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      Democrats agree Biden had to act on immigration – but they’re split over his asylum order

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      Democratic mayors, governors and members of Congress from the south-west to the north-east stood beside Joe Biden at the White House, when he unveiled an executive order temporarily sealing the US-Mexico border to most asylum seekers – the most restrictive immigration policy of his presidency.“We must face a simple truth,” the US president said. “To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now.”Those around him agreed, applauding the directive as a welcome, if belated, step. Yet for many Democrats not in attendance, the moment marked an astonishing retreat from just four years ago, when the president campaigned on dismantling the incendiary immigration policies of Donald Trump.Most Democrats accept that Biden had to do something to address an issue that has become one of his biggest political vulnerabilities. But the party, once united in furious opposition to Trump’s asylum clampdown, now finds itself divided over his course of action, split on both the substance of the policy and the wisdom politics.Biden is once again campaigning for the presidency against Trump, but the political climate has changed demonstrably.Unprecedented levels of migration at the south-west border, fueled by poverty, political upheaval, climate change and violence and amplified by incendiary Republican rhetoric, have rattled Americans. Polls show border security is a top – sometimes the top – concern among US voters this election season.The action, designed to deter illegal border crossings, was an attempt by the Biden administration to confront those concerns. But it also invited unwelcome comparisons to his predecessor, whose policies he was accused of “reviving” in a legal challenge brought last week by the American Civil Liberties Union.“It violates fundamental American values of who we say we are – and puts people in danger,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy organization. “It’s part of a trap that the Democrats are falling into – they’re buying the narrative the right is pushing on immigration.”For three years, Republicans have accused Biden of ignoring mounting concern over the south-west border, which they falsely claim is under “invasion”. But as the humanitarian situation has worsened, he has also been confronted by criticism from Democratic mayors and governors pleading for more federal help managing the record number of people arriving in their cities and states, especially during peaks in 2022 and 2023.Biden moved to act unilaterally after Republicans blocked – at Trump’s behest – an attempt to pass a bipartisan bill to restrict asylum. Congress also rejected a multibillion-dollar budget request from the White House for additional resources to manage the situation, raising questions about how authorities will enforce the new rule.Supporters of Biden’s latest policy, including border-state and swing-state Democrats, say the action will deter illegal immigration by encouraging people to seek asylum in an “orderly” manner at legal ports of entry. Even if the rule is blocked by the courts, they are ready to make the case to voters that Biden took decisive action when Republicans would not.“We all want order at the border,” said New York representative Tom Suozzi, a Democrat who flipped a House seat in a special election earlier this year after campaigning on more border security. “The American people want us to deal with immigration.”But progressives, immigration-rights advocates and some Hispanic leaders say that the new order not only suspends long-standing guarantees that anyone who reaches US soil has the right to seek asylum, it undermines American values. The president’s embrace of punitive policies, they argue, risks losing the support of key parts of his coalition.Biden knew the order would infuriate corners of his party – he addressed them directly in his White House remarks earlier this month, saying the goodwill of the American people was “wearing thin”.“Doing nothing is not an option,” he said. “We have to act.”But advocates and progressives say he can do more to protect undocumented immigrants who have lived in the country for decades, some for nearly their entire lives.They are urging Biden to use his bully pulpit to move the immigration fight beyond the border by using his presidential authority to shield more immigrants from deportation and create avenues for them to work legally. The White House is reportedly considering a future action that would protect undocumented spouses of American citizens from deportation.Last week the Biden campaign released a new ad marking the 12th anniversary of Daca – the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program established by the Obama White House in 2012 – as the Democrat runs for re-election and looks for ways to shore up support from Latino voters.The program provides temporary work permits and reprieves from deportation for hundreds of thousands of Dreamers, people brought without permission to the US as children.In the “Spanglish” ad, Dreamers tout a recent move by the Biden administration to extend health care coverage to Daca recipients while warning that Trump has threatened to end the program.“Ultimately, Congress needs to act to reform our immigration system,” Cárdenas said. “But until then, we need Biden doing everything he can to show that he still believes what he promised he would do when he came into office.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden’s policy, which took effect immediately, seeks to deter illegal immigration by temporarily blocking people who cross the US border outside lawful ports of entry from claiming asylum, with some exceptions. The order lifts when daily arrests for illegal crossing from Mexico fall to 1,500 per day across a seven-day average. The last time crossings fell below that threshold was in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic halted migration.The number of illegal border crossings has fallen in recent months, due in part to stepped-up Mexican enforcement and seasonal trends. But officials say the level is still elevated, and worry the trend could reverse as the weather cools and a new Mexican president takes power weeks before the November election.Despite its failure, the bipartisan border security deal, negotiated with the blessing of the White House, underscored just how far to the right the immigration debate in Washington has shifted.The legislation included a wishlist of Republican border security demands aimed at keeping people out. Absent were any long-sought Democratic aspirations of expanding pathways to citizenship and work visas for the millions of undocumented people living in the US. Instead, Democrats tied the border deal to a foreign aid package opposed by conservatives.“That changed the contours of what had been a widely understood immigration framework,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, immigration policy director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, adding: “I’m not sure what the consensus or compromise border solution is anymore.”On the campaign trail, Democrats hope to capitalize on Republican resistance to the border deal by casting Trump as unserious about addressing illegal immigration at the border, his signature issue. But it may prove difficult for Biden to make inroads on what has long been one of the country’s most polarizing political issues.Polls consistently show deep public disapproval of how Biden has handled the border, with voters giving Trump, who has also faced sharp criticism for his immigration plans, a wide advantage.A CBS News poll found broad public support for the president’s executive order, including among Republicans, but they also believed illegal border crossings were more likely to fall under Trump than Biden.And a new Monmouth University poll last week found Biden’s standing practically unchanged by the action, with roughly half of Americans – 46% – saying it did not go far enough, compared with 31% who said it was about right. Just 17% said the order went too far.On Wednesday, a coalition of immigrant-advocacy groups led by the ACLU sued the Biden administration over the directive.“By enacting an asylum ban that is legally indistinguishable from the Trump ban we successfully blocked, we were left with no choice but to file this lawsuit,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the ACLU.The administration anticipated legal challenges. “We stand by the legality of what we have done,” the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, said in a Sunday interview with ABC, adding that he would have preferred for Congress to act.Last week, a group of 18 progressive members of Congress sent a letter to Mayorkas asking the administration to reconsider the asylum rule on the grounds that it “puts asylum seekers at grave risk of unlawful removal and return to harm”.Despite their disappointment, Biden’s Democratic critics say Trump – who has said undocumented immigrants “poison the blood of our country” and is planning a sweeping mass-deportation campaign in a potential second term – would be far more dangerous.“The more American voters focus on the anti-immigrant, extremist policies that the right is pushing, the more they’re going to reject that vision,” Cárdenas said. But, she added: “Americans want to know, what’s the plan? What’s the strategy? What’s the vision? And I think it will serve Biden and Democrats better if they have an answer to the question of what it is they are for.” More

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      Drill, baby, drill … if you haven’t passed out from heatstroke

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      Hello!More than a dozen Donald Trump supporters collapsed at his rallies amid record high temperatures in the south-west in recent days – presumably missing Trump’s promise at the gatherings to gut Biden’s environmental policies and “drill, baby, drill”. So what would a Trump administration mean for those who hope the world can limit global heating and the climate crisis? We’ll take a look after the headlines.Here’s what you need to know …1. Hunter Biden convicted of gun chargesHunter Biden, the president’s son who has become a bete noire for Republicans, was found guilty of three charges relating to buying a gun while being a user of crack cocaine. Rightwing politicians and media have accused Hunter and his father of various corrupt acts, but a Republican-led House committee spent a year investigating the pair and failed to come up with any corruption charges. The judge will now decide on Hunter Biden’s punishment: the crimes are punishable by up to 25 years in prison, although a lesser sentence is expected.2. Trump awaits his fateTrump was interviewed by probation officers on Monday, ahead of his sentencing in July. The probation interview typically serves to prepare a report on a convicted individual, which will then be considered by the judge when issuing sentence – which in this case could, in theory, include a prison sentence. Trump was convicted of 34 felony crimes related to him falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor who claims they had an affair. He is due to be sentenced on 11 July.3. A warning for Republicans?Ohio’s sixth district went to Trump by 29 points in 2020 – but in a special election on Tuesday night, Republican candidate Michael Rulli triumphed by just nine points, which could suggest a lack of enthusiasm among voters. Elsewhere, Trump-endorsed candidates won primary elections in Nevada and South Carolina, including Nancy Mace, a congresswoman involved in the effort to remove Kevin McCarthy as House speaker: Mace had faced a vengeance-led challenge from a McCarthy-backed candidate, but won comfortably.Trump supporters drop in extreme heat waiting for their climate-denying kingpinView image in fullscreenLast week Trump and his campaign managed to send 17 supporters to the hospital after people wilted in 100F heat at his rallies in Arizona and Nevada. At the Phoenix event, Trumpers were forced to line up outside a megachurch venue for hours in the hot sun, and the stricken received only a brief mention from their leader, with Trump suggesting that people will not “be so thrilled” about waiting outside.The south-west is being blasted by record-breaking heat, with temperatures of 45C (113F) in the last week. Half of Arizona and Nevada were under heat warnings over the weekend, and given that extreme heat is accepted to be a consequence of the climate emergency, we might have expected a presidential candidate to talk up environmental efforts to limit global heating.Nah.“[Biden has] got windmills all over the place, every time you see a windmill going up you need tremendous subsidy, now it kills your birds, it ruins your landscape, ruins your value, if you have a house and you can see a windmill your house is worth half,” Trump told the crowd in Phoenix.He added: “We’re going to drill, baby, drill.”My colleagues Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor, who cover the environment, have previously reported on the Trump team’s plans to increase fossil fuel production in “a frenzy” of oil and gas drilling, while sidelining government climate scientists. In Phoenix, Trump repeated his pledge to scrap key parts of Biden’s climate plans, including rebates for people who buy electric vehicles. And just last week it emerged that Trump had promised lucrative tax favors to fossil fuel executives if they gave his campaign $1bn.Biden, for his campaign, has touted the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested a record $278bn in moving towards renewable energy sources, and in March claimed: “I’m taking the most significant action on climate ever in the history of the world.”But Oliver and Nina Lakhani also reported that Biden is weakening some of his previous climate plans – delaying a regulation to reduce emissions from gas power plans, and relaxing rules about how much carbon cars can emit.Both sides, then, could be doing more. But it’s worth taking into account one analysis that found a second Trump presidency could lead to an additional 4bn tons of US emissions by 2030.By the way: Trump has never been a fan of windfarms, and in May he said would scrap offshore wind projects on “day one” of his presidency. Part of Trump’s reasoning seems to be his incorrect belief that wind turbines cause cancer, while he has previously claimed – also wrongly – that wind turbines lead to whale deaths by making them “batty”.Of course, this wasn’t the first time Trump has expressed an interest in aquatic life, because …Shark!View image in fullscreen… the presidential hopeful has a fascination with, and loathing of, sharks. Trump has previously tweeted that he ranks sharks alongside the “losers and haters of the world”, while Stormy Daniels, the porn star whose silence Trump bought (and was convicted of fudging business accounts to pay for), has said Trump is “obsessed with sharks”. Daniels said he went as far to say: “I hope all the sharks die.”Clearly sharks were still on Trump’s mind this week. In Vegas, he went on a typically meandering monologue, musing whether it would be better to stay on board a sinking electric boat or to jump into shark-infested waters.“You know what I’d do if there was a shark, or you get electrocuted?” Trump asked the crowd. “I’d take electrocution every single time.” Please, please watch the full video.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWho had the worst week: Jesus ChristView image in fullscreenRiding high after his Easter resurrection, things took a turn for the worse for the Son of God this week when he was compared – and not for the first time – to Donald Trump.“The Democrats and the fake news media want to constantly talk about ‘President Trump is a convicted felon’,” Marjorie Taylor Greene told a crowd. “Well, you want to know something? The man that I worship is also a convicted felon. And he was murdered on a Roman cross.”Trump has previously encouraged the comparison to Jesus.Out and about: El PasoView image in fullscreen“A gut punch.” “Political theater.” “Nonsensical.”That was the reaction from advocates in El Paso the day after Joe Biden announced a clampdown on asylum. Many worried about how the order would affect migrants fleeing violence, poverty and persecution in their home countries.I spoke with them as part of an incredibly well-timed immigration reporting workshop in El Paso, a historically liberal city in west Texas, where Spanish and English are spoken interchangeably and the border is a line many cross daily for work, school or to grab a bite.Many were skeptical. Juan Acereto Cervera, an adviser to the mayor of Juárez, the Mexican city across the border from El Paso, said the policy would do little to stop people from seeking a better life elsewhere.“Nothing’s going to stop the migration, nothing,” he said.That is the conundrum Biden faces as he tries to address an issue that poses both a serious policy challenge and a serious political threat to his re-election campaign.– Lauren Gambino, political correspondent, El Paso, TexasBiggest lie: Charlie KirkView image in fullscreenJoe Biden’s acceptance of the legal process in his son Hunter’s criminal case, and a promise that he wouldn’t pardon him, stands in contrast to how Trump reacted after his conviction of 34 felonies – which the former president has frequently and falsely claimed was orchestrated by the Biden administration.It also provides an example against the Republican-pushed claim that the elder Biden can, and does, rig the courts against Trump. Wouldn’t he have saved his own son?Of course not, say Trump allies, who have started to push a new conspiracy about the Hunter Biden conviction.“This is a fake trial trying to make the justice system appear ‘balanced’,” said Charlie Kirk, the leader of conservative youth group Turning Point USA. “Don’t fall for it.” More

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      Mayorkas insists immigration order not at odds with Biden’s campaign promise

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      The US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, defended both the timing and substance of Joe Biden’s new executive order to restrict immigration at the southern border, as the president faces criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike over the measure.The order, issued on Tuesday, tells officials to shut down asylum requests once the average number of encounters between legal ports of entry reaches 2,500 or more. If the number of encounters falls to 1,500 or fewer for seven consecutive days, the border would reopen two weeks later.During an interview on ABC News’s This Week, host Martha Raddatz noted that crossings had never reached the threshold of falling to 1,500 or fewer during Biden’s presidency – and Mayorkas declined to say whether he expected it to happen before election day.Mayorkas declined to give a concrete timeline on when to expect border crossings to meet the targeted threshold. Mayorkas was impeached by House Republicans earlier this year over his handling of the border, but the charges were quickly dismissed by the Senate.“We are at a very early stage. Implementation, as you noted, has just begun,” Mayorkas told Raddatz on Sunday. “It’s early, the signs are positive. Our personnel have done an extraordinary job in implementing a very big shift in how we operate on the southern border.”Some Democrats have assailed the order as essentially a revival of the Trump administration’s asylum ban, which was struck down by federal courts. Biden also criticized the measure when he was a candidate for president.Mayorkas insisted on Sunday that the executive order was not at odds with Biden’s campaign promise.“What the president said then is what we are living today,” he said. “We are allowing individuals to access asylum through the ports of entry, pursuant to a program that we developed. We are allowing people to access asylum if they come from the countries of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.”Republicans have dismissed the policy as insufficient and an election-year stunt. “This is like turning a garden hose on a five-alarm fire. And the American people are not fools. They know that this play is too little, too late,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, said last week. But the Republican criticism comes after Republican senators twice blocked a sweeping bipartisan border security bill. Trump, who is the presumptive Republican nominee in November’s presidential election, had lobbied against the measure.Mayorkas defended the timing of the executive order, which came four months after the border bill first failed. He said the administration would have preferred for Congress to act.“The bipartisan deal was rejected once. We pressed forward again. It was rejected a second time. And then we developed this and have implemented it and we are at an early stage,” he said. “And let’s not minimize the significance of this move and the significance of operationalizing it. And it requires the cooperation of other countries which we have secured.” More

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      Joe Biden’s exquisite Trump verdict dilemma

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      Hello! Welcome back to our new US elections newsletter.I’m David Smith, Washington bureau chief, filling in for Adam Gabbatt this week.The fall from grace of Donald Trump, from commander-in-chief to convicted criminal, is still reverberating in Washington and beyond.Last week’s trial verdict drove yet another wedge between Republicans and Democrats. The former were fast and furious in denouncing it. The latter are less sure about how to proceed. And no one knows what impact it might have on the presidential election.First, some of the happenings in US politics.Here’s what you need to know …1. Biden’s border crackdownJoe Biden signed an executive order that will temporarily shut down the US-Mexico border to asylum seekers attempting to cross outside of lawful ports of entry, when a daily threshold of crossings is exceeded. The move is a dramatic reversal for a president and a party that spent years embracing the ideal of the US as a nation of immigrants.2. Garland stands his groundThe US attorney general, Merrick Garland, defended his stewardship of the justice department in a combative display on Capitol Hill that saw him accusing Republicans of attacking the rule of law while telling them he “will not be intimidated”. Testifying before the House judiciary committee, Garland accused Republican congressmen of engaging in conspiracy theories and peddling false narratives.3. Biden heads to France for D-day anniversaryJoe Biden is due to land in Paris, France, today ahead of the 80th anniversary of the D-day landings. France rescinded its decision to invite Russian representatives because of the Ukraine war. John Kirby, a spokesperson for the White House national security council, said: “Russia led by Vladimir Putin is literally trying to undermine the rules-based order that the Soviet Union actually had a role in world war two in helping create.”Joe Biden’s exquisite dilemmaView image in fullscreenIn the final line of the 1972 film The Candidate, Bill McKay, played by Robert Redford, having just won election to the US Senate, turns to his political consultant and asks: “What do we do now?”That is the question for Joe Biden and Democrats after the euphoria of seeing Donald Trump become the first former US president convicted of a crime.Elections can be won or lost by defining a candidate with a single memorable framing: soft-on-crime Michael Dukakis, wealthy Mitt Romney, elitist Hillary Clinton. Last week’s conviction of Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York is a permanent stain and would, in past times, have made such branding easy.But in the Maga “mirror world”, where January 6 rioters are perceived as “hostages” and Biden as the true threat to democracy, Democrats are proceeding with care. Trump has an unrivalled ability to turn his opponent’s own power against them. Think of it like tennis. The harder you whack the ball at Trump, the harder it tends to come back at you over the net.As the trial unfolded in New York, Biden, a devout institutionalist, took the reasonable view that less was more: the head of state ought to remain above the fray. And pragmatically, he was aware any perceived interventions would feed the baseless rightwing media narrative that he had loaded the legal system against his rival.But for his campaign team in Delaware, it became increasingly difficult to watch Biden’s speeches and their carefully crafted emails disappearing into the ether. Just as in the 2016 campaign, Trump was sucking up all political oxygen.On Tuesday of last week, the frustration came to a boil and they started to fight back, holding a press conference outside the court. The Biden campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, told reporters: “We’re not here today because of what’s going on over there. We’re here today because you all are here.”The campaign deployed Robert De Niro, a Hollywood actor famed for playing gangsters, to castigate Trump as the biggest mob boss of all. He also veered off script by becoming embroiled in a verbal brawl with Trump supporters.The episode prompted characteristic Democratic hand-wringing over whether De Niro, 80, was the right messenger with the right message, and Republican cries of hypocrisy. Jason Miller, Trump’s senior campaign adviser, said: “After months of saying politics had nothing to do with this trial, they showed up and made a campaign event out of a lower Manhattan trial day for President Trump.”A day later Biden and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, launched a Black voters initiative at Philadelphia’s Girard College, a majority Black boarding school. Wednesdays had typically been a safe bet to wrestle back the news cycle because it was the trial’s day off. But on that particular Wednesday the jury was deliberating its verdict.TJ Ducklo, a senior adviser for communications for the Biden-Harris campaign, peevishly posted on X: “The President just spoke to approx 1,000 mostly black voters in Philly about the massive stakes in this election. @MSNBC @CNN & others did not show it. Instead, more coverage about a trial that impacts one person: Trump. Then they’ll ask, why isn’t your message getting out?”Such complaints can themselves be counterproductive. Worthy as the Biden event was, would any news organisation worth its salt really not devote full coverage to the first conviction of a former president – and potential future president – in American history?A day after the verdict, the president had a brief, deliberate riff on the trial. “The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed,” he said. “And it’s reckless, it’s dangerous and it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict.”Biden then spoke about a Middle East peace plan. But as he walked away, reporters shouted questions about the Trump verdict. Biden said nothing but turned and beamed.That evening, the Biden-Harris campaign went further with a press release headlined 34 Lowlights from Convicted Felon Donald Trump’s Press Conference Speech, mocking Trump’s chaotic performance at Trump Tower earlier in the day. And at a campaign event on Monday, Biden referred to Trump as a “convicted felon”.But how long and how hard to press this case is a dilemma. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 10% of Republicans and 25% of independents say they are less likely to vote for Trump because of the verdict.Former Alabama senator Doug Jones told the Politico website: “I don’t think Democrats need to be shy about weighing in. I don’t think there’s anything to lose and a lot to gain, because I am convinced there’s a swath of people out there who are going to be very, very troubled by this at this point and haven’t really completely followed it, wondered about it – but now all of a sudden, this is a gamechanger.”Others, however, point to opinion polls suggesting that Trump’s criminal conviction will not shift many voters and could even backfire. The Trump campaign claims it raised $53m online in the 24 hours after the verdict. Republicans are keeping the topic alive at every opportunity, crying “sham” and “show trial” and vowing retribution.The more cautious Democrats also believe time and effort would be better spent promoting Biden’s record and drawing a contrast with Trump on policy: abortion rights, the economy, climate, racial justice, foreign affairs and defending democracy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVoters in crucial battleground states, the theory goes, are more exercised by the price of eggs or gas than the findings of a jury in Manhattan.Democrats have long been accused of pulling their punches, lacking the killer instinct that is part of Republicans’ DNA. In this case, Biden has to thread the needle with exquisite precision, offering a message that reminds independent voters why they should reject his opponent – while not firing up the Trump base or giving moderate Republicans a reason to return to the fold.Lock him up? It’s complicated.Lie of the weekView image in fullscreen“I didn’t say ‘Lock her up,’” the man who repeatedly both said and encouraged a frequent chant of “lock her up” claimed after he was convicted of 34 felonies.Former president Donald Trump told Fox News in an interview after his conviction in the New York hush-money trial that it was just his supporters who said “lock her up,” referring to Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.“The people would all say, ‘Lock her up, lock her up,’” Trump claimed. “Then we won. And I say – and I said pretty openly, I said, ‘All right, come on, just relax, let’s go, we’ve got to make our country great.’”He said he “could have done it” – locked her up – but decided it was for the good of the country to move ahead and that locking her up “would have been a terrible thing”.Trump very much said to lock up Clinton, or some version of the idea, at various times on the 2016 campaign trail. His supporters chanted it at rallies for years, with his encouragement. – Rachel Leingang, misinformation reporterWho had the worst week?View image in fullscreenThe Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate and “Democracy dies in darkness” fame, is in some disarray. Publisher Will Lewis ousted Sally Buzbee, the newspaper’s executive editor, and hastily announced a restructuring plan.At a contentious staff meeting on Monday, Lewis reportedly told staff: “We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around. We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it any more.”Matt Murray, a former Wall Street Journal editor, has been named to temporarily replace Buzbee. After the elections in November, Robert Winnett, a longtime editor at the Telegraph in Britain, will take over the core reporting functions at the Post. Lewis is facing scrutiny over his commitment to gender and racial diversity.Like most media organisations, the Post boomed during Donald Trump’s presidency but has lost readers since. Its website had 101 million unique visitors a month in 2020, and had dropped to 50m at the end of 2023. The Post lost a reported $77m last year. A Politico website headline described the latest shake-up as “the Rupert Murdoch-ization of the Washington Post” – not a great sign five months before an impossibly high stakes election.Elsewhere in US politicsView image in fullscreenThe 2020 election reckoning continuesWisconsin’s attorney general, Josh Kaul, filed felony charges on Tuesday against three men who played a key role in the effort to appoint fake electors in the state as part of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. Kenneth Chesebro, Jim Troupis and Michael Roman were each charged with one felony count of forgery, according to court documents.Further strains on Biden-Bibi relationsJoe Biden has said that there is “every reason” to draw the conclusion that Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war in Gaza for his own political self-preservation. Biden made the remarks about the Israeli prime minister in an interview with Time magazine published on Tuesday morning, drawing a sharp response from the Israeli government, which accused the US president of straying from diplomatic norms.Hunter on trialView image in fullscreenFederal prosecutors painted Joe Biden’s son Hunter as a drug addict whose dark habits ensnared loved ones and who knew what he was doing when he lied on federal forms to buy a gun in 2018 when he said he was not in the throes of addiction. The judge also reportedly declined requests from the defendant to prohibit jurors from being shown messages, videos and photos that show him with drugs or discussing them around the time that he bought the gun in question, including one image depicting him undressed from the chest up. More

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      Democrats decry Biden executive order turning away some asylum seekers

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      Progressive Democrats and immigration advocates have shared their outrage after Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday that would turn away some asylum seekers.Biden’s order will temporarily shut down the US-Mexico border to asylum seekers attempting to enter the country legally when authorities have determined that the border is “overwhelmed”.The president said the order comes after Republicans rejected a bipartisan immigration deal that would have changed several areas of US immigration policy.“Today, I’m moving past Republican obstruction and using the executive authorities available to me as president to do what I can on my own to address the border,” Biden said during remarks on the order on Tuesday.“Frankly, I would have preferred to address this issue through bipartisan legislation, because that’s the only way to actually get the kind of system we have now that’s broken fixed – to hire more border patrol agents, more asylum officers, more judges.”US representative Nanette Barragán of California, who chairs the Congressional Hispanic caucus, said Tuesday morning that she was “disappointed” in Biden’s direction with immigration policy, the New Republic reported.View image in fullscreenCalifornia representative Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American caucus, said she was “disappointed at the enforcement-only strategies” announced by Biden.“Rather than address humanitarian issues at the border effectively and with the nuance they deserve, today’s actions will gut protections for countless migrants exercising their legal right to claim asylum,” she said.US representative Raúl Grijalva, whose Arizona district borders Mexico, said that the order is a “significant departure from President Biden’s promise of a more humane and just approach to immigration”.He added: “It tramples on the universal right to claim asylum and prevents migrants from attempting to legally access safety and security in the United States. It is ripe for legal challenges and antithetical to our values.”The American Civil Liberties Union denounced Biden’s executive order and said they will be challenging it in court.“The Biden administration just announced an executive order that will severely restrict people’s legal right to seek asylum, putting tens of thousands of lives at risk,” the organization said in a post on X.Meanwhile, other Democrats have welcomed Biden’s actions as a necessary step to address the humanitarian crisis at the border.Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio told the Washington Post that he believes it is the “right direction”, adding: “I want to see more.” More

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      Biden to sign executive order to close southern US border to asylum seekers

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      Joe Biden will this week sign an executive order to temporarily close the southern US border to asylum seekers in a sharp political U-turn aimed at winning support on a key voter concern in a presidential election year.The US president is expected to sign the order as early as Tuesday to seal the border with Mexico to migrants when numbers of asylum claimants rise above a daily threshold of 2,500.Mayors of several US border cities are expected to be present in the White House for Biden’s announcement.Biden’s move echoes a similar approach adopted by Donald Trump in 2018 when he was president and reverses his one-time philosophical opposition to his predecessor’s hostility to migrants. When he was a presidential candidate, Biden denounced Trump’s policy, saying it upended decades of US asylum law.He has been forced to change course as the number of asylum seekers coming through the US-Mexico border has surged during his presidency, with opinion polls consistently showing immigration to be at or near the top of voters’ concerns, ahead of inflation and the economy.An attempt by the White House to cobble together legislation tightening border restrictions by tying it to aid to Ukraine and Israel failed earlier this year after Republican lawmakers withdrew support, apparently at the urging of Trump, who did not want Biden to claim credit for resolving an issue he has attempted to make his own.According to CBS, which broke the story, Biden’s executive order will enable US immigration officials to quickly deport migrants who enter the country illegally without processing their asylum claims.Controversially, it will rely on a presidential authority known as 212 (f) which became infamous during Trump’s presidency because of its use to enforce certain immigration restrictions, including travel bans from Muslim countries.Like Trump’s restrictions, Biden’s order is likely to face legal challenges.Migration at the southern border surged to record numbers at the end of last year. Buthe order comes at a moment when the number of migrants crossing from Mexico is down in the past six months, a trend attributed to stronger enforcement on the part of the Mexican authorities but which is not expected to sustain itself.An estimated 179,000 “border encounters” were recorded in April, according to US Customs and Border Protection figures, compared with a record high of 302,000 last December. More than 3,500 migrants were said to have crossed various points along the 2,000-mile border illegally on Sunday alone.Biden initially rolled back Trump’s restrictive border policies after taking office in January 2021, issuing orders to freeze his predecessor’s border wall construction and reissuing protections set up under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) scheme originally adopted by the Barack Obama White House.Biden suspended Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy – whereby asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their US immigration claims were being considered – on the first day of his administration before the homeland security department formally cancelled it months later. The US supreme court subsequently upheld Biden’s approach following a lower court ruling against it.When Trump’s policy was in operation, Biden denounced it, saying: “This is the first president in the history of the United States of America [under whom] anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. That’s never happened before.”A recent Associated Press poll showed about two-thirds of voters, including 40% of Democrats, disapproved of Biden’s handling of the southern border. More

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      Senate Republicans block bipartisan border security bill for a second time

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      Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan border security bill for a second time, part of an attempt by Chuck Schumer to flip the script on immigration – a major political liability for Joe Biden and Democrats in this year’s election.The 43-50 vote was far short of the necessary 60 votes needed to advance the legislation. Republicans, who have repeatedly demanded Democrats act on the border, abandoned the compromise proposal at the behest of Donald Trump who saw it was a political “gift” for Biden’s re-election chances.In bringing the proposal to the floor, Democrats hoped the doomed effort would underline their argument that Republicans are not serious about addressing the situation at the US border with Mexico, an issue that polls show is a major concern among voters.“To those who’ve said for years Congress needs to act on the border,” said Schumer, the Senate majority leader, in a floor speech before the vote. “This bipartisan bill is the answer, and it’s time show we’re serious about fixing the problem.”Democrats had spent the days leading up to Thursday vote hammering the message that the president and his party are trying to solve the issue, but have been thwarted by Republicans following Trump’s lead.“Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system,” Biden said in a statement. “If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history.”Biden trails Trump in national and battleground-state surveys. Voters trust the former president over Biden to tackle the border issue by a wide margin, according to several recent surveys, with immigration often ranking as a top concern.In February, after months of negotiations, a bipartisan group of senators had unveiled an immigration compromise – legislation Republicans said was necessary to unlock their support for a foreign aid package that included assistance to Ukraine.The legislation, which would have made major changes to immigration law and received endorsements from the National Border Patrol Council and the US Chamber of Commerce, initially appeared to have the support to pass. But then Trump denounced the plan as weak and demanded his allies in the Senate abandon it. They quickly followed his lead.When it came to the floor, the measure failed in a 50-49 vote, far short of the 60 ayes needed to move forward. All but four Republicans opposed it. They were joined by a group of liberal and Latino Democrats who argued that the approach was too punitive and failed to include relief for immigrants who have lived and worked in the US for years.“The Senate border bill once again fails to meet the moment by putting forth enforcement-only policies and failing to include provisions that will keep families together,” the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said in a statement this week, urging a vote against the bill, which none of its members were involved in negotiating. They called on Congress to pass legislation to protect Dreamers, immigrants who were brought to the US as children, and to expand work visas.No Republican voted for the bill this time around. Instead Republicans accused Schumer of holding a “show vote”, aimed at protecting Democrats’ narrow majority ahead of this year’s election.“This is not trying to accomplish something. This is about messaging now,” Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who helped negotiate the border deal, said earlier this week. “This is trying to poke Republicans rather than try to actually solve a problem.”Kyrsten Sinema, an independent from Arizona who negotiated the compromise with Lankford, also opposed Schumer’s move, which she called an act of “political theater”.“To use this failure as a political punching bag only punishes those who were courageous enough to do the hard work in the first place,” she said in a floor speech on Thursday.Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah, both Republican senators, also changed their vote, opposing the measure after supporting it in February. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the lone Republican senator to vote in favor of advancing the bill.But the bill also lost support from Democrats, among them Cory Booker, the senator of New Jersey, and Laphonza Butler of California. The liberal senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Alex Padilla of California again voted against it.In a statement, Booker said he voted for the bill in February in part because it included “critical foreign and humanitarian aid”, which was passed as a standalone package last month.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I remain committed to pursuing commonsense, bipartisan legislation to modernize our immigration system so that it aligns with our most fundamental values,” he said.The White House had lobbied Republicans in advance of the vote. Biden on Monday spoke to the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, urging them to “stop playing politics and act quickly to pass this bipartisan border legislation”, according to a White House summary of the conversations.“You caused this problem,” McConnell said he told Biden during their call, while urging the president to reinstate Trump-era immigration policies. “Why don’t you just allow what the previous administration was doing?” McConnell said he told the president.Since the bill’s failure in February, Biden has taken a series of executive actions to stem the flow of migration and speed up the asylum process, which can take months or even years. But the administration has maintained there are limits to what the president can do unilaterally.“Only Congress can fix our broken immigration system,” the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, said in a statement after the vote. “I urge Congress to do so. In the meantime, we will continue to enforce the law with full force with the limited resources we have.”In advance of the vote, Schumer repeatedly acknowledged that he did not expect all 51 members of the Democratic caucus to support it. Johnson had already declared it “dead on arrival”.In a statement, the speaker called the procedural vote an “election year Hail Mary” by Democrats and said the onus was on the president to “use his executive authority to finally secure the border and protect American families”.The measure was designed to clamp down on illegal border crossings, which reached record levels last year, though the overall numbers have dropped in recent months. Among its provisions, the bill proposes provisions that would make it more difficult to seek asylum in the United States, while expanding detention facilities and speeding up the deportation process for those who enter the country unlawfully.It would also institute a new emergency authority that would in effect close the border if the number of migrants encountered by immigration officials averaged more than 4,000 people a day at the border over the course of one week. The authority would be triggered automatically if the average surpassed 5,000 a day or if 8,500 try to enter unlawfully in a single day.Democrats have emphasized the aspects of the bill they say would curtail fentanyl smuggling, which has led to a drug overdose epidemic that is killing tens of thousands of Americans each year. Despite Republican claims, illicit opioids are overwhelmingly smuggled over the border by US citizens, not migrants.The White House spokesman Andrew Bates wrote in a memo released on the eve of the vote: “Congressional Republicans have to choose: will they again decide that politics is more important than stopping fentanyl traffickers and saving the lives of innocent constituents? Joe Biden knows where he stands.” More

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      At the US’s latest border hotspot, aid workers brace for volatility

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      Jacqueline Arellano is driving up and down the 15 freeway in southern San Diego county on a recent morning in mid-April, boxes of donated clothing and safety gloves in her trunk.She stops in a Home Depot parking lot and hands a man the spare stroller she grabbed from her house. He’d mentioned to her earlier that day how tiring it was to move around the city with his toddler in his arms.Arellano is director of US programs for Border Kindness, a non-profit migrant relief organization that runs weekly Day Laborer Outreach programs in San Diego and Imperial counties. Organizers hand out donations in spots where migrants congregate, and while doing so listen to people’s stories and answer their questions, as best as they can.The needs at the US-Mexico border here in California are larger than ever. In April, San Diego was the busiest sector for arrivals of the entire US-Mexico border. Meanwhile, immigration has risen to the top of voters’ concerns in the November presidential election, with Joe Biden facing bipartisan calls to stem the flow of people crossing the border and Donald Trump vowing an aggressive crackdown.The eight years she’s spent doing this work have given Arellano a window into the ever-shifting dynamics of immigration at the San Diego-Tijuana border. Back in 2016, when she first started to make these outreach runs, the people she met at the various Home Depot parking lots were primarily day laborers, waiting to be picked up by contractors working across the region. Many were undocumented, originally from Mexico, and had been based in the US for some time.After Trump moved into the White House the following year, the workers’ prevalent fear was being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and facing deportation, she said. So while handing out donations, volunteers would also pass on red printed cards that informed workers of their rights when faced with Ice.View image in fullscreenGradually, Arellano and other aid workers realized that the information they were sharing was no longer relevant to the day laborers they were meeting. “Within the last couple of years, we’ve seen global migration reflected in the community,” she said. First they saw an increase in people arriving from Haiti, then people from all over the world. The people arriving now speak languages other than Spanish, she said, and they have more recently arrived on US soil. Crucially, they are not trying to avoid immigration enforcement authorities. Rather, they have filed for asylum and want to see their cases work their way through the system.Of the 43 men who lined up to receive work gloves that day in mid-April, most are from Mexico and Haiti, but there are people from Venezuela, Bolivia, Guatemala, Brazil and Ecuador. After handing out supplies, Arellano spends an hour talking one-on-one with some of them. A few ask about basic necessities, like where to buy food.One man from Ecuador shows her paperwork saying he is expected at immigration court in Chicago. “So he’s over here in San Diego with a court date in Chicago – has no idea what to do. He doesn’t have an attorney. He doesn’t know how to get an attorney. He has no money. He was asking me literally: ‘How do I get a phone? What is a Western Union? Where do I go?’”Newly arrived migrants often don’t know how to navigate the immigration system even as they’re relying on it to secure legal status in the US, Arellano said. She connects them with partner organizations that can help provide legal services, shelter and other assistance, like Al Otro Lado, a non-profit providing legal and humanitarian aid to people.These connections with other aid workers on the ground have become increasingly essential as the needs of people at the border keep changing and expanding. “This is being held down by groups of ordinary people, by groups of friends, in large part,” she said about the support system for newly arrived groups. “It shouldn’t be like that. It shouldn’t be just groups of friends coming together to plug our fingers in a sinking ship.”Part of the breakdown in resources for asylum seekers, according to Dara Lind, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, a non-profit immigration advocacy group, is inaction at the federal level. “All the civil society help in the world isn’t sufficient to actually make sure that people know where they’re supposed to go,” Lind said.Because Congress hasn’t made meaningful updates to the immigration system in 34 years, Lind explained, the system is coming apart at the seams, affecting both border enforcement and legal immigration.In the California desert, migrants, including children, have been detained in open-air border camps before their asylum requests can be registered. Most receive a court date to appear for an immigration hearing more than a year away – that’s just how backlogged the immigration court system is.Still, Lind said, “it hasn’t created sufficient urgency for Congress to fix it. And instead, it’s become a way that presidents of both parties have justified taking aggressive, proactive executive action because someone needs to do something, and Congress isn’t doing its job.”Lind said despite years of border crises, no one is holding the federal government accountable for both the human suffering and the overall inefficiency that aid workers like Arellano see day-to-day at the border.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionErika Pinheiro is the executive director of Al Otro Lado. Among many services, her organization provides life-saving supplies at the open-air detention sites on the California-Mexico border. Providing supplies in the desert is becoming more perilous as border patrol moves these sites into more remote areas, Pinheiro said.“It’s a very hostile environment to work in,” she said, listing armed robbers, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, rising temperatures, concertina wire – and hostility from border patrol agents. “We’ve had our staff followed, pulled over multiple times, harassed, told to leave,” she said.Al Otro Lado is one of several organizations seeking to address immediate emergencies at the US-Mexico border. Volunteers with another arm of Border Kindness, for example, hike into the desert to place water bottles, tinned food and weather-appropriate clothing for people crossing the border in remote locations.View image in fullscreenFinancial support for humanitarian aid is waning, Pinheiro noted. “The philanthropic funding, I think due to a lot of the anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from both sides of the aisle, has really dried up,” she said. California has also cut state funding, particularly affecting the shelter system for individuals waiting for their day in immigration court, and Pinheiro said donations from individuals were also down.“The work has become so politicized, whereas really giving formula to a baby shouldn’t be a political issue.”In this election year, both Al Otro Lado and Border Kindness are bracing for further repercussions. “Regardless of outcome, elections are always destabilizing for the immigrant community,” Arellano said.Should Biden win re-election, she expects to see the situation at the border remain largely unchanged. The past years, Arellano said, “in many ways have been the worst it’s ever been at the border”, but there’s been less public outrage than Trump’s immigration policies elicited.If Trump wins a second term, however, she expects a “further decimation of legal protections and processes that can really impact people for years”.Pinheiro expects Democrats to push through changes in asylum law if Biden were elected. While adjudicating cases more quickly could help alleviate some of the pressure, she cautioned, expediting asylum requests could also result in fewer people receiving asylum who are qualified for it.“Forcing asylum seekers to go through these interviews while still detained in border patrol custody is not the answer,” she said, especially if they are not given access to information and legal representation.Should Trump be elected, Pinheiro expects humanitarian aid and legal workers at the border to face increased criminalization. During the last Trump presidency, she and other lawyers, human rights activists and journalists were put on a watchlist and interrogated at the border, she said. Targeting humanitarian and legal assistance could be a Republican administration’s way of stopping groups like Al Otro Lado and Border Kindness from documenting what’s happening at the border, she fears, and would curtail their ability to respond to people’s needs. More