THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

A police officer in East Pittsburgh, Pa., was charged with criminal homicide on Wednesday in the fatal shooting last week of Antwon Rose II, an unarmed teenager who was struck three times while trying to flee.

Officer Michael Rosfeld, 30, turned himself into the authorities around 7 a.m. and was booked into a jail in Allegheny County, according to court records. He was arraigned about an hour later and was released after posting $250,000 bail. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for the morning of July 6.

Prosecutors in Allegheny County argued in court on Wednesday morning that Officer Rosfeld should be denied bail, but they were overruled. “We believe the magisterial district judge’s ruling on bail was improper but we do not plan on contesting it at this time,” a spokesman for the district attorney said.

The shooting occurred just hours after Officer Rosfeld was sworn into the East Pittsburgh Police Department last Tuesday. He pulled over a Chevrolet Cruze that matched the description of a vehicle seen near an earlier drive-by shooting in which a 22-year-old man was struck in the abdomen. When the car stopped, Antwon, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, and a passenger in the back seat jumped out and ran.

A video of the encounter posted on Facebook shows them running from police vehicles as three shots are fired, and Antwon falling to the ground. The video sparked days of protests in the East Pittsburgh area and calls for Officer Rosfeld to be charged in the shooting.

// posted by montag @ 1:58 PM 0 Comments

NATO has been preparing for its July summit meeting for a year now, but there is one wild card: President Trump.

Nobody knows which president will show up — the truculent one railing about inadequate military spending by the allies or the boastful one taking credit for recent spending increases.

Either way, NATO members say they fear that all the preparation and the desire to show solidarity in the face of a new Russian threat will be overshadowed, if not undone, by a divisive encounter followed by Mr. Trump’s prospective summit meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.

The European allies are deeply worried that they will confront the Trump who was on display at the meeting in June in Canada of the seven major economies, known as the Group of 7, or G-7. Those in the room described him as angry, mocking, wandering and rude, especially to the host, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The Trump administration regards Western European nations as free-riders on an American-funded, postwar peace that enabled them to build lavish social benefit systems because they spent so little on defending themselves. He has also made clear that he thinks the European Union, as a trading bloc, has taken advantage of American generosity.

European and some American officials say they dread the same pattern — a noisy, divisive NATO summit, damaging deterrence, followed by a chummy meeting with a dictator, in this case Mr. Putin, whose long-term goals are to destabilize the European Union, undermine NATO and restore Russian influence over Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and the Balkans.

Whatever the organization has prepared, “the only real deliverable for NATO summits is solidarity and cohesion,” said Douglas Lute, a former American general and ambassador to the organization. “But that is at risk because the odds are that Trump will deliver a G-7 performance. And I fear that we will come out of this summit with symbols of division.”

R. Nicholas Burns, a former NATO ambassador and career diplomat who served both Republican and Democratic administrations, asked: “Which Trump will show up?”

// posted by montag @ 1:49 PM 0 Comments

Harley-Davidson, the American motorcycle manufacturer, said on Monday that it would shift some production of its iconic bikes overseas to avoid retaliatory tariffs imposed by the European Union in response to President Trump’s trade moves.

The decision, announced in a public filing, is the latest and most high-profile example of how Mr. Trump’s trade war is beginning to ripple through the United States economy as domestic companies begin struggling with a cascade of tariffs both here and abroad. While Mr. Trump says his trade policy is aimed at reviving domestic manufacturing, Harley-Davidson’s decision shows how the administration’s moves could have the unintended effect of reducing employment and economic growth in the United States.

Last week, the European Union hit back against Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs with penalties on $3.2 billion worth of American products, including bourbon, orange juice, playing cards and Harley-Davidsons. On Monday, the Wisconsin-based company said that European tariffs on its motorcycles had increased to 31 percent from 6 percent and estimated that would add about $2,200, on average, to every motorcycle exported from the United States to the bloc.

Rather than pass that cost along, the company said it would shift production to its overseas facilities to avoid the European Union tariffs.

“Harley-Davidson believes the tremendous cost increase, if passed on to its dealers and retail customers, would have an immediate and lasting detrimental impact to its business in the region, reducing customer access to Harley-Davidson products and negatively impacting the sustainability of its dealers’ businesses,” the company said in the filing.

Harley’s decision carries huge significance given Mr. Trump’s frequent championing of the Wisconsin company as an American icon and a successful American manufacturer that is creating jobs in the United States. Mr. Trump hosted Harley-Davidson executives at the White House in February 2017, where he called the firm a “true American icon” and thanked it “for building things in America.”

// posted by montag @ 1:44 PM 0 Comments

A 15-year-old migrant boy who was housed in a large shelter near the southern tip of Texas walked off its premises on Saturday and disappeared into the borderland, officials said.

The shelter, a former Walmart in Brownsville, Tex., that was repurposed as the largest migrant child care center in the country, has come under intense scrutiny as children who were separated from their parents under President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy began being housed there.

On Sunday, the nonprofit group Southwest Key Programs, which operates the center known as Casa Padre, confirmed that the teenager was missing.

The news of a teenager’s departure came as company officials sought to reassure members of Congress and the news media who had toured the center that the roughly 1,500 boys living there, aged 10 to 17, were well cared for and closely monitored.

A spokesman for Southwest Key, Jeff Eller, said on Sunday it could not legally require children to stay on the premises if they sought to leave, and that “from time to time” children had left several of its 27 shelters for immigrant children.

“We are not a detention center,” Mr. Eller said in a statement. “We talk to them and try to get them to stay. If they leave the property, we call law enforcement.”

Federal officials echoed that position, saying they could not stop a child who attempted to leave. The officials did not respond to a question about how many children had walked away from migrant centers nationwide.

Mr. Eller said that less than 1 percent of all of the children who have come through Southwest Key’s centers have left, though he declined to provide specific numbers.

The revelation that children can leave such centers on their own raised a host of questions about the shelter system: What happens to their immigration proceedings; how family members can reunite; whether they can sidestep the lengthy process of being approved for release to a parent or sponsor; and who is responsible for their safety, especially in an area like the Rio Grande Valley, one of the busiest corridors for human trafficking.

// posted by montag @ 1:28 PM 0 Comments

Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller spent years on the political fringe in the nation’s capital as high-decibel immigration hard-liners, always warning about the dangers of open borders but rarely in a position to affect law or policy.

Now, Mr. Sessions, the attorney general and former senator from Alabama, and Mr. Miller, the president’s top policy adviser and former Senate aide to Mr. Sessions, have moved from the edges of the immigration debate to its red-hot center. Powerful like never before, the two are the driving force behind President Trump’s policy that has led thousands of children to be separated from their parents at the nation’s southern border.

It was Mr. Sessions who ordered prosecutors to take a new “zero tolerance” attitude toward families crossing into the United States, part of his plans to reshape the country’s law enforcement priorities to limit immigration. It is Mr. Miller who has championed the idea inside the White House, selling Mr. Trump on the benefits of a policy that his adversaries have called “evil,” “inhumane” and equivalent to child abuse or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The partnership between Mr. Sessions and Mr. Miller began in 2009, when Mr. Miller, a conservative rabble rouser and contrarian who emerged from the left-leaning Santa Monica, became a spokesman for the senator. He sported sideburns and skinny ties as he often delivered long and passionate lectures to reporters, and anyone else who would listen, about the dangers of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants.

Mr. Sessions, 71, had strong views shaped by his experience as a young politician in rural Alabama, where he saw immigrants take jobs at a poultry plant away from poor, unskilled Americans.

During more than a decade as a federal prosecutor and state attorney general, and 20 years in the Senate, Mr. Sessions came to believe that immigrants, whether here legally or illegally, posed a direct threat to the country by depressing wages, committing crimes and competing for welfare benefits. He was deeply influenced by the work of George Borjas, a Harvard economist who has said that immigrants have an adverse impact on the economy.

Mr. Miller, 32, had gone from California to Duke University. While a student, he met David Horowitz, a right-wing provocateur and the founder of Students for Academic Freedom, which opposed progressive thought on college campuses. After Mr. Miller graduated, Mr. Horowitz helped him get a job with Michele Bachmann, then a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, and recommended him highly to Mr. Sessions.

Together Mr. Miller and Mr. Sessions often drew on the work of anti-immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies — some of which are derided as hate groups by immigration activists and civil rights organizations.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white nationalists and other hate groups, describes FAIR as having “a veneer of legitimacy” that “hides much ugliness.”

By 2013, Stephen K. Bannon, then the head of Breitbart News, invited Mr. Miller and Mr. Sessions to a dinner at the Capitol Hill townhouse that served as the headquarters for the conservative news outlet. The three bonded over an article titled “The Case of the Missing White Voters,” foreshadowing the case they would help Mr. Trump build during his presidential campaign.

Later that year, Mr. Sessions and Mr. Miller worked tirelessly to defeat a bipartisan immigration bill. The senator spent hours on the floor arguing with his colleagues while Mr. Miller churned out a nonstop flurry of news releases. He cast the fight against immigration in dramatic terms, with the future of the nation at stake.

// posted by montag @ 1:47 PM 0 Comments

President Trump likes nothing more than presenting himself as the ultimate deal maker, the master negotiator who can translate his success in business into the worlds of politics, policy and diplomacy. “That’s what I do, is deals,” he said one day last month.

Except that so far he has not. As he threw in the towel on immigration legislation on Friday, saying that Republicans should give up even trying until after the fall midterm elections, Mr. Trump once again fell short of his promise to make “beautiful” deals that no other president could make.

His 17 months in office have in fact been an exercise in futility for the art-of-the-deal president. No deal on immigration. No deal on health care. No deal on gun control. No deal on spending cuts. No deal on Nafta. No deal on China trade. No deal on steel and aluminum imports. No deal on Middle East peace. No deal on the Qatar blockade. No deal on Syria. No deal on Russia. No deal on Iran. No deal on climate change. No deal on Pacific trade.

Even routine deals sometimes elude Mr. Trump, or he chooses to blow them up. After a Group of 7 summit meeting this month with the world’s leading economic powers, Mr. Trump, expressing pique at Canada’s prime minister, refused to sign the carefully negotiated communiqué that his own team had agreed to. It was the sort of boilerplate agreement that every previous president had made over four decades.

“Trump is an anarchist,” said Jack O’Donnell, a former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, who became a sharp critic. “It was his approach in business, it is his approach as president. It does not take good negotiating skills to cause chaos. Will this ever lead to concessions? Maybe, but concessions to what? Not anything that resembles a deal. I just do not see him getting much done.”

Ultimately, his advisers said, his hard-line positions that for now have left him at an impasse with negotiating partners should pay off in ways that did not for presidents like Barack Obama and George W. Bush. “I don’t think it’s that counterintuitive to say that playing hardball will lead to better trade deals eventually,” said Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist and former aide to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump points to a few deals, notably the major tax-cutting package that passed late last year. But even that was negotiated mainly by Republican lawmakers, who said Mr. Trump did not seem engaged in the details. Nor did he secure the bipartisan support he had hoped for. And as legislative challenges go, handing out tax cuts without paying for them is not exactly the hardest thing that politicians do.

As for foreign policy, Mr. Trump has taken great pride in his recent meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, asserting that “I have solved that problem” after a decades-long nuclear standoff and even musing that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. But there is no deal, at least not yet. There is a vague 391-word statement essentially agreeing to agree, an expression of a goal with no details.

// posted by montag @ 1:50 PM 0 Comments

Gina Anders knows the feeling well by now. President Trump says or does something that triggers a spasm of outrage. She doesn’t necessarily agree with how he handled the situation. She gets why people are upset.

But Ms. Anders, 46, a Republican from suburban Loudoun County, Va., with a law degree, a business career, and not a stitch of “Make America Great Again” gear in her wardrobe, is moved to defend him anyway.

“All nuance and all complexity — and these are complex issues — are completely lost,” she said, describing “overblown” reactions from the president’s critics, some of whom equated the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children and parents to history’s greatest atrocities.

“It makes me angry at them, which causes me to want to defend him to them more,” Ms. Anders said.

In interviews across the country over the last few days, dozens of Trump voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, described something like a bonding experience with the president that happens each time Republicans have to answer a now-familiar question: “How can you possibly still support this man?” Their resilience suggests a level of unity among Republicans that could help mitigate Mr. Trump’s low overall approval ratings and aid his party’s chances of keeping control of the House of Representatives in November.

“He’s not a perfect guy; he does some stupid stuff,” said Tony Schrantz, 50, of Lino Lakes, Minn., the owner of a water systems leak detection business. “But when they’re hounding him all the time it just gets old. Give the guy a little.”

Republican voters repeatedly described an instinctive, protective response to the president, and their support has grown in recent months: Mr. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is now about 90 percent. And while polling has yet to capture the effect of the last week’s immigration controversy, the only modern Republican president more popular with his party than Mr. Trump at this point in his first term, according to Gallup, was George W. Bush after the country united in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Trump has also retained support across a range of demographics other than the working-class voters who are most identified with him. This includes portions of the wealthy college-educated people in swing counties, like Virginia’s Loudoun, in the country’s most politically competitive states.

Many of these voters say their lives and the country are improving under his presidency, and the endless stream of tough cable news coverage and bad headlines about Mr. Trump only galvanizes them further — even though some displayed discomfort on their faces when asked about the child separation policy, and expressed misgivings about the president’s character.

// posted by montag @ 1:34 PM 1 Comments

In a major statement on privacy in the digital age, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the government generally needs a warrant to collect troves of location data about the customers of cellphone companies.

“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.

The 5-to-4 decision has implications for all kinds of personal information held by third parties, including email and text messages, internet searches, and bank and credit card records. But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said the ruling was limited.

“We hold only that a warrant is required in the rare case where the suspect has a legitimate privacy interest in records held by a third party,” the chief justice wrote. The court’s four more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — joined his opinion.

Each of the four other justices wrote a dissent, with the five opinions running to more than 120 pages. In one dissent, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the distinctions drawn by the majority were illogical and “will frustrate principled application of the Fourth Amendment in many routine yet vital law enforcement operations.”

“Cell-site records,” he wrote, “are uniquely suited to help the government develop probable cause to apprehend some of the nation’s most dangerous criminals: serial killers, rapists, arsonists, robbers, and so forth.”

In a second dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the decision “guarantees a blizzard of litigation while threatening many legitimate and valuable investigative practices upon which law enforcement has rightfully come to rely.”

The case, Carpenter v. United States, No. 16-402, arose from armed robberies of Radio Shacks and other stores in the Detroit area starting in 2010.

Prosecutors also relied on months of records obtained from cellphone companies to prove their case. The records showed that Mr. Carpenter’s phone had been nearby when several of the robberies happened. He was convicted and sentenced to 116 years in prison.

Mr. Carpenter’s lawyers said cellphone companies had turned over 127 days of records that placed his phone at 12,898 locations, based on information from cellphone towers. The records disclosed whether he had slept at home on given nights and whether he attended his usual church on Sunday mornings.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the information was entitled to privacy protection.

“Mapping a cell phone’s location over the course of 127 days provides an all-encompassing record of the holder’s whereabouts,” he wrote, going on to quote from an earlier opinion. “As with GPS information, the timestamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his ‘familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.’ ”

// posted by montag @ 1:41 PM 0 Comments

Earlier this month, in a drill shrouded in secrecy, prison guards practiced for something that hasn't actually happened at Guantánamo in a decade. They rehearsed receiving a new war-on-terror detainee.

Medical evaluation? Check. Notification of the International Red Cross? Check. Assignment to a cell? Check. Security and more security. Gone are the iconic orange uniforms that made Camp X-Ray infamous. The man who played the role of new captive wore white.

Navy Rear Adm. John Ring, the prison commander, says he hasn't gotten any word that new prisoners are coming. But since President Donald Trump signed an order keeping the prison open, Ring's staff is now preparing for what spokeswoman Navy Cmdr. Anne Leanos calls an "enduring mission.”

"I have not been told we’re getting new people. I have no order to receive new people. I’ve been asked some hypothetical questions about capacities and things like that, but we are not imminently expecting anybody," Ring told reporters in early June.

Guantánamo today has 40 prisoners and a staff of 1,800 troops and civilians. With the maximum-security Camp 5 prison just reopened, after a cellblock was remade into a clinic and mental health ward, the detention center can now take in another 40 men.

One wrinkle is that any new detainees are likely to be members of the Islamic State, not al-Qaida. And while some people see ISIS as offshoot of al-Qaida, the militant movements are not allies and have vastly different aims.

"Unless we got some al-Qaida from Afghanistan, which is possible, most of the conversation is about Syria, and most of those guys, I understand, are ISIS," said Ring, who doesn't decide who comes and goes from Guantánamo. "So it’s possible we could get folks from either place."

Any new prisoner would be the first to arrive at Guantánamo since the CIA delivered an Afghan "high-value detainee" in March 2008. That was years before the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria declared its worldwide caliphate, invaded and controlled a huge swath of Iraq and Syria and released a series of brutal videotaped killings of captives in orange jumpsuits.

Al-Qaida has "a different ideology" than ISIS, says Leanos, the prison spokeswoman. Besides, after more than a decade in military detention, there's also a "different mentality" among the captives — who are profiled as al-Qaida members or affiliates — and have come to understand Guantánamo prison's incentive system says the admiral's cultural adviser who is only identified with one name, Zaki. Captives who follow the guards' commands get to live communally, pray and eat in groups, take art, language and gardening classes and read more books, for example.

"If suspected ISIS fighters are transferred to Guantánamo I would expect that a legal challenge to their detention would be filed within days if not hours of their arrival," said Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been at the forefront of representing and finding attorneys for military detainees.

He and other opponents of Guantánamo detention argue the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, Congress' permission for the president to wage war on al Qaida and the Taliban over the Sept. 11 attacks, does not apply to ISIS. “The one thing that's guaranteed is it will create years more of litigation,” Dixon said.

// posted by montag @ 1:41 PM 0 Comments

Since the earliest days of the Trump presidency, the administration has been preparing to erect tent cities to house immigrants who had come to the country illegally.

The Department of Homeland Security asked Congress for $95 million to erect tent cities in two locations in Texas to "detain all immigration violators," according to a budget document shared with McClatchy and provided to Congress in March 2017.

The so-called "soft-sided structure facilities in Tornillo and Donna, Texas" were to house immigrants — possibly unaccompanied children or families — after the United States saw a surge in the number of immigrants crossing its southern border during the Obama administration.

But in the following weeks, the number of immigrants coming to the U.S. declined and the administration informed Congress in April 2017 that it no longer needed the money for tent cities.

The administration's new plan to house thousands of immigrant children separated from their parents in tent cities in Texas — at Fort Bliss Army base near El Paso, Dyess Air Force base in Abilene and Goodfellow Air Force base in San Angelo — has caused a national uproar with critics quickly dubbing them "concentration camps."

Clara Long, U.S. researcher at Human Rights Watch, said children should not be detained at all and that the focus of the administration should be on keeping families together.

“It’s not about the materials on the wall. It’s holding children in detention itself," she said. "Tents are bad because they allow the government to expand detention rapidly."

HHS spokesman Kenneth Wolfe said temporary structures contain a full heating, ventilation and air conditioning system, as well as a floor, walls and doors. “Using semi-permanent structures allows for increased speed and flexibility to get the shelter operational to care for children and expand as necessary,” he said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, talking to reporters in Miami Tuesday, declined to say how many tent cities will be erected to hold children. "We keep working to expand capacity to ensure we can properly care for the children," he said.

The tent cities are being built for an increasing number of immigrants as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen enforce a new zero tolerance policy that calls for prosecuting all adults who crosses the border illegally. But Azar said the "vast majority" of immigrant children in HHS's custody are unaccompanied minors sent to the United States alone and not those separated from their parents.

Tens of thousands of unaccompanied children and families have been apprehended since 2014, when a surge of Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan mothers and children raced into the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, fleeing violence and poverty.

"Roughly half a million illegal immigrant family units and minors from Central America have been released into the United States since 2014 at unbelievably great taxpayer expense," President Donald Trump said at a National Federation of Independent Businesses event. "Nobody knows how much we're paying for this monstrosity that's been created over the years."

// posted by montag @ 1:34 PM 0 Comments

President Trump and two members of his cabinet mounted an aggressive defense on Monday of his policy of separating children from their parents at the border in response to a growing outcry from members of both parties.

“They could be murderers and thieves and so much else,” Mr. Trump said of the people crossing the border. “We want a safe country, and it starts with the borders, and that’s the way it is.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions also defended the practice, while insisting that “we do not want to separate parents from their children,” and later, at a tumultuous White House news briefing, Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, gave a forceful explanation of the administration’s actions, arguing that it had no choice, and insisting that the only way the practice could end would be through congressional action.

Unlike Mr. Trump, she did not repeat the false accusation that only the Democrats, the minority party, were to blame for what she said was Congress’s failure to act to end a policy that, by some counts, has resulted in nearly 2,000 children taken away from their parents in a six-week period.

After Mr. Trump’s latest comments on Monday, a growing number of Republican lawmakers — including Representative Steve Stivers of Ohio, who leads the House Republicans’ campaign arm — joined the chorus of criticism. Mr. Stivers warned that if the policy is not changed, he would support “means to stop unnecessary separation of children from their parents.”

Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, called it an “ugly and inhumane practice,” and called for an immediate end to it, as did other Republican lawmakers, including Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, Republican of Florida, who called the practice “totally unacceptable.” And Representative Mia Love, Republican of Utah, whose parents emigrated from Haiti, issued a statement condemning what she called the administration’s “horrible” separation policy.

// posted by montag @ 2:02 PM 0 Comments

Four years ago, Ahmad Shirin was in his native Afghanistan, fearing that the Taliban would kill him for serving as an interpreter for the U.S. Army, a job dutifully and dangerously carried out for 12 years.

Today, Shirin lives in Charlotte thanks to a special visa program for translators and interpreters who assisted U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

That program is now in jeopardy.

Shirin said he fears that thousands who also aided American forces won’t be able to follow him to the U.S. because a special visa program for Afghans is in congressional limbo, partially entangled in the immigration debate raging in Washington.

“The people who supported the U.S. Army and U.S. government, their lives are in danger, serious danger,” said Shirin, who works part-time as an Uber driver in Charlotte. “These people made a lot of sacrifices to help the United States.”

The Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program, which allows Afghans who supported the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan and face threats because of their work to apply for refuge in the United States, needs to be renewed for Fiscal 2019, which begins October 1.

But the effort has become a victim of the broader debate over immigration.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told McClatchy last week that he didn’t have a problem with the 4,000 special visas sought by Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., but added “I just want some integrity provisions added” to the program.

When asked what those provisions might be, Grassley responded “you’ll have to define integrity.”

Tillis and Shaheen unsuccessfully tried to get an amendment for 4,000 special immigration visas, or SIVs, attached to a must-pass defense bill that the Senate passed Monday night, 85 to 10.

Tillis, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, still saw hope. He said lawmakers could add the visas and extend the program when Senate and House negotiators meet to write a final bill.

Failing that, “well look for other vehicles — we’ll find out whether or not the administration would have any leeway under any sort of other methods to allow people to immigrate here.”

“We send a very negative message to any people in country who are sympathetic with what we’re trying to do to help when we say ‘We want your help, but we won’t guarantee your safety,’” Tillis added. “These are folks who have done something extraordinary in support of our country in a very dangerous place.”

The Afghan program, part of the Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009 and patterned after a visa program created for Iraqis allies a year earlier, has enjoyed Republican and Democratic support in both chambers of Congress.

// posted by montag @ 1:52 PM 0 Comments

Aleksandr Burman, a Ukrainian who engaged in a health care scheme that cost the federal government $26 million and was sentenced to a decade in prison, paid $725,000 cash for a condo at a Trump Tower I in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla. in 2009.

Leonid Zeldovich, who has reportedly done extensive business in the Russian-annexed area of Crimea, bought four Trump units outright at a cost of more than $4.35 million, three of them in New York City between 2007 and 2010.

And Igor Romashov, who served as chairman of the board of Transoil, a Russian oil transport company subject to U.S. sanctions, paid $620,000 upfront for a unit at a building adorned with the future U.S. president's name in Sunny Isles Beach in 2010.

Buyers connected to Russia or former Soviet republics made 86 all-cash sales — totaling nearly $109 million — at 10 Trump-branded properties in South Florida and New York City, according to a new analysis shared with McClatchy. Many of them made purchases using shell companies designed to obscure their identities.

“The size and scope of these cash purchases are deeply troubling as they can often signal money laundering activity," said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and a former federal prosecutor. "There have long been credible allegations of money laundering by the Trump Organization which, if true, would pose a real threat to the United States in the event that Russia were able to leverage evidence of illicit financial transactions against the president."

There's nothing illegal about accepting cash for real estate. But transactions that do not involve mortgages — which account for one in four residential purchases in the country — raise red flags for law enforcement officials as it could be a way to commit fraud or launder money.

In 2016, the Treasury Department targeted Miami and New York — where cash purchases account for half of residential sales — for increased scrutiny, requiring title insurers to report the names behind the shell companies buying homes with cash. It was later expanded to include a handful of other localities, including Broward County, Fla., which includes Fort Lauderdale and its wealthy suburbs.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has spent more than a year investigating whether Trump's campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, a widening probe that appears to include questions about his family business, the Trump Organization. "This is all about money laundering," former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is quoted as saying about the Mueller inquiry in the book, Fire and Fury.

Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, the firm behind a dossier alleging ties between Trump and Russians, told the House Intelligence Committee in November that his group uncovered "patterns of buying and selling that we thought were suggestive of money laundering" at Trump-branded properties around the globe. "Generally speaking, the patterns of activity that we thought might be suggestive of money laundering were ... fast-turnover deals, and deals where there seemed to have been efforts to disguise the identity of the buyer," he said.

The all-cash buyers include Alexey Ustaev, founder of a private bank based in St. Petersburg, Russia; Igor Zorin, a government official who runs a state-owned broadcasting company; the wife of hockey player Viacheslav Fetisov; pop star Igor Nikolaev; Roman Sinyavsky, a luxury real estate broker who was one of the first to sell units at a Trump's South Florida building and Evgeny Bachurin, who Russian President Vladimir Putin fired as head of Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency before becoming a donor to a political action committee supporting Trump, according to American Bridge.

Other news reports have looked at Russian buyers of Trump Organization properties but less attention has been paid to the all-cash purchases.

"We've long suspected that Donald Trump's businesses were a front for money laundering and our research suggests it could be true," said Harrell Kirstein, communicators director for the Trump War Room at American Bridge. "The millions of dollars in previously unreported, all-cash real estate deals we discovered raise troubling questions about who is funding his businesses, why, and what they're getting in return."

// posted by montag @ 1:40 PM 0 Comments

They’d had a plan: Elsa Johana Ortiz Enriquez packed up what little she had in Guatemala and traveled across Mexico with her 8-year-old son, Anthony. In a group, they rafted across the Rio Grande into Texas. From there they intended to join her boyfriend, Edgar, who had found a construction job in the United States.

Except it all went wrong. The Border Patrol was waiting as they made their way from the border on May 26, and soon mother and son were in a teeming detention center in southern Texas. The next part unfolded so swiftly that, even now, Ms. Ortiz cannot grasp it: Anthony was sent to a shelter for migrant children. And she was put on a plane back to Guatemala.

“I am completely devastated,” Ms. Ortiz, 25, said in one of a series of video interviews last week from her family home in Guatemala. Her eyes swollen from weeping and her voice subdued, she said she had no idea when or how she would see her son again.

As the federal government continues to separate families as part of a stepped-up enforcement program against those who cross the border illegally, the authorities say that parents are not supposed to be deported without their children. But immigration lawyers say that has happened in several cases. And the separations can be traumatic for parents who now have no clear path to recovering their children.

“From our work on the border, we have seen a significant increase in the number of moms separated from their children, and many of them have reported they didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye before the separation, “ said Laura Tuell, the global pro bono counsel at Jones Day, an international law firm providing assistance to refugees in Texas, whose lawyers spoke with Ms. Ortiz.

“Some of the women we have encountered in detention at the border have reported facing pressure to deport voluntarily in order to be reunified with their children,” she said.

Critics say that Ms. Ortiz’s saga is the latest indication that the administration’s new enforcement strategy was rolled out without adequate planning. The processing and detention of migrant families can involve three Homeland Security agencies — Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services — as well as the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services. Poor coordination among them has made it hard to track children and parents once their paths diverge in the labyrinthine system.

// posted by montag @ 1:42 PM 0 Comments

President Trump on Saturday repeated his false assertion that Democrats were responsible for his administration’s policy of separating migrant families apprehended at the border, sticking to a weekslong refusal to publicly accept responsibility for a widely condemned practice that has become a symbol of his crackdown on illegal immigration.

“Democrats can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change!” Mr. Trump said in a morning post on Twitter.

It came the day after his administration said that it had taken nearly 2,000 children away from their parents in a six-week period ending last month, as part of a new “zero tolerance” policy that refers for criminal prosecution all immigrants apprehended crossing the border without authorization.

The White House defended the practice this week, saying the president was merely enforcing the law. And in recent speeches around the country, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, has made a spirited case for it, arguing that a strict approach is a vital tool for deterrence.

In fact, there is no law that requires families to be separated at the border. There is a law against “improper entry” at the border, as well as a consent decree known as the Flores settlement that limits to 20 days the amount of time that migrant children may be held in immigration detention, which a federal judge ruled in 2016 also applies to families. A 2008 anti-trafficking statute — signed into law by a Republican president, George W. Bush — also requires that certain unaccompanied alien minors be transferred out of immigration detention in 72 hours. None of those laws or precedents mean that children must be taken away from their parents.

It is the Trump administration’s decision this year to prosecute all unlawful immigrants as criminals that has forced the breakup of families; the children are removed when the parents are taken into federal custody.

// posted by montag @ 1:22 PM 0 Comments

Tensions flared on Friday between federal authorities in Arizona and residents of a Native American reservation straddling the border with Mexico after a video surfaced in which a Border Patrol vehicle appears to hit a man from the tribe before driving away.

The video, which was recorded on the phone of the victim, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation identified as Paulo Remes, spread quickly on social media after several tribe members and Indivisible Tohono, an organization focused on the impact of border policies, posted the footage on Twitter and Facebook.

“They just ran me over, bro,” Mr. Remes is heard saying on the video. He told The Arizona Daily Star that he was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment of injuries from the incident, which took place on Tohono O’odham land about 60 miles southwest of Tucson. Mr. Remes appeared to be standing in a dirt road facing the vehicle when it made contact, knocking him to the ground.

Mr. Remes told the newspaper that the driver of the vehicle did not stop.

The United States Border Patrol said in a statement that it was “actively investigating” the incident. “We do not tolerate misconduct on or off duty and will fully cooperate with all investigations of alleged unlawful conduct by our personnel,” the Border Patrol said.

Robert G. Daniels, a spokesman in Arizona for the Border Patrol, said the agency was not able to release the identity of the agent involved in the episode; the video seems to show the vehicle speeding away after the victim is hit.

“All I can say is that this incident is under investigation,” Mr. Daniels said.

The vehicle incident is the most recent episode in a history of strain between federal authorities and the Tohono O’odham, a tribe with about 34,000 enrolled members whose territory straddles the border between the United States and Mexico. The tribe controls about 2.8 million acres in Arizona.

Edward D. Manuel, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, said in a statement that the victim is 34 years old. Mr. Manuel, who did not identify the victim by name, added that the tribe’s police department was investigating the incident together with the F.B.I. and the United States Attorney’s Office.

// posted by montag @ 1:47 PM 0 Comments

Joseph Otting, one of the country’s most powerful banking regulators, repeatedly stumbled over questions from lawmakers this week on whether discrimination remains a problem in the United States, saying he had “personally never observed it.”

Otting, the U.S. comptroller of the currency, is a leading proponent of revamping the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which compels banks to lend to borrowers in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Democrats warn that rolling back the law could open the way for more discriminatory lending, and lawmakers peppered Otting with questions about the issue during two congressional hearings.

During a House Financial Services Committee hearing Wednesday, Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-Mass.) asked Otting whether he believed “discrimination exists in America today.”

“I have personally never observed it, but many of my friends from the inner city across America will tell me that it is evident today,” Otting said.

Capuano pressed Otting, asking, “Do you believe that it exists?”

“People have told me it exists, and so I trust those people when they tell me that,” the comptroller responded.

Capuano returned to the question several times, asking Otting whether he had ever read about discrimination and whether he believed those reports. Otting’s response: “My experience with writers are they’re right half the time.”

Capuano eventually surrendered, as he ran out of time. “I’m going to give it up,” he said. “Mr. Otting, you got me. Never having seen discrimination, you’re a very lucky man.”

Later in the hearing, another Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, called Otting’s responses to those previous questions “stupefying, even jaw-dropping.” Cleaver asked Otting whether he was familiar with the white supremacist rally that rocked Charlottesville last August, leading to the death of a counterprotester.

“To be honest with you, I don’t watch TV,” Otting said. “I saw what was across the headlines, but I didn’t spend specific time to study or analyze what took place.”

Had he read any newspaper articles about the violence in Charlottesville, Cleaver asked?

“I don’t read a newspaper,” Otting said.

Cleaver then broached a topic that has roiled the banking industry for years: whether tech companies that want to offer some banking services should be required to comply with the same anti-discrimination laws as traditional banks.

“I am a big believer of minority inclusion,” said Otting, who began his career at Bank of America. Noting his more than 30 years of experience in the banking industry, he said: “There are many people who would say that Joseph Otting spent more time in the inner cities of America than most banking executives across the world. ”

// posted by montag @ 1:43 PM 0 Comments

President Trump went on offense on Friday with a withering series of attacks on the F.B.I., congressional Democrats, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Canada’s prime minister, football players, the media, the special counsel and other favorite targets even as he hailed his relations with the leaders of North Korea, China and Russia.

After a couple of days out of sight following his trip to Singapore to meet with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, Mr. Trump delivered a blizzard of pointed messages on Twitter, gave an interview to his preferred Fox News show and then engaged in a typically freewheeling encounter with reporters on the White House driveway.

Mr. Trump seemed energized by his North Korea trip and a new report excoriating the F.B.I., and portrayed his presidency as a string of unvarnished successes in foreign policy and the economy despite the unfair and even criminal forces arrayed against him. He dismissed any contrary information or questions and blamed any setbacks on his predecessor or the Democratic minorities in Congress.

The president seized on the Justice Department inspector general report released Thursday that sharply criticized the F.B.I. and its former director James B. Comey for their handling of the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. The report, he said, exposed what he called “the scum on top” of the F.B.I. as “total thieves,” and he insisted that Peter Strzok, a senior F.B.I. agent who had spoken privately against him, should be fired.

“They were plotting against my election,” he said. When it was pointed out that the report actually found that no decisions were made out of political bias, he dismissed the conclusion. “The end result was wrong. I mean, there was total bias. I mean, when you look at Peter Strzok, and what he said about me. When you look at Comey, all his moves. You know, it was interesting, it was a pretty good report. Then I say that the I.G. blew it at the very end with that statement.”

Mr. Strzok was a top agent on the investigation into Mrs. Clinton in 2016, and his text messages to a colleague, Lisa Page, were cited by the inspector general for showing an unprofessional bias. When Ms. Page was alarmed in August 2016 at the prospect of Mr. Trump’s winning the election, Mr. Strzok reassured her. “We’ll stop it,” he wrote.

Mr. Trump said that proved the F.B.I. was out to get him. “Peter Strzok should have been fired a long time ago, and others should have been fired,” he said.

Mr. Strzok was removed last year from the Russia investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. But the inspector general found no evidence that the F.B.I. did anything to stop Mr. Trump or rig the investigation into Mrs. Clinton in her favor. In fact, the report’s criticisms of Mr. Comey and the bureau’s conduct focused on actions that damaged Mrs. Clinton, not Mr. Trump, and it deemed the decision not to prosecute her a reasonable one.

Mr. Trump was asked on “Fox and Friends” whether Mr. Comey should be prosecuted and put in prison. “I would never want to get involved in that,” Mr. Trump said. “Certainly he, they just seem like criminal acts to me. What he did was criminal. What he did was a terrible thing to the people. What he did was so bad in terms of our Constitution, in terms of the well-being of our country. What he did was horrible.”

Mr. Trump continued, “Should he be locked up? Let somebody make a determination.”

He added: “If you read the I.G. report, I’ve been totally exonerated.”

But the report dealt only with the handling of the investigation into Mrs. Clinton and did not address allegations against Mr. Trump and his campaign related to contacts with Russia during the election and possible obstruction of justice after he took office.

// posted by montag @ 1:27 PM 0 Comments

The New York State attorney general’s office filed a scathingly worded lawsuit on Thursday taking aim at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, accusing the charity and the Trump family of sweeping violations of campaign finance laws, self-dealing and illegal coordination with the presidential campaign.

The lawsuit, which seeks to dissolve the foundation and bar President Trump and three of his children from serving on nonprofit organizations, was an extraordinary rebuke of a sitting president. The attorney general also sent referral letters to the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission for possible further action, adding to Mr. Trump’s extensive legal challenges.

The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, culminated a nearly two-year investigation of Mr. Trump’s charity, which became a subject of scrutiny during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. While such foundations are supposed to be devoted to charitable activities, the petition asserts that Mr. Trump’s was often used to settle legal claims against his various businesses, even spending $10,000 on a portrait of Mr. Trump that was hung at one of his golf clubs.

The foundation was also used to curry political favor, the lawsuit asserts. During the 2016 race, the foundation became a virtual arm of Mr. Trump’s campaign, email traffic showed, with his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski directing its expenditures, even though such foundations are explicitly prohibited from political activities.

The $10,000 portrait was one of several examples of the foundation being used in “at least five self-dealing transactions,” according to the attorney general’s office, violating tax regulations that prohibit using nonprofit charities for private interests.

In 2007, to settle a dispute between the City of Palm Beach and Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, the foundation paid $100,000 to the Fisher House Foundation, another charity.

In 2012, a man named Martin B. Greenberg sued the Trump National Golf Club after he made a hole-in-one at a fund-raising golf tournament that had promised to pay $1 million to golfers who aced the 13th hole, as he did. As part of a settlement, the charitable foundation paid $158,000 to a foundation run by Mr. Greenberg.

The foundation also paid $5,000 to one organization for “promotional space featuring Trump International Hotels,” and another $32,000 to satisfy a pledge made by a privately held entity controlled by Mr. Trump to a charitable land trust.

// posted by montag @ 1:48 PM 0 Comments