The Biden administration introduced new rules on Wednesday to bring the United States – the largest car culture the world has ever seen – into the era of electric vehicles.

With new tailpipe pollution limits from the Environmental Protection Agency, automakers will essentially be forced to make a majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States all-electric or hybrid by 2032. To meet the new standards, 56 percent of new cars sold by 2032 would have zero emissions and another 16 percent would be hybrids, according to the EPA’s analysis.

Electric vehicles currently account for just 7.6 percent of new car sales, so the targets represent an ambitious effort to overhaul one of the country’s largest industries in a remarkably short time.

A successful phase-out of gas-powered cars and trucks could also make a big dent in the fight against climate change; Automobiles and other forms of transportation are the largest source of emissions the United States produces due to global warming.

But there are plenty of things that could derail the White House plan.

Politics

Electric vehicles are now an integral part of the culture wars. a opinion research found that 71 percent of Republicans would not buy an electric car, compared to 17 percent of Democrats.

Former President Donald Trump has used increasingly bold language about electric vehicles and their effect on the US economy, claiming they will “kill” the US auto industry and calling electric vehicles a “killer of jobs.” It is almost certain that he will continue that theme in his presidential campaign.

Speaker Mike Johnson called the rule part of President Biden’s “crusade against American energy and gas-powered vehicles,” saying it would limit consumer choice, raise costs for consumers and increase U.S. dependence on China.

Lobbying and lawsuits

The fossil fuel industry also opposes the new EPA rule.

American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a lobbying group, has launched a major advertising campaign to politicize what it incorrectly calls “Biden’s EPA car ban” in swing states.

And a coalition of fossil fuel companies and Republican lawyers are expected to sue to block the rule. These challenges could end up before the Supreme Court, which has issued several rulings in recent years limiting the EPA’s authority.

Car dealers

American car dealers are a major obstacle to the transition to electric vehicles. Last year, two-thirds of American dealers did not have a single electric car for sale, he said a Sierra Club report. And about half of dealers said they wouldn’t offer an electric car even if they could.

There are several reasons for dealers’ resistance. Profit margins for electric cars are generally smaller than for gas-powered cars and their sales requires infrastructure investments. Perhaps more importantly, dealers earn almost half of their profits from servicing cars. Electric vehicles have fewer parts, require far fewer trips to the service department and are cheaper to maintain than gasoline-powered cars and trucks.

And dealers are politically influential, with donations heavily skewed toward the Republican Party. In many states, they are protected by laws that prohibit automakers like Tesla from selling directly to consumers.

Lukewarm question

Early adopters drove sales of Teslas and other all-electric hits like the Ford Mustang Mach-E. But demand has declined in recent months. Ford said in December that this would be the case scaling back production of the acclaimed F-150 Lightning pickup – the electric version of the best-selling vehicle line in America – by half.

EVs are still the fastest growing segment of the U.S. auto market, but many consumers remain reluctant to leave their gas guzzlers behind. Electric vehicles generally remain more expensive than their conventional counterparts, and there are fewer models to choose from, as well as fewer SUVs and pickup trucks, the most popular categories in the country.

Prices could eventually drop, especially if that happens in China new generation of cheap EVs makes it to the United States. But given the Biden administration’s increased scrutiny of Chinese electric vehicle imports, that seems unlikely at the moment.

Charging infrastructure

American motorists, especially those in rural areas, are concerned about the range of electric vehicles. And charging an electric car outside major cities can still be a major challenge, as I discovered on an ill-fated reporting trip last year.

Not all EVs can be charged at all EV chargers, it can take hours to top off a battery, and there are few chargers left in much of this vast country. For anyone who doesn’t have a charger at home, or is planning a trip of more than a few hundred miles, charging is a big problem.

The federal government should help with this. In 2021, Congress appropriated $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of EV chargers across the country. But from December not one was installed.

Why the new standards could work

Despite the many obstacles, there is also reason to believe that the EPA rule could work – or at least make a big difference.

Automakers have been slow to introduce new EV models, but a wave of cheaper, better-performing electric vehicles are expected to hit the market in the coming years. The charging infrastructure is being standardized and car companies are investing their own money in developing a better network.

And while the EPA rule will likely face legal challenges — and Trump has pledged to “end” the Biden administration’s climate rules if he is re-elected — it cannot be easily undone.

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Persistent heat from India to Brazil

This week, the heat index in Rio de Janeiro reached 144 degrees Fahrenheit, or 62 degrees Celsius, the highest ever measured in the city. The national government has issued health warnings due to the extreme heat in several cities.

In South Sudan, temperatures were forecast to reach 113 degrees Fahrenheit, well above the 90 degrees typical of the dry season from December to March, as my colleague Abdi Latif Dahir reported.

In Bengaluru, India, water supplies are running lowand last month Ghana and Nigeria issued heat warnings to the public.

We don’t yet know whether all these events were caused or exacerbated by climate change. But we do know that human-induced global warming was the cause of many of the extreme heat events that helped make last year the hottest on record. A recent study also concluded that climate change made the extreme heat that West Africa experienced in February ten times more likely, my colleague Delger Erdenesanaa reported.

What is abundantly clear is that many of these developing countries are not prepared to protect people from this kind of heat.

Most schools in South Sudan are overloaded, underfunded and lack infrastructure such as air conditioning. And in West African countries, about half of the urban population lives in informal housing, including houses built with sheet steel, which retains heat.

Maja Vahlberg, one of the authors of the West Africa study, told Delger that this means that “people have very limited options for individual coping strategies, such as using air conditioning and drinking or showering more often.” — Manuela Andreoni

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The Biden administration’s new regulations limiting tailpipe emissions from cars and light trucks would transform the U.S. auto market and chart a course away from the internal combustion engine and toward a future of electric cars and hybrids.

This is what you need to know about the measure.

It is a major problem in the fight against climate change

In terms of reducing emissions that are warming the planet, this regulation does more than any other climate rule issued by the federal government, and more than any measure planned for the remainder of Biden’s first term.

That’s partly because transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases generated by the United States. It is also because the rule is objectively ambitious. The rule is expected to remove more than seven billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next thirty years, more than all the greenhouse gases produced by the entire U.S. economy in one year. And because the United States is a huge auto market, analysts predict that companies that make cleaner cars in the United States will start selling them on the global market as other governments adopt or pursue similar standards.

The rule is not a ban on petrol vehicles

The rule does not mandate the sale of electric vehicles, and consumers can still buy and drive gas-powered cars. Rather, it requires automakers to meet stringent new average emissions limits across their entire product lines; it is up to manufacturers to decide how to meet these limits.

Under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency can limit the pollution caused by the total number of cars each year. EPA officials said that as long as automakers adhere to emissions rules, they can sell a mix of gasoline cars, hybrids, electric cars or other types of vehicles, such as those that run on hydrogen.

The rule does not apply to the sale of used vehicles.

It penalizes automakers, not consumers, for noncompliance

Beginning in model year 2027, when the rule takes effect, auto companies will report to the EPA the average emissions associated with all passenger cars they sell. Emission limits will start modestly and increase slowly in the early years of the program, before rising sharply after 2030. Companies that don’t meet emissions limits would have to pay fines that could run into billions of dollars.

Success depends on consumer behavior

Whether America’s roads fill with non-polluting vehicles depends on a central question: Will motorists buy them? Early adopters flocked to electric vehicles, but sales have cooled and automakers worry they need more time to develop the market. That’s one reason why the EPA postponed strict emissions requirements for car sales until after 2030, so manufacturers could improve designs and develop more affordable models, and to build charging infrastructure.

Trump could reverse the rule, but not quickly or easily

Trump has vowed to “end” the Biden administration’s climate rules “on Day 1.” But now that the car rule is final, it will be more difficult and time-consuming, but not impossible, for a future administration to roll back this rule. And even if it were, the Clean Air Act requires it to be replaced with another rule that controls greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles.

The Supreme Court will likely decide his fate

The rules are expected to face immediate legal challenges from a coalition of fossil fuel companies and Republican attorneys general, complaints that will likely make their way to the Supreme Court. The court’s six-to-three conservative majority has taken steps in recent years to limit the EPA’s authority. In a 2022 decision on another major EPA climate rule, the court sharply limited, but did not overturn, EPA’s authority. limit greenhouse gas pollution from power plants.

The climate law that President Biden signed in 2022 has created a large and growing market for companies to buy and sell clean energy tax credits, new data from the Treasury Department shows, creating opportunities for start-ups ups to raise money for projects such as wind farms and solar energy. panel installations.

The market also offers new opportunities for large companies and financial institutions to make money.

Treasury officials will report Tuesday that more than 500 companies have registered a total of 45,500 new clean energy projects with the Internal Revenue Service to take advantage of tax breaks in the 2022 law. That law, the Inflation Reduction Act, is the most expensive attempt by the federal government ever to reduce fossil fuel emissions and combat global warming.

The projects registered with Treasury vary greatly in size. They can be as small as a single wind turbine or as large as a new, advanced battery factory. Treasury officials say their focus so far is on wind and solar energy, with projects registered in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The figures reflect both the broad scope of the climate law and the new mechanisms it has created for companies to capitalize on its incentives.

The law aims to encourage more production and faster deployment of emissions-reducing technologies, in part by offering tax breaks to companies that produce or install these technologies across the country. The credits are lucrative: Solar manufacturers, for example, say the incentives have significantly lowered the cost of U.S. production and helped U.S. panels compete with those from China.

To cash in on tax benefits, U.S. companies generally must have sufficient revenues and profits to generate a significant federal tax liability. That has made it difficult for small businesses, startups and others struggling to turn a profit to take advantage of the climate law. So the authors of the Inflation Reduction Act created what are essentially two solutions to help the law boost those businesses, both of which require projects to be registered with the IRS.

One mechanism allows a handful of groups, such as nonprofit hospitals and local and tribal governments, to do this receive direct payments from the government for the value of tax breaks – for activities such as installing a series of solar panels.

A more comprehensive mechanism essentially allows companies to buy and sell the value of their tax credits on an open marketplace. For example, a large corporation with a significant tax liability might pay $900,000 to a start-up that has generated $1 million in tax credits for wind turbine production. The start-up receives a cash injection to help finance production. The large company reduces its tax bill with a discount.

Normally, financial intermediaries skimp on facilitating the transaction, but experts say the cost for many companies is still lower than the cost of borrowing money to guarantee production.

“Companies that need liquidity can sell their credits instead of taking out loans,” says the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. wrote last month“which is especially important when interest rates are high.”

Finance ministry officials say the registration of projects is an initial screening to detect possible fraud in claiming tax benefits. It does not guarantee that the registered projects will be eligible for credits. Officials don’t expect the first wave of data on the number of credits claimed last year, the first full year of the law’s stimulus, to be available until the fall.

Still, the number of projects now registered is an increase from January, when the Treasury Department reported just over 1,000 registrations for direct payments or eligibility for the new tax credit market. Of the total of 45,500 registrations, more than 98 percent are intended for the market, officials said.

“Before the Inflation Reduction Act, it was more challenging for companies to access tax breaks to finance projects and deploy new clean energy,” Wally Adeyemo, deputy secretary of the treasury, said in a written statement. “Meeting our economic and climate goals depends on companies’ ability to finance capital-intensive projects such as building new factories, and the early data is encouraging.”

Mr. Adeyemo said the data also suggested that another part of the Inflation Reduction Act was working as intended: an increase in funding for the IRS, part of which is dedicated to modernizing the agency’s technological capabilities and enabling to easily collect information, such as tax returns. -credit registrations.

A new $120 million pledge to lift President Biden and his allies will bring the total expected spending by outside groups pushing for Biden’s re-election to $1 billion this year.

The League of Conservation Voters, a leading climate organization that is among the biggest donors to progressive causes, announced its plans Tuesday to support Mr. Biden, at a time when his Republican challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, is struggling to to increase Biden’s support. funds. Mr. Biden’s campaign, independent of outside groups, expects to raise and spend $2 billion as part of his re-election bid.

Republican groups are also likely to make big spending moves into November, but it’s difficult to make direct comparisons between Democratic organizations and their Republican counterparts. Democratic and progressive organizations often announce their spending plans before they have raised the funds, which often come from small donors. Republican groups that rely more on big donors tend not to telegraph their plans.

The pro-Biden outside money comes from nearly a dozen organizations, including climate groups, labor unions and traditional super PACs. There are left-wing groups like MoveOn and moderate Republicans like Republican Voters Against Trump.

The biggest spenders so far are Future Forward, the super PAC blessed by the Biden campaign, which has earmarked more than $250 million in television advertising; the Service Employees International Union, which said last week it would spend $200 million to support Mr. Biden and fellow Democrats; and American Bridge, the Democratic research organization that said as much in January it planned to spend $140 million about an anti-Trump advertising campaign in battleground states.

“The enormity of what we’re talking about has never been seen before in the history of our country,” said Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United, the government reform advocacy group that works to expand the possibilities of this kind of restrict external groups. spend unlimited money on elections.

On Wednesday, the League of Conservation Voters will host its annual dinner in Washington. Among those expected to attend include Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democrat who is the minority leader in the House of Representatives, and a handful of other Democratic members of Congress.

Pete Maysmith, the league’s senior vice president of campaigns, said the group’s funding would subsidize both an advertising campaign on television and digital platforms and an on-the-ground program that will encourage its members and supporters to tell their friends to vote for Biden.

“It’s hard to imagine a bigger stake in this election,” Mr. Maysmith said. “We will communicate with voters in the battleground states and in key races about the stakes, why President Biden has been such a champion on climate change and the obvious and extreme danger of getting Donald Trump and his MAGA back acolytes and big oil enthusiasts. another four years in office.”

Stephanie Schriock, the former president of Emily’s List, the group that supports and finances Democratic women running for office, said she expected the amount of outside money supporting Mr. Biden to be $2.5 billion to $3 billion amounts, where large sums will be spent on legal issues. issues and efforts to get out the vote this fall.

Major Democratic donors, Ms. Schriock said, were animated in recent weeks as Trump closed in on and then clinched the Republican presidential nomination.

“People just didn’t want to believe it was going to be Donald Trump again,” she said. “The whole concept of this happening again just froze them and since Super Tuesday that has changed. People say, ‘Oh, this is happening and this is real.’

It does not include $1 billion in Democratic money pledged on behalf of Mr. Biden another $239 million in advertising disclaimers created by Senate Majority PAC, the super PAC dedicated to electing Senate Democrats. The super PAC backing House Democrats, House Majority PAC, has not yet made any advertising reservations. A spokesperson declined to reveal the group’s plans on Monday.

The $1 billion also does not account for an expected influx of tens of millions — if not more — from organizations supporting Democrats, including Planned Parenthood, and the political groups backed by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York . Neither Planned Parenthood nor Mr. Bloomberg’s groups have disclosed their spending plans for the 2024 election, but past spending has been significant.

One Republican group that has made its plans public is Faith & Freedom, the conservative organization led by Trump ally Ralph Reed, who said last week that it would spend $62 million to register and turn out evangelical voters for Mr. Trump.

Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC backing Republican Senate candidates, has also earmarked $130 million in ad time for the Senate races in Ohio and Montana.

Trump’s main super PAC has spent $380,000 on radio ads targeting black voters. On the day of Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address this month, another pro-Trump super PAC spent $500,000 on TV ads.

The disparity between the pro-Biden and pro-Trump outside groups reflects the cash advantage Mr. Biden’s campaign has over Mr. Trump’s.

Mr. Biden’s campaign announced Sunday that it, along with the Democratic National Committee and affiliated fundraising organizations, entered March with $155 million in cash on hand. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee had about $40 million at the end of January. The groups have not released a more recent total.

The Biden campaign is prohibited from coordinating with the outside groups but has publicly encouraged their help.

“These are real and meaningful investments that we expect will reach the voters who will decide this election, while Donald Trump and a cash-strapped Republican Party show no interest or ability to build a winning coalition,” he said. Julie Chávez Rodríguez. , Mr. Biden’s campaign manager.

Mr. Maysmith of the League of Conservation Voters said his group would work with other pro-Biden super PACs to avoid duplication and strengthen their efforts. He said there are already plans to speak to voters who are inclined to support Biden’s climate agenda but are concerned about his age.

“If they raise concerns about the president’s age, we are absolutely prepared to hear that, acknowledge that and then articulate why the president may not be the youngest man, but he has done more on climate change than any other president in the world.” the history of this country,” Mr Maysmith said.

Other groups that support Mr. Biden and have announced their 2024 spending plans include VoteVets, the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy, the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the countryand Climate Power, which announced an $80 million plan last year.

Ms Muller said the massive spending by outside groups, if Biden is re-elected with Democratic majorities in Congress, could lead to long-sought restrictions on the flow of such large sums into the US political ecosystem.

“It is possible that voter confidence will be further eroded,” she said. “There’s not much room left to fall.”

The climate law that President Biden signed in 2022 has created a large and growing market for companies to buy and sell clean energy tax credits, new data from the Treasury Department shows, creating opportunities for start-ups ups to raise money for projects such as wind farms and solar energy. panel installations.

The market also offers new opportunities for large companies and financial institutions to make money.

Treasury officials will report Tuesday that more than 500 companies have registered a total of 45,500 new clean energy projects with the Internal Revenue Service to take advantage of tax breaks in the 2022 law. That law, the Inflation Reduction Act, is the most expensive attempt by the federal government ever to reduce fossil fuel emissions and combat global warming.

The projects registered with Treasury vary greatly in size. They can be as small as a single wind turbine or as large as a new, advanced battery factory. Treasury officials say their focus so far is on wind and solar energy, with projects registered in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The figures reflect both the broad scope of the climate law and the new mechanisms it has created for companies to capitalize on its incentives.

The law aims to encourage more production and faster deployment of emissions-reducing technologies, in part by offering tax breaks to companies that produce or install these technologies across the country. The credits are lucrative: Solar manufacturers, for example, say the incentives have significantly lowered the cost of U.S. production and helped U.S. panels compete with those from China.

To cash in on tax benefits, U.S. companies generally must have sufficient revenues and profits to generate a significant federal tax liability. That has made it difficult for small businesses, startups and others struggling to turn a profit to take advantage of the climate law. So the authors of the Inflation Reduction Act created what are essentially two solutions to help the law boost those businesses, both of which require projects to be registered with the IRS.

One mechanism allows a handful of groups, such as nonprofit hospitals and local and tribal governments, to do this receive direct payments from the government for the value of tax breaks – for activities such as installing a series of solar panels.

A more comprehensive mechanism essentially allows companies to buy and sell the value of their tax credits on an open marketplace. For example, a large corporation with a significant tax liability might pay $900,000 to a start-up that has generated $1 million in tax credits for wind turbine production. The start-up receives a cash injection to help finance production. The large company reduces its tax bill with a discount.

Normally, financial intermediaries skimp on facilitating the transaction, but experts say the cost for many companies is still lower than the cost of borrowing money to guarantee production.

“Companies that need liquidity can sell their credits instead of taking out loans,” says the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. wrote last month“which is especially important when interest rates are high.”

Finance ministry officials say the registration of projects is an initial screening to detect possible fraud in claiming tax benefits. It does not guarantee that the registered projects will be eligible for credits. Officials don’t expect the first wave of data on the number of credits claimed last year, the first full year of the law’s stimulus, to be available until the fall.

Still, the number of projects now registered is an increase from January, when the Treasury Department reported just over 1,000 registrations for direct payments or eligibility for the new tax credit market. Of the total of 45,500 registrations, more than 98 percent are intended for the market, officials said.

“Before the Inflation Reduction Act, it was more challenging for companies to access tax breaks to finance projects and deploy new clean energy,” Wally Adeyemo, deputy secretary of the treasury, said in a written statement. “Meeting our economic and climate goals depends on companies’ ability to finance capital-intensive projects such as building new factories, and the early data is encouraging.”

Mr. Adeyemo said the data also suggested that another part of the Inflation Reduction Act was working as intended: an increase in funding for the IRS, part of which is dedicated to modernizing the agency’s technological capabilities and enabling that it easily collects information, such as tax returns. -credit registrations.

President Biden’s reelection campaign said Sunday that it had raised more than $53 million in February along with the Democratic Party, an influx of cash expected to boost Democrats’ cash advantage in a general election battle against former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Biden, the Democratic Party and their shared accounts now have $155 million cash on hand — up from $130 million at the end of January, his campaign said. The campaign received strong support from small donors for its February fundraising.

So far, Mr. Biden and the Democrats have built a significant fundraising advantage over Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee, which jointly reported in late January that they had about $40 million in cash on hand. The Trump campaign hasn’t released February fundraising numbers but says it also had its strongest month among small donors — surpassing the $22.3 million raised last August. Mr. Trump and the RNC formed a formal joint fundraising account last week.

“The fact that we have $155 million in cash on hand – 100 percent of which is going towards building the campaign and targeting the six or seven states that will determine the outcome of this election – is just a huge competitive advantage ,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-chair of the Biden campaign, said in an interview.

Trump has been reaching out to donors at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Florida, in an effort to narrow the financial disparity he faces against Biden. The former president is also facing the financial strain of his legal bills, which are being paid by one of his political action committees.

Both campaigns are due to announce details of their finances on March 20, with a more complete picture on April 15.

In February, Mr. Biden’s campaign said it had received contributions from 469,000 different donors. More than 178,000 people have committed to making monthly donations – a significant amount of renewable cash. The campaign said it had received especially strong responses to fundraising emails that focused on Trump becoming the likely Republican nominee.

The new figures cover the combined fundraising of Mr. Biden’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the Biden Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee between Mr. Biden and the DNC. The campaign did not break down how much each of these entities raised or how much money they individually have on hand.

The figures do not include the money Mr. Biden raised after his State of the Union address on March 7. His campaign said it raised $10 million in the 24 hours after the speech, which served to fuel Mr. Biden’s restart. election effort.

Although Mr. Biden is outpacing Mr. Trump this cycle, the $53 million he raised in February remains far lower than the $86 million Mr. Trump collected in February 2020, when he was a sitting president seeking to re-election.

Mr. Biden has spent heavily this month as the campaign intensifies. He invested $30 million in a six-week advertising campaign in key battleground states and hired new staff. He and Vice President Kamala Harris have also campaigned in several swing states since the State of the Union. Last week, Ms. Harris made a high-profile trip to an abortion clinic, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. official known to do so — a visit that underscored how reproductive rights have become an important issue for Democratic voters.

Mr. Katzenberg said the campaign’s fundraising had “accelerated” as Mr. Biden and his surrogates began hitting the road.

“The more people see Joe Biden and his energy and his enthusiasm and his dedication,” Mr. Katzenberg said, “it has, I think, taken away a whole lot of gossip and a kind of competitive false narrative about him and him. his current capabilities and his mental acuity.”

In the coming weeks, the Biden campaign will ramp up fundraising even further, with two events sure to generate attention and big money. On March 28, Biden will appear alongside former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at a fundraiser at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. (The Biden campaign said a sweepstakes-style contest to attend that event raised $4 million in February.)

Next, Hillary Clinton and Lin-Manuel Miranda will host a fundraiser for Mr. Biden on Broadway on April 3.

Rebecca Davis O’Brien And Reid J. Epstein reporting contributed.

On a recent evening in California, a woman named Sandra was at a birthday party with her 15-year-old son when she looked at the clock.

She panicked: it was after 10 p.m

She had less than an hour to get home in time for the 11 p.m. curfew imposed by U.S. immigration authorities, part of a nearly year-old tracking system for migrant families hoping to gain asylum in the United States.

She motioned for her son to leave and pushed him out the door and into the car.

They arrived home at 10:58 p.m., the bulky GPS monitor on her right ankle reporting her location to authorities who were watching her. Her heart, which had been beating against her chest the entire ride home, finally slowed.

Sandra, 45, and her son Justin, who crossed the border in December after fleeing Colombia, are part of a nearly year-old Biden administration program that aims to quickly relocate many of the migrant families who have arrived in the region processed – and possibly deported. United States in record numbers.

The goal of the program is to prevent families from skipping their asylum hearings and melting into American society, joining the millions of undocumented immigrants who remain in the country indefinitely under the radar of U.S. authorities.

If the families do not pass the asylum screening, they can be deported within weeks. The asylum process usually takes years and most applications are ultimately rejected.

So far, the Family Expedited Removal Management program has tracked more than 19,000 people since May, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by The New York Times. More than 1,500 of them have been deported and about 1,000 have absconded by prying off their ankle monitors, ICE data show. The rest have passed the initial screening or have ongoing cases.

Although the program has only been used in a fraction of claims, some U.S. officials see it as a test case for a faster way to deal with families seeking refuge in America, where laws require the government to consider asylum claims from anyone who succeeds. American soil.

They hope the program can provide an alternative to the usual options for dealing with migrant families: detaining them in expensive ICE facilities, which President Biden has criticized, or releasing them with court dates years in the future and no consistent way to detain them. tracks.

Thomas Giles, an ICE official leading the program, said it was promising.

“It has certainly led to an increase in family unit moves over the last nine months compared to before, so we’ve been successful with that,” he said. But he cautioned that the program requires a huge amount of resources and is still in its infancy.

“This is essentially what we’ve had to do for the last decade, but on a massive scale,” said John Sandweg, ICE’s acting director during the Obama administration.

The Biden administration should expand the program, he said, because it is difficult to deport people — especially families — if they have been in the United States for years, building lives in America as their cases work their way through the system.

What to do with families?

Chronically underfunded and understaffed, America’s immigration system cannot keep pace with the number of people seeking asylum in America. Mr. Biden, in an election year when immigration is a dominant issue, may even consider limiting asylum altogether.

There were more than 2.5 million encounters with migrants at the southwestern land border in fiscal year 2023, a record number that has strained resources in American cities.

The questions of how, where and for how long to detain migrants have confused successive governments. But in particular, the issue of what to do with families has been one of the most fraught, with increasingly ethical and political implications.

Years of scientific consensus show that holding minors, even with their parents, can cause developmental damage. Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump all detained families in ICE facilities, hoping the prospect of detention would deter migrant families from making the journey.

Mr. Trump tried to expand the practice and hold families indefinitely, but a federal judge said that violated a court settlement that required families be held for only 20 days.

The Biden administration made a point of ending the detention of families and instead releasing families with ankle bracelets and trackable cellphones. That model was a precursor to the new program, which uses strict curfews and accelerated asylum screenings in addition to electronic surveillance.

The program is used in more than 40 locations and has the tools to monitor thousands of migrants and make rapid rulings in a decisive step in the asylum process: the credible-fear interview.

In a functioning system, most asylum seekers would be interviewed at the border to determine whether they have a credible fear of persecution in their home country. But only about 500 such interviews are conducted every day – for a tiny fraction of the thousands of people crossing the border.

The rest are often released into the country with a trial far in the future.

The new program aims to screen families and quickly deport those who don’t meet the bar due to credible fears. Mr. Giles, the ICE official who runs the program, said ICE gives migrants a list of free legal services providers when they are processed into the program.

If families fail the initial screening, case managers who track their movements ensure their travel documents are in order and coordinate travel home, usually on chartered government planes. When they abscond, ICE begins searching for them for immediate arrest.

If they are successful, they can at least remain in the United States until their case is resolved.

‘I didn’t want to come’

Sandra said she came to the United States as a last resort.

In Colombia, she led a Christian organization for many years that focused on helping children of people addicted to drugs. It was, she said, her “dream job.”

But last year, she said, gang members threatened to kill her because she refused to help them sell drugs. She knew she had to leave.

“I didn’t want to come,” she said through a Spanish interpreter, asking that only her first name be used out of fear for her safety. “Many people come here because they are looking for the famous American dream – but that was not my case.”

In Colombia, she said, she was “up here,” gesturing above her head. In America she is ‘down here’, pointing to her anklet.

She began organizing the trip to the United States in the winter, with a vague plan for what to do once she arrived with Justin: Her eldest son, who had come to the United States a few years ago, would buy plane tickets to Buy them Oakland. , California.

But first she had to cross the border. In Mexico they were robbed and threatened with kidnapping and torture. Cartel members threatened to detain them until their families paid money. There was only one option, she said. Cross the border.

In early December, they walked into Arizona and told Border Patrol they were afraid to return to Colombia, triggering the asylum process.

The administration saw them as candidates for the new expedited process because they were headed to the Bay Area, where the program has an office. Sandra was fitted with an ankle monitor and told to report to a government office in San Francisco.

The case manager there told Sandra that she was not a criminal, but that this was part of Mr. Biden’s program to get things “under control,” she recalled.

“This is humiliating in a way,” she said. “We know we didn’t get here legally, but we had no way to do it legally.”

‘Completely unsustainable’

Many immigrant advocates say the expedited removal program actually works too quickly, making it difficult for people to find legal representation. They also criticize the use of GPS trackers, which are more commonly used in criminal courts.

The National Immigrant Justice Center said building an asylum case requires “complex legal research, fact-gathering and numerous in-person meetings with the client for trauma-informed interviews and case preparation.”

“The speed of the program is completely unsustainable,” said Cindy Woods, national policy advisor at Americans for Immigrant Justice, an organization that represents families whose cases are processed through the expedited removal program, including Sandra’s.

Ms. Woods said a mother of two from Ecuador contacted her over the summer two days before her family’s credible anxiety screening. But the woman became distraught as she spoke of “past harm and threats”, Ms Woods said.

There was no time to prepare her for the asylum screening, which she ultimately failed, Ms Woods said. The woman is now in hiding with her family in Ecuador.

Ms Woods said the accelerated removal program was preferable to family detention. But she said, “It’s happening way too fast.”

For the Biden administration, speed is the whole point.

The immigration court backlog exceeded three million cases last year, and there are not nearly enough judges and interpreters to handle it effectively. The new accelerated program is an attempt to prevent families from becoming even more disadvantaged.

The future

On a Friday in late December, Sandra arrived in San Francisco for her first asylum screening.

She explained to the officers why she came to the United States and what she risked at home. A week later the decision was made: she had passed the credible fear screening, the first administrative step on the road to asylum.

She was in America for four weeks.

Now she waits with the rest of the asylum seekers for her case to go to immigration court. There are often multiple hearings, including one where both the migrant and the government present evidence. That could take years.

Now that she has passed the initial screening, government officials have removed her ankle monitor — a relief, she said. She is going to apply for a work permit so she can earn money.

But the country still feels deeply unknown to her.

“We trust God and I think everything will turn out well,” she said. “But of course we are afraid of what will happen.”

Faced with the prospect that they may never be able to impeach President Biden, Republicans in the House of Representatives are exploring a pivot to a different strategy: issuing criminal referrals against him and those close to him.

In recent weeks, a political and factual reality has emerged on Capitol Hill. Despite their subpoenas and depositions, Republicans in the House of Representatives have failed to provide any solid evidence of Mr. Biden’s misconduct and lack the votes in their own party to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment.

Instead, top Republican Party lawmakers have begun strategizing to make criminal referrals against Mr. Biden, members of his family and his associates, essentially sending letters to the Justice Department urging them urging prosecutors to investigate specific crimes they believe were committed.

The move would be largely symbolic, but it would allow Republicans in Congress to save face while putting an end to their so-far troubled impeachment inquiry. It has the added appeal for the Republican Party of joining former President Donald J. Trump’s pledge to prosecute Mr. Biden if he wins the election.

And it would prevent a repeat of the humiliating process that Republicans in the House of Representatives, who have a small and shrinking majority, endured last month with the impeachment of Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security. After initially failing to get enough votes to impeach Mr. Mayorkas, Republicans narrowly succeeded on the second try, only to realize that the Democratic-controlled Senate was poised to quickly acquit him — or even dismissal of charges without trial.

“There’s nothing I’ve heard in the last few weeks that says we’re anywhere close to voting” for impeachment, said Rep. Kelly Armstrong, Republican of North Dakota and author of the resolution authorizing the impeachment inquiry.

Mr Armstrong said he believed criminal referrals were the much more likely outcome. Mr. Armstrong suggested that Republicans in the House of Representatives could make references regarding alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act in connection with international business deals by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and suggested that the Department of Justice would investigate allegations of obstruction.

“I’m still interested in why we haven’t gotten better answers about the whole-of-government approach to obstructing all these investigations,” Mr. Armstrong said.

Republicans say they are not done with their investigation and that they could still change course and decide to hold an impeachment vote. They have scheduled a public hearing next week with former business associates of Hunter Biden, though Mr. Biden himself has declined to appear.

In an interview, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he also demanded audio recordings of President Biden that were part of Robert K. Hur’s special counsel investigation into his handling of classified documents.

Criminal referrals, Mr. Jordan said, were among the options “on the table” as the Republican Party moves forward.

Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and chairman of the Oversight Committee, has repeatedly suggested in recent weeks that issuing criminal referrals could mean the end of the impeachment inquiry, rather than a vote on impeachment.

“What does responsibility ultimately look like? It looks like criminal references. It seems like people are being referred to the Justice Department,” Mr. Comer said in a recent interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “If Merrick Garland’s Justice Department does not take any criminal referrals seriously, then perhaps the next president, with a new attorney general, will.”

The shift to investigating criminal referrals came after Mr. Comer had what his aides said was a chance meeting with Mr. Trump in Florida last month. A spokeswoman for Mr. Comer would not comment on what was discussed but said that while having lunch with Vernon Hill, a banker who has donated to Mr. Trump’s campaigns, the chairman unexpectedly ran into Mr. short 10-minute conversation.

The potential change in strategy also comes as Republicans have lost seats in the House of Representatives, making impeachment all the more unlikely. With the departure next week of Rep. Ken Buck, the Colorado Republican, the party will have just 218 votes in the House of Representatives, a narrow majority of the 435-member organization.

On Thursday, Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed that Republican leaders were discussing the possibility of criminal referrals.

In a brief interview at the Capitol, he made clear that impeaching President Biden was not his top priority at the moment, saying he had been “a little busy with appropriations.” But he said House leadership would consider whether to issue criminal referrals.

“It needs more thought, that’s for sure,” he said.

Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a close ally of President Trump, was among those calling for Republicans in the House of Representatives to pursue criminal referrals against Mr. Biden and his family members.

“He deserves them,” Mr. Gaetz said of Mr. Biden.

Mr. Gaetz added that it was clear that Republicans did not have the votes for impeachment.

“I don’t think enough Republicans believe that a bribe can be obtained through a payment to a family member,” said Mr. Gaetz, who claimed that Hunter Biden’s income from foreign companies was little more. then a bribery scheme. But he added that if Trump were to win the election, he could install new staff at the Justice Department, which could pursue prosecutions based on Republicans’ referrals.

“The DOJ is about to change hands,” Mr. Gaetz said. “It’s about to be under new management.”

Criminal references would be politically easier for Republicans in the House of Representatives than impeachment. They do not require a vote from Congress or even have any legal weight. Mr. Comer could simply draft a letter outlining the allegations.

The Democratic-led House of Representatives special committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol made major headlines in the last Congress with its criminal references to Mr. Trump. (He was later charged by the Justice Department with crimes related to the scheme to overturn the 2020 election.)

Rep. Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel on arming the government, said Republicans were just trying to salvage a failing investigation. Republicans suffered a brutal blow when one of the key pieces of evidence they presented was discredited by the Justice Department.

“They realize they don’t have the votes for impeachment because they don’t have the evidence,” Ms. Plaskett said. “But they realize that with a criminal referral, if there is a referral, it will take some time for it to work through the Department of Justice, which gives them additional fodder during the election cycle. They’re just trying to create some sort of false equivalency between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which isn’t there.”

Even some Republicans said a reference against Biden might not make sense. citing the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

“We are not referring a sitting president for criminal charges,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, Republican of California. He added that Republicans can refer the president’s relatives based on evidence they uncover, “but most of what we discovered, they already knew.”

Representative Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, who participated in Hunter Biden’s closed-door deposition as a member of the Oversight Committee, said he believed the investigation had “clearly” crossed the Biden family’s threshold of reasonable suspicion, but that hadn’t happened yet. determined that the president had committed a crime.

“If our investigation shows that impeachment is not a just prosecution, perhaps a criminal referral is,” Mr. Higgins said.

But Mr. Higgins also suggested that Republicans in the House of Representatives could simply let voters decide.

“It’s a much heavier burden for impeachment. So I would say whatever the Oversight Committee does, the American people will have a chance to make a decision in November.”

Jonathan Swan And Maggie Haberman reporting contributed.

Faced with the prospect that they may never be able to impeach President Biden, Republicans in the House of Representatives are exploring a pivot to a different strategy: issuing criminal referrals against him and those close to him.

In recent weeks, a political and factual reality has emerged on Capitol Hill. Despite their subpoenas and depositions, Republicans in the House of Representatives have failed to provide any solid evidence of Mr. Biden’s misconduct and lack the votes in their own party to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment.

Instead, top Republican Party lawmakers have begun strategizing to make criminal referrals against Mr. Biden, members of his family and his associates, essentially sending letters to the Justice Department urging them urging prosecutors to investigate specific crimes they believe were committed.

The move would be largely symbolic, but it would allow Republicans in Congress to save face while putting an end to their so-far troubled impeachment inquiry. It has the added appeal for the Republican Party of joining former President Donald J. Trump’s pledge to prosecute Mr. Biden if he wins the election.

And it would prevent a repeat of the humiliating process that Republicans in the House of Representatives, who have a small and shrinking majority, endured last month with the impeachment of Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security. After initially failing to get enough votes to impeach Mr. Mayorkas, Republicans narrowly succeeded on the second try, only to realize that the Democratic-controlled Senate was poised to quickly acquit him — or even dismissal of charges without trial.

“There’s nothing I’ve heard in the last few weeks that says we’re anywhere close to voting” for impeachment, said Rep. Kelly Armstrong, Republican of North Dakota and author of the resolution authorizing the impeachment inquiry.

Mr Armstrong said he believed criminal referrals were the much more likely outcome. Mr. Armstrong suggested that Republicans in the House of Representatives could make references regarding alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act in connection with international business deals by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and suggested that the Department of Justice would investigate allegations of obstruction.

“I’m still interested in why we haven’t gotten better answers about the whole-of-government approach to obstructing all these investigations,” Mr. Armstrong said.

Republicans say they are not done with their investigation and that they could still change course and decide to hold an impeachment vote. They have scheduled a public hearing next week with former business associates of Hunter Biden, though Mr. Biden himself has declined to appear.

In an interview, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he also demanded audio recordings of President Biden that were part of Robert K. Hur’s special counsel investigation into his handling of classified documents.

Criminal referrals, Mr. Jordan said, were among the options “on the table” as the Republican Party moves forward.

Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and chairman of the Oversight Committee, has repeatedly suggested in recent weeks that issuing criminal referrals could mean the end of the impeachment inquiry, rather than a vote on impeachment.

“What does responsibility ultimately look like? It looks like criminal references. It seems like people are being referred to the Justice Department,” Mr. Comer said in a recent interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “If Merrick Garland’s Justice Department does not take any criminal referrals seriously, then perhaps the next president, with a new attorney general, will.”

The shift to investigating criminal referrals came after Mr. Comer had what his aides said was a chance meeting with Mr. Trump in Florida last month. A spokeswoman for Mr. Comer would not comment on what was discussed but said that while having lunch with Vernon Hill, a banker who has donated to Mr. Trump’s campaigns, the chairman unexpectedly ran into Mr. short 10-minute conversation.

The potential change in strategy also comes as Republicans have lost seats in the House of Representatives, making impeachment all the more unlikely. With the departure next week of Rep. Ken Buck, the Colorado Republican, the party will have just 218 votes in the House of Representatives, a narrow majority of the 435-member organization.

On Thursday, Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed that Republican leaders were discussing the possibility of criminal referrals.

In a brief interview at the Capitol, he made clear that impeaching President Biden was not his top priority at the moment, saying he had been “a little busy with appropriations.” But he said House leadership would consider whether to issue criminal referrals.

“It needs more thought, that’s for sure,” he said.

Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a close ally of President Trump, was among those calling for Republicans in the House of Representatives to pursue criminal referrals against Mr. Biden and his family members.

“He deserves them,” Mr. Gaetz said of Mr. Biden.

Mr. Gaetz added that it was clear that Republicans did not have the votes for impeachment.

“I don’t think enough Republicans believe that a bribe can be obtained through a payment to a family member,” said Mr. Gaetz, who claimed that Hunter Biden’s income from foreign companies was little more. then a bribery scheme. But he added that if Trump were to win the election, he could install new staff at the Justice Department, which could pursue prosecutions based on Republicans’ referrals.

“The DOJ is about to change hands,” Mr. Gaetz said. “It’s about to be under new management.”

Criminal references would be politically easier for Republicans in the House of Representatives than impeachment. They do not require a vote from Congress or even have any legal weight. Mr. Comer could simply draft a letter outlining the allegations.

The Democratic-led House of Representatives special committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol made major headlines in the last Congress with its criminal references to Mr. Trump. (He was later charged by the Justice Department with crimes related to the scheme to overturn the 2020 election.)

Rep. Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel on arming the government, said Republicans were just trying to salvage a failing investigation. Republicans suffered a brutal blow when one of the key pieces of evidence they presented was discredited by the Justice Department.

“They realize they don’t have the votes for impeachment because they don’t have the evidence,” Ms. Plaskett said. “But they realize that with a criminal referral, if there is a referral, it will take some time for it to work through the Department of Justice, which gives them additional fodder during the election cycle. They’re just trying to create some sort of false equivalency between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which isn’t there.”

Even some Republicans said a reference against Biden might not make sense. citing the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

“We are not referring a sitting president for criminal charges,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, Republican of California. He added that Republicans can refer the president’s relatives based on evidence they uncover, “but most of what we discovered, they already knew.”

Representative Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, who participated in Hunter Biden’s closed-door deposition as a member of the Oversight Committee, said he believed the investigation had “clearly” crossed the Biden family’s threshold of reasonable suspicion, but that hadn’t happened yet. determined that the president had committed a crime.

“If our investigation shows that impeachment is not a just prosecution, perhaps a criminal referral is,” Mr. Higgins said.

But Mr. Higgins also suggested that Republicans in the House of Representatives could simply let voters decide.

“It’s a much heavier burden for impeachment. So I would say whatever the Oversight Committee does, the American people will have a chance to make a decision in November.”

Jonathan Swan And Maggie Haberman reporting contributed.

Robert K. Hur, the former special counsel who investigated President Biden’s possession of classified documents after he left the vice presidency, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Republicans criticized Mr. Hur over his conclusion that the evidence was insufficient to charge Mr. Biden with a crime. Democrats, for their part, attacked him for disparaging comments in his report on Mr. Biden’s mental acuity — including calling him a “well-meaning, older man with a poor memory” who had “diminished his faculties late in life.”

Here are five takeaways:

Hur was attacked by both sides.

Members of both parties were unhappy with aspects of Mr. Hur’s report. Republicans were angry that Mr. Biden was not charged with a crime, and repeatedly pointed to the criminal indictment against former President Donald J. Trump, which accuses him of deliberately withholding sensitive national security documents. Democrats accused Mr. Hur of smearing Mr. Biden’s mental acuity, saying that was contrary to Justice Department practices.

Sometimes the comments became harsh.

Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia, accused Mr. Hur of deliberately providing fodder to “play into Republicans’ narrative that the president is unfit for office because he is senile.” That casting was false, he said, pointing to Mr. Biden’s energetic speech at the State of the Union.

Getting Mr. Hur, a former Trump political appointee to acknowledge that he is a registered Republican, accused Mr. Johnson of “doing everything you can do to get President Trump re-elected so you can be appointed to federal judge or perhaps to another position at the Ministry of Justice.”

Mr. Hur responded that he “had no such ambitions.” He insisted: ‘Party politics had no place in my work, it had no place in the investigative steps I took, it had no place in the decision I made, and it had no place in a single word of my report. ”

Across the aisle, Representative Tom Tiffany, Republican of Wisconsin, accused Mr. Hur of protecting Mr. Biden as part of what he portrayed as a politicized double standard by the Justice Department, which it accuses of committing crimes.

“I want to thank you for the work you have done to the best of your ability, but unfortunately you are part of the Praetorian Guard that guards the swamp here in Washington DC and protects the elites – and Joe Biden is part of that company of the elites,” Mr. Tiffany said.

Attempts to score political points dominated the hearing.

The hearing rarely focused on gaps in the evidence Mr. Hur gathered, beyond Mr. Biden’s mental state. Instead, Republicans sought to portray Mr. Biden as a criminal who has escaped indictment solely because he is, in the words of Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, a “senile cooperator” and “the elevator doesn’t go all the way to the ground’. the top.”

Mr. Hur, who has been under fire for making what some have described as unnecessary and disparaging comments about Mr. Biden’s memory, had an incentive to focus on how Mr. Biden’s mental state could be presented to a jury come across as relevant and appropriate to discuss. .

Democrats often focused on how Mr. Trump kept classified documents; Mr. Trump was criminally charged. That included the contrast between Mr. Biden’s cooperation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to hinder efforts to retrieve files he kept at his Florida club and residence, Mar-a-Lago. And on several occasions, they played video clips of Mr. Trump misremembering things or speaking garbled.

There was less discussion about why the facts Mr. Hur found fell short of proving Mr. Biden knew he had a particular classified document, regardless of his memory.

Yet Democrats like Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania have at several points led Mr. Hur to agree that his report also included lines like: “In addition to this dearth of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents we cannot refute.”

“I didn’t acquit him.”

Moments after Mr. Hur’s report became public last month, Mr. Biden’s allies quickly sought to characterize it as an exoneration of the president. In their view, Mr Hur’s failure to find enough evidence to charge the president with a crime meant Mr Biden was innocent.

But Mr. Hur did find some evidence consistent with Mr. Biden deliberately withholding classified documents — even as he also concluded that the available facts did not provide sufficient evidence. Against that backdrop, five words during a conversation with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat, could complicate Democrats’ message as the 2024 campaign unfolds.

After claiming that Mr. Hur had exonerated the president, Ms. Jayapal tried to go further with her comments. But Mr Hur intervened and said: “I did not ‘acquit’ him – that word does not appear in the report.” He repeated that several more times, under questioning from members of both parties.

The discussion offered an echo of an ambiguous and much-researched line in the 2019 report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Unlike Mr. Hur, Mr. Mueller did not some indication as to whether Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime, but he wrote only that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” of obstruction of justice.

Hur made lawmakers say things he disagreed with.

Throughout the hearing, Mr. Hur generally kept a straight face and — except when defending himself personally — rarely raised objections to members of Congress who questioned him, even when their claims contradicted what he said or wrote.

For example, while Republicans like Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey used their time to portray Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump’s improper possession of classified documents as equals, Mr. Hur did not speak and repeated what he wrote in his report: that there are “several material differences” between the two cases.

And late in the hearing, Mr. Hur did not respond when a Democratic congresswoman, Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, declared that “you were able to completely and totally exonerate him of any criminal wrongdoing.”

The hearing seemed likely to resonate in the coming campaign.

Some of the most intense conversations have focused on the president’s age and cognitive abilities, and are likely to resonate in the next eight months of the 2024 presidential campaign as Mr. Biden faces a rematch with Mr. Trump.

Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest elected president, has been dogged for months by concerns about his age among voters of both parties. He and his allies have dismissed those concerns, but Mr. Hur’s report described memory problems during a five-hour interview.

On Tuesday, Republicans repeatedly tried to engage Mr. Hur in discussions about the president’s state of mind, but he refused to go beyond the words in his report. Democrats, meanwhile, angrily disputed Mr. Hur’s claim that he was not political: “You were not born yesterday, you understood exactly what you were doing. It was a choice, said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California.

Within the West Wing, the political damage has already been done by Mr Hur’s report. And Tuesday’s hearing can do little but reinforce it — a reality Republicans were clearly aware of when they invited him to testify.

For the president’s opponents, Mr. Hur’s denial that he exonerated Mr. Biden could also be political gold. It’s not hard to imagine this moment appearing in political television ads in support of Trump’s campaign.

Democrats will try to focus on Mr. Hur’s conclusion that no charges should be filed, and draw a sharp contrast between the charges brought against Mr. Trump over his own handling of turning over classified documents after he had left the White House. 2021.