U.S. teachers face language barriers, student trauma as record migration reaches classrooms

Ted Hesson, Kristina Cooke and M.B.Pell
Sat, October 5, 2024 






U.S. teachers face language barriers, student trauma as record migration reaches classrooms

U.S. schools faced with rising numbers of migrant students

CHARLEROI, Pennsylvania - Dana Smith had been teaching first grade at the public school in the small Pennsylvania town of Charleroi for more than 16 years when she found herself confronting a new challenge last year: a sharp rise in students from Haiti who did not speak English.

She started using a phone app to translate lessons, but the constant pauses for translation frustrated her. She wondered if she was hindering the learning of American students who knew some of the basics she was reviewing, a complaint raised by a vocal segment of parents in the district.

"It was very stressful," she said. "We never know when we're going to get new ones coming in, where their levels are, how adjusted they are to this culture. The unexpected."

More than half a million school-age migrant children have arrived in the U.S. since 2022, according to immigration court records collected by Syracuse University, exacerbating overcrowding in some classrooms; compounding teacher and budget shortfalls; forcing teachers to grapple with language barriers and inflaming social tensions in places unaccustomed to educating immigrant students.

To gauge the impact of immigration on public schools across the U.S., Reuters sent a survey to more than 10,000 school districts. Of the 75 school districts that responded, serving a total of 2.3 million children or about 5% of the public school population, a third said the increase in immigrant children had had a "significant" impact on their school district.

While not exhaustive, the Reuters' survey, the first by a media organization, offers the most extensive view to date of how U.S. public schools are grappling with record migrant arrivals across the southern border.

The responses spanned school districts across 23 states, from Texas to Alaska, and include the largest urban district of New York City as well as the tiny and rural Hot Springs Elementary School District in southern California, with just 16 pupils.

Forty-two districts said they had hired more English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers and consultants. Fifteen districts described difficulties communicating with parents or a lack of interpreter services.

"Textbooks are not in their language. Resources are not easily available. Google Translate does not work that great," the Springfield City school district in Ohio said in its response to the survey conducted between late August and late September.

Republican candidate Donald Trump has made immigration a top talking point in the Nov. 5 presidential election, blaming his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, for record numbers of migrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border during President Joe Biden’s administration.

Trump also faults Harris for a Biden program launched in late 2022 that allowed legal entry to 530,000 Haitians and others with U.S. sponsors.

At a rally in Arizona last month, Trump used Charleroi, a town an hour south of Pittsburgh, as an example of the negative impacts of immigration.

About 2,000 immigrants, including about 700 Haitians, live in the town with many arriving in the last few years, according to Charleroi Borough Manager Joe Manning, swelling a population that declined from over 11,000 a century ago to 4,200 in the 2020 census.

"Charleroi, what a beautiful name, but it's not so beautiful now," Trump told supporters. "The schools are scrambling to hire translators for the influx of students who don't speak, not a word of English, costing local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Washington County, where Charleroi is located, backed Trump over Biden in 2020 by 23 percentage points, symbolizing a part of the rural vote that could help Trump win Pennsylvania, the most important of the election battleground states that could decide control of the White House.

The vast majority of Haitians arriving in the U.S. since 2023 entered legally or are eligible to remain and seek work permits through the Temporary Protected Status program.

While Trump has derided a wide range of immigrant groups throughout his political career, he has taken particular aim at Haitians, questioning while president in 2018 why the U.S. would accept Haitians and immigrants from 'shithole countries' in Africa.

He thrust immigration to the forefront of a Sept. 10 debate with Harris when he repeated a false rumor that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Public schools and other city buildings in Springfield received bomb threats after the debate.

Amy Nelson, an assistant principal in the Charleroi school district, said the school has not received direct threats but she is concerned about anti-Haitian posts in a local Facebook group, including a re-post of a purported Ku Klux Klan group describing Haitians in Springfield in derogatory terms and calling on Americans to "stand against forced immigration."

In response to a Reuters request for comment about the effects of migration on schools, a campaign spokesperson pointed to Trump remarks at a Sept. 23 rally in Pennsylvania.

"It takes centuries to build the unique character of each state," Trump said at the time. "Reckless migration policy can change it very quickly."

The Harris campaign touted $130 billion directed to schools under Biden's 2021 economic stimulus package. Harris “will build on those investments and continue fighting until every student has the support and the resources they need to thrive,” Harris campaign spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement to Reuters.

White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez said the Biden administration has increased funding to address teacher shortages and requested $50 million in new funding to support English language learning.

In the Reuters survey, 17 districts said they requested additional state funds to help immigrant students. Twelve of these districts reported receiving additional funds - including a district in New Jersey that said it still wasn't enough to hire an ESL supervisor.

Ten districts said their teachers were not well-trained or received no training to meet the needs of new immigrant students, and 42 said they would welcome more training for teachers and administrators. The training requests included how to teach kids who don't speak English, how to approach different cultural norms and how to help kids recover from trauma.

"Anytime you have an unpredictable pattern of student enrollment all at once, the strain it creates on the system is tremendous," Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero wrote in his response. Denver has seen a huge increase in migrant arrivals since 2023, in large part due to the state of Texas busing 19,200 people from the U.S.-Mexico border to the Democratic-run city.

In addition to the language barriers and differences in educational backgrounds, the jump in arrivals "required our system to stand up processes across the city to not only communicate with families but also support them in getting their basic needs met in order to have students coming to school ready to learn," Marrero wrote.

Still, 11 respondents said - unprompted - that the newcomers had enriched the school community, bringing new perspectives and resilience that other children could learn from.

SIGNS OF STRAIN

On a rainy Wednesday morning at Charleroi High School, students shuffled between classes in small groups. "Hello, my Haitian friends," one American student said as he passed Haitian girls walking in the opposite direction.

Julnise Telorge, an 18-year-old from Haiti in her final year of high school, said she feels safe in Charleroi - despite the time last school year when a white student bumped into her in the hallway and made a derogatory comment.

Telorge said the comment upset her and that she did not know why someone would say that. "I think because she doesn't like Blacks," she said.

School district officials said they were unaware of the incident.

The number of non-English speaking students in the 1,450-student Charleroi Area School District shot up to 220 currently from just 12 in the 2021-2022 school year, according to the district administrators. About 80% percent of those students are of Haitian descent, Superintendent Ed Zelich said.

Like many of the Haitians arriving in Charleroi, the Telorge family were attracted by job openings at Fourth Street Foods, a plant packaging frozen breakfast foods located on a hill just below the school complex.

Telorge's father, Julis, works at the plant where he earns $15 an hour, he said. He is applying for asylum.

About a third of the plant's 1,000 workers are Haitian, according to its owner Dave Barbe, who said that there are not enough Americans in the area to do the work.

The school district has hired five new staff members, including three teachers specializing in English for non-native speakers, as well as a part-time interpreter, Zelich, the superintendent, said.

He estimated the cost at $400,000 a year, a fraction of the district's $30.7 million budget, but a cost the district has covered while it waits for possible reimbursement by the state.

And there are additional costs.

After parents of 37 children pulled their kids out of the school district this year to send them to the local charter school, the district was legally required to pay an additional $500,000 for transportation and the higher charter school tuition, Zelich said.

Beth Pellegrini, who attended Charleroi public schools herself as a child and served on the Parent Teacher Association, said she decided this year to send her three children to the charter school in part because teachers were too busy trying to communicate with non-English speaking students to give them enough attention.

Her 7-year-old daughter was struggling with math while her sons, who are older, have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

"My kids were all falling behind," Pellegrini said. "It wasn't just the immigrants, but it felt like the teachers didn't have the time to dedicate to them."

Joseph Gudac, the Charleroi school district business manager, said he expected the local school tax there would need to increase if the number of non-English speaking students keeps rising.

MAKING PROGRESS

The new dynamic in some American classrooms has challenged teachers to adapt, but it hasn't been without strains.

In the United States, all children, regardless of their immigration status, have a right to a free public education. But the federal government pays for only a small fraction of newcomer educational services.

Smith, the Charleroi first-grade teacher, workshopped ideas with her colleagues on how to cope. She paired Haitian students with more advanced English skills with beginners, she said. She used more physical cues, pointing to get students to sit in their seats.

She incorporated repetition into her lessons, particularly around language.

Yet when the school offered to pay for teacher training, Smith did not want to take on another work assignment on top of her day job.

"That's just one more thing that I have on my plate that I would rather not have," she said, noting that she planned to retire in a few years. "They should be wanting to learn our language, learn our culture."

Despite the challenges, Smith said the situation has improved. While she has six English language learners out of 17 students in her classroom this year, they all attended kindergarten at the school and have a good working knowledge of the language.

During a class last month, she started the day with basics: roll call, sharpening pencils, reviewing the days of the week, and the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag in the back corner of her colorful classroom.

The students followed the lesson and responded to cues.

"They have already had a year under their belt," she said. "So I can see that their progression has made a big difference."

One Haitian girl in Smith's class went from speaking no English when she entered school last year to receiving an award for academic excellence, according to Nelson, the assistant principal.

The girl's mother died of breast cancer last year and Nelson and her husband are trying to adopt her.

"She is so resilient," Nelson said.

HOPES FOR THE FUTURE

When Haitian students at Charleroi's high school need to talk to a teacher, they often go to Bridget DeFazio.

DeFazio, 40, started teaching French at the school in 2008. Her language skills suddenly became more sought after as dozens of Haitians, many of whom understood or spoke French, enrolled in the middle school and high school.

DeFazio and another teacher paid out of pocket for an ESL certification last year and she now teaches ESL classes in addition to French.

"Yeah, it has been challenging, but for me, a good challenge," she said. "I mean, I've been here 17 years, so it was almost like a breath of fresh air for me, something new that I can try."

When students walked into her ESL class last week, she greeted them in Haitian Creole.

The 10 students in her class took notes and answered questions as she ran through adjectives - smart, dumb, funny, happy, sad, shy - in a booming voice that filled the room.

"I've never seen kids more eager to learn," DeFazio said. "At the end of the day, they are teenagers. They're going to get into trouble, they're going to be late for class, they're going to test the limits. But when I pull them aside and talk to them, it's, 'OK, madame, we get it.'"

(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, Kristina Cooke in San Francisco, and M.B. Pell in New York; Story editing by Suzanne Goldenberg and Mary Milliken; Data editing by Benjamin Lesser; Photography and video by Carlos Barria; Video production by Olivia Zollino and Grace Lee; Story design by Jillian Kumagai.)

 

Social media users’ actions, rather than biased policies, could drive differences in platform enforcement

New MIT Sloan research has found that politically conservative users tend to share misinformation at a greater volume than politically liberal users and this could explain why conservatives were suspended more frequently

MIT Sloan School of Management

A new paper, “Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions,” published today in Nature suggests that the higher quantity of social media policy enforcement (such as account suspensions) for conservative users could be explained by the higher quantity of misinformation shared by those conservative users — and so does not constitute evidence of inherent biases in the policies from social media companies or in the definition of what constitutes misinformation. 

Written by researchers from MIT Sloan School of Management, the University of Oxford, Cornell University, and Yale University, co-authors of the paper include Mohsen Mosleh, Qi Yang, Tauhid Zaman, Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand.

The spread of misinformation has become an increasing concern, especially as the 2024 presidential election in the United States approaches. Many Americans who disagree on political issues agree that the sharing of false information is a substantial problem; sixty-five percent of Americans say that technology companies should take action to restrict the spread of false information. However, there is great dissension as to whether tech companies are actually moderating platforms fairly.

“Accusations of political bias are often based largely on anecdotes or noteworthy cases, such as the suspension from Twitter and Facebook of former President Trump,” said MIT Sloan professor Rand. “This study allows us to systematically evaluate the data and better understand the differential rates of policy enforcement.” 

The asymmetry of conservative sanctions versus liberal sanctions should not be attributed to partisan bias on the part of social media companies and those determining what counts as misinformation, Rand and the co-authors noted. 

The research began by looking at Twitter’s suspension of users following the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Researchers identified 100,000 Twitter users from October 2020 who shared hashtags related to the election, and randomly sampled 9,000 — half of whom shared at least one #VoteBidenHarris2020 hashtag and half of whom shared at least one #Trump2020 hashtag. Researchers analyzed each user’s data from the month before the election to quantify their tendency to share news from low-quality domains (as well as other potentially relevant characteristics), and then checked nine months later to determine which users were suspended by Twitter.

Accounts that had shared #Trump2020 before the election were 4.4 times more likely to have been subsequently suspended than those who shared #VoteBidenHarris2020. Only 4.5% of the users who shared Biden hashtags had been suspended as of July 2021, while 19.6% of the users who shared Trump hashtags had been suspended. 

“We found that there were political differences in behavior, in addition to the political differences in enforcement,” said Rand. “The fact that the social media accounts of conservatives are suspended more than those of liberals is therefore not evidence of bias on the part of tech companies, and shouldn’t be used to pressure tech companies to abandon policies meant to reduce the sharing of misinformation.”

To better understand this difference, the researchers examined what content was shared by these politically active Twitter users in terms of the reliability of the sources through two different methods. They used a set of 60 news domains (the 20 highest volume sites within the categories of mainstream, hyper-partisan and fake news), and collected trustworthiness ratings for each domain from eight professional fact-checkers. In an effort to eliminate concern about potential bias on the part of journalists and fact-checkers, the researchers also collected ratings from politically-balanced groups of laypeople. Both approaches indicated that people who used Trump hashtags shared four times more links to low-quality news outlets than those who used Biden hashtags. 

“Prior work identifying political differences in misinformation sharing has been criticized for relying on the judgment of professional fact-checkers. But we show that conservative Twitter users shared much lower quality news, even when relying on ratings from politically-balanced groups of laypeople,” said co-author Dr Mohsen Mosleh, Associate Professor, Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford. “This can’t be written off as the result of political bias in the ratings, and means that preferential suspension of conservative users is not necessarily the result of political bias on the part of social media companies.”

The study also discovered similar associations between conservatism and low-quality news sharing (based on both expert and politically-balanced layperson ratings) were present in seven other datasets from Twitter, Facebook, and survey experiments, spanning 2016 to 2023 and including data from 16 different countries. For example, the researchers found cross-cultural evidence of conservatives sharing more unambiguously false claims about COVID-19 than liberals, with conservative political elites sharing links to lower quality new sources than liberal political elites in the U.K. and Germany as well. 

“The social media users analyzed in this research are not representative of Americans more broadly, so these findings do not necessarily mean that conservatives in general are more likely to spread misinformation than liberals. Also, we’re just looking at this particular period in time,” said Rand. “Our basic point would be the same if it was found that liberal users shared more misinformation and were getting suspended more. Such a pattern of suspension would not be enough to show bias on the part of the companies, because of the differences in users’ behavior.”

Even under politically neutral anti-misinformation policies, the researchers expect that there would be political asymmetries in enforcement. While the analyses do not rule out the possibility of any bias on the part of platforms, the inequality of sanctions is not diagnostic of bias one way or the other. Policy-makers need to be aware that even if social media companies are working in an unbiased way to manage misinformation on their platforms, there will still be some level of differential treatment across groups.

---

Journal

Nature

Article Title

Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions

Solidarity drives online virality in a nation under attack, study of Ukrainian social media reveals

University of Cambridge

While divisive social media posts get more traction in countries such as the US, a new study shows that celebrating national unity is the way to go viral in Ukraine.

“Ingroup solidarity” statements got far more likes and shares than hostile posts about Russians – a trend that only grew stronger in the wake of the invasion.

The first major study of social media behaviour during wartime has found that posts celebrating national and cultural unity in a country under attack receive significantly more online engagement than derogatory posts about the aggressors.  

University of Cambridge psychologists analysed a total of 1.6 million posts on Facebook and Twitter (now X) from Ukrainian news outlets in the seven months prior to February 2022, when Russian forces invaded, and the six months that followed.

Once the attempted invasion had begun, posts classified as expressing Ukrainian “ingroup solidarity” were associated with 92% more engagement on Facebook, and 68% more on Twitter, than similar posts had achieved prior to Russia’s full-scale attack.

While posts expressing “outgroup hostility” towards Russia only received an extra 1% engagement on Facebook after the invasion, with no significant difference on Twitter.

“Pro-Ukrainian sentiment, phrases such as Glory to Ukraine and posts about Ukrainian military heroism, gained huge amounts of likes and shares, yet hostile posts aimed at Russia barely registered,” said Yara Kyrychenko, from Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab (SDML) in its Department of Psychology.

“The vast majority of research on social media uses US data, where divisive posts often go viral, prompting some scholars to suggest that these platforms drive polarisation. In Ukraine, a country under siege, we find the reverse,” said Kyrychenko, lead author of the study published today in Nature Communications.  

“Emotions that appeal to ingroup identity can empower people and boost morale. These emotions may be more contagious, and prompt greater engagement, during a time of active threat – when the motivation to behave beneficially for one’s ingroup is heightened.”

Previous research from the same Cambridge lab found that going viral on US social media is driven by hostility: posts that mock and criticise the opposing sides of ideological divides are far more likely to get engagement and reach larger audiences.

The new study initially used the same techniques, finding that – prior to the invasion –social media posts from pro-Ukrainian as well as pro-Russian news sources that contained keywords of the ‘outgroup’ – opposing politicians, placenames, and so on – it did indeed generate more traction than posts containing ‘ingroup’ keywords.*    

However, researchers then trained a large language model (LLM) – a form of language-processing AI, similar to ChatGPT – to better categorise sentiment and the motivation behind the post, rather than simply relying on keywords, and used this to analyse Facebook and Twitter posts of Ukrainian news outlets before and after the invasion.**

This deeper dive revealed a consistently strong engagement rate for solidarity posting – higher than for ‘outgroup hostility’ – in the lead up to Russia’s attack, which leaps even further after the invasion, while interactions with derisive posts about Russia flatline.

Lastly, a separate dataset of 149,000 post-invasion Tweets that had been geo-located to Ukraine was fed into a similar LLM, to test this effect on social media posts from the Ukrainian population, rather than only news sources.***  

Tweets – now X posts – from the Ukrainian public containing messages of “ingroup solidarity” championing Ukraine were likely to get 14% more engagement, while those expressing antagonism to Russians were likely to gain only a 7% increase.****

“Social media platforms allow expressions of the national struggle that would otherwise have been private to reach millions,” said Kyrychenko.

“These moments echo solidarity and resistance from a first-person account, which can make them more powerful than traditional media rooted in impersonal reporting.”

Researchers acknowledge these trends may result from algorithms used by social media companies, but say the fact that similar effects were detected on two separate platforms, and with posts from both Ukraine’s news sources and its citizenry, suggests much of this information-sharing dynamic is driven by people.

“The Kremlin has long tried to sow division in Ukraine, but fails to understand that the Euromaidan revolution and Russia’s attempted invasion have only spurred Ukrainian identity towards national unity,” said Dr Jon Roozenbeek, study senior author from Cambridge’s SDML as well as King’s College London.

“We can trace through social media posts this fortification of Ukrainian group identity in the face of extreme Russian aggression,” said Roozenbeek, who published the book Propaganda and Ideology in the Russian–Ukrainian War earlier this year.

Kyrychenko, a Cambridge Gates Scholar born and raised in Kyiv, recalls the critical role Facebook and Twitter played in the Euromaidan protests in 2014, some of which she participated in as a teenager, and her surprise at the attitude towards social media she encountered in the US after moving there to study in 2018, during the Trump presidency.  

“By the time I arrived in the US, social media was seen as toxic and divisive, whereas my experience of these platforms in Ukraine had been as a force for positive political unity in the fight for democracy,” said Kyrychenko.

While Kyrychenko points out that hate speech and conspiracy theories still thrive online in Ukraine, she argues that the solidarity fostered on social media reflects some of the early promise these platforms held for uniting people against tyranny.

“The Ukrainian experience reminds us that social media can be used for good, pro-social causes, even in the direst of situations.”

 

NOTES:

* Facebook and Twitter were banned in Russia following the invasion. As such, this initial element of the study was the only one to feature Russian social media posts. 

** The team manually labelled 1600 Ukrainian social media posts as either “ingroup solidarity” or “outgroup hostility” based on whether they praised Ukraine and promoted national unity or attacked Russia as immoral warmongers, and fed these into the LLM to train it to read and categorise Ukrainian social media posts. The researchers also provided the LLM guideline definitions for “ingroup solidarity” and “outgroup hostility”.

*** The researchers only used pro-Ukrainian Tweets: posts that were supportive of Ukraine, whether through attacking Russia or championing Ukraine. 

**** For example, if the LLM labelled a post as ‘ingroup solidarity’, it was likely to get 14% more engagement than if it was not labelled as ‘ingroup solidarity’, controlling for other variables such as: if the post has media or a URL, if it mentioned the ingroup, the outgroup, the number of ‘positive’ words, and so on.

Examples of social media posts that were part of the study’s dataset: 

Ingroup solidarity:

• "Thanks to the KALUSH ORCHESTRA band for their support! Glory to Ukraine! 🇺🇦" got 4434 retweets. 
• "Our flag will fly over all of Ukraine, said General Valery Zaluzhnyi." got 5577 favorites and 767 retweets.
• "Ukrainian soldiers congratulate students with September 1 and remembers their first bells 💔🔔" ...  got 92381 shares and 482896 likes on Facebook.
• "In a Polish church, they decided to sing the song "Oh, there's a red viburnum in the meadow" right during the service! 🇺🇦 ❤️🇵🇱" ... got 34897 shares and 68847 likes on Facebook.

A further description from lead author Yara Kyrychenko of an example of Ukrainian ‘ingroup solidarity’ social media content:

“On New Year’s Eve 2022, a family in the then recently de-occupied Ukrainian city of Kherson watched Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential address over WhatsApp with their relatives in the still-occupied territories.

“A video of the entire family crying – as Zelensky states Ukraine will liberate and rebuild – quickly went viral across platforms. It captured something so powerful and deeply emotional that watching it makes many cry, even months later.

“The sense of unity despite barriers, the tender cherishing of the national tradition, and the human connection—all distilled into one TikTok. Posts like these evoke similar feelings of solidarity in countless Ukrainians, even though each has seen a different face of the war.”

Outgroup Hostility:

• "Boris Johnson: negotiating with Putin is like negotiating with a crocodile" got 425 retweets and 4957 favorites.  
• "It hurts to understand that these bastards shoot absolutely everything. It doesn't matter if the military is there or not. Hospitals, schools...." got 21728 Shares and 25125 Likes. 
• "❗️Russians don't want to fight for Putin. The story of a soldier captured in Kharkov. "Bastards! I hate them! They are making propaganda!"" ... got 65409 shares and 79735 Likes.  

---

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-024-52179-8 

Article Title

Social identity correlates of social media engagement before and after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

Article Publication Date

1-Oct-2024

US 'Welcome Corps' helps resettle LGBTQ+ refugees fleeing crackdowns against gay people

MICHAEL CASEY and TERRY CHEA
Updated Wed, October 2, 2024 
 

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Cabrel Ngounou's life in Cameroon quickly unraveled after neighbors caught the teenager with his boyfriend.

A crowd surrounded his boyfriend's house and beat him. Ngounou's family learned of the relationship and kicked him out. So Ngounou fled — alone and with little money — on a dangerous, four-year journey through at least five countries. He was sold by traffickers and held captive as a sex slave in Libya, harassed in Tunisia and tried unsuccessfully to take a boat to Europe.

"The worst thing was that they caught us. So it was not easy for my family," Ngounou said. “My sisters told me I need to get out of the house because my place is not there. So that’s what really pushed me to leave my country.”


Ngounou's troubles drew attention after he joined a protest outside the U.N. refugee agency's Tunisia office. Eventually, he arrived in the United States, landing in San Francisco in March.

Ngounou joined a growing number of LGBTQ+ people accepted into the Welcome Corps, which launched last year and pairs groups of Americans with newly arrived refugees. So far, the resettlement program has connected 3,500 sponsors with 1,800 refugees, and many more want to help: 100,000 people have applied to become sponsors.

President Joe Biden has sought to rebuild the refugee programs Donald Trump largely dismantled as president, working to streamline the process of screening and placing people in America. New refugee resettlement sites have opened across the country, and on Tuesday, the Biden Administration announced that it resettled 100,000 refugees in fiscal year 2024, the largest number in more than three decades.

In contrast, Trump has pledged to bar refugees from Gaza, reinstate his Muslim ban and impose “ideological screening” for all immigrants if he regains the presidency. He and running mate JD Vance are laying groundwork for their goal of deporting millions of illegal immigrants by amplifying false claims, such as the accusation that Haitians given temporary protected status to remain in the U.S. legally are eating pets in Ohio.

Under Biden, meanwhile, two human rights officials in the State Department were tasked last year with identifying refugees who face persecution either due to their sexual orientation or human rights advocacy.

“LGBTQ refugees are forced to flee their homes due to persecution and violence, not unlike other people,” said Jeremy Haldeman, deputy executive director of the Community Sponsorship Hub, which implements the Welcome Corps on behalf of the State Department. But they are particularly vulnerable because they're coming from places "where their identities are criminalized and they are at risk of imprisonment or even death.”

More than 60 countries have passed anti-LGBTQ laws and thousands of people have fled the Middle East and Africa seeking asylum in Europe. In April, Uganda’s constitutional court on Wednesday upheld an anti-gay law that allows the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”

“There are just a lot of people who are really at risk and are not safe in their country, and they’re usually not safe in the neighboring or regional countries either,” Kathryn Hampton, senior adviser for U.S. Strategy at Rainbow Railroad, which helps LGBTQI+ people facing persecution.

The demand far outstrips capacity: Of more than 15,000 requests for help in 2023, the nonprofit helped resettle 23 refugees through the Welcome Corps program in cities as large as Houston and towns as small as Arlington, Vermont. It has a goal of resettling 50 this year.

"So, we have a lot of urgency as an organization to find and create new pathways that LGBTQI+ people can access to find safety,” Hampton said.

Another refugee in the program, Julieth Luna Garcia, is a transgender woman from El Salvador who settled in Chicago.

Speaking through a translator, the 31-year-old Garcia said she suffered abuse from her family because of her trans identity and couldn't legally access gender-affirming care until she arrived in the United States.

"I lived with constant fear, even more so at night. I didn’t like to go out. I was really scared that somebody would find me alone and do something,” Garcia said. Since arriving in February, Garcia has found a place to live and a job as a home health aide and hopes to study to become a lawyer. "Here, I’m not scared to say who I am. I’m not scared to tell anyone," she said.

Maybe the biggest change was starting hormone treatments, she said: “To see yourself in the mirror and see these changes, I can’t really explain it, but it’s really big. It’s an emotional and exciting thing and something I thought I would never experience.”

Welcome Corps sponsors are expected to help refugees adjust for at least three months after they arrive. Garcia said the five volunteers helped her “adapt to a new life with a little less difficulty,” by accessing benefits, getting a work permit and enrolling in English classes.

Ngounou recalled how his sponsors, a team of seven that included a lesbian couple, Anne Raeff and Lori Ostlund, hosted him and connected him with LGBTQ resources and a work training program. They also served as his tour guides to gay life, taking him to the historically gay Castro district, where Ngounou got his first glimpse of the huge rainbow Pride flag and stopped to read every plaque honoring famous gay people.

“Cabrel was just very, very moved by that. Just kind of started crying. We all did,” Raeff recalled.

“I know that feeling like when we were young, when you’d go into a gay bar and you’d feel like this sense of kind of freedom, like this community,” she said. “That was the only place where you could go and actually be open. And that ... this is this community of people and we all have this in common.”

Now the 19-year-old Ngounou works in a coffee shop and takes college courses, with the goal of becoming a social worker. He hopes the boyfriend he met in Tunisia can visit him in San Francisco — and he still finds it hard to believe that they can share their love openly.

“Here I’m really me ... I feel free,” he said with a laugh. "I feel free to have my boyfriend and walk with him in the street. I feel free, you know, to enjoy myself with him wherever we want to enjoy ourselves. But in Tunisia or anywhere else, in Cameroon, you have to hide such things.”

APTOPIX US LGBTQ Refugees
Julieth Luna Garcia, a transgender woman from El Salvador, looks into a compact mirror at Horner Park in Chicago, Monday, Sept. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

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This story has been corrected. Ngounou was sold by traffickers and held captive as a sex slave in Libya, not sexually assaulted in prison.

___

Casey reported from Boston.

Opinion

Israel aims to control the social media sphere by any means necessary, even through abduction

September 27, 2024 

Telegram logo is displayed on a number of screens in London, England on August 26, 2024 [Leon Neal/Getty Images]

by Muhammad Hussein


In this modern digitised age, unregulated freedom of speech is a rarity, as much as it is a fashion for conservatives and political commentators to advocate for it. So when Pavel Durov, the CEO of the Telegram app, was arrested by French authorities in August, a flurry of theories emerged regarding the causes and reasons for his fate.

French and international media reported that Durov had failed to adequately take action to curb criminal use of his platform, with France’s OFMIN – a government agency tasked with preventing violence against minors – having issued an arrest warrant due to a preliminary investigation based on allegations that Telegram harbours numerous criminal offences including fraud, drug trafficking, cyber-bullying, organised crime and the promotion of terrorism.

Many around the world were rightly sceptical of those claims, however, and understandably so, as how does a platform go about gaining full control of what its users post or discuss? It is almost impossible for other messaging and social media sites to do so, either. Facebook, for example, cannot go about identifying and deleting all scams on its marketplace page, Whatsapp – although also under Meta – cannot reasonably be expected to flag all chats pertaining to criminal activity, nor can LinkedIn hunt down fake or scandalous job listings.

But government and law enforcement agencies do not expect them to do such things, only simply to allow them to gain access to the private data and activities of the platforms’ users if and when deemed ‘necessary’. Telegram was apparently not willing to give that privacy up, making it a lot of enemies amongst key state actors throughout the world.

Like all prominent platforms in all prominent fields, government authorities aim to dominate and impose their control over them in an indirect way in order to gain backdoor access to their data, profiles and users’ private messages and conversations. The common reason given for such access is, of course, the claim that it would hugely assist counter-terrorism surveillance and operations.

Not only do authorities monitor through that access, but they also attempt to intervene in the platforms’ processes and influence their output and their users’ views.

The most known example of this was the exploitation of Twitter – now X – by American intelligence agencies, with Elon Musk’s revelations of the ‘Twitter files’ two years ago having proven that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) had suppressed certain reports regarding President Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and their dealings in matters such as Ukraine and China.

Read: Elon Musk’s Twitter Files are cleaning house, but what other secrets remain?

The files also revealed the social media site’s creation of secret blacklists of Conservative or right-wing figures, in a direct attempt to censor them and their prominent views including the criticism of Covid-19 lockdowns and measures, as well as the platform’s suspension of former President Donald Trump’s account at the time.

In implementing those policies, Twitter staff and leading figures had even met with FBI officials on a frequent basis, along with officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Those meetings were not simply for reports or updates, but notably allowed those intelligence agencies to have a direct say in what Twitter could and could not allow on its site, wielding direct pressure on the platform’s policies and moderation, and potentially even meddling in the US elections.

Thus was the US federal government and its agencies exposed for picking sides and attempting to acquire further sway over the political system. And, since then, a model was presented to the world on how other Western authorities – as well as authorities in other regions throughout the wider international community – can gain access to and control over social media and messaging platforms.

Telegram is one of the few social media or messaging platforms in which security is ingrained into its very architecture, with its servers distributed across multiple territories and different jurisdictions, making it difficult for authorities to target any single government or location.




Pavel Durov, CEO and co-founder of Telegram in San Francisco, California on September 21, 2015 [Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch]By arresting Durov, the theory goes, French authorities were attempting to apply pressure on the Telegram boss to at least loosen restrictions on governments’ gaining of access to the platform’s databases – and that seems to have worked. Earlier this month, following Durov’s release, Telegram reportedly quietly updated its FAQs, removing a key sentence which previously stated that “All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them.”

The arrest of Durov and the subsequent pressure to reduce Telegram’s restrictions are thought by some to be the result of the platform’s recent angering of Israel and its security services. The app has frustrated many players throughout the course of its rise, but it may have apparently taken it a step too far by earning the scorn of Tel Aviv.

Not only was a Telegram channel responsible for significant leaks of the personal life and data of the chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency two years ago, but a channel was also responsible, as recently as a few months ago, for hacking into the Israeli Justice Ministry, leaking tens of thousands of classified documents and sensitive emails.

A report by Israeli news outlet, Haaretz, has only confirmed that frustration by Tel Aviv at Telegram’s lack of sufficient cooperation, especially since the start of its ongoing invasion of Gaza, when Hamas and its supporters spread material further propagating the Resistance group’s tactics and tenacity.

According to the report, those concerns pushed Israelis in the high-tech industry to attempt to contact the UAE-based Durov in late 2023, but he was reportedly largely unreceptive to the private requests to enhance moderation and suppression on his platform.

Read: Meta announces removal of content targeting Zionists in significant anti-Palestinian policy change

The tech boss’s lack of compliance, therefore, seemed to give Israel no choice but to force its hand, potentially requesting an allied state such as France – one that Durov frequents and is a citizen of – to apply pressure on him.

Then there is the theory of Durov being closely followed by an alleged Mossad agent up until the time of his arrest, in the form of 24-year-old Yuli Vavilova, a Dubai-based Russian crypto-coach who had accompanied the Telegram founder on his trips prior to landing in Paris, avidly posting their locations on social media like most influencers do.

Following Durov’s arrest, she was reported to have mysteriously ‘disappeared’, although she remains active on social media, which led to speculation that she may have been placed as a ‘honey trap’ by intelligence agencies, chief amongst them Israel’s Mossad. For now, that remains just that – speculation – and she has since claimed in a recent Instagram post that there is “a lot of false information circulating, but that’s a topic for the future”.

What can be said for now is that Durov’s arrest and the targeting of his platform’s moderation standards were effectively an abduction for the purpose of extortion, not of money but of something more precious to governments and their security services: data, unhindered access and guarantees of compliance.

And, by all means, Israel and its concerns or wishes seemed to have at least some involvement and leverage in bringing that about, so shaking Durov that he announced only days ago greater moderation and a new crackdown on illegal content shared on Telegram.

It is reminiscent of when X’s Elon Musk dared to take on the pro-Israel lobby and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) just over a year ago, before being bashed by the lobby’s immense power and dragged first to Israel for a tour of the Kibbutz at the centre of Hamas’s 7 October attack, and then to the Auschwitz concentration camp in January this year.

After being beaten into submission, the great free speech advocate, who was once heralded as a man daring to face down suppression, now no longer dares not to express views in contradiction to the pro-Israel and Zionist lobby.

Such is the extent of its reach and power, and it is with this that Telegram and any other remaining social media platforms must bow to the will of Tel Aviv and its allies, heralding in an era of an even greater global crackdown on freedom of speech.

 

The ‘feral 25-year-olds’ making 

Kamala Harris go viral on TikTok

Drew Harwell, (c) 2024 , The Washington Post

Sat, September 14, 2024

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After Tuesday night’s debate, as former president Donald Trump worked the reporters in the spin room in Philadelphia, Vice President Kamala Harris’s TikTok team was busy appealing to a different crowd.

In the digital “war room” at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., they hit the button on their pièce de résistance shortly after midnight: A six-second video that mocked Trump’s performance by showing his lectern inhabited by a laughably dramatic “Dance Moms” star. “I thought I was ready to be back. I thought I was stronger than this but obviously I’m not,” she lamented. “I wanna go home.”

Viewed more than 7 million times, the video was produced by a small TikTok team - all 25 and under, some working their first jobs - given unfettered freedom to chase whatever they think will go viral. Over the past eight weeks, Harris’s social media team has helped supercharge her campaign, harnessing the rhythms and absurdities of internet culture to create one of the most inventive and irreverent get-out-the-vote strategies in modern politics.

They have trolled Trump inside his own social network, Truth Social. They have made viral memes out of bags of Doritos and camouflage hats. In 2016, a single Hillary Clinton tweet might have required 12 staffers and 10 drafts; today, many of Harris’s TikTok videos are conceived, created and posted in about half an hour.

“This campaign empowers young people to speak to young people,” said Parker Butler, the 24-year-old director of Harris’s digital rapid response content, a team that watches all of Trump’s speeches and can blast a clip onto social media at a moment’s notice. “And we’re here to put in the work.”

Trump also has leaped forcefully into social media, seeing it as critical to grabbing voters’ attention in an age of mass distraction. But while Trump has posted attacks on Harris’ intelligence, warnings of economic “disaster” and grim polemics about how America’s “FUTURE IS AT STAKE” - “We’re a nation in decline,” he says in one video, holding handcuffs aloft. “Nobody is safe. Absolutely nobody” - the Harris team has adopted a more playful approach, chasing virality with snarky, upbeat and oddball content delivered at internet speed.

Trump’s team has occasionally worked to mimic Harris’s online energy, but with darker memes. This week, Trump’s Truth Social account posted AI-generated images showing him saving cats from a crowd of dark-skinned men - a reference to the false claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating pets, which Trump repeated on the debate stage. In other images, cats hold up signs reading “Don’t Let Them Eat Us. Vote for Trump!” and “Kamala Hates Me.”

Harris’s “digital rapid response” team, as it’s called, is active on every major social platform, posting family photos on Facebook, hours-long speeches on YouTube and Spanish-language calls to action on WhatsApp. On debate night, they hosted live-streamed watch parties on Twitch, walloped Trump’s untruths on Threads and X, and hyped Harris’s most fiery lines on Instagram and TikTok. Minutes after she claimed Trump rallygoers leave “his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” her team posted the clip with the caption, “Holy s--- 🔥🔥🔥 She just cooked him,” following up with a photo of Harris in a kitchen, smiling.

“They really run it like a fan account,” said Rachel Karten, a social media consultant who writes Link in Bio, a newsletter about online culture. “It’s not like it’s coming from a campaign. It’s like: We talk like you. Even the caption is like: ‘You have to watch this.’”

The online rollout has helped Harris circumvent the tough questions and uncertainties of the traditional political press, allowing her to reach millions of voters who turn to social media as a news source. By the time Harris sat for her first big TV interview as the Democratic nominee, she had already appeared in dozens of social media videos, giving direct-to-camera monologues about Roe v. Wade, chatting on the phone with the Obamas and talking with her running mate Tim Walz about “White guy tacos” and the guitar skills of Prince.

The approach seems to be paying off. The Harris campaign has gotten 100 million more views than Trump on TikTok, despite having half as many followers, according to an analysis of data from Zelf, an online measurement firm.

It’s also gotten under Trump’s skin. He posted a Truth Social video this month saying his campaign had “the greatest social media program in history” and that any claims of Harris’s online success were “misinformation”: “She’s not even a small fraction of what we do. But that’s the way they do it, they lie.” He has also, without evidence, accused her team of paying for fake followers. The Harris campaign responded, “Rent free” - as in, how they’re living, inside his head.

Campaign officials say the digital operation has seen success beyond social media. To some supporters, it’s a big reason the 59-year-old politician is generating interest among young voters.

“That’s kind of like what charisma is today: Can you land well on the internet?” Colton Wickland, 27, said at a rally in Milwaukee last month.

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‘Create the news’

Though only a small fraction of her campaign’s 250-person digital operation, Harris’s social media team is by far its most visible part, running all her accounts and watching for trend-worthy moments they can spotlight in real time.

Deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, who has described them as a pack of “feral 25-year-olds,” said the campaign started developing the strategy last year, worried voters had forgotten who Trump was and that the campaign needed “a voice that was more aggressive and hard-hitting” to remind them.

The team faces minimal content-approval checks and “barring objection, we’re gonna go. Everything goes on a five-minute warning,” Flaherty said. “You just gotta trust your people. Our f---up ratio [is as low] as if there were 19 layers of approval.”

A 13-person rapid-response team keeps a shared calendar of all major political events for both Republicans and Democrats and monitors them in shifts to ensure “we are never not watching,” said Butler, the team’s manager. When an eye-catching moment happens - like when Trump said immigrants had “poisoned” the country - the team races to post a clip of it on social media, working shifts that sometimes go past midnight.

“Campaigns are not just responding anymore,” Butler said. “Our job is to create the news.”

Each of the team’s social media “strategists” specializes in an individual platform, catering to its audience, subculture and slang. One strategist, for instance, is solely responsible for Facebook, where Butler said content for baby boomers thrives.

Lauren Kapp, 25, heads the five-person TikTok team. Every day, she wakes around 6:30 a.m. and starts scrolling the video app so she can be ready for their daily 9 a.m. meeting, when the team breaks down what’s trending that day.

A few years ago, Butler and Kapp were both fresh graduates of what Kapp called “the covid class.” Butler, a high school debate champ in Texas during Trump’s presidency, graduated from American University in 2020 and landed work as a video editor for Biden’s campaign. Kapp, who struggled to find a job as a political correspondent after leaving University of California, Berkeley, was hired by the Democratic National Committee as a “vertical video producer” after building a midsize TikTok following under the username “Poli Sci Princess.”

Earlier this year, both shifted from the Democrats’ online operation to the Biden-Harris team, where their job is not to mimic the cinematic editing and high production values of traditional campaign ads but instead to behave like typical TikTok users: reposting other people’s videos, sharing memes and sound bites, and reacting to major news moments, such as the particularly spicy dig Walz took at Vance during a speech in Philadelphia (“omg Tim Walz WENT THERE”).

They’ve “stitched” Trump into clips that tee him up as a punchline and split-screen his comments on abortion alongside the mobile game “Subway Surfers” - a common TikTok tactic for keeping overstimulated viewers’ attention. One post ranked photos of Walz by “aura points,” TikTok slang for a measure of coolness. (Enjoying a state-fair ride with his daughter, Hope, was “+23958 aura.”)

The team records and edits the videos on their phones before sending them over Slack to Butler, who typically reviews and signs off in less than 15 minutes. It can look freewheeling, but the team treats its content strategy like a science. Kapp said she won’t use any TikTok “trending sound” - the short audio clips that users can apply to their own videos - if it’s been used in more than 200,000 videos. “People get bored very easily,” she said.

After the Democratic convention, Kapp had just gotten home from Chicago and was trying to think of ways to emphasize Trump’s links to the conservative policy doctrine Project 2025 when she opted for a wild juxtaposition: a niche TikTok meme of dolphins and rainbows. The single-image post is now one of their most popular pieces of content, with more than 7 million views. Trump’s campaign copied it a few days later.

“You wouldn’t anticipate a political campaign to do it, which is what contributed to the virality of it,” she said.

TikTok is one of the world’s most popular social apps, with 170 million U.S. accounts, and roughly 40 percent of its American users said they use it to keep up with politics or current events, a Pew Research Center survey found last month; Trump’s campaign employs a TikTok team of its own.

For Harris, there’s an awkward hurdle, however: The Biden administration is currently defending in court a potential nationwide ban of TikTok, arguing the Chinese-owned app is a national security threat. Harris’s team uses TikTok on phones with nothing else installed to abide by a federal prohibition of the app on government-owned devices.

The campaign’s online engagement has skyrocketed during the Harris era. On TikTok, their “like-to-view” ratio, a measure of viewer engagement, went from about 10 percent during the Biden months to 25 percent, Kapp said.

And though campaigns dating back to former president Barack Obama have taken social media seriously, the Harris team’s big innovation has been letting a new wave of Generation Z innovators take control, said April Eichmeier, an assistant professor who studies political communication at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

“The under-25 group right now has never known a world without digital media,” she said. “They know how things land on TikTok because that’s their culture.”

The team’s seemingly frenetic and amateurish output conceals a sophisticated strategy, said Lara Cohen, a former executive at X who led some of its top partnerships with media operations and influencers. Each viral video helps them sneak into nonpolitical spaces and reach voters who are undecided or otherwise tuned-out.

“Great ideas die with too long an approval process,” said Cohen, now an executive at the creator-service company Linktree. “Someone’s going to be too worried to do something edgy. And they’re clearly not afraid of that.”

- - -

‘Oh he’s mad lol’

As the campaign’s social media experimentation has exploded, the lines between its online and offline presence have blurred. TikTok-style monologues have appeared in TV ads. Candidate selfies in field offices have appeared, from multiple angles, on Instagram. The campaign’s $40 camouflage “Harris Walz” hat has shown up not just in TikTok videos but on the head of Harris’s stepdaughter Ella Emhoff.

Harris and Walz, too, have tried their best to be omnipresent. During the convention, Harris played a name-that-song quiz with a social media show and told another creator that her favorite Chicago food was an Italian beef sandwich. Walz recently appeared on the short-video show “Subway Takes,” in which comedians offer their most controversial or raunchy opinions; Walz extolled the value of home-gutter management.

The goal, campaign staffers said, has been to humanize the candidates in a bitterly contentious race. After a Harris fundraising email said she’d coped with Trump’s 2016 election victory by scarfing down “a family-sized bag of nacho Doritos,” leading one Fox News guest to complain it was not “the response of an elite leader,” Walz’s X account posted a video showing him grabbing her a bag between campaign stops. “Every attack on her only seems to make her more relatable,” one viral Threads post said.

Rather than characterize Trump as a generational threat, Harris’s operation has often worked to cast him as an “unhinged and unserious man” and the butt of a big joke. Last month, when Trump suggested he might back out of this week’s debate, the team layered his video clips with the sound of a chicken. And where previous campaigns were reluctant to amplify Trump’s attacks, the Harris campaign has repeated them verbatim to mock or defang them alongside quips like “Oh he’s mad lol.”

Harris’s team has gone on the offensive inside Trump’s Truth Social, using their 350,000-follower account to needle Trump about his crowd size. Beyond just laughs, one campaign aide said a goal of the account is to rattle and enrage Trump inside his online safe space. After the debate, Harris’s team posted Fox News clips calling Trump’s performance a “train wreck.”

Trump’s campaign has derided Harris’s strategy as juvenile, with a spokesman saying anyone who thinks “using emojis is some cutting-edge message technique … [is] severely out of touch with reality.”

On TikTok, however, Harris’s team has proved so popular that people claiming to secretly run the account has become a meme in itself. To show it’s in on the joke, the campaign posted a video featuring Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, who - when asked who runs the account - dryly replies: “It’s obviously me.”

The real test will come in November, when the election shows whether sway on social media can produce real-world power. With less than two months until Election Day, Harris’s TikTok has shown a pivot toward more substantive fare, including a multipart series laying out Trump affiliates’ links to Project 2025.

They’ve also worked to capitalize on a new sense of hope among Democrats. One video, built on a trending clip of poignant music typically used for scenic vistas and sunsets, features a voice-over - “Oh, I wasn’t sad, I just needed a …” - then cuts to a buoyant DNC crowd cheering near an American flag.

“They’ve basically created this digital [fandom] of her,” Cohen said. “It sounds corny, but the most successful people online are the ones who feel unfiltered and authentic and real. That’s what people rally around.”

- - -

Dylan Wells contributed to this report.

Kamala Harris says she is a gun owner in presidential debate with Trump. Here's what she said


By Melissa Quinn
CBS NEWS
September 11, 2024

Washington — Vice President Kamala Harris surprised many when she revealed Tuesday night that she is a gun owner as she rebuffed former President Trump's claim during the presidential debate that her administration would confiscate Americans' firearms.

"This business about taking everyone's guns away, Tim Walz and I are both gun owners," Harris said during the debate hosted by ABC News. "We're not taking anybody's guns away."

Walz has spoken publicly about being an avid hunter and gun owner. He even earned "A" ratings from the National Rifle Association from 2010 to 2016, though his grade fell to an "F" in 2018 after the Minnesota governor backed stricter gun laws after the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

But Harris' quip about having a gun raised eyebrows, even though it's not the first time the vice president has spoken about it publicly.

In 2019, while running in the Democratic presidential primary, Harris told reporters that she is a gun owner, according to a CNN report at the time.

Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, debates Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. president Donald Trump, for the first time during the presidential election campaign.

WIN MCNAMEE / GETTY IMAGES

"I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do — for personal safety," she said. "I was a career prosecutor."

A Harris campaign aide told CNN in 2019 that she has a handgun that was purchased years ago.

She also said at a policy forum during her first presidential campaign that she supports a mandatory buyback program for assault-syle weapons.

"There are 5 million at least, some estimate as many as 10 million," Harris said of the guns. "And we're going to have to have smart public policy that's about taking those off the streets, but doing it the right way."

Harris campaign officials told The New York Times in July that she will not push for a mandatory buyback of certain guns as president, but supports tightening gun restrictions.

Following Tuesday's debate, a Harris campaign official again confirmed the Democratic presidential nominee owns a handgun, and it's the same firearm she mentioned five years ago.

Harris has called for more stringent gun laws, including universal background checks and red-flag laws, which allow people to petition the courts to temporarily take away a person's gun if they are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. She also supports a ban on assault-style weapons and increased funding for mental health care.

But the vice president has said on the campaign trail that she supports the Second Amendment.

"It is a false choice to say you're either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone's guns away," she said during a campaign event in New Hampshire last week. "I'm in favor of the Second Amendment, and I know we need reasonable gun safety laws in our country."

The debate between Harris and Trump was their first face-to-face meeting and may be the only matchup between the two presidential hopefuls before the November election.

ASSASSINATED BY ZIONIST SNIPER

‘No one should be shot for a protest’: US’ Blinken warns Israel after ‘unprovoked and unjustified’ killing of American activist

WAGGING HIS FINGER FIERCELY


Palestinian security forces carry the body of slain Turkish-American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, covered with a chequerred keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag, during a memorial service starting from the Rafidia hospital in Nablus. — AFP pic
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Wednesday, 11 Sep 2024 

LONDON, Sept 11 — US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday urged Israel to make “fundamental changes” in its operations in the occupied West Bank after the military acknowledged its fire likely killed a US citizen activist there.

US President Joe Biden later said he thought the killing of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was an “accident”, but Blinken called it “unprovoked and unjustified”.

After an initially measured response to Eygi’s death on Friday, pending a fact-finding exercise, Blinken said the United States would raise it at senior levels with its key ally.

The investigation, and eyewitness accounts, make clear “that her killing was both unprovoked and unjustified”, Blinken told reporters on a visit to London.

“No one should be shot and killed for attending a protest,” he said.


“In our judgement, Israeli security forces need to make some fundamental changes in the way that they operate in the West Bank, including changes to their rules of engagement.

“We have the second American citizen killed at the hands of Israeli security forces. It’s not acceptable. It has to change.”


Biden told reporters hours later however that the killing appeared to have been an accident.

“Apparently it was an accident — it ricocheted off the ground, and she got hit by accident,” Biden said, without elaborating.

Ceasefire push

Eygi, who was 26 and also held Turkish citizenship, was killed as she attended the site of weekly demonstrations against Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law but supported by right-wing members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

The Israeli military said it had found that it was “highly likely that she was hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF (Israeli army) fire”.

It added that the fire “was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot”.



Palestinians and international activists lift portraits of slain Turkish-American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi as they arrive for her final farewell at the Rafidia hospital morgue in Nablus in the occupied West Bank on September 8, 2024. — AFP pic

It said Eygi was killed “during a violent riot in which dozens of Palestinian suspects burned tyres and hurled rocks towards security forces at the Beita Junction”.

But Eygi’s family rejected the military’s version of events and called its preliminary inquiry “wholly inadequate”.

“She was taking shelter in an olive grove when she was shot in the head and killed by a bullet from an Israeli soldier,” they said in a statement.

“This cannot be misconstrued as anything other except a deliberate, targeted and precise attack by the military against an unarmed civilian.”

‘Peaceful’ demonstration

Eygi was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian organisation.

On Saturday it dismissed claims that ISM activists threw rocks at Israeli forces as “false” and said the demonstration was peaceful.

The United Nations’ rights office had earlier said Israeli forces killed Eygi with a “shot in the head”.

The mayor of Beita, the Palestinian official news agency Wafa and her family also reported that Israeli soldiers killed her.

Turkey said she was killed by “Israeli occupation soldiers”, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a fierce critic of Israel despite his country’s ties with the country — condemning Israel as “barbaric”.

The United States is the crucial supporter of Israel, providing billions of dollars in weapons and diplomatic support.

It has maintained its support despite concern over the deaths of several US citizens.

Blinken also has been at the forefront of efforts to seek a ceasefire in the 11-month war.

He acknowledged that “very hard” differences remained, but said that all sides would benefit from a deal that would “turn down the temperature” in Gaza.

“It’s clearly in Israel’s interest,” he said.

Speaking next to Blinken, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy voiced outrage at a different Israeli strike on Tuesday in a designated safe zone that officials in Hamas-run Gaza said killed 40 people.

Israel said it targeted a Hamas command centre.

“We’re meeting at a critical moment — a critical moment for securing a ceasefire in Gaza, with the shocking deaths in Khan Yunis this morning only reinforcing how desperately needed that ceasefire is,” Lammy said. — AFP