TEXAS: Vice President JD Vance is visiting the US-Mexico border on Wednesday to highlight the tougher immigration policies that the White House says has led to dramatically fewer arrests for illegal crossings since Donald Trump began his second term.
Vance will be joined in Eagle Pass, Texas, by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard as the highest-ranking members of Trump’s Republican administration to visit the southern border.
The White House says Vance is set to tour the border, hold a roundtable with local, state, and federal officials and visit a detention facility. State authorities and local activists say Vance’s itinerary also likely includes a visit to Shelby Park, a municipal greenspace along the Rio Grande that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott seized from federal authorities last year in a feud with the Biden administration. Abbott accused that administration of not doing enough to curb illegal crossings.
“Border security is national security,” Hegseth told Fox News before the trip. He added, “We’re sending those folks home, and we’re not letting more in. And you’re seeing that right now.”
Trump made a crackdown on immigration a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, pledging to halt the tide of migrants entering the US and stop the flow of fentanyl crossing the border. As part of that effort, he imposed 25 percent tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada, saying neither is doing enough to address drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
“They are now strongly embedded in our country. But we are getting them out and getting them out fast,” Trump said of migrants living in the US illegally as he delivered an address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night.
Although Trump has not made a trip to the border since Inauguration Day, the visit of three of his top officials is evidence of the scope of his administration’s focus on the issue. He has tasked agencies across the federal government with working to overhaul border and immigration policy, moving well beyond the Department of Homeland Security, the traditional home of most such functions.
Arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico plummeted 39 percent in January from a month earlier, though they’ve been falling sharply since well before Trump took office on Jan. 20 from an all-time high of 250,000 in December 2023. Since then, Mexican authorities increased enforcement within their own borders and President Joe Biden, a Democrat, introduced severe asylum restrictions early last summer.
The Trump administration has showcased its new initiatives, including putting shackled immigrants on US military planes for deportation fights and sending some to the US lockup at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. It has also expanded federal agents’ arrests of people in the US illegally and abandoned programs that gave some permission to stay.
Trump border czar Tom Homan said migrants with criminal records have been prioritized in early efforts to round up and deport people in the US illegally, but he added of other migrants, “If you’re in the county illegally, you’re not off the table.”
“When we find the bad guy, many times they’re with others, others who aren’t a criminal priority, but were in the country illegally,” Homan told reporters outside the White House on Tuesday. “They’re coming, too.”
Since Trump’s second term began, about 6,500 new active duty forces have been ordered to deploy to the southern border. Before that, there were about 2,500 troops already there, largely National Guard troops on active duty orders, along with a couple of hundred active duty aviation forces.
Of those being mobilized, many are still only preparing to go. Last weekend, Hegseth approved orders to send a large portion of an Army Stryker brigade and a general support aviation battalion to the border. Totaling about 3,000 troops, they are expected to deploy in the coming weeks.
Troops are responsible for detection and monitoring along the border but don’t interact with migrants attempting to illegally cross. Instead, they alert border agents, who then take the migrants into custody.
Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with tackling the root causes of immigration during his administration, seeking to zero in on why so many migrants, particularly from Central America, were leaving their homelands and coming to the US seeking asylum or trying to make it into the county illegally.
Harris made her first visit to the border in June 2021, about 3 1/2 months deeper into Biden’s term than Vance’s trip in the opening weeks of Trump’s second term. Trump has routinely joked that Harris was in charge of immigration policy but didn’t visit the border or even maintain close phone contact with federal officials.
Vance’s trip also comes as the Trump administration is considering the use of the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 to detain and deport Venezuelans based on a proclamation labeling the gang Tren de Aragua an invasion force that could be acting at the behest of that country’s government. That’s according to a US official with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.
It is unclear how close the decisions are to being finalized. Some officials have questioned whether the gang is acting as a tool for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom the US has not recognized as that country’s legitimate leader. There are some concerns that invoking the law would require the US to more formally recognize Maduro.
Still, the 1798 law allows the president to deport any noncitizen from a country with which the US is at war, and it has been mentioned by Trump as a possible tool to speed up his mass deportations.
Vance visits the US-Mexico border to tout Trump’s immigration crackdown
https://arab.news/mn2zq
Vance visits the US-Mexico border to tout Trump’s immigration crackdown
- Vance will be joined in Eagle Pass, Texas, by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard
- The White House says Vance is set to tour the border, hold a roundtable with local, state, and federal officials and visit a detention facility
Nobel peace laureates who did not pick up their prize
PARIS: Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who lives in hiding, is not the first Nobel Peace Prize winner who could not pick up their prize. Here are other notable absentees at the Oslo awards ceremony:
2023: Narges Mohammadi
The Iranian activist had to celebrate her Nobel Prize from a cell in Tehran’s Evin prison.
Mohammadi, who has campaigned against the compulsory wearing of the hijab and the death penalty in Iran, was represented by her 17-year-old twins, both living in exile in France, who read a speech she managed to smuggle out of her cell.
She had been in prison since 2021 but was released in December 2024 for a limited period on medical leave.
2022: Ales Bialiatski
The Belarusian human rights campaigner was in jail. He was represented by his wife Natalia Pinchuk.
Bialiatski, the founder of Viasna — the main human rights defense organization in Belarus — was sentenced in 2023 to 10 years in prison for “foreign currency trafficking.”
2010: Liu Xiaobo
The Chinese dissident was in prison serving an 11 year jail term for “subversion.” His chair remained symbolically empty, where the prize was placed.
His wife, Liu Xia, was placed under house arrest after the prize was announced and his three brothers were blocked from leaving China.
A veteran of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Liu died in 2017 of liver cancer in a Chinese hospital at the age of 61, after being transferred there from prison.
1991: Aung San Suu Kyi
Myanmar’s democracy champion won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize when she was under house arrest as part of a crackdown by the military leadership on the pro-democracy opposition.
Though given permission to travel, she declined due to fears of potentially not being able to return to her country.
Aung San Suu Kyi was represented at the ceremony by her two sons and her husband, who accepted the award on her behalf. Symbolically, an empty chair was again placed on the stage.
1983: Lech Walesa
The Polish trade union activist who forced authorities to recognize the communist bloc’s first and only free trade union, Solidarity (Solidarnosc) feared he would not be allowed back into Poland if he traveled to Oslo for the ceremony. His wife Danuta and his son represented him.
1975: Andrei Sakharov
The Soviet dissident and physicist was honored by the Nobel committee for his “fearless personal commitment in upholding the fundamental principles for peace between men.” Sakharov was barred by Soviet authorities from traveling to Norway and was represented by his wife Elena Bonner, also a rights activist.
1973: Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho
The 1973 award, one of the most controversial in the history of the peace prize, was given in the absence of the two recipients, who had reached a Vietnam ceasefire agreement that soon failed.
Le Duc Tho turned down the prize, saying that the ceasefire was not respected. Kissinger did not go to Oslo for fear of demonstrations.
1935: Carl von Ossietzky
German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp when he won the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize.
Von Ossietzky had been arrested three years earlier in a raid on opponents of Adolf Hitler following the Reichstag fire.
A German lawyer tricked his family into allowing him to pocket the prize money and was sentenced to two years of hard labor. Ossietzky died in captivity in 1938.
