US politics

Georgia’s Republican-led legislature passes sweeping voting restrictions

Georgia lawmakers on Thursday gave final approval to legislation to impose sweeping new restrictions on voting access in the state that make it harder to vote by mail and give the state legislature more power over elections.

The measure was signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, on Thursday evening. “Significant reforms to our state elections were needed. There’s no doubt there were many alarming issues with how the election was handled, and those problems, understandably, led to a crisis of confidence,” Kemp said during prepared remarks shortly after signing the bill.

It requires voters to submit ID information with both an absentee ballot request and the ballot itself. It limits the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, allows for unlimited challenges to a voter’s qualifications, cuts the runoff election period from nine to four weeks, and significantly shortens the amount of time voters have to request an absentee ballot.

The legislation also empowers the state legislature, currently dominated by Republicans, to appoint a majority of members on the five-person state election board. That provision would strip Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who stood up to Trump after the election, from his current role as chairman of the board. The bill creates a mechanism for the board to strip local election boards of their power.

Gloria Butler, a Democratic state senator, said the bill would make it harder to vote, especially for poor and disabled people. “We are witnessing a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we’ve seen since the Jim Crow era,” she said just before the bill passed.

“This bill is absolutely about opportunities, but it isn’t about opportunities to vote. It is about the opportunity to keep control and keep power at any cost,” Jen Jordan, a Democratic state senator, said on Thursday.

Park Cannon, a Democratic state representative, was arrested on Thursday after knocking on the door of the governor’s office during a protests against the legislation’s signing. Video captured by a bystander shows Cannon, who is Black, handcuffed with her arms behind her back and being forcibly removed from the state Capitol by two officers, one on each arm. She says, “Where are you taking me?” and, “Stop” as she is taken from the building.

The legislation comes after Georgia saw record turnout in the November election and January US Senate runoffs, including surges among Black and other minority voters. It has become the center of national attention because many see it as a crystallization of a national push by Republicans to make it harder to vote. Alluding to a measure in the Georgia bill that bans providing food or water to people standing in line to vote, Joe Biden called that national effort “sick” during a Thursday press conference. “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” he said.

Facing opposition from top Republicans in the state, Republicans dropped a push to require voters to give an excuse to vote by mail. And amid national outcry, they backed away in recent weeks from proposals to prohibit early voting on Sundays, a day that Black voters have traditionally used in disproportionate numbers to cast ballots. The measure that passed on Thursday actually expands weekend early voting in the state, requiring an additional Saturday and authorizing counties to offer it on two Sundays if they choose.

Republicans seized on that provision in the bill on Thursday to claim that they were actually expanding voter access in Georgia. “The bill greatly expands the accessibility of voters in Georgia and greatly improves the process of administration of elections while at the same time providing more accountability to provide that the vote is properly preserved,” Barry Fleming, a GOP state representative who spearheaded the legislation, said on Thursday.

They offered little substantive justification for why the measure was necessary after an election in which there was record turnout, and in which multiple recounts in the presidential race found no evidence of fraud. Instead, they said the bill was necessary to preserve voter confidence.

The nearly 100-page measure was only formally unveiled last week, when it was abruptly inserted into another two-page bill. While the legislation includes several of the measures lawmakers debated, it included some new ideas that had not been fully debated. Democrats and voting activists have accused Republicans of trying to ram through a bill without fully vetting it.

Democrats and voting rights groups are expected to swiftly file a slew of lawsuits challenging the measure.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

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Biden holds first press conference and pledges 200m vaccine shots in 100 days

In his first press conference as president, Joe Biden announced he had doubled his administration’s vaccination goal to 200m shots during his first 100 days as president.

“I know it’s ambitious, twice our original goal, but no other country in the world has even come close to what we are doing,” Biden said of his new goal.

Biden’s decision to make the announcement at the beginning of his press conference represented a clear attempt to at least insulate one piece of news his administration hoped would not fall through the cracks at a briefing where a host of contentious issues were expected – particularly on immigration and the filibuster.

On immigration, Biden stressed that the situation at the southern border was not a crisis. The president recently appointed vice-president Kamala Harris as the point-person to try to tackle problems there.

An ABC News reporter, however, noted that one border facility was currently holding unaccompanied migrant children at 1,556% capacity. She asked Biden if he considered that to be acceptable.

“That’s a serious question, right? Is it acceptable to me? Come on,” Biden said. “That’s why we’re going to be moving 1,000 of those kids out quickly.”

The president expressed sympathy with parents who felt their best option was to send children on the treacherous journey to the US. And when a Univision reporter noted that Customs and Border Protection has not been notifying migrant children’s family members about their arrival to the US in a timely manner, Biden said it would take time to improve communications and processes in the immigration system.

But he also reiterated that his administration would not relax laws to increase the number of people coming in across the border, other than minors.

“They should all be going back. All be going back,” Biden said. “The only people we are not going to leave sitting there on the other side of the Rio Grande with no help are children.”

Biden was also asked multiple times about his position on the filibuster. He agreed with the critique of Democratic senators that it is a relic of the Jim Crow era of American history designed to defend slavery.

But rather than offering full-throated endorsement of ending the filibuster, he instead argued that there should only be a “talking filibuster”, where a senator could block legislation as long as they kept talking on the floor of the chamber.

“I strongly support moving in that direction,” Biden said.

Biden has increasingly had to take a go-it-alone approach to executing his agenda, despite efforts to win over Republican support. That has helped fuel pressure among rank-and-file lawmakers to try and gut the filibuster or create workarounds for Democratic legislation that faces staunch opposition from Republicans.

When Biden became president, he had hoped his longstanding relationship with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican in that chamber, would help create bipartisan support. But Biden shrugged off that opposition, nottng that he and McConnell know each other well.

He added: “I have electoral support from Republican voters. Republican voters agree with what I’m doing.”

The president also noted that despite the gains the country has experienced on the vaccine effort, the impact of the pandemic is still being felt. He reiterated a theme he and his closest aides have been trying to drill into Americans’ heads since Biden signed into law his American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

“There are still too many Americans out of work, too many families hurting,” Biden said. “But I can say to you, the American people, help is here and hope is on the way.”

Biden also said he was likely to run for re-election in 2024, which he had not previously addressed. Asked if Harris would be his running mate, the president said: “I fully expect that to be the case. She’s doing a great job.”

On the war in Afghanistan Biden did not offer a precise timetable for withdrawal but did say that he did not troops to be there by the end of next year.

“I can’t picture that being the case,” Biden said.

Mostly absent from the conference were questions about the coronavirus pandemic and the topic of gun control, after two mass shootings in the past two weeks. Biden promised to expand on his gun control actions in the coming weeks.

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Rachel Levine becomes first openly transgender official to win Senate confirmation

The US Senate on Wednesday confirmed the former Pennsylvania health secretary, Rachel Levine, to be the nation’s assistant secretary of health. She is the first openly transgender federal official to win Senate confirmation.

The final vote was 52-48. Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine joined all Democrats in supporting Levine.

Levine had been serving as Pennsylvania’s top health official since 2017, and emerged as the public face of the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. She is expected to oversee Health and Human Services offices and programs across the US.

President Joe Biden cited Levine’s experience when he nominated her in January.

Levine “will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic – no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability,” Biden said.

Transgender-rights activists have hailed Levine’s appointment as a historic breakthrough. Few trans people have ever held high-level offices at the federal or state level.

However, the confirmation vote came at a challenging moment for the transgender-rights movement as legislatures across the US – primarily those under Republican control – are considering an unprecedented wave of bills targeting trans young people.

One type of bill, introduced in at least 25 states, seeks to ban trans girls and young women from participating in female scholastic sports.

One such measure already has been signed into law by the Mississippi governor, Tate Reeves, and similar measures have been sent to the governors in Tennessee, Arkansas and South Dakota.

Another variety of bill, introduced in at least 17 states, seeks to outlaw or restrict certain types of medical care for transgender youths. None of these measures has yet won final approval.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, confronted Levine about medical treatments for transgender young people – include hormone treatment and puberty blockers – during her confirmation hearing on 25 February.

Paul asked: “Do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life-changing decision as changing one’s sex?”

Levine replied that transgender medicine “is a very complex and nuanced field with robust research and standards of care” and said she would welcome discussing the issues with him.

In the past, Levine has asserted that hormone therapy and puberty-blocking drugs can be valuable medical tools in sparing some transgender youth from mental distress and possible suicide risk.

A pediatrician and former Pennsylvania physician general, Levine was appointed as Pennsylvania’s health secretary by Democratic governor Tom Wolf in 2017. She won confirmation by the Republican-majority Pennsylvania Senate.

However, Senator Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, voted against Levine’s confirmation Wednesday.

“In Pennsylvania, the pandemic struck seniors in nursing homes disproportionately hard compared to other states,” Toomey said. “This was due in part to poor decisions and oversight by Dr Levine and the Wolf administration.”

He also said an extended lockdown advocated by Levine “was excessive, arbitrary in nature, and has led to a slower recovery”.

A graduate of Harvard and of Tulane Medical School, Levine is president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. She’s written in the past on the opioid crisis, medical marijuana, adolescent medicine, eating disorders and LGBTQ medicine.

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US gun-safety groups call for urgent action after Colorado shooting

After recording a year with the lowest level of public mass shootings in more than a decade, the US suffered its second such incident in less than a week on Monday night with a shooting at a Colorado grocery store that killed 10, including one police officer.

Gun safety advocates including former president Barack Obama called for immediate action by Congress to address the resurgent national epidemic as the country emerges from a year of lockdowns and social distancing sparked by the coronavirus pandemics.

In remarks at the White House, Joe Biden called for a new ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and said the Senate “should immediately pass” legislation to close loopholes in the background checks system for the purchase of guns.

The Republican minority in the Senate is highly likely to block any action on gun control. Nonetheless, senators on the Democratic side echoed Biden’s call to action.

“This is the moment to make our stand. NOW,” tweeted Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, where a shooter killed 26 people at an elementary school in 2012.

A male suspect was arrested at the scene, a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado. He was named on Tuesday, as were the 10 victims.

“This is a tragedy and a nightmare for Boulder county, and in response, we have cooperation and assistance from local, state and federal authorities,” said the Boulder county district attorney, Michael Dougherty.

The Colorado attack brought the week’s death toll from mass public shootings to 18, after a gunman killed eight people at three Atlanta-area spas last Tuesday. Six of those victims were women of Asian descent, and that attack produced a national demand for reckoning with discrimination and violence directed at Asian Americans.

While racist scapegoating by Donald Trump and others sparked thousands of attacks against Asian Americans during America’s pandemic year, 2020 was an unusually quiet one for mass public shootings, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.

There were 10 such shootings in 2018 and nine in 2019, according to the database, which tracks public incidents in which at least four people died, not including the shooter.

The US suffered only two such incidents in 2020 – both at the start of the year, before the spread of the coronavirus led to local economic and school shutdowns and related restrictions.

Gun sales surged during the pandemic, leading to fears of a return of mass gun violence after coronavirus restrictions eased. Those fears appear to have been fulfilled already.

“We have had a horrific year as a country, as a world,” Colorado’s state senate majority leader, Stephen Fenberg, a Democrat, told MSNBC. “It had finally started to feel like things are getting back to ‘normal’. And, unfortunately, we are reminded that that includes mass shootings.”

The police officer killed in the Colorado store attack, Eric Talley, 51, the father of seven children, was the first to respond to reports of shots fired at the store, authorities said.

The attack came just days after a judge blocked Boulder from enforcing a two-year-old ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines in the city.

“The court has determined that only Colorado state (or federal) law can prohibit the possession, sale and transfer of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines,” wrote the county judge, Andrew Hartman, according to the Denver Post.

While no state is untouched by mass shootings, Colorado has had an especially difficult history of such incidents, beginning with an attack on students at a high school in Columbine in 1999 that killed 13. In Aurora in 2012, a gunman fired at a crowd watching a Batman movie, killing 12 and wounding 58.

As previously scheduled, the Senate judiciary committee held a hearing Tuesday on “constitutional and common sense steps to reduce gun violence”. Gun safety legislation has failed to gain traction in Congress despite wide public agreement about certain safeguards such as universal background checks.

“To save lives and end these senseless killings, we need more than thoughts and prayers – we need federal action on gun safety from the Senate, and we need it now,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “That work begins with this hearing, and we cannot rest until we pass background checks into law.”

Murphy, who does not sit on that committee but who mounted a nearly 15-hour filibuster on the Senate floor in 2016 to advance gun safety legislation after 49 people died in a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Florida, called on colleagues to finally address gun violence.

Murphy invoked Monday’s shooting in Boulder, a mass shooting at a Florida high school in 2018 that killed 17 and the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

“No more Newtowns. No more Parklands. No more Boulders,” he tweeted. “Now – we make our stand.”

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Texas ramps up efforts to derail progressive policies

Texas has branded itself as an aggressive and litigious arm of the Republican party for years – a rightwing David up against the Democratic Goliath.

So, when Democrat Joe Biden took over the Oval Office in January, the state’s conservative leaders were already raring for a knock-down, drag-out brawl.

“I promise my fellow Texans and Americans that I will fight against the many unconstitutional and illegal actions that the new administration will take, challenge federal overreach that infringes on Texans’ rights, and serve as a major check against the administration’s lawlessness,” the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, tweeted on Biden’s inauguration day.

Just two days later, Texas filed the first major lawsuit against Biden’s administration, successfully blocking a 100-day deportation moratorium that the governor, Greg Abbott, chided as an “attempt to grant blanket amnesty” to immigrants.

Far from a one-off burst of hostility, that incendiary case marked a return to Texas politicians’ tried and true playbook of weaponizing the courts to derail progressive policies, a tactic that’s proven surprisingly potent amid ideological warfare with the feds.

“They’ve been successful at, like, causing uncertainty,” said Katie Keith, associate research professor for the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. “And making a mess of things that I think other folks feel are otherwise settled.”

The state’s leadership leaned heavily on the judiciary under Barack Obama’s administration, which they sued at least 48 times, the Texas Tribune reported, tackling issues as disparate and all-encompassing as immigration, environmental regulations and voting rights.

Then, in the aftermath of last year’s presidential election, Paxton went so far as to challenge 20m votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in a far-fetched attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat. And right now, Texas is spearheading yet another existential threat to the Affordable Care Act in the supreme court, even as Biden urges the justices to preserve Obama’s signature healthcare law.

Because of the high stakes, these cases often capture national attention, and Texas’s ambitious current and former attorneys general have shown a willingness to trade resources and time for newspaper quotes and TV interviews. The court battles give key players such as Paxton a platform “to demonstrate that they are fighters and they’re looking out for their voters”, said Keith E Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University.

“These kinds of lawsuits have become very high-profile events” and allow those involved to “grandstand and send a political message to constituents about all the hard work you’re doing to oppose the administration that they don’t like”, Whittington said.

Texas’s judicial activism is part of a larger partisan gambit that’s been going on for years. Politicians undo or delay federal policies they find unfavorable or overreaching, while strategically framing the narrative in the press.

“They are good opportunities to really try to influence the messaging about how particular policies or particular laws are understood, and what the potential problems with them are,” Whittington said.

Both Republicans and Democrats play the game: when Trump occupied the Oval Office, blue strongholds such as California raced to the courts as a first line of defense from federal decisions that jeopardized their more liberal agendas. Now that Biden is the commander-in-chief, Republicans are naturally starting to do the same, with Texas apparently leading the charge.

“If the goal is to win, then certainly that affects the kind of cases you bring forward, what kinds of legal arguments you can make, how carefully you have to prepare for them,” Whittington said.

“If the goal instead is to get media attention and score political points – and excite voters and donors – you don’t necessarily need to win. You just need to be able to highlight the issue and get public attention. And sometimes you can get that with pretty bad legal arguments.”

Texas has garnered a reputation for its casual relationship to sound legal judgment, with cases ranging from potentially successful to downright bogus. When, for example, Paxton tried to overturn the 2020 election results in the supreme court, a legion of lawyers and former elected officials banded together to decry his “unprecedented argument” that made “a mockery of federalism and separation of powers”.

“The case … was clearly without merit, and it is difficult to understand why anybody in the attorney general’s office would have thought otherwise,” said Lisa Marshall Manheim, an associate professor at the University of Washington School of Law.

Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor, similarly derided the state’s challenge to the ACA, calling it “galactically stupid” in an interview with the Texas Tribune.

But instead of giving Texas and others a slap on the wrist, federal courts have almost encouraged them by issuing nationwide injunctions that hamstring entire policies as long as cases stay tied up. That stalling strategy can sometimes hand state governments a de facto victory, even if they eventually lose.

“There’s a world in which all these specious arguments, everything else, could really be discouraged by the courts,” Keith said. That’s definitely not happening in Texas, where she described the bench as “extraordinarily conservative and ideological”, allowing “these lawsuits to go further than most of us think they should”.

It’s one thing to “forum shop”, seeking out courts that could be more amenable to your case. Paxton, however, can seemingly “judge shop”. Between 2015 and 2018, almost half of Texas’s suits against the federal government in district courts ended up in Judge Reed O’Connor’ courtroom, the Texas Tribune reported. A conservative favorite aligned with the Texas Republican senator John Cornyn, O’Connor has handed the state victory after victory – including striking down the ACA.

“The law is still standing, but it’s been bruised and battered, right?” Keith said. So “why wouldn’t they sort of use a similar playbook for other issues?”

Because of the implications nationwide, millions of Americans are watching these lawsuits play out – not to witness a bitter contest between two parties, but to anxiously await a referendum on their futures.

“They’re people’s real rights and real livelihoods and just real lived realities that are sort of hanging in the balance,” Keith said. “It’s sort of frustrating to watch these cycles go in and out, because you know that they do affect real people.”

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Trump backs challenge to Georgia official who refused to overturn election

Donald Trump advanced his quest on Monday to purge elected Republicans who refused to go along with his attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election, announcing an endorsement in Georgia in an effort to unseat a key election official.

The secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, infuriated Trump last year by refusing a point-blank request to fake the presidential election result in Georgia.

Jody Hice, a Republican member of Congress who supported Trump’s effort to overturn Joe Biden’s win, announced on Monday he would challenge Raffensperger in a summer 2022 primary. Trump endorsed Hice immediately.

“Unlike the current Georgia secretary of state, Jody leads out front with integrity,” Trump said in a statement that repeated his false claims of election fraud and declared his “complete and total endorsement” of Hice.

Two months out of office, Trump has begun an effort to flex his influence with core Republican voters who will decide the party’s nominations in thousands of races across the country next year.

Trump boasted of the effort in an appearance on a podcast hosted by a Fox News contributor, The Truth with Lisa Boothe.

“The fact that I give somebody an endorsement has meant the difference between a victory and a massive defeat,” he said. “They’re all going to win and they’re going to win big.”

Trump has shown a high success rate with endorsements in Republican primaries. He has repeatedly endorsed losing candidates in general election contests, however – including both Georgia US Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who were beaten by Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in January, tipping the Senate to Democratic control.

Some Republicans fear Trump’s intervention in primary elections could produce extreme nominees who might be relatively weak in general election contests.

Other Republicans high on Trump’s hitlist include the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, and Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, the only Republican senator up for re-election in 2022 to vote to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial.

Raffensperger is the most prominent elected official to be targeted by Trump so far with an endorsement of a challenger. In a phone call after the election, Trump told Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” so he could win the state, which no Republican presidential candidate had lost in three decades.

“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump told Raffensperger in a call Raffensperger recorded. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”

In an interview with the Guardian about his decision to defend the election result, Raffensperger said he voted for Trump but would not help him steal the election.

“I’m a conservative Republican. Yes, I wanted President Trump to win,” he said. “But as secretary of state we have to do our job. I’m gonna walk that fine, straight, line with integrity. I think that integrity still matters.”

Since being banned from his longtime social media megaphone, Twitter, for spreading election lies, Trump has tried new methods for getting messages out, in the form of statements e-blasted to reporters – and now, podcast appearances.

Trump told Boothe the new format was better than Twitter.

“We’re sending out releases, they’re getting picked up much better than any tweet,” he said. “When I put out a statement, it’s much more elegant than a tweet, and I think it gets picked up better.”

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Trump will use ‘his own platform’ to return to social media after Twitter ban

Donald Trump will soon use “his own platform” to return to social media, an adviser said on Sunday, months after the former president was banned from Twitter for inciting the US Capitol riot.

Trump has chafed in relative silence at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida since losing his Twitter account and the protections and powers of office. Recently he has released short statements which many have likened to his tweets of old.

Speculation has been rife that Trump might seek to create his own TV network in an attempt to prise viewers from Fox News, which was first to call the crucial state of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night, to Trump’s considerable anger.

But on Sunday adviser Jason Miller said social media was the immediate target.

“The president’s been off of social media for a while,” he told Fox News Media Buzz host Howard Kurtz, “[but] his press releases, his statements have actually been getting almost more play than he ever did on Twitter before.”

Miller said he had been told by a reporter the statements were “much more elegant” and “more presidential” than Trump’s tweets, but added: “I do think that we’re going to see President Trump returning to social media in probably about two or three months here with his own platform.

“And this is something that I think will be the hottest ticket in social media, it’s going to completely redefine the game, and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what exactly President Trump does. But it will be his own platform.”

Asked if Trump was going to create the platform himself or with a company, Miller said: “I can’t go much further than what I was able to just share, but I can say that it will be big once he starts.

“There have been a lot of high-power meetings he’s been having at Mar-a-Lago with some teams of folks who have been coming in, and … it’s not just one company that’s approached the president, there have been numerous companies.

“But I think the president does know what direction he wants to head here and this new platform is going to be big and everyone wants him, he’s gonna bring millions and millions, tens of millions of people to this new platform.”

Trump, his supporters and prominent conservatives alleged bias from social media companies even before the events of 6 January, when five people including a police officer died as a mob stormed the Capitol, seeking at Trump’s urging to overturn his election defeat.

In the aftermath of the attack, Trump was also suspended from Facebook and Instagram. Rightwing platforms including Gab and Parler have come under intense scrutiny amid investigations of the Capitol putsch.

Trump was impeached for inciting the attack but acquitted when only seven Republican senators voted to convict.

He therefore remains free to run for office and has dominated polls regarding prospective Republican nominees in 2024, raising impressive sums in political donations even while his business fortunes suffer amid numerous legal threats.

Miller emphasised the hold Trump retains on his party.

“He’s already had over 20 senators over 50 members of Congress either call or make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to ask for [his] endorsement,” he said.

With the sort of performative hyperbole Trump aides often display for their watching boss, Miller claimed endorsements from the former president were “the most important in world history. There’s never ever been this type of endorsement that’s carried this much weight.”

Saying the media should “pay attention to Georgia on Monday”, Miller said an endorsement there would “really shake things up in the political landscape”.

Trump faces an investigation in Georgia over a call to a Republican official in which he sought to overturn defeat by Joe Biden. In January, Democrats won both Georgia seats in the US Senate.

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Mayorkas blames Trump for border woes as Republicans attack Biden

The Biden administration is facing mounting pressure over a surge of unaccompanied migrant children crossing into the US, with the numbers seeking asylum at a 20-year high that is placing federal facilities and shelters under immense strain.

The homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, took to the political talk show circuit on Sunday to press the administration’s case that it is doing all it can. He continued to refer to the problem as a “challenge” not a “crisis”, attempting to put blame squarely on the previous incumbent of the White House, Donald Trump.

“It is taking time and it is difficult because the entire system was dismantled by the prior administration,” Mayorkas told CNN’s State of the Union. “There was a system in place that was torn down by the Trump administration.”

On ABC’s This Week, Mayorkas highlighted the tougher aspects of Joe Biden’s border policy, stressing that the administration was still expelling families and single adults under a regulation known as Title 42. He insisted largely Central American migrants arriving in increasing numbers were being given a clear message: “Do not come. The border is closed. The border is secure.”

But prominent Republicans have seized on the border difficulties as an opportunity to attack Biden for being soft on immigration.

Donald Trump said Mayorkas was “clueless” and called on him to complete the border wall.

first acts as president, Biden scrapped Trump’s hardline policy of sending unaccompanied children seeking asylum back to Mexico.

Under Biden’s guidelines, unaccompanied minors were exempted from the Title 42 rules and shielded from expulsion. That was deemed in line with the president’s pledge to achieve a “fair, safe and orderly” immigration system.

On Sunday, Mayorkas said the new approach addressed the humanitarian needs of migrant children “in a way that reflects our values and principles as a country”. But in the past few weeks, the numbers of minors seeking asylum has grown so rapidly that it has outpaced capacity to process the children in line with immigration laws.

72 hours allowed under immigration law.

There have been reports of overcrowding and harsh conditions in federal facilities in Texas. The Associated Press reported that some children were said by immigration lawyers to be sleeping on the floor after bedding ran out.

The government has tried to move as many children as possible into shelters run by the US Refugee Office, but they in turn have become stressed. There are now more than 9,500 children in shelters and short-term housing along the border. Non-governmental groups working with migrants and refugees have been forced to scramble to deal with the sudden demand for shelter.

As the administration struggles to keep a grip on events, it is also coming under criticism from Republicans and media outlets for refusing to allow reporters inside the beleaguered CBP facilities where children are being held. On Friday, Mayorkas visited El Paso in Texas with a bipartisan congressional delegation. Reporters were not allowed to follow them.

US Customs and Border Protection agents take people into custody near the Mexico border in Hidalgo, Texas. — US Customs and Border Protection agents take people into custody near the Mexico border in Hidalgo, Texas, on Saturday. Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP

The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, called the move “outrageous and unacceptable”. In a tweet, he said: “No press. No cameras. What is Biden hiding?”

Quizzed by Fox News Sunday about the apparent lack of accountability, despite Biden’s promise to bring “trust and transparency” back to public affairs, Mayorkas said the administration was “working on providing access” to border patrol stations.

But he added: “First things first – we are focused on operations and executing our plans.”

While the political heat is rising at the border, moves are under way in Washington to try and find a longer-term fix to the age-old immigration conundrum. Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that would give “Dreamers”, undocumented migrants brought to the US as children, a pathway to citizenship.

The legislation has an uncertain future in the Senate, given its 50-50 split and the need to reach 60 votes to pass most major legislation.

Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois who has introduced a similar Dream Act to the Senate five times in the past 20 years, told CNN that he thought he was close to securing the necessary 60 votes. He also decried the current debate about whether there was a “crisis” or “challenge” at the border.

“We need to address our immigration laws in this country that are broken,” he said. “What you see at the border is one piece of evidence of that, but there’s much more.”

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‘We all know hate when we see it’: Warnock rejects FBI chief’s view of Atlanta shootings

Law enforcement officials including the director of the FBI have said the shootings in Atlanta in which eight people were killed do not appear to have been racially motivated, but the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock said on Sunday: “We all know hate when we see it.”

Six women of Asian descent, another woman and a man were killed on Tuesday, in a shootings at spas in the Atlanta area.

Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man, was charged with the murders. He told police his actions were not racially motivated, and claimed to have a sex addiction.

Speaking to NPR on Thursday, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, said: “While the motive remains still under investigation at the moment, it does not appear that the motive was racially motivated.”

But such conclusions are rejected by protesters who see a link to rising attacks on Asian Americans in light of the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China, and racially charged rhetoric from former president Donald Trump and others.

Warnock, a Democrat, took office in January as the first African American elected to the US Senate from Georgia. On Saturday he and his fellow Democratic senator Jon Ossoff spoke to protesters near the state capitol in Atlanta.

“I just wanted to drop by to say to my Asian sisters and brothers, ‘We see you, and, more importantly, we are going to stand with you,’” Warnock said, to cheers.

On Sunday, he told NBC’s Meet the Press: “I think it’s important that we centre the humanity of the victims. I’m hearing a lot about the shooter, but these precious lives that have been lost, they are attached to families. They’re connected to people who love them. And so, we need to keep that in mind.

“Law enforcement will go through the work that they need to do, but we all know hate when we see it. And it is tragic that we’ve been visited with this kind of violence yet again.”

Warnock also cited a Georgia hate crimes law passed amid outrage over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a young African American man, and which prosecutors may decide to use against Young.

“I’ve long pushed for hate crimes laws here in the state of Georgia,” Warnock said. “It took entirely too long to get one on the books here. But thankfully, we do have that law on the books right now.”

Calling for “reasonable gun reform”, Warnock also linked official responses to the Atlanta shootings to efforts by Republicans to restrict voting among minority groups.

“This shooter was able to kill all of these folks the same day he purchased a firearm,” Warnock said. “But right now, what is our legislature doing? They’re busy under the gold dome here in Georgia, trying to prevent people from being able to vote the same day they register.

“I think that suggests a distortion in values. When you can buy a gun and create this much carnage and violence on the same day, but if you want to exercise your right to vote as an American citizen, the same legislature that should be focused on this is busy erecting barriers to that constitutional right.”

Young bought a 9mm handgun at Big Woods Goods. Matt Kilgo, a lawyer for the store, told the Associated Press it complies with federal background check laws and is cooperating with police, with “no indication there’s anything improper”.

Democrats and campaigners for gun law reform said a mandatory waiting period might have stopped Young acting on impulse.

“It’s really quick,” Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told the AP. “You walk in, fill out the paperwork, get your background check and walk out with a gun. If you’re in a state of crisis, personal crisis, you can do a lot of harm fairly quickly.”

According to the Giffords Center, studies suggest purchase waiting periods may bring down firearm suicides by up to 11% and homicides by about 17%.

David Wilkerson, the minority whip in the Georgia state House, said Democrats planned to introduce legislation that would require a five-day period between buying a gun and getting it.

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US to house some migrant families in hotels in shift by Biden administration

Some migrant families arriving in the US will be housed in hotels under a new program managed by nonprofit organizations, according to two people familiar with the plans, a move away from for-profit detention centers criticized by Democrats and health experts.

Endeavors, a San Antonio-based organization, will oversee what it calls “family reception sites” at hotels in Texas and Arizona, the sources said. The organization, in partnership with other nonprofits, will initially provide up to 1,400 beds in seven different brand-name hotels for families deemed vulnerable.

The opening of the reception centers would mark a significant shift by the administration of Joe Biden. In January, Biden issued an order directing the justice department not to renew its contracts with privately operated criminal detention facilities. However, the order did not address immigration jails run by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).

Roughly 1,200 migrants were being held in two family detention centers in Texas as of Wednesday, according to an Ice spokeswoman. A third center in Pennsylvania is no longer being used to hold families. The spokeswoman did not comment on the plan to house families in hotels.

The number of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border has climbed as Biden has rolled back some of the hardline policies of former president Donald Trump. Biden, who took office on 20 January, has faced criticism from Republicans. Some Democrats opposed re-opening a Trump-era emergency shelter for children.

The hotel sites, set to open in April, will offer Covid-19 testing, medical care, food services, social workers and case managers to help with travel and onward destinations, according to the two sources, who requested anonymity to discuss the matter. Staff will be trained to work with children.

It remained unclear whether migrants would be required to wear ankle bracelets or be subject to any other form of monitoring, the people said.

The families will arrive at border patrol stations and then be sent to the hotel sites to continue immigration paperwork, the two sources said. They could leave the reception centers as soon as six hours after arrival if paperwork is completed, they test negative for Covid-19 and transportation has been arranged.

Biden officials have said migrant families will be “expelled” to Mexico or their home countries under a Trump-era health order known as Title 42. But more than half of the 19,000 family members caught at the border in February were not expelled, with many released into the US.

The housing of some migrants in hotels was reported by Axios earlier on Saturday.

Endeavors will also operate a new 2,000-bed shelter for unaccompanied children in Texas, the sources said.

The Biden administration has struggled to house a rising number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the US-Mexico border. More than 500 children were stuck in crowded border stations for more than 10 days as of Thursday.

The new family and child facilities are expected to ramp up bed capacity gradually, the people familiar with the effort said.

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