‘This is the place where dreams end.’ Stranded in border cities, migrant families wait with little chance of refuge

TIJUANA, Mexico — Tucked into a grassy canyon where cars bump along dirt roads, Templo Embajadores De Jesús has become one of several shelters in this border city across from San Diego, where hundreds of migrant families expelled from the United States have been stranded over the past month.

On a sunny afternoon this week, the church’s auditorium buzzed with the anxious shuffle of nearly 1,000 people, mostly mothers and children from Honduras and Guatemala, who were flown to San Diego and released into Tijuana by US immigration officials after they attempted to cross into the country undetected at points along the border as much as 1,500 miles away.

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Trump’s improved performance with Latino voters in 2020 was powered by a surprising source: women

WASHINGTON — Dinah Vargas grew up knowing that in her native New Mexico “you are born Democrat and Catholic.”

But in late 2019, as she renewed her driver’s license at a kiosk in a drab Department of Motor Vehicles office in Albuquerque’s South Valley, a question on the machine about her voter status sparked an inner wrestling match.

You are registered as a Democrat. Is this correct?

No, she thought, it wasn’t any more. She had become a staunch opponent of abortion and an admirer of Donald Trump, and in recent years it seemed, to her at least, that Democrats no longer stood for the values she most cared about: “family, faith, and freedom.”

“I was holding up the line,” recalled Vargas, a former political campaign photographer who is now a conservative radio talk show host. “And I said, ‘You have to give me a minute, this is a big deal for me.’ I had been a Democrat my whole life — and then, I changed my party affiliation.”

The relationship between Trump and men — including Latino men — has been closely studied. The former president’s embrace of an unapologetically blunt ”made-in-the-USA” brand of masculinity drew support from white men and some men of color and was seen as a significant reason for his political success. Some analysts even predicted it could produce the largest gender gap ever in the 2020 election as women voters opted in droves for Joe Biden.

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San Antonio Book Festival: “Dispatches from a Wounded Country”

I’ll be moderating a panel at the San Antonio Book Festival with Mexican writer and University of Houston professor Cristina Rivera Garza. We’ll talk the “misnamed war on drugs,” systematic violence in Mexico and along the US-Mexico border, and collective grief as a form of resistance.

“Dispatches from a Wounded Country” takes place from 12:00-12:45 pm Central on Friday, April 9.

Register here.

For her first major task as VP, Kamala Harris is handed a thorny diplomatic mission

WASHINGTON — When President Biden charged his vice president with solving the “root causes” of the current migrant crisis at the southern border, she responded with surprising equanimity — and a smile.

“I gave you a tough job,” Biden said, a bit incredulous, as he announced her new role in front of a crush of reporters in the White House State Dining Room late last month. “And you’re smiling.”

Kamala Harris’s first major mission as vice president is not one a lot of politicians would be happy to receive. She’s been deputized to own arguably the most politically thorny issue the administration has on its plate, as Republican lawmakers rush to the border to decry an uptick in unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. Decades of failed attempts to overhaul the nation’s immigration system by administrations of both parties litter her way.

“Look it’s a huge problem, I’m not going to pretend it’s not,” Harris said in a CBS interview on March 24 in which she pleaded for some patience from the public. “We’re dealing with it, but it’s going to take some time.

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‘An incredibly difficult balancing act’: Will Kevin McCarthy lead the fractious House Republicans to the majority?

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, as the story goes, made his start with a stroke of good luck.

The eight-term Republican from California’s conservative Central Valley won $5,000 in a state lottery as a young man and used it to open his own deli — Kevin O’s. The money he later made selling the business helped put him through college, and the whole experience helped fuel his motivation to enter politics: to fight for the little guy and against big government and regulation.

But there is more to the tale than fate and fortune as he positions himself to reach his ultimate goal — speaker of the House — if he can navigate the land mines of being a Republican leader in the post-Trump era.

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Once again, thousands of children have come to the border. So much for a new day on immigration

WASHINGTON — Even before President Biden took office, immigrant rights advocates and foreign policy experts warned he could face an early test of his vision for a radically different and more humane approach to immigration. Hurricanes and a pandemic had battered El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in the late fall and early winter, leaving half a million people without homes and ready to make the dangerous trip to the US border.

Biden nodded to the challenges but counted on his significant experience with immigration. As vice president, he had taken the lead in the scramble to shelter migrant children arriving by the thousands without parents at the US-Mexico border in 2014. His White House made plans to address the gangs, government corruption, and poverty at the root of the rise in people fleeing Central America’s Northern Triangle nations.

But not even 100 days into his presidency, his administration appears to have lost the thread. Once again, thousands of unaccompanied minors have come to the border, entangling the new Biden administration in a familiar debate over the nation’s broken immigration system that has been cast in the old, familiar terms of “surge,” “crisis,” and “national security,” instead of framed around providing aid to asylum seekers, refugees, or migrant children.

So much for a new day on immigration.

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In three Republican districts, a view of Trump’s continued dominance in the party

WASHINGTON — After a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters violently attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, a reckoning seemed inevitable for a Republican Party that had embraced him and spread his lies about election fraud.

Republicans like Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming all but called him a traitor. Senator Mitch McConnell denounced him in scathing terms, and McConnell’s allies warned that Trump would only turn voters off and weigh the party down, pointing to the embarrassing Senate losses in Georgia.

Seven weeks and one impeachment later, however, that reckoning has been limited, where it is apparent at all.

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Can the Republican Party rein in the conspiracies? Here’s what its history says

WASHINGTON — Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell took the floor after Donald Trump was acquitted in his second impeachment trial and denounced the wild and unfounded claims of “a stolen election” spouted by the former president and the US Capitol rioters who scaled walls, shattered windows, and trashed congressional offices.

“This was an intensified crescendo of conspiracy theories orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch institutions on the way out,” McConnell said of the Jan. 6 attack.

McConnell, in the end, didn’t defy the consensus in his party, and was among the 43 Senate Republicans who ultimately refused to convict Trump of inciting the attack. But he is plainly disturbed and angered by the rising power of conspiracists in his party. And he is right to be. The GOP is increasingly a party of warring forces: the right versus the ever further right, Trump and his followers versus everyone else, sense versus something untethered from reality and democratic tradition. The battle is almost sure to be the other half of the American political story during the Biden years, and the collisions ahead could well dominate the road to 2024.

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One mother’s quest captures the challenges as Biden seeks to reunite separated migrant families

WASHINGTON — Angelica Gonzalez-Garcia answered the call from an unknown number with suspicion.

She was scared and alone in a small apartment in Framingham, desperate to find her 7-year-old daughter after they had been separated a month earlier without any explanation at an Arizona detention center. At the time, in mid-2018, the public was only becoming aware of what immigration lawyers along the US-Mexico border had long suspected: The US government was splitting migrant families apart not by incompetence or chance but as a matter of policy, a form of deterrence, as then Attorney General Jeff Sessions described it, to discourage others from coming north.

While Gonzalez-Garcia was shuffled from immigration facility to immigration facility, her daughter managed to call her grandmother in Guatemala from a shelter in Texas. The mother tried to connect with the girl by phone, and was able to reach an acquaintance willing to house them in Massachusetts. When Gonzalez-Garcia was released in Colorado, a social worker guided her to the airport for a flight to Boston.

Yet, no one — not the federal officials, the asylum officers, or the advocates — could tell her how to get the government to return her daughter.

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President Biden’s push to reverse Trump immigration policies is both symbolic and substantive

WASHINGTON — Alien. Origin: Latin. Definition: a foreigner.

When it first appeared in an English treatise, the term applied to anyone born outside the British Isles, including those in the Colonies that would become the United States. The first uses of the word were technical, but it took on a pejorative meaning in the early 1970s, when Mexican Americans became the racial targets of xenophobic politicians and trade unions, right-wing groups, and federal immigration agencies.

So, it was fitting to some political analysts and immigrant advocates when President Biden signaled on his first day in office that he wanted to slash the word alien from immigration laws and replace it with “noncitizen.” It was one of several sweeping actions to reverse a hardline approach to immigration under a predecessor who paved his way to the White House decrying Mexicans as criminals and rapists.

The executive orders, memorandums, and directives flowing from the Oval Office are expected to continue Tuesday, with the announcement of a task force to reunite migrant families separated by immigration officials under then-President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy.

The flurry of moves has been a mix of the symbolic and the substantive, and together they represent a stark departure from Trump’s rhetoric and policies, even if the prospects for the boldest action so far — a broad immigration bill — remain very much in doubt because of Republican opposition.

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‘Boring is a good thing’: A day in post-Trump Washington

WASHINGTON — With a stroke of his pen just before 12:20 p.m., President Biden had made it official: Another hallmark of the Trump administration — in this case, a ban on transgender people serving in the military — had fallen away.

It was just one sign on one day of a brand new administration determined to transform government and purge the tumult of the past four years.

Inside the West Wing, a place that was literally scrubbed down last week, there are empty picture hooks on walls that used to be covered in framed photographs of Donald Trump. There is a new and exhaustive regimen to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the White House complex. There is a responsive press operation and a more diverse administration staff. There are even dogs.

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Biden sworn in as 46th president, vowing renewal through unity

WASHINGTON — Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States on Wednesday, ending his predecessor’s turbulent tenure and assuming the country’s highest office at a wrenching moment of crisis with a somber vow of renewal through unity.

Standing on the west front of the Capitol, a place transformed into a crime scene two weeks ago by an armed mob hellbent on derailing democracy, Biden placed his hand on a family Bible and took the oath of office shortly before assuming power at noon. Then he urged Americans to end “this uncivil war” and work together to overcome the pandemic, economic devastation, and political unrest.

“Without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos,” Biden said. “This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge. And unity is the path forward.”

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As vice president, Kamala Harris will have a role unlike any of her predecessors

WASHINGTON — When Kamala Harris is sworn in as vice president Wednesday, she will step into a role so often relegated to the background that John Nance Garner, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s number two, once described it as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.”

But beyond shattering glass ceilings, Harris, 56, will assume outsized responsibilities unlike any of her predecessors, as she helps lead a nation battling multiple crises.

She is likely to be frequently called to cast the tiebreaking vote in a 50-50 Senate. She could end up presiding over President Trump’s second impeachment trial for inciting the mob attack on the US Capitol. And at the White House, President-elect Joe Biden has said he wants her to be “the last voice in the room” on every major decision that he makes.

“There is the version of the vice president that is sort of marginalized and not a key player — someone pulled out for funerals and state dinners,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. But she and other analysts do not expect the same for Harris given Biden’s experience when he was vice president during the Barack Obama administration.

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House members push for answers in wake of security breaches at Capitol

WASHINGTON — The removal of panic buttons from Representative Ayanna Pressley’s Capitol Hill office before an armed insurrection overran the complex is under review by the House Administration Committee, as Congressional Democrats push to determine whether the mob had inside help.

“The American people do deserve to know if these assailants were at all enabled by the very people who are responsible for stopping them and how we can ensure that attacks like this will never happen again,” Pressley said in an interview.

“Congress needs to immediately launch comprehensive, transparent investigations into what happened, and how our law enforcement agencies failed to protect the Capitol and members of Congress,” she said.

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‘It was like looking at evil’: The Capitol attack through the eyes of the Massachusetts delegation

For days, Massachusetts lawmakers said, they and their colleagues had received assurances from police that security would be tight and that they would be shielded from the masses as Trump continued to spout lies and conspiracies, refusing to concede his loss in November. But incited by Trump’s words, the rally morphed into a protest that escalated into an armed insurrection to overturn the election, rattling the world and now embroiling lawmakers in efforts to try to remove Trump from office in his final days.

The traumatic events of a day now etched in history are the backdrop for Wednesday’s House impeachment vote.

Read here for a reconstruction of the mob attack through the eyes of the Massachusetts Delegation.

Walsh, Raimondo introduced by Biden as Cabinet nominees

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden on Friday introduced Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh as his nominee for Labor secretary and Rhode Island Governor Gina M. Raimondo as his choice to head the Commerce Department, saying they would be part of an economic team tasked with mitigating the devastating impact of the pandemic on American workers and businesses.

The nominations came as the federal government reported the nation lost 140,000 jobs last month, the first decline since May, as coronavirus cases and deaths have surged.

“The anxiety and fear of the women and men out there reminds me of when President Obama and I were sworn in during the Great Recession in 2009,” Biden said at a Wilmington, Del., news conference, as he urged quick Senate confirmation of all his Cabinet picks. “With the pandemic raging, people are losing work and losing hope.”

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Concerns rise even as Trump’s term dwindles. Analysts are wary of the president’s possible actions

WASHINGTON — After President Trump began his last two weeks in office by inciting a deadly insurrection, what could his final days hold?

Some of his closest allies have abandoned him and condemned his actions leading up to Wednesday’s violence at the Capitol. Aides and two Cabinet secretaries resigned and others are considering it. Questions are being raised about his mental state. And congressional Democratic leaders are calling him a threat to the nation’s democracy and urging his removal from office.

As the Trump presidency winds down, there is a growing fear of what he might do next.

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‘The place was under siege’: Globe reporter describes the scene inside the Capitol building

WASHINGTON — The shuffling in the Senate press gallery started a little after majority leader Mitch McConnell finished his scathing rebuke of President Trump’s baseless election fraud claims.

The faint chants from pro-Trump protesters outside were getting louder as more people streamed to the front of the Capitol building on Wednesday and Congress began the process of counting the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden the next president. Senate press staff said they had a plan to lock the gallery doors on the third floor should the security situation outside escalate.

It was all “just in case,” all very hypothetical.

Then, a warning from a crackly Capitol radio reverberated across the room alerting us to get away from the windows and doors. There were reports of shots fired, and a reporter burst into the room shouting that Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over the vote counting, had been evacuated.

It was suddenly clear this unusual day at the Capitol was about to get even more so. The place was under siege.

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Mob of Trump supporters storms Capitol in attempt to overturn election, but Congress certifies Biden’s victory

WASHINGTON — A mob of President Trump’s supporters rushed barricades, scaled walls, brawled with police, and broke windows to storm the US Capitol on Wednesday afternoon, temporarily halting the congressional tallying of Electoral College votes that declare Joe Biden the next president.

The attack on the Capitol put a horrifying exclamation point on Trump’s months-long campaign to overturn the results of the election in the face of repeated declarations by courts and state elections officials that he had lost. But the Trump-stoked insurrection was unsuccessful, as determined lawmakers returned to the Capitol Wednesday night and certified Biden’s 306-232 electoral vote victory about 3:30 a.m. Thursday.

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