Abortion rights emerged as a major topic of discussion on Sunday among U.S. senators who will vote on President Donald Trump’s eventual Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is retiring at the end of the month.

“My colleagues on both sides of the aisle [Democrats and Republicans] know that this could be one of the key votes of their entire career,” Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington state said on NBC’s Meet the Press program. “If they vote for somebody who is going to change [legal] precedent, it could be a career-ending move.”

Abortion has been legal nationwide in America since a landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe versus Wade. Subsequent court decisions have reinforced the rights of women to terminate pregnancies.

As a candidate in 2016, Trump signaled a clear intention to pave the way for overturning Roe versus Wade by nominating socially conservative jurists likely to believe the high court erred in its 1973 decision.

Watch related video by VOA’s Michael Bowman:

“That will happen, and that’ll happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life [anti-abortion] justices on the court,” Trump said at a presidential debate against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

But in an interview broadcast on Sunday, Trump told Fox News that he “probably” will not ask his nominee how he or she would vote on Roe versus Wade, adding that he is putting “conservative people on” the court.

No guarantees

Some senators who oppose abortion rights said, regardless of whom Trump nominates and how far rightward the ultimate ideological composition of the Supreme Court shifts, there are no guarantees about future decisions on abortion or any other divisive topic.

“I’m pro-life,” South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said on Meet the Press. “[But] you don’t overturn precedent unless there is a good reason. And I would tell my pro-life friends, you can be pro-life and conservative, but you can also believe in stare decisis [letting legal precedent stand]. Roe versus Wade, in many ways, has been affirmed over the years.”

Democrats won’t be able to block Trump’s nominee on their own, but could be joined by moderate Republicans who back abortion rights.

“I would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade, because that would mean to me that their judicial philosophy does not include a respect for established decisions.” Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine told CNN’s State of the Union.

Senate Republicans are promising a confirmation vote before the November midterm elections.

Senate Republicans are promising a confirmation vote before the November midterm elections.

“The Senate will vote to confirm Justice Kennedy’s successor this fall,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said. “The president’s nominee should be considered fairly.”

Last year, three Senate Democrats joined Republicans to confirm Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, a staunch judicial conservative. Trump could have even more high court vacancies to fill, as Kennedy is one of four justices over the age of 70.

 
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Washington is gearing up for a protracted battle over a looming U.S. Supreme Court vacancy as President Donald Trump considers a replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is retiring at the end of the month. VOA’s Michael Bowman has this report.
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Guatemalan Yeni Gonzalez crossed the border into the United States illegally and was separated from her children. VOA is following her quest to overcome legal barriers and get her kids back from distant detention centers. This is one case among the 2,000 children of illegal migrants separated from their families.

After 43 days in the custody of the U.S. immigration authorities and having been separated on the southern border of the United States from her three children when trying to enter the country as an illegal immigrant, Yeni Gonzalez was released on bail.

The undocumented mother spoke with the Voice of America,

“I’m going to look for my children,” she said. … “It has been very difficult, very hard for me, I felt that my heart broke into a thousand pieces, they snatch my children from my arms.”

For five weeks Yeni Gonzalez was detained in this immigration center in Eloy Arizona, 3,800 kilometers from New York where her three children were taken, after they were separated when they tried to cross the border illegally

Yeni Gonzalez was distraught.

“I asked them to please give me a call, and they said no, there were no calls,” she said. “And I told them, please, I want to know from my children, that I already have days of not knowing about them and he said, ‘do you know something? You will be deported to Guatemala and your children,’ he told me, ‘will remain in the hands of this government.'”

In a VOA interview, Yeni says she was unaware of the “Zero Tolerance” policy that separated her from her children. She says if she had known, she would never have brought her children this way.

They are in New York, under the care of the Cayuga center. Donations made it possible for her to be released on bail.

“The bail was paid by some families, mothers who are in New York City. And thank God they sent me by text message, confirmation that was paid, that the bail of $7,500 dollars was paid,” said Yeni’s lawyer, Jose Orechena.

The departure of Yeni coincided with the visit to a migration processing center in Tucson Arizona, of the first lady of the United States, Melania Trump, who is closely following the situation of these undocumented families and the work of the authorities.

“I’m here to support you and give my help, whatever I can on behalf of children and the families,” she said.

The Trump administration says it will reunify families, according to the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar.

“They would be unified with either parents or other relatives under our policies, so of course if the parent remains in detention, unfortunately under rules that are set by Congress and the courts, they can’t be reunified while they’re in detention,” he said.

Yeni Gonzalez is looking forward to hugging her kids very soon.

 
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Thousands of protesters in Washington and locations across the country rallied Saturday to protest the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their families at the border. The largest event was held outside the White House. From Washington, VOA’s Jill Craig has more.
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Several prominent Democrats who are mulling a bid for the White House in 2020 have sought to bolster their progressive credentials by calling for major changes to immigration enforcement, with some pressing for the outright abolition of the federal government’s chief immigration enforcement agency. 

President Donald Trump responded on Twitter Saturday that it will “never happen!” 

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, has “become a deportation force,” telling CNN late Thursday “you should get rid of it, start over, re-imagine it and build something that actually works.”

Her comments follow similar sentiments expressed by Sen. Kamala Harris of California over the past week. In interviews with multiple outlets, she has said the government “maybe” or “probably” should “start from scratch” on an immigration enforcement agency.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who sought the Democratic nomination in 2016 and is mulling another run, has stopped short of his colleagues’ calls to dismantle ICE. But he has also been quick to note his vote opposing the 2002 law that paved the way for ICE to replace the old Immigration and Naturalization Service following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Trump tweeted Saturday morning from New Jersey that Democrats “are making a strong push to abolish ICE, one of the smartest, toughest and most spirited law enforcement groups of men and women that I have ever seen.” He noted the agency’s work to counter MS-13 gang members.

He urged ICE agents to “not worry or lose your spirit,” adding: “The radical left Dems want you out. Next it will be all police. Zero chance, It will never happen!”

Balancing act

Housed within the Department of Homeland Security, ICE is in charge of executing hundreds of federal immigration statutes. The debate over the agency’s future follows the widespread outcry in recent weeks after the Trump administration separated more than 2,000 migrant children from their parents. Marches took place across the country Saturday to protest the policy, which Trump later reversed.

The Democratic calls to scrap the agency underscore the balancing act the party is facing on immigration issues. Such rhetoric could prove unhelpful to the 10 Democratic senators seeking re-election this fall in states Trump carried in 2016, where conservative views on immigration prevail. But calling for an end to ICE could be a winner for Democrats seeking to rally the party’s base in the 2020 presidential primaries.

Trump seems to relish the prospect of Democrats making the abolishment of ICE a campaign issue. 

“Well I hope they keep thinking about it. Because they’re going to get beaten so badly,” he said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo,” according to an excerpt released Saturday. He added: “get rid of ICE you’re going to have a country that you’re going to be afraid to walk out of your house. I love that issue if they’re going to actually do that.”

Many anti-Trump activists, who are driving the Twitter hashtag #abolishICE, have celebrated the moves by Gillibrand, Harris and others.

Nelini Stamp, the national organizing director for the Working Families Party, one of many progressive groups that ratcheted up its activity after Trump’s election, called it a “critical moment” in the early maneuverings for 2020.

“Any Democrats who want to be the nominee need to stand on the right side of this,” Stamp said. “Even if they don’t say ‘abolish ICE,’ they can’t not address it.”

Angel Padilla, policy director at the grassroots group Indivisible, said ICE “terrorizes communities” and that Gillibrand’s move “demonstrates where the progressive base is.”

Still, not every immigrant advocacy group takes the same view.

No litmus test

Cristobal Alex, president of the Latino Victory Project, a political action group that backs pro-immigration candidates, rejected ICE as a “litmus test.” But he said it’s “heartening” that immigration policy in general “is at the forefront of the conversation ahead of 2020.”

Alex said his group has met privately with several potential presidential candidates.

Their focus, Alex said, should be on “stopping the long-standing culture of corruption” in U.S. immigration policy and “the appalling practices” of the Trump administration, not on a move that by itself “amounts to rebranding.”

Indeed, the would-be presidential candidates haven’t yet detailed what they propose in ICE’s place. Before the border separation crisis, Harris had introduced legislation that would curb the expansion of immigration detention centers. She and Gillibrand and others have at least hinted that they would want the Justice Department’s prosecutorial power less involved in border security.

Whatever the details, the focus on ICE could cause problems for some potential candidates with more conservative records on immigration.

Former Vice President Joe Biden voted as a senator from Delaware for the 2002 law, the Homeland Security Act, that paved the way for ICE to replace the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He also voted in 2006 for a Bush administration-backed border security measure. Biden, however, has been critical of Trump’s immigration policy as he considers a 2020 run. Earlier this year, Biden headlined a private event with the Latino Victory Project in Miami.

The activists pushing for ICE abolition, meanwhile, said they aren’t worried about potential blowback or any difficulties for Democrats facing more conservative voters, including those potentially swayed by Trump’s repeated charges that Democrats favor “open borders.”

At the Working Families Party, Stamp said she sees the activists taking a position that “offers space” to other Democrats activists who won’t agree with them.

“We give them room to talk about better immigration policy,” she said, comparing the circumstances to the civil rights movement, when Martin Luther King Jr., was viewed more favorably by white power brokers than more strident leaders like Malcolm X.

“Martin Luther King never said, ‘Black power,’” Stamp said. “But having the left flank that did made the right folks willing to at least talk to King.”
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For evangelical Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr., this is their political holy grail.

Like many religious conservatives in a position to know, the Liberty University president with close ties to the White House suspects that the Supreme Court vacancy President Donald Trump fills in the coming months will ultimately lead to the reversal of the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade. But instead of celebrating publicly, some evangelical leaders are downplaying their fortune on an issue that has defined their movement for decades.

“What people don’t understand is that if you overturn Roe v. Wade, all that does is give the states the right to decide whether abortion is legal or illegal,” Falwell told The Associated Press in an interview. “My guess is that there’d probably be less than 20 states that would make abortion illegal if given that right.”

Falwell added: “In the ’70s, I don’t know how many states had abortion illegal before Roe v. Wade, but it won’t be near as many this time.”

The sentiment, echoed by evangelical leaders across the country this past week, underscores the delicate politics that surround a moment many religious conservatives have longed for. With the retirement of swing vote Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, Trump and his Republican allies in the Senate plan to install a conservative justice who could re-define the law of the land on some of the nation’s most explosive policy debates — none bigger than abortion.

And while these are the very best of times for the religious right, social conservatives risk a powerful backlash from their opponents if they cheer too loudly. Women’s groups have already raised the alarm for their constituents, particularly suburban women, who are poised to play an outsized role in the fight for the House majority this November.

Two-thirds of Americans do not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, according to a poll released Friday by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. Among women of reproductive age, three out of four want the high court ruling left alone. The poll was conducted before Kennedy’s retirement was announced.

“The left is going to try very hard to say this is all about overturning Roe,” said Johnnie Moore, a Southern Baptist minister who was a co-chairman of the Trump campaign’s evangelical advisory board. The more significant shift on the high court, he said, would likely be the help given to conservatives in their fight for what they call religious freedom.

Tony Perkins, who leads the socially conservative Family Research Council, said abortion was simply “a factor” in evangelicals’ excitement over a more conservative Supreme Court. He suggested that public opinion was already shifting against abortion rights, although that’s not true of the Roe v. Wade ruling, which has become slightly more popular over time.

Perkins agreed with Moore that the broader push for religious freedom was a bigger conservative focus.

Many evangelicals, for example, have lashed out against Obama-era laws that required churches and other religious institutions to provide their employees with women’s reproductive services, including access to abortion and birth control. Others have rallied behind private business owners who faced legal repercussions after denying services to gay people.

Yet sweeping restrictions to abortion rights are certainly on the table, Moore noted.

“There is a high level of confidence within the community that overturning Roe is actually, finally possible,” Moore said. He added: “Evangelicals have never been more confident in the future of America than they are now. It’s just a fact.”

In Alabama, Tom Parker, a Republican associate justice on the state Supreme Court who is campaigning to become the state’s chief justice, explicitly raised the potential of sending cases to Washington that would lead to the overturning of key rulings, including Roe v. Wade.

“President Trump is just one appointment away from giving us a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court,” Parker said in an interview on the radio program Wallbuilders Live. “And they are going to need cases that they can use to reverse those horrible decisions of the liberal majority in the past that have undermined the Constitution and really just abused our own personal rights.”

Despite Trump’s struggles with Christian values in his personal life at times, skeptical evangelical Christians lined up behind him in the 2016 election, and they remain one of his most loyal constituencies.

The president’s standing with white evangelical Christians hit an all-time high in April when 75 percent of evangelicals held a favorable view of Trump, according to a poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute.

The unlikely marriage between the thrice-married president and Christian conservatives has always been focused on Trump’s ability to re-shape the nation’s judicial branch.

On the day she endorsed candidate Trump in March 2016, the late iconic anti-abortion activist Phyllis Schlafly first asked him privately whether he would appoint more judges like the conservative Antonin Scalia, recalled Schlafly’s successor Ed Martin, who was in the room at the time. Trump promised he would.

The president followed through with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch less than a month after his inauguration, delighting religious conservatives nationwide. And the Trump White House, while disorganized in other areas, made its relationship with the religious right a priority.

The first private White House meeting between evangelical leaders and senior Trump officials came in the days after the Gorsuch nomination, said Moore, who was in attendance. He said the White House has hosted roughly two dozen similar meetings since then in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.

A senior administration official such as Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump or Kellyanne Conway — if not Trump himself — has always been present, Moore added. Each meeting featured a detailed briefing on the administration’s push to fill judicial openings.

“The courts have been at the very center of the relationship,” Moore said.

And now, as the focus shifts toward the president’s next Supreme Court nomination, evangelical leaders who once held their noses and voted for Trump have little doubt he will pick someone who shares their conservative views on abortion, same-sex marriage and other social issues.

Falwell insisted only that Trump make his next selection from the list of prospective nominees he released before his election. All are believed to oppose the Roe v. Wade ruling.

Any deviation from the list, Falwell said, would be “a betrayal.” He noted, however, that he’s in weekly contact with the White House and has supreme confidence that the president will deliver.

“This is a vindication for the 80 percent of evangelicals who supported Trump. Many of them voted on this issue alone,” Falwell said. “Today’s a day that we as evangelicals, and really all average Americans, can say we told you so.”
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The U.S. ambassador to Estonia says he has resigned over frustrations with President Donald Trump’s comments about the European Union and the treatment of Washington’s European allies.

In a private Facebook message posted Friday, James D. Melville wrote: “For the President to say EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘NATO is as bad as NAFTA’ is not only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to go.”

Melville is a senior U.S. career diplomat who has served as the American ambassador in the Baltic nation and NATO member of Estonia since 2015. He has served the State Department for 33 years.

The U.S. Embassy in Tallinn did not immediately comment.
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As Americans debate the Trump administration’s hardened immigration policies, one group of citizens has first-hand experience with the process: the more than 43 million Americans who lawfully immigrated to the country.

VOA reporters in Los Angeles spoke with a range of immigrants from all around the world about the Trump administration’s policies, the treatment of children who enter the United States illegally with their families, and the rights of asylum seekers.

While many remain divided on the issues surrounding illegal immigration and Trump’s handling of it, these foreign-born citizens who make up some 14 percent of the U.S. population said legitimate refugees and asylum seekers should get the help they need.

VOA’s Elizabeth Lee contributed to this report.
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U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the coming U.S. Supreme Court vacancy, his chief of staff, the upcoming summit with Russia, tariffs and NATO on Friday while aboard Air Force One en route from Washington to his private golf club in New Jersey.

Trump said he plans to announce his nominee for the high court on July 9 and that he has identified five finalists, including two women.

He also said he may interview two contenders for the nomination this weekend.

He said he will not ask candidates whether they would overturn a 1973 ruling in the Roe v. Wade case, which established a woman’s right to an abortion, nor would he discuss gay rights with them.

The president’s nominee must win confirmation by the Senate.

Republicans control the chamber but only by a slim majority, making the views of moderates, including some Democrats, important.

Trump met Thursday with senators from both parties at the White House to discuss the court vacancy created by the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, which was announced Wednesday.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Friday he hoped the confirmation process would be done “in time for the new justice to begin the fall term of the Supreme Court … the first Monday in October.”

Chief of staff

Trump said he is not looking for a new chief of staff to replace John Kelly, but at some point “things happen.”

Kelly, a retired general, is nearing a year in the job and could be leaving soon, a source familiar with the situation said Thursday.

Among possible choices for Trump are Mick Mulvaney, who is the White House budget director and a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Nick Ayers, who is Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, the source said.

Trump has occasionally chafed at the restrictions Kelly has placed on who gets access to see him and has wondered aloud whether he needs someone with more political experience for the job as congressional elections approach, two sources said.

But he frequently praises Kelly publicly and has expressed admiration of him.

Kelly was picked as chief of staff last summer to bring order to the West Wing in place of Reince Priebus, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee who presided over the chaotic early months of the Trump presidency.

Russia summit

Trump said he would raise the issue of alleged Russian meddling in U.S. elections during his planned meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki next month.

He also said he would discuss the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine and other international issues during the July 16 summit.

“I’ll talk to him about everything,” Trump said.

“We’re going to talk about Ukraine, we’re going to be talking about Syria. We’ll be talking about elections … we don’t want anybody tampering with elections.”

Russia has denied U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessment that Moscow sought to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election to boost Trump’s prospects of becoming president.

After Trump and Putin met briefly in Vietnam in November 2017, Trump was criticized in the United States for saying he believed Putin when he denied Russian meddling.

Trump denies wrongdoing and calls an investigation into possible collusion between his presidential campaign and Russia a “witch hunt.”

Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, the sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States in response, and Russia’s military intervention in the war in Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad are major causes of strain in the two countries’ relations.

Asked if the United States would recognize Crimea as part of Russia, Trump said: “We’re going to have to see.”

He gave a similar answer when he was asked if he would lift the sanctions on Russia. “We’ll see what Russia does,” Trump said.

Tariffs

Trump said his administration’s investigation into whether to increase tariffs on cars from the European Union and other trading partners would be completed in three to four weeks.

He also said the United States has been treated very badly by the World Trade Organization, but he is not considering withdrawing from it at this point.

Asked when the probe would be concluded, he said: “Very soon. It’ll be done in three, four weeks.”

Trump ordered the “Section 232” national security probe into autos on May 23, and his unusually fast timeline calls for it to be possibly completed in just over two months. Similar national security probes ordered last year that led to import tariffs of 25 percent steel and 10 percent on aluminum took about 10 months to complete.

NATO

Trump said that Germany and other European nations need to spend more on NATO, reiterating a complaint that U.S. allies are not pulling their weight on defense spending.

“Germany has to spend more money. Spain, France. It’s not fair what they’ve done to the United States,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
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U.S. President Donald Trump touted the Republican tax cut plan Friday, six months after he signed it into law, saying it was strengthening the U.S. economy and helping average Americans by increasing investment, jobs and wages.

“It is my great honor to welcome you back to the White House to celebrate six months of new jobs, bigger paychecks and keeping more of your hard-earned money where it belongs: in your pocket or wherever else you want to spend it,” he said.

A recent report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, however, projects a gloomy fiscal outlook in the U.S., which is experiencing rising debt under the Trump administration.

The CBO report predicts the country’s debt burden will double in 30 years, exceeding even the U.S. debt load during World War II.

The tax law, officially titled the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, was the largest overhaul of the country’s complex tax laws in three decades. It cut the corporate tax rate, which was among the highest in the industrialized world, from 35 to 21 percent. It trimmed rates for millions of individual taxpayers as well, with the biggest cuts mostly benefiting the wealthiest earners, although some taxpayers saw bigger tax bills because of various changes in the tax regulations.

The CBO report, which cautioned the high debt levels also increase chances of a fiscal crisis, projects the tax cuts could spur short-term economic growth, but it quickly would fall back to a long-term average of 1.9 percent.

While most of the rising debt is due to increasing entitlement spending and other problems that existed before Trump’s 2016 election, the report said the new tax law is contributing to the short-term debt by cutting government revenue. Spending increases approved by both Republicans and Democrats are also raising deficits.

The Republicans’ $1.5 trillion in tax cuts and $1.3 trillion in spending enacted earlier this year have already helped push the CBO’s debt projections higher through 2041, the report said.

Some analysts say the country’s fiscal health is quickly deteriorating because of higher spending for entitlement programs such as Social Security, insufficient government revenue and spiraling interest payments on debt.

“The massive deficits caused by policymakers’ recent tax and budget decisions have drastically worsened the country’s long-term finances,” said Bipartisan Policy Center economic policy director Shai Akabas. 

The Brookings Institution’s Tax Policy Center concluded in a June 13 report that “the new tax law will raise deficits and make the distribution of after-tax income more unequal.”

Former Federal Reserve Bank chair Janet Yellen, a Democratic appointee whom Trump replaced with Republican Jerome Powell, said Thursday that the tax cuts would probably provide only a meager boost to the growth of the U.S. economy.

“The calculations that I’ve seen and seem reasonable to me suggest that the payoff is likely to be in tenths of a percent, which in growth is a lot, but may not be what some people are hoping for,” she said.

Tariffs

Any benefits for individuals and corporations from the tax cuts may be undermined by Trump’s imposition of tariffs on foreign countries.

Tariffs have already been announced on Chinese products, foreign aluminum and steel imports from Canada, Mexico and the European Union, and on solar panels and washing machines and Canadian lumber and paper. Trump has also threatened tariffs on automobile imports and on other foreign products and materials.

“Tariffs on steel and aluminum imports are a tax hike on Americans and will have damaging consequences for consumers, manufacturers and workers,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, a Republican, said May 31.

The Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Kevin Brady of Texas, said last month that the tariffs “hurt our efforts to create good-paying jobs by selling more ‘Made in America’ products to customers in these countries.”

Retaliatory tariffs imposed by Canada, China, the EU and Mexico could hinder the ability of U.S. companies to sell products to other countries, which could in turn kill American jobs and suppress wages.
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The United States is accepting an increasingly large share of Christian refugees, primarily from Africa, while the number of total arrivals remains on track for a historic low this fiscal year, federal data show.

With three-quarters of the fiscal year over, and amid massive cuts to the U.S. refugee program under the Trump administration, nearly 68 percent of arriving refugees this fiscal year are Christian — a 16-year high, according to State Department statistics reviewed by VOA. Prior to this year, the highest proportion was in fiscal 2007, at 60 percent.

But researchers and advocates are quick to highlight that while Christian refugees hit a historic high proportionally, the number of Christians, Muslims and people of all other religions are low compared with previous years.

“I don’t know a single Christian who is in any way consoled” by that higher proportion, said Matthew Soerens, U.S. director of church mobilization for World Relief, one of nine national resettlement organizations in the U.S. “I think it’s a tragedy for Christians, Muslims and every other religion. Most every group you could look at is down at least 60 percent.”

In a conference call last week that was reported by the Christian Post, members of the Evangelical Immigration Table, a broad coalition of evangelical groups, also signaled grave concerns that acceptance of Middle Eastern Christians was nearing zero.

“These persecuted Christians have almost been entirely shut out in the past six months, during which time just 21 Christians from the Middle East have been admitted to the U.S. as refugees,” said Kathryn Freeman, the director of public policy for the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission. “I think it is also important to note that we feel the national slowdown in refugee resettlement is affecting refugees of all faiths.”

Since Donald Trump took office, partially on a platform of barring Muslims from coming to the United States, the share of Muslim refugee arrivals to the country has dwindled to a never-before-seen nadir, as VOA reported earlier this year. That figure currently hovers at around 15 percent, despite ongoing resettlement needs from majority-Muslim countries.

Muslim refugee flows fell 94 percent from January to November 2017, a Cato Institute report from December further noted. And refugees weren’t the only travelers affected — there was also a 26 percent drop in immigrants and a 32 percent decrease in temporary visa issuances from majority-Muslim countries, according to the report.

“We have a president whose rhetoric has made it very clear [regardless of what the latest Supreme Court decision says] that Muslim populations from particular countries are not welcome in the United States,” said Maria Cristina Garcia, a Cornell University professor who has written about the history of refugees in the U.S. in the decades since the end of the Cold War.

Promises

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network a week after his 2017 inauguration, Trump said Christian refugees would be prioritized. The first travel ban, which would be released later that same day, carved out special allowances for Christian refugees. That part was dropped in later iterations.

In the interview, however, Trump also pointed out that the U.S. had been making it “very tough” for Syrian Christians to be resettled in the country. 

“If you were a Muslim, you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible, and the reason that was so unfair — everybody was persecuted, in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody, but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair,” he said.

But the administration has not followed through. Seventeen Christian Syrians have been resettled in the U.S. since October, a number that is unlikely to budge after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Trump’s travel ban this week, which bars all Syrian entries except in the case of special waivers.

Similarly, 22 Iraqi Christians have arrived since October; the country was initially included in the travel ban, but later removed. During the same period in then-President Barack Obama’s last full year in office, hundreds of Iraq Christian refugees came to the U.S.

Not about faith

“Religion should be a factor in resettlement only to the extent that it determines your vulnerability,” said Soerens of World Relief. “It should never be a preference of … one religion over another.”

The Trump administration has pushed back on allegations that refugee admissions are based on religion, or even that levels of Christians or Muslims are affected by Trump’s policy decisions.

“Let me start by first noting, and really, really strongly here — our admissions has nothing to do with religion in any way, shape or form,” a senior administration official said during a media call in January, in response to a question from VOA about the drop in Muslim arrival numbers during the first months of the fiscal year.

“The slowdown in many places is a result of many different factors, including security checks and medical checks and the number of resources that [the Department of Homeland Security] is able to commit and, frankly, learning new procedures and the elements of coordinating different parts of the bureaucracy. So I think that partially answers the question,” a State Department official said on the same call.

And there are Americans who support fewer refugee arrivals.

The Pew Research Center reported in May that while 51 percent of Americans favor accepting refugees, 43 percent of Americans oppose it. There is a noticeable shift, however, among Republicans — a year ago, about 1 in 3 said the country had a responsibility to resettle refugees; that’s now dropped to 1 in 4.

Moreover, when the fiscal year ends September 30, the U.S. is on track to welcome just under half the 45,000-refugee ceiling imposed by the president. The resettlement cuts come during an unrelenting need for resettlement, according to recent data from the United Nations. 
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U.S. and Russian leaders have agreed to meet July 16 to discuss long-standing disagreements on global issues such as conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. elections and NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe. The summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin comes on the heels of the NATO summit in Brussels, but the two leaders have chosen neutral territory to meet. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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Official Washington is preparing for another major political battle in the months ahead as President Donald Trump prepares to nominate a successor to retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump vowed to appoint reliable conservatives as justices, and the president’s next appointment could have an impact on the court and American society that will last a generation. VOA National correspondent Jim Malone previews the fight from Washington.
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A federal judge in Chicago on Thursday ordered the U.S. government to release a 9-year-old Brazilian boy who was separated from his mother at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying their continued separation “irreparably harms them both.”

Judge Manish Shah mulled his decision for just a few hours before finding that Lidia Karine Souza can have custody of her son, Diogo, who has spent four weeks at a government-contracted shelter in Chicago. Shah ordered that the child be released Thursday, but didn’t specify a time. Souza’s attorneys said she would pick up her son Thursday afternoon.

The mother, who has applied for asylum, was released from an immigrant detention facility in Texas on June 9 and is living with relatives outside Boston.

“Judge Shah has vindicated the rule of law and taken a definitive step to allow Lidia’s son to finally be with her again. We are hopeful that this outcome will benefit other families facing similar circumstances,” attorneys Jesse Bless and Britt Miller said in a written statement.

Four hours

Shah, the son of immigrants from India, took just four hours before posting his written ruling after a hearing Thursday morning.

“Continued separation of … (the) 9-year-old child, and Souza,” he wrote, “irreparably harms them both.”

The decision came two days after a different judge ordered the government to reunite more than 2,000 immigrant children with their families within 30 days, or 14 days for those younger than 5. White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters declined to say Thursday whether the administration will be able to abide by the deadline. She said more than 500 children have been reunified with their families.

In Washington Thursday, police arrested nearly 600 people after hundreds of loudly chanting women demonstrated inside a Senate office building against Trump’s immigration policy. Among those arrested was Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the Democrat from Washington state, she said on twitter.

Meanwhile, Melania Trump spent time with children at a complex in Phoenix where dozens of migrant children separated from their parents at the border are being held.

Weeks in quarantine

Souza’s son has spent four weeks at a government-contracted shelter in Chicago, much of it alone in a room, quarantined with chickenpox. He spent his ninth birthday on Monday without his mom. Even after Tuesday’s ruling in California, Souza’s attorneys nonetheless moved forward with an emergency hearing in their lawsuit against the Trump administration.

Shah wrote that he understood that volume of paperwork, filings and forms normally required before the government can release a child in its custody are intended to ensure the child’s well-being. But, he said, “the government’s interests in completing certain procedures to be sure that (Souza’s child) is placed in a safe environment and in managing the response to ongoing class litigation do not outweigh the family’s interest in reuniting.”

The fitness of the mother in this case isn’t questioned, he said, so dragging out processing “only serves to interfere in the family’s integrity with little to no benefit to the government’s interests.”

Souza has been allowed to phone her son for just 20 minutes per week. She has said he would beg her through tears to do everything in her power to get him back to her. The 27-year-old woman searched for weeks to find Diogo after the two were separated at the border in late May. When she was released, she filled out nearly 40 pages of documents that U.S. officials told her were required to regain custody.

‘This … is a nightmare’

Then they told her that the rules had changed and that she needed any family members living with her in the United States to be fingerprinted and still more documents.

Government attorney Craig Oswald told Shah that U.S. officials have been “raked over the coals … before” for not being thorough about such background checks, which he said are meant to ensure a child’s safety.

Souza was seeking safety by coming to the U.S., but it’s not the safety she sought for herself and her son. This was not the American dream.

“This … is a nightmare,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday.

For days and weeks now, some of the hundreds of parents separated from their children at the Mexican border by the Trump administration have been battling one of the world’s most complex immigration systems to find their youngsters and get them back.

For many, it has been a lopsided battle, and a frustrating and heartbreaking one. Most do not speak English. Many know nothing about their children’s whereabouts. And some say their calls to the government’s 1-800 information hotline have gone unanswered.

Children spread out

Huge logistical challenges remain, and whether the U.S. government can manage to clear away the red tape, confusion and seeming lack of coordination and make the deadline remains to be seen.

Among the complicating factors: Children have been sent to shelters all over the United States, thousands of miles from the border. And perhaps hundreds of parents have been deported from the U.S. without their children.

Jesse Bless, an attorney from Jeff Goldman Immigration in Boston, one of two firms representing Souza, said some parents who are trying to get their children placed with friends or relatives in the U.S. are being asked by the government to provide, along with fingerprints of relatives, utility bills and lease information, which many newly arrived immigrants don’t have.

Souza and her son were separated after she requested asylum, arguing her life was in danger in her native Brazil. 

“I came out of necessity,” she told the AP.

After her son was taken, she had no idea where he was until another detained mother said her child knew a boy named Diogo in a Chicago shelter. She had been told the soonest he could be released would be in late July.

Souza visited Diogo for the first time since May on Tuesday. They embraced, and she kissed him several times on the head and face, then grabbed his cheeks gently with her hands as they both cried.

“I missed you so much,” she said in Portuguese.

Asked how he was, Diogo said: “I am better now.”

Their visit lasted an hour. Then he returned to U.S. government custody.

“He cried a lot when the time came to say goodbye,” she said. “He thought we would be taking him home.”
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