’s chairman.

    Mayorkas never testified on his own behalf during the rushed impeachment proceedings — he and the committee couldn’t agree on a date — but drew on his own background as a child brought to the U.S. by his parents fleeing Cuba and on his career spent prosecuting criminals.

    “Your false accusations do not rattle me and do not divert me” from public service, he wrote.

    Green, the Republican committee chair, disparaged Mayorkas’s letter as an “11th-hour response” to the committee that was “inadequate and unbecoming of a Cabinet secretary.”

    Rarely has a Cabinet member faced impeachment’s bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and Democrats on the panel called the proceedings a stunt and a sham that could set a chilling precedent for other civil servants snared in policy disputes by lawmakers who disagree with the president’s approach.

    “This is a terrible day for the committee, the United States, the Constitution and our great country,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the committee’s ranking Democrat.

    Referring to Trump’s campaign slogan, Thompson said the “MAGA-led impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas is a baseless sham.”

    The House’s proceedings against Mayorkas have created an oddly split-screen Capitol Hill, as the Senate works intently with the secretary on a bipartisan border security package that is now on life support.

    The package being negotiated by the senators with Mayorkas could emerge as the most consequential bipartisan immigration proposal in a decade. Or it could collapse in political failure as Republicans, and some Democrats, run from the effort.

    Trump, on the campaign trail and in private talks, has tried to squelch the deal. “I’d rather have no bill than a bad bill,” Trump said over the weekend in Las Vegas.

    President Joe Biden, in his own campaign remarks in South Carolina, said if Congress sends him a bill with emergency authority he’ll “shut down the border right now” to get migration under control.

    “I’ve done all I can do,” Biden told reporters Tuesday before departing for a campaign-related trip to Florida. “Give me the power” through legislation, which he said is something he’s asked “from the very day I got in office.”

    The Republicans are focused on the secretary’s handling of the southern border, which has experienced a increasing number of migrants over the past year, many seeking asylum in the U.S., at a time when drug cartels are using the border with Mexico to traffic people and ship deadly fentanyl into the states.

    Republicans contend that the Biden administration and Mayorkas either got rid of policies in place under Trump that had controlled migration or enacted policies of their own that encouraged migrants from around the world to come to the U.S. illegally via the southern border.

    They also accused Mayorkas of lying to Congress, pointing to comments about the border being secure or about vetting of Afghans airlifted to the U.S. after military withdrawal from their country.

    “It’s high time” for impeachment, said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who called Mayorkas the “architect” of the border problems. “He has what’s coming to him.”

    The House impeachment hearings against Mayorkas sprinted ahead in January while the Republicans’ separate impeachment inquiry into Biden over the business dealings over his son Hunter Biden dragged.

    Democrats argue that Mayorkas is acting under his legal authorities at the department and that the criticisms against him do not rise to the level of impeachment.

    House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York called the proceedings a “political stunt” ordered up by Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a Trump ally, who pushed the resolution forward toward the votes.

    During the hearing, Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., pointed to Trump’s comments echoing Adolf Hitler that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. and to his proposals for militarizing the border as extreme, arguing the impeachment proceedings were “all about trying to get Donald Trump re-elected.”

    It’s unclear if House Republicans will have the support from their ranks to go through with the impeachment after a committee vote, especially with their slim majority and with Democrats expected to vote against it.

    Last year, eight House Republicans voted to shelve the impeachment resolution proposed by Greene rather than send it along to the committee, though many of them have since signaled they would be open to it.

    If the House does agree to impeach Mayorkas, the charges would next to go the Senate for a trial. In 1876, the House impeached Defense Secretary William Belknap over kickbacks in government contracts, but the Senate acquitted him in a trial.

    __

    Associated Press writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.

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  • House GOP releases impeachment articles in bid to oust Homeland Security’s Mayorkas over the border

    House GOP releases impeachment articles in bid to oust Homeland Security’s Mayorkas over the border

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    WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Sunday released two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as they vowed to swiftly push forward with efforts to oust the Cabinet member over what they call his failure to manage the U.S.-Mexico border. Democrats and the agency slammed the move as a politically motivated stunt lacking the constitutional basis to remove him from office.

    Republicans contend Mayorkas is guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that amount to a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” on immigration and a “breach of the public trust.” Impeachment, they say, is “Congress’s only viable option.”

    “Alejandro N. Mayorkas willfully and systemically refused to comply with the immigration laws, failed to control the border to the detriment of national security, compromised public safety, and violated the rule of law and separation of powers in the Constitution, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States,” the impeachment resolution says.

    Ever since taking control of the House in 2023, Republicans have pushed to impeach Mayorkas. Sunday’s announcement comes as their other impeachment drive — to impeach Democratic President Joe Biden in relation to his son Hunter’s business dealings — has struggled to advance.

    But Republicans have moved with rapid speed against Mayorkas after a series of hearings in recent weeks. It all comes at a time when border security and immigration are key issues in the 2024 campaign and as Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is promising to launch the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history if he returns to the White House.

    The GOP push also comes at a curious time for Mayorkas.

    Even as the House is taking steps to try remove him from office, Mayorkas has been engaged in arduous negotiations with senators seeking to reach a bipartisan deal on border policy. He has won praise from senators for his engagement in the process.

    The Republican-controlled House Homeland Security Committee is set to vote Tuesday on the articles of impeachment, aiming to send them to the full House for consideration. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has said the House will move forward as soon as possible with a vote after that.

    Passage requires only a House majority. The Senate would hold a trial, and a two-thirds vote is required for conviction, an exceedingly unlikely outcome in the Democratic-run Senate.

    Democrats say Republicans have held a sham of an impeachment process against Mayorkas and lack the constitutional grounds to impeach the secretary. They also say Republicans are part of the problems at the border, with Republicans attacking Mayorkas even as they have failed to give his department the tools it needs to manage the situation.

    “They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it. That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas,” the department said in a statement Sunday.

    The two articles mark the culmination of a roughly yearlong examination by Republicans of the secretary’s handling of the border and what they describe as a crisis of the administration’s own making. Republicans contend that the administration and Mayorkas specifically either got rid of policies in place under Trump that had controlled migration or enacted policies of their own that encouraged migrants from around the world to come to the U.S. illegally via the southern border.

    They cite growing numbers of migrants who have at times overwhelmed the capacity of Customs and Border Protection authorities to care and process them. Arrests for illegal crossings topped 2 million in each of the U.S. government’s past two budget years. Some days last December, illegal crossings topped 10,000. The backlog of people in immigration court has grown by 1 million over the past budget year.

    In the articles, Republicans argue that Mayorkas is deliberately violating immigration laws passed by Congress, such as those requiring detention of migrants, and that through his policies, a crisis has arisen at the border. They accuse him of releasing migrants without effective ways to make sure they show up for court or are removed from the country. They cited an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo written by Mayorkas that sets priorities for whom the agency should target for enforcement proceedings as proof that he is letting people stay in the country who don’t have the right to do so.

    They also attacked the administration’s use of the humanitarian parole authority, which allows the DHS secretary to admit certain migrants into the country. Republicans said the Biden administration has essentially created a mass parole program that bypasses Congress. They cited cities such as New York that have struggled with high numbers of migrants, taxing housing and education systems, as proof of the financial costs immigration is taking.

    Democrats say Republicans simply disagree with the administration’s policies and that policy differences aren’t grounds for impeachment. They have lambasted the proceedings, calling them a waste of time when lawmakers should be working together to solve the problems.

    Democrats, as well as Mayorkas, have argued that it’s not the administration’s policies that are causing people to attempt to migrate to America but that the movement is part of a global mass migration of people fleeing wars, economic instability and political repression. They have argued that Mayorkas is doing the best he can to manage border security but with a system that hasn’t been updated in decades and is chronically underfunded.

    The department on Sunday cited high numbers of people being removed from the country, especially over roughly the last six months and its efforts to tackle fentanyl smuggling as proof that DHS is not shirking its border duties. And, they said, no administration has been able to detain every person who crosses the border illegally, citing space capacities. Instead, they focus on those who pose security threats.

    “A standard requiring 100% detention would mean that Congress should have impeached every DHS Secretary since the Department was founded,” the agency said in the statement.

    The last Cabinet secretary to be impeached was William Belknap, the war secretary under President Ulysses Grant, over corruption issues.

    The House voted unanimously March 2, 1876, to impeach Belknap on five articles of impeachment that he’d criminally disregarded his Cabinet duties and used his office for private gain. Belknap had resigned earlier that same day. After a trial in the Senate, a majority of senators vote to convict him but they didn’t have enough votes to hit the the necessary two-thirds majority and Belknap was acquitted.

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  • Biden returns to South Carolina to show his determination to win back Black voters in 2024

    Biden returns to South Carolina to show his determination to win back Black voters in 2024

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    COLUMBIA, S.C. — COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Joe Biden doesn’t need to worry about his prospects in South Carolina’s Democratic primary next week. He’s got that locked up.

    He also knows he’s not likely to win the solidly red state come November. It hasn’t voted for a Democrat since 1976.

    He’s spent the weekend in the state nonetheless, intent on driving home two messages: He’s loyal to the state that saved his campaign in 2020 and he’s determined to win back Black voters here and elsewhere who were central to his election last time but are less enthused this go-round.

    “You’re the reason I am president,” Biden told attendees at the state party’s fundraising dinner ahead of its first ever “first-in-the-nation” Democratic primary on Feb. 3. “You’re the reason Kamala Harris is a historic vice president. And you’re the reason Donald Trump is a defeated former president. You’re the reason Donald Trump is a loser. And you’re the reason we’re going to win and beat him again.”

    Biden received raved applause and chants of “four more years” from attendees at the dinner, as he criticized his predecessor’s policies and highlighted his efforts to support Black Americans. He was set to spend Sunday in the state where politics and faith are intertwined at a political event at St. John Baptist Church.

    Deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said of the primary that Biden’s team was working to “blow this out of the water” by running up the score against longshot challengers. The Biden campaign also wants to learn lessons about activating Black voters — the backbone of the party — ahead of an expected 2024 rematch with GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

    Biden also reiterated his willingness to take extreme measures to curtail immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border, as lawmakers continue talks on a reform of the country’s immigration policies, saying that he would shut down the border “right now” if such a bill were to pass.

    Calling border security “one of the most important issues we’re facing,” Biden said a ”bipartisan bill” would give him “the emergency authority to shut down the border until it could get back under control,” noting that it would fund additional border security agents, immigration judges and asylum officers. “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” he said.

    Saturday was the first time Biden shared a stage with Rep. Dean Phillips, a longshot challenger for the Democratic nomination, who called on the president, 81, to step aside for a younger generation of leaders to take on Trump.

    “The numbers do not say things are looking good,” Phillips said of Biden’s poll numbers, at times struggling to hold the attention of the crowd, many of whom were holding Biden campaign signs ahead of the president’s appearance.

    “My invitation to president Biden is to pass the torch,” Phillips said. Struggling to hold the attention of the crowd, many of whom were holding Biden campaign signs ahead of the president’s appearance, Phillips repeatedly asked the audience to quiet down and listen to him.

    He told The Associated Press he did not interact with Biden at the event, saying of Biden’s staff, “No. I don’t think they want him to see me.”

    Ahead of the dinner, Biden stopped into Regal Lounge Men’s Barber & Spa in Columbia, greeting, owners, employees and customers mid-haircut at the barbershop.

    The president has been getting mixed reviews from some Black voters in the state that came through for him in 2020, including discontent over his failure to deliver on voting rights legislation and other issues.

    Last year, at the outset of Biden’s reelection bid, conflicting views among the same South Carolina Democratic voters whose support had been so crucial to his nomination provided an early warning sign of the challenges he faces as he tries to revive his diverse winning coalition from 2020.

    Overall, just 50% of Black adults said they approved of Biden in a December poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs. That is compared with 86% in July 2021, a shift that is generating concern about the president’s reelection prospects.

    APVoteCast, an extensive national survey of the electorate, also found that support for Republican candidates ticked up slightly among Black voters during the 2022 midterm elections, although Black voters overwhelmingly supported Democrats.

    The Biden campaign is running TV ads in South Carolina highlighting Biden initiatives that it hopes will boost enthusiasm among Black voters.

    “On his first day in office with a country in crisis, President Biden got to work — for us,” the ad states. “Cutting Black child poverty in half, more money for Black entrepreneurs, millions of new good-paying jobs and he lowered the cost of prescription drugs.”

    The campaign is spending more than $270,000 on the ads through the primary, according to tracking data. The Democratic National Committee also launched a six-figure ad campaign across South Carolina and Nevada, which is next on the Democratic primary calendar, to boost enthusiasm for Biden among Black and Latino voters. And first lady Jill Biden was in the state on Friday evening to rally voters.

    Biden’s campaign has also hired staff in South Carolina to organize ahead of the primary and through the general election, although for nearly 50 years the state has picked a Republican for president.

    Meanwhile, a pro-Biden super PAC, Unite the Country, is airing an ad featuring Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina ticking through what he says are major Biden accomplishments such as reducing student loan debt and cutting insulin costs for older people.

    It was Clyburn’s 2020 endorsement of his longtime friend Biden that helped the then-candidate score a thundering win in South Carolina’s presidential primary,

    In the new ad, Clyburn references his late wife, Emily, who influenced his 2020 endorsement of Biden. She said “that if we wanted to win the presidency, we better nominate Joe Biden,” Clyburn says in the ad. “She was right then, and she’s still right today.”

    Clyburn greeted Biden at the airport and accompanied him throughout his visit.

    While Trump has seen slightly improving levels of support among Black and Latino voters, Biden’s team is more concerned that a lack of enthusiasm for Biden will depress turnout among voters who are pivotal to the Democratic coalition.

    Biden’s team is using South Carolina as a proving ground, tracking what messages and platforms break through with voters.

    South Carolina, where Black voters make up a majority of the Democratic electorate, is now the first meaningful contest in the Democratic presidential race after the party reworked the party’s nominating calendar at Biden’s call. Leading off with Iowa and New Hampshire had long drawn criticism because the states are less diverse than the rest of the country.

    “It’s important for us to show up and to show out,” said Shivani Dahya, 22, a fellow with the state Democratic party from Rock Hill, asked about the import of Biden performing well with South Carolina’s non-white Democratic voters. “I think being first in the nation, we’ve set the example so other states can look at us and say, look at them, they’re voting, they’re getting out there, so let’s do the same.”

    Moving up the South Carolina vote was also a political payback to the state and Clyburn for their role in sending Biden to the White House.

    A co-chairman of Biden’s reelection campaign, Clyburn has remained one of the president’s most stalwart advocates in Congress, as well as in his home state. Frequently, he reminds people of the same message he delivered in his 2020 endorsement: “We know Joe, and Joe knows us.”

    Biden’s decision to campaign in the state “helps solidify South Carolina’s place as the first in the nation primary moving forward,” said Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler.

    It also provides Biden an opportunity to re-engage with Black voters who have connections that extend well beyond South Carolina.

    “Obviously the diaspora is strong, familial ties are strong with other key swing states in the area like Georgia and North Carolina,” Tyler said.

    This is Biden’s second trip to South Carolina this month. He spoke earlier in the month at the pulpit of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, where nine Black parishioners were shot to death in 2015 by a white stranger they had invited to join their Bible study. In his speech, Biden denounced the “poison” of white supremacy in America and said such ideology has no place in America, “not today, tomorrow or ever.”

    It was meant as a direct contrast with Trump, whom Biden accused of “glorifying” rather than condemning political violence.

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  • Illegal border crossings from Mexico reach highest on record in December before January lull

    Illegal border crossings from Mexico reach highest on record in December before January lull

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    WASHINGTON — Arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico reached an all-time high in December since monthly numbers have been released, authorities said Friday, exposing a growing vulnerability for President Joe Biden in his campaign for a second term.

    The Border Patrol tallied 249,785 arrests on the Mexican border in December, up 31% from 191,112 in November and up 13% from 222,018 in December 2022, the previous all-time high.

    Arrests fell more than half during the first two weeks of January, “consistent with historical trends and enhanced enforcement,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement. CBP previously said a crackdown by Mexican authorities contributed to the January decline.

    Mexicans accounted for 56,236 arrests in December, while Venezuelans were second with 46,937, erasing much of the decline that followed the start of deportation flights to Venezuela in October. Arrests of Guatemalans surged, with Hondurans and Colombians rounding out the top five nationalities.

    Tucson, Arizona, was again the busiest corridor for illegal crossings among nine sectors on the Mexican border, with 80,185 arrests. Del Rio, Texas, the focus of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s enforcement efforts, was second with 71,095 arrests. San Diego, where nearly 6,000 Chinese were arrested, was a distant third.

    When including migrants who were allowed to enter the United States under new or expanded legal pathways, migrant encounters totaled 302,034, topping 300,000 for the first time and shattering the previous high of 269,735 in September. U.S. authorities admitted 45,770 people at land crossings with Mexico in December through an online appointment system called CBP One, bringing the total to more than 413,000 since it was introduced a year ago.

    The administration’s broad use of parole authority to allow migrants in the country has been a major sticking point in Senate negotiations over border security.

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  • DeSantis: No One Would Have Ratified the Constitution If Protection for States Was Excluded

    DeSantis: No One Would Have Ratified the Constitution If Protection for States Was Excluded

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    Office of Governor Ron DeSantis, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    By Bethany Blankley (The Center Square)

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is among the 25 governors who has expressed support for Texas defending its border. He was one of the first governors to send reinforcements to support Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border security effort roughly two years ago.

    Trump’s Border Battle Cry: Calls On All Willing States to Deploy National Guard To Help Texas In Border Fight Against The Feds

    DeSantis responded to an ultimatum given Thursday by the Biden administration to Abbott to take down concertina wire barriers it constructed and relinquish control of a park in Eagle Pass, Texas. The president is also demanding that Texas allow access to a 2.5 mile stretch of state land along the Rio Grande River so that Border Patrol agents can allow illegal foreign nationals to enter between ports of entry.

    Doing so is a direct violation of laws established by Congress and the U.S. Constitution, Abbott argues, and he refuses to comply with any demands.

    The conflict escalated after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Border Patrol agents could destroy Texas concertina wire barriers in Eagle Pass. It does not instruct Texas to remove the barriers or to stop enforcing state law.

    The Biden administration argues Texas’ actions are unconstitutional and disrupt Border Patrol operations. Abbott argues the president is facilitating criminal activity, has violated his oath of office, and broken the federal government’s compact with the states.

    RFK Jr. Backs Texas In State’s Battle With Biden Over Border

    The escalation continues as calls for President Joe Biden to federalize Texas National Guard troops raise additional constitutional issues. If Texas troops were to be federalized when they were called up under constitutional authority to secure the Texas border, such a move could constitute an impeachable offense, a constitutional law expert argues.

    On Thursday, DeSantis posted a video asking, “Can the federal government defy the law and force a state to allow a foreign invasion?,” answering the founding fathers would say no.

    The president demanding Texas “remove fortifications along its border to let people come in illegally is just crazy,” DeSantis said. “If the constitution was originally understood to mean that a state could not protect itself against an invasion, that the federal government could force a state to allow an invasion, the constitution would have never been ratified in the first place. Texas would have never joined the union when it did.”

    He also pointed to Federalist 46 in which founding father James Madison described “situations where federal encroachment can be mitigated by state action.” He said Texas is “holding its ground and has every right to fortify the border visa via an invasion,” referring to Article 1, Section 10 of the constitution.

    25 Governors Issue Joint Statement In Solidarity With Texas In Their Fight To Secure The Border

    The clause has been cited in invasion resolutions passed by officials in 51 Texas counties, with more expected to follow. Kinney, Goliad and Terrell counties were the first to declare an invasion in Texas and U.S. history, on July 5, 2022. The constitutional issues playing out today are what they warned about in 2021 when they were also the first to issue disaster declarations, citing the border crisis.

    DeSantis also pointed to situations “where liberal jurisdictions over many years have been sanctuary jurisdictions against enforcing federal immigration law. They will deliberately act to frustrate the laws on the books and somehow that’s viewed as OK” but it’s not OK when Texas is “acting to enforce the laws on the books to ensure that they have a secure state and that we have a secure country,” he said.

    “So all of this is just nonsense what Biden’s doing,” DeSantis continued. “Texas has every right to stand its ground. We in Florida have been sending people to help for many years now because we understand it’s not just the Texas issue it’s ultimately an American issue. If we don’t have sovereignty in this country, then we’re not going to be a country anymore. Texas has every right to hold their ground to stay the course and Florida will continue to be there helping out every step of the way.”

    Reprinted with permission from The Center Square.

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