Category Archives: US immigration

‘A senseless tragedy’: woman dies after bid to climb US border wall

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Border patrol officials and the Cochise county sheriff’s office investigating cause of death of the 32-year-old woman

A Mexican woman attempting to climb the US border wall in eastern Arizona died after her leg became trapped in a climbing harness and she was left hanging upside down, authorities said.

Border patrol officials and the Cochise county sheriff’s office said they were investigating the cause of death of the 32-year-old on a section of the wall near Douglas, Arizona. The sheriff’s office said her foot and leg became entangled as she tried to maneuver down the US side of the wall and that she hung upside down “a significant amount of time”.

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Biden ends Trump-era asylum curbs amid border-region Democrat backlash

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Administration signals end of Title 42 immigration restrictions – ostensibly to fight Covid – but some fear electoral consequences

Joe Biden will next month end a controversial pandemic-related expulsion policy that effectively closed America’s asylum system at its border with Mexico, it was announced on Friday.

The decision to lift the Title 42 public health order, which will take effect on 23 May, is seen as long overdue by immigration advocates who regard the order as inhumane. But it was seized on by Republicans and some electorally vulnerable Democrats, who warned of chaos at the border.

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Revealed: US to close or scale back troubled immigration detention centers

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  • Center in Gadsden, Alabama ‘long a facility of serious concern’
  • Advocates have complained over quality of Ice medical care

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) is planning to close a troubled detention center in Alabama and will significantly scale back the number of beds contracted at three other facilities, citing concerns about conditions, according to an internal government document seen by Reuters.

According to the document, Ice will discontinue the use of the Etowah county detention center in Gadsden, Alabama, saying it had “long been a facility of serious concern, due to the quantity, severity, diversity and persistence of deficiencies identified during facility inspections”.

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‘We had no choice’: over 8,000 Russians seek US refuge in six-month period

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The increase in asylum-seekers is 35 times the number who crossed the border in Mexico during the same time period last year

Maksim Derzhko calls it one of the most terrifying experiences of his life. A longtime opponent of Vladimir Putin, he flew from Vladivostok to the Mexican border city of Tijuana with his 14-year-old daughter and was in a car with seven other Russians. All that separated them from claiming asylum in the United States was a US officer standing in traffic as vehicles inched toward inspection booths.

The emotions are “hard to put into words,” he says. “It’s fear. The unknown. It’s really hard. We had no choice.”

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‘Traumatised and terrified, with nowhere else to go’: huge numbers of people stuck at US border

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Title 42, enacted under Trump and kept in place by Biden, has led to hundreds of thousands being denied their right to asylum since the start of the pandemic

When Henry Ruiz* and Raquel Hernandez boarded a bus heading north to America with their two young children, they knew there would be no going back.

It was June 2021, and a few weeks earlier Ruiz, a 28-year-old banana farmer from central Mexico, had been abducted by a group of armed men and taken to an isolated ranch where 15 others – 13 men and two women – were being held.

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‘Constantly afraid’: immigrants on life under US government surveillance

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Participants in the privately run Isap program, billed as an alternative to detention, describe painful ankle monitors and contradictory rules

Macarena had just put on a pair of skinny jeans when her phone rang.

On the other end of the line was an employee from BI Inc, the private contractor tracking Macarena’s whereabouts on behalf of US Immigration authorities. The employee had received an alert that the ankle monitor Macarena was wearing had been tampered with, Macarena recalled them saying. They asked if she was trying to take it off.

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Trump’s border wall breached by smugglers over 3,000 times, records reveal

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The barrier Trump touted as ‘impenetrable’ can be breached with common power tools, the Washington Post reports

Smugglers have breached the Trump administration’s border wall along the US-Mexico frontier more than 3,000 times, government maintenance records obtained by the Washington Post reveal.

Nearly 500 miles of barrier was constructed by the Trump administration beginning in 2019, mostly in rural New Mexico and Arizona. Former president Trump touted the “big, beautiful wall” as the “Rolls-Royce” of barriers, but smugglers have breached the wall at least 3,272 times, mostly with common power tools found at hardware stores.

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Kabul to California: how the ‘hip-hop family’ mobilised for young Afghans

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With breakdancers, artists and parkourists facing a bleak future under the Taliban, a global network stepped in to help, drawing on the activist spirit of rap culture

A veteran of the hip-hop scene and internationally celebrated breakdancer, Nancy Yu – AKA Asia One – has her fair share of people contacting her looking for advice. But the message she received in 2019 from a young Afghan was a little different.

Frustrated by his breakdancing crew’s inability to get visas to perform internationally, Moshtagh* was wondering if Asia could help. “He felt they were really good, but they felt, like, invisible to the world,” she says. “I liked him. He wasn’t trying to bug me or say ‘we need this right now’ … He seemed rather humble and honest.”

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US immigration courts struggle amid understaffing and backlog of cases

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Judges, scholars and attorneys all concerned whether people due in court will receive notice before their hearings

America’s immigration courts are struggling to function at the most basic level, with judges who are already woefully understaffed and often undertrained now overwhelmed by a growing backlog of more than 1.6m cases, industry leaders have warned.

The system is so damaged that judges, scholars and attorneys all share concerns about whether immigrants due in court will even receive notice before their hearings so they know to show up and aren’t ordered deported in absentia – an urgent concern made worse by volatile immigration policies at the US-Mexico border.

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Ten missing and 17 detained by US after boat capsizes in Puerto Rico

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Incident is latest calamity as migrants from Dominican Republic and Haiti increasingly try to cross treacherous smuggling route

Federal authorities detained 17 Dominican migrants on Friday after their boat capsized near Puerto Rico’s north-west coast in the pre-dawn hours, with the US Coast Guard searching for an estimated 10 others still missing.

Jeffrey Quiñones, a Customs and Border Protection spokesman, told the Associated Press that those detained told officials that a total of 27 people were onboard the boat that struck a rock and turned over near Shacks Beach in Isabela.

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Four more bodies found off Florida coast from capsized boat

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Discovery brings total to five, but search for survivors will be suspended if new discoveries are not made, says US coast guard

The US coast guard said it would call off the search for survivors at sunset on Thursday if no new discoveries were made following a boat capsizing off the Florida coast at the weekend with 40 people on board.

Four more bodies had been discovered, bringing the total to five, Capt Jo-Ann Burdian, commander of the coast guard’s Miami sector, said in a press conference on Thursday.

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Guatemala’s economy buoyed by record $15bn sent home from workers overseas

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Critics accuse the country’s government of doing nothing to stop the ‘escape valve’ of migration as it covers up their lack of spending

The amount of money Guatemalans living abroad send home to their families reached record levels in 2021. Remittances rose to more than $15bn (£11bn) in 2021, an increase of 35% on the previous year.

The unprecedented rise prompted experts to question the political will to tackle the migration crisis when remittances from the US contribute so much to the Guatemalan economy.

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World’s poorest bear brunt of climate crisis: 10 underreported emergencies

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Care International report highlights ‘deep injustice’ neglected by world’s media, as extreme weather along with Covid wipes out decades of progress

From Afghanistan to Ethiopia, about 235 million people worldwide needed assistance in 2021. But while some crises received global attention, others are lesser known.

Humanitarian organisation Care International has published its annual report of the 10 countries that had the least attention in online articles in five languages around the world in 2021, despite each having at least 1 million people affected by conflict or climate disasters.

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Trump’s border wall and the slow decay of American soil | Carlos Sanchez

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The ‘big, beautiful wall’ has kept US citizens away from the no man’s land it created – and in effect ceded territory to Mexico

Several miles south of the small town of San Juan, Texas, beyond acres of onion fields, orange groves and other cash crops sits a historic cemetery and the site of the beginning of a slow decay of American soil.

I hadn’t been to this area for more than a year because of the pandemic, and I was startled at how different this remote part of Texas had become. The most obvious change is the steel 18ft-high bollard fencing, among the last vestiges of Donald Trump’s glorious border wall with Mexico.

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‘A lot of abuse for little pay’: how US farming profits from exploitation and brutality

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Two dozen conspirators forced workers to pay fees for travel and housing while forcing them to work for little to no pay

In June, a farm worker from Mexico, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, was transported through a trafficking network from Monterey to work on farms in Georgia.

They paid the traffickers 20,000 pesos, about $950, loaned from their mother, taking frequent trips back and forth to Monterey, before being told it was safe to leave. Then they were finally transported across the border.

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Remain in Mexico: migrants face deadly peril as Biden restores Trump policy

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The US has struck a deal with Mexico to make asylum seekers wait south side of the border while their applications are processed

The Biden administration’s move to revive Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy will subject thousands of people to “enormous suffering” and leave them vulnerable to kidnap and rape as they languish in dangerous Mexican border cities, migration advocates have warned.

After reaching a deal with Mexico, the US will by 6 December start returning asylum seekers from other Latin American countries to Mexico where they will be obliged to wait while their case is assessed.

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US border agents engaged in ‘shocking abuses’ against asylum seekers, report finds

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Revealed: documents released after six years of legal tussles uncover over 160 cases of misconduct and abuse

Shocking instances of sexual and physical abuse of asylum seekers at the southern US border by federal officers have been uncovered by Human Rights Watch, after a years-long battle to wrestle the information from the Department of Homeland Security under freedom of information laws.

A stash of redacted documents released to the human rights group after six years of legal tussles uncover more than 160 cases of misconduct and abuse by leading government agencies, notably Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Border Patrol. The papers record events between 2016 and 2021 that range from child sexual assault to enforced hunger, threats of rape and brutal detention conditions.

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A nurse’s journey from treating Covid in Brazil to death in the US desert

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Lenilda dos Santos left her home in rural Amazonia, part of a South American exodus driven by a coronavirus-era depression

As coronavirus tore through the Valley of Paradise, a farm-flanked backwater in the Brazilian Amazon, Lenilda dos Santos, a nurse technician, stood on the frontline clutching hands most feared to touch.

“She was a warrior during the pandemic,” said Lucineide Oliveira, a friend and colleague at the town’s small, understaffed hospital. “She’d say: ‘If we have to die, we’ll die. But we must fight.’”

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Canada invited Chelsea Manning to country just so she could be thrown out

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Bizarre request made ahead of immigration hearing for Manning, whose previous attempts to enter Canada have been denied

Canadian government lawyers recently invited US whistleblower Chelsea Manning to travel to a hearing in Montreal – so that border agents could then physically remove her from the country.

The bizarre request, which was eventually denied by an adjudicator, was made ahead of an immigration hearing set to begin on Thursday for Manning, whose previous attempts to enter Canada have been denied.

This article was amended on 7 October 2021 to correct a city name that was misspelled.

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Senior state department official calls Biden’s deportation of Haitians illegal

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Harold Koh, a legal adviser and Obama administration veteran, criticises use of health protocol to expel thousands of migrants

A senior legal adviser in the state department has accused the Biden administration of deporting Haitians illegally through the use of a public health law.

Harold Koh, a veteran of the Obama administration, had been due to leave government service to take up a teaching position at Oxford University. He wrote a letter to the state department leadership, lambasting the expulsions of thousands of Haitians in recent weeks.

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