BORDER/CONGRESS/ELECTION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “As the 2020 presidential election gets into full swing, President Donald Trump is focusing on one of his favorite topics: immigration. Over the past several days, the president has warned he’ll cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Central American nations where migrants come from, and he threatened to seal off the entire southern border. That follows his decision to declare a “national emergency,” so he can expand the border wall without approval from Congress. All that is happening as the United States tries to renegotiate its trade agreement with Mexico and Canada…Tom Jawetz, vice president for immigration policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, said the president’s actions represent a purely political strategy to create the impression of chaos along the border…The Trump administration pointed to a massive increase in the number of people trying to cross the U.S.-Mexican border in recent months as its reason for declaring a national emergency. Overall, illegal immigration across the southern border remains lower than the peak years throughout the 1990s and 2000s, when the Border Patrol regularly apprehended more than 1 million undocumented immigrants a year crossing the southern border.”
–Alan Gomez, “Cutting aid and closing ports: Here’s what’s happening at the southern border,” USA Today, April 1, 2019 6:57 pm