Harris calls on Texas voters to protect abortion and voting rights

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Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday referred to as Texas’ abortion ban “immoral” and urged Texans to protect reproductive rights when contemplating their decisions within the upcoming November elections.

“A democracy will be as strong as our willingness to fight for it,” she stated throughout a dialogue on reproductive rights on the LBJ Presidential Library on the University of Texas at Austin campus, a part of a daylong journey that ended with an look at a downtown fundraiser for Texas Democrats.

While Harris pressured the significance of voting not just for a governor and lawyer basic who assist reproductive rights, she additionally famous native elections have been additionally essential, particularly when it comes to selecting a prosecutor. District attorneys will now have to determine whether or not to prosecute Texas medical doctors and well being care staff in the event that they carry out an abortion not meant to save the lifetime of the pregnant affected person.

Performing an abortion in Texas is now a felony punishable by up to life in jail. The new state regulation, which has solely slim exceptions to save the lifetime of a pregnant affected person, went into impact in August, two months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The regulation has pressured Texans to search abortions in different states.

“It’s going to matter who your county prosecutor is if you live in a place where there’s a state law that has criminalized doctors and nurses and health care providers,” Harris stated.

Harris stated that the U.S. Department of Justice is working with state attorneys basic to guarantee Americans have a proper to journey however “not the one in Texas,” she stated, referring to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

At the fundraiser, Harris endorsed Beto O’Rourke for governor and highlighted for the viewers among the Biden administration’s achievements: distributing pandemic reduction, passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which caps drug costs for Medicare recipients, together with passing a hefty infrastructure invoice alongside and making historic strides to tackle the local weather change disaster.

But she additionally spent loads of her tackle discussing the U.S. Supreme Court determination this summer time within the Dobbs v. Jackson case, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

“The United States Supreme Court just took a constitutional right that had been recognized from the people of America, from the women of America,” Harris stated. “While extremists — so-called leaders — trumpet the rhetoric of freedom, they attack the very foundations of freedom.”

She blamed Texas’ elected GOP leaders for eradicating girls’s freedoms, calling them “the ones passing laws making it difficult for people in the states to vote.”

Harris added: “One of those people is the governor of this very state.” Even earlier than the Dobbs determination, she stated, Gov. Greg Abbott and different leaders handed among the “most radical, most anti-women laws in the country.”

Harris warned that overturning Roe was only a first step for Republicans.

“Where do we think this is heading?” Harris requested the group. “Justice Clarence Thomas said the quiet part out loud. Contraception is on the line. Marriage equality is on the line. With Republican party leaders in charge, health care is on the line.”

One subject noticeably absent from her go to was any point out of immigration.

Shortly after Biden took workplace, he assigned Harris the accountability of immigration. In June 2021 Harris she traveled to Guatemala and Mexico, a visit she stated was an effort to sort out the foundation causes of unlawful immigration. A couple of weeks after that journey, she visited Border Patrol services in El Paso and met with migrant support teams, however the vp has not but visited the Rio Grande Valley, the place a lot of border apprehensions are occurring.

Predictably, Harris’ go to drew barbs from Texas Republicans, together with Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who’ve criticized the federal authorities’s stance relating to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Texans have been forced to bear the consequences of this Administration’s failure to address the border crisis, including the historic number of illegal crossings as well as the tragic rise in migrant deaths, drug smuggling, fentanyl overdoses, and cartel violence,” Cornyn stated in an announcement on Friday. “Unfortunately, the Administration’s Border Czar hasn’t seen the epicenter of their self-inflicted crisis firsthand, which has overwhelmed our border communities and law enforcement.”

Cornyn’s jab at Harris got here after Cruz, put strain on the Biden administration on immigration, threatening Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas with impeachment for “dereliction of duty” on the southern border in a letter to the division Thursday.

Federal immigration brokers have recorded 2.1 million encounters on the Southwest border — a report quantity — within the first 11 months of the fiscal yr 2022, which ended on Sept. 30 That’s a 24% enhance from your complete earlier fiscal yr 2021. Of these, greater than half occurred on the Texas-Mexico border, the place brokers recorded 1.2 million encounters through the first 11 months of the fiscal yr 2022.

One caveat. Those numbers embrace repeat border crossings by people who made a couple of try. And these repeat crossings have helped drive the variety of encounters larger.

In March 2020, the Trump administration invoked an emergency well being order generally known as Title 42 which immigration brokers have used to immediately flip away many individuals attempting to cross the border, again to Mexico, together with asylum seekers, with out having to file expenses and wait on the formal deportation course of.

Immigration brokers report an individual trying to cross greater than as soon as throughout the identical fiscal yr as a brand new encounter. The newest recidivism charge out there exhibits that it’s at 27%, the very best it’s been because the fiscal yr 2015.

Reporter Uriel Garcia contributed to this story.

Disclosure: LBJ Presidential Library and University of Texas at Austin have been monetary supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news group that’s funded partly by donations from members, foundations and company sponsors. Financial supporters play no function within the Tribune’s journalism. Find an entire list of them here.