[News] The Migrant Crisis Thread

US President Joe Biden's administration is to build a section of border wall in southern Texas in an effort to stop rising levels of immigration.

About 20 miles (32km) will be built in Starr County along its border with Mexico, where officials report high numbers of crossings.

Building a border wall was a signature policy of Donald Trump as president and fiercely opposed by Democrats.

In 2020, Mr Biden promised he would not build another foot of wall if elected.

His administration passed a proclamation soon after taking office that said building a wall across the southern border "is not a serious policy solution".

On Thursday, however, Mr Biden said he "can't stop" the construction of the border wall because the funding for it had already been appropriated.

When asked whether he believes the wall could work, he replied simply: "no".

In a statement to Associated News on Wednesday night, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) similarly defended the latest move, saying it was using funds already allocated for a border barrier.

"Congress appropriated fiscal year 2019 funds for the construction of border barrier in the Rio Grande Valley, and DHS is required to use those funds for their appropriated purpose," the statement said.

Mr Biden and the statements stand in stark contrast to a notice about the project on the US Federal Registry in which Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that there is "presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas".

Speaking at his daily news conference, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador criticised the announcement, saying that a wall is "contrary" to what President Biden had previously advocated.

"I understand there is strong pressure from extreme right-wing political groups in the United States," he added.

New York City is intensifying efforts to transport migrants out of the city as its shelter system reaches capacity, setting up a dedicated office to provide asylum-seekers with free, one-way tickets to anywhere in the world.

City Hall confirmed the establishment of a new “reticketing center” in Manhattan as its latest bid to ease pressure on its shelters and finances following the arrival of more than 130,000 asylum-seekers since last year.

Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has described the situation as a crisis and has begun to warn that shelters are so full that migrants will soon be forced onto the street as winter approaches.

“I cannot say this enough. You know, we are out of the room,” he told reporters this week. “And it’s not ‘if’ people will be sleeping on the streets, it’s when. We are at full capacity.”

Italy will build two centres in Albania to host tens of thousands of illegal migrants, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said.

She announced the plan at a news conference with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in Rome.

Ms Meloni said the centres - due to open next spring - will be able to process up to 36,000 people a year.

The plan will apply to migrants rescued at sea by Italian boats, and not to those who arrive on Italian shores.

The migrants will stay in the centres while Italy examines their asylum requests, Ms Meloni said, adding that the plan would not apply to pregnant women, children and vulnerable people.

She said the structures - which will be built at Italy's expense - would be able to accommodate 3,000 people each month "for the time necessary to quickly process asylum applications and, if necessary, for repatriation".

The centres will be built at the port of Shengjin and the Gjader area in north-west Albania. Security personnel and police officers will be provided by Albania.

Ms Meloni said that, although Albania is not an EU member state, "it is already behaving like one". She added that she believes "Albania is, for all intents and purposes, a European country" and stated her support for Albania's entry into the EU.

Speaking in Italian, Mr Rama used warm words to describe his country's relationship with Italy, saying that Italy's citizens and institutions had helped Albanians in the 1990s after the fall of the Communist regime.

"This debt cannot be repaid," Mr Rama said. "But if Italy calls, Albania responds."

Mr Rama added: "Everyone can see this is a difficult situation for Italy. Geography has become a curse for Italy, because if you arrive in Italy, you arrive in the EU. But when it comes to managing these arrivals as the EU, we know how things go."

"We might not have the capacity to be the sole solution, but we have the duty to... help Italy," he added.

Mr Rama said he and Ms Meloni discussed the migrants centre agreement while the Italian PM was on holiday in Albania over the summer.

A day after the plans were announced, a European Commission spokesperson told the BBC that the Commission is aware of the "operational arrangement" between the Italian and Albanian authorities but said it had not yet received detailed information about it.

However, it pointed out that the agreement still needs to be translated into law by Italy and added: "It is important that any such arrangement is in full respect of EU and international law."

The Commission is likely to hold off from giving a verdict on the plan until it is approved by the Italian Parliament.

Opposition politicians in both Italy and Albania have criticised the agreement.

Riccardo Magi, the leader of Italian liberal party +Europa (More Europe), said the plan was "frightening" and that the centres would be like "a sort of Italian Guantanamo".

HOMESTEAD, Fla. (AP) — In New York, migrants at a city-run shelter grumble that relatives who settled before them refuse to offer a bed. In Chicago, a provider of mental health services to people in the country illegally pivoted to new arrivals sleeping at a police station across the street. In South Florida, some immigrants complain that people who came later get work permits that are out of reach for them.

Across the country, mayors, governors and others have been forceful advocates for newly arrived migrants seeking shelter and work permits. Their efforts and existing laws have exposed tensions among immigrants who have been in the country for years, even decades, and don’t have the same benefits, notably work permits. And some new arrivals feel established immigrants have given them cold shoulders.

Thousands of immigrants marched this month in Washington to ask that President Joe Biden extend work authorization to longtime residents as well. Signs read, “Work permits for all!” and “I have been waiting 34 years for a permit.”

Despite a brief lull when new asylum restrictions took effect in May, arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico topped 2 million for the second year in a row in the government’s budget year ending Sept. 30. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of migrants have been legally admitted to the country over the last year under new policies aimed at discouraging illegal crossings.

“The growing wave of arrivals make our immigration advocacy more challenging. Their arrival has created some tensions, some questioning,” said U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, a Chicago Democrat whose largely Latino district includes a large immigrant population. People have been “waiting for decades for an opportunity to get a green card to legalize and have a pathway to citizenship.”

Asylum-seekers must wait six months for work authorization. Processing takes no more than 1.5 months for 80% of applicants, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Those who cross the border on the Biden administration’s new legal pathways have no required waiting period at all. Under temporary legal status known as parole, 270,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela arrived through October by applying online with a financial sponsor. Another 324,000 got appointments to enter at a land crossing with Mexico by using a mobile app called CBP One.

The administration said in September that it would work to reduce wait times for work permits to 30 days for those using the new pathways. By late September, it had blasted 1.4 million emails and texts reminding who was eligible to work.

José Guerrero, who worked in construction after arriving 27 years ago from Mexico, acknowledged many new arrivals felt compelled to flee their countries. He says he wants the same treatment.

“All these immigrants come and they give them everything so easily, and nothing to us that have been working for years and paying taxes,” Guerrero, now a landscaper in Homestead, Florida, about 39 miles (63 kilometers) south of Miami. “They give these people everything in their hands.”

The White House is asking Congress for $1.4 billion for food, shelter and other services for new arrivals. The mayors of New York, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston wrote to Biden last month to seek $5 billion, noting the influx has drained budgets and cut essential services.

The mayors also support temporary status — and work permits — for people who have been in the U.S. longer but have focused on new arrivals.

“All of the newcomers arriving in our cities are looking for the chance to work, and every day we get calls from business leaders who have unfilled jobs and want to hire these newcomers,” the mayors wrote. “We can successfully welcome and integrate these newcomers and help them pursue the American Dream if they have a chance to work.”

Many new arrivals are indisputably in dire circumstances, including some who hoped to join relatives and friends but find their calls blocked and messages unreturned.

Angel Hernandez, a Venezuelan who walked through Panama’s notorious Darién Gap rainforest, where he witnessed corpses, was sorely disappointed when he reached New York. The construction worker said he and his aunt, uncle and their two children left Colombia after more than three years because work dried up.

Hernandez, 20, planned to settle with his uncle’s brother, who settled in the United States about a year earlier and lives in a house with a steady job. His job search has been fruitless.

“Everyone is out for themselves,” he said outside the Roosevelt Hotel, a Midtown Manhattan property that was closed until the city opened it for migrants in May.

The influx has put many immigrant services groups in a financial bind.

For decades, the Latino Treatment Center has provided help with drug abuse to many immigrants living in Chicago without legal status. It started helping new arrivals sleeping at the police station across the street, fixing a shower in the office for migrants to use a few days a week and offering counseling.

“It is such a unique situation that we weren’t set up for,” said Adriana Trino, the group’s executive director. “This has been a whole different wheelhouse, the needs are so different.”

Many organizations deny friction and say they have been able to make ends meet.

“We’re trying to keep a balance of doing both — people who have been here for years and people who are arriving, and so far we have been able to serve everybody,” said Diego Torres of the Latin American Coalition, which assists immigrants in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In Atlanta, the Latin American Association says it has spent $50,000 this year on temporary housing and other aid for new arrivals. Santiago Marquez, the organization’s chief executive, hasn’t sensed resentment.

“Our core clients – most of them are immigrants – they understand the plight,” he said. “They’ve gone through it. They understand.”

Still, it’s easy to find immigrants with deep roots in the United States who chafe about unequal treatment.

A 45-year-old Mexican woman who came to the United States 25 years ago and has three U.S.-born children said it was unfair that new arrivals get work permits over her. She earns $150 a week picking sweet potatoes in Homestead.

“For a humanitarian reason, they are giving opportunities to those who are arriving, and what is the humanity with us?” said the woman, who asked that she be identified by her last name only, Hernandez, because she fears being deported.

The Washington rally reflected an effort by advocates to push for work permits for all, regardless of when they came.

“It is a system that has strained our city and, at this moment, it brings conflict between neighbors.” Lawrence Benito, head of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said at a Chicago rally last month.

FASS BOYE, SENEGAL (AP) –

A month had passed when the first four men decided to jump.

Countless cargo ships had navigated past them, yet no one had come to their rescue. Their fuel was finished. The hunger and thirst were overwhelming. Dozens had already died, including the captain.

The voyage from the struggling Senegalese fishing town of Fass Boye to Spain’s Canary Islands, a gateway to the European Union where they hoped to find work, was supposed to take a week. But more than a month later, the wooden boat carrying 101 men and boys was getting blown further and further away from its intended destination.

No land was in sight. Yet the four men believed — or hallucinated — that they could swim to shore. To stay on the “cursed” boat, they thought, was a death sentence. They picked up empty water containers and wooden planks — anything to help them float.

And then, one by one, they leapt.

In the days that followed, dozens more would do the same before disappearing into the ocean. There were those who chose to stay in the boat and those who had no choice, no strength left to move. They withered under a deafening wind and a relentless sun.

The migrants still in the boat watched as their brothers faded. Those who died onboard were tossed into the ocean until the survivors had no energy left and bodies began accumulating.

At last, on day 36, a Spanish fishing vessel spotted them.

They were 290 km (180 miles) northeast of Cape Verde, the last cluster of islands in the eastern central Atlantic Ocean before the vast nothingness that separates West Africa from the Caribbean.

As the number of people leaving Senegal for Spain this year surged to record levels, the AP spoke to dozens of survivors, rescuers, aid workers and officials to understand what the men endured at sea, and why, despite their traumatic experience, many are willing to risk their lives again.

Two children from the west African country of Guinea who were abandoned in Bogotá’s airport have been taken into government custody after spending several days on their own in the international departures terminal.

Colombia’s national immigration department said the children, aged 10 and 13, had been travelling with separate groups and were left in the airport by their relatives earlier this month for reasons that have not been clarified.

The discovery of the two children comes as migrants from Africa increasingly use South American and Central American airports as stepping stones on the long route to the US.

Last year, more than 12,000 Africans crossed the roadless Darién jungle between Colombia and Panama on their way north after taking flights to Brazil, according to statistics published by Panamanian officials.

But this year, the number of Africans making the grueling trek across the jungle fell by 25% as an air route that begins in Turkey and takes migrants to countries north of the Darién appears to have become more popular.

Colombian officials said the children found in Bogotá’s airport this week had arrived on a direct flight from Istanbul and were planning to fly to El Salvador, from where migrants take connecting flights to Nicaragua, a country that allows people from most African countries to enter its territory without visas, after they pay a fine.

From Nicaragua, African migrants make their way overland to the US, said Adam Isacson, an immigration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group.

“Human smuggling networks are discovering that there are new ways to skip the Darién, for those who can pay,” Isacson said. “And they will continue to look for routes, even if they are complicated.”