Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision allowing Texas to arrest and deport migrants resonated deeply in Arizona, which adopted its own divisive crackdown on illegal immigration more than a decade ago.

Arizona’s effort, which became known as the “show me your papers” law, sparked an outpouring of fear and anger after it passed in 2010 and shook state politics in ways that still resonate today — offering a lesson in what awaits us. Texas.

The law required immigrants to carry immigration documents, and gave police and sheriffs the authority to investigate and detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. It made undocumented immigrants afraid to drive or leave their homes. It led to boycotts and angry protests. A politics resists removed the law’s Republican architect from office. Legal challenges overturned key provisions of the law.

The measure also spurred a new generation of Latino activists to organize, register voters and run for office, creating a political movement that has helped elect Democrats across Arizona and transform a once reliably Republican state in a purple political battlefield.

“It made me realize where I stand in the United States, where my parents stand,” said Valeria Garcia, 21, an undocumented activist who was brought to Arizona from Mexico at age 4 and is now studying political science and cross-border science. studies at Arizona State University. “That was a political awakening.”

Immigration attorneys and immigrant children who grew up under the law, Senate Bill 1070, said it created profound fear and uncertainty in Latino communities across Arizona. Some families hurriedly left the state. Some stopped working.

“It really created a chilling effect across the state,” said Delia Salvatierra, an immigration attorney in Phoenix.

The Supreme Court struck down parts of Arizona law in a 2012 decision that declared the federal government, not the states, had the power to set immigration policy. In 2016, voters in Maricopa County ousted Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the hardline opponent of illegal immigration and a strong supporter of state crackdowns.

With the number of illegal border crossings reaching record levels, Republicans who control the Arizona state legislature have again pushed for strict new measures. Earlier this year they passed the “Arizona Border Invasion Act.” account similar to the Texas law that would have allowed local and state authorities to arrest and deport migrants who enter Arizona illegally. The veto was vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.

Some who lived through the earlier law say the scars are still there. Denise Garcia, born in Phoenix to parents from Chihuahua, Mexico, was still in elementary school when the law went into effect. She vividly remembers how her family changed their routines to hide from authorities and felt afraid to leave the house. She said several immigrant friends from her neighborhood had moved back to Mexico. She said life felt like a haze of fear.

‘Are my parents going to be deported?’ she said. “Will I come home to an empty house?”

The House of Representatives on Thursday passed legislation that would require migrants who enter the country without authorization and are accused of theft to be taken into federal custody, after Republicans introduced a bill attacking President Biden and Democrats as dangerously lax in the field of border enforcement.

The measure is named after Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student from Georgia who was murdered in February. Authorities have charged a Venezuelan migrant who entered the United States illegally and was subsequently released on parole in the case.

The bill has little chance of making headway in the Democratic-led Senate, but Republicans used it as a way to draw attention to Democrats in the border debate and sow the kind of fear about immigrants that former president Donald J. Trump has had. made a staple of his politics.

Their efforts to harass Democrats on the issue appeared to be successful, as 37 members of Biden’s party supported the legislation, which broadly denounced the administration’s “open borders” policy. The bill, which passed by a vote of 251-170, also named “Border Czar” Vice President Kamala Harris” and Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security, who was impeached by the House of Representatives last month. And it called on Mr. Biden to “publicly denounce his administration’s immigration policies that resulted in the murder of Laken Riley.”

Many Democrats condemned the bill, calling it a cowardly political maneuver that exploited a tragedy and did nothing to address the situation at the border. They argued that the legislation would subject more people to mandatory detention at a time when Republicans refuse to give the Department of Homeland Security the resources it needs to implement its policies. They also noted that the legislation could put innocent people at risk of unlawful detention.

“Let’s think about that,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York. “Someone who is arrested but never even charged will now be subject to mandatory immigration detention.” He said people are often arrested for crimes they did not commit. Ms Riley’s case was heartbreaking, he said, but “tough cases make for bad law.”

Immigration officials currently have broad discretion in whether to detain undocumented immigrants, but are required to do so in cases of drug offenses, serious crimes and membership of a terrorist organization. Yet space issues mean officials can only detain those who pose the greatest threat to public safety and national security.

On Thursday, hours before Biden’s State of the Union address, Republicans directly blamed him for Ms. Riley’s death. Rep. Tom McClintock of California said her murder was “predestined the day this administration took office.”

Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey simply stated, “Laken Riley is dead because of Joe Biden’s policies.”

Ms. Riley went for an afternoon run near the University of Georgia campus last month and never returned. Her body was later found on a forest trail, with visible injuries from what authorities later called “blunt trauma.”

The man accused of the killing is a migrant from Venezuela, arrested by border police for illegally entering the country in 2022 and released with temporary permission to stay in the country.

In New York City, Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, was subsequently arrested on charges of driving a scooter without a license and with a child not wearing a helmet. In Georgia he was arrested in connection with a shoplifting case. But when officials ran his name through their databases, there was no indication he would be detained.

Then came Mrs. Riley’s murder.

The House bill would call on Mr. Biden to end the practice that critics sometimes call “catch and release,” in which migrants caught crossing the border without authorization are released on parole to to remain in the country until their immigration claims can be decided. It also calls on him to strengthen immigration enforcement, “detain and remove criminal aliens,” reinstate the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy that requires migrants to remain in Mexico while their immigration claims have been processed, putting an end to what it called Trump policies. Biden’s ‘parole abuse’.

The measure would also allow states to sue the federal government for failing to enforce border security laws, which Democrats say are unconstitutional.

“DHS can’t hold everyone, so the executive branch, not the states, must make choices,” said Representative Glenn F. Ivey, Democrat of Maryland. “This bill would not give DHS the resources to change that. We all know we need more border agents and more judges to reduce the backlog of immigration cases. This bill is not a serious attempt to address real border security needs.”

Mr. Biden has requested nearly $14 billion to hire more Border Patrol agents and judges so asylum decisions can be made more quickly. Republicans rejected that request.

The House-passed legislation came just weeks after Senate Republicans rejected the tough border security restrictions they themselves had demanded, after Mr. Trump stoked opposition to the bipartisan compromise and made clear he would ease the unrest at the borders as a political advantage in the presidential race.

“If Republicans had taken it seriously, they would not have rejected the Senate bill,” Nadler said. “That bill was going to pass until President Trump decided he would rather have a problem for the campaign than solve the problem.”

The Laken Riley Act is part of a long-standing Republican campaign to stoke fears that lax immigration policies will lead to a surge of immigrants and people of color in otherwise safe communities, fueling crime.

Mr. Trump and other Republicans have tried to spin the issue for political advantage. Speaking about Ms. Riley’s murder, Mr. Trump recently referred to “Biden migrant crime” and said prisons in other countries are “emptying” in the United States.

On Thursday, Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and majority leader, said Ms. Riley’s killing was part of a trend.

“It’s happening over and over again in communities across America since Joe Biden opened our southern border,” he said.

The statistics do not support these claims. For years, studies have found that undocumented immigrants have much lower crime rates than citizens born in the United States and legal immigrants when it comes to a variety of crimes, including violent crimes, drug crimes, and property crimes.

Mr. Trump and Republicans have chosen to emphasize the exceptions. During his presidency, Mr. Trump has often emphasized what he called “angel families,” relatives of people killed by undocumented immigrants, to advocate his strictest border policies. Speaker Mike Johnson planned to host angel families in his box in the House chamber for Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday.

Capitalizing on racially charged crime politics is hardly a new tactic. Long before Trump entered the political scene and warned about criminals entering the country from Mexico, former President George Bush used the case of Willie Horton, a black man who committed violent crimes while briefly granted leave from prison, to fuel a campaign to get going. in 1988 against his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said the bill passed Thursday would have done nothing to prevent Ms. Riley’s death.

“This is a sickening new low for the Republican majority in the House of Representatives,” she said.

Not since Theodore Roosevelt ran against William Howard Taft in 1912 have voters had a chance to weigh the credentials of two men who have done the job of president.

And despite holding intense and similarly critical opinions of both President Biden and his predecessor, Americans have far more positive views of Donald J. Trump’s policies than of Mr. Biden.

Overall, 40 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s policies had helped them personally, compared to just 18 percent who said the same about Mr. Biden’s policies. Instead, 43 percent of voters said Mr. Biden’s policies had hurt them, nearly double the share who said the same about Mr. Trump’s policies, the latest Times/Siena poll found.

That presidents are often remembered with more fondness once they leave office is nothing new. Looking back at nine of the past 11 presidents, job performance approval rose 12 percentage points after leaving office, both on average and for Mr. Trump in particular, according to a Gallup poll from June.

But recent Times/Siena polls show how relatively well-regarded Trump’s policies are, even among groups affected by policies that Democrats hope will lead to trouble in 2024. And for many, it seems to be all about the economy.

Women are 20 percentage points more likely to say that Mr. Trump’s policies have helped them than those of Mr. Biden, despite the fact that Mr. Trump appointed Supreme Court justices who ultimately overturned the right to abortion, and that about two-thirds of women in America believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Overall, the share of women who think Mr. Trump’s policies have helped them is 39 percent, with 26 percent saying his policies have hurt them and 34 percent saying it hasn’t made much difference.

In polls from six major battleground states in October, 42 percent of women said abortion should always be legal; of that group, two-thirds said Trump’s policies had hurt them. But women who thought abortion should be more limited — including those who said abortion should be largely legal — were far more likely to say Trump’s policies helped them rather than hurt them.

“I like his policies,” said Nadeen Geller, 57, a housewife who lives in Staten Island, New York, and plans to vote for Mr. Trump. “I think they work.”

“I think he can do wonders economically,” added Ms. Geller, who supports keeping abortion legal before 15 weeks of pregnancy and later for health reasons. “I think he can do very well for this country.”

Views on the economy are deeply intertwined with views on the candidates’ policies. And while Republicans almost universally view the economy as bad, Democrats are more evenly divided. Among voters who said the economy was in excellent or good shape, large shares also said they had felt the positive impact of Mr. Biden’s policies. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who think the economy is fair or poor are more likely to say Biden’s policies have hurt them or not made much of a difference.

Another of Mr. Trump’s first signature policies, his plan to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, was opposed by two-thirds of Spanish votersThis is evident from exit polls conducted during the 2016 elections. It was part of a series of policies, including a travel ban from several predominantly Muslim countries, that contributed to strong Democratic voter turnout and major victories for Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterm elections.

Now, 37 percent of Hispanic voters said Mr. Trump’s policies have helped them personally, compared to 15 percent who said this about Mr. Biden’s policies.

“The money flowed into Trump, even during the Covid years toward the end of his term,” said Henry Perez, 50, who lives in California’s Central Valley. He voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 but switched to Mr. Biden in 2020 because, as a union member, he was unenthusiastic about Mr. Trump’s policies toward unions.

Mr. Perez plans to vote for Mr. Trump again this fall, partly because of the economy.

“Just go to the pump and go to the store — that will tell you everything you need to know about how Biden’s policies hurt me,” he said.

Black voters were the least likely to say Mr. Trump’s policies helped them, but they still rated Mr. Trump’s policies more favorably than Mr. Biden’s.

Gameli Fenuku, a 22-year-old student from Richmond, Virginia, plans to vote for Biden — mainly because “he said he would make college more affordable for students.” But he said Mr. Biden’s policies had hurt him overall, and Mr. Trump’s had helped.

“I don’t want to say it was just because he was president, but everything was definitely cheaper,” Mr. Fenuku said of Mr. Trump, adding: “We weren’t just handing out money to other countries.” He said he would consider voting for Mr. Trump, a stance that was once a rarity among young black men like Mr. Fenuku but has become increasingly common in recent polls.

Mr. Biden’s student loan policies were also cited by Mary Turak, 64, a nurse who lives in Pittsburgh. Ms. Turak, a Democrat, said those around her were “more financially secure” under Mr. Biden, with new jobs, better wages and less student debt.

“One of my daughters has had hers completely forgiven,” Ms. Turak said, adding, “I have another daughter with student loan debt that will probably be forgiven at some level.”

But overall, across gender, age, race and education, voters were more likely to say Biden’s time in office had hurt more than helped.

“He doesn’t really take care of anything at home,” said Jonathan Jones, 35, of Plant City, Florida, citing the wars and the economy as reasons he disapproves of Mr. Biden’s policies.

Mr. Jones, who used to work in manufacturing and now cares for his mother, voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but plans to vote for Mr. Trump in 2024.

“Although Donald Trump sometimes gets on my nerves with his comments, he really helped people,” Mr. Jones said. “Whether it’s food, housing, gas or jobs.”

For the candidates’ own supporters, views on their policies seem to match their enthusiasm gap. Half of Biden’s 2020 supporters said his policies haven’t made much difference to them either way. The vast majority of Trump’s supporters in 2020 said his policies had helped them.

In fact, among the small number of Mr. Biden’s supporters in 2020 who said they planned to vote for Mr. Trump this fall, nearly 60 percent said Mr. Biden’s policies had hurt them. Only a handful said his policies had helped them.

Mr. Biden, however, is winning among the sizable groups of voters who say his policies or those of Mr. Trump have not made much of a difference.

And if we go back to the 1912 race, who did voters ultimately choose? Neither Taft, the incumbent president, nor Roosevelt, his predecessor and challenger. Woodrow Wilson beat them both.

Two days before Michigan’s Democratic primary, speakers at a rally on Sunday in Dearborn, Michigan, urged voters to withhold their support for President Biden over his policy on the war in Gaza — saying only Mr. Biden and the Democrats who support his policies Israel’s policies would be to blame if the protest vote helped former President Donald J. Trump win in November.

“You all know that Trump is an existential threat to our democracy,” said one of the speakers, Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, “and President Biden risks another Trump term because of his support for the far right, most extremist administration . government in the history of Israel.”

Ms. Tlaib is the only member of Michigan’s congressional delegation to support an effort to encourage Democrats to protest Mr. Biden’s position on the war in Gaza by declaring “uncommitted” during the state’s primaries on Tuesday to vote. That move, led by a group called Listen to Michigan, has set in motion a primary that Mr. Biden is expected to win easily but has also raised concerns that the president could lose the support he needs to swing state to win in the general elections in 2011. November.

It’s unclear how much support the push for “unfettered” voting has generated, even as Listen to Michigan has held rallies and visited mosques across the state since it began its efforts this month.

But Sunday’s event, which was organized by a group known as the Michigan Task Force for Palestine and drew more than 200 people to an indoor event space in Dearborn, was intended in part to show that support for the effort extends further than that of Michigan. large Arab-American community. Other speakers at the meeting included the black pastor of a Baptist church in Detroit; a lawyer affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace, a group of progressive activists; and leaders of a local chapter of the United Automobile Workers, which Mr. Biden has also endorsed supported a ceasefire.

“This is not an Arab issue for President Biden,” said Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, a Democrat who spoke at the meeting and supports the “unoccupied” efforts. “It is not a Muslim issue. He has a humanitarian issue on his hands.”

Mr. Biden’s allies — including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Democrat of Michigan, who is co-chairing his re-election campaign — have argued that any vote not cast in support of the president helps Mr. Trump, the dominant front-runner. for the Republican nomination. They have highlighted Mr Trump’s past anti-Muslim statements, particularly his calls to reimpose a travel ban.

Ms. Whitmer said on CNN on Sunday that she understood “the pain” many Arab Americans were feeling, but added that “every vote not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term.” She pointed to the fact that Trump barred people from some countries with predominantly Muslim populations from entering the United States when he was president.

Several speakers on Sunday rejected such arguments, saying that while they did not want Trump to be re-elected, they were determined to push Biden to address their concerns about the conflict in the Middle East.

“No, I don’t want Trump to win, but I don’t see any other way unless Biden acts,” said Assemblywoman Gabriela Santiago-Romero, a Democrat who added that she was “tired of being asked to vote out of fear.” .”

“We need to strike fear in the hearts of Democrats,” she said.

Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said in a statement that Mr. Biden “knows how important it is to earn the trust of every community” and that the president “worked closely and proudly with leaders in the Muslim, Arabic -American and Palestinian territories.” communities.” He added that Mr. Biden had “urged Israel to do everything possible to prevent civilian casualties” and allow humanitarian aid to Gaza.

In addition to Listen to Michigan, Mr. Biden faces opposition from a campaign called Abandon Biden, whose supporters in several states, including Michigan, have vowed not to vote for the president in November anyway, citing the high death toll in Gaza. .

On Sunday, Ms. Tlaib criticized her colleagues in Congress who voted to send military aid to Israel. “I have a message for many of them now: Michigan says brave no more,” she said.

And when she called on the people in the room on Tuesday to “come,” someone shouted back, “We’re here!”

Maggie Astor reporting contributed.

More than 800 officials in the United States, United Kingdom and the European Union released a public letter Friday protesting their governments' support for Israel in the Gaza war.

The letter marks the first time officials in allied countries across the Atlantic have come together to openly criticize their governments over the war, say current and former officials organizing or supporting the effort.

The officials say it is their duty as public servants to help improve policy and work in the interests of their country, and that they are speaking out because they believe their governments must change the direction of the war. The signatories say they have raised their concerns through internal channels but have been ignored.

“Our governments' current policies weaken their moral standing and undermine their ability to stand up for freedom, justice and human rights worldwide,” the letter said, according to a copy obtained Thursday by The New York Times. It adds that “there is a plausible risk that our governments' policies contribute to serious violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and even ethnic cleansing or genocide.”

The Israeli army launched a bombing and ground campaign in Gaza after Hamas fighters invaded Israel on October 7, killing about 1,200 people while kidnapping about 240, Israeli officials said. More than 27,000 people have been killed in Gaza and nearly 2 million displaced since the Israeli offensive began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and United Nations officials.

The document does not include the names of the signatories because they fear reprisals, said one organizer, an official who has worked at the State Department for more than 20 years. But about 800 current officials have approved the letter as it quietly circulates among national-level employees in multiple countries, the official said.

The effort shows the extent to which pro-Israel policies among American, British and European leaders have created dissension among officials, including many who implement their governments' foreign policies.

About 80 of the signatories are from U.S. agencies, with the largest group coming from the State Department, an organizer said. The governing authority most represented among the signatories are the collective institutions of the European Union, followed by the Netherlands and the United States.

National-level officials from eight other North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states, as well as Sweden and Switzerland, approved the letter, another person familiar with the letter said. Most of these supporters work in the foreign ministries of those countries.

“The political decision-making of Western governments and institutions” about the war “has created unprecedented tensions with the expertise and duties that apolitical officials bring,” said Josh Paul, who worked at the State Department office that oversees arms transfers, but who resigned in October over the Biden administration's support for Israel's military campaign. Mr Paul said he knew the organizers of the letter.

“One-sided support for Israel's atrocities in Gaza, and a blindness to Palestinian humanity, is both a moral failure and, given the damage it causes to Western interests around the world, a policy failure,” he said.

U.S. officials released a number of similar letters and derogatory messages last fall. In November, more than 500 employees from about 40 U.S. government agencies sent a letter to President Biden criticizing his policies on the war. The officials also did not reveal their names in that letter.

More than 1,000 employees of the United States Agency for International Development published an open letter to the same effect. And dozens of State Department officials have sent at least three internal dissents to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.

Across the Atlantic, disagreement among European officials has also erupted in the months since Israel's military response in Gaza after the October 7 attack.

In the European Union, which has a joint diplomatic corps known as the European External Action Service as well as agencies dealing with humanitarian aid and development, hundreds of officials have signed at least two separate dissenting letters to the bloc's leadership. Unlike the United States, the EU does not have “channels of dissent” where officials can formally express their disagreement with policy.

The 27 EU countries and their collective institutions have taken different positions on the war, but the majority of governments are largely pro-Israel.

Only a handful of EU countries – notably Ireland, Spain and Belgium – have done so consistently called on their partners and the EU to moderate support for Israel, push for a ceasefire and focus on the suffering of Gazans.

One of the signatories of the joint letter, Berber van der Woude, a former Dutch diplomat, said she had agreed to write her name down in part in support of active officials who feared retaliation for dissent.

Ms van der Woude, a conflict and peacekeeping expert who had served in the Dutch Foreign Ministry, including its mission in Ramallah, in the West Bank, resigned in 2022 in protest against her government's policies. Since then she has been a prominent pro-Palestinian voice in the Netherlands.

She said she was deeply demoralized by the fact that Dutch policy towards Israeli Palestinians was tightly controlled by a very small number of top officials, and that this trend had intensified after the October 7 attacks.

“The fact that you cannot talk about it makes it frustrating because the policy choices and actions of the Dutch ministry are harmful to the situation in the Middle East, but also have an enormous spillover effect on the international rule of law. ” she said.

Dutch diplomats, she added, have grown up in a strong tradition of upholding international law, due to the Netherlands' unique role as home to high-profile institutions such as the International Criminal Court.

Ms. van der Woude said that dissent in situations like the Israel-Hamas conflict, even among the ranks of officials who tend to work behind the scenes and follow the political lead of elected governments, is justified if the policy adopted is seen as harmful. .

“Just because you are a public servant does not absolve you of your responsibility to continue to think,” she said. “If the system produces perverse decisions or actions, we have a responsibility to stop it. It's not as simple as 'shut up and do as you're told'; we are also paid to think.”