Sorted by date Results 51 - 75 of 103
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — President Donald Trump is moving fast to spend billions of dollars to build a wall on the Mexican border with money secured under his declaration of a national emergency, but he first must get past the courts. On Friday, a federal judge in Oakland, California, will consider arguments in two cases that seek to block the White House from spending Defense and Treasury Department money for wall construction. California and 19 other states brought one lawsuit; the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition, r...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — After a 19-year-old gunman fired at least eight rounds into a California synagogue, he stopped to fumble with his semiautomatic rifle and then fled with 50 unused bullets, prosecutors said Tuesday. In his first court appearance, John T. Earnest pleaded not guilty to murder and attempted murder in the shooting that killed a worshipper and injured three others at the Chabad of Poway synagogue on the last day of Passover, a major Jewish holiday. He also pleaded not guilty to burning a mosque last month in nearby Escondido. Earnest...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — The Trump administration wants up to two years to find potentially thousands of children who were separated from their families at the border before a judge halted the practice last year, a task that it says is more laborious than previous efforts because the children are no longer in government custody. The Justice Department said in a court filing late Friday that it will take at least a year to review about 47,000 cases of unaccompanied children taken into government custody between July 1, 2017 and June 25, 2018 — the day...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — Border agents have been told to explicitly target Spanish speakers and migrants from Latin America in carrying out a Trump administration program requiring asylum seekers wait in Mexico, according to memos obtained by The Associated Press that reveal some inner workings of a top government priority to address the burgeoning number of Central Americans arriving in the country. The Trump administration launched the program in late January in what marks a potentially seismic shift on how the U.S. handles the cases of immigrants se...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A jackhammer reduced prototypes of President Donald Trump's prized border wall into piles of rubble Wednesday, a quick ending to an experiment that turned into a spectacle at times. The four concrete and four steel panels, spaced closely together steps from an existing barrier separating San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, instantly became powerful symbols associated with the president and one of his top priorities when they went up 16 months ago. For Trump's allies, the towering models were a show of his commitment to border s...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — In Washington, it's all about the wall. At the border, it's only part of the story. Border authorities are struggling with outdated facilities ill-equipped to handle the growing increase in family migrants, resulting in immigrants being released onto the streets every day. The immigration court system is so clogged that some wait years for their cases to be resolved, and lacks funding to pay for basic things like in-person translators. An increase in sick children arriving at the border is putting a strain on medical r...
By, Associated Press TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Thousands of Central Americans journeying toward the United States were 2,500 miles from their destination in October when they reached a moment of decision: Should they press on toward the U.S. border? Or should they stop and put down roots in Mexico, where the government offered to let them stay? Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a group of activists escorting the caravan, warned the migrants that the offer might be too good to be true and called a voice vote on whether to continue. "Let's keep going!" the c...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Just 7 years old, Jackeline Caal was picked up by U.S. authorities with her father and other migrants this month in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert. Some seven hours later, she was put on a bus to the nearest Border Patrol station but soon began vomiting. By the end of the two-hour drive, she had stopped breathing. Jackeline hadn't had anything to eat or drink for days, her father later told U.S. officials. The death of the Guatemalan girl is the latest demonstration of the desperation of a growing number of Central A...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — No criminal charges will be filed against any of the 42 people associated with a caravan of Central American migrants who were arrested in a clash that ended with U.S. authorities firing tear gas into Mexico to counter rock throwers, The Associated Press has learned. The decision not to prosecute came despite President Donald Trump's vow that the U.S. will not tolerate lawlessness and after extensive preparations were made for the caravan, including deployment of thousands of active-duty troops to the border. Charges were n...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — President Donald Trump is strongly defending the U.S. use of tear gas at the Mexico border to repel a crowd of migrants that included angry rock-throwers and barefoot, crying children. On Tuesday, U.S. authorities lowered the number of arrests during the confrontation to 42 from 69. Rodney Scott, chief of the Border Patrol's San Diego sector, said the initial count included some arrests in Mexico by Mexican authorities who reported 39 arrests. Scott also defended the agents' decisions to fire tear gas into Mexico, saying t...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — With about 3,000 Central American migrants having reached the Mexican border across from California and thousands more anticipated, the mayor of Tijuana said Friday that the city was preparing for an influx that will last at least six months and may have no end in sight. Juan Manuel Gastelum said there were 2,750 migrants from the caravan in Tijuana and that estimates by Mexico's federal government indicate the number could approach 10,000. "No city in the world is prepared to receive this — if I'm allowed — this avalanch...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Migrants in a caravan of Central Americans arrived in Tijuana by the hundreds Wednesday, getting their first glimpse of the robust U.S. military presence that awaits them after President Donald Trump ordered thousands of troops to the border. Several hundred people from the caravan got off buses and made their way to a shelter on the Mexican side near the border to line up for food. Doctors checked those fighting colds and other ailments while several dozen migrants, mostly single men, spent the night at a Tijuana b...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — President Donald Trump tweeted an ad that blames Democrats for allowing a Mexican man who was in the U.S. illegally to kill two police officers in Northern California in 2014 in methamphetamine-fueled attacks. Luis Bracamontes was sentenced to death. The ad shows video of Bracamontes saying in court that he wished he had killed more police officers, one of his many outbursts before the judge. The ad links Bracamontes' crimes to a large caravan of Central American migrants moving through Mexico and suggests that Democrats w...
ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — Former President Barack Obama said Saturday that November midterm elections would give Americans "a chance to restore some sanity in our politics," taking another swipe at his successor as he raises his profile campaigning for fellow Democrats to regain control of the House. Obama didn't mention President Donald Trump by name during a 20-minute speech in the key Southern California battleground of Orange County but the allusions were clear. "We're in a challenging moment because, when you look at the arc of American h...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A federal judge on Friday said the Trump administration was solely responsible for reuniting hundreds of children who remain separated from the parents after being split at the U.S.-Mexico border, puncturing a government plan that put the onus on the American Civil Liberties Union. "The reality is that for every parent that is not located, there will be a permanently orphaned child and that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration," U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said. His remarks in a conference call came a d...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — The Trump administration said Thursday that more than 1,800 children separated at the U.S.-Mexico border have been reunited with parents and sponsors but hundreds remain apart, signaling a potentially long wait for anguished families. The federal government was under a Thursday deadline to reunify more than 2,500 children who were separated at the border from their parents under a new immigration policy designed to deter immigrants from coming here illegally. The policy quickly backfired amid global outrage from political and r...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A federal judge on Friday commended Trump administration efforts to reunify young children and families separated at the border but also said he plans to watch closely as a deadline approaches involving older children. U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said at a hearing in San Diego that the government has demonstrated good faith and largely complied with a deadline this week to reunite families with children under 5. At the same time, he indicated he will be monitoring the administration's actions ahead of a July 26 deadline t...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — Lugging little backpacks, smiling immigrant children were scooped up into their parents' arms Tuesday as the Trump administration scrambled to meet a court-ordered deadline to reunite dozens of youngsters forcibly separated from their families at the border. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, two boys and a girl who had been in temporary foster care were reunited with their Honduran fathers at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement center about three months after they were split up. The three fathers were "just holding them and h...
LOS FRESNOS, Texas (AP) — Gabriel Canas, a bus driver from El Salvador who fled his homeland after members of MS-13 stormed his bus, did an initial screening interview for asylum under the worst circumstances. He hadn't spoken to his 9-year-old daughter since the Border Patrol separated them two weeks earlier. And in that time, he had been moved repeatedly from one detention facility to another. "The day I had my interview, I wasn't well because they'd taken my daughter away. I was worried sick. I didn't know where she was. I hadn't spoken t...
McALLEN, Texas (AP) — The Trump administration has scaled back a key element of its zero-tolerance immigration policy amid a global uproar over the separation of more than 2,300 migrant families, halting the practice of turning over parents to prosecutors for charges of illegally entering the country. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said Monday that President Donald Trump's order last week to stop splitting immigrant families at the border required a temporary halt to prosecuting parents and guardians, unless they h...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — The MS-13 gang made Jose Osmin Aparicio's life so miserable in his native El Salvador that he had no choice but to flee in the dead of night with his wife and four children, leaving behind all their belongings and paying a smuggler $8,000. Aparicio is undeterred by a new directive from Attorney General Jeff Sessions declaring that gang and domestic violence will generally cease to be grounds for asylum. To him, it's better to take his chances with the American asylum system and stay in Mexico if his bid is denied. "...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Deflect blame for the bad things. Take undue credit for the good things. When President Donald Trump and his environmental chief sat down with different audiences this past week, the blame game was on display. So was some chest-thumping. Trump tried to lay responsibility on Democrats for the separation of children from parents at the border, even though the policy comes from his own administration. He cited outdated numbers to boast about a decline in illegal border crossings. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott P...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — The group that organized a monthlong caravan of Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States wanted to draw attention to the plight of people fleeing violence. If headlines are any measure, it has been a smashing success. President Donald Trump and Cabinet members have called the caravan a deliberate attempt to overwhelm U.S. authorities and proof that more must be done to secure the border with Mexico, including construction of a wall. The rhetoric from the White House and its allies has also fueled an o...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Tension between the Mexican government and Central American asylum seekers simmered Wednesday as men, women and children camped in a large plaza for a fourth straight day waiting for U.S. inspectors to process their claims. U.S. Customs and Border Protection had accepted 28 caravan members for processing at San Diego's San Ysidro crossing by late Tuesday, leaving about 100 to wait at the Mexican entrance under tarps tied to waist-high metal gates to shield them from sporadic rain. Another 20 or so caravan members were a...
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — The caravan of Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States sought the world's attention as scores of migrants traveled through Mexico on a journey to escape their violent homelands. Now that the group has arrived at the border, the next steps in their journey will unfold mostly out of public view. The caravan first drew attention in the U.S. when President Donald Trump promised that his administration would seek to turn the families away. The rest of the asylum-seeking process will happen slowly and s...
