Covering immigration and DHS for the @WSJ. forgetful tweeter. Please Get in touch directly: michelle.hackman@wsj.com or MHackman.59 on signal
Washington, DC
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Hello! 👋🏼 I'm a reporter for the @WSJ covering immigration. If you work in/with the government and have something to share with a reporter, you can reach me securely on signal at mhackman.59
I take the safety of sources extremely seriously. No one needs to know we talked
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Biden Chief of staff Ron Klain says in published memo to incoming WH staff that Biden will reverse Trump's travel ban on inauguration day
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Family members of unauthorized immigrants are now eligible to get stimulus checks under the $900 billion deal reached last night. That eligibility is retroactive, so adults excluded last time could get up to $1800 now wsj.com/articles/what-is-in-…
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California's governor has just signed a new law banning private prisons and immigration detention centers. Will have a big impact on ICE's ability to detain people in California W/@Alejandrolazo wsj.com/articles/california-…
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Confirmed: The White House will propose merging the Education and Labor Departments, as part of a much broader plan to consolidate the federal government wsj.com/articles/white-house…
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Wow, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf is conducting a naturalization ceremony for new citizens live at the RNC. Note until today, his agency was planning to furlough 2/3 of the citizenship agency, adn these ceremonies would have slowed to a trickle
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New: The White House has concluded, based on an opinion from the office of legal counsel at the Justice Department, that neither Cuccinelli or Morgan is eligible for the acting Homeland Security Secretary job wsj.com/articles/white-house…
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The immigrants who became citizens at last night's naturalization ceremony at the White House were told only minutes beforehand that President Trump would be appearing, and they weren't told that footage of the ceremony would air during the RNC wsj.com/articles/immigrants-…
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New from me: The Biden team is struggling to deal with a rise in unaccompanied migrant children in their custody. As of Friday, HHS shelters were at 93% capacity, and more than 700 children had backed up in border patrol custody wsj.com/articles/rise-in-mig…
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New from me: some 100,000 green cards are set to go to waste amid backlogs at citizenship and immigration services if the government can’t figure out a legal way to save them — unless congress or the courts intervene wsj.com/articles/some-100-00…
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A federal judge struck down new rules that would have made it tougher for foreign workers, particularly new international graduates of U.S. colleges, to qualify for an H-1B visa and significantly more expensive for companies to sponsor them wsj.com/articles/federal-jud…
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“They say they would have gladly worked another five or 10 years, but they just reached a point under this administration where they can’t. It used to be there were pressures, but you were an independent judge left to decide the cases.” latimes.com/world-nation/sto…
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Republican Sens. Graham, Cornyn, Crapo, Risch, Rounds, Young, Murkowski, Sullivan and Lankford write President Trump to urge him not to restrict temporary, work-based visas, which they say will help the economic recovery
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Today is the eighth anniversary of President Obama announcing DACA, and it very well could be the day the Supreme Court comes out with its decision on the case. There are ~700,000 DACA recipients Whose lives could be upended if the program is rescinded
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For no particular reason, just noting WSJ news style: Jill Biden is Dr. Biden on second reference in our pages wsj.com/articles/vol-33-no-1…
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I am the only blind reporter across most national publications, as far as i know. For that i give @wsj a lot of credit — they hired me and bend over backward to make my work possible
Newsroom diversity has been a problem for a long time. Not just racial diversity. Economic class too. Reporters overestimated Warren this year because Warren was the candidate of their class - upscale whites. Warren was the candidate their friends liked.
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Wow, missed this: President Joe Biden called for funding to investigate complaints of white supremacist beliefs at U.S. immigration enforcement agencies in his first budget request to Congress on Friday reuters.com/article/us-usa-b…
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As of today, the White House was still debating one or two countries on this list, but new countries being added to the #travelban include: Belarus, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania wsj.com/articles/trump-admin…
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Elizabeth Neumann, asst. sec for terrorism at DHS until 2019, says on refugee press call: "the administration's approach to refugees is not based on security. it has to do with the larger effort to keep out the other."
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"I feel helpless." My latest on Indian immigrants in the green card backlog feeling in limbo as up to 80,000 green cards are set to expire today and potential solutions in Congress falter wsj.com/articles/up-to-80-00…
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DNC officials also created fake craigslist job postings for Trump organization. Requirement: "no gaining weight" wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/ema…
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My latest is about a bizarre, kafkaesque situation in which peoples citizenship applications are stalling because the paperwork needed to complete them is stuck inside an underground government storage cave that is closed for Covid wsj.com/articles/with-paperw…
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In 2019, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson blocked the Trump administration from implementing a policy to deport anyone found in the country who had illegally entered in the previous two years wsj.com/articles/judge-block…
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"Thirteen years ago, Afghan interpreter Mohammed helped rescue then- Sen. Joe Biden & two other senators stranded in a remote Afghanistan valley after their helicopter was forced to land in a snowstorm. Now, Mohammed is asking President Biden to save him."
wsj.com/articles/afghan-inte…
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Healthcare timeline
- bill text end of this week
- CBO next Mon/Tues
- Vote on Thursday
wsj.com/articles/senate-gop-…
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Wow. The government just said in court it has agreed to rescind the july 6th policy on interntional students, which would return rules to the status quo it set this spring
New: The White House and DHS are in talks to scale back a policy ICE issued last week on international students. one option is to apply the policy only to newly-enrolling students. W/@AndrewRestuccia wsj.com/articles/white-house…
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There are several other immigration/travel bans, incl one on work visas; one on family members of citizens looking to immigrate; country-base covid restrictions and a ban on immigrants who don’t have health coverage. I haven’t seen Biden team address any of these additional bans
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NEWS: GAO rules that Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, the top two officials at the Department of Homeland Security, were invalidly appointed and are ineligible to be serving in their current roles as acting officials gao.gov/products/B-331650
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Acting Sec. @DHSMcAleenan has just walked off the stage after being prevented form speaking threeor four times. He won't be speaking today
Acting DHS Secretary McAleenan is at Georgetown Law today to speak, but he is being prevented to begin by a spirited group of protesters shouting, "when immigrants are under attack, stand up fight back"
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Pretty rough for blind people who now can't see *either* the headline or the image for links posted to twitter
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The U.S. sent representatives from the CDC to re-test 12 of the deported immigrants Guatemala said had tested positive on a single deportation flight. All 12 tested positive again wsj.com/articles/guatemala-a…
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The U.S. is set to issue 280,000 employment-based green cards by the end of this fiscal year - twice the usual total wsj.com/articles/u-s-expects…
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Hi Twitter! Some news: as of today, I am now covering immigration policy and enforcement for the @WSJ in Washington. I am extremely thrilled and already a little overwhelmed. If this is your world, especially if you work in the government or used to, please please be in touch.
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With talks over a covid relief package collapsed, it seems very likely U.S. Citizenship and Immigration services will move ahead with furloughing 70% of its staff later this month. That will mean a near-complete shutdown of the legal immigration system wsj.com/articles/u-s-immigra…
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NEW: The Biden administration is in talks to offer immigrant families separated at the border during the Trump administration around $450,000 a person in compensation. W/@aviswanatha and @sgurman wsj.com/articles/biden-admin…
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A bill intended to speed up green cards for Indian and Chinese immigrants caught in a years long backlog just failed on the Senate floor. Blocked by GOP Sen David Purdue. Indian immigrants waiting in the Senate gallery put their heads in their hands and covered their eyes
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The White House has privately told allies it is determined to see what, if anything, it can get done on immigration in the next 6 mos. Might be a deal on dreamers, or a larger legalization deal for essential workers they think they can do w/50 senate votes wsj.com/articles/bidens-immi…
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New from me: the government says it has found evidence of collusion in the H-1B lottery process, where a small group of unnamed companies worked together to submit multiple lottery entries for the same person with the goal of driving up their chances wsj.com/articles/u-s-says-so…
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Wow wow. Some airlines flying to the northern Mariana Islands are making women who **look pregnant** take pregnancy tests, so they can prevent them from going to give birth to U.S. citizen children wsj.com/articles/ticket-pass…
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The night before Juan Guaidó declared himself Venezuela’s interim president, he got a phone call from Vice President Mike Pence urging him to invoke a clause in the country's constitution to take over as interim president wsj.com/articles/a-call-from…
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Another aspect to this story: some of the diversity visa lottery winners are Afghans who didn't receive their visas yet and are about to lose a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get them wsj.com/articles/diversity-v…
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Not to mention that consular processing has slowed down so much that no one is getting a fiancé visa right now
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An issue that has flown under the radar: tens of thousands of immigrants, mostly Indian women, are losing months of pay—if not their jobs and in some cases their homes—because of massive bureaucratic delays in processing their visa renewals+work permits wsj.com/articles/work-permit…
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Chad Wolf says DHS is returning 90% of migrants within 120 minutes, calls it "a big accomplishment." Frames it as the culmination of Trump's immigration agenda, does not mention public health -- the legal rationale allowing the government to return migrants so quickly
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News: The Parliamentarian has rejected Democrats' third immigration proposal, offering millions of immigrants deportation protections and work permits. Likely the end of the road for helping unauthorized immigrants through reconciliation. W/@aduehren wsj.com/articles/senate-parl…
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Two debates, zero immigration questions. Remarkable given it has been President Trump's top and perhaps most consequential policy priority wsj.com/livecoverage/vp-deba…
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Did you know: Trump put in place a sweeping ban on most forms of immigration, and Biden has left it in place? Now, pressure is building on the administration to change course wsj.com/articles/businesses-…
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“We can’t allow the Republican Party to be hijacked,” Gonzales (R., Tex.) aid. “Trying to ban legitimate asylum claims — one, it’s not Christian, and two, to me, it’s very anti-American. So a lot is at stake.” washingtonpost.com/politics/…
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NEW: Remember the massive trove of commercially available cell phone location data @NYTimes revealed in December? @ByronTau and I found that the Department of Homeland Security bought the data in 2017 and has used it for immigration and border enforcement. wsj.com/articles/federal-age…
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A reminder that CBP anticipated receiving between 21,800 and 25,000 unaccompanied minors in May, per internal docs we saw. Actual number was under 14,000 wsj.com/articles/border-cros…
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USCIS says it’s formally getting rid of the blank space policy, which among other things meant an application would be rejected if the applicant didn’t have a middle name and left the middle name feel blank
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Good @NickMiroff Look here at why calls to break up the department of homeland security are growing, Including a set of recommendations from former secretary’s to refocus the agencies Mission washingtonpost.com/national/…
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The number of unaccompanied kids in CBP custody is at 1,040, the highest it's been since April 27. Per daily gov't data
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The government just dropped its appeal of a court ruling that Ken Cuccinelli illegally served as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services democracyforward.org/wp-cont… Story about court hearing from March: wsj.com/articles/cuccinelli-…
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The $250 million that's going toward the Texas border wall is coming out of the budget for Texas prisons, which are already so under-funded that most don't have air conditioning, per @efindell
.@GovAbbott news of the day: Texas is going to build a wall and jail lots of people and taxpayers and donors are going to pay for it wsj.com/articles/texas-gover…
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The U.S. govt is considering asking Black Americans on federal forms including the census whether their ancestors were enslaved. The move would differentiate them from more recent Black immigrants+their children, who now make up approx 1/5 of the Black pop wsj.com/articles/u-s-conside…
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one thing missing from the border conversation: unaccompanied children started coming in increasing numbers in the fall, in part b/c of a court decision saying Trump couldn't immediately "expel" them. @acaldwellwsj and i wrote this in early December wsj.com/articles/arrests-of-…
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While complaining about the media's supposed bias for HRC, Don Trump Jr. slipped in a casual holocaust reference blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/…
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Sen. Kennedy is not giving DHS Sec Wolf an easy time in this hearing. Asks how many people in US will get coronavirus per models. Wolf doesn't know. "You're the Secretary. I think you oughta know that answer."
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Thousands of families around the world are about to lose what is likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to immigrate to the U.S. if the State Department doesn’t process their diversity visas, by @AvaSasani wsj.com/articles/diversity-v…
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Joe Biden commits in this statement to taking at least 95,000 refugees each year of his presidency; for reference, Trump accepted 18,000 this year medium.com/@JoeBiden/my-stat…
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I do a staggering amount of my work for the @Wsj in my pajamas, and I’d prefer not to be shaded for it by my own employer thanks
No, you shouldn't be wearing sweatpants to work—even when you work from home on.wsj.com/34jTJoU
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Looks like another firing at DHS: Jennifer Costello, deputy inspector general. For background on her situation and that office, read this great @NickMiroff story washingtonpost.com/national/…
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Athulya moved here when she was 5. She competed on her HS debate team, graduated from UT Austin with a degree in journalism and dreams of becoming a lawyer. But because of an unforeseen consequence of immigration laws, she may need to move back to India wsj.com/articles/adult-child…
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Here’s a little only-as-an-immigration-reporter, only-in-a-pandemic story. When I was a high school senior, I participated in a science competition (don’t worry, I was the lone psych kid.) 1/x
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Per WH pool, Biden was asked if he thinks the border is secure. "No," he said. Asked if his admin's policies have caused any of the problems, he also said no
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The fee to become a citizen is about to go up by more than 80% to $1170
It’s the belief that all people are created equal & imbued with natural rights that forges the way for moments like today—where background, wealth, or age fade away, & belief in the American creed takes center stage. Honored to have welcomed this group as fellow Americans.
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Inbox: signs the U.S. immigration system is entering the 21st century. You can now file a DACA renewal application (both the deferred action and the work permit) online
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According to our math, Ice under Biden performed 467 arrests on average per day in 2023 (although the average fell to 310 in 2024) @anthonydb
ICE officers blitz US, arresting 460 immigrants under Trump’s mass deportation operation: Report washingtonexaminer.com/polic… via @dcexaminer
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Safe-corridor routes would require travelers to be tested for Covid-19 before their flight and again upon arrival, allowing them to avoid lengthy quarantines at their destinations. The U.S. and U.K. are in discussions to open up the New York-London route wsj.com/articles/u-s-covid-t…
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Mayorkas's own family fled Cuba in 1960 when he was just a year old
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warning in a press conference that people fleeing from Haiti or Cuba by boat will be interdicted by the Coastguard and "will not make it to the United States." Says they have sent to Coastguard cutters to the Haitian coast
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Our Wall Street Journal Washington Bureau lost some of its most beloved reporters and editors today. I am heartbroken that this industry we love and care about so much can be so fickle and turn peoples lives upside down. Please pay for News and hire my talented colleagues
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To clarify, the Cares act blocked *U.S. Citizens* from receiving stimulus checks if their spouse or parent was in the country illegally. The money goes to these people. Here's an Evangelical-led letter on the issue: evangelicalimmigrationtable.…
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An important piece here by the Wall Street Journal wsj.com/articles/u-s-postal-…
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Acting DHS Secretary McAleenan is at Georgetown Law today to speak, but he is being prevented to begin by a spirited group of protesters shouting, "when immigrants are under attack, stand up fight back"
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Between ever more competitive visa lotteries, a growing backlog of Green Cards and workers on H-1Bs who are laid off, putting their immigration status in a precarious state, immigrants are getting fed up with America. Canada is trying to take advantage wsj.com/articles/canada-woos…
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This is really important reporting from @Tanvim showing the government has put in-country green card processing on hold too, though the President didn’t have power to do that in his April immigration suspension rollcall.com/2020/06/12/admi…
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An actual inquiry I just sent DHS today: "Hi there folks, who is the acting secretary of homeland security today? Thanks."
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ICE prosecutors have been instructed by the Biden Admin that they can consider dismissing cases for immigrants who have been longtime green card holders, are pregnant, elderly, have a serious health condition or have been in the US from a young age buzzfeednews.com/article/ham…
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Singularly horrific -- an 11-year-old student's account of playing dead while the shooter lingered in her classroom for an hour cnn.com/2022/05/27/us/robb-s…
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That was certainly quite the ride. Anyone else also remember how DHS rolled out the fact it was cutting New York off from global entry — at 9pm in a Fox News interview?
Remember when the Trump admin cut off New York residents from Global Entry?
Government officials later admitted they made false statements in the case & allowed NY residents to sign up again.
Last week, the US government agreed to pay New York $115K to close the case.
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Our latest is on the Trump administration's push to build its border wall where it's easiest to build, meaning in many cases it's putting up wall in places where not many people cross the border and destroying protected land in the meantime wsj.com/articles/trump-admin…
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The @WSJ editorial board is calling on Trump to offer green cards to the people of Hong kong. "This is the kind of Reaganesque move that would remind the world of America’s big heart and faith in freedom," they write. wsj.com/articles/visas-for-h…
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CO Rep. Mike Coffman becomes first vulnerable GOPer to air an anti-Trump ad. I'm sure there'll be more: politi.co/2aPEonH
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New: The Biden administration plans to raise the cap on H-2B seasonal-worker visas, used by resorts, theme parks, landscapers and fisheries, among others, by 22,000 additional visas wsj.com/articles/biden-to-in…
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ICE announced it is now moving to use its expanded swift deportation authority. Any immigrant in the country who can't prove to an immigration officer they have been in the country for more than two years could be deported within days w/o a hearing wsj.com/articles/appeals-cou…
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I just got an email from a disability rights activist chiding me for using the phrase "turn a blind eye" on the radio. Should I tell her?
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I lost my site when I was a kid, before I ever learned to ride a bike without training wheels. This year, I found a tandem biking partner, and went from learning how not to fall on my face to 30 mile rides most weekends. This is the best ❤️
Friends! My parents are biking from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean IN MATCHING JERSEYS. It’s my dad’s dream and they are doing it on a tandem (my mom is blind).
They have an Instagram, go cheer them on — instagram.com/lookupmoveforw…
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Pay attention to what Joe Biden says he'll do on immigration: unlike in most other policy areas, he can enact much of his vision (and progressive asks) without Congress wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-w…
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My colleague @AndrewRestuccia and I confirmed many of the rumors about coming new restrictions and limits on legal immigration. Nothing is decided but here is what is being considered wsj.com/articles/trump-admin…
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New: The White House and DHS are in talks to scale back a policy ICE issued last week on international students. one option is to apply the policy only to newly-enrolling students. W/@AndrewRestuccia wsj.com/articles/white-house…
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“Many WSJ journalists, including many who are white, find the way we cover race to be problematic," reads a letter 150 @WSJ staffers sent to management on Friday.
I signed the letter. wsj.com/articles/americas-ne…
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Reminder: Chad Wolf made an "unpublicized visit" to We Build The Wall's construction site in New Mexico in November, about a week after assuming the Acting DHS Secretary role news.yahoo.com/acting-homela…
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Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) plans to bring up a bill next week for unanimous passage that would recapture any unused employment-based green cards over the past two years. But already two Republicans plan to object wsj.com/articles/up-to-80-00…
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Ken Cuccinelli, a top official at the Department of Homeland Security, said on CNN Tuesday that the policy was designed in part to “encourage schools to reopen.” His words are cited in the universities’ lawsuit. wsj.com/articles/harvard-mit…
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