Biden Administration

Submitted by Joint CenterResponse to Haitian migrants’ crisis: Outrage spread after footage of Border Patrol agents on horses chasing and whipping Haitian migrants crossing the Mexican border into Texas was made public. In response to the footage, Vice President Kamala Harris said, “what I saw depicted, those individuals on horseback treating human beings the way they were was horrible,” and that she “fully support[s]” a “thorough investigation into what is going on there.” (The Department of Homeland Security has since launched a full investigation). The increase of Haitian migrants to the United States comes after a series of tumultuous events in Haiti including the assassination of the country’s president in early July followed by a magnitude 7.2 earthquake last month leaving over 12,000 injured, over 2,000 dead, and nearly 53,000 homes destroyed. On Thursday, Daniel Foote—the Biden administration’s special envoy to Haiti—resigned noting that he “will not be associated with the United States inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs to daily life.” He also stated that the United States’s “policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed, and [his] policy recommendations have been ignored and dismissed, when not edited to project a narrative different from my own.”Facing extreme heat: President Biden announced that he’s “mobilizing an all-of-government effort to protect workers, children, seniors, and at-risk communities from extreme heat” after twelve people died in Louisiana following Hurricane Ida, and states in the Northwest saw record-breaking heatwaves over the summer. A University of California, San Diego study found that “low-income neighborhoods and communities with higher Black, Hispanic, and Asian populations experience significantly more urban heat than wealthier and predominantly White neighborhoods.”

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