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Previous administrations have also dispatched FEMA to help process migrants during surges in border crossings. However, the Biden administration cannot use disaster aid funding to support the processing of migrants in Texas after they cross the border without the consent of Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican. States must request the funding from the federal government.

The agency will help provide basic care as criticism mounts over the treatment of the increasing number of young migrants who have filled detention facilities at the southwest border.

When this happened during the Trump administration, his staffers and cabinet members were harassed, heckled and even forced out from restaurants in protest. Time magazine went so far as to run a cover showing a towering Trump looking down upon a crying Hispanic little girl.

this is a crisis, and one of Biden's making

Over and over, the reporters were told the same thing -- these migrants were coming to America because Biden told them they could.

Biden issued a 100-day moratorium on most deportations, which a federal judge blocked, and ended the Trump administration's "Remain in Mexico" rule.

If there was one bright line dividing the Democratic and Republican parties in last year's election -- and in the actions of the last two chief executives -- it was immigration. Biden ran against Trump's so-called "racist" policies and pledged to reverse his immigration restrictions and border security measures. The message was sent loud and clear: with Trump gone, the border is open.

Now in office, laughably, Biden and his Department of Homeland Security secretary are trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

Biden's first crisis as President is at hand

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for selecting border wall construction sites, contended in a statement last week that locations chosen for new border barriers are “areas of high illegal entry.”

The Biden administration has not made clear precisely what plans it has for the wall. But in February, after temporarily suspending building activities, President Biden rescinded the national emergency that his predecessor used to justify advancing construction.Democratic members of Congress from border states, including Veronica Escobar of Texas and Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico, wrote to Mr. Biden this month urging him to cancel all remaining construction contracts and divert remaining funds to removing portions of the wall in places with “particularly destructive environmental damage and destruction of sacred sites.”

ven with the halting of new construction, parts of the federal bureaucracy are slowly continuing forward with the land acquisition process, alarming some landowners who had hoped Mr. Biden would heed their fears about the prospect of living in the barrier’s shadows.

We must reimagine the landscapes we share with Mexico. The border should not be a line that divides cultures and fragments their desert environment. It is a juncture where two nations connect, where history is shared, where cultures are alive and where a common future must unfold.

In the decades after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, about 1.4 million Cubans fled the island, many heading for the United States, where they transformed the social and ethnic fabric of Miami. During the 1980s and 1990s, more than 1 million people — more than a quarter of the population — were displaced during El Salvador’s civil war.

y, the growing Venezuelan diaspora is reshaping cities from Miami to Buenos Aires to Madrid. But most Venezuelan migrants are staying in Latin America, where countries are handling a dire situation in different ways.

Chávez’s handpicked successor, President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has reached a breaking point, with lower oil prices and economic mismanagement leading to the world’s highest inflation rate and spiraling indexes of poverty and malnutrition.

Our migration levels are now comparable to Syria or to [the Rohingya going to] Bangladesh,”

leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, thousands of Venezuelans — especially from the upper classes — moved out of the country

Venezuelans have enjoyed access to special permits good for two years in Colombia’s border region, allowing them to stay up to seven days at a time.

Facing severe food and medical shortages at home, most have stocked up on supplies, or visited hospitals, before returning across the border.

bringing a dramatic surge across the border that reached a peak of 90,000 people a day in December. In early February, President Juan Manuel Santos suspended the issuing of new temporary visas and declared a massive militarization of the border.

The moves cut the daily flow almost in half — though critics say it has only motivated migrants to cross at dozens of illegal entry points along the border, putting them at risk of harm from guerrillas and criminal bands

Locals, meanwhile, are accusing the Venezuelans already here of harming the economy and driving up crime.

They come with fruit they buy for nothing in Venezuela and sell for prices here that I can’t compete with. They come here, killing and robbing Colombians. We need take our city back.”

The family had recently arrived from Venezuela. The little girl was malnourished and also had developed a life-threatening heart blockage. The hospital was petitioning national authorities for funds before proceeding with the costly operation.

Instead, he said, it was carrying out special operations designed to limit the number of Venezuelans without valid visas.

“Like any country, we need to have a safe and secure border,” Martinez said. But many Venezuelans weren’t able to get passports in their homeland because of the cost and long wait.

The operations are sending as many as 100 migrants a day back to Venezuela.

You have to go,” said a female officer. More than a dozen Colombian officers surrounded the thin Venezuelan. “I can’t,” Andie said, her voice breaking. “Please. I’m pregnant, and we won’t survive there.”

And on the eve of the press conference came news of provocative new ballistic missile tests by North Korea

a week that was supposed to feature presidential events to lift up and underline the Rescue Act has yielded entirely different and vexing storylines that you can be sure will dominate Thursday's session.

Eager to avoid unforced rhetorical errors, Biden's team did a brilliant job throughout the general election campaign of controlling his interactions with the news media, mitigating the risk of unintended stories.

As president, Biden participated last month in a televised CNN town hall with citizens, a format that allowed him to display his prodigious empathy and decency, with limited opportunity for follow-ups from the moderator.

Biden may choose in an opening statement to make an announcement that he hopes will drive the news coverage. He will be furnished with a list of questioners, carefully curated by the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki. As is customary, he will have spent hours prepping with his team.

Biden and his team can only guess at the nature of the questions, many of which will be shaped by the events of the past week and even the hours before he takes the podium.

Last week, in one of Biden's rare interviews, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked the President whether he thought Vladimir Putin is a "killer." Biden paused, but after a moment of hesitation said, "I do." His blunt characterization of the Russian president touched off a diplomatic furor and probably was not the news the White House wanted to make.

Thursday will be an interesting test for this nascent presidency. /* dynamic basic css */ .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container {margin:0;padding:0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container .ob-clearfix {display:block;width:100%;float:none;clear:both;height:0px;line-height:0px;font-size:0px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container.ob-multi-row {padding-top: 2%;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container {position:relative;margin:0;padding;0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link:hover {text-decoration:none;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon-container {position:absolute;left:0;height:50%;width:100%;text-align:center;top:25%;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon {display:inline-block;height:100%;float:none;opacity:0.7;transition: opacity 500ms;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon:hover {opacity:1;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-rtb-image {background-color:white;background-position:center;background-repeat:no-repeat;width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;bottom:0;left:0;right:0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-rtb-image.ob-lazy-bgimg{background:none!important;}.AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what{direction:ltr;clear:both;padding:5px 10px 0px;} .AR_36 .ob_what a:after {content: "";vertical-align:super;;;background-image: url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/achoice.svg');background-size:75% 75%;width:12px;height:12px;padding-left:4px;display:inline-block;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:right center;border-left:1px solid #999;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what a{color:#757575;font-size:11px;font-family:arial;text-decoration: none;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what.ob-hover:hover a{text-decoration: underline;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia_covid, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{vertical-align:baseline !important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 5px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia_covid{width:auto;height:16px;max-height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_67x12.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:12px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_text_logo_67x22.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:22px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_feed_logo.png') no-repeat center top;width:86px;height:23px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_smartFeedLogo.min.svg') no-repeat center top;width:140px;height:21px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sphere_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_sphere.svg') no-repeat center top;width:93px;height:27px;vertical-align:baseline!important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 0px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} @media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(min-resolution: 192dpi) { .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16@2x.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px; 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The U.S. government had more than 4,200 unaccompanied migrant children in its custody as of Sunday, according to a Department of Homeland Security document obtained by NPR.

The children are spending an average of 117 hours in detention facilities before being moved to more hospitable shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services — far longer than the 72 hours allowed by law.

The 16-year-old boy from Guatemala died in the care of U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the last record-breaking detention of unaccompanied minors during the Trump administration, when Sanders led the agency

Back in 2019, Long served as a detention monitor for the legal team that advocated for the children in court. She testified to Congress at the time about sick kids sleeping in cells and older children caring for younger ones.

She largely blames the Trump administration for hollowing out what little infrastructure existed to handle these cyclical flows of unaccompanied minors.But Long also raises concerns about transparency in President Biden's administration and questions why detention monitors like herself have been blocked from seeing certain areas of concerning facilities.

David Lapan, a former senior official in Trump's Department of Homeland Security, said the former president was more focused on sending a message about enforcement than caring for the children.

Sanders, the former acting CBP commissioner, quit the Trump administration in the midst of the last border crisis.He described the deaths of children on his watch as a transformational experience and now works with an organization, Glasswing International, that works to address the root causes of migration in Central America.

"I would like to thank President López Obrador of Mexico for the great cooperation we are receiving, and for right now putting 27,000 troops on our southern border," Trump told the United Nations General Assembly last month. "Mexico is showing us great respect, and I respect them in return."A few days later, Trump told reporters he was "using Mexico to protect our border" because Democrats weren't doing enough to fix the immigration system.

López Obrador has said he had no choice but to negotiate. "We represent our country with dignity, and we have nothing to be ashamed of," he said in September. "The sovereignty of Mexico is defended. At the same time, we do not want confrontation. We have a frank, open hand extended to all the governments of the world, and we embrace all the peoples of the world, and we are especially interested in a good relationship with the United States."

Nearly 15,000 troops are deployed to Mexico's northern border, where they've set up 20 checkpoints, Mexican Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval said last week at a press briefing on the country's security strategy. At the southern border, 12,000 troops are deployed and have set up 21 checkpoints. Military helicopters regularly conduct aerial reconnaissance in both border regions, he said. So far, Cresencio said, more than 60,000 migrants have been intercepted as part of the effort.

To get an idea why the government is spending so much on Trump's border wall, look no further than the construction sites down in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

On one side of a caliche road, you can see the pedestrian fence that was erected more than a decade ago. At 18 feet, it looks downright puny. On the other side of the road are massive steel bollards topped with an "anti-climbing plate" that rise 30 feet above the cotton fields, surrounded by men in hardhats and heavy equipment.

"The cost of almost $20 million per mile cost is four times as much as the most expensive other walls being built,"

Border walls are much in vogue in the post-Cold War era, he said, and there are now at least 60 around the world.

Some of the extra money will be used to build the wall higher and 10 miles longer. There have also been "increased project costs due to unforeseen site conditions" — to wit, serious seepage problems where the levee wall crosses a canal that empties into the Rio Grande.

Taking private land through eminent domain involves multiple agencies, including the Department of Justice, and can lead to lawsuits.

"Where you have private property and the government has to go through the courts to get that property, it takes a lot longer and it drives the cost up because you have to pay for that land,"

Contrary to President Trump's claims, the wall is not "going up at a record speed." In fact, construction has fallen months behind schedule because of the complexities of acquiring private land in the South Texas.

Democrats say they do want border security, but the way to do it is with manpower and technology, not steel and concrete.

"I live on the border. I don't want to see chaos. I want to see law and order at the border," Cuellar continued. "But I don't want to just be spending billions of dollars to those federal contractors."

The federal contractors are mostly giant construction companies with experience handling complex federal projects.

Now, the Pentagon inspector general is reviewing the contract. Auditors want to know if the White House steered it to Fisher, who maintains his bid was the best.

There is no improvement. I would say the opposite,” Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili said in an interview. “Unfortunately, Russia never appreciates when you concede or make a step forward or compromise. They always take it for granted.”All the same, he insisted that even though his government had no intention of repeating Mr. Saakashvili’s disastrous 2008 attempt to confront Russia militarily, the border will not last.“It has no prospect,” he said. “They are trying to build this border, these fences, inside our country. We think it is temporary.”

Some tents are spray-painted with messages like "help us, it's cold" and "borders are racist." Refugees stand in long lines waiting for food, usually bread with a piece of cheese.

It's gotten harder in recent weeks for refugees to get across the border so they can continue toward what they hope will be safe havens like Germany and Sweden.Macedonia is allowing only a few dozen Iraqis and Syrians to cross the border each day, which has created a backlog in Greece

A spokesperson for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees told CNN on Sunday that office was told by the Greek border police that Macedonia will now restrict acceptance of refugees from Iraq and Syria by province.

The geographical restrictions would mean that Syrians from the provinces of Damascus, Homs, Qamishli, Latakia and Tartus as well as Iraqis from the provinces of Baghdad, Diyala and Kirkuk and from Iraqi Kurdistan would not be allowed to continue on the route.

"There were strikes and people ran away. I happened to have my ID in my pocket, hers was in the house. We ran away, people were running away barefoot," he says, remembering the day they fled. If they had known what would happen, Ahmed says, they never would have come. They were sold a dream by those who made the journey before them.

At least 18 people trying to reach Greece drowned when their boat capsized off of Turkey's western coast, according to Turkey's semiofficial Anadolu news agency.

So far this year, more than 418 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Last year, more than 3,700 migrants died crossing the Mediterranean in attempts to reach Europe, making it the deadliest year on record for such deaths.

But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.’s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week’s showdown.

The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule a flagrant case of government overreach.

The publicity campaign was part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to counter critics of its policies through social media tools, communicating directly with Americans and bypassing traditional news organizations.

At the White House, top aides to President Obama have formed the Office of Digital Strategy, which promotes his agenda on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other social sites. Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser to the president, is charged in part with expanding Mr. Obama’s presence in that online world.

White House officials declined to say if they think Mr. Reynolds or other agency officials did anything wrong.

Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but are not allowed to engage in propaganda, defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.

As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of those prohibitions, a 26-page legal opinion signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded in an investigation requested by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

And you have UNHCR [the UN refugee agency] telling people how to apply for asylum.”

Many migrants instead tried their luck on the triple razor-wire fence that lines the borders of the Spanish enclave of Melilla, which more than 2,000 migrants and refugees managed to scale in 2014

t was the third boat attempting the crossing in as many days. On Sunday, the Spanish coastguard rescued 51 people making the journey, and on Monday another 47 people.

The numbers arriving on the islands nevertheless remain a far cry far from those in 2006, when more than 31,000 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands. Hundreds of others drowned or died of thirst and exposure while attempting the journey, which can take up to two weeks.

Meanwhile, the bodies of 11 migrants attempting to reach Spain’s Canary Islands by boat were recovered on Tuesday, the latest victims of a perilous migration route that appears to be regaining popularity with sub-Saharan migrants desperate to make it to Europe.

Greece has dispersed more than 2,000 refugees

Greece has dispersed more than 2,000 refugees

EU announced that over 1 million people had now claimed asylum within its borders since the start of the year.

Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis continue to be allowed into Macedonia and the Balkans

on Wednesday 11 people were confirmed to have drowned in the Atlantic Ocean during an attempt to reach Spain’s Canary Islands by boat from west Africa.

which includes asylum seekers from warring countries such as Somalia, as well as peaceful ones like Morocco.

he morning to disperse the camp,

Other observers speculate that those who have been returned to Athens will not remain for long, with many expected to try to reach northern Europe via Bulgaria or Albania instead.

On Sunday, the Spanish coastguard rescued 51 people making the journey, and on Monday another 47 people.

Rough estimates suggest that more than 400 people have arrived in the Spanish archipelago since the start of the year,

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.

Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.

Those price increases combined with Mr. Shkreli’s jeering response to his critics has made him a lightning rod for public outrage and fodder for the presidential campaign. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and others, like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, have come under fire from lawmakers and consumers for profiting from steep price increases for old drugs.

But the criminal charges brought against him actually relate to something else entirely — his time as a hedge fund manager and when he ran his first biopharmaceutical company, Retrophin.

Still, for many of his critics, Mr. Shkreli’s arrest was a comeuppance for the brash executive who has seemed to enjoy — relish, even — his public notoriety. On Thursday, a satirical New Yorker column by the humorist Andy Borowitz said Mr. Shkreli’s lawyers had informed their client their hourly legal fees had increased by 5,000 percent.

a celebration of aggressive masculinity,

the best people of the world.”

“beat” by other nations and need to start beating them instead, his surprisingly deft exploitation of blue-collar economic anxieties, his dark references to Mexican “rapists”

One could even go a little further. A great deal has been written on the question of why America didn’t produce an enduring socialist or Communist mass movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

as opposed to the “fascism” that liberals see lurking in every Republican president) is equally striking.

that inoculated our politics against fascism’s appeal.

nd while he has a number of obvious similarities to past right-populist candidates, from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to the Alabama governor George Wallace,

e fascist temptations can creep in.

He plainly regards his semi-professed Christianity purely instrumentally and has little time for the religious right’s causes.

Not so Trump: He clearly doesn’t care a whit for limited government or libertarianism, and he’s delighted

Wallace was a noxious segregationist, but his racism was bound up in a local and regional chauvinism, a skepticism of centralized power and far-off Washington elites. Not so Trump:

he can do things better, that centralization is fine and dandy so long as you have the right Duce

“proto-fascist” zone on the political spectrum than either the average American conservative

Should Trump’s rivals imitate the “fascism” whisperers in their party and start attacking Trump as a

Trump may indeed be a little fascistic, but that sinister resemblance is just one part of his reality-

He isn’t actually building a fascist mass movement (he hasn’t won a primary yet!)

still several degrees of ugly away from the actual fascist move,

precisely because Trump doesn’t have many of the core commitments that have tended to inoculate conservatives against fascism, it’s still quite likely that the Republican Party is inoculated against him

but they should make it awfully difficult for him to get to 40 or 50 percent. And a somewhat fascist-looking candidate who

Finally, freaking out over Trump-the-fascist is a good way for the political class to ignore the legitimate reasons he’s gotten this far —

the reasonable skepticism about the bipartisan consensus favoring ever more mass low-skilled immigration

then tarring his supporters with the brush of Mussolini and Der Führer right now seems like a shortsighted step

The best way to stop a proto-fascist, in the long run, is not to scream “Hitler!” on a crowded debate stage. It’s to make sure that he never has a point.

he caravan, an annual event organized by activists to highlight the journey that migrants undertake, has typically dispersed into separate, smaller groups at some point along the journey. Organizers of the event project that some 200 or so will proceed all the way to the border in coming days.

Mr. Kim said the new barriers in Calexico are replacing solid metal panels that sat as high as 18 feet in some areas. But smugglers and border crossers have cut holes in them thousands of times in recent years, requiring near-constant repairs.

The new bollard-style barriers are likely to be harder to breach and will offer agents more security, because they will be able to see what and who is on the other side. The Border Patrol has established a “First Amendment zone” for potential protesters, Mr. Kim said, but so far the area at the western edge of the project hasn’t been used.

That means that if the UK leaves all the EU's economic structures there is currently no example anywhere around Europe, or further afield, that can keep the Irish border after Brexit as open as it is now.

Some Democrats have also been critical of Biden's handling of the matter, suggesting the detention of families and children in temporary facilities is no better than how Trump handled migrant children during his time in office.

During the Obama administration, Biden and several of his top officials weathered an earlier wave of migrant children in 2014. Some of the playbook in responding to that event -- which the Obama administration described at the time as a "humanitarian crisis" -- is being considered again.

Biden dispatched the delegation to the border last weekend as a fact-finding mission, officials said. At the two sites, which include tent facilities, the officials spoke with some of the people who are in charge of running them, rank-and-file officials working there and a few of the migrants who are being held in the facilities, including some of the children.

Behind the scenes, Biden has quizzed aides on what more can be done through the executive branch to expedite processing of migrant children and expand the capacity for housing them. He's raised the issue in informal meetings and during otherwise-unrelated discussions with senior advisers.