Illegal Immigration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Some Texas Hispanics Drawn to Republicans Share Immigration Grievances

      by

      Former President Donald J. Trump’s brand of populism has been widely viewed as an appeal to white voters. But similar grievances have resonated in the Rio Grande Valley in a profound way.BROWNSVILLE, Texas — Mayra Flores, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, has done much of her campaigning in South Texas in Spanish. She has heard one phrase repeatedly from voters as she and other candidates try to become the first Republicans to represent the Rio Grande Valley in Congress.¿Y nosotros?And what about us?“I hear every day that they’re tired — they feel that there is so much attention and help being given to the immigrants,” Ms. Flores said. “The attention’s on all these illegal immigrants, and not on them.”Grievance politics, it turns out, translates.Donald J. Trump’s brand of populism has been widely viewed as an appeal to white voters: Republicans around the country continue to exploit the fear that the left is attacking religious values and wants to replace traditional white American culture with nonwhite multiculturalism. But similar grievances have resonated in the Rio Grande Valley in a profound way, driving the Republican Party’s successes in a Democratic stronghold where Hispanics make up more than 90 percent of the population.The difference is in the type of culture believed to be under assault. Democrats are destroying a Latino culture built around God, family and patriotism, dozens of Hispanic voters and candidates in South Texas said in interviews. The Trump-era anti-immigrant rhetoric of being tough on the border and building the wall has not repelled these voters from the Republican Party or struck them as anti-Hispanic bigotry. Instead, it has drawn them in.“Our parents came in a certain way — they came in and worked, they became citizens and didn’t ask for anything,” said Ramiro Gonzalez Jr., a 48-year-old rancher from Raymondville, on the northern edge of the Rio Grande Valley. “We were raised hard-core Democrats, but today Democrats want to give everything away.”Ramiro Gonzalez Jr., a rancher in Raymondville, is among Latino conservatives who are reshaping South Texas politics.Jason Garza for The New York TimesFor years, the Republican primary in the Rio Grande Valley was an afterthought, a sleepy election overshadowed by a Democratic primary that grabbed all the attention and candidates. But this year, in the run-up to the Texas primary election on Tuesday, there has been a flurry of Republican rallies, door-knocking and events, including at the Hispanic community center that the Republican National Committee opened in McAllen four months ago.The Republican gains run far deeper than Mr. Trump and, in some ways, predate him, interviews with Hispanic voters and candidates showed. Republican candidates are building on a decades-long history of economic, religious and cultural sentiment that has veered toward conservatives. George W. Bush performed even better in his 2004 re-election campaign in the region than Mr. Trump did in 2020. Many of those who voted for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for president and then flipped for Mr. Trump had previously backed Mr. Bush.For the moment, Republicans in the Rio Grande Valley remain a minority. Last year, a Republican was elected mayor of McAllen, the Valley’s second-most populous city, and a Democratic state lawmaker in Rio Grande City switched to the Republican Party, both of whom earned praise from the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott. But Democrats still dominate the vast majority of local elected offices in the Valley.A sign outside the Republican National Committee’s Hispanic community center in McAllen.Jason Garza for The New York Times“It’s still relatively insignificant, when you look at Democrat versus Republican overall,” said Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a South Texas Democrat who narrowly won his 2020 re-election. He is now running in a redrawn neighboring district and is likely to face Ms. Flores as his Republican opponent in November. Though he said he was confident voters would “come home” to Democrats this fall, Mr. Gonzalez criticized the party for not doing more to focus on the region.A Guide to the Texas PrimaryThe 2022 midterm elections begin with the state’s primary on March 1.Governor’s Race: Gov. Greg Abbott’s rightward shift will face a test in November. His likely challenger, Beto O’Rourke, is haunted by his 2020 presidential bid.Attorney General’s Race: Whether Ken Paxton can survive the G.O.P. primary may be the biggest test yet of Donald Trump’s continued power over voters.A Changing Landscape: Issues like abortion and immigration are driving Hispanic voters in Democratic strongholds to switch parties and prompting liberal candidates to shift tactics.A Deepening Divide: Competitive districts are being systemically erased across the country. Texas is an especially extreme example.New Voting Law: Officials have rejected thousands of absentee ballots based on new requirements, an alarming jump ahead of the primary.“So far I see no action,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “I’ve had to rely on myself, not on the national party coming down here to save us, so in that respect, it’s sad.”For decades, conventional wisdom held that the more Hispanic voters showed up to the polls, the more precarious the political future would be for Republicans. But the inverse has lately been reshaping South Texas politics: As tens of thousands of new voters have gone to the polls, Republicans have gained more than Democrats. In Hidalgo County, which includes McAllen, Mr. Trump received nearly twice as many votes in 2020 as he did four years earlier.Mr. Trump’s performance in these border counties was one of the big surprises of 2020, rattling Democrats who had assumed that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric would alienate Latinos. In this year’s midterm elections, South Texas is the setting for the only competitive House race in the state, and both parties now consider Hispanic voters across the country a potentially decisive swing vote.At a dinner for Ms. Flores’ campaign at Don Chucho Tacos y Tequilas in the border city of Brownsville, her supporters began with a prayer and the pledge of allegiance to the Texas flag. They wore wide-brimmed cowboy hats and red MAGA caps. They applauded when the mariachis took the stage — and when Ms. Flores introduced her husband, an off-duty Border Patrol agent.“We’ve been voting California values, Austin values, but not South Texas values,” Ms. Flores told the crowd. She added, speaking the Spanglish so prevalent in the region, “Spread the chisme. Somos Americanos.” Spread the word. We are Americans.“This,” she continued, “is our country.”“I want to bring God back into politics,” said Luis Cabrera, the pastor of City Church in Harlingen, Texas.Jason Garza for The New York Times‘We feel under attack’Pastor Luis Cabrera, 44, remembers the fear in his parents’ eyes when they fled Nicaragua in 1979, in the midst of the Sandinista revolution.His father, a lawyer for the ousted president, received death threats and after obtaining visas from the American embassy there, the family left nearly all they had behind, flying with $10,000 in cash on a flight to Washington, D.C. Eventually, Mr. Cabrera’s father found work as an immigration paralegal in Houston, and then took the family to the Rio Grande Valley.Now, Mr. Cabrera runs City Church, a small congregation in a former warehouse in the border city of Harlingen. He estimates that his church is 96 percent Hispanic, and 100 percent Republican.“The people coming now seem to be less willing to work and are more dangerous compared to how it used to be,” Mr. Cabrera said. “I’m not saying all of them, but trust me, there’s a lot of people who are crossing this border and they don’t care about this country. They want to just commit crime. They want to just come make money the wrong way. They don’t want the American dream.”The Rio Grande Valley lies at the southeast corner of the U.S.-Mexico border, an amalgam of dozens of small cities and towns across four counties, a mix of recently developed strip malls and centuries-old ranch land. The Stars and Stripes and other flags fly from the back of large pickup trucks and flagpoles installed on front yards. The vast majority of the Valley’s nearly 1.4 million residents speak Spanish and have ties to Mexico. Pockets of deep poverty remain, and residents have long viewed Border Patrol and other law enforcement jobs as a reliable path to the middle class. For all the talk by Republicans of border chaos and of dangerous migrants, crime in McAllen is at a historic low.Mr. Cabrera sells T-shirts at the entrance of his church.Jason Garza for The New York TimesThe gulf between the undocumented Central American migrants crossing the border and the Latino residents of the Valley is deep and wide.Many residents are Mexican Americans who have lived in the region for four or five generations, or proudly proclaim their parents and grandparents came to the United States legally. They know both Border Patrol agents and undocumented Mexican immigrants who have lived and worked in border cities for years. Those who are Republicans say they do not see their views on immigration as hypocritical or anti-Hispanic. Instead, they see themselves as a bulwark for law and order. A few thousand Border Patrol agents live and work in the region, many of them Hispanic, adding to a pro-law enforcement ethos that shows up in churches, schools and local politics.“We’re in a war — a war of ideas,” said Jessica Martinez, 33, a Brownsville stay-at-home mother who said she had never voted until she cast a ballot for Mr. Trump in 2020, after she grew frustrated with the relentless outrage against him from liberals. “That’s how we as Christians see it. We feel under attack.”In Harlingen, Mr. Cabrera turned the entrance of the church into a retail space. He displays and sells T-shirts reading Make America Godly Again and Make America Repent. For years, he said, he avoided speaking about politics from the pulpit. But in the last year he has hosted several Republican leaders at the church, including Mr. Abbott.“I want to bring God back into politics,” Mr. Cabrera said. “And so that’s what I’m doing.”‘I worry about our values’Joe Cadriel, a 57-year-old veteran of the gulf war’s Desert Storm and a retired social worker, has rarely placed campaign advertisements on his front lawn. But he made an exception for Ms. Flores, the Brownsville Republican running for Congress.Mr. Cadriel and his wife, Diana, a retired educator, both voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then cast their ballots for Mr. Trump four years later, convinced that he would best protect the southern border, a mere 10 miles from their Weslaco home.The couple grew up in the Rio Grande Valley as children of conservative Democrats, and they harbored a proud independent streak. Mr. Cadriel has been infuriated by illegal immigration for as long as he can remember — he said he once left a job because he felt too angry seeing food stamps and other benefits going to children of unauthorized immigrants.“I’m OK with people coming in saying I’m going to do something productive,” Mr. Cadriel said. “But that wasn’t what was happening. You’d have these people claiming they needed food stamps for their children, but their children were babies, so who do you think was benefiting from it? They were just trying to take advantage.”Joe and Diana Cadriel of Weslaco, Texas, voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Donald Trump in 2020.Jason Garza for The New York TimesThe Cadriels equate walking away from the Democratic Party with getting an education, not from college courses or books, but from conservative media and scripture. A retired educator and churchgoing Catholic, Ms. Cadriel, 57, slowly began to feel that her family’s traditional values were under attack. She stopped watching Good Morning America and The View in favor of Fox News.“I worry about where we’re headed, about what will and won’t be allowed,” she said. “I worry about our values.”Republican candidates like Ms. Flores hope to capitalize on the Cadriels and other former Democrats.Ms. Flores’ parents worked as migrant farmworkers, moving each year to pick cotton in West Texas. Though her parents were Democrats, Ms. Flores said she was raised with “conservative values” and was drawn to Republicans because of her anti-abortion views. Soon after graduating from South Texas College in 2019, she became involved with the Hidalgo County Republican Party, volunteering as the Hispanic outreach chair while she worked as a respiratory therapist.Ms. Flores’ campaign signs do not mention policy or party, but instead highlight three words: “Dios, familia, patria.” God, family, country. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Quick Fix to Help Overwhelmed Border Officials Has Left Migrants in Limbo

      by

      Republicans say the policy helps undocumented immigrants disappear; many immigrants say it has prevented them from following the government’s instructions.WASHINGTON — A Haitian couple and their young son were among thousands of undocumented immigrants whom U.S. officials decided to allow entry through the southwest border last summer — part of a record-setting surge in unauthorized crossings over the past year.Beginning last spring, immigration officials were so overwhelmed that they admitted tens of thousands of migrants while issuing them a new document that did not include the typical hearing dates or identification numbers recognized in the immigration court system. The change sped up the process of releasing them into the country, but also made it much harder for the new arrivals to start applying for asylum — and for the government to track them.Months later, the government has not been able to complete the processing started at the border, showing how ill prepared the system was for the surge and creating a practical and political quagmire for the Biden administration.President Biden pledged as a candidate to fix the country’s broken immigration system, a campaign mantra that resonated with many voters after the harsh policies of President Donald J. Trump. But over Mr. Biden’s first year in office, his administration’s response to the surge in migration has consisted largely of crisis-driven reactions — including the faster entry process.Migrants were caught crossing the southwest border illegally more than 2 million times between December 2020 and December 2021, the largest number since at least 1960. They came not just from Central America and the Caribbean but from around the world, many fleeing persecution and economic hardship with the expectation that Mr. Biden would be more welcoming than Mr. Trump.Although migrants were expelled in a little more than half the cases, more than 400,000 of them were released into the country for a variety of reasons during Mr. Biden’s first year in office. Of those, more than 94,000 were released through the sped-up process — a streamlined version of a longtime practice that critics call “catch and release,” in which those who are apprehended at the border are released from custody pending their immigration court proceedings. These migrants were instructed to register with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement within 60 days to complete the process the border officials started. But in some parts of the country, local ICE offices were overwhelmed and unable to give them appointments. So the Haitian family and other new arrivals have spent months trying in vain to check in with ICE and initiate their court cases. “It was a quick fix — ‘Deal with them later,’” said Evangeline Chan, an immigration lawyer in New York. “But they have not been able to.”Human rights advocates say the change has made it harder for those seeking asylum to get by while they wait to be officially recognized in the immigration system. Republicans, in the meantime, have pounced on the Biden administration for releasing undocumented immigrants into the country with even less ability to keep track of them.“Those who cross our border illegally should be detained and deported, not released into the interior of our country on an unenforceable promise to reappear,” 80 Republican House members wrote in a letter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this month. “It is nothing short of reckless.”Migrants in Del Rio, Texas, in 2020. Under a Trump administration policy, many asylum seekers had to wait in Mexico until U.S. immigration judges ruled on their cases.Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesA ‘huge mess’Mr. Trump’s policy was to restrict the flow of asylum seekers at the southwest border by making it harder to qualify and by making some people wait in Mexico before they could enter the country to apply. In some cases, applicants had to stay in Mexico until U.S. immigration judges ruled on their cases.The most restrictive policy, however, came at the beginning of the pandemic when the federal government started using an obscure public health rule known as Title 42 to turn migrants away at the border, including those seeking asylum.Even so, hundreds of thousands have been allowed into the country for a variety of reasons including a lack of detention space because of pandemic precautions. The Biden administration has also made exceptions for humanitarian reasons, particularly for families and children.Mr. Biden’s stated goal is to reverse Mr. Trump’s harshest immigration policies and be more welcoming to immigrants, but so far, immigration and human rights advocates say he has not come through, in large part because he has kept the public health order in place. Without it, Mr. Biden would have to make the tough choice of releasing even more undocumented immigrants into the country to await proceedings or detaining them..A record number of migrants were caught illegally crossing the southern U.S. border in President Biden’s first year in office, putting his administration in crisis-reaction mode. Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesAs of the end of January, nearly 33,000 immigrants who were issued documents without court dates and the typical identification number had missed their deadline to check in and start their proceedings in immigration court, according to an ICE official speaking on condition of anonymity. It is impossible to know how many have tried to check in with ICE to get court cases started and how many have chosen not to.Hopeful that immigration will prove a potent campaign issue, Republicans are blaming Mr. Biden for the sharp increase in migrants at the border because of his campaign promise that his administration would be more welcoming than the last. His response to the surge, they say, has only made things worse.“D.H.S. was forced to deal with an unmitigated disaster, and notices to report was one of the desperate policies it implemented trying to cope,” Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, said in a statement. The streamlined document, known as a notice to report, he added, “just exacerbated the problem.”Some immigration advocates agree.“This N.T.R. situation is a huge mess that everyone is trying to navigate right now,” Emily Haverkamp, an immigration lawyer and expert on asylum policies, said.The potential for complications with the expedited processing was not lost on some members of the Biden administration, according to several current and former administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal debate. But some officials in the Department of Homeland Security argued that border officials could not have handled the surge of migrants without the expedited option to release them into the country.Migrants who crossed the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, head to request asylum in El Paso, Texas. Border officials have been overwhelmed by the surge in illegal crossings.Jose Luis Gonzalez/ReutersA ‘vicious cycle’After setting off last June on a treacherous journey from Chile — where they had relocated to years earlier — the Haitian family made it to Texas in August, where border officials released them without a court summons and told them to report to an immigration office once they reached Miami, their destination.When they did so, the office was closed, operating on a reduced schedule because of the pandemic. When they tried to register online, they were told they would not get an appointment to finish their paperwork and receive official identification numbers, known as alien numbers, until 2032. When they wrote to an ICE email address, the automated response said the agency needed the family’s alien numbers.“It’s a vicious cycle,” the husband said through a translator.The delays have been felt most acutely in Miami, New York, Houston and Los Angeles, where many of the recent immigrants have settled. Miami appears to have the biggest backlog, and the Homeland Security Department said it is in the process of sending more staff to there to help address it.Once people are officially entered into the immigration court system — now facing its greatest backlog in history — the average wait for an initial court appearance is nearly five years, according to data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.The Haitian couple, like most new immigrants, are not authorized to work, making it impossible to earn an honest living; they are residing with other Haitian immigrants in the Miami region. They tried for months to enroll their son in kindergarten, facing bureaucratic roadblocks at every turn. They cannot afford a lawyer to help them find a way to comply with the government.Some of their challenges are standard for people stuck in the broken immigration system; other challenges are new, resulting from the fact that they were released without being enrolled in immigration court proceedings.“You’re more under the radar and you’re more in the shadows,” Ruby Powers, an immigration lawyer in Texas, said.Stuck in this gray area, immigrants have to wait even longer to apply for a work permit. Once they have the work permit, immigrants can apply for a Social Security Number, which makes it possible to start settling in. With a Social Security Number, an asylum-seeking immigrant can apply for a driver’s license in many states, open a bank account, enter a contract for a cellular phone, and more.In the past, families willing to house new immigrants could count on them eventually getting permission to work, said Leonie Hermantin, the director of development, communications and strategic planning at the Sant La Haitian Community Center in North Miami.Leonie Hermantin of the Sant La Haitian Community Center in North Miami, speaking with a Haitian family who had recently arrived in the U.S.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times“Now you have people who are stuck staying at people’s houses who are getting increasingly inhospitable,” she said, adding that some will soon face homelessness. “They are in this state of limbo. We at social service agencies — we just don’t know what to do.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      As U.S. Navigates Crisis in Haiti, a Bloody History Looms Large

      by

      American policy decisions are vital to understanding Haiti’s political instability, and why it remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.In September 1994, the United States was on the verge of invading Haiti.Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country’s first democratically elected president, had been deposed in a military coup three years earlier. Haiti had descended into chaos. Gangs and paramilitaries terrorized the population — taking hostages, assassinating dissidents and burning crops. International embargoes had strangled the economy, and tens of thousands of people were trying to emigrate to America.But just days before the first U.S. troops would land in Haiti, Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator on the Foreign Affairs Committee, spoke against a military intervention. He argued that the United States had more pressing crises — including ethnic cleansing in Bosnia — and that Haiti was not especially important to American interests.“I think it’s probably not wise,” Mr. Biden said of the planned invasion in an interview with television host Charlie Rose.He added: “If Haiti — a God-awful thing to say — if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.”Despite Mr. Biden’s apprehension, the invasion went forward and the Haitian military junta surrendered within hours. Mr. Aristide was soon restored to power, and the Clinton administration began deporting thousands of Haitians.Nearly a decade later, Haiti’s constitutional order would collapse again, prompting another U.S. military intervention, more migrants and more deportations. As rebels threatened to invade the capital in 2004, Mr. Aristide resigned under pressure from U.S. officials. A provisional government was formed with American backing. The violence and unrest continued.That cycle of crisis and U.S. intervention in Haiti — punctuated by periods of relative calm but little improvement in the lives of most people — has persisted to this day. Since July, a presidential assassination, an earthquake and a tropical storm have deepened the turmoil.Mr. Biden, now president, is overseeing yet another intervention in Haiti’s political affairs, one that his critics say is following an old Washington playbook: backing Haitian leaders accused of authoritarian rule, either because they advance American interests or because U.S. officials fear the instability of a transition of power. Making sense of American policy in Haiti over the decades — driven at times by economic interests, Cold War strategy and migration concerns — is vital to understanding Haiti’s political instability, and why it remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, even after an infusion of more than $5 billion in U.S. aid in the last decade alone.A bloody history of American influence looms large, and a century of U.S. efforts to stabilize and develop the country have ultimately ended in failure.Marines in Haiti marched during the last days of occupation, which ended in 1934 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe American Occupation (1915-34)The politics of slavery and racial prejudice were key factors in early American hostility to Haiti. After the Haitian Revolution, Thomas Jefferson and many in Congress feared that the newly founded Black republic would spread slave revolts in the United States.For decades, the United States refused to formally recognize Haiti’s independence from France, and at times tried to annex Haitian territory and conduct diplomacy through threats.It was against this backdrop that Haiti became increasingly unstable. The country went through seven presidents between 1911 and 1915, all either assassinated or removed from power. Haiti was heavily in debt, and Citibank — then the National City Bank of New York — and other American banks confiscated much of Haiti’s gold reserves during that period with the help of U.S. Marines.Roger L. Farnham, who managed National City Bank’s assets in Haiti, then lobbied President Woodrow Wilson for a military intervention to stabilize the country and force the Haitian government to pay its debts, convincing the president that France or Germany might invade if America did not.The military occupation that followed remains one of the darkest chapters of American policy in the Caribbean. The United States installed a puppet regime that rewrote Haiti’s constitution and gave America control over the country’s finances. Forced labor was used for construction and other work to repay debts. Thousands were killed by U.S. Marines.The occupation ended in 1934 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. As the last Marines departed Haiti, riots broke out in Port-au-Prince, the capital. Bridges were destroyed, telephone lines were cut and the new president declared martial law and suspended the constitution. The United States did not completely relinquish control of Haiti’s finances until 1947.François Duvalier, top, and his son Jean-Claude, bottom, were both dictators who presented themselves as anti-communist to gain the support of the United States.Agence France–Presse/ Getty ImagesThe Duvalier DynastyThe ruthless dictator François Duvalier took power in 1957, as Fidel Castro led a revolution in Cuba and as U.S. interests in the region were becoming increasingly focused on limiting the influence of the Soviet Union.Duvalier, like many other dictators in the Caribbean and Latin America, recognized that he could secure American support if he presented his government as anti-communist. U.S. officials privately described Duvalier as “the worst dictator in the hemisphere,” while deeming him preferable to the perceived risk of a communist Haiti.When the United States suspended aid programs because of atrocities committed soon after Duvalier took office, the Haitian leader hired public relations firms, including one run by Roosevelt’s youngest son, to repair the relationship.Duvalier — and later his son Jean-Claude — ultimately enjoyed significant American support in the form of aid (much of it embezzled by the family), training for Haitian paramilitary forces who would go on to commit atrocities and even a Marine deployment in 1959 despite the protests of American diplomats in Haiti.By 1961, the United States was sending Duvalier $13 million in aid a year — equivalent to half of Haiti’s national budget.Even after the United States had tired of Duvalier’s brutality and unstable leadership, President John F. Kennedy demurred on a plot to remove him and mandate free elections. When Duvalier died nearly a decade later, the United States supported the succession of his son. By 1986, the United States had spent an estimated $900 million supporting the Duvalier dynasty as Haiti plunged deeper into poverty and corruption.President Jovenel Moïse, who was assassinated in July, ruled Haiti by decree and turned to authoritarian tactics with the tacit approval of the Trump and Biden administrations.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesFavored CandidatesAt crucial moments in Haiti’s democratic era, the United States has intervened to pick winners and losers — fearful of political instability and surges of Haitian migration.After Mr. Aristide was ousted in 1991, the U.S. military reinstalled him. He resigned in disgrace less than a decade later, but only after American diplomats urged him to do so. According to reports from that time, the George W. Bush administration had undermined Mr. Aristide’s government in the years before his resignationFrançois Pierre-Louis is a political science professor at Queens College in New York who served in Mr. Aristide’s cabinet and advised former Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis. Haitians are often suspicious of American involvement in their affairs, he said, but still take signals from U.S. officials seriously because of the country’s long history of influence over Haitian politics.For example, after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, American and other international diplomats pressured Haiti to hold elections that year despite the devastation. The vote was disastrously mismanaged, and international observers and many Haitians considered the results illegitimate.Responding to the allegations of voter fraud, American diplomats insisted that one candidate in the second round of the presidential election be replaced with a candidate who received fewer votes — at one point threatening to halt aid over the dispute. Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, confronted then-President René Préval about putting Michel Martelly, America’s preferred candidate, on the ballot. Mr. Martelly won that election in a landslide.A direct line of succession can be traced from that election to Haiti’s current crisis.Mr. Martelly endorsed Jovenel Moïse as his successor. Mr. Moïse, who was elected in 2016, ruled by decree and turned to authoritarian tactics with the tacit approval of the Trump and Biden administrations.Mr. Moïse appointed Ariel Henry as acting prime minister earlier this year. Then on July 7, Mr. Moïse was assassinated.Mr. Henry has been accused of being linked to the assassination plot, and political infighting that had quieted after international diplomats endorsed his claim to power has reignited. Mr. Martelly, who had clashed with Mr. Moïse over business interests, is considering another run for the presidency.Robert Maguire, a Haiti scholar and retired professor of international affairs at George Washington University, said the instinct in Washington to back members of Haiti’s political elite who appeared allied with U.S. interests was an old one, with a history of failure.Another approach could have more success, according to Mr. Maguire and other scholars, Democratic lawmakers and a former U.S. envoy for Haiti policy. They say the United States should support a grass-roots commission of civic leaders, who are drafting plans for a new provisional government in Haiti.That process, however, could take years. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The Democrats Are in Danger of a Midterm Rout

      by

      The Democrats are staring down real danger.They just aren’t getting enough done. They aren’t moving quickly enough on President Biden’s major campaign promises.The warning signs are all around.Democrats are still wrangling over their infrastructure and social spending bills. And the longer the fight drags on, the uglier it looks. Washington watchers are right — to a degree — to say that this is simply the way that large legislation is worked through. It’s a slog.In the end, I believe that the Democrats will have no choice but to pass something, no matter the size, because the consequence of failure is suicide. Democrats must go into the midterms with something that they can call a win, with something that at least inches closer to the transformations Biden has promised.But the budget isn’t the only issue.There is still a crisis at the border. In August, the Pew Research Center noted that the U.S. Border Patrol had reported “nearly 200,000 encounters with migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in July, the highest monthly total in more than two decades.”That’s the largest number since Bill Clinton was president.The handling of Haitian immigrants was a particular blight on the administration, and the images of officers cracking their reins like whips will be hard to erase from memory.Furthermore, the Senate parliamentarian has advised Democrats against including a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants in their spending bill. It is not clear if Senate Democrats will try to get around the parliamentarian’s nonbinding ruling, but 92 legal scholars have called on them to do just that.As for police reform, negotiations on that legislation completely fell apart with customary finger-pointing as the epilogue.The president has said that, “The White House will continue to consult with the civil rights and law enforcement communities, as well as victims’ families to define a path forward, including through potential further executive actions I can take to advance our efforts to live up to the American ideal of equal justice under law.”But executive orders are severely limited when it comes to state and local policing, and any order one president issues can be rescinded by the next.Then there is the massive, widespread assault on voting rights rolling out across the country, what some have rightly referred to as Jim Crow 2.0.As the Brennan Center for Justice put it earlier this month, “In an unprecedented year so far for voting legislation, 19 states have enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for Americans to vote.”And yet, it is still not clear if there are enough votes in the Senate to pass voter protections, Senator Joe Manchin hasn’t agreed to change filibuster rules which would allow Democrats to pass the legislation on their own, and Biden has yet to throw his full weight behind the fight to preserve the franchise from Republican assaults.Not to mention that Covid is still killing far too many Americans. The surge of cases during Biden’s first year ate away at any optimism about the development and administration of vaccines.Democrats have been unable to deliver much to make their voters happy, and their major agenda items have been stalled in Congress for so long that many of those voters are growing impatient and disillusioned.As a result, many recent polls have shown Biden’s approval ratings plummeting to the lowest level of his young presidency: According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, 38 percent of respondents approved of Biden’s job performance, but 53 percent disapproved.More than half disapproved of his handling of the economy, the military, taxes, and foreign policy, and nearly 70 percent disapproved of his approach to immigration reform and the situation at the Mexican border. Only his handling of Covid received a smaller disapproval rating, of 50 percent.As Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy put it, “Battered on trust, doubted on leadership, and challenged on overall competency, President Biden is being hammered on all sides as his approval rating continues its downward slide to a number not seen since the tough scrutiny of the Trump administration.”Black voters continue to be Biden’s strongest supporters on many of these metrics, but even their support seems disturbingly soft.Maybe the Democrats will pass a massive spending bill and tout it well, and people will forget their disappointment on other issues and revel in the mound of cash the Democrats plan to spend. Maybe. There is no doubt that this country desperately needs the investments Democrats want to make. In fact, it needs even more investment than the amount Democrats have proposed.But even if they succeed in passing both the infrastructure framework and the social spending bill, those investments may come too late to discharge growing dissatisfaction. An unpopular president with slipping approval numbers is an injured leader with little political capital to burn.Biden is better than Trump, but that’s not enough. People didn’t just vote for Biden to vanquish a villain; they also wanted a champion. That champion has yet to emerge.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      How the Census Bureau Stood Up to Donald Trump’s Meddling

      by

      WASHINGTON — There were 10 days left in the Trump presidency. And John Abowd and Tori Velkoff had a decision to make.Six months earlier, in July 2020, President Donald Trump had ordered the Census Bureau, where they were senior officials, to produce a count of every unauthorized immigrant in the nation, separate from the 2020 census count that was well underway. The Trump administration’s goal was to strip those immigrants from the population count used to divvy up House seats among the states.The move promised to benefit Republicans by sapping electoral strength from Democratic-leaning areas and handing more voting power to older, white and most likely more conservative populations.Mr. Abowd, the bureau’s chief scientist, and Ms. Velkoff, its chief demographer, were obligated by law to carry out the president’s orders. They’d assigned some of their top experts to produce an immigrant count from billions of government records. Mr. Trump had also inserted four political appointees into the bureau’s top ranks since June, in no small part to ensure that the numbers were delivered.But despite months of work, the results, in Mr. Abowd’s and Ms. Velkoff’s view, fell far short of the bureau’s standards for accuracy. Now the agency’s director, Steven Dillingham, was demanding the tallies — accurate or not — before the president left office.Mr. Abowd and Ms. Velkoff went to Ron Jarmin, the deputy director. The trio, who had more than 75 years of experience in the bureau among them, agreed on a response: They would reject the demand unless they could explain in a technical report why the numbers were useless. (In an interview this month, Mr. Dillingham said that he was merely asking for an assessment of the immigrant tabulations, with whatever caveats were necessary. “I said, look over that data and see if any of it is ready,” he said.)Mr. Jarmin then sent a message to three other Census Bureau experts whom he had assigned to assist the political appointees. Stop whatever you’re doing, it said. Any future orders will come from me.That internal struggle, which has not been previously reported, was the breaking point in a battle with the Trump administration over political interference in the census. By now, tales of Trump appointees disrupting, or outright corrupting, the work of federal agencies are familiar. But in this case, the meddling threatened not just to change the allocation of federal power, but also to skew the distribution of trillions of federal tax dollars.It was not a revolt or some sort of deep-state resistance that thwarted that effort. Instead, a slice of the career bureaucracy that keeps the federal government running, day in and day out, stood up for what it saw as the core function of the Census Bureau — to produce the gold standard for data about the nation’s population.“We tried to do what we thought was statistically sound and valid,” Ms. Velkoff said in an interview in June. “If we didn’t have a statistically sound and valid methodology, then we pushed back.”The episode pitting career officials against political appointees raises an important question: Should the Census Bureau be better protected from such political interference in the future?The White House had initially sought to identify unauthorized immigrants by adding a question about citizenship to the census form itself. Mr. Abowd had warned that doing so would harm the quality of the count. In focus groups the bureau conducted, people in various ethic groups expressed an “unprecedented” level of concern about giving the government identifying information, according to a 2017 report on the research. Nonetheless, Wilbur Ross, the secretary of the Commerce Department, which includes the Census Bureau, ordered the agency to go ahead with the citizenship question.But in June 2019, the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Ross’s proffered rationale — that adding the citizenship question was necessary to better enforce the Voting Rights Act — calling it “contrived.”With that avenue closed, the administration immediatelyordered the Census Bureau to gather data on unauthorized immigrants by combing through records of some 20 federal agencies.Mr. Abowd, Ms. Velkoff and their colleagues spent the next year collecting immigrant data from the administrative records. Then in July 2020, Mr. Trump ordered the data to be used to remove unauthorized immigrants from the coming census totals that would reapportion the House for the next decade. But to segregate unauthorized immigrants from the census totals for each state, there first had to be a census.And that was a problem. In the summer of 2020, the bureau faced the huge challenge of counting every household in the midst of a pandemic. Despite that, Mr. Ross ordered the agency to finish the count by Sept. 30 and to produce the politically crucial population figures for apportioning House seats among the states by Dec. 31. The deadlines ensured the census totals would be delivered to Mr. Trump whether or not he won the November election.Internally, census officials were aghast. Anyone who thought the agency could meet the December deadline, the day-to-day leader of the census, Timothy Olson, wrote to Mr. Jarmin and other senior census officials, “has either a mental deficiency or a political motivation.”But the anti-immigrant forces within Mr. Trump’s administration kept the pressure on, creating four new political jobs in the bureau’s top ranks — an unprecedented step — beginning in June 2020.Senior bureau officials gave them offices. They also quietly ordered that the appointees be given only rounded numbers — estimates, which could not be labeled official for political or other reasons.The first of the new political appointees was Nathaniel Cogley, a political-science professor at a state university in rural Texas who has specialized in African studies. He was soon joined by the other three, and they reported weekly to an aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff.Mr. Cogley began attacking the bureau’s effort to count a small share of known households that evade the best efforts of census takers. In these cases — 1.2 million people in 2010, but probably many more in pandemic-scarred 2020 — the bureau has long used a statistical method called imputation, looking at nearby households to make educated guesses about who lives in the places the census field operation missed.Some of those households are occupied by right-leaning libertarians who are deeply suspicious of the government. But many are low-income families, members of minorities and unauthorized immigrants, who expand the count for urban areas and thus increase representation for traditional Democratic strongholds.“If you leave out imputations, you leave out African Americans, Hispanics and other hard-to-count people,” Kimball Brace, a demographer and president of a consulting firm that does work on redistricting, said in an interview. Mr. Cogley called him to ask for evidence that imputation was statistically unsound. “I saw Cogley’s view as totally a way of justifying how the Republicans come out on this,” Mr. Brace said. (Mr. Cogley did not respond to calls, texts and emails asking for comment.)Mr. Ross had the power to order the bureau to do as Mr. Cogley wished. But after listening to dueling presentations, he allowed the imputation work to continue — handing the career officials a victory on one of their most important concerns. (Mr. Ross declined to comment on the record.)In early November, when Joe Biden won the presidential election, the 10-week clock for Mr. Trump’s time in office began to tick with new urgency. There would be no second term. Mr. Abowd, Ms. Velkoff and their colleagues raced to meet the Dec. 31 deadline. But the bureau hit a major technical snag: The pandemic had scrambled the locations of tens of millions of people, like college students and agricultural workers, who should have been counted where they studied or worked but instead lived elsewhere temporarily because of the coronavirus.Putting them in their proper place would take time. In late November, census officials told Mr. Dillingham, the bureau’s director, that they could not meet the Dec. 31 deadline and maintain the agency’s standards for accuracy.Mr. Cogley and other political appointees pressed for shortcuts to speed ahead, going so far as to suggest commandeering computers from other agencies to accelerate data processing, an idea the bureau dismissed as impractical. But the political appointees and the White House never answered a basic question about the numbers they most wanted: What definition of “unauthorized immigrant” should the bureau use? Did it include people contesting their deportation in court? Or children whose birthplace was unclear? Or immigrants whose green cards were being processed?In December, the White House tried one last tack: If census experts could not reliably say who should be removed from the state-by-state apportionment totals because they were in the country illegally, then administration officials would decide for them, using whatever tabulations of immigrants the bureau provided.This would take a hammer to the bureau’s standards for accuracy. It would also reverse past practice, in which the Census Bureau calculated the House apportionment and the White House delivered the results to Congress as a formality. In January, Mr. Dillingham told Mr. Jarmin it was the bureau’s No. 1 priority — above the census itself — to turn over figures on undocumented immigrants to the White House by Jan. 15. He acknowledged proposing cash bonuses to those who could make it happen, but said he made sure anyone working on the project “would not be pulled off the 2020 census data.”This last-minute order, which Mr. Dillingham delivered orally rather than in writing, was the breaking point for the career officials who had carried out every other directive. “The integrity of the statistical process that the Census Bureau is ethically committed to was abrogated in serious ways,” Mr. Abowd said.Separately and anonymously, three career officials filed whistle-blower complaints with the Commerce Department’s inspector general. The complaints accused Mr. Dillingham of violating a cardinal rule for the federal government called Statistical Policy Directive 1. “A federal statistical agency,” it states, “must be independent from political and other undue external influence in developing, producing and disseminating statistics.” Mr. Dillingham said this month that when he heard about the complaints to the inspector general, he stopped asking for the immigrant tabulations.On Jan. 18, Mr. Dillingham resigned. Mr. Trump left office two days later without the counts that would have downgraded the status of immigrants and most likely helped more Republicans win election.The census has been wielded as a political weapon before. When the very first count in 1790 fell short (at 3.9 million) of George Washington’s expectations, he didn’t change the number, but he instructed Thomas Jefferson to check it. When Jefferson’s work produced an estimate above four million, he included the higher number in descriptions of the census abroad to make the new country appear stronger.When the 1920 census counted rising population totals in American cities — thanks to an influx of Italians, Poles, Jews and others from outside Northern Europe — Congress refused to reapportion the House until 1929 so that rural areas wouldn’t lose seats.And most notoriously, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Army used census information to round up Japanese Americans for internment. (In 2000, the bureau apologized.)Now a group of officials at the agency are considering how the census could be better protected from political meddling and misuse. In July, a committee of career professionals put in place a new policy on data stewardship, which firms up the rules governing internal as well as external access to confidential data. A bigger idea is to move the bureau out of the Commerce Department to make it more independent, like the National Science Foundation. Congress could also mandate by statute that immigrants who reside in the country must continue to be counted, as they always have been. Lawmakers (or the president, by executive order) also could further strengthen the existing safeguards in Statistical Policy Directive 1.In the end, the delays that frustrated the anti-immigrant ambitions of Mr. Trump’s administration may end up helping his party. The bureau’s release of redistricting numbers on Thursday was several months behind schedule. Republicans, who control more state legislatures and have shown a greater appetite for extreme gerrymandering than Democrats have, could benefit because little time remains to contest maps before the 2022 elections.The newly released numbers will now set the stage for what are likely to be colossal battles over control of the House and State Legislatures.For career professionals, “the highest priority now,” Mr. Abowd said, “is restoring the credibility of the 2020 census and the Census Bureau.”Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at The Times magazine. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      White House Considers Lifting Rule That Blocked Migrants During Pandemic

      by

      Among the plans under consideration is whether to give migrant families a chance to apply for protections, and to possibly lifting the public health rule for single adults this summer.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is in the later stages of planning how to phase out a Trump-era public health rule that has allowed border agents to rapidly turn away most migrants who have arrived at the southern border during the pandemic, according to two administration officials. It is possible that in the coming weeks, border officials could start allowing migrant families back into the country, with an eye toward lifting the rule for single adults this summer.The plan, while still not final, is sure to ​complicate an already thorny issue for President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is visiting the border on Friday as Republicans accuse the administration of being slow to address what they describe as an unrelenting surge of migrants trying to enter the country. Lifting the rule will only exacerbate that.Since the beginning of the pandemic, border agents have turned away migrants nearly 850,000 times under the public health rule, known as Title 42, which immigration and human rights advocates call unnecessary and cruel, particularly for those seeking asylum. Migrant families have been turned away more than 80,000 times since the rule was put in place in March 2020, according to government data.The White House has deflected questions about how much longer the rule will remain in place, saying it is up to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which issued the policy. An agency spokeswoman referred questions about the rule to the White House.Mr. Biden, who has promised a more humane approach to immigration enforcement, decided not to continue the Trump administration’s policy of expelling children who arrived alone at the border. Single adults and many families, however, have continued to be turned away because of the public health rule, whose stated purpose is to prevent the coronavirus from spreading at points of entry or Border Patrol stations. Still, some migrant families have been allowed into the United States because Mexico or their home countries refuse to take them back.Despite the measured approach, lifting the rule — which many public health experts say has little point this late in the pandemic — is likely to sharply increase the flow of migrants, at least in the short term. That would force Mr. Biden to address the issue without compromising his pledge to take a more compassionate approach to enforcing immigration laws.Plans to lift the rule have been under discussion for weeks, but there appears to be a fresh sense of urgency; officials familiar with the evolving plan shared details with The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. Axios earlier reported some of the details.For migrant families, the officials said, one idea under consideration is to put those seeking asylum into one of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s alternatives to detention. That includes having them wear ankle bracelets as their request makes its way through the immigration system, a process that can take years because of a chronic backlog of cases. The administration has already been doing this for other migrant families this year.The administration is considering placing families who do not make asylum claims in the queue for expedited removal, a process that allows immigration officers to deport people without a hearing, a lawyer or a right of appeal in some cases.One official familiar with the plans said that all the ideas under consideration included health and safety measures to avoid the spread of the virus.Lifting the public health rule for single adults is likely to come later, according to the most recent discussions, possibly by the end of the summer. Single adults have been barred from entering the country more than 262,000 times since the rule went into effect. The administration is still debating where these migrants would go once they enter the country, including whether to place them in expedited removal or in home detention so as to avoid a detention center, as Mr. Biden campaigned against mass incarceration of undocumented immigrants.Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas, a senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, said border officials had been bracing for an end to the public health rule and other pandemic restrictions, including a ban on nonessential cross-border commercial traffic that was recently extended until July 21.President Biden has promised a more humane approach to immigration enforcement and started to allow children who arrived alone at the border to enter the country.Pete Marovich for The New York Times“That could be, according to them, ‘a perfect storm,’ because all of a sudden all those people will be coming into the U.S.,” Mr. Cuellar said.The Biden administration is trying to avoid just such a storm with a phased-in approach.Another challenge for the administration is that detention centers overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are filling up, holding nearly 27,000 as of Thursday. That is a 90 percent jump compared with the average number of detainees in March, according to government data. If the administration lifts the health rule entirely, it would face the question of where to house the migrants, caught between significantly increasing the number of detained immigrants and releasing everyone to wait for court proceedings.Lifting the public health rule for families, though, will make it hard for the administration to defend keeping it in place for single adults.“This piecemeal approach doesn’t cut it,” said Denise Bell, a researcher for Amnesty International’s refugee and migrant rights program. “How many carve-outs until you have to admit there is no good public health rationale for Title 42?”Lifting the public health rule could lead to some bottlenecks along the border, but it could also ease pressure on the Department of Health and Human Services, which is overseeing the care of unaccompanied migrant children who have been arriving in record numbers.As of Thursday, about 14,500 such children were being held in government shelters, according to internal government data obtained by The Times, as officials try to place them with family members or other sponsors in the United States. Nearly half of the children are staying in emergency shelters where some conditions are far below government standards; the average stay is currently 37 days.“When families were pushed back, sometimes they’d make that extraordinarily difficult choice to send their child ahead, with the hope that as an unaccompanied child migrating alone, they’d have a better chance of being accepted and processed through,” said Wendy Young, the president of a nonprofit, Kids in Need of Defense. “It’s a horrible choice that families have to make, but we did see families doing exactly that.”Without the public health rule, families may again start trying to cross the border together — a better option, Ms. Young said, than being placed in the large emergency shelters overseen by the health and human services department.Ms. Harris, who will travel to El Paso on Friday with Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, is leading the administration’s efforts to help improve conditions in Central America, where many of the children are coming from, to deter migration.For weeks, Republicans have pressed Ms. Harris about why she traveled to Central America this month, but not to the American side of the border with Mexico. Her visit comes just days before Mr. Trump goes to the border with a group of Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who has pledged to finish Mr. Trump’s border wall in his state after Mr. Biden halted construction. Mr. Abbott has also threatened to kick thousands of migrant children out of shelters there. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Fact-Checking Claims on the Migrant Surge at the U.S.-Mexico Border

      by

      As migrants arrive at the southwestern border in increasing numbers, lawmakers and officials are misleading about border policies, migrants, the coronavirus and immigration flows.With the number of migrants apprehended at the southwestern border expected to reach a two-decade high, Republicans are blaming President Biden for the surge, while Democrats argue that immigration system he inherited left him ill-prepared.Here’s a fact-check.Biden officials have inaccurately described the Trump administration’s actions.What Was Said“The previous administration was expelling these unaccompanied children, some who are girls under the age of 12, for example, back to Mexico. We ended that practice.”— Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of homeland security, in a congressional hearing on Wednesday.This is misleading. The practice of expelling unaccompanied children ended thanks to a court ruling before Mr. Biden took office, though his administration declined to resume expulsions when an appeals court decided it could do so.Citing the threat of the coronavirus and using a public health emergency law known as Title 42, the Trump administration announced last March that it would send back to their home countries people who illegally crossed the southwestern border, rather than detaining and processing them.In mid-November, a federal judge ruled that the administration could not expel unaccompanied children. As a result, expulsions of unaccompanied children fell from nearly 3,200 in October to 1,520 in November to just three in December and 18 in January.An appeals court stayed that ruling in late January, once again allowing the expulsion of children, but the Biden administration has decided against the practice. It continues to send back adults and families, however.“Unaccompanied children haven’t been expelled since November,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, which advocates on behalf of immigrants. “They chose to keep the status quo in place.”What Was Said“We inherited a government that had allowed the number of beds to safely and humanely house these children — administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Refugee Resettlement — had allowed it to shrink to a record low number.”— Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, in an interview this month on MSNBC.False. The Biden administration is struggling to find space for migrant children and teenagers who have recently arrived at the border, with some sleeping on gym mats with foil sheets in processing facilities as they wait to be transferred to shelters contracted with the Office of Refugee Resettlement. But Mr. Klain is wrong that the backlog is because the previous administration drastically downsized monthly bed capacity.When the Obama administration faced its own surge of migrant children, the refugee agency increased its monthly bed capacity to about 8,000 beds in the 2015 fiscal year from about 2,000 in the 2011 fiscal year, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Under the Trump administration, monthly bed capacity fell to about 7,000 in October 2017, but grew to over 16,000 by December 2018. By Mr. Trump’s last full month in office, in December 2020, monthly bed capacity was at 13,000 — hardly a “record low.”The issue, however, is that shelters could no longer operate at a full occupancy rate during a pandemic. The refugee office reduced capacity to at least 40 percent to comply with coronavirus protocols, before returning to full occupancy this month as the number of children increased.A White House spokesman acknowledged that the maximum number of beds “theoretically” stood at 13,000 under Mr. Trump, but contended that the previous administration took no steps to mitigate the reduction in occupancy capacity or shortages in staffing that reduction caused.Republicans have mischaracterized Mr. Biden’s immigration policies, especially in relation to the virus.What Was Said“The Biden border crisis, though, was created by Joe Biden’s promises of amnesty and open borders and free health care for illegals during the campaign.”— Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, in an interview on Monday on Fox News.“Yes, the signals that the Biden administration is sending by eliminating the migrant protection program or ‘Remain in Mexico’ program that was negotiated with the Mexican government, and as well as the failure to enforce the Title 42 public health order, which basically give the Border Patrol the ability to keep people out of the country who may infect the U.S. population, basically, they’re ignoring all of that.”— Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, in an interview on Sunday on Fox News.This is exaggerated. Both senators were partly accurate in their descriptions of Mr. Biden’s policies.It is true that Mr. Biden has proposed a pathway for citizenship for the undocumented immigrants currently residing in the United States and revoked the previous administration’s policy that required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico as they awaited decisions on their cases.But Mr. Cotton is wrong that Mr. Biden promised “free health care” for undocumented immigrants. A spokesman for Mr. Cotton said the senator was referring to the 2020 campaign, when Mr. Biden raised his hand after Democratic presidential candidates were asked during a 2019 debate whether their health care plans would allow unauthorized immigrants to have access to such care. But there was no mention of “free” health care. Under Mr. Biden’s plan, those immigrants could buy health care plans including a proposed public option on exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act.Mr. Cornyn’s reference to Title 42 was also inaccurate. Though the Biden administration has decided not to expel unaccompanied children, despite a court ruling allowing the practice, it has continued Title 42 expulsions of most border crossers. In fact, out of the more than 100,000 encounters at the southwestern border in February, 72,000 led to expulsions.What Was Said“When I talked to the doctor to see when they’re being tested for Covid, when they get out, more than 10 percent are testing positive, while you’re being stored together. In a time when the president will keep our country closed, when maybe we have hope for a Fourth of July to get together just with our family, how much spread of Covid is he creating every single day by his policies along this border?”— Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, on Monday in a news conference.This is exaggerated. Bob Fenton, the acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said during a congressional hearing a day later that migrants were testing positive at a rate of “less than 6 percent” across the entire border. That is a lower positivity rate than currently in Texas (9 percent), Arizona (11 percent) and New Mexico (8 percent), but higher than in California (3 percent).There are different coronavirus protocols in place for different migrant populations, but the notion that migrants are spreading the virus unchecked is hyperbolic.Asylum seekers with pending cases who returned to Mexico under the Trump-era program must test negative before entering the United States. Those who test positive with mild or no symptoms are required to quarantine for 10 days, while those who show severe symptoms must seek treatment in Mexico, according to the State Department.For migrants who are not immediately sent away and processed by border officials, the Department of Homeland Security relies on community organizations for testing and reimburses the costs, according to the department. Those who test positive while in Border Control custody are immediately isolated. Unaccompanied children specifically are tested at facilities operated by the Department of Health and Human Services.Mr. Mayorkas, in the congressional hearing on Wednesday, acknowledged that the system was not foolproof.“There were times earlier when individuals were apprehended and we sought to expel them and we were unable to expel them and we were compelled to release them and we did not have the opportunity to test them,” he said. “We are doing the best we can to ensure that the policy is executed 100 percent of the time.”Lawmakers omitted context in describing border crossing trends.What Was Said“You can’t help but notice that the administration changes and there’s a surge.”— Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, on Sunday in an interview on Fox News.“We began seeing the increase in unaccompanied minors going back to last April 2020. This is not something that happened as a result of Joe Biden becoming president. We saw the increases dating back almost a year. And this was during the Trump administration.”— Representative Veronica Escobar, Democrat of Texas, on Sunday in an interview on CNN.Mr. Cassidy is ignoring that encounters with migrants at the border have been ticking up for months before Mr. Biden took office, while Ms. Escobar is downplaying that the increases accelerated in February.“It’s both. We have been seeing an increase in overall encounters at the border since April of 2020, and there was a bigger increase than we’ve seen in the past few months in February,” said Jessica Bolter, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.Border Patrol agents encountered unaccompanied children at the southwestern border 741 times in April 2020, the lowest monthly level in a decade. That number did gradually increase over the last few months of Mr. Trump’s presidency. But in February, Border Patrol agents recorded more than 9,400 encounters with unaccompanied children, a 61 percent increase since January, a 170 percent increase from February 2020 and the highest number since May 2019.The exact impact of Mr. Biden’s policies or election on border crossings is difficult to gauge, as migration flows are driven by myriad factors and there has been only one full month of data under Mr. Biden.“The push factors are at the highest they’ve been at quite some time,” said Mr. Reichlin-Melnick, ticking off political corruption, instability, poverty and violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. The economic toll of the pandemic and two hurricanes that battered the region toward the end of last year further exacerbated difficult conditions.Conversely, better economic opportunities and the chance to reunite with family have pulled migrants to the United States, and immigration policy can act as an extra tug.Rescinding the Remain in Mexico policy, halting the construction of a border wall, and ending agreements allowing the United States to return asylum seekers to Central American countries “have motivated people to try to enter illegally now,” asserted Jessica M. Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, which promotes lower levels of immigration.Whether or not those specific policies spurred the rise, Ms. Bolter said that Mr. Biden’s promises of a more humane border policy have been one of the factors in increased migration — a point acknowledged by White House officials and by people crossing the border themselves.But she cautioned that hyperbolic rumors and false advertising might also be at play.“It’s not like everyone in Central America is paying attention to the specific policy positions to the Biden administration,” Ms. Bolter said. “Smugglers see these opportunities and they exaggerate them.”We welcome suggestions and tips from readers on what to fact-check on email and Twitter. More