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Tag: Texas

  • BUC-EE’S TO BREAK GROUND ON NEW TRAVEL CENTER IN HILLSBORO, TX ON JAN. 24

    BUC-EE’S TO BREAK GROUND ON NEW TRAVEL CENTER IN HILLSBORO, TX ON JAN. 24

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    Press Release
    –

    Jan 10, 2023 13:00 CST


    HILLSBORO, Texas, January 10, 2023 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Buc-ee’s, home of the world’s cleanest bathrooms, freshest food and friendliest beaver, will break ground on its new travel center in Hillsboro, Texas, on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023. The start of construction will be celebrated at 1 p.m. CST with a ceremony attended by local leaders.

    Located at 165 State Highway 77, Buc-ee’s Hillsboro will occupy 74,000 square feet and offer 120 fueling positions. Buc-ee’s favorites including Texas barbeque, homemade fudge, kolaches, Beaver Nuggets, jerky and fresh pastries will all be available. Visitors will find thousands of snack, meal and drink options, as well as the same award-winning restrooms, cheap gas, quality products and excellent service that have won the hearts, trust and business of millions in the South for 40 years. 

    Attendees of the Buc-ee’s Hillsboro groundbreaking ceremony will include Mayor Andrew Smith of Hillsboro along with members of the Hillsboro City Council, as well as Hill County Judge Justin Lewis and the Hill County Commissioners Court.

    Founded in Texas in 1982, Buc-ee’s operates 44 stores across Texas and the South. Since beginning its multi-state expansion in 2019, Buc-ee’s has opened travel centers in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Now, Buc-ee’s is headed West with store groundbreakings in Colorado and Missouri. 

    “Hillsboro is one of the best forks in the road we’ve ever seen, and they have a beautiful, historic courthouse as a bonus!” said Stan Beard of Buc-ee’s. “Whether you’re headed to Fort Worth and West Texas or Dallas and East Texas, you can make Buc-ee’s your stop, coming and going. The City of Hillsboro and Hill County have been such great partners, and we look forward to being a great neighbor for years to come.” 

    Throughout the project, Buc-ee’s corporate development team will continue to work closely with local partners including the City of Hillsboro and Hill County. Buc-ee’s Hillsboro will bring at least 200 jobs to the area, with starting pay beginning well above minimum wage, full benefits, a 6% matching 401k, and three weeks of paid vacation.

    General Photos Courtesy of Buc-ee’s: CLICK HERE. 

    About Buc-ee’s
    Buc-ee’s is the world’s most-loved travel center. Founded in 1982, Buc-ee’s now has 34 stores across Texas, including the world’s largest convenience store, as well as 10 locations in other states. Buc-ee’s is known for pristine bathrooms, a large amount of fueling positions, friendly service, Buc-ee’s apparel and fresh, delicious food. Originally launched and still headquartered in Texas, Buc-ee’s has combined traditional quality and modern efficiency to redefine the pit stop for their customers. For more information, visit www.buc-ees.com.

    Source: Buc-ee’s

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  • Don’t try to make sense of Biden’s border policy | CNN Politics

    Don’t try to make sense of Biden’s border policy | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden’s immigration policy is confusing and full of contradictions.

    Make some sense of these developments:

    Biden …

    • made his first visit to the border as president on Sunday, but failed to see any migrants …
    • is expanding former President Donald Trump’s border policy, known as Title 42, even though Biden says he doesn’t like it …
    • asked courts to end that Trump-era policy, but seemingly had no workable plan for when they nearly did …
    • has traveled to Mexico City for a summit with North American leaders, but his White House is making very clear they aren’t anticipating any progress on the border crisis …
    • watches on as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, in particular, freelances his own border security with increasingly elaborate stunts to argue the border is too porous. The latest involves adding a wall of shipping containers to the border at El Paso, Texas.

    How did Biden visit an aid center at the border during an admitted crisis and fail to encounter any actual migrants?

    “There just weren’t any at the center when he arrived,” a senior administration official said in Priscilla Alvarez and MJ Lee’s report for CNN. “Completely coincidental. They haven’t had any today.”

    Granted, border crossings have dropped in the new year.

    But Alvarez and Lee point to on-the-ground reporting from CNN’s Rosa Flores that “hundreds of migrants, including children, were living on the street after crossing into the United States in El Paso. And nearly 1,000 additional migrants were in federal custody in detention facilities in El Paso on Sunday, according to the City of El Paso’s migrant dashboard.”

    Abbott hand-delivered a message to Biden on the tarmac in El Paso complaining Biden hasn’t paid enough attention to the border. The strongly worded letter was also posted on Abbott’s website.

    “Your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry Texas property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies,” Abbott wrote.

    Rather than meet with migrants, Biden focused on meeting with border enforcement personnel, including in a quick stop alongside an iron fence between the US and Mexico. Reporters were kept at a distance. Read the full report from Alvarez and Lee.

    What’s no coincidence is the administration’s hard-to-follow immigration policy.

    As part of the new immigration plan announced last week, Biden said the US would accept up to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela into a humanitarian “parole program,” but then also made clear Title 42 would be applied in a new way, continuing the policy of turning away more people at the border.

    The idea is to get people to apply legally from home rather than just show up at the border.

    CNN’s Catherine Shoichet does an admirable job of trying to keep track of Biden’s relationship with Title 42, the Trump-era pandemic policy written by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not Congress, and which has morphed into de facto US immigration policy.

    It allows the government to turn away more migrants at the border. When it appeared Title 42 would lapse at the end of 2022, a mass of migrants gathered at the border in anticipation.

    “Officials have claimed court decisions left them with no other choice, but they’ve also chosen to expand the policy beyond any court’s order,” Shoichet writes.

    Take a look at her timeline of the Biden administration’s evolution on Title 42. The recent expansion of the policy came after the Supreme Court required officials to maintain it.

    A group of Democratic lawmakers said they were “deeply disappointed” in the new version of the policy, which they argued would “do nothing to restore the rule of law at the border.”

    “Instead, it will increase border crossings over time and further enrich human smuggling networks,” Sens. Cory Booker and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico and Alex Padilla of California wrote in a joint statement.

    It’s a concern Biden actually shares. Even though he is essentially expanding the policy, the president also acknowledged last week his move could makes things worse because it almost encourages people turned away at the border to try repeatedly to enter the US.

    White House officials are tamping down expectations for Biden’s meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is often referred to in shorthand as AMLO.

    Mexico recently agreed to accept up to 30,000 migrants per month from the four countries included in the new policy who attempt to enter the US and are turned back.

    AMLO has suggested Mexico could accept more. But national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the policy will need time to play out before anyone should expect tweaks.

    While it’s hard to make sense of Biden’s border policy, it’s important to remember the systemic dysfunction of the US border debate that has paralyzed Congress for decades.

    The issue of immigration is top of mind for Republicans who now control the House, but it’s not at all clear there will be any movement toward the kind of bipartisan and comprehensive efforts that could change things.

    Meantime, Biden will be left to the existing policies, even if they were written under the previous administration and kept in place, for now, by the Supreme Court.

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  • DOJ appeals decision that faulted Air Force for 2017 Texas church shooting | CNN Politics

    DOJ appeals decision that faulted Air Force for 2017 Texas church shooting | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department on Monday formally appealed a 2021 federal court ruling that found the US government was mostly responsible for the 2017 mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, arguing that the court erred when it said the government was more at fault for the massacre than the shooter himself.

    During the shooting, the gunman, former US Air Force member Devin Patrick Kelley, killed 26 people and wounded 22 others at the First Baptist Church in the small community of Sutherland Springs. He died later that day from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

    “The attack on innocent victims at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs was an inexpressible tragedy and the United States unequivocally does not seek to excuse the Air Force’s failure to submit Kelley’s fingerprints and record of conviction for inclusion in NICS databases,” attorneys for the department wrote in court papers filed Monday evening. “Nonetheless, under settled Texas and federal law, the United States is not liable for Kelley’s actions, and is certainly not more responsible for those acts than the murderer himself.”

    DOJ spokeswoman Dena Iverson said in a recent statement that the government and plaintiffs have been engaged in a months-long effort to resolve the case through an out-of-court resolution.

    “Although the formal mediation has now ended, we remain open to resolving the plaintiffs’ claims through settlement and will continue our efforts to do so,” Iverson said.

    In a July 2021 ruling from US District Judge Xavier Rodriguez for the Western District of Texas, the court found the government 60% responsible for the harm that happened in the shooting and “jointly and severally liable for the damages that may be awarded.”

    Rodriguez concluded the Air Force failed to exercise reasonable care when it didn’t submit the shooter’s criminal history to the FBI’s background check system, which increased the risk of physical harm to the general public.

    “Even if the United States could be liable, the court erred in apportioning 60% of the responsibility to the United States (20% for line employees and 40% for supervisors), leaving only 40% for Kelley,” the DOJ attorneys argued in their filing on Monday.

    “The court committed legal error in apportioning a share of responsibility to the United States under a negligent supervision theory after already imposing liability for the acts of the supervised line employees – under Texas law, these theories are mutually exclusive. Moreover, the court erred by holding the United States more responsible for Kelley’s outrages than Kelley himself,” they wrote.

    In its filing, the DOJ asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to hold oral arguments to hear the appeal, writing: “The record in this case is voluminous and the legal issues are important and complex. Oral argument will be of substantial benefit to this Court in understanding the important issues in the case.”

    Victims of the shooting and families who suffered a loss in the incident have previously voiced opposition to the DOJ’s plan to appeal the decision, with an attorney for some of them saying on Monday that the move “dealt a blow to America’s safety.”

    “The DOJ’s appeal asks the court to hold that flagrantly and repeatedly violating the law – for over thirty years – by allowing child abusing felons and domestic violence offenders’ guns does not risk the safety of the public. The twenty-six dead and twenty-two injured at the Sutherland Springs mass shooting disagree,” Jamal Alsaffar, the lead attorney for the Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church families, said in a statement.

    Kelley was charged in military court in 2012 on suspicion of assaulting his spouse and their child. Kelley received a bad conduct discharge, confinement for 12 months, and was demoted to E-1, or airman basic.

    But despite his history of domestic abuse and questionable behavior involving firearms, Kelley was able to purchase the Ruger AR-556 rifle he allegedly used in the shooting from a store in San Antonio in April 2016, a law enforcement official previously told CNN.

    The failure to relay that information prevented the entry of his conviction into the federal database that must be checked before someone is able to purchase a firearm. Had his information been in the database at the National Criminal Information Center, it should have prevented gun sales to Kelley. Federal law prohibits people convicted of a misdemeanor crime involving domestic violence from owning firearms.

    Rodriguez’s order stated that no other individual – not even the shooter’s parents or partners – knew as much as the government did about his violent history and the violence he was capable of committing.

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  • Biden struggles to confirm judges in the South and thwart Trump’s impact | CNN Politics

    Biden struggles to confirm judges in the South and thwart Trump’s impact | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats have moved quickly to appoint scores of judges during the past two years, outpacing former President Donald Trump, but they have stalled in the South.

    The dearth of nominees offered in southern states, notably where both US senators are Republican, threatens to undercut Biden’s large-scale effort to counteract Trump’s effect on the federal judiciary, particularly to bolster civil rights and ensure voter protections.

    The Biden team’s well-documented diversification of the courts – nominees have been overwhelmingly women and people of color, such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and offered professional diversity, including public defenders and civil rights lawyers – has withered when it comes to district courts in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas, where more than a dozen such court vacancies exist.

    “That is where the entrenchment of hyper-conservatism is real and difficult to uproot,” said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

    The pattern of vacancies, particularly in the South, is not lost on the Biden selection team, led by political veterans with deep experience in judicial selection and confirmation. (Biden, himself, as a senator from Delaware, once led the Senate Judiciary Committee.)

    “All of these seats are deeply important to us. We care about all of these vacancies,” Paige Herwig, senior counsel to the President, told CNN. “It’s not a secret that a large number of vacancies are in states with two Republican senators. But we are always here in good faith. We are here to work with home state senators.”

    Many states beyond the South with two GOP senators, such as Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah, lack nominees for court vacancies, but the South is disproportionately affected because of its sheer population and number of open seats. The South also endures as a battleground for intense litigation over civil rights and liberties.

    Federal judges are appointed for life and can become a president’s most enduring legacy. Judges’ effect on American life is clear, from the top at the Supreme Court, down to district court judges who decide which litigants even get to trial.

    District courts are “the gateway to access to justice,” Nelson said.

    District court judges have also shown their muscle in recent years by blocking executive branch policy with nationwide injunctions. Biden’s early initiatives, notably over immigration and student-debt relief, were first thwarted in lower courts by Republican-appointed judges.

    During Biden’s first two years, the White House and Senate Democrats plainly prioritized judicial vacancies in blue states, where they could make swift and immediate progress.

    Overall, Biden won confirmations for 97 appointments to the US district courts, appellate bench and Supreme Court over the past two years.

    For the comparable two-year period, Trump, who set out to transform the federal courts the help of White House counsel Don McGahn and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, had named 85 judges. They scouted out likeminded conservative ideologues and then accelerated appointments in the following years by openly encouraging judges to retire to generate more vacancies.

    U.S. Supreme Court says Trump-era border policy to remain in effect while legal challenges play out


    10:08

    – Source:
    CNN

    Like other progressive leaders, Nelson praises the Biden focus on a more diverse bench. Yet she said the White House could step up the pace of nominations and the Senate can move faster on the nominees it has received.

    “Nancy Abudu is an excellent example of someone whose nomination has been stalled,” Nelson said. Abudu, a litigation director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, would, if confirmed, be the first Black woman on the US appeals court for the 11th Circuit, covering Alabama, Georgia and Florida. She was designated for an open Georgia seat and endorsed by the state’s two senators, both of whom are Democrats.

    The Senate Judiciary Committee, which had been evenly split between Democrats and Republicans last year, deadlocked in May on Abudu’s nomination, and she had been awaiting a procedural vote by the full Senate that then would have allowed an up-or-down vote on confirmation. Biden has renominated her for the new Congress.

    The question now is whether the White House will be able to ramp up negotiations with red-state senators and whether the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, will ease the practice of requiring district court nominees to have the backing of home-state senators.

    By the terms of the Constitution, a president seeks the “advice and consent” of the Senate judicial appointments. Senators traditionally have influenced the selection of nominations to district and appellate courts in their home states, even to the point of blocking a disfavored candidate. In recent years, however, presidents have been able to wield more latitude for appeals court nominations.

    The Judiciary Committee, however, will not hold a hearing on a district court nomination unless both home-state senators have signed off, in what’s referred to as the “blue slip” process. These blue slips of paper, as they are relayed to the committee, are intended to signify that a home-state senator has been consulted in the president’s choice. For Biden’s judicial selections, that process poses significant roadblocks.

    Herwig, overseeing the judicial selection machinery, stresses that Biden is trying to generate consensus and says appointments for a Louisiana-based seat on the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit (Judge Dana Douglas) and Indiana-based seat on the 7th Circuit (Judge Doris Pryor), which arose from some dealings with GOP senators, “demonstrate that there are possibilities to work together.” The Senate confirmed Douglas and Pryor, both former US magistrate judges, in December.

    A second seat on the powerful 5th Circuit appellate court, covering Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, is open with no nominee. Judge Gregg Costa, based in Texas, had announced about a year ago that he would be resigning in August 2022.

    While a good portion of the open seats can be chalked up to Democratic and Republican differences, another notable appellate vacancy – for a Maryland seat on the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit – rests in Democratic hands.

    Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, announced her retirement more than a year ago, and made it effective in September 2022. But Biden and Sen. Ben Cardin, Maryland’s senior senator, have been at odds over a successor, and the White House apparently does not want to more forward without Cardin’s backing. Herwig would not comment on that vacancy, and a Cardin spokeswoman said the senator was awaiting word from the White House on his suggested nominees.

    In the meantime, the 4th Circuit, resolving appeals from Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia district courts, remains closely divided with seven Democratic and six Republican appointees.

    Biden’s team signaled from the start its priority for the judiciary, and White House chief of staff Ron Klain, a former Supreme Court law clerk, has been fixated on filling the bench. Klain worked with then-Sen. Biden on the Judiciary Committee and separately helped evaluate judicial candidates in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

    Herwig is a product of the Senate, too, previously serving two Democratic senators who sit on the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein and Amy Klobuchar.

    In the South, however, where voting rights and immigration disputes rage, change has been slow. Going forward, as Democrats gained one more seat in the November midterm elections toward their Senate majority, southern states are likely to become a critical arena for an administration determined to reshape the bench.

    The Administrative Office of the US Courts reports that as of January 6, there were 82 vacancies on federal district and appellate courts. Biden has designated nominees for only about half of those vacancies. (There are a total 677 authorized judgeships at the trial-level US district courts, 179 on the US courts of appeals and nine on the Supreme Court.)

    The South has a disproportionate share of those vacancies without nominations.

    Of all 50 states, Florida and Louisiana have the most openings with no nominees pending, 4 apiece. Texas has three vacancies with no nominees pending, and Alabama two (one dating to mid-2020) with no nominees offered.

    It is plain, given the number of vacancies and how long some have existed, that it will not be easy to fill them. And it is unclear whether the Democratic White House and Republican senators are truly talking to each other, or actually talking past each other.

    Press secretaries for Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, deeply invested in the ideology of the bench, and regularly opposing Biden appointees, said the senators were working with the administration on judges.

    In Louisiana, the communications director to Sen. John Kennedy, another member of the Judiciary Committee, said Kennedy’s office had no information to provide on possible appointments in Louisiana.

    Ryann DuRant, press secretary to Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, said the White House reached out to Tuberville soon after he became a senator in 2021 to address the courts, but that since then, “there has been radio silence from the White House.”

    “When the White House is ready to move forward on Alabama judicial nominees,” DuRant added in a statement, “Senator Tuberville welcomes the opportunity to discuss as a part of his role to provide advice and consent.”

    McKinley Lewis, communications director for Florida Sen. Rick Scott, said the senator welcomed “an open, good faith dialogue with the White House to ensure any nominees to serve on Florida’s federal courts will respect the limited role of the judiciary and will not legislate from the bench.”

    Herwig declined to detail any conservations yet stressed that there was no senator with whom her team would not work.

    It’s unclear whether the Senate Judiciary Committee will feel increased pressure, from its Democratic ranks or from outside liberal interests, to amend the “blue slip” process.

    Trump’s total appointments in four years reached 231, a figure that might be hard for Biden to match, if stalemates continue in Republican-dominated locales.

    There are at least another 20 vacancies expected in 2023, based on information gathered by the Administrative Office of the US Courts. About a third of those are in southern locales.

    At some point, judges weighing retirement, and equally concerned about whether Biden could successfully tap a replacement, may simply opt against stepping down during his remaining presidency.

    In the Trump years, his GOP allies openly encouraged judges thinking about retirement to just do it. It was a sign of how vigorously Republican leaders wanted to shape the courts.

    Speaking specifically of Supreme Court justices, former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said in a 2018 radio interview, “If you’re thinking about quitting this year, do it yesterday.”

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  • El Paso shelter says video of officer slamming person on ground shows ‘excessive force’ | CNN

    El Paso shelter says video of officer slamming person on ground shows ‘excessive force’ | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A homeless shelter in El Paso, Texas, released a video showing what the group said was Customs and Border Protection officials apprehending a person outside of its welcome center.

    The Opportunity Center for the Homeless posted the surveillance video, which shows someone who appears to be in law enforcement pushing the person up to the teal windows at the entrance of the building and then slamming the person to the ground and handcuffing them.

    Another person who appears to be in law enforcement stands over them.

    The group says the surveillance video was taken at 11:50 a.m. on January 6.

    It is unclear what led up to the incident. CNN reached out to the Opportunity Center for the Homeless Sunday night to inquire about the person’s whereabouts or condition following the January 6 incident and whether there was any additional video taken before or after the footage that was shared on social media.

    Opportunity Center for the Homeless founder Ray Tullius issued a statement saying, “Through the years, the Opportunity Center for the Homeless has had a respectful and long-standing working relationship with law enforcement officials in the community.

    “[On Friday], an individual receiving services at the Welcome Center, located at 201 E. 9th Avenue, was apprehended in front of the facility by Customs and Border Protection officials with what seems to us to be excessive force.

    “To our knowledge, this is an isolated incident. However, it raises our concerns for the well-being of the individual taken into custody and all the guests receiving services in our homeless programs. As we have done it for the last twenty-nine years, the Opportunity Center for the Homeless will continue to extend a helping hand to those in need of help,” the statement reads.

    In a statement, US Customs and Border Protection said its Office of Professional Responsibility is reviewing the incident.

    “Although, at the moment we do not have all the details of what occurred during this incident, CBP takes all allegations of misconduct seriously, investigates thoroughly, and holds employees accountable when policies are violated,” the agency said.

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  • Biden heads to the border for the first time as president | CNN Politics

    Biden heads to the border for the first time as president | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden is heading to the US-Mexico border on Sunday on the heels of major policy announcements and following relentless calls from Republicans who believe the trip is overdue.

    The trip to the border – the first for Biden since he took office – comes as the administration wrestles with a growing number of migrants, overwhelming federal and local resources. Republicans, some border-district Democrats in Congress and even Democratic mayors have criticized Biden for failing to address record levels of border crossings.

    With his visit to El Paso, Texas, on Sunday, Biden is seizing on an issue that’s been a political liability for his administration, while calling on Congress to overhaul the US immigration system to meet current needs.

    But the patchwork of policies put in place by the administration to manage the border so far has often put Biden at odds with his own allies who argue that the administration’s approach is too enforcement heavy.

    “It’s enraging and sad to see a Democratic administration make it harder for vulnerable people to seek asylum all because they’re scared of angry MAGA voters on this issue,” a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus told CNN, responding to the latest policy announcements.

    Previewing the trip, a White House official said the president will “meet with federal, state, and local officials and community leaders who have been critical partners in managing the new migration challenge impacting the entire Western Hemisphere with record numbers of people fleeing political oppression and gang violence in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba.” The president is scheduled to spend about three hours on the ground.

    Biden will evaluate border enforcement operations, touring the Bridge of the Americas Port of Entry alongside Customs and Border Protection officers, members of Congress and local officials and law enforcement.

    The White House said it’s the busiest port in El Paso and received $600 million under bipartisan infrastructure law.

    Biden will then visit the El Paso County Migrant Services Center to meet with local officials, faith leaders and non-governmental organizations “who have been critical to supporting migrants fleeing political oppression and economic collapse in their home countries.”

    The official said the president will also spend time with local business leaders to hear about the economic impact of migration in the region and worker shortages.

    Biden will be joined by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; Texas Reps. Veronica Escobar, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, all Democrats; El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser; El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego; and additional community and business leaders.

    Mayorkas on Sunday defended Biden’s approach to addressing the migrant surge at the southern border, saying the administration was operating in a humane but necessary way.

    “We are dealing with in a broken immigration system that Congress has failed to repair for decades, and there is unanimity with respect to that reality,” Mayorkas told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week,” while attributing the surge to regional displacement impacting the entire Western Hemisphere.

    “We want individuals who qualify for relief under our laws to come to the United States in a safe and orderly way. And that is why we are building lawful pathways so people do not have to place their lives and their life savings in the hands of ruthless smugglers,” he said.

    Mass movement across the Western Hemisphere has posed an urgent challenge for Biden, who in his first few months in office faced a surge of unaccompanied migrant children at the border and later, the abrupt arrival of thousands of Haitian migrants.

    Since 2021, there have been more than 2.4 million arrests along the US-Mexico border, according to US Customs and Border Protection data. That includes people who have attempted to cross more than once. Many have also been turned away under a Trump-era Covid restriction known as Title 42 that allows federal authorities to expel migrants quickly, citing the Covid-19 pandemic.

    The arrival of thousands of migrants has strained border communities, including El Paso. The city has prided itself on being a welcoming place for migrants but has been overwhelmed in recent months with the sudden arrival of thousands of migrants, straining local resources and prompting pleas for federal assistance.

    Anxiety about the scheduled end of Title 42 prompted thousands of migrants in recent weeks to turn themselves in to border authorities or to cross into the United States illegally in a very short period.

    The policy was scheduled to lift last month, but a Supreme Court ruling kept the rule in place while legal challenges play out in court.

    Federal data shared with CNN indicates that migrant encounters in El Paso have dropped drastically since December, when thousands crossed on a daily basis.

    There have been less than 700 daily encounters on average over the last few days, compared to nearly 2,500 at its peak in December, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

    DHS said it deployed 100 additional personnel to the El Paso region in December, and this week, the department will open another temporary facility to process migrants. Shelters in Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, have also seen a decrease in migrants, DHS said.

    Biden has said he wanted to wait until he knew an outcome in the Title 42 legal machinations before traveling to the border and accused Republicans calling for him to travel there of playing political games.

    “They haven’t been serious about this at all,” he said.

    El Paso has been at the center of the immigration debate dating back to the Trump administration, which piloted the controversial family separation policy in the region.

    While Biden has condemned Trump-era immigration policies, his own administration has wrestled with striking a balance between enforcement and holding up its humanitarian promises.

    In El Paso, Biden will be faced with the history of his predecessor and the challenges he faces as the administration tries to stem the flow of mass migration in the hemisphere.

    He’ll also be visiting a state whose governor has been a fierce critic of the Biden administration’s immigration policies. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who already criticized the president’s upcoming visit on Twitter, has sent thousands of migrants on buses to Democratic-led cities and deployed the National Guard along the Texas-Mexico border, including in El Paso.

    In recent months, the El Paso sector has surpassed the Rio Grande Valley sector in migrant arrests. RGV has historically been one of the busiest sectors for border crossings. The El Paso sector patrols 268 miles of international border.

    Last November, border authorities encountered more than 53,000 migrants in the El Paso sector, according to the latest available data from US Customs and Border Protection.

    Last year, El Paso – whose mayor, Leeser, is a Democrat – began sending migrant buses to New York City, following in the footsteps of Republican governors, to try to get people to their destination and decongest the city. That effort has since stopped.

    Escobar, who represents El Paso, said in a tweet that she’s “excited” to welcome Biden to the city. While she didn’t place a big emphasis on Biden visiting the border, she made clear she welcomed it in recent weeks and urged the federal government to provide assistance to the city.

    John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, said that the president is looking forward to seeing firsthand the situation on the border ahead of the North American Leaders’ Summit in Mexico City.

    “The President is very much looking forward to seeing for himself first-hand what the border security situation looks like, particularly in El Paso. He’s very much also interested in getting to talk to Customs and Border Patrol agents on the ground who are actually involved in this mission to get their first-hand perspectives of it,” Kirby told reporters Friday.

    Ahead of Biden’s border visit, the administration also announced plans to expand the policy and include Haitians, Nicaraguans and Cubans while it remains in place. Title 42 has so far largely applied to migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Venezuela.

    The announcements Biden made Thursday reflect the administration’s effort to prepare for the end of Title 42, along with putting in place programs to manage the surge of migrants that have coincided with the anticipated end of the rule.

    The administration will now accept up to 30,000 migrants per month from Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela under a humanitarian parole program geared toward those nationalities. Those who do not come to the US under that program may be expelled to Mexico under Title 42.

    The announcement drew criticism from immigrant advocates and Democrats who argued the policies will put migrants who are seeking asylum in harm’s way.

    “The expansion of Title 42 to include Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans is a broken promise,” said Dylan Corbett, executive director of Hope Border Institute, in a statement. Hope Border Institute has been assisting migrants who have arrived in El Paso.

    “Border communities will continue to work hard to pick up the broken pieces of our nation’s immigration system and show that our future lies not with expulsion and deportation, but with humanity and hope,” he added.

    Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus grilled top Biden officials, including Mayorkas, over the newly announced border policies in a call Thursday, according to two sources in attendance.

    Members felt blindsided by the new policies and frustrated with the lack of engagement prior to their rollout, the sources said.

    “It was really heated,” one source said, adding that members were “livid” that the administration didn’t consult with them ahead of time. The call included officials with the Department of Homeland Security and the White House.

    One of the sources of tension during the call was a new asylum regulation that could bar migrants who are seeking asylum in the United States from doing so if they passed through another country on their way to the US-Mexico border. The restrictions are reminiscent of limits rolled out during the Trump administration, though officials have rejected the comparison.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Escobar previews Biden’s trip to southern border

    Escobar previews Biden’s trip to southern border

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    Escobar previews Biden’s trip to southern border – CBS News


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    Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas says President Biden is visiting El Paso, Texas, to meet with those who are “actually doing the work on the ground day to day.”

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  • GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales criticizes White House for handling of Biden border trip

    GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales criticizes White House for handling of Biden border trip

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    GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales criticizes White House for handling of Biden border trip – CBS News


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    GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas says the White House denied his request to accompany President Biden on his visit to El Paso, which is in Gonzales’ district.

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  • Elon Musk says he can’t get a fair trial in San Francisco, requests Tesla shareholder fraud trial be moved to Texas 

    Elon Musk says he can’t get a fair trial in San Francisco, requests Tesla shareholder fraud trial be moved to Texas 

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    Elon Musk wants his upcoming fraud trial with Tesla Inc. shareholders moved out of San Francisco, saying jurors in the region will probably be biased against him because of recent layoffs at Twitter Inc. and “local negativity.”

    The billionaire who runs both Tesla and Twitter proposed the trial be held in western Texas, where Tesla moved its headquarters to Austin from northern California about a year ago, according to a filing by his attorneys late Friday.

    A substantial portion of the San Francisco-area jury pool “is likely to hold a personal and material bias against Mr. Musk as a result of recent layoffs at one of his companies as individual prospective jurors — or their friends and relatives — may have been personally impacted,” the lawyers wrote. “The existing baseline bias has been compounded, expanded, and reinforced by the negative and inflammatory local publicity surrounding the events.”

    Investors suing Tesla and Musk, its chief executive officer, argue that his August 2018 tweets about taking the electric-car maker private with “funding secured” were “indisputably false” and cost them billions of dollars by spurring wild swings in Tesla’s stock price. Musk has maintained that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had agreed to support his attempt to take Tesla private. The trial is set to begin January 17. 

    “To be clear, this motion is not being brought simply because Mr. Musk has been the subject of negative news coverage. Mr. Musk has been a public figure for more than a decade and recognizes that being the subject of negative and even unfair media attention comes with the territory,” according to the filing. “The local media and political establishment have attempted to depict Mr. Musk as personally responsible for causing material economic harm to the significant number of potential jurors impacted by the layoffs and to the City of San Francisco as a whole.” 

    Musk has sparred with Twitter’s hometown of San Francisco after turning some space at the company’s Market Street headquarters into makeshift bedrooms, a possible violation of city building codes. Musk has also slammed Mayor London Breed over the city’s fentanyl crisis. 

    He bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October and installed himself as chief executive officer. After Tesla’s corporate headquarters moved to Austin in December 2021 the company still has a formidable presence in California. In a blog post this week, the company said it has 47,000 employees in the state. 

    Musk’s attorneys think western Texas would offer a fairer venue than northern California.

    “Mr. Musk is far likelier to receive a fair trial in the Western District of Texas,” they wrote. “Mr. Musk has not been the subject of overwhelming, pervasive, and inflammatory press coverage by the local media in the Western District of Texas, like he has in this district. Texas news outlets publish far fewer stories about Mr. Musk.”

    Our new weekly Impact Report newsletter examines how ESG news and trends are shaping the roles and responsibilities of today’s executives. Subscribe here.

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    Dana Hull, Bloomberg

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  • Video game workers form Microsoft’s first US labor union

    Video game workers form Microsoft’s first US labor union

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    A group of video game testers has formed Microsoft’s first labor union in the U.S., which will also be the largest in the video game industry.

    The Communications Workers of America said Tuesday that a majority of about 300 quality-assurance workers at Microsoft video game subsidiary ZeniMax Studios has voted to join the union.

    Microsoft already told the CWA it would accept the formation of the union at its Maryland-based video game subsidiary, fulfilling a promise it made to try to build public support for its $68.7 billion acquisition of another big game company, Activision Blizzard.

    Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5 billion in 2021, giving the Xbox-maker control of ZeniMax’s well-known game publishing division Bethesda Softworks and popular game franchises such as The Elder Scrolls, Doom and Fallout.

    Senior game tester Wayne Dayberry said in an interview with The Associated Press that the unionization campaign began before Microsoft took over and reflected workplace concerns that are common at video game companies.

    “Throughout the industry, the quality assurance departments are treated poorly, paid very little, and treated as replaceable cogs,” said Dayberry, who has worked for five years at ZeniMax’s Rockville, Maryland headquarters on games such as Fallout, Prey and The Evil Within.

    “There’s not a lot of dignity involved in it,” he said. “That’s something we’re hoping to show people in the industry who are in like situations, that if we can do it, they can do it as well.”

    The unionization campaign accelerated thanks to Microsoft’s ongoing bid to buy California-based game giant Activision Blizzard. Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, made a June pact with the CWA union to stay neutral if Activision Blizzard workers sought to form a union.

    The worker-friendly pledge sought to appeal to U.S. regulator concerns under President Joe Biden about the labor implications of massive business mergers, though it didn’t stop the Federal Trade Commission from suing last month to block Microsoft’s planned Activision Blizzard acquisition. The antitrust case had its first hearing Tuesday and could drag on for months.

    Two small units of Activision Blizzard workers were the first to certify unions last year in Middleton, Wisconsin and Albany, New York. A third, Boston-based Activision Blizzard subsidiary Proletariat, filed a Dec. 27 petition with the National Labor Relations Board to unionize its 57 workers.

    Microsoft’s legally binding neutrality agreement specifically applied to Activision Blizzard workers after the closing of the merger. But it also reflects Microsoft’s broader principles on handling unionization, which is still uncommon in the tech and gaming industries.

    Dayberry said Microsoft’s neutrality promise gave workers confidence that there wouldn’t be any “retaliation or union-busting, which there has been none of.”

    Microsoft’s green light allowed the ZeniMax union certification to go through a third-party arbitrator rather than the lengthier process typically overseen by the NLRB. A weekslong election period ended on Dec. 31 and was formally certified Tuesday. Microsoft said in a statement that it recognizes the union.

    “They have definitely stood by their word all along,” said CWA spokesperson Beth Allen. “It’s pretty momentous. Microsoft is an outlier in the way tech companies have been behaving.”

    The unionizing workers are based in Hunt Valley and Rockville, Maryland, as well as the Texas cities of Austin and Dallas.

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  • Video game workers form Microsoft’s first US labor union

    Video game workers form Microsoft’s first US labor union

    [ad_1]

    A group of video game testers has formed Microsoft’s first labor union in the U.S., which will also be the largest in the video game industry.

    The Communications Workers of America said Tuesday that a majority of about 300 quality-assurance workers at Microsoft video game subsidiary ZeniMax Studios has voted to join the union.

    Microsoft already told the CWA it would accept the formation of the union at its Maryland-based video game subsidiary, fulfilling a promise it made to try to build public support for its $68.7 billion acquisition of another big game company, Activision Blizzard.

    Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5 billion in 2021, giving the Xbox-maker control of ZeniMax’s well-known game publishing division Bethesda Softworks and popular game franchises such as The Elder Scrolls, Doom and Fallout.

    Senior game tester Wayne Dayberry said in an interview with The Associated Press that the unionization campaign began before Microsoft took over and reflected workplace concerns that are common at video game companies.

    “Throughout the industry, the quality assurance departments are treated poorly, paid very little, and treated as replaceable cogs,” said Dayberry, who has worked for five years at ZeniMax’s Rockville, Maryland headquarters on games such as Fallout, Prey and The Evil Within.

    “There’s not a lot of dignity involved in it,” he said. “That’s something we’re hoping to show people in the industry who are in like situations, that if we can do it, they can do it as well.”

    The unionization campaign accelerated thanks to Microsoft’s ongoing bid to buy California-based game giant Activision Blizzard. Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, made a June pact with the CWA union to stay neutral if Activision Blizzard workers sought to form a union.

    The worker-friendly pledge sought to appeal to U.S. regulator concerns under President Joe Biden about the labor implications of massive business mergers, though it didn’t stop the Federal Trade Commission from suing last month to block Microsoft’s planned Activision Blizzard acquisition. The antitrust case had its first hearing Tuesday and could drag on for months.

    Two small units of Activision Blizzard workers were the first to certify unions last year in Middleton, Wisconsin and Albany, New York. A third, Boston-based Activision Blizzard subsidiary Proletariat, filed a Dec. 27 petition with the National Labor Relations Board to unionize its 57 workers.

    Microsoft’s legally binding neutrality agreement specifically applied to Activision Blizzard workers after the closing of the merger. But it also reflects Microsoft’s broader principles on handling unionization, which is still uncommon in the tech and gaming industries.

    Dayberry said Microsoft’s neutrality promise gave workers confidence that there wouldn’t be any “retaliation or union-busting, which there has been none of.”

    Microsoft’s green light allowed the ZeniMax union certification to go through a third-party arbitrator rather than the lengthier process typically overseen by the NLRB. A weekslong election period ended on Dec. 31 and was formally certified Tuesday. Microsoft said in a statement that it recognizes the union.

    “They have definitely stood by their word all along,” said CWA spokesperson Beth Allen. “It’s pretty momentous. Microsoft is an outlier in the way tech companies have been behaving.”

    The unionizing workers are based in Hunt Valley and Rockville, Maryland, as well as the Texas cities of Austin and Dallas.

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  • 6 die in 3-vehicle crash on Texas highway, authorities say

    6 die in 3-vehicle crash on Texas highway, authorities say

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    GEORGE WEST, Texas — A minivan trying to overtake a vehicle in a no-passing zone on a Texas highway crashed head-on into an SUV, which was then rear-ended by another vehicle, authorities said. Six people died and five others were injured.

    The crash happened around 6:20 p.m. Friday near George West, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of Corpus Christi, said Sgt. Guadalupe Casarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

    “It was a pretty drastic scene,” Casarez said.

    The crash remained under investigation Monday, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. But the department said in a news release that a minivan traveling south on U.S. Highway 59 tried to pass in a no-passing zone and crashed head-on into the northbound SUV. A sedan then slammed into the back of the SUV.

    The vehicle that was being passed was not hit in the crash, Casarez said.

    The driver of the minivan, Xochitl Veronica Lopez, 39, of Houston, died at the scene, along with a juvenile passenger in the minivan, the department said.

    The driver of the SUV, Salvador Almeda Mendoza, 47, of Ganado, Texas, was also killed, along with two passengers, Ilda Briones Nieves, 58, and Honorio Lazo Navarro, 74, both of Ganado.

    The sixth person killed was a passenger in the sedan whose name has not been released.

    Five other people were taken to a hospital with “non-incapacitating injuries,” the public safety department said.

    Authorities so far don’t believe that alcohol was a factor, Casarez said.

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  • Misery in El Paso: Hundreds of homeless migrants live in squalor amid deportation fears | CNN

    Misery in El Paso: Hundreds of homeless migrants live in squalor amid deportation fears | CNN

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    El Paso, Texas
    CNN
     — 

    One-year-old Brenda’s tiny feet are bare on the cold asphalt of an El Paso parking lot as the harsh reality starts to sink in for her parents. They are undocumented. They are homeless. And their daughter barely escaped death when they crossed the Rio Grande.

    “My daughter would have died because she was super frozen,” said Glenda Matos.

    Matos’ pain is clear in her eyes as she recalls her daughter being drenched, in the freezing cold, all while crying hysterically. Matos and her husband, Anthony Blanco, say they had nothing to keep their daughter warm, not even body heat, because they, too, were wet and cold.

    Matos says she hugged Brenda tightly and ran from house to house begging for help until they finally found a kind El Paso resident who helped them with clothes and shelter.

    “I asked God for help,” Glenda said. “God… put those people in my way.”

    For Matos, the tiny red rosary with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, hanging from Brenda’s ancle, saved them. Matos says she wrapped the religious token on her daughter’s little body for protection when they left their native Venezuela.

    Brenda and her parents are some of the hundreds of migrants living in squalor in the streets of downtown El Paso around Sacred Heart Parish. The makeshift camp – with its piles of blankets, strollers and tents lining both sides of a busy street – has city officials expressing concerns about safety and public health given the area is packed with migrants who have no running water or proper shelter.

    The surge of migrants aggregating here started a few weeks ago, when anxiety about the scheduled end of the Trump-era pandemic public health rule known as Title 42 prompted thousands of migrants to turn themselves in to border authorities or to cross into the United States illegally in a very short period of time.

    Title 42 allows immigration authorities to swiftly return some migrants to Mexico. The policy was scheduled to lift last week, but a Supreme Court ruling kept the rule in place while legal challenges play out in court.

    While the impact of the ruling has sent ripples throughout the southern border, the scene in El Paso is one of a kind. It’s the only U.S. border town where hundreds of migrants are living in the streets longer than expected. It’s a new phenomenon that city officials say had never happened during prior migrant surges.

    It’s driven, in part, by the anxiety created by the uncertainty of Title 42, which motivated some migrants to cross the border illegally. These migrants don’t have family or sponsors in the US to receive them. And many also fear that traveling out of town without the proper paperwork could lead to apprehension by US immigration authorities.

    Evelyn Palma sits with her five children in the streets of El Paso, Texas.

    The misery around Sacred Heart Parish is palpable. Evelyn Palma has blankets hooked and draped on a chain-linked fence to keep the cold and the drizzle from hitting her five children, ages 1 to 8, some of them shirtless. She’s been living on the street for eight days. But Friday was especially miserable because it was 40 degrees and it poured overnight.

    “We woke up drenched,” Palma said.

    The 24-year-old mother from Honduras says she and her children turned themselves in to immigration authorities earlier this month, but they were swiftly returned to Mexico, likely under Title 42. That’s why, she says, that a week ago she decided to evade authorities by crossing the river.

    She is part of the growing number of migrants who El Paso city officials say have decided to enter the US illegally and, for various reasons, have not left the city.

    “They are people who came into the country in anticipation of Title 42 going away,” said Mario D’Agostino, El Paso’s deputy city manager.

    The living conditions Palma and other migrants are enduring has officials concerned about their safety and overall public health. City spokesperson Laura Cruz-Acosta says that the spread of disease is top of mind.

    “We are still in the middle of what is being called a ‘tripledemic,’ with continuing high infection levels of upper respiratory infections across the community,” Cruz-Acosta said.

    Evelyn Palma receives gifts for her children in the streets of El Paso, Texas.

    And while the city has space for about 1,500 migrants at shelters that have been erected at the convention center and at a public school, those beds are only offered to migrants who have turned themselves in to border authorities and have been allowed to stay in the US pending their immigration cases. Those migrants receive documentation from US Customs and Border Protection that allows them to travel within the country.

    Migrants who enter the country illegally are not offered city-provided shelter because federal dollars are being used to foot the bill. And those monies can’t be used to serve people who entered the country illegally, according to D’Agostino.

    City officials have been referring undocumented migrants to non-profit organizations and churches like Sacred Heart Parish, which turns into a shelter when night falls.

    That’s why hundreds of migrants aggregate on the streets around the church, hoping to score one of the 120 to 130 slots to enter the church for the night.

    Around 6 p.m., a line of migrants forms outside the church’s gymnasium. Parents can be seen clutching their children to try to keep them warm. Women and men with children are given priority, according to Rafael García, the priest that runs the shelter. García says it’s tough to send people away but that his church has limited resources to serve the growing need.

    Angello Sánchez and his 4-year-old son Anyeider were allowed into the shelter for the night several times this week. The Colombian father says he was trying to protect his son from the cold because his little face still had windburn from being out in the elements during the recent freeze.

    “I got here from southern Mexico on a train. It was so cold and he wasn’t wearing any jacket,” Angello said.

    Palma, the mother of five, says she was offered entry into the shelter with her children but decided not to take the offer because a pregnant friend who is accompanying her was denied access.

    El Paso, which means “The Pass” in Spanish, has historically been a gateway for migrants passing through into the United States.

    “For hundreds of years people have been passing through and it’s just part of their journey,” D’Agostino said. “In normal times the community doesn’t even realize it.”

    But this migrant surge is different because migrants are staying for days and even more than a week, city officials say.

    Besides lacking family or sponsors in the US to receive them, many migrants don’t have money to pay for their transportation out of the city. And in the makeshift migrant camp around Sacred Heart Parish, word is spreading about another factor that has some undocumented migrants hunkering down in El Paso: The fear of getting detained at immigration checkpoints located in the interior of the US.

    In the last week, at least 364 undocumented migrants who were traveling in commercial buses headed to northern cities were detained at these immigration checkpoints, according to tweets posted by El Paso’s border patrol chief.

    Palma says she heard about the checkpoints and the apprehensions and decided to stay in El Paso longer while she figures out what to do.

    “If immigration detains me, they’ll return me,” Palma said.

    Juan Pérez, from Venezuela, was down the street and said that “immigration is in the exits [of the city]… they’ll return us and send us to Mexico.”

    The US has 110 Border Patrol checkpoints in the southern and northern borders, where vehicles are screened for the “illegal flow of people and contraband,” according to a recent US Government Accountability Office report. The checkpoints are usually between 25 and 100 miles from the border, according to the same report.

    Anthony Blanco holds a hand-written sign asking for a job while his wife, Glenda Matos, plays with Brenda in the streets of El Paso, Texas.

    Anthony Blanco says he’s not afraid of being detained at these interior checkpoints.

    “I’ve walked through many different countries without documents. I don’t think we’re going to be detained, but if that happens, it was God’s will,” Blanco said.

    For days this week, Blanco has been holding a sign on the street corner that reads, “Help me with work so I can support my wife and baby,” and asking drivers who pass by for money for bus tickets to Denver.

    Why Denver? He says word has spread that there is work there and living is more affordable.

    Friday morning, a day which was especially miserable because it was cold after a hard overnight rain, Blanco was all smiles. He says he had collected enough money to continue his journey to Denver.

    “Thank God,” Blanco said.

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  • New year expected to bring more changes to state voting laws

    New year expected to bring more changes to state voting laws

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    State lawmakers around the country introduced thousands of bills to change the way elections are run after former President Donald Trump falsely blamed his 2020 loss on voter fraud. Hundreds became law.

    Even with proponents of Trump’s election lies roundly defeated during this year’s midterms, advocates on both sides of the voting debate are bracing for another round of election-related legislation. Republicans are eager to tighten election rules further while Democrats, who took control of two additional statehouses, will seek to make it easier to cast a ballot.

    Minnesota’s newly reelected Democratic secretary of state, Steve Simon, said he had spoken to several secretaries of state who are eager to push for changes in voting. Losses by election-denier candidates in top races have emboldened some Democrats to champion expansions of voting rights.

    “Voters spoke loudly and clearly about what they wanted and didn’t want, both in regards to this office and all these other issues,” said Simon, who defeated a Republican challenger who parroted some of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

    Democrats won majorities in both houses of the Minnesota Legislature in November, giving Simon a good shot at enacting changes. He expects to urge lawmakers to adopt automatic voter registration and allow high school students to pre-register.

    States routinely make adjustments in their voting laws — some subtle, some dramatic. But experts have never seen an explosion of legislation like that which followed the 2020 presidential election, when more than 3,600 election bills were introduced, according to the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks the legislation.

    Liz Avore, senior adviser to the group, said 22 states in the last couple of years expanded access to the ballot, 10 created new restrictions and five expanded access in some ways while creating new barriers in others. This, she said, has created a divide in the U.S. in which “your ZIP code determines your access to our democracy.”

    That divide seems likely to grow next year. Legislatures won’t convene until January at the earliest, so it’s unclear how many bills are being drafted and on which subjects. But Texas, where the Legislature meets only once every two years and lawmakers can “pre-file” drafts of legislation for the upcoming session, offers a preview.

    The Associated Press has identified nearly 100 election-related legislative proposals already filed in the state, both to increase access to the ballot box and to further restrict it. This includes one that would allow the state’s top lawyer to assign a prosecutor focused on election crimes, testing the boundaries of a court ruling earlier this year that said the attorney general did not have the authority to prosecute election crimes.

    Another would assign a group of peace officers to serve as election marshals who investigate claims of election-related missteps. That would follow the lead of Florida, where officers in a special unit assigned to elections have already made a handful of arrests — including of people who mistakenly thought they were eligible to vote under a 2018 constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to some felons. Critics have labeled the unit a political tool of the governor.

    Matt Simpson, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said current election legislation proposed in the state, such as increasing criminal penalties for election crimes and creating election marshals, is “extreme” and “very intimidating” for voters. He said these approaches are primarily political and don’t solve actual voting-related issues, such as high rejection rates of mail ballots and ballot applications due to widespread confusion on the identification numbers necessary.

    “It is certainly the case that Texas elections do not have widespread fraud,” Simpson said. “These bills, these concerns that are raised, are solutions in search of a problem.”

    The reliability of Texas’ elections was underscored by the release earlier this month of an audit by the secretary of state’s office. The 359-page audit of the 2020 election in the state’s two largest Democratic counties and two largest Republican ones found some “irregularities,” but they were largely related to holding an election during a pandemic.

    “In most cases, the audit found that the counties followed their procedures and clearly documented their activities,” the audit says.

    Ohio is another Republican-controlled state where lawmakers continue to push for restrictions.

    The state is likely to draw national attention next year after Republicans indicated they might try again to place on the May ballot a measure requiring a 60% majority for any future constitutional amendments to pass. That provision could limit the ability of Ohio voters to rein in GOP gerrymandering or otherwise counter the majority-Republican Legislature, such as by codifying the right to an abortion.

    Republicans failed to muster enough votes during December’s lame-duck session to place the higher threshold for passing amendments on the ballot, but they did pass a sweeping election law overhaul. The bill adds a photo ID requirement for voters and provides them for free, codifies a directive requiring one ballot drop box per county and eliminates early voting on the Monday before Election Day — county officials had said it interfered with their final preparations. The legislation also shrinks the window for receiving mail-in ballots after the election from 10 days to four.

    Republican state Sen. Theresa Gavarone said taking steps to tighten access to the voting booth and speed vote counting are aimed at improving the “perception, confidence and integrity” in elections.

    “Folks, perception matters,” Gavarone said. “Whether you want to believe it or not, the goal should not just be to secure our elections, but it’s imperative that we give people doubting the results of our elections reason to participate in them.”

    Voting rights advocates were outraged.

    “This legislation will make voting unnecessarily harder for seniors, students, rural Ohioans, active-duty military and other eligible Ohioans,” said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters Ohio.

    The office of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said he was reviewing the legislation.

    Democrats are readying their own pushes, especially in two states where they won control of the legislatures and retained the governorship — Michigan and Minnesota.

    Michigan voters not only gave Democrats control of the state Legislature, they also passed Proposal 2, a sweeping ballot initiative that expanded early and mail voting. Democrats already are preparing to strengthen the measure in the legislative session.

    “There will need to be quite a bit of implementation legislation next term, and I look forward to working with the Legislature and the governor’s office to enact this,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum, a Democrat, said in an interview.

    Jake Rollow, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of State, said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson will likely ask lawmakers to allocate $100 million annually for local election offices and propose new measures against circulating election misinformation. A Democratic state lawmaker also proposed imposing penalties for people who pressure election workers, a key cause of Democrats in state legislatures after conspiracy theorists targeted voting officials after the 2020 presidential election.

    In Minnesota, Simon said he also wants to increase penalties against threatening or interfering with election workers. He said he’ll push a range of other reforms, including pre-registering high schoolers so they can quickly join the voting rolls upon turning 18. Younger voters lean Democratic, but Simon said he’s not trying to promote his party.

    He said he merely wants to make the electorate more reflective of the population, a goal he also pushed when the statehouse was split between Republicans and Democrats.

    “These are reforms that will benefit everyone,” he said.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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  • New year expected to bring more changes to state voting laws

    New year expected to bring more changes to state voting laws

    [ad_1]

    State lawmakers around the country introduced thousands of bills to change the way elections are run after former President Donald Trump falsely blamed his 2020 loss on voter fraud. Hundreds became law.

    Even with proponents of Trump’s election lies roundly defeated during this year’s midterms, advocates on both sides of the voting debate are bracing for another round of election-related legislation. Republicans are eager to tighten election rules further while Democrats, who took control of two additional statehouses, will seek to make it easier to cast a ballot.

    Minnesota’s newly reelected Democratic secretary of state, Steve Simon, said he had spoken to several secretaries of state who are eager to push for changes in voting. Losses by election-denier candidates in top races have emboldened some Democrats to champion expansions of voting rights.

    “Voters spoke loudly and clearly about what they wanted and didn’t want, both in regards to this office and all these other issues,” said Simon, who defeated a Republican challenger who parroted some of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

    Democrats won majorities in both houses of the Minnesota Legislature in November, giving Simon a good shot at enacting changes. He expects to urge lawmakers to adopt automatic voter registration and allow high school students to pre-register.

    States routinely make adjustments in their voting laws — some subtle, some dramatic. But experts have never seen an explosion of legislation like that which followed the 2020 presidential election, when more than 3,600 election bills were introduced, according to the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks the legislation.

    Liz Avore, senior adviser to the group, said 22 states in the last couple of years expanded access to the ballot, 10 created new restrictions and five expanded access in some ways while creating new barriers in others. This, she said, has created a divide in the U.S. in which “your ZIP code determines your access to our democracy.”

    That divide seems likely to grow next year. Legislatures won’t convene until January at the earliest, so it’s unclear how many bills are being drafted and on which subjects. But Texas, where the Legislature meets only once every two years and lawmakers can “pre-file” drafts of legislation for the upcoming session, offers a preview.

    The Associated Press has identified nearly 100 election-related legislative proposals already filed in the state, both to increase access to the ballot box and to further restrict it. This includes one that would allow the state’s top lawyer to assign a prosecutor focused on election crimes, testing the boundaries of a court ruling earlier this year that said the attorney general did not have the authority to prosecute election crimes.

    Another would assign a group of peace officers to serve as election marshals who investigate claims of election-related missteps. That would follow the lead of Florida, where officers in a special unit assigned to elections have already made a handful of arrests — including of people who mistakenly thought they were eligible to vote under a 2018 constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to some felons. Critics have labeled the unit a political tool of the governor.

    Matt Simpson, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said current election legislation proposed in the state, such as increasing criminal penalties for election crimes and creating election marshals, is “extreme” and “very intimidating” for voters. He said these approaches are primarily political and don’t solve actual voting-related issues, such as high rejection rates of mail ballots and ballot applications due to widespread confusion on the identification numbers necessary.

    “It is certainly the case that Texas elections do not have widespread fraud,” Simpson said. “These bills, these concerns that are raised, are solutions in search of a problem.”

    The reliability of Texas’ elections was underscored by the release earlier this month of an audit by the secretary of state’s office. The 359-page audit of the 2020 election in the state’s two largest Democratic counties and two largest Republican ones found some “irregularities,” but they were largely related to holding an election during a pandemic.

    “In most cases, the audit found that the counties followed their procedures and clearly documented their activities,” the audit says.

    Ohio is another Republican-controlled state where lawmakers continue to push for restrictions.

    The state is likely to draw national attention next year after Republicans indicated they might try again to place on the May ballot a measure requiring a 60% majority for any future constitutional amendments to pass. That provision could limit the ability of Ohio voters to rein in GOP gerrymandering or otherwise counter the majority-Republican Legislature, such as by codifying the right to an abortion.

    Republicans failed to muster enough votes during December’s lame-duck session to place the higher threshold for passing amendments on the ballot, but they did pass a sweeping election law overhaul. The bill adds a photo ID requirement for voters and provides them for free, codifies a directive requiring one ballot drop box per county and eliminates early voting on the Monday before Election Day — county officials had said it interfered with their final preparations. The legislation also shrinks the window for receiving mail-in ballots after the election from 10 days to four.

    Republican state Sen. Theresa Gavarone said taking steps to tighten access to the voting booth and speed vote counting are aimed at improving the “perception, confidence and integrity” in elections.

    “Folks, perception matters,” Gavarone said. “Whether you want to believe it or not, the goal should not just be to secure our elections, but it’s imperative that we give people doubting the results of our elections reason to participate in them.”

    Voting rights advocates were outraged.

    “This legislation will make voting unnecessarily harder for seniors, students, rural Ohioans, active-duty military and other eligible Ohioans,” said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters Ohio.

    The office of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said he was reviewing the legislation.

    Democrats are readying their own pushes, especially in two states where they won control of the legislatures and retained the governorship — Michigan and Minnesota.

    Michigan voters not only gave Democrats control of the state Legislature, they also passed Proposal 2, a sweeping ballot initiative that expanded early and mail voting. Democrats already are preparing to strengthen the measure in the legislative session.

    “There will need to be quite a bit of implementation legislation next term, and I look forward to working with the Legislature and the governor’s office to enact this,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum, a Democrat, said in an interview.

    Jake Rollow, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of State, said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson will likely ask lawmakers to allocate $100 million annually for local election offices and propose new measures against circulating election misinformation. A Democratic state lawmaker also proposed imposing penalties for people who pressure election workers, a key cause of Democrats in state legislatures after conspiracy theorists targeted voting officials after the 2020 presidential election.

    In Minnesota, Simon said he also wants to increase penalties against threatening or interfering with election workers. He said he’ll push a range of other reforms, including pre-registering high schoolers so they can quickly join the voting rolls upon turning 18. Younger voters lean Democratic, but Simon said he’s not trying to promote his party.

    He said he merely wants to make the electorate more reflective of the population, a goal he also pushed when the statehouse was split between Republicans and Democrats.

    “These are reforms that will benefit everyone,” he said.

    ———

    Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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  • Today in History: December 29, Texas becomes a state

    Today in History: December 29, Texas becomes a state

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    Today in History

    Today is Thursday, Dec. 29, the 363rd day of 2022. There are two days left in the year.

    Today’s Highlight in History:

    On Dec. 29, 1845, Texas was admitted as the 28th state.

    On this date:

    In 1170, Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was slain in Canterbury Cathedral by knights loyal to King Henry II.

    In 1812, during the War of 1812, the American frigate USS Constitution engaged and severely damaged the British frigate HMS Java off Brazil.

    In 1851, the first Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in the United States was founded in Boston.

    In 1890, the Wounded Knee massacre took place in South Dakota as an estimated 300 Sioux Indians were killed by U.S. troops sent to disarm them.

    In 1940, during World War II, Germany dropped incendiary bombs on London, setting off what came to be known as “The Second Great Fire of London.”

    In 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, crashed into the Florida Everglades near Miami International Airport, killing 101 of the 176 people aboard.

    In 1978, during the Gator Bowl, Ohio State University coach Woody Hayes punched Clemson player Charlie Bauman, who’d intercepted an Ohio State pass. (Hayes was fired by Ohio State the next day.)

    In 1989, dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel (VAHTS’-lahv HAH’-vel) assumed the presidency of Czechoslovakia.

    In 1992, the United States and Russia announced agreement on a nuclear arms reduction treaty.

    In 2006, word reached the United States of the execution of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (because of the time difference, it was the morning of Dec. 30 in Iraq when the hanging took place). In a statement, President George W. Bush called Saddam’s execution an important milestone on Iraq’s road to democracy.

    In 2007, the New England Patriots ended their regular season with a remarkable 16-0 record following a 38-35 comeback victory over the New York Giants. (New England became the first NFL team since the 1972 Dolphins to win every game on the schedule.)

    In 2016, the United States struck back at Russia for hacking the U.S. presidential campaign with a sweeping set of punishments targeting Russia’s spy agencies and diplomats.

    Ten years ago: Maine’s same-sex marriage law went into effect. Shocked Indians mourned the death of a woman who’d been gang-raped and beaten on a bus in New Delhi nearly two weeks earlier; six suspects were charged with murder. (Four were later sentenced to death; one died in prison; the sixth, a juvenile at the time of the attack, was sentenced to a maximum of three years in a reform home.)

    Five years ago: Puerto Rico authorities said nearly half of the power customers in the U.S. territory still lacked electricity, more than three months after Hurricane Maria.

    One year ago: British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in New York of helping lure teenage girls to be sexually abused by the late Jeffrey Epstein; the verdict capped a monthlong trial featuring accounts of the sexual exploitation of girls as young as 14. (Maxwell would be sentenced to 20 years in prison.) More than a year after a vaccine was rolled out, new cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. were soaring to their highest levels on record at over 265,000 per day; the surge was driven largely by the highly contagious omicron variant. Candace Parker, who helped the Chicago Sky win the franchise’s first WNBA championship, was named The Associated Press’ Female Athlete of the Year for a second time.

    Today’s Birthdays: Actor Inga Swenson is 90. Retired ABC newscaster Tom Jarriel is 88. Actor Barbara Steele is 85. Actor Jon Voight is 84. Singer Marianne Faithfull is 76. Retired Hall of Fame Jockey Laffit Pincay Jr. is 76. Actor Ted Danson is 75. Singer-actor Yvonne Elliman is 71. The president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, is 69. Actor Patricia Clarkson is 63. Comedian Paula Poundstone is 63. Rock singer-musician Jim Reid (The Jesus and Mary Chain) is 61. Actor Michael Cudlitz is 58. Rock singer Dexter Holland (The Offspring) is 57. Actor-comedian Mystro Clark is 56. Actor Jason Gould is 56. News anchor Ashleigh Banfield is 55. Movie director Lilly Wachowski is 55. Actor Jennifer Ehle is 53. Actor Patrick Fischler is 53. Rock singer-musician Glen Phillips is 52. Actor Kevin Weisman is 52. Actor Jude Law is 50. Actor Maria Dizzia is 48. Actor Mekhi Phifer (mih-KY’ FY’-fuhr) is 48. Actor Shawn Hatosy is 47. Actor Katherine Moennig is 45. Actor Diego Luna is 43. Actor Alison Brie is 40. Country singer Jessica Andrews is 39. Actor Iain de Caestecker is 35. Actor Jane Levy is 33. Singer-actor-dancer Ross Lynch is 27. Rock musician Danny Wagner is 24.

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  • Tent processing center for migrants going up in El Paso, expected to increase capacity by 1,000 | CNN

    Tent processing center for migrants going up in El Paso, expected to increase capacity by 1,000 | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    In response to the increased number of migrants crossing the border in El Paso, US Customs and Border Protection is erecting a soft-sided tent facility to increase migrant processing capacity by about 1,000, according to Landon Hutchens, US Customs and Border Protection spokesperson.

    “The facility will be used by U.S. Border Patrol El Paso Sector to provide additional migrant processing capabilities, with a capacity to hold approximately 1,000 migrants while they are processed in accordance with U.S. immigration law,” Hutchens said in a statement.

    The facility is expected to be operational sometime in January.

    In preparation for the possible lifting of Title 42, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would be adding 10 soft-sided facilities to boost its processing capacity. The facility going up in El Paso is one of those facilities.

    “This is part of the agency’s response efforts regarding increased migrant encounters in the El Paso area, along with surging additional personnel and providing funding to local partners,” Hutchens added.

    “The addition of temporary processing facilities such as this one increases CBP’s capacity to safely take noncitizens into custody and place them into immigration proceedings.”

    Title 42 was put in place by the Center for Disease Control in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in a public health bid to curb the spread of Covid-19, but advocates argue it’s been used to halt immigration at the US-Mexico border.

    The controversial order was set to end December 21 but remains in limbo after the Supreme Court issued an order Wednesday allowing the policy to remain in effect while legal challenges play out – a process that could stretch out for at least several months.

    The city of El Paso is straining to handle the daily influx of migrants crossing the border.

    Two vacant schools in the city are being prepared to house migrants, Deputy City Manager Mario D’Agostino said Tuesday.

    Shelters have been set up at hotels, and some church parishes have volunteered to house migrants, he said. About 1,000 beds have been set up in El Paso’s convention center, which housed more than 480 migrants overnight on Christmas Eve and about 420 on Christmas Day, city spokesperson Laura Cruz-Acosta confirmed to CNN.

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  • Buses of migrants arrive near Vice President Kamala Harris’ home in Washington, D.C.

    Buses of migrants arrive near Vice President Kamala Harris’ home in Washington, D.C.

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    Buses of migrants arrive near Vice President Kamala Harris’ home in Washington, D.C. – CBS News


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    The Biden administration slammed Texas Gov. Greg Abbott after he ordered three buses of migrants to be dropped off near Vice President Kamala Harris’ home in Washington, D.C., on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve. Caitlin Huey-Burns has the latest.

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  • Migrants dropped near vice president’s home on frigid Christmas Eve

    Migrants dropped near vice president’s home on frigid Christmas Eve

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    Three buses of recent migrant families arrived from Texas near the home of Vice President Kamala Harris in record-setting cold on Christmas Eve.

    Texas authorities have not confirmed their involvement, but the bus drop-offs are in line with previous actions by border-state governors calling attention to the Biden administration’s immigration policies. But a spokesperson for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement the migrants “willingly chose” to go to Washington, D.C., and signed voluntary consent waivers upon boarding the buses that they agreed on the destination.

    The buses that arrived late Saturday outside the vice president’s residence were carrying around 110 to 130 people, according to Tatiana Laborde, managing director of SAMU First Response, a relief agency working with the city of Washington to serve thousands of migrants who have been dropped off in recent months.

    Local organizers had expected the buses to arrive Sunday but found out Saturday that the group would get to Washington early, Laborde said. The people on board included young children.

    Some were wearing T-shirts despite temperatures hovering around 15 degrees Fahrenheit (-9 degrees Celsius). It was the coldest Christmas Eve on record for Washington, according to the Washington Post.

    Laborde said employees had blankets ready for the people who arrived on Christmas Eve and moved them quickly onto waiting buses for a ride to an area church. A local restaurant chain donated dinner and breakfast.

    Most of the arrivals were headed to other destinations and expected to remain in Washington only briefly.

    Renae Eze, Abbott’s spokesperson, criticized the Biden administration for its border policies, saying in a statement the federal government processed and released the migrants.

    “Instead of their hypocritical complaints about Texas providing much-needed relief to our overrun and overwhelmed border communities, President Biden and Border Czar Harris need to step up and do their jobs to secure the border — something they continue failing to do,” Eze said in a statement.

    Abbott’s office said last week that Texas has given bus rides to more than 15,000 people since April to Washington, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

    The White House condemned the move by Abbott, noting the drop-off occurred as much of the country was experiencing a deadly winter storm.

    “Governor Abbott abandoned children on the side of the road in below freezing temperatures on Christmas Eve without coordinating with any federal or local authorities. This was a cruel, dangerous, and shameful stunt,” White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan said in a statement. 

    Hasan said the Biden administration is willing to work with Republicans and Democrats on comprehensive immigration reform and border security proposed by President Biden, but added, “these political games accomplish nothing and only put lives in danger.”

    Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, both Republicans, are strong critics of Mr. Biden on his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border, where thousands of people are trying to cross daily, many to seek asylum. Officials on both sides of the border are seeking emergency help in setting up shelters and services for migrants, some of whom are sleeping on streets.

    Republicans argue Biden and Harris, designated the administration’s point person on the root causes of migration, have relaxed restrictions that induced many people to leave their countries of origin. Biden has ended some policies but kept others enacted by former President Donald Trump, whose administration also grappled with spikes in border crossings and at one point separated immigrant families and children as a deterrence initiative.

    The Biden administration is also grappling with how to respond to the spike in migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, overwhelming local resources and shelters. In El Paso, Texas, where its mayor declared a state of emergency, hundreds of migrants have been forced to sleep on city streets amid freezing temperatures. In fiscal year 2022, federal border authorities stopped migrants over 2.3 million times, a record high.

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  • The US asylum backlog is nearing 1.6 million, the highest number on record | CNN

    The US asylum backlog is nearing 1.6 million, the highest number on record | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Nearly 1.6 million asylum applications are pending in US immigration courts and at US Citizenship and Immigration Services – the largest number of pending asylum cases on record, according to analysis of federal data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

    US immigration courts have seen an over seven-fold increase in asylum cases from fiscal year 2012, when there were 100,000 cases pending, and the end of fiscal year 2022, when the backlog grew to over 750,000, per the clearinghouse.

    “Since then, in just the first two months of [fiscal year] 2023 (October – November 2022), the asylum backlog jumped by over 30,000 new cases and now totals, 787,882,” the clearinghouse stated.

    The asylum seekers are from 219 different countries and speak 418 different languages, according to the Syracuse group. About 3 out of 10 are children under the age of 18 and the leading countries of origin include Guatemala, Venezuelan, Cuba and Brazil, the group said. Florida and Massachusetts are among the states with the biggest asylum case growth.

    The overall average wait time for an asylum hearing is about 4.3 years, but in Omaha, Nebraska – the court with the longest delay – the wait time averages 5.9 years, according to the group.

    A growing number of asylum seekers are being electronically monitored through the Department of Homeland Security’s Alternative to Detention program, while a small portion – about 2,000 – are in ICE detention, according to the clearinghouse.

    The analysis comes amid a recent surge in migrants – many from Venezuela and Haiti – at the southern US border.

    Despite the continued cold temperatures, border agents in the El Paso area continue to encounter between 1,500 and 1,600 migrants every day, a federal law enforcement source with knowledge of operations on the ground told CNN.

    It’s a drop compared to the numbers seen a few weeks ago, when 2,500 migrants were being encountered each day. Last week, the daily encounters dropped to about 1,500 per day, according to a statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security.

    The city declared a state of emergency earlier this month over thousands of migrants living in unsafe conditions.

    Many undocumented migrants – those who don’t have the proper documentation showing they’ve been processed by US border patrol – have been on the streets seeking shelter during the winter storm. The same law enforcement source also warned that human smuggling has also continued in the area.

    Peter Jaquez, the Border Patrol Chief in El Paso, tweeted last week that in 48 hours, agents foiled 12 smuggling schemes and apprehended 15 human smugglers and 57 migrants.

    Efforts to transport migrants to other sectors for processing are ongoing in the El Paso area, according to the law enforcement source. Last week, about 6,000 migrants were moved out of the El Paso area for processing and another 3,400 migrants were expelled in removal flights, CNN previously reported.

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