President Joe Biden has “limited ability” to step up security at the U.S.-Mexico border via executive action, a top Democratic lawmaker said on Sunday, arguing that the issue should be addressed with legislation in Congress.

Senator Chris Murphy, the lead Democrat who negotiated a bipartisan border security bill introduced this year, said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that U.S. courts would likely strike down sweeping action by Biden.

“The president has such limited ability to issue executive orders that would have an impact on the border. He can’t conjure resources out of thin air,” Murphy said. “If he were to try to shut down portions of the border, the courts would throw that out, I think, within a matter of weeks.”

Biden, a Democrat seeking another term in Nov. 5 elections, has said his administration is looking at executive actions to potentially block migrants at the border after Republicans rejected the bipartisan Senate bill this year. Republicans spurned the measure after former President Donald Trump, Biden’s Republican challenger, came out against it.

Senate Republicans blocked the bill again last week and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said it “doesn’t secure the border” and “incentivizes further illegal immigration.”

The number of migrants caught illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has dropped this year compared with a monthly record high in December, a trend U.S. officials partly attribute to increased enforcement by Mexico.

Murphy said the decrease was due to “smart, effective diplomacy between the United States and the Mexican government” but warned that the dropoff may not be permanent and that illegal crossings remain high compared with a decade ago.

“We have to just recognize that without updating the laws of this country, without surging more resources to the border, we can’t count on the numbers staying as low as they are today,” Murphy said.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean Pierre said last week that the Senate bill would deliver “significant policy changes, resources, and personnel needed to secure our border and make our country safer.”

Migrants and asylum seekers transit through Mexico to the U.S. to escape violence, economic distress and negative impacts of climate change, according the United Nations.

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 Tuesday to accept nearly $19.6 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay for a migrant transition day center to help immigrants entering the United States travel to their final destinations.

Supervisors on April 30 voted 4-1 to advance the proposal, after directing Sarah Aghassi, interim chief administrative officer, to begin programs to temporarily provide shelter, food, transportation, acute medical care, personal hygiene supplies and labor to support migrants recently released from federal Department of Homeland Security custody.

Board Chairwoman Nora Vargas said the money would address “one of the biggest challenges” facing the county, global migration.

Speaking through board clerk Andrew Potter — due to a vocal cord issue — Vargas said the county was “taking a monumental step forward in addressing the needs of our migrant and refugee communities.”

She added the services are about treating every individual with dignity and respect.

Supervisors also approved a provision that requires nonprofit contractors to accept all migrants, to ensure they don’t end up on the streets.

In a statement, Vargas said the county will move forward with soliciting bids to establish the migrant center.

The funding should be available by the end of May, with proposals due in June and a contract awarded in July, according to Vargas’ office.

The board voted Tuesday after hearing an update from Barbara Jimenez of the county’s Department of Homeless Solutions and Equitable Communities. She went through the steps county officials have taken since the FEMA money was first made available, including a meeting with nonprofits that assist migrants.

Feedback from that meeting included a suggestion that language translation and “culturally informed” services be made quickly available to those starting their journey in the United States, she said.

Jimenez said that since mid-September, more than 136,000 migrants have been released from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol custody in the county.

Just as he did in late April, Supervisor Jim Desmond voted no, saying the money doesn’t equal a long-term plan for a national migration crisis.

This item “effectively approves and perpetuates the federal government’s mismanagement of the border,” Desmond said. “I refuse to be complicit in a broken system.”

Desmond criticized the Biden administration for not following the law, and once again stressed the need for better security and vetting process for migrants.

More people are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border than the Border Patrol can manage, which is a safety concern, Desmond said. He said more than 80% of migrants claiming asylum don’t qualify, and there’s no recourse for those who don’t show up to their court date.

“We should not be tolerating the current situation at the border,” he also said.

Vice Chair Terra Lawson-Remer said Desmond knows that there was a bipartisan bill in Congress that would have answered some of his concerns — but former President Donald Trump didn’t want it passed, so it would be a political weight around President Joe Biden’s neck.

“We all agree that we have to fix the border crisis,” and that more money is needed for security, she added.

“I know that we never get to say the stuff that’s really going on; we just sit there and have theater every day,” said Lawson-Remer, who praised the CAO’s office for working to prevent migrants from being stuck in the county.

Supervisors last October approved $3 million, followed by an additional $3 million in December, to open a temporary migrant center.

After that facility was closed due to a lack of funding, supervisors in late February approved Vargas’ proposal for a sustainable, federally funded center.

City News Service contributed to this article.

President Joe Biden on Monday urged Republican leaders in the House and Senate to support a revived bipartisan bill on border security, even as House Speaker Mike Johnson declared the bill would be “dead on arrival.”

Democrats are again trying to pass the Border Act, which they say would reform U.S. asylum laws, hire thousands of border agents and help curtail fentanyl smuggling.

Record numbers of migrants have been caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden took office in 2021 and border security has become one of the leading presidential campaign issues ahead of the Nov. 5 election that will pit Biden against former President Donald Trump.

In February, a version of the bill stalled in the Senate after Trump told Republicans not to support it even though it contained several border-security measures they had sought. Biden and other Democrats said Trump undercut the bill in order to keep the border debate alive during the campaign.

Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday announced the Senate would seek to pass the new bill this week, after which the White House said it strongly supported the legislation.

In the president’s calls to Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Biden asked congressional Republicans to “stop playing politics” and quickly pass the legislation, the White House said.

Before the president reached out, leaders of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives called the bill politically motivated.

“Should it reach the House, the bill would be dead on arrival,” Johnson and other Republicans said in a statement.

The previous legislation was tied to U.S. foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel, but this bill would stand alone, Schumer said.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Sunday the Senate would once again try to pass a bipartisan border security bill this week after a previous attempt failed when enough Republicans withdrew their support at the urging of former President Donald Trump.

“I hope Republicans and Democrats can work together to pass the bipartisan Border Act this coming week,” Schumer said in a letter to senators.

The Border Act would reform asylum laws, hire thousands of border agents and seek to curtail fentanyl smuggling, among other measures, the Democratic leader said.

Leaders of the Republican-controlled House of Representative called the bill politically motivated.

“Should it reach the House, the bill would be dead on arrival,” House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans said in a statement.

The White House said it strongly supported the legislation.

The previous legislation was tied to U.S. foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel, but this bill would stand alone, Schumer said.

Record numbers of migrants have been caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border since Democratic President Joe Biden took office in 2021, and border security has become one of the leading issues in the presidential campaign. Trump is seeking to return to office by challenging Biden in the Nov. 5 election.

In February, a bipartisan immigration bill stalled in the Senate after Trump told Republicans not to support it even though it contained several border-security measures they had sought.

“The former President made clear he would rather preserve the issue for his campaign than solve the issue in a bipartisan fashion. On cue, many of our Republican colleagues abruptly reversed course on their prior support, announcing their new-found opposition to the bipartisan proposal,” Schumer said.

It’s a “scary” trend that border county officials say is getting scarier: Mexican cartels paying teenagers from throughout the country to smuggle migrants across the state as “load car” drivers.

“We’ve had them from every state in the lower 48 down here,” said Robert Watkins, commander of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office patrol and special operations division in Arizona. “We have 1,500 smugglers coming into Cochise County a month to transport people.”

Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot says the trend has “been going on since 2020, and it’s just increased as you’ve seen more and more people coming across (the border).”

Wilmot said cartels will post on social media platforms offering teens thousands of dollars for every migrant they pick up at the southern border and take to Phoenix or Tucson.

Watkins said this process is a significant shift in how smuggling is conducted. Cartels are singling out kids, he said, because “the federal government does not prosecute people under the age of 18 for trafficking or narcotics.”

He also believes that cartels are targeting teens who live in poorer communities.

“The cartels are actually setting up what’s called geofences around schools and in impoverished communities around the country,” Watkins said. “They’re flooding social media with these smuggling posts. So, if you think about it, what 15-year-old kid would not drive three hours to make $10,000?”

Load car driving has led to hundreds of incidents in Cochise County alone, with sometimes deadly consequences. As part of the operation, cartels encourage teens to speed away from law enforcement, and those speeds sometimes reach “well over 120 miles an hour through populated areas,” Watkins said.

It was during such an incident that Wanda Sitoski, 65, was killed in 2021 when police said a load car driver ran a red light as part of a smuggling operation in southern Arizona. Police charged then-16-year-old Felix Mendez, a Mesa resident, with first-degree murder in the incident. Mendez is currently in jail awaiting trial and recently rejected a plea deal that would have sentenced him to jail for nearly 25 years.

Wilmot said this issue is particularly difficult to solve because most of the recruiting takes place on social media. This means any solution would require an increased level of cooperation from social media companies to combat the “pretty brazen” tactics used by smugglers.

“We have our intel units that are trying to work with the social media companies to pay more attention to this kind of stuff because it’s going to be up to social media monitoring this type of activity,” Wilmot said.

Repeated requests for comment from TikTok, Meta, ES Social Media Management and other companies and associations were not returned.

But Watkins agreed with Wilmot, saying social media can expose teens “to every degree of evil in the world.”

“The cartel would not be able to bring people to the border from the South to smuggle, and the cartel could not use our youth as Uber drivers and have them come down here to pick up these migrants and transport them throughout the country,” Watkins said.

This article was produced by Cronkite News at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

The Biden administration will speed up the immigration court cases of some single adults caught illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under a new program announced on Thursday, part of a broader effort to reduce illegal immigration in the run-up to Nov. 5 elections, senior administration officials said.

Single adults with court dates heading to five cities — Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City — could be placed in a “recent arrivals docket,” senior administration officials said on a call with reporters. U.S. immigration judges will aim to resolve their claims for asylum in 180 days instead of a process that can now take years because of major backlogs, the officials said.

President Joe Biden, seeking reelection in November, has toughened his approach to border security in recent months as immigration has emerged as a top voter concern. Biden’s Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump, has criticized Biden’s approach and vowed to reinstitute hardline polices.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a statement urged Congress to pass a bipartisan Senate bill that would increase border enforcement.

“This administrative step is no substitute for the sweeping and much-needed changes that the bipartisan Senate bill would deliver,” Mayorkas said.

Biden administration officials declined to say how many people could be placed in accelerated case processing, but at least 10 judges will initially be assigned to the new program, one official said.

The Biden administration on Wednesday imposed visa restrictions on more than 250 members of the Nicaraguan government and levied sanctions on three Nicaraguan entities in a move partly related to migrant smuggling through the Central American country.

The administration also intends to finalize a proposed regulation later this year that would allow asylum officers to quickly deny claims of migrants convicted of a serious crime, linked to terrorism or posing other dangers to public safety.

The Biden administration is set to tighten access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border via a new regulation that could be issued as soon as Thursday, four sources familiar with the matter said, in a targeted move aimed at reducing illegal crossings.

The regulation would require migrants to be assessed at an initial asylum screening stage to see whether they should be barred from asylum and quickly deported, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss internal government planning. They added that the measure appeared limited in scope.

The migrants would be assessed for asylum bars related to criminality and security threats, two of the sources said.

The new regulation would improve efficiency by screening asylum seekers earlier in the process to determine whether they should be barred, one of the sources, a U.S. official, told Reuters. It would be issued as a proposed regulation and finalized at a later date, the official said.

President Joe Biden, a Democrat seeking another four-year term in the Nov. 5 election, has struggled with record numbers of migrants caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border since taking office in 2021. Former President Donald Trump, Biden’s Republican challenger, has criticized Biden for rolling back more restrictive Trump-era policies.

The Biden administration has considered a more sweeping move to block asylum seekers and migrants at the border using a federal statute deployed by Trump in his travel bans, but is not immediately planning to take that step, the sources said.

Biden implemented new asylum restrictions last year, but their effectiveness has been limited by a lack of resources to process arriving migrants.

The regulation expected to be issued this week could potentially mean thousands of people would be more quickly deported from the U.S. per year, two of the sources said, a relatively small number compared with the total number caught crossing illegally.

The Department of Homeland Security is piloting artificial intelligence to train officers who review applicants for refugee status in the United States, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters on Tuesday.

The work addresses what Mayorkas said is “labor-intensive” instruction that typically involves senior personnel. In this pilot, he said, DHS is training machines to act like refugees so officers can practice interviewing them.

“Refugee applicants, given the trauma that they have endured, are reticent to be forthcoming in describing that trauma,” he said. “So we’re teaching the machine to be reticent as well” and to adopt other “characteristics” of applicants.

The remarks, made on the sidelines of the security-focused RSA Conference in San Francisco, elaborate on AI initiatives that DHS announced earlier this year. The department has said it planned to develop an interactive app to supplement its training of immigration officers, drawing on so-called generative AI that creates novel content based on past data.

Specifically, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within DHS, would build an AI program that tailored training materials to officers’ needs and prepare them to make more accurate decisions, the department said.

AI will not make immigration decisions themselves, DHS told Reuters. The AI will know country-specific conditions and other information to help officers, Mayorkas said.

The pilot adds to the many tests in industry and government seeking to reduce costs and improve performance through AI, particularly after ChatGPT’s viral launch in 2022. Such experimentation has not been without problems, including issues with translation, incorrect timeframes and pronouns.

Among more “advanced” deployments of AI, Mayorkas said the department has worked to spot anomalies when commercial trucks and passenger vehicles make border crossings. The goal, he said, is to help the department detect smuggling attempts for bringing fentanyl and other contraband into the United States.

After Jerry Brown became governor of California for the first time nearly a half-century ago, he declared that the state had entered “an era of limits.”

Citing “sluggish economic growth, increasing social instability, widespread unemployment and unprecedented environmental challenges,” Brown told state legislators in his 1976 state of the state speech, “In place of a manifest economic destiny, we face a sober reassessment of new economic realities, and we all have to get used to it.”

At the time, his rather gloomy observation seemed to be in line with current events. California had seen startling population growth and economic expansion in the decades after World War II, becoming the most populous state in 1962 during the governorship of Brown’s father, Pat Brown.

However, population growth slowed in the 1970s after the postwar baby boom had waned. By then the state’s economy was undergoing a dramatic, dislocating transformation from industrialism to post-industrial domination by trade, services and technology.

As it turned out, however, the conditions Brown cited, which he translated into fiscal austerity for state government, were merely a pause, not a permanent new reality.

California boomed in the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan’s administration pumping many billions of dollars into the state’s aerospace sector for a military buildup and a population surge driven by waves of migration, mostly from Latin America and Asia, and a new baby boom.

Between 1980 and 1990, California’s population increased by more than 6 million people to nearly 30 million. The 26% gain meant California gained a whopping seven new congressional seats after the 1990 census.

However, things began to slow down shortly thereafter. In the 1990s, the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union manifested itself in sharp cutbacks in military spending, leading to a recession and an exodus of aerospace workers and their families.

Population grew slowly over the next two decades and declined during the COVID-19 pandemic as stay-at-home workers fled to states with less expensive housing, foreign immigration slowed, the death rate rose and the birth rate declined.

However, a new report from the state Department of Finance’s demographics unit says that after four years of population loss, California gained a tiny bit in 2023, “driven by decreased mortality and a rebound in legal foreign immigration.”

The gain was 67,000 residents, bringing California’s population to 39,128,162, the department’s demographers found as they calculated the various factors that influence population changes. What they call “natural growth” — births minus deaths — increased from 106,700 in 2022 to 118,400 in 2023, largely because the death rate dropped after spiking upward during the pandemic.

California’s 1980s baby boom is just a faint memory, however. At one point Californians were producing more than 600,000 babies each year, the equivalent of more than one birth every minute, but the state’s birthrate has dropped to a record low and it now has one of the nation’s lowest fertility rates, according to a new study released this week.

The Birth Industry Lawyers Group, which specializes in maternity legal issues, used federal data to report that California’s fertility rate over the past several years, 55 per 1,000 women, is below the national rate of 58.8 and ninth lowest among the states. South Dakota is the most fecund state with a 71.2 fertility rate, followed closely by North Dakota.

The new Department of Finance report projects that with the effects of pandemic worn off, California’s population will continue to grow, albeit slowly.

The new data raise an old question: Is California better off with an increasing population or do the demands of more people just make things more complicated by increasing competition for jobs, housing and other necessities of life?

CalMatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters.

President Biden’s administration will allow certain immigrants illegally brought to the U.S. as children greater access to federally run health insurance, the White House said on Friday, addressing a sensitive issue ahead of elections in November.

With the move, an estimated 100,000 previously uninsured participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, are expected to enroll in the Health Insurance Marketplace and Basic Health Program, both created under the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said.

The DACA program was launched in 2012 under former President Barack Obama, to whom Biden was vice president. The program offers deportation relief and work permits to so-called “Dreamer” immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children or overstayed a visa.

“Dreamers are our loved ones, our nurses, teachers, and small business owners,” Biden said in a statement. “And they deserve the promise of health care just like all of us.”

DACA enrollees will have access to related financial assistance, such as tax credits and reduced out-of-pocket costs under the change, which will be effective Nov. 1, according to a White House fact sheet.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about any costs to the U.S. government.

Immigration has emerged as a top issue for voters ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November pitting Biden, a Democrat, against Republican former President Donald Trump. Biden has sought to balance a tougher approach to border security with policies that protect asylum seekers and others in the U.S. illegally.

Trump, an immigration hardliner, tried to end DACA during his presidency but was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court. About 530,000 people are currently enrolled in the program — including nearly 10,000 in San Diego County — but are subject to an ongoing legal fight.

HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said on Thursday that people without health care insurance delay preventative or routine medical care, leading to unnecessary costs later.

The regulation will give DACA participants access to the Basic Health Program, which serves low-income residents, according to a White House fact sheet.

The change will not open access to two other low-income programs, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as was initially proposed in 2023.