WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden said on Thursday he expects to speak with China’s President Xi Jinping about what the United States says was a Chinese spy balloon that a US fighter jet shot down early this month after it transited the United States.
“We are not looking for a new cold war,” Biden said.
Biden, in his most extensive remarks about the Chinese balloon and three unidentified objects downed by US fighters, did not say when he would speak with Xi, but said the United States was continuing to engage diplomatically with China on the issue.
“I expect to be speaking with President Xi, I hope we are going to get to the bottom of this, but I make no apologies for taking down that balloon,” Biden said in response to complaints from Beijing.
After the speech, he told NBC News: “I think the last thing that Xi wants is to fundamentally rip the relationship with the United States and with me.”
China says the 200-foot (60-meter) balloon was for monitoring weather conditions, but Washington says it clearly was a surveillance balloon with a massive undercarriage containing electronics.
Biden, who had made few public comments about the spate of aerial objects that began with the spotting of the Chinese balloon, broke his silence after lawmakers demanded more information on the incidents, which have baffled many Americans.
He said the US intelligence community was still trying to learn more about the three unidentified objects: one that was shot down over Alaska, one over Canada and a third that plunged into Lake Huron. The administration has said they were downed because they posed a threat to civil aviation.
“We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were, but nothing right now suggests they were related to the Chinese spy balloon program or they were surveillance vehicles from any other country,” Biden said.
The intelligence community believes the objects were “most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions,” Biden said.
Biden said they might have been spotted due to radar that was enhanced in response to the Chinese balloon.
“That’s why I’ve directed my team to come back to me with sharper rules for how we will deal with these unidentified objects moving forward, distinguishing between those that are likely to pose safety and security risks that necessitate action and those that do not,” he said.
Biden said the results of the administration’s review of how to deal with unidentified objects going forward would be classified and shared with relevant members of Congress. “These parameters will remain classified so we don’t give a road map to our enemies to try to evade our defenses,” he said.
Biden’s remarks followed reports that the Chinese balloon, downed on Feb. 4 after crossing the continental United States, originally had a trajectory that would have taken it over Guam and Hawaii but was blown off course by prevailing winds.
The incident prompted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a planned February visit to Beijing, where both sides had sought to stabilize already fraught relations.
Blinken’s scheduled attendance at the Munich Security Conference this weekend has raised speculation that he could meet China’s top diplomat Wang Yi there.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that US military and intelligence agencies tracked the balloon from when it lifted off from China’s southern island province of Hainan.
It was shot down off the South Carolina coast. American lawmakers have slammed the administration for letting it first drift across the country, including near sensitive military bases.
Asked in advance about Biden’s remarks, a China’s foreign ministry spokesman on Thursday once again referred to the downed balloon as an “unmanned civilian airship,” and said its flight into US airspace was an “isolated” incident.
The US “should be willing to meet China in the middle, manage differences and appropriately handle isolated, unexpected incidents to avoid misunderstandings and misjudgments; and promote the return of US-China relations to a healthy and stable development track,” spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters at a regular briefing.
Beijing had criticized Washington for overreacting by shooting down the balloon, and warned of “countermeasures against relevant US entities that undermine China’s sovereignty and security.”
On Thursday, China put Lockheed Martin Corp. and a unit of Raytheon Technologies Corp. on an “unreliable entities list” over arms sales to Taiwan, banning them from imports and exports related to China in its latest sanctions against the US companies. Lockheed makes the F-22 Raptor fighter jet that flew the mission to shoot down the Chinese balloon and Raytheon makes the AIM-9X Sidewinder missile that blew it out of the sky.
Biden says he will speak to China’s Xi about balloon incident
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Biden says he will speak to China’s Xi about balloon incident
Thousands rally against immigration enforcement in subzero Minnesota temperatures
- Protesters have gathered daily in the Twin Cities since Jan. 7, when 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer
MINNEAPOLIS: Police arrested about 100 clergy demonstrating against immigration enforcement at Minnesota’s largest airport Friday, and thousands gathered in downtown Minneapolis despite Arctic temperatures to protest the Trump administration’s crackdown.
The protests are part of a broader movement against President Donald Trump’s increased immigration enforcement across the state, with labor unions, progressive organizations and clergy urging Minnesotans to stay away from work, school and even shops. The faith leaders gathered at the airport to protest deportation flights and urge airlines to call for an end to to what the Department of Homeland Security has called its largest-ever immigration enforcement operation.
The clergy were issued misdemeanor citations of trespassing and failure to comply with a peace officer and were then released, said Jeff Lea, a Metropolitan Airports Commission spokesman. They were arrested outside the main terminal at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport because they went beyond the reach of their permit for demonstrating and disrupted airline operations, he said.
Rev. Mariah Furness Tollgaard of Hamline Church in St. Paul said police ordered them to leave but she and others decided to stay and be arrested to show support for migrants, including members of her congregation who are afraid to leave their homes. She planned to go back to her church after her brief detention to hold a prayer vigil.
“We cannot abide living under this federal occupation of Minnesota,” Tollgaard said.
Protesters demand ICE leave Minnesota
The Rev. Elizabeth Barish Browne traveled from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to participate in the rally in downtown Minneapolis, where the high temperature was minus 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 degrees Celsius) despite a bright sun.
“What’s happening here is clearly immoral,” the Unitarian Universalist minister said. “It’s definitely chilly, but the kind of ice that’s dangerous to us is not the weather.”
Protesters have gathered daily in the Twin Cities since Jan. 7, when 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. Federal law enforcement officers have repeatedly squared off with community members and activists who track their movements.
Sam Nelson said he skipped work so he could join the march. He said he’s a former student of the Minneapolis high school where federal agents detained someone after class earlier this month. That arrest led to altercations between federal officers and bystanders.
“It’s my community,” Nelson said. “Like everyone else, I don’t want ICE on our streets.”
Organizers said Friday morning that more than 700 businesses statewide have closed in solidarity with the movement, from a bookstore in tiny Grand Marais near the Canadian border to the landmark Guthrie Theater in downtown Minneapolis.
“We’re achieving something historic,” said Kate Havelin of Indivisible Twin Cities, one of the more than 100 participating groups.
Detention of a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old
A 2-year-old was reunited with her mother Friday, a day after she was detained with her father outside of their home in South Minneapolis, lawyer Irina Vaynerman told The Associated Press.
Vaynerman said they had quickly challenged the family’s detention in federal court. The petition states that the child, a citizen of Ecuador, was brought to the US as a newborn. The child and her father, Elvis Tipan Echeverria, both have a pending asylum application and neither are subject to final orders of removal.
A US district judge on Thursday had barred the government from transferring the toddler out of state, but she and her father were on a commercial flight to Texas about 20 minutes later, according to court filings. They were flown back Friday.
Agents arrested Tipan Echeverria during a targeted operation, according to a DHS statement said. DHS said the child’s mother was in the area but refused to take the child.
Vaynerman rejected that explanation, saying Tipan Echeverria was “not allowed” to bring his 2-year-old to her mother inside their home.
DHS repeated its allegation Friday that the father of 5-year-old Liam Ramos abandoned him during his arrest by immigration officers in Columbia Heights on Tuesday, leading to the child being detained, too.
Department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Liam was detained because his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, “fled from the scene.” The two are detained together at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas, which is intended to hold families. McLaughlin said officers tried to get Liam’s mother to take him, but she refused to accept custody.
The family’s attorney Marc Prokosch said he thinks the mother refused to open the door to the ICE officers because she was afraid she would be detained. Columbia Heights district superintendent Zena Stenvik said Liam was “used as bait.”
Prokosch found nothing in state records to suggest Liam’s father has a criminal history.
On Friday, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino sought to shift the narrative away from Liam’s detention by attacking the news media for, in his view, insufficient coverage of children who have lost parents to violence by people in the country illegally. After briefly mentioning the 5-year-old during a news conference, he talked about a mother of five who was killed in August 2023.
Details from Good’s autopsy
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner posted an initial autopsy report online for Good that classified her death as a homicide and determined she died from “multiple gunshots wounds.”
A more detailed independent autopsy commissioned by Good’s family said one bullet pierced the left side her head and exited on the right side. This autopsy, released Wednesday through the Romanucci & Blandin law firm, said bullets also struck her in the arm and breast, although those injuries weren’t immediately life-threatening.
Antonio Romanucci, an attorney for the family, said in a statement that the family is still awaiting the full report from the medical examiner and “hope that they communicate with Renee’s family and share their report before releasing any further information to the public.”
A spokesperson for the firm said there were no funeral plans to share yet.
