On January 6, Gabriel Garcia—a first-generation Cuban American and former member of the Proud Boys—livestreamed his attempt to breach the Capitol. “How does it feel being a traitor to the country?” he screamed at police officers as he entered the building. Once inside the Rotunda, Garcia yelled, “Nancy, come out and play!” as insurrections searched for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  Garcia was subsequently found guilty of two felony charges related to his actions that day. But a year later, he seemed unrepentant: In fact, Garcia joined a press conference in Miami to commemorate the ann ..read more

Joshua Rubin, a Brooklyn software developer and founder of the pro-immigrant grassroots group Witness at the Border, spent his 72nd birthday in Eagle Pass, Texas. He gathered with another half a dozen volunteers at the border town across from Mexico’s Piedras Negras for a two-week vigil “to, according to the organization, “stand up against [Governor] Greg Abbott’s racist and inhumane regime,”  They carried vinyl banners that read “Justice for Migrants” and “Give Back Shelby Park,” a reference to the 47-acre field on the banks of the Rio Grande named after a Confederate general that A ..read more

It seems like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott could use a dictionary.  Why? Because on Sunday, the Republican went on Fox News and accused President Joe Biden of “using illegal immigrants as political pawns.” And given his own record, it is unclear if understands what the word means.  Chessboards aside, Oxford Languages says a pawn is “a person used by others for their own purposes.” This, of course, describes how Abbott has himself treated migrants who have crossed the border into Texas. Since 2022, he bussed thousands of them to Democratic-controlled New York City and Washington ..read more

President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last night was, in many respects, better than expected. But one moment, when the president went off-script, will be hard to shake off. During the section on immigration, Biden fumbled when mentioning the death of 22-year-old Laken Riley. A nursing student at the University of Georgia, Riley was killed in February. A man from Venezuela who US officials say entered the United States unlawfully was, soon after, charged with kidnapping and murder. Since then, Republicans have elevated the tragedy to accuse the Biden administration of allowing a ..read more

As the battle over the border rages in Congress, many Republicans are pushing to advance a bill that would revive one of the Trump era’s harshest policies: deporting family members in the US who step forward to take in unaccompanied migrant children. “It would be a wholly preventable crisis.” It’s one of the many hardline provisions in HR 2, a sweeping border security plan that GOP leaders say is necessary to clamp down on the number of migrants arriving in the country. That bill, which passed in the House last year, is waiting in the wings as lawmakers fight over the possibility of new immigr ..read more

The Biden administration is reportedly considering using executive authority to impose harsh immigration measures, including a push to end asylum for migrants crossing between ports of entry at the US-Mexico border—a move that the Trump administration tried in 2018 and was shot down by the courts. The measures, which NBC News first reported on Wednesday, would mimic some of the provisions included in the now-dead Senate bipartisan border deal, including raising the standards for the initial asylum screening known as a “credible fear” interview. Biden’s plans would also instruct US Im ..read more

The New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer first heard of Juan Romagoza when the doctor was the main plaintiff and lead witness in a human rights case in Florida in the early 2000s. Romagoza had been the victim of abominable brutalities by the military rule in his home country of El Salvador when in the 1980s a right-wing government backed by the United States cracked down. On suspicion of being a guerrilla commander, the military in El Salvador tortured Romagoza; he was shocked, sodomized, burned, and then placed in a coffin for 48 hours. After an uncle in the military interceded for his re ..read more

After failing to muster enough votes last week, House Republicans can now say they got nothing done and approved two articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. Democrats and constitutional law experts have decried the proceedings, which charge Mayorkas with “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust,” as a baseless “political stunt.”  “I knew I was entering an extraordinarily polarizing environment, an environment where norms were in jeopardy, where civility was not always respected,” Mayorkas told t ..read more

In 2020, Joe Biden campaigned on the idea that Trump-era immigration policies amounted to “a moral failure and a national shame.” Now, he is backing a border deal that is so aligned with conservative goals that it causes glee: “[W]e would never get [these measures] in a Republican Senate,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) recently gushed, “even with a Republican president.” Under electoral pressure, and with unprecedented numbers of migrants arriving in the southwest, Biden has made a radical U-turn. He has recently vowed to close the border and now endorsed what would be the most restrictive overhaul ..read more

House Speaker Mike Johnson believes in facts. “Facts are stubborn things, and they do not change,” he said this Sunday on Meet the Press. Neither does his stance on single-party impeachment, he would like us to believe. “The founders of this country warned against the single-party impeachment,” he said in December 2019, as the House of Representatives moved forward with the first impeachment of President Donald Trump. “They feared it would bitterly and perhaps irreparably divide our nation.” Despite the fact that a Republican-led impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayork ..read more