Seven killed near migrant shelter after being struck by car in Texas

Ryan King

May 07, 01:35 PM May 07, 01:40 PM

At least seven people are dead after a deadly car incident in Brownsville, Texas Sunday morning, according to police.

A driver, 30-year Michael Alexander Nash, allegedly rammed his vehicle into multiple people near Ozanam Center, a shelter for the homeless and migrants around 8:30 a.m. local time, authorities said.

MAYORKAS SAYS TITLE 42 BORDER SITUATION IS 'VERY SERIOUS' AND 'VERY DIFFICULT'

As many as six people are receiving treatment for injuries stemming from the incident, which took place around Minnesota Road and North Bernal Road, per police. Injuries range from serious to minor.

The suspect is currently in police custody and is being screened for possible drug or alcohol use. He is being kept in the hospital and is under 24-hour supervision, according to local reports.

A motive for the incident is not immediately clear.

Brownsville is a city fixated in close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border. The accident comes amid high anticipation of a migrant surge next ween week after the pandemic-era Title 42 policy expires on May 11.

The Washington Examiner contacted the Brownsville Police Department for additional information.

Texas man hired through Craigslist arrested for smuggling migrants

Emily Jacobs

April 16, 12:14 AM April 16, 12:15 AM

A criminal smuggling organization recruited a Texas man through Craigslist to transport migrants from Mexico into the United States, authorities who arrested him said this week.

The Texas Department of Public Safety said officers arrested Nathaniel Chavez, 42, as he drove a black Volkswagen Passat through Val Verde County with four Mexican immigrants toward Austin, Texas, one of whom was a minor. Chavez, who authorities say is from Spring, Texas, was charged with two counts of smuggling persons for financial benefit and one count of smuggling of a minor.

TEXAS INVESTIGATING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CAMPSITE FOUND 30 MILES NORTH OF MEXICO BORDER

Asked by police what he was doing, the suspect said he found the driving job on Craigslist, the online classifieds domain. Chavez's expected compensation for the alleged smuggling operation was not immediately clear.

"Transportation gig available, payout same day and cash on delivery," the Craigslist ad, posted on the Houston area site, read. The classified was brief, noting that "all you need is a vehicle" for the task at hand, and that "all vehicle types" were "wanted."

“They’re being recruited off social media — whether it be Facebook, TikTok, Instagram — and they’re promised big money for very little work,” Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe told NewsNation of the new method for finding smugglers.

As migrants continue to flood the U.S.-Mexico border, more Americans are being recruited to smuggle them into the country. Chavez's arrest comes as border states struggle to respond to the crisis, and the legislative and executive branches remain unable to break the partisan bottleneck that has prevented any progress on major political issues, including immigration reform.

Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels told House and Senate lawmakers on a Congressional delegation to the border and port of entry earlier this month that the border crisis was directly connected to rising crime in his community.

WATCH: Cruz and Mayorkas accuse each other of being 'revolting' in tense exchange

Anna Giaritelli

March 28, 02:30 PM March 28, 02:30 PM

The secretary of the Department of Homeland Security blasted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for unleashing a "revolting" series of accusations against him during a public hearing that descended into chaos over his handling of the border.

Cruz and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas faced off Tuesday afternoon in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about oversight of DHS.

TRUMP STIRS UP GOVERNMENT DISTRUST AT WACO RALLY ON ANNIVERSARY OF DEADLY SIEGE

"Mr. Secretary, I want to say to you right now — your behavior is disgraceful. And the deaths, the children assaulted, the children raped. They are at your feet, and if you had integrity, you'd resign," Cruz said in his final statement.

"And I will tell you, the men and women of the Border Patrol, they've never had a political leader undermine them. They despise you, Mr. Secretary, because you're willing to let children be raped to follow political orders," Cruz continued. "This is a crisis. It's a disgrace. You won't even admit this human tragedy is a crisis."

As Cruz finished his remark, Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) gave Mayorkas the option of responding to Cruz's statement.

"What the senator said was revolting. I'm not going to address it," Mayorkas said.

Cruz jumped in with the final line.

"Your refusal to do your job is revolting," Cruz said.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) immediately launched into his own line of questioning and said Cruz's treatment of Mayorkas was "disrespectful."

House Democrat says he’s considering Mayorkas impeachment over border wall construction

Cami Mondeaux

March 18, 02:48 PM March 18, 02:48 PM

A House Democrat said he would consider voting in favor of impeaching Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, offering GOP lawmakers a possible path to charging the Biden administration official.

Rep. Juan Vargas (D-CA) expressed interest in joining his Republican colleagues to impeach Mayorkas, although for different reasons than what GOP lawmakers are currently trying to pursue. Vargas said he would consider voting to impeach the DHS secretary over the construction of a pair of border walls in San Diego that Mayorkas previously vowed to halt.

MAYORKAS HAS NO PLANS TO RESIGN AFTER REPUBLICANS WORK TO IMPEACH HIM

“[Mayorkas] told us that he would help us, and he hasn’t done it,” Vargas told reporters on Friday. “He betrayed us.”

Vargas is referring to a border wall project underway at Friendship Park, located between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico. Friendship Park has long served as a place for families to meet along the border with a gate in between them, but the area has been closed off by gates for several years.

Now, Border Patrol agents say the gates are deteriorating and should be replaced with new walls — a decision Vargas and other local Democratic officials have pushed back against. Construction on the new border walls reportedly began several weeks ago and is scheduled to be completed in six months.

Vargas accused Mayorkas of ending public access to the area, noting the Homeland secretary had once promised the construction would be stopped.

House Republicans have been adamant to impeach Mayorkas since taking control of the lower chamber in January. GOP leaders such as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) have long vowed to open impeachment inquiries into the DHS secretary if he doesn’t step down from office, targeting him for his handling of the southern border.

Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) introduced three articles of impeachment against Mayoraks in January, accusing Mayorkas of allegedly undermining law enforcement activities at the southern border. Fallon’s impeachment inquiry introduces three articles against Mayorkas, including charges of engaging in a pattern of conduct “incompatible with his duties," providing false and misleading testimony to Congress, and “knowingly” slandering Border Patrol agents.

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) introduced his own articles of impeachment against Mayorkas for “the systematic destruction of the geographical integrity of the United States of America.”

The articles of impeachment have been referred to the House Judiciary Committee, and it’s unclear if or when they will be considered by the entire House. If Republicans impeach Mayorkas, it’s unlikely he would be convicted in the Democratic-led Senate.

Meanwhile, the DHS said Mayorkas has no plans to resign from his post, noting the accusations being used to file the impeachment inquiry do not meet the constitutional standard of high crimes and misdemeanors.

“Secretary Mayorkas is proud to advance the noble mission of this Department, support its extraordinary workforce, and serve the American people," a DHS spokesperson told the Washington Examiner in January. "The Department will continue our work to enforce our laws and secure our border, while building a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system. Members of Congress can do better than point the finger at someone else; they should come to the table and work on solutions for our broken system and outdated laws, which they have not updated in over 40 years.”

Biden’s border visit leads to blowback from Left

Haisten Willis

January 07, 07:00 AM January 07, 07:00 AM

President Joe Biden satisfied long-standing calls from conservatives by deciding to visit the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, over the weekend.

The visit comes alongside a host of new immigration measures designed to stem the record flow of illegal crossings. While border hawks remain skeptical, the move also comes with the risk of alienating Biden's more progressive supporters.

BIDEN TO MAKE LONG-AWAITED BORDER VISIT AFTER IMMIGRATION STRATEGY REBOOT

Heritage Foundation border specialist Lora Ries told the Washington Examiner last August that Biden had "made the political calculation that he’d rather be beat up by the Right than by the Left" on the border issue, fearing he'd be labeled the deporter in chief in the way former President Barack Obama was in 2014 if he embraced enforcement.

Sure enough, Democratic resistance emerged soon after Biden's announcement.

A quartet of senators released a statement slamming the president's revitalized southern border strategy, pinning some of the blame on Republican "obstruction."

"While we understand the challenges the nation is facing at the Southern border exacerbated by Republican obstruction to modernizing our immigration system, we are deeply disappointed by the Biden Administration’s decision to expand the use of Title 42,” the senators wrote.

They described Title 42 as a "failed and inhumane Trump-era policy" that will exclude thousands of immigrants fleeing violence and persecution.

Polling shows a sharp partisan divide on the issue of immigration, which helps explain the delicate balance Biden seeks to strike. A Pew Research Center survey from September found that 73% of all respondents said increasing border security should be a goal, with 91% of Republicans and 59% of Democrats agreeing.

But while 79% of Republicans wanted to see an increase in deportations, just 39% of Democrats agreed. Meanwhile, 80% of Democrats favored establishing a way for most illegal immigrants to stay legally, compared to just 37% of Republicans.

After ignoring the issue for most of his presidency, the record-smashing number of people crossing the border as 2022 drew to a close may have made the issue too big for Biden to ignore.

Between 2,378,944 Border Patrol encounters and an estimated 600,000 illegal crossers who slipped through without any contact, nearly 3 million people crossed the border in fiscal 2022. That's up from 2.1 million in 2021, which itself was a record high. The figure was just 300,000 as recently as 2017 and 2020.

Border state Democrats, such as the mayor of El Paso and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), began calling out the president in the final weeks of the year.

Biden himself tried to carve out a nuanced view of the issue this week, acknowledging the need for a balance between asylum and order.

“We should all recognize that as long as America is the land of freedom and opportunity, people are going to try to come here. And that’s what many of our ancestors did, and it’s no surprise that it’s happening again today," he said. "We can’t stop people from making the journey, but we can require that they come here in an orderly way under U.S. law.”

Asked if he agreed with activists that migration is a human right, Biden said it is for families who are being persecuted but then acknowledged that people already in the United States have a right to be assured that those who are coming are not criminals and have passed background checks.

Andrew Arthur, a fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, agreed with Ries that any level of border enforcement is bound to upset some on the Left.

"They like the nearly unlimited migration which exists right now," he said. "So anything that impinges on that is going to be something they will complain about."

Border hawks aren't necessarily thrilled with Biden's moves either, with some calling it too little, too late.

Arthur disagrees strongly with the administration's plan to admit up to 30,000 Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan nationals with a U.S. sponsor into the country per month, calling Biden's moves ill-advised and illegal.

The move may have been necessitated by a record number of illegal crossings last year, but it still carries political risk for Biden among progressives, who are likening Biden to his hated predecessor.

"The plan [Biden] announced further ties his administration to the poisonous anti-immigrant policies of the Trump era," reads a statement from the American Civil Liberties Union, "instead of restoring fair access to asylum protections.”

US must have 'record' financial investment at the border to halt terrorists: John Kirby

Ryan King

September 24, 03:25 PM September 24, 03:25 PM

In purchase to safeguard the United States from any felony features slipping in by way of the southern border, the Biden administration sought a "document" volume of financial commitment in protection actions, according to White House Nationwide Security Council spokesman John Kirby.

When underscoring that the Biden administration is "operating really hard to secure the border" and has troops stationed there to help the Border Patrol, Kirby threw shade at Republicans for blocking the "record" degree of border funding the Biden administration pursued from Congress previously this yr.

DESANTIS ADMINISTRATION FACES LAWSUIT FROM FLORIDA LAWMAKER Above MIGRANT FLIGHTS

"We continue to have troops that are down there aiding Border Patrol officers to check out to focus on this. We requested for document concentrations of funding for DHS. Sad to say, there was no Republican assistance for that," Kirby explained to WHD News Electronic.

In April, Republicans opposed a funding ask for from the Biden administration to tackle the expiration of the pandemic-period Title 42 plan, which denied immigrants entry at the border to assistance sluggish the spread of the coronavirus. Republicans had been opposed to allowing that plan to expire in the 1st area.

Kirby was pressed on no matter if he believed it was a wise plan to permit an open border amid remnants of terrorist groups, this kind of as the Islamic State and al Qaeda, reportedly running in the region. So considerably, the U.S. had a report 2.3 million arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border for the fiscal 12 months of 2022, which ends Friday.

"We are doing the job really hard to secure the border by way of trying to spend in innovative abilities," Kirby pressured in reaction to Fox Digital. "So, we're going to continue to keep at this, and we naturally want to unquestionably really encourage more aid coming from the Republican side for some of the points that we're seeking to do."

A amount of Republican-led states have begun sending illegal immigrants to metropolitan areas run by Democrats in protest of the mass inflow, which includes asylum-seekers pouring as a result of the southern border. Previously this month, for example, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent two busloads of immigrants shut to the home of Vice President Kamala Harris.

In addition to border security problems, Kirby also lambasted Russian President Vladimir Putin for leaning on nuclear weapons as "blackmail" in opposition to the West.

"I can explain to you, we have observed no indication that tells us we have to have to improve our strategic deterrent posture. Rather than blustering and professing he's staying blackmailed by other nations about the planet, he wants to finish the war," the Countrywide Stability Council spokesman explained. "He wants to pull his troops out. It could conclude now if he would do the suitable thing."