For Australia’s asylum-seekers
centres on remote Pacific islands in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.
Under the deal, Australia would in return resettle refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
Trump has assured Australia that the US would honour its agreement to resettle the asylum-seekers.
Australia’s hardline immigration policy has drawn international condemnation from the United Nations and other rights groups.
Some 1161 men, women and children remain in indefinite detention in Manus Island and Nauru. Another 1000 or so people are in detention in Australia, some of them asylum-seekers transported from Manus Island and Nauru for medical treatment. — Reuters changing the rules to avert a filibuster — a manoeuvre that is known on Capitol Hill as “the nuclear option” — if Democrats stand firm in resistance.
Some Democrats said they would frame their opposition to Gorsuch as more considered than Republican opposition to Garland.
Progressive groups including Democracy for America, meanwhile, demanded “total opposition to all of Trump’s appointees”, including Gorsuch, until Trump rescinds his travel ban.
The Centre for American Progress, a liberal thinktank, yesterday warned Democrats not to relent.
“The only reason that Trump can name this Supreme Court justice is because of the unconscionable actions by Senate Republicans in refusing to even hold a hearing” for Garland, the group said in a memo to senators. “Rewarding such behaviour by confirming a radical nominee should not even be an option for Democrats.”