Their parents are fired feds. They want senators to listen to them.
There was the 12-year-old who had offered to sell his Pokémon cards to help the family budget. And his 8-year-old sister who said she could do without birthday presents. Their mom lost her job at the Administration for Children and Families and, for months, had been coming to Capitol Hill to try to get lawmakers to listen. Last Tuesday, they joined her.
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Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Once targeted over Trump shoutout in 2016, Gregory Cheadle plans Redding return
Five years after making his fifth California Congressional District 1 election bid, a Redding politician and real estate broker plans to return to Shasta County in a few months, doctorate in hand. Gregory Cheadle said he's still devoted to public service — the impetus behind him going back to school — and is using those failed election runs to foster personal growth. "I didn't earn a PhD to sit in an ivory tower somewhere," said Cheadle, 68, who graduated in June from Loma Linda University with a doctorate in social welfare. 'My time away (from Redding) wasn't an escape … it was preparation" for public service. Cheadle went from long-shot Republican politician to a national pariah after President Donald Trump singled him out as one of his supporters during a 2016 campaign stop. That notoriety that followed and six lost elections hasn't dampened Cheadle's optimism or appreciation for the Redding community. His home is here, he said, and he wants to return. 'Sometimes it takes leaving and returning ... to truly appreciate where you're meant to be." Note to readers: If you appreciate the work we do here at the Redding Record Searchlight, please consider subscribing yourself or giving the gift of a subscription to someone you know. He said he's not sure if he wants to run for local office again or serve his community some other way when he arrives home in Redding, likely around the holidays: "I just have to find out where I fit." That said, he does think Shasta County's political arena could use an overhaul. "The county's grassroots leaders fight culture wars, and dispute election denial and conspiracy theories instead of economic development and infrastructure," Cheadle said. Events that shaped Cheadle's life Cheadle's credits two childhood experiences for his passion for public service and his ability to bounce back from defeat. Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1956, Cheadle spent his early years in Oakland with his mother. When he was 8, his father took him from his mother and back to Cleveland, 'a traumatic experience that taught me early about resilience,' Cheadle said. It was a pivotal time for the nation and for Cheadle. He recalled during his childhood seeing military tanks rumbling through the streets during political unrest that marked the 1960s. He clearly remembers meeting the man whose election helped deescalate the violence. It was Cleveland's first Black mayor, Carl Stokes. 'He came walking down the street. He shook my hand. I was on cloud nine," Cheadle said. Cheadle said meeting Stokes taught him celebrities were real people making a difference in their communities and that he could make a difference, too. After graduating from high school in 1975, Cheadle spent the next decade earning his bachelor's and master's degrees at Cal State Hayward. He also received his real estate license, but soon discovered no broker would hire a Black person to sell real estate in the mostly white suburbs of Contra Costa County, he said. By then married and helping support a family, Cheadle drew on his learned resilience. Real estate agents had to work under a broker, so Cheadle got his broker's license in 1988 and became his own boss, he said. After more than a decade selling real estate, the father of three moved his family to Redding in 2000 to give them a better quality of life than he could afford in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was in Redding he discovered his "calling in public service," he said. At first he planned to go into criminal defense. He earned his law degree in 2012 at Cal Northern in Chico, but was one of the 70% of aspiring lawyers who didn't pass the California bar, he said. So Cheadle pivoted to public service through politics. He first threw his hat in the North State's District 1 Congressional ring in 2012, repeating the bid in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020 — each time attempting to challenge GOP incumbent Doug LaMalfa. Through 2018, he said he was running as 'an 1856 Republican," the party of Abraham Lincoln, but even in the conservative district he never made it past the primaries against the heavily favored LaMalfa. Cheadle faces backlash after Trump shoutout Bent on making a difference in a county where 80% of the population identified as white and less than 1% as Black, Cheadle said he resolved not to let other people's attitudes about race be his problem. That became impossible when on June 3, 2016, Cheadle — then on his third congressional bid — went to hear then-presidential candidate Donald Trump speak at Redding Regional Airport. When Trump mentioned an 'African American guy who was a fan of mine,' Cheadle told the Record Searchlight, he was just having a bit of fun when he tried to get Trump's attention. 'Look at my African American over here. Look at him. Are you the greatest? You know what I'm talking about? OK,' Trump said in Cheadle's direction. Cheadle appeared on national news saying he couldn't find offense in someone calling him "the greatest," but others did. He stopped campaigning and retreated to his home to ride out a wave of angry phone calls and Facebook messages. By then divorced, the backlash cost him friends and made him feel unsafe going out, he said. The only time Cheadle said he voted for Trump was in the 2016 general election. Cheadle reemerged in 2018 to run for Congress as a Republican, but by 2020 he'd redefined himself as a political Independent. Leaving the Republican Party wasn't waffling, it was "the result of following my conscience," he said. "I watched Republicans weaponize patriotism against a Black man (Colin Kaepernick) peacefully protesting police brutality." Cheadle came under fire again after he defended Kaepernick's decision to kneel, this time from Republicans. 'The venom directed at me was a revelation," he said. "This wasn't the party of Lincoln (who) died alongside enslaved people." But Cheadle faced a conundrum. Running as a Republican gave him an audience unwilling to support racial justice, he said, while running as an Independent meant he kept his principles, but few supporters. So, he reinvented himself again. While a doctoral student at Loma Linda, Cheadle ran for Congressional District 43 in 2024, this time as a Democrat against Democratic incumbent Maxine Waters of Southern California. While Waters won handily, Cheadle placed a distant fifth out of the five candidates in the primary, but said he again learned from the experience. While not a perfect fit, the Democratic Party shares his views on racial equality, while Republicans are caught in a double standard. For example, the GOP considers Black unemployment numbers that are double white unemployment numbers to be the norm, Cheadle said: 'If those numbers were reversed, they'd declare a national emergency." When he gets back to Redding around Christmas, Cheadle — who penned the pro-vegan book 'Milk Madness,' published in 2022 — plans to finish writing three other books he has in the works, he said. One is about the 2016 Trump rally in Redding and the fallout afterward. Jessica Skropanic is a features reporter for the Record Searchlight/USA Today Network. She covers science, arts, social issues and news stories. Follow her on Twitter @RS_JSkropanic and on Facebook. Join Jessica in the Get Out! Nor Cal recreation Facebook group. To support and sustain this work, please subscribe today. Thank you. This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: Gregory Cheadle, who left Republican Party, returning to Shasta County Solve the daily Crossword
CNN
23 minutes ago
- CNN
ICE follows starkly different playbooks in how it's arresting immigrants in red and blue states, data shows
The Trump administration is apprehending hundreds of immigrants every day across the country – but there's a stark split in where Immigration and Customs Enforcement makes those arrests in blue states and red states. In states that voted for President Donald Trump, ICE agents are far more likely to arrest immigrants directly from prisons and jails, a CNN analysis of data from the agency found. In Democratic-leaning states, by contrast, ICE is frequently arresting immigrants from worksites, streets and mass roundups that have sparked protests and intense backlash in cities such as Los Angeles. Most of those arrested don't have any criminal record. The ICE data shows that overall, more immigrants are being arrested in red states than blue states – both in the community and, especially, in prisons and jails. But there is a clear divide in where ICE is apprehending people: 59% of arrests in red states took place in prisons and jails, while 70% of arrests in blue states took place in the community. That partisan gap between red and blue states existed before Trump's second term began – but it has widened since last year. Trump officials say the differing tactics are simply a downstream effect of sanctuary policies in many Democratic-controlled states and large cities, which can limit prisons and jails from cooperating with ICE. In many of those states, local authorities can't hold immigrants in custody based on ICE orders alone – so they're often released before immigration officials can arrest them. 'Sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don't want, more agents in the communities and more worksite enforcement,' Trump border czar Tom Homan told reporters last month. 'Why is that? Because they won't let one agent arrest one bad guy in a jail.' But advocates for immigrant rights say the community arrests – from raids at factories and restaurants to surprise detentions at ICE check-ins – are punitive measures aimed at instilling fear in blue states and cities. The aggressive tactics reflect 'a deliberate federal strategy to punish Massachusetts and other immigrant-friendly states for standing up against Trump's reckless deportation machine,' argued Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, the executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston-based nonprofit that represents immigrants in court. An ICE spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on CNN's analysis. The divide is especially dramatic in Massachusetts, where 94% of immigrants arrested by ICE were apprehended in the community, and 78% of them had no criminal record. The state has a court decision and local policies that limit law enforcement from cooperating with ICE. The agency's regional office was also led until March by Todd Lyons, who is now the acting ICE director, and who has described the focus on community arrests in Massachusetts, his home state, as a direct response to sanctuary policies. 'If sanctuary cities would change their policies and turn these violent criminal aliens over to us, into our custody, instead of releasing them into the public, we would not have to go out to the communities and do this,' Lyons said at a press conference in June. Regardless of the cause, the varying local laws and ICE tactics are creating a 'patchwork system' across the country, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute. Immigrants are facing 'really divergent outcomes based on where people live,' she said. CNN's analysis is based on ICE records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Deportation Data Project, a research group associated with the UC Berkeley law school. The analysis covers the period since Trump took office through late June. In its annual reports, ICE defines arrests in two categories: those that happen in prisons and jails, and 'at-large' arrests in the community. In prisons and jails, ICE typically sends a detainer request to corrections officials for undocumented inmates, and then agents come to the facilities to arrest them before they leave custody. Community arrests, by contrast, include everything from workplace raids to teams trailing and apprehending immigrants. In 2024, under President Joe Biden – whose administration said it was prioritizing arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records – about 62% of ICE arrests were from prisons and jails, while 27% were in the community, the data shows. So far in Trump's term, arrests overall are up, and the balance has changed: 49% have been in prisons and jails, and 44% in the community. But those percentages diverge widely between the 31 states won by Donald Trump and the 19 states won by Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, which have similar total undocumented populations, according to 2023 estimates from the Center for Migration Studies, a nonprofit. In the Trump-voting states, ICE is not only more likely to arrest immigrants already in custody, but they're also more likely to have a record: 41% of those arrested in red states had a prior criminal conviction, compared to 36% of immigrants arrested by ICE in Harris states. Most prior convictions are for lower-level crimes like traffic offenses, immigration violations and other non-violent charges, a CNN analysis of internal ICE data found earlier this summer. In part, that disparity comes from how states and cities without sanctuary policies respond to ICE detainer requests. In most red states, those detainers are honored, allowing ICE to pick up thousands of undocumented immigrants directly from jail or prison. But in many blue states and cities, sanctuary policies direct officials to refuse ICE detainer requests without a court warrant. Some states go further in limiting local police's collaboration with ICE: Boston prevents officers from even asking about immigration status, for example. The ICE data suggests that some sanctuary policies are blocking the agency from arresting immigrants – to a point. In Mississippi, for example, which has banned the establishment of sanctuary policies in the state, 87% of immigrants ICE filed a detainer request for through the end of May were later arrested by the agency in prisons and jails. In New York, which has state and local policies limiting cooperation with ICE, only 4% of the immigrants that ICE had requested detainers for were arrested in prisons and jails. So in blue states, the Trump administration has instead relied more on a different policy: immigration raids and community arrests. In Los Angeles, where those raids sparked unrest earlier this summer, Trump deployed the National Guard. The administration later sued the city for its sanctuary policies, saying the city was contributing to a 'lawless and unsafe environment.' Many activists, though, say the nature of those blue-state raids – and especially ICE's efforts to promote and publicize them – show they serve a broader purpose beyond just evading sanctuary policies. Those aggressive tactics are 'shocking and they're such a departure from the norm,' Bush-Joseph said. 'But their intent might be more so about deterrence and trying to dissuade people from coming to the US-Mexico border, as well as trying to get people to self-deport.' Overall, ICE's arrest and detention machine may just be ramping up. The recent budget reconciliation bill signed by Trump includes billions in new funding for the agency. And a growing number of local and state law enforcement agencies – largely in red states – are signing up for an ICE program that allows them to help enforce immigration laws. ICE's embrace of public arrests is particularly pronounced in Massachusetts. While Massachusetts doesn't have a formal sanctuary law at the state level, a 2017 state supreme court ruling bans law enforcement from holding anyone beyond the time they would otherwise be released on the basis of an ICE detainer request. Boston and several other cities also have policies that go further, preventing law enforcement from coordinating with ICE more broadly. Lyons, the acting ICE director, led the Boston ICE office – which is responsible for arrests in Massachusetts and five other New England states – before being elevated to his current role. In interviews and statements, he's decried sanctuary policies in the state. 'Boston's my hometown and it really shocks me that officials all over Massachusetts would rather release sex offenders, fentanyl dealers, drug dealers, human traffickers, and child rapists back into the neighborhoods,' he told reporters this summer – without addressing the fact that a large majority of immigrants arrested in the state this year had no criminal convictions. In May, ICE carried out what officials described as the largest enforcement operation in the agency's history, arresting more than 1,400 people in communities across Massachusetts. Around New England, other high-profile cases have included ICE officers detaining a Tufts PhD student who co-wrote a student newspaper op-ed critical of Israel and smashing the window of an immigrant's car and yanking him out of the passenger seat in front of his wife. ICE's aggressive tactics in the region have been defined by 'a general level of mean-spiritedness and brutality,' said Daniel Kanstroom, a Boston College law professor who founded the college's immigration and asylum law clinic. 'We've never seen masked agents before. We've never seen students arrested for writing op-eds before. We've never seen people dragged out of immigration court before.' Stepped-up community arrests are having a marked impact on immigrant-heavy neighborhoods in the Boston area, local advocates say. In suburbs like Chelsea and Everett, which have large Salvadoran and Central American communities, some immigrants are staying home out of fear of ICE raids. 'We're seeing people not going to their doctor's appointments, kids not going to school, folks not going grocery shopping,' said Sarang Sekhavat, the chief of staff at the Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition. 'You're seeing a lot of businesses in some of these neighborhoods really suffering because people just don't want to leave home… bustling, active neighborhoods that have become very quiet now.' ICE's dragnet has picked up people like Geovani Esau De La Cruz Catalan, who was arrested by immigration agents on the street outside his Chelsea home in June – just days after he crossed the stage at his high school graduation. The 20-year-old, who has no criminal history, came to the US from Guatemala in 2022. He told CNN his hopes to build a new life in America were dashed when he was detained. 'I thought they were going to take away all the dreams I had,' De La Cruz said in Spanish. 'I was in shock.' De La Cruz spent two weeks in ICE custody before being released with a future immigration court date. His stepmother, Mayra Balderas, said he has a work permit, but it's unclear whether he'll be allowed to stay or deported back to Guatemala. Balderas, an American citizen who immigrated to the US more than three decades ago, said ICE agents were frequently patrolling her Chelsea neighborhood, something she'd never seen before Trump took office. 'Since I've been here, I never have any experience like that – going into the neighborhoods and pulling people and doing what they're doing,' Balderas said. 'They are scaring people.' Methodology CNN analyzed data on ICE arrests and detainers published by the Data Deportation Project, a research group associated with UC Berkeley law school. The data includes administrative arrests, in which immigrants arrested face deportation, not criminal arrests for human trafficking or similar crimes. For data that was missing information about the state where an immigrant was arrested, when possible, CNN inferred the state based on which ICE field office conducted the arrest, using areas of responsibility described on the ICE website. A state could not be identified for about 11% of arrests, and those are not included in state-by-state totals. Based on information in ICE annual reports and interviews with policy experts, CNN defined arrests in jails and prisons as those with an apprehension method described in the data as 'CAP Local Incarceration,' 'CAP State Incarceration,' or 'CAP Federal Incarceration' (referring to ICE's Criminal Alien Program) and arrests in the community as those listed as 'Non-Custodial Arrest,' 'Located,' 'Worksite Enforcement,' 'Traffic Check,' or 'Probation and Parole.' About 7% of arrests were listed as 'Other Efforts' or didn't fit clearly into either category.
Fox News
23 minutes ago
- Fox News
Newsom vows to fight back over Texas redistricting plan: 'Fight fire with fire'
Political analyst Tiffany Marie Brannon joins 'Fox & Friends First' to discuss the latest on the redistricting feud in Texas and her reaction to a House Democrat saying she is a 'proud Guatemalan' before she's an American.
