CDC: Unaccompanied child migrants will be able to seek US asylum
ATLANTA — Unaccompanied child migrants trying to enter the United States will no longer be denied a chance to seek asylum under new guidance announced by U.S. health authorities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in announcing the change late Friday night, said “that expulsion of unaccompanied noncitizen children is not warranted to protect the public health.”
The change was announced shortly before a court order was to take effect that would have allowed the Biden administration to expel unaccompanied children seeking asylum under Title 42 authority, which was introduced in March 2020 to prevent spread of COVID-19.
The order remains in place for adults and families traveling with children.
Testing and other preventive measures allow children traveling alone to be released to sponsors in the United States, the CDC said. Sponsors are typically family or other close relatives.
A federal judge ruled in a lawsuit by the state of Texas that the CDC failed to explain why children traveling alone were exempted from Title 42, and gave the administration a week to appeal.
Instead, the CDC lifted the order — but only for unaccompanied children.
A phone message and email left with the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was not immediately returned.
Migrants have been expelled more than 1.6 million times under Title 42, named for a 1944 public health law. Biden has kept the order in place but exempted unaccompanied children during his first days in office.
Prominent Democrats and advocacy groups have been pressing to end Title 42 for all migrants.
“It is not a humane or effective solution to securing our border,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., tweeted Friday.
Outbreak surges in China:
Two mayors have been dismissed in northeastern China, and Shanghai has closed its school system and shifted to online instruction, as a coronavirus outbreak in mainland China gathers speed.
China’s National Health Commission announced Saturday that another 1,524 locally transmitted coronavirus cases had been detected in provinces across mainland China. That was up from 1,100 cases reported a day earlier, and a couple hundred cases per day a week ago.
The mayors of Jilin City and the Jiutai district of the city of Changchun have both been dismissed, the state-run Xinhua news agency announced Saturday, without specifying exactly when the dismissals had happened. Both places have had expanding outbreaks.
Jilin City has an urban population of 1.8 million, while the mostly rural Jiutai district has 760,000 residents. Changchun, which has 9 million people, was placed under partial lockdown Friday.
Saudi Arabia on Saturday executed 81 people convicted of crimes ranging from killings to belonging to militant groups, the largest known mass execution carried out in the kingdom in its modern history.
It wasn’t clear why the kingdom choose Saturday for the executions, though
Mass execution:
they came as much of the world’s attention remained focused on Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The state-run Saudi Press Agency announced the executions, saying they included those “convicted of various crimes, including the murdering of innocent men, women and children.”
The kingdom also said some of those executed were members of al-Qaida, the Islamic State group and also backers of Yemen’s Houthi rebels. The report did not say where the executions took place.
Turkey, Armenia talk:
Turkey and Armenia have agreed to press ahead with efforts to establish diplomatic relations “without conditions” and continue normalization efforts that could lead to the reopening of their shared borders for trade, their foreign ministers said Saturday.
Ararat Mirzoyan met with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, on
the sidelines of a diplomacy forum in Antalya, Turkey.
Mirzoyan said he welcomed Turkey’s invitation to the forum “as a positive signal” for improved relations between the two countries
Turkey, a close ally of Azerbaijan, shut its border with Armenia in 1993 in a show of solidarity with Baku, which was locked in a conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.
In 2020, Turkey strongly backed Azerbaijan in the six-week conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, which ended with a Russiabrokered peace deal.
Turkey and Armenia also have longstanding hostility over the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in massacres, deportations and forced marches that began in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey.
Citizens in Turkmenistan voted Saturday in an election that
Turkmenistan election:
could mark the beginning of a political dynasty for the Central Asian nation’s sitting president.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, 64, announced the vote last month, setting the stage for his 40-year old son Serdar to take over. Preliminary results are expected Sunday, but few doubt that the president’s son will win by a landslide.
Serdar Berdymukhamedov has risen through a series of increasingly prominent government posts and most recently has served as the country’s deputy prime minister, answering directly to his father.
Activist arrested: Far-right activist Ammon Bundy has been arrested after refusing to leave a hospital in connection with a child-welfare case, police said Saturday.
Bundy was arrested at about 1:15 a.m. on suspicion of misdemeanor trespassing at St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center in Meridian, west
of Boise, the Idaho Statesman reported.
Bundy, a gubernatorial candidate in Idaho, is wellknown for participating in armed standoffs with law enforcement, notably at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016, which left one man dead, and on federal land near his family’s ranch in Nevada in 2014.
He’s also scheduled to stand trial this week on three charges from a previous trespassing case at the Idaho Capitol.
The arrest Saturday concerned a 10-month-old determined to be “suffering from severe malnourishment” and at risk of injury or death, the Meridian Police Department said in a news release.
The baby’s parents had refused to let officers check on its welfare after the family canceled an appointment.
Bundy urged his followers to go to the hospital to support the family.