The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-02)

A2 EZ M2 THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, MAY 2 , 2022

MISSISSIPPI

Festival canceled; one shooting suspect dead

A law enforcement officer shot and killed one of the people suspected of firing shots at a festival in Mississippi, a sheriff said late Saturday. Organizers said Sunday that, in response to the shootings, they canceled the final day of the Mississippi Mudbug Festival at the state fairgrounds in Jackson. Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones said several people were taken to hospitals with unknown injuries after gunfire Saturday night. He said the person killed was a teena ger. He said an “officer-involved shooting investigation is underway stemming from this incident” but did not provide additional details. He said the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation was called to assist. Jones said two or three people exchanged gunfire about 10 p.m.

Saturday in and around a vehicle at a f airgrounds parking lot. “During the course of the exchange, at least one of these individuals fired multiple rounds, multiple shots, toward the midway area of the event that was in progress,” Jones said. “We do not believe there was anybody else injured along the midway during the course of this gunfire.” The second annual festival shut down after the shootings. Saturday’s headliner was Blue Oyster Cult. A b and spokesman said everyone in the band was safe. The precise conditions of the wounded weren’t clear. Jones said two juveniles were detained for questioning, and authorities recovered a car, two rifles and a pistol from the scene. Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesperson Bailey Martin confirmed that MBI is investigating. She declined to name the agency for which the officer works. — Associated Press

NEW MEXICO

Wind-driven fires force evacuations

Thousands of residents of northern New Mexico villages evacuated Sunday as fierce winds drove the largest active U.S. wildfire toward their drought-parched valley. Winds gusting over 40 mph blew embers a mile ahead of the blaze to start new fires as bulldozers carved fire breaks to protect the villages of Ledoux, Mora and Cleveland around 40 miles northeast of Santa Fe. They are among farming communities and an Old West city in the path of the Calf Canyon fire, the most destructive of a dozen Southwest blazes that scientists say are more widespread and arriving earlier due to climate change. Firefighters were hampered by strong, erratic winds set to keep shifting direction until Thursda y. Burning since April 6, the fire has destroyed hundreds of

properties and forced the evacuation of dozens of settlements in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. — Reuters

Information sought on escaped Ala. inmate: The U.S. Marshals Service said Sunday that it is offering up to $10,000 for information about an escaped inmate and a “missing and endangered” correctional officer who disappeared Friday after the two le ft a j ail in northern Alabama. Casey Cole White, 38, had been jailed on a murder charge in Florence, about 75 miles west of Huntsville. The inmate and assistant director of corrections Vicky White, 56, left the detention center to go to a nearby courthouse, the sheriff’s office said in a Facebook post. Investigators said the two are not related. “Casey White is believed to be a serious threat to the corrections officer and the public,” the U.S. marshal for northern Alabama, Marty Keely, said in a statement. — From news services

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Border Protection is, rather than a full counting of people trying to cross. Most people apprehended at the border have been turned away, under the Title 42 public health code that Biden plans to end s oon: In the past six months, the government has apprehended, and then removed, people at the border some 549,000 times. l People who are apprehended and then processed by immigration authorities: These are people who cross the border, get processed by immigration of fi- cials and who are let go to various ends, like applying for asylum. Over the past six months, about 500,000 people were taken into custody but not immediately expelled. Some were deported, but most remain in the United States pending a court hearing. I t can take years for their asylum cases to resolve, and many people just end up staying in the country, under the radar. So, of the roughly 1 million or more apprehensions at the border in the past six months, about half have resulted in people being immediately kicked back out, and less than half have resulted in people being processed by immigr ation authorities. The second group includes people allowed to stay in the country and apply for asylum and other humanitarian statuses. All three numbers have reached historic highs, said Jessi- ca Bolter with the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, “but it’s not the case that everyone who comes to the border gets in .”

How high are border crossings historically? Here’s a v isual comparison of apprehensions at the border, go- ing back to the Obama administration. About half of those apprehended in the past six months were sent back to their home countr y. Slightly less than half were let in to apply for asylum or other humanitarian statuses.

How does Title 42 f actor into all of this? Title 42 is a public health order put in place by the Trump administration that allows the government to send migrants back to their home countries, rather than hold them in detention at the border and process them. Although it’s controversial, the Biden administration kept the poli cy for more than a year, to prevent the border from becoming unmanageable. It plans to

phase it out in May. But that move is now tangled up in legal wrangling: A group of Republican attorneys general sued to keep the policy in place, and a federal judge in Louisiana agreed to temporarily block the Biden administration from lifting it. Lifting this policy is likely to mean that migrants will think it’s easier to come to the border and apply for asylum. And border crossings will likely spike. “We expect migration levels to increase as smugglers seek to take advantage of and profit from vulnerable migrants,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Con- gress recently. “Once someone makes it across the border, if the y’re not expelled under Title 42, there is a pretty good chance they will be able to stay in the United States at least for several years,” said Bolter from the Migration Policy Institute, adding that this is truer for families traveling to- gether. The administration worries that this dynamic could send an influx of migrants to communities along the U.S.-M exico border that aren’t prepared to handle them. That could create humanitarian crises on the border — and major political problems for Bid en.

It’s putting pressure o n Biden on all sides Biden has struggled politically with the border since he took office. Attempted crossings rose when he became president, under the belief that he would be more lenient to migrants than Trump was. We’ve seen some troubling images arise from crowded border situations, like that of a White Border Patrol agent on horseback trying to catch Hai- tian men. Biden is facing political pressure from all sides on immigration policy. Republicans and some moderate, vulnerable Dem- ocrats on the ballot in November say Biden shouldn’t lift Title 42 because it will create chaos at the border. Republicans point to the high number of apprehensions as evi- dence that the Biden administration being in over its head. “The border crisis is raging un- checked,” the Republican Na- tional Committee recently said. The GOP is also trying to connect these numbers to the fentanyl drug crisis in America, since the illegal, synthetic version of the

BY AMBER PHILLIPS

Crossings and attempted crossings of the U.S.-M exico border are at record levels, and climbin g. It’s becoming a c ampaign issue, as Republicans accuse Presi- dent Biden of being too lenient at the border, and liberal Demo- crats accuse Biden of being too tough. Many observers also wor- ry that crowded border conditions are fast becoming a h uman- itarian problem. Here’s what’s happening at the border and how it could affect Democrats’ chances to stay in power in November ’s midterm elections.

Why have they risen? A variety of reasons. There’s a huge labor demand in the United States right now, and the Mexi- can economy in particular is lagging. (Most of the people trying to cross are Mexicans, but there is a significant flow of people from other countries acro ss the region, like Cubans and Colombians.) The pandemic has exacerb ated the struggles of local economies and uprooted many people from their communities. And there’s a g eneral sense, fairly or not, that it’s easier to cross now than ever because Biden is president, compared with Donald Trump, who was known globally for his anti- immigr ation rhetoric and policies. About 15,000 Ukrainians es- caping war have come to Mexico to be allowed across the border. They were largely welcomed and given one-year humanitarian pa- role in the United States, reports The Washington Post’s Kevin Si- eff. (The administration has started denying them access at the southern border as they roll out a p rogram to allow Ukraini- ans into the country by other means.) But Ukrainians are still only a small fraction of the people trying to cross the border.

How many people are crossing the border? To understand the politics of the border requires understand- ing the numbers coming from it. There are many ways to break down the data. Here are three big ones. l People who cross illegally and are never caught: The na- ture of this stat is that it’s difficult to track. But there are cameras stationed on remote outposts along the border, and Post immigr ation reporter Nick Miroff says that border officials have acknowledged that any- where from 1,000 to 2,000 of these border crossings a d ay are detected but not intercepted. l People who are apprehended: T his is the number you’ll hear about the most, because it’s what the government measures most consistently. “Apprehen- sions” measures how many times the government encounters someone at the border who do esn’t have legal authorization to enter the country. This is a gauge of how busy U.S. Cu stoms

drug can be smuggled from Mex- ico. Biden ’s defenders counter that the high number of apprehensions show that border security is strong — and that Republicans can’t claim Biden has an open- border policy while also urging Biden to continue keeping a Trump-era restriction. Liberal activists, meanwhile, are criticizing the Biden admin- istr ation as being no be tter than Trump’s: “I t’s an abomination that the Biden administration did not lift Title 42 a long time ago,” former Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro told The Post’s Annie Linskey and Miroff in March. This is all resonating beyond border states. As Linskey and Miroff report, more than a third of voters in Wisconsin, which has some very competitive congres- sional races this November, said in a recent poll they were “very concerned” over illegal immigration. As Republicans try to recap- ture the House of Representa- tives in November ’s midterm elections, House Minority Lead- er Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) traveled to the border in April and claimed that Biden isn’t doing enough to stop the flow of migrants into the country. “This crisis is cre ated by the presiden- tial policies of this new administration,” he said.

How Biden has changed Trump’s policies Other than keeping Title 42 in place, Biden has softened Trump’s immigration policies qu ite a b it. His administration has cut way back on deporting people who are already in the country illegally. Arrests last year fell to their lowest levels since at least 2015. He ditched Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which re- quired many migrants to stay in Mexico while they wait for deci- sions on their asylum claims. A federal judge later forced the administration to reinstate it. In April the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case, Biden v. Texas, about whether the president can end the program. And this spring, the Biden administration will make a big change in how it processes asylum cases. It will allow asylum officers at the border to grant asylum there, rather than pass the case onto judges in a bogged- down court system. It also would send people who don’t get asylum at the border to immigr ation courts, which usu- ally take months to wrap up a case. (Right now, it takes years.) Immigration analysts say this could help tamp down on the notion that coming to the border and asking for asylum is an easy way to get into the country. But soon Biden will be without his main tool to suppress border crossings, just months before an election where his party could lose control of one or both cham- bers of Congress, and where Republicans are making immigration a bigger and bigger issue. “Both the Trump and Biden administration became really ad- dicted to Title 42,” said immigration analyst Cris Ramón, “because all of a sudden you had this rapid instrument to remove migrants from the border.”

ANALYSIS

Border crossings have become a midterm issue

Partisan interpretation o f policy is a hot-button campaign choice

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The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-02)

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