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Five Mexican citizens apprehended this week after illegally entering the United States in remote northern Maine were returned to Canada within hours under a rule put into place as part of the U.S. government response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A similar policy by the Canadian government allows the return to the United States of most people seeking asylum in Canada.

While the restrictions haven't ended illegal immigration into the United States from Canada, the emergency policy has all but ended the use of Roxham Road in Champlain, New York one of the most well-known routes used by people fleeing the U.S. to seek asylum in Canada.

For more than three years, Janet McFetridge, a humanitarian activist from Champlain, helped the northbound asylum seekers.

It makes me wonder where they are and whether they are safe, she said of their absence.

Prior to COVID-19, depending on the circumstances of the individual border crosser, the five people apprehended in Maine on May 12 could have been charged with a federal crime in the United States or quickly processed for deportation to their home country.

President Donald Trump closed the borders with Mexico and Canada to all-but-essential traffic in March. For those entering illegally or seeking asylum, the administration has suspended immigration laws on public health grounds, giving border officials authority to rapidly expel them.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's order allowing rapid expulsions along the Mexican and Canadian borders is set to expire May 21, but administration officials have said it could be extended.

The vast majority of the expulsions have been on the southern border. CBP statistics show that between the time the rule was implemented and the end of April, 20,860 people were returned to Mexico. On the northern border, there were 27.

One of the first instances of returning northern border crossers came on March 21, the day the policy was implemented, when Border Patrol agents in Richford, Vermont, apprehended six individuals who had just illegally entered the U.S. from Canada. They were returned to Canada the same day.

Justin Mohammed of Amnesty International Canada, which is party to a pending Canadian lawsuit challenging the safe third country agreement that allows the northbound migrants to seek asylum in Canada, said his organization was extremely concerned by the Trump administration's summary expulsion of migrants back to Canada, including people who could possibly seek refugee protection.

The terms of the arrangement between Canada and the U.S. have never been publicly disclosed, and thus it is unclear how Canada is ensuring that it will not be complicit in any violations committed by American authorities, he said Friday in an emailed statement.

But Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for tight restrictions on immigration, said Friday the immigration crackdown is having the desired effect of reducing illegal immigration.

Its pretty clear the main reason for this is the policies, Vaughn said. They are not going to get away with making asylum claims, they are not going to be able to game the system.

Since around the time Trump took office, tens of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. who despaired of finding a permanent safe haven began crossing illegally into Canada to seek asylum. Many of those asylum seekers used Roxham Road, a back road in Champlain that ends at the Canadian border.

There, they would cross the border and be arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but were allowed to file an asylum claim. In most cases, they were released while their applications were pending.

After the pandemic hit, the Canadian government implemented its own border restrictions that allows it to return most asylum seekers to the United States. The current order is now scheduled to expire June 30.

In an email response to questions, the Canada Border Services Agency said that between March 21 and May 13, 26 asylum seekers were returned to the U.S., including 21 irregular border crossers 14 in Quebec and nine in British Columbia. The other three asylum seekers presented at a port of entry in southern Ontario and were sent back to the U.S.

Two other asylum seekers were allowed to enter Canada under exceptions to the rule that include being an unaccompanied minor or a U.S. citizen seeking to make an asylum claim in Canada.

In the Maine case, Customs and Border Protection says the immigrants were apprehended May 12 near the St. Juste Port of Entry in Maine's Big 10 Township, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) southeast of Quebec City.

They were spotted by a local resident emerging from brush near the border. The local then gave the five people a ride to the nearby border crossing, where they were taken into custody by the Border Patrol.

Later that same day they were returned to Canada at the Armstrong, Quebec, port of entry.

More:
Virus rules tighten illegal immigration on northern border - ABC News

Identifying illegal aliens in Census Bureau data is a challenging task. Researchers must gather the limited amount of outside information they have about the illegal population, then make educated guesses about the legal status of non-citizens in the data. Given all the uncertainty, it's important to assess the face validity of the results in other words, are they plausible?

That's where a new Cato Institute analysis went wrong. Intending to demonstrate the importance of immigrants to the healthcare system, Alex Nowrasteh and Michelangelo Landgrave reported that over 42,000 physicians in the United States are illegal aliens.

Take a moment to consider the implausibility of that number. The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) estimates 7,427,035 illegal immigrants in the labor force, based on the same 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) data that Cato used. If Cato's illegal-physician count is correct, then about 0.6 percent of all illegal workers are doctors. But only 0.5 percent of natives in the labor force are doctors 653,865 native-born doctors out of 135,783,619 workers. In other words, illegal workers are supposedly more likely to be physicians than native workers!

Here is another way to look at it: The 2018 ACS shows a total 66,065 non-citizen physicians who arrived in the United States since 1980.1 This is around the earliest time that any current illegal alien could have arrived due to the IRCA amnesty.2 Nowrasteh and Landgrave would have us believe that nearly two-thirds of them are here illegally.3

Their illegal counts for some other healthcare occupations also constitute an implausibly high share of post-1980 non-citizens. In the table below, the first three columns are from Cato's Table 1, and the last two columns (in red) are our calculations from the same data. For example, 88 percent of all post-1980 non-citizen nurse-anesthetists are supposedly illegal, as are 71 percent of physician assistants.

Source: Columns 1, 2, and 3 from are Table 1 of "Immigrant Health Care Workersby Occupation and State", by the Cato Institute, which is based on the 2018 AmericanCommunity Survey. Columns 4 and 5 are our calculations from the same data.

In addition to obtaining an advanced education that is out of reach for most illegal aliens, doctors and other health care providers also need to be licensed, yet few states offer licenses to people who are not authorized to work in the country. Moreover, like doctors, many of these occupations (e.g. nurse-anesthetists, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants) typically require Drug Enforcement Agency registration so they can dispense drugs. In short, many of Cato's numbers do not just stretch credulity, they break it.4

The licensing requirement is the primary reason both Pew and the CMS, which produce the two leading demographic profiles of the illegal population, automatically count physicians as legal.5 CIS follows the same rule, and it is why we do not report an estimate for illegal doctors and other highly regulated medical professions in our analysis of occupations. This is not to say that the number of illegal alien doctors or other high-skilled medical practitioners is exactly zero. Surely there are some, but no probabilistic method will be able to count them reliably.

1 Cato includes in their numbers those employed, those unemployed, and those totally out of the labor force (neither working nor looking for work). The ACS reports occupations for those not working if they were employed in the prior five years. Though it impacts the numbers only slightly, the inclusion of those totally out of the labor force is surprising since these individuals are by definition not practicing medicine. Nonetheless, the post-1980 non-citizen figures we report follows Cato's definition of healthcare professional.

2 The Cato healthcare report links to another Cato report to explain how they determine legal status. That report states that they followed the method of another researcher, Christian Gunadi, and the Cato authors "identified an immigrant as lawfully present if he or she met any of the following criteria: the immigrant arrived after 1980." This must be a typo as "after" should read "before". Gunadi is certainly clear in his report that he considers anyone a legal immigrant if they arrived before 1980.

3 Cato did not adjust upward the number of illegal immigrants identified in the data. We know this because the number of legal and illegal immigrants they report separately add up to the total number immigrants in the ACS.

4 There are occupations, such as medical assistants, that typically require only modest training and no licensing, where significant numbers of illegal immigrants do work. So their numbers in that category are not unreasonable.

5 Robert Warren of the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) noted in an email on May 13, 2020, that the estimates developed by CMS employ "logical edits" to the ACS data that exclude doctors as possible illegal immigrants. The lack of logical edits in the healthcare field is presumably the main reason Cato came up with implausible numbers.

View post:
Are There Really 42000 Illegal Immigrant Doctors? - Immigration Blog

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the $125 million coronavirus disaster relief fund last month to support undocumented immigrants who were ineligible for federal stimulus checks and unemployment benefits due to their immigration status.

It's the first state funding effort directed at helping undocumented immigrants as the coronavirus pandemic causes financial hardships and spurs unemployment across the nation.

Applications will be accepted until June 30 or until funds run out.

Undocumented workers are essential, Newsom said

Undocumented workers are overrepresented in many of the sectors deemed essential and that are keeping the state afloat, including health care, agriculture and food, manufacturing and logistics and construction, Newsom said in his initial announcement.

About 10% of California's workforce is undocumented, he said. And though they paid over $2.5 billion in local and state taxes last year, they benefit from neither unemployment insurance nor the $2.2 trillion stimulus signed by President Trump.

Private donors to the $50 million philanthropy effort include the Emerson Collective, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, James Irvine Foundation, California Endowment and Blue Shield Foundation.

"I'm not here to suggest that $125 million is enough. But I am here to suggest it's a good start, and I'm very proud it's starting here in the state of California," he said.

The measure is likely to draw criticism from groups that oppose illegal immigration, who argue that it is unfair to offer financial support to immigrants who have broken the law.

While some argue that it is not the government's responsibility to support those undocumented when American citizens are hurting financially, immigration advocates say the disproportionate effect on undocumented workers is a wider problem.

CNN's Madeline Holcombe and Catherine Shoichet contributed to this report.

See the article here:
California is now offering support to undocumented immigrants, in the first relief fund of its kind - CNN

While California Gov. Gavin Newsom and many of his fellow Democrats continue to push for open borders, COVID-19 cases are increasing along our southern border, straining local medical facilities in Southern California and beyond.

The respected Wall Street Journal reported last week that hospitals in the border city of Chula Vista, Calif., are struggling to cope with a large number of COVID-19 patients, an influx they attribute to legal crossings from Tijuana, one of Mexicos cities hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Although the medical crisis along the border isnt attributed to illegal immigrants excuse me, undocumented workers you can understand how open borders would exacerbate the problem. In March, before the U.S. closed the border to non-essential travelers, more than 531,000 pedestrians and some 1.6 million vehicle passengers crossed the border into San Diego County at San Ysidro.

Scripps Health says it is near capacity for patients with COVID-19 at its Chula Vista hospital, the Wall Street Journal article continued. Sharp HealthCare, which owns Chula Vistas largest hospital, had to turn away ambulances during some busy days in April, the Journal added, describing Tijuana as a magnet for Mexican and foreign migrants seeking to enter the U.S Is it ever!

San Diego County has the third highest number of coronavirus cases in California, behind only populous Los Angeles and Riverside counties, the Journal continued. Chula Vista and nearby communities have the highest rate of infections per 100,000 people and the number has been rising The crisis south of San Diego illustrates a new threat: that Mexicos struggles to tackle the pandemic could spill over into the U.S. Apparently, however, it already has.

Meanwhile, Newsom and open borders advocates want to roll out the welcome mat for millions of illegal immigrants, and give them millions, or even billions, of taxpayer dollars worth of free benefits, including health care, not to mention sanctuary city policies that encourage more illegal immigration. President Trump has threatened to withhold federal aid from sanctuary cities and I think he should because those cities are openly violating our immigration laws.

States and cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland that welcome illegal immigrants should pay the price for doing so and not look to the federal government for multi-million or billion-dollar bailouts. Carlos Mora, founder of the Migrant Affairs Council in Baja California, Mexico, told the Journal that some migrants deported from the U.S. have tested positive for COVID-19. My guess is that some could mean hundreds, or even thousands of illegal immigrants.

In a joint statement issued in March by the Mexican and U.S. governments, both governments recognized the need for a dedicated joint effort to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus and address the economic effects resulting from reduced mobility (that is, tougher border controls) along our shared border. That sounds fine but Im pleased that construction is moving forward on Trumps big, beautiful border wall that Mexico was going to pay for. Remember that whopper?

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf visited Arizona last week to check on border wall construction. He found that 181 miles of walls ranging in height from 18 to 30 feet have been erected along our southern border since Trump took office in January, 2017, and 190 miles more are currently under construction. Thats good news for those of us who believe in secure borders and the Rule of Law.

Im glad the federal government is paying attention to our southern border during the coronavirus crisis because public safety is a top priority.

Guy W. Farmer is the Appeals senior political columnist.

Read the original post:
Guy Farmer: COVID-19 on the U.S.-Mexico border - Nevada Appeal

On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a notice in the Federal Register that will clear the way for the construction of barriers and roads from the Columbia Solidarity International Bridge southalong the Rio Grande to just north of San Ignacio, Texas. That approximately 69-mile stretch includes Laredo, Texas, as well as sections of the Southwest border just north of that city's downtown through Webb and Zapata Counties.

I would give you a list of the 25 laws (by my count) that are waived by that notice, but your eyes would likely glaze over. That said, under the authority in section 102(c) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) (as amended by various statutes, including the REAL ID Act of 2005 and the Secure Fence Act of 2006, both of which I worked on), Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf waived, among other provisions: the National Environmental Policy Act; the Endangered Species Act; the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (not to be confused with the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, which is also waived); the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act; the Federal Cave Resources Protection Act of 1988; the Noise Control Act; the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act; the Antiquities Act; the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act; the National Trails System Act; the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899; and the Eagle Protection Act.

I discussed the history of these waivers and the secretary's authority thereunder in congressional testimony in February 2018. Simply put, however, Congress has given DHS significant authority to waive federal statutes "to ensure that there is sufficient fencing and tactical infrastructure to support the Border Patrol in its mission."

And, as much as I dislike noise and enjoy migratory birds and in particular eagles that waiver was plainly needed. In my February 2020 post, "The View from Laredo: Not enough Border Patrol agents or infrastructure", I explained that:

The notice states:

In fiscal year 2019, the Border Patrol apprehended over 38,000 illegal aliens attempting to enter the United States between border crossings in the Laredo Sector. In that same time period, the Border Patrol had over 400 drug-related events between border crossings in the Laredo Sector, through which it seized over 36,000 pounds of marijuana, over 500 pounds of cocaine, over 28 pounds of heroin, and over 500 pounds of methamphetamine.

Given the overwhelming responsibilities those 1,800 Border Patrol employees must handle, and the limited infrastructure they have to assist them in that effort, I have a feeling that those "400 drug-related events" are just the tip of the iceberg.

I will also note that although the Wuhan coronavirus has many Americans sheltering in place, things have not gotten much quieter along that border. In FY 2020, Border Patrol has already made 21,000 apprehensions and seized 19,000 pounds of drugs in in Laredo Sector. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has noted:

The majority of its activity is occurring in areas where Laredo Sector lacks infrastructure, access and mobility, and technology. These projects will improve Laredo Sector's ability to impede and deny illegal border crossings and the drug and human smuggling activities of transnational criminal organizations.

The former sentence is unsurprising, and the latter is an understatement. Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico two fairly good-sized cities sit just hundreds of feet apart. Without infrastructure, Border Patrol's task is impossible. With it, it becomes merely herculean.

I trust that this waiver will be met with lawsuits and congressional bloviation, but in the end, those barriers and roads will likely be built, and South Texas, and the United States as a whole, will undoubtedly be safer for it.

One last point: CBP's website shows where there are existing barriers along the border (in black) and where the new border wall system is planned (in red). There is a lot more red than black, and if you zoom in on the heavily trafficked Laredo and Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Sectors (which combined accounted for 42 percent of the single adult apprehensions by Border Patrol along the Southwest border in FY 2019), there is not much black at all. In light of this, I expect that Friday's notice will be the first of many.

View original post here:
DHS Issues Waiver for Barrier and Road Construction Around Laredo - Immigration Blog