Politics
California races roiled by border, immigration. It could tip control of the House
On a recent overcast Saturday in the manicured backyard of a constituent’s home, Rep. Mike Levin (D-San Juan Capistrano) told several dozen supporters about his efforts to bring more sand to local beaches, reduce veteran homelessness and prevent gun violence.
From the crowd, Peggy Aveni whispered to her friend: “What about immigration?” When Levin began taking questions, she immediately raised her hand.
“I am concerned about the immigration thing,” Aveni told him. “I know that the Republicans have tried to squash anything from happening. So, will anything happen before the election?”
With immigration at the forefront of the presidential election, the U.S.-Mexico border has become an increasingly significant political issue in downballot races. In California, where the San Diego region is now a top destination for arriving migrants, a handful of competitive House races could help determine control of Congress.
A handful of California Republicans appear vulnerable in the November election, including Reps. David Valadao of Hanford and Ken Calvert of Corona, and their defeat could help Democrats reclaim the majority in the House of Representatives.
But there are also Democrats — including Levin — who are clinging to their seats.
“Right now, the border is the No. 1 issue impacting this district,” said Levin’s Republican opponent, retired businessman Matt Gunderson. “The San Diego County line has become the epicenter of border crossings. Until we secure the border, all our other issues, in terms of public safety and public health and inflation, kind of fall to the wayside.”
Immigration is becoming a higher priority for Levin, whose maternal grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico with parents who had work permits.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Levin, an environmental lawyer who has served the 49th District in Congress since 2019, represents most of northern coastal San Diego County and parts of southern Orange County. His top priorities are fighting climate change, supporting veterans and protecting democracy, though immigration has increasingly crept up his list.
At the Encinitas campaign event, he told the crowd that the asylum system is broken. It has become easier for people to pay thousands to a cartel or get step-by-step instructions on social media than to enter through a legal pathway, he said.
He reminded them that Republicans, heeding the demands of former President Trump, killed a bipartisan border security bill after months of negotiations. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and conservative news outlets have used politically divisive issue of immigration as a cudgel to attack President Biden.
“We do have a genuine crisis,” Levin said. “It is not necessarily what Fox News makes it out to be. But it’s unacceptable. It’s untenable.”
Aveni, 70, who is an independent voter, said she supports Levin but found his answer to her question evasive. She said she supports legal immigration.
“My friends in general, even the more liberal ones, understand that this is a big issue for Southern California,” she said. “I want something done, and it’s just too bad that it took three years in the Biden administration to even get there.”
In an interview after the event, Levin said that his grandparents on his mother’s side immigrated from Mexico with their parents, who had work permits. He said their experience might not have been possible today.
Republican Matt Gunderson, who’s challenging Levin, says that until the border is secured, “all our other issues, in terms of public safety and public health and inflation, kind of fall to the wayside.”
(Gunderson Campaign)
Levin said he wants to expand legal pathways to citizenship, particularly for so-called Dreamers and others who have lived in the U.S. for decades.
The failed border security deal marked the first time most Democrats supported immigration legislation that did not include a legalization component. Still, he said, it was a good-faith negotiation that included necessary funding for more border agents, asylum officers and immigration judges.
“It’s true that it’s a political issue,” he said, but “it is genuinely a national security concern that should be treated as such. For me, that prioritizes where it ranks on the continuum of all the variety of other things that voters may care about.”
At the White House three days after his meet-and-greet, Levin stood near Biden, just behind Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, as the president announced his executive order limiting asylum at the border. The order raises the legal standard for asylum claims and blocks access for those crossing outside legal points of entry when their numbers average more than 2,500 a day.
Asked how he felt about Biden leaning on the same legal provision that Trump used to ban people from several Muslim-majority countries, Levin said he hopes Biden is using it “for far different purposes.” The historic numbers of arrivals in the last few years, he said, show change is necessary.
But Gunderson, Levin’s Republican challenger, said the president’s order had come too late. The former car dealership owner, who ran unsuccessfully for state Senate in 2022, has focused his campaign largely on affordability for the middle class.
The Biden administration dismantled Trump’s border policies just to “inch their way back” as the election nears, Gunderson said.
“No recent ‘come to Jesus’ perspective is going to change what they’ve done over the last three and a half years,” he said.
Immigration is factoring into other California races, too. In the 45th District, Republican Rep. Michelle Steel of Seal Beach faces Democratic challenger Derek Tran, an Army veteran and Orange County business owner whose parents were Vietnamese political refugees.
Tran recently faced heat from Asian American community leaders for telling Punchbowl News that Steel “tries to run on that she’s a refugee” though “she came to this country for economic gain.” Her family fled communist North Korea for Seoul before she later moved to the U.S. for college.
For her part, Steel has criticized Democrats for their handling of the U.S.-Mexico border, saying her constituents had arrived legally.
And in the 41st District, Calvert, the longest-serving Republican member of California’s congressional delegation, faces Democrat Will Rollins, a former federal prosecutor who helped prosecute Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
A redrawing of congressional maps divided the once solidly GOP district in Riverside County. Though both candidates have advocated for securing the southern border, Rollins also supports a path to citizenship for certain immigrants and says those arriving at the border should be treated humanely.
Dave Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said that while immigration has been one of Biden’s weakest issues in approval polls, “Democrats down ballot have been somewhat successful in establishing independence from the White House on this issue.”
The issue has become a lightning rod in districts and states not just along the border, but also across suburbs farther north due to the strain that recent arrivals have placed on municipal budgets, Wasserman said. He pointed to Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), who jabbed at the administration as being slow to respond to the issue, while also blasting Trump and Republicans for sabotaging the bipartisan compromise.
“Generally swing voters are supportive of tightening the border or going further than Biden and Democrats have gone in the last three years,” Wasserman said. “Whereas the focus in 2016 was on Trump’s rhetoric on immigrants and immigration in a way that polarized Hispanic voters against him, the focus now has been on the humanitarian crisis stemming from record numbers of illegal crossings.”
Amid relentless criticism from former President Trump that she is responsible for out-of-control illegal immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday made her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border since 2021, announcing more stringent measures she would take as president to restrict border entry.
“The United States is a sovereign nation, and I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border, and to enforce them,” Harris told a crowd in Douglas, Ariz., gathered in a small auditorium at Cochise College Douglas Campus, where the stage was flanked by large signs that read, “Border security and stability.” “We are also a nation of immigrants. The United States has been enriched by generations of people who have come from every corner of the world to contribute to our country and to become part of the American story.”
Harris said she would go beyond Biden administration policies to further restrict border access outside of official ports of entry.
Earlier in the afternoon, Harris visited a port of entry less than 10 miles from the campaign event. Two Border Patrol agents walked with her along the towering fence, which was built during the Obama administration. Harris later told reporters that she had thanked them for their work.
“They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job. They are very dedicated,” she said. “And so I’m here to talk with them about what we can continue to do to support them.”
She advocated for hiring more officers and adding more fentanyl detection systems at border entry points.
“I reject the false choice that suggest we must either choose between securing our border or creating a system of immigration that is safe, orderly and humane,” Harris said. “We can and we must do both.”
Immigration reform has bedeviled presidents of both parties for decades.
A bipartisan proposal earlier this year that combined increased funding for border security and foreign aid for Ukraine appeared to be the first breakthrough until it was derailed when Trump urged Republicans to oppose it.
Kamala Harris speaks at Cochise College Douglas Campus in Douglas, Ariz., on Friday.
(Carolyn Kaster / Associated Press)
That deal fell short of comprehensive plans discussed for decades that would revamp the asylum system and the legal immigration process and provide a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million people in the country without legal authorization, including those who arrived as children. Harris on Friday mentioned farm workers and immigrants who arrived as children, known as “Dreamers.”
“As president, I will put politics aside to fix our immigration system and find solutions to problems which have persisted for far too long,” Harris said.
In advance of Harris’ visit to the border, Trump pointed to reports that there are more than 425,000 convicted criminals who are in the country illegally but not detained by federal authorities, according to data provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to a lawmaker’s request.
That includes more than 13,000 convicted of homicide and more than 15,800 convicted of sexual assault, according to the ICE data shared on X, formerly Twitter, by Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas).
Trump said Thursday that 21 million people entered the country illegally in just the last four years. He framed the bipartisan effort that he helped defeat as “her atrocious border bill.”
“It was not a border bill. It was an amnesty bill … ,” he said at a news conference in Manhattan. “Fortunately Congress was too smart for it.”
The bill would not have provided a path to citizenship for people who lack legal status.
The GOP nominee’s appearance at Trump Tower was reminiscent of his 2015 campaign announcement there, notably his references to other nations purposefully sending criminals to the United States.
His remarks included multiple falsehoods, such as saying Harris approved a raft of changes to the nation’s immigration policies that as vice president she had no control over, and that she was the Biden administration’s “border czar.” She had been charged with trying to improve conditions in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to stop those nations’ residents from fleeing their homelands.
That assignment has been a political headache for Harris — drawing criticism from the left and right.
In a 2021 visit to Central America, Harris told would-be migrants that they would be deported if they crossed the border, angering allies of immigrants who said they were fleeing poverty, corruption and violence.
“Do not come,” she said at the time. “You will be turned back.”
On the same trip, Harris laughed off questions in a nationally televised interview about why she had not yet visited the border as vice president, inflaming critics on the right.
Both political parties are hyper-focused on immigration because while the presidential race is very tight in the polling, Trump has a double-digit edge on the issue of border security. That edge has narrowed, however, since President Biden decided not to seek reelection and Harris garnered the support to become the Democratic presidential nominee.
Border stops hit a record in December, with agents making nearly 250,000 arrests. As the political problem raged, Biden signed an order in June to heavily restrict asylum claims, prompting a sharp drop in border encounters, to fewer than 60,000 in July and August.
Republicans have been hammering the issue, with GOP members of Congress filing a resolution that “strongly condemns the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border” one day after the president announced he would not seek reelection.
While some of the former president and his allies’ claims are demonstrably false and have been denounced by GOP elected officials, such as allegations that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, concerns among some voters about the impact of an insecure border on the economy, crime and the fentanyl crisis are palpable in many communities.
Friday’s visit was Harris’ second to Arizona since she became the Democratic presidential nominee, according to the Harris-Walz campaign. While Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and others have swung through the southwestern battleground state, Harris has focused much of her in-person campaigning in critical states farther east, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.
Hours before the vice president landed in Arizona, Republicans held a press call featuring two mothers whose daughters were raped and killed by immigrants who were in the country illegally and the mother of a teenage son who overdosed on fentanyl. The women lambasted Harris for the administration’s immigration policy and for visiting the border so close to the election.
“I’m trying very hard not to cry. We live 1,800 miles away from the border,” said Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a mother of five who was brutally attacked while walking a bucolic and well-traveled public trail in Maryland. Her body was discovered in a drain pipe.
“No one is safe in America, no one is safe. If you have a sanctuary city in your state, you’re not safe,” she said. “They have bused, flown, trained illegal immigrants to literally every nook and cranny and every tiny town in the whole of the United States.”
Such fears are among the reasons the Harris campaign released an ad about immigration in Arizona on Friday, and visited the Southern border less than a month and a half before election day. As vice president, she previously visited the region once in 2021, when she toured the port of entry and border operation in El Paso.
Mehta reported from Phoenix and Pinho reported from Douglas. Times staff writers Noah Bierman and Andrea Castillo contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.
Three men connected to Iran have been indicted in relation to a hacking plot against former President Donald Trump’s campaign, the Department of Justice announced Friday.
Masoud Jalili, Seyyed Ali Aghamiri and Yasar Balaghi are the three suspects named in the case, according to a federal indictment unsealed Friday afternoon.
The indictment shows the trio are facing a long list of charges, including: Conspiracy to Obtain Information from a Protected Computer; Defraud and Obtain a Thing of Value; Commit Fraud Involving Authentication Features; Commit Aggravated Identity Theft; Commit Access Device Fraud; and Commit Wire Fraud While Falsely Registering Domains.
DOES IRAN’S HACKING OF THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN PROVE THEY WANT KAMALA HARRIS TO WIN THE ELECTION? EXPERTS WEIGH IN
Three hackers with ties to Iran were indicted by the DOJ. (Background: Reuters)
The three hackers, who are accused of working for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, were allegedly “engaged in a wide-ranging hacking campaign that used spearphishing and social engineering techniques to target and compromise the accounts of current and former U.S. government officials, members of the media, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals associated with U.S. political campaigns.”
Last week, the U.S. revealed the Iranian hackers had obtained information on the Trump campaign and tried to distribute it to people linked to the Biden campaign and media organizations since June.
IRAN TRIED TO INFLUENCE ELECTION BY SENDING STOLEN MATERIAL FROM TRUMP CAMPAIGN TO BIDEN’S CAMP, FBI SAYS
READ THE FEDERAL INDICTMENT – APP USERS, CLICK HERE:
The federal government acknowledges that the Trump campaign has been a specific and repeated target of Iran since he ordered the killing of Qasem Soleimani, the former commander of the IRGC Qods Force.
Trump was briefed Tuesday about “real and specific threats” from Iran to assassinate the Republican presidential candidate, according to his campaign.
Iran’s aim to assassinate Trump is part of the Islamic Republic’s efforts to “destabilize and sow chaos in the United States,” Trump Campaign Communications Director Steven Cheung said in a press release.
Young veiled Iranian schoolgirls perform while an image of former U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is shown during a ceremony commemorating assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosque in Tehran, Iran. Ismail Haniyeh was killed in his residency in northern Tehran the day after the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. (Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“Intelligence officials have identified that these continued and coordinated attacks have heightened in the past few months, and law enforcement officials across all agencies are working to ensure President Trump is protected and the election is free from interference,” Cheung said.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Fox News Digital’s Bradford Betz and Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
Television station group owner E.W. Scripps is shutting down its 24-hour news channel on Nov. 15, another sign of a contraction in the TV news industry.
E.W. Scripps Chief Executive Adam Symson informed staff Friday of the closure of the channel known as Scripps News. More than 200 jobs will be eliminated, according to his memo.
Scripps News supplied a 24-hour feed of live coverage and documentary programming to broadcast TV stations and ad-supported streaming services such as Tubi and Pluto. The free channel also streamed on the company’s digital platforms. The service was founded as Newsy in 2015 and was a cable channel before evolving into a full-time service for TV and streaming platforms in 2021.
Symson said the audience for the Atlanta-based Scripps News channel was growing. The channel drew 1 million viewers with its coverage of the Sept. 10 debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump, according to two people familiar with the data.
But Symson said the company was unable to get major advertisers to sign on because of the current divisive political environment in the U.S.
“Many brands and agencies have decided that advertising around national news is just too risky for them given the polarized nature of this country, no matter the accolades and credentials a news organization like Scripps receives for its objectivity,” Symson said. “I vehemently disagree, but it is hurting Scripps News, along with every other national linear and digital news outlet.”
The shutdown is the latest example of how the TV news business is struggling as it faces an exodus of viewers away from traditional television viewing. Earlier this week, CBS News announced the layoffs of a weekend morning anchor, Jeff Glor, and several prominent correspondents. CNN and the news divisions of NBC and ABC are all expected to make significant staff and salary reductions after the presidential election in November.
Symson said Scripps’ digital platforms will continue to carry live news coverage from the field and will have a reporting team in Washington to serve the company’s TV stations.
Scripps News received an Emmy Award this week and has earned a number of other journalism prizes over its two-year run.
The operation also partnered on significant stories with other news organizations on stories including ProPublica, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.
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