Biden pledges billions to rebuild cities ‘torn apart’ by highways decades ago

Joe Biden hailed the beginning of $3.3bn in infrastructure spending on US projects on Wednesday “to right historic wrongs” with efforts to reconnect city neighborhoods riven by interstate highways that plowed with particular impunity through many Black, brown, Asian American and Hispanic communities decades ago.

The US president was in Milwaukee, where he traveled to announce new infrastructure investment and officially open his election campaign’s Wisconsin office in the vital swing state.

Democratic party campaigns in Wisconsin are typically run from the state capital, Madison, whereas the Biden re-election campaign has picked Milwaukee, the more industrial and diverse city on Lake Michigan, where 40% of residents are Black. The Republicans will hold their convention in Milwaukee in July.

Biden is striving to make an impact on the campaign trail in a number of swing states this week after his fiery State of the Union speech last week.

He travels to Michigan on Thursday, part of the “blue wall”, along with Pennsylvania, where Biden was born and has made more campaign trips than any other state.

Donald Trump flipped all three states to win the White House in 2016, but Biden took them back four years ago and almost certainly needs to hold them if he is to secure a second term.

Biden and Trump unofficially clinched their parties’ respective nominations on Tuesday night after more primary wins, and expect to be officially anointed at their party conventions this summer.

The rare presidential election rematch, the first since 1956, comes while Trump is due in court later this month for the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president, with more to come as he faces 91 criminal charges across four cases at federal and state