Biden is left with few choices as immigration takes center stage in American politics

Biden is left with few choices as immigration takes center stage in American politics
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Anti-immigration protesters take part in a "Take Our Border Back" convoy at Cornerstone Childrens Ranch near Quemado, Texas on February 2, 2024. (AFP)
Biden is left with few choices as immigration takes center stage in American politics
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Anti-immigration protesters take part in a "Take Our Border Back" convoy at Cornerstone Childrens Ranch near Quemado, Texas on February 2, 2024. (AFP)
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Updated 03 February 2024
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Biden is left with few choices as immigration takes center stage in American politics

Biden is left with few choices as immigration takes center stage in American politics
  • With immigration becoming a top issue as the 2024 presidential campaign shapes up, President Biden is now sounding increasingly like former President Trump, pressing Congress for asylum restrictions

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona: Almost immediately after he walked into the Oval Office on his first day as president, Joe Biden began rolling back his predecessor’s immigration policies, which he had assailed throughout the 2020 campaign as harsh and inhumane.

A lot has changed in three years.
Biden, now sounding increasingly like former President Donald Trump, is pressing Congress for asylum restrictions that would have been unthinkable when he took office. He’s doing it under pressure not just from Republicans but from Democrats, including elected officials in cities thousands of miles from the border who are feeling the effects of asylum seekers arriving in the United States in record numbers.
With the 2024 presidential campaign shaping up as a likely rematch between Biden and Trump, immigration has moved to the forefront as one of the president’s biggest potential liabilities. Biden, looking to neutralize it, has already embraced a sweeping bipartisan measure still being negotiated in the Senate that would expand his authority to put strict new limits on border crossings.
“If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” Biden said last weekend.
The bill’s future is uncertain, and Trump has weighed in against it, but Biden’s Democratic allies have grown impatient for the president to act.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a liberal Democrat, recently called on the president to call up the National Guard, and when he declined, she did it herself at the state’s expense.
“Every Arizonan should know we are taking significant and meaningful steps to keep them safe, even when the federal government refuses to,” Hobbs said in her state of the state address in January.
The influx has strained social services in cities including New York, Chicago and Denver, which are struggling to shelter thousands of asylum seekers without housing or work authorization. Images of migrants with nowhere to go camping out in public have dominated local newscasts.
Nine Democratic governors from all across the country sent a letter last week to Biden and congressional leaders pleading for action from Washington “to solve what has become a humanitarian crisis.”
States and cities are spending billions to respond but are outmatched by the record pace of new arrivals, wrote the governors of Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and New Mexico.
They asked for money to help with their immediate needs and a commitment to work toward modernizing immigration laws.
“It is clear our national immigration system is outdated and unprepared to respond to this unprecedented global migration,” the governors wrote.
Trump, meanwhile, is eager to rekindle the passions that the border fueled during his successful 2016 campaign, when his vow to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico became perhaps his most familiar rallying cry.
“It has been a message that has resonated not just with Republicans or Democrats, but across the country, because now even those liberal cities, those blue cities, those blue mayors, they’re saying we can’t handle the crisis anymore and give us help,” said Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first 2016 campaign manager. “It is a fundamental shift in thinking over the last eight years on the issue.”
Trump lamented over the weekend that his border message didn’t resonate when he ran for reelection in 2020. He said it was because he’d done such a good job controlling the border that he “took it out of play,” though at the time voters were largely focused on COVID-19 and the pandemic had dampened job prospects for migrants.
“Literally we couldn’t put it in a speech,” Trump said at a campaign rally Saturday in Las Vegas. “Nobody wanted to hear about the border. We had no border problem. But now we can talk about the border because it’s never, ever been worse than it is now.”
As president, Trump separated children from their families at the US-Mexico border as an effort to deter people from crossing in a policy that was maligned as inhumane by world leaders, US lawmakers and even Pope Francis. When he ran for office the first time he referred to Mexican immigrants as “rapists and criminals” and this campaign has gone farther, saying migrants are ” destroying the blood of our country.”
In the end, total deportations were higher under the first term of President Barack Obama, who enacted enforcement priorities similar to Biden’s, than under Trump. That was due in part to a lack of cooperation from many cities and states whose leaders opposed Trump’s immigration policies.
By the end of Trump’s administration, the US had completed more than 450 miles (720 kilometers) of new wall construction along the 2,000-mile (3,145 kilometer) border. Much of the construction was in areas where there had already been some form of barrier.
An immigration deal in Congress that had been in the works for weeks is now in jeopardy largely because Trump is loath to give Biden a win on immigration, an issue he wants to hammer as his own as he seeks a return to the White House, and his supporters in Congress are following his lead.
White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez said House Republicans under Speaker Mike Johnson are blocking Biden’s efforts to improve border security.
“It’s long past time for Speaker Johnson and the House GOP to join President Biden and work across the aisle in the best interests of the majority of the American people, who back President Biden’s approach,” Fernandez Hernandez said in a statement.
Johnson has argued Biden already has enough authority to stop illegal border crossings, but without congressional backing, many actions he could take would likely be challenged in court. Trump and Biden alike used emergency authority from the COVID-19 pandemic, known as Title 42, to quickly turn back migrants at the border. With the public health emergency now over, Biden can’t use those powers.
Frustration among voters has escalated.
Wayne Bowens, a 72-year-old retired real estate agent in Scottsdale, Arizona, said he’s disgusted by both Biden and Trump’s recent border moves. Biden is only changing his tune because he’s worried about losing, he said, and Trump is hoping to block the Senate deal to help him win.
“Ukraine, Israel. People are dying. And yet other people are thinking, ‘How many votes can I get if I play this right?’” said Bowens, a Republican who dislikes both leading candidates but will likely vote for Trump unless a viable third-party candidate emerges. “It’s become a very disgusting world.”
Immigration remains a major worry for voters in the 2024 election. An AP-NORC poll earlier this month found that those voicing concerns about immigration climbed to 35 percent from 27 percent last year. Most Republicans, 55 percent, say the government needs to focus on immigration in 2024, while 22 percent of Democrats listed immigration as a priority. That’s up from 45 percent and 14 percent, respectively, in December 2022.
Arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico reached an all-time high in December since monthly numbers have been released.
The Border Patrol tallied just under 250,000 arrests on the Mexican border in December, up 31 percent from 191,000 in November and up 13 percent from 222,000 in December 2022, the previous all-time high.
The situation on the border makes Biden vulnerable with two voting groups he’ll need to win — Latinos and college-educated white Republican women, said Mike Madrid, a California-based Republican strategist who has worked to defeat Trump and has a book on Latino voters set for release this summer.
Biden has no choice but to embrace tougher border security and restrict asylum, even though it will anger progressives in his base, Madrid said.
“It is his single biggest problem,” Madrid said. “And it is the single biggest opportunity, because I think if he can put the Republicans on defense he’s in a very commanding position to win reelection.”
 


After Trump’s Project 2025 denials, he is tapping its authors and influencers for key roles

After Trump’s Project 2025 denials, he is tapping its authors and influencers for key roles
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After Trump’s Project 2025 denials, he is tapping its authors and influencers for key roles

After Trump’s Project 2025 denials, he is tapping its authors and influencers for key roles

WASHINGTON: As a former and potentially future president, Donald Trump hailed what would become Project 2025 as a road map for “exactly what our movement will do” with another crack at the White House.
As the blueprint for a hard-right turn in America became a liability during the 2024 campaign, Trump pulled an about-face. He denied knowing anything about the “ridiculous and abysmal” plans written in part by his first-term aides and allies.
Now, after being elected the 47th president on Nov. 5, Trump is stocking his second administration with key players in the detailed effort he temporarily shunned. Most notably, Trump has tapped Russell Vought for an encore as director of the Office of Management and Budget; Tom Homan, his former immigration chief, as “border czar;” and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller as deputy chief of policy.
Those moves have accelerated criticisms from Democrats who warn that Trump’s election hands government reins to movement conservatives who spent years envisioning how to concentrate power in the West Wing and impose a starkly rightward shift across the US government and society.
Trump and his aides maintain that he won a mandate to overhaul Washington. But they maintain the specifics are his alone.
“President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025,” said Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement. “All of President Trumps’ Cabinet nominees and appointments are whole-heartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.”

A copy of Project 2025, Trump's blue print for reforming the government, is shown during the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago. (AP/File)

Here is a look at what some of Trump’s choices portend for his second presidency.
As budget chief, Vought envisions a sweeping, powerful perch
The Office of Management and Budget director, a role Vought held under Trump previously and requires Senate confirmation, prepares a president’s proposed budget and is generally responsible for implementing the administration’s agenda across agencies.
The job is influential but Vought made clear as author of a Project 2025 chapter on presidential authority that he wants the post to wield more direct power.
“The Director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind,” Vought wrote. The OMB, he wrote, “is a President’s air-traffic control system” and should be “involved in all aspects of the White House policy process,” becoming “powerful enough to override implementing agencies’ bureaucracies.”
Trump did not go into such details when naming Vought but implicitly endorsed aggressive action. Vought, the president-elect said, “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State” — Trump’s catch-all for federal bureaucracy — and would help “restore fiscal sanity.”
In June, speaking on former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Vought relished the potential tension: “We’re not going to save our country without a little confrontation.”
Vought could help Musk and Trump remake government’s role and scope
The strategy of further concentrating federal authority in the presidency permeates Project 2025’s and Trump’s campaign proposals. Vought’s vision is especially striking when paired with Trump’s proposals to dramatically expand the president’s control over federal workers and government purse strings — ideas intertwined with the president-elect tapping mega-billionaire Elon Musk and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Trump in his first term sought to remake the federal civil service by reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers — who have job protection through changes in administration — as political appointees, making them easier to fire and replace with loyalists. Currently, only about 4,000 of the federal government’s roughly 2 million workers are political appointees. President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s changes. Trump can now reinstate them.
Meanwhile, Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s sweeping “efficiency” mandates from Trump could turn on an old, defunct constitutional theory that the president — not Congress — is the real gatekeeper of federal spending. In his “Agenda 47,” Trump endorsed so-called “impoundment,” which holds that when lawmakers pass appropriations bills, they simply set a spending ceiling, but not a floor. The president, the theory holds, can simply decide not to spend money on anything he deems unnecessary.
Vought did not venture into impoundment in his Project 2025 chapter. But, he wrote, “The President should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.”
Trump’s choice immediately sparked backlash.
“Russ Vought is a far-right ideologue who has tried to break the law to give President Trump unilateral authority he does not possess to override the spending decisions of Congress (and) who has and will again fight to give Trump the ability to summarily fire tens of thousands of civil servants,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat and outgoing Senate Appropriations chairwoman.
Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, leading Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, said Vought wants to “dismantle the expert federal workforce” to the detriment of Americans who depend on everything from veterans’ health care to Social Security benefits.
“Pain itself is the agenda,” they said.
Homan and Miller reflect Trump’s and Project 2025’s immigration overl
ap
Trump’s protests about Project 2025 always glossed over overlaps in the two agendas. Both want to reimpose Trump-era immigration limits. Project 2025 includes a litany of detailed proposals for various US immigration statutes, executive branch rules and agreements with other countries — reducing the number of refugees, work visa recipients and asylum seekers, for example.
Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving advisers and architect of his immigration ideas, including his promise of the largest deportation force in US history. As deputy policy chief, which is not subject to Senate confirmation, Miller would remain in Trump’s West Wing inner circle.
“America is for Americans and Americans only,” Miller said at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27.
“America First Legal,” Miller’s organization founded as an ideological counter to the American Civil Liberties Union, was listed as an advisory group to Project 2025 until Miller asked that the name be removed because of negative attention.
Homan, a Project 2025 named contributor, was an acting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement director during Trump’s first presidency, playing a key role in what became known as Trump’s “family separation policy.”
Previewing Trump 2.0 earlier this year, Homan said: “No one’s off the table. If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”
Project 2025 contributors slated for CIA and Federal Communications chiefs
John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, was previously one of Trump’s directors of national intelligence. He is a Project 2025 contributor. The document’s chapter on US intelligence was written by Dustin Carmack, Ratcliffe’s chief of staff in the first Trump administration.
Reflecting Ratcliffe’s and Trump’s approach, Carmack declared the intelligence establishment too cautious. Ratcliffe, like the chapter attributed to Carmack, is hawkish toward China. Throughout the Project 2025 document, Beijing is framed as a US adversary that cannot be trusted.
Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, wrote Project 2025’s FCC chapter and is now Trump’s pick to chair the panel. Carr wrote that the FCC chairman “is empowered with significant authority that is not shared” with other FCC members. He called for the FCC to address “threats to individual liberty posed by corporations that are abusing dominant positions in the market,” specifically “Big Tech and its attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.”
He called for more stringent transparency rules for social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube and “empower consumers to choose their own content filters and fact checkers, if any.”
Carr and Ratcliffe would require Senate confirmation for their posts.


COP29 draft deal would have rich nations pay $300 billion in climate finance

COP29 draft deal would have rich nations pay $300 billion in climate finance
Updated 24 November 2024
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COP29 draft deal would have rich nations pay $300 billion in climate finance

COP29 draft deal would have rich nations pay $300 billion in climate finance
  • EU, US, others raised their offer after earlier draft rejected
  • Climate talks run into overtime. Talks reach deal on carbon credits

BAKU, Azerbaijan: Developed nations should pay $300 billion a year by 2035 to help poorer countries deal with climate change, according to a new draft deal from UN climate talks published early on Sunday, after an earlier target of $250 billion was rejected.
Reuters previously reported that the European Union, the United States and others wealthy countries would support the $300 billion annual global finance target in an effort to end a deadlock at the two-week summit.
The document, described as a draft decision rather than a draft negotiating text like previous iterations, said nations had decided to set a goal “of at least $300 billion per year by 2035 for developing country Parties for climate action.”
The decision would need to be adopted by consensus before becoming final.
The COP29 climate conference in the Azerbaijan capital Baku had been due to finish on Friday, but ran into overtime as negotiators from nearly 200 countries struggled to reach consensus on the climate funding plan for the next decade.
At one point delegates from poor and small island nations walked out of talks in frustration over what they called a lack of inclusion, and amid concerns fossil fuel producing countries were seeking to water down aspects of the deal.
The summit cut to the heart of the debate over the financial responsibility of industrialized countries, whose historical use of fossil fuels has caused the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions, to compensate others for the damage wrought by climate change.
It also laid bare the divisions between wealthy governments constrained by tight domestic budgets and developing nations reeling from the costs of worsening storms, floods and droughts.
Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister Biman Prasad told Reuters he was optimistic for an eventual agreement in Baku.
“When it comes to money it’s always controversial but we are expecting a deal tonight,” he said.
The new goal is intended to replace developed countries’ previous commitment to provide $100 billion per year in climate finance for poorer nations by 2020. That goal was met two years late, in 2022, and expires in 2025.
A previous $250 billion proposal drawn up by Azerbaijan’s COP29 presidency was rejected as too low by poorer countries, which have warned a weak deal would hinder their ability to set more ambitious greenhouse gas emissions cutting targets.
Countries also agreed Saturday evening on rules for a global market to buy and sell carbon credits that proponents say could mobilize billions of dollars into new projects to help fight global warming.

What counts as developed nation?
Negotiators have been working to address other questions on the finance target, including who is asked to contribute and how much of the funding is provided as grants, rather than loans.
The roster of countries required to contribute — about two dozen industrialized countries, including the US, European nations and Canada — dates back to a list decided during UN climate talks in 1992.
European governments have demanded others join them in paying in, including China, the world’s second-biggest economy, and oil-rich Gulf states.
Donald Trump’s US presidential election victory this month has also cast a cloud over the Baku talks.
Trump, who takes office in January, has promised to again remove the US from international climate cooperation, so negotiators from other wealthy nations expect that under his administration the world’s largest economy will not pay into the climate finance goal.
A broader goal of raising $1.3 trillion in climate finance annually by 2035 — which would include funding from all public and private sources and which economists say matches the sum needed — was included in the draft deal.


Warrants of ICC are binding, Borrell says

Warrants of ICC are binding, Borrell says
Updated 23 November 2024
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Warrants of ICC are binding, Borrell says

Warrants of ICC are binding, Borrell says
  • I have the right to criticize the decisions of the Israeli government without being accused of antisemitism

NICOSIA: EU governments cannot pick and choose whether to execute arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against two Israeli leaders and a Hamas commander, the EU’s foreign policy chief said on Saturday.

The ICC issued the warrants on Thursday against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri for alleged crimes against humanity.
All EU member states signed the ICC’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute.
Several EU states have said they will meet their commitments under the statute if needed, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has invited Netanyahu to visit his country, assuring him he would face no risks if he did so.
“The states that signed the Rome convention must implement the court’s decision. It’s not optional,” Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, said during a visit to Cyprus for a workshop of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists.
Those same obligations were also binding on countries aspiring to join the EU, he said.
“It would be very funny that the newcomers have an obligation that current members don’t fulfill,” he said.
The US rejected the ICC’s decision and Israel said the ICC move was antisemitic.
“Every time someone disagrees with the policy of one Israeli government — (they are) being accused of antisemitism,” said Borrell, whose term as EU foreign policy chief ends this month.
“I have the right to criticize the decisions of the Israeli government, be it Mr. Netanyahu or someone else, without being accused of antisemitism. This is not acceptable. That’s enough.”
In their decision, the ICC judges said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for acts including murder, persecution, and starvation as a weapon of war as part of a “widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza.”
The warrant for Al-Masri lists charges of mass killings during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Israel says it has killed Al-Masri.
Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has praised the “courageous decision” of the International Criminal Court to seek the arrest of Netanyahu and Gallant.
“We support the arrest warrant. We consider it important that this courageous decision be carried out by all country members of the accord to renew the trust of humanity in the international system,” Erdogan said in a speech in Istanbul.
“It is imperative that Western countries — who for years have given the world lessons on law, justice, and human rights — keep their promises at this stage,” added Erdogan, whose country is not a state party in the ICC accord.
Erdogan has become a fierce critic of Israel since the start of its military offensive on Gaza in October 2023.
He has vowed several times to make sure that Israel’s prime minister is “brought to account” over the Israeli military campaign in the Palestinian territory.
Turkiye and 52 other countries this month sent a letter to the UN demanding an end to arms sales and deliveries to Israel.

 


Mozambique opposition leader Mondlane sets conditions for post-election talks

Mozambique opposition leader Mondlane sets conditions for post-election talks
Updated 23 November 2024
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Mozambique opposition leader Mondlane sets conditions for post-election talks

Mozambique opposition leader Mondlane sets conditions for post-election talks
  • We are open to dialogue. It has to be a genuine dialogue. It cannot be full of traps

MAPUTO: Mozambique’s opposition leader said he would accept the president’s offer of talks after deadly post-election unrest on terms including their being held virtually and legal proceedings against him being dropped.
President Filipe Nyusi invited Venancio Mondlane to his office in Maputo on Nov. 26 after the killing of dozens of people in a police crackdown on demonstrations against the results of the Oct. 9 election.
Mondlane, who says the election was rigged in favor of Nyusi’s Frelimo party, is believed to have left the country for fear of arrest or attack, but his whereabouts are unknown.
“We are open to dialogue,” Mondlane said in a Facebook live address. “It has to be a genuine dialogue. It cannot be full of traps.”
A written reply to Nyusi’s invitation lists as one condition for the meeting: “That the participation of the elected candidate Venancio Mondlane is virtual.”
Authorities have laid criminal and civil charges against him, including for damages caused during protests by his supporters, which has led to his bank accounts being frozen.
Another condition in the document made public by Mondlane’s office is that “the judicial proceedings in question must be immediately terminated.” It also lays out 20 points that Mondlane wants on the agenda for talks, including “restoring electoral truth” and prosecuting anyone involved in vote-rigging.
Others are a public apology and compensation for the deaths during the demonstrations, as well as constitutional, economic, and electoral reforms.
Rights groups have accused Mozambique authorities of using live ammunition on demonstrators in the country, which has been governed since independence from Portugal in 1975 by Frelimo.
The Center for Democracy and Human Rights civil society group says around 65 people have been killed. Mondlane on Friday gave a toll of more than 60.
Nyusi said Tuesday 19 people had died, including five police officers.
The president is meant to hand over to Frelimo candidate Daniel Chapo in January, whom the election authority says won 71 percent of votes against 20 percent for Mondlane.
The unrest was discussed Wednesday by regional leaders at a summit of the 16-nation Southern Africa grouping Southern African Development Community, or SADC, which said in a statement afterward that it “extended condolences to the government and people” for the lives lost.
Human Rights Watch criticized the SADC, for failing to denounce Mozambique for excessive use of force.
“SADC has squandered an opportunity to condemn human rights abuses against post-election protesters in Mozambique publicly,” it said in a statement.
The rights watchdog urged the grouping to tell Nyusi’s government to respect the right to peaceful protest and cease using unnecessary and excessive force.

 


EU recalls its ambassador from Niger

Niger's General Abdourahamane Tiani. (AFP file photo)
Niger's General Abdourahamane Tiani. (AFP file photo)
Updated 23 November 2024
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EU recalls its ambassador from Niger

Niger's General Abdourahamane Tiani. (AFP file photo)
  • The EU expresses its profound disagreement with the allegations

NIAMEY: The EU will recall its ambassador from Niger after the country’s ruling military questioned an EU delegation’s management of humanitarian aid meant for flood victims, the European External Action Service, or EEAS, said on Saturday. Niger’s junta issued a statement on Friday accusing the EU ambassador in the West African country of dividing a 1.3 million euro fund to assist flood victims between several international NGOs in a non-transparent manner, and without collaborating with the authorities.
It ordered an audit into the fund’s management as a result.
The EU “expresses its profound disagreement with the allegations and justifications put forward by the transitional authorities,” the EEAS said in a statement.
“Consequently, the EU has decided to recall its ambassador from Niamey for consultations in Brussels.”
Niger has been under military rule since the junta seized power in a 2023 coup.