tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-244969022024-03-18T16:02:13.410-07:00Beverly Hills Immigration Law<a href="http://www.freeimagehosting.net/q6qxh"><img src="http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/q6qxh.jpg"></a>Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.comBlogger15061125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-91563418226095617482024-03-18T16:01:00.000-07:002024-03-18T16:01:26.468-07:00Tennessee House advances bill requiring local officers to aid US immigration authoritiesNASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The Republican-led Tennessee House advanced a proposal Thursday that would require law enforcement agencies in the state to communicate with federal immigration authorities if they discover people are in the the country illegally, and would broadly mandate cooperation in the process of identifying, catching, detaining and deporting them.
The House vote coincides with efforts in other Republican-led states to inject more state and local involvement in immigration enforcement, while criticizing President Joe Biden’s border policies. That includes a Texas law allowing authorities in that state to arrest migrants who enter the U.S. illegally and order them to leave the country, which remains blocked temporarily in court.
“President Biden’s administration has delivered this pain to our doorsteps,” Tennessee Republican Rep. Chris Todd of Madison County said during Thursday’s debate.
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Action on the Tennessee bill now moves to the GOP-led Senate floor. It says law enforcement agencies and officials “shall” cooperate in various immigration tasks already spelled out in state law, instead of saying they “are authorized” to do so, which was put into Tennessee code in a toughening of state immigration law that passed in 2018.
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The bill also refers back to a federal law that says it is voluntary for states and local governments to get involved in certain federal immigration law enforcement tasks.
The way it’s written, the bill could raise legal confusion and worsen tensions between law enforcement and immigrant communities by making local officers de-facto immigration agents, Judith Clerjeune of the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition’s voter engagement arm has said.
Democratic opponents also said Republicans are hurting communities of immigrants who are seeking a better life.
“If you’re fleeing countries due to violence, if you’re fleeing places due to humanitarian issues, we are turning our back on those individuals,” said Rep. Justin Pearson, a Memphis Democrat. “And that is immoral and wrong.”
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A legislative fiscal analysis of the bill says “most, if not all, law enforcement agencies already communicate with the federal government regarding an individual’s immigration status,” citing information from the Tennessee police and sheriffs associations.
The Metro Nashville Police Department expressed concern about the bill. Spokesperson Don Aaron said it could erode the trust Nashville police have built with immigrant communities.
“We rely on members of our community, including immigrants, some of whom are victims, others witnesses, for cooperation and information to further investigations,” Aaron said in an emailed statement. “The concern is this legislation could dissuade cooperation with our officers among some Nashville residents.”
Some conservative advocacy groups are urging states to pass stricter immigration policies while they have criticized illegal border crossings under Biden. The Heritage Foundation, a long-standing conversative think tank, has recommended proposals for states to consider, from verification of worker immigration status to bans on driver’s licenses, license plates, or in-state tuition for people in the country illegally.
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A Heritage Action spokesperson said the group supports the Tennessee bill, but hasn’t worked on that one.
In Georgia, Republicans have proposed immigration law changes after police accused a Venezuelan man of beating a nursing student to death on the University of Georgia campus. Immigration authorities say the man unlawfully crossed into the U.S. in 2022. It is unclear whether he has applied for asylum.
One of them, in part, would require eligible Georgia cities and counties to apply for so-called 287(g) agreements to perform some immigration enforcement-related tasks locally to help the federal government. Another would punish cities and counties that Republicans there say are illegally harboring immigrants who are in the country without permission by cutting off most state aid to the local government and removing elected officials from office.
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Tennessee Republicans are pushing toward other stricter immigration rules, as well. One bill would make it a misdemeanor to knowingly or recklessly transport someone who is in the country illegally into the state. A current ban only applies when the transportation is aimed at a commercial advantage or private financial gain.
The policing bill has raised questions about whether it would force law enforcement agencies to sign up for 287(g) agreements. Republican bill sponsor Rep. Rusty Grills of Newbern said those agreements wouldn’t be required. But Clerjeune has noted that the 287(g) program is mentioned in the federal law that the new state bill cites.
The 287(g) program would require local governments to take on costs to get involved, some opponents of the bill said.
More than 130 agencies in 22 states have one of two varieties of those agreements. Two are in Tennessee: the Greene County and Knox County sheriff’s offices. The Nashville-Davidson County sheriff ended an agreement to house immigrants for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2019.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-26202339675638391332024-03-18T13:43:00.000-07:002024-03-18T13:43:47.760-07:00Trump says some undocumented immigrants are ‘not people,’ warns US will see ‘blood bath’ if not reelectedFormer President Trump denounced some undocumented immigrants as “not people” and warned of a “blood bath” if he is not reelected at a chaotic rally in Ohio on Saturday night.
Trump spoke in a Dayton, Ohio, suburb on Saturday to campaign for Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who faces a neck and neck primary against state Sen. Matt Dolan and Secretary of State Frank LaRose on Tuesday.
The former president’s comments about migrants accused of crimes come as immigration remains a critical issue for the 2024 election.
“I don’t know if you call them people,” he said at the rally. “In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”
Trump also predicted a dire scene if he loses the November election, claiming Biden would tank the U.S. economy.
“If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country,” Trump said while discussing his proposal for steep tariffs on vehicle imports.
The Biden campaign denounced the comments as part of Trump’s “threats of political violence.”
“He wants another January 6, but the American people are going to give him another electoral defeat this November because they continue to reject his extremism, his affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge,” campaign spokesperson James Singer said in a statement.
Trump’s comments Saturday echo his previous use of pejorative language against immigrants, which began at the launch of his 2016 presidential campaign, where he called Mexicans “rapists,” and recently when he said migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
The latter comment drew comparisons to similar phrases in Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” a comparison Trump has denied and denounced.
The three-person race for the Republican Ohio Senate nomination is expected to go down to the wire, with recent polls showing either Moreno or Dolan in the lead.
Moreno has gained the backing of Trump and his allies, while Dolan is backed by more moderate political forces in the Buckeye State, including Gov. Mike DeWine (R) and former Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).
General election polls have shown Dolan as the stronger candidate against Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who faces a difficult campaign for a critical seat in Democrats’ efforts to keep their razor-thin Senate majority.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-39689148138232292762024-03-18T13:25:00.000-07:002024-03-18T13:25:20.562-07:00Recent immigrants have filled labor gaps, boosted job creation, experts sayAs we learned last week, the U.S. added 275,000 jobs in February, not far from the number it added in February the prior year — 287,000. In fact, the economy has been creating jobs like nobody’s business, month after month, for a few years now.
But there’s a mystery. The unemployment rate actually ticked up last month. Wage growth has slowed down, and so has inflation — things you would not expect from a labor market that’s still driving full speed ahead. The explanation touches on one of the most highly charged political debates of the moment.
For many economists, something about this booming job market was not adding up.
“Where are all these jobs coming from?” asked Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management. “Why is it the economy’s creating so many jobs without accelerating wage inflation?”
The short answer is that the U.S. has been importing economic capacity.
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“Immigration has played a very important role in why job growth continues to be so strong,” he said.
There has been a wave of immigration — legal and not — since 2022. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 5.9 million people migrated to the U.S. in that time, more than 3 million of them in 2023. A large number came across the southern border, said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute.
“There’s the really strong draw factor of our booming economy. We recovered from the pandemic recession much more quickly and strongly than many other countries, especially in the Americas,” she said.
The U.S. is maxing out its legal immigration pathways, but even undocumented people are finding employment, said Madeline Zavodny, professor of economics at the University of North Florida.
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“The popular perception you have is, ‘Oh, they’re illegal immigrants. They’re going to be on the streets’ and all of this,” she said. “But it does look like a lot of them are working.”
And working on the books to show up in the data. Tara Watson, who directs the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution, said all this extra labor has basically helped fix shortages.
“Immigrants are helping to supply some of the goods and services that people have been looking for as they come out of the COVID era,” she said.
They’ve also filled shortages of workers in certain fields, helping to balance out an overheated labor market. In effect, she said, immigration has helped bring down inflation.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-77474469419359153742024-03-18T12:23:00.000-07:002024-03-18T12:23:08.239-07:00The U.S. is still sending Haitians intercepted at sea back to Haiti despite the violence in their home countryDespite extreme violence, political instability and hunger engulfing Haiti, the United States is continuing to return Haitian migrants interdicted at sea back to the gang-controlled country, to the dismay of Haitian advocates in the U.S. who decry the policy.
On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard stopped 65 Haitians who were trying to flee Haiti by boat and sent them back to Haiti, the agency said in a statement.
“There is a specific disdain when it comes to Haitian asylum-seekers,” said Guerline Jozef, a human rights advocate and co-founder of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. “The first [U.S.] act is not ‘How do we protect the people?’ it is ‘How do we deter them and how do we make sure they don’t make it to our shores?’”
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Jozef cited increased deportations and alleged mistreatment of thousands of Haitian migrants who were massed under a Texas bridge in 2021 as further evidence of an unfair U.S. stance toward Haitian asylum-seekers.
Jozef said the gangs’ takeover of ports, airports and much of Port-au-Prince has created a situation “that is fearful, that is traumatizing, that is horrific.”
“Once again, we have a clear example that U.S. policy responds by violence when it comes to Haitian people, Haitian refugees and asylum-seekers,” Jozef said.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the interdictions at sea are done to preserve human life by discouraging Haitians from taking the dangerous maritime journey.
“The Coast Guard’s primary mission … is to preserve human life at sea,” said Capt. Willie Carmichael, the incident commander for the operation.
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The migrants on Thursday were sailing on a boat in distress, the Coast Guard said, and a “good Samaritan” alerted a Coast Guard command center of its whereabouts and condition on March 7.
Since Oct. 1, 2023, the Coast Guard has repatriated 131 Haitians stopped at sea.
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Former President Donald Trump accused President Joe Biden’s border policies of leading to a mass exodus of Haitians to the U.S.
“Hundreds of thousands of people are pouring into our Country from Haiti. They are headed to Florida. But don’t worry, Crooked Joe Biden has everything totally under control. MAGA!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday.
There is no evidence that thousands of people have been able to escape Haiti since gunmen attacked the main international airport on Feb. 29. With gangs in control of key ports and the largest airport, it has been difficult for most Haitians to leave, Jozef said.
DHS also said the number of undocumented migrants coming to the U.S. directly from Haiti is low.
“DHS is monitoring the situation in Haiti and coordinating closely with the State Department and international partners. At this time, irregular migration flows through the Caribbean remain low,” a spokesperson said. “U.S. policy is to return noncitizens who do not have a fear of persecution or torture or a legal basis to enter the United States. Those interdicted at sea are subject to immediate repatriation pursuant to our longstanding policy and procedures.”
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-36374845235098991332024-03-18T12:17:00.000-07:002024-03-18T12:17:29.371-07:00Immigrant Advocates Push Work Permit Fix in Race Against ClockNearly a quarter million work permit renewals pending
Tens of thousands at risk from employment eligibility cliff
Tens of thousands of immigrants working in jobs like health care, construction, and delivery risk losing their employment authorization in a matter of weeks without Biden administration action on massive backlogs for work permit renewals, advocates and local government leaders are warning.
They’re asking US Citizenship and Immigration Services to re-issue a measure it adopted two years ago extending the work eligibility period for those with pending renewals or to go even further to reduce persistent backlogs at the agency.
The government is currently taking about 16 months to process those work permit renewals, said Leidy Perez, policy director at the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, a member-led organization that supports immigrants seeking asylum. Although immigrants get an automatic six-month extension of employment eligibility with a pending renewal application, thousands who filed in October could see their legal work status begin to lapse in the coming weeks.
“We’ve seen the waiting period for renewals skyrocket,” Perez said. “It’s continuously more concerning as we get closer to that April date.”
USCIS didn’t comment on specific regulatory plans. However, the agency sent a final rule to the White House earlier this month, still under review, that would temporarily increase the automatic extension period for certain applicants renewing work permits.
The agency declined to share details on the forthcoming regulations.
Immigration advocates have urged the agency at a minimum to boost the automatic extension period for work permits pending renewal to 18 months—as it did in the face of serious backlogs two years ago. Elected officials from across the country meanwhile have asked the agency to go even further by making the relief permanent.
Improving Efficiency
Andreas M., a member of ASAP, has worked as a cell phone repair tech, a barista, and most recently as a pharmacy technician at CVS since immigrating to Los Angeles and filing an asylum claim in 2016. His ability to maintain legal employment in the US was thrown into doubt beginning in 2021, however, when the wait to renew his work permit stretched past a year and a half.
“It was such an uncertain situation; I didn’t know what was going to happen,” said Andreas, an ethnic Armenian seeking asylum in the US from Azerbaijan. “I was waking up in the mornings three, four times a week calling USCIS so I could try to catch someone.”
With mounting work permit backlogs prompting multiple class action complaints, USCIS in May 2022 issued temporary regulations tripling an automatic extension period for work permits pending renewal decisions from 180 to 540 days, part of a slate of new measures to improve efficiency. Those regulations allowed Andreas to maintain his employment authorization and keep his job until eventually securing a new five-year work permit.
“I wouldn’t have lasted more than a month, especially in Los Angeles,” he said. “I could breathe again.”
That temporary final rule expired at the end of October, meaning asylum seekers and other immigrants with pending work permit renewals would only have the typical six months of additional employment authorization. Backlogs for those renewal applications have meanwhile persisted.
Absent comparable measures from the agency, advocates say other immigrants could soon face similar pressures in the coming weeks.
While most initial work permit applications are adjudicated within two months, more than 160,000 asylum seekers had work permit renewals pending for more than 180 days as of Sept. 30, according to the most recent update released by USCIS. More than 246,000 total renewals were pending overall.
In response to questions on current processing times, the agency said it had adopted other measures to improve efficiency since May 2022, including increasing the duration of work permits for some categories from two years to five. Median processing times for employment authorization documents have also been reduced, with most processed in three months or less this year, the agency said.
Local Impact
Immigrants who do obtain work permits typically go straight into the workforce, filling essential jobs in the health-care system and schools, said Pious Ali, a city council member in Portland, Maine.
“They are transforming the face of the workforce and the face of the community in a very positive way,” he said.
Immigrants applying through the Boston Asylum Office of USCIS, which serves Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine, face some of the highest backlogs in the country to have their cases heard. The government should allow asylum seekers to obtain employment authorization continuing until the date of their initial interviews, Ali said.
“If there’s a break in employment authorization, you are disrupting their lives again,” he said. “Extending it until they go to a hearing—that’s a win-win. They will continue working and employers won’t have to spend money and resources hiring someone else.”
A letter from more than 40 local elected officials last month asked that USCIS adopt a permanent extension of the 540-day auto renewal period for pending work permit renewals. If it doesn’t go that far in new regulations, the agency should make any temporary increase effective for at least three years so it can work through renewal backlogs, the officials said.
Meanwhile, some immigrants with short-term status wait so long for work permit renewals that they may be only valid for a few months by the time they are issued, advocates say. That’s the case for thousands of Temporary Protected Status recipients, said Gueline Jozef, executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance.
“By the time they get the card, it’s about to expire,” she said. “We applaud the fact that USCIS is doing a lot to get short turnarounds on work authorization, but we really need them to make sure that people who are renewing their cards can get them as soon as possible.”
Labor Squeeze
Research from FWD.us, which advocates for immigration reform, found those admitted through programs like TPS are filling hundreds of thousands of jobs in industries with persistent labor shortages. The Biden administration “needs to act quickly to reduce any further wait, or even worse, put employers in the position of losing employees,” Todd Schulte, the group’s president, said in a statement.
The prospect of letting immigrants be kicked out of the workforce—even temporarily—because of slow processing of work permits is sparking nervousness among employers otherwise eager to fill jobs with immigrant workers, said Jennie Murray, president and CEO at the National Immigration Forum.
“They may say, I can’t continue to pour training time and resources into people I’m not sure I’m going to be able to keep employed with us,” she said.
While USCIS aims to reduce processing times, Congress must also make more resources available and expand legal pathways for immigrant workers, Murray said. Losing employment authorization for those already contributing to the labor force would be damaging for the entire US economy, she said.
“Our economy can attribute much of the boom of building back from Covid to immigrant workers,” she said. “Making folks exit the workforce is obviously a really big problem.”
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-53288443002974412962024-03-15T14:30:00.000-07:002024-03-15T14:30:06.552-07:00Migrants can solve our labor crisis if we can match them with jobsIt’s practically impossible to look at the news these days without reading headlines about the “migrant crisis.” Reports tell of asylum seekers from Venezuela crowding hotels and shelters in New York and Chicago. Politicians call for a response to the droves of people crossing the Southern border on foot.
Concurrently, the U.S. is experiencing a different crisis: a labor shortage. The U.S. workforce collapsed during the pandemic and has yet to recover, with 9.5 million open jobs and only 6.5 million unemployed workers. The food services, retail, manufacturing, and construction industries have been hit especially hard. Consumers feel the effects through inflation and scarcity of services such as childcare and healthcare.
The irony is hard to miss: The multitudes of migrants represent a supply of workers ready and willing to alleviate the shortage.
Unfortunately, there is currently no mechanism for matching migrants with surplus jobs. The closest thing is the H-2B visa, which allows a U.S. employer to bring a foreign national for a temporary, non-agricultural job when there are not enough U.S. workers available.
But the H-2B program is ill-equipped to meet current demands due to its requirements and limitations. For example, the program requires the migrant to have a job offer at the time of application. Connecting with potential employers or employees abroad is difficult.
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Furthermore, the application process alone is enough to deter many employers from even considering hiring from abroad. The employer, or “petitioner,” must fill-out paperwork, pay a $460 processing fee, and possibly hire an immigration attorney to assist in navigating the complicated system. The undertaking is even less justifiable for small businesses and employers seeking to fill roles that do not require special skills or qualifications.
Also, H-2B visas are only available to people from certain countries. Mexico, Haiti and Honduras are on the list, but other countries experiencing high rates of expatriation are notably missing, including Venezuela, Syria, and Afghanistan. And Congress caps the number of H-2B visas granted each year at 66,000. In comparison, 800,000 people applied for asylum and 2.3 million people were apprehended at the border in 2022.
Perhaps most damning is the H-2B visa’s one-year limit on the migrant’s stay. One year is not enough time to plug the gaps in our workforce. The obligation to return to one’s country after just one year is personally disruptive and, in some cases, impossible, depending on the migrant’s reason for leaving.
In light of the current labor market and immigration climate, the H-2B requirements should be revamped or a new visa program should be created. We need a system dedicated to efficiently processing migrants who are willing to fill key jobs, without requiring that they have a job offer before applying and return after a year.
For example, DHS can compile a list of critical jobs and grant migrants a visa conditioned on their obtaining one of the listed jobs within a certain number of months of arriving in the U.S. The visa may require that migrants continue to work in a listed role, with no more than a specified time between jobs. Noncompliance would result in the visa’s expiration.
Of course, there is a risk that a visa-holder will not seek or secure a job once in the U.S. and will remain nonetheless. But that’s no worse than the status quo. Currently, visa-holders routinely overstay their visas and migrants make their way across the border without documentation. It is better that migrants enter the system, have the chance to work, and pay taxes.
Another advantage to a job-focused program is its potential to relieve the strained asylum system. Recently, we’ve witnessed a record number of migrants gain entry to the U.S. by claiming asylum. Asylum-seekers must apply for protection within one year of arriving in the country, but in the meantime, they are not permitted to work. And they may have to wait longer than a year, as agencies are facing a backlog of two million applications.
Many of these migrants could achieve their goals by going through a simpler process in which they must merely demonstrate a willingness to fill a key job, rather than proving fear of persecution or torture in their home countries, which is required to seek asylum.
Embracing willing foreign workers is key to competing in the global market. This month the Congressional Budget Office released a report stating that immigration will contribute $7 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next decade. The effect can be accelerated by creating a path for migrants to efficiently and lawfully join the U.S. workforce.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-78330718777103317972024-03-15T11:35:00.000-07:002024-03-15T11:35:58.535-07:00NYC thinks Census Bureau estimates missed tens of thousands of asylum seekersThree New York City boroughs lost almost 80,000 residents from people moving away last year, according to population estimates released Thursday, but city officials think those numbers are a vast undercount that doesn’t capture the influx of asylum seekers who came to the city.
The city rented out entire hotels to house some of the tens of thousands of migrants who came to New York City last year and also put cots in schools and temporarily housed people in tents, a cruise ship terminal and a former police academy building.
As many as 50,000 people were overlooked in the city’s shelters, according to city officials, who plan to challenge the 2023 population estimates with the U.S. Census Bureau.
“We wanted to flag it,” said Casey Berkovitz, press secretary for New York’s Department of City Planning. “Once you account for this underestimate ... the year marked a return to prepandemic levels.”
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The three counties representing the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx in New York City lost 28,300 people, 26,300 people and 25,300 people respectively last year, according to the estimates. Even though births outpaced deaths and people from abroad moved into these counties, these factors couldn’t overcome an outflow of residents, though it was substantially smaller than in 2022.
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Only Los Angeles County had a larger population loss last year — 56,000 fewer residents in 2023, the largest decline in the U.S.
In the most popular destinations for immigrants — counties in South Florida and counties that are home to Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Jose — international migration grew by double digits year-over-year.
The estimates don’t distinguish between legal and illegal immigration, so it’s impossible to know if any of the growth came from unlawful border crossings. Arrests for illegal crossings hit a record high in December but fell by half in January.
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In Miami-Dade County, there were almost 54,500 new residents from outside the U.S., the highest in the nation last year and an almost 40% increase over the previous year. The international migration offset the departure of more than 47,000 residents who left Miami-Dade County for other U.S. counties.
Among metro areas, which combine counties having social and economic connections, the Dallas metro area had the biggest growth last year — more than 152,000 residents — and surpassed 8 million residents for the first time. That growth was followed by metro Houston, with almost an additional 140,000 residents, and metro Atlanta, with an increase of more than 68,000 people.
Metro Atlanta jumped two spots from last year to become the sixth most populous metro area, with 6.3 million residents. It is surpassed only by metro New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Houston.
Polk County, Florida, was the county more people moved to last year than any other county in the U.S., according to the estimates.
More than 29,300 people moved last year to the county located between Tampa and Orlando, two metro areas where housing has grown increasingly pricey and the county is considered a cheaper alternative. In short order, Polk County has come to have fewer orange groves along Interstate 4 and more subdivisions for local service workers as well as distribution warehouses for on-demand deliveries for residents in both metropolitan areas.
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Almost all the growth in Polk County — 88% — consisted of people moving from another part of the U.S. rather than from abroad, according to the 2023 population estimates.
“Subdivision growth has been springing up and it happens in such a manner that you don’t always notice it. But when you are stuck in traffic, that’s when you really pay attention that it’s going on,” Matt Joyner, a seventh-generation Polk County resident, said about the influx of new residents.
Only four other counties — Harris and Montgomery counties in metro Houston; Collin County in metro Dallas; and Maricopa County, home to Phoenix — grew by more people, thanks to their higher numbers of natural increase, or births outnumbering deaths.
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Harris County, which is home to Houston, grew by almost 54,000 people, the most of any county last year, with about two-thirds of the growth coming from births outpacing deaths. That natural increase of almost 34,700 people was the highest in the nation.
With more than 62,000 acres of citrus groves, Polk County is one of the leading producers of oranges in Florida. The state’s citrus industry in recent years has been squeezed between a fast-spreading bacteria that has attacked the health of trees all over the state and relentless growth that has spilled over as its metro areas have expanded.
Despite that, Polk County has held onto its citrus heritage. Most of the growth has been concentrated in the northeastern part of the county, just a few miles from Walt Disney World in metro Orlando. But many of the citrus growers there who sold their land to subdivision builders have just moved to the southern part of the county, where citrus groves are still plentiful, said Joyner, CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual, a growers’ advocacy group.
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New residents to Polk County have something picturesque to see if they drive around the county’s groves right now — white flowers on citrus trees and a sweet aroma in the air.
“Everywhere you go right now, the groves are snow white and the smell is sweet,” Joyner said. “It reminds you of the old days.”
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-27806785719661305312024-03-15T11:32:00.000-07:002024-03-15T11:32:17.698-07:00Focus groups: Wisconsin swing voters blame GOP for failed border billWisconsin swing voters largely blame Republicans — and specifically Donald Trump — for Congress' failure to pass bipartisan legislation to help improve border security, according to our latest Engagious/Sago focus group.
Why it matters: Interviews with voters who backed Trump in 2016 and flipped to President Biden in 2020 suggest that Biden's State of the Union speech last week left them feeling that Trump's GOP is more responsible for Washington's lack of action.
Context: The border plan negotiated by Republican and Democratic senators became dead on arrival after Trump, the GOP's presumed presidential nominee, said he opposed it — and made clear he wanted to campaign on the chaos at the border.
In response, Biden vowed to tell voters "every day between now and November" that Trump and congressional Republicans were responsible for refusing to fix the crisis.
That includes during the State of the Union, where Biden again challenged Republicans to pass the bipartisan border bill.
Between the lines: "With the State of the Union, Biden successfully got swing voters mad at Trump for tanking a congressional deal on immigration," said Engagious president Rich Thau, who moderated the panels.
"The problem for Biden, though, is these same voters still trust Trump more to fix the border mess."
All 13 participants in the focus group expressed concern about the situation at America's southern border; some said illegal immigration has hurt Wisconsin.
Zoom in: Axios sat in on two Engagious/Sago online focus groups Tuesday night. The groups included six Wisconsinites who identified as independents, four Democrats and three Republicans.
A focus group is not a statistically significant sample like a poll, but the responses show how some voters are thinking and talking about current events.
Participants watched a three-minute excerpt from Biden's State of the Union speech in which he talked about immigration.
What they're saying: Nine of the 13 voters said they were upset with Trump for blocking efforts to find a solution to the country's immigration problem.
"I think [Trump] wants to come in and try to show everybody that he saved the day by passing a bill — and so he's sabotaging Biden's opportunity," Hannah H. said.
"He should have no say right now. He's not in office of any sorts," Brandon M. said.
And yet, most participants thought Trump would do a better job than Biden at securing the border.
"[Trump] seems to be more action-oriented. .... Good or bad, he just seems to be able to get more things done," Mark J. said.
The bottom line: If the election were today, most of the participants said they'd choose Biden over Trump.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-21482595843414732032024-03-15T11:29:00.000-07:002024-03-15T11:29:58.072-07:00Migrants lacking passports must now submit to facial recognition to board flights in USMcALLEN, Texas (AP) — The U.S. government has started requiring migrants without passports to submit to facial recognition technology to take domestic flights under a change that prompted confusion this week among immigrants and advocacy groups in Texas.
It is not clear exactly when the change took effect, but several migrants with flights out of South Texas on Tuesday told advocacy groups that they thought they were being turned away. The migrants included people who had used the government’s online appointment system to pursue their immigration cases. Advocates were also concerned about migrants who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally before being processed by Border Patrol agents and released to pursue their immigration cases.
The Transportation Security Administration told The Associated Press on Thursday that migrants without proper photo identification who want to board flights must submit to facial recognition technology to verify their identity using Department of Homeland Security records.
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“If TSA cannot match their identity to DHS records, they will also be denied entry into the secure areas of the airport and will be denied boarding,” the agency said.
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FILE - The Tennessee Capitol is seen, Jan. 22, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. The Republican-led Tennessee House advanced a proposal Thursday, March 14, that would require law enforcement agencies in the state to communicate with federal immigration authorities if they discover people are in the the country illegally, and would broadly mandate cooperation in the process of identifying, catching, detaining and deporting them. (AP Photo/George Walker IV, File)
Tennessee House advances bill requiring local officers to aid US immigration authorities
FILE - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner, listens during a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, Sept. 13, 2022. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in five cities will start wearing body-worn cameras under a new policy being rolled out. Acting ICE Director Lechleitner said the agency has 1,600 body-worn cameras that will be furnished to agents and officers in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Buffalo and Detroit. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents roll out body cameras to agents in five cities
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally Saturday, March 9, 2024, in Rome Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
Trump blasts Biden over Laken Riley’s death after Biden says he regrets using term ‘illegal’
Agency officials did not say when TSA made the change, only that it was recent and not in response to a specific security threat.
It’s not clear how many migrants might be affected. Some have foreign passports.
Migrants and strained communities on the U.S.-Mexico border have become increasingly dependent on airlines to get people to other cities where they have friends and family and where Border Patrol often orders them to go to proceed with their immigration claims.
Groups that work with migrants said the change caught them off guard. Migrants wondered if they might lose hundreds of dollars spent on nonrefundable tickets. After group of migrants returned to a shelter in McAllen on Tuesday, saying they were turned away at the airport, advocates exchanged messages trying to figure out what the new TSA procedures were.
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“It caused a tremendous amount of distress for people,” said the Rev. Brian Strassburger, the executive director of Del Camino Jesuit Border Ministries, a group in Texas that provides humanitarian aid and advocacy for migrants.
Strassburger said that previously migrants were able to board flights with documents they had from Border Patrol.
One Ecuadorian woman traveling with her child told the AP she was able to board easily on Wednesday after allowing officers to take a photo of her at the TSA checkpoint.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-60622291853426850742024-03-15T10:31:00.000-07:002024-03-15T10:31:35.652-07:00USCIS Clarifies Anti-Discrimination PolicyU.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services today announced agency-wide anti-discrimination guidance that addresses public-facing interactions and affirms our public service principles.
The Policy Manual update reiterates that, consistent with the USCIS mission statement and core values, USCIS does not tolerate the discriminatory treatment of any individuals. USCIS considers discrimination to be the unlawful treatment of a person or group of persons based on classes or other categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong. The update clarifies that it is USCIS policy to treat the public in a nondiscriminatory manner, regardless of whether they belong to a class or group specifically protected under federal anti-discrimination laws or other legal authorities.
Agency-wide anti-discrimination training is available to all employees to support awareness and understanding of the policy and its impacts.
For more information, please see the USCIS Policy Manual.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-46368763579144406102024-03-14T15:51:00.000-07:002024-03-14T15:51:05.646-07:00Migrants mired in transit as Mexico becomes US’s immigration enforcerBetween border visits and rallies, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are duelling to control the narrative on immigration, placing the issue – and Mexico’s role in it – at the heart of the coming election.
In tasking Mexico with reducing arrivals at the border, the US has given its neighbour leverage over US political discussion. On the ground, this has meant many migrants find themselves stuck in Mexico, running a gauntlet of extortion and violence as they try to make it to the northern border.
“It used to be that the Darién Gap was the most horrific part of their journey, but now people are saying that Mexico is the worst,” said Ari Sawyer, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Mexico is the new jungle.”
There are two components to Mexico’s central role in US immigration.
Many Mexicans are themselves going to the US, and Mexico remain the top nationality among immigrants.
Then there is Mexico’s status as the United States’ immigration enforcer, a role that has evolved over the course of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s presidency, starting in 2018, as the number of migrants trying to reach the US through Mexico has risen tremendously.
Compared to before the pandemic, detentions of migrants in an irregular situation have risen fourfold, reaching almost 800,000 in 2023.
But it is far from clear what Mexican officials are doing with the people they detain.
According to Tonatiuh Guillén, former commissioner of Mexico’s National Institute of Migration, detained people should be taken to a migration office to be reviewed. Meanwhile, consulates should be contacted, and the decision made on whether to repatriate them.
But if the official detention numbers are accurate, he says, then it would be far beyond the capacity of Mexico’s institutions to process them.
In any case, deportations have not risen in step with detentions – on the contrary, they collapsed last year, to a little over 50,000.
In the first year of López Obrador’s administration, deportations as a percentage of detentions stood at 88%. In 2023, they stood at 6.8%.
What is happening instead, according to human rights organisations, is that migrants are being put on buses and sent back south, sometimes all the way to the border with Guatemala.
“If you’re detained in Mexico City, you go to Acayucan. If you’re detained in Acayucan, it’s Villahermosa. And if you’re detained in Villahermosa, it’s Palenque,” said Rafael Velásquez, Mexico director of the International Rescue Committee. “In other words, you go one step back.”
At the same time, obstacles have been raised to make it harder for migrants to move north. These include checkpoints on roads and greater efforts to stop migrants hitching a ride on cargo trains.
“Without a doubt there is a series of tactics to reduce people’s ability to move through the country,” said Velásquez. “But they are not formal, and when you ask for information, it’s murky.”
Combined with the sustained entries on the southern border and the fall in deportations, the implication is that there are ever more migrants mired in transit through Mexico. “It’s like they’re stuck on this treadmill,” said Sawyer.
As there is not a parallel strategy of social inclusion, these migrants are highly vulnerable.
They are often unable to work formally, continually extorted by officials, and sometimes kidnapped and disappeared by criminal groups.
Meanwhile the limited infrastructure that exists to support migrants has been overwhelmed.
“If it weren’t for civil society organisations that attend to the humanitarian aspects we’d be in an even worse situation,” said Guillén.
Since illegal border crossings hit a new record in December 2023, hurting Biden’s polling and triggering high-level meetings between US and Mexican officials, they have fallen by almost half – a remarkable drop, even accounting for seasonal trends.
US officials credited Mexico with reducing arrivals at the border through greater enforcement.
“The US needs Mexico for immigration deterrence and enforcement,” said Sawyer. “And López Obrador has been very willing to trade the rights of migrants and asylum seekers for political capital in Washington.”
Within Mexico, such a bargain comes with relatively low political cost.
“In contrast to the US, where migration is a huge issue, in Mexico it simply isn’t,” said Guillén. “Things as terrible as that detention centre fire in Ciudad Juárez happen –with the deaths, practically the murders, of those migrants – and there is no great political cost.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-36428995404466579152024-03-14T14:51:00.000-07:002024-03-14T14:51:12.035-07:00US immigration fillip shifts economy's trajectoryLONDON, March 13 (Reuters) - With fears of a U.S. recession wiped away and financial markets bulled up on the growth trajectory again, an immigration fillip is playing a key role - and may even prove disinflationary to boot.
Likely one of the hottest of hot button issues in this year's White House election, upward revisions to U.S. immigration estimates have economists and investors rethinking the economic and inflation outlooks yet again.
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Resulting higher growth forecasts and likely easing of labor supply bottlenecks speak to some of a potential holy grail for the economy.
But the new estimates also sharpen the edge of November's election outcome where President Joe Biden and likely challenger Donald Trump are clearly at loggerheads on how to handle the issue.
In its long-term economic and fiscal projections released last month, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) flagged rising net immigration as mainly responsible for a forecast 5.2 million increase in the workforce over the next 10 years -- adding some $7 trillion to economic output and $1 trillion to tax revenue.
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The non-partisan budget referee took from its 30-year demographic projections, opens new tab in January, where it revised up its estimate of net immigration compared with a year earlier by some 8.3 million people for the six years through 2026.
The changes mean it now reckons the overall labor force will be 2.6% larger in 2053 that it assumed only a year ago. And as declining fertility rates would have seen the national headcount decline otherwise, net immigration is now expected to account for all the expected population growth from 2040 onwards.
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While the politicians argue over the whys and wherefores of that jump in migrant numbers, the economic impact is already highly significant.
In a paper released last week, Brookings economists, opens new tab Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson reckoned the CBO revisions - which show 3.3 million net immigrants last year compared to the 1 million projected pre-pandemic - can help explain the surprising strength of consumer spending and overall growth since 2022.
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But they also said the new numbers suggest the labor market could run hotter than previously thought without fueling wage and inflation pressures.
"For 2024 we estimate sustainable employment growth will be between 160,000 and 200,000, approximately double the sustainable level that would have occurred in absence of the pickup in immigration according to the pre-pandemic projections," they wrote.
Morgan Stanley's Chief U.S. economist Ellen Zentner tallies with that and reckons payroll gains of about 200,000 per month are now consistent with an unchanged unemployment rate.
"The new 2023 data suggest we can add immigration as an explanation for faster-than-expected growth and disinflation last year, raising the possibility of faster potential growth in the next several years," she wrote.
"This isn't just about the normalization of supply chains."
CBO chart on US population growth and factors
The re-painted picture has obvious ramifications for both the Federal Reserve's interest rate deliberations as well as for investors gauging both that and 'sustainable' growth and investment returns of the long term.
And renewed vigor in Wall St stocks at record highs may not solely be about the artificial intelligence frenzy after all.
JPMorgan economists point out that the CBO does show net immigration of foreign nationals returning close to historical norms after 2026. But they admit the recent boost in numbers quickly feeds into faster labor force expansion, even if not all immigrants are immediately granted work authorization.
And that's what bumps the CBO's economic growth outlook to an average 2.0% per annum over the decade from 1.9% seen previously - with a beefed up labor supply permitting disinflation to continue without crimping growth.
Higher potential growth sees inflation settling about 2.2% after 2026, according to the CBO, around where financial markets' long-run inflation expectations also seem to coagulate.
And it raises the return on capital. Ten-year Treasury yields are painted in at around the current 4.1% by 2034 too, to put a 'real' rate of 1.9%.
But JPMorgan's team quibble with some of the CBO's long-range forecasts - on productivity and unemployment forecasts for example - and think its debt-to-GDP assumptions are too low, due in part to a likelihood of tax cut extensions from here.
And so despite the long-term growth lift, their concern about mounting government debt piles remains.
"The question is not whether the U.S. will face a moment of reckoning on government debt but rather when it will happen and how painful the necessary adjustment will be," they wrote.
More immediately, the immigration issue now spins into the hustings and how voters will view the stance of both presidential candidates later this year.
This week's 2025 budget proposals from Joe Biden included his unfulfilled request last year for $13.6 billion in emergency funds for U.S.-Mexico border enforcement - to pay for more Border Patrol agents, asylum officers and immigration judges.
For his part, former President Trump wants to reprise his 2016-2020 hardline position and has promised to crack down on illegal immigration and restrict legal immigration if elected.
What seems clear now is that the economic fallout from the differing stances could be large - affecting how long the recent immigration trends continue at this pace.
Pointing out that Border Patrol encounters were up 16% in the three months through January compared to a year earlier, Morgan Stanley said this could either be evidence of migrant flows accelerating or a temporary surge due to the election.
"Election-year politics might cause a clampdown on immigration - as might a new president," it concluded.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-39310845852646620612024-03-14T13:57:00.000-07:002024-03-14T13:57:51.692-07:00How immigration is driving U.S. job growthA surge in immigration last year helps explain the economy's striking resilience — and if sustained, could allow the job market to keep booming without stoking inflation in the years ahead.
Why it matters: Immigration policy is deeply politically contentious, but there is a strong consensus among economic policymakers that the immigration increase is a key part of the labor supply surge that helped bring down price pressures last year even amid the economy's robust growth.
State of play: New analysis from the Brookings Institution puts some hard numbers on the relationship between the rise in immigration and the labor market — finding an influx of workers is allowing the U.S. to sustain higher rates of payroll gains than forecasters thought it could before the pandemic.
"Faster population and labor force growth has meant that employment could grow more quickly than previously believed without adding to inflationary pressures," economists Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson write for the Hamilton Project.
By the numbers: Before the pandemic, forecasters estimated sustainable monthly employment growth would be between 60,000 and 130,000 in 2023 — a key reason why last year's monthly average of 255,000 looked way too hot.
But Edelberg and Watson say that, accounting for higher immigration, the economy could have accommodated job growth between 160,000 and 230,000 in 2023 "without adding to pressure in the labor market that pushed up wages and price inflation."
The authors estimate that, if immigration continues at the current rate, "employment growth of nearly 200,000 workers a month is consistent with a healthy, but not too hot, labor market" — roughly double what forecasters thought to be the case before the pickup in immigration.
What they're saying: "It seemed rather surprising to me that we could be so close to the inflation target, and employment growth would still be well above the pace I thought was consistent with a sustainable labor market," Edelberg, a former Congressional Budget Office chief economist, tells Axios.
"What this tells me is monetary policy does not have to do as much as I thought to slow the labor market," Edelberg adds.
How it works: The research uses immigration estimates from the CBO that suggest faster population and labor force growth in recent years not fully captured by the Labor Department (which uses Census population estimates).
The big picture: The authors estimate the immigration surge didn't just jolt the labor force — but also is at least a small factor behind resilient consumer spending and GDP growth.
Immigration pushed up real consumer spending growth by about 0.2 percentage point last year — with a similar boost expected this year, the authors estimate.
Economic activity directly attributable to the increase in immigration also increased real GDP by 0.1 percentage point per year since 2022.
Yes, but: The authors also note that immigration growth also heightened demand for housing — and may have put "upward pressure on rents in some areas."
Demographic factors in U.S. population growth
Annual population change 2004-2024
An area chart showing the factors that are responsible for U.S. population growth since 2004. While the birth rate has declined, net immigration has make up the difference, coming up to over 1 percent in 2024.
2004
2008
2012
2016
2020
2024
±0%
+0.25%
+0.5%
+0.75%
+1%
Births minus deaths
Net immigration
Projected
Data: The Brookings Institution via Congressional Budget Office; Graphic: Rahul Mukherjee/Axios
The effects of the immigration surge may still be playing out.
"The authorization process [for undocumented immigrants] means that labor force participation of new immigrants could be hump-shaped over several years, pointing to some of the effects of 2023 immigration still being in the pipeline," Evercore ISI vice chair Krishna Guha wrote in a note this week.
What they're saying: On Capitol Hill last week, Fed chair Jerome Powell acknowledged the math of the situation while trying to avoid being drawn into the deeply political questions around immigration policy.
"It's just arithmetic," Powell told the House Financial Services Committee. "If you add a couple million people to an economy, a percentage of them work, there will be more output."
"I'm just reporting the facts there," he added. "I'm not going to say anything is needed for the future or good policy indirectly or directly. I think it's just reporting the facts to say that immigration and labor force participation both contributed to the very strong economic output growth that we had last year."
Between the lines: Don't expect the Biden administration to tout immigration-driven job growth on the campaign trail, as our colleague Hans Nichols reports. Beyond the politics, there are some policy challenges generated by elevated immigration rates.
"Our analysis shows they have been really positive for the overall economy and, frankly, really positive for the federal budget" but that some of the influx has put pressure on state resources, Edelberg says. "But these immigration flows have not been the result of optimal, well-thought out policy."
If that's the case, "communities that have been growing like gangbusters because of really strong immigration will see that growth come to a stop. Those sorts of abrupt starts and stops for local economies can be painful."
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-42492962401929977492024-03-14T12:01:00.000-07:002024-03-14T12:01:52.012-07:00U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents roll out body cameras to agents in five citiesWASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in five cities will start wearing body-worn cameras as they interact with the public under a new policy announced Wednesday.
Acting ICE Director Patrick J. Lechleitner said the agency has 1,600 body-worn cameras that will be furnished to agents and officers in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Buffalo and Detroit.
“This is also an important step to further build public trust and confidence in our dedicated and professional law enforcement officials,” Lechleitner said.
The move is part of efforts rolled out by President Biden in 2022 to require federal law enforcement officers who are out in the public to wear the cameras to increase transparency and trust in law enforcement.
ICE is made up of two law enforcement arms — Homeland Security Investigations special agents who investigate transnational crime — and Enforcement and Removal Operations officers who arrest and remove people determined not to have the right to stay in America.
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ICE conducted a six-month pilot program with HSI agents in New York, Newark, El Paso and Houston and another pilot program with ERO deportation officers in Atlanta, Indianapolis and Salt Lake City, Lechleitner said.
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Mother RowVaughn Wells, right, and stepfather Rodney Wells, center, speak at the Tennessee Capitol on Thursday, March 14, 2024 in opposition to a bill that would rescind some policing changes made in Memphis after their son, Tyre Nichols, died following a police beating in January 2023. Rep. Justin Pearson, left, introduced them at the news conference. (AP Photo/Jonathan Mattise)
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An 80-year-old former officer with communist East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, holds a folder in front of his face at the start of his trial at the state court in Berlin, Thursday March 14, 2024. The former officer went on trial Thursday over the killing of a Polish man at a border crossing in divided Berlin 50 years ago. (Sebastian Christoph Gollnow/dpa via AP)
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The goal is to eventually expand the body cameras nationwide, but Lechleitner said to expand beyond the initial five cities the agency would need more funding from Congress.
“Right now, we can’t do more than those cities,” he said.
The agency in January laid out policies detailing when body-worn cameras would be used, including executing pre-planned arrest warrants, executing a removal order, or responding to violent disturbances at ICE facilities. The agency said specifically that the cameras would not be used to record people engaged in activities protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-19276213051479285322024-03-14T10:45:00.000-07:002024-03-14T10:45:52.218-07:00Biden administration discussing using Guantanamo Bay to process possible influx of Haitian migrantsThe Biden administration is discussing using Guantanamo Bay to process Haitian migrants if there is a mass exodus to the US amid worsening conditions in the country, according to a US official.
For years, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which is located about 200 miles from Haiti, has had a migrant center to hold and process migrants before returning them to Haiti or a third country.
The center — which is separate from where terrorist suspects are held — has been used before. In 2010, for example, the US military prepared the site in anticipation of Haitians fleeing the earthquake-stricken country.
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But discussions to expand capacity at the site mark the latest sign of growing concern within the administration about people fleeing Haiti in droves as gangs attack government structures and social order is on the brink of collapse.
Migrants from Haiti would likely attempt to reach Florida by sea in a journey that can be perilous, and the US is weighing plans to take those interdicted at sea and transport them to Guantanamo for processing and potential repatriation.
“We are clear-eyed that economic, political, and security instability are key drivers for migrants around the world. We are closely monitoring the situation and the routes frequently used by migrants to reach our borders and at this time, irregular migration flows through the Caribbean remain low,” a National Security Council spokesperson told CNN.
A Homeland Security spokesperson said that so far, migration from the Caribbean remains low.
“DHS is monitoring the situation in Haiti and coordinating closely with the State Department and international partners. At this time, irregular migration flows through the Caribbean remain low,” the spokesperson said.
“Those interdicted at sea are subject to immediate repatriation pursuant to our longstanding policy and procedures. The United States returns or repatriates migrants interdicted at sea to The Bahamas, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti,” the spokesperson added.
Haiti’s government has been under a state of emergency since groups attacked the country’s largest prison in Port-au-Prince earlier this month, killing and injuring police and prison staff and allowing some 3,500 inmates to escape.
Gangs now control 80% of Haiti’s capital, according to United Nations estimates. The chaos has forced tens of thousands to flee their homes, adding to the more than 300,000 already displaced by gang violence.
As the situation deteriorates, the United States deployed a Marine Fleet-Anti-terrorism Security Team (FAST) to Haiti to support security at the US embassy in Port-au-Prince after non-essential personnel were evacuated over the weekend.
And earlier this week, the embattled prime minister of Haiti, Ariel Henry, said he will resign, paving the way toward a political transition in Haiti that the US, among others, had pushed for.
But amid the uncertainty in Haiti, Biden administration officials are bracing for a mass migration event at a time when federal resources are already strapped, and key immigration agencies are low on funds.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for example, has drafted contingency plans to cut detention capacity and release thousands of migrants unless they get additional funds. They would likely have to provide personnel who have already been diverted to assist along the US southern border.
The Department of Homeland Security has been dusting off mass migration event plans, as they’ve done before with Haiti, including in 2022 as the number of Haitians interdicted at sea ticked up.
On Tuesday, Defense Department and military officials told Congress that the department is doing “a number of things to ensure we’re keeping track of” a potential mass migration from Haiti.
“I think that we need to be postured appropriately for that, exactly what you’re talking about. And I have put in a request for increased capability to do exactly that. And we are ready if a mass migration — if we need to deal with a mass migration. We did a full walkthrough of our contingency plan on Gitmo last summer with all of the interagency and all of my components,” US Southern Command Commander Gen. Laura Richardson told lawmakers.
Rebecca Zimmerman, the official performing the duties of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs, said that so far, the administration has “not yet seen large numbers, what we would characterize as a maritime mass migration.”
Maritime migration presents its own unique challenges and involves US Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine Operations, the US Border Patrol and Coast Guard, among others, coordinating to interdict migrants who are often taking the dayslong journey in makeshift vessels.
The agencies work together to identify and interdict migrants so they may be repatriated. If migrants make landfall, they’re brought into Border Patrol custody.
Border authorities in southern Florida are monitoring the situation in Haiti and preparation is underway in the event of an influx of Haitians arriving, according to a US Customs and Border Protection official. In the past, more than 100 people amassed on vessels for the dangerous journey by sea.
Immigration enforcement agencies within the Department of Homeland Security continue to face a budget shortfall in the absence of supplemental funding. Last year, the White House asked Congress for around $14 billion in additional funds to secure the US-Mexico border as part of a broader national security supplemental request.
President Joe Biden has repeatedly implored lawmakers to pass the request but faced challenges in the Republican-controlled House. The request remains stalled in Congress.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-50045084879861823762024-03-13T17:03:00.000-07:002024-03-13T17:03:31.118-07:00'Democrats for Border Security' task force seeks to redefine the party on immigrationWASHINGTON — A newly formed group of House Democrats is seeking to shift the party's positioning on immigration to the center and address a major vulnerability for President Joe Biden that could shape his prospects for re-election this fall.
The “Democrats for Border Security” task force is co-chaired by Reps. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, who represents a border district, and Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., who flipped a Republican-held swing district after he campaigned on his support for tougher border laws.
One thing they have in common: They're fed up with the party's leftward turn on immigration over the last decade and want a course change to emphasize enforcement. Cuellar's calls for tougher immigration laws date back years. Then Suozzi successfully deployed it in the suburbs of New York. They both say Democrats must do the same to win competitive House districts and defeat former President Donald Trump this November.
“I think it’s a pretty good pathway for Democrats. Don’t cede the narrative to Republicans when it comes to border security," Cuellar said in an interview. “It doesn’t matter if we’re Hispanics. We want to see order. We want to see security."
A late-January NBC News poll found that Trump has a 35-point advantage over Biden among voters asked who they believe would do a better job at "securing the border and controlling immigration." Trump and Republicans are putting a heavy emphasis on a border crackdown as their pitch to voters in the election.
Biden’s 2025 budget proposal includes $4.7 billion fund for border security
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In his special election last month, Suozzi sought to flip the script by going on offense with border security, embracing a bipartisan bill to impose tougher asylum laws and depicting his Trump-aligned opponent as seeking to exploit the issue for political gain. He also called for more legal pathways for aspiring Americans. It worked.
Suozzi said he has told the White House that Biden can replicate his strategy successfully all over the country. And he believes Biden has begun to do it.
“I think Democrats are already changing,” Suozzi told NBC News. “Democrats have always been concerned about border security, but now they’re being more vocal about it and proactive about it. And I think the president is doing that.”
The new caucus has 26 members, including a host of Democrats in tough districts, including Reps. Matt Cartwright, D-Pa.; Angie Craig, D-Minn.; Jared Golden, D-Maine; Susie Lee, D-Nev.; Steven Horsford, D-Nev.; Mike Levin, D-Calif.; Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla.; and Mary Peltola, D-Alaska. It also includes Reps. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., and Colin Allred, D-Texas, who are running for the Senate in border states where immigration looms large for their electorates.
“Look, some of the loudest voices on the border crisis have made clear they have no interest in solving it,” Gallego said. “The Arizona border leaders and law enforcement I’ve met with are tired of it. We need to cut through the noise and get a border security bill done.”
Progressive leader: We 'can't be Republican Light'
Some progressives are uneasy with the shift. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, said Democrats “can’t be Republican Light on harsh enforcement policies” after they ran against Trump’s border policies in 2020. She wants Democrats to “start making the connection between chaos at the border and chaos in the legal immigration system.”
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She added: “I’ve asked the White House to not use some of those harsh statements and instead focus on Republican hypocrisy.”
The leftward shift traces to former President Barack Obama's second term after he dominated among Hispanic voters in 2012. A popular narrative formed that a more liberal immigration stance was key to winning more Hispanic voters. Democrats, egged on by activists who criticized Obama as too tough on deportations, de-emphasized punishment for lawbreakers and focused their rhetoric on creating pathways to citizenship.
But over time that narrative fell apart, as the asylum system became overwhelmed with more migrants than the government can process. In 2016, Trump gained ground with Hispanic voters relative to Republicans in 2012, while campaigning on mass deportations for people in the U.S. illegally, winning 28%. That rose to 38% for Trump in 2020, when his harsh immigration policies included family separation. Diverse Texas districts along the Mexico border, once Democratic strongholds, have shifted toward Republicans.
Cuellar, whose break with liberals over immigration dates to the Obama era, said the Democratic Party was led astray, as Hispanic voters also want to punish lawbreakers.
“That’s a myth,” Cuellar said. “They want border security. Still be respectful of the immigrants, but they want border security.”
He said public perception has moved away from Democrats on the issue — not because the party doesn't support resources for enforcement but because “Democrats won’t talk about border security” as much in recent years.
“I’m glad that the White House and other Democrats are looking at this as a very important issue to people — not only people like my constituents on the border but in other places. So yes, I see a shift from the White House, which I support,” he said. “I see a shift from other Democrats, more to the middle, to the center, where most Americans are at.”
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-90512591350303928932024-03-13T16:53:00.000-07:002024-03-13T16:53:27.960-07:00Immigration fight could trigger shutdown at end of next weekSenators in both parties are warning that a political food fight over funding for the Department of Homeland Security could cause a partisan government shutdown this month by derailing a second tranche of spending bills that Congress needs to pass by March 22.
Congress came within hours of a partial shutdown last week before it managed to pass a package of six largely noncontroversial spending bills before the Friday deadline.
But lawmakers say the next package of bills, which would fund the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), State and Homeland Security (DHS) as well as foreign operations, will be a much heavier lift because of deep partisan divisions over President Biden’s immigration policy.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told The Hill on Tuesday that the DHS funding bill is “the most challenging one,” an assessment shared by other senators.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said “Homeland is absolutely the toughest” of the bunch but pointed out all of them are getting weighed down by fights over policy riders being pushed by House conservatives.
“You got Defense in there,” she noted. “Labor, HHS is not an easy account either, but nobody’s talking about that. We’re all talking about Homeland and how challenging that’s going to be.”
Murkowski said DHS funding is “snarled up” with demands for the Biden administration to continue construction of a border wall and adopt the Trump-era policy of requiring migrants to “remain in Mexico” while their asylum claims get processed in the United States.
House Republicans are also pushing to zero out Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s salary; to prohibit funding for the CBP One app, which the Biden administration has used to parole migrants into the country; and to defund memos limiting Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection enforcement operations.
Murkowski floated the possibility of separating the appropriations bill funding Homeland Security from the rest of the package to avoid a broader government shutdown after March 22.
“I think you may have a situation where you could bifurcate this whole thing. If Homeland could not be resolved, you could move through those we have agreement on so that they’re at least in a better place process-wise, and then we deal with Homeland differently,” she said.
Sources familiar with the negotiations say that House Republicans are insisting on a variety of immigration-related policy riders that are unacceptable to Senate Democrats. There’s also a fight over how to spend billions of dollars that would be newly allocated to Mayorkas to deal with the huge surge of migrants across the southern border.
“It’s a big mess,” said a Senate Republican aide about the impasse over the Homeland Security funding measure. “It could jeopardize the larger package.”
A Senate Democratic source familiar with the negotiations between Senate and House appropriators said that House Republicans don’t want to greenlight the billions of dollars in new funding allocated to the Biden administration to handle the hundreds of thousands of migrants coming across the border.
“The Republicans wanted a lot more money in the allocations” for the Department of Homeland Security, but “now they don’t want to spend it because it might make things better, and they don’t want to make things better.”
“They want policy riders on everything,” the source added.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the chair of the Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee, broadly corroborated that claim without discussing any of the details inside the negotiating room.
“I think we’ve plainly seen that Republicans do not want to fix the problem at the border. I think their focus is very clearly on keeping this a pretty big mess. Their priorities on the border are political, not practical,” he said.
Murphy noted the increase in the “allocation for Homeland [Security] is much more significant” than the increases for any other appropriations subcommittee.
“That’s in part because there are enormous emergency expenses that the Biden administration has had to pay out over the past year” due to the number of migrants crossing the border, which exceeded 300,000 people in December alone, he said.
He confirmed there are many policy riders under discussion, declaring: “This will be the hardest bill to finish.”
Senators say the tentative plan is to unveil legislative text of the second funding package by Sunday evening, which would give House lawmakers and senators enough time to review it and pass it by the March 22 deadline.
One alternative option would be to separate the Homeland Security bill and pass a stopgap funding measure to keep the Homeland Security Department and its agencies operating beyond the deadline while passing a full-year appropriations package for the departments of Defense, Labor and HHS and other less controversial priorities.
Or congressional leaders could opt to pass a broader funding stopgap postponing the March 22 deadline for all departments and agencies covered by the second tranche of appropriations bills until sometime in April.
Both chambers are scheduled to take an extended recess beginning March 23.
Lawmakers would want to avoid setting a new funding deadline on March 29, which is Good Friday.
They need to wrap up the full-year appropriations bills by April 30 to avoid triggering an across-the-board 1 percent funding cut that would impact all discretionary spending programs.
The 1-percent cut is required by law to take effect after April 30 if Congress hasn’t passed all of its regular appropriations bills by that date. The penalty was a concession to Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) included in last year’s bipartisan deal to raise the debt limit.
Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) warned that failing to get all of the spending bills passed in time to avoid the cut would be a “disaster.”
“It’s unclear how [the Office of Management and Budget] would interpret that if it’s just one bill” that doesn’t pass “and it gets a [continuing resolution],” she said.
Collins confirmed that Homeland Security funding looms as the biggest obstacle to getting the second funding package passed.
“Immigration, border security are difficult issues as we’ve shown earlier this year,” she said, pointing to the collapse of a bipartisan Senate border security deal last month.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday pleaded with colleagues not to stumble into a shutdown because of disagreements over border security.
“It’s a difficult issue,” he acknowledged. “But we have to get it done. We don’t want to shut down the government. It’s going to cause huge problems for everybody, including our military, including our veterans, including so many other people.”
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-17713465241016821832024-03-13T16:34:00.000-07:002024-03-13T16:34:26.742-07:00Supreme Court extends freeze on controversial Texas immigration lawThe Supreme Court on Tuesday extended a temporary freeze on the enforcement of Texas’ controversial immigration law that allows state law enforcement to arrest and detain people they suspect of entering the country illegally.
Without action from the high court, the Texas law would have gone into effect Wednesday. Now, with the new administrative orders in place, its implementation will remain paused through Monday.
Justice Samuel Alito issued the latest administrative holds, which will give the court additional time to review briefing in the case and do not necessarily signal which way the justices are leaning on the underlying request.
The Biden administration and others filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court on March 4 asking the justices to block enforcement of the law.
Senate Bill 4, signed into law by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in December, immediately raised concerns among immigration advocates of increased racial profiling as well as detentions and attempted deportations by state authorities in Texas, where Latinos represent 40% of the population.
The Justice Department has argued that the law would “profoundly” alter the status quo “that has existed between the United States and the States in the context of immigration for almost 150 years.”
A federal judge in Austin, Texas, had blocked the state government from implementing the law. But a federal appeals court granted a temporary stay of the lower court’s decision and said it would take effect on March 10 if the Supreme Court didn’t act.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, and other officials told the Supreme Court on Monday that the “Constitution recognizes that Texas has the sovereign right to defend itself from violent transnational cartels that flood the State with fentanyl, weapons, and all manner of brutality.”
The state officials described Texas in court papers as being “the nation’s first-line defense against transnational violence” and said the state has been “forced to deal with the deadly consequences of the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to protect the border.”
The case represents the latest example of the Biden administration turning to the Supreme Court in its ongoing battle with Texas over immigration. Earlier this year, the high court handed a temporary win to the administration when it wiped away a lower-court order that prohibited the federal agents from removing razor wire that Texas officials deployed along part of the US-Mexico border.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-77078973371118940242024-03-12T11:14:00.000-07:002024-03-12T11:14:03.966-07:00Judge blocks Texas AG’s effort to obtain records from migrant shelter on US-Mexico borderEL PASO, Texas (AP) — A Texas judge on Monday ruled in favor of a large migrant shelter on the U.S.-Mexico border that is seeking to shield records from Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is seeking to shut down the facility over claims it encourages migrants to enter the country illegally.
The order by Judge Francisco X. Dominguez of El Paso keeps Annunciation House — which for decades has been one of Texas’ largest border shelters for migrants — from having to immediately turn over internal documents that Paxton’s office demanded last month.
Dominguez criticized Paxton and accused him of running “roughshod” over the shelter “without regard to due process or fair play.”
Paxton’s office did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
Aid groups have given critical support to new arrivals, eliciting criticism from some quarters.
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State officials visited Annunciation House in early February demanding immediate access to review records — including medical and immigration documents — of migrants who received services at the shelter since 2022.
Officials from Annunciation House, which oversees a network of shelters, said they were willing to comply but needed time to determine what they could legally share without violating the constitutional rights of their clients.
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About 500 migrants currently are spread over Annunciation House sites, an uptick in their numbers, said Ruben Garcia, the shelter’s executive director.
Although the shelter can return to normal operating procedures, Garcia said the lawsuit has negatively affected them.
“We depend a lot of volunteers and we’ve had volunteers leave because they’ve been concerned that they could somehow get caught up in this legal process,” Garcia said. “I’m sure it’s going to make other people who might consider volunteering think twice about wanting to volunteer.”
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-27429274854713587802024-03-12T11:13:00.000-07:002024-03-12T11:13:08.184-07:00USCIS Streamlines Process for Refugee Employment Authorization DocumentsUSCIS has begun implementing a streamlined process for Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization, to provide Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) more efficiently to eligible refugees after they are admitted into the United States. This streamlined process shortens the wait time for an EAD to approximately 30 days instead of several months. All individuals admitted into the United States as refugees on or after Dec. 10, 2023, will receive EADs pursuant to this new process.
Under U.S. law, a refugee is legally authorized to work as soon as they arrive in the United States. Obtaining proof of this work authorization in the form of an EAD, however, was previously a cumbersome paper-based process that led to undue delays. The new process is fully automated and no longer requires refugees to apply for an EAD, allowing for more efficient processing and adjudication of Form I-765 and quicker delivery of EADs after we approve them.
With this new process, USCIS will digitally create a Form I-765 for arriving refugees and begin adjudicating it as soon as they are admitted into the United States. After USCIS approves a refugee’s Form I-765, refugees will generally receive their EAD within one to two weeks. USCIS will mail their EAD via U.S. Postal Service Priority Mail to their address of record. The time frame for a refugee to receive their EAD card may vary, depending on delivery times. Please allow a total of 30 days before inquiring.
USCIS will also electronically provide the Social Security Administration with the information required to assign a Social Security number and mail a Social Security card to the refugee.
USCIS recognizes that documents such as an EAD and Social Security card are critical to a newly arrived refugee’s ability to integrate into the United States. This new process is the result of coordination across the U.S. government to support the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and refugee integration. USCIS is committed to streamlining and digitizing our processes to make them more efficient. We launched this process on Dec. 10, 2023, following a successful trial period.
This process does not apply to following-to join refugees admitted into the United States based on an approved Form I-730, Refugee/Asylee Relative Petition. Additionally, refugees seeking a replacement or renewal EAD will still need to complete and submit Form I-765.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-4347307936480110402024-03-12T10:53:00.000-07:002024-03-12T10:53:05.677-07:00Sex trafficking victim says Sen. Katie Britt telling her story during SOTU rebuttal is ‘not fair’The woman whose story Alabama Sen. Katie Britt appeared to have shared in the Republican response to the State of the Union as an example of President Joe Biden’s failed immigration policies told CNN she was trafficked before Biden’s presidency and said legislators lack empathy when using the issue of human trafficking for political purposes.
“I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo — and that to me is not fair,” Karla Jacinto told CNN on Sunday.
CNN’s Freedom Project, which seeks to raise awareness about modern-day slavery, previously profiled Jacinto’s story.
Watch CNN's 2016 interview with Karla Jacinto
02:54 - Source: CNN
Jacinto told CNN that Mexican politicians took advantage of her by using her story for political purposes and that it’s happened again in the United States.
“I work as a spokesperson for many victims who have no voice, and I really would like them to be empathetic: all the governors, all the senators, to be empathetic with the issue of human trafficking because there are millions of girls and boys who disappear all the time. People who are really trafficked and abused, as she [Britt] mentioned. And I think she [Britt] should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude,” Jacinto said.
Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., is seen in the U.S. Capitol during votes on Tuesday, January 9, 2024.
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During the Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday, Britt said, “When I first took office, I did something different. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas, where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12,” before saying, “President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable.”
Jacinto said she met the senator at an event at the southern border with other government officials and anti-human-trafficking activists, instead of one-on-one as Britt stated. She also said that she was never trafficked in the United States, as Britt appeared to suggest. She was not trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, but by a pimp who operated as part of a family that entrapped vulnerable girls to force them into prostitution, she said.
Jacinto said she was kept in captivity from 2004 to 2008, when President George W. Bush was in office and when Biden was a senator.
CNN reached out to the senator’s office seeking comment Sunday.
Sean Ross, Britt’s communications director, told The Washington Post that the senator was talking about Jacinto and disputed that Britt’s language was misleading.
Asked by Fox News’ Shannon Bream on Sunday whether she meant to give the impression that the story had taken place during Biden’s time in office, Britt responded: “No, Shannon,” before criticizing the president’s border policies.
“I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12. So I didn’t say a teenager, I didn’t say a young woman, a grown woman. A woman, when she was trafficked, when she was 12,” Britt said.
In a prior statement to CNN, a spokesperson for Britt’s office neither confirmed nor denied Britt was sharing Jacinto’s account, but said the story the senator told “was 100% correct.”
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-54457231865175109432024-03-12T10:50:00.000-07:002024-03-12T10:50:00.617-07:00White House: Biden ‘absolutely did not apologize’ for using term ‘illegal’A White House spokesperson denied Monday that President Biden apologized for using the term “illegal” to describe an undocumented migrant during his State of the Union speech, after Biden said he had “regret” over his words.
The man, accused of killing university student Laken Riley in Georgia, is a migrant from Venezuela who was not authorized to be in the U.S., according to immigration officials. The incident has become a political lightning rod for conservatives.
“I want to be really clear about something,” White House spokesperson Olivia Dalton said Monday. “The president absolutely did not apologize. There was no apology anywhere in that conversation. He did not apologize. He used a different word.”
Dalton’s comments draw a distinction between an apology and the president’s show of regret, which came after some Democrats denounced the use of the term as derogatory. A Biden campaign spokesperson said using the term was a “small mistake.”
On Sunday, multiple Republicans went after the president for showing that regret, painting it as an apology and claiming it proved he was weak on border security policy.
“The president is cowering to his base and showing deference to a man who deserves none,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “This man is an illegal immigrant who brutally murdered Laken Riley. President Biden should be apologizing to Laken’s family. What an embarrassment.”
Riley’s death has become the center of the political conversation on border security, as Republicans pin the crime on Biden’s policy, while the White House continues to push the GOP to pass a bipartisan border security deal.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-35997680688244796182024-03-12T10:10:00.000-07:002024-03-12T10:10:56.144-07:00The Supreme Court may let Texas get away with a totally unconstitutional deportation lawFor well more than a century, the federal government has enjoyed near exclusive authority over immigration policy, while states have largely been restricted to assisting in carrying out federal policies. The Supreme Court has reinforced this rule many times over many decisions, such as Truax v. Raich (1915), which said that “the authority to control immigration — to admit or exclude aliens — is vested solely in the Federal Government.”
Texas, however, now wants the Supreme Court to abandon this longstanding constitutional rule, and it thinks that the political tumblers have finally aligned in a way that would lead the Court to do just that.
Texas seeks to upend the longstanding balance of power between the federal government and the states through a law, known as SB 4, which allows Texas state courts to issue deportation orders that will be carried out by Texas state officials. The law is now before the Supreme Court in two “shadow docket” cases, known as United States v. Texas and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy v. McCraw.
The Texas law will go into effect on Wednesday at 5 pm unless the Supreme Court acts, so it is likely that the Court will hand down some sort of decision before then (although that decision could just be a brief order extending the deadline to some future date).
The Supreme Court is as conservative as it’s been since the 1930s, with Republicans controlling six seats on the nine-justice Court. And Texas’s case attempting to seize control of the Texas/Mexico border arrives at the justices’ feet at the same time that an unusually large wave of migrants are arriving at the border.
The reason why the federal government has historically had exclusive authority over nearly all questions of immigration policy is to prevent a single state’s mistreatment of a foreign national from damaging US relations with another nation. Indeed, Hines v. Davidowitz (1941) warned that “international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs” committed against foreign nationals.
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Which isn’t to say that the United States must always treat foreign citizens with caution or deference — just that a decision that could endanger the entire nation’s relationship with a foreign state should be made by a government that represents the entire nation.
SB 4 is not allowed under Truax, Hines, and countless other decisions, including an Obama-era case involving a very similar Arizona law, Arizona v. United States (2012).
But the current Supreme Court has only a weak attachment to following precedent, especially when a precedent is widely disliked by modern-day Republicans. So there is at least some risk that the Court’s GOP-appointed majority will allow SB 4 to go into effect.
How does an unambiguously unconstitutional law wind up before the Supreme Court?
To a certain extent, an immigration-related conflict between a red state and the federal government was inevitable the minute a Democrat entered the White House. Under President Obama, Arizona’s Republican government enacted a similarly unconstitutional law, known as SB 1070, which imposed registration requirements on immigrants and which gave state police enhanced authority over suspected undocumented immigrants.
The Supreme Court struck down several key provisions of SB 1070 in Arizona, in an opinion which also reaffirmed that the national government, and not the states, must have primacy over immigration. “[I]t is fundamental that foreign countries concerned about the status, safety, and security of their nationals in the United States must be able to confer and communicate on this subject with one national sovereign,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court in Arizona, “not the 50 separate States.”
But Kennedy is no longer on the Court, and he was replaced by the more hardline conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Also gone is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who joined the majority opinion in Arizona, and who died in 2020 and was replaced by Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
If Kavanaugh and Barrett unite with the three most conservative justices, that’s five votes to overrule Arizona, and to bless Texas’s SB 4.
Yet, while Republican-led lawsuits pushing harsher US immigration policies are now a fixture of Democratic administrations, Texas might have a particularly strong political hand right now because of the unusually large number of migrants arriving at the southern US border. For most of the 2010s, US Customs and Border Protection reported about 400,000 to 500,000 “encounters” with migrants at this border every year. Now, that number stands around 2 million a year.
There are several reasons why this uptick in migration is happening now.
One of the biggest factors is political instability in many parts of Central America and the Caribbean. For many years, the so-called “Northern Triangle” countries — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — were a major source of migration, as citizens of those nations fled corruption, gang violence, and high levels of poverty. This migration remains ongoing, and is now augmented by migrants fleeing an economic and political crisis in Venezuela, and violence and political instability in Haiti, among other things.
Additionally, the United States recently relaxed its border policy because it could no longer point to the Covid-19 pandemic to justify extraordinary measures. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the Trump administration invoked a statute which allows the government to close the border in order to prevent the spread of a “communicable disease” that is present in a foreign country. This tight border policy remained in effect well into the Biden administration, until May of 2023.
This policy (which was known as “Title 42”) always stood on dubious legal grounds. It certainly wasn’t effective in keeping Covid from entering the United States. And the idea that we could prevent the spread of this “communicable disease” by locking down the border became less and less defensible as Covid both became ubiquitous in the United States, and ceased to be a global crisis.
By spring of 2023, even Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Republican appointed by Trump, openly mocked the suggestion that Title 42 could remain in place. “The current border crisis is not a COVID crisis,” wrote Gorsuch.
SB 4 is one of several illegal steps Texas has taken with respect to the border
Texas has since tried to augment a federal border policy that is widely viewed as inadequate with a series of dubiously legal policies. In addition to enacting SB 4, the state has constructed physical barriers — including razor wire fences and floating obstructions in the Rio Grande — intended to keep migrants out of the country (or, in at least one case, to cause them to drown while trying to enter).
In January, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Texas could not use razor wire to prevent US Border Patrol agents from entering an area where migrants are present, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Barrett joining the Court’s three Democratic appointees.
President Biden, for what it is worth, agrees with Republicans that legal changes are necessary to limit border crossings. Indeed, he pressed Senate Democrats to negotiate a bipartisan bill that would make it harder for migrants to claim asylum, increase funding for immigration officials and detention facilities, and allow the government to close down border crossings if they exceed a certain level.
But, after Democratic and Republican negotiators agreed on a bill, much of the GOP abruptly pulled its support. According to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), this happened because presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump told Republicans “he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it.”
And so, here we are, with an unpopular spike in southern migration overwhelming the US immigration system, and a Congress that is unable to address the problem because the leader of the GOP prefers chaos to a solution.
Texas Republicans, meanwhile, have their own answer. It just requires the Supreme Court to toss out more than a century of established law, and strip away the United States’ ability to speak with one voice on matters of foreign policy.
If Texas prevails in this lawsuit, the consequences will be unpredictable, and could be catastrophic. It would mean, as the Supreme Court warned in Hines, that states would gain broad leeway to act against foreign nationals — potentially endangering US relations with our allies, or worse.
For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-60912614043901834362024-03-12T10:02:00.000-07:002024-03-12T10:02:08.348-07:00Biden's proposed budget includes $4.7 billion emergency fund for border migrant surgesPresident Joe Biden’s budget proposal for 2025 includes a $4.7 billion emergency fund for border security to enable the Department of Homeland Security to ramp up operations in the event of a migrant surge, according to a portion of the budget reviewed by NBC News.
The contingency fund would let DHS tap into funds on an as-needed basis when the number of undocumented migrants crossing the southern border tops a certain threshold that is unspecified in the budget. If the money is not used to address a surge, the money would be transferred to the general funds of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The request is likely to fall on deaf ears among congressional Republicans, who have already refused to fund $13.6 billion the Biden administration asked for in an emergency supplemental request aimed at responding to a record high number of migrants crossing the border.
A migrant crosses the Rio Grande with his child attempting to reach the United States border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
A migrant crosses the Rio Grande with his child attempting to reach the United States border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on Jan. 2, 2024. David Peinado / Anadolu via Getty Images file
It comes as both CBP and ICE are facing significant budget shortfalls.
NBC News first reported that ICE will have to start cutting key operations by May if Congress does not help cover a $500 million budget gap.
Acting CBP Commissioner Troy Miller said that Republicans’ blocking of border provisions of the national security supplemental bill earlier this year will put his agency in a weaker position should the number of migrants rise as the weather warms.
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“I certainly continue to be cognizant that the numbers of migrants coming across the southern border could increase and probably will increase in the weeks and months ahead,” Miller said. “I think that’s one of the reasons that as we looked at the national security bill, it gave us additional authorities and resources to effectuate a consequence so that we could quickly screen off folks that didn’t have a valid asylum claim and send them back.”
Migrants attempting to cross in to the U.S. from Mexico are detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Jacumba Hot Springs, Calif.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection detains migrants trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico in Jacumba Hot Springs, Calif., on Nov. 28. Nick Ut / Getty Images file
Biden’s budget also asks Congress for $405 million to hire 1,300 more Border Patrol agents, funding to keep ICE’s 34,000 existing detention beds, $1 billion for aid to Central America to address the root causes of migration, and nearly $1 billion to address the backlog of over 2.4 million pending cases in U.S. immigration courts.
To combat fentanyl smuggling, the budget asks for funding to hire an additional 1,000 CBP officers who can stop the illicit drug from coming across the U.S.-Mexico border and $849 million for technology to detect fentanyl at the border.
After an NBC News report that some fentanyl detection scanners were sitting unused because of Republican opposition to funding to place them in the ground, Sen. Jon Tester, D.-Mont., asked Congress to fund the technology.
The budget also asks Congress for funds to ensure that migrant children who cross the border unaccompanied are placed with relatives and sponsors as quickly as possible.
In a statement, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said, “The President’s Budget, in combination with the Senate’s bipartisan border security legislation, is vital to meeting the needs of our workforce and the challenges we face. The President’s Budget prioritizes staying ahead of the diverse and complex threats facing the homeland and highlights our unwavering dedication to protecting the security of the American people.”Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24496902.post-61281951815330957592024-03-11T16:40:00.000-07:002024-03-11T16:40:43.258-07:00Daily eBriefs - March 11, 2024Immigration Law
When an immigration judge’s adverse credibility determination and the underlying facts upon which it was based are part of the record, the appellate court must consider all those facts in its substantial evidence review, regardless of whether the Board of Immigration Appeals expressly mentioned them. An immigration judge failed to properly consider and evaluate the evidentiary weight of multiple documents an asylum-seeker offered into the record independent of her noncredible testimony.
Kalulu v. Garland - filed March 11, 2024
Cite as 2024 S.O.S. 21-895
Full text click here >http://sos.metnews.com/sos.cgi?0324//21-895Eli Kantorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05421766326093941154noreply@blogger.com0