Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said it’s “both a sad and tragic day when a government official uses migrants as a pawn for political purposes,” after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent migrants to Washington on Thursday.

A bus of more than 30 migrants arrived Thursday at the residence of Vice President Kamala Harris less than 24 hours after a bus of 40 migrants arrived at the Naval Observatory. Last year, more than 100 migrants bused from Texas arrived at Harris’ residence in Washington on Christmas Eve in freezing temperatures.

The move comes as cities throughout the U.S. are preparing to receive busloads of people at potentially record numbers due to Title 42 expiring. Title 42 allowed officials to turn away people at the border on public health grounds.

The expected surge after Title 42 ends Thursday has local leaders warning that they’re not equipped to welcome them and pleading with the federal government to launch a national resettlement strategy.

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Asian American and Pacific Islanders are the nation’s fastest growing racial or ethnic group in the country. And with that exploding growth comes expanding influence.

So as we celebrate AAPI Heritage Month, POLITICO is recognizing contributions and impact from Asian power players in local, state, federal and even international levels.

Here are five Asian American politicians and activists you should keep an eye on.

We featured them in March in our annual Power List of 40 people with undeniable sway over key policy battles — from abortion to environmental justice to elections to tense negotiations with geo-political foes.

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Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain says that sexism and racism are partially to blame for the swirl of criticism and negative stories that have followed Kamala Harris during her tenure as vice president.

“Well, I do think sexism and racism are part of the problem, no question about it,” Klain told Kara Swisher on an episode of her podcast, “On With Kara Swisher,” released Thursday. “I think she was not as well known in national politics before she became vice president. And I think that she hasn't gotten the credit for all that she's done.”

Klain’s comments come after a Reuters story published last month stated that Harris was “gearing up for another national campaign,” despite bad poll numbers and concerns about her from Democrats. Following that, senior administration officials publicly came to her defense.

White House chief of staff Jeff Zients said on Twitter that Harris was “an invaluable, relentless voice for the American people.”

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In her first remarks since her running mate announced their reelection bid, Vice President Kamala Harris blasted the U.S. Supreme Court and Republican lawmakers who are restricting access to reproductive health care across the country in a speech at her alma mater, Howard University.

“These extremist so-called leaders would dare to tell us what is in our own best interest. Well I say, I trust the women of America. I trust the people of America,” Harris said to the crowd. “So don’t get in our way because if you do, we’re going to stand up, we’re going to organize and we’re going to speak up and we’re going to say we’re not having that, we’re not playing that!”

At one point Harris did something rarely seen from the vice president, grabbing the microphone and walking around the stage as she lambasted attacks on abortion. Aides say she had an outline on the podium but that the vast majority of the more than 20 minute speech was off the cuff.

“They're also saying they're going to ban abortion. Six weeks into a pregnancy? Well, clearly most of them don't even know how a woman's body works because most women don't even know they're pregnant at that stage of a pregnancy,” Harris said to a raucous applause.

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President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden paid $137,658 in federal income taxes on $579,514 in earnings, according to their 2022 tax return provided Tuesday by the White House.

The Bidens’ effective tax rate was 23.8 percent. They reported donating $20,180 to 20 different charities — the largest gift was $5,000 to the Beau Biden Foundation, an organization that protects children from abuse and named for their late son. They gave the same amount to the charity last year.

The couple owed $4,632 to the IRS.

The numbers closely mirrored those from last year, when the Bidens reported paying $150,439 in federal income taxes on $610,702 for an effective tax rate of 24.6 percent.

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President Joe Biden on Monday called Ralph Yarl, a Black 16-year-old who was shot in Kansas City, Mo., after ringing the wrong doorbell, the White House confirmed Monday night.

Yarl was shot twice Thursday night after he approached the wrong house while picking up his siblings, an incident that Prosecuting Attorney Zachary Thompson described Monday as having “a racial component.”

On Monday, Andrew Lester, an 84-year-old white man, was charged with first-degree assault. Lester, who told police that he thought the person at his front door was trying to break into his house, was also charged with armed criminal action.

Yarl was released from the hospital Sunday and has since been recovering at home.

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An impassioned Kamala Harris took the stage in Nashville Friday evening before a packed room of energized students, just 24 hours after Tennessee Republicans booted two young, Black lawmakers from office.

The vice president had just met privately with the “Tennessee Three” — Democratic Reps. Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis — who were punished for violating statehouse decorum rules by participating in a gun protest last week after three 9-year-old children and three school officials were murdered at a Nashville elementary school. Johnson, who is white and participated in the same demonstration, was not expelled.

The three lawmakers have captured national attention in the wake of last week’s mass shooting, as the nation watched Tennessee Republicans’ unprecedented use of overwhelming political power unfold. Democrats have rallied around the events, warning of an attack on democracy. The White House hasn’t slept on the opportunity to do the same.

“We need leaders who have the courage to act at statehouses and Washington, D.C. in the United States Congress,” Harris said, her voice rising above the cheers and applause in Fisk Memorial Chapel. “Have the courage to act, instead of the cowardice to not allow debate and to not allow a discussion on the merits of what is at stake. Courage. You can’t call yourself a leader if you don’t have the courage to know what is right and act on it regardless of the popularity of the moment.”

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SAN FRANCISCO — The 36-year-old Jerry Brown who was propelled to the California governorship in the backlash to Watergate nearly a half-century ago would have hardly believed it.

But there was the soon to be 85-year-old Brown, sitting in the lobby of his Nob Hill condo tower last week and pining in his rapid-fire, staccato style for the daring diplomacy of Richard Nixon.

“Nixon and Brezhnev, the two of them gathered together in the Kremlin and Nixon brought his wife and they stayed overnight, stayed up late at night drinking champagne and talking,” Brown recalled of the president who made his name confronting communism only to negotiate with the world’s leading communists. “And it paved the way for a detente. That’s like ancient history. You can’t even conceive of that occurring, whether in Beijing or in Moscow.”

Call him America’s last true dove.

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ACCRA, Ghana — Vice President Kamala Harris looked off to her right, shaking her head, the Atlantic Ocean in the foreground.

She’d just finished a tour of the Cape Coast Castle, a colonial slave port where Africans from all over the continent were brought — and then raped, beaten and sold as chattel. Her voice caught as she began to speak.

She wiped tears from her face as she and the second gentleman Doug Emhoff walked the cobblestone grounds. “The horror of what happened here must always be remembered,” she declared, deviating from prepared remarks. “It cannot be denied. It must be taught.”

It was a rare unguarded moment for the usually stoic Harris. And one that showed the possibilities and opportunities that come with getting her outside of the D.C. settings. The first Black U.S. vice president, she also was the highest Biden administration official to visit the continent, and her visit generated profound excitement. Every street she rode down was filled with people, often holding Ghanaian and American flags, who waved and screamed and cheered, hoping to get a glance into her motorcade. Large posters of her face were posted all over Accra, many of them saying “Akwaaba.” Welcome.

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ACCRA, Ghana — For Vice President Kamala Harris' first trip in office to Africa, the goal is nothing less than the resetting of relations between the United States and the countries she's scheduled to visit.

Fearful that China has gained a huge economic foothold on the continent, the Biden administration is trying to not just loosen that grip but encourage more American businesses to invest in African nations.

Harris’ arrival Sunday marks the latest, most high-profile effort to achieve those ends. She is the fifth top Biden administration official to visit Africa this year: U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen came in January, first lady Jill Biden visited in February and Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the trip earlier this month. President Joe Biden plans to visit later in the year.

In Ghana, Harris’ primary focus is on elevating the nation’s youth — and she noted the median age of Africans is 19.

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Vice President Kamala Harris joined lawmakers from both parties in criticizing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ comments earlier this week that supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia is not a vital national security interest.

“If you really understand the issues, you probably would not make statements like that,” Harris said Wednesday night on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."

Responding to a questionnaire from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in an interview on Monday night, DeSantis downplayed the importance of continuing aid to Ukraine, characterizing Russia’s invasion as a “territorial dispute” and arguing that it’s not among “vital national interests” for the United States. While the cost of ongoing aid has been a point of contention in the Republican Party, most in the GOP have expressed support for the Ukrainian cause.

DeSantis, widely expected to announce a 2024 presidential campaign, has yet to announce such a run but has spent recent weeks making high-profile stops around the country — including in Iowa — to promote his new book.

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Newly released video of the Capitol attack shows just how close rioters came to a senior GOP senator who was third in line for the presidency on Jan. 6, 2021.

The footage, released after media requests to access videos used in connection with a Jan. 6 criminal case, shows the apparent evacuation of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) from the Senate chamber as a uniformed officer separates him and his security detail from the first wave of rioters who had breached the building. Those rioters were led by Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola, who used a riot shield to shatter a Senate window and ignite the breach of the building near the chamber.

Grassley's caught-on-tape proximity to the pro-Trump rioters adds new dissonance to Fox News host Tucker Carlson's on-air minimization of the siege — a portrayal that palpably split Senate and House Republicans.

The video, taken by a rioter who entered the Capitol moments after the breach and released in a case separate from Pezzola's, shows the Proud Boy gazing past the police officer at the evacuating senator, though it’s unclear if he recognized Grassley. As the camera pans, Pezzola is shown speaking on his phone before turning away from the scene.

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California’s large Republican electorate prefers Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to former President Donald Trump, according to a new poll that captures shifting conservative preferences ahead of a contested presidential primary.

The Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll released Friday suggests many conservatives are ready to move on from the former president and affirms that DeSantis would be the Republican most likely to draw voters from Trump. The tally also contains grim news for Vice President Kamala Harris as voters in the Democrat's home state remain tepid on her presidential prospects.

Republicans in California would choose DeSantis over Trump in a head-to-head presidential matchup by a resounding 17 points, according to the poll. That advantage shrinks in a Republican field featuring former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and other Republican contenders, but DeSantis still would enjoy a clear advantage over Trump in that scenario. He also has a higher favorability rating among Republicans than the former president.

California’s 5.2 million registered Republican voters could play an outsize role in the Republican presidential primary when they select a presidential candidate next March. The primary offers a prime moment of influence for voters who are often sidelined in the politics of the heavily Democratic state.

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Vice President Kamala Harris said the recent U.S. downing of a Chinese surveillance balloon over American waters should not have an impact on diplomatic relations between the two global superpowers.

“I don’t think so, no,” she told POLITICO in an exclusive phone interview Tuesday.

Harris’ remarks come more than a week after the U.S. decided to shoot down the balloon off the South Carolina coast, and they resemble one of the clearest public efforts by the administration to prevent further geopolitical fallout from the incident. Asked to describe the Biden administration’s approach to Beijing, she said: “We seek competition, but not conflict or confrontation.”

Harris noted that she said as much to Chinese President Xi Jinping when they met briefly in November at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Bangkok. “Everything that has happened in the last week and a half is, we believe, very consistent with our stated approach,” she said.

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It was the last Friday of January. In Washington, Vice President Kamala Harris was set to host a White House summit about lead-pipe replacement. It’s a key component of the administration’s infrastructure push and would become part of the president’s looming State of the Union Address. And it was also almost guaranteed to get scant buzz in Washington’s attention industry.

Meanwhile, Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, was on a trip to Poland to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day at Auschwitz. He was joined there by Joe Scarborough, the favorite morning host of many of the insiders whose worries about the Vice President’s electoral prospects regularly make news. Scarborough and Emhoff’s much-promoted conversation occupied the better part of an hour on Morning Joe. That’s the sort of exposure a lot of elected officials can only dream about — the political-media equivalent of an invite to the popular kids’ table.

Not long ago, it might have confounded Washington to hear that a middle-aged corporate-lawyer white-guy dad figure would be a breakout media star of the Biden administration even as the Beltway smart set tsk-tsks the barrier-breaking veep’s political chops, the subject of grim stories in the past two weeks in both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Plainly, Emhoff shines in some ways Harris doesn’t — which reflects his own innate political touch, the kind of instinctive connection that even some Harris supporters worry she doesn’t show.

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Prominent Democrats on Wednesday rallied behind President Joe Biden after he faced tense jeering from Republicans during his State of the Union address.

“It showed just that Biden was talking to the average American, and the contrast of these guys screaming and yelling and throwing junk on the wall, and not having a plan, just calling names, I think is going to serve the president so well and it’s going to serve the country well,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

The president’s speech at the Capitol on Tuesday night began without much theatrics but slowly escalated over the roughly 75 minutes to GOP heckling and off-script responses from Biden. The jeering ranged from shouted boos to audible calls from the Republican side of the House floor of "secure the border" and "your fault."

Schumer said on Democrats’ side of the room Tuesday, “there was excitement” as Biden was “hitting it out of the park.” The contrast with the Republican side of the room, he said, will be “remembered for quite a while, by anybody who watched it.”

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Sen. Mitt Romney told off embattled Rep. George Santos as members of both houses of Congress filed into their seats for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech Tuesday, later calling the New Yorker an "embarrassment" to reporters.

Santos — a New York Republican whose short tenure in the House has been underscored by revelations that he fabricated much of his resume, and may have lied or misled election officials in his campaign’s financial filings — secured a prime seat in the House chamber on Tuesday night, putting him in position to rub elbows with fellow legislators as they arrived.

Romney (R-Utah) made it clear that he believed Santos had overstepped by parking himself in that central location. Romney confronted Santos as the senator made his way to his own seat, and later paraphrased his remarks to the first-term congressman to reporters in the Capitol.

“Trying to shake hands with every senator in the United States — given the fact that he's under ethics investigation, he should be sitting in the back row and saying quiet, instead of parading in front of the president and people coming into the room," Romney said.

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