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What is so galling about the continued transport of migrant children through Chattanooga is not the private firms allowing their facilities to be used and not the nonprofit organizations fulfilling their missions to help protect minor children but that the children's continued illegal flow into the country is not only allowed but sanctioned by the president of the United States.

The fact that it has been done under cover of darkness (the most recent instance a flight into Wilson Air Center at the Chattanooga Municipal Airport late last Saturday, according to WRCB-TV)), with tarps shielding movement at a local facility last month, with no notice to state officials, is tacit acknowledgement that what is occurring is wrong, against the law.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, U.S. Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, and U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann all have made the Biden administration aware of their dismay at the flagrant flouting of the law. But they can only get in line.

Children have been brought to Nashville, Knoxville and Atlanta, as well as Chattanooga, a source close to the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Nashville's FOX 17 News this week. The source indicated chains of buses from those cities often transport them to larger cities such as New York, Chicago or Miami.

"There are drop-offs in small towns and big cities all along the routes," the source said. "I don't know if they're going into other processing centers. In some cases, family members are waiting to find these children ... But my understanding in a number of these cases, these kids are fresh across the border ... They have intentionally not shared a lot of information with us. They don't want this to get out."

The source said most of the trips originate in Dallas and that Department of Defense regulations require different buses along the way.

"The bus comes through in the middle of the night," he said. "The kids get on a different bus ... The bus goes another eight or nine, 10 hours; they'll make a couple stops along the way ... Then they'll get on another bus, go another eight or nine hours. So they have chained all of these companies together. They go from one bus company to another bus company to another bus company. It's very sad."

A bus driver, also speaking in anonymity, told the television station she is given scant details about the trips she is to take.

(READ MORE: Immigration experts say Tennessee officials are misguided in criticizing unaccompanied migrant children program)

"I myself am kind of in the dark," she said. "... The whole thing is last minute."

The driver said while she has observed some touching reunions of children with family members, "I think that's the exception, not the rule."

A record 19,000 migrant children entered the United States illegally in March. That followed 9,500 in February. The number in April was expected to be lower than that in March, according to administration officials, but the highest number for April in history.

In early May, 22,195 children were in custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Whether that number included the number dispersed at the expense of the administration into the interior of the country was not known.

Late last month, Lee told this page that he had declined the Biden administration's request to house migrant children in Tennessee "for a number of reasons," but mainly because the administration could not clarify information state officials sought and because the state was "not equipped to handle them in those facilities" being suggested.

He said the state was not told about the children brought into Chattanooga and hosted by Redemption to the Nations Church in April, and that the whole movement of migrant children including some being trafficked and others being smuggled in by "coyotes" earning enormous fees is "incredibly unsafe," places them in "increasing danger" and "has to be stopped."

"They're calling an audible in the middle of a crisis because they don't know what to do," Lee said of the Biden administration. "The answer is to secure the border."

The state has taken refugee children before, and the Tennessee governor indicated the state "can be good-faith partners" again.

The problem, though, not just for this state but for all states, is the Biden administration's unwillingness to control the flow at the Southern border, its hypocrisy about why it wants more illegal immigrants here (for "bought" votes down the road), and its incredible lack of transparency and communication about the movement of minors within states.

That the country's leaders would ever facilitate its laws to be broken, and make children pawns in doing so, would have been unimaginable and unconscionable to those who founded the nation on freedom, liberty and the rule of law.

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Cooper: Movement of illegal immigrant children in the dark of night is evidence the Biden Administration knows its actions are wrong - Chattanooga...

Much like the rest of the nation, Alondra Garcia has spent the pandemic not quite knowing whats coming next.

The bilingual elementary school teacher from Milwaukee has had to contend with adjusting to virtual learning, a bout with COVID-19, and now a return to in-person schooling under Milwaukee Public Schools strict pandemic safety regulations. All the while, she was doing her best to teach the next generation.

It was very exhausting, Garcia said.

But Garcia had another set of uncertainties looming: She is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era program that protects from deportation and provides a work permit to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.

While DACA recipients like Garcia avoided the worst-case scenarioa wholesale dismantling of the program after repeated attempts by former President Donald Trumpthey are still waiting for President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress to fulfill their 2020 campaign promises of immigration reform and a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants.

More than 6,500 DACA recipients and 70,000 other undocumented immigrants live in Wisconsin, according to figures from the American Immigration Council. Many of them spent the last 14 months working in essential jobslike meatpackingthat put them at high risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19.

Now, advocates say, its time for those workers to get rewarded with a clear path to citizenship.

You know what? Its about time we give this recognition that they have through this pandemic put the food on Americas table, said Tony Gonzalez, director of the American Hispanic Association in Wausau.

Three bills currently before Congress would provide that reward and deliver on Democrats promised reforms.

Throughout the first months of Bidens term, Voces de la Frontera Action, an immigrant and workers rights group based in Milwaukee, held marches and protests throughout Wisconsin advocating for the bills and pressuring Democrats to either pass them or roll them into a larger package that could be passed through budget reconciliation, a process that requires only a simple Senate majority vote rather than the 60 votes needed to overcome a likely Republican filibuster.

The White House is opposed to using budget reconciliation for immigration reform, saying it would prefer a bipartisan solution. But Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, said she isnt holding out for Republican support.

We dont believe there is hope for bipartisanship, Neumann-Ortiz said. So our push is on Democrats.

Key to that push is Democratic Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Neumann-Ortiz said, due to her relative seniority and leadership position as Senate Democrats caucus secretary. Following a Voces de la Frontera event Thursday at the state Capitol, Baldwin released a statement through the group reiterating her support for immigration reform using whatever legislative path we can, including the budget reconciliation process.

Democrats have power now, and they need to wield it, Neumann-Ortiz said.

Garcia, who is involved with Voces de la Frontera and recently joined the group in a demonstration in Washington, DC, echoed that sentiment and warned Democrats may lose Latino support and enthusiasm if they dont deliver.

If we dont do something about it this year, I feel like people are gonna lose motivation, lose that optimism, lose that want to actually think its going to be possible, Garcia said.

Gonzalez lives and organizes within the heavily Republican 7th Congressional District currently represented by US Rep. Tom Tiffany, whose newsletters and press releases frequently invoke negative images of illegal aliens. Still, Gonzalez said, hes not giving up on the hope for wider support.

I propose just to bring people to the table and have a conversation, and have a real, good, robust conversation, Gonzalez said. No fights, no finger-pointingmore, Lets lay the ground of whats common, and how do we find solutions?

Read more here:
Wisconsin Advocates Say the Time for Immigration Reform Is Now - UpNorthNews

Nine boats packed with hundreds of migrants arrived on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa on Sunday, and officials said more people were expected as the weather improved.

Around 1,200 people got off the vessels at Lampedusa, one of the main landing points for people trying to get across the Mediterranean into Europe, ANSA news agency said.

"Migrants arrivals are resuming alongside good weather," Lampedusa's mayor Toto Martello told state broadcaster RAI. "We need to restart discussions about the immigration issue."

Around 11,000 migrants disembarked on Italy's coasts from the start of 2021 to May 7, compared with 4,105 in the same period the year before, interior ministry data shows.

Overall numbers are still down from 2015, when hundreds of thousands of migrants made the perilous sea crossing to Europe, many of them fleeing poverty and conflict across Africa and the Middle East.

But the issue still sharply divides European governments and has fuelled anti-immigration sentiment and parties across the continent.

Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy's far-right League party, called on Prime Minister Mario Draghi to tackle the issue.

"With millions of Italians facing difficulties, we cannot care for thousands of illegal migrants," he wrote on Twitter.

Some of the boats were intercepted off the coast of the Mediterranean island by the Italian tax police, who deal with financial crime and smuggling, ANSA said.

About 400 migrants of various nationalities got off one of the boats, a drifting fishing vessel, the agency reported.

Another boat carrying 325 people was intercepted eight miles off Lampedusa, the agency added.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Boats carrying hundred of migrants arrive in Italy's Lampedusa - Reuters

For a "nation of immigrants," Americans have remarkably mixed feelings about immigration feelings which are surely a contributing factor to our multi-decade treadmill slog toward immigration reform.

Consider these new poll results from Pew Research Center:

Every single question sees a majority agreeing that the proposal at hand is either "very" or "somewhat" important for the United States. Dive into the demographic breakdowns and you'll find partisan trends, but often less dramatic than the past five years of immigration debate might suggest. In fact, on a two-year trendline, Republicans and Democrats are generally moving in the same direction, albeit from different starting points.

So what has Americans thus united? Beefing up border security and keeping out asylum seekers yet treating asylum seekers humanely if they somehow manage to break through our diverse defenses. The same survey also found seven in 10 Americans (including half of Republicans) want a path to legal status for immigrants in the country illegally, and another recent poll from The Associated Press found three quarters of Americans want to allow refugees to come to the United States to escape violence.

It all seems so contradictory. Together, these surveys suggest the median U.S. opinion is that an undocumented immigrant inside the country should be allowed to stay, but an asylum seeker at the border should be turned away by a robust security apparatus, but a refugee trying to come from farther away should be welcomed in.

Some of this is different people wanting different things. Yet with majority opinions well above 50 percent on so many of these questions, there must be overlap, and overlap doesn't make much sense. Why beef up security only to accept those who evade it? (Particularly when border security has already massively expanded in both cost and manpower, by both Democrats and Republicans over the past three decades.) And why the favor for refuge and disfavor for asylum? The main difference between them is location. (As the Department of Homeland Security explains: "An asylee is a person who meets the definition of refugee and is already present in the United States or is seeking admission at a port of entry.") Moreover, regardless of individuals' views, how are lawmakers supposed to turn this jumble into reasonably coherent and representative governance?

I suspect the confusion around location is partly just how humans work: It's easier for us to identify with and meaningfully care about people physically closer to us. We can shrug at a major catastrophe half the world away and sob over a much smaller tragedy in our own town. Likewise, an undocumented immigrant is here illegally, but she is here. "Americans have empathy for those who live among us and who are good people as most illegal immigrants are," Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, told me in an interview by email. "But those feelings do not extend to people on the other side of the border."

That latter group includes asylum seekers, Nowrasteh said, because many Americans don't believe the "migrants showing up on the southwest border are bona fide asylum seekers" and that belief is often correct. "Some of them may be asylum seekers according to a broad reading of U.S. law," he explained, "but the vast majority of them clearly aren't." They're better described as economic migrants trying to do the whole only in America, land of opportunity thing, which is quite difficult to accomplish under current law. Asylum is one of very few legal immigration paths for unskilled workers without close family in the United States. That's why so many people who don't strictly need asylum try to get it.

This dynamic might sound like a great reason to make our immigration process much simpler and open to more people. That's certainly how it strikes me. The trouble is many "Americans have no idea how the immigration system works and how restrictive it is," Nowrasteh told me. They also "hate chaos and want to stop it by using the government," he continued, sharing research which suggests "the perception of greater chaos and less control over immigration leads to opposition to immigration, even the legal variety, and greater political support for harsh repressive methods."

The recent surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border including tens of thousands in line to seek asylum looks like chaos on American news segments. That has many Americans (even many who are typically pro-immigration) demanding more security and restrictions at the border. What they don't realize is the extensive security and byzantine restrictions already in place are a key source of the very chaos they want to stop.

Giving economic migrants a quick, doable option to immigrate "the right way" would remove the incentive for them to do it "the wrong way," including illicit border crossings and the unmerited asylum claims Americans are so eager to reduce. For our immigration policy and feelings alike, we need to simplify.

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Americans are incoherent on immigration - The Week

French politicians have been debating whether there is a link between terrorism and immigration, after a policewoman was killed by a Tunisian man in Paris on April 23. InfoMigrants reviews the current laws on immigration and legalizing undocumented foreigners in France.

The April 23 killing of a French policewoman by a 36-year-old Tunisian man in Rambouillet, near Paris, reopened a contentious debate about the legalisation of undocumented foreigners in France. After several simplistic, inaccurate or false statements were made by politicians in the news and social media, InfoMigrants takes stock of the immigration laws concerning the legalization of foreigners in France.

1. "We must stop legalising illegal immigrants. When a person enters our country violating French law, and stays on with an illegal status, we must end the possibility of legalising him under the law."

-- Marine Le Pen, head of the right-wing National Rally party (formerly the National Front) on BFM-TV, April 23, 2021.

Marine Le Pen talked about revoking the possibility under the law of regularising a foreigner who has entered French soil illegally. This is legally complicated, if not impossible.

First, this proposal contravenes the principle of the right to asylum, governed by the Geneva Convention, to which France is a signatory. An individual has the right to request international protection without any prerequisite. There is no need to have an "authorisation" to enter French soil.

The law does not require an asylum seeker to have valid papers when submitting his or her claim for asylum, which is decided by Ofpra (French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons).

The protection of a foreigner threatened in his or her country is enshrined in the French Constitution. It is not a priori possible to question the access to asylum.

Secondly, it is estimated that there are about 350,000 undocumented foreigners in France, according to the Washington DC-based Pew Research Center. Some of them work and participate in the French economy, but they do not meet the criteria for legalisation by the administration. Others are parents of children born in France. Still others have entered legally (as students, for example) but have not renewed their residence permit and are now in an illegal status.

The cases are varied and covered under specific regulations. "Stop legalising illegal immigrants" implies that the cases of all undocumented migrants are identical. This is not true.

2. "We must come to our senses: [we must] deport illegal immigrants."

-- Marine Le Pen on BFM-TV, April 23, 2021

This is already the case. France is deporting people who have no legal status. In 2020, France sent back a total of more than 9,000 people. That's half as many as in 2019 when 19,000 people were sent back. According to the Interior Ministry, this decline can be partly attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and numerous border closures.

The deportation trend has been steadily rising in recent years. In 2016, 12,900 people were sent back to their countries of origin compared with 14,200 in 2017, 15,600 in 2018 and 19,000 in 2019.

Second, the expulsion of an undocumented migrant is subject to rules. It is not automatic. For example, a foreigner without a passport or without nationality cannot be expelled. In order to send him/her back, s/he must have the agreement of his/her country of origin and request a consular pass. However, these documents are issued piecemeal by the countries concerned. A deportation can therefore take a long time.

Last November, the French government chastised countries that refuse to take back their nationals, especially those imprisoned for radicalisation. French President Emmanuel Macron is particularly targeting Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, countries that are reluctant to allow potential criminals to return home. According to the Interior Ministry, as of November 2020, France had 231 undocumented foreigners being monitored for "radicalisation" and has made their expulsion a priority.

3. "How could a man who remained illegal for 10 years on our territory be legalized?"

-- Marine Le Pen on BFM-TV, April 23, 2021

According to anti-terrorist prosecutors, the attacker in the Rambouillet stabbing case was born in Tunisia and arrived in France in 2009. In 2019, he received an exceptional employment authorisation and in December 2020, a residence card valid until December 2021. His illegal status therefore lasted 10 years.

Le Pen is offended that after several years as an undocumented resident, a foreigner can be granted a residence permit. These cases are not rare and they are regulated. A 2012 Interior Ministry circular set the terms for legalisation, such as duration of stay in France, family situation, children in school, sufficient resources, etc.

Manuel Valls, who was Interior Minister at that time, did not want to "legalize en masse" but to provide a roadmap to prefectures to help them grant residence permits in a consistent manner.

Generally, undocumented migrants must be able to prove a promise of employment or a work contract. They must also prove that they speak French and that they adhere to French values.

Many foreigners contacted by InfoMigrants are helped in these procedures by specialised lawyers or by groups defending undocumented migrants.

4/ We must "stop denying the link between terrorism and immigration."

Valrie Pcresse, head of the Soyons Libres party on Europe 1, April 25

"There is a link between immigration and terrorism. It is necessary from now on, from today, in a radical way, to stop all immigration"

Guillaume Peltier, deputy vice-president of the Les Rpublicains (LR) party on France 3, April 25

The link between immigration and terrorism regularly comes up in public debates on Frances security situation. To support their anti-immigrant statements, many politicians cite the latest attacks in France as an example.

The most recent was on October 29, 2020, when a 21-year-old Tunisian man who had just arrived in France murdered two women in the Basilica of Notre Dame in Nice, in southern France. The attacker is effectively an undocumented foreigner. He reached France by taking advantage of the "classic" migration route taken by thousands of migrants, via the Italian island of Lampedusa.

A few days earlier, Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Russian of Chechen origin, beheaded French school teacher Samuel Paty, Anzorov is not French either. He arrived in France at the age of six with his parents. All of them had residence permits.

However, since 2012, most of the other terrorists involved in the deadly attacks in France were French and born on French soil. The include Toulouse attacker Mohammed Merah, the Kouachi brothers (Cherif and Said) who conducted the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack, Amedy Coulibaly, who attacked a kosher supermarket in 2015) and Larossi Abballa, who killed a police officer and his partner in their home in Magnanville, near Paris, in 2016.

The November 13 2015 Paris attacks case is particular. Six of the 10 Islamic State (IS) group members who conducted the attacks were French, two were Iraqi, one was Belgian and the last one Belgian-Moroccan. None of them were "migrants" in the humanitarian sense of the word, but all of them (except the Abdeslam brothers) took advantage of the migration flows via Greece, to go back and forth to Syria.

The October 2019 attack at the Paris police headquarters was conducted by a Frenchman, Mickal Harpon, who murdered four police officers. The man was originally from the French overseas territory of Martinique.

Cherif Chekatt, the alleged perpetrator of the attack on December 12, 2018 in downtown Strasbourg is also French.

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Myths and realities about undocumented foreigners in France - InfoMigrants