Month: June 2018

In New York, Auxiliary Police Officers act as liaison between communities and the police department. Recently, Gursoch Kaur made headlines when she became the first female Sikh officer to serve in the Auxiliary Unit wearing a traditional Sikh turban. Usually dastars are worn by Sikh men, but some women choose to wear them to raise awareness about their religion. Aunshuman Apte reports.
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The U.S. Supreme Court, winding down its nine-month term, will issue rulings this week in its few remaining cases including a major one on the legality of President Donald Trump’s ban on people from five Muslim-majority nations entering the country.

The nine justices are due to decide other politically sensitive cases on whether non-union workers have to pay fees to unions representing certain public-sector workers such as police and teachers, and the legality of California regulations on clinics that steer women with unplanned pregnancies away from abortion.

The justices began their term in October and, as is their usual practice, aim to make all their rulings by the end of June, with more due on Monday. Six cases remain to be decided.

The travel ban case was argued on April 25, with the court’s conservative majority signaling support for Trump’s policy in a significant test of presidential powers.

Trump has said the ban is needed to protect the United States from attacks by Islamic militants. Conservative justices indicated an unwillingness to second-guess Trump on his national security rationale.

Lower courts had blocked the travel ban, the third version of a policy Trump first pursued a week after taking office last year. But the high court on Dec. 4 allowed it to go fully into effect while the legal challenge continued.

The challengers, led by the state of Hawaii, have argued the policy was motivated by Trump’s enmity toward Muslims. Lower courts have decided the ban violated federal immigration law and the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on the government favoring one religion over another.

The current ban, announced in September, prohibits entry into the United States by most people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

In a significant case for organized labor, the court’s conservatives indicated opposition during arguments on Feb. 26 to so-called agency fees that some states require non-members to pay to public-sector unions.

Workers who decide not to join unions representing certain state and local employees must pay the fees in two dozen states in lieu of union dues to help cover the cost of non-political activities such as collective bargaining. The fees provide millions of dollars annually to these unions.

The justices seemed skeptical during March 20 arguments toward California’s law requiring Christian-based anti-abortion centers, known as crisis pregnancy centers, to post notices about the availability of state-subsidized abortions and birth control. The justices indicated that they would strike down at least part of the regulations.
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s point man in the Middle East has wound up a peace mission to the region. 

U.S. envoy and Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner says the Trump administration will unveil its Midddle East peace plan soon, with or without the Palestinians.  

The Palestinian Authority refused to meet Kushner during his weeklong visit to the region because the United States has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Kushner made the comments to a Palestinian newspaper after holding separate talks in the region with the leaders of Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.  He said the international community is “getting frustrated” with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for failing to take “constructive [steps] toward achieving peace.”

The Palestinians, who see east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, say the U.S. peace plan will be dead on arrival. 

“President Abbas will not accept the dictations of the American administration, not [only] President Abbas [but also] the Palestinian people as a whole.  So now the blame game has begun,” said Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his talks with Kushner were productive.

Speaking at the weekly Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Netanyahu praised President Donald Trump and his administration for their strong support for Israel.

Netanyahu says Israel is prepared to return to the negotiating table without preconditions, and he is urging the Palestinians to follow suit. 

 
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While the U.S. government is closely guarding information about immigrant children recently separated from their parents, members of Congress as well as state and local officials are sharing what they have been able to find out about young detainees in their areas.

The children are under federal jurisdiction, leaving local officials in the dark about all but a few details regarding children classified as “unaccompanied minors” being housed in their area.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti held a news conference Friday revealing that there were about 100 immigrant children staying in his city. He said he had been told the children were in group homes or staying with foster families, but he did not know where.

Garcetti said his staff had learned what it knew from activists and other groups that take in unaccompanied minors. He said most of the children were believed to be “among the very youngest” of those taken from their parents. He said he was worried that some might be too young to recognize their parents, complicating attempts to reunite families.

Kansas facility

In Topeka, Kansas, on Friday, officials from the state child welfare agency toured facilities of a group home known as The Villages, which has contracted with the federal government to house 50 unaccompanied minors. The executive director of The Villages, Sylvia Crawford, confirmed to The Kansas City Star that some of the children had been separated from their parents and had come from Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. 

In Chicago, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, told reporters that 66 children separated from their families were being housed in shelters across the city. He said one-third of the children were under age 5. Two-thirds, or more than 40, were younger than 13.

Durbin said he had toured one of the nine shelters operated by the Heartland Alliance, an immigrant aid group. He said the children were receiving proper care, although he said the separation from their families was “inhumane” and “cruel.”

Evelyn Diaz, president of Heartland Alliance, said her group had located about two-thirds of the children’s families, but that the process can be difficult when the parents are in detention.

“It’s like a scavenger hunt,” she said.

​Reunited

Meanwhile, a migrant mother from Guatemala and her 7-year-old son were reunited early Friday after being separated a month ago at the U.S. border.

Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia and her son Darwin were reunited at Baltimore-Washington International Airport in Maryland, a day after the mother had sued in federal court and the Justice Department agreed to release her son.

WATCH: Guatemalan Migrant Mother, Son Reunited

On Thursday, President Donald Trump changed the family separation policy, telling federal agencies not to separate immigrant families who had illegally crossed into the country from Mexico.

However, it was unclear when or how more than 2,300 children already separated from their families since April would be returned to their families.

How officials will handle the immigrant legal cases also remains unclear. A VOA reporter at an immigration court hearing in Brownsville, Texas, on Thursday morning said prosecutors dropped misdemeanor charges against 17 migrants. But the Justice Department later insisted it was not dropping charges against detained immigrants. 

DOJ lawyers Thursday asked a federal judge in California for an emergency ruling that would allow them to detain minors with their legal guardians until their immigration cases were adjudicated. Authorities now may hold families in immigration detention for only 20 days. On average, current cases are taking 721 days to resolve.

Senior White House Correspondent Steve Herman, National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin, Justice Department Correspondent Masood Farivar and Aline Barros contributed to this report.
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Republicans in the U.S. House of Representative plan to hold a vote next week on an immigration bill despite Trump urging them Friday to abandon efforts to pass legislation until after the mid-term elections.

Even if the Republicans — who have a majority in both the House and Senate — approve a bill, it faces almost certain defeat in the upper chamber where Democrats hold enough seats to prevent Republicans, even if they all vote together, from reaching the 60 votes needed for passage.

Earlier in the week, the president had called for Congress to quickly approve sweeping immigration legislation. But in a Friday tweet the president said, “Republicans should stop wasting their time on Immigration until after we elect more Senators and Congressmen/women in November. Dems are just playing games, have no intention of doing anything to solves this decades old problem. We can pass great legislation after the Red Wave!”

Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican representing a majority Hispanic district in the state of Florida, who is not running for re-election, termed the president’s tweets “schizoid policy making.”

Another retiring lawmaker, Republican Congressman Mark Sanford of South Carolina, a frequent Trump critic who recently lost his primary election, said Trump’s reversal sends “a horrifically chilling signal” that “makes immigration reform that much more unlikely.”

On Saturday, California Democratic Senator Kamala Harris spoke in Otay Mesa, a community in San Diego, at a rally for revised immigration policies. “This is a fight born out of knowing who we are and fighting for the ideals of our country,” she said. Harris spoke after touring a detention facility and speaking with several mothers.​

Trump’s call for Congress to postpone action came as House Republican leaders failed to garner enough support for two bills that would overhaul U.S. immigration laws and bolster border security.

A hard-line measure authored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte failed to pass on Thursday. The measure would have not guaranteed young undocumented immigrants a way to achieve permanent legal residency and included controversial enforcement measures such as a required worker validation program.

House Republican leaders suddenly delayed a vote Thursday on a compromise measure that has the support of key moderate Republican after concluding they lacked enough support to gain passage despite the growing controversy over separating children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. Next week the House will vote on the compromise bill, which would provide $25 billion for Trump’s border wall, provide a pathway to “dreamers” and keep migrant families intact.

In his weekly radio address Saturday, Trump said the path to immigration reform starts on Capitol Hill.

“Congress and Congress alone can solve the problem. And the only solution that will work is being able to detain, prosecute and promptly remove anyone who illegally cross the border,” the president said.

Aboard Air Force One on Saturday en route to Las Vegas, Nevada, Trump lashed out at House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York, accusing them on Twitter of favoring illegal immigrants over American citizens. ​

All 435 seats in the House and a third of the 100-member Senate will be contested in the November election.

What is unclear, however, is whether Trump realizes the moderate Republicans he is alienating are among the most vulnerable in the mid-term elections.

“No one has more to lose in November than the president does when it comes to the majority in the House, because if this majority flips over to be a Democrat, there will be a big push for impeachment,” said Republican Congressman Bradley Byrne of Alabama, an opponent of the immigration measure.

Trump demonstrated Friday after his tactical retreat on immigration policy that there is no strategic shift to his overall tough approach to those attempting to illegally enter the country — vowing to “end the immigration crisis, once and for all.”

U.S. immigration laws, Trump declared, are “the weakest in the history of the world.”

Trump made the remarks on Friday in an auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, where he presided over an event with “Angel Families” — those who have had relatives killed by people who have entered the country illegally.

“Your loss will not have been in vain,” the president told the families who held large photos of their slain relatives. “We will secure our borders … the word will get out. Got to have a safe country. We’re going to have a safe country.”

Family members were called by Trump to the presidential lectern to recount how their loved ones were killed by those who were in the United States illegally. Several of those speaking condemned the media for ignoring the stories of the victims and praised Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for their attention to border security.

Trump, in his remarks, also suggested those illegally in the United States commit more crimes on a statistical basis than citizens or resident aliens.

However, studies have shown that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit a crime in the U.S. than native-born citizens, including one published by the libertarian CATO Institute this year. 

Despite Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, 75 percent of Americans believe immigration in general is beneficial to the U.S., according to a poll released Thursday by the polling organization Gallup.

“Americans’ strong belief that immigration is a good thing for the country and that immigration levels shouldn’t be decreased present the president and Congress with some tough decisions as to midterm elections loom,” Gallup said in a press release.
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The Justice Department says it has given House Republicans new classified information related to the Russia investigation after they had threatened to hold officials in contempt of Congress or even impeach them.

A spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan says the department has partially complied with multiple requests from the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees. House Republicans had given the department a Friday deadline for all documents, but Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said the department asked for more time.

“Our efforts have resulted in the committees finally getting access to information that was sought months ago, but some important requests remain to be completed,” Strong said in a statement Saturday. “Additional time has been requested for the outstanding items, and based on our understanding of the process we believe that request is reasonable. We expect the department to meet its full obligations to the two committees.”

In a letter sent to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes late Friday, the Justice Department said it had that day provided a classified letter to his panel regarding whether the FBI used “confidential human sources” before it officially began its Russia investigation in 2016. Nunes has been pressing the department on an informant who spoke to members of President Donald Trump’s campaign as the FBI began to explore the campaign’s ties to Russia.

The department has already given top lawmakers in the House and Senate three classified briefings on the informant. But Nunes has said he wanted the entire committee to receive the information.

In the letter, the Justice Department’s acting assistant director of congressional affairs, Jill Tyson, said the department had also given Nunes materials related to oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Republicans have for months questioned whether the department abused that act when prosecutors and agents in 2016 applied for and received a secret warrant to monitor the communications of a Trump campaign associate.

Democrats have criticized the multiple document requests, charging that they are intended to discredit the department and discredit or even undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties and whether there was obstruction of justice.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has backed the document requests, and he led a meeting last week with committee chairmen and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to try to resolve the issue. In a television interview two days after that meeting, on June 17, Nunes said if they don’t get the documents by this week, “there’s going to be hell to pay” and indicated the House could act on contempt or even impeachment. A spokesman for Nunes did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

Tyson also wrote House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert Goodlatte, who had subpoenaed the department for documents related to the Russia investigation and also the department’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016. She detailed progress on those requests and said the department is “expeditiously completing them.”

In the letters, Tyson said the department had built “new tools” to search top secret documents and had diverted resources from other congressional requests.
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Officials in Afghanistan said Friday insurgents in separate attacks have kidnapped 33 employees of a construction company and killed at least 20 government security forces.

The Taliban has launched major coordinated attacks across the country since ending its three-day Eid cease-fire on Sunday, killing more than 100 Afghan forces and overrunning new territory.

The kidnapping occurred near the border with Pakistan in the southern province of Kandahar.

A provincial government spokesman, Daud Ahmadi, told VOA the area police swiftly tried to rescue the abductees, but they failed to do so and lost four of their personnel in the process.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility, though Kandahar is one of former strongholds of the Taliban.

Separately, a predawn Taliban attack in western Badghis province killed 16 police personnel and two civilians. An insurgent spokesman claimed Taliban fighters also seized a large quality of ammunition and other equipment.

The attack came a day after insurgents overran Afghan army posts and killed more than 40 soldiers in another part of Badghis.

Meanwhile, heavy fighting is raging in central eastern Maidan Wardak province where the Taliban staged a major early morning attack on government security outposts.

A provincial government spokesman told VOA the fighting blocked a main road for traffic, stranding hundreds of passengers.

The Taliban has captured a key base and over a dozen security posts in the fighting, claimed insurgent spokesman Zabihullah in a statement sent to reporters.

Eid cease-fire

The Taliban temporarily halted attacks on Afghan forces during Eid holidays but resumed battlefield activities from Monday after rejecting the government’s request to extend their limited cease-fire.

President Ashraf Ghani extended by 10 days his unilateral cease-fire, initially due to end Wednesday. But rising insurgent attacks have prompted severe criticism of Ghani for unilaterally extending the cease-fire.

The president defended his initiatives, hoping it would encourage the insurgents to quit violence to come to the table for peace talks to end the Afghan war. The national Eid cease-fire was the first in the last 17 years of the fighting in Afghanistan.

The Taliban killed nearly 500 pro-government forces in May, according to government officials and Afghan media reports.

Taliban seeks U.S. talks

The Islamist insurgency dismisses the Afghan government as an American “puppet regime” and has been demanding direct talks with the United States.

Washington rejects the idea of holding direct talks with the Taliban and maintains that Afghans themselves have to determine their own future. Senior U.S. diplomat for the region, Alice Wells, reiterated that stance while testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

“The United States has made clear that we are prepared to support, facilitate and participate in direct negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban,” Wells stated.

“We will support the government and all Afghan stakeholders as they work to reach a mutually agreeable negotiated settlement that ends the conflict and ensures Afghanistan is never again used as a safe haven for terrorist groups.”

The Taliban is said to be controlling or influencing nearly half of Afghanistan as it continues to overrun new territory, posing a big challenge for international-backed efforts to convince the insurgency to hold peace talks with Kabul.

New research based on interviews with insurgent officials has concluded the Taliban has established a “system of parallel governance” in vast swathes of Afghanistan.

The detailed study by the Overseas Development Institute says the Islamist insurgency controls education, access to information, health care, economic activity, expression, behavior and life prospects for millions of Afghans.

“That the Taliban set the rules in vast swathes of the country is a reality with which few in the international community are willing to engage … the most urgent question is what can or should be done now to shape the rules for Afghans living under the Taliban.”
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U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to impose a 20 percent tariff on vehicles assembled in the European Union and shipped to the United States, in retaliation for European tariffs on American imports.

On Friday, the day new EU tariffs went into effect, Trump tweeted, “…if these Tariffs and Barriers are not soon broken down and removed, we will be placing a 20% Tariff on all of their cars coming into the U.S. Build them here!”

Auto industry experts say such tariffs could negatively impact the U.S. economy, as well as Europe’s.

“It’s really a tangle; it’s not a simple question” of cars being made in one place and sold in another, Kasper Peters, communications manager of ACEA, the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, said Friday in an interview with VOA.

In March, ACEA Secretary General Erik Jonnaert noted the impact European carmakers with plants in the United States have on local economies. “EU manufacturers do not only import vehicles into the U.S. They also have a major manufacturing footprint there, providing significant local employment and generating tax revenue,” Jonnaert said in a statement.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said earlier this week that his department plans to wrap up by July or August an investigation into whether imported cars and car parts are a threat to national security. But Daniel Price, a former senior economic adviser to President George W. Bush, told The Washington Post that Trump’s threat of new tariffs “short-circuited the … process and conclusively undercut the stated national security rationale of that investigation.”

The new EU tariffs enacted Friday apply to billions of dollars’ worth of American goods — including jeans, bourbon and motorcycles.

The action is the latest response to Trump’s decision to tax imported steel and aluminum.

The U.S. is scheduled to start taxing more than $30 billion in Chinese imports in two weeks.

Like the EU, China has promised to retaliate immediately, putting the world’s two largest economies at odds. 

A U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior vice president, John Murphy, was cited by the Associated Press as saying he estimates that $75 billion in U.S. products could be subjected to new foreign tariffs by the end of the first week of July.

Separately, a spokesman for China’s Commerce Ministry said, “The U.S. is abusing the tariff methods and starting trade wars all around the world.”

“Clarity [is] still lacking about how far things will ultimately go between [the] U.S. and China and the potential ripple effect for world trade,” said financial analyst Mike van Dulken.

During his presidential campaign, Trump promised to apply tariffs, saying countries around the world had been exploiting the U.S.

A former White House trade adviser says Trump “has been so belligerent that it becomes almost impossible for democratically elected leaders — or even a non-democratic leader like [Chinese President] Xi Jinping — to appear to kowtow and give in.”

Phillip Levy, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said, “The president has made it very hard for other countries to give him what he wants.”
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Honduras native, Carlos and his 17-year-old son were nabbed after crossing the Rio Grande River into the U.S.

“We were walking after we crossed the river,” he told VOA in Spanish. “All wet. That’s when they detained us. We went to immigration, and they separated my son from me.”

Carlos, who did not want to share his last name, was in detention for six days before he was released and reunited with his son. They plan to join relatives in Orlando, Florida.

In the meantime, they are learning what they can do to stay in the United States. When asked about asylum, Carlos did not understand what it meant — a common reaction among those VOA interviewed.

“I don’t know what I can do [to stay],” he said.

Assistance for asylum seekers

To help people like Carlos, the Texas Civil Rights Project has taken a front seat in coordinating with other allied organizations to direct people to immigration service providers and get them pro-bono legal representation in their immigration proceedings.

Lawyers at the project have also attended mass sessions at the Federal Court House in McAllen, Texas. They gather as much information as they can within the five to 10 minutes they have with those who were separated from their children and sent to court after being charged with criminal misdemeanors for illegal entry.

“We go through every interview, every parent who has been separated from a child,” Efren Olivares, a lawyer with the project, told VOA. “The vast majority of them, in McAllen anyways, are asylum seekers and fled their country escaping violence and threats,” he said.

No changes – yet

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently announced changes to asylum regulations that would rule out claims made on the basis of “private” violence like spousal abuse and gang cruelty.

Those changes, if they have been implemented, have not affected the process in McAllen, where Carlos is basing his claim on gang violence.

“Here you’re free. …There’s a lot of evil over there. A lot of gangs,” Carlos said in Spanish.

Even if gang violence is still an accepted claim, Carlos’ chances of being granted asylum are slim. In 2016, for every one person who got asylum, 10 more didn’t.

Carlos left his wife and daughters in Honduras. On the way to the United States, he was robbed twice.

“A Mexican man took everything we had. It was a very hard moment,” he said.

Hidalgo County Republican GOP chairwoman Adrienne Peña-Garza told VOA the current asylum process is not working. She hopes Congress acts to improve things.

“People are using the asylum to get over here, but then at the same time there are those that truly are running away from terrifying situations,” she said.

Fixing asylum

A conservative Republican, Peña-Garza says the issue is complicated, but believes that it can be developed in “a more proper manner.”

“There are loopholes that are being abused, but at the same time we do want to be a compassionate country that is going to listen to the concerns of those that are in dire need. There has to be a balance there, and I haven’t seen it,” she said.

David Bier, immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, told VOA the United States has trained asylum officers to do the job of evaluating claims.

“[Trump] is really fundamentally calling asylum in United States a loophole and that is not the correct frame for what our asylum system is, which is ultimately about not repeating what we did during World War II, which was about sending people back to prosecution and death, but about creating a process by which we evaluate every claim individually and then adjudicate them on an individual basis,” he said.

At the moment, he says people who are trying to claim asylum legally by presenting themselves at ports of entry, are being turned away, a violation of both domestic and international law. The American Immigration Council has filed a lawsuit in a California court challenging the “unlawful practice of turning away asylum seekers who present themselves at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

“You have to address the issue of people trying to come the right way and make it easy for them to do so and that would ultimately fix the problem,” said Biers.

Carlos is at least getting his day in court. He and his son have been released from detention to join their relatives in Florida, pending an initial court hearing on June 27. They will be asked why they came to the United States illegally and be required to demonstrate a credible fear of going back.

If they manage that hurdle, they will be given another court date, likely some time well into the future. The immigration court system currently has a backlog of 700,000 cases.

 
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