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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...‘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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...District judge Andrew Hanen’s ruling expected to be appealed, leaving supreme court to rule on program’s fate for the third time
A federal judge on Wednesday declared illegal a revised version of a federal policy that prevents the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the US as children.
US district judge Andrew Hanen agreed with Texas and eight other states suing to stop the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program. The judge’s ruling was ultimately expected to be appealed to the US supreme court, sending the program’s fate before the high court for a third time.
Continue reading...Episode reported by CNN required emergency memo to senior officials and suggests agency does not know migrants’ location
Federal agents are reportedly trailing a group of more than a dozen Uzbek nationals who entered the US as asylum seekers aided by a smuggler with ties to Isis.
The extraordinary episode, which multiple US officials confirmed to CNN on Tuesday, was considered so serious that it required an emergency intelligence report to senior Biden administration figures.
Continue reading...Justice department alleges rocket company refused to consider asylum seekers and refugees for jobs because of citizenship status
The US justice department on Thursday filed a lawsuit against the billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX for alleged hiring discrimination against refugees and asylum seekers.
SpaceX “routinely discouraged asylees and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them, because of their citizenship status” from at least September 2018 to May 2022, according to the justice department.
Continue reading...Court to decide whether to remove them as Greg Abbott and other Republican governors defend militarization of border with Mexico
A federal judge heard arguments on Tuesday about whether state authorities should remove huge buoys installed to stop migrants crossing the river that divides Texas from Mexico.
The court hearing in Austin came a day after Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, and a group of hardline Republican governors gathered on the riverbank to defend local militarization of the US-Mexico border – while also acknowledging that the 1,000ft (305-meter) floating barrier had been adjusted after complaints that it had mostly drifted into Mexican territory.
Continue reading...Maura Healey calls on federal government to provide ‘urgent action’ as shelters housing migrants and refugees reach capacity
Massachusetts governor Maura Healey declared a state of emergency on Tuesday as shelters housing migrants and refugees reached capacity, and called on the federal government to help.
In a letter addressed to US secretary of homeland security Alejandro Mayorkas, Healey said: “To our partners in the federal government, Massachusetts has stepped up to address what sadly has been a federal crisis of inaction that is many years in the making.
Continue reading...Mayor Eric Adams plans to house as many as 2,000 adults seeking asylum, in tent city where center opened and then closed last year
New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, announced a plan Monday to house as many as 2,000 migrants on an island in the East River where a migrant center was set up last year and then taken down weeks later.
The state will reimburse the city for the cost of operating a tent city for adult migrants on Randalls Island, Adams said.
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