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WASHINGTON—Donald Trump’s allies are drawing up detailed proposals to implement the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s plans for an unprecedented immigration crackdown, including an effort that would deport asylum seekers to other countries, according to people involved in the effort.

A cadre of former Trump administration officials, Trump supporters and conservative immigration wonks are writing executive orders, policy memos and other documents in a bid to transform campaign rhetoric into policy. The goal, the people said, is to be ready on the first day of a Trump presidency to stem the flow of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, unwind President Biden’s immigration agenda and lay the groundwork for what the former president has said would be the largest mass deportation in U.S. history.

Those involved are discussing issues including ways to expedite migrants’ asylum hearings to make them more quickly eligible for deportation; rescind deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants created by the Biden administration; and force countries across the globe to accept back more of their deported citizens.

Outside advisers have started identifying countries in South America, including Panama, and in Africa that could become partners for new asylum deals, the people involved in the effort said. In 2020, the Trump administration struck a deal with Guatemala on a short-lived program that sent back roughly 1,000 migrants from neighboring El Salvador and Honduras to seek asylum there. Advisers want to revive the idea, in part inspired by an accord struck between the U.K. and Rwanda in 2022 that would allow the U.K. to send migrants seeking asylum to the East African country instead. (The plan hasn’t gone into effect yet because of legal challenges.)

The extent of the planning shows Trump’s outside advisers are getting a head start on clearing the hurdles they would face in enacting the deportation campaign, which has become Trump’s signature 2024 campaign promise on immigration.

“The logistical challenges will be really significant,” a former senior Trump administration official said.

In addition to recruiting enough manpower to arrest migrants and opening up enough detention space to hold them, another important roadblock looms: The migrants who have arrived in the U.S. under the Biden administration aren’t currently legally deportable. And for those who are, many of their home countries won’t take them back. The executive actions that Trump’s advisers are planning are intended to circumvent those constraints without action from Congress.

There is also the question of who would lead such an effort. Trump’s high-profile supporters are jockeying for government posts should he return to the White House. Stephen Miller, the lead architect of much of Trump’s first-term immigration agenda, is widely expected to return to the administration, likely in a senior White House role.

Some Trump advisers have discussed Tom Homan, who led U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration, as a candidate to lead the Department of Homeland Security or serve as a “border czar,” a position that wouldn’t require Senate confirmation. Others who are seen by people close to Trump as candidates for senior jobs include: Chad Wolf, the former acting Homeland Security secretary; Mark Morgan, the former acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection; and Joe Edlow, the former acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Homan said he would strongly consider a position in the administration if asked to serve. “I agree with the president: It has to be a historic deportation operation, because we’ve had a historic influx,” he said.

The discussions about Trump’s second-term immigration agenda are unfolding inside conservative groups, including the America First Policy Institute, which is run by former Trump administration officials, and the Heritage Foundation, which oversees Project 2025, an effort by dozens of right-leaning organizations to plan for the next Republican administration. Other conversations are taking place in informal settings—with Trump campaign officials and Trump himself—and aren’t affiliated directly with those groups.

Rob Law, director for homeland security and immigration at the America First Policy Institute, confirmed that the group has identified executive actions on immigration. A Heritage Foundation spokeswoman didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Trump campaign said outside groups don’t speak for the former president.

“Despite our being crystal clear, some ‘allies’ haven’t gotten the hint, and the media, in their anti-Trump zeal, has been all-too-willing to continue using anonymous sourcing and speculation about a second Trump administration in an effort to prevent a second Trump administration,” Trump senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said. “Unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.”

Senior officials at the outside groups expect that at least some of their draft plans will be put in place if Trump wins the election. They hope to avoid a repeat of what happened in 2016, when Trump abruptly fired the head of his presidential transition team, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and tossed out the reams of plans that Christie’s team had drawn up.

Trump has said he would act like a dictator on his first day back at the White House, when he would harness the power of his office to “close the border” and expand oil drilling. Behind that assertion, which has rattled constitutional scholars and many Democrats, is a desire by the president and his advisers to issue executive actions on immigration shortly after inauguration.

People close to Trump say the effort is modeled in part on Biden’s first day in office in 2021, when he signed prewritten orders to halt construction of Trump’s border wall, lift a travel ban on citizens of several Muslim-majority countries and end a border policy known as Remain in Mexico. Trump probably would reverse those measures, as well as several other Biden immigration initiatives, on his first day.

Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa called Trump’s immigration plans cruel, anti-American and ineffective. “The American people want solutions on the border, Donald Trump only wants chaos,” Moussa said.

Pulling off an extensive deportation operation—Trump said recently that he is targeting as many as 20 million people—would require coordination at every level of government, as well as the military. Advisers are eyeing military bases for expanded detention capacity and making plans to deputize red-state governors to deploy National Guard troops to add to the ranks of immigration officers making arrests. The former president and his advisers are also discussing using local and state law enforcement to aid the effort.

The operation likely would need billions of dollars in new funding, either from Congress or transferred from the Pentagon.

Morgan said any mass deportation operation would be contingent in part on immigrants—fearing arrest—simply turning themselves in to the authorities voluntarily.

“If they actually see a whole-of-government, expanded commitment to start arresting and deporting people,” Morgan said, “we hope people would come and work with the federal government to have themselves repatriated.”

In his 2016 campaign, Trump said he would build a wall along most of the U.S.-Mexico border, but fell far short of completing it during his time in office. He also said he would pursue large-scale deportations during campaign speeches eight years ago, but his administration deported a couple hundred thousand immigrants a year, numbers that pale in comparison to the estimated 11 million living in the U.S. while he was in office.

The Biden administration on Thursday announced an effort to shorten the time it takes for U.S. immigration judges to decide the asylum cases of certain migrants who enter the country illegally along the border with Mexico.

Migrant adults released by federal border officials after crossing into the U.S. unlawfully will be eligible to be placed in the program, under a joint initiative between the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, which oversees the nation’s immigration courts.

The effort’s objective, senior U.S. officials said, is to speed up the process of granting asylum to migrants with legitimate cases, and rejecting weak cases. Federal officials under Republican and Democratic administrations have said the current years-long timeframe to decide asylum cases serves as a “pull factor” that attracts migration by economic migrants, who don’t qualify for humanitarian protection, but who often use the asylum system to work in the U.S.

Over the past years, the backlog of cases received by the immigration courts has ballooned, leading to wait times that often surpass four years. Fewer than 800 immigration judges are overseeing more than 3.5 million unresolved cases.

Single migrant adults who plan to live in five major U.S. cities — Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City — could be selected for the new process, which will instruct immigration judges to issue decisions within 180 days, instead of years.

Since the Obama administration, the U.S. has set up several similar programs, colloquially known as “rocket dockets.” While officials have portrayed them as ways to discourage illegal immigration, advocates have said the rocket dockets trample on migrants’ due process by making it more difficult for them to secure lawyers in time for their hearings.

The scope of Thursday’s announcement was not immediately clear, as U.S. officials declined to provide an estimate of the number of migrants who would be placed in the fast-track proceedings. Ten judges have been assigned to the program, one of the officials said during a call with reporters.

The latest rocket docket is the most recent step taken by the Biden administration to curtail unlawful border crossings, which spiked last year to record levels. Last week, the Biden administration published a proposed rule that would allow immigration officials to more quickly reject and deport asylum-seeking migrants who are deemed to endanger public safety or national security.

Last year, the administration implemented a regulation that presumes migrants are ineligible for U.S. asylum if they enter the country illegally after failing to request refuge in another country. It paired that policy with a vast expansion of avenues for some would-be migrants to enter the U.S. legally.

President Biden, who has increasingly embraced more restrictive border policies, has also been considering a more sweeping measure that would further restrict asylum for those entering the U.S. illegally. The move, which would rely on a presidential authority known as 212(f), would almost certainly face legal challenges.

Administration officials have argued they are exploring unilateral immigration actions due to the collapse of a border security agreement that the White House forged with a bipartisan group of senators earlier this year. While the deal would have severely restricted asylum and increased deportations without legalizing unauthorized immigrants, most Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, rejected it outright.

“This administrative step is no substitute for the sweeping and much-needed changes that the bipartisan Senate bill would deliver, but in the absence of congressional action we will do what we can to most effectively enforce the law and discourage irregular migration,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement Thursday.

The Biden administration has faced unprecedented levels of migration along the southern border, including over two million migrant apprehensions in each of the past two years.

In recent months, however, migrant crossings have plunged, bucking historical patterns that have seen migration soar in the spring. Last month, Border Patrol recorded nearly 129,000 migrant apprehensions, down from 137,000 in March, according to government data. U.S. officials have credited increased deportations and an immigration crackdown by Mexico for the surprising drop.

The Biden administration plans to speed up court cases for some recently arrived migrants who are seeking asylum, marking the latest move to address arrivals at the US-Mexico border, according to senior administration officials.

The Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department announced Thursday a new court docket targeting migrants who have unlawfully crossed the US southern border. Migrants placed on the docket will have their cases resolved within 180 days —cutting the process down by months, if not years.

The new docket applies to single adults who are released from government custody and headed to one of five destination cities: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City.

“Today, we are instituting with the Department of Justice a process to accelerate asylum proceedings so that individuals who do not qualify for relief can be removed more quickly and those who do qualify can achieve protection sooner,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.

“This administrative step is no substitute for the sweeping and much-needed changes that the bipartisan Senate bill would deliver,” Mayorkas added, referring to a border security deal that Senate Republicans blocked earlier this year. “But in the absence of Congressional action we will do what we can to most effectively enforce the law and discourage irregular migration.”

Thursday’s announcement is reminiscent of a similar move targeting migrant families in 2021 — and previous attempts to quickly hear cases under the Obama and Trump administrations. Immigrant advocates and attorneys have previously raised concerns over rushing asylum cases and undermining due process.

“In general, we do view the dedicated docket as having achieved its objective of getting people through the immigration court process much faster than we would normally get people through the process,” a senior administration official told reporters Thursday, acknowledging that deporting individuals if ordered to be removed has been challenging given resource constraints.

Immigrants fighting deportation generally have a chance to make their case in court, where they can ask a judge to allow them to stay in the US by arguing they qualify for asylum or another legal option. Cases can often take years because of an immigration court backlog, prompting the effort to set up a process intended to expeditiously work through cases.

The immigration court backlog exceeds 3 million pending cases, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse or TRAC, which tracks immigration court data.

Around 10 immigration judges have been assigned to start working on these dockets, as soon as this week, according to another administration official.

“We’ve identified judges who have availability to manage to do these and manage along with all the existing work that they’re doing,” the senior administration official said. “As conditions merit, we’ll adjust as is necessary.”

The Biden administration will issue visa restrictions against 250 people and sanctions against three organizations that support the Nicaraguan government, whose authoritarian leader officials say has profited off people trying to reach the United States.

Senior administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity on Wednesday to preview the plans, said that the Nicaraguan government, led by President Daniel Ortega, had created a system to profit from large numbers of migrants by charging them visa fees upon arrival in the country’s airports and requiring them to leave Nicaragua within 96 hours.

The Biden administration will also issue a policy alert to private companies, including airlines, of concerns about irregular immigration patterns and potential human rights abuses stemming from those practices. Officials said no efforts to enforce the policy were underway.

The announcement reflected a growing concern among President Biden and his advisers that a surge of undocumented immigrants into the United States is a growing threat to his re-election campaign. It also showed that the administration has limited options to stem the flow of immigration from troubled countries whose citizens are searching for a better life in the United States.

Nicaragua has become an increasingly popular hub for migrants from Latin America and Africa trying to reach the United States. The visa-selling practice, administration officials say, has led to human rights abuses and created opportunities for traffickers and smugglers, who prey on people rushed through the country with eventual hopes of reaching the southwestern border of the United States.

The State Department will issue visa restrictions to 250 people, a group that includes government workers and family members of people tied to the Ortega administration. The Treasury Department will issue sanctions against three entities financially supporting the Nicaraguan government, including a Russian military training center that one official said “supports repressive activities by the Nicaraguan national police to prosecute political opposition.”

According to a statement from Matthew Miller, a spokesman from the State Department, the United States has issued visa restrictions against at least 1,400 people to date, many of them Nicaraguan officials, “particularly targeting those complicit in human rights violations and corrupt practices.”

Rosario Murillo, the vice president and first lady of Nicaragua who acts as the government’s spokeswoman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the visa restrictions.

In November 2021, Mr. Biden issued a presidential proclamation restricting people who “undermine or injure democratic institutions or impede the return to democracy in Nicaragua” from entering the United States. “The repressive and abusive acts of the Ortega government and those who support it compel the United States to act.”
According to a 2023 survey by the AmericasBarometer project by Vanderbilt University, almost half of Nicaraguan citizens are interested in leaving the country. That number has risen steadily under Mr. Ortega, whose government has moved to close universities, confiscate the homes of dissidents forced into exile and stripped political prisoners of their citizenship.

The survey also found that roughly 32 percent of people across 26 Latin American countries surveyed say they want to migrate.

Mr. Biden has tried in recent months to flip the political blame for the surge in immigration back onto Republicans, who blocked a bipartisan bill that contained the strictest border measures in decades. Mr. Biden’s challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, had influenced Republican lawmakers who torpedoed the bill.

On Tuesday evening, Mr. Biden again told a group of supporters that Mr. Trump was to blame for the delay in a new border bill.

“Republicans in Congress must act because it’s the right thing to do,” Mr. Biden said, “and America needs it done.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will give the White House cover to use stricter immigration executive actions by resurrecting a bipartisan border bill for a vote likely next week, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: Schumer’s move serves a dual purpose, also protecting his vulnerable Democratic incumbents on one of their worst issues ahead of 2024.

Republicans are expected to overwhelmingly vote against the bill, which would provide new tools to restrict access to asylum when border numbers surge.

The bill’s failure would bolster the White House’s standing to pull the trigger on similar, harsh restrictions using executive authorities — while blaming Senate Republicans for inaction.
Multiple Democratic sources said they see Schumer’s renewed focus on the border as a precursor to executive action by President Biden.

The border is slated to be front and center in the Senate next week, multiple sources told Axios.

Democrats expect Republicans to stand against the border package, which had backing from both parties earlier this year but was killed after former President Trump urged his allies to block it.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was the lead Republican negotiator on the package, told reporters on Thursday that he would not vote for it now, saying Schumer’s move is “just political messaging.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who negotiated the deal on behalf of Democrats, started the process by reintroducing the bill this week.

What to watch: The Biden administration has been preparing various executive and administrative actions for months.

It has already rolled out efforts to fast-track the asylum process for some illegal border crossers and imposed visa restrictions on Colombians and Nicaraguans, targeting people who profit off of migrant smuggling.

Biden is also expected to use a section of U.S. code called 212(f) — the basis for some of Trump’s harshest immigration moves — to severely curtail asylum-seekers when border numbers spike.

Congressional Democrats facing tough re-election bids in November have been pounding the table for border legislation in Congress and for action from the White House.
Republicans have made the border the top issue in campaigns across the country as the party tries to take back a majority in the Senate.

Recent polling has found that immigration is one of — if not the — top issues for American voters this year.

Senate Democrats on Thursday refiled a previously failed bipartisan border security bill in a bid to force Republicans to again oppose legislation they helped craft just months before the November election.

But the Republican co-author of the measure will vote down the proposal this go-around and disparaged what he called a “nonserious” attempt to score political points off the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border.

“It’s just a messaging piece,” Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), the lead GOP negotiator on immigration, said. “This is trying to poke Republicans in the eye rather than try to solve the problem.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who for months worked with Lankford and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) to craft the legislation before conservatives ultimately turned against the deal, told the Washington Examiner that the intent of holding another vote will be to “give Republicans another shot to do the right thing.”

“They have not expressed any interest in coming back to the table,” Murphy said. “They’ve got to make a political decision about whether they care more about the border or Donald Trump’s reelection efforts.”

Lankford rejected those accusations, telling the Washington Examiner there’s been “no approach or no attempt to try to change” the proposal on the part of Murphy or any other Democrat since it first failed in February.

“What I got was, ‘We’re dropping this bill — you might have heard we’re dropping the bill,’” Lankford said recalling a recent exchange with Murphy. “No disdain for Chris, but there’s not been outreach to try to get something and say, ‘We couldn’t get the last one through. How do we actually get the next one through?’ There’s been no interchange like that.”

Lankford was one of four Senate Republicans who previously voted for its passage. This time around, Republicans across the board have assailed what they consider a political stunt while Democrats try to flip the script on a policy that’s a top election-year issue in polling with voters.

The bill, which was previously attached to a foreign aid package, would have provided roughly $20 billion for border security, expanded expulsion authority, bolstered asylum standards, and limited catch-and-release practices. Pressure from Republicans and vulnerable Senate Democrats has mounted on President Joe Biden to take more aggressive executive action to clamp down on the surge of illegal crossings.

It’s unclear when Senate Democrats will hold another vote on the bipartisan deal.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) appears inclined to take up the doomed endeavor in the near future, as early as the coming weeks. Thursday marked 100 days since it failed the first time, which Schumer spotlighted in a speech on the Senate floor. He accused Republicans of being the ones playing politics with the border by opposing the measure.

“The only way we fix the border long term is through bipartisan legislation, like the one we had in the Senate three months ago,” Schumer said. “But as we all know, Donald Trump swooped in and told his MAGA supporters to kill the bill.”

Lankford holds little hope for accomplishing anything on the subject before Election Day due to a general lack of “enthusiasm.” He criticized his own party by drawing parallels between Democrats rehashing the bipartisan deal to Senate Republicans trying to take up the House’s conservative border bill known as H.R. 2, both of which he emphasized were futile actions.

Lankford further criticized the politics behind some Democrats not wanting to anger their base and some in the GOP not wanting to give Biden an election-year policy win.

“Everybody in America sees this,” he said.

When Mayor Eric Adams was asked about New York City’s lifeguard shortage at his weekly news conference, he seized the moment to make a point about potential migrant workers.

Imagine if the city could quickly hire migrants for jobs that urgently needed to be filled, he wondered aloud, before asking: “How do we have a large body of people that are in our city and country that are excellent swimmers, and at the same time we need lifeguards?”

His remarks on Tuesday drew criticism from all sides. Immigrant rights groups called the comments “racist and divisive.” Conservative leaders viewed them as an attempt to legitimize the hiring of noncitizens.

Mr. Adams, unsurprisingly, saw things differently.

On Wednesday, the mayor explained that he had visited migrant centers in the city and asked people there if they knew how to swim. He was “blown away” by the number of those who raised their hands.

“We have these capable people who know how to swim — from West Africa, from Ecuador, from South and Central America, from Mexico — and we have a shortage of lifeguards,” Mr. Adams said in response to a question from a reporter from the news outlet The City as he walked into City Hall. “If we start planning out now, we could be prepared next year.”

As nearly 200,000 migrants have arrived in New York City over the last two years, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has repeatedly called for them to be able to work so they can support themselves. In his remarks on Tuesday, he also suggested that migrants fill key jobs such as food service workers and nurses.

“This hasn’t been new — I’ve been saying this over and over again: Let people work,” Mr. Adams said on Wednesday.

Mr. Adams has previously mentioned hiring migrants as lifeguards, including in February when he was asked about using police drones to help people who are drowning. (A city official noted on Tuesday that New York had made progress in hiring more lifeguards and that 560 people had passed the city’s lifeguard test this year, compared with 364 last year.)

Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said on Wednesday that Mr. Adams had repeatedly argued that migrants who are living in the city’s shelter system should be able to fill vacant jobs and that “anyone who is trying to make more out of the mayor continuing to make that point today is missing the forest for the trees.”
Still, Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, rejected Mr. Adams’s implication that migrants would make good lifeguards “because some immigrants had to swim or wade across water on their dangerous journeys to seek safety in the United States.”

“This comment is racist, and the mayor should not be making light of the perilous and often life-threatening journeys people are forced to make to escape violence and persecution,” he said.

It was not the first time immigrant groups have criticized Mr. Adams’s rhetoric. They have argued that his comments that the migrant crisis could “destroy” New York City and that some migrants were creating a crime wave are dangerous.

Alexa Avilés, a councilwoman representing Brooklyn and the chairwoman of the Committee on Immigration, called the mayor’s comments “appalling.”

“What won’t he blame immigrants for?” she said. “First it was budget cuts and now it’s lifeguard shortages.”
Melissa Mark-Viverito, a former City Council speaker, called the mayor’s comments “insane” on social media.

“He is just constantly putting out these comments that are very stereotypical, very prejudicial, very just ugly,” she said, adding, “There’s no reflection, there’s no acknowledgment that what I said actually may be hurtful to folks.”

Conservative voices have also criticized Mr. Adams’s response to the migrants, arguing that he has been too accommodating by offering them housing and services, including debit cards for food.

Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, posted a video of the mayor’s comments on social media on Wednesday and asked whether Mr. Adams and other Democrats such as President Biden thought that breaking the law by entering the country was “qualification for employment in our country?”

Mr. Adams has been prone to making off-the-cuff remarks perceived by some as odd, inflammatory or, at times, seemingly untrue — with some examples chronicled in a video on “The Daily Show” this week. He has compared himself to the spiritual leader Gandhi, urged gentrifiers to “go back to Iowa” and joked that he understood angry New Yorkers because he sometimes gave himself the middle finger.
But Marvin Carbajal, a New York City physical education teacher and the head coach for the boys’ swimming team at Bushwick Campus, said there was a germ of truth behind the mayor’s comment. He said he knew of at least seven students on the swim team who could have become city lifeguards, were they not undocumented.

Two of those students, he said, passed the lifeguard test, only to discover that their immigration status precluded them from working.

“It did sound a little bit offensive,” Mr. Carbajal said of the mayor’s remarks, adding, “I kind of understand what he was trying to say.”

Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday pardoned Daniel Perry, the Army veteran who was convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in Austin in 2020.

The move came shortly after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended a full pardon for Perry, who had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for the killing, which turned him into a cause célèbre among some Republicans who argued that he acted in self-defense.

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It’s the first time in at least decades that a Texas governor has pardoned someone for a serious violent crime, let alone murder. Perry was released from custody shortly after the announcement.

“Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney,” Abbott said in a statement. “I thank the Board for its thorough investigation, and I approve their pardon recommendation.”

The move comes days before Abbott is set to address the National Rifle Association’s convention in Dallas alongside former President Donald Trump. As part of the pardon, Perry regains his right to own and carry a firearm.

Abbott had asked the board last year to take up Perry’s case and expedite it. The board unanimously agreed to recommend a pardon after “a thorough examination of the amassed information,” the agency said in a release.

Perry had been driving for Uber on the night of July 25, 2020, when he turned into an intersection full of protesters in downtown Austin and was confronted by Garrett Foster, who was carrying an AK-47 rifle. Seconds later, Perry used his revolver to shoot and kill Foster, who is white. Both men were legally armed.

Both were on opposite sides of a protest movement that had reached a crescendo after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Perry’s defense team attempted to portray the protesters as an angry mob and said Foster, an Air Force veteran, was carrying his rifle in a threatening manner, which meant Perry had the right to shoot him under Texas’ self-defense laws. Prosecutors contended that Perry deliberately drove into a group of peaceful protesters and lost his right to self-defense by provoking the confrontation with Foster.

Travis County District Attorney José Garza denounced the pardon on Thursday, saying the governor and the board put “politics over justice and made a mockery of our legal system.”

“Their actions are contrary to the law and demonstrate that there are two classes of people in this state where some lives matter and some lives do not,” he said in a statement. “They have sent a message to Garrett Foster’s family, to his partner, and to our community that his life does not matter.”

Abbott cannot grant a pardon without an endorsement from the board, but he appoints all the board members and can remove them at any time. Attorneys with experience in pardon cases have said the governor can pressure the board when it works to his favor, or defer to it when it’s not.

“It’s a complete perversion of justice and it’s a sad moment in criminal justice,” Gary Cohen, an Austin attorney who has specialized in pardon and parole law for nearly 40 years, said of the announcement Thursday. “It sets a horrible precedent. It’s disrespectful for the judicial process, for the judges, for victims – all the signals it sends are horrible.”

Perry’s verdict ignited conservatives across the country. Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted of killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wis., in 2022, immediately called for Perry’s pardon. So did former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Less than a day later, Abbott announced his intention to do so.

But when court documents unsealed after the verdict showed that Perry, who is white, had previously written about wanting to kill protesters, Muslims and Black people, Abbott seemed to change his tone.

Thursday’s announcement was the first time Abbott has pardoned someone in the middle of the year, and it comes as he is campaigning heavily for several hard-right conservatives in runoff elections later this month. Typically, the pardon board makes its recommendations throughout the year and Abbott announces final decisions in late December, shortly before Christmas.

The board had similarly considered recommending a posthumous pardon for Floyd related to a 2004 drug arrest in Houston. The panel unanimously agreed to recommend one in October 2021, but before Abbott could make a decision, it reversed the recommendation, citing “procedural errors.”

Douglas O’Connell, Perry’s lawyer, said Thursday that Perry was “thrilled and elated to be free.” He said he intended to push the Army to upgrade Perry’s service characterization to an honorable discharge.

“The action by Governor (Abbott) and the Pardon Board corrects the courtroom travesty which occurred over a year ago and represents true justice in this case,” O’Connell said in a statement.

Whitney Mitchell, Foster’s fiancée, said Abbott’s decision “has made us all less safe.” She called Foster the love of her life and said she was heartbroken by this “lawlessness.”

“With this pardon, the Governor has desecrated the life of a murdered Texan, impugned that jury’s just verdict, and declared that citizens can be killed with impunity as long as they hold political views that are different from those in power,” she said in a statement.

Different organizations criticized on Thursday the decision by the U.S. government to conduct a new deportation flight of Haitian migrants despite the country still being engulfed in violence.

This was the second deportation flight since late February, when an already chaotic situation was exacerbated further and gangs intensified their attacks on the country’s police and institutions.

Sunil Varghese, Policy Director at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), called the decision “unconscionable” and said that, “to make matters worse, many of those aboard today’s deportation flight likely were subjected to unfair, elevated standards to seek asylum in the United States due to recent Biden administration policies.”

“The U.S. must stop deporting Haitians immediately. Now is the moment for the U.S. government to offer TPS and humanitarian assistance to Haiti, not to send people fleeing for their lives back into grave danger,” he added.

Residents flee their homes as gang violence escalates in Port-au-Prince,

Residents flee their homes as gang violence escalates in Port-au-Prince, Haiti CLARENS SIFFROY/AFP
Different organizations criticized on Thursday the decision by the U.S. government to conduct a new deportation flight of Haitian migrants despite the country still being engulfed in violence.

This was the second deportation flight since late February, when an already chaotic situation was exacerbated further and gangs intensified their attacks on the country’s police and institutions.

Sunil Varghese, Policy Director at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), called the decision “unconscionable” and said that, “to make matters worse, many of those aboard today’s deportation flight likely were subjected to unfair, elevated standards to seek asylum in the United States due to recent Biden administration policies.”

“The U.S. must stop deporting Haitians immediately. Now is the moment for the U.S. government to offer TPS and humanitarian assistance to Haiti, not to send people fleeing for their lives back into grave danger,” he added.

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Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director at America’s Voice, said on her end that “sending Haitians back amidst political turmoil and increased gang attacks will worsen human suffering.”

“We support the calls from community members and organizations like the Haitian Bridge Alliance and others in urging President Biden to provide protections for Haitian families and immediately stop cruel deportation.”

The organization also recalled a statement by Guerline Jozef, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, during a press conference earlier this month, emphasizing that “sending people to a country plagued by insecurity and humanitarian crises is unconscionable.”

The outlook for Haiti continues to be uncertain. A multinational force tasked with quelling violence in the country seems to be closer to arriving, but gangs controlling most of the capital warned they won’t lay down their arms.

Speaking to NPR last week, the country’s most notorious gang leader, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, said the consortium of criminal organization he leads is gearing up for a lengthy fight that will involve “a lot of bloodshed.” He added that forces will eventually get tired of fighting and leave the Haiti.

In the meantime, the country’s recently-appointed transitional council attempts to solidify its position after a chaotic start that saw them backtrack on a prime minister announcement. Police authorities want the transitional council to demand the resignation of the police chief, as they “continue to lose their premises and equipment and officers,” according to a Haitian police union.

Residents flee their homes as gang violence escalates in Port-au-Prince,

Residents flee their homes as gang violence escalates in Port-au-Prince, Haiti CLARENS SIFFROY/AFP
Different organizations criticized on Thursday the decision by the U.S. government to conduct a new deportation flight of Haitian migrants despite the country still being engulfed in violence.

This was the second deportation flight since late February, when an already chaotic situation was exacerbated further and gangs intensified their attacks on the country’s police and institutions.

Sunil Varghese, Policy Director at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), called the decision “unconscionable” and said that, “to make matters worse, many of those aboard today’s deportation flight likely were subjected to unfair, elevated standards to seek asylum in the United States due to recent Biden administration policies.”

“The U.S. must stop deporting Haitians immediately. Now is the moment for the U.S. government to offer TPS and humanitarian assistance to Haiti, not to send people fleeing for their lives back into grave danger,” he added.

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U.S. military planes begin landing in Haiti as multinational effort to quell violence gathers pace
Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director at America’s Voice, said on her end that “sending Haitians back amidst political turmoil and increased gang attacks will worsen human suffering.”

“We support the calls from community members and organizations like the Haitian Bridge Alliance and others in urging President Biden to provide protections for Haitian families and immediately stop cruel deportation.”

The organization also recalled a statement by Guerline Jozef, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, during a press conference earlier this month, emphasizing that “sending people to a country plagued by insecurity and humanitarian crises is unconscionable.”

The outlook for Haiti continues to be uncertain. A multinational force tasked with quelling violence in the country seems to be closer to arriving, but gangs controlling most of the capital warned they won’t lay down their arms.

Speaking to NPR last week, the country’s most notorious gang leader, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, said the consortium of criminal organization he leads is gearing up for a lengthy fight that will involve “a lot of bloodshed.” He added that forces will eventually get tired of fighting and leave the Haiti.

Haiti’s gang leader anticipates prolonged conflict amid arrival of international forces, warns of ‘bloodshed’

In the meantime, the country’s recently-appointed transitional council attempts to solidify its position after a chaotic start that saw them backtrack on a prime minister announcement. Police authorities want the transitional council to demand the resignation of the police chief, as they “continue to lose their premises and equipment and officers,” according to a Haitian police union.

Over 360,000 people have had to leave their homes and millions are unable to conduct their daily lives amid daily violence on the streets.

Nine hours and countless bullets after gunmen began bombarding Stanley’s police station in Port-au-Prince, the twentysomething officer started fearing he would not make it out alive.

“If you don’t hear from me, it’s because I’m dead,” he wrote on a family WhatsApp group by way of goodbye.

The officer’s sister shivered as she read her sibling’s parting text and – when he didn’t answer her messages – rang one of his closest friends desperate for news. “I’m going out of my mind,” she sobbed.

Contrary to his prediction, Stanley* did survive the recent assault on his fortress-like base but was left badly shaken. “What scared me the most was the idea of a needless death – that I might die and it would change nothing,” the police officer said as heavily armed gangs continued to sow terror in Haiti’s capital despite the creation of a transitional government that is supposed to lead the country out of its latest crisis.

Other members of Haiti’s embattled national police force have not been so lucky in the face of a coordinated gang insurrection that began in late February and has plunged Port-au-Prince into anarchy and forced the prime minister to resign.

Lionel Lazarre, the spokesperson for Haiti’s police union Synapoha, said 17 officers had been killed and “many” wounded – mostly by gunshots – in the first four months of this year.

In the worst attack, five officers were killed when armed criminals stormed a police station in the city’s north on 29 February. Videos of the mutilated victims spread on social media, the newspaper Le Nouvelliste reported. In one, it wrote, “the corpse of a policeman is seen lying on a wheelbarrow, his uniform soaked in blood”. Another shows an officer being beheaded. In a brazen show of defiance, criminals later returned to the station to demolish it with a Chinese front-end loader.

“It’s clear the [previous] government failed in its security mission. Everyone says the police are overwhelmed by the recent events,” said Lazarre. “There are neighbourhoods we used to go into easily but no longer can.”

William O’Neill, the UN’s top expert on human rights in Haiti, voiced amazement that Haiti’s outgunned and under-resourced police force had avoided being completely overpowered by criminals boasting a military-grade arsenal, largely smuggled in from the US. “It’s a minor miracle they’re still hanging on. I don’t know how they do it,” said O’Neill, who believes Haiti needs a 5,000-strong international security force to help the police restore order.

A UN-backed “multinational security support mission”, reportedly led by 1,000 Kenyan troops, is expected to be deployed to Haiti in the coming weeks to bolster the fight against the gangs although questions remain over how the force will be funded.

Part of the answer to how Haitian police are clinging on lies in the mettle of officers such as Stanley who are on the frontline of a lopsided struggle against gangs that run about 80% of the capital. For their troubles such officers generally receive no more than $100 (£79) a week.

That measly salary earns them a front row seat to a security collapse that has seen more than 2,500 people killed or injured this year alone and forced the airport and seaport to close.

Last weekend, another 4,500 people were forced to flee their homes in the capital, according to the UN migration agency, taking the number of people displaced by the chaos to about 100,000.

“The gangs are in charge,” admitted one former senior security official who believed things were so dire combat drones should be imported to eliminate gang leaders from above, “like in Afghanistan”.

A spokesperson for another police union, SPNH-17, this week called for the head of Haiti’s national police, Frantz Elbé, to resign over the “critical and catastrophic” situation after another attack on a police station, accusing top police officials of being complicit with the gangs.

Peter, another Port-au-Prince cop in his mid-20s, recalled being ambushed during a recent patrol by fighters with assault rifles. “It seemed like bullets were coming from everywhere at the same time,” said the police officer, who fled his vehicle with three colleagues and took shelter beside walls and street lamps.

The officers managed to repel the assailants after a long shootout but one was injured and taken to hospital. After the gun battle, Peter returned to his bullet-riddled vehicle and continued patrolling but he spent the next fortnight off work, rattled by the near-death experience.

“I realised it could have been me who was injured or even killed,” he said. “Thank God it wasn’t me that day … I still haven’t told my mother.”

Lazarre admitted Haiti’s national police force was woefully ill-equipped for its battle against outlaws who flaunt their increasingly sophisticated arsenal in slick social media videos resembling those posted by Mexican cartels.

“If the police had more weapons they could respond better to the criminals,” said Lazarre. “The police is about to celebrate its 29th anniversary but they don’t even have one or two helicopters to fight the current battle.”

Peter said a lack of basic equipment meant some colleagues bought their own bulletproof vests or armour plates, shipping them to Haiti with the logistics company DHL. In the last three years, more than 3,000 officers have left their jobs as the security situation unravelled after the 2021 murder of President Jovenel Moïse. Many have abandoned the country altogether.

Haiti’s police have faced criticism for disappearing from the streets of Port-au-Prince since the rebellion began and abandoning citizens to their own fate. But the union spokesperson said officers were doing their best to fight back, “even though times are tough”.

Lazarre called for more “offensive action” to regain the initiative from armed groups. “When you’re in a football team, you can’t just defend. You have to attack too … You can’t play a 90-minute game just defending. Eventually, you’ll let in a goal.”

Stanley and Peter said they were determined to fight on and were proud to be part of Haiti’s police force, despite the dangers. “We are the armed arm of the citizens. We are their shield,” said Stanley.

But in a city now almost entirely controlled by criminals, the shadow of death was never far away, said Peter, who is his household’s sole breadwinner. “And when a policeman dies in service what’s left for the family?” he asked.

US Senator Dick Durbin held a hearing in Washington last week while Stormy Daniels was testifying in Manhattan about her relations with Donald Trump. Durbin’s topic, the Dream Act, didn’t get quite as much attention. But in many ways, the story of the Dream Act is seedier than anything Daniels offered up about Trump.

The Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for qualified immigrants who arrived in the US as children, has been around a while. Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, first introduced it in the Senate 23 years ago. His persistence has yet to pay off — but at least Durbin is still here to make the case. The legislation’s lead Republican sponsor, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, died before seeing it become law.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the executive action taken by President Barack Obama as a halfway measure in lieu of the stalled Dream Act, is now 12 years old itself. More than 800,000 noncitizens have used the program to obtain legal protection against deportation. Senator Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who joined Durbin in supporting DACA, is dead now, too. Yet all these years later, the security of DACA recipients remains tenuous, and many potential Dreamers lack even DACA’s legal status, which enables them to work, study and live without the threat of imminent deportation.

Opposition to the Dream Act has always been the most clarifying element of US immigration politics. Moral arguments about immigrating “the right way” or “waiting in line” simply don’t apply. Many Dreamers arrived in the US before the age of 5. Were they supposed to lecture their parents on the proper mode of migration?

Economic arguments about Dreamers mostly point in the direction of legalization. The Department of Homeland Security found 343,000 DACA recipients employed in jobs that the department considers “essential.” After having invested in their educations, the public now reaps the benefits of their labor. A 2021 analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress found DACA recipient households paid $6.2 billion in federal taxes and $3.3 billion in state and local taxes. Legalization would reduce the risks that Dreamers currently face in starting businesses or buying property in a country that hasn’t committed to their future, unleashing additional economic energy.

Socially, the arguments for Dreamers are even stronger. It’s not just that most Dreamers are culturally, functionally, American. They are integrated into American communities, workforces and institutions. Many Dreamers live in mixed families with US citizen family members. According to a 2019 estimate by the Migration Policy Institute, 1.3 million unauthorized immigrants were married to a US citizen spouse, and 3.5 million lived with at least one US citizen child under the age of 18. The Center for Migration Studies estimates that more than 40% of mixed-status households own their homes. The social costs of ripping apart such families are incalculable.

The case for Dreamers has always been logically and morally sound, which is why Durbin and allies designated them as a special class to begin with — to highlight the most sympathetic cohort of immigrants. Who could oppose easing their plight?

The answer, of course, is people who worry that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” in Trump’s explicitly fascist locution. White nationalism doesn’t distinguish between categories of migrants. It distinguishes between categories of skin color and culture. Most Dreamers are the wrong hue. (Thus Trump’s lament that the US lacks immigrants from “nice” countries such as Denmark and Switzerland. It’s not immigration that Trump opposes; it’s immigrants who aren’t White.)

Trump’s plan to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” using militia to hunt down undocumented immigrants, build camps to imprison them and then deport them by the millions, is a frontal challenge not just to long-settled immigrants but to American pluralism and democracy. The Fugitive Slave Act, which may be the American policy most proximate to Trump’s dystopian vision, heightened tensions between slave and free states and led to mob violence. Trump’s plan envisions a similar encroachment on the democratic sensibilities and community values of cities and states that don’t share MAGA’s — or the Confederacy’s — obsession with racial purity. It’s also another clue that Trump hopes to add the US to the ranks of authoritarian states that he admires — those defined not by ideals of pluralism or equality before the law but of herrenvolk democracy, where citizens who look and behave the right way are empowered, and everyone else is not.

Dreamers may have long histories in America, but they have no place in MAGA’s color-coded vision of the American future. In the White House, Trump tried to phase out DACA. A lawsuit by Republican attorneys general currently seeks to strip DACA recipients of protections, which would place even this relatively small, marginally protected group among Trump’s targets for state aggression. Perhaps there is some small comfort for Dreamers in knowing that they aren’t alone. Trump’s list of targets grows longer each day.

Republicans in the Arizona Senate have resurfaced an immigration ballot measure that would ask voters this November to make illegally crossing the border a state crime. Though Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, vetoed a similar bill this year, that hasn’t stopped the state’s Republicans from keeping House Concurrent Resolution 2060 (HCR 2060) alive to gain political points and give local law enforcement more authority to criminally charge undocumented individuals.

But Republicans putting another reiteration of the state’s 2010 “Show me your papers” law on the November ballot would be a gift to President Joe Biden

. The generation that successfully fought SB 1070 hasn’t gone away and remains organized and politically active.

Arizona is one of the states where Biden is trailing former President Donald Trump, according to a poll this week from The New York Times and Siena College. He’s winning Latinos by 10 points in that poll, but HCR 2060 could be an issue that pushes Latino turnout and support for Biden higher. According to Pew Research, Latinos make up 25% of the state’s eligible voters, accounting to 1.3 million voters. The NALEO Education Fund estimates that more than “855,000 Latinos are expected to cast ballots this November in Arizona, which mirrors the 2020 Latino turnout and is an increase of 57.5 percent from 2016.”

Arizona Latinos helped deliver the state and the presidency to Biden in 2020 after Hilary Clinton lost the state to Trump in 2016. They also helped elect Democrats for governor and the U.S. Senate in 2022.

Immigrant rights activists have been protesting at the state Capitol in Phoenix against HCR 2060, arguing that the measure, if put on the ballot and then approved by voters, would lead to racial profiling and targeting of immigrant communities, including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and those who’ve lived in Arizona much longer.

HCR 2060 was expected to be voted on this week, but a Republican legislator signaled his disapproval of some of the measure’s provisions, particularly the prospect that it could make an estimated 20,000 DACA recipients subject to deportation. As of now, the measure has been stalled, which means Arizona’s Generation SB 1070 has earned another political victory, even if it’s temporary.

“I do think that the Latino vote is very strong and we’re ready to come out to the polls,” 25-year-old Karime Rodríguez, a services and immigration manager for LUCHA (Living United for Change in Arizona) told me Wednesday morning via a phone interview. “Despite everything that’s happening politically, these are humanitarian issues. And especially myself, I’m a young Latina, I’m a student, and all the communities that I’m around are ready to fight. Back then during SB 1070, it was just our parents, the original dreamers, but now it’s all of us.”

Rodríguez, a DACA recipient who is now on the path to naturalization, acknowledges that some Latinos in her community might be drifting away from President Biden, but she emphasizes that generation SB 1070 is not going anywhere and is getting more politically mature and better organized.

The politics of HCR 2060 couldn’t come at a better time for Biden and Democrats. “All eyes are on Arizona this election season to see what’s going to happen. But as we’ve shown in the past, our community will come out in waves to make sure that we are voting for measures that benefit us and all of our community members,” Rodríguez says. “We’ll do that again this year. I think that when you oppress a group for so long that there is a time where you know we get tired of fighting, we get tired of being on the defensive side, but at the same time we leave our guard down when measures like HCR 2060 slip through the cracks without us knowing, and we can’t let that happen.”

There are indications that Biden is trending up again nationally with Latinos, and unlike the NYT poll, a poll from the Latino Community Foundation released at the start of May shows Biden leading Trump by 20 points with Arizona Latinos. On Tuesday, the action fund of UnidosUS, the largest Latino civil rights group in the country, chose Arizona to formally endorse Biden. That said, Arizona is neither in the Biden camp nor the Trump one. If HCR 2060 reaches the ballot (even if there are provisions that protect DACA recipients) Rodríguez is one of many organizers who is fully confident that the measure can be defeated. In addition to Arizona electing Democrats as governor and senator in 2022, grassroots organizers worked hard to pass Proposition 308, which opened up in-state tuition to anyone in Arizona who attended state high schools for at least two years. There is no doubt that they can defeat HCR 2060.

“If the measure passes, then it goes to the ballot, and it’ll be in the hands of Arizonans to vote on this, on this measure,” Rodríguez says. “Arizonans have more sympathy and empathy towards migrants, and although our southern border is always used in the news as a spectacle, what surveys actually show within our state is that people want solutions to help migrants. And so, I do believe that in the polls, we’ll be able to shut it down.”

And if they do, they’ll likely shut down any hopes of Trump winning the state, too.

More than 100 immigration and civil rights organizations are urging Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to abandon his plans to bring a bipartisan Senate immigration deal to the floor after it was cast aside by the GOP earlier this year.

In a Thursday letter, the groups said the bill “constitutes a deep betrayal of immigrant communities.”

The Senate GOP blocked advancement of the package in February after former President Trump criticized it as something only a “fool” would support. It had been negotiated by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) alongside Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.).
But it was also opposed by various immigration allies because it would sharply curtain asylum rights for those fleeing danger and persecution.

The package would raise the “credible fear” standard those seeking asylum would need to meet to further pursue their claim.

It would also only allow migrants to seek asylum if they cross at a port of entry, but that option would also cease if certain border crossing limits were triggered.
“Among many concerns, this bill would, for the first time ever, allow the U.S. government to deny people the opportunity to apply for asylum at our border simply based on border apprehension numbers,” the groups write in a letter, spearheaded by Humans Rights First.

“Instead of supporting a proposal that would exacerbate the challenges at the border, we need Congressional leaders to invest in increasing processing capacity to meet humanitarian and operational needs,” the letter added, arguing Schumer had been critical about efforts to restrict immigration during the Trump administration.

Schumer has told colleagues he plans to bring the legislation to a vote next week.

And on the Senate floor this week, he asked Republicans to join Democrats in backing it.

“We’re not walking away from trying to resolve the problems at the border. We hope Republicans will change course and join us. Instead of just making a lot of speeches, pointing a lot of fingers, blame, blame, blame, let’s get something done. It is right within our grasp, a bipartisan bill that, when shown to many Republicans, they said, ‘Wow,’” Schumer said.

“It wasn’t until Donald Trump said, ‘I want the border to remain in chaos so I can win reelection,’ that Republicans backed off. Well, shame.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, Immigration Hub, International Refugee Assistance Project and the National Immigrant Justice Center were among the groups that asked Schumer to keep the bill shelved.

Schumer’s initial consideration of the bill followed demands from Republicans that aid to Ukraine would only be mulled if it was paired with immigration reform.

However, the GOP later shifted on that demand, passing an aid bill for Ukraine and other allies last month.

“Now, aid for Ukraine is not an issue. Sending this harmful and counterproductive bill to vote, again, constitutes a deep betrayal of immigrant communities,” the groups wrote.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is preparing more changes to the nation’s asylum system meant to speed up processing and potential removal of migrants who continue to arrive at the southern border, an interim step as President Joe Biden continues to mull a broader executive order to crack down on border crossings that may come later this year.

The change under consideration would allow certain migrants who are arriving at the border now to be processed first through the asylum system rather than going to the back of the line, according to four people familiar with the proposal. The people were granted anonymity to speak about an administration policy before it is made final.

The announcement, expected to come from the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, could come as early as Thursday, although the people cautioned that it could be delayed. The broader goal of the administration with this change is to process recent arrivals swiftly, within six months, rather than the numerous years it would take under the current backlog in the nation’s asylum system.

The new rules would apply to people who cross between ports of entry and turn themselves in to immigration authorities.

The Biden administration is taking increasingly restrictive measures to dissuade people from coming to the U.S.-Mexico border. Right now, when a migrant arrives, particularly a family, they are almost always released into the country where they wait out their asylum court dates in a process that takes years. By quickly processing migrants who have just arrived, it could stop others from trying to make the trip.

A record 3 million cases right now are clogging the nation’s immigration court. The average caseload for a judge is 5,000 and these changes won’t help diminish their workload. There are roughly 600 judges.

The administration has tried for years to move more new arrivals to the front of the line for asylum decisions, hoping to deport those whose claims are denied within months instead of years. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations also tried to accelerate the process, going back to 2014. In 2022, the Biden administration introduced a plan to have asylum officers, not immigration judges, decide a limited number of family claims in nine cities.

Michael Knowles, spokesman for the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council, a union that represents asylum officers, said in a February interview that the 2022 plan was “a very important program that got very little support.”

Last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement began an effort in 45 cities to speed up initial asylum screenings for families and deport those who fail within a month. ICE has not released data on how many families have gone through the expedited screenings and how many have been deported.

A bipartisan border agreement drafted by three senators and endorsed by Biden earlier this year offered funding for 100 new immigration judges and aides. But that legislation never advanced after Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, urged fellow Republicans to kill the deal.

Meanwhile, advocates for immigrants have generally expressed concern about changes that would expedite already-fraught proceedings for migrants, who arrive at the U.S. border after what is often a harrowing journey north.

Mexico is stopping nearly three times as many migrants who have crossed its southern border as it was a year ago, a trend that U.S. officials say has helped blunt the surge in crossings of the U.S. border usually seen at this time of year.

Biden administration officials also point to the increased help from Mexico in slowing migration as proof that their relationship with their southern neighbors is more effective than the Trump administration’s.

Former President Donald Trump has derided President Joe Biden’s record and claimed that his administration was more successful at controlling the border.

Early last year, Mexico interdicted roughly 100,000 migrants at its southern border or inside Mexico per month, while the U.S. was apprehending over 193,000 migrants monthly at the U.S.-Mexico border. This year, more migrants are being stopped inside Mexico than in the U.S., with over 280,000 being interdicted in Mexico and 189,000 in the U.S. in March, according to figures obtained by NBC News.

The Mexican government doesn’t publicly share its migrant interdiction numbers like the U.S. does.

The high numbers of migrants stopped in Mexico show how chaotic the U.S. border could become if Mexico cannot sustain its interdiction efforts. Another spike in border crossings could hurt Biden in the coming election.

According to Customs and Border Protection officials, April’s figures, which have yet to be publicly released, are expected to continue to show relatively low numbers compared to the seasonal uptick typically seen in April and May.It isn’t known how many of the migrants Mexico intercepts are actually deported. Many migrants are stopped by Mexican officials at the Guatemala-Mexico border and promptly returned to Guatemala, immigration advocates told NBC News.

Many others are being stopped in northern Mexico and bused to the southern end of the country. From there, they can’t use the CBP One app on their mobile phones to make appointments for U.S. asylum hearings, since the app doesn’t work south of Mexico City, said Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA.

“In one way, they are doing the dirty work of the U.S. in order to keep people from accessing the U.S. southern border and exercising their right to seek safety,” Fischer said.

Certain groups, like unaccompanied children and migrants traveling as families, receive special protection under Mexican law that limits their deportation.

U.S. officials say Mexico’s willingness to interdict more migrants, a costly process, is in large part due to increased dialogue between the two countries on issues like immigration, fentanyl and illegal firearms trafficking.

Both Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, recognized the severity of the problem at the end of last year when Mexico’s funding to stop migrants ran low and the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border surged to record highs.

At the end of December, Biden held a call with López Obrador and sent Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Mexico to meet with their counterparts. Since then, Mexico has interdicted at least 270,000 migrants each month.

“President Biden and President AMLO have developed a relationship in which they talk about the shared challenges [of migration], and they both jointly recognize the shared challenges,” a senior Biden administration official said. “They’ve had multiple conversations and multiple calls over the last couple of years tackling and talking about this issue.”

The Trump administration threatened Mexico with increased tariffs and disruptions in trade if it didn’t comply with policies like Remain in Mexico, which forced immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. to wait in poor conditions in northern Mexico.

“We have treated Mexico with respect as a sovereign equal,” the senior Biden administration official said. “That’s a difference with this administration’s approach.”

A history of cooperation

The Biden administration isn’t the first to work jointly with Mexico to address migration and other border issues.

In 2008, during George W. Bush’s administration, the Merida Initiative — a security agreement between the U.S. and Mexico — was launched to reduce violence and fight drug trafficking. Congress approved $1.5 billion for the initiative over two years, enabling the purchase of equipment like helicopters and other aircraft to support the efforts of Mexican law enforcement.

During the Obama administration, the U.S. and Mexico expanded cooperation to include combating transnational criminal organizations by providing forensic equipment and training to Mexican law enforcement and improving immigration enforcement in Mexico.

The Trump administration focused on reducing synthetic drug production and refining border interdiction and port security. In 2018, it reportedly wanted to pay Mexico $20 million to help deport thousands of migrants who entered Mexico in hope of reaching the U.S. The sum, according to CNN and The New York Times, would be used to fund bus and airplane tickets to send migrants back to their home countries. In 2019, Trump stopped threatening tariffs against Mexico after it agreed to crack down on crossings of its southern border. Mexico deployed 6,000 troops to its border with Guatemala to intercept migrants.

During the Biden administration, the U.S. and Mexico announced a new security cooperation agreement in 2021 called the Bicentennial Framework. The Bicentennial Framework replaced the Merida Initiative and emphasized preventing transborder crime by minimizing human and arms trafficking and disrupting illicit drug supply chains.

hing, NY
CNN
—
A simple act of walking into a mosque with his wife and two children in New York City is what made the past six months of struggle worth it for Ye Chengxiang – even if not everyone is celebrating his arrival.

“It’s only been over two months here, but we can feel the spirit of freedom, inclusiveness, and equality,” he said over a bowl of noodles. It was his only day off from working 12-hour shifts at a Chinese restaurant in New York City.

The slim former restaurant owner left China last October. The ruling Communist Party’s crackdown on his Hui Muslim ethnic group and growing restrictions on personal life gave his family no choice, he says. “When I was in China, I had a pent-up feeling in my heart,” he said of living as a Muslim in China, where his children were banned from entering a mosque.

Ye and his wife drained $40,000 of their life savings and illegally crossed the United States’ southern border in December after an exhausting weeks-long journey that saw the family take a hazardous boat journey from Colombia to the edge of the Darien Gap, a mountainous rainforest region that connects South and Central America. His anxieties melted away as Ye crossed into the US, which he described as entering a warm embrace. “I felt like I was home, and that feeling was very real,” he said.

Their destination was New York City’s Flushing neighborhood, home to a Chinese community going back generations. The city has integrated millions of migrants over the decades, and it continues to inspire newcomers like Ye – even as the arrival of such migrants has turned into a flashpoint in US politics ahead of the November elections.

After arriving in New York, Ye spent a week in a Manhattan shelter. Then, with the help of a group of other Chinese Muslim asylum seekers, he found a place to live and a job making noodles as his family proceeded through the religious asylum claim process.  Their first court date is in October

He is exhausted, barely having time to learn English or explore the new city. But he is happy. The first time that he walked to a mosque in Flushing with his wife and daughters, “I immediately felt that rock, that lump in my heart, dissolve away,” he told CNN.

On downtown Flushing’s Main Street, people hand out fliers offering help, for a fee, for the undocumented to secure drivers’ licenses. Alongside the street vendors hawking vegetables, undocumented migrants walk into buildings with employment agencies offering restaurant and sales jobs. This is what draws Chinese migrants toward enclaves like Flushing and Sunset Park, where immigrant networks, legal service centers, job markets and nonprofits form a vital support system.

For Chinese asylum seekers like Ye, there is a well-trodden route to residency in the US. Chinese nationals have the highest number of asylum claims granted  in the US compared to other nationalities, because their “pathway to claiming political asylum [for Chinese nationals] is more codified,” said Amy Hsin, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York, who specializes in immigration and social inequality. The US expanded asylum pathways for Chinese citizens in the past due to geopolitical events and policies, like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the one-child policy, she explained.

Recently, growing restrictions on freedoms in China and its stuttering economy have led to this new influx of disillusioned Chinese citizens. More than 37,000 Chinese citizens were picked up by law enforcement crossing illegally from Mexico in 2023, US government data shows. That’s up from around 3,800 people the year before, and many of them were headed to New York City, according to experts.

‘America is better’
On the fourth floor of an old mall, migrant workers walk into a legal service center. They say they have lost their passports, or had them confiscated, in the melee of voluntarily turning themselves in for asylum with the Customs and Border Protection. The office, which helps them in their asylum applications, also connects them with the Chinese Embassy to apply for new travel documents.

In the waiting room, migrants told CNN how videos on social media, providing detailed instructions on how to cross Central America to the US, inspired them to make the journey. They spoke of the socio-economic pressures back in China, made worse by pandemic restrictions and its lack of economic rebound, forcing them to leave the country.

The center’s owner, who declined to be named in this story because he does not have a license to practice law in the US, has helped more than 100 Chinese nationals since opening the office two years ago. The burden of proof for asylum claims in the US is high and the owner said many of his clients have struggled to provide concrete evidence of political and religious repression they faced in China. Many go on to protest against the Chinese government once in the US, freed from Chinese authorities and its censors, he said.

Dressed simply in jeans and a black jacket, Jiang Zhen said the sweeping crackdown on free speech, civil society and religion was suffocating him in China. He believes he was blacklisted for criticizing China’s government on social media sites, his accounts banned or suspended.

Poverty in rural China, like in his hometown in Hunan province, had become unbearable, with relatives and parents of friends “drinking pesticides, drowning themselves in rivers, or hanging themselves … especially when they are suffering from diseases like cancer and have no money for treatment,” he said, adding that the Chinese government ignores “the living conditions of the lower classes.”

CNN has reached to Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment about claims of political and religious repression, but they have yet to respond.

As he waits for his work permit, which can take up to 18 months to approve, the 33-year-old now works illegally cleaning dishes at a Cantonese restaurant in Queens. He earns $4,000 a month, slightly more than what he earned as a business owner in the coastal Chinese province of Guangdong.

Next to him, a woman in a pearl-colored puffer jacket, who asked to remain anonymous because she works illegally in the country, said the US was not what she had imagined. She joked that China’s infrastructure bests what she has seen in New York. “From movies I watched when I was younger, I remembered Chinatowns being bustling and beautiful,” she said. “But after coming here, I found that Chinatown is in a state of ​​disrepair. It’s broken and dirty. I was so surprised,” she said as the room burst out in laughter.

When asked why she has chosen to remain in the US, she replied: “Because the US is actually more powerful, despite sometimes the broken appearance,” she said. “I am not starving in China, but everyone wants a better life. Obviously, America is better.”

Anti-China measures
Both China and US authorities have been concerned with the uptick in migration to the southern border – but for entirely different reasons.

A Chinese government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to comment publicly, told CNN that they believed some new Chinese migrants are participating in violent anti-China demonstrations in the US to help with their asylum cases. The official pointed to clashes between anti-China protesters and pro-China supporters in San Francisco in November, when Chinese leader Xi Jinping was attending a forum in the city.

In the US, a record number of migrants at the southern border has been seized upon by Republicans who claim it as proof of the Biden administration’s impotence, pushing immigration control to a top election issue. While most migrants at the southern border hail from Latin American countries, some politicians have focused on Chinese migration as a security concern; Republican Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, claimed last May that some Chinese migrants at the border had military experience, according to his blog, though he did not offer evidence.

Wan Yanhai, a human rights activist based in New York, said the implication that the Chinese asylum seekers could be soldiers or spies was “discriminatory.”

There would be little reason for the Chinese government to embed spies among southern border arrivals, he pointed out, considering migrants are not the demographic that would gain access to state secrets in the US. “These migrants in the US are doing low-level jobs and don’t speak the language, so they can’t do this kind of work. … It’s impossible for them to be spies.”

But the rhetoric around the rise of undocumented Chinese migrants highlights growing tensions between the US and Chinese governments. Geopolitical and security concerns have led an increasingly hawkish Biden administration to unravel years of technological and economic integration with its chief rival in the Pacific.

But Jiang, the asylum seeker who believes he was blacklisted by Beijing, is unfazed by the growing intergovernmental tensions. “It’s not really anti-China, it’s anti-Communist Party. I’m also against the Communist Party, I don’t have a good impression of them either, right?”

‘Deportation can’t stop me from embracing freedom’
Wan, a prominent former HIV activist in China, had to leave the country in 2010 due to harassment by Chinese authorities, he says. He received permanent US residence a year later and has gone on to help Chinese migrants in Flushing.

Many of the new arrivals head to the enclave’s unlicensed hostels, he said. He worries that rising hostel prices – upwards of $20 per night – could lead to a rise in homelessness, especially for the low-income elderly population in Flushing.

Li Jiada lives in one of those hostels, sharing a cramped room with five other men, sparsely decorated except for a calendar hanging above his single bed.

Life has not been easy for the 26-year-old, soft-spoken former fashion photographer since he arrived in the US in January. He had spent three months in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center after failing an initial screening for asylum when he crossed the southern border. He was released this year pending deportation proceedings expected within the next year.

He initially struggled to find a job in New York. When he found one, he says, he was sexually harassed by a client and has since found a new role as a manicurist, earning $2,000 a month. His costs are higher than what he earns, but he says, “There’s no regret because coming here has given me more options.”

He is desperate to stay in the US and thinks Christianity, which he discovered while in detention, will save him from deportation. The Communist Party sees any large group outside its dominion as a threat, has banned the online sale of Bibles, and has arrested Christians for “inciting subversion of state power.”

“Maybe my only way forward is through Jesus,” he said. Li plans on filing a new asylum application based on his new-found religion.

Sitting in a Baptist church in Flushing, Li spoke about the stress of the looming deportation and thinks back about the first thing he did when he arrived in New York: seeing the Statue of Liberty, a sculpture that has become a symbol of hope for millions of immigrants before him.

“After the treacherous journey to get here, I needed to see the embodiment of my beliefs: democracy, freedom, equality, and rule of law,” he said. “The US has yet to accept me, but deportation can’t stop me from embracing freedom.”

The ethnic enclave has largely shielded the migrants CNN spoke to from a recent rise in anti-Asian crimes in the city. Still, Li thinks he may have been targeted for being Chinese: Someone threw a full can of soda at him as he waited for a train back to Flushing from Manhattan, he said. And like a true New Yorker, he gave the assailant a piece of his mind.

“At that moment, I felt like I could suddenly speak English fluently,” he joked. “My talent was unleashed, and I said: “What the f**k?”

WASHINGTON — The United States on Wednesday imposed visa restrictions on more than 250 members of the Nicaraguan government and levied sanctions on three Nicaraguan entities in retaliation for “repressive actions” and a failure to stem migrant smuggling through the Central American country.

Senior administration officials told reporters that the officials subject to visa restrictions included police and paramilitary officials, prosecutors, judges and public higher education officials.

At the same time, the Departments of State, Homeland Security, and the Treasury issued a joint alert to notify airlines and travel agents about the ways smuggling and human trafficking networks are exploiting legitimate transportation services to facilitate illegal migration to the United States through Nicaragua.

“Actions by the Nicaraguan government are of grave concern. President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo have put in place permissive-by-design migration policies,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

The Nicaraguan government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Increasingly migrants have been flying into Nicaragua and then heading north overland to the U.S.-Mexico border as some smugglers have promoted the route through social networks.

Many migrants in recent years have started their journeys in Brazil or other South American countries, but flying into Nicaragua avoids the often perilous journey through the jungle region known as the Darien Gap on the Colombia-Panama border.

The administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has struggled with record numbers of migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border and, as he runs for reelection in November, voters have increasingly said that immigration is a top concern.

Senior Biden administration officials told reporters on a Wednesday conference call that sanctions would be levied against a Russian training center operating in Managua since October 2017 that enabled anti-democratic behavior and repression.

A press release from the Treasury Department said Nicaragua was one of Russia’s “main partners” in Central America and the training center provided specialized courts to the Nicaraguan National Police (NNP), which the statement called “a repressive state apparatus, carrying out extrajudicial killings, using live ammunition against peaceful protests, and even participating in death squads.”

In addition, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on two gold companies it said were “government affiliated.”

Gold is Nicaragua’s top commodity export, the Treasury announcement said, and “this action aims to degrade the ability of the Ortega-Murillo regime to manipulate the sector and profit.” Reuters was not immediately able to reach the companies for comment

Migrant apprehensions on the border halved from December to March, according to U.S. government data, in part because of increased enforcement by Mexican authorities, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said.

When Donald Trump first ran for president in 2015, he promised that he would implement a process for deporting the 11 million residents of the United States who are here without authorization. There would be a “deportation force,” he said, one that leveraged local law enforcement to identify and expel undocumented immigrants. He offered words of praise for the deportation program implemented under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, an effort known by the racist name “Operation Wetback.”

Once Trump took office, no widespread deportation effort followed. He took a hard line on immigration, certainly, but fell short of the sort of widespread effort to uproot undocumented immigrants that he promised. His supporters seem not to have minded.

On the 2024 campaign trail, though, Trump has revisited the idea — thanks, in part, to the increase in immigrants to the United States under President Biden that has made the issue a centerpiece of campaign rhetoric. Speaking to Time magazine this year, Trump again promised that he would launch a massive deportation effort modeled on Eisenhower’s.

“I don’t believe this is sustainable for a country, what’s happening to us,” Trump said, “with probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million by the time Biden’s out. Twenty million people, many of them from jails, many of them from prisons, many of them from mental institutions.” (This claim is not substantiated.) He indicated he would be willing to deploy the military as part of the effort. Immigrants weren’t civilians, he insisted, but an invading force “like probably no country has ever seen before.”

The odds are good that this is simply Trump using exaggerated rhetoric to amplify his arguments about the Biden administration. But some of the extreme promises he made before 2016 ended up being Trump administration policy. So it’s worth considering just what a massive deportation program would look like — and how it would upend an enormous part of American society and the economy.

How many people would be affected?

Trump’s exaggerations begin with his assessment of how many people live in the country illegally.

It is hard to determine precisely how many people live here without authorization, though statistical and demographic methods allow us to approximate the answer. In 2021, for example, the Pew Research Center estimated that about 10.5 million undocumented immigrants live in the country.
A central point Trump wants to make here is that the number has ballooned under Biden. But this is often exaggerated by him and his allies. Yes, millions of people have been stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden took office (been “encountered” in the parlance). But about 2.5 million were quickly turned away under the auspices of Title 42, a policy implemented in response to the coronavirus pandemic. From January 2021 to January 2024, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) repatriated — that is, returned to their home countries — 4 million people. (That includes people who might have entered the United States illegally more than once, as was particularly common under Title 42.)

There are immigrants who escape into the United States without being detained. This group, called “got-aways” by immigration officials, was estimated by CBP at about 1.8 million for fiscal 2021 through 2023 (which ended in September). If the same ratio of encounters to “got-aways” holds in fiscal 2024 as did in 2022 and 2023, we can estimate that an additional 400,000 immigrants were not stopped at the border since Oct. 1. That is 2.2 million in total, including the small number who entered from October 2020 through December of that year.

Add up the Pew estimate from 2021, the number of got-aways and the number of immigrants released into the United States, and you land at 15.2 million people. But this number is too high for more than one reason.

One is that there is no way of knowing how many of that number remain in the country. Some immigrants arrive for seasonal work and may not stay over the long term.
Another is that many of those released into the country are allowed to be here. It has been increasingly common in recent years for immigrants to arrive in the United States and turn themselves over to law enforcement to seek legal asylum. If they pass an initial review of their situation, many are allowed to remain in the country until their cases are heard by immigration judges. This can take years, but, until a judge rejects or approves their claim, they may remain.

This bit of nuance is ignored in Trump’s rhetoric. So is the fact that many of those who live in the United States without authorization are parents, workers and people who have lived here for decades.

The Migration Policy Institute has estimates of the demographics of the country’s undocumented population as it stood in 2019. (The size of that population was about the same as it was in 2021.) From those estimates, we learn that:
A third of undocumented immigrants are from places other than Mexico and Central America, including Asia.
A fifth have been in the country for at least 20 years.
A third have children who are U.S. citizens.
Two-thirds — 6.8 million — were employed.
Three in 10 own homes.

This greatly complicates the situation. Would the government deport someone who owns a house? How would ownership of that house be resolved? What about parents of kids who are citizens? Will the Trump administration again embark on a policy of separating families?

In the abstract, Trump or his allies might simply say, sure. But how much political support would he and his party have over the long term should such a policy be implemented? How much support would there be for uprooting 4 percent of American workers — including a big chunk of the construction and recreation industries — for Trump to fulfill his campaign promise?

One challenge is that Trump’s allies ignore the nuances here. Earlier this month, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) appeared on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” where he endorsed Trump’s deportation policy.

“President Trump and I have talked about this at length,” Johnson said. “But the challenge we’ll have is finding them, Brian. As you know, they have been spread out everywhere.” The speaker called the prospect of finding undocumented immigrants the “greatest challenge of our generation.”

The Brian to whom he was referring was co-host Brian Kilmeade.

“Well, we know where the hotels are,” Kilmeade replied. “We could point you there and we can help in New York City.”
His colleague Ainsley Earhardt added that “the 16 million number that you said under Biden, that could be a lot higher.”

You can see the misinformation here: There aren’t “16 million under Biden” and those housed in hotels in New York, like others “spread out everywhere,” are often individuals awaiting asylum claims.

But Johnson is right in one sense. Figuring out how to rip 10 million to 15 million people out of the United States — 3 to 4 percent of the entire population — would be an enormous and expensive challenge.

What would broad deportations look like?

The Migration Policy Institute’s look at the undocumented population in 2019 included an assessment of the counties where those immigrants were estimated to live. Many are in or around large cities — not uncommon for immigrants to the United States because there are often existing communities from those immigrants’ home countries, making the transition easier.

Some of the places where the undocumented population was estimated to be highest were:
Los Angeles County, Calif.: 951,000
Harris County, Tex.: 481,000
Dallas County, Tex.: 293,000
Cook County, Ill.: 257,000
Orange County, Calif.: 236,000
Queens County, N.Y.: 235,000

Let’s consider Queens County for a second, Trump’s birthplace. Located just over the East River from Manhattan, it is home to about 2.3 million people. In other words, the estimated population of undocumented immigrants in Queens in 2019 was equal to 1 in 10 borough residents.
The Trump proposal is to uproot 10 percent of Queens, 8 percent of the Bronx, 5 percent of Manhattan, 3 percent of Staten Island and 6 percent of Brooklyn. Trump and Johnson want to detain 1 out of every 11 residents of Los Angeles and remove them from the country.

Again, Trump’s theoretical model is that program from the 1950s. Author Adam Goodman described it in his book “The Deportation Machine.”

“The campaign depended not only on hundreds of Border Patrol agents organized in special mobile task forces, but also on local and state authorities and law enforcement officers, farmers and ranchers, and the media,” Goodman wrote. He added that the campaign stoked and mobilized public fears that the immigrants “propagated disease, committed crimes, drained the tax base, and degraded the labor standards and living conditions of domestic workers.”
The operation started in California before extending to Texas and, later, Chicago. The California operation involved roadblocks and detentions in makeshift camps centered in school playgrounds. Those detained were sent by bus to the border and then into Mexico. In Texas, Goodman explained, “officials frequently crowded apprehended men, women, and children onto the flatbeds of trucks and packed them into buses,” which, one newspaper reported, necessitated that they then “sit for hours in the hot sun while the patrol unit completes a load.”

And that was the task down by the border.

“Whereas the service relied on hundreds of Border Patrol officers and the use of light planes to locate large numbers of immigrants and jeeps and buses to apprehend them in the southwestern border region,” Goodman wrote, “in Midwestern metropolitan areas a relatively small number of agents conducted investigations and relied on tips from citizens and informants to carry out piecemeal deportation campaigns.”

The program was successful in removing some immigrants from the country — but also successful in inculcating an environment of fear in which other immigrants left voluntarily. It is safe to say, given Trump’s track record, that stoking concerns about deportation to get immigrants to leave of their own accord could be part of his plan.
That program also solely focused on repatriating immigrants from Mexico. The composition of the undocumented population at this point is far more diverse, including more than 1.6 million immigrants who have come from Asia. It is, needless to say, much more difficult and expensive to deport someone to Asia than to Mexico.

In 2005, the Center for American Progress published a report looking at the cost of implementing a national program aimed at deporting every undocumented U.S. resident. That report estimated that the cost of such a program — targeting 10 million people — would run $41 billion a year for five years, assuming that a fifth of undocumented immigrants left of their own volition. That’s a total cost of about $321 billion in 2023 dollars. It’s more than a third of the entire budget request Biden submitted this year for the Defense Department.

It includes a lot of grim details, reinforcing the scale and severity of the proposal.

“166,647 additional beds would need to be constructed before mass deportations could begin,” the report states. “New prison beds cost a minimum of $14,000 per bed (and are likely substantially more expensive), resulting in a total one-time cost of $2.33 billion to create sufficient bed space.”

That’s assuming that each bed is used for eight immigrants a year, because, according to their data, it usually took more than 40 days for a deportation to occur.

Trump and his allies have lots of chest-thumping rhetoric about building military installations in the desert to house migrants or sending the National Guard on excursions into blue states to round up undocumented immigrants. The intent is to present the image of a president who abides no undocumented immigration, given the danger he suggests those immigrants present (both explicitly and implicitly).
But the scale and complexity defy that bravado. Imagine police going door-to-door in Queens, trying to determine whether the person with whom they are speaking is a citizen and, if not, whether that person is waiting for adjudication of their asylum claims or have U.S.-born kids. Imagine that person being arrested, put into a van, as the officer moves three buildings down the block or two floors up in the same apartment building. Imagine this happening in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Denver, Atlanta. Imagine the outcry on social media, from neighbors, from employers.
Perhaps there’s a reason Trump didn’t do this the first time around.

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) prepped his run for a fiercely contested Senate seat by bashing the incumbent for “abandoning the Democratic Party” and Arizonans, and standing in the way of expanding voting rights and abortion access with her support for the filibuster. Now, after Sinema decided not to seek reelection, Gallego says he would “love to have” avowed centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s endorsement, calling her “very well-liked” among her fellow independents.

For years, Gallego has vigorously championed a comprehensive immigration overhaul offering legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants. Now, Gallego also emphasizes urging President Biden to free up resources for Border Patrol and communities, saying the historic number of illegal crossings and the government’s struggle to manage it amounts to a “crisis.”

And when he faced a primary challenger for his seat in 2018, Gallego campaigned as a “real progressive,” and he belonged, for eight years, to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Now, Gallego is no longer a member of the group, and the word “progressive” does not appear in his ads or on his website.

“I want to make sure that whether you are from Prescott, PebbleCreek, Tucson — no matter where — that you know that your senator is there to fight for you whether you are Democrat, Republican or independent,” Gallego said at a town hall in a suburb west of Phoenix earlier this spring, drawing loud cheers from the crowd of about 300.
Running in a contest that could determine control of the Senate, Gallego, 44, has raced to the political middle in a state with strong moderate and independent streaks. Unlike Sinema and Sen. Mark Kelly, who won recent elections by running as centrist alternatives to Republicans aligned with Donald Trump, Gallego has a more recent left-leaning past that has complicated his pitch, strategists said.

“Ruben’s trying to follow in the mold of those others but the difference is, Ruben has a very left of center voting record and that, clearly, the Republicans are going to bring up in this election,” said Max Fose, a longtime Arizona Republican strategist who supported Sinema in her 2018 Senate bid.
Senate Democrats’ 51-49 majority is in peril this fall, and nonpartisan analysts see Arizona as a top GOP pickup opportunity. Gallego’s campaign will test whether Arizona Democrats’ blueprint in the Trump era can work against likely Republican nominee Kari Lake, 54, a former TV anchor they feel has given them a familiar opening by aligning closely with Trump and his views. Republicans are seeking to portray Gallego as a left-wing extremist out of step with the state. Adding to Gallego’s challenge is Biden’s unpopularity and anger over the administration’s border policies. The Phoenix area congressman has distanced himself from the top of the ticket and sought to focus attention on access to abortion, an issue that has put Lake on the defensive.

Gallego allies see a ripening opportunity, particularly with Sinema, a former Democrat who became an independent in 2022, not competing for many of the same voters he is courting. Lake, who lost the governor’s race two years ago, has run as a polarizing hard-right candidate in a state where longtime Republican Sen. John McCain was beloved for his reputation as a “maverick” who bucked his party at times. Gallego supporters believe he has a compelling personal story to tell as a Marine veteran and son of immigrants who has eschewed the prototypical liberal profile over the years. He has at times admonished the left for failing to connect with working class families and challenged them on issues such as military spending.

Gallego’s campaign has attracted national interest and he has been a prolific fundraiser, amassing a much larger war chest than Lake. Gallego on Monday made a major $19 million ad reservation for this fall, almost double what Lake plans to reserve.

The Democrat is venturing into conservative and far-flung areas of the state, and recently he hosted a watch party for a highly anticipated boxing match as part of an effort to engage Latino men. And he’s been rolling out more endorsements while traveling the state touting his support for abortion rights.

But not everyone is sold. Among them: Sinema, who suggested she does not see Gallego or Lake as sufficiently moderate.

“Candidates who campaign as righteous warriors for the edges of the political spectrum will not be productive in getting outcomes for the state of Arizona, period,” she said at a recent McCain Institute forum, when asked what advice she would give to her successor.

‘I’m not just a demonized person you hear about’

In an hour-long town hall and an interview with The Washington Post at a 55-plus retirement community here last month, Gallego vowed to court Republicans and independents and restore bipartisanship and civility in Washington. The state’s electorate is roughly split evenly among Republicans, Democrats and independents.
“We are setting up meetings with Republicans, calling and seeing who’s willing to talk to me, so you could sit down and meet me, so I’m not just a demonized person you hear about,” Gallego said.

It is common for candidates to tack to the center after primaries. But in Gallego’s case, the move has come even earlier, as he faces no competition for the Democratic nomination. His allies felt especially relieved when Sinema announced in March that she would not run again.
“We have reached out and, you know, we’ll be respectful. Obviously, this is a big change,” he said in the interview of Sinema. “But of course we’d love to work with her.”
Brent Fooks, 55, an independent voter, said he thinks Gallego and Lake are in their “mudslinging phase.” He said he has been turned off by Lake’s inflammatory rhetoric. “I would tend to go more toward the Gallego camp at this point,” said Fooks, a financial adviser.

Gallego has embraced some policy positions that show the balancing act he is undertaking. Asked about the war in the Middle East at his event, he said “Israel has a right to defend itself” after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and he wants to see a two-state solution where Palestinians “have a country of their own.” On immigration, he talked about a need to create more legal pathways for migrants so that Border Patrol “can really focus on those bad guys.” On abortion, he favors ending the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade, a move that put him at odds with Sinema and some other centrists.
Mary Evans, a lifelong Republican who has voted for Democrats in the last two presidential elections, said she was planning to support Gallego because, “I hate Trump.” Evans, a real estate agent who lives in the retirement community, said she was deeply frustrated with Democrats and Biden, in particular, for their handling of the border but that she viewed her vote in November as choosing the “lesser of two evils.”

Noticeably absent from Gallego’s pitch to voters was any mention of Biden. In the interview, Gallego said Biden needs to “take direct leadership of the situation” at the U.S.-Mexico border. He also directed his frustration at Republicans, including Lake, who opposed a bipartisan border bill Biden backed that would have enabled the president to effectively shut down the border when crossings are high, saying they would “rather have the political wedge than the actual solution.”

Biden allies pointed to an event focused on reproductive rights Gallego spoke at with Vice President Harris last month. In a statement, Biden’s campaign highlighted Lake’s close ties to Trump and slammed Republicans’ positions on abortion, health care and democracy, among other things. “It’s why they were defeated in 2020 and 2022 and why Democrats will beat them again,” said Josh Marcus-Blank, a Biden campaign spokesperson.

Personal attacks fly

Gallego has focused heavily on his biography: He’s the son of immigrant parents from Colombia and Mexico. He grew up in the Chicago area with three sisters, raised by a single mother on a secretary’s salary. He attended Harvard before joining the Marines and deploying to Iraq in 2005.

Lake and her allies have brought up his personal life in a negative context. She recently wrote on X that Gallego has “so little character that he walked out on his wife just days before she gave birth to his firstborn child.” Gallego and his ex-wife Kate Gallego, now the mayor of Phoenix, announced in December 2016 that they were divorcing. Their son was born in early 2017.

Gallego has spoken about his struggle with post-traumatic stress following his military deployment, saying it at times caused him to drink and smoke too much and put a strain on his marriage. Kate Gallego endorsed his candidacy late last year.

Lake and her surrogates have also been hammering Gallego for backing liberal causes such as Medicare-for-all and opposing funding for Trump’s proposed border wall. She often ties Gallego to Biden and what she calls the president’s “open border policies,” once posting a photo of Gallego greeting Biden after he stepped off Air Force One in a visit to Arizona last summer.

“The border is out of control and we need someone who’s going to listen to the people’s wishes and stop letting people come across the border. It’s just ridiculous what’s happening,” said John Dailey, 78, a Lake supporter in Sun City West.

Lake’s allies have sought to amplify her arguments about Gallego.

“She’s not running against an astronaut, Mark Kelly. She’s not running against Kyrsten Sinema. She’s running against a truly radical, far-left activist. He really is,” Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said at an event earlier this spring with Lake.
Gallego dismisses such criticism by pointing to bipartisan legislation he has worked on and by saying he’s talking to voters across the state to earn their vote and show that’s not who he is. He also emphasizes that Lake’s shifting stance on abortion and her position on other issues are out of step with Arizonans.

The Arizona Supreme Court last month cleared the way for a near-total abortion ban to go into effect, sparking outrage among abortion rights advocates. Later, state lawmakers voted to repeal the ban and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs signed it into law. The repeal does not take effect until 90 days after the legislature adjourns, which could lead to the ban taking effect on Sept. 26 for a short period of time. In the wake of the court decision, Lake called the ruling “out of step with Arizonans” after previously praising the 160-year-old Arizona law as “great.”
An atypical liberal profile

In some respects, Gallego has established a liberal-leaning voting record in his career as a state and federal legislator. He previously co-sponsored the bill to establish Medicare-for-all and has voted for legislation to grant D.C. statehood, strengthen voting rights and support efforts to combat climate change.

At the same time, Gallego has parted ways with the left. Gallego let his Congressional Progressive Caucus membership lapse over increased dues, his team said. In 2016, he backed Hillary Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president, calling her “the right choice for today’s progressive movement.”

In Washington, Gallego is known as a sharp-tongued lawmaker willing to criticize policies and politicians in both major parties. He’s used profane language to rip into Republicans, including in tweets about Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and the National Rifle Association after a deadly mass killing in Uvalde, Texas.

If he wins, Gallego would be Arizona’s first Latino senator. He has at times been a vocal critic of his party’s outreach to Latino voters, previously lambasting liberal activists trying to steer the party toward the use of “Latinx,” a label he has said he bans his office from using.

Gallego acknowledged he doesn’t have control over what Lake and her allies say about him — but he urged voters to hear him out.

“Listen to me. I’m going to go and talk and work with you,” he said.

Sen. Mike Lee has recently joined the chorus of right-wing voices warning that immigrants and noncitizens are registering to vote, which is why he signed on to proposed legislation requiring proof of citizenship as part of the voter registration process. However, Lee hasn’t produced any evidence to back up his claims.

The possibility of noncitizens casting a ballot is the latest immigration-related boogeyman employed by conservatives to raise doubt about the legitimacy of elections. Lee, along with other prominent Republicans, are invoking images of hordes of immigrants flooding over the southern U.S. border to tip elections toward Democrats. Former President Donald Trump is using the issue on the campaign trail, while Elon Musk has pushed the idea on social media, claiming, “They (Democrats) are importing voters.”

During a Sunday interview on Fox News, host Maria Bartoromo asked Lee about claims that the Biden administration was giving newly arrived immigrants voter registration materials.

Bartiromo: “Ken Paxton, the A.G. of Texas, last week told me that he thinks, when they cross the border, officials are giving them Social Security numbers, and they’re giving them voter registration sheets. What about that,” Bartiromo asked the senator. “Do you have any evidence of that?”

“Yes. So – well, yes, it’s happening all over the place,” Lee replied.

Lee continued the interview without citing evidence or specific examples. Sen. Lee’s office did not respond to questions from The Salt Lake Tribune.

Lee is the Senate sponsor of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which updates the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), more commonly referred to as the Motor Voter Act, to require anyone registered to vote in U.S. elections to provide proof of citizenship. Currently, people must only fill out a form swearing they are U.S. Citizens, but documentation is not required.

During a news conference unveiling the SAVE Act, House Speaker Mike Johnson similarly could not offer any evidence to support the claim that noncitizen voting was a crisis.

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable,” Johnson said.

In 2004, Arizona voters approved a ballot initiative requiring voters to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The Supreme Court struck down the Arizona law in 2013, ruling that NVRA pre-empted Arizona’s requirement.

“What that means is a person can fill out a form. As long as they check the right box and sign their name and are willing to lie, they can vote in federal elections even if they’re not citizens, and they couldn’t prove it because they’re not citizens,” Lee explained on Sunday.

In what is likely not a coincidence, Lee has jumped on the issue as a fundraising tool.

On Monday morning, Lee’s campaign sent out an email with “Illegal immigrants are being registered to vote” as its subject line. The email links to Lee’s fundraising website, which asks for donations to aid his “efforts to protect our elections.”

There’s very little evidence that Lee’s alleged scenario is happening, let alone in numbers significant enough to impact the outcome of an election.

In 2016, Trump claimed widespread illegal voting was the reason he lost the national popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by more than 3 million votes. Spurred by Trump’s claims, a Brennan Center for Justice study examined election data from 42 jurisdictions. Of the 23.5 million ballots in the study, they found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected, but not proven, noncitizen voting — just 0.0001% of votes cast.

Former Utah County Clerk Josh Daniels, who now leads the nonprofit group Trust Utah Elections, says claims that noncitizens are flocking to America to cast a ballot are nothing more than cynical fearmongering.

“This is complete nonsense and is a misconception that comes when people don’t understand the actual process,” Daniels said.

Daniels explains there are several safeguards to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote in the first place or to catch any that slip through. Every person who registers to vote in Utah has their citizenship status verified against the federal E-verify database, which determines whether a person is eligible for employment. Additionally, a Utah driver license complies with the Real ID Act, which also verifies citizenship status.

Daniels adds that it makes little sense for a noncitizen to register to vote because there are devastating legal consequences if caught.

“Under federal immigration laws, making a ‘false claim’ to citizenship, which can include a declaration of citizenship on a voter registration form, such persons can become legally deportable and barred from future entry into the United States,” he said. “Most immigrants and noncitizens would rather stay U.S. residents and workers than vote in an election once.”

The genesis of the current right-wing panic about fraudulent voting can be traced back to former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, who was reportedly circulating a memo about “the threat of noncitizen voting in 2024″ earlier this year. Lee and Mitchell worked together on the scheme to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Mitchell also represented Lee’s campaign in a 2017 campaign finance case and signed a letter touting Lee as a possible Supreme Court nominee.

DULZURA, Calif. — At dawn came a dozen men, women and children from Nepal. Following in the twilight was a cluster of families from Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, along with half a dozen Chinese men.
Behind them were men from India and couples from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan carrying infants.

Scattered migrants kept arriving at the top of a steep dirt road to surrender to U.S. border agents in order to claim asylum.

“I am finally here, in America,” Justin Agbobli, 30, who had traveled from Togo in West Africa, proclaimed in French. “Today is a dream come true!”

San Diego County has become the most popular spot for migrants illegally entering the United States, according to the latest government figures. With 37,370 arrests last month, it was the busiest of the Border Patrol’s nine sectors along the southern border for the first time since the 1990s.

Driving the numbers is a massive increase in people from countries that usually don’t account for much illegal immigration.

It has long been the case that the majority of migrants arriving along the 2,000-mile border come from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. But a dramatic shift has been underway along the 60-mile stretch that makes up the San Diego sector.

Between Oct. 1 and March 31, those four countries accounted for just 20% of the 185,469 apprehensions in the San Diego sector. The other 80% were arrests of people from China, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Turkey, India and a vast array of other faraway places.

The diversity here reflects a massive worldwide movement of people that has been attributed to a variety of factors, including continued economic fallout from the pandemic, rising political repression and increasing ease of international travel.

As to why San Diego has become the favored crossing spot on the U.S. border, experts point to a crackdown by Mexican authorities that has made it harder to reach Texas.

Migrants and the smugglers they hire have long sought out the path of least resistance.

That now appears to be San Diego.

On a recent morning in the tiny community of Dulzura, a 36-year-old industrial engineer from Turkey who had just crossed the border from Mexico would give only his first name, Melih.

“You might see me as an invader — and yes, you are right, in a sense, I am invading your country,” he said. “But I am coming to your country to commit no crime. This — crossing the border illegally — is the only crime I have ever committed in my entire life.”

He said he wanted to enter the country to work but was told there was a two-year wait at U.S. consulates in Turkey just to apply for a tourist visa. “Who can wait that long?” he asked before stubbing out a cigarette butt and heading uphill to join the line of some 100 migrants turning themselves in.

For much of the 1980s and ‘90s, San Diego was ground zero for immigration polemics.

“They keep coming,” intoned an inflammatory 1994 campaign ad for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson that included footage of dozens of migrant families charging up Interstate 5 just north of the border.

“Enough is enough,” Wilson declared at the end of the spot.

The furor about illegal immigration resulted in the Clinton administration’s signature Operation Gatekeeper, which militarized the border with a frenzy of fence-building, agent deployments and installations of sensors, lights and cameras.

Steel walls went up in places where the line once featured stands of repurposed metal sheets designed for makeshift military airstrips in Vietnam.

But more walls didn’t stop people from coming. Instead, the flow shifted east to Arizona and Texas.

Now, a quarter-century later, human traffic along the border is moving west.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott asserts that’s because of his actions — posting National Guard forces and state troopers along the Rio Grande and installing barbed wire and other barriers.

“Our stiff resistance is working,” Abbott wrote on X in February.

Experts said it is possible that talk about the Republican governor’s Operation Lone Star has steered some migrants away from Texas. Word spreads quickly on social media platforms where migrants share travel tips.

But a much bigger factor, experts said, is that Mexico — under pressure from the Biden administration to help curb illegal immigration — has clamped down on migrants hopping on freight trains bound for areas near Texas.

“Mexican authorities have put a lot of pressure on key migration routes to Texas, and that may be forcing people to try other routes further west,” said Cris Ramón, senior advisor on immigration for the Latino civil rights organization UnidosUS. ”Migration is a dynamic phenomenon, and people are going to adjust and find the circumstances where they have the best chance to reach the United States.”

Indeed, the total number of apprehensions along the entire border between Oct. 1 and March 31 — slightly exceeding 1 million — was nearly unchanged from the same period a year earlier. That’s because a 29% drop in the Texas sectors was counterbalanced by a 134% increase in the Tucson sector and a 69% rise in the San Diego sector.

Multibillion-dollar networks of smugglers quickly assess where enforcement pressure is most stringent and adapt. In Tijuana, so-called coyotes guide migrants to remote areas of eastern San Diego County, where border fencing is scant, or to gaps gouged in the metal wall near the giant port of entry in the U.S. border community of San Ysidro.

Migrants interviewed said smugglers had directed them to the Tijuana-San Diego corridor without explaining why — even though the trip here involves more than 1,000 miles additional travel compared with some points along the Rio Grande.

“The smugglers charged us $3,500 each from Ecuador — for me and my girlfriend — and I thought that was a pretty fair price,” said one 30-year-old who would give only his first name, Exar. “I know a lot of people paid a lot more.”

Like many migrants, he said he put his faith in the professionals, choosing smugglers who were highly recommended by compatriots.

He and his girlfriend flew from Ecuador to El Salvador, and from there traveled in various cars through Central America to Mexico, he said. Once in Tijuana, the smugglers led him and his group to a hole in the border fence.

A mechanical engineering student from a middle-class family, he said he left Ecuador after gangs made extortion demands on his father, who runs a soldering shop. Now he was hoping to reach the home of a brother in New Jersey.

“I understand why Biden and Trump want to stop immigration,” he said. “But it’s a little late for that, no?”

: :

The most dramatic increases in migrant apprehensions in the San Diego sector involve people from China. Between Oct. 1 and March 31, there were 23,890 arrests of Chinese.

That was 18 times the total during the same period a year earlier and accounted for nearly all Chinese migrants detained border-wide.

Increases in arrests were also substantial for other countries whose citizens previously accounted for relatively few illegal border crossings.

Ecuador: up 499% to 13,654.

Colombia: up 114% to 35,819.

Brazil: up 622% to 12,698.

Turkey: up 88% to 6,786.

India: up 331% to 6,560.

Many migrants interviewed had flown from Africa, Asia or Europe to South America and trekked north through the Darién Gap, a 60-mile stretch of dense rainforest between Colombia and Panama. Getting people across the gap has become big business in recent years, boosting its allure as a conduit to United States. Last year it drew more than 500,000 migrants.

Others avoided the Darién, flying from Colombia to Central America or directly to Mexico, then made their way to Tijuana, which has an extensive infrastructure that caters to migrants.

“Why do people come to Tijuana and San Diego? It’s very simple,” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, who heads the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego. “Because Tijuana is the border city best equipped to receive migrants, where there are more shelters, more hotels, a major airport, more coyotes, more business — all the good and the bad we have in Tijuana.”

Once they cross the border, most migrants these days don’t run from the Border Patrol. They seek out agents to give themselves up to claim asylum — and eventually have a chance at legal residency in the United States. Many are unaware that a Biden administration policy change last year means that people who cross illegally are presumed ineligible for asylum.

On a recent morning, more than 100 men from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America huddled near a campfire at a rough camp within view of passing traffic on Interstate 8 outside the California high-desert community of Jacumba Hot Springs, an hour’s drive east of San Diego. Border Patrol agents had swung by the camp at dawn and picked up parents with children, but not single men, the stranded migrants said.

Several Chinese men were irate about having to wait for hours in the blustery weather.

“Why don’t American police like Chinese?” asked one man, who gave his name as Long, 35, and said that he was an engineer back home in Guangdong province and that he sought freedom and economic betterment in the United States.

Finally, agents showed up and led the Chinese men, along with others, to a Border Patrol bus waiting to take them off to detention.

Many detainees are soon freed with court dates a year or more away to appear for immigration hearings.

Almost daily, white buses contracted by the Border Patrol drop off scores of migrants at a trolley station parking lot in San Ysidro. Many express surprise at having been released from custody so quickly after having crossed illegally into the United States.

“So this is California?” asked Hernán Torres, a 49-year-old former security guard from Colombia who was held for two days and planning to go to Denver to find work.

He surveyed the parking lot, where entrepreneurs speaking fast-paced Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic and other tongues were sizing up new arrivals, offering rides and other services. Money-changers bared wads of hundred-dollar bills.

The U.S. government was dispatching additional agents to the San Diego area in response to the recent increases in migrants arriving there, according to a senior Customs and Border Protection official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Mexican authorities were doing the same on their side of the border.

“Just like we’ve done in the past, when the cartels shift, we adjust our operations,” the official said.

Those efforts, he said, might eventually reduce migration in the San Diego sector. But he suggested that it was only a matter of time before new routes would emerge somewhere else.

“The cartels,” the official said, “are constantly trying to find ways to exploit and circumvent enforcement.”

Last week, the Social Security and Medicare Trustees released a doom-and-gloom report concerning the financial future of these cornerstone programs. The report’s only bright spot — that the U.S. may have pushed off insolvency by a single year — is little consolation as our country faces the triumvirate of an aging population, the lowest birthrate since the census has kept track and rising federal debt.
These generational realities call for solutions at scale. Renewing America’s commitment to thoughtful immigration policy is precisely the lifeline that Medicare and Social Security so desperately need. Welcoming more newcomers promises to replenish the American workforce and create a larger pool of contributors to the beleaguered systems vital to supporting older Americans.

While false xenophobic narratives around immigration suggest that our country is full, the reality is that immigration, far from being a drain on resources, would help ensure that Social Security and Medicare remain viable, sustainable programs. What nativists consistently miss is that immigrants offer direct economic and tax contributions, demographic rejuvenation and the health care workforce to adequately care for an aging population.
In terms of economic contributions, immigrants represent a diverse pool of talent and skills for our workforce, which in turn stimulates economic growth.
In fact, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, immigration will help bolster the U.S. economy by about $7 trillion over the next decade and generate approximately $1 trillion in federal tax dollars. Fiscal benefits are not limited to high-skilled immigrants on labor visas either; according to a new Department of Health and Human Services study, refugees and asylees alone made a net positive contribution of nearly $124 billion dollars to local, state, and federal tax coffers from 2005 to 2019.

Addressing labor shortages, which have resulted in 8.5 million vacancies, would also bolster the tax base that funds Medicare and Social Security. In fact, immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start businesses, thereby creating jobs, spurring innovation and strengthening our broader economy.
Additionally, immigrants directly contribute to both programs through payroll taxes, including undocumented immigrants who contribute billions of dollars to a benefits system they will likely never be eligible to access themselves.
With an aging population and native-born birth rates at an all-time low, immigration also offers much-needed demographic rejuvenation, which is essential for both Medicare and Social Security to survive. By welcoming more immigrants, we revitalize the workforce and support a larger pool of contributors to these programs.

Study after study has shown that immigrants tend to be younger, work for longer and boast higher birth rates, helping offset the current demographic imbalances our country grapples with.
Beyond funding for the social safety net, the U.S. also must address the inadequate supply of direct healthcare workers. According to government estimates, in less than a decade, the country could face a shortage of nearly 200,000 nurses and 124,000 physicians. Immigrants are essential to making the math work, with foreign-born workers already making outsized contributions among certain healthcare occupations, comprising 26 percent of physicians and surgeons and 40 percent of home health aides.
Especially in the wake of the exodus of healthcare workers during the pandemic, immigrants have a critical role to play in alleviating the staffing shortages every hospital and nursing home faces today.

According to a 2022 American Health Care Association survey, 61 percent of nursing home providers reported limiting new admissions due to staffing shortages. Immigrant healthcare workers are well positioned to fill these gaps, and in so doing they bring diverse cultural perspectives and language skills that can improve access to care and health outcomes for underserved communities as well.
While insolvency challenges are daunting, measured and strategic immigration solutions are readily available. Removing dependents and children from the numbers of employment-based immigrants who count toward visa caps, for example, would admit more people of working age. Other solutions include regularizing marginalized communities such as Dreamers and other undocumented workers and clearing bureaucratic backlogs that hamper our country’s ability to recruit talent in a timely manner.
Congress should also seek to expand immigration pathways for direct health care workers. One such possibility is a Brookings Institute proposal to create a dedicated visa category for healthcare workers, whose current labor pathway options are either capped, temporary or seasonal. Under the proposal, employers would petition for workers to come to the U.S. for three years, renewable for a second term, and allow these healthcare visa holders to eventually petition for permanent residency.

Amid this fiscal reckoning, reforming our immigration system is key to bringing Social Security and Medicare one serious step closer to sustainable solvency. But such immigration reforms will require real leadership rather than the political grandstanding that has become par for the course in Congress.

Lawmakers would be wise to consider voter sentiment when it comes to these programs; only 17 percent support raising the retirement age, while 65 percent of Americans think the U.S. should make it easier for anyone seeking a better life to enter legally.
It’s long past time for elected officials to recognize that our country’s competitive advantage lies in the enduring desire of people to build a future here. There is a price we pay for stubborn, knee-jerk opposition to newcomers, and unless policymakers take action, older Americans will be unfairly forced to bear that cost.

Arizona Republican lawmakers want to deport “Dreamers,” except perhaps one who at least is showing a moment of sanity.

Republican Sen. Ken Bennett this week single-handedly stalled the MAGA-backed “Secure the Border Act” that would criminalize border crossers and potentially target young immigrants known as “Dreamers.”

Bennett held his support out of concerns over what would happen to the immigrants brought as children to this country — and whom, by the way, the majority of Arizonans want to legalize, not deport.

Rep. Alexander Kolodin balked at Bennett telling him on X, formerly Twitter: “Senator, they have to go back.”

Kolodin makes the goal of this bill clear

Kolodin, who has slammed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as “undistinguished” and who the State Bar of Arizona placed on probation over election lawsuits, says that allowing “Dreamers” to stay “incentivizes more illegal immigration.”

“We already did more than most countries would do for them by educating them and providing in-state tuition. People come here all the time on educational/work visas and then have to return,” Kolodin said.

ELVIA DIAZ
MAGA wants to deport ‘Dreamers.’ Only 1 Arizona lawmaker can stop them
Opinion: MAGA lawmakers want Arizona’s young migrants ‘to go back.’ Only one Republican lawmaker may have the backbone to stop them.
Elvia Díaz
Arizona Republic

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Arizona Republican lawmakers want to deport “Dreamers,” except perhaps one who at least is showing a moment of sanity.

Republican Sen. Ken Bennett this week single-handedly stalled the MAGA-backed “Secure the Border Act” that would criminalize border crossers and potentially target young immigrants known as “Dreamers.”

Bennett held his support out of concerns over what would happen to the immigrants brought as children to this country — and whom, by the way, the majority of Arizonans want to legalize, not deport.

Rep. Alexander Kolodin balked at Bennett telling him on X, formerly Twitter: “Senator, they have to go back.”

Kolodin makes the goal of this bill clear

Rep. Alexander Kolodin on the House floor inside the House of Representatives in Phoenix on Jan. 24, 2024.
Kolodin, who has slammed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as “undistinguished” and who the State Bar of Arizona placed on probation over election lawsuits, says that allowing “Dreamers” to stay “incentivizes more illegal immigration.”

“We already did more than most countries would do for them by educating them and providing in-state tuition. People come here all the time on educational/work visas and then have to return,” Kolodin said.

The only good thing about his rant is that now Arizonans know the true intentions behind MAGA’s sweeping anti-immigrant proposal.

We weren’t fooled to think House Concurrent Resolution 2060, which Kolodin and others want to send to voters in November, is about securing the U.S.-Mexico border.

They want to go after all immigrants in Arizona. Some “Dreamers” are currently protected from deportation, but even they could be targets if their immigration status changes.

“Sending people back to a country other than their country of origin, that just doesn’t work,” Bennett said this week. “I think that’s critical.”

That makes me think Bennett isn’t entirely against deporting “Dreamers.”

It sounds like he simply wants to make sure they’re sent to where they came from — so, presumably, not just dumping them in Mexico, like many others have been under former President Trump and now President Biden.

Will Bennett stand up for ‘Dreamers?’

Who are these “Dreamers” that MAGA loves to hate just as much as asylum seekers? They are hundreds of thousands of immigrants with deep roots in the U.S.

Kolodin is right. They are an educated force, but not thanks to government handouts. They’re in every profession, including doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants and engineers. They’re essential workers in construction and landscaping, as well as cooks.

They’ve been in legal limbo for years since former President Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA program to protect them from deportation.

Most Americans and Arizonans, including Republicans, want to legalize “Dreamers,” except Kolodin and other extreme MAGA lawmakers who would rather see a brain drain and hurt the state’s labor force.

Perhaps Bennett is smart enough to see beyond his colleagues’ anti-immigrant sentiment they’re fueling just for the purpose to get elected and not what’s best for Arizona’s economy.

Perhaps Bennett is smart enough to heed the advice of the state’s most prominent business groups sounding the alarm against HCR 2060. He can single-handedly stop it in a closely split Senate — and that’s tremendous power he can use to serve Arizona.

The political wing of the largest Latino civil rights group endorsed President Biden Tuesday in Arizona, according to a press release.

“For Latino voters, a clear choice,” Janet Murguía, UnidosUS Action Fund president, said in a press conference Thursday. “With Biden, we can continue forward on a path to progress and a brighter future.”

“With [former President Trump,] we move backwards, to harmful and extreme policies and [an] economy that crushed our Latino families,” Murguía continued. “As a community and as a country, we can’t afford to go backwards.”

The group also endorsed Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) in his bid for the Senate this year. Gallego will likely face off against controversial former Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.

“This is an election we cannot afford to lose,” Murguía said at the press conference. “We must reelect Joe Biden and [Vice President Harris.] And we’re here because we know the president and vice president cannot fight these battles and continue their road to progress by themselves. They need elected officials who share the same values, and will work to find solutions in Congress.”

A New York Times/Siena College poll from last month found Biden at 50 percent support among Hispanics, with former President Trump at 41 percent. Biden’s campaign has said that they are doing as much as they can to expand their support among Hispanics.

Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison welcomed the endorsement from UnidosUS Action Fund in a post on the social media platform X Tuesday.

“Thank you @UnidosUSAFfor endorsing the Biden-Harris campaign!” Harrison’s post reads. “The incredible organizing power of your organization will help us reelect President @JoeBiden and Vice President @KamalaHarris and deliver more for the Latino community.”

Democrats have downplayed the political threat they face this year due to the huge surge of migrants across the southern border, but their recent actions show they are increasingly nervous about the political liability of the issue, which polls at the top of voters’ concerns.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is stepping up his messaging effort on border security, and he has told colleagues he plans to bring the bipartisan Senate border security deal back to the floor for a vote next week.

And he has also discussed breaking the legislation up into several components for vulnerable colleagues to introduce separately, according to sources familiar with the planning talks.

At the same time, Senate Democrats in tough races are putting pressure on the Biden administration to address the surge of hundred of thousands of migrants into the country, even if Congress doesn’t pass legislation.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the Senate Democrats’ most vulnerable incumbent, last week confronted Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin over what he called the “unacceptable” situation on the southern border.
He also became the first Senate Democrat to cosponsor the Laken Riley Act, which would require federal officials to apprehend and detain people living in the country illegally who commit certain crimes until they can be removed from the United States.

And Senate Democrats are calling for President Biden to take executive actions to secure the border, something they expect the White House to announce soon.

“It’s definitely going to be an important issue, and Democrats in swing states — our incumbents from Jacky Rosen to Jon Tester – are going to need to talk about their vote for the bipartisan border security bill. They’re going to be talking about the work they’ve done to support law enforcement,” said a Democratic strategist who has worked on several Senate races. Rosen is running for reelection in Nevada.

The strategist called Biden’s recent poll numbers in swing states a “disaster.”

The source cited the price of groceries, gas and Biden’s age as issues impacting voters’ views of him and the presidential race. But the source also cited border security as a major issue in swing states, especially for Democrats who need to outperform Biden in November.

“Democrats realize, on the border and immigration, you need to talk about that. You can’t just not talk about that. I’ll be interested in seeing what the Biden team does on executive actions. I think it can be helpful,” the strategist added.

New polling shows Biden trailing former President Trump in several battleground states, including two where border security and immigration are especially salient issues: Arizona and Nevada.

A New York Times/Siena College poll of more than 4,000 registered voters across six battleground states found Biden trailing in five of them: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, which is bad news for Senate Democratic candidates running in all of those states except for Georgia, which does not have a Senate race.

The poll found that voters in those battlegrounds cited immigration as the second-most important issue deciding their votes, behind only the economy and ahead of abortion.

Jon Ralston, a longtime commentator on Nevada politics and CEO and editor of the Nevada Independent, pointed out that immigration ranked second only to the economy as the top issue for Nevada voters.

“When you asked registered voters what one issue was most important in deciding your vote, immigration was second,” he said. “If the race is going to be close, and 10 percent are voting just on immigration — which is a stand-in word for ‘border’ in these polls — that could change the game. That could determine the race.

“Even though Nevada is not a border state, it’s always been an issue here because of the large number of undocumented workers in the state,” he added.

The New York Times poll showed Biden trailing Trump 50 percent to 38 percent in a head-to-head match-up in Nevada, but it showed Rosen with a slight lead over Republican candidate Sam Brown, 40 percent to 38 percent.
Ralston said a lot can change in the presidential race over the next five months and that it’s “inconceivable” that either candidate would win the purple state by double digits, but he said local Democrats are worried.

“The Democrats I talk to who know what’s going on are very worried. They think Biden’s behind in Nevada. They’re worried about what the Biden campaign is doing in Nevada to combat this,” he said.

There’s a frustration among some Senate Democrats that the Biden White House hasn’t been aggressive enough in dealing with the border.

Tester vented his frustration with Austin at a Senate hearing last week.

“Look, I’ve repeatedly called upon Secretary Mayorkas and President Biden and Congress to step up and fix what’s going on at the southern border. It’s not sustainable at all, and it’s unacceptable,” he told Austin sternly.

Tester previously confronted Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas at a hearing last month.
“The fact is the border needs to be fixed. And we need to step up as Congress, the administration needs to step up, you need to step up!” Tester said, his voice rising as he glared at the Cabinet official.

Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, said Senate Democrats are right to feel nervous about how border politics are playing in the 2024 election and urged Biden to pay more attention to the issue.

“I certainly hope they’re nervous. They need to be much more aggressive on the border,” he said. “There needs to be executive actions on the border, dealing with asylum and anything else that can convince voters that Biden’s top goal at the southern border is to make sure there’s order there.”
Biden administration officials, however, argue that there’s only so much they can do to stop migrants from entering the country without congressional action, because current law requires border officials to process asylum claims, which often take years to work their way through the courts.
But Kessler said Biden would help himself politically by making a second trip to the border to show that fixing the migrant crisis is a top priority.

“It’s something Democrats have been too reluctant to talk about because there’s a fear it may offend some in our base, and they have to throw that fear aside,” he said, arguing Biden can talk about border crossings dropping 40 percent since December and an increase in fentanyl confiscation.
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the Senate’s second-most vulnerable Democrat, is touting the passage of the FEND Off Fentanyl Act, which he co-sponsored and was signed into law as part of the foreign aid package.

He’s using that accomplishment to fend off attacks related to the border.

“Watch our fentanyl stuff at home,” he said. “People are thrilled we passed that bill, and they know that I was the lead sponsor and they know in Ohio that’s a big, big part of the issue.”

Reflecting the growing angst among Democrats, Schumer tackled the border security issue head-on last week, devoting time in three of his floor speeches to castigate Republicans for voting against the bipartisan border security deal in February, despite it having the support of the National Border Patrol Council.

“Democrats know that the situation at the border is unacceptable. We know that the status quo cannot continue,” he said Thursday. “But Democrats also know that fixing the border requires bipartisan legislation from Congress.”
Speaking at the weekly leadership press conference, Schumer called on Republicans to support the bill they rejected earlier this year, which was paired with a $95 billion emergency foreign aid package that included $61 billion for Ukraine.

“When Republicans first saw a bill, they said ‘Wow, this is a strong, tough bill. We like it.’ The minute Donald Trump said he wants chaos at the border for electoral purposes, they did 180 degrees and didn’t support a border bill supported by The Wall Street Journal editorial page, [the U.S.] Chamber of Commerce and the Border Patrol union,” Schumer said, standing next to a poster illustrating that 91 days had passed since Republicans blocked the bill.

A Republican senator who requested anonymity to discuss internal border politics said Democratic colleagues are feeling more pressure than Republicans on the issue, citing polling in battleground states.

“The polling numbers in battleground states, I’ve seen a lot of polling in battleground states … [show] the immigration issue isn’t just about immigration, it’s also about crime and the economy. Those things get all wrapped up into it. Independent voters are putting their finger on that and saying, ‘See, that border is open, and my wages aren’t going up and I’m not safe and my kids aren’t safe,’” the GOP senator.

“Democrats can read polls,” the senator added. “I’m sure they’re saying something to Schumer, ‘make a push at this.’ Because it’s hurting Biden.”

EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Immigration remains the top concern for American voters less than six months from the November general election, according to the latest Gallup poll.

It’s been the driving issue among a highly polarized electorate for the past few months and is unlikely to go away even after a winner is declared on election night. That’s according to immigration experts and stakeholders converging Tuesday in Houston for a forum sponsored by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“It has never happened in the history of Gallup that immigration is the main issue driving people to the polls for multiple months in a row. The second issue, the economy, isn’t even close. This is very much an immigration election, and the stakes could not be higher,” said Jeremy Robbins, executive director of the American Immigration Council.

Almost half of Republicans polled say they’re more concerned about increased immigration than the state of the economy, compared to only 8 percent of Democrats.

“It’s about fear, it’s about anxiety, frustration [….] and instability. Sometimes it’s about, ‘Hold on, why am I not hearing English when I go to the grocery store. This is America. Why am I not able to understand people in my own country?’” Robbins said. “Sometimes it’s about economics: ‘I feel really unstable in my job. I can’t even make ends meet, and now people are coming in and are going to compete against me?’”

This anxiety is not confined to white voters, but also immigrants who’ve been in the United States for a long time. Robbins said he recently spoke to a man originally from India upset at an influx of Afghans into his community.

“The idea of, ‘Why are they helping this person and not helping me?’ that I think, is the crux of what is driving immigration in this election. It’s like we feel immigration is happening to us without our control at a time that we feel unstable,” he said.

A March poll by the Pew Research Center shows 75% of Hispanics in the United States described the recent influx of migrants at the border as a “major problem” or a “crisis.” Almost as many Hispanics are critical of the way the U.S. government is handling the situation at the southern border, according to the Pew poll.

Jeremy Robbins, executive director of the American Immigration Council, speaks at an immigration forum sponsored by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Participants in the institute’s “The Future of Immigration in the 2024 Elections” workshop say a permanent solution to a broken immigration system isn’t likely to happen regardless of who wins in November.

Joe Biden might be reelected but continue to be crippled by a divided Congress. Trump might win and restore hardline measures at the border, forcing people to come in other ways. Either man will have to invest heavily in new asylum adjudicators and immigration judges given the backlog of 3.7 million pending claims in court and a docket of 5,000-plus cases per judge. A solution is years in the making.

Images of throngs of people crossing the southern border are being “weaponized” by some politicians to motivate the electorate, speakers said. Emotions are getting in the way of a rational debate on how to lawfully take in people fleeing oppression who could help an economy with unfilled jobs.

A group of migrants stand next to the border wall as a Border Patrol agent takes a head count in Eagle Pass, Texas, Saturday, May 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)
“If it’s an us-them (situation), if your community is just people who look like you and you feel unstable, immigration is going to be a really threatening thing,” Robbins said.

Baker Institute Center for the U.S. and Mexico Director Tony Payan said immigration reform has become a difficult goal in a Congress divided today and possibly in the future. But he said immigration has already changed the face of the country and will continue to do so.

Fertility rates among non-Hispanic white women are declining, the rate for African American women is flat and fertility among Latinas is high but “dropping very fast,” he said. In addition, the Baby Boom generation continues to exit the workforce and immigration is the only path to keep the population growing.

“It doesn’t mean we have to take in 100 million people from around the world, but there is room for a few million that can settle and revitalize” communities and the U.S. economy, Payan said.

El Paso Catholic Diocese Bishop Mark J. Seitz said the highly-charged debate has brought additional hardship for migrants crossing the border. That’s because Texas officials, frustrated over their perception of the Biden administration having caused the migrant surge and not doing much to abate it, have sent troops to patrol the border and directed its state police to arrest migrants for state crimes.

“Texas has become a laboratory for the most inhospitable and dehumanizing immigration policy. We are witnessing a new stage in the deadly militarization of our border with Mexico, a country we are not at war with,” Seitz said. “It is a country with which we share so many ties of history and culture and is vital to our state and national prosperity.”

The bishop worries Texas will eventually target migrants far from the border, especially if federal courts uphold the state’s SB4 immigration enforcement law. Amid this environment, Seitz urged people to go vote.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress are telling radically different stories about the biggest threats to the election system in the run-up to November.

Why it matters: Confidence in U.S. elections cratered among Republican voters after the 2020 election, and the theories being pushed by congressional conservatives could sow even more distrust.

But both parties are warning the 2024 election could be tampered with, a red flag after the last presidential election.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and top Trump allies spent last week trumpeting a bill that would prohibit noncitizens from voting in elections.

On the other side of the Capitol this week, the Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a hearing on the threats facing the 2024 election.

Zoom in: Republicans have continued to spread the conspiracy theory that noncitizen immigrants are influencing the outcomes of elections, with Johnson calling it “unprecedented and a clear and present danger.”

Noncitizens are already barred from voting in federal elections, but Johnson suggested — without evidence — “that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.”
There is no evidence that such voting has ever happened on a significant scale, and the penalties for a noncitizen immigrant voting in a federal election are severe.
Former President Trump has repeatedly blamed allegations of fraud in the 2020 election for his loss, but those claims have been debunked.

The other side: Senate Democrats will take an entirely different focus.

The Intel Committee, led by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), will focus on cyberthreats facing American election infrastructure and external disinformation campaigns.
Warner has said the U.S. is less prepared to protect elections this year than in 2020, and there is significant concern among lawmakers about the readiness of social media platforms to combat propaganda.

Democrats in the aftermath of the 2016 election blamed disinformation from the Russian government for influencing the outcome of the contest.

The Biden administration is proposing a new policy that it said would more quickly screen out immigrant arrivals eligible to remain in the country, but observers and those tasked with carrying out the change have suggested it would place additional burdens on a system already operating above its capacity.

The proposed rule would task asylum officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services with vetting migrants for public safety and national security concerns earlier in the process than currently takes place. Officers could deem migrants inadmissible during an initial “credible fear” screening interview—which typically occurs within days of a border crossing and while the individual is being detained—if they determine the applicants engaged in serious criminal activity, persecuted others or had terrorist involvement, among other factors.

“The proposed rule we have published today is yet another step in our ongoing efforts to ensure the safety of the American public by more quickly identifying and removing those individuals who present a security risk and have no legal basis to remain here,” Homeland Security Department Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said.

Asylum officers and immigration advocacy groups, however, are voicing concerns the change will have unintended consequences and bring new pressures on an already overstretched workforce. Making determinations on the statutory bars to entry in the asylum is a complex and burdensome process, which the groups warned could lead to improper decisions or fewer screenings altogether.

Under the current system, potential asylees do not face the “mandatory bar” questions until a subsequent interview or when they face a judge in the Justice Department’s immigration court system. Front-loading that process and giving more discretion to asylum officers who will generally not have the opportunity to discuss the case with lawyers or review evidence, the American Immigration Council said, will add opacity to an already non-transparent system.

Given the relatively few asylum officers—both the White House and lawmakers in both parties recently tried to revamp USCIS by surging the agency with more staff—AIC predicted the rule would further strain an already overwhelmed operation.

“This regulation would increase the risks of erroneous denials of asylum seekers while making the asylum process more inefficient and inconsistent,” AIC said.

Michael Knowles, a long-time asylum officer, president of the American Federation of Government Employees local that represents USCIS employees in the Washington area and a spokesperson for the larger council, said that while the impact cannot be fully assessed until a final rule is issued and implementation guidance is distributed, his members are already questioning how realistic it is to take on more responsibilities during initial screenings.

The process is meant to function like a triaging, Knowles said, in which officers determine which immigrants can proceed to the next step and which are not likely to succeed and therefore should face expedited removal. The mandatory bar questions, on the other hand, typically require submissions of evidence and detailed reviews.

“You’re asking us to do something that is very complex where the stakes are very high, in a screening situation where people are being held at temporary holding [centers],” Knowles said. “We’re under pressure to quickly make our screening determinations in 24 hours or 48 hours at the most. Now you’re adding more lines of inquiry. That’s inevitably going to mean a longer interview.”

The new rule follows one the Biden administration issued last year that required immigrants who entered U.S. territory after first traveling through another country to have either applied for asylum elsewhere during their travels, made an appointment at a port of entry through a DHS app or received parole through a limited program. Asylum officers, through their union, called that rule “contrary to the moral fabric of our nation” and said it amounted to a “stark reinterpretation” of their jobs.

The rule required asylum officers to conduct a more complete adjudication of a migrant’s application, which the union similarly said would create substantial additional burdens on those personnel and make the process more time-consuming.

Biden and a bipartisan coalition of senators recently sought to vastly increase the number of asylum offices, proposing as part of a larger package $4 billion for USCIS to hire more than 4,300 new staff for the positions. That would have more than quadrupled the asylum officers currently employed, but the bill foundered after former President Trump spoke out against it.

Knowles and AIC noted the mandatory bars weed out very few people each year applying for asylum. Frontloading the questions, they said, will create additional operational hurdles to clear without materially addressing the number of migrants seeking asylum.

“You’re creating a lot more work that’s not going to have a big impact,” Knowles said.

AIC noted in the first half of fiscal 2024, DHS released far more detained migrants with a notice to appear before an immigration judge than those whom it screened with a credible fear interview. The department’s resources already cannot handle the volume of asylum seekers, the group said, particularly in periods like December 2023 when the number of illegal crossings surged to an all-time high. Since January, migrant encounters by Border Patrol have fallen significantly.

DHS suggested the change would reduce the pressure on its resources, as the immigration courts—housed within Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review—are currently facing a backlog of more than 2 million cases. Rather than taking years for a case to wind through the system, DHS said asylum officers would be able to quickly flag those representing individuals clearly not eligible to remain in the U.S. It noted, however, that USCIS is still dealing with insufficient staffing.

“The administration again calls on Congress to pass needed reforms and provide DHS the resources and tools it needs to fully implement expedited processing of all individuals encountered at the border,” the department said.

Absent those resources, Knowles said, the new rule would create more pressure.

“We’re already understaffed and you’re having to do more steps in the procedure, which could slow it down,” he said.

Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said in their first days of detention migrants typically do not have access to legal counsel or time to prepare their case or an appeal.

“Ultimately to establish a fair and orderly process at the border,” Chen said, “Congress needs to provide the Department of Homeland Security with the resources to meet its mission and also ensure the truly vulnerable are not summarily denied protection without due process.”

AIC suggested DHS may be forced to simply screen fewer migrants crossing the border.

“When the U.S. government adds additional components to a screening interview, it decreases the possibility that someone will pass, but it also forces the asylum officer to take longer conducting and adjudicating the interview,” the group said, which “may decrease the number of interviews officers can conduct on the margin.”

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — The city of Buffalo on Tuesday marked the second anniversary of a racist mass shooting that killed 10 Black people with the dedication of a memorial space honoring the victims.

Anchoring the space outside the Tops supermarket targeted in the attack is a sculpture entitled “Unity,” which features purple metal pillars representing each person killed. Three gold pillars represent those who were wounded.

The sculpture by Buffalo artist Valeria Cray and her son, Hiram Cray, is part of the newly constructed 5/14 Tops Honor Space, a small park-like area with benches, pillars and gardens.

“It’s still so traumatic,” said Buffalo resident Lisa Kragbe as she sat on a bench in the Honor Space before a ceremony attended by city, state and federal officials. She said people still have trouble going into the store, which was renovated after the attack.

Payton Gendron, who is white, is serving a sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole after he pleaded guilty to state charges of murder and hate-motivated domestic terrorism. Gendron, who was 18 when he livestreamed the massacre after driving three hours from his home in Conklin, New York, could face the death penalty if convicted of pending federal hate crimes. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.

The Honor space also includes a pear tree gifted to Buffalo through the 9/11 Memorial & Museum’s Survivor Tree Seedling Program. Seedlings from a tree pulled from the World Trade Center rubble after 9/11, are sent to communities that embody the tree’s spirit.

A larger memorial for the victims is planned off-site.

Eight people were dead and 40 others were hospitalized after a bus carrying farm workers collided with a pickup truck and overturned early Tuesday in north central Florida, officials said.

The driver of the pickup, Bryan Maclean Howard, survived and was charged with eight counts of driving under the influence-manslaughter, said David Kerner, executive director of the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

“Our sympathies and prayers are with the families of the deceased,” Kerner said in a statement. “Consistent with our duties, the Florida Highway Patrol will conduct both a thorough and exhaustive traffic crash and criminal investigation.”

The deadly collision happened around 6:35 a.m. on a hilly and rain-slicked rural road about 80 miles north of Orlando, the highway patrol said.

The bus, a 2010 International, was heading west on State Road 40 when, “for unknown reasons,” a 2001 Ford Ranger “traveled toward the centerline” and the vehicles sideswiped each other, Highway Patrol Lt. Pat Riordan told reporters.

The bus, which was carrying about 50 people, barreled off the roadway, went through a fence, struck a tree and overturned in a field, Riordan said.

Forty of the bus passengers were hospitalized, Riordan said. At least eight of them were critically injured, according to the Marion County Fire Rescue service, which had initially reported that 53 people had been injured.

Riordan warned there was a “high probability” that the death count could rise because many of the injured were “in very serious condition.”

“At this point, we are conducting a massive traffic homicide investigation,” Riordan said.

The driver of the Ford pickup was also taken to the hospital with serious injuries, he said.

Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods told reporters over 30 ambulances were at the scene and described the victims as “hard-working individuals.” He said the rain and the slick road conditions may have been factors in the crash.

Meanwhile, Dominique O’Connor of the Farmworker Association of Florida said it was trying to help local authorities aid the victims and their families, most of whom speak only Spanish and are not from the area.

“These workers are all here on H-2A work visas,” O’Connor said.

The H-2A program allows certain U.S. employers to bring foreign nationals into the country to fill temporary agricultural jobs, O’Connor said.

In Orlando, the Mexican Consulate said on X that emergency telephone numbers are being made available for information about any Mexican people potentially involved in the crash or their family members.

The workers were headed to the family-owned Cannon Farms in Dunnellon, NBC affiliate WESH of Orlando reported, citing the highway patrol.

Cannon Farms announced on social media early Tuesday that it would be closed “out of respect to the losses and injuries endured early this morning in the accident that took place to the Olvera Trucking Harvesting Corp.”

“Please pray with us for the families and the loved ones involved in this tragic accident,” Cannon Farms said. “We appreciate your understanding at this difficult time.”

Calls to Cannon Farms went to a recorded message that said: “This is Cannon Farms. I just wanted to let everybody know that we are going to be closed due to a tragic accident. Please pray for the families of those involved and the losses of loved ones.”

Olvera Trucking did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ambulances took the injured to several local hospitals. And at the request of first responders, Marion County Public Schools used one of its buses to ferry some of the victims to hospitals.

AdventHealth Ocala said it was treating 16 patients: 12 in the main emergency department at AdventHealth Ocala and four at AdventHealth Timber Ridge ER, Dr. Rodrigo Torres, AdventHealth Ocala’s chief medical officer, said in a statement.

Two HCA Florida Healthcare facilities in Ocala were also treating patients: seven in critical condition and two stable at HCA Florida Ocala Hospital and one stable at HCA Florida West Marion Hospital.

TUCSON, Ariz. (13 News) – A much-anticipated vote of House Concurrent Resolution 2060, also known as the Secure the Border Act, did not happen because Republicans did not have enough votes to pass it.

There is a very narrow margin for the Republicans in the state legislature. They cannot lose a single vote to pass bills and on Tuesday, they lost two.

The first was District 1′s Ken Bennett who said he had concerns about the language of the bill. And the second is Tucson Republican Justine Wadsack, who was absent.

Without enough votes, the chamber recessed until May 22, when they will likely try again. That is, if they can change the language to suit Bennett.

“There are some things that if we don’t get it we are not going to vote for it,” Bennett told a gaggle of reporters who surrounded him following the vote to adjourn. “Some of the things are important enough my vote is contingent on that.”

HCR 2060 would give local police the power to arrest someone if they suspect they are in the country illegally. It would also let the state to deport them and not even to their country of origin, which is one of Bennett’s concerns.

Another is racial profiling, like the “Show Me Your Papers” bill, SB 1070, which passed 14 years ago and was mostly struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

This has caused concerns that police will stop brown-skinned people without probable cause.

Although supportive of law enforcement, Bennett still has some concerns about that.

Then there’s the cost of enforcement and implementation which some estimate could be as high as $325 million a year. He’s got concerns about that too.

Some groups and organizations believe the bill could target DACA recipients which is another concern for the Republican lawmaker.

The body recessed for eight days when they will come back to try again.

Even if they pass it, it must still go to the House for approval before it can get on the ballot and that is not a guarantee.

Two years after a racist gunman massacred 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket in a Black neighborhood, the conspiracy theory that motivated him has become mainstream within the Republican Party.

The “great replacement theory” — a claim espoused by white nationalists that nonwhite immigration is part of a liberal (often Jewish-led) plot to overthrow the American way of life — had been linked to multiple mass shooters before the Buffalo shooting at Tops Supermarket on May 14, 2022. Donald Trump (no stranger to anti-immigrant conspiracies) helped to popularize great replacement rhetoric years before the Buffalo shooting — polling data around the time of the shooting indicated that a majority of Trump’s 2020 voters believe it.

And Trump has only ratcheted up that rhetoric since then. It’s typical today to hear MAGA Republicans spewing the toxic bigotry that forms the basis of the great replacement theory, if not touting the conspiracy by name.

Trump, for example, claims that the Biden administration’s immigration policies are part of a “conspiracy to overthrow the government.” He, along with House Speaker Mike Johnson, have put the replacement theory at the center of the Republican agenda through baseless allegations that undocumented immigrants might illegally sway federal elections. That Trump is making such claims after pushing Republicans not to pass strict immigration reforms underscores his intent to use immigration to sow fear among voters.

“Replacement theory is real,” Trump-loving Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Scott Perry told fellow lawmakers last week, in audio unearthed by CNN. Other Republicans have been only slightly less overt in promoting the conspiracy theory.

Nearly every Republican member of the House, for example, voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who is Jewish, over nonsensical accusations that he and the Biden administration were deliberately allowing an “invasion” of immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. Multiple GOP governors have used similar allegations of a liberal-aligned immigrant “invasion” to justify their own anti-immigrant crackdowns — some of which usurp federal authority, a tactic that had right-wing extremists clamoring for civil war.

Two years after one of the replacement theory’s many adherents gunned down innocent people in a Black neighborhood — one of several acts of violence it has inspired — Republicans are still using it to incite racist fury among their followers.

Here they go again.

Six months before election day, for the third straight presidential contest, Donald Trump and his Republican lickspittles are sounding alarms about virtually nonexistent voting fraud, laying the groundwork to claim that he wuz robbed should he lose to President Biden.

Trump has refused in recent interviews to commit to accepting the results in November; since the sore loser still doesn’t concede his 2020 defeat, his antidemocratic perfidy about 2024 doesn’t surprise. Neither do the echoes from his servile party, especially the Republicans vying to be his running mate. Lately, their dodges of reporters’ questions about whether they’d honor the outcome are nothing short of cringeworthy.

And Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson (R-La.), after huddling with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on the topic, is seeking to ram through the House a bill forcing anyone registering to vote to provide documentary proof of citizenship beyond driver’s licenses or Social Security cards, to prevent noncitizens from voting — something that almost never occurs and is already a federal crime.

Policy isn’t the point, however; politics is. This gambit is a two-fer for firing up Republican voters: It plays to their anti-immigrant fervor and election fraud myths.

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” Johnson lied at a news conference Wednesday at the Capitol steps. “But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.”

Because it doesn’t exist, certainly not on the scale that Johnson, Trump and other Republicans claim. Repeated studies, including last year in Arizona, show that examples of noncitizens trying to vote are infinitesimal, and even those few are mostly prevented from actually registering or casting ballots.

Here’s how I would like to make America great again: By getting Republicans to stop lying about fraud, stop legislating unnecessary voting restrictions and restore what had been a bipartisan consensus — that our elections are free and fair, a model for the world. The 2020 election that Trump still insists was stolen from him? A council of his own Homeland Security Department declared it “the most secure in American history.”

Before Trump, no one had to ask candidates whether they’d accept the results of an election. Of all Trump’s shattered norms, his refusal to commit to that bedrock principle is perhaps the most corrosive to our democratic foundations.

“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results,” Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this month, before another MAGA rally where he falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” When a Time magazine reporter asked if he expected violence after the 2024 election, Trump replied matter-of-factly, “If we don’t win, you know, it depends.”

In other words, “If I win, I’ll accept the results.” And, “If I lose, you might get hurt.” As Biden says, most recently on CNN on Wednesday, “You can’t only love your country when you’re winning.”

Even when Trump won in 2016, thanks to a majority in the electoral college, he cried fraud. Stung that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots, he concocted the lie that 3 million to 5 million immigrants in the country illegally had voted for her. Trump’s alliance with the House speaker against all-but-nonexistent voting by noncitizens has the added benefit, for him, of fortifying that falsehood.

Trashing elections — and specifically, declining to pledge support for the results — comes naturally to Trump. But for his toadies, the stance is awkward, to say the least.

The once-respected Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina last week embarrassingly dodged the question of whether he’d accept the outcome of the 2024 vote more than a half-dozen times on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” When host Kristen Welker persisted in seeking a simple yes or no, Scott peevishly objected, “This is why so many Americans believe that NBC is an extension of the Democrat Party.” (Scott, like many Republican trolls, childishly won’t use the opposition’s rightful name: Democratic Party.)

Among others aching to be Trump’s vice presidential nominee, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum similarly sidestepped the question on CNN’s “State of the Union.” And Rep. Elise Stefanik, a House Republican leader from New York, refused to say whether she’d vote in Congress to certify 2024 results. “We’ll see if this is a legal and valid election,” she told Welker.

In February, Trump favorite Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio lashed out at host George Stephanopoulos on ABC News’ “This Week” for asking about the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol and finally conceded that if he’d been vice president, he wouldn’t have certified Biden’s election afterward as former Vice President Mike Pence did. Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida wouldn’t commit to Axios that, if he’s Trump’s vice president, he’d certify the 2028 presidential votes if a Democrat wins.

What a sorry signal to the rest of the world when prominent politicians — and, really, their entire party — won’t acknowledge the proven integrity of U.S. elections.

If Democrats are stealing elections, how do these Republicans account for their own victories? How is it that Democrats allowed Republicans to capture control of the House in 2022?

Well, Republicans now seem to have their answer: It’s because Democrats hadn’t yet allowed enough undocumented migrants into the country to vote illegally!

“That is the design, I think, of why they opened the border,” Johnson said on CNBC, mimicking Trump’s rally rhetoric. “To turn them into voters.”

That just ain’t so, and Johnson knows it — I give him that much credit. Noncitizens aren’t voting. U.S. elections aren’t rigged. Voter fraud is vanishingly rare. Republicans who tell you differently are lying.

And we all know, intuitively, why.

Fear of uncontrolled immigration is upsetting the political landscape in the run-up to the presidential election.

At a rally in December, former president Donald Trump went as far as to say that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Americans’ mistrust of new immigrants is hardly new. In fact, it exhibits a striking resemblance to the prevailing fears 100 years ago.

The country might soon need to “station a soldier every hundred yards on our borders to keep out the hordes,” argued an article in Wisconsin in April of 1924.

Treating Japan in the same way as “white nations,” an Illinois newspaper cautioned in May of 1924, could allow Japanese immigrants to own land and seek the “rights given white immigrants.”

“America,” wrote James J. Davis, the secretary of labor, in the New York Times in February of 1924, should not be “a conglomeration of racial groups, each advocating a different set of ideas and ideals according to their bringing up, but a homogeneous race.”

“I think that we have sufficient stock in America now for us to shut the door.”
That sounds like Donald Trump, right? Maybe on one of his campaign stops? It certainly fits the mood of the country. This year, immigration became voters’ “most important problem” in Gallup polling for the first time since Central Americans flocked to the border in 2019. More than half of Americans perceive immigrants crossing the border illegally as a “critical threat.”
Yet the sentiment expressed above is almost exactly 100 years old. It was uttered by Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith, a South Carolina Democrat, on April 9, 1924. And it helped set the stage for a historic change in U.S. immigration law, which imposed strict national quotas for newcomers that would shape the United States’ ethnic makeup for decades to come.
Immigration was perceived as a problem a century ago, too. Large numbers of migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe flocked to the United States during the first two decades of the 20th century, sparking a public outcry over unfamiliar intruders who lacked the Northern and Western European blood of previous migrant cohorts.
On May 15, 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which would constrain immigration into the United States to preserve, in Smith’s words, America’s “pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock.”
“It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries,” Smith continued, speaking of America not 40 years after the Statue of Liberty was erected in New York harbor, with its open arms for all humankind. Immigration, Smith noted, should be shaped “to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation in her progress and in her power.”
The act set the rules of who’s in and who’s out. Here is what happened:

In the 1800s, most immigrants arriving in the United States came from Western and Northern Europe. By the early 1900s, that flow changed to Eastern and Southern European countries, such as Italy, Russia and Hungary.

The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act established narrow national quotas. Immigration from Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe was slashed to a trickle.

Western and Northern European countries such as Germany, Britain and Ireland were given the largest allowances.

The act did not set quotas for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Mexico, and countries in the Caribbean and South America.

The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 undid the national quotas, and immigration surged afterward.

Despite continued attempts to preserve the nation’s White European identity, immigrants today come from a diverse range of nations, mostly in the Global South.

Fast forward 100 years and the United States no longer has quotas. But it still has not landed on an immigration policy it can live with. Trump asks why the United States can’t take in immigrants only from “nice countries, you know, like Denmark, Switzerland,” instead of “countries that are a disaster.” President Biden, who not even four years ago wanted to grant citizenship to millions of unauthorized immigrants, today wants to “shut down the border right now.”
All the while, desperate immigrants from around the world keep fleeing poverty, repression and violence, launching themselves into the most perilous journey of their lives to reach the United States.

The public conversation over immigration that has raged at least since the days of the 1924 Johnson-Reed law can explain Washington’s policy failure: There is no way America can reconcile the sentiments embodied by the Statue of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor,” etc. — with its deep-seated fear that immigrants will reshape its ethnic makeup, its identity and the balance of political power.
Try as they might, policymakers have always been unable to protect the White America they wanted to preserve. Today’s “melting pot” was built largely with policies that didn’t work. Millions upon millions of migrants have overcome what obstacles the United States has tried to put in their way.

Israel Zangwill’s play “The Melting Pot” — which opened at the Columbia Theatre in D.C. on Oct. 5, 1908 — has a narrow understanding of diversity by current standards. The play was an ersatz “Romeo and Juliet,” featuring a Jewish Russian immigrant and a Christian Russian immigrant. But it carried a lofty message. “Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians — into the crucible with you all!” trumpets David Quixano, the main character. “God is making the American.”
Americans, however, were already uncomfortable with that fluid sense of identity. In 1910, two years after the debut of Zangwill’s play, geneticist Charles Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. It provided the intellectual grounding for America’s increasingly overt xenophobia.

In “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics,” Davenport wrote that Italians had a “tendency to crimes of personal violence,” that Jews were prone to “intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest,” and that letting more of them in would make the American population “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial,” as well as “more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality.”
Harry Laughlin, another Cold Spring Harbor researcher, told members of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee in 1922 that these new immigrants brought “inferior mental and social qualities” that couldn’t be expected “to raise above, or even to approximate,” those of Americans descended from earlier, Northern and Western European stock.
The Johnson-Reed Act wasn’t the first piece of legislation to protect the bloodstream from the outside world. That would have been the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which kept Chinese migrants out for six decades. In general, though, immigration law before World War I excluded people based on income and education, as well as physical and moral qualities — not on ethnicity and its proxy, nation of origin.
In 1907, “imbeciles, feeble minded persons, unaccompanied children under 17 years of age” and those “mentally or physically defective” were put on the excluded list, alongside women coming for “prostitution or for any other immoral purpose.” The Immigration Act of 1917 tried to limit immigration to the literate.

But the large number of migrants arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe since the turn of the 20th century refocused the national debate. In 1907, Congress established the Dillingham Commission, which would reach for arguments from eugenics to recommend choosing migrants to maintain existing American bloodlines via “the limitation of the number of each race arriving each year” to a percentage of those living in the United States years before. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 did just that, establishing the first specific national quotas.
In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act completed the project, reshaping the nation’s identity over the next four decades. It set an overall ceiling of 165,000 immigrants per year, about 20 percent of the average before World War I, carefully allotting quotas for preferred bloodstreams. Japanese people were completely excluded, as were Chinese people. Elsewhere, the act established national quotas equivalent to 2 percent of citizens from each country recorded in the 1890 U.S. census. Germans received 51,227 slots; Greeks just 100. Nearly 160,000 Italians had entered the United States every year in the first two decades of the century. Their quota was set at less than 4,000.

And, so, the melting pot was purified — and emptied: Two years after the Johnson-Reed Act, sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild published “The Melting Pot Mistake,” a reiteration of the racial logic that undergirded all the new restrictions. By 1970, immigrants made up less than 5 percent of the population, down from nearly 15 percent in 1910.
There can be “no doubt that if America is to remain a stable nation it must continue to be a white man’s country for an indefinite period to come,” Fairchild wrote. “An exclusion policy toward all non-white groups is wholly defensible in theory and practice, however questionable may have been the immediate means by which this policy has been put into effect at successive periods in our history.”
And yet perhaps the most important lesson to flow from this moment is that the levee didn’t hold. Today, immigrants are back at 14 percent of the population. And despite the repeated efforts over the decades to preserve the ethnic purity proposed in Johnson-Reed, the pot filled up with undesirables again. Migrants from Europe accounted for three-quarters of the foreign born in 1960, but only 10 percent in 2022.
The Statue of Liberty is arguably the nation’s most prominent symbol, representing America as a land of opportunity and refuge. But the nation’s tolerance of outsiders has mostly been shaped by baser instincts, a tug of war between the hunger for foreign labor to feed a galloping economy and the fear of how the newcomers might change what it means to be American.

Immigration restrictions relax when the immigrant population is comparatively small and jobs plentiful, and they tighten when the foreign footprint increases and jobs get relatively scarce. Muzzafar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute points out that even recent migrants turn against newer cohorts, fearful that they may take their jobs and transform their communities.
Fifteen percent, Mr. Chishti suggests, might be the tipping point when the uneasy equilibrium tips decidedly against newcomers. Foreign-born people amounted to about 15 percent of the population when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and again when the Johnson-Reed Act was signed into law.

In the 1960s, when the foreign-born share was dropping to about 5 percent of the population, however, other considerations became more important. In 1965, the quotas established four decades earlier were finally disowned.
Their demise was, in part, a barefaced attempt to woo the politically influential voting bloc of Italian Americans, who had a hard time bringing their relatives to the United States under the 1924 limits. There was a foreign policy motivation, too: The quotas arguably undermined the international position of the United States, emerging then as a leader of the postwar order in a decolonizing world.
The story Americans most like to hear is that the end of the quotas was a natural outcome of the civil rights movement, in tension with the race-based preferences implicit in the immigration law. “Everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated discrimination based on one’s place of birth,” Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said in 1964. “Yet this system is still the foundation of our immigration law.”
But the most interesting aspect of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which did away with the quotas, lies in what it did not try to change. Though the new immigration law removed quotas by nationality, it did not abandon the project of protecting the predominant European bloodstream from inferior new strains. It just changed the instrument: It replaced national quotas with family ties.
Rep. Michael Feighan, an Ohio Democrat who chaired the House subcommittee on immigration, ditched the original idea of replacing the nationality quotas with preferences for immigrants with valuable skills. In their place, he wrote in preferences for the family members of current residents, which ensured new arrivals remained European and White.
It was paramount to preserve America as it was. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who managed passage of Hart-Celler through the Senate, promised his fellow Americans that the new legislation “will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.”

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” President Lyndon B. Johnson claimed on Oct. 3, 1965, as he signed the Hart-Celler Act into law at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”
That didn’t quite work out as planned. Migrants allowed in under Hart-Celler have ushered in an America that looks very different from the one Johnson addressed. Half of the foreign born today come from Latin America; about 3 in 10 from Asia. Fewer than 6 in 10 Americans today are White and not of Hispanic origin, down from nearly 9 in 10 in 1965. Hispanics account for about one-fifth of the population. African Americans make up nearly 14 percent; Asian Americans just over 6 percent.

And some of the old arguments are back. In 2017, the Harvard economist George J. Borjas published a tome about foreigners’ impact on the United States, in which he updated the debate over migrant quality to the post-1965 era: Newer cohorts, mostly from Latin America and other countries in the Global South were, he said, worse than earlier migrants of European stock. “Imagine that immigrants do carry some baggage with them,” he wrote. “That baggage, when unloaded in the new environment, dilutes some of the North’s productive edge.”
That the Hart-Celler law did, in fact, drastically change the nature of the United States is arguably the single most powerful reason that U.S. immigration politics have again taken a dark, xenophobic turn. But even as arguments from eugenics are getting a new moment in the sun to justify new rounds of draconian immigration restrictions, the six decades since 1965 suggest the project to preserve a White European America has already lost.

What went wrong? Much of Europe got rich, and this dramatically reduced its citizens’ incentive to move to the United States. Instead, immigrants from poorer reaches of the planet — from Asia but predominantly from Latin America — took the opportunity to invite their relatives into the land of opportunity.
As usual, the U.S. economy’s appetite for foreign labor played a large role. Mexicans, like people from across the Americas, had been mostly ignored by immigration law. They were not subject to the 1924 quotas, perhaps because there weren’t that many of them coming into the United States or, perhaps, because their labor was needed in the Southwest — especially during the world wars.
Mexicans suffered periodic backlashes, such as when the Hoover administration figured that kicking out millions of Mexicans and Mexican-looking Americans was a smart political move in response to the Great Depression, or when President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched “Operation Wetback,” a mass deportation effort created ostensibly to raise wages in the South.
In any event, the first quota for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere as a whole came with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Nonetheless, the story of immigration after that was largely a Mexican affair. By 2000, Mexicans accounted for 30 percent of the foreign-born population, up from 6 percent 40 years earlier.
Unsurprisingly, the zeitgeist again took to worrying about the pollution of the American spirit. Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington fretted that “the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages.”
And still, the U.S. political system proved powerless to stem the tide. U.S. economic interests — and the draw they exerted on immigrants from Mexico and other unstable economies south of the border — overpowered the ancestral fears.

The last major shot at immigration reform passed in Congress, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, was based on a supposed grand bargain, which included offering legal status to several million unauthorized immigrants, bigger guest-worker programs to sate employers’ demands for labor and a clampdown on illegal work that came with a penalty on employers who hired unauthorized workers.
Employers, of course, quickly found a workaround. Unauthorized migration from Mexico surged, and the mass legalization opened the door to family-based chain migration on a large scale, as millions of newly legalized Mexican immigrants brought their family members into the country. In 1980, there were 2.2 million Mexican immigrants in the United States. By 2022, there were 11 million.

Migration today, again, has taken a new turn. Migrants are no longer mostly single Mexicans crossing the border surreptitiously to melt into the U.S. labor force. They are families, and they come from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Ecuador, China and India. Mexicans accounted for fewer than a quarter of migrant encounters with U.S. agents along the border in the first half of fiscal 2024.
The most explosive difference is that immigration today is much more visible than it has possibly ever been. Immigrants don’t try to squeeze across the border undetected. They cross it without permission, turn themselves in and ask for asylum, overwhelming immigration courts and perpetuating the image of a border out of control.
Americans’ sense of threat might have more to do with the chaos at the border than with immigration itself. Still, the sense of foreboding draws from that same old well of fear. That fear is today arguably more acute than when ethnic quotas were written into U.S. immigration law in 1924. Because today, the White, Anglo-Saxon Americans who believe this nation to be their birthright are truly under demographic siege.
Twenty years from now, White, non-Hispanic Americans will slip below 50 percent of the population and become just another, albeit big, minority. For Trump’s electoral base of older, White rural voters, the prospect of non-Whites acquiring power to challenge their status as embodiments of American identity amounts to an existential menace that may justify radical action.
Immigration has re-engineered U.S. politics. Non-White voters account for some 40 percent of Democrats. Eighty-one percent of Republican voters, by contrast, are both White and not Hispanic. The nation’s polarized politics have become, in some nontrivial sense, a proxy for a conflict between different interpretations of what it means to be American.

The renewed backlash against immigration has little to offer the American project, though. Closing the door to new Americans would be hardly desirable, a blow to one of the nation’s greatest sources of dynamism. Raw data confirms how immigrants are adding to the nation’s economic growth, even while helping keep a lid on inflation.
Anyway, that horse left the stable. The United States is full of immigrants from, in Trump’s memorable words, “s—hole countries.” The project to set this in reverse is a fool’s errand. The 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration law might have succeeded in curtailing immigration. But the restrictions did not hold. From Presidents Johnson to Trump, efforts to circle the wagons around some ancestral White American identity failed.
We are extremely lucky it did. Contra Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith’s 100-year old prescriptions, the nation owes what greatness it has to the many different women and men it has drawn from around the world to build their futures. This requires a different conversation — one that doesn’t feature mass expulsions and concentration camps but focuses on constructing a new shared American identity that fits everyone, including the many more immigrants who will arrive from the Global South for years to come.

New York
CNN
—
If voters return former President Donald Trump to the White House, he’s promised to launch an unprecedented crackdown on immigration and even conduct mass deportations.

Trump recently told Time that he would aim to deport 15 million to 20 million people, perhaps by using the National Guard.

Some economists worry that Trump’s proposed immigration crackdown — if it survived legal challenges — would backfire on the US economy by worsening worker shortages, reigniting inflation and forcing the Federal Reserve to keep borrowing costs high for even longer.

“If he follows through in deporting a significant amount of immigrants, that’s going to be very difficult for businesses,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, told CNN. “It’s going to cause them to raise wages and prices.”

Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, said the problem is that the supply of native-born workers simply cannot meet demand.

“We need to import workers,” Brusuelas said. “If either party oversteps in reducing the flow of workers, it’s likely we would face a serious shortage of workers and a renewed bout of inflation. You would drive the unemployment rate down to 3% and wages would pop. You’d get classic inflation.”

And that would have serious implications for the Fed, which has already warned that interest rates will need to stay high for longer than anticipated to fight stubborn inflation.

“In that case, higher for longer has a much different meaning,” said Brusuelas.

In a statement to CNN, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt argued, without evidence, that President Joe Biden “allowed” undocumented immigrants to “invade our border” and that if he’s reelected they will be allowed to stay.

“Medicare, Social Security, the healthcare system, public safety and American democracy itself will buckle and collapse,” Leavitt said. “When President Trump is back in the White House, he will deport the millions of illegal immigrants Joe Biden let in and reimplement his America First, pro-growth, pro-job agenda to uplift all Americans.”

‘It’s a rip-off’
Inflation remains a major concern for Americans.

Even though consumer prices are no longer skyrocketing, the cumulative impact of three years of high inflation is painful. Americans are paying much more for housing, food and car insurance than they were before Covid-19.

Frustrations with the high cost of living helped drive down consumer sentiment to a six-month low, the University of Michigan survey of consumers found on Friday.

“Most Americans view high inflation and high prices as unfair. It’s a rip-off. How is it possible I’m paying more for something – a lot more for something – today than three years ago?” said Zandi.

Anger over inflation could help return Trump to the White House. And yet, ironically, economists warn that his immigration plan – and his vow to impose massive tariffs on China and other nations – could worsen that same inflation problem.

“My sense is President Trump’s policies are inflationary,” said Zandi. “It’s higher tariffs, it’s more deportations. … I think these things are going to lead to higher prices for American consumers.”

Some businesses continue to face a shortage of workers. Although the number of job openings has tumbled in recent months, it remains well above pre-pandemic levels, according to the Labor Department.

Migrant crisis
Of course, it’s hard to know whether Trump would carry through on his immigration proposals. After all, he promised mass deportations in 2016, too. And Trump’s immigration plans would surely face serious legal challenges.

But immigration remains a major concern for voters in the 2024 election and Trump has made it a centerpiece of his campaign.

The spike in immigration over the last several years has caused a severe strain on resources in some cities and states as officials scramble to house, educate and feed asylum seekers.

And the flow of migrants, along with a series of high-profile criminal cases involving migrants, have contributed to concerns about crime — though criminologists are skeptical about the connection.

Even the Biden administration has tried to take a tougher position on immigration. Last week, US officials proposed a rule that would let immigration authorities rapidly reject migrants who are ineligible for asylum.

A positive supply shock
Yet economists say the immigration spike has also played a major role in one of the big positive surprises of the past few years: America’s ability to defy recession forecasts.

To the shock of many forecasters, the post-Covid labor market has not run out of workers. Jobs growth continues at a pace few thought possible. And the unemployment rate has stayed under 4% for 27 months in a row, matching the record streak from 1967 to 1970.

Economists say the recent spike in immigration helped make these surprises possible, by preventing the jobs market from totally overheating and the Fed from overdoing rate hikes.

“It helped to ease the very tight labor market, bring in some of those wage pressures and reduce inflation,” said Zandi. “It also allowed the economy to grow more quickly.”

Prior to Covid-19, population and labor force projections from the federal government suggested the US economy would only be able to sustainably add (without worsening inflation) between 60,000 and 140,000 jobs per month and then between 60,000 and 100,000 per month by 2024, according to research from The Hamilton Project.

In reality, the US economy added an average of 255,000 jobs per month in 2023 — two to four times the pace considered sustainable, research notes.

“Just in the last year, a big part of the story of the labor market coming back into better balance is immigration returning to levels that were more typical of the pre-pandemic era,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell told “60 Minutes” in February.

Net immigration of 2.3 million in 2023
The Hamilton Project paper estimates sustainable employment growth will be between 160,000 and 200,000 per month in 2024 — about double what would have been possible before the immigration surge.

Without that influx of workers, the US economy could have faced a different fate.

“The Fed would have likely overdone it with rates and tipped the economy into recession,” said Brusuelas, the RSM economist.

Immigration collapsed when the Covid-19 pandemic began in early 2020, contributing to the historic shortage of workers that drove up wages.

But then immigration rebounded massively in 2022 and 2023, in part because of a surge of migrants.

US authorities had more than 2.5 million encounters with migrants crossing the US-Mexico border last year alone, according to Homeland Security estimates.

In 2023, the United States experienced net immigration of about 3.3 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That well exceeds the average of just 900,000 that was typical between 2010 and 2019.

The immigration spike has been so significant that the CBO estimates the United States is on track to have 1.7 million more people in its pool of workers this year compared with what was expected last year.

Goldman Sachs economists estimate that the immigration surge eased wage growth by 0.3 percentage points at the national level and by at least twice as much in the low-paying leisure and hospitality sector.

Although the “textbook answer” is that immigration should not matter much for wages and inflation, Goldman Sachs economists recently told clients: “We think this time was a bit different.”

“The main reasons are that the immigration turnaround was very large and that it occurred at a time when the labor market was historically overheated,” Goldman Sachs economists wrote.

What happens next
Looking ahead, Goldman Sachs said “moderate fluctuations” in immigration will probably have “little impact” on wage growth and inflation. The exception, the bank said, would be in the event of “dramatic policy changes.”

Wendy Edelberg, director of The Hamilton Project and senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told CNN she is “confident” an immigration crackdown like the one Trump proposes would have “negative” effects on the economy.

However, Edelberg is less concerned about the inflationary impact and more worried about a crash in demand — especially in communities that have experienced a large influx of immigrants.

She noted that some businesses have enjoyed a sharp increase in demand in recent years in large part because of immigrants.

“That’s the kind of thing that could spark a recession,” Edelberg said. “I don’t mean to suggest this would be a cataclysmic recession, but this would be a very abrupt reduction in aggregate demand. Generally, that’s not the kind of thing that our economy likes.”

Former President Donald Trump’s focus on the border and his ongoing vow to launch the biggest “domestic deportation operation” have dominated the political discourse on immigration this election cycle. But legal immigration is also in play in a potential second Trump term, with the announcement of some drastic cuts to foreign workers.

Trump’s record on immigration, as well as his playbook of proposals called Project 2025 — spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation with input from former Trump administration officials — offer a good idea of what could be in store for noncitizens who have come into the U.S. or are trying to come through legal means.

During his administration, Trump made it harder for foreign-born workers to enter the U.S. on visas or as refugees. Under his watch, visa denials and extensions shot up and refugee admissions were slashed.

Without renewed visas, some U.S. businesses lost employees who had to leave when their work permits expired. Also, far fewer green cards were issued to people not already in the U.S., according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that advocates for expanding legal immigration.

“What we saw last time, you would see again, but likely on steroids the next time around,” said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan think tank on trade and immigration.

Policy and regulation changes under Trump, combined with the pandemic, led to a reduction in the U.S. foreign workforce, resulting in a significant decrease in the growth of the gross domestic product, economist Madeline Zavodny wrote in a policy brief for the foundation.

Zavodny said that between 2016 and 2022 the GDP growth fell, but, had the foreign-born, working-age population continued to grow, the GDP would have been about $335 billion larger than it was. The foreign worker slowdown began before Covid, but was exacerbated by it, she wrote.

“A slower-growing working-age population means a smaller increase in the number of people to produce goods and services and to generate new ideas that lead to technological progress and long-run growth. A slower-growing or shrinking working-age population also increases the potential for price pressures and shortages,” Zavodny wrote.

Trump’s technical changes to legal immigration were not the sort to grab headlines, but they did affect people who had “followed the rules” to legally work and live in the U.S.

Anderson, who has written about Trump’s effect on legal immigration, wrote in a January column for Forbes that after Trump took office, the denial rate for applications for H1-B visas for initial employment rose to 24% for the 2018 fiscal year and 21% in 2019; meanwhile, denial rates for H1-B visa renewals went up 12% in 2018 and 2019.

Following a lawsuit in 2020, the rates fell to 2% in 2022. But, if elected, the Trump team could implement a rule it left pending in 2020 that would reimplement restrictions, according to Anderson.

Trump also used immigration law to block entry of other visa-holders such as L1 visas for transfers within companies before a court ruled he’d exceeded his authority, Anderson wrote.

Trump has been highly critical of Biden’s humanitarian parole program that has allowed in Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, as well as Ukrainians and Afghans, and vowed to shut it down.

“If you listen to him, he is very consistent in his focus on immigration. His shorthand on how he would change legal immigration is when he talks about letting in people from nice countries, which is code for white,” said Angela Kelley, a senior adviser at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Jaime Florez, spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said “we haven’t heard anything from” Trump or received any formal information about his plans on legal immigration.

“He understands no immigration reform is going to be successful if we don’t have a border that is under control,” Florez said. “He understands that most legal immigrants who arrive legally and are still waiting for USCIS to resolve their immigration status are going to be seriously jeopardized by the open border policy of the Biden administration.”

Some proposals for Trump are spelled out in Project 2025, what its conservative creators are calling a “mandate for leadership” should he be re-elected. Florez said that any suggestions that Trump would implement the proposals are “speculation.”

Project 2025 calls for immediate rule-making affecting temporary work visas and employment authorization along with a slew of other reversals of Biden’s policies, some which undid Trump’s changes.

“Internal efforts to limit employment authorization should be matched by congressional action to narrow statutory eligibility to work in the United States and mitigate unfair employment competition for U.S. citizens,” the document states. “The oft-abused H-1B program should be transformed into an elite program through which employers are vying to bring in only the top foreign workers at the highest wages so as not to depress American opportunities.”

The Trump playbook also calls for suspending updates to an annual list of countries whose citizens can submit H-2A and H-2B temporary worker visas, which would affect agriculture, hospitality, forestry and construction employers that rely on them for workers.

This would hit agriculture the hardest, as it could lose up to 10% of its workforce on some farms, according to the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank that scrutinized Project 2025.

“Refusing to update the list would mean that after the expiration of the 2024 list, no countries would be eligible to participate in the program, thus grinding it to a halt,” the center stated.

Project 2025 is calling for turning U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service personnel into a security agency, thus requiring all workers to be vetted, for steps that would require immigrants to apply more frequently for work permits and an expansion of investigations into the background of potential workers. All would make obtaining benefits more time-consuming and make existing backlogs even longer, the Niskanen Center stated.

That would put many people legally in the country at risk because the conservatives want Trump to force out of the country any person who is rejected for an immigration benefit or status adjudication, which could include renewing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a work permit, student visas, awaiting asylum and a host of other permissions, until USCIS catches up on all case backlogs.

Kelley, from the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the conservatives’ recommendations and Trump’s previous actions on legal immigration are “a roadmap telling us this is the path this candidate would take if elected, and it is a roadmap that would lead us over a cliff.”

The GOP unveiled a bill last week to bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections — prohibiting something that’s already illegal to address a problem lawmakers can’t prove exists.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was candid last week in telling reporters that Republicans are motivated by intuition in seeking another law that would limit voting to U.S. citizens.

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that — it will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states,” Johnson said in a Wednesday press conference on the Capitol steps.

Federal law since 1996 has banned noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and many states have passed laws that do the same for local elections.

So Johnson’s speech was a jarring admission to voting rights advocates who have the data on noncitizens voting — figures that show how minimal such instances are.
“Well, the thing is, we actually do have the numbers, and we know that noncitizens don’t vote illegally in detectable numbers, let alone in large numbers,” said Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel in the Voting Rights & Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, pointing to a study reviewing data from 42 different jurisdictions.
“The Brennan Center study from the 2016 general election showed an estimated 30 incidents of suspected — not confirmed — noncitizen votes out of 23.5 million, which is 0.0001 percent of the votes cast. So the Speaker’s intuition is incorrect,” she told The Hill.

That’s a conclusion that’s also been reached by the libertarian Cato Institute, with one of its experts calling the claims one of the “most frequent and less serious criticisms” relating to migration.

Johnson’s appeal to gut feeling touched a raw nerve with civil rights advocates, who see illegal voting as a nonissue and a proxy to enact voter suppression against underserved communities.

“Intuition doesn’t count for anything — doesn’t mean a lick. And we need proof. We need specifics. And I can tell you that many of our organizations have scoured for any signs of voting that has been irregular or done by folks who are not qualified. There just hasn’t been any evidence,” said Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS, the country’s largest Latino civil rights organization.

“So he can have intuition all he wants, but that does not mean it’s true. It does not mean there is evidence, and it does not mean it’s factual. We need to see specifics, data to demonstrate any proof of irregularities.”

Johnson first floated the framework for the bill in an April trip to Mar-a-Lago, making the announcement alongside former President Trump shortly after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) threatened a vote to oust him.

“I think this is another way for him to appease the crazies on the right, because he’s on the chopping block right now and he’s got to do something to feed them some red bait, and we saw him do that when he stood next to Trump at Mar-a-Lago,” Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Nanette Díaz Barragán (D-Calif.) said.

House Democrats joined a majority of Republicans to save Johnson’s job in a floor vote just hours after he unveiled the voter fraud bill alongside numerous Trump allies including Stephen Miller, the architect of many of Trump’s immigration policies, and former acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, who helped carry them out. Cleta Mitchell, who aided in Trump’s legal efforts to challenge the 2020 election results after he lost, was also in attendance.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE Act, would require voters to demonstrate they are citizens in order to be able to cast a ballot.

Such measures have often sparked concern among voting rights advocates who fear many citizens don’t have passports or birth certificates on hand, documents that can be expensive to get and create barriers to accessing the ballot box.

Sweren-Becker said the Brennan Center has found that between 5 percent and 7 percent of Americans, adding up to millions of people, don’t have “the most common types of documents used to prove citizenship.”

It’s a barrier that has played out as states have passed their own proof of citizenship laws — many which have since been struck down in court. A Kansas law on the books for three years resulted in more than 22,000 people suspended from voter rolls after failure to submit proof of citizenship. Courts have killed that law along with similar plans in several other states, though in March a federal judge upheld an Arizona law after a multiyear effort to require proof of citizenship to vote.

“It’s stupid. It’s already illegal. They’re trying to create a message – a lie – to the American people that undocumented people are voting. It’s illegal to do that now. They don’t need to do another bill. It’s already illegal,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said.

“It’s just one more waste of time that the GOP is specializing in.”

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), one of the chief crafters of the legislation, said Wednesday it is needed because “the most fundamental thing you can do to destroy the rule of law and to destroy our republic is to undermine faith in our elections.”

“We should have documentary proof. … We should have a system to guarantee that only citizens of the United States vote in federal elections,” he said.

But advocates have long maintained that system is already in place, and they say research from right-leaning organizations proves it.

“We’ve got organizations that have been, you know, sort of right-wing organizations, very conservative organizations, highly scrutinize this area of any potential for illegal voting by anyone who’s not qualified, particularly undocumented, and they just can’t report any great number, if at all,” Murguía said.

The Heritage Foundation maintains a database of what it calls “recent” instances of voter fraud, though some cases in the file go back to the 1980s. Under “ineligible voting,” the database reports about 50 cases of voting by noncitizens.
Among the noncitizen voting cases, many involve visa holders or legal permanent residents rather than people living in the country illegally.

Ahead of the 2014 midterm elections in Florida, then-Gov. Rick Scott (R) announced a program to purge 180,000 foreign nationals from voter rolls, but that number was first reduced to 2,600, then to 198, until 85 names were removed from the rolls and only one person was prosecuted.
Unlike other crimes where it can be difficult to sort out the culprit, voter registration and casting a ballot creates the paper trail that is itself the crime.

Noncitizens who even register to vote or take another action to falsely claim they are a citizen could face up to five years in prison, and those who cast a ballot could be incarcerated for up to one year.

Those who violate the law also face deportation and jeopardize any chances at gaining citizenship.

The man prosecuted in Florida’s voter purge, Josef Sever, was sentenced to five months in prison, a relatively short sentence handed down by the judge in consideration that Sever would almost certainly be deported.

“The consequences are so severe that really this is not something that anybody would risk,” Sweren-Becker said.
“And that intuition actually bears out in the numbers.”

hinelander is closer to the Arctic Circle than to Mexico, so it is no great surprise that few people in the small Wisconsin city have laid eyes on the foreign migrants Donald Trump claims are “invading” the country from across the US border 1,500 miles to the south.

But Jim Schuh, the manager of a local bakery, is nonetheless sure they are a major problem and he’s voting accordingly.

“We don’t see immigrants here but I have relatives all over the country and they see them,” he said. “That’s Biden. He’s responsible.”

Large numbers of voters in key swing states agree with Schuh, even in places where migrants are hard to find as they eye cities such as Chicago and New York struggling to cope with tens of thousands of refugees and other arrivals transported there by the governors of Texas and Florida.

Trump has been pushing fears over record levels of migration hard in Wisconsin where the past two presidential elections have been decided by a margin of less than 1% of the vote. A Marquette law school poll last month found that two-thirds of Wisconsin voters agree that “the Biden administration’s border policies have created a crisis of uncontrolled illegal migration into the country”.

Trump has twice held rallies in Wisconsin over the past month at which migrants have been a primary target. In Green Bay he called the issue “bigger than a war” and invoked the situation in Whitewater, a small city of about 15,000 residents in the south of the state.

Republican politicians have turned Whitewater into the poster child for anti-migrant rhetoric in Wisconsin after the city’s police chief, Dan Meyer, appealed for federal assistance to cope with the arrival of nearly 1,000 people from Nicaragua and Venezuela over the past two years.

Meyer made clear in a letter to President Joe Biden in December that he was not hostile to the foreign arrivals as he expressed concern about the “terrible living conditions” endured by some.

“We’ve seen a family living in a 10ft x 10ft shed in minus 10 degree temperatures,” he wrote.

But the police chief said that his department was struggling to cope with the number of Spanish-speaking migrants because of the cost of translation software and the time taken dealing with a sharp increase in unlicensed drivers. Meyer also said that his officers had responded to serious incidents linked to the arrivals including the death of an infant, sexual assaults and a kidnapping.

However, he told Biden that “none of this information is shared as a means of denigrating or vilifying this group of people … In fact, we see a great value in the increasing diversity that this group brings to our community.”

That did not stop Republican politicians from descending on Whitewater to whip up fear.

The Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, a close ally of Trump who has spoken at the former president’s political rallies, and a Republican member of Congress from the state, Bryan Steil, held a meeting in the city to denounce what they described as the “devastating” consequences of the migrant arrivals.

Johnson blamed “the whole issue of the flood of illegal immigrants that have come to this country under the Biden administration”.

Steil declined to back Meyer’s appeal for federal financial assistance and said the answer lay in legislation to secure the border. However, the congressman was among those Republicans who killed off a bipartisan border security law after Trump opposed the legislation in an apparent move to keep the crisis a live political issue going into the presidential election.

Republican members of the Wisconsin legislature wrote to Biden in January demanding action over what they claimed was a surge in violent crime in Whitewater even though Meyer has said he sees no threat to residents from the migrants and that “we are a safe community”.

Some Whitewater residents are furious at the political intervention. Brienne Brown, a member of the city council for six years, said residents had been welcoming of the migrants, with community organisations providing food, furniture and bedding to many.

“The spotlight fell on us because Ron Johnson and Bryan Steil decided to make it a political event for themselves. Most people here were incredibly angry. They feel like they’ve been used as a political football,” she said.

“The crime that is occurring is super low level, which is mostly our police department pulling over somebody in a car who doesn’t have a licence.”

The police chief has called for migrants to be allowed to obtain driving licences but the Wisconsin legislature will not allow it.

Brown said that the serious incidents of assault involved domestic violence as well as the case of a woman who abandoned her newborn baby in a field, and that those kind of crimes remained uncommon.

Wisconsin has long relied on migrant workers, many of them undocumented, as farm labour. Studies have suggested that the state’s dairy farms would grind to a halt without foreign workers. Historically, most were from Mexico. Whitewater tended to attract people from Guanajuato as migrants from the Mexican state sent word back about job opportunities.

Brown noticed a change during the Covid crisis.

“I’d knock on doors a lot just to talk to my constituents right around the pandemic. I started noticing that a lot of them were not from Mexico. They were from Nicaragua and Venezuela,” she said.

Brown said the workers moved into accommodation left by students forced to return home by the pandemic lockdown.

“We have a lot of farms, a lot of chicken farms, a lot of egg farms. There are factories that make spices, there are factories that can food. They’re always looking for low-paid workers and they never have enough. So there was plenty of work available,” she said.

Schuh, like many other Americans critical of what they describe as Biden’s open border policy, makes a point of distinguishing between those who go through the formal process of immigration with a visa and those walking across the border to seek asylum or work illegally.

“I have nothing against immigrants but it has to be done the right way,” he said.

Trump continued to stoke the issue at a rally in Michigan earlier this month when he blamed Biden for the murder of Ruby Garcia in March. The former president claimed his administration had deported the man who has confessed to the shooting, Brandon Ortiz-Vite, and that “crooked Joe Biden took him back and let him back in and let him stay in and he viciously killed Ruby”. Ortiz-Vite was deported in 2020 following his arrest for drinking and driving. It is not clear when he returned to the US.

Trump told the rally that he spoke to Garcia’s family and that they were “grieving for this incredible young woman”. But Garcia’s sister, Mavi, denied that anyone in the family spoke to the former president and accused him of exploiting the murder for political ends.

“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” she told WOOD-TV.

“It’s always been about illegal immigrants. Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”

The buses rumble into town day and night, dumping migrants in a city many didn’t even know existed.

But instead of landing closer to the U.S. border, they are being hauled roughly 1,000 miles in the opposite direction — deep into southern Mexico in a shadowy program meant to appease the Biden administration and ship migrants far from the United States.

Mexican authorities rarely publicly acknowledge the busing program, making it much less contentious than the efforts by Republican governors to transport migrants to blue states that have become political theater in the United States.

Yet the busing program is exposing the chasm between the Mexican government’s rhetoric promoting a humanitarian approach to migration, and the country’s role as a heavy-handed enforcer of U.S. border objectives, leaving many migrant families stranded to fend for themselves.

“I asked the agents, ‘How can you treat us like dirt?’” said Rosa Guamán, 29, from Ecuador. She was detained with her husband and two children by migration agents in April near the border city of Piedras Negras. Nobody told them they were being taken to Villahermosa, an oil hub in southeastern Mexico, until they were well on their way.

At an overcrowded shelter in Villahermosa, she described the ride as the most dispiriting part of a monthslong journey that included trekking across swaths of jungle, threats of sexual assault and bribing Mexican officials with the hope of getting to New Jersey.

“We’re starting over from zero,” Ms. Guamán said.

Mexico’s National Migration Institute declined to comment. Officials there sometimes frame the detention and transfers of migrants in humanitarian jargon as “rescues” or “dissuasion” aimed at easing conditions in dangerous, overcrowded areas, or they use the technical term “decompression.”

But the busing program is anything but humanitarian, according to immigration lawyers, rights groups and shelter operators in Mexico. The rules for busing migrants south of the border are often cloaked in obscurity — or publicly ignored by authorities at a time when immigration isn’t as polarizing an issue in Mexico’s own election as it is in the United States.

Ernesto Vasconcelo, a Venezuelan-born lawyer who offers legal counseling to migrants in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, said there is no public database for lawyers or family members to see where migrants are taken and their current status.

Mexican migration authorities, he said, “refuse to give any information to anyone, they do not allow migrants to have any legal representation, and that is in itself illegal.”
In December, migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border exploded to their highest level on record. Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Mexico City for emergency talks aimed at pressing Mexico’s government to do more to curb migration.

Almost immediately after, charter flights and buses started dropping large numbers of people in Villahermosa.

The tactic was effective.

In the first four months of 2024, U.S. border apprehensions plunged in one of the steepest declines in decades, giving the Biden administration some relief as immigration persists as a top voter concern in this year’s election.

A senior White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly said the United States does not dictate what measures Mexico should take to curb migration. The official added that while numbers are down, smugglers are sophisticated and both governments need to closely watch what happens going forward.

Mexican authorities have used busing on occasion for years, but its expansion in recent months spotlights the country’s toughening policies on migration. Eunice Rendon, the coordinator of Migrant Agenda, a coalition of Mexican advocacy groups, said that busing was a “practice meant to wear migrants down, to exhaust them.”
Transferring migrants south, far from their intended destination, imposes not only an emotional and physical toll, Ms. Rendon said, but also a financial burden since they must spend money on transportation, lodging and bribes every time they make the trip north.

Still, busing is part of a strategy that has allowed President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico to center his country’s U.S. relations around migration, fending off much explicit American criticism in other areas like trade policy, management of energy resources or his treatment of political opponents.

There are doubts as to whether Mexico’s efforts are sustainable.

The country reported about 240,000 migrant apprehensions in January and February but fewer than 7,000 deportations in the same two months, suggesting that most of those apprehended remain in Mexico with the chance to head north again.

And the flow of migrants coming into Mexico from South America persists. Panama said roughly 109,000 people crossed the jungle straddling Central and South America known as the Darién Gap in the first three months of 2024, a 14 percent increase compared to the same period last year.

Villahermosa is one of the top destinations to which migrants are bused. Migrants sleep on the street outside of bus stations and convenience stores. Entire families beg for change at busy intersections.

Nearby, people sit on the sidewalk speaking languages like Hindi and Russian.

Karina del Carmen Vidal, manager of a local migrant shelter, said her facility has room for about 160 people, and has been at or above capacity for months. Hundreds of other families rent out rooms in surrounding areas.

“The migrants arrive here in a complete state of shock,” said Ms. Vidal. In some cases, she said, they had been bused multiple times to Villahermosa.

Migrants in the city described being coerced by Mexican agents into taking the buses, and deprived of information as to where they were going and why.
A Russian man at the shelter recounted being detained in March by migration officials in Mexico City shortly before boarding a flight to Tijuana. Unable to speak Spanish or much English, he struggled to understand what was happening.

“Nobody explained anything to me,” said the man, 34, who asked not to be identified. Using Google Translate, he said he had deserted from the Russian Army with the aim of getting to California, and was afraid relatives in Russia could be targeted if he was identified.

With Mexican officials declining to provide details, it’s unclear how many people have been bused south.
But at least thousands of foreign migrants have been sent to Villahermosa and another southern city, Tapachula, according to migration experts, lawyers and religious leaders.

When they are dropped off, some people opt to stay and apply for asylum in Mexico. Others are given an official “exit notice,” which gives them up to 30 days to leave the country — plenty of time to try going north again.

Others, however, said they were simply left on the street, without being taken to the migrant processing center.

Tonatiuh Guillén, who headed Mexico’s National Migration Institute at the start of Mr. López Obrador’s administration, said that during his tenure, the agency would relocate smaller numbers of migrants, mainly from Central America. He said it was considered easier to process migrants and prepare them for deportation in cities in southern Mexico.

But Mr. Guillen described the current busing policy as a kind of “merry-go-round” in which people are forced to try multiple times to make it across the U.S.-Mexico border, paying bribes time and again to migration officials and police during each attempt.
“It is a perverse scenario for migrants” Mr. Guillén said.

Criticism of the busing program from local authorities in Villahermosa has been somewhat muted, perhaps not surprising since the surrounding Tabasco is a bastion of support for Mr. López Obrador and his home state.

Both the interim mayor of Villahermosa and the former mayor, who is running for re-election, did not respond to requests for comment. Tabasco state’s governor declined to comment. They are all members of the president’s ruling party, Morena.

Still, local media have sought to link the migrant influx to crime fears, casting widespread attention on the cases of a Senegalese man accused of robbing mobile phones, and another migrant said to have boarded a bus to beg for money, then assaulting the driver.

Roberto Valencia Aguirre, a Roman Catholic priest, said he had to abandon a plan to shelter migrants in a church in an affluent part of the city after parishioners voiced objections.

“It was a very unpleasant reaction from some people who said, ‘No, Father, we don’t want migrants here,’” he said.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A permanent memorial honoring the 10 Black victims of a racist mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket will feature interconnected stone pillars and arches, and a windowed building where exhibitions and events will be held, community and elected leaders announced Monday.

The design, “Seeing Us,” by Jin Young Song and Douglass Alligood, was revealed a day before the second anniversary of the attack. It was selected from among 20 submissions to the 5/14 Memorial Commission, which was established months after an 18-year-old white gunman opened fire at a Tops supermarket on May 14, 2022.

New York state has committed $5 million to the $15 million project, Gov. Kathy Hochul said at a news conference to unveil the design. Buffalo will contribute $1 million, and a yearlong fundraising campaign is expected to make up the difference.

“As we approach the solemn two-year anniversary of when our neighbors were senselessly slaughtered solely because of the color of their skin, we rededicate ourselves in supporting the East Buffalo community, remembering those we lost, and supporting those who were injured,” she said.

Nine shoppers, ranging in age from 32 to 86, and a retired Buffalo police officer working as a security guard, were killed during the Saturday afternoon attack. Three store employees were wounded.

The Rev. Mark Blue, chairman of the 5/14 Memorial Commission, said the victims’ families were consulted during the design selection process.

“What happened on 5/14 was an act of senseless violence and it was an act of hate,” he said. “It’s my intent to make sure we have a memorial that the families and the communities can be proud of.”

Payton Gendron is serving a sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole after he pleaded guilty to state charges of murder and hate-motivated domestic terrorism. He is awaiting trial on separate federal charges and could receive the death penalty if convicted. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.

To mark the second anniversary of the shooting on Tuesday, Tops Friendly Markets will dedicate another memorial near the store and hold a moment of silence at 2:28 p.m., the time of the attack.

Buffalo artist Valeria Cray and her son Hiram Cray, a faculty member at the State University of New York Corning Community College, created a sculpture called “Unity for the Honor Space” for the memorial. The site also features 10 granite bollards.

As they sat in the lobby of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Washington, D.C., last month, Garnell Whitfield Jr. and others who have lost relatives nationwide to gun violence listened as U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland helped dedicate an exhibit honoring those killed.

Garland spoke of some of the victims on the new “Faces of Gun Violence Memorial” wall, including Whitfield’s 86-year-old mother, Ruth, describing her as a “mother, grandmother and great grandmother whose door and pantry were always open to family and friends.” He said the wall will serve as a reminder to ATF employees of who they are fighting for each day.

“That in and of itself is progress that they would understand the need to be more empathetic and to realize the impact of gun violence on the people that they’re trying to protect and serve,” Whitfield, the retired Buffalo, New York, fire commissioner, told ABC News.

This week marks two years since a self-described white supremacist killed 10 Black people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo. In addition to Whitfield’s mother, the other victims were Roberta Drury, 32; retired Buffalo police officer Aaron Salter Jr., 55; Heyward Patterson, 67; Pearl Young, 77; Geraldine Talley, 62; Celestine Chaney, 65; Katherine “Kat” Massey, 72; Margus Morrison, 52; and Andre Mackniel, 53.

“I will always carry the scar of 5/14 and what happened to my mother. I’ll always miss her. So, I don’t expect to be healed,” Whitfield said. “I know that’s something everybody talks about. I think that’s kind of an unrealistic expectation.”

One of the major hurdles to overcoming his grief, he said, is that such racially motivated killings and other hate crimes targeting Black people continue to rise across the country.

An ABC News analysis of the most recent FBI data shows that of the more than 8,500 hate crimes reported nationwide between 2020 and 2022, Black people were targeted in 52.3% of the offenses. Between 2021 and 2022, the numbers rose from 2,217 to 3,421, making Black people four times more likely to be targeted than the overall U.S. non-Hispanic Black population.

Hate crimes targeting Black people under the age of 18 rose 10% in 2020, 12% in 2021 and 14.6% in 2022, according to the data.

Among the hate crimes committed since the Buffalo mass shooting was a racially motivated attack at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, that left three Black people dead on May 26, 2023. On Nov. 22, 2023, a white gunman wounded two Black and two white shoppers at a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, in what police said was a racially motivated shooting. The gunmen in both rampages died by suicide, according to police.

In February 2023, a Florida man and a Maryland woman, both alleged to be white supremacists, were arrested and accused of plotting to attack multiple energy substations with the purpose of destroying Baltimore, the U.S. Department of Justice announced. Officials said the pair was fueled by a racist extremist ideology as they “conspired to inflict maximum harm on the power grid” and “lay this city to waste.” Both suspects have pleaded not guilty to the charges and are awaiting a trial

“Honestly, we shouldn’t even have to look at the FBI statistics to know that Black people in America are still victims of subjugation, of discrimination, of racism, of hate,” Whitfield told ABC News. “The fact that’s still the case all these years later tells you a lot about this country and what its intent is for us.”

‘It was a modern-day lynching’
About two months before the massacre at a Tops store in the predominantly Black East Side neighborhood of Buffalo, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching law, named after a Black teenager who was kidnapped, beaten and killed in Mississippi in August 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman. The law defines lynching as a hate crime and increases the maximum penalty to 30 years imprisonment for anyone convicted of conspiring to commit a racially motivated crime resulting in death or serious bodily injury.

To date, no one has been charged under the law.

“There was a reason why it took nearly 200 years to pass an antilynching law in Congress. It’s because the power of lynching is so much embedded into the society,” Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, a professor of law and Africana studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told ABC News.

Browne-Marshall said lynchings were committed to strike fear in Black communities, to “send a message to the community that white men are in charge.”

Browne-Marshall described the Emmett Till Antilynching law as “powerful,” but said prosecutors have been reluctant to apply it to criminal hate crime cases.

“So few prosecutors are doing their jobs when it comes to lynching. We as Americans have ignored the power of the prosecutor to bring charges,” she said.

Browne-Marshall said prosecutors in such high-profile cases as Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger who was chased down and killed by three white vigilantes in 2020 near Brunswick, Georgia, initially balked at pursuing charges until widespread protests forced them to take action.

“Without protest, the prosecutors are sitting back and allowing these cases to be put under the rug,” Browne-Marshall said.

But federal prosecutors countered they are using an arsenal of federal hate crime laws to seek justice for victims of racially motivated crimes.

In the Arbery case, the defendants — Travis McMichael, his father, Gregory McMichael, and a neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan — were convicted on state charges of malice murder, four counts of felony murder, aggravated assault with a shotgun, aggravated assault with a pickup truck, false imprisonment and criminal intent to commit a felony. They were all sentenced to life in prison, the McMichaels without the possibility of parole. They were also convicted of federal hate crime charges, including using violence to intimidate and interfere with Arbery because of his race and because he was using a public street. The McMichaels were given additional life sentences, while Byran received a 35-year prison sentence.

“Protecting civil rights and combatting white supremacist violence was a founding purpose of the Justice Department, and one that we will continue to pursue with the urgency it demands,” Attorney General Garland said following the sentencing of the McMichaels and Bryan.

“Racially-motivated acts of violence are abhorrent and unlawful, and have no place in our society today,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said earlier this month after a 52-year-old North Carolina man was sentenced to 41 months in prison and three years of supervised release for an unprovoked attack on a Black motorist he shouted racial slurs at and physically assaulted. The attacker, who prosecutors said displayed a Ku Klux Klan flag at his home, was also convicted of physically assaulting a Hispanic neighbor in a hate-filled assault.

“The severe sentence imposed for these vicious hate crimes should send a strong message that perpetrators of hate-fueled violence will be held accountable,” Clarke added. “The Justice Department is steadfast in its commitment to investigating and prosecuting hate crimes wherever they occur in our country.”

Payton Gendron, the gunman in the Buffalo massacre, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty to 15 state charges, including 10 counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder and domestic terrorism motivated by hate. In January, federal prosecutors announced they would pursue the death penalty against Gendron.

A federal grand jury indicted the Buffalo gunman with 27 federal charges, including 14 violations of the Shepard-Byrd Act, a landmark anti-hate crime law signed by President Barack Obama in 2009. The law was named after Matthew Shepard, a gay student who was tortured and murdered in Wyoming in October 1998, and James Byrd Jr., a Black man killed in 1998 by white supremacists who abducted him, beat him and dragged him by a chain from the back of a pickup truck.

Garnell Whitfield and Browne-Marshall argued that the Emmett Till Antilynching law should be expanded to include racially motivated mass shootings.

“It was meant to strike fear into our communities, to start a race war and further subjugate us, keep us in our place. So, yes, it was a modern-day lynching,” said Whitfield, adding that the only difference was that the killer used an AR-15 rifle instead of a rope.

While the antilynching law requires proof of a conspiracy, both Whitfield and Browne-Marshall alleged that some social media companies facilitated the teenage killer’s white supremacist radicalization by allowing racist propaganda to fester on their platforms.

“This is a conspiracy. It’s the oldest conspiracy we know – white supremacy,” Whitfield said.

But no precedent has been set for criminally charging a social media company as a co-defendant in a mass shooting, and prosecutors have found no evidence the Buffalo shooter entered into an “agreement” with any social media company to carry out his attack, a requirement of federal conspiracy.

In May 2023, Whitfield and other relatives of those killed in the Buffalo attack filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Buffalo in an attempt to hold several social media companies responsible for aiding the killer in his attack.

The gunman was “motivated to commit his heinous crime by racist, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist propaganda fed to him by the social media companies whose products he used,” the lawsuit argues, adding that the teenager did not appear to have been raised in a racist family, did not live in a racially polarized community and had no reported personal history of negative interactions with Black people.

Some social media companies named in the lawsuit denied the allegations it is aiding the indoctrination of users of their platforms in white supremacy. Twitch, the Amazon-owned social media gaming site the Buffalo gunman used to live stream the shooting, said in a statement that it closely monitors its site and took down the livestream of the Tops rampage in two minutes.

“We take our responsibility to protect our community extremely seriously, and trust and safety is a major area of investment,” Twitch said in its statement in response to the lawsuit, adding it was continuously examining the Buffalo shooting and “sharing those learnings with our peers in the industry to support a safer internet overall.”

Google, the parent company of YouTube, which was also named in the lawsuit, also issued a statement denying the allegations, saying, “Through the years, YouTube has invested in technology, teams, and policies to identify and remove extremist content. We regularly work with law enforcement, other platforms, and civil society to share intelligence and best practices.”

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, said on its website in February, “We define a hate speech attack as dehumanizing speech; statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt or disgust; cursing; and calls for exclusion or segregation. We also prohibit the use of harmful stereotypes, which we define as dehumanizing comparisons that have historically been used to attack, intimidate, or exclude specific groups, and that are often linked with offline violence. We also prohibit the usage of slurs that are used to attack people on the basis of their protected characteristics.”

The Buffalo lawsuit followed the release of a scathing report by New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office, alleging several online platforms played roles in the Buffalo mass shooting by radicalizing the killer as he consumed voluminous amounts of racist and violent content and allowing him to broadcast the deadly attack.

The KKK is ‘alive and well’
Advocates against racism are also getting support from some unlikely people. Scott Shepherd — the former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee, told ABC News that when he first heard of the Buffalo mass shooting, “it made me sick.”

The 64-year-old Shepherd, who describes himself as a “reformed racist” and now advocates against racial hate, said he also felt guilt.

He said many of the same practices he used to recruit KKK members are still being followed. But instead of rallies and cross burnings, white supremacist groups today use the internet to grow and indoctrinate their ranks, Shepherd said.

“It’s not the robes and hoods, it’s the mentality. And that mentality is what we’ve got to address,” Shepherd said. “As I’ve said before, the internet is a great thing. But that’s one of the tools that’s being used to radicalize these kids.”

‘There’s nothing special about this day’
On Tuesday, a monument titled “Unity” will be unveiled outside the Tops store where the Buffalo mass shooting occurred. A moment of silence will be held at 2:28 p.m. ET marking the time the massacre unfolded followed by a tolling of the bells, officials said.

The 5/14 Memorial Commission will also reveal the design picked for a second monument to be erected in Buffalo that is being funded by the state.

But Whitfield said that for him, the day will be no different from any other.

“So 5/14 may be significant for some, it’s two years now since then. But it’s no more significant on 5/14 than it is on 5/13 or 5/12, or today. I have to live the rest of my life without my mother and with what happened to her,” Whitfield said.

Whitfield said he’ll continue to speak out against white supremacy and is motivated to be as “consistent and determined” in that work as white nationalists are in their deeds.

“Every day since then [5/14] and for the rest of my life, I will honor my mother by doing this work,” Whitfield said. “There’s nothing special about this day coming up because I’ve tried to live according to these principles every day. That’s how I’m going to honor my mother and my ancestors.”

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Students often throw up or wet themselves when gunfire erupts outside their school in northern Port-au-Prince.

When they do, school director Roseline Ceragui Louis finds there’s only one way to try to calm the children and keep them safe: getting them to lie on the classroom floor while she sings softly.

“You can’t work in that environment,” she said. “It’s catastrophic. They’re traumatized.”

Haiti’s capital is under the onslaught of powerful gangs that control 80% of of the city.

On Feb. 29, gangs launched coordinated attacks targeting key infrastructure. The attacks have left more than 2,500 people dead or wounded in the first three months of the year. Now, in a bid to help save Haiti’s youngest generation, the country is undergoing a wider push to dispel a long-standing taboo on seeking therapy and talking about mental health.

GETTING HELP
At a recent training session in a relatively safe section of Port-au-Prince, parents learned games to put a smile on their children’s faces. The parents are often so distraught and discouraged they don’t have energy to care for the kids, said Yasmine Déroche, who trains adults to help children overcome trauma inflicted by persistent gang violence.

Gunmen have burned police stations, stormed Haiti’s two biggest prisons to release more than 4,000 inmates and fired on the country’s main international airport, which closed March 4 and hasn’t reopened. The violence has also paralyzed Haiti’s largest seaport.

Meanwhile, some 900 schools have closed, affecting some 200,000 children.

“We must fight against this social inequality so that all children, all young people, can have the same opportunities to go to school, to work, to earn a living,” said Chrislie Luca, president of the nonprofit Hearts for Change Organization for Deprived Children of Haiti. “All of these are problems that have led us where we are today, with the country on the edge of the abyss.”

EDGE OF THE ABYSS
UNICEF’s Haiti representative said the violence has displaced more than 360,000 people, the majority women and children. In addition, at least one-third of the 10,000 victims of sexual violence last year were children, Bruno Maes said.

“Children are left to fend for themselves, without assistance, without enough protection,” he said.

More than 80 children were killed or wounded from January to March, a 55% increase over the last quarter of 2023 and “the most violent period for children in the country on record,” said Save the Children, a U.S. nonprofit.

Luca said among those hurt were two boys struck in the head while walking to school and an 8-year-old girl playing inside her home when she was hit by a bullet that tore through her intestines, requiring emergency surgery.

“We are witnessing a lot of mental health issues,” Maes said. “This violence is traumatizing.”

Louis said her 10-year-old son would daily cry “You’re going to die!” as she headed to school, and the violence did not allow the boy to eat, sleep or play.

Louis remained resolute, knowing she had to be strong for him and her students.

“My heart is destroyed, but my students see my smile every day,” she said.

Still, many would fall asleep in class, unable to focus after sleepless nights punctuated by gunfire.

Others had more important things on their mind.

“It’s hard to focus at school or focus on playing a game when the rest of your body is worried about whether your mom and dad are going to be alive when you get home from school,” said Steve Gross, founder of the U.S. nonprofit Life is Good Playmaker Project

Some students are increasingly drawn into gangs, toting heavy weapons as they charge drivers for safe passage through gang territory.

“The young children are traumatized and agitated,” said Nixon Elmeus, a teacher whose school closed in January. He recalled how his best student stopped talking after an encounter with gangs. Other students become violent: ”Ever since the war started, the children themselves have acted like they’re part of a gang.”

LEARNING TO COPE
Gèrye Jwa Playmakers, a Haitian partner nonprofit aimed at helping children, held a training session for teachers that Louis attended after gang violence forced her school to close in March. She learned which games were best to distract students from the violence outside school gates.

“How can I recapture these children?” she asked.

With hundreds of schools closed, online courses are for those who can afford Wi-Fi and a generator. Most Haitians live often in the dark due to chronic power outages.

With no school, high poverty and trauma such as having to sidestep mangled bodies on streets, kids have become easy prey. Between 30% to 50% of members of armed groups are now children, Maes noted.

“That’s a very sad reality,” he said.

A 24-year-old man who offered only his last name, Nornile, for safety reasons, said he was in a gang for five years.

At night, he would work as a security guard for the gang leader. During the day, he would run errands and buy him food, clothes, sandals and other goods. Nornile said felt proud the gang trusted him but thought about quitting when one of his three brothers was killed by gangs on June 16, 2022.

“Ghetto men don’t fight for education or a hospital. They fight for territory,” he said. “They only care about themselves.”

Nornile left the gang two years after his brother died and began working for Luca’s nonprofit.

“The reality of the gang is that the person can carry a weapon, but in his mind, that’s not what he really wants,” Nornile said.

PLAYING AGAIN
Jean Guerson Sanon, co-founder and executive director of Gèrye Jwa Playmakers, stressed the importance of parents interacting daily with children to boost their mental health.

“Sometimes, that’s all we have,” he said, noting that conversations about mental health remain largely taboo.

“If you go see a psychologist, it’s because you’re ‘crazy,’ and ‘crazy’ people are really discriminated against in Haiti,” he said.

At the training on a recent Sunday, parents learned games for their children. One was mirroring the other person; another was pretending an inflatable ball was a piece of cheese that the child, pretending to be a mouse, had to steal.

By the end of the training, parents were giggling as they invented different dance moves in a large circle in yet another way to play with their kids.

When asked to draw what a safe space meant to them, several of them drew homes; some drew flowers; and one, Guirlaine Reveil, drew a man with a gun as she approached a police station — a real-life scenario that occurred a couple years ago.

One parent, Celestin Roosvelt, said he tells his children, 2 and 3, that gunfire is not a bad thing, a lie he called necessary.

“You have to find a way to live in your own country,” he said with an apologetic shrug.

At the end of the training, parents were given a copy of the presentation, crayons and an inflatable ball.

Déroche, who runs the program, noted how parents feel so overwhelmed that they are disconnected from their children’s needs.

“I know that the crisis we’re living through right now will have consequences that will take I don’t know how many years to sort out,” she said.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The gangs in Haiti can’t be ignored. This weekend they took the streets in their neighborhoods in a show of force. NPR saw dozens of heavily armed men, some wearing balaclavas in the blazing Caribbean heat, with handguns, with assault rifles with machetes.

And Jimmy Chérizier, known as Babekyou in Haitian Creole — or Barbecue — is one of the most powerful and notorious gang leaders. He heads the G9 federation of gangs.

He is the man who convinced many of Haiti’s gangs to stop fighting each other and start fighting the government. The alliance of rival gangs is known as Viv Ansanm, or “Living Together.”

Over the past two months, they’ve attacked government installations, brought down a prime minister and nearly paralyzed the capital city. Haitians have largely been left to fend for themselves.

The U.S. Treasury put him on a sanctions list in 2020, and the United Nations sanctioned him in 2022. He stands accused of human rights abuses, including taking part in massacres, along with other charges.

Who is Barbecue?

Barbecue met with NPR in Delmas, the neighborhood he controls in the capital of Port-au-Prince, and talked for over an hour. He arrived in a brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser and had a boy on his knees cleaning his flip-flops.

Barbecue, 47, used to be a police officer. He worked for a squad called the Unité départementale de maintien d’ordre. He led operations against gangs and was responsible for quelling unrest. Members of the unit were accused of shooting protesters dead.

But in the interview, he said eventually he had “an awakening.”

He claims the system made him who he is. As a policeman, he said, he learned that politicians created the gangs, that they used them and the police to do their dirty work, to target their business rivals and their enemies. And so he started fighting against the political elite to try to change the system.

What did Barbecue say about his role in the violence?

Much of the interview focused on his part in the violence and mayhem. According to a recent U.N. report, in the first few months of 2024, approximately 2,500 Haitians were killed or injured in gang violence.

Barbecue argues that the gangs are fighting against the rich, who have exploited Haiti.

But that’s not exactly what NPR has seen and reported. The gangs are extorting poor people, women are getting raped, houses have been burnt. He did not refute this.

“Everything you say right now is true,” he replied. “But all of the extortion and all of the mistreatment is because the government allowed those things to happen.”

Essentially, he said, the government and Haitian elites have allowed this situation to happen — to create chaos and to remain in power.

He also had a message for Washington. He said that the U.S. government carried some “responsibility” for the situation in Haiti, for not letting Haitians decide their own future for themselves.

The U.S., the association of Caribbean nations known as CARICOM and other regional powers helped establish a nine-member transitional council to pave the way for elections. The U.S. called the installation of the council a “critical step toward free and fair elections.”

But in Barbecue’s view, “the transitional council is not the will of the Haitian people. This is what Washington wants,” he said, “and this is what they have imposed.”

Barbecue on the imminent arrival of the Kenyan led multinational force

Barbecue said the gangs are preparing for a long fight. He said he expects a lot of bloodshed and eventually, the international forces will get tired and they will leave.

Asked if he expects to survive, he said: “My life depends on God and my ancestors.”

“If the Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines worried about his life,” he said, “Haiti wouldn’t be free today.”

The Arizona lawmakers pushing for a Texas-style law authorizing local officers to go after illegal border crossers insist nobody will be racially profiled because of it.

That’s a myth and they know it.

There’s no such thing as an immigration crackdown without racial profiling — not in Arizona or any place else in America.

Reality is that most asylum seekers and border crossers fleeing poverty and other calamities come from countries where darker skins predominate.

What the ballot measure would do

A proposed ballot measure doesn’t limit immigration enforcement to areas immediately around the border.
Until a few years ago, most people crossing the southern border came from Mexico.

Now they’re mainly from elsewhere, including Central America, Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, Turkey and other war-zone countries like Ukraine.

Thus, putting a target on these immigrants is a target on anyone with dark skin, unless enforcement is geographically limited to the borderline, which the Arizona proposal doesn’t do

ELVIA DIAZ
Arizona Republicans aren’t giving you the full story on their ‘border security’ bill
Opinion: Arizona lawmakers pushing a ballot measure to crack down on illegal immigration aren’t telling the truth on what it does.
Elvia Díaz
Arizona Republic

SKIP

The Arizona lawmakers pushing for a Texas-style law authorizing local officers to go after illegal border crossers insist nobody will be racially profiled because of it.

That’s a myth and they know it.

There’s no such thing as an immigration crackdown without racial profiling — not in Arizona or any place else in America.

Reality is that most asylum seekers and border crossers fleeing poverty and other calamities come from countries where darker skins predominate.

What the ballot measure would do

A proposed ballot measure doesn’t limit immigration enforcement to areas immediately around the border.
Until a few years ago, most people crossing the southern border came from Mexico.

Now they’re mainly from elsewhere, including Central America, Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, Turkey and other war-zone countries like Ukraine.

Thus, putting a target on these immigrants is a target on anyone with dark skin, unless enforcement is geographically limited to the borderline, which the Arizona proposal doesn’t do.

The Republican-sponsored House Concurrent Resolution 2060 is largely similar to the legislation that Gov. Katie Hobbs recently vetoed. They now want to skip the governor and send it directly to the November ballot to rally voters against Democrats whom they blame for the uptick of border crossers.

The Arizona proposal, which mimics Texas’ immigration law being litigated in federal court, would make it a state crime to enter the country illegally, punishable with jail time and longer prison sentences for repeat offenders.

It’s also stacked with a range of penalties designed to crack down on illegal immigration anywhere in the state — not just at the border, as proponents maintain.

Those include:

Making it a state crime to submit false documents in applying for federal, state or local benefits,
Requiring agencies to use the federal E-Verify program to determine public benefits eligibility, and
Imposing a minimum 10-year prison sentence on adults caught selling fentanyl that results in a death.

Supporters insist it’s about border security

“This is truly a border security bill,” Republican Sen. President Warren Petersen told Fox News, insisting that it is different than the infamous Senate Bill 1070 that led to racial profiling of Latinos and which cost Arizona hundreds of millions of tourism dollars and legal fees.

What Petersen says and what the proposal spells out don’t entirely match.

“It allows law enforcement to, if they see somebody crossing the border illegally, they’re able to arrest them, detain them and put them through the judicial process,” Petersen said.

GOP looks for job security:In fake border bill

That’s right. But a crucial detail he and others leave out of their media soundbites is the fact that the proposal doesn’t specifically limit law enforcement along Arizona’s 370-mile shared border with Mexico.

Technically, any law enforcement officer anywhere in the state could turn “any traffic stop into an immigration interrogation,” as Democratic Rep. Analise Ortiz puts it.

Republican Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes admitted as much during this week’s legislative hearing, saying there’s a lot of questions to be answered.

Speaking on behalf of the Arizona Sheriff’s Association, Rhodes said border counties would bear the brunt of arresting undocumented immigrants but still wouldn’t say enforcement is strictly limited to the border.

This is important because border enforcement — at the border — is Republicans’ selling point to voters, leaving out the sweeping ramifications this kind of law would inflict on Arizona’s labor market, immigrant families of mixed-immigration status and Latinos in general.

These provisions would target brown people

Nobody can deny that SB 1070 put a target on brown people. Police data and court documents prove it.

Anecdotally, countless U.S. citizens were targeted under the “show me your papers” provision of SB 1070. Some of them told lawmakers as much, yet Republicans dismissed the narrative as nothing more than politicking.

Yet, proponents can’t admit the fact that the legislation as written gives local enforcement anywhere in the state the authority to enforce immigration law and that it would be up to them to carry it out — and how.

No word yet on how much of taxpayers’ money it would take to enforce any of the provisions.

Or on how local law enforcement would differentiate illegal border crossers from legal residents and U.S. citizens making a wrong turn in traffic.

What would give local cops the “probable cause” to question the immigration status of somebody they encounter other the initial suspicions because of their skin color?

Presumably, none of the supporters have ever been racially profiled and truly believe the practice doesn’t exist. But these people are smart enough to know exactly what has happened under SB 1070.

They know exactly what they’re doing. They’re counting on Arizonans to merely take their word for what they say the ballot measure would do — whether that’s true or not.

After the 2020 presidential election, the Trump campaign hired Ken Block, a data analyst and expert in voter data, to investigate and prove that voter fraud had occurred.

“I had no idea then how finding so little would lead to so much,” Block said in a press release promoting his new book, “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.”

Block’s account is only part of the ample evidence and research that shows that voter fraud was virtually nonexistent. Yet Republicans are obsessed with the myth — and they’re doing it because it serves multiple purposes for them and for Donald Trump.

Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson joined fellow GOP members of Congress to announce the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require those registering to vote in federal elections to show proof of US citizenship.

Never mind that for nearly 30 years, noncitizens have been explicitly banned from voting in federal elections.

Nor are Republicans entirely ignoring the lack of data to support their claims. “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number,” Johnson said during the press conference. “This legislation will allow us to do exactly that — it will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states.”

How convenient and unoriginal it is to use intuition to ignore facts. “The speaker said that this question is unanswerable and relied on his intuition, but in fact, the question is very answerable,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel in the Voting Rights & Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in an interview. “And it’s been answered many times, in that there is not a serious problem with noncitizen voting in the United States.”

The reality is that the latest attempt by Republicans to zero in on undocumented immigrants who allegedly vote when they can’t serves at least four political purposes for themselves and Trump.

First, national poll after national poll has shown that voters are ranking immigration as their top issue, above inflation or the economy more broadly. It is a forgone conclusion that Republicans believe that criminalizing immigrants — inciting baseless fearmongering around the influx of migrants at the Southern border — will pay off in the November elections.

As The New York Times’ Jazmine Ulloa recently reported: “It was not so long ago that the term invasion had been mostly relegated to the margins of the national immigration debate. … But now, the word has become a staple of Republican immigration rhetoric.”

So, the SAVE Act is just another way for the GOP and Trump to keep the vilification of immigrants front and center during the presidential campaign.

Second, focusing on noncitizen voting also lays the groundwork for a potential attempt at delegitimizing the November election should President Biden win. It’s a way to preemptively assert that voter fraud will occur. Indeed, casting doubt on the election is a fundamental part of the Trump playbook, which takes me to my third point: Beating the illegal voting drum also gives Trump cover to continue the decidedly debunked allegation that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Republicans have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars “trying to prove that there is a problem of noncitizen voting and they continue to come up empty time and time again,” Sweren-Becker said. Block, the data expert hired by Trump, was reportedly paid $800,000 for his work. But that’s not all — The Washington Post reported last year that the Trump campaign spent an additional $1 million to find electoral fraud, but none was found.

“The fact that so many people have invested so many resources and don’t have the evidence to back up their claims should indicate to all of us that those claims are false” and that policy proposals like the SAVE Act are “hammers in search of a nail,” Sweren-Becker said.

Lastly, perpetuating the myth of illegal noncitizen voting may also discourage eligible Americans from casting their ballots. “The rhetoric is intended to cast doubt upon the integrity of our elections,” Sweren-Becker said. The SAVE Act is just another GOP-led effort “to make it harder at every step of the process.” For instance, research has shown that voter identification requirements represent a barrier to voting and disproportionately burden minority communities.

Make no mistake, that’s the ultimate coup for Republicans: To suppress legal voting.

After months of delay, a transitional council for Haiti has picked a president and prime minister. The interim appointments pave the way for deployment of an international security force, led by Kenyan police. Its job is to restore order and retake the capital, Port-au-Prince, from armed criminal gangs that control most of it and have already killed thousands. The ultimate goal is an election for a permanent government.

The mission faces a raft of challenges. Though authorized by the United Nations and funded by the United States, the deployment is unpopular in Kenya, where police have a reputation for human rights abuses. It’s unclear that the planned 1,100-man force is large and capable enough to take on hundreds of heavily armed gangs. Will the Kenyans be expected to disarm them? Or just provide a “static” presence at key buildings and infrastructure?

The Haiti deployment represents a comeback for the “responsibility to protect.” This is the principle, born two decades ago — amid bloody wars in the Balkans, famine and anarchy in Somalia, and genocide in Rwanda — that the international community can, and should, intervene to save civilian populations in failed states. Since the United Nations General Assembly endorsed “R2P” in 2005, however, it has only been invoked once: the NATO-led military mission in Libya in 2011, which began with the goal of preventing massacres and ended with the toppling of Moammar Gaddafi amid anarchic factional fighting.

The Libya intervention not only went awry; it led China, Russia and nations of the Global South to denounce civilian protection as a pretext for the United States and Europe to engage in self-interested regime change. Yet even staunch proponents of R2P also looked at Libya and argued that it was, in hindsight, a misapplication of the concept. Libya helps explain why, in 2012, President Barack Obama hesitated to enforce his “red line” against the Syrian regime’s atrocities, despite urgings from R2P advocates in his administration. U.S. airstrikes might have toppled the regime — creating a power vacuum that the Islamic State could have exploited.

Haiti’s predicament, however, shows that the problem R2P meant to address remains real and that discarding the concept altogether would be a mistake. It needs to be applied more carefully and consistently. Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister and president of the International Crisis Group, has identified five criteria for doing that.

First, the threat of mass civilian casualties must be serious and imminent. Second, while an intervention can never be free of geopolitical motivations or consequences, its primary goal must be to save civilians. Third, opportunities for diplomatic and economic pressure must be exhausted first. Fourth, the military force used must be sufficient to deal with all threats on the ground. Fifth, and crucially, intervention must be reasonably certain to do more good than harm.

These standards can help the U.S. public sort through its inevitably competing impulses: the decent wish to do something — anything — to stop the suffering and the skeptical concern that a given crisis is too complicated, remote and, for a nation with problems of its own, costly.

Such doubts are understandable regarding Haiti, where the record of interventions is lengthy and mixed — from the Marine Corps’s often-abusive 1915-1934 occupation to the cholera epidemic and accusations of sex trafficking during a 2004-2017 U.N. peacekeeping mission.

Also understandable are questions about selectivity: Why a U.S.-backed mission to Haiti but not, say, Sudan, where a two-year battle between dueling warlords has killed at least 15,000 people, displaced 9 million more, left millions on the brink of famine and led to a likely genocide in Darfur? Or Myanmar, whose military, bent on crushing a popular insurgency, has killed more than 6,000 people in almost three years and displaced 3 million more?

Mr. Evans’s criteria provide answers. The slaughter in Sudan and Myanmar is clear, but not the chances intervention could do more good than harm. Also, the Haiti mission meets a sixth criterion we would add to Mr. Evans’s list: If intervention is warranted, it is crucial to assemble the broadest possible coalition, including countries from the region. The proposed Haiti mission is backed by a U.N. Security Council resolution and Kenyan police; the Bahamas, Barbados, Benin, Chad and Bangladesh have offered additional personnel. It did not trigger Russian and Chinese vetoes at the U.N., as more geopolitically sensitive missions elsewhere might have.

The main lingering uncertainty relates to Mr. Evans’s fourth criterion: force sufficiency. Gen. Peter Cosgrove, who commanded Australian troops in a humanitarian intervention in East Timor in 1999, memorably attributed his success to telling local militias, “there’s only one military force allowed to posture here, and that’s my force.” If the Haiti operation cannot say the same to that country’s gangs, it could fail. With enough U.S. help, though, the mission could save Haitian lives and breathe much-needed new life into the responsibility to protect.

Right-wing Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania drew headlines this week when CNN reported that he cast the Ku Klux Klan as the “military wing of the Democratic Party” during a closed-door congressional briefing on antisemitism. But Perry also promoted the anti-immigrant and antisemitic great replacement theory at the same Oversight Committee briefing, titled “the Origins and Implications of Rising Antisemitism in Higher Education.”

“Replacement theory is real,” Perry said of the extremist conspiracy theory that the white majority is being displaced by a nonwhite population they consider to be “inferior.” Perry then launched into a rant about “importing” people into the country that “have no interest in being Americans.” He also suggested a coordinated effort was underway “to chill the conversation so that we can continue to bring in more people that we never met that are un-American.”

Perry was arguing that a version of the great replacement theory was already afoot in America, being led by what he later called the “radical Left.”

Perry’s comments may have caused a stir but they are anything but exceptional in today’s Republican Party. The pro-immigration group America’s Voice has identified a staggering 165 members of the 118th Congress who have used replacement theory rhetoric in their official capacity.

More specifically, Republicans have seized on the word “invasion” to amplify the idea that immigrants are flooding into the country to replace white voters at the ballot box.

Donald Trump spent the final weeks of the 2018 midterms hyping a migrant “invasion” that he surely hoped would blunt Democratic momentum at the polls. Trump failed to prevent the blue wave election, but he did succeed in inspiring the El Paso shooter who murdered 22 people in 2019 to supposedly fend off a “Hispanic invasion.”

And he is not the only mass shooter to use such rhetoric. Next week marks the two-year anniversary since an avowed white supremacist opened fire in a Buffalo grocery store in a predominantly Black area, killing 10 people and wounding three.

The Buffalo shooter mentioned invasion or invaders 39 times in his racist screed, according to Zachary Mueller, senior research director at America’s Voice, who helped assemble a report in advance of the Buffalo massacre anniversary. The report is titled, “Two Years After the Deadly Terror Attack in Buffalo, the Replacement Theory has Only Gone More Mainstream.”

“Fighting the invasion of replacers was core to the [Buffalo shooter’s] stated motive,” Mueller told Daily Kos in a statement. “Invasion is not a synonym for large but implies the coordinated effort to overtake and dominate a country.”

Mueller added that Republicans aren’t simply pushing hyperbolic language, they are “arguing migrants constitute a literal military invasion as defined by the Constitution.”

Mueller also sees the word “invasion” as a useful tool to track the escalation of the dangerous conspiracy theory. While some politicians, such as Perry, will explicitly defend “replacement theory” by name, most don’t.

“Often, we are looking for coded versions or core rhetoric associated with the idea that there is an intentional plot to facilitate an invasion of non-white migrants to shift the voting power of ‘real’ Americans in favor of Democrats,” Mueller explained.

Coded language leads to the same extremism over time, but it’s generally harder to track. “The rhetoric of ‘invasion’ allows us to measure the problem,” he adds.

In the current congressional session, Republicans have introduced a dozen pieces of legislation using the “invasion” conspiracy theory, according to the America’s Voice report. “They have used the language 31 times in Congressional hearings and 96 times on the floors of Congress.”

And their spending on ads pushing replacement theory rhetoric has skyrocketed. So far this year, Republican-aligned campaigns have aired 46 unique broadcast ads costing $10.7 million that use the “invasion” language. In 2020, a campaign that unfolded amid the pandemic, Republican campaigns spent just $173,000 on ads citing an “invasion.”

Republican leaders are currently promoting new legislation that will bar noncitizen voting—which is already illegal and also exceedingly rare. Yet at a press conference this week announcing the bill, Speaker Mike Johnson said the law would allow states to track voting by non-U.S. citizens, calling it a “clear and present danger.”

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” Johnson claimed without providing any evidence, conceding, “But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number.”

Trump has claimed to be the victim of supposed illegal noncitizen voting for almost a decade.

“I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump claimed in 2016 after Clinton trounced him in the popular vote by nearly 3 million.

Early in the 2024 presidential race, Trump began pumping the notion that Democrats are letting migrants flow into the country so they can register them to vote.

“I think they really are doing it because they want to sign these people up to vote. I really do,” Trump said at a Mason City, Iowa, campaign event in January. “They can’t speak a word of English for the most part, but they’re signing them up.”

There’s very little distance between that claim and the Charlottesville white supremacists chanting “You will not replace us!” in 2017.

Immigration is going to be a top-of-mind issue for many voters this year. Republicans are making sure of that through their ad dollars, their legislation, and their appeal to any voter who will listen that their power is being subverted by an “invasion’” of noncitizens who are inferior and “un-American.”

It’s a racist conspiracy theory with roots in 1930s Nazi Germany that is being fully embraced and strategically deployed by the Republican Party from top to bottom.

Navigator collects, analyzes, and distributes real data on progressive messaging. The Hub Project’s Bryan Bennett and Gabriela Parra talk with Kerry about what they are seeing in their research this election cycle, and which messaging can help progressive candidates win elections in 2024—and beyond.

WASHINGTON—Some House Democrats are leaning into border security on the campaign trail after years of playing defense against Republican criticism, hoping to defuse a top political liability headed into the fall elections.

The party now argues that Democrats in competitive races can run on fixing the border, while painting Republicans as obstructionists for rejecting the Senate’s bipartisan border deal, according to a memo from House Democrats’ campaign arm. Republicans currently have a 217-213 majority in the House, and the fight for control of the chamber is seen as a tossup.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are teeing up plans to hold a new vote on the bipartisan border deal, which failed in February, while the Biden administration is considering its own actions.

The efforts show Democrats are trying to flip the script on an issue that has long bedeviled them politically, as record numbers of illegal migrants have crossed the southern border since President Biden took office. Immigration has emerged as voters’ top concern, with polls showing they prefer GOP candidate Donald Trump over Biden on the issue.

The House Democrats’ memo, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, points to polling that found February’s Senate deal, designed to sharply cut down on illegal border crossings and speed up asylum claims, was broadly popular with Americans even as Trump and other Republicans said it wasn’t tough enough. The memo charges that Republicans killed the border deal so that they could campaign on the issue and deny Biden a political win.

The memo also highlights the victory by Rep. Tom Suozzi (D., N.Y.) in a hard-fought special election earlier this year. Suozzi campaigned on his support for the border deal, while his Republican opponent, Mazi Pilip, called the pact an “absolute nonstarter.” The memo says Suozzi’s willingness to engage with voters on the issue was a “blueprint” for winning tight races.

Republicans, who blame Biden-era policies for the surge in crossings, argue that Suozzi’s win can’t be chalked up to his stance on immigration, but rather such factors as his opponent’s inexperience and Suozzi’s strong name recognition in the Long Island district he had previously represented.

“If Democrats say ‘lean in’ on the border, we say: ‘It’s your political funeral,’” said Jack Pandol, spokesman for the House Republicans’ campaign arm.

Republicans passed a border bill in the House last year, but the Senate declined to take it up.

In an interview, Suozzi said he emphasized immigration because it is what people in his district were talking about—after nearly 200,000 migrants came to the New York area from the border, many of them on buses paid for by the state of Texas. His internal polling showed it was a key issue.

“Democrats have to recognize this is not just a Republican issue, this is an American issue. When you see the images on television of people streaming across the border, and it looks chaotic, then you are, like, ‘Hey, something is wrong here,’” he said.

The Democrats’ memo cites a series of candidates in competitive districts who are emphasizing fixing the border, including Reps. Hillary Scholten of Michigan, Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania.

On the Senate side, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York told Democrats that he is considering bringing the bipartisan bill back up for a vote, according to a person familiar with the matter. News of the potential vote was reported earlier by Axios.

The border situation “is unacceptable,” Schumer told reporters Wednesday. “Our Republican colleagues may have given up on acting on the border, but Democrats have not,” he said.

Polls show that voters give Republicans an edge over Democrats on securing the border. A Wall Street Journal survey in February found that immigration ranked as the top issue for voters, surpassing the economy and inflation. In the same poll, 65% of voters said they disapproved of Biden’s handling of border security, and 71% said developments in immigration and border security are headed in the wrong direction.

After the border deal’s collapse, Biden wavered about whether to issue an executive order that would mimic one of its key provisions, allowing the government to effectively turn away any asylum seeker who crosses the border illegally. Biden’s legal advisers have warned that such an action, unless passed by Congress, would likely be quickly struck down in court, and border officials have told him the order would have very little effect without the billions of dollars the bipartisan border deal would have invested to hire personnel.

Biden has said in interviews and to associates that he is likely to move ahead with such an order anyway, in large part to show voters he is taking any steps possible to control the border.

On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a rule that will screen asylum seekers earlier in the process for reasons they can’t qualify for asylum, such as previous criminal convictions.

Immigrant advocates believe the change will deny asylum seekers due process, because they likely wouldn’t be able to find lawyers before a screening where they could be determined to be ineligible for protection. The policy will take months to finalize, though, and could never take effect if Trump wins in November and decides not to stick with it.

April 15 started off as a typical day for Gabriela Zavala. Like usual, she was focused on juggling a busy family life with remotely running a small organization that helps asylum-seekers in Matamoros, Mexico.

But by evening, the 41-year-old’s email inbox started to fill with threats.

Zavala showed NPR emails, some of which included racist language, that said, “Don’t think for one moment that we are not watching,” and “kill yourself.”

The vitriol started after a social media thread from one of the most influential conservative institutions in the U.S. went viral.

“BREAKING – Flyers distributed at NGO in Mexico encouraging illegals to vote for President Biden,” read the first post in a 10-part thread on X, formerly known as Twitter, posted at 9:03 p.m. U.S. Central time by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.

The Heritage Foundation’s investigative arm shared an image of the flyer and a video of copies hanging inside portable toilets at a Matamoros migrant camp. Within 12 hours, members of Congress would raise the flyer in hearings with Biden administration officials and use it to justify more restrictive voting laws.

To Zavala’s surprise, the flyer had her name on it, along with her organization’s logo. Zavala told NPR in an April 30 interview that she didn’t write it and has no connection to it. The flyer also had a Biden campaign logo, and in awkwardly written Spanish, it read in part, “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.”

“I was almost in a state of shock,” said Zavala, a U.S. citizen who lives in Texas. “And I said, ‘Wow, you know, this is completely untrue.'”

Zavala said her group, Resource Center Matamoros (RCM), is focused on helping asylum-seekers and has nothing to do with politics. “We have never encouraged people to vote for anyone,” said Zavala, who added that she is well aware that noncitizens are ineligible to vote. She said she would never “tell somebody that can’t vote — that I know can’t vote — ‘Hey, go vote.'”

Parts of the thread include a brief snippet of a recorded conversation with Zavala and details about her professional background.

The final post in the Heritage thread reads, “This flyer obviously seeks to prey on unsophisticated illegals and encourages them to illegally vote.” It quickly racked up more than 9 million views and was boosted by X’s owner, Elon Musk.

Mike Howell, the executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, said the flyer is “accurate.” He also said the thread does not accuse Zavala of authoring it. Yet his organization’s posts amplified the flyer, which bears her name, to a large audience, including members of Congress, and highlighted Zavala and her organization. Later posts published by Heritage criticize and attempt to rebut media efforts to fact-check Zavala’s purported connection to the flyer. Howell has condemned threats of violence related to the flyer.

NPR’s on-the-ground reporting with RCM officials, migrants and other aid workers, along with additional reporting, has found no evidence to support the narrative that there is an effort underway in Matamoros to encourage migrants to vote in U.S. elections. Nor did NPR find any evidence that Zavala has any connection to the flyer besides the obvious fact that someone put her name and logo on it.

In an interview with NPR, both Howell and the social media influencer who collaborated on the thread acknowledged that they did not try to verify with Zavala whether she or anyone at RCM created the flyers before they posted on X. (You can read or watch NPR’s interview with the Oversight Project here.)

Zavala said she felt “victimized” and kept wondering, “Why would somebody want to do this? Why would somebody want to intentionally create a fake flyer?”

The Heritage thread buttressed a key narrative of former President Donald Trump and his allies, who have made false claims about noncitizens swaying election outcomes since 2016 and who had been emphasizing the issue in the months before the flyer appeared online.

At a time when U.S. border agencies have been overwhelmed by record-high numbers of asylum-seekers arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, the current iteration of this narrative is that President Biden is allowing migrants to enter the U.S. so they will illegally vote for him.

“If the ground is being seeded with claims like these,” said Jared Holt, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international think tank focused on extremism around the world, “then that may very well be another possible avenue to try to delegitimize democratic processes in this country.”

Behind the thread

The Heritage thread says the flyer was discovered by Muckraker, a right-wing video site. Anthony Rubin, the site’s founder, often uses undercover tactics in his videos. He has traveled across Latin America to film migrants in transit to the United States. He portrays them as an “invasion” and has appeared as a guest on outlets that have spread conspiracy theories, including Alex Jones’ Infowars. Juries in Connecticut and Texas ordered Jones to pay a combined $1.5 billion to the families of victims of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., for falsely claiming the shooting was a hoax.

In an interview with NPR, Rubin said he was tipped off to the existence of the flyer by a shelter worker in New York who said a migrant had received one in Matamoros. He said the video of the flyers was shot by an anonymous source with a “close connection” to his team.

Muckraker’s own X account shared the thread about the flyers with the caption, “Claims of illegals being instructed to vote in elections has been labeled a ‘conspiracy theory’, until now…”

The Heritage Foundation launched the Oversight Project in 2022 to investigate and provide “aggressive oversight” of the Biden administration. Howell declined to comment on the relationship between Heritage and Muckraker or whether Muckraker was being paid for the content.

“We’re going up against some very powerful and dangerous people to include the cartels, weaponized Biden administration, etc., and we’re not interested in giving an org chart out,” Howell said, adding that he was glad to work with “anybody across any ideological spectrum who’s willing to fight the invasion of the United States.”

The Heritage thread, in addition to publicizing the flyers, also includes posts that link RCM to HIAS, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. It notes that Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas once sat on the board of HIAS, a Jewish organization with offices in 20 countries that aids migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees.

Other posts suggest a connection between Zavala and RCM and liberal billionaire George Soros and point out that he has given money to HIAS. While the intent of the posts is unclear, Soros, who is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor, is the target of many far-right and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

HIAS released a statement saying that it has no connection to the flyers and does not support their message. Beth Oppenheim, the organization’s chief advancement officer, said in recent months that HIAS has “increasingly become a target” for misinformation online. She said the other campaigns against HIAS have referenced “great replacement” theory, which falsely claims that Jews are bringing immigrants into the U.S. to replace white Americans. Several mass shooters have cited the theory as justification for their acts.

An unexpected visit

To date, it is unknown who created the flyer. But right away, Zavala said, she understood one piece of the mystery behind the viral social media thread.

Earlier on April 15, the same day the thread appeared, two American men wearing flip-flops rang the bell at RCM’s building in Matamoros and said they wanted to volunteer. The scene was captured by RCM’s security cameras. NPR was given access to the footage.

Later, it would become clear that the two men were Anthony Rubin, the founder of Muckraker, and his brother, Joshua Rubin.

Anthony Rubin can be heard on security footage saying that he and his brother previously worked with migrants “in Colombia, in Panama.”

Hugo Terrones, RCM’s director, came outside to meet the men, who were never let inside. Terrones said that Anthony Rubin, who was speaking in broken Spanish, claimed he worked for HIAS. That exchange can be faintly made out on the security footage. HIAS briefly rented office space from RCM two years ago.

Terrones called Zavala and handed over his phone so Rubin could speak with her in English.

Zavala said she told Rubin about volunteering at the shelter, which can include tasks such as cleaning or playing with children.

Later she would discover a snippet of that brief conversation in Heritage’s X thread with a caption saying Zavala implied that “she wants to help as many illegals as possible before President Trump is reelected.”

In the recording, Rubin can be heard saying, “In all honesty, we’re just trying to help as many people as possible before Trump gets reelected.”

Zavala replies with a laugh: “Believe me, we’re in the same boat.”

“It was in the context of volunteering,” Zavala told NPR. “Yes, we want to help as many people as we can, you know? And for me, it’s like, regardless of who’s in office.”

Rubin did not deny to NPR that he introduced himself as a volunteer and a HIAS worker. “Absolutely, we were down there, and we were inquiring whether or not it would be possible to volunteer,” Rubin said.

He previously told The New York Times that he did not recall whether he had said he was with HIAS. A spokesperson for HIAS said Rubin has never been employed by the organization.

Terrones told NPR that Rubin had asked him unusual questions, including whether Terrones knew of organizations in the U.S. that help migrants vote for Biden. Terrones said he kept answering, “No.”

“He kept repeating and was very persistent, asking us if we would vote for Biden,” said Terrones. He said Rubin asked, “Biden or Trump?”

Rubin said he does not recall what he asked Terrones. In his videos, Rubin often asks migrants similar questions. Rubin told NPR that in those videos, migrants “all say Biden.” He said that this means it would be “pretty ridiculous” to think “this would not be then weaponized once they cross the border.”

Trump enacted a series of escalating policies to chip away at the U.S. asylum system when he was in office, and he has pledged to continue if he is elected again. Biden was critical of Trump’s policies when he ran for president in 2020. Once in office, Biden continued the emergency border policies that Trump enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic that turned away many asylum-seekers until last May, and he introduced new asylum restrictions.

Biden has urged asylum-seekers to use a U.S. government app to make an appointment at a port of entry and avoid crossing the border illegally. But appointment slots are scarce, so migrants arriving in Mexican border cities like Matamoros end up waiting weeks or months in dangerous and difficult conditions.

The flyer becomes political fodder

Just 12 hours after the flyer was posted to X, Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Dan Bishop both brought posters of the flyer to a budget hearing with Mayorkas. This was shortly before they presented articles of impeachment against him.

“How can Congress and the American people have confidence that the outcome of close elections will not turn on the votes of noncitizens who have registered and voted unlawfully?” Bishop asked.

The Daily Signal, the Heritage Foundation’s news site, later published a roundup of Republican lawmakers’ responses to the flyers, in which many of them called for stricter voting laws.

It is already illegal for noncitizens to cast ballots in federal elections, and studies have repeatedly shown it is rare. The topic gained new attention in April, when Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson promoted federal legislation that would implement new citizenship documentation requirements.

Gilda Daniels, an election law professor at the University of Baltimore, recently told NPR that requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote would make it much harder for many eligible U.S. citizens, including students, older adults and poor people, to vote.

Clumsy translations, defunct phone numbers

Zavala said a “blanket of fear” fell over her in the days after the flyers went viral.

“I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t know if I should respond,” Zavala said. “If I say something, is it going to fuel the fire more? Will this cause more death threats?”

She shut down her social media accounts as the hateful messages kept coming.

She said it bothered her that no one publicizing the flyer on social media or in Congress had checked with her about whether she or anyone at RCM had written it.

“They never cared to call me and find out whether it was true or not,” Zavala said. “I mean, that really is, you know, an attack on my character as a person.”

Rubin told NPR that it “certainly occurred to me” to ask RCM to verify the flyer when he visited, but he didn’t want to bring attention to himself because he said he had previously been kidnapped by the Gulf Cartel near there. “I need to maintain a low profile here because I am in enemy territory. The cartel literally told me, ‘Never come back here again.'”

Howell, a former attorney for the Department of Homeland Security, acknowledged that the Oversight Project did not reach out to Zavala before publishing the X thread because “it was in the immediate public interest to know about the invasion in the United States.” He added, “Would the United States reach out to the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] to verify intelligence about them flooding fentanyl into this country? Of course not.”

Howell noted that the Heritage Foundation’s news outlet, The Daily Signal, sought comment from Zavala after the thread was published. The first story that The Daily Signal published about the thread, on April 15, does not mention seeking comment from Zavala; only the second story, on April 16, does. The second story says Zavala didn’t respond to The Daily Signal.

Zavala said there are a number of clues that suggest the flyer was not written by her or anyone at RCM.

It contains errors, such as “Bienvedinos” instead of “Bienvenidos” (Welcome). Zavala is not a native Spanish-speaker, but she said she checks the grammar and spelling of what she writes in Spanish.

Whoever made the flyer relied heavily on RCM’s English-language website, which has dated posts that stop after 2021. Zavala said she has not had the time or resources to update it.

The flyer lists a defunct phone number that Zavala said she hasn’t used in years but is still listed on the website.

The first two sentences of the flyer appear to be an old description of the organization copied directly from the website and run through Google Translate into Spanish. It mentions that HIAS shares the office, an arrangement that ended in 2022, according to both groups.

The next two sentences, which remind readers to vote for Biden when they get to the U.S., are written in a different style and are riddled with more errors than the previous ones. That section translates “United States” as “estados unidos,” without the usual capitalization, while the previous section uses the abbreviation “los EE. UU.”

There are also inaccuracies in the X thread. The thread says the site where the video shows the flyers is a “Resource Center Matamoras (RCM) location.”

But RCM has not staffed the site for years, which was also confirmed to NPR by people from other local nongovernmental organizations who work with migrants. Glady Cañas of Ayudándoles a Triunfar and Andrea Rudnik of Team Brownsville both told NPR that there is no longer a formal camp at that site.

NPR visited the site and saw an informal encampment with a small number of migrants staying there, but did not see any evidence of the flyers. Anyone can access the encampment, which is in a city park along the banks of the Rio Grande.

Aid workers like Cañas are redirecting migrants who show up at the encampment to shelters.

Rubin told NPR that Terrones, RCM’s director, gave him a “firsthand” tour of the camp the day he visited, was “letting himself into these different tents” and introduced Rubin to a Russian man who was staying there. “So this idea that they don’t have any tie-ins with that camp is total nonsense,” said Rubin.

Terrones maintains that RCM currently has no role at the site, which he considers closed. He said he took the Rubin brothers to the encampment because he had trouble communicating with them and was trying to tell them it was basically empty. He said he opened tents to show them no one was inside. He said he had met the Russian man weeks earlier when he came to RCM asking for help.

Cañas and Rudnik each told NPR that they had never seen the flyers at the encampment or heard about them from other volunteers or migrants.

“Somebody would have noticed it,” said Rudnik, a co-founder and volunteer with Team Brownsville. “And nobody did.”

She also said she had never seen any organizations hang flyers in the portable toilets before.

“Those port-a-potties are pretty filthy,” Rudnik said. “If we wanted people to know something, it would be put in a different place.”

Migrants who remain at the encampment denied ever seeing the flyers. Orlando Martínez, a 36-year-old from El Salvador, said he has been at the site for over a year and has never seen any such flyers, “nor has anyone come to say we should vote for Biden.” He was among just a handful of people present when NPR visited on the afternoon of April 29.

“No one who crosses illegally can vote,” Martínez said. He said he knows the same is true for those who make an appointment to enter through a U.S. port of entry.

There was no evidence of flyers in sight when NPR toured RCM’s building. Asylum-seekers who have been at RCM for weeks as they wait for their appointments at the border told NPR they had not seen the flyer or been encouraged to vote in the U.S. either.

A second thread

Zavala decided to break her silence and gave a brief comment to The Associated Press. The April 17 story reported that Zavala said she hadn’t made the flyer, did not know who had, and does not encourage immigrants to vote. Other fact-checking organizations, including PolitiFact and Lead Stories, published articles citing Zavala’s denial to the AP and the flyer’s Spanish-language errors.

Among those who questioned the Heritage thread was Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin, who regularly covers border issues. “I am extremely skeptical of this,” Melugin posted on X. “There’s plenty of controversy with some NGO’s, but this flier seems fake or doctored, even at first glance.”

Heritage has stood by its story.

On April 25, 10 days after the initial thread, Heritage released a second X thread. It criticizes “legacy media” for discrediting the flyer based on Zavala’s denial and the translation errors. It points out that Zavala is not a native Spanish-speaker.

In an interview with NPR, Howell added, “The counterattack [against the story] has provided absolutely zero evidence. Our international bombshell reporting has stood the test of all scrutiny and will withstand some more.”

The second X thread also included an excerpt of an affidavit with the name and signature apparently redacted. The affidavit’s author claimed to have seen 40 copies of the flyer “inside the shelter,” which appears to be a reference to RCM. The author says that they took a flyer to their home and that the next day they saw a similar flyer inside the portable toilets at the camp and recorded a video.

“The individual who authored the affidavit is somebody that we have a close connection with,” Rubin said. “This isn’t some random individual.”

Howell said they wouldn’t give more details about the affidavit’s author. “Obviously we’re protecting our sources and methods on this.”

NPR was unable to verify the affidavit’s account, which is dated April 19, four days after Heritage’s first thread was published. The affidavit gives no time frame for when the events it describes occurred.

Heritage’s X thread calls the migrant camp a “hotbed for political activity.” It includes photos of a tour that Jill Biden took of the camp when her husband was running for president in 2020, a photo of a Biden campaign sign hanging in the camp in 2021 and a photo showing “Bye Trump” balloons at the camp after the last presidential election.

Zavala said RCM, which did work closely with the camp during the time the photos were taken, did not put up any campaign signs. Zavala said she chose not to attend Jill Biden’s visit.

She said in the lead-up to the 2020 election, some asylum-seekers had been stuck at the camp for well over a year due to Trump administration policies. “All their hopes were riding on a new administration coming in,” she said. She said some migrants chose to put up signs “without influence or encouragement by any NGO, including RCM.”

Rudnik, of Team Brownsville, remembers a volunteer from the U.S., who was not affiliated with an NGO, put up the “Bye Trump” balloons on her own. Zavala said she didn’t know about the balloons at the time, but had anyone asked her, “I would have said, ‘No, it is not a good idea.'”

Sharing her side of the story

By the time Heritage published its second social media thread, Zavala had decided she had to say more publicly. She agreed to talk to a reporter for The New York Times and then to NPR. “It wasn’t enough that I just denied it,” Zavala said about the flyer. “I need to share my side of the story. People need to hear what actually happened.”

Zavala wanted the public to know that the Rubin brothers rang the bell at RCM hours before the thread published.

She said while it is clear who publicized the flyers, she doesn’t know who made them, who put them in the portable toilets or who created the video.

“If I can’t tell you exactly who it was and really have it in evidence, I’m not going to go out there and accuse somebody of something,” Zavala said. She said even though she felt that whoever made the flyer “smeared” her name and put it through “the entire national public spotlight,” she is not willing to do the same to anyone else.

She still feels fearful about what having her name associated with this flyer could mean for her, her family and her staff.

It weighs on her that acts of violence, like the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart, have been inspired by immigration-themed conspiracy theories.

“What if one crazy extremist takes this to heart and says, ‘I’m just going to hurt them’?” Zavala said.

In an interview with The New York Times that Heritage shared online, Howell condemned death threats, saying he gets them “all the time.” He added, “No one should do it.”

Zavala said she will continue to focus on her mission to help asylum-seekers.

“There’s people fleeing from extreme situations, extreme circumstances,” Zavala said. “And if I have the resources and the capability to help them, I will.”

NPR’s Audrey Nguyen, Texas Public Radio’s Gaige Davila and independent journalist Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas contributed reporting to this story. Davila and Cárdenas reported from Matamoros, Mexico.

GLENDALE, Ariz.—Ubaldo Lopez is leaning toward supporting former President Donald Trump this year after voting for President Biden in 2020. Lopez said the economy feels worse under Biden and he worries about the surge of migrants illegally crossing the state’s southern border.

“Even though I’m part of an immigrant family, I think I would like to have more control over who comes over here,” said Lopez, 47, a second generation Mexican-American living in Phoenix.

At the same time, the glass-production worker is likely to vote for Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego in the state’s Senate race. Lopez said being Latino gives Gallego an “understanding towards the Latino community and a better understanding of the people of the state of Arizona.”

Gallego is on the front lines of his party’s battle to win back Latino voters, particularly men, many of whom have soured on the party under Biden’s leadership. The race will test the power of representation on the ballot in Arizona, a top political battleground, where Latinos make up about one-fifth of the electorate, according to AP VoteCast. And his Senate candidacy—in an expected matchup with Trump ally Kari Lake—could offer a road map for the kinds of messaging and organizational outreach that might help Democrats win back some Latinos, a core constituency for the party.

“Most of these men are independent men, working-class men. They appreciate that I’m a veteran, Latino veteran, and working class,” Gallego said in a recent interview over tortas, a type of Mexican sandwich. Gallego said the Biden campaign will bring back some of the voters, but added: “There is going to be a subsection of voters, there’s just no denying it, that are going to vote for Donald Trump and vote for me.”

Gallego, 44, is forging a different path from most Democrats who have recently won statewide office here. Those Democrats, most of whom are white, have pulled together a fragile cross-party coalition with campaigns placed in the ideological center and avoided confrontation with their critics.

Gallego, meanwhile, a former member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, represents one of the state’s most liberal districts—which is 65% Latino, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—and has a solid Democratic voting record. Gallego came up in political circles as a Latino activist and is known for his willingness to publicly criticize those he disagrees with, sometimes using profanity.

The Senate race is seen as one of the most competitive in the country and could decide which party controls the chamber. Down-ballot polling is often scarce, but in Arizona, Gallego holds narrow leads in recent public surveys, in part by outperforming Biden with Latino voters.

The Wall Street Journal poll of the seven states that will decide the election from March had Trump winning Latino men, 47% to 40%. In 2020, Biden won Latino men nationally 59% to 38%, according to AP VoteCast. The Journal poll, an average of seven battleground states, showed Biden leading Trump with Latinos overall but his margin was down from 2020.

“We know our agenda is strong and resonant among Latinos, and we also know it’s going to take time and effort on our part to meet Latinos where they are and bring them into our coalition,” Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesman, said in a statement. “Trump is doing nothing to talk to Latino voters.”

After publication, Jaime Florez, the Hispanic communications director for the Republican National Committee, said the RNC and Trump campaign were working to show Latinos that “the American Dream will only be alive and reachable again if we re-elect President Trump.”

Republicans say there is plenty of time for Lake, 54, to win over voters. Gallego is widely believed to be less well known than Lake, who spent three decades as a TV anchor here and ran in a major gubernatorial race in 2022, which she narrowly lost. However, Gallego has a substantial fundraising lead over Lake.

Lake, whose husband and children are Latino, spent Cinco de Mayo weekend reaching out to the community, including in the border town of Nogales. “When people learn about who Ruben Gallego is, they are going to run the other way,” Lake said in a recent interview, citing some of Gallego’s past votes. “He is a radical Democrat.”

Maggie Acosta, field director for Worker Power, an organization that targets Latino voters in support of Democratic candidates, said when they knock on doors voters generally aren’t excited about either Biden or Trump, but they can be convinced. She said voters do know who Gallego is and are enthusiastic about his candidacy.

“A lot of those people are very uninformed, it takes conversations and that’s why we go out door to door,” Acosta said.

Gallego has moved toward the center on immigration by increasingly criticizing the Biden administration for not doing enough to combat the migrant surge. Gallego was supportive of bipartisan legislation that aimed to secure the border earlier this year. Trump urged Republicans not to vote for the bill to keep it a campaign issue.

Gallego said his views were in line with many Latinos, who he said want border security in addition to broad federal immigration changes.

Last weekend, Gallego’s campaign co-hosted an event with a boxing gym where the mostly male attendees gathered to watch a fight between Canelo Alvarez and Jaime Munguia and eat tacos.

One attendee, Jose Irra, 25, said he didn’t vote in 2020 but planned to back Trump this year because he saw the former president as better on economics than Biden. But Irra, who works in real estate and lives in Phoenix, doesn’t consider himself a Republican and is open to voting for Gallego because he was visible in the community.

Some other attendees rejected Democrats outright. Sonny Hernandez, 70, a retired truck driver from Youngtown, said he would vote for Republicans straight down the ticket. He believed Lake could help Trump get his agenda through Congress.

“[Trump] made sure that the border was secure,” Hernandez said.

Arizona has become ground zero for the fight over abortion access after the state Supreme Court reinstated a near total ban last month. It has been repealed, but because of a legislative quirk, it could still go into effect for several months.

The Biden team is working to connect with Latino men over the abortion issue as a way to bolster the president’s support with the demographic. One ad airing in competitive states featured a Marine Corps veteran talking about the threat to abortion access and Biden’s efforts to protect his daughter’s freedoms.

Gallego praised that messaging. “Talking to [Latino men] in that manner, ‘this is overreach that puts your family in danger,’ is a very, very smart way to do it.” He and other Democrats are also talking about the threat of access as a key issue to hold on to Latinas and suburban women. The Biden campaign is opening campaign offices in predominantly Latino areas.

Fabiola Lopez of Phoenix, 34, who works in quality control at a beef plant, had initially been leaning toward Trump for economic reasons and was uncommitted on the Senate race. However, concern over access to abortion was enough for her to say she was leaning toward voting for Democrats.

Lopez who was attending the event with her teenage daughter Laila said: “I want her to do whatever she wants in life and then have kids.”

If Gallego wins the Senate race, he will be the first Latino to represent Arizona. The candidacy of another Latino in the state, Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state who won in 2022, offers hints that Gallego might pull off a victory.

Matt Grodsky, director of communications for Fontes’s campaign, said what resonated with Latino voters in that race was a moderate, patriotic message “against the backdrop of what’s happened in some of the countries where obviously a lot of individuals immigrated from.”

Alfonso Salas, 63, a medical assistant from Phoenix, who supports Biden said he wants to see the campaign be more aggressive “about the difference between authoritarianism and fascism.”

Gallego said some of his appeal among Latinos may have little to do with policy.

“I grew up in the neighborhoods that they are in right now,” he said.

Republicans are increasingly joining former President Trump on hedging or dodging when asked whether they’ll accept the results of the 2024 elections.

Why it matters: Promising to accept the results of elections used to be a cliche. But in the Trump era, that’s no longer a guarantee.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) told CNN’s “State of the Union” today he’ll accept the results if they’re “fair and free.” In February, he told ABC News that if he were vice president in 2020, he would have told states to submit alternate slates of electors and let Congress decide.

Speaker Mike Johnson would “adhere to the rule of law” on accepting results, but is fine with legal challenges, spokesperson Taylor Haulsee told the New York Times.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) repeatedly dodged when “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker asked if he’ll accept the next election’s results, calling it a “hypothetical question.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said she’ll accept results if “constitutional,” but also said the 2020 election was not, because of COVID-era changes to voting.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he’ll accept the results if “there’s no massive cheating.”

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) will accept the results if he thinks they’re fair and if states follow their own laws, he said last month at an Axios event.

The bottom line: Trump campaign officials said it wasn’t a “litmus test” when they asked potential RNC hires if the 2020 election was stolen, Axios’ Sophia Cai reported in March.

“There is a litmus test,” a Trump official told reporters at the time. “And that is, ‘Do you support President Trump, or not?'”

CNN
—
The Biden administration moved Friday to terminate a decades-old agreement that governs conditions for migrant children in government custody, according to a court filing, which argues that the settlement was meant to be temporary.

The 1997 Flores settlement, as the agreement is known, requires the government to release children from government custody without unnecessary delay to sponsors, like parents or adult relatives, and dictates conditions by which children are held. The Health and Human Services Department is charged with the care of unaccompanied migrant children.

The Biden administration has previously signaled that it planned to end the Flores agreement, instead preparing a federal regulation that, the administration argues, “faithfully implements” the requirements spelled out in the settlement, provides additional protections and responds to “unforeseen changed circumstances since 1997.” The regulation was published in late April.

“By its own terms the FSA was meant to be temporary. The parties initially agreed that the FSA would terminate no later than five years after final court approval and then later agreed that the FSA would terminate 45 days after the INS published final regulations implementing the FSA,” Friday’s court filing reads.

“The Rule is expansive and responsive to the changing needs of ORR’s (Unaccompanied Children) Program. ORR anticipates it will guide its operations and provide needed protections to unaccompanied children for years to come,” the filing adds, referring to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency within HHS.

But immigration attorneys have expressed concern over the lack of outside oversight if the Flores settlement is terminated.

“If the government were to prevail in its motion, HHS would no longer be bound by the Flores settlement. As Flores counsel, we would no longer be able to interview children in HHS custody, or file motions to enforce when the rights guaranteed by Flores are denied to children in HHS custody,” said Neha Desai, senior director of immigration at the National Center for Youth Law.

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

In an extended riff at his rally on Saturday in New Jersey, former President Donald J. Trump returned to a reference that has become a staple of his stump speech, comparing migrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer and cannibal from “The Silence of the Lambs,” as he aims to stoke anger and fear over migration in advance of the election.

“Has anyone ever seen ‘The Silence of the Lambs’? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man,” Mr. Trump said in Wildwood, N.J. “He often times would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? ‘Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner,’ as this poor doctor walked by. ‘I’m about to have a friend for dinner.’ But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”

He continued: “We have people that have been released into our country that we don’t want in our country, and they’re coming in totally unchecked, totally unvetted. And we can’t let this happen. They’re destroying our country, and we’re sitting back and we better damn well win this election, because if we don’t, our country is going to be doomed. It’s going to be doomed.”

Mr. Trump, beginning with his announcement for the presidency in 2015, has frequently claimed that those crossing the border are violent criminals or mentally ill people who have been sent to the United States by other countries. There is no evidence to back his assertion, and border authorities have said that most migrants who cross the border are vulnerable families fleeing poverty and violence.

But that has not kept Mr. Trump from saying that migrants come from “mental institutions” or “insane asylums,” and comparing them to the fictional psychopath.

Mr. Trump, who often veers into asides during his stump speech, then returned immediately to decrying the migrant crisis and criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of it.

Throughout his campaign this year, Mr. Trump has frequently brought up Hannibal Lecter, once calling him “legendary” and another time referring to him as a nice fellow. In Wildwood, he spoke on the 1991 movie longer than he generally does.

Hannibal Lecter, a fictional psychopath who paired human organs with fava beans and an Italian red, was played memorably by Anthony Hopkins, winning an Oscar for his performance.

It is not clear what Mr. Trump meant by “late, great,” given that neither the character — nor the actor who played the role — have died, in person, film or the books the character originated from.

“The Silence of the Lambs” is one of several references that Mr. Trump frequently invokes during his rallies.

Another favorite is the gangster Al Capone, to whom Mr. Trump often compares himself.

“I’ve been indicted more than the great Alphonse Capone. Scarface,” Mr. Trump said incredulously on Saturday. “Al Capone was so mean that if you went to dinner with him and he didn’t like you, you’d be dead the next morning. And I got indicted more than him.”

NEW YORK — It was 7 a.m. on a recent Friday when Wang Gang, a 36-year-old Chinese immigrant, jostled for a day job in New York City’s Flushing neighborhood.

When a potential employer pulled up near the street corner, Wang and dozens of other men swarmed around the car. They were hoping to be picked for work on a construction site, at a farm, as a mover — anything that would pay.

Wang had no luck, even as he waited for two more hours. It would be another day without a job since he crossed the southern U.S. border illegally in February.

The daily struggle of Chinese immigrants in Flushing is a far cry from the picture former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have sought to paint of them as a coordinated group of “military-age” men who have come to the United States to build an “army” and attack America.

Since the start of the year, as the Chinese newcomers adjust to life in the U.S., Trump has alluded to “fighting age” or “military age” Chinese men at least six times and suggested at least twice that they were forming a migrant “army.” The talking point also appears in conservative media and on social platforms.

“They’re coming in from China — 31, 32,000 over the last few months — and they’re all military age and they mostly are men,” Trump said during a campaign rally last month. “And it sounds like to me, are they trying to build a little army in our country?”

Asian advocacy organizations say they worry the rhetoric could encourage further harassment and violence toward the Asian community, which saw more hate incidents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wang, who traveled several weeks from Wuhan, China, to Ecuador, to the southern U.S. border, said the idea that Chinese migrants were building a military “does not exist” among immigrants he has met.

“We came here to make money,” he said.

Immigrants in Flushing said they came to escape poverty and financial losses from China’s strict lockdown during the pandemic, or to escape the threat of imprisonment in a repressive society where they couldn’t speak or exercise their religion freely.

Since late 2022 — when China’s three-year COVID-19 lockdown began to lift — the U.S. has seen a sharp rise in the number of Chinese migrants. In 2023, U.S. authorities arrested more than 37,000 Chinese nationals at the U.S.-Mexico border, more than 10 times the previous year’s number. In December alone, border officials arrested 5,951 Chinese nationals on the southern border, a record monthly high, before the number trended down during the first three months of this year.

Most who have come are single adults, according to federal data. There are more men than women on the perilous route, which typically involves flying to South America and then making the long, arduous trek north to the U.S. border.
One reason men may come alone in higher numbers is the danger, said a 35-year-old Chinese man who only gave his family name of Yin because he was concerned about the safety of his wife and children, who remain in China for now.
“This trip is deadly. People die. The trip isn’t suitable for women — it’s not suitable for anyone,” said Yin.

Immigrants in Flushing said they came to America to escape China, not to fight on its behalf.

Thirty-six-year-old Chen Wang, from southeastern China, said he decided to come to the U.S. in late 2021 after he posted comments critical of the ruling party on Twitter. He was admonished by local police and feared that he could be imprisoned.

More than two years later, he is still unemployed and lives in a tent in the woods that he has made into a home. Chen described his fellow Chinese on the journey as simply people “chasing a better life.”

To be sure, U.S. intelligence leaders have grave concerns about the threat China’s authoritarian government poses to the country. There also have been crimes committed by Chinese immigrants, including the arrest in March of a Chinese national breaching a military base in California, but there has been no evidence that migrants from China are coming to the U.S. to fight Americans.

Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell last month called the Chinese nationals “economic migrants.”

China has said it strongly opposes illegal immigration. Its foreign ministry said Trump’s claims of a Chinese migrant army were “an egregious mismatch of the facts.” The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, said letting so many Chinese migrants into the U.S. sets a “dangerous precedent” that nefarious actors could exploit.

“These individuals have not been vetted or screened, and we have no idea who they are affiliated with or what their intention is,” he said in an emailed statement.

Sapna Cheryan, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, said the claims about Chinese migrants — made without evidence — build on pervasive stereotypes that Asian people do not belong in the country.

These ideas have fueled violence against Asian Americans and could embolden people again, she said.
Li Kai, also known as Khaled, a 44-year-old Muslim from a city close to Beijing, said he was worried about Trump’s statements regarding illegal immigration and Muslims, but said he has no choice other than to stay.

He was one of the few who made the trip with his family. He shares a bunk bed and sofa with his wife and two sons in a temporary home in Flushing where he has placed an American flag on the wall.

When his sons are at school, he studies for a commercial driver’s license. He hopes to find a job and start paying taxes.

“Now that I have brought my family here, I want to have a stable life here,” he said. “I would like to pay back.”

GOP leaders sidestep border demands in legislative deals
Conservative critics say lawmakers have little to show voters
Republicans are facing backlash from immigration hard-liners on and off Capitol Hill after repeatedly failing to attach conservative border policies to must-pass legislation.

Congress passed a sweeping foreign aid package in April that lacked the border security demands many GOP House members insisted on for more than a year. Weeks earlier, lawmakers cleared a government funding measure that also largely excluded right-wing border demands.

“They’ve squandered opportunity after opportunity,” Ira Mehlman, media director for the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform, said of Republicans. “They’ve made promises they haven’t kept.”

The outrage from conservative advocacy groups and some lawmakers highlights the limits of GOP leaders’ efforts to use border security to unite the fractious conference. And it raises questions about whether House Republicans will pay a political price for making immigration promises they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep.

Congress rarely makes big legislative deals in an election year, leaving must-pass bills as the most viable vehicles for getting priorities across the finish line. Lawmakers are pushing for immigration-related amendments on the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization package (H.R. 3935) the Senate is working on this week, but they aren’t expected to advance.

BGOV Bill Summary: FAA Reauthorization Agreement

The only remaining option ahead of the election is a government funding deal or stopgap measure before a Sept. 30 deadline. Lawmakers and conservative advocates view it as the last opportunity to get border measures done this year, but many are pessimistic about their chances.

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), at left, speaks with House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.), before the start of a Jan. 10, 2024, hearing.
Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), at left, speaks with House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.), before the start of a Jan. 10, 2024, hearing. Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
“We’re going to work really hard, but I’m certainly not going to count on it,” said Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.), whose Homeland Security Committee was a leader on the GOP’s marquee border legislation (H.R. 2).

He added that he’s frustrated with leadership for backing down on opportunities to push the bill through. “We need to put our foot down a lot more,” he said.

‘Nice to Say’
Border hawks’ resignation marks a big shift from a little more than a year ago, when Republicans took control of the House and trumpeted plans to pass legislation, hold the Biden administration accountable for rising migrant arrivals, and use leverage to force policy changes.

After some infighting, Republicans mostly united to pass H.R. 2 last May to tighten asylum standards, increase immigrant detention, and require border wall construction, among other things.

Critics say Republicans took their victory laps too early. With the GOP controlling the House and Democrats controlling the Senate and the White House, the border measure was always destined to be a mere messaging bill unless Republicans played hardball in broader legislative negotiations.

“It’s nice to say we passed something, but unless it becomes law then it doesn’t really matter very much,” Mehlman said.

The House Freedom Caucus and other hard-line Republicans insisted on tying H.R. 2 to fiscal 2024 appropriations legislation and to a divisive aid package for Ukraine — the latter push sparked a months-long bipartisan border negotiation that conservatives later rejected.

But GOP leaders ultimately agreed to deals on both fronts that lacked the aggressive border security measures. Both got more than 100 Republican votes in the House.

“We had two opportunities, and unfortunately we didn’t get it done,” Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said.

Homeland Funding Bill Hikes Border Cash But Spurns GOP Asks

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a perennial thorn in Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)’s side, on Wednesday unsuccessfully moved to oust him from his position, in part for failing to use appropriations bills to force border enforcement legislation forward.

Political Cost
The legislative outcomes left conservative groups fuming at Johnson and further shook their faith in Congress’s ability to seize the moment to pass restrictive border legislation amid unprecedented voter concern.

“It’s a huge missed political opportunity for Republicans because they can’t point to something that they’ve done or tried to do when it comes to border security, which is the No. 1 issue for all voters,” said Eric Ruark, director of research and public relations at NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for lower levels of immigration.

Johnson spokesperson Athina Lawson defended House Republicans’ work on border measures, saying the House has passed H.R. 2 and other bills to crack down on illegal immigration, only to have Senate Democrats ignore the legislation.

Americans have named immigration as a top concern for three straight months in Gallup polling, with rising interest noted among independents.

“It is difficult for center-right voters in the country, for anybody who believes that our chaotic border situation should be addressed, to not be disappointed in the Republican conference’s failure to go to the mat for them,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), a member of the Homeland Security Committee.

Some Republicans are also directing their frustration at GOP colleagues in the Senate, where Democrats have a slim majority.

“It’s sitting on their lap,” Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.) said of H.R. 2. “They put the blame on us and say, gee, we need to put it on a rider. Why don’t they put it on a rider? Let them try it. And they don’t.”

Common Foe
The finger-pointing among Republicans has somewhat obscured one sentiment they all tend to agree on: that Democrats and President Joe Biden’s administration are to blame for the record migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border.

The administration is set to unveil a plan as soon as Thursday to speed up deportations of migrants who are deemed security threats, but it hasn’t yet taken more expansive executive action border hawks have pushed.

“Democrats have only proposed measures for political cover that won’t fix the problem, and Republicans are not going to let the White House accept anything less than transformative change,” Lawson, of Johnson’s office, said in a statement. “House Republicans understand that the only way to truly solve the problem is to elect President Trump in November.”

Political operatives are working to cut through the GOP infighting and focus on that message.

“Since the White House and Democrat-controlled Senate refuse to act, voters will have to voice their disapproval at the ballot box,” Heritage Action Executive Vice President Ryan Walker said in a statement to Bloomberg Government.

Donald Trump, campaigning to oust Biden in November, has pledged to carry out mass deportations, build migrant detention camps, and use the US military to combat illegal immigration.

Bishop, who’s running for attorney general in North Carolina, said he hopes voters see that putting Trump back in the White House is the only way to achieve a border crackdown. Ensuring Republicans keep control of the House is crucial to helping Trump achieve his agenda, he said.

“At some point in time, hopefully President Trump can put some spine in this Republican majority,” he said.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is proposing changes in the asylum process, which will allow immigration officials to reject migrants with criminal records sooner.

The Department of Homeland Security revealed details of the proposed new rule on Thursday.

Under current law, a migrant who arrives at the border and undergoes an initial “credible fear” screening is allowed to continue with the process even if they have a criminal background. They are detained in such cases.

“This is really intended to be a national security and public safety measure,” the senior official said. “It’s intended to ensure that the people we are most concerned about can be removed as early as possible in the process.”

Individuals “who pose a national security or public safety risk” would be subject to the new rule, “specifically those who have been convicted of a particularly serious crime, participated in the persecution of others, are inadmissible on national security or terrorism-related grounds, or for whom there are reasonable grounds to deem them a danger to the security of the United States,” according to a DHS statement.

Compared to the vast majority of cases, “the number of migrants who are subject to these bars is small,” DHS said. The Homeland Security official refused to quantify the potential asylum seekers it would affect.

Immigration experts say asylum eligibility is complicated and questioned whether migrants applying for asylum will have access to legal representation that early in the process.

“The main issue here – which we have found repeatedly – is that when cases move quickly, people can’t get attorneys,” said Austin Kocher, assistant professor at Syracuse University who studies federal immigration enforcement.

“An attorney might be able, on the client’s behalf, to make interventions and provide some balance. But the way the policy is being proposed, they want to move this part of the process so fast, it’s going to be almost impossible for people to get attorneys,” Kocher said.

In an election year, the president is under significant pressure to keep unlawful crossings down.

“Congress hasn’t done anything meaningful on immigration in the lifetimes of most migrants,” Kocher said. “I can completely understand why the Biden campaign and the president himself would want to show they’re doing things to make it tougher at the border to balance out what is an extremely hardline position from the other side.”

President Joe Biden had been considering new executive actions to crack down on record migration at the southern border after congressional Republicans in February blocked border legislation backed by the White House.

The legislation, which was killed in the Senate, would have given the Department of Homeland Security the power to shut down the border to migrants crossing illegally when daily crossings exceed a daily average of 4,000 in any one-week period.

And if migrant border encounters surpass an average of 5,000 a day − a threshold now met − DHS would have been required to close the border to migrants seeking to cross without prior authorization between ports of entry.

Jack Enright was swimming off the coast of La Jolla, Calif., just north of San Diego, on a sunny Tuesday morning in January when he spotted a boat racing toward the shore, headed straight for him.

As he swam out of the way, Enright said, he initially didn’t know what the white pleasure craft was doing. “But when I saw there was a boat full of people,” he said, “that’s when I knew.”

It was, he realized, another smuggling operation carrying migrants into the U.S. illegally via the sea. When the boat ran ashore, about a dozen people ran out and up a rocky walkway toward a nearby street, where they disappeared.

While illegal immigration by people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has risen to record levels in recent years, seaborne smuggling of migrants has surged as well—particularly in Southern California.

Their dramatic arrivals, some of which locals, including Enright, have caught on video, have become an increasingly common sight for people who visit or live by beaches, sometimes sparking fear and anger.

The number of times migrants illegally entered or attempted to enter California by boat has more than doubled from 308 in the federal fiscal year that ended in September of 2020 to 736 in the same period last year, according to Customs and Border Protection. While most arrive around San Diego, they have ventured as far as Santa Barbara County, north of Los Angeles.

The migrant boat landings are adding to an already chaotic situation around San Diego, which has recently become the most active stretch along the border for illegal migration. Federal agents there have made more than 220,000 arrests since Oct. 1, putting this fiscal year on track to be the busiest in decades.

The crush of arriving migrants, mostly asylum seekers, has far exceeded capacity at Border Patrol stations, prompting authorities to release more than 100,000 people since October. Most are dropped off at public transit stations in the city with orders to report back to immigration court at a later date.

Those releases have caused an outcry and have strained local government resources. A county-funded welcome center was closed earlier this year after running out of money. A new one was recently authorized using money provided under a federal grant intended to help local governments manage migrant arrivals.

Like ghosts

Most migrants who enter illegally by land immediately surrender to authorities and request asylum. Those arriving via boat, in contrast, typically speed away in waiting vehicles.

“The big concern for us is we have absolutely no idea who these people are,” said San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, a Republican. “We have no idea what they are doing. They’re ghosts.”

CBP said its agents have made nearly 8,000 arrests for illegal entry into the U.S. in maritime smuggling incidences since 2020.

The federal government hasn’t provided information on the nationalities of any of those people. Most are likely Mexican nationals who were previously deported or have a criminal history in the U.S., according to Rafael Fernandez de Castro, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Such people generally aren’t eligible to request asylum.

“They risk that, if they are seen by police, they will be immediately thrown out or even serve some time in jail,” Fernandez de Castro said.

Some more-affluent migrants, meanwhile, might be misled by smugglers to believe sneaking in by boat is their best or only option. They typically pay the highest smuggling fees, which can reach $30,000, according to Fernandez de Castro.

Desmond said he thinks a 2017 California law limiting when local law enforcement can work with federal immigration authorities is helping drive the beach arrivals. He said even if local law enforcement officers were on the scene, they wouldn’t be able to arrest migrants whose only known crime was entering the U.S. illegally.

“In California, we are laying out the red carpet and welcome mat for illegal immigrants to cross the border,” Desmond said.

A spokeswoman for Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said local authorities are still able to work with their federal partners in immigration cases involving serious criminals, but Congress needs to act to address border security and improve the asylum system.

Zipping past surfers

A few of the most daring smuggling occurrences in the past year have been captured on video by beachgoers and posted to a social-media account run by Britt Mayer, an independent journalist who chronicles migration issues in San Diego.

In April, a boat carrying at least a dozen people raced on shore in Carlsbad, about 50 miles north of the Mexican border, on a Saturday afternoon. Video showed it zipping by bobbing surfers before landing on the beach not far from a young girl playing in the sand.

The migrants aboard ran to a parking lot where a pair of vehicles were waiting, then sped off. A few left behind darted into a nearby neighborhood.

“It’s becoming more obvious that they don’t care if they are seen,” Mayer said.

Many landings happen under the cover of darkness, according to Robert Butler, who runs TowboatUS San Diego. His government contracting firm salvages migrant boats, which are frequently abandoned on beaches.

“I believe the objective is to get on the beach, drop off cargo and run back to Mexico,” Butler said. “But they are very, very bad at that.”

His company routinely gets three to four calls a week to salvage an abandoned smuggling boat, he said. One day in mid-April, two calls came in about an hour, one in La Jolla and another just to the north in neighboring Orange County.

“If it’s a foggy night, I’ll actually have a crew staged the next morning ready to go,” Butler said.

New data show almost 80% of unauthorized immigrants have lived in the United States for a decade or longer, raising questions about deporting a group with such deep roots in the country. The estimates are included in a new Department of Homeland Security report. The data spotlight Donald Trump’s plan to attempt deportation of the entire unauthorized immigrant population. Beyond the disruption to the lives of the immigrants and their U.S. citizen children and spouses, economists have concluded deporting millions of individuals would disrupt the economy and cost many U.S.-born workers their jobs.

DHS Estimates Of The Unauthorized Immigrant Population

A new DHS report estimates that 11 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States as of January 1, 2022. That is approximately 1 million lower than the estimate of 12 million unauthorized immigrants in 2015. The 2022 total is higher than in 2020 but lower than the 11.6 million unauthorized immigrants estimated to live in the U.S. in 2018.

“This report estimates two populations to derive the unauthorized immigrant population estimate: 1) the total foreign-born population living in the United States on January 1 of each year in the series, and 2) the legally-resident, foreign-born population on the same dates,” according to DHS. “The unauthorized immigrant population estimate is the residual when the second population is subtracted from the first population.”

Among the key findings:

– Approximately 80% or 8.7 million of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants arrived in the U.S. before 2010. That means the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants have lived in the United States for more than a decade.

– The unauthorized immigrant population from Mexico has continued to fall—declining from 5.5 million in 2018 to 4.8 million in 2022, about 180,000 annually.

– “After Mexico, the next largest unauthorized immigrant populations were from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The numbers of unauthorized immigrants from Guatemala (750,000) and Honduras (560,000) increased from 2018 by 21% and 24%, respectively, mostly between January 2019 and January 2020,” according to the DHS report.

– The unauthorized immigrant population from India declined by 54% and from China by 47% between 2018 and 2022.

– California (2.6 million) and Texas (2.1 million) were the leading states of residence for the unauthorized population in 2022, followed by Florida (590,000), New Jersey (490,000), Illinois (420,000) and New York (410,000).

Donald Trump’s Deportation Plan

“Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025—including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled,” reports the New York Times.

According to Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” The idea is to use local police and National Guard from states with Republican governors.

“To ease the strain on ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights,” reports the New York Times. “And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.”

A policy focusing law enforcement resources on deporting anyone in unlawful status would not prioritize removing dangerous individuals from the United States. Using local police to enforce immigration laws on a mass scale would, by definition, reduce the time police spend on preventing crime in their cities and towns.

What Economists Think Of Trump’s Deportation Plan

The Congressional Research Service reports that about 45% of unauthorized immigrant adults 15 and older are married, with approximately 41% of those married to a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident spouse. “According to 2018 estimates, 5.2 million children ages 17 and under (7% of the total U.S. child population) lived with at least one unauthorized immigrant parent. Eighty-five percent of those children were U.S. citizens.”

Economists reject the notion that mass deportation would “free up” jobs for U.S. workers. They point out that this belief is based on the “lump of labor fallacy,” which assumes a fixed number of jobs exist in an economy. Analysts note immigrants increase the number of jobs through consumer spending, entrepreneurship and other means.

George Mason University economics professor Michael Clemens examined research by University of Colorado Professor Chloe East, who explored the impact of enforcement actions under the Secure Communities immigration enforcement program. “Mass deportation under Secure Communities substantially harmed U.S. workers county by county, reducing both their employment and wages,” writes Clemens. “The worst harms were inflicted on the least educated and most vulnerable U.S. workers.”

According to Clemens, the results imply “that for every one million unauthorized immigrant workers seized and deported from the United States, 88,000 U.S. native workers were driven out of employment.” Clemens calculates that if the U.S. government deported three million unauthorized immigrant workers per year, “that would mean 263,000 fewer jobs held by U.S. native workers, compounded each additional year that mass deportations continue.” He notes that does not include temporary layoffs. “They represent persistent declines in the number of jobs available to be held by any U.S. workers.”

Why do deportations of unauthorized immigrants harm U.S. workers? “The answer is that the U.S. labor market is more complex than the cartoon economy in the minds of some politicians, who think that business owners faced with a loss of immigrant workers will simply hire native [U.S.-born] workers to replace them,” writes Clemens in an analysis for the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“In the real economy, employers respond in several other ways,” notes Clemens. “Business owners hit by sudden reductions to labor supply invest less in new business formation. They invest their capital in other industries and in technologies that use lower-skill labor less intensively, reducing demand for U.S. workers too. . . . And in a one-two punch, the disappearance of migrant workers also dries up local demand at grocery stores, leasing offices, and other nontraded services.” According to Clemens, the “demand for all workers overwhelms the reduction in the supply of foreign workers” and most U.S. workers will be worse off.

Using Legal Pathways To Control Illegal Immigration

Policy options exist to control illegal immigration by using incentives. “Expanding legal pathways reduces illegal entry more effectively than traditional enforcement-only approaches,” according to a National Foundation for American Policy study. “Border Patrol data show work visas and the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole programs have been far more effective against illegal immigration than the Trump administration’s enforcement-only policies.”

The reduced supply of foreign-born workers starting in 2017 contributed to inflation and led to lower economic growth in 2022. The latest estimate of the unauthorized immigrant population offers an opportunity to examine the assumptions behind deporting millions of immigrant workers.

Last month, many high-achieving graduates of top American universities once again anxiously awaited the results of a competitive application. Yet the outcome of the annual H-1B visa lottery was entirely out of their hands. Now many of these highly qualified young people are packing their bags and preparing to depart the United States.

Each year, the U.S. government leaves the decision of who receives the popular work visa for specialty occupations up to chance. Last year, approval rates for the H-1B were lower than for Harvard Business School. America’s immigration is broken, and it doesn’t look like it is getting fixed anytime soon.

The H-1B cap has been an unprecedented drain on U.S. resources and a bane to American national interests. Half of the U.S. Fortune 500 companies were built by first- or second-generation immigrants. Eighty-three percent of computer science Ph.D.s in the U.S. — the kinds of people the country desperately needs to keep its innovative edge — were born abroad.

America’s flawed immigration system has real consequences. Over the past years, Canada has successfully “scooped” a number of international graduates left behind by the H-1B lottery.

Between 2016 and 2019, the number of Indian students attending master’s programs in STEM fell by 38 percent in the U.S. During the same time period, the rate of Indian graduate students in Canada rose by a whopping 182 percent.

Americans overwhelmingly want to fix their broken immigration system: If polled, 73 percent say there should be a visa that allows STEM graduates to work in the country. Even 60 percent of Republican voters are in favor of increasing skilled immigration. Still, policy change continues to be elusive.

The good news is that there may be an alternative.
The O-1A visa, colloquially known as the “Einstein visa,” has long been shrouded in mystique. In truth, however, approval rates for the O-1 have consistently exceeded 90 percent over the past five years. Of course, the visa is highly competitive: with a list of eight criteria that includes internationally recognized awards and original scholarly contributions, the O-1 visa likely attracts applicants that are already highly accomplished. But for many of the extraordinary international workers in the country, the O-1A visa may be within reach.

The O-1 is attractive for a number of reasons. Unlike other visas, it has no cap on the number of visas issued per year and country. Without many of the constraints of the H-1B — such as the prevailing wage requirement — the O-1 visa can be a particularly attractive option for international workers with entrepreneurial ambitions.

Under President Biden’s leadership, United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) has actively encouraged qualified individuals to apply. In January 2022, the White House announced new USCIS policy guidance, clarifying what evidence satisfies the eligibility criteria for the O-1. Since then, approvals of O-1 petitions in STEM fields have increased by over 30 percent.

But the potential is much greater still. There are over 50,000 new foreign-born STEM Ph.D.s and post-doctorates in the U.S. annually, 50 percent of whom work outside of academia. And importantly, the O-1A is not just an avenue for U.S. university graduates to stay in the country — it is also a way for the world’s best and brightest to come work in this country.

Universities, companies and immigration lawyers all have a role to play in raising awareness of the O-1 and supporting potential applicants. On the corporate side, HR teams and hiring managers should proactively educate themselves on the range of visa options and encourage eligible international hires to consider the O-1. Universities have an obligation to set their foreign-born students up for post-graduation success, including by offering practical advice on pursuing visas like the O-1. Meanwhile, the legal community must cultivate more O-1 expertise to adequately support applicants.

For now, the H-1B lottery remains a stressful gamble for America’s top international graduates. But with wider adoption, the O-1 could open up new possibilities for talented immigrants to pursue the American dream.
Johannes Lang is a researcher for the Talent Mobility Fund and a John F. Kennedy Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School.

“In October of (1717), a Philadelphia Quaker named Jonathan Dickinson complained that the streets of his city were teeming with ‘a swarm of people… strangers to our Laws and Customs, and even to our language.’ These new immigrants dressed in outlandish ways. The men were tall and lean, with hard, weather-beaten faces. They wore felt hats, loose sackcloth shirts close-belted at the waist, baggy trousers, thick yarn stockings and wooden shoes ‘shod like a horse’s feet with iron.’ The young women startled Quaker Philadelphia by the sensuous appearance of their full bodices, tight waists, bare legs and skirts as scandalously short as an English undershift. The older women came ashore in long dresses of a curious cut.”

David Hackett Fischer, “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways In America”

Jonathan Dickinson was staring down his Quaker nose at Scots-Irish immigrants, an early contingent of more than a quarter-million people who would arrive at our shores in waves through much of the 18th century. (Many would find their way into Appalachia and eventually to Texas.)

Farmers, laborers, craftsmen and small-business people for the most part, they came from the war-ravaged borderlands of Great Britain, and as Fischer notes, they faced intense prejudice from ethnic groups that arrived earlier. He quotes one writer who described them as “the scum of two nations.” An outspoken Anglican clergyman called them “the scum of the universe.”

Through the centuries, this nation of immigrants, this nation that from the beginning has relied on the energy, hard work and ingenuity of its newcomers, has struggled with the fact that the “golden door” remains open, inexplicably, long after we and our own folk are safely inside. The culmination of our fear and apprehension was the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 barring all future Asian immigration and setting race-based quotas for immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. (Johnson-Reed was the law for more than four decades.)

A hundred years later, the same nativist fears and xenophobic inclinations are not only roiling the nation but also threatening to undercut a growing economy. Now that Donald Trump has laid bare his ambitious plans for border security and immigration policy, it’s time to review basic facts about immigrants among us, documented and otherwise, and their effect on the economy.

Climbing out of the pandemic aberration the past couple of years, many Americans feel bad about the economy and too many experience real hardship, but we’ve avoided a recession, added hundreds of thousands of jobs month after month and are gradually getting a handle on inflation. The share of native workers between 25 and 54 years old is somewhat higher than pre-pandemic employment levels. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Stasticis, however, all of the net job growth since the pandemic — all of it — is the result of foreign-born workers who’ve made their way back into the economy after the Trump administration threw sand into the already troubled gears of the immigration system.

“We don’t set immigration policy. We don’t comment on it,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley in February. “I will say, over time, though, the U.S. economy has benefited from immigration.”

As Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell noted recently, immigrants are willing to take jobs that native-born Americans simply won’t do. We see it all around us: Immigrants are the ones taking care of the elderly, harvesting fruits and vegetables, busing restaurant tables, building houses, cleaning hotel rooms. (Remember those six workers who died while filling potholes on the night that Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge came down? They were from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.) Immigrants also are filling high-tech positions that would otherwise go unfilled, because not enough of us have the necessary skills.

Here’s another immigrant fact we see with our own eyes: Immigrants start new businesses, thereby creating jobs, at a much higher rate than native-born Americans do. That food truck parked in an inner city gas station parking lot or a little Tex-Mex eatery in a dusty Texas town are obvious examples, but they’re not the only ones. According to a 2022 study by the National Foundation for American Policy, 55% of U.S. startup companies valued at more than $1 billion were founded by immigrants.

Ruth Ellen Wasem, an immigration expert formerly with the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT-Austin, points out in a 2020 report that immigration has added “trillions to the gross domestic product each year.” But do immigrants displace native workers? The research shows they’re “complementary,” not competitors, leading to net positive job creation, though the earning power of some native workers is “stunted.”

So let’s just wipe out those advantages to our nation, shall we? That’s effectively what Trump proposes to do if he wins a second term in the White House.

In a recent Time magazine cover story — a story that set off warning signals on numerous fronts — the former president vows he’ll round up every suspected undocumented man, woman and child in this country, an estimated 11 million people. He would rely on local law enforcement and the National Guard to track them down and then — if he follows the advice of former aide Stephen Miller, the anti-immigration zealot — relocate them to massive internment camps along the border until they can be deported. (Would any person in this country with brown skin or an accent, whatever their immigration status, feel safe if Trump is reelected?)

Despite the fear-driven prejudices that Trump cynically stokes, towns and states around the country are recognizing the vitality of newcomers and are working to accommodate their presence. Utica, N.Y., for example, old and tired and emptying out for decades, is one of several Rust Belt cities that have developed strategies not only to attract immigrants but also to help them adapt to their new communities. As Susan Hartman writes in her recent book “City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life into a Dying American Town,” the effort has been successful. The newcomers, about a quarter of the city’s population of 60,000, “have been an economic engine for the city,” Hartman writes, “starting small businesses, renovating down-at-the-heels houses, opening churches and other places of worship — and injecting a sense of vitality to its streets.”

Closer to home, Dallas is the first city in Texas to earn the Certified Welcoming status awarded by a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization called Welcoming America. Wasem, the former LBJ School professor, led a recent study of the Dallas effort and found, as she summarizes in The Hill, “immigrants boosted all Dallas residents.”

That hasn’t stopped Gov. Greg Abbott from hosting preening Republican governors from other states eager to take selfies at the border and denounce the Biden administration’s handling of immigration. We agree with the governors in this respect: Americans should not have to tolerate an unremitting crisis at the border or a disastrously organized, poorly managed immigration system or a Congress that plays politics year after year with that broken system. Local jurisdictions, especially those close to the border, should be compensated. for the extra burden they bear. Like cities and states around the country, the United States of America should be able to welcome newcomers fairly and efficiently, with an eye to border security. Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar boondoggle that has done nothing to fix the border, is certainly not our way, but we have to admit that the golden door is tarnished and broken.

The nation desperately needs people of good will to tackle the problem like one Republican elected official many of us remember. On Jan. 19, 1989, he spoke these words about immigration: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our strength from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams, we create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to the land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to new frontiers. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever close the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

They called him “Dutch,” but his ancestry was Irish on his father’s side, Scottish (and English) on his mother’s, not unlike those immigrants who offended a proper Quaker in the City of Brotherly Love 271 years earlier. Ronald Reagan’s paean to our immigrant past — and future — was his final speech as president of the United States.

This month of May marks the anniversaries of various measures and events with one common denominator — they are the product and consequence of extreme migration policies based in xenophobia, as well as the virulent rhetoric that characterizes the discourse about these very same issues.

May 7th marked six years since the officialization of the nasty Zero Tolerance policy, in 2018, which separated families at the border and literally tore children from their mothers’ and fathers’ arms. Its impact remains. That year, Jeff Sessions, then Attorney General under Donald Trump, justified the public policy by citing Romans 13 in the New Testament, affirming that laws have to be obeyed because, “God has ordained them for the purpose of order.” Romans 13 says, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” God therefore, according to Sessions, would condone family separation. The same Romans 13 includes the advice to “love your neighbor as yourself” but, for Republicans, this does not seem to apply to immigrants.

May 11th marks one year since the expiration of Title 42, implemented by Trump in the middle of the pandemic to expel migrants, including people seeking asylum, in an expedited fashion under the guise of public health. Its real intention was to undermine asylum laws and, in the process, generate chaos at the border and in the interior of the country, with still latent humanitarian, economic, and political repercussions.

And May 14th will mark two years since the Buffalo, New York massacre where Peyton Gendron, an unstable person influenced by white supremacist rhetoric and a believer in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory — which says that minorities want to replace white people and remove them from political power — killed ten people and wounded three. Eleven of his victims were African American.

The worst thing about all of this is that the elements and rhetoric that contributed to implementing these policies have had deadly effects, not only in Buffalo but in other massacres motivated by racial hate in El Paso and Pittsburgh, and have only intensified this electoral cycle. Republican presidential hopeful Trump has already laid out his plans to revive these policies, as well as the loopholes he will use to guarantee their implementation, in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, an action plan that details the policies a second Trump administration would implement on immigration and other matters.

On immigration issues, the central piece is a campaign of mass deportations — the largest in United States history, according to the former president. This would mean enormous detention camps and enormous violations of civil rights, since no one has a symbol indicating whether he is a citizen, resident, or undocumented immigrant tattooed on his forehead.

For David Bier, Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, the tip of the spear of Project 2025 on immigration is “mass deportation, is blocking legal immigration by every means possible.” At a panel discussion about Project 2025, organized by America’s Voice, Bier indicated that this deportation campaign did not materialize in Trump’s first term “because Congress held them in check.” “But now they have this loophole, and the loophole that they have settled on is using the military and using state and local law enforcement to do the work for them, and to deport people from the United States without due process,” affirmed Bier.

That would also be devastating for the economy.

“The impact is huge because a 100 percent of labor force growth right now is coming from immigrants…. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this recent surge in immigration is going to increase GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by $7 trillion dollars over the next decade. It’s gonna increase tax revenues by a trillion dollars,” he added.

Angela Kelley, an immigration expert and Senior Advisor to the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) said, on the same panel, that the damage of a second Trump administration would be indelible. “Damage to the millions of American families that will be destroyed by deportation, to those fleeing violence who will face a sealed border, and to all citizens who’ll have to show papers or risk arrest. The Trump plan in action will throw sand into America’s economic engine and a dagger in the heart of America’s character. “

Trump’s mass deportation dream is a humanitarian and economic nightmare for the United States.

The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, traveled to Columbia University two weeks ago to decry the “virus of antisemitism” that he said pro-Palestinian protesters were spreading across the country. “They have chased down Jewish students. They have mocked them and reviled them,” he said to jeers from protesters. “They have shouted racial epithets. They have screamed at those who bear the Star of David.”

Former President Donald J. Trump chimed in. President Biden, he wrote on Truth Social, “HATES Israel and Hates the Jewish people.”

Amid the widening protests and the unease, if not fear, among many Jews, Republicans have sought to seize the political advantage by portraying themselves as the true protectors of Israel and Jews under assault from the progressive left.

While largely peaceful, the campus protests over Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that has killed tens of thousands have been loud and disruptive and have at times taken on a sharpened edge. Jewish students have been shouted at to return to Poland, where Nazis killed three million Jews during the Holocaust. There are chants and signs in support of Hamas, whose attack on Israel sparked the current war. A leader of the Columbia protests declared in a video that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

Debate rages over the extent to which the protests on the political left constitute coded or even direct attacks on Jews. But far less attention has been paid to a trend on the right: For all of their rhetoric of the moment, increasingly through the Trump era many Republicans have helped inject into the mainstream thinly veiled anti-Jewish messages with deep historical roots.

The conspiracy theory taking on fresh currency is one that dates back hundreds of years and has perennially bubbled into view: that a shady cabal of wealthy Jews secretly controls events and institutions contrary to the national interest of whatever country it is operating in.

The current formulation of the trope taps into the populist loathing of an elite “ruling class.” “Globalists” or “globalist elites” are blamed for everything from Black Lives Matter to the influx of migrants across the southern border, often described as a plot to replace native-born Americans with foreigners who will vote for Democrats. The favored personification of the globalist enemy is George Soros, the 93-year-old Hungarian American Jewish financier and Holocaust survivor who has spent billions in support of liberal causes and democratic institutions.

This language is hardly new — Mr. Soros became a boogeyman of the American far right long before the ascendancy of Mr. Trump. And the elected officials now invoking him or the globalists rarely, if ever, directly mention Jews or blame them outright. Some of them may not immediately understand the antisemitic resonance of the meme, and in some cases its use may simply be reflexive political rhetoric. But its rising ubiquity reflects the breaking down of old guardrails on all types of degrading speech, and the cross-pollination with the raw, sometimes hate-filled speech of the extreme right, in a party under the sway of the norm-defying former, and perhaps future, president.

In a July 2023 email to supporters, the Trump campaign employed an image that bears striking resemblance to a Nazi-era cartoon of a hook-nosed puppet master manipulating world figures: Mr. Soros as puppet master, pulling the strings controlling President Biden.

To take a measure of the drumbeat of the cabal conspiracy theory among elected officials, The New York Times reviewed about five years of campaign emails from Mr. Trump, as well as press releases, tweets and newsletters of members of Congress over the last decade.

The review found that last year at least 790 emails from Mr. Trump to his supporters invoked Mr. Soros or globalists conspiratorially, a meteoric rise from prior years. The Times also found that House and Senate Republicans increasingly used “Soros” and “globalist” in ways that evoked the historical tropes, from just a handful of messages in 2013 to more than 300 messages from 79 members in 2023.

Mr. Trump frequently referred to Mr. Soros as “shadowy” and “the man behind the curtain who’s destroying our country.” He linked Mr. Soros and other enemies to a “globalist cabal,” echoing the trope that Jews secretly control the world’s financial and political systems — an idea espoused in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fraudulent document used by Stalin and the Nazis as a rationale for targeting Jews. Republican members of Congress repeatedly made incendiary and conspiratorial claims about Mr. Soros and globalists — that they were “evil,” that they “hate America” and that they wanted the American people to be “humiliated or destroyed and replaced or dead.” Republicans blamed them for leading people to “forget about God and family values,” for controlling the media, for allowing “violent criminals and rapists to get off scot-free” and more.
Conservative lawmakers dispute the notion that invoking Mr. Soros and globalists is antisemitic. “Not every criticism of Mr. Soros is antisemitic,” said Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. “Every criticism of Mr. Soros that I have levied is directed specifically at his flawed policy goals.” What’s more, he said, “I regularly criticize globalists of all faiths.”

Republican elected officials also point to their longstanding support for Israel. “Jewish Americans and Jewish leaders around the world recognize that President Trump did more for them and the State of Israel than any president in history,” said a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump. She added, “Joe Biden can’t stand up to antisemitism in his own Democrat Party — primarily because his biggest donors like George Soros help fund it.”

Dov Waxman, a professor of Israel studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that Mr. Trump and other Republicans “are presenting themselves as committed to fighting antisemitism, but they’re actually mainstreaming some of the most antisemitic ideas in circulation today.”

That duality was encapsulated on the day the House speaker visited Columbia. Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters that evening at the Manhattan courthouse where he is on trial, amped up his criticism of the campus protests — and added a twist: He compared them to the violent 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., where torch-bearing white supremacists chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” At the time, he sought to minimize the deadly Charlottesville rally by saying there were “very fine people on both sides.” Now, he called it “a little peanut,” adding: “The hate wasn’t the kind of hate that you have here. This is tremendous hate.”

Oct. 7 Creates an Opening
From campuses in turmoil to the halls of Congress, activism on the left has ignited ever-more-fevered debate over the meaning, propriety and limits of language.
Chief among the phrases at issue is “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,” which has become a mantra of the campus protests. While pro-Palestine activists describe the chant as a rallying cry for Palestinian liberation, to many supporters of Israel it signals a call for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Indeed, the pro-Palestinian movement has long faced accusations that its criticism of Israeli policy, particularly its opposition to the idea of a Jewish homeland on disputed territory, amounts to prejudice against Jews.

In November, the Republican-led House, with support from 22 Democrats, censured Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat and Congress’s sole Palestinian American, for her statements after the Hamas attack, including “from the river to the sea.”

(The Times’s review of lawmakers’ statements found roughly 20 from the last decade by a handful of Democrats, including Ms. Tlaib, that could be construed as antisemitic. These included “from the river to the sea,” as well as messages that Israel was a colonialist state or that lobbyist money was the driving force behind political support for Israel.)

In response to her censure, Ms. Tlaib said her criticisms were of Israel’s government, not Jews. “The idea that criticizing the government of Israel is antisemitic sets a very dangerous precedent, and it’s being used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation,” she said.

But the new surge of pro-Palestinian activism in traditionally left-wing spaces like college campuses has left some American Jews feeling especially vulnerable, an anxiety that has only grown as the protests and the efforts to shut them down have become more confrontational. In the wake of the Hamas attack, many have been stunned by what they see as a lack of empathy or solidarity from groups and people they had previously considered allies.

Accompanying the campus protests — and the furor surrounding them — have been sharp increases in reports of antisemitic incidents on a broader national canvas.

In 2023, the Anti-Defamation League reported more than 8,800 instances of anti-Jewish violence, harassment and vandalism, the most since it began tracking incidents in 1979 and a 140 percent increase from the record set the previous year. The tally included a 30 percent increase in antisemitic propaganda from white supremacists, from 852 incidents in 2022 to 1,112 in 2023.

The A.D.L.’s new figures, however, reflect the heightened sensitivities over language: After Oct. 7, as the Forward first reported, the A.D.L. broadened its criteria to include more “anti-Zionist chants and slogans” at rallies.
“For us, the context has changed,” explained Oren Segal, vice president of the A.D.L. Center on Extremism. “After a massacre that kills 1,200 Israelis, we were including more of those expressions in support for terror, more of the calls that ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’ as antisemitic incidents in a way that we had not traditionally done.”

The post-Oct. 7 turmoil has split both American Jewry and the Democratic Party. The protesters have assailed not just Israeli policy but also President Biden’s support for Israel in the Gaza war. Against that backdrop, there has been much political opportunism.

In March, when the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat and the nation’s highest-ranking Jewish elected official, called for new elections to replace Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, congressional Republicans accused him of being anti-Israel. Mr. Trump went further, saying that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.” When Jewish groups criticized his comments, the Trump campaign held firm, saying that the Democratic Party “has turned into a full-blown anti-Israel, antisemitic, pro-terrorist cabal.”

The fissures have opened up on both sides of the aisle.

In a series of hearings since Oct. 7, House Republicans have grilled educational leaders on antisemitism, and last week they introduced a bill to crack down on antisemitic speech on college campuses.While it passed overwhelmingly, with bipartisan support, it gave Republicans a hoped-for opening to press their case that Democrats are soft on antisemitism: Seventy progressive Democrats voted “no,” with some worrying that it would inappropriately inhibit criticism of Israel. But the bill also ended up splitting the right: Twenty-one Republicans voted against it, saying that they feared it would outlaw parts of the Bible.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said she would not vote for a bill that “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” The assertion that Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus is widely considered an antisemitic trope and has been disavowed by the Roman Catholic Church.
(Evangelical Christians, who have been central to Republicans’ support for Israel, believe that God made an unbreakable promise to Jews designating the region as their homeland. Some also connect Israel’s existence to biblical prophecies about the last days before a theocratic kingdom is established on Earth and, some believe, those who do not convert to Christianity perish.)

In this moment, many Jews in America feel that the most salient threats come from anti-Israel activity, even if in the long term they should not dismiss strains of antisemitism on the “reactionary right” and the “illiberal left,” said Alvin Rosenfeld, director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, Bloomington.

“If you were to ask me, where do I think the most serious threats today come from,” he said, “it wouldn’t be first and foremost from some things that politicians have said.”

But as America’s presidential election draws nearer, he cautioned, that might change.

“It’s turning very ugly,” he said, adding that Mr. Trump’s comments about Jews who vote for Democrats “go beyond what I could have imagined, even. It’s not just bad, it’s vile.”

Targeting Soros
Mr. Trump once claimed to be “the least antisemitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” but he has a history of trafficking in antisemitic tropes.
During the 2016 campaign, he tweeted a photo of Hillary Clinton against a backdrop of $100 bills and a Star of David. His closing campaign ad featured Mr. Soros — along with Janet L. Yellen, then chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, and Lloyd Blankfein, then the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, both of whom are Jewish — as examples of “global special interests” enriching themselves on the backs of working Americans.

In 2018, he helped popularize the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Soros was financing a caravan of Central American migrants, a view shared by the gunman who killed 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Mr. Trump’s targeting of Mr. Soros escalated in the run-up to his indictment last April in Manhattan on charges related to hush-money payments to a porn star who claimed they had had a sexual encounter. Mr. Trump said the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, had been “handpicked and funded by George Soros,” an allegation then amplified by Trump acolytes.

In fact, Mr. Soros’s involvement was indirect: In 2021, the political arm of a racial-justice organization called Color of Change pledged $1 million to the Bragg campaign; shortly afterward, the group received $1 million from Mr. Soros, one of several donations, totaling about $4 million, since 2016. Color of Change eventually spent about $425,000 in support of Mr. Bragg; a spokesman for Mr. Soros said none of his contributions had been earmarked for the candidate.

Since then, Mr. Trump’s attacks have only intensified and widened — blaming Mr. Soros or globalists, for example, for letting “violent criminals” go free, “buying the White House” and turning America into a “Marxist Third World nation.”

In Congress, Republican lawmakers who followed Mr. Trump’s lead run the gamut, from conspiracy theorists like Ms. Greene and Paul Gosar of Arizona to party leaders like Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 4 House Republican, and Mr. Johnson.

On several occasions, Mr. Johnson has criticized the Manhattan district attorney prosecuting Mr. Trump by prominently referring to his indirect links to Mr. Soros. Last spring, in a newsletter to constituents, he called Mr. Bragg the “Soros-selected D.A.”

In a statement for this article, a spokesman dismissed the idea that Mr. Johnson’s references to Mr. Soros were antisemitic, pointing to the antisemitism bill introduced last week by Republicans. He added, “No numbers of opinions from so-called ‘experts’ can change the fact that pro-Hamas campus agitators and the D.A.s who are supposed to prosecute them have both been funded by major Democrat donors including Mr. Soros.”

Ms. Greene has been among the most prolific users of the trope. She has invoked Mr. Soros or “globalists” at least 120 times over the last five years, including referring to him at least a dozen times during the 2020 election as an “enemy of the people,” an epithet used by Nazis and Stalinists that Mr. Trump has wielded against journalists and other perceived opponents. She did not respond to a request for comment.
Code Words
Across the centuries, the conspiracy theory of the manipulative, avaricious Jew has worn many faces, from Judas to Shylock to the Rothschilds. Under Stalin, accusations of “rootless cosmopolitanism” echoed Hitler’s charges about a “poison injected by the international and cosmopolitan Jew[s],” to destroy the Aryan race.

After the Cold War, the code words “internationalist” and “cosmopolitan” were largely replaced by “globalist” and “Soros,” according to Pamela Nadell, a professor of history and Jewish studies at American University. Mr. Soros became a target of Hungary’s right-wing nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, who is something of a hero on the American right.

An analysis of right-wing extremist media in the United States — including neo-Nazi sites like The Daily Stormer and an A.D.L. database of the transcripts of more than 50,000 episodes of extremist and conspiracy-oriented podcasts — revealed a flood of bluntly antisemitic iterations of the globalist and Soros tropes.

In a June 2022 podcast, for example, Harry Vox, a self-described investigative journalist, railed against “every scumbag who uses the word ‘globalist’ because he’s afraid to use ‘Jewish banking cartel,’ which is the real definition for the term ‘globalist.’”

While people like Mr. Vox operate largely out of sight of mainstream politics, some purveyors of blatantly antisemitic rhetoric have become woven into Mr. Trump’s Republican Party.

Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz have appeared on the “Infowars” program hosted by Alex Jones, who said in 2017 that “the head of the Jewish mafia is George Soros.” Mr. Jones was an early supporter of Mr. Trump, who appeared on “Infowars” during his first presidential campaign. During a 2022 episode, Mr. Jones said, “I understand there’s a Jewish mafia, and they’re used to demonize anybody that promotes freedom, but I don’t blame Jews in general for that.” His guest on that episode was the rapper Kanye West — now known as Ye — who professed admiration for Hitler.

In late 2022, Mr. Trump hosted Mr. West at dinner at Mar-a-Lago along with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist leader and outspoken Holocaust denier. In the ensuing publicity firestorm, Mr. Trump said in a statement that he did not know Mr. Fuentes, and that Mr. West “expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson.’”

Last May, Mr. Trump phoned in to an event at his Miami resort hosted by the ReAwaken America Tour, a Christian nationalist road show featuring speakers who have promoted far-right, often antisemitic, conspiracy theories. The tour has been led in part by Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, who said during a ReAwaken rally in 2021 that the United States should have only one religion. Mr. Trump praised the May attendees for being a part of an “important purpose,” and said he wanted to bring Mr. Flynn back to the White House. Mr. Trump’s eldest sons, and others from his inner circle, have been featured speakers on the tour.

The current climate has highlighted Republican politicians’ split-screen messaging.

After Oct. 7, Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona posted on X, “Anti-Semitism and calls for the destruction of Israel are detrimental to the safety of our Jewish communities.” Just months before, he had appeared on a show hosted by Stew Peters, a conspiracy theorist who promotes antisemitic tropes including that “the criminal cabal — primarily Jewish-controlled central banks” are funding evil in America. At least three other congressional Republicans have appeared on Mr. Peters’s show.
Recently some Republicans have blamed Mr. Soros for the pro-Palestinian protests. “America-hating, chaos-funding George Soros at work again trying to destabilize our nation on behalf of Hamas terrorists,” Representative Beth Van Duyne, Republican of Texas, wrote on X.

In fact, Mr. Soros’s connection to the protests is indirect: His foundation has donated to groups that have supported pro-Palestinian efforts, including recent protests, according to its financial records. It has also given to groups that focus on fighting antisemitism, the records show. “We have never and will never pay protesters, nor do we coordinate, train, or advise participants or grantees on the advocacy tactics they choose to pursue,” said a spokeswoman for the foundation.

Asked by The Times whether she was aware that the invocations of Mr. Soros are widely considered anti-Jewish in certain contexts, Ms. Van Duyne posted the questions and her response on X. In addition to funding “organizations that are driving antisemitism on college campuses,” she wrote, “Soros also funded the violent BLM movement, organizations who fought to defund the police, and helped elect pro-criminal district attorneys.”

And when conservative movers and shakers gathered in late February for the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual homecoming of influential activists and politicians on the right, they were greeted this way: “Welcome to CPAC 2024, where globalism goes to die.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson warned at the Capitol this week that non-U.S. citizens voting in the November elections is a “clear and present danger,” proposing federal legislation to stop it. Tennessee’s GOP governor recently signed legislation requiring the state to scrutinize its voter rolls for noncitizens. And in four other states, Republicans have helped put measures on the ballot this fall to make sure the only people who vote in elections are American citizens.

But experts say the Republican spotlight on the issue glosses over two crucial facts: Noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare, and it is already banned in almost all places, including the ones with ballot measures in November.

That hasn’t stopped Republicans from making the issue a frequent talking point. The unfounded threat brings together two issues Republicans believe will drive turnout with their base: illegal immigration and election fraud claims.

Critics warn that attempts to crack down on noncitizen voting could suppress the votes of Latino voters who fear being wrongly accused of illegally casting ballots. They say they could also lead to database mismatches that push legitimate voters off the rolls.

A news conference on Capitol Hill led by Johnson (R-La.) on Wednesday was the most visible element of a multifaceted GOP strategy to center concerns about noncitizen voting in the 2024 campaign. Among the states asking voters to add language to their constitutions explicitly banning noncitizens from voting is Wisconsin, a key swing state. Republicans in another battleground, North Carolina, are pressing to do the same.

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump, has led the push. He has long argued, without evidence, that Democrats allow undocumented immigrants to cast ballots, insisting that the practice hurt his margin of victory in 2016 and helped cost him the White House in 2020.

Democrats, Trump wrote on Truth Social in December, were “scrambling” to register illegal immigrants so they would “be ready to VOTE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024.”
Since January, noncitizen voting has shown up thousands of times in social media posts, podcasts and other public statements from high-profile right-wing politicians, commentators and influencers, according to a Washington Post analysis. Republican lawmakers in Congress have mentioned it hundreds of times in the same time period, according to a review of their social media posts and podcasts.

Elon Musk, who has increasingly aligned himself with the right since buying Twitter and rebranding it as X, has posted about noncitizen voting at least 20 times this year to his 182 million followers. “Their preferred term for an illegal immigrant is FDV (Future Dem Voter),” he wrote in March.
Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster, said that while there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would influence the results of an election, Trump has convinced millions of Americans to believe otherwise. If additional bans on noncitizen voting “gives some voters greater confidence in the integrity of our elections, then it’s a good thing,” Ayres said.

But Democrats and voting rights advocates say the effort is an insincere scheme to gin up GOP turnout. They also warn that the focus lays the groundwork to sow doubt in the election results and could have a chilling effect on legal voting among immigrants, especially Latino voters.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s getting louder at the moment when Trump is back on the campaign trail,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights program. “It combines his election denial rhetoric with his xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric in a way that is definitely pandering to a particular set, to a certain group of supporters.”

“It’s troubling and it’s obviously false,” Morales-Doyle said.
After the 2016 election, the Brennan Center reviewed 23.5 million votes cast and found about 30 instances of voting by possible noncitizens. That amounts to one vote out of every 770,000 cast.

An official audit in 2022 of Georgia’s voter rolls found about 1,600 noncitizens attempted to register to vote in that state over 25 years, with most of the attempts occurring in the previous six years. None of them were successful, according to the audit.

The latest push to focus on noncitizen voting is being driven in part by several Trump associates who were involved in his efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank focused on policy priorities for his possible second term, sent letters to top election officials in nine states that have large undocumented immigrant populations, urging them to ensure noncitizens aren’t able to vote. The group’s leaders include Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general who challenged Pennsylvania’s vote counting in the days after the 2020 election.

Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss, has also been involved. She now runs the Election Integrity Network, which has pushed to limit voting on college campuses and recruit poll watchers.

At Wednesday’s news conference, Johnson stood in front of the U.S. Capitol flanked by Mitchell, Republican lawmakers and Stephen Miller, a former Trump senior adviser who promoted a plan to send to Washington Trump-supporting slates of electors from states that Biden had won after the 2020 election. Miller said the threat of noncitizens voting invites “grand foreign interference in our elections” to help Democrats.

Republicans who control the House say they will try to to quickly pass the legislation, but it is unlikely to be taken up in the Democrat-controlled Senate. The Capitol Hill event came less than a month after Johnson and Trump gave a joint news conference in Mar-a-Lago. The speaker warned then that an influx of noncitizen voting “could turn an election.”

Jim Womack, the president of the North Carolina chapter of Mitchell’s group, has led efforts to get the GOP-led state legislature to put a referendum on noncitizen voting on the ballot this fall. He acknowledged it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote but said the amendment would clear up any ambiguity. And while he insisted his group’s efforts are not political, he offered that they could be politically motivating for Republican legislators.

“That may be the only way we get it to move if the perception is that it will motivate conservative voters,” he said.

North Carolina State Sen. Brad Overcash (R), a sponsor of legislation to get the amendment on the ballot, said he believes it will “overwhelmingly” pass among voters. He said he had grown concerned by municipalities in other states giving noncitizens the right to vote in local elections and wanted to keep that from happening in North Carolina.
“It’s just an opportunity to bring clarity, maybe even before that clarity is needed,” he said.

Washington, D.C., and a handful of other cities nationwide allow noncitizens to vote in elections for school board or other local offices. Some jurisdictions require the noncitizens to reside in the country legally or have children in local schools to cast ballots. Courts have struck down a New York City law allowing noncitizen voting in a case the city is appealing to the state’s highest court.

Since 2020, five states — Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana and Ohio — have amended their state constitutions to ensure noncitizens can’t vote in local or state elections. This fall, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kentucky and Idaho will have measures on the ballot to ban voting by noncitizens in their constitutions.

Wisconsin GOP strategist Keith Gilkes said the issue provides a rallying cry for Republican candidates this fall and could help Republicans in a close election. The state went to Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 — by about one percentage point each time.

“Small things can make a difference in success and failure in this state,” Gilkes said.

The Wisconsin proposal has alarmed Christine Neumann-Ortiz, the executive director of Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant rights group based in Milwaukee.

“I think this effort is anti-democratic and deceptive, promotes misinformation and is racist,” she said.
Noncitizens know they are not allowed to vote under laws that are already on the books, she said, and they don’t want to try to vote because they know it would probably ruin their chances of ever becoming a citizen.

By putting the measure on the ballot, Republicans are creating the perception that there is a problem even though there isn’t one, Neumann-Ortiz said.

Republicans who control the Wisconsin legislature began the lengthy process of scheduling the ballot measure three years ago as they raised concerns about city governments in large liberal cities in other states allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections. Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August (R) said the measure was needed to ensure courts don’t allow the practice in Wisconsin — even though no jurisdiction has tried to do so.

“Voting is one of the most sacred rights you have as a U.S. citizen and should be reserved for U.S. citizens only,” he said. “We’ve got more and more illegal immigrants in the country than ever before. And I certainly don’t believe that those folks should have the opportunity to cast ballots at any level.”

August said he expects voters to approve the measure, and once they do he wants the state to scrutinize its voter rolls for any evidence that noncitizens are already registered.
Eleven states since the 2020 election have enacted laws to identify noncitizens who have registered to vote and remove them from the rolls, according to the Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit group that tracks election-related legislation. Megan Bellamy, vice president for law and policy for the group, said such measures could lead to eligible voters getting kicked off the rolls.

No one maintains a comprehensive database of noncitizens, and people who share the same names as noncitizens could wrongly be flagged as ineligible voters, Bellamy said. In addition, some new citizens may be listed in jury exclusion lists and other databases as noncitizens if the information was gathered before they were naturalized, she said.
“We see these efforts to prevent noncitizens from voting largely as overreactions,” Bellamy said.

Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who serves on Wisconsin’s bipartisan elections commission, said state lawmakers should be focused on getting more funding to election clerks, beefing up cybersecurity and making it easier to tabulate absentee ballots so results can be made public faster.

The focus on noncitizen voting, she said, amounts to “unnecessary election theater.”

The Biden administration announced a new regulation Thursday aimed at allowing immigration officials to more quickly identify and deport migrants who are ineligible for U.S. asylum earlier in the process.

The regulation by the Department of Homeland Security would apply to migrants who ask for asylum after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. CBS News reported the administration’s plans earlier this week. At this point, as a proposed regulation, it must go through a public comment period before taking effect.

It would instruct government asylum officers to apply certain barriers to asylum that are already part of U.S. law during so-called credible fear interviews, the first step in the years-long asylum process. Those who pass these interviews are allowed to seek asylum before an immigration judge, while those who fail them can be deported expeditiously.

The Biden administration has said its proposed changes to asylum standards, unveiled on Thursday, that would fast-track some deportation will enhance security and speed up a backlog of cases amid record numbers of arrivals at the US-Mexico border.

The changes will also, by Biden’s own admission, be limited in scope and only affect a “small” number of people who have been convicted of serious crimes or may pose a national security risk.

It’s a measured step that nonetheless highlights how Joe Biden, facing immense political pressure in an election year where immigration remains a top voter concern, is trying to score points on both sides.

Republicans have blamed Biden for a record number of migrants at the border. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive nominee, has presented a draconian vision for a “record-setting deportation operation” that would run roughshod over legal guardrails protecting immigrants.
The Republican party has upped the ante in recent months, trying and failing to impeach Biden’s homeland security Alejandro Mayorkas over claims he has failed to enforce the nation’s immigrations laws. The party has also seized on the killing of the Georgia college student Laken Riley to promote mass arrests and detention camps and stoke fears of immigrant men as dangerous, after an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela, Jose Antonio Ibarra, was charged with her murder.

Pressure to clamp down on border crossings has also come from centrist and swing-state Democrats, even as progressives, immigration rights advocates and Latino leaders have urged the president to do more to protect immigrants within the US and improve conditions for asylum seekers at the border.

The proposal is the president’s latest attempt to address an issue that represents one of his biggest vulnerabilities in the election. Under current rules, asylum officers review an asylum seeker’s background and any criminal charges against them during the interview stage of the process. Under the proposed new standards, officers at the border could turn some asylum seekers away within days or hours of their arrival at the border, during an initial screening for “credible fear” of persecution they are fleeing.

The proposed rule that was released on. Thursday would only affect about 2 to 3% of asylum seekers, by the administration’s estimation, based on historical data. It also aims to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist. Decades of data has found that immigrants, including asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, are much less likely to be incarcerated or convicted of a crime than US-born people. Recent investigations have also found no link between undocumented immigrants and violent or property crimes.

Moreover, migrants who turn themselves in to United States Border Patrol so they can seek asylum are already subject to heavy surveillance, via ankle monitors, cellphone apps and check-in protocols, while they wait – sometime for years – for their cases to be processed through immigration courts.
“There is already a nearly impossibly high standard when it comes to asylum adjudications, and eligibility for asylum,” said Faisal Al-Juburi, chief external affairs officer at Raíces, an immigrant support and advocacy group in Texas. “I think this stands to exacerbate further what is a manufactured crisis at the end of the day.”

The effectiveness of the proposed rule will hinge on its implementation, said Laurence Benenson, vice-president of policy and advocacy at the National Immigration Forum, a centrist advocacy group. “There are some real concerns about whether people who have legitimate claims are just going to be turned back,” he said.

The proposed rules also raise another concern – that it won’t make much of a dent in the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border at all.

The administration itself admits as much. “We will continue to take action, but fundamentally it is only Congress that can fix what everyone agrees is a broken immigration system,” said Mayorkas in a statement.

A record number of people fleeing war, political insecurity, violence, poverty and natural disasters are arriving at the US border seeking refuge, sometimes waiting days at harsh open-air camps before they are seen at overwhelmed processing centres, and then months or years before their cases are resolved in backlogged immigration courts.

Advocates for asylum seekers and other immigrants have long been asking lawmakers to funnel more resources toward hiring more officials who are trained to evaluate asylum claims, more immigration judges and court staff, and offering migrants legal representation so that their cases can be processed more efficiently.

Despite Republicans’ characterization of Biden as permissive on immigration, the president has overseen the revival of border-wall construction and the unprecedented electronic monitoring of asylum seekers. After ending one of Trump’s most restrictive border policies, his administration attempted to implement new, tougher rules that would bar asylum seekers who travelled through another country failed to seek protection there. Biden is also exploring his executive authority to restrict asylum at the border.

Al-Juburi rejected the administration’s claims that the proposed changes would only affect a small number of people who are ineligible for asylum anyway. It would, he said, empower officers at the border without specialised training to make quick judgements about migrants who lack legal counsel.

“If you have any sort of criminal background based on being persecuted by a foreign government – maybe even for your own stance against that government – you could fall through the cracks and be turned away.”

Having fled his native Venezuela, Luis Guerrero was living in Colombia when he heard about a legal way to get into the United States: a smartphone app created by the U.S. government.

Five months later — after making it through a jungle trek, a kidnapping ordeal and a long wait in Mexico — he, his wife and their 11-year-old son lined up with scores of other asylum seekers to cross a bridge into Texas for immigration interviews scheduled through the app.

As the family inched toward the gate, Guerrero explained that friends had encouraged them to cross the border illegally and turn themselves in to claim asylum.

“But, no,” he said. “I wanted to do it the correct way.”

A few hours later, an agent from U.S. Customs and Border Protection handed Guerrero a slip of paper with a court date for 2025.

Then they headed to a bus station with the aim of making it to Houston, where they planned to live with friends while Guerrero sought government permission to work and prepared an application for asylum.

Their story is not uncommon these days as tens of thousands of migrants arrive at the border each week. But amid the divisive debate surrounding immigration policy in a U.S. election year, there is no consensus on what lesson to draw from the experiences of the Guerrero family and others in similar predicaments.

The government app — known as CBP One — has become a key piece of that debate, and a sort of Rorschach test.

The Biden administration lauds the app as part of the solution to the border crisis.

Immigrant advocates say CBP One is glitch-prone and reduces the right of asylum to a lottery while forcing migrants into a dangerous waiting game.

Republican lawmakers denounce the app as an “open borders” ploy that encourages more migrants to head for the United States.

The app’s inception dates to the final months of the Trump administration, which launched it to help prevent backups of ordinary travelers entering the country legally.

After downloading it to their phones and entering their passport information, foreign nationals could use CBP One to smooth their way through border crossing and airports.

At the same time, President Trump was invoking a public health rule known as Title 42 to turn away large numbers of asylum seekers entering the country illegally.

President Biden came to office vowing to impose a more “humane” immigration policy. But illicit border crossings soon skyrocketed, creating scenes of border chaos, inundating already overwhelmed immigration courts and fueling criticism of the White House.

Fearing a new border crush as they prepared to lift Title 42, Biden officials seized upon the previously obscure CBP One, announcing last May that asylum seekers would be required to schedule appointments at the border and use the app to do so.

Migrants must reach central or northern Mexico before the app will even let them try.

The administration argues that the app discourages illegal crossings, allows for advance screening and frees officers to seize narcotics, arms and cartel cash.

“I can highlight a number of instances over the last 10 years where migrants showing up at our ports of entry without any advance information quickly overwhelm our teams,” Diane Sabatino, acting executive assistant commissioner for the CBP’s office of field operations, testified in March at a congressional hearing about the app.

To encourage use of the app, the government has made it increasingly difficult for migrants to walk up to border crossings and request asylum. Border agents routinely turn away “walk-ins.” And entering the country illegally can endanger future asylum claims.

Each day the app is used to set up 1,450 appointments along the Southwest border. The greatest share of appointments go to people from Venezuela, Haiti and Mexico.

Since the beginning of last year, migrants have used the app to make nearly 550,000 appointments.

Despite those numbers, immigration advocates say the app is inadequate.

“The CBP One app cannot and should not be the sole way for people to seek safety in our country,” said Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA, which on Thursday released a report titled “CBP One — A Blessing or a Trap?”

Some migrants fail to make appointments because they lack smartphones or regular internet access, or because the app crashes or grants too few appointments to meet the demand.

The app only schedules appointments within three weeks. If nothing is available, migrants have little choice but to try again the next day.

As a result, the advocates say, thousands of people have been left stranded in Mexico for months, dodging cartel gangsters, crooked cops and other criminals.

“Using a smartphone application sanitizes things and makes it feel like it’s safe and unbiased,” said Ari Sawyer, a border researcher for Human Rights Watch. “But, on the contrary, it’s abusive and putting people in serious danger.”

After fleeing her home in the violence-scarred Mexican state of Michoacán, María Medina, 27, said she took her two young children to the U.S. border last month in hopes of claiming asylum.

“They wouldn’t let me in,” she recounted.

Instead, she was told she needed to make an appointment using the app. She said she didn’t know what it was. Now she was stuck in Tijuana.

Mónica Esmeralda, 25, said she and her family fled to the border in November after receiving threats from a gang that extorts money from businesses in her hometown of Ayutla de los Libres in the Mexican state of Guerrero.

“They said that if we didn’t pay they would kidnap my daughter or one of my nieces,” Esmeralda said. “We decided to leave.”

Four months later, she and her husband and 2-year-old daughter, three nieces and a nephew were living in a shelter in Ciudad Juárez, constantly refreshing the app.

“No appointment yet,” she lamented.

When Guerrero, the Venezuelan migrant, arrived in Mexico, he thought the hardest part of his trip was behind him. His family had walked 60 miles across the Darién Gap — the jungle strip between Colombia and Panama — and then traversed Central America.

For weeks he logged into the app from Mexico City in hopes of making an appointment. But when he finally secured one for Dec. 26 in the Texas border city of Laredo, things did not go as planned.

Minutes after arriving at the airport on the Mexico side of the border in Nuevo Laredo — a cartel hub notorious for shake-downs and abductions of migrants — Guerrero said he and his wife and son were shoved into a vehicle and taken to a cartel safe house.

Guerrero said the kidnappers demanded $800 a person to release them.

“We told them we didn’t have the money,” he said. “And we didn’t have any family in the United States or back in Venezuela who could pay.”

The kidnappers gave up after two days and let them go, apparently accepting that the family had no one who could fork over a decent ransom.

Having missed their border appointment, Guerrero and his traumatized family caught a ride to the Mexican city of Monterrey and found work hawking sweets and peanuts.

Guerrero re-registered with CBP One — as required after missing an appointment — and continued to log in each day to play what many migrants have taken to calling “the asylum lottery.”

The biggest critics of the app are not immigrant rights activists, but Republican lawmakers.

They accuse the Biden administration of scheming to let in migrants fleeing economic hardship — which is not a valid reason for asylum under U.S. law.

CBP One is “facilitating mass illegal immigration into the United States,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) said in March at a hearing of a Homeland Security subcommittee that he chairs.

At the same hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) scolded the CBP’s Sabatino: “The CBP app is like a welcoming app: ‘Welcome to America! Come on in!’ You aren’t vetting people.”

In response, Sabatino said that migrants using the app must provide biographical details and selfies that allow for a “robust” screening against law enforcement criminal records, watch lists, intelligence reports and biometric databases.

But critics question how much vetting can be done of people from so many different nations, including some with limited or no diplomatic relations with the United States.

“You’re letting in hundreds of thousands of people just because they made an online appointment and cleared some elementary database checks,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington research group that seeks reduced immigration. “You’re just encouraging more and more people to come to the border.”

About 95% of migrants who schedule appointments through the app are allowed into the United States, according to the CBP.

The vast majority go on to petition for asylum. That triggers a review process to determine whether applicants have a legitimate fear of persecution back in their homelands because of their race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.

Losing an asylum case does not ensure that someone leaves the country.

According to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees immigration courts, a third of the almost 500,000 people facing deportation in fiscal year 2023 failed to appear for final hearings and were ordered removed in absentia.

In San Diego, migrants emerging from their CBP One interviews on a recent afternoon stepped onto U.S. territory under a brilliant sun. Many seemed stunned, and somewhat disoriented, to have reached the United States.

“We don’t have to worry anymore,” said Nelson Díaz, 42, a car mechanic from outside Havana who crossed with his cousin and two friends from Cuba.

On the U.S. side of the border, they took photos and selfies against the backdrop of fluttering U.S. and California flags. A few yards out of the frame the 30-foot-tall border wall loomed.

The four soon headed for the San Diego airport for a flight to Miami to reunite with friends and relatives as they await hearing dates later this year or in 2025.

Another recent arrival explained how she and her family had waited for six months at a shelter in Tijuana, cooking and cleaning to defray costs while she repeatedly logged on to the app to try for an appointment for herself, her husband, son, daughter-in-law and two friends.

“I tried every single day,” said Wendy More, 40, who had fled Guatemala. “Sometimes at 11 in the morning. Sometimes at 3 a.m. Then I saw someone on social media say 5 o’clock in the morning was the best time, so I tried that. And, with the will of God, five days later we got our appointment.”

The six were now staying with More’s sister in Riverside County while they seek work permits and formally file for asylum based on violence they said they suffered back home.

“We all feel more secure, more tranquil, not having to hide from anyone in this country,” More said. “We battled but we made it. It’s mostly a question of patience.”

As for Guerrero, who made it to his friend’s home in Houston with his wife and son, he said in a telephone interview that he has lined up a job as a handyman for when his work permit comes through.

The family opened a bank account and is trying to find a lawyer to help with their asylum petition, which Guerrero said will be based on his opposition to Venezuela’s socialist government.

His wife is contemplating going back to school. The couple’s son is enrolled in sixth grade and is learning English.

“The boy is doing well, he wants to erase from his memory what happened to us in Mexico,” Guerrero said. “He was so happy when he began his classes.”

Guerrero has told friends in Venezuela, including his brother — a cellphone repairman — that the journey to the United States is worth it.

“It’s a hard trip, very difficult, you have to be ready,” Guerrero said. “You need resolve. Also, you need an appointment.”

A new Biden administration rule announced Thursday aims to speed up asylum processing at the southern border for a a limited group of people believed to have committed serious crimes or who have terrorist links and ultimately more quickly eject them from the country.

The change comes as the administration has been struggling to demonstrate to voters during an election where immigration is a key issue that it has a handle on the southern border. Republicans have consistently slammed the Biden administration over policies that they say have worsened problems at the southern border.

In a statement announcing the changes, the Department of Homeland Security said migrants who are deemed to pose a public threat are taken into custody but a determination on whether they’re eligible for asylum isn’t made until later in the asylum process. Under the proposed rule, asylum officers hearing cases at an initial screening stage called credible fear screening — that’s intended to happen just days after a person arrives in the country will now be able to consider that criminal history or terrorist links when deciding whether someone should ultimately be removed from the country.

“This will allow DHS to expeditiously remove individuals who pose a threat to the United States much sooner than is currently the case, better safeguarding the security of our border and our country,” the department said in the statement.

Under current law, certain mandatory bars make people ineligible for asylum, for example, if you’ve been convicted of a particularly serious crime. But those usually come into play when an immigration judge is making a final determination on whether someone gets asylum and that process can take years. Migrants are usually detained during this time, the department said.

When the rule is in place asylum officers can consider evidence of terrorism links for example and use that as a basis for a denial.

The agency gave no figures on how many people would be affected but said it was small.

Republicans immediately criticized the changes as too little. In a statement, House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark E. Green, a Republican from Tennessee called it an “unserious, politically motivated attempt to address a significant problem the Biden administration itself created.”

Separately from the rule announced Thursday, the administration is weighing larger executive action to crack down on immigration at the border. But the timing on when that might be announced depends in large part on whether the number of illegal border crossings increases. After hitting a record high in December, they have decreased in recent months in large part due to Mexican government enforcement.

Under U.S. and international law, anyone who comes to the U.S. can ask for asylum. People from all over the world travel to the U.S-Mexico border to seek that protection. To be granted asylum they must prove persecution or fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion

It’s a high bar and the majority of people who apply for asylum ultimately don’t qualify. But the process can take years in overloaded immigration courts.

Critics have questioned whether the asylum system should be fundamentally changed to make it more restrictive while others say the U.S. has a moral obligation to protect people fleeing for their lives.

Last year the administration announced another rule aimed at restricting the asylum process but in much more expansive ways than the one announced Thursday. That rule made it extremely difficult for migrants who come directly to the southern border to get asylum unless they use a government app to make an appointment or they have already tried to seek protection in a country they passed through on their way to the U.S.

Opponents said it’s essentially a rehash of similar efforts by former President Donald Trump and sued. The Biden administration says there are substantial differences between their rule and what Trump tried. That rule is still in place while the issue plays out in court.

Generally, immigration advocates have been hesitant of any steps that would seek to make the initial, credible fear screening harder. They say that migrants are often doing these interviews immediately after surviving life-threatening perilous trips to the U.S. and that these initial credible fear screenings are designed to have a lower bar than final asylum determinations so that people aren’t wrongfully removed.

Gregory Chen, the director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the rules barring people with criminal or terrorist backgrounds from asylum are important to protect the country. But his concern is that these changes will speed up what is already a “highly complex” legal analysis.

“At that early stage, few asylum seekers will have the opportunity to seek legal counsel or time to understand the consequences,” he said. “Under the current process they have more time to seek legal advice, to prepare their case, and to appeal it or seek an exemption.”

The new rule goes into effect after a 30-day comment period.

Is the Biden administration’s strategy at the U.S.-Mexico border working?

It’s a question many U.S. voters are weighing as the country nears a rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Trump has vowed to be more aggressive on immigration in a second term, saying he would crack down on migrants and asylum-seekers at the border as well as immigrants already living in the country. In his first term, Trump enacted policies that separated thousands of children from their parents and ordered migrant asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their cases were evaluated.

Biden meanwhile continued some Trump-era policies and has dealt with a record-number of apprehensions at the border during his presidency and a backlogged immigration system. He’s also subject to competing criticisms that he is either too soft on immigration or that he has been too harsh on people trying to escape instability in their home countries.

As part of NPR’s We, The Voters 2024 election series, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the person tasked with executing Biden’s vision on immigration, sat for an interview with Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep.

Mayorkas is the first Latino to hold the post since DHS’ creation in 2003. He oversees enforcement agencies U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes applications for immigration benefits like green cards and citizenship.

Earlier this year, Mayorkas was impeached by House Republicans who alleged that his use of parole to allow some migrants into the country was unlawful. Those charges were quickly dismissed by the Senate.

Here’s what Mayorkas had to say about the work his department is doing at the border.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Steve Inskeep: When it comes to asylum-seekers who have reached this country, what is your fundamental goal?

Alejandro Mayorkas: What we want to do and what we do is enforce the law. And what that means is that if someone has a claim for humanitarian relief, if they claim asylum and their claim prevails, they have established a legal basis to remain in the United States. If their claim fails, then they are to be removed from the United States. We enforce the law.

Inskeep: Do you also have a policy goal to cause fewer people to arrive, fewer people to get in, fewer people to stay?

Mayorkas: Well, our goal is to eliminate to the fullest extent possible the phenomenon of what is commonly termed “irregular migration.” People placing their lives and their life savings in the hands of smugglers to arrive in between the ports of entry, which is dangerous and also feeds a criminal network. And instead, we want them to use lawful pathways to make claims for relief under United States law. That is why we have built more lawful pathways in this administration than in any other time, and we are seeking to disincentivize arriving in between the ports of entry at our dangerous southern border.

Inskeep: Is it fair to say that this isn’t working, given the sheer numbers of people who’ve continued to come to the southern border?

Mayorkas: No, it is not.

Inskeep: You think it’s working?

Mayorkas: I think it is working.

Inskeep: What’s the evidence that the Biden administration’s approach is working?

Mayorkas: One, the numbers have decreased. Migration is a dynamic phenomenon, so the numbers increase and they decrease. But the numbers have decreased. We have also removed or returned an historic number of people more this year than I think in any year since 2011.

Inskeep: During our reporting, we talked with John Modlin, who’s the chief patrol officer for the Tucson sector, a very busy sector of the border right now. He said the increase began in 2021, just as the Biden administration was taking office, and that migrants say they believed the laws would be different and that they would be allowed in. I know the administration tried to message differently and told people not to come, but why do you think that didn’t work well?

Mayorkas: Let’s take a step back. The number of encounters in 2019 exceeded the number of encounters in 2018 by almost 100%.

Inskeep: Meaning there was a big increase during the Trump administration?

Mayorkas: Absolutely. I won’t have the precise numbers, but I’m going to ballpark it. There were maybe about 560,000 encounters in 2018 and maybe close to a million in 2019.

Inskeep: Sure, there have been waves. But in this case we have people telling Border Patrol they came because they thought Biden would let them in.

Mayorkas: Well, remember what we are battling. We are battling sophisticated smuggling organizations that peddle in disinformation. And so that is a reality that we have to counter, and we seek to counter that with accurate information.

Inskeep: Listening to you, it seems to me that I could define your policy difference with Republicans in part in this way: You want people to come lawfully. Republicans don’t want people to come or not so many people to come. Is that a fair description?

Mayorkas: Certainly there are some who don’t want anyone to come lawfully or otherwise.

Inskeep: Or they just feel the asylum seekers specifically are taking advantage of the system. Let’s talk about the asylum-seekers and not other kinds of immigrants who may come here legally.

Mayorkas: Our goal is to have legitimate asylum-seekers, individuals with successful claims to be able to avail themselves of humanitarian relief outside the hands of smugglers.

Inskeep: Do you think most people who ask for asylum have a legitimate case?

Mayorkas: I think that empirically, when one takes a look at the numbers who have claimed and the numbers who succeed, I would respectfully submit that the majority do not qualify.

Migrants claiming asylum can be allowed into the U.S. Here’s how it works

Inskeep: So most of them, if it got right down to it, probably should not have come, if you were able to give them advice?

Mayorkas: If I were able to give them advice, of course. But I don’t mean to diminish the desperation that fuels their travel and their flight because, even though they may not qualify for asylum, that doesn’t mean that they don’t legitimately want a better life for themselves and their children, their loved ones, that they are not seeking to escape generalized violence. When a mother, when loving parents are fearful of sending their daughter to school because the walk is so precarious and they actually take. The leap to send that daughter alone to traverse another country, only to reach our southern border. I don’t want to diminish what that means in the lives of people. But the fact of the matter is, if they don’t qualify for relief, they won’t stay.

Inskeep: We spoke to Republican Arizona congressman Juan Ciscomani, who was born in Mexico. He says it’s taking too long for legal immigration applications to be processed, while the border is “wide open” for arriving migrants. Is there something unfair about the current state of the law that allows people to come and say, “I want asylum” and they usually get several years before a court hearing?

Mayorkas: I don’t think the 720,000 people that we’ve removed to return would consider the border open, so I would respectfully disagree with him.

The bipartisan legislation would have eliminated the years-long process between encounter and final adjudication in our ability to remove that individual. And I would respectfully wish that the congressman had actually supported that bipartisan legislation rather than opposed it. If people really want to fix the system, then they should advance solutions rather than really dwell on the problem and frankly perpetuate it by declining to implement solutions.

The congresswoman makes a legitimate claim that individuals who are seeking other lawful processes, their cases are taking longer because we have had to allocate resources to the challenge at the border. That’s not the only reason that the duration of time has been extended. You know, the prior administration gutted our legal immigration system, financially gutted. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. If they had actually promulgated a fee rule that properly resourced that agency, the backlogs would not have accumulated as they have.

EL PASO — Twice in recent months, hundreds of migrants have rushed a border gate in El Paso in an effort to push past state troopers and National Guard and get into the U.S.

The Texas Department of Public Safety responded by arresting hundreds of the migrants en masse on misdemeanor rioting charges. Now that strategy is being tested in local courts.

Earlier this week, a judge in El Paso dismissed 211 of the rioting cases related to one incident; the same judge had previously dismissed 140 other cases from another border-rushing incident — those cases were revived when the local district attorney took the unusual step of presenting the misdemeanor cases to a grand jury, which indicted all the migrants.

Typically grand juries only review more serious felony cases, while prosecutors present misdemeanor cases directly to judges who must determine if there’s enough evidence to support charging someone with a crime.

El Paso District Attorney Bill Hicks has defended his move and says that it is about maintaining law and order, not anything to do with an individual’s legal status. Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Hicks to the job after the previous district attorney left office following an effort to oust her amid allegations of incompetence and official misconduct.

“This, at least from the prosecutor’s point of view, has nothing to do with immigration,” Hicks said this week. “This is a matter of people committing a crime and destroying property and endangering lives.”

At news conference on Thursday, Hicks defended his decision to present the cases to a grand jury and said his office will appeal Judge Ruben Morales’ ruling. He added that the 211 migrants would be released on Thursday. He said that if an appeal’s court reverses Morales’ ruling he would issue arrest warrants for the 211 migrants whose cases the judge dismissed this week.

“It’s proper to take those cases to a grand jury of 12 people in our community and ask those 12 people in our community what do they think,” he said. “It’s appropriate that our community has the opportunity to speak.”

Hicks said he is not prosecuting the cases to make any political statement about immigration. He said he is doing so because anyone that “breaks the laws in our community, we will file charges and make sure that that person faces justice in our courtrooms.”

“These cases are not about immigration. These cases are not about politics,” he said. “These cases are clearly about law and order.”

Elissa Steglich, co-director of the University of Texas School of Law’s immigration clinic, said the rioting charges appear to be tied to the state’s recent push to deter migrants from crossing into Texas — an effort that has put it in conflict with the federal government, which has primary jurisdiction over immigration laws.

“It’s hard not to see the arrests as an attempt to enforce immigration law while using state criminal provisions,” Steglich said. “It raises the real tension in that people under the law have the right to seek asylum.”

DPS did not respond to a request for comment about the latest case dismissals. A spokesperson earlier referred inquiries to Hicks’ office.

The first border gate rush occurred in March when, according to Hicks, nine migrants at the front of a group of roughly 1,000 asylum-seekers cut through concertina wire and allegedly assaulted National Guard members.

At Abbott’s direction, DPS arrested more than 200 of those individuals on misdemeanor rioting charges.

It’s a rare criminal charge: Fourteen people were charged with rioting in El Paso County over the last decade before this year’s mass arrests, according to county figures. The crime is punishable by up to 180 days in jail or a $2,000 fine.

“If this is their new strategy, I’m hoping they will quickly learn that it’s a poor one,” said El Paso County Public Defender Kelli Childress, who is defending many of the migrants. “Arresting people against whom you have evidence that they committed a crime is one thing, but arresting people for the purpose of harassment to add to some sort of deterrent would be a really bad mechanism to curb migration.”

DPS arrested 141 migrants on the same charge following another border gate rush in April.

Morales dismissed 140 of the cases shortly after, ruling that DPS had insufficient probable cause to continue detaining the migrants, who were then turned over to federal authorities.

Following the dismissals, Hicks presented the same cases to a grand jury, which indicted the migrants on the same charges. That led federal authorities to send the migrants back to county custody so they could be served warrants. But the future of the new cases remains unclear after this week’s dismissal of the cases against the other migrant group.

On Wednesday, Morales dismissed the cases related to the March incident because prosecutors had convened a grand jury in state court, then took the cases to a county court without a required order transferring the cases between jurisdictions.

“I can’t just randomly take cases and hear them without proper orders,” Morales said during a hearing this week. “That’s just not the way it works.”

Childress, the public defender, said she is raising the same issue to challenge the charges against the migrants who rushed the border in April.

Immigration-related cases don’t end up in Texas courts frequently: U.S. Border Patrol agents typically detain migrants who illegally cross the border and either charge them with suspicion of entering the country illegally — which are handled in federal courts — or send them through an administrative process to quickly deport them. Migrants can also request political asylum.

But in different parts of the Texas-Mexico border, including in El Paso, the state has set up barriers aimed at preventing migrants from surrendering to Border Patrol after they’ve crossed the Rio Grande.

The El Paso arrests occurred amid the state’s ongoing, multibillion-dollar border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, and an escalating fight with the federal government over immigration enforcement. DPS troopers deployed to the border as part of Operation Lone Star have arrested migrants on state trespassing charges since July 2021.

Lawmakers last year approved a new law that would let Texas police arrest people suspected of entering the country illegally on state charges. The law, Senate Bill 4, remains locked in a legal battle between the federal and state government.

Legal experts said the mass arrests like those carried out by DPS on the border can be challenging to prosecute in court.

“The issue in all of these mass crime cases is you need to figure out who did what, which can be very difficult,” said Thomas P. Hogan, a former prosecutor currently teaching at South Texas College of Law Houston. “You need to figure out exactly what conduct each individual engaged in and whether or not it violated the law.”

FRANKLIN, W.Va.—Not many places need warm bodies more than this picturesque town in the Appalachian Mountains. There are so many elderly people and so few workers to take care of them that some old folks have died before getting off the wait list for home visits by health aides.

“We advertise all the time,” said Janice Lantz, the local senior center’s director. “We can’t hire a direct-care worker.”

West Virginia shares a demographic dilemma afflicting many parts of the country: an aging population and unfilled jobs. Decades of migration out of Appalachia have left West Virginia older, less educated and less able to work than other parts of the U.S. Its labor-force participation rate—the share of the 16-and-older population either working or looking for work—was 55.2% in March, the second-lowest in the country.

Some other states, including Maine, Indiana and Utah, have sought immigrants to shore up their workforces. But while West Virginia represents one extreme in its labor needs, it represents another in its resistance to immigration.

Since last year, Republican Gov. Jim Justice has signed legislation banning “sanctuary cities” in West Virginia and deployed that state’s own National Guard troops to the Mexican border in Texas. State lawmakers have introduced bills that would: require businesses to conduct additional screening for unauthorized workers; punish companies for transporting migrants who are deportable under U.S. law; create a program to enable state authorities to remove even some immigrants with legal status to work; and appropriate money for Texas to install more razor wire along the Rio Grande.

In a recent television ad, Moore Capito, a former Republican state legislator running to succeed Gov. Justice in November, enacted a scene in which he blocks a van of migrants from entering the state.

There is little evidence that many recent immigrants—either those who entered the country legally or those who didn’t—have had any inclination to go to West Virginia, the only state with fewer residents than it had in 1940. The portion of its population that is foreign-born is 1.8%, the lowest of any state.

Local business groups representing manufacturers, bankers, real-estate agents, builders and auto dealers are lobbying against the proposed worker-screening legislation, which they say would deter needed workers and create burdensome and duplicative requirements.

“We should avoid sending messages, either overtly or through our actions, that this is not a good place to come if you’re willing to work,” said Steve Roberts, president of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce. The state doesn’t need only doctors and engineers, he said, but manual laborers to “do the work that some of us have just gotten too old to do.”

West Virginia’s elected officials say they aren’t opposed to immigrants who have entered the country legally, only those who haven’t. Lawmakers intent on preventing a feared influx of migrants say they are motivated by rule of law—and a desire to put West Virginians first.

The worker shortage is especially dire in sparsely populated Pendleton County, where Franklin is the county seat.

The dining room at Franklin’s Star Hotel & Restaurant, adorned with taxidermied creatures including a black bear and a bobcat, has had to stop serving breakfast on weekdays or opening on weekends. “We can’t find help anywhere,” said Felicia Kimble, whose family owns the place.

General contractor Jay Nesselrodt said he has to turn down work every week because he can’t hire enough workers. A recent Tuesday found him juggling emails, phone calls and a paint roller at the Fisher Mountain golf course, where he is renovating the clubhouse.

“I’m supposed to be managing people,” he said. “Instead, I’m painting.” So was his wife, a lawyer.

Nesselrodt said he has long relied on Latin American immigrants who drive in from northern Virginia to do most of the painting, drywall and tile work at his jobs. They were tied up that day. When his brother died two years ago, they came to the funeral. “They’re like family,” he said.

Later that evening, at the Pendleton County High School boys’ basketball game, the gray-haired spectators outnumbered the students. Declining enrollment has meant that for the school to field teams, many athletic students need to play football, basketball and baseball, said Athletic Director Jackee Propst.

Local historians said the state has long been wary of outsiders, not just from other countries but from other states. “West Virginians don’t want immigration—of any kind,” said Stephen Smoot, editor of the Pendleton Times newspaper. There is even antipathy toward “come-heres” from nearby metropolitan areas who move in and look down their noses at locals, Smoot said.

Voters picked “Wild and Wonderful” as the state official slogan in 2007. Wildlife officials have reintroduced elk, locally extinct for more than a century. For many residents who fish, hunt or simply seek solitude in the hills and hollows, fewer humans is a plus.

“There’s a quality of life that comes from living in a sparsely populated area,” said Smoot. “You don’t have the irritations of constant human contact.”

National issue

Many of the migrants who have streamed over the nation’s southern border recently have been granted permission to work. Those who enter the country illegally often turn themselves in to federal authorities and request asylum, and some get permission to work while waiting for their claims to be adjudicated. In addition, the Biden administration has made many migrants who entered illegally, including roughly 470,000 Venezuelans last year, eligible for work permits under “temporary protected status.”

West Virginia has attracted few migrants in recent decades. Its lack of existing immigrant communities in its cities and towns has made it less likely for new migrants to head to those places, immigration experts said.

Nonetheless, in West Virginia as in much of the country, the border and migration are potent political issues. Nationally, more respondents to The Wall Street Journal’s February poll cited immigration and border security than any other issue as their most important concern in this fall’s election. Former President Donald Trump, the presumed Republican nominee, has made it a central part of his campaign. Trump carried 68% of West Virginia’s votes in 2020, his highest share of any state.

West Virginia state Sen. Mike Stuart, a Republican who sponsored one of the bills to fund for razor wire along the border in Texas, said immigration is among the top concerns he hears from voters. “I think we’re in a pre-emptive mode right now to try to make sure we don’t become a tent community like what we see on television,” he said.

Rabbi Victor Urecki, who set up a short-lived refugee-resettlement program in Charleston in 2016, said the state has become less welcoming since he moved to the area in the 1980s. He said Trump has tapped into a distrust of outsiders that is part of human nature but more potent in a place that remembers better days. “When things are falling apart,” he said, “it’s hard for people to look in the mirror.”

Some other places have viewed the recent immigration wave as an opportunity to have more workers generating economic output and tax revenue.

The capital of Kansas has launched a Spanish-language marketing campaign, “Choose Topeka,” hoping to draw workers to fill thousands of open jobs. Maine, one of just three states with a population older than West Virginia’s, is creating an Office of New Americanstasked with “welcoming and supporting immigrants to strengthen Maine’s workforce.”

The Republican governors of Utah and Indiana have asked Congress to let states sponsor immigrant visas to help them fill hundreds of thousands of open jobs. Utah also has extended in-state tuition to refugees, asylum seekers and other migrant groups.

Not everyone necessarily benefits from increased immigration. An influx of migrants could exacerbate housing shortages or put downward pressure on competing workers’ wages. Neither is much of a risk in West Virginia, which had the nation’s fourth-highest rate of vacant housing and the second-highest rate of job openings in 2023.

‘Vicious cycle’

The number of locations where business is conducted in West Virginia declined 9.3% between 2011 and 2021, according to the Census Bureau, the biggest drop in the U.S.

“We suffer from this vicious cycle,” said John Deskins, director of West Virginia University’s bureau of business and economic research. “The people who move away tend to be younger, more educated, more prepared for the workforce. And it makes the remainers older.”

Elected officials have tried almost everything they can think of to shore up the workforce, except encourage immigration. Justice signed into law last year what he said was the biggest income-tax cut in West Virginia history, advertised as, among other things, a way to attract workers and business.

The legislature, where Republicans outnumber Democrats 31-3 in the Senate and 89-11 in the House of Delegates, has weighed tightening requirements on unemployment benefits in hopes of nudging some of the unemployed back to work.

The state also relaxed qualification standards for public-school teachers, expedited permitting for major projects and floated measures to draw retired veterans.

Former Intuit CEO and native son Brad D. Smith, now president of Marshall University in Huntington, launched a program in 2021 offering $12,000 checks and free co-working space and outdoor-gear rentals to remote workers who relocate to the state. The program is only open to U.S. citizens and green-card holders, a criteria intended to attract people likely to stay in West Virginia long-term, administrators said. Four of the 226 grantees so far are from other countries: Germany, Canada, Ukraine and Colombia.

The governor has talked up the state’s tourism prospects. Justice owns the historic Greenbrier resort in the southeastern corner of the state, which has long employed international students and other foreign workers in seasonal jobs. Justice didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Pendleton County, which boasts trout streams, caverns and a sizable rock-climbing area, is the sort of place that the governor’s tourism push is designed to benefit. County commissioners say revenue from Airbnb rentals and second-home purchases has kept their budget growing even though the population has declined 21% since 2010, to around 6,000.

In the five years that Lantz has run the Pendleton County Senior Center, the number of direct-care workers has declined to 12, from 30. Such workers help old people get out of bed, bathe and prepare meals, and they sometimes call 911. They are essential for the growing number of elderly who don’t have family nearby.

Few locals are drawn by the pay of $10 to $12 an hour, though. As a result, about 15 people are on the wait list for at-home care—almost as many as the senior center serves, Lantz said. Around five people on the list have died in recent years.

In many places, eldercare is performed disproportionately by immigrants. They make up 14% of the U.S. population but 32% of home-care workers, according to PHI, a nonprofit that advocates for such services.

But immigrants aren’t coming to Pendleton County on their own, and the county hasn’t taken any measures to encourage them. Local officials cited the lack of public transportation, language barriers, shortages of teachers and potential strains on the volunteer-based emergency services among the reasons.

A closed Navy facility in Sugar Grove with scores of housing units has been empty since 2015, and local officials only informally discussed the possibility of using it to house migrant workers at a JBS chicken plant in the neighboring county. A JBS spokeswoman said the company wasn’t approached about the idea, and is building a 153-unit apartment complex to provide affordable housing to plant workers.

Some Franklin residents, asked whether migrants are a potential solution to their labor woes, brought up a variety of concerns. “If they don’t work, there’s going to be crimes and drugs,” said one man who was chatting with the owner of the town’s used-furniture store.

Franklin’s representative in the state’s House of Delegates, Republican Elias Coop-Gonzalez, moved to West Virginia from Guatemala as a teenager—his father is American—making him one of the few foreign-born residents of his 94% white district.

This year, he co-sponsored a bill that would apply to a category of immigrants called “inspected unauthorized aliens”—those who haven’t entered the U.S. through an official port of entry but whom the federal government has allowed to stay and work while their legal status is in limbo.

If the bill becomes law, it would establish a program to transport them out of West Virginia.

“If people cross the border, and they can get away with breaking the law…it’s just going to exacerbate the problem,” Coop-Gonzalez said. Because the federal government is failing to secure the border, he said, “the state has to take some measures to push back.”

The U.S. Department of Justice officially filed suit against Iowa Thursday, arguing that the state’s new immigration law criminalizing “illegal reentry” is unconstitutional and should be blocked from going into effect.

In their lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, the DOJ argues that Senate File 2340 — which allows Iowa police to arrest undocumented immigrants who have previously been deported or barred from the U.S. — violates federal law and undermines existing immigration efforts.

The litigation comes a week after a top DOJ official warned state leaders to stop enforcing the law or be brought to court, and hours after civil rights groups filed their own suit seeking to block the law.

And it comes the same day the The American Immigration Council, American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Iowa filed the suit on behalf of Iowa Migrant Movement for Justice against the state for the same law.

“Iowa cannot disregard the U.S. Constitution and settled Supreme Court precedent,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton in a statement. “We have brought this action to ensure that Iowa adheres to the framework adopted by Congress and the Constitution for regulation of immigration.”

The lawsuit challenges the law under the supremacy clause and commerce clause in the U.S. Constitution.

“(Iowa)’s efforts, through SF 2340, intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens, frustrate the United States’ immigration operations, and interfere with foreign relations,” Boynton and other DOJ officials write in the lawsuit.

Gov. Kim Reynolds and Attorney General Brenna Bird, both Republicans, have signaled they intend to defend the law, which passed the GOP-led Iowa Legislature and was signed into law last month. It takes effect July 1.

“The DOJ and ACLU are suing lowa for protecting our citizens, all while Joe Biden refuses to enforce immigration laws already on the books,” Reynolds wrote on social media Thursday afternoon. “If he won’t stand for the rule of law, lowa will!”

Iowa’s law has spurred harsh opposition from immigration advocates, as well as questions from police and county attorneys who have received no guidance on how to enforce the law or prosecute cases involving it.

SF 2340 mimics a Texas law that has been blocked by the courts while a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality is decided. Penalties can range from two to 10 years in prison, and judges can order that a person convicted under the law be deported back to their country of origin.

Stephen Miller is not subtle. His rhetoric tends toward the apocalyptic, a habit that would seem hard to maintain over the course of a decade that included holding a senior position in the White House. But he sticks to it.

On Wednesday evening, for example, Miller warned his followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, about a devious, nation-ending effort undertaken by the duplicitous Democratic caucus in the House.

“ALERT,” he wrote. “House Dems just voted UNANIMOUSLY to give illegals representation in Congress AND the Electoral College. House Seats and Electoral College votes WILL BE added to areas with the most illegals (including all Biden illegals) unless Senate passes the bill. Invasion by design.”

This type of fuming has a particular audience, credulous types that inherently assume the worst about Democrats, particularly on issues of immigration. (X owner Elon Musk, for example, reposted Miller’s comment with a “100” emoji, indicating agreement.) But Miller’s argument is nonsense.
First of all, the measure at issue, H.R. 7109, passed. Democrats opposed it unanimously, yes, but Republicans have a majority, and they voted unanimously to enact it. It now heads to the Senate, where the Democratic majority is likely to block it. That’s the better point at which to complain.

But the complaint itself is dishonest. The legislation would implement a question on the census determining whether respondents are citizens. Those responses, then, would be used to filter noncitizens out of the process of apportioning congressional representation and, by extension, electoral votes.

In other words, it would change the system as it currently exists. Opposing the legislation isn’t “giving” anyone anything; it’s keeping something from being taken away. If it is “invasion by design,” the design was the Founding Fathers,’ not congressional Democrats’.

There are good reasons not to make this change. The point of apportioning members of the House by population, for example, is that it allows more populous places to have a bigger say in federal decisions about apportioning money and resources. If the changes proposed under H.R. 7109 were implemented, states with more people — and therefore more need for funding for things such as housing, regardless of how those people came to be in those states — would be disadvantaged in debates with states with smaller populations.

Another reason not to implement the proposal is that it doesn’t differentiate between people living in the country under legal visas or with green cards and those who lack documentation. There were about 12.7 million people with green cards living in the United States in January 2023, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Over half lived in the country’s four most populous states. Should this law be enacted, those millions of residents would no longer count toward the states’ House apportionment.

Sorry, Texas. Sorry, Florida.

The idea of putting a citizenship question on the census has been a focus of Trump allies for years. During Donald Trump’s presidency, the idea was moved forward, only to be blocked by the Supreme Court. But there already exists a question about citizenship that’s included in surveys conducted by the Census Bureau: not the decennial census but the monthly American Community Survey (ACS).
That’s how we know how many noncitizens live in the United States. According to 2022 data, the Census Bureau estimates there are about 24.5 million naturalized citizens living in the country and another 21.7 million foreign-born noncitizens. A big chunk of them, remember, are living here with green cards. And despite Miller’s breathless warnings about noncitizens in his social media post, the number of immigrants released into the country during the Biden administration was under 3 million at the start of the year.
The states where the most noncitizens live are the largest states: New York, Texas and Florida. That’s in part because those states are more populous because of large cities, and immigrants often move to urban areas with existing immigrant communities.

But when considering the idea of expanding the citizenship question to the decennial census, it’s worth considering what’s happened to the ACS’s question over time.

In 2018, the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality released a report recording a sharp increase in ACS respondents who didn’t answer the question about citizenship.

This was mostly because of a methodological change, demographer William O’Hare wrote. Budget constraints reduced the bureau’s ability to follow up with those who didn’t complete the survey. This decrease in follow-up, though, “had an impact on the nonresponse rates for the citizenship question but had very little impact on other questions.”

In 2010, 2.7 percent of ACS respondents didn’t answer the citizenship question. By 2016, that percentage increased to 6 percent — but other questions, like those about race and gender, saw no such increase.

Census Bureau data shows this trend toward nonresponse on the citizenship question increased after 2016. From 2017 to 2021 — a period that overlaps with the Trump presidency, shown in gray below — nonresponse on that question jumped from 6.2 percent to 10.1 percent.

In 2022, the states with the largest populations of noncitizens also had nonresponse rates that were above the national level. States with the smallest populations of noncitizens had nonresponse rates below the national level.

And that’s the ACS, not the census. O’Hare compared nonresponse rates for several categories on the ACS with nonresponse rates for the same questions on the census. The latter were higher.

“The nonresponse rates reported here from the ACS are likely to underestimate the nonresponse rates one would expect for the same questions in the 2020 decennial Census,” he concluded.

In other words, the effect of putting a citizenship question on the census would probably be to see more people skip the question. It would also probably have the effect of depressing participation in the census at all, as analysis of the prospect of adding it in 2020 made clear.

The situation, then, is that Republicans want to add a question to the census that would change the process of how the nation’s population is counted and how the nation’s power is allocated — a change that would theoretically disadvantage more-Democratic states. (In 2020, the five states with the lowest percentage of noncitizens backed Trump by 18 points. The five states with the highest percentage backed Joe Biden by 13 points.) But implementing this change would also probably mean that the Census Bureau would collect incomplete data — or have to put more resources toward getting responses to the questions.

It would, however, be a victory for Miller and other immigration hard-liners.

The Biden administration is planning to announce a new regulation as early as Thursday that is designed to allow immigration officials to deport migrants who are ineligible for U.S. asylum earlier in the process, three sources familiar with the internal plans told CBS News.

The regulation by the Department of Homeland Security would apply to migrants who ask for asylum after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, according to the sources, who requested anonymity to talk about the rule before its formal announcement.

It would instruct government asylum officers to apply certain barriers to asylum that are already part of U.S. law during so-called credible fear interviews. This is the first step in the years-long asylum process. Those who pass these interviews are allowed to seek asylum before an immigration judge, while those who fail them can be deported expeditiously.

Migrants barred under U.S. law from asylum include those who may pose a danger to public safety or national security. The rule would allow officials to reject and deport migrants in these categories soon after they cross the border.

The regulation, which is relatively narrow in scope, is one of several actions the Biden administration has been considering to restrict access to the U.S. asylum system amid a spike in applications in recent years, mostly driven by migrants crossing the southern border illegally.

Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

President Biden is also considering invoking a sweeping presidential authority to enact a broader restriction on asylum ahead of the election in November, sources with knowledge of the deliberations told CBS News. The authority, known as 212(f), allows presidents to suspend the entry of migrants whose arrival is deemed to be detrimental to U.S. interests. Former President Donald Trump invoked the law to justify several immigration restrictions, including a travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries.

The president has not yet announced a final decision on the 212(f) order that has been considered for months.

While the upcoming regulation will not affect massive numbers of migrants, it still reinforces a policy shift by Mr. Biden, who earlier in his presidency promised to “restore” the U.S. asylum system.

But after record levels of migrant apprehensions along the southern border, including over 2 million in each of the past two years, and an accompanying political backlash, Mr. Biden’s administration has enacted and floated more restrictive asylum rules.

Last year, the administration published a regulation that disqualifies migrants from asylum if they enter the U.S. illegally after failing to request humanitarian protection in a third country, like Mexico.

The administration has coupled that restriction with an unprecedented expansion in channels for would-be migrants to come to the U.S. legally. These include a phone app that lets migrants in Mexico schedule times to be processed at official border crossings and a program that allows some migrants to fly to the U.S. if they have American sponsors.

After spiking to record levels in December, migrant crossings along the southern border have plummeted by over 40% this year. In April, illegal crossings declined to approximately 129,000, the second consecutive monthly drop, according to internal Border Patrol data obtained by CBS News.

U.S. officials say the dramatic drop in migration stems from increased deportations and stepped-up efforts by Mexico to stop migrants from reaching the American border. Texas state officials have also attributed the decline in crossings to their actions, including the miles of razor wire they have set up along stretches of the border.

This May 1st, in an election year, reminded us of the importance of essential immigrant workers and how urgent it is that those who are undocumented obtain protection and work permits—in the midst of this poisonous political atmosphere in which we live, and could get even worse. Events organized across the country called on President Joe Biden to offer immigration relief in the face of congressional inaction, including to the undocumented spouses of 1.1 million U.S. citizens.

The situation is precarious, given the plans that the virtual Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is forging. The former president and his aides are chomping at the bit, hungrier than ever to implement their anti-immigrant menu, beginning with mass deportations. That is, if he is officially nominated and unseats Biden on November 5th. In an interview with Time magazine, Trump and his aides outlined their Machiavellian plans, emphasizing the border with Mexico. The author wrote, “To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.”

“Trump says he plans to sign orders to reinstall many of the same policies from his first term, such as the Remain in Mexico program, which requires that non-Mexican asylum seekers be sent south of the border until their court dates, and Title 42, which allows border officials to expel migrants without letting them apply for asylum,” says the article.

About how to plan mass deportations, Trump told Time that “he would rely mostly on the National Guard to round up and remove undocumented migrants throughout the country.”

“If they weren’t able to, then I’d use [other parts of] the military,” Trump added. “When I ask if that means he would override the Posse Comitatus Act — an 1878 law that prohibits the use of military force on civilians — Trump seems unmoved by the weight of the statute.”

“Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren’t legally in our country,” Trump affirmed.

The warning of a purge of migrants, detention camps for undocumented people, and mass deportations are not simple threats by Trump. Their proponents have gone looking for legal loopholes that permit them to implement the plans without being stopped in the courts.

In addition to what Time cited, the former president wants to cancel Temporary Protected Status, affecting 700,000 beneficiaries; reinstate Zero Tolerance; deny citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented parents; and impose an ideological test on visa applicants. Many of these proposals are contained in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a roadmap on immigration and other topics for a potential Trump second term.

Neither Trump’s threats nor the claims of workers and their citizen and resident relatives can fall on deaf ears. It is said that those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it, and many people in this country do not know their history. There have already been “purges,” like the one headed by Republican President Dwight (Ike) Eisenhower and his “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s, which removed more than a million Mexican people from the country, including U.S. citizens.

As more recent history has demonstrated as well, state laws that seek to prosecute and remove undocumented immigrants wind up violating the civil rights of citizens and residents in the process.

This is occurring at the same time various polls conclude that United States citizens support policies that balance border control with the legalization of undocumented people, especially those who have been living and working in this country for decades.

Because, on neither this May 1st nor any other, can we forget the vital role that all workers play — especially those who labor without a document that guarantees them that after a life in the United States, paying taxes, and having children and grandchildren who are U.S. citizens, they would not be put on a path to deportation, especially if Trump returns to the White House.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration plans to propose a new rule Thursday aimed at speeding up the asylum claims process for some migrants — a potential prelude to broader actions from President Joe Biden later this year that would impose a bigger crackdown at the border.

It’s meant to affect migrants with criminal records or those who would otherwise be eventually deemed ineligible for asylum in the United States. The proposal, which the Department of Homeland Security plans to announce on Thursday, was confirmed by four people familiar with its contents who were granted anonymity to detail plans not yet public.

Under current law, a migrant who arrives at the border and undergoes an initial screening for “credible fear” — one criterion for asylum — is allowed to continue with the process even if they have a criminal background or would pose a security risk. A judge would later determine whether that migrant would be eligible for asylum.

The change would effectively let an officer at the initial screening stage make that determination, rather than waiting for a judge, according to the people. The people also said the proposal affects a relatively small universe of migrants and those who would not be qualified to receive asylum protections anyway.

But despite those caveats, immigration advocates have previously raised questions about any changes to the credible fear process, saying that migrants are often doing these interviews immediately after surviving life-threatening perilous trips to get to the U.S.

Because of this, initial interviews are designed to have a relatively lower bar so that migrants aren’t wrongfully deported, they say. And they’ve questioned how much legal help migrants who are in custody can actually get in order to prepare them for this key first step toward an asylum claim.

It will likely be months before Thursday’s proposal, which was first reported by Politico, would actually go into effect. Biden continues to mull larger executive action on the border, whose timing depends in large part on whether the number of illegal border crossings increases — they have been steadily decreasing since December.

The proposed rule also comes amid pressure from fellow Democrats and immigrant rights advocates to support immigrants already in the United States.

Janet Murguía, the president of UnidosUS, a civil rights advocacy organization, said she met with Biden last week at the White House with other Latino leaders to push for relief for immigrants who do not have legal status but have been in the United States for years.

“I believe that President Biden is open to this notion that he can do something. He asked for more specifics,” Murguía said. “We’re going to make the case in the White House. We’re going to make the case here in the Capitol, across the country, in every community.”

At a news conference Wednesday, Latino and progressive congressional Democrats expressed frustration at the idea that the White House would clamp down on the border without also assisting immigrants who crossed the border illegally as children.

“Mr. President, we know what’s in your heart. Let’s reject the extremist messaging vilifying immigrants. Let’s embrace our values as a nation of immigrants and provide relief for the long-term residents of the United States,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat.

The lawmakers are calling for the Biden administration to provide relief from deportation to spouses and other family members of U.S. citizens, as well as extended temporary protected status, which allows people from countries ravaged by disaster and war to live and work legally in the United States.

At the same time, Democrats, especially those in political swing states, are encouraging the White House to take unilateral action to curtail border crossings.

In the Senate, Democrats are considering whether to put a series of border proposals to a vote in order to show that Republicans are opposed to swifter border enforcement. And in the House, 15 Democrats penned a letter to the White House this week encouraging executive actions.

“We need to make sure that we are adjudicating those who are coming across just as quickly as possible, specifically around sort of administrative judges being down at the southern border,” said Rep. Angie Craig, a Minnesota Democrat who led the letter. “And I do think there’s a limit to the number of people who we can accept into our nation on an asylum claim. At the end of the day, we cannot have a border where an unlimited amount of people can simply cross.”

CNN
—
The Biden administration on Thursday is expected to propose a rule cracking down on migrants ineligible to claim asylum, according to two sources familiar, a change that’s not expected to be sweeping but rather a tightening of the current immigration system.

The move comes as the White House has tried to toughen its position on the US-Mexico border and flip the script on Republicans who continue to hammer President Joe Biden on immigration ahead of the November election.

The proposed rule would allow immigration officials to quickly reject some migrants from claiming asylum earlier in the process if they’re found to be ineligible. The regulation, which would still need to go through a public comment period, is not expected to cast a wider net of people who would be restricted from applying for asylum, according to a source.

Politico first reported on the proposed changes.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut acknowledged Wednesday that the administration was pursuing asylum changes, but noted that without legislation, making full scale changes to the asylum system is incredibly difficult.

Murphy told reporters he’s been engaged with the administration on the policies under review, but noted fuller scale changes that Republicans want Biden to make risk being challenged in court.

Senate Democrats are going to keep pushing for the failed bipartisan immigration bill to get more GOP support, Murphy said, adding that at this point, it’s not clear the measure would get another vote.

As immigration policies take center stage in the nation’s political debate and the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program remains uncertain, senators are holding a hearing Wednesday on the “urgent need to protect immigrant youth,” according to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The occasion has prompted 1,636 scholars and alumni of TheDream.US, an organization helping DACA recipients and other undocumented immigrant youths known as Dreamers go to college, to sign a letter urging Congress to “provide us with the opportunity to pursue a path to U.S. citizenship naturalization.”

“Such action will provide certainty to our families and communities and strengthen our nation’s economy by ensuring the future of a vital, vibrant workforce,” the letter, first shared with NBC News, reads.

Other organizations such as evangelical and educational groups have also shared letters of support ahead of the hearing.

Gaby Pacheco, an education leader and president of TheDream.US, is one of five witnesses who spoke at the hearing. She advocated for legislation that would give a pathway to legalization to young immigrant adults who’ve spent most of their lives in the U.S., something that polls have shown has broad support.

“The reality is that more than ever, without bipartisanship, we’re not going to be able to get anything done,” Pacheco told NBC News in a phone interview ahead of her testimony.

But achieving the much-needed bipartisanship may be more challenging now than ever before, said Pacheco, a former DACA recipient who has advocated for Dreamers her entire life.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairman of the Judiciary Committee, opened the hearing focusing on the contributions of Dreamers and DACA recipients. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the ranking member, responded by saying that fixing DACA “is not my concern right now” because his priority is solving the “complete, utter disaster” riddling the border and U.S. immigration policies.

Graham added that legalizing Dreamers would send others the message “to keep coming” and worsen the immigration crisis.

Durbin responded that it is unfair to hold “these young people accountable for your concerns” and said DACA recipients go through extensive background checks and become exceptional workers.

The senators’ differing stances are a departure from their bipartisan efforts just a year ago, when they both introduced the Dream Act of 2023, which would have allowed Dreamers to earn lawful permanent residence.

Immigration has increasingly become a flashpoint for politicians on both sides of the aisle ahead of the November presidential election, with Republicans overwhelmingly pointing to selected instances of undocumented noncitizens’ being charged with murder and other serious crimes to push for hard-line immigration policies, while Democrats decry such efforts and deem them “cheap” political tactics.

According to the National Institute of Justice at the Justice Department, “Recent research suggests that those who immigrate (legally or illegally) are not more likely, and may even be less likely to commit crime in the US.”

“I think it’s very sad and tragic, what happens in the country when a very small, tiny population that does bad things is now put front stage to scare everyday Americans about who immigrants are,” said Pacheco, who has been in the U.S. since she was 8, after emigrating from Ecuador with her family.

Such dynamics are reflected in the pool of witnesses testifying before the Senate, which includes Tammy Nobles, the mother of slain 20-year-old Kayla Hamilton who sued the federal government in January alleging it allowed a gang-affiliated undocumented teen charged with Hamilton’s killing into the country.

After recounting the heartbreaking events that led to her daughter’s death, Nobles said, “Not all immigrants are seeking the American dream. Some are criminals that are seeking to harm American lives.”

Over a decade of DACA — and uncertainty about its future

More than 800,000 young adults who were brought to the U.S. as children and lack legal immigration status have been able to work and study without fear of deportation since DACA was first implemented in 2012 as an executive action by then-President Barack Obama. An overwhelming majority of DACA recipients were born in Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Then-President Donald Trump tried to shut down the program, though he was stopped by the courts. A series of lawsuits challenging DACA spearheaded by Republican-led states continue making their way through the courts.

An estimated 400,000 young people who would have been eligible to apply for DACA have been shut out of the program since 2021, when a federal judge decided to halt it for new registrants amid the ongoing legal challenges.

In addition to Nobles and Pacheco, the other witnesses include Mitchell Soto-Rodriguez, a police officer in Illinois who has DACA, and two immigration policy experts.

In her testimony, Soto-Rodriguez said she became a police officer after being inspired by the officer “who showed compassion” when responding to a car accident she and her mother were in when Soto-Rodriguez was an undocumented teen.

After obtaining DACA, Soto-Rodriguez learned that she still wasn’t eligible to apply to be an officer. But when the police chief in her town learned of her story, it inspired him to advocate for changes in the laws to allow DACA recipients to become police officers, she said.

Irving Hernandez, 20, one of the hundreds of TheDream.US scholars and alumni who signed the organization’s letter to Congress, is among those who have been shut out of DACA in recent years.

A junior at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Hernandez is studying health psychology and aspires to have a career helping people dealing with anxiety, depression, trauma and other mental health challenges.

“I want to be such a huge catalyst for change,” he said.

Hernandez said he wants lawmakers to “give Dreamers the opportunity to succeed, because we really don’t get that opportunities.”

Supporters of DACA say it’s one of the most successful policies for immigrant integration.

Since DACA started in 2012, recipients have contributed $108 billion in wages to the economy, as well as $33 billion in combined taxes, according to FWD.us, a bipartisan group supporting immigration reform. Most DACA recipients are young adults who have lived in the U.S. for more than 16 years.

Pacheco, a longtime advocate trying to bridge the political divide on Dreamer legislation, recalled testifying at a congressional hearing over a decade ago, shortly after she became a DACA recipient. Now sitting in front of senators as someone who was able to become a naturalized U.S. citizen after she was sponsored by her husband, Pacheco said she hopes to convey her life story to them, show the success of the DACA program and put a spotlight on the immigrant youth who have been shut out of the program.

WASHINGTON — Immigration advocates and Democratic lawmakers are urging President Joe Biden to prioritize long-term undocumented immigrants as his administration weighs executive actions to curb record crossings along the southern border.

In a letter signed by more than 80 lawmakers, including members of the Congressional Hispanic and Progressive caucuses, the Democrats ask Biden to “take all available actions to streamline pathways to lawful status for undocumented immigrants” ahead of the November election.

“Deporting all such individuals — as former President Donald Trump has threatened to do if reelected — would devastate the American economy and destroy American families,” they added.

The letter offers concrete steps they say the White House could take, including streamlining the process by which DACA recipients, or immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, can seek to change to a nonimmigrant status.

Lawmakers also ask Biden to unify families by allowing undocumented migrants married to U.S. citizens to seek parole on a case-by-case basis and reduce processing times for green card cases so that those migrants could be eligible to work.

The chair of the Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Nanette Barragan, D-Calif., said in a statement that Biden “should seize this critical moment by exercising his Executive Authority to rebuild our broken immigration system.”

“We urge him to provide pathways to citizenship and protections for the millions of long-term undocumented residents who have contributed to the rich fabric of the United States,” she said.

The new push follows a letter in March from Senate Democrats, led by Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, of Illinois, and Immigration Subcommittee Chair Alex Padilla, of California, outlining the same call to action.

”As the Biden administration considers executive actions on immigration, we must not return to failed Trump-era policies aimed at banning asylum and moving us backwards,” Padilla told NBC News in a statement.

On Monday, NBC News reported that Biden is considering using his executive authority in the coming weeks to potentially restrict the number of migrants who can enter the U.S.

The administration has been in touch with immigration advocacy groups ahead of any executive order.

A Department of Homeland Security official with knowledge of the discussions said the White House would most likely invoke power reserved for the president in Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows a president discretion over who is admitted into the U.S.

Under that authority, Customs and Border Protection would be directed to block the entry of migrants crossing over from Mexico if daily border crossings passed a certain threshold. It’s similar to a provision of the border bill negotiated by a bipartisan group of senators earlier this year, which was killed by Republicans, in part, at Trump’s urging.

Advocates are worried that the policy would be too restrictive on asylum, as are some Democrats who opposed the bill in February and called for a legal pathway to citizenship for undocumented people in the U.S. to be included in the text.

Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus lobbied the administration over months to no avail, with Democratic leadership eventually giving up its long-held red line on immigration reform to unlock aid to Ukraine amid a Republican blockade.

The GOP rejected the bipartisan compromise regardless, effectively sinking all near-term prospects for Congress to tackle an issue that has plagued the U.S. government for years.

Nonetheless, Padilla said this is Biden’s “opportunity” to “provide relief for the long-term immigrants of this nation.”

Padilla is leading a news conference Wednesday afternoon with lawmakers and advocates from FWD.us, American Families United, UnidosUS and CASA to spotlight the letter to Biden.

The president of FWD.us, an immigration advocacy group, said in a statement that most Americans “don’t have the opportunity to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of American families — but President Biden does.”

”He has the legal authority to provide affirmative relief to the spouses of U.S. citizens, and other longtime undocumented community members,” Todd Schulte said. “We hope, and believe, he will act soon to protect these American families.”

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration plans to propose a new rule Thursday aimed at speeding up the asylum claims process for some migrants — a potential prelude to broader actions from President Joe Biden later this year that would impose a bigger crackdown at the border.

It’s meant to affect migrants with criminal records or those who would otherwise be eventually deemed ineligible for asylum in the United States. The proposal, which the Department of Homeland Security plans to announce on Thursday, was confirmed by four people familiar with its contents who were granted anonymity to detail plans not yet public.

Under current law, a migrant who arrives at the border and undergoes an initial screening for “credible fear” — one criterion for asylum — is allowed to continue with the process even if they have a criminal background or would pose a security risk. A judge would later determine whether that migrant would be eligible for asylum.

The change would effectively let an officer at the initial screening stage make that determination, rather than waiting for a judge, according to the people. The people also said the proposal affects a relatively small universe of migrants and those who would not be qualified to receive asylum protections anyway.

But despite those caveats, immigration advocates have previously raised questions about any changes to the credible fear process, saying that migrants are often doing these interviews immediately after surviving life-threatening perilous trips to get to the U.S.

Because of this, initial interviews are designed to have a relatively lower bar so that migrants aren’t wrongfully deported, they say. And they’ve questioned how much legal help migrants who are in custody can actually get in order to prepare them for this key first step toward an asylum claim.

It will likely be months before Thursday’s proposal, which was first reported by Politico, would actually go into effect. Biden continues to mull larger executive action on the border, whose timing depends in large part on whether the number of illegal border crossings increases — they have been steadily decreasing since December.

The proposed rule also comes amid pressure from fellow Democrats and immigrant rights advocates to support immigrants already in the United States.

Janet Murguía, the president of UnidosUS, a civil rights advocacy organization, said she met with Biden last week at the White House with other Latino leaders to push for relief for immigrants who do not have legal status but have been in the United States for years.

“I believe that President Biden is open to this notion that he can do something. He asked for more specifics,” Murguía said. “We’re going to make the case in the White House. We’re going to make the case here in the Capitol, across the country, in every community.”

At a news conference Wednesday, Latino and progressive congressional Democrats expressed frustration at the idea that the White House would clamp down on the border without also assisting immigrants who crossed the border illegally as children.

“Mr. President, we know what’s in your heart. Let’s reject the extremist messaging vilifying immigrants. Let’s embrace our values as a nation of immigrants and provide relief for the long-term residents of the United States,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat.

The lawmakers are calling for the Biden administration to provide relief from deportation to spouses and other family members of U.S. citizens, as well as extended temporary protected status, which allows people from countries ravaged by disaster and war to live and work legally in the United States.

At the same time, Democrats, especially those in political swing states, are encouraging the White House to take unilateral action to curtail border crossings.

In the Senate, Democrats are considering whether to put a series of border proposals to a vote in order to show that Republicans are opposed to swifter border enforcement. And in the House, 15 Democrats penned a letter to the White House this week encouraging executive actions.

“We need to make sure that we are adjudicating those who are coming across just as quickly as possible, specifically around sort of administrative judges being down at the southern border,” said Rep. Angie Craig, a Minnesota Democrat who led the letter. “And I do think there’s a limit to the number of people who we can accept into our nation on an asylum claim. At the end of the day, we cannot have a border where an unlimited amount of people can simply cross.”

The Biden administration is planning to announce a new regulation as early as Thursday that is designed to allow immigration officials to deport migrants who are ineligible for U.S. asylum earlier in the process, three sources familiar with the internal plans told CBS News.

The regulation by the Department of Homeland Security would apply to migrants who ask for asylum after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, according to the sources, who requested anonymity to talk about the rule before its formal announcement.

It would instruct government asylum officers to apply certain barriers to asylum that are already part of U.S. law during so-called credible fear interviews. This is the first step in the years-long asylum process. Those who pass these interviews are allowed to seek asylum before an immigration judge, while those who fail them can be deported expeditiously.

Migrants barred under U.S. law from asylum include those who may pose a danger to public safety or national security. The rule would allow officials to reject and deport migrants in these categories soon after they cross the border.

The regulation, which is relatively narrow in scope, is one of several actions the Biden administration has been considering to restrict access to the U.S. asylum system amid a spike in applications in recent years, mostly driven by migrants crossing the southern border illegally.

Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

President Biden is also considering invoking a sweeping presidential authority to enact a broader restriction on asylum ahead of the election in November, sources with knowledge of the deliberations told CBS News. The authority, known as 212(f), allows presidents to suspend the entry of migrants whose arrival is deemed to be detrimental to U.S. interests. Former President Donald Trump invoked the law to justify several immigration restrictions, including a travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries.

The president has not yet announced a final decision on the 212(f) order that has been considered for months.

While the upcoming regulation will not affect massive numbers of migrants, it still reinforces a policy shift by Mr. Biden, who earlier in his presidency promised to “restore” the U.S. asylum system.

But after record levels of migrant apprehensions along the southern border, including over 2 million in each of the past two years, and an accompanying political backlash, Mr. Biden’s administration has enacted and floated more restrictive asylum rules.

Last year, the administration published a regulation that disqualifies migrants from asylum if they enter the U.S. illegally after failing to request humanitarian protection in a third country, like Mexico.

The administration has coupled that restriction with an unprecedented expansion in channels for would-be migrants to come to the U.S. legally. These include a phone app that lets migrants in Mexico schedule times to be processed at official border crossings and a program that allows some migrants to fly to the U.S. if they have American sponsors.

After spiking to record levels in December, migrant crossings along the southern border have plummeted by over 40% this year. In April, illegal crossings declined to approximately 129,000, the second consecutive monthly drop, according to internal Border Patrol data obtained by CBS News.

U.S. officials say the dramatic drop in migration stems from increased deportations and stepped-up efforts by Mexico to stop migrants from reaching the American border. Texas state officials have also attributed the decline in crossings to their actions, including the miles of razor wire they have set up along stretches of the border.

It’s no surprise immigration is a hot political issue this year, as the number of foreign-born people in the United States reaches record levels and waves of migrants throng the southern border applying for asylum. What’s less clear is why candidates are campaigning on the issue of migrant crime.

Donald Trump and the Republicans have highlighted cases such as the killing of nursing student Laken Riley in February, allegedly by a migrant from Venezuela.

“That could have been my daughter. It could have been yours,” Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama said in the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union address.

But national statistics show no sign of a migrant-driven crime wave. Violent crime is trending down, after the spikes of 2020-2021, even as migration has surged. Past studies have found immigrants to be less likely to commit crimes. While it’s possible the newer arrivals are contributing to crime rates, it’s nearly impossible to tell how much, as the FBI’s statistics aren’t parsed by immigration status.

Still, at the local neighborhood level, some see a problem.

“Unfortunately, crime is up,” Carlos Chaparro says in Spanish. He runs a vocational school on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York. It’s a traditionally Latin American neighborhood that has become a magnet for many of the approximately 190,000 migrants who’ve come through New York in the last two years.

“My clients say that when they leave [the school] at night, they’re being attacked and mugged, increasingly in the last year,” he says.

NPR talked to more than 20 people along this commercial strip, and they all said their impression was that crime has gone up in the last year. It’s a trend that is reflected in the statistics. According to the New York City Police Department’s CompStat system, crime in this precinct is up more than 15% in the first four months of this year compared to the same period last year, while it’s down in the city as a whole. Robbery is up more than 40% in the first four months of this year compared with the same period last year.

“It happens a lot,” says Johnny Velasquez, as he comes from his night shift as a security guard in Manhattan. Like Chaparro, he says there has been a lot more theft in the neighborhood lately — especially the grab-and-run kind.

“It’s an everyday thing. People on the scooters, like driving by while you’re on the phone, they’ll take it. Every day, you walk here, you don’t know what’s gonna happen,” he says.

Velasquez, Chaparro and others on the street blame the influx of newcomers.

“A lot of them [are] standing in front of the store selling lollipops to make a living,” Velasquez says, but “there’s other ones that come here for the wrong reasons.”

Velasquez just witnessed an attempted street theft — a man tried to grab a backpack, but his victim fought back and the suspect was struggling with police just 10 feet away. But in this case, the apparent thief is American, and the victim is a migrant — a young man from Ecuador who’d been trying to fix the wheel on his scooter when he was attacked.

Jack Donohue, who worked for the NYPD for 32 years and is now a senior fellow at the Center on Policing at Rutgers University, calls the rise in crime in that neighborhood “substantial,” but he says you can’t automatically blame the migrants.

“It’s a question of what’s happening and dissecting it. Not just the occurrence, but who gets arrested for it, would shed a little light on what dynamics are in play there,” Donohue says.

The available statistics don’t shed much light, though. Neither the NYPD nor the mayor’s office would talk to NPR for this story.

Meanwhile, the question of migrant crime in New York City has become politically charged, as local news reports focus on migrants accused of attacking police and participating in organized theft rings.

But Steven Dudley, an expert on Latin American gangs and co-director of the research group InSight Crime, says there’s a difference between the arrival of migrants with ties to a gang and the arrival of the gang itself.

“You may see individuals connected to Tren de Aragua that may commit crimes on their own. But that doesn’t mean that Tren de Aragua as a criminal organization is operational,” Dudley says. “For us to consider Tren de Aragua operational in the United States, they would need to be active in a collective manner, committing crimes in a collective manner over a period of time.”

He adds that migrants with “ties” to the gang may be coming to the U.S. to get away from the gang.

Carolina Reyna says she’s worried about regular street crime. She lives in New York’s largest migrant shelter, the Roosevelt Hotel near Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. She says the constant police presence there makes her feel safe, but she says she’s no longer willing to go to the Latin American neighborhood in Queens — not since she was mugged there coming home from her job at a bar.

“The boy stabbed me on the left side, in the breast,” she says. She says the kid had an Ecuadorian accent. “It’s way too dangerous around there,” she says. “There are people who are doing things that don’t fit with why we came to this country.”

Police took her to the hospital and told her there is security video of the attack. But since February, the case has gone cold.

While the NYPD wouldn’t speak to NPR on the record, police say privately that the real problem is not that migrants commit more crimes. It’s that those who do are difficult to find and prosecute.

“Making cases against the migrants, it’s just very frustrating,” says Christopher Flanagan, a retired NYPD detective who was commander for major cases. He says that migrants typically don’t have the local roots and associations that investigators rely on and that there’s often no criminal record available from the country of origin.

“They’re going in with no information, very few avenues to identify people,” he says. And if they do make an arrest, “they have very little confidence that the person’s going to be present in court.”

Venezuelans working along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens say those who commit crimes and get away are making it harder for the rest of the migrants.

“You have to enforce the law against them,” Jose Villalobos says. He has been in the U.S. for five years and has worked jobs ranging from parking cars to selling snacks — which he does now under a tent draped with a Venezuelan flag. In his home country, he used to have a job with the central bank calculating the inflation rate until he was forced out for political reasons. Now that he’s making his way in the U.S., he thinks his countrymen are getting a bad rap from other Latin Americans in the neighborhood.

“They say, ‘Here come the criminals,’ but no, we’re not all like that. We’ve come to work and do good. As with any country, we have good people and bad,” he says.

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) held a press conference Wednesday outside the Capitol to denounce the phantom threat of election fraud.
“There is currently an unprecedented and a clear and present danger to the integrity of our election system, and that is the threat of non-citizens and illegal aliens voting in our elections,” Johnson said.

It’s illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections — they rarely do — and Johnson presented no evidence to the contrary. His press conference seemed designed to flatter former President Donald Trump as Johnson fends off a challenge to his speakership from the Trump-backing wing of the House Republican conference.
Johnson spoke from the base of the east steps to the House of Representatives, one of several parts of the Capitol stormed by Trump’s mob on Jan. 6, 2021. Newly released security camera footage from that day shows Trump supporters mounting the steps, then confronting and attacking police officers guarding the House. In one clip, at the top of the House steps, one of the rioters brandished a sign that said “end the FRAUD.”
On Wednesday, at the bottom of the steps, flanked by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), former Trump administration official Stephen Miller and others, Johnson endorsed new legislation that would require proof of citizenship for people to register to vote.
Federal law already requires people registering to attest that they are citizens, with criminal penalties for lying; the bill stands no chance of passing the Democratic-majority Senate or becoming law.

Asked for evidence that undocumented immigrants vote heavily in federal elections, Johnson said it was just something everyone knows, while admitting nobody can prove it.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable,” Johnson said. We don’t have that number.”
Johnson refused to say if he had accepted the results of the 2020 election, which Trump still falsely claims was tainted by fraud, or if he would accept the results of this year’s rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden.
“What we’re talking about today is the 2024 election,” Johnson said. Nobody can go back and re-litigate what happened in 2020.”
Johnson then re-litigated what happened in 2020, calling it “the COVID election” and accusing states of having “haphazardly put together new laws and opened up the systems, and led to all sorts of confusion and chaos and concern that lingers even to today.”

Johnson’s false election fraud claims prompted a disgusted reaction from several Democrats.
“Repeating the big lie of a stolen election and wild, unfounded falsehoods of widespread illegal votes that already incited political violence is just wrong,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said on social media. “Doing it on the very spot where these lies incited a violent assault on our democracy is disgusting and unacceptable.”

Washington
CNN
—
GOP Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania said in a closed door briefing with lawmakers on Tuesday that the Ku Klux Klan is the “the military wing of the Democratic party” and that migrants coming to the US “have no interest in being Americans,” according to audio of Perry’s comments shared with CNN.

Perry, a right-wing Republican who has repeated elements of the anti-immigrant and antisemitic replacement theory before, said this during the House Oversight Committee’s member briefing entitled “the Origins and Implications of Rising Antisemitism in Higher Education.”

The briefing comes ahead of the Oversight panel’s hearing on Wednesday about the District of Columbia’s response to the pro-Palestinian protests and encampments occurring on college campuses, as House Republicans attempt to crack down on the demonstrations making waves across the country and attempt to unify around a firm position against antisemitism. That hearing was canceled Wednesday morning after the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, cleared out a pro-Palestinian encampment on George Washington University’s campus early Wednesday and arrested 30 protesters there and three others in a separate altercation, Metro Police Chief Pamela A. Smith said.

“The KKK in modern times, a lot of young people think somehow it’s a right-wing organization when it is the military wing of the Democratic Party. Decidedly, unabashedly, racist and antisemitic,” Perry said according to the recording.

The KKK is not affiliated in any way with the modern Democratic Party.

Perry then defended replacement theory, which is the idea that white people are being slowly and intentionally replaced by minorities and immigrants.

“Replacement theory is real” Perry said according to the recording shared with CNN. “They added white to it to stop everybody from talking about it.”

While Perry said he is happy to accept people “that are here legally,” pointing to his ancestors who migrated to the US, he has an issue with migrants that are “un-American.”

“What is happening now is we’re importing people into the country that want to be in America … but have no interest in being Americans, and that’s very different and to disparage the comments is to chill the conversation so that we can continue to bring in more people that we never met that are un-American,” Perry said, according to the recording.

Perry claimed his words were twisted when presented with his closed-door remarks.

“Once again, the radical Left twists facts in order to silence conversation about its own crimes and Biden’s intentional failures to enforce laws and close or regulate our borders. My point is proven yet again: when the Left loses an argument, it debases and smears instead of engaging in debate on merits,” Perry said in a statement provided to CNN.

Replacement theory is the idea that white people are being slowly and intentionally replaced by minorities and immigrants. The xenophobic and racist rhetoric associated with the theory has found its way into the mainstream of American politics and elements of it appear to have motivated some of the most heinous recent mass murders in the US and around the world. There are specific antisemitic elements of the unfounded theory as well, that Jews specifically are organizing a flood of non-white immigrants.

Hours before Arizona state legislators voted to repeal an 1864 abortion ban last month, a group of mostly Latina Democrats huddled at a nearby Mexican restaurant for a strategy session on galvanizing Latina voters over abortion rights.

“I am 23 — why do I have less rights than my abuelita in Mexico?” Melissa Herrera, a Democratic campaign staffer, asked the cluster of women at the restaurant, referring to her grandmother.

The question crystallized what Democrats hope will be a decisive electoral factor in their favor this year, one that upends conventional political wisdom: A majority of Latino voters now support abortion rights, according to polls, a reversal from two decades ago. Polling trends, interviews with strategists and election results in Ohio and Virginia, where abortion rights played a central role, suggest Democrats’ optimism regarding Latinas — once considered too religious or too socially conservative to support abortion rights — could bear out.

Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, stringent curbs have been taking effect in Republican-dominated states. In Arizona, for one, the May 2 repeal of the blanket ban from 1864 still leaves abortions governed by a two-year-old law prohibiting the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with no exception for rape or incest.

As of April 2023, according to the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of Latinos believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Twenty years earlier, most Hispanics told Pew that they opposed abortion rights by a nearly two-to-one margin. (The most recent polling has been conducted online, instead of over the phone, but the surveys show an overall gradual shift in opinions.)

Latino majorities came out in favor of reproductive rights in 2023 elections in Ohio and Virginia, according to other surveys, and women played a major role in stalling the shift of Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party in 2022, when many voted for Democrats, citing abortion and reproductive health as the most important issue.

“Abortion is going to be an essential issue this cycle,” said Victoria McGroary, the executive director of BOLD PAC, the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “We are going to see what I think is going to be crystal-clear evidence that reproductive freedom matters to Latino voters.”

Surveys show the diversity of the Latino voting population still poses some obstacles for Democrats, with support for abortion rights varying based on factors including age, geography and party affiliation. Latino voters in South Texas and South Florida remain more culturally conservative, and a majority of Latino evangelicals, a growing segment of the population, still says abortion should be illegal.
Within that culturally conservative world, many remain unmoved.

Leaving a shopping plaza in Phoenix, Daisy Ochoa, 31, a paralegal, said she was planning to vote for Republicans in November because their stances on the issue are in line with her Christian faith.

“I believe that if there is life, there is life,” she said. “I don’t think anybody should take life, unless there’s some threat to the mom.”

But outside a grocery store near downtown, Gina Fernandez, 52, a Democrat and an administrative assistant, offered signs that Democrats had struck a nerve. She said she had been raised in a Mexican American and Roman Catholic household but had considered her right to abortion a foregone conclusion until the Supreme Court overturned Roe. That jolted her and her 19-year-old daughter. She used to vote for the best candidate regardless of party affiliation, Ms. Fernandez said.

“This cycle, I’m voting for all Democrats,” she said.

Democratic officials and activists in Arizona point to lingering uncertainty over abortion access in the state, since the repeal will not take effect until 90 days after the Legislature adjourns for the summer. That, they say, is fueling support for a November ballot initiative that would enshrine the right to abortion in the state’s Constitution — and could lift Democrats up and down the ballot.
“It is still not over,” said Mary Rose Wilcox, a former city councilwoman and elected county official who owns El Portal, the restaurant that has served as a center of Latino political activity in Phoenix and hosted the April strategy session. “We need a straight law that safeguards protections.”

The women also said they needed to counter what they called misconceptions about Latino voters’ conservatism.

“I always say I’m a pro-choice Catholic,” Raquel Terán, a Democratic House candidate who convened the round-table meeting, said in an interview. “I go to Mass, but I also support a woman’s right to choose.”

Rosie Villegas-Smith, a Mexican immigrant who founded Voces Unidas por la Vida, an anti-abortion organization in Phoenix, said she believed Hispanic support for abortion rights in recent polling was overblown. She accused Democrats of fear-mongering and misleading voters on the issue.
“They speak in euphemisms and say abortion is health care but abortion is not health care,” she said. “Once Latinos learn what abortion truly is, they are against it.”

Republicans at the national level argue that abortion is not going to matter more to Latinos than crime, border security or the economy, particularly among working-class families worried about the cost of gas and groceries.

“You have seen Republicans making up ground with Latino voters because of a message on those issues,” said Jack Pandol, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans. “They have a better message on improving quality of life, on bringing costs down, on making communities safe.”

A crop of Latina Democratic candidates is nonetheless running on abortion rights in districts with large or fast-growing Hispanic populations. In interviews, some said the fall of Roe had made the issue more urgent for their constituencies — and made voters more receptive to their message that abortion access was crucial to personal freedom and health care, even if the voters themselves were against the procedure.

In Oregon, Representative Andrea Salinas, who in 2022 became one of the first two Hispanic candidates elected to Congress from the state, said she cast the issue of abortion rights as a matter of “empowering women to make their own personal choices with their doctor.”

“I didn’t have as much as my competitors to put out glossy mailers or fancy television ads, but what I did have I used to lean into reproductive rights,” said Ms. Salinas, adding that the issue helped fuel her victory in a northeastern district home to the most Latinos in the state.

Ms. Terán, who is running to become the first Latina to represent Arizona in Congress, recalled that Democratic operatives cautioned her not to talk about her past work experience with Planned Parenthood, an abortion rights group, when she first ran for a state legislative seat in 2018 because it was a Latino-heavy district. She disregarded that advice and won.

She went on to make abortion rights central to her platform in the Arizona House. In 2019, she and other state lawmakers visited El Salvador to study the impact of the nation’s abortion ban, and they met with women who had been imprisoned for having the procedure done. She later co-wrote the measure that repealed Arizona’s 1864 abortion law.

GOP Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado has railed against a new initiative that allows state residents to call a hotline to sign up to host a migrant family.

The nonprofit Hope Has No Borders has paired at least 500 migrants with host families in Colorado since late 2023, Denver TV station KDVR reported.

As of May 1, anyone who wants to sign up for the nonprofit’s Home Host program can call Mile High United Way’s help center by dialing 211 to sign up. The help center will then pass along the information to Hope Has No Borders to match hosts with migrant families.

But the conservative congresswoman called the initiative “the most asinine and ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Denver has now opened a hotline for residents to call and offer up their own homes to illegals,” Boebert wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “If you have extra space, you’re encouraged to host a ‘migrant’ for some time.”

She continued: “We need to close the damn border and have some semblance of a sovereign nation again. The entire world sees this stuff and thinks we’re a joke of a nation…and we’re really beginning to look like one!”

Newsweek has reached out by email to Mile High United Way for comment. Boebert’s office was also contacted via email.

Erin Lennon, who first began hosting an immigrant family in her home last year, told Denver TV station KMGH that she felt compelled to help those who are new to her city.

“They’re extremely hard workers. They want to succeed. They want to have a chance,” Lennon said about the family of four who recently moved into her home after a two-month trip from Chile.

Hope Has No Borders’ mission “is to provide humanitarian relief and community support to individuals as they transition from crisis to HOPE,” a spokesperson for the nonprofit told Newsweek.

“HOPE’s Host Home Program is one of a wide range of solutions needed to address socio-economic disparities. Our program is designed to include hosts with a willingness to open their homes to a broad range of people in need of transitional housing including veterans, those experiencing poverty, or those who have been displaced due to a natural disaster,” the spokesperson said.

The program is run independently by Hope Has No Borders, the spokesperson added, and does not receive funding from Mile High United Way.

The Colorado initiative comes as immigration remains a central issue ahead of November’s presidential election, with Republican lawmakers seeking to blame President Joe Biden for the surge in migrants coming across the southern border. Meanwhile, Denver and other U.S. cities have struggled to manage the rising number of migrants that have been transported from Texas and other states.

Denver says it has spent almost $70 million in services for more than 41,000 migrants who have arrived in the city since the end of 2022. In an update on Monday, the city said it “extends its gratitude to the nonprofits, volunteers and members of the community offering their support to guests through housing, food, legal assistance and more.”

Last month, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston announced the creation of a program that would place 1,000 or so asylum seekers who were in the city’s hotel shelter system in apartments for up to six months. His office said this was a “first step in providing a long-term and sustainable” response to the city’s migrant crisis.

Those who arrive after April 10 will be provided short-term stay at a shelter and assistance with travel to other destinations, Johnston’s office said.

Psst. Have you heard? Illegal border crossings are down. Way down.

From the last four months of 2023 to the first four months of 2024, illegal crossings at the U.S. southwestern border fell a whopping 40 percent, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Such crossings usually rise in the early months of a calendar year, as the weather warms, so this number might even understate the turnaround.

Two takeaways from this development: First, the standard GOP (and media) talking points about the “border crisis” are woefully out of date. Second: Anyone who cares about border security should support a presidential candidate with (ahem) good diplomatic relationships.

The latest trends at the border have earned precious little coverage, despite immigration featuring prominently this election cycle. Presumably, Republicans aren’t eager to tout the progress, which threatens Donald Trump’s narrative that only he can halt the migrant “invasion.” Biden administration officials have talked a little about these numbers, but they seem loath to prematurely declare victory. (And to be fair, April’s border apprehensions, at around 130,000, remain high by historical standards.)

So what explains the recent declines?

Texas claims its legally dubious border measures deserve credit, but the timing of the state’s actions doesn’t quite fit the trends. Instead, other factors have likely eased pressures.

Some relate to President Biden’s domestic policies, such as creating more pathways for lawful entry, which reduce migrants’ incentive to brave dangerous terrain and show up at our border unannounced. The biggest factors, though, appear to be measures not from the United States directly but from our allies. Most significantly: Mexico.

Most migrants crossing illegally from Mexico into the United States are not Mexican nationals. They’re citizens of other countries, such as Guatemala and Ecuador, who transit through our southern neighbor. In early December, Mexico’s immigration agency ran out of funds to continue its migrant deportations and transfers. Not coincidentally, that is when unlawful crossings from Mexico into the United States peaked.

But by the end of the month, after negotiations with Biden and his top aides, the Mexican president committed to providing more funding and military resources to address irregular migration. This included military patrols, highway checkpoints and busing migrants en masse from northern Mexico (i.e., closer to the United States) to southern Mexico. As my colleague Nick Miroff recently reported, Mexican authorities have been intercepting about 8,000 U.S.-bound migrants daily.

“It’s mostly about Mexico’s interdiction efforts, especially the ongoing efforts to stop migrants from getting to the U.S.-Mexico border,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “That came after negotiations with the Biden administration.”

Whether Mexico’s efforts will continue at full force in the months ahead is unclear. The country’s previous crackdowns eventually petered out, when pressures built up on Mexico’s own southern border. Lower-level officials who enforce Mexico’s transit restrictions have also proved susceptible to bribes.

Fortunately, though, Mexico isn’t our only friend that has stepped up.

Other allies have worked harder to ensure that they’re not facilitating smuggling networks. Spain, for example, has implemented more transit visas, particularly for populations known to use Spain as a transit point to Latin America (and from there, into the United States).

Some of our allies — such as Canada, Greece and Spain (again) — have also opened up more legal pathways for migrants to work in their countries. This is happening partly because these countries need more laborers as their native-born populations age. But here, too, U.S. leadership and Biden’s relationship with key allies have encouraged other countries to share more of the global burden of mass migration.

“I cannot overstate the importance of these new labor pathways abroad,” a Homeland Security official told me. “Economic opportunity is an incredibly significant driver of migration patterns, including to the United States.”
Mass migration is a global problem, which requires global solutions. Likewise, U.S. border challenges are not exclusively, or even primarily, about securing our southern border; they require dealing with migration routes that begin thousands of miles away. That’s one reason the GOP’s myopic focus on “building the wall” failed to curb migration during the Trump era. Trump supporters have conveniently forgotten that border crossings spiked in 2019 to their highest levels in over a decade and were reversed only when the coronavirus pandemic temporarily disrupted international migration patterns.

Deportation and migration are at heart diplomatic issues. Solving them requires having strong relationships with our allies — especially Mexico, which will likely elect its first female president next month.

But it’s not only Mexico; we need friends in countries much farther away and at all points in between. “There are people, today, making a decision in India to pay $60,000 to smugglers to get them to the United States,” said Reichlin-Melnick. “This is not a problem that a wall would solve.”
All of which is to say that voters who value secure borders should consider which presidential candidate proves better at forging and maintaining cooperative relationships with our allies. If you think that’s Trump, then boy, do I have a border bridge to sell you.

The supplemental border bill’s spectacular failure in Congress has wrought many devastating consequences. Among them is the U.S. government’s inability to effectively move migrants away from the overwhelmed larger cities to other parts of the country that would happily receive them. Non-governmental organizations and the government must work together to send migrants to such cities, ensuring adequate resettlement and employment options while saving taxpayer dollars.

For years, millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent transferring migrants to select locations. Between April 2022 and November 2023, Texas alone spent $86.1 million to bus 66,200 migrants and asylum seekers from the border to these six cities: Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C (four of which rank among the most expensive in the country). Arizona spent $5.7 million to transport 26,513 asylum seekers to these same cities between January and November 2023, and Florida allocated $12 million to do so in FY2022-23.

Due to overcrowding and high housing prices, these six cities are often not even the final destination. After their arrival, more money is spent transporting migrants elsewhere — sometimes even back to the same state they came from. In 2023, Denver spent $4.3 million to help migrants and asylum seekers travel to their final destination — which, for several hundred individuals, was Texas. New York City opened a Reticketing Center to provide free plane tickets for travel to any location, including back to Florida and Texas.

Sending people to only six U.S. cities with some of the highest cost of living is logistically and fiscally unsustainable.

We can curb this wasteful trend by relocating migrants and asylum seekers to a broader range of locations. This can be facilitated by an increase in federal funding. The most recent “dead on arrival” supplemental bill proposed that $933 million be transferred to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program, one of FEMA’s grant programs for managing migration. Through the Shelter and Services Program, grants can be awarded to entities providing shelter and services, including transportation, to migrants and asylum seekers released from DHS custody at the southern border. Funds can be used for various types of transportation assistance to migrants as they arrive or after they have been initially resettled in a city to travel to their final destination.

But without purposeful coordination, migrants will continue to be thoughtlessly shuffled throughout the country. Many mid-size and more affordable cities indicate they would welcome the arrival of migrants. Salt Lake City, for example, is a Certified Welcoming City that has created policies and programs fostering immigrant inclusion in civic, social and economic life. Utah established two public-private funds to support refugee resettlement in the state: the Afghan Community Fund, founded in 2021 to support the resettlement of Afghans, and the Refugee Services Fund, which helps refugees access “family-sustaining” employment in the state.

In February 2023, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox joined Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb in saying that declining birth rates and earlier retirements will amplify the job gap crisis and that immigrants, refugees and asylees are necessary to “help build strong communities,” underscoring the economic case for welcoming new community residents arriving through asylum, refugee resettlement and other immigration pathways.

Topeka, Kan., a city of about 125,000 people, is also developing economic incentives to entice Latinos and other immigrants. The Choose Topeka program provides work-authorized individuals with up to $15,000 if they rent or buy homes in the city and are employed by local businesses that partner with the program. Many of these business partners are recruiting Hispanic workers. For example, the Greater Topeka Partnership economic development group has launched marketing campaigns to attract immigrants, specifically Spanish speakers.

The Office of Global Michigan was formed to grow the state’s economy by investing in and recruiting foreigners with valuable skills. Two of its programs, the Refugee and Humanitarian Parolee Resettlement Fund and the Newcomer Rental Subsidy support refugees and humanitarian parolees with essential social services and employment access. Other states with Rust Belt cities, like Dayton, Erie and Pittsburgh, are similarly working to attract migrants and foreign talent to address their falling population. St. Louis is also considering taking migrants from Chicago to help address its declining population and spur economic growth.

Cities across the country indicate they want and need to grow; for this, welcoming work-authorized people to live, work and raise families in their cities is vital. Meanwhile, the largest U.S. cities are struggling under the weight of too much migration and are spending millions of dollars annually in ultimately misguided strategies to alleviate the problem. With some thoughtful planning and coordination, we can help overwhelmed cities, answer the demands of smaller cities looking to attract new residents and help migrants seeking a better life in a welcoming community.

Kristie De Pena is senior vice president for policy and director of immigration policy at the Niskanen Center. Claire Holba is immigration policy analyst at he Niskanen Center.

Last week, President Joe Biden committed a diplomatic faux pas when he chided India and Japan, two critical US allies, for being “xenophobic.” Attributing America’s success to its historic openness to immigration, the president suggested that Delhi and Tokyo’s aversion to foreigners constrained their economic growth and population stability.

Tactless as it may have been, Biden was not wrong. Japan, in particular, is expected to see its population drop by a third in the next half-century.

But a few months ago, the US Census Bureau released new projections showing that America’s own population will — for the first time ever — shrink after 2080.

Only one thing is preventing the nation from reaching this milestone next year: immigration.

The consistent arrival of newcomers is expected to keep America from aging as rapidly as Japan and other major economies. If immigration opponents were to cut annual admissions in half, the US would start to shrink in 2044.

All countries’ populations change with trends in birth rates and life expectancy. And like many high-income nations, the US has witnessed a drop in fertility over the last half-century. Combined with longer life expectancy, this has contributed to severe demographic aging.

Aging is problematic for two reasons. It promises insolvency when too few working-age people pay into pension and health care funds that have obligations to support higher numbers of retirement-age seniors. Population decline also spells the decline of economic power and market size — one of America’s greatest geopolitical assets.

The primary demographic antidote for low fertility is immigration. Disproportionately working age and reaching higher fertility rates, immigrants inject youth, labor and innovation into societies, and — at high enough numbers — they offset aging trends. As Biden touted, this has been a core part of America’s economic growth over the last few decades, but also our demographic stability. Nearly all US population increases have been attributable to immigrant arrivals, as opposed to births outpacing deaths.

What makes the new Census Bureau projections especially bleak is that the shrinkage is expected to take place even if the US government keeps immigrant admissions at their present levels. And in case you haven’t downloaded Truth Social, present levels are unacceptable to today’s Republican Party.

In an interview with Time magazine published last week, former President Donald Trump said he wants to place new arrivals in detention camps and deport millions of immigrants that Census projections assume will otherwise remain in the US — both of which will only hasten our country’s demographic decline.

According to the Census report, the number of Americans over 64 years old will surpass the number of Americans under 18 by 2029. At that point, only 60% of the US population will be between 18 and 64 — down from close to 70% in 2010. Deaths in America are projected to outpace births by 2038 for the first time ever. At that point, there will be 13,000 more deaths than births in the US, but the shortfall increases to 1.2 million more deaths annually by 2100 — double the annual shortfall in Japan today.

The US population is projected to reach a high of nearly 370 million in 2080 before beginning its historic downward turn. But if immigration were to be cut approximately in half, Census Bureau demographers estimate that this milestone would occur in 2044. If borders close completely, as many Republican public officials advocate, the decline would start next year.

The immediacy of this impact should not be surprising. If US population growth is attributable to immigrant arrivals, which it now is, then America will cease to grow when no newcomers are admitted.

Of course, Republicans’ self-defeating anxiety around immigration is informed, to some extent, by an earlier Census report — the March 2015 release that anticipated a “majority minority” milestone in 2044. Unlike the new study, the projected decline of America’s “White” population to an under-50% share of the population made headlines everywhere. The numbers — which are problematic for numerous reasons — both emboldened liberals about their electoral prospects and generated fierce backlash to immigration among conservatives.

Once a bureaucratic matter so insignificant to conservatives that the Reagan administration endorsed amnesty for all undocumented foreigners, immigration has now become the central pillar of the post-2015 Republican Party. Immigration is the top issue priority for conservatives entering the 2024 general election, and a hindrance for Biden’s prospects among independents.

But if the 2015 Census projections inflamed anti-immigrant sentiment, the recent report might have the opposite effect.

That’s because my newest research suggests that information about the realities of demographic aging persuades people — especially moderates and centrists — to open their minds about immigration.

My coauthors and I surveyed more than 20,000 adults across 19 European countries. A subset of these respondents was informed about real demographic trends, much like those revealed by the recent US Census report according to demographers, birth rates in their country “are significantly below the level needed to maintain the native population.”

The same subset of respondents was also told that, even though many immigrants have already entered their country over the years, to maintain current population levels, the government will need to accept “significantly more immigrants from countries outside of Europe with higher birth rates, such as Muslim-majority and African countries.”

Remarkably, despite the invocation of the minority outgroups that rankle some voters, respondents in the subset were more likely to support increased immigration numbers than those who were not exposed to the news about demographic decline at all.

In Western European countries — where elevated minority fertility rates are tempering the effects of demographic aging — respondents were even resistant to far-right fearmongering narratives about “replacement theory” after immigration was portrayed as critical to the nation’s endurance. This was especially true for respondents with centrist political ideologies, those who were over 35 years old and those with average educational backgrounds.

Rather than see immigrants as a threat to “replace” the nation, these respondents grew more likely to see them as a way to “replenish” the nation.

The findings from this experiment and the Census Bureau report emerge at a moment when American and European political leaders are scrambling to fortify their borders. But just as people want a well-managed admissions system, there is a countervailing desire to sustain the national population.

As much as the world polarizes over foreigners’ arrival, demographic aging is an unwavering, intensifying reality that remains unaddressed, and a good reason to invest in an orderly immigration system that sustains the nation into the future.

May 14 marks two years to the day when a white nationalist drove to a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, where he murdered 10 Black people. The shooter left behind a racist screed that repeatedly cited the alleged “invasion” by immigrants and the larger ”great replacement theory” as his motivation. This bigoted and antisemitic replacement conspiracy theory, originally popular among the white nationalist movement, claims there is an intentional plot by liberal elites to facilitate an invasion of nonwhite people to replace the white population in Western countries. Many Americans were first introduced to this vile conspiracy theory at the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” hate rally, where a collection of neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched with torches while chanting, “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” The next day, one of their ranks murdered a peaceful protester and injured 19 others. Along with the related “invasion” conspiracy, these insidious beliefs have inspired other deadly terrorist attacks in El Paso, Texas; Poway, California and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as well as other foiled plots in recent years.

Unfortunately, while these conspiracies used to be limited to the white nationalist fringes of the internet, they have spread and been mainstreamed in recent years by numerous elected officials, including Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall. Marshall has repeatedly and falsely asserted that migrants seeking safety in the United States constitute an armed military-style invasion — echoing the racist screeds of multiple domestic terrorists. Less than three months after the mass murder in Buffalo, Marshall introduced Senate Resolution 741, “to express the sense of the Senate regarding the constitutional right of State Governors to repel the dangerous ongoing invasion across the United States southern border.” Marshall’s resolution is wrong in his constitutional interpretation. Even some of the staunchest advocates of restricting immigration disagree with the senator’s framing of the issue. He is not just wrong — his rhetoric is extremely dangerous.

The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the Justice Department have testified that the threat from racially motivated domestic extremists is the leading threat to the homeland. Last summer, Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson asked DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a congressional hearing: “When elected officials repeat great replacement rhetoric, including the language of invasion, are they putting a target on the backs of immigrants and people of color?” Mayorkas responded: “It certainly fuels the threat landscape that we encounter.” Marshall and others mainstreaming these ideas and rhetoric continue to fuel that threat landscape. In February of this year, Marshall reintroduced his resolution invoking the white nationalist invasion conspiracy. In March, he introduced the End Aerial Invasion Act, picking up on some easily debunked disinformation to further launder the conspiracy theory. He has also consistently promoted this rhetoric on the Senate floor, in Senate press conferences, Senate committee hearings and all over his social media and TV appearances. His language is not “tough talk.” Marshall’s repeated references to an “invasion” are already associated with a significant body count. Promoting this language and codifying it in official congressional action normalize the white nationalist conspiracy. The more this rhetoric is normalized, the more the threats to public safety increase.

The violent threat from antisemites and white nationalists is not abstract to Kansas. Last month marked a decade from when an antisemite and white supremacist carried out a mass murder at a Jewish community center in Overland Park. Two years later in 2016, we narrowly avoided a horrific attack in Garden City, Kansas, after the FBI disrupted a bomb plot that sought to target the Somali immigrant community there. Reasonable Kansans can disagree about how to reform our immigration system, but we all must start to agree that dehumanizing language, like “invasion,” pollutes the debate by courting bigoted political violence. It must once and for all be dumped from our mainstream political discourse.

The Biden campaign on Tuesday is launching a digital ad to remind Latino voters of President Trump’s family separation policy at the border — officially announced six years ago today — which resulted in nearly 4,000 kids being taken from their parents.

Why it matters: The Biden campaign is upping its effort to puncture nostalgia for Trump’s four years in office. Some Americans have increasingly embraced some of Trump’s more extreme immigration policies and rhetoric.
Zoom in: The ad, called Ripped Apart, interlaces video of Trump making anti-immigrant comments with the cries of children who were separated from their parents.

The ad highlights Biden’s efforts to reunite families.
“If Trump is re-elected, the chaos and cruelty we saw in his first term is the floor: he’ll go even further to attack and demonize immigrants, while doing nothing to address the real issues plaguing our broken immigration system,” Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez says in a statement.

Flashback: The separation policy — in place since mid-2017 but formally announced in 2018 — and the torrent of news coverage about families was a pivotal moment in the Trump administration that largely turned public opinion against him. Trump reversed course by June 2018.

Families were separated as border authorities implemented a “zero tolerance” policy that required adults to be criminally prosecuted — a misdemeanor for first-time offenses — for crossing the border illegally.

That meant kids who had traveled with their parents were taken into government custody and, because of faulty tracking systems, many were apart from their parents for months.

Between the lines: Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt says in a statement that Biden’s “reversal of President Trump’s immigration policies has created an unprecedented immigration, humanitarian, and national security crisis on our southern border and has led to [the] highest rates of human trafficking on record.”

She adds that Trump “will restore his effective immigration policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shockwaves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history.”
The big picture: Immigration has catapulted to one of the top issues on voters’ minds this election season — and Biden has explored an executive order to limit crossings at the Southern border.

Border authorities had 1.3 million encounters with immigrants from October to March alone.

On May 7, 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions officially announced the Trump administration’s infamous “zero tolerance” policy. “If you are smuggling a child,” Sessions said, “then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law.” The idea was to deter would-be migrants from coming to the United States by ripping families apart. At least 1,780 children had already been separated by that point, according to government records. But it was not until that day six years ago that the hallmark draconian measure of the Trump era was given a public rollout.

Standing next to Sessions that day was Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The intellectual “father” of the idea of separating families to deter migration, Homan was among the Homeland Security officials who first floated the extreme measure as a way to tackle the 2014 migrant family crisis during the Obama administration. (Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson rejected the proposal.) “Most parents don’t want to be separated,” Homan told the Atlantic‘s Caitlin Dickerson. “I’d be lying to you if I didn’t think that would have an effect.”

Today, on the anniversary of the “zero tolerance” policy, Homan was again on public display—a speaker at a Heritage Foundation event called “Securing the Border and Keeping Americans Safe: How Illegal Immigration Leads to Preventable Crime.” It was meant to draw on a false trope linking immigrants to criminal activity and violence. (Evidence shows that immigrants are less likely than US citizens to commit crimes.)

Homan, a career law enforcement officer, now leads a homeland security consulting firm and is a fixture on Fox News and other right-wing media outlets. In his office, he keeps a framed Washington Post article that said he was “really good” at deporting people. Homan is also helping lay the groundwork for a potential second Trump presidency’s mass deportation plans. “We’re going to do it the way we’ve always done it—professionally and well-planned—and we take the worst first,” he said on The Joe Piscopo Show earlier this week. Homan then added a caveat: “No one is off the table.”

At Heritage, Homan condemned sanctuary cities as “sanctuaries for criminals” and referenced the murder of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was killed by a Venezuelan migrant who entered the United States unlawfully. The case quickly became a political flashpoint on the right and even prompted President Joe Biden to make “an illegal” remark during the State of the Union address, which he later regretted. “Do we want to talk about family separation?” Homan said, referencing Riley’s he added: “They buried their children. That’s the separation.”

The 5,000 families forcibly separated under Trump and who are still living through the consequences of the zero tolerance policy might disagree with Homan’s assessment. In some cases, parents are still waiting for reunification after having been away from their children for years. As a result of a settlement agreement reached last year, some families are entitled to apply for temporary lawful status and work authorization in the United States. They may also have another shot at applying for asylum, but without access to legal counsel, the odds are stacked against them. As one advocate told me: “the actual physical reunification—it’s just one of a long process of healing and rebuilding.”

Decrying the Biden administration’s border policies as the “biggest national security failure I’ve seen in this country in my lifetime,” Homan also parroted claims not supported by facts that most immigrants arrested by ICE under the previous administration had criminal records and that the Trump years saw the most secure border in history. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, he said, “should have been impeached two and a half years ago.”

IF HE WINS a second term in November, Donald Trump wants to covertly deploy American assassination squads into Mexico soon after he’s sworn into office again, according to three people who’ve discussed the matter with the former U.S. president.

Both during and after his presidency, the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee has floated different ideas for bombing or invading Mexico in response to the American fentanyl crisis and to “wage WAR” on notorious drug cartels. As president, Trump even thought it was possible to bomb the cartels’ drug labs, and then potentially pin the strikes on another country, according to his former defense secretary, Mark Esper.

What was once a fringe notion that senior Trump administration officials quickly moved to shut down has now become a mainstream GOP policy proposal, including among influential Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and conservative think tanks.

Trump is currently campaigning for the White House on a public vow to, in his words, “make appropriate use of Special Forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.”

The former president has not presented specific details in public about these plans — for example, how many U.S. troops he’d be willing to send into sovereign Mexican territory. But, the three sources tell Rolling Stone, in conversations with close MAGA allies, including at least one Republican lawmaker, Trump has privately endorsed the idea of covertly deploying — with or without the Mexican government’s consent — special-ops units that would be tasked with, among other missions, assassinating the leaders and top enforcers of Mexico’s powerful and most notorious drug cartels.

In some of these discussions, Trump has insisted that the U.S. military has “tougher killers than they do” and pondered why these assassination missions haven’t been done before, arguing that eliminating the heads of cartels would go a long way toward hobbling their operations and striking fear into the hearts of “the kingpins.” (In fact, versions of this strategy have indeed been tried before in the long-running international war on drugs, including in Mexico, where the nation’s government, with U.S. support, devoted substantial resources to wiping out as many cartel bosses as possible. It has not worked.)

During some of these conversations, Trump has likened these proposals to the 2019 military raid that he ordered that resulted in the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, insisting that the U.S. should approach drug cartel leadership in the same manner. One of the sources, who discussed the issue with Trump earlier this year, recalls the ex-president saying that the U.S. government should have a “kill list of drug lords,” as this source describes Trump’s ideas, of the most powerful and infamous cartel figures that American special forces would be assigned to kill or capture in a potential second Trump administration.

Trump’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

As Rolling Stone reported last year, Trump directed his policy advisers to supply him with a menu of military options for attacking Mexican drug cartels, if he reconquers the White House. This included scenarios for potential air strikes, drone attacks, U.S. troop deployments, and other forms of warfare, for taking on the major drug cartels’ leaders, who Trump has long derided as some “bad hombres.”

Just a few short years ago, the concept of a Trump or any modern administration invading or bombing Mexico — including without the cooperation of Mexico’s president — would have been widely viewed as a fanciful scheme or a mere outburst, even coming from a figure as extreme as the 45th commander in chief. However, in recent years, the policy prescriptions have gone far beyond Trump’s venting of frustrations, and entered the Republican Party mainstream.

MAGA-aligned think tanks, such as the Center for Renewing America and the America First Policy Institute, have released policy papers that forcefully endorse wielding significant military force against these criminal organizations. One of these policy blueprints — from CRA and bylined by former Trump official Ken Cuccinelli — was privately briefed to Trump in 2023, and is bluntly titled: “It’s Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, formerly Trump’s top rival in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, pledged that if he were elected president, he would order Special Forces to enter Mexico “on Day One.” A growing list of influential GOP lawmakers have announced legislation or publicly blessed a new blitz of military action in Mexico. Last year, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) announced legislation that would “give the military the authority to go after these organizations wherever they exist,” causing Mexico’s leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador to denounce it as “an offense to the people of Mexico.”

At the time, Graham told Rolling Stone while he “would like to work with Mexico,” the senator was putting a congressional authorization for use of military force “on the table as a potential” option, should the Mexican leadership not submit to an invasion of its own soil. The AUMF that Congress passed in 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks has undergirded the decades-long War on Terror, which has led to an international death toll estimated in the millions.

This massive policy drive among the Trumpist and Republican Party elite runs in diametric opposition to their (frequently hollow) rhetoric about supposedly “ending the era of endless wars.”

Military experts, foreign leaders, and even Trump’s famously hawkish former national security adviser John Bolton have warned against the slate of invade-Mexico proposals. Some argue launching a U.S. offensive or invasion will, simply put, not solve the problem. Others also point out that Mexico is a U.S. partner, not an adversary, and that taking such unilateral action would shred diplomatic relations and likely cause immense chaos and further eruptions of cartel violence.

“Treating this as a military problem is just analytically, and from a policy perspective, completely incorrect — leaving aside the legal and constitutional questions about if a president can even do this,” says Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who is currently with the Center for International Policy. “But as I’ve long said, Trump is a consequence of the status quo, not a deviation from it… What Trump wants to do here would just be him using the tools created by the War on Terror — hugely expansive and permissive tools of warfare developed after 9/11 — but to a greater degree, and pointing it in a different direction.”

Duss adds, “Obviously Mexico is our southern neighbor, but if you look at some of the authorities that President Biden has asserted in Syria and elsewhere, those authorities are already very broad. And as bad as Trump invading Mexico would be, Trump could just claim he is acting in a continuum of executive authority. It’s more aggressive, more expansive, but not completely outside the boundaries of how administrations have tended to use these tools… The entire constitutional order of war making has been completely upended over the decades since 9/11. Trump or any other president can basically start wars wherever and whenever they want.”

However, none of the cross-partisan objections seem to be blunting Trump and other conservative politicians’ desire for attacking the neighboring country or mass-assassinating cartel honchos. In February, for instance, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-Texas) introduced companion bills that attempted to pressure the Biden administration to devise plans “to capture or kill the leaders of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the most brutal and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico.”

According to Luttrell, the legislation “makes clear that the Jalisco cartel cannot remain emboldened at our border and that the United States military must be ready to engage and eliminate the Jalisco cartel, should it be determined the best course of action is to use the Armed Forces of our great country.”

If Trump returns to power, those two lawmakers will have a much more receptive ear in the Oval Office than they have now with President Joe Biden. And recently, Trump has held an advantage in much of the battleground-state and national polling. Most surveys point to a tight race between Biden and Trump.

The partisan chasm on immigration proposals is so wide that there is little, if any, common ground to be found between the right and left on policy solutions, according to a new poll commissioned by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
The survey, conducted by Ipsos, asked respondents to rate their support or opposition to eight different immigration policies, and none of the proposals received majority support from both Democrats and Republicans.

Three proposals came close.

Of all respondents, 66 percent said they would support making it easier for people fleeing violence to immigrate to the United States; 84 percent of Democrats supported that idea, as did 64 percent of independents and 49 percent of Republicans.

Raising penalties on businesses hiring undocumented workers was supported by 85 percent of Republican respondents, 67 percent of independents, 66 percent of all respondents, and 48 percent of Democrats.

And increasing deportations found support from 89 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of independents, 65 percent of all respondents, and 46 percent of Democrats.

The poll comes as the Biden administration is weighing options to address immigration through executive action, including potentially making more immigrants eligible to work legally or cracking down on asylum at the border.
In the survey, proposals leaning toward making it easier for foreign nationals to immigrate or regularize their status received the approval of at least 73 percent of Democrats, and only cracked 40 percent approval among Republicans in one case.

The proposal with the largest Republican-Democrat split was expansion of the border wall. An overwhelming 87 percent of Republicans approve that idea, while only 28 percent of Democrats do. Overall, respondents were evenly split on the wall: 52 percent of independents and 54 percent of respondents overall approve further wall construction.
Democratic support was highest for crating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants currently in the country: 85 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of respondents overall and 59 percent of independents support that notion, though only 33 percent of Republicans agree.
A toned-down version of a path to citizenship, “establishing a way for most immigrants currently in the country illegally to stay here legally,” drew the support of 80 percent of the poll’s Democratic respondents, 54 percent of respondents overall, and 52 percent of independents.

Republicans overwhelmingly reject the idea: Only 27 percent voiced approval.

A proposal to increase the number of people allowed to come legally drew the support of 73 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of independents, and 55 percent of all respondents and 36 percent of Republicans.

Ahead of November’s election, the partisan divide presents a challenge for both parties to appease their respective bases while winning over undecided and centrist voters.

Republicans are pushing the issue more aggressively — an AdImpact analysis of ad spending commissioned by the Immigration Hub found that the GOP has spent $38 million on “anti-immigrant TV ads” connected to federal, state and local races in six battleground states.

Excluding Montana, where Democrats and groups aligned with Democrats have spent $1 million on TV and digital ads, “Democratic candidates and groups spent $2,534 on 3 ads that aired 25 times in Texas.” The anti-immigration ads received 2.3 billion views, compared to 25 million for the pro-immigration ads, according to that report.

And the report found that a majority of the Republican and Republican-leaning ads were placed in North Carolina, Texas and Ohio, states where Republicans already hold an advantage.

Those investments could address intra-party divisions on immigration.

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll found significant differences in attitudes toward the proposed policy solutions between “Trump Republicans” and “Non-Trump Republicans,” and between Liberal and moderate or conservative Democrats.

The poll defined Trump Republicans as respondents who express a very favorable opinion of former President Trump, and non-Trump Republicans as those who expressed somewhat favorable or unfavorable views. The two groups are more or less evenly split — 53 percent of Republican respondents fell into the pro-Trump category, and 47 percent did not.

Among Democrats, the biggest split was on support for border wall construction. Liberals overwhelmingly reject the idea: Only 15 percent said they support more wall construction, while moderate and conservative Democrats are split, with 56 percent support.

Increasing deportations and raising penalties on companies who hire undocumented workers also showed nearly-30 percentage point splits among Democrats.

Those three policies garnered overwhelming support among all Republican respondents, but measures to either increase immigration or allow immigrants to get papers proved divisive among Republicans.

The biggest split was between 42 percent of non-Trump Republicans who favor allowing most undocumented immigrants to stay in the country legally, while only 15 percent of Trump supporters favor that measure.

2024 Election Coverage

Similarly, a pathway to citizenship drew 46 percent support among non-Trump Republicans, and 22 percent among Trump supporters.

Majorities of non-Trump GOP voters voiced support for making it easier for immigrants on temporary visas to stay in the United States, and for making it easier for people fleeing violence to come to the country, while only about a third of pro-Trump Republicans supported those measures.

The poll was conducted April 5-4 among a weighted national sample of 1,021 adults nationwide, with a reported 3.3 percent overall margin of error, and a 6.3 percent margin of error for Republicans, 5.8 point margin for Democrats and 5.1 point margin for independents.

The heart of the debate over the U.S.-Mexico border is illegal immigration.

Yet that decades-old issue is complicated by hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers claiming, under a process allowed by U.S. law, that they fear returning to their home countries.

Near the border this spring, NPR met a recent arrival who insisted that her entry was legal. She was at Casa Alitas, a cavernous shelter in Tucson, Ariz.

Yajaíra Peñaloza told us she arrived in the U.S. from Venezuela on Christmas Day last year.

“It was baby Jesus’ gift,” she said.

Neither she nor her travel companions had come with a visa, but Peñaloza had secured a court date in 2026 to request asylum. In the meantime, she said, she would try to find a job to support herself financially as soon as she received a federal work permit to do so.

“We are doing everything to be here legally, while we wait,” Peñaloza said.

What describes the legal status of people such as Peñaloza?

NPR asked Muzaffar Chishti with the Migration Policy Institute. Our conversation follows.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

Steve Inskeep: This is someone that most Americans would think of as an “illegal immigrant” since she came here without a visa. She says, “I’m here legally. I’m following the legal process.” So let’s begin right there. Does someone in this situation have legal status?

Muzaffar Chishti: The quick answer is no. What she and most people who are arriving at the border are doing is that they are arriving without authorization to enter the United States. She’s certainly showing up at a port of entry, which makes it different than between ports of entry. But she has an appointment. At the appointment, she is basically telling a Customs and Border Protection official, “I have fear of returning to my country.” So she’s being placed in what we call removal proceedings and given a date with a notice to appear at her removal proceeding.

During that time, she doesn’t have any real status, but she can’t be removed because she is showing up for an appointment to contest her removability. At that hearing — when she will be asked, “Do you have a remedy against removal?” — she’ll say, “Yes, I’m seeking asylum,” and that’s when the asylum application kicks in.

Inskeep: Was the United States obliged to let her in at the port of entry when she showed up without a visa?

Chishti: Yes. Anyone on U.S. soil who expresses a fear of returning to their country on the basis of five protected classifications of U.N. protocol, we have the obligation to let them in to pursue their asylum applications.

[The five protected classes are race, religion, nationality, political opinion and membership in a particular social group.]

Inskeep: I understand that people from different countries may claim different kinds of status when they get to the United States. Does this person get anything special for being from Venezuela?

Chishti: Well, she would have had a much better status if she had applied from abroad. Four countries — which include Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — President Biden last year gave them an unusually special treatment that nationals of those countries can fly in directly to the U.S. under a provision called parole.

Parole is a status. Someone who arrives on parole has lawful status, and they’re also authorized to work. She could have done that, [but] for that, you need a U.S. sponsor that will support you while you’re here. She didn’t do that, so she doesn’t fall in that category. Therefore, she has no choice but to apply for asylum.

Inskeep: Does she have an opportunity to work legally during the couple of years she’ll be waiting for a hearing in the United States?

Chishti: Under the law, once you put in an asylum application, within six months of that, you get the right to work.

Inskeep: Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, was impeached by House Republicans earlier this year for allegedly overusing the power of parole — actively letting people into the United States. What is the power of parole?

Chishti: The power of parole is as old as at least World War II, when we let in most refugees fleeing from Europe to enter the United States — mostly Jewish and some Pentecostals. And [the] idea is that, in the absence of any other provision of the law which will allow someone to enter — like you don’t have a student visa, you don’t have an employment visa, you don’t have a family visa — but the administration thinks it’s in the U.S. interest to let that person in, parole authority is one important authority given to the administration. It’s used for humanitarian purposes or for exigent circumstances.

It’s true that this administration has used the parole authority more extensively than any administration, and that is under challenge. And we’ll see how the courts rule on that.

Inskeep: Has it become very simple to get years in the United States simply by showing up in any fashion and saying, “I want asylum?”

Chishti: Well, that’s true. That’s sort of why many people think that the border crisis is actually an asylum crisis. That just invoking the word “asylum” then lets you enter the U.S. Then you are sent for a hearing, which may [not take place for] years. And then at the end of that hearing, even if you’re not granted asylum, the chances of being removed are very low. All of those factors have become pull factors. So therefore, getting the asylum processing and adjudication under control, which means efficient and timely decisions, is critical to send a message that just because you want to invoke the word “asylum” doesn’t mean you will stay in the U.S. for years on end.

Inskeep: You’re saying there is a legal process. It can be followed. It plausibly even could work. But the number of people arriving has overwhelmed it.

Chishti: That’s right. The only thing I would add is we have rules, regulations, resources and staffing for a border challenge of the 2008 era.

That was an era when the border challenge was single Mexican males trying to sneak their way into the United States. No element of the definition is true today. More people are non-Mexicans, more people are family units, and almost all are not sneaking in but asking for asylum. That fundamentally changes the nature of the challenge.

But we don’t have the resources or the laws or regulations to meet that. And I think one of the ways to reduce the backlog is not to send new cases to immigration judges. It’s an overwhelmed system. To send more cases to an already backlogged system is the definition of insanity. We believe that all new asylum cases should be sent to asylum officers who are civil servants trained in country conditions, and they can finish a case in months as against years. Only then can we make a real dent in the processing of asylum cases.

Inskeep: Muzaffar Chishti, thank you so much.

Chishti: Thanks so much for talking to me.

Senate Judiciary to hear about need for permanent relief
Biden DACA regulations under appeal at Fifth Circuit
Lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee are turning their focus to the status of undocumented young people as the program that’s protected more than half a million Dreamers for nearly 12 years faces an uncertain future.

New applications to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which was established in 2012 via executive memorandum, have been frozen for the past three years after a federal district court judge in Texas foundthat it was unlawfully implemented.

The program covered about 530,000 active recipients at the end of 2023, about 80% of them born in Mexico, according to the most recent data from the Department of Homeland Security.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the chair of the Judiciary Committee, said in remarks on the Senate floor ahead of Wednesday’s hearing that, as a result, thousands of undocumented young people “ready to serve our country as doctors, teachers, or first responders may never have that opportunity.”

“It’s time for Congress to grant them the stability and certainty in their lives they deserve,” Durbin said last week.

Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the committee’s ranking member, last year co-sponsored the Dream Act, which would offer a pathway to permanent status for undocumented people who came to the US as children. But legislation offering relief to immigrants has been ensnared in political fights over border security and enforcement.

The legal battle over DACA has landed back at the the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which ruled just a year and a half ago that the program was unlawful because it violated the procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. The court now will mull whether DACA regulations issued by the Biden administration fortify the program’s legal standing.

Republican states suing to overturn the program argue it still exceeds the executive branch’s statutory authority.

The growing legal uncertainty over the program, plus the the looming presidential election, add to urgency for Congress to pass permanent protections for Dreamers, proponents say.

Employers including IBM Corp., Starbucks Corp., and Google LLC, warned the appeals court in February that rescinding DACA’s removal protections and employment authorization would drain $460 billion from the gross domestic product.

DACA survived a repeal effort by the Trump administration, but faced renewed legal challenges under the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, new Department of Health and Human Services regulations make DACA recipients eligible later this year for subsidized coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met with senior Latin American officials in Guatemala on Tuesday as part of the Biden administration’s push to get countries in the region to ramp up enforcement of their borders and expand legal ways to migrate.

President Biden has faced criticism for his handling of the U.S. border with Mexico, and the issue is a key concern for many voters in this year’s presidential election. U.S. officials have, in recent years, increasingly turned to international partnerships to help them keep large numbers of migrants from reaching the southern border.

“At the core of our efforts is the message that individuals should take advantage of lawful pathways rather than make the dangerous journey north,” Mr. Blinken said on Tuesday.

He added: “We’re supporting local efforts to help people remain safely in their own countries by addressing the root causes that drive people to move.”

The United States relies heavily on Mexico, its closest partner on migration, to control the number of people who are destined for the southern border. In late December, Mr. Blinken and Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, went to Mexico to discuss increased enforcement during a month in which U.S. border agents had arrested more than 250,000 migrants. On some days in December, 10,000 stops were made.

Since then, the number of migrants arriving at the southern border has dropped dramatically. In February, agents made around 140,000 apprehensions. In March, there were more than 137,000 apprehensions, and the April count is expected to be even lower, at around 129,000, according to a person familiar with the statistics who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss figures yet to be finalized.

The downward trend of the border numbers could help Mr. Biden make the case that he is taking border security seriously.

The meeting on Tuesday is part of continuing talks connected to the Los Angeles Declaration, a 2022 agreement signed by the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil and other countries. The agreement stipulated that each country was responsible for securing its borders and that the countries would promote new legal migration efforts.

Kristie Canegallo, the acting deputy homeland security secretary, said that the compact was important for “providing a framework and shared goals.”
U.S. officials point to the creation of so-called safe mobility offices in countries such as Colombia, Guatemala, Ecuador and Costa Rica, as a direct result of the agreement. The offices have helped the Biden administration increase refugee processing from the region.

On Monday, the United States placed visa restrictions on executives from Colombian companies that transport migrants via sea, saying that the movements were “designed primarily to facilitate irregular migration to the United States.”

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico — Desperate and exhausted, the migrants gathered around a tree that offered them some shade from the unforgiving sun.

They had traveled from countries throughout Latin America, including Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru and Venezuela. Some of them were parents traveling with small children, including toddlers. Others were young men. Some of the teenagers appeared to be unaccompanied minors traveling without their parents.

All of them shared a common goal: entering the U.S., which was just a few yards away. But standing in their way were miles of razor wire and other barriers erected by the state of Texas at the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott to deter migrants from crossing into the U.S. illegally.

“They’re trying to kill us,” one of the migrant men said in Spanish, showing CBS News cameras how sharp the wire could be.

Some said they had tried to get past the barriers several times to no avail. At one point, the migrants huddled around the cameras to describe the austere conditions in the makeshift camp they had set up near the U.S. border with tents and blankets.

They said they had been sleeping near that tree for days, some as long as two weeks, braving the elements for a chance to enter the U.S. “We don’t have food. We don’t have water,” one Venezuelan woman carrying a small child said in Spanish.

Rene, a migrant from Honduras, said he had been sleeping outside for 15 days, after traveling to Mexico with his young daughters, ages 3 and 9. He pointed to an area filled with brushes where they slept, using blankets to shield themselves from the cold temperatures at night and in the morning.

“I don’t sleep the entire night,” Rene said in Spanish, noting he closes his eyes only intermittently to make sure his daughters are OK.

Illegal crossings fall

Illegal crossings along the U.S. southern border have dropped by more than 40% this year since soaring to record levels in December. In April, U.S. Border Patrol recorded roughly 129,000 unlawful crossings, the second consecutive monthly drop, according to preliminary government data obtained by CBS News. The pattern has defied historical trends — migration usually spikes in the spring.

Still, tens of thousands of migrants are estimated to be waiting in Mexico, in places like Ciudad Juárez where shelter space is limited and the conditions are sometimes dire.

Many in Mexico are waiting to secure an appointment to enter the U.S. at an official port of entry through a Biden administration program powered by a smartphone app known as CBP One. But the process is capped at 1,500 spots each day. And the demand in Mexico is far higher.

Facing wait-times that often extend for months, some migrants, like the ones in the makeshift encampment, grow desperate and decide to try to cross into the U.S. illegally. But they first have to make it past the Texas barriers to surrender to federal Border Patrol agents, the initial step in the years-long asylum process.

Karina Breceda, who oversees migrant shelters in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, called the barricades set up by Texas “inhumane,” noting she has helped some migrants, including children, who were cut by the razor wire.

“The U.S. is the greatest country in the world,” Breceda said. “We’re able to have, I think, policy that treats this situation with dignity.”

But on the U.S. side of the border, Texas Department of Public Safety Sergeant Eliot Torres said the wire is supposed to serve as a “sign” warning migrants not to enter the U.S. between official ports of entry, which is a federal crime. Texas has also sought to make the act a state crime through a law known as SB4, but federal courts have blocked the measure at the request of the Biden administration.

“The inhumane part is in … the optic, right?” Torres said near a stretch of the border near El Paso that Texas has fortified with razor wire and additional fencing. “That’s what people perceive it to be.”

Torres acknowledged migrants could be cut by the wire. Asked if that’s part of the deterrence objective, he said, “Yes.” But Torres noted that Texas officials provide medical aid to migrants who sustain injuries or who are otherwise in distress.

“We’re here protecting our border, but also we’re not going to … just let somebody stand there, have an injury,” Torres said.

Abbott and other Texas officials have credited their actions — from the razor wire, to arrests of migrants on state trespassing charges — for the marked decline in migrant crossings in recent months, which has been more acute in the Lone Star State than in Arizona and California.

But federal officials believe the main catalyst is an aggressive crackdown on U.S.-bound migrants by Mexican officials, who have ramped up efforts to stop migrants from boarding trains and buses that would take them closer to the American border. They’re also deporting some migrants to southern Mexico.

Still, some migrants like Rene have made it to northern Mexico despite the crackdown, and are willing to wait indefinitely for a chance to make it to the U.S.

“We came searching for the American dream,” he said.

A traveling carnival business owner in Texas is the latest to be accused of labor exploitation amid a surge in calls for worker protection reforms and child labor violations across the nation.

Angel Reyes Isidro, 41, allegedly operated a carnival business in Houston with unauthorized workers, according to an indictment. In 2019, Reyes falsified temporary employment applications to obtain H-2B visas for 24 unnamed foreign seasonal workers, the indictment alleges.

The H-2B program allows employers to temporarily hire foreign nationals to work temporary nonagricultural jobs in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Under the program, the department said employers are required to prove that they will offer wages that “equals or exceeds the highest of the prevailing wage” or is applicable to minimum wage standards.

But after the 24 workers entered the United States between June and August 2019, the indictment alleges Reyes charged them illegal visa fees, paid them below the minimum pay required, and made threats of deportation and loss of future employment opportunities. Reyes profited from the scheme and was paid to illegally transfer four workers to another employer.

The case underscores how employers across the country have benefited from the labor of exploited workers.

But after the 24 workers entered the United States between June and August 2019, the indictment alleges Reyes charged them illegal visa fees, paid them below the minimum pay required, and made threats of deportation and loss of future employment opportunities. Reyes profited from the scheme and was paid to illegally transfer four workers to another employer.

The case underscores how employers across the country have benefited from the labor of exploited workers.

“Recent immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are among the most exploited workers in the country, enduring wage theft, dangerous working conditions, discrimination, and even physical assaults,” according to the non-profit organization Green America.

Federal authorities have also increasingly called attention to labor violations after the Labor Department reported last year that child labor violations have risen 69% since 2018. The rise in child labor cases in the United States coincides with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors in recent years.

Immigration and child advocates have noted that migrant children are vulnerable to labor exploitation and human trafficking in the country. Many migrant children have been found working in dangerous industries, such as meatpacking and poultry, construction, and major label food factories, according to the American Immigration Council’s Immigration Impact project.

Carnival business workers put in poor working, living conditions

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas said Reyes continued operating his carnival business with unauthorized workers from 2022 to the time of his arrest on April 28.

Reyes “placed the workers in cramped and crowded conditions where workers had to take turns sleeping on the floor because there was not enough bed space,” the indictment states. Testimony during a federal court hearing further alleged that Reyes threatened workers with a firearm and sexually harassed female workers, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Prosecutors also said Reyes, who is a Mexican national living in the United States, “poses a serious flight risk, risk of obstructing justice and is a danger to the community.” He has been charged with fraud in foreign labor contracting, false statements, and mail fraud, among other crimes, according to the indictment.

Reyes faces up to 20 years in federal prison for mail fraud and a maximum of 10 years for visa fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a news release. The other counts carry a five-year maximum term of imprisonment.

Federal authorities take steps to strengthen labor protections

In 2023, the Labor Department announced new actions to protect workers against employer exploitation, including migrants and children. The new efforts to strengthen protections for workers were part of the Biden administration’s “approach to ensuring our most vulnerable workers know their rights, are protected from abuse at the hands of their employers and can advocate for themselves at work,” the department said.

The H-2B program is one of many temporary work visa programs in the United States, according to an Economic Policy Institute report in 2022. The program is commonly used for jobs in landscaping, construction, forestry, seafood and meat processing, traveling carnivals, restaurants, and hospitality.

The report noted that as the H-2B program continues to grow, migrants with H-2B visas are being “employed in industries in which there is extensive wage theft and lawbreaking by employers.”

Citing data from the Labor Department, the report said nearly $1.8 billion in wages were stolen from workers between 2000 and 2021. During those years, more than 225,000 cases across seven major H-2B industries were investigated by the Labor Department with violations discovered in over 180,000 cases, according to the report.

“The H-2B program has been plagued by worker exploitation for too long,” Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su said in a statement last October. “The Biden-Harris administration is committed to protecting H2-B workers from abuse and with this report, we’re taking a whole-of-government approach to protecting these vulnerable workers, which will also help ensure they are not used to undercut labor standards for domestic workers.

Uptick in child labor across the U.S.

Last year, the Labor Department denounced the uptick in child labor nationwide. Since then, federal authorities have issued penalties to numerous employers in violation of child labor laws, many including meat and poultry processing facilities.

During the fiscal year of 2023, the department said its investigators found that more than 5,800 children had been employed in violation of federal child labor laws — an 88% increase since 2019. In total, 955 federal investigations found child labor violations, which resulted in more than $8 million in penalties, according to the department.

The largest case of that year revealed at least 102 children, between the ages of 13 to 17, worked overnight shifts at 13 meat processing facilities in eight states.

A federal investigation found that Packers Sanitation Services Inc. LTD (PSSI), which is based in Wisconsin and one of the nation’s largest food safety sanitation services providers, employed children in hazardous jobs to clean dangerous powered equipment, including brisket saws and “head splitters” used to kill animals.

The Labor Department said in its lawsuit that most of the children who worked at some of the facilities were not fluent English speakers and had to be interviewed in Spanish. NBC News reported in March 2023 that the Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department were investigating whether a human smuggling scheme brought migrant children to work at the facilities.

“Our investigation found Packers Sanitation Services’ systems flagged some young workers as minors, but the company ignored the flags. When the Wage and Hour Division arrived with warrants, the adults – who had recruited, hired and supervised these children – tried to derail our efforts to investigate their employment practices,” Labor Department Wage and Hour Regional Administrator Michael Lazzeri said in a statement last February.

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico — Desperate and exhausted, the migrants gathered around a tree that offered them some shade from the unforgiving sun.

They had traveled from countries throughout Latin America, including Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru and Venezuela. Some of them were parents traveling with small children, including toddlers. Others were young men. Some of the teenagers appeared to be unaccompanied minors traveling without their parents.

All of them shared a common goal: entering the U.S., which was just a few yards away. But standing in their way were miles of razor wire and other barriers erected by the state of Texas at the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott to deter migrants from crossing into the U.S. illegally.

“They’re trying to kill us,” one of the migrant men said in Spanish, showing CBS News cameras how sharp the wire could be.

Some said they had tried to get past the barriers several times to no avail. At one point, the migrants huddled around the cameras to describe the austere conditions in the makeshift camp they had set up near the U.S. border with tents and blankets.

They said they had been sleeping near that tree for days, some as long as two weeks, braving the elements for a chance to enter the U.S. “We don’t have food. We don’t have water,” one Venezuelan woman carrying a small child said in Spanish.

Rene, a migrant from Honduras, said he had been sleeping outside for 15 days, after traveling to Mexico with his young daughters, ages 3 and 9. He pointed to an area filled with brushes where they slept, using blankets to shield themselves from the cold temperatures at night and in the morning.

“I don’t sleep the entire night,” Rene said in Spanish, noting he closes his eyes only intermittently to make sure his daughters are OK.

Illegal crossings fall

Illegal crossings along the U.S. southern border have dropped by more than 40% this year since soaring to record levels in December. In April, U.S. Border Patrol recorded roughly 129,000 unlawful crossings, the second consecutive monthly drop, according to preliminary government data obtained by CBS News. The pattern has defied historical trends — migration usually spikes in the spring.

Still, tens of thousands of migrants are estimated to be waiting in Mexico, in places like Ciudad Juárez where shelter space is limited and the conditions are sometimes dire.

Many in Mexico are waiting to secure an appointment to enter the U.S. at an official port of entry through a Biden administration program powered by a smartphone app known as CBP One. But the process is capped at 1,500 spots each day. And the demand in Mexico is far higher.

Facing wait-times that often extend for months, some migrants, like the ones in the makeshift encampment, grow desperate and decide to try to cross into the U.S. illegally. But they first have to make it past the Texas barriers to surrender to federal Border Patrol agents, the initial step in the years-long asylum process.

Karina Breceda, who oversees migrant shelters in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, called the barricades set up by Texas “inhumane,” noting she has helped some migrants, including children, who were cut by the razor wire.

“The U.S. is the greatest country in the world,” Breceda said. “We’re able to have, I think, policy that treats this situation with dignity.”

But on the U.S. side of the border, Texas Department of Public Safety Sergeant Eliot Torres said the wire is supposed to serve as a “sign” warning migrants not to enter the U.S. between official ports of entry, which is a federal crime. Texas has also sought to make the act a state crime through a law known as SB4, but federal courts have blocked the measure at the request of the Biden administration.

“The inhumane part is in … the optic, right?” Torres said near a stretch of the border near El Paso that Texas has fortified with razor wire and additional fencing. “That’s what people perceive it to be.”

Torres acknowledged migrants could be cut by the wire. Asked if that’s part of the deterrence objective, he said, “Yes.” But Torres noted that Texas officials provide medical aid to migrants who sustain injuries or who are otherwise in distress.

“We’re here protecting our border, but also we’re not going to … just let somebody stand there, have an injury,” Torres said.

Abbott and other Texas officials have credited their actions — from the razor wire, to arrests of migrants on state trespassing charges — for the marked decline in migrant crossings in recent months, which has been more acute in the Lone Star State than in Arizona and California.

But federal officials believe the main catalyst is an aggressive crackdown on U.S.-bound migrants by Mexican officials, who have ramped up efforts to stop migrants from boarding trains and buses that would take them closer to the American border. They’re also deporting some migrants to southern Mexico.

Still, some migrants like Rene have made it to northern Mexico despite the crackdown, and are willing to wait indefinitely for a chance to make it to the U.S.

“We came searching for the American dream,” he said.

If the United States really wants to cut the record flow of illegal drugs and migrants entering our country, we should start by sharply increasing foreign aid for Guatemala’s new democratically elected president, Bernardo Arevalo. By supporting him, we also promote democracy and freedom, two critical American values.

As Central America’s largest nation, a free Guatemala can serve as a beacon of liberty in a region ruled by authoritarian governments.

Today, Guatemala is the second-largest source of undocumented migrants crossing our southern border and a large source of cocaine and fentanyl precursors. But Arevalo is trying to change that. Tragically, Guatemala was led for decades by brutal generals and corrupt political hacks. Finally, Guatemala has a leader dedicated to combatting the narco-trade, protecting democracy, and expanding economic opportunity for all Guatemalans.
As part of a high-level delegation that recently traveled to Guatemala and met with Arevalo, I saw a leader struggling to create a new Guatemala despite many odds. His success in meeting these promises, which will also help our country, could depend on how much aid we give this fledgling democracy.

Guatemala is economically impoverished with almost 20 percent of the economy dependent on remittances from Guatemalan expatriates. It has one of Latin America’s highest poverty rates with more than half the people living below the poverty line. Almost half of all Guatemalan children are malnourished and, in some regions, the percentage of households with stunted children is close to 90 percent.

Crippled with massive poverty and little opportunity for economic advancement, it’s no surprise thousands of Guatemalans annually leave for the U.S.

It’s also been a playground for international drug cartels. That’s why the U.S. government labeled Guatemala a “major illicit drug-producing or drug-transit” country. One popular mayor even bragged, “They call me a narco, and I am.”
But now there’s a new sheriff in town and reason for hope. A diplomat and son of a former president, Guatemala’s crooked power structure did everything possible to block Arevalo’s presidency. They recognize he’s a threat to the corrupt system that made them rich. After his surprise win in the first round of elections, they tried to remove his party from the ballot and called for another election. They even tried to stop his inauguration, delaying it until early the next morning.

The good news is that Arevalo has proposed a broad platform, including economic reform and a crackdown on corruption, to address his nation’s problems. He understands the most effective way to reduce illegal migration is to address its root causes, including unemployment and food insecurity.

The bad news is that implementing many of these changes is difficult because the old guard, led by corrupt judges and prosecutors, is doing everything it can to guarantee he fails.
Compounding his challenges, his government holds a narrow majority in the parliament, making it harder to pass his plans. While he enjoyed a landslide victory at the polls, public support is fickle and that backing could quickly dissipate if he fails to deliver demonstrable results soon.

Such an outcome would make it easier for the corrupt old guard to remove him from power illegally. That means time is of the essence to help this critical ally.

The United States should dramatically increase assistance and our government should encourage the U.S. business community to increase its investments in Guatemala. This aid can help him succeed and deliver some badly needed early wins.

To its credit, the Biden administration just provided an additional $170 million for development and security assistance. But we can and should do more. The U.S. should also urge allies like Canada and Europe to increase aid to Guatemala and encourage multi-lateral banks, like the World Bank, to increase their investments.

Backing Arevalo is not just a moral imperative but a strategic necessity. If he succeeds, it’s a win for America too. But if he fails, both Guatemala and America will pay a heavy long-term price.

Thomas Kahn is a distinguished faculty fellow at American University and a Trustee of Freedom House. He served as the Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee from 1997-2016, the longest in history.

It was May 7, 2018, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, speaking in San Diego, outlined a new federal policy that came to haunt the Trump administration.
“I have put in place a ‘zero tolerance’ policy for illegal entry on our southwest border,” Sessions said. “If you cross this border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. It’s that simple.”

“If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, then we will prosecute you,” he continued. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law.”
In practice, the policy applied to any child crossing the border between checkpoints. Adults were detained, and the children with them — sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, whoever — were sent somewhere else. The intention was obvious, as was quickly made apparent: The administration sought to deter people from coming to the United States by presenting the very real possibility that they would lose their children by doing so.

Public outcry soon forced the administration to shift the policy. The public called for children separated from their families to rejoin them. But the administration didn’t keep records allowing that to easily happen. Joe Biden made reunification a part of his 2020 campaign for president and, upon taking office, instantiated a task force that aimed to figure out how to get kids back to their families.
Last month, the task force published its most recent set of data on the reunification efforts. More than 3,200 children have been reunited with their families, about 800 of them thanks to the task force’s work. An additional 1,400, though, have not been — at least through the auspices of the task force. Of the 1,400, about 300 are either in the process of being reunified or have had their families contacted.

The numbers shift over time, in part because the legal landscape changes. In October, for example, a case filed in June 2018 — Ms. L. v. U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement — was finally settled. That settlement meant that about 350 children were added to the pool of those needing to be reunified with their families because the boundaries of what qualified as a separation had changed.

As he seeks reelection to the presidency, Donald Trump has again focused on immigration as an issue and pledged a hard-line approach. Speaking on CNN last year, he celebrated the effects of the policy.
“It stopped people from coming by the hundreds of thousands,” he said, “because when they hear ‘family separation,’ they say, ‘Well, we better not go.’ And they didn’t go.”
A few months before, the Guardian reported on one family that had, after four years, finally been reunited. Nery Ortega Lima, an immigrant from Guatemala, described the point at which he was separated from his children.
“I had no idea where they were taking us,” Ortega Lima said. All the migrants there were quickly lined up and the father only had a few moments to say goodbye to his son — while officials held on to mothers trying to get their toddlers back.
“I told my son to not be afraid and that everything was going to be OK. I told him to be a good boy,” he said.
“I was in tears,” Lilian Yanes, the boy’s mother told the newspaper. “I remember seeing my son leave as a kid and now I saw he was a strong man.”
According to the most recent task force data, the families of more than 1,000 kids taken away at the border have not had the opportunity to see who those children have become.

WASHINGTON (Gray DC) – More than 36 million Hispanic voters are eligible to cast a ballot this November. That’s four million more than in 2020.

“Donald Trump is enemy number one for the Latino community,” Hector Sanchez Barba from Mi Familia Vota said.

His organization is dedicated to making democracy more inclusive for everyone. His organization is teaming up with Unidos US Action Fund, America’s voice, Latino victory project and Voto Latino to educate Hispanic voters this election season. Barba said misinformation and disinformation is crippling Latino communities.

“We are making sure that not only that we are informing but connecting with networks in the nation, especially in Spanish, to make sure this isn’t happening through the data checking and the message is in the right place,” Barba said.

“In our 20 years of doing focus groups and surveys, it was the first time GenZ was talking about housing,” Maria Theresa Kumar with Voto Latino said.

The economy, healthcare access and jobs are all issues on the minds of Latino voters. However, immigration and the border remain top of mind to the demographic. These organizations feel Trump’s policies will only hold Latino communities back.

“[Trump] calls for migrant detention camps and massive deportation programs,” Janet Murguía of Unidos Action Fund said. “Of course, the Latino community supports a secure border. There is a humanitarian element that should be a significant factor on how we manage the border.”

59 percent of Latino voters supported Joe Biden in 2020 according to Pew Research CENTER. These organizations say they are working to grow that support through face-to-face education. Especially in battle ground states like Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and Georgia.

“We are done being a pinata for Trump and the extremists in his party,” Murguía said. “We are united in condemning this type of dangerous rhetoric and these types of draconian policies.”

Cárdenas offered her backing to a bipartisan immigration bill that would create a 12-year, two-part path to legal status and require that the border first be declared secure before pathways to legal status are granted.

Education: George Mason University. Best career advice she ever received: “My mom gave me the best advice to survive in this city of overachievers. The closest translation would be ‘Don’t waste time in jealousy—instead focus on improving yourself.’ ” Hidden talent: “I am a decent baker.”

Law360 (May 6, 2024, 8:00 PM EDT) — Immigration experts warned Monday that the prospect of another Trump presidency may see limits introduced on legal immigration pathways, in part by curbing some temporary foreign worker programs and suspending immigration processing in excessively backlogged categories.

A second Trump administration is expected to adopt a conservative think tank’s ideas to cap the H-2A temporary foreign worker program for seasonal agricultural positions at its current levels, with a call to wind it down entirely in 10 to 20 years.

The same goes for the H-2B program for non-agricultural foreign workers, with a call to phase it out in 10 years, according to the 920-page plan dubbed “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 outlining its preferred policy agenda for a conservative president. Both H-2 programs allow U.S. employers to hire foreign workers when they can’t find interested domestic workers.

The Heritage Foundation has published a so-called “Mandate for Leadership” since 1981 outlining its policy preferences for conservative presidential candidates. In the first year of his presidency, Donald Trump implemented about 64% of that year’s mandate within the first year of his administration, making it a reliable predictor of what could be on the horizon if he gets reelected, according to Kristie De Peña, the director of immigration at think tank Niskanen Center.

The Heritage Foundation proposal would also suspend updates to the eligible country list for the H-2 programs, which the U.S. Department of Homeland Security releases annually after conducting risk evaluations, like of non-immigrant visa overstays.

But preventing the list from being updated could bring the H-2 programs to a screeching halt sooner rather than later, De Peña said.

“Refusing to update that list would mean that no countries will be eligible to participate in the program after the 2024 list expires,” she said, noting that could hamper the ability of employers to fill labor gaps in agriculture, construction, hospitality and forestry services.

De Peña was one of several speakers Monday at a virtual event hosted by America’s Voice, a nonprofit that advocates for a path to citizenship for all unauthorized immigrants.

The Heritage Foundation did not return a press inquiry from Law360 on Monday.

The think tank’s plan also suggests pausing the intake of applications for immigration benefits in categories with “excessive” backlogs. The plan doesn’t provide specific thresholds to define an excessive backlog, but De Peña said it could be significant.

“What is clear is that many, many categories of legal immigration channels could be suspended because most are backlogged,” she said, noting there are about 20 to 35 backlogged categories, including relative visa petitions and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals renewals for children who were brought to the U.S. unlawfully as children.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, said efforts to tamp down on legal immigration will hamper economic growth.

“100% of labor force growth right now is coming from immigrants. So… it’s pretty clear that at this point, we may have actually avoided a recession because of the impact of immigrants,” he said during Monday’s event.

Without immigrants, there would have been no net job growth since Dec. 20, 2019, Bier said, citing a February Congressional Budget Office report estimating $7 trillion in gross domestic product growth over the next decade, and $1 trillion in government revenue based on current immigration trends that have boosted the labor force.

In addition to restricting legal immigration avenues, the Heritage Foundation plan proposes cutting off federal financial aid to students of universities that offer in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants, which De Peña said could affect up to 60% of Americans enrolled in higher education programs.

Among the other proposals, the Heritage Foundation plan suggests ending the Flores settlement, which established permanent standards for unaccompanied migrant children, including safe and sanitary conditions and a ban on detention longer than 20 days.

In a recent interview with Time, Trump promised to revive the Remain in Mexico program requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their immigration court dates. The Heritage Foundation plan calls for updating the statutory language underlying the program “to withstand judicial scrutiny and executive inaction.”

De Peña said during Monday’s webinar that one of the most compelling aspects of some of the changes the Heritage Foundation proposed is that they are intended to either withstand legal challenges or not involve Congress.

“Most of the proposed changes can … arguably be done through agency guideline revisions or rulemaking, meaning that the very comprehensive sort of litigation strategy that we employed over the last decade is going to become even more cumbersome and really longer term overall,” she said.

Trump also vowed to restart some version of his Title 42 public health policy, which allowed for the swift expulsion of asylum seekers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Heritage Foundation plan advocates for implementing a similar authority that could be invoked in other circumstances, like “loss of operational control of the border,” which it does not define.

The former president is facing a litany of criminal charges, including allegations he falsified business records to make a hush money payment ahead of the 2020 presidential election to adult film star Stormy Daniels, and conspiracy charges stemming from his alleged attempt to overturn the election results.

Trump also promised in the Time interview to use the National Guard to carry out a sweeping deportation operation to remove the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the country.

Bier said that using the military to carry out deportation raids will have a widespread effect, should a second Trump administration undertake such a venture.

“There’s no way to know walking down the street who’s a U.S. citizen and who’s not,” he said. “And so … our rights are going to be impacted by this. As soon as you empower every state and local law enforcement to turn every traffic stop into an immigration stop, it’s going to affect all of us.”

WASHINGTON — The flow of people into the U.S. over the southwest border has slumped in the first four months of the year by one key metric, according to the Biden administration, which attributed the decline to increased enforcement and steps taken to stem the flow by Mexico and other countries further south.

The number of encounters between migrants and immigration authorities during the first fourth months of this year are down 40% compared with the final four months of last year, according to senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition they not be identified.

The decline implies that the number of arrivals by undocumented migrants has continued to slide from March into April, the first time during the Biden administration that the figures slowed during that span despite warmer weather, when the figures would typically rise.

Record flows of migrants have overwhelmed the U.S. immigration system, increasing political pressure on President Joe Biden as he heads toward a re-election fight again Donald Trump. With an overhaul stalled in Congress, Biden said last month his administration may further restrict migrants’ ability to claim asylum, echoing some of the Trump-era policies he had previously rejected.

Customs and Border Protection data show that border encounters fell to about 190,000 per month in February and March, down from a record of more than 300,000 in December, after Mexico restored funding for migration services and ramped up deportations.

The officials on Monday also said that the U.S. plans to announce millions of dollars for migration-related use, including humanitarian support such as food and shelter, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken travels to Guatemala for a regional meeting on the issue on Tuesday.

The U.S. on Monday also imposed visa restrictions on some Colombian ferry operators moving migrants north to the Darien Gap between Central and South America, the officials said, referring to a treacherous mountain pass traversed by more than 520,000 people last year.

McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — U.S. officials are in Guatemala City, Guatemala, this week to participate in talks with other nations from the Western Hemisphere regarding ways to combat irregular migration and strengthen regional border security.

The third Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection Ministerial begins Tuesday in Guatemala with representatives from over 20 countries, but some meetings start Monday, senior administration officials said during a call Monday morning with media.

Two previous talks — held in 2022 at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, and another held that year in Lima, Peru — set the stage for regional discussions, and “regional collaboration is working,” a senior administration official said, in helping to reduce migrants from trying to illegally cross borders, including the Southwest border of the United States.

“All of these efforts and what we are doing regionally is working. We are seeing a significant reduction so far this year as opposed to the previous two years and we attribute that to consequences we are imposing at our border, as well as the enforcement efforts our partners in Mexico and further south are taking as well,” a senior administration official said. “This is a shared responsibility for the U.S. and the region and we look forward to the meetings today and tomorrow in Guatemala to continue to have these conversations with our partners.”

At the first meeting in Los Angeles, a migration pact was signed by President Joe Biden and 20 other leaders across the region.

The United States, at that time, also announced it would provide millions of dollars in assistance to help humanitarian efforts and supporting labor pathways.

On Monday, senior administration officials said another announcement involving “a multi-hundred-million dollar commitment tomorrow, providing humanitarian and development assistance to foster assimilation of migrant communities … and efforts to fully integrate migrants,” will be announced Tuesday.

No other information was given, except that officials said this is new funding, not previously announced.

In 2022, the United States pledged $331 million in humanitarian and long-term development assistance across the region. The U.S. Agency for International Development also pledged at the time:

$171 million in humanitarian assistance to what it called the “Venezuela regional crisis,” which included $72.7 million for health care, food nutrition and other services through United Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations, and $98.2 million for Venezuelan migrants and refugees in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.
$35.9 million to promote the social and economic integration of millions of Venezuelan migrants and refugees in South America through policy reform, pathways for legal status, professional certification, job training and placement.
$4.1 million in Central America to expand work opportunities in Belize, Costa Rica and Panama.
“Migration presents a complex challenge but one we believe we can manage if we coordinate our efforts while creating lawful alternatives for people to migrate, settle and thrive, and, of course, addressing the root causes,” a senior administration official said. “We’ll share the progress we’ve made with our combined efforts, and identify next steps.”

Main emphasis during this week’s talks will center on these three discussions:

Fostering regional stability by addressing the root causes driving people to migrate, and helping to support communities where migrants are going.
Establishing refugee resettlement programs and lawful pathways to the United States.
Strengthening enforcement of borders and working with regional partners to manage migration “in a humane way,” officials said.
Officials touted a 40% drop in encounters along the Southwest border in the first four months of Fiscal Year 2024, from Fiscal 2023.

They cited aggressive repatriation of individuals not qualified to remain in the United States “resulting in record use of expedited removal at our border and record removals and repatriations of individuals.” That includes removals to 170 countries.

From May 12 — when Title 42 was lifted — until April 3, DHS has removed or returned over 690,000 people, most of whom crossed the Southwest border, including over 105 ,000 family members, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports.

But DHS has permitted over 435,000 nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to arrive at the border using the U.S. humanitarian parole processing requirements, the official said.

Also, 547,000 migrants have been allowed to schedule asylum interviews via the agency’s CBP One app since last May, the official said.

The agency reported that in March, Border Patrol recorded 137,480 migrant encounters between U.S. ports of entry on the Southwest border — a 45% drop from December 2023, and a 16% drop from March 2023.

Sources tell NewsNation that the number U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions in April fell to 128,949. The San Diego Sector led with 37,374 encounters, followed by Tucson with 31,245; and El Paso with 30,411.

Officials on Monday also announced that the State Department imposed visa restrictions on executives of several Colombian transportation companies who are accused of moving migrants illegally by sea and transporting them to the dangerous Darrien Gap in Panama.

“We will work globally with our partners to share information so we can take real-plan action to deter and stop irregular migration and better identify and expel various actors,” the senior official said.