US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) - Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

Federal judge blocks Biden admin from ending Title 42 border expulsions

Adam Shaw | Fox News — Fri, 20 May 2022 04:35:59 +0000

There were more than 234,000 migrant encounters in April,

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Biden administration from ending the Title 42 public health order on May 23 — stopping the administration from a move that had seen significant Republican and Democratic opposition amid fears it would exacerbate the border crisis.

Judge Robert Summerhays, in the Western District of Louisiana, granted a preliminary injunction on the Biden administration’s plan to end the order on May 23. It was in response to a lawsuit by two dozen Republican states, led by Arizona, Louisiana and Missouri.

“Today’s ruling is a significant win as Title 42 is one of the few policies that is actually working,” said Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich. “I’m grateful to the court for upholding the rule of law and helping maintain some level of sanity as we continue to battle the Biden-made border crisis.”

FEDERAL JUDGE EXTENDS ORDER BLOCKING BIDEN ADMIN FROM ROLLING BACK TITLE 42 AHEAD OF HEARING

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had announced in April that the order, which has been used since March 2020 to expel a majority of migrants at the southern border due to the COVID-19 pandemic, would expire at the end of May.

“After considering current public health conditions and an increased availability of tools to fight COVID-19 (such as highly effective vaccines and therapeutics), the CDC Director has determined that an Order suspending the right to introduce migrants into the United States is no longer necessary,” the agency said.

The move sparked outrage from both Democrats and Republicans, who warned that the move would lead to a surge in illegal immigration at the border and more people being released into the U.S.

DHS has acknowledged these concerns, saying it is planning for up to 18,000 people a day. However, it has also said that it believes that over time it will reduce the numbers encountered at the border when it re-implements criminal penalties for repeat border crossings.

A number of moderate Democrats joined Republicans in signing onto legislation preventing the administration from lifting the order until 60 days after the CDC says the national emergency on COVID-19 is over. That legislation has not yet been voted on in the Senate.

INTERNAL CBP DOC WARNS OF ‘SIGNIFICANT SAFETY IMPLICATIONS’ OF TITLE 42 LIFT, CARTEL HOLD ON CENTRAL AMERICA

The Republican lawsuit, seeking the injunction, claimed the lifting of the order violated the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires a notice-and-comment period and also bars moves deemed “arbitrary and capricious.”

The lawsuit claims the administration failed to estimate or account for the costs to the states. They cite “increased health care costs for aliens infected with COVID-19 and the cost of increased illegal immigration caused by the Termination Order and the presence of much greater numbers of paroled aliens with non-meritorious asylum claims who were induced to enter the United States because of the Termination Order.”

“This suit challenges an imminent, man-made, self-inflicted calamity: the abrupt elimination of the only safety valve preventing this administration’s disastrous border policies from devolving into an unmitigated catastrophe,” the complaint read.

Summerhays, in his order, said that the record supports the states’ position “that the Termination Order will result in increased border crossings and that, based on the government’s estimates, the increase may be as high as three-fold.” He also agreed with states that lifting Title 42 will increase costs on healthcare and education – and said the government did not dispute that claim.

“In sum, the Plaintiff States have demonstrated that the Termination Order will affect their ‘quasi-sovereign’ interests based on its impact on their healthcare systems and their interest in the health and welfare of their citizens,” he said.

The judge also agreed with the states that the lifting of Title 42 was subject to the ACA, and that the government did not overcome “the presumption of reviewability under the APA.”

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Summerhays, a Trump nominee, was widely seen as likely to issue the injunction, particularly as he had granted a temporary restraining order preventing the Department of Homeland Security from transitioning away from Title 42 by removing migrants via a process called “expedited removal” instead.

The Justice Department is expected to appeal the federal district court judge’s ruling, and the Supreme Court may be asked to weigh in with an emergency order, but that may not happen for the next several weeks.

Meanwhile, the number of migrants encountered at the southern border has remained at highs not seen in decades. There were more than 234,000 migrant encounters in April, compared to 178,000 in April 2021 and just 17,106 in April 2020.

Fox News’ Bill Mears contributed to this report.

Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, with a focus on immigration. He can be reached at adam.shaw2@fox.com or on Twitter: @AdamShawNY

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/federal-judge-blocks-biden-admin-ending-title-42-border-expulsions?test=38861ea43380e1402f1c90f21546ad4b

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US troops on ‘heightened alert’ over rising Ukraine-Russia tensions

ABC - Good Morning America — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 00:40:00 +0000

The post US troops on ‘heightened alert’ over rising Ukraine-Russia tensions first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

US election 2020: Trump’s impact on immigration – in seven charts

Ed Lowther — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 19:11:16 +0000

Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in 2016 with a pledge to bring down illegal immigration, famously blaming undocumented migrants from Mexico for a host of problems, including drugs and crime. In the four years since, how has this rhetoric translated into a wider immigration policy? -Getty Images

The number of foreign-born people living in the US has risen by about 3% from 43.7 million the year before Mr Trump’s election to about 45 million last year.

But this rise conceals a big shift in the largest group by far within this population – those who have moved to the US from Mexico. Having remained at nearly the same level for years, the number of people living in the US who were born in Mexico has fallen steadily since Mr Trump’s election.

While this dip was more than offset by an increase in the number of people who have moved to the US from elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, demographers at the US Census Bureau have estimated that net migration – the number of people moving to the US minus those moving out of the US – has fallen to its lowest level for a decade.

This is partly due to lower levels of immigration, but also because more people who were born outside the US are moving back overseas, according to Anthony Knapp of the US Census Bureau.

Beneath this trend there are some important changes to the visa system.

Mr Trump has allowed more people to come to the US temporarily for work, but made it harder for people to settle permanently in the US. The reduction in permanent visas, from about 1.2 million in 2016 to about 1 million in 2019, has primarily affected family members of US citizens and residents hoping to join their relatives, with the number of permanent visas sponsored by employers largely unchanged.

Although more people are affected by this, in percentage terms his most significant change to immigration policy has been to lower the number of refugees admitted to the US.

The number of people admitted to the US as refugees each year is determined by a system of quotas, the size of which are ultimately defined by the president. People seeking to move to the US as refugees must make their applications from outside the country, and need to convince US officials that they are vulnerable to persecution at home.

Mr Trump’s hostility to any immigration from Muslim-majority countries is well known – he once pledged to enact a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” – and a reduction in refugee quotas proved easier to implement than an outright ban, which became mired in legal challenges.

As a result, the number of refugees admitted from a number of majority-Muslim countries, including Iraq, Somalia, Iran and Syria, fell almost to zero soon after he took office.

Curbing visas and refugee admissions is not the only way to reduce the number of people entering the country, and Mr Trump has also sought to make it harder to move to, or remain in, the US without any relevant documentation.

However, this is more difficult than it might seem. To understand what has happened during President Trump’s tenure, we first need to get to grips with what the official statistics on deportation mean, and they are broken down into two categories.

People are said to be “removed” if they are taken out of the country under the authority of a court order, and people are “returned” if they are refused admission while trying to cross the border, or asked to leave the country without a court order.

Being removed has a lasting legal consequence, making it much harder to gain re-entry to the country. But many people who have been returned across the US-Mexico border simply tried to enter the US again at a later date. President Obama escalated a policy enacted by his predecessor, President George W Bush, to step up removals – particularly of those who had been accused or convicted of criminal offences.

President Trump has not brought about any significant changes to the number of people in either deportation category compared with his predecessor.

The US Immigration, Customs and Enforcement agency, which handles most deportations, has described the current rate of removals as “extremely low”, blaming a lack of resources and “judicial and legislative constraints”, among other things.

The agency is also under pressure at the Mexican border, where the administration’s changes to asylum policy have resulted a long backlog of cases, sometimes with families separated and children held in detention centres, and asylum seekers being returned to Mexico to await the processing of their claims.

Despite widespread media coverage of the border crisis, the data for 2019 suggests that would-be migrants have not been deterred – the number of detentions at the border was more than double the number for the previous year, driven largely by a large rise in the number of families attempting to get across.

This shift is likely to translate into a significant rise in the returns numbers for 2019, which are due to be released in the next few months.

One interesting question is whether President Trump’s tough stance on immigration is still a major selling point among his supporters. The number of people telling pollsters that immigration is a bad thing has fallen steadily since he took office, with many former detractors apparently now believing it is generally good for the US.

Although there remains a gulf between Democratic and Republican voters on the issue, with Republicans far less likely to see immigration in a positive light, and far more likely to want stricter curbs on illegal immigration, the trend among both groups is the same.

Mr. Trump will be hoping that there remain enough Republican supporters of his approach to help push him past the winning post on election night.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54638643

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Crisis At The Border: The Collection Of DNA Samples From Migrants

Michael Armstrong — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 08:22:14 +0000

Crisis At The Border: The Collection Of DNA Samples From Migrants

On October 21st, 2019, the Department of Justice issued a proposal that would permit the collection of DNA samples from migrants detained at the southern U.S. border. The biometric data collected from migrants in federal immigration custody would then be funneled into the FBI criminal justice DNA database, whose extensive data comes from people who have been arrested, charged and or convicted with serious crimes. The rule was published the following day, October 22nd, 2019, in the Federal Register and is currently open for public comments until November 10th, twenty days after it was published. According to an NPR article published by Joel Rose and Bobby Allyn, “Attorney General William Barr issued the rule, which is set to be published in the Federal Register on Tuesday [October 21st], with the expectation that federal authorities will gather DNA information on about 748,000 immigrants annually, including asylum-seekers presenting themselves at legal ports of entries.”

“The proposed rule change would help to save lives and bring criminals to justice by restoring the authority of the Attorney General to authorize and direct collections of DNA from non-United States person detained at the border and the interior by DHS, with the ultimate goal of reducing victimization of innocent citizens.” This was a statement given by Deputy Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen, at the announcement of the rule on October 21st, 2019. Following the announcement by the Department of Justice, many prominent groups like the ACLU raised concerns about the violation of privacy and other important matters. Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s speech, privacy, and technology project, said that the “Forced DNA collection raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns and lacks justification, especially when DHS is already using less intrusive identification methods like fingerprinting. This kind of mass collection alters the purpose of DNA collection from one of criminal investigation to population surveillance, which is contrary to our basic notions of freedom and autonomy.” Vera Eidelman wasn’t the only member out of the ACLU to issue a statement on the matter. Naureen Shah, the ACLU’S senior advocacy and policy counsel said in a statement that “This proposed change in policy is extraordinary in its breadth and transparent with its xenophobic goals. It seeks to miscast these individuals, many of whom are seeking a better life or safety, as threats to the country’s security.”

Resources are very limited and the budget is tight when it comes to the crisis happening on the United States-Mexico border. It is neither wise nor efficient to funnel the funds necessary to get this change in policy up and running when the conditions in deportation centers violate basic human decency. There are not enough resources at the southern border to even give the migrants detained at immigration centers basic hygienic products, yet the Department of Justice thinks the optimal solution at the moment is to resort to xenophobic policies. Not only does this raise privacy concerns, it also pushes the Trump administration’s caricature of migrants and immigrants. This reinforces the Trump idea that immigrants are criminals and rapists that are here to terrorize the American population, an idea that the president has been pushing since day one.

Even the way the Deputy Attorney General described the rule by saying that it will save lives and bring criminals to justice pushes the false narrative that migrants who are coming to the United States are criminals, despite studies showing that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than citizens. This change costs money and it’s not a necessary step that needs to be taken when fingerprinting is an identification process being used right now that doesn’t raise privacy concerns nor has the potential to collect information that can be abused. In fact, this change in policy only seems like a superficial action meant to make it look like the Trump administration is doing anything meaningful. The goal for the Trump administration may be to reduce the victimization of innocent citizens, but it’s at the expense of the victimization of innocent migrants.

The Trump administration has argued that this change is authorized by the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005, which was meant to amend the DNA Identification Act of 1994 “to repeal provisions prohibiting the DNA profiles from arrestees who have not been charged in an indictment or information with a crime.” Up until now, immigrants detained at immigration centers were exempted from the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005. According to the NPR article, “Under the Obama administration, Homeland Security officials said it wasn’t feasible to do that, and the collection hasn’t been required. But officials inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection thought that was wrong, and they stepped forward as whistleblowers to say their agency is violating the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005.”

It doesn’t seem that this change can be stalled in the courts, yet with just a year remaining in Trump’s term and various factors affecting the probability of re-election, it will be hard to determine whether this will be a permanent and long term change and if so what the future implications are.

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