Biden to apologize for government forcing Native American children into boarding schools
ABC/Lorenzo Bevilaqua
(PHOENIX) — President Joe Biden was in Arizona on Friday to apologize to Native Americans for the federal government forcing Indian children into boarding schools where the White House said they were abused and deprived of their cultural identity.
Departing the White House Thursday, Biden said he was going to Arizona “to do something that should have been done a long time ago.”
He said he would make “a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years.”
The White House called his trip to Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix — his first to Indian Country as president — “historic.”
Officials said he will discuss the Biden-Harris administration’s record of delivering for tribal communities, including keeping his promise to visit the swing state, which is happening close to Election Day.
“The president also believes that to usher in the next era of the Federal-Tribal relationships we need to fully acknowledge the harms of the past,” the White House said.
“For over 150 years, the federal government ran boarding schools that forcibly removed generations of Native children from their homes to boarding schools often far away. Native children at these schools endured physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and, as detailed in the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report by the Department of the Interior (DOI), at least 973 children died in these schools,” the White House said.
“The federally-run Indian boarding school system was designed to assimilate Native Americans by destroying Native culture, language, and identity through harsh militaristic and assimilationist methods,” it said.
(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump visited Aurora, Colorado, for a campaign rally on Friday where he continued to push misleading narratives about the city’s migrant population.
“My message today is very simple,” Trump told the crowd. “No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can ever be allowed to become the president of the United States. We’re not going to let it happen.”
In the final weeks of his campaign, Trump has continued to focus on the issue of immigration, escalating his rhetoric on undocumented immigrants he often paints as violent criminals.
“I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered,” Trump said. “These towns have been conquered … And we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them out of our country. And we will be very, very effective in doing it. It’s going to happen very, very fast.”
Specifically, the former president has used Aurora and Springfield, Ohio, to emphasize his point, both examples stemming from viral online stories he’s been quick to promote, often without proper context.
His false narratives on Aurora began last month when a video of armed individuals roaming around an apartment complex in Aurora went viral among right-wing social media influencers.
Trump, who has shared that video himself, has repeatedly claimed that members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang have “taken over” apartment complexes and “overrun” the city, despite the Aurora Police Department refuting allegations of the apartment complex being run by a Venezuelan gang.
Aurora’s Police Chief Todd Chamberlain has directly refuted Trump’s claims, saying in a press conference late last month that, “This is not an immigration issue. This is a crime issue.”
“We are not, by any means, overtaken by Venezuelan gangs,” he added.
The City of Aurora also provided clarity on the situation in a post on its official X account, stating that while there was a concern about a “small” presence of the Venezuelan gang members in Aurora, the city is taking the situation seriously. The city stressed that Aurora is a “safe community” and that reports of gang members are “isolated to a handful of problem properties alone.”
Mike Coffman, the Republican mayor of Aurora, has also pushed back on Trump’s “grossly exaggerated” claims.
“Former President Trump’s visit to Aurora is an opportunity to show him and the nation that Aurora is a considerably safe city – not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs,” Coffman said.
Still, Trump has continued to amplify these debunked stories to his supporters throughout the country as a rallying cry as he attacks the immigration policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
At his second campaign stop on Friday in Reno, Nevada, Trump continued to repeat baseless and debunked rhetoric on a Venezuelan gang taking over apartment complexes in Aurora even after the city’s Republican mayor denounced his rhetoric, saying his comments “unfairly hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety.”
In Reno, the former president again called the U.S. an “occupied country” and the situation in Aurora a “full-blown invasion.”
“It is a full blown invasion. Armed Venezuelan gang members storming an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado,” Trump said.
In the press release announcing Friday’s event, the Trump campaign described Aurora as a “war zone,” arguing people were crossing the border and descending upon the city “bringing chaos and fear with them.”
Similarly, Trump has repeatedly amplified debunked claims that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Springfield.
Trump’s visit is one that he has been wanting to make for a while to bring more attention to the country’s immigration policies. At recent campaign rallies, Trump has become more vocal about his desire to visit Aurora and Springfield.
While the Republican mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, discouraged visits from candidates on both sides of the aisle, Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has presented the trip as a learning opportunity for the former president.
“The reality is, Donald Trump continues to tell economically damaging and hurtful lies about Aurora,” Polis said in a statement to ABC affiliate Denver7 amid ongoing discussions of a potential visit. “If former President Trump does visit, he will find the city of Aurora is a strong, vibrant, and diverse city of more than 400,000 hardworking Coloradans and a wonderful place to live, run a business, raise a family, and retire.”
Trump has launched attacks on the local and state officials on the campaign trail, often making baseless claims that Aurora Mayor Coffman and Gov. Polis are “petrified,” saying Coffman “doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing” — and even claiming they don’t want to raise the immigration issue because they want to be “politically correct.”
Campaigning in Uniondale, New York, last month, Trump, while declaring that he planned to visit Aurora and Springfield soon, suggested that he might not make it back out after his visiting those places due to unspecified crime.
“I’m going to go there in the next two weeks. I’m going to Springfield, and I’m going to Aurora,” Trump said in Uniondale. “You may never see me again, but that’s OK. Got to do what I got to do. Whatever happened to Trump? ‘Well, he never got out of Springfield.'”
Trump’s visit to Aurora also came as he’s pledged on the campaign trail to begin his promise of mass deportations in Springfield and Aurora.
“We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump said as he took reporter questions in Los Angeles, California, last month. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora, [Colorado].”
“We’re going to take those violent people, and we’re going to ship them back to their country, and if they come back in, they’re going to pay a hell of a price,” Trump also said.
Springfield has many Haitian residents who are either legally authorized to live and work in the U.S. or are protected from expulsion by law.
Arnold Palmer at the Bay Hill Club and Lodge on March 17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. Via Chris Condon/PGA TOUR/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Arnold Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer Wears, reacted to former President Donald Trump’s vulgar comments about her late father, calling them “disrespectful,” “inappropriate,” and “unacceptable.”
“Being at the airport, which is named for my dad, where he flew out of to go to work every day or every week, you know, to come there and talk about … hackneyed anecdotes from the locker room … seemed disrespectful and inappropriate to me,” she told ABC News Monday afternoon.
Not only was Arnold Palmer a renowned American golfer with a popular beverage named in his honor, he also has a regional airport named after him in his hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Campaigning at that airport on Saturday evening, Trump kicked off the rally with a long-winded story about Palmer, who dies in 2016, specifically referring to the golfer’s genitals.
“When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump joked.
According to Wears, Trump was “appropriating someone he admires to bolster his own image,” and that “people deserve better.”
“The people coming to these rallies deserve substance about plans Trump has as a candidate, if he could elucidate on some of the threats he’s made to people,” she continued. “I mean, these are important issues that should be discussed for people when they’re getting ready to vote, and using my dad to cover over the important things just seems unacceptable to me.”
Wears also confirmed to ABC News that she will be voting in the presidential election, though she did not disclose which candidate she plans to vote for.
An unaffiliated North Carolina voter, Wears plans to cast her ballot from one of the seven critical battleground states that could impact the election.
According to 538’s polling averages, Trump is leading in North Carolina by 0.8 points.
ABC News’ Kelsey Walsh, Lalee Ibssa, and Soorin Kim contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Democrats again helped Republicans get a short-term government funding bill over the finish line on Wednesday to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month.
The measure is largely an extension of current funding levels but includes $231 million in additional aid to the Secret Service to help protect presidential candidates during the election.
The bill passed by a 341-82 margin, with 209 Democrats voting for it. While 82 Republicans voted against the bill, 132 voted with Speaker Mike Johnson, who saw his funding plan voted down last week as Democrats rejected the inclusion of the controversial SAVE Act.
The SAVE Act, pushed by Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump, would have required proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. Democrats said that measure was unnecessary because it’s already a crime for noncitizens to vote. Although Johnson said there was “no daylight” between him and Trump on the funding bill, Trump called several hardline House Republicans in recent days, trying to get a last-minute change to the plan.
Before the vote, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries pointed out that it has been House Democrats that have helped Republicans avoid shutdowns during the current Congress.
“Can anyone name a single thing that extreme MAGA Republicans in the House have been able to do on their own to make life better for the American people? A single thing? Just one,” he asked. “Can the American people name a single thing that extreme MAGA Republicans have done to make their lives better? Zip, zero. So that is the track record that will be presented to the American people,” he said.
Former President Donald Trump had called on congressional Republicans to allow the government to shut down over the SAVE Act.
Johnson told ABC News, “I am not defying President Trump” when asked if the former president approved of the new solution to avoid a shutdown.
“I’ve spoken with him at great length, and he is very frustrated about the situation,” Johnson said at his weekly press conference on Tuesday. “His great concern is election security, and it is mine as well. It is all of ours.”
Johnson asserted Trump “understands the current dilemma” with House Republicans and said, “there’s no daylight between us.”
The White House and congressional Democrats all slammed Johnson’s attempt to tie the voter eligibility legislation to government funding, noting that it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.
But the “clean” short-term measure to avert a shutdown was praised by Democratic leaders and the Biden administration.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Senate would “immediately move” to pass the measure as soon as the House sends it over, and “if all goes well in the House, the Senate should be sending President Biden a bill before the end of today.
“Americans can breathe easy that because both sides have chosen bipartisanship, Congress is getting the job done,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “We will keep the government open. We will prevent vital government services from needlessly coming to a halt. We will give appropriators more time to fully fund the government before the end of the year. And I’m especially pleased we’re getting the job done with some time to spare.”
In addition to funding the government through Dec. 20, the bill includes funds to replenish FEMA and $231 million for the U.S. Secret Service in the wake a second apparent assassination attempt against Trump.
The White House Office of Management and Budget on Tuesday released a statement calling for “swift passage of this bill in both chambers of the Congress to avoid a costly, unnecessary Government shutdown.”
ABC News’ Allison Pecorin contributed to this report.
