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      How Biden’s New Immigration Policy Works

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      The new policy will give some 500,000 people a pathway to citizenship.President Biden’s new immigration policy protects some 500,000 people who are married to U.S. citizens from deportation and gives them a pathway to citizenship.The election-year move comes just two weeks after Mr. Biden imposed a major crackdown at the U.S.-Mexico border, cutting off access to asylum for people who crossed into the United States illegally.The policy announced on Tuesday is aimed at people who have been living in the United States for more than a decade and have built their lives and families here.Here is how it works:Why do the spouses of American citizens need protection?Marrying an American citizen generally provides a pathway to U.S. citizenship. But people who crossed the southern border illegally — rather than arriving in the country with a visa — must return to their home countries to complete the process for a green card, something that can take years. The new program allows families to remain in the country while they pursue legal status.Who is eligible?There are roughly 1.1 million undocumented immigrants married to U.S. citizens in the United States, according to Fwd.us, an immigration advocacy group, but not all of them are eligible for the program.The spouses must have lived in the United States for 10 years and have been married to an American citizen as of June 17. They cannot have a criminal record. Officials estimate that the policy will provide legal status and protections for about 500,000 people. The benefits would also extend to the roughly 50,000 children of undocumented spouses who became stepchildren to American citizens.When will the program take effect?Biden administration officials said they expected the program to start by the end of the summer. Those eligible will then be able to apply for the benefits.Why is President Biden doing this now?Mr. Biden is trying to strike a tricky balance on immigration, which is a serious political vulnerability for him. Polls show Americans want tougher policies. Just two weeks ago, Mr. Biden announced a crackdown on asylum at the southern border.His new policy, giving hundreds of thousands of immigrants new legal protections, is a way for him to answer the calls from the progressive base of the Democratic Party, which has accused the White House of betraying campaign promises to enact a more humane approach to immigrants. More

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      Biden to Give Legal Protections to Undocumented Spouses of U.S. Citizens

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      Undocumented spouses of American citizens will be shielded from deportation, provided work permits and given a pathway to citizenship, according to officials briefed on the plan.President Biden on Tuesday will announce sweeping new protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have been living in the United States illegally for years but are married to American citizens, officials familiar with the plan said.Mr. Biden will detail the policy at the White House on Tuesday while marking the 12-year anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which protects people who came to the United States as children from deportation, the officials said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a policy that had not been formally announced.Under the policy, undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens will be shielded from deportation, provided work permits and given a pathway to citizenship. Officials briefed on the conversations said it could affect up to 500,000 undocumented spouses, although the exact scale of the program remained unclear.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Marrying an American citizen generally provides a pathway to U.S. citizenship. But people who crossed the southern border illegally — rather than arriving in the country with a visa — must return to their home countries to complete the process for a green card.That means long separations from their spouses and families. The new program would allow families to remain in the country while they pursue legal status.Officials briefed on the discussions said the announcement could amount to the most sweeping unilateral move by a president to provide relief to unauthorized immigrants since President Barack Obama implemented DACA. In a separate move on Tuesday, Mr. Biden is also expected to announce new ways to help people in DACA, known as Dreamers, gain access to work visas.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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      After Delay, Top Democrats in Congress Sign Off on Sale of F-15 Jets to Israel

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      Senior Democrats who had taken the unusual step of holding out relented to pressure from the Biden administration and allowed a multibillion-dollar sale of weapons to move ahead.A Biden administration plan to sell $18 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets to Israel is moving forward after two top Democratic holdouts in Congress signed off on the deal, according to multiple people familiar with the sale.Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, who had publicly opposed the transfer by citing Israel’s tactics during its campaign in Gaza, has lifted his hold on the deal, one of the largest U.S. arms sales to Israel in years. Mr. Meeks said that the sale would take years to deliver and that he supported the Biden administration’s plans to hold up the sale of other munitions.“I have been in close touch with the White House and National Security Council about this and other arms cases for Israel, and have repeatedly urged the administration to continue pushing Israel to make significant and concrete improvements on all fronts when it comes to humanitarian efforts and limiting civilian casualties,” Mr. Meeks said in a statement.Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who had delayed signing off but never publicly said he was blocking the deal, also agreed to allow it to go forward, joining top Republicans who had agreed to the plan months ago.Closing out the informal consultation process with Congress allows the State Department to move forward on officially notifying Congress of the sale, the final step before sealing the deal and one that has almost always been a foregone conclusion when it comes to Israel. That changed in recent months amid mounting concern in the United States about Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas, and as Democrats in Congress have increasingly hinted that they might use their leverage over weapons transfers to demand that Israel change its tactics.The decision to relent to pressure from the Biden administration was a stark reversal for Mr. Meeks, who had been outspoken about his opposition to the deal, signaling his frustration with Israel’s actions in the war, which have led to tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties and helped to create a hunger crisis in Gaza.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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      War Crimes Hearing Gives Public Virtual Look Inside a Secret C.I.A. Prison

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      Years after the agency’s “black site” program was shut down, details are slowly emerging during trials at Guantánamo Bay.The public on Monday got its first view of a C.I.A. “black site,” including a windowless, closet-size cell where a former Qaeda commander was held during what he described as the most humiliating experience of his time in U.S. custody.The former commander, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, led the 360-degree virtual tour of the site, Quiet Room 4, during a sentencing hearing at Guantánamo Bay that began last week. He described being blindfolded, stripped, forcibly shaved and photographed naked on two occasions after his capture in 2006.He never saw the sun, nor heard the voices of his guards, who were dressed entirely in black, including their masks.Mr. Hadi, 63, was one of the last prisoners to be held in the overseas black site network where the George W. Bush administration held and interrogated about 100 terrorism suspects after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Even now, years after the Obama administration shut the program down, its secrets remain. But the details are slowly emerging at the national security trials of former prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.In court on Monday, spectators saw Quiet Room 4, a 6-foot-square empty chamber, which Mr. Hadi said resembled the place he was held for three months — minus a bloodstain that was on the wall of his cell then.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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      Record Number of NATO Allies Hit Military Spending Targets

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      President Biden and the NATO secretary general sought to present a robust and united front against Russia as the alliance prepares for its annual meeting next month.President Biden and the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, announced on Monday that a record number of allies were meeting their military spending commitments as the two leaders sought to present a robust and unwavering response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.Mr. Biden and Mr. Stoltenberg met ahead of the annual NATO summit next month in Washington, where member countries are expected to discuss additional measures to help secure long-term security, funding and eventual membership for Ukraine. Mr. Stoltenberg announced on Monday that NATO was prepared to take on a larger role in Ukraine’s security in the meantime.“I expect that when we meet next month, we will agree to have a NATO role in providing security assistance and training,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “This will reduce the burden on the United States and strengthen our support to Ukraine.”That is possible in part because the number of allies meeting their informal commitments to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their militaries has soared. When NATO allies made the pledge in 2014, only three members — including the United States — met that mark, Mr. Stoltenberg said. About five years ago, roughly 10 did, he said, and this year more than 20 of the alliance’s 32 members will.Mr. Stoltenberg also said allies have increased military spending this year by 18 percent — the biggest jump in decades.The reassurances from the two leaders come as questions have arisen anew about the alliance and the commitment to Ukraine. Russia has recently made advances on the front lines after a temporary delay in military aid to Ukraine caused by congressional gridlock. And Mr. Biden’s main rival in the November election, former President Donald J. Trump, has expressed skepticism toward assistance for Ukraine and the value of NATO itself.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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      What Happens When You Knock on 8,000 Doors

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      Milagros PicoIn 2018, the district judge for our area of south-central Montana was retiring and encouraged my husband, Ray, to run to fill his seat. Ray, a lawyer with 30 years of experience in civil and criminal practice, was new to politics. He expected to be the underdog. While all judicial races in the state are nonpartisan, we were not members of the dominant Republican Party. And we had lived in Montana for only 20 years, long enough to know we would still be considered newcomers.I told Ray: “They just need to get to know you. Then they’ll love you.”The district covers three rural counties, too big to gather all those voters together at a campaign event, so wooing them with Ray’s barbecued brisket was out. We would, we decided, go to them.Over six months, we knocked on the doors of over 8,000 registered voters from across the political spectrum. We didn’t know what to expect, but we certainly didn’t anticipate how eager people were to share very personal stories — not just eager, but, it seemed, compelled.There’s an immediate intimacy in having a conversation on someone’s doorstep. It is, after all, a threshold between public and private, but who would have thought that political canvassing would be so conducive to such unvarnished honesty? Perhaps because of the fracturing of our communities, we encountered an almost universal need to be witnessed and validated, to trust.Listening will not, alone, alleviate suffering — It has to be accompanied by, as a start, better access to public services. Neither is listening a magic cure for our political divisions. But I believe that any system in which some people feel they don’t matter is doomed to fail. I have no idea what it will take to heal our divisions, but I believe it will have something to do with sharing stories.Instead of talking about ourselves, we focused on the people we met. We would take note of some detail around the house, most often their gardens or their dogs — there were always dogs, big dogs and little dogs, an abundance of old and cherished dogs.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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      How a ‘Committed Partisan Warrior’ Came to Rethink the Political Wars

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      Bob Bauer, the personal attorney for President Biden and former White House counsel for President Barack Obama, is now wrestling with the win-at-all-costs nature of American politics.Once, after he executed a particularly tough-minded legal attack on Republicans, Bob Bauer remembers, a conservative magazine called him an “evil genius.” He took it as a compliment. “I was very proud of that,” he said. “I thought, That’s cool.”For decades, Democrats have turned to him as their lawyer to wage battles against the opposition. Reverse a House race they seemingly lost? Accuse the other side of criminal activity? Go to court to cut off Republican money flows? Find a legal justification for an ethically iffy strategy? Mr. Bauer was their man.But now Mr. Bauer, the personal attorney for President Biden and previously the White House counsel for President Barack Obama, is looking back and rethinking all that. Maybe, he says, that win-at-all-costs approach to politics is not really conducive to a healthy, functioning democracy. Maybe, in taking the “genius” part to heart, he should have been more concerned about the “evil” part.In a new book, “The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis,” to be published on Tuesday, Mr. Bauer takes stock of what he sees as the coarsening of American politics and examines the tension between ethical decisions and the “warrior mentality” that dominates the worlds of government and campaigns today. And in the process of thinking about what went wrong, Mr. Bauer, who calls himself a “committed partisan warrior,” has stopped to wrestle with his own role in the wars.“I tell stories that go from sort of youthful peccadilloes to more significant mistakes I think that I made as I thought about what it meant to win a policy or win an election, about how far you go to do that,” he said on a recent evening at the New-York Historical Society, where he discussed the book.“How do we make the politics better?” he asked. “How do we uphold our democratic norms by focusing on choices that people in positions of public responsibility have to make? And how do we make them in a way that is respectful of those norms and respectful of those institutions — as opposed to politics as blood sport, whatever it takes?”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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      J.D. Vance’s Strange Turn to 1876

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      The most favorable gloss you could give to Donald Trump’s effort to “Stop the Steal” is that it was an attempt to deal with real discrepancies in the 2020 presidential race as well as to satisfy those voters angry about the conduct of the election.This, in fact, was the argument made by Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio in a recent interview with my colleague Ross Douthat. Vance defended the conduct of the former president and his allies, and condemned the political class for its attempt to “try to take this very legitimate grievance over our most fundamental democratic act as a people, and completely suppress concerns about it.”Vance briefly analogized Trump’s attempt to contest the election to that of the disputed election of 1876, describing the latter as an example of what should have been done in 2020. “Here’s what this would’ve looked like if you really wanted to do this. You would’ve actually tried to go to the states that had problems; you would try to marshal alternative slates of electors, like they did in the election of 1876. And then you have to actually prosecute that case; you have to make an argument to the American people.”Let’s look at what happened in 1876. In that race, the Democrat, Gov. Samuel Tilden of New York, won a majority of the national popular vote but fell one vote short of a majority in the Electoral College. The Republican, Rutherford Hayes, was well behind in both. The trouble was 20 electoral votes in four states: Florida, Louisiana, Oregon and South Carolina. In the three Southern states, where the elections were marred by fraud, violence and anti-Black intimidation, officials from both parties certified rival slates of electors.Hayes believed, probably correctly, that had there been “a fair election in the South, our electoral vote would reach two hundred and that we should have a large popular majority.” As the historian Michael Fitzgibbon Holt noted in “By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876,” “Had blacks been allowed to vote freely, Hayes easily would have carried all three states in dispute, Mississippi, and perhaps Alabama as well.”In the weeks following the election, Democrats and Republicans in those states would fight fierce legal battles on behalf of their respective candidates. In South Carolina, where an election for governor was in dispute as well, Democrats threatened to seize the statehouse by force. The predominantly Black Republican majority in the state legislature tried to certify the Republican candidate as the winner, and Democrats went as far as convening a separate legislature, where they crowned their candidate, Wade Hampton III, the victor.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