Written by 
Elon Musk gave $75m to pro-Trump group
Elon Musk gave around $75 million to his pro-Donald Trump spending group in the span of three months, federal disclosures showed, underscoring how the billionaire has become crucial to the Republican candidate’s efforts to win the presidential election, Reuters reports.
America PAC, which is focused on turning out voters in closely contested states that could decide the election, spent around $72 million of that in the July-September period, according to disclosures filed to the Federal Election Commission.
That is more than any other pro-Trump super PAC focused on turning out voters. The Trump campaign is broadly reliant on outside groups for canvassing voters, meaning the super PAC founded by Musk – the world’s richest man – plays an outsized role in the razor-thin election between Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris.
Key events
A little bit more detail on Billy who spoke earlier.
A reporter asked him how hold he was, and where he came from. He replied that he is 16, and came from Guatemala.
Billy was followed by a girl who gave her name as Janice Adriana and shared her own story of being detained when trying to enter the United States.
“They told us that they were going to separate me and my mom, and that’s when everything bad started to happen. I started crying, me and Mama started crying because we thought we were never going to see each other again” Adriana said.
She continued:
Then they took her away from me, and after that, I had to stay in this foster care for a week, and I asked them plenty of times when I was gonna see my mom again, and they told me I was gonna see her soon, but it never happened.
After that, they took me to my dad for and I stayed here with him for about two months, and I was feeling a little bit better because I was out of the foster care, and at least I was with my dad, but then they deported him to Honduras, and I had nobody with me, only my aunt, which I had to stay with her for three years. I couldn’t see my mom for those whole three years, which was really sad for me, because I thought I wasn’t going to see her more than that.
Adriana closed with: “Kamala Harris helped me and my parents get together again, and now me and my parents are happily living together, and I don’t want Donald Trump to be president again, because I don’t want other kids to go through what I did.”
Billy was eventually reunited with his father, but said the damage from their forced separation lingers:
I went and ran to my dad, I hugged him, and I told him I did not want this to happen ever again. And he promised me that he would not ever leave me again. And after that, we still fear. I go to therapists, but I still have the fear of Trump being reelected, and that same thing happening to me or other kids ever again.
Kamala Harris helped us be together again, and she helped us be a family again. And I don’t want this to happen to any more kids.
The Harris campaign organized the event ahead of a town hall Trump will participate this evening on Univision News, as part of his effort to woo Latino voters.
Victims of Trump-era family separation policy speak at Harris campaign event
Survivors of Donald Trump’s family separation policy are telling their stories at an event convened by Kamala Harris’s campaign to condemn the former president’s hardline immigration policies.
A young man who identified himself as Billy told a press conference in Doral, Florida, that he was detained after arriving in the United States and told he would see his father again soon.
“After that day, I never saw him again for 40 days,” Billy said, describing how he was instead flown to New York and put with a foster family.
“They told me that I wasn’t going to get to see my dad again and that I wasn’t going to be able to see my family again. As a nine-year-old, you can probably imagine how that felt, great sadness in front of me and very traumatic, something that I still hold to this day. The emptiness that I felt when I when they told me that I wasn’t going to be able to see my family again, was something out of this world, and something that no kids should go through.”
Lauren Gambino
Joe Biden is headed to Arizona next week – but the White House says it’s for an official event (ie not a campaign event).
It’s not clear yet what brings the president to the battleground state that he won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, becoming the first Democratic nominee to win Arizona since Bill Clinton.
Recent polling shows Kamala Harris trailing Donald Trump in the state, even as the Democratic candidate for Senate, Ruben Gallego, leads his Republican opponent, Trump ally Kari Lake.
Harris doesn’t need to win Arizona, since she has other paths to 270. But it is perhaps a worrying sign about her standing among Hispanic voters, who make up about a third of the state’s electorate. However, Democrats cannot hold on to the Senate without keeping the seat.
Michelle Obama to headline Georgia rally aimed at young voters
Michelle Obama will later this month hold a rally in Atlanta aimed at encouraging young voters to get to the polls, her nonpartisan organization When We All Vote announced.
The 29 October event will feature Atlanta-area college and high school students and is aimed at encouraging first-time voters to cast ballots in Georgia, which Joe Biden won in 2020 by a narrow 12,000 votes.
“The election doesn’t start on Election Day — it ends on Election Day. Thanks to our Georgia partners and volunteers who continue to make sure their communities are ready to vote, Georgia voters are fired up and ready to use their voices,” said When We All Vote’s executive director Beth Lynk in a statement.
Obama launched When We All Vote in 2018 with the aim of getting new voters out to the polls. The Atlanta rally will be her first public event since her speech to the Democratic national convention, where she artfully decried Donald Trump:
Harris set for evening interview on Fox News
It’s a big day for Fox News, where Kamala Harris will at 6pm sit for an interview with anchor Bret Baier, hours after Donald Trump’s pre-recorded town hall airs.
It will be something of a journey into hostile territory for the vice-president, since Fox’s coverage and viewership tends to skew conservative. We don’t know yet what they’ll talk about, but Baier yesterday said the interview would air without commercial breaks.
Harris will appear on Fox News as she continues a string of media interviews intended to boost her candidacy with less than three weeks to go until the presidential vote. Here’s more on that:
Fox News to broadcast town hall with Trump, Georgia women
At 11am today, Fox News will broadcast a pre-recorded town hall with Donald Trump and a group of women in swing state Georgia.
Expect a friendly encounter – Fox News is a conservative network, and a brief clip of the event broadcast yesterday shows Trump taking questions on immigration, an issue that is a mainstay of his speeches. Nonetheless, the event does serve a purpose for the former president: polls have shown that his standing is weak among some groups of women, and the event appears to be geared towards turning that around, specifically in a state that could decide the election.
“Women constitute the largest group of registered and active voters in the United States, so it is paramount that female voters understand where the presidential candidates stand on the issues that matter to them most,” Fox News presenter Harris Faulkner said in announcing the event.
State governments across the US are taking steps to eliminate protections for minors as rates of child labor violations, injuries and chronic school absenteeism rise, according to a report released today.
The report by Governing For Impact, the Economic Policy Institute, and Child Labor Coalition proposes actions the Biden-Harris administration can take in response to a recent surge in child labor violations around the country and a trend of some states passing legislation that rollbacks state-level child labor protections.
Its authors also warn that moves to weaken child protections will likely escalate under a second Trump presidency.
Obama to return to campaign for Harris as Michigan begins voting
Barack Obama will next week hit the campaign trail on behalf of Kamala Harris on Tuesday, when early voting begins in Michigan, the vice-president’s campaign announced.
The former president will rally voters in Detroit, Harris’s campaign said, without giving further details.
Obama made his first campaign appearance for Harris last week in Pennsylvania, where he encouraged Black men to cast ballots for the vice-president:
Donald Trump’s pro-Israel stance has alienated the far right, which is ramping up antisemitic attacks, Ben Makuch writes.
One campaign issue where the Maga world and the extremists of Telegram and other fringe social media sites have diverged, is the former president’s support for Israel in its several military operations across the Middle East.
The ideologies of the far right and Donald Trump have for the most part been in agreement since he took the reins of the Republican ticket at the RNC convention in July.
While supporters waved ultranationalist “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” signs, Trump gave a speech mixed with hate, in a nomination that was roundly approved across the rightwing political sphere.
That sense of unity, however, has begun to crack under the weight of antisemitic attacks aimed at Trump for commemorating the anniversary of the 7 October attacks …