Wednesday, May 19, 2021
The Biden administration and the Mexican government have made the situation at the border so confusing that even seasoned experts can’t always determine who is allowed in and who isn’t. That may be contributing to the high number of border crossings.
No matter how hard he tried, Jonatan Garcia said, he couldn’t find steady work in Guatemala. He dabbled in construction, and on some days picked beans, after losing his sales job at a TV station a few weeks after the pandemic shuttered businesses and further stifled employment in his country.
Desperation quickly mounted for Garcia. He struggled to make enough money to provide food for his wife and two small children, and they faced eviction from the three-room house they rented in the mostly indigenous and impoverished rural state of Baja Verapaz.
Then, Garcia said, smugglers falsely told him that President Joe Biden had signaled during a television appearance that migrants would be allowed to enter the United States. The new administration has been trying to combat such misinformation as it seeks to rein in the influx of migrants at the southern border of the U.S.
Garcia borrowed nearly $7,000 from a friend and, aided by a smuggler, traveled to Texas with his 6-year-old son. He left behind his wife and baby while he searched for stable employment.
Garcia and his son were among a record-setting number of migrants who were detained while attempting to enter the country at the U.S.-Mexico border in March and April under confounding policies that have turned the immigration process into a game of roulette. While not rising as rapidly as they had in the months immediately previous, border detentions reached a 21-year high after increasing again in April, according to federal statistics released this week.
Because of a lack of uniform policies and uneven enforcement of some laws in the U.S. and Mexico, migrants can be granted or denied entrance into the country based on a variety of factors, including where they cross and the age of their children. Smugglers have exploited the confusion to manipulate vulnerable migrants into making the journey north, adding to the sustained influx at the border, experts said.
Migrants were taken into custody by U.S. Customs and Border Protection a total of 178,622 times in April. The data includes migrants who have previously crossed. Nearly 67,000 individuals, mostly those crossing with their families and unaccompanied children, were allowed to stay in the U.S. while they seek protection from deportation. The remainder, largely single adults, were summarily turned away under a health order instituted by former President Donald Trump and continued under Biden that denies entrance to the country during the coronavirus pandemic.
In his first presidential address to Congress last month, Biden said the U.S. must contend with the root causes of migration that force people to flee their countries, including persistent violence, poor economic conditions aggravated by the pandemic and two hurricanes that pummeled Central America last year.
An online lending platform called Kabbage sent 378 pandemic loans worth $7 million to fake companies (mostly farms) with names like “Deely Nuts” and “Beefy King.”
The shoreline communities of Ocean County, New Jersey, are a summertime getaway for throngs of urbanites, lined with vacation homes and ice cream parlors. Not exactly pastoral — which is odd, considering dozens of Paycheck Protection Program loans to supposed farms that flowed into the beach towns last year.
As the first round of the federal government’s relief program for small businesses wound down last summer, “Ritter Wheat Club” and “Deely Nuts,” ostensibly a wheat farm and a tree nut farm, each got $20,833, the maximum amount available for sole proprietorships. “Tomato Cramber,” up the coast in Brielle, got $12,739, while “Seaweed Bleiman” in Manahawkin got $19,957.
None of these entities exist in New Jersey’s business records, and the owners of the homes at which they are purportedly located expressed surprise when contacted by ProPublica. One entity categorized as a cattle ranch, “Beefy King,” was registered in PPP records to the home address of Joe Mancini, the mayor of Long Beach Township.
“There’s no farming here: We’re a sandbar, for Christ’s sake,” said Mancini, reached by telephone. Mancini said that he had no cows at his home, just three dogs.
All of these loans to nonexistent businesses came through Kabbage, an online lending platform that processed nearly 300,000 PPP loans before the first round of funds ran out in August 2020, second only to Bank of America. In total, ProPublica found 378 small loans totaling $7 million to fake business entities, all of which were structured as single-person operations and received close to the largest loan for which such micro-businesses were eligible. The overwhelming majority of them are categorized as farms, even in the unlikeliest of locales, from potato fields in Palm Beach to orange groves in Minnesota.
The Kabbage pattern is only one slice of a sprawling fraud problem that has suffused the Paycheck Protection Program from its creation in March 2020 as an attempt to keep small businesses on life support while they were forced to shut down. With speed as its strongest imperative, the effort run by the federal Small Business Administration initially lacked even the most basic safeguards to prevent opportunists from submitting fabricated documentation, government watchdogs have said.
Tuesday, May 18, 2021
Area organizations that help low-income families access the internet are now able to apply for free Wi-Fi.
During this year, Comcast is selecting nonprofits to benefit from its Lift Zones program, which will supply free internet access for the next three years. Boys & Girls Clubs of Tucson and the Pascua Yaqui Clubhouse were recent recipients of the service.
“Equipping our Pascua Yaqui Clubhouse with a Lift Zone has made a huge difference in the lives of the students we serve,” said Adam Ortiz, Clubhouse Director. “While some of our students have an internet connection at home, staying at home during the summer days often isn’t possible. The clubhouse is a safe space where students can come to connect to the internet, and with each other.”
Comcast is currently accepting nominations for potential Lift Zone sites across Southern Arizona. Community partners can visit arizona.comcast.com/lift-zones to learn more and nominate their organization.
“Access to the Internet is a critical component of digital equity, and we’re proud to partner with key community organizations in making that possible through our Lift Zones,” said Chris Dunkeson, Area Vice President, Comcast. “There is no single answer to address the digital divide, but we’re working hard to bridge the gap for as many students and families in our Southern Arizona service footprint as possible.”
In newly disclosed records, Trump officials cited conspiracies about Antifa to justify interrogating immigration lawyers with a special terrorism unit. The documents also show that more lawyers were targeted than previously known.
Taylor Levy couldn’t understand why she’d been held for hours by Customs and Border Protection officials when crossing back into El Paso, Texas, after getting dinner with friends in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in January 2019. And she didn’t know why she was being questioned by an agent who’d introduced himself as a counterterrorism specialist.
Levy was part of the legal team representing the father of a girl who’d died the previous month in the custody of the Border Patrol, which is part of CBP. “There was so much hate for immigration lawyers at that time,” she recalled. “I thought that somebody had put in an anonymous tip that I was a terrorist.”
The truth was more troubling. Newly released records show that Levy was swept up as part of a broader than previously known push by the administration of President Donald Trump to use the federal government’s expansive powers at the border to stop and question journalists, lawyers and activists.
The records reveal that Levy and attorney Héctor Ruiz were interrogated by members of CBP’s secretive Tactical Terrorism Response Team. The lawyers were suspected of “providing assistance” to the migrant caravan that was then the focus of significant attention by the administration and right-wing media. Officials speculated in later reports that immigration lawyers were seeking to profit by moving migrants through Mexico, and that “Antifa” may have been involved.
The records were provided to ProPublica by the Santa Fe Dreamers Project, a public interest law firm and advocacy group that received them after filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit about the stops of Levy and Ruiz at the border in El Paso.
WASHINGTON — They don't have the high profiles or long tenure of other members of Congress, but Arizona lawmakers in the last Congress ranked relatively high on a recent scorecard of congressional effectiveness.
The Center for Effective Lawmaking study, by researchers at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, ranked members on the amount of substantive legislation they introduced and how far it moved toward passage in the 116th Congress.
A compilation of those scores showed Arizona had the 10th-most effective House delegation and 14th-most effective senators. The report’s authors said an unusual number of freshmen and minority party members scored well, showing that “even in these politically challenging times, bipartisanship is still working and … viable.”
“Compared to previous congresses, we have a notably larger number of freshman legislators who are essentially punching above their weight class, they score above expectation,” said Alan Wiseman, a Vanderbilt professor and co-author of the study.
But in Arizona, seniority did appear to come into play: The highest-ranking House member was Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Tucson, who is both the longest-tenured member of the delegation and who is now in his second term as chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. He finished 14th among House Democrats and 16th overall in the chamber.
He was one of three Arizona Democrats to finish in the top 10% of House members, along with Reps. Tom O’Halleran of Sedona, who ranked 31st, and Ruben Gallego of Phoenix, who came in at 33rd.
Republicans, as a group, had a lower combined score than Democrats and Arizona was no different. Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Peoria, was the state’s highest-ranking Republican, in 147th place overall and 26th among GOP members.
Still, Lesko, who just started her second full term in Congress, said she was surprised to be ranked so high, especially given the pace of Washington compared with her experience as a state legislator.
