News Of Western Pennsylvania And The World
Mexican authorities have arrested Ovidio Guzmán, son of notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, a source from the federal government of Mexico told CNN, in a dramatic operation in the northern state of Sinaloa on Thursday that led to clashes around the city of Culiacán.
Source: Mexican authorities arrest son of notorious drug lord ‘El Chapo’ | CNN
For nearly three years, the Title 42 public health law has allowed the U.S. to quickly expel hundreds of thousands of migrants to Mexico.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed U.S. border officials to continue expelling migrants under a policy known as Title 42 indefinitely, granting a petition from Republican-led states to prevent the Biden administration from immediately ending the pandemic-related measure.
The high court decided to hear a request from 19 Republican-led states who were seeking to delay the end of Title 42, which was originally set to expire on Dec. 21 because of a lower court order that found the policy to be unlawful.
The Supreme Court will now hear arguments on whether it should allow the Republican-controlled states to defend Title 42’s legality during its February 2023 session. In the meantime, the court agreed to suspend the lower court order which had invalidated the expulsion policy. That means Title 42 will likely remain in place for several months pending the high court’s review.
Source: Supreme Court keeps Title 42 border expulsions in place indefinitely, granting GOP-led petition
An effort led by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) to maintain Title 42 is threatening efforts to pass a sweeping government funding bill before a shutdown deadline later this week.
Congressional negotiators on both sides say the biggest holdup is ongoing negotiations to decide what the voting threshold would be to pass the amendment.
Source: Mike Lee, Title 42 drama holds up omnibus passage
Dispute between rival gangs lead to fatal shooting of lawmaker and his father in southern state of Guerrero
The Guerrero state security council said gunmen burst into the town hall in the village of San Miguel Totolapan on Wednesday and opened fire on a meeting the mayor was holding with other officials.
Among those shot dead were the mayor, Conrado Mendoza, his father and former mayor, Juan Mendoza, and other local officials, according to a statement from state authorities.
Source: Mexico mayor among 20 killed in town hall massacre
More than a dozen people were indicted in what federal investigators called a multi-state cocaine trafficking operation that included places in Pittsburgh.
Source: 16 people in 5 states, including people in Pittsburgh, charged in massive DEA drug bust
A massive earthquake struck the southwest of Mexico late Tuesday.
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake rattled the southwest region of Mexico late Tuesday prompting local leaders to appeal for calm in communities impacted.
Source: Strong earthquake hits east of Acapulco, Mexico, ‘people are worried’
By The Associated Press
Fear has invaded the Mexican border city of Reynosa after gunmen in vehicles killed 14 people, including taxi drivers, workers and a nursing student, and security forces responded with operations that left four suspects dead.
While this city across the border from McAllen, Texas is used to cartel violence as a key trafficking point, the 14 victims in Saturday’s attacks appeared to be what Tamaulipas Gov. Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca called “innocent citizens” rather than members of one gang killed by a rival.
Local businessman Misael Chavarria Garza said many businesses closed early Saturday after the attacks and people were very scared as helicopters flew overhead. On Sunday, he said “the people were quiet as if nothing had happened, but with a feeling of anger because now crime has happened to innocent people.”
“It’s not fair,” said taxi driver Rene Guevara, adding that among the dead were two of his fellow taxi drivers whom he defended and said were not involved in crime.
The attacks took place in several neighborhoods in eastern Reynosa, according to the Tamaulipas state agency that coordinates security forces, and sparked a deployment of the military, National Guard and state police across the city.
Source: Fear shakes Mexico border city after violence leaves 18 dead
MEXICO CITY (AP) — An elevated section of the Mexico City metro collapsed and sent a subway car plunging toward a busy boulevard late Monday, killing at least 20 people and injuring about 70, city officials said.
A crane was working to hold up one subway car left dangling on the collapsed section so that emergency workers could enter to check the car to see if anyone was still trapped. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said 49 of the injured were hospitalized, and that seven were in serious condition and undergoing surgery.
Sheinbaum said a motorist had been pulled alive from a car that was trapped on the roadway below. Dozens of rescuers continued searching through wreckage from the collapsed, preformed concrete structure.
“There are unfortunately children among the dead,” Sheinbaum said, without specifying how many. ,
The overpass was about 5 meters (16 feet) above the road in the southside borough of Tlahuac, but the train ran above a concrete median strip, which apparently lessened the casualties among motorists on the roadway below.
“A support beam gave way,” Sheinbaum said, adding that the beam collapsed just as the train passed over it.
Rescue efforts were briefly interrupted at midnight because the partially dangling train was “very weak.”
“We don’t know if they are alive,” Sheinbaum said of the people possibly trapped inside the subway car.
Hundreds of police officers and firefighters cordoned off the scene as desperate friends and relatives of people believed to be on the trains gathered outside the security perimeter.
Oscar López, 26, was searching for his friend, Adriana Salas, 26. Six months pregnant, she was riding the subway home from her work as a dentist when her phone stopped answering around the time the accident occurred.
“We lost contact with her, at 10:50 p.m., there was literally no more contact,” López said. With little information and a still serious coronavirus situation in Mexico City, López said “they are not telling us anything, and people are just crowding together.”
The collapse occurred on the newest of the Mexico City subway’s lines, Line 12, which stretches far into the city’s southside. Like many of the city’s dozen subway lines, it runs underground through more central areas of the city of 9 million, but then runs on elevated, pre-formed concrete structures on the city’s outskirts.
Source: Mexico City metro overpass collapses onto road; 20 dead
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has finally addressed the border crisis — but only to accuse anyone using the term “surge” of pushing a “white supremacist” philosophy.
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has repeatedly been accused of ducking the dangerously overcrowded migrant detention centers despite saying they were akin to “concentration camps” under the previous administration.
She initially appeared outraged when asked during an Instagram Live ask-me-anything session why she was “not addressing the border crisis and the kids in cages like you used to” — asking after a pause, “Are you for real?”
“It’s not a border crisis. It’s an Imperialism crisis, it’s a climate crisis, it’s a trade crisis. And also it’s a carceral crisis,” she said, without directly addressing the kids-in-cages allegation itself.
Source: AOC says calling border crisis a ‘surge’ pushes white supremacy
A 9-year-old Mexican girl drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande into Texas this week with her family, according to federal officials.
It was the third Mexican migrant drowning at the border in less than two weeks. Last week, two migrants perished near the Texas border town of Laredo.
The girl had been crossing into the country at Eagle Pass on Saturday with her mother and 3-year-old brother when all three began struggling in the water, a Customs and Border Protection spokesman told The Post on Friday.
“All three migrants were unconscious and had washed ashore onto an island in the river when bystanders flagged down nearby Border Patrol agents,” said the spokesman, Dennis Smith.
Source: 9-year-old Mexican girl drowns crossing Rio Grande into US | Fox News
As crossings along the southern border surge to near-record levels, the Biden administration is considering flying migrants to states near the Canadian border, according to a report.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) requested the plane support from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Friday after 1,000 migrant families and unaccompanied minors crossed the Rio Grande into South Texas Friday morning, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials told The Washington Post. Border agents still have another 1,000 migrants they were unable to process last night, according to communications reviewed by the Post.The backups at CBP are exacerbated by the nearly 4,500 unaccompanied children being held in detention centers and tent sites at the border, many beyond the legal three-day limit.
The Biden administration contends that the situation at the border is a “challenge,” not a “crisis.”
“A Border Patrol facility is no place for a child,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency will help shelter and transfer a record number of child migrants showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border, the Homeland Security secretary said Saturday,
While the administration of President Joe Biden has avoided calling the situation a national emergency as former President Donald Trump declared in 2019 , it acknowledged a rising number of “encounters” at the border since April.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said FEMA would help children found at the border avoid being treated as detainees of Customs and Border Protection and move them more quickly into the care of the Department of Health and Human Services
Source: FEMA ordered to help with influx of migrant children at U.S.-Mexico border
The Biden administration’s task force to reunite families separated at the border under former President Donald Trump will allow those families to reunite and settle in the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Monday.
“We are hoping to reunite the families either here or in the country of origin,” Mayorkas said at the White House press briefing. “We hope to be in a position to give them the election and, if in fact, they seek to reunite here in the U.S., we will explore lawful pathways for them to remain in the United States — and to address the family needs, so we are acting as restoratively as possible.”
Source: Biden to allow migrant families separated under Trump to reunite in the U.S.
The U.S. on Friday began admitting migrants waiting in Mexico for their immigration cases to be processed — as the Biden administration moves to wind down the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a move critics say could fuel a new border crisis.
The program, known as the “Remain-in-Mexico” policy and agreed to with Mexico, was a key component of the Trump administration’s efforts to curb the 2019 border crisis and end “catch-and-release” — by which migrants were released into the U.S. to await their hearings.
MPP set up court tents at the border where migrants could have their hearings and cases processed and then would return to Mexico to await the result. Proponents said it stopped the pull factors bringing migrants north, and was effective in weeding out illegitimate asylum claims. But critics claimed it was cruel and designed to close the border — pointing also to squalid conditions in camps set up on the Mexican side of the border.
Biden ordered a review of MPP after entering office, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced last week that it would begin to process migrants placed in the program.
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Sunday he has tested positive for COVID-19 and that the symptoms are mild.
Mexico’s president, who has been criticized for his handling of his country’s pandemic and for not setting an example of prevention in public, said on his official Twitter account that he is under medical treatment.
“I regret to inform you that I am infected with COVID-19,” he tweeted. “The symptoms are mild but I am already under medical treatment. As always, I am optimistic. We will all move forward.”
José Luis Alomía Zegarra, Mexico’s director of epidemiology, said López Obrador had a “light” case of COVID-19 and was “isolating at home.”
Mexico’s president wrote that while he recovered Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero would be taking over for him in his daily news conferences, at which he usually speaks for two hours without breaks each weekday.
Source: Mexico’s president says he’s tested positive for COVID-19
A gas tanker explosion along a Mexican highway killed at least a dozen people on Monday, according to reports.
The massive blast shook the busy Guadalajara-Tepic highway shortly before 11 a.m., sending motorists scrambling from their cars for safety, the Spanish-language newspaper El Universal said in a report.
Dramatic video posted on Twitter shows motorists leaving their cars and walking towards what appears to be a collision on the road ahead — only to scramble for their lives in the other direction when a burst of fire and smoke erupts in front of them.
Authorities said the explosion was caused by a tanker truck lugging natural gas that crashed into three other vehicles, bursting into flames, according to Mexico’s Milenio newspaper.
At least five people were killed in a pickup truck at the scene, three others while inside a Honda car, and three others in an unidentified vehicle
Source: More than a dozen killed in fiery gas-tanker blast on Mexican highway
U.S. border officials say human smugglers put migrants in harm’s way by launching rafts into the river’s cold, fast-moving waters.
Source: Migrant Raft Overturns In Rio Grande, 1 Child Dead, 3 Others Missing : NPR
President Trump called Monday night for a sweeping overhaul to an asylum system he has long said is rife with fraud.
MEXICO CITY — A man in northern Mexico had to be rescued after he accidentally trapped himself in a hole that he dug so he could spy on his former girlfriend in violation of a court order to stay away from her, authorities said Sunday.
The Sonora state attorney general’s office said the 50-year-old man had spent days digging the hole in Puerto Penasco, a town on the Gulf of California, only to become trapped and require assistance to get out.
The man had been ordered to stay away from his former girlfriend due to domestic violence charges and he is now in jail, authorities said.
Source: Man traps himself in hole he dug to spy on his ex
Gunmen burst into a bar in southeastern Mexico on Friday and opened fire, reportedly killing 13 people.
Source: Suspects still on loose after 13 people shot dead at Mexico party – New York Daily News
An armed right-wing militia group operating along the U.S.-Mexico border posted several videos to social media this week, including one in which they held about 200 asylum seeking migrants at gunpoint near Sunland Park, NM until U.S. Border Patrol agents arrived.
Source: New Mexico militia detains migrants at gunpoint until Border Patrol arrives: report
