Category Archives: US immigration

Judge rules Daca suspension invalid, Homeland Security head in office illegally

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Chad Wolf took office unlawfully, says federal court judge, therefore could not suspend program that shields young people from deportation

A federal judge in New York has ruled that the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, assumed his position unlawfully and has invalidated Wolf’s suspension of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which shields young people from deportation.

“DHS failed to follow the order of succession as it was lawfully designated,” the US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis wrote.

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US deports migrants who accuse detention center gynecologist of abuse

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Six former patients who complained about Dr Mahendra Amin, who has been accused of operating without consent, deported

The Trump administration is trying to deport several women who allege they were mistreated by a Georgia gynecologist at an immigration detention center, according to their lawyers.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has already deported six former patients who complained about Dr Mahendra Amin, who has been accused of operating on migrant women without their consent or performing procedures that were medically unnecessary and potentially endangered their ability to have children.

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US steps up deportation of Haitians ahead of election, raising Covid fears

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The Trump administration justifies the expulsions under a public health law but critics say they risk spreading coronavirus in the Caribbean nation

US immigration authorities have radically stepped up deportation flights to Haiti in the weeks before the election, raising concerns over returned migrants’ safety on their return home and the risks of spreading coronavirus in the impoverished Caribbean state.

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Trump aide Stephen Miller preparing second-term immigration blitz

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The hardline adviser is said to be ready to unleash executive orders deemed too extreme for a president seeking re-election

The architect of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy, senior adviser Stephen Miller, is said to have a drawer full of executive orders ready to be signed in “shock and awe” style if Trump is re-elected.

The former homeland security department chief of staff, Miles Taylor, said this wishlist was reserved for the second term because it included policies that were too unpopular for a president seeking re-election.

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Trump v Biden: the key moments of the final presidential debate – video highlights

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Joe Biden and Donald Trump have gone head-to-head for the final time before the US election on 3 November in the final television debate, helped by a mute button on the candidates’ microphones that prevented interruptions.

Squaring off in Nashville, Biden had to field aggressive questioning about his son’s business dealings and when Trump compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, the challenger branded his opponent 'one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history'. Here is a look back at the key moments

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‘Children brought here by coyotes’: Trump squares off with Biden on immigration – video

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Donald Trump and Joe Biden have squared off over immigration policies, including the US government being unable to locate the parents of more than 500 immigrant children. 'Children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they're brought here and they used to use them to get into our country. We now have as strong a border as we've ever had,' Trump said. The president also criticised immigration under the previous Obama-Biden administration, including the catch and release policy, saying 'those with the lowest IQ' were the only ones who returned for an immigration hearing

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US Ice officers ‘used torture to make Africans sign own deportation orders’

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Cameroonians say officers choked, beat and threatened to kill them, as lawyers tell of pre-election removal drive

US immigration officers allegedly tortured Cameroonian asylum seekers to force them to sign their own deportation orders, in what lawyers and activists describe as a brutal scramble to fly African migrants out of the country in the run-up to the elections.

Many of the Cameroonian migrants in a Mississippi detention centre refused to sign, fearing death at the hands of Cameroonian government forces responsible for widespread civilian killings, and because they had asylum hearings pending.

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Parents of 545 children still not found three years after Trump separation policy

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Lawyers struggling to find parents deported to Central America, says ACLU, after US government removed 1,030 children in 2018

Three years after Donald Trump ordered a crackdown on undocumented migrants crossing into the US, lawyers are still struggling to find the parents of 545 children separated from them under the “zero-tolerance” policy, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

In a court filing, the ACLU said that about two-thirds of the parents had been deported back to the country of origin in Central America, leaving their separated children behind. In the rush to carry out Trump’s orders, the locations of the parents were not recorded and three years later they still cannot be found.

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Statue of former California governor Pete Wilson removed in San Diego

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  • Protests highlighted legacy on immigration and gay rights
  • Republican, 87, does not immediately comment

A statue of the former California governor Pete Wilson was removed from a San Diego park after critics said the governor supported laws and policies that hurt immigrants and the LGBTQ community.

The 13-year-old statue near Horton Plaza Park was removed by Horton Walk, the non-profit that owns it, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Horton Walk’s president, Steve Williams, wrote in an email that no decision had been made on whether it will be returned.

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Thousands of migrants cross into Guatemala with slim hopes of reaching US

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The caravan from Honduras is the biggest since the pandemic hit Central America in March, triggering a rise in unemployment and poverty

Thousands of Honduran migrants hoping to reach the United States have entered Guatemala, testing the newly reopened frontier that had been shut by the coronavirus pandemic.

Authorities had planned to register the migrants as they crossed and offer assistance to those willing to turn back, but early on Thursday, the group pushed past armed guards without registering. By midday more than 3,000 migrants had crossed illegally, said Guatemalan officials.

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More migrant women say they did not consent to surgeries at Ice center

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AP review finds no evidence of mass hysterectomies but files show growing allegations of operations women did not fully understand

Sitting across from her lawyer at an immigration detention center in rural Georgia, Mileidy Cardentey Fernandez unbuttoned her jail jumpsuit to show the scars on her abdomen. There were three small, circular marks.

Related: Ice hysterectomy allegations in line with US's long and racist history of eugenics | Moira Donegan

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UK awards border contract to firm criticised over role in US deportations

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Exclusive: tech firm Palantir has come under fire for links to Trump’s drive to eject migrants

The government has awarded oversight of the UK’s post-Brexit border and customs data to Palantir, an American tech firm notorious for assisting the Trump administration’s drive to deport migrants from the US.

Palantir, whose co-founder Peter Thiel has been a vocal supporter of Trump, was formally awarded a contract last week to manage the data analytics and architecture of the UK’s new “border flow tool”, which will collate data on the transit of goods and customs from 31 December, according to a Cabinet Office document seen by the Guardian.

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Nancy Pelosi demands investigation into hysterectomy claims at Ice centre

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  • Whistleblower cited alarming rate of surgery for detainees
  • House speaker concerned at ‘staggering abuse of human rights’

The top congressional Democrat, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has joined mounting calls for an investigation into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centre in Georgia accused of performing hysterectomies on migrant women held there without their full consent.

Pelosi branded the substance of allegations presented by a whistleblowing nurse “a staggering abuse of human rights”.

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‘It’s not the same’: How Trump and Covid devastated an Arizona border town

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Nogales residents say the city is struggling amid the pandemic and after years of Trump painting the area as a ‘war zone’

When Francis Glad was a child growing up in Nogales, Arizona, the US-Mexico border near her home was nothing like it is now. “It was more like a neighbor fence, like you have at your house,” she remembers. “It was very symbiotic. Just people coming back and forth.”

But today, a towering 30ft border wall, made of dizzying steel bollards, slices through the Nogales sister cities.

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Trump is using federal agents as his ‘goon squad’, says Ice’s ex-acting head

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John Sandweg says the deployment of homeland security officials is a ‘manufactured crisis’ stemming from ‘a failure of leadership’

The former acting director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which works under the Department of Homeland Security, has condemned the Trump administration’s handling of protests in Portland by deploying federal agents into the city.

Related: Portland clampdown: why are federal agents there and what are they doing?

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Trump delivers White House coronavirus briefing without public health experts – live

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The United States is failing to report vital information on Covid-19 that could help track the spread of the disease and prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, according to the first comprehensive review of the nation’s coronavirus data.

The report, Tracking Covid-19 in the United States, paints a bleak picture of the country’s response to the disease. Five months into the pandemic, the essential intelligence that would allow public health authorities to get to grips with the virus is still not being compiled in usable form.

Related: 'Flying blind': US failure to report vital coronavirus data is hobbling response

Circling back to testing ...

Trump, who has been boasting about the country’s coronavirus testing for months, was right in saying that the US has dramatically ramped up testing and is now testing a higher proportion of citizens than many other countries.

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US supreme court rejects Trump’s bid to end Daca program

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John Roberts wrote in 5-4 majority opinion the administration’s decision to end program was ‘arbitrary and capricious’

The US supreme court has rejected Donald Trump’s bid to end the program that made it possible for undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children to live and work in the US without fear of deportation.

More than 652,800 people, including doctors fighting the coronavirus, were waiting on the decision about the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, commonly known by its acronym Daca.

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Trump announces 60-day ban on immigrants seeking permanent status in US

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President says he could extend measure depending on health of economy amid coronavirus

Donald Trump has announced a 60-day ban on immigrants seeking to live and work in America permanently, and said he could extend it depending on the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

The US president framed the executive order, which he expects to sign on Wednesday, as an effort to protect American workers from foreign competition. He said it would apply only to those seeking green cards and not temporary workers, but he did not explain how those whose applications are currently being processed would be affected.

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Detainees in US immigration jails living in fear as coronavirus spreads

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Recordings obtained by Guardian reveal people in Ice centers in the south concerned they are not being properly cared for

Detainees at immigration detention centers across the American south have alleged heavy-handed crackdowns amid increasing panic and protest over the coronavirus pandemic, according to advocates and recordings of detainees obtained by the Guardian.

A number of detainees have expressed concern they are not being properly cared for in packed detention centers. Former senior immigration officials and attorneys have called for the release of nonviolent detainees. Judges in New Jersey, New York and California have ordered the release of small numbers, based on health concerns.

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Construction of US-Mexico border wall proceeds despite coronavirus pandemic

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The Trump administration announced plans to erect 150 miles of barrier on the border, involving large numbers of contractors

The Trump administration is ramping up construction of its multibillion-dollar southern border wall, despite the rapidly escalating coronavirus epidemic which threatens to kill thousands of Americans and plunge the country into economic recession.

Earlier this week, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced plans to erect more than 150 miles of the 30ft border wall in Arizona, New Mexico and California – in addition to ongoing construction work at at least 15 sites across those states and Texas.

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