Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 103
SAN DIEGO (AP) — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Monday during a visit to El Paso, Texas, that, "It's more than a crisis. This is human heartbreak." Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday called the wave of migrants a difficult challenge but nothing new. Spin and semantics aside, migration flows to the U.S. from Mexico are surging in a major way for the third time in seven years under Republican and Democratic presidents — and for similar reasons. HOW HAVE FLOWS CHANGED SINCE JOE BIDEN BECAME PRESIDENT? Border enc...
WASHINGTON (AP) — A surge of migrants on the Southwest border has the Biden administration on the defensive, with the head of Homeland Security acknowledging the depth of the problem Tuesday but insisting it's under control and saying he won't revive a Trump-era practice of immediately expelling teens and children. The number of migrants being stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border has been rising steadily since last April, and the administration is still rapidly expelling most single adults and families under a public health order issued by P...
HOLTVILLE, Calif. (AP) — Thirteen people killed in one of the deadliest crashes involving migrants sneaking into the U.S. had entered California through a hole cut into the border fence with Mexico in what was believed to be a larger smuggling operation, officials said Wednesday. Surveillance video showed a Ford Expedition and Chevrolet Suburban drive through the opening early Tuesday, said Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol's El Centro sector chief. The Suburban carried 19 people, and it caught fire for unknown reasons on a nearby interstate a...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — During the Trump administration's final weeks, the Department of Homeland Security quietly signed agreements with at least four states that threaten to temporarily derail President Joe Biden's efforts to undo his predecessor's immigration policies. The agreements say Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana and Texas are entitled to a 180-day consultation period before executive branch policy changes take effect. The Biden administration rejects that argument on grounds that immigration is solely the federal government's responsibility u...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — President-elect Joe Biden's decision to immediately ask Congress to offer legal status to an estimated 11 million people in the country has surprised advocates given how the issue has long divided Democrats and Republicans, even within their own parties. Biden will announce legislation his first day in office to provide a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants in the United States illegally, according to four people briefed on his plans. The president-elect campaigned on a path to citizenship for the roughly 11 m...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — The head of the agency handling citizenship and visa applications was surprised when he faced blowback for cutting a reference to the U.S. being a "nation of immigrants" in its mission statement. The son of a Peruvian immigrant added language about "protecting Americans" instead. L. Francis Cissna argued that America is indisputably a nation of immigrants but that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' mission statement wasn't the place to say so. Joseph Edlow, who now oversees the agency, said he hasn't thought about t...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — One of President Donald Trump's top priorities on immigration if he wins a second term would be to use agreements with Central American governments as models to get countries around the world to field asylum claims from people seeking refuge in the United States, a top adviser said Friday. Stephen Miller, a key architect of Trump's immigration policies, said the agreements would help stop "asylum fraud, asylum shopping and asylum abuse on a global scale." Miller, in an interview with The Associated Press, also forecast a b...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — Pamela Thompson, a recruiter at Adventist Health Bakersfield in California, made seven job offers to foreign nurses in February and just finished a first round of interviews with 12 more candidates. They are from all over the world, including the United Kingdom, Philippines, Australia and Malaysia. The international candidates fill the private hospital's critical need for experienced nurses who can work in emergency rooms and intensive care units, Thompson said — jobs that can't be met only with U.S. nurses, many of whom are...
TORONTO (AP) — The U.S. and Canada have agreed to temporarily close their shared border to nonessential travel, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday, and the Trump administration is considering a plan to turn back all people who cross the border illegally from Mexico, two administration officials said. Canada and the U.S. are eager to choke off the spread of the virus but also maintain their vital economic relationship. Canada relies on the U.S. for 75% of its exports. Trump made the announcement on Twitter, saying the decision would n...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — Dealing a significant blow to a signature Trump administration immigration policy, a federal appeals court ruled Friday that the government can no longer make asylum-seekers wait in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration courts. The government faced a setback from a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that may prove temporary if President Donald Trump's administration appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has consistently sided with Trump on immigration and border security policies. The...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A labeling error caused a woman infected with the novel coronavirus to be mistakenly released from a hospital but the oversight was noticed as she was returning to a San Diego military base where more than 200 evacuees from China are living under federal quarantine, officials said Tuesday. Several patients who were under observation for symptoms were released from UC San Diego Medical Center on Sunday but the labeling mix-up came to authorities' attention while they were being driven back to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, s...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A federal judge has prohibited U.S. immigration authorities from relying on databases deemed faulty to ask law enforcement agencies to hold people in custody, a setback for the Trump administration that threatens to hamper how it carries out arrests. The ruling applies only to the Central District of California, where state law already sharply limits the extent to which state and local law enforcement agencies can honor requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the district encompasses ICE's Pacific Enforcemen...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — U.S. authorities on Wednesday announced the discovery of the longest smuggling tunnel ever found on the Southwest border, stretching more than three-quarters of a mile from an industrial site in Tijuana, Mexico, to the San Diego area. The tunnel featured an extensive rail cart system, forced air ventilation, high voltage electrical cables and panels, an elevator at the tunnel entrance and a drainage system. While there were no arrests, no drugs found at the site and no confirmed exit point in the U.S., the length — more than 14...
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — Tommy Fisher's ambitious plan to win a border wall contract included what could be the next best thing to making a pitch directly to President Donald Trump himself — talking to him through his favorite cable TV channel, Fox News. And it just may have worked. Fisher's North Dakota-based firm was awarded a $400 million contract this week to build 31 miles of wall in Arizona after he made numerous appearances on Fox, repeating a Trumpian boast that he could build the wall, faster, better and cheaper than anyone else. It did...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A federal appeals court heard arguments Tuesday on a bid to halt military funding for construction of President Donald Trump's border wall as the pace of construction raises questions about whether time is running out for the administration's critics. The administration has begun work on 129 miles (206 kilometers) of Pentagon-funded projects in California, Arizona and New Mexico since the Supreme Court ruled in July that construction can proceed during a legal challenge. The Pentagon has diverted $6.1 billion to pay for c...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A Salvadoran woman seeking asylum in the United States spends her days holed up in her cousin's cramped slum house just across the border in Mexico — too scared to leave after receiving a savage beating from two men three weeks ago while she was strolling home from a convenience store. The assault came after she spent four months in captivity in Mexico, kidnapped into prostitution during her journey toward the U.S. The woman, 31, is among 55,000 migrants who have been returned to Mexico by the Trump administration to wait for...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration's move to vastly extend authority of immigration officers to deport people without allowing them to appear before judges, the third legal setback for its immigration agenda in one day. The policy, which was announced in July but hasn't yet been enforced, would allow fast-track deportations to apply to anyone in the country illegally for less than two years. Now, they are largely limited to people arrested almost immediately after crossing the Mexican border. U.S. District J...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A Southern California ministry whose leaders are charged with using deadbolt locks to detain homeless residents and making them turn over panhandling money was no fly-by-night operation. Imperial Valley Ministries was known in the remote desert region for decades of work helping drug addicts turn their lives around. The ministry operated a ranch for men, a group home for women and a small headquarters office on one of the busiest streets in El Centro, a city of 45,000 people in a region of scorching summers, high u...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — Four days after a man killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand, court documents show a San Diego college student expressed regret in a text message that he missed watching the livestream video of the attack and praised the shooter's writings as "spot on with everything," and something everyone should read. Five days later, authorities say John T. Earnest set a mosque on fire in Escondido, north of San Diego, where seven people on a retreat were sleeping inside and escaped safely. A month later, they say Earnest opened f...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — More than 900 children, including babies and toddlers, were separated from their parents at the border in the year after a judge ordered the practice be sharply curtailed, the American Civil Liberties Union said Tuesday in a legal attack that will invite more scrutiny of the Trump administration's widely criticized tactics. The ACLU said the administration is separating families over dubious allegations and minor transgressions including traffic offenses. It asked a judge to rule on whether the 911 separations from June 28, 2...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A new policy to deny asylum to anyone who shows up on the Mexican border after traveling through another country threatens to exacerbate overcrowding at severely strained U.S. immigration detention centers and makeshift holding areas. Photos and video of Vice President Mike Pence's visit Friday to McAllen, Texas, showing men crammed behind chain-link fences offered the latest glimpse into squalid conditions at Customs and Border Protection facilities. Women are being held in smaller tents at the station. The Border Patrol h...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Hundreds of immigrants showed up at border crossings Tuesday in hopes of getting into the U.S. but faced the likelihood of being turned away under a new Trump administration asylum rule that upends long-standing protections for people fleeing violence and oppression in their homelands. The policy went into effect Tuesday but drew two swift lawsuits from immigrant advocacy groups in federal courts, one in San Francisco and one in Washington, D.C. "This is the Trump administration's most extreme run at an asylum ban yet," s...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — An appeals court on Wednesday upheld a freeze on Pentagon money to build a border wall with Mexico, casting doubt on President Donald Trump's ability to make good on a signature campaign promise before the 2020 election. A divided three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco agreed with a lower court ruling that prevented the government from tapping Defense Department counterdrug money to build high-priority sections of wall in Arizona, California and New Mexico. The decision is a setback for T...
"Inhumane." ''Shameful." ''Intolerable." ''Brutal." Mounting revelations about squalid and dangerously overcrowded conditions at Border Patrol holding centers have fueled public outrage heading into the Fourth of July weekend, with protesters taking to the streets and social media to decry the situation as un-American and unacceptable. The swelling furor over President Donald Trump's immigration polices comes as the administration said Wednesday that it is looking for more properties to permanently hold unaccompanied children who cross the...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge has blocked President Donald Trump from building key sections of his border wall with money secured under his declaration of a national emergency, delivering what may prove a temporary setback on one of his highest priorities. U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr.'s order, issued Friday, prevents work from beginning on two of the highest-priority, Pentagon-funded wall projects — one spanning 46 miles (74 kilometers) in New Mexico and another covering 5 miles (8 kilometers) in Yuma, Arizona. On Saturday, Tr...
