After successfully suing the Biden administration, the 84 Dreamers represented by a Long Beach educational organization convinced a judge to grant their request to travel internationally and return to the United States.

As part of the Cal State Long Beach program, students would be travelling to Mexico, but Dreamers were questioning their ability to travel and return legally whilst maintaining their DACA status. They had contacted immigration authorities, and after having to delay the trip multiple times having to wait for a response, they filed an official complaint seeking an official response from the Biden administration.

Although the students were able to secure a victory in the judge’s ruling for their legal re-entry, their public advocacy has demonstrated a clear flaw in the processing times of immigration officials. It wasn’t until the official complaint was filed that Dreamers started hearing back from immigration authorities.

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Given the sensitive and timely nature of immigration hearings and rulings, the case has provided Dreamers and members of Congress to ramp up advocacy for accelerated processing times.

With almost 75% of American adults in favor of granting permanent legal status to DACA recipients, Democrats in Congress have increasingly taken bolder steps to afford Dreamers Temporary Protected Status.

With immigration a hotly debated topic in American legislation, Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) announced his intent to use the budget reconciliation process to overcome the hurdle of convincing Republicans to support the measure, instead requiring simple majority in the Senate to award hundreds of thousands of green cards for Dreamers.

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President Biden himself announced his intent to preserve and fortify DACA recipients after his predecessor tried unsuccessfully to end the program without sufficient justification.

With continued support for the plight of Dreamers nationwide, the political landscape is quickly changing, and law firms like the CIMA Law Group are ready and willing to continue to provide excellent legal support.

In the last few months, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of people attempting to cross the U.S. Border. In fact, Border Patrol has seen a 150% increase in encounters this year compared to the same period last year. With this steep increase has come a new tactic used by both migrants and drug smugglers alike to evade capture by Border Patrol agents. Acting deputy chief patrol agent Sabri Dikman described this new tactic, referred to as “swarming.” She stated that “instead of years gone by where we’d have a group of 20, a group of 30 crossing the border, currently we see 10 groups of two, so what happens is they split up, they cross the border, and it takes two agents or one agent to address each one of those individual groups so we become task-saturated.”

To further complicate matters, migrants and smugglers have now started to come over dressed in camoflauge and are using boots made from sections of carpet to make footprints harder to detect. This sudden change in tactics has led to over 60,000 “get-aways”, or in other words, people who have been spotted by Border Patrol cameras but have not been captured. Despite the increased “success” of evading Border Patrol agents, the Arizona-Mexico border remains one of the deadliest locations in the country for those wishing to cross. Just this last January, deaths near the Arizona border hit a 10-year high which can likely be attributed to the previous summer’s record heat in 2020.

The reasons for the sudden influx in people attempting to illegally cross the border are not entirely clear. Through interviews with those they have arrested, Border Patrol agents have learned that many people are being misled to believe that U.S. law and Border Patrol operations have changed in some way under the new Presidential Administration. Smugglers have now taken advantage of these misconceptions, lying to people about how they will be recieved by authorities at the U.S. Border. Despite this, the mission of U.S. Border Patrol has remained unchanged. “The laws for immigration have not changed, so our job has not changed . . . We’re still enforcing the same laws we have been enforcing for many years.” 

If you need help with your immigration needs, the CIMA Law Group in Phoenix, Arizona is more than equipped to answer your questions and provide help.

Sources:

We all vividly remember the atrocities that happened on January 6th. Even though there was an insurrection, 8 out of 51 Senators still voted to overturn the 2020 Presidential election results. The House is set to vote Wednesday, May 19th to establish an independent commission that would investigate the January 6th insurrection. It is still unknown how many Republicans will join the Democrats in supporting this bill. The bill is expected to pass through the Democratically controlled House, but it is important to see how many Republicans will join them. This comes after some Republicans started to downplay the violence that occurred and Representative Clyde said the insurrectionists were “just tourists”. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell came out and said they opposed the bipartisan bill to open an investigation into January 6th. This bill will pass, it does not need Republican support, but the Democrats want bipartisan support. How many, if any, will choose to vote “yay” on this bill?

Information from:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/19/politics/house-vote-january-6-commission/index.html

The Trump Justice Department secretly seized the phone records of three Washington Post reporters who covered the federal investigation into ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the newspaper said Friday. They also tried to obtain the email records for the three reporters: Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller, and Adam Entous, who now works at The New Yorker. Federal investigators obtained the records for their work, home, and cellphone numbers from April 15 to July 31, 2017. The three reporters received letters informing them of the seizure that did not specify what the seizure was about. But the three reporters wrote a piece published July 21, 2017 about classified intelligence intercepts that indicated Russia’s ambassador to the United States had discussed the Trump campaign with Sen. Jeff Sessions.

The documents that were seized are known as toll records and include the numbers of all the calls made to and from the phone numbers over the time period and how long each call lasted. The three reporters were also told that prosecutors tried to get a court order for “non content communication records” for their work email accounts but they never got those records. Though it wasn’t clear what specifically provoked the searches through the records, Washington Post reporters broke major stories about Trump allies like Jeff Sessions meeting with the Russian ambassador to discuss the Trump campaign, as well as the Obama administration’s efforts to investigate Russian interference. The Obama administration, for its part used the 1917 Espionage Act more often than all other administrations combined to prosecute leakers.

While 70% of Republicans believe the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Former President Trump, Liz Cheney, did not. She knew she was going to be voted out of her leadership position within the Republican Party so she spoke out on Tuesday, May 11, 2021. She said, “We cannot let the former President drag us backward and make us complicit in his efforts to unravel our democracy. Down that path lies our destruction, and potentially the destruction of our country”. She called out the party saying they are not conservatives like they believe because they are not accepting the truth. After the January 6th insurrection, a majority of Republicans still voted to overturn the results for a free and fair election, and they are still in Trump’s pocket. Liz Cheney has called him, as well as some of her colleagues like Kevin McCarthy, out. Without knowing it, the GOP just gave her a megaphone. She is a national leader and she said she will do everything in her power to keep former President Trump away from the Oval Office. In her words, “You can see the danger that he continues to provoke with his language. We have seen his lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution”. She will not go down without a fight.

Quotes from:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/12/politics/cheney-gop-megaphone/index.html

Donald Trump has launched a new “communications” website, which says it will publish content “straight from the desk” of the former US president. The former president launched his own Twitter-like platform Tuesday that allows followers to retweet, like, or post to Facebook his latest political missives. The site URL is donaldjtrump.com/desk. The page is trademarked under DTTM Operations LLC — part of the Trump brand that includes Trump Plaza, Trump Tower, The Mar-A-Lago Club and Trump National Golf Club/. The new platform is designed like a generic version of Twitter but is hosted as a running blog. A Twitter spokesperson communicated on Tuesday that “Generally, sharing content from the website reference is permitted as long as the material does not otherwise the Twitter Rules”. Trump has posted content dating back to March 24 on the new ‘platform’. The latest post is a video advertising his new platform, calling it “a place to speak freely and safely, straight from the desk of Donald J. Trump.”

The Trump’s ‘platform’ went live just ahead of ruling by the independent Oversight Board on the ban concerning Trump, who was banned on Facebook following the Capitol attack on January 6. On January 21, the Oversight Board accepted a case referral from Facebook to examine its decision to indefinitely suspend Trump’s access to post content on Facebook and Instagram, as well as provide policy recommendations on suspensions when the user is a political leader. YouTube has said they will reactivate Mr Trump’s account when the threat of “real-world violence” reduces.

Caitlyn Jenner, the Republican former Olympian and prominent transgender activist, announced on Friday that she would challenge Gov. Gavin Newsom of California in this year’s recall election. Ms. Jenner, whose candidacy represents one of the most prominent bids for public office by an openly transgender person in the United States, said she had filed initial paperwork to run. A recall election in the state could be confirmed this month after a petition against current governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, reached the number required to trigger a vote. Voters would be asked if they want Mr. Newsom to stay or another candidate.

A source involved with Jenner’s campaign said the leading transgender rights activist will run as a socially liberal and fiscally conservative Republican — a strategy she hopes will appeal to a broad swath of California voters who may be frustrated with the state’s progressive economic policies but remain to the left of the national GOP. “I think she has policy positions that align with right-of-center Republicans but also voters who fall outside of that category,” Jenner said. The race would come at a time of steep challenges for California. In addition to the pandemic, the state is likely to face another drought for the second time in less than a decade.