Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs is expected to veto the trespassing bill as well as one that cleared the second of both houses Wednesday that would make it a state crime to enter Arizona illegally between ports of entry.

“They are acting on clear political signals from the voters that immigration and the border is their No. 1 issue,” Stan Barnes, a Phoenix-based political consultant and former Republican state senator, said of the GOP lawmakers. “This is what their constituents want.”

Arrests for illegal crossings topped 2 million for the first time in each of the government’s last two budget years, and Arizona in recent months emerged as the most popular area to cross.

The state Senate’s GOP said the “Arizona Border Invasion Act” would “protect Arizona citizens and communities from the crime and security threats associated with the current border invasion caused by the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce immigration laws.”

It would allow local law enforcement to arrest non-U.S. citizens who enter Arizona from anywhere but a lawful entrance point. A violation would be a top-tier misdemeanor – or a low-level felony for second offenses.

“I think we are seeing an effort in these bills to advance an inflammatory immigration agenda,” said Noah Schramm, policy strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union in Arizona. “They seem to trying to force Hobbs into a situation where she has to say ‘no,’ and then they can say she is unwilling to do anything on the border.”

The moves in Arizona come as Republicans in several states, most notably Texas, trumpet tough immigration policies in the lead up to this year’s presidential election.

A federal judge on Thursday blocked a new Texas law that would give police broad powers to arrest migrants suspected of illegally entering the U.S., rejecting Republican Gov. Abbott’s immigration enforcement effort. The preliminary injunction pausing the law came as President Joe Biden and his likely Republican challenger in November, Donald Trump, were visiting distinct areas of the Texas-Mexico border.

Federal law already prohibits the unauthorized entry of migrants into the U.S. But Republicans in Arizona and Texas say that the U.S. government is not doing enough and they need additional state powers.

Hobbs “has declared on numerous occasions her disapproval for the lawlessness caused by the federal government’s open border policies,” said Arizona Sen. Janae Shamp, who sponsored the state border control bill. “Now is her chance to protect the citizens of Arizona by signing.”

Hobbs confirmed Thursday she planned to veto the bills and said she recognizes that Arizonans are frustrated by the situation on the border.

Texas-Mexico Border Feb 29

On the Rio Grande, 300 miles apart, Biden and Trump try to use immigration to election advantage

Immigration 16 hours ago

Judge blocks Texas law that gives police broad powers to arrest migrants who enter the US illegally

“But passing job killing, anti-business bills that demonize our communities is not the solution,” she said. “Instead of securing our border, these bills will simply raise costs, hurt our farmers, put Arizona entrepreneurs out of business, and destroy jobs for countless working class Arizonans.”

A separate Arizona bill that focuses on trespassing has raised eyebrows because of its author’s stated intention that it could be used by farmers to legally kill people crossing their properties.

But the text of the bill does not mention migrants or the border, instead making a few changes in an existing law.

Republican Rep. Justin Heap used the example of a rancher defending his property from migrants when he said his bill would close “a loophole” in the earlier law that allows a property owner to use deadly force against someone inside a home but not elsewhere on the property.

“We are seeing an increasingly larger number of migrants or human traffickers moving across farm and ranchland,” Heap told a committee hearing earlier this year.

His statement brought to mind one case in which border rancher George Kelly faces trial later this month in the fatal shooting of a migrant on his Nogales area property.

Abbott said in an interview with a conservative commentator earlier this year that his state was doing everything to stop migrants from crossing the border illegally short of shooting them “because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

This isn’t the first time Republican lawmakers in Arizona have tried to criminalize migrants who aren’t authorized to be in the United States.

When passing its landmark 2010 immigration bill, the Arizona Legislature considered expanding the state’s trespassing law to criminalize the presence of immigrants and imposed criminal penalties.

But the trespassing language was removed and replaced with a requirement that officers, while enforcing other laws, question people’s immigration status if they’re believed to be in the country illegally.

The questioning requirement was ultimately upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court despite the racial profiling concerns of critics, but courts barred enforcement of other sections of the law.

The law touched off a national furor with supporters calling for similar legislation for their own states and detractors calling for an economic boycott of Arizona.

Several other Arizona immigration laws have been thrown out by courts over the years.

The preliminary injunction granted by U.S. District Judge David Ezra pauses a law that was set to take effect March 5 and came as President Joe Biden and his likely Republican challenger in November, Donald Trump, were visiting Texas’ southern border to discuss immigration. Texas officials are expected to appeal.

Opponents have called the Texas measure the most dramatic attempt by a state to police immigration since a 2010 Arizona law that opponents rebuked as a “Show Me Your Papers” bill. The U.S. Supreme Court partially struck down the Arizona law, but some Texas Republican leaders want that ruling to get a second look.

Ezra cited the Constitution’s supremacy clause and U.S. Supreme Court decisions as factors that contributed to his ruling. He said the Texas law would conflict with federal immigration law, and the nation’s foreign relations and treaty obligations.

Ezra wrote in his decision that allowing Texas to “permanently supersede federal directives” due to an invasion would “amount to nullification of federal law and authority — a notion that is antithetical to the Constitution and has been unequivocally rejected by federal courts since the Civil War.”

Following Ezra’s decision, the office of Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he immediately appealed the ruling.

“We have appealed this incorrect decision. Texas has a clear right to defend itself from the drug smugglers, human traffickers, cartels, and legions of illegal aliens crossing into our state as a consequence of the Biden Administration’s deliberate policy choices,” said Paxton in a statement. “I will do everything possible to defend Texas’s right to defend herself against the catastrophic illegal invasion encouraged by the federal government.”

The lawsuit is among several legal battles between Texas and Biden’s administration over how far the state can go to try to prevent migrants from crossing the border.

The measure would allow state law enforcement officers to arrest people suspected of entering the country illegally. Once in custody, they could agree to a Texas judge’s order to leave the country or face a misdemeanor charge for entering the U.S. illegally. Migrants who don’t leave after being ordered to do so could be arrested again and charged with a more serious felony.

At a Feb. 15 hearing, Ezra expressed skepticism as the state pleaded its case for what is known as Senate Bill 4. He also said he was somewhat sympathetic to the concerns expressed by Abbott and other state officials about the large number of illegal crossings.

Ezra, who was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, said he feared the United States could become a confederation of states enforcing their own immigration laws. “That is the same thing the Civil War said you can’t do,” Ezra told the attorneys.

Civil rights groups, who also sued the state, have argued the law could lead to civil rights violations and racial profiling.

Republicans who back the law have said it would not target immigrants already living in the U.S. because of the two-year statute of limitations on the illegal entry charge and would be enforced only along the state’s border with Mexico.

Tensions have remained high between Texas and the Biden administration this year over who can patrol the border and how. Other GOP governors have expressed support for Abbott, who has said the federal government is not doing enough to enforce immigration laws.

Among other things, Texas placed a floating barrier in the Rio Grande, put razor wire along the U.S.-Mexico border and stopped Border Patrol agents from accessing a riverfront park in Eagle Pass that they previously used to process migrants.

First responders in Eagle Pass say they are overwhelmed and increasingly traumatized by what they see: parents drowned or dying, their children barely holding onto life after attempting to cross the Rio Grande.

The emotional strain on firefighters and EMTs has grown so great that city officials have applied for a state grant that would bring in additional mental health resources for front-line workers, NBC News reported.

“It’s an unprecedented crisis,” said Eagle Pass Fire Chief Manuel Mello. “It’s nothing close to what I experienced while I was on the line. It’s a whole different monster.”

Firefighters say the first calls for help usually blare through the three stations in Eagle Pass while crews are still sipping their morning coffee, bracing themselves for what the day will bring.

Parents with young children might be near drowning or trapped on islands somewhere between the United States and Mexico, surrounded by the fierce currents of the Rio Grande.

On some shifts, firefighters with the Eagle Pass Fire Department can spend three to five hours in the water, helping rescue migrants crossing the river or recovering their drowned bodies.

“It’s something we’ve never gone through,” said Eagle Pass native Marcos Kypuros, who has been a firefighter and EMT for two decades. “It’s been hard having to keep up with that on top of everything else we take care of.”

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Mexico Feb 13

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Eagle Pass has become ground zero in recent months for an unrelenting border crisis that is equal parts political and humanitarian.

With hundreds of thousands of people attempting to cross the border illegally each year near Eagle Pass, city emergency personnel have increasingly been called upon to perform difficult and often dangerous rescues or to retrieve dead bodies, they said. They do this while juggling other emergencies in the city of 28,000 and throughout sparsely populated Maverick County.

“They see decomposing bodies, they see children that have drowned. Babies 2-months-old, with their eyes half-open, their mouths full of mud,” Mello said. “I know that when I signed up, they told me that I would see all of that, but not in the number that these guys are seeing now.”

Call volumes to the fire department surged last summer after Title 42, which set limits on asylum-seekers hoping to enter the United States, was lifted. On a typical day, the department might receive 30 calls, but the number has doubled in recent months, Mello said.

The added strain prompted one of his firefighters, who was still working through the required probationary period, to turn in his gear and switch careers entirely, he added.

After a record-breaking number of illegal crossings in December, federal authorities say the figure dropped by half in January. The most significant decrease was in the U.S. Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector, which includes Eagle Pass.

But the steady rise in crossings last year has taken a toll on first responders who did not sign up for this kind of work, Kypuros said.

“Those times where we recover four or five, six, up to seven bodies a day — it was just rough,” he said.

As the number of calls for emergencies on the border grew last fall, so did the number of sick days firefighters requested, according to the fire chief.

“I try and leave all this at work, not take it home with me, but it’s so hard,” Kypuros said. “Sometimes it’s hard to cope.”

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It was not immediately clear when the funds the city applied for would be awarded.

After the record-breaking number of attempted border crossings last year, Abbott ramped up the state’s immigration enforcement efforts. Last week, he announced the deployment of 1,800 members of the Texas National Guard to Eagle Pass in an effort to curb illegal crossings.

Abbott, a Republican, installed razor wire near the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass as part of the enforcement operation, and previously placed buoys in the river to prevent crossings.

Firefighters have treated lacerations and open wounds from people trying to crawl through the concertina wire, Kypuros said. At times, local hospitals get so overwhelmed with patients from the border that wait times for a bed can stretch to two hours, Garcia added.

As thousands of people without pathways to U.S. citizenship wait in squalid, makeshift camps on the Mexico side of the border, others attempt dangerous river crossings across the Rio Grande, endangering their own lives and those of their loved ones.

Harish Garcia, who has worked as a firefighter EMT in Eagle Pass for three years, still cannot shake the memory of a drowning mother and her young daughter. Garcia’s crew, including a firefighter with a daughter around the same age as the little girl, loaded the two into an ambulance, he said, but it was too late.

When crews returned to the station, some called their families. Others went quiet, Garcia said.

“Unfortunately, calls are going to keep coming in after that, so we can’t hang on to that for too long,” he said months later. “We have to just let it go and move on to the next call.”

Garcia and Kypuros say they’ve lost count of how many bodies they’ve recovered in recent months. The majority are found after failed attempts to cross the river, but other calls have led fire crews into the rough brush of South Texas, where dehydration and exposure can prove just as deadly.

David Black, a psychologist who has worked with the California law enforcement community for more than 20 years, said witnessing the death of a child is often the most traumatizing event a first responder can experience. Without a strong support system both in and out of the workplace, that stress can eat away at them.

“We outsource our worst-case scenarios to first responders,” he said. “If you have your own children, that can really impact how you look at your own family.”

As Eagle Pass waits for the state grant to be approved, agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other federal workers already have access to mental health resources internally.

The services, which include on-site clinicians and field psychologists, are part of a larger effort to “improve resiliency and encourage our colleagues to seek help when they need it,” said Troy Miller, acting CBP commissioner.

Mello said that despite the uncertain nature of the border crisis and the political tensions between the White House and the governor’s office, he is optimistic that help will come.

Until then, he knows the calls for help will keep coming.

Morgan Chesky reported from Eagle Pass, Texas, and Alicia Victoria Lozano from Los Angeles.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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The administration, stymied by Republican lawmakers who rejected a negotiated border bill earlier this month, has been exploring options that President Joe Biden could deploy on his own without congressional approval, multiple officials and others familiar with the talks said. But the plans are nowhere near finalized and it’s unclear how the administration would draft any such executive actions in a way that would survive the inevitable legal challenges. The officials and those familiar with the talks spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to comment on private ongoing White House discussions.

The exploration of such avenues by Biden’s team underscores the pressure the president faces this election year on immigration and the border, which have been among his biggest political liabilities since he took office. For now, the White House has been hammering congressional Republicans for refusing to act on border legislation that the GOP demanded, but the administration is also aware of the political perils that high numbers of migrants could pose for the president and is scrambling to figure out how Biden could ease the problem on his own.

White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández stressed that “no executive action, no matter how aggressive, can deliver the significant policy reforms and additional resources Congress can provide and that Republicans rejected.”

“The administration spent months negotiating in good faith to deliver the toughest and fairest bipartisan border security bill in decades because we need Congress to make significant policy reforms and to provide additional funding to secure our border and fix our broken immigration system,” he said. “Congressional Republicans chose to put partisan politics ahead of our national security, rejected what border agents have said they need, and then gave themselves a two-week vacation.”

Arrests for illegal crossings on the U.S. border with Mexico fell by half in January from record highs in December to the third lowest month of Biden’s presidency. But officials fear those figures could eventually rise again, particularly as the November presidential election nears.

The immigration authority the administration has been looking into is outlined in Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives a president broad leeway to block entry of certain immigrants into the United States if it would be “detrimental” to the national interest of the United States.

Trump, who is the likely GOP candidate to face off against Biden this fall, repeatedly leaned on the 212(f) power while in office, including his controversial ban to bar travelers from Muslim-majority nations. Biden rescinded that ban on his first day in office through executive order.

But now, how Biden would deploy that power to deal with his own immigration challenges is currently being considered, and it could be used in a variety of ways, according to the people familiar with the discussions. For example, the ban could kick in when border crossings hit a certain number. That echoes a provision in the Senate border deal, which would have activated expulsions of migrants if the number of illegal border crossings reached above 5,000 daily for a five-day average.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has also called on Biden to use the 212(f) authority. Yet the comprehensive immigration overhaul Biden also introduced on his first day in office — which the White House continues to tout — includes provisions that would effectively scale back a president’s powers to bar immigrants under that authority.

After a record-breaking number of encounters at the southern border in December, crossings dropped by half last month, authorities reported Tuesday. The largest decrease was in the Del Rio sector that includes Eagle Pass, Texas, the main focus of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent border enforcement efforts. Mexico also increased enforcement efforts during that time after talks with U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration.

A look at the numbers and what’s behind them:

WHAT DO THE NUMBERS SAY?

Overall, arrests by U.S. Border Patrol dropped in January by 50% from 249,735 in December, the highest monthly tally on record.

Tucson, Arizona, was again the busiest sector for illegal crossings with 50,565 arrests, down 37% from December, followed by San Diego. Arrests in the Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector plummeted 76% from December to 16,712, the lowest since December 2021. Arrests in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, dropped 60% to 7,340, the lowest since July 2020.

A significant decrease was noted among Venezuelans whose arrests dropped by 91% to 4,422 from 46,920. But those numbers could change soon. Panama reported that 36,001 migrants traversed the dangerous Darien Gap in January, up 46% from December. The vast majority who cross the Panamanian jungle are Venezuelans headed to the United States, with considerable numbers from Haiti, China, Ecuador and Colombia.

WHAT IS MEXICO DOING?

Mexico has been forcing migrants from freight trains that they sometimes use to cross the country to get closer to the U.S. border. Immigration officers in Mexico also have been busing migrants to that country’s southern border and flying some back to their countries.

That enforcement effort began after a visit from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Mexico City on Dec. 28.

Mexican border states such as Coahuila partnered with Mexico’s federal government. By January, members of Mexico’s military and national guard were patrolling the banks of the Rio Grande. Officers filled buses with migrants and drove them away from Piedras Negras, which is on the Mexican side of the river across from Eagle Pass.

WHAT IS TEXAS DOING?

Over in Eagle Pass, the Texas National Guard took over a city-owned park along the river. Texas has denied U.S. agents access to Shelby Park since Jan. 10. It also installed additional razor wire and anti-climbing fencing in the area.

Border Patrol agents had previously used the park for monitoring and patrols, as well as to process migrants who made it across the river to U.S. soil. Migrants who are seeking asylum are released to await immigration court proceedings that can take years.

“What you have is this magnet,” Mike Banks, Texas’ border czar, said. “You’re basically saying, `Cross the river right here. Get across and we’ll process immediately and release you.’ So again, that’s a pull factor. So we’ve taken that pull factor away.”

WHAT ELSE IMPACTS THE NUMBERS?

The number of people trying to make the journey often increases when the weather is warmer in the U.S. and decreases during the colder months. Since 2021, crossings on the southern border increase by an average of 40% from January to March, according to federal data from the last three years.

Another factor last year was the end of COVID-19 restrictions in May. The use of a public health policy known as Title 42 allowed the Trump and Biden administrations to turn asylum-seekers back to Mexico, even if they were not from that country.

Crossings fell dramatically for a month after Title 42 ended and the Biden administration enforced new rules.

Under Title 42 migrants were denied asylum more than 2.8 million times starting in March 2020 on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19. When Title 42 expired, the Biden administration launched a policy to deny asylum to people who travel through another country, such as Mexico, to the U.S., with few exceptions.

However, the numbers eventually started climbing until reaching December’s record high.

As passing legislation on border security in Congress appears unlikely, the plans under consideration signal that the White House wants to take action before numbers at the border, which have dropped in the past month, rise again as expected.

The plans have been under consideration for months, the officials said. In December, as Congress prepared to leave town for the holidays with no border solution, illegal crossings of the southwest border hit records at more than 10,000 per day.

The unilateral measures under consideration might upset some progressives in Congress, the officials said, but they noted that Democratic mayors who have asked for more help from the federal government to handle the influx of migrants in their cities would be pleased. The measures are still being drafted and are not expected to take place any time soon.

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan border bill that they had negotiated with Democrats and the Biden administration over the preceding months.

In a statement, a White House spokesperson said, “The administration spent months negotiating in good faith to deliver the toughest and fairest bipartisan border security bill in decades because we need Congress to make significant policy reforms and to provide additional funding to secure our border.”

“Today, Congressional Republicans chose to put partisan politics ahead of our national security and voted against what border agents have said they need. No regulatory actions would accomplish what the bipartisan national security agreement would have done for border security and the immigration system at large.”

Regardless of how much any executive action might appear to increase immigration enforcement both on the border and in the interior of the U.S., the officials said, it would pale in comparison to the effects that would arise if Congress had passed the border security bill.

“It’s a plan B,” an official said. Both officials said doing nothing is not an option.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden argued the bipartisan bill would have “made important fixes to our broken immigration system,” calling it “the toughest, fairest law” on the border ever proposed.

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Feb 6

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Biden faces growing political backlash, some of it from members of his own party, over his handling of the border as he campaigns for re-election. He plans to cite the Republican turnabout on the bipartisan border legislation as proof that for political reasons the GOP does not really want to solve the problem. But he is still vulnerable on the issue, trailing his likely 2024 opponent, former President Donald Trump, by more than 30 points on securing the border and controlling immigration, according to a new NBC News poll released this week.

The Biden administration has already taken multiple unilateral actions to try to stem the flow of migrants.

In May, when Covid restrictions were set to lift at the border, the Department of Homeland Security introduced restrictions that would make more migrants eligible for speedy deportations. But overwhelming numbers meant the vast majority of migrants apprehended by border agents were still released into the U.S.

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In finalizing a new rule earlier this week, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services shared details on the new fees, which will apply to any benefit requests postmarked on or after April 1.

The new fees affect benefits related to employment-based visas, work authorizations, applications to register as a permanent resident, and those to apply for naturalization.

“For the first time in over seven years, USCIS is updating our fees to better meet the needs of our agency, enabling us to provide more timely decisions to those we serve,” USCIS Director Ur M. Jaddou said in a written statement.

Some fees, including those to replace existing permanent resident cards, will slightly decrease when the changes go into effect.

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The news release said that USCIS will use the new revenues to “improve customer experience and stem backlog growth.”

The rule comes after USCIS conducted a year-long review that included more than 5,400 public comments.

As a result of the input, the agency says the new fees are the same or lower than originally published in a proposed rule change first published in January 2023.

Also, there is a standard $50 discount for applications submitted online, and a reduction in the fees for Employment Authorization Document applications when you are adjusting your status or if you are under the age of 14 in certain situations.

While this is the first full filing fee adjustment since December 2016, USCIS has announced increases for some processing fees more recently.

In December, the agency announced that it would increase the filing fee for Form I-907 to Request Premium Processing, to adjust for inflation.

The adjustment, which goes into effect February 26, increases certain premium processing fees from $1,500 to $1,685, $1,750 to $1,965, and $2,500 to $2,805. 

What are the new fees of the most popular forms?

Here is the list with all the new immigration fees.

It was the first group since January 2022 and was comprised of men, women and children mostly from inland and southern Honduras, where many farm workers lost their jobs due to the closure of some plantations.

“We are determined to keep going because here we are worse off. We have no jobs. We are hungry,” said Edgar Iván Hernández, a 26-year-old farm worker who was traveling with three relatives.

His cousin, Arnold Ulises Hernández, said they were encouraged to join the caravan after finding out about it on social networks. “The best way is to leave in a group because that way we are not stopped much by the police or immigration,” he said.

The vast majority of migrants cross Central America and Mexico in small groups, using all types of transportation and smuggling networks. Only a few form caravans.

The San Pedro Sula bus terminal is where migrants leave daily in buses headed north toward the U.S., but it was also the origin of the massive caravans of late 2018 and 2019.

In those years, many made it as far as the southern U.S. border. But after the pandemic the situation changed radically due to pressure from the U.S., which asked Mexico and Central American governments to increase their efforts to stop migrants headed north.

Since then, the caravans were stopped first in southern Mexico and later in Guatemalan territory.

Days before Honduran President Xiomara Castro took office in January 2022, a similar group of some 600 migrants departed from San Pedro Sula and was disbanded by Guatemalan security forces.

In 2023, there were record numbers of migrants all over the hemisphere. Arrests for illegal crossings into the U.S. from Mexico intensified by the end of year when U.S. authorities registered up to 10,000 illegal crossings over several days in December. The number dropped to 2,500 in the first days of January.

In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton rejected the Biden administration’s request for the state to “cease and desist” its takeover of Shelby Park, an epicenter of southwest border illegal immigration in Eagle Pass.

“Because the facts and law side with Texas, the State will continue utilizing its constitutional authority to defend her territory, and I will continue defending those lawful efforts in court,” Paxton wrote.

When reached for comment, a DHS spokesperson referred NBC News to Department of Homeland Security General Counsel Jonathan Meyer’s letter this week directing the state to stop blocking the Border Patrol’s full access to roughly 2½ miles of the U.S.-Mexico border occupied by the state’s National Guard.

DHS officials said Saturday that a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande after Border Patrol agents “were physically barred by Texas officials from entering the area” under orders from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. The Texas Military Department disputed the DHS statement, saying its personnel were aware of a distress report but had not detected any distressed migrants.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

Judge Christina Martyak agreed to a three-month extension, referred Aarón Rodriguéz and Cindy Baneza to free legal aid provided by the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami in the same courthouse — and their case remains one of the unprecedented 3 million currently pending in immigration courts around the United States.

Fueled by record-breaking increases in migrants who seek asylum after being apprehended for crossing the border illegally, the court backlog has grown by more than 1 million over the last fiscal year and it’s now triple what it was in 2019, according to government data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Judges, attorneys and migrant advocates worry that’s rendering an already strained system unworkable, as it often takes several years to grant asylum-seekers a new stable life and to deport those with no right to remain in the country.

“Sometimes hope already sinks,” said Mayra Cruz after her case was also granted an extension by Martyak because the Peruvian migrant doesn’t have an attorney.

“But here I’ve felt a bit safer,” added Cruz, who said she had to flee with only the clothes on her back with her partner and their children after repeated threats from gangs.

About 261,000 cases of migrants placed in removal proceedings are pending in the Miami court — the largest docket in the country. That’s about the same as were pending nationwide a dozen years ago, said Syracuse University professor Austin Kocher.

The backlog includes migrants who have been in the United States for decades and were apprehended on unrelated charges, but most are new asylum seekers who declare a fear of persecution if they are sent back, he added.

Backlogged courts, administered by the Justice Department, often get little attention in immigration debates, including in current Senate negotiations over the Biden administration’s $110 billion proposal that links aid for Ukraine and Israel to asylum and other border policy changes.

When migrants are apprehended by U.S. authorities at the border, many are released with a record of their detention and instructions to appear in court in the city where they are headed. That information is passed on from the Department of Homeland Security to the Justice Department, whose Executive Office for Immigration Review runs the courts, so that an initial hearing can be scheduled.

“They’re just being released without any idea of what comes next,” said Randy McGrorty, executive director of Catholic Legal Services for the Archdiocese of Miami, which has seen hundreds of thousands of migrants join its diaspora communities.

So many migrants go to them for advice that, in the last couple of years, they’ve largely switched to teaching how to self-petition and represent themselves before judges.

“We help them understand what judges want, and we help judges with efficiency and preserving fundamental rights,” said Miguel Mora, a Catholic Legal Services supervising attorney in Miami.

Advocates say that most migrants ask for individual legal representation, something that’s becoming increasingly rare given the huge numbers, and how to get work permits, which migrants can apply for 150 days after filing their asylum application.

It’s a vicious cycle — without regular work, most can’t afford even a low-cost lawyer, so their cases can take even longer.

“We don’t have the money,” Rodriguéz, 23, told Judge Martyak, who had already granted him an extension for having no attorney at a previous hearing, as his partner rocked the stroller where their U.S.-born baby slept. They fled Honduras after the gang that had killed the father of Baneza’s oldest child threatened further violence unless they started paying from the meager profits of their tortilla shop.

“We were left with no other option than get out of the country,” Rodriguéz told The Associated Press. “We’ve already had three court appearances. Time is helping. We’re getting a little bit oriented.”

But the slow-moving process also means it takes years for asylum-seekers to be able to reunite with families they left behind and integrate fully in American society, said Karen Musalo, an attorney and professor who leads the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at the University of California in San Francisco.

Time also doesn’t help with the backlog, even though government records show judges completed far more cases in the last year than ever before, because their dockets keep growing so fast. Their average caseload is now 5,000 per judge, said Mimi Tsankov, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

She cited estimates that doubling the current number of judges to about 1,400 might solve the current backlog by 2032. In the new budget request, the Executive Office for Immigration Review is requesting funds from Congress to hire 150 new judges and support staff, said its press secretary, Kathryn Mattingly.

Experts like retired judge Paul Schmidt, who also served as government immigration counsel while the last major reform was enacted nearly forty years ago, say the broken system can only be fixed with major policy changes. An example would be allowing most asylum cases to be solved administratively or through streamlined processes instead of litigated in courts.

“The situation has gotten progressively worse since the Obama administration, when it really started getting out of hand,” said Schmidt, who in 2016, his last year on the bench, was scheduling cases seven years out.

In the mid-2010s, families and children from Central America seeking asylum became the majority of illegal crossers at the U.S. southern border. In response, the Obama administration as well as the Trump and Biden administrations started prioritizing some categories of cases they want solved faster to reflect enforcement priorities.

But courts are ineffective deterrents to people desperate to flee their countries, and judges say shuffling cases around only adds to the chaos as they wade through dozens if not hundreds of cases a day.

At the courthouse in Miami last week, one judge went looking for a Haitian family who hadn’t shown up, then granted an order of deportation in absentia, just as she had for a Colombian family who also failed to appear at their hearing immediately before.

Another judge found that a Cuban mother, then a Venezuelan man had applied for other forms of protection special to their countries and dismissed their cases, telling them they were done with the court. The woman broke into grateful tears. The man, who had come more than 200 miles for the minutes-long hearing, mumbled “God bless you” in Spanish.

And a steady stream of migrants went to find Catholic Legal Services — one couple directed there by the judge to figure out how to present in court their video of the gang murder that had forced them to flee.

___

Associated Press reporter Elliot Spagat contributed from San Diego, California.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

The pair of men, from New York City, are accused of staging armed robberies at at least four places in Massachusetts and at least four more nationwide, prosecutors said. Both were arrested Dec. 13 on a charge of conspiracy to commit visa fraud — Rambhai Patel, 36, in Seattle and Balwinder Singh, 39, in Queens.

The alleged scheme let clerks present for the fake robberies apply for what’s known as a U visa, which lets people who’ve been mentally or physically abused and help prosecute criminals stay in the United States for four years.

In the staged robberies, prosecutors said, the pretend robber would show what appeared to be a weapon, then take money from the register and flee. The store’s clerk and/or the owner — both were allegedly involved in the schemes, with the victims paying Patel and Patel paying the store owners — would wait at least five minutes to call police and report the robbery.

Prosecutors didn’t share information on specific reported robberies that they allege were faked, or say if others are being charged with participating.

It wasn’t immediately clear if Patel or Singh had attorneys who could speak to their charges, which carry a sentence of up to five years in prison for a conviction.

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Worried about his mother’s health, Jacob Mabil tried for months to persuade her to let him start the process that would take her from a sprawling refugee camp where she had spent almost a decade after fleeing violence in South Sudan.

He wanted her to come live with him and his young family in the U.S. But before she would agree, she asked for a promise: that he would one day also bring the granddaughters she had raised since they were babies.

Mabil, now 44, said he would do everything he could. But it turned out that he was allowed to petition only for immediate family members. Though his mom joined him in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, in 2020, his nieces remained in Africa.

“That always killed me,” said Mabil, whose own childhood was ripped apart by civil war in Sudan.

As the U.S. government transforms the way refugees are being resettled, Mabil and his family now have hope that they will be reunited with two of his nieces, who soon turn 18 and 19. The Biden administration opened the application process this month that lets Americans who have formed groups to privately sponsor refugees request the specific person they want to bring to the U.S.

When he was just 8, Mabil was forced to run for his life as soldiers came into his village in what is now South Sudan, setting it on fire as they killed people. He became part of the group of children known as the “lost boys,” who spent years on their own and walked hundreds of miles to flee violence.

Mabil, who didn’t even know his mother was alive until shortly after he arrived in the U.S. in his early 20s, said he wants his sister’s daughters to have the same opportunities that he has had.

Traditionally, resettlement agencies have placed refugees in communities, but the push to add private sponsorship as well has come as President Joe Biden works to restore a program that was decimated under former President Donald Trump. The launch at the start of 2023 of the State Department’s Welcome Corps program, which allows everyday Americans the chance to form their own groups to privately sponsor refugees, came after a similar endeavor that let U.S. citizens sponsor Afghans or Ukrainians.

“In many ways it is, I think, one of the most important things that the U.S. resettlement program has ever done,” said Sasha Chanoff, founder and CEO of RefugePoint, a Boston-based nonprofit that helps refugees. “It will allow families who are in desperate need to reunite to do so.”

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With the U.S. hoping to bring in 125,000 refugees this fiscal year, the use of private sponsors expands the capacity of the existing system, said Welcome Corps spokeswoman Monna Kashfi said. She added that the opportunity to apply to sponsor a specific refugee has been greatly anticipated.

“We have heard all throughout the year from people who wanted to know … when they could submit an application to sponsor someone that they know,” she said.

Mabil, his wife and his mother have already joined two family friends to form their own sponsor group to start the process to bring over his two nieces, who were placed in a boarding school when their grandmother left Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya for the U.S. One is set to graduate soon and the other has returned to the camp after graduating.

Chanoff said that unaccompanied girls are often “in extraordinary danger” at the camp and regularly kidnapped and sold into marriage.

Mabil’s wife, Akuot Leek, 33, is also from South Sudan and spent her childhood traveling from place to place with her family to try to escape violence. She wants the young women to have the same freedom that she had to choose what to do with their lives.

Leek and Mabil began dating after meeting at a wedding in the U.S. and both are college graduates who now work in finance.

Mabil was one of about 20,000 youths who joined an odyssey that took them first to Ethiopia, where they spent about three years before a war there forced them to flee again. The survivors eventually made it to Kakuma, where Mabil spent almost a decade before coming to the U.S.

“They had survived bullets and bombs and wild animal attacks and things that you and I can’t imagine to get to Kakuma camp,” said Chanoff, who met Mabil at the camp.

Leek and Mabil say that once his nieces are settled in Texas, they may work to bring over other family members.

Mabil’s mother, Adeng Ajang, said living with her son and daughter-in-law and four grandchildren in their comfortable home has made her very happy. Now, the only stress she has in her life is worrying about her granddaughters.

“It was difficult to leave them,” said Ajang as her daughter-in-law translated from the Dinka language. “It was hard.”

Ajang said talks to her granddaughters on the phone often. “Sometimes we talk and then we will start to cry,” she said.

For Mabil, he’s excited and nervous to start the process. “This is my last chance,” he said.

Video journalist Kendria LaFleur contributed to this report.

The United States added 1.6 million people, more than two-thirds of which came from international migration, bringing the nation’s population total to 334.9 million. It marks the second year in a row that immigration powered population gains.

A decline in the number of deaths since the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic also contributed to the U.S. growth rate.

Population gains stem from immigration and births outpacing deaths.

After immigration declined in the latter half of last decade and dropped even lower amid pandemic-era restrictions, the number of immigrants last year bounced back to almost 1 million people. The trend continued this year as the nation added 1.1 million people.

The last time immigration surpassed 1.1 million people was in 2001, according to Census Bureau figures compiled by William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution.

It is a sign of things to come. Without immigration, the U.S. population is projected to decline as deaths are forecast to outpace births by the late 2030s.

“The immigration piece is going to be the main source of growth in the future,” Frey said.

The census determines how many U.S. congressional seats each state gets. If trends continue through the 2030 count, California could lose four U.S. House seats and New York three. Texas could gain four seats and Florida could add three, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.

While low by historical standards, 2023’s half-percent growth rate was a slight uptick from the 0.4% rate last year and the less than 0.2% increase in 2021.

There were about 300,000 fewer deaths this year compared with a year earlier. That helped double the natural increase to more than 500,000 people in 2023, contributing to the largest U.S. population gain since 2018, according to estimates that measure change from mid-2022 to mid-2023. The population increased in 42 states, up from last year’s 31 states.

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The vast majority of growth, 87%, came from the South, a region the Census Bureau defines as stretching from Texas to Maryland and Delaware. But the concentration of growth seen during the height of the pandemic in Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia diminished in 2023.

“We peaked in the movement of people to those Sun Belt hotshots,” Frey said. “It’s tapering off a little bit.”

South Carolina’s 1.7% growth rate topped all other states, and its population rose by more than 90,000 residents. More than 90% of the growth came from domestic migration, or people moving from another U.S. state to South Carolina. Without domestic and international migration, the Palmetto State would have lost population in 2023 with almost 1,300 more deaths than births.

Florida had the next-highest growth rate at 1.6%, adding more than 365,000 residents. That was also the second-highest growth in terms of raw numbers. Only Texas surpassed it, gaining more than 473,000 people. More people moved to Florida than any other’s U.S. state this year, with the almost 373,000 movers about evenly split between domestic and international. Significantly fewer residents died in Florida compared to last year, leading to a natural decrease of only around 7,600 people.

Of the 50 states, New York had the biggest rate of population decline, losing 0.5%. It also recorded the largest decline in pure numbers, with a drop of almost 102,000 residents, although it marks a much smaller decline than last year’s 180,000-person drop. The almost 74,000 international arrivals and the state’s natural increase of more than 41,000 residents couldn’t offset the almost 217,000 New Yorkers who departed the state from mid-2022 to mid-2023.

California was still the nation’s most populous state, with 38.9 million residents, though it lost more than 75,000 residents this year. The decline was an improvement from the more than 113,000-person drop last year. Texas was the second most populous state with 30.5 million residents.

For the first time, Georgia surpassed 11 million people in 2023, joining only seven other states above that population threshold.

“Barring something completely unforeseen, the 2020s are shaping up to be the South’s decade,” the Brennan Center for Justice said in a report on Tuesday.

___

Follow Mike Schneider on X, formerly known as Twitter: @MikeSchneiderAP.

The separation of thousands of families “represents one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country,” U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said moments before approving a settlement between the Justice Department and families represented by the American Civil Liberties Union that ended a legal challenge nearly seven years after it was filed.

Sabraw, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, ordered an end to separations in June 2018, six days after then-President Donald Trump halted them on his own amid intense international backlash. The judge also ordered that the government reunite children with their parents within 30 days, setting off a mad scramble because government databases weren’t linked. Children had been dispersed to shelters across the country that didn’t know who their parents were or how to find them.

As he reminisced and congratulated lawyers on both sides, the judge recalled a sense of horror over initial allegations and how subsequent disclosures left him increasingly dismayed over how the policy was carried out in 2017 and 2018. He read from an earlier order in which he said the practice was “brutal, offensive and fails to comply with traditional notions of fair play and decency.”

Sabraw referred to another court filing in 2018 that described how many parents were deported without knowing where their children were. “Simply cruel,” he said.

The government and volunteers have yet to locate 68 children who were separated under the policy to determine if they are safe and reunited with family or loved ones, according to the ACLU. Sabraw said those children who are unaccounted for was “always my greatest fear and concern.”

Under the settlement, the type of “zero-tolerance” policy under which the Trump administration separated more than 5,000 children from parents who were arrested for illegally entering the country would be prohibited until December 2031.

Children may still be separated but under limited circumstances, as has been the case for years. They include if the child is believed to be abused, if the parent is convicted of serious crimes or if there are doubts that the adult is the parent.

Families that were separated may be eligible for other benefits — legal status for up to three years on humanitarian parole; reunification in the United States at government expense; one year of housing; three years of counseling; legal aid in immigration court. But the settlement doesn’t pay families any money. In 2021, the Biden administration considered compensating parents and children hundreds of thousands of dollars each, but talks stalled.

As he seeks to return to the White House in next year’s elections, Trump has been noncommittal whether he would try to resume family separations. He defended the results in an interview with Univision last month, claiming without evidence that it “stopped people from coming by the hundreds of thousands.”

“When you hear that you’re going to be separated from your family, you don’t come. When you think you’re going to come into the United States with your family, you come,” Trump said.

The Department of Homeland Security referred Friday to an earlier statement by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that the settlement reflects efforts to address a “cruel and inhumane policy, and our steadfast adherence to our nation’s most dearly held values.”

ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told reporters that the judge’s comments Friday “said it all. This was a tragic episode in our country’s history.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to the ruling Friday.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is involved with the negotiations, told reporters Monday night that new pathways to citizenship won’t be a part of any final agreement.

“I think I’ve developed a reputation as being a fairly reasonable, compromise-oriented person. You come to me and tell me we had to have DACA and path to citizenship in this bill, it would be the last discussion you have with me [on] border security,” Tillis said. “This is not the time, or the place, nor the policy construct for it to work.”

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a top Democratic negotiator in the talks, said that while DACA is a priority that Democrats would want to see included in the deal, it doesn’t align with what Republicans want the final bill to look like.

Congressional leaders are aiming to pass legislation before Christmas that includes supplemental aid to Israel, Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific, multiple people involved in discussions told NBC News this month. Republicans are demanding tougher border security measures and stricter asylum laws in exchange for the additional Ukraine aid sought by the Biden administration.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

A paralegal in Sheepshead Bay is accused of stealing thousands of dollars from immigrants she falsely promised to provide legal services to at a lower rate — when she did no legal work for them or file petitions on their behalf, and at times falsely said she was an attorney, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office said.

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez and Special Agent-in-Charge of Homeland Security Investigations, New York Ivan Arvelo, announced Monday the indictment of Zoya Shamilova of Sheepshead Bay on a 17-counts in which she was charged with grand larceny, attempted grand larceny, immigrant assistance services fraud, attempted immigrant assistance services fraud, coercion, practicing law without a license and first-degree scheme to defraud.

Shamilova was released without bail. She is set to return to court on Jan. 17, 2024. Attorney information was not immediately known.

According to the district attorney, citing the indictment, from about May 2022 to August 2023, Shamilova falsely claimed that she could help the victims — who were from Poland, Ukraine, Serbia, India and Kazakhstan — with various immigration services including greencards and obtaining Temporary Protected Status for a fee fo about $4,500 to $16,250. Allegedly, the victims met Shamilova when they sought consultations with the law firm where she was employed as a paralegal, and stole more than $38,000 from individuals she promised to help.

According to the indictment, after accepting the payments from the victims, Shamilova did not file any petitions with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Rather, she allegedly made excuses or simply ignored calls and text messages from clients who were looking for updates on their cases.

Additionally, Shamilova allegedly threatened to report two undocumented individuals to immigration authorities after they questioned her.

The apparent fraud was discovered when an individual texted the founder and managing partner of the law firm to follow up on her case, saying she had met with Shamilova to retain the firm.

Allegedly, after the founder looked into the matter and found documents related to the fraud, she fired Shamilova and reported her to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office and other agencies.

“We allege that this defendant tried to enrich herself by targeting individuals from our vulnerable immigrant communities as they attempted to comply with federal requirements,” Gonzalez said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Arvelo shared similar sentiments calling Shamilova “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“As alleged, Zoya Shamilova lured vulnerable individuals with promises of cheaper legal services as they navigated the immigration process,” Arvelo said. “A wolf in sheep’s clothing, she is accused not only of stealing from her victims under the guise of legitimacy, but then threatening their livelihoods when they began to question her scheme. While our investigation found Shamilova charged each victim thousands of dollars, she is the person who will ultimately pay the greatest price.”

Authorities urge anyone who believes they have been victimized by Shamilova to contact the District Attorney’s Action Center at 718-250-2340 or send an e-mail to ShamilovComplaints@brooklynda.org.

This is the first time in years that U.S. immigration authorities are deporting people to the South American nation, marking a significant concession by the government of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to a longtime adversary.

The first plane, a Boeing 737 jet, took off from the Texas border city of Harlingen and touched down in Miami before arriving hours later outside Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. The roughly 130 passengers were Venezuelan women and men who were shuttled to the plane on buses, and wore wrist and ankle restraints. As they boarded, U.S. immigration officers patted them down.

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Biden’s administration said it plans to have “multiple” deportation flights a week to Venezuela, according to a U.S. Transportation Department waiver on travel restrictions, which would place Venezuela among the top international destinations for U.S. immigration authorities.

Restarted flights to Venezuela come after the country’s government and opposition agreed to work on electoral conditions that are expected to trigger relief from U.S. energy sanctions on the Maduro government.

“This flight to Venezuela is the first I’ve seen in my career of an entire charter flight of Venezuelans going back to their country. And we plan on having several more of these in the coming days and weeks,” said Corey Price, an acting executive associate director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Price said those who were prioritized for the flights include recent arrivals as well as migrants who have committed crimes in the U.S. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens said the passengers had illegally entered the U.S. between ports of entry. State television showed footage of migrants in face masks exiting the plane in Maiquetia airport outside Caracas.

The deportees will find a homeland that is still in the midst of complex social, political and economic crises. The Venezuelan government said it had entered into an agreement with the U.S. government that “allows the orderly, safe and legal repatriation of Venezuelan citizens from the United States.” In a statement issued when the flights were first announced, Maduro’s government blamed recent migration on economic sanctions and said it would assist deportees with resources.

The situation has evolved since a global drop in the price of oil — Venezuela’s most valuable resource — a decade ago and mismanagement by the self-proclaimed socialist government pushed the country into a downward spiral. People are grappling with constant food-price hikes and business closures, and workers try to meet their needs with a monthly minimum wage of $3.70 that’s barely enough to buy a gallon of water.

The U.S. government employs a fleet of charter carriers known collectively as ICE Air. Using charter airlines though, these flights, which typically carry 135 migrants, will fly to Venezuela from unspecified airports in the United States, according to the Department of Homeland Security. They will be for Venezuelans who have received final removal orders, which are issued after losing an asylum bid or to those who weren’t able to seek humanitarian protection.

The flights are in response to “an increase in migration from Venezuela that is straining immigration systems throughout the hemisphere — including in the United States,” the Transportation Department said in its waiver.

The U.S. has struggled for years to deport people to countries with which it has strained diplomatic relations, including Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. After a hiatus of more than two years, Cuba allowed for the resumption of U.S. deportations in April, with deportation flights there operating only about once a month.

The U.S. government hopes the recent threat of deportation will be enough to make Venezuelans reconsider trying to enter the United States illegally — and opt instead for the online appointment system to make asylum claims or attempt other legal paths. But it has not deterred many people from continuing to migrate.

Venezuelan migration to the U.S. tapered off a year ago when the Biden administration agreed to allow Venezuelans to enter the country if they applied online with a financial sponsor who also arrived at the airport. More than 61,000 Venezuelans came on that route since last October.

The restart of the deportation flights takes places just weeks after the Biden administration announced that it is granting temporary legal status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans that have arrived in the U.S. by July 31.

The temporary status makes it easier for them to get work authorization and stop deportation orders.

Experts and immigration attorneys are urging Venezuelans to apply to TPS to prevent their repatriation.

“Venezuelans who have not applied for TPS and have deportation orders could be affected,” said Rachel Leon, an immigration attorney in Florida. “Those who are eligible for TPS should apply as soon as possible to avoid facing deportation.”

At the same time, Mexico agreed to let in some Venezuelans who were deported from the U.S. after crossing the border illegally, recognizing that Venezuela wouldn’t.

The lull was short-lived. In August, Venezuelans were arrested more than 22,000 times on charges of crossing the border illegally, fourth behind people migrating from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. Many head to New York, Chicago and other major U.S. cities, overwhelming shelters and temporary housing there.

___ Gonzalez reported from Harlingen, Texas. Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.

The settlement between the Biden administration and the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been representing families separated from their children, still has to be approved by the judge. But if finalized, it would make it much more difficult for any administration including former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, to revive one of his most controversial tactics to halt immigration at the southern border if he wins next year’s election.

“It is our intent to do whatever we can to make sure that the cruelty of the past is not repeated in the future. We set forth procedures through this settlement agreement to advance that effort,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told The Associated Press.

The Trump administration separated thousands of children from their parents or guardians they were traveling with as it moved to criminally prosecute people for illegally crossing the southwestern border. Minors could not be held in criminal custody with their parents. They were transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services and then typically sent to live with a sponsor, often a relative or someone else with a family connection.

Faulty tracking systems by U.S. officials caused many to be apart for an extended time or never reunited with their parents. Facing strong opposition, Trump eventually reversed course in 2018, days before a judge put a halt to the practice after a lawsuit brought by the ACLU. During a CNN town hall earlier this year, Trump didn’t rule out once against separating families.

Lee Gelernt, lead counsel for the ACLU, praised the settlement.

“This settlement means that babies and toddlers will finally get to see their parents after years apart and that these suffering families will have an opportunity to seek lawful status. It also crucially bars an attempt by a future administration to reenact another family separation policy,” said Gelernt. “Nothing can make these families whole again but this is at least a start.”

President Joe Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office to reunite families. According to figures released by the Department of Homeland Security in February, 3,881 children were separated from their families from 2017 to 2021. About 74% of those have been reunited with their families: 2,176 before a Biden administration task force was created and 689 afterward.

Hundreds of families sued the federal government, seeking both monetary damages and policy changes.

This settlement filed in federal court in San Diego does not include monetary damages. But it does provide key benefits including authorization for parents of separated children to come to the U.S. under humanitarian parole for three years and work in the U.S. The families receive some help with housing and medical and behavioral health benefits designed to address some of the trauma associated with the separations.

Mayorkas described how he’d met with a woman who had been separated from her daughter and how after they had been reunited, her daughter still struggled with the experience.

“We need to help these families heal. And that is an obligation that we carry because of the pain that we inflicted upon them,” he said.

They’ll also get access to legal services which will be vital as they may file asylum applications to stay in the United States on a permanent basis. The settlement also waives the usual one-year timeline limiting when someone can apply for asylum, and the parents can apply even if they were previously denied, Gelernt said. A special team of supervisors will review their cases.

Some of these benefits were already available to families under a Biden-administration created task force designed to reunite separated families. But Gelernt said the settlement goes beyond the task force’s purview in key ways such as the asylum assistance. The settlement also bars future separations, which the task force did not, and Gelernt said a future administration could have disbanded the task force whereas the settlement is binding.

Under the settlement, it would still be possible to separate children at the border from their parents or guardians, but under limited scenarios, as has been the case for many years. They include if the child is being abused or the parent committed a much more serious crime than crossing the border illegally.

The settlement requires the government to keep detailed documentation when it does separate children from parents so as to avoid the chaos that erupted during the Trump-era family separations where parents and children could not be reunited.

At one point in 2021, the administration was negotiating a possible payout of hundreds of thousands of dollars to each parent and child who was separated. Word leaked on negotiations and produced a political backlash.

Now that the government and the ACLU have agreed on a settlement plan, the judge will hold a hearing to decide whether to accept it. Before that, people opposed to the settlement can raise objections to the judge.

The ruling is a victory for the Biden administration and its approach to creating new pathways to enter the United States, while, at the same time, making it more difficult for those who don’t follow prescribed methods to seek asylum.

More than 263,000 people scheduled appointments on the CBP One app from when it was introduced in January through August, including 45,400 who were processed in August. The top nationalities of those who scheduled appointments are Haitian, Mexican and Venezuelan.

The app has been criticized on the right as too permissive and on the left as too restrictive.

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CBP One has become “the sole mechanism to access the U.S. asylum process at a (port of entry) on the southern border,” attorneys for Al Otro Lado and the Haitian Bridge Alliance argued in a brief before Friday’s hearing in San Diego. Turning back people without appointments violates agency policy and leaves them ”stranded in dangerous Mexican border towns, vulnerable to kidnapping, assault, rape, and murder,” they said.

The Justice Department insisted there is no policy of turning back asylum-seekers. While those with appointments get priority, officers cannot “turn back” people without them, government attorneys wrote.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Schopler, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, said his hands were effectively tied by Supreme Court precedent that limits his authority on immigration policy.

The plaintiffs are disappointed with the decision and considering an appeal, said Melissa Crow, an attorney for the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, which represents them.

Katherine Shinners, a Justice Department attorney, told the judge that his reasoning was correct and the case was “fairly straightforward.”

Faced with an influx of asylum-seekers from more than 100 countries, the administration’s mix of legal pathways and more enforcement is being challenged in court on several fronts.

The government appealed a decision to block a new rule that makes it more difficult to claim asylum for anyone who travels through another country, like Mexico, and enters the U.S. illegally. That rule remains in effect while under appeal.

Another closely watched case challenges a policy to grant a two-year stay for up to 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela if they apply online with a financial sponsor and arrive at an airport. Texas is leading 21 states to argue that Biden overreached, saying it “amounts to the creation of a new visa program that allows hundreds of thousands of aliens to enter the United States who otherwise have no basis for doing so.”

The challenge to CBP One will continue in San Diego, despite the judge’s refusal on Friday to intervene immediately.

But President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has so far rejected a U.S. request to set up sites in Mexico, noting he would prefer to have such centers in countries that are the sources of migration, despite the fact that a considerable number of migrants enter the United States from Mexico.

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López Obrador said that he would raise the subject in a meeting of Latin American leaders he will host later this month, suggesting that the countries might agree to a common plan on such sites.

“We have been looking at setting up sites in Mexico, because they (the United States) have asked for it,” López Obrador said. “We have not accepted it, first we want to talk to the presidents,” referring to the Oct. 22 meeting with the leaders of 11 countries that are on migration routes.

The meeting will be held in the southern Mexico city of Palenque. Among those expected to attend are Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama and Belize.

Migrant transit centers financed by the United States have been set up in Guatemala to receive applications from Central American citizens seeking to apply for work visas, family reunifications or refugee status.

The centers are part of a larger migratory strategy aimed at reducing the large number of migrants from Latin American and the Caribbean to the United States.

Eventually, applicants with scheduled appointments will be received at offices to be opened in eight places across Guatemala.

The influx of migrants has caused tension between the United States and Mexico.

On Monday, the Mexican government sent a diplomatic note to the United States complaining about the closure of some freight or train border crossings because of the large number of migrants gathered on the border.

Mexico also protested Texas’ truck inspections that have caused major delays at border crossings. López Obrador claimed Monday that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to enforce additional truck inspections was “very irresponsible” and politically motivated.

Mexico’s national freight transport chamber said Sunday that 19,000 trucks were delayed at the border. The freight association claimed the delayed trucks were carrying about $1.9 billion in goods.

The Texas Department of Public Safety said it had started “enhanced commercial vehicle safety inspections” on Sept. 19 in crossing around El Paso and Del Rio, Texas, “to deter the placement of migrants and other smuggling activity” and detect unsafe vehicles.

But it all may end soon. A sudden procedural change in how the federal government processes green cards for foreign-born religious workers, together with historic highs in numbers of illegal border crossers, means that thousands of clergy like him are losing the ability to remain in this country.

“We were right on the edge of becoming permanent residents, and boom, this changed,” Colombia-born Castillo said as his wife rocked their 7-month-old boy, a U.S. citizen by birth. “We have done everything correctly, from here onward we believe that God will work a miracle. We don’t have any other option.”

To become permanent U.S. residents, which can eventually lead to citizenship, immigrants apply for green cards, generally through U.S. family members or employers. A limited number of green cards are available annually, set by Congress and separated into categories depending on the closeness of the family relationship or the skills needed in a job.

Citizens of countries with disproportionately high numbers of migrants are put in separate, often longer green card queues. Currently, the most backlogged category is for the married Mexican children of U.S. citizens – only applications filed before March 1998 are being processed.

For faith leaders, the line historically has been short enough to get a green card before their temporary work visas expired, attorneys say.

That changed in March. The State Department announced that for nearly seven years it had been placing in the wrong line tens of thousands of applications for neglected or abused minors from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and would now start adding those to the general queue with the clergy. Since the mid-2010s, a surging number of youth from these countries have sought humanitarian green cards or asylum after illegally crossing into the U.S.

This change means that only applications filed before January 2019 are currently being processed, moving forward the Central American minors by a few months but giving clergy with expiring visas, like Castillo, no option but to leave their U.S. congregations behind.

“They’re doing everything they’re supposed to be doing and all of a sudden, they’re totally steamrolled,” said Matthew Curtis, an immigration attorney in New York City whose clients, like an Israeli rabbi and a South African music minister, are running out of time. “It’s like a bombshell on the system.”

Attorneys estimate so many people are now in the queue that the wait is at least a decade long, because only 10,000 of these green cards can be granted annually.

Curtis’ firm advises potential clergy applicants that “there is no indication when you can receive a green card.”

That’s likely to dissuade religious organizations from hiring foreign workers precisely when they’re most needed because of the growing demand for leaders of immigrant congregations who can speak languages other than English and understand other cultures.

“There’s a comfort to practice your religion in your native tongue, in someone close to your culture celebrating Mass,” said Olga Rojas, the Archdiocese of Chicago’s senior counsel for immigration. The U.S. Catholic Church has also turned to foreign priests to ease a shortage of local vocations.

At one Chicago-area parish that’s been helping with this year’s surge of new arrivals from the border, two Mexican religious sisters have started ministries for women in the shelters as well as English classes, Rojas said.

“These two sisters know they won’t get green cards,” she added, and they expect to lose other religious sisters and brothers who are teachers, principals and serve in other key roles. “That’s catastrophic.”

Those from religious orders with vows of poverty, like Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks, are especially hard hit, because most other employment visa categories require employers to show they’re paying foreign workers prevailing wages. Since they’re getting no wages, they don’t qualify.

Across all faith traditions, there are few options for these workers to continue their U.S.-based ministry, attorneys say. At a minimum, they would need to go abroad for a year before being eligible for another temporary religious worker visa, and repeat that process, paying thousands in fees, throughout the decade – or for however long their green card application stays pending.

“A big concern is that leaving is not really viable. The church will replace the pastor or shut down, it’s too much instability,” said Calleigh McRaith, Castillo’s attorney in Minnesota.

Being in limbo is challenging for the affected religious workers, including Stephanie Reimer, a Canadian serving a nondenominational Christian youth missionary organization in Kansas City. Her visa expires in January.

“I’ve done a lot of praying,” she said. “There are days when it feels overwhelming.”

Martin Valko, an immigration attorney in Dallas whose clients include imams and Methodist pastors, said many rely on their faith to stay hopeful.

But realistic options are so few that the American Immigration Lawyers Association and faith leaders, like Chicago’s Catholic cardinal and coalitions of evangelical pastors, have lobbied the Biden administration and Congress to fix the problem.

Administrative solutions could include allowing religious workers to at least file for their green cards, so they can get temporary work authorization like those in other queues awaiting permanent residence.

The most effective and immediate fix would be for Congress to remove from this category the vulnerable minors’ applications, attorneys say. Despite being humanitarian, they make up the vast majority of the queue they share with religious workers, said Lance Conklin, a Maryland attorney who co-chairs the lawyer association’s religious workers group.

“They shouldn’t be pitted against each other in competition for visas,” said Matthew Soerens, who leads the Evangelical Immigration Table, a national immigrant advocacy organization.

Back at the Iglesia Pentecostal Unida Latinoamericana, Castillo said he has ministered to a family with two young children who survived the Darien Gap, a jungle in Central America favored by smugglers that’s among the most dangerous parts of migrants’ journeys, and a mother and daughter who said they came “through the hole” in the border wall.

“Some of them are in a better migration situation” than himself and his wife Yarleny, Castillo said. But he added that his call to minister to them is undaunted. “I serve God. He will take charge of these affairs while I lead those he has entrusted to me.”

That’s why, even as they face having to leave the country when their visas expire in February, the Castillos are fundraising to buy the building where they now rent worship space. They also regularly drive 10 hours to South Dakota, where they’re establishing another church.

“In this work, one is constantly helping destroyed migrant families,” Yarleny Castillo said. “And they need a space like this.”

—-

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Christian Martinez, 29, is the first conviction for the U.S. government over the tragedy in San Antonio, where the truck was found on a remote back road in June 2022. The dead included eight children who were riding inside the trailer that had no air conditioning in the sweltering Texas heat.

Martinez pleaded guilty to four smuggling-related charges and faces up to life in prison. Court records show his sentencing is set for Jan. 4.

David Shearer, an attorney for Martinez, declined comment.

Prosecutors said Martinez, who lived in suburban Houston, took the driver of the trailer to San Antonio to pick up the vehicle before it made its way to the U.S. border city of Laredo. Once there, Homero Zamorano Jr. allegedly loaded the migrants into the trailer and made his way back north while Martinez and four other men passed messages and made each other aware of the trailer’s progress.

Zamorano and the other defendants are still awaiting trial. Zamorano has pleaded not guilty.

An indictment unsealed in June alleged that the men worked with human smuggling operations in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. They allegedly shared routes, guides, stash houses, trucks and trailers, some of which were stored at a private parking lot in San Antonio.

The truck had been packed with 67 people, and the dead included 27 from Mexico, 14 from Honduras, seven from Guatemala and two from El Salvador, authorities in Mexico said.

Migrants paid the organization up to $15,000 each to be taken across the U.S. border. The fee would cover up to three attempts to get into the country, according to the indictment.

In a post shared on X, previously known as Twitter, Chaves said Rio Grand City Border Patrol agents discovered the infant at the Texas border and included a blurred image of the baby boy.

“This is a chilling reminder of how children are exploited by human traffickers and criminal organizations every day,” Chavez added.

The incident comes amid a growing crisis at the border as a record number of migrant children are making the perilous journey through Latin America to reach the U.S., according to the U.N. children’s agency. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded over 149,000 children crossing in the fiscal year 2021, more than 155,000 in fiscal year 2022, and over 83,000 in the first eight months of fiscal year 2023, UNICEF said.

This is not the first time that a minor has been found alone at the border. On Aug. 23, two young siblings — a 7-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy — were found abandoned in Rio Grande City. They reportedly came from Chiapas, Mexico, and were left to fend for themselves near the Rio Grande River, in the Eagle Pass area.

Days earlier, two brother from Honduras, aged 12 and 4, were also found near the Rio Grande. They told authorities they were abandoned by migrant smugglers.

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Mohammad was a university professor, teaching human rights courses in Afghanistan before he fled for the United States. Mohammad is also Hazara, an ethnic minority long persecuted in his country, and he said he was receiving death threats under the Taliban, who reimposed their harsh interpretation of Sunni Islam after taking power in 2021.

He crossed the Texas border in April 2022, surrendered to Border Patrol agents and was detained. A year later, a hearing was held via video conference. His words were translated by a court interpreter in another location, and he said he struggled to express himself — including fear for his life since he was injured in a 2016 suicide bombing.

At the conclusion of the nearly three-hour hearing, the judge denied him asylum. Mohammad said he was later shocked to learn that he had waived his right to appeal the decision.

“I feel alone and that the law wasn’t applied,” said Mohammad, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition that only his first name be used, over fears for the safety of his wife and children, who are still in Afghanistan.

Mohammad’s case offers a rare look inside an opaque and overwhelmed immigration court system where hearings are often closed, transcripts are not available to the public and judges are under pressure to move quickly with ample discretion. Amid a major influx of migrants at the border with Mexico, the courts — with a backlog of 2 million cases -– may be the most overwhelmed and least understood link in the system.

AP reviewed a hearing transcript provided by Mona Iman, an attorney with Human Rights First now representing Mohammad. Iman also translated Mohammad’s comments to AP in a phone interview from Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas.

The case reflects an asylum seeker who was ill-equipped to represent himself and clearly didn’t understand what was happening, according to experts who reviewed the transcript. But at least one former judge disagreed and said the ruling was fair.

Now Mohammad’s attorney has won him a new hearing, before a different judge — a rare second chance for asylum cases. Also giving Iman hope is a decision this week by the Biden administration to give temporary legal status to Afghan migrants living in the country for more than a year. Iman believes he qualifies and said he will apply.

But Mohammed has been in detention for about 18 months, and he fears he could remain in custody and still be considered for deportation.

AP sought details and comment from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency didn’t address questions on Mohammad’s case but said noncitizens can pursue all due process and appeals and, once that’s exhausted, judges’ orders must be carried out.

____

For his April 27 hearing, Mohammad submitted photos of his injuries from the 2016 suicide bombing that killed hundreds at a peaceful demonstration of mostly Hazaras. He also gave the court threatening letters from the Taliban and medical documents from treatment for head wounds in 2021. He said militants beat him with sticks as he left the university and shot at him but missed.

In court, the government argued that Mohammad encouraged migration to the U.S. on social media, changed dates and details related to his history, and had relatives in Europe, South America and other places where he could have settled.

In ruling, Judge Allan John-Baptiste said the threats didn’t indicate Mohammad would still be at risk, and that his wife and children hadn’t been harmed since he left.

Mohammad tried to keep arguing his case, but the judge told him the evidentiary period was closed. He asked Mohammad whether he planned to appeal or would waive his right to do so.

Mohammad kept describing his claim, but John-Baptiste reminded him he’d already ruled. Mohammad said if the judge was going to ignore the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan, he wouldn’t ask for an appeal. John-Baptiste indicated he had considered it.

“You were not hit by the gunshot or the suicide bomber,” John-Baptiste said. “The harm that you received does not rise to the level of persecution.”

Mohammad continued, explaining how his family lives in hiding, his wife concealing her identity with a burqa.

“OK, are you going to appeal my decision or not?” John-Baptiste ultimately asked.

“No, I don’t,” Mohammad said.

“And we don’t want you to make the decision now that you can’t come back later and say you want to appeal. This is final, OK, sir?” John-Baptiste said.

“Yes. OK, I accept that,” Mohammad said.

He later asked whether he could try to come back legally. The judge started to explain voluntary departure, which would allow him to return in less than a decade, but corrected himself and said Mohammad didn’t qualify.

“I’m sorry about that, but, you know, I’m just going to have to order you removed,” John-Baptiste said. “I wish you the best of luck.”

Mohammad later told AP he couldn’t comprehend what was happening in court. He’d heard from others in detention that he had a month to appeal.

“I didn’t understand in that moment that the right would be taken from me if I said no,” he said.

___

Former immigration judge Jeffrey Chase, who reviewed the transcript, said he was surprised John-Baptiste waived Mohammad’s right to appeal and that the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld that decision. Case law supports granting protection for people who belong to a group long persecuted in their homelands even if an individual cannot prove specific threats, said Chase, an adviser to the appeals board.

But Andrew Arthur, another former immigration judge, said John-Baptiste ruled properly.

“The respondent knew what he was filing, understood all of the questions that were asked of him at the hearing, understood the decision, and freely waived his right to appeal,” Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for immigration restrictions, said via email.

Chase said the hearing appeared rushed, and he believes the case backlog played a role.

“Immigration judges hear death-penalty cases in traffic-court conditions,” said Chase, quoting a colleague. “This is a perfect example.”

Overall, the 600 immigration judges nationwide denied 63% of asylum cases last year, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Individual rates vary wildly, from a Houston judge who denied all 105 asylum requests to a San Francisco one denying only 1% of 108 cases.

John-Baptiste, a career prosecutor appointed during the Trump administration’s final months, denied 72% of his 114 cases.

Before Mohammad decided to flee, his wife applied for a special immigrant visa, which grants permanent residency to Afghans who worked for the U.S. government or military, along with their families.

But that and other legal pathways can take years. While they waited, Mohammad said, the Taliban came looking for him but instead detained and beat his nephew. Mohammad described making the devastating decision to leave his family, who had no passports.

He opted for a treacherous route through multiple countries to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, which has seen the number of Afghans jump from 300 to 5,000 in a year.

Mohammad said he crossed into Pakistan, flew to Brazil and headed north. He slept on buses and trekked through Panama’s notorious Darien Gap jungle, where he said he saw bodies of migrants who didn’t make it.

Mohammad planned to live with a niece in North Carolina. Now he fears if he’s sent home and his wife gets her visa, they’ll be separated again.

Deportations to Afghanistan are extremely rare, with a handful each year.

Attorney Iman said they’re grateful Mohammad’s case has been reopened, with a hearing scheduled for Oct. 4. She is fighting for his immediate release.

“I have no doubt that his case would have turned out differently had he been represented,” Iman said. “This is exactly the type of vulnerable individual that the U.S. government has promised, has committed to protect, since it withdrew from the country.”

____

Associated Press reporter Elliot Spagat contributed from San Diego.

For a second straight day in the French port city of Marseille, Francis took aim at European countries that have used “alarmist propaganda” to justify closing their doors to migrants, and tried to shame them into responding with charity instead. He called for migrants to have legal pathways to citizenship, and for the Mediterranean Sea that so many cross to reach Europe to be a beacon of hope, not a graveyard of desperation.

The Mediterranean, Francis told Macron and a gathering of regional bishops, “cries out for justice, with its shores that on the one hand exude affluence, consumerism and waste, while on the other there is poverty and instability.”

The pope’s visit to the city in southern France, which drew an estimated 150,000 well-wishers Saturday, comes as Italy’s far right-led government has reacted to a new wave of arriving migrants by threatening to organize a naval blockade of Tunisia and to step up repatriations. The French government, for its part, has beefed up patrols on its southern border to stop migrants in Italy from crossing over.

After the bishops’ meeting ended, Macron and Francis held a private, half-hour meeting. They spoke about migration issues and a series of other topics, the French presidency said, adding that both leaders share a “joint will” to bring human solutions to the situation.

France is a “host country” to migrants — especially to asylum seekers — and is supporting European solidarity policies, including through financing and fighting human trafficking, the French presidency said. The Vatican provided no readout of the meeting.

Macron’s centrist government has taken a harder line on migration and security issues after coming under criticism from French conservatives and the far right. With elections for the European Union’s parliament set for next year, Macron is pushing for the EU to strengthen its external borders and to be more efficient in deporting individuals who are denied entry.

Macron greeted Francis on a wind-swept promenade overlooking Marseille’s old port, and helped him walk into the Palais du Pharo for the Mediterranean bishops meeting. With his wife by his side, the French leader listened as a young Italian volunteer working in Greece and the bishop of Tirana, Albania, who fled to Italy during Albania’s communist rule, spoke of the welcomes they received in foreign countries.

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Border Patrol temporarily separated families this summer, court filing says

“May we let ourselves be moved by the stories of so many of our unfortunate brothers and sisters who have the right both to emigrate and not to emigrate, and not become closed in indifference,” Francis said. “In the face of the terrible scourge of the exploitation of human beings, the solution is not to reject but to ensure, according to the possibilities of each, an ample number of legal and regular entrances.”

Francis’ two-day trip was scheduled months ago, but it is taking place as mass migration to Europe isonce again making headlines. Nearly 7,000 migrants who boarded smugglers boats in Tunisia came ashore on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa within a day last week, briefly outnumbering the resident population.

Nevertheless, Francis said talk of a migration “emergency” only fuels “alarmist propaganda” and stokes peoples’ fears.

“Those who risk their lives at sea do not invade, they look for welcome, for life” he said. “As for the emergency, the phenomenon of migration is not so much a short-term urgency, always good for fueling alarmist propaganda, but a reality of our times.”

In addition to Macron, the pope’s audience on Saturday included European Commission Vice President Margarítis Schinás, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde and French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who has said France would not take in new migrants from Lampedusa.

The French president and first lady Brigitte Macron later attended Francis’ final Mass at the Marseille Velodrome that drew an estimated 50,000 people and featured a giant banner of the pope hoisted up in the stands. The Vatican, citing local organizers, said 100,000 more lined Marseilles’ central Avenue du Prado to cheer as his popemobile passed by.

History’s first Latin American pope has made the plight of migrants a priority of his 10-year pontificate. For his first trip as pope, he traveled to Lampedusa to honor migrants who had drowned while attempting to cross the sea.

In the years since, he has celebrated Mass on the U.S.-Mexico border, met with Myanmar’s Rohingya refugees and, in a visible display of his commitment, brought home 12 Syrian Muslims on his plane after visiting a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece.

Migrants and their advocates living in Marseille, which has a long tradition of multicultural hospitality, said Francis’ call for charity and paths to citizenship gave them hope that at least someone in Europe was sympathetic to their plight.

“It is a very beautiful opportunity for us,” said Francky Domingo, who is part of a Marseille-based association representing migrants seeking official identification documents. “We really want the pope to be our spokesperson to the politicians because the European policy on migration is very, very repressive for us migrants.”

Stephanie Tomasini, a 48-year-old Marseille resident who attended the mass, said the pope sent an important message. “We must be able to … extend a hand and share, all of us should do that. Today, we’re not faced with difficulties, but we could be tomorrow, and we will want someone to open the doors for us,” she said.

Many faithful came from across French regions to see the pope, who last visited the country almost a decade ago. Catherine Etienne, from Brest in western France, watched Francis’ parade with joy. “We are really happy to have seen the Pope. We’re very moved,” she said.

In his remarks, Francis also repeated his opposition to euthanasia, which he has long decried as a symptom of a “throwaway culture” which treats the elderly and infirm as dispensable. Listing euthanasia as a “social evil,” he criticized supporters of assisted suicide as providing “false pretenses of a supposedly dignified and ‘sweet’ death that is more ‘salty’ than the waters of the sea.”

The issue is current in France, where Macron is expected in the coming weeks to unveil a bill that would legalize end-of-life options in France. French media reported that he delayed the presentation of the measure until after the pope’s visit to keep the sensitive topic from interfering.

No details of the government’s proposal have been released, but several options are under consideration, including legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia for adult patients with incurable conditions under strict conditions that guarantee their free and informed consent.

The French presidency said Francis and Macron discussed the issue during their bilateral meeting but didn’t enter into the details.

___

Associated Press writers Nicolas Garriga, Helena Alves and Masha Macpherson contributed to the story.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Now as Yeison prepares to finally enter the U.S., it’s likely he will have to leave Niko behind.

That’s because Niko is a squirrel.

The 23-year-old man and his pet squirrel are an unusual but blunt reflection of the emotional choices migrants make over what to take — and what to leave behind — as they embark on the dangerous trip north. Yeison, who declined to give his last name because he fears for his family’s safety in Venezuela, said going without Niko was out of the question. But Mexico is where they might be forced to part ways.

Yeison, who is among millions of Venezuelans fleeing political and economic unrest back home, secured an appointment for Saturday to present himself at the border to seek entry to the U.S. and request asylum. Animals are generally not allowed to cross the border.

“It would practically be like starting with nothing, without Niko,” Yeison said.

Many who set off on the roughly 3,000-mile (4,800-kilometer) journey to the U.S. do so with only what they can carry and their loved ones. For Yeison, that was a squirrel with a black stripe and flecks of white hair, who made the long trip nesting in a red knit cap stuffed inside a backpack.

For six months, Yeison and Niko lived in a tent at an encampment with hundreds of other migrants in Matamoros. The site is across from the Texas border city of Brownsville, which is hundreds of miles east of Eagle Pass and not experiencing the same dramatic increase in migrants that prompted the mayor to issue an emergency declaration this past week.

On a recent day, Niko crawled over Yeison’s shoulders and stayed close while darting around the tent. Chances are slim Yeison can take Niko across the border, but volunteers at the encampment aren’t giving up.

Gladys Cañas, the director of a nongovernmental organization, Ayudándoles A Triunfar, said she has encountered other migrants who wanted to cross with their pets — cats, dogs and even a rabbit once. But until now, never a squirrel.

Cañas helped connect Yeison with a veterinarian to document Niko’s vaccinations to provide to border agents. She is hopeful they’ll allow the squirrel to cross, whether with Yeison or with a volunteer.

“There’s a connection between him and the squirrel, so much that he preferred to bring it with him than leave the squirrel behind with family in Venezuela and face the dangers that come with the migrant journey. They gave each other courage,” she said.

Yeison said he found the squirrel after nearly stepping on him one day in Venezuela. The squirrel appeared to be newly born and Yeison took him home, where he named him Niko and family members fed him yogurt. The picky squirrel, Yeison said, prefers nibbling on pine trees and is fed tomatoes and mangoes, even in times when food is hard to come by.

At first, Yeison said he sought work in Colombia. He returned to find a loose pine splinter lodged in Niko’s eye and resolved after that to take the squirrel with him on the next journey to the U.S.

Like thousands of migrants, Yeison made the trip through the perilous jungle known as the Darien Gap, where he said he found the body of a man under some blankets. He said he concealed Niko in a backpack when they boarded buses and crossed through checkpoint inspections in Mexico. But one time, Yieson said, a bus driver discovered the squirrel and made him pay extra to keep the animal on board. Yeison said he sold his phone for $35 to cover the cost.

Once they reached the encampment in Matamoros, the pair settled into a routine. Yeison makes money cutting hair by his tent and often falls asleep sharing the same pillow with Niko at night.

He was bracing for a separation.

“I don’t want for him to be separated from me, because I know that we’d get heartsick. I’m sure of that,” Yeison said. “And if he doesn’t get sick, I hope he gets to be happy. And that he never forgets my face.”

Dr. Paul Wise, a pediatrician associated with Stanford University, interviewed families in the Rio Grande Valley area of Texas this summer and found children as young as 8 were separated from their parents while being held in the temporary custody of Customs and Border Protection, according to the document filed Friday in the Central District of California.

“Interviews with parents and children found that there were minimal or no opportunities for phone contact or direct interaction between parent and child. The separation of families and the lack of interaction while in custody do significant, and potentially lasting, harm to children, particularly younger children,” Wise said in the court filing. 

Wise also said some migrants reported children younger than 8 were separated. He noted that in the past some teenage males who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with their mothers were separated from family pods that typically held younger children. But in the cases he documented this summer, the children being separated were much younger, according to the filing.

A Customs and Border Protection official told NBC News that the circumstances in which families are separated in CBP custody are rare and separation usually happens with a father is traveling alone with his children. If CBP personnel are not able to find a pod for that individual family due to overcrowding, they make an assessment based on the age of the children and sometimes put the children in a pod with other children of their age and gender, the official said.

Read the full story at NBCNews.com here.

The proposal would reform the H-2A visa program, under which hundreds of thousands of immigrants, mostly from Mexico, take on seasonal jobs in the U.S. agriculture industry. The number of people admitted under the program has soared in recent years, as rapid hiring after the pandemic and a low unemployment rate has left many farmers scrambling for workers.

Last year, about 370,000 people were admitted with H-2A visas, double the number in 2016 and five times as many as in 2005, Labor Department officials said. Yet as the popularity of the program has grown, so have concerns about abuses. Reports of overcrowded farm vehicles and fatalities have increased as the numbers have risen, senior department officials said.

The department is already required to ensure that the H-2A program doesn’t undercut the wages or working conditions of Americans who take similar jobs. Employers are required to pay minimum U.S. wages or higher, depending on the region.

“This proposed rule is a critical step in our ongoing efforts to strengthen protections for farm workers and ensure that they have the right to fair and predictable wages, safe working conditions and freedom from retaliation,” said Julie Su, acting secretary of Labor, in a statement.

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The new rule, which is subject to a 60-day comment period, seeks to make it easier for labor unions to contact and interact with the H-2A workers, and to protect the workers from retaliation if they meet with labor representatives. The workers would be allowed to have visitors, including those from labor groups, in employer-provided housing, for example.

The rule would also require farmers who employ H-2A workers to provide seat belts on vans that are often used to transport workers long distances. Transportation accidents are a leading cause of death for farm workers, according to the department.

And in a step intended to counter human trafficking, employers would be required to identify anyone recruiting workers on their behalf in the U.S. or foreign countries and to provide copies of any agreements they have with those recruiters.

Another visa program, the H-2B, which allows temporary workers in fields other than agriculture, already includes similar requirements, department officials said.

“We’re putting together a series of new protections or clarifying protections to make sure that workers in the program can really advocate on behalf of themselves, and that…will help prevent the problems that we’re seeing with exploitative conditions,” a senior Labor department official said.

“You’re talking about passing up something like $1 trillion in production every year that these jobs go unfilled,” David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, told CNBC.

With 5.8 million unemployed workers in the U.S., some economists say all of these roles are unlikely to be filled by people currently living in the U.S.

Currently, American immigration policies bar many employers from hiring unskilled migrants.

Bier explained, “In 1986, Congress banned people working without authorization in the U.S. They made it impossible to hire someone who was in the U.S. illegally or without employment authorization.”

Now, some argue this protects workers already living in the U.S., but the public is split almost evenly on this. Fifty-one percent of Americans surveyed by the Cato Institute worry immigration could reduce the number of jobs available. 

Meanwhile, the number of job openings remains at historic levels. Darrell Bricker, co-author of “Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline” and CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs said, “The effect of a shrinking aging population is a decline in innovation, combined with the fact that you’re just going to run out of the things that drove economic growth.”

He continued, saying there is “a huge opportunity for the United States to blunt some of the effects of fertility decline and population aging by having an immigration policy that may be a bit more focused, not necessarily on just accepting anybody for compassionate reasons, but for bringing in people to fill in those skill gaps.”

Bricker’s home country of Canada has a much more open immigration policy and credits its Covid pandemic recovery in part to its approach to immigration.

Dany Barah, associate professor of the practice of international and public affairs at Brown University and a Venezuelan immigrant, said, “One could argue that Canada has benefited a lot from the broken migration system in the U.S.”

Bahar and his colleagues are developing what they’re calling the Occupational Opportunity Network to help keep decision-makers informed about how migrants can help the U.S. economy grow. 

“By looking at every occupation in every locality in the U.S. and projections and historical data, we’re able to actually come up with numbers that are much higher than the current caps in the U.S. system and we hope that these numbers are going to be the basis for a comprehensive immigration reform,” he told CNBC.

However, not all immigration experts agree we need more open borders. Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow, border security and immigration center, at the Heritage Foundation said: “We’re in a really unique environment at the moment. We’re sort of testing, pushing the envelope of our national sovereignty and our ability to to absorb people.”

Hankinson explained the current visa system, specifically in the case of the HB-1 visa, undercuts the skilled labor market by bringing in workers from abroad. “It’s never allowed the market to exercise that function where the wages go up and then people are tempted to go into those fields and fill those jobs.”

Watch the video to learn more about how U.S. immigration policies impact economic growth and how the U.S. can fix it.

The testimony sought to reinforce what the Biden administration argues are the diplomatic stakes over wrecking-ball-sized buoys that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott authorized this summer as part of the Republican’s increasingly hardline measures in the name of curbing the flow of migrants crossing the border.

U.S. District Judge David Ezra did not immediately rule at the conclusion of the hearing Tuesday in Austin. At one point, Ezra said the issue centered on whether Abbott has the power to unilaterally try stopping what the governor has described as an “invasion” on America’s southern border.

Greg Abbott Jul 26, 2023

DOJ files injunction in Texas buoy case, asks judge to order them removed

“Mexico has sensitivities about sovereignty and doesn’t want to be seen as a lesser partner to the United States,” said Hillary Quam, the State Department’s coordinator for border affairs between U.S. and Mexico.

She said Mexico has raised concerns “at the highest diplomatic levels” with the U.S. in the short time that the buoys — which stretch roughly the length of a handful of soccer fields on a portion of the river near the Texas city of Eagle Pass — have been on the water. Quam said infrastructure projects between the countries and Mexico’s commitments to delivering water to the U.S. could stall over the barrier.

The hearing was held days after Texas repositioned the barrier closer to U.S. soil. During a trip Monday to Eagle Pass, Abbott said the barrier was moved “out of an abundance of caution” after what he described as allegations that they had drifted to Mexico’s side of the river. He added that he did not know whether the allegations were true.

Ezra questioned why Texas would have moved the barrier if it was already on the U.S. side and whether the currents of the river were causing the buoys to drift.

“If it were in a position Texas was comfortable with, they wouldn’t have done that,” Ezra said.

Ezra ordered both sides to submit written closing arguments by Friday as the Biden administration seeks a court injunction ordering the removal of the buoys.

In the meantime, Abbott’s sprawling border mission known as Operation Lone Star continues to face numerous legal challenges, including a new one filed Monday by four migrant men arrested by Texas troopers after crossing the border.

The men, including a father and son, are among thousands of migrants who since 2021 have been arrested on trespassing charges in the state. Most have either had their cases dismissed or entered guilty pleas in exchange for time served. But the plaintiffs remained in a Texas jail for two to six weeks after they should have been released, according to the lawsuit filed by the Texas ACLU and the Texas Fair Defense Project.

Instead of a sheriff’s office allowing the jails to release the men, the lawsuit alleges, they were transported to federal immigration facilities and then sent to Mexico.

Officials in both Kinney and Val Verde counties, which have partnered with Abbott’s operation, are named in the lawsuit. A representative for Kinney County said Monday that he did not believe anyone had yet reviewed the complaint. A representative for Val Verde County did not return an email seeking comment.

Associated Press writer Valerie Gonzalez in McAllen, Texas, contributed to this report.

By the time their paths crossed at the tidy one-story brick house in Cincinnati, they had encountered hundreds of other Mauritanians, nearly all of them following a new path surging in popularity among younger migrants from the West African nation, thanks largely to social media.

“Four months ago, it just went crazy,” said Oumar Ball, who arrived in Cincinnati from Mauritania in 1997 and recently opened his home to Sow, Sall and more than a dozen other new migrants. “My phone hasn’t stopped ringing.”

The spike in migration was made possible by the discovery this year of a new route through Nicaragua, where relaxed entry requirements allow Mauritanians and a handful of other foreign nationals to purchase a low-cost visa without proof of onward travel.

New York City Aug 17, 2023

New York City suggests housing migrants in infamous jail closed after Jeffrey Epstein's suicide

Immigration Jul 19, 2023

Judge to hear challenge to Biden's US-Mexico border policy for asylum seekers

As word of the entry point spreads, travel agencies and paid influencers have taken to TikTok to promote the trip, selling packages of flights that leave from Mauritania, then connect through Turkey, Colombia and El Salvador, and wind up in Managua, Nicaragua. From there, the migrants, along with asylum seekers from other nations, are whisked north by bus with the help of smugglers.

“The American dream is still available,” promises a video on TikTok, one of dozens of similar posts from French-speaking “guides” that help Mauritanians make the trip. “Don’t put off tomorrow what you can do today.”

“We wish you success. Nicaragua loves you very much,” a man working for a travel agency says in Spanish in another video.

The influx of Mauritanians has surprised officials in the U.S. It came without a triggering event — such as a natural disaster, coup or sudden economic collapse — suggesting the growing power of social media to reshape migration patterns: From March to June, more than 8,500 Mauritanians arrived in the country by crossing the border illegally from Mexico, up from just 1,000 in the four months prior, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

The new arrivals likely now outnumber the estimated 8,000 foreign-born Mauritanians previously living in the U.S., about half of whom are in Ohio. Many arrived in the 1990s as refugees after the Arab-led military government began expelling Black citizens.

Some who left say they’re again fleeing state violence directed against Black Mauritanians. Racial tensions have increased since the May death of a young Black man, Oumar Diop, in police custody, with the government moving aggressively to crush protests and disconnect the country’s mobile internet.

The nation was one of the last to criminalize slavery, and the practice is widely believed to persist in parts of the country. Several Mauritanians who spoke to The Associated Press said police targeted them because of anti-slavery activism.

“Life is very difficult, especially for the Black Mauritanian population,” said Sow, 38, who described himself as an activist in the country. “The authorities became threatening and repressive.”

It became difficult to fight, he said, and his life was threatened. So he fled via the new route to Cincinnati, where he’d heard a thriving Mauritanian community was helping new arrivals get on their feet.

Previously, applying for asylum in the U.S. meant flying to Brazil, then risking a dangerous trek through the dense jungle of the Darien Gap. The new route through Nicaragua bypasses that link.

The trip can cost $8,000 to $10,000, a hefty sum that some families manage by selling land or livestock. With economic growth over the past decade, Mauritania has moved into the lower ranks of middle-income countries, according to the U.N. refugee agency, but the poverty rate remains high, with 28.2% living below the poverty line.

The Nicaragua route also allows migrants to avoid the boat voyages to Europe that have killed tens of thousands in the past decade. Mauritanian and Spanish authorities have cracked down on boats crossing the Atlantic for Spain’s Canary Islands, and people are increasingly being intercepted after trekking to North Africa to try to cross the Mediterranean. Flying to Nicaragua is legal, and the rest of the trip is on land — attractive options for Mauritanians and others who want to leave Africa.

The new passage presents a rare opportunity to a generation yearning for a better life, said Bakary Tandia, a Mauritanian activist living in New York: “No matter what is your burning desire to come, if there is no route, you will not even think about it. The reality is: People are seeing a window of opportunity, that’s why they are rushing.”

Still, some who’ve followed the Nicaragua route say they were misled about potential dangers and the future awaiting them in the U.S. This month, a bus carrying migrants tumbled down a steep hillside in Mexico, killing 18 people, including one Mauritanian. Two other Mauritians were hospitalized.

Sall, a 23-year-old nurse, said she was robbed of her remaining money on a bus in Mexico by men dressed as police officers. After crossing the border, she was hospitalized with dehydration.

“On WhatsApp they say, ‘Oh, it’s not very difficult.’ But it’s not true,” she said. “We confront so much pain along the way.”

Ibrahim Dia, a 38-year-old who owns a cleaning company in the Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou, said his brother left the country in June, following the Nicaragua trip he’d seen countless others take in recent months. But he was detained at the border and remains jailed at a Texas detention site, Dia said.

Many Mauritanians enter the U.S. in Yuma, Arizona. Some are dropped off on a Mexican highway by smugglers for a roughly two-hour walk through a knee-deep river and flat desert shrub and rocks. They surrender to Border Patrol agents in Yuma waiting under stadium lights where a wall built during Donald Trump’s presidency abruptly ends.

After a period of detention and screening that could last hours or days, they may enter the country to await a court date, a process that can take years. Others are kept in detention for weeks, or placed on a small number of flights deporting them back to Mauritania.

Human rights groups have called on the Biden administration to grant Temporary Protected Status to Mauritania, pointing to reports of abuse against Black residents who are deported after fleeing.

Those who can enter are often put in touch with a close-knit group of American and Mauritanian-born advocates who connect them to housing and help pay for flights across the U.S. Some head to Philadelphia, Denver, Dallas or New York, where an overwhelmed shelter system has left migrants — many from Mauritania and elsewhere in Africa — sleeping on the sidewalk

Ohio remains the most common destination. Several thousands have found their way to Cincinnati, settling in with the small but vibrant existing community. A group of volunteers, led by longtime resident Ball, help with paperwork and adjustments to the country. Some days, Ball makes multiple trips to the airport to pick up people coming from the border, bringing them to his home or a block of apartments rented out by the community.

On a recent Friday evening, more than a dozen Mauritanians carpooled to a nearby mosque to pray. After the service, they piled into the living room of another friend’s house for dinner: steaming bowls of lamb and couscous served on the floor, with cans of Coca-Cola. A women’s World Cup game played as the group discussed their pasts and futures.

Sall, the one-time nurse, said she wants to go back to school. She’s taken on an unofficial role as cook in the house she shares with others new to Ohio. She hopes to stay in Cincinnati with the community that’s embraced her and many others.

“The Mauritanian people gave me a big welcome,” she said. “And they gave me hope.”

____

Offernhartz reported from New York; Brito from Barcelona, Spain. AP journalist Elliot Spagat contributed from San Diego.

The proposal, suggested in an Aug. 9 letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration, came as New York struggles to handle the estimated 100,000 migrants who have arrived in the city since last year after crossing the southern U.S. border.

The city is legally obligated to find shelter for anyone needing it. With homeless shelters full, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has taken over hotels, put cots in recreational centers and school gyms and created temporary housing in huge tents.

The letter, written by a senior counsel for the city’s law department, identifies several other sites in which migrants could potentially be housed, including the defunct Metropolitan Correctional Center, which closed in 2021.

That shutdown came after the detention center, whose prisoners have included Mafia don John Gotti, associates of Osama bin Laden and the Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, came under new scrutiny because of squalid conditions and security lapses exposed following Epstein’s death.

Lawyers had long complained that the jail was filthy, infested with bugs and rodents, and plagued by water and sewage leaks so bad they had led to structural issues.

The letter didn’t make clear whether the city had actually approached the federal Bureau of Prisons about getting access to the jail as residential housing for migrants. As asylum seekers, the migrants are not prisoners and are mostly in the U.S. legally while their asylum applications are pending, leaving them generally free to travel.

In a statement, the federal Bureau of Prisons said “While we decline to comment concerning governmental correspondence, we can provide; MCC New York is closed, at least temporarily, and long-term plans for MCC New York have not been finalized.”

At least one advocacy group assailed the idea of housing migrants at the jail.

“Mayor Adams likes to say that all options are on the table when it comes to housing asylum seekers, but certain places should most definitely be off the table,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “The Metropolitan Correctional Center was a notoriously decrepit jail, and is not a suitable place to support people trying to build a new life in a new country.”

The influx of migrants to the city has created some tension between the Hochul and Adams administrations. Lawyers for the two Democrats have sparred in court filings over how best to confront an issue that carries financial, political and humanitarian implications.

In a letter this week, an attorney representing Hochul sought to reject allegations that the state had not responded to the migrant influx in a substantial way, detailing steps the governor has taken while accusing the city of failing to accept state offers of assistance.

“The City has not made timely requests for regulatory changes, has not always promptly shared necessary information with the State, has not implemented programs in a timely manner, and has not consulted the State before taking certain actions,” the letter said.

Hochul’s attorney also noted the state has set aside $1.5 billion for the city to assist migrants and has advanced the city $250 million for the effort but said the city has only submitted reimbursement documents for just $138 million.

Avi Small, a spokesman for Hochul, said in a statement Thursday that “Governor Hochul is grateful to Mayor Adams and his team for their work to address this ongoing humanitarian crisis. Governor Hochul has deployed unprecedented resources to support the City’s efforts and will continue working closely with them to provide aid and support.”

The city, in its own filing, has suggested Hochul use executive orders or litigation to secure housing for migrants in upstate New York or to consider trying to get neighboring states to accept migrants.

Lawyers for the city are also requesting to use state-owned properties such as the Jacob K. Javitz Convention Center or State University of New York dormitories to house new arrivals, in addition to requesting the federal government allow them to use federal sites such as the Metropolitan Correctional Center jail and Fort Dix.

Adams’ office did not immediately return an emailed request for comment Thursday.

The new rule makes it extremely difficult for people to be granted asylum unless they first seek protection in a country they’re traveling through on their way to the U.S. or apply online. It includes room for exceptions and does not apply to children traveling alone.

The decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals grants a temporary reprieve from a lower court decision that had found the policy illegal and ordered the government to end its use by this coming Monday. The government had gone quickly to the appeals court asking for the rule to be allowed to remain in use while the larger court battles surrounding its legality play out.

The three-judge panel ruled 2-1 in favor of the government’s request to stay the lower court’s ruling while the appeal goes forward. They also said they would expedite the hearing for the appeal with both sides expected to send in their arguments to the court by mid-September and a hearing to be held at an unspecified date, meaning a relatively fast timeline to review the case.

Judges William Fletcher and Richard Paez, who were both appointed by President Bill Clinton, ruled in favor of the stay but gave no reason for their decision. Judge Lawrence VanDyke, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, dissented. In his dissent VanDyke seemed to agree with the legality of the rule in theory but said it was little different than previous rules put forward by the Trump administration that were shot down by the same appeals court when Trump was in office. He suggested that the judges had been moved to grant the stay because they feared that if the case went all the way to Supreme Court, that body would have done it instead.

“I wish I could join the majority in granting a stay. It is the right result. But that result, right as it may be, isn’t permitted by the outcome-oriented mess we’ve made of our immigration precedent,” VanDyke wrote.

The new asylum rule was put in place back in May. At the time, the U.S. was ending use of a different policy called Title 42, which had allowed the government to swiftly expel migrants without letting them seek asylum. The stated purpose was to protect Americans from the coronavirus.

The administration was concerned about a surge of migrants coming to the U.S. post-Title 42 because the migrants would finally be able to apply for asylum. The government said the new asylum rule was an important tool to control migration.

Rights groups sued, saying the new rule endangered migrants by leaving them in northern Mexico as they waited to score an appointment on the CBP One app the government is using to grant migrants the opportunity to come to the border and seek asylum. The groups argued that people are allowed to seek asylum regardless of where or how they cross the border and that the government app is faulty. They also argue that the new asylum rule is essentially a reboot of two previous rules put forward by President Donald Trump that sought to limit asylum — the same point Judge VanDyke alluded to in his dissent.

The groups also have argued that the government is overestimating the importance of the new rule in controlling migration. They say that when the U.S. ended the use of Title 42, it went back to what’s called Title 8 processing of migrants. That type of processing has much stronger repercussions for migrants who are deported, such as a five-year bar on reentering the U.S. Those consequences — not the asylum rule — were more important in stemming migration after May 11, the groups argue.

“The government has no evidence that the Rule itself is responsible for the decrease in crossings between ports after Title 42 expired,” the groups wrote in court briefs.

But the government has argued that the rule is a fundamental part of its immigration policy of encouraging people to use lawful pathways to come to the U.S. and imposing strong consequences on those who don’t. The government stressed the “enormous harms” that would come if it could no longer use the rule.

“The Rule is of paramount importance to the orderly management of the Nation’s immigration system at the southwest border,” the government wrote.

The government also argued that it was better to keep the rule in place while the lawsuit plays out in the coming months to prevent a “policy whipsaw” whereby Homeland Security staff process asylum seekers without the rule for a while only to revert to using it again should the government ultimately prevail on the merits of the case.

__

Follow Santana on Twitter @ruskygal.

Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department reported for the first time Wednesday that a body had been found along the floating barrier. The Coahuila state prosecutor’s office later told local media outlets that the two bodies were recovered and that the process of identification was underway.

The Texas Department of Public Safety said in a statement Thursday that it had received a report Wednesday of “a possible drowning victim floating upstream from the marine barrier and notified (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) and the Mexican Consulate.”

The agency said that later Wednesday, a second body was found at the marine barrier.

“Preliminary information suggests this individual drowned upstream from the marine barrier and floated into the buoys,” Steve McCraw, the DPS director said. “There are personnel posted at the marine barrier at all times in case any migrants try to cross.”

Abbott’s office and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment but issued a statement Thursday afternoon saying:

“The Mexican government is flat-out wrong. To be clear, preliminary information points to the drowning occurring before the body was even near the barriers. The Texas Department of Public Safety previously reported to Border Patrol the dead body floating upstream from the barriers in the Rio Grande. Also, DPS monitors the barriers for anyone attempting to cross and has not observed anyone attempting to cross since they were installed,” the governor’s office said. “Unfortunately, drownings in the Rio Grande by people attempting to cross illegally are all too common. As was reported in early July before the marine barriers were installed, four people drowned trying to cross the river.”

The governor’s statement went on say the United Nations declared the U.S-Mexico border the deadliest land crossing in the world and pointed blame over illegal crossings in the directions of President Joe Biden and Mexican President López Obrador.

“If President Biden and President López Obrador truly cared about human life, they would do their jobs and secure the border,” Abbott’s office said.

In their statement on Aug. 2, the Mexican government said, “The government of Mexico reiterates that the installation of said wall of wire buoys violates our sovereignty and has an impact on the security, integrity and human rights of migrants, and that it is an action that does not correspond to the close relationship that the governments of United States and Mexico.”

TEXAS MARINE BARRIER

Greg Abbott Jul 26, 2023

DOJ files injunction in Texas buoy case, asks judge to order them removed

Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department initially said one body was found along the barrier, then hours later said a second body was found about three miles upriver, away from the area of the buoys. The cause of death is unknown in both cases.

Many had warned about the danger of the barrier, designed to make it more difficult for migrants to climb over or swim under.

Mexico had warned about the risks posed by the bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys on the Rio Grande. The Foreign Relations Department also claimed the barrier violates treaties regarding the use of the river and Mexico’s sovereignty.

“We made clear our concern about the impact on migrants’ safety and human rights that these state policies would have,” the department said in a statement.

Mexico confirmed it was officials from the Texas DPS that initially notified Mexico’s Consulate in Eagle Pass Wednesday about a body.

The barrier was installed in July and stretches roughly the length of three soccer fields. It is designed to make it more difficult for migrants to climb over or swim under the barrier.

The U.S. Justice Department is suing Abbott over the floating barrier. The lawsuit asks a court to force Texas to remove it. The Biden administration says the barrier raises humanitarian and environmental concerns.

The buoys are the latest escalation of Texas’ border security operation that also includes razor-wire fencing and arresting migrants on trespassing charges.

Migrant drownings occur regularly on the Rio Grande. Over the Fourth of July weekend, four people, including an infant, drowned in the river near Eagle Pass before the buoys were installed.

Daniel Gonzalez, 68, of Hickory, surrendered at the Lincolnton Police Department with several relatives by his side, the department said in statement. His family members told detectives that Gonzalez had hit the gas pedal accidentally while trying to park his car and left the scene in a panic.

Gonzalez had rammed his SUV into a group of 20-30 migrant workers who were waiting Sunday morning to board a shuttle bus that travels to and from a nearby farm.

An original statement from the police department earlier Monday said detectives believed the assault was intentional. Maj. Brian Greene, interim chief of the Lincolnton Police Department, said the driver’s motives are still under investigation, and that police are considering the new evidence.

North Carolina Jul 31, 2023

Police search for driver who intentionally hit 6 migrant workers; injuries aren't life-threatening

Officers recovered the black sport utility vehicle involved in the crash. They arrested Gonzalez Monday night and charged him with a felony hit and run with a $50,000 secure bond.

The victims were treated at a local hospital for their injuries, and all six were released late Sunday, Greene told The Associated Press in an interview. Police identified them as Jorge A. Lopez, Zalapa M. Hermosillo, Jose L. Calderon, Luis D. Alcantar, Rodrigo M. Gutierrez-Tapia and Santiago Baltazar. They could not be reached for comment Monday.

The workers had arrived at the Walmart parking lot late Sunday morning from Knob Creek Orchard in Lawndale. Greene said they make the same trip once a week and use a shaded lawn at the bottom of the parking lot in Lincolnton as their regular meeting place to board buses. The men were standing under trees Sunday when an SUV pulled up next to the bus.

“It turns right in front of the bus and appears like it’s almost going to park,” Greene said, describing security footage of the incident. “And then it appears to accelerate at the last minute, jumping the curb, hitting the individuals and the trees and going through the area into the other side of the parking lot and exits the same way it came.”

The police department said it is continuing to work with the FBI, the State Bureau of Investigation and the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles on the investigation.

The workers were rammed by a vehicle outside a Walmart in Lincolnton on Sunday in what appears to have been an intentional assault, but Maj. Brian Greene, interim chief of the Lincolnton Police Department, said the driver’s motives are still under investigation. The victims were treated at a local hospital for their injuries, and all were released late Sunday, Greene told The Associated Press.

Police identified them as Jorge A. Lopez, Zalapa M. Hermosillo, Jose L. Calderon, Luis D. Alcantar, Rodrigo M. Gutierrez-Tapia and Santiago Baltazar. They could not be reached for comment Monday afternoon.

The workers had arrived at the Walmart parking lot late Sunday morning from Knob Creek Orchard in Lawndale, where they tend to the farmland. Greene said they make the same trip once a week and use a shaded lawn at the bottom of the parking lot as their regular meeting place to board buses. The men were standing under trees Sunday when an SUV pulled up next to the bus.

“It turns right in front of the bus and appears like it’s almost going to park,” Greene said, describing security footage of the incident. “And then it appears to accelerate at the last minute, jumping the curb, hitting the individuals and the trees and going through the area into the other side of the parking lot and exits the same way it came.”

Police are asking the public for help identifying the driver and the vehicle, described in the police report as an older model black sport utility vehicle with a luggage rack.

In a push to offer migrants a safer alternative to crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, the White House announced Friday it will allow some migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who are already in Mexico to cross to the U.S. legally through the refugee resettlement program.

The new initiative will also allow eligible migrants to use the U.S. Customs and Border Protection app to book an appointment with a U.S. immigration officer before approaching the border.

US-Mexico Border Jul 27, 2023

Biden administration ramps up deportations

Immigration Jul 27, 2023

Number of migrant families with kids crossing US border nearly triples in two months

“We encourage migrants to use these legal pathways instead of putting their lives in the hands of dangerous smugglers and traffickers,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement.

The new initiative also allows asylum-seekers to enter a path to permanent residency and citizenship in addition to receiving government benefits only available to migrants with refugee status.

As part of the agreement, Mexico also agreed to build “multipurpose international spaces” in its southern border to offer migrants new asylum and temporary employment permits before they reach the U.S.

“The expanded cooperation between the United States and Mexico to manage our shared border in a humane and orderly way is a testament to strong and enduring bonds of friendship and partnership between our two countries,” the White House said.

The new initiative announced by the Biden administration comes two months after the expiration of pandemic-era border restriction known as Title 42 in May.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, about 85,000 migrants have been deported since Title 42 was lifted, that’s up 65% since the same period last year, when 51,246 migrants were repatriated.

Deputies served a search warrant Wednesday afternoon at a site on unincorporated land near the city of Merced and discovered the operation. Images posted online by the Merced County Sheriff’s Office showed trays, bags and boxes stuffed with what looked to be marijuana in a run-down interior space.

“We literally have thousands of pounds of finished marijuana from an illegal grow and illegal source,” Sheriff Vern Warnke said in a video.

Deputies found 60 people working there including men and women who were offered various unspecified resources, plus one juvenile, who was seen by child welfare authorities and released to a parent, the Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

“Our investigators learned that these individuals arrived at the property several days prior with the promise that they would have a good-paying job and a place to stay,” the statement said.

“Once there, they were forced to process marijuana while staying in horrible living conditions to pay back the individuals that brought them across the border,” it continued, without giving details on those conditions.

“These folks are indentured, they owe money … they’re scared to death,” Warnke said.

“It’s heart-wrenching. So we’re going to try and take care of these folks,” he added.

Authorities didn’t disclose their countries of origin.

Three goats and two dogs that were not being cared for adequately were also rescued, according to the statement.

No arrests were made but investigators were “working tirelessly to find the individuals responsible,” the Sheriff’s Office said.

The worst-case scenarios didn’t happen, and the administration has been touting a 42% drop in illegal border crossings since May.

But the reality at the border is more nuanced: The number of migrants arriving in the U.S. is still high, multiple law enforcement sources said. And the Biden administration has been ramping up deportations. 

According to the Department of Homeland Security, about 85,000 migrants have been “repatriated” since Title 42 was lifted. That’s up 65% since the same period last year, which saw 51,246. During the same period the previous year, there were 33,087 repatriations, according to it.

“The Department is sending a clear message about the consequences of coming to the United States and seeking asylum improperly,” said Miguel Vergara, ICE Harlingen field office director.

More migrant crossings are also being classified as legal because they’re scheduling screening appointments at ports of entry on a mobile app. Still, the number of migrant families with children crossing the southern border has nearly tripled in the past two months, raising concerns of yet another overall uptick in crossings.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

Earlier this week, more than 2,230 migrants were crossing the border daily on average, up from 790 in early June. While single adults are still the largest demographic seen at the border, families are the fastest-growing demographic of undocumented border crossers, according to the data. Most of the migrants are from northern Central America and Mexico, according to the data.

Three senior Department of Homeland Security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity say they are closely watching the number of families coming because of growing concern the numbers could soon spike and send border numbers back to near record highs.

Immigrant advocates say more families are crossing to escape poverty and violence in their home countries, as well as to escape cartels and extreme heat they encounter while waiting to cross in Mexico. 

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

The order from U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar of the Northern District of California takes away a key enforcement tool set in place by the Biden administration as coronavirus-based restrictions on asylum expired in May. The use of a rule known as Title 42 allowed the U.S. to expel millions of people starting in early 2020 on the grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19.

“The Rule — which has been in effect for two months — cannot remain in place,” Tigar wrote in an order that will not take effect for two weeks.

The new rule imposes severe limitations on migrants seeking asylum but includes room for exceptions and does not apply to children traveling alone.

Immigrant rights groups that sued argued it is a violation of U.S. law that protects the right to asylum regardless of how a person enters the country. The groups said it forces migrants to seek protection in countries that don’t have the same robust asylum system and human rights protections as the United States and leaves them in a dangerous limbo. They also argued that the CBP One app the government wants migrants to use doesn’t have enough appointments and isn’t available in enough languages.

Tigar agreed with their interpretation. The administration had argued that protection systems in other countries that migrants travel through have improved. But Tigar said it’s not feasible for some migrants to seek protection in a transit country and noted the violence that many face in Mexico in particular.

“While they wait for an adjudication, applicants for asylum must remain in Mexico, where migrants are generally at heightened risk of violence by both state and non-state actors,” Tigar wrote.

He also wrote that the rule is illegal because it presumes that people are ineligible for asylum if they enter the country between legal border crossings. But, Tigar wrote, Congress expressly said that should not affect whether someone is eligible for asylum.

The judge also rejected the administration’s arguments that it had provided other avenues for people to come to the U.S. and that should be taken into account. The administration has specifically pointed to a program that allows as many as 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela if they have a sponsor and fly into the U.S. The judge called those avenues “irrelevant” and noted that such pathways are not available to all migrants.

The Biden administration said the asylum rule was a key part of its strategy to strike a balance between strict border enforcement and ensuring several avenues for migrants to pursue valid asylum claims. The rule was a response to political and economic instability fueling an exodus of migrants from countries including Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela.

Critics have argued that the rule is essentially a newer version of two efforts by President Donald Trump to limit asylum at the southern border. The Supreme Court eventually allowed the Trump administration to limit asylum for people who don’t apply for protection in a country they travel through before coming to the U.S. to go into effect. But another Trump effort to bar people from applying for asylum except at an official border entry point was caught up in litigation and never took effect.

In announcing the new rule, the Biden administration emphasized the complex dynamics at play when it comes to immigration that at one time consisted largely of adults from Mexico seeking to come to the U.S. They could easily be returned home. Now migrants come from across the Western Hemisphere and beyond.

The new rule took effect May 11 with the expiration of a COVID-19 restriction known as Title 42 that had limited asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The new rule makes it extremely difficult for migrants who come directly to the southern border to get asylum unless they use a government app to get an appointment or they’ve already tried to seek protection in another country before coming to the U.S. It includes room for exceptions and would not apply to children traveling alone.

The lawsuit threatens to undermine a key tool that President Joe Biden’s administration has relied on to manage immigration as congressional Republicans attack the administration for what they say is a failure to control the roughly 2,000-mile (3,220-kilometer) border with Mexico. Republicans see immigration as a key issue in next year’s presidential election.

A group of immigrant rights organizations that sued argues the new rule violates immigration law that allows people to seek asylum wherever they arrive on the border. The groups argue that it forces migrants to seek protection in countries that don’t have the same robust asylum system and human rights protections as the United States and leaves them in a dangerous limbo.

“The rule is already inflicting untold suffering on thousands of asylum seekers, who are either being deported to persecution or stranded in Mexican states where migrants face horrific and pervasive violence,” the groups argue in court filings.

They also argue that the CBP One app that the government wants migrants to use to set up appointments is faulty. It doesn’t have enough appointments and isn’t available in enough languages, they argue.

Also, opponents say the Biden rule is essentially a rehash of efforts by President Donald Trump to limit immigration at the southern border. A federal appeals court prevented those similar but stricter measures from taking effect.

The Biden administration has argued that the asylum rule is not a rehash of Trump’s efforts but part of an overall strategy that provides a way into the U.S. for those who follow legal pathways and consequences for those who don’t. They also argue that the new asylum rule was needed because it took effect when immigration numbers at the southern border were expected to skyrocket when Title 42’s use went away. And, they say, the strategy is working. The number of border crossings peaked ahead of the end of Title 42 and then fell.

As for legal pathways, the government points to a program it created in January that allows 30,000 people a month to enter the country from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela if they have a sponsor and fly into an airport. Advocates for immigrants note that program covers only four countries.

Separately, Republican-aligned states are suing over that January program. A trial is slated for late August.

In one account, Texas Trooper Nicholas Wingate told a supervisor that upon encountering a group of 120 migrants on June 25 — including young children and mothers nursing babies — in Maverick County, a rural Texas border county, he and another trooper were ordered to “push the people back into the water to go to Mexico.”

The trooper described the actions in an email dated July 3 as inhumane.

Travis Considine, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Safety, said the accounts provided by the trooper were under internal investigation. He said the department has no directive or policy that instructs troopers to withhold water from migrants or push them back into the river.

The emails, first obtained by Hearst Newspapers, thrust Texas’ sprawling border security mission back under scrutiny at a time when Abbott is expanding the mission by putting a new floating barrier on the Rio Grande. The Republican has authorized more than $4 billion in spending on the mission, known as Operation Lone Star, which has also included busing thousands of migrants to Democrat-led cities and arresting migrants on trespassing charges.

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White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday that the trooper’s account, if true, was “abhorrent” and “dangerous.” Democrats in the Texas Capitol said they planned to investigate.

“We are talking about the bedrock values of who we are as a country and the human indecency that we are seeing,” Jean-Pierre said. “If this is true, it is just completely, completely wrong.”

Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales, whose sprawling south Texas congressional district includes the border, tweeted, “Border security should not equal a lack of humanity.”

In one instance, according to Wingate, a 4-year-old girl attempting to cross through razor wire was “pressed back” by Texas National Guard soldiers in accordance with orders and that the child later fainted from the heat. Temperatures in Maverick County this summer have soared into the triple-digits.

Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber, who has supported the state deploying workers to the border, said he was taken aback by the trooper’s account.

“I don’t agree with whatever they were told to do,” Schmerber said. “That’s not something that’s part of our mission. You know, I know that we’re here to protect and serve no matter who it is, you know, either immigrants or U.S. citizens. But we’re not going to do any harm to anybody.”

Wingate did not immediately return an email message seeking comment Tuesday. The Texas Military Department also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As concern and outrage over the trooper’s account mounted Tuesday, Abbott’s office issued a statement that said no orders have been given “that would compromise the lives of those attempting to cross the border illegally.” The statement did not address Wingate’s specific accounts and defended the border mission overall.

The statement said the razor wire “snags clothing” but did not address the accounts of migrants being cut and bloodied by the barrier.

“The absence of these tools and strategies—including concertina wire that snags clothing—encourages migrants to make potentially life-threatening and illegal crossings. Through Operation Lone Star, Texas continues stepping up to respond to the unprecedented humanitarian crisis at our southern border,” the statement read.

The email chain with the trooper included a log showing 38 encounters between June 25 and July 1 with migrants in need of medical assistance, ranging from weakness to lacerations, broken limbs and drownings in which life-saving measures were required. A dozen were under a year old.

Other accounts included a 19-year-old woman who was found cut by the wire and having a miscarriage. The others had cuts or broken bones as a result of where the wires were placed, according to the email.

“We need to operate it correctly in the eyes of God,” Wingate wrote.

In response to Wingate’s accounts, McCraw sent an email saying “the priority of life requires that we rescue migrants from harm and we will continue to do so.”

A separate email exchange obtained by The Associated Press dated July 14 shows McCraw receiving pictures, originally sent by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, of injuries caused by the sharp wire placed by Texas officials.

The pictures showed some injuries that required stitches as well as bloodied hands and legs.

The group, made up of largely Venezuelan migrants, walked along a highway in southern Mexico, led by a Venezuela flag with the phrase “Peace, Freedom. SOS.” The men, women, children and teenagers were followed by Mexican National Guard patrols.

Migrants told The Associated Press they crossed into Mexico illegally through a river dividing the two countries. They said they decided to organize the group and start out because many had been sleeping on the street and had run out of money to buy food.

“We just want to move forward, to fulfill our American dream and work, because we’re all workers here,” one Venezuelan, Roseli Gloria said while taking a brief rest along the highway.

She carried a backpack and a piece of rolled up foam for sleeping. She said she had been in Mexico for a week before joining the group.

Participants in the group said that they received little aid from Mexican immigration authorities and that they were given mixed and confusing instructions about how to move forward or seek asylum in the U.S.

The formation of the latest migrant group in southern Mexico comes amid a record migratory flow to the United States from countries across Latin America. In the 12 months through May 2023, U.S. authorities reported nearly 2.5 million encounters with migrants on its southern border, an uptick from the year before.

The journey is not an easy one, with migrants often targeted by kidnappings, extorsion and other violence from armed groups in the region. As a result, migrants often travel in groups of hundreds to stay safe.

Migrants from Venezuela previously sought refuge in other South American nations like Colombia and Peru, but increasingly they are making the perilous journey through the jungles of the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama in an attempt to reach the U.S.

This marks the fourth death of a child in U.S. government custody this year.

The girl had been hospitalized at El Paso Children’s Hospital for a significant, pre-existing illness when she was referred from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to the Office of Refugee Resettlement in May, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement Tuesday.

The girl was provided medical treatment “according to the mother’s wishes and aligned with the recommendations of the hospital’s health care provider team,” the statement said.

The girl’s condition deteriorated Friday, and she died Monday as a result of multi-organ failure due to an underlying disease, officials said. Officials said her mother and brother were with her when she died and in the days leading up to her death.

Officials did not release the girl’s name or say when she had entered the country.

In May, a 17-year-old boy from Honduras died in U.S. custody. Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza died at a holding center in Safety Harbor, Florida. His mother said her son had epilepsy but showed no signs of being seriously ill before he left for the United States.

Days later, an 8-year-old girl from Panama who had a history of heart problems and sickle cell anemia died while she and her family were in custody of Border Patrol in Harlingen, Texas. The mother of Anadith Danay Reyes Alvarez said agents repeatedly ignored pleas to hospitalize Anadith as her daughter felt pain in her bones, struggled to breathe and was unable to walk.

In March, a 4-year-old “medically fragile unaccompanied child from Honduras” died at a hospital in Michigan, according to a Health and Human Services statement at the time.

The deaths raised questions and scrutiny over the qualifications of U.S. agents to handle medical emergencies by migrants in their custody.

Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service said it could not confirm that the rescued boat was one of the three reported missing, but told The Associated Press that the vessel was a multi-colored, 20-meter-long (65-foot-long) canoe of the type known in Senegal as a pirogue.

Eighty men and six women of sub-Saharan origin were rescued and expected to reach Spanish soil Monday evening, the Spanish agency said. It also said it had alerted boats sailing in Atlantic waters between the Canary Islands and West Africa to be on the lookout for other migrant boats still missing.

Helena Maleno Garzon, coordinator for the aid group Walking Borders, which is known as Caminando Fronteras in Spanish, said earlier Monday that the three missing boats had departed Senegal in late June.

Two boats departed June 23 from Mbour, a coastal city in central Senegal, carrying about 100 people, and a third left the southern town of Kafountine four days later with approximately 200 people, Garzon said.

There has been no contact with the boats since their departures, she said.

“The most important thing is to find those people. There are many people missing in the sea. This isn’t normal. We need more planes to look for them,” Garzon told The Associated Press.

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The Atlantic migration route is one of the deadliest in the world, with nearly 800 people dying or going missing in the first half of 2023, according to Walking Borders.

In recent years, the Canary Islands have become one of the main destinations for people trying to reach Spain, with a peak of more than 23,000 migrants arriving in 2020, according to Spain’s Interior Ministry. In the first six months of this year, more than 7,000 migrants and refugees reached the Canaries.

One of the deadliest mass drownings of Europe-bound migrants happened last month on the Mediterranean Sea, where more than 500 people were presumed dead off the coast of Greece. Criticism has mounted over the European Union’s yearslong failure to prevent such tragedies.

Boats that go missing often aren’t documented. Some are never found or are discovered across the world years later. An AP investigation published this year found that at least seven migrant boats from northwest Africa, likely trying to reach the Canary Islands in 2021, drifted to the Caribbean and Brazil.

The boats mainly travel from Morocco, Western Sahara and Mauritania, with fewer coming from Senegal, the Spanish aid group said. However, at least 19 boats from Senegal have arrived in the Canary Islands since June, the group said.

Factors such as ailing economies, a lack of jobs, extremist violence, political unrest and the impact of climate change push migrants to risk their lives on overcrowded boats to reach the Canaries. Last month in Senegal, at least 23 people were killed during weeks of protests between opposition supporters and police.

A woman whose 19- and 24-year-old sons left on one of the boats from Mbour in June told the AP they had a goal of trying to pull the family out of poverty.

Daw Demba, 48, said she discovered her sons’ secret plans days before they left and tried to convince them not to. They assured her it would be safe because the captain had made the trip safely multiple times, she said.

“I am desperate to hear the voices of my sons. I am convinced they are still alive,” Demba said through tears in a phone interview from her home in Mbour. “Every moment, every second, I am still believing.”

Before they departed, she armed her sons, Massou Seck and Serigne Galaye Seck, with traditional spiritual items, including a bottle of water that had been blessed and Quranic paper with their names written on it for protection.

Walking Borders’ Maleno said she had been in contact with the Moroccan, Spanish and Mauritanian marines and that more needs to be done to look for the missing boats.

“Imagine if there (were) 300 American people missing at sea. What (would) happen? Many planes will look for them,” she said.

Brito reported from Barcelona, Spain.

The crackdown on out-of state licenses is part of a larger immigraton legislation signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and that went into effect on July 1.

The bill prohibits the issuance of a driver license to anyone who does not provide proof of lawful presence in the U.S. and specifies that out-of-state driver licenses issued exclusively to undocumented immigrants are invalid in Florida.

Anyone presenting an invalid out-of-state driver license during a traffic stop will be subject to a citation for driving without a valid license.

The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles published a list of out-of-state license classes that are invalid in Florida.

They include:

• Connecticut licenses that indicate “Not For Federal Identification”

• Delaware licenses that indicate “Driving Privilege Only” or “Not Valid for Identification”

• Hawaii licenses that indicate “Limited Purpose Driver’s License” or “Limited Purpose Instruction Permit” or “Limited Purpose Provisional Driver’s License” or “Not Valid for use for official Federal purposes”

• Rhode Island licenses that indicate “Not for Federal Identification” or “Driver Privilege Card” or “Driver Privilege Permit”

• Vermont licenses that indicate “Not for REAL ID Purposes Driver’s Privilege Card” or “Not for REAL ID Purposes Junior Driver’s Privilege Card” or “Not for REAL ID Purposes Learner’s Privilege Card”

The bill, SB 1718, also requires private companies with over 25 employees to use E-Verify, an online employment verification system, to prove the legal employment eligibility of workers.

Penalties will be applied to employers who knowingly have immigrants without documentation working for them, with the severity dependent on how many undocumented immigrants were employed.

Additionally, Florida hospitals that accept Medicaid will be required to document whether or not a patient is a United States citizen, and whether or not the patient is an undocumented immigrant.

However, neither citizenship nor legal status will affect their medical care, and undocumented patients will not be reported to immigration authorities.

DeSantis, who blames the Biden administration for what he says is a crisis at the southern border, said the bill and license crackdown is meant to combat illegal immigration.

“Someone who is in our country illegally and has violated our laws should not possess a government-issued ID which allows them access to state-funded services and other privileges afforded to lawful residents,” DeSantis said in a statement Wednesday. “The Biden administration may continue to abdicate its responsibilities to secure our border, but Florida will stand for the rule of law. Even if the federal government refuses, Florida will act decisively to protect our citizens, our state, and our country.”

Critics say the new immigration legislation is among the harshest state laws in the country and makes life harder for Florida’s roughly 775,000 undocumented immigrants.

The naturalization test is one of the final steps toward citizenship — a monthslong process that requires legal permanent residency for years before applying.

Many are still shaken after former Republican President Donald Trump’s administration changed the test in 2020, making it longer and more difficult to pass. Within months, Democratic President Joe Biden took office and signed an executive order aimed at eliminating barriers to citizenship. In that spirit, the citizenship test was changed back to its previous version, which was last updated in 2008.

In December, U.S. authorities said the test was due for an update after 15 years. The new version is expected late next year.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposes that the new test adds a speaking section to assess English skills. An officer would show photos of ordinary scenarios – like daily activities, weather or food – and ask the applicant to verbally describe the photos.

In the current test, an officer evaluates speaking ability during the naturalization interview by asking personal questions the applicant has already answered in the naturalization paperwork.

“For me, I think it would be harder to look at pictures and explain them,” said Heaven Mehreta, who immigrated from Ethiopia 10 years ago, passed the naturalization test in May and became a U.S. citizen in Minnesota in June.

Mehreta, 32, said she learned English as an adult after moving to the U.S. and found pronunciation to be very difficult. She worries that adding a new speaking section based on photos, rather than personal questions, will make the test harder for others like her.

Shai Avny, who immigrated from Israel five years ago and became a U.S. citizen last year, said the new speaking section could also increase the stress applicants already feel during the test.

“Sitting next to someone from the federal government, it can be intimidating to talk and speak with them. Some people have this fear anyway. When it’s not your first language, it can be even more difficult. Maybe you will be nervous and you won’t find the words to tell them what you need to describe,” Avny said. “It’s a test that will determine if you are going to be a citizen. So there is a lot to lose.”

Another proposed change would make the civics section on U.S. history and government multiple-choice instead of the current oral short-answer format.

Bill Bliss, a citizenship textbook author in Massachusetts, gave an example in a blog post of how the test would become more difficult because it would require a larger base of knowledge.

A current civics question has an officer asking the applicant to name a war fought by the U.S. in the 1900s. The applicant only needs to say one out of five acceptable answers – World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War or Gulf War – to get the question right.

But in the proposed multiple-choice format, the applicant would read that question and select the correct answer from the following choices:

A. Civil War

B. Mexican-American War

C. Korean War

D. Spanish-American War

The applicant must know all five of the wars fought by the U.S. in the 1900s in order to select the one correct answer, Bliss said, and that requires a “significantly higher level of language proficiency and test-taking skill.”

Currently, the applicant must answer six out of 10 civics questions correctly to pass. Those 10 questions are selected from a bank of 100 civics questions. The applicant is not told which questions will be selected but can see and study the 100 questions before taking the test.

Lynne Weintraub, a citizenship coordinator at Jones Library’s English as a Second Language Center in Massachusetts, said the proposed format for the civics section could make the citizenship test harder for people who struggle with English literacy. That includes refugees, elderly immigrants and people with disabilities that interfere with their test performance.

“We have a lot of students that are refugees, and they’re coming from war-torn countries where maybe they didn’t have a chance to complete school or even go to school,” said Mechelle Perrott, a citizenship coordinator at San Diego Community College District’s College of Continuing Education in California.

“It’s more difficult learning to read and write if you don’t know how to do that in your first language. That’s my main concern about the multiple-choice test; it’s a lot of reading,” Perrott said.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a December announcement that the proposed changes “reflect current best practices in test design” and would help standardize the citizenship test.

Under federal law, most applicants seeking citizenship must demonstrate an understanding of the English language – including an ability to speak, read and write words in ordinary usage – and demonstrate knowledge of U.S. history and government.

The agency said it will conduct a nationwide trial of the proposed changes in 2023 with opportunities for public feedback. Then, an external group of experts — in the fields of language acquisition, civics and test development — will review the results of the trial and recommend ways to best implement the proposed changes, which could take effect late next year.

More than 1 million people became U.S. citizens in fiscal year 2022 — one of the highest numbers on record since 1907, the earliest year with available data — and USCIS reduced the huge backlog of naturalization applications by over 60% compared to the year before, according to a USCIS report also released in December.

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Trisha Ahmed is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. Follow Trisha Ahmed on Twitter: @TrishaAhmed15

The scammers range from human traffickers — often referred to as coyotes — to social media influencers, and many of them fraudulently pose as work recruiters, legal advisors or immigration coaches.

Most of the impostors take advantage of the many twists and turns in U.S. immigration policy, tricking migrants into paying for fake legal advice, work visas, political asylum or alternative ways to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

About a quarter of migrants surveyed earlier this month said they received messages offering immigration services and jobs, mainly via Facebook and WhatsApp. Two thirds of the 210 surveyed said they fell victim to some sort of fraud or disinformation. One migrant said he spent $1,500 on a form that turned out to be fake.

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In Mexico, 5,684 complaints of crimes against migrants were reported from 2016 to November 2022, according to Mexico’s interior ministry. Of these, 1,849 were classified as illicit trafficking, 2,655 as theft and only eight as fraud.

Pursuing a fraud complaint is complicated. Migrants typically enlist the help of an independent organization such as Center for Migrant Rights, the nonprofit Al Otro Lado or a migrant shelter like CafeMin. Migrants often continue their attempt to cross the border, and if they succeed, they abandon their case.

As a result, misinformation and scams continue to flourish — and go unpunished, with scammers using social networks such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Tiktok to target migrants.

Migrants can lose anywhere from $1 to $20,000 per person overall in the scams, according to social media posts monitored during May and June and testimonies collected from migrants in early June.

Mercedes Pérez got in touch via social media with Jaime Díaz Márquez, who posed as an employee of an American religious organization and promised to get political asylum in the U.S. for her and 14 relatives. Pérez said he asked for $55 for each family member in exchange for processing a parole, a temporary permit the U.S. grants for urgent humanitarian reasons to allow migrants to stay in the country for at least a year without a visa.

In a Facebook Live broadcast, Díaz Márquez assured the family they would be able to pick up their papers and cross the border legally on Dec. 9, 2022. He later deleted videos and didn’t post again. Mercedes said she lost $770, and received nothing in return.

She reported the alleged fraud to Al Otro Lado, and was directed to file a complaint with local authorities. Ultimately, she declined to do so for fear of retaliation.

Díaz Márquez didn’t respond to multiple attempts seeking comment via telephone and WhatsApp.

Al Otro Lado says migrants affected by scammers rarely report fraud for fear of being deported or jeopardizing their entry into the U.S.

Evelyn Reyes, a Mexican native, said her husband paid about $2,000 and mailed his passport to a person supposedly named Alberto who he contacted via Facebook. The money was supposed to go toward a round-trip flight and a visa for the passport, which was supposed to be delivered to him in Mexico City. But he lost the money, and his passport.

“When he arrived, there was nothing — just ghosts,” Reyes said.

Jorge Gallo, regional press officer for the UN’s International Organization for Migration, said that many migrants “get into huge debts to be able to pay for the services of these coyotes and in many cases they lose everything.”

Gallo says coyotes sometimes simply abandon migrants in the middle of a border crossing, exposing them to danger and even risking their lives.

Then there are social media influencers who offer legal services without being lawyers. Take Darío Andrés, who advertises his services on TikTok and Instagram, where he has more than 500,000 followers.

On his Instagram profile, the self-styled lawyer and partner José Rafael Román Argote, offer migrants advice from Florida. But a search of the 50 bar associations across the U.S. show neither of them registered.

Attempts to speak to Andrés and Argote via WhatsApp messages, TikTok, Instagram and calls were not answered.

These kinds of online personalities share information about immigration procedures as bait to their followers, to later sell them advice that is not always legally sound or is even misinformation.

U.S. policies have shifted often, sowing confusion among migrants and creating opportunity for scammers. Title 42, which ended May 11, denied asylum on grounds of preventing spread of COVID-19 but was applied unevenly. And U.S. authorities created an opaque system of exemptions that allowed select organizations to pick who qualified for exemptions but their names were not made public and their selection criteria were often a mystery.

After Title 42, the main ways to enter the country are with a mobile app called CBP One, which relies on a lottery of 1,250 slots daily at land crossings with Mexico, and parole for up to 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans a month who apply online with a financial sponsor and arrive at an airport.

Mexico’s Center for Migrant Rights says it has noticed an increase in online migrant recruitment fraud since 2016, especially through ads on Facebook. While the center does not offer specific figures, the digital survey carried out among migrants indicated that 13% of the total respondents received false job offers.

A U.S. employer who wants to hire seasonal migrants — in agriculture, for example — must have a temporary labor certification. The processing of visas is referred to private agencies that search for workers.

Jocelyn Reyes, CDM’s director of Promotion, Education and Leadership Development, says workers’ recruitment process has been irregular, informal, poorly documented and opaque since the temporary work system between the United States and Mexico was created.

Reyes says that recruiting agencies have been able to monopolize the process by having access to information about job opportunities in the U.S. and arranging the H-2 visas that allow workers to work temporarily in the U.S.

Recruiters often impose fees on migrants interested in accessing job opportunities, something that is illegal, according to the CDM.

At the same time, the Fraud Prevention Department of the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico, where the largest number of visas for temporary agricultural work are processed, said that from 2019 to date the number of messages to their hotline that report fraud have increased from 12% to 15%.

Some scammers pose as companies authorized to hire temporary workers in the United States. They might charge for a criminal background check, which is not necessary and which they never actually carry out, according to the migrant rights center.

Samantha Hernández, a spokeswoman for the CafeMin shelter that receives migrants from Latin America and Central America in Mexico City, says misinformation online leads many migrants to believe they need documents of safe passage to go through the Mexican capital.

Laura Ortiz, originally from El Salvador, said that she and others paid $2,500 to an alleged lawyer to organize safe passage. Actually, she needed only to contact Mexican immigration authorities.

“They took our money,″ Ortiz said, adding that later the scammers “blocked us from WhatsApp.”

She said she did not report the scam out of fear of being imprisoned and deported.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This report was a collaboration among Verificado, Conexión Migrante, The Associated Press, Data-Pop Alliance and PolitiFact. It was produced with support from the International Center for Journalism’s Disarming Disinformation project, with primary funding from The Scripps Howard Foundation.

Research team: Daniela Mendoza, Patricia Mercado, Julie Ricard, Abril Mulato, Gabriela Martínez, María Ramírez Uribe, Angélica Villegas, Anna Carolina Spinardi, Yvette Yañez and Ivonne Valdés.

Authorities said on the anniversary of the June 27, 2022, tragedy that the four Mexican nationals had a planning role in the smuggling operation, and were aware that the trailer’s air-conditioning unit was malfunctioning and would not blow cool air to migrants trapped inside during the sweltering three-hour ride from the border city of Laredo to San Antonio.

When the trailer was opened in San Antonio, 48 migrants were already dead. Another 16 were taken to hospitals, where five more died.

It was the deadliest tragedy to claim the lives of migrants smuggled across the border from Mexico. The dead included 27 people from Mexico, 14 from Honduras, seven from Guatemala and two from El Salvador.

The driver and another man were arrested shortly after the migrants were found. They were charged with smuggling resulting in death and conspiracy.

The four new arrests were made Monday in Houston, San Antonio and Marshall, Texas. The new defendants are Riley Covarrubias-Ponce, 30; Felipe Orduna-Torres, 28; Luis Alberto Rivera-Leal, 37; and Armando Gonzales-Ortega, 53. All are charged with conspiracy to transport immigrants resulting in death, serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy. Each man faces a maximum penalty of life in prison if convicted.

A federal grand jury indictment unsealed Tuesday reveals some details of a “patchwork association” of smugglers that allowed them to “consolidate costs, spread out risk, and operate more profitably.”

The indictment alleges the men worked with human smuggling operations in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, and shared routes, guides, stash houses, trucks and trailers, some of which were stored at a private parking lot in San Antonio.

Migrants paid the organization up to $15,000 each to be taken across the U.S. border The fee would cover up to three attempts to get into the country, the indictment said.

Migrants were given a code word to provide at various checkpoints on their journey, which would show they were paid “customers” of a smuggler who had made arrangements for them.

The indictment said the men exchanged the names of migrants who would be smuggled in the truck. Orduna-Torres provided the address in the Texas border city of Laredo where they would be picked up, and Gonzalez-Ortega met them there. The four then coordinated the trip and exchanged messages about the truck’s progress on the drive to San Antonio.

The truck was found on a remote San Antonio road, and arriving police officers detained driver Homero Zamorano Jr. after spotting him hiding in some nearby brush.

Surveillance video captured footage of the 18-wheeler passing through a Border Patrol checkpoint. One survivor, a 20-year-old from Guatemala, told The Associated Press that the smugglers had covered the trailer’s floor with what she believed was powdered chicken bouillon, apparently to throw off any dogs at the checkpoint.

Another survivor, Adan Lara Vega, said the truck was already hot when it left Laredo and that the trapped migrants soon started crying, and pleading for water. Some took turns breathing through a single hole in the wall, while others pounded on the walls and yelled to get the driver’s attention.

“Human smugglers prey on migrants’ hope for a better life — but their only priority is profit,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “Tragically, 53 people who had been loaded into a tractor-trailer in Texas and endured hours of unimaginable cruelty lost their lives because of this heartless scheme.”

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For more AP coverage of the immigration issue: https://apnews.com/hub/immigration