U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Tuesday that he believes NAFTA negotiations will produce “some sort” of a deal for President Donald Trump to evaluate but repeated his warnings that the United States will walk away from the trade pact if key problems are unresolved.

Ross, speaking before the start of a fifth round of talks this week to modernize the North American Free Trade Agreement, said Mexico and Canada would suffer far more than the United States if the pact is dissolved.

“I would certainly prefer them to come to their senses and make a sensible deal,” Ross told a Wall Street Journal CEO forum.

“In any negotiation if you have one party that is not in fact prepared to walk away over whatever are the threshold issues, that party is going to lose,” Ross added.

Trump has relentlessly criticized NAFTA for draining U.S. manufacturing jobs to Mexico, calling it “the worst trade deal ever made” and threatening to scrap it unless it can be improved to reduce U.S. trade deficits with Mexico and Canada.

Ross said Trump’s “general point of view is that no deal is better than a terrible deal,” but added that he does not know how Trump will evaluate a deal resulting from negotiations.

“Some sort of a draft will land on his desk. So it will be a binary decision in that sense,” Ross said.

At negotiations resuming in Mexico City on Thursday, Mexico and Canada are expected to respond to tough demands from the United States such as a five-year sunset clause that would effectively trigger frequent renegotiations as well as a controversial U.S.-specific content rule for automotive products and far higher regional automotive content.

Ross gave no indication that U.S. negotiators would soften their stance on these topics, which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce counts among “poison pill” demands that could sink the talks.

Asked whether the content demands that 85 percent of a car’s value be produced within the region and 50 percent in the United States would simply drive auto and parts production to Asia, as industry executives have warned Ross said: “We don’t think so.

We believe there will be a different thing because of all the other changes that we’re making.”

He said Republican tax reform efforts including lower rates and immediate expensing of capital expenditure costs and regulatory changes would lower the cost of doing business and keep the United States attractive for automotive investment.

Trump has wanted a five-year sunset clause for trade agreements since he began campaigning for president Ross said, to ensure that they deliver promised benefits.

“The reason we want it is that the tragic truth is that forecasts that were made when trade agreements were entered into, never have been achieved, at least in the case of the U.S.”
…

The first room in the former warehouse, now a detention center, is a waiting area where visitors check in and wait to see whether they will be allowed to visit a detainee.

Security screening is similar to that at an airport checkpoint. Visitors must show identification and leave belongings in a locker. No phones. No pictures. No recording of any kind.

“This one is actually nice. She is helpful,” a local volunteer who regularly visits detainees tells me about the security official standing behind the window. Above the window: “United We Stand.”

On a dead end road in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the Elizabeth Detention Center is an immigration jail that holds about 285 people. Privately owned, it is run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the fifth-largest corrections company in the United States.

The center is in an industrial area surrounded by parking lots, a railroad, a freight station and the New Jersey Turnpike — a geographic location that works as an invisible wall.

Current U.S. policy is to detain those who ask for asylum once they reach a U.S. port of entry regardless of whether they have a valid visa. The Elizabeth Detention Center is a 15-minute drive from Newark Liberty International Airport, one of the busiest entry points to the U.S. for international arrivals.

A name and a number

It is late afternoon at the end of October; about 30 people are waiting to see friends or loved ones inside the Elizabeth facility. All the blue plastic chairs are taken, and there is a check-in line. Some wait outside. Church groups, mothers and children, and other people visiting loved ones wait their turn. Also, volunteers from local nonprofit groups visit detainees every week.

I have been given the name and alien number of a detainee by First Friends, an immigrant advocacy group. It’s all the information I need to be admitted as a volunteer visitor. The goal of the visitation program, according to First Friends organizers, is to give immigrants a moment of support and friendship.

I am asked to show identification. My Maryland driver’s license is met with a skeptical look by the officer. She double-checks front and back, but I get the green light to enter. Like all visitors, I must go through a metal detector, take my shoes and jacket off, and leave my pen and notebook behind. I then step inside a large metal jail door that closes with a clank before another slides open on the other side.

“I never get used to this sound,” another visitor tells me.

Once the gates of an immigration detention center close on asylum seekers, they may not open again for months. As of September, immigration officials say, there were more than 38,000 immigrants detained nationwide in 203 facilities. Detainees leave a detention center once their cases have been gone through the immigration process, which could mean authorization for them to live in the United States or deportation.

The visitation area is filled with round tables and chairs. Detainees must sit facing officers who are posted on the right side of the room. In the back, on a single row of chairs, immigrants wait for their visitors.

Under a Statue of Liberty mural, I sit at a round table and face Faras Khan from Pakistan, who is in the midst of deportation proceedings. His girlfriend is also visiting. As a corrections officer watches from the side of the room, Khan talks about his case, how he feels he is an American because he has not lived in Pakistan since he was a 1-year-old.

Visa overstayed

Khan’s father sought asylum after overstaying a nonimmigrant visa, claiming he had been persecuted in Pakistan. At the time, Khan, still a child, was listed as a derivative beneficiary. His father’s asylum was denied, and he was deported to Pakistan.

But Khan, now in his late 20s and diagnosed as bipolar, is fighting to stay. He was taken into custody after a meeting with immigration officials and has been detained for more than six months.

A 2016 Human Rights First report shows that clients held at New Jersey facilities, who were represented by Human Rights First pro bono attorneys, were detained for an average of eight months.

After detention

Edafe Okporo was held at Elizabeth for five months. He was taken there after his flight landed at Newark, and he requested asylum.

“I was told by immigration that they don’t have housing for immigrants, arriving alien, so I was told I was going to be taken to a jail,” Okporo said.

Okporo is from Nigeria, where he was working as an LGBTQ rights and public health activist in a country that does not recognize gay rights and criminalizes gay activity. In October 2016, he won an award from a New York human rights organization that published a photo of him and exposed his work.

“The community was calling for my execution, so I had to flee. I had a U.S. visa, and that was the only travel document I had to travel with,” Okporo said.

Okporo said his time in detention put him in a deep depression.

The rooms in Elizabeth, he said, are not private. Though there is a “privacy wall” inside showers and toilets, a person can still see what others are doing.

“I got alone. Lonely. … I’ve never been in that kind of isolation before. You are instructed on what to do and what not to do. And they are giving you food to eat, whether you like it or not, you just do it,” he said.

Anxiously waiting

Not knowing the outcome of his case also added to his anxiety.

“If I lose, I would be returning to my country. If I win, I would be released. Where I would be released? I was depressed because my family … I do not have communications because my family do not accept me because of my sexual orientation,” he said.

Okporo said that besides the volunteer visitation program, he found a way out in books and meditation.

“I love reading. I increased my passion for reading by always going to the library and picking up books to read,” he said. “Even [though] my body was incarcerated, my body was free because I was able to go through a day-to-day activity of how to meditate and get a grip of my mind.”

Okporo was granted asylum.

The American Friends Service Committee, which represents immigrants held in New Jersey detention facilities pro bono, reports that between February 2015 and September 2016 it represented 80 asylum seekers. Of those, 40 received asylum. All remained in detention while their claims were adjudicated.

Okporo will be eligible to apply for legal permanent resident status in one year. But he has already begun his new life in America. With First Friends’ help, he has gotten three jobs.

“I produced a cookbook,” he said proudly, “which featured 40 refugees from different countries around the world.”
…

An array of surveys of voter approval ratings for U.S. President Donald Trump continue to be mired in the 30 percent range, but he contended Tuesday that an outlier poll with a higher mark proves the others are wrong.

The latest survey by Quinnipiac University showed American voters disapprove of Trump’s nearly 10-month White House tenure by a 58-to-35 percent margin, with 40 percent saying he is fit to serve as president and 57 percent he is not.

Other recent surveys showed similar results, with Gallup on Tuesday giving Trump a 57-38 disapproval rating. Last week, Reuters/Ipsos pegged his negative standing at 60-35, while The Washington Post-ABC News survey in early October showed a negative reading of 59-37, which it said was the lowest in seven decades at this point in the four-year terms of U.S. presidents.

However, Trump, in a Twitter comment, cited Monday’s result from the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports, which showed him at a 53-46 negative standing and attacked mainstream national news outlets for citing the polls with his approval ratings in the 30-percent range.

“One of the most accurate polls last time around,” Trump said of Rasmussen. “But #FakeNews likes to say we’re in the 30’s. They are wrong. Some people think numbers could be in the 50’s. Together, WE will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

By Tuesday, the Rasmussen polling edged down for Trump, with a 54-44 negative reading.

Quinnipiac pollster Tim Malloy said, “President Donald Trump returns from his big Asia trip to find numbers frozen in the negative. Ominously, there is creeping slippage in (Trump’s political) base.”

Quinnipiac said that American voters by a 58-to-37-percent margin think that Trump is not honest, by 59-38 that he does not have good leadership skills, by 59-39 that he does not care about average Americans, by 65-30 that he is not level-headed and by 62-34 that he does not share their values.

On the plus side, Quinnipiac said by a 58-39 margin, voters think Trump is a strong person and by 55-41 that he is intelligent.
…

A proposal by the U.S. Senate to change the way shares in startup companies are taxed incited panic and dread in Silicon Valley on Monday, with startup founders and investors warning of nothing less than the demise of their industry should the proposal become law.

The provision in the Senate’s tax reform plan, which appeared to catch the industry by surprise, involves the treatment of employee stock options. These options give the holder the right to purchase shares in the future at a set price and can be very valuable if a company does well and the share price increases.

Options are often a major portion of the compensation for startup employees and founders, who take lower salaries in anticipation of a big payout if their startup takes off. Options typically vest over a four-year period.

Senate Republicans have now proposed taxing those stock options as they vest and before startup employees have the opportunity to cash them in, resulting in annual tax bills that could easily climb into the tens of thousands of dollars, say startup founders and venture capitalists.

“If there were a single piece of legislation to adversely affect startups, it would be this,” said Venky Ganesan, managing director at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. “Everyone is freaked out.”

Justin Field, vice president of government affairs at the National Venture Capital Association, said that the Senate’s proposed tax change would be “crippling” to the startup industry.

How far the provision gets remains to be seen. The National Venture Capital Association was successful in getting a similar proposal removed from the House tax bill, although it “didn’t fully appreciate” the Senate’s intention to add the tax provision, Field said.

The association also helped to steer lawmakers away from a proposal discussed late last year to tax venture capitalists’ profits on investments at a higher rate.

Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a member of the Senate Committee on Finance, has filed an amendment to repeal the provision in the tax bill, according to his spokesman.

A new proposal

Under current tax code, employees are taxed only when they exercise their options. Options are exercised when the price they were granted at–known as the strike price–is lower than the share price, and some shares can then be sold to pay the taxes.

But the Senate proposal would require startup employees to pay regular income tax on the value gain of their stock options even before they are exercised. These options are illiquid assets, and cannot be spent or saved.

“What this would mean is every month, when your equity compensation vests a little bit, you will owe taxes on it even though you can’t do anything with that equity compensation,” Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures, wrote on his blog Monday.

For instance, if a startup employee receives stock options at a dollar per share, and the shares increase in value by $1 every year during the four-year vesting period, the employee would have to pay income tax on $1 per share after the first year, pay again on the $1 increase in value after the second year, and so on.

When that employee owns hundreds of thousands and even millions of shares, that is a hefty bill to pay. And there is always the risk the startup will eventually fail.

“This reform will force the average employee to pay taxes on that bet well before they even know if it’s a winning ticket,” said Amanda Kahlow, founder and executive chairman of marketing data startup 6sense.

For startup founders in particular, such a tax bill could be ruinous.

“It would mean that I would have to sell the company,” said Shoaib Makani, founder and chief executive of long-haul trucking startup KeepTruckin. “I have zero net worth aside from the common stock I hold in the company. It would be impossible. I would be in default.”

Some executives in the startup industry, however, have pushed for companies to move toward bigger salaries so employees are not so dependent on options to buy a house or pay for other large expenses. And when startups suffer valuation cuts, employees can end up with worthless options.

The Senate’s proposal came as a revenue-generating measure to help offset tax breaks in the bill. A spokesman for Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, did not respond to requests for comment and other Republicans on the committee were not immediately available.

A spokeswoman for Senator Ron Wyden, the committee’s ranking member and a Democrat, said he was aware of concerns that the provision would limit startups’ ability to attract talent.
…

Attorney General Jeff Sessions returns to Capitol Hill this week amid growing evidence of contacts between Russians and associates of President Donald Trump, bracing for an onslaught of lawmaker questions about how much he knew of that outreach during last year’s White House campaign.

The appearance before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday follows a guilty plea from one Trump campaign aide who served on a foreign policy council that Sessions chaired, as well as statements from another adviser who said he’d advised the then-GOP Alabama senator about an upcoming trip to Russia.

Those details complicate Sessions’ effort to downplay knowledge of the campaign’s foreign contacts, and Democratic lawmakers who already contended the attorney general had not been forthcoming with them have signaled that questions about the new revelations are likely to dominate what could otherwise have been a routine oversight hearing.

“These facts appear to contradict your sworn testimony on several occasions,” Democrats from the committee said in a letter to Sessions last week.

Republicans, for their part, are likely to press Sessions on their demands for investigations into the Clinton Foundation and an Obama-era purchase of American uranium mines by a Russian-backed company.

In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said Sessions had directed “senior federal prosecutors” to “evaluate certain issues” raised in letters sent by Republican lawmakers, and to determine whether investigations – or the possible appointment of a special counsel – were warranted. 

Sessions, an early Trump backer who led a foreign policy advisory council during the campaign, has been shadowed for months by questions about his own communications with Russians and by contacts of others in the Trump orbit. That issue has been at the forefront of each of his congressional hearings even as Sessions has labored to promote the Justice Department’s work and priorities, and Tuesday’s appearance is unlikely to be an exception.

Earlier in the year

At his January confirmation hearing, Sessions told Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., that “I did not have communications” with the Russians during the campaign and said he was “unaware” of contacts between others in the campaign and Russia. Yet he recused himself in March from overseeing the Justice Department’s investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin after acknowledging two previously undisclosed encounters with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

He struck a similar note before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, when he denied knowledge of communications between Russians and Trump campaign officials.

“I did not and I’m not aware of anyone else that did, and I don’t believe it happened,” Sessions said under questioning, again from Franken.

But that narrative has been challenged by a pair of recent events, most notably a guilty plea from George Papadopoulos, who last month admitted in court to lying to the FBI about his own foreign contacts. He was part of a foreign policy council that Sessions chaired, and the two are among the men in a March 2016 photograph that Trump posted on social media. Charging documents in that case indicate that Papadopoulos told the council “that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump” and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

One of the attendees at that meeting, J.D. Gordon, recalled that Sessions quickly “shut him down and said, ‘We’re not going to do that.”’

Gordon has also said that Papadopoulos went around him and Sessions and that they did not know he had continued to try to arrange such a meeting.

Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee advised Sessions in a letter last week that they intended to press him on what they said were “inconsistencies” between the attorney general’s past statements and the new revelations.

“If, as recent reports suggest, you rejected Mr. Papadopoulos’s suggestion that President Trump meet with Vladimir Putin at that March 31 meeting – a fact you appear to have remembered only after Mr. Papadopoulos’s account was made public – it seems likely that you were ‘aware’ of communications between the Russian government and surrogates of the Trump campaign,” the letter states.

Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores declined to comment Monday.

Adding to the questions for Sessions was the release by the House Intelligence Committee last week of a transcript of a private interview with Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the campaign who acknowledged that he had contact with a high-level Russian official while on a trip to Russia last year.

Page told the panel he had informed some members of the Trump campaign about the trip, including Sessions. He said he mentioned in passing to Sessions that he was preparing to visit Russia and Sessions “had no reaction whatsoever.”
…

North Korea warned Monday that the unprecedented deployment of three U.S. aircraft carrier groups “taking up a strike posture” around the Korean peninsula is making it impossible to predict when nuclear war will break out.

North Korea’s U.N. ambassador, Ja Song Nam, said in a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres that the joint military exercises with South Korea are creating “the worst ever situation prevailing in and around the Korean peninsula.”

Along with the three carrier groups, he said, the U.S. has reactivated round-the-clock sorties with nuclear-capable B-52 strategic bombers “which existed during the Cold War times.”

He also said the U.S. is maintaining “a surprise strike posture with frequent flights of B-1B and B-2 formations to the airspace of South Korea.”

“The large-scale nuclear war exercises and blackmails, which the U.S. staged for a whole year without a break in collaboration with its followers to stifle our republic, make one conclude that the option we have taken was the right one and we should go along the way to the last,” Ja said.

He didn’t elaborate on what “the last” might be, but North Korea has launched ballistic missiles that have the potential to strike the U.S. mainland, and it recently conducted its largest-ever underground nuclear explosion. It has also threatened to explode another nuclear bomb above the Pacific Ocean.

The four-day joint naval exercises by the U.S. and South Korea, which began Saturday in waters off the South’s eastern coast, were described by military officials as a clear warning to North Korea. They involve the carrier battle groups of the USS Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz, which include 11 U.S. Aegis ships that can track missiles, and seven South Korean naval vessels.

Seoul’s military said in a statement that the exercises aim to enhance the combined U.S. and South Korean operational and aerial strike capabilities and to display “strong will and firm military readiness to defeat any provocation by North Korea with dominant force in the event of crisis.”

According to the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet, it is the first time since a 2007 exercise near Guam that three U.S. carrier strike groups have operated together in the western Pacific.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis insisted on Monday that the carrier maneuvers are not extraordinary.

“There’s no big message” intended for North Korea or anyone else, he told reporters in an impromptu exchange in a Pentagon hallway. “This is what we normally do with allies.”

Reminded that it had been 10 years since the last three-carrier exercise, Mattis noted that the Navy has a limited number of carriers and can’t often put three in the same place.

“It’s just a normal operation,” he said.

The military drills come amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Asia, which has been dominated by discussions over the North Korean nuclear threat.

Ja accused the U.N. Security Council in Monday’s letter of repeatedly “turning a blind eye to the nuclear war exercises of the United States, who is hell bent on bringing a catastrophic disaster to humanity.” He said the exercises raise serious concern about “the double standard” of the U.N.’s most powerful body.

He also referenced Trump’s September speech to the U.N. General Assembly in which the president said that if the U.S. is “forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

Trump tweeted soon after making the speech that Korea’s leadership “won’t be around much longer” if it continued its provocations, a declaration that led the North’s foreign minister to assert that Trump had “declared war on our country.”

Ja said Monday the U.S. “is now running amok for war exercises by introducing nuclear war equipment in and around the Korean peninsula, thereby proving that the U.S. itself is the major offender of the escalation of tension and undermining of the peace.”’

Ja asked Guterres to circulate the letter to the Security Council and the General Assembly, and also asked him to use his power under Article 99 of the U.N. Charter to bring to the Security Council’s attention “the danger being posed by the U.S. nuclear war exercises which are clearly threats to international peace and security.”
…

Former Vice President Joe Biden says he wouldn’t have agreed to replace Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee under any circumstances.

Biden tells NBC’s “Today” show he had decided not to run last year, and says, “I would have never done that.”

He was asked about former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile’s book, which says she considered replacing Clinton with Biden because of health concerns. Biden says, “I wouldn’t have taken” Clinton’s place as the party’s standard-bearer.

Biden says he was for Clinton, but that he worried about her prospects. He says not long before the election, “It hit me like a ton of bricks, there was no discussion of Issues” in her campaign.

Biden also said once again that he hasn’t decided about running in 2020.

 
…

Former Vice President Joe Biden said he is uncertain about a run for president in 2020, but indicated he’s looking for fresh blood to lead the Democratic Party back to the White House.

“I’ve done it a long time,” said Biden, who previously ran for president in 1988 and 2008, “and I’m just not sure it’s the appropriate thing for me to do.”

His comments came in an interview with Snapchat’s “Good Luck America” set to be released Tuesday morning, in one of Biden’s first on-camera interviews since leaving office in January. The Associated Press was provided with an exclusive preview of the interview.

Biden suggested that if “no one steps up,” he’d be open to giving it another try. 

“I’m not doing anything to run,” he said. “I’m not taking names, I’m not raising money, I’m not talking to anybody, but something’s got to happen.”

Democratic roster

Biden has launched a handful of outside political and policy organizations since leaving the Obama administration, including the Biden Foundation, formed to advocate for his domestic priorities.

The roster of Democrats considering a White House run has swelled well into the double-digits, with potential candidates emboldened by President Donald Trump’s historically low poll numbers.

Biden was interviewed alongside Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican, at the University of Delaware last month.

“We’re both hoping that both our parties generate some real energetic people who have the depth and the capacity to do it,” Biden said of the pair.

Biden, 74, considered a run for the Oval Office in 2016, but decided against it, later citing the trauma of his son Beau’s death to cancer in May 2015 for keeping him from the race. The painful subject forms the story of his new memoir, Promise Me, Dad, set for release this week. Biden is launching a month-long tour to promote the book’s publication. He’s become a vocal critic of Trump’s administration in public appearances in recent months.

“We gotta turn this ship around,” Biden said of the country. “And I’d much prefer to be helping someone turn it around than being the guy trying to turn it around.”

Right decision in 2016

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey released Sunday, Biden said he regrets not being in the White House, but not his decision to stay on the sidelines last year. 

“I don’t regret the decision I made because it’s the right decision for my family,” he said.

Kasich, who has been an outspoken opponent of Trump’s since he challenged him for the Republican nomination in 2016, declined to address his own 2020 plans. “You hold the pen and the Lord will write the sentence,” he said.
…

Allegations of sexual misconduct against a Republican Senate candidate have thrown the party into chaos at a critical time – as Republicans make a major push to overhaul America’s tax code and as President Donald Trump concludes a marathon Asia trip. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, many Republican lawmakers are denouncing or distancing themselves from firebrand Christian conservative Roy Moore, who, until last week, had been heavily favored to win next month’s special election for a Senate seat in Republican-leaning Alabama.
…

The chairman of the House’s tax-writing committee said Sunday that he’s confident that chamber won’t go along with the Senate’s proposal to eliminate the deduction for property taxes, setting up a major flashpoint as Republicans in the House and Senate aim to put a tax cut bill on President Donald Trump’s desk before Christmas.

The GOP is moving urgently to push forward on the first rewrite of the U.S. tax code in three decades, but key differences promise to complicate the effort.

Among the biggest differences in the two bills that have emerged: the House bill allows homeowners to deduct up to $10,000 in property taxes while the Senate proposal unveiled by GOP leaders last week eliminates the entire deduction.

The deduction is particularly important to residents in states with high property values or tax rates, such as New Jersey, Illinois, California and New York. Congressman Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he worked with lawmakers in those states to ensure the House bill “delivers this relief,” and he was committed to ensuring it stays in the final package.

“It’s important to make sure that people keep more of what they learn, even in these high-tax states,” Brady, R-Texas, said during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”

Both the House and Senate bill would eliminate deductions for state and local income taxes and sales taxes paid. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Republicans should fully restore what is referred to as the SALT deduction, or millions of middle-class families would end up paying higher federal income taxes, not less.

“The House’s so-called ‘compromise’ would be saying to the middle class we’ll only chop off four of your fingers instead of all five,” Schumer said in a statement.

 
…

The arrival of more than than 130,000 Puerto Ricans in Florida since Hurricane Maria has some officials anticipating a political shakeup in a battleground state dominated by the Republican party.

Both parties are actively courting new arrivals to Florida, which President Donald Trump won last year by 112,000 votes out of 9.6 million cast.

Many Puerto Ricans have expressed outrage over Trump’s handling of the storm but have applauded efforts by Republican Gov. Rick Scott to welcome them.

As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans can vote in federal elections when they move to the mainland. Newcomers must register as voters by next July 30 to vote in primaries ahead of the 2018 general election of a new governor to replace term-limited Scott and choose Florida’s congressional delegation.

Javier Gonzalez has joined a human tide of more than 130,000 U.S. citizens arriving in Florida since Hurricane Maria wrecked Puerto Rico, grateful for a place to start over but resenting how their island has been treated since the disaster.

More than a million Puerto Ricans — about 5 percent of Florida’s population — already call the state home, and given the outrage many feel over President Donald Trump’s handling of the storm, political observers say this voting bloc could loosen the Republican Party’s hold on this battleground state.

Gonzalez, 38, saw the storm destroy the restaurant he opened with his father five years ago. Without power or reliable water, he became violently ill from food poisoning for three weeks. Finally, he packed his bags, determined to make his future in Miami instead.

“There is resentment, and we feel abandoned compared to Texas and Florida,” Gonzalez said. “We were desperate for help.”

Like any Puerto Rican, Gonzalez can vote in all elections now that he’s moved to the mainland. He doesn’t plan to register for any party, but he follows the news and understands their platforms. He’s aware of Trump’s tweets.

“It’s not right that we’ve fought from World War I, to Vietnam and Afghanistan and that the first thing the president says is: ‘You have a large debt, big problems and have cost us millions,'” Gonzalez added.

Puerto Ricans are not the gift to the Republican Party that the anti-Castro Cuban diaspora has been historically. They’ve tended to favor Democrats, given their support for public education and social services. Around 70 percent of Florida’s non-Cuban Latinos voted for Hillary Clinton.

Both parties are courting the new arrivals to Florida, which Trump won last year by just 112,000 votes out of 9.6 million cast.

“There is an intent to grab those who are coming,” said Rep. Robert Asencio, a Democrat of Puerto Rican descent who represents Miami in the Florida House and leads the Miami-Dade Committee for Hurricane Maria Relief.

“A lot of my colleagues say they are not politicizing this, but there is an effort to bring people either to the Democratic or the Republican side,” Asencio said.

Newcomers must register by next July 30 to vote in 2018 for a new governor to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Rick Scott and choose Florida’s congressional delegation, now 11 Democrats and 16 Republicans. Democratic U.S. Senator Bill Nelson also defends his seat next year, and Scott, who has been applauded for helping evacuees, is expected to challenge him in what could be a close race.

Scott set up three disaster relief centers to help arrivals with driver’s licenses, job searches, and disaster aid applications. Scott also asked education officials to waive public school enrollment rules for evacuated islanders, and to give college-bound evacuees the same tuition breaks state residents get.

Asencio calls Scott’s actions “damage control,” given the multimillionaire governor’s close relationship with Trump, who offended Puerto Ricans by tweeting they wanted “everything to be done for them” rather than taking responsibility for their own recovery. They also resent Trump’s rating of his own disaster response as a “10 out of 10,” blaming his administration for delays that exposed their families to illness and misery.

The island still faces a lengthy and painful recovery after the storm took down the entire electrical grid, leaving hospitals in the dark and closing schools for several weeks. Initial projections that 95 percent of the people will have power restored by year’s end now look optimistic.

Maria’s evacuees are following waves of people frustrated by Puerto Rico’s unemployment and debt crisis who settled in Central Florida, shifting from New York, the favored destination of previous generations. Of the more than 140,000 islanders estimated to have left since the storm, more than 130,000 went to Florida, where Puerto Ricans may soon displace Cubans as the largest Latino group.

State Rep. Rene Plasencia, a Republican from Orlando, predicts that Scott’s warm welcome will leave a bigger impression on the newcomers than any Trump tweets.

“For whatever people think of the president, you have to take into consideration the actions of Governor Scott,” said Plasencia, whose mother and wife are from Puerto Rico. “People aren’t making decisions out of a sequence of tweets… It makes good news, but it doesn’t make political shifts.”

Billionaires Charles and David Koch also are involved, funding the Libre Initiative, which welcomed hundreds of evacuees on the first cruise ship to arrive from San Juan.

Cesar Grajales, who lobbies for Libre, says they’re helping evacuees learn English and connect with community and business leaders.

Democrats hope Colombian-American Annette Taddeo’s recent underdog state Senate victory against a well-funded Republican in South Florida shows her anti-Trump message will keep resonating.

“It is a strong indication that voters are paying attention, and they are angry,” said Cristobal Alex, president of the Latino Victory Project. “We wouldn’t have the devastation and abandonment of Puerto Rico without Donald Trump. People will look at that.”

On the island, Puerto Rico’s lack of statehood means they can’t vote in general presidential elections, and can only send a non-voting representative to Congress. On the mainland, they’ll have more power.

“I know for a fact that we are well educated and we are going to come here to work,” Gonzalez said. “And yes, we are going to make a voice. We are going to make a bigger voice than before.”

 
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