News — Politics

In the summer of 2019, Magdalena Hernández Pérez and I were outside her home on the edge of Cubulco, a small city four hours north of Guatemala City. As her grandkids played on the patio, Hernández, looking burdened beyond her 39 years, sat on a teal chair that matched the wall behind her. “Why didn’t they respect my rights?” she asked in Spanish, her voice shaking, her cries evoking the distinct guttural sounds I’d heard as my grandmother’s children stood over her casket.  The “they” Hernández was referring to were US border officials. Two years before we met, in December 2017, they put...

Inauguration 2021, as PYMNTS has previously covered, was something of an unusual event when it came to commerce. The COVID-19 pandemic combined with advanced security measures meant that many local Washington, D.C. businesses who count on the influx of tourists every four years actually had to shut down at the mayor’s request. “We are 110 percent supportive of what the mayor is doing to secure the city right now,” David Moran, director of operations for Clyde’s Restaurant Group, told the Washingtonian. “Of course, we’d rather be open and do business, but it’s just the right thing to do.” But where some...

In the Before Times, Jody Kanikula and a half dozen fellow Democratic women activists would gather for drinks each Thursday after the weekly Kane County Democrats meeting in Geneva, Illinois. These days, they settle for Saturday morning Zoom calls to reimagine what their political organizing looks like now that their preferred tools of the trade—door knocking and mail drops—are off the table. I met Kanikula and her friends in October 2018, a high season of political activity. The group was trying to elect Democrat Lauren Underwood, then a 32-year-old nurse who’d guided the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, to...

Make Money. Maybe Not in That Order. On the night of the 2020 Iowa caucuses, Brad Parscale, President Trump’s campaign manager and technology guru, arrived at an elementary school on the outskirts of Des Moines. With attention focused on the hard-fought Democratic contest, Trump sought to steal a bit of the spotlight by displaying total dominance over his no-hope opponents. As part of the process, each GOP candidate had dispatched someone to caucus sites around the state’s largest city to speak on their behalf. For some 100 voters in suburban Urbandale, it was Parscale. A 6-foot-8-inch Texan with a red...