DEARBORN, Michigan: Widespread anger among Arab Americans and Muslims over US support for Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon could cost Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, the election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein told Reuters on Sunday.
Polls show Stein garnering just 1 percent in the Nov. 5 election, while Harris and her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, are almost tied with 49 percent and 48 percent.
But Stein has seen growing support among Arab Americans and Muslims in battleground states like Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin where they have large populations that helped propel President Joe Biden to victory in the 2020 election.
“The Democrats have lost the Muslim American and the Arab American vote,” Stein told Reuters after a rally attended by about 100 people in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn.
“They’re going to be losing enough swing states that they will not win and they cannot win.”
A Cook Political Report poll conducted from Sept. 19-25 showed Harris leading or tied with Trump in nearly all seven states that could decide the election — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina.
But Stein, who has been campaigning on a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an immediate US arms embargo on Israel, won 40 percent of the Muslim vote in Michigan in an August poll by the Council on American Islamic Relations, that also put her ahead of Harris and Trump among Muslims in Arizona and Wisconsin.
Democrats could win back those voters if they demanded and work to enact an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon, and also halted arms sales to Israel, but there was no sign of such action, she said.
The Biden administration, along with several US allies like France, has called for an immediate 21-day ceasefire across the Israel-Lebanon border and has long expressed support for a ceasefire in Gaza, but agreements have been elusive.
Asked about her potential function as a “spoiler,” Stein said another Trump presidency would be “terrible” but so would four more years of Democratic rule, given high rental costs, the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and attacks on civil liberties.
“This is a very dire situation that will be continued under both Democrats and Republicans. So we say there is no lesser evil in this race,” she said.
Harris has increased her outreach in recent days, meeting with a small group of Arab American and Muslim leaders in Flint, Michigan, on Friday, and dispatching her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, to take part in a Muslim Zoom call.
Farah Khan, co-chair of the Abandon Harris campaign in Michigan, said she would vote for a third-party candidate. “We are trying to ... punish Harris,” she said. “We may not be in a large (enough) number to put somebody in office, but we are definitely in the numbers to take somebody out of the office.”
Trump is also wooing Arab and Muslim voters and his campaign opened an office on Saturday in Hamtramck, a Detroit suburb whose Yemeni-American mayor Amer Ghalib has endorsed Trump.
Stein said Harris was also losing support among some union workers, Black men and Latinos, many of whom had drifted away from their traditional support for the Democratic party.
“Working people feel abandoned and betrayed by the Democratic Party,” she said. “It’s not like the Republicans are making things good for working people, but because the Democrats make promises and betray them, they seem to be punished by their traditional base,” she said. “That train has left the station.”
Green Party candidate Jill Stein sees ‘no lesser evil’ between Harris, Trump
https://arab.news/g8vnc
Green Party candidate Jill Stein sees ‘no lesser evil’ between Harris, Trump
- Stein says Democrats losing Arab-Muslim vote in battleground states
- Stein warns support for Israel may cost Harris election
Federal judge issues order to prohibit immigration officials from detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia
- His lawyers had sent an urgent request to the judge, warning that ICE officials could immediately place him back into custody
- Instead, Abrego Garcia exited the building after a short appointment, emerging to cheers from supporters who had gathered outside
BALTIMORE, USA: A federal judge blocked US immigration authorities on Friday from re-detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia, saying she feared they might take him into custody again just hours after she had ordered his release from a detention center.
The order came as Abrego Garcia appeared at a scheduled appointment at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office roughly 14 hours after he walked out of immigration detention facility in Pennsylvania.
His lawyers had sent an urgent request to the judge, warning that ICE officials could immediately place him back into custody. Instead, Abrego Garcia exited the building after a short appointment, emerging to cheers from supporters who had gathered outside.
Speaking briefly to the crowd, he urged others to “stand tall” against what he described as injustices carried out by the government.
Abrego Garcia became a flashpoint of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown earlier this year when he was wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. He was last taken into custody in August during a similar check-in.
Officials cannot re-detain him until the court conducts a hearing on the motion for the temporary restraining order, US District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland said. She wrote that Abrego Garcia is likely to succeed on the merits of any further request for relief from ICE detention.
“For the public to have any faith in the orderly administration of justice, the Court’s narrowly crafted remedy cannot be so quickly and easily upended without further briefing and consideration,” she wrote.
Abrego Garcia on Friday stopped at a news conference outside the building, escorted by a group of supporters chanting “We are all Kilmar!”
Abrego Garcia says he has ‘so much hope’
“I stand before you a free man and I want you to remember me this way, with my head held up high,” Abrego Garcia said through a translator. “I come here today with so much hope and I thank God who has been with me since the start with my family.”
He urged people to keep fighting.
After Abrego Garcia spoke, he went through security at the field office, escorted by supporters.
When Abrego Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, announced to the crowd assembled outside that his client would walk back out the field office’s doors again, he stressed that the legal fight was not over.
“Yesterday’s order from Judge Xinis and now the temporary restraining order this morning represent a victory of law over power,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
The agency freed him just before 5 p.m. on Thursday in response to a ruling from Xinis, who wrote federal authorities detained him after his return to the United States without any legal basis.
Mistakenly deported and then returned
Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran citizen with an American wife and child who has lived in Maryland for years. He immigrated to the US illegally as a teenager to join his brother, who had become a US citizen. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from being deported back to his home country, where he faces danger from a gang that targeted his family.
While he was allowed to live and work in the US under ICE supervision, he was not given residency status. Earlier this year, he was mistakenly deported and held in a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison despite having no criminal record.
Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, President Donald Trump’s Republican administration brought him back to the US in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges and asked a federal judge there to dismiss them.
A lawsuit to block removal from the US
The 2019 settlement found he had a “well founded fear” of danger in El Salvador if he was deported there. So instead ICE has been seeking to deport him to a series of African countries. Abrego Garcia has sued, claiming the Trump administration is illegally using the removal process to punish him for the public embarrassment caused by his deportation.
In her order releasing Abrego Garcia, Xinis wrote that federal authorities “did not just stonewall” the court, “They affirmatively misled the tribunal.” Xinis also rejected the government’s argument that she lacked jurisdiction to intervene on a final removal order for Abrego Garcia, because she found no final order had been filed.
ICE freed Abrego Garcia from Moshannon Valley Processing Center, about 115 miles (185 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, on Thursday just before the deadline Xinis gave the government to provide an update on Abrego Garcia’s release.
He returned home to Maryland a few hours later.
Immigration check-in
Check-ins are how ICE keeps track of some people who are released by the government to pursue asylum or other immigration cases as they make their way through a backlogged court system. The appointments were once routine but many people have been detained at their check-ins since the start of Trump’s second term.
The Department of Homeland Security sharply criticized Xinis’ order and vowed to appeal, calling the ruling “naked judicial activism” by a judge appointed during the Obama administration.
“This order lacks any valid legal basis, and we will continue to fight this tooth and nail in the courts,” said Tricia McLaughlin, the department’s assistant secretary.
Sandoval-Moshenberg said the judge made it clear that the government can’t detain someone indefinitely without legal authority.
Abrego Garcia has also applied for asylum in the US in immigration court.
Charges in Tennessee
Abrego Garcia was hit with human smuggling and conspiracy to commit human smuggling charges when the US government brought him back from El Salvador. Prosecutors alleged he accepted money to transport within the United States people who were in the country illegally.
The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee for speeding. Body camera footage from a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer shows a calm exchange with Abrego Garcia. There were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling. However, Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning.
A Department of Homeland Security agent testified at an earlier hearing that he did not begin investigating the traffic stop until after the US Supreme Court said in April that the Trump administration must work to bring back Abrego Garcia.
