Harris condemns Trump’s plan for mass deportations in address at Latino leadership conference – live | US elections 2024

The Teamsters released polling data of its members this afternoon that showed its members supported Donald Trump by a large margin over Kamala Harris, and said the union’s leaders will announce its endorsement for president later today:

Organized labor, including the Teamsters, have typically backed Democrats, but this year, the union, which is the country’s largest, has held off endorsing a presidential candidate. President Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican national convention in July, infuriating some members of the rank-and-file, while the New York Times reported earlier this week that Harris had met with O’Brien in what was described as a meeting that grew tense over how Joe Biden had handled a potential railway strike and a dispute between the Teamsters and UPS.

While the Teamster’s straw poll shows Harris is unpopular with its members, Biden was preferred over Donald Trump when the survey was taken earlier this year. Here’s more on the tensions within the union over O’Brien’s overtures to Trump:

Kamala Harris is scheduled to join a virtual organizing call on Wednesday afternoon, intended to rally young voters.

The event will feature Harris, as well as Tennessee state representative Justin J Pearson and actor and producer Chloë Grace Moretz.

During a campaign event for former president Donald Trump on Tuesday, the Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders took a swipe at vice-president Kamala Harris for not having biological children.

“So my kids keep me humble,” Huckabee Sanders said, adding “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”

Though Harris does not have biological children, she has two stepchildren through her marriage to her husband, Doug Emhoff.

In response to Huckabee Sanders’s remarks on Tuesday, Kerstin Emhoff, who is the ex-wife of the second gentlemen, reposted the video of Huckabee Sanders on X, and added the caption: “Cole and Ella keep us inspired to make the world a better place. I do it through storytelling. Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families. That keeps you pretty humble.”

A new poll conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and released on Wednesday shows a tight race in the state of Georgia.

The results show that Donald Trump received 47% of the support among registered voters in Georgia, compared with 44% for Kamala Harris.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution also reported a Harris campaign official has said that the Democratic nominee will be traveling to Atlanta, Georgia on Friday in an appearance focusing on reproductive rights.

The Federal Reserve has announced it is cutting rates by a half point, bringing them down to between 4.75% and 5%.

This marks the first time in four years that the Fed has cut interest rates.

The Fed chair Jay Powell is expected to hold a press conference about the rate cut at 2.30pm ET.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont announced on Wednesday that he is preparing to file resolutions that would block the sale of offensive US weaponry to Israel. This comes as last month the Biden administration approved $20bn in arms sales to Israel.

Sanders said in a statement that after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing around 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 others, Israel “of course, had the right to defend itself against Hamas.”

“It did not, however, have the right to wage an all-out war against the Palestinian people, which is what prime minister Netanyahu’s extremist government has done” Sanders said.

Since October of last year, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s ongoing attacks in Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry.

Sanders continued:

Sadly, and illegally, much of the carnage in Gaza has been carried out with U.S.-provided military equipment. Providing more offensive weapons to continue this disastrous war would violate U.S. and international law.

The sales would reward Netanyahu’s extremist government, even as it continues to cause massive destruction in Gaza, undermine the prospects of a ceasefire deal that would secure the release of the hostages, and advance its effort to illegally annex the West Bank.

Congress must act to save lives, uphold U.S. and international law, and stand up for U.S. interests. We must end our complicity in Israel’s illegal and indiscriminate military campaign, which has caused mass civilian death and suffering.

A new poll released by Quinnipiac University shows Kamala Harris is leading Donald Trump in two key battleground states and just slightly ahead of Trump in Wisconsin, another battleground state.

In Pennsylvania, the poll states that 51% of likely voters said they supported Harris, compared with 45% for Trump, a six-point difference. In Michigan, Harris leads Trump by five points in this poll, and in Wisconsin Harris leads Trump by just one percentage point.

The new poll was published on Wednesday, just over a week after the 2024 presidential debate, and with less than 50 days to go until the election.

Kamala Harris has gained the endorsement of more than 100 Republican former national security officials and lawmakers, who say she is a better choice to manage foreign policy and America’s relationships with its allies and enemies than Donald Trump. But several new polls show voters aren’t quite so sure about the two candidates. Majorities of Americans view both candidates unfavorably, Gallup found, while in Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Trump has a narrow edge with voters in the swing state Joe Biden won four years ago. Harris just finished speaking at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual leadership conference in Washington DC, where she condemned Trump’s plans for mass deportations, and said better border security and sorting out the problem of Dreamers are not mutually exclusive.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• Harris’s weakness in Georgia may be due to lackluster support among both Democratic faithful and Black voters, the Journal-Constitution found.

• The House will vote today on a government funding bill that also cracks down on non-citizens casting ballots, but the legislation is not expected to pass.

• Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s Democratic leader, decried the GOP for blocking legislation to protect IVF access nationwide, and linked their opposition to Project 2025.

Harris just wrapped up her speech, but before she did, she made the case that restoring reproductive freedom was a concern of Hispanic voters.

“Today, 40% of Latinas in America live in a state with a Trump abortion ban,” the vice-president said.

She then described how difficult it could be for a pregnant woman to travel out-of-state to seek care:

So, imagine if she is a working woman – understand that the majority of women who seek abortion care are mothers, understand what that means for her. So, she’s got to now travel to another state. God help her that she has some extra money to pay for that plane ticket. She’s got to figure out what to do with her kids. God help her if she has affordable childcare. Imagine what that means. She has to leave her home to go to a airport, stand in a TSA line.

…

Go through the details. So, she’s got to stand in the TSA line to get on a plane, sitting next to a perfect stranger, going to a city where she’s never been to go and receive a medical procedure. She’s going to have to get right back to the airport, because she got to get back to those kids, and it’s not like her best friend can go with her, because the best friend is probably taking care of the kids, all because these people have decided they’re in a better position to tell her what’s in her best interest than she is to know.

Harris then argued that support for reproductive freedom does not necessarily clash with religious beliefs against abortion: “It’s just simply wrong, and I think we all know one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do if she chooses. If she chooses, she will talk with her priest, her pastor, her rabbi, her imam, but not the government telling her what to do.”

Kamala Harris has shifted to immigration, hitting out at Donald Trump for his promise to carry out mass deportations if elected, while insisting that border security and sorting out the status of undocumented people brought to the country as children are not mutually exclusive.

“While we fight to move our nation forward to a brighter future, Donald Trump and his extremist allies will keep trying to pull us backward,” Harris said. “We all remember what they did to tear families apart, and now they have pledged to carry out the largest deportation, a mass deportation, in American history. Imagine what that would look like and what that would be. How’s that going to happen? Massive raids, massive detention camps. What are they talking about?”

Harris also mentioned Dreamers, as undocumented people who grew up in the United States are known, and improving border security, which an increasing number of Democrats are demanding:

We must also reform our broken immigration system and protect our Dreamers. And, understand, we can do both – create an earned pathway to citizenship and ensure our border is secure. We can do both, and we must do both.

Harris began her remarks with a staple of her stump speeches: her background as a prosecutor in the Bay Area of northern California, which she said was informed by her mother’s quest to cure breast cancer.

Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a biomedical scientist, “had two goals in her life, to raise her two daughters, my sister, Maya and me, and to end breast cancer,” the vice-president said.

“She was a breast cancer researcher, and growing up, our mother taught us certain fundamental values, the importance of hard work, the power of community, and the responsibility that we have to not complain about anything, much less injustice, right? Because, why are you complaining about it? She would say, do something about it,” the vice-president said.

Harris continued:

Part of the background on why I became a prosecutor was actually when I was in high school, I learned that my best friend was being abused, being molested by her stepfather, and when I learned about it, I told her she had to come live with us. And I called my mother, and my mother said, of course she does, and she did.

And so I decided I wanted to start a career and do the work of … making sure that we protect the most vulnerable. And so I started my career as a courtroom prosecutor and took on those who would be predators against the most vulnerable.

Kamala Harris is now giving remarks at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual leadership conference in Washington DC.

She’s about 30 minutes late to starting the event.

This evening, Donald Trump will rally in New York’s Long Island, a state home to several House districts that will determine whether the GOP retains control of Congress’s lower chamber.

Earlier this morning, a social media account reported that police securing the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, where Trump will speak, had found an explosive device. But the county police department said on X that report is not correct, though it had detained for questioning one person “who may have been training a bomb detection dog near the site”.

We’re expecting Kamala Harris to soon deliver remarks at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual leadership conference in Washington DC.

She will undoubtedly mark Hispanic Heritage Month, which began on Sunday, and make the case for why Latino voters should support her in the November election.

We’ll let you know what the vice-president has to say.

Yesterday, Senate Democrats tried for the second time to pass legislation protecting access to IVF care nationwide, in reaction to an Alabama supreme court ruling earlier this year that temporarily cut off access to the procedure in the state.

But Republicans stood in the bill’s way, voting almost unanimously to keep it from clearing the 60-vote threshold needed for passage.

In remarks on the Senate floor today, the chamber’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said the GOP’s votes were a harbinger of what would come if Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint to remake the US government authored by conservatives connected to Donald Trump, was implemented. Pro-abortion groups fear the plan’s proposals to curb access to the procedure could also be used against IVF:

Yesterday was a sad day in the Senate as Republicans – for the second time this year – blocked legislation to protect families’ access to IVF.

By voting against IVF, Republicans confirmed many Americans’ worst fear: Project 2025 is alive and well when it comes to reproductive rights.

Senate Republicans have spent months tying themselves into knots claiming that of course they are in favor of protecting IVF.

But when it mattered most – when it came time to actually vote – Republicans showed their true colors and voted no.

And what made yesterday’s vote even worse was that was the second time they’ve blocked IVF protections, even though it’s increasingly clear many Americans are worried about access.

Both times, without hesitation, Senate Republicans caved to the extremists on their right flank.

Here’s more on the effort by Democrats to protect IVF access:

Over in the Senate, Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer continued to press House Republicans to approve spending legislation, known as a continuing resolution (CR) that has the support of both parties.

“For the last two weeks, Speaker Johnson and House Republican leaders have wasted precious time on a proposal that everyone knows can’t become law. His own Republican Conference cannot unite around his proposal. Today, the House is expected to vote on the speaker’s CR, and it is expected to fail,” Schumer said, in remarks on the Senate floor.

“I hope that once the Speaker’s CR fails he moves on to a strategy that will actually work: bipartisan cooperation. It’s the only thing that has kept the government open every time we have faced a funding deadline. It’s going to be the only thing that works this time too. Bipartisan, bicameral cooperation. That’s what works. That’s what we’re willing and happy to do. And the clock is ticking. If Republicans keep squabbling and careen us into a shutdown, the consequences will reverberate across the country.”

House Democrats are expected to vote against the government funding bill that is paired with legislation intended to keep non-citizens from voting.

Even if the legislation does pass, the White House said it “strongly opposes” the Save act, which requires people to prove citizenship when registering to vote.

But a perhaps more significant question is whether Republican House speaker Mike Johnson’s push even has the requisite support of his own party. Punchbowl News suggests it does not:

The House is set to vote today on a short-term funding bill that won’t pass. GOP lawmakers are grumbling about messaging, strategy and yearning to get back home to run for reelection. And Speaker Mike Johnson is being publicly and privately cagey about his next move, frustrating the entire House Republican Conference, which is looking for guidance about the leadership’s plans.

In fact, the GOP leadership is even in the dark at most times as to what Johnson is thinking and planning.

Johnson is putting a bill on the floor that his entire leadership team — Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Tom Emmer of Minnesota — knows is going to fail. One House Republican lawmaker entered a meeting of GOP whips Tuesday and told us that he was “going to see how well they’re polishing this turd.”

In theory, the impending failure of the six-month stopgap funding bill coupled with the SAVE Act will lead House Republicans toward accepting a clean CR. Johnson can then tell hardline conservatives that he has no other option.

“It’ll fail, then we’ll go back and do something that’s to the end of the year clean,” said Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), a senior House appropriator. “That’s just reality. We’ve been through this drill enough times to know that nobody’s come up with a silver bullet to put somebody in a chokehold ‘till they scream, ‘Uncle.’”