The Supreme Court won't allow the Biden administration to implement a policy that prioritizes deportation of people in the country illegally who pose the greatest public safety risk.
The court's order Thursday leaves the policy frozen nationwide for now. The vote was 5-4 with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson in saying they would have allowed the Biden administration to put in place the guidance. The court also announced it would hear arguments in the case, saying they would be in late November. The order is the first public vote by Jackson since she joined the court June 30 following the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer. The justices were acting on the administration's emergency request to the court following conflicting decisions by federal appeals courts over a September directive from the Homeland Security Department that paused deportation unless individuals had committed acts of terrorism, espionage or “egregious threats to public safety.” The federal appeals court in Cincinnati earlier this month overturned a district judge’s order that put the policy on hold in a lawsuit filed by Arizona, Ohio and Montana. But in a separate suit filed by Texas and Louisiana, a federal judge in Texas ordered a nationwide halt to the guidance and a federal appellate panel in New Orleans declined to step in. Canadian citizens and permanent residents who are in a relationship with a foreign national may sponsor that person to join them in Canada and become a permanent resident. You may sponsor your spouse, common-law partner or conjugal partner. There are two main options to choose from when sponsoring your spouse or partner: Outland Sponsorship and Inland Sponsorship. Outland SponsorshipOutland sponsorship is an option for couples who are not living together in Canada. This application is for foreign nationals who are residing abroad and are to be sponsored by their Canadian spouse or partner. If your spouse or partner is unable to apply from inside Canada or does not legally live in Canada at the time of the application, outland sponsorship is likely the only option available. To be eligible to sponsor a spouse or partner under the Outland application category, the sponsor and sponsored person must meet the following criteria:
It is important to note that if you are in a conjugal relationship, the Outland Sponsorship application is the only option available to you as conjugal relationships are not eligible under Inland Sponsorship. If the sponsored persons’ work or personal situation requires them to travel outside the country, Outland Sponsorship may be the better option as it allows for travel to and from Canada during the application process. Inland SponsorshipInland sponsorship is an option for couples who are living together in Canada. This application is for foreign spouses or partners who have valid temporary status in Canada, either as a worker, student or visitor. The sponsored person will be able to continue to live, work or study in Canada while the inland sponsorship application is being processed.
To be eligible to sponsor a spouse or partner under the Inland application category, the sponsor and sponsored person must meet the following criteria:
Federal authorities arrested three people Tuesday in connection with a human smuggling incident on San Antonio’s Southwest Side that left 51 migrants dead — making it one of the deadliest such episodes in recent history.
Homero Zamorano, 45, was arrested after officials say he abandoned the tractor-trailer in a desolate area near Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland and fled the scene. Zamorano has addresses in Houston and the Rio Grande Valley. “He was very high on meth when he was arrested nearby and had to be taken to the hospital,” a law enforcement officer said. After arresting Zamorano, authorities traced the semitruck to a home in the 100 block of Arnold in Bexar County. They put the house under surveillance and saw two men — Juan Francisco D’Luna-Bilbao and Juan Claudio D’Luna-Mendez — leaving in a truck, sources said. When authorities stopped the truck, one of the men confessed to having a weapon in the vehicle. Officers obtained a search warrant and searched the home on Arnold, where they found more guns, according to court records. The two men were arrested on suspicion of possessing firearms while in the country illegally. They were detained without bail after a brief hearing in federal court. Zamorano may appear Wednesday in federal court on human smuggling charges. He has a long criminal history. Craig Larrabee, acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio, said the death toll from Monday’s human smuggling incident makes it “the worst one we’ve seen in the U.S.” “The (human smuggling) organizations are getting more violent — they don’t care about the people,” he said. “They don’t think of them as people. They think of them as commodities.” The 51 migrants from Mexico and Central America were found in the abandoned tractor-trailer, which could fit around 100 people. Eleven other people who were rescued from the trailer and were hospitalized, including an adolescent boy who was in critical condition at University Hospital. President Joe Biden capped off a rocky Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles last week with a major declaration on migration also signed by 18 Latin American countries and Canada, with hundreds of millions of dollars set to be disbursed to help integrate migrants into countries other than the United States. But the deal’s dearth of initiatives addressing northward migration is unlikely to burnish Biden’s credibility on the topic ahead of November’s midterms and the 2024 presidential election, instead kicking the can down the road when it comes to dealing with the countries of origin of many U.S.-bound migrants.
The administration appears stuck in a bind, experts say, as maintaining the status quo on regional migration means Democratic candidates may get hammered for not reducing border crossings, but most solutions also constitute politically unpalatable choices. Biden went into the summit with a spate of unresolved problems but little political capital to spend: Voters have been consistently unimpressed with his handling of immigration since he came to office, and the White House has struggled to find a balance of policies that fulfill legal and humanitarian obligations to migrants — a key desire of progressives — without inviting backlash from the broader electorate. The summit did not end without results: As part of the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration, the United States committed to taking 20,000 refugees from across Latin America over the next two fiscal years, as well as expanding temporary work visa programs. But the declaration was notably most expansive on the provision of pathways to legal status for migrants in Mexico, Canada, Spain, Guatemala and Belize — rather than the United States, where arrivals on the southern border in March and April were at a 22-year high of more than 200,000 people a month. That was hardly a surprise, according to Brian Winter, the vice president for policy at Americas Society/Council of the Americas and editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly. “At the end of the day, a declaration coming from a hotel conference center in Los Angeles isn’t going to do much to address migration itself,” Winter said, explaining that the reforms needed to fix the U.S. immigration system long ago fell victim to Washington deadlock. “This is a United States that can’t even do the easy stuff anymore,” he said. “It’s not a mystery what commonsense immigration reform would look like and we have pluralities of Americans who support things like a pathway to citizenship for the people who are already here. But we also have pluralities who support background checks for guns and we can’t get that done either.” As if to underscore how solvable migration can be if the political will exists, the Los Angeles Declaration did include status regularization and hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to resettle millions of migrants — just not the ones who tend to end up in the United States. Colombia, for instance, agreed to regularize the status of 1.5 million Venezuelan refugees. Ecuador also committed to issue a similar decree and Costa Rica renewed temporary protected status for Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Cubans, with the U.S. government agreeing to spend $314 million to help integrate Venezuelans in 17 countries. “We would not have said this five years ago, but suddenly most countries in the hemisphere have large numbers of immigrants thanks to Venezuela’s collapse,” noted Andrew Selee, president of the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. “And so for the first time, you have a bunch of countries eager to talk about migration and to create some sort of order out of the large movements of people who are passing through without much control.” The United States itself, though, has found less room for similar maneuvers, with the prospect of regularizing millions of undocumented migrants and welcoming millions more asylum seekers into the country a political nonstarter for Biden. In fact, even the president’s most modest efforts to reform migration have proven fraught. Morning Consult surveys show that Biden’s two least popular policy moves have been raising the cap on the number of refugees admitted annually and the attempt to revoke Title 42, a pandemic-era measure that uses public health law to expel asylum seekers who would otherwise remain in the United States while their cases are adjudicated. Both measures would only benefit legal migrants, but Alexandra Filindra, an associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said any perception that a policy would lead to increased refugee arrivals from Latin America would be exploited in U.S. elections. “White Americans are reluctant to accept the entry and especially the relocation close to them of nonwhite refugees and non-Christian refugees, especially when it involves some sort of material burden,” Filindra said. “For a long time in political science, we have known that negative outgroup attitudes, whether they relate to African Americans or Latinos or Muslims, are big predictors of opposition to inclusive immigration programs. And conversely, nativism and xenophobia are big predictors of white American support for restrictive immigration policies.” That’s why, critics say, the Biden administration has continued the Trump-era strategy of pushing border enforcement further south, such as by asking Mexico and Guatemala to stop migrants hundreds of miles from U.S. territory and process or deport them, instead of prioritizing reform at home. “The strategy from day one has been, ‘See what we can get Latin American countries to take off our hands,’ without giving them much to make it effective,” said David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Washington-based Cato Institute. “It’s not like it was under the Trump administration, where relations were totally adversarial, but the strategy has been the same the entire time, just using these countries as an extension of the U.S. Border Patrol.” FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) – Republican Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita is suing President Joe Biden, claiming the current administration’s immigration policies are becoming a drain on Hoosier taxpayers which will only worsen as more people cross the country’s southern border.
The suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court of Northern Indiana, also claims a growing number of fentanyl overdoses throughout the state and a supposed influx of sex offenders in the country are both tied to a “record number” of immigrants entering the United States on a daily basis. Rokita said in the suit the policies have caused irreparable harm to Indiana and asks the court to order the Biden administration to enforce current immigration laws and pay the state costs as well as reasonable attorney fees. Of the 100,000 to 124,000 undocumented people in Indiana, roughly 53 percent of are uninsured while another 17 percent have incomes below the poverty line, the lawsuit claims. That costs the state roughly $549 million a year, an amount that will only grow as more find their way to Indiana, according to the lawsuit. “The Defendants have disregarded and ignored the plain language of (federal immigration law) by multiple means, including promulgating regulations contrary to congressionally enacted statutes and contriving the release of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from the border into the interior of the United States,” the lawsuit said. Rokita also named the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection as well as the United States as defendants in the suit. The administration is not detaining or questioning people found at ports of entry or at borders as it should, the suit said, and is instead releasing many into the country without proper review. Biden’s administration is also actively eliminating ways for agencies to detain more immigrants or build larger facilities, according to the lawsuit. MEXICO CITY -- Mexican immigration authorities said Sunday they found the bodies of three apparent migrants who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande, the border river with Texas also known as the Rio Bravo. The National Immigration Institute said no identification was found on two of the bodies, but a third bore documents indicating he was from Nicaragua. Officers from the institute’s migrant protection team also found three migrants alive but unable to continue crossing the river due to cold water temperatures and strong currents. The woman, a 2-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy, all from Honduras, were rescued with an airboat and taken to a shelter in the border city of Piedras Negras. It was the latest in a series of migrant deaths in Mexico that some activists attribute to heightened security that has led some migrants to use riskier routes to reach and cross the U.S. border.
Earlier this week, a bus crash in northern Mexico killed seven migrants and injured 24. One of those killed was a pregnant woman and two of the injured were minors. No nationalities were immediately available for the seven dead, but of those who survived, 11 were from El Salvador, seven from Honduras and four from Cuba. Also injured were one Panamanian and one Mexican citizen. The bus plunged through a guardrail and down an embankment in the northern state of San Luis Potosi on Wednesday. Immigrant traffickers frequently cram migrants aboard freight trucks and buses to traverse Mexico on their way to the United States. On Tuesday, authorities in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz said six migrants drowned off Mexico’s Gulf coast and one was missing. Apparently, all were from Honduras. Smugglers sometimes take migrants in open boats across the Gulf to avoid highway immigration checkpoints. 4/21/2022 0 Comments Us Immigration Agency Explores Data Loophole to Obtain Information on Deportation TargetsOver the last decade, a growing number of American cities and states have restricted the information local law enforcement departments can exchange with immigration authorities.
But new documents reveal that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has tapped a network of private technology companies to skirt such sanctuary policies, facilitating access to “real time” information about incarcerations and jail bookings, which enables them to pick up immigrants targeted for deportation. The documents, which were obtained by a group of immigrant advocacy groups including Mijente, Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, and American Friends Services Committee and reviewed by the Guardian, show that in lieu of law enforcement cooperation in jurisdictions with sanctuary policies, Ice has turned to LexisNexis and Equifax, data brokers that collect, access and then sell personal and criminal justice information. The report focuses on Colorado, where a sanctuary policy has limited cooperation between local agencies and Ice since 2019. But many of the databases Ice has acquired access to are national in scope, the documents show. Several US jurisdictions with sanctuary policies have started to ask questions about Ice’s use of tech solutions and loopholes. In Chicago, members of the Cook County board of commissioners in April requested an investigation into whether Ice’s use of data brokers violated sanctuary policies. After the Senate returns to Washington, D.C., from its April recess, a bipartisan group of senators wants to start formally convening meetings to try to restart immigration reform efforts.
After Democrats' attempts to go it alone as part of a sweeping bill failed last year, a bipartisan immigration deal appears to be their best hope of making good on their pledge to reform immigration. They would face a significant uphill battle in reaching such a reform agreement ahead of the November election, where Republicans intend to use the issue as a key line of attack. However, Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) told The Hill that they intend to convene a group of senators interested in reviving immigration discussions — a perennial policy white whale for Congress — after a two-week recess. "Yes... we want to sit down at a table and invite members who have immigration, bipartisan immigration bills, to come and propose those bills to us, and see if we can build a 60-vote plus margin for a group of bills." When asked about holding meetings after the recess, Durbin said, "It may not be possible, but I believe it is." When asked about the talks, Tillis told The Hill that after the recess he wanted to "start some working groups leading up to whenever we get back." |