Archives for May 2021

LA JOYA, Texas (AP) — Marely had traveled for 13 days, trekking with her mother from Central America to the busiest corridor for illegal U.S.-Mexico border crossings. Then, as the 12-year-old Salvadoran girl got on an inflatable raft to cross the Rio Grande in Texas in the middle of the night, she discovered her mom wasn’t coming with her.

Her mom told her that she loved her very much right before the boat got pushed into the water.

“I thought she had already gotten on, but she hadn’t,” Marely told The Associated Press this week, tears rolling down her cheeks.

But she didn’t scream or ask the smugglers to go back and get her mother.

“I knew she was on the other side. There was no going back. They told us to run, to keep going,” said Marely, who turned herself over to Border Patrol agents in La Joya, Texas.

The AP is not using the girl’s last name. It does not normally name children without permission from their parents, and the identity of her parents could not be obtained.

Growing numbers of migrant families are making the heart-wrenching decision to separate from their children and send them into America alone. Many families with kids older than 6 have been quickly expelled from the country under federal pandemic-related powers that don’t allow migrants to seek asylum. But they know that President Joe Biden’s administration is allowing unaccompanied children to stay in the U.S. while their cases are decided.

Forced out of the country, they are sending their older children, like Marely, back to cross alone. These self-separations mean children arrive in the United States confused and in distress. Many have traveled hundreds of miles with their parents without understanding why they can’t cross the last stretch together.

Once in the U.S., Marely joined two teenagers traveling without their parents and a larger group of families fleeing poverty, storm devastation and violence in their homelands. For two hours, the girl from a village south of San Salvador walked as a thunderstorm brewed overhead in the vast Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, a busy stretch for river crossings.

Marely’s mother had her memorize the full name and number for her grandmother in Washington, D.C., who told the AP she was expecting to receive her granddaughter.

As more families decide to send their children alone, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been pressed by lawmakers about the possibility that expulsions could be a “new source of family separation.” It follows widespread outrage over former President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that forced apart families on the border, some of whom still haven’t been reunited.

Mayorkas has defended speedy family expulsions, saying they protect both the American public and migrants. He said officials are “hearing anecdotally” of families who self-separate and added that about 40% of unaccompanied children have a parent or legal guardian in the U.S. and 50% have other relatives who can take care of them after they are released from government custody.

April was the second-busiest month on record for unaccompanied children encountered at the border — 17,171 were stopped — following March’s all-time high of 18,960, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

This week, Border Patrol agents found five unaccompanied migrant girls, ranging from 7 years to 11 months old, near the border town of Eagle Pass, Texas.

Agents about 250 miles (400 kilometers) south in La Joya, Texas, late Wednesday came across an 8-year-old Honduran girl named Emely, who had been walking in the brush for six hours with a group of strangers and had lost a shoe in the mud. She was sobbing uncontrollably because she lost the number of her mother who she says was expecting her in the U.S. and didn’t know where she lived.

Emely had lost sight of a fellow migrant who had her contact information, but the mother saw an AP photograph of her arrival on the Spanish-language broadcast Univision and contacted the network.

In an encampment in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, near where Marely last saw her mother, the numbers of expelled migrant families are growing. And they are making desperate decisions.

Jose Rodriguez, 41, of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, has been staying under a gray tarp with a group of Hondurans, but he hasn’t been able to sleep since he sent his 8-year-old son in mid-April with a distant cousin to cross the river into Roma, Texas.

Rodriguez had tried to cross the border with his son Jordyn, but the two were expelled in early March. They had no money and no way to return home.

“As a parent, it is very difficult. I do not wish this upon anyone. There are people who ask me if I sent my son. ‘Yes,’ I tell them, ‘but don’t do it,’” Rodriguez said. “You need to have a lot of faith and cling to God in order not to fall apart. If you are weak, you may pass out, and if you have heart disease, you may die. It is very hard.”

His wife, who stayed behind in Honduras with their 1-year-old, initially opposed sending Jordyn to cross the border alone, but Rodriguez persuaded her. He told her their lives in Honduras would only get worse, with the threat of gangs and the economy hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic and two tropical storms.

To pay the smugglers’ fees for his son’s solo attempt, Rodriguez washed dishes at a taco stand near the encampment for a month and a half. It also took some convincing to get Jordyn to go.

“You have to keep going. You will have the best clothes, the best computer and tennis shoes, and toy cars that light up,” Rodriguez said he told his son when they said goodbye.

For four days, Rodriguez says he walked around the plaza, stopping every couple of steps to cry, until he received a recorded audio message from a cousin in the U.S. whose number he had written on Jordyn’s birth certificate.

“I have good news for you. They have the boy in a home for children his age,” the cousin said.

Social workers now call Rodriguez from a shelter in Chicago twice a week to see if there is anyone Jordyn can stay with in the U.S. Relatives said they could not take care of Jordyn because they also were recent immigrants and had their own children to support.

“To this day I do not sleep. The food doesn’t taste of anything, because I think of this every single moment,” Rodriguez said. “What I want is to be with him.”

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Adriana Gomez Licon is on Twitter at https://twitter.com/agomezlicon

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — A fading coronavirus crisis and an astounding windfall of tax dollars have reshuffled California’s emerging recall election, allowing Democratic Gov. Gavin Newscom to talk about an end to most COVID-19 restrictions and propose billions in new spending as he looks to fend off Republicans who depict him as a foppish failure.

The governor spent much of 2020 on the defensive for whipsaw decisions during the depths of the pandemic that angered many business owners and residents. But more recently he has appeared to steady his stride with the all-but-certain election looming this fall.

The first-term Democrat unleashed a torrent of new spending after the state’s budget was blessed with a $76 billion surplus and $27 billion in federal pandemic aid. This week, he crisscrossed the state to unveil a string of proposals sure to bring smiles from many voters: $12 billion to fight homelessness; checks up to $1,100 for millions of low and middle-income earners who struggled during lockdowns; $2.7 billion to pay for all of the state’s 4-year-olds to go to kindergarten for free; and hundreds of millions to help small businesses recover from the economic downturn.

His budget released Friday was studded with initiatives favored by his progressive base, including $7.2 billion to pay off people’s outstanding rent and utility bills and $300 million to forgive traffic and other fines for lower-income residents. There also was $35 million to encourage local universal basic income programs and money to give Medicaid benefits to people 60 and older living in the country illegally.

As the virus threat diminishes, the economy rebounds and Californians return to familiar routines, Republican candidates will need to emphasize policy differences on issues like taxes and homelessness, rather than banking on lingering resentment from lockdowns and the pandemic, said Tim Rosales, a veteran GOP strategist who is sitting out the recall.

With conditions in the state improving “it’s harder and harder to maintain that level of … anger” during the worst days of the pandemic, he said, conceding Newsom is “on the right trajectory in terms of his approval ratings.”

The goal for Newsom’s team is not just surviving the recall. They are looking to position the governor for an expected 2022 re-election campaign that will kick off immediately following the recall election and, as importantly, restore his name to the national discussion about potential White House contenders.

Under a best-case scenario for the governor, a comeback story line from the recall might even help Newsom discredit the image popularized by his GOP gubernatorial rivals of a preening lightweight.

Republican businessman John Cox mocks Newsom as a “pretty boy.” Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer says the race is about “genuine versus phony.”

Faulconer rolled out his own attention-grabbing proposal Wednesday: Ending the state income tax for individuals making up to $50,000 and households up to $100,000, which could find wide appeal with voters in a state where taxes seem to go relentlessly in one direction: higher.

Newsom was elected in a 2018 landslide over Cox, but his popularity tumbled as he contended with public unrest over long-running school and businesses closures during the pandemic, fallout from a multibillion-dollar unemployment benefits scandal and embarrassment over his decision to attend a lavish birthday dinner at an exclusive restaurant in November while lecturing residents to stay home for safety.

Look for the Republicans to continue to attack his image — he remains shackled to the French Laundry debacle. In one night at that restaurant with lobbyists and friends, he managed to reinforce a trifecta of loathsome stereotypes about politicians – hypocrisy, elitism and the whiff of improper backroom deal-making. He later apologized for what he called a “bad mistake.”

While Newsom dominated the narrative of the race all week — the economy is “roaring back,” he told reporters in Los Angeles — a sudden spike in virus cases or another epic season of wildfires would test him again. And schools could also be a vulnerable flank. California badly trailed other states in getting children back into classrooms, a reality Republicans repeat at every turn.

The leading GOP candidates in the race start at a disadvantage in heavily Democratic California, where registered Democrats outnumber GOP voters by nearly 2-to-1. A Republican candidate hasn’t won a statewide race since 2006, when Arnold Schwarzenegger won re-election after gaining office in a recall election.

Newsom’s team has worked for months to tie the recall to national Republicans and supporters and operatives of former President Donald Trump, who is broadly unpopular in California outside his GOP base.

For Newsom, one of his advantages as a candidate was on vivid display this week: He used the power of his office to dominate the public stage as he made appearances in San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland and the Central Valley, among other locations.

Cox, meanwhile, has been campaigning with a bear in a bid to attract publicity. He criticized Newsom Friday for the surge in spending: “We should be slashing taxes and making California more affordable and not ballooning the size of our government,” he said.

Reality TV personality and former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner so far has appeared more curio than contender, barely registering in recent polling. She tweeted Friday that “California should already be fully open!”

Faulconer’s biggest challenge is becoming known outside his hometown area in San Diego. He said he intends to take his campaign to communities around the state, where voters are looking for “somebody who actually has the experience … who can bring positive change and reform.”

Thad Kousser, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, said a lot will change by the time voters go to the polls. Will the massive investment in homelessness make a change? Will Newsom suffer another self-inflicted wound like his trip to the French Laundry?

“Right now the recall is not in the hands of the governor or its backers. This is all about the direction of the state,” he said. “What really matters is where we are in the fall.”

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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Ethiopia has again delayed its national election after some opposition parties said they wouldn’t take part and as conflict in the country’s Tigray region means no vote is being held there, further complicating Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s efforts to centralize power.

The head of the national elections board, Birtukan Mideksa, in a meeting with political parties’ representatives on Saturday said the June 5 vote in Africa’s second most populous country would be postponed, citing the need to finish printing ballots, training staffers and compiling voters’ information. The board said she estimated a delay of two to three weeks.

Ethiopia last year delayed the vote, the first major electoral test for Abiy, citing the COVID-19 pandemic. That heightened tensions with the Tigray region’s leaders, who declared that the prime minister’s mandate had ended and defiantly held a regional vote of their own that Ethiopia called illegal.

Since then, war in Tigray has killed thousands and led the United States to allege that “ethnic cleansing” against Tigrayans was being carried out in the western part of Tigray, a region of some 6 million people. The term “ethnic cleansing” refers to forcing a population from a region through expulsions and other violence, often including killings and rapes.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Saturday said the U.S. is “gravely concerned by the increasing number of confirmed cases of military forces blocking humanitarian access” to parts of Tigray, calling it “unacceptable behavior.” The statement again urged the immediate withdrawal from Tigray of soldiers from neighboring Eritrea who witnesses say have blocked or looted aid and carried out atrocities including gang rapes. “Both Eritrean and Ethiopian authorities have repeatedly promised such a withdrawal,” Blinken said.

Ethiopia’s prime minister, who introduced sweeping political reforms after taking office in 2018 and won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year, has vowed that this election would be free and fair. Abiy will keep his post if his Prosperity Party wins a majority of seats in the national assembly.

But questions about the vote have been growing amid sometimes deadly ethnic tensions in other parts of the country of some 110 million people and more than 80 ethnic groups.

The campaign director for one of Ethiopia’s largest opposition parties, Yilkal Getnet with the Hibir Ethiopia Democratic Party, told The Associated Press his party has long believed the country is not ready to hold an election at this time.

“There are lots of peace and security challenges across the country in addition to the border issue with Sudan,” Yilkal said, adding that the safety of millions is in question. “As opposed to the ruling party’s thinking, we don’t believe that the election will solve these problems. A national dialogue on a range of issues should come first.”

The European Union recently said it would not observe the vote, saying Ethiopia failed to guarantee the independence of its mission and refused its requests to allow the importation of communications equipment. Ethiopia replied that external observers “are neither essential nor necessary to certify the credibility of an election.”

The opposition Oromo Federalist Congress earlier this year pulled out of the vote. Several of the party’s leaders remain behind bars after a wave of violence last year sparked by the killing of a popular Omoro musician.

Late last month, five U.S. senators wrote to the U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffrey Feltman, expressing concerns about Ethiopia’s ability to hold fair elections while the Tigray conflict continues.

In response to that, Ethiopia’s national election board said it was “striving” to ensure the poll will be free. “Shortfalls are inevitable given factors such as population size, development deficits at all levels, a nascent democratic culture and an increasingly charged political and security environment,” it said.

The election board has said some 36.2 million people have registered to vote. It was hoped that up to 50 million would do so.

“We are deeply concerned about increasing political and ethnic polarization throughout the country,” the State Department said Friday.

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LONDON (AP) — The biggest soccer crowd in England since players started taking a knee saw the anti-racism gesture booed by some fans before the FA Cup final between Chelsea and Leicester on Saturday.

The jeering was heard over some applause as more than 20,000 supporters were allowed inside Wembley Stadium after producing negative coronavirus test results.

It is the largest gathering of any form in Britain since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

Players started taking a knee when the Premier League resumed from its 100-day shutdown in June 2020 as part of calls to eradicate racial injustice in society following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

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More AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

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