Tag: Texas state government

Biden creates national monuments in Nevada, Texas mountains

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Tuesday he is establishing national monuments on more than half a million acres in Nevada and Texas and creating a marine sanctuary in U.S. waters near the Pacific Remote Islands southwest of Hawaii. The conservation measures are “protecting the heart and soul of our national pride,″ Biden said.

Speaking at a White House summit on conservation action, Biden said the new monuments are among the “natural treasures” that “define our identity as a nation. They’re a birthright we have to pass down to generation after generation.″

Biden designated Avi Kwa Ame, a desert mountain in southern Nevada that Native Americans consider sacred, as a national monument, along with the Castner Range in El Paso, Texas. He also moved to create a national marine sanctuary in U.S. waters around the Pacific Remote Islands.

Conservation and tribal groups praised Biden’s actions, but Nevada’s new Republican governor slammed the monument designation as “federal confiscation” of Nevada land and “a historic mistake that will cost Nevadans for generations to come.”

Gov. Joe Lombardo, who unseated the state’s Democratic governor in November, said the White House did not consult with his administration before moving to block clean-energy projects and other development in his state. “This kind of ‘Washington Knows Best’ policy might win plaudits from unaccountable special interests, but it’s going to cost our state jobs and economic opportunity,” Lombardo said in a statement.

“Our national wonders are literally the envy of the world,″ Biden said in a speech at the Interior Department. “They’ve always been and always will be central to our heritage as a people and essential to our identity as a nation.″

The Nevada site spans more than 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) and includes Spirit Mountain, a peak northwest of Laughlin called Avi Kwa Ame (ah-VEE’ kwa-meh) by the Fort Mojave Tribe and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The rugged landscape near the Arizona and California state lines is home to bighorn sheep, desert tortoises and a large concentration of Joshua trees, some of which are more than 900 years old.

In Texas, the Castner Range designation will protect cultural, scientific and historic objects, honor U.S. veterans and tribal nations, and expand access to outdoor recreation on public lands, Biden said. Located on Fort Bliss, Castner Range served as a training and testing site for the U.S. Army during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The Army ceased training at the site and closed Castner Range in 1966.

Together, the two new national monuments protect nearly 514,000 acres (208,000 hectares) of public lands. The Avi Kwa Ame landscape is sacred to 12 tribes and is home to rare wildlife and plants, while Castner Range is the ancestral homeland of the Comanche and Apache people, and its cultural ecology is considered sacred to several Indigenous communities.

“To the native people who point to Avi Kwa Ame as their spiritual birthplace, and every Nevadan who knows the value of our cherished public lands: Today is for you,″ tweeted Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nevada, who sponsored a bill to protect the rugged region near the Mojave National Preserve from development, including solar farms and a proposed wind farm.

“Spirit Mountain will now be protected for future generations,″ Titus said.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said Avi Kwa Ame “holds deep spiritual, sacred and historic significance to the Native people who have lived on these lands for generations,″ adding that she was grateful to Biden “for taking this important step in recognition of the decades of advocacy from tribes and the scientific community.″

In the Pacific, Biden directed the Commerce Department to initiate a marine sanctuary designation to protect 777,000 square miles around the Pacific Remote Islands. If completed, the new sanctuary would help ensure the U.S. reaches Biden’s goal to conserve at least 30% of ocean waters under U.S. jurisdiction by 2030, the White House said.

The area to be protected is “larger than Alaska and Colorado put together,″ Biden said.

Biden’s actions come as he faces sharp criticism from environmental groups and youth activists over his approval of the huge Willow oil drilling project in Alaska.

Biden has made fighting global warming a central part of his agenda and has pledged to cut planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. But the decision on Willow has alienated supporters, particularly young activists skeptical about political compromise at the same time Biden is planning to announce his reelection campaign.

Climate activists gathered outside the Interior Department on Tuesday to condemn what they call Biden’s “climate hypocrisy” and demand the administration change course on Willow. Protesters hung a large yellow banner that said, “Stop the Willow oil project” and chanted “no more drilling, no more drilling, no more drilling on federal land.”

In Texas, the Castner Range monument “will preserve fragile lands already surrounded on three sides by development,″ help ensure access to clean water and protect rare and endangered species, said Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar.

Fort Mojave Tribe Chairman Timothy Williams, who attended the conservation summit, said tribes throughout the Southwest consider Avi Kwa Ame to be sacred land. Biden’s creation of a new monument demonstrated his “commitment to respect tribal nations and our nation-to-nation relationship.″

Under the leadership of Biden and Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet member, “We have a seat at the table and we have seen an unprecedented era and opportunity for our tribal communities,″ Williams said.

The Honor Avi Kwa Ame coalition, which includes tribes, local residents, state lawmakers and conservation groups, said its members were “overjoyed” at the new monument.

Biden designated his first national monument, in Colorado, last year. In 2021, he restored the boundaries for Bears Ears National Monument in Utah after they were significantly narrowed by President Donald Trump, a Republican.

Biden announced other steps Tuesday to conserve, restore and expand access to public lands and waters, promote tribal conservation and reduce wildfire risk. The proposals seek to modernize management of America’s public lands, better harness the ocean to help fight climate change and better conserve wildlife corridors, the White House said.

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Associated Press writers Darlene Superville in Washington and Ken Ritter and Rio Yamat in Las Vegas contributed to this story.

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March 21, 2023
New year expected to bring more changes to state voting laws

State lawmakers around the country introduced thousands of bills to change the way elections are run after former President Donald Trump falsely blamed his 2020 loss on voter fraud. Hundreds became law.

Even with proponents of Trump’s election lies roundly defeated during this year’s midterms, advocates on both sides of the voting debate are bracing for another round of election-related legislation. Republicans are eager to tighten election rules further while Democrats, who took control of two additional statehouses, will seek to make it easier to cast a ballot.

Minnesota’s newly reelected Democratic secretary of state, Steve Simon, said he had spoken to several secretaries of state who are eager to push for changes in voting. Losses by election-denier candidates in top races have emboldened some Democrats to champion expansions of voting rights.

“Voters spoke loudly and clearly about what they wanted and didn’t want, both in regards to this office and all these other issues,” said Simon, who defeated a Republican challenger who parroted some of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

Democrats won majorities in both houses of the Minnesota Legislature in November, giving Simon a good shot at enacting changes. He expects to urge lawmakers to adopt automatic voter registration and allow high school students to pre-register.

States routinely make adjustments in their voting laws — some subtle, some dramatic. But experts have never seen an explosion of legislation like that which followed the 2020 presidential election, when more than 3,600 election bills were introduced, according to the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks the legislation.

Liz Avore, senior adviser to the group, said 22 states in the last couple of years expanded access to the ballot, 10 created new restrictions and five expanded access in some ways while creating new barriers in others. This, she said, has created a divide in the U.S. in which “your ZIP code determines your access to our democracy.”

That divide seems likely to grow next year. Legislatures won’t convene until January at the earliest, so it’s unclear how many bills are being drafted and on which subjects. But Texas, where the Legislature meets only once every two years and lawmakers can “pre-file” drafts of legislation for the upcoming session, offers a preview.

The Associated Press has identified nearly 100 election-related legislative proposals already filed in the state, both to increase access to the ballot box and to further restrict it. This includes one that would allow the state’s top lawyer to assign a prosecutor focused on election crimes, testing the boundaries of a court ruling earlier this year that said the attorney general did not have the authority to prosecute election crimes.

Another would assign a group of peace officers to serve as election marshals who investigate claims of election-related missteps. That would follow the lead of Florida, where officers in a special unit assigned to elections have already made a handful of arrests — including of people who mistakenly thought they were eligible to vote under a 2018 constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to some felons. Critics have labeled the unit a political tool of the governor.

Matt Simpson, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said current election legislation proposed in the state, such as increasing criminal penalties for election crimes and creating election marshals, is “extreme” and “very intimidating” for voters. He said these approaches are primarily political and don’t solve actual voting-related issues, such as high rejection rates of mail ballots and ballot applications due to widespread confusion on the identification numbers necessary.

“It is certainly the case that Texas elections do not have widespread fraud,” Simpson said. “These bills, these concerns that are raised, are solutions in search of a problem.”

The reliability of Texas’ elections was underscored by the release earlier this month of an audit by the secretary of state’s office. The 359-page audit of the 2020 election in the state’s two largest Democratic counties and two largest Republican ones found some “irregularities,” but they were largely related to holding an election during a pandemic.

“In most cases, the audit found that the counties followed their procedures and clearly documented their activities,” the audit says.

Ohio is another Republican-controlled state where lawmakers continue to push for restrictions.

The state is likely to draw national attention next year after Republicans indicated they might try again to place on the May ballot a measure requiring a 60% majority for any future constitutional amendments to pass. That provision could limit the ability of Ohio voters to rein in GOP gerrymandering or otherwise counter the majority-Republican Legislature, such as by codifying the right to an abortion.

Republicans failed to muster enough votes during December’s lame-duck session to place the higher threshold for passing amendments on the ballot, but they did pass a sweeping election law overhaul. The bill adds a photo ID requirement for voters and provides them for free, codifies a directive requiring one ballot drop box per county and eliminates early voting on the Monday before Election Day — county officials had said it interfered with their final preparations. The legislation also shrinks the window for receiving mail-in ballots after the election from 10 days to four.

Republican state Sen. Theresa Gavarone said taking steps to tighten access to the voting booth and speed vote counting are aimed at improving the “perception, confidence and integrity” in elections.

“Folks, perception matters,” Gavarone said. “Whether you want to believe it or not, the goal should not just be to secure our elections, but it’s imperative that we give people doubting the results of our elections reason to participate in them.”

Voting rights advocates were outraged.

“This legislation will make voting unnecessarily harder for seniors, students, rural Ohioans, active-duty military and other eligible Ohioans,” said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters Ohio.

The office of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said he was reviewing the legislation.

Democrats are readying their own pushes, especially in two states where they won control of the legislatures and retained the governorship — Michigan and Minnesota.

Michigan voters not only gave Democrats control of the state Legislature, they also passed Proposal 2, a sweeping ballot initiative that expanded early and mail voting. Democrats already are preparing to strengthen the measure in the legislative session.

“There will need to be quite a bit of implementation legislation next term, and I look forward to working with the Legislature and the governor’s office to enact this,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum, a Democrat, said in an interview.

Jake Rollow, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of State, said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson will likely ask lawmakers to allocate $100 million annually for local election offices and propose new measures against circulating election misinformation. A Democratic state lawmaker also proposed imposing penalties for people who pressure election workers, a key cause of Democrats in state legislatures after conspiracy theorists targeted voting officials after the 2020 presidential election.

In Minnesota, Simon said he also wants to increase penalties against threatening or interfering with election workers. He said he’ll push a range of other reforms, including pre-registering high schoolers so they can quickly join the voting rolls upon turning 18. Younger voters lean Democratic, but Simon said he’s not trying to promote his party.

He said he merely wants to make the electorate more reflective of the population, a goal he also pushed when the statehouse was split between Republicans and Democrats.

“These are reforms that will benefit everyone,” he said.

___

Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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December 30, 2022
New year expected to bring more changes to state voting laws

State lawmakers around the country introduced thousands of bills to change the way elections are run after former President Donald Trump falsely blamed his 2020 loss on voter fraud. Hundreds became law.

Even with proponents of Trump’s election lies roundly defeated during this year’s midterms, advocates on both sides of the voting debate are bracing for another round of election-related legislation. Republicans are eager to tighten election rules further while Democrats, who took control of two additional statehouses, will seek to make it easier to cast a ballot.

Minnesota’s newly reelected Democratic secretary of state, Steve Simon, said he had spoken to several secretaries of state who are eager to push for changes in voting. Losses by election-denier candidates in top races have emboldened some Democrats to champion expansions of voting rights.

“Voters spoke loudly and clearly about what they wanted and didn’t want, both in regards to this office and all these other issues,” said Simon, who defeated a Republican challenger who parroted some of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

Democrats won majorities in both houses of the Minnesota Legislature in November, giving Simon a good shot at enacting changes. He expects to urge lawmakers to adopt automatic voter registration and allow high school students to pre-register.

States routinely make adjustments in their voting laws — some subtle, some dramatic. But experts have never seen an explosion of legislation like that which followed the 2020 presidential election, when more than 3,600 election bills were introduced, according to the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks the legislation.

Liz Avore, senior adviser to the group, said 22 states in the last couple of years expanded access to the ballot, 10 created new restrictions and five expanded access in some ways while creating new barriers in others. This, she said, has created a divide in the U.S. in which “your ZIP code determines your access to our democracy.”

That divide seems likely to grow next year. Legislatures won’t convene until January at the earliest, so it’s unclear how many bills are being drafted and on which subjects. But Texas, where the Legislature meets only once every two years and lawmakers can “pre-file” drafts of legislation for the upcoming session, offers a preview.

The Associated Press has identified nearly 100 election-related legislative proposals already filed in the state, both to increase access to the ballot box and to further restrict it. This includes one that would allow the state’s top lawyer to assign a prosecutor focused on election crimes, testing the boundaries of a court ruling earlier this year that said the attorney general did not have the authority to prosecute election crimes.

Another would assign a group of peace officers to serve as election marshals who investigate claims of election-related missteps. That would follow the lead of Florida, where officers in a special unit assigned to elections have already made a handful of arrests — including of people who mistakenly thought they were eligible to vote under a 2018 constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to some felons. Critics have labeled the unit a political tool of the governor.

Matt Simpson, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said current election legislation proposed in the state, such as increasing criminal penalties for election crimes and creating election marshals, is “extreme” and “very intimidating” for voters. He said these approaches are primarily political and don’t solve actual voting-related issues, such as high rejection rates of mail ballots and ballot applications due to widespread confusion on the identification numbers necessary.

“It is certainly the case that Texas elections do not have widespread fraud,” Simpson said. “These bills, these concerns that are raised, are solutions in search of a problem.”

The reliability of Texas’ elections was underscored by the release earlier this month of an audit by the secretary of state’s office. The 359-page audit of the 2020 election in the state’s two largest Democratic counties and two largest Republican ones found some “irregularities,” but they were largely related to holding an election during a pandemic.

“In most cases, the audit found that the counties followed their procedures and clearly documented their activities,” the audit says.

Ohio is another Republican-controlled state where lawmakers continue to push for restrictions.

The state is likely to draw national attention next year after Republicans indicated they might try again to place on the May ballot a measure requiring a 60% majority for any future constitutional amendments to pass. That provision could limit the ability of Ohio voters to rein in GOP gerrymandering or otherwise counter the majority-Republican Legislature, such as by codifying the right to an abortion.

Republicans failed to muster enough votes during December’s lame-duck session to place the higher threshold for passing amendments on the ballot, but they did pass a sweeping election law overhaul. The bill adds a photo ID requirement for voters and provides them for free, codifies a directive requiring one ballot drop box per county and eliminates early voting on the Monday before Election Day — county officials had said it interfered with their final preparations. The legislation also shrinks the window for receiving mail-in ballots after the election from 10 days to four.

Republican state Sen. Theresa Gavarone said taking steps to tighten access to the voting booth and speed vote counting are aimed at improving the “perception, confidence and integrity” in elections.

“Folks, perception matters,” Gavarone said. “Whether you want to believe it or not, the goal should not just be to secure our elections, but it’s imperative that we give people doubting the results of our elections reason to participate in them.”

Voting rights advocates were outraged.

“This legislation will make voting unnecessarily harder for seniors, students, rural Ohioans, active-duty military and other eligible Ohioans,” said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters Ohio.

The office of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said he was reviewing the legislation.

Democrats are readying their own pushes, especially in two states where they won control of the legislatures and retained the governorship — Michigan and Minnesota.

Michigan voters not only gave Democrats control of the state Legislature, they also passed Proposal 2, a sweeping ballot initiative that expanded early and mail voting. Democrats already are preparing to strengthen the measure in the legislative session.

“There will need to be quite a bit of implementation legislation next term, and I look forward to working with the Legislature and the governor’s office to enact this,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum, a Democrat, said in an interview.

Jake Rollow, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of State, said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson will likely ask lawmakers to allocate $100 million annually for local election offices and propose new measures against circulating election misinformation. A Democratic state lawmaker also proposed imposing penalties for people who pressure election workers, a key cause of Democrats in state legislatures after conspiracy theorists targeted voting officials after the 2020 presidential election.

In Minnesota, Simon said he also wants to increase penalties against threatening or interfering with election workers. He said he’ll push a range of other reforms, including pre-registering high schoolers so they can quickly join the voting rolls upon turning 18. Younger voters lean Democratic, but Simon said he’s not trying to promote his party.

He said he merely wants to make the electorate more reflective of the population, a goal he also pushed when the statehouse was split between Republicans and Democrats.

“These are reforms that will benefit everyone,” he said.

———

Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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December 28, 2022
Migrants flee more countries, regardless of US policies

TIJUANA, Mexico — In 2014, groups of unaccompanied children escaping violence in Central America overwhelmed U.S. border authorities in South Texas. In 2016, thousands of Haitians fled a devastating earthquake and stopped in Tijuana, Mexico, after walking and taking buses through up to 11 countries to the U.S. border.

In 2018, about 6,000 mostly Guatemalan and Honduran migrants fleeing violence and poverty descended on Tijuana, many of them families with young children sleeping in frigid, rain-soaked parks and streets.

A Trump-era ban on asylum, granted a brief extension by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday, was one of the U.S. policies affecting migrants’ decisions to leave their homes. The last eight years show how an extraordinary convergence of inequality, civil strife and natural disasters also have been prompting millions to leave Latin America, Europe and Africa. Since 2017, the United States has been the world’s top destination for asylum-seekers, according to the United Nations.

———

This is part of an occasional series on how the United States became the world’s top destination for asylum-seekers.

———

Migrants have been denied the right to seek asylum under U.S. and international law 2.5 million times since March 2020 on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19, an authority known as Title 42. It applies to all nationalities but has fallen disproportionately on people from countries that Mexico takes back, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and, more recently Venezuela, as well as Mexico. Pent-up demand is expected to drive crossings higher when asylum restrictions end.

When the pandemic hit, nationalities rarely seen at the border grew month after month, from Cuba, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia. High costs, strained diplomatic relations and other considerations complicated U.S. efforts to expel people from countries that Mexico wouldn’t take.

Cubans are fleeing their homes in the largest numbers in six decades to escape economic and political turmoil. Most fly to Nicaragua as tourists and slowly make their way to the U.S. They were the second-largest nationality at the border after Mexicans in October.

Grissell Matos Prieguez and her husband surrendered to border agents near Eagle, Pass, Texas, Oct. 30, after a 16-day journey through six countries that included buses, motorcycles and taxis and exhausting night walks through bushes and foul-smelling rivers.

“Throughout all the journey you feel like you are going to die, you don’t trust anybody, nothing,” said Matos, a 34-year-old engineer. “You live in a constant fear, or to be detained and that anything would happen.”

To pay for the trip from Santiago de Cuba, they sold everything, down to computers and bicycles, and borrowed from relatives in Florida. Their parents and grandparents stayed behind.

A recent surge that has made El Paso, Texas, the busiest corridor for illegal crossings is made up largely of Nicaraguans, whose government has quashed dissent.

Haitians who stop in South America, sometimes for years, have been a major presence, most notably when nearly 16,000 camped in the small town of Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021. The Biden administration flew many home but slowed returns amid increasingly brazen attacks by gangs that have grown more powerful since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse last year.

Migration is often driven by “pull factors” that draw people to a country, such as a relatively strong U.S. economy and an asylum system that takes years to decide a case, encouraging some to come even if they feel unlikely to win. But conditions at home, known as “push factors,” may be as responsible for unprecedented numbers over the last year.

Looking back, Tijuana attorney and migrant advocate Soraya Vazquez says the Haitian diaspora of 2016 was a turning point.

“We began to realize that there were massive movements all over, in some places from war, in others from political situations, violence, climate change,” said Vazquez, a San Diego native and former legislative aide in Mexico City. “Many things happened at once but, in the end, men and our governments are responsible.”

After hosting legal workshops for Haitians in Tijuana, Vazquez helped bring chef Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen to the city’s migrant shelters for four years. Seeking financial stability, she became Tijuana director of Al Otro Lado, a nonprofit group that reported $4.1 million in revenue in 2020 and was recently named a beneficiary of MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropy.

“What provoked all of this? Inequality,” Vazquez said over tea in Tijuana’s trendy Cacho neighborhood.

For decades, Mexicans, largely adult men, went to the U.S. to fill jobs and send money home. But in 2015, the Pew Research Center found more Mexicans returned to Mexico from the U.S. than came since the Great Recession ended.

Mexicans still made up one of three encounters with U.S. border agents during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, higher than three years ago but well below the 85% reported in 2011 and the 95% at the turn of the century. And those fleeing are increasingly families trying to escape drug-fueled violence with young children.

Like clockwork, hundreds cross the border after midnight in Yuma, Arizona, walking through Mexican shrub to surrender to U.S. agents. Many fly to the nearby city of Mexicali after entering Mexico as tourists and take a taxi to the desert. The Border Patrol releases them to the Regional Center for Border Health, a clinic that charters six buses daily to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

The health clinic had shuttled families from more than 140 countries by August, not one from Mexico, said Amanda Aguirre, its executive director.

Daniel Paz, a Peruvian who surrendered to border agents in Yuma with his wife and 10-year-old in August, had the surprise misfortune of being expelled home without a chance at asylum, unusual even after the Peruvian government began accepting two U.S. charter flights a week.

Peruvians were stopped more than 9,000 times by U.S. authorities along the Mexican border in October, roughly nine times the same period a year earlier and up from only 12 times the year before.

Paz is watching developments around Title 42 and considering another attempt after the government of Peruvian President Pedro Castillo was toppled Dec. 7.

“We’ll see if I’m back in January or February,” he texted Sunday from Lima. “There is no lack of desire.”

Tijuana’s latest newcomers are Venezuelans, about 300 of whom recently temporarily occupied a city-owned recreational center.

About 7 million Venezuelans fled since 2014, including nearly 2 million to neighboring Colombia, but only recently started coming to the United States.

Many Venezuelans gather at Mexico’s asylum office that opened in Tijuana in 2019 and processed more than 3,000 applications in each of the last two years from dozens of countries, led by Haitians and Hondurans.

Jordy Castillo, 40, said he’d wanted to leave Venezuela for 15 years but didn’t act until friends and family started reaching the United States last year. His three brothers were first in his circle to seek asylum there, even though they knew no one.

“They found someone who took them in and got settled,” he said.

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Associated Press writer Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed.

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December 22, 2022
Trump’s tax returns to be discussed by congressional panel

WASHINGTON — The Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee is expected to vote Tuesday on whether to publicly release years of Donald Trump ’s tax returns, which the former president has long tried to shield.

Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., has kept a close hold on the panel’s actions, including whether the panel will meet in a public or private session. And if lawmakers move forward with plans to release the returns, it’s unclear how quickly that would happen.

But after a yearslong battle that ultimately resulted in the Supreme Court clearing the way last month for the Treasury Department to send the returns to Congress, Democrats are under pressure to act aggressively. The committee received six years of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses. And with just two weeks left until Republicans formally take control of the House, Tuesday’s meeting could be the last opportunity for Democrats to disclose whatever information they have gleaned.

Trump has long had a complicated relationship with his personal income taxes.

As a presidential candidate in 2016, he broke decades of precedent by refusing to release his tax forms to the public. He bragged during a presidential debate that year that he was “smart” because he paid no federal taxes and later claimed he wouldn’t personally benefit from the 2017 tax cuts he signed into law that favored people with extreme wealth, asking Americans to simply take him at his word.

Tax records would have been a useful metric for judging his success in business. The image of a savvy businessman was key to a political brand honed during his years as a tabloid magnet and star of “The Apprentice” television show. They also could reveal any financial obligations — including foreign debts — that could influence how he governed.

But Americans were largely in the dark about Trump’s relationship with the IRS until October 2018 and September 2020, when The New York Times published two separate series based on leaked tax records.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 articles showed how Trump received a modern equivalent of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate holdings, with much of that money coming from what the Times called “tax dodges” in the 1990s. Trump sued the Times and his niece, Mary Trump, in 2021 for providing the records to the newspaper. In November, Mary Trump asked an appeals court to overturn a judge’s decision to reject her claims that her uncle and two of his siblings defrauded her of millions of dollars in a 2001 family settlement.

The 2020 articles showed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2017 and 2018. Trump paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the past 15 years because he generally lost more money than he made.

The articles exposed deep inequities in the U.S. tax code as Trump, a reputed multi-billionaire, paid little in federal income taxes. IRS figures indicate that the average tax filer paid roughly $12,200 in 2017, about 16 times more than the former president paid.

Details about Trump’s income from foreign operations and debt levels were also contained in the tax filings, which the former president derided as “fake news.”

At the time of the 2020 articles, Neal said he saw an ethical problem in Trump overseeing a federal agency that he has also battled with legal filings.

“Now, Donald Trump is the boss of the agency he considers an adversary,” Neal said in 2020. “It is essential that the IRS’s presidential audit program remain free of interference.”

The Manhattan district attorney’s office also obtained copies of Trump’s tax records in February 2021 after after a protracted legal fight that included two trips to the Supreme Court.

The office, then led by District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., had subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm in 2019, seeking access to eight years of Trump’s tax returns and related documents.

The DA’s office issued the subpoena after Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen told Congress that Trump had misled tax officials, insurers and business associates about the value of his assets. Those allegations are the subject of a fraud lawsuit that New York Attorney General Letitia James filed against Trump and his company in September.

Trump’s longtime accountant, Donald Bender, testified at the Trump Organization’s recent criminal trial that Trump reported losses on his tax returns every year for a decade, including nearly $700 million in 2009 and $200 million in 2010.

Bender, a partner at Mazars USA LLP who spent years preparing Trump’s personal tax returns, said Trump’s reported losses from 2009 to 2018 included net operating losses from some of the many businesses he owns through his Trump Organization.

The Trump Organization was convicted earlier this month on tax fraud charges for helping some executives dodge taxes on company-paid perks such as apartments and luxury cars.

The current Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, told The Associated Press in an interview last week that his office’s investigation into Trump and his businesses continues.

“We’re going to follow the facts and continue to do our job,” Bragg said.

Trump, who refused to release his returns during his 2016 presidential campaign and his four years in the White House while claiming that he was under IRS audit, has argued there is little to be gleaned from the tax returns even as he has fought to keep them private.

“You can’t learn much from tax returns, but it is illegal to release them if they are not yours!” he complained on his social media network last weekend.

Republicans, meanwhile, have railed against the potential release, arguing that it would set a dangerous precedent.

Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the Ways and Means Committee’s Republican leader, accused Democrats on the committee of “unleashing a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond President Trump, and jeopardizes the privacy of every American.”

“Going forward, partisans in Congress have nearly unlimited power to target political enemies by obtaining and making public their private tax returns to embarrass and destroy them,” Brady said in a statement. “We urge Democrats, in their rush to target former President Trump, not to unleash this dangerous new political weapon on the American people.”

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Kinnard reported from Columbia, South Carolina. Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak and Jill Colvin in New York contributed this report.

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December 19, 2022
Biden called gay marriage ‘inevitable’ and soon it’ll be law

WASHINGTON — A decade ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden shocked the political world and preempted his boss by suddenly declaring his support for gay marriage — one of the country’s most contentious issues — on national television. But not everyone was surprised.

A small group had attended a private fundraiser with Biden weeks earlier in Los Angeles where he disclosed not only his approval but his firm conclusion about the future of same-sex marriage.

He predicted, “Things are changing so rapidly, it’s going to become a political liability in the near term for someone to say, ‘I oppose gay marriage.’”

“Mark my words. And my job — our job — is to keep this momentum rolling to the inevitable.”

The day that Biden envisioned may have arrived. He plans on Tuesday to sign legislation, passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress, to protect gay unions — even if the Supreme Court should revisit, as some fear or hope, its ruling supporting a nationwide right of same-sex couples to marry.

Biden’s signature will burnish his legacy as a champion of equality at a time when the LGBTQ community is anxious to safeguard legal changes from a backlash on the right that has used incendiary rhetoric, particularly against transgender people.

“It is a historic moment and a long time coming,” said Bruce Reed, the White House deputy chief of staff and a longtime adviser to Biden. “It’s all the more inspiring in light of what the country has been put through in recent years, and what courts have threatened of late.”

If there’s a feeling of anticlimax, it’s because the politics of marriage have shifted as dramatically as Biden predicted. Although the issue is not universally embraced — a majority of Republicans in the House and Senate voted against the legislation — it’s no longer considered a dangerous third rail.

———

That wasn’t the case a decade ago.

Chad Griffin, who led the American Foundation for Equal Rights and the Human Rights Campaign, said it was common for lawmakers to tell him, “You know privately I’m with you, and you know so-and-so in my family is gay or lesbian, but politically, I can’t be out there.”

Activists’ frustration extended to President Barack Obama. He had made some changes, such as eliminating the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule that prevented gay people from serving openly in the military, but had stopped short of embracing marriage equality despite lawsuits that were forcing the issue to the forefront.

As Obama’s vice president, Biden shared the same stance. In 1996, he had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevented federal recognition of same-sex unions.

In April 2012, Biden attended the fundraiser at the Los Angeles home of a married gay couple — Michael Lombardo, an HBO executive, and Sonny Ward, an architect — and their children. When it was time for the question-and-answer session, Griffin decided he shouldn’t sidestep the issue.

“When you came in tonight, you met Michael and Sonny and their two beautiful kids,” he said to Biden. “And I wonder if you can just sort of talk in a frank, honest way about your own personal views as it relates to marriage equality.”

Biden responded as Griffin had requested — frankly and personally.

“All you got to do is look in the eyes of those kids,” he said. “And no one can wonder, no one can wonder whether or not they are cared for and nurtured and loved and reinforced. And folks, what’s happening is, everybody is beginning to see it.”

Just over two weeks later, Biden was on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and host David Gregory asked whether he supported gay marriage. Biden said the issue came down to “a simple proposition.”

“Who do you love? And will you be loyal to the person you love?” Biden said. “And that’s what people are finding out is what all marriages, at their root, are about, whether they’re marriages of lesbians, or gay men, or heterosexuals.”

Biden said the president, not him, “sets the policies.” But he said gay couples should have “all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.”

Gautam Raghavan was leading LGBTQ outreach for the White House at the time. On the Sunday that the interview aired, he and his husband were hosting some friends for brunch, and the TV was on in the background.

“We were watching it and thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe that just happened,’” Raghavan said. He can’t remember what they ate that morning, but “I’m sure we had a mimosa afterward.”

It was an unusually unscripted moment in carefully choreographed Washington.

For Biden, “all politics is personal,” said Reed, who was Biden’s chief of staff in the vice president’s office. “And I think that’s what prompted him to speak his mind.”

Not everyone was pleased. Obama was left trailing a step behind his vice president, and three days later did an interview to disclose his own support for gay marriage. He said Biden had gotten “a little over his skis” but there were no hard feelings.

———

At the time of Biden’s interview, Jim Obergefell was living in Ohio with his partner, John Arthur, who had recently been diagnosed with the deadly disease known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS.

Marriage was always considered out of the question, Obergefell said, but Biden’s comments caught his attention. The following year, after the Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional, Obergefell proposed to Arthur.

They married in Maryland, where it was legal, but their home state of Ohio would not recognize their union. Although Arthur died in 2013, their legal battle continued to the Supreme Court. Obergefell met Biden for the first time in 2015.

“I just remember walking up to him and he hugged me and the first words out of his mouth were condolences for the loss of my husband,” he said.

The Supreme Court soon legalized gay marriage nationwide in a decision known as Obergefell v. Hodges.

Although the issue was widely considered to be settled, it resurfaced last June when the court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in 1973. In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court “should reconsider” other precedents as well, including the Obergefell ruling, raising concern that other civil rights could be rolled back.

Legislation to revive the right to abortion was politically impossible. But marriage might be a different matter, and supporters believed they could rally enough Republican votes to sidestep a filibuster in the Senate. They were right.

Obergefell, however, is not experiencing a sense of satisfaction.

“Our right to marry was affirmed by the Supreme Court. And in a perfect world, we would never have to worry about losing that,” he said. “We now know that rights that people counted on and expected are no longer safe.”

Instead of feeling happy, he said, “I’m on edge.”

———

It’s a common sentiment right now in the face of political attacks over LGBTQ issues.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., signed legislation limiting teachers’ ability to talk about sexual orientation or gender identity in schools. In Texas, GOP Gov. Greg Abbott wants state child welfare investigators to consider gender-affirming care as a form of abuse.

Protesters, sometimes armed, have shown up at events where drag queens read to children. Five people were shot to death at a gay club in Colorado last month. The suspect has been charged with hate crimes.

“The story of civil rights in America is always evolving,” said Raghavan, who now runs the White House personnel office. “We should never assume that we’re done with something because we got a good court decision or a piece of legislation.”

Biden has taken steps to safeguard rights for transgender people, such as reinstating anti-discrimination provisions eliminated by President Donald Trump. Biden also ended the ban on transgender people serving in the military. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is the first openly gay Cabinet member, and Biden’s assistant health secretary, Rachel Levine, is the first transgender person to win Senate confirmation to an executive post.

Sarah McBride, a transgender state senator from Biden’s home state of Delaware, said it’s a comfort “for so many of us, who feel frightened or vulnerable or alone, to know that the leader of this country, the leader of the free world, not only sees us but embraces us.”

McBride worked for Biden’s eldest son, Beau, during his campaigns for Delaware attorney general, and she came out as transgender in 2012.

Before Beau Biden died from brain cancer in 2015, he helped pass Delaware laws that legalized gay marriage and banned discrimination over gender identity. McBride said the experience deepened the elder Biden’s own commitment to these issues and “he’s carrying on Beau’s legacy.”

As last month’s midterm elections approached, the White House played host to Dylan Mulvaney, a Broadway performer who has chronicled her gender transition on TikTok, to talk about transgender issues with Biden.

Conservative critics were apoplectic. Ben Shapiro, a popular commentator, called the interview “maybe the most disturbing clip in presidential history.”

But Biden, much like he has in the past, suggested that acceptance was possible — maybe even likely. Asked by Mulvaney how leaders can better advocate for transgender people, Biden responded that it was important to be “seen with people like you.”

“People fear what they don’t know. They fear what they don’t know,” he said. “And when people realize, individuals realize, ‘Oh, this is what they’re telling me to be frightened of, this is the problem.’ I mean, people change their minds.”

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December 10, 2022
Border Patrol agent dies in ATV accident during Texas patrol

MISSION, Texas — A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent died Wednesday after an all-terrain vehicle accident while patrolling along the border in south Texas, according to the agency.

The accident happened about 1 a.m. near Mission, Texas, along the border with Mexico, Customs and Border Patrol said in a statement. The agent was tracking a group of people who had crossed the border illegally.

Fellow agents found the man unresponsive, began life-saving efforts and called for an ambulance, the statement said. The agent died at a hospital.

“The death of an Agent who died while securing our nation’s border is a tremendous loss for our organization and our nation, our prayers are with his family and co-workers during this difficult time,” said U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz in the statement.

The agency did not release the identity of the agent and declined further comment.

The Texas-Mexico border has seen multiple deadly accidents in recent years stemming from immigration-related pursuits.

In June, four migrants died and three other people were injured after a Jeep being pursued by Border Patrol agents crashed into the back of a tractor-trailer on the interstate near the Texas border city of Encinal.

In January, Texas Department of Public Safety Special Agent Anthony Salas died after being involved in a single vehicle traffic accident near Eagle Pass while working with U.S. Border Patrol to transport six people who had illegally immigrated to the U.S.

Last year, an Austin man was charged in the deaths of eight migrants after a deadly crash near the border city of Del Rio following a police chase.

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December 7, 2022
Migrant-death suspect ran detention center accused of abuse

AUSTIN, Texas — One of two Texas brothers who authorities say opened fire on a group of migrants getting water near the U.S.-Mexico border, killing one and injuring another, was warden at a detention facility with a history of abuse allegations.

The shooting happened Tuesday in rural Hudspeth County about 90 miles (145 kilometers) from El Paso, according to court documents filed Thursday. One man was killed; a woman was taken to a hospital in El Paso where she was recovering from a gunshot wound in her stomach, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

DPS said the victims were among a group of migrants standing alongside the road drinking water out of a reservoir when a truck with two men inside pulled over. According to court documents, the group had taken cover as the truck first passed to avoid being detected, but the truck then backed up. The driver then exited the vehicle and fired two shots at the group.

Witnesses from the group told federal agents that just before hearing the gunshots, they heard one of the two men in the vehicle yell derogatory terms to them and rev the engine, according to court documents.

Authorities located the truck by checking cameras and finding a vehicle matching the description given by the migrants, according to court records.

Michael Sheppard and Mark Sheppard, both 60, were charged with manslaughter, according to court documents. Court records did not list attorneys for either man. Contact information for them or for their representatives could not be found and attempts to reach them for comment since their arrest have been unsuccessful.

Records show that Michael Sheppard was warden at the West Texas Detention Facility, a privately owned center that has housed migrant detainees. A spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told The Associated Press that no ICE detainees had been held at that detention facility since October 2019, following the opening of a larger detention facility nearby.

Scott Sutterfield, a spokesman for facility operator Lasalle Corrections, responded to an AP email asking whether Sheppard had been fired as warden. Sutterfield said the warden had been fired “due to an off-duty incident unrelated to his employment.” Sutterfield declined further comment, citing the “ongoing criminal investigation.”

A 2018 report by The University of Texas and Texas A&M immigration law clinics and immigration advocacy group RAICES cited multiple allegations of physical and verbal abuse against African migrants at the facility. According to the report, the warden “was involved in three of the detainees’ reports of verbal threats, as well as in incidents of physical assault.” The warden cited in the report was not named.

However, Texas Congressman Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat, said in a press conference Saturday that Sheppard was in fact the warden at the facility at the time of the allegations and when the report was published. According to information provided by Doggett’s office, the webpage for Louisiana-based LaSalle Corrections listed Sheppard as an employee at West Texas since 2015.

Doggett, along with other Texas Democratic congressmen, called on Saturday for a federal investigation into the shooting.

“The dehumanizing, the demeaning of people who seek refuge in this country, many of whom are people of color, is what contributed to the violence we see here,” Doggett said.

In one account detailed in the report, a migrant told the lawyers that the warden hit him in the face while at the nurse’s station and when he turned to the medical officers he was told they “didn’t see anything.”

“I was then placed in solitary confinement, where I was forced to lie face down on the floor with my hands handcuffed behind my back while I was kicked repeatedly in the ribs by the Warden,” a migrant referred to as Dalmar said in the report.

The attorneys submitted a civil rights complaint over the allegations that year but according to response letter sent to the lawyers in 2021, the Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties conducted an onsite investigation, made multiple recommendations to ICE, but did not find evidence of “any excessive use of force incidents” or “incidents of wrongful segregation” and found some uses of force to have been appropriate.

Fatma Marouf, a co-author of the report and director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Texas A&M, said it was difficult for authorities to follow up on the allegations because many of the people interviewed for the report were deported shortly after.

Marouf said current views on immigration enforcement based in deterring people at all costs have “spiraled out of control.”

“We don’t even see people as humans anymore,” Marouf said.

The number of Venezuelans taken into custody at the U.S.- Mexico soared in August, while fewer migrants from Mexico and some Central American countries were stopped, officials said earlier this month. Overall, U.S. authorities stopped migrants 203,598 times in August, up 1.8% from 199,976 times in July but down 4.7% from 213,593 times in August 2021.

Silky Shah, executive director of advocacy organization Detention Watch Network, said this is both a problem of the current rhetoric around immigration, including the use of terms like “invasion” by GOP leaders including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and inaction from federal officials to move away from the previous administration’s immigration policies that added to this sentiment.

“I think there is no question that there is a discourse that is stoking actions like this,” Shah said.

————

Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat and Paul Weber contributed to this report.

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October 1, 2022