Activist known as ‘pioneer,’ ‘visionary’
María Jiménez, a Houston fixture of immigration and civil rights who broke barriers and mentored others to pursue community activism, died Tuesday of cancer. She was 70.
For decades, beginning when shewas a student at the University of Houston, Jiménez fought for immigrant communities, working on issues such as supporting a farmworkers strike by boycotting grapes and lettuce. She also spoke up for other marginalized groups — helping to organize the first nationwide conference on gay rights.
and said, ‘You’re a traitor to the American people,’ ” she said. “All because I run a nonprofit that tries to make voting by mail easier and more secure.”
“I personally have gotten 10 or 12 of those — emails with the nooses, images of people who have been hung,” said the chief election official of one Western state, who refused to be named for fear of drawing even more threats. “They don’t reference anything you’re doing wrong. They’re just, ‘This election was stolen. We know you had something to do with it. We’re going to come for you.’ ”
That official, like some others, said the threats had been sent not just to highranking officials whose profiles have been raised by news media interviews but to comparatively unknown members of their staffs.
The threats are the fallout of an election in which Trump has stoked baseless claims of election fraud on a daily basis, his lawyers have peddled conspiracy theories and supporters have called for extralegal actions with the goal of keeping Trump in power.
Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday that the Justice Department had found no evidence of fraud on a scale that could have overturned the results in an election that Trump lost bya 306-232 margin in the Electoral College and almost 7 million votes.
Officials in some states refused to confirm threats against their election workers, worrying that doing so would only make the problem worse. But published reports of election-related threats and harassment have risen steadily in recent weeks. And in interviews, a number of state and local election officials have said that the volume of intimidating communications from outsiders — some of whom even identify themselves — was unprecedented.
Among the targets, according to interviews and news reports, are officials in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, as well as election officers in less contested states such as Virginia, Vermont and Kentucky.
In Philadelphia, an aide to a Republican city commissioner was bombarded with abuse shortly after the Nov. 3 vote after a Trump supporter, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, singled him out at a broadcast news conference.
In Vermont, a caller left threatening voicemails on election officials’ phones Tuesday, including a call for them to face a firing squad. Although the calls were the first tobe reported to lawenforcement authorities, the secretary of state, Jim Condos, said in a statement, “they are merely the exten-sion of a pattern of vitriolic, often obscene, calls that our staff have had to endure during this election year.”
Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, said last month that she and her family received “utterly abhorrent” death threats after Joe Biden won the state’s electoral votes.
Not all the threats came from supporters of the president. In Michigan, the Detroit Free Press reported, the Republican chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers was pelted with emails containing photos of dead women and threats against her daughter after she initially refused to certify the results of the election last month.
But Trump and his supporters have unleashed an attack on the election results and procedures with few if any parallels in recent history. Michael Flynn, Trump’s recently pardoned former national security adviser, on Wednesday called on the president to declare martial lawand order a new election overseen by the military.
Joseph di Genova, a former U.S. attorney who is a lawyer for the Trump campaign, was disavowed even by the White House after he said Monday that Christopher Krebs, the federal cybersecurity official who deemed the November election themost secure in history, should be “taken out at dawn and shot.”
The language reflects the increasingly out-of-bounds rhetoric by some supporters of the president. Steve Bannon, the campaign strategist who briefly served as a Trump adviser, said last month that FBI Director, Christopher Wray and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top federal scientist on coronavirus issues, should be beheaded and their heads placed on pikes outside the White House.
Trump has only doubled down on his fraud claims since Sterling, a voting systems manager in the office of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, warned that “someone’s going to get killed” if the incendiary rhetoric surrounding Trump’s accusations did not abate.