Month: July 2018

Iran will likely have to agree to complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization in any future deal with the United States, just like North Korea, a top diplomatic official signaled Friday.

“Nothing in the conduct of foreign policy is ever done in a vacuum,” Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, Dr. Yleem D.S. Poblete, told an audience in Washington.

“The end state we must seek for the successful conclusion of any future deal with Iran must also inform and be informed by the end state we are seeking for North Korea,” she said. “Inconsistency in our approach to either negotiation will undermine our credibility and most likely doom the prospects for successfully dealing with the threats to our security posed by these and other actors.”

Demands that Pyongyang dismantle all of its nuclear facilities have been central to the U.S. position in meetings with top North Korean officials.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated to U.S. Senate lawmakers Thursday that the “objective remains the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea as agreed to by Chairman Kim Jong Un.”

The Trump administration has been more confrontational with Iran in recent weeks, with President Donald Trump threating Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in a tweet this past Sunday.

“Never, ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before,” Trump tweeted.

National Security Adviser John Bolton likewise warned this week that, “if Iran does anything at all to the negative, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid before.”

Tough rhetoric, sanctions

Some analysts and former officials say Trump may be using the tough rhetoric to drive Tehran back to negotiations over its nuclear capabilities, similar to the tactics that he used in the runup to talks with North Korea’s leader.

The U.S. and other world powers had a deal to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, but Trump announced in May that the U.S. was pulling out of what he has repeatedly called a “terrible” agreement.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has said Tehran continues to comply with the terms of the JCPOA.

U.S. officials say they are willing to negotiate a new deal with Iran but insist any new agreement must also address Iran’s missile programs as well as its support of terror groups and other malign activities. In the meantime, the U.S. is set to re-impose economic sanctions on Tehran.

“Insofar as it is possible for Iran, we shall remain party to the accord, we shall not quit the JCPOA on condition that we can also benefit from it,” Iran’s Rouhani said earlier this month during a visit to Vienna.

But the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency has since said that the country has not built a factory that can produce 60 nuclear centrifuges a day — necessary if Tehran decides to increase its production of enriched uranium.

‘Full spectrum of threats’

“Any new agreement must address the full spectrum of threats,” the State Department’s Poblete said Friday. “It should verifiably and indefinitely deny Iran all paths to nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, rather merely contain, control or delay it.”

Poblete also criticized Iran’s ally Syria for its failure to adhere to its commitments under the Treaty of Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, suggesting its nuclear activities have continued despite the destruction of its reactor as a result of an Israeli airstrike in 2007.

“Syria’s failure to cooperate with the IAEA remains a matter of ongoing concern,” she said. “Syria continues to go to great lengths to deceive, obfuscate and distract international attention from its perennial noncompliance.”
…

Video and audio recordings from a fatal tourist boat accident in Missouri show that the lake went from calm to deadly dangerous in a matter of minutes, the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday.

The NTSB cited preliminary findings gathered from the video recorder camera system salvaged by divers after the duck boat sank July 19 at Table Rock Lake near Branson. Seventeen of the 31 people on board died, including nine family members from Indianapolis.

The material was examined at a lab in Washington, but the agency has not yet analyzed the findings, and no conclusions about the cause of the accident, one of the nation’s worst maritime accidents in recent decades, have been drawn.

Frightening scene

The findings, though, paint a chilling picture of the final few minutes before the boat went under.

The captain and driver boarded the vessel at 6:27 p.m. The excursion begins on land at a terminal in Branson. Normally, the vessel tours the popular country music and entertainment community first before going to the lake for about a 20-minute boat ride. The driver drives the vehicle on land, and the captain takes over on the water.

But the video recordings show that at 6:28 p.m., someone briefly stepped onto the rear of the vehicle and told the crew to take the water portion of the tour first. A minute later, with passengers boarding, the captain made a reference to looking at the weather radar prior to the trip.

The vessel arrived at the lake a few minutes before 7 p.m. and the captain briefed passengers on the location of emergency exits and life jackets, then demonstrated use of life jackets and pointed out the location of life rings.

The vessel entered the water around 6:55 p.m. at a time when the water appeared calm, the NTSB said. In fact, over the next five minutes the captain allowed four different children to sit in the driver’s seat.

But suddenly just after 7 p.m., whitecaps rapidly appeared on the water and winds increased, the NTSB said. The captain returned to the driver’s seat.

The driver lowered plastic side curtains and at 7:01 p.m. the captain made a comment about the storm.

Alarm sounds

At 7:03 p.m. the captain made a call on a hand-held radio but the content was unintelligible. A minute later, an electronic tone associated with the bilge alarm activated; about a minute later, the captain reached down and the alarm stopped.

The captain made another call on a hand-held radio at 7:05 but the content was again unintelligible.

Over the next couple of minutes, water splashed inside the passenger compartment.

At 7:07 p.m. an electronic tone associated with the bilge alarm activated again.

At 7:08 p.m. the inward-facing video recording ended as the vessel was still on the surface of the water.

Phone and email messages left with a spokeswoman for Ripley Entertainment, the owner of Ride the Ducks of Branson, were not immediately returned.

A private inspector who examined 24 duck boats for Ripley Entertainment in August, including the one that sank, said that when the bilge alarm went off, it would be a sign that “there’s a significant amount of water in the hull.”

“It just wasn’t getting evacuated,” said Steve Paul, owner of Test Drive Technologies in the St. Louis area.
…

The Taliban has confirmed that it held direct talks with the United States in Qatar this week on finding a negotiated end to the 17-year war in Afghanistan. 

A senior Taliban official told VOA on Friday that Alice Wells, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for South and Central Asia, led the American delegation in the meeting in Doha.

The insurgent official, speaking on condition of anonymity, explained the “preliminary” dialogue focused merely on “laying the groundwork for future contacts and meetings” between the Taliban and the U.S. 

“The overall atmosphere of the meeting was very good and the discussions were also productive,” said the Taliban official,but he shared no further details.

Reports of Monday’s landmark meeting in the Qatari capital appeared in American newspapers earlier this week but neither U.S. officials nor the Taliban directly commented on them until now.

The U.S. State Department declined to comment on the reported meeting with the Afghan insurgency.

No comment from U.S.

“The United States is exploring all avenues to advance a peace process in close consultation with the Afghan government,” said a State Department official when asked for a reaction to reports of talks with the Taliban.

The official made it clear that the Afghan government was fully involved in the effort to jump-start peace talks. “Any negotiations over the political future of Afghanistan will be between the Taliban and Afghan government,” said the State Department official.

The Afghan Taliban has been informally operating a political office in Doha for several years.

The Islamist insurgency had long called for direct talks with Washington. The Taliban insists the U.S., and not the Afghan government, has the authority to determine a timetable for all American and NATO troops to withdraw from Afghanistan.

First significant step

This week’s Qatar talks marked the first significant step toward starting an Afghan peace and reconciliation process since a single round of talks was held between Afghan and Taliban officials in Pakistan in 2015, with U.S. and China also in attendance as observers.

U.S. officials are reported as saying Monday’s engagement with the Taliban was aimed at building on momentum generated by last month’s unprecedented temporary cease-fires the Afghan government and the Islamist insurgency observed during three-day Eid festivities last month.

The meeting in Doha came as the Afghan government is considering another unilateral ceasefire with the insurgents during the upcoming Eid festival in August to encourage the Taliban to come to the table for peace talks. 

 
…

Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri says Russian hackers tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate her Senate computer network, raising questions about the extent to which Russia will try to interfere in the 2018 elections.

McCaskill, who is up for re-election this year, confirmed the attempted hack after The Daily Beast website reported that Russia’s GRU intelligence agency tried to break into the senator’s computers in August 2017. The Daily Beast report Thursday was based on the site’s forensic analysis after a Microsoft executive said last week that the company had helped stop email phishing attacks on three unidentified candidates.

In a statement, McCaskill said she wants to hold the hackers and Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable.

“While this attack was not successful, it is outrageous that they think they can get away with this,” she said. “I will not be intimidated. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, Putin is a thug and a bully.”

Her office would not give any details about the attempted attack or say how they learned about it. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he did not have immediate comment. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment Thursday night.

Vulnerable Senate seat

McCaskill, a Democrat in a state that overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump, is considered one of the most vulnerable senators up for re-election this year. According to The Daily Beast, the email phishing scam that targeted her office was similar to a successful Russian hacking of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, in 2016.

The report comes two days after Trump suggested that the Russians may try to help Democrats in this election cycle. He has repeatedly questioned the extent to which Russia interfered in the 2016 elections despite an assessment from the country’s intelligence agencies that they did. The intelligence agencies said Russia was attempting to help Trump win the election.

Trump tweeted Tuesday, without evidence: “I’m very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election. Based on the fact that no President has been tougher on Russia than me, they will be pushing very hard for the Democrats. They definitely don’t want Trump!”

Warner urges action

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said the news confirms what he and others have warned for some time.

“The Russians saw 2016 as a success, and they’ll be back in 2018, unless we do far more to protect ourselves than we’re currently doing,” Warner said, “Unfortunately, the lack of leadership from the White House means that we still have no all-of-government approach to addressing this threat.”
…

U.S. officials say they expect to reunite all eligible children who had been separated from their parents after entering the country illegally by Thursday’s court-ordered deadline (0700 UTC Friday).

The Justice Department said in a court filing Thursday afternoon in San Diego that more than 1,400 children 5 years old and older had been reunited so far. It said 378 were released in what it calls “appropriate circumstances,” meaning they were turned over to sponsors who can properly care for them.

But 700 children are still in government custody and their fates are uncertain.

Many of their parents have been deported from the United States, leaving the children in what one immigration advocacy group calls a “black hole.”

In some cases, government lawyers said the parents are criminals or unfit to care for children.

Immigration attorneys said some of the parents who returned home alone may have been led to believe by the government that going back to their own country is the only way they can see their kids again.

Lawyers for the America Civil Liberties Union say they have advocates on the ground in such places as Honduras and Guatemala and will investigate that allegation.

“The government shouldn’t be proud of the work they’re doing on reunification,” Lee Gelernt of the ACLU said Thursday. “We created this cruel, inhumane policy … now we’re trying to fix it in every way we can and make these families whole.”

Under President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, families who illegally crossed into the United States from Mexico in most of April and May were automatically detained.

But because it is illegal to put children in jail, the youngsters were taken away from their parents and held separately.

Visitors to these detention centers reported seeing children held in cages in less than ideal conditions and given little to occupy their time all day.

Trump signed an executive order rescinding the family separations after a nationwide outcry, including from many fellow Republicans.

A judge gave officials two separate deadlines to reunite children younger than 5 and children 5 and older.

Many of the parents have been given ankle bracelets after being reunited with their children so they will not skip a hearing for asylum.
…

As migrant families and immigration advocates fight in court to return children to their parents, a Maryland nonprofit has been providing care packages to the children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Volunteers fill backpacks with basic necessities, one by one, picking up shampoo, toothbrushes, blankets, pajamas, stuffed animals and books. They’ve been shipped to shelters in Texas, Florida, New York and Virginia — locations where migrant children were taken after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. 

“I’m not going to get into the political wave of what is happening, but I will tell you this: We have children who have walked into our country that needed us. They need us. They needed our cases, and so that’s what we decided to do,” Rob Scheer, founder of Comfort Cases, told VOA. 

Scheer was inspired by his own experience in the foster care system when he started the Comfort Cases nonprofit in 2013 with his husband, Reece. It all started in his garage. Today, the charity serves about 39 U.S. states and territories, including Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. 

Their mission is to give a child that “sense of dignity” and to “provide a proper bag, filled with comfort and essential items.” Children in foster care are often moved from home to home multiple times, and often have only a trash bag to gather their few belongings. 

As a child, Scheer had to transport his belongings the same way. Some 40 years later, he and Reece adopted four children from the foster care system who also arrived with their meager belongings in trash bags. 

“I just really felt like this was something that we needed to do. And at first, it was what we needed to do as a family. … Little did we know that it would become a national charity,” he said.

Migrant children

Once Scheer heard about the separations at the Texas border, he called his team and volunteers and said they could not just sit back and watch what was happening. 

“At the end of the day, I don’t walk in the shoes of their parents. I can’t tell you the reasons why they came to the border or why they entered our country. The only thing that I can tell you is that they’re here, and these children need us,” Scheer said. 

The backpacks contain special things.  

“For the migrant kids, we have special stuffed animals made by a woman who donated, I think, a thousand of them. … They also get a Spanish book and an English book, or they get a book that’s half Spanish, half English,” said Marli Abramowitz, an intern at Comfort Cases.

Abramowitz said as soon as news broke about the family separations, the team packed and shipped cases to McAllen, Texas. 

In 2017, the charity donated 11,000 cases. This year, the number is set to hit 14,000. 

Linda Walker, who has been volunteering with the nonprofit for the past six months, said she immediately felt Comfort Cases had a role to play in the immigration issue. 

She said even though the organization had to overcome some bureaucratic obstacles to reach the children, she hopes the backpacks hold “everyday necessities” — and the message that the migrants are welcome here.

“I know it’s been difficult. … I think the children there [in shelters], wrapped in their silver blankets, would look a lot more comfortable with some of the things that are in this backpack,” Walker said. 

The Trump administration has scrambled to return more than 2,500 immigrant children who were separated from their parents under the “zero tolerance” policy. 

Officials acknowledged in court documents it may have deported as many as 463 parents without their children.

“That’s something that could have completely been avoided, but now they don’t have their parents, and it’s going to be a hard journey to get them back,” Brennan Dunne, another Comfort Cases intern, said.

The high school student said helping others is a rewarding experience but believes the situation at the border shouldn’t have happened. 

“You can’t rip children away from their parents,” Dunne said. “It’s unacceptable.” 
…

As smoke from a nearby wildfire pours into Yosemite Valley, Tom Lambert has had to tell tourists who booked his vacation home months in advance that they would have to defer their dream stays so firefighters could take protective measures against the growing blaze. 

The decision to shut the scenic heart of Yosemite National Park at the height of tourist season is heartbreaking for travelers, many of whom mapped out their trips months in advance to hike and climb amid the spectacular views of cascading waterfalls and sheer rock faces.

“We had one guest who planned a weeklong trip,” Lambert said. “It was a father-daughter trip, for her high school graduation. … Now it’s done. It’s sad.” Another guest had to delay plans to climb Half Dome.

The closure has also been a financial blow to Lambert and other businesses that rely on the summer tourist traffic.

Most people left the valley Tuesday, when officials reluctantly announced the closure, park spokesman Scott Gediman said. The remaining campers packed up their gear Wednesday, joining the exodus that has been mostly orderly.

“People have been very understanding,” Gediman said.

Officials emphasized that Yosemite wasn’t under imminent danger from the fire. Authorities decided on the shutdown to allow crews to perform protective measures such as burning away brush along roadways without having to deal with traffic in the park that welcomes 4 million visitors annually.

On Wednesday, an extended family from Los Angeles on their annual trip to the national park prepared to leave the Upper Pines campground.

“Very disappointed,” Lisa Salgado said. “We look forward to this all year. This is the trip of our summer.”

The group members arrived Monday and had planned to stay through Saturday. Instead, they packed tents and other gear into vehicles, hoping they could find another campground elsewhere.

“So, this is a new memory,” said Miguel Martinez. “I’ve never been evacuated before.”

Yosemite Valley will be closed until at least Sunday, along with a winding, mountainous, 20-mile (32-kilometer) stretch of California’s State Route 41 that leads into the area, Gediman said.

At least 1,000 campground and hotel bookings were canceled — to say nothing of the impact on day visitors, park workers and small businesses along the highway, Gediman said. Rangers went to campsites one at a time to inform visitors of the closures. Hotel guests got phone calls and notes on their doors.

“This is the prime visitor season, so this wasn’t an easy decision to make,” Gediman said. “This was purely for safety’s sake.”

The last time the 7.5-mile-long (12-kilometer-long) valley was closed because of fire was 1990, he said.

Lambert and his wife, Theresa Ho, were briefly evacuated last week when smoke cast an unhealthy pall over the home where they live upstairs and rent the downstairs to tourists.

“Basically June, July and August are the big revenue months,” he said, estimating that about 100 nearby vacation properties would be forced to offer refunds.”We’re going to lose half of July and half of August, probably.”

Yosemite Valley is the centerpiece of the visitor experience, offering views of landmarks such as Half Dome, Bridal Veil Fall, El Capitan and Yosemite Falls. The glacial valley has been enveloped by a choking haze of smoke from the Ferguson Fire.

Over nearly two weeks, flames have churned through 60 square miles (155 square kilometers) of timber in steep terrain of the Sierra Nevada just west of the park. The fire was just 25 percent contained.

Mandatory evacuations are in place in several communities while other people have been told to get ready to leave if necessary.

More than 3,300 firefighters are working on the fire, aided by 16 helicopters. One firefighter was killed July 14, and six others have been injured.

Rhonda Salisbury, CEO of Visit Yosemite/Madera County, said the regional visitors bureau has been relocating tourists statewide following the closure.

“People are heartbroken,” she said. “Some want to ride it out for a few days and see if they can get back in the park.” Others want help finding places to stay away from Yosemite.

Gediman suggested valley visitors divert to Tuolumne Meadows, on Yosemite’s northern edge, or to Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks to the south.

“There are wonderful places to visit in the region, so we’re asking people to consider alternative plans,” he said.

In Southern California’s San Jacinto Mountains, a highway was closed and evacuations were ordered near the town of Idyllwild as crews tried to stop the spread of an out-of-control wildfire.

In the state’s far north, a 7-square-mile (18-square-kilometer) wildfire has forced the evacuation of French Gulch, a small Shasta County community that dates to the Gold Rush.
…

Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, who uncovered proof that thousands of Japanese-Americans incarcerated in the United States during World War II were held not for reasons of national security but because of racism, has died at age 93.

Bruce Embrey, co-chair of the Manzanar Committee, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Herzig-Yoshinaga died July 18 at her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance.

Her discovery of a 1942 document revealing the real reason that approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans were kept in camps around the country led to formal apologies from President Ronald Reagan and others and the awarding of $20,000 each to those locked up.

Before she came across the document buried in the National Archives, the government had maintained Japanese-Americans were sent to the guarded camps during the war because there was no time to determine who might be spies.

But the real reason, according to the document drafted by Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, and uncovered by Herzig-Yoshinaga in 1982, stated incarceration was used because authorities considered it “impossible to separate the sheep from the goats” when looking for spies among Japanese-Americans because of the cultural similarities.

“Her discovery of that original published justification, which was then later altered 180 degrees, revealed that the motivation for incarceration was not really a military necessity but outright racism,” said San Francisco attorney Dale Minami, who used it as evidence in getting wartime convictions vacated for those who refused to report to relocation camps.

Until Herzig-Yoshinaga found it, Minami said, the government believed every copy had been destroyed. He called her a pre-eminent researcher who knew her way around the National Archives perhaps better than anyone.

Born August 5, 1924, in Sacramento to Japanese immigrant parents, Aiko Yoshinaga moved with her family to Los Angeles as a child. She was a 17-year-old senior at Los Angeles High School when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, plunging the United States into World War II. Soon afterward, she learned she and 14 other Japanese-American students at her school would not graduate with their Class of 1942.

“You don’t deserve to get your high school diplomas because your people bombed Pearl Harbor,” she recalled her school’s principal telling them.

Forty-seven years later they would receive those diplomas, at a special ceremony held at Southern California’s Santa Anita racetrack, where numerous Japanese-American families had been housed in horse stables before being shipped to relocation camps.

Denied graduation, Herzig-Yoshinaga instead eloped with her fiance, and the couple was shipped soon afterward to Manzanar. Now a historical site, it was then a sprawling, barbed-wire enclosed makeshift prison perched on a dry, dusty, barren region of California’s high desert and surrounded by guards.

It was there, in a tarpaper-covered barracks shared by three families, where she gave birth to her first child.

After the war she moved to New York, divorced, remarried, gave birth to two more children and divorced again.

It was while living as a single mother in the 1960s, she would recall years later, that she began to seriously question why her government had her locked up.

“I hooked up with a group called Asian Americans for Action,” she said during a Manzanar Committee event in 2011 honoring her with a legacy award. “They turned my head around. They got me to think, ‘Yeah, I never thought about all the reasons why the government did this to us.’ ”

Her third husband, Jack Herzig, a lawyer who fought against the Japanese as an Army paratrooper in World War II, aided in her search after the couple married in 1978 and moved to Washington, D.C.

“She was just a regular person who was wondering, ‘Why was I plucked out of high school before my senior year and not allowed to graduate?’ And that drove her personal crusade,” Minami said Wednesday.

“She was just a lovely woman, very kind and generous,” he added. “You could even call her sweet and cute. But that belied a real commitment to social justice. Not just for Japanese-Americans but for all marginalized groups.”

Herzig-Yoshinaga is survived by her son, David Abe, and daughters Lisa Furutani and Gerrie Lani Miyazaki.  Her husband, Jack Herzig, died in 2005.

A memorial is planned September 2 at the Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles. 
…

The chief of the Homeland Security Department has told members of Congress that the government is “on track” to meet Thursday’s court-ordered deadline of reuniting hundreds of migrant children with their families, lawmakers who met privately with her said.

Wednesday’s assertion by Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was greeted with open disbelief and anger, according to many of the roughly 20 members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, all Democrats, who attended. The private, hourlong meeting seemed to achieve little toward dousing lawmakers’ criticism of how children taken from their parents are being handled.

Nielsen also told the group, “I am not a racist,” according to two of the lawmakers. One of them, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., said she made the remark after he told her she worked for a “racist regime.” Gutierrez said she cited her friendship with the first lady of Honduras and other Latina women.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, tweeted that she told the lawmakers: “I am not a racist. Nobody believes families should be separated.”

A spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department was asked for comment and did not immediately provide one.

Deadline Thursday

After the meeting, lawmakers said Nielsen provided no statistics to support her assertion that the deadline for reuniting families would be met.

“She said they believe they’re on track” to meet the court deadline, said Rep. Jim Costa, D-Calif., one of several lawmakers who said she used that phrase to describe the status of reuniting separated families.

“That’s impossible. And we all said this to her,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz.

Gutierrez said he told Nielsen “she is committing crimes against humanity, that she is a child abuser” and that she is “an accomplice of Donald Trump’s racist regime.”

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego set a Thursday deadline for reuniting children age 5 and older who have been held by the government since their families were caught entering the country without authorization.

As many as 2,551 children age 5 and older were separated from their families and 1,187 children have been reunited with parents, guardians or sponsors, the government has said. The exact number still separated is unclear. The government has been releasing hundreds of families to faith-based groups, which are caring for them.

​Parents deported without children

The government has said 463 migrant parents may have been deported after being separated from their children, further complicating the reunification process. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said Nielsen suggested to the lawmakers Wednesday that those children were left behind in the U.S. at those parents’ requests.

“We simply do not believe that’s true,” Menendez said.

A separate deadline that Sabraw had set for reuniting around 100 children younger than age 5 with their families passed two weeks ago. Just more than half have rejoined their parents or guardians, according to the latest figures.

The separations caused a bipartisan, nationwide uproar against Trump’s policy of “zero tolerance,” in which the government prosecutes all migrants entering the U.S. illegally.

The government initially separated children from their detained parents or guardians. Under pressure, Trump abandoned the family separation policy, but hundreds of children remain apart from their parents in conditions that visitors have described as horrid.

Nielsen ignored reporters’ questions when she left the meeting.

“Very productive. Very frank,” she said.

Rising costs

The lawmakers said Nielsen also told them her agency is financing the costs of detaining families with a 1 percent across-the-board cut to its programs.

A Homeland Security spokeswoman said the added costs are due to increased numbers of people being caught entering the country, and the money is being used for additional beds and transportation expenses.

Separately, the Republican-dominated House Appropriations Committee approved $5 billion for building parts of Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico after rejecting a Democratic effort to redirect that money to other immigration programs.

Trump has requested the $5 billion for next year, but the Senate version of the bill financing the Homeland Security Department has just $1.6 billion. The final amount will need to be worked out later this year.
…