Washington Post | Annie Polland had an immediate thought after she heard Ken Cuccinelli’s revision of the famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty on Tuesday: Her sixth-grade students seemed to understand Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” better than the head of the nation’s legal immigration system did. “Clearly, he did not take part in our curriculum,” said Polland, the executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society, which is leading a three-year initiative called the Emma ... Read more

U.S. Representative Don Beyer (VA-08), Co-Chair of the Endangered Species Caucus, released the following statement today after the Trump administration finalized regulations to significantly weaken the Endangered Species Act (ESA): “We are in the middle of a global wave of mass extinction and history will judge us for how we treat those with whom we share this planet. Despite the major successes of the ESA, iconic species are facing increasingly daunting threats to survival. We have a moral resp... Read more

USA Today | On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump vented on Twitter about a political adversary, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and assailed an American city, Baltimore. "Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous," Trump wrote. Trump continued by saying conditions on the border were "clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded," ... Read more

After the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report urging the U.S. Department of Education to implement recommendations to address inaccuracies in federal restraint and seclusion data, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, and U.S. Representative Don Beyer (VA-8), on Tuesday led a group of 42 members of Congress, including U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.), top Democrat on the HELP Committee, and... Read more

U.S. Representatives Don Beyer (D-VA) and 23 Representatives today sent a letter to Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Kevin McAleenan seeking details to ensure Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents who posted racist, misogynist, and anti-immigrant messages and images in two Facebook groups will be held accountable. They wrote: “We are deeply disturbed by the recently revealed secret Facebook groups for current and retired U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) ... Read more

Rep. Beyer issued the following to statement today on his vote for a motion to table Rep. Al Green’s resolution which would refer one article of impeachment against President Trump for racist tweets directly to the U.S. Senate: “I strongly support an impeachment inquiry into the conduct of President Trump. I voted to table H. Res. 489 because it would effectively prevent the House from conducting such an inquiry. “I believe that we have substantial evidence, both in the Mueller Report and elsewh... Read more

CNBC | President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is also a senior White House advisor, is regularly giving counsel to 2020 Trump campaign leaders on how to appeal to online donors and where to spend their money. As recently as Thursday, Kushner met with campaign leadership, including campaign chief Brad Parscale, along with Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel. Kushner and Parscale regularly hold strategy sessions on how to improve messaging about Trump’s accomplishmen... Read more

NPR | A group of four minority Democratic congresswomen targeted by President Trump in a series of Sunday morning tweets denounced his racist remarks and accused him of "stoking white nationalism." Weighing in on friction between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and four liberal Democrats dubbed "the squad," Trump referred to " 'Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen" in his tweets, saying they should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." "So... Read more

Washington Post | President Trump said Sunday that four minority, liberal congresswomen who have been critical of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” prompting other Democrats — including Pelosi — to leap to their defense. Pelosi denounced Trump’s tweets as “xenophobic comments meant to divide our nation,” while the four congresswomen promised to continue fighting Trump’s agenda and accused him of ... Read more

Think Progress | Vice President Mike Pence visited a Border Patrol detention facility in Texas on Friday evening. The image of him in a blazer, blithely looking through a chain-link fence at hundreds of people, forced to stand in an overcrowded, confined space with no room to lie down, is destined to be one of the seminal representations of the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants coming to the United States, many of whom are seeking asylum. After visiting the first detention center, con... Read more