Category Archives: US immigration

‘I feel like a criminal for quitting’: nurses in the US fight ‘stay or pay’ agreements

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Filipino nurses for Ohio-based company say they have been forced to pay thousands in fees after signing training contracts

Filipino nurses are calling for the US’s top labor watchdog to review controversial “stay or pay” training repayment agreement provisions that have left them facing lawsuits and thousands of dollars in fees after they quit their jobs.

Training repayment agreement provisions (Trap) are contracts employers require workers to sign before beginning a job and stipulate that if a worker leaves the job before a specified time, they owe substantial fees.

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US-Mexico border talks yield ‘important agreements’ on rail and bridge crossings

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Two countries agree to enhance efforts to tackle human smuggling, poverty and violence and promote legal ‘pathways’

US and Mexican officials have hailed the success of talks held on Wednesday aimed at curbing historically high unauthorized immigration across their shared, 2,000-mile border that risks becoming a humanitarian disaster and an election year political crisis for Joe Biden.

After the closed-door meeting between the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the Mexican foreign minister, Alicia Bárcena, the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, hailed what he described as “important agreements”.

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Biden mulls border crackdown in face of Trump’s migrant-bashing rhetoric

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President faces pressure from Republican critics and Democratic allies as he struggles to address what both sides agree is a crisis

Heading into the heat of the 2024 election season, Joe Biden is weighing major changes to US immigration policy that would toughen border enforcement and address an issue that has emerged as one of the president’s biggest political vulnerabilities ahead of a likely rematch against his anti-immigration rival Donald Trump.

But it is also a risk for Biden, who entered the White House in 2021 promising to “restore humanity and American values to our immigration system” after Trump’s four-year crackdown on immigration.

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How Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is taking over the Republican party

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Rhetoric that was widely seen as echoing Hitler was not enough for some senior Republicans to break ranks with the former president

Donald Trump has the tacit blessing of senior Republican figures as he seeks to put border security front and center of the 2024 election by deploying fascistic language to fire up his support base, political analysts warn.

The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 has called for a sharp crackdown on immigration and asserted at a weekend rally that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

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Two Guinean children abandoned in Bogotá airport as migrant routes shift

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Migration through the treacherous Darién gap is slowing as less restrictive air routes open up between South and Central America

Two children from the west African country of Guinea who were abandoned in Bogotá’s airport have been taken into government custody after spending several days on their own in the international departures terminal.

Colombia’s national immigration department said the children, aged 10 and 13, had been travelling with separate groups and were left in the airport by their relatives earlier this month for reasons that have not been clarified.

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Texas sends plane to Chicago with over 100 people who crossed US-Mexico border

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Spokesman for Greg Abbott says flights are result of criticism over his operation of bussing migrants to Democratic-led cities

Texas sent a plane with more than 120 people who crossed the US-Mexico border to Chicago in an escalation of Greg Abbott’s bussing operation, which has sent more than 80,000 people to Democratic-led cities across the country since last year.

The first flight, which the Republican governor’s office said left from El Paso and arrived Tuesday, was arranged a week after Chicago’s city council took new action over the busloads of migrants that have drawn sharp criticism from Brandon Johnson, the city’s mayor. The city has said bus operators began trying to drop off people in neighboring cities to avoid penalties that include fines, towing or impoundment.

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‘Texas, we’ll see you in court’: migrant law sparks outcry and opposition

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Democrats call on attorney general to halt state law, while Mexican president and ACLU both say they will challenge it

As a group of Texas and Hispanic Democrats demanded the US attorney general block what they called “the most extreme anti-immigrant state bill in the United States”, signed by the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, on Monday, the president of Mexico and the American Civil Liberties Union also vowed to fight the law.

“Texas, we’ll see you in court,” the ACLU said.

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Texas governor signs bill allowing police to arrest migrants entering US illegally

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Law gives police sweeping new powers as well as empowering local judges to order migrants’ expulsion

The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, on Monday signed a bill giving all police in the state sweeping new powers to arrest migrants deemed to have entered the US illegally as well as empowering local judges to order their expulsion back across the US-Mexico border.

The hard-right Republican’s actions represent a brazen challenge to the federal government’s authority over the enforcement of US immigration law.

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‘He’s dog-whistling’: Trump denounced over anti-immigrant comment

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Former president said undocumented immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ at political rally on Saturday

Donald Trump is facing a backlash for repeating a remark at a political rally on Saturday where he said undocumented immigrants to the United States are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

The former US president’s comments were the latest example of his campaign rhetoric that seemed to go beyond the lies and exaggerations that are a trademark of his stump speeches and instead go into territory of outright extremism or racism. In November he was widely condemned for calling his opponents “vermin”, language that echoed that used historically by dictators and authoritarians.

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Texas governor endorses Trump for 2024 race at US-Mexico border event

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Greg Abbott said Biden’s border policies pose a danger to the US and credited Trump with lowering number of border crossings

Donald Trump won the endorsement of Texas governor Greg Abbott at an event near the US-Mexico border Sunday, a location meant to highlight the former Republican president’s plans to crack down on immigration if he wins the 2024 White House race.

Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination to challenge Democratic president Joe Biden next year, traveled to Edinburg, Texas, with his fellow Republican Abbott to visit national guard soldiers, state public safety department troopers and other service members stationed there.

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Eight dead in Texas crash after police chase suspected migrant smuggler

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Officials say driver fled police and smashed into Chevrolet which then caught fire, with everyone in both vehicles killed

Eight people died on Wednesday when the driver of a car suspected of carrying smuggled migrants fled police and smashed into an oncoming vehicle on a south Texas highway.

The crash happened about 6.30am when the driver of a 2009 Honda Civic tried to outrun deputies from the Zavala county sheriff’s office and attempted to pass a semi-truck, the state department of public safety (DPS) said. The Civic collided with a 2015 Chevrolet Equinox, which caught fire.

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Top Mexican court to give new life to controversial Trump-era border policy

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‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, which forces people seeking asylum to wait in Mexico while US claims are processed, set to be revived

The Mexican supreme court is poised to give new life to a controversial US-Mexico border policy at a time when both countries are looking for ways to slow the flow of migrants heading north.

The “Remain in Mexico” policy, officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols, is a Trump-era policy that forced people seeking asylum in the US to wait out their legal proceedings in Mexico for months or even years. The government of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador accepted the arrangement and allowed thousands of asylum seekers to be sent back to the country from the US.

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Chicago’s plan to hire controversial firm to house migrants alarms critics

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GardaWorld has been investigated for safety violations and is also the same company that bussed migrants in from Texas

The mayor of Chicago is at loggerheads with fellow progressives and his own Democratic state governor over the city’s choice of a vexed company to erect controversial tents for asylum seekers during the bitter midwest winter – as wider tensions rise on the left at the local and national level over migration policy chaos.

While the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, and the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, are divided over how to house thousands of migrant families currently sleeping inside and outside Chicago police stations, the two are united in fury at lack of emergency funding coming from Joe Biden’s White House.

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Border walls and deportations: Biden’s migrant plans prompt outrage

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The president decried Trump’s migration approach but a series of recent steps, critics say, are barely different from his predecessor

As a candidate in the 2020 election, Joe Biden assailed Donald Trump over what he cast as his rival’s ineffective and un-American approach to immigration – one that undermined the nation’s long history of welcoming those seeking refuge in the United States.

Now as president, facing a migrant crisis that is straining resources at the border and feeding into major US cities, Biden has taken a series of steps that critics on his left say are hardly distinguishable from his predecessor.

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AOC slams sanctions against Venezuela and deportation flights

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said US measures to pressure Maduro’s government contribute to exodus of people from that country

Left-wing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the US was “contributing to the destabilisation that drives migration” with measures such as sanctions on Venezuela and Thursday’s decision to resume deportation flights to the South American country.

She also demanded that Joe Biden reverse his recent decision to expedite border wall construction.

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US set to resume deportation flights for Venezuelan migrants

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Officials tell AP process expected to begin shortly but decline to provide more details before announcement of government plan

The Biden administration is going to resume deporting migrants to Venezuela, two US officials told the Associated Press on Thursday.

The process is expected to begin shortly, the officials said, though they did not provide specific details on when the flights would begin taking off. The officials were not authorized to publicly disclose details of the government’s plan ahead of an official announcement and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

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Scorching heat caused deaths to double at busiest US-Mexico border route

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More than 100 of 148 recorded deaths in El Paso sector were recorded between May and September when heat topped 100F

Scorching summer temperatures caused the number of deaths along one of the busiest migrant routes into the US to more than double in the 2023 fiscal year that closed on Sunday, according to data from the US border patrol.

More than 100 of the 148 recorded deaths in the patrol’s El Paso sector were recorded between May and September when temperatures were at or above 100F (37.7C) for 44 consecutive days, the El Paso Times said on Tuesday.

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Revealed: US collects more data on migrants than previously known

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Documents show immigration agency Ice and BI Inc gather more information on those in Isap program and store it for longer

A US immigration enforcement program that tracks nearly 200,000 migrants is collecting far more data on the people it surveils than officials previously shared, and storing that data for far longer than was previously known, the Guardian can reveal.

Newly released documents show that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) stores some personal information the program collects on migrants through smartphone apps, ankle monitors and smartwatches for up to 75 years.

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‘Anything for my family’: Venezuelans in US welcome temporary protected status

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Asylum seekers who arrived before the end of July – about 472,000 – will now be able to legally live and work in the US

Venezuelan asylum seekers in the United States have welcomed the news of temporary permission to live and work in the country as a vital “helping hand” after the Biden administration announced that it would extend temporary protected status (TPS) to nearly half a million Venezuelan nationals.

The Department of Homeland Security announced that the TPS extension now includes those who arrived in the US by the end of July, whereas the previous cutoff date was 8 March 2021.

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New York mayor’s remarks on migrants ‘dangerous’, warns fellow Democrat

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Progressive Tiffany Cabán says Eric Adams’ hostile comments on migrants have ‘real possibility’ of inciting violence

A prominent New York progressive is warning that mayor Eric Adams’s hostile comments about the rising number of migrants in the city are “dangerous” and risk inciting violence against the new arrivals and other immigrants.

Tiffany Cabán, aiming for re-election to the city council this November and long endorsed by leading leftwing figures, including US senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, attacked as “irresponsible” the mayor’s remarks last week that the sharp increase in migration to New York would “destroy” the city.

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