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Harris calls Trump 'fascist' after ex-aide's Hitler comparison
Vice President Kamala Harris said that she believes that Donald Trump "is a fascist” after his longest-serving chief of staff said the former president praised Adolf Hitler while in office and put personal loyalty above the Constitution.
Harris seized on comments by former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, about his former boss in interviews with The New York Times and The Atlantic published Tuesday warning that the Republican nominee meets the definition of a fascist and that Trump, while in office, suggested that the Nazi leader “did some good things.”
Harris bets her policies can attract Latino voters while Trump touts his time as president to them
Speaking at a CNN town hall Wednesday night, Harris said they offer a window into who the former president “really is” and the kind of commander in chief he would be.
When asked if she believed that Trump is a fascist, Harris replied twice, “Yes, I do.” Later, she brought it up herself, saying Trump would, if elected again, be “a president who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
The Democratic presidential nominee said Kelly's comments, less than two weeks before voters will decide whether to send Trump back to the Oval Office, were a “911 call to the American people” by the former chief of staff. They were quickly seized by Harris as part of her closing message to voters as she works to sharpen the choice at the ballot box for Americans.
“I believe Donald Trump is a danger to the well-being and security of the United States of America," she said, saying the American people deserve a president who maintains “certain standards," which include “certainly not comparing oneself, in a clearly admiring way, to Hitler.”
She added that if reelected, Trump would no longer be tempered by people who would “restrain him” from his worst impulses.
Earlier Wednesday, Harris repeated her increasingly dire warnings about Trump’s mental fitness and his intentions for the presidency.
“This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best, from the people who have worked with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room,” Harris told reporters outside the vice president's residence in Washington.
The comments from Kelly, the retired Marine general who worked for Trump in the White House from 2017 to 2019, built on past warnings from former top Trump officials as the election enters its final two weeks.
Kelly has long been critical of Trump and previously accused him of calling veterans killed in combat “suckers” and “losers.” His new warnings emerged as Trump seeks a second term vowing to dramatically expand his use of the military at home and suggesting he would use force to go after Americans he considers “enemies from within.”
“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Kelly recalled to the Times. Kelly said he would usually quash the conversation by saying “nothing (Hitler) did, you could argue, was good,” but Trump would occasionally bring up the topic again.
In his interview with The Atlantic, Kelly recalled that when Trump raised the idea of needing “German generals,” Kelly would ask if he meant “Bismarck’s generals,” referring to Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor who oversaw the unification of Germany. “Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking Trump. To which the former president responded, “Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.”
Trump said on his Truth Social media platform that Kelly had “made up a story” and went on to heap insults on his former chief of staff, including that Kelly's “toughness morphed into weakness.”
Trump’s campaign also denied the accounts. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Kelly had “beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated" and, after Harris' statement, accused the Democratic candidate of sharing "outright lies and falsehoods.”
Chris Sununu, New Hampshire's Republican governor and onetime Trump critic, said Kelly's comments did not change his plans to vote for the former president.
“Look, we’ve heard a lot of extreme things about Donald Trump, from Donald Trump. It's really par for the course,” the governor told CNN. “Unfortunately, with a guy like that, it’s kind of baked into the vote at this point.”
Some of the former president's supporters in swing states responded to Kelly's comments with a shrug.
“Trump did his four years, and we were in great shape. Kelly didn’t have anything good to say about Trump. He ought to have his butt kicked," said Jim Lytner, a longtime advocate for veterans in Nevada who served in the Army in Vietnam and co-founded the nonprofit Veterans Transition Resource Center.
Harris said Wednesday that Trump admired Hitler's generals because he “does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution, he wants a military that is loyal to him. He wants a military who will be loyal to him personally.”
Polls show the race is tight in swing states, and both Trump and Harris are crisscrossing the country making their final pitches to the sliver of undecided voters. Harris' campaign has spent considerable time reaching out to independent voters, using the support of longtime Republicans such as former Rep. Liz Cheney and comments like Kelly's to urge past Trump voters to reject his candidacy in November.
Harris’ campaign held a call with reporters Tuesday to elevate the voices of retired military officials who highlighted how many of the officials who worked with Trump now oppose his campaign.
“People that know him best are most opposed to him, his presidency,” said retired Army Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson.
Anderson said he wished Kelly would fully back Harris over Trump, something he has yet to do. But retired Army Reserve Col. Kevin Carroll, a former senior counselor to Kelly, said Wednesday that the former top Trump official would “rather chew broken glass than vote for Donald Trump.”
Before serving as Trump's chief of staff, Kelly worked as the former president's secretary of homeland security, where he oversaw Trump's attempts to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Kelly was also at the forefront of the administration's crackdown in immigration policy that led to the separation of thousands of immigrant parents and their children along the southern border. Those actions made him a villain to many on the left, including Harris.
After Kelly left the Trump administration and joined the board of a company operating the nation's largest detention center for unaccompanied migrant children, Harris wrote during her 2019 run for president that he was “the architect” of the administration’s "cruel child separation policy. Now he will profit off the separation of families. It’s unethical. We are better than this.”
When she was in Miami for a primary debate in June 2019, Harris was also one of a dozen Democratic presidential candidates who visited the detention center south of the city and protested against the administration’s harsh treatment of young migrants.
In his interview with the Times, Kelly also said Trump met the definition of a fascist. After reading the definition aloud, including that fascism was “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader,” Kelly concluded Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Kelly added that Trump often fumed at any attempt to constrain his power, and that “he would love to be” a dictator.
“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Kelly told the Times, adding later, “I think he’d love to be just like he was in business — he could tell people to do things and they would do it, and not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and whatnot.”
Kelly is not the first former top Trump administration official to cast the former president as a threat.
Retired Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bob Woodward in his recent book “War” that Trump was “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.” And retired Gen. Jim Mattis, who worked as secretary of defense under Trump, reportedly later told Woodward that he agreed with Milley’s assessment.
Throughout Trump's political rise, the businessman-turned-politician benefited from the support of military veterans.
AP VoteCast found that about 6 in 10 military veterans said they voted for Trump in 2020, as did just over half of those with a veteran in the household. Among voters in this year’s South Carolina Republican primary, AP VoteCast found that close to two-thirds of military veterans and people in veteran households voted for Trump over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trump's toughest opponent in the 2024 Republican primary.
3 hours ago
Los Angeles Times editor resigns after newspaper withholds presidential endorsement
The editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times has resigned after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president, a journalism trade publication reported Wednesday.
Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review in an interview that she resigned because the Times was remaining silent on the contest in “dangerous times.”
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza said. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”
In a post on the social media platform X that did not directly mention the resignation, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong said the board was asked to do a factual analysis of the policies of Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump during their time at the White House.
Additionally, "The board was asked to provide (its) understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years,” he wrote. “In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being president for the next four years.”
Soon-Shiong, who bought the paper in 2018, said the board “chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”
Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review that the board had intended to endorse Harris and she had drafted the outline of a proposed editorial.
A LA Times spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
The LA Times Guild Unit Council & Bargaining Committee said it was “deeply concerned about our owner’s decision to block a planned endorsement in the presidential race."
“We are even more concerned that he is now unfairly assigning blame to Editorial Board members for his decision not to endorse," the guild said in a statement. “We are still pressing for answers from newsroom management on behalf of our members.”
Trump’s campaign jumped on Garza’s departure, saying the state’s largest newspaper had declined to endorse the Democratic ticket after backing Harris in her previous races for U.S. Senate and state attorney general.
Her exit comes about 10 months after then-Executive Editor Kevin Merida left the paper in what was called a “mutually agreed” upon departure. At the time, the news organization said it had fallen well short of its digital subscriber goals and needed a revenue boost to sustain the newsroom and its digital operations.
12 hours ago
Efforts by Russia, Iran and China to sway US voters, Microsoft report says
Foreign adversaries have shown continued determination to influence the U.S. election –- and there are signs their activity will intensify as Election Day nears, Microsoft said in a report Wednesday.
Russian operatives are doubling down on fake videos to smear Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, while Chinese-linked social media campaigns are maligning down-ballot Republicans who are critical of China, the company’s threat intelligence arm said Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Iranian actors who allegedly sent emails aimed at intimidating U.S. voters in 2020 have been surveying election-related websites and major media outlets, raising concerns they could be preparing for another scheme this year, the tech giant said.
The report serves as a warning – building on others from U.S. intelligence officials – that as the nation enters this critical final stretch and begins counting ballots, the worst influence efforts may be yet to come. U.S. officials say they remain confident that election infrastructure is secure enough to withstand any attacks from American adversaries. Still, in a tight election, foreign efforts to influence voters are raising concern.
Microsoft noted that some of the disinformation campaigns it tracks received little authentic engagement from U.S. audiences, but others have been amplified by unwitting Americans, exposing thousands to foreign propaganda in the final weeks of voting.
Russia, China and Iran have all rejected claims that they are seeking to meddle with the U.S. election.
“The presidential elections are the United States’ domestic affairs. China has no intention and will not interfere in the US election,” the Chinese Embassy said in a statement.
“Having already unequivocally and repeatedly announced, Iran neither has any motive nor intent to interfere in the U.S. election; and, it therefore categorically repudiates such accusations,” read a statement from Iran's mission to the United Nations.
A message left with the Russian Embassy was not immediately returned on Wednesday.
The report reveals an expanding landscape of coordinated campaigns to advance adversaries’ priorities as global wars and economic concerns raise the stakes for the U.S. election around the world. It details a trend also seen in the 2016 and 2020 elections of foreign actors covertly fomenting discord among American voters, furthering a divide in the electorate that has left the nation almost evenly split just 13 days before voting concludes.
“History has shown that the ability of foreign actors to rapidly distribute deceptive content can significantly impact public perception and electoral outcomes,” Clint Watts, general manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, said in a news release. “With a particular focus on the 48 hours before and after Election Day, voters, government institutions, candidates and parties must remain vigilant to deceptive and suspicious activity online.”
The report adds to previous findings from Microsoft and U.S. intelligence that suggest the Kremlin is committed to lambasting Harris’ character online, a sign of its preference for another Donald Trump presidency.
Russian actors have spent recent months churning out both AI-generated content and more rudimentary spoofs and staged videos spreading disinformation about Harris, Microsoft’s analysts found.
Among the fake videos were a staged clip of a park ranger impersonator claiming Harris killed an endangered rhinoceros in Zambia, as well as a video sharing baseless allegations about her running mate Tim Walz, which U.S. intelligence officials also attributed to Russia this week. Morgan Finkelstein, national security spokeswoman for the Harris campaign, condemned Russia's efforts.
Another Russian influence actor has been producing fake election-related videos spoofing American organizations from Fox News to the FBI and Wired magazine, according to the report.
China over the last several months has focused on down-ballot races, and on general efforts to sow distrust and democratic dissatisfaction. A Chinese influence actor widely known as Spamouflage has been using fake social media users to attack down-ballot Republicans who have publicly denounced China, according to Microsoft’s analysts.
Candidates targeted have included Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama, Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, all of whom are running for reelection, the report said. The group also has attacked Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
All four politicians sent emailed statements condemning China's aggression against American political candidates and its efforts to weaken democracy.
In its statement, the Chinese embassy said U.S. officials, politicians and media “have accused China of using news websites and social media accounts to spread so-called disinformation in the US. Such allegations are full of malicious speculations against China, which China firmly opposes.”
Iran, which has spent the 2024 campaign going after Trump with disinformation as well as hacking into the former president’s campaign, hasn’t been stymied by ongoing tension in the Middle East, according to the Microsoft report.
Quite the opposite, groups linked to Iran have weaponized divided opinions on the Israel-Hamas War to influence American voters, the analysts found. For example, an Iranian operated persona took to Telegram and X to call on Americans to sit out the elections due to the candidates’ support for Israel.
Microsoft's report also said it observed an Iranian group compromising an account of a notable Republican politician who had a different account targeted in June. The company would not name the individual but said it was the same person who it had referenced in August as a “former presidential candidate.”
The report also warned that the same Iranian group that allegedly posed as members of the far-right Proud Boys in intimidating emails to voters in 2020 has been scouting swing-state election-related websites and media outlets in recent months. The behavior could “suggest preparations for more direct influence operations as Election Day nears,” Watts said.
Iran's mission to the United Nations said in a statement that the allegations in the report “are fundamentally unfounded, and wholly inadmissible.”
Even as Russia, China and Iran try to influence voters, intelligence officials said Tuesday there is still no indication they are plotting significant attacks on election infrastructure as a way to disrupt the outcome.
If they tried, improvements to election security means there is no way they could alter the results, Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told The Associated Press earlier this month.
Intelligence officials on Tuesday also warned that Russia and Iran may try to encourage violent protests in the U.S. after next month’s election, setting the stage for potential complications in the post-election period.
13 hours ago
US confirms North Korea sent 3,000 troops to Russia for possible Ukraine combat
The U.S. said Wednesday that 3,000 North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia and are training at several locations, calling the move very serious and warning that those forces will be “fair game” if they go into combat in Ukraine.
The deployment raises the potential for the North Koreans to join Russian forces in Ukraine and suggests expanded military ties between the two nations as Moscow seeks weapons and troops to gain ground in a grinding war that has stalemated after more than two years.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called it a “next step” after the North has provided Russia with arms, and said Pyongyang could face consequences for aiding Russia directly. His comments were the first public U.S. confirmation of North Korea sending troops to Russia — a development South Korean officials disclosed but was denied by Pyongyang and Moscow.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. believes that at least 3,000 North Korean soldiers traveled by ship to Vladivostok, Russia’s largest Pacific port, in early to mid-October.
“These soldiers then traveled onward to multiple Russian military training sites in eastern Russia, where they are currently undergoing training,” Kirby said. “We do not yet know whether these soldiers will enter into combat alongside the Russian military, but this is certainly a highly concerning probability.”
Kirby said they could go to western Russia and then engage in combat against Ukraine’s forces, but both he and Austin said the U.S. continues to assess the situation.
Exactly what the North Korean troops are doing in Russia was “left to be seen," Austin told reporters in Rome.
He added: “If they’re co-belligerents, their intention is to participate in this war on Russia’s behalf, that is a very, very serious issue, and it will have impacts not only in Europe, it will also impact things in the Indo-Pacific.”
Kirby warned, however, that “I can tell you one thing, though, if they do deploy to fight against Ukraine, they’re fair game.”
He said a key question is what North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un is getting out of this.
Russia and North Korea have sharply boosted their cooperation in the past two years, and in June they signed a major defense deal requiring both countries to use all available means to provide immediate military assistance if either is attacked.
South Korean officials worry that Russia may reward North Korea by giving it sophisticated weapons technologies that could boost its nuclear and missile programs that target South Korea. South Korea said Tuesday it would consider supplying weapons to Ukraine in response to the reported troop dispatch.
South Korea’s spy chief had told lawmakers that 3,000 North Korean troops are now in Russia receiving training on drones and other equipment before being deployed to battlefields in Ukraine.
South Korean intelligence first publicized reports that the Russian navy had taken 1,500 North Korean special warfare troops to Russia this month, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said his government had intelligence that 10,000 North Korea soldiers were being prepared to join the invading Russian forces.
On Wednesday, South Korean National Intelligence Service Director Cho Tae-yong told lawmakers that another 1,500 North Korean troops have entered Russia, according to lawmaker Park Sunwon, who attended Cho's closed-door briefing.
Cho told lawmakers his agency assessed that North Korea aims to deploy a total of 10,000 troops to Russia by December, Park told reporters.
Park cited Cho as saying the 3,000 North Korean soldiers sent to Russia have been split among multiple military bases. Cho told lawmakers that NIS believes they have yet to be deployed in battle, Park said.
Also speaking jointly about the briefing, lawmaker Lee Seong Kweun said the NIS found that the Russian military is teaching those North Korean soldiers how to use military equipment such as drones.
Lee cited the NIS chief as saying Russian instructors have high opinions of the morale and physical strength of the North Korean soldiers but think they will eventually suffer heavy causalities because they lack an understanding of modern warfare. Lee, citing Cho, said Russia is recruiting a large number of interpreters.
Lee said NIS has detected signs that North Korea is relocating family members of soldiers chosen to be sent to Russia to special sites to isolate them. The NIS chief told lawmakers that North Korea hasn't disclosed its troop dispatch to its own people.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Tuesday said North Korea sending troops to Ukraine would mark a “significant escalation,” and said he asked South Korea’s president to send experts to Brussels next week to brief the military alliance.
Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Directorate head, Kyrylo Budanov, told the online military news outlet The War Zone on Tuesday that North Korean troops were to arrive to Russia's Kursk region on Wednesday to help Russian troops fighting off a Ukrainian incursion.
Last week, South Korea's spy agency said North Korea had sent more than 13,000 containers of artillery, missiles and other conventional arms to Russia since August 2023 to replenish its dwindling weapons stockpiles.
Reports that the North is sending troops to Russia stoked security jitters in South Korea. It has shipped humanitarian and financial support to Ukraine, but it has so far avoided directly supplying arms in line with its policy of not supplying weapons to countries actively engaged in conflicts.
North Korea has 1.2 million troops, one of the largest standing armies in the world, but it hasn’t fought in large-scale conflicts since the 1950-53 Korean War. Experts question how much North Korean troops would help Russia, citing a shortage of battle experiences.
Experts say North Korea wants Russia's economic support and its help to modernize the North's outdated conventional weapons systems as well as its high-tech weapons technology transfers.
13 hours ago
Housing on the ballot: Harris, Trump push different plans for tackling housing affordability crisis
Millions of Americans can’t afford to buy a home or rent a suitable apartment, making housing a central issue for voters in the upcoming presidential election.
The biggest single reason homeownership is out of reach for many is there aren’t nearly enough homes for sale to balance out the market between buyers and sellers.
The shortfall, which some economists say ranges from 1 million to around 4 million homes, has for the better part of the last decade fueled bidding wars that boosted the median sales price of a previously occupied U.S. home to an all-time high of $426,900 in June — even as home sales have been in a deep slump for more than two years.
Higher mortgage rates have also kept many home shoppers on the sidelines. The average rate on a 30-year mortgage rose to a 23-year high of nearly 8% late last year, and now sits at 6.44%.
Renters haven't had it any easier. While the median U.S. asking rent has been easing for more than a year following a wave of new apartment construction, it remains roughly 20% higher than it was before the pandemic.
Against this backdrop, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have put out proposals that they contend will make the American Dream accessible to more Americans.
Harris’ campaign has laid out a detailed roadmap of policies aimed at expanding access to affordable housing both for homebuyers and renters that includes offering first-time homebuyers up to $25,000 in down payment assistance and tax incentives for builders and federal funds for cities to speed up construction. She claims her plan will add 3 million new housing units over the next four years.
Trump says he will create tax incentives for homebuyers, cut “unnecessary” regulations on home construction and make some federal land available for residential construction, though the campaign's platform doesn't include any details. Trump also claims that he will lower housing costs by reducing inflation and stopping illegal immigration.
Setting aside the fact that many of the candidates' policies would require support from a majority of lawmakers in Congress, which the next president may not have, economists say the campaigns’ platforms offer some good ideas, but no sure fixes to the housing market’s longstanding challenges.
Here’s a look at some of the candidates' key ideas:
Trump's immigration crackdown
Trump and his campaign have repeatedly tied the nation’s housing woes to immigration, suggesting mass deportations will ease the demand for homes, thus making housing more available and affordable.
The former president has long focused broadly on undocumented immigrants as a core political issue, but when it comes to housing policy, his campaign has also pointed fingers at immigrants who are legally in the country too. His running mate, the Ohio Senator JD Vance, has blamed Haitian immigrants living in his home state for causing a housing problem.
Chris Herbert, managing director of Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, said in a statement that rising interest rates and the pandemic-era spike in housing demand are to blame for rising costs —– not immigrants.
“While immigrants do add to overall housing demand, they cannot be blamed for the recent surge in home prices and rents that took off in 2020 and 2021, as immigration reached its lowest levels in decades due to the pandemic,” Herbert said.
Jim Tobin, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, said mass deportations could make the supply problem worse because one-third of the homebuilding industry's labor force is foreign born.
“Anything that potentially disrupts the inflow of foreign-born labor into our industry would be disruptive. No doubt about it,” Tobin said.
Sarah Saadian, senior vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said undocumented people tend to live in overcrowded units, so the eviction of only immigrants in a home wouldn’t create an actual vacancy, nor does it address the affordability dilemma.
“The most pressing part is wages and incomes aren’t high enough to cover rental costs and that doesn’t really have anything to do with undocumented people,” Saadian said.
Harris’ $25,000 down-payment plan
Harris aims to directly aid home shoppers by providing up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time buyers who have paid their rent on time for two years.
The campaign, which claims the program would help more than 4 million first-time buyers and cost $100 billion, says that such down-payment assistance is not new, noting that as of 2019 nearly three-quarters of single-family mortgages included down payment aid provided by state housing finance agencies.
Like Trump’s plan, Harris’ proposal could backfire in a way. Economists warn that introducing a buyer incentive when the supply of homes for sale remains tight in many markets could juice prices, making homeownership less affordable. The impact could depend on the particular market. The impact could depend on the particular market.
“In Los Angeles, $25,000 down payment assistance is not enough, but it is enough in Detroit,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin.
Still, if the number of homes on the market grows, the financial assistance makes more sense, because it can reassure homebuilders that “there will be buyers willing to buy” the homes they build, Fairweather said.
The federal government has offered tax incentives to homebuyers in the not too distant past. In 2008, the Obama Administration enacted a first-time homebuyer tax credit of up to $,7,500 as the housing market reeled from a housing crash and the Great Recession. It pulled forward sales as buyers seized on the incentive, but the housing market remained in a slump until 2012.
The Trump campaign promises to make homeownership affordable for “families, young people, and everyone,” but doesn’t offer specifics. It mentions that the GOP will “support first-time buyers” and claims it will reduce mortgage rates by “slashing” inflation.
However, experts say Trump’s overall economic agenda in a second term would worsen inflation, which fell last month to its lowest point in more than three years.
Agreed: zoning and federal lands
Among the few things the two candidates do agree on: easing up on zoning laws and using federal lands to build homes.
Trump has pledged to tackle zoning and other construction regulations in order to accelerate housing production, though his platform doesn’t go into details.
Harris is proposing a $40 billion fund to spur local governments, which control zoning laws, to streamline their regulations in order to cut down on the time it takes for builders to get projects cleared and completed. One caveat: state and local governments have to show that they’re building housing that is affordable.
Harris bets her policies can attract Latino voters while Trump touts his time as president to them
Both candidates have also said, however vaguely, that they’re in favor of making “limited portions” of or “certain” federal land available for home construction.
Harris’ plan points to the Biden administration’s initiative in Las Vegas, where the Bureau of Land Management sold off 20 acres at a steep discount for Clark County to build single-family homes that will eventually be sold to those with an annual household income of up to $70,000.
Don Simpson, the vice president of the Public Lands Foundation, said the laws were set more than 20 years ago to give Nevada authorities the ability to buy federal land at below market rate for affordable housing. Simpson said there are other small parcels near places like Barstow, California, and Boise, Idaho where this could be replicated on a limited basis.
Nicholas Irwin, a University of Nevada Las Vegas professor, said the 210 homes will hardly make a dent in the estimated 75,000-unit shortage that Southern Nevada needs today.
“We’re short by a lot. More federal land alone isn’t going to solve this,” Irwin said.
1 day ago
Early voting kicks off in battleground Wisconsin with a push from Obama and Walz
In-person early voting kicked off Tuesday across battleground Wisconsin, with former President Barack Obama and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz hosting a rally in liberal Madison and Republicans holding events to encourage casting a ballot for Donald Trump before Election Day.
Trump lost Wisconsin by just under 21,000 votes in 2020, an election that saw unprecedented early and absentee voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Republican Former President Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris are expecting another razor-thin margin in Wisconsin, and both sides are pushing voters to cast their ballots early.
Dozens of voters waited in line outside Milwaukee's municipal building for the start of early voting at 9 a.m. Hours and locations for early voting varied across the state.
Trump was highly critical of voting by mail in past elections, falsely claiming it was ripe with fraud. But this election, he and his backers are embracing all forms of voting, including by mail and early in-person. Trump himself encouraged early voting at a rally in Dodge County, Wisconsin, earlier this month.
Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Brian Schimming said Monday that the vote-early message from Trump and Republicans this year has been “very clear.” Schimming even put in a plug for using absentee ballot drop boxes, a method of returning ballots that Trump once opposed and that some Wisconsin Republicans still do.
“We need to avail ourselves of every imaginable way to get votes in," Schimming said on a press call. “If it’s the difference between getting a vote in, or not getting a vote in, I say to Republicans, ‘Put it in the mailbox or put it in the drop box.’"
Numerous Republican officeholders and candidates planned to cast their ballots Tuesday.
“You never know when a snowstorm is going to come in November in Wisconsin,” said U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, who represents southeastern Wisconsin and plans to vote Tuesday. “It's a great opportunity while the weather’s nice to get out to your local office and cast your vote and have that vote banked.”
Obama and Walz, the governor of neighboring Minnesota, scheduled an early voting rally in the Democratic stronghold of Madison. Harris held a rally at the same venue last month, attracting more than 10,000 people.
Obama was headed to neighboring Michigan later Tuesday, among the several stops the former president is making in battleground states to encourage early voting.
Harris has been spending a lot of time in the “ blue wall ” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the final weeks of the campaign, including stops in Michigan and Wisconsin on Monday. Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance was in the conservative Milwaukee suburbs on Sunday.
The Wisconsin Democratic Party was also staging events across Wisconsin to encourage early voting, as were liberal advocacy groups including Souls to the Polls, a Milwaukee-based organization that targets Black voters. That is a key demographic for Democrats in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city and also the source of the highest number of Democratic votes.
Early voting in Wisconsin began Tuesday and runs through Sunday, Nov. 3. However, locations and times of early voting vary across the state. Voters do not need to give a reason for voting absentee. Ballots started being sent by mail in late September, but beginning Tuesday voters can request one at designated voting locations and cast their ballot in person.
As of Friday, more than 305,000 absentee ballots had already been returned in Wisconsin. Voters can continue to return them by mail, in person, or at absentee ballot drop boxes in communities where those are available. All absentee ballots must be received by the time polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day.
2 days ago
Mideast conflict shapes US presidential race as Harris, Trump vie
Two weeks out from Election Day, the crisis in the Middle East is looming over the race for the White House, with one candidate struggling to find just the right words to navigate its difficult cross-currents and the other making bold pronouncements that the age-old conflict can quickly be set right.
Vice President Kamala Harris has been painstakingly — and not always successfully — trying to balance talk of strong support for Israel with harsh condemnations of civilian casualties among Palestinians and others caught up in Israel's wars against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Harris seeks to win over Republicans uneasy about Trump with visits to Midwestern suburbs
Former President Donald Trump, for his part, insists that none of this would have happened on his watch and that he can make it all go away if elected.
Both of them are bidding for the votes of Arab and Muslim American voters and Jewish voters, particularly in extremely tight races in the battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Harris over the weekend alternately drew praise and criticism over her comments about a pro-Palestinian protester that were captured on a widely shared video. Some took Harris' remark that the protester's concerns were “real” to be an expression of agreement with his description of Israel’s conduct as “genocide.” That drew sharp condemnation from Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren.
But Harris' campaign said that while the vice president was agreeing more generally about the plight of civilians in Gaza, she was not and would not accuse Israel of genocide.
A day earlier, the dynamics were reversed when Harris told reporters that the “first and most tragic story” of the conflict was the Oct. 7 Hamas attack last year that killed about 1,200 Israelis. That was triggering to those who feel she is not giving proper weight to the deaths of the more than 41,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza.
Trump, meanwhile, in recent days has participated in interviews with Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya and Lebanese outlet MTV, where he promised to bring about peace and said “things will turn out very well” in Lebanon.
In a post on his social media platform Monday, he predicted a Harris presidency would only make matters in the Mideast worse.
“If Kamala gets four more years, the Middle East will spend the next four decades going up in flames, and your kids will be going off to War, maybe even a Third World War, something that will never happen with President Donald J. Trump in charge,” Trump posted. “For our Country’s sake, and for your kids, Vote Trump for PEACE!”
Harris' position is particularly awkward because as vice president she is tethered to President Joe Biden’s foreign policy decisions even as she’s tried to strike a more empathetic tone to all parties. But Harris aides and allies also are frustrated with what they see as Trump largely getting a pass on some of his unpredictable foreign policy statements.
“It’s the very thoughtful, very careful school versus the showboat,” said James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute, who has endorsed Harris. “That does become a handicap in these late stages when he’s making all these overtures. When the bill comes due they’re going to walk away empty-handed, but by then it’ll be too late.”
The political divisions on the campaign trail augur potentially significant implications after Election Day as powers in the region, particularly Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, closely eye the outcome and the potential for any shifts to U.S. foreign policy.
A new AP-NORC poll finds that neither Trump nor Harris has a clear political advantage on the situation in the Middle East. About 4 in 10 registered voters say Trump would do a better job, and a similar share say that about Harris. Roughly 2 in 10 say neither candidate would do a better job.
There are some signs of weakness on the issue for Harris within her own party, however. Only about two-thirds of Democratic voters say Harris would be the better candidate to handle the situation in the Middle East. Among Republicans, about 8 in 10 say Trump would be better.
In Michigan, which has the nation’s largest concentration of Arab Americans, the Israel-Hamas war has profound and personal impacts on the community. In addition to many community members having family in both Lebanon and Gaza, Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a metro Detroit resident, was killed while trying to deliver aid to his hometown in southern Lebanon.
The war’s direct impact on the community has fueled outrage and calls for the U.S. to demand an unconditional cease-fire and impose a weapons embargo on Israel.
Although both parties have largely supported Israel, much of the outrage and blame has been directed at Biden. When Harris entered the race, many Arab American leaders initially felt a renewed sense of optimism, citing her past comments and the early outreach efforts of her campaign.
However, that optimism quickly faded as the community perceived that she had not sufficiently distanced her policies from those of Biden.
“To say to Arab Americans, ‘Trump is going to be worse’ — what is worse than having members of your family killed?” said Rima Meroueh, director of the National Network for Arab American Communities. “That’s what people are saying when they’re asked the question, ‘Isn’t Trump going to be worse?’ It can’t be worse than what’s happening to us right now.”
Future Coalition PAC, a super PAC backed by billionaire Elon Musk, is running ads in Arab American communities in Michigan focused on Harris’ support for Israel, complete with a photo of her and her husband, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish. The same group is sending the opposite message to Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, attacking her support for the withholding of some weapons from Israel — a Biden administration move to pressure the longtime U.S. ally to limit civilian casualties.
Harris spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein cast Trump's approach toward the Middle East as part of a broader sign that "an unchecked, unhinged Trump is simply too dangerous — he would bring us right back to the chaotic, go-it-alone approach that made the world less safe and he would weaken America.”
2 days ago
'Stunning security failures' led to assassination attempt at Trump rally
The assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally in July was “preventable and should not have happened,” according to a bipartisan House panel that is investigating the shooting and what it calls the “stunning security failures” at the event.
The report from a House task force, released Monday, is just the latest look at the cascading and wide-ranging law enforcement failings that preceded the July 13 shooting at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally where Trump was struck in the ear by gunfire. One rallygoer was killed in the shooting and two others were wounded.
Donald Trump serves french fries at Pennsylvania McDonald’s
Members of both the House and Senate have repeatedly questioned why the Secret Service, an agency tasked with protecting the country’s top leaders, didn’t do a better job communicating with local authorities during the campaign rally, particularly when it came to securing the building that was widely agreed to be a security threat but that ultimately was left so unprotected that gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to climb up and shoot.
Lawmakers in their report focus on "the fragmented lines of communication and unclear chains of command" between Secret Service and Pennsylvania state and local police but place the majority of the blame on the Secret Service for the security breakdown.
“Federal, state, and local law enforcement officers could have engaged Thomas Matthew Crooks at several pivotal moments,” the report stated. Lawmakers added that throughout the afternoon, “as Crooks’s behavior became increasingly suspicious, fragmented lines of communication allowed Crooks to evade law enforcement” and climb onto the unsecured roof where he would eventually open fire.
“Put simply, the evidence obtained by the Task Force to date shows the tragic and shocking events of July 13 were preventable and should not have happened,” the report continued.
The preliminary findings are drawn from thousands of pages of documents, nearly two dozen transcribed interviews with state and local officials as well as a series of both classified and non-classified briefings from senior officials at the Secret Service and the FBI.
The report breaks little new ground, as the failed Secret Service response has been already documented by an independent commission, an interim Senate report as well as congressional testimony and news media investigations. The House report, like others before it, does not identify specific individuals who may be to blame.
But The Associated Press has previously reported that at least five Secret Service agents have been placed on modified duty. The director of the Secret Service at the time, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned shortly after the shooting, saying she took full responsibility for the lapse.
The task force — comprised of seven Republicans and six Democrats — showcased some of the report's findings during a public hearing last month. Lawmakers say they plan to issue a final report, including recommendations to avoid future assassination attempts against political candidates, by mid-December.
The task force has also begun investigating the second assassination attempt on Trump last month where a man with a rifle camped outside one of his golf courses in southern Florida.
3 days ago
Donald Trump serves french fries at Pennsylvania McDonald’s
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump manned the fry station at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania on Sunday before staging an impromptu news conference, answering questions through the drive-thru window.
As reporters and aides watched, an employee showed Trump how to dunk baskets of fries in oil, salt the fries and put them into boxes using a scoop. Trump, a well-known fan of fast food and a notorious germophobe, expressed amazement that he didn't have to touch the fries with his hands.
“It requires great expertise, actually, to do it right and to do it fast,” Trump said with a grin, putting away his suit jacket and wearing an apron over his shirt and tie.
The visit came as he's tried to counter Democratic nominee Kamala Harris' accounts on the campaign of working at the fast-food chain while in college, an experience that Trump has claimed — without offering evidence — never happened.
A large crowd lined the street outside the restaurant in Feasterville-Trevose, which is part of Bucks County, a key swing voter area north of Philadelphia. The restaurant itself was closed to the public for Trump's visit. The former president later attended an evening town hall in Lancaster and the Pittsburgh Steelers home game against the New York Jets.
After serving bags of takeout to people in the drive-thru lane, Trump leaned out of the window, still wearing the apron, to take questions from the media staged outside. The former president, who has constantly promoted falsehoods about his 2020 election loss, said he would respect the results of next month's vote “if it's a fair election.”
He joked about getting one reporter ice cream and when another asked what message he had for Harris on her 60th birthday on Sunday, Trump said, “I would say, ‘Happy Birthday, Kamala,’” adding, “I think I’ll get her some flowers.”
Trump did not directly answer a question of whether he might support increased minimum wages after seeing McDonald’s employees in action but said, “These people work hard. They’re great.”
He added that “I just saw something … a process that’s beautiful.”
When aides finally urged him to wrap things up so he could hit the road to his next event, Trump offered, “Wasn’t that a strange place to do a news conference?”
Trump has long questioned Harris' story of working at McDonald's
Trump has fixated in recent weeks on the summer job Harris said she held in college, working the cash register and making fries at McDonald’s while in college. Trump says the vice president has “lied about working” there, but not offered evidence for claiming that.
Representatives for McDonald’s did not respond to a message about whether the company had employment records for one of its restaurants 40 years ago. But Harris spokesman Joseph Costello said the former president's McDonald's visit “showed exactly what we would see in a second Trump term: exploiting working people for his own personal gain.”
“Trump doesn’t understand what it’s like to work for a living, no matter how many staged photo ops he does, and his entire second term plan is to give himself, his wealthy buddies, and giant corporations another massive tax cut,” Costello said in a statement.
In an interview last month on MSNBC, the vice president pushed back on Trump’s claims, saying she did work at the fast-food chain four decades ago when she was in college.
“Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family,” she said. “I worked there as a student.”
Harris also said: “I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility, then, is to meet those needs.”
Trump has long spread groundless claims about his opponents based on their personal history, particularly women and racial minorities.
Before he ran for president, Trump was a leading voice of the “birther” conspiracy that baselessly claimed President Barack Obama was from Africa, was not an American citizen and therefore was ineligible to be president. Trump used it to raise his own political profile, demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate and five years after Obama did so, Trump finally admitted that Obama was born in the United States.
During his first run for president, Trump repeated a tabloid’s claims that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, who was born in Cuba, had links to President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Cruz and Trump competed for the party’s 2016 nomination.
In January of this year, when Trump was facing Nikki Haley, his former U.N. ambassador, in the Republican primary, he shared on his social media network a post with false claims that Haley’s parents were not citizens when she was born, therefore making her ineligible to be president.
Haley is the South Carolina-born daughter of Indian immigrants, making her automatically a native-born citizen and meeting the constitutional requirement to run for president.
And Trump has continued to promote baseless claims during this campaign. Trump said during his presidential debate with Harris that immigrants who had settled in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets — a claim he suggested in an interview Saturday was still true even though he could provide no confirmation.
Trump's visit created a spectacle in Pennsylvania
“It is a fundamental value of my organization that we proudly open our doors to everyone who visits the Feasterville community,” the McDonald’s location’s owner, Derek Giacomantonio, said in a statement. “That’s why I accepted former President Trump’s request to observe the transformative working experience that 1 in 8 Americans have had: a job at McDonald’s.”
Police closed the busy streets around the McDonald’s during Trump's visit. Authorities cordoned off the restaurant as a crowd a couple blocks long gathered, sometimes 10- to 15-deep, across the street straining to catch a glimpse of Trump. Horns honked and music blared as Trump supporters waved flags, held signs and took pictures.
John Waters, of nearby Fairless Hills, had never been to a Trump rally and had hoped to see the former president so close to his house after missing other nearby rallies.
“When I drove up, all the cars, unbelievable, I was like, ‘He’s here’s, he’s coming, he’s definitely coming with this all traffic,’” Waters said.
Trump is especially partial to McDonald's Big Macs and Filet-o-Fish sandwiches. He’s talked often about how he trusts big chains more than smaller restaurants since they have big reputations to maintain, and the former president’s staff often pick up McDonald’s and serve it on his plane.
Jim Worthington, a Trump supporter and fundraiser who owns a nearby athletic complex and chaired Pennsylvania’s delegation to the Republican National Convention, said he arranged Trump’s visit to the locally owned McDonald’s franchise.
The campaign contacted him looking for a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania and Worthington started looking for one. He got in touch with Giacomantonio through a friend and talked the franchise owner through some initial nervousness.
Giacomantonio needed to know that McDonald’s corporate offices would be OK with it, first. Second, he was concerned that being seen as a Trump supporter would hurt his business or a spark boycott, Worthington said.
“He certainly had concerns, but I eased his mind, and talked to him about the benefits,” Worthington said.
3 days ago
Immigrants help power America’s economy. Will the election value or imperil them?
Few things say America like Janille and Tom Baker’s ranch, with its grazing cattle, scrub brush-dotted desert and snow-capped mountains.
If only they could get American citizens to work on it.
The ranch in remote eastern Nevada produces around 10,000 tons of hay annually, and combines cowboy culture with a dash of Manifest Destiny. Rabbits, gophers and the occasional badger always outnumber humans and the nighttime sky is dark enough to count the stars.
But the Bakers’ business couldn’t survive without an agricultural guest worker program that brings in Mexican immigrants for about nine months a year to help harvest crops in fields where temperatures frequently exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius).
“When people complain that foreign workers are taking their jobs, I roll my eyes,” said Janille Baker, who manages the ranch’s accounting. “In any industry, everybody’s trying to find help. So this anti-immigration stance doesn’t really make sense to me. If everyone needs workers, how are you planning to fill those jobs?” The ranch follows federal rules that require advertising available positions and making them available first to U.S. citizens. But in the last six years, only two Americans called to inquire about jobs. A third trekked out in person, but left after seeing what the work entailed.
Immigration has become a source of fright and frustration for voters in this presidential election — with possible outcomes that could take the United States down two dramatically different paths. Nowhere are the stakes higher than in Nevada, where 19% of residents are foreign-born and around 9% of the total workforce doesn’t have U.S. legal status.
The influx of illegal border crossings has strained city and state resources across the nation, even in Democratic strongholds. And yet immigration has fueled job growth in ways that strengthen the economy and improve the federal government’s fiscal health.
So black and white in the candidates’ rhetoric, immigration is actually incredibly complex in reality — a fact that reveals itself every day in Nevada.
Voters say it is among their most important issues in November. How they come down on immigration, choosing former President Donald Trump ’s hard-line proposals for mass deportations or Vice President Kamala Harris ' calls for a path to citizenship for millions of people in the country illegally who have been here for years, will go a long way toward determining the outcome.
Nearly 300 miles or 480 kilometers south of Baker Ranch, neon-saturated Las Vegas had almost 41 million tourists visit last year, and is seeing the issue of immigration play out differently, but with distinct parallels.
“There’s a lot of fear,” said Nancy Valenzuela, a 48-year-old maid who works at the Strat casino. “There are people who don’t have papers. They’re like, ‘They want to throw us all out.’”
Valenzuela plans to vote for Harris. But others can only watch and hope their way of life isn’t turned upside down. “We’re here, propping up the country so the economy doesn’t crash,” said Haydee Zetino, who scrubs lavish hotel suites at Harrah’s Casino on the famed Las Vegas strip. She is an immigrant from El Salvador with only temporary protected U.S. status and can’t vote.
Absolutes sweep away nuance
If Trump deported all 11 million immigrants without legal status in the U.S., as he has suggested, the collateral risk could extend to the entire economy. Nevada’s job losses alone might nearly equal what it suffered during the 2008 financial crisis. More than 10% of Nevada’s population lives in homes with at least one immigrant in the country illegally, according to estimates from the advocacy group Fwd.us.
“In our wonderful, 24-hour economy, we know that these hotels and casinos could not, should not, would not be able to open every day without immigrants,” said Peter Guzman, president and CEO of the Latin Chamber of Commerce in Nevada.
Trump could also revive pushes he made during his first term to cancel programs that have extended temporary legal status to Zetino and hundreds of thousands of others
Harris has called for humane treatment at the border, particularly for children and families, and for letting longtime immigrants get citizenship. But she’s also promised to revive a bipartisan package that Trump forced congressional Republicans to squash, which sought to provide $20 billion for immigration enforcement and tightened rules for immigrants seeking U.S. asylum.
Recent Biden administration orders have imposed asylum restrictions when the border is overwhelmed. The vice president recently walked the border with Mexico in Douglas, Arizona, and called for getting tougher than Biden has — despite his administration having seen arrests for illegal border crossings fall sharply in recent months, even approaching levels recorded during Trump’s final year in the White House.
Polling released last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed Trump has an advantage over the vice president on who voters trust to better handle immigration 44% vs. 37% — a gap Harris’ campaign has sought to narrow by moving harder to the middle on the issue.
Immigrants say a bipartisan push toward getting tougher at the border has clouded the larger issue in ways often too complicated to break down easily along ideological lines.
“I think that our focus is completely directed into the border and not toward the people who are already here and have been here for many, many years,” said Erika Marquez, immigrant justice organizer for the advocacy group Make the Road Nevada, and a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-area effort giving limited protections to immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
The Pew Research Center estimates that 11 million people in the country illegally live in the U.S. Big states like California, Texas and Florida have larger numbers who potentially could have even more influence on workforces and communities. But all of those states are all solidly red or blue in presidential races — and aren’t likely to sway the election as toss-up Nevada might.
Read: Thousands flee southern Lebanon in search of safety and shelter
Clark County, encompassing Las Vegas, is about 75% of the state’s population and includes a sizeable number of hospitality industry workers represented by Nevada’s powerful Culinary Union, which has endorsed Harris.
But Trump is hoping to turn out infrequent voters there, and do very well in much of the rest of the state, which tends to be rural and conservative. Washoe County, home to Reno, is a perennial toss-up, though. And voters can also choose “None” of the presidential candidates, adding to the Nevada electorate’s famously fickle nature.
Maria Nieto, president of the Young Democrats of Nevada, also got Obama-era protections for immigrants who arrived as children. She said she was always taught while growing up never to talk about her legal status. Now, however, Nieto, is making a point of using her story to motivate people to exercise voting rights she doesn’t have.
“At times, I think that people don’t realize how personal this is,” she said.
The post-Election Day economic consequences might be even more dire.
A group of researchers led by Warwick J. McKibbin, an economics professor at the Australian National University, found that removing workers in the U.S. illegally would sharply reduce labor supply in the mining, agriculture, services, and manufacturing sectors. Deporting even 7.5 million workers might slash Real Gross Domestic Product by 12%.
If Nevada lost all of its workers in the country illegally, Labor Department figures suggest the direct job losses would be roughly as large as those from the 2008 financial crisis, which stalled tourism, triggered a wave of housing market foreclosures and cost the state about 9.3% of its jobs during the subsequent Great Recession.
And rounding up people in the country illegally may not even count people like Zetino, Marquez, and Nieto, nor the guest workers at Baker Ranch, all of whom are authorized to be in the U.S.
Zetino, 62, gained temporary protected status since arriving after a major 2001 earthquake in El Salvador, but saw Trump try to remove it during his term.
“These people don’t have any conscience,” she said of mass deportation supporters. “They believe they can lift up the country, move the economy forward, but they don’t think of those at the bottom.”
‘No issue with people who want to come here legally’
Trump has made border security an unofficial anthem of his campaign, constantly decrying an “ invasion ” of people flooding into the country illegally. At the same time, he’s endorsed more temporary visas for qualified foreigners, saying at a recent town hall with Spanish-language Univision, “We want workers, and we want them to come in, but they have to come in legally, and they have to love our country.”
But the former president also has lately stepped up his attacks on people with temporary protected status, including spreading falsehoods about Haitians legally living in Ohio abducting and eating pets, and threatening to deport them should he win in November. Trump has further stoked tensions by suggesting that immigrants coming into the U.S. illegally are doing so to expressly take jobs from Black and Hispanic Americans.
Still, some of Trump’s top supporters in Nevada are more careful to make distinctions between immigrants here legally and not. That includes former North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, who has been endorsed by Trump as he runs for Congress and acknowledged of his state: “We are running out of labor force right now.”
“We have no issue with people who want to come here legally,” Lee said. “We’ll train them and they’ll work, and we see all the joys of America that way.” But he said people in the country illegally, by contrast, have contributed to higher crime rates, including construction sites being burglarized.
Other conservatives are more explicit about the economic damage tougher immigration policies might do, though.
Read more: Thousands of exploding devices in Lebanon trigger a nation that has been on edge for years
Guzman, of the Latin chamber, has organized forums examining how construction in Las Vegas has been slowed by not being able to find enough workers. He’s pushed for expanding guest worker programs, noting on a call with an advocacy group, “I’m a registered Republican, and we are not all the same on this issue.”
Florisela López Rivera has seen that nuance firsthand and worries about politics overwhelming decency.
A dishwasher at Wynn Casino in Las Vegas, López Rivera is originally from El Salvador and got temporary protected status after Hurricane Mitch’s devastation in 1998. She recently gained permanent U.S. residency after her wife became a citizen, which means she’s unlikely to face deportation under any circumstances.
López Rivera is a member of the Culinary Workers Union, which represents 60,000, majority-Hispanic workers in Las Vegas and Reno. A Harris supporter, López Rivera canvasses for her union to advocate for the vice president, stressing Harris being the daughter of immigrants.
She speaks Spanish while knocking on doors and says that she encounters some people who tell her, “I love Trump.” Even then, she tries to engage them rather than simply turning away.
“When we focus on the negative, we lose the human side of things,” López Rivera said.
Bipartisan support for stricter border security
Harris’ calls for tightening asylum rules and stepping up enforcement at the border underscore just how much voters backing both parties want a strong hand there.
“Everybody I know, Republican or Democrat, believes border security is important,” said Edgar Flores, a Democratic Nevada state senator and immigration attorney. “We have real problems with drugs, with gangs, with violence.”
But move even partially toward mass deportations, Flores said, and “you’re going to disturb the most essential industries in Nevada, and that’s going to be replicated around the country.”
Marquez, of Make the Road Nevada, said her organization accepts that there need to be stiffer controls at the border, but added, “I think a lot of people — and Trump himself — have this irrational idea that we are here and we are not good people.”
“We are all working class,” said Marquez, who was born in Leon, Mexico, and immigrated at age 3, when her grandmother paid smugglers to take her and her then-pregnant mother into the United States. “All we want is being able to supply food, shelter and a good education for our children and just to be able to grow as a community.”
A recent Scripps News/Ipsos survey found that 86% of Republicans “strongly” or “somewhat support” mass deportations, but so do 25% of Democrats. Overall, 54% of voters support removing potentially millions of people from the country, topping the 42% who oppose it, while a third of Americans see securing the U.S.-Mexico border as the country’s top immigration priority, the survey found.
‘You can’t get anyone to come do the work’
Back on Baker Ranch, the H-2A visa program brings immigrant workers to the fields. They harvest hay, control weeds and irrigate with wheel lines moved by hand, or fully hand irrigate, building small dams using tarps they drag to different areas so that crops can be better submerged in water.
During Trump’s first term, the H-2A program’s participation rose, but he also proposed a rule just before the end of his term that would have frozen farmworkers’ salaries for two years, loosened requirements for worker housing and restricted the transportation costs they could be reimbursed for. The Biden administration wiped those out, but imposed new rules it says can better protect workers and has seen participation climb even higher.
Tom Baker co-owns the ranch with his brothers, and it began operating in 1954, nearly two decades before the area was electrified. He calls it “hard, hot work” that’s “kind of miserable.”
“These kinds of farms, without immigrants, would become infeasible because you can’t get anyone to come do the work,” said Baker, 54. “The wage isn’t the issue. It’s whether people will come do the job.”
The soil — enriched by hot days and nights that turn cooler because of higher elevations — can make for superior hay, some of which goes to race and polo horse centers like West Palm Beach, Florida, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.
The ranch has 26 employees, including five current H-2A immigrant workers. Many of the oldest ranch hands arrived long enough ago to get U.S. legal status through 1980s programs. Some have children who were born in the U.S. and are citizens, even if one or both of their parents are not.
The guest workers declined to comment, not wanting to attract undue attention. Still, three generations of immigrant workers at the ranch largely hail from the towns of Apozol and Juchipila in north-central Mexico.
The original arrivals now have grown children. Some of them work at the ranch and have had their own children who are now in high school and work there themselves during the summers. One former employee’s wife had her baby in a ranch vehicle on the way to the hospital, about 80 miles away.
Janille Baker, 51, is no fan of Trump, but also has at times become exasperated with Biden administration regulations. Those include small things like immigrant living quarters being required to have screen doors, despite being air conditioned and already equipped with screens on the windows.
“It is a hot potato and each side’s lobbing one at the other. And, in all honesty, both are to blame,” she said of immigration. “There is going to come a point where it has to get taken care of. You can’t just keep using fearmongering and scaring people, and then being critical of the people who do or don’t want to do whatever jobs.”
3 days ago