Making Sense of Chaos at the Border

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/us/border-immigration-breaking-point-california-nipsey.html

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With an aging population and declining birthrates, the country is far from “full,” as President Trump has claimed. And yet, our immigration system has been pummeled by record numbers of migrant families flooding the border.

The administration has pushed to make it much tougher for those seeking asylum to win protection in the United States. And yet, the federal government wants to issue more visas to foreign workers in fields like landscaping and housekeeping.

Now, as my colleagues reported from San Ysidro, the immigration system may actually be reaching a breaking point.

Here are the top takeaways:

The situation isn’t new.

Experts have been warning for years that the immigration system was heading for a major failure, as trends shifted. Instead of a migrant population of mostly young men crossing the border in search of temporary work, it’s been largely families since 2014.

That has placed more strain on systems meant to aid children and others who say they’re fleeing from violence.

And while members of both political parties have called for overhauls over the years, none have been successful.

[Read the full story here.]

The people coming to the U.S. are coming for different reasons.

That shift from men seeking work to families seeking refuge has taken place alongside other changes in the population of migrants crossing the border.

Many more are seeking asylum than in years past, which means they say they’re fleeing their home countries — increasingly in Central America, rather than Mexico — over fears for their safety.

One of the biggest pressure points is a backlog in immigration courts.

The influx of migrants means immigration courts have been flooded with cases, which can drag out for years.

Immigration courts now have more than 800,000 pending cases. They take an average of 700 days to process.

[Read about another difficulty in backlogged immigration courts: the lack of interpreters who speak indigenous languages.]

The president’s efforts at deterrence aren’t working.

The Trump administration has tried a series of strategies to communicate that migrants aren’t welcome, including prosecuting everyone who crosses illegally and taking their children from them.

Most recently, the administration implemented a policy of forcing those seeking asylum to stay in Mexico while their cases are resolved, but that was blocked by a California judge.

None of those efforts have worked; the president’s talk about shutting down all immigration — legal and illegal — has actually spurred smugglers to advertise by claiming that now is the time to try to enter the United States.

[Want to read more about the border each week? Read Crossing the Border, a limited-run newsletter. Sign up here to receive the next issue in your inbox.]

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A celebration of Nipsey Hussle’s life will be held this morning at Staples Center. It will be followed by a 25-mile funeral procession through the L.A. neighborhoods where he grew up. BET will broadcast and stream the memorial.

Don’t know much about the rapper and community advocate? Catch up with these stories, and follow our reporters live for coverage here.

• After Nipsey Hussle was shot dead in broad daylight, there was an outpouring of grief in the South Los Angeles neighborhood where he grew up and made his life’s work as both a rapper and an entrepreneur. [The New York Times]

• A prime example of the way he operated in the community? The time he teamed up with Fatburger. [The New York Times]

• As an artist, Nipsey Hussle was part of an ascendant group of rappers who kept close to their roots — and enjoyed a passionate hometown following as a result. For Hussle, though, the commitment came with a tragic price. [The New York Times]

• This interactive explores how the rapper saw Slauson Avenue. [The Los Angeles Times]

• Senator Kamala Harris “speaks like a woman who knows that facts are ammunition. Everything you say can and will be used against you.” She’s still taking her shot. [The Atlantic]

• Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman were the two highest profile parents charged in the college admission fraud investigation. Their paths have diverged significantly since the bombshell announcement that they were among the accused. [The New York Times]

• California has some of the strictest vaccination laws in the country. But doctors have broad authority to grant medical exemptions — and some are wielding that power for cash. [California Healthline]

• Wednesday was Dolores Huerta Day. Here’s how the labor leader who’s spent most of her life in Kern County is honored around the country. [The Bakersfield Californian]

• “It is wonderful to see the nearly circular shadow of the black hole. There can be no doubt this really is a black hole at the center of M87, with no signs of deviations from general relativity,” said Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at Caltech. [The New York Times]

• Craft beer is catching on in South Korea. Here’s why Booth Brewing, a Korean beer maker that’s on the cutting edge of the trend, is actually making most of its product in Eureka. [NPR]

If you hung out at the mall in the mid-2000s, you had basically one way to signal that you weren’t just an average teenage girl browsing for pastel baby Ts or boot cut jeans.

That was to head to Hot Topic, where black was the color and infinity was the number (of rubber bracelets). The chain, which opened its first store in Montclair in 1989, felt like a true product of its pre-retail-apocalypse time.

So it was a pleasant surprise to see this story, from The Times’s Style section, about how Hot Topic has managed to stay hot: by expanding its vision of fandom beyond cultural phenomena that could be neatly categorized as punk, goth or emo.

Today, Ed Labay, the chain’s vice president of merchandise, likened the store’s layout to the inside of “a teen’s mind,” or a social media feed.

California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here.

Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, went to school at U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles — but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter, @jillcowan.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.