• DHS

    The House, by a one-vote margin, on Tuesday voted to impeach DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. In a 214-to-213 vote mostly along party lines, the House impeached Mayorkas for willfully refusing to enforce border laws and breaching the public trust. Mayorkas is the first sitting cabinet secretary in U.S. history to be impeached.

  • IMMIGRATION
    Diana Roy

    Record numbers of migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border are challenging the Joe Biden administration’s attempts to restore asylum protections. Here’s how the asylum process works.

  • MIGRANTS & TERRORISM
    Alex Nowrasteh

    The headlines are attention-grabbing, but reality is more mundane: Most people on the terror watchlist are not terrorists. The terror watchlist contains known terrorists, but also people who engaged in conduct related to terrorism, such as fund raising. Individuals on the watchlist who crossed the border illegally have never committed an attack domestically, let alone killed or injured anyone in such an attack. We should be concerned about people on the terrorist watchlist, but we should not immediately assume that they are terrorists planning a domestic attack.

  • BORDER SECURITY
    Bethany Blankley, <em>The Center Square</em>

    The Texas legislature has allocated more than $11.6 billion to border security efforts over a four-year period, the most in state history. It totals more than multiple state fiscal year budgets and more than what the Trump administration allocated to federal border security efforts in Texas.

  • MIGRATION
    Dora Mekouar

    Each day, about 10,000 people born between 1946 and 1964 leave the U.S. workforce, a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic when older workers decided to retire early rather than risk getting sick. The problem is that for every one person leaving, there’s only one person coming into the labor force, and if the labor force is not growing, economic growth is slowed down, or worse.

  • MIGRATION
    Astrid Prange de Oliveira

    Migration partnerships can’t halt large movements of refugees, but they can help countries to better manage migration. Germany has signed a number of partnerships into effect in recent years.

  • EXTREMISM
    Uriel J. García and William Melhado

    A Tennessee man arrested Monday hoped to travel to the southern border with a militia group that allegedly plotted to go “to war with the border patrol,” believing that the country was being invaded by migrants.

  • EXTREMISM
    Ben Knight

    Germany is considering banning Austria’s far-right extremist Martin Sellner from entering the country. Such a move is not unprecedented, but the legal hurdles in the EU are high.

  • IMMIGRATION
    Ariana Figueroa

    Nine Democratic governors sent a letter to President Joe Biden and congressional leaders, requesting federal aid and urging changes to immigration law as their states take in an overwhelming number of asylum-seekers. The governors asked that Congress grant Biden’s request to include in a supplemental funding bill $4.4 billion for a federal migration strategy and $1.4 billion in aid to states and local governments dealing with an influx of migrants.

  • IMMIGRATION
    David J. Bier

    Migrants aren’t the problem and the country is not “overwhelmed.” Nativist politicians and impossible barriers to legal entry caused (and maintain) the chaos. In other words, immigration restrictionists create the problems and then demand ever more restrictions to fix them.

  • BORDER SECURITY
    William Melhado

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ordered Texas to allow federal border agents access to the state’s border with Mexico, where Texas officials have deployed miles of concertina wire. The high court’s order effectively maintains long-running precedent that the federal government — not individual states — has authority to enforce border security.

  • BORDER SECURITY
    Uriel J. García

    A park on the Rio Grande is the new focus of a long battle over border enforcement that’s reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Under federal law, the federal government has sole authority to enforce immigration laws — a power that’s been affirmed by Supreme Court decisions, but Gov. Greg Abbott, in the past three years, has convinced state lawmakers to spend more than $10 billion in an attempt to deter hundreds of thousands of migrants who have crossed the Rio Grande into Texas, many of whom are seeking asylum.

  • MIGRATION
    Will Freeman

    It’s undeniable that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, irregular migration—primarily from crisis-stricken countries in Latin America and the Caribbean—has reached unprecedented, unmanageable proportions. But it should be recognized that tight restrictions on asylum and parole will drive migration further underground, where criminal groups profit.

  • MIGRATION
    Jennifer Holleis

    Morocco intensifies its gatekeeper role in EU migration, stopping 87,000 migrants in 2023. Key to the deal is European acceptance of Morocco’s claim to disputed Western Sahara.

  • MIGRANTS
    Tim Henderson

    As congressional leaders wrestle with potential solutions as part of a larger spending agreement, a former top national immigration official offered a proposal: Fund basic help for migrants at the border and in destination cities, send them where they’re wanted and can get jobs, and make quick decisions on asylum to discourage mass entry.

     

  • BORDER SECURITY
    Sneha Dey

    Texas officers took control over Shelby Park against the city’s wishes on Wednesday and have since blocked U.S. Border Patrol agents from entering.

  • IMMIGRATION
    Jean Lantz Reisz

    There is bipartisan agreement for the need for immigration reform and stark disagreement on what that reform should be. Conservative Republicans in Congress are now proposing legal changes that would make it harder for most applicants to get asylum. The Republicans’ plan is similar to both a similar rule that the Department of Homeland Security adopted in 2019 and a policy that President Joe Biden is trying to push through. The proposed changes would make it almost impossible for a migrant entering through the U.S.-Mexico border to get asylum, even if that migrant has a legitimate fear of returning to his or her home country.

  • BORDER SECURITY
    Uriel J. García

    More than 33,000 migrants have arrived from Texas since August 2022. The city wants the 17 bus and transportation companies twhich contracted with Texas to take the migrants to New York City to pay more than $700 million in damages.

  • BORDER SECURITY
    Rob Garver

    U.S. officials processed an estimated 300,000 people at the U.S. border with Mexico in December, which would be the highest number ever recorded, according to multiple news organizations. While DHS will release the December numbers later this month, Reuters and other news organizations estimate that 300,000 people attempted to cross the border in the final month of 2023, with about 50,000 of them coming through designated points of entry.

  • MIGRATION
    Aline Barros

    As the U.S marks the 80th anniversary of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, thousands of Chinese immigrants are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, mostly for the same reasons as their countrymen did more than a century ago.