A federal appeals court appears open to further shrinking the scope of the Voting Rights Act in a case that could lead to another major Supreme Court showdown over voting rights.
The 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals at a hearing on Wednesday considered whether private entities – and not just the US Justice Department – can bring lawsuits under a key provision of the law. Two of the three members of the appellate panel asked questions suggesting they were leaning against the idea that the provision, known as Section 2, could be enforced with private lawsuits.
If those seeking a narrowing of the VRA are successful, it would significantly diminish the use of the law to challenge ballot regulations and redistricting maps that are said to be racially discriminatory.
A vast majority of the cases that are brought under the Voting Rights Act – which prohibits election rules that have the intent or effect of discriminating on the basis of race – are brought by private plaintiffs, with the Justice Department facing strained resources and other considerations that limit the number of VRA cases it files to, at most, a few each year.
Last year, however, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Arkansas – running counter to decades of legal practice – said that private parties do not have the ability to sue under the Section 2.
During arguments Wednesday about whether the judge’s ruling should be upheld, Circuit Judges Raymond Gruender and David Stras questioned the attorney arguing in favor of a so-called private cause of action whether the parts of Supreme Court and 8th Circuit opinions that her clients were leaning on were “dicta,” i.e. statements that are not binding on lower courts.
“I am dubious whether that is a holding,” Gruender, an appointee of former President George. W. Bush, said of an 8th Circuit case that ACLU attorney Sophia Lin Lakin argued pointed to the more robust interpretation of VRA enforcement.
Stras, a Trump-appointee, grilled Lakin on more recent cases from the Supreme Court that scaled back private causes of action in other laws.
A decision that blocked private parties’ path to court under the VRA would be a “radical” one, saidDavid Becker, an alum of the Justice Department’s voting section who now leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
“It absolutely means it’s more likely that there will be potential partisan mischief that could negatively impact the voters who are protected by the Voting Rights Act,” Becker, who signed a friend-of-the court brief favoring the broader interpretation, told CNN.
A decision from the 8th Circuit is unlikely to come for at least several weeks.
The February 2022 ruling by US District Judge Lee Rudofsky that private parties could not sue under Section 2 is believed to be a first-of-its-kind decision. It emerged from a VRA challenge brought by the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP to Arkansas’ state House map.
Critics of Rudofsky’s ruling noted that it flew in the face of decades of judicial practice – including in multiple Supreme Court cases – where courts considered and decided Section 2 cases brought by private parties. They point to a 1996 Supreme Court case where five justices sanctioned the practice. They also stress that, since it was passed in 1965, the Voting Rights Act has been reauthorized and amended numerous times, and never once has Congress weighed in to say that courts were getting it wrong by hearing Section 2 lawsuits brought by private individuals and organizations.
However, those in favor of reading the VRA more narrowly have seized on a concurrence by Justice Neil Gorsuch in a 2021 VRA case that called it an “open question” whether the provision has a private cause of action. Only Justice Clarence Thomas signed on to Gorsuch’s concurrence, but it provided Rudofsky with a jumping off point to conclude the answer was no.
The office of Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who is defending Rudofsky’s ruling, did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. Her briefs argue that Congress intended only for attorney general to bring Section 2 lawsuits and there is a lack of textual support in the Voting Rights Act for a private cause of action for the provision.
“Despite what the practice has been, when you look at the text of the statute there is a real question as to whether there is a private right of action,” Jason Torchinsky – a GOP election law attorney who represented Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton in a friend-of-the-court brief arguing against a private cause of action – told CNN.
At Wednesday’s 8th Circuit hearing, Circuit Judge Lavenski Smith – a George W. Bush appointee who is the chief judge of the appellate court – showed the most skepticism of Arkansas’ arguments against a private cause of action, though Stras also pushed back on some of the more sweeping claims made by Arkansas Solicitor General Nicholas Bronni.
Those against a private cause of action argue the current interpretation of the law has spawned an ever-increasing amount of private VRA litigation that is overburdening election administrators and injecting chaos into their planning.
“Courts have essentially assumed that there is this private right of action,” Honest Election Project executive director Jason Snead told CNN.
“But it’s never actually been determined that there is, and in the absence of the expressed decision by Congress to create a private right of action and put it in the text of the law, courts are not empowered to create one,” said Snead, whose group favors stricter voting laws and filed a friend of the court brief supporting Arkansas.
Without a private cause of action, enforcement of the Voting Rights Act would shrink drastically. Over the last four decades, private litigation has consistently made up the bulk of the successful Section 2 lawsuits, according to briefs filed in the case, and the number of Section 2 cases brought by the DOJ has trended downward, with the Trump administration bringing just one new lawsuit under the provision.
Even as the judiciary – and particularly the US Supreme Court – was yanked further to the right under Trump’s makeover of the federal bench, many legal experts are viewing Arkansas’ arguments as a longshot. That the argument is being put forward is nonetheless a sign of how far conservative opponents of the VRA are willing to push the envelope in this legal environment, according to Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA School of Law.
“In any fair reading of the Voting Rights Act, this argument is an easy loser, but we’ll see,” Hasen told CNN. “I don’t count anything out these days.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats have moved quickly to appoint scores of judges during the past two years, outpacing former President Donald Trump, but they have stalled in the South.
The dearth of nominees offered in southern states, notably where both US senators are Republican, threatens to undercut Biden’s large-scale effort to counteract Trump’s effect on the federal judiciary, particularly to bolster civil rights and ensure voter protections.
The Biden team’s well-documented diversification of the courts – nominees have been overwhelmingly women and people of color, such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and offered professional diversity, including public defenders and civil rights lawyers – has withered when it comes to district courts in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas, where more than a dozen such court vacancies exist.
“That is where the entrenchment of hyper-conservatism is real and difficult to uproot,” said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The pattern of vacancies, particularly in the South, is not lost on the Biden selection team, led by political veterans with deep experience in judicial selection and confirmation. (Biden, himself, as a senator from Delaware, once led the Senate Judiciary Committee.)
“All of these seats are deeply important to us. We care about all of these vacancies,” Paige Herwig, senior counsel to the President, told CNN. “It’s not a secret that a large number of vacancies are in states with two Republican senators. But we are always here in good faith. We are here to work with home state senators.”
Many states beyond the South with two GOP senators, such as Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah, lack nominees for court vacancies, but the South is disproportionately affected because of its sheer population and number of open seats. The South also endures as a battleground for intense litigation over civil rights and liberties.
Federal judges are appointed for life and can become a president’s most enduring legacy. Judges’ effect on American life is clear, from the top at the Supreme Court, down to district court judges who decide which litigants even get to trial.
District courts are “the gateway to access to justice,” Nelson said.
District court judges have also shown their muscle in recent years by blocking executive branch policy with nationwide injunctions. Biden’s early initiatives, notably over immigration and student-debt relief, were first thwarted in lower courts by Republican-appointed judges.
During Biden’s first two years, the White House and Senate Democrats plainly prioritized judicial vacancies in blue states, where they could make swift and immediate progress.
Overall, Biden won confirmations for 97 appointments to the US district courts, appellate bench and Supreme Court over the past two years.
For the comparable two-year period, Trump, who set out to transform the federal courts the help of White House counsel Don McGahn and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, had named 85 judges. They scouted out likeminded conservative ideologues and then accelerated appointments in the following years by openly encouraging judges to retire to generate more vacancies.
U.S. Supreme Court says Trump-era border policy to remain in effect while legal challenges play out
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CNN
Like other progressive leaders, Nelson praises the Biden focus on a more diverse bench. Yet she said the White House could step up the pace of nominations and the Senate can move faster on the nominees it has received.
“Nancy Abudu is an excellent example of someone whose nomination has been stalled,” Nelson said. Abudu, a litigation director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, would, if confirmed, be the first Black woman on the US appeals court for the 11th Circuit, covering Alabama, Georgia and Florida. She was designated for an open Georgia seat and endorsed by the state’s two senators, both of whom are Democrats.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, which had been evenly split between Democrats and Republicans last year, deadlocked in May on Abudu’s nomination, and she had been awaiting a procedural vote by the full Senate that then would have allowed an up-or-down vote on confirmation. Biden has renominated her for the new Congress.
The question now is whether the White House will be able to ramp up negotiations with red-state senators and whether the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, will ease the practice of requiring district court nominees to have the backing of home-state senators.
By the terms of the Constitution, a president seeks the “advice and consent” of the Senate judicial appointments. Senators traditionally have influenced the selection of nominations to district and appellate courts in their home states, even to the point of blocking a disfavored candidate. In recent years, however, presidents have been able to wield more latitude for appeals court nominations.
The Judiciary Committee, however, will not hold a hearing on a district court nomination unless both home-state senators have signed off, in what’s referred to as the “blue slip” process. These blue slips of paper, as they are relayed to the committee, are intended to signify that a home-state senator has been consulted in the president’s choice. For Biden’s judicial selections, that process poses significant roadblocks.
Herwig, overseeing the judicial selection machinery, stresses that Biden is trying to generate consensus and says appointments for a Louisiana-based seat on the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit (Judge Dana Douglas) and Indiana-based seat on the 7th Circuit (Judge Doris Pryor), which arose from some dealings with GOP senators, “demonstrate that there are possibilities to work together.” The Senate confirmed Douglas and Pryor, both former US magistrate judges, in December.
A second seat on the powerful 5th Circuit appellate court, covering Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, is open with no nominee. Judge Gregg Costa, based in Texas, had announced about a year ago that he would be resigning in August 2022.
While a good portion of the open seats can be chalked up to Democratic and Republican differences, another notable appellate vacancy – for a Maryland seat on the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit – rests in Democratic hands.
Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, announced her retirement more than a year ago, and made it effective in September 2022. But Biden and Sen. Ben Cardin, Maryland’s senior senator, have been at odds over a successor, and the White House apparently does not want to more forward without Cardin’s backing. Herwig would not comment on that vacancy, and a Cardin spokeswoman said the senator was awaiting word from the White House on his suggested nominees.
In the meantime, the 4th Circuit, resolving appeals from Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia district courts, remains closely divided with seven Democratic and six Republican appointees.
Biden’s team signaled from the start its priority for the judiciary, and White House chief of staff Ron Klain, a former Supreme Court law clerk, has been fixated on filling the bench. Klain worked with then-Sen. Biden on the Judiciary Committee and separately helped evaluate judicial candidates in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Herwig is a product of the Senate, too, previously serving two Democratic senators who sit on the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein and Amy Klobuchar.
In the South, however, where voting rights and immigration disputes rage, change has been slow. Going forward, as Democrats gained one more seat in the November midterm elections toward their Senate majority, southern states are likely to become a critical arena for an administration determined to reshape the bench.
The Administrative Office of the US Courts reports that as of January 6, there were 82 vacancies on federal district and appellate courts. Biden has designated nominees for only about half of those vacancies. (There are a total 677 authorized judgeships at the trial-level US district courts, 179 on the US courts of appeals and nine on the Supreme Court.)
The South has a disproportionate share of those vacancies without nominations.
Of all 50 states, Florida and Louisiana have the most openings with no nominees pending, 4 apiece. Texas has three vacancies with no nominees pending, and Alabama two (one dating to mid-2020) with no nominees offered.
It is plain, given the number of vacancies and how long some have existed, that it will not be easy to fill them. And it is unclear whether the Democratic White House and Republican senators are truly talking to each other, or actually talking past each other.
Press secretaries for Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, deeply invested in the ideology of the bench, and regularly opposing Biden appointees, said the senators were working with the administration on judges.
In Louisiana, the communications director to Sen. John Kennedy, another member of the Judiciary Committee, said Kennedy’s office had no information to provide on possible appointments in Louisiana.
Ryann DuRant, press secretary to Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, said the White House reached out to Tuberville soon after he became a senator in 2021 to address the courts, but that since then, “there has been radio silence from the White House.”
“When the White House is ready to move forward on Alabama judicial nominees,” DuRant added in a statement, “Senator Tuberville welcomes the opportunity to discuss as a part of his role to provide advice and consent.”
McKinley Lewis, communications director for Florida Sen. Rick Scott, said the senator welcomed “an open, good faith dialogue with the White House to ensure any nominees to serve on Florida’s federal courts will respect the limited role of the judiciary and will not legislate from the bench.”
Herwig declined to detail any conservations yet stressed that there was no senator with whom her team would not work.
It’s unclear whether the Senate Judiciary Committee will feel increased pressure, from its Democratic ranks or from outside liberal interests, to amend the “blue slip” process.
Trump’s total appointments in four years reached 231, a figure that might be hard for Biden to match, if stalemates continue in Republican-dominated locales.
There are at least another 20 vacancies expected in 2023, based on information gathered by the Administrative Office of the US Courts. About a third of those are in southern locales.
At some point, judges weighing retirement, and equally concerned about whether Biden could successfully tap a replacement, may simply opt against stepping down during his remaining presidency.
In the Trump years, his GOP allies openly encouraged judges thinking about retirement to just do it. It was a sign of how vigorously Republican leaders wanted to shape the courts.
Speaking specifically of Supreme Court justices, former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said in a 2018 radio interview, “If you’re thinking about quitting this year, do it yesterday.”
The South Carolina Supreme Court struck down Thursday a ban on abortion after cardiac activity is detected — typically around six weeks — ruling the restriction violates the state constitution’s right to privacy.
The decision comes nearly two years after Republican Gov. Henry McMaster signed the measure into law. The ban, which included exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest or pregnancies that endangered the patient’s life, drew lawsuits almost immediately. Since then, legal challenges have made their way through both state and federal courts.
“The State unquestionably has the authority to limit the right of privacy that protects women from state interference with her decision, but any such limitation must be reasonable and it must be meaningful in that the time frames imposed must afford a woman sufficient time to determine she is pregnant and to take reasonable steps to terminate that pregnancy. Six weeks is, quite simply, not a reasonable period of time for these two things to occur, and therefore the Act violates our state Constitution’s prohibition against unreasonable invasions of privacy,” Justice Kaye Hearn wrote in the majority opinion.
Currently, South Carolina bars most abortions at 20 weeks.
Varying orders have given the law’s supporters and opponents both cause for celebration and dismay. Those seeking abortions in the state have seen the legal window expand to the previous limit of 20 weeks before returning to latest restrictions and back again.
Federal courts had previously suspended the law. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade allowed the restrictions to take place — for just a brief period. The state Supreme Court temporarily blocked it this past August as the justices considered a new challenge.
The high court’s momentous decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization set off a flurry of activity at the state level. Republican-dominated states moved forward with new restrictions while abortion rights’ advocates sought additional safeguards. With federal abortion protections gone, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic sued in July under the South Carolina constitution’s right to privacy. Meanwhile, other states have seen challenges to restrictions as a matter of religious freedom.
“We are encouraged by South Carolina’s Supreme Court ruling today on the state’s extreme and dangerous abortion ban,” tweeted White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “Women should be able to make their own decisions about their bodies.”
In South Carolina, lawyers representing the state legislature have argued that the right to privacy should be interpreted narrowly. During oral arguments this past October, they argued historical context suggests lawmakers intended to protect against searches and seizures when they ratified the right in 1971. Planned Parenthood attorneys representing the challengers have said the right to privacy encompasses abortion. They argued previous state Supreme Court decisions already extended the right to bodily autonomy.
The justices’ limited ruling left the door open for future changes. The state House and Senate failed to agree on additional restrictions during this past summer’s special session on abortion. Still, a small but growing group of conservative lawmakers have vowed to push that envelope once more this legislative session — despite some Republican leaders’ insistence no agreement is possible.
In a statement to The Associated Press, South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Trav Robertson applauded the ruling Thursday, which he said amounted to “a voice of reason and sanity to temper the Republicans’ legislative actions to strip rights away from women and doctors.”
Republican South Carolina House Speaker G. Murrell Smith, Jr., wrote in a series of tweets that the state justices “followed the path of the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade by creating a constitutional right to an abortion where none exists.” Smith added the decision failed to respect the separation of powers.
The Atlantic is publishing a collection of key internal government documents related to the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, known as Zero Tolerance. The records informed the reporting of my cover story on how it came to be and who was responsible. Our hope is to introduce greater transparency around a policy that gravely harmed thousands of families and whose development and intent were concealed from the public for years. During the Trump administration, more than 5,000 migrant children were taken from their parents as part of a dubious and ineffectual strategy to deter migration across the southern border. Hundreds remain separated today.
These records showcase, among other things, government officials’ attempts to mislead the public; inconsistent and sometimes nonexistent record keeping, which to this day means that a full accounting of separations does not exist; efforts to extend the length of time that children and parents were kept apart; and early and repeated internal warnings about the policy’s worst outcomes, which were ignored.
As you will see, some of the records are marked “pre-decisional,” “deliberative,” or “attorney-client privileged” in an attempt to exempt them from federal disclosure requirements and ensure they would never become public. The Atlantic obtained them only through extensive litigation.
The Atlantic’s records, combined with others secured by the House Judiciary Committee, the progressive nonprofit group American Oversight, and separated families themselves, have been organized and tagged for future use. The collection is far from complete, and many of the documents still contain redactions. However, we hope that this database will prove a useful tool for those engaged in research and documentation of family separations, and that the body of publicly available information will continue to grow.
In the spring of 2017, Jeff Self, the Border Patrol chief in the El Paso Sector, which includes New Mexico and parts of Texas, quietly launched a regional program to start referring migrant parents traveling with children for prosecution, which would require those families to be separated. This strained resources throughout the immigration system, including at the Department of Health and Human Services, which took custody of the children. Federal officials would later call the program a “pilot” and use it as a model for expanding the practice nationwide. Some early separations also occurred in Yuma, Arizona, under a separate initiative.
At a February 14, 2017, interagency meeting, immigration-enforcement officials presented a nationwide plan to separate families as an immigration deterrent. Afterward, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services—the agency that would be charged with caring for separated children—pushed back against the plan while scrambling to prepare. The plan was also leaked to the media, after which Homeland Security officials began to assert publicly that the idea had been abandoned. In reality, during and after regional separation programs were implemented in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, the nationwide plan was still being pushed aggressively by leaders of the immigrant-enforcement agencies, as well as by Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s chief immigration adviser, and Gene Hamilton, a confidant of Miller’s who worked at DHS and the Department of Justice.
Though a full accounting of the family separations that took place during the Trump administration does not exist, these internal government charts offer some insight into the nature of those that were recorded. For example, Homeland Security officials have often suggested that some of the individuals separated under Zero Tolerance were actually “false families,” or that separated parents were guilty of more serious crimes beyond the misdemeanor of illegally crossing the border, to justify taking their children away. But the first chart in this list makes clear that 2,146 of 2,256 separated parents who were referred for prosecution between May 5 and June 20, 2018, were charged only with the misdemeanor. During the same period, 137 parents were charged with the felony of having crossed the border illegally more than once, while only two were presented with “other charges.” The second chart notes that over those weeks, at least 251 children younger than 6 were separated from their parents, along with 1,370 children ages 6 to 12, and 1,272 ages 13 to 17.
Below is a small sampling of instances when government officials, members of congress, reporters and community groups sought information about a noticeable rise in family separations. Despite these inquiries, for more than a year, Department of Homeland Security officials denied that the agency’s treatment of families had changed, suggesting that business was proceeding as usual and that families were not being separated any more than in the past.
*The government supplied numerous copies of this directive with various portions redacted. The least redacted version has been excerpted here from the Border Patrol’s “After Action Report,” which summarized the results of the separations that occurred in the El Paso Sector in 2017.
Note: The government occasionally supplied The Atlantic with multiple versions of the same email chain or report, and redacted different portions of each. Such documents have been combined in order to show all unredacted material.
The unanimous vote awarded Till and his mother, both civil rights icons, the Congressional Gold Medal.
The United States House of Representatives has unanimously passed a bill to posthumously award the Congressional Gold Medal to Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager murdered in a racially-motivated attack in the 1950s, and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley.
The bill, which passed the Senate in January, is meant to honour Till and his mother – who had insisted on an open-coffin funeral to demonstrate the brutality of her son’s killing – with the highest civilian honour that Congress awards.
The medal will be given to the National Museum of African American History where it will be displayed near the coffin Till was buried in.
Till was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 after witnesses said he whistled at a white woman at a grocery store in rural Mississippi, a violation of the South’s racist social codes at the time.
Four days later, he was rousted from bed at his great-uncle’s home in the predawn hours and abducted. His killing galvanised the US civil rights movement after Till’s mother insisted on the open coffin and Jet magazine published photos of his brutalised body.
The Senate bill was introduced by Democrat Cory Booker and Republican Richard Burr. The House version of the legislation is sponsored by Democratic Representative Bobby Rush, who also introduced a bill to issue a commemorative postage stamp in honour of Mamie Till-Mobley. She died in 2003.
“The courage and activism demonstrated by Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, in displaying to the world the brutality endured by her son helped awaken the nation’s conscience, forcing America to reckon with its failure to address racism and the glaring injustices that stem from such hatred,” Booker said in a statement after the bill passed the Senate.
Congress has been handing out the medals since 1776, with previous recipients including civil rights icons like Rosa Parks, the Little Rock Nine and Jackie Robinson. The designation comes months after President Joe Biden signed the first anti-lynching legislation, named after Till, into law.
Until March of this year, Congress had failed to pass such legislation nearly 200 times, beginning with a bill introduced in 1900 by North Carolina Representative George Henry White, the only Black member of Congress at the time.
Sen. Raphael Warnock’s re-election is being celebrated by supporters across the nation with many political observers crediting the work of voting rights groups for the consequential win.
Warnock delivered a victory speech to a fiery crowd in Atlanta on Tuesday night that touched on the power of faith, his deep Georgia roots and the perseverance of voters in the face of Republican-led voter suppression efforts. Election officials said a record number of voters showed up for early voting last week. And Black voters have been largely credited for Warnock’s win, signaling that Georgia is no longer a reliably red state.
In his speech, Warnock also honored the Black and White unsung heroes of the civil rights movement who died fighting for equal voting rights, making wins like his possible.
“Tonight, I want to pay tribute to all those, over so many years, who have put their voices, and their lives on the line, to defend that right,” Warnock said. “Martyrs of the movement like (Michael) Schwerner, (James) Chaney and (Andrew) Goodman, Viola Luizzo, James Reeb. And those who stood up and spoke up like Fannie Lou Hamer. John Lewis, who walked across a bridge knowing that there were police waiting to brutalize him on the other side. Yet, by some stroke of destiny mingled with human determination he walked across that bridge in order to build a bridge to a more just future.”
While Hamer and Lewis have been widely discussed by historians and journalists, Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman, Luizzo and Reeb are lesser known. But that doesn’t negate the significance of their work toward equality. All of them were killed by white supremacists or Ku Klux Klan members.
Here is what you should know about five “martyrs” of the movement:
Historical records show Liuzzo, a White woman, had been committed to fighting for economic justice and civil rights.
She was an active member of the Detroit NAACP chapter and the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit. Family members say she decided to travel to Selma in 1965 after seeing televised news reports of peaceful protesters being beaten and tear-gassed by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
In Selma, Liuzzo marched and helped transport demonstrators in her car. She was ambushed and shot to death by KKK members while driving Leroy Moton, a Black man, to Montgomery. Within 24 hours of Liuzzo’s death, President Lyndon Johnson announced the arrests of the KKK members. They were all acquitted by Alabama courts, however a federal grand jury found them guilty of violating Liuzzo’s civil rights and they were sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Reeb, a White Unitarian minister who lived in Boston, died after traveling to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to answer Martin Luther King Jr’s call to clergy to join demonstrations for voting rights in the aftermath of “Bloody Sunday.”
The 38-year-old minister was beaten by a group of White men on March 9, 1965 as he and two other White clergymen left an integrated Selma restaurant after having dinner. He was hit in the head and died two days later at a Birmingham hospital.
His killing gained nationwide attention, prompted vigils in his honor and is believed to have contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“The world is aroused over the murder of James Reeb. For he symbolizes the forces of goodwill in our nation. He demonstrated the conscience of the nation. He was an attorney for the defense of the innocent in the court of world opinion. He was a witness to the truth that men of different races and classes might live, eat, and work together as brothers,” King said as he delivered a eulogy for Reeb in 1965.
Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. The killings were among the most notorious of the civil rights era, and were the subject of the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”
The three men, who registered African Americans to vote, had just visited the victims of the burning of a Black church in Neshoba County when a sheriff’s deputy took them into custody for speeding. The men were driving a car with license plates registered to the Congress of Federated Organizations (COFO), one of the most active civil rights groups in Mississippi, according to an FBI file on the case.
After their release from the county jail, a Ku Klux Klan mob tailed their car, forced it off the road and shot them to death. Their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam, after an extensive FBI investigation.
Chaney was a 21-year-old Black volunteer with COFO. Goodman, a White 20-year-old, was a college student and new volunteer from New York. Schwerner, a White 24-year-old former social worker, was an established civil rights organizer who was “particularly reviled by the Klan for his work,” according to the FBI file.
The killings fueled the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the next year.
In 1967, prosecutors convicted eight defendants for violating the federal criminal civil rights conspiracy statute, namely the victims’ right to live. None served more than six years in prison.
No murder charges were filed at the time but nearly 40 years later, Edgar Ray Killen, a part-time Baptist minister and the plot leader, was found guilty of manslaughter in 2005 and sentenced to three consecutive 20-year sentences. Killen died in 2018.
Indiana’s Republican attorney general may continue to investigate an Indianapolis doctor who spoke publicly about providing an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim from neighboring Ohio, a judge ruled Friday.
An attempt to block a probe by Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office was rejected by Marion County Judge Heather Welch. She also ruled Friday in a separate lawsuit that Indiana’s abortion ban adopted in August violates the state’s religious freedom law signed by then-Gov. Mike Pence in 2015. The Indiana abortion ban, however, has been on hold since mid-September as courts consider a challenge from abortion clinic operators who argue the ban violates the state constitution.
The judge’s ruling on the investigation into Dr. Caitlin Bernard came two days after the attorney general’s office asked the state medical licensing board to discipline Bernard, alleging she violated state law by not reporting the girl’s child abuse to Indiana authorities and broke patient privacy laws by telling a newspaper reporter about the girl’s treatment.
That account sparked a national political uproar in the weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, with some news outlets and Republican politicians suggesting Bernard fabricated the story. The girl had been unable to get an abortion in Ohio after a more restrictive abortion law took effect there.
Bernard filed a lawsuit against the state attorney general last month, arguing Rokita’s office was wrongly justifying the investigation with “frivolous” consumer complaints submitted by people with no personal knowledge about the girl’s treatment. Bernard and her lawyers maintain the girl’s abuse had already been reported to Ohio police before the doctor ever saw the child.
But the judge turned down Bernard’s request for an injunction to block the investigation. Welch ruled the medical licensing board now had jurisdiction over the matter since the attorney general filed the complaint on Wednesday. That complaint asked the state medical licensing board to impose “appropriate disciplinary action” without specifying a proposed penalty. The board, which has the authority to suspend, revoke or place on probation a doctor’s license, said Friday it had received the complaint but that no hearing date had been set.
Welch, however, found that Rokita wrongly made public comments about investigating Bernard before the complaint was filed. Welch wrote that Rokita’s statements “are clearly unlawful breaches of the licensing investigations statute’s requirement that employees of the Attorney General’s Office maintain confidentiality over pending investigations until they are so referred to prosecution.”
Bernard’s lawyer, Kathleen DeLaney, criticized Rokita for violating his “duty of confidentiality” and preemptively pushing the case to the medical board, thus “taking it out of the hands of Judge Welch.”
“We are confident in the record and testimony that we have already developed and look forward to presenting Dr. Bernard’s evidence to the Medical Licensing Board,” DeLaney said.
The attorney general’s office said the ruling supported protection of patient privacy rights.
“The doctor and her attorneys initiated this media frenzy from the beginning, and it continues to draw attention to this innocent little girl who is trying to cope with a horrific trauma,” the office said in a statement that did not address the judge’s criticism of Rokita’s public comments on the case.
Bernard provided abortion drugs to the girl in Indianapolis in late June, as she said doctors determined the girl was unable to have an abortion in neighboring Ohio. That’s because Ohio’s “fetal heartbeat” law had taken effect with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to end women’s constitutional protections for abortion. Such laws ban abortions from the time cardiac activity can be detected in an embryo, which is typically around the sixth week of pregnancy.
Rokita has kept the investigation going even after a 27-year-old man was charged in Columbus, Ohio, with raping the girl and public records obtained by The Associated Press show Bernard met Indiana’s required three-day reporting period for an abortion performed on a girl younger than 16.
In Welch’s ruling on the state’s abortion ban, the judge sided with five residents — who hold Jewish, Muslim and spiritual faiths — who argued that the ban would violate their religious rights on when they believe abortion is acceptable.
“The undisputed evidence establishes that the Plaintiffs do not share the State’s belief that life begins at fertilization or that abortion constitutes the intentional taking of a human life,” Welch wrote. “To the contrary, they have different religious beliefs about when life begins. … Under the law, the Court finds these are sincere religious beliefs.”
Rokita’s office, which has been defending the abortion ban in court, did not immediately comment on the religious freedom lawsuit ruling.
Americans should not just consider how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade impacts women’s rights, but also how it affects individuals’ civil rights, Anita Hill said in an interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace.
Asked by Wallace if the decision by Justice Clarence Thomas to vote in the 5-4 majority in favor of overturning the landmark ruling makes it harder for her to reconcile his time on the high court, Hill said the decision was about a “shrinking of rights.”
Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment in testimony during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Thomas has denied the allegations.
She told Wallace that the conservative Thomas is not the only one on the bench who wants to assess access to contraception and protections for gender identity, adding that “the votes are there to move us in that direction.”
“I believe that’s why we should – how we should be looking at Dobbs, not just as an indicator of what is going to happen on reproductive rights, but also what will happen to us as a country in terms of how much we value the civil rights of individuals and especially marginalized people,” she said on “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” which is set to air on CNN on Sunday night.
The Senate on Tuesday passed legislation to protect same-sex and interracial marriage, called the Respect for Marriage Act, in a landmark bipartisan vote amid concern the Supreme Court might overturn its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage. The House would need to approve the legislation before sending it to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed into law.
Hill also told Wallace she was “shocked” to get a call from Thomas’ wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, who she said in 2010 left a voicemail message requesting an apology from the law professor.
“I had really no idea what to make of it. But I knew this, I knew that I did not want to entertain that kind of call either on the voicemail or face to face, that it was not something that clearly, I was not going to apologize for 1991,” Hill said. “And I didn’t in fact believe that the call was a sincere attempt to reconcile anything, and that I was going to do what I needed to do to stop it from happening.”
Infowars host Alex Jones filed for personal bankruptcy protection Friday in Texas, citing debts that include nearly $1.5 billion he has been ordered to pay to families who sued him over his conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook school massacre.
Jones filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Houston. His filing listed $1 billion to $10 billion in liabilities and $1 million to $10 million in assets.
Jones acknowledged the filing on his Infowars broadcast, saying the case will prove that he’s broke, and asking viewers to shop on his website to help keep the show on the air.
“I’m officially out of money, personally,” Jones said. “It’s all going to be filed. It’s all going to be public. And you will see that Alex Jones has almost no cash.”
FILE – Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones takes the witness stand to testify at the Sandy Hook defamation damages trial at Connecticut Superior Court in Waterbury, Conn. Thursday, Sept. 22, 2022.
Tyler Sizemore/Hearst Connecticut Media via AP
Jones, who sells dietary supplements and other items on his Infowars site, and promotes them during his shows, said he would not be commenting further on the bankruptcy.
For years, Jones described the 2012 massacre as a hoax. A Connecticut jury in October awarded victims’ families $965 million in compensatory damages, and a judge later tacked on another $473 million in punitive damages. Earlier in the year, a Texas jury awarded the parents of a child killed in the shooting $49 million in damages.
The bankruptcy filing temporarily halted all proceedings in the Connecticut case. A judge was forced to cancel a hearing scheduled for Friday on the Sandy Hook families’ request to secure the assets of Jones and his company to help pay the more than $1.4 billion in damages awarded there.
Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Sandy Hook families in the Connecticut case, criticized the bankruptcy filing.
“Like every other cowardly move Alex Jones has made, this bankruptcy will not work,” Mattei said in a statement. “The bankruptcy system does not protect anyone who engages in intentional and egregious attacks on others, as Mr. Jones did. The American judicial system will hold Alex Jones accountable, and we will never stop working to enforce the jury’s verdict.”
An attorney representing Jones in the bankruptcy case did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
In the Texas and Connecticut cases, some relatives of the 20 children and six adults killed in the school shooting testified that they were threatened and harassed for years by people who believed the lies told on Jones’ show. One parent testified that conspiracy theorists urinated on his 7-year-old son’s grave and threatened to dig up the coffin.
Photos of Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre victims sits at a small memorial in Newtown, Connecticut, just a month after the 2012 shooting.
John Moore / Getty Images
Erica Lafferty, the daughter of slain Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, testified that people mailed rape threats to her house.
Jones has laughed at the awards on his Infowars show, saying he has less than $2 million to his name and won’t be able to pay such high amounts. Those comments contradicted the testimony of a forensic economist at the Texas trial, who said Jones and his company Free Speech Systems have a combined net worth as high as $270 million. Free Speech Systems is also seeking bankruptcy protection.
In documents filed in July in Free Speech Systems’ bankruptcy case in Texas, a budget for the company for Nov. 26 to Dec. 23 estimated product sales will total nearly $3 million, while operating expenses will be nearly $739,000. Jones’ salary is listed at $20,000 every two weeks.
Sandy Hook families have alleged in another lawsuit in Texas that Jones hid millions of dollars in assets after victims’ relatives began taking him to court. Jones’ lawyer denied the allegation.
A third trial over Jones’ comments on Sandy Hook is expected to begin within the next two months in Texas, in a lawsuit brought by the parents of another child killed in the shooting.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Wednesday the company does not have plans to stop selling an antisemitic film that gained notoriety recently after Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving tweeted out an Amazon link to it.
Pressure has been mounting on Amazon to discontinue sale of the film, called “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” since Irving shared the link to the documentary with his millions of Twitter followers in October. The synopsis on Amazon says the film “uncovers the true identity of the Children of Israel.”
At The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York City, Jassy said it is difficult for the company to determine what content crosses the line to where Amazon doesn’t make it available to customers.
“As a retailer of content to hundreds of millions of customers with a lot of different viewpoints, we have to allow access to those viewpoints, even if they are objectionable — objectionable and they differ from our particular viewpoints,” the Times quoted Jassy as saying.
Some cases are “more straight forward”
He said making decisions about what content to take down is “more straight forward” in some cases, such as when it “actively incites or promotes violence, or teaches people to do things like pedophilia.”
Dozens of celebrities, public figures as well as Jewish organizations and the Nets have called on the company to take down the film or add a disclaimer offering an explanation as to why the documentary and related book are problematic.
Amazon told the newspaper earlier this month that it would look into adding a disclaimer on the documentary’s main page. But that hasn’t happened.
The Seattle-based company did not reply to request for comment sent by The Associated Press earlier this month on whether it would add a disclaimer or not. Jassy, who is Jewish, said Wednesday that Amazon has employees that flag content, but scaling that more broadly could be challenging.
“The reality is that we have very expansive customer reviews,” he said. “For books with a lot of attention — especially public attention — customers do a good job monitoring other people.”
Irving was suspended by the Nets on November 3 after he refused to issue the apology that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver sought for posting the link the the film. He returned after issuing an apology more than two weeks later. He missed eight games.
Twitter will no longer enforce its policy against COVID-19 misinformation, raising concerns among public health experts that the change could have serious consequences if it discourages vaccinations and other efforts to combat the still-spreading virus.
Eagle-eyed users spotted the change Monday night, noting that a one-sentence update had been made to Twitter’s online rules: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.” That policy, first put in place in May 2020, labeled tweets about the COVID-19 pandemic deemed to be incomplete, misleading or disputed.
By Tuesday, some Twitter accounts were testing the new boundaries and celebrating the platform’s hands-off approach, which comes after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk.
“This policy was used to silence people across the world who questioned the media narrative surrounding the virus and treatment options,” tweeted Dr. Simone Gold, a physician and leading purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation. “A win for free speech and medical freedom!”
Twitter’s decision disappointed many public health officials, however, who said it could lead to more false claims about the virus, or the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
“Bad news,” tweeted epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, who urged people not to flee Twitter but to stay and stand up for accurate information about the virus. “Stay folks — do NOT cede the town square to them!”
Twitter was one of several social platforms to try to control the online conversation in early 2020, after the emergence of a new and deadly virus led to hysteria and speculation, and as the scientific understanding of the illness evolved.
Twitter has struggled with enforcement of the policy, as other platforms have. Even when it was in place, posts making bogus claims about home remedies or vaccines could still be found, while factually accurate posts were suppressed if they were perceived as critical of vaccination or masking. It was difficult on Tuesday to identify exactly how the platform’s rules may have changed.
Messages left with San Francisco-based Twitter seeking more information about its policy on COVID-19 misinformation were not immediately returned Tuesday.
The virus continues to spread, although fewer Americans are dying from COVID-19 today than at the start of the pandemic. Nationally, new COVID cases averaged nearly 38,800 a day as of Monday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The numbers are far lower than last winter, but are also a vast undercount because of reduced testing and reporting of the virus. About 28,100 people with COVID were hospitalized daily and about 313 died, according to the most recent federal daily averages.
Cases and deaths were up from two weeks earlier. Yet a fifth of the U.S. population hasn’t been vaccinated, and most Americans haven’t gotten the latest boosters. Many have also stopped wearing masks, as a majority of venues aren’t now requiring them.
Musk, who has himself spread COVID misinformation on Twitter, has signaled an interest in rolling back many of the platform’s previous rules meant to combat misinformation.
Last week, Musk said he would grant “amnesty” to account holders who had been kicked off Twitter. He’s also reinstated the accounts for several people who spread COVID misinformation, including that of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose personal account was suspended this year for repeatedly violating Twitter’s COVID rules.
Greene’s most recent tweets include ones questioning the effectiveness of masks and making baseless claims about the safety of COVID vaccines.
Under the policy enacted in January 2020, Twitter prohibited false claims about COVID-19 that the platform determined could lead to real-world harms. More than 11,000 accounts were suspended for violating the rules, and nearly 100,000 pieces of content were removed from the platform, according to Twitter’s latest numbers.
A search for common terms associated with COVID misinformation yielded lots of misleading content, but also automatic links to helpful resources about the virus as well as authoritative sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Combating lies a “collective responsibility”
Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 coordinator, said Tuesday that the problem of COVID-19 misinformation is far larger than one platform, and that policies prohibiting COVID misinformation weren’t the best solution anyway.
Speaking at a Knight Foundation forum Tuesday, Jha said misinformation about the virus spread for a number of reasons, including legitimate uncertainty about a deadly illness. Simply prohibiting certain kinds of content isn’t going to help people find good information, or make them feel more confident about what they’re hearing from their medical providers, he said.
“I think we all have a collective responsibility,” Jha said of combating misinformation about COVID. “The consequences of not getting this right — of spreading that misinformation — is literally tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily.”
Foxconn, the electronics manufacturing company that assembles Apple’s iPhones, apologized Thursday for the pay dispute that triggered massive employee protests, and violent police pushback, at a factory in central China where anti-virus controls slowed production.
Mounting unrest at the Zhengzhou factory has persisted for at least a month, since thousands of employees staged a walkout in October over what they said were unsafe working conditions linked to the spread of COVID-19. All of this comes as China grapples with a spike in virus infections, seen especially in highly populated cities.
Foxconn hired a slate of new employees following the exodus. Accusations that the company unlawfully altered its policies for incoming workers, who say they were hired with the promise of higher pay than they are actually receiving, led to protests at the factory.
Videos shared on social media earlier this week appeared to show one particularly large demonstration involving thousands of people in Zhengzhou, wearing masks and facing rows of police officers wearing protective suits and holding riot shields. Police kicked and hit a protester with clubs after the person grabbed hold of a metal pole that was being used to strike him. Witnesses also said that employees at the iPhone factory were beaten and detained amid the protests.
In this photo provided Nov 23, 2022, security personnel in protective clothing were seen taking away a person during protest at the factory compound operated by Foxconn Technology Group who runs the world’s biggest Apple iPhone factory in Zhengzhou in central China’s Henan province.
Associated Press
Foxconn, the biggest contract assembler of smartphones and other electronics for Apple and other global brands, addressed employees’ complaints about wage discrepancies in its Thursday apology. The company blamed a “technical error” in the process of adding new employees and said they would be paid what they were promised.
“We apologize for an input error in the computer system and guarantee that the actual pay is the same as agreed and the official recruitment posters,” said a company statement. It promised to “try its best to actively solve the concerns and reasonable demands of employees.”
Late Wednesday, Apple said it had people on the ground at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou facility.
“We are reviewing the situation and working closely with Foxconn to ensure their employees’ concerns are addressed,” the company based in Cupertino, California, said.
The dispute comes as the ruling Communist Party tries to contain a surge in coronavirus cases without shutting down factories, as it did in 2020 at the start of the pandemic. Its tactics include “closed-loop management,” or having employees live at their workplaces without outside contact.
Authorities promised last month to reduce economic disruption by cutting quarantine times and making other changes to China’s “zero-COVID” strategy, which aims to isolate every case. Despite that, the infection surge has prompted authorities to suspend access to neighborhoods and factories and to close office buildings, shops and restaurants in parts of many cities.
On Thursday, people in eight districts of Zhengzhou with a total of 6.6 million residents were told to stay home for five days. Daily mass testing was ordered for a “war of annihilation” against the virus.
Apple earlier warned iPhone 14 deliveries would be delayed after employees walked out of the Zhengzhou factory and access to the industrial zone around the facility was suspended following outbreaks.
To attract new workers, Foxconn offered $3,500 for two months of work, according to employees, or almost 50% more than news reports say its highest wages usually are.
Employees complained that after they arrived, they were told they had to work an additional two months at lower pay to received the higher wage, according to an employee, Li Sanshan.
Foxconn offered up to $1,400 to new hires who choose to leave, the finance news outlet Cailianshe reported, citing unidentified recruiting agents.
Foxconn’s statement Thursday said employees who leave will receive unspecified “care subsidies” but gave no details. It promised “comprehensive support” for those who stay.
The protests in Zhengzhou come amid public frustration over restrictions that have confined millions of people to their homes. Videos on social media show residents in some areas tearing down barricades set up to enforce neighborhood closures.
Foxconn, headquartered in New Taipei City, Taiwan, earlier denied what it said were comments online that employees with the virus lived in factory dormitories.
The Georgia Supreme Court Wednesday reinstated the state’s ban on abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy.
In a one-page order, the high court put a lower court ruling overturning the ban on hold while it considers an appeal. Abortion providers who had resumed performing the procedure past six weeks after the lower court ruling will again have to stop.
The order said seven of the nine justices had agreed to the decision. It said one was disqualified and another did not participate.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled on November 15 that the state’s abortion ban was invalid because when it was signed into law in 2019, U.S. Supreme Court precedent under Roe. v. Wade and another ruling allowed abortion well past six weeks.
The decision immediately prohibited enforcement of the abortion ban statewide. Abortion providers had resumed performing the procedure past six weeks, though some said they were proceeding cautiously over concerns the ban could be quickly reinstated.
Abortion rights protesters participate in nationwide demonstrations following the leaked Supreme Court opinion suggesting the possibility of overturning the Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., May 14, 2022.
ALYSSA POINTER / REUTERS
The state attorney general’s office appealed the ruling to the state Supreme Court. It also asked the high court for an order putting the decision on hold while the appeal was pending.
Georgia’s ban took effect in July, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It prohibited most abortions once a “detectable human heartbeat” was present.
Cardiac activity can be detected by ultrasound in cells within an embryo that will eventually become the heart around six weeks into a pregnancy. That means most abortions in Georgia were effectively banned at a point before many people knew they were pregnant.
The Biden administration declared Thursday that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince should be considered immune from a lawsuit over his role in the killing of a U.S.-based journalist, a turnaround from Joe Biden’s passionate campaign trail denunciations of Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the brutal slaying.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attends the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference in the Saudi capital Riyadh on October 23, 2018.
FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP via Getty Images
The administration said the senior position of the crown prince, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and recently named prime minister as well, should shield him against a suit brought by the fiancée of slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and by the rights group Khashoggi founded, Democracy for the Arab World Now.
The request is non-binding and a judge will ultimately decide whether to grant immunity. But it is bound to anger human rights activists and many U.S. lawmakers, coming as Saudi Arabia has stepped up imprisonment and other retaliation against peaceful critics at home and abroad and has cut oil production, a move seen as undercutting efforts by the U.S. and its allies to punish Russia for its war against Ukraine.
The State Department on Thursday called the administration’s call to shield the Saudi crown prince from U.S. courts in Khashoggi’s killing “purely a legal determination.”
The State Department cited what it said was longstanding precedent. Despite its recommendation to the court, the State Department said in its filing late Thursday, it “takes no view on the merits of the present suit and reiterates its unequivocal condemnation of the heinous murder of Jamal Khashoggi.”
Saudi officials killed Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. They are believed to have dismembered him, although his remains have never been found. The U.S. intelligence community concluded Saudi Arabia’s crown prince had approved the killing of the widely known and respected journalist, who had written critically of Prince Mohammed’s harsh ways of silencing of those he considered rivals or critics.
The Biden administration statement Thursday noted visa restrictions and other penalties that it had meted out to lower-ranking Saudi officials in the death.
“From the earliest days of this Administration, the United States Government has expressed its grave concerns regarding Saudi agents’ responsibility for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder,” the State Department said. Its statement did not mention the crown prince’s own alleged role.
Mr. Biden as a candidate vowed to make a “pariah” out of Saudi rulers over the 2018 killing of Khashoggi.
“I think it was a flat-out murder,” Biden said in a 2019 CNN town hall, as a candidate. “And I think we should have nailed it as that. I publicly said at the time we should treat it that way and there should be consequences relating to how we deal with those — that power.”
But Mr. Biden as president has sought to ease tensions with the kingdom, including bumping fists with Prince Mohammed on a July trip to the kingdom, as the U.S. works to persuade Saudi Arabia to undo a series of cuts in oil production.
Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, and DAWN sued the crown prince, his top aides and others in Washington federal court over their alleged roles in Khashoggi’s killing. Saudi Arabia says the prince had no direct role in the slaying.
“It’s beyond ironic that President Biden has singlehandedly assured MBS can escape accountability when it was President Biden who promised the American people he would do everything to hold him accountable,” the head of DAWN, Sarah Leah Whitson, said in a statement, using the prince’s acronym.
Mr. Biden in February 2021 had ruled out the U.S. government imposing punishment on Prince Mohammed himself in the killing of Khashoggi, a resident of the Washington area. Mr. Biden, speaking after he authorized release of a declassified version of the intelligence community’s findings on Prince Mohammed’s role in the killing, argued at the time there was no precedent for the U.S. to move against the leader of a strategic partner.
The U.S. military long has safeguarded Saudi Arabia from external enemies, in exchange for Saudi Arabia keeping global oil markets afloat.
“It’s impossible to read the Biden administration’s move today as anything more than a capitulation to Saudi pressure tactics, including slashing oil output to twist our arms to recognize MBS’s fake immunity ploy,” Whitson said.
A federal judge in Washington had given the U.S. government until midnight Thursday to express an opinion on the claim by the crown prince’s lawyers that Prince Mohammed’s high official standing renders him legally immune in the case.
The Biden administration also had the option of not stating an opinion either way.
Sovereign immunity, a concept rooted in international law, holds that states and their officials are protected from some legal proceedings in other foreign states’ domestic courts.
Upholding the concept of “sovereign immunity” helps ensure that American leaders in turn don’t have to worry about being hauled into foreign courts to face lawsuits in other countries, the State Department said.
Human rights advocates had argued that the Biden administration would embolden Prince Mohammed and other authoritarian leaders around the world in more rights abuses if it supported the crown prince’s claim that his high office shielded him from prosecution.
Prince Mohammed serves as Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler in the stead of his aged father, King Salman. The Saudi king in September also temporarily transferred his title of prime minister — a title normally held by the Saudi monarch — to Prince Mohammed. Critics called it a bid to strengthen Mohammed’s immunity claim.
Outside the Maricopa County tabulation center last weekend, a few dozen outraged Arizonans paced single file along the sidewalk waving KARI LAKE flags. Through megaphones, some of them denounced imaginary corruption schemes and clamored for a “redo” election. Others chanted the Lord’s Prayer, like the musicians on the Titanic playing hymns to calm the passengers.
The noteworthy thing about the Maricopa protest, though, wasn’t the scene. It was its singularity. Two years ago, shouts of “Stop the steal!” could be heard across the country in nearly every state. This year, the refrain was largely limited to one block in downtown Phoenix, where at times reporters outnumbered the demonstrators.
If any state was going to devolve into chaos after a disappointing election for Republicans, it would have been Arizona—ground zero for election denial in 2020, and where this year, primary voters nominated an entire slate of fringe election cranks to all of the state’s major offices. Instead, the midterms delivered a sure blow to the election-denial movement, both there and everywhere else: The most prominent conspiracists, such as the Arizona secretary-of-state candidate Mark Finchem and Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano, lost by significant margins; some of these candidates even acknowledged their losses by—surprise!—actually conceding. On Monday night, Lake was declared the loser in her race for Arizona’s governorship, adding a final note to what has seemed like a comprehensive repudiation of the denialists. And where experts and reporters had anticipated widespread election-fraud mayhem, nothing close to it has yet emerged.
It would be foolish, though, to pronounce “Stop the Steal” dead. The movement may have fizzled without Donald Trump, but if he runs again in 2024, we haven’t seen the last of it. Even if Trump isn’t on the ballot, an entire swath of the Republican Party is now open to the idea that any narrow loss can be blamed on fraud. Trust in elections among rank-and-file GOP voters remains low, and in some respects has gotten worse, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center. The damage inflicted in 2020 endures. “He’s broken the seal,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of TheBulwark, told me. Election denial “is part of our politics now.”
Things could have been so much worse.
Ahead of the election, poll workers in Arizona and beyond feared for their safety, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law reported an uptick in calls to its Election Protection hotline. In the Phoenix suburbs, armed men were patrolling ballot drop-off sites. The day before the election, I watched a group of women stake out a ballot box, studying voters through binoculars for signs of cheating. The central counting facility in downtown Phoenix was fenced off with a ring of plastic Jersey barriers, and police patrolled the streets on horseback.
Election officials in Maricopa County, who appeared very tightly wound, held a press conference to get ahead of any potential claims of election chicanery. A time-consuming vote count does not indicate fraud, they reminded the room full of reporters; ballots are processed and reviewed by bipartisan teams; tabulation machines work.
Unfortunately, events on Election Day quickly undermined those careful efforts at reassurance. The sun had not yet risen when the first handful of tabulation machines stopped reading ballots. By midday, dozens of machines were malfunctioning at polling sites throughout the county. Voters at those sites were told to feed their ballots into “Door 3,” a regrettably sinister-sounding name for a secure slot that would sort the misread ballots to be counted later. And they would be counted later, as officials reassured voters in a series of follow-up press conferences.
Voters I spoke with were understandably confused and frustrated. And the malfunctioning machines had state GOP leaders immediately taking to Twitter to suggest wrongdoing. “They are incompetent and/or engaging in malfeasance just like in 2020,” GOP Chair Kelli Ward posted. Those complaints spiraled into partisan hysteria as the counting went on. Frustrated MAGA commentators suggested that Maricopa County officials had engaged in outright corruption and “CIVIC TERRORISM.” Finchem accused them of “screwing with the election counts.”
Still, despite those initial glitches and dark mutterings, Election Day unfolded mostly without threats or funny business. Poll workers weren’t harmed, and voters were, for the most part, not intimidated. Almost everyone on the America First Secretary of State Coalition slate lost last week, including Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who’d described Democrats as having a “satanic agenda”; Finchem, the mustachioed Oath Keeper of Arizona; and the head of the coalition himself, Nevada’s Jim Marchant.
Parroting Trump’s election lies got many Republican candidates across the finish line in their primary. Finchem’s repeated election-fraud claims won him a regular spot on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. The former president has praised Lake’s commitment to the bit, too, reportedly telling donors that even if asked about the weather, Lake would find a way to bring the conversation back to 2020.But thesewild claims proved poisonous to moderates and swing voters—polling suggests that some went to the polls explicitly to vote against deniers. We know this because many Republicans who didn’t traffic in election lies performed well: Brian Kemp beat Stacey Abrams by almost eight points in the Georgia governor’s race. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis won reelection by nearly 20 points.
Fans of democracy can take heart that only 14 out of 94 election deniers won in races for positions that oversee elections, including secretary of state, attorney general, and governor, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for election integrity. Of those 14, only five candidates were not incumbents. “The movement is still not gaining ground,” Joanna Lydgate, the CEO of States United Action, told me.
That things didn’t turn out worse is a relief, given the chaos of 2020. But the dynamic of this year’s election was different in a few important ways. Republicans were on the defensive back then: The general election was a national referendum on their president. This year, Trump himself wasn’t on the ballot—whereas, in 2020, he had spent months priming the base to blame polling fraud if he lost. It’s clear now that nobody does Stop the Steal like 45.
“The thing that gives you power as an election denier is that people believe you, and Trump was able to make people believe him,” Longwell told me. Few other candidates have that power, and none in this midterm election could nationalize the issue as he did in the presidential contest. This time, the GOP had no central character over whom Trump supporters could feel outraged.
Yet the election-fraud fires that Trump and his allies have fanned for so long will not be easily extinguished. If repeated audits and cold evidence haven’t done enough to deter conspiracists these past two years, then a disappointing midterm cycle won’t dissuade them either.
Election deniers didn’t win in swing states, but elsewhere they did. Four of them will oversee elections in Indiana, Wyoming, Alabama, and South Dakota. More than 200 Republicans running for Congress and statewide positions who’d questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election won or retained their office last week, including more than 180 in the House. Other election deniers won at the state level in ultraconservative districts across the country. These ruby-red areas might sink deeper into denial, creating islands where both voters and officials are debilitatingly distrustful of elections.
Take Cochise County, Arizona. There, 170 miles southeast of Phoenix, some GOP election officials have been hankering to do a full hand-count audit in the election. Paradoxically, Republican candidates won handily there both this year and in 2020, so no obvious motive for distrusting the results is apparent. But the years-long drumbeat of misinformation from the state GOP chair, Ward, and her allied band of election-fraud kooks have nurtured a deep suspicion of the whole process.
Republican leaders in Arizona don’t believe in machine tabulation and view hand counts as the purest, most accurate way to tally votes—never mind the extensive evidence that the opposite is true. This year, Cochise County tried to forge ahead with a full hand-count audit, even after a judge ordered local officials not to. Only a timely ruling from the Arizona Supreme Court last week kept them from carrying one out. “What I’ll be doing over the next two years is looking at these counties that have gone really hard to the right,” Jessica Huseman, the editorial director of Votebeat, a nonpartisan election-news outlet, told me. “Because there’s no one to push back.”
Even in states where election deniers lost, voters have been primed to suspect outcomes they don’t like, glitches they don’t understand, and delays in counting. “If [Lake] doesn’t announce that she’s going to win tonight, we might have to go through like a week or so of shenanigans—the same shenanigans that they pulled in 2020,” Stephen Tenner, a former actor from New York, told me at a lavish GOP Election Night party in Scottsdale. “We’re waiting for it this time; we weren’t ready last time. So we’re going to catch the fraud.”
Other Republicans I interviewed were less persuaded of the likelihood of fraud, but were comfortable entertaining the idea. “I’d like to go back to same-day voting and paper ballots. There are problems with machines,” a man named William from Phoenix, who declined to give his last name, told me at the party. Would he blame fraud if Republicans lost? I asked. “Well, there were problems with the elections two years ago,” he said, adding that, this time around, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs should have recused herself from official duties during the election. “I would be hesitant to say I thought [this one] was completely honest.”
The thing about trust is that it’s painstakingly hard to build and relatively easy to demolish. Election denial is now a chronic wound in America’s body politic, only partially healed, and ready to reopen—red and raw—whenever circumstances permit. Those circumstances may arise sooner rather than later if Trump is on the ballot again in 2024. Even if he isn’t, the former president has already broken the tradition of gracious presidential concessions and peaceful transfers of power. He’s encouraged a populist animus toward institutions that will likely remain a litmus test for future Republican candidates. And more than anything, Trump has created a blueprint for exploiting the messiness and complexity of America’s elections. An audience for this type of exploitation is still out there, if Republicans want to take advantage of it.
On Monday, after Maricopa County released a decisive batch of ballots that led all major news networks to declare Hobbs the next governor of Arizona, a few members of Team Lake sprang into action to ensure that any ballots with errors were quickly cured. That’s a standard and legitimate procedure in elections, and can be helpful in especially close ones. But other Republicans continued to follow the denialist script. Ward accused Maricopa County of voter suppression. Finchem, the failed secretary-of-state candidate, began to do the impossible calculations. “I should win by 3% and @KariLake should win by 11%,” he tweeted. “If that doesn’t happen you know the real story.”
Lake’s own account was silent for more than an hour after the networks had called the race. After all of this, would this cycle’s Stop the Steal standard-bearer actually concede? The answer came at 10:30 p.m. eastern, with a simple tweet: “Arizonans know BS when they see it,” Lake wrote.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said Tuesday it would back proposed federal legislation to safeguard same-sex marriages, marking the latest show of support for the measure from conservative-leaning groups.
The nearly 17-million member, Utah-based faith said in a statement that church doctrine would continue to consider same-sex relationships to be against God’s commandments. Yet it said it would support rights for same-sex couples as long as they didn’t infringe upon religious groups’ right to believe as they choose.
“We believe this approach is the way forward. As we work together to preserve the principles and practices of religious freedom together with the rights of LGBTQ individuals much can be accomplished to heal relationships and foster greater understanding,” the church said in a statement posted on its website.
Support for the Respect for Marriage Act under consideration in Congress is the church’s latest step to stake out a more welcoming stance toward the LGBTQ community while holding firm to its belief that same-sex relationships are sinful. Still, its stance toward LGBTQ people — including those who grow up in the church — remains painful for many.
The Washington D.C. Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Kensington, Maryland, U.S., on Monday, April 18, 2022.
Bloomberg
Patrick Mason, a professor of religious studies at Utah State University, said the church’s position was both a departure from and continuation of its past stances — respecting laws yet working to safeguard religious liberty and ensuring they won’t be forced to perform same-sex marriages or grant them official church sanction.
“This is part of the church’s overall theology essentially sustaining the law of the land, recognizing that what they dictate and enforce for their members in terms of their behavior is different than what it means to be part of a pluralistic society,” he said.
The faith opposes same-sex marriage and sexual intimacy, but it has taken a more welcoming stance to LGBTQ people in recent years. In 2016, it declared that same-sex attraction is not a sin, while maintaining that acting on it was.
The bill, which has won support from Democrats and Republicans, is set for a test vote in the Senate Wednesday, with a final vote as soon as this week or later this month. It comes after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, with Justice Clarence Thomas issuing a concurring opinion indicating that an earlier high court decision protecting same-sex marriage could come under threat.
The legislation would repeal the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act and require states to recognize all marriages that were legal where they were performed. It would also protect interracial marriages by requiring states to recognize legal marriages regardless of “sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin.” It makes clear that the rights of private individuals and businesses wouldn’t be affected.
Utah’s four congressmen — who are all members of the church — each voiced support for the legislation earlier this year.
People gather to watch a large television screen at City Hall prior to the California Supreme Court hearing on same–sex marriages, in San Francisco, California, March 5, 2009.
Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The church’s public stance is a stark contrast from 14 years ago, when its members were among the largest campaign contributors in support of California’s Prop. 8, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman in response to cities such as San Francisco granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Troy Williams, the executive director of Equality Utah, said it was “thrilling” to see the church part of the coalition in support of the legislation.
“Despite differences we may have, we can always discover common ground on laws that support the strengthening of all families,” Williams, who grew up a church member, said.
The faith opposes laws that would make it illegal for churches to not allow same-sex couples to marry on their property. But it has supported state-based efforts to pass laws that prohibit employment and housing discrimination as long as they clarify respect for religious freedom.
The Respect for Marriage Act neither fully codifies the U.S. Supreme Court decision that enshrined a federal right to same-sex marriage nor details all religious liberty concerns of those who object to it.
Faith groups see it as vehicle for passing religious liberty protections they haven’t been able to in the past, said Tim Schultz, the president of the 1st Amendment Partnership.
Schultz’s organization is advocating for religious liberty on behalf of a coalition concerned with that subject — a coalition that includes The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Same-sex marriage has achieved broad appeal in our culture in significant part because it hasn’t trampled on people who believe in traditional marriage,” he said.
Have you ever met someone who’s watching their life’s work—their very legacy—fall apart in front of their eyes? I’m talking to two of them right now.
Earl and Mary Rose Wilcox spent the morning juggling plates of chorizo and shouting orders in Spanish toward the kitchen behind them. Now they’re catching their breath in a corner booth at El Portal, the South Phoenix restaurant they’ve run for two decades. They point out the members of their family depicted in a mural on the nearby wall, retracing the mission that brought them to this place and wondering aloud how it all went wrong.
I came to Arizona looking to answer the question of why, over the past few years, so many Hispanics have fled the Democratic Party. This exodus is evident across numerous counties, congressional districts, and battleground states, but the stakes seem highest in Arizona, where Republicans are promoting a slate of extremist candidates and counting on Hispanic voters to help put them in office.
What I found is Earl and Mary Rose, a couple in their mid-70s and the twin bosses of a Phoenix political machine, reckoning with the same awful conclusion I have heard from so many Hispanics, both here and around the country. “The party doesn’t care about us,” Mary Rose tells me. “They pretend to care every two years.”
When Earl and Mary Rose bought El Portal in 1999, in the working-class barrio of Grant Park, they didn’t know much about running a kitchen. Earl had been one of few Hispanic lawmakers in the state legislature; Mary Rose broke barriers twice, as the first Hispanic woman ever elected to the city council and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. But the Wilcoxes envisioned the cramped, dusky dining room of El Portal as more than a place for cheap tacos and tequila; it would be a de facto headquarters for the city’s Hispanic Democrats. There weren’t many of them. But Earl and Mary Rose knew that was about to change.
The Hispanic population was just beginning to boom, and the potential of these voters to tip elections toward Democrats—nationally, but particularly in states like Arizona—was becoming more apparent with every campaign. Hispanics are not a monolith, even if the political class treated them as such. The Wilcoxes wanted to harness the political promise of their community. What they didn’t want was to be taken advantage of. They felt that Democrats were prone to patronizing Hispanics, offering noble rhetoric but never a seat at the table. Earl and Mary Rose decided that the only way to advance their interests was to start organizing, creating a base of power separate from the party’s, making the Hispanic vote so essential that no Democrat could win without it.
The Wilcoxes staged protests, hosted candidate events, ran voter-registration drives, transported voters to the polls. Yet the next two decades brought little but defeat: Two losing battles over comprehensive immigration reform. The signing of S.B. 1070, Arizona’s law codifying racial profiling. Perpetual conflict with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who terrorized Hispanic neighborhoods with “round-ups” and targeted his political opponents. (He once indicted Mary Rose; she and Earl sued him and the county for violating their civil rights, resulting in a $975,000 settlement.) And then there was Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency.
Mary Rose and Earl Wilcox, top, co-owners of El Portal, bottom, a restaurant in South Phoenix (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Finally, in 2020, a breakthrough: Joe Biden didn’t just win the election, he won Arizona, only the second time since Harry Truman’s administration that a Democrat had carried the state. Given Biden’s winning margin—three-tenths of a percentage point—and the unprecedented turnout of Hispanic voters, there could be no disputing who had delivered Arizona to the president-elect.
The state’s Hispanic population had tripled since 1990, but Republicans had spent those years doubling down on the harsh policing and immigration policies that appealed to their white conservative base. Earl and Mary Rose had spent decades waiting for the GOP’s bill to come due. On Election Night 2020, they toasted to a new era.
And then the strangest thing happened. People started coming into El Portal to vent their frustrations and unload their grievances—against the Democratic Party.
“Our community, we may not be educated at the highest levels, but we have a lot of street smarts. We know when people are bullshitting us,” Earl tells me, motioning to the people sitting around us. “You know what they say to Democrats now? ‘Es pura cábula.’ Bunch of bullshit.”
Over the past few years, Hispanics have begun abandoning the Democratic Party, defying generations of political patterns and causing varying degrees of panic on the left. In the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives, they won the Hispanic vote by 40 points nationally. In 2020, Democrats still carried the vote by an estimated 33 points against Trump himself, though the party’s margin against GOP candidates nationwide shrank to 27 points. This summer, numerous polls showed Hispanics splitting in a statistical tie between the two parties. Even if such findings are exaggerated—several recent surveys have shown Democrats reestablishing an advantage among these voters—it’s evident that Republicans are poised next week to win their biggest share of Hispanics in the modern era.
Whether this translates into outright GOP victories is harder to predict, given the party’s continued hemorrhaging of white suburban voters. Indeed, this is what makes the implications of a Hispanic partisan realignment so profound: At a moment when Democrats have begun to dominate the affluent, college-educated vote that for decades formed the cornerstone of the Republican coalition, perhaps the only thing that can keep the GOP competitive is an infusion of support from the very middle- and working-class Hispanics who were, at this moment in history, supposed to deliver the Democrats a foolproof majority.
Given the ferocity of the criticisms Earl relays to me from his patrons—Democrats are insufficiently patriotic; they are elitist in their cultural sensibilities; and they are oblivious to the struggles and priorities of working people—I ask the obvious question: How durable is his party’s hold on the Hispanic vote?
Guests gather for an anniversary party at the American Legion post next door to El Portal. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
He thinks for a moment. There’s a professor from Arizona State, he tells me, who comes by often. One recent morning, after overhearing some of Earl’s regulars sounding off on the Democratic Party over breakfast, the professor pulled him aside. He could sense that Earl was anxious, and told him not to worry. Whatever gains the GOP was making were bound to be temporary. Hispanics, the professor told him, would never abandon the Democratic Party.
Earl shakes his head. “I’m not so sure anymore,” he says.
The Democrats’ predicament today is 20 years in the making.
It’s almost hard to remember now, but in 2002, Democrats were deep in the minority. The president, George W. Bush, was immensely popular, and the GOP was about to win strong congressional majorities in the midterms. There was no easy path back to power for Democrats. Salvation arrived in the form of a book, written by the political scientist Ruy Teixeira and the journalist John B. Judis, called The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book, which analyzed evolving social structures relative to voting behaviors, argued that because America was becoming more educated, more urban, more secular, and more diverse, Democrats were “on the verge of establishing the same kind of ‘lock’ on the electoral college that the Republicans enjoyed in the 1980s.”
On the left, the book was treated as something akin to divine prophecy. Though Teixeira and Judis took pains to avoid having their work reduced to an end-of-white-America analysis, it was inevitable: The book documented how, every election cycle, minorities were increasing as a share of the overall electorate while non-college-educated white voters were decreasing at an even faster clip. A phrase that appeared nowhere in the book—“Demographics are destiny”—became a kind of support-group mantra for progressives whose consolation after Bush’s reelection in 2004 was the assurance of a long game that was already being won.
“It took hold because, let’s face it, this was something Democrats really wanted to hear,” Teixeira, a Democrat himself, told me this summer. “And so, of course, when Obama got elected in 2008, it was viewed as a validation of that analysis—even though Obama’s election was more complicated than that.”
Democrats had won big among nonwhite voters since the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. What set apart Barack Obama’s victory wasn’t necessarily his margins—he carried two-thirds of Hispanics, per exit polls, and 95 percent of Blacks—but the mass mobilization of these and other groups that had historically gone underrepresented. Obama assembled “a coalition of the ascendant,” as my colleague Ron Brownstein put it, cornering the demographics—young people, women with college degrees, and minorities, particularly Hispanics—that were emerging as the future of the electorate. By emphasizing these groups, by elevating them and celebrating their inclusion in the party’s coalition, Democrats were portraying themselves as the party of a new America.
When Obama put that same winning coalition back together in 2012, running up the same crushing margins among nonwhite voters, “Demography is destiny” became conventional wisdom, and not just on the left. Two days after Mitt Romney’s defeat, Fox’s Sean Hannity called for comprehensive immigration reform, complete with a path to citizenship, lest Hispanic voters usher Republicans into permanent minority status. The national GOP commissioned an autopsy report focused on repairing the relationship with Hispanics. Senator Lindsey Graham, who led a team of Republicans on a doomed mission to fix the nation’s immigration laws, warned that his party was entering “a demographic death spiral.”
But neither the left nor the right really understood Hispanics, who were motivated by different issues than were Blacks—to the extent that they could be accurately categorized at all. In Florida alone, Cubans are generally more conservative than Colombians, who are generally more conservative than Puerto Ricans; the Mexicans who live across the Southwest have distinct ideological profiles that depend on how long they’ve been in the United States. All the emphasis on nonwhites, and the GOP’s inability to win them, made it hard to see the very different reasons that different blocs had for supporting Democrats—or their different degrees of partisan loyalty.
Josue Gomez, Alejandro Villa, and Brandon Gomez canvas a neighborhood in South Phoenix, encouraging residents to register to vote. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“In my opinion, the Latino vote has always had a swing dimension to it,” says Carlos Odio, a former Obama aide who specialized in Hispanic outreach and in 2019 co-founded the Miami-based firm Equis Labs. “Now, it just so happened to swing the same way over a series of elections. It’s like a coin flip landed on heads, over and over again, for a variety of reasons. But we keep thinking the coin will always land on heads. I think it’s a mistake.”
There are two ironies at work. The first is that it required the presidency of Donald Trump—he of the “I love Hispanics!” caption on a Cinco de Mayo tweet, fork digging into a Trump Tower taco bowl—for some Democrats to question their own dogma. Trump was supposed to be uniquely unacceptable to minorities, and to Hispanics in particular, given his assessment of Mexicans as, among other things, “rapists.” Yet Democrats didn’t see major gains with Hispanics during his four years in office. Instead, their margins shrank.
“In the end, the 2020 election wasn’t won by the ‘ascendant’ nonwhite voters at all,” Teixeira told me. “It was the college-educated white voters who won the election for Biden.”
Hence the second irony: The very thing that breathed life into the Democratic Party 20 years ago—the focus on identity and inclusion—is making it more popular with white voters, and less popular with Hispanic voters. (This is what far-right fear merchants like Tucker Carlson fail to grasp: The immigrants demonized by his “Great Replacement” rhetoric are now, in some respects, likelier to vote Republican than the people they are supposedly replacing.)
Democrats like Teixeira believe that the party has become culturally detached from Hispanic voters, moving too far left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights. Democrats like Odio say the real problem is a “class disconnect” in which Democrats are catering to the cultural concerns of economically secure whites at the expense of the pocketbook priorities of working-class Hispanics.
Neither man is wrong. Hispanics are leaving the Democratic Party for many different reasons. This represents “a sea change” in our politics, Teixeira said, whether his fellow Democrats want to accept it or not. “The idea that what we’re seeing from the Hispanic vote recently is a deviation, and that they will snap back to their historic preference for the Democrats two to one, I think it’s a total illusion,” he said. “The real question is how far this trend goes.”
The timing couldn’t be worse for Democrats. According to Pew Research, the U.S. Hispanic population has grown to 62 million from fewer than 10 million in 1970. (Hispanics accounted for more than half of America’s population growth from 2010 to 2020.) In the last election, Hispanics eclipsed African Americans in terms of raw eligible voters. Hispanics are not yet a national force—their numbers are still diluted in the upper Midwest, for instance—but in several key battleground states, such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona, they have become the most essential, and most coveted, demographic.
“We’re in a game of tug-of-war. There are two sides,” Odio told me. “Democrats are going to lose where they let go of the rope.”
I asked him where Democrats are in the most trouble with Hispanic voters, and Odio didn’t hesitate. It’s the place where he lives: Miami, Florida.
Juan Cuba can still remember the moment he began to worry.
It was 2013, and Democrats were euphoric after Obama’s back-to-back victories. Not only had the president carried Florida in both elections, but he had made a statement in Miami-Dade County, a place crowded with Cuban Americans, who, due to historic distrust of the Democratic Party dating back to John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs, have aligned more with the GOP than have other Hispanics. Obama won the state’s most populous county by 16 points in 2008 and 24 points in 2012. In a place where Republicans had spent a generation building relationships with Hispanic voters—much of it thanks to Jeb Bush, the popular bilingual governor, whose brother ran two ultracompetitive presidential campaigns in Miami-Dade—Obama’s triumphs felt like a watershed.
Campaign volunteers rally primary voters in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
And yet Cuba, who assumed the role of executive director of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party after Obama’s reelection, started seeing red flags. As the 2014 midterm campaign got under way, Democrats spoke with a certainty—bordering on arrogance—about the Hispanic vote being locked up. Those who had turned out for Obama, Cuba told me, were now considered part of the party base. Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee for governor, campaigned as if Hispanics were a sure thing. They would vote, and they would vote for Democrats.
Crist lost the governor’s race by about 64,000 votes. And although he won Miami-Dade by a sizable margin, turnout lagged relative to both parties’ expectations. “Had we engaged more voters, especially Hispanic voters, we would have won that race,” Cuba said.
When Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination in 2016, Democrats in South Florida stressed to her team the importance of not repeating that mistake. Clinton poured resources into Miami-Dade, running a ground game that located existing voters, registered new ones, and tracked both to make sure they were casting ballots. Cuba’s concerns about the party’s complacency were assuaged. He had a new worry, however. The messages used by Clinton and her Democratic allies to mobilize Hispanic voters were nothing like what they’d used in the Obama campaigns. There was little about hope and change. It was mostly about fear and victimhood.
“I’m an immigrant myself, and when I think back to what worked on those Obama campaigns, it was really that he spoke to the aspirations of Hispanics. He talked about the American dream. He gave people a sense of how the Democratic Party was about social mobility through hard work,” Cuba said. “But by 2016, we’d become less the party of the American dream, and more the party of anti-Trump.”
It worked, at least initially: Clinton carried Miami-Dade by nearly 30 points against Trump—an unprecedented margin in Florida’s biggest county. But Cuba, who rose to the position of county party chair in 2017, recalls how quickly the anti-Trump message began losing potency. The economy was roaring to life after eight sluggish years of post-recession recovery at the same time that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, emboldened by Bernie Sanders’s insurgency in 2016, was espousing an open distrust of capitalism and questioning the existence of opportunity and upward mobility in America.
“I’ll never forget, we did a focus group with Hispanic voters in 2019,” Cuba said. “It was clear that a lot of these Hispanics voted against Trump in 2016 because they were scared of him. And by 2019, they weren’t scared anymore.”
María-Elena López has held a variety of positions within the Miami-Dade Democratic Party. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
María-Elena López, who held a variety of positions under Cuba in the county party, saw this shift taking place in real time. She believes that there is no real mystery to it: While Trump successfully portrayed himself as a populist achieving hard-won economic growth—signing tax cuts into law, touting a record-shattering stock market, boasting the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in history—Democrats came across as a bunch of out-of-touch idealogues. Promises of shared social progress, she told me, offend the sensibilities of many first- and second-generation immigrants who hate the idea of government handouts.
“We’re not a political party, we’re a charity. And you know what? These people don’t want charity,” López said. “These immigrants come here to make money and keep their families safe. They are not here because the sea levels are rising, or because of social justice, or anything else. We’re out there talking about racism and the Green New Deal and defunding the police, and we’re freaking them out.”
López is a former Republican who, in the mid-1990s, became estranged from the GOP of her youth. She became an avid Democrat during Obama’s first run, got deeply involved with local party politics, and today serves as first vice chair of the county party. She counts herself as a progressive on nearly every issue. But, López said, many of her fellow progressives don’t appreciate how fundamentally conservative the Hispanic community is—more religious, more entrepreneurial, more working class—relative to the other cogs in the Democratic coalition.
At one point in our conversation, I mentioned to López how the overturning of Roe v. Wade seemed to be muddying forecasts of a Republican romp at the polls in November; how some Democrats, particularly those running in wealthy white suburbs, were gaining momentum in their campaigns by hammering the GOP’s anti-abortion platform. López, who had been quite animated, suddenly lowered her voice.
“You see, that’s a perfect example. I’m telling every single one of my candidates here, do not talk about abortion in this campaign,” López said. “You have a lot of Latinos who are fine with abortion being the law of the land—but they are against it morally. They may not be, quote-unquote, pro-life, but don’t shove the issue in their face. Don’t force them to choose sides. They might not choose the side you would think.”
To some extent, López said, the same principle applies to other issues she feels Democrats are enamored of—green energy and racial justice, individual pronouns and group identities. “What the hell is a ‘Latinx’?” she said, throwing up her arms. “Now we’re inventing language?” (This was but one of the many unsolicited rants I heard against the term Latinx.)
Campaign volunteers surround Maria Dominguez and her children as she votes in the Florida primary. Originally from Nicaragua, Dominguez recently obtained U.S. citizenship; it was her first time voting in the country. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
López said it’s all about opportunity cost: Every minute Democrats spend on topics that appeal to small portions of their existing base is time that could have been spent speaking to a single theme that preoccupies voters across the ideological spectrum: jobs, opportunity, upward mobility. “You can still be the party of all those other things,” she said. “Just don’t talk about them so much.”
Of course, the challenge for Democrats isn’t just modulating the message; it’s also combating the right-wing misinformation machine.
When I sat down with Joe Garcia on the narrow, concrete-slabbed patio of a Miami Beach café, the former congressman spoke in fatalistic tones. A political party is only as good as its rhetoric, Garcia told me, and in South Florida, “Democrats are losing the rhetoric war to Republicans—badly.”
Garcia, who was elected alongside Obama in 2012 and represented his native Cuban neighborhoods in western Miami-Dade, said Republicans have always been craftier in delivering their messages on Spanish-language TV and radio. What’s new, he said, is the way conservatives have swarmed the most popular social-media pages and WhatsApp chat groups in his community, relentlessly circulating half-sourced posts that portray the Democratic Party as weak on crime and soft on socialism.
Former Representative Joe Garcia smokes a cigar outside Pinecrest Bakery in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“Look at Biden’s new Cuba policies, for instance,” Garcia said. What the administration announced in the spring—the relaunching of a family-reunification program, increased flights to the island, an easing of restrictions on the money Americans can send and invest there—“should actually be more popular with Cubans than Trump’s hard-line policies,” Garcia said.
But the White House—according to numerous Democrats on the ground—did nothing to coordinate a messaging strategy around these policy changes. Nobody here could get booked on a local news program, or write a social-media post defending the new policies, because they found out about them at the same time everyone in the general public did. As a result, Garcia told me, puffing a massive Cuban cigar, “Democrats are getting killed, every single day, on Spanish-language media here, even though it’s an argument we should be winning.”
This episode reflects a broader intellectual arrogance, Garcia said. The conviction that history and demography are on the Democrats’ side dulls the political instinct of persuasion. “Look, I’m a big fan of Barack Obama. But he turned our party into a religious order,” he said. “When you think you’re right—no, when you know you’re right—everybody should just get it. You stop making the argument.”
Garcia pointed to 2018, when Democrats nominated Andrew Gillum for governor—a candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Garcia and his fellow Democrats in Miami could already recite the attacks on Gillum as a sleeper socialist. When those attacks came, Gillum didn’t do much to dispel them. (When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked if he was a socialist, Gillum replied simply, “No, I’m a Democrat.”) He wound up winning Miami-Dade by 21 points—down from Clinton’s 30-point margin two years before—and lost the election by 32,463 votes statewide. “Let’s face it,” Garcia said. “We lost the governorship to Ron DeSantis because our nominee wouldn’t come out and say, ‘I’m not a goddamn socialist.’”
Democrats here say the national party should have learned a hard lesson from that campaign. Instead, after 2018, the party’s ranks began to swell with influential young progressives, such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who championed far-left policies while openly embracing the socialist label. Moderate Democrats were reluctant to push back. It was a Republican dream come true. By the time Trump ran for reelection in 2020, the GOP had scaled up the socialism attacks nationwide. The reward was clearest in South Florida: Republicans knocked off two Democratic congressional incumbents, and Trump closed the gap in Miami-Dade to seven points, a 23-point swing from the 2016 election.
The name “AOC” came up in dozens of my conversations with Hispanic Democrats around the country, many of whom are struggling to neutralize the socialism charge in their own communities. By turning the young representative into a boogeyman, Garcia told me, Republicans forced Democrats to play defense over labels and abstractions while rendering the left’s version of 21st-century populism unacceptable to a huge swath of the electorate that might otherwise be receptive to it.
Campaign volunteers shout their support for candidates outside the Westchester Regional Library in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“She is not Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Mao, or anything like that. She’s a classic northeastern liberal who’s pushing a social agenda that, in many respects, has real viability at a time like this,” Garcia said of Ocasio-Cortez. “So, how do you shut down the debate? You engage in name-calling. You use propaganda to scare us from acting on the issues most important to our base.”
He also acknowledges, however, that the Democratic base is changing. Progressive policies—around climate, or guns, or even immigration—might poll well with the liberal, college-educated wing of the party. But they might also continue to alienate the working class, including the Hispanic working class, from the Democratic brand. Days before I sat down with Garcia in Miami Beach, a poll from The New York Times and Siena College showed, for the first time in the survey’s history, that “Democrats had a larger share of support among white college graduates than among nonwhite voters.”
This is what Carlos Odio meant when he told me national Democrats have “let go of the rope” in Miami-Dade County. It wasn’t that his party would no longer compete for votes down there; rather, it was that his party was acknowledging a new reality, in which affluent white voters are a higher political priority than are working-class Hispanics. This would have been unthinkable just five years ago. I asked Garcia if he was comfortable with such a trade-off.
He shrugged. “That’s how we won last time.”
In Bruno Lozano’s blue pickup truck, the air-conditioning whistling through every vent, we stopped and gazed at the Del Rio International Bridge. It was here, Lozano told me, that in September 2021 tens of thousands of Haitian migrants gathered underneath the bridge and set up camp for several days in extreme heat. Del Rio had dealt with migrant waves before, but nothing like this. The city could not handle the influx; its border-processing facilities were at capacity, its humanitarian workers past their breaking point. The community was panicked. Lozano, then the mayor, was desperate. Some of these migrants, he thought, were going to die.
“I’m right here, at the bridge, watching this thing spiral out of control. And Democrats in Washington are like, ‘Nothing to see here,’” Lozano said.
Bruno Lozano, left, a former mayor of Del Rio, Texas, says his warnings to Democratic leadership about a deteriorating situation at the southwest border went largely unheeded. An abandoned bus in Del Rio, right, where migrants discarded clothing after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to the United States. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Lozano told me he reached out to every Democratic official he could think of, in Texas and beyond, pleading for any help or resources they could offer. When that failed, he asked them to come visit Del Rio, to at least shine a light on what was happening at the border. “They looked the other way,” Lozano said. “They just pretend it’s not happening.”
When he was elected mayor of Del Rio in 2018, Lozano, just 35 years old at the time, fit the profile of a rising star in the Democratic Party. An openly gay Hispanic military veteran, Lozano “checked every box” for the party. Since he had defeated a Republican incumbent just as his county was beginning to turn red, Lozano said, “you would figure Democrats might listen when I’m telling them something is wrong.”
Lozano said he began sounding the alarm almost as soon as Biden took office. He told his fellow Democrats that, for all the damage done by Trump’s cruel border-security policies, a relaxed approach to border enforcement could prove even more disastrous. He warned them of a potential humanitarian or national-security crisis. He told high-ranking party officials in Austin and in Washington—including during a visit to the White House for an LGBTQ pride event—that Hispanics in his community were turning on the Democratic Party, in part because of its indifference to the chaos at the southern border.
He told me they refused to listen. And today, Lozano said, pulling into the parking lot of a Ramada Inn a few miles from the border, the problem is worse than ever.
The Ramada is where locals host wedding receptions, where businesspeople and politicians meet for breakfast, and where, on a blazing July afternoon, the Del Rio Chamber of Commerce was holding its monthly luncheon. There was no vacancy at the hotel; rooms were booked for Border Patrol agents who had flooded into the area to reinforce a sector that was being overrun.
“This is the biggest wave of illegal immigration in American history, and we’re at the epicenter of it here in Del Rio,” Jason Owens, the Border Patrol’s chief patrol agent of the Del Rio sector, announced at the luncheon. “In the last 24 hours, we’ve apprehended 2,240 people in this sector alone.”
The room buzzed. Forty or so people, local entrepreneurs, most of them Hispanic and many of them lifelong Democrats, exchanged looks of dismay. A few expletives could be heard. Owens wasn’t done.
“In fiscal year 2021, we apprehended nearly 260,000 people in the Del Rio sector. That was more than the previous nine fiscal years combined,” Owens said. “This fiscal year … we are already in excess of 330,000 people apprehended in this sector. Last year was record-breaking; this year, we’ve already shattered it.”
Deputy Jaime Guzman searches for migrants just off the shore of the Rio Grande in Del Rio, Texas. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Part of this can be attributed to the continued enforcement of Title 42, a Covid-era policy that suspended asylum requests and authorized the automatic expulsion of single adult migrants who hailed from certain countries; many of those migrants have been apprehended and expelled more than once, driving the number of crossings higher. Because of the known gaps in America’s immigration policy, Owens said, many migrants in this area follow a trail to where they know Border Patrol will be waiting. Those who are allowed to stay in the U.S.—because they are not subject to expulsion, or because they have no criminal record—are typically processed, then detained or released, with orders to appear at a future court date.
Owens said it’s the migrants who go out of their way not to get caught—he cited data from video monitoring suggesting that roughly 140,000 people have crossed unmolested in this sector in fiscal year 2022—who worry him the most. Those 140,000 who got away combined with the 330,000 apprehensions makes for 470,000 illegal crossings from October through July—in the Del Rio sector alone. “And there are nine sectors along the southwest border,” Owens said.
When he opened the meeting to questions, person after person demanded to know how this could be happening, who was to blame, and what they could do to punish the political actors responsible.
“How do you feel,” Sarita Perales, an administrator from the local hospital, asked, “about the Biden open-border policy?”
Owens fought a smirk. “The administration will tell you that the border’s not open,” he replied, eliciting groans from the audience.
Technically, the border is not open. But you wouldn’t know it from spending a few days in Del Rio. People I spoke with down there said they’d never seen anything like the mass of humanity moving across the border since Biden became president. In fairness, apprehensions at the southern border began to rise in the spring of 2020 and continued to climb throughout Trump’s final year as president. But the numbers spiked much higher after Biden took office. It’s difficult to examine the policies of his administration—which, according to the left-leaning Migration Policy Institute, “narrowed the scope of immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior” and “adopted something of a new approach to border enforcement”—and dispute the conclusion that Democrats have made it easier for migrants to attempt and complete an unlawful crossing into the U.S., making a historically bad problem much worse.
This is exactly what Perales, a mother of four, feared would happen. Born in Mexico, Perales came to the U.S. legally when she was 7 years old and became a naturalized citizen in 2017. Her first opportunity to vote in a presidential election was in 2020, and she felt “so disappointed with my choices.” Perales grew up in Del Rio, a place with deep Democratic roots. She has progressive sensibilities on many social issues. She hated some of the hard-line policies of the Trump administration, including the forced separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the more she listened to activists and elected officials on the left, the more worried she became that Democrats would embrace the other extreme—refusing to secure the border at all.
The fence that separates the United States and Mexico in Val Verde County, left; abandoned backpacks inside a residential home used by migrants while the owner was away, right (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Perales ended up voting for Trump. Despite disagreeing with him and the Republican Party on a host of issues, she told me, she plans to vote a straight-GOP ticket in 2022, because of the chaos Democrats have brought to her community.
“Where is our respect for laws? Where is our respect for the people already here?” Perales said. “I’m an immigrant; I’m also an American. We are allowing our country to be overrun.”
Studies and polling suggest that Hispanics who entered the U.S. legally tend to be more conservative on questions of immigration. Some progressive Hispanics have bemoaned this, likening it to selfishly slamming shut a door behind you. Perales insisted that she doesn’t feel threatened, economically or otherwise, by new immigrants. She understands the hopeless circumstances that drive so many people from impoverished and conflict-ridden countries to make the journey north. What worries her is the perception of “crossing without consequences.” She wants the U.S. to broadcast a stricter approach to immigration, not just for the sake of the rule of law and for the stability of her community, but also for the well-being of those thinking of coming here.
“They’re being treated so inhumanely,” Perales said of the migrants traveling to America. “But it’s the open-borders policy that is leading to that inhumane treatment.”
Joe Frank Martinez, sheriff of Val Verde County, photographed along the U.S.-Mexico border wall (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Joe Frank Martinez, the sheriff of Val Verde County, told me the same thing when I visited his office in Del Rio. A strong show of deterrence at the border, he said, is the decent thing to do. Not a week went by this summer, Martinez said, that he and his deputies didn’t discover a body of someone who had either drowned in the river or perished in the heat. Shortly before my visit, he told me, they recovered four corpses in the span of three days. (I checked the weather app on my phone. It was 106 degrees outside.)
Like most of the sheriffs in South Texas, Martinez is a Democrat. But definitions are a funny thing down there. Many of the residents have ancestral roots in both old Mexico and present-day Texas; they identify as “Tejanos.” In the same way Tejanos here don’t identify with, say, Mexican Americans in Arizona, Democrats here don’t identify with Democrats just about anywhere else. Martinez is pro-life, pro-gun, and generally conservative in ways that don’t mesh with the modern Democratic Party.
He believes that both parties deserve blame for failing to fix a broken immigration system and “put something in place that can reasonably allow people to make a legal entry.” But, Martinez insisted, this present crisis is one of his own party’s making. “Right now, these migrants feel like they’ve got a standing invitation from this administration to cross the border,” he said.
It wasn’t long ago that Democrats ruled South Texas. Today, Martinez told me, “the Democratic strongholds in Del Rio aren’t real Democratic anymore.” Val Verde County, which Democrats carried by an average of eight points in the previous three presidential elections, went for Trump by 10 points in 2020. The Twenty-third Congressional District, which covers Val Verde, is held by a Republican. Just weeks before I arrived in Del Rio, Mayra Flores, a Mexican-born Republican, flipped the Thirty-fourth District—farther to the east, in the Rio Grande Valley—in a special election. (A Democrat had carried the district by double digits in every election since it was redrawn after the 2010 census.) The GOP is favored to flip the neighboring Fifteenth District next week and represent a majority of Texas’s border districts; less than a decade ago, Democrats controlled every single one.
Martinez said most of the Democrats he’s known over the years have become skeptical of the party. For longer than he can remember, he’s had a weekly breakfast with the same group of seven or eight guys at the Ramada. They were always Democrats—all of them. Now, he said, there’s only one holdout. The rest have switched sides.
In the sheriff’s view—and he said it’s part perception, part reality—his party has become too progressive for Hispanics in a community like his. “This talk of defunding the police, it’s had a real impact,” Martinez said, describing the local Hispanic community as ardently pro–law enforcement. Meanwhile, he added, the moderates in his party at the state and national levels aren’t doing enough to push back on the left. Over the past three years, Martinez estimated, he’s given tours of the border to more than 100 members of Congress. “I haven’t had a single Democrat here. Not one,” he said. “And trust me—I’ve invited them.” (Not long after we spoke, Martinez finally welcomed his first congressional Democrat, Darren Soto of Florida, to the border.)
The Rio Grande, left; wet clothing discarded by a migrant on the river’s Del Rio–side bank, right (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
In Lozano’s truck, as we drove on a narrow road that runs parallel to a stretch of border fence—started by the George W. Bush administration, continued under Obama—he was still seething. Progressives exploit the suffering at the southern border to raise money or get booked on television shows, he said, but they won’t actually come see it for themselves. I asked him why.
“Because it’s a romanticized ideology,” Lozano said. “It’s easy for them to romanticize this whole situation. ‘They’re struggling! They need help! They’re coming here for a better life!’ It’s harder for them to come look at bodies of people who died in 107-degree heat. Kids who drowned. Border Patrol agents—who they’re so opposed to—trying to help pregnant mothers. None of this fits their narrative.”
I asked Lozano what he wants Democrats to do about the border crisis. He laughed.
“Democrats refuse to even call it a crisis. They’re gaslighting me,” Lozano said. He ran through a list of requests: more funding for Border Patrol; better technology to monitor movement; more support for humanitarian groups on the ground; stricter processing policies to deter would-be migrants; and, yes, in certain places, reinforced physical barriers. Above all, he wants Democrats to stop signaling that America has an open border. Throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, he noted, the party’s aspiring leaders took a host of positions—on decriminalizing border crossings, or providing health insurance to undocumented immigrants—that broke with decades of orthodoxy, to appease the progressive base.
“I’m all about the American dream. But this is unsustainable, just totally unsustainable,” Lozano said. “Government is supposed to be about stability. But this party, my party, is inviting all this instability. I’ve had enough.”
Lozano is no longer the mayor of Del Rio. This summer, just a few weeks before I came to town, he served his last day in office. Once a promising young prospect in the Democratic ranks, he quit electoral politics, walking away from a job he loved. Now, he’s thinking about quitting the Democratic Party, too.
Danny Ortega is a legend in local progressive circles and a member of Arizona’s Democratic Party Hall of Fame. As an activist and civil-rights attorney, he has spent decades working in households and neighborhoods where voting is a foreign behavior, and where fear of filling out government forms runs deep, pleading with first- and second-generation Hispanics to get involved with politics. Around the time Obama was first elected, Ortega told me, he sensed a turning point. The GOP’s overt targeting of the Hispanic community—via legislation and law enforcement, rhetoric and rumormongering—helped embolden citizens to finally turn out to vote, and to vote for Democrats. The floodgates had opened. Demography, at last, was going to be destiny.
Until it wasn’t.
“The past few years, our young people have been registering as independents. More than 50 percent of them. We have the data,” Ortega said. “These voters, the future of our community, they are abandoning us. And honestly,” he paused, with a grimace, “I don’t blame them.”
The activist and civil-rights attorney Danny Ortega (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
We sat in Ortega’s first-floor law office in Phoenix, now the nation’s fifth-largest city thanks to a mass influx of immigrants, most of whom are Mexican. Surrounded by framed awards and photos with politicians, Ortega was leaning across his desk, sweating through his Hawaiian shirt, shouting mostly at himself. For too long, Ortega said, Democrats have refused to spend real time and resources in the Hispanic community, checking a box during campaign season but rarely engaging between elections. When Democrats do come calling, he said, they treat Hispanics like children: speaking in paternalistic tones about what’s good and bad for them economically; assuming simple and monolithic views on social issues; pandering shamelessly on immigration and promising sweeping reforms that never materialize.
More and more, Ortega told me, Hispanics are suspicious of his party. They question whether Democrats want to solve a problem like immigration; whether they would rather continue to wield themes of racism and xenophobia to mobilize voters against the GOP; whether moral outrage is simply the means to a political end. In his view, the Democratic Party has a credibility crisis, and it’s not specific to immigration. Ortega said that so many adjacent Democratic causes—voting rights, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights—are viewed skeptically, particularly by younger Hispanics, who perceive Democrats as manipulative at worst and tone-deaf at best. Even if their social-justice efforts are regarded as genuine, Democrats are pushing an agenda that doesn’t resonate with a wide array of voters during this time of economic uncertainty.
“A lot of Latinos, they’re just not moved by these issues,” he said. “They may think Republicans are racist, but some of them are going to vote for the Republicans anyway, because they’re better on the economy, better on small business, better on regulation.”
César Chávez hears it all the time. A member of the Arizona House who represents the most concentrated community of Hispanics in the state, Chávez finds himself engaged in a daily struggle to hold the line for the Democratic Party.
“It’s very hard for an individual to vote for somebody who leans more on social justice than on the economy,” Chávez told me in a coffee shop not far from the state capitol. “When a person has to choose between paying for a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas, every other issue goes out the window.”
Chávez was born in Mexico. When he was 3 years old, he and his pregnant mother crossed the desert and found their way to Pennsylvania, where his father, who had also immigrated illegally, was working on a mushroom farm. Chávez was raised alongside Amish children and “fell in love with America,” cherishing the traditional values of his community. Because it was Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program that eventually granted his father citizenship—allowing the rest of the family to eventually follow suit—Chávez felt a kinship with the GOP. It wasn’t until his family moved to Phoenix that Chávez experienced real discrimination. He came to feel that the Democratic Party, with its emphasis on inclusion, was the natural home for people like him.
César Chávez represents Arizona’s most concentrated community of Hispanics in the state legislature. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Chávez told me this experience speaks for many of his constituents. The Democratic Party “has always been their safe haven,” he said. But today, he continued, progressives have adopted a “no-holds-barred mentality” on social issues that leaves many Hispanic voters—religious, patriotic, culturally conservative voters—questioning whether they still belong.
“There are individuals in my party who believe these voters are always going to be there for us. They take them for granted,” Chávez said. “That’s why I think this could get a lot worse.”
For all the baggage saddling the state GOP—a proud conspiracy theorist as chair; a trio of prominent election deniers running for statewide office—the party’s consultants and strategists are making real inroads in the Hispanic community. They are hiring Hispanic staffers, spending money on Spanish-language media, investing heavily in grassroots infrastructure. This matches descriptions I heard everywhere else: Republicans can sense that the door is opening, and they are preparing to barrel through it.
“I’m telling you,” Chávez said, “if we don’t do something about it, we’re going to lose a big part of this vote.”
Back at El Portal, Earl and Mary Rose Wilcox’s restaurant in South Phoenix, the warnings are the same. One woman, a longtime progressive activist named Petra Falcon, tells me that Hispanics “have no idea what Democrats really stand for anymore.” Anita Ritter, who serves as the secretary of the American Legion post next door, says she doesn’t know of many of her members who still vote for Democrats.
And then there is Luis Acosta. A respected Democratic campaign consultant, Acosta is also a so-called Dreamer. His mother brought him to the U.S. when he was 2; his earliest memory is crawling under the chain-link border fence. Inspired by Obama’s candidacy, Acosta threw himself into Democratic politics. He helped elect numerous candidates to office. But now, he tells me, he’s “absolutely done” helping the Democratic Party win elections.
Luis Acosta, a Democratic campaign consultant, says he is “absolutely done” helping the Democratic Party win elections. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“People are tired of being taken for granted. Tired of being ignored for two years and then pandered to when it’s election time. Tired of being in the shadows. Just tired,” Acosta says. “There’s no other way to put it. We’ve supported the Democrats my whole life. Now, we want to know: Are we more than a talking point to you?”
In the corner booth, Earl and Mary Rose look distressed. Earl tells me this kind of talk has been pervasive in his restaurant and his neighborhood since Biden took office. And now they’re even hearing it at home: Two of Earl’s grandsons voted for Trump in 2020. One of them, Earl says, got hooked by the pandemic-era fights over public-education policy and is now a Tucker Carlson devotee; the other grandson, he says, is “less dogmatic” but exasperated by the left’s fixation on social justice.
Mary Rose confesses to feeling a certain pessimism. She and Earl spent a generation building a community, organizing a vote, working to translate raw Hispanic numbers into real political influence. Yet they are confronting the same harsh realities today, about power and patronage, that they fretted over 23 years ago. Wins and losses are not the measure; Democrats could sweep Arizona’s statewide races against an unpalatable bunch of Republicans this fall, but it won’t quiet the feeling that the Wilcoxes’ dream is slipping away. They have so much of what they wanted—an engaged base, a hard-won 11 electoral votes, a Democrat in the White House—and so little to show for it.
“Maybe the best we can hope for is that these voters”—Mary Rose nods toward one of her adult grandsons nearby—“become independents, and we fight for them on a race-by-race basis,” she says. “And honestly, that’s a win for Republicans.”
Ruby Bernal discusses politics over breakfast at El Portal. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Twitter’s unending fight against spam accounts is now a problem for new owner Elon Musk, who pledged in April to defeat the bot scourge or “die trying!”
He later cited bots as a reason to back out of buying the social platform. But now that the billionaire has completed the deal, he’s faced with the task of delivering on his promise to clean up the fake profiles that have preoccupied him and bedeviled Twitter since long before he expressed interest in acquiring it.
The challenge carries high stakes. The bot count matters because advertisers — Twitter’s chief revenue source — want to know roughly how many real humans they are reaching when they buy ads. It’s also important in the effort to stop bad actors from amassing an army of accounts to amplify misinformation or harass political adversaries.
Ironically, it was not bots but Musk himself on Sunday who tweeted and then later deleted a link to an article pushing an unfounded conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi. The tweet from Musk, coming just three days after he finalized his $44 billion purchase of the platform, raised concerns about the type of content that will be allowed on the social media site under his control.
“How do we make Twitter a better place”
“The bigger picture in my mind is: How do we make Twitter a better place for everybody,” said bot-counting expert Emilio Ferrara, who worked over the summer to investigate the problem for Musk. He cited the “value of the platform as a societal experience, as a collective place to have civilized discourse and talk freely without interference from nefarious accounts,” or scams, spam, pornography and harassment.
To find out just how bad the bots are, Musk hired Ferrara and other data scientists to investigate. At the time, Musk sought to prove that Twitter was misleading the public and advertisers when it said fewer than 5% of its daily active users are fake or spam accounts.
The Tesla CEO tweeted in May that the question of what “advertisers were getting for their money” was “fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.” If Twitter lied or withheld crucial information about the bot count, Musk could have argued that he was justified in terminating the $44 billion agreement.
So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.
Ferrara, an associate professor of computer science and communications at the University of Southern California, said he had no real interest in whether Musk ultimately ended up owning the platform.
Instead, he hoped that “any findings would be able to help improve the platform,” Ferrara told The Associated Press, speaking for the first time about his planned role as Musk’s expert trial witness.
The question now is what Musk will do with that information. Ferrara’s presentation — some 350 pages of analysis and supporting documents — is locked up in confidential court filings, and he said he can’t disclose his conclusions.
Twitter’s former leaders and its lawyers said Musk wildly exaggerated the problem because he had buyer’s remorse. Precise counts are “almost impossible” because any bot estimate is based on assumptions that can lead to bias, said Filippo Menczer, a researcher who has been studying social bots for more than a decade and was consulted by Twitter earlier this year.
Not an easy fix
“Nobody knows exactly how bad the problem is,” said Menczer, director of Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, who said he was speaking from his role as an academic researcher, not a consultant. “I would guess it’s not as bad as Musk said and not as good as Twitter claimed.”
Many experts also doubt Musk’s ability to easily make improvements, which he’s suggested would rely on using algorithms to track and remove fake accounts and implementing new measures to “authenticate” real people.
Earlier this month, Ferrara was preparing to travel to the East Coast to testify in Delaware, where Musk was defending against Twitter’s lawsuit asking a court to force him to close the deal. But two weeks before the scheduled Oct. 17 trial, Musk changed his mind and said he would go ahead with the $44 billion acquisition. It closed Thursday.
Most legal experts didn’t think Musk had much of a case. The court’s head judge seemed likely to side with Twitter based on the specific terms and conditions of the April purchase agreement.
But that’s not to say Musk didn’t have a point about the bots, according to Ferrara and other researchers hired by Musk’s legal team.
The analysis firm CounterAction, which worked with Ferrara, said it concluded in a July 18 report submitted to the court that Twitter’s spam rate for monetizable accounts — those of value to advertisers — was at least 10% and could be as high as 14.2%, depending on how the rate is measured.
Trevor Davis, the firm’s founder and CEO, said that analysis was based on a “firehose” of internal data that Twitter gave to Musk, but the company declined to provide additional data sought by Musk’s team.
“We expect that access to the withheld data would reveal an even higher true spam rate,” Davis said in a prepared statement.
Good bots vs. bad bots
Musk has long been preoccupied with Twitter spambots promoting cryptocurrency schemes, in part because, as a celebrity user with more than 110 million followers, he sees a lot of them. Some scammers have opened accounts mimicking Musk’s name and likeness to try to get people to think he’s endorsing something.
Not all bots are bad. Twitter encourages the use of automated accounts that report the weather, earthquakes or post humor or lines from literary classics. Twitter also allows for anonymity, which protects free speech and privacy — especially in authoritarian regions. But that practice can make it harder to root out malicious fake accounts.
Ferrara first caught Twitter’s attention in the aftermath of revelations that Russia used social media to meddle in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, when he led a research group that estimated that 9% to 15% of Twitter’s active English-language accounts were bots.
In a blog post soon after, Twitter complained that such outside research “is often inaccurate and methodologically flawed.” The company has repeatedly reported the under-5% number in its quarterly filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, though it also cautions that it could be higher.
Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter said it removed 1 million spam accounts each day. To calculate how many accounts are malicious spam, Twitter reviews thousands of accounts sampled at random, using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geolocation and how the account behaves when it is active.
Dueling methodologies
But over the past months, Musk and Twitter have tussled over the methodology. Twitter uses a metric it calls mDAU, for monetizable daily active usage.
That “is literally a metric they invented,” Ferrara said. “You cannot contrast and compare that metric with any other service.”
When Musk first started publicly raising questions about the bot numbers after agreeing to buy the company, another firm, Israel-based Cyabra, said it had the answer.
“That elusive number you are looking for … we have it. It’s 13.7%,” the firm tweeted on May 17, flagging Musk’s Twitter handle to get his attention.
Cyabra’s machine-learning technology works by scanning a large number of social media profiles to track behavioral patterns, trying to pick out which are behaving like humans. Such guesswork can misfire — but the tweet caught the attention of people close to Musk, if not the billionaire himself.
Cyabra CEO Dan Brahmy said the company started working with the Musk camp by the end of May. Regardless of what the true bot count is, he said it’s not going to be an easy problem to solve.
“Some bots are definitely nefarious,” Brahmy said. “The trade-offs are between being extremely high on sign-up standards and information security versus being extremely open minded in a way” that fosters freedom of speech and creativity.
Since Musk officially took over as Twitter’s boss on Friday, he has made a number of changes and plans to charge $20 a month for Twitter Blue, a verification service that currently costs $5 monthly, the Verge reported.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer accused her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon, of “stoking violence” and pushing conspiracy theories meant to divide people, while Dixon said voters have felt the pain of the Democrat’s failures and told Michiganders “you deserve better.”
The two faced each other in their final debate before the midterm elections in two weeks. Dixon, a former businesswoman and conservative commentator endorsed by former President Donald Trump, is hoping a late surge of support will help her unseat the first-term incumbent Democrat, who has a multimillion-dollar fundraising advantage.
Whitmer and fellow Democrats spent months pummeling Dixon with ads before the Republican and her supporters — including the family of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — responded. The final weeks of the campaign have seemed more competitive, with both hopefuls running TV ads and the candidates holding public events around the state.
“We always knew that this would be a close race,” Whitmer told reporters after the debate. “This is a great state, but it’s a divided state at times. I take no person, no vote, or no community for granted.”
Economy and inflation
Addressing the persistent inflation and high prices on voters’ minds, Dixon said Whitmer “has not done anything to help.” She criticized the governor for vetoing a GOP measure earlier this year to freeze the state’s 27-cents-per-gallon gas tax and warned that a recession is “at our doorstep.”
Whitmer called the measure the Republican-led Legislature approved “a gimmick.” It would have frozen the tax for six months effective in 2023 — a delay Whitmer said wouldn’t have provided immediate help to people who need it.
“I don’t have time for games, and I don’t think you do either,” Whitmer said, adding that inflation is a problem around the globe. She said her administration was able to help people in Michigan by providing help such as free or low-cost child care.
Whitmer questioned how Dixon – who supports repealing the state’s income tax – would balance the state budget and ensure sufficient funding for areas like education without the roughly $12 billion the state receives from income taxes.
Dixon countered that she would eliminate the tax over time, suggesting it could be done over eight to 10 years, and noted there are other states without an income tax and argued that it’s not a “radical” idea.
School safety
One of Whitmer’s sharpest lines of the night addressed school safety. The debate at Oakland University was held about 15 miles from Oxford High School, where a teenage student fatally shot four students last year. The 16-year-old shooter on Monday pleaded guilty to charges including first-degree murder.
In an exchange about education, Dixon criticized Whitmer’s administration for allowing books in school libraries that she says are inappropriate because they reference sex and gender.
“Do you really think books are more dangerous than guns?” Whitmer asked. She dismissed the book issue as a distraction at a time when deadly school shootings occur with regularity. The governor called for stricter gun laws, including background checks and secure gun storage.
Asked after the debate about the remark, Dixon said she doesn’t differentiate.
“I think there are dangers all over for our children. I don’t rank one as different than the other,” she said. “I want to make sure our kids are safe no matter what.”
Dixon is endorsed by the National Rifle Association and said during the debate that she supports having armed guards at schools and single-entry buildings. She pointed to a report on how to better secure schools and said if it had been implemented at Oxford “we might have saved lives.”
Whitmer, a former prosecutor, countered, “Ask yourself, who’s going to keep your kids safe? A former prosecutor with plans or a candidate with thoughts and prayers?”
Abortion
The first question of the night once again centered on abortion, a topic that’s dominated the race since the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned the landmark case granting the right to abortion. Before the high court’s decision, Whitmer filed a lawsuit to stop a 1931 abortion ban from taking effect in Michigan.
A proposal on the state’s November ballot will let voters decide whether to enshrine the right to the procedure in the state constitution. The two candidates disagreed on what the constitutional amendment would allow.
Dixon, who opposes abortion except to save the life of the mother, claimed the proposal would allow abortion “up to the moment of birth for any reason” while calling it the “most radical abortion law in the country.” But Dixon said voters could vote how they wanted on the proposal – while also voting for her.
Whitmer said the proposal would return abortion rights that had been in place for 49 years before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and said none of what Dixon said about the proposal was true.
Women candidates
Asked by moderators to say something nice about their opponents, each focused on the other’s role as a mother. Dixon has four school-aged daughters, while Whitmer has two college-aged daughters and three stepsons.
Dixon praised Whitmer’s emphasis on her daughters and her fight for women, while Whitmer said of Dixon that she appreciates “how hard it is to run for office and raise kids.”
The race between Dixon and Whitmer is the first time two women have competed against each other for Michigan governor. Nationally, there are five woman-vs.-woman races this fall. That’s more than there have been, combined, in all elections in the country’s history, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
