Half a Million Immigrants Could Get U.S. Citizenship Under New Plan | Crypto Scammers Are Targeting Trump’s MAGA Supporters | Miami Is Entering a State of Unreality, and more

The White House announced Tuesday that the Biden administration will, in the coming months, allow certain spouses of U.S. citizens without legal status to apply for permanent residency and eventually, citizenship. The move could affect upwards of half a million immigrants, according to senior administration officials.
To qualify, an immigrant must have lived in the United States for 10 years as of Monday and be married to a U.S. citizen. If a qualifying immigrant’s application is approved, he or she would have three years to apply for a green card, and receive a temporary work permit and be shielded from deportation in the meantime.
About 50,000 noncitizen children with a parent who is married to a U.S. citizen could also potentially qualify for the same process, according to senior administration officials who briefed reporters on the proposal on condition of anonymity. There is no requirement on how long the couple must have been married, and no one becomes eligible after Monday. That means immigrants who reach that 10 year mark any time after June 17, 2024, will not qualify for the program, according to the officials.
Senior administration officials said they anticipate the process will be open for applications by the end of the summer, and fees to apply have yet to be determined.

Biden to Announce Deportation Protection, Work Permits for Spouses of US Citizens  (AP / VOA News)
President Joe Biden is planning to announce a sweeping new policy Tuesday that would lift the threat of deportation for tens of thousands of people married to U.S. citizens, an aggressive election-year action on immigration that many Democrats had sought.
Biden is set to host a White House event to celebrate an Obama-era directive that offered deportation protection for young undocumented immigrants and will announce the new program then, according to three people briefed on the White House plans. The policy will allow roughly 490,000 spouses of U.S. citizens an opportunity to apply for a “parole in place” program, which would shield them from deportations and offer them work permits if they have lived in the country for at least 10 years, according to two of the people briefed. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the announcement publicly.
The White House on Monday declined to comment on the expected announcement.
Families who would potentially benefit from Biden’s actions were expected to attend the White House event on Tuesday afternoon

Miami Is Entering a State of Unreality  (Mario Alejandro Ariza, The Atlantic)
Thirty years ago, when the dangers of climate change were beginning to be understood but had not yet arrived in force, the creeping catastrophe facing Miami might have been averted. But as atmospheric concentrations of carbon reach levels not seen in 3 million years, politicians promise resilience while ignoring emissions; developers race to build a bounty of luxury condos, never mind the swiftly rising sea. Florida is entering a subtropical state of unreality in which these decisions don’t add up.
A massive network of canals keeps this region from reverting to a swamp, and sea-level rise is making operating them more challenging. The biggest canals, run by the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), offer primary drainage; smaller canals are operated by municipalities and private entities. The majority of these canals drain to the sea during low tides using gravity. But sea-level rise erodes the system’s capacity to drain water—so much so that SFWMD has already identified several main canals that need to be augmented with pumps. The scary part about last week’s flood is that it didn’t happen during particularly high tides: Less rain, or rain that fell at a gentler rate, would have drained away easily.
Other adaptation initiatives are under way. Miami is overhauling how it deals with stormwater, and has installed pumps and backflow valves in vulnerable and low-lying neighborhoods. Miami Beach has spent about a decade raising roads, installing pumps, and improving its infrastructure in a multimillion-dollar effort to buy time.
But the amount of rain that did fall last week is the sort of extreme-weather event that infrastructure planners don’t design for, if only because it would be too expensive to construct stormwater systems capable of moving that much water that quickly. “Nowhere can withstand this much rain,” Bryan McNoldy, a senior researcher at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, told me. At his home in Biscayne Park, he slept uneasily on Wednesday night after nine inches of rain fell in just 11 hours. “That’s definitely more than what my area can ingest,” he said on Friday. Just a few more inches of rain would have meant water coming up through his floorboards.

Crypto Scammers Are Targeting Trump’s MAGA Supporters  (Vittoria Elliott, Wired)
Last month, former president and convicted felon Donald Trump announced that his campaign would accept donations in cryptocurrency. In the weeks that followed, the cybercrime detection firm Netcraft found dozens of scam websites seeking to target Trump supporters and swindle them out of their crypto, according to a report shared exclusively with WIRED.
Netcraft found that in the days leading up to the announcement, scammers registered domains with common misspellings, hoping to capture supporters intending to access donaldjtrump.com. One domain registered to donalbjtrump.com was a near perfect replica of the actual Trump campaign website. And while the Trump campaign accepts donations via Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, some of the scam websites instead appear to be using portals meant to look like Coingate, a blockchain and crypto payment processor.
“As a victim, the fact that the real campaign is using Coinbase payments rather than direct cryptocurrencies” wouldn’t be very obvious, says Rob Duncan, head of research at Netcraft. “The way it’s been advertised is ‘Donald Trump’s taking cryptocurrency donations,’ when actually that’s quite it’s a bit more subtle.

Banks Are Finally Realizing What Climate Change Will Do to Housing  (Chris Baraniuk, Wired)
Rising sea levels, biodiversity collapse, extreme weather—these are the grisly horsemen of climate apocalypse. But don’t forget the fretting loan officers. A study published earlier this year found that US mortgage approvals tend to dip following periods of hotter-than-normal weather. For every 1 degree Celsius that temperatures rise above average, approvals fell by nearly 1 percent—and their value by more than 6.5 percent.
Lower consumer demand was only part of the problem, according to the study’s authors. The effect was mostly down to loan officers’ worries about climate change and what it might mean for the assets they were lending against. In other words, climate change was devaluing property before their very eyes.
It’s not just the heat. In May, yet another beachfront house in North Carolina’s Outer Banks tumbled into the angry sea. It’s the sixth home lost along Cape Hatteras National Seashore since 2020. Researchers say lenders are increasingly trying to pass on the risk of mortgaging coastal properties due to calamities like this. Wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding are also impacting other financial services used by homeowners. It’s increasingly difficult to get home insurance in Minnesota, for instance, following extreme hail storms in recent years.