Tag: Trumpera

Sinema and Tillis pitch two-year border patch as Trump-era policy expires

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The legislation would provide protections for migrants whose return to their home countries would threaten their life, freedom, or expose them to torture. It also provides protections for migrants with acute medical needs, according to a Sinema aide.
The legislation would need at least 60 votes to pass the Senate, making it all but guaranteed that it won’t pass before Title 42’s expiration, and it faces an uphill climb more broadly in a chamber that has struggled in recent years to find consensus on border and immigration issues.
And it comes as the House is set to vote on its own sweeping border and immigration proposal next week. But it’s not meant to be a response to that bill — with aides and senators involved noting that Sinema, Tillis and others are holding broader talks on a separate track — but instead is in response to the looming May 11 date for the expiration of the Trump-era authority.
The end of Title 42 has sparked fierce criticism from Republicans, as well as warnings from some Democrats who worry that the administration doesn’t have the resources positioned along the U.S.-Mexico border to be able to process an increase in migrants seeking entry into the United States.
Eleven Senate Republicans — including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — sent a letter to Biden Wednesday urging him to reverse course and keep Title 42 in place. Graham, in a press conference on Wednesday, compared the end of Title 42 to “being hit by a slow moving truck in Kansas.”
“I’m asking them to find an acceptable substitute for Title 42,” he added.
The administration had initially planned to end the Trump-era program on May 23, 2022. But the policy got tied up in a lengthy court battle as Republicans made an effort to keep the authority in place. The Biden administration then announced in February that the end of the Covid-19 pandemic public health emergency would also terminate Title 42.
But the issue is rife with potential political trip wires for the Biden administration, who faced public urging from Democrats over the past year to keep the program in place. Tillis and Sinema offered an amendment late last year that, among other provisions, would have extended Title 42 and boosted border funding. The proposal failed but got support from several senators up for reelection in 2024 in red and purple states: Sens. Sinema, Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

Asked whether he would support a two-year expulsion authority similar to Title 42, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) told reporters on Thursday that he’s instead been “working on getting the resources” border officials need if Title 42 goes away.
“We’re looking at other options. Right now I’ve been focused on getting the resources they need for when May 11 comes,” said Kelly, who previously voted for the duo’s amendment last year.
Manchin, who like Sinema hasn’t yet announced if he will run for reelection, called the end of Title 42 a “shame” and appeared frustrated by Congress’ inability to legislate on the border.
“I think the border has to be secure, period. … It’s a disaster at the border,” Manchin said in a brief interview, asked about steps the administration or lawmakers should take.
The administration has been ramping up its response to the policy ending as they face concerns about being able to respond to a potential increase sparked by both the end of Title 42 and the upcoming summer season.
The administration announced late last month that it would establish immigration processing centers throughout Latin America to help slow down the number of migrants coming to the U.S.
And earlier this week the administration announced it would add another 1,500 active-duty troops to the southern border to deal with the influx of migrants expected with the expiration of Title 42.
The additional troops, which are being sent to fill a request from the Department of Homeland Security, will fill “critical capability gaps,” including detection and monitoring, data entry and warehouse support. They will be there for up to 90 days, after which military reservists or contractors will do the work.
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#Sinema #Tillis #pitch #twoyear #border #patch #Trumpera #policy #expires
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

May 4, 2023
Fed blames Trump-era policies, SVB leaders — and itself — for bank’s stunning collapse

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Those directives, combined with the Fed’s implementation of a bipartisan bank deregulation law passed by Congress in 2018, “impeded effective supervision by reducing standards, increasing complexity, and promoting a less assertive supervisory approach,” according to the report.
“We must strengthen the Federal Reserve’s supervision and regulation based on what we have learned,” Barr said in a press release.
The document is the opening salvo in a renewed debate over bank regulation as the Fed and other agencies consider how to improve their policing of financial risks in the wake of banking industry turmoil. SVB and another regional lender, Signature Bank, failed after depositor runs during the same weekend in March, leading government officials to backstop all deposits for the two failed firms — even those not insured by the FDIC — in a bid to stem the panic.
The fallout continues, with regulators and Wall Street now anxiously awaiting the fate of San Francisco-based First Republic, which was hammered by more than $100 billion of withdrawals after SVB’s collapse. The bank is furiously seeking avenues to stay afloat, and regulators are reportedly ready to put it in receivership if that effort fails.
The findings on SVB are likely to lead to tougher rules on regional banks in particular, and Fed Chair Jerome Powell made clear he is backing efforts by Barr, who has been vice chair for supervision since July.
“I welcome this thorough and self-critical report on Federal Reserve supervision from Vice Chair Barr,” Powell said in the release. “I agree with and support his recommendations to address our rules and supervisory practices, and I am confident they will lead to a stronger and more resilient banking system.”
But House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) slammed the report as overly political.
“While there are areas identified by Vice Chair Barr on which we agree … the bulk of the report appears to be a justification of Democrats’ long-held priorities,” McHenry said in a statement. He called it “a thinly veiled attempt to validate the Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats’ calls for more regulation.”

“Politicizing bank failures does not serve our economy, financial system, or the American people well,” he said.
McHenry and other lawmakers had been closely awaiting the post-mortem on the Fed’s supervision of SVB as they weigh further scrutiny of the bank’s failure. Barr, in a letter highlighting his conclusions from the report, said he welcomes an external examination of the central bank’s oversight of SVB, including from Congress.
One major finding is that the central bank has a culture where examiners shy away from taking forceful enough action to get banks to make important changes in a timely way, a senior Fed official told reporters. That problem worsened under Quarles, according to the report.
“Supervisory practices shifted,” the document states. “In the interviews for this report, staff repeatedly mentioned changes in expectations and practices, including pressure to reduce the burden on firms,” as well as to meet a high bar of evidence before taking action.
That approach “contributed to delays and, in some cases, led staff not to take action,” according to the report.
Another problem, the report said, was just how quickly SVB grew, tripling in size in just a few years. Once the bank was big enough to warrant more stringent supervision, it was given considerable time to comply with heightened standards that it wasn’t ready for.
Barr in his letter said supervisors should begin preparing banks ahead of time for those types of standards.
Other key policies that Barr said he wants to consider:
— Raising standards for regional banks.
— Requiring banks that aren’t well-managed to rely less on debt and have more cash on hand. That could “serve as an important safeguard until risk controls improve, and they can focus management’s attention on the most critical issues.”
— Targeting incentive pay for senior bank officials as a means to focus their attention on solving serious problems more quickly.
— Toughening oversight of how banks compensate their leaders more generally.
— Looking more closely at how much banks are relying on uninsured deposits and safe assets that have dropped in value to be able to get cash quickly in a crisis.
The Government Accountability Office in its own report released Friday criticized both the Fed’s supervision of SVB and the FDIC’s oversight of Signature Bank. It found that regulators had identified issues with both banks but failed to “escalate supervisory actions in time to prevent the failures.”
GAO had previously warned in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis about the risks posed by not acting fast enough to make supervisory concerns a priority. The agency in 2011 recommended that federal banking regulators consider incorporating “additional triggers that would require early and forceful regulatory action to address unsafe banking practices” into their supervisory frameworks.
“While the regulators took steps to address our recommendations, we continue to believe that incorporating noncapital triggers would enhance the framework by encouraging earlier action and giving the regulators and banks more time to address deteriorating conditions before capital is depleted,” GAO said in the report.
The FDIC in a separate report on Signature’s collapse, also released Friday, conceded that “in retrospect, [it] could have escalated supervisory actions sooner.” But it attributed a large share of the blame to insufficient staffing.
The team dedicated to overseeing Signature “experienced frequent vacancies and continuous turnover” from 2017 through March 2023. That group was steadily expanded from three in 2017 to nine in 2023, as the bank grew, but had “at least one vacancy 60 percent of the time and had 17 different staff assigned during this time period not including field territory resources that were temporarily assigned to cover gaps.” It also had difficulty finding a qualified person to be the examiner in charge of the bank.
This is a broader problem in the agency’s New York regional office, it added.
Katy O’Donnell contributed to this report.
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#Fed #blames #Trumpera #policies #SVB #leaders #banks #stunning #collapse
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 28, 2023
Supreme Court cancels oral arguments in Trump-era immigration policy case

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The public health emergency is the legal backbone of the Title 42 policy, a decades-old health directive the Trump administration resurfaced in March 2020 to sharply curtail the flow of asylum seekers into the U.S., particularly across the border with Mexico. The Biden administration has pledged to end the policy.
While the Biden administration officially opposes Title 42 policy, which many immigrant-rights advocates have bitterly denounced, Republicans and even some Democrats welcomed legal action to keep the asylum restrictions in place. Officials in border areas feared a massive influx in migration and even began to see an increase in December before legal maneuvering halted plans to end the policy that month.
Earlier this month, the White House declared the Covid-19 and national public health emergencies would come to an end on May 11. In a statement to Congress, the administration noted that the continual renewal of Title 42 orders — which have allowed the government for the past three years to turn away migrants without listening to their asylum claims — would come to an end, too. Since its implementation, Title 42 has been used more than 2 million times to expel migrants.
“Absent other relevant developments, the end of the public health emergency will (among other consequences) terminate the Title 42 orders and moot this case,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court last week, establishing its legal stance on the fate of the policy. “The government has also recently announced its intent to adopt new Title 8 policies to address the situation at the border once the Title 42 orders end.”
After conflicting court rulings from federal district court judges in Washington, D.C. and Louisiana, a sharply divided Supreme Court stepped in last December, staying an order requiring the Biden administration to end Title 42. By a 5-4 vote, the justices put the D.C.-based judge’s order on hold and appeared to defer to the Louisiana-based judge’s order that blocked a wind-down of the policy.
However, the high court insisted at the time that it was not requiring that the controversial immigration policy be kept in place.
“The stay itself does not prevent the federal government from taking any action with respect to that policy,” the court said then.
The handling of the border has been a constant challenge for the Biden administration — stymied by court battles and a Congress unable to reach a deal on immigration reform. Administration officials have continually said they’re preparing to lift Title 42, and have rolled out new policies intended to alleviate pressure at the border.

In January, Biden unveiled a new border measure that involved accepting 30,000 migrants a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela while cracking down on those who fail to use the plan’s legal pathways. The number of migrants and asylum seekers attempting to cross the border has dropped by 40 percent since December, which administration officials credit to the new policies.
The president’s announcement was made as the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice released details of a plan to impose a new regulation — a version of a Trump-era policy often called the “transit ban.” Under the new rule, migrants would be prohibited from applying for asylum in the United States unless they were first turned away for safe harbor by another country. It would also deem ineligible migrants who don’t go through authorized ports of entry.
The regulation is expected to be rolled out in the coming weeks and will likely be met with swift criticism from immigration lawyers, advocates and Democrats.
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#Supreme #Court #cancels #oral #arguments #Trumpera #immigration #policy #case
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 17, 2023
John Bolton wants ‘all the details’ in briefing on Trump-era balloons

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Now Bolton, who is weighing a 2024 presidential run, promised to “ask for all the details, top to bottom, on what the record indicates about Chinese or other aerial incursions during the Trump administration.”
“I want to know whether overflights during the Trump administration were detected or not detected. If they were detected, what were they assessed to be, and who made that assessment? How far up the chain of command did the information and assessments go?” he continued.
Bolton first discussed his upcoming briefing with NBC News.
The former U.N. ambassador blasted Biden’s team, specifically National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, for continually bringing up the Trump-era balloon flights. “If the White House thinks this is a way to build confidence in their response to the recent incursions, it is sadly mistaken,” he said.
Kirby responded to Bolton’s comments during a session with reporters Tuesday. “All we’re doing is speaking the truth. This is a well-funded, deliberate program to collect intelligence on other nations, including us,” he said. “The reason we know that is because of the work we’ve done since we came into office to understand this program” and “decipher how these balloons operate”
Kirby further told reporters that the three objects hovering above the U.S. and Canada and shot down by the military last weekend could be “balloons tied to some commercial work.”
Biden administration officials briefed senators Tuesday morning on the latest information regarding the Chinese spy balloon and the downed objects.
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#John #Bolton #details #briefing #Trumpera #balloons
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 14, 2023