Jonathan Blitzer

The daily stream of racism and mendacity has had a numbing effect. But the question of what Trump might actually do is a prospect that voters cannot afford to ignore.

For years, the former President has claimed that undocumented immigrants vote illegally. That fiction is now the explicit position of the Party establishment.

At the Democratic National Convention, the sense of relief was as overwhelming as the general euphoria—but the campaign against Donald Trump has only just begun.

Republicans have attacked the Vice-President as the Biden Administration’s “border czar,” but her remit was always to address the root causes farther south.

The Center for Renewing America is one of roughly two dozen right-wing groups that have emerged in Washington since Trump left office. What unites them is a wealthy network based on Capitol Hill called the Conservative Partnership Institute, which many in Washington regard as the next Trump Administration in waiting. C.P.I.’s list of personnel and affiliates includes some of Trump’s most fervent backers: Meadows is a senior partner; Stephen Miller, Trump’s top adviser on immigration, runs an ass…

A couple of weeks ago, at the White House, President Joe Biden announced the most consequential act of immigration relief in more than a decade. He gave roughly half a million undocumented spouses of citizens a path to permanent legal status, on the condition that they have lived here since at least 2014 and pass a criminal-­background check. “I refuse to believe that to secure our border we have to walk away from being American,” Biden said. “The Statue of Liberty is not some relic of American…

Last December, while top-ranking officials at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security were meeting with a small group of senators to negotiate the asylum bill, I sat down with the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. “We’re at a threshold moment,” he told me. At the time, record numbers of migrants were arriving at the southern border; the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, was busing tens of thousands of them to Democratic cities; and Congress had recently rejected a…

By ten o’clock, as the hearing started, the room was unusually crowded. Berner’s supporters from the labor movement had turned out, expecting a showdown. The exchange went as predicted for half of the hearing, with the first five Republicans grilling Berner about her time with the union. But when it was Ted Cruz’s turn, two hours into the proceedings, he didn’t address Berner at all. “Mr. Mangi,” he began. “Last week, the American people were horrified to watch the testimony of the presidents of…

Joe Biden’s Texas Showdown

D.H.S. has a sprawling portfolio, with two hundred and sixty thousand employees spread across two dozen agencies, including the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and a cybersecurity division. But the department is best known for presiding over what some have called the third rail of American politics: the country’s immigration system, which was last reformed in 1990 and has been in a state of disrepair for decades. “I’ve seen it,” Mayorkas told Biden. “I’v…