Congress green-lights NM plan to further tap the land grant fund for public education - By Marisa Demarco, Source New Mexico
A few lines in the 4,126-page measure Congress sent to President Biden’s desk for signature Friday will mean hundreds of millions more in funding for New Mexico’s public school students each year.
Voters in N.M. overwhelmingly approved pulling an additional 1.25% from the state’s multi-billion dollar Land Grant Permanent Fund for education each year. Because the fund was set up by Congress when New Mexico became a state, the will of the voters in 2022 still required a congressional sign-off.
The lengthy bill had finally cleared both chambers on Friday — hours before the government would shut down without it — and is expected to be signed by Biden.
In the next fiscal year in New Mexico, over $200 million will come out of a pool of money fed monthly by revenue from oil, gas and mineral extraction on state lands.
Over half of the new money is destined for the state’s burgeoning early childhood education system as it recruits staff and works to reach all corners of the state, providing free or low-cost child care and pre-kindergarten schooling.
“When we improve our education and child care system, we also make our state a better place to raise a family, to start or expand a business, to find a good-paying job, and to hire the best and brightest employees,” U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich said in a written statement earlier this month as Congress went back and forth over the spending bill.
The rest of the fresh funding will go to K-12 public education, beefing up instruction for students who are at-risk, making the school year longer and paying teachers better.
Advocates say infusing public education with much-needed resources will go a long way toward putting New Mexico into compliance with a court order to provide equitable education to all of the state’s students, including those who are Indigenous, come from families with low incomes, have disabilities or are learning English.
Those students have historically not received the quality of education they have a right to under the New Mexico Constitution, according to the judge’s ruling in the Yazzie-Martinez case.
The effort to further tap the fund for public schools in New Mexico spanned years. With Biden’s approval, it will finally cross the finish line.
Another $1.45 billion for northern NM fire victims clears Congress as part of the omnibus bill - By Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
More than $1 billion in additional compensation for victims of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire was approved by the United States House of Representatives as part of a 4,100-page spending package that’s heading to President Joe Biden’s desk.
The $1.45 billion comes on top of $2.5 billion passed earlier this year to pay property damage and other types of claims to the fire victims of New Mexico’s biggest-ever wildfire, which started after the United States Forest Service botched prescribed burns. .
In total, fire victims will receive $3.95 billion in aid, minus administrative costs, and $140 million to revamp the drinking water system in Las Vegas, N.M., a town of about 14,000 people downriver of the fire. Floods in the burn scar contaminated the city’s reservoirs.
Members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation have hailed the multi-billion-dollar program as “historic” and said the money will go to fully compensating victims of the fire, who up to this point received limited payments — if they received any — from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Still, the amount for N.M. approved Friday by Congress is lower than the initial request — $2.9 billion — from President Biden’s administration.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez told Source New Mexico earlier this week that the amount was halved during negotiations, along with many other proposals.
“That’s the negotiation,” she said Wednesday. “A lot of things got cut.”
In addition to the money for fire victims here, the $1.7 trillion package contains dozens of new initiatives, including some regarding presidential vote certifications and new protections for pregnant workers.
The bipartisan vote Friday was 225-201, with one member voting “present.” The U.S. Senate voted 68-29 to approve the bill Thursday after adding several bipartisan amendments to the package.
Judge finds man linked by DNA to Albuquerque rape not guilty - Associated Press
A man accused of raping a woman who sued the city of Albuquerque over its backlog of untested rape kits has been acquitted of all charges.
A judge in 2nd Judicial District Court dismissed one count of kidnapping and two counts of criminal sexual penetration this week against 45-year-old Victor Gonzales.
Judge Jennifer Wernersbach presided over the bench trial.
New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas expressed his disappointment on the verdict, citing the fact that Gonzales' DNA was linked to the rape kit the victim gave after her attack.
"I am deeply concerned that the prior sexual history of an alleged victim of a violent sexual assault was used to discredit her testimony," Balderas said in a statement.
Gonzales' attorney, Raymond Maestas, says the judge made the right ruling.
Maestas previously argued that the DNA evidence could still mean consensual contact had occurred. Gonzales has repeatedly denied sexually assaulting the victim.
The victim gave a rape kit in December 2010 after reporting being kidnapped, bound and raped at knifepoint. Her kit was not tested until 2018.
Meanwhile, Gonzales was previously charged with multiple attacks on women that occurred between 2010 and 2012. He was arrested for this case in 2020.
The victim filed a lawsuit in February, accusing Albuquerque police of discriminating against women and girls by treating violent rapes as a low priority. She asked for unspecified damages.
At the time, city officials' only comment was to point to Mayor Tim Keller's executive order in 2018 ordering police to make a plan for clearing the backlog.
Scope of New Mexico’s fake elector scheme detailed in Jan. 6 committee report - By Ryan Lowery, Source New Mexico
The House select committee investigating the violent and deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results released its final report late Thursday.
The 846-page report is the culmination of an 18-month investigation that included more than 1,000 witness interviews and nearly a dozen public hearings. While detailing Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of an election he lost, the report describes how the former president and his allies tried to use fake electors in New Mexico and six other states to help him ignore the will of voters and stay in power.
The report led the committee to issue four criminal referrals against the former president, and one of those criminal referrals focused on the effort to appoint fake electors in states where Trump lost to President Joe Biden.
“This scheme involved lawyers, such as Kenneth Chesebro and Rudy Giuliani, as well as Mark Meadows,” the report stated. “It also was aided at key points by Chairwoman of the Republican National Committee Ronna McDaniel, members of Congress, and Republican leaders across seven states.”
The goal of the fake elector scheme was to have alternate slates of electors in place so the outcome of the election could be ultimately decided by Congress. The idea was that by having fake electors in New Mexico, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Congress could accept the decisions made by those alternate slates of electors and reject the official slates.
The report concluded that Trump oversaw the scheme himself, and that Republican leaders in some states “did not know exactly what they were being asked to do.” It also concluded that Trump campaign officials pitched the idea as a contingency, just in case any given state changed course and declared Trump the winner of its electoral votes.
Electors in each state were required to sign documents certifying their state’s election results by Dec. 14, 2020. When that date arrived, there was still no real evidence disputing the election results, making any contingency unnecessary.
“Trump and his advisors wanted Vice President Pence to disregard real electoral college votes for former Vice President Biden, in favor of these fake competing electoral slates,” the report stated. “But there never were real, competing slates of electors. By the time the fake Trump electors met on Dec. 14, appropriate government officials in each of the seven states had already certified their state’s official election results for former Vice President Biden.”
Not one court had issued an order reversing or calling into question those results of the election, either, and most election-related litigation had concluded as well. The committee also determined that the vice president does not have the authority to pick which presidential electors to count during a joint session of Congress, making the entire fake elector scheme superfluous.
“These groups of Trump backers who called themselves presidential electors were never actually electors, and the votes they purported to cast on Dec. 14 were not valid,” the report stated. “They were fake. They had no legal standing, and their fake votes could not have been used by Vice President Pence to disregard the real votes of electors chosen by the voters.”
THE “MIGHT” IN NEW MEXICO’S DOCUMENT
New Mexico’s fake elector documents differed slightly from most of the others in that the idea that this was a contingency plan was expressly written into the document.
“[I]t might later be determined that we are the duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of New Mexico…,” the document stated.
Pennsylvania is the only other state to include this sort of contingency wording. Documents filed by fake electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin didn’t contain the same hedge.
THE ILLEGAL ACT THAT LED TO VIOLENCE
During a speech at the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, Trump exhorted those assembled that day to march to the Capitol and to “demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.”
The House committee contends this comment was made intentionally as part of an overarching scheme to overturn the election and hold onto power.
“This was no off-the-cuff remark; it was the culmination of a carefully planned scheme many weeks in the making,” the report stated. “This plea by the president turned the truth on its head. There was only one legitimate slate of electors from the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and Trump wanted them rejected.”
The committee stated that the plan to prepare alternative slates of electors in these key states — and the plan to have Vice President Pence choose electoral votes from fake electors over the real ones — was devised by John Eastman, a lawyer and law professor in California who lives in Santa Fe and is registered to vote in New Mexico. The committee also asserts that Eastman knew the plan was illegal but that he pushed for it anyway.
“Eastman knew before proposing this plan that it was not legal. Indeed, in a pre-election document discussing Congress’s counting of electoral votes, Dr. Eastman specifically disagreed with a colleague’s proposed argument that the vice president had the power to choose which envelopes to ‘open’ and which votes to ‘count,’” the report stated.
By the time Trump spoke at the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, his top lawyers had implored that he not follow through with the plan to have Pence accept votes from the fake electors, the committee said in its report. Some senior campaign staff members had expressed concerns as well, and days before the joint session, the acting attorney general and the deputy attorney general blocked the sending of a letter indicating that there were “competing slates” of electors.
“The fake elector effort was an unlawful, unprecedented and destructive break from the electoral college process that our country has used to select its president for generations,” the report stated. “It led directly to the violence that occurred on Jan. 6. To address the damage that it caused, it is important to understand how it transpired.”
New Mexico state historian target of free speech complaint - Associated Press
New Mexico's state historian is being sued by a Santa Fe man who claims his free speech rights were violated when his comments were deleted from the state official's Facebook page.
Daniel Ortiz filed his civil rights complaint Dec. 16 in state district court, accusing Rob Martinez of violating free speech protections in the New Mexico Constitution. The complaint states the comments were deleted based on the point of view Ortiz expressed.
The complaint asks the court to order Martinez to stop deleting comments based on people's viewpoints and award Ortiz an unspecified amount of damages.
"He's been using his position to put forth a narrative that is Hispano-phobic and against Hispanic history and culture," Ortiz told the Santa Fe New Mexican.
Martinez said in an email to The Associated Press that he could not comment on the pending litigation.
The New Mexico Commission of Public Records and Archives, the state agency where Martinez works, is also named as a defendant in the complaint and did not respond to a request for comment.
Martinez writes a monthly history column for The New Mexican and at times has written sympathetically about the treatment of Native people by the Spanish and criticized Don Juan de Oñate over his massacre and enslavement of people from Acoma Pueblo more than 400 years ago.
The lawsuit says Martinez deleted Ortiz's comments when Martinez shared a link on the Facebook page to an Oct. 1 column about the Christian Reconquista of Spain from the Moors and how institutions developed in that process — such as the Inquisition and the Spanish system of racial classification — were brought to the New World.
"While some feel a need to demonize the Spanish, and Juan Oñate specifically, it is important to ask 'What would the alternative been if it wasn't the Spanish who arrived first?'" Ortiz commented on the post, according to the lawsuit.
Martinez replied that the article was not demonizing anyone. Ortiz then called the article "historically inaccurate."
Ortiz is the second plaintiff that attorney Kenneth Stalter has represented in a lawsuit over the deletion of comments from a social media page maintained by a public official.
Earlier this year, Stalter obtained a $25,000 settlement for a man who sued Santa Fe District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies, claiming she deleted comments and blocked the man for posting comments critical of her handling of criminal cases associated with the 2020 felling of an obelisk in the Santa Fe Plaza.
Stalter said the constitution is clear that when the government sets up a public forum, it can't pick and choose from the points of view that it likes and doesn't like.
"That message hasn't filtered down to all the government officials who have adopted Facebook pages," he said.
Title 42 border rules confound Washington, migrants alike - By Colleen Long Associated Press
The drawn-out saga of Title 42, the set of emergency powers that allows border officials to quickly turn away migrants, has been chaotic at the U.S.-Mexico border. In Washington, it hasn't unfolded much better.
The Supreme Court is weighing whether to keep the powers in place following months of legal battles brought on by Republican-led states after President Joe Biden's administration moved to end the Trump-era policy, which was set to lapse this week until the court agreed to take it up.
The administration has yet to lay out any systemic changes to manage an expected surge of migrants if the restrictions end. And a bipartisan immigration bill in Congress has been buried just as Republicans are set to take control of the House.
In short, America is right back where it has been. A divided nation is unable to agree on what a longer-term fix to the immigration system should look like. Basic questions — for example, should more immigrants be allowed in, or fewer? — are unanswered. Meantime the asylum system continues to strain under increasing numbers of migrants.
The Biden administration has been reluctant to take hardline measures that would resemble those of his predecessor. That's resulted in a barrage of criticism from Republicans who are using Title 42 to hammer the president as ineffective on border security. The rules were introduced as an emergency health measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
"The Democrats have lost the messaging war on this," said Charles Foster, a longtime immigration attorney in Texas who served as an immigration policy adviser to Republican George W. Bush but now considers himself independent. "The tragedy is, Democrats more than anyone should focus on this issue, because unless and until it can be fixed, and the perception changes, we'll get nothing ever through Congress."
Anyone who comes to the U.S. has the right to ask for asylum, but laws are narrow on who actually gets it. Under Biden, migrants arriving at the border are often let into the country and allowed to work while their cases progress. That process takes years because of a 2-million-case backlog in the immigration court system that was exacerbated by Trump-era rules.
Title 42 allows border officials to deny people the right to seek asylum, and they have done so 2.5 million times since March 2020. The emergency health authority has been applied disproportionately to those from countries that Mexico agreed to take back: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and more recently Venezuela, in addition to Mexico.
"There is not going to be a good moment, politically speaking," to end the restrictions, said Jorge Loweree of the American Immigration Council. The administration should have been preparing all along to create a better system for asylum seekers," Loweree said.
"It has allowed the other side to weaponize this issue. And the longer it remains in place, the longer the weapon will remain effective."
The authority was first invoked at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic by President Donald Trump, whose immigration policies were aimed at keeping out as many migrants as possible. He also drastically reduced the number of refugees allowed into the country, added restrictions to the asylum process that clogged the system and kept migrants in detention, and reduced legal immigration pathways.
Biden has been working to expand legal immigration and has undone some of the most restrictive Trump policies. But the administration kept the policy in place until this spring, and even expanded its use after announcing it would end.
Republican say there will be even more chaos if it's lifted. But even with Title 42 in place, border officials have been encountering more migrants than ever before. In the budget year that ended Sept. 30, migrants were stopped 2.38 million times, up 37% from 1.73 million times the year before.
"I don't know why it's taking them so long to get serious about deterrence," Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said of the Biden administration. Capito is an incoming member of the Senate Republican leadership and the top GOP senator on the committee that oversees money for Homeland Security, the federal agency that manages border security.
Border officials have braced for an expected increase, and migrants who have arrived are unsure of how asylum processes will work when the policy ends. Homeland Security officials have reported faster processing for migrants in custody on the border, more temporary detention tents, staffing increases and more criminal prosecutions of smugglers.
They say progress has been made on a plan announced in April but large-scale changes are needed. Meanwhile, the Senate's Republican leadership killed a bipartisan immigration bill that would have addressed some of these issues.
The split isn't just inside Congress. One in 3 U.S. adults believes an effort is underway to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains, according to an AP-NORC survey.
Biden and his aides have said they are working to divert migrants coming out of Central America and helping provide aid to poorer nations that are bleeding people headed for the U.S. But the president is limited without action from Congress.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the administration is surging assistance to the border and will continue to do so. But "the removal of Title 42 does not mean the border is open," she said. "Anyone who suggests otherwise is simply doing the work of these smugglers who again are spreading misinformation, which is very dangerous."
A year-long appropriations bill passed the Senate on Thursday that would give the Border Patrol 17% more money, as well as 13% more for the Justice Department to develop an electronic case management system for immigration courts.
But Citizenship and Immigration Services, central in the asylum process, only got one third of what Biden had proposed to speed up the system.
Democrats, for their part, say they want policies that reflect America's reputation as a haven for those fleeing persecution. But they can't agree on what that looks like.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., has been working on the issue for 20 years. This week, he stood on the Senate floor, sounding dejected as he talked about how Congress couldn't push through reform.
"It is a humanitarian and security nightmare that is only getting worse," he said. "We're being flooded at the border by people who want to be in the United States, safely in the United States."
Why, he asked, can't Washington figure out a better way?
Torrance County official known as dedicated public servant - Associated Press
Torrance County Commissioner LeRoy Candelaria, a semi-retired rancher and Vietnam veteran known for his public service, has died. He was 73.
Torrance County officials made the announcement late Thursday, saying Candelaria had health issues. He was finishing the second year of his latest four-year term. The Republican was elected to the commission in 2004, again in 2012 and most recently in 2020.
Colleagues said Candelaria always had the rural county's best interest at heart and that his experience and wisdom will be missed. Members of the tight-knit community east of Albuquerque shared their condolences on social media, with one saying Candelaria would walk a mile just to say hello.
"This is a hard day for Torrance County residents and staff. Today, we lost a dedicated public servant and friend," Commission Chair Ryan Schwebach said in a statement.
The commission earlier this year endured much criticism from voters who denounced certification of the primary election results. At the time, the New Mexico secretary of state's office had said it was inundated with calls from officials around the country concerned that certification controversies like those in Torrance and Otero County in southern New Mexico would become a new norm.
In Torrance County, commissioners were denounced as "cowards and traitors" by a hostile crowd before voting to certify results from June's primary. Candelaria explained that he had taken time outside commission meetings to explain his position that New Mexico's vote-counting machines are well-tested and monitored.
Candelaria supported the county clerk and acknowledged that many people were still upset about the 2020 presidential election.
"Let's worry about the next election and not take things personally," he said at the time.
Candelaria graduated from Mountainair High School in 1968 and joined the U.S. Army, where he served in the 4th Infantry Division during the Vietnam War. He later served in the Army Reserves, 387th Combat Engineers.
Family and friends said he was a strong advocate for veterans as well as active duty personnel and first responders.
After retiring from the state transportation department, Candelaria went to work for San Bar Construction in 1998 and continued with the company until his death.
Candelaria also was a member of the local soil and water conservation district, the Estancia Basin Resource Association and the New Mexico Acequia Association.
He is survived by his wife of 35 years, Concepcion "Concha", his son Anthony and daughters Adriana and Miranda. Service plans were pending.
Albuquerque chief targets uptick in shootings by officers - By Susan Montoya Bryan Associated Press
The police chief in New Mexico's largest city wants to address an increase in shootings by his officers by better defining Albuquerque's policy on the use of less-lethal force.
Chief Harold Medina made the announcement Thursday. He said his department has been working with the U.S. Department of Justice and an independent monitoring team for the past year to update a policy that was first adopted as part of court-ordered reforms stemming from an agreement with federal officials.
Medina said officers will be trained on the updated policy once it is approved.
"I want to be sure that officers are empowered to use less-lethal force when it is necessary and when it can be used effectively to prevent an incident from escalating to the point where deadly force must be used," he said in a statement.
The Albuquerque Police Department presented data in November that reflected this year's record pace for shootings by officers. There have been 18 such shootings so far this year, compared with 10 or fewer for each of the four previous years.
Medina noted three common circumstances typically surround such shootings: when officers are attempting to apprehend violent suspects; when individuals are experiencing a mental health episode; and when people with little criminal history make bad decisions under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
The department's data showed there have been 54 police shootings dating back to 2018. Of the cases reviewed, 85% involved people who were armed with a gun or a weapon that appeared to be a firearm.
More than half of the cases involved people under the influence of drugs or alcohol, while there were only two cases in which intoxication did not play a role. Without toxicology tests, it was unknown whether drugs or alcohol played a role in the remainder of the cases.
While there have been fewer instances of use of force overall, Medina acknowledged again Thursday that the department has seen an increase in deadly force.
Top officials in the police department and the city attorney's office are conducting a review of this year's shootings with the aim of identifying trends that may be otherwise missed in the course of the year. The group will assign specific questions to subject matter experts and assign deadlines to address those concerns.
The department plans to conduct such reviews every six months.
Community organizations, civil rights advocates and individuals pushing for more changes have said the recent cases in Albuquerque and elsewhere around New Mexico underscore the need for a statewide use-of-force policy that includes clear and consistent protocols for deescalating interactions with the public.
Prohibition of sacred tribal items export becomes law – KUNM News, Source New Mexico
President Joe Biden signed the Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony – or “STOP” Act –Wednesday, prohibiting the export of sacred tribal cultural items and strengthening penalties for stealing or illegally trafficking them.
In a press release, the Governor of Acoma Pueblo Randall Vicente called the passage of the STOP Act “historic.” The pueblo has been advocating for the legislation since 2015, when it began seeking the return of a sacred ceremonial shield from a French auction house.
U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, who first introduced the STOP Act in 2016, called the new federal law an important step in QUOTE-“halting the illegal and immoral theft of items that Tribes have identified as essential and sacred pieces of their cultural heritage.”
Source New Mexico reports the law’s penalties include fines and over a year in jail for exporting these items, and 10 years for a second offense. The law allows some exceptions, like in cases where a tribe has relinquished possession.
The artifacts that can no longer be exported are defined in the law as funeral objects, human remains, items used in ceremonies, and items with ongoing historical, cultural or traditional uses to tribes.
Santa Feans gather to honor the city’s dead unhoused people – Santa Fe New Mexican, KUNM News
Activists and community members gathered in a church courtyard in Santa Fe yesterday in honor of National Homeless Persons’ Remembrance Day — a bell tolling out above them once for every one of the 37 members of the city’s unhoused community who died this year, and once more for all those whose deaths are unknown.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reports The New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, which has hosted the event for 18 years, has only counted one other year with more deaths: last year, at 39.
Nancy McDonald, executive Director for Santa Fe community services Inc. said the death toll has been climbing in recent years, and the reason why is not clear.
Some of those who were honored at the event died of old age, while others lost long fought battles with illness, or overdosed, victims of the ongoing opioid epidemic, and still others succumb to the elements.
An artic storm sweeping across the state has caused temperatures to plummet, prompting the city to activate a Code Blue protocol, making extra room in shelters and doubling up city workers efforts to get people out of the cold.
However, McDonald criticized a policy that ended the practice of handing out tents and sleeping bags, and she said she fears there will be even more deaths before the year is out.
University of New Mexico, grad workers union come to deal - Associated Press
An overwhelming majority of graduate student workers at the University of New Mexico have approved a new contract agreement, capping months of bargaining.
The Albuquerque Journal reported Thursday that the United Graduate Workers Union voted in favor of the agreement 437-17 last week.
Pay hikes, paid bereavement leave and revised procedures for filing grievances are part of the new contract for teaching assistants and research assistants. There will also be renewed discussions of compensation in fall of next year.
UNM officials declined comment to the newspaper since the agreement has not been signed yet.
Christian Rhoads, a union chief steward, says every worker will get a 7% raise. But those getting the lowest stipend will receive a 10% raise. The raises will take effect with the next semester. Under the agreement, employees will also get t two weeks of medical leave and three days of bereavement leave every semester.
UNM grad workers earn on average $14,500 a year. Many say they end up working at least 40 hours a week.
The state Public Employees Labor Relations Board recognized graduate employees' demand to unionize in August 2021.
Migrants near US border face cold wait for key asylum ruling - By Morgan Lee And Elliot Spagat Associated Press
Hairdresser Grisel Garcés survived a harrowing, four-month journey from her native Venezuela through tropical jungles, migrant detention centers in southern Mexico and then jolting railcar rides north toward the U.S. border.
Now on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande across from El Paso, Texas, she's anxiously awaiting a pending U.S. Supreme Court decision on asylum restrictions expected to affect her and thousands of other migrants at crossings along some 1,900 miles (3,100 kilometers) of border from Texas to California. And she's doing so while living outside as winter temperatures plunge over much of the U.S. and across the border.
She told of fleeing economic hardship only to find more hardship, such as now having to shiver through temperatures colder than any she's ever experienced.
"Riding the train was bad. Here the situation is even worse. You just turn yourself over to God's mercy," said Garcés, who left a school-aged daughter behind, hoping to reach the U.S. with her husband.
Their savings exhausted, some days they don't eat. And on Thursday, Garcés waited and watched as hundreds of migrants formed a line to gradually pass through a gate in the border fence for processing by U.S. immigration officials. She fears immediate deportation under current asylum restrictions and doesn't dare cross the shallow waters of the Rio Grande within view.
Dozens of migrants have been spending their nights on the concrete banks of the river, awaiting word of possible changes to the asylum restrictions put in place in March 2020. In El Paso, sidewalks are serving as living quarters outside a bus station and a church for some migrants who can't find space immediately at an expanding network of shelters underwritten by the city and religious groups.
That Trump administration-era ban on asylum — Title 42 — was granted a brief extension by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday. It's not clear when the Supreme Court's definitive decision will come. The Biden administration asked the court to lift the restrictions, but not before Christmas.
Under Title 42, authorities have expelled asylum-seekers inside the United States 2.5 million times, and turned away most people who requested asylum at the border, on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19.
Title 42 applies to all nationalities but has most affected people from countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and, more recently, Venezuela.
Immigration advocates have sued to end the use of Title 42. They say the policy goes against American and international obligations to people fleeing persecution and is outdated now that coronavirus treatments have improved.
Conservative-leaning states appealed to the Supreme Court, warning an increase in migration would take a toll on public services and cause an "unprecedented calamity" with which they fear the federal government has no plan to deal.
In El Paso, Texas National Guard members have taken up positions at the behest of the state, while volunteers and law enforcement officers worried some migrants could succumb to the cold. Nighttime temperatures have been in the 30s (below 3.8 degrees Celsius) and will be even colder in coming days.
Elsewhere, hundreds of migrants fashioned a makeshift encampment — with black plastic bags for crude tents — in a park in Matamoros, Mexico, near Brownsville, Texas.
Shivering in the cold after his recent expulsion from the U.S., a former Venezuelan navy military policeman, Carlos Hernandez, spoke about how he, his wife and their 3-year-old daughter recently struggled through the cold river, only to be turned back after reaching the other side.
Hernandez said he had a falling out with superiors in Venezuela for refusing orders to take action against government opponents in the navy. He said he hoped to cross again and eventually reach Canada.
"It was very cold," he said of the river crossing.
In Tijuana, Mexico, across from San Diego, an estimated 5,000 migrants were staying in more than 30 shelters and many more renting rooms and apartments. Razor-topped walls rising 30 feet (9 meters) along the border with San Diego make illegal crossing daunting.
Francisco Palacios waited hours with his wife and 3-year-old daughter at a Tijuana-area border crossing at midweek before going to a hotel to nap. He said the family from the western Mexican city of Morelia awaits the court decision on whether and when to lift the pandemic-era restrictions that have prevented many from seeking asylum.
"We don't have a choice," Palacios said Wednesday, explaining his family arrived in Tijuana two weeks earlier to escape violence and gangs that for years extorted a chunk of their income selling fruit from a street cart.
Man linked to 5 killings in 2 states sentenced for murder - Associated Press
A man accused of killing several people in two states has been sentenced in New Jersey to 35 years in prison for the beating death of a former mentor.
Sean Lannon, 48, had pleaded guilty in October to first-degree murder in the March 2021 slaying of Michael Dabkowski, 66. Gloucester County prosecutors have said Lannon broke into the victim's East Greenwich home and beat him to death with a hammer.
Dabkowski had served as a mentor to Lannon and his twin brother when they were children in the 1980s and involved in a youth program. Lannon told investigators Dabkowski had sexually abused him as a child and that he had gone to the home to retrieve sexually explicit photos, but no evidence was ever presented in court to support that claim.
Lannon, who was sentenced Wednesday, still faces murder charges in New Mexico stemming from the killing of his ex-wife and two of her friends whose decomposed bodies were found in a pickup truck parked at an Albuquerque airport in March 2021. Police have said the three were lured to their deaths over a period of weeks before they were dismembered and their remains stuffed into plastic bins.
Lannon is also charged in the death of another man in New Mexico who authorities say agreed to help him move the bins, unaware of what they contained.