Republicans met in Houston for the 10th debate of the 2016 campaign season and the final showdown before Super Tuesday next week.  President George H.W. Bush was in evidence in the arena; the brand of politics he practiced was not, as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz took turns battering frontrunner Donald Trump in a smashmouth affair reflecting the increasing urgency of his opponents’ efforts to slow his roll before the March 1 contests in which over 650 delegates are at stake. Much of the early discussion focused on immigration and Donald Trump’s support among Hispanics—a point of pride for the frontrunner, following his win in Nevada, but a potential challenge in the contests yet to come. A new Washington Post-Univision poll showed that despite his victories, Trump received worse ratings from Hispanics than any of his GOP rivals. Immigrant youth, organized by grantee United We Dream among other advocates, demonstrated outside the debate hall, protesting the candidates’ pledges to end President Obama’s executive actions extending DAPA and DACA relief.

Avowed white supremacists have begun openly organizing on Trump’s behalf. David Duke urged listeners to his talk radio show to join Trump’s campaign, while a leader of the American Freedom Party, a white nationalist group, rallied supporters in Minnesota and Vermont via robocalls paid for by the group’s superPAC:  “Don’t vote for a Cuban. Vote for Donald Trump.”  Trump has taken steps to distance himself, returning a campaign contribution here, downplaying retweets from a white supremacist account there. But grantee the Southern Poverty Law Center branded those efforts as  “milquetoast.” As SPLC’s Mark Potok put it, “the fact is that white nationallists are mobilizing for Trump whether he likes it or not.”

Two former presidents of Mexico both said in recent interviews that the idea of their country paying to build a wall abutting the United States was a non-starter. One of the ex-presidents, Vicente Fox, went further, expressing puzzlement that significant numbers of Hispanics turned out in support of Trump in the Nevada caucuses, calling such voters “followers of a false prophet.”

The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, which includes grantees NCLR and NALEO among others, released a set of policy priorities including comprehensive immigration reform and economic security measures aimed at making the 2016 candidates more responsive to issues of importance to their members. 

On the Democratic side, grantee MoveOn.org mounted a petition drive to encourage superdelegates to let the voters decide, rather than have an elite group of party insiders and officeholders exercise decisive influence.

The Apple-FBI battle over access to a slain San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone moved to Capitol Hill on Thursday, as FBI director James Comey appeared before the House Intelligence Committee urging members to take up encryption legislation now in the works, and arguing that the tensions on display in the San Bernardino phone dispute should ultimately be resolved via legislation, whatever the courts in the pending matter decide. Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein are drafting a bill requiring companies to “override encryption technology when presented with a warrant,” according to the Washington Post. 

Meanwhile, Apple got some support from the tech sector on the legal claim outstanding, as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft all indicated they would file amicus briefs or otherwise back Apple’s legal stance. Advocates passed around Apple’s account of what all it would need to do if it lost its challenge to the government.

 

Despite the escalating friction on the iPhone front, members of the Obama administration sat down with Apple, along with other tech concerns such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Microsoft, to discuss ways to stop the spread of ISIS online. The meeting generated some controversy in the media world, as Buzzfeed and only a few other online news organizations were invited to the meeting, while many others were not, creating the impression that the invitees were participating in the talks rather than covering them.

Advocates continued to push talking points to shape the debate over the fight to fill the late Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat, arranging a Thursday “Twitterstorm” to hammer home the Senate’s constitutional obligations and the potential damage to a wide array of interests if the vacancy lingered for two terms and the court deadlocked, allowing harmful lower court rulings to stand. Grantee the Center for American Progress assessed the racial sensitivity of Justice Scallia’s legacy, and found it exacerbated the opportunity gap for blacks and other disenfranchised minorities. 

Color of Change launched a petition drive, calling on the FCC to put a stop to “stingray” surveillance, an increasingly popular technology used by police departments to track cell phones. The NYPD was recently found to have used the technology over 1,000 times without a warrant since 2008, while other police departments go to great lengths to avoid revealing details about their use of the technology; in Massachusetts, departments have made pacts with the FBI not to divulge their stingray activities, and have even been known to dismiss cases rather than reveal such information in court. These techniques are disproportionately used against communities of color, the grantee maintains. 

Immigration surfaced in the Illinois Senate race, as incumbent Republican Mark Kirk launched attack ads faulting his probable Democratic opponent, Rep. Tammy Duckworth, for encouraging the resettlement of Syrian refugees.

Grantees decried a new Obama Justice Department policy that places new restrictions on “sanctuary cities,” pressuring them to drop their stance against cooperating with federal immigration authorities’ deportation requests. The move would allow the Bureau of Prisons to move any inmate into immigration custody if ICE seeks deportation, even in cases in which state or local officials want to hang onto the prisoner, either to pursue prosecution or allow them to finish out their state or local sentence. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network termed the move an ill-advised retaliation for the killing of Kathryn Steinle at the hands of an undocumented immigrant who had previously been deported, a case which led to criticism that San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city contributed to the crime.

Among other grantee activities:

--America’s Voice posted a piece on Medium arguing that Marco Rubio’s once-credible stands on immigration reform have been caught in the undertow of the xenophobic rhetoric of the GOP frontrunner.

--The Center for Democracy and Technology pressured Congress to safeguard the privacy and free speech rights of Internet users in cross-border disputes about the ownership of data. CDT supports measures that would allow a foreign government to demand content from US data providers if that foreign government maintained a good record on human rights and followed accepted best practices in its surveillance laws.

--Linda Sarsour and other national security/human rights grantees promoted a new documentary, entitled (T)error, chronicling what happened when a former Black Panther was recruited to be a counter-terrorism informant for the FBI.

--The American Immigration Council posted an op-ed criticizing the Obama administration’s deportation of unaccompanied minors from the Northern Triangle countries of Central America.

--The American Immigration Lawyers Association gave an interview predicting  a stalemate in US v Texas, the challenge to President Obama’s immigration executive actions.

--The ACLU scheduled a conference call to discuss how Scalia’s death may affect the Supreme Court’s remaining decisions this term.