'No credible threats' to Super Bowl security
The New Orleans Superdome will be 'the safest place to be' during Super Bowl 59 this Sunday.New Orleans was rocked by a terrorist attack on Bourbon Street in the early hours of New Year's Day, which left 14 people dead and dozens wounded.US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, visited the site on Monday with Louisiana governor Jeff Landry on Monday before speaking to media.She said that the Super Bowl is "the biggest homeland security event that we do every year" and that there is currently "no specific, credible threats to the Super Bowl, which I think should give us all a sense of security".Since then, US media have reported that Donald Trump will attend Sunday's game,, external becoming first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl.There were already set to be more than 2,000 law enforcement agents in New Orleans for the Super Bowl.The NFL has been working on security of the event for two years and Cathy Lanier, the NFL's chief security officer, said that adjustments have been made to their security plan since the New Year's attack."I am confident the safest place this weekend will be under the security umbrella," she said.
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Reuters
16 hours ago
- Reuters
Trump administration ending protected status for Nepalese migrants
June 5 (Reuters) - The Trump administration has moved to end deportation protections the United States granted to thousands of Nepalese people after a 2015 earthquake devastated the country, according to a government notice posted on Thursday. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in the notice that the administration is terminating temporary protected status for Nepal after a review found the country has largely recovered from the disaster. "There are notable improvements in environmental disaster preparedness and response capacity, as well as substantial reconstruction from the earthquake's destruction such that there is no longer a disruption of living conditions and Nepal is able to handle adequately the return of its nationals," the notice said. The department estimates there are around 12,700 Nepalese with the status, which provides deportation relief and work permits to people already in the U.S. if their home countries experience a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event. Of those, approximately 5,500 have lawful permanent residence in the U.S. The notice said the revocation will take effect 60 days from Friday, giving the approximately 7,000 Nepalese migrants with temporary protected status who aren't permanent residents until August 5, 2025, to leave the country or change their immigration status. After that date, they could face deportation. The Department of Homeland Security and the Nepalese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Donald Trump, who returned to the presidency in January, has pledged to deport record numbers of migrants in the United States illegally and has moved to strip certain migrants of temporary legal protections, expanding the pool of possible deportees. During his first term from 2017 to 2021, Trump's administration tried to end most enrollment in the temporary protected status program, but was stymied by federal courts. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court let the Trump administration end temporary protected status that was granted to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the U.S. by his predecessor Joe Biden. Trump has also sought to end the status for Haitians, Afghans and others.
The Guardian
21 hours ago
- The Guardian
Cleveland Browns clash with city over plan to move stadium to the suburbs
For Ryan James, co-owner of the Flat Iron Cafe, Cleveland's oldest Irish pub, National Football League game days are a lifeline in an increasingly difficult business climate. 'We open up at 9am, and within a few hours, both floors are full of supporters,' he says. The pub bought a bus to shuttle fans the one-mile drive to the Browns' stadium on the Lake Erie waterfront. 'We carry 150 people on that alone.' He estimates that the eight or nine days a year that the Cleveland Browns play at home account for up to 10% of his annual revenue – a critical amount in a business with such tight margins. But now, James and hundreds of other local businesses in downtown Cleveland are faced with the prospect of taking a major financial hit. Except for a brief spell in the 1990s, fans have thronged downtown Cleveland on Sundays in fall and winter to cheer on their NFL team, the Cleveland Browns, for 80 years. The stadium and team have served as an economic linchpin for the downtown area in good times and bad. In parking and hotel taxes alone, the city is thought to earn about $1m per game. But now, the team wants to move to Brook Park, a suburb south-west of Cleveland, and build a new, $2.4bn domed stadium – half of which its owners are asking to be paid by Cuyahoga county and Ohio taxpayers. It's an issue that communities across the country are facing as major sports franchises move to build or update facilities to make them usable for a range of events, all while asking taxpayers to kick in billions of dollars. The Browns' billionaire owners, Jimmy Haslam and his wife, Dee, maintain that the city of Cleveland has dragged its feet on committing to funding updates to the current stadium, and that the new stadium would drive investment to another part of the region. The city, which owns the stadium, had offered to commit $500m to efforts to renovate the stadium at its current location. 'I don't want to see our taxpayers get fleeced in a deal that socializes the risk back to them and puts the profits in the pockets of a few,' says Chris Ronayne, the Cuyahoga county executive. 'We're talking about something bigger than these teams; we're talking about community vibrancy. The move away is counter to our strategy of keeping the downtown robust.' The Browns and the city have filed lawsuits against each other. Currently, the city of Cleveland pays $1.3m in property taxes and insurance for the stadium annually, with the Browns contributing $250,000 in rent. The team is believed to be worth about $5.15bn, and earns about $100m a year in gate receipts alone. The use of public funds to pay for sports facilities used by billionaire owners is a growing source of contention for cities and their residents around the US. In Kansas City, the Royals (Major League Baseball) and Chiefs (NFL) franchises had teamed up to attempt to persuade local authorities to pay up to $1.7bn through a 40-year sales tax that, in part, would pay for new stadium suites and parking facilities. But last year, voters in Jackson county, Missouri, rejected the proposal. In Chicago, the city's storied Bears (NFL) franchise has been vacillating between building a new facility in the city – a move backed by the city's mayor that would see $2.4bn of public spending – and out of town to a location 25 miles from the city center. In places such as Jacksonville, Florida, and Nashville, Tennessee, taxpayers are contributing billions of dollars to finance facility renovations or entire new stadiums. Dozens of NFL teams, whose average value has doubled in recent years, argue that improving their facilities is only possible with the help of public money. In Los Angeles, however, the owner of the Rams, Stan Kroenke, paid all $5bn for the cost of the SoFi Stadium, which opened in 2020. In Cleveland, county authorities say they are not explicitly opposed to supporting the Browns' stadium needs at its current location. 'We can make a renovation, and you can have a conversation in the future about a new dome stadium downtown,' says Ronayne. '[But] this is the youngest of the three [professional sports facilities] downtown. This mad rush to Brook Park is just a boondoggle.' The state of Ohio, whose legislature has a Republican supermajority, has said it plans to kick in $600m of taxpayer money through bonds, meaning that residents hundreds of miles from Cleveland with no interest in the team or the sport, could find themselves paying for this new stadium, and any interest accrued on those bonds. The state budget that would include hundreds of millions of dollars of funding must be signed into law by Ohio's governor, Mike DeWine, by 30 June. DeWine, a Republican, has previously expressed his opposition to the funding proposal and can veto bills that have cleared Ohio's legislature, though he regularly follows the party line. An investigation by the Ohio Capital Journal recently found that politicians who have voiced support for the new Browns stadium have received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the Haslams, who also own the Columbus Crew Major League Soccer team and hold a stake in the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks, and are thought to be worth about $8.5bn. This is happening at a time that Ohio politicians are proposing cuts to the state's education budget that would result in a financial hole several hundreds of millions of dollars in size. But some believe that using the Browns' current home, a valuable, visible space in downtown Cleveland just eight or nine times a year for football games, with a few concerts thrown in, is a waste. The Greater Cleveland Partnership, the metro area's chamber of commerce, supports the move, calling it 'more practical' than investing in the Browns' current site. Both Jimmy and Dee Haslam sit on the Partnership's executive committee. In Brook Park, locals say they would welcome the stadium nearby. 'I think it would be good for my business and the people of Brook Park. It's really not even moving out of Cleveland and most of the people who go to the games are in the suburbs anyway,' says Sam Clarke, who runs a graphics design company a short distance from the site of the proposed new stadium. 'But it's not going to matter if the owners are always making the worst moves. They can't really ever seem to get out of their own way. You can play wherever you want but it doesn't change the bigger issue.' For James, a Browns fan who has run the Flat Iron Cafe in downtown Cleveland for 17 years, the stadium drama is about one thing. 'It's just billionaires trying to make more billions, and I can't stomach that,' he says. 'I have no respect for the organization.'
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Trump's crusade against all immigrants – even legal ones – is unprecedented
The Donald Trump administration has billed itself as taking unprecedented steps to crack down on illegal immigration. While the total number of deportations has yet to surge, it may happen soon. The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, supports suspending habeas corpus to speed up deportations, and the border czar, Tom Homan, has suggested blatantly ignoring court orders. Private companies are also lining up to cash in on mass deportations. Nonetheless, Trump's approach so far to immigration deemed illegal has not differed much from what Barack Obama and Joe Biden did. So why does everything feel different? The answer is that Trump has launched an unprecedented crusade against legal immigrants. And the tactics have been jarringly lawless and cruel. For example, Trump's administration has almost completely banned refugee resettlement, sought to revoke temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands who have immigrated to flee extreme conditions, eliminated the legal status of thousands of international students, arrested legal asylum seekers at their immigration check-ins, jailed other legal asylum seekers in a maximum security prison in El Salvador, declared an end to birthright citizenship and revoked the legal status of nearly a million humanitarian parolees who had applied for legal entry using the CBP One app. While the Obama and Biden administrations likewise took aggressive measures to regulate undocumented immigration – thus earning well-founded criticisms from immigration activists who took to calling Obama the 'deporter-in-chief' – both presidents also worked to expand the pathways for legal immigration. Some of their initiatives were blocked by Congress or the courts, but the result was a net expansion of legal immigration under both administrations. On the other hand, Trump has consistently worked to block as many pathways to legal migration as possible. In Trump's first term, certain aspects of his immigration agenda were similarly constrained by Congress or the courts, but the result was still a major decrease in legal immigration. In Trump's second term, this assault on legal immigrants has escalated at a furious pace, and while courts have already found many of these actions illegal according to long-established precedent, the administration shows no sign of slowing down. Indeed, Trump officials have become increasingly bold in defying court rulings, and all of this is taking place under the watch of a supreme court so Trump-friendly that last year it granted him sweeping immunity to commit crimes. As a historian of border policy, I find Tump's attack on the CBP One app especially demoralizing. A longstanding contradiction in our immigration system is that while technically people have the right to apply for asylum once they reach US soil, it is incredibly difficult to arrive in the US to exercise this right. Accordingly, the only legal way to immigrate for the vast majority of people is to first survive a deadly gauntlet of oceans, jungles, deserts and criminal organizations, and only then begin an asylum application, which is still a long shot. David Fitzgerald's 2019 book Refuge Beyond Reach offers a detailed description of this insidious system and its long history. While it was largely unappreciated at the time, the Biden administration took meaningful steps to address this deadly contradiction by creating a way to legally apply for asylum through the CBP One app while still abroad. This enabled people facing grave humanitarian crises to start applications outside the US, and if approved, they could then buy plane tickets and travel to the US safely with humanitarian parole. The initiative was successful, legal, and in many ways, historic. Hundreds of thousands of people were able to migrate legally and escape extremely difficult conditions. This infuriated conservatives, who launched a barrage of vicious lies to demonize the program and the people using it. JD Vance insisted on the debate stage that these immigrants were illegal, and when corrected by debate moderators, whined that fact-checking was against the rules. Ted Cruz used his podcast to accuse Biden of chartering flights to bring in undocumented people who would vote Democrat. And Trump accused them of eating pets. Just by cancelling the program for future enrollees, Trump is already launching a disturbing assault on legal immigration. Yet in an escalation of cruelty that is difficult to even comprehend, Trump canceled the program retroactively as well, capriciously revoking the legal status of hundreds of thousands of extremely vulnerable people who simply followed the rules. If you think that that sounds dystopian and cruel, you're right. And that's exactly the point: cruelty itself is a tactic to scare immigrants away. The child separation policy from Trump's first term was an early example of this penchant for using visible displays of cruelty as an immigration deterrent and his new administration has worked around the clock to invent creative new horrors: from shipping deportees to Guantánamo Bay, to sending masked agents to disappear students, to indefinitely detaining immigrants with no criminal record in a notoriously dangerous prison in El Salvador (many of whom were arrested while attending legal immigration appointments), and then sending Noem to El Salvador to do a photoshoot with these political prisoners as props. The message to immigrants is clear: leave, or never come in the first place, because this could happen to you, even if you do it 'the right way'. The takeaway from all of this is that right now, real people – our friends, families, students and neighbors – are suffering at the hands of a cruel and lawless government. And while Republican policymakers are driving these actions, many centrist Democrats, such as Gavin Newsom, are giving tacit approval by writing off these disturbing human rights violations as merely the 'distraction of the day'. I refuse to ignore this suffering. I hope you refuse as well. Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College.
