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    Appeals Court Keeps Block on Texas Migrant Law

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    The decision in favor of the federal government left in place a trial court injunction while courts determine whether the measure is legal. A federal appeals court late Tuesday ruled against Texas in its bitter clash with the federal government, deciding that a law allowing the state to arrest and deport migrants could not be implemented while the courts wrestled with the question of whether it is legal.A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which has a reputation for conservative rulings, sided in its 2-to-1 decision with lawyers for the Biden administration who have argued that the law violates the U.S. Constitution and decades of legal precedent.The panel’s 50-page majority opinion left in place an injunction imposed last month by a lower court in Austin, which found that the federal government was likely to succeed in its arguments against the law. The opinion was written by the Fifth Circuit’s chief judge, Priscilla Richman, a nominee of President George W. Bush, and was joined by Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez, who was nominated to the bench by President Biden last year.Judge Richman found that Texas’ law conflicted with federal law and with Supreme Court precedent, particularly a 2012 immigration case, Arizona v. United States.“For nearly 150 years, the Supreme Court has held that the power to control immigration — the entry, admission and removal of noncitizens — is exclusively a federal power,” she wrote. “Texas has not shown that it is likely to succeed on the merits,” she said after discussing how various arguments made by the state fell short.It was a setback for Gov. Greg Abbott but not an unexpected one: The governor has said that he anticipated the fight over the law’s constitutionality to eventually reach the Supreme Court. Mr. Abbott has said the law, which allows the state to arrest and deport migrants on its own, is necessary to deal with the record number of migrants crossing into Texas from Mexico. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mexico Condemns Texas Law, and Says It Will Not Accept Deportations From the State

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      Mexico will not accept deportations made by Texas “under any circumstances,” the country’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow Texas to arrest migrants who cross into the state without authorization.The ministry condemned the state law, known as Senate Bill 4, saying it would separate families, violate the human rights of migrants and generate “hostile environments” for the more than 10 million people of Mexican origin living in Texas.Mexico’s top diplomat for North America, Roberto Velasco Álvarez, rejected the ruling on the social media on Tuesday, saying that immigration policy was something to be negotiated between federal governments.The Mexican government has severely criticized the measure since last year, and rejected the idea of local or state agencies, rather than federal authorities, detaining and returning migrants and asylum seekers to Mexican territory.“Texas has taken a very combative stance,” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican studies at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s only aggravating the problem because you violently close one part of the border, but others are still open.”A senior Mexican foreign ministry official who was not allowed to speak publicly said that the Supreme Court ruling would not affect existing migration agreements between the two countries.While Mexico has served as the United States’ immigration enforcer, often discouraging migrants from massing at the border, the country has also publicly pushed for two key policies to address the root causes that force people out of their home countries — such as poverty, violence, inequality and climate change — and expand regular pathways for migration.Last week, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico said his administration was proposing that the Biden administration give legal status to at least five million undocumented Mexicans living and working in the United States.He has also called on the United States to suspend sanctions against Venezuela and lift the blockade against Cuba, saying that such measures would reduce migration flows from those countries. And he has called proposals to build walls or close the border as “electoral propaganda.”“Do you think the Americans and Mexicans will approve of this?” Mr. López Obrador said last month. “Companies cannot stand it. Maybe for a day, but not for a week.” More

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      U.S. Quietly Resumes Deportation Flights Deep Into Mexico

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      The flights had been paused for nearly two years, but the authorities are taking more forceful measures to discourage migrants from repeatedly trying to cross into the United States.The United States has quietly resumed deporting some Mexicans on flights that carry them far from the southern border, U.S. and Mexican officials said, a move designed in part to discourage them from repeatedly trying to cross into the United States.The first flight to Morelia, a city in central Mexico hundreds of miles from the nearest U.S. border crossing, took off on Tuesday carrying more than 100 Mexicans, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details.A senior Mexican official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the flights were expected to continue on a regular basis.Tuesday’s flight was the first of its kind in nearly two years. U.S. authorities more commonly deport Mexicans over land, near the border. But the number of Mexicans crossing into the United States has spiked in recent months, prompting U.S. authorities to find more forceful ways to discourage people from making the trip north.The Biden administration is struggling to contain one of the largest surges of uncontrolled immigration in American history, with people fleeing poverty, political instability and violence in Central America, South America and elsewhere. Last week, President Biden tried to address a growing political liability by imploring Congress to grant him the power to shut down the border.The United States paused deportation flights for Mexicans in 2022, when officials turned their attention to the skyrocketing number of migrants arriving from countries including Haiti and Venezuela.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Border Deal Is a Political Trap for Democrats

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      For the past two months, a small group of senators from both parties has been negotiating a deal to address the crisis at our southern border. The lawmakers are united in their desire to stop unauthorized migrants from entering the United States — an ambitious objective that has eluded past administrations.But the policies under discussion are likely to drive more unauthorized migration to the border and make President Biden’s immigration challenges even worse.In December border officials processed some 300,000 migrants — the most recorded in a single month. Over the past decade, Republican leaders in Congress have failed to come to the table to negotiate on immigration policies that Americans support, and yet they have created the false perception that Trump-era policies can solve the border crisis. Mr. Trump’s record on immigration shows it’s just not that simple.The negotiations demonstrate how far the immigration debate has shifted away from solutions that once defined bipartisan immigration reform efforts, like a 2013 Senate bill that would have prioritized border security and a path to legal status and eventual citizenship for the estimated 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.In 2016, Donald Trump killed broad support in his party for this type of deal by casting immigrants as threats to our nation. As president, he restricted the number of immigrants coming to the United States, separated families, and dismantled our immigration courts, hampering the ability to process asylum seekers at the border. And yet in 2019, under his watch, there was a 90 percent increase in migrant apprehensions along the southern border compared to the year before.Today, as the crisis is being felt not just along the border but also in cities across the nation, voters strongly disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the border. His administration has not taken meaningful action to stop Republican-controlled states from sending buses full of asylum seekers to cities with no advance notice or to step in with a federal solution. As a result, Democrats are now more open to working toward a solution that reduces unauthorized immigration.The proposed deal would simultaneously restrict and expand executive authority. For starters, Mr. Biden could lose key powers that presidents have used for decades to regulate immigration in times of crisis. Worse, if Mr. Trump is re-elected, he will have new tools at his disposal that he could use to terrorize immigrants and make the chaos at the border even more acute.As a former government official who has worked in the executive and legislative branches to identify solutions to mass migration at the southern border, I agree with lawmakers that the status quo is unsustainable and that reforms are needed. But this deal will not alleviate Mr. Biden’s border challenges unless Congress builds legal migration pathways that weaken cartels who have profited the most from new asylum restrictions.Take the reported expulsion authority that Senate negotiators are considering. The policy would allow border officials to expel migrants without asylum screenings. That may appear to be an effective deterrence measure but similar asylum restrictions, including Title 42, have proved otherwise. When I served on the National Security Council, I examined whether expulsions played a role in reducing smuggling activity. The data showed that not only did more people attempt to cross than before, but they also took more dangerous routes, guided by smugglers who profited handsomely.Instead of what is on the table now, Democrats should learn from past mistakes and fight for a plan that would create more legal pathways, incentivize people to seek asylum at our ports of entry, expedite asylum claims so that people who are eligible can work and contribute to our economy, and deport people who do not have valid legal claims to stay in the United States. Congress must grant Mr. Biden’s request for funding to hire agents and asylum officers to process migrants in a humane and orderly fashion — which a majority of voters support.The most nonsensical demand in the current border deal is that Senate Republicans want to restrict the president’s parole authority. In January 2023, Mr. Biden announced a series of measures aimed at stemming unauthorized crossings, including new legal pathways for migrants from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua. The president invoked his powers to extend parole to people from these countries who had an American sponsor, giving them permission to work and apply for asylum if they hoped to stay beyond two years. And it worked. The data shows that apprehension of these migrants declined by 92 percent within a year.Democrats may think that it is worth embracing punitive immigration policies for the hope of improving Mr. Biden’s polling numbers. But if these lawmakers really want to stop people from coming here, they must also address the drivers of migration.Deteriorating conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean guarantee that more migrants will be forced to seek refuge in the United States. Democrats should incentivize countries across the region to build capacity to protect asylum seekers, create legal pathways and increase foreign aid and humanitarian assistance to help would-be migrants live safely closer to home.In the short term, the White House can demonstrate leadership by using every tool at its disposal to accelerate the processing of asylum cases, work with regional partners to find protection for migrants before they make their way to the border and develop a federal response to help cities buckling under the strain of absorbing tens of thousands of migrants. An administration capable of welcoming more than 70,000 Afghans and coordinating their arrival in communities around the country is equally capable of coordinating the arrival of asylum seekers and identifying temporary federal housing to relieve communities struggling to provide housing.There is too much at stake for Democrats to accept the terms of this Senate proposal. While it is understandable to want to fix the vulnerabilities at the border, Mr. Trump and his advisers have been clear that terrorizing immigrants is central to their second-term agenda. He has promised to round up immigrants in camps and conduct mass deportations. He has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”Mr. Biden has begun his re-election campaign with a promise to protect our democracy from these harms. Yet by compromising on policies that are likely to increase unauthorized migration at the border, he risks emboldening Mr. Trump and his ilk to step up their attacks on immigrants. On Jan. 5, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said in a radio interview that the state isn’t “shooting people” illegally crossing the border because “the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”Mr. Biden must help voters understand that the border won’t change until Congress builds the immigration system our country needs. This political moment demands ambitious solutions that can address the scope of today’s migration challenge, not a set of policies that will keep us stuck in the same failed legal framework of the past decade.Andrea R. Flores is the vice president for immigration policy and campaigns at FWD.us.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More