Democrats condemn Haley Stevens betrayal following endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers – US politics live

As we continue to bring you more on the fallout of Haley Stevens’ decision to endorse Republican nominee Mike Rogers in the US Senate race in Michigan, the chorus of anger and frustration at the Democratic congresswoman continues to grow.

On Sunday, Nancy Pelosi, the outgoing US representative, former House speaker, and once the party’s king-maker-in-chief, said that Stevens’ has “chosen to dangerously betray Michigan families’ healthcare, freedoms and future with her horrific endorsement [of Rogers].”

In the homestretch of the election, Donald Trump will be in Washington today, after a weekend of campaigning in Iowa and Kansas. He’s set to deliver remarks at 2pm ET by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, after which he’ll take part in several tele- rallies from the White House.

We’ll bring you the latest lines as that gets under way.

Donald Trump railed against Democratic US senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed at a campaign event in Iowa Sunday, repeatedly referring to the Michigan progressive as a “jihadist”.

Trump’s comments aimed to influence a neck-and-neck race that will play an outsized role in determining which party controls the senate after Tuesday’s midterm elections.

The president bashed El-Sayed, a practicing Muslim, in brazenly racist terms, saying that Congress would have to “get a special metal detector for Abdul” if he were elected. “If you vote for this jihadist lunatic that wants to destroy you, you’re crazy,” Trump said.

The Michigan race has drawn national attention in recent days, as Hayley Stevens, who lost to El-Sayed in the August primary election, declined to campaign with him, while demanding that he publicly disavow an outside group’s political ad that posited a link between rising prices and US military support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

El-Sayed responded by telling Stevens to stay away from a campaign event at which they were supposed to appear together on Sunday. Stevens turned around and endorsed Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent. Steven’s high-profile defection in the waning hours of the tight race drew the condemnation of Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who is Jewish.

Trump, on the other hand, heaped praise on Stevens for turning against El-Sayed, urging her to join the GOP.

“It was an incredible thing,” Trump said. “I’d love her to join the Republican party. I think that could happen.”

Immigrants who have been granted release from detention after winning habeas corpus petitions in court are being re-arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The Guardian has identified at least 20 cases nationwide relating to people who were detained after being released on habeas corpus petition in the last year, according to court records, attorneys and media reports.

Increasing arrests and detentions have led to immigrants filing more than 91,000 habeas petitions as they seek to challenge their detentions, according to research by ProPublica. More petitions have been filed since 25 January than during the past three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term, combined, the outlet found.

A petition of habeas corpus – Latin for “you shall have a body” – challenges in a federal court the government’s right to hold someone in custody while their main legal case is proceeding.

But in a new development, people are winning their release only to find themselves quickly detained again.

“We’ve seen a very, very sharp increase in people who are released on habeas petitions, only to be very rapidly re-detained, often in violation of the federal court’s order,” said Bridget Pranzatelli, an attorney with the National Immigration Project.

Two years on from her devastating presidential election defeat, Kamala Harris was greeted like a rockstar as she took the stage before a rapt audience at Georgia’s Clark Atlanta University.

When a politician is greeted by a friendly crowd, they often hear chants of their name. But at Clark, an historically-Black college (HBCU), students instead delivered a school spirit chant for the Atlanta University Center, celebrating an HBCU alumna – and the country’s first female and first Black vice-president – as one of their own.

Harris is “big sister general”, said Sanaiya Archer, a sophomore at Spelman College in Atlanta. “I’m able to see myself in her. Not that I personally relate to her, but she went to an HBCU, she’s an HBCU alum, I’m at an HBCU. And it’s just amazing to see a Black woman that I can see anywhere else in my life on a presidential scale.”

That scale has yet to reach the Oval Office. In 2024, following the reluctant withdrawal of Joe Biden, Harris launched a 107-day campaign for the White House which again brought to the US tantalizingly close to electing its first female president. She lost.

Donald Trump’s return left Democrats reeling – again. Even as it contests this week’s midterm elections, the party has yet to settle on who could lead it back into power, and how.

In his first public comments since Stevens’s endorsement of Rogers, El-Sayed told reporters at a press conference outside of a rally he held on Sunday, the very same rally that Stevens had earlier been disinvited from attending, “At the end of the day, I actually don’t think about Haley Stevens.” He added, “I’m just less interested in the politics of it all than I am in the policy of it all.

“If you are somebody who believes that we should stand up to hate, and you have watched this last campaign, I think we probably would not want to support Mike Rogers and Donald Trump and JD Vance,” he said.

But Stevens’s political pivot earned her praise from Donald Trump, someone whose policies she has an entire page on her website dedicated to denouncing.

Trump, during his rally in Iowa, heaped praise on Stevens for turning against El-Sayed, urging her to join the GOP. “It was an incredible thing,” Trump said. “I’d love her to join the Republican party. I think that could happen.”

Stevens had lost by a close margin in this year’s primary, and for months had refused to openly campaign for El-Sayed, as had his other opponent Mallory McMorrow.

Some of the people who worked for Stevens’s campaign also reportedly quit following her Rogers endorsement.

Her long-time chief of staff, Justin German, and her communications director, Logan Basch, were among those who left, according to CNN correspondent Manu Raju.

German later released a statement on behalf of Stevens’ campaign team endorsing El-Sayed:

As Haley Stevens’ Chief of staff for eight years, I speak on behalf of our team in wholeheartedly supporting Abdul El-Sayed for Senate. This election is too important to sow division or stand on the sidelines.

We are shocked and heartbroken by Congresswoman Stevens’ decision to support Mike Rogers.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

Democratic politicians have condemned congresswoman Haley Stevens, who lost the Michigan Democratic Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed, over her endorsement of his Republican rival just days before the midterm vote.

Stevens’ extraordinary endorsement of Mike Rogers was the culmination of an escalating feud between the former primary rivals – primarily over support for Israel – that has roiled one of the most fiercely contested Senate contests of the cycle.

As one might expect, top Democrats have been quick to express their outrage at the congresswoman’s “betrayal”.

California governor Gavin Newsom said on the political talkshow 2WAY that Stevens “went another 180 degrees overnight, so something was going on there”. “She’s been successful at taking our eye off the ball and that’s why I understand party leadership condemning it … This may be curiously the October surprise of sorts,” he added.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer also responded negatively to the endorsement. Schumer’s campaign account called it a “despicable betrayal” from Stevens in a statement, but continued to push for unity among Democrats. He said:

Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed, because we know he will fight for the economic interests of working families in Michigan, unlike Mike Rogers, who is a tool of Donald Trump and billionaire donors. We Democrats equally united in our total revulsion at the racist, Islamophobic, and over-the-top false attacks on Abdul by Republicans.

These attacks are evidence of the total bankruptcy of the Republican Party today, who resort to ugly and un-American fearmongering because they have nothing to offer on the problems that concern people today.

Meanwhile, Michigan’s Democratic party chair Curtis Hertel said:

Haley Stevens’ decision to campaign with Rogers – a man who has repeatedly sold out Michigan’s working class, wants to pass a national abortion ban, and has pledged to be a loyal vote for Trump’s agenda – shows that she has abandoned everything she claims to care about. We reject the attempts by Stevens and bad-faith actors to divide our party and undermine our momentum, and will not allow these eleventh-hour distractions deter us.

Bernie Sanders joined the controversy, attacking Stevens for what Democrats view as an extraordinary betrayal after Stevens accepted El-Sayed’s narrow victory over her in Michigan’s Democrat senate primaries.

“Rep. Haley Stevens’ staff is right to resign in disgust,” Sanders posted on X. “They understand that the election in Michigan is far more important than Haley’s fragile ego and that all of us must stand together to elect Abdul, defeat Rogers and end the Republican rubber-stamp control of the Senate.”

Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, said Stevens had “betrayed” working class people “by endorsing the very Republican she said she wanted to run against”.

Read our full report here:

In other developments:

• Donald Trump railed against Democratic US senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed at a campaign event in Iowa Sunday, repeatedly referring to the Michigan progressive as a “jihadist”. The president bashed El-Sayed, a practicing Muslim, in brazenly racist terms, saying that Congress would have to “get a special metal detector for Abdul” if he were elected. “If you vote for this jihadist lunatic that wants to destroy you, you’re crazy,” Trump said.

• A judge has dismissed the Donald Trump-backed lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska’s US Senate race if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses. Trump said on 23 October that he had ordered the justice department to file the lawsuit in a move that voting rights experts called an “unprecedented intervention” by the federal government with control of Congress in the balance.

• Democratic US Senator Chris Murphy has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke. Murphy, 53, started feeling numbness in his arm while attending his son’s hockey game on Saturday, according to the Connecticut senator’s chief of staff, Allison Herwitt. A hospital visit confirmed that Murphy had experienced a stroke.