US-Mexico border

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Senate Republicans set to block advancement of Ukraine-Israel aid bill

      by

      The Senate will hold a key procedural vote on whether to advance a supplemental funding bill that includes financial aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan as well as provisions aimed at bolstering border security.The vote, which will be held on Wednesday afternoon, is expected to fail due to opposition from Senate Republicans, who have demanded stricter border regulations in exchange for their support.The vote comes one day after Senate Democrats formally unveiled the $111bn supplemental security bill, reflecting the funding request that Joe Biden issued in October to provide assistance to the US’s allies abroad.Ahead of the vote, Biden delivered an address to urge Congress to pass the bill, warning that a failure to act would only benefit Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, in the war against Ukraine.“Who is prepared to walk away from holding Putin accountable for this behavior? Who among us is really prepared to do that?” Biden said. “I’m not prepared to walk away, and I don’t think the American people are either.”Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, addressed leaders of the G7 group of nations and called on them to confound Vladimir Putin by winning “the battle of motivations” and not showing weakness.The G7 leaders met by video at short notice in a show of solidarity with the Ukrainian leader that included trying to breathe new life into the sanctions against Russia.Zelenskiy thanked G7 leaders for their support, and warned that Moscow was counting on collapse of western support for Ukraine. “Russia believes America and Europe will show weakness and will not maintain support for Ukraine at the proper level. Putin believes the free world will not fully enforce its own sanctions and the Russian elite mocks the world’s doubts about using Russian assets to compensate for damage from Russian aggression,” he said.“All these are part of a much broader issue – what can freedom do and what can dictatorships do. We must answer these questions together.”Although the bill includes a number of border security measures, Republicans in both chambers have insisted the legislation must go further in restricting migrants’ asylum and parole applications. Those proposals are a non-starter for many Democrats, making it unclear how a supplemental bill can pass the divided Congress.Biden said on Wednesday that he was willing to make “significant compromises on the border,” but he accused Republicans of taking an all-or-nothing approach to the immigration talks.“This has to be a negotiation,” Biden said. “Republicans think they can get everything they want without any bipartisan compromise. That’s not the answer.”Those tensions spilled over on Tuesday night, when a classified Senate briefing on Ukraine erupted into a shouting match. Zelenskiy was scheduled to speak at the briefing, but he was forced to cancel due to a “last-minute” issue, according to the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer.The briefing still occurred despite Zelenskiy’s absence, but Schumer then accused Republicans of having “hijacked” the meeting to discuss border security. Republicans then criticized Schumer for refusing to address the crucial issues that created the current standoff.“Republicans are just walking out of the briefing because the people there are not willing to actually discuss what it takes to get a deal done,” Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican of Utah, said.With no resolution in sight, Senate Republicans are expected to successfully filibuster the supplemental security bill, blocking it from advancing. The impasse increases the likelihood that Congress will fail to approve more aid for Ukraine before the end of the year, as the White House has warned that Kyiv is desperately in need of more financial assistance.“I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from US military stocks,” Shalanda Young, the director of the office of management and budget, wrote in a letter to congressional leaders on Monday.“There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money – and nearly out of time.”Even as Republicans have raised serious concerns about the border provisions of the bill, the $10bn allocated for aid to Israel has sparked criticism from Bernie Sanders . In a letter sent to his colleagues on Tuesday, the progressive Vermont senator warned against providing a “blank check” to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, as the death toll in Gaza continues to climb.“No, I do not think we should be appropriating $10.1bn for the right-wing, extremist Netanyahu government to continue its current military strategy,” Sanders wrote. “What the Netanyahu government is doing is immoral, it is in violation of international law, and the United States should not be complicit in those actions.” More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Texas legislators pass hardline immigration bill denounced as racist

      by

      The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, is expected to sign a bill that would make crossing into the state without documentation a crime, one of the harshest immigration policies in the US to date.The bill, SB 4, was passed by the Texas house and is awaiting final approval from Abbott.On Wednesday, Abbott said that he looked forward to signing the bill, in a post to X, formally known as Twitter.“I look forward to signing Senate Bill 4, which creates penalties for illegal entry into Texas & authorizes the removal of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border,” Abbott said.In recent months, Abbott, a Republican, has launched a series of controversial programs targeting migrants, including bussing migrants to Democratic-led cities without proper coordination and Operation Lone Star, a multimillion-dollar initiative that has placed razor wire and thousands of troops at the Texas-Mexico border.SB 4 makes it unlawful for anyone to cross into Texas from another country without papers a state misdemeanor that is punishable by up to two years in prison.The law also requires a state judge to order a person to return to the country they crossed from in lieu of prosecution.If a person refuses to return, they could face a felony charge and up to 20 years in prison.The bill also gives Texas officers the ability to arrest anyone who they believe has crossed into the state illegally, a fact that advocates and Democrats have decried as racist.Legal advocates have questioned the bill’s legality, as removing noncitizens from the US falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Experts have also warned that the new bill could cause a dispute with Mexico, as the country and others could choose not to cooperate with state officials.Democratic Texas representatives and advocates soundly denounced the bill as problematic and a waste of state funds.The Texas representative Jolanda Jones called SB 4 and its supporters “racist”.“It’s not all right to be racist. I will stop pulling the race card when you stop being racist,” she said.The Texas representative Ramón Romero Jr posted a video on social media denouncing the passing of SB 4 and emphasizing the importance of winning elections.“We fought really hard but sadly on issues like this, their ears are closed on the other side,” Romero said in a video posted to X, referring to Republicans. “We can say anything and they’re just not listening.”In a statement to X, the Texas Civil Rights Project, a social justice non-profit, said the bill was “creating an entirely new, separate, unequal immigration system in the US” and allowing police to “be both judge and jury to determine a person’s right to stay in the US”.Immigrant rights organizations also rallied outside of the Texas House on Tuesday to protest the vote on SB 4.SB 4 was considered as apart of a separate legislative session requested by Abbott for several anti-immigration bills. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Why is Joe Biden campaigning for Donald Trump? | Moustafa Bayoumi

      by

      The question sounds ludicrous, but how else would you characterize Biden’s latest pronouncement to build 20 new miles of Trump’s border wall along the southern border? This is like throwing red meat to Trump’s base, who will chomp and salivate over what they will portray as an admission of defeat by the Democrats on securing the border.And why wouldn’t they? Back when he was campaigning for president, Joe Biden promised “not another foot” of Trump’s border wall would be built. He halted construction of the wall on his first day in office with a proclamation stating that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution. It is a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.”Now, the government is poised to spend nearly $200m on 20 miles of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley. The administration says it has been forced into this situation because Congress appropriated $1.375bn for such border barriers in 2019, and the funds that remain must be disbursed by the end of the fiscal year. But Democrats had control over Congress for the first two years of the Biden administration. They could have reallocated those funds. Instead, this Democratic administration is now sounding very Trump-like. “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries,” reads the notice in the Federal Register.This is a political failure by the Democrats on one of the most important issues of the looming 2024 election. And it’s a massive policy failure as well.For one thing, the border wall – what Trump called the “Rolls-Royce” of barriers – doesn’t even work. According to the Washington Post, the US Customs and Border Protection’s own records show that the wall has been breached more than 3,000 times, as it is easily hacked open by common power tools. And you know what else can breach a 30ft wall? A ladder. Smugglers also routinely hoist people over the wall and lower them down the other side with ropes. The Democratic Texas congressman Henry Cuellar was right when he said: “A border wall is a 14th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.”This newly announced policy by the Biden administration promises to be a devastating environmental failure as well. Why, exactly, has the administration waived 26 federal laws that include protections for the environment, clean air, safe drinking water and endangered species when building this policy failure? Who forced them to adopt that position? The ability to waive these protections, called the Secure Fence Act, was passed by Congress in 2006, but Biden will be the first Democratic president to use the law. And the effects could be unrecoverable.Starr county, Texas, the area designated for the new wall, is part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Refuge, home to endangered ocelots and at least two types of endangered plants, the Zapata bladderpod and prostrate milkweed. And while the steel barriers of the wall may be permeable to human smugglers, larger mammals will have their migration routes blocked by the barrier.Laiken Jordahl, south-west conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, stated that this new wall construction “will stop wildlife migrations dead in their tracks. It will destroy a huge amount of wildlife refuge land. And it’s a horrific step backwards for the borderlands.” Just last month, the US Government Accountability Office released a report detailing legions of harmful effects of the existing wall, from destruction of Indigenous burial grounds to damage to endangered wildlife and much more.This terrible new wall also represents a humanitarian failure from this administration. No serious person disputes that the numbers of people seeking refuge at the border is immense and that solving this issue constitutes a significant challenge to the government. But if we want to consider ourselves as a fair, just and humane society, the solution to this issue must also be fair, just and humane. What most people don’t realize is that so much of our larger border policy – including border walls, fast-track deportation flights, private immigration jails, keeping most asylum seekers from working and more – often enables smuggling and abuse more than curtails it.Greater attention must be paid to addressing root causes of human migration. Venezuelans now account for the second largest nationality group (after Mexicans) to cross the southern border, but rather than lifting punitive economic sanctions that the US has imposed on Venezuela since 2006, the administration has instead announced that it will resume deportation flights to Venezuela. But lifting sanctions would clearly help alleviate at least one important reason for migration while quickly deporting people, at best, merely treats a symptom.The Biden administration cannot have it both ways. It can’t be against the wall while arguing for its construction at the same time. This is not just bad policy. It’s bad politics, needlessly self-destructive at a time when the Republicans are willfully self-destructive. Such a policy certainly won’t win them more votes or get them re-elected. Rather, it’s like the Democrats are feeding their own flesh to Trump and his supporters, and asking us to watch the feast, proving that sometimes we truly are our own worst enemies.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is a contributing opinion writer at Guardian US More

    • 163 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden criticized for waiving 26 laws in Texas to allow border wall construction

      by

      Joe Biden faced intense criticism from environmental advocates, political opponents and his fellow Democrats after the president’s administration waived 26 federal laws to allow border wall construction in south Texas, its first use of a sweeping executive power that was often employed under Donald Trump.“A border wall is a 14th-century solution to a 21st-century problem,” the Democratic Texas congressman Henry Cuellar said. “It will not bolster border security in Starr county.“I continue to stand against the wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars on an ineffective border wall.”Environmental advocates said the new wall would run through public lands, habitats of endangered plants and species such as the ocelot, a spotted wild cat.“A plan to build a wall will bulldoze an impermeable barrier straight through the heart of that habitat,” said Laiken Jordahl, a south-west conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity.“It will stop wildlife migrations dead in their tracks. It will destroy a huge amount of wildlife refuge land. And it’s a horrific step backwards for the borderlands.”During the Trump presidency, about 450 miles of barriers were built along the south-west border. The Biden administration halted such efforts, though the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, resumed them.A federal proclamation issued on 20 January 2021 said: “Building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution.”On Wednesday, border officials claimed the new project was consistent with that proclamation.“Congress appropriated fiscal year 2019 funds for the construction of border barrier in the Rio Grande Valley, and [homeland security] is required to use those funds for their appropriated purpose,” a statement said.The statement also said officials were “committed to protecting the nation’s cultural and natural resources and will implement sound environmental practices as part of the project covered by this waiver”.Observers were not convinced. Referring to a famous (and much-mocked) Trump campaign promise, Matt Stoller, research director at the American Economic Liberties Project, said: “Well Mexico didn’t pay for the wall, but Biden did.”Pointing to a campaign promise by Biden – “There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration” – Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, said: “Biden’s flip-flop here is not only a validation of President Trump’s border and immigration policies, but also a validation of President Trump’s entire 2024 America First campaign!”Polling shows Trump leads Biden when voters are asked who would handle border security better.On Wednesday, homeland security officials posted the announcement on the US federal registry. Few details were provided about construction in Starr county, Texas, which is part of a busy border patrol sector currently seeing “high illegal entry” by undocumented migrants via Central and South America.According to government data, about 245,000 such entries have been recorded this fiscal year in the Rio Grande Valley sector.“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas,” the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, said in the federal registry notice.The Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and Endangered Species Act were among federal laws waived to make way for construction. The waivers avoid reviews and lawsuits challenging violation of environmental laws.Starr county, between Zapata, Mexico, and McAllen, Texas, is home to about 65,000 people in 1,200 sq miles, part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.Federal officials announced the project in June and began gathering public comments in August, sharing a map of construction that could add up to 20 miles to existing border barriers. The Starr county judge, Eloy Vera, said the new wall would start south of the Falcon Dam and go past Salineño, Texas.“The other concern that we have is that area is highly erosive,” the county judge said, pointing to creeks cutting through ranchland. “There’s a lot of arroyos.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden administration sued over asylum appointment app that ‘does not work’

      by

      Immigrant rights advocates and asylum seekers filed a lawsuit against Customs and Border Protection last week, claiming federal officials have created a new, unlawful hurdle for people seeking asylum in the United States.Migrants fleeing violence in their home countries are now required to book an appointment with border officials through CBP One, a smartphone app designed by the US government.“It is unfathomable that a refugee who just traveled across nine different countries with only the clothes on their back would somehow have access to a very expensive smartphone,” said Angelo Guisado, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, part of the legal team behind the lawsuit.Many asylum seekers cannot schedule appointments on the app because they do not have “up-to-date smartphones, wifi, a cellular data plan, or reliable electricity, all of which are necessary to use CBP One”, according to the new lawsuit.The lucky few who managed to download CBP One said the app is riddled with technical glitches, indecipherable error messages, and mistranslations of English words.“People are scraping together whatever money they have to buy smartphones, all for an app that does not work,” Guisado told the Guardian.Though the app is available to view in Spanish and Haitian Creole, the error messages are often written in English. One migrant showed Guisado an error message that appeared to just be a line of computer code.“We know the Republicans intend on making life harder for every single poor, Black, or brown person who wants to immigrate here, but Democrats are doing the same exact thing while putting forth these statements that adhere to higher ideals,” Guisado said.The Biden administration first announced the CBP One requirement for asylum seekers in May, when the US prepared to lift a pandemic-era restriction on immigration called Title 42. As the government braced for a sudden uptick in migrants along the US-Mexico border, the app was billed as a tool to more quickly process asylum requests.Despite widespread warnings, the so-called “migrant surge” never materialized. In May, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN that border agents saw a “50% drop in the number of encounters versus what we were experiencing earlier in the week before Title 42 ended”.Still, the Biden administration continued to use CBP One to process people seeking asylum. Even after officials touted record-low border crossings, the app remains a primary arbiter of who gets to be considered for asylum.A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection told the Guardian that, thanks to the app’s new usage, the agency “is processing on average 4-5 times as many migrants per day at south-west border ports of entry than it did a decade ago, significantly expanding access to our ports of entry.”The agency spokesperson also said “CBP continues to process individuals who walk up to a port of entry without an appointment”.Under the Department of Homeland Security’s own guidelines, migrants who face exceptional danger, like threats of murder or kidnapping, are eligible for asylum without a pre-scheduled appointment.But when a Nicaraguan woman – identified in the lawsuit as Michelle Doe – approached the border with her newborn baby, officers turned her away. She explained that her abusive ex-partner, a member of the Mexican cartel, had broken her phone before he threatened to kill her.The border officers told Michelle that she still needed to book an appointment through CBP One.Many of the would-be asylees in the lawsuit are single mothers who fled their homes after experiencing domestic abuse, threats of gang violence, or in Michelle’s case – both.“After getting turned away by CBP, they come to us to hide them,” said Nicole Ramos, director of the border rights project at Al Otro Lado, a legal nonprofit and a plaintiff in the new lawsuit.Since May, Ramos and her team have scrambled to find safe shelter and medical care for asylum seekers who were turned away because of the new app policy.It’s dangerous work that requires extreme discretion – Ramos is in constant fear that migrants like Melissa will be discovered by cartel members while waiting to land an appointment with US border officials.“While they’re waiting to get this app to work, these people are being hunted,” Ramos said. “The only time it seems possible for us to get around this app, to get an exception, is when people have very, very grave and urgent medical conditions.”Even then, Ramos said she and her colleagues need to show Customs and Border Protection “extensive medical documentation” to prove that a migrant qualifies for an exception. Because the process of getting an exception is so cumbersome, Ramos said she has been forced to triage asylum cases, prioritizing the migrants who cannot receive medical care in Mexico.“The whole process requires us as advocates to participate in vulnerability Olympics, we have to decide who is most likely to die sooner, so we push to prioritize their cases,” she said. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Federal judge blocks Biden administration’s restrictive asylum rule

      by

      A federal judge on Tuesday blocked a rule that allows immigration authorities to deny asylum to migrants who arrive at the US-Mexico border without first applying online or seeking protection in a country they passed through.But the judge delayed his ruling from taking effect immediately to give the Joe Biden White House time to appeal.The order from judge Jon Tigar of California’s northern federal district takes away a key enforcement tool set in place by the Biden administration as coronavirus-based restrictions on asylum expired in May. The new rule imposes severe limitations on migrants seeking asylum but includes room for exceptions and does not apply to children traveling alone.In an order that will not take effect for two weeks, Tigar wrote “the rule … cannot remain in place”, in part because it improperly presumes people who enter the country between legal border crossings are ineligible for asylum.The justice department said it would seek to prevent the judge’s ruling from taking effect and maintained the rule was lawful.Immigrant rights groups that sued over the the rule applauded the judge’s decision.“The promise of America is to serve as a beacon of freedom and hope, and the administration can and should do better to fulfill this promise, rather than perpetuate cruel and ineffective policies that betray it,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Katrina Eiland, who argued the case, said in a statement.The administration had argued that protection systems in other countries that migrants travel through have improved. But Tigar said it was not feasible for some migrants to seek protection in a transit country and noted the violence that many face in Mexico in particular.He also wrote that the rule was illegal because it presumes that people are ineligible for asylum if they enter the country between legal border crossings. But, Tigar wrote, Congress expressly said that should not affect whether someone is eligible for asylum.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden’s staff has said the asylum rule is a key part of its strategy to balance strict border enforcement while ensuring several avenues for migrants to pursue valid asylum claims. According to Customs and Border Protection, total encounters along the southern border have gone down recently. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      DoJ sues Texas governor over refusal to remove anti-migrant buoys from river

      by

      The US Department of Justice has sued the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, over his refusal to remove a floating barrier placed on the Rio Grande to stop migrants entering the US from Mexico.The move is the latest in a growing political spat between Abbott and the Biden administration, heightened by Republican attempts to scaremonger over immigration as the 2024 presidential election looms.The lawsuit filed by the federal government asks a court in Texas to force the state to remove the roughly 1,000ft line of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys the Biden administration says raises humanitarian and environmental concerns.The suit also says Texas unlawfully installed the barrier without permission, near the border city of Eagle Pass.The suit was filed on Monday, after Abbott refused to comply with instructions to remove the barrier.“Texas will fully utilise its constitutional authority to deal with the crisis you have caused,” Greg Abbott wrote to Joe Biden in a letter reported by CNN and other outlets.“Texas will see you in court, Mr President.”It was the latest confrontational move by a governor who for more than two years has escalated measures to stop migrants entering the US, pushing legal boundaries along the 1,200-mile border with Mexico.Blowback over the tactics is widening, including from within Texas and particularly in light of a state trooper’s account of razor wire leaving asylum seekers bloodied and officers denying migrants water in 100F (37.7C) heat and being told to push children into the river.Last week, the US justice department told Texas to remove the river barriers, citing federal laws against obstructing waterways and imposing a Monday deadline. On Monday, Abbott said that in refusing to comply, he was “assert[ing] Texas’s sovereign interest in protecting [its] borders” in his role as the “commander-in-chief of [the] state’s militia”.Repeating a common Republican talking point, the governor also wrote to Biden: “If you truly care about human life, you must begin enforcing federal immigration laws. By doing so, you can help me stop migrants from wagering their lives in the waters of the Rio Grande.”Saying migrants could attempt to use legitimate ports of entry, Abbott said: “While I share the humanitarian concerns noted in your lawyers’ letter, Mr President, your finger points in the wrong direction. Neither of us wants to see another death in the Rio Grande … Yet your open-border policies encourage migrants to risk their lives by crossing illegally through the water, instead of safely and legally at a port of entry. Nobody drowns on a bridge.”A White House spokesperson said Abbott’s behavior was “ making it hard for the men and women of border patrol to do their jobs of securing the border and putting both migrants and border agents in danger”.Biden’s border enforcement plan, the spokesperson added, had “led to the lowest levels of unlawful border crossings in over two years. Governor Abbott’s dangerous and unlawful actions are undermining that effective plan.“If Governor Abbott truly wanted to drive toward real solutions, he’d be asking his Republican colleagues in Congress why they voted against President Biden’s request to increase funding for the Department of Homeland Security and why they’re blocking the comprehensive immigration reform and border security measures that would finally fix our broken immigration system.”The White House also said Republicans “have no plan and are just playing political games”.Criticism of Abbott is growing within his own state.Speaking to the Associated Press, David Donatti, an attorney for the Texas American Civil Liberties Union, said: “There are so many ways that what Texas is doing right now is just flagrantly illegal.”Aron Thorn, a Texas Civil Rights Project attorney, described “a very strong correlation” between Abbott’s border policy and “the Trump and post-Trump era in which most of the Trump administration’s immigration policy was aggressive and extreme and very violative of people’s rights and very focused on making the political point.“The design of this is the optics and the amount of things that they sacrifice for those optics now is quite extraordinary.”In Eagle Pass, Jessie Fuentes, a kayaker, has filed his own lawsuit over work done on the river. On Monday that suit, Epi’s Canoe & Kayak Team v State of Texas, was cited in the suit filed by the federal government.Citing measures including floating barriers and shipping containers and razor wire placed along riverbanks cleared of vegetation, Fuentes recently told the Eagle Pass city council: “The river is a federally protected river by so many federal agencies, and I just don’t know how it happened.”A member of the Eagles Pass council, Elias Diaz, told the AP: “I feel like the state government has kind of bypassed local government … and so I felt powerless at times.”Hugo Urbina, a farmer whose land abuts the river, said he supported efforts to reduce border crossings via the Rio Grande. But Urbina said Abbott and his administration “do whatever it is that they want … breaking the law and … making your citizens feel like they’re second-hand citizens”.The Texas land office has said it will permit “vegetation management” on the banks of the river as part of anti-migration efforts. The state military department has cleared out carrizo cane, which the land office has called an invasive plant. Environmental experts are concerned changes to the landscape will affect the flow of the river.Tom Vaughan, co-founder of the Rio Grande International Study Center, said: “As far as I know, if there’s flooding in the river, it’s much more severe in Piedras Negras” – on the Mexican side – “than it is in Eagle Pass because that’s the lower side of the river.“And so next time the river really gets up, it’s going to push a lot of water over on the Mexican side, it looks like to me.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Another bus with dozens of migrants from Texas arrives in Los Angeles

      by

      Another bus carrying asylum seekers arrived in downtown Los Angeles from a Texas border city early on Saturday, the second such transport in less than three weeks.The bus, which arrived at about 12.40pm at Los Angeles’s Union Station from Brownsville, Texas, held 41 people including 11 children who were with their families, according to a statement from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles (Chirla).The busload of people were welcomed by a collective of faith and immigrants’ rights groups and transported to St Anthony’s Croatian Catholic church, where they were given water, food, clothing, medical checkups and initial legal immigration assistance.The office of Los Angeles’ mayor, Karen Bass, was not formally notified but became aware of the bus on Friday, said Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, in a statement.The asylum seekers came from Cuba, Belize, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and Venezuela. According to a statement from Chirla, most of those on the bus are seeking to reunify with family members or sponsors. Six of them need to fly to Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland, said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a spokesperson for Chirla.Cabrera said the group “was less stressed and less chaotic than the previous time”, referring to the busload of people who arrived at the same major transit hub on 14 June. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, claimed responsibility for that move in a tweet that read: “Small Texas border towns remain overrun & overwhelmed because Biden refuses to secure the border”.Abbott has not mentioned the latest bus – and an attempt to contact him was not immediately returned – but posted figures in a tweet on Saturday that claimed the Texas national guard and state troopers have “apprehended more than 386,000” asylum seekers. “While Biden ignores the border crisis, Texas is stepping up to fill the gaps he created,” Abbott said.Bass tweeted: “Los Angeles believes in treating everyone with respect and dignity and will continue to do so.”Bass said that after she took office last year, she directed city agencies to begin planning for a possible scenario in which LA “was on the receiving end of a despicable stunt that Republican governors have grown so fond of”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Chirla and our partners in Los Angeles are organized and ready to receive these asylum seekers when they get here,” said Angélica Salas, Chirla’s executive director, in a statement. “If Los Angeles is their last destination, we will ensure this is the place where they get a genuine and humane reception.”Earlier in June, the state of Florida picked up three dozen migrants in Texas and sent them by private jet to California’s capital, catching shelters and aid workers in Sacramento by surprise. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, held Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, responsible for the flights of asylum seekers, which came in two waves, and appeared to threaten to file kidnapping charges after the first incident in which a group of migrants was dumped at a Sacramento church. More