U.K. leader seeks lifeline after surviving confidence vote
British Prime Minister Theresa May was seeking a Brexit lifeline from European Union leaders Thursday after winning a noconfidence vote among her own Conservative lawmakers at home — a victory won only after she put a time limit on her leadership.
May won the vote in London on Wednesday after promising lawmakers privately that she would quit before Britain’s next national election, which is scheduled for 2022.
Arriving in Brussels for an EU summit, May said “in my heart, I would love to be able to lead the Conservative Party into the next general election.”
“But I think it is right that the party feels that it would prefer to go into that election with a new leader,” May said. She didn’t specify a date for her departure.
May headed to the EU summit in Brussels seeking reassurances about the divorce deal that she can use to win over a skeptical British Parliament, particularly pro-Brexit lawmakers whose loathing of the deal triggered the challenge to her leadership.
May caused an uproar in Parliament on Monday when she scrapped the lawmakers’ planned vote on her Brexit deal at the last minute to avoid a heavy defeat. Two days later, she won a leadership vote among Conservative lawmakers by 200 votes to 117.
The victory gives May a reprieve — the party can’t challenge her again for a year. But the size of the rebellion underscores the unpopularity of her Brexit plan.
The EU is adamant there can be no substantive changes to the legally binding agreement on Britain’s withdrawal from the bloc but have suggested that there could be some “clarifications.”
“The deal itself is nonnegotiable,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said in Brussels. “So today is about clarification.”
Rutte said EU leaders were willing to listen to May, who will address them before a summit dinner where they will discuss Brexit — and eat the meal — without her.
May said her focus “is on ensuring that I can get those assurances that we need to get this deal over the line.”
“I don’t expect an immediate breakthrough, but what I do hope is that we can start work as quickly as possible on the assurances that are necessary,” she said.
U.K. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay told the BBC that there were signs of “positive” movement from the EU on the most intractable issue — a legal guarantee designed to prevent physical border controls being imposed between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland, a member of the EU.
The provision, known as the backstop, would keep the U.K. part of the EU customs union if the two sides couldn’t agree on another way to avoid a hard border.
Pro-Brexit lawmakers strongly oppose the backstop, because it keeps Britain bound to EU trade rules, and unable to leave without the bloc’s consent. Pro-EU politicians consider it an unwieldy, inferior alternative to staying in the bloc.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said he discussed possible remedies in a meeting with May on the sidelines of the summit.
“Some of the suggestions she made made sense, others I thought were difficult,” he said.
Varadkar said the EU might be able to give Britain “a greater assurance” that speedy talks on a new U.K.EU trade deal would mean the backstop would never need to be used.
Among EU leaders, there is sympathy for May’s predicament, but also exasperation at Britain’s political mess, and little appetite to reopen the negotiations.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking down to Britain’s departure from the bloc, which is due to take place on March 29 — deal or no deal. not been previously reported, is likely to intensify scrutiny of detention conditions at Border Patrol stations and CBP facilities that are increasingly overwhelmed by large numbers of families with children seeking asylum in the United States.
According to CBP records, the girl and her father were taken into custody at around 10 p.m. on Dec. 6 south of Lordsburg, N.M., as part of a group of 163 people who approached U.S. agents to turn themselves in. More than eight hours later, the child began having seizures at 6:25 a.m., CBP records show.
Emergency responders who arrived soon after measured her body temperature at 105.7 degrees, and according to a statement from CBP, she “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”
After a helicopter flight to an El Paso hospital, the child went into cardiac arrest and “was revived,” according to the agency.
“However, the child did not recover and died at the hospital less than 24 hours after being transported,” CBP said.
The agency did not release the name of the girl or her father, but he remains in El Paso awaiting a meeting with Guatemalan consular officials, according to CBP.
The agency said it is investigating the incident to ensure appropriate policies were followed. Food and water are typically provided to migrants in Border Patrol custody, and it wasn’t immediately clear Thursday if the girl received provisions and a medical exam during the middle of the night, prior to the onset of seizures.
“Our sincerest condolences go out to the family of the child,” CBP spokesman Andrew Meehan said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Border Patrol agents took every possible step to save the child’s life under the most trying of circumstances,” Meehan said. “As fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, we empathize with the loss of any child.”
Though much of the political and media attention has focused in recent weeks on migrant caravans arriving at the Tijuana-San Diego border, large numbers of Central Americans continue to cross the border into Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. The groups sometimes spend days in smugglers’ stash houses or walking through remote areas with little food or water prior to reaching the border.
Arrests of migrants traveling as family groups have skyrocketed this year, and Homeland Security officials say court rulings that limit their ability to keep families in detention have produced a “catch and release” system that encourages migrants to bring children as a shield against detention and deportation.
In November, Border Patrol agents apprehended a record 25,172 “family unit members” on the Southwest border — including 11,489 in the Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol sector in south Texas and 6,434 in the El Paso sector, which covers far west Texas and all of New Mexico. Migrants traveling as part of a family group accounted for 58 percent of those taken into custody last month by the Border Patrol.
On Tuesday, CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said during testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the agency’s holding cells are “incompatible” with new reality of parents with children coming across the border to surrender to agents en masse, requesting asylum.
“Our border patrol stations were built decades ago to handle mostly male single adults in custody, not families and children,” McAleenan told lawmakers.
The small Border Patrol station in Lordsburg received a single group of 227 migrants on Thursday, according to CBP, after taking in separate group of 123 on Wednesday. Both groups — extremely large by CBP standards — mostly consisted of families and children, according to the agency.
The agency said it was expecting an autopsy on the child, but results would not likely be available for several weeks. An initial diagnosis by physicians at El Paso’s Providence Hospital listed the cause of death as septic shock, fever and dehydration.