There’s something fundamentally excessive about winter sports. Instead of curling up with a book or Netflix when the weather turns cold, winter athletes wrestle with inordinate layers and high-tech gear just to make it through the day without frostbite. They sprint across ice with knives strapped to their feet and hurtle down mountains at speeds generally reserved for interstate highways. They fall off ski lifts—or are trapped overnight in them. Show me an experienced winter recreationalist, and I’ll show you someone who has slipped, skidded, and crashed their way to a broken tailbone or torqued knee, and more likely than not a concussion or two.
But over the past few years, climate change, social media, and a pandemic-era obsession with the outdoors have combined to make these already intense sports even more extreme. Seasoned athletes have long considered bunny slopes and indoor ice rinks to be mere gateways to backcountry skiing (zooming through the tree line on untouched powder—and sometimes jumping out of a helicopter to get there) or “wild” ice skating over remote glaciers and freshly frozen lakes. Now a growing crowd of beginners has started to follow them—and the consequences can be fatal.
Since the rise of remote work enabled an exodus from big cities in 2020 and 2021, a record number of people have visited U.S. ski areas each winter. Resorts can be so crowded that people wait 45 minutes for a chair lift that, four years ago, might have only had a three-minute line. No wonder skiers are searching farther and farther afield to get their fix. Greg Poschman, the county commissioner chairman of Colorado’s Pitkin County, told me that in just the past few seasons, he’s seen more people up in the backcountry and out on frozen lakes and rivers than he has in a lifetime living near Aspen. That sentiment is echoed by athletes and officials across the United States. All it takes is a sufficiently impressive stunt posted to social media, and once-deserted corners of the natural world will be inundated with hobbyists a few days later.
In the wilderness, or even the “sidecountry” just outside resort bounds, athletes are exposed to dangers that are rare in more controlled settings. Miles from civilization, no one is policing the landscape for holes in the ice, buried rocks and twigs, and surprise cliffs, not to mention avalanches and ice dams. Perhaps most crucially, pushing out farther from roads and services means being farther from rescue when things go wrong. “You may be doing something that’s a low-risk sport”—ice-skating, snowshoeing, and the like—“but the consequences are very high,” Poschman said.
Even sports that have never relied on curated resorts to thrive are becoming more treacherous. Kale Casey, a five-time Team USA co-captain for sled-dog sports, told me that unpredictable winter seasons are forcing teams away from traditional routes across Alaska that have become unsafe. Portions of the famous roughly 1,000-mile Iditarod race have been rerouted. Mushers are strategically running certain portions of races at night so their dogs—bred for temperatures around –20 degrees—don’t overheat. As the planet warms, and snow coverage of Alaska’s tundra contracts, other winter sports are converging with the mushers on the little snow that’s left. This season, five dogs have been hit and killed by people riding snowmobiles (known locally as snow machines); five more dogs were also injured in these collisions. “During the lockdown, there wasn’t a snow machine available in Alaska,” Casey told me. “Everybody bought them—and they’ve got to go places. Where do they go? They go where we go.”
Climate change isn’t just pushing winter athletes into more crowded or remote territory. It’s also making that territory less predictable. From across the Northern Hemisphere, the near-identical refrain I heard went something like this: As recently as five years ago, the snow season used to begin sometime around Thanksgiving. It started slowly, with the odd storm or two, building up ice and snowpack gradually as temperatures fell. On a given day, you could be fairly certain of the quality of whatever frigid surface you were skiing on, climbing up, or skating over. And if the weather wasn’t good, well, the snow and ice would be there for you the next day.
But now everyone I spoke with—whether in Iceland or in alpine California—said the first storms don’t come until January. The weather is unpredictable: Record-setting blizzards are interspersed with snow-melting rain. A dry early season followed by rain and wet snow is the perfect recipe for avalanches, Poschman said. Shannon Finch, who was an avalanche-rescue dog handler in Utah for 12 years before turning to heli-ski guiding, told me that even experts are now “perplexed, confused, and getting caught off guard” in environments they’d previously navigated with ease. Her dog, Lēif, struggled in these new conditions: When someone is buried by an avalanche, their scent is less likely to rise through wetter snow and warmer air temperatures. Consequently, Lēif needed to cover considerably more ground before making a rescue.
The shorter seasons also create havoc for a uniquely human reason: FOMO. “People are chomping at the bit to get out there” and are willing to take greater risks for good snow or ice, Travis White, who runs a tourism fishing business in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, told me. The result is that even a relatively leisurely activity such as ice fishing suddenly becomes an extreme sport. With fewer waterways icing over, more people from places that no longer freeze regularly are suddenly crowding onto just a few lakes. These newcomers aren’t around to watch the water slowly freeze; they don’t know where to watch out for eddies and currents that may make the ice unstable, or how to avoid the most recently frozen patches, which are also the most dangerous.
Stories of ice fishers, figure skaters, and hockey players falling in—even dying—abound. Incidents on the snow are common too. Earlier this month, 23 people needed rescuing in Killington, Vermont, after ducking a boundary rope to ski and snowboard out-of-bounds on a particularly good powder day—the kind that’s getting vanishingly rare in the Northeast.
White, like many of the other winter enthusiasts I spoke with, also blames social media for the extremification of his sport. Inexperienced ice fishers might see a cool spot posted on Instagram and find it easily, thanks to geolocation. The same goes for wild ice-skating, snowmobiling, and backcountry skiing. Athletes also worry that impressive, engagement-oriented stunts posted online could inspire inexperienced people to try extreme moves in those remote sites. “The only thing that I see on social media is people jumping off cliffs on their skis,” Ben Graves, a Colorado-based outdoor educator and an avid backcountry skier, told me. But only a tiny fraction of skiers who can find said cliffs are good enough to jump off them with something approximating safety.
That fraction could soon get even smaller. Ívar Finnbogason, a manager at Icelandic Mountain Guides, is deeply concerned by the decline in skill he’s witnessed over the past decade. He stepped away from a career as an ice climber when he became a father, in part because of the danger but mostly because waiting and waiting for the right conditions meant that he simply couldn’t train effectively. “That’s no way for you as an athlete—as someone with ambition—to build up your momentum,” he told me.
By the end of the century, snow and ice may be so scarce that only the most well-resourced and committed athletes can even attempt these new extremes. With just a degree or two Celsius more warming, much of the Northern Hemisphere can expect massive snow loss. If this happens, the only way to reach the snow might be with a helicopter or a days-long hike.
A dramatic collapse in winter sports might well result in fewer accidents. But we would also lose something intrinsically human. For many winter-recreation devotees, these sports are more than just activities to pass the time. They are a way of life, dating as far back as 8000 B.C.E. Perhaps those who test their skills against the strength of Mother Nature have it right. Maybe now is the time for winter athletes to take their passions to dangerous new heights, before they lose the option forever.
Growing up in India, which for decades has clocked millions of tuberculosis cases each year, Lalita Ramakrishnan was intimately familiar with how devastating the disease can be. The world’s greatest infectious killer, rivaled only by SARS-CoV-2, Mycobacterium tuberculosis spreads through the air and infiltrates the airways, in many cases destroying the lungs. It can trigger inflammation in other tissues too, wearing away bones and joints; Ramakrishnan watched her own mother’s body erode in this way. The sole available vaccine was lackluster; the microbe had rapidly evolved resistance to the drugs used to fight it. And the disease had a particularly insidious trait: After entering the body, the bacterium could stow away for years or decades, before erupting without warning into full-blown disease.
This state, referred to as latency, supposedly afflicted roughly 2 billion people—a quarter of the world’s population. Ramakrishnan, now a TB researcher at the University of Cambridge, heard that fact over and over, and passed it down to her own students; it was what every expert did with the dogma at the time. That pool of 2 billion people was understood to account for a large majority of infections worldwide, and it represented one of the most intimidating obstacles to eradicating the disease. To end TB for good, the thinking went, the world would need to catch and cure every latent case.
In the years since, Ramakrishnan’s stance on latent TB has shifted quite a bit. Its extent, she argues, has been exaggerated for a good three decades, by at least an order of magnitude—to the point where it has scrambled priorities, led scientists on wild-goose chases, and unnecessarily saddled people with months of burdensome treatment. In her view, the term latency is so useless, so riddled with misinformation, that it should disappear. “I taught that nonsense forever,” she told me; now she’s spreading the word that TB’s largest, flashiest number may instead be its greatest, most persistent myth.
Ramakrishnan isn’t the only one who thinks so. Together with her colleagues Marcel Behr, of Quebec’s McGill University, and Paul Edelstein, of the University of Pennsylvania (“we call ourselves the three BERs,” Ramakrishnan told me), she’s been on a years-long crusade to set the recordstraight. Their push has attracted its fair share of followers—and objectors. “I don’t think they’re wrong,” Carl Nathan, a TB researcher at Cornell, told me. “But I’m not confident they’re right.”
Several researchers told me they’re largely fine with the basic premise of the BERs’ argument: Fewer than 2 billion isn’t that hard to get behind. But how many fewer matters. If current latency estimates overshoot by just a smidge, maybe no practical changes are necessary. The greater the overestimate, though, the more treatment recommendations might need to change; the more research and funding priorities might need to shift; the more plans to control, eliminate, and eventually eradicate disease might need to be wholly and permanently rethought.
The muddled numbers on latency seem to be based largely on flawed assumptions about certain TB tests. One of the primary ways to screen people for the disease involves pricking harmless derivatives of the bacterium into skin, then waiting for an inflamed lump to appear—a sign that the immune system is familiar with the microbe (or a TB vaccine), but not direct proof that the bacterium itself is present. That means that positive results can guarantee only that the immune system encountered something resembling MTB at some point—perhaps even in the distant past, Rein Houben, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told me.
But for a long time, a prevailing assumption among researchers was that all TB infections had the potential to be lifelong, Behr told me. The thought wasn’t entirely far-fetched: Other microbial infections can last a lifetime, and there are historical accounts of lasting MTB infections, including a case in which a man developed tuberculosis more than 30 years after his father passed the bacterium to him. Following that logic—that anyone once infected had a good enough chance of being infected now—researchers added everyone still reacting to the bug to the pool of people actively battling it. By the end of the 1990s, Behr and Houben told me, prominent epidemiologists had used this premise to produce the big 2 billion number, estimating that roughly a third of the population had MTB lurking within.
But, as the BERs argue, for TB to be a lifelong sentence makes very little sense. Decades of epidemiological data show that the overwhelming majority of disease arises within the first two years after infection, most commonly within months. Beyond that, progression to symptomatic, contagious illness becomes vanishingly rare.
The trio is convinced that a huge majority of people are clearing the bug from their body rather than letting it lie indefinitely in wait—a notion that recent modeling studies support. If the bacteria were lingering, researchers would expect to see a big spike in disease late in life among people with positive skin tests, as their immune system naturally weakens. They would also expect to see a high rate of progression to full-blown TB among people who start taking immunosuppressive drugs or catch HIV. And yet, neither of those trends pans out: At most, some 5 to 10 percent of people who have tested positive by skin test and later sustain a blow to their immune system develop TB disease within about three to five years—a hint that, for almost everyone else, there may not be any MTB left. “If there were a slam-dunk experiment, that’s it,” William Bishai, a TB researcher at Johns Hopkins, told me.
Nathan, of Cornell, was less sold. Immunosuppressive drugs and HIV flip very specific switches in the immune system; if MTB is being held in check by multiple branches, losing some immune defenses may not be enough to set the bacteria loose. But most of the experts I spoke with are convinced that lasting cases are quite uncommon. “Some people will get into trouble in old age,” Bouke de Jong, a TB researcher at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, in Antwerp, told me. “But is that how MTB hangs out in everybody? I don’t think so.”
If anything, people with positive skin tests might beless likely to eventually develop disease, Ramakrishnan told me, whether because they harbor defenses against MTB or because they are genetically predisposed to clear the microbe from their airway. In either case, that could radically change the upshot of a positive test, especially in countries such as the U.S. and Canada, where MTB transmission rarely occurs and most TB cases can be traced from abroad. Traditionally, people in these places with positive skin tests and no overt symptoms have been told, “‘This means you’ve got sleeping bacteria in you,’” Behr said. “‘Any day now, it may pop out and cause harm.’” Instead, he told me, health-care workers should be communicating widely that there could be up to a 95 percent chance that these patients have already cleared the infection, especially if they’re far out from their last exposure and might not need a drug regimen. TB drugs, although safe, are not completely benign: Standard regimens last for months, interact with other meds, and can have serious side effects.
At the same time, researchers disagree on just how much risk remains once people are a couple of years past an MTB exposure. “We’ve known for decades that we are overtreating people,” says Madhu Pai, a TB researcher at McGill who works with Behr but was not directly involved in his research. But treating a lot of people with positive skin tests has been the only way to ensure that the people who are carrying viable bacteria get the drugs they need, Robert Horsburgh, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. That strategy squares, too, with the goal of elimination in places where spread is rare. To purge as much of the bug as possible, “clinicians will err on the side of caution,” says JoAnne Flynn, a TB researcher at the University of Pittsburgh.
Elsewhere in the world, where MTB transmission is rampant and repeat infections are common, “to be honest, nobody cares if there’s latent TB,” Flynn told me. Many people with very symptomatic, very contagious cases still aren’t getting diagnosed or treated; in too many places, the availability of drugs and vaccines is spotty at best. Elimination remains a long-term goal, but active outbreaks demand attention first. Arguably, quibbling about latency now is like trying to snuff stray sparks next to an untended conflagration.
One of the BERs’ main goals could help address TB’s larger issues. Despite decades of research, the best detection tools for the disease remain “fundamentally flawed,” says Keertan Dheda, a TB researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the University of Cape Town. A test that could directly detect viable microbes in tissues, rather than an immune proxy, could definitively diagnose ongoing infections and prioritize people across the disease spectrum for treatment. Such a diagnostic would also be the only way to finally end the fuss over latent TB’s prevalence. Without it, researchers are still sifting through only indirect evidence to get at the global TB burden—which is probably still “in the hundreds of millions” of cases, Houben told me, though the numbers will remain squishy until the data improve.
That 2 billion number is still around—though not everywhere, thanks in part to the BERs’ efforts. The WHO’s most recent annual TB reports now note that a quarter of the world’s population has been infected with MTB, rather than is infected with MTB; the organization has also officially discarded the term latent from its guidance on the disease, Dennis Falzon, of the WHO Global TB Programme, told me in an email. However subtle, these shifts signal that even the world’s biggest authorities on TB are dispensing with what was once conventional wisdom.
Losing that big number does technically shrink TB’s reach—which might seem to minimize the disease’s impact. Behr argues the opposite. With a huge denominator, TB’s mortality rate ends up minuscule—suggesting that most infections are benign. Deflating the 2 billion statistic, then, reinforces that “this is one of the world’s nastiest pathogens, not some symbiont that we live with in peace,” Behr told me. Fewer people may be at risk than was once thought. But for those who are harboring the microbe, the dangers are that much more real.
Maddy Montiel and Brad Butterfield marveled at the community they found this semester at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Montiel, an environmental science major, and Butterfield, a journalism major, had lived in their vehicles for several years, the only way, they said, that they could afford to attend college. They usually found parking in campus lots or on nearby streets.
But the pair and about 15 others like them — students living in sedans, aging campers, a converted bus, who could afford a $315 annual parking permit but not rent — found one another on campus parking lot G11. They started parking together in a row of spaces and named their community “the line.” They shared resources: propane tanks to heat their living quarters, ovens to cook meals. They helped one another seal leaky roofs and formed an official campus club aiming to secure a mailing address.
They felt safe.
Students Brad Butterfield and Maddie Montiel embrace next to a pair of parking tickets she received from Cal Poly Humboldt police.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
“None of us have ever had something like that before,” said Montiel, 27. “People who live like this don’t really congregate, and try to stay out of view.”
Then the notices arrived late last month. The university was going to enforce a campus policy, written into parking regulations, that prohibits overnight camping. Remove vehicles by noon on Nov. 12, or they could be towed and students could face disciplinary action, the letter said.
Montiel and Butterfield moved their vehicles to another campus parking lot, hoping the university would back down if they became less visible. They found two spots under redwood trees at the edge of campus. Others from G11 scattered, driven back into hiding.
On the morning of Nov. 13, several students who stayed at G11 and other campus lots awoke to discover parking violations on their windshields, a $53 fine for living overnight in their vehicles, $40 for those whose vehicles were too large for one spot.
The actions by Humboldt — defended by university officials as necessary for health and safety — provide an up-close look at how low-income California State University students determined to earn a college degree struggle to meet their basic needs amid the state’s student affordable housing crisis.
Cal Poly Humbolt student Caleb Chen eats noodles in his van in campus parking lot G11.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
“We’re putting everything we have into our education in order to be here,” Montiel said. “For them to just keep putting all of this added pressure onto us just seems really unnecessarily cruel.”
The campus-wide email landed at the end of October: The university would soon prohibit students from sleeping in cars.
“Overnight camping in University parking lots creates unsanitary and unsafe conditions for both those encamped and for our campus community at large,” the email said. “The University Police Department and other campus offices have taken calls from concerned members of the campus community expressing fear and frustration about the situation.”
Days later, three administrators visited students parked in G11 to share details about the enforcement, said Butterfield, 26.
“This is a direct response to the public health and safety concerns that have stemmed from overnight activity in University parking lots,” said a letter given to students. The university would provide temporary emergency housing to students through the end of the semester, which ends in December, or would help students identify campsites or other locations where they could park off campus.
Tom Jackson, Cal Poly Humboldt’s president, declined an interview request through spokesperson Aileen Yoo, who said university staff is also available to help students find longer-term housing solutions.
“These aren’t evictions. The University is enforcing a long-standing parking policy,” Yoo said in an email.
Two people walk through the lobby of a building at Cal Poly Humboldt.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
In response, faculty in the sociology department wrote a letter to university officials, condemning them for upholding a policy that “criminalizes” the students. The message to the campus community “framed our houseless students as a group of people who are feared, clearly intimidating them to get them off campus,” the letter said.
“There are ways that we can address this in a way that best serves our students and community,” said Tony Silvaggio, chair of the sociology department and vice president of the Humboldt chapter of the California Faculty Assn. “And it’s not just kicking them off campus to live on the streets somewhere else.”
The University Senate, a campus governing body, passed a resolution urging the university to suspend its enforcement of the parking policy until the end of the academic year, include students in decision-making and explore “safe parking” options on campus.
The students of G11 started an online petition, pushing back against the characterization that they are unsanitary or create danger. The students said they went out of their way to pick up trash and to maintain a clean environment.
The campus-wide email was “an attempt to shame, humiliate, and isolate the houseless community on campus,” the petition said. “We are living in our vehicles and are legally homeless because, quite simply, we cannot afford rent.”
After the uproar, the university sent a second campus-wide email that said, “The challenges of affordable housing can be particularly acute for students, and the University is invested in supporting them.” But the university did not reverse its decision.
Butterfield and Montiel raced to persuade officials to reconsider, meeting with administrators, including campus police and the dean of students.
They tried to schedule a meeting with Mark Johnson, the university’s chief of staff, and Cris Koczera, director of risk management and safety services. But an email from a campus ombudsman told the students the administrators would not meet with them. The university’s decision and the options it presented were clear, the email said, and “no constructive discussion is to be had.”
For Montiel, Humboldt was a world away from San Bernardino, her hometown. She first visited the university in high school, tagging along on a road trip with a friend.
Students Brad Butterfield and Maddy Montiel, along with their dog Ollie, prepare for class after taking a shower on the campus of Cal Poly Humboldt.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Montiel was struck by the abundance of the nearby forest, the beauty of the redwoods that towered over campus. Years later, she learned the college had an environmental science program that offered experiences that aligned with her goals of working in ecological restoration.
“I fell in love with the place and always saw it as a dream — but never attainable because it was so far, and it’d be too expensive,” she said.
She attended Riverside City College for five years, enrolling in classes full time as she juggled multiple jobs. After she earned multiple associate degrees, she told herself, “I’m just going to go for it and figure out living up in Humboldt.”
She is making it work by living in a 1995 Chevy Coachman, purchased with a loan that costs her $600 a month. She has also taken out $25,000 in student loans for tuition and fees and works as a studio tech in the campus metalsmithing studio to pay for other living expenses.
In fall 2022, Montiel purchased a campus parking permit that allows students to park on campus during the academic year and eventually settled into the G11 lot.
A student’s note on the window of his van tells police he is not camping at Cal Poly Humboldt. The university recently told students they could not sleep in their cars overnight.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
In her aging Coachman, she studies on a tray table and practices yoga on a narrow strip of walkway. She cooks meals on a small propane stove inside. Her bed is lofted over the driver and passenger seats. Every other week, she visits a dump station to empty waste and fill her water tanks.
Over time, more students began to park in G11, a lot situated among dorms and a short walk from a campus market. The location was convenient for shuttling back and forth between classes or to access the campus gym for showers. This semester, the 15 to 20 students found comfort in their community. They celebrated the start of the year with a beach bonfire and eventually formed the Alternative Living Club.
Student Caleb Chen searches for water late at night with a gallon container on the campus of Cal Poly Humboldt.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
The club began as a way for unhoused students to receive mail, as they needed an address for scholarship and job applications. Montiel, the club’s president, envisioned more. The club could offer a support system for unhoused students, an avenue to propose ideas about how the university could better help them. They talked about pooling funds for a storage facility, formalizing a safe parking program.
Montiel said many cash-strapped students have approached club members and said they are leaning toward moving into vehicles “because it’s their last and only option” to stay in college.
But now Montiel wonders if the club and the growing visibility of homelessness on campus led to the university’s decision to displace them.
“We’re kind of more seen,” she said. “We weren’t just scattered and hidden.”
Carrie White, another student who took up residence in the parking lot, transferred to Humboldt after graduating from community college in Utah. As she calculated her living expenses, the 27-year-old biology major realized she could not afford rent while attending school.
“I can’t afford to pay $1,500, $900 a month and work and then do a STEM degree,” said White, who is from England. “I can’t afford it.”
Student Brad Butterfield prepares to move his camper off the Cal Poly Humboldt campus.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
So she purchased an old school bus and gradually converted it to her home. At Humboldt, she works up to 20 hours a week, balancing a research assistant job with an internship in 3D facial reconstruction and a fellowship where she volunteers in the community.
As a person who is autistic, White said, she relies on routine and is sensitive to noise and light. Living in her bus, she has some control over her environment.
“I’ve tried to do those things with my budget and with my situation, and then this has happened,” she said. “There’s a lack of thought and consideration.”
This isn’t the first time in recent years that Cal Poly Humboldt has generated anger over its response to student housing shortages.
Last academic year — in anticipation of a large enrollment jump after becoming a polytechnic campus — the university announced it would prioritize limited on-campus housing for first-year students. Many continuing students would have to search for housing in off-campus rentals or at a limited number of motels leased by the university.
Around the same time, officials also weighed a proposal to house students on a floating barge, an idea that attracted national media attention and was mocked in a brief segment by Stephen Colbert. The barge plan has not materialized, and enrollment remained flat this academic year.
Brad Butterfield stores his belongings with his dog Ollie after taking a shower on the campus of Cal Poly Humboldt.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
But the university’s approach to dealing with housing shortages points to a larger issue in the California State University — the nation’s largest four-year public higher education system, with nearly 460,000 students.
At Cal Poly Humboldt, 2,069 beds were available on campus in 2022, the report said. The campus enrolled nearly 6,000 students.
Humboldt also faces challenges unique to its location as the northernmost Cal State campus. Arcata, a city of about 19,000 people where Cal Poly Humboldt is located, is in the midst of its own housing crisis. Earlier this month, the City Council declared a shelter crisis.
The declaration enabled the city to draw on funding to continue operating a safe parking program, which is operated by Arcata House Partnership, an organization that provides support for unhoused people. The program provides a space for residents who live in their cars to safely park and services including charging stations, bathrooms and meals, as they work to find stable housing.
But the program is full, and up to 20 people at a time are on the waitlist, said Darlene Spoor, executive director of Arcata House Partnership. She said she would be “willing to have a conversation with people from the university about whether we could open a safe parking program for students.”
Students Derek Beatty, left, and Caleb Chen hang out late at night in parking lot G11 at Cal Poly Humboldt.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Spoor said, more people have moved to Humboldt and purchased homes at high prices, pricing some longtime residents out of homebuying and driving up rental costs.
Plans are underway to ease the strain on students. By fall 2025, Cal Poly Humboldt plans to build more on-campus dorms and apartments, increasing the number of available beds by 1,250.
But on-campus options still remain out of reach for some students. A dorm room shared by three people and a required basic meal plan, for example, is expected to cost at least $10,900 per student next academic year. Room and board in a double costs about $13,000; a plan for a single dorm room runs more than $14,500 for the nine-month academic year.
Neither of those options would have worked for Steven Childs. The 47-year-old wildlife major said he would not have attended Humboldt if he could not live out of his cargo van.
He was scrolling YouTube one day when he came across a video that showed Humboldt students living in their cars. He thought to himself, “Oh, man, I think that’s my option. That’s the only way that seems reasonable.”
Childs, who lives in the San Gabriel Valley when school is not in session, gave up work as a private investigator to attend Humboldt. His wife’s salary now supports them both.
“I’m pushing 50, and I don’t want to be saddled with college debt through retirement,” he said. “I could sacrifice and live out of a vehicle.”
Butterfield, the journalism major, could not find housing that worked within his budget range of $650 to $900 a month, plus security deposit and other fees.
He decided to pay for his education with savings from service-industry and other jobs, and does not want student loans.
Brad Butterfield and Maddy Montiel study in a camper parked on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
He lives in an 1976 GMC Sportscoach that cost $9,500. He spends at least $200 a month on expenses for the RV, including insurance and propane.
“I had a couple hundred dollars left in my bank account to come up here and try to live off of,” he said.
On the night of Nov. 13 — hours after receiving citations for overnight camping — about 10 G11 students gathered inside a small university building. They worried they could face disciplinary action or lose their vehicles. Five unpaid tickets could get them towed.
One student said he had struggled to fall asleep the night before, worried that parking enforcement would ticket him. Another student wondered aloud about what they would do next semester. They brainstormed ways to draw more attention to their fight.
They talked about occupying a building. They discussed how they would appeal the parking violations, and weighed potential legal action. Two students said they planned to sleep overnight in a campus study room so footage from security cameras could prove they did not sleep in their vehicles.
In the end, they agreed to stay in touch over a group chat to prepare for the upcoming weeklong fall break.
Student Brad Butterfield outside his camper at the Cal Poly Humboldt campus.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Montiel and Butterfield had decided to move their vehicles again, this time off campus, to a city street next to a university parking lot. They have to move the vehicles by 7 a.m, when the city begins enforcing metered parking restrictions.
“Love you guys,” Montiel told the group before everyone went their separate ways.
One couldn’t help but pity the dutiful campaign staffers and surrogates who trickled into the spin room in Milwaukee last night. They arrived with an unenviable task: to convince reporters that their respective candidates had won the first debate of the Republican presidential primary.
To anyone who had watched, it was plain, of course, that none of the eight Republicans onstage had won in any meaningful sense. Donald Trump—facing four indictments and leading in the polls by 40 points—didn’t even bother to show up. And with many voters tuning in to the race for the first time, Trump’s rivals struggled to show they were equipped to take him down. In fact, few even tried. The former president’s name barely came up in the debate’s first hour—and when the conversation did turn to the subject of his growing rap sheet, most of the candidates defended him. All but two pledged to support Trump as the party’s nominee even if he is convicted. By the end of the evening, Trump’s path to renomination looked clearer than ever.
So how to spin this state of affairs if you work for one of the also-rans?
The answer, it turned out, was simple: Ignore it.
In multiple interviews after last night’s debate, I asked GOP campaign representatives how they planned to win the primary if their candidates were unwilling to directly confront Trump. Some offered platitudes—“This is a marathon, not a sprint.” Others gestured vaguely at plans to criticize the front-runner in the future. Most flatly refused to acknowledge the reality of Trump’s current dominance in the race. They preferred to pretend.
Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a supporter of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, scoffed when I mentioned Trump’s lead in the polls. “Go back and look at where Ted [Cruz] was in the numbers in 2016,” Roy instructed me.
“But … Cruz didn’t win the primary,” I replied, confused.
“Well, but he won Iowa!”
Matt Gorman, a spokesperson for Senator Tim Scott’s campaign, complained that reporters and pundits were overstating the likelihood of another Trump nomination. “Too many people think it’s inevitable,” he said. But when asked how that outcome might be avoided, Gorman had only wishful thinking to offer: “We hope that [Trump] debates. That’s our hope.”
It’s easy to see why, in an ideal world, Trump’s rivals would want to get him back on the debate stage. Several of the candidates managed strong moments last night. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley earned loud applause after calling out Republicans in Washington for adding trillions of dollars to the national debt: “Our kids are never going to forgive us for this.” Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie offered a passionate defense of former Vice President Mike Pence for refusing to go along with Trump’s ploy to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021: “He deserves not grudging credit. He deserves our thanks as Americans for putting his oath of office and the Constitution of the United States before personal, political, and unfair pressure.” And the 38-year-old entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy successfully made himself the evening’s main character with a rat-a-tat of Trumpian talking points, one-liners, and comic insults that aggravated his opponents as the debate wore on.
Some of the debate’s sharpest moments came when the candidates were tangling with Ramaswamy. Christie derided him as an “amateur” who “sounds like ChatGPT.” Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, snapped at him, “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.” Even Pence, who typically affects the manner of a sleepy Sunday-school teacher, seemed to repeatedly lose his cool with Ramaswamy. “Now is not the time for on-the-job training,” Pence said at one point. “We don’t need to bring in a rookie.” (This counts as a harsh burn for Pence.)
On social media and in the press room, theories abounded as to why Ramaswamy seemed to be getting under so many of his opponents’ skin. Maybe it was generational—the know-it-all Millennial with the irritating high-school-debate patter disrespecting his Boomer elders. Or maybe it was his “Ted Cruz energy”—that signature blend of arrogance and smarminess that seems calibrated to repel. Certainly it didn’t help that Ramaswamy insisted on dismissing his opponents as “super-PAC puppets.”
But perhaps the onstage hostility had less to do with Ramaswamy than with that other blustery political neophyte who cartwheeled into GOP politics one day on a whim and promptly overshadowed the rest of the field. With Trump refusing to participate in the debates, Ramaswamy made for a serviceable proxy. (Certainly, his campaign seems to share Trump’s taste for trolling: When I asked Chris Grant, a Ramaswamy adviser, about Pence’s repeated outbursts at the candidate last night, Grant laughed and then giddily compared the former vice president to the grandpa on The Simpsons yelling at a cloud.) Still, sinking Ramaswamy—who currently polls in the high single digits—won’t meaningfully change the shape of the field. The only way to pull that off is to take votes away from the front-runner. And no one seems to have a clear plan to do that.
Back in January, I wrote about the “magical thinking” that pervaded the GOP ahead of 2024. Virtually everyone in the party I talked with—donors, strategists, elected officials—wanted to move on from Trump, but no one was willing to do anything about it. Instead, they all seemed to be waiting for the problem to resolve itself, whether via criminal charges or death or some other miraculous development. “There is a desire for deus ex machina,” one GOP consultant told me at the time. “It’s like 2016 all over again, only more fatalistic.”
Seven months later, on a debate stage in Milwaukee, we witnessed the natural consequence of this attitude. Trump—still alive—is gliding toward his third consecutive presidential nomination while his rivals squabble with one another.
Barack Obama did it. Donald Trump did it. Joe Biden, of course, has done it too. But each of them was wrong: Kissing another person’s baby is just not a good idea.
That rule of lip, experts told me, should be a top priority during the brisk fall and winter months, when flu, RSV, and other respiratory viruses tend to go hog wild (as they are doing right this very moment). “But actually, this is year-round advice,” says Tina Tan, a pediatrician at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Rain, wind, or shine, outside of an infant’s nuclear family, people should just keep their mouths to themselves. Leave those soft, pillowy cheeks alone!
A moratorium on infant smooching might feel like a bit of a downer—even counterintuitive, given how essentialit is for infants and caregivers to touch. But kissing isn’t the only way to show affection to a newborn, and the rationale for cutting back on it specifically is one that most can get behind: keeping those same wee bebes safe. An infant’s immune system is still fragile and unlearned; it struggles to identify infectious threats and can’t marshal much of a defense even when it does. Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale, told me she usually advises parents to avoid public places—church, buses, stores—until their baby is about six weeks old, and able to receive their first big round of immunizations. (And even then, shots take a couple of weeks to kick in.)
The situation grows far less perilous once kids’ vaccine cards start to get more full; past, say, six months of age or so, they’re in much better shape. But risk remains a spectrum, especially when lips get involved. The mouth, I am sorry to tell you, is a weird and gross place, chock-full of saliva, half-chewed flecks of food, and microbes galore; all that schmutz is apt to drool and dribble onto whatever surfaces we drag our faces across. Flu, RSV, rhinovirus, SARS-CoV-2, and the coronaviruses that lead to common colds are among the many respiratory pathogens that hang out in and around our mouth. Although these viruses don’t usually make adults very sick, they can clobber young, unvaccinated kids, whose airways are still small. Health-care workers are seeing a lot of those illnesses now: Cameron recently treated a two-week-old who’d caught rhinovirus and ended up in the ICU.
Also on the list of smoochable threats is herpes simplex 1, the virus responsible for cold sores. “That’s the one I worry about the most,” says Annabelle de St. Maurice, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at UCLA and the mother of a 1-year-old daughter. Most American adults harbor chronic HSV-1 infections in their mouth with no symptoms at all, save for maybe the occasional lesion. But the super-transmissible virus can spread throughout the body of an infant, triggering high fevers and seizures bad enough to require a visit to the hospital. For the first few weeks of a baby’s life, anyone with an active cold sore—blood relative, presidential candidate, or both—would do well to keep away. (Even a history of cold sores might warrant extra caution.)
The lip-restraining guidance is most pertinent to people outside an infant’s household, experts told me, which can include extended family. Ideally, even grandparents “should not be kissing on the baby for at least the first few months,” Tan told me. Within a home, siblings attending day care and school—where it’s easy to pick up germs—might also want to sheathe their smackeroos at first. Years ago, Cameron’s own son had to be admitted to the hospital with RSV when he was six weeks old after catching the virus from his 4-year-old sister. Lakshmi Ganapathi, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me that she didn’t kiss her own two sons on the face before they hit the six-week mark—though experts told me that they don’t expect most parents to get this puritanical about puckering up.
Baby-kissing—especially outside families and tight-knit social circles—isn’t a universal impulse: A few of my friends were rather shocked to hear that such a PSA was even necessary. But people’s threshold for instigating a loving lunge is far lower when it comes to babies than to older kids or adults. One colleague told me that strangers have reached into his daughter’s stroller to stroke her hair; another mentioned that randos have swooped in to tickle his son’s feet. When de St. Maurice takes strolls around her neighborhood with her daughter, she’s surprised by how often casual acquaintances will try to dive-bomb her baby with pursed lips.
Then again, there is perhaps no lure more powerful than a tiny human. Babies snare us visually, with their wide eyes, round cheeks, and button noses; their scent wafts toward us like the heady perfume of a fresh cream scone. (One colleague with kids told me that inhaling that particular odor was, for him, “like huffing glue.”) Among primates, human infants are born especially vulnerable, in desperate need of help, and so we go into overdrive providing it, even to others’ babies, who—at least in our social species—might benefit from communal care. “It’s programmed into us,” Oriana Aragón, a social psychologist at the University of Cincinnati, told me. “I’m able to get really strong reactions out of people with just a photograph.” Even the urge to plant a wet one on someone else’s baby may have adaptive roots in kiss feeding, the practice of delivering pre-chewed meals to an infant lip to lip, says Shelly Volsche, an anthropologist at Boise State University. Kiss-feeding isn’t very popular in the United States today, but it’s still practiced by many groups around the globe.
But as important as these acts are for babies, they can also be at odds with an infant’s health when a bunch of respiratory viruses are swirling about. Those costs aren’t always top of mind when a stranger locks eyes with a tiny human across the way, and it can be “a really awkward conversation,” de St. Maurice told me, to deter someone who just wants to shower affection on your child. Cameron recommends being frank: “I’m just trying to protect my baby.” Physical deterrents can help, too. “Put them in the stroller, put the canopy up, buckle the baby in, make it as difficult as possible,” she said. That’s a lot of barriers for even the most dedicated baby kissers to surmount. De St. Maurice also likes to point out that her little infant, as adorable as she is, “could also potentially transmit something to you.” Plus, by the time they’re six months old, babies may be experiencing their first whiffs of stranger danger and react negatively to unfamiliar hands and mouths. “That’s not particularly good for the baby, and the stranger wouldn’t get anything out of it either,” says Ann Bigelow, a developmental psychologist at St. Francis Xavier University, in Canada.
Again, this advice isn’t meant to starve infants of tactile stimulation. Kids need to be exposed to the outside world and all of its good-germiness. More than that, they need a lot of physical touch. “The skin is our largest sense organ,” Bigelow told me. Skin-to-skin contact stimulates the release of oxytocin, and cements the bond between a caregiver and an infant. Kissing doesn’t have to be the means for giving that affection, though it certainly can be. “Heck, when I’m a grandparent, I’m going to be kissing my grandchild,” Cameron told me. “Just try and stop me.”
You may not be aware of this, but you can read everything that your doctor writes about you. Go to your patient portal online, click around until you land on notes from your past visits, and read away. This is a recent development, and a big one. Previously, you always had the right to request your medical record from your care providers—an often expensive and sometimes fruitless process—but in April 2021, a new federal rule went into effect, mandating that patients have the legal right to freely and electronically access most kinds of notes written about them by their doctors.
If you’ve never heard of “open notes,” as this new law is informally called, you’re not the only one. Doctors say that the majority of their patients have no clue. (This certainly has been the case for all of the friends and family I’ve asked.) If you do know about the law, you likely know a lot about it. That’s typically because you’re a doctor—one who now has to navigate a new era of transparency in medicine—or you’re someone who knows a doctor, or you’re a patient who has become intricately familiar with this country’s health system for one reason or another.
When open notes went into effect, the change was lauded by advocates as part of a greater push toward patient autonomy and away from medical gatekeeping. Previously, hospitals could charge up to hundreds of dollars to release records, if they released them at all. Many doctors, meanwhile, have been far from thrilled about open notes. They’ve argued that this rule will introduce more challenges than benefits for both patients and themselves. At worst, some have fretted, the law will damage people’s trust of doctors and make everyone’s lives worse.
A year and a half in, however, open notes don’t seem to have done too much of anything. So far, they have neither revolutionized patient care nor sunk America’s medical establishment. Instead, doctors say, open notes have barely shifted the clinical experience at all. Few individual practitioners have been advertising the change, and few patients are seeking it out on their own. We’ve been left with a partially implemented system and a big unresolved question: How much, really, should you want to read what your doctor is writing about you?
The debate about open notes can be boiled down to a matter of practicality versus idealism. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone, doctor or otherwise, who argues against transparency for patients in principle. At the same time, few people I spoke with for this article believe that the new rule has been put in place all that smoothly. For care providers, the primary concern has been the trouble that can come with writing notes for a new audience. Notes, generally scribbled in shorthand incomprehensible to the unknowing eye, have traditionally served doctors, and doctors alone. They allowed physicians to stay up to date on their patients and share information with colleagues for input on cases.
Some doctors told me they worry that open notes could result in distress for patients who read something they don’t understand, and that highly technical language could make something sound worse than it is. Oncology, for instance, can involve an onslaught of potentially concerning terminology. (Psychotherapy notes are exempt from the new rule.) Other doctors fear that valuable information can be lost if they go too far in de-jargonizing notes to make them patient-friendly. Or that de-jargonizing notes is simply unfeasible. “Let’s say you came to me with pain and pointed to your mid-clavicular line. I’d just put ‘MCL,’” says Aldo Peixoto, a nephrologist at Yale. “But if I were writing for you to understand, I’d have to say ‘pain on the top-right portion of her abdomen in the line that runs from the middle of her clavicle,’ and so on. Rather than writing four lines of prose, I could’ve used literally three letters.”
If that sounds quibbling, consider the trade-offs. Less time for doctors can translate into less time for patients. Many clinicians already write notes well into the evening. Certainly, the pandemic hasn’t helped. Some doctors told me that if they find themselves in a dilemma of either writing notes in less-efficient, plain language or fielding worried patient calls and messages, exhausted practitioners will face yet another burden. And then there’s the matter of trust. Jack Resneck, the president of the American Medical Association, the nation’s largest professional group of doctors and medical students, told me that doctors can need time and space with patients to get them to open up and be receptive to guidance through difficult situations. If these patients were to see notes too soon, Resneck said, they might “immediately flee and not come back to see you.”
As doctors have spent more time dealing with open notes, many have eased off their strongest objections. Some, including Resneck and the AMA, have warmed up to the new rule as certain exceptions have been granted, such as allowing doctors whose patients have parents or partners with access to their notes to omit certain details from their write-ups for privacy reasons. Other physicians seem to be coming to a somewhat awkward realization: On a practical level, many concerns about how this change affects patients are irrelevant, because most patients don’t yet know they have instant access to their notes in the first place. Every doctor I spoke with for this story told me that their patients were largely unaware. Many doctors and hospitals are not going out of their way to inform people about the new rule, so unless patients are particularly on top of shifting rules within our convoluted health-care system, they’re unlikely to encounter the notes on their own. Kerin Adelson, an oncologist at Yale, admitted she didn’t know how to find notes in her own patient portal. She spent several minutes with me on the phone fumbling through different tabs to locate them.
Fans of open notes are frustrated that there is not a greater push for awareness. Even acknowledging that the new system has its shortcomings, many argue that the only way to make things better is to get people invested in the access they’ve recently been granted. Lydia Dugdale, a primary-care doctor at Columbia University, worries about ensuring equity. “Things like socioeconomic status, education, literacy: All of those issues affect the degree to which any given patient is going to want to read and correct and interrogate his or her health record,” she told me. Tom Delbanco, a Harvard doctor and one of the co-founders of OpenNotes, an initiative that spearheaded the push for access to doctors’ notes in the U.S., believes that the effort required to refrain from using “bad words” in notes is minor, and that it shouldn’t make any significant demands on clinicians’ schedules. Doctors who are now taking more time to write notes because of the change, he told me, “probably ought to because they’ve been writing lousy notes.”
Open notes can be valuable for people with chronic conditions and their caregivers, who need to stay in the know. Liz Salmi, the communications and patient-initiatives director at OpenNotes, told me about pulling her full medical record eight years into dealing with brain cancer, before notes were easily and freely available. The document was 4,839 pages. To get a PDF, she said, she had to pay $15 for each DVD it was uploaded to, and her records spanned multiple discs. But the information was worth it: Having access to the record gave Salmi a way to remember all of the crucial bits of information she’d gotten piecemeal from various doctors.
The fact that many people have no idea open notes exist doesn’t change the deeply personal questions at stake in the debate about whether the notes do more good or harm—questions that everyone must confront in one way or another in dealing with America’s medical system, whether or not they fully realize it. How much information do you truly want about your health, and how much do you trust your doctor to deliver it to you? What is a doctor’s role in informing people about their health?
Open notes are only part of this conversation. The new law also requires that test results be made immediately available to patients, meaning that patients might see their health information before their physician does. Although this is fine for the majority of tests, problems arise when results are harbingers of more complex, or just bad, news. Doctors I spoke with shared that some of their patients have suffered trauma from learning about their melanoma or pancreatic cancer or their child’s leukemia from an electronic message in the middle of the night, with no doctor to call and talk through the seriousness of that result with. This was the case for Tara Daniels, a digital-marketing consultant who lives near Boston. She’s had leukemia three times, and learned about the third via a late-night notification from her patient portal. Daniels appreciates the convenience of open notes, which help her keep track of her interactions with various doctors. But, she told me, when it comes to instant results, “I still hold a lot of resentment over the fact that I found out from test results, that I had to figure it out myself, before my doctor was able to tell me.”
As Americans continue to age, get sick, and navigate the health-care system, many of us may become more invested in the idea of open notes. Until they play a more widespread role in people’s lives, however, the most pressing question about whether you truly want instant access to all your medical information might be how it affects your doctor’s life. Many physicians have come around to open notes, or at least have realized that allowing patients to see what has been written about them is not always a huge bother. But the bigger question of just how quickly patients should be able to access medical information, and how soon doctors should be available to help patients process it, continues to plague physicians. The advent of immediate data sharing “has been a major problem in terms of physician quality of life, and that’s eroded across the board,” Peixoto told me. “Doctors don’t want to be connected all the time. They actually have their lives.”
Where we have landed, then, is an in-between. Patients can read their doctor’s notes and view test results at any hour of the day, but we can access our providers only at certain times. There is likely room for refinement. Allowing a patient to select whether they receive test results from their physician or their portal, or see notes only after their doctor has had the opportunity to walk them through the terminology used, for instance, could make all the difference, some doctors told me. For now, it’s worth asking yourself whether you want to access your patient portal alone, or want to wait until you can get your doctor on the line.
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)
