Harris meets border patrol agents on tour of border wall in Arizona
Kamala Harris has arrived at the US-Mexico border in Arizona, where the vice-president was briefed by two customs and border protection officials.
Harris stepped out of her motorcade on a dusty desert road outside Douglas, Arizona, and shook hands with two men, the Associated Press reported. Harris chatted with the uniformed agents as they walked along the rust-colored border wall in temperatures that neared 100F (38C).
The section of the wall Harris is viewing was constructed during Barack Obama’s administration, in 2011-2012, according to the White House pool reporter.
Harris’s conversation with the CBP officers was not audible to the pool reporter on scene. A White House official told him that Harris had “heard directly from CBP officials on their efforts to combat traffickers and transnational criminal organizations”.
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A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month found that 43% of voters favored Trump on the issue of immigration and 33% favored Harris, while 24% either didn’t know, chose someone else or refused to answer, Reuters reports.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s town hall in Warren, Michigan, which was supposed to start about an hour ago, is now running about an hour behind schedule, the New York Times reports. (The Detroit Free Press has a livestream here, should you wish to follow along.)
PBS has a livestream of Kamala Harris’ expected campaign remarks on border policy in Douglas, Arizona, that will go live in about a half hour.
Asked what she had learned from her conversation with customs and border protection officials, Kamala Harris told today’s White House pool reporter:
They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job. They are very dedicated. And so I’m here to talk with them about what we can continue to do to support them. And also thank them for the hard work they do.
Lauren Gambino
After pacing along the border wall in triple-digit heat, Kamala Harris is now headed to a college gymnasium in Douglas, Arizona, where she is expected to deliver a speech calling for tougher law enforcement action at the border.
Harris’s chat with customs and border protection officials by the side of the wall included a briefing on efforts to stop the flow of fentanyl across the border, Lauren reports.
Douglas, the town Harris’s team chose for her remarks, is a blue dot of Democratic voters in the otherwise overwhelmingly red Cochise county.
There’s record-breaking heat in Arizona as the vice president visits the border today:
The latest 115° day EVER is possible in Phoenix tomorrow! 3 weeks later than the previous record.
The 30-year avg number of 115°+ days in a year is 2. 2024 has had 11 so far.
Just look at the trend over the last century! This is the fingerprint of #climatechange in #Phoenix. pic.twitter.com/2O831NuBsy
Harris meets border patrol agents on tour of border wall in Arizona
Kamala Harris has arrived at the US-Mexico border in Arizona, where the vice-president was briefed by two customs and border protection officials.
Harris stepped out of her motorcade on a dusty desert road outside Douglas, Arizona, and shook hands with two men, the Associated Press reported. Harris chatted with the uniformed agents as they walked along the rust-colored border wall in temperatures that neared 100F (38C).
The section of the wall Harris is viewing was constructed during Barack Obama’s administration, in 2011-2012, according to the White House pool reporter.
Harris’s conversation with the CBP officers was not audible to the pool reporter on scene. A White House official told him that Harris had “heard directly from CBP officials on their efforts to combat traffickers and transnational criminal organizations”.
The Wisconsin supreme court has ruled that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s name will remain on the swing state’s presidential ballot, the AP reports.
The decision from the liberal-controlled court on Friday marks the latest twist in Kennedy’s quest to get his name off ballots in battleground states where the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is tight.
The state supreme court upheld the ruling of a circuit judge who said state law says candidates can be removed only if they die. Some absentee ballots have already been sent to voters.
DOJ files lawsuit against state of Alabama for last-minute voter purges
The justice department is suing Alabama for what it alleges is an illegal attempt to remove voters from the voter rolls too close to November’s election.
My colleague Sam Levine reported earlier this Month that the DOJ had issued a very public warning to states about why last-minute voter purges are illegal. Here’s the fact sheet on the law.
“As Election Day approaches, it is critical that Alabama redress voter confusion resulting from its list maintenance mailings sent in violation of federal law,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general of the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “Officials across the country should take heed of the National Voter Registration Act’s clear and unequivocal restrictions on systematic list maintenance efforts that fall within 90 days of an election. The Quiet Period Provision of federal law exists to prevent eligible voters from being removed from the rolls as a result of last-minute, error-prone efforts.”
We’ll have more context on this soon. Meanwhile, some early reporting from NPR:
If you’re getting confused about Trump’s campaign events today, you’re probably not the only one: Trump spoke in Walker, Michigan, earlier today. Walker is close to Grand Rapids, Michigan, on the western side of the state. Now Trump is headed to Warren, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where he’s holding a town hall at Macomb Community College.
David Smith
Trump was supposed to talk about the economy. Instead, he ranted about the border.
Eager to deflect attention from Kamala Harris’s border visit, Donald Trump proved unable to resist turning a campaign stop in Michigan – ostensibly focused on inflation – into a rant about immigration.
The former US president seized on data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made public on Friday by the House of Representatives’ homeland security committee.
According to the committee, the data shows that as of 21 July “nearly 650,000 criminal illegal aliens were currently on ICE’s Non-Detained Docket (NDD) and roaming free in communities throughout the United States. This figure includes roughly 15,000 individuals convicted of or charged with murder, more than 20,000 of sexual assault, and more than 105,000 of assault.”
Trump told supporters in Walker, Michigan: “For the first time ever, we have specific numbers that were just released and it’s about the people that crossed the border illegally under Kamala Harris. That she’s even running is frankly ridiculous. That’s not a president. That’s not a president. She went to the border today because she went to see if she could - she’s getting killed on the border.”
Studies show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans. But Trump said: “They just pour into our country. She has no idea where they’re from. From parts unknown. She’s responsible for every bloody crime scene, every funeral, every orphan child.”
He added; “She delivered these horrors, she unleashed these atrocities, and blood is on her hands at a level that probably nobody’s ever seen in this country before. But on November 5th, Kamala Harris will be held accountable for these crimes. She will be sent back to California and we will close the border, we will stop the invasion, we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”
Trump again referenced Springfield, Ohio and, although he did not specifically mention a baseless conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants eating pets, he said: “Those people have to be taken out and brought back to their country from where they came. I’m sorry.”
Trump supporters applaud snipers at Michigan town hall
In the wake of two attempted assassination attempts against Donald Trump, his supporters applauded the appearance of counter-snipers at a town hall event in Warren, Michigan, where Trump is slated to speak later today, the New York Times reported.
A local Twitter account appeared to have a photograph of the snipers heading up to the roof:
Donald Trump threatens to prosecute Google for ‘displaying bad stories’ about him
In the middle of a busy day of presidential campaign events in Michigan, a key swing state, Donald Trump posted on his social media platform that, if elected president, he plans to prosecute Google for, he alleged, “only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J Trump” while “only revealing Good stories about Kamala Harris”.
It’s not immediately clear what prompted this threat against Google, or why Trump believes that this supposed behavior would be a crime that his justice department would be able to prosecute.
I’ll update with a response from Google as soon as we have it.
As US politicians focus on border security, heat deaths are hitting record numbers
As my colleague Lauren Gambino is reporting, from somewhere near Tombstone, Arizona, Kamala Harris is currently heading to the border between the US and Mexico, where her comments are expected to focus on the US border with Mexico, and on presenting herself as a leader who is willing, like Donald Trump, to embrace tough, punitive border policies, as a response to Americans who want to shut US borders to migrants and asylum-seekers fleeing violence and economic and environmental disasters elsewhere in the world.
But as Gabrielle Canon, our extreme weather correspondent, has just reported, one of the growing deadly threats to residents of states like Arizona isn’t other people: it’s extreme heat, which has already killed hundreds of people in Arizona so far this year.
Brutal heat continues to plague the south-west US, with excessive heat alerts lingering long into September as parts of the region set grim new records for deaths connected to the sweltering temperatures.
In Arizona’s Maricopa county, home to Phoenix, 664 fatalities are believed to have been linked to the heat this year , according to public health officials, who are still working to confirm more than half of them. Southern Nevada, where Las Vegas is located, has seen more deaths this year than in any year prior, with officials confirming this week that there have been 342 fatalities linked to the heat. This surpassed last year’s record, which marked an 80% increase over 2022.
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