The November elections are only 11 weeks away.
And, it seems, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has taken note, laying out in a memo new justifications for his probe into Vice President Joe Biden amid criticisms — including from the U.S. intelligence community — that it serves as a vehicle for Russian propaganda. Johnson’s memo also lays out where he believes his effort is going.
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) on Monday afternoon issued an interoffice memo-like response to President Trump accusing him of having “gone rogue, again” earlier in the day. Continue reading “Sasse Posts Interoffice-Like Memo To Defend His Criticism Of Trump’s Executive Actions”
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
While it is refreshing to see a bevy of conservative intellectuals and former Republicans take on Donald Trump with an eye toward electing Joe Biden as president, this mobilization seems bereft of a strategic plan for re-establishing a center-right party that is not rooted in white grievance politics and an insatiable desire to own the libs. Fair enough; there is a serious enough task at hand. But plan beats no plan, and planning can seldom start too early.
Continue reading “Never-Trump GOPers Must Support Democracy Reform To Cleanse Party When He’s Gone”
This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Since March, the Trump administration has pushed thousands of migrant children back to their home countries without legal screenings or protection, citing the risk that they could be carrying COVID-19 into the United States.
But by the time the children are boarded on planes home, they’ve already been tested for the virus — and proven not to have it.
Court documents, and information given by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to congressional staff last week, reveal that the Trump administration has agreed to test every child in its custody before sending them back to their home countries under the expulsion policy.
ICE’s comprehensive testing appears to undermine the rationale for the mass expulsion policy: that it is necessary to “prevent the introduction” of COVID-19 into the United States.
The Trump administration has argued that, because of the pandemic, it must circumvent protections built into immigration law for migrant children, which dictate they should be turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services (and ultimately to sponsors in the U.S.) and given a chance to seek asylum. Administration officials have said that they can’t risk that infected children would spread COVID-19 through the system. Yet even after children test negative for the virus, they aren’t being allowed to access the usual protections.
The Trump administration has cited sections 265 and 268 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code, which allows the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to order the exclusion of any person or thing that might introduce a disease into the United States. Citing that law, in March the CDC began barring the entry of anyone crossing into the U.S. without papers.
“The Trump administration’s claim that they need to summarily expel children because of COVID was always a pretext,” Lee Gelernt of the ACLU, who has represented children in lawsuits challenging the expulsion policy, told ProPublica. “If they are now actually testing and know the children do not have COVID, then the policy is that much more unjustified.”
A court report filed in July noted that “virtually all” children in ICE custody were being tested for COVID-19 before expulsion, as a condition of “testing requirements” imposed by their home countries. In congressional briefings last week, recounted to ProPublica by multiple staff members who attended, ICE clarified what those “testing requirements” were.
The U.S. has agreements with 10 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to return unaccompanied children under the public health order. All those agreements, ICE told Congress, require that children test negative for COVID-19 before being sent back.
“All single minors expelled from the U.S. under Title 42 authority are done so under informal agreements which remain fluid between the U.S. and the foreign governments,” an ICE spokesperson told ProPublica. “There are informal agreements in place with some countries which require testing for COVID-19 prior to expulsion.” Asked specifically about its claim to Congress that all countries agreeing to accept children required testing, and whether that was at odds with the stated rationale for the expulsion policy, ICE declined to clarify, citing “pending litigation.”
Under the new policy, most adult migrants are being pushed back to Mexico within a matter of hours. To apply the expulsion order to children, however, the administration has developed an ad hoc system in which children are held for days in hotels, with little contact with the outside world — making it almost impossible for lawyers or advocates to locate them — before being returned to the countries from which they fled.
Thousands of children have been expelled since the policy was enacted in March. Some are sent to overcrowded government shelters in Central American countries like Guatemala; others are totally out of reach of legal service providers, who have not been able to find them.
Under U.S. immigration law, unaccompanied migrant children who arrive without papers are supposed to be put in the custody of HHS, which can place them with a sponsor (usually a relative) while they await a hearing before a judge to determine if they qualify for immigration status. The Trump administration has claimed that it’s too dangerous to continue sending these children to HHS during a pandemic.
Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Mark Morgan argued during an Aug. 6 press briefing that “if we introduce these individuals to ORR” — the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is the HHS office responsible for migrant children — “we’re defeating the entire purpose of Title 42, we’re still introducing these individuals into our system throughout and creating a greater exposure risk to the American people.”
But on July 22, an independent court report filed in the Flores litigation, which governs the care of children in immigration custody, noted that “virtually all individuals in hotels awaiting ICE deportation flights will be tested for COVID-19 prior to deportation to comply with testing requirements imposed by the home countries for returning deportees.” (The Trump administration stresses that “deportation” is a term from immigration law, and that, since migrants subject to the CDC order aren’t being processed under immigration law, what’s happening to them isn’t technically deportation. However, the court report used the term “deportation” to refer to public-health expulsions as well.)
In most cases, ICE is satisfying this requirement by using rapid COVID-19 tests produced by Abbott Laboratories that can produce results in as little as 15 minutes. While Abbott’s rapid tests have come under scrutiny for a high rate of false-negative results, they continue to be used by the Trump administration. However, at least one country — Guatemala — requires that the U.S. government obtain COVID-19 test results from a lab, a process that can take four to five days.
It is not clear exactly when the testing requirements went into effect. The court report refers to them as “recently imposed.” A Guatemalan official recently told Reuters that only a few of the children who have been returned to Guatemala under the policy have documentation proving they’ve tested negative for COVID-19. It’s not clear whether this means ICE is violating the terms of its agreement with Guatemala to test children, or if these children weren’t subject to that agreement. Anaeli Torres of Guatemala’s social welfare agency told ProPublica that it isn’t always known to the agency whether a child has been deported under immigration law or expelled under the public health order when they arrive in Guatemala from the U.S.
Since the spring, ICE has been accused of helping spread COVID-19 through Central America and the Caribbean by deporting people who had caught the coronavirus in immigration detention facilities. ICE has denied this, asserting that all detainees are tested for COVID-19 before being deported.
But people expelled under the public health law are not being put in ICE detention. Further, unlike deportees who are removed from the U.S. because they are found to have violated immigration law, migrants expelled under the public health policy have had no legal due process. They are being barred from the U.S. purely because they might have the coronavirus and might spread it to others.
The CDC’s original order banning the “introduction” of migrants, from March, assumed that it would be impossible to test migrants for COVID-19. That was key to its rationale for barring their entry. “In theory, to mitigate public health risks, CBP would have to transport aliens in their custody suspected of COVID-19 infection to a nearby medical site for sample collection and testing, and then implement containment protocols (i.e. quarantine or isolation) in their facilities while awaiting test results,” the order said. “CDC would not have the resources or personnel required to house in quarantine or isolation or monitor dozens, much less hundreds or thousands of aliens.”
In the months since, however, ICE has created an ad hoc system of quarantine and isolation. Migrants held in hotels, often for several days or even weeks, are prevented from leaving their rooms and have limited outside contact.
Ironically, migrants who test positive for COVID-19 are required to remain in the U.S., while those who test negative are expelled. It’s not clear if any unaccompanied children have tested positive for coronavirus while in ICE custody. At least one migrant family housed in a San Antonio hotel tested positive while awaiting expulsion. The family was sent to an ICE detention center to recover.
While referrals to HHS are supposed to happen within 72 hours, the administration has frequently held children in hotels for longer than that when preparing to expel them. The court report noted that testing requirements often prolonged their stays in the U.S. since results can take several days to process.
Rapid testing eliminates that concern, but ICE did not explain in its congressional briefing, or at any other time, why it cannot send children to HHS once they have tested negative.
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President Trump on Monday said that he will deliver his Republican presidential nomination speech in either the Gettysburg battlefield or the White House. Continue reading “Trump Floats Idea Of Accepting Nomination At WH Or Gettysburg”
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The future of Puerto Rico’s botched primaries rested in the hands of a judge on Monday as answers trickled out on why voting centers lacked ballots and forced officials to reschedule part of the primaries in a blow to the U.S. territory’s democracy.
A plan to hold another primary on Aug. 16 for centers that could not open on Sunday could change depending on the ruling of a lawsuit filed by Pedro Pierluisi, who is running against Gov. Wanda Vázquez to become the potential nominee of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party.
Meanwhile, María Dolores Santiago, the party’s electoral commission official, told The Associated Press that key officials knew about the problems leading up to the primary on Sunday, but nobody did anything to stop it. She said the last of the remaining ballots arrived Saturday at 8:30 p.m., days behind schedule, and that trucks loaded with the ballots and electronic voting machines didn’t leave until Sunday, the day of the primary, when normally they depart one or two days beforehand.
Santiago repeatedly refused to answer questions including why she didn’t personally suggest that the primaries be delayed during Saturday’s meeting with the president of the electoral commission. She only said that at the time, the general agreement was to go ahead and hold the primary.
“Maybe other decisions should have been taken, but we have to work with reality,” she said. “It’s unfair to throw around blame.”
Gov. Wanda Vázquez and other top officials from the island’s two main parties have demanded that the president of the elections commission resign after a lack of ballots meant people were only able to vote in nearly 60 of 110 precincts on Sunday. Carlos Méndez, president of the island’s House of Representatives, also demanded that the commission release the results of the completed votes.
It was the first time primaries have been halted and led many to worry that it has cracked Puerto Ricans’ confidence in their government and could affect the outcome of upcoming November general elections on an island with a voter participation rate of nearly 70%.
“That scar will never leave Puerto Rico,” said political analyst Domingo Emanuelli. “It was a hold-up of the country’s democracy.”
Juan Ernesto Dávila, president of the election commission, told WAPA TV on Monday that he thought the ballots would go out in time and that the electoral commission officials of the two main parties he met with a day before the primaries never mentioned the possibility of delaying them. He also said it wouldn’t be responsible to resign amid an ongoing primary.
“Once the primary process concludes, I will analyze that,” he said.
The primary pits two candidates who served as replacement governors following last year’s political turmoil. Vázquez faces Pierluisi, who represented Puerto Rico in Congress from 2009 to 2017.
Pierluisi briefly served as governor after Gov. Ricardo Rosselló resigned in August 2019 following widespread street protests over a profanity-laced chat that was leaked and government corruption. But Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court ruled that Vázquez, then the justice secretary, was constitutionally next in line because there was no secretary of state.
Meanwhile, the main opposition Popular Democratic Party, which supports Puerto Rico’s current political status as a U.S. territory, was holding a primary for the first time in its 82-year history. Three people are vying to become governor — San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, known for her public spats with U.S. President Donald Trump following the devastation of Hurricane Maria; Puerto Rico Sen. Eduardo Bhatia; and Carlos Delgado, mayor of the northwest coastal town of Isabela.
A federal control board that oversees Puerto Rico’s finances dismissed accusations that the electoral commission did not have enough funding, saying it approved all of its funding requests.
“The disruptions … are the result (of) inefficient organization at an agency that only two weeks ago struggled to procure the printing of ballots for an election that was originally supposed to take place on June 7,” the board said in a statement. “The State Elections Commission has sufficient money, and it has the more than enough staff to perform the one task it is charged with.”
The ongoing chaos could be further disrupted by additional lawsuits, experts say.
Edgardo Román, president of the Bar Association of Puerto Rico, said the situation is in a legally gray area. A new date has to be set for those who didn’t get a chance to vote because the ballots never arrived, he said, but it’s less clear what will happen to those who didn’t return to centers to vote because they didn’t find out in time that the ballots eventually arrived.
“Everything has been rather abrupt,” he said. “We have had the worse electoral experience in the history of Puerto Rico.”
The political upheaval was demoralizing to some, but Gireliz Zambrana, a 31-year-old federal employee who didn’t get a chance to vote on Sunday, said he would try again on Aug. 16 even though he is frustrated and said what happened is irrational.
He stressed that Puerto Rico’s situation had to change: the island is still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria and a series of strong earthquakes amid a pandemic and a 13-year economic recession.
“One has to go out and vote,” he said. “The only way to fix all of this is kicking people out.”
President Trump took to Twitter on Monday morning to scorn Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), who called his flurry of executive actions over the weekend “unconstitutional slop.” Continue reading “Trump Goes After Sasse After He Decries Executive Actions As ‘Unconstitutional Slop’”
The alarm over how recent changes at the U.S. Postal Service will impact vote by mail has reached a fever pitch.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Vilified, threatened with violence and in some cases burned out, dozens of state and local public health officials around the country have resigned or have been fired amid the coronavirus outbreak, a testament to how politically combustible masks, lockdowns and infection data have become.
The latest departure came Sunday, when California’s public health director, Dr. Sonia Angell, quit without explanation following a technical glitch that caused a delay in reporting virus test results — information that was used to make decisions about reopening businesses and schools.
Last week, New York City’s health commissioner was replaced after months of tension with the Police Department and City Hall.
A review by the Kaiser Health News service and The Associated Press finds at least 48 state and local health leaders have resigned, retired or been fired since April across 23 states. The list has grown by more than 20 people since the AP and KHN began tracking departures in June.
As of Monday, confirmed infections in the United States stood at over 5 million, with deaths topping 163,000, the highest in the world.
The departures of so many top leaders around the country make a bad situation worse, at a time when the U.S. needs good public health leadership the most, said Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
“We’re moving at breakneck speed here to stop a pandemic, and you can’t afford to hit the pause button and say, ‘We’re going to change the leadership around here and we’ll get back to you after we hire somebody,’” Freeman said.
Many of the firings and resignations have to do with conflicts over mask orders or social distancing shutdowns, she said. Many politicians and ordinary Americans have argued that such measures are not needed, contrary to the scientific evidence and the advice of public health experts.
“It’s not a health divide; it’s a political divide,” Freeman said.
Some health officials said they were leaving for family reasons, others had planned to retire, and some left for jobs at other health agencies, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Still, many left amid threats and a pressure-cooker environment.
After West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice demanded the resignation of Dr. Cathy Slemp in June over what he said were discrepancies in the data, the move was criticized by public health experts at Johns Hopkins University. Slemp said the department’s work had been hurt by outdated technology like fax machines and slow computer networks.
“We are driving a great aunt’s Pinto when what you need is to be driving a Ferrari,” Slemp said.
Since 2010, spending on state public health departments has dropped 16% per capita, and the amount devoted to local health departments has fallen 18%, according to a KHN and AP analysis. At least 38,000 state and local public health jobs have disappeared since the 2008 recession, leaving a skeletal workforce for what was once viewed as one of the world’s top public health systems.
In Oklahoma, both the state health commissioner and state epidemiologist have been replaced since the outbreak began in March. The governor’s first pick for health commissioner was forced out in May because lawmakers were concerned he wasn’t qualified.
In rural Colorado, Emily Brown was fired in late May as director of the Rio Grande County Public Health Department after clashing with county commissioners over reopening recommendations. The person who replaced her resigned July 9.
She said she knows many public health department leaders who are considering resigning or retiring because of the strain.
“I think there’s a leadership gap. Our elected officials in positions of power, whether presidents, governors or mayors, they aren’t supporting staff better or aligning messages,” forcing public health officials to bear the political pressure, Brown said. “It’s really hard to hear that we could be losing that expertise.”
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Weber reported from St. Louis. Associated Press writer Sean Murphy and KHN writer Anna Maria Barry-Jester contributed reporting.
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Weber is a reporter with Kaiser Health News. This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and KHN, which is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
Attorneys for President Trump hit back in a Monday court filing at suggestions that the President is under investigation for fraud, saying that the allegations only meet the bar for civil wrongdoing.
Continue reading “Trump To Vance: I Would Prefer A Civil, Not Criminal Subpoena”
