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      Judge Pauses Biden Administration Program That Aids Undocumented Spouses

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      Ruling in favor of 16 Republican-led states that sued the administration, a federal judge put the program on hold while the court considers the merits of the case.A federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked on Monday a Biden administration program that could offer a path to citizenship for up to half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens, ruling in favor of 16 Republican-led states that sued the administration.Judge J. Campbell Barker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued an administrative stay that stops the administration from approving applications, which it started accepting last week, while the court considers the merits of the case.In suspending the initiative, Judge Barker said that the 67-page complaint filed on Friday by the coalition of states, led by Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas, raised legitimate questions about the authority of the executive branch to bypass Congress and set immigration policy.“The claims are substantial and warrant closer consideration than the court has been able to afford to date,” wrote Judge Barker, who was appointed by former President Donald J. Trump.The administration can continue to accept applications for the program, but can no longer approve them, according to the order. The suspension initially remains in place for 14 days while the parties submit arguments in the case; it could be extended.The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal actions that Texas has spearheaded challenging federal immigration policies.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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      Biden’s Asylum Restrictions Are Working as Predicted, and as Warned

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      Border numbers are down significantly. But migrant activists say the restrictions President Biden imposed in June are weeding out people who may have legitimate claims of asylum.In the months since President Biden imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, the policy appears to be working exactly as he hoped and his critics feared.The number of people asking for haven in the United States has dropped by 50 percent since June, according to new figures from the Department of Homeland Security. Border agents are operating more efficiently, administration officials say, and many of the hot spots along the border, like Eagle Pass, Texas, have calmed.The numbers could provide a powerful counternarrative to what has been one of the Biden administration’s biggest political vulnerabilities, particularly as Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, tries to fend off Republican attacks.But migrant activists say Mr. Biden’s executive order is weeding out far too many people, including those who should be allowed to have their cases heard, even under the new rules. They say the figures are so low in part because of a little-noticed clause in the new policy, which changed how migrants are treated when they first arrive at the border.Under the new rules, border agents are no longer required to ask migrants whether they fear for their lives if they are returned home. Unless the migrants raise such a fear on their own, they are quickly processed for deportation to their home countries.As of early June, border agents are no longer required to ask whether migrants are fearful of returning to their home countries. Instead, the agents are to look for signs of fear, such as crying or shaking.Paul Ratje for The New York TimesWe 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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      Así es la estrategia de Kamala Harris en materia de migración

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      La candidata demócrata ha sido vapuleada por Trump y otros por su historial en materia migratoria. Ahora está probando un enfoque que, según los demócratas, ya ha funcionado antes.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Durante semanas, los republicanos se han dedicado a atacar a la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris por el tema migratorio, culpándola de las políticas del presidente Joe Biden en la frontera.Ahora, Harris, la candidata presidencial demócrata, está tratando de neutralizar esa línea de ataque, una de sus mayores debilidades ante los votantes, con una serie de estrategias que los demócratas aseguran que les han funcionado en las últimas elecciones y con la postura más contundente que ha mostrado hasta ahora como una fiscala estricta con la delincuencia y dedicada a proteger la frontera.Esta semana, contraatacó con la promesa de aumentar la seguridad fronteriza de resultar elegida y criticó a su oponente republicano, el expresidente Donald Trump, por ayudar a acabar con un acuerdo fronterizo bipartidista en el Congreso. Además, su campaña ha dado marcha atrás en algunas de las posturas más progresistas que adoptó durante su candidatura a la nominación demócrata en 2019, entre ellas su postura de que los migrantes que cruzan la frontera de Estados Unidos sin autorización no deberían enfrentar sanciones penales.“Fui fiscala general de un estado fronterizo”, dijo el viernes Harris, quien fue fiscala superior de California, en un mitin en Arizona, un estado pendular donde la inmigración es una de las principales preocupaciones de los votantes.“Perseguí a las bandas transnacionales, a los cárteles de la droga y a los traficantes de personas. Los procesé, caso por caso, y gané”, dijo.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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      Harris Hopes a New Playbook Will Neutralize G.O.P. Attacks on Immigration

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      For weeks, Republicans have pummeled Vice President Kamala Harris on immigration, blaming her for President Biden’s policies at the border.Now, Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, is seeking to neutralize that line of attack, one of her biggest weaknesses with voters, running a playbook that Democrats say has worked for them in recent elections and staking out her clearest position yet as a tough-on-crime prosecutor focused on securing the border.This week, she has hit back by promising to heighten border security if elected and slamming her Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, for helping kill a bipartisan border deal in Congress. And her campaign has walked back some of the more progressive positions she took during her bid for the Democratic nomination in 2019, including her stance that migrants crossing the U.S. border without authorization should not face criminal penalties.“I was attorney general of a border state,” Ms. Harris, who was once California’s top prosecutor, said on Friday at a rally in Arizona, a swing state where immigration is a top concern for voters. “I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and human traffickers. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.”A day earlier, the Harris campaign released a television advertisement highlighting her pivot. The ad, targeted to voters in the battleground states, promised that Ms. Harris would “hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.” It made no mention of undocumented immigrants already in the United States — a top priority for many progressives and immigration activists — although in her Arizona speech Ms. Harris stressed the importance of “comprehensive reform” that includes “an earned pathway to citizenship.”No other Democratic nominee has taken a position this tough on border security since Bill Clinton. Her stance reflects a change in public opinion since Mr. Trump left the White House in 2021. More Americans, including many Democrats and Latino voters, have expressed support for hard-line immigration measures.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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      Eddie Canales, 76, Dies; Gave Migrants Water, and Dignity

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      After a long career as a union organizer, he came out of retirement in 2013 to form the South Texas Human Rights Center and provide lifesaving aid.Eddie Canales, a human rights advocate who fought to save migrants trekking through the harsh terrain of South Texas, died on July 30 at his home in Corpus Christi. He was 76.The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Nancy Vera, his associate at the South Texas Human Rights Center, the nonprofit rescue organization that Mr. Canales founded in Falfurrias, Texas.For over a decade, Mr. Canales placed dozens of water stations — giant blue plastic barrels marked “Agua” filled with gallon water jugs — along the region’s routes for migrants evading a checkpoint on U.S. Route 281, about 70 miles north of the border with Mexico. The migrants, who are usually led (and sometimes abandoned) by smugglers, known as “coyotes,” leave the main road and undertake a perilous journey through featureless scrub and bush to evade the Border Patrol.Some don’t make it. Those who fail succumb to severe dehydration, hunger and exposure to the unforgiving elements in a semi-desert where temperatures can easily reach 100 degrees in the summer and drop below freezing during the winter. Mr. Canales led a campaign to recover, identify and ensure proper burials for the migrants’ remains.The mission required forcefulness and tact. The land is private and belongs to South Texas ranchers, many indifferent or hostile. Some have created armed posses dressed in military gear to hunt up the migrants and turn them over to the authorities, as shown in a trenchant 2021 documentary about Mr. Canales’s work, “Missing in Brooks County.”The migrants “go through the ranches,” Mr. Canales said in a 2015 oral history interview for the University of North Texas.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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      Carlos Espina is a One-Man Telemundo on TikTok

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      On a recent scorcher of a Houston afternoon, Carlos Eduardo Espina was driving to a restaurant that specializes in Nicaraguan and Puerto Rican food when he received a news alert on his iPhone: The former president of Honduras had been sentenced to 45 years in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking.“Oh, I need to make a video, actually, in the car,” Mr. Espina, 25, said apologetically as he pulled his Honda crossover S.U.V. into the restaurant’s parking lot. He skimmed a Honduran newspaper’s Instagram post about the news and then opened TikTok, where he has 9.4 million followers. He turned the camera on himself while his girlfriend, who was sitting behind him, crouched out of the frame, clearly used to this sort of drill.His hazel eyes widened, and he boomed, “Importante noticia de última hora” — Spanish for “important breaking news” — then shared a one-minute recap. The video racked up more than 100,000 views during lunch, which Mr. Espina received for free because the restaurant owner was thrilled to recognize him from TikTok.Mr. Espina created TikTok content on his phone while dining at a Nicaraguan restaurant in Houston.Callaghan O’Hare for The New York TimesMr. Espina watching Mexico play Venezuela in the Copa América at a Venezuelan food truck in College Station, Texas. Mr. Espina, whose videos are mainly in Spanish, has flown under the radar in the national press.Callaghan O’Hare for The New York TimesMr. Espina, a recent law school graduate who lives in College Station, Texas, has become something of a one-man Telemundo for millions of Latinos in the United States and one of the White House’s favored social media personalities. He posts almost constantly, sharing earnest and personal news about immigration and the Latino community, along with videos about food, sports and politics — and often championing the Biden administration’s agenda.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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      Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term

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      Now is the summer of Republican content.The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trump’s legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage — if they didn’t actually help him.Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one might think of a colonoscopy: an unpleasant reminder of age. Even if Biden can be cajoled into quitting, his likeliest replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, whose 37 percent approval rating is just around that of her boss. Do Democrats really think they can run on her non-handling of the border crisis, her reputation for managerial incompetence or her verbal gaffes?In short, Republicans have good reason to think they’ll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in.Three in particular: First, Trump won’t slay the left; instead, he will re-energize and radicalize it. Second, Trump will be a down-ballot loser, leading to divided and paralyzed government. Third, Trump’s second-term personnel won’t be like the ones in his first. Instead, he will appoint his Trumpiest people and pursue his Trumpiest instincts. The results won’t be ones old-school Republicans want or expect.Begin with the left.Talk to most conservatives and even a few liberals, and they’ll tell you that Peak Woke — that is, the worst excesses of far-left activism and cancel culture — happened around 2020. In fact, Peak Woke, from the campus witch hunts to “abolish the police” and the “mostly peaceful” protests in cities like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis that followed George Floyd’s murder, really coincided with the entirety of Trump’s presidency, then abated after Biden’s election.That’s no accident. What used to be called political correctness has been with us for a long time. But it grew to a fever pitch under Trump, most of all because he was precisely the kind of bigoted vulgarian and aspiring strongman that liberals always feared might come to power, and which they felt duty bound to “resist.” With his every tweet, Trump’s presidency felt like a diesel engine blowing black soot in the face of the country. That’s also surely how Trump wanted it, since it delighted his base, goaded his critics and left everyone else in a kind of blind stupor.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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      Oklahoma Law Criminalizing Immigrants Without Legal Status Is Blocked

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      The ruling by a federal judge is the latest setback for G.O.P.-controlled states that have passed their own laws on immigration. A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked Oklahoma from enforcing its new immigration law that would make it a crime to enter the state without legal authorization to be in the United States.The ruling, issued just days before the law was set to go into effect on Monday, is the latest legal setback for Republican-controlled states that have tested the limits of their role in immigration by passing their own legislation meant to crack down on people who crossed the border illegally. The Justice Department maintains that only the federal government can regulate and enforce immigration. A Texas law that would have given state and local police officers the authority to arrest undocumented migrants was put on hold by a federal appeals court in March. The Supreme Court had briefly let the law stand but returned the case to the appeals court, which decided to pause enforcement of it. Then, in May, a federal judge temporarily blocked part of a Florida law that made it a crime to transport unauthorized immigrants into the state. And in mid-June, an Iowa law that would have made it a crime for an immigrant to enter the state after being deported or denied entry into the country was put on pause by a district court. In the Oklahoma case, U.S. District Judge Bernard M. Jones wrote in his ruling that the state “may have understandable frustrations with the problems caused by illegal immigration,” but the state “may not pursue policies that undermine federal law.” He issued a preliminary injunction, pausing enforcement of the law while a case over the law’s constitutionality continues. Under the new law, willfully entering and remaining in Oklahoma without legal immigration status would be a state crime called an “impermissible occupation.” A first offense would be a misdemeanor, with penalties of up to one year in jail and a $500 fine; a subsequent offense would be a felony, punishable by up to two years in jail and a $1,000 fine.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