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Us Mexico Border Wall
The Pentagon will deploy roughly 1,500 more active duty soldiers to the southern border to support President Donald Trump's expanding crackdown on immigration, a U.S. official said Friday. That would eventually bring the total to about 3,600 active duty troops at the border. The order has been approved, the official said, to send a logistics brigade from the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Liberty in North Carolina. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the deployment has not yet been publicly announced. The Pentagon has been scrambling to put in motion Trump's executive orders signed shortly after he took office on Jan. 20. The first group of 1,600 active duty troops has already deployed to the border, and close to 500 more soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division are expected to begin moving in the coming days. About 500 Marines also have been told to go to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where some of the detained migrants will be held. Several hundred Marines have already arri
The Pentagon on Wednesday said it has begun deploying 1,500 active duty troops to help secure the southern border in the coming days, putting in motion plans US President Donald Trump laid out in executive orders shortly after he took office to crack down on immigration. Acting Defence Secretary Robert Salesses said the Pentagon will provide military aircraft to support Department of Homeland Security deportation flights for more than 5,000 detained migrants and the troops will assist in the construction of barriers. The number of troops and their mission may soon change, Salesses said in a statement. "This is just the beginning," he said. It remains to be seen if they will end up doing law enforcement, which would put American troops in a dramatically different role for the first time in decades. The active duty forces will join the roughly 2,500 US National Guard and Reserve forces already there. There are currently no active duty troops working along the roughly 3,219-km ...
Arizona voters have approved letting local police arrest migrants suspected of illegally entering the state from Mexico, an authority that would encroach on the federal government's power over immigration enforcement but would not take effect immediately, if ever. With the approval of Proposition 314, Arizona becomes the latest state to test the limits of what local authorities can do to curb illegal immigration. Within the past year, GOP lawmakers in Texas, Iowa and Oklahoma have passed immigration laws. In each case, federal courts have halted the states' efforts to enforce them. The only presidential battleground state that borders Mexico, Arizona is no stranger to a bitter divide on the politics of immigration. Since the early 2000s, frustration over federal enforcement of Arizona's border with Mexico has inspired a movement to draw local police departments, which had traditionally left border duties to the federal government, into immigration enforcement. The state Legislature
Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at Arizona's border with Mexico, making her first visit to the international boundary since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee as she confronts one of her biggest vulnerabilities ahead of the November election. Harris on Friday stepped out of her motorcade on a dusty desert road outside Douglas, Arizona, and shook hands with two men from the US Border Patrol. Harris, wearing sunglasses, slacks and a black coat, chatted with the uniformed agents as they walked along the rust-colored border wall in temperatures that neared 100 degrees. Later, she was expected to call for further tightening asylum restrictions, breaking from President Joe Biden's policy on an issue where her rival, former President Donald Trump, has an edge. Trump and his fellow Republicans have pounded Harris relentlessly over the Biden administration's record on migration and fault the vice president for spending little time visiting the border during her time in the Whi
Mexico's president called Donald Trump a friend on Friday and said he would write to the former US president to warn him against pledging to close the border or blaming migrants for bringing drugs into the United States. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called Trump, president from 2017 to 2021 and again the Republican nominee for this fall's presidential election, a man of intelligence and vision, despite Trump's repeated calls to close the two countries' border. Mexicans were offended in 2015 when then-candidate Trump claimed that, in many cases, immigrants arriving in the US illegally included criminals, drug dealers, rapists". And Mexico was shocked in 2019 when Trump as president threatened to close the border for a long time unless Mexican authorities stopped migrants from crossing. Lpez Obrador said the two countries' economies were so intertwined that they couldn't bear a closure for even a month. Lopez Obrador said that in a letter he planned to send next week, I am .
Immigration takes centre stage as the Republican National Convention resumes Tuesday, with speakers spotlighting a key element of former President Donald Trump 's political brand that helped endear him to the GOP base when he began his first campaign in 2015. Among speakers slated for Tuesday night were families who've been impacted by violent crime - part of a GOP strategy to link crime to border policies. They include the family of Rachel Morin, a Maryland woman whom prosecutors say was killed and raped by a fugitive from El Salvador and whose story has been frequently highlighted by Trump on the campaign trail. Immigration has long been one of Trump's banner issues, as he has criticized the unprecedented number of migrants entering the country illegally through the US border with Mexico. The numbers of unauthorized crossings have fallen abruptly after President Joe Biden issued a rule suspending many asylum claims at the border. At rallies and other campaign events, Trump has ...
For the first time in more than two decades, Mexico last year surpassed China as the leading source of goods imported to the United States. The shift reflects the growing tensions between Washington and Beijing as well as US efforts to import from countries that are friendlier and closer to home. Figures released Wednesday by the U.S. Commerce Department show that the value of goods imported to the United States from Mexico rose nearly 5% from 2022 to 2023, to more than $475 billion. At the same time, the value of Chinese imports imports tumbled 20% to $427 billion. The last time that Mexican goods imported to the United States exceeded the value of China's imports was in 2002. Economic relations between the United States and China have severely deteriorated in recent years as Beijing has fought aggressively on trade and made ominous military gestures in the Far East. The Trump administration began imposing tariffs on Chinese imports in 2018, arguing that Beijing's trade practices
President Joe Biden on Tuesday acknowledged that a bill to provide security funding for Ukraine and for the US border with Mexico is stalled in Congress. The Democratic president blamed the situation on former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner and told Congress to show some spine and stand up to Trump. A bipartisan Senate deal intended to curb illegal crossings at the US border with Mexico faced almost certain defeat Tuesday as Senate Republicans signalled their opposition, stranding President Joe Biden with no clear way to advance aid for Ukraine through Congress. The Democratic president has urged lawmakers to embrace a bipartisan Senate deal that pairs border enforcement measures with USD 60 billion in wartime aid for Ukraine, as well as tens of billions of dollars more for Israel, other US allies in Asia, the US immigration system and humanitarian aid for civilians in Gaza and Ukraine.
A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed Border Patrol agents to cut razor wire that Texas installed on the US-Mexico border, while a lawsuit over the wire continues. The justices, by a 5-4 vote, granted an emergency appeal from the Biden administration, which has been in an escalating standoff at the border with Texas and had objected to an appellate ruling in favor of the state. The concertina wire along roughly 48 kilometers of the Rio Grande near the border city of Eagle Pass is part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's broader fight with the administration over immigration enforcement. Abbott also has authorised installing floating barriers in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass and allowed troopers to arrest and jail thousands of migrants on trespassing charges. The administration also is challenging those actions in federal court. A federal appeals court last month forced federal agents to stop cutting the concertina wire. Large numbers of migrants have crossed at Eagle Pass in recent ..
President Joe Biden on Thursday defended his administration's decision to waive 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow for construction of roughly 20 miles of additional border wall, saying he had no choice but to use the Trump-era funding for the barrier to stop illegal migration from Mexico. Asked if he thought such walls work, he said flatly, No. The new construction was announced in June, but the funds were appropriated in 2019 before the Democratic president took office. Biden said he tried to get lawmakers to redirect the money but Congress refused, and the law requires the funding to be used as approved and the construction to be completed in 2023. The money was appropriated for the border wall, Biden said. I can't stop that. Still, the waiving of federal laws for the construction something also done when Republican Donald Trump was president -- raised questions, particularly because Biden condemned border wall spending when he was running for the White House. One of Biden
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump traded barbs on Tuesday as the two leading Republican White House candidates staged duelling events in the critical early voting state of New Hampshire. Addressing a town hall in Hollis, DeSantis vowed to actually build the US-Mexico border wall that Trump tried but failed to complete in his first term while pledging to tear down Washington's traditional power centres in ways that Trump fell short. Speaking later at a Republican women's luncheon in the state capital of Concord, Trump countered that DeSantis was being forced to settle for second place in the primary and accused the governor of supporting cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs as a way to tame federal spending. Beyond the rhetoric, the conflicting events demonstrated each candidate's evolving strategy. DeSantis took extensive audience questions a trademark in New Hampshire politics that he eschewed during his previous visit to the .
Former President Donald Trump's longtime ally Steve Bannon surrendered on Thursday to face state money laundering and conspiracy charges in New York alleging he duped donors who gave money to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. Bannon is scheduled to be arraigned on Thursday afternoon. Prosecutors say that while Bannon promised donors all the money they gave would go to building the wall, he was involved in funnelling hundreds of thousands of dollars to two other people involved in the scheme. The indictment didn't identify those people by name, but the details match those of Brian Kolfage and Andrew Badolato, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in April. Bannon's state-level charges in New York stem from the same alleged conduct as an attempted federal prosecution that ended abruptly, before trial, when Trump pardoned Bannon on his last day in office. Manhattan prosecutors also charged WeBuildTheWall, Inc., a nonprofit entity that Bannon and others allegedly used to solicit .