Trump signs executive order to exclude undocumented people from census – live

Joe Biden promised to give a raise to childcare workers, who he said are “too often underpaid, unseen, and undervalued.”

The Democratic candidate noted 40% of childcare workers are still on SNAP or Medicaid, calling that figure “unacceptable.”

Biden also reflected on his own time as a single father, raising his two sons after his first wife and young daughter were killed in a car accident.

“We know so many of you are going through the same thing without the kind of help I had, but now everything, everything feels different,” Biden said. “There’s just that feeling, that sense, when you just don’t know if everything is going to turn out okay.”

Closing his speech, Biden urged Americans to not lose hope and to remain resilient in the face of this crisis.

“Let’s get the hell — heck up,” Biden said, correcting his language.

Joe Biden laid out his plan to expand access to preschool for working families, directly linking the need for affordable childcare to the country’s economic recovery.

“We’re trapped in a caregiving crisis within an economic crisis within a healthcare crisis,” the Democratic candidate said.

Biden pledged that, if elected, he would guarantee access to “free, high-quality preschool” for every three- and four-year-old child in the country.

The former vice president also promised that low- and middle-income families would not spend more than 7% of their income on care for children under the age of five.

Echoing his other recent speeches, Joe Biden sharply criticized Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Democratic candidate said the president “simply doesn’t understand” that the economy will not recover until the country gets the spread of coronavirus under control.

“For all his bluster about his expertise on the economy, he’s unable to explain how he’ll actually help working families hit the hardest,” Biden said. “He’s quit on you. He’s quit on this country.”

Joe Biden is describing the third plank of his “Build Back Better” plan to reinvigorate the US economy, which has severely suffered because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Democratic candidate said the plan was aimed at “easing the squeeze on working families” who are caring for young children and elderly loved ones.

“I know it’s hard to think of the future when you’re just trying to get through the crisis at hand,” Biden said, noting that many childcare facilities have been forced to close because of the pandemic.

“We’re in a childcare emergency, and it didn’t have to be this way,” Biden said.

Joe Biden is now delivering remarks in New Castle, Delaware, on how he will “build a robust 21st century caregiving and education workforce,” according to his campaign.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has recently delivered a series of speeches on how he would help rebuild the US economy if elected.

Biden’s remarks come as Trump has pushed schools to reopen this fall despite concerns about the spread of coronavirus in the classroom once in-person instruction resumes.

The American Civil Liberties Union vowed to sue the Trump administration over its executive order aimed at excluded undocumented persons from being counted in the 2020 census.

“Trump tried to add a citizenship question to the census and lost in the Supreme Court,” the group said in a tweet.

“His latest attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities WILL be found unconstitutional. We’ll see him in court — and win — again.”

The order will almost certainly become tied up in legal battles, making it unlikely the matter will be settled before the November election.

The White House said Trump has signed his executive order aimed at excluding undocumented persons from being counted in the 2020 census.

“For the purpose of the reapportionment of Representatives following the 2020 census, it is the policy of the United States to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” the order reads.

“Excluding these illegal aliens from the apportionment base is more consonant with the principles of representative democracy underpinning our system of Government.”

Critics of the expected order have argued the Constitution calls for counting all persons in the United States, whether they are citizens or not. If implemented, the order could cause areas with large populations of undocumented persons to lose funding and government representation.

However, the American Civil Liberties Union has already said it intends to file a lawsuit against the administration over the order, meaning the matter will likely become tied up in the court system.

The order comes one year after the supreme court blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to this year’s census.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

• Trump will soon sign an executive order aimed at excluding undocumented persons from being counted in the census, the White House confirmed to the Guardian. But the American Civil Liberties Union has already said it plans to legally challenge the order, which comes a year after the supreme court blocked the administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the census.
• The president will resume his coronavirus briefings later today. The White House press secretary deflected a question about whether other officials, such as Drs Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, will appear at the briefings.
• Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell outlined the broad strokes of the Republican coronavirus relief bill. McConnell said the legislation would include $105 billion for schools, which is well short of the $430 billion that Democrats have been pushing for. The bill will also allocate more money in small business loans and direct payments to American families, McConnell said.

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

A spokesperson for Republican congressman Ted Yoho denied that he called Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “a fucking bitch,” after he confronted the progressive lawmaker about her comments on poverty and policing.

Yoho’s spokesperson told ABC News, “He did not call Rep. Ocasio-Cortez what has been reported in the Hill or any name for that matter. … Instead, he made a brief comment to himself as he walked away summarizing what he believes her polices to be: bullshit.”

According to the Hill, Yoho delivered the insult about Ocasio-Cortez shortly after their tense exchange on the Capitol steps ended.

Congressman Roger Williams, who joined Yoho on the Capitol steps, told the Hill that he was not aware whether his colleague made the insulting comment.

“I was actually thinking, as I was walking down the stairs, I was thinking about some issues I’ve got in my district that need to get done,” Williams said. “I don’t know what their topic was. There’s always a topic, isn’t there?”

The federal agents being sent to Chicago are expected to remain in the city for at least two months, according to the Associated Press.

The AP reports:

DHS is slated to send about 150 Homeland Security Investigations agents to Chicago to help local law enforcement deal with a spike in crime, according to an official with direct knowledge of the plans who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.

The agents, which are generally used to conduct investigations into human trafficking, drugs and weapons smuggling, were expected to stay in Chicago at least two months, according to the official. It’s not clear exactly how they will back up local law enforcement or when they will arrive, but they will make arrests for federal crimes, not local ones.

Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has said she opposes the administration’s efforts to send federal agents to her city and may even file a lawsuit over the issue.

“We are not going to have people who don’t know our streets, don’t know our neighborhoods and then who are engaging in clearly unconstitutional conduct operating at will in our city,” Lightfoot said in an interview last night.

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:

Donald Trump is planning to take executive action Tuesday to exclude undocumented persons from the official Census Bureau count for drawing electoral districts, the White House confirmed.

The decision will likely be met with an immediate legal challenge (the American Civil Liberties Union has already indicated it will sue). The US constitution requires districts to be apportioned based on a census of all “persons.”

Electoral districts must have roughly the same amount of people in them, but Republicans have been pushing in recent years to exclude those who can’t vote from the official tally. In 2015, Thomas Hofeller, a top Republican redistricting expert, wrote that only using the voter eligible population would be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”

The US supreme court ruled in 2016 that states were not required to draw districts based only on the number of eligible voters, but left an open question as to whether states could choose to do so. The issue is expected to return to the court in the future.

Trump’s executive order comes a year after the US supreme court blocked his administration’s effort to add a question asking about citizenship to the 2020 census survey, which goes to every US household. In a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said the Trump administration had not followed proper procedure in adding the question and that its justification “seems to have been contrived.”

Moments ago, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said it was “absolutely absurd” that the St Louis couple who pointed guns at anti-racism protesters had been charged with a felony.

McEnany accused the St Louis prosecutor who filed the charges against Mark and Patricia McCloskey of an “extreme abuse of power,” claiming the couple was merely “defending themselves from violent protesters.”

Lois Beckett has more details on the charges:

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, both personal injury attorneys in their 60s, will be charged with felony unlawful use of a weapon and a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree assault.

‘It is illegal to wave weapons in a threatening manner – that is unlawful in the city of St Louis,’ the circuit attorney Kim Gardner told the Associated Press on Monday, arguing that the couple’s actions risked creating a violent situation during an otherwise non-violent protest.

‘We must protect the right to peacefully protest, and any attempt to chill it through intimidation will not be tolerated,’ Gardner said in a statement.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany concluded her briefing with one of her trademark scripted walk-offs.

The press secretary lashed out against the New York Times for the newspaper’s recent deep dive on how the Trump administration failed to get coronavirus infections under control.

Specifically, the Times reported this on Dr Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force:

Dr. Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Colleagues described her as dedicated to public health and working herself to exhaustion to get the data right, but her model-based assessment nonetheless failed to account for a vital variable: how Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.

McEnany said of the Times article, “The attack on Dr. Birx was appalling and egregious, and the New York Times should be ashamed of themselves.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was asked to elaborate on her comment that Trump is tested “multiple times a day” for coronavirus.

The White House previously said the president was tested on a daily basis, but McEnany’s comment that he is tested multiple times each day is new.

McEnany would not provide further details, only saying Trump is tested “often.” She repeated, “Sometimes it is more than one time a day.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany accused journalists of trying to “scare” Americans about the pandemic.

“I think in many cases the media has tried to scare the American people,” McEnany said.

The press secretary argued the media has not appropriately covered other health-related costs of the shutdowns caused by coronavirus.

McEnany’s comments come as the US death toll from coronavirus surpasses 140,000. The US has also confirmed more than 3.8 million cases of the virus.