Category Archives: US immigration

Children at the border: the crisis that America wasn’t prepared for

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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

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Supreme court to rule on Obama-era Daca program for young migrants

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Court expected to hear arguments late this year, with a decision on Dreamers likely to come before 2020 election

The supreme court will review the constitutionality of an Obama-era program allowing undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children to get temporary deportation relief and work permits.

Trump ended the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), but the decision was challenged in several lawsuits. The program protected about 700,000 people known as Dreamers.

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To all parents who can picture themselves in Valeria and her dad | Debbie Weingarten

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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.

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Is it wrong to look at the harrowing photo of a drowned father and daughter? | Peter Beaumont

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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.

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‘The river is treacherous’: the migrant tragedy one photo can’t capture

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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.

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US border: photo of drowned father and daughter highlights migrants’ peril – video report

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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.

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The USA is imprisoning people it finds undesirable. Australia has already lived this nightmare | Jason Wilson

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To disestablish these camps anywhere, we need to oppose them everywhere

Australia’s economy is increasingly in the doldrums, but our leaders can point to a successful export of their own devising. In the US, the Trump administration is bedding down and expanding its network of punitive refugee camps. Like Australia’s, they have a dual function: as a deterrent to pursuing the right of political asylum, and as a political weapon.

Australia’s nightmare, like the USA’s, has been long in the making. It is a bipartisan creation. Labor, under Paul Keating, instituted the policy of mandatory detention. John Howard did much of the work of shaping it into permanent nightmare, and of turning the issue of refugees into a cudgel with which to smite political opponents.

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‘They wanted the American dream’: reporter reveals story behind tragic photo

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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.

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Shocking photo of drowned father and daughter highlights migrants’ border peril

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The toddler’s arm was still draped around her father’s neck after bodies were found in the Rio Grande as they sought asylum

  • Warning: contains graphic images

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.

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US government lawyer: detained children do not need soap and blankets – video

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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

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Mexico immigration chief vows to cut number of people migrating by 60%

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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.

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Jury deadlocks over activist who gave migrants food and shelter

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Scott Daniel Warren faced up to 20 years in prison in a case aid groups said would have wide implications on their work

A US jury could not reach a verdict Tuesday against a border activist who, defense attorneys say, was simply being kind by providing two migrants with water, food and lodging when he was arrested in early 2018.

Scott Daniel Warren, a 36-year-old college geography instructor, was charged with conspiracy to transport and harbor migrants in a trial that humanitarian aid groups said would have wide implications on their work. He faced up to 20 years in prison.

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‘I’m about to have my baby’: migrants stuck in Mexico face more uncertainty

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Tariff deal calls for expansion of policy forcing Central American asylum seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases wind through US courts

In a cramped San Diego courtroom, immigrant mothers cradled restless babies and toddlers as they waited to go before a judge. After a quick exchange, they were whisked back to Mexico where they face months, or possibly years, before their cases play out in the US.

Hundreds of miles away, a judge in El Paso, Texas, noticed that an infant was fussing and let the child’s mother stand up and burp the baby before shipping her and about a dozen others, including six pregnant women, back to the Mexican border city of Juarez.

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‘All I have done, no credit!’ Enraged Trump defends US-Mexico migrant deal

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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

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Mexican president leads ‘celebration’ rally after US tariffs dropped

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Andrés Manuel López Obrador tells crowd in Tijuana he is raising an ‘open hand’, not a closed fist, to Donald Trump

The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, travelled to the border city of Tijuana to rally the country in “defence of national dignity”, but to also reaffirm friendship with the US people – barely a day after the US cancelled the threat of tariffs.

López Obrador called the rally, which was convened prior to the tariffs being cancelled, a “celebration” of both countries brokering a deal.

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Trump’s Mexico deal is victory for ‘hostage-taking’, ex-WTO head says

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Pascal Lamy said Trump’s actions went against the spirit of diplomacy after Mexico agreed to expand asylum program

The immigration deal imposed on Mexico by Donald Trump under the threat of punitive tariffs is a victory for “hostage-taking” over international rules, a former head of the World Trade Organization (WTO) said on Saturday.

Related: Trump calls off tariffs after US-Mexico deal but Mnuchin says threat remains

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Mexico tightens southern border security as another day passes with no tariff deal

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Under pressure from Trump, Mexico has launched a crackdown on the Guatemala border, arresting activists and holding migrants

As Donald Trump’s deadline for new tariffs on Mexican imports draws near, Mexico has stepped up security along its porous border with Guatemala – deploying police and soldiers to its southern frontier and arresting prominent migration activists.

Trump last week pledged to impose 5% tariffs on Mexican products on 10 June unless Mexico stops Central American migrants from travelling through its territory.

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Trump cancels key services for unaccompanied child migrants – live

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Officials say language classes and recreation programs for immigrant children staying in federal shelters ‘not directly necessary’

Vice President Mike Pence will meet Wednesday with top Mexican officials who are seeking to head off the administration’s threatened tariffs, the Hill reports.

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard is representing his country at the talks and expected to argue Mexico is already taking steps to prevent migrants from crossing the US-Mexico border.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Paul Manafort should not be held in solitary confinement, and nor should anyone else. Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chair, is reportedly heading for Rikers Island where he’s likely to be held in solitary while awaiting trial on New York state charges.

Yes - released from solitary.

NYT used the term solitary confinement, & that’s what I am commenting on.

“Protective custody” IS a separate practice, but does not necessarily exclude solitary. If he is in fact not being held in solitary, great. Release everyone else from it too.

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Trump warns ‘foolish’ Republican senators in rare clash over Mexico tariffs

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Lawmakers in president’s own party voice firm opposition to threat over Mexico

In a rare confrontation, Republican senators declared deep opposition Tuesday to Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs on all goods coming into the US from Mexico. But it’s unclear they have the votes to stop him, and Trump said they’d be “foolish” to try.

All sides, including officials from Mexico meeting Trump negotiators in Washington this week, remain hopeful that high-level talks will ease the president away from his threat. But with the tariffs set to start next Monday, and Trump declaring them “more likely” than not to take effect, fellow Republicans in Congress warned the White House they were ready to stand up to the president.

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House passes bill offering 2 million migrants a chance at citizenship

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Measure to protect Dreamers and others stands little chance of passing but highlights Democrats’ push for immigration reform

Democrats shunned a White House veto threat and muscled legislation through the House on Tuesday that would bestow a chance for citizenship on an estimated 2 million-plus migrants, a bill that stands virtually no chance of enactment but lets them showcase their efforts on one of their highest-profile priorities.

The measure is just one skirmish in Democrats’ multi-front battle against most congressional Republicans over immigration, an issue that has deadlocked the two parties for decades but intensified under the harsh policies and rhetoric of Donald Trump. It is likely to join a host of other House-passed measures advancing Democrats’ agenda that are running aground in the GOP-run Senate, including legislation on healthcare, gun control, climate change and election security.

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