bipartisan

Reporting from Washington — A pair of influential senators presented President Obama with a three-page blueprint for a bipartisan agreement to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, but the proposal’s viability is threatened by politics surrounding the healthcare debate.

Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), in a 45-minute meeting Thursday in the Oval Office, also asked for Obama’s help in rounding up enough Republican votes to pass an immigration bill this year.

Although details of their blueprint were not released, Graham said the elements included tougher border security, a program to admit temporary immigrant workers and a biometric Social Security card that would prevent people here illegally from getting jobs.

Graham also said the proposal included “a rational plan to deal with the millions of illegal immigrants already in the United States.” He did not elaborate on what the plan would be. But in a recent interview, he suggested that onerous measures were unrealistic.

“We’re not going to mass-deport people and put them in jail, nor should we,” Graham said. “But we need a system so they don’t get an advantage over others for citizenship.”

In a statement after the Obama meeting, Graham predicted that their effort would collapse if Senate Democrats proceeded with a strategy to pass a healthcare bill through a simple majority vote — a process known as “reconciliation.” Senate leaders say they are committed to doing just that.

“I expressed, in no uncertain terms, my belief that immigration reform could come to a halt for the year if healthcare reconciliation goes forward,” said Graham, who portrayed the document handed to Obama as “a work in progress.”

Graham added: “For more than a year, healthcare has sucked most of the energy out of the room. Using reconciliation to push healthcare through will make it much harder for Congress to come together on a topic as important as immigration.”

In their own statements, Obama and Schumer sounded more upbeat.

The president said: “Today I met with Sens. Schumer and Graham and was pleased to learn of their progress in forging a proposal to fix our broken immigration system. I look forward to reviewing their promising framework, and every American should applaud their efforts to reach across party lines and find common sense answers to one of our most vexing problems.”

Immigration has gotten scant attention of late. Obama had initially promised to address the issue in his first year, but the deadline slipped as he struggled to pass a healthcare bill. Latino voters, who were a crucial piece of Obama’s winning coalition in the 2008 campaign, have grown impatient. Some advocates of an immigration overhaul warn that Latino voters will stay home in the November mid-term elections if the issue is delayed again.

In an attempt to defuse the anger, Obama met with a group of 14 immigration advocates in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, hours before his meeting with the two senators.

Afterward, some of the guests described the atmosphere in the room as tense. They said they told Obama that families were being severed by widespread deportations. In the fiscal year that ended in September, the U.S. deported 388,000 illegal immigrants, according to the Department of Homeland Security — up from 369,000 the year before.

“I don’t think the president liked hearing that the immigration system is tearing apart families. But that’s our reality,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, who attended the meeting.

Obama agreed to have them meet with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to discuss deportation policies, the White House said.

Even without the healthcare obstacle, passing an immigration bill would be difficult. Schumer has been trying to line up additional Republican co-sponsors in hopes of broadening the bill’s bipartisan support. None has signed up.

Those who attended the meeting said that Obama committed to helping find Republican votes. But he also conceded that in a polarized Senate, that was a difficult mission.

“He was very frank about the challenge of moving this or anything else in the U.S. Congress,” said John Wilhelm, president of the labor union Unite Here.

peter.nicholas@

latimes.com

The administration of United States President Donald Trump has announced new oil drilling off the California and Florida coasts for the first time in decades, advancing a project that critics say could harm coastal communities and ecosystems, as Trump seeks to expand US oil production.

The White House announced the news on Thursday.

The oil industry has been seeking access to new offshore areas, including Southern California and off the coast of Florida, as a way to boost US energy security and jobs.

What’s in the plan?

The administration’s plan proposes six offshore lease sales through 2030 in areas along the California coast.

It also calls for new drilling off the coast of Florida in areas at least 160km (100 miles) from that state’s shore. The area targeted for leasing is adjacent to an area in the Central Gulf of Mexico that already contains thousands of wells and hundreds of drilling platforms.

The five-year plan also would compel more than 20 lease sales off the coast of Alaska, including a newly designated area known as the High Arctic, more than 320km (200 miles) offshore in the Arctic Ocean.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in announcing the sales that it would take years for the oil from those parcels to get to market.

“By moving forward with the development of a robust, forward-thinking leasing plan, we are ensuring that America’s offshore industry stays strong, our workers stay employed, and our nation remains energy dominant for decades to come,” Burgum said in a statement.

The American Petroleum Institute said in response that the announced plan was a “historic step” towards unleashing vast offshore resources. Industry groups have pointed to California’s history as an oil-producing state and say it already has infrastructure to support more production.

Political pushback

Leaders in both California and Florida have pushed back on the deal.

Last week, Florida Republican Senator Ashley Moody and Rick Scott co-sponsored a bill to maintain a moratorium on offshore drilling in the state that Trump signed in his first term.

“As Floridians, we know how vital our beautiful beaches and coastal waters are to our state’s economy, environment and way of life,” Scott said in a statement. “I will always work to keep Florida’s shores pristine and protect our natural treasures for generations to come.”

A spokesman for California Governor Gavin Newsom said Trump officials had not formally shared the plan, but said “expensive and riskier offshore drilling would put our communities at risk and undermine the economic stability of our coastal economies”.

California has been a leader in restricting offshore oil drilling since the infamous 1969 Santa Barbara spill that helped launch the modern environmental movement. While there have been no new federal leases offered since the mid-1980s, drilling from existing platforms continues.

Newsom expressed support for greater offshore controls after a 2021 spill off Huntington Beach and has backed a congressional effort to ban new offshore drilling on the West Coast.

A Texas-based company, with support from the Trump administration, is seeking to restart production in waters off Santa Barbara damaged by a 2015 oil spill. The administration has hailed the plan by Houston-based Sable Offshore Corp as the kind of project Trump wants to increase US energy production as the federal government removes regulatory barriers.

The announcement comes as Governor Newsom attended the COP30 climate conference in Brazil.

“He [Trump] intentionally aligned that to the opening of COP,” Newsom said.

Even before it was released, the offshore drilling plan met strong opposition from Newsom, a Democrat who is eyeing a 2028 presidential run and has emerged as a leading Trump critic.

Newsom pronounced the idea “dead on arrival” in a social media post. The proposal is also likely to draw bipartisan opposition in Florida. Tourism and access to clean beaches are key parts of the economy in both states.

Democratic lawmakers, including California Senator Alex Padilla and Representative Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, warned that opening vast coastlines to new offshore drilling would hurt coastal economies, jeopardise national security, ravage coastal ecosystems, and put the health and safety of millions of people at risk.

“With this draft plan, Donald Trump and his Administration are trying to destroy one of the most valuable, most protected coastlines in the world and hand it over to the fossil fuel industry,” Padilla and Huffman said in a joint statement.

The federal government has not allowed drilling in federal waters in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, which includes offshore Florida and part of offshore Alabama, since 1995, because of concerns about oil spills. California has some offshore oil rigs, but there has been no new leasing in federal waters since the mid-1980s.

Since taking office for a second time in January, Trump has systematically reversed former President Joe Biden’s focus on slowing climate change to pursue what the Republican calls US “energy dominance” in the global market.

Trump, who recently called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” created a National Energy Dominance Council and directed it to move quickly to drive up already record-high US energy production, particularly fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas.

Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has blocked renewable energy sources such as offshore wind and cancelled billions of dollars in grants that supported hundreds of clean energy projects across the country.

WASHINGTON — Washington National Cathedral on Thursday hosts a bipartisan show of respect and remembrance for Dick Cheney, the consequential and polarizing vice president who in later years became an acidic scold of fellow Republican President Trump.

Trump, who has been publicly silent about Cheney’s death Nov. 3, was not invited to the 11 a.m. memorial service.

Two ex-presidents are coming: Republican George W. Bush, who is to eulogize the man who served him as vice president, and Democrat Joe Biden, who once called Cheney “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history” but now honors his commitment to his family and to his values.

Daughter Liz Cheney, a former high-ranking House member whose Republican political career was shredded by Trump’s MAGA movement, will join Bush in addressing the gathering at the grand church known as “a spiritual home for the nation.”

Others delivering tributes include Cheney’s longtime cardiologist, Jonathan Reiner; former NBC News correspondent Pete Williams, who was Cheney’s spokesman at the Pentagon; and the former vice president’s grandchildren. Hundreds of guests are expected.

Cheney had lived with heart disease for decades and, after the Bush administration, with a heart transplant. He died at age 84 from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said.

The White House lowered its flags to half-staff after Cheney’s death, as it said the law calls for, but Trump did not issue the presidential proclamation that often accompanies the death of notable figures, nor has he commented publicly on his passing.

The deeply conservative Cheney’s influence in the Bush administration was legendary and, to his critics, tragic.

He advocated for the U.S. invasion of Iraq on the basis of what proved to be faulty intelligence and consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Bush credited him with helping to keep the country safe and stable in a perilous time.

After the 2020 election won by Biden, Liz Cheney served as vice chair of the Democratic-led special House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. She accused Trump of summoning the violent mob and plunging the nation into “a moment of maximum danger.”

For that, she was stripped of her Republican leadership position and ultimately defeated in a 2022 Republican primary in Wyoming. In a campaign TV ad made for his daughter, Dick Cheney branded Trump a “coward” who “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.”

Last year, it did not sit well with Trump when Cheney said he would vote for Democrat Kamala Harris in the presidential election.

Trump told Arab and Muslim voters that Cheney’s support for Harris should give them pause, because he “killed more Arabs than any human being on Earth. He pushed Bush, and they went into the Middle East.”

Woodward writes for the Associated Press.

This week, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani made history by becoming the first Muslim mayor of New York City. His road to victory was anything but smooth. After he secured a historic win in the mayoral primary, he faced a landslide of attacks from across the political spectrum. In the months that followed, the hateful rhetoric from right-wing provocateurs, social media personalities, and even his three opponents mushroomed.

Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa claimed that Mamdani supports “global jihad”; independent candidate and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo agreed with a comment that Mamdani would celebrate “another 9/11”; and outgoing NYC mayor, Eric Adams, who dropped out and endorsed Cuomo, suggested that a Mamdani mayorship would turn New York into Europe, where “Islamic extremists … are destroying communities.”

Sadly, as researchers of anti-Muslim bias, and Muslim individuals who came of age in a post-9/11 America, we know attacks of this nature – on someone’s character or fitness for a job because of their religious background or national origin – aren’t entirely unexpected. We know that Islamophobia spikes not after a violent act, but rather during election campaigns and political events, when anti-Muslim rhetoric is used as a political tactic to garner support for a specific candidate or policy.

Worryingly, these attacks also reflect a general trend of rising Islamophobia, which our research has recently uncovered. The latest edition of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding’s (ISPU) American Muslim Poll, which contains our Islamophobia Index, released on October 21, reveals that in the last three years, Islamophobia has sharply risen in the US, across almost all demographic groups.

Among the general population in the US, on our 1 to 100 scale, the index increased from a score of 25 in 2022 to a score of 33 in 2025. This jump was most pronounced among white Evangelicals, whose score increased from 30 to 45 between 2022 and 2025, and Catholics, whose score increased from 28 to 40 during the same period. Protestants also saw a rise of 7 points, from 23 in 2022 to 30 in 2025. Jews had an Islamophobia score of 17 in 2022, the lowest of any group that year, which increased only slightly to 19 in 2025, the same score as Muslims in 2025. The only group that did not change since 2022 is the non-affiliated.

Undoubtedly, the weaponisation of Islamophobia by high-profile individuals is a major driver of this worrying trend. And it can lead to devastating outcomes for Muslims: From job loss and inability to freely worship, to religious-based bullying of Muslim children in public schools and discrimination in public settings, to even physical violence. Simply put, dangerous rhetoric can have dangerous consequences.

Much of this Islamophobic rhetoric relies on five common stereotypes about Muslims, which we used in putting together our index: That they condone violence, discriminate against women, are hostile to the US, are less civilised, and are complicit in acts of violence committed by Muslims elsewhere. We then surveyed a nationally representative sample, including 2,486 Americans, to identify the extent to which they believed in these tropes.

More Americans are embracing these stereotypes about Muslims, even though they are easily disproved.

For example, despite popular media portrayals of Muslims as more prone to violence or as being complicit in violence perpetrated by Muslims elsewhere in the world, ISPU research shows American Muslims overwhelmingly reject violence. They are more likely than the general public to reject violence carried out by the military against civilians and are as likely to reject individual actors targeting civilians.

The popular stereotype that Muslim communities discriminate against their women also does not hold water. The fact is that Muslim women face more racial and religious discrimination than they do gender discrimination, which all women, Muslim or not, report at equal levels in the United States. The vast majority (99 percent) of Muslim women who wear hijab say they do so out of personal devotion and choice – not coercion. And Muslim women report that their faith is a source of pride and happiness.

Our research also disproves the belief that most Muslims living in the US are hostile to the country. We have found that Muslims with strong religious identities are more likely than those with weaker ones to hold a strong American identity. It also shows that Muslims participate in public life from the local to the national level through civic engagement, working with neighbours to solve community problems, and contributing during times of national crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Flint water crisis.

The trope that most Muslims living in the US are less “civilised” than other people has no factual basis, as well. The use of the “civilised/uncivilised” dichotomy strips individuals of their human dignity and separates people into a false, ethnocentric hierarchy on the basis of race or religion. Accusing a group of being less civilised than another is a frequently used dehumanising tactic. Dehumanisation, defined by Genocide Watch as when one group denies the humanity of the other group, is a step on the path to genocide.

We have seen all of these tropes activated in the past few weeks to launch Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani. We have also seen too many of our politicians and public figures use them comfortably in their public speech, placing an entire faith community in harm’s way. As Mamdani said in a speech addressing the Islamophobic attacks by his fellow candidates, “In an era of ever-diminishing bipartisanship, it seems that Islamophobia has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement.”

But Islamophobia isn’t just bad for Muslims – it undermines our democracy and constitutional freedoms. Research has linked belief in these anti-Muslim tropes to greater tolerance for anti-democratic policies. People who embrace Islamophobic beliefs are more likely to agree to limiting democratic freedoms when the country is under threat (suspending checks and balances, limiting freedom of the press), condone military and individual attacks on civilians (a war crime under the Geneva Convention), and approve of discriminatory policies targeting Muslims (banning Muslims, surveilling mosques, and even restricting the ability to vote).

Weaponising Islamophobia in political speech may be perceived as a winning strategy to rally support, but communities where it is deployed end up losing. That is why such practices must be challenged. Confronting and denouncing hate means preserving democracy and human dignity. Perhaps the election of Mamdani will signal a real shift away from this political strategy. As the mayor-elect said in his acceptance speech, “No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.