NYC mayor de Blasio disputes Border Protection allegations he crossed border illegally
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio lashed out at the Trump administration and denied any wrongdoing after a letter from U.S. Customs and Border Protection emerged stating the mayor and his security detail illegally crossed over the U.S.-Mexico border during a visit to Texas last month.
During a news conference Wednesday at the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, de Blasio called the allegations “absolutely ridiculous” and an attempt by the Trump administration to create a distraction amid the immigration debate involving illegal immigrant children.
“[This] is another way to distract [the American people] from an inhumane policy,” de Blasio said about the letter being released about two weeks after it was issued.
“Threats by the Trump administration will not stop me from speaking out and won’t stop my fellow mayors from speaking out,” the mayor said.
In a letter sent on June 25 and obtained by Fox News, CBP said de Blasio and his security detail, run by the New York Police Department, illegally crossed the border near El Paso on June 21. The mayor and his security detail were spotted taking photos by a Border Patrol agent on the Rio Grande River flood plain south of the Tornillo, Texas, Port of Entry.
They had been denied earlier in the day entrance to a holding facility for immigrant children, which de Blasio said on Wednesday “made no sense.”
The letter said a border patrol agent approached a group of 10 to 12 people and asked if they received authorization from a Border Patrol or public affairs officer to be in the area. New York Police Department inspector Howard Redmond was with de Blasio and the group did not have a Border Patrol agent or public affairs officer with them, according to the letter.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio looks through a closed gate at the Port of Entry facility, in Fabens, Texas, where tent shelters are being used to house separated family members.. (AP)
When asked how they entered the vicinity, the group reportedly pointed toward Mexico.
“The agent informed the group that they had illegally crossed the United States/Mexico Border at a place other than a designated port of entry and that this was a violation of federal law,” the letter read.
The agent ordered the group to remain at the scene, but they disregarded the request and walked across a river bed and back into Mexico, according to the letter. The agent had left to get a supervisor to take the group to an official crossing for an inspection per federal law.
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Migrants describe hunger and solitary confinement at for-profit detention center
CNN)The 40-year-old mother found herself in solitary confinement, locked in a cell behind a steel door for 23 hours a day, according to her legal filing and attorney.
Feds miss deadline to reunite all immigrant children under 5 with families
SAN DIEGO — Lawyers for the Justice Department said in a court filing Tuesday that the federal government will miss a court-imposed deadline to reunite most of 102 migrant children under the age of 5 with their parents from whom they were separated. More children were reunited with their families Tuesday, but there were still dozens still separated from their families by the end of the day.
CBS News correspondent Mireya Villarreal reports that the judge wants to see constant progress and that there is a system in place that tracks these children.
As of Tuesday morning, four children had been reunited with their parents, according to the joint filing submitted by the government and the ACLU to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.
A June 26 court order stemming from a lawsuit filed over the Justice Department’s “zero tolerance” policy — which led adults and children to be separated when apprehended crossing the border — gave the government two weeks to reunite children under the age of 5 with their parents, and one month for all others.
On a conference call with reporters Tuesday, Chris Meekins, chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ assistant secretary for preparedness and response, said the administration has tried to speed up reunifications by adding extra staff to conduct criminal background checks and determine claims of parentage.
“Let me be clear, HHS could have transferred every child in HHS care to a parent if we did not take into account child safety,” Meekins said.
Meekins said at least 14 children will not be reunited with those claiming to be parents, eight of whom failed criminal background checks, five of whom were determined not to be parents and one of whom is the subject of a claim of child abuse deemed to be credible.
The filing noted 13 others currently deemed ineligible for reunification, for reasons ranging from parents currently in the custody of other criminal justice agencies to a parent who is being treated for a communicable disease, and one who lives in a home with another adult who has a criminal background.
One child whose parents’ location is unknown may not actually be an immigrant, according to the filing.
“Records show the parent and child might be U.S. citizens,” lawyers for the government wrote in the filing.
Abril Valdes, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan told the Associated Press that two young boys and a girl were among those reunited Tuesday with their families at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The parents will be free while their cases wind through immigration court, and they’re expected to be required to wear ankle monitors, AP reports.
Valdes says her client, Ever Reyes Mejia, and the other two fathers “were hugging and loving their” children and telling the kids that “they were never going to be separated again.”
In total, the administration said it expects to ultimately reunite 75 of the 102 children with their parents. It noted that 20 of those parents were already deported, even though their children remain in U.S. government custody.
In the filing, the ACLU criticized the government’s work reuniting the children with their parents.
“For (the parents) who were deported without their children, (government officials) have not even tried to contact them or facilitate their reunification by today,” ACLU lawyers wrote.
There are as many as 2,900 more children five or older who remain in federal custody awaiting a July 26 reunification deadline, HHS Secretary Alex Azar said Thursday.
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This Black Family Was Delivering Papers, And Guess What? Cops Were Called On Them.
T’is officially the season for calling the police on our Brothers and Sisters
A mother wanted to teach her sons about the value of hard work, and thought that a good-old-fashioned paper route was the way to do so. Instead, however, her sons learned a hard lesson about being black in America, ABC6/FOX28 reports.
Brandie Sharpe and sons Mycah, 17, and Uriah, 11, were working a paper route in a Columbus, Ohio neighborhood when they realized they’d accidentally delivered a few papers to the wrong houses.
Sharp sent Uriah to retrieve the misplaced papers and as he was doing so, the group was approached by a police officer.
“I showed him the thing for the Dispatch, The Bag, the midday week paper, that we get,” Brandie told ABC6/FOX28. “And he said ‘Oh, really?’ and by that time I was kind of like, ‘Okay, why are you questioning me about this?'”
A resident had called the police on the family.
“It looked like at first they were delivering newspapers or something, but I noticed they were walking up to the houses with nothing in hand and one of them came back with something,” the caller told the dispatcher. “I mean, I don’t want to say something was going on, but it just but it just seemed kind of suspicious.”
Sharp isn’t buying it.
“I want to know what was suspicious, what was suspicious,” Sharp told NBC4. “That an 11-year -old was up in the driveway, getting a newspaper, literally went up and came right back down.”
The incident prompted an angry Facebook post from Sharp that went viral.
“First day of paper route and we are pulled over by police … Sad I cant even teach my son the value of working without someone whispering and looking at us out the side of their eye perhaps because we DON’T ‘look like a person that belongs in their neighborhood,’” she wrote.
“Police officer pulls up and ask us questions as if we were intruding in their area. Totally disgusted and disturbed that this kind of behavior still exist [sic]. My apologies Upper Arlington for bringing my 12-year-old African American son into your neighborhood to deliver the paper and make a few dollars on the side … NO HARM INTENDED … I will make sure my boss changes his route.”
Police department spokesman Bryan McKean says the responding officer “determined very quickly that these individuals were delivering the newspaper,” and that race wasn’t a factor in the department’s response.
“If she feels she was treated unfairly by our officer, we want to hear from her,” McKean said. “We want to know what our officer did to make her feel that way so we can investigate that and we can find out.”
The Upper Arlington Police Department also issued a statement describing the incident and pointing out a law saying delivery people cannot leave papers driveways.
“For some context, [Upper Arlington] recently enacted a law placing more stringent requirements on the delivery of printed materials, such as advertising packets, to help reduce littering. Deliveries must be made to specific locations, such as on a porch or through a mail slot in the front door,” the statement read. “This has changed the patterns of delivery people, since they are required to walk up to each home to correctly deliver these materials. Residents are seeing this change in approach but may not be aware of the new law.”
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These Two Doctors Are Behind The First Black-Owned Water Company To Have Products Sold At Walmart
The water sold out within one month!
A black-owned alkaline water company has made it onto Walmart’s shelves.
Live Alkaline Water is sourced from a spring in North Carolina that has been in Dr. Robert McCray’s family for over a century. He told First Coast News his aunt took him to the spring and told him his “ancestors are crying out” to him, calling on him to be a responsible steward for the water.
To put his family’s water to good use, McCray partnered with Dr. Shayla Creer to start a bottled water company.
At first things didn’t seem to be going anywhere; however, eventually, Creer and McCray had a stroke of luck.
“I called … many Walmarts, and finally we got a hold of one who allowed us to do a presentation,” Creer told the station.
Unbeknownst to them, a regional manager was present and liked their idea.
“It was hard to keep our composure,” said McCray. “Because it’s the product that was [our] baby.”
Alkaline water is thought by many to have extraordinary health benefits, including the management of acid reflux disease. Once it was in stores, McCray and Creer’s water sold out within a month of being on sale.
The water is now sold in three Walmart locations and several privately-owned businesses in North Florida. It can also be purchased online.
Article via: First Black Owned Water Company
Haiti unrest leaves US missionaries stranded
CNN- A number of US missionary groups are stranded in Haiti after protesters took to the streets following a fuel price hike ordered by the government.
A Texas police officer pulled his gun on a group of kids. Now, he’s doing desk duty
First, he told the children to “back up.” Then he pointed his gun at them.
A gun comes out and it’s captured on camera
Instagram Model Accidentally Kills Herself During Filming Of Viral Video
A 35 year old Russian Instagram Super Model dies after getting into an accident while filming a video story.
The video shows the woman, who’s only wearing bikini bottoms hanging out of the window in a moving car when she’s struck by a road sign.
The incident took place while she was on vacation in the Dominican Republic.
Watch the video here: http://southlandpost.com/instagram-model-accidentally-kills-herself-during-filming-of-viral-video/
N.J. braces for dangerous rip currents as Tropical Storm Chris is set to strengthen into a hurricane
Tropical Storm Chris is expected to become Hurricane Chris later Tuesday as it continues to spin far off the coast of North Carolina.
Forecasters from the National Hurricane Center said Chris — which should become the second hurricane of the relatively slow 2018 Atlantic hurricane season — made very little movement during the past 24 hours but is expected to track north and east Tuesday into early Wednesday.
Once the storm begins to travel farther north, it will create rough surf as far north as the Jersey Shore, forecasters said.
“Swells generated by Chris are expected to increase and affect portions of the coasts of North Carolina and the Mid-Atlantic states during the next few days,” the hurricane center said in its storm advisory Tuesday morning. “These swells could cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions.”
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Ethiopia and Eritrea Declare an End to Their War
Ethiopia and Eritrea on Monday formally declared an end to their “state of war,” a two-decade-long standoff that followed a brutal war over their shared border.
The official end of hostilities is expected to bring some stability to a part of the world better known for its enduring conflicts, and to a region that abuts one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world even as war rages on in Yemen, just across the Red Sea.
The announcement came after Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, visited Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, on Sunday, where he embraced President Isaias Afwerki on an airport tarmac. The leaders said the countries would resume trade, economic and diplomatic ties, including reopening embassies and restarting flights.
“The state of war between Ethiopia and Eritrea has come to an end,” the leaders said in a joint declaration. “A new era of peace and friendship has been opened.”
More than 80,000 people had died in the war.
Later on Monday, Ethiopia asked the visiting secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, to lift sanctions against Eritrea, Mr. Abiy’s chief of staff said in a message on Twitter. The United Nations had imposed an arms embargo and a partial travel ban on Eritrea, citing its disputes with neighboring countries.
Mr. Guterres told reporters on Monday that the sanctions might “become obsolete.”
Eritrea gained its independence from Ethiopia in the early 1990s but has not recorded the same growth as its neighbor, sinking into economic and social isolation. Ethiopia, landlocked since the secession, has a strategic interest in a critical Eritrean port, Assab.
A border war broke out between the countries in the late 1990s, and since then, they have been locked in an unyielding animus.
Eritrean dissidents have accused the government of using the war to justify endless military service that has been behind the exodus of young Eritreans in recent years. Eritreans were among the largest group of people landing on Mediterranean shores during the height of Europe’s migration crisis.