Move allows administration to redirect money despite lawmakers’ refusal to provide funding
The US supreme court cleared the way for Donald Trump to use billions in Pentagon funds to build a border wall.
The decision allows the Trump administration to redirect approximately $2.5bn approved by Congress for the Pentagon to help build his promised wall along the US-Mexico border even though lawmakers refused to provide funding.
Continue reading...At a federal immigration court in El Paso asylum seekers wait in limbo as a result of Trump’s policies
Judge Sunita Mahtabfar, presiding over the El Paso immigration court in south-west Texas, kicked off the hearing by asking the 16 asylum seekers a question.
“Is anyone here afraid to return to Mexico?” she said.
Continue reading...Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for a “9/11-style commission” to investigate child separation on the border with Mexico on Saturday, and said the US government has a life-long responsibility to children it severed from their parents, to provide them with mental health support.
Related: Bieber thanks Trump over A$AP Rocky but urges: 'Let those kids out of cages'
Continue reading...The vice-president, Mike Pence, got a first-hand view of migrant detention facilities after touring two centres in Texas as he spoke out against grandstanding on Capitol Hill after legislators delivered emotional testimony about appalling conditions. Pence was in the border city of McAllen, Texas where he was joined by a delegation of Republican lawmakers as they toured migrant detention centres. President Donald Trump has said that a nationwide wave of arrests of immigrants facing deportation will begin over the weekend.
Continue reading...Controversy continued on Saturday over Mike Pence’s visit to a detention facility on the Texas border, in which the vice-president said appalling conditions described by a pool reporter were “tough stuff” but placed the blame for the migrant crisis on Democrats in Congress.
Families fleeing violence, poverty and drought in Central America have been coming to the US in record numbers, peaking in May when the border patrol made nearly 133,000 apprehensions. Detention facilities quickly filled up, forcing many migrants to languish in unsuitable facilities much longer than the 72 hours required by law.
Continue reading...In an emotional testimony to the House oversight committee on Friday, Democratic representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib described conditions at an immigrant detention center, decrying alleged mistreatment happening 'in front of the American flag'. During Ocasio-Cortez's testimony a congressional staffer fainted. The testimony comes as Mike Pence was due to travel to Texas on Friday to tour a facility and participate in a roundtable with border patrol and members of the Senate judiciary committee
Continue reading...In the House oversight committee, Yazmin Juárez, whose 21-month old baby daughter died in Ice custody, delivered searing testimony before Congress on Wednesday afternoon. 'We came to the United States where I hoped to build a better safer life for us,' said Juárez. 'Instead I watched my baby girl die slowly and painfully just a few months before her second birthday'
Continue reading...Report from government’s own auditors includes images of children and adults penned into rooms
New images of children and adults in “dangerously” overcrowded US border patrol facilities in Texas have been released as part of a report from government auditors.
The congressional House oversight committee announced on Tuesday it will hold a hearing next week on the treatment of migrants held in detention facilities at the southern border after a series of reports of poor treatment.
Continue reading...Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and Angie Valeria were brought to their final rest in ceremony attended by 200 relatives and friends
A Salvadoran man and his young daughter who drowned trying to cross into Texas were brought to their final rest on Monday, a week after a heartbreaking image of their bodies floating in the Rio Grande cast a spotlight on America’s migration crisis.
About 200 relatives and friends followed a hearse bearing the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, to La Bermeja municipal cemetery in southern San Salvador. The ceremony was private, and journalists were not allowed access.
Continue reading...Despite fears stoked by Trump, fewer migrants are arriving at the border than in past years – but most are now children headed to facilities that are ill-equipped to receive them
At a border patrol processing facility in McAllen, Texas on 11 June, a group of lawyers and doctors met a 17-year-old girl from Guatemala. She was in a wheelchair and she held her tiny one-month-old daughter, who was swaddled in a gray sweatshirt so dirty it was almost black.
Related: ‘People with no names’: the drowned migrants buried in pauper’s graves
Continue reading...Horror builds with each new report – children kept in cages, children taking care of infants, mothers who have been torn from their babies. What if it was your child?
Warning: graphic images
For as long as I have been a mother, I’ve had recurrent nightmares about water carrying my children away. In the dreams, my sons slip quietly beneath the surface, becoming blurry underwater shapes, and then disappearing completely. My panic is animal – a pulsing in my ears, static in my brain, a scream-howl building in my chest. I wake up thrashing against the water, searching desperately for my boys.
When the news broke of 23-month-old Valeria and her father, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, Salvadoran migrants who had been swept away by the Rio Grande, I was camping along a river in northern Arizona, without access to the internet. I had been photographing plants and making videos of the river to show my desert children, who were at home in Tucson with my parents. When I emerged from the woods, I came face-to-face with a gas station newspaper and saw it.
Continue reading...In an age when social media has undermined our ability to engage with pictures, Julia le Duc’s tragic image raises tough questions
Warning: graphic images
Julia le Duc’s image of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, lying drowned on a muddy shoreline after an attempted crossing of Rio Grande into the US appears like a summation of all the arguments about the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies.
The pair look as though they could be locked in a sleeping embrace, the child’s head tucked inside her father’s T-shirt, where she’d been placed by him for safety as he swam, protecting their last dignity.
Continue reading...The father and his toddler daughter pictured face down in the river were two of dozens who drowned this year while crossing the border to seek asylum
Under a hot sun beating down on the US border, a family of five can be seen mid-river, struggling against a cruel current of greenish-grey water threatening to sweep them off their feet. It appears to be a couple and their three children, risking their lives in the treacherous Rio Grande that divides Mexico from Texas.
The father clutches a black backpack in his hand, the family’s only luggage. On his back he’s carrying a small boy wearing a rainbow-striped T-shirt. A little girl is on the woman’s back, small arms clasped tightly around her mother’s neck.
Continue reading...Searing photographs showing a man and his 23-month-old daughter lying face down in shallow water along the Mexican bank of the Rio Grande near the US border highlight the perils of the latest migration crisis involving mostly Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty.
Continue reading...Julia Le Duc gives details of the father and his toddler daughter who died trying to cross the Rio Grande Warning: graphic images
Julia Le Duc is a reporter for La Jornada in Matamoros, the Mexican city directly across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas.
Her shocking photographs showing the bodies of Salvadoran migrant Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter Valeria cast a fresh spotlight on the migration crisis at America’s southern border. Here she describes how the images came into being.
Continue reading...The toddler’s arm was still draped around her father’s neck after bodies were found in the Rio Grande as they sought asylum
The grim reality of the migration crisis unfolding on America’s southern border has been captured in photographs showing the lifeless bodies of a Salvadoran father and his daughter who drowned as they attempted to cross the Rio Grande into Texas.
The images, taken on Monday , show Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, 26, and his daughter Valeria, lying face down in shallow water. The 23-month-old toddler’s arm is draped around her father’s neck, suggesting that she was clinging to him in her final moments.
Continue reading...Soap, toothbrushes and blankets are some of the items migrant children detained in the US do not need, a Trump administration official has claimed. Sarah Fabian, a lawyer for the US Department of Justice, argued at the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit that such children do not always require certain sanitary products
Continue reading...Newly appointed chief, Francisco Garduño, said he hoped to prevent hundreds of thousands of migrants entering the country each year
Mexico’s immigration chief has vowed to slash the number of migrants entering his country by 60% and prevent Mexico from being used as “a trampoline” to the United States, as the Mexican government scrambles to satisfy Donald Trump’s demands to curb migration.
Trump has given Mexico a 45-day deadline – which ends on 22 July – to reduce the flow of undocumented Central American migrants to the United States’ southern border, leaving the Mexican government racing to meet those demands and avert the threat of tariffs.
Continue reading...President tweets ire at New York Times and opponents as agreement to avoid tariffs comes under scrutiny
The Trump administration was forced to defend its immigration agreement with Mexico on Sunday, amid reports that key provisions in the deal, forged under the threat of trade tariffs, were mostly old commitments agreed to months ago.
Related: Mexican president leads 'celebration' rally after US tariffs dropped
Continue reading...For Mexican farmworkers, seasonal employment in the US is an opportunity to earn more – but those who make the journey can be easily exploited by recruiters
The sun is rising and a line of workers dressed in jeans and hoodies is already snaking its way around the block. A few of them started gathering outside the US consulate building as early as 4am.
Monterrey, the third largest city in Mexico, is a little over 100 miles from the US border, and a hub for farmworkers applying for temporary work visas.
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