Illegal immigrants surging to US-Mexico border in race against Election Day

Border Patrol: Surge in illegal immigrants ahead of election

Americans aren’t the only ones motivated by Tuesday’s election. The presidential race has immigrants from around the world racing to the U.S.-Mexican border, as the cartels exploit a powerful narrative: get into the U.S. while you still can.
“Smugglers are telling them that they need to come across now while there’s a chance,” said Art Del Cueto, a Border Patrol agent in Tucson, Ariz., whose views were echoed by another agent in Texas.
“People think if one candidate wins, certain things will happen, like a giant wall being built and then they can never get through,” said Chris Cabrera, an agent in the Rio Grande Valley. “Another faction believes that if the other candidate wins, they’ll get amnesty if they’re here by a certain date.”
Those two competing narratives – triggered by the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, respectively -- are driving immigration numbers the Border Patrol hasn’t seen in years in some sectors.
“We are overwhelmed,” said a veteran agent in McAllen, Texas. “We are seeing 800 to 1,000 apprehensions every night.”
In fiscal 2016, the Border Patrol apprehended 117,200 immigrants from Central America, almost one-third of all apprehensions border-wide -- and 5,000 more than during the so-called surge of 2014. The agency also apprehended 5,000 Haitians, up from just 700 last year. The number of immigrants claiming to be from Africa and Asia also is up.
"There are always going to be push and pull factors that influence an individual’s decision to make that trek," said Tucson Border Patrol Sector Chief Paul Beeson.
The poverty and violence plaguing many of these countries helps push immigrants north, Beeson said. Pull factors include available and good-paying jobs in the U.S. and immigration policy that provides work permits and freedom for immigrants while the courts adjudicate their ‘asylum’ claim.
“When you stop somebody, you ask their name and the first thing they tell you is – ‘I’m here for asylum, I can’t go home because they’ll kill me.’ … When it takes a good five or six minutes just to get their name out of them, they have a rehearsed story,” said Cabrera. “Once they get those papers saying they can pass through our checkpoint, we’ll never see them again.”
Del Cueto said the agents are “not getting any backing” from D.C. and “we need to start enforcing every single immigration law we have on the books.”
Del Cueto and Cabrera belong to the National Border Patrol Council, which represents the Border Patrol’s 18,000 field agents who are prohibited from talking openly to the media.
While Central American immigrants have posed the biggest resource challenge for Texas, they say a surge of Haitians are pouring into ports of entry in California and Arizona.
Last year, the U.S. saw a 500 percent increase of Haitians admitted to the U.S., double that in San Diego where right now 2,000 are waiting outside the port in San Ysidro. According to Homeland Security sources, another 2,000 are in Mexicali and several hundred are in San Luis, just south of Yuma where Del Cueto says immigrants are sleeping in a church parking lot. Further east in Nogales, Mexico, 150 are waiting to cross into the U.S. They are camped next to the border fence, waiting for Customs and Border Protection officers to process them as refugees.
Some had jewelry and one woman had an iPad. The men surrounded the women, who huddled around a pile of boxes containing water and food.
“We’ve been in Nogales 20 days,” said one middle-aged man in a striped shirt in broken English. “We need help crossing the border.”
He said each immigrant paid a $4,000 to $6,000 smuggling fee. Once here, he said the Mexican government had given each a number based on their arrival.
“We are seeing an uptick in the number of Haitians that are looking for an immigration benefit,” said Beeson, who admits the surge is taking agents off the front lines.
Following the earthquake several years ago, Haitians were allowed to immigrate and stay in the U.S. under a program known as ’Temporary Protected Status.’ Earlier this year, the U.S. ended that protection, leaving some Haitians in the pipeline traveling through Mexico, where according to officials there, roughly 8,000 are on their way to the border.
While Trump and Clinton have very different visions of immigration reform and border security, Stratfor’s Cott Stewart doesn’t see the border threat changing until conditions do south of the border.
“There’s really no easy answer to it because there are just deeper issues,” said Stewart, from the defense and security think tank. “You have pervasive corruption where you see all levels of government are involved in, you know, drug dealing and other criminal activity. … So these things all tie together and make it a very difficult place for people to live and survive and because of that it’s very understandable why people would want to migrate from those conditions up to the United States.”

Melania Trump, Cruz hit trail as surrogates for Donald

Melania Trump and Ted Cruz both made their post-convention debut as Donald Trump surrogates on the campaign trail Thursday -- though the Texas senator and former primary contender did so without mentioning the GOP nominee by name at his initial appearance.
Cruz joined Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence on the campaign trail in Prole, Iowa, a month and a half after he posted a tepid endorsement of Trump on Facebook.
“This election has been one wild ride, but the stakes in this election have never been higher,” Cruz told the audience. He noted that maintaining GOP control of Congress and “putting a Republican in the White House” amounted to the “whole enchilada.”
Standing at a podium with a Trump-Pence logo, Cruz praised several Iowa Republicans, including Rep. Steve King and Sen. Charles Grassley, but did not name Trump.
Cruz did mention Trump at a later stop in Michigan, telling the crowd in Portage, "You oughta vote for Donald Trump and Mike Pence and Republicans up and down the ticket."
In Iowa and Michigan, Cruz delivered his pitch to the base, while Melania Trump made her first solo appearance in suburban Philadelphia, where Donald Trump is trailing Clinton.

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“He knows how to make real change. Make America great again is not just a slogan,” she said, adding that as first lady she would be an advocate for women and children.
Despite her husband’s reputation for frank, sometimes crude talk, the native of Slovenia focused on family issues saying that the “culture has gotten too mean and rough.”
Prior to her address, the Pennsylvania state Democratic Party sent out a copy of an old Michelle Obama speech that was labeled as an “advanced copy” of Melania’s speech, a reference to allegations of plagiarism that emerged after her Republican National Convention speech.
Cruz and Melania Trump are the latest in a growing pool of surrogates campaigning for Trump, as Hillary Clinton deploys influential Democrats ranging from President Obama to Bernie Sanders to the trail.
“Surrogates can be very helpful in the final days of the campaign when it is far more important to energize and excite voters than to persuade them,” Republican campaign strategist Chris Jankowski told FoxNews.com.
“I think it would have been wiser to have heard more from Ivanka and Melania all throughout September and October. This speech may have some impact ... but I am doubtful that it will have enough of an impact,” Sarah Lenti, a Colorado-based Republican consultant, added.
In battleground states where the margins are narrowing, the surrogates are making the biggest showing.
Michigan, which has not voted for a Republican candidate for president since President George H. W. Bush in 1988, is such a case.
A Fox2/Mitchell poll released on Wednesday showed Clinton’s lead in the Great Lakes state has narrowed to 3 percent.
The week began with Trump rallying on Monday, while Donald Trump Jr. arrived mid-week to make stops at Michigan State University and Grand Valley State University. Ivanka Trump appealed to suburban women voters during a “Michigan Women in Business Roundtable” event.
Not new to the role of surrogate, Obama fired up a Florida crowd with a feisty speech that went off-script as much as Trump.
“This is the guy who spent 70 years -- his whole life -- born with a silver spoon, showing no respect for working people. He’s spent a lot of time with celebrities,” Obama told the audience in Miami.
But Trump, the president said, does not hang out with working people unless they’re cleaning his room or mowing the fairways.
“You’re going to make this guy your champion if you’re a working person?” he asked the crowd.

'Self-recruited' Trump volunteers break mold for how campaigns are run

Alaska resident Mike Robbins putting up a sign in Anchorage, Alaska.

Alaska can be an afterthought in presidential elections, a frigid electoral landscape that often sees the race decided before its polls even close.
But this time, volunteers from the deep-red state with its three Electoral College votes started campaigning for Donald Trump long before the campaign kicked in staff members – and without the help of the state or national Republican Party.
“I woke up one day and said, ‘I have to do something.’ I was losing sleep over it,” said Mike Robbins of Anchorage, who owns several radio stations.
That was back in January. Robbins went on to hold fundraisers to buy shirts and signs, enlist hundreds of volunteers and wage a social media blitz on Trump’s behalf. He became an alternate delegate for the national convention, blanketed Anchorage with Trump signs and bumper stickers and welcomed the campaign’s Alaska director in August with a highly organized machine already in place.
This scenario has played out in states across the country.
Despite tensions between Republican leaders and Trump – and concerns that the GOP nominee’s campaign lags Hillary Clinton’s in raw organizational strength – one factor Trump has going for him is an army of volunteers who began boosting his ground game, in some cases, before the professionals got heavily involved.

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FoxNews.com talked to volunteers in five western states who were among Trump’s main source of on-the-ground support at a time when neither the Trump campaign nor the RNC had dedicated staff.
This is in marked contrast to Clinton, who had early support from the Democratic National Committee and a huge volunteer network already in place due to highly organized state Democratic committees.
​"We have 80 offices throughout the state that we activated last fall, all with volunteers ready to go," said Michael Soller, communications director for the California Democratic Committee. ​
Five days before Election Day, Clinton still maintains the clear advantage in most assessments of the electoral map. A Democratic National Committee spokesman said field organizers are updating their robust voter file, an important election tool. “We don’t take any vote for granted. We have a robust ground game focused on making sure all of our voters get to the polls, not just for Hillary Clinton but for Democrats up-and-down the ticket,” the spokesman said.
But voter enthusiasm is a factor – and the Trump campaign points to the energy of its supporters.
“We recognize that we’re running a grassroots movement,” said Jessica Ditto, Trump’s deputy communications director. “People are fired up about it. They feel like they are enlisted in the campaign.”
For the most part, Trump’s campaign did not assign a paid staff member to organize volunteers in individual states until March or later. By then, many supporters were hosting their own fundraisers, call centers and speeches.
“When I was first hired in April and word got out, within 24 hours I had 1,000 emails -- how these folks found me and got to me, I don’t know,” said Tim Clark, California director of the Trump campaign. “The next day it was another 1,000 [emails] and it’s been that way ever since. I’m not recruiting volunteers because our volunteers are self-recruited.”
Clark says he was thankful to have a relatively easy job: pockets of Trump supporters already existed across the state, formed through Meetup and Facebook groups. He just stitched them together into a bigger statewide group.
“They were already talking to each other online, putting up their own signs and training each other,” he said.
Across the West
Over in southern Texas, Miriam Cepeda has been a one-woman Trump operation since March. Back then, everywhere she went people were supporting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Trump only really had a presence in Austin, Houston and Dallas.
“I appointed myself to take care of Rio Grande area,” said Cepeda. “No one was speaking on behalf of his campaign or encouraging people [in south Texas]. I took the bull by the horns and ran with it.”
A 25-year-old graduate student, Cepeda crisscrossed cities across the Rio Grande Valley, marketing Trump until the campaign noticed her and made her an official part of its network.
“I posted signs, started a list of volunteers, sent out emails, located donors, started Facebook and Instagram pages,” she said.
In New Mexico, Cecilia DeBaca, 63, decided she wanted to support Trump when she heard him talk last year about the restrictions of political correctness.
“You can’t say Merry Christmas, can’t sing Christmas carols,” DeBaca said. “You can’t say anything anymore.”
So she started talking to everyone she could about Trump – at Walmart, gas stations, grocery stores and the pharmacy. DeBaca also went to the Trump website and found out how to start making phone calls for the campaign. Then she contacted her local Republican Women chapter and led efforts to set up booths at public events to lead voter drives and engage bigger audiences.
Undeterred that her state has been blue since President Obama took office, DeBaca said she has had almost a perfect record convincing strangers to vote Trump.
She and her husband both became state and national delegates.
Up the West Coast in the northern Seattle area, business strategy consultant Luis Valdes has “put up signs, held fundraisers -- anything to help Mr. Trump.”
He started campaigning after the national convention. Back then, Valdes didn’t see any Trump presence in the historically blue state. Valdes said he started going to festivals, events and job sites where he could talk to large groups of Hispanic voters. A refugee from Cuba, Valdes is now an American citizen and understands oppression.
“I explain, ‘Don’t try to make this country into the one you just left,’” Valdes said.
Trump has been to Washington state three times, more than any other GOP candidate in recent history. While the state is still considered to favor Clinton heavily, Trump backers may have made some inroads. During a recent drive from Portland to Seattle, Trump signs dotted the freeway, Valdes recalled.
“Right now I’m driving up I-5 and I just passed an overpass with about 15 people who were holding Trump Pence signs and waving flags,” he said. “Along the whole way I only saw a few Hillary signs.”

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Recordings aggravated FBI, DOJ feud in Clinton Foundation probe

Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.
Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” these people said.
The account of the case and resulting dispute comes from interviews with officials at multiple agencies.
Starting in February and continuing today, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and public-corruption prosecutors became increasingly frustrated with each other, as often happens within and between departments. At the center of the tension stood the U.S. attorney for Brooklyn, Robert Capers, who some at the FBI came to view as exacerbating the problems by telling each side what it wanted to hear, these people said. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Capers declined to comment.
The roots of the dispute lie in a disagreement over the strength of the case, these people said, which broadly centered on whether Clinton Foundation contributors received favorable treatment from the State Department under Hillary Clinton.
Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said.

FBI's Clinton Foundation investigation now 'a very high priority,' sources say

Clinton and Weiner?

The FBI's investigation into the Clinton Foundation that has been going on for more than a year has now taken a "very high priority," separate sources with intimate knowledge of the probe tell Fox News.
FBI agents have interviewed and re-interviewed multiple people on the foundation case, which is looking into possible pay for play interaction between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. The FBI's White Collar Crime Division is handling the investigation.
Even before the WikiLeaks dumps of alleged emails linked to the Clinton campaign, FBI agents had collected a great deal of evidence, law enforcement sources tell Fox News.
"There is an avalanche of new information coming in every day," one source told Fox News, who added some of the new information is coming from the WikiLeaks documents and new emails.
FBI agents are "actively and aggressively pursuing this case," and will be going back and interviewing the same people again, some for the third time, sources said.
Agents are also going through what Clinton and top aides have said in previous interviews and the FBI 302, documents agents use to report interviews they conduct, to make sure notes line up, according to sources.

Electoral map, polls scrambled in final days amid campaign unrest

The 2016 presidential race is, borrowing a phrase from Donald Trump, once again keeping America in “suspense” – with the polls and the electoral map being scrambled in the final days amid a slew of late-breaking developments.
Just one week ago, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had assumed a confident air on the stump, enjoying a rare period when the political pieces were aligning for her in the wake of damaging allegations against her Republican rival. But the polls are tightening again, as voters assess a range of other factors, including the FBI’s stunning decision to revisit her private email investigation.
Election prognosticators still say Clinton enjoys the advantage going into the big day – in large part because the states President Obama won in 2012 mostly have stayed Democrat-leaning this year, giving her a substantial built-in advantage.
But, even though Trump faces a tough climb to the 270 electoral votes it takes to win, the map is changing in the final days, in several cases in his favor.
The latest Fox News Electoral Scorecard has moved both Florida and Nevada – two states previously rated “lean Democrat” – into the “toss-up” category, citing shifts in the polls.
The same update moved Alaska from “solid Republican” to “lean Republican” and North Carolina from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat.” But in another indicator of how difficult the race is to gauge, a new WRAL News poll showed Trump with a 7-point lead in North Carolina, despite other polls showing Clinton ahead.

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National polls show the race tightening up into a virtual draw. The latest ABC News/ Washington Post tracking poll shows the candidates tied, 46-46 percent.
As with any election year, what matters is what happens in the battlegrounds.
“In the end, the popular vote isn’t what matters. It’s the Electoral College,” pollster Frank Luntz told Fox News. “And that Electoral College map is very difficult for Donald Trump, even though in every other indicator, it’s moving in the right direction for him.”
The Fox News Electoral Scorecard shows all the “solid” and “lean” Democrat states would give Clinton 287 electoral votes, more than enough to take the White House. The Republican-rated states give Trump 174.
To win, Trump would need to lock down the toss-up states as well as pick off territory from the Democratic column.
On the campaign trail, Trump is sounding more confident of his chances, no longer focusing as heavily on warnings that the vote would be “rigged” against him.
“In just one week, we are going to win the great state of Wisconsin and we are going to win back the White House … lotta’ good polls out there today,” he declared at a rally Tuesday night in Eau Claire, Wis., while also citing the North Carolina poll.
Trump has seized on a spate of developments, including the FBI’s investigation of newly discovered emails on a laptop used by Clinton adviser Huma Abedin’s estranged husband Anthony Weiner – as well as the tidal wave of revelations from WikiLeaks-posted emails from the Clinton campaign chairman’s hacked account.

Trump, Clinton make final push for Florida in last days of campaign

Republican nominee Donald Trump turned his attention to the battleground state of Florida Wednesday, making three campaign stops across the Sunshine State.
Trump visited Miami, Orlando and Pensacola, and was scheduled to stop in Jacksonville Thursday.
"'Stay on point, Donald, stay on point,"' Trump teasingly quoted his staff as saying at an evening rally in Pensacola. "No sidetracks, Donald. Nice and easy. Nice and easy."'
A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday showed Trump in a virtual tie in Florida with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Both sides agree the New York businessman has virtually no chance to win the presidency without the state's trove of 29 electoral votes.
"We don't want to blow this," Trump told rowdy supporters in Miami. "We gotta win. We gotta win big."
Conceding nothing in the state, Clinton has also been a frequent visitor. She posed for pictures and shook hands during a surprise visit to a South Florida Caribbean-American neighborhood Wednesday morning.

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The Democratic nominee has built a powerful ground game, backed by a dominant media presence, that dwarfs her opponent's. Clinton has more than doubled Trump's investment in Florida television ads. Overall, the state has been deluged with $125 million in general election advertising -- by far the most of any state.
Later Wednesday, Clinton addressed a boisterous crowd of around 15,000 in Arizona, a traditionally Republican state that she has tried to pluck away from Trump.
"This state is in play for the first time in years," said Clinton, whose husband Bill won Arizona in his successful 1996 re-election bid. Clinton also waded into a local sheriff's race getting national attention, backing Democrat Paul Penzone in the race for Maricopa County sheriff, a post held by immigration hardliner Joe Arpaio.

"I think it's time you had a new sheriff in town, don't you?" she asked the crowd at Arizona State University.
Trump lashed out at "Crooked Hillary" in Miami, predicting that a Clinton victory would trigger an "unprecedented and protracted constitutional crisis" as federal investigators probe the former secretary of state's email practices. But Trump did not take the bait dangled by the Clinton campaign about his treatment of women.
In Pensacola, Trump turned his criticism to President Barack Obama, who had spent Wednesday rallying Clinton supporters in North Carolina.
"He's gotta stop campaigning for Crooked Hillary," Trump said of Obama. "He's gotta go back -- go to the office ... I mean this guy, all he wants to do is campaign for Hillary. It's unbelievable."
Democrats acknowledge that the FBI's renewed attention to her has helped rally reluctant Republicans behind their nominee. That's given Trump an enthusiasm boost in Florida and across Midwestern battlegrounds long considered reliably blue territory.

"I'm definitely nervous," said former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat. "Democrats in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, if you heard it was over, if you thought those states were in the bag, don't believe it."

Perhaps heeding Rendell's warning, Clinton's team is devoting new resources to states like Michigan, which last voted for a Republican nominee in 1988.