Tuesday, July 27, 2021
WASHINGTON – A federal judge’s ruling that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is unlawful should have no practical impact on more than 600,000 covered immigrants for now – but it is sure to have an emotional impact, advocates say.
“I think it’s the mental toll,” said José Patiño, a DACA recipient and director of education and external affairs at Aliento. “It makes it really difficult to continue moving forward.”
The July 16 ruling by U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Texas was just the latest in a string of reversals and renewals that have been with DACA since it started in 2012 and have reached as high as the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hanen agreed with Texas and eight other states that the Department of Homeland Security did not have the authority to create the DACA program, which defers deportation of immigrants who were brought to this country illegally as children.
Hanen said DHS could still receive applications for first-time DACA protection, but could not approve them. Acknowledging the “hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients and others who have relied on this program for almost a decade,” however, he said that current recipients could continue to apply for and receive renewals of their DACA protection.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said on its website that “DHS will continue to accept the filing of both initial and renewal DACA requests,” but that “DHS is prohibited from granting initial DACA requests.”
Monday, July 26, 2021
Friday, July 23, 2021
PHOENIX – Although the percentage of those unwilling to take a COVID-19 vaccine has remained unchanged since May, Arizonans are showing less concern about the risks, according to a new survey by OH Predictive Insights.
The online opt-in panel survey of 1,000 adults, conducted from July 6-11, found that 42% of Arizonans were “slightly or not at all concerned” about the deadly disease, whereas 35% of Arizonans were “extremely or moderately concerned.”
“The data showed no statistically meaningful change from May in the number of Arizonans unwilling to take the COVID-19 vaccine (21%), while those who reported already taking the vaccine rose by 8%,” according to the survey. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
The decrease in “pandemic panic” comes at a time when the Arizona Department of Health Services’ daily curve showed an uptick in COVID-19 cases in the past week. Earlier this month, the daily number of new cases exceeded 1,000 for the first time since February. Arizona has recorded more than 18,100 deaths since January 2020.
Health experts say immunization is the best way to fight the Delta variant of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, which quickly became the dominant strain in Arizona.
“By and large, it is a surge among the unvaccinated,” said Dr. Joshua LaBaer, executive director of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, in a media briefing Wednesday. “The important take-home message is that the vaccines do work against this Delta variant.”
According to the survey, vaccine willingness rates varied among Arizonans of different racial groups, education levels and ages.
“College-educated white respondents reported an 81% vaccination rate while 57% of non-college-educated white respondents said they had been vaccinated,” the survey said. “However, 58% of college-educated Hispanic/Latinos say they have vaccinated, and a statistically equivalent 56% of non-college-educated Hispanic/Latinos are vaccinated as well.”
Thursday, July 22, 2021
Wednesday, July 21, 2021
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
WASHINGTON – Arizona Democrats called on Attorney General Mark Brnovich to investigate the state Senate’s audit of Maricopa County election returns, which they said Friday is little more than a “sham audit” disguising a series of politically motivated attacks.
Their demands come as a congressional panel has launched its own investigation into Cyber Ninjas, the private firm that was contracted to do the audit that is still ongoing after six months.
A House Oversight subcommittee on Wednesday gave Cyber Ninjas two weeks to produce documents showing their experience, their policies, how they are paid and what communication they had, if any, with former President Donald Trump, who has insisted on audits like Arizona’s.
State Democrats welcomed the federal probe, which they hoped would spur Brnovich to do the same.
“Unless he (Brnovich) agrees to investigate, there is no other conclusion we can draw upon, other than that he doesn’t care about Trump’s reported election interference,” Arizona Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios said Friday.
Rios was joined by House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding and Arizona Democratic Party Chair Raquel Terán at a news conference in which they said Brnovich needs to take action immediately to stop the “illegal behavior” they said has been seen in the audit.
Requests for comment from both Brnovich and Cyber Ninjas were not immediately returned Friday. But in a meeting Thursday with Senate Republicans, Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan defended his company’s performance in the audit, now six months old, and said its operations have been transparent throughout.
Monday, July 19, 2021
WASHINGTON – The private firms auditing Maricopa County elections told senators Thursday they have finished reviewing the more than 2 million ballots, but will not be able to deliver a complete report without cooperation from county officials.
That led Arizona Senate President Karen Fann to threaten to take the county “back to court” to force compliance – one day after a judge said Fann and the auditors need to comply with county requests for public records in what critics call a “sham audit.”
The comments came during an update of the audit, now six months old, in which no questions or comments were taken and auditors spent much of the time defending their actions and criticizing opponents.
Senate Democrats did not attend the session on the audit, which one said “is clearly an attempt to sow distrust in our election system.”
“At the end of the day, this is Sen. Fann and one other Republican bringing in essentially their clients, their paid clients, to have this back-and-forth conversation, and quite honestly, perpetuate a lot of the conspiracy theories that they’ve been throwing out,” said Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios.
Rios said Democrats only learned of the meeting 17 hours before it started.
“This is not a hearing,” Rios said. “If it were a true hearing, we would have had to have been noticed 24 hours in advance, and it would have had to have been held in front of a committee which would include Democrats and Republicans.”
But Fann, a Prescott Republican, and Sen. Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, were the only two lawmakers at the more than two-hour event, in which former Secretary of State Ken Bennett, Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and CyFIR CEO Ben Cotton laid out progress of the audit.
