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Trump vows to ‘end all sanctuary cities immediately’; Harris faces Fox interview – US elections live


Trump says he would ‘end all sanctuary cities immediately’ with executive order

Donald Trump said at his Fox News town hall that if he was elected, he would sign an executive order to ban sanctuary cities under a two-century old law.

“We are going to end all sanctuary cities immediately … I can do it with an executive order. I have to do it with an executive order. You can do it with … the Aliens Act of 1798, we can do things in terms of moving people out. We can move them out of the sanctuary cities,” Trump said.

After first taking office in 2017, Trump signed an executive order cutting cities who do not cooperate with immigration authorities off from federal funding, but it was later struck down by the courts. He has centered his most recent campaign on imposing hardline immigration policies, and plans to use the Aliens Act of 1798 to do so:

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Key events

The Guardian’s Robert Tait reports that Kamala Harris has said Donald Trump is a “fascist”, an escalation in her rhetoric against him. Here’s more:

Kamala Harris has agreed that Donald Trump is a fascist in her most forthright statement yet in casting her presidential opponent as a potential autocrat harboring authoritarian visions should he return to the White House.

The US vice-president and Democratic nominee crossed a psychologically important boundary in addressing the issue of fascism in an interview with Charlamagne Tha God, an influential radio host whose audience reaches a predominantly Black audience of 8 million listeners monthly. The talk happened during a campaign stop in Detroit, the centre of a battle between the two candidates for the battleground state of Michigan.

Setting out the electoral options in the hourlong phone-in interview, Harris was initially cautious, telling her host that voters in the 5 November election “have two choices … and it’s two very different visions for our nation” before giving a vague definition of her vision.

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Special counsel argues Trump is responsible for January 6 – report

Jack Smith, the special prosecutor leading the team that charged Donald Trump over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, alleged in a new filing that the former president bears responsibility for the violent January 6 attack on the Capitol, NBC News reports.

The statement comes as Smith tries to get his case back on track, after the supreme court earlier this year ruled Trump has immunity for official acts while in office.

Here’s more on the argument from Smith’s team:

In a filing responding to Trump’s attempt to dismiss the case, Smith’s team said it “is incorrect” for Trump’s team to assert that the superseding indictment returned against Trump in August does not show that Trump bears responsibility for the events of Jan. 6.

Trump, Smith’s team said, “willfully caused others” to obstruct the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory by repeating his false claims of election fraud and giving “false hope” to his supporters who believed that former Vice President Mike Pence might overturn the election, and by “pressuring” Pence and legislators to accept fraudulent certificates as part of the fake electors scheme.

“Those allegations link the defendant’s actions on January 6 directly to his efforts to corruptly obstruct the certification proceeding,” Smith’s team wrote.

“Contrary to the defendant’s claim… that he bears no factual or legal responsibility for the ‘events on January 6,’ the superseding indictment plainly alleges that the defendant willfully caused his supporters to obstruct and attempt to obstruct the proceeding by summoning them to Washington, D.C., and then directing them to march to the Capitol to pressure the Vice President and legislators to reject the legitimate certificates and instead rely on the fraudulent electoral certificates,” Smith’s team wrote.

Trump’s lawyers previously argued the indictment “stretches generally applicable statutes beyond their breaking point based on false claims that President Trump is somehow responsible for events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021” and sought to “assign blame for events President Trump did not control and took action to protect against.”

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Calling himself ‘father of IVF’, Trump claims support for fertility treatment

Asked about his stance on IVF care, Donald Trump claimed at the Fox News town hall that he and the rest of the Republican party were in favor of the care that allows people struggling with fertility issues to have children, going so far as to call himself “the father of IVF”.

The question came after the Alabama supreme court issued a ruling earlier this year that briefly cut off access to the treatment in the deep-red state, raising fears that Republican politicians opposed to the treatment would press the party to ban it nationwide, or in other states.

After describing himself to the questioner as “the father of IVF” Trump said at the town hall that after the court ruling, he got a call from Katie Britt, “a fantastically attractive person” who is also a Republican senator from Alabama. She told him about the decision’s implications, and he said he then came out in favor of continued access to IVF. Here’s how he put it:

We really are the party for IVF. We want fertilization, and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF even more than them, so, we’re totally in favor of it.

Nonetheless, Republicans in the US Senate have repeatedly blocked passage of legislation that would guarantee access to the procedure nationwide:

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Trump says he would ‘end all sanctuary cities immediately’ with executive order

Donald Trump said at his Fox News town hall that if he was elected, he would sign an executive order to ban sanctuary cities under a two-century old law.

“We are going to end all sanctuary cities immediately … I can do it with an executive order. I have to do it with an executive order. You can do it with … the Aliens Act of 1798, we can do things in terms of moving people out. We can move them out of the sanctuary cities,” Trump said.

After first taking office in 2017, Trump signed an executive order cutting cities who do not cooperate with immigration authorities off from federal funding, but it was later struck down by the courts. He has centered his most recent campaign on imposing hardline immigration policies, and plans to use the Aliens Act of 1798 to do so:

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Trump says prices must come down but admits ‘damage is done’ in town hall

Fox News is now airing its pre-recorded town hall with Donald Trump and a group of female voters in Georgia.

It’s a friendly crowd, which greeted Trump with applause and cheers when he stepped onstage. Thus far, the former president has spent most of his time talking about how much better everything would be if he was in charge.

Moderator Harris Faulkner nonetheless made a modest effort to get him to back up some of his assertions, particularly when it comes to inflation. Trump has said prices will go down if he is elected, but Faulkner pointed out that prices that rise due to inflation typically do not go down, but rather grow at a slower rate.

Trump replied by changing the subject, before acknowledging that prices probably will not decrease:

So I feel so badly about what’s happened, because none of this would have happened just to start. There wouldn’t have been a war in Ukraine and Russia. There wouldn’t have been an October 7 in Israel. There wouldn’t have been this horrible, most embarrassing day in the history of our country, with Afghanistan, where we lost 13 soldiers, but they never talk about the soldiers that are so badly wounded. I mean, with legs and arms and face Obliteration, all these things, and there wouldn’t have been any inflation. And it’s so sad to say, we have to get prices down, because the damage is done.

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Speaking of Donald Trump, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi shared her (outraged) thoughts on the former president, among other topics, in an interview with the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland yesterday.

It’s on the Politics Weekly American podcast, and you can listen to it here:

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Texas congresswoman Veronica Escobar was also at the press conference.

The Democrat is a national co-chair of the Harris- represents the area around the border city of El Paso, and had this to say about Donald Trump’s immigration policies:

El Paso, Texas was where Donald Trump began his horrific policy of separating families, separating children, children as young as the kids just heard from, from their parents.

We are having this press conference because we want Americans to remember what Donald Trump did, not just at the border, but what he did to our country. We know that our immigration system is broken, and I can tell you, as a resident of the border, no one knows more that our immigration system is broken than those of us who live on the US-Mexico border and who’ve been working for immigration reform for decades.

But what Donald Trump presents are not solutions. Donald Trump doesn’t bring policy ideas to the table. Donald Trump did not fix a broken system. In fact, what Donald Trump did was take a broken system and he obliterated it. He uses cruelty as American public policy.

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Here’s video of the children who were separated from their parents while entering the United States speaking at a Harris campaign event about their experiences:

Children ripped away from their parents under Trump speak out for the first time: “I suffered a lot of trauma… I go to a therapist, but I still have the fear of Trump being reelected… I don’t want other kids to go through what I did” pic.twitter.com/O5YTsZfBLs

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 16, 2024

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A little bit more detail on Billy who spoke earlier.

A reporter asked him how hold he was, and where he came from. He replied that he is 16, and came from Guatemala.

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Billy was followed by a girl who gave her name as Janice Adriana and shared her own story of being detained when trying to enter the United States.

“They told us that they were going to separate me and my mom, and that’s when everything bad started to happen. I started crying, me and Mama started crying because we thought we were never going to see each other again” Adriana said.

She continued:

Then they took her away from me, and after that, I had to stay in this foster care for a week, and I asked them plenty of times when I was gonna see my mom again, and they told me I was gonna see her soon, but it never happened.

After that, they took me to my dad for and I stayed here with him for about two months, and I was feeling a little bit better because I was out of the foster care, and at least I was with my dad, but then they deported him to Honduras, and I had nobody with me, only my aunt, which I had to stay with her for three years. I couldn’t see my mom for those whole three years, which was really sad for me, because I thought I wasn’t going to see her more than that.

Adriana closed with: “Kamala Harris helped me and my parents get together again, and now me and my parents are happily living together, and I don’t want Donald Trump to be president again, because I don’t want other kids to go through what I did.”

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Billy was eventually reunited with his father, but said the damage from their forced separation lingers:

I went and ran to my dad, I hugged him, and I told him I did not want this to happen ever again. And he promised me that he would not ever leave me again. And after that, we still fear. I go to therapists, but I still have the fear of Trump being reelected, and that same thing happening to me or other kids ever again.

Kamala Harris helped us be together again, and she helped us be a family again. And I don’t want this to happen to any more kids.

The Harris campaign organized the event ahead of a town hall Trump will participate this evening on Univision News, as part of his effort to woo Latino voters.

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Victims of Trump-era family separation policy speak at Harris campaign event

Survivors of Donald Trump’s family separation policy are telling their stories at an event convened by Kamala Harris’s campaign to condemn the former president’s hardline immigration policies.

A young man who identified himself as Billy told a press conference in Doral, Florida, that he was detained after arriving in the United States and told he would see his father again soon.

“After that day, I never saw him again for 40 days,” Billy said, describing how he was instead flown to New York and put with a foster family.

“They told me that I wasn’t going to get to see my dad again and that I wasn’t going to be able to see my family again. As a nine-year-old, you can probably imagine how that felt, great sadness in front of me and very traumatic, something that I still hold to this day. The emptiness that I felt when I when they told me that I wasn’t going to be able to see my family again, was something out of this world, and something that no kids should go through.”

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Trump vows to ‘end all sanctuary cities immediately’; Harris faces Fox interview – US elections live

Lauren Gambino

Joe Biden is headed to Arizona next week – but the White House says it’s for an official event (ie not a campaign event).

It’s not clear yet what brings the president to the battleground state that he won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, becoming the first Democratic nominee to win Arizona since Bill Clinton.

Recent polling shows Kamala Harris trailing Donald Trump in the state, even as the Democratic candidate for Senate, Ruben Gallego, leads his Republican opponent, Trump ally Kari Lake.

Harris doesn’t need to win Arizona, since she has other paths to 270. But it is perhaps a worrying sign about her standing among Hispanic voters, who make up about a third of the state’s electorate. However, Democrats cannot hold on to the Senate without keeping the seat.

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Michelle Obama to headline Georgia rally aimed at young voters

Michelle Obama will later this month hold a rally in Atlanta aimed at encouraging young voters to get to the polls, her nonpartisan organization When We All Vote announced.

The 29 October event will feature Atlanta-area college and high school students and is aimed at encouraging first-time voters to cast ballots in Georgia, which Joe Biden won in 2020 by a narrow 12,000 votes.

“The election doesn’t start on Election Day — it ends on Election Day. Thanks to our Georgia partners and volunteers who continue to make sure their communities are ready to vote, Georgia voters are fired up and ready to use their voices,” said When We All Vote’s executive director Beth Lynk in a statement.

Obama launched When We All Vote in 2018 with the aim of getting new voters out to the polls. The Atlanta rally will be her first public event since her speech to the Democratic national convention, where she artfully decried Donald Trump:

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Harris set for evening interview on Fox News

It’s a big day for Fox News, where Kamala Harris will at 6pm sit for an interview with anchor Bret Baier, hours after Donald Trump’s pre-recorded town hall airs.

It will be something of a journey into hostile territory for the vice-president, since Fox’s coverage and viewership tends to skew conservative. We don’t know yet what they’ll talk about, but Baier yesterday said the interview would air without commercial breaks.

Harris will appear on Fox News as she continues a string of media interviews intended to boost her candidacy with less than three weeks to go until the presidential vote. Here’s more on that:

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Fox News to broadcast town hall with Trump, Georgia women

At 11am today, Fox News will broadcast a pre-recorded town hall with Donald Trump and a group of women in swing state Georgia.

Expect a friendly encounter – Fox News is a conservative network, and a brief clip of the event broadcast yesterday shows Trump taking questions on immigration, an issue that is a mainstay of his speeches. Nonetheless, the event does serve a purpose for the former president: polls have shown that his standing is weak among some groups of women, and the event appears to be geared towards turning that around, specifically in a state that could decide the election.

“Women constitute the largest group of registered and active voters in the United States, so it is paramount that female voters understand where the presidential candidates stand on the issues that matter to them most,” Fox News presenter Harris Faulkner said in announcing the event.

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State governments across the US are taking steps to eliminate protections for minors as rates of child labor violations, injuries and chronic school absenteeism rise, according to a report released today.

The report by Governing For Impact, the Economic Policy Institute, and Child Labor Coalition proposes actions the Biden-Harris administration can take in response to a recent surge in child labor violations around the country and a trend of some states passing legislation that rollbacks state-level child labor protections.

Its authors also warn that moves to weaken child protections will likely escalate under a second Trump presidency.

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Obama to return to campaign for Harris as Michigan begins voting

Barack Obama will next week hit the campaign trail on behalf of Kamala Harris on Tuesday, when early voting begins in Michigan, the vice-president’s campaign announced.

The former president will rally voters in Detroit, Harris’s campaign said, without giving further details.

Obama made his first campaign appearance for Harris last week in Pennsylvania, where he encouraged Black men to cast ballots for the vice-president:

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Donald Trump’s pro-Israel stance has alienated the far right, which is ramping up antisemitic attacks, Ben Makuch writes.

One campaign issue where the Maga world and the extremists of Telegram and other fringe social media sites have diverged, is the former president’s support for Israel in its several military operations across the Middle East.

The ideologies of the far right and Donald Trump have for the most part been in agreement since he took the reins of the Republican ticket at the RNC convention in July.

While supporters waved ultranationalist “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” signs, Trump gave a speech mixed with hate, in a nomination that was roundly approved across the rightwing political sphere.

That sense of unity, however, has begun to crack under the weight of antisemitic attacks aimed at Trump for commemorating the anniversary of the 7 October attacks …

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