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      Parents of 337 children separated at border under Trump still not found

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      US immigrationParents of 337 children separated at border under Trump still not foundActivists and Biden officials have helped reunite 861 children with their parents but 337 remain in limbo Maya YangThu 12 Aug 2021 12.06 EDTLast modified on Thu 12 Aug 2021 15.03 EDTUS officials still cannot find the parents of 337 children separated at the Mexico-border by the Trump administration.According to a new court filing released on Wednesday by the justice department and the American Civil Liberties Union, attorneys, activists and Biden officials have helped reunite 861 children with their parents but 337 remain in limbo.In February, the Biden administration launched the Family Reunification Task Force as part of its efforts to undo the Trump administration’s controversial “zero-tolerance” policy that called for the criminal prosecution of adults crossing the border. The policy resulted in thousands of families being separated and received severe backlash from human rights organizations and immigration advocacy groups. Forty-five separated children have been reunited with their families since the creation of FRTF.According to the filing, the 337 children fall into three groups. The first group consists of 250 children whose parents are believed to have been removed from the US after being separated from their children. The second group consists of approximately 75 children whose parents are believed to be in the US. The last group includes 12 children for whom the government has not provided a phone number for the parent, child, sponsor or attorney.In addition to attempts to reach parents, sponsors and attorneys by telephone, the taskforce has also engaged in on-the-ground searches for the parents, which have been largely focused in the countries of origin of the parents who were removed from the US after their separation from their children.Despite the government’s efforts to overhaul Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy, Biden has warned migrants not to enter the US. In an interview with ABC in March, Biden said his message to migrants was: “Don’t come over. Don’t leave your town or city or community.”According to Customs and Border Protection, the number of migrants that reached the southern border in July was more than 200,000, a figure that had not been seen in 20 years.Among the 200,000 migrants was a “record” 19,000 unaccompanied minors, according to David Shahoulian, assistant secretary for border and immigration policy.TopicsUS immigrationTrump administrationBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Reign of Terror review: from 9/11 to Trump by way of Snowden and Iraq

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      BooksReign of Terror review: from 9/11 to Trump by way of Snowden and IraqSpencer Ackerman, once of the Guardian, displays a masterful command of the facts but sometimes lets his prejudice show Lloyd GreenSun 8 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 8 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTThis 11 September will be the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the crash of Flight 93. Two wars have left 6,700 Americans dead and more than 53,000 wounded. After the Trump presidency, America roils in a cold civil war. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is on the move again. Saddam Hussein is dead and gone but Iraq remains “not free”.‘A madman with millions of followers’: what the new Trump books tell usRead moreIn other words, the war on terror has produced little for the US to brag about. In an April Pew poll, two-thirds of respondents rated international terror as a “big” problem, albeit one that trailed healthcare, Covid, unemployment and 10 more.Against this bleak backdrop, Spencer Ackerman delivers his first book under the subtitle “How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump”. It is part-chronicle, part-polemic. The author’s anger is understandable, to a point.Ackerman displays a masterful command of facts. No surprise. In 2014, he was part of the Guardian team that won a Pulitzer for reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks about the National Security Agency.Ackerman stuck with the topic. A contributing editor at the Daily Beast, he has also been its senior national security writer. Ackerman is fluent in discussing the so-called security state, and how it is a creature of both political parties.In the face of Snowden’s revelations, congressional leaders came out for the status quo. According to Harry Reid, then the Democratic Senate majority leader, senators who complained about being left in the dark about the NSA had only themselves to blame. All other Americans were to sit down and shut up.Nancy Pelosi, then House minority leader and a persistent critic of the Patriot Act, a chief vehicle for surveillance powers, declined to criticize Barack Obama or high-tech intrusion in general. Instead, she called for Snowden’s prosecution. He made Russia his home.Ackerman notes that the American Civil Liberties Union and Rand Paul, Kentucky’s junior senator, were notable exceptions to the rule. At the time, Paul remarked: “When you collect it from a billion phone calls a day, even if you say you’re going to keep the name private, the possibility for abuse is enormous.”Ackerman also shines a light on how the far right played an outsized role in domestic terrorism before and after 9/11, reminding us of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, teasing out McVeigh’s ties to other white nationalists.The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January this year is one more chapter in the story. Trump falsely claimed Antifa, leftwing radicals, were the real culprits. The roster of those under indictment reveals a very different story.In congressional testimony in April, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, described “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” as the greatest domestic threat. Garland also singled out “those who advocate for the superiority of the white race”.Chad Wolf, Trump’s acting homeland security chief, made a similar point last fall. Of course, his boss wasn’t listening.Ackerman delves meticulously into the blowback resulting from the war on terror. Unfortunately, he downplays how the grudges and enmities of the old country have been magnified by key social forces, immigration chief among them.Joe Biden, then vice-president, condemned the Boston Marathon bombers as “knock-off jihadists”. But Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev had received asylum. The immigrant population stands near a record high and the US fertility rate is in retrograde. On the right, that is a combustible combination. When Tucker Carlson is in Hungary, singing the praises of Viktor Orbán, the past is never too far away.In his effort to draw as straight a line as possible between the war on terror and the rise of Trump, Ackerman can overplay his hand. Racism, nativism and disdain for the other were not the sole drivers of Trump’s win, much as Islamophobia was not the sole cause of the Iraq war, a conflict Ackerman acknowledges he initially supported.Trump’s victory was also about an uneven economic recovery and, when it came to America’s wars, who did the fighting and dying. Overwhelmingly, it wasn’t the offspring of coastal elites. In 2016, there was a notable correlation between battlefield casualties and support for Trump.According to Douglas L Kriner of Boston University and Francis X Shen of the University of Minnesota, “Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan could very well have been winners for [Hillary] Clinton if their war casualties were lower.” Residents of red states are more than 20% more likely to join the military. Denizens of blue America punch way above their weight when it comes to going to college.Ackerman, a graduate of New York’s hyper-meritocratic Bronx High School of Science, bares his own class prejudices much in the way Clinton did at a notorious Wall Street fundraiser. Hillary dunked on the “Deplorables”. Ackerman goes after those he sees as socially undesirable.In his telling, Trump is “an amalgam of no less than four of the worst kinds of New Yorkers”. According to his taxonomy, those are “outer-borough whites”, wealth vampires, dignity-free media strivers and landlords.I Alone Can Fix It: Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker on their Trump bestsellerRead moreThis year, many of those “outer-borough whites” voted for a Black candidate, Eric Adams, in the Democratic mayoral primary. Adams, Brooklyn’s borough president, is a former police captain.The real estate industry is a critical part of the city economy. Strivers have been here since the Dutch came onshore. As for “wealth vampires” – come on, really?The city’s economy reels. Murder is way up. Law and order matters. Ackerman’s disdain is misdirected.Nationally, the security state is not going to just disappear. But not all is gloom and doom. In a break with Obama and Trump, the Biden White House has pledged to no longer go gunning for reporters over leaks.The US is leaving Afghanistan. Unlike Trump, Biden was not dissuaded. And last Wednesday, the Senate foreign relations committee voted to end the 1991 and 2002 authorizations of use of military force in Iraq. Even the leviathan can budge.TopicsBooksSeptember 11 2001Donald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsreviewsReuse this content More

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      US justice department to appeal Daca court decision, says Biden

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      US immigrationUS justice department to appeal Daca court decision, says BidenTexas federal judge’s ruling prevents government from approving new applications but doesn’t affect current recipients Victoria BekiempisSat 17 Jul 2021 11.25 EDTLast modified on Sat 17 Jul 2021 11.44 EDTJoe Biden has said the US Department of Justice intends on appealing a new court decision that effectively halts an Obama-era program aimed at protecting young immigrants from deportation.Texas federal judge Andrew Hanen on Friday deemed illegal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program. This program prevents the deportation of immigrants who were brought to the US unlawfully as children, known as “Dreamers”.Texas borderlands too often a photo op for politicians pushing stereotypesRead moreThis ruling bars the government from approving any new applications – in other words, suspending Daca. For now, Daca is preserved for the more than 616,000 people enrolled in the program until other courts weigh in. Hanen’s decision is also in favor of the eight other conservative states suing to thwart Daca.“Yesterday’s federal court ruling is deeply disappointing. While the court’s order does not now affect current Daca recipients, this decision nonetheless relegates hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to an uncertain future,” the president’s statement said.“The Department of Justice intends to appeal this decision in order to preserve and fortify Daca. And, as the court recognized, the Department of Homeland Security plans to issue a proposed rule concerning Daca in the near future.”Daca has come under fire from conservatives since its creation in 2012. Texas in 2018 requested to halt the program through a preliminary injunction.While Hanen denied this request, his ruling then appears to have presaged. Hanen stated that he believed Daca, as instituted, was probably unconstitutional without Congress’s approval.Hanen also decided in 2015 that Barack Obama could not broaden Daca protections or implement a program that protected Dreamers’ parents.In September 2017, the Trump administration announced that it planned to end Daca, throwing recipients into turmoil. Following extensive legal battles, the US supreme court blocked Donald Trump’s efforts.Biden has pushed for Daca to become permanent, and vowed on the campaign trail that he would make the program permanent. While the US House green-lit legislation in March that created a path toward citizenship for Dreamers, the measure has languished in the Senate.“In 2012, the Obama-Biden administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) policy, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to remain in the United States, to live, study and work in our communities. Nine years later, Congress has not acted to provide a path to citizenship for Dreamers,” Biden’s statement also said.“But only Congress can ensure a permanent solution by granting a path to citizenship for Dreamers that will provide the certainty and stability that these young people need and deserve. I have repeatedly called on Congress to pass the American Dream and Promise Act, and I now renew that call with the greatest urgency.“It is my fervent hope that through reconciliation or other means, Congress will finally provide security to all Dreamers, who have lived too long in fear,” Biden said.The Associated Press contributed to this reportTopicsUS immigrationUS politicsTexasJoe BidenLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Texas borderlands too often a photo op for politicians pushing stereotypes

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      Cartas de la fronteraTexasTexas borderlands too often a photo op for politicians pushing stereotypesUbiquitous political border tours fixate on immigration, missing the complex character and needs of the region Carlos SanchezThu 8 Jul 2021 14.54 EDTLast modified on Thu 8 Jul 2021 15.14 EDTEdward Marquez, the father of my classmate when I was growing up, became a border community hero in 1994 when, as a state district judge from El Paso, he initiated a rare legal maneuver that resonated along the Texas-Mexico border. Fed up with a long history of disparate funding and state services to border communities from the state capital in Austin, he convened a court of criminal inquiry – a weapon in the legal arsenal that is available when a judge has evidence that a prosecutor fell short of pursuing a criminal case and justice was not being served.Welcome to the US southern border: same country, different planetRead moreIn this instance, it was evidence of historical neglect for Texas border communities. The unprecedented court of inquiry highlighted funding disparities to border communities such as a $43 per capita allotment to El Paso in state highway funds compared with as much as $220 per capita for other Texas cities. State leaders were subpoenaed to testify about the funding disparities, always with the threat that Judge Marquez had the power to indict them if he found compelling evidence that they had violated the rights of border residents under the state’s equal protection clause.Ultimately, an embarrassed Democratic administration, led by the then governor, Ann Richards, ensured additional funding went to border cities like El Paso and the legacy of Judge Marquez was cemented in history.The political reality that the judge brought to national attention nearly three decades ago, however, continues to plague border communities and has created an uncomfortable political paradox: the communities need the attention of state and national policymakers to highlight massive problems with poverty, health issues and educational attainment. But whenever this region draws international attention, that attention has little to do with these social issues and everything to do with the heated debate over immigration.Unfortunately, this paradox is as old as the border itself and feeds into negative stereotypes about the safety of this region, while acting as an economic drag. In 2016, McAllen, in south Texas, was selected by an amateur sports federation as a two-year venue for a statewide competition that typically attracts thousands of young athletes . Texas cities yearn to host the event because as many as 20,000 or more parents and kids show up to watch and compete – all the while ringing up hefty hotel and food bills that contribute to the local economy.But before the Games of Texas, as it’s called, began that year, south Texas got word that parents in different parts of the state were concerned about border violence. While Mexican drug cartels were often listed as the main source of concern, another immigration surge was well under way. Word got around that some parents were even talking about organizing spinoff games in north Texas to avoid having to expose their families to the treachery of the south Texas borderlands.Community leaders launched a counter-offensive, writing columns for newspapers in other parts of the state and vowing to show off the region’s family spirit. Parents who braved the trip to south Texas left that first year impressed with the local hospitality, and any widespread concern about the dangers of the region seemed to disappear the next year.Virtually every year, the Democratic border congressman Henry Cuellar issues a press statement following the annual release of the FBI Uniform Crime Report to demonstrate the safety of border communities relative to other cities across Texas and the nation.But too often, elected officials seeking a quick photo opportunity politicize the border rather than address the needs of its communities. The local joke is that if you’re a Republican a border tour requires a ride up the Rio Grande on a state-owned, armored plated gunboat (federal vessels are much less ominous looking and rarely make the photo-op cut). But if you’re a Democrat, the border tour entails a must-see-and-be-seen visit to a local facility that provides humanitarian services to migrants.When the then speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, visited the border in 2017, federal authorities approached landowners along the Rio Grande to ask them to keep the media off their property, trying unsuccessfully to make private a huge swath of international boundary.Sometimes it’s best to view these border tours with a sense of levity. One go-to place to visit is the county-owned Anzalduas park, a birdwatching paradise on the banks of the Rio Grande, which provides a magnificent vista overlooking Mexico. When President Trump visited in January 2019, US Customs and Border Protection attended with all its glorious, mechanized immigrant-fighting vehicles on display.But it is the Texas Republican senator John Cornyn (to his credit, a frequent border community visitor) who will live in infamy after he visited the park to decry the dangers of immigration in front of media cameras. His timing was slightly off; as he spoke, journalists witnessed the launching from the Mexican shore of a double-decker party boat touring the beautiful river, accompanied by festive music.Trump’s most recent visit to the border, in June, shows how misleading such tours can be. The newly elected mayor of McAllen was the only local elected official who toured the wall with Trump and the Texas governor, Greg Abbott. Little beyond the wall and the dangers of the migrants were mentioned.For business and political leaders along the border, these visits offer little by way of solution and serve only to further inflame passions about immigration. In a rare moment when a large group of US senators allowed a local elected official to speak about the community, the official urged the members of Congress to overhaul existing immigration laws because the current system is broken.“We can’t do that until we stop these immigrants from crossing,” one senator told the local official. And soon that particular border tour ended – after the senators met with the media and posed for a few photos near the river.Carlos Sanchez is director of public affairs for Hidalgo county, Texas. He was a journalist for 37 years and has worked at the Washington Post and Texas Monthly magazine, as well as eight other newsroomsTopicsTexasCartas de la fronteraUS politicsUS immigrationfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Kamala Harris takes heat from both sides in daunting border visit

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      The sun beat down on the 30ft border fence that separates El Paso, Texas from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as temperatures headed towards 100F on the southern border that stands as a symbol for so much in American politics.The heat was also on for Vice-President Kamala Harris, who was making her first trip to the border since being tasked with immigration policy by Joe Biden more than three months ago.It is not an easy job. She was handed one of the toughest issues in American politics and one that has plagued successive American presidents for several decades, no matter what political party was occupying the White House.Criticism for Harris came from both sides of the political aisle for the length of time it took her to make the trip on Friday. More attacks came from Donald Trump, who had accepted an offer from Texas’ rightwing governor Greg Abbott to tour the border ahead of an attempt by Republican-run Texas to fund the completion of a border wall. “If Governor Abbott and I weren’t going there next week, she would have never gone!” Trump said.But Trump’s criticism of Harris was hardly the only voice raised against her as she seeks to come to grips with immigration and border security. She was also criticized by immigration activists and many on the left of the Democratic party for the message she delivered during an early June visit to Guatemala.“Do not come. Do not come,” she said. “I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back.”The blunt message was ill-received by those who pointed out that Harris’ parents were also immigrants.“[Her comments] reinforced the years of attacks on the rights of refugees and asylum seekers by the previous administration,” said Dylan Corbett, the director of a local non-profit organization that focuses on immigration policies and aiding migrants in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. “The message should be: ‘How can we, together, build a future where your children don’t have to migrate?’”After touring a border patrol facility to kick off her visit, Harris made an unannounced stop at the Paso Del Norte port of entry, a busy international bridge that connects the downtown centers of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.While there, she met with five girls detained at the bridge’s processing center, aged between nine and 16 and all from Central America. The meeting was closed to the press, but her office described the meeting as positive, with the girls calling Harris an inspiration and drawing photos for her.Approximately 1,600 children just like those girls are being housed in shelters at the US army’s Fort Bliss in El Paso, according to US media, where there are lengthy stays, poor conditions and infrequent meetings with lawyers.But a visit to the controversial shelter on Fort Bliss was not part of the vice-president’s visit, despite the announcement of an investigation of the housing for migrant children.Across the street from her meeting with the girls, a small group of immigration advocates chanted from the corner, “Si, se puede!” after Harris left. She headed back to the airport, where she met with the leaders of immigrants rights organizations. The focus of their discussion was reported as the root causes and drivers of immigration to the United States.Behind the talk, though, is a brutal reality.The trip from Central America for many immigrants is long and potentially lethal, especially for children. There are deaths from heat stroke as migrants trek through triple-digit desert heat, or fall from the 30ft high border wall already in place in high-traffic areas along the international line.Migrants who survive that fall are just a few of the people who are taken to a local non-profit organization, Annunciation House, which operates as a network of shelters, helping to connect migrants with family in the States and legal representation for asylum cases.The injuries range from fractured ankles to head injuries that have left a woman quadriplegic, according to the director of Annunciation House, Ruben Garcia.“We have such little appreciation for what they’re risking to be safe, to put food on the table,” Garcia said. “These people aren’t coming here because they want to put jacuzzis in their houses.”Nor is getting to the border, or even across it, the end of the story. Should migrants survive the trip from their home countries, through Mexico and across the border into the US, in most cases, they are not currently allowed to stay in the US, even when seeking asylum.Nearly 100,000 migrants have been expelled from El Paso, Texas, into Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, since October, according to data provided by the border patrol. The expulsions are still taking place under a policy known as Title 42, implemented by the Trump administration. Thus far, Title 42 has been kept in place by the Biden administration despite outcry from immigration organizations.“The expulsions under Title 42 are still rampant,” Garcia said.The policy falls under the umbrella of public health and was implemented as a response to Covid-19. “We all know it had nothing to do with the pandemic, it had to do with immigration control,” Garcia said. “I tell people: Donald Trump did get his wall. It’s called Title 42.”There was little sign Harris planned to end that. Nor is there much doubt that the debate over immigration and the border in the US will remain toxic after a Trump era when many Republicans – including the former president – made openly racist statements about immigrants.“In the United States, there is an incredibly significant population that doesn’t want you, they speak extremely derogatorily about you,” said Garcia. “They wouldn’t care if you die on the way, they wouldn’t care if you fell off the wall and broke your back.”Harris sought to draw a little of that poison on her trip. “Let’s not lose sight that we’re talking about human beings,” she said.After meeting with Harris, Linda Rivas, the executive director of Las Americas, a non-profit organization that provides legal representation during immigration processes, said she was grateful to share the stories of her clients with the vice-president but also called for more action. “The Biden-Harris administration must improve the asylum process and end the cruel border policies that ripped families apart,” Rivas said.But as the policy debate continues and Harris mulls her next steps, the heat is unlikely to relent – either in US politics or at the sweltering border itself.In a statement last week, US Customs and Border Protection described crossing the border in the desert in the summer. “The terrain along the border is extreme, the summer heat is severe, and the miles of desert migrants must hike after crossing the border in many areas are unforgiving,” it said.At the moment, not much looks likely to change that. 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      Kamala Harris says US-Mexico border situation is ‘tough’ but claims progress

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      Kamala Harris described the situation as “tough” at the US-Mexico border where migrants are being held in detention and routinely expelled before their pleas for sanctuary can be heard, as on Friday she made her first visit there as vice-president.In El Paso, west Texas, she met with five girls, aged between nine and 16, who had been held at a Customs and Border Protection processing center after crossing the border.She then visited the border itself at the nearby Paso del Norte port of entry, across from the Mexican city of Juárez, where there are frequently scenes of misery and chaos as people huddle in peril there and at other points along the border, waiting for a chance to be allowed to make a legal case to be in the US.“We inherited a tough situation,” Harris said during a meeting with faith-based organizations, as well as shelter and legal service providers.She added: “In five months we’ve made progress, but there’s still more work to be done.”She is tasked with addressing causes of migration, particularly from Central America, which range from violence, poverty and corruption to climate change.“The stories that I heard today reinforce the nature of those root causes,” she said.Meanwhile, the Biden administration is looking into conditions for migrant children at the Fort Bliss army base in El Paso, it was announced during Harris’s journey to the border, amid testimonials presented in court that conditions are desperate.Symone Sanders, Harris’s spokeswoman, told reporters aboard Air Force Two en route that Joe Biden and Harris “have instructed [homeland security secretary Xavier] Becerra to do a thorough investigation” of the conditions where children are being held in tents at the military facility.“The administration is taking this very seriously. Extremely seriously,” Sanders said.However, a White House spokesman later sent a statement that conditions at Fort Bliss had improved and that: “HHS [the health and human services department] has already been looking into [the] facility on their own. At no time did The White House recommend a probe of the facility.”Harris faced the most politically challenging moment of her vice-presidency during her visit, as part of her role leading the Biden administration’s response to recent increases in families and unaccompanied children migrating across the US-Mexico border.Harris was asked by a reporter why “right now was the right time” to make her first trip to the border.She replied that it was not her first trip, although it is her first trip as vice-president and since Joe Biden put her in charge of solving immigration and migration problems.After taking questions, Harris was briefed by border patrol on the agency’s efforts to computerize records to speed up processing of migrants’ legal cases. Many are seeking asylum from human rights violations, and children, in particular, aim to reunite with family members already in the US while their cases are dealt with.Harris did not visit the secure facilities at Fort Bliss. Last month, Becerra announced he was walking back plans to house thousands of children younger than 12 there, after Democratic lawmakers and immigration activists protested that the facility did not meet basic child welfare standards.The temporary shelter is one of a dozen or so makeshift sites the government set up to provide more capacity beyond the traditional, licensed shelters that the health and human services department oversees.The vice-president has faced bipartisan criticism for declining to make the trip thus far , as well as remarks on her trip to Guatemala, when she starkly spelled out the Biden administration’s message to those seeking sanctuary in the US: “Don’t come.”Those comments “reinforced the years of attacks on the rights of refugees and asylum seekers by the previous administration”, Dylan Corbett, the director of a local non-profit organization that focuses on immigration policies and aiding migrants in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, told the Guardian.With Donald Trump visiting the area less than a week after Harris and the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, making increasingly rightwing remarks about immigration, Republicans will be watching the vice-president’s visit closely for fodder for further attacks.Aside from party politics, CBP, the federal agency, recently reported nine deaths of migrants along the border just in the El Paso sector, but said they were only reporting the number of deaths where agents find the deceased individual or are involved in an emergency response. The actual number is likely to be higher.Those are deaths such as by heatstroke as migrants trek through triple-digit desert heat, or falls from the 30t-high border wall.“We have such little appreciation for what they’re risking to be safe, to put food on the table,” Ruben Garcia, the director of the Annunciation House network of shelters in the area, said. “These people aren’t coming here because they want to put jacuzzis in their houses.”Biden’s first few months in office have seen record numbers of migrants attempting to cross the border.CBP recorded more than 180,000 encounters on the Mexican border in May, the most since March 2000.Those numbers were boosted by a coronavirus pandemic-related ban on the legal facility for seeking asylum from persecution, a rule called title 42 begun by Trump and continued by Biden that allows most people unlawfully crossing the border to be summarily expelled into Mexico, at their peril.Harris was joined on the trip by the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin and local Democratic congresswoman Veronica Escobar.Escobar called El Paso the new Ellis Island, the facility in New York harbor that processed millions of migrants to the US a century ago. Looking forward to welcoming @VP Harris to El Paso – America’s new Ellis Island.As I told VP last March, El Paso has chosen to employ compassion toward those seeking refuge, and her visit will provide key context for her diplomatic efforts to address root causes of migration.— Rep. Veronica Escobar (@RepEscobar) June 24, 2021
      Harris did not visit Fort Bliss on Friday, nor the memorial to victims of the mass shooting by a man professing hatred of immigrants, at an area Walmart store in 2019.Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a Latino civil rights organization, called Harris’s visit “a day late and a dollar short”. More

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      US ends Trump-era asylum rules for immigrants fleeing violence

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      The US government on Wednesday ended two Trump administration policies that made it harder for immigrants fleeing violence to qualify for asylum, especially Central Americans. Attorney general Merrick Garland issued a new policy saying immigration judges should cease following the Trump-era rules that made it tough for immigrants who faced domestic or gang violence to win asylum in the United States. The move could make it easier for them to win their cases for humanitarian protection and was widely celebrated by immigrant advocates. “The significance of this cannot be overstated,” said Kate Melloy Goettel, legal director of litigation at the American Immigration Council. “This was one of the worst anti-asylum decisions under the Trump era, and this is a really important first step in undoing that.” Garland said he was making the changes after President Joe Biden ordered his office and the Department of Homeland Security to draft rules addressing complex issues in immigration law about groups of people who should qualify for asylum. The changes come as US immigration authorities have reported unusually high numbers of encounters with migrants at the southern border. In April, border officials reported the highest number of encounters in more than 20 years, though many migrants were repeat crossers who previously had been expelled from the country under pandemic-related powers. The number of children crossing the border alone also has been hovering at all-time highs. Many Central Americans arrive on the border fleeing gang violence in their countries. But it isn’t easy to qualify for asylum under US immigration laws, and the Trump-era policies made it that much harder. More than half of asylum cases decided by the immigration courts in the 2020 fiscal year were denials, according to data from the department of justice’s executive office for immigration review. Four years earlier, it was about one in five cases. In the current fiscal year, people from countries such as Russia and Cameroon have seen higher asylum grant rates in the immigration courts than people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the data shows. One of the Trump administration policies was aimed at migrants who were fleeing violence from non-state actors, such as gangs, while the other affected those who felt they were being targeted in their countries because of their family ties, said Jason Dzubow, an immigration attorney in Washington who focuses on asylum. Dzubow said he recently represented a Salvadoran family in which the husband was killed and gang members started coming after his children. While Dzubow argued they were in danger because of their family ties, he said the immigration judge denied the case, citing the Trump-era decision among the reasons. Dzubow welcomed the change but said he doesn’t expect to suddenly see large numbers of Central Americans winning their asylum cases, which remain difficult under US law. “I don’t expect it is going to open the floodgates, and all of a sudden everyone from Central America can win their cases. Those cases are very burdensome and difficult,” he said. “We need to make a decision: do we want to protect these people?” More