Department of Homeland Security
DHS: U.S. to start reopening southern border to asylum seekers
The United States will next week begin reopening the southern border to asylum-seekers who the Trump administration forced to remain in Mexico while awaiting immigration court hearings. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said this in a statement on Friday. “Beginning on Feb. 19, the Department of Homeland Security will begin phase one of a programme to restore safe and orderly processing at the southwest border. “DHS will begin processing people who had been forced to ‘remain in Mexico’ under the Migrant Protection Protocols,” the statement said. The move marks a first step toward overturning the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the ‘remain in Mexico’ policy, which since being implemented in January 2019 has forced migrants to wait in Mexico while t...
US election: FBI probes robocalls urging voters to ‘stay home’
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating calls that seek to discourage people from voting, a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security told reporters on Tuesday. Authorities would not offer details. US state and local officials have been raising the alarm over at least two separate automated call campaigns as millions of people cast their votes on Tuesday to decide between President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden. Janaka Stucky, 42, a Democratic voter who lives in Medford, Massachusetts, was one of the many who received the robocall on Tuesday. “My first thought was that actually, it was a municipal test call for a COVID lockdown thing,” he told the Reuters news agency. “The more I thought about it I was like, oh this actually feels really off and weir...
China admits to destroying early coronavirus samples, says action was taken due to safety concerns
China has acknowledged it destroyed early samples of COVID-19, confirming a claim put forward by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo late last month. On Friday, Liu Dengfeng, a supervisor with China’s National Health Commission, admitted that ‘the Chinese government issued an order on January 3 to dispose of coronavirus samples’ at unauthorized laboratories, according to Newsweek. But Liu denied that the samples were destroyed as part of a cover-up, insisting that they were disposed of so as to ‘prevent risk to laboratory biological safety and prevent secondary disasters caused by unidentified pathogens.’ He stated that the labs were ‘unauthorized’ to handle such samples, and they had to be terminated in order to comply with Chinese public health laws. Liu did not specify how many labs des...
