DeSantis convened his allies this week in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to press them to raise money to support Trump, making the case over a seafood and steak dinner that they need to work together to prevent Democratic President Joe Biden from winning a second term. The governor and about 30 people then spent Thursday morning in a hotel conference room raising money for an outside group that supports the former president’s 2024 White House campaign.

Trump called into the gathering to thank members of the group for their work, according to four people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to publicly discuss the private session and spoke on condition of anonymity.

In what three people present described as a warm and gracious call to the group that was heard over speakerphone, Trump praised DeSantis and the effort, saying “Ron, I love that you’re back.”

A reconciliation helps both of them. Trump is trying to make up fundraising ground against Biden while DeSantis hopes to preserve a potential future White House run for which Trump’s supporters could be key.

DeSantis and his top donors raised more than $3 million on Thursday for the super political action committee Right for America, backed by big Republican donors such as Ike Perlmutter, who has agreed to match at least a portion of the DeSantis team’s fundraising rather than funneling money directly to Trump’s campaign.

That arrangement, reached after talks between the Trump and DeSantis camps, is designed to address concerns among DeSantis supporters about their money going to pay the former president’s legal bills, according to people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the private talks. Trump notably blessed the structure when he called into the group’s meeting Thursday.

“This is where I want you to focus,” Trump said in a roughly 15-minute call, according to a senior political adviser to DeSantis who was not authorized to publicly discuss the private meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity.

DeSantis’ decision to push money to the PAC instead of giving directly to Trump’s campaign has raised eyebrows among some Trump campaign officials, according to a person familiar with the former president’s campaign thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the arrangement.

Right for America is competing for donors with MAGA Inc., the chief super PAC backing Trump. Such groups are prohibited from directly coordinating with a presidential campaign, something that hamstrung DeSantis during his presidential run due to conflicts between his campaign and his support of Never Back Down, the largest super PAC backing DeSantis’ candidacy.

Other supporters of both men support the arrangement. Right for America is run by Sergio Gor, a longtime Trump ally who is close to the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. The two run Winning Team Publishing, which published two of the former president’s books.

“We are thrilled by the support we are receiving from Governor DeSantis,” Gor said in a statement. “We look forward to ensuring President Donald Trump is elected in November.”

Some DeSantis donors had been reluctant to give to Trump because they worried their money would help pay Trump’s lawyers in his criminal cases instead of being used directly to focus on beating Biden.

A number of big-name Florida contributors who have given to DeSantis remain hesitant about contributing to efforts to support Trump, said Al Hoffman, a Palm Beach County Republican donor and former Republican National Committee finance chair.

“I know that there are Republican conservative, big-money donors that are very reluctant to endorse Trump,” said Hoffman, who was also chairman of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s 2002 reelection campaign.

DeSantis endorsed Trump when he dropped out of the race and promised in a face-to-face meeting with the former president in April to work for his campaign. The 45-year-old governor, who has won two terms and pushed a longtime swing state increasingly to the right, may run for the White House again and would need the backing of Trump voters in a future Republican primary.

DeSantis called his allies to Fort Lauderdale this week to raise money for Trump, telling them on Wednesday night that they needed to work to prevent a second Biden term.

The meeting was the kickoff for what is expected to be a coast-to-coast fundraising effort by DeSantis allies, with upcoming events likely in Texas, California, Washington state and perhaps New York.

Trump and DeSantis have also discussed a role for the governor at the Republican National Convention. Aides to DeSantis said it was Trump’s suggestion and was not contingent on any fundraising effort on DeSantis’ part.

Donors who discussed the Thursday event were struck by the collegiality between Trump and DeSantis during the call. One person who spoke on condition of anonymity about the closed-door gathering called the conversation “very gracious” and noted that Trump and DeSantis talked about golf, a favorite Trump pastime.

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Jack Herrera | LA Times Special Feature

A Californian suddenly transported to this South Texas town on a Sunday morning, just in time for the service at the Tree of Life evangelical church, might be hard-pressed to know she wasn’t in California anymore. California has more megachurches than any other state, so the nature of the congregation wouldn’t provide the tipoff.

Rows of pickups in the large parking lot might be a tell, but the percentage of Texans who drive trucks is actually around the national average. Even if the Californian began asking for political opinions, she’d still have trouble proving she was in Texas. “We’re a diverse congregation,” said Kristen Kallus-Guerra, a congregant who serves as a greeter at the church doors. “Around the election, our pastor always reminds us to go out and vote — but he doesn’t tell us who to vote for.”

The most obvious evidence that the Tree of Life Church was in Texas would be the number of Dak Prescott jerseys. At least five congregants wore the Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback’s No. 4 uniform to church on a recent November morning. The diversity of Texas can surprise people used to viewing the state through the lens of its very conservative public policies. The people of the two states do not differ nearly as much as their governance, according to a poll of roughly 1,600 California and Texas residents, conducted by YouGov for the Los Angeles Times.

California versus Texas is a rivalry without parallel. The nation’s two most populous states are political mirror images — the liberal bastion on the left coast, and the conservative Southern garrison on the Gulf. California fervently protects abortion rights; Texas bans nearly all abortions. Texas upholds gun rights; California strictly regulates firearms. California plans to ban new gasoline-powered cars by 2035; Texas has banned companies that divest from fossil fuels from doing business with the state. But a plurality of respondents in both California and Texas identified as moderates — 32% of Californians and 31% of Texans — the poll found. Moderate can mean very different things to different people, but on specific policy questions, residents of the two states were often surprisingly close.

Asked if government should do more to solve problems and help the needs of people, majorities in both states said yes — 61% of Californians and 55% of Texans. The opposing view, that government does “too many things better left to businesses and individuals” was only a bit more popular in Texas, 34%, than in California, 26%. Asked about government benefits, 55% of Californians and 50% of Texans agreed that “poor people have hard lives because government benefits don’t go far enough to provide a decent standard of living.”

Even on the most hot-button issues — abortion, same-sex marriage, climate change — the poll found that the differences between Californians and Texans came down to a difference that’s fewer than 10 percentage points. The poll shows that one demographic group has an outsized role in widening the political gulf between the two states — white residents, who also are more likely to vote than other racial groups. Religious belief is a major factor in why white residents of Texas and California hold opposing views, the poll indicates. Overall, the poll illuminates one of the central aspects of America’s political divide: Rather than huge splits in public opinion, the gap between America’s quintessential red and blue states comes down to tipping points.

Texans, on average, lean a few points to the right, Californians a few more points to the left. Those leanings tip politics in each state, empowering conservative Republicans in Texas and liberal Democrats in California who have driven policy in opposite directions, magnifying differences between two states that otherwise have much in common.

States divided

If it weren’t for their political reputations, it might be easier to see California and Texas as twins, not foils. Both Western states, with their dramatic landscapes, used to be part of Mexico; both have brutal colonial pasts, with Spaniards and later Americans waging wars of removal against Native peoples.

The early economies of California and Texas were defined by cattle and agriculture and later oil. In the last few decades, California, and increasingly Texas, have benefited from a boom in tech and venture capital. Latinos make up the largest group in both states, a little over 40% of the population in each, according to the most recentcCensus. Non-Latino white residents are a minority in both states (34.7% of the population in California and 39.8% in Texas).

Texans are more rural — or more likely to label their communities that way: 30% of Texans, but just 15% of Californians, say they live in a rural area or small town, the poll found. Half of Californians, but just a third of Texans, say they live in an urban area. It’s easy to forget that as recently as the 1990s, Texas was a mostly Democratic state. Democratic control began to crumble in the 1980s, but only ended in 1994 with the political ascension of a popular governor and heir to a political dynasty: George W. Bush. Bush’s rise set the tone for Texas politics over the next three decades.

Take guns, for instance. When Bush ousted Democratic Gove. Ann Richards, it was still illegal to own a handgun in Texas. The year before that election, after the bloody battle in Waco between law enforcement agents and a religious cult known as the Branch Davidians, Richards vetoed a bill that would have made handguns legal. In his campaign, Bush used that veto as a wedge issue. It proved highly successful.

Thirty years later, Texans can legally carry concealed handguns in public — without any license.

Environmental justice

California moved in the opposite direction over roughly the same period. Several issues spurred political organizing that helped drive the state to the left: Then-Gov. Pete Wilson’s campaign in 1994 for Proposition 187, a ballot measure aimed at cutting off social services to unauthorized immigrants, increased voter registration and mobilization among Latino residents.

A revived labor movement led to growing union power and influence — about 1 in 5 California residents have a union member in their family, roughly twice the level in Texas, the poll found. Few issues, however, have had more grassroots impact on the state than environmentalism. When he was 4, Jeremy Terhune’s family moved from Kansas to Stockton, Calif. In the early ’90s, as Terhune grew up, Stockton blended more seamlessly into the ranch and farmland of California’s Central Valley. But in the last 20 years, Stockton has transformed.

With a population of 322,000, it has absorbed thousands of residents priced out of the Bay Area. Stockton is hard to define. It is, by some measures, the United States’ most racially diverse city. While more liberal than the surrounding counties of the Central Valley, the city still elected a Republican mayor in 2020 (albeit in a nonpartisan election).

Terhune has spent more time thinking about Stockton’s political values than most. For over a decade, he worked as a community organizer with environmental groups in Stockton and the Valley. He had to learn a key lesson. “You have to start by asking questions; you have to meet people where they’re at,” Terhune said. “When it comes to people who aren’t what some call traditional environmentalists — like farmers, or hunters, or even the Latino community — I start by asking how they recreate. Where they get outdoors, even if it’s just a park.” Terhune’s work culminated in founding PUENTES, an organization dedicated to making underserved communities environmentally healthier and more sustainable.

The organization’s biggest victory was founding Boggs Tract Community Farm, a large urban garden in a predominantly Black neighborhood. “We took a garbage dump, got the soil tested, and converted it into an organic farm,” Terhune says. “Now all of a sudden, everybody’s a gardener— suddenly urban gardening is a thing in Stockton.” Efforts like that have made environmental values a major part of California culture. As the Democratic Party nationally embraced environmentalism, and the Republicans moved away from it, that helped cement the state’s Democratic identity.

The effect can be seen in how California residents view climate change — 70% percent say climate change is a “serious” issue, including just over half, 51%, who call it “very serious.” In Texas, by comparison, 62% call the issue serious, but less than half, 42%, said it was very serious. Terhune points to a century-long history of community organizing to explain why California is culturally green: The Sierra Club was founded in San Francisco in 1892.

As the environment changes in Texas — the state just had one of its hottest summers in history in the midst of a exceptional drought — attitudes there might change as well, Terhune suggests. He points to the devastating 2021 February winter freeze, which brought the state’s electrical grid to the point of collapse. “I think Texans are just as environmental and just as engaged in environmental justice as we are,” Terhune says. “But it’s about making that connection — and (after these storms), people are more aware of the environment.”

New Braunfels

Like Stockton, New Braunfels has gone through a period of explosive change — it’s one of the fastest-growing places in the country, with a population of roughly 100,000. It’s the sort of place that will define Texas’ future.

Once rural ranchland, New Braunfels has been transformed into a bustling suburb between two of the country’s largest cities — San Antonio is about 20 minutes south, and Austin is 40 minutes north. That makes New Braunfels the sort of place where aspects of Texan culture collide — and that includes politics. San Antonio and Austin each went heavily for Joe Biden in the last election, and rural Texas went strongly for Donald Trump.

New Braunfels was something of a swing district. Of course, politics aren’t the only thing that makes the culture of New Braunfels diverse. At the Tree of Life Sunday service, the choruses to the worship songs were sung in English and Spanish. The Latino — Tejano, more specifically — influence of South Texas is clearly present. After the 75-minute service on the first weekend in November, Kallus-Guerra sat chatting with other members of the congregation.

With the outline of the state tattooed behind her right ear, Kallus-Guerra is proud to be Texan, although she says she has trouble defining what precisely being Texan means. Texas identity matters in this state — 50% of residents said being a Texan was a “big part” of their identity, compared with 44% of Californians who felt that way about their state.

That’s true even though the share of people who are recent arrivals is significantly higher in Texas than in California. “As far as like California-Texas, they can be different, sure,” she said. “But everyone has differences.” Kallus-Guerra has met enough first-time churchgoers coming through the doors that she recognizes that some things about people — their needs, their yearnings — are more universal. “A lot of people are looking for that structure, looking for a higher being to look for rather than it just being random chance, all this craziness — it’s looking for a compass that they can go to,” she said.

Religion

For Texans looking for such a structure, faith is a common answer. Religion is a more important compass for Texans, on average, than Californians, and that’s a major factor in the political differences between the two states.

When asked if it is necessary to believe in God to have good values, 47% of Texans said yes compared with 33% of Californians — a larger gulf than most other questions on the poll. Texans are more likely than Californians to report going to church at least once a week and more likely to call religion important in their lives. Roughly half of Texans say religion is a major part of their identities, compared with just over a third of Californians. Protestants, in particular, are a much larger part of the religious picture in Texas — 32% compared with 19% in California.

Not all religious people are conservative. But religious conservatives, especially evangelical Protestants, play a huge role in politics. Conservative churches serve as a place where like-minded people can share and reinforce each other’s views and mobilize for political action, much as unions, environmental groups and other civic organizations do on the left.

Religious identity has a big effect on many political issues, most notably abortion. Fifty-eight percent of Californians said they believed abortion should be legal in some or most cases, compared with 47% of Texans, the L.A. Times/YouGov poll found. Just 12% of Texans believe abortion should be illegal in all cases, which is essentially what state law currently provides. In California, 9% said abortion should be illegal in all cases.

The gap is far wider between religious and nonreligious residents of both states. In Texas, evangelical Christian groups hold enormous influence in the statehouse, in a way they do not in California. Conversely, abortion-rights advocacy groups like Emily’s List and Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America) are major political players in California. When Gov. Gavin Newsom chose a new U.S. senator to finish the term of deceased Sen. Dianne Feinstein, he chose Laphonza Butler, the president of Emily’s List from 2021-23 who was also formerly the head of the state’s largest union.

Race

Whether the wide gap between Texas and California will persist could depend on the two states’ populations of color.

In both California and Texas, the political priorities of the state government largely follow the preferences of their white residents — a minority of the population, but still a majority of voters in both states. That pushes California further left and Texas further right. That difference shows up on questions about policy as well as basic values.

On the question of whether belief in God is necessary for a person to have good values, for example, Black and Latino Texans closely resemble Black and Latino Californians. In both states, the groups are fairly evenly divided. White Californians, however, overwhelmingly reject that idea, 28% say yes to 65% no. White Texans are split, 42% say yes, 52% no. Similarly, on abortion, a wide gap exists between the two states’ white populations.

White Californians favor legal abortion in all or most cases by 20 percentage points, 58% to 38%; white Texans oppose abortion in most cases, 44% to 52%. By contrast, 48% of Latino Texans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 51% of Latino Californians. Fifty-nine percent of Black Texans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 63% of Black Californians.

A similar pattern of sharper ideological divides among white residents and much greater similarity between Latino and Black residents shows up on other issues, including attitudes toward guns, the poll found.

But change has been coming, slowly, to both states. As the voting populations grow more diverse, the poll indicates, these two states with so much in common could draw politically closer.

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Jayne Jordan, 61, was a lifelong Californian until August, when she sold her home in Corona and moved to Azle, Texas. Jordan wanted to stay close to her daughter and grandchildren, who are planning to move from Irvine to the Lone Star State next year in order to buy a home.

When she joined a Facebook group of California migrants to Texas, she found a community willing to help her choose the right moving company and weigh in on which route to take for the 1,360-mile drive. She soon found through the Facebook group that her neighbor across the street in Azle had also moved from the same neighborhood in Corona. “It’s a small world,” Jordan said. “A lot of people from California are moving here.” Jordan’s move is reflective of a larger trend for California, where more residents have been moving out over the last few years than new people moving in.

In 2022, 818,000 Californians left for other states, while 476,000 moved in, resulting in a total domestic loss of 342,000 to the Golden State, according to newly released census data. But some states have been taking in more of California’s former residents than others, with Texas leading in that category. In 41 U.S. states, more people arrived from California than moved to California last year, according to the data. More than 100,000 Californians moved to Texas last year, compared with around 40,000 who made the opposite move. Florida drew nearly 75,000 people from California, with 30,000 moving in the opposite direction.

Washington, Nevada and Florida each saw around 50,000 Californian arrivals and far fewer people move to California. Only 42 Californians moved to West Virginia in 2022, by far the lowest total of any state. New Jersey, the state that most bucked the trend, had around 6,600 more people move to California than arrived from the state. Experts attribute the exodus from California primarily to the high cost of housing in the state but also to issues such as crime, politics and traffic.

As Texas booms, the state will have to contend with many of the same issues that are driving California to leave, says Mechele Dickerson, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on the housing crisis. Texas is appealing to Californians who are looking for lower housing costs and don’t mind the trade-offs. “We have more land that can be developed,” Dickerson said. Between July 2020 and July 2022, Texas’ housing stock soared by almost 5% — the third-biggest gain of any state.

California’s housing stock increased by just 1.6% during the span. In raw numbers, Texas added more than twice as many housing units as did California. “Some people blame Californians for driving up housing prices, particularly in the city of Austin,” Dickerson said. As buyers “come here with cash in hand having sold their homes in California,” she said, longtime renters are priced out of cities like Austin.

Those renters are pushed to suburbs and exurbs, which are seeing booms comparable to those in California’s suburban and exurban areas. “We used to laugh at those people in L.A.” because of their long commutes, Dickerson said, “and now that’s what we’re seeing” as people move farther from city centers in search of affordability. Texas is seeing rising home values that are making some areas less affordable, and cities are also grappling with other social issues Californians are familiar with. “We have been challenged by what to do with a growing unhoused population” as low-income people are displaced by the cascading effects of a housing crisis, she said.

Though Texas has added a lot of housing, “we’re building more on the high end and not affordable housing,” Dickerson said. California saw an exodus during the COVID-19 pandemic, as remote work and soaring home values had some residents moving to cheaper locales. Recent data show the so-called exodus — which hit coastal cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco particularly hard — eased considerably in the last two years. The California recovery has been uneven, with some suburban areas seeing major booms while downtown San Francisco continues to struggle. But those who have made the move say they are surprised how many transplanted Californians they find in Texas.

Locally, Dickerson said, there is a common joke: “We are becoming California, not just because the Californians are moving here.” Issues of traffic, homelessness and affordability may have driven people to abandon California, but those issues may not be far behind in Texas’ major cities, either. Marie Bailey, 44, moved from El Segundo to a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in 2017.

She and her husband built a home for $750,000, while a “tiny fixer upper” in El Segundo would’ve cost upward of $1 million. The couple quickly figured out that they could capitalize on the niche in the real estate market for California migrants to Texas. For years, Bailey has administered the Facebook group where Jayne Jordan and 45,000 others swap recommendations on how to make the move. She runs a real estate firm that places Californians all over the state. “99% of our clientele are people moving from California,” Bailey said. As for why people make the move, “No. 1 is cost of living and No. 2 is politics.”

Texas is Republican red in the same way California is a bastion of Democratic blue, battling on issues including abortion, gun control, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights. The political difference might make some hesitant to make the move, but for others it is a major bonus. Bailey’s husband, who was previously employed by the UCLA medical system, “wouldn’t even talk about his politics because he was afraid of losing his job,” she said. “Nowhere is perfect,” Bailey said, “but we fit in a lot better here.”

Though clients miss the beaches and “the weather is more extreme” in Texas, by and large those who have made the move with Bailey’s firm are happy, she said. Plus, she added, “We like not having to pay $5 or $6 per gallon in gas.” The average price of a gallon of gas in Texas was $2.91 on Nov. 3 versus $5.18 in California. Back in Azle, Jordan and her husband are adjusting to their new life.

Their family home in Corona sold in four days and they now live in a new custom build. It’s a more rural community than what they had in Corona, so “there’s a lot of really big bugs that we’re not used to,” but otherwise Jordan and her husband are settling in. “We have noticed people in Texas are far more friendly than in California,” she said, and the cost of living is far lower.

She also likes living in a place with a lower fire danger and less air pollution compared to the Inland Empire. “No, don’t miss it at all,” she said of the state she called home for six decades.

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas has moved a floating barrier on the U.S.-Mexico border closer to American soil as the Biden administration and Mexico protest the wrecking ball-sized buoys that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott authorized in the name of preventing migrants from entering the country.

The repositioning comes ahead of a hearing Tuesday that could decide whether the buoys remain. Texas began installing the bright-orange buoys on the Rio Grande in July and the state was quickly sued by the Justice Department, which argues the barrier could impact relations with Mexico and pose humanitarian and environmental risks.

During a trip Monday to the border city of Eagle Pass, where the buoys are located, Abbott said the barrier was moved “out of an abundance of caution” following what he described as allegations that they had drifted to Mexico’s side of the river.

“I don’t know whether they were true or not,” Abbott said.

It is not clear when U.S. District Judge David Ezra of Austin might rule on the barrier.

In the meantime, Abbott’s sprawling border mission known as Operation Lone Star continues to face numerous legal challenges, including a new one filed Monday by four migrant men who were arrested by Texas troopers after crossing the border.

The four men include a father and son and are among thousands of migrants who since 2021 have been arrested on state trespassing charges in Texas. Most have either had their cases dismissed or entered guilty pleas in exchange for time served. But the four men continued to remain in a Texas jail for two to six weeks after they should have been released, according to the lawsuit filed by the Texas ACLU and the Texas Fair Defense Project.

Instead of a Texas sheriff’s office allowing the jails to release the men, the lawsuit alleges, they were transported to federal immigration facilities where they were then sent to Mexico.

“I think a key point of all that, which is hard to grasp, is also that because they’re building the system as they go, the problems flare up in different ways,” said David Donatti, an attorney for the Texas ACLU.

Officials in both Kinney and Val Verde counties, which have partnered with Abbott’s operation, are named in the lawsuit. A representative for Kinney County said Monday he did not believe anyone had yet reviewed the suit. A representative for Kinney County did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

The complaint also alleges that there were at least 80 others who were detained longer than allowed under state law from late September 2021 to January 2022.

Abbott was joined at the border on Monday by the Republican governors of Iowa, Oklahoma, Nebraska and South Dakota, all of whom have sent their own armed law enforcement and National Guard members to the border.

___ Gonzalez reported from McAllen, Texas.

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The Justice Department on Monday sued Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over a newly installed floating barrier on the Rio Grande that is the Republican’s latest aggressive tactic to try to stop migrants from crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.

The lawsuit asks a federal judge in Austin to force Texas to remove a roughly 1,000-foot (305-meter) line of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys that the Biden administration says raises humanitarian and environmental concerns. The suit claims that Texas unlawfully installed the barrier without permission between the border cities of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Mexico.

The buoys are the latest escalation of Texas’ border security operation that also includes razor-wire fencing, arresting migrants on trespassing charges and sending busloads of asylum-seekers to Democratic-led cities in other states. Critics have long questioned the effectiveness of the two-year operation, known as Operation Lone Star. A state trooper’s account this month that some of the measures injured migrants has put the mission under intensifying new scrutiny.

In anticipation of the lawsuit, Abbott sent President Joe Biden a letter earlier Monday that defended Texas’ right to install the barrier. He accused Biden of putting migrants at risk by not doing more to deter them from making the journey to the U.S.

“Texas will see you in court, Mr. President,” Abbott wrote.

The Biden administration has said illegal border crossings have declined significantly since new immigration restrictions took effect in May. In June, the first full month since the new polices took effect, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said migrant encounters were down 30% from the month prior and were at the lowest levels since Biden’s first full month in office.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that Abbott’s policies as a whole have made it difficult for U.S. Border Patrol agents to access Rio Grande.

“Those are unlawful actions that are not helpful and is undermining what the president has put forward and is trying to do,” she said.

In a letter last week, the Justice Department gave Texas until Monday to commit to removing the barrier or face a lawsuit. The letter said the buoy wall “poses a risk to navigation, as well as public safety, in the Rio Grande River, and it presents humanitarian concerns.”

The state deployed the buoys without notifying the International Boundary and Water Commission or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Mexico’s secretary of state asked the federal government to intervene, saying the barrier violates international treaties.

The lawsuit is not the first time the Biden administration has sued Texas overs it actions on the border.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021 accused the state of usurping and even interfering with the federal government’s responsibility to enforce immigration laws after Abbott empowered state troopers orders to stop vehicles carrying migrants on the basis that they could increase the spread of COVID-19.

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Dan Walters | CalMatters

The cross-country game of oneupmanship between California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Republican governors of Florida and Texas is becoming more intense with every passing week.

The latest move from Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott is to send planes and buses full of Latin American migrants to California cities.

Newsom – backed by Attorney General Rob Bonta – has threatened legal or even criminal action for what they described as virtual kidnappings. “I know one was on the basis of all the interviews and all the facts that are now in evidence,” Newsom said on NBC’s “Today” show after a plane brought immigrants to Sacramento. “Now we have to prove it. “They’re human beings used as pawns for a guy’s political advancement.

That’s pretty sad and pathetic,” Newsom continued. “This is California – fourth- or fifth-largest economy on planet Earth. We mean business. And so Ron DeSantis should know that.” Bonta has fired off demands to Florida for details about the decision to send the migrants to California, and tweeted, “State-sanctioned kidnapping is immoral.”

DeSantis and Abbott contend that those sent to California agreed to being transported and their actions illustrate the Biden administration’s lack of action on border security. “Texas border towns are overwhelmed & overrun because of Biden’s open border policies,” Abbott tweeted. “Texas buses migrants to self-declared sanctuary cities like LA to provide relief to our border communities. We will continue this effort until Biden secures the border.”

Predictably, the episode triggered another round of vitriol. After Newsom denounced DeSantis, a presidential hopeful, again during a Fox News interview last week, DeSantis unloaded on Newsom during a bill-signing ceremony last week saying he “has a real serious fixation on the state of Florida. I think it’s just bizarre that he does that.

What I would tell him is – you know what, stop pussyfooting around. Are you going to throw your hat into the ring and challenge Joe (Biden)?” “Are you going to get in and do it, or are you going to sit on the sidelines and chirp?” DeSantis continued. “So why don’t you throw your hat into the ring, and then we’ll go ahead and talk about what’s happening.”

Florida and Texas taxpayers are financing the planes and buses that ferry migrants to California, and a little-noticed order by a federal judge revealed that one Newsom gesture is costing Californians more than a half-million dollars. After Texas enacted a law to authorize private lawsuits against anyone who aborted a fetus with a detectable heartbeat, and made it virtually impossible to defend such a suit, Newsom persuaded the California Legislature to pass a copycat measure affecting manufacturers of banned firearms.

At the time, Newsom acknowledged that it was a stunt designed to highlight the absurdity of the Texas law rather than a serious expression of policy. The Texas law has survived legal challenges so far, but the California law was quickly voided by federal Judge Roger Benitez as unconstitutional because it would have required defendants to pay the costs of litigation even if they won.

Newsom, who had been sharply critical of Benitez for previous gun rights decisions, praised the judge’s rejection of the law he had championed, saying, “I want to thank Judge Benitez. We have been saying all along that Texas’ anti-abortion law is outrageous. Judge Benitez just confirmed it is also unconstitutional.” Later, Benitez awarded the gun rights groups which had challenged the California law almost $557,000 in attorney fees – money they can use to pursue many other challenges to California gun controls. Taxpayers, not Newsom, are paying the price for his stunt.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author’s articles on this Opinion piece or elsewhere online or in the newspaper where we have articles with the header “COLUMN/EDITORIAL & OPINION” do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints or official policies of the Publisher, Editor, Reporters or anybody else in the Staff of the Hemet and San Jacinto Chronicle Newspaper.

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Facing new pressure over gun violence in Texas after two more mass shootings, Republicans on Monday unexpectedly allowed a bill that would raise the purchase age for semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21 to advance out of a House committee — even though the proposal has almost no chance of becoming law.

The surprise move revealed faint momentum for gun control advocates after a weekend mass shooting at an outdoor mall near Dallas, but at the same time underscored how Texas Republicans are so resistant to gun restrictions that even clearing a small legislative hurdle caused supporters to celebrate.

Two Republicans joined Democrats in an 8-5 vote on the House Select Committee on Community Safety to advance the bill, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has previously spoken against. It is unclear when or if the proposal would get a full vote in the Texas House with just a few weeks left to pass any new laws.

“It doesn’t have the support of the Legislature,” said Republican state Rep. Ryan Guillen, who chairs the committee and voted against the measure.

Abbott has shown no appetite for revisiting gun restrictions after two mass shootings in the span of a week. The first took place in Cleveland, northeast of Houston, where a man killed five of his neighbors with an AR-style rifle after they confronted him about shooting rounds in his yard.

The bill that advanced Monday had languished for weeks prior to Saturday’s shooting that left eight people dead at Allen Premium Outlets, a sprawling outdoor shopping center.

Before the vote, protesters’ chants of “Do Something!” echoed through the hallways of the Capitol in the country’s largest red state. Protesters eventually camped outside the House chamber and chanted at lawmakers as they entered.

They included several relatives of victims of a mass shooting a year ago at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Some of them stood holding photos of their slain children, and some wept following the vote.

One of the Republicans who voted in favor of the bill was state Rep. Sam Harless, who through his office declined to be interviewed. “It is not his intention to capitalize with media coverage on the misery and suffering of those who have lost loved ones in these tragedies for simply voting his heart, his conscience, and his district,” Ron Hickman, Harless’ chief of staff, said in an email.

The push to raise the purchasing age has been led for months in the Capitol by relatives of the 19 children and two teachers who were killed in Uvalde when an 18-year-old gunman with an AR-style rifle opened fire in a fourth-grade classroom.

Mack Segovia, whose stepdaughter, Eliahna, was killed at Robb Elementary, attended Monday’s rally wearing a shirt with a photo of the girl in her softball uniform.

“It happened again. And it’s going to happen again and again and again,” Segovia said. “It happened this weekend in a mall. You’re not safe anywhere. … It’s going to strike again, we just don’t know where.”

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ALLEN, Texas (AP) — A gunman stepped out of a silver sedan and started shooting people at a Dallas-area outlet mall Saturday, killing eight and wounding seven others — three critically — before being killed by a police officer who happened to be nearby, authorities said.

Authorities did not immediately provide details about the victims at Allen Premium Outlets, a sprawling outdoor shopping center, but witnesses reported seeing children among them. Some said they also saw what appeared to be a police officer and a mall security guard unconscious on the ground.

The shooting, the latest eruption of what has been an unprecedented pace of mass killings in the U.S., sent hundreds fleeing in panic. Barely a week before, authorities say, a man fatally shot five people in Cleveland, Texas, after a neighbor asked him to stop firing his weapon while a baby slept.

A 16-year-old pretzel stand employee, Maxwell Gum, described a virtual stampede of shoppers. He and others sheltered in a storage room.

“We started running. Kids were getting trampled,” Gum said. “My co-worker picked up a 4-year-old girl and gave her to her parents.”

Dashcam video that circulated online showed the gunman getting out of a car and shooting at people on the sidewalk. More than three dozen shots could be heard as the vehicle recording the video drove off.

Allen Fire Chief Jonathan Boyd said seven people including the shooter died at the scene. Nine victims were taken to area hospitals, but two of them died.

Three of the wounded were in critical condition in the evening, Boyd said, and four were stable.

An Allen Police officer was in the area on an unrelated call when he heard shots at 3:36 p.m., the police department wrote on Facebook.

“The officer engaged the suspect and neutralized the threat. He then called for emergency personnel,” it added.

Mass killings are happening with staggering frequency in the United States this year: an average of about one a week, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.

The White House said President Biden had been briefed on the shooting and the administration had offered support to local officials. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has signed laws easing firearms restrictions following past mass shootings, called it an “unspeakable tragedy.”

Fontayne Payton, 35, was at H&M when he heard the sound of gunshots through his headphones.

“It was so loud, it sounded like it was right outside,” Payton said.

People in the store scattered before employees ushered the group into the fitting rooms and then a lockable back room, he said. When they were given the all-clear to leave, Payton saw the store had broken windows and a trail of blood to the door. Discarded sandals and bloodied clothes lay nearby.

Once outside, Payton saw bodies.

“I pray it wasn’t kids, but it looked like kids,” he said. The bodies were covered in white towels, slumped over bags on the ground.

“It broke me when I walked out to see that,” he said.

Further away, he saw the body of a heavyset man wearing all black. He assumed it was the shooter, Payton said, because unlike the other bodies it had not been covered up.

Tarakram Nunna, 25, and Ramakrishna Mullapudi, 26, said they saw what appeared to be three people motionless on the ground, including one who appeared to be a police officer and one who appeared to be a mall security guard.

Another shopper, Sharkie Mouli, 24, said he hid in a Banana Republic store during the shooting. As he left, he saw what appeared to be an unconscious police officer lying next to another unconscious person outside the outlet store.

“I have seen his gun lying right next to him and a guy who is like passing out right next to him,” Mouli said.

Stan and Mary Ann Greene were browsing in the Columbia sportswear store when the shooting started.

“We had just gotten in, just a couple minutes earlier, and we just heard a lot of loud popping,” Mary Ann Greene told The Associated Press.

Employees rolled down the security gate and brought everyone to the rear of the store until police arrived and escorted them out, the Greenes said.

Eber Romero was at the Under Armour store when a cashier mentioned that there was a shooting.

As he left the store, Romero said, the mall appeared empty, and all the shops had their security gates down. That is when he started seeing broken glass and people who had been shot on the floor.

Video shared on social media showed people running through a parking lot amid the sound of gunshots.

More than 30 police cruisers with lights flashing were blocking an entrance to the mall, with multiple ambulances on the scene.

A live aerial broadcast from a news station showed armored trucks and other law enforcement vehicles outside the mall.

Ambulances from several neighboring cities responded.

The Dallas office of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also responded.

Allen, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of downtown Dallas, has roughly 105,000 residents.

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MATAMOROS, Mexico (AP) — About two dozen makeshift tents were set ablaze and destroyed at a migrant camp across the border from Texas this week, witnesses said Friday, a sign of the extreme risk that comes with being stuck in Mexico as the Biden administration increasingly relies on that country to host people fleeing poverty and violence.

The fires were set Wednesday and Thursday at the sprawling camp of about 2,000 people, most of them from Venezuela, Haiti and Mexico, in Matamoros, a city near Brownsville, Texas. An advocate for migrants said they had been doused with gasoline.

It was not immediately known who was to blame in torching the tents. Cartel-backed gangs often draw suspicion in any border attacks because of their penchant for preying on migrants and demanding money for passage through their territory. But a government official suggested the fires could have been set by a group of migrants frustrated over their long wait in Matamoros to cross the border.

“The people fled as their tents were burned,” said Gladys Cañas, who runs the group Ayudandoles A Triunfar. “What they’re saying as part of their testimony is that they were told to leave from there.”

There were no reports of deaths or significant injuries. But about 25 rudimentary shelters made up of plastic, tarps, branches and other materials were torched in a sparsely populated part of the camp. Many who lived there also apparently lost clothing, documents and whatever other modest belongings may have been left inside.

Margarita, a Mexican woman staying at the camp, said Friday she saw migrants from Venezuela screaming during the previous day’s blaze.

“They had their children with them and a few other things they had a chance to get,” Margarita said. She spoke on the condition that her last name not be published due to fears for her safety.

Gangs recently threatened migrants who were wading across the river border illegally, as well as their guides, Margarita said, but the crossings had continued.

Criminal groups often prey upon migrants in the area and demand money in return for permission to pass through their territory.

However, Juan José Rodríguez, director of the Tamaulipas Institute for Migrants, a state agency coordinating with Mexico’s federal government, said he had no information that a gang was responsible for the fires.

Rodríguez attributed them to a group of migrants and said some 10 tents that had already been abandoned were burned. He added that they apparently set the fires to express frustration with a U.S. government mobile app that assigns turns for people to show up at the border and claim asylum.

Migrants have been applying for 740 slots made available daily on the glitch-plagued app, CBPOne, which allows them to enter the U.S. legally at an official crossing.

There are far more migrants than available slots, exacerbating tensions in Mexican border cities that house them, often in shelters and camps like the one in Matamoros. Last year hundreds of migrants blocked a major pedestrian crossing between Tijuana and San Diego until authorities shut down the protest.

In Matamoros on Wednesday night, about 200 migrants gathered on the southern side of an international bridge and halted all U.S.-bound traffic, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported. Vehicles were able to resume crossing after about two hours and pedestrians were allowed to cross after about four hours.

CBP made no mention of fires at the Mexican camp in its statement about the bridge shutdown.

The tent fires in Matamoros come on the heels of a March 27 blaze that killed 40 men at a Mexican immigration detention center in Ciudad Juarez. The fire was allegedly started by a detained migrant to protest conditions at the facility in the city across from El Paso, Texas.

The U.S. government is increasingly turning to Mexico while preparing to end pandemic-era asylum restrictions, known as Title 42 authority, on May 11. Mexico recently began accepting people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who cross the border irregularly and are turned back by the U.S.

The Biden administration also is putting final touches on a policy under which asylum would be denied to people who pass through another country, such as Mexico, to reach U.S. soil.

___

Associated Press writer Alfredo Peña in Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, contributed to this report.

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — When Texas’ new abortion law made no exceptions in cases of rape, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott defended it with an assurance: Texas would get to work eliminating rapes.

One year later, Lindsey LeBlanc is busy as ever helping rape victims in a college town outside Houston.

“The numbers have stayed consistently high,” said LeBlanc, executive director of the Sexual Assault Resource Center in Bryan, near Texas A&M University. Despite hiring two additional counselors in the past six months, she still has a waitlist for victims.

“We are struggling to keep up with demand,” she said.

The constant caseloads in Texas are another example of how Republicans have struggled to defend zero-exception abortion bans that are unpopular in public polling, have caused uproar in high-profile cases and are inviting political risk heading into November’s midterm elections. A year since Texas’ law went into effect in September 2021, at least a dozen states also have bans that make no exceptions in cases of rape or incest.

The absence of exceptions has caused divisions among Republicans, including in West Virginia, where a new law signed this month allows a brief window for rape and incest victims to obtain abortions only if they report to law enforcement first. Recently, South Carolina Republicans scuttled a proposed ban after failing to get enough GOP support.

“It really disgusts me,” said Republican South Carolina state Sen. Katrina Shealy, ripping into her male colleagues on the floor of the state Senate.

Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, also of South Carolina, allowed exceptions under the proposed national abortion ban he introduced last week. The proposal has virtually no chance of passing, with even GOP leaders not immediately backing it, reflecting how Republicans have broadly struggled to navigate the issue of abortion with voters since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer.

Overwhelming majorities of voters think their state should generally allow abortion in specific cases, including rape, incest or if the health of the pregnant person is endangered. Even Republicans are seeing it as a line with some voters.

“It’s a very gray issue,” said Claudia Alcazar, the GOP chairwoman in Starr County along the Texas-Mexico border that has become a new political battleground after Republicans made big gains with more conservative Hispanic voters in 2020.

She said she knows those who are “hardcore, never have abortion for any reason, period. And then I have the other ones that are like, ‘Well, you know, it depends.’”

In Texas, the blowback was swift when Abbott said last September: “Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets.” Critics called it detached from reality. A sexual assault hotline in Houston has answered almost 4,800 calls through August this year — putting it on track to exceed last year’s volume of 4,843.

As of this summer, all abortions were banned in Texas except if it would save a mother’s life.

Asked what Abbott has done in the past year to eliminate rape, spokeswoman Renae Eze highlighted older measures to clear rape test kit backlogs, a law signed in June aimed at coordinating and expanding sexual assault resources and a task force his office launched in 2019 to address the issue.

“To prevent such heinous crimes before they happen, and to prosecute any criminals to the full extent of the law, Governor Abbott has aggressively fought against defunding the police and led bail reform efforts to prevent the release of dangerous criminals,” Eze said in a statement.

More than 14,000 rape crimes have been reported in Texas since the law took effect last year, according to data from the Texas Department of Public Safety. That was slightly down from the year before and consistent with a decline in other violent crime figures across the state.

Crisis centers in Texas say the number of rape victims they’ve accompanied to hospitals for exams is rebounding since the pandemic restrictions kept advocates from entering. The Women’s Center in Fort Worth has made more than 650 visits to counsel victims undergoing exams in the past year compared to about 340 in the year prior, said Alisha Mathenia, the assistant director of crisis services at the center.

The majority of sexual assaults are never reported to police, making any available data an incomplete picture. And about 8 out of 10 sexual assaults are committed by a person known to the victim, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.

“We’re not talking about a large of number of rapists walking around on the street. That’s a myth,” said Democrat Donna Howard, a state representative in Austin who co-authored the bill creating Abbott’s task force.

At The SAFE Alliance in Austin, where sexual assault victims can get exams and medical care at its Eloise House, senior director Juliana Gonzales said it’s admirable for Texas to work on rape prevention. “But I also think it’s important for the state to live in the reality that we have to respond to sexual assault,” she said.

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