A shortfall of immigrants is worsening widespread labor shortages and hobbling the U.S. economy at a time when more than 10 million jobs remain unfilled, particularly in low-paying and physically demanding industries.
Alonzo Arteaga’s title is general manager of a small hotel in Topeka, Kan. But these days, he doubles as a housekeeper, making beds, vacuuming floors and laundering towels to fill an ever-worsening worker shortage.
Like businesses around the country, Senate Luxury Suites is struggling to keep going without critical employees. The hotel is down to three housekeepers, half of what it had before the pandemic, and Arteaga blames a years-long immigration slowdown, which he says has made an already tough situation worse.
“It’s been three years of trying absolutely everything,” said Arteaga, who has raised pay by about $3 an hour andoffers discounted monthly rates to employees. “It feels like the workers really aren’t there.”
A shortfall of immigrants is worsening widespread labor shortages and hobbling the U.S. economy at a time when more than 10 million jobs remain unfilled, particularly in low-paying and physically demanding industries such as hospitality, agriculture, construction and health care.
While the slowdown in immigration began well before the pandemic, the covid crisis intensified the process as the Trump administration effectively halted the flow of foreign-born workers into the United States. Although legal immigration has rebounded somewhat since then, particularly in the last six months, major shortages remain, rippling through the economy at a time when the labor force is also missing workers from early retirements, ongoing health problems and caregiving challenges.Labor force shortages are also contributing to higher prices for some goods and services, as companies raise wages to compete for a smaller pool of workers and to keep existing staff.
The crisis had prompted senators on both sides of the aisle to try to strike a deal that allowed more legal immigration in the weeks before Republicans take control of the House. But those proposals never got off the ground, making an immigration overhaul far less politically feasible.
“Immigration is something almost everyone agrees needs to be fixed, but it’s become a political wedge issue,” said Tara Watson, an economics professor at Williams College and fellow at the Brookings Institution. “There have been huge bureaucratic delays since the Trump administration. And of course covid really put a wrench in the gears. But this is a long-term structural problem that has not been addressed.”
Economists say it’s difficult to quantify exactly how many foreign-born workers are missing from the labor force, particularly when it comes to undocumented immigrants. By one estimate, the United States is shy of about 1.7 million legal immigrants based on pre-pandemic migration trends, according to Giovanni Peri, director of the Global Migration Center at the University of California at Davis.
Even though immigration rates have picked up in recent months, Peri says it could be another four years before the country makes up for current shortfalls. Even then, it won’t be enough to catch up to the rapidly aging workforce that is projected to leave millions more positions unfilled.
Economists estimate that the lack of immigration is responsible for close to half of the workers missing from the labor force, a deficit Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell recently estimated to be about 3.5 million workers.
“There is no question: We need more immigration,” said Adam Ozimek, chief economist at Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan business organization. “Immigrants aren’t just workers, they are particularly flexible, mobile workers, who help address acute labor shortages wherever they emerge. And that’s particularly important in this constrained economy we’re facing right now.”
Visas for college students and highly skilled science and tech workers have bounced back relatively quickly, Peri said. But immigration rates for people without a college education have been slower to make up for lost ground.
“If someone doesn’t have much education and doesn’t have a close relative in the U.S., there is virtually no legal pathway for them to get a green card," said Watson of Williams College. “There is a pool of untapped talent out there.”
Trump took office, largely on an anti-immigrant platform. Although his administration didn’t make legislative changes, it slowed down visa processing through “a culture of extreme vetting and extreme delays” that was enough to deter immigration in all forms, especially among those without college educations, Peri said.
The number of new immigrants entering the country legally each year, which peaked in 2016, fell by 6 percent in 2017 and another 9 percent the following year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. But the pandemic dealt the biggest blow: New arrivals plunged 50 percent between 2019 and 2021.
“Covid caused two years of lost immigration,” Peri said. “Embassies and consulates that release visas were mostly shut down. The processing of green cards in the U.S. was mostly shut down. Even international travel was mostly gone.”
Many of those situations have since improved, but business owners say it hasn’t been enough to make up for years of lost workers.
Early in the pandemic, Mariama Lowe lost nearly three-quarters of the employees at her home health-care business in Alexandria, Va., to covid illnesses, career changes and early retirements. She’s since gone from 100 nurses and personal care aides — almost all of them immigrants — to 27.
“We’re in a very difficult position, because there is nobody to hire anymore,” Lowe said. “Tech companies can go recruit from anywhere; they have all of these avenues available to them. But a home health agency like me? I don’t have that opportunity. I just have to go with whoever’s here and whoever’s available. And right now, it’s not a lot.”
Beyond creating wider avenues for immigrants to enter the country, business owners, economists and policymakers say there also needs to be a focus on retaining foreign-born workers already in the United States. That includes “dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as young children; recently laid-off tech workers on H1-B visas who may have to leave the country if they don’t find new work within 60 days; and the adult children of highly educated legal immigrants awaiting permanent residency.
I don't know how true this story is for NYC considering we are opening up more asylum houses here in and have a border that is still crowded.
Maybe the smaller cities are having trouble?
Does NYC traditionally have jobs that 'Muricans don't want to do? Lots of hospitality jobs in hotels and food service. And the number of work visas for those types of positions has been held at the same number since 2006, I think the article mentioned. Farmers are planting/raising less because they don't have the labor to harvest. Which leads to higher prices, less supply, inflation. Mexico's Gen X'ers and Z'ers don't want that work as they're more educated than in the past. So, that's where immigrants from Central America come in. But you know, the "other." And POOTWH slow walked LEGAL immigration. We're our own worst enemy at times with our combined exploitation and fear mongering. Build the wall. Dumbest fucking campaign slogan ever and tens of millions of 'Muricans fell for it.
I don't know how true this story is for NYC considering we are opening up more asylum houses here in and have a border that is still crowded.
Maybe the smaller cities are having trouble?
Does NYC traditionally have jobs that 'Muricans don't want to do? Lots of hospitality jobs in hotels and food service. And the number of work visas for those types of positions has been held at the same number since 2006, I think the article mentioned. Farmers are planting/raising less because they don't have the labor to harvest. Which leads to higher prices, less supply, inflation. Mexico's Gen X'ers and Z'ers don't want that work as they're more educated than in the past. So, that's where immigrants from Central America come in. But you know, the "other." And POOTWH slow walked LEGAL immigration. We're our own worst enemy at times with our combined exploitation and fear mongering. Build the wall. Dumbest fucking campaign slogan ever and tens of millions of 'Muricans fell for it.
Food industry here just like where you live. Go into your favorite restaurants kitchen and it's the same. Usually not legals.
Didn't Trump lose a few of his Mir a laga workers because of his policy?
I don't know how true this story is for NYC considering we are opening up more asylum houses here in and have a border that is still crowded.
Maybe the smaller cities are having trouble?
Does NYC traditionally have jobs that 'Muricans don't want to do? Lots of hospitality jobs in hotels and food service. And the number of work visas for those types of positions has been held at the same number since 2006, I think the article mentioned. Farmers are planting/raising less because they don't have the labor to harvest. Which leads to higher prices, less supply, inflation. Mexico's Gen X'ers and Z'ers don't want that work as they're more educated than in the past. So, that's where immigrants from Central America come in. But you know, the "other." And POOTWH slow walked LEGAL immigration. We're our own worst enemy at times with our combined exploitation and fear mongering. Build the wall. Dumbest fucking campaign slogan ever and tens of millions of 'Muricans fell for it.
Food industry here just like where you live. Go into your favorite restaurants kitchen and it's the same. Usually not legals.
Didn't Trump lose a few of his Mir a laga workers because of his policy?
That's the point. Make them legal by upping the numbers allowed in, streamlining the process and understand that the US economy needs people to fill these jobs. Stop being afraid of the "other" and welcome them here. Afterall, they end up being better than native born. 10M unfilled jobs in the US, a loss of 5 years of migrant labor due to POOTWH and covid. Who's cleaning up Flo Rida, by the way? And I'm not insinuating that you're afraid of the "other." Repubs mostly are and deplorables surely are.
I don't know how true this story is for NYC considering we are opening up more asylum houses here in and have a border that is still crowded.
Maybe the smaller cities are having trouble?
Does NYC traditionally have jobs that 'Muricans don't want to do? Lots of hospitality jobs in hotels and food service. And the number of work visas for those types of positions has been held at the same number since 2006, I think the article mentioned. Farmers are planting/raising less because they don't have the labor to harvest. Which leads to higher prices, less supply, inflation. Mexico's Gen X'ers and Z'ers don't want that work as they're more educated than in the past. So, that's where immigrants from Central America come in. But you know, the "other." And POOTWH slow walked LEGAL immigration. We're our own worst enemy at times with our combined exploitation and fear mongering. Build the wall. Dumbest fucking campaign slogan ever and tens of millions of 'Muricans fell for it.
Food industry here just like where you live. Go into your favorite restaurants kitchen and it's the same. Usually not legals.
Didn't Trump lose a few of his Mir a laga workers because of his policy?
I’ve noticed it’s not just restaurants they work for house contractors, landscaping,house cleaning! I’ve seen those roofing crews get to a house all immigrants and take the roof off in 4 hrs and have new roof on by days end and how about those tree cutting crews those guys are the best climbers! One of those crews took down a 60’ oak in my yard in 8 hrs I was shocked how fast they worked plus how good the climbers were..
I don't know how true this story is for NYC considering we are opening up more asylum houses here in and have a border that is still crowded.
Maybe the smaller cities are having trouble?
Does NYC traditionally have jobs that 'Muricans don't want to do? Lots of hospitality jobs in hotels and food service. And the number of work visas for those types of positions has been held at the same number since 2006, I think the article mentioned. Farmers are planting/raising less because they don't have the labor to harvest. Which leads to higher prices, less supply, inflation. Mexico's Gen X'ers and Z'ers don't want that work as they're more educated than in the past. So, that's where immigrants from Central America come in. But you know, the "other." And POOTWH slow walked LEGAL immigration. We're our own worst enemy at times with our combined exploitation and fear mongering. Build the wall. Dumbest fucking campaign slogan ever and tens of millions of 'Muricans fell for it.
Food industry here just like where you live. Go into your favorite restaurants kitchen and it's the same. Usually not legals.
Didn't Trump lose a few of his Mir a laga workers because of his policy?
I’ve noticed it’s not just restaurants they work for house contractors, landscaping,house cleaning! I’ve seen those roofing crews get to a house all immigrants and take the roof off in 4 hrs and have new roof on by days end and how about those tree cutting crews those guys are the best climbers! One of those crews took down a 60’ oak in my yard in 8 hrs I was shocked how fast they worked plus how good the climbers were..
I used to be a tree climber and landscaper. Tough work. You don't find our youth doing that anymore. Those jobs are actually career paths for people now.
I don't know how true this story is for NYC considering we are opening up more asylum houses here in and have a border that is still crowded.
Maybe the smaller cities are having trouble?
Does NYC traditionally have jobs that 'Muricans don't want to do? Lots of hospitality jobs in hotels and food service. And the number of work visas for those types of positions has been held at the same number since 2006, I think the article mentioned. Farmers are planting/raising less because they don't have the labor to harvest. Which leads to higher prices, less supply, inflation. Mexico's Gen X'ers and Z'ers don't want that work as they're more educated than in the past. So, that's where immigrants from Central America come in. But you know, the "other." And POOTWH slow walked LEGAL immigration. We're our own worst enemy at times with our combined exploitation and fear mongering. Build the wall. Dumbest fucking campaign slogan ever and tens of millions of 'Muricans fell for it.
Food industry here just like where you live. Go into your favorite restaurants kitchen and it's the same. Usually not legals.
Didn't Trump lose a few of his Mir a laga workers because of his policy?
That's the point. Make them legal by upping the numbers allowed in, streamlining the process and understand that the US economy needs people to fill these jobs. Stop being afraid of the "other" and welcome them here. Afterall, they end up being better than native born. 10M unfilled jobs in the US, a loss of 5 years of migrant labor due to POOTWH and covid. Who's cleaning up Flo Rida, by the way? And I'm not insinuating that you're afraid of the "other." Repubs mostly are and deplorables surely are.
This is a great comment. While the US has a long history of imposing restrictive and racist immigration policies (see: Chinese Exclusion Act), for much of the first half of the 20th century it was easier for people to come to the US work for a time, save money, and return home. Some did so seasonally, then we started punishing people for coming and going and restricting entry (unless you could prove you were a tourist or had a student/work/business owner visa) which in turn made people who came in through irregular means have to stay here or they could never come back. Reagan was a terrible politician, but his administration and congress collaborating on legalizing millions of undocumented people was a huge improvement (see IRCA of 1986). The fact that no other administration has been able to re-do this is an embarrassment. Both parties use the same dehumanizing rhetoric to refer to immigrants as a "illegals", "flood", "wave", "invasion", and their unwillingness to actually address the root causes (bad immigration policy, bad US foreign policy) they seem content to keep people vulnerable and easily exploitable as flexible labor.
Cuban migrants flow into Florida Keys, overwhelm officials
By CODY JACKSON and TERRY SPENCER
Today
MARATHON, Fla. (AP) — More than 500 Cuban immigrants have come ashore in the Florida Keys since the weekend, the latest in a large and increasing number who are fleeing the communist island and stretching thin U.S. border agencies both on land and at sea.
It is a dangerous 100-mile (160-kilometer) trip in often rickety boats — unknown thousands having perished over the years — but more Cubans are taking the risk amid deepening and compounding political and economic crises at home. A smaller number of Haitians are also fleeing their country’s economic and political woes and arriving by boat in Florida.
The Coast Guard tries to interdict Cuban migrants at sea and return them. Since the U.S. government’s new fiscal year began Oct. 1, about 4,200 have been stopped at sea — or about 43 a day. That was up from 17 per day in the previous fiscal year and just two per day during the 2020-21 fiscal year.
But an unknown number have made it to land and will likely get to stay.
“I would prefer to die to reach my dream and help my family. The situation in Cuba is not very good,” Jeiler del Toro Diaz told The Miami Herald shortly after coming ashore Tuesday in Key Largo.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said it would be issuing a statement Wednesday, but had not yet done so.
Dry Tortugas National Park, a group of seven islands 70 miles (110 kilometers) west of Key West, remained closed to visitors Wednesday as the U.S. evacuated migrants who came ashore there earlier in the week. Normally, about 255 tourists a day arrive by boat and seaplane to tour the islands and Fort Jefferson, which was built 160 years ago. Officials did not know when it would reopen.
In Marathon, some 45 miles (72 kilometers) northeast of Key West, about two dozen migrants were being held in a fenced-in area outside a Customs and Border Protection station where tents had been erected to provide shade. When Associated Press journalists tried to speak with the migrants through the fence, Border Patrol employees told them to leave.
Ramón Raul Sanchez with the Cuban-American group Movimiento Democracia went to the Keys to check on the situation. He told the AP that he met a group of 22 Cubans who had just arrived. They were standing along the main road, waiting for U.S. authorities to pick them up. Sanchez and Keys officials said the Biden administration needs a more coordinated response.
“There is a migration and humanitarian crisis, and it is necessary for the president to respond by helping local authorities,” Sanchez said.
Cubans are willing to take the risk because those who make it to U.S. soil almost always get to stay, even if their legal status is murky. They also arrive by land, flying to Nicaragua, then traveling north through Honduras and Guatemala into Mexico. In the 2021-22 fiscal year, 220,000 Cubans were stopped at the U.S.-Mexican border, almost six times as many as the previous year.
Callan Garcia, a Florida immigration attorney, said most Cubans who reach U.S. soil tell Border Patrol agents they can't find adequate work at home. They are then flagged “expedited for removal" as having entered the country illegally. But that does not mean the actually will be removed quickly — or at all.
Because the U.S. and Cuba do not have formal diplomatic relations, the American government has no way to repatriate them. Cubans are released but given an order that requires them to contact federal immigration authorities periodically to confirm their address and status. They are allowed to get work permits, driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers, but cannot apply for permanent residency or citizenship.
Garcia said that can last for the rest of their lives; some Cubans who came in the 1980 Mariel boatlift still are designated “expedited for removal."
“They're just sort of here with a floating order for removal that can't be executed,” Garcia said.
A small percentage of Cuban immigrants tell Border Patrol agents they are fleeing political persecution and are “paroled," Garcia said. Under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, they are released until they can appear before an immigration judge to make their case. If approved, they can receive permanent residency and later apply for citizenship.
On the other hand, Haitian immigrants almost always get sent back, even though political persecution and violence is rife there, along with severe economic hardship.
“That inconsistency has something that immigrant rights advocates have always pointed to,” Garcia said.
___
Spencer reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. AP reporter Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Biden toughens border, offers legal path for 30,000 a month
By COLLEEN LONG, ZEKE MILLER and ELLIOT SPAGAT
2 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Thursday the U.S. would immediately begin turning away Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans who cross the border from Mexico illegally, his boldest move yet to confront the arrivals of migrants that have spiraled since he took office two years ago.
The new rules expand on an existing effort to stop Venezuelans attempting to enter the U.S., which began in October and led to a dramatic drop in Venezuelans coming to the southern border. Together, they represent a major change to immigration rules that will stand even if the Supreme Court ends a Trump-era public health law that allows U.S. authorities to turn away asylum-seekers.
“Do not, do not just show up at the border,” Biden said as he announced the changes, even as he acknowledged the hardships that lead many families to make the dangerous journey north.
“Stay where you are and apply legally from there,” he advised.
Biden made the announcement just days before a planned visit to El Paso, Texas, on Sunday for his first trip to the southern border as president. From there, he will travel on to Mexico City to meet with North American leaders on Monday and Tuesday.
Instead, the U.S. will accept 30,000 people per month from the four nations for two years and offer the ability to work legally, as long as they come legally, have eligible sponsors and pass vetting and background checks. Border crossings by migrants from those four nations have risen most sharply, with no easy way to quickly return them to their home countries.
“This new process is orderly,” Biden said. “It’s safe and humane, and it works.”
The move, while not unexpected, drew swift criticism from asylum and immigration advocates, who have had a rocky relationship with the president.
“President Biden correctly recognized today that seeking asylum is a legal right and spoke sympathetically about people fleeing persecution," said Jonathan Blazer, the American Civil Liberties Union’s director of border strategies. “But the plan he announced further ties his administration to the poisonous anti-immigrant policies of the Trump era instead of restoring fair access to asylum protections.”
Even with the health law restrictions in place, the president has seen the numbers of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border rise dramatically during his two years in office; there were more than 2.38 million stops during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the first time the number topped 2 million. The administration has struggled to clamp down on crossings, reluctant to take hard-line measures that would resemble those of the Trump administration.
That’s resulted in relentless criticism from Republicans who say the Democratic president is ineffective on border security, and the newly minted Republican House majority has promised congressional investigations on the matter.
The new policy could result in 360,000 people from these four nations lawfully entering the U.S. in a year, a huge number. But far more people from those countries have been attempting to cross into the U.S. on foot, by boat or swimming; migrants from those four countries were stopped 82,286 times in November alone.
Enyer Valbuena, a Venezuelan who was living in Tijuana, Mexico, after crossing the border illegally, said Thursday’s announcement came as no surprise but a blow nonetheless.
“This was coming. It’s getting more difficult all the time,” he said by text message.
Some Venezuelans waiting on Mexico’s border with the U.S. have been talking among themselves if Canada is an option, Valbuena said. He had been waiting for the outcome of the pandemic-related asylum ban before trying to enter the U.S. again and is seeking asylum in Mexico, which offers a much better future than Venezuela.
“If it becomes more difficult (to reach the U.S.), the best path is to get papers in Mexico,” said Valbuena, who currently works at a Tijuana factory.
Mexico has agreed to accept up to 30,000 migrants each month from the four countries who attempt to walk or swim across the U.S.-Mexico border and are turned back. Normally, these migrants would be returned to their country of origin, but the U.S. can not easily send back people from those four countries for a variety of reasons that include relations with the governments there.
Anyone coming to the U.S. is allowed to claim asylum, regardless of how they crossed the border, and migrants seeking a better life in the U.S. often pay smugglers the equivalent of thousands of dollars to deliver them across the dangerous Darien Gap.
But the requirements for granting asylum are narrow, and only about 30% of applications are granted. That has created a system in which migrants try to cross between ports of entry and are allowed into the U.S. to wait out their cases. But there is a 2 million-case immigration court backlog, so cases often are not heard for years.
The only lasting way to change the system is through Congress, but a bipartisan congressional effort on new immigration laws failed shortly before Republicans took the House majority.
“The actions we’re announcing will make things better, but will not fix the border problem completely," Biden said, in pressing lawmakers to act.
Under then-President Donald Trump, the U.S. required asylum seekers to wait across the border in Mexico. But clogs in the immigration system created long delays, leading to fetid, dangerous camps over the border where migrants were forced to wait. That system was ended under Biden, and the migrants who are returned to Mexico under the new rules will not be eligible for asylum.
Biden will also triple the number of refugees accepted to the U.S. from the Western Hemisphere, to 20,000 from Latin America and Caribbean, over the next two years. Refugees and asylum-seekers have to meet the same criteria to be allowed into the country, but they arrive through different means.
Border officials are also creating an online appointment portal to help reduce wait times at U.S. ports of entry for those coming legally. It will allow people to set up an appointment to come and ask to be allowed into the country.
At the U.S.-Mexico border, migrants have been denied a chance to seek asylum 2.5 million times since March 2020 under the Title 42 restrictions, introduced as an emergency health measure by Trump to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But there always has been criticism that the restrictions were used as a pretext by the Republican to seal off the border.
Biden moved to end the Title 42 restrictions, and Republicans sued to keep them. The U.S. Supreme Court has kept the rules in place for now. White House officials say they still believe the restrictions should end, but they maintain they can continue to turn away migrants under immigration law.
The four nationalities that Biden addressed Thursday now make up the majority of those crossing the border illegally. Cubans, who are leaving the island nation in their largest numbers in six decades, were stopped 34,675 times at the U.S. border with Mexico in November, up 21% from October. Nicaraguans, a large reason why El Paso has become the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, were stopped 34,209 times in November, up 65% from October.
But Venezuelans were seen far less at the border after Mexico agreed on Oct. 12 to begin accepting those expelled from the United States. They were stopped 7,931 times, down 64% from October.
Venezuelans have said the changes have been difficult, particularly with finding a sponsor who has the financial resources to demonstrate the ability to support them. And even if they find a sponsor, sometimes they delay their arrival because they don’t have the economic resources to pay for the flight to the U.S. For some, the Venezuelan passport that they need has expired, and they cannot afford to pay for the renewal.
___
Spagat reported from San Diego. Associated Press writers Rebecca Santana in Washington and Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Biden toughens border, offers legal path for 30,000 a month
By COLLEEN LONG, ZEKE MILLER and ELLIOT SPAGAT
2 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Thursday the U.S. would immediately begin turning away Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans who cross the border from Mexico illegally, his boldest move yet to confront the arrivals of migrants that have spiraled since he took office two years ago.
The new rules expand on an existing effort to stop Venezuelans attempting to enter the U.S., which began in October and led to a dramatic drop in Venezuelans coming to the southern border. Together, they represent a major change to immigration rules that will stand even if the Supreme Court ends a Trump-era public health law that allows U.S. authorities to turn away asylum-seekers.
“Do not, do not just show up at the border,” Biden said as he announced the changes, even as he acknowledged the hardships that lead many families to make the dangerous journey north.
“Stay where you are and apply legally from there,” he advised.
Biden made the announcement just days before a planned visit to El Paso, Texas, on Sunday for his first trip to the southern border as president. From there, he will travel on to Mexico City to meet with North American leaders on Monday and Tuesday.
Instead, the U.S. will accept 30,000 people per month from the four nations for two years and offer the ability to work legally, as long as they come legally, have eligible sponsors and pass vetting and background checks. Border crossings by migrants from those four nations have risen most sharply, with no easy way to quickly return them to their home countries.
“This new process is orderly,” Biden said. “It’s safe and humane, and it works.”
The move, while not unexpected, drew swift criticism from asylum and immigration advocates, who have had a rocky relationship with the president.
“President Biden correctly recognized today that seeking asylum is a legal right and spoke sympathetically about people fleeing persecution," said Jonathan Blazer, the American Civil Liberties Union’s director of border strategies. “But the plan he announced further ties his administration to the poisonous anti-immigrant policies of the Trump era instead of restoring fair access to asylum protections.”
Even with the health law restrictions in place, the president has seen the numbers of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border rise dramatically during his two years in office; there were more than 2.38 million stops during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the first time the number topped 2 million. The administration has struggled to clamp down on crossings, reluctant to take hard-line measures that would resemble those of the Trump administration.
That’s resulted in relentless criticism from Republicans who say the Democratic president is ineffective on border security, and the newly minted Republican House majority has promised congressional investigations on the matter.
The new policy could result in 360,000 people from these four nations lawfully entering the U.S. in a year, a huge number. But far more people from those countries have been attempting to cross into the U.S. on foot, by boat or swimming; migrants from those four countries were stopped 82,286 times in November alone.
Enyer Valbuena, a Venezuelan who was living in Tijuana, Mexico, after crossing the border illegally, said Thursday’s announcement came as no surprise but a blow nonetheless.
“This was coming. It’s getting more difficult all the time,” he said by text message.
Some Venezuelans waiting on Mexico’s border with the U.S. have been talking among themselves if Canada is an option, Valbuena said. He had been waiting for the outcome of the pandemic-related asylum ban before trying to enter the U.S. again and is seeking asylum in Mexico, which offers a much better future than Venezuela.
“If it becomes more difficult (to reach the U.S.), the best path is to get papers in Mexico,” said Valbuena, who currently works at a Tijuana factory.
Mexico has agreed to accept up to 30,000 migrants each month from the four countries who attempt to walk or swim across the U.S.-Mexico border and are turned back. Normally, these migrants would be returned to their country of origin, but the U.S. can not easily send back people from those four countries for a variety of reasons that include relations with the governments there.
Anyone coming to the U.S. is allowed to claim asylum, regardless of how they crossed the border, and migrants seeking a better life in the U.S. often pay smugglers the equivalent of thousands of dollars to deliver them across the dangerous Darien Gap.
But the requirements for granting asylum are narrow, and only about 30% of applications are granted. That has created a system in which migrants try to cross between ports of entry and are allowed into the U.S. to wait out their cases. But there is a 2 million-case immigration court backlog, so cases often are not heard for years.
The only lasting way to change the system is through Congress, but a bipartisan congressional effort on new immigration laws failed shortly before Republicans took the House majority.
“The actions we’re announcing will make things better, but will not fix the border problem completely," Biden said, in pressing lawmakers to act.
Under then-President Donald Trump, the U.S. required asylum seekers to wait across the border in Mexico. But clogs in the immigration system created long delays, leading to fetid, dangerous camps over the border where migrants were forced to wait. That system was ended under Biden, and the migrants who are returned to Mexico under the new rules will not be eligible for asylum.
Biden will also triple the number of refugees accepted to the U.S. from the Western Hemisphere, to 20,000 from Latin America and Caribbean, over the next two years. Refugees and asylum-seekers have to meet the same criteria to be allowed into the country, but they arrive through different means.
Border officials are also creating an online appointment portal to help reduce wait times at U.S. ports of entry for those coming legally. It will allow people to set up an appointment to come and ask to be allowed into the country.
At the U.S.-Mexico border, migrants have been denied a chance to seek asylum 2.5 million times since March 2020 under the Title 42 restrictions, introduced as an emergency health measure by Trump to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But there always has been criticism that the restrictions were used as a pretext by the Republican to seal off the border.
Biden moved to end the Title 42 restrictions, and Republicans sued to keep them. The U.S. Supreme Court has kept the rules in place for now. White House officials say they still believe the restrictions should end, but they maintain they can continue to turn away migrants under immigration law.
The four nationalities that Biden addressed Thursday now make up the majority of those crossing the border illegally. Cubans, who are leaving the island nation in their largest numbers in six decades, were stopped 34,675 times at the U.S. border with Mexico in November, up 21% from October. Nicaraguans, a large reason why El Paso has become the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, were stopped 34,209 times in November, up 65% from October.
But Venezuelans were seen far less at the border after Mexico agreed on Oct. 12 to begin accepting those expelled from the United States. They were stopped 7,931 times, down 64% from October.
Venezuelans have said the changes have been difficult, particularly with finding a sponsor who has the financial resources to demonstrate the ability to support them. And even if they find a sponsor, sometimes they delay their arrival because they don’t have the economic resources to pay for the flight to the U.S. For some, the Venezuelan passport that they need has expired, and they cannot afford to pay for the renewal.
___
Spagat reported from San Diego. Associated Press writers Rebecca Santana in Washington and Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.
So now that we have agreed to let people in let's see if the borders get even more inundated in knowing that they actually have a chance to get in.
They agreed to let in 360,000 a year for 2 years. That is 720,000 for those 2 years. They still have a 2,000,000 backlog?
Opinion | Biden just outmaneuvered MAGA Republicans — and they barely noticed Opinion by Greg Sargent January 17, 2023 at 15:33 ET If President Biden rolls out a major new pro-immigrant policy, and MAGA Republicans don’t make any noise about it, did the announcement happen at all? Why, yes, it did. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas unveiled an initiative on Friday that would extend more protection against deportation to undocumented immigrants who report labor rights violations by employers. This is a big move by the administration, one long sought by immigration advocates. Biden’s immigration record is decidedly mixed, but this would address a serious problem: Undocumented migrant workers often fear reporting workplace violations — ones they were victims of or just witnessed — because it could lead to their deportation. Now they will have improved access to a legal process that can defer their deportations for two years and potentially extend them work permits. The hope: To encourage them not just to report unsafe or exploitative working conditions, but also to cooperate with ongoing Labor Department investigations, improving working standards for all workers. So far, this policy has sparked relatively little outrage among MAGA Republicans and right-wing media. Yet it has hallmarks that typically anger the right. It would allow some migrants here unlawfully to remain in the U.S. interior, based on the use of prosecutorial discretion to defer deportations, something the right has long raged against. What explains the quiet response? It might be that this change creates an awkward political situation for the anti-immigrant right, one that says a good deal about its ideology and its limitations. Here’s why: This policy attempts to align the interests of undocumented workers with those of native-born workers. For some on the right, casting those interests as irrevocably in conflict has been essential to their project. This zero-sum agitprop packages the nativist impulse to drastically limit immigration as all about protecting the American worker. But this new move undermines that rhetoric. In describing the shift, Mayorkas took pains to note that it will facilitate holding “exploitative employers” accountable for taking advantage of vulnerable workers who are in the U.S. lawfully. Mayorkas added: “Employers who play by the rules are disadvantaged by those who don’t.” In other words, allowing undocumented migrants to speak out about exploitative labor violations without fear of retribution helps aboveboard employers and U.S. workers, too. Chris Newman, general counsel of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, has long argued this would help resolve perceived conflicts between migrants and U.S. workers. “It removes the pernicious incentive for predatory employers to hire undocumented immigrants with the intent to abuse them,” Newman told me. “All workers, whether documented or undocumented, have an interest in being compensated, in not being abused, in being able to blow the whistle,” immigration lawyer David Leopold added. When the undocumented are exploited, Leopold said, “that brings down the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers as well.” Republicans might yet strongly oppose this policy. They might argue it’s an abuse of executive power, or that it will harm mom-and-pop small-business owners. This is how Republicans attack Biden’s effort to expand IRS crackdowns on wealthy tax cheats, as The Post’s Catherine Rampell details: By pretending it’s about protecting small businesses.
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Cuban migrants flow into Florida Keys, overwhelm officials
By CODY JACKSON and TERRY SPENCER
Today
MARATHON, Fla. (AP) — More than 500 Cuban immigrants have come ashore in the Florida Keys since the weekend, the latest in a large and increasing number who are fleeing the communist island and stretching thin U.S. border agencies both on land and at sea.
It is a dangerous 100-mile (160-kilometer) trip in often rickety boats — unknown thousands having perished over the years — but more Cubans are taking the risk amid deepening and compounding political and economic crises at home. A smaller number of Haitians are also fleeing their country’s economic and political woes and arriving by boat in Florida.
The Coast Guard tries to interdict Cuban migrants at sea and return them. Since the U.S. government’s new fiscal year began Oct. 1, about 4,200 have been stopped at sea — or about 43 a day. That was up from 17 per day in the previous fiscal year and just two per day during the 2020-21 fiscal year.
But an unknown number have made it to land and will likely get to stay.
“I would prefer to die to reach my dream and help my family. The situation in Cuba is not very good,” Jeiler del Toro Diaz told The Miami Herald shortly after coming ashore Tuesday in Key Largo.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said it would be issuing a statement Wednesday, but had not yet done so.
Dry Tortugas National Park, a group of seven islands 70 miles (110 kilometers) west of Key West, remained closed to visitors Wednesday as the U.S. evacuated migrants who came ashore there earlier in the week. Normally, about 255 tourists a day arrive by boat and seaplane to tour the islands and Fort Jefferson, which was built 160 years ago. Officials did not know when it would reopen.
In Marathon, some 45 miles (72 kilometers) northeast of Key West, about two dozen migrants were being held in a fenced-in area outside a Customs and Border Protection station where tents had been erected to provide shade. When Associated Press journalists tried to speak with the migrants through the fence, Border Patrol employees told them to leave.
Ramón Raul Sanchez with the Cuban-American group Movimiento Democracia went to the Keys to check on the situation. He told the AP that he met a group of 22 Cubans who had just arrived. They were standing along the main road, waiting for U.S. authorities to pick them up. Sanchez and Keys officials said the Biden administration needs a more coordinated response.
“There is a migration and humanitarian crisis, and it is necessary for the president to respond by helping local authorities,” Sanchez said.
Cubans are willing to take the risk because those who make it to U.S. soil almost always get to stay, even if their legal status is murky. They also arrive by land, flying to Nicaragua, then traveling north through Honduras and Guatemala into Mexico. In the 2021-22 fiscal year, 220,000 Cubans were stopped at the U.S.-Mexican border, almost six times as many as the previous year.
Callan Garcia, a Florida immigration attorney, said most Cubans who reach U.S. soil tell Border Patrol agents they can't find adequate work at home. They are then flagged “expedited for removal" as having entered the country illegally. But that does not mean the actually will be removed quickly — or at all.
Because the U.S. and Cuba do not have formal diplomatic relations, the American government has no way to repatriate them. Cubans are released but given an order that requires them to contact federal immigration authorities periodically to confirm their address and status. They are allowed to get work permits, driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers, but cannot apply for permanent residency or citizenship.
Garcia said that can last for the rest of their lives; some Cubans who came in the 1980 Mariel boatlift still are designated “expedited for removal."
“They're just sort of here with a floating order for removal that can't be executed,” Garcia said.
A small percentage of Cuban immigrants tell Border Patrol agents they are fleeing political persecution and are “paroled," Garcia said. Under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, they are released until they can appear before an immigration judge to make their case. If approved, they can receive permanent residency and later apply for citizenship.
On the other hand, Haitian immigrants almost always get sent back, even though political persecution and violence is rife there, along with severe economic hardship.
“That inconsistency has something that immigrant rights advocates have always pointed to,” Garcia said.
___
Spencer reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. AP reporter Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.
Off course Cubans get here by boat way harder then walking 2000miles and they vote Republican!
Migrants seeking US sponsors find questionable offers online
By ANITA SNOW
Today
Pedro Yudel Bruzon was looking for someone in the U.S. to support his effort to seek asylum when he landed on a Facebook page filled with posts demanding up to $10,000 for a financial sponsor.
It's part of an underground market that's emerged since the Biden administration announced it would accept 30,000 immigrants each month arriving by air from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti. Applicants for the humanitarian parole program need someone in the U.S., often a friend or relative, to promise to provide financial support for at least two years.
Bruzon, who lives in Cuba, doesn't know anyone who can do that, so he searched online. But he also doesn't have the money to pay for a sponsor and isn't sure the offers — or those making them — are real. He worries about being exploited or falling prey to a scam.
“They call it humanitarian parole, but it has nothing to do with being humanitarian,” said Bruzon, who said he struggles to feed himself and his mother with what he makes as a 33-year-old Havana security guard. “Everyone wants money, even people in the same family.”
It’s unclear how many people in the United States may have charged migrants to sponsor them, but Facebook groups with names like “Sponsors U.S.” carry dozens of posts offering and seeking financial supporters.
Several immigration attorneys said they could find no specific law prohibiting people from charging money to sponsor beneficiaries.
“As long as everything is accurate on the form and there are no fraudulent statements it may be legal,” said lawyer Taylor Levy, who long worked along the border around El Paso, Texas. “But what worries me are the risks in terms of being trafficked and exploited. If lying is involved, it could be fraud.”
Also, she noted, it “seems counterintuitive” to pay someone to promise to provide financial support.
Attorney Leon Fresco, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, said charging to be a sponsor is a “gray area” and the U.S. should send a forceful message against the practice.
Kennji Kizuka, an attorney and director of asylum policy for the International Rescue Committee, which resettles newcomers in the United States, said this type of thing happens with every new U.S. program benefitting migrants.
“It looks like some are just going to take people’s money and the people are going to get nothing in return,” Kizuka said.
One common scheme with immigration programs is known as notario fraud and involves people who call themselves “notarios públicos” charging large sums. In Latin America, the term refers to attorneys with special credentials, leading lead migrants to believe they are lawyers who can provide legal advice. In the U.S., notaries public are merely empowered to witness the signing of legal documents and issue oaths.
In another scheme, someone poses as a U.S. official asking for money. The U.S. government notes: “We do not accept Western Union, MoneyGram, PayPal, or gift cards as payment for immigration fees.”
“Fulfilling our humanitarian mission while upholding the integrity of the immigration system is a top priority for USCIS,” the agency said in response to questions about the potential for exploitation. It says the agency “carefully vets every prospective supporter through a series of fraud- and security-based screening measures.”
“Additionally, USCIS thoroughly reviews each reported case of fraud or misconduct and may refer those cases to federal law enforcement for additional investigation,” the statement said.
The agency did not address whether any application has been rejected because of concerns that potential sponsors might be requesting money.
The Department of Homeland Security says 1,700 humanitarian parole applications were accepted as of Jan. 25 from Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans, plus an undisclosed number of Venezuelans. A Texas-led lawsuit seeks to stop the program, which could allow 360,000 people a year to enter the U.S. legally.
One Facebook post advertising paid sponsorships led to a person who identified himself as an American citizen living in Pensacola, Florida. Told he was communicating with a journalist, the person refused to talk on the phone and would only text.
The person told The Associated Press he had sponsored a Cuban uncle and aunt for $10,000 each. He refused to provide contact information for those relatives, then stopped responding to questions.
Another would-be sponsor said via Facebook messenger that they charge $2,000 per person, which includes a sponsorship fee, document processing and an airline ticket. Requests for more information were answered with a phone number from the Dominican Republic that rang unanswered.
A man who posted seeking a sponsor told the AP that he was disturbed by some offers.
“It’s very easy to trick a desperate person and there are an abundance of them here,” the man, who identified himself as Pedro Manuel Carmenate, of Havana, said. “You just have to tell the people what they want to hear.”
Of course, not all sponsors charge a fee. A new initiative called Welcome.US aims to match Americans to migrants without supporters. Also, nonprofit organizations are trying to spread accurate information about the program.
Sarah Ivory, executive director of the nonprofit USAHello that provides online information in multiple languages, said the proliferation of offers for paid sponsorship is “deeply troubling and frustratingly predictable,” reflected in hundreds of queries to the group.
“Many report that they barely have the money to feed themselves, much less pay to get a passport or arrange a sponsor,” Ivory said.
Such desperation is reflected on social media.
“I’m looking for a sponsor for two people please, my husband is in a wheelchair,” reads a post from someone who says she lives in Havana. “I will give my house with everything inside and I’ll pay $4,000 for each” person sponsored.
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OpinionWhat a family trunk and a sea of cast-off backpacks say about America
On a reporting trip to the U.S. border with Mexico some years ago, I was taken by an immigration expert to an arroyo on the outskirts of Tucson. The dry gully was screened by desert brush from a suburban development half a mile away; it was the end of a brutal passage for hikers in search of a new life.
My guide took me there to see an enormous carpet of discarded packs so thick you could walk for the length of several football fields while stepping only on backpacks: old canvas ones, cheap nylon ones, some marked with familiar swooshes and others blazoned with Disney princesses. Battered backpacks and backpacks almost pristine, as if delivered fresh from the nearest Walmart.
I stood amid that sea of frantic goodbyes. Each pack was the residue of a person’s home, a person’s family, a person’s memories. The owners of that poignant detritus had carried what they could of their pasts across the thirsty desert and, with their destination in sight, dropped everything to vanish into America.
Half-forgotten, those backpacks welled up in my memory the other day, when a heavy, old trunk with wrought-iron handles came out of a delivery van and into my front hallway. A stranger had telephoned a few weeks before. When my wife answered, the caller said he was from St. Louis. He had come across this old trunk for sale, he said. A name was painted on the side — “B. H. von Drehle” — in confident (yet clearly amateur) script. The caller wondered if this artifact had some connection to me.
I had no idea how to answer. Some families cherish their lineage from generation to generation. Other Americans were ripped from their roots before arriving on this continent as enslaved people or refugees. My family’s past was not stolen. It was freely surrendered, like the pasts of countless other immigrant families from Germany.
According to the Library of Congress, in 1894 there were about 800 German-language newspapers published in the United States. Around that time, my grandfather was born. As a boy, he spoke German at home and in church. But in the space of some 30 years, the United States went to war twice against Germany, and that was the end of German identity. My father spoke not a word of German. His children could hardly find Germany on a map. No “Kiss Me, I’m German” T-shirts for us. From Lou Gehrig to Doris Day, millions shucked off their immigrant ancestry and gave everything to America, their beer and hot dogs, their Christmas trees and Santa Claus, their pretzels and kindergarten.
We bought the trunk, and now the oaken evidence was in my front hall — this eichensarg, as its original owner might have said. This heavy, empty coffin bearing a whiff of the past my family had forgotten.
Genealogical research that once required years can be done in minutes today. Thank the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In hopes of saving as many past souls as possible, the Mormons have created a dazzling database, available through the genealogy database, available through the genealogy site Ancestry.com. It whisked me to the B.H. von Drehles in my faraway family tree.
One was a farmer born in 1800 in the countryside near Hanover. The other was the farmer’s oldest son and namesake: Bernhard Heinrich von Drehle. With his younger brother (my grandfather’s grandfather), B.H. packed what the two of them could carry into this trunk and left home forever in 1854 — one of the heaviest years of German immigration to America.
They sailed into a storm of anti-immigrant backlash. The “Know-Nothings,” as opponents of the major political party dubbed its members, wanted to keep America for Americans. The brothers nevertheless landed in New Orleans, transferred to a paddle-wheel steamer and rode the Mississippi River to St. Louis. They hoped to be Americans, too.
The difference between my trunk and those backpacks in the Arizona sand is not necessarily a difference between welcome and hostility. Welcome and hostility have always been mixed. The difference is not entirely a contrast between memory and forgetting. Pasts are remembered or erased in American history for many reasons.
The difference, it seems to me after staring a long while at the trunk, is that my forebears were able to carry this stout container openly into their futures. Five generations later, it surfaces like Queequeg’s casket. That will never happen for those backpacks in the desert.
I don’t know every story of those from the Global South diaspora who cannot come to the United States with even a bagful of their memories. I don’t even know my own family story. But I know this trunk and those backpacks are expressions of the same truth, the same hope, the same dreams. All of us who come from elsewhere, with memories or without them, owe it to the past to share the future with those who travel behind us.
What a family trunk and a sea of cast-off backpacks say about AmericaOn a reporting trip to the U.S. border with Mexico some years ago, I was taken by an immigration expert to an arroyo on the outskirts of Tucson. The dry gully was screened by desert brush from a suburban development half a mile away; it was the end of a brutal passage for hikers in search of a new life.
My guide took me there to see an enormous carpet of discarded packs so thick you could walk for the length of several football fields while stepping only on backpacks: old canvas ones, cheap nylon ones, some marked with familiar swooshes and others blazoned with Disney princesses. Battered backpacks and backpacks almost pristine, as if delivered fresh from the nearest Walmart.
I stood amid that sea of frantic goodbyes. Each pack was the residue of a person’s home, a person’s family, a person’s memories. The owners of that poignant detritus had carried what they could of their pasts across the thirsty desert and, with their destination in sight, dropped everything to vanish into America.
Half-forgotten, those backpacks welled up in my memory the other day, when a heavy, old trunk with wrought-iron handles came out of a delivery van and into my front hallway. A stranger had telephoned a few weeks before. When my wife answered, the caller said he was from St. Louis. He had come across this old trunk for sale, he said. A name was painted on the side — “B. H. von Drehle” — in confident (yet clearly amateur) script. The caller wondered if this artifact had some connection to me.
I had no idea how to answer. Some families cherish their lineage from generation to generation. Other Americans were ripped from their roots before arriving on this continent as enslaved people or refugees. My family’s past was not stolen. It was freely surrendered, like the pasts of countless other immigrant families from Germany.
According to the Library of Congress, in 1894 there were about 800 German-language newspapers published in the United States. Around that time, my grandfather was born. As a boy, he spoke German at home and in church. But in the space of some 30 years, the United States went to war twice against Germany, and that was the end of German identity. My father spoke not a word of German. His children could hardly find Germany on a map. No “Kiss Me, I’m German” T-shirts for us. From Lou Gehrig to Doris Day, millions shucked off their immigrant ancestry and gave everything to America, their beer and hot dogs, their Christmas trees and Santa Claus, their pretzels and kindergarten.
We bought the trunk, and now the oaken evidence was in my front hall — this eichensarg, as its original owner might have said. This heavy, empty coffin bearing a whiff of the past my family had forgotten.
Genealogical research that once required years can be done in minutes today. Thank the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In hopes of saving as many past souls as possible, the Mormons have created a dazzling database, available through the genealogy database, available through the genealogy site Ancestry.com. It whisked me to the B.H. von Drehles in my faraway family tree.
One was a farmer born in 1800 in the countryside near Hanover. The other was the farmer’s oldest son and namesake: Bernhard Heinrich von Drehle. With his younger brother (my grandfather’s grandfather), B.H. packed what the two of them could carry into this trunk and left home forever in 1854 — one of the heaviest years of German immigration to America.
They sailed into a storm of anti-immigrant backlash. The “Know-Nothings,” as opponents of the major political party dubbed its members, wanted to keep America for Americans. The brothers nevertheless landed in New Orleans, transferred to a paddle-wheel steamer and rode the Mississippi River to St. Louis. They hoped to be Americans, too.
The difference between my trunk and those backpacks in the Arizona sand is not necessarily a difference between welcome and hostility. Welcome and hostility have always been mixed. The difference is not entirely a contrast between memory and forgetting. Pasts are remembered or erased in American history for many reasons.
The difference, it seems to me after staring a long while at the trunk, is that my forebears were able to carry this stout container openly into their futures. Five generations later, it surfaces like Queequeg’s casket. That will never happen for those backpacks in the desert.
I don’t know every story of those from the Global South diaspora who cannot come to the United States with even a bagful of their memories. I don’t even know my own family story. But I know this trunk and those backpacks are expressions of the same truth, the same hope, the same dreams. All of us who come from elsewhere, with memories or without them, owe it to the past to share the future with those who travel behind us.
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Maine to petition federal government to let asylum seekers work
PORTLAND
Yesterday
Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signed a bill directing Maine's labor commissioner to petition the federal government for a waiver allowing asylum seekers to work while awaiting final determinations on their claims.
Her signature Thursday comes as the state grapples with the arrival of more than 1,000 asylum seekers, mostly from African nations, since the start of the new year.
In Portland, all shelters including an emergency one in a basketball arena are at capacity.
Letting asylum seekers go to work sooner is “a move that would benefit Maine employers in need of workers, that would reduce strain on state and municipal budgets, and that would allow asylum seekers to put their talents and skills to use, just as they want to do,” Scott Ogden, a Mills spokesman, said Friday via email.
The bill, sponsored by Republican Sen. Eric Brakey and co-sponsored by Democratic House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, may not have any practical effect since it's contrary to federal policy, which lets asylum seekers remain in the country but doesn't let them work until they are granted asylum.
But it sends a message at a time when resources are spread thin for providing food and shelter to asylum seekers who want to contribute but are unable to do so, supporters said.
The law takes effect 90 days after the special legislative session ends. After that, a letter will be drafted to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and to Citizenship and Immigration Services.
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Border appears calm after lifting of pandemic asylum restrictions
By VALERIE GONZALEZ, ELLIOT SPAGAT and GIOVANNA DELL'ORTO
Yesterday
EL PASO, Texas (AP) — The border between the U.S. and Mexico was relatively calm Friday, offering few signs of the chaos that was feared following a rush by worried migrants to enter the U.S. before the end of pandemic-related immigration restrictions.
Less than 24 hours after the rules known as Title 42 were lifted, migrants and government officials were still assessing the effect of the change and the new regulations adopted by President Joe Biden's administration to stabilize the region.
“We did not see any substantial increase in immigration this morning,” said Blas Nunez-Neto assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security. He said the agency did not have specific numbers.
Migrants along the border continued to wade into the Rio Grande to take their chances getting into the U.S. while defying officials shouting for them to turn back. Others hunched over cellphones trying to access an appointment-scheduling app that that is a centerpiece of the new system. Migrants with appointments walked across a bridge hoping for a new life. And lawsuits sought to stop some of the measures.
The Biden administration has said the revamped system is designed to crack down on illegal crossings and to offer a new legal pathway for migrants who often pay thousands of dollars to smugglers to get them to the border. On Friday, Biden commended Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for his country’s collaboration with the U.S. and Canada to establish migration hubs in Latin America where asylum seekers will be able to apply for refuge.
Migrants are now essentially barred from seeking asylum in the U.S. if they did not first apply online or seek protection in the countries they traveled through. Families allowed in as their immigration cases progress will face curfews and GPS monitoring.
Across the river from El Paso in Ciudad Juárez, many migrants watched their cellphones in hopes of getting a coveted appointment to seek entry. The application to register to enter the U.S. had changed, and some were explaining to others how to use it. Most were resigned to wait.
“I hope it’s a little better and that the appointments are streamlined a little more,” said Yeremy Depablos, 21, a Venezuelan traveling with seven cousins who has been waiting in the city for a month. Fearing deportation, Depablos did not want to cross illegally. “We have to do it the legal way.”
The legal pathways touted by the administration consist of a program that permits up to 30,000 people a month from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter if they apply online with a financial sponsor and enter through an airport.
About 100 processing centers are opening in Guatemala, Colombia and elsewhere for migrants to apply to go to the U.S., Spain or Canada. Up to 1,000 can enter daily through land crossings with Mexico if they snag an appointment on the app.
If it works, the system could fundamentally alter how migrants come to the southern border. But Biden, who is running for reelection, faces withering criticism from migrant advocates, who say he's abandoning more humanitarian methods, and from Republicans, who claim he's soft on border security.
At the Chaparral port of entry in Tijuana on Friday, a few migrants approached U.S. authorities after not being able to access the appointment app. One of them, a Salvadoran man named Jairo, said he was fleeing death threats back home.
“We are truly afraid,” said Jairo who was traveling with his partner and their 3-year-old son and declined to share his last name. “We can’t remain any longer in Mexico and we can’t go back to Guatemala or El Salvador. If the U.S. can’t take us, we hope they can direct us to another country that can.”
Farther east, small groups of Haitian migrants with appointments to request asylum crossed the Gateway International Bridge connecting Matamoros, Mexico, with Brownsville, Texas. They crossed with the assistance of a nongovernmental organization, passing the usual commuter traffic of students and workers lined up on the bridge's pedestrian path.
The Rev. Daniel Mora said most of the migrants took heed of flyers distributed this week by U.S. immigration authorities offering a “last chance” to submit to processing and left. El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said that 1,800 migrants turned themselves over to Customs and Border Protection on Thursday.
Melissa López, executive director for Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services at El Paso, said many migrants have been willing to follow the legal pathway created by the federal government, but there is also fear about deportation and possible criminal penalties for people who cross the border illegally.
Ruben Garcia, director of the Annunciation House shelter in El Paso and coordinator for a regional network on migrant shelters, said he fears that migrants passing through Mexico may be diverted by smugglers away from cities with humanitarian infrastructure toward remote, desolate stretches of the border. He said thousands of migrants are currently passing through two U.S. immigration processing centers in El Paso, amid uncertainty about ensuing deportations and monitored releases.
The lull in border crossings follows a recent surge of crossings by migrants in hopes of being allowed to stay in the United States before the Title 42 restrictions expired.
Title 42 had been in place since March 2020. It allowed border officials to quickly return asylum seekers back over the border on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The U.S. has declared the national emergency over, ending the restrictions.
While Title 42 prevented many from seeking asylum, it carried no legal consequences, encouraging repeat attempts. After Thursday, migrants face being barred from entering the U.S. for five years and possible criminal prosecution.
Border holding facilities were already far beyond capacity in the run-up to Title 42's expiration. Officials had orders to release migrants with a notice to report to an immigration office if overcrowding and other factors became critical.
But late Thursday, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump temporarily halted the administration’s plans to release people into the U.S. and set a court date on whether to extend the ruling. Customs and Border Protection said it would comply, but called it a “harmful ruling that will result in unsafe overcrowding.”
Other parts of the administration's immigration plan were also in legal peril.
Advocacy groups including the ACLU sued the administration on its new asylum rules minutes before they took effect. Their lawsuit alleges the administration policy is no different than one adopted by Trump, which was rejected by the same court.
The Biden administration says its rule is different, arguing that it’s not an outright ban but imposes a higher burden of proof to get asylum and that it pairs restrictions with other newly opened legal pathways.
ACLU National Political Director Maribel Hernández Rivera said many new required steps were unrealistic.
“Asylum is not something you schedule when you are fleeing for your life," she said.
___
Gonzalez reported from Brownsville, Texas, and Spagat from Tijuana, Mexico. Associated Press writers Colleen Long and Rebecca Santana in Washington; Christopher Sherman in Mexico City; Julie Watson and Suman Naishadham in Tijuana, Mexico; Gerardo Carrillo in Matamoros, Mexico; Maria Verza in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; Gisela Salomon in Miami; and Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico contributed to this report.
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Border appears calm after lifting of pandemic asylum restrictions
By VALERIE GONZALEZ, ELLIOT SPAGAT and GIOVANNA DELL'ORTO
Yesterday
EL PASO, Texas (AP) — The border between the U.S. and Mexico was relatively calm Friday, offering few signs of the chaos that was feared following a rush by worried migrants to enter the U.S. before the end of pandemic-related immigration restrictions.
Less than 24 hours after the rules known as Title 42 were lifted, migrants and government officials were still assessing the effect of the change and the new regulations adopted by President Joe Biden's administration to stabilize the region.
“We did not see any substantial increase in immigration this morning,” said Blas Nunez-Neto assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security. He said the agency did not have specific numbers.
Migrants along the border continued to wade into the Rio Grande to take their chances getting into the U.S. while defying officials shouting for them to turn back. Others hunched over cellphones trying to access an appointment-scheduling app that that is a centerpiece of the new system. Migrants with appointments walked across a bridge hoping for a new life. And lawsuits sought to stop some of the measures.
The Biden administration has said the revamped system is designed to crack down on illegal crossings and to offer a new legal pathway for migrants who often pay thousands of dollars to smugglers to get them to the border. On Friday, Biden commended Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for his country’s collaboration with the U.S. and Canada to establish migration hubs in Latin America where asylum seekers will be able to apply for refuge.
Migrants are now essentially barred from seeking asylum in the U.S. if they did not first apply online or seek protection in the countries they traveled through. Families allowed in as their immigration cases progress will face curfews and GPS monitoring.
Across the river from El Paso in Ciudad Juárez, many migrants watched their cellphones in hopes of getting a coveted appointment to seek entry. The application to register to enter the U.S. had changed, and some were explaining to others how to use it. Most were resigned to wait.
“I hope it’s a little better and that the appointments are streamlined a little more,” said Yeremy Depablos, 21, a Venezuelan traveling with seven cousins who has been waiting in the city for a month. Fearing deportation, Depablos did not want to cross illegally. “We have to do it the legal way.”
The legal pathways touted by the administration consist of a program that permits up to 30,000 people a month from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter if they apply online with a financial sponsor and enter through an airport.
About 100 processing centers are opening in Guatemala, Colombia and elsewhere for migrants to apply to go to the U.S., Spain or Canada. Up to 1,000 can enter daily through land crossings with Mexico if they snag an appointment on the app.
If it works, the system could fundamentally alter how migrants come to the southern border. But Biden, who is running for reelection, faces withering criticism from migrant advocates, who say he's abandoning more humanitarian methods, and from Republicans, who claim he's soft on border security.
At the Chaparral port of entry in Tijuana on Friday, a few migrants approached U.S. authorities after not being able to access the appointment app. One of them, a Salvadoran man named Jairo, said he was fleeing death threats back home.
“We are truly afraid,” said Jairo who was traveling with his partner and their 3-year-old son and declined to share his last name. “We can’t remain any longer in Mexico and we can’t go back to Guatemala or El Salvador. If the U.S. can’t take us, we hope they can direct us to another country that can.”
Farther east, small groups of Haitian migrants with appointments to request asylum crossed the Gateway International Bridge connecting Matamoros, Mexico, with Brownsville, Texas. They crossed with the assistance of a nongovernmental organization, passing the usual commuter traffic of students and workers lined up on the bridge's pedestrian path.
The Rev. Daniel Mora said most of the migrants took heed of flyers distributed this week by U.S. immigration authorities offering a “last chance” to submit to processing and left. El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said that 1,800 migrants turned themselves over to Customs and Border Protection on Thursday.
Melissa López, executive director for Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services at El Paso, said many migrants have been willing to follow the legal pathway created by the federal government, but there is also fear about deportation and possible criminal penalties for people who cross the border illegally.
Ruben Garcia, director of the Annunciation House shelter in El Paso and coordinator for a regional network on migrant shelters, said he fears that migrants passing through Mexico may be diverted by smugglers away from cities with humanitarian infrastructure toward remote, desolate stretches of the border. He said thousands of migrants are currently passing through two U.S. immigration processing centers in El Paso, amid uncertainty about ensuing deportations and monitored releases.
The lull in border crossings follows a recent surge of crossings by migrants in hopes of being allowed to stay in the United States before the Title 42 restrictions expired.
Title 42 had been in place since March 2020. It allowed border officials to quickly return asylum seekers back over the border on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The U.S. has declared the national emergency over, ending the restrictions.
While Title 42 prevented many from seeking asylum, it carried no legal consequences, encouraging repeat attempts. After Thursday, migrants face being barred from entering the U.S. for five years and possible criminal prosecution.
Border holding facilities were already far beyond capacity in the run-up to Title 42's expiration. Officials had orders to release migrants with a notice to report to an immigration office if overcrowding and other factors became critical.
But late Thursday, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump temporarily halted the administration’s plans to release people into the U.S. and set a court date on whether to extend the ruling. Customs and Border Protection said it would comply, but called it a “harmful ruling that will result in unsafe overcrowding.”
Other parts of the administration's immigration plan were also in legal peril.
Advocacy groups including the ACLU sued the administration on its new asylum rules minutes before they took effect. Their lawsuit alleges the administration policy is no different than one adopted by Trump, which was rejected by the same court.
The Biden administration says its rule is different, arguing that it’s not an outright ban but imposes a higher burden of proof to get asylum and that it pairs restrictions with other newly opened legal pathways.
ACLU National Political Director Maribel Hernández Rivera said many new required steps were unrealistic.
“Asylum is not something you schedule when you are fleeing for your life," she said.
___
Gonzalez reported from Brownsville, Texas, and Spagat from Tijuana, Mexico. Associated Press writers Colleen Long and Rebecca Santana in Washington; Christopher Sherman in Mexico City; Julie Watson and Suman Naishadham in Tijuana, Mexico; Gerardo Carrillo in Matamoros, Mexico; Maria Verza in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; Gisela Salomon in Miami; and Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico contributed to this report.
I don’t know why we’re joking about this and pretending it’s not a problem. Just because it didn’t look like a zombie hoard from TWD doesn’t mean it’s not a big problem.
“Migrant border crossings in fiscal year 2022 topped 2.76 million, breaking previous record”
I don’t know why we’re joking about this and pretending it’s not a problem. Just because it didn’t look like a zombie hoard from TWD doesn’t mean it’s not a big problem.
“Migrant border crossings in fiscal year 2022 topped 2.76 million, breaking previous record”
I don’t know why we’re joking about this and pretending it’s not a problem. Just because it didn’t look like a zombie hoard from TWD doesn’t mean it’s not a big problem.
“Migrant border crossings in fiscal year 2022 topped 2.76 million, breaking previous record”
Mace, I just want a logical answer. Restaurants around me are cutting their hours because no one wants to work in the food industry any longer. Old folks around me can’t find anyone to cut their grass for less than 50. Waste management had to purchase garbage trucks that can auto lift and empty the cans because no one wants to be a garbage man. You know where I’m going with this. We expect and ensure that our children are doing better than each generation before. So first, who do you think will start filling all these jobs? Farmers, laborers, etc. And second, what’s wrong with other mothers and fathers just like us wanting more for their children.
I’m on your side that something has to be done and so are these people you’re getting upset with. Everyone acts and thinks differently about everything going on. I don’t think anyone means to upset you.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
I don’t know why we’re joking about this and pretending it’s not a problem. Just because it didn’t look like a zombie hoard from TWD doesn’t mean it’s not a big problem.
“Migrant border crossings in fiscal year 2022 topped 2.76 million, breaking previous record”
Mace, I just want a logical answer. Restaurants around me are cutting their hours because no one wants to work in the food industry any longer. Old folks around me can’t find anyone to cut their grass for less than 50. Waste management had to purchase garbage trucks that can auto lift and empty the cans because no one wants to be a garbage man. You know where I’m going with this. We expect and ensure that our children are doing better than each generation before. So first, who do you think will start filling all these jobs? Farmers, laborers, etc. And second, what’s wrong with other mothers and fathers just like us wanting more for their children.
I’m on your side that something has to be done and so are these people you’re getting upset with. Everyone acts and thinks differently about everything going on. I don’t think anyone means to upset you.
I’m not sure who will fill them, but I don’t think allowing millions of illegal immigrants is the answer. Theres nothing wrong mothers wanting more for their kids. I feel for them and don’t blame them. I just don’t think that the process as it is is working or sustainable. Yet it’s being mocked if you think it’s a big deal.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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Trump, covid slowed down immigration. Now employers can’t find workers.
Alonzo Arteaga’s title is general manager of a small hotel in Topeka, Kan. But these days, he doubles as a housekeeper, making beds, vacuuming floors and laundering towels to fill an ever-worsening worker shortage.
Like businesses around the country, Senate Luxury Suites is struggling to keep going without critical employees. The hotel is down to three housekeepers, half of what it had before the pandemic, and Arteaga blames a years-long immigration slowdown, which he says has made an already tough situation worse.
“It’s been three years of trying absolutely everything,” said Arteaga, who has raised pay by about $3 an hour and offers discounted monthly rates to employees. “It feels like the workers really aren’t there.”
A shortfall of immigrants is worsening widespread labor shortages and hobbling the U.S. economy at a time when more than 10 million jobs remain unfilled, particularly in low-paying and physically demanding industries such as hospitality, agriculture, construction and health care.
While the slowdown in immigration began well before the pandemic, the covid crisis intensified the process as the Trump administration effectively halted the flow of foreign-born workers into the United States. Although legal immigration has rebounded somewhat since then, particularly in the last six months, major shortages remain, rippling through the economy at a time when the labor force is also missing workers from early retirements, ongoing health problems and caregiving challenges. Labor force shortages are also contributing to higher prices for some goods and services, as companies raise wages to compete for a smaller pool of workers and to keep existing staff.
Congress working to strike last-minute immigration deals
“Immigration is something almost everyone agrees needs to be fixed, but it’s become a political wedge issue,” said Tara Watson, an economics professor at Williams College and fellow at the Brookings Institution. “There have been huge bureaucratic delays since the Trump administration. And of course covid really put a wrench in the gears. But this is a long-term structural problem that has not been addressed.”
Even though immigration rates have picked up in recent months, Peri says it could be another four years before the country makes up for current shortfalls. Even then, it won’t be enough to catch up to the rapidly aging workforce that is projected to leave millions more positions unfilled.
Economists estimate that the lack of immigration is responsible for close to half of the workers missing from the labor force, a deficit Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell recently estimated to be about 3.5 million workers.
“There is no question: We need more immigration,” said Adam Ozimek, chief economist at Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan business organization. “Immigrants aren’t just workers, they are particularly flexible, mobile workers, who help address acute labor shortages wherever they emerge. And that’s particularly important in this constrained economy we’re facing right now.”
Visas for college students and highly skilled science and tech workers have bounced back relatively quickly, Peri said. But immigration rates for people without a college education have been slower to make up for lost ground.
“If someone doesn’t have much education and doesn’t have a close relative in the U.S., there is virtually no legal pathway for them to get a green card," said Watson of Williams College. “There is a pool of untapped talent out there.”
Trump took office, largely on an anti-immigrant platform. Although his administration didn’t make legislative changes, it slowed down visa processing through “a culture of extreme vetting and extreme delays” that was enough to deter immigration in all forms, especially among those without college educations, Peri said.
The number of new immigrants entering the country legally each year, which peaked in 2016, fell by 6 percent in 2017 and another 9 percent the following year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. But the pandemic dealt the biggest blow: New arrivals plunged 50 percent between 2019 and 2021.
“Covid caused two years of lost immigration,” Peri said. “Embassies and consulates that release visas were mostly shut down. The processing of green cards in the U.S. was mostly shut down. Even international travel was mostly gone.”
Many of those situations have since improved, but business owners say it hasn’t been enough to make up for years of lost workers.
Early in the pandemic, Mariama Lowe lost nearly three-quarters of the employees at her home health-care business in Alexandria, Va., to covid illnesses, career changes and early retirements. She’s since gone from 100 nurses and personal care aides — almost all of them immigrants — to 27.
“We’re in a very difficult position, because there is nobody to hire anymore,” Lowe said. “Tech companies can go recruit from anywhere; they have all of these avenues available to them. But a home health agency like me? I don’t have that opportunity. I just have to go with whoever’s here and whoever’s available. And right now, it’s not a lot.”
Beyond creating wider avenues for immigrants to enter the country, business owners, economists and policymakers say there also needs to be a focus on retaining foreign-born workers already in the United States. That includes “dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as young children; recently laid-off tech workers on H1-B visas who may have to leave the country if they don’t find new work within 60 days; and the adult children of highly educated legal immigrants awaiting permanent residency.
Continues
Immigration revisions would alleviate worker shortages, businesses say - The Washington Post
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Maybe the smaller cities are having trouble?
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Didn't Trump lose a few of his Mir a laga workers because of his policy?
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After Title 42 ends soon we are expected to receive an additional 1000 asylum seekers a day here.
This is a great comment. While the US has a long history of imposing restrictive and racist immigration policies (see: Chinese Exclusion Act), for much of the first half of the 20th century it was easier for people to come to the US work for a time, save money, and return home. Some did so seasonally, then we started punishing people for coming and going and restricting entry (unless you could prove you were a tourist or had a student/work/business owner visa) which in turn made people who came in through irregular means have to stay here or they could never come back. Reagan was a terrible politician, but his administration and congress collaborating on legalizing millions of undocumented people was a huge improvement (see IRCA of 1986). The fact that no other administration has been able to re-do this is an embarrassment. Both parties use the same dehumanizing rhetoric to refer to immigrants as a "illegals", "flood", "wave", "invasion", and their unwillingness to actually address the root causes (bad immigration policy, bad US foreign policy) they seem content to keep people vulnerable and easily exploitable as flexible labor.
MARATHON, Fla. (AP) — More than 500 Cuban immigrants have come ashore in the Florida Keys since the weekend, the latest in a large and increasing number who are fleeing the communist island and stretching thin U.S. border agencies both on land and at sea.
It is a dangerous 100-mile (160-kilometer) trip in often rickety boats — unknown thousands having perished over the years — but more Cubans are taking the risk amid deepening and compounding political and economic crises at home. A smaller number of Haitians are also fleeing their country’s economic and political woes and arriving by boat in Florida.
The Coast Guard tries to interdict Cuban migrants at sea and return them. Since the U.S. government’s new fiscal year began Oct. 1, about 4,200 have been stopped at sea — or about 43 a day. That was up from 17 per day in the previous fiscal year and just two per day during the 2020-21 fiscal year.
But an unknown number have made it to land and will likely get to stay.
“I would prefer to die to reach my dream and help my family. The situation in Cuba is not very good,” Jeiler del Toro Diaz told The Miami Herald shortly after coming ashore Tuesday in Key Largo.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said it would be issuing a statement Wednesday, but had not yet done so.
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Dry Tortugas National Park, a group of seven islands 70 miles (110 kilometers) west of Key West, remained closed to visitors Wednesday as the U.S. evacuated migrants who came ashore there earlier in the week. Normally, about 255 tourists a day arrive by boat and seaplane to tour the islands and Fort Jefferson, which was built 160 years ago. Officials did not know when it would reopen.
In Marathon, some 45 miles (72 kilometers) northeast of Key West, about two dozen migrants were being held in a fenced-in area outside a Customs and Border Protection station where tents had been erected to provide shade. When Associated Press journalists tried to speak with the migrants through the fence, Border Patrol employees told them to leave.
Ramón Raul Sanchez with the Cuban-American group Movimiento Democracia went to the Keys to check on the situation. He told the AP that he met a group of 22 Cubans who had just arrived. They were standing along the main road, waiting for U.S. authorities to pick them up. Sanchez and Keys officials said the Biden administration needs a more coordinated response.
“There is a migration and humanitarian crisis, and it is necessary for the president to respond by helping local authorities,” Sanchez said.
Cubans are willing to take the risk because those who make it to U.S. soil almost always get to stay, even if their legal status is murky. They also arrive by land, flying to Nicaragua, then traveling north through Honduras and Guatemala into Mexico. In the 2021-22 fiscal year, 220,000 Cubans were stopped at the U.S.-Mexican border, almost six times as many as the previous year.
Callan Garcia, a Florida immigration attorney, said most Cubans who reach U.S. soil tell Border Patrol agents they can't find adequate work at home. They are then flagged “expedited for removal" as having entered the country illegally. But that does not mean the actually will be removed quickly — or at all.
Because the U.S. and Cuba do not have formal diplomatic relations, the American government has no way to repatriate them. Cubans are released but given an order that requires them to contact federal immigration authorities periodically to confirm their address and status. They are allowed to get work permits, driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers, but cannot apply for permanent residency or citizenship.
Garcia said that can last for the rest of their lives; some Cubans who came in the 1980 Mariel boatlift still are designated “expedited for removal."
“They're just sort of here with a floating order for removal that can't be executed,” Garcia said.
A small percentage of Cuban immigrants tell Border Patrol agents they are fleeing political persecution and are “paroled," Garcia said. Under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, they are released until they can appear before an immigration judge to make their case. If approved, they can receive permanent residency and later apply for citizenship.
On the other hand, Haitian immigrants almost always get sent back, even though political persecution and violence is rife there, along with severe economic hardship.
“That inconsistency has something that immigrant rights advocates have always pointed to,” Garcia said.
___
Spencer reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. AP reporter Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Thursday the U.S. would immediately begin turning away Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans who cross the border from Mexico illegally, his boldest move yet to confront the arrivals of migrants that have spiraled since he took office two years ago.
The new rules expand on an existing effort to stop Venezuelans attempting to enter the U.S., which began in October and led to a dramatic drop in Venezuelans coming to the southern border. Together, they represent a major change to immigration rules that will stand even if the Supreme Court ends a Trump-era public health law that allows U.S. authorities to turn away asylum-seekers.
“Do not, do not just show up at the border,” Biden said as he announced the changes, even as he acknowledged the hardships that lead many families to make the dangerous journey north.
“Stay where you are and apply legally from there,” he advised.
Biden made the announcement just days before a planned visit to El Paso, Texas, on Sunday for his first trip to the southern border as president. From there, he will travel on to Mexico City to meet with North American leaders on Monday and Tuesday.
Homeland Security officials said they would begin denying asylum to those who circumvent legal pathways and do not first ask for asylum in the country they traveled through en route to the U.S.
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Instead, the U.S. will accept 30,000 people per month from the four nations for two years and offer the ability to work legally, as long as they come legally, have eligible sponsors and pass vetting and background checks. Border crossings by migrants from those four nations have risen most sharply, with no easy way to quickly return them to their home countries.
“This new process is orderly,” Biden said. “It’s safe and humane, and it works.”
The move, while not unexpected, drew swift criticism from asylum and immigration advocates, who have had a rocky relationship with the president.
“President Biden correctly recognized today that seeking asylum is a legal right and spoke sympathetically about people fleeing persecution," said Jonathan Blazer, the American Civil Liberties Union’s director of border strategies. “But the plan he announced further ties his administration to the poisonous anti-immigrant policies of the Trump era instead of restoring fair access to asylum protections.”
Even with the health law restrictions in place, the president has seen the numbers of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border rise dramatically during his two years in office; there were more than 2.38 million stops during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the first time the number topped 2 million. The administration has struggled to clamp down on crossings, reluctant to take hard-line measures that would resemble those of the Trump administration.
That’s resulted in relentless criticism from Republicans who say the Democratic president is ineffective on border security, and the newly minted Republican House majority has promised congressional investigations on the matter.
The new policy could result in 360,000 people from these four nations lawfully entering the U.S. in a year, a huge number. But far more people from those countries have been attempting to cross into the U.S. on foot, by boat or swimming; migrants from those four countries were stopped 82,286 times in November alone.
Enyer Valbuena, a Venezuelan who was living in Tijuana, Mexico, after crossing the border illegally, said Thursday’s announcement came as no surprise but a blow nonetheless.
“This was coming. It’s getting more difficult all the time,” he said by text message.
Some Venezuelans waiting on Mexico’s border with the U.S. have been talking among themselves if Canada is an option, Valbuena said. He had been waiting for the outcome of the pandemic-related asylum ban before trying to enter the U.S. again and is seeking asylum in Mexico, which offers a much better future than Venezuela.
“If it becomes more difficult (to reach the U.S.), the best path is to get papers in Mexico,” said Valbuena, who currently works at a Tijuana factory.
Mexico has agreed to accept up to 30,000 migrants each month from the four countries who attempt to walk or swim across the U.S.-Mexico border and are turned back. Normally, these migrants would be returned to their country of origin, but the U.S. can not easily send back people from those four countries for a variety of reasons that include relations with the governments there.
Anyone coming to the U.S. is allowed to claim asylum, regardless of how they crossed the border, and migrants seeking a better life in the U.S. often pay smugglers the equivalent of thousands of dollars to deliver them across the dangerous Darien Gap.
But the requirements for granting asylum are narrow, and only about 30% of applications are granted. That has created a system in which migrants try to cross between ports of entry and are allowed into the U.S. to wait out their cases. But there is a 2 million-case immigration court backlog, so cases often are not heard for years.
The only lasting way to change the system is through Congress, but a bipartisan congressional effort on new immigration laws failed shortly before Republicans took the House majority.
“The actions we’re announcing will make things better, but will not fix the border problem completely," Biden said, in pressing lawmakers to act.
Under then-President Donald Trump, the U.S. required asylum seekers to wait across the border in Mexico. But clogs in the immigration system created long delays, leading to fetid, dangerous camps over the border where migrants were forced to wait. That system was ended under Biden, and the migrants who are returned to Mexico under the new rules will not be eligible for asylum.
Biden will also triple the number of refugees accepted to the U.S. from the Western Hemisphere, to 20,000 from Latin America and Caribbean, over the next two years. Refugees and asylum-seekers have to meet the same criteria to be allowed into the country, but they arrive through different means.
Border officials are also creating an online appointment portal to help reduce wait times at U.S. ports of entry for those coming legally. It will allow people to set up an appointment to come and ask to be allowed into the country.
At the U.S.-Mexico border, migrants have been denied a chance to seek asylum 2.5 million times since March 2020 under the Title 42 restrictions, introduced as an emergency health measure by Trump to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But there always has been criticism that the restrictions were used as a pretext by the Republican to seal off the border.
Biden moved to end the Title 42 restrictions, and Republicans sued to keep them. The U.S. Supreme Court has kept the rules in place for now. White House officials say they still believe the restrictions should end, but they maintain they can continue to turn away migrants under immigration law.
The four nationalities that Biden addressed Thursday now make up the majority of those crossing the border illegally. Cubans, who are leaving the island nation in their largest numbers in six decades, were stopped 34,675 times at the U.S. border with Mexico in November, up 21% from October. Nicaraguans, a large reason why El Paso has become the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, were stopped 34,209 times in November, up 65% from October.
But Venezuelans were seen far less at the border after Mexico agreed on Oct. 12 to begin accepting those expelled from the United States. They were stopped 7,931 times, down 64% from October.
Venezuelans have said the changes have been difficult, particularly with finding a sponsor who has the financial resources to demonstrate the ability to support them. And even if they find a sponsor, sometimes they delay their arrival because they don’t have the economic resources to pay for the flight to the U.S. For some, the Venezuelan passport that they need has expired, and they cannot afford to pay for the renewal.
___
Spagat reported from San Diego. Associated Press writers Rebecca Santana in Washington and Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
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They agreed to let in 360,000 a year for 2 years. That is 720,000 for those 2 years. They still have a 2,000,000 backlog?
Opinion by Greg Sargent
January 17, 2023 at 15:33 ET
If President Biden rolls out a major new pro-immigrant policy, and MAGA Republicans don’t make any noise about it, did the announcement happen at all?
Why, yes, it did. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas unveiled an initiative on Friday that would extend more protection against deportation to undocumented immigrants who report labor rights violations by employers.
This is a big move by the administration, one long sought by immigration advocates. Biden’s immigration record is decidedly mixed, but this would address a serious problem: Undocumented migrant workers often fear reporting workplace violations — ones they were victims of or just witnessed — because it could lead to their deportation.
Now they will have improved access to a legal process that can defer their deportations for two years and potentially extend them work permits. The hope: To encourage them not just to report unsafe or exploitative working conditions, but also to cooperate with ongoing Labor Department investigations, improving working standards for all workers.
So far, this policy has sparked relatively little outrage among MAGA Republicans and right-wing media. Yet it has hallmarks that typically anger the right. It would allow some migrants here unlawfully to remain in the U.S. interior, based on the use of prosecutorial discretion to defer deportations, something the right has long raged against.
What explains the quiet response? It might be that this change creates an awkward political situation for the anti-immigrant right, one that says a good deal about its ideology and its limitations.
Here’s why: This policy attempts to align the interests of undocumented workers with those of native-born workers. For some on the right, casting those interests as irrevocably in conflict has been essential to their project. This zero-sum agitprop packages the nativist impulse to drastically limit immigration as all about protecting the American worker.
But this new move undermines that rhetoric. In describing the shift, Mayorkas took pains to note that it will facilitate holding “exploitative employers” accountable for taking advantage of vulnerable workers who are in the U.S. lawfully. Mayorkas added: “Employers who play by the rules are disadvantaged by those who don’t.”
In other words, allowing undocumented migrants to speak out about exploitative labor violations without fear of retribution helps aboveboard employers and U.S. workers, too.
Chris Newman, general counsel of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, has long argued this would help resolve perceived conflicts between migrants and U.S. workers. “It removes the pernicious incentive for predatory employers to hire undocumented immigrants with the intent to abuse them,” Newman told me.
“All workers, whether documented or undocumented, have an interest in being compensated, in not being abused, in being able to blow the whistle,” immigration lawyer David Leopold added. When the undocumented are exploited, Leopold said, “that brings down the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers as well.”
Republicans might yet strongly oppose this policy. They might argue it’s an abuse of executive power, or that it will harm mom-and-pop small-business owners. This is how Republicans attack Biden’s effort to expand IRS crackdowns on wealthy tax cheats, as The Post’s Catherine Rampell details: By pretending it’s about protecting small businesses.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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Pedro Yudel Bruzon was looking for someone in the U.S. to support his effort to seek asylum when he landed on a Facebook page filled with posts demanding up to $10,000 for a financial sponsor.
It's part of an underground market that's emerged since the Biden administration announced it would accept 30,000 immigrants each month arriving by air from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti. Applicants for the humanitarian parole program need someone in the U.S., often a friend or relative, to promise to provide financial support for at least two years.
Bruzon, who lives in Cuba, doesn't know anyone who can do that, so he searched online. But he also doesn't have the money to pay for a sponsor and isn't sure the offers — or those making them — are real. He worries about being exploited or falling prey to a scam.
“They call it humanitarian parole, but it has nothing to do with being humanitarian,” said Bruzon, who said he struggles to feed himself and his mother with what he makes as a 33-year-old Havana security guard. “Everyone wants money, even people in the same family.”
It’s unclear how many people in the United States may have charged migrants to sponsor them, but Facebook groups with names like “Sponsors U.S.” carry dozens of posts offering and seeking financial supporters.
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Several immigration attorneys said they could find no specific law prohibiting people from charging money to sponsor beneficiaries.
“As long as everything is accurate on the form and there are no fraudulent statements it may be legal,” said lawyer Taylor Levy, who long worked along the border around El Paso, Texas. “But what worries me are the risks in terms of being trafficked and exploited. If lying is involved, it could be fraud.”
Also, she noted, it “seems counterintuitive” to pay someone to promise to provide financial support.
Attorney Leon Fresco, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, said charging to be a sponsor is a “gray area” and the U.S. should send a forceful message against the practice.
Kennji Kizuka, an attorney and director of asylum policy for the International Rescue Committee, which resettles newcomers in the United States, said this type of thing happens with every new U.S. program benefitting migrants.
“It looks like some are just going to take people’s money and the people are going to get nothing in return,” Kizuka said.
Levy said such exploitation surrounding a similar U.S. program for Ukrainians prompted the government to publish an online guide about how to spot and protect against human-trafficking schemes.
One common scheme with immigration programs is known as notario fraud and involves people who call themselves “notarios públicos” charging large sums. In Latin America, the term refers to attorneys with special credentials, leading lead migrants to believe they are lawyers who can provide legal advice. In the U.S., notaries public are merely empowered to witness the signing of legal documents and issue oaths.
In another scheme, someone poses as a U.S. official asking for money. The U.S. government notes: “We do not accept Western Union, MoneyGram, PayPal, or gift cards as payment for immigration fees.”
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services warns about potential scams with the humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans that was rolled out last month and notes online that the program is free.
“Fulfilling our humanitarian mission while upholding the integrity of the immigration system is a top priority for USCIS,” the agency said in response to questions about the potential for exploitation. It says the agency “carefully vets every prospective supporter through a series of fraud- and security-based screening measures.”
“Additionally, USCIS thoroughly reviews each reported case of fraud or misconduct and may refer those cases to federal law enforcement for additional investigation,” the statement said.
The agency did not address whether any application has been rejected because of concerns that potential sponsors might be requesting money.
The Department of Homeland Security says 1,700 humanitarian parole applications were accepted as of Jan. 25 from Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans, plus an undisclosed number of Venezuelans. A Texas-led lawsuit seeks to stop the program, which could allow 360,000 people a year to enter the U.S. legally.
One Facebook post advertising paid sponsorships led to a person who identified himself as an American citizen living in Pensacola, Florida. Told he was communicating with a journalist, the person refused to talk on the phone and would only text.
The person told The Associated Press he had sponsored a Cuban uncle and aunt for $10,000 each. He refused to provide contact information for those relatives, then stopped responding to questions.
Another would-be sponsor said via Facebook messenger that they charge $2,000 per person, which includes a sponsorship fee, document processing and an airline ticket. Requests for more information were answered with a phone number from the Dominican Republic that rang unanswered.
A man who posted seeking a sponsor told the AP that he was disturbed by some offers.
“It’s very easy to trick a desperate person and there are an abundance of them here,” the man, who identified himself as Pedro Manuel Carmenate, of Havana, said. “You just have to tell the people what they want to hear.”
Of course, not all sponsors charge a fee. A new initiative called Welcome.US aims to match Americans to migrants without supporters. Also, nonprofit organizations are trying to spread accurate information about the program.
Sarah Ivory, executive director of the nonprofit USAHello that provides online information in multiple languages, said the proliferation of offers for paid sponsorship is “deeply troubling and frustratingly predictable,” reflected in hundreds of queries to the group.
“Many report that they barely have the money to feed themselves, much less pay to get a passport or arrange a sponsor,” Ivory said.
Such desperation is reflected on social media.
“I’m looking for a sponsor for two people please, my husband is in a wheelchair,” reads a post from someone who says she lives in Havana. “I will give my house with everything inside and I’ll pay $4,000 for each” person sponsored.
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Opinion What a family trunk and a sea of cast-off backpacks say about America
On a reporting trip to the U.S. border with Mexico some years ago, I was taken by an immigration expert to an arroyo on the outskirts of Tucson. The dry gully was screened by desert brush from a suburban development half a mile away; it was the end of a brutal passage for hikers in search of a new life.My guide took me there to see an enormous carpet of discarded packs so thick you could walk for the length of several football fields while stepping only on backpacks: old canvas ones, cheap nylon ones, some marked with familiar swooshes and others blazoned with Disney princesses. Battered backpacks and backpacks almost pristine, as if delivered fresh from the nearest Walmart.
I stood amid that sea of frantic goodbyes. Each pack was the residue of a person’s home, a person’s family, a person’s memories. The owners of that poignant detritus had carried what they could of their pasts across the thirsty desert and, with their destination in sight, dropped everything to vanish into America.
Half-forgotten, those backpacks welled up in my memory the other day, when a heavy, old trunk with wrought-iron handles came out of a delivery van and into my front hallway. A stranger had telephoned a few weeks before. When my wife answered, the caller said he was from St. Louis. He had come across this old trunk for sale, he said. A name was painted on the side — “B. H. von Drehle” — in confident (yet clearly amateur) script. The caller wondered if this artifact had some connection to me.
I had no idea how to answer. Some families cherish their lineage from generation to generation. Other Americans were ripped from their roots before arriving on this continent as enslaved people or refugees. My family’s past was not stolen. It was freely surrendered, like the pasts of countless other immigrant families from Germany.
According to the Library of Congress, in 1894 there were about 800 German-language newspapers published in the United States. Around that time, my grandfather was born. As a boy, he spoke German at home and in church. But in the space of some 30 years, the United States went to war twice against Germany, and that was the end of German identity. My father spoke not a word of German. His children could hardly find Germany on a map. No “Kiss Me, I’m German” T-shirts for us. From Lou Gehrig to Doris Day, millions shucked off their immigrant ancestry and gave everything to America, their beer and hot dogs, their Christmas trees and Santa Claus, their pretzels and kindergarten.
We bought the trunk, and now the oaken evidence was in my front hall — this eichensarg, as its original owner might have said. This heavy, empty coffin bearing a whiff of the past my family had forgotten.
Genealogical research that once required years can be done in minutes today. Thank the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In hopes of saving as many past souls as possible, the Mormons have created a dazzling database, available through the genealogy database, available through the genealogy site Ancestry.com. It whisked me to the B.H. von Drehles in my faraway family tree.
One was a farmer born in 1800 in the countryside near Hanover. The other was the farmer’s oldest son and namesake: Bernhard Heinrich von Drehle. With his younger brother (my grandfather’s grandfather), B.H. packed what the two of them could carry into this trunk and left home forever in 1854 — one of the heaviest years of German immigration to America.
They sailed into a storm of anti-immigrant backlash. The “Know-Nothings,” as opponents of the major political party dubbed its members, wanted to keep America for Americans. The brothers nevertheless landed in New Orleans, transferred to a paddle-wheel steamer and rode the Mississippi River to St. Louis. They hoped to be Americans, too.
The difference between my trunk and those backpacks in the Arizona sand is not necessarily a difference between welcome and hostility. Welcome and hostility have always been mixed. The difference is not entirely a contrast between memory and forgetting. Pasts are remembered or erased in American history for many reasons.
The difference, it seems to me after staring a long while at the trunk, is that my forebears were able to carry this stout container openly into their futures. Five generations later, it surfaces like Queequeg’s casket. That will never happen for those backpacks in the desert.
I don’t know every story of those from the Global South diaspora who cannot come to the United States with even a bagful of their memories. I don’t even know my own family story. But I know this trunk and those backpacks are expressions of the same truth, the same hope, the same dreams. All of us who come from elsewhere, with memories or without them, owe it to the past to share the future with those who travel behind us.
Opinion | What a family trunk and a sea of cast-off backpacks say about America - The Washington Post
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wow.
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Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signed a bill directing Maine's labor commissioner to petition the federal government for a waiver allowing asylum seekers to work while awaiting final determinations on their claims.
Her signature Thursday comes as the state grapples with the arrival of more than 1,000 asylum seekers, mostly from African nations, since the start of the new year.
In Portland, all shelters including an emergency one in a basketball arena are at capacity.
Letting asylum seekers go to work sooner is “a move that would benefit Maine employers in need of workers, that would reduce strain on state and municipal budgets, and that would allow asylum seekers to put their talents and skills to use, just as they want to do,” Scott Ogden, a Mills spokesman, said Friday via email.
The bill, sponsored by Republican Sen. Eric Brakey and co-sponsored by Democratic House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, may not have any practical effect since it's contrary to federal policy, which lets asylum seekers remain in the country but doesn't let them work until they are granted asylum.
But it sends a message at a time when resources are spread thin for providing food and shelter to asylum seekers who want to contribute but are unable to do so, supporters said.
The law takes effect 90 days after the special legislative session ends. After that, a letter will be drafted to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and to Citizenship and Immigration Services.
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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EL PASO, Texas (AP) — The border between the U.S. and Mexico was relatively calm Friday, offering few signs of the chaos that was feared following a rush by worried migrants to enter the U.S. before the end of pandemic-related immigration restrictions.
Less than 24 hours after the rules known as Title 42 were lifted, migrants and government officials were still assessing the effect of the change and the new regulations adopted by President Joe Biden's administration to stabilize the region.
“We did not see any substantial increase in immigration this morning,” said Blas Nunez-Neto assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security. He said the agency did not have specific numbers.
Migrants along the border continued to wade into the Rio Grande to take their chances getting into the U.S. while defying officials shouting for them to turn back. Others hunched over cellphones trying to access an appointment-scheduling app that that is a centerpiece of the new system. Migrants with appointments walked across a bridge hoping for a new life. And lawsuits sought to stop some of the measures.
The Biden administration has said the revamped system is designed to crack down on illegal crossings and to offer a new legal pathway for migrants who often pay thousands of dollars to smugglers to get them to the border. On Friday, Biden commended Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for his country’s collaboration with the U.S. and Canada to establish migration hubs in Latin America where asylum seekers will be able to apply for refuge.
Migrants are now essentially barred from seeking asylum in the U.S. if they did not first apply online or seek protection in the countries they traveled through. Families allowed in as their immigration cases progress will face curfews and GPS monitoring.
Across the river from El Paso in Ciudad Juárez, many migrants watched their cellphones in hopes of getting a coveted appointment to seek entry. The application to register to enter the U.S. had changed, and some were explaining to others how to use it. Most were resigned to wait.
“I hope it’s a little better and that the appointments are streamlined a little more,” said Yeremy Depablos, 21, a Venezuelan traveling with seven cousins who has been waiting in the city for a month. Fearing deportation, Depablos did not want to cross illegally. “We have to do it the legal way.”
The legal pathways touted by the administration consist of a program that permits up to 30,000 people a month from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter if they apply online with a financial sponsor and enter through an airport.
About 100 processing centers are opening in Guatemala, Colombia and elsewhere for migrants to apply to go to the U.S., Spain or Canada. Up to 1,000 can enter daily through land crossings with Mexico if they snag an appointment on the app.
If it works, the system could fundamentally alter how migrants come to the southern border. But Biden, who is running for reelection, faces withering criticism from migrant advocates, who say he's abandoning more humanitarian methods, and from Republicans, who claim he's soft on border security.
At the Chaparral port of entry in Tijuana on Friday, a few migrants approached U.S. authorities after not being able to access the appointment app. One of them, a Salvadoran man named Jairo, said he was fleeing death threats back home.
“We are truly afraid,” said Jairo who was traveling with his partner and their 3-year-old son and declined to share his last name. “We can’t remain any longer in Mexico and we can’t go back to Guatemala or El Salvador. If the U.S. can’t take us, we hope they can direct us to another country that can.”
Farther east, small groups of Haitian migrants with appointments to request asylum crossed the Gateway International Bridge connecting Matamoros, Mexico, with Brownsville, Texas. They crossed with the assistance of a nongovernmental organization, passing the usual commuter traffic of students and workers lined up on the bridge's pedestrian path.
In downtown El Paso, a few dozen migrants lingered outside Sacred Heart Catholic Church and shelter where as recently as Tuesday nearly 2,000 migrants were camped. Faith leaders in the city are striving to provide shelter, legal advice and prayer for migrants as they navigate new restrictions.
The Rev. Daniel Mora said most of the migrants took heed of flyers distributed this week by U.S. immigration authorities offering a “last chance” to submit to processing and left. El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said that 1,800 migrants turned themselves over to Customs and Border Protection on Thursday.
Melissa López, executive director for Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services at El Paso, said many migrants have been willing to follow the legal pathway created by the federal government, but there is also fear about deportation and possible criminal penalties for people who cross the border illegally.
Ruben Garcia, director of the Annunciation House shelter in El Paso and coordinator for a regional network on migrant shelters, said he fears that migrants passing through Mexico may be diverted by smugglers away from cities with humanitarian infrastructure toward remote, desolate stretches of the border. He said thousands of migrants are currently passing through two U.S. immigration processing centers in El Paso, amid uncertainty about ensuing deportations and monitored releases.
The lull in border crossings follows a recent surge of crossings by migrants in hopes of being allowed to stay in the United States before the Title 42 restrictions expired.
Title 42 had been in place since March 2020. It allowed border officials to quickly return asylum seekers back over the border on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The U.S. has declared the national emergency over, ending the restrictions.
While Title 42 prevented many from seeking asylum, it carried no legal consequences, encouraging repeat attempts. After Thursday, migrants face being barred from entering the U.S. for five years and possible criminal prosecution.
Border holding facilities were already far beyond capacity in the run-up to Title 42's expiration. Officials had orders to release migrants with a notice to report to an immigration office if overcrowding and other factors became critical.
But late Thursday, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump temporarily halted the administration’s plans to release people into the U.S. and set a court date on whether to extend the ruling. Customs and Border Protection said it would comply, but called it a “harmful ruling that will result in unsafe overcrowding.”
Other parts of the administration's immigration plan were also in legal peril.
Advocacy groups including the ACLU sued the administration on its new asylum rules minutes before they took effect. Their lawsuit alleges the administration policy is no different than one adopted by Trump, which was rejected by the same court.
The Biden administration says its rule is different, arguing that it’s not an outright ban but imposes a higher burden of proof to get asylum and that it pairs restrictions with other newly opened legal pathways.
ACLU National Political Director Maribel Hernández Rivera said many new required steps were unrealistic.
“Asylum is not something you schedule when you are fleeing for your life," she said.
___
Gonzalez reported from Brownsville, Texas, and Spagat from Tijuana, Mexico. Associated Press writers Colleen Long and Rebecca Santana in Washington; Christopher Sherman in Mexico City; Julie Watson and Suman Naishadham in Tijuana, Mexico; Gerardo Carrillo in Matamoros, Mexico; Maria Verza in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; Gisela Salomon in Miami; and Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico contributed to this report.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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“Migrant border crossings in fiscal year 2022 topped 2.76 million, breaking previous record”
that’s some big numbers right there.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna53517
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Theres nothing wrong mothers wanting more for their kids. I feel for them and don’t blame them. I just don’t think that the process as it is is working or sustainable. Yet it’s being mocked if you think it’s a big deal.
record high compared to what? the year or two before?
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14