Do Republicans want to better secure the U.S. border‚ or do they want to keep what has become an open sore festering for another year as an election issue? That’s the choice presented to Congress this week with the rollout of the Senate’s bipartisan border security bill‚ and we’ll soon learn what the GOP really wants. By any honest reckoning‚ this is the most restrictive migrant legislation in decades. Previous immigration talks have involved trading security measures for legalizing more...

Senate negotiators on Sunday evening released a long-awaited bipartisan deal to address what they called the “security crisis” at the southern border and to stem the surge of as many as 10‚000 migrants a day from countries all over the world. The ambitious set of reforms included in the deal is designed to give Customs and Border Patrol agents “operational control” of the border by speeding up the adjudication of asylum claims and giving President Biden and future presidents authority to...

President Biden’s assertion that he’s ready to sign a border deal — one that would make it much harder for migrants to enter the United States — is a necessary and long overdue step to restore the public’s confidence in the federal government’s ability to maintain control over immigration. The crush of asylum seekers crossing the southern border has overwhelmed the government’s capacity to deal justly with their claims. The needs of the migrants have strained the resources of cities and...

South Dakota has apologized and will pay $300‚000 under a settlement with a transgender advocacy group that sued Gov. Kristi Noem and her health secretary last year after the state terminated a contract with it. Attorneys for the Transformation Project announced the settlement Monday. The nonprofit sued last year after the state canceled the contract for a community health worker in December 2022. The contract included a roughly $136‚000 state-administered federal grant‚ about $39‚000 of...

Senate Democrats teed off on the GOP after Republicans walked away from bipartisan compromise legislation that they had said was urgently needed to secure the U.S. border‚ following pressure from former President Donald Trump. “They are a disaster right now‚” a visibly frustrated Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told reporters Tuesday. “How can you trust any Republicans right now? They told us what to do. We followed their instructions to the letter. And then they pulled the rug out from under us...

Mitch McConnell essentially declared the border security-foreign aid package dead on Tuesday‚ telling reporters “we have no real chance here to make a law.” The Senate minority leader stressed there are parts of the national security supplemental — which included border policy changes as well as aid to Ukraine‚ Israel and Taiwan — that he believes are worth revisiting. On Tuesday morning‚ he was still stumping for Ukraine aid on the floor. But after four months of border policy...

Drinking water in the United States is at risk‚ scientists have said‚ as nitrogen pollution seems to be increasing. In a new study‚ scientists found that a third of the world's drinking water could be polluted with nitrogen by 2025. Researchers of the study are also concerned that water will not just be polluted‚ but there will be a severe lack of it at this time. And this could affect up to 3 billion people‚ the paper published in Nature Communications reports. "We are surprised that...