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“I don’t know if we should trust the government,”

It wasn’t your choice to come to America. But once you realize you’re here illegally, it becomes your choice to figure out who gets to know that.

Can you tell your classmates that you can’t join the overseas choir trip because you don’t have a valid passport? Can you tell your coach that you have to stay in the area and can’t be recruited by an out-of-state college? Can you tell a human resources manager that you can’t get a driver’s license because you don’t have a Social Security number?

In a sunlit courtyard, volunteers at a church soup kitchen are handing out lunch bags and cups of fruit juice. Arcadina Dámaso, the coordinator, says demand has shot up. "Until December, a maximum of 50 people would come here," she says. "Now, we're serving 75. Most of the new ones are Senegalese and Moroccan."

Stricter controls across the Mediterranean have led more migrants to choose this longer, treacherous route to Europe. Nearly all who reach the islands want to end up in mainland Spain, to find jobs or join relatives, which is more than 1,000 miles away.

The bottleneck has angered some locals, while for migrants it's causing misery. Younes Rida, 30, is getting a meal at the soup kitchen.

Biden Gives Venezuelans Reprieve to Remain in U.S. Trump Had RejectedHundreds of thousands of Venezuelans can temporarily continue to live and work in the United States as the administration considers its next steps in the effort to force out Venezuela’s president.

WASHINGTON — As many as 320,000 Venezuelans living in the United States were given an 18-month reprieve on Monday from the threat of being deported, as the Biden administration sought to highlight how dangerous that country has become under President Nicolás Maduro.

Two senior Biden administration officials said the new protections would be offered to those who can prove they are living in the United States as of Monday. The cutoff date aimed to discourage smugglers from enticing other Venezuelans to make the arduous journey to the United States at a time the Biden administration is already struggling with how to accommodate thousands of Central American migrants headed to the southern border.

The 10-year-old had been lost for hours — crying and shaking as he wandered a vast scrubland— when he saw the Border Patrol officer.

Wilton and his mother, Meylin, 30, crossed the border into Texas last month to seek asylum after fleeing their native Nicaragua. But they were immediately sent back to Mexico under Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that expels migrants who cross the border without allowing them to apply for protection.

The smugglers then abandoned Wilton after leading him across the border, leaving him to wander through the arid farmland of South Texas looking for assistance, until he found the Border Patrol agent who recorded his encounter with the boy.

Joe Biden’s inauguration, with its camp authoritarian light displays and general atmosphere of praetorian menace, was exactly the sort of swearing-in that his predecessor might have relished

A sort of blithe tactlessness persists. “Did you ever five years ago think every second or third ad out of five or six would be biracial couples?” is not a question one can readily imagine being asked by any American politician of standing other than Mr. Trump — or his successor, who in fact posed it to CNN’s viewers in February.

This month he briefly committed his administration to maintaining Mr. Trump’s parsimonious annual cap on the number of refugees the United States will accept (though in response to criticism the White House now claims that it will reconsider the issue next month).

“The Blumstein family, consisting of Mr. B, age 43, his wife, same age, and their two children, ages 6½ and 2½ arrived in the United States on 12/21/50,” begins the social worker’s minutely detailed account of my grandparents’, and my father’s, first weeks as refugees in the United States.

My father was born stateless in Uzbekistan in 1945, as World War II was winding down. His Polish-born Jewish parents had spent years in flight — first to Russia in 1939, when Hitler invaded their home country, only to be deported via cattle cars into forced labor in Siberia. My father’s older brother perished of diphtheria during the war. Postwar, my grandparents boarded trains west, but at the Polish border heard the news that nearby villagers had murdered Jews who returned and gave up on their plan to reclaim their home.

“Misrepresentation in visa and citizenship applications is a matter of U.S. immigration law, and few if any of the normal due process rights accorded to defendants in criminal trials apply,” my father wrote in his memoir, “Lies That Matter,” which will be published next month. “And so deportations to the U.S.S.R. followed by a firing squad were seen as not really ‘punitive,’ as if lives were not at stake.” To my father this was not justice: The immigration system did not take into consideration whether the punishment fit the crime. He left O.S.I. after 18 months.

Tens of thousands of immigrants from Central America and Mexico, including thousands of unaccompanied minors, are journeying to the border. In February, the US Customs and Border Protection says it tracked over 100,000 migrants crossing the southern border, almost a 30% increase over January. Nearly 10,000 were unaccompanied minors, and more than 14,000 of those minors are now in US custody.

Yet White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday refused to characterize the situation as a "crisis," instead, calling it a "circumstance."

That's right -- kids tightly packed in detention facilities, sleeping on mats on the floor with aluminum-like blankets. For all of the hue and cry from the left hammering former President Donald Trump for keeping "kids in cages" at our southern border, Biden has now served in two administrations -- first as vice president and now as President -- in which migrant children are being held in terrible conditions.

For many young and working class people across the country, the Bernie Sanders campaign brought hope for the first time in their lives.

I cannot vote for him.

, I have seen firsthand how desperately Americans need his life-saving policies. I cried with folks who had lost everything because of pharmaceutical industry greed, natural disasters and crushing student and medical debt.

In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, we are being urged by governments and the media to “trust the experts” – that is, public health officials

historians are experts too. Of course our expertise is different, but what it tells us, and what we should communicate to the public, is that “trusting the experts” isn’t nearly as simple as it may seem.

By definition, experts know much more about a given subject than the rest of us: that’s their great strength. But experts can also suffer from tunnel vision: though they know  their own specialties, they may fail to look left or right and see the larger contexts, consequences, or costs of their actions

A stimulus package proposed by Democrats in the House of Representatives includes a number of items that will benefit illegal immigrants -- including an expansion of stimulus checks and protections from deportations for illegal immigrants in certain “essential” jobs.The $2.2 trillion bill includes language that allows some illegal immigrants -- who are “engaged in essential critical infrastructure labor or services in the United States” --  to be placed into “a period of deferred action” and authorized to work if they meet certain conditions.

Also in the legislation is language that would allow the a second round of stimulus checks, $1,200 per adults and $500 per dependant, to be extended to those without a social security number -- including those in the country illegally who file taxes via an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN).

“Once again House Democrats are trying to bailout millions of illegal aliens – and not just financially, but give them de facto amnesty as well,” FAIR’s government relations director RJ Hauman told Fox News. “This would be an unprecedented move and take desperately needed money and jobs away from Americans in the middle of a pandemic. Even though it has absolutely zero chance of becoming law, I hope voters are paying close attention.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian forces had seized 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory as the war nears its 100th day.

Ukraine claimed that a counteroffensive had made gains near Mykolaiv.

Western officials hope that weapons from the U.S. and Germany could help Ukrainians turn the tide of the war, especially in the east, where Moscow remains focused on capturing Sievierodonetsk, despite fierce resistance from Ukrainians. It is the last city in the Luhansk region that is not under Russian control.Civilian toll: Zelensky accused Russia of forcibly deporting more than 200,000 Ukrainian children since the start of the war and said that about 14,000 Ukrainian civilians and service members have been killed since the war started.

Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.

Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities

Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.

I agree with Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that the current nihilist extremism of the current Republican Party is “the central problem in American life.”

And yet I find the chances of getting reform from within close to impossible, given how far they’ve now gone over the edge. And this is a tragedy not just for America, but for the GOP itself.

Here, for example, was a man whose family life would make him a cult hero if he were a Republican, but who has been demonized as an alien threat to America from the get-go. Here’s a Democrat who adopted Heritage Foundation ideas for healthcare exchanges. Here’s a Democrat who has actually cut Medicare. His stimulus was one-third tax cuts. Domestic energy production has soared under Obama, even as record numbers of illegal immigrants have been deported. There were and are so many ways in which the GOP could have used Obama for their own advantage – both strategically and culturally. But they refused to, opting instead for visceral, dumb, self-defeating short-term tactical political advantage. All tactics and emotion; no strategy and reason.

The Senate proposal will probably include four main elements: border enforcement, employer enforcement, handling the future flow of legal immigration (including temporary agriculture workers and high-skilled engineers) and a pathway to citizenship for those who entered the nation illegally.

“Then you go to the next big thing — the 12 million. How do you deal with the 12 million in a firm, fair way, realizing you can’t put them all in jail and they’re not all going to self-deport?”

Trump isn't your typical conservative.

"I think what a lot of Republicans want to see is that we have a standard bearer that bears our standards." House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Thursday,

and the fact that his message has earned him millions of Republican votes suggests a fracture between the grassroots and leadership.

Every election is a choice,” she said, noting that Trump “doubled down” on his plans to create a deportation force to round up people in the country illegally,

We're going to end raids and round-ups. We're going to keep families together. We know we've got work to do but I think winning the election will really set that in motion, don't you?"

Clinton said she is more than three million votes and nearly 300 pledged delegates ahead of Sanders. I

Rather than a pragmatic fixer-upper, Mr. Trump now seems likely to be the vehicle through which the ideological right achieves its decades-old dream of undoing the Great Society and the Warren and Burger courts. But the victory that made that possible was based explicitly on identity, not ideology.

One of the odd things about Mr. Trump is that he has brought back J.F.K.’s “trust me” mode in a kind of unhinged parody. His plans are neither detailed nor ideological: He will replace the Affordable Care Act with “great plans” and negotiate better deals.

What’s the alternative to ideological or identity politics? Before Reagan, politics had been largely technocratic, substituting expertise for ideology. “What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of a modern economy,” John F. Kennedy said in 1962. Experts would address “subtle challenges for which technical answers, not political answers, must be provided.”

Trump Open to Shift on Russia Sanctions, ‘One China’ Policy

President-elect Donald Trump suggested he would be open to lifting sanctions on Russia and wasn’t committed to a longstanding agreement with China over Taiwan

n an hourlong interview, Mr. Trump said that, “at least for a period of time,”