Immigration

WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Joe Biden is turning to a veteran of the Department of Homeland Security to lead the agency created after the September 11 attacks but reshaped by President Donald Trump to carry out his hardline immigration and law enforcement agenda.

In the end, Trump never even needed a physical wall to prevent people from seeking refuge in the U.S.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The United Nations and other organizations are applauding changes to Mexico’s immigration law that would prohibit holding migrant children in immigration detention centers.

The policies that represent our country must protect all children and families, including non-citizens, who are guaranteed rights by the U.S. Constitution and international law.

HOUSTON (AP) — Months before the Trump administration separated thousands of families at the U.S.-Mexico border, a “pilot program” in Texas left child-welfare officials scrambling to find empty beds for babies taken from their parents in a preview of bigger problems to come, according to a report released Thursday by congressional Democrats.

Historically speaking, the cruelty surrounding U.S. immigration policy is arguably the most bipartisan issue of our times.

Professor Goodman gives a crash course on the history of migrant exploitation and expulsion in the United States, and lays out how the deportation machine still keeps the country running today.

My fear of the virus hasn’t been the only thing I’ve wrestled with these past few months.

In a court filing this week, the ACLU said the parents of two-thirds of those children have already been deported to Central America.

It is likely the cases will not be reviewed until next year.

“This is inhumane and unconscionable,” Haitian Bridge Alliance executive director Guerline M. Jozef said.

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — U.S. immigration agents assigned to Guatemala to advise local authorities violated terms of their funding by helping officials deport Hondurans traveling in a migrant caravan early this year, the Democratic staff of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee’ said in a report Tuesday.

Roland, who was born in Haiti and lived for decades in the U.S. as a legal permanent resident, had been in and out of immigration court since 2012 over a minor criminal conviction, a process that had torn apart his marriage.

The right thing to do is restore TPS and allow participants to remain in the country permanently.

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — The Guatemalan government’s halt of more than 3,000 Honduran migrants who had set out for the United States amid the pandemic signaled that U.S. pressure on immigration continues to extend southward.

Meanwhile, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador speculated that the caravan may have been “organized” to get Mexico involved in the U.S. presidential elections, saying that he found it “strange” that the migrants mobilized their caravan so close to the November vote.

NEW YORK (AP) — Vice President Mike Pence in March directed the nation’s top disease control agency to use its emergency powers to effectively seal the U.S. borders, overruling the agency’s scientists who said there was no evidence the action would slow the coronavirus, according to two former health officials. The action has so far caused nearly 150,000 children and adults to be expelled from the country.

In this story, Lili takes us on her family’s emotional journey as one of the many devastated by COVID-19.

MORALES, Guatemala (AP) — Guatemala vowed to detain and return members of a new caravan of about 2,000 migrants that set out from neighboring Honduras in hopes of reaching the United States, saying they represent a health threat amid the coronavirus pandemic.

CORINTO, Honduras (AP) — About 2,000 Honduran migrants hoping to reach the United States entered Guatemala on foot Thursday morning, testing the newly reopened frontier that had been shut by the coronavirus pandemic.

Sadly, this treatment of Latina, Indigenous and Black women is nothing new. The U.S. has a long history of forcibly sterilizing women from these communities.