BP agents intercept vehicle carrying several illegal entrants
Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents intercepted a vehicle early Wednesday morning after it illegally crossed the border in the desert south of Yuma, apprehending 18 Mexican nationals and one U.S. citizen.
According to a news release from the agency, at approximately 1 a.m. Yuma
Sector video surveillance cameras captured video of a black Dodge Durango crossing the border south of the Foothills.
Several individuals, according to information provided by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, were then seen getting into the vehicle, which continued east along the border afterwards.
As agents closed in on the vehicle, it left the dirt road it had been traveling on and headed north into the desert, where it eventually became disabled.
The driver and the passengers all fled the vehicle, but agents were able to apprehend everyone.
Agents also located a man in the same area who was trying to climb the border fence in an attempt to get back into Mexico.
The man, a 36-year-old Mexican national, however, fell from the fence and was injured. A Border Patrol agent trained as an emergency medical technician (EMT) provided him with medical care while waiting for an ambulance.
He was then transported to Yuma Regional Medical Center and later flown to a Phoenix-area hospital for further treatment.
The illegal entrants and the U.S. citizen were all arrested and will be processed accordingly.
An initial records check conducted on the U.S. citizen, a 23-year-old male, revealed that he had an extraditable warrant for failure to appear in court after being caught with 26 pounds of methamphetamine.
In addition, five of the illegal entrants will face felony charges for re-entering the U.S. after having been previously deported.
WASHINGTON – After decades of failed attempts to pass comprehensive immigration legislation, congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden are signaling openness to a pieceby-piece approach.
They unveiled a broad bill Thursday that would provide an eight-year pathway to citizenship for 11 million people living in the country without legal status. There are other provisions, too, but the Democrats are not talking all-or-nothing.
“Even though I support full, comprehensive immigration reform, I’m ready to move on piecemeal, because I don’t want to end up with good intentions on my hands and not have anything,” said Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar. “I’d rather have progress.”
The pragmatic approach is a clear recognition of the past failures to deliver on a large-scale immigration overhaul – and how success could be even more difficult in a highly polarized, closely divided Congress.
The Democrats’ legislation reflects the broad priorities for immigration changes that Biden laid out on his first day in office, including an increase in visas, more money to process asylum applications, new technology at the southern border and funding for economic development in Latin
American countries.
But advocates for expansive immigration say they could pursue smaller bills focused on citizenship for groups such as young immigrants brought to the U.S. by their parents as children, for agricultural workers and other essential labor.
“I know what it’s like to lose on big bills and small bills. The fear that people have experienced in the last
four years deserves every single opportunity, every single bill to remedy,” said Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director for United We Dream, an immigration advocacy group.
“The biggest thing here is that we’re going to get something across the finish line, because not doing so is not an option.”
The broad legislation – which includes a pathway
to citizenship, but not much in the way of the enhanced border security that’s typically offered to win Republican votes – faces long odds with Democrats holding only a slender majority in Congress.
Even before the new bill was unveiled, Democrats were reining in expectations for their final result. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin has said that any final Senate bill likely “will not reach the same levels” as Biden’s proposal.
Indeed, comprehensive bills negotiated by bipartisan teams of lawmakers failed multiple times during Republican George W.
Bush’s administration and again in 2013 during Democrat Barack Obama’s.
Republican Donald Trump signed legislation that increased border security, and took executive action to restrict legal immigration to the U.S. and remove some protections for immigrants living in the country set by Obama. Biden has signed a number of executive orders rolling back some of the Trump restrictions, but he promised throughout his campaign and transition that immigration overhaul would be a top priority.
The White House insisted Thursday there have been no decisions on strategy. But multiple immigration organizations said administration officials had signaled in recent conversations that they were open to a multilevel approach in which lawmakers would press forward on the comprehensive bill while also pursuing individual pieces.
Cuellar, who was in office for most of those early, failed attempts, said many in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are still committed to a comprehensive overhaul. He said the White House reached out to him and he advised them to start with a broad bill, but he added that “reality is going to hit people, hopefully,” and more lawmakers will get on board with a more incremental approach.
Indeed, Biden himself suggested in a CNN town hall Tuesday night that “there’s things I would deal by itself.” One of the lead sponsors of the bill, New
Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, seemed to suggest Thursday he was open to a less expansive approach.
“If we can get certain elements of this standing up and passed individually both in the House and the Senate, that’s great,” he said.
Tom Jawetz, vice president for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, said that Biden’s decades of experience in the Senate have given him a realistic view of what’s possible.
“He also knows how to count votes, and he knows what it takes to get legislation across the line,” he said. “And so I think there is real energy behind pressing forward on all fronts and seeing what shakes out.”
Democrats have a third option: using a parliamentary maneuver to attach some immigration items to a budget bill, which would then require just 51 votes to pass. Advocates have been pressing the new administration to consider attaching a pathway to citizenship for some to an economic stimulus package that they’re expected to introduce after they’ve passed the COVID-19 bill. That approach would almost certainly face a strong procedural challenge.
“The ultimate goal is to make sure that 2022 doesn’t come around, and we have done nothing on immigration for another Congress,” said Jawetz.
Democrats have expressed optimism that this time will be different not just because of the shift in strategy, but also because they say the politics of the issue have changed. They point to support from business groups for reform, and they note that Latinos are not a monolithic Democratic voting bloc, given that Trump improved his showing with Latino voters in the 2020 election.
Martinez Rosas said that if Congress fails to take action on reform, it will “absolutely” be a problem for Democrats in elections in 2022 and beyond.
“This will be the fight, the defining fight,” she said. “The difference between now and in 2013, is that the progressive movement is unified around the acknowledgment that immigration is a must-fix issue.”
Humans are making Earth a broken and increasingly unlivable planet through climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. So the world must make dramatic changes to society, economics and daily life, a new United Nations report says.
Unlike past U.N. reports that focused on one issue and avoided telling leaders actions to take, Thursday’s report combines three intertwined environment crises and tells the world what’s got to change. It calls for changing what governments tax, how nations value economic output, how power is generated, the way people get around, fish and farm, as well as what they eat.
“Without nature’s help, we will not thrive or even survive,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “For too long, we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature. The result is three interlinked environmental crises.”
Thus the 168-page report title is blunt: “Making Peace With Nature.”
“Our children and their children will inherit a world of extreme weather events, sea level rise, a drastic loss of plants and animals, food and water insecurity and increasing likelihood of future pandemics,” said report lead author Sir Robert Watson, who has chaired past UN science reports on climate change and biodiversity loss.
“The emergency is in fact more profound than we thought only a few years ago,” said Watson, who has been a top level scientist in the U.S. and British governments.
This year “is a makeit or break-it year indeed because the risk of things becoming irreversible is gaining ground every year,” Guterres said. “We are close to the point of no return.”
The report highlighted what report co-author Rachel Warren of the University of East Anglia called “a litany of frightening statistics that hasn’t really been brought together:”
• Earth is on the way to an additional 3.5 degrees warming from now (1.9 degrees Celsius), far more than the international agreed upon goals in the Paris accord.
• About 9 million people a year die from pollution.
• About 1 million of Earth’s 8 million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction.
• Up to 400 million tons of heavy metals, toxic sludge and other industrial waste are dumped into the world’s waters every year.
• More than 3 billion people are affected by land degradation, and only 15% of Earth’s wetlands remain intact.
• About 60% of fish stocks are fished at the maximum levels. There are more than 400 oxygen-depleted “dead zones” and marine plastics pollution has increased tenfold since 1980.
“In the end it will hit us,” said biologist Thomas Lovejoy, who was a scientific advisor to the report. “It’s not what’s happening to elephants. It’s not what’s happening to climate or sea level rise. It’s all going to impact us.”
The planet’s problems are so interconnected that they must be worked on together to be fixed right, Warren said. And many of the solutions, such as eliminating fossil fuel use,
combat multiple problems including climate change and pollution, she said.
The report “makes it clear that there is no time for linear thinking or tackling problems one at a time,” said University of Michigan environment professor Rosina Bierbaum, who wasn’t part of the work.
In another break, this report gives specific solutions that it says must be taken.
This report uses the word “must” 56 times and “should” 37 times. There should be 100 more because action is so crucial, said former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, who wasn’t part of the report.
“Time has totally ran out. That’s why the word ‘must’ is in there,” Figueres said.
The report calls for an end to fossil fuel use and says governments should not tax labor or production, but rather use of resources that damages nature.
“Governments are still playing more to exploit nature than to protect it,”
Guterres said. “Globally, countries spend some 4 to 6 trillion dollars a year on subsidies that damage the environment.”
Scientists should inform leaders about environmental risks “but their endorsement of specific public policies threatens to undermine the credibility of their science,” said former Republican Rep. Bob Inglis, who founded the free market climate think tank RepublicEn.org.
The report also tells nations to value nature in addition to the gross domestic product when calculating how an economy is doing.
Getting there means changes by individuals, governments and business, but it doesn’t have to involve sacrifice, said UN Environment Programme Director Inger Andersen.
“There’s a country that has been on that path for 25 years: Costa Rica,” Andersen said. “Yes, these are difficult times, but more and leaders are stepping in.”