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Monorails, shipping containers and nuclear waste dumps are just some of the ways that US construction companies have interpreted Donald Trump’s call for an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful wall” to march 2,000 miles across the country’s border with Mexico. Up to 400 bidding contractors were expected to submit their schemes this week to the US Customs and Border Protection agency, in a militarised beauty pageant worthy of one of Trump’s own reality TV shows.

Federal funding for one of President Donald Trump’s premier policy proposals may be excluded from the House GOP’s budget for Fiscal Year 2017-2018. “There is a lot of anti-American sentiment in Mexico,” McCain said during a Senate hearing with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary John Kelly. “If the election were tomorrow in Mexico, you’d probably have a left-wing, anti-American president in Mexico. That can’t be good for America.”

These reforms include a surge of 25 immigration judges at detention centers along the border, and the hiring of 50 new immigration judges in 2017 and an additional 75 in 2018.

A study by Mexico’s top university has revealed that at least 800 species of wildlife will be adversely affected by President Trump’s planned 2,000-mile border wall with Mexico. Research published by ecologists from the Mexican National Autonomous University has shown that an impassable physical barrier placed into ecosystems inhabited by jaguars, black bears and bighorn sheep will so disrupt patterns of migration as to cause a “natural catastrophe.” “The U.S.-Mexico border is made up of mountains, jungle, coastline and many other diverse ecosystems,” Professor Gerardo Ceballos, who led the investigation published last week, told Fox News. “Wildlife has populated these...

An illegal alien who allegedly twice raped his 15-year-old stepdaughter now stands accused of murdering the girl after Obama’s Department of Justice refused to prosecute him on human smuggling charges. ICE officers were never able to deport the man despite a lengthy criminal history that includes charges of assault, burglary, and human smuggling. Many opportunities to prevent the needless rape and murder of a young Texas girl slipped by the wayside before 36-year-old Armando Rodrigo Garcia-Ramirez twice impregnated his victim, Jennifer Delgado. In 2008, police arrested the Mexican national for assault. A local prosecutor chose to drop the charges, the...

MEXICO CITY — The United States invasion of Mexico in 1846 inflicted a painful wound that, in the 170 years that followed, turned into a scar. Donald Trump has torn it open again. Among the many lies that he has constructed, none is more ridiculous than his attempt to contradict history by presenting the United States as a victim of Mexico, a country that supposedly steals jobs, imposes onerous treaties and sends its “bad hombres” across the border. To confront this fake history, some Mexicans are proposing to remind Mr. Trump exactly what country was the first victim of American...

New York City can destroy personal documents associated with its municipal identification program, a judge ruled Friday in a victory for city officials who have sought to protect cardholders from possible deportation. Republican state Assembly members Ronald Castorina Jr. and Nicole Malliotakis filed a lawsuit in December seeking to prevent the destruction of documents, such as copies of foreign passports, used to verify a person’s identity to obtain the IDNYC card. Justice Philip G. Minardo of State Supreme Court on Staten Island ruled against the lawmakers but issued a stay Friday until April 17, pending an appeal. …

Mexico's central bank chief said on Wednesday the bank altered course on how to protect the peso after a couple of tweets by U.S. President Donald Trump in early January pummeled the local currency to near historic lows and wiped out the effect of a $2 billion currency intervention. The Banco de Mexico in early January had sold dollars to fight off the peso's nosedive to record lows amid fears the protectionist policy pronouncements of then President-elect Trump could further hammer Latin America's second-largest economy. "I'll say it like this, in simple terms: with two tweets from you know who,...

Wildlife conservation groups are collaborating with a federal government agency to halt construction of the southern border wall by fudging science to claim that unimpeded trans-border corridors are essential to an “endangered species” with 99% of its population in Mexico. Under the plan, large areas of Arizona and New Mexico would be prohibited from erecting a border wall so that jaguars—which don’t even occupy the area—can roam back and forth between the two countries. More than ¾ million acres in Arizona and New Mexico would be designated as critical habitat for jaguars under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA), which...

Most Americans oppose funding President Donald Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a poll released Thursday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The president gets higher marks for efforts to boost defense spending and beef up the border patrol. Even many of Trump’s supporters reject his proposed budget cuts to scientific and medical research, the poll found. The poll results come at a crucial time. Congressional Republicans and Democrats are wrestling over whether to include a down payment for the wall — financed by U.S. taxpayers instead of Mexico, despite Trump’s repeated promises — in...

Helen Beristain voted for Donald Trump even though she is married to an undocumented immigrant. In November, she thought Trump would deport only people with criminal records -- people he called "bad hombres" -- and that he would leave families intact. "I don't think ICE is out there to detain anyone and break families, no," Beristain told CNN affiliate WSBT in March, shortly after her husband, Roberto Beristain was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a statement to CNN, ICE said, "On April 4, 2017, officers with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO)...

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told the Senate on Wednesday morning that he doesn't expect construction of a wall the full length of the U.S.-Mexico border — marking the abandonment of a central campaign promise by President Donald Trump. "It's unlikely that we will build wall or a physical barrier from sea to shining sea," Kelly testified to the Senate Homeland Security Committee. "We're not going to build a wall where it doesn't make sense. But we'll do something across the Southwest border." That's a direct contradiction of Trump's vow of a "big, beautiful wall" the full 2,200-mile...

Carnival Corporation’s Holland America line runs eight different cruises that stop in Mexican locations, but it has now scrapped Acapulco from its itineraries for both 2017 and 2018 due to rising security fears. Holland America released a statement Wednesday which read, “Due to recent security concerns, Holland America Line has replaced calls at Acapulco, Mexico, with alternative Mexican ports on eight scheduled 2017/2018 cruises.

PHOENIX — Attorney General Mark Brnovich is making a last-ditch effort to let Gov. Doug Ducey deny driver's licenses to "dreamers.'' Legal briefs filed Wednesday ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn rulings by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which has concluded that those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are in this country legally. More to the point, the judges said Arizona has no right to unilaterally decide the issue for itself. That is precisely what Jan Brewer did in 2012 when she issued an executive order declaring that DACA, instituted by the Obama administration,...

Democratic Congressman Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke, an Irish-American who adopted the Mexican nickname during his childhood in Texas, officially announced on Friday that he will run for U.S. Senate in 2018 against Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas). . . . The Mexican nickname came in handy in 2012 when O'Rourke decided to challenge eight-term incumbent Democrat Silvestre Reyes in a congressional district that is 75 percent Mexican and just 2 percent Irish. O'Rourke won and has since legislated under the belief that he is the representative for both the people of El Paso and neighbor across the U.S. border, Juarez,...

A mysterious palace that was home to a bloodthirsty and wealthy ruler some 2,300 years ago has been discovered in Mexico. The incredible building was once the home and business center for the ruler of an ancient empire that predates the Aztecs, scientists have claimed.

The prosecutor from Nayarit allegedly began smuggling drugs in January 2013An attorney general from a Mexican state was arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border south of San Diego for allegedly smuggling and trying to distribute drugs over a period of years, according to charges filed by the state of New York in early March. The State of New York filed drug trafficking charges against Edgar Veytia, Nayarit's state prosecutor, on March 2, which led to his arrest on Monday, according to the indictment and authorities. Veytia was taken into custody Monday at the Cross Border Xpress bridge, which links Tijuana Airport...

The attorney general of Mexico's Pacific coast state of Nayarit, hard hit by drug cartel violence in recent years, has been arrested in San Diego on U.S. narcotics trafficking conspiracy charges, federal officials said on Wednesday.Edgar Veytia, 45, who has served as the top law enforcement officer of Nayarit since 2013, was charged in a seven-page, three-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury on Monday in the New York borough of Brooklyn and unsealed on Tuesday.

President Trump’s proposed border wall has been hotly debated as a political, economic and human rights issue ever since it emerged as a signature part of his campaign platform. But it’s also a major conservation issue, wildlife biologist Jeff Corwin argues. “The impact will be huge. It will be an environmental catastrophe,” Corwin told CBS News on Wednesday. Corwin, a nature conservationist known for his television work on the cable network Animal Planet, is concerned that the wall will dramatically disrupt what has been “nature’s corridor through North and South America” for millions of years now. At least 89 endangered...

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Tuesday mused about the difficulties of building President Trump's signature border wall on the Mexican border, asserting that America can't give away the Rio Grande to Mexico in the process. "The border is complicated, as far as building a physical wall," he said during a speech to the Public Land Council in Washington D.C., according to E&E News. "The Rio Grande, what side of the river are you going to put the wall? We're not going to put it on our side and cede the river to Mexico. And we're probably not going to put...