Louisiana cancels $3B repair coastal restoration funded by Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement
The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project had been intended to rebuild upward of 20 square miles (32 kilometers) of land in southeast Louisiana to combat sea level rise and erosion on the Gulf Coast.
Conservation groups and other supporters of the project stressed it was an ambitious, science-based approach to mitigating the worst effects of climate change in a state where a football field of land is lost every 100 minutes. But Republican Gov. Jeff Landry has repeatedly said the project would undermine local oystermen and the fishing industry and fought against it since taking office last year.
The Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group, a coalition of federal agencies overseeing settlement funds from the 2010 Gulf oil spill, said that in a Thursday statement that the Mid-Barataria project is 'no longer viable' for a range of reasons including ongoing litigation and the suspension of a federal permit after the state stopped working on the project.
A spokesperson for Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority confirmed to The Associated Press that the state is canceling the project.
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The Guardian
26 minutes ago
- The Guardian
LA archdiocese to deliver food and medication to parishioners homebound due to Ice raids
The archdiocese of Los Angeles is launching a new initiative to provide essentials such as hot meals, groceries and prescription medications to people and families too afraid to leave their homes due to immigration raids. The move to support immigrant parishioners experiencing heightened fear amid a nationwide crackdown by the Trump administration that has seen tens of thousands of arrests and outraged civil liberties groups. 'This is a challenging moment for our community,' Archbishop José H Gómez said in a statement. 'Many of our friends and family, our neighbors and fellow parishioners, are afraid and anxious. These are good, hard-working men and women, people of faith, people who have been in this country for a long time and are making important contributions to our economy.' 'Now they are afraid to go to work or be seen in public for fear that they will get arrested and be deported. This new archdiocesan fund is designed to help our brothers and sisters in this difficult moment,' Gomez said. The newly created Family Assistance Program, supported entirely by donations, will work through the archdiocese's 288 parishes across Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties to assist parishioners in need. Contributions can be made on the website or at any parish, with funds directed toward communities identified as especially at risk. Many donors have already stepped forward: the businessman and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso gave $50,000 and pledged to match an additional $50,000. The Catholic Association for Latino Leadership added $10,000, and Vallarta Supermarkets contributed another $10,000 in the form of gift cards. According to an archdiocese spokesperson, Yannina Diaz, many churches are reactivating or expanding delivery systems that were built during the Covid-19 pandemic to reach homebound and elderly members. 'We're tapping into what already exists and what already works,' Diaz told the Los Angeles Times. Since June, Ice has arrested nearly 3,000 people in Los Angeles. Many of those detained had no criminal history, and some included citizens or lawful residents who were mistakenly apprehended. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion Given the large number of immigrants within the Catholic community in the greater Los Angeles area, the archdiocese is feeling the brunt of the enforcement efforts. Nationally, 30% of foreign-born Christians in the US identify as Catholic, according to Pew Research Center data, the largest share among Christian denominations. In Los Angeles, 28% of all Christians are Catholic, making it by far the most popular religion. The archdiocese's announcement comes about two weeks after Alberto Rojas, the San Bernardino bishop who leads more than 1.5 million Catholics in southern California, has formally excused parishioners from their weekly obligation to attend mass following immigration detentions on two parish properties in the diocese.
The Guardian
32 minutes ago
- The Guardian
She fled Cuba for asylum – then was snatched from a US immigration courtroom
Jerome traveled a thousand miles from California to El Paso, Texas, so he could accompany Jenny to her immigration hearing. He and his wife had promised to take her after she had fled Cuba last December, after the government there had targeted her because she had reported on the country's deplorable conditions for her college radio station. Everything should have been fine. Jenny, 25, had entered the United States legally under one of Joe Biden's now-defunct programs, CBP One. By the end of the year, she could apply for a green card. But a few days before her hearing, Jerome started to feel like something was off. Jenny's court date had been abruptly moved from May to June with no explanation. Arrests at immigration courthouses peppered the news. And when Jenny went before the court, the government attorney assigned to try to deport her asked the judge to dismiss her case, arguing vaguely that circumstances had changed. Instead, the judge noted that Jenny was pursuing an asylum claim and scheduled her for another court date in August 2026 – the best possible outcome. 'She turned around and looked at me and smiled. And I smiled back, because she understood that she was free to go home,' Jerome said. But as Jenny left the courtroom and approached the elevator to leave, a crowd of government agents in masks converged on her and demanded she go with them. Just before she disappeared down a corridor with the phalanx of officers, she turned back to look at Jerome, her face stricken, silently pleading with him to do something. 'I said, 'She's legal. She's here legally. And you guys just don't care, do you? Nobody cares about this. You guys just like pulling people away like this,'' Jerome recalled telling the agents. 'And nobody said a word. They couldn't even look me in the eye,' he told the Guardian. Footage of her apprehension was taken by those advocating for her and shared with the Guardian. Now Jenny is languishing in immigration custody. Her hearing for August 2026 has been replaced with a date for next month when the government attorney might once again attempt to dismiss her case, and her case been transferred from a judge who grants a majority of asylum applications to one with a less than 22% approval rate. 'There's no heart, there's no compassion, there's no empathy, there's no anything. [It's] 'We're just going to yank this woman away from you, and we don't care,'' Jerome said. The Guardian is not using his or Jenny's full name for their safety. Similar scenes have played out again and again at immigration courthouses across the country for weeks, as people following the federal government's directions and attending their hearings are being scooped up and sent to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention. The unusual tactics are happening while Donald Trump and his deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, push for Ice to make at least 3,000 daily arrests – a tenfold increase from during Biden's last year in office. Ice agents have suddenly become regulars at immigration court, where they can easily find soft targets. At first, the officers appeared to focus arrests on a subset of migrants who had been in the US for fewer than two years, which the Trump administration argues makes them susceptible to a fast-tracked deportation scheme called expedited removal. Ice officers seem to confer with their agency's attorneys, who ask the judge to dismiss the migrants' cases, as they did with Jenny. And, if judges agree, the migrants are detained on their way out of court so that officials can reprocess them through expedited removal, which allows the federal government to repatriate people with far less due process, sometimes without even seeing another judge. But reporting by the Guardian has uncovered how Ice is casting a far wider net for its immigration court arrests and appears also to be targeting people such as Jenny whose cases are ongoing and have not been dismissed. The agency is also snatching up court attendees who have clearly been in the US for longer than two years – the maximum timeframe that according to US law determines whether someone can be placed in expedited removal – as well as those who have a pathway to remain in the country legally. After the migrants are apprehended, they're stuffed into often overcrowded, likely privately run detention centers, sometimes far from their US-based homes and families. They're put through high-stakes tests that will determine whether they have a future in the US, with limited access to attorneys. And as they endure inhospitable conditions in prisons and jails, the likelihood of them having both the will to keep fighting their case and the legal right to stay dwindles. 'To see individuals who are law-abiding and who have received a follow-up court date only to be greeted by a group of large men in masks and whisked away to an unknown location in a building is jarring. It breaks my understanding and conception of the United States having a lawful due process,' said Emily Miller, who is part of a larger volunteer group in El Paso trying to protect migrants as best they can. One woman Miller saw apprehended had come to the US legally, submitted her asylum petition the day of her hearing, and was given a follow-up court date by the judge before Ice detained her. 'My physical reaction was standing in the hallway shaking. My body just physically started shaking, out of shock and out of concern,' Miller said. 'I have lived in other countries where I've been a stranger in a strange land and did not speak the language or had limited language abilities. And as a woman, to be greeted by masked men is something we are taught to fear because of violence that could happen to us.' Elsewhere in Texas, at the San Antonio immigration court earlier this month, a toddler dressed in pink and white overalls ran gleefully around the drab waiting room. Far more chairs than people lined the room's perimeter, as if more attendees had been expected. A constantly multitasking employee at the front window bowed her head in frustration as the caller she was speaking to kept asking more questions. Self-help legal pamphlets hung on the wall – a reminder that the representation rate for people in immigration proceedings has plummeted in recent years, and the vast majority of migrants are navigating the deportation process with little to no expert help. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion In one of the courtrooms, a family took their seats before the judge. Their seven-year-old boy pulled his shirt over his nose, his arms inside the arm holes. The government attorney sitting with a can of Dr Pepper on her desk promptly told the judge she had a motion to introduce, even as the family filed their asylum applications. She wanted to dismiss their cases, she said, as it was no longer in the government's best interest to proceed. The judge said no. She scheduled the family for their final hearings just over a year later. And she warned them, carefully, that Ice might approach them as soon as they left her courtroom. What happened next, she said, was not in her control. Her last words to the family: 'Good luck.' Men in bulletproof vests were hanging around in the hallway, but the family safely made it into the elevator and left the courthouse for the parking lot. Stephanie Spiro, associate director of protection-based relief at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), said that for the most part, Ice is leaving families with children alone (with notable exceptions). It's 'single adults' they're after, people who often have loved ones in the US depending on them, but whose immigration cases involve them alone, she said. A few days later, two such adults – a man and a woman – separately went before a different immigration judge in San Antonio, whose courtroom had signs encouraging people to 'self-deport', the Trump administration's phrase for leaving the country voluntarily before being removed. The government attorney that day moved to dismiss both the man's and the woman's cases, which the judge granted, dismissing the man's case even before the government attorney had given a reason why. Using a Turkish interpreter, the judge then told the man it was likely that immigration authorities would try to put him into expedited removal – despite the fact that he had entered the US more than two years earlier. Soon after, the woman – who had been in the country for nearly four years – went before the court without a lawyer. The judge tried to explain to her what might happen if her case were dismissed, but as he finished, she admitted in Spanish: 'I haven't understood much of what you've told me.' The woman went on to say that she was deep in the process of applying for a visa for victims of serious crimes in the US – a visa that provides a pathway to citizenship. But the judge was upset with her for not also filing an asylum application, and he threatened to order her repatriated. It was the government attorney who 'saved' her, the judge said, by requesting the case be dismissed instead. As soon as the woman walked out of the courtroom, agents approached her and directed her out of the hallway, into a small room. Around the same time, outside the building, men wearing gaiters over their faces ushered a group of people into a white bus, presumably to be transported to detention. Spiro of the NIJC, meanwhile, works in Chicago and said she and fellow advocates have documented Ice officers in plainclothes coming to immigration court there with a list of whom they're targeting – and court attendees are apprehended whether or not their case is dismissed. 'People are getting detained regardless,' Spiro added. 'And once they're detained, it makes it just so much harder to put forth their claim.' Migrants picked up at the court in Chicago have been sent to Missouri, Florida and Texas – to detention spaces that still have capacity, but also to where judges are more likely to side with the Trump administration for speedier deportations. Many of them end up far from their loved ones, and a lag in Ice's publicly accessible online detainee locator has meant some of them have at times essentially disappeared. As word of mouth has spread among immigrant communities in Chicago about these arrests, the once bustling court has gone eerily quiet, Spiro said. That, in turn, could have its own serious consequences, as no-shows for hearings are often ordered deported. 'They don't want to leave their house because of the detentions that are happening,' Spiro said of Chicago's immigrants. 'So to go to court, and to go anywhere – they don't want to come to our office. To go anywhere where there's federal agents and where they know Ice is trying to detain you is just terrifying beyond, you know, most people's imagination.'
Reuters
34 minutes ago
- Reuters
Trump's distraction methods fall flat against Epstein uproar
July 26 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's super powers as a public figure have long included the ability to redirect, evade and deny. But the Republican's well-worn methods of changing the subject when a tough topic stings politically are not working as his White House fends off persistent unrest from his usually loyal base about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. Trump has scolded reporters, claimed ignorance and offered distractions in an effort to quash questions about Epstein and the suspicions still swirling around the disgraced financier's case years after his 2019 death in prison. The demand for answers has only grown. "For a president and an administration that's very good at controlling a narrative, this is one that's been harder," said Republican strategist Erin Maguire, a former Trump campaign spokeswoman. Unlike political crises that dogged Trump's first term, including two impeachments and a probe into alleged campaign collusion with Russia, the people propelling the push for more transparency on Epstein have largely been his supporters, not his political foes. Trump has fed his base with conspiracy theories for years, including the false "birther" claim that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Trump's advisers fanned conspiracies about Epstein, too, only to declare them moot upon entering office. That has not gone over well with the president's right-leaning base, which has long believed the government was covering up Epstein's ties to the rich and powerful. "Donald Trump's been running a Ponzi scheme based on propaganda for the better part of a decade and it's finally catching up to him," said Geoff Duncan, a Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia and Trump critic. "The far right element is just dug in. They're hell bent on getting this information out." The White House has dismissed reporting about Trump's ties to Epstein as "fake news," though it has acknowledged his name appears in documents related to the Epstein case. Trump and Epstein were friends for years before falling out. "The only people who can't seem to shake this story from their one-track minds are the media and Democrats," said White House spokesman Harrison Fields. Before leaving for a trip to Scotland on Friday, the president again urged people to turn their attention elsewhere. "People should really focus on how well the country is doing," Trump told reporters, lamenting that scrutiny was not being given to others in Epstein's orbit. "They don't talk about them, they talk about me. I have nothing to do with the guy." Trump in recent weeks has employed a typical diversion playbook. He chastised a reporter for asking about Epstein in the White House Cabinet Room. He claimed in the Oval Office that he was not paying close attention to the issue. And, with help from Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, he explosively accused Obama of treason for how he treated intelligence in 2016 about Russian interference in the U.S. election. On Thursday Trump took his distraction tour to the Federal Reserve, where he tussled with Chair Jerome Powell about construction costs and pressed for lower interest rates. That, said Republican strategist Brad Todd, was more effective than focusing on Obama in 2016, which voters had already litigated by putting Trump back in office. "The Tulsi Gabbard look backward, I think, is not the way for them to pivot," Todd said, noting that Trump's trip to the Fed highlighted the issue of economic affordability and taking on a Washington institution. "If I was him I'd go to the Fed every day until rates are cut." Democrats have seized on Trump's efforts to move on, sensing a political weakness for the president and divisions in the Republican Party that they can exploit while their own political stock is low in the wake of last year's drubbing at the polls. A Reuters/Ipsos poll this month showed most Americans think Trump's administration is hiding information about Epstein, creating an opportunity for Democrats to press. Trump's supporters and many Democrats are eager to see a release of government files related to Epstein and his case, which the Justice Department initially promised to deliver. "Yesterday was another example of the Trump folks trying to throw as much stuff against the wall to avoid the Epstein files," Mark Warner, a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia, said in a post on X on Thursday about Gabbard's accusations against Obama. Trump allies see the administration's efforts to change topic as a normal part of an all-out-there strategy. "They are always going at 100 miles an hour. Every department, every cabinet secretary, everybody is out there at full speed blanketing the area with news," Republican strategist Maguire said. Trump has weathered tougher periods before, and his conservative base, despite its frustration over the files, is largely pleased with Trump's work on immigration and the economy. In a July Reuters/Ipsos poll, 56% of Republican respondents favored the administration's immigration workplace raids, while 24% were opposed and 20% unsure. Pollster Frank Luntz noted that Trump had faced felony convictions and other criminal charges but still won re-election last year. "We've been in this very same situation several times before and he has escaped every time," Luntz said.
