A Texas lawmaker is blaming the actions of President Barack Obama for the recent surge of illegal immigration in the Rio Grande Valley.
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott held a joint press conference at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio on Monday morning.
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During the press conference, Cruz blamed an executive order signed by President Barack Obama back in June 2012 for creating the current surge of illegal immigration.
President Obama signed an executive order creating the “deferred action” program giving legal to thousands of people who were brought to the United States illegally as children.
Progressive Mikel Weisser– from the Left Coast of Arizona– is challenging Tea Party favorite Paul Gosar for the CD 4 seat.
Arizona’s Congressional delegation includes nine members of the House of Representatives: five Democrats Ann Kirkpatrick (CD1), Ron Barber (CD2), Raul Grijalva (CD3), Ed Pastor (CD7, retiring this year), and Kyrsten Sinema (CC9) and four Republicans Paul Gosar (CD4), Matt Salmon (CD5), David Schweikert (CD6), and Trent Franks (CD8).
At Blog for Arizona, we complain often and loudly about Blue Dog Democrats and their votes, but our country’s real enemy in the fight for freedom, democracy, and self determination is the Tea Party. They pontificate poetically about family values, but they vote for laws that deny food security, basic healthcare, quality education, and a living wage to millions of Americans. They talk about freedom, but they support for-profit mass incarceration and widespread surveillance of Americans– not to mention forcing us to live in fear due to lax gun laws. They wave the flag and promote patriotism, but they send soldiers to fight in useless wars and cut their benefits and ridicule them when they come home. And, above all, they spout folksy, vacuous platitudes, while they dutifully serve their corporate benefactors and ignore “the little guy”.
“I knew it was an uphill battle when I started,” laughs Weisser. “It is about bringing a fight to GOP ideas I know are wrong for America. About stopping Republican terrorism and backwards thinking and working for a 21st century America.” (Public forum and candidate details after the jump.)
The local Tucson community is rallying to aid the refugee children from Central America who are being brought here by immigration officials in an humanitarian crisis. (h/t photo: The Arizona Republic).
Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson met with community leaders and local and federal officials Friday to plan for humanitarian aid for immigrant women and children being dropped off at the bus station downtown.
The Department of Homeland Security began dropping off several hundred immigrants a week at the Tucson Greyhound station for about three weeks, expecting them to find their own way to cities across the country to report to immigration offices there.
Large numbers of mostly Central Americans and families from Mexico are being apprehended in south Texas in the Rio Grande Valley and being flown to bus stations in Tucson and Phoenix because federal officials cannot handle the influx of immigrants in Texas for processing.
Gov. Jan Brewer is using the federal government’s shipments of undocumented migrants to Arizona to fatten her federal political action committee, Jan PAC.
In a message to supporters titled “Abandoned in Arizona,” Brewer says President Barack Obama can ignore her pleas to address the issue, but “he cannot ignore the unified demands of the citizens of this country.” She asks supporters to help “bring respect and security” back by signing a petition to end “his appalling practice.”
“If we continue to let ourselves be walked over, Arizona will become the battleground it is starting to resemble,” the message said. “We must seize the opportunity now and start fighting if we want to redeem our state before it’s too late.”
In a post script to the message, Brewer asks supporters to fund her efforts against the federal government: “It only takes 2 minutes to make a donation to a fight that is worth every penny.”
When Eric Cantor lost his primary Tuesday night, and his position as House Majority Leader, a lot of liberals were exultant because why the hell shouldn’t we be? It was comical watching the whole thing unfold, since the Cantor camp had been assured of a 30 point victory by their own advisers. And Eric Cantor is a dick anyway. A huge wingnut. A wingnut with access to lots of money, therefore an “establishment Republican”, but that didn’t moderate a single one of his stances. It’s been Cantor leading the GOP House majority in obstructionism, even to the point of endangering the country’ssolvency.
Oh wait, he was “good on immigration” or something like that, so I’ve been told by party poopers who insist that “immigration reform is dead now”. Meh. It’s true that immigration reform is looking pretty moribund these days, but that already the case before Cantor’s primary loss. I’m not sure what people think Eric Cantor would have done on immigration in the next few weeks that he won’t now that he’ll be resigning as Majority Leader next month. His past performance on the issue has certainly been less than impressive, as Vox‘s Dara Lind explains:
A Texas lawmaker is blaming the actions of President Barack Obama for the recent surge of illegal immigration in the Rio Grande Valley.
