LA PALMA: Around 300 more people fled their homes early on Thursday as flows of molten rock pouring from the Cumbre Vieja volcano threatened to engulf another area on the Spanish island of La Palma.
Emergency crews gave people living between the towns of Tazacorte and La Laguna a few hours to collect their belongings and pets and go to a meeting point.
During the morning, a 4.5 magnitude earthquake rocked the island, the Spanish National Geographic Institute said — the strongest of 100 quakes that have hit the eruption zone over the past 24 hours.
Tremors have been recorded almost constantly since before the eruption.
With no end in sight to the eruption, which is in its fourth week, authorities said they were expecting the lava flow to keep spreading northwest from the volcano.
Red hot lava has already laid waste to nearly 600 hectares of land and destroyed about 1,500 houses and other buildings, including a cement plant that gave off toxic fumes earlier in the week.
The flow has also devoured banana and avocado plantations vital to the island’s economy.
According to the official register, 300 people live in the area located between Tazacorte and La Laguna.
A small group of between 10 and 15 people who lived nearby already left on Wednesday evening. More than 6,000 people have been evacuated on the island of 83,000 people.
Hundreds more flee as lava spreads on Spain’s La Palma
https://arab.news/6w35m
Hundreds more flee as lava spreads on Spain’s La Palma
- Emergency crews gave people living between Tazacorte and La Laguna a few hours to collect their belongings and pets
- During the morning, a 4.5 magnitude earthquake rocked the island
US judge blocks Trump plans to end of deportation protections for South Sudanese migrants
- Kelley issued the order after four migrants from South Sudan along with African Communities Together, a non-profit group, sued
BOSTON: A federal judge on Tuesday blocked plans by US President Donald Trump’s administration to end temporary protections from deportation that had been granted to hundreds of South Sudanese nationals living in the United States.
US District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston granted an emergency request by several South Sudanese nationals and an immigrant rights group to prevent the temporary protected status they had been granted from expiring as planned after January 5.
The ruling is a temporary victory for immigrant advocates and a setback for the Trump administration’s broader effort to curtail the humanitarian program. It is the latest in a series of legal challenges to the administration’s moves to end similar protections for nationals from several other countries, including Syria, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua.
Kelley issued the order after four migrants from South Sudan along with African Communities Together, a non-profit group, sued. The lawsuit alleged that action by the US Department of Homeland Security was unlawful and would expose them to being deported to a country facing a series of humanitarian crises.
Kelley, who was appointed by Democratic former President Joe Biden, issued an administrative stay that temporarily blocks the policy pending further litigation.
She wrote that allowing it to take effect before the courts had time to consider the case’s merits “would result in an immediate impact on the South Sudanese nationals, stripping current beneficiaries of lawful status, which could imminently result in their deportation.”
Homeland Security Department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the judge’s ruling ignored Trump’s constitutional and statutory authority and that the temporary protected status extended to South Sudanese nationals “was never intended to be a de facto asylum program.”
Conflict has ravaged South Sudan since it won independence from Sudan in 2011. Fighting has persisted in much of the country since a five-year civil war that killed an estimated 400,000 people ended in 2018. The US State Department advises citizens not to travel there.
The United States began designating South Sudan for temporary protected status, or TPS, in 2011.
That status is available to people whose home countries have experienced natural disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary events. It provides eligible migrants with work authorization and temporary protection from deportation.
About 232 South Sudanese nationals have been beneficiaries of TPS and have found refuge in the United States, and another 73 have pending applications, according to the lawsuit.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem published a notice on November 5 terminating TPS for South Sudan, saying the country no longer met the conditions for the designation.
The lawsuit argues the agency’s action violated the statute governing the TPS program, ignored the dire humanitarian conditions that remain in South Sudan, and was motivated by discrimination against migrants who are not white in violation of the US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.
“The singular aim of this mass deportation agenda is to remove as many Black and Brown immigrants from this country as quickly and as cruelly as possible,” Diana Konate, deputy executive director of policy and advocacy at African Communities Together, said in a statement.
