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US immigration

Republicans have taken up the politics of bigotry, putting US democracy at risk | Robert Reich

March 28, 2021 by Staff Reporter

Republicans are outraged – outraged! – at the surge of migrants at the southern border. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declares it a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration”. The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs claims, “we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right now is probably the most dramatic that I’ve seen at the border in my lifetime.”

Donald Trump demands the Biden administration “immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks – they should never have stopped it. They are causing death and human tragedy.”

“Our country is being destroyed!” he adds.

In fact, there’s no surge of migrants at the border.

US Customs and Border Protection apprehended 28% more migrants from January to February this year than in previous months. But this was largely seasonal. Two years ago, apprehensions increased 31% during the same period. Three years ago, it was about 25% from February to March. Migrants start coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer, then stop coming in the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly.

To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by US policies over the years, that drives migration in the first place.

But the “surge” has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear – and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting.

designed to make it harder for people to vote – especially the young, the poor, Black people and Hispanic Americans, all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats – by eliminating mail-in ballots, reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.

To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill, the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering and keeps dark money out of elections. It passed the House but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies.

On Wednesday, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz falsely claimed the new bill would register millions of undocumented migrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.

The core message of the Republican party now consists of lies about a “crisis” of violent migrants crossing the border, lies that they’re voting illegally, and blatantly anti-democratic demands voting be restricted to counter it.

The party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states’ rights and a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with America’s avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law and human rights.

Donald Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible for this, but he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry and the GOP has taken him up on it.

This transformation in one of America’s two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere.

“I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy?” Joe Biden opined at his news conference on Thursday.

In his maiden speech at the state department on 4 March, Antony Blinken conceded that the erosion of democracy around the world is “also happening here in the United States”.

The secretary of state didn’t explicitly talk about the Republican party, but there was no mistaking his subject.

“When democracies are weak … they become more vulnerable to extremist movements from the inside and to interference from the outside,” he warned.

People around the world witnessing the fragility of American democracy “want to see whether our democracy is resilient, whether we can rise to the challenge here at home. That will be the foundation for our legitimacy in defending democracy around the world for years to come.”

That resilience and legitimacy will depend in large part on whether Republicans or Democrats prevail on voting rights.

Not since the years leading up to the civil war has the clash between the nation’s two major parties so clearly defined the core challenge facing American democracy.

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Filed Under: POLITICS, US Tagged With: Biden administration, Republicans, US Congress, US domestic policy, US immigration, US news, US politics, US voting rights, US-Mexico border, World news

Republican senator Ted Cruz mocked for documentary-style trip to US-Mexico border

March 27, 2021 by Staff Reporter

Republican senator Ted Cruz has drawn criticism for taking a trip to America’s southern border as the conservative Texan politician once again became the butt of internet jokes and memes.

In the style of a wildlife documentary, Cruz captured his experience with the help of professional photographers and shared his recent journey to the US-Mexico border Thursday night on social media, where he aimed to shed light on what Republicans have dubbed a crisis.

Sporting a dark green fishing shirt and matching baseball cap with the Texas flag, Cruz spoke at a press conference where he sought to paint a dramatic picture of his experience: “On the other side of the river we have been listening to and seeing cartel members – human traffickers – right on the other side of the river waving flashlights, yelling and taunting Americans, taunting the border patrol.”

Despite his claims that the border situation is a direct result of the Biden administration’s immigration policies, residents in the Rio Grande Valley have said no such crisis exists. In fact, the number of border crossings under the Biden administration largely mirror those under the former Trump administration. Cruz was accompanied by 18 other Republican senators including John Cornyn, Susan Collins, and Linsey Graham.

After claiming he ran into heckling cartel members and saw a dead body floating in the Rio Grande, Cruz was derided by many, including former congressman Beto O’Rourke who said: “You’re in a border patrol boat armed with machine guns. The only threat you face is unarmed children and families who are seeking asylum (as well as the occasional heckler).”

Ted Cruz and Susan Collins claim they were “heckled” by drug cartels at the Mexican border. Both agreed it brought back painful memories of their proms

— Paul Rudnick (@PaulRudnickNY) March 26, 2021

O’Rourke added: “If you’re looking for a crisis to cosplay Senator for, I’m happy to point you in the right direction.”

Some compared Cruz’s attempt at embedded journalism to a scene from Jurassic Park.

Comedians on Twitter capitalized on the Republican senator’s stunt.

Others referenced the junior senator’s recent vacation to Cancun, Mexico that he recently took while millions of Texans went without power and heat during a deadly winter storm.

Yet more compared the jaunt to a scene from Deliverance, a film about four city-slickers that venture to the rural backwoods of Georgia by canoe.

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Filed Under: POLITICS, US Tagged With: Republicans, Ted Cruz, Texas, US immigration, US news, US-Mexico border

Republicans and Democrats send dueling delegations to US border

March 26, 2021 by Staff Reporter

Republicans and Democrats sent dueling delegations to the southern US border on Friday, in an attempt to frame perceptions of the Biden administration’s immigration policy amid an uptick in recent weeks in border crossings by undocumented migrants.

A group of Republican senators led by Ted Cruz of Texas presented their trip as an exposé of dire circumstances, with Cruz sharing video of himself on Thursday night standing in darkness next to the Rio Grande river and falsely warning about a “flood” of human smuggling.

A group of Democratic members of the House of Representatives led by Joaquín Castro of Texas described a different vulnerability at the border, that of unaccompanied children held by the US government.

The Democratic delegation planned on Friday to visit children at a Department of Health and Human Services facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, to ensure “that they’re treated humanely”, Castro said.

Beto O’Rourke, the former representative from El Paso, Texas, blasted Cruz on Twitter on Friday for what O’Rourke implied was a political charade designed to slow the momentum of Joe Biden, who has presided over a successful coronavirus vaccine rollout, signed an $1.9tn economic relief package and announced plans for a similar big spend on infrastructure.

“The truth is, the number of individual asylum seekers and immigrants seeking to come to this country is the SAME or LOWER than it was in 2019 when [Donald] Trump was President (and you were, apparently, Senator),” O’Rourke sniped at Cruz. “This isn’t any more of a crisis today than it was then.”

After two election cycles in which the former president’s strategy of fearmongering about supposed pressure on the border produced a Republican rout in midterm elections and then his own defeat, Cruz and colleagues returned to the strategy once again with a two-day, high-profile tour of border areas that included almost one quarter of the party’s senators.

One member of the delegation, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, tweeted video from a visibly crowded border detention facility on Friday, claiming the facility was holding almost 10 times its intended capacity.

Cruz was trying on Friday to get the hashtag “#Bidenbordercrisis” going on Twitter.

Biden said in a news conference on Thursday: “I’m ready to work with any Republican who wants to help solve the problem. Or make the situation better.”

But the president sought to draw a sharp line between his border policies and those of his predecessor.

“The idea that I’m going to say, which I would never do, ‘If an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let him starve to death and stay on the other side’ – no previous administration did that either, except Trump,” Biden said. “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it.”

Trump enacted a policy of family separation at the border, taking more than 5,500 children from their parents and then failing to keep track of the separated families, ultimately stranding hundreds of children whose parents could not be found, according to court documents.

Biden has placed Kamala Harris in charge of addressing the situation on the border. In an interview earlier this week the vice-president said that she and Biden would “absolutely” visit the border in person.

“They should all be going back. All be going back,” Biden said of people crossing the border. “The only people we are not going to leave sitting there on the other side of the Rio Grande with no help are children.”

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said a nine-year-old child from Mexico died last week while trying to reach the US border.

“US border patrol agents assigned to Del Rio sector’s marine unit rescued two migrants attempting to cross the Rio Grande, March 20,” the agency said in a statement released on Thursday. “US border patrol marine unit agents responded to assist three individuals stranded on an island on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande River.”

Border agents administered first aid to the three migrants. Two of them, a woman from Guatemala and her three-year-old child, regained consciousness, but the third, a child from Mexico, did not and was later pronounced dead by medical officials.

“We extend our deepest condolences to the family and friends of this small child,” the Del Rio sector chief patrol agent, Austin L Skero II, said in the statement.

A member of the Democratic border delegation, Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, spotlighted the plight of children held in US border detention facilities.

“Heading to the southern border with 7 year old Jakelin Caal on my mind,” Tlaib tweeted on Friday morning. “She died in detention, in our care, in 2018. I want to make sure no child dies like this, with conditions that we control.”

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Filed Under: POLITICS, US Tagged With: Democrats, Republicans, US immigration, US news, US politics, US-Mexico border, World news

Biden charges Harris with stemming migrant numbers at US-Mexico border

March 24, 2021 by Staff Reporter

Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that he is charging Kamala Harris with diplomatic efforts to stem migration at the US-Mexico border, amid a deepening humanitarian challenge there.

The vice-president will collaborate with officials from Mexico and Central America, according to Reuters, taking on similar responsibilities to Biden’s when he responded to an influx of children and families as vice-president under the Obama administration.

“Needless to say, the work will not be easy,” Harris said. “But it is important work.”

Both Biden and Harris were meeting with department heads and immigration advisers, after alarming images circulated earlier this week showing packed border holding cells, where young migrants rested on side-by-side floor mats and turned to mylar blankets for warmth.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered nearly 9,500 children who came to the country unaccompanied by a parent or guardian at the south-western border last month, and more than 15,000 are currently in federal custody – nearly doubling the previous record, according to the Washington Post.

The arrival of so many vulnerable people, coinciding with the coronavirus pandemic, has sent administrators scrambling for more space to safely accommodate those children, many of whom are stranded in inhospitable CBP facilities long after the legal time limit of 72 hours.

As Biden shared Harris’s new assignment, White House officials and lawmakers were touring a controversial shelter in Carrizo Springs, Texas, under the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal arm that cares for unaccompanied children until they can be released to parents or sponsors.

Following widespread criticism of the administration’s lack of transparency surrounding its border operations, HHS was allowing one network camera to join and document the tour, even as officials announced they were opening a second Carrizo Springs facility to hold an additional 500 migrant kids.

A Pentagon spokesperson said on Tuesday that it had also received a request from HHS to use an empty dormitory at joint base San Antonio and land at Fort Bliss – both in Texas – to host unaccompanied children, CNN reported.

As the urgent situation captures national attention, more politicians are expected to descend on the border later this week. The Democratic representative Joaquin Castro tweeted Monday that he would lead a delegation to Carrizo Springs on Friday, a move he called “oversight to ensure humane treatment and orderly process to unite kids with families”.

Texas’s two Republican senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, have also announced a visit to the state’s Rio Grande Valley on Friday.

Cornyn, an outspoken critic of the White House’s immigration policy, is currently under fire for seemingly lamenting that unlike former presidents, Biden “has instead emphasized the humane treatment of immigrants, regardless of their legal status”.

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Filed Under: POLITICS, US Tagged With: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, US immigration, US news, US-Mexico border, World news

Migrants held in overcrowded Texas facility, photos released by congressman show

March 22, 2021 by Staff Reporter

The Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar has brought more pain for the Joe Biden administration on its border policy by releasing pictures of an overcrowded immigration facility in Texas where he said more than 400 male minors were being held in a section meant for 250.

The White House is under growing pressure over conditions at the southern border, where federal authorities are trying to cope with an increase in migrant crossings from Mexico, many by unaccompanied minors, while staying true to Biden’s promise to implement a more humane policy than that pursued by Donald Trump.

Cuellar said the images showed a facility in Donna, Texas, that contained eight plastic-divided “pods” used to hold migrants. He said he did not visit the facility himself. The pictures showed migrants covered in foil blankets and lying on plastic mattresses.

Migrants in a room with walls of plastic sheeting at a facility in Donna, Texas, in a photo released 22 March. Photograph: Rep. Henry Cuellar/Reuters

Under US policy, children are not supposed to be held in custody for more than three days. More than 2,000 have currently passed that limit. Controversy is also mounting over the Biden administration’s refusal to allow press access to such border facilities.

Cuellar gave the pictures to Axios and described “terrible conditions for the children”, who he said should be moved into the care of the Department of Health and Human Services. Border patrol agents were “doing the best they can under the circumstances”, the congressman said, but were “not equipped to care for kids” and “need help from the administration”.

“We have to stop kids and families from making the dangerous trek across Mexico to come to the United States,” Cuellar said. “We have to work with Mexico and Central American countries to have them apply for asylum in their countries.”

Under US policy, children are not supposed to be held in custody for more than three days. More than 2,000 have currently passed that limit.
Under US policy, children are not supposed to be held in custody for more than three days. More than 2,000 have currently passed that limit. Photograph: Rep. Henry Cuellar/Reuters

On Sunday the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, told TV networks the administration was working to speed up processing.

“I have said repeatedly from the very outset a border patrol station is no place for a child,” he told CNN. “That is why we are working around the clock to move these children.”

He blamed the chaos at the border on the Trump administration. To MSNBC, he said: “We are not expelling children, girls, five, seven, nine years old back into the desert of Mexico, back into the hands of traffickers.”

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Filed Under: POLITICS, US Tagged With: Texas, US immigration, US news, World news

Mayorkas blames Trump for border woes as Republicans attack Biden

March 21, 2021 by Staff Reporter

The Biden administration is facing mounting pressure over a surge of unaccompanied migrant children crossing into the US, with the numbers seeking asylum at a 20-year high that is placing federal facilities and shelters under immense strain.

The homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, took to the political talk show circuit on Sunday to press the administration’s case that it is doing all it can. He continued to refer to the problem as a “challenge” not a “crisis”, attempting to put blame squarely on the previous incumbent of the White House, Donald Trump.

“It is taking time and it is difficult because the entire system was dismantled by the prior administration,” Mayorkas told CNN’s State of the Union. “There was a system in place that was torn down by the Trump administration.”

On ABC’s This Week, Mayorkas highlighted the tougher aspects of Joe Biden’s border policy, stressing that the administration was still expelling families and single adults under a regulation known as Title 42. He insisted largely Central American migrants arriving in increasing numbers were being given a clear message: “Do not come. The border is closed. The border is secure.”

But prominent Republicans have seized on the border difficulties as an opportunity to attack Biden for being soft on immigration.

Donald Trump said Mayorkas was “clueless” and called on him to complete the border wall.

first acts as president, Biden scrapped Trump’s hardline policy of sending unaccompanied children seeking asylum back to Mexico.

Under Biden’s guidelines, unaccompanied minors were exempted from the Title 42 rules and shielded from expulsion. That was deemed in line with the president’s pledge to achieve a “fair, safe and orderly” immigration system.

On Sunday, Mayorkas said the new approach addressed the humanitarian needs of migrant children “in a way that reflects our values and principles as a country”. But in the past few weeks, the numbers of minors seeking asylum has grown so rapidly that it has outpaced capacity to process the children in line with immigration laws.

72 hours allowed under immigration law.

There have been reports of overcrowding and harsh conditions in federal facilities in Texas. The Associated Press reported that some children were said by immigration lawyers to be sleeping on the floor after bedding ran out.

The government has tried to move as many children as possible into shelters run by the US Refugee Office, but they in turn have become stressed. There are now more than 9,500 children in shelters and short-term housing along the border. Non-governmental groups working with migrants and refugees have been forced to scramble to deal with the sudden demand for shelter.

As the administration struggles to keep a grip on events, it is also coming under criticism from Republicans and media outlets for refusing to allow reporters inside the beleaguered CBP facilities where children are being held. On Friday, Mayorkas visited El Paso in Texas with a bipartisan congressional delegation. Reporters were not allowed to follow them.

US Customs and Border Protection agents take people into custody near the Mexico border in Hidalgo, Texas, on Saturday. Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP

The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, called the move “outrageous and unacceptable”. In a tweet, he said: “No press. No cameras. What is Biden hiding?”

Quizzed by Fox News Sunday about the apparent lack of accountability, despite Biden’s promise to bring “trust and transparency” back to public affairs, Mayorkas said the administration was “working on providing access” to border patrol stations.

But he added: “First things first – we are focused on operations and executing our plans.”

While the political heat is rising at the border, moves are under way in Washington to try and find a longer-term fix to the age-old immigration conundrum. Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that would give “Dreamers”, undocumented migrants brought to the US as children, a pathway to citizenship.

The legislation has an uncertain future in the Senate, given its 50-50 split and the need to reach 60 votes to pass most major legislation.

Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois who has introduced a similar Dream Act to the Senate five times in the past 20 years, told CNN that he thought he was close to securing the necessary 60 votes. He also decried the current debate about whether there was a “crisis” or “challenge” at the border.

“We need to address our immigration laws in this country that are broken,” he said. “What you see at the border is one piece of evidence of that, but there’s much more.”

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Filed Under: POLITICS, US Tagged With: Biden administration, Democrats, Republicans, US Congress, US domestic policy, US foreign policy, US immigration, US news, US politics, US Senate, US-Mexico border, World news

US to house some migrant families in hotels in shift by Biden administration

March 21, 2021 by Staff Reporter

Some migrant families arriving in the US will be housed in hotels under a new program managed by nonprofit organizations, according to two people familiar with the plans, a move away from for-profit detention centers criticized by Democrats and health experts.

Endeavors, a San Antonio-based organization, will oversee what it calls “family reception sites” at hotels in Texas and Arizona, the sources said. The organization, in partnership with other nonprofits, will initially provide up to 1,400 beds in seven different brand-name hotels for families deemed vulnerable.

The opening of the reception centers would mark a significant shift by the administration of Joe Biden. In January, Biden issued an order directing the justice department not to renew its contracts with privately operated criminal detention facilities. However, the order did not address immigration jails run by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).

Roughly 1,200 migrants were being held in two family detention centers in Texas as of Wednesday, according to an Ice spokeswoman. A third center in Pennsylvania is no longer being used to hold families. The spokeswoman did not comment on the plan to house families in hotels.

The number of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border has climbed as Biden has rolled back some of the hardline policies of former president Donald Trump. Biden, who took office on 20 January, has faced criticism from Republicans. Some Democrats opposed re-opening a Trump-era emergency shelter for children.

The hotel sites, set to open in April, will offer Covid-19 testing, medical care, food services, social workers and case managers to help with travel and onward destinations, according to the two sources, who requested anonymity to discuss the matter. Staff will be trained to work with children.

It remained unclear whether migrants would be required to wear ankle bracelets or be subject to any other form of monitoring, the people said.

The families will arrive at border patrol stations and then be sent to the hotel sites to continue immigration paperwork, the two sources said. They could leave the reception centers as soon as six hours after arrival if paperwork is completed, they test negative for Covid-19 and transportation has been arranged.

Biden officials have said migrant families will be “expelled” to Mexico or their home countries under a Trump-era health order known as Title 42. But more than half of the 19,000 family members caught at the border in February were not expelled, with many released into the US.

The housing of some migrants in hotels was reported by Axios earlier on Saturday.

Endeavors will also operate a new 2,000-bed shelter for unaccompanied children in Texas, the sources said.

The Biden administration has struggled to house a rising number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the US-Mexico border. More than 500 children were stuck in crowded border stations for more than 10 days as of Thursday.

The new family and child facilities are expected to ramp up bed capacity gradually, the people familiar with the effort said.

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Filed Under: POLITICS, US Tagged With: Biden administration, Joe Biden, US immigration, US news, US politics

US House passes bill that would give Dreamers a path to citizenship

March 18, 2021 by Staff Reporter


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The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that would give undocumented immigrants, including “Dreamers”, a pathway to citizenship.

The House on Thursday voted 228 to 197, largely along party lines, to set up a legal pathway to citizenship for Dreamers – people who came to the US as undocumented minors and who received temporary protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program.

The bill, called the American Dream and Promise Act of 2021, would also grant green cards for many immigrants who have fled war or natural disasters and are residing in the US with a temporary protected status. In all, it could make 4.4 million people eligible for permanent residence in the US, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Nine Republicans joined Democrats in support of the measure.

Representatives also voted 247-174 Thursday on a second bill, which would grant legal status for undocumented farmworkers. Both measures passed in 2019, as well, with some Republican support – but the measures are likely to join a growing list of legislation that will hit a wall in the evenly divided Senate, where Republicans have vowed to block proposals with the filibuster.

The measures are among several attempts by Democrats to reverse Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies. They also coincide with Joe Biden’s efforts to address the number of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border, many of whom are fleeing dangerous conditions in Central America.

The Dreamer bill would grant conditional legal status for 10 years to many undocumented immigrants who were brought into the US as children.

During Thursday’s debate, the Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal noted she had come from India to the US alone at the age of 16, saying: “Let’s stop the hypocrisy of criminalizing immigrants.”

Immigrant rights groups celebrated the news of its passage. “This is a result of years of organizing and pressure from the immigrant rights movement, but we’ll continue to hold our celebration until the very end,” tweeted the advocacy group Raices.

As president, Trump rescinded the Obama-era Daca program, which offered temporary protection from deportation to Dreamers. However, the supreme court ruled in 2020 that Trump’s move had been unlawful.

The Biden White House backed both bills. But it also urged lawmakers to adopt broader reforms in Biden’s sweeping immigration bill introduced last month, saying this would secure the border and “address the root causes of instability and unsafe conditions causing migration from Central America”.

“We can’t keep waiting,” Biden wrote on Twitter. “I urge Congress to come together to find long term solutions to our entire immigration system so we can create a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system, tackle the root causes of migration and legalize the undocumented population in the United States.”

Immigration rights activists hold a rally in front of the US supreme court in Washington DC, 12 November 2019. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Biden’s wide-ranging plan would provide a path to US citizenship to the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally. But the Senate’s No 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, said this week that goal does not have enough support in the House or Senate.

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, panned the House efforts on Thursday, saying they would exacerbate problems at the border, further dimming prospects in that chamber, where a supermajority of at least 60 of 100 members are needed for most legislation to advance.

And even if the Dreamers bill were to pass the Senate, it would still have limitations, including provisions around criminal history that could bar some young immigrants from legal status if they have committed a misdemeanor. It also gives the Department of Homeland Security discretion over which youths can be excluded from the path to citizenship, based on alleged gang affiliation or dispositions in juvenile court.

Human Rights Watch and other groups have written to Democratic legislators asking them to strike provisions that would bar young immigrants who have been criminalized from becoming citizens.

“If we learned anything in 2020, it’s that the policing and mass incarceration systems in this country are fundamentally rigged against Black and Latinx people,” said Jacinta González, the senior campaign organizer for the advocacy group Mijente, who criticised the bill for being “designed to strip access to Biden’s promise of immigration reform from people who have experienced police contact. Criminalization born of a racist system cannot be the measure by which we determine who belongs and who goes.”

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Filed Under: POLITICS, US Tagged With: Biden administration, US Congress, US immigration, US news, US politics

Mexico: smugglers use bracelets to track migrants as they cross US border

March 13, 2021 by Staff Reporter

Along the banks of the Rio Grande in the scrubby grassland near Penitas, south-east Texas, hundreds of colored plastic wristbands ripped off by migrants litter the ground, signs of what US border officials say is a growing trend among powerful drug cartels and smugglers to track people paying to cross unlawfully into the United States.

The plastic bands – red, blue, green, white – some labeled “arrivals” or “entries” in Spanish, are discarded after migrants cross the river on makeshift rafts, according to a Reuters witness. Their use has not been widely reported before.

Some migrants are trying to evade border agents, others are mostly Central American families, or young children traveling without parents who turn themselves in to officials, often to seek asylum protections because of dangers in their home countries.

Border patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley sector, which spans more than 34,000 sq miles along Texas-Mexico border, have recently encountered immigrants wearing the bracelets during several apprehensions, said Matthew Dyman, a spokesperson for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The “information on the bracelets represents a multitude of data that is used by smuggling organizations, such as payment status or affiliation with smuggling groups”, Dyman told Reuters.

The differing smuggling techniques come as Joe Biden’s administration has sought to reverse restrictive immigration polices set up by his predecessor, Donald Trump. But a recent jump in border crossings has Republicans warning loudly and repeatedly that the easing of hardline policies will lead to an immigration crisis.

A shoe and wristbands discarded by migrants from along the banks of the Rio Grande. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters

US border agents carried out nearly 100,000 apprehensions or rapid expulsions of migrants at the US-Mexico border in February, the highest monthly total since mid-2019.

The categorization system using wristbands illustrates the sophistication of organized criminal groups ferrying people across the border, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, the director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Washington DC-based bipartisan policy center

“They run it like a business,” said Cardinal Brown, which means “finding more patrons and looking for efficiencies”.

Migrants can pay thousands of dollars for the journey to the US and human smugglers have to pay off drug cartels to move people through parts of Mexico where they lay claim to territory.

“This is a money-making operation and they have to pay close attention to who has paid,” she said. “This may be a new way to keep track.”

Criminal groups operating in northern Mexico, however, have long used systems to log which migrants have already paid for the right to be in gang-controlled territory, as well as for the right to cross the border into the United States, migration experts said.

When increased numbers of Central Americans were arriving at the border on express buses in 2019, smugglers kept tabs on them by double checking “the names and IDs of migrants before they got off the bus to make sure they had paid,” Cardinal Brown said.

A migrant in Reynosa – one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico, across the border from McAllen, Texas – who declined to give his name for fear of retaliation, showed Reuters a picture of a purple wristband he was wearing.

He said he paid $500 to one of the criminal groups in the city after he arrived a few months ago from Honduras to secure the purple bracelet to protect against kidnapping or extortion.

He said once migrants or their smugglers have paid for the right to cross the river, which is also controlled by criminal groups, they receive another bracelet.

“This way we’re not in danger, neither us nor the coyote,” he said, using the Spanish word for smuggler.

One human smuggler who spoke on conditions of anonymity, confirmed the bracelets were a system to designate who has paid for the right to transit through cartel territory.

“They are putting these (bracelets) on so there aren’t killings by mistake,” he said.

Migrants and smugglers say it’s a system required by the cartels that control waterfront territory in the conflict-ridden state of border-adjacent Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

In January, a group of migrants was massacred in Tamaulipas state just 40 miles west of Reynosa. Twelve police officers have been arrested in connection with the killings.

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Filed Under: POLITICS, US Tagged With: US immigration, US news, US-Mexico border, World news

Biden officials visit US-Mexico border to monitor increase in crossings

March 7, 2021 by Staff Reporter

The new US secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, led a visit by Biden administration officials to the border with Mexico on Saturday, amid a growing number of border crossings and criticism by Republicans that a crisis is brewing.

Joe Biden has sought to reverse rigid immigration polices set up by his predecessor as president, Donald Trump, whose presidency was dominated by efforts to build a border wall and reduce the number of legal and illegal migrants.

Biden has faced criticism from immigration activists who say unaccompanied children and families are being held too long in detention centers instead of being released while asylum applications are considered.

The White House said last week Biden had asked senior members of his staff to travel to the border and report back about the influx of unaccompanied minors. It declined at the time to release details about the trip, citing security and privacy concerns.

Mayorkas and officials including domestic policy adviser Susan Rice visited a border patrol facility and a refugee resettlement facility, the White House said on Sunday.

“They discussed capacity needs given the number of unaccompanied children and families arriving at our border,” a statement said, “the complex challenges with rebuilding our gutted border infrastructure and immigration system, as well as improvements that must be made in order to restore safe and efficient procedures to process, shelter, and place unaccompanied children with family or sponsors.

“Officials also discussed ways to ensure the fair and humane treatment of immigrants, the safety of the workforce, and the wellbeing of communities nearby in the face of a global pandemic.”

An influx of people seeking to cross the border is likely to be a big issue in the 2022 midterm elections. Trump may use it to rally his base against Biden and lay the groundwork for a potential return as a presidential candidate in 2024 or as a way to boost a successor.

“The border is breaking down as I speak,” Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, told Fox News on Sunday.

“Immigration in 2022 will be a bigger issue than it was in 2016.”

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Filed Under: POLITICS, US Tagged With: Biden administration, Democrats, Republicans, US domestic policy, US foreign policy, US immigration, US news, US politics, World news

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