New Mexico Monument Project Seeks Input On Air Tour Plan – Associated Press
The public will have a chance to weigh in on a plan to allow air tours over Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico.
The National Park Service and the Federal Aviation Administration are asking for public comment on the draft of the proposed Air Tour Management Plan.
Under the plan up to 101 air tours would be allowed each year across nine defined routes. That number is based on the average number that were reported over the monument between 2017 and 2019.
Comments can be submitted through the Park Service's planning, environment and public comment website now through Oct. 3. The project's plans are also available to look at on the website.
There are concerns air tours could damage wildlife and other natural and cultural resources.
Bandelier National Monument is among two dozen parks in the National Park System considering air tour management plans. It is about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northwest from Santa Fe and protects more than 50 square miles (130 square kilometers) of historical Native American territory.
Kirtland Air Force Base To Break Ground On New Laboratory – Associated Press
Kirtland Air Force Base will be home to a state-of-the-art laboratory for development of space technology, officials said.
Officials there will break ground next week on the Wargaming and Advanced Research Simulation Laboratory.
The $6 million, 10,685-square-foot (992-square-meter) facility will be used for simulations and analysis involving space technology research and development. This includes creating a virtual terrain where warfighters can act out scenarios using energy and space technology.
It all falls under the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate.
The groundbreaking event is scheduled for Sept. 8 at 10 a.m.
Health Official: New Mexico Children Need More Virus Testing -- By Cedar Attanasio Associated Press / Report For America
More children in New Mexico are contracting COVID-19, and low testing rates in schools mean fewer cases are counted.
This week health and education officials called for more testing of children. Some promised more testing options in the coming weeks.
School-aged children in the state are tested for COVID-19 at half the rate of adults. Fewer participate in routine testing. Around 1 in 10 school-aged kids test positive for the virus when they are tested, double the rate of adults.
Some schools have shut down temporarily this semester because of infections.
"In order to be confident that we're really knowing what's going on in schools we do need more testing," said David Scrace, who heads New Mexico's health and human services departments, on Wednesday.
Education officials have aspired for schools to test 25% of unvaccinated students each week.
Virtually no district is anywhere close to that, according to data released by the New Mexico Public Education Department from the spring semester through the end of last month.
Last week the vast majority of districts received test results from 1% or fewer of their students, according to data reported by school districts to the education department.
Albuquerque Public Schools, which serves 1 in 5 New Mexico children, said that it does not track voluntary student testing, and doesn't collect testing data citing logistical challenges, according to district spokeswoman Monica Armenta.
The district has focused instead on vaccine drives for students 12 and up who are eligible for the shots.
It's likely an undercount, but children 17 years old and younger still account for around 20% of cases, according to the Department of Health. A similar portion was seen last spring when schools allowed in-person schooling again.
More testing means identifying more cases and sending home those who are infected as well as close contacts for about a week of observation. Online schooling for those children is even worse than it was last year, since their classes are focused on in-person instruction.
"Which does not go well, she's basically doing nothing," said mom Dawn Lourenco who has a sixth-grader on quarantine from The Public Academy for Performing Arts charter school. "Without me becoming the teacher it's hard to know what is expected."
Lourenco supports programs and was one of the 8.6% of the school's parents who answered the most recent call to test students without symptoms. She believes testing can help prevent shutdowns of entire schools, like that of her 15-year old son.
He's also in remote learning this week, because a critical mass of staff and students at his high school either tested positive or were close contacts.
Lourenco took her older daughter to a testing center near the staging grounds for Albuquerque's annual hot air balloon festival.
"My daughter came back negative, but her carpool buddy came back positive," said Lourenco, who works from home doing customer support for a packaging company. "That person got tested on (a) Tuesday morning and didn't get the results until Friday night."
Delays in testing results make it harder to get students and school staff back in class when they're listed as contacts of infected peers.
At a school board meeting in Santa Fe this week, school leaders said they've applied for approval from the Department of Health to operate a testing site on campus, hoping they can cut down delays in test results and offer convenient testing for students.
At the same meeting, the Santa Fe teachers union also recommended regular, mandatory testing of unvaccinated students.
The Department of Health says it will start offering on-site testing to some schools once per week, starting next week, Scrace said. The details are still being worked out.
Student testing will require parental permission forms, but schools say it will still help. Unvaccinated school staff are already required to participate in weekly testing.
"We would certainly be interested in having a mobile testing unit set up to assist with our staff surveillance testing program," said Rio Rancho district spokeswoman Melissa Perez.
Navajo Nation Reports 74 New COVID-19 Cases, 1 New Death – Associated Press
The Navajo Nation on Friday reported 74 new COVID-19 cases and one additional death.
The latest numbers pushed the Navajo Nation's total to 32,784 cases since the pandemic began more than a year ago and 1,407 known deaths.
Tribal President Jonathan Nez is pleading for residents not to leave the reservation over the Labor Day weekend.
"The safest place to be is at home here on the Navajo Nation where the infection rate for COVID-19 is much lower than border towns and cities off our Nation," Nez said in a statement.
Nez previously said all Navajo Nation executive branch employees will need to be fully vaccinated against the virus by the end of September or submit to regular testing.
The new rules apply to full, part-time and temporary employees, including those working for tribal enterprises like utilities, shopping centers and casinos.
Any worker who does not show proof of vaccination by Sept. 29 must be tested every two weeks or face discipline.
The tribe's reservation is the country's largest at 27,000 square miles (70,000 square kilometers) and it covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
Explainer: Mexico Confronts Complex Position On Immigration - By María Verza, Associated Press
Mexico has faced immigration pressures from the north, south and within its own borders in recent weeks, putting it in an increasingly difficult position.
Thousands of migrants continue to cross its southern border, the United States sends thousands more back from the north and there's the renewed prospect of the U.S. making asylum seekers wait in Mexico for long periods of time.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Thursday the strategy of containing migrants in the south was untenable on its own and more investment is needed in the region to keep Central Americans from leaving their homes.
But the groups of migrants walking north from southern Mexico in recent days have mostly been Haitians, a group that would not be addressed by the president's proposed tree planting and youth employment programs in Central America.
MEXICO'S SOUTHERN BORDER
Protests among the thousands of mostly Haitian migrants stuck in the southern city of Tapachula have intensified in recent weeks. Many have been waiting there for months, some up to a year, for asylum requests to be processed.
Mexico's refugee agency, which handles the applications, is overwhelmed. It was already behind and the pandemic slowed things even more. So far this year, more than 77,000 have applied for protected status in Mexico, 55,000 of those in Tapachula. Haitians account for about 19,000 of those applicants.
Tapachula's shelters are full, leaving many asylum seekers to live in unsanitary conditions while they wait. Without the ability to work, many have few options.
Frustrated by the delay and their living conditions, some began to organize in groups of hundreds. Last Saturday, several groups began walking out of Tapachula headed north. The groups have so far been dispersed and-or detained by Mexican authorities, sometimes with excessive force.
MEXICO'S NORTHERN BORDER
Concern has been growing in northern Mexico since the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the restart of the controversial program that made asylum seekers wait in Mexico while their cases are processed. The Trump-era policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols, but better known as "Remain in Mexico," led to more than 70,000 asylum seekers waiting, mostly in dangerous Mexican border cities.
The Biden administration ended the program earlier this year and said it would appeal the court decision even as the Department of Homeland Security takes steps to comply. On the ground, asylum seekers trying to enter the U.S. have been frozen out. Shelters in northern Mexico fear they could soon be overwhelmed again by returned asylum seekers. The Mexican government has not said how it will respond.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues the rapid removal of migrants under a pandemic-related authority invoked by the Trump administration. So far this year, the U.S. government has made 674,000 expulsions under that Title 42 authority.
U.S. EXPULSIONS TO SOUTHERN MEXICO
The U.S. government is also flying thousands of migrants from other countries to southern Mexico, where Mexican authorities drive them to remote locations on its border with Guatemala and drop them off. The idea is to reduce returns by making it more difficult for migrants to reach the U.S. again. Mexico is similarly moving migrants detained in the north to its southern border, said Dana Graber Ladek, Mexico chief for the International Organization for Migration, a part of the United Nations system.
Alejandra Macías, from the nongovernmental organization Asylum Access Mexico, says those are illegal transfers "because they don't screen for people at risk." The IOM has expressed concern about the flights as well, because people are dropped off "sometimes at night, sometimes without knowing exactly what they are doing or where they are," said Graber Ladek.
MEXICAN GOVERNMENT ACTIONS
President López Obrador went along with the tough immigration policies of the Trump administration and has expressed willingness to continue cooperating with the Biden administration.
Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval said last week that the main objective of the armed forces and National Guard is "to detain all migration" and "cover the northern border, the southern border with soldiers."
But on Thursday, the president sounded frustrated with the migrant containment strategy, which lately has drawn widespread criticism. He said he would write a letter to Biden insisting the U.S. government invest in his proposed development projects to help people in Central America and southern Mexico feel less need to migrate — though so far, U.S. officials have been unenthusiastic about the specific plans.
His government has promised to issue thousands of work visas and welcome asylum seekers. But it was the military that received more budget support, while the refugee agency saw its budget reduced.
"We are overflowing with an absolutely unusual avalanche, above all of Haitians," said Andrés Ramírez Silva, head of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance.
Others say the problem goes beyond an increase in asylum applicants. The Roman Catholic Church said the government "lacks a clear immigration policy and strategic planning." It faults a mismanagement of resources, militarization of immigration policy and a lack of coordination between factions in government that push for containment and those that prioritize human rights.
POSSIBLE FIXES
To clear the backlog in Tapachula, Mexico's refugee agency wants to offer new options to Haitians — the second largest migrant group behind Hondurans — that would allow them to travel outside the state of Chiapas and find legal work.
Ramírez Silva says these migrants don't meet all the requirements to win asylum, but they do need protection because they can't be returned to a country amid a political and humanitarian crisis.
He said not everyone in the Mexican government agrees with that approach, but he does have the support of United Nations agencies. Graber Ladek said they are working with the Mexican government to facilitate the granting of temporary immigration permits until officials can develop other ideas that wouldn't be limited to one nationality.