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(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton issued a statement on a California’s court’s denial of Judicial Watch request temporary restraining order (TRO) against California Governor Gavin Newsom and his Director of the California Department of Social Services Kim Johnson to restrain them from spending $79.8 million dollars of taxpayers’ money to provide direct cash benefits to unlawfully present aliens. Though the court found that Judicia Watch was likely to succeed on the merits (that Governor Newsom had no authority under law to spend the money), the court found that there was a public interest in sending tax money...

Mexicans received more than $4 billion in remittances from the United States in March, a 49 percent increase from the $2.7 billion sent in February, marking the biggest month-to-month increase on record. The February-to-March spike in remittances – money sent to friends and family abroad by U.S. residents – was the single largest month-to-month rise since at least 1995, the earliest year when data is available from the country's central bank, the Banco de México. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador referenced the surge in remittances at his daily press conference Tuesday, framed as part of his commemoration of Cinco...

GUATEMALA CITY - Migrants returning from the United States were once considered heroes in Guatemala, where the money they send back to their hometowns is a mainstay of the economy. But since the coronavirus pandemic hit, migrants in town after town have been mistreated, run off or threatened by neighbors who fear they will bring the virus back with them from the United States. Vanessa Díaz said her mother heard rumors that neighbors were organizing to keep her from reaching her home in the northern province of Petén after she was deported back to Guatemala on a flight from the...

Thousands of  desperate  migrants are trapped in limbo and even at risk of death without food, water or shelter in scorching deserts and at sea, as  governments close off borders and ports amid the coronavirus pandemic. Migrants have been dropped by the truckload in the Sahara Desert or bused to Mexico’s desolate border with Guatemala and beyond. They are drifting in the Mediterranean Sea after European and Libyan authorities declared their ports unsafe. Many governments have declared emergencies, saying a public health crisis like the coronavirus pandemic requires extraordinary measures. However, these measures are just the latest efforts by governments...

A group of Senate Democrats on Saturday sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf requesting that the Trump administration to provide COVID-19 testing for migrants before they're deported from the country. The letter was spearheaded by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and signed by 13 additional senators, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). According to the letter, the Trump administration has "deported dozens of Guatemalan, Mexican, and Haitian...

Judicial Watch Exposes Deep State Leaks to Washington Post Judicial Watch Sues California to Stop Governor Newsom’s Initiative to Provide $75 Million in Cash Benefits to Illegal Aliens Judicial Watch Sues Pennsylvania to Force Voter Roll Clean Up Judicial Watch Exposes Deep State Leaks to Washington Post Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a distinguished public servant, was briefly national security advisor to President Trump until allegations surfaced in the Washington Postthat he had been in communication with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. Flynn’s lawyers alleged in a November 1, 2019, court filing that James Baker, the Pentagon’s Director of the Office...

SAN DIEGO - The Trump administration on Thursday suspended immigration court hearings for asylum-seekers waiting in Mexico through June 1, bowing to public health concerns while extending a state of limbo those locked down in Mexican migrant shelters. With an order suspending hearings through Friday set to expire, the Homeland Security and Justice departments said that asylum-seekers with hearings through June 1 should appear at a border crossing when instructed to get new dates. They said that authorities will review conditions related to the coronavirus and proceed “as expeditiously as possible,” raising the prospect of additional delays. While it is...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced itfiled a lawsuit in the Superior Court of California County of Los Angeles on behalf of two California taxpayers, Robin Crest and Howard Myers, asking the court to stop the state from expending $75 million of taxpayer funds to provide direct cash assistance to unlawfully present aliens ( Crest et al. v. Newsom et al. (No. 20STCV16321)). The lawsuit alleges California Governor Gavin Newsom overstepped his authority and violated federal law when, without affirmative state legislative approval, he took executive action to create the “Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants Project” and provide cash...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials report that an illegal alien from India tested positive for the coronavirus (COVID-19) after he illegally crossed the border with a group of Mexican nationals. CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan reported that Border Patrol agents patrolling near Calexico, California, apprehended a group of three Mexican nationals and an Indian national after they illegally crossed the border from Mexico. Border Patrol agents quickly returned the Mexican nationals to their home country under anti-coronavirus policies. “On Thursday, April 23, a U.S. Border Patrol agent apprehended three Mexican nationals and one Indian national suspected of having illegally...

When it unveiled an unprecedented order last month to swiftly expel virtually all unauthorized migrants from the U.S. southern border, the Trump administration said potentially infected foreigners could spread the coronavirus in the U.S., prompt outbreaks in immigration jails and strain public health resources along border communities. But in a paradoxical twist, Guatemala, the largest source of migration to the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years, fears the U.S. is exporting the virus there through its deportation policy. At least 99 migrants recently deported to Guatemala by the U.S. have tested positive for coronavirus as of Sunday, according to the nation's...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico has almost entirely cleared out its migrant shelters over the past five weeks to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, returning most of the occupants to their countries of origin, official data showed on Sunday. In a statement, the National Migration Institute (INM) said that in order to comply with health and safety guidelines, since March 21 it had been removing migrants from Mexico’s 65 migrant facilities, which were harboring 3,759 people last month. In the intervening weeks, Mexico has returned 3,653 migrants to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador by road and air with...

NEW YORK - Ulises García went from being a waiter to working at a laundromat. Yelitza Esteva used to do manicures and now delivers groceries. Maribel Torres swapped cleaning homes for sewing masks. The coronavirus pandemic has devastated sectors of the economy dominated by immigrant labor: Restaurants, hotels, office cleaning services, in-home childcare and hair and nail salons, among others, have seen businesses shuttered as nonessential. The Migration Policy Institute found that 20% of the U.S. workers in vulnerable industries facing layoffs are immigrants, even though they only make up 17% of the civilian workforce. And some of those immigrants,...

When Congress passed the CARES Act to provided relief from the coronavirus impact, it sent about $14 billion to institutions of higher education to address the unique impact the virus has had on college campuses. Colleges and universities had been waiting for the Department of Education to release guidance to detail how exactly schools could allocate the grant money, including who is eligible. Today, Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Department released new guidance to address that and more. In the guidance, DeVos chose to limit the students eligible for the grant aid to those eligible for federal student financial aid...

MEXICO CITY/PORT-AU-PRINCE - Mexico and Haiti have detected coronavirus infections among migrants deported recently from the United States, officials said on Tuesday, part of a growing trend of contagion among deportees. The new infections come after an outbreak among deportees to Guatemala, where the government at the weekend linked almost a fifth of all cases of the new coronavirus in the country to flights returning migrants from the United States last week. All three affected countries have far fewer confirmed cases of the disease than the United States. Three Haitians who arrived in the Caribbean country two weeks ago tested...

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee, accused Democrats of exploiting the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic in order to push for "extreme changes in immigration policy." "This concept ought to be simple: We should not turn our back on the citizens and lawful immigrants of this great country to favor those that broke the law and came here illegally or overstayed their visas," said the Ohio congressman during a conference call with Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Matthew Albence and Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Mark Morgan. Democrats have called...

Does Google Have Hillary Clinton’s Emails? Court Authorizes Subpoena to Find Out It Took Coronavirus for the Veterans Affairs to House Homeless Vets in Tents Mexican Drug Tunnel Leads to U.S. Warehouse Run by Illegal Aliens Trump’s Winning Coronavirus Bet Does Google Have Hillary Clinton’s Emails? Court Authorizes Subpoena to Find Out If you use Gmail, you know that Google holds your messages seemingly forever. Could it be doing the same with Hillary Clinton’s elusive emails? We’ll find out. We have served a subpoena, authorized by a DC federal court, on Google to produce all Clinton emails from a...

City officials in Orange ordered a small motel operating as a birth tourism lodge to shut down by the end of the month. Council members on Tuesday night revoked the JR Motel’s conditional use permit, saying the owner did not operate the facility for its intended use. The JR Motel doesn’t have a sign or take reservations from the general public. Instead, it caters to well-off Chinese women who come to the United States while pregnant with the intention of giving birth to a child who, by law, will be an American citizen. Though the practice isn’t illegal, city officials...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Wednesday plans to give cash payments to adult immigrants living illegally in the state to help them weather the coronavirus crisis. The plan, which would use a mix of taxpayer money and charitable donations from corporations and philanthropists, will give 150,000 adults $500 each during the coronavirus outbreak, the governor said. California has had an estimated 2 million immigrants living in the country illegally. They have not been eligible for the $2.2 trillion stimulus package approved by Congress last month, which pledged cash payments to most Americans while boosting unemployment benefits by $600 per...

HOUSTON - Elsy was on the phone in an immigration detention center when guards showed up with face masks and forms to sign. The asylum-seeker from El Salvador and others had resorted to tearing their T-shirts into face coverings after a woman in their unit tested positive for COVID-19. But the guards would not give out the masks until the detainees signed the forms, which said they could not hold the private prison company running the detention center in San Diego liable if they got the coronavirus, according to Elsy and two other detainees, including one who read the form...

For Aldo Martinez, a paramedic in Fort Myers, Fla., who often works a 37-hour shift, the long days have become routine since the coronavirus pandemic broke out -- several of his colleagues have had to self-quarantine out of fears they may have been exposed to COVID-19. Aside from filling in for his colleagues, tending to the dozens of calls he receives each day, and keeping himself safe on the job, Aldo feels an extra degree of pressure as one of more nearly 680,000 young immigrants whose ability to work in the country would be threatened if the Deferred Action for...