America

US Congress Certifies Joe Biden’s Victory

Published

3 months ago

January 7, 2021

US lawmakers have certified Joe Biden’s election victory, hours after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an attack that saw four people die.

“Today is a reminder, a painful one, that democracy is fragile. To preserve it requires people of good will, leaders with the courage to stand up, who are devoted not to pursuit of power and personal interest at any cost, but to the common good,” Biden said.

One woman was shot by police, while three others died as a result of “medical emergencies”, officials said.

The mob, which had been encouraged by President Trump, stormed the building in a bid to overturn the election result, suspending a Congress session.

The president-elect blasted the “insurrection”. President Donald Trump later called on them to “go home” while continuing to make false claims of electoral fraud. Twitter and Facebook later froze his accounts.

What happened at the Capitol?

Protesters surged up the Capitol steps at about 14:15 local time (19:15 GMT), shoving past barricades and officers in riot gear to penetrate the building.

The action was targeting the joint session of Congress being held to certify Mr Biden’s election victory on 3 November. The invasion sent members of Congress scrambling for cover under their seats as tear gas was fired.

The mob – some of whom wore body armour – used chemical irritants to attack police, according to Washington Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee.

They shouted and waved pro-Trump and US flags as they roamed the halls, demanding the results of the presidential election be overturned.

Several thousand National Guard troops, FBI agents and US Secret Service were deployed to help overwhelmed Capitol police.

Two pipe bombs were recovered, one from the Democratic National Committee offices, not far from the Capitol, and one from the nearby Republican National Committee headquarters.

The occupation of the Capitol lasted more than three hours before the building was secured by law enforcement. But there was little sign the protesters were heeding Mr Trump’s call to go home, despite a citywide curfew declared by the city mayor from 18:00 to 06:00.

So far, more than 52 people have been arrested – 47 of them for curfew violations.

There were also protests on Wednesday at state legislatures in Kansas, Georgia, Utah and on the other side of the country in Oregon and the north-western state of Washington.

America

Trump Acquitted For Second Time Following Historic Senate Impeachment trial

Published

2 months ago

February 14, 2021

CNN

The USA Senate acquitted former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial Saturday, voting that Trump was not guilty of inciting the deadly January 6 riot at the US Capitol — but the verdict amounted to a bipartisan rebuke of the former President with seven Republicans finding him guilty.The final vote was 57 guilty to 43 not guilty, short of the 67 guilty votes needed to convict.

Held exactly one month after the House impeached Trump, the number of Republican senators who voted against Trump ended up higher than even what Trump’s legal team had anticipated, marking a stark departure from the first impeachment trial last year when only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, found Trump guilty.

This time, Republicans Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowksi of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Romney voted to convict Trump.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was Burr, the former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman who led the Senate’s Russia investigation, after he voted earlier in the week that the trial was unconstitutional.

Both Burr and Toomey are retiring from the Senate at the end of 2022.

America

Obama Presidential Center Groundbreaking For August

Published

2 months ago

February 4, 2021

Staff Writer

On Wednesday, the US federal review process concluded and effectively paving the way for Obama Presidential Center that had stalled for four years.

“Today, after a comprehensive federal regulatory review process, I’m proud to announce the Obama Presidential Center will break ground in 2021,” Former US President Barak Obama said on Wednesday.

“Michelle and I couldn’t be more excited to bring this new center of energy, connection, and growth to the South Side of Chicago. Along with the thousands of jobs it will create, our hope is that the Obama Presidential Center can serve as a catalyst for long-overdue investment in and around historic Jackson Park. That’s why we’re working with local partners to create a new destination to help inspire visitors from hope to action, breathe new life into the park, and deliver real benefits to the community we love,” Obama added.

He explained that getting to this point would not have been possible without the many Chicagoans who have been a part of this process. “So I want to thank each and every person out there who helped us reach this milestone—and for their continued partnership in the years to come.”

Federal agencies closed the final review into the project after determining the Obama center’s construction and nearby roadway fixes would not pose a “significant impact” on the environment, according to city and Obama Foundation officials.

With other federal reviews looking into factors such as the project’s effects on historic properties also recently ending, that means preliminary work can start in April and groundbreaking can likely begin as early as August. The Obama Foundation estimates construction will take about four years.

In 2016, Obama announced that Jackson Park, sandwiched between Lake Michigan and Woodlawn, would be the destination of his future presidential center, at the time scheduled to open in 2021.

His choice was heralded by supporters who hoped the project would help revitalize neighboring communities and become a source of pride for South Side locals and visitors alike.

The groundbreaking of the $500 million campus will include a museum, Obama Foundation offices, a public library branch, an athletic center and an outdoor recreation space.

Its opening initially had been set for this year, but four years of obstacles have stood in the project’s way, at times leaving supporters with dashed hopes as groundbreaking repeatedly was delayed.

America

President Joe Biden Plans To Legalise 11Million Undocumented People

Published

2 months ago

January 27, 2021

Miriam Jordan NYT

Maria Elena Hernandez recently retrieved a flowery box tucked in her closet and dusted it off. For more than a decade, she has used it to store tax returns, lease agreements and other documents that she has collected to prove her family’s long years of residence in the United States.

“We have been waiting for the day when we can apply for legal status. In this box is, hopefully, all the evidence we’ll need,” said Ms. Hernandez, 55, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who arrived in this country with three small children in 2000.

She had just learned of President Biden’s plan to offer a pathway to U.S. citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented people, announced as part of a sweeping proposal to overhaul the nation’s immigration system.

The bill would allow undocumented immigrants who were in the United States before Jan. 1 to apply for temporary legal status after passing background checks and paying taxes. As newly minted “lawful prospective immigrants,” they would be authorized to work, join the military and travel without fear of deportation. After five years, they could apply for green cards.

The president’s proposal would be perhaps the most ambitious immigration redesign passed since 1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized three million people.

Converting more than three times that many people into full citizens could open the door to one of the most significant demographic shifts in modern U.S. history, lifting millions out of the shadows and potentially into higher-paying jobs, providing them with welfare benefits, health coverage and Social Security eligibility while eventually creating many new voters.

“This is the boldest immigration agenda any administration has put forward in generations,” said Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “But given that the Democrats have razor-thin majorities in Congress, the administration needs to have its expectations tempered.” Legalizing just one group at first — say, farmworkers — might be “more realistic,” he said.

In a sign of the hurdles ahead, another one of Mr. Biden’s early immigration initiatives, a 100-day freeze on deportations, was temporarily blocked by a federal judge on Tuesday after a lawsuit by the Texas attorney general, an advocate of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Immigration reform has stalled in Congress time and again, primarily over what is widely known as amnesty. Despite beefed-up border enforcement and employer sanctions, Mr. Reagan’s overhaul failed to curb the arrival of unauthorized immigrants.

While Congress has wrestled with how to revamp the immigration system, the immigrants have continued to live, work and raise families in the United States. More than 60 percent have resided in the country for more than a decade and they have more than four million U.S.-born children. They account for 5 percent of the work force, representing the backbone of the agriculture, construction and hospitality sectors.

Many came for economic reasons. Others were fleeing political upheaval and violence. And about four in 10 did not enter the United States through the southwestern border. Rather they are visa overstays — tourists, students or temporary skilled workers who never left.

The family of Denise Panaligan, 27, came to the United States from the Philippines in 2002 after her father, a financial analyst, obtained an H-1B visa. They remained after their temporary legal status ran out.

“When people look at us, they don’t think undocumented because we are Asians,” said Ms. Panaligan, a middle school teacher in Los Angeles. “Coming in contact with deportation officers and ICE, we never experienced that. We’re invisible to enforcement.”

But their decision led to other indignities, she said. Her mother had to work as a housekeeper despite having a college education. Denise’s father, Art, died two years ago of brain cancer without ever returning to his homeland to see his own parents because he would not have been allowed back into the United States.

“The Biden plan would fulfill our hope of keeping the family together,” said Ms. Panaligan, who has two younger sisters, one of them born in the United States.

The largest share of unauthorized immigrants is from Mexico. Having survived treacherous river and desert crossings to reach the United States, they found a nation willing to look past laws that prohibit hiring them, to employ them in fields and factories, and in homes as nannies and housekeepers.

Maribel Ramirez and Eusebio Gomez of Mexico have toiled in California’s vineyards since crossing the border 19 years ago. They have managed to buy a home and raise two American-born sons. Their oldest, Eusebio Jr., 17, plans to enlist in the Marines. But Ms. Ramirez said she asked herself, “Why should my son give his life to a country that doesn’t value his parents?”

Other experts argue there are benefits of legalization. Opening a pathway to citizenship for nearly 11 million people, seven to eight million of whom participate in the labor force, is tantamount to “an economic stimulus,” according to Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis.

Between 2005 and 2015, new immigrants accounted for nearly half of the growth in the working-age population, and in the next two decades, immigrants will be key to offsetting an aging population that is retiring. Demographers say the increased educational attainment of Americans coupled with a shortage of blue-collar workers highlights the need for immigrants, in ever larger numbers, to perform low-skilled jobs. About five million of them work in jobs designated as “essential” by the government.

Among the biggest backers of the Biden initiative are employers who rely on immigrants. Through the years, meatpacking plants, dairy farms and a multitude of other worksites have been caught up in immigration raids targeting unauthorized workers.

The Reagan-era amnesty in 1986 caused only a temporary drop in the number of undocumented immigrants because it was not accompanied by a robust system for legally bringing in low-skilled workers. Employers faced fines for knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants but were not responsible for vetting documents presented by job applicants, spawning a huge industry of fake Social Security numbers.

“The principle is simple: If you carry out a broad legalization, it doesn’t freeze undocumented migration flows as long as labor demand persists,” said Wayne Cornelius, director emeritus of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. “You need to increase the number of legal entry opportunities for future migrants.”

The illegal influx began to swell again in the early 1990s.

“Migrants arriving after 1986 would have vastly preferred coming legally, not having to pay hundreds of dollars to purchase false docs,” Mr. Cornelius said. “But not enough legal entry tickets were available.”

Economic imperatives prevailed, driving illegal immigration up year after year.

A building boom in Sun Belt states like Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona drew hundreds of thousands of undocumented construction workers. And as farm workers who had benefited from the amnesty aged and exited the fields, young undocumented labor arrived to replace them.

From 1986 to 2008 the country’s undocumented population swelled from three million to 12 million despite an exponential increase in funding for border security, including boots on the ground. The militarization did not reduce illegal entries. Instead, it turned a seasonal migration of mainly men who returned home each year to Mexico into a settled population of families.

The economic recession between 2007 and 2009 ultimately reduced the flow of immigrants. Despite successive waves of Central American migration, illegal entries remain substantially lower than in the early 2000s.

It has been about two decades since Ms. Hernandez stuffed a change of clothes in a bag, grabbed her three young children and closed the door on their lives in Jalisco, Mexico. Days later, they slipped across the border.

“We didn’t have papers, but I was determined to head north for a better life,” she said. “I had relatives who had benefited from a 1986 amnesty and I figured our day would come.”

Ms. Hernandez got a job in Los Angeles packing CDs. Her husband, Pedro Hernandez, joined them shortly after and found work at a nursery. Their children, Luis, then 7, and Elitania and Juan, then 4-year-old twins, thrived in school. They lived modestly, in apartments where the children slept in the bedrooms and the couple in the living room.

Their hopes were lifted, dashed and revived as Congress took up various immigration bills.

“Every president gave us hope that something good was coming, and then nothing. Again maybe. Then nothing,” Ms. Hernandez recalled.

Ms. Hernandez said she and her husband worked hard, paid their taxes and never got into debt.

“We tried to do everything right, according to the law, in a country that had not opened its doors to us, but that we had entered anyway,” she said.

Things got more challenging when Mr. Hernandez lost his job in 2006 His employer, concerned about government audits, had asked him to prove he was in the country legally.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began showing up in their neighborhood, the family avoided going out for days at a time. Mr. Hernandez rode his bike to a new job, figuring he would be less likely to encounter law enforcement than while driving his old Mazda. Ms. Hernandez signed up for adult English classes. As the children got older, she advised them to always be on their best behavior.

“I grew up hearing that you have to be an extra good citizen,” said Luis Hernandez, her oldest child, now 28. “Mom always said that: ‘People who have papers can make mistakes, but you can’t,’” he said.

Because of their undocumented status, Luis, who played club soccer, and Juan, a varsity football player, skipped games that required travel.

When Mr. Obama created a program known as DACA in 2012 to temporarily shield undocumented immigrants who had been brought into the country as children, Luis Hernandez and his siblings, then teenagers, applied immediately. It enabled them to work legally. They got their driver’s licenses.

But President Donald J. Trump’s incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric and his administration’s attempt to rescind DACA generated deep anxiety in the Hernandez household. When Mr. Biden took office, the family rejoiced.

After the inauguration, Ms. Hernandez was at her dining room table thinking about the imminent birth of her second grandchild, who will be an American citizen. She and her husband planned to drive to Utah to meet the baby, and she worried about making a trip across state lines without legal status, lest law enforcement stop them.

When she learned that the president had unveiled a blueprint for legalization, she said, she was stunned at first. Then she went to retrieve the box of documents.

NYTimes