Border patrol’s growing presence at hospitals creates fear
An armed Border Patrol agent roamed the hallways of an emergency room in Miami on a recent day as nurses wheeled stretchers and medical carts through the hospital and families waited for physicians to treat their loved ones. The agent in the olive-green uniform freely stepped in and out of the room where a woman was taken by ambulance after throwing up and fainting while being detained on an immigration violation, according to advocates who witnessed the scene. The presence of immigration authorities is becoming increasingly common at health care facilities around the country, and hospitals are struggling with where to draw the line to protect patients’ rights amid rising immigration enforcement in the Trump administration. Some doctors say this increased presence could undermine public health in cities with large immigrant populations, frightening patients who need care and prompting them to avoid hospitals. Normally, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents enter hospitals when detainees require emergency medical services or specialized care. In many cases, agents escort sick immigrants to the hospital after apprehending them at the border. In some instances, they have detained them after leaving a hospital. In 2017, Border Patrol agents followed a 10-year-old immigrant with cerebral palsy to a Texas hospital and took her into custody after the surgery. She had been brought to the U.S. from Mexico when she was a toddler. Doctors, lawyers and family members have complained about immigrants being shackled in hospitals and the intrusive presence of uniformed agents in exam rooms during treatment and discussions with physicians about medical care. The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics devoted its entire January issue to medical care for immigrants who are in the country illegally, including a discussion of whether medical facilities should declare themselves “sanctuary hospitals,” similar to sanctuary cities. “Our patients should not fear that entering a hospital will result in arrests or deportation. In medical facilities, patients and families should be focused on recovery and their health, not the ramifications of their immigration status,” the association said in a statement. But Dr. Elisabeth Poorman, a primary care physician at the University of Washington in Seattle, says facilities need to constantly train staff on how to interact with law enforcement and immigrant patients in these situations. “The ground is constantly shifting. I can tell the patient I am committed to your safety, but in the current administration we cannot tell everyone that they are 100% safe,” she said. Earlier this year, the agency that oversees Border Patrol said its agents averaged 69 trips to the hospital each day across the country. In the first half of the year, the federal government said Border Patrol agents had spent about 153,000 hours monitoring detained people at hospitals, as more families and children were crossing the border from Mexico. That’s the equivalent of about 20,000 8-hour shifts spent at hospitals. Hospitals, schools and places of worship are considered “sensitive locations” by a government policy and are generally free from immigration enforcement. But the rule is discretionary and ambiguous when an enforcement action begins before a trip to a hospital or when an immigrant is already in custody. Thomas Kennedy, policy director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, says his organization received a call on Sunday alerting them of the detention and hospitalization of a woman in the suburb of Aventura. The woman’s identity was not disclosed by the group, saying the family asked for privacy. The woman and her ex-husband were driving with their two children, who are U.S. citizens, after a day at Haulover Beach on Sunday when a Border Patrol car flashed its lights to pull them over. Border Patrol conducts operations within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of a U.S. land or coastal border, and Florida lies entirely within this zone. Kennedy said the agents told her she had to go with them, and shortly after, she threw up and fainted. The agents then called for an ambulance. Keith Smith, a spokesman for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, said the woman was detained for being “illegally present” in the United States, and clarified Border Patrol does not conduct any enforcement operations in hospitals in Florida. “However, agents will transport persons in custody and remain with them until medically treated and cleared,” he said in an email. Smith added agents were following national standards when escorting the woman to the hospital. In what Kennedy says is a recorded exchange between him and the Border Patrol agent with their faces off camera, Kennedy is heard asking the agent to show a warrant. The agent’s response: I don’t need one. “It is a little unorthodox to have a Border Patrol officer outside of her room and going in and out while she is receiving medical treatment,” Kennedy said. “This type of stuff creates fear. It prevents undocumented immigrants from seeking care.” Kennedy said he confronted the staff at Aventura Hospital and Medical Care, but employees told him they didn’t want to get involved and were simply providing care. The hospital, which is part of the Nashville-based health care giant HCA, Inc., did not respond to questions regarding cooperation with immigration authorities. The immigration agency said its agents must document the hospitalization providing a discharge summary, treatment plans and prescribed medications from any medical evaluation. Health care lawyers and medical associations say providers generally should not allow law enforcement unrestricted access to treatment areas, to comply with the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA. The law protects against improper disclosure of confidential information that may result from offering such access. A spokesman for NYC Health and Hospitals, which operates the public hospitals and clinics, said that when patients show up in custody of immigration enforcement, officers would be posted outside the treatment room, the same way it happens with police officers. But hospitals have yet to come up with a universal set of policies on how medical staff and physicians interact with immigration authorities. Dr. Poorman said she
U.S. government opens new holding center for migrant children
A former oilfield worker camp off a dirt road in rural Texas has become the U.S. government’s newest holding center for detaining migrant children after they leave Border Patrol stations, where complaints of overcrowding and filthy conditions have sparked a worldwide outcry. Inside the wire fence that encircles the site are soccer fields, a giant air-conditioned tent that serves as a dining hall, and trailers set up for use as classrooms and as places where children can call their families. The long trailers once used to house workers in two-bedroom suites have been converted into 12-person dorms, with two pairs of bunk beds in each bedroom and the living room. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said about 225 children are being held at the site in Carrizo Springs, with plans to expand to as many as 1,300, making it one of the biggest camps in the U.S. government system. The government said the holding center will give it much-needed capacity to take in more children from the Border Patrol and prevent their detention in stations like the one in Clint, Texas, where lawyers last month reported some 250 youngsters were being held in cells with inadequate food, water and sanitation. Of the children held at Carrizo Springs, 21 had previously been detained at Clint, HHS spokesman Mark Weber said. HHS said the Carrizo Springs location is a comfortable environment for children while they wait to be placed with family members or sponsors in the U.S. But immigrant advocates and others liken such places to child prison camps and worry that the isolated location 110 miles (180 kilometers) from San Antonio, the nearest major city, will make it more difficult to find lawyers to help the teenagers with their immigration cases. Advocates have complained that HHS’ largest holding centers — a facility in Homestead, Florida, a converted Walmart in Brownsville, Texas, and a now-closed tent camp at Tornillo, Texas — have traumatized children through overcrowding and inadequate staffing. “All of this is part of a morally bankrupt system,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat. There’s also the huge cost: an average of $775 per day for each child. HHS plans to pay the nonprofit Baptist Child and Family Services up to $300 million through January to run the Carrizo Springs site. The government allowed The Associated Press to visit on Tuesday and distribute photos and video, though the AP could not show children’s faces because of privacy restrictions. Boys and girls are kept in separate buildings and follow separate schedules. They have decorated their rooms with drawings of superheroes and the flags of their home countries, including Guatemala and El Salvador. Many children smiled and greeted visitors as they walked by. Several girls knitted yarn hats and armbands. A series of tents serves as the infirmary, with nurses on hand treating a few children for lice and flu-like symptoms. Breakfast is at 7 a.m., followed by soccer, then six hours of classes in reading, writing, social studies, science and math. In reading class on Tuesday, the students were asked to practice reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in English. Many did so haltingly before the teachers called one student to the front to help lead them. After he finished, the whole class applauded. HHS said the goal is to move the children through the holding center and others like it as quickly as possible. The department said it has sped up placing children with sponsors to an average of 45 days, down from 93 days last November. One key, HHS said, was lifting a requirement that all adult relatives be fingerprinted before they can take a child out of custody. “This facility is all about unification,” said Weber, the HHS spokesman.The holding center is opening amid record numbers of family members apprehended at the border and thousands of children traveling without their parents as they flee violence and poverty in Central America. Baptist Child and Family Services also ran the Tornillo camp, which opened last summer as thousands of children were separated from their parents by Trump administration policy. Tornillo reached as many as 2,800 children until it was closed in January. BCFS CEO Kevin Dinnin said he had refused in December to take more children at Tornillo because the camp was holding them for so long, a decision that led to its closing. Dinnin said he resolved never to open another emergency center like it, but the conditions reported in Border Patrol custody changed his mind. He said he also believes HHS is doing more to process children more quickly. “At the end of the day, our philosophy has been … to keep kids out of CBP jail cells,” Dinnin said. Jonathan Ryan, executive director of the legal group RAICES, said his organization is ready to send lawyers to Carrizo Springs but is waiting for the OK from the government. “We just want to get inside and work with those kids,” Ryan said. “Children who have been detained, who have gone through deprivation and cages in Border Patrol custody, are potentially being released without ever having had access to legal advice and screening.” By Nomaan Merchant Associated Press Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Richard Shelby: Border security talks ‘stalled’ as clock ticks
Bargainers clashed Sunday over whether to limit the number of migrants authorities can detain, tossing a new hurdle before negotiators hoping to strike a border security compromise for Congress to pass this coming week. The White House wouldn’t rule out a renewed partial government shutdown if an agreement isn’t reached. With the Friday deadline approaching, the two sides remained separated by hundreds of millions of dollars over how much to spend to construct President Donald Trump’s promised border wall. But rising to the fore was a related dispute over curbing Customs and Immigration Enforcement, or ICE, the federal agency that Republicans see as an emblem of tough immigration policies and Democrats accuse of often going too far. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, in appearances on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and “Fox News Sunday,” said “you absolutely cannot” eliminate the possibility of another shutdown if a deal is not reached over the wall and other border matters. The White House had asked for $5.7 billion, a figure rejected by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, and the mood among bargainers has soured, according to people familiar with the negotiations not authorized to speak publicly about private talks. “You cannot take a shutdown off the table, and you cannot take $5.7 (billion) off the table,” Mulvaney told NBC, “but if you end up someplace in the middle, yeah, then what you probably see is the president say, ‘Yeah, OK, and I’ll go find the money someplace else.’” A congressional deal seemed to stall even after Mulvaney convened a bipartisan group of lawmakers at Camp David, the presidential retreat in northern Maryland. While the two sides seemed close to clinching a deal late last week, significant gaps remain and momentum appears to have slowed. Though congressional Democratic aides asserted that the dispute had caused the talks to break off, it was initially unclear how damaging the rift was. Both sides are eager to resolve the long-running battle and avert a fresh closure of dozens of federal agencies that would begin next weekend if Congress doesn’t act by Friday. “I think talks are stalled right now,” Sen. Richard Shelby, Republican-Ala., said Sunday on “Fox News Sunday.” ″I’m not confident we’re going to get there.” Sen. Jon Tester, Democrat-Mont., who appeared on the same program, agreed: “We are not to the point where we can announce a deal.” But Mulvaney did signal that the White House would prefer not to have a repeat of the last shutdown, which stretched more than a month, left more than 800,000 government workers without paychecks, forced a postponement of the State of the Union address and sent Trump’s poll numbers tumbling. As support in his own party began to splinter, Trump surrendered after the shutdown hit 35 days without getting money for the wall. This time, Mulvaney signaled that the White House may be willing to take whatever congressional money comes — even if less than Trump’s goal — and then supplement that with other government funds. “The president is going to build the wall. That’s our attitude at this point,” Mulvaney said on Fox. “We’ll take as much money as you can give us, and we’ll go find the money somewhere else, legally, and build that wall on the southern border, with or without Congress.” The president’s supporters have suggested that Trump could use executive powers to divert money from the federal budget for wall construction, though it was unclear if he would face challenges in Congress or the courts. One provision of the law lets the Defense Department provide support for counterdrug activities. But declaring a national emergency remained an option, Mulvaney said, even though many in the administration have cooled on the prospect. A number of powerful Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican-Ky., have also warned against the move, believing it usurps power from Congress and could set a precedent for a future Democratic president to declare an emergency for a liberal political cause. The fight over ICE detentions goes to the core of each party’s view on immigration. Republicans favor tough enforcement of immigration laws and have little interest in easing them if Democrats refuse to fund the Mexican border wall. Democrats despise the proposed wall and, in return for border security funds, want to curb what they see as unnecessarily harsh enforcement by ICE. People involved in the talks say Democrats have proposed limiting the number of immigrants here illegally who are caught inside the U.S. — not at the border — that the agency can detain. Republicans say they don’t want that cap to apply to immigrants caught committing crimes, but Democrats do. In a series of tweets about the issue, Trump used the dispute to cast Democrats as soft on criminals. He charged in one tweet: “The Border Committee Democrats are behaving, all of a sudden, irrationally. Not only are they unwilling to give dollars for the obviously needed Wall (they overrode recommendations of Border Patrol experts), but they don’t even want to take muderers into custody! What’s going on?” Democrats say they proposed their cap to force ICE to concentrate its internal enforcement efforts on dangerous immigrants, not those who lack legal authority to be in the country but are productive and otherwise pose no threat. Democrats have proposed reducing the current number of beds ICE uses to detain immigrants here illegally from 40,520 to 35,520. But within that limit, they’ve also proposed limiting to 16,500 the number for immigrants here illegally caught within the U.S., including criminals. Republicans want no caps on the number of immigrants who’ve committed crimes who can be held by ICE. As most budget disputes go, differences over hundreds of millions of dollars are usually imperceptible and easily solved. But this battle more than most is driven by political symbolism — whether Trump will be able to claim he delivered on his long-running pledge to “build the wall” or newly empowered congressional Democrats’ ability to thwart him. Predictably each side blamed
Donald Trump pays tribute to fallen officers in emotional ceremony
President Donald Trump paid emotional tribute Tuesday to fallen law enforcement officers and the loved ones who carry on without them, saying those who wore the uniform “were among the bravest Americans to ever live.” “They made the ultimate sacrifice so that we could live in safety and in peace,” Trump said. Trump, who likes to project an image of strength and has been criticized for failing to bring the nation together at times of tragedy, made a rare showing of public empathy as he shared the stories of some of the families gathered in the crowd. Near the end of his speech, he invited onstage the elderly mother and other loved ones of a slain police officer from his native New York City. Officer Miosotis Familia, a mother of three, was killed in July 2017 after being shot in the head by a man who fired into a parked police vehicle in the Bronx. The gunman was later fatally shot by police. “I’d like to have this family,” he said, as he urged them to join him. Trump joked that he had promised not to reveal the age of Familia’s mother, Adrianna Valoy, but that she climbed the stairs better than he did. Trump turns 72 next month. “So I promised that I wouldn’t tell you that she’s 90 years old, but, you know what, she is really something, right?” he told the audience. “You look like 55 maybe, 55. Boy, I’ll tell you what. You got up those stairs better than I did.” After inviting Familia’s police partner to say a few words, Trump told her children how proud their mother was of them. “She’s looking down, and she’s so proud of you. She’s so proud of you. And you are great,” Trump said. “Your mom’s legacy will never, ever die. You have good genes. Right? Good genes. The best genes I’ve ever seen.” The president, who made law and order a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, also used the yearly tribute at an outdoor memorial near the Capitol to press Congress to prioritize border security. He said that includes ending policies that allow individuals he described as “violent criminals” back onto the streets. Trump issued the plea after speaking about Border Patrol agent Rogelio Martinez, who died last year from injuries suffered while he and his partner were responding to reports of unknown activity near a border town southeast of El Paso, Texas. Trump said government’s first duty is to protect its people and that the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Border Patrol agency, is “on the front lines of this incredible, heroic fight.” “That is why we are calling on Congress to secure our borders, support our border agents, stop sanctuary cities and shut down policies that release violent criminals back into our communities,” he said. “We don’t want it any longer. We’ve had it. Enough is enough.” Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
A look at border security, fencing as Donald Trump announces wall
President Donald Trump announced his long-awaited plan Wednesday to build a wall on the 1,954-mile U.S. border with Mexico, calling for its “immediate construction” to stop illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking and acts of terrorism. He is not the first president to embark on an aggressive buildup on the border. Here’s a look at what is already there: SEMI-FORTIFIED BORDER One-third of the U.S.-Mexico border, or 653 miles, is already studded with fence in a potpourri of styles, from menacing barriers to those that can be easily hopped. The barriers arose from the Secure Fence Act passed in the last year of the George W. Bush administration. In California, the fence climbs out of the Pacific. Its meanest stretch, three layers thick, separates San Diego from Tijuana. Half those 14 miles are topped by razor wire. In dunes to the east, a “floating fence” of 16-foot steel tubes can be raised or lowered as sands shift. Almost all of Arizona’s border is fenced, although the deterrence effect for human-and drug smugglers is constantly questioned. Cities such as Yuma and Nogales have high fencing but stretches of the remote desert have things like posts, wire-mesh and livestock fencing that can halt vehicles but people can hop. Vehicular fencing marks most of New Mexico’s 180-mile border. Nearly all Texas’ 1,250-mile border is fence-free, the winding Rio Grande the only barrier. The state has just 110 miles of fences and fortified concrete levees . Mountains, rivers and other natural barriers are expensive to build on and have been largely left alone . One stretch in Texas’ Hidalgo County along the Rio Grande cost $10 million a mile. SURVEILLANCE TECH Politicians along the border, even GOP lawmakers in Washington, have endorsed surveillance technology as offering more security for the buck than fence or wall. The Border Patrol is expanding the use of eye-in the-sky tethered dirigibles that scan the horizon as they float on cables and of camera-studded towers. Its high-flying Predator drones have logged more than 3,000 hours a year since 2011. Neither technology nor maintenance of existing fence comes cheap. The government spent $450 million last fiscal year on “Border Security Fencing, Infrastructure, and Technology.” And a major Boeing-led project in Arizona called the “SBINet,” whose network was supposed to marshal surveillance monitoring, proved a boondoggle, costing taxpayers $1 billion before it was canceled in 2010. PEOPLE CROSSING Not a single person involved in a terrorist act in the United States is known to have illegally entered the country from Mexico along the southwest border. Apprehensions of people at the border are far down from a peak of 1.6 million in 2000 to 408,870 in the year ending Sept. 30, with net immigration by Mexicans at zero. More Central Americans were apprehended illegally crossing the border than Mexicans last year. The Central Americans are fleeing a humanitarian crisis — the world’s highest murder rates and abject poverty. Most surrender at the border and seek asylum. The Border Patrol has bulked up, too, from about 9,500 agents in 2004 to some 17,500 today. The locals, meanwhile, mostly don’t want a wall. A May poll in U.S. southwest border cities found 72 percent against the idea. The Cronkite News-Univision-Dallas Morning News poll had a 2.6 percent error margin DRUG SMUGGLING Most drugs entering the United States sneak through legal ports of entry — not through fence-less wilds. They hide in concealed compartments of passenger vehicles or commingled with legitimate goods in tractor-trailers, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says. The U.S. Border Patrol says it seized 1.3 million pounds of marijuana, most of it in Arizona, and 4,180 pounds of cocaine, most split between the San Diego sector and Texas’ Rio Grande valley, in the most recent fiscal year. Smugglers have been tunneling under fences for years, primarily in California and Arizona where marijuana is the payload. Authorities also occasionally find ladders constructed a foot higher than existing fence as creative smugglers find new ways in — and under. And since 1990, the DEA says, 225 border tunnels have been discovered. Off-road vehicles and backpackers are also used, but that tends to require scouts. Ultralight aircraft and drones have also made cross-border airdrops, mostly of marijuana. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Visa overstays often overlooked in border security debate
More than 20 years had elapsed since the U.S. government estimated how many people entered the country legally and overstayed their visas. The updated numbers, finally published in January, were sobering. The Homeland Security Department said 527,127 people who were supposed to leave the country in the 2015 fiscal year overstayed, more than the population of Atlanta. And that was only those who entered by plane or ship, not on land. To put that in perspective, the Border Patrol made 337,117 arrests of people entering the country illegally during the same period, nearly all on the border with Mexico. More people overstayed visas than were caught crossing the border illegally. An estimated 40 percent of the 11.4 million people in the U.S. illegally overstayed visas, a crucial but often overlooked fact in the immigration debate. That percentage may grow as India and China replace Mexico as the largest senders of immigrants to the United States. Mexicans have long entered illegally through deserts of California, Arizona and Texas but the absence of a shared border makes that route unlikely for Asians. Overstays accounted for about 1 percent of 45 million visitors on business and tourist visas from October 2014 to September 2015, according to the long-awaited Homeland Security report. Canada occupied the top slot for overstays, followed by Mexico, Brazil, Germany and Italy. The United Kingdom, Colombia, China, India and Venezuela rounded out the top 10. The Pew Research Center said last year that more Mexicans were leaving the United States than coming, ending one of biggest immigration waves in U.S. history. Lack of jobs for unskilled labor after the Great Recession is widely cited as a reason but border enforcement played a part. The Border Patrol more than quintupled to 21,444 agents in 2011 from 4,028 in 1993. The U.S. erected fences along about 650 miles of border with Mexico, nearly all of it in the final years of George W. Bush’s administration. Last year, Border Patrol arrests – one gauge of illegal crossings – fell to the lowest level since 1971. About five years ago, the busiest corridor for illegal crossings began shifting from Arizona to South Texas, where roughly two of every three apprehended are from countries other than Mexico. Large numbers of women and children from Central America turned themselves in to U.S. authorities, triggering lengthy proceedings in clogged immigration courts. Images of children crammed into Customs and Border Protection holding cells made big news in 2014. “We weren’t chasing people. People were walking up, looking for someone in a green uniform,” said Customs and Border Protection Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske. “There were smugglers that would call 911 and say, ‘Hey, we got some people coming across.’ It was a border management issue, not a border security issue … Do you have health care personnel? Do you have food? Do you have clothing?” The government has taken steps to better track overstays, but it’s a tall order without a good checkout system. Airports weren’t designed to inspect visitors when they leave. The U.S. and Canada have exchanged names of people from third countries who enter on their shared border since 2013, but Mexico generally doesn’t track who enters by land. Congress has long pressed for biometric screening such as fingerprints, facial images or eye scans on departing visitors, but financial and logistical challenges have been enormous. “It’s tough because we just don’t have the infrastructure,” said Jim Williams, a former Homeland Security official who oversaw efforts to introduce biometric screening from 2003 to 2006. “It’s an open door. You (should) treat it like a house. You want to let people in you trust and you also want to know if they ever left.” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson pledged to have biometric checks on departing visitors at the busiest airports by 2018. But the ambitious target will likely fall to his successor. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Donald Trump says Border Patrol ordered to let immigrants illegally cross border to vote in election
Citing a Border Patrol union leader, Donald Trump said Friday that agents have been told to allow immigrants into the United States illegally “so they can vote in the election.” But he offered no evidence to support his most recent claim that presidential voting may be tainted by fraud. In an immigration roundtable with Trump, Art Del Cueto, a vice president for the National Border Patrol Council, told the candidate Friday officials in the U.S. are being directed to ignore criminal histories of immigrants and speed up citizenship applications. “That’s a massive story,” Trump responded, saying it would be ignored by the media. “They are letting people pour into the country so they can go ahead and vote.” However, union spokesman Shawn Moran, who was in New York with Del Cueto, said later in a telephone interview that several issues were conflated during the roundtable discussion. Border Patrol agents have indeed seen an increase in attempts to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, Moran said. But Moran did not say any border agents had been ordered to let those immigrants in so they could vote in November. The two issues are sometimes linked in a misleading fashion, and the brief exchange between Del Cueto and Trump underscored that. Neither Del Cueto nor Trump offered evidence to back up the idea immigration officials are taking action to allow people who have recently crossed the border to cast ballots on Election Day. Newly admitted immigrants are not permitted to vote, a right that is reserved for citizens. The process of achieving citizenship takes years. Citizenship applications are handled by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, not the Border Patrol. There is no evidence that USCIS officials have been directed to quickly approve citizenship applications, though some lawmakers have asked the agency to address such reports. Trump has repeatedly said he fears the election will be rigged and has made a hard-line stance on immigration a centerpiece of his campaign. His latest provocative claim comes as Trump and Clinton are preparing for their second debate, a town-hall style confrontation Sunday night. It’s a critical moment for Trump, who after a rough performance in last week’s debate, is tasked with showing he can stick to his campaign message and steer clear of comments likely to alienate moderate voters. Trump and Clinton have been treading somewhat lightly on the campaign trail in recent days, as Hurricane Matthew barreled down on swing state Florida. The pause was a reminder of the possibilities and perils of campaigning during a crisis. Plenty of presidents and presidential hopefuls before them have used similar natural disasters to showcase their leadership — or their shortcomings — in ways that can change the trajectory of the race. Both Clinton and Trump appear to be moving carefully, for now. The campaigns spent Thursday moving staff and volunteers, closing offices and canceling events in the path of the storm, as many Floridians heeded calls to evacuate. In Florida, the Clinton campaign pulled its ads from the Weather Channel, amid criticism about insensitivity, and the Trump team pulled its negative TV ads. “Even if you want to do politics, no one is there to listen,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic consultant who directed or advised Barack Obama‘s campaigns in the state in 2008 and 2012. Both the campaigns and state officials were watching closely how the storm might impact Florida votes. The storm arrived five days before the voter registration deadline, prompting the Clinton campaign to ask state officials for an extension. Florida Gov. Rick Scott, Republican who leads a super PAC working to defeat Clinton, refused. “Everyone has had a lot of time to register,” he said. Officials were also eyeing the vote-by-mail operation. Vote-by-mail ballots were due to be sent this week, leaving the potential for ballots to arrive just as voters evacuate their homes. At least half of Florida voters typically cast ballots early, either by mail or in person. Officials said they hope any disruption to voting would be less severe than with Superstorm Sandy, which struck New Jersey and New York just before the 2012 presidential election and kept many voters away from polls. Sandy’s greater political impact, however, may have been the way President Obama used the moment to his advantage. Obama quickly surveyed the aftermath, received a warm welcome from Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, and promised millions in aid. Trump, who is trying to recapture momentum lost in a rocky first debate, practiced his skills in public Thursday night at a town hall in Sandown, New Hampshire. Although his aides called the event a dry run for Sunday, Trump dismissed the notion. “I said, ‘Forget debate prep.’ I mean, give me a break,” said Trump, who mocked Clinton for spending days preparing. “She’s resting. She wants to build up her energy for Sunday night. And you know what? That’s fine. But the narrative is so foolish.” Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
