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U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials report that an illegal alien from India tested positive for the coronavirus (COVID-19) after he illegally crossed the border with a group of Mexican nationals. CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan reported that Border Patrol agents patrolling near Calexico, California, apprehended a group of three Mexican nationals and an Indian national after they illegally crossed the border from Mexico. Border Patrol agents quickly returned the Mexican nationals to their home country under anti-coronavirus policies. “On Thursday, April 23, a U.S. Border Patrol agent apprehended three Mexican nationals and one Indian national suspected of having illegally...

When it unveiled an unprecedented order last month to swiftly expel virtually all unauthorized migrants from the U.S. southern border, the Trump administration said potentially infected foreigners could spread the coronavirus in the U.S., prompt outbreaks in immigration jails and strain public health resources along border communities. But in a paradoxical twist, Guatemala, the largest source of migration to the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years, fears the U.S. is exporting the virus there through its deportation policy. At least 99 migrants recently deported to Guatemala by the U.S. have tested positive for coronavirus as of Sunday, according to the nation's...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico has almost entirely cleared out its migrant shelters over the past five weeks to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, returning most of the occupants to their countries of origin, official data showed on Sunday. In a statement, the National Migration Institute (INM) said that in order to comply with health and safety guidelines, since March 21 it had been removing migrants from Mexico’s 65 migrant facilities, which were harboring 3,759 people last month. In the intervening weeks, Mexico has returned 3,653 migrants to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador by road and air with...

NEW YORK - Ulises García went from being a waiter to working at a laundromat. Yelitza Esteva used to do manicures and now delivers groceries. Maribel Torres swapped cleaning homes for sewing masks. The coronavirus pandemic has devastated sectors of the economy dominated by immigrant labor: Restaurants, hotels, office cleaning services, in-home childcare and hair and nail salons, among others, have seen businesses shuttered as nonessential. The Migration Policy Institute found that 20% of the U.S. workers in vulnerable industries facing layoffs are immigrants, even though they only make up 17% of the civilian workforce. And some of those immigrants,...

When Congress passed the CARES Act to provided relief from the coronavirus impact, it sent about $14 billion to institutions of higher education to address the unique impact the virus has had on college campuses. Colleges and universities had been waiting for the Department of Education to release guidance to detail how exactly schools could allocate the grant money, including who is eligible. Today, Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Department released new guidance to address that and more. In the guidance, DeVos chose to limit the students eligible for the grant aid to those eligible for federal student financial aid...

MEXICO CITY/PORT-AU-PRINCE - Mexico and Haiti have detected coronavirus infections among migrants deported recently from the United States, officials said on Tuesday, part of a growing trend of contagion among deportees. The new infections come after an outbreak among deportees to Guatemala, where the government at the weekend linked almost a fifth of all cases of the new coronavirus in the country to flights returning migrants from the United States last week. All three affected countries have far fewer confirmed cases of the disease than the United States. Three Haitians who arrived in the Caribbean country two weeks ago tested...

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee, accused Democrats of exploiting the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic in order to push for "extreme changes in immigration policy." "This concept ought to be simple: We should not turn our back on the citizens and lawful immigrants of this great country to favor those that broke the law and came here illegally or overstayed their visas," said the Ohio congressman during a conference call with Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Matthew Albence and Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Mark Morgan. Democrats have called...

Does Google Have Hillary Clinton’s Emails? Court Authorizes Subpoena to Find Out It Took Coronavirus for the Veterans Affairs to House Homeless Vets in Tents Mexican Drug Tunnel Leads to U.S. Warehouse Run by Illegal Aliens Trump’s Winning Coronavirus Bet Does Google Have Hillary Clinton’s Emails? Court Authorizes Subpoena to Find Out If you use Gmail, you know that Google holds your messages seemingly forever. Could it be doing the same with Hillary Clinton’s elusive emails? We’ll find out. We have served a subpoena, authorized by a DC federal court, on Google to produce all Clinton emails from a...

City officials in Orange ordered a small motel operating as a birth tourism lodge to shut down by the end of the month. Council members on Tuesday night revoked the JR Motel’s conditional use permit, saying the owner did not operate the facility for its intended use. The JR Motel doesn’t have a sign or take reservations from the general public. Instead, it caters to well-off Chinese women who come to the United States while pregnant with the intention of giving birth to a child who, by law, will be an American citizen. Though the practice isn’t illegal, city officials...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Wednesday plans to give cash payments to adult immigrants living illegally in the state to help them weather the coronavirus crisis. The plan, which would use a mix of taxpayer money and charitable donations from corporations and philanthropists, will give 150,000 adults $500 each during the coronavirus outbreak, the governor said. California has had an estimated 2 million immigrants living in the country illegally. They have not been eligible for the $2.2 trillion stimulus package approved by Congress last month, which pledged cash payments to most Americans while boosting unemployment benefits by $600 per...

HOUSTON - Elsy was on the phone in an immigration detention center when guards showed up with face masks and forms to sign. The asylum-seeker from El Salvador and others had resorted to tearing their T-shirts into face coverings after a woman in their unit tested positive for COVID-19. But the guards would not give out the masks until the detainees signed the forms, which said they could not hold the private prison company running the detention center in San Diego liable if they got the coronavirus, according to Elsy and two other detainees, including one who read the form...

For Aldo Martinez, a paramedic in Fort Myers, Fla., who often works a 37-hour shift, the long days have become routine since the coronavirus pandemic broke out -- several of his colleagues have had to self-quarantine out of fears they may have been exposed to COVID-19. Aside from filling in for his colleagues, tending to the dozens of calls he receives each day, and keeping himself safe on the job, Aldo feels an extra degree of pressure as one of more nearly 680,000 young immigrants whose ability to work in the country would be threatened if the Deferred Action for...

Four Democrat congressmen, three of whom represent districts along the U.S. southern border, demanded the Trump administration halt border construction amid the coronavirus pandemic and direct the funds instead to fight the outbreak. In the letter dated Wednesday to the heads of the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security, Reps. Raul Grijalva, Filemon Vela and Ann Kirkpatrick and House Homeland Security Committee chairman Bennie Thompson demanded border wall construction immediately cease to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. "At a time when we are all taking extraordinary steps to limit the death toll and economic devastation...

SAN DIEGO - A U.S. Border Patrol agent wouldn’t let Jackeline Reyes explain why she and her 15-year-old daughter needed asylum, pointing to the coronavirus. That confrontation in Texas came just days after the Trump administration quietly shut down the nation’s asylum system for the first time in decades in the name of public health. “The agent told us about the virus and that we couldn’t go further, but she didn’t let us speak or anything,” said Reyes, 35, who was shuttled to a crossing March 24 in Reynosa, Mexico, a violent border city. She tried to get home to...

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) edited a headline from the New York Post that slammed her and other members of the "Squad." The headline, which reads, "'Squad' members want to make illegal immigrants eligible for coronavirus aid," was edited by Omar on Twitter, who swapped the words "illegal immigrants" to "American taxpayers." "There, fixed it for you," Omar said in her tweet. The New York Post report highlights components that progressive members of the so-called "squad," including Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Omar, want to add to the next coronavirus aid and relief package. The article highlighted that...

Guatemala has asked the US to limit the number of people it puts on planes for deportation to Central American countries to 25, down from 60 to 90. Two people had to be taken to hospital after they tested positive for coronavirus upon getting off a deportation flight. Guatemala says it is concerned deported migrants from the US - which has the highest number of cases in the world - will spread the virus to Guatemala. Guatemala has had 70 confirmed cases. In an attempt to prevent the virus from spreading throughout the country, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei has banned...

Santiago (AFP) - Latin America is heading into "a deep recession" in 2020, with an expected drop in the region's GDP of 1.8 to 4.0 percent due to the coronavirus pandemic, the UN economic commission for the region said Friday. "We are at the beginning of a profound recession. We're faced with the largest fall in growth that the region has had," said Alicia Barcena, executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL). Latin America was already struggling economically, with feeble growth of just 0.1 percent in 2019. As with other parts of the...

Six immigrant detainees who have underlying health issues that make them more vulnerable to coronavirus were ordered released by a federal judge Thursday, April 2, from the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County. The order from Judge Terry J. Hatter, a senior U.S. district judge, was in response to a lawsuit filed Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California against officials with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and the Adelanto facility. The civil rights group argued that detainees at the Adelanto facility aren’t being given appropriate protection from coronavirus, and that continued...

The women detained at the for-profit jail in the small, rural town of Jena, Louisiana, hail from all corners of Latin America. Some are asylum-seekers who fled repressive regimes. Others are lawful U.S. permanent residents who were picked up by immigration authorities after serving time in prison. Some are mothers and even grandmothers. Right now, they're all terrified. Like many of the more than 35,000 immigrants currently in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, the women held at the LaSalle detention center in Jena feel powerless to shield themselves from the highly contagious coronavirus, which has killed more than...

BASILE, Louisiana - U.S. immigration officials say they have a plan if detention centers get hit with coronavirus outbreaks: They will transfer detainees with serious symptoms to hospitals with “expertise in high risk care.” But many centers - each housing hundreds of people, often in close quarters - are located in remote communities, far from hospitals able to handle a rush of patients with COVID-19. Detention center outbreaks in such areas could quickly swamp local hospitals, threatening their ability to treat local residents along with detainees. The shortage of available care is especially acute in Louisiana, according to interviews with...