Biden administration tries again to end Trump’s ‘Remain
in Mexico’ policy
The Biden administration is making another attempt to end a Trump-era immigration program that a court ordered reinstated, offering a more detailed description about the “benefits and cost” of forcing some asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are pending. “I have concluded that there are inherent problems with the program that no amount of resources can sufficiently fix,” Alejandro Mayorkas, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, wrote in the new justification for ending the program, released Friday. Republicans have said the program, known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, stemmed illegal migration, while human rights advocates have assailed it as inhumane.
SCOTUS declines
to block Maine vaccine mandate
The Supreme Court has rejected an emergency appeal from health care workers in Maine to block a vaccine mandate that went into effect Friday. Three conservative justices noted their dissents. The state is not offering a religious exemption to hospital and nursing home workers who risk losing their jobs if they are not vaccinated. Only New York and Rhode Island also have vaccine mandates for health care workers that lack religious exemptions. Both are the subject of court fights and a court has allowed workers in New York to seek religious exemptions while the lawsuit plays out.
Adam Kinzinger, Republican Trump critic, won’t seek re-election in House
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who emerged this year as one of the preeminent Republican critics of former President Donald Trump, announced Friday that he would not seek reelection in 2022. Kinzinger’s electoral fate was largely sealed late Thursday when Illinois Democrats adopted a new congressional map that eliminated the Republican-majority district that Kinzinger represented for the past decade. Kinzinger was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He announced his departure from Congress in a five-minute video in which he reiterated his opposition to Trump’s influence on the Republican Party.
Ex-Maryland man who joined
al-Qaida sentenced
A military jury imposed a sentence of 26 years Friday on a former Maryland man who admitted joining al-Qaida and has been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. But under a plea deal, the man could be released as soon as next year because of his cooperation with U.S. authorities. The sentencing of Majid Khan, a 41-year-old citizen of Pakistan who came to the U.S. in the 1990s, is the culmination of the first trial by military commission for one of the 14 so-called high-value detainees who were sent to the U.S. naval base in Cuba in 2006 after being held in a clandestine network of overseas CIA detention facilities and subjected to the harsh interrogation program developed in response to the 9/11 attacks.
Sheriff defends filing of criminal complaint against Cuomo
A New York sheriff on Friday defended his decision to file a criminal complaint against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo without consulting prosecutors or the accuser, a woman who says the Democrat groped her late last year. But Sheriff Craig Apple said he was confident in the strength of the case, which he said was based on witness interviews and voluminous records. A court summons requires Cuomo to appear for an arraignment on Nov. 17, though that date could change.
‘Rust’ armorer has ‘no idea’ how live rounds got on set, attorneys say
Attorneys for Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer on the set of the film where Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer last week, issued a statement Friday saying she did not know how live rounds wound up on the set in New Mexico. “Hannah has no idea where the live rounds came from,” Gutierrez-Reed’s attorneys, Jason Bowles and Robert Gorence, said in the first public statement on her behalf. In their statement, they charged that the set of the film, “Rust,” had been unsafe, and that Gutierrez-Reed, 24, had been hired to two positions, “which made it extremely difficult to focus on her job as an armorer.”
By wire sources
