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Harris touts ‘border security and stability’ at Arizona campaign stop

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DOUGLAS, Ariz. —

Amid relentless criticism from former President Trump that she is accountable for out-of-control unlawful immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday made her first go to to the U.S.-Mexico border since 2021, asserting extra stringent measures she would take as president to limit border entry.

“The US is a sovereign nation, and I imagine now we have an obligation to set guidelines at our border, and to implement them,” Harris instructed a crowd in Douglas, Ariz., gathered in a small auditorium at Cochise Faculty Douglas Campus, the place the stage was flanked by massive indicators that learn, “Border safety and stability.” “We’re additionally a nation of immigrants. The US has been enriched by generations of people that have come from each nook of the world to contribute to our nation and to change into a part of the American story.”

Harris mentioned she would transcend Biden administration insurance policies to additional prohibit border entry exterior of official ports of entry.

Earlier within the afternoon, Harris visited a port of entry lower than 10 miles from the marketing campaign occasion. Two Border Patrol brokers walked together with her alongside the towering fence, which was constructed throughout the Obama administration. Harris later instructed reporters that she had thanked them for his or her work.

“They’ve bought a troublesome job and so they want, rightly, assist to do their job. They’re very devoted,” she mentioned. “And so I’m right here to speak with them about what we will proceed to do to assist them.”

She advocated for hiring extra officers and including extra fentanyl detection methods at border entry factors.

“I reject the false alternative that counsel we should both select between securing our border or making a system of immigration that’s protected, orderly and humane,” Harris mentioned. “We are able to and we should do each.”

Immigration reform has bedeviled presidents of each events for many years.

A bipartisan proposal earlier this 12 months that mixed elevated funding for border safety and international assist for Ukraine seemed to be the primary breakthrough till it was derailed when Trump urged Republicans to oppose it.

Kamala Harris speaks at Cochise College Douglas Campus in Douglas, Ariz., on Friday.

That deal fell wanting complete plans mentioned for many years that might revamp the asylum system and the authorized immigration course of and supply a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million folks within the nation with out authorized authorization, together with those that arrived as youngsters. Harris on Friday talked about farm employees and immigrants who arrived as youngsters, often called “Dreamers.”

“As president, I’ll put politics apart to repair our immigration system and discover options to issues which have continued for much too lengthy,” Harris mentioned.

Prematurely of Harris’ go to to the border, Trump pointed to studies that there are greater than 425,000 convicted criminals who’re within the nation illegally however not detained by federal authorities, based on knowledge supplied by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to a lawmaker’s request.

That features greater than 13,000 convicted of murder and greater than 15,800 convicted of sexual assault, based on the ICE data shared on X, previously Twitter, by Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas).

Trump mentioned Thursday that 21 million folks entered the nation illegally in simply the final 4 years. He framed the bipartisan effort that he helped defeat as “her atrocious border bill.”

“It was not a border invoice. It was an amnesty invoice … ,” he mentioned at a information convention in Manhattan. “Luckily Congress was too good for it.”

The invoice wouldn’t have supplied a path to citizenship for individuals who lack authorized standing.

The GOP nominee’s look at Trump Tower was harking back to his 2015 marketing campaign announcement there, notably his references to different nations purposefully sending criminals to the USA.

His remarks included a number of falsehoods, resembling saying Harris permitted a raft of modifications to the nation’s immigration insurance policies that as vp she had no management over, and that she was the Biden administration’s “border czar.” She had been charged with making an attempt to enhance circumstances in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to cease these nations’ residents from fleeing their homelands.

That project has been a political headache for Harris — drawing criticism from the left and proper.

In a 2021 visit to Central America, Harris instructed would-be migrants that they’d be deported in the event that they crossed the border, angering allies of immigrants who mentioned they have been fleeing poverty, corruption and violence.

“Don’t come,” she mentioned on the time. “You’ll be turned again.”

On the identical journey, Harris laughed off questions in a nationally televised interview about why she had not but visited the border as vp, inflaming critics on the fitting.

Each political events are hyper-focused on immigration as a result of whereas the presidential race may be very tight within the polling, Trump has a double-digit edge on the difficulty of border safety. That edge has narrowed, nevertheless, since President Biden decided not to seek reelection and Harris garnered the support to change into the Democratic presidential nominee.

Border stops hit a file in December, with brokers making almost 250,000 arrests. Because the political drawback raged, Biden signed an order in June to heavily restrict asylum claims, prompting a pointy drop in border encounters, to fewer than 60,000 in July and August.

Republicans have been hammering the difficulty, with GOP members of Congress submitting a decision that “strongly condemns the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to safe the USA border” in the future after the president introduced he wouldn’t search reelection.

Whereas among the former president and his allies’ claims are demonstrably false and have been denounced by GOP elected officers, resembling allegations that Haitian migrants are consuming pets in Springfield, Ohio, issues amongst some voters concerning the impression of an insecure border on the financial system, crime and the fentanyl disaster are palpable in lots of communities.

Friday’s go to was Harris’ second to Arizona since she turned the Democratic presidential nominee, based on the Harris-Walz marketing campaign. Whereas Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and others have swung via the southwestern battleground state, Harris has targeted a lot of her in-person campaigning in essential states farther east, resembling Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.

Hours earlier than the vp landed in Arizona, Republicans held a press name that includes two moms whose daughters have been raped and killed by immigrants who have been within the nation illegally and the mom of a teenage son who overdosed on fentanyl. The ladies lambasted Harris for the administration’s immigration coverage and for visiting the border so near the election.

“I’m making an attempt very laborious to not cry. We reside 1,800 miles away from the border,” mentioned Patty Morin, the mom of Rachel Morin, a mom of 5 who was brutally attacked whereas strolling a bucolic and well-traveled public path in Maryland. Her physique was found in a drain pipe.

“Nobody is protected in America, nobody is protected. If in case you have a sanctuary metropolis in your state, you’re not protected,” she mentioned. “They’ve bused, flown, educated unlawful immigrants to actually each nook and cranny and each tiny city in the entire of the USA.”

Such fears are among the many causes the Harris marketing campaign launched an advert about immigration in Arizona on Friday, and visited the Southern border lower than a month and a half earlier than election day. As vp, she beforehand visited the area as soon as in 2021, when she toured the port of entry and border operation in El Paso.

Mehta reported from Phoenix and Pinho reported from Douglas. Occasions workers writers Noah Bierman and Andrea Castillo contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.

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Judge jails recycling plant owners in Watts toxic waste case

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The house owners of a recycling plant accused of exposing South L.A. highschool college students to poisonous waste and steel projectiles for many years will spend a number of days in jail after a decide decided they violated a court docket order.

Matthew Weisenberg and Gary Weisenberg, the house owners of S&W Atlas Iron & Metal, have been handcuffed and led away from a downtown L.A. courtroom Thursday morning after Superior Courtroom Choose Terry Bork discovered they’ve continued to pose a threat to the neighborhood by accepting canisters that held explosive supplies onto their web site. A bail listening to is about for Monday.

The Weisenbergs are awaiting trial on 25 counts of failing to correctly get rid of hazardous wastes and failing to attenuate the chance of publicity or hearth at their Watts plant, which has operated subsequent door to Jordan Excessive College for about 70 years.

The fees got here after years of protests from neighborhood activists, college students and a lawsuit by the L.A. Unified College District, which alleged Atlas allowed “harmful, sharp steel projectiles, effective metallic mud and different objects to be launched or emitted from their property.”

In June 2023, former Dist. Atty. George Gascón introduced felony expenses in opposition to the corporate and the Weisenbergs, alleging the plant uncovered Jordan college students to harmful explosions and lead ranges discovered to be 75 instances increased than these deemed protected by the U.S. Environmental Safety Company.

An explosion on the Atlas grounds left Jordan college students jarred on the primary day of college final 12 months, officers mentioned.

The Weisenbergs have been out of jail on their very own recognizance for the reason that expenses have been filed, however prosecutors filed a movement contending they violated the phrases of that launch earlier this month, after an investigation by the state’s Division of Poisonous Substances discovered a number of containers of acetylene, a extremely flammable fuel, on the property.

L.A. Superior Courtroom Choose Ricardo Ocampo had ordered Atlas to not settle for any fuel containers that hadn’t been minimize or punctured, as to keep away from potential future explosions. The Weisenbergs’ protection attorneys, Vicki Podberesky and Benjamin Gluck, argued their shoppers separated the offending acetylene canisters as quickly as they have been found and stored them away from equipment that might trigger an explosion.

“There’s proof of an actual effort to conform. I perceive it broke down. I perceive the court docket doesn’t need canisters to be accepted full cease,” Gluck mentioned. “We wish some steering as to what we are able to do if somebody drives a canister onto our property.”

Gluck mentioned it will be unlawful for Atlas staff to take away the canisters from the property on their very own, and an organization that makes a speciality of elimination of hazardous waste had but to conduct a pick-up on the time of the March 6 go to from an investigator with the Dept. of Poisonous Substances.

Bork was not swayed.

“The issue is that they’re not in the midst of the desert, they’re proper over the wall from tons of of highschool college students,” Bork mentioned.

“One thing broke down within the protocols that Choose Ocampo ordered and relied upon when he made his resolution to not assign bail or to remand the defendants into custody,” he continued, including that the “protocol has been ineffective to remedy the chance of hurt.”

An Atlas spokesperson didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

Bork ordered the Weisenbergs jailed till he can maintain a listening to to find out a correct bail quantity on Monday.

“Right now is the primary time the house owners of Atlas metals have felt the implications for his or her a long time of harm to the Watts neighborhood,” Genesis Cruz, former scholar of Jordan Excessive College mentioned in a press release. “We stay hopeful that this step alerts the top of their reckless and harmful operations and the hurt prompted to generations of scholars.”

Occasions Workers Author Clara Harter contributed to this report.

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Opinion | Pope Francis Projects a Lonely Moral Voice in a New World of Politics and Trump

Pope Francis has been in a Rome hospital for a month, battling double pneumonia and its issues. His situation can be severe for anybody however may very well be extra threatening for an 88-year-old man who had a part of a lung eliminated as a youth and who stubbornly refuses to decelerate. Whereas the Vatican reported this week that he’s enhancing, he could also be so weakened that, some have speculated, he may determine to step down.

Both approach, the destiny of a pope stays of nice concern among the many world’s roughly 1.3 billion Catholics and a supply of heightened curiosity for individuals who see Francis as an more and more lonely ethical voice on the world stage and surprise what sort of pope will ultimately succeed him.

The craving for a pacesetter who places the wants and pursuits of others — together with the least highly effective — forward of his personal is felt particularly among the many many Individuals as we speak who desperately search a light-weight contained in the darkness of Donald Trump.

For this pope has emerged within the face of perilous international developments which have at occasions left the forces of liberal democracy reeling — nationalism, populism, disinformation, xenophobia, financial inequality and authoritarianism. A world with out a pope like Francis will in some methods resemble a Hobbesian dystopia with out a prophet pointing to our higher angels or a wise idealist exhibiting a greater approach.

Francis has turn into much more outspoken as these worrisome political developments accelerated, particularly with Mr. Trump’s electoral victory. Shortly earlier than the onset of his present sickness, Francis took direct purpose at Mr. Trump’s mass deportation coverage and demonization of immigrants. “What’s constructed on the premise of drive,” Francis warned in a unprecedented letter to American bishops, “and never on the reality concerning the equal dignity of each human being, begins badly and can finish badly.”

The pope proclaimed his imaginative and prescient nearly instantly after he was elected 12 years in the past this month as the primary pope from the Southern Hemisphere, the primary Jesuit pope, the primary to take the identify of the saint from Assisi. He traveled within the sweltering warmth to the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, the place so many migrants have landed or the place their boats and our bodies had been misplaced and celebrated Mass on an altar made from the wood of refugee boats.

Francis has additionally persistently denounced the harmful temptation of populism and the rise of “a myopic, extremist, resentful and aggressive nationalism.” On a 2021 go to to Athens he warned towards the worldwide “retreat from democracy,” a political system he referred to as “the response to the siren songs of authoritarianism.” Unifying world powers in a shared battle towards international warming has been a central theme of his papacy as properly.

The pope is not any starry-eyed moralist. “Actuality is bigger than concepts,” as he likes to say, and he’s life like about how the world works. He hates ideologies that hijack minds and hails the old school politics that will get stuff executed. Politics “is a each day martyrdom: searching for the widespread good with out letting your self be corrupted,” he has told aspiring politicians.

Warning against “propaganda that instills hatred, divides the world into mates to be defended and foes to be fought,” the pope has forcefully pushed for an inclusive church and an inclusive world. Just like the Gospels, Francis was a D.E.I. exponent earlier than that turned a foul factor, and he stays convincing as a result of he focuses on the ethical core of what variety, fairness and inclusion imply and why they’re essential. The keys are humility and mercy.

Learn the pope’s remarkable address to a joint session of Congress in 2015: Francis channeled not simply Catholics corresponding to Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day but in addition figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. “To mimic the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is one of the simplest ways to take their place,” Francis stated, including, “We should transfer ahead collectively, as one, in a renewed spirit of fraternity and solidarity, cooperating generously for the widespread good.”

Having a Roman pontiff as a bulwark of liberal values may, after all, be seen as ironic. The Catholic Church till the center of the final century was, formally at the very least, no champion of democracy or spiritual freedom or different rules that Individuals, most notably, see as foundational.

Or used to. Now we now have the pope selling most of the rights and rules that a lot of America appears to be turning towards. However that is the place we’re. “On this time of neo-imperial powers, I believe that the Catholic Church is the very best anti-empire — warts and all — that we now have,” the Villanova theologian Massimo Faggioli recently said.

That slim hope hinges on who will ultimately succeed Francis. Some Catholics (together with key gamers within the U.S. administration) harbor fever goals of a Trumpian pope who would purge the church of liberals and gays and anybody thought-about heterodox.

However there are not any viable papabili, or papal candidates, within the Trump mould and fewer political conservatives within the Faculty of Cardinals — whose members elect the pope and have been largely appointed by Francis — than there have been just a few years in the past. Mr. Trump’s bullying approach of working might even result in a backlash among the many cardinals and a papal successor much less pleasant to Trumpist populism than there may have been a yr in the past.

The end result of the following conclave may properly be thought-about a political take a look at for Mr. Trump and his motion, a lot because the conclave of October 1978 despatched a message to the Soviet Union. In that election, the cardinals selected Poland’s Karol Wojtyla, a 58-year-old mountain-hiking cardinal from behind the Iron Curtain, who turned John Paul II. “What number of divisions does the pope have?” Stalin as soon as requested when warned about offending the Vatican. Stalin’s successors discovered the reply the onerous approach: John Paul II helped deliver down Communism.

In fact, the delineation between good and evil is much less clear as we speak. The Soviet successor is authoritarian Putinism, which doesn’t match neatly into an East-West paradigm, and Francis, in a latest message from the hospital, lamented what he termed the world’s “polycrisis.” The answer would require what he as soon as referred to as an “artisanal path” to a handmade peace created by the each day actions and selections of people.

This can be a more durable route in a seemingly extra sophisticated post-Chilly Warfare world. However as Democrats flounder about for a message to counter Mr. Trump, they may do worse than hearken to a pope who has been preaching one for greater than a decade.

David Gibson is the director of the Middle on Faith and Tradition at Fordham College and has coated the Vatican as a journalist for 4 many years.

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