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DHS budget reflects a shift in U.S. immigration policy, border enforcement

WASHINGTON – President Joe Bidens immigration policy changes took shape Friday in a budget request that would eliminate border-wall funding, boost spending on care for unaccompanied migrant children to $3.3 billion and overhaul the way asylum seekers are handled at the Mexico border by dramatically increasing staffing to process their claims.

The budget would also increase internal oversight of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, set up a $30 million fund to assist migrant families separated during the Trump administration and more than double the resources available for a major increase in refugee admissions.

Lawmakers from both parties have expressed concern that Biden’s $52 billion request for the Department of Homeland Security leaves overall funding flat, despite a migration influx this spring that has sent border crossings to their highest levels in 20 years.

The administration also faced criticism from immigrant advocates Friday who expressed disappointment that Biden’s budget continues to fund tens of thousands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds, while maintaining a controversial program that deputizes state and local police to detain immigrants for deportation.

In a statement, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the president’s budget “will invest in our broad mission set, including preventing terrorism; keeping our borders secure; repairing our broken immigration system; improving cybersecurity; safeguarding critical infrastructure; and strengthening national preparedness and resilience.”

“The Budget will provide DHS with the resources we need to keep our country safe, strong, and prosperous,” Mayorkas said.

Under Biden, immigration arrests and deportations have dropped to their lowest levels on record. But advocates for immigrants, who have praised Biden’s other moves on immigration, said they were concerned about the budget for ICE.

“President Biden’s proposed DHS budget today includes positive measures to increase accountability and oversight but fails to make a sharp enough break from the Trump administration’s wasteful and harmful spending on the detention and deportation machine,” said Naureen Shah, lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.

On the campaign trail, Biden said he would create a “fair and humane immigration system,” and he has revoked his predecessor’s controversial measures, such as the travel ban from countries with Muslim majorities, and limited immigration arrests to recent border crossers and people who pose a threat to national security and public safety.

But Mayorkas has said he is considering “significant changes” to the enforcement guidelines for ICE agents, and the proposed budget provides for robust enforcement: The budget projects that ICE would deport 167,420 immigrants in fiscal 2022, the same estimate as the prior year’s proposal, and would fund 32,500 detention beds, down from 34,000 the prior year.

A Biden administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail ongoing deliberations, said the president’s budget would reduce the total number of ICE beds and shift some of their use from detention to processing individuals for release into the community on “alternatives to detention,” such as case-management programs, so they can await a hearing in immigration court.

Mayorkas said at a budget hearing this week that he was “concerned about the overuse of detention” and was looking to expand alternatives.

The Biden administration also would add 100 new immigration judges, provide funding to reduce the backlog of 1.2 million cases in the immigration courts, and increase access to legal aid for children and families.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s proposed budget also would increase programs that deputize state and local law enforcement to assist ICE in enforcing immigration laws.

Biden had promised to “end the Trump administration’s historic use of 287(g) agreements,” named after the section of federal immigration law that authorizes them. Biden said on his campaign website that the programs “undermine trust and cooperation between local law enforcement and the communities they are charged to protect.” He promised to terminate all agreements the Trump administration signed and “aggressively limit” the use of these types of programs.

But ICE’s budget proposal said it expected the 287(g) program to “continue to increase in future years.”

“It’s a betrayal of the promises made on the campaign trail,” said Heidi Altman, director of policy for the National Immigrant Justice Center, an advocacy organization. “It’s a real lack of political courage.”

DHS signaled later Friday that part of the 287(g) language in the proposed budget is inaccurate and would change.

“This language does not reflect Administration policy and we are working to correct it,” DHS spokeswoman Marsha Espinosa said in a statement. “ICE still maintains authority over 287g, and we continue to exercise strict oversight and evaluate each of these agreements.”

The biggest change in Biden’s DHS budget is the elimination of $1.5 billion in border-wall funding. Biden has pledged not to add “another foot” to the former president’s signature project, and his administration’s decision to suspend construction activity has left a significant portion of last year’s appropriation unused.

Biden’s CBP budget would invest $660 million in new facilities for CBP’s Office of Field Operation, part of a plan that the administration says will modernize U.S. ports of entry and improve processing for legal trade and travel. Another new program would spend $2.1 million “to fund on-site clinicians to support employee resiliency and suicide prevention” at CBP.

Biden’s proposed budget would fortify U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes immigrants’ applications for citizenship, green cards and other legal benefits. His budget request would add more than 1,300 positions and $345 million to reduce backlogs, and process up to 125,000 refugee admissions next year.

The 2022 request also boosts DHS’s cybersecurity defense funding to $2.1 billion, a 5% increase, and provides $131 million to counter domestic terrorism and violent extremism, which the administration has identified as the most urgent lethal threat to the American public.

Published : May 29, 2021

By : The Washington Post · Nick Miroff, Maria Sacchetti

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Putin shows his support for Lukashenko as West moves to isolate Belarus

MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin offered a sweeping display of support Friday for his embattled ally in Belarus, as the West looked to further isolate Alexander Lukashenkos regime over its interception of a jetliner to arrest an opposition journalist.

Ameeting in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi served as a reminder of Russia’s role as a political and economic lifeline for Lukashenko, who has held power since 1994 but faced a wave of protests last year after an election that opposition groups and Western officials decried as rigged.

His pariah status deepened after Belarus claimed it had received a bomb threat for a Ryanair plane and scrambled a fighter jet to divert the flight – bound from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania – to the airport in Minsk. Prominent dissident Roman Protasevich, who had been living in exile, was arrested upon landing and now faces a 15-year prison sentence in Belarus.

In Sochi, Putin made no immediate comments on possible steps to strengthen Russia’s commitments to Belarus. But the cozy body language and banter – even joking about swimming in the Black Sea – conveyed a message that Russia was fully behind Lukashenko.

“Thank you for coming to this meeting. We agreed on this even before the next round of . . . ” Putin said as he turned to Lukashenko, who jumped in to finish the sentence: “A surge of emotions.”

“Yes, a surge of emotions,” Putin agreed.

“We have things to talk about even without these events,” added Putin, who also made note of the forced landing in Austria of a plane carrying Bolivia’s President Evo Morales in 2013 – part of the hunt for fugitive U.S. secret-spiller Edward Snowden.

“There was nothing, just silence,” Putin said of the response.

Lukashenko, making a dig at his Western critics, said he had brought “documents” to brief Putin.

“I will show you so that you understand what is happening, so that you understand what kind of people these are,” Lukashenko said.

Belarus said there was an in-flight bomb threat against the Ryanair flight, but an email cited by Belarusian authorities containing the alleged threat was sent after the plane was diverted, Swiss email provider ProtonMail said Thursday, further challenging the Belarusian regime’s version of events.

Russia’s backing for Belarus also became clear when two European airlines, Air France and Austrian Airlines, said they had to cancel flights to Moscow on Thursday because Russian aviation authorities did not approve new flight paths that avoided Belarus’s airspace. EU leaders on Monday had barred the bloc’s airlines from flying over Belarus.

Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote on Twitter that the Kremlin’s tolerance of Lukashenko “hurts Russian interests.”

“The longer it lasts, the more bad surprises it breeds,” he said.

Moscow and Minsk have drawn closer to each other as both countries’ relations with the West have grown increasingly adversarial. Putin is a known opponent of regime change and prefers the stability of a long-serving ruler in a country that has so far served as an allied buffer between Russia and the West. Belarus geographically separates Russia from the NATO states of Poland and Lithuania.

“The message to Putin is that there will be no more anti-Western Belarusian leader, which means that we must hold on to this,” Artyom Shraibman, a Minsk-based analyst, wrote in a commentary. “Any change of power in Minsk in such a situation is a drift towards the Belarusian rapprochement with Europe.”

Yet Lukashenko has occasionally irritated the Kremlin by resisting plans to implement a more than two-decade-old unification plan for the two countries and by cozying up to Europe when he saw it benefiting his rule.

When the two countries were unable to agree on a new price for the oil Russia sells to Belarus in December 2019, Moscow cut the supply. A few months later, Belarus ordered its first shipment of U.S. oil in an attempt to show Russia that it would be willing to turn to its rivals, if necessary.

But Lukashenko no longer has the leverage to play the East against the West. Much of the international community considers his regime illegitimate after last August’s election – in which he claimed a resounding victory – was widely denounced as rigged.

As mass anti-government protests broke out in the aftermath, Lukashenko turned to Putin for help. Putin backed him then, too, promising to dispatch a military contingent to aid Belarusian authorities, if necessary.

All 27 EU leaders agreed Monday to toughen sanctions on Lukashenko’s government. On Friday, the White House announced that Washington will reimpose full sanctions against nine Belrusian state-owned enterprises. Biden administration officials are also coordinating with allies in the European Union and elsewhere to develop “a list of targeted sanctions against key members” of Lukashenko’s regime, Press secretary Jen Psaki said.

E.U. foreign ministers suggested during informal talks Thursday in Lisbon that coming sanctions could target Belarus’s exports of oil products and potash, a primary cash-earner for the Lukashenko government. State-owned giant Belaruskali says it produces about 20 percent of the world’s supply of the potassium-rich salt used in fertilizers.

If Lukashenko does not make concessions, “one must assume that this will be just the beginning of a large and long spiral of sanctions,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told reporters.

The Kremlin has said that could also harm the Russian economy.

“Clearly, considering the direct and indirect assistance we have been providing to our Belarusian partners on a permanent basis, of course, the certain unfavorable atmosphere around Belarus is complicating things,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday.

Published : May 29, 2021

By : The Washington Post · Mary Ilyushina, Isabelle Khurshudyan

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New Covid-19 cases and death toll continue to surge in Asean

Southeast Asia on Friday reported its highest number of new Covid-19 cases and deaths in over two weeks.

There were 27,656 new cases, higher than Thursday’s 24,952, while 479 people died, higher than the previous day’s 457.

The number of Covid-19 cases in Asean crossed 3.94 million, while total deaths rose to 77,669.

Malaysia reported a new high of infections for the fourth consecutive day with 8,290 new cases and 61 deaths on Friday, taking cumulative cases in the country to 549,514 and the death toll to 2,552.

The Malaysian government decided to announce a total lockdown countrywide from June 1-14 after new cases per day crossed 8,000. Over 72,000 patients are still hospitalised.

Cambodia reported 599 new cases and two nore deaths on Friday, taking cumulative cases in the country to 28,237 and the death toll to 196. So far, 20,900 people have been cured and discharged. Cambodia’s Ministry of Tourism on Friday announced the country’s readiness to welcome foreign tourists who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 to travel within the country.

Published : May 29, 2021

By : THE NATION