More migrants from Texas border arrive in NYC, Mayor Adams slams Gov. Abbott again: ‘It is unimaginable’ what he’s done.

“When you think about this country — a country that has always been open to those who are fleeing persecution and other intolerable conditions — we’ve always welcomed that,” he continued. “This governor is not doing that in Texas, but we are going to send the right message, the right tone, of being here for these families.”

Taxis took the 14 migrants to their next destinations free of charge, CBS New York reported.

Under New York State law, the city must provide housing for any adult who arrives by 10 p.m. with kids at a homeless shelter the day of their arrival.

New York City saw its first bus of migrants sent by Abbott on Friday morning. A charter bus brought about 50 people to the Port Authority Bus Terminal after a roughly two-day journey from the Lone Star State.

Mayor Eric Adams and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (AP)

“The journey by bus, it was tough,” one of the new arrivals, 40-year-old Alfonso Ruiz, told the Daily News on Friday. “Stopping and shouting and stopping almost all day.”

In the spring, Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who’s also Republican, announced plans to send buses of migrants to Washington, D.C. They were protesting President Biden’s move to lift restrictions on seeking asylum that were imposed near the start of the COVID pandemic. The rule remains in effect, under a court order.

Adams has been calling for federal funding to help handle the new migrants. On Sunday, he said Texas should coordinate its plans with New York .

Mayor Adams greets asylum seekers arriving in New York City from Texas. (Diane Bondareff/Mayoral Photo Office)

“In addition to Washington, D.C., New York City is the ideal destination for these migrants, who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city,” Abbott stated Friday. “I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief.”

Last week, the mayor turned down an invitation from Abbott to see the state’s southern border first-hand.

“Instead of a photo-op at the border, we hope Gov. Abbott will focus his energy and resources on providing support and resources to asylum seekers in Texas as we have been hard at work doing in New York City,” Adams spokesman Fabien Levy said at the time.

Washington, D.C. has received more than 6,100 migrants from Texas, according to Abbott’s office.

But the Pentagon on Friday rejected a request from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser for the National Guard to provide assistance for what she called a “growing humanitarian crisis.”

The Statelessness Pandemic

Oct 15, 2021LAURA VAN WAAS, NATALIE BRINHAM

PROJECT SYNDICATE


Over time, denaturalization has rightly come to be seen as a violation of human rights. But, as recent histories of the problem show, the international community still faces the same conundrum that it did a century ago, when droves of newly stateless people appealed to it for protection.

Mira L. Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History, Harvard University Press, 2020.

Claire Zalc, Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France, Belknap Press, 2020.

TILBURG – Legal theorists once consigned the idea of “statelessness” to the realm of fiction, because they considered it to be impossible within the state system that emerged after World War I. Every human being was supposed to be assigned a nationality and a country to call his or her own. But the war had created many refugees, and as empires disintegrated and new nation-states adopted exclusionary nationality laws, not everyone was in fact included.The rise of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s further exposed the fallibility of this system and the ominous reality of the state’s power to exclude people or strip them of citizenship. Across Europe, citizenship-stripping went hand in hand with genocide for Jews and other minority groups.

Following World War II, questions about the right to nationality, state power, and the limits of sovereignty loomed large in the development of human rights and international law. Could the states that were being created out of the independence movements and diminished European empires adopt nationality laws that excluded entire population groups? Did national governments hold the power to strip their own citizens of that status? Who was responsible for the newly stateless?

These issues remain highly pertinent today. Statelessness affects at least 15 million people, and the nationality of millions more is under threat, owing to an escalation of racially discriminatory policies and rhetoric in many countries. Nationality policies remain a favored tool of authoritarians, who sometimes use them in tandem with mass atrocities, as in Myanmar, where the Rohingyas have been denied citizenship and subjected to genocide and mass deportations to Bangladesh. Making matters worse, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to even more xenophobic scapegoating and ethno-nationalism, with political leaders like former US President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán blaming migrants and refugees for spreading the coronavirus.

The pandemic also reminds us of the enduring influence that nationality has over our lives. Last May, Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, warned that, “The right to a nationality is a fundamental human right and in this time of crisis it can mean the difference between life or death.” When governments prioritize their citizens over others in their public-health and economic responses, the stateless suffer. Because statelessness remains a major blind spot for the institutions charged with protecting life and livelihoods, stateless people have been left further behind than ever.

GHOSTS OF STATELESSNESS PAST

At a time when statelessness demands urgent attention, two recent books provide important lessons about the nature of state power, international responses to national acts of exclusion, and the consequences of failure. Statelessness: A Modern History, by Mira L. Siegelberg of the University of Cambridge, and Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France, by Claire Zalc, Director of the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History at the École Normale Supérieure, underscore both the historic scale of the problem and its grim costs. Each takes a different but equally meticulous approach to researching the history of the problem. And both explore how people have had their citizenship denied and revoked against the background of some of the most violent periods in modern history. Together, they remind us that the history of statelessness is a history of crumbling empires, world wars, genocides, and the emergence of an interstate system based on the formal equality of states.

Siegelberg’s work is a sweeping survey of international legal and political thought, covering a period that includes WWI, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the Holocaust, the postwar reconstruction of the international legal order, and the independence movements of the postwar decades. Drawing on a wide variety of archival sources – including popular fiction, case law, correspondence from stateless people to the League of Nations, works of legal and political theory, and notes from negotiations on human-rights treaties – she documents how the problem of statelessness informed theories of human rights and sovereignty.

Siegelberg is concerned with how notions of statelessness developed within, and then shaped, “the political contours of the modern interstate order.” She reminds us that the concepts of citizenship and statelessness are not static. Rather, the meanings attached to these terms are constantly being reshaped and reconstructed by historic events and shifting power relations.

While Seigelberg’s book provides a comprehensive overview of international perspectives and experiences concerning statelessness and the modern state’s power to exclude, Zalc’s work focuses on Vichy France between 1940 and 1944, when Jews and others were denaturalized in increasing numbers to serve the Nazi agenda of deportation to death camps. Her detailed investigation provides unique insights into how bureaucracies in authoritarian regimes produce and reproduce violence.

Drawing on the Vichy government’s archives, Zalc follows the life stories of some of those who were naturalized as French during the interwar years, only to be stripped of their citizenship and deported under wartime France’s collaborationist regime. In parallel, she also delves into the life stories of the civil servants and judges who presided over these denaturalizations, revealing the murky boundaries between collusion and resistance to Nazi policies.

CREATING THE “OTHER”

Siegelberg’s Statelessness shows us that the racial hierarchies that characterized early twentieth-century citizenship regimes gave way not to equal citizenship, as was envisaged, but rather to other forms of racism in Europe. At the same time, Zalc’s book demonstrates how processes of citizenship were racialized with the help of seemingly neutral and innocuous bureaucratic categories and data collection. Under the French Third Republic, Jewishness had been considered a private matter of faith and thus went largely unrecorded by the state. But as Zalc shows in fascinating detail, the categorizations of “Jew” and “Israelite” were deciphered and applied retroactively to stigmatize and discriminate. With a new racialized definition of “Jew,” and under pressure from the occupying Nazi regime to identify, count, and denaturalize Jews according to quotas, individual citizen files were scrutinized for evidence of Jewishness.

This process relied on proxy indicators. Chief among these were first and last names which were deemed, sometimes inaccurately, “Jewish.” Name changes, too, were identified as suspicious. Other proxy indicators included place of origin, profession, and family affiliation. The lack of clarity on the criteria for denationalization, and the broad scope left for discretion in decision-making, enabled “bureaucratic anti-Semitism.”

Zalc’s work provides direct evidence of how state power – and sometimes state violence – functions through the routine processes of registration, categorization, and counting. This was how discriminatory decisions by administrators and judges, on the basis of predominantly unstated racial criteria, ultimately resulted in deportation and mass murder. Denationalization, Zalc shows, does not only result from explicit discrimination in nationality laws, but also from the misuse of administrative and bureaucratic processes.

We see this today, too. National registers or citizenship-verification processes requiring excessive documentation and paperwork are used to exclude and marginalize certain groups. A case in point is the mass disenfranchisement of Muslims carried out by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in Assam – the biggest exercise of its kind in this century. An administrative act described by the government as “just a process” has pushed some 1.9 million people to the brink of statelessness, and many more will follow if this “process” is rolled out nationwide.

Racialized categories are also still being applied retroactively to exclude people, including through proxy indicators such as name, place of origin, or one’s status as a “dual national.” For example, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the denial and deprivation of nationality in the Dominican Republic has “disproportionately affected people of Haitian descent, who are frequently identified as such, correctly or incorrectly, based on the national origin or migratory status of their parents, skin color (especially those with a dark-colored skin), language ability, or surnames.”

And in Myanmar, where racial hierarchies in citizenship acquisition are explicit, registration and application processes have been fully weaponized against ethnic minorities and political opposition groups. Categories such as place of birth, religion, and family affiliation are used to single out Myanmar Muslims for discrimination. Meanwhile, Rohingyas using “Burmese names” on registration documents is forbidden, not explicitly in law but in the implementation of registration procedures at the township level. Local administrative processes, including restriction of movement for those within particular geographic pockets, enable the classification of ethnic and religious “others” and sustains systems of apartheid.

UNDER COVER OF “NATIONAL SECURITY”

Siegelberg and Zalc highlight not only the potential for bureaucratic violence through the administration of citizenship, but also how this exercise of state power is put to deliberate and targeted use. The archival material examined by Zalc offers a sampling of some of the legitimizing rhetoric of the day. In Vichy France, the law on denationalization was “of primordial importance.” According to a 1941 letter by Prime Minister François Darlan, it was needed to ensure that “the morally tainted or insufficiently assimilated elements that have been allowed to infiltrate the national community be eliminated as soon as possible.”

Similarly, a recent academic symposium canvassing revocations of citizenship from the 1960s through the present (with contributions focusing on Syria, India, Nigeria, and Myanmar) identified a common thread: “those targeted for exclusion are reimagined and branded as ‘aliens’ or even ‘infiltrators,’ who the state can and must uncover.”

Zalc warns that the inherent “malleability of the notion of national interest” can easily be used to legitimize “discretionary power as being exercised in the name of the higher interests of the state.” This has become a live issue again today. The revocation of nationality is enjoying something of a renaissance even in some Western democracies, where it is framed as a counterterrorism measure. As the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism Tendayi Achiume noted in a 2018 report to the General Assembly:

“States all over the world continue to use national security and counterterrorism justifications to strip members of their national populations of citizenship […] which in practice [has] a disproportionate effect on marginalized racial, national, and religious groups.”

TURNING A BLIND EYE

When stateless people appealed to the League of Nations for assistance in the years following WWI, the world’s first global-governance body received so many letters that it was forced to acknowledge the issue, and to consider whether and how it could take up the refugees’ cause. But, as Siegelberg shows, the response was muted. Firm in their resolve to protect the legitimacy of states and the international state system, legal experts at the League shied away from “the messier world of politics.” They preferred to situate “the problem of statelessness within the domain of the conflict of laws and avoided addressing it as a wider international or humanitarian crisis resulting from mass denationalization or exclusionary national legislation.”

Then came the post-WWII system, which renewed the ambition to use international law to insulate the modern world against mass atrocities, statelessness, and human-rights abuses, but has proved insufficiently robust. States have maintained and adapted their powers to exclude and denationalize their own people.

This is evident even in countries that harbor no doubts about their status as liberal democracies. In 2019, the United Kingdom’s then-Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, summarily revoked the citizenship of Shamima Begum, a teenage girl who had run away from home to become the bride of an Islamic State fighter. (Since this decision had clear political motives and was taken without any judicial proceedings, a court of appeal ruled in July 2020 that Begum should be allowed to return to the UK to fight the decision, but this ruling was overturned by the UK Supreme Court.)

Siegelberg probes the sources of the current international system’s weaknesses, such as the relationship between human-rights frameworks and sovereignty. In recent decades, important strides have been made in reframing statelessness as a human-rights issue, rather than as merely a matter of conflicting laws. Solutions have shifted from a focus on technical legal assistance (which tiptoes around the elephant in the room – state power) to approaches that challenge discrimination and states’ exclusionary powers directly.

And yet, the international system still renders us powerless to temper the discretionary power of states to choose their own membership. There is no reliable, effective check against authoritarian states that set out to disenfranchise sections of their national communities.

The contemporary drivers of statelessness are eerily reminiscent of the League of Nations era. Ethno-nationalism, security-related anxiety, and economic scapegoating are all contributing to processes of “Othering” that, in the extreme, leave individuals or entire communities without citizenship. And, as was true of the post-WWI period, we have very few effective remedies to protect stateless people.

At the same time, statelessness remains a key causal factor in human-rights abuses. The international community has come under scrutiny for failing to protect Myanmar’s Rohingyas from mass atrocities. But the writing there had been on the wall since the enactment of the country’s 1982 citizenship law, which stripped them of their rights.

Willful ignorance of the problem of statelessness has provided fertile ground for official abuses historically. Today, we must not look away as xenophobia is institutionalized in citizenship laws and bureaucracies. We must put aside fears of the “messier world of politics” and call states to account for their exclusions – before it is too late for the excluded.

Biden expands refugee cap to 62,500 people

 

Alex Wong/Getty Images

After obfuscating last month, President Joe Biden on Monday announced that he would be quadrupling the country's refugee ceiling to 62,500 for the 2021 fiscal year, with an eye toward expanding it to 125,000 refugee admissions in 2022. [CNN / Priscilla Alvarez and Maegan Vazquez] The revisions eliminate the historically low cap set at 15,000 admissions by President Donald Trump last year. [CNN / Priscilla Alvarez and Maegan Vazquez] The Biden administration almost didn’t make a change. Last month, it stated Trump’s cap was “justified by humanitarian reasons” and “otherwise in the national interest.” Backlash among Democratic allies was swift. [Associated Press / Matthew Lee, Zeke Miller and Julie Watson] In raising the cap, Biden struck a different tone. “This erases the historically low number set by the previous administration of 15,000, which did not reflect America’s values as a nation that welcomes and supports refugees,” he said in a White House press statement. [New York Times / Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs] But a lifted cap doesn’t mean the White House will let in quadruple the refugees. Biden acknowledged that the government “will not achieve 62,500 admissions this year." Refugee settlement has been slowed by barriers set up by the Trump administration and by the Covid-19 pandemic, [Politico / Laura Barron-Lopez, Nahal Toosi, and Natasha Korecki]

More Than 170,000 Migrants Taken Into Custody At Southwest Border In March

 NPR

JOHN BURNETT

JOEL ROSE

A group of migrants from El Salvador arrives in Roma, Tex

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

More than 170,000 migrants were taken into custody at the Southwest border in March, the highest monthly total since at least 2006, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials who have been briefed on the preliminary numbers but are not authorized to speak publicly.

The numbers are still being finalized and could change, the officials said. The number of migrants encountered at the border, including families as well as unaccompanied children and teenagers, has been increasing in recent months. In February, CBP reported more than 100,000 encounters.

NATIONAL

2 Girls Dropped Over U.S. Border Wall To Be Reunited With Mother

POLITICS

Biden Says 'Nothing Has Changed' But Child Migrants Crossing Border At Higher Pace

A CBP official also said Border Patrol agents have seen an increase in what they call "got aways," or unauthorized immigrants who are detected crossing the border by surveillance cameras but who agents have not been able to apprehend.

The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the number of "got aways" has risen to about 1,000 a day. Agents say they are being diverted from enforcement operations to process the rising number of migrants in custody.

Border Patrol facilities have been overwhelmed by the increase, and the Biden administration has been rushing to open new facilities to process the migrants. CBP announced Friday the opening of a 90,000-square-foot processing facility in Eagle Pass, Texas.

Children and teenagers arriving without their parents are being allowed into the U.S. But many of the migrants are being turned back under Title 42, the health order implemented by the Trump administration aimed at limiting the spread of the coronavirus, and some of the increase in recent months includes migrants crossing more than once.

A dire situation at the border

 VOX

Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images

Thousands of unaccompanied migrant minors are arriving at the US-Mexico border, and President Joe Biden has called in the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help manage the increasingly untenable situation as his administration attempts to unravel former President Trump’s migrant processing system. [Washington Post / Nick Miroff] Customs and Border Protection has held 3,000 kids longer than the legal limit of 72 hours in temporary holding facilities that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has admitted are “no place for a child” as the administration struggles to house the influx of kids arriving at the border. [CBS News / Camilo Montoya-Galvez] New reports show some children have been held as long as eight days without access to phones or showers. Biden is calling on FEMA to help house and transport kids away from Border Patrol custody. [BuzzFeed News / Adolfo Flores] About 435 unaccompanied children are arriving at the border each day. Biden has pledged to treat them more humanely than Trump, who had all migrants wait in Mexico and made no exceptions for children, housing them in squalid detention centers and separating families. But Biden has opened additional facilities, which were not intended for kids, due to the huge influx of migrants. [USA Today / Matthew Brown] Unlike Trump, the Biden administration is accepting unaccompanied minors. But Biden inherited an immigration system that struggles to manage the flow of migrants from Central America annually and a complex web of legal proceedings from the Trump administration that Biden’s personnel are still attempting to untangle. [Vox / Nicole Narea] The Biden administration has told migrants not to come, but the numbers of expected arrivals are projected to be high due to the pandemic and natural disasters in Central America. Shelters in Mexico and the US are reaching capacity. [NYT / Maria Abi-Habib] A group of progressive House Democrats, led by Rep. Ilhan Omar, is asking the Biden administration to end its contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the reports of inhumane conditions in detention facilities. [Newsweek / Danya Hajjaji] Meanwhile, a group of House Republicans led by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy toured the border today and blamed the Biden administration for the crisis. [NPR / Barbara Sprunt] House Democrats will take up two immigration bills this week as part of a piecemeal approach to enacting President Biden’s agenda — a path to citizenship for DREAMers and for farmworkers. [WSJ / Michelle Hackman]

Under Biden, the US will accept more refugees

 

Paul Ratje/Agence France-Presse/AFP via Getty Images

VOX After four years of cuts from former President Trump, President Joe Biden will issue an executive order raising the refugee ceiling, allowing the US to accept more global refugees. [Reuters / Steve Holland and Ted Hesson] The Trump administration set a historically low cap of 15,000 refugees for this year. On the campaign trail, Biden pledged to raise it to 125,000 while campaigning, but plans to wait until the new fiscal year begins in October. He has not specified how many refugees he plans to accept. [CNN / Priscilla Alvarez and Kevin Liptak] Trump’s actions will take time to undo. In order to increase the refugee ceiling, Biden will need to reopen the more than one-third of offices Trump closed and workers he let go of. [The Associated Press / Matthew Lee and Julie Watson] Biden’s plan was praised by the UN’s refugee agency. Refugee advocacy groups praised the move, but called for urgency in repairing the damage Trump had done. [The Independent / Mayank Aggarwal] Experts say the global refugee situation is worsening, with the UN estimating there are 26.3 million in the world. Further complicating matters, some 40,000 refugees have already been screened but are stuck in limbo due to Trump’s gutting of the relevant agencies. [The New York Times / Lara Jakes, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Maggie Haberman and Michael D. Shear] The backlog created by Trump means Biden is unlikely to hit his target of 125,000 refugees, even though his plan is to prorate the number between two fiscal years. [The Associated Press] Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also said the US may join the United Kingdom in adding people fleeing Hong Kong to the list of refugees the country should accept. [The New York Times]

Supreme Court just allowed Trump’s expansion of deportations to go unchecked

Asylum seekers now have little recourse to challenge fast-tracked deportations.

VOX

The Supreme Court just issued a ruling with sweeping, immediate implications for the immigration enforcement system, potentially allowing the Trump administration to move forward in deporting tens of thousands of immigrants living in the US with little oversight.

The case, Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, concerns immigration officials’ authority to quickly deport migrants who don’t express fear of returning to their home countries, which would make them eligible for asylum. The process, first enacted in 1996 and known as “expedited removal,” takes weeks, rather than the typical years it can take to resolve a full deportation case, and does not involve a hearing before an immigration judge or offer immigrants the right to a lawyer.

In a 7-2 decision, the justices found Thursday that newly arrived immigrants don’t have the right to challenge their expedited removal in federal court, which advocates claim is a necessary check on immigration officials to ensure that migrants with credible asylum claims aren’t erroneously turned away and have access to a full and fair hearing.

Until recently, only a small number of immigrants who had recently arrived in the US could be subjected to expedited removal. But President Donald Trump has sought to vastly expand US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s power to use expedited removal as a means of deporting any immigrant who has lived in the US for up to two years, potentially affecting an estimated 20,000 people.

Thursday’s decision therefore allows Trump to significantly scale up his immigration enforcement apparatus while going largely unchecked.

How expedited removal works

Full deportation proceedings are lengthy by design: Immigrants have a right to seek protection in the US and should be afforded a full opportunity to do so. Under expedited removal, however, that process is condensed to a matter of weeks, which most immigration attorneys say is not conducive to building a legal case in their favor.

If a migrant arrives in the US without authorization and expresses fear of persecution in their home country, a US Customs and Border Protection agent will first determine whether to refer them to an asylum officer in US Citizenship and Immigration Services for a screening known as a “credible fear” interview.

Asylum officers undergo extensive training to administer these interviews in a non-adversarial way and to interact with people who have faced trauma, including rape, domestic abuse, torture, and death threats. But under Trump, CBP officials have also started administering these interviews, which advocates say they are ill-equipped to do. While they have to undergo some additional training to administer these interviews, CBP agents are typically armed and have sought in many documented cases to intimidate and use excessive force against asylum seekers.

The Trump administration has also proposed changes to the credible fear interview process that would make it much more difficult for asylum seekers to pass the credible fear screening.

But if they do pass, they will have the opportunity to fight their deportation in immigration court, where they will typically have a short, initial hearing before a judge and a government attorney to learn about their rights and how their case will proceed. They are usually given time to retain a lawyer and prepare their case, which includes gathering documents attesting to experiences that might make them eligible for relief from deportation or protections under the asylum system or international torture agreements.

They then have to wait for another hearing in which they actually argue why they should be permitted to remain in the US before an immigration judge makes a decision in their case. Immigrants with currently pending cases have been waiting almost two years on average for that second hearing, according to the most recently available data.

These exhaustive proceedings in immigration court, however, are only accessible to migrants if a CBP agent initially refers them to an asylum officer and they pass a credible fear screening. Asylum seekers can challenge a credible fear determination before the asylum officer’s supervisor and then an immigration judge, but after that, they have no recourse — they may face expedited removal.

What’s more, CBP agents have historically failed to identify and refer every migrant who claims fear of persecution in their home country to asylum officers, allowing people with potentially valid asylum claims to fall through the cracks, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, a professor at Pennsylvania State Law, said.

Wave of New Polling Suggests an Erosion of Trump’s Support

NY TIMES

The coronavirus pandemic, a severe economic downturn and the widespread demonstrations in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in police custody have posed severe challenges for Trump. His approval rating has fallen to 13.2 percentage points among registered or likely voters, down from 6.7 points on April 15, according to FiveThirtyEight estimates. And now a wave of new polls shows Joe Biden with a significant national lead, placing him in a stronger position to oust an incumbent president than any challenger since Bill Clinton in the summer of 1992.

He leads the president by around 10 percentage points in an average of recent live-interview telephone surveys of registered voters. It’s a four-point improvement over the six-point lead he held in a similar series of polls in late March and early April. Since then, Bernie Sanders has left the Democratic race, the severity of the coronavirus pandemic has become fully evident, and the president’s standing has gradually eroded.

The erosion has been fairly broad, spanning virtually all demographic groups. But in a longer-term context, the president’s weakness is most stark in one respect: his deficit among women. He trails Mr. Biden by 25 points among them, far worse than his 14-point deficit four years ago. He still leads among men by six points in the most recent polls, about the same margin as he led by in the final polls of registered voters in 2016.

Over the shorter term, the decline in the president’s standing has been particularly pronounced among white voters without a college degree, helping to explain why the Trump campaign has felt compelled to air advertisements in Ohio and Iowa, two mostly white working-class battleground states where Mr. Trump won by nearly 10 points four years ago.

In the most recent polls, white voters without a college degree back the president by 21 points, down from 31 points in March and April and down from the 29-point lead Mr. Trump held in the final polls of registered voters in 2016.

Mr. Trump didn’t just lose support to the undecided column; Mr. Biden ticked up to an average of 37 percent among white voters without a degree. The figure would be enough to assure Mr. Biden the presidency, given his considerable strength among white college graduates. 

Mr. Biden has also made some progress toward redressing his weakness among younger voters. Voters ages 18 to 34 now back Mr. Biden by a 22-point margin, up six points from the spring and now somewhat ahead of Hillary Clinton’s lead in the final polls of 2016. Young voters will probably never be a strength for Mr. Biden — a septuagenarian who promised a return to normal, rather than fundamental change during the Democratic primary — but for now his margin is not so small as to constitute a grave threat to his prospects.

BUT five months remain until the presidential election. There is plenty of time for the race to swing in Mr. Trump’s favor, just as it did in the final stretch of the 2016 campaign. Indeed, the 2016 race was characterized by a predictable, mean-reverting oscillation between nearly double-digit leads for Mrs. Clinton — as in August and October — and a tighter race in which Mr. Trump trailed in national polls but remained highly competitive — as in July, September and November.

Mr. Biden’s lead in the polls today is not vastly different from the leads Mrs. Clinton claimed at her peaks after the “Access Hollywood” tape was revealed or when Mr. Trump became embroiled in a feud with a Muslim Gold Star military family.

If the race does revert toward the president, as it did on so many occasions four years ago, he could quickly find himself back within striking distance of squeaking out a narrow win. His relative advantage in the Electoral College compared with the nation as a whole, or possibly among likely voters compared with registered voters, means that he doesn’t need to gain anywhere near 10 points to get back within striking distance of re-election. In the final national polls of registered voters in 2016, Mr. Trump trailed by around an average of five points. It was close enough.

If the election were held today, the Electoral College would pose no serious obstacle to Mr. Biden, thanks to his strength compared with Mrs. Clinton among white voters and particularly those without a college degree. He would win even if the polls were exactly as wrong as they were four years ago.

Trump's campaign announced he will restart his “Keep America Great” rallies with a rally in Tulsa Oklahoma 0n June 19.

Campaign manager Brad Parscale previously said the rallies would probably resume in late summer, but Trump has been increasingly determined to get back out on the road as he slips in the polls. (Josh Dawsey and Felicia Sonmez)

Trump campaign officials are unlikely to put into place any social distancing measures for rally attendees, or require them to wear masks, people familiar with the decision-making process said, adding that it would be unnecessary because the state is so far along in its reopening.

Mr. Trump has also made it clear he doesn’t want to speak in front of gatherings that look empty because of social distancing, or to look out on a sea of covered faces as he tries to project a positive message about the country returning to normal life and the economy roaring back, even as his top health advisers have warned the pandemic is far from over. “Oh my goodness,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert, said Tuesday. “Where is it going to end? We’re still at the beginning of it.”

Campaign officials said they were considering some modest attempts at reducing risk by providing hand sanitizer on site, but said no final decisions had been made about how to safely bring together a large group of people.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Oklahoma had recorded 7,480 cases of the coronavirus and 355 deaths, according to its health department.

Mr. Trump will return to the campaign trail on Juneteenth, an annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States and celebrated as African-Americans’ Independence Day. After weeks of protests over the killing of George Floyd in police custody, protests and marches are already planned this year for the holiday in many states.

In 1921, Tulsa was the site of one of the country’s bloodiest outbreaks of racial violence, when white mobs attacked black citizens and businesses with guns and explosives dropped from airplanes.

For years now, Mr. Trump’s rallies have not shocked, awed and driven news cycles the way they did during the 2016 election, when he was an unknown political entity

.

And during the 2018 midterm election cycle, aides and advisers unsuccessfully pinned their hopes on rallies to improve the president’s mood over his lackluster polls and the special counsel’s investigation. But they did little to stabilize his frame of mind, or keep him less active on Twitter.

Why Mayor De Blasio Is Hemorrhaging Support

In the week or so since Mayor Bill de Blasio first defended the NYPD's response to protests against police brutality — and instituted the city's first curfew since 1943 — more than 1,000 current and former staff members have signed a letter saying the mayor is failing at his job. A senior aide resigned, as Politico put it, over "de Blasio’s near-unconditional defense of the NYPD amid incidents of violence against protesters." And yesterday, hundreds of employees from the mayor's office gathered at City Hill to express opposition to their boss.

"We came to this administration because we saw someone who was listening," Catherine Almonte, who has served in various roles in the administration, told Gothamist. "We saw someone who shared our values and we showed up to do the work. And we are not happy right now. This is not what we signed up for."

One of the boldest public rebukes yet has come from Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who accused the mayor last week of "hiding behind your black wife and children."
"I don’t know if they give out F-minuses," Williams added, "but he deserves one, at least for this entire year, in how he responded to the pandemic and how he’s responding to the protests. We’re probably better off with no mayor at all, to be honest."

George Arzt, who was Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary and has spent years working in city government, told Gothamist that it's "unprecedented" in city history "to have employees protest the policies of the current mayor en masse."

"He’s the first person from the progressive wing of the [Democratic] party to have become mayor, and so within that wing of the party, there was great hope," Arzt said. "And the results haven’t been there."

There are other reasons why liberals rag on the mayor — he takes an SUV to the gym, he hasn't turned the city into a cyclist's paradise, his affordable housing expansion hasn't gone far enough. But some see the root of this current backlash not just in his shortcomings as a progressive, but in his futile attempt to appease the police — and conservative police unions — who never liked him in the first place.

To recap: De Blasio originally ran on ending Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk policing strategy (his son Dante highlighted the point in that famous ad from 2013). Then, after a Staten Island grand jury failed to indict an NYPD officer for killing Eric Garner in 2014, de Blasio said he "couldn’t help but immediately think what it would mean to me to lose Dante." At a subsequent funeral for two officers who were gunned down in their squad car, police officers turned their backs on him.

"The mayor was clearly so deeply affected by the NYPD backlash in 2014," said City Councilmember Ritchie Torres, "that he has been governing in a state of fear of his own police department ever since. . . . He went from a reformer of the police to an enabler of the police and the culture of silence and indifference to black and brown lives."

New York City began to reopen. 

“Monday marked the first, limited phase of a four-part reopening plan. Wholesale sellers and manufacturers were allowed to resume business, and the construction industry made its noisy return. Many businesses remained closed. In Lower Manhattan, where City Hall and most city agencies are based, lunch spots were still closed or boarded up. Vehicle traffic was light and there was a fraction of the foot traffic that would normally clog sidewalks.”

NYC Transit officials on Tuesday said that subways and buses saw an additional 213,548 riders on Monday, the first day of the city's reopening, compared to the same day last week.

It was the first time that subway ridership reached 800,000 since before the coronavirus crisis began. Manhattan, which had seen the largest drop in ridership during the pandemic, saw a 20 percent increase on Monday.

Overall, bus ridership has fared better, reaching 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Ridership on subways on Monday was 15 percent of its level one year ago.

The fraction of New York City residents tested for coronavirus and found to be positive is now 1 percent, the lowest it has been since the coronavirus crisis began,

Although the infection rate is based on the number of city residents getting tested, the city has significantly ramped up testing to nearly 34,000 people tested in one one day. Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday said that going forward, the city would test a minimum of 35,000 people a day to ensure that health officials receive a reliable snapshot of the daily infection rate.
On Monday, the state recorded 40 new deaths from the prior day.


A new Washington Post-Schar School poll finds Americans’ move toward acknowledging racism as a top problem in the United States has been remarkably fast. The issue in the context of police brutality isn’t new, but the iteration of this debate made national news in 2014 in Ferguson, Mo. At that time, less than half the country, 43 percent, saw police killings of black men as a sign of a broader problem, The Post reports. Today 69 percent say as much.

Perhaps the only other issue to move public opinion so quickly in recent years has been same-sex marriage.

Mnuchin arrives for a Presidential Recognition Ceremony in the Rose Garden[/caption]

Following messy start, enormous Paycheck Protection Program shows signs of buttressing economy

New jobs report suggests PPP helped prevent broader economic collapse, but its overall effectiveness remains unknown

The government’s giant corporate loan forgiveness program initially ran dry, prompting outrage. The new problem: Now not enough businesses are taking advantage.

The economy remains extremely weak, with a high unemployment rate and a surge in Americans seeking assistance. Many economists say conditions will remain shaky for at least another year.

But they also say things would be even worse without the giant loan forgiveness program, which Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) shepherded through Congress and then helped defend during chaotic weeks of implementation.

Getting to this point strained the government, the banking industry and small businesses, with many missteps and pivots along the way as they tried to build a program from scratch. And the Trump administration vacillated wildly between trying to rush money out the door and then trying to tighten rules, enraging lawmakers such as Rubio, confusing borrowers and nearly overwhelming banks, even those with small-business expertise.

Two months later, the PPP has directed more than $530 billion to 4.5 million companies, and economists, business leaders, White House officials and lawmakers from both parties think it helped stabilize the economy. Because the government has released no detailed information about how many jobs the program has saved, it’s still unclear whether it achieved its primary goal of apportioning the lion’s share of the money to workers.

People are sawing through and climbing over Trump’s border wall. Now contractors are being asked for ideas to make it less vulnerable.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has asked contractors for help making President Trump’s border wall more difficult to climb over and cut through, an acknowledgment that the design currently being installed along hundreds of miles of the U.S.-Mexico boundary remains vulnerable.

The notice of the request for information that CBP posted gives federal contractors until June 12 to suggest new anti-breaching and anti-climbing technology and tools, while also inviting proposals for “private party construction” that would allow investors and activists to acquire land, build a barrier on it and sell the whole thing to the government.

Trump continues to campaign for reelection on a promise to complete nearly 500 miles of new barrier along the border with Mexico by the end of 2020, but administration officials have scaled back that goal in recent weeks. The president has ceased promoting the $15 billion barrier as “impenetrable” in the months since The Washington Post reported that smuggling crews have been cutting through new sections of the structure using inexpensive power tools.

“We have an adaptive adversary; regardless of materials, nothing is impenetrable if given unlimited time and tools,” the agency said. “Walls provide the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) the ability to slow and stop potential crossings. That means building wall will deter some people from attempting to cross, while slowing the efforts of those who still try.”

The public notice is the first indication that CBP officials do not think the steel bollard design they selected from prototypes in 2017 is sufficiently formidable to achieve that goal.

Smuggling crews have managed to saw through the steel bollards using commercially available demolition tools such as reciprocating saws with inexpensive metal-cutting blades. Others have fashioned long, improvised ladders out of cheap rebar. More-athletic fence jumpers have been seen using rope ladders to climb up the barrier, sliding down the other side by gripping a bollard like a firehouse pole.

Trump is expected to attend a ceremony in Yuma, Ariz., next week to mark the completion of the barrier’s 200th mile, according to officials who were not authorized to describe the plans.